Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (29 page)

In theory each king’s power was absolute, but in practice he had to defer to his advisers; after all, he could not know everything that was going on everywhere in the kingdom. He also had to defer to the general populace, in the sense that it helped to retain popularity if from time to time he did so. However, few of those who presented themselves at court got to see the king in person rather than, at best, one of his Friends. The barons therefore acted as intermediaries not only between the king and the army but between the king and his citizens. Without the barons’ goodwill he could hardly function.

In critical situations, a Macedonian king might also decide to call an assembly so that his subjects would be fully informed as to what was about to happen, and have fewer grounds for complaint afterward. So, for instance, when Alexander the Great revealed his plans to march farther east than anyone had expected, he first ran the decision past his men;
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and we have seen how several of the Successors had their troops conduct show trials of their opponents to legitimate their wars and assassinations.

Macedon was a tempered monarchy, then, but not a constitutional monarchy. The king was the executive head of state and the chief religious official. It was his right to decide matters of policy, both foreign and domestic (such as levels of taxation); it was his right to form and break alliances and to declare war and peace, and he was commander
in chief of the armed forces. He was also the chief judge, with the power to decide whether or not to hold a trial in any given situation, or even whether to order a summary execution. The Homeric model of kingship was close; in Homer’s poems, the elders advise, the people listen and shout out their views, but the final decisions rest entirely with the king.
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The king’s position could be likened to that of a head of a household: he was decidedly the head, but there were plenty of occasions when he had to negotiate potential opposition to see that he got his way. A lot depended, then, on the personality and will of the king. If he was passionate enough and committed enough to a project, there was no person and no body that could stop him. He could do whatever he could get away with.

The Successors’ default administrative model was the Macedonian system, but their immediate predecessors, Philip II and more especially Alexander the Great, had shifted the model more in the direction of autocracy. Their unprecedented successes gave them unprecedented authority, so that they were less afraid of overriding the wishes of their Friends. The same goes for the Successors, as long as they were successful. Ptolemy and Seleucus were certainly successful, and autocratic.

Apart from their shared Macedonian background, other similarities between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid administrations stem from the simple fact that they both came as conquerors, and like conquerors of all epochs had three immediate concerns: security, economic exploitation (control of resources), and appeasement (or legitimation of their rule). These three concerns are interconnected: their kingdoms would not be secure unless they appeased the native elites, nor would they be secure unless they could maintain armies; but armies needed the money economic exploitation could provide, which in turn required a compliant native population. Unlike many later colonialists, these conquerors saw the stupidity of terrorizing or even exterminating the native populations.

As conquerors, and as Macedonian kings, Seleucus and Ptolemy owned their kingdoms as their private estates; as “spear-won” land, it was theirs to dispose of as they wanted. “Tax” was the equivalent of rent to a landlord; huge swaths of land were crown territory, farmed by
royal appointment, with all the profits, not just a taxed percentage, swelling the king’s coffers. All resources were concentrated in the hands of the king and then redistributed. Neither Ptolemy nor Seleucus was ever quite a despot, however, and their power was diffused through the hierarchical structures beneath them. Nor were they simply bandits; they took thought for the future, and wanted their sons and grandsons to succeed to functioning and profitable kingdoms after them.

One of the redistributions the kings made was to give away some of their land to temples, cities, and even deserving individuals, who, depending on the size of the donation, could thus become barons within the kingdom, with estates that might encompass several villages and many tied serfs. This was a way for the kings to attract the loyalty of powerful men, and at the same time it brought more land into production and into the taxation system. The villages and farmers on the estate paid tax to the estate owner, who passed on what he owed to the royal treasury. These estates were not always heritable and alienable; they remained nominally crown territory, and in certain circumstances—presumably extreme ones, such as disloyalty—the king could repossess the land. The king could thus assure himself of the continued loyalty of the Greek and Macedonian elite within his kingdom.

Both Seleucus and Ptolemy also settled their troops on the land; in the Macedonian fashion, these soldiers, and then their descendants, owed military service to the crown, and always formed the core of the kingdoms’ armies. This was an economical policy; it was expensive to maintain a standing army, but a pool of soldiers was needed for emergencies, and the royal coffers would profit from the taxes paid by such people as farmers. The policy also made the men grateful to their king, and hence they or their sons would be more likely to respond willingly to any future call-up. A typical allotment consisted of two or three pieces of land, to be used for different agricultural purposes. The size of the allotment depended on its fertility and on the rank of the settler; officers and cavalrymen, higher up the social scale, as usual got more.

Ptolemy settled mercenaries throughout Egypt, wherever such a settlement might help to develop agriculture, police a district, or secure a trade route. Above all, he drained the Fayyum marshes southwest of Memphis specifically for the purpose of settling his mercenaries—t housands of them, during his reign alone. The draining of the marshes shows in miniature the combination of local and Macedonian expertise: the Egyptians had long been expert at irrigation, and the Macedonians
brought new developments in drainage engineering. It was a massive project, as great in its way as the building of Alexandria; the water level of Lake Moeris was lowered by radial canalization, and these new canals served to irrigate the reclaimed land. The amount of land in use was trebled. Many of the new settlers, however, preferred to live as absentee landlords in the Greek cities of Naucratis (founded as a Greek emporium in the second half of the seventh century
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), Ptolemais (founded by Ptolemy ca. 310 on the site of an earlier Greek settlement), and of course Alexandria. Memphis too had long had a substantial Greek population. After the battle of Ipsus, the settling of mercenaries on allotments was extended throughout Greater Egypt, to Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Phoenicia. Ptolemy now felt that these were more securely his possessions.

The size of Seleucus’s territory meant that he had many more trouble spots and trade routes to police and protect. He established far more mercenary settlements, ranging from fortresses to cities; perhaps as many as twenty cities were founded in the first two generations of Seleucid rule. The cities would attract further immigrants and help to cohere the districts in which they were founded, as plants fix soil on a hillside. In Egypt, only Ptolemais really served the same function, since it was founded in the Thebaid district of southern Egypt, which had a perennial tendency to regard itself as a separate state, and so contained a large garrison as well as serving as the administrative center for the region.

Seleucus too founded his cities in agriculturally rich areas, which could then be exploited and taxed to the maximum, and intermarrying with the local population was encouraged (though not imitated by any king after Seleucus himself). Seleucus offered incentives such as payment of removal costs, grants of grain, and relief from taxation for the first few years, to help the immigrants get started; and as soon as he felt it was feasible, he allowed the land to be alienable—not just passed down from father to son, with implicit renewal of the tenancy at each break, but disposable outside the family. Ptolemy was forced to follow suit, or risk losing out in the market for mercenaries.

Mercenaries felt themselves well rewarded by being set up as farmers, and gave their loyalty accordingly. Many of them had left home in the first place because there was insufficient land for them to prosper there. They had won their share of the booty taken in war, and now they and their sons had financial security for life. In Seleucus’s case, the fact that the Greek settlements were spread thinly over a vast empire meant that he had to take steps to ensure that this loyalty
endured. He had the sons of his settlers trained at his military headquarters in Apamea. The son remained in training until his father was withdrawn from the reserve, at which point he returned to his allotment and took his father’s place in the reserve, ready to be called up. The culture of the school shaped his loyalty to the king. Ptolemy felt no need for such provisions.

Not unnaturally, the settlement of foreigners on this scale could disturb local sensibilities, so both Ptolemy and Seleucus took care to confiscate land only from those who were too weak and scattered to organize armed resistance, or where it was scarcely used. Hence, for instance, the draining of the underused Fayyum. Wherever possible, they gave away crown land.

Resentment was also offset by the fact that the new cities increased the demand for agricultural products and local farmers’ profit margins. Many of the immigrants were content to let former owners continue as tenant farmers, and they increased productivity by introducing new crops and new techniques wherever possible, such as double-cropping and the use of iron plowshares. The extensive irrigation systems of Egypt and Babylonia were also serviced and extended; they were essential in these regions, which could not rely on rainfall. But the newcomers also learned; the seeding plow, which placed seeds in regular furrows, had long been in use in Babylonia, but not in mountainous Greece, whose small amount of good arable land was sown by hand. Overall, the coming of the Greeks and Macedonians did not make as much of a difference as might be thought. Even in a remote area like Bactria, recent archaeology has shown that the incoming Greeks expanded land use only by 10 percent.
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Ptolemy’s kingdom comprised about 23,000 square kilometers (8,880 square miles) and a population of about four million; Seleucus’s, at its largest extent, occupied over 3,750,000 square kilometers (about 1,500,000 square miles) and had a population of about fifteen million. The immigrant population was never more than 10 percent in either kingdom. They were heavily outnumbered. And so they took more radical measures to avoid displeasing at least the more powerful among the native populations—the merchants and landowners, and especially the priests, who were in effect the only political group in both Egypt and Babylonia. If resistance was going to emerge, it would most likely be fomented by the priests, as the leaders of their people—and as the managers of wealthy temple estates with a lot to lose. A king who did not have the support of the priesthood would not last long; he would not even be considered a true pharaoh.

First, as successful defenders of their realms, the kings brought peace and prosperity, which went a long way toward mitigating any hatred their arrival might have caused. Second, existing temple-run lands (which could be massive estates, including a number of villages along with their workshops and farmland) and large privately owned estates generally remained in place—which is to say that the king graciously granted that much of his spear-won land to the temples and landowners. Their side of the bargain was loyalty, or at least passivity. Ptolemy and Seleucus also both undertook programs of refurbishing old temples or building new ones, and made certain to take part in the appropriate local ceremonies and celebrations. Their Persian predecessors had rarely acted with such diplomacy toward the Egyptian priesthood.

Third, both of them employed natives in responsible positions in the administration. How could they not? They needed collaborators, people who spoke the languages and were familiar with the way things worked at a local level. They needed to guarantee a smooth transition to the new dispensation, so that taxes would begin to flow in as quickly as possible. But they fell short of Alexander’s notion of an empire governed by both Macedonians and natives; under Ptolemy and Seleucus, natives rarely rose very high in the administration. Few provinces of Asia and none of the forty-two counties (or “nomes”) of Egypt, for instance, ever had a native governor. The top jobs, and positions at court, were reserved for Greeks and Macedonians.

Nevertheless, as the years and decades passed, the native elite became more and more hellenized, in the familiar colonial process whereby the closer one gets to the ruling class, the more cultural differences are eradicated. To this extent, the upper levels of society were permeable by natives. Otherwise, in both states, hellenization was superficial; people were proud of their traditions and were encouraged in that pride by their priests. The gymnasia that sprang up all over Egypt and Asia, and resources such as the Museum in Alexandria, were intended primarily for Greek use, not to hellenize the natives. Just as the gymnasia in classical Greece had been for the aristocratic elite, so the gymnasia of every town and even large village in the new world were for the new elite, Greeks and other nonnatives, with rare exceptions for successful social-climbing natives. As in British India, there were formidable barriers to full assimilation.
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Fourth, they interfered as little as possible in native traditions. Both Egypt and Seleucid Asia were Janus states, in which local religious practices, artistic conventions, and so on continued unabated alongside
newly introduced Greek forms. Successor imperialism was happily unaccompanied by the phenomenon familiar from later empires of missionary conversion of the natives to a “better” religion; Greek religion was scarcely dogmatic, and like polytheists from all times its practitioners were tolerant and found it easy to identify their gods with native gods.