Dividing the Spoils

by Waterfield, Robin

  THE PROCLAMATION OF TYRE

  In the early days of the siege, Antigonus was reminded of his naval weakness when Seleucus deliberately sailed past at the head of a Ptolemaic fleet. No doubt some of the ships peeled off to deliver supplies to the semi-beleaguered town before rejoining the main fleet. Its mission was to establish the island of Cos as a secure Ptolemaic base, and from there to raid Antigonid possessions in Asia Minor. When Polemaeus moved into the region in response to these raids, Seleucus withdrew. But first he stopped at the famous sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus, where the shrine had recently been magnificently refounded by Alexander the Great, since it had proclaimed him a son of Zeus. The oracle reputedly hailed Seleucus as “king”;5 it was only a little premature.

  Polyperchon’s son Alexander reached Antigonus at Tyre, and not long after his arrival, Antigonus launched a propaganda offensive against Cassander. He summoned an assembly of all the Macedonians he had under arms, or who had become military colonists in the area, and issued the “Decree of the Macedonians,” more commonly known as the “Proclamation of Tyre.”6 The first task of the assembled Macedonians was to try Cassander in absentia for all his anti-Argead crimes: killing Olympias (though, ironically, she had been condemned herself in just such a show trial by Cassander’s Macedonians), detaining Rhoxane and Alexander IV (whose release “to the Macedonians” Antigonus demanded), forcing Thessalonice to marry him, rebuilding Thebes, and so on. This was a more public version of the bullying tactic Antigonus had tried out with Seleucus the previous year. But Cassander was never going to submit; his war with Antigonus lasted another fourteen years.

  The deal with Polyperchon and Alexander became clear too. The appointment of Polyperchon as “General of the Peloponnese” was meant to replace, not supplement, his regency. Antigonus now declared that he had himself “taken over responsibility for the monarchy,” so that, in addition to being “Royal General of Asia,” he was now also the self-proclaimed legitimate regent. Antigonus recognized that Polyperchon’s claim to the regency was empty, and that by virtue of his control of the king, Cassander had usurped it. It was Cassander, then, who was named as the pretender. There could hardly be any doubt that Antigonus’s intention was to rule the entire Macedonian empire.

  The final article of the proclamation declared that the Greek cities were to be free, autonomous, and ungarrisoned. Antigonus had already begun to foster such autonomy in the cities within or just outside his reach, but now he was making it official policy. It was good propaganda and good sense. He needed the goodwill of the cities, so that they would supply him with Greek manpower and expertise, and it was cheaper to manage the cities without garrisons.

  In the short term, however, the chances of Greek freedom were remote, even within Antigonus’s own domain, since he must have garrisoned many of the cities of Asia Minor and the Cycladic islands in case of invasion. But of course, as well as being a manifesto, the declaration was aimed, as Polyperchon’s had been a few years earlier, at his enemies. He was still trying to secure the loyalty of the Greek cities of Cyprus, by encouraging those that were ruled by princelings loyal to Ptolemy to throw them out, and he needed to undermine Cassander’s hold on the cities of Greece. The proclamation economically served more than one purpose.

  Cynicism is easy, but Antigonus does seem to have done his best to keep this promise of autonomy within his own realm—as well as using it as a sweetener for potential allies. It was not always possible, however. I have already referred, a little earlier, to a couple of letters from Antigonus, written around 303 BCE to the cities of Lebedus and Teus. Antigonus wanted to unite the two communities at or near the site of Teus, while Lebedus was to be altogether abandoned. It is clear from the tone of the letters that Antigonus was pushing this plan through against the will of the inhabitants, and that his intention was to ensure that his coffers would continue to be filled by taxes from the new joint city. In practice, the cities’ “freedom” was often an illusion.

  But Antigonus’s declaration worried Ptolemy enough for him to respond immediately with a proclamation of his own, affirming his commitment to the freedom of the Greek cities. Coming from Ptolemy, this is doubly strange: in the first place, he was already master of Greek cities, in Cyprus and Cyrenaica, in which he had installed garrisons, and so the speciousness of the propaganda was self-evident; second, Cassander had cities on the Greek mainland under his sway, just as Antigonus did in Asia Minor and Greece, so Ptolemy risked damaging the interests of his ally as much as those of his enemy (supposing anyone took his manifesto seriously). It is hard, then, to know what to make of Ptolemy’s declaration. But if, as is likely, he had his Macedonian troops approve the proclamation, as Antigonus had done, then at least part of the point was not to let Antigonus get away with claiming to be the official spokesperson for Macedon. Whoever controlled Macedon and the king in theory controlled Egypt, as one of the satrapies of the king’s empire.

  As they often do in times of war, the abstract generalizations of these manifestos disguised horrors. Antigonus was encouraging, and Ptolemy was in danger of encouraging, the democratic elements within the Greek cities controlled by Cassander to rise up against their administrations. Any who did so would embroil their cities at the very least in the banishment of prominent citizens, and very likely in assassination and even civil war. Old feuds were refreshed, and in a number of Greek cities atrocities were carried out in the name of one political system or the other. In the summer of 315, for instance, very shortly after the Declaration of Tyre, five hundred democratic rebels were rounded up and massacred at Argos by Cassander’s garrison commander.7

  CASSANDER IN GREECE

  In response to Antigonus’s proclaimed usurpation of power in Macedon and to his rapport with Polyperchon and Alexander, Cassander needed to act quickly to stabilize his core territories in Greece. An attempt to win Polyperchon over to his cause failed, and in the summer of 315, while Antigonus was busy at Tyre, Cassander reinvaded the Peloponnese with the help of a Ptolemaic fleet of fifty ships. A swift and successful campaign netted him a number of new possessions, including Corinth’s southern port.

  After attending the famous athletic games at Nemea, Cassander returned to Macedon, but he had not finished with the Peloponnese. Almost immediately, he sent his most trusted general Prepelaus back south, and Prepelaus succeeded in detaching Polyperchon’s son Alexander from the Antigonid cause. He was appointed “General of the Peloponnese” for Cassander. We are told that Alexander’s reason for changing sides was that this position was all he had ever wanted,8 but this is implausible, since he could expect to inherit the Antigonid title before long from his elderly father. He must have reckoned Cassander’s position stronger in the Peloponnese. The decisive factor was probably that Alexander’s chief stronghold was Corinth, and Cassander now controlled the more important of its two ports.

  By the end of 315, all the northern Peloponnese was under Cassander’s control. Polyperchon was reduced to holding Messenia in the southwest with his mercenary forces, and Sparta in the southeast was currently too trivial for anyone to bother with. The Ptolemaic fleet had no more work to do in the area and it sailed for home, defeating on the way a small Antigonid fleet and army as it passed through Caria.

  Cassander had defused the immediate threat to his realm, but had not done enough to enable him to carry the war into Antigonid territories in Asia Minor. The next year, 314, started disastrously for him when Aristodemus first persuaded the Aetolians to make an alliance with Antigonus, and then, on his way back to the Peloponnese, undid much of the good Cassander had done there the previous year. The Aetolian alliance was important not just in itself, but because the Aetolians were allies of at least some of the Boeotian states, who had lost land and power when Cassander refounded Thebes and had accordingly allied themselves with Macedon’s most implacable enemies. Central Greece effectively became a no-go area for Cassander, and he was cut off from the Peloponnese. He had no choice but to trust his Gen
eral of the Peloponnese, the renegade Alexander, to take care of matters there, while he himself was restricted to campaigning against the Aetolians and the Illyrians.

  Eliminating the threat of the Illyrians on the western borders of Macedon was a solid gain, but otherwise things were not going well for Cassander. Aristodemus had done a brilliant job for the Antigonid cause in the Peloponnese. In the autumn, Antigonus succeeded in detaching the islands of Lemnos and Imbros from Athens, which helped him to command the grain route from the Black Sea region to Greece; the islands were also good sources of grain themselves. And then the Peloponnese, already a powder keg, had its fuse lit by the assassination of Alexander under mysterious circumstances. His general-ship and alliance with Cassander had lasted less than a year. Cassander immediately lost the vital strongholds of Corinth and Sicyon, which were taken over by Alexander’s wife, the formidable Cratesipolis, in a bid for semi-independence. She did manage to hold her little realm together for a few years—but then the Acrocorinth, the craggy hill overlooking the plain of Corinth and commanding the isthmus, has proved its strategic importance time and again over the centuries.

  THE CARIAN THEATER

  Asander had been appointed to the governorship of Caria immediately after the death of Alexander the Great and confirmed in the post at Triparadeisus. For years, he had apparently been a loyal friend of Antig-onus, but something had happened to make that change. Wealthy and cultured, Caria had a history of spawning independent dynasts, and perhaps Asander had ambitions in that direction—ambitions that would justly make him afraid of retaliation by Antigonus. Perhaps his only crime was, like Seleucus, to fail to submit to Antigonus’s assumption of seniority. At any rate, late in the summer of 315 he declared for the anti-Antigonid alliance.

  This was, of course, intolerable to Antigonus. Apart from his obvious desire to keep Asia Minor as a unified whole, Caria would make a perfect bridgehead for an invasion of Asia Minor from Egypt or Cyprus, where Ptolemy was concentrating his forces. Antigonus ordered Polemaeus into the region. Polemaeus arrived late in 315, in time to winter on the borders, but for much of the following year Asander managed to keep him at bay, with his own not inconsiderable army supplemented by a mercenary force donated by Ptolemy. Toward the end of 314, perhaps in response to a personal visit we happen to know that Asander made to Athens, when he provided the city with money to raise troops, Cassander sent Prepelaus to Caria with a force that might have broken the deadlock.9 But it was wiped out by the indispensable Polemaeus, who was emerging as one of the best generals of the time.

  The stalemate in Caria continued, but Polemaeus had done his job. He had contained the situation in Asia Minor long enough for Antigonus to wrap up affairs in Phoenicia. The fleet was built, and with its help Antigonus finally brought the siege of Tyre to an end, so that the whole Phoenician seaboard was under his control. The precariousness of Cassander’s position in Greece also made the timing right. And so Antigonus decided to leave the Middle East in the hands of his relatively untried son Demetrius, now aged twenty-two, while he marched to Caria to deal with the traitor himself—and then to see what could be done about Cassander.

  The Restoration of Seleucus

  ANTIGONUS’S PLAN, on returning to Asia Minor, was not just to retake Caria. If he defeated Lysimachus, whose main job was to hold the straits against invasion from Asia, he could get to Macedon; if he defeated Cassander, Ptolemy would be isolated and he could finish him off at his leisure. He therefore left Demetrius a relatively small force—a mere twenty thousand, including two thousand Macedonian infantry, five thousand horse, and forty-three elephants—with which to hold Ptolemy at bay. He took the bulk of the army north, while his fleet sailed around Asia Minor to join him. After a tough crossing of the Taurus, Antigonus arrived only in time to winter in Celaenae, but his ships encountered a fleet of Cassander’s, originally sent to support Prepelaus in Caria, and captured every single vessel. Cassander’s Carian expedition had been a complete disaster.

  Antigonus massively outnumbered Asander on both land and sea, and early in 313 the terrified rebel came to terms. He would be allowed to remain as governor of Caria, but strictly as Antigonus’s subordinate, with no troops under his personal command and no garrisons in the cities. He gave his brother to Antigonus as a hostage, but a few days later, realizing that he could not live as Antigonus’s pawn, he changed his mind, freed his brother, and wrote urgently to Ptolemy and Seleucus for help. Not surprisingly, Antigonus was furious. He broke up his winter quarters and attacked Caria by land and sea. It was an outstanding campaign, a true blitzkrieg with coordinated land and sea operations. In a matter of weeks all Caria—or the coastal regions, at least, which were all that counted—fell to Antigonus and his generals. Asander fled or was killed; we hear nothing of him again.

  With Asia Minor once more secure, Antigonus could focus on Greece, which lay open to the might of his new fleet. Cassander felt the threat and was prepared to negotiate, but the talks came to nothing, and Antigonus put into effect his invasion plan. First, in an attempt to tie up Lysimachus’s forces, he fostered an uprising among the Greek cities within Lysimachus’s Thrace, which had never been content under Macedonian rule. The cities threw out their garrisons and entered into an alliance with the local tribes, Lysimachus’s constant enemies.

  Lysimachus rose to the challenge. He advanced rapidly, and at the threat of siege all but one of the rebel cities capitulated. A joint Thracian and Scythian army failed to react quickly enough to help, and Lysimachus went to face them. He persuaded enough of the Thracians to desert, and then crushed the rest. The final rebel city, Callatis, held out and was intermittently under siege until 309, but the uprising was effectively over.

  Antigonus sent help, but Lysimachus left a holding force at Callatis and went out to meet this new threat. The Odrysian king, Seuthes III, saw an opportunity to renew his bid for independence and reneged on the peace treaty he had negotiated a couple of years previously with Lysimachus. He occupied the mountain pass through which Lysimachus would have to march to meet Antigonus’s forces. But Lysimachus, fully living up to his reputation for military genius, repulsed first Seuthes and then the Antigonid army. Seuthes was forced to come to terms, and the renewed pact was sealed by an exchange of brides.

  Lysimachus’s brilliance had foiled Antigonus so far, but would he be capable of halting a full-fledged invasion? Antigonus laid his plans carefully. He sent his nephew Telesphorus to the Peloponnese with a small fleet and a large army, with which he mopped up all the remaining Cassandrian garrisons in the northern Peloponnese except for Sicyon and Corinth, held for Cassander by Cratesipolis. But Telesphorus failed to prevent Cassander from securing the island of Euboea as his first line of defense against the imminent invasion. Antigonus dispatched Polemaeus with a substantial force. With the help of his Boeotian allies, Polemaeus as usual did brilliantly: he gained control of much of Euboea and, on the mainland, even briefly threatened Athens.

  Once Polemaeus had established himself, Antigonus recalled much of the fleet from Greek waters and, as the winter of 313/312 ap proached, moved north toward the Propontis and Europe. Cassander had no choice but to withdraw to Macedon to face the threat of invasion via Thrace, leaving an insufficient force in Euboea, under the command of his brother Pleistarchus, to combat Polemaeus. Meanwhile, again at Antigonus’s instigation, the Aetolians and Epirotes continued to make trouble for Cassander, and he had to dedicate even more of his forces to a campaign in western Greece. He had barely enough troops in Macedon to offer resistance to Antigonus’s threatened invasion.

  But Antigonus’s northern feint came to nothing. He approached the independent city of Byzantium for an alliance. That would give him a foothold in Europe and a chance to establish himself there over the winter. But, at Lysimachus’s prompting, the Byzantines preferred to stay neutral, and Lysimachus had both the time and the manpower (his army had been swelled by the mercenary troops he had defeated) to prepare his defenses. Antigonus decid
ed against forcing a crossing, in uncertain winter weather, into well-defended territory, and distributed his troops to winter quarters in the region of the Propontis. The invasion was planned for the following year, across the Hellespont, as soon as the weather improved.

  THE BATTLE OF GAZA

  The months of the winter of 313/312 brought respite for Cassander, but his situation was still desperate. For the first time since the Lamian War in 322, little of southern Greece, with the notable exception of Athens, was under Macedonian control, and Antigonus’s assurances of freedom had revived a militant spirit of independence among the Greek cities. It would take a miracle to stop Antigonus. The most obvious move would be for him to come at Macedon via Thrace while Polemaeus marched north from central Greece, and that was surely what Antigonus had in mind for 312. But nothing is certain in war.

  First, the Antigonid impetus was blunted by internal squabbling. Polemaeus had succeeded in Euboea, where Telesphorus had failed. Not unnaturally, Antigonus gave Polemaeus overall responsibility for Greece. But Telesphorus, in the Peloponnese, took himself off in a huff at this, and created a separate enclave for himself in Elis. His behavior there, such as robbing sacred sites to pay his mercenaries, was winning the Antigonid cause no friends, and demanded attention. Polemaeus soon brought his brother (or cousin) back into their uncle’s (or father’s) fold, but in the meantime he was not available to support Antigonus’s invasion. Fortunately for Antigonus, neither Polyperchon nor Cratesipolis seems to have been in a position to exploit the situation further; they rarely had the manpower for more than defensive work.