In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 28
The new legal tender being introduced by the Diadokhoi soon saved 2 grams of silver in negotiations; the 17.62-gram tetradrachm was now reduced to the Rhodian weight of 15.50 grams to cover the manufacture cost; Ptolemy was the first to adopt the new standard in 310 BCE when it seems he banned foreign money from circulating in Egypt. Thus imports became cheaper where exports were taxed as usual. Electrum coins, like the early Lydian currency and later the staters from Cyzicus, Phocaea and Mytilene, were cautiously traded as they could not be assayed until Archimedes’ discovery of specific gravity, causing much head scratching for the metronomoi, the inspector of weights and measures, the daneistes (moneylenders), the trapezitai, the official bankers and their kollybistikai trapezai, exchange banks.200
Greeks were wary of coins being traded at a higher nominal than intrinsic (bullion) value, especially when bronze was being minted, and today it is still possible to see bankers’ ‘test cuts’ on the edges to reveal the inner material, as forgers were known to cover copper with silver plate. Ptolemy II Philadelphos introduced bronze in Egypt around 260 BCE, and later copper drachmas appeared with Roman domination of the Mediterranean, though its exchange rate to a silver equivalent was to plummet from 60:1 to as low as 625:1, until Roman annexation of Egypt stopped the inflationary crisis.201
Herodotus believed that hard gold and silver currency had originated in Lydia with Gyges or his son, probably in the 7th century BCE; once again this most likely stemmed from the king’s need to pay mercenaries, whereafter its usage gradually spread.202 But now, in the new Diadokhoi kingdoms, currency was overlaid with propaganda that carried motifs fashioned to humiliate opponents. Short on land-based success, and too young to have exploited his own association with Alexander, Demetrius depicted Poseidon with a trident and a ship’s prow to recall his victory at Salamis, a motif that suggested his thalassocracy. So even the successor coins, each displacing the popular Persian gold daric in Asia, were not free from what has been termed ‘antique spin’.203
Over the 250 years that stretched from Alexander’s accession in 336 BCE through to the close of the Hellenistic era, some ninety-one mints produced ‘Alexander’s coinage’ (twenty-six in his own lifetime); a Roman quaestor of Macedonia even reintroduced his image on new coins struck sometime around 90 BCE, though possibly this was specifically to pay the local population to fight against the mutual Pontic threat. The last Alexander-styled coin of the Hellenistic era was churned out at Mesembria (on the Thracian coast, now Bulgaria) around 65 BCE.204
A Ptolemy I Soter tetradrachm minted at Alexandria ca. 300-285 BCE showing his own likeness: a diademed head, an aegis around the neck and an eagle standing on a thunderbolt on the obverse. The eagle may be connected to Aelian’s statement of rumours that Ptolemy was an illegitimate son of Philip II.205 Images provided with the kind permission of the Classical Numismatic Group. Inc. www.cngcoins.com.
A Seleucus I Nikator tetradrachm minted at Seleucia-on-Tigris ca. 296-281 BCE showing the strength of his elephant corps. The laureate head of Zeus and Athena brandishing a spear with shield in a quadriga of elephants on the obverse.
A Demetrius Poliorketes tetradrachm minted at Salamis ca. 306-285 BCE celebrating his naval victory over Ptolemy. It displays Nike with a trumpet and stylus on a ship’s prow, with Poseidon with trident and arms in a mantle on the obverse.
A bronze coin with the legend ‘of King Lysimachus’ with a leaping lion and spearhead. Numismatists are divided on whether the head in Attic crested helmet depicts a young male or the goddess Athena.
‘Royal mints’ and what we might term ‘state banks’ (demosiai trapezitai) funded an arms race that saw the construction of ever more ambitious ships for the swelling Diadokhoi fleets. It was in this environment that sophisticated banking tools must have evolved, such as credit arrangements alongside commodity commitments, because transporting large quantities of coin from one treasury or sanctuary to another was simply impractical.206
The trireme (‘three’, Greek trieres, Roman triremis), probably the first ship to be pulled by oars at three levels, had been the mainstay of Mediterranean navies; they were generally increased in size to what the Romans later termed quadriremes (‘fours’), and quinqueremes (‘fives’) in the Syracusian and Carthaginian styles, though larger denominations may refer to the rower per oar (a system later termed alla scaloccio) rather than to the number of decks of oarsmen.207 The positioning of oarsmen to avoid the clashing of strokes was aided by a parexeiresia, an overhanging outrigger, though the exact configuration of even the ubiquitous trireme is still debated; some scholars believe a trieres refers to three men seated on a single bench, each pulling an independent oar (a system later known as alla sensile).208
The cost of maintaining a fleet of the magnitudes we read of in the Diadokhoi Wars would have been a huge undertaking: ships were manned by conscripted citizens, not slaves, who were in any case expensive to upkeep. Powering them would have been the thranitai, zygitai, and thalamitai (or thalamioi), the upper, middle, and lower deck rowers in a three-tiered design. An Athenian trireme would have required over 10,000 drachmas per year (1.5 to 2 talents) to run, before accounting for the wages of its fighting contingent at something like 4 to 6 obols per man per day.209
Possibly as a response to Ptolemy sending Antigonus a package containing a large fish and green figs (‘master the sea, or eat these’),210 each now commissioned kataphraktos (armoured) polyremes: the ‘eights’ (okteres), ‘nines’ (enneres) and finally the ‘tens’ (dekeres) that were soon seen floating around the Eastern Mediterranean. Alexander had shown them the way, for he had ordered wood for 700 ‘sevens’ (hepteres), and according to the Naturalis Historia of Pliny (‘The Elder’, 23-79 CE), he had once built a ‘ten’ from trees cut from the forests of Lebanon.211 By 314 BCE Antigonus commanded 240 warships which included ninety that allegedly had four banks of oars, ten of them ‘fives’, three with nine ‘orders’ of oarsmen, and ten ships housing ten.212 To repel them, and as described in the accounts of Demetrius’ famous siege of Rhodes (305-304 BCE), thick floating booms of squared logs with iron plates and spikes, the phragma or kleithron, were often deployed to block their path into harbours, whilst more elaborate pontoon barriers, zeugmata, were constructed from vessels planked together.213
The showman in Demetrius commissioned more ambitious ships still, the megista skaphe: ‘fourteens’, ‘fifteens’ and ‘sixteens’ (hekkaidekereis), some of them catapult-prowed and shooting arrows or stones.214 They were ‘much admired by his enemies as they sailed past’, though historians are, once again, still at odds over the intricate rowing arrangement these titans must have employed.215 Plutarch attempted to describe them:
… up until this time, no man had seen a ship of fifteen or sixteen banks of oars … However, in the ships of Demetrius their beauty did not mar their fighting qualities, nor did the magnificence of their equipment rob them of their usefulness, but they had a speed and effectiveness which was more remarkable than their great size.216
Following the defeat of Antigonus at Ipsus in 301 BCE, and after Asia Minor and Syria had been torn apart by those vying for the pieces, the treasury at Cyinda still yielded 1,200 talents to Demetrius, throwing him a fleet-building lifeline in well-forested Cilicia.217 Here he celebrated his new family ties with Seleucus who married his daughter, Stratonice, aboard a ship with thirteen banks of oars, and Demetrius soon occupied Cilicia, possibly with Seleucus’ consent. According to Plutarch, the marriage was prompted by the alliance formed between Lysimachus and Ptolemy (from the aforementioned marriages to Ptolemy’s daughters).218
The Cilician aggression earned Demetrius the denunciation of the provincial governor, Cassander’s brother Pleistarchus, who then took refuge with Lysimachus who now controlled all of Asia Minor north of the Taurus range. Having already seen the Chersonese ravaged by Demetrius, Lysimachus invaded Cilicia by land, but he cordially asked Demetrius to give him a demonstration of his naval power and Demetrius obliged; this is just on
e of the episodes that captures the mercurial and perplexing relationships between the warring Diadokhoi.219
The new fleet enabled Demetrius to cling on to his garrisoned Greek cities as well as Ephesus, Sidon, Tyre and Cyprus, for a while, the latter harbours posing a threat to Ptolemaic Egypt.220 And some years on, after a revival in Greece (starving Athens into submission in 295 BCE with his remaining fleet of 300 ships) and his increasingly autocratic and unpopular kingship in Pella (294-288 BCE) – when his darkest hours were approaching that would see him expelled from Macedonia after his soldiers deserted to Lysimachus and Pyrrhus – Demetrius was still able to (plan to) lay keels for 500 new ships. He soon raised an army of 98,000 men with 12,000 cavalry; ‘all wondered at not just the multitude, but at the magnitude’ of the force with which he planned to re-conquer ‘Antigonid’ Asia Minor. Demetrius’ behaviour leaves us in no doubt that in the minds of the Diadokhoi, at least, state property and monarchy indeed belonged to the man with the crown and not to ‘the people’.221
The recruiting numbers still sound incredible today, though we know Greek league cities were fined if they did not produce their levy of soldiers, and surviving details of those fines suggest Demetrius was prepared to pay well above the average for a Greek hoplite.222 Even pirates were being employed for their naval experience, though notably this was principally for action against Rhodes, ‘their special enemy’.223 Yet a fleet of 500 ships would have required thousands of talents per year if crews were to be retained throughout winter; this was an impossible undertaking for even the former dominant naval powers of Athens and Rhodes, restricting these ambitious navies to the former-Persian-Empire-coffered Diadokhoi alone.
Commissioned sometime after 289 BCE, Lysimachus built a mammoth ship at Heraclea, the Leontophoros (‘Lion Bearer’, denoting his new symbol); it was possibly a catamaran that required 1,600 rowers and its construction may have been funded by the hidden Thracian treasure hoard revealed to him ca. 285 BCE.224 Detail of the ‘super dreadnought’ was recorded in Photius’ epitome of Memnon’s History of Heraclea:
… in this fleet were some ships, which had been sent from Heraclea, six-bankers and five-bankers and transports, and one eight-banker called the Lion-Bearer, of extraordinary size and beauty. It had one hundred rowers on each line, so there were eight hundred men on each side, making a total of sixteen hundred rowers. There were also twelve hundred soldiers on the decks, and two steersmen.225
Demetrius’ son, Antigonus II Gonatas (ca. 319-239 BCE), under threat from all sides and by then unsurprisingly short on funds, needed twenty-four years to build a riposte, his ‘sacred triremos’, a ship possibly larger still and built at Corinth. It secured victory at Kos (ca. 258 BCE) over Ptolemy II Philadelphos who was now assisting Athens after the Chremonidean War (ca. 267-261 BCE). He had himself been busy constructing a ‘twenty’ and two ‘thirties’ in a fleet comprising four ‘thirteens’, two ‘twelves’, fourteen ‘elevens’, thirty ‘nines’, thirty-seven ‘sevens’, five ‘sixes’ and seventeen ‘fives’.226 A surviving papyrus detailed Ptolemy II’s instructions to fell 500 acacia, tamarisk and willow trees to provide the breastwork of his ‘long ships’. The fleet included twice as many smaller ships, with more than 4,000 in total in the Aegean.227 The bloated nautical appetites culminated in Ptolemy IV Philopatros (reigned 221-204 BCE) building a tessarakonteres, a giant 280 cubit-long (perhaps 410 feet) ‘forty’, allegedly requiring 4,000 rowers and 400 additional crew to ferry a further 2,850 armed men to war.228
Despite Plutarch’s enthusiasm for the performance of Demetrius’ fleet, there is little evidence that these later huge and unwieldy warships remained dominant at sea, and smaller agile vessels were more practical for most naval operations: the fast lembos and the light hemiolia and myoparones of the pirates, for example, or the trihemioliai the Rhodians used to counter them, because their nimble shallower-draughted ships could usefully navigate up rivers.229 The behemoths were probably also too slow to catch opponents in ramming or close-quarter manoeuvres, in which a dorudrepanon (‘spear-sickle’) might be used to cut enemy rigging, and they would have been vulnerable to the 2-metre long Athlit-style ram (embolos) sheathed in bronze that typically featured on the bows of triremes.230 Certainly the tactical manoeuvres used effectively by the Rhodians such as the diekplous, periplous and anastrophe, designed to shear away oars and punch a hole in enemy lines, outflank and expose vulnerable sterns with a quick avoidance turn, must have fallen by the wayside when two giants met.231 The Hellenistic naval arms race was about prestige above functionality; this was floating court propaganda.
The construction techniques were soon applied to pleasure barges; Athenaeus described the Syracusia launched ca. 240 BCE and which had been designed by Archimedes for Hieron II (ca. 308-215 BCE) the Greek king of Syracuse who was his friend and possibly his cousin. It came complete with eight armed towers and catapults, gardens, a bathhouse, gymnasium and a temple to Aphrodite: the summit of Hellenistic extravagance. To construct the Syracusia, wood sufficient for sixty quadriremes was cut from Mount Etna and it took 300 craftsmen over a year to build it. A folly too large to dock anywhere but Alexandria, the unwieldy giant was gifted to Ptolemy III Euergetes (‘Benefactor’, reigned 246-222 BCE) and renamed ‘Alexandris’.232 Guiding the ship to her final resting place was the Pharos, the lofty lighthouse that had been designed by Sostratus of Cnidus and which took twelve years to build on Pharos Island; standing for over sixteen hundred years, it has been aptly described as nothing short of more Ptolemaic ‘propaganda in stone’.233
The Roman Emperor Caligula, clearly looking back with admiration to Alexander and his successors, was inspired by what he read and determined to have the final say in water-borne excess that outshone even Cleopatra’s 300-foot-long barge on which she seduced her Roman suitors in its gardens, grottoes, porticoes and bedrooms. Caligula built the previously unparalleled barges that were recovered by Mussolini from the lake known to the Romans as Diana’s Mirror, now Lake Nemi, when he drained it through 1928 to 1932. These were nothing less than floating palaces with underfloor heating, libraries, temples and mosaics; excavations suggest the barges must have been cripplingly costly, no doubt a part of the reason why the new emperor taxed lawsuits, weddings and prostitution, and auctioned gladiators’ lives at Colosseum games.234
A reconstruction of the Pharos in Alexandria. Engraving by F Adler, 1901.
CULTS, HEROES, SAVIOURS AND GODS: THE FINAL METAMORPHOSIS
Alongside the Diadokhoi coinage, portraits and naval power, emerged the encouragement of cult worship, a development termed a ‘… servile, despicable flattery, the product, not of any religious feeling, but of scepticism.’235 By the end of the 4th BCE ‘the heroisation of living men was no longer a paradox’ and liturgies proliferated.236 In November 311 BCE, officially the seventh year of the reign of King Alexander IV, Ptolemy erected the Satrap Stele commemorating the victory by the ‘Great Viceroy’ (himself) over Demetrius at Gaza the previous year (though the never-mentioned Seleucus was at Ptolemy’s side); it described the Egyptian satrap-soon-to-be-king as ‘… strong in two arms, wise in spirit, mighty among men, of stout courage, of firm foot and resisting the furious.’237 It went on to eulogise his fighting ability, his restoration of Egyptian statues and temples, and it firmly placed Ptolemy in the pantheon of Egyptian gods and beside Alexander himself. The rhetoric must have recalled the eulogies he would have read on the Babylonian royal cylinders, or the inscription Onesicritus claimed to have seen on the tomb of Darius I; indeed, the descendants of Seleucus did have stone cylinders carved to tell their stories in the tradition of the Persian Great Kings.238
Demetrius, who modelled himself on Dionysus, and who now sported a many-coloured cloak depicting the heavens, was described by Plutarch as ‘… amorous, bibulous, warlike, munificent, extravagant, and domineering.’239 Upon entering Athens by chariot in 307 BCE, he turned the rooms of the Parthenon behind the statue of Athena into his lodging and became legendary for his w
omanising; he was ‘not a very suitable guest for the virgin goddess’, counselled the devout Plutarch.240 But the Hellenistic kings no longer feared impiety for they were becoming demi-gods themselves; when Demetrius returned ‘democracy’ to the Athenians, he and his father were hailed as God Saviours. Plutarch captured the moment: ‘They decreed Demetrius and Antigonus should be woven into the sacred robe, along with those of the gods; and the spot where Demetrius first alighted from his chariot they consecrated and covered with an altar, which they styled the altar of Demetrius Alighter.’241
Enthused by the delivery of 150,000 medimnoi of grain – possibly from Antigonus’ grain-producing estates in Asia in an attempt to bypass the Ptolemaic monopoly – and now that Athens had sufficient timber for one hundred new ships, the city set about naming games, hymns and even a month, Demetrion, after the liberator (at the expense of the Athenian month of Munychion).242 The city extended its traditional ten tribes to include two new orders: the Antigonis and the Demetrias, with the extravagant and fawning Stratocles proposing many of the obsequies that included golden statues.243 By ‘championing the case of the Greek cities’, the League of Islanders and then Scepsis erected altars and a cult statue to Antigonus from 311/310 BCE onwards; Samos, Delos and Sicyon followed with cults and games thrown in honour of both father and son.244 By 307/6 BCE the tide of approbation saw them attempt to unite Greeks under a new coalition, and by 302 BCE Antigonus and Demetrius, exploiting the anthem of ‘freedom’ once more, drafted their charter of a new Hellenic League (we have it in fragments) that would conveniently continue waging war against Cassander.245