In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Above any other feature of Alexander’s army, the sarissa came to represent the indomitable face of Macedonian might. National unity was now significantly lubricated by the goldmines of Crestonia, Mygdonia (formerly occupied by the Thracian Edones), Damastion and Thrace, as well as silver from Mount Pangaeum now flowing into the state coffers at 1,000 talents a year (equivalent in value to 300,000 gold pieces) since Crenides, renamed Philippi, fell to Philip in 356 BCE. With the dissolution of the Chalcidian League after Olynthus fell in 348 BCE, new mineral deposits were won.105 Iron ore, lead, molybdenum, magnetite, huntite, chrome and copper were mined for income and to pay for the accessories of war; this was an essential resource, because in the absence of any significant middle class, the infantry had to be armed, outfitted, housed and fed by the state. Although there is no firm evidence that Philip had formally remunerated his infantrymen, Curtius and Diodorus suggested 2-3 drachmas per day were paid to state levies, but when this commenced is unclear; of course the king additionally had the spoils of war to call upon to reward his men.106

  Philip’s new phalanx design was, in any case, a cheaper option than units of fully panoplied hoplites, enabling him to outfit a greater percentage of the recruiting pool of perhaps 30,000 men of fighting age in his consolidated Macedonia. Indeed, a spear butt-spike has been unearthed inscribed with the letters MAK suggesting the weapon was Macedonian government issue; comparison can be made with Athens where the state issued a hoplite shield and spear at the completion of the ephebia, the compulsory military training of eighteen to twenty-year-old citizens in garrison at the Piraeus.107

  WHEN ‘THE PRESTIGE OF OLD REFLECTS UPON THE PRESTIGE OF THE PRESENT’

  The Macedonian sarissa worked its way inexorably through the Persian heartlands and in the set-piece battles with Darius III. Yet the upper satrapy revolts, which saw increasing mountain warfare, were a different affair altogether, and it was here that Alexander suffered his first setbacks, conspiracies and the resulting trials. But it was in India that the slackening tide finally turned and where the campaign bordered on disaster for both him and his battle-weary men. The king’s popularity was in retrograde motion by which time the stature of Alexander’s own Bodyguards – ‘autocrats within their own armies long before the assumption of royal title’ – along with the most prominent of his pan-provincial strategoi and the generals under them, were hugely influential, both regionally and amongst their own men.108

  The one-eyed Antigonus had governed much of Asia Minor for over a decade by the time Alexander returned to Babylon, with talented satraps and officers about him. Parmenio had been vested with a pivotal administrative role at Ecbatana in Media, guarding the royal treasury and keeping communication and supply routes open between Asia Minor and the Near East. If he had survived the banquet at which Alexander ran him through, Black Cleitus might have assumed a similar role from Bactra (the capital of Bactria, modern Balkh) to govern the upper satrapies. And in Alexander’s vanguard the voice of Craterus resounded loudly with the veterans.109 These top-tier commanders, along with the Silver Shields veterans and their popular infantry officers, remained the conservative face of a Macedonian authority, which, for many of the rank and file, represented a far more coherent and attractive order than Alexander’s increasingly indecipherable behaviour and erratic policy towards those he conquered.

  As Macedonian regent and hegemon in Pella, Antipater had ably governed Greece, Thessaly, Illyria, Epirus, the upper cantons and neighbouring tribes for more than a decade in Alexander’s absence, and his ‘home army’ may well have preserved a nationalist spirit that Alexander’s troops in Asia were to lose, for in Macedonia it was still Philip II the army nostalgically recalled, and it was probably his heroon, not Alexander’s, they saw standing at Aegae.110

  In 331 BCE Antipater had crushed King Agis III of Sparta at Megalopolis, the city founded by the Arcadian League with Epaminondas’ support; it was here that the ‘prestige of old reflected upon the prestige of the present’. In the wake of defeat at Issus and following Alexander’s rejection of his peace terms, Darius III had been trying to rouse Greece into an uprising against Macedonia; his envoy, Pharnabazus, was courting King Agis who had to sail to Halicarnassus in a single trireme to raise his money for a war that was ever more reliant upon mercenaries, in this case 8,000 escapees from Issus who had later seen action in Egypt. Lycurgan law prohibited Sparta’s free citizens from engaging in moneymaking activity, whilst its xenalasia barred foreigners from entering the state (also denying its citizens the right to exit), so the reliance on Persian gold is not difficult to understand. Antipater received 3,000 talents from Alexander in Asia with which to equip a force to meet the threat, though whether it arrived in time has been questioned.111

  Megalopolis was a significant victory, though Alexander deprecatingly labelled it a ‘battle between mice’ when he heard the outcome in Ecbatana in Media.112 Antipater had been faced with a revolt by Memnon in Thrace at the same time, probably not coincidentally, and a substantial Macedonian army under Corrhagus, his strategos in the Peloponnese, had recently been annihilated.113 If that threat was not enough, Alexander had just stripped his regent of more new recruits. The ‘never more violent conflict’ with Sparta took the lives of 5,300 of the 22,000 arrayed in their ranks, half of which were mercenaries; Curtius claimed hardly anyone returned to the Spartan camp without a wound. Some 3,500 of Antipater’s 40,000 troops fell; this was a death toll larger than the Macedonian casualty numbers provided at the three major battles Alexander fought against Darius in Asia.114

  The technique of grabbing hold of the sarissa with two hands to render it useless was still a generation away, and a defeated Sparta was finally forced to join the League of Corinth and its oath of non-aggression towards Macedonia.115 The previously unwalled city would soon have a ditch and palisade, something unthinkable in Xenophon’s day in which King Agesilaus II had been questioned on the lack of fortification; as a reply he simply pointed to his men.116 A century after Alexander, by 222 BCE and the battle at Sellasia, Sparta would itself convert to the Macedonian style of warfare under Cleomenes III.117

  Curtius alleged: ‘Alexander was often heard to say that Antipater took upon himself the state of a king, that he was more powerful than a prefect ought to be, and that he was puffed up by the rich spoil and fame of his Spartan victory while he claimed as his own all that the king had given him.’118 Although this may be polemical material added later by anti-Macedonian, or more targeted anti-Antipatrid hostility, it clearly suggests the extent of the regent’s influence at home.119

  Antipater’s influence would increase following Alexander’s death and the challenge that came when Greece tested his resolve in the Lamian War. Following a setback when initially outnumbered whilst waiting for reinforcements from Asia, and after a siege in the town of Lamia some 6.25 miles north of Thermopylae – where the Greek commander Leosthenes was nevertheless killed – Antipater finally met the Greek allied forces at Crannon in 322 BCE; supporting them were elements of the Thessalian cavalry, originally Antipater’s allies by virtue of the legacy of Alexander’s giving each of them a talent bonus when he dismissed them at Ecbatana. Their experience had already taken its toll; their recent defeat of the newly returned Leonnatus, who fought bravely in the region’s swampy terrain, saw ‘… the first major defeat for Macedonian cavalry in over thirty years.’120

  Although the Thessalian brigade bettered their Macedonian counterparts at Crannon, Antipater’s overwhelming numbers, which had been boosted by the arrival of Craterus and 1,500 cavalry with 11,000 mixed infantry including 6,000 veterans who left Macedonia with Alexander twelve years before, saw the Greeks treating for peace. Their terms were initially refused, and the Thessalian cities were stormed one by one as Antipater and Craterus made their way south towards Athens.121

  Following defeat at Lamia and abandoned by its allies, Athens was soon to suffer a further blow to her democratic heart. Antipater had seen his fill of Alexander’s expe
riment in managing democracy from afar and he effectively turned its government into a plutocracy. Under the old system, citizens were still divided into the four property classes that emerged under Solon’s reforms, regardless of their production. Antipater’s new constitution demanded a property qualification of 2,000 drachmas, effectively disenfranchising 22,000 Athenian citizens and leaving just 9,000 ‘qualifying’ voters in a city now garrisoned at Piraeus; estimates suggest the number of male citizens in the city had already dropped from some 60,000 in the day of Pericles to 30,000 by the time Demosthenes had first rallied the population against Philip.122 The new regime was a far cry from Pericles’ egalitarian declaration: ‘Neither is property a bar, but a man may benefit his city whatever the obscurity of his condition.’123

  Ploutos and penia, wealth and poverty, were once again at war. Those who were ostracised either emigrated or fled to Thrace with Antipater’s encouragement, though they too were summarily branded ‘warmongers and disturbers of the peace’.124 The principal beneficiaries were the incorruptible Phocion ho chrestos (‘do good’; he had turned down Leosthenes’ military post) and the highly purchasable Demades, who, until he was implicated in plotting with the royalist Perdiccas in Asia, enjoyed Antipater’s support; he managed to convince the Athenian Assembly to sentence the newly reconciled Hyperides and Demosthenes to death.125 Demosthenes had once warned Phocion that he might be killed some day if the people became irrational. Phocion responded with: ‘Yes, however, they would kill you if they came to their senses’; it seems they did.126

  The Macedonian garrison entered the city while the celebration of mysteries was in progress and while the gods ‘… looked down with indifference upon the most grievous woes of Hellas.’127 Although Antipater’s son, Cassander, would halve the voting qualification in 318/317 BCE (to those possessing more than 10 minae, 1,000 drachmas) when garrisoning Munychia in the face of Polyperchon’s promise of freedom, a democracy that had lasted in various guises from 507 BCE to 322 BCE, was now dead.128 The panel of 6,000 male citizens over the age of thirty who had taken the solemn Heliastic Oath (which pledged impartiality), so providing the city with annual jurors (diskastai) at the People’s Court with its annual magistrates and legislators (nomothetai), were subordinated to the law of the Macedonian pike. Eisangelia, denunciation, and the resulting charges of treason, now hovered over any loose recalcitrant tongues.129

  IN THE WAKE OF THE WRATH OF PELEUS’ SON

  A famous Roman aphorism was used well by Tacitus: ‘They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal; this they falsely name Empire, and when they create a desert, then they call it peace’;130 it is a disillusioned speech that could have been written in hindsight of the Macedonian campaign in Asia. Few men in history were ever universally loved to the point where they could rule out assassination, and as Demosthenes’ opening oration declared, fewer still could have been as widely resented, feared and hated, outside his own campaign headquarters as Alexander by 323 BCE.131 With Alexander’s passing, ‘… the civilised world, which had never before known only one master, now found itself in a novel situation, that of knowing no master at all.’132 Momentum was lost and his fragile sarissa-enforced statecraft began to implode. The vacuum united everyone who had suffered his policies in quiet dissent, including the pezhetairoi who had carried the pikes on their shoulders for some 170,000 stades.133

  The theme of the years either side of Alexander’s death was uncertainty, both in Greece and Asia. The Persian Empire at its height had enjoyed an annual income of 30,000 talents, and sources suggest Alexander and his hubristic new order spent over 50,000 talents, equivalent to fifty years of Athenian total revenue, in his extravagant last two years.134 Some 10,000 had repaid soldiers’ personal debts, gold crowns were handed out at Susa (though surely not the 15,000 talents-worth claimed by Chares) and a further 10,000 talents paid off veterans, with a similar sum destined for temple restoration in Greece; presents, weddings dowries and a research grant of 800 talents to Aristotle added to the bill, as well as payments to orphaned children and their promised education.135

  The compliant rajah of Taxila had even been given 1,000 talents and Harpalus had fled to Athens with a further 5,000 from the treasury, equating to some 140 tons in silver or 14 tons of gold, which alone (if in gold) would have required a minimum of thirty ships to transport it.136 In comparison, the sacking of ancient Thebes in 336/5 BCE had apparently only yielded 440 talents, though this number probably related to the sale of prisoners alone.137 Some 180,000 talents had reportedly been captured from Persian treasuries (estimated by Engels at some 7,290 tons of gold and silver) during Alexander’s campaign, possibly the equivalent of one hundred billion dollars today; it would have been sufficient to run Athens and the Aegean for two centuries. Justin suggested 50,000 talents remained at Alexander’s death.138

  By summer 323 BCE and through the months preceding it, projects had been underway for an ornate funeral pyre for Hephaestion costing a further 12,000 talents, gargantuan Babylonian dockyards and the construction of 700 warships.139 Opulent dinners with 600 to 700 Companions allegedly ran to 100 minae, if Ephippus is to be believed; that is 10,000 drachmas or well over a talent per meal. Once again, this appears an emulation of the Great King’s dining arrangements, though these negative images painted by Ephippus might have been written to reinforce Greek bitterness during the Lamian War.140 Alexander had appointed a Rhodian, Antimenes, to upkeep the roads in the region and he had already imposed a previously unenforced ancient duty of ten per cent on imported goods, a levy that must have been hugely unpopular; it was no doubt required to fund these heady projects in the face of a waning treasury.141 This points to the collapse of the Achaemenid tax-raising network, which saw serfs paying great landowners, who in turn paid satraps who collected for the Great King; it was clear that the treasuries across the empire would soon be bled dry.142

  The regional strategoi, and the king’s Bodyguards above them who were impatient to administer a chunk of the new empire, knew it, and a confrontation was inevitable, though whether that was resolved with a poisoned cup we may never establish. Evidence suggests the common Macedonian would have considered the state treasury as a wealth safeguarded by the kings for the people, and that their tax revenues were similarly the property of a state they had a voice in through their representative landlords and nobles at the Common Assembly of Macedones. If so, Alexander’s continued extravagance would have increased the resentment at Babylon from the men who had not yet been provided bonuses or anything more then a soldier’s basic remuneration.143

  In Alexander’s wake, manpower drains, commodity price rises and famines resurfaced. The early years of the campaign saw little new coinage issued, for Philip II’s gold staters, Philippeioi, and his silver tetradrachms had already become an international medium used from what is now Romania and Italy in the West, to Syria in the East, while bronze coinage was used for local transactions, the latter only possible under a stable and established monetary regime. But Alexander struck enormous quantities of what was expected to become the new reference currency in the late campaign. It is estimated that from 330 BCE onwards, after raiding the Persian treasuries, Alexander minted some 4,680 tons of silver in the form of to basileion nomisma, the king’s coinage; this was an enormous circulation increase, with some coins remaining in use for up to a century. Unsurprisingly, an unusually large issue was minted in 324/323 BCE. But as time would show, the economies of his successors were no less ambitious, and they too needed trading platforms based on nomisma, metal-based money.144

  By 301 BCE and the ‘Battle of the Kings’ at Ipsus, the cost of living had tripled over the previous century; wheat prices had risen from 2 drachmas per artaba (27 litres, a dry measure used in Persian and Egypt) in 404 BCE to 10 drachmas around 300 BCE, and oil prices had trebled.145 The dramatist, Menander, suggested that any man whose land was mortgage-free was ‘lucky’, and overbearing loans at Ephesus, a city ruined by its continued support for Demetrius Poliorketes
against Lysimachus in the Diadokhoi Wars, led to a suspension of ordinary law, so that palliative measures were invoked to stop the collapse of interest payments and other property obligations.146

  Some 30,000 ‘campaign’ talents, discounting gifts and bonuses, are reckoned to have re-crossed the Hellespont. The tombs at Emathia, Pieria and the ‘Great Tomb’ at Lefkadia display the extraordinary resources of even the undistinguished officer who made it home alive, despite the claims by Curtius that: ‘The army which had defeated so many rich nations took from Asia more prestige than booty.’147 This was, nevertheless, private wealth and not a state resource that could have more positively contributed to the nation’s infrastructure. We have evidence that the quantity of ‘unearned’ wealth dumped on Macedonia had been hugely inflationary too, destabilising and devastating the rural markets that saw gold-to-silver ratios drop from (approximately) 15:1 to 10:1, when supply of manufactured goods could often not meet the demand. Philip’s expansion of the mines at Mount Pangaeum, which had once provided the Athenian Peisistratus (died ca. 527 BCE) with much of his wealth, and the associated argyrokopeion, the gold mint at Amphipolis, had already contributed to the inflationary trend.148

  A more obvious cause of upheaval in Macedonia itself was the ongoing recruitment campaigns that saw some 33,800 or more men-in-arms shipped to Asia, besides the 14,000 Macedonians Alexander had originally departed with; in total this may have equated to something like one in eight of every adult eligible for military service.149 And we should not forget that in 334 BCE Alexander Molossus of Epirus, Alexander’s uncle (and brother-in-law through his marriage to Cleopatra), simultaneously invaded Italy with an army that further depleted regional manpower. Little of this economic upheaval was ever recorded in the mainstream narratives; the fate of men and battles took precedent from Homer and Herodotus onwards, when the social causes that led to war were marginalised by all but Thucydides.150 Yet a whole world order was changing and the Argead regime of the generation of Philip and Alexander was to blame.