by David Grant
Alexander’s absence in Asia had been a mixed blessing for Athens. The city-state, paradoxically, enjoyed something of a pax makedonika with some prosperity returning between 330-324 BCE under the stewardship of Lycurgus who implemented prudent financial restraints, and who by 330 BCE had replaced the previous temporary structures that held the plays performed at the Great Dionysia with an enlarged stone theatre; it was the city’s new ‘tragic’ heart that may have held as many as 17,000 spectators overlooking its three bronze statues of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus (ca. 525-455 BCE). Most likely with the help of the newly pro-Macedonian statesman Phocion, Lycurgus does appear to have silenced Demosthenes, whose ‘good luck’ motto on his shield at Chaeronea had clearly not performed.151
Ironically, this period of relative stability enabled Athens to amass as much as 18,000 talents that would later be used for waging war against Macedonia.152 But the years 330-326 BCE had also seen Greece in the grip of a series of acute grain famines, throwing Athens’ thirty-five sitophylakes and sitonai, the corn guardians and corn buyers, into turmoil. Egyptian Cyrene, the most important city of the pentopolis of five settlements in the republic of Cyrenaica (Libya) and a vital grain centre for Athens, is recorded as sending 1,200,000 Attic medimnoi (230,000 bushels) of corn to Greece, including 72,600 to Olympias and 50,000 to Cleopatra in Macedonia and Epirus.153 But Cleomenes, Alexander’s governor administering the Arabian portion of Egypt east of the Nile Delta with the financial responsibility of arabarchos (monetary administrator or revenue collector), refused to allow grain ships to leave his ports without a crippling imposition of duty which only increased Athenian hostility, resulting in negative portrayals of him that were (spuriously) attached to both Demosthenes and Aristotle.154
But trade routes had opened up, wider-spread Greek law rationalised and harmonised transactions, piracy was suppressed by the Diadokhoi navies and Macedonians spent coin on Greek expertise and luxury goods; ‘capitalism’ flourished at both state and private enterprise level though it would also lure Greeks overseas, and with it there appears to have been widespread emigration from Greece in the half century after the fall of the Archaemenid regime.155 This was no doubt accelerated by the drop in local mercenary rates of pay that had steadily fallen from as much as 8 obols per day ca. 400 BCE when fewer soldiers of fortune were for hire, to perhaps as little as 4 obols at Alexander’s death. The remuneration was never extravagant even in cheaper non-inflationary times; paupers on state benefit in Athens received 2 obols per day, and the stipend for jury duty paid twice this, or more.156 It was a clear example of supply and demand and now better employment opportunities were beginning to present themselves in the newly Hellenised lands of the Diadokhoi.
CITY-TAKERS WITH BRONZE-BEAKED SHIPS, AND NO ORDINANCES OF JUSTICE: THE RISE OF THE MYRMIDONS157
At Alexander’s death in 323 BCE his Bodyguards and leading generals had to pick up the pieces. They, alongside the foremost infantry battalion officers at Babylon, had voiced their opinions, in one form or another, in the Assembly of Macedones convened to decide on the fate of empire governance and Alexander’s last wishes and instructions. But by now, as events were to prove, the Somatophylakes were too authoritative in their own right to be subservient to their peers, and though alliances of necessity pockmark the Successor Wars, they were forged only to preserve the independence they had by then achieved and to bring down a mutual threat.
Any persisting veneer of Agread loyalty vanished following the short-lived treaty known as the ‘Peace of the Dynasts’ of 311 BCE:
… Cassander, Ptolemy, and Lysimachus came to terms with Antigonus and made a treaty. In this, it was provided that: Cassander be general in Europe until Alexander, the son of Roxane, should come of age; that Lysimachus rule Thrace, and that Ptolemy rule Egypt and the cities adjacent thereto in Libya and Arabia; that Antigonus have first place in all Asia, and that the Greeks be autonomous. However, they did not abide by these agreements, but each of them, putting forward plausible excuses, kept seeking to increase his own power.158
Cassander abandoned his ‘plausible excuses’ when he had Alexander IV and Roxane executed in spring 310 BCE, ‘a move welcomed by all the successors who had aspired to the kingship’. Alexander IV was, after all, pledged in marriage to Deidameia, the daughter of the Molossian Aeacides and the sister of Pyrrhus of Epirus. This could have revived an Epirote-Macedonian dynastic superpower like that of Philip II through Olympias, and one promised by the marriage of their daughter, Cleopatra, to Alexander Molossus.159
Soon after, Cassander orchestrated the murder of Alexander’s elder son, Heracles, by his mistress Barsine, reportedly the half-Greek daughter of the renowned Artabazus (son of the Achaemenid princess Apame) and his Rhodian bride. Some five or six years before the mighty clash of powers at Ipsus, these super-governors – Cassander, Lysimachus, Ptolemy, Seleucus and Antigonus – who by now were reporting to no one but themselves, began to declare themselves kings, or to behave as such.160 Thereafter, the new dynasts would be raising and retaining what became their own revenues, rather than nominally collecting them for the Pellan regime.161 As it has been poignantly noted, Ptolemy’s early rejection of epimeletia to the kings following Perdiccas’ death in Egypt (320 BCE) was, ‘in a quiet way, an early declaration of independence’.162
Cornelius Nepos provided a suitable summation of this first generation of the successors:
… nor did they care to perform what they had originally promised, namely, to guard the throne for Alexander’s children; but, as soon as the only defender of the children was removed [Eumenes], they disclosed what their real views were. In this iniquity the leaders were Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Lysimachus, and Cassander.163
Antigonus was, most likely, the first satrap to openly reveal his empire-wide ambitions, as well as the first to grant himself and his son basileia, in 307-306 BCE; this effectively coincided with the commencement of the Fourth Diadokhoi War, which was emphatically ended at Ipsus in 301 BCE. The regal proclamations supposedly came at Athenian request; Demetrius had recently ‘freed’ Athens from Cassander (307 BCE), though his crown was sealed by his naval victory at Salamis on Cyprus in 306 BCE. Demetrius had allegedly fought alone on the stern of a galley against an enemy boarding party in a battle in which 12,800 of Ptolemy’s men were taken prisoner after the annihilation of half of his army.164 The crowning of his father was formalised when Aristodemus of Miletus, ‘the boldest flatterer of all the courtiers’, arrived and declared: ‘Hail King Antigonus!’165
Seleucus declared himself a king when he heard the news, and Ptolemy and Lysimachus (who, along with his son, married two of Ptolemy’s daughters) were not slow to follow with their royal declarations, though it is highly likely that they were addressed as kings some years before in their own domains.166 Agathocles, the tyrant of Sicily, who started life as a mercenary solder, followed suit, proving that anyone can wear purple; a few years on he was offering his daughter, Lanassa (the name of Heracles’ granddaughter), to Pyrrhus to safeguard his regal future along with a dowry of Corfu (Korkyra). King of Epirus intermittently from 306 BCE, Pyrrhus would marry the daughters of both Illyrian and Paeonian kings.167
The title ‘basileus’ was soon to be emphasised by a newly manifested festival, the basileia.168 These kingships had unique connotations when attached to the early Diadokhoi; it was more a ‘term of office’ than ‘head of state’, for the ‘state’ was – as epitomised by Demetrius’ tidal career ‘now waxing, now waning’ – a notional region with ever-shifting borders and displaced campaign headquarters.169 Demetrius was, uniquely, a king without a country for much of his career until the six years following 294 BCE when he finally ascended the throne of Macedonia as King Demetrius I and reunited the previously divided state once more. By then, however, he was not unanimously popular and had to defend his intriguing in a Common Assembly, whose attendees only agreed to his kingship ‘due to their lack of a better man…’170 But even the royal women were now being r
eferred to as basilissa, koine Greek for ‘queen’, once married to the new Hellenistic kings who were ‘officially monogamous’ (a view which is challenged) despite the ‘many mistresses they might maintain’.171
Demetrius Poliorketes, the charismatic son of Antigonus Monophthalmos, delighted in hearing revellers propose that only he and his putative father were true kings (though Plutarch recorded that he was, in fact, Antigonus’ adopted nephew), whereas Ptolemy was merely an admiral, Lysimachus a treasurer and Seleucus nothing more than ‘a commander of a squadron of elephants’, thus an elephantarchos.172 Seleucus’ beasts had been a widely publicised gift from Chandragupta (probably in 303 BCE), but that appears to have been a face-saving initiative to camouflage his failed invasion of India, following which he had been forced to cede his easternmost provinces to the Indian dynast.173 All laughed at their new titles except Lysimachus, for treasurers were traditionally eunuchs, though Seleucus’ own ‘spectacularly successful’ naval operations with the Ptolemaic fleet were being marginalised with his new epithet.174
The Diadokhoi were, however, walking a tightrope of acceptance, but being adept politicians who could have shown Cicero a thing or two, they continued to milk their association to the dead conqueror, even the hostile Cassander, who, though was never destined to acquire any of Asia (apart from an expeditionary force to Cappadocia and, arguably, some authority in Cilicia, briefly governed by his brother Pleistarchus), managed to control Macedonia for almost twenty years.175 After he had orchestrated the execution of Olympias at Pydna in 316/315 BCE, irreverently ‘throwing her body out without burial’ (he possibly also removed her statue from the Philippeion at Olympia), Cassander took Alexander’s half-sister, Thessalonice, as his bride.176
Next came Diadokhoi associations to Alexander in literature and art. Apelles’ paintings had captured the gradual divinity in the Macedonian king’s profile from youthful victor, to hero, and then to god.177 And if the Pellan poet, Poseidippus, accurately described Lysippus’ sculpting skill, itself a poetic mimesis in bronze, there did indeed exist a powerful imagery at work:
Lysippus, Sicyonian sculptor, daring hand, learned artisan,
Your bronze statue has the look of fire in its eyes,
That one you made in the form of Alexander, The Persians deserve
No blame. We forgive cattle for fleeing a lion.178
Alexander’s approved team – the painter Apelles, the sculptor Lysippus and the gem engraver and goldsmith Pyrgoteles – had been effective for the Argeads and now they would be newly employed.179 Lysippus, who had criticised Apelles for painting Alexander wielding a thunderbolt rather than a spear (that being the more glorious), was commissioned to sculpt King Seleucus.180 Ptolemy hired Antiphilus, an alleged hostile rival of Apelles, to paint him in a hunt; Antiphilus’ canvas of a youthful Alexander and Philip with Minerva, also painted at Ptolemy’s court, reinforced the suggestion of ‘a family unit’ and would have supported the rumours of Ptolemy’s parentage; the appearance of the Ptolemaic eagle symbol may also have been designed to signify Argead roots.181 Philoxenus of Eretria even painted a battle scene at either Issus or Gaugamela for Cassander who had been absent from both conflicts; this was possibly the model for the famous Pompeii mosaic (unearthed in 1831) that now resides in the National Museum of Archaeology in Naples.182
Not to be outdone, monuments commissioned by Seleucus and Antigonus, and erected by the Eleans, appeared at Olympia beside Alexander and Philip.183 In fact, Plutarch and Polybius both record a tradition being circulated: Antigonus and his descendants also came from the same line as Philip II; Herodian recorded that Antigonus, like Alexander, ‘… imitated Dionysus in every way, even wearing a crown of ivy instead of the Macedonian hat or the diadem and carrying the thyrsus instead of a sceptre.’184 An inscription first published just a few decades ago and dating to the latter half of the 3rd century BCE, further confirmed that one of the Ptolemies (a Lagid) and Antiochus (a Seleucid) were additionally addressed as descendants of Heracles and the Argeads.185
Ptolemy erected a bronze equestrian statue to Alexander, symbolising alexikakos the national protector, and it remained a landmark in Alexandria for a thousand years, reminding the population that the ‘saviour’, Soter, had been his true heir.186 Sometime later he constructed the Tychaion, dedicated to the goddess of fortune; it adjoined the Mouseion (the home of the Muses) that housed additional Argead portraits. Seleucus commissioned a statue to the goddess Tyche in his new capital of Antioch; in this both successors had possibly been stimulated by Demetrius of Phalerum’s Peri Tyches, published sometime around 310 BCE.187 In the shadows of these living gods, the poetic Idylls of Theocritus (floruit ca. 270 BCE) and the mimiamboi (mimes) of Herodas (a younger contemporary, both 3rd century BCE), felt duty-bound to remind their audience in verse that the common man (and now more prominently, woman) and the challenges and routines of commonplace life, did still, in fact, exist.
Cicero knew that ‘endless money formed the sinews of war’ and it was never truer than now.188 For a time, Alexander’s image was retained on the head of the Diadokhoi coins and the major denominations minted by Seleucus, including gold staters and silver tetradrachms that maintained Alexander’s imperial currency type. These personal likenesses still carried the clean-shaven and leonine-maned look of the conqueror and they were often adorned with bulls’ and rams’ horns recalling Dionysus and Ammon, or struck with Heracles wearing a lion’s scalp.189 These were mythological and divine associations that Alexander perpetuated himself at the court symposia, imagery that was likely reenergised once Cleitarchus’ colourful campaign account entered circulation a generation on.190 As Olga Palagia argues: ‘The Successors used lion hunt imagery as a means of underlying and legitimising their share in his empire’; it represented their part in that subjugation of Persia and was perhaps a gesture to Heracles Kynagidas, the tutelary deity of the hunt.191
From the Diadokhoi there soon emerged an inevitable image-fusion of ‘the king they had served’, and ‘the king they had themselves become’, for they and their epigonoi had to relate to the mixed ethnicities now under their regal wings. Seleucus in particular had to appeal to veteran Macedonian campaigners – the Greek garrison troops he inherited from Antigonus after the battle of Ipsus – and yet he also needed to connect psychologically with his multi-ethnic Asiatic ranks. They included the half-caste sons of the campaigners whose education Alexander planned to fund when envisioning them as future replacements for their veteran fathers.192 Seleucus, who retained an Achaemenid-style administration, went on to portray Alexander in an elephant-scalp headdress as a symbol of his hybrid army.
Lysimachus, once reportedly blundering into Alexander’s spear – a wound staunched by the king’s bloody diadem which, according to Aristander, portended a troubled future reign193 – justified his association as a ‘treasurer’ by minting at his new capital, Lysimachia, built on the site of the demolished Cardia; it was itself greatly damaged by an earthquake twenty-two years later.194 As the new king of Thrace and its bordering lands, Lysimachus also churned out coins from Sestus, Lampsacus, Abydus, Sardis and from other new mints established across the Asia Minor satrapies he acquired from Antigonus after Ipsus, with most denominations showing the winged goddess Nike, Lysimachus’ well-earned victory motif.
But once their own dynasties were securely established following the uncertainties preceding kingships, the Diadokhoi had their own likenesses minted in addition to Alexander’s to propagate their cults and to lure Hellenic trade and Greek settlers eastward.195 True Ptolemaic numismatic independence came with the legend Alexandreion Ptolemaiou (the Alexandrine of Ptolemy) on which the dynast’s own heavy-set jaw entered circulation sometime around 304 BCE in his ‘dual kingship’ of Egypt, though gold staters still carried Alexander in a chariot pulled by four elephants.196 Ptolemy had established a Graeco-Macedonian administration in Alexandria but maintained a traditional Egyptian model in the Nile valley and delta. Outside these regions metal commerce
was revolutionary, as coinage was not used in rural Egypt where raw commodities, manufactured goods, or metal exchanged by weight (uncoined), were traded instead. The exceptions were the Greek trading posts and their prostatai, the administrators in charge of the ports, but even then coin was predominantly used for the payment of foreign mercenaries.197
Lysimachus announced his independence by striking his own lion’s forepart device in 303 BCE, and Seleucus added the anchor symbol at his new mints at Susa, Ecbatana and Seleucia-on-Tigris; the anchor, said to be visible on Seleucus’ thigh, was allegedly a divine birthmark carried through the generations.198 It has been argued that the strategic positioning of his new cities in otherwise rural areas was to propagate a coined monetary economy as quickly as possible where commodity-based trading was still the norm, rather than for any military initiative. This was especially true of the Seleucid East where tax rates on agriculture soon rose to fifty per cent in order to restock the treasuries that had been pillaged in the earlier campaigns. The greatest advantage, however, was that coin struck in gold and silver, often referred to as chrysion and argyrion, was non-perishable, it could be hoarded, and it was more stable than commodities (as Aristotle observed), so in universal demand.199
