In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
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Warned of the direction of the enemy’s approach, Antigonus simply retorted with: ‘But who but me would be their mark?’ He fell at the ‘battle of the kings’ in a shower of javelins, by now in his mid-eighties. It was an age that Ptolemy himself attained, and Seleucus and Lysimachus almost, remarkable achievements in such violent times (and when the average lifespan of the period was thirty-eight years, due to various causes).252 Antigonus’ corpse was abandoned by all but the faithful Thorax of Larissa, though it was later afforded the courtesy of a burial with royal honours.253 Ipsus indeed proved kakodaimones, an ill-starred day, and as it has been pointed out, it was a propaganda failure too.254 Despite all Antigonus’ positive work and progress in Asia – the sophisticated and largely successful administrations, colonisations and new city foundations – the results were once again reaped by the victors; he is remembered as an ambitious warlord rather than a cultured empire administrator, when the reality surely lay somewhere in-between.
The ‘centripetal leaders’, Perdiccas and Antigonus (and arguably Eumenes too), who attempted to maintain the unity of Alexander’s empire under central authority (ultimately their own, with their accomplices), were finally eclipsed by the ‘centrifugal forces’ vying for a chunk of the ‘great carcass’.255 The commonality of purpose that had brought the victors together was nothing more than a veneer and the spoils of Asia were once again divided.
Pliny stated that Antigonus had once commissioned the celebrated artist, Protogenes, and his own friend Apelles, to paint him in profile to avoid the complication of his disfigured eye, for Antigonus is said to have often joked at his cyclopean nickname, heterophthalmos.256 Yet when it came to immortality in oils he was more perspicacious, defying Cicero’s assertion that: ‘Things perfected by nature are better than those finished by art.’257 Also present at the ‘battle of the kings’ was the historian Hieronymus, and this too provides a tutorial reminder that a historian’s profiling rarely mirrored the true face of events. So we must ask: did Hieronymus give us portraits with true likenesses, or simpler and more attractive profiles of his patrons? Those closer to events remained just as curious; Plutarch reported that a peasant was found digging at Ipsus some years after the formative battle. When questioned on his activity, he replied: ‘I am looking for Antigonus.’258
The Battle of Zama by Henri-Paul Motte, 1890. Although the battle at Zama between Hannibal and Scipio took place a century after Ipsus, this engraving captures the terror of facing war elephants, the ‘tanks of the ancient battleground’. According to Polybius, in earlier wars the Romans hamstrung captured Seleucid elephants.259
BENE QUI LATUIT BENE VIXIT – ‘TO LIVE WELL IS TO LIVE CONCEALED’: HIERONYMUS THE TRAPEZE ARTIST260
The narrating of the years in which Eumenes and Antigonus faced off in many ways constituted Hieronymus’ own ‘Babylonian compromise’, an equivalent to the dilemma Cleitarchus faced when narrating events surrounding Alexander’s death. Serving both of the protagonists, Hieronymus co-joined their stories in person and in ink and so his history of the Successor Wars was always destined to be a compromised narrative.
For reasons we can only speculate, Hieronymus was spared execution when captured at Gabiene; he was employed by the victor and served three generations of Antigonids.261 Neither yet a historian and never a general, his exact role under Eumenes remains unclear, though on later occasion he was titled epimeletes, suggesting a guardianship of affairs. Yet his wounds at Gabiene suggest that as a philos of Eumenes (here more representative of personal or technical staff) he did see action in the ranks.262
Hieronymus was later cited as ‘overseer of revenue’ from the extraction of naturally occurring bitumen (asphaltum) at the Dead Sea, a valuable resource used in mummification and shipbuilding. He was likely installed in the region as part of Demetrius Poliorketes’ flawed expedition against the Nabateans, as Diodorus’ detailed narrative suggests we have a somewhat disgruntled eyewitness account; Antigonus had failed here before him and Hieronymus apparently saw little value in a second unprovoked attack. The Nabateans also had a monopoly on the highly profitable frankincense trade and Hieronymus might have visited an early settlement at Petra, the rock-carved city rediscovered by the Western world some 2,100 years on.263
His defeat at the hands of the Arabs did not deter Demetrius from appointing Hieronymus governor, epimeletes kai harmostes, of Boeotia, centred at Thebes; once again it was a post that ended in expulsion.264 So we may speculate that Hieronymus’ most successful role on a campaign had been as an envoy, or perhaps parakletos, advocate, travelling between Eumenes and Antigonus through the siege at Nora and which ultimately resulted in Eumenes’ release.265
Hieronymus was to have a far more significant part to play through the age of the Diadokhoi in something of a ‘Polybian role’, when the captive came to admire his captor (if not necessarily the country that bred him) in the role of an influential client historian. Antigonus, his son Demetrius, and his son Antigonus II Gonatas, especially, appear to have been tolerant of writers and historians at their courts, perhaps due to the time the latter generations spent ‘governing’ over ‘educated’ Athens. Gonatas, who claimed Heraclid origins and a more useful political descent from the Argead house, invited the Stoic Zeno of Citium to complete his royal ‘reason and education’, for like Philip II, he knew the Macedones needed ‘enlightening’; he even appointed Zeno’s student, the philosopher Persaeus of Citium, to govern a newly recovered Corinth.266 It may well have been Antigonus II Gonatas who constructed the Great Tumulus at Vergina, which protected the Argead necropolis from further plundering in the wake of the Celtic Gauls (Galatai); and he, or his father, may have been responsible for the tomb (Tomb III) that is thought to house the remains of Alexander IV, the son of the Alexander and Roxane. Both posthumous reverences would have reinforced a useful association with the Argead line.267
In his career with Monophthalmos after Eumenes’ death, Hieronymus would have become associated with Nearchus who was appointed as an adviser to Demetrius in Syria in late 313/312 BCE.268 Dismissing his advice, Demetrius attacked Ptolemy at Gaza with disastrous results.269 And yet it appears that unless Diodorus (and Trogus) was drawing from a new source, Hieronymus curiously underlined the chivalry stemming from these confrontations after which captured officers, personal effects, and even generals, were returned unharmed. The portrayal of Ptolemy’s generosity was perhaps simply the mechanism by which Demetrius’ reciprocal honour, following a later reversed outcome, could be fully displayed; similar sentiment is evident in Diodorus’ account of the aftermath of Antigonus’ siege of Tyre.270 Possibly, having witnessed the futile attempts of the Diadokhoi to forge a greater empire, Hieronymus was simply praising Ptolemy and his own final patron for a policy that resisted such a self-destructive path.
We cannot underestimate the complexity of the task facing the Cardian historian when he finally laid out his scrolls. The consecutive years captured by his history outspanned the chronological breadth of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, Xenophon’s Anabasis and Alexander’s campaign histories combined. Hieronymus’ career had witnessed Eumenes’ execution, the early death of Antigonus’ younger son, Philip, in 306 BCE, the disastrous invasion of Egypt in the same year when 80,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry and eighty-three elephants supported by a fleet of 150 warships and 100 transports faired no better than Perdiccas’ attempt seventeen years before.271 In fact, Ptolemy, who might himself have had no more than a core of 5,000 Macedonians in an army of some 30,000 men, used similar tactics again; he offered rich sums of money for enemy troop defection so that Antigonus had to post slingers to deter the deserters from leaving his ranks.272
After the failed year-long siege of Rhodes by Demetrius Poliorketes in 305 BCE, came the collapse of Antigonus’ Asian empire, where Hieronymus would have seen his by-now corpulent patron lying on the Phrygian plain at Ipsus.273 He would have watched on as the once charismatic Demetrius Poliorketes was reduced to drinking himself to death by 283 B
CE without the twang of a Scythian bowstring to bring him to his senses, and he would have recalled that Demetrius’ wife, the thrice-widowed Phila the daughter of Antipater, had committed suicide by drinking poison five years earlier when Demetrius lost control of Macedonia (288 BCE).274 Hieronymus would have additionally heard reports arriving from his native city, Cardia, as it was ruined by Lysimachus in 309 BCE, with his own eponymous city of Lysimachia rising in its place. This might have inspired him to claim it was Lysimachus who desecrated the royal graves at Aegae when warring against Pyrrhus (rather then the opposite) who had briefly ruled in the western part of Macedonia.275
Under Antigonus II Gonatas, the ‘enlightened despot’ who finally defeated the Gallic Celts near Lysimachia in 277 BCE, and who surrounded himself with philosophers, poets, writers, and the god Pan in no small way (though undertaking the occasional execution of hostile historians, Medius of Larissa amongst them), Hieronymus was provided with a modicum of homonoia in which he afforded his final patron’s grandfather with some biographical payback for the years he campaigned for the Pellan court.277 After the early turbulent years of Gonatas’ reign, this may have been the environment in which Marsyas of Pella was able to publish his account.278 Athens, on the other hand, was less fortunate; after its attempted bid for freedom in the Chremonidean War stirred up by Ptolemy II Philadelphos, and following Gonatas’ victory over the Greek coalition at Corinth in 265 BCE, the city was again starved to submission and garrisoned until 229 BCE.
A bust of Lysimachus at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. He had reportedly lost fifteen children by the time he died at age seventy-four at the Battle of Curopedion in 281 BCE.
By the time Hieronymus’ final patron finally attained the throne, a threadbare Macedonia was now a shadow of its former self, reflecting upon which Antigonus II Gonatas became ‘the first Stoic king’.279 Hieronymus lived through the death of one of Gonatas’ sons, Alcyoneus, whose passing was stoically accepted by his father, and he witnessed the self-destruction of the once brilliant Pyrrhus (whose memoirs he used). Ultimately, he bore witness to the last of the sons and daughters of Alexander’s Diadokhoi relentlessly tearing each other’s kingdoms apart. The ‘heroic’ part of the Hellenistic period had drawn to a close; ‘few people still believed in either the possible unity of Alexander’s empire or in the “freedom” of the Greeks’. So it comes as no surprise that ‘a dark thread’ ran through the whole of Hieronymus’ history.280
But there remain loose threads, missing strands and twisted fibres too in the accounts of those who extracted their detail from Hieronymus, and these have a direct bearing on our case. As the Second War of the Diadokhoi drew to a close with Eumenes’ capture at Gabiene, it appears Hieronymus’ reporting was still steeped in a reflective anger that went back to his compatriot’s death. It is, for example, difficult to imagine Antigonus’ rationale for destroying the crack, if unruly, Silver Shields unit that was now ostensibly his to use. It seems more likely that Antigonus’ (as well as Hieronymus’) own complex nature was being exposed; the result was an awkward and not wholly convincing fusion of retribution and pathos that positioned the captor as despising the Argyraspides’ treachery more than Eumenes himself. So Antigonus’ alleged regret at the execution of his former Pellan court friend and a still truculent foe, and his harsh retribution, was most likely in part the historian’s reflection of his own complex emotions on the episode.281 In Plutarch’s expanded account of the aftermath of Gabiene, similar sentiments can be found; Antigonus ‘could not endure to see Eumenes, by reason of their former intimate friendship’. After deliberating for some days on his dilemma, Eumenes was deprived of food before being dispatched.282
Any hesitation Antigonus had shown to his men was surely contrived and politically expedient, for his army now swelled with ranks of angry captured soldiers, and this was most likely why Peucestas was not immediately executed, for his eastern coalition was significantly present.283 Yet the ‘victor weeping over the vanquished is a motif of Hellenistic historiography’; it was a lamentation Antigonus II Gonatas was to later afford to Pyrrhus, and one Eumenes himself had lavished on the fallen Craterus. This tragic emphasis appears to have been at the heart of the writings of Duris, a strong candidate for detail of the period and a source Plutarch seems to have frequently used.284 But who could blame the one-eyed general for Eumenes’ final execution? The Cardian was simply too unpredictable an adversary to trust in any future coalition, as Antigonus’ men appear to have vocally pointed out.285
The moment that Eumenes died was, as Hornblower points out, the event that emancipated Hieronymus as a historian, for thereafter he joined the hunter rather than the hunted, with no offers or mediations now tugging at his loyalties.286 But when faced with the task of biographing these two opponents years later, Hieronymus attempted to preserve the andreia, the warrior virtue, of each, while permitting the deceptions that hallmarked a great general: the hero Odysseus, for example, and the Spartan cunning that Xenophon had espoused and Polybius seems to have admired. Even the laudatory Cyropaedia permitted a lesson on chicanery.287 Hieronymus’ early pages had additionally needed to salvage Eumenes from the Perdiccan wreckage (the chiliarch’s charges against Antigonus were termed ‘false and unjust’) and then carefully preserve the arete of those he subsequently served, whilst maintaining a sense of isothenes, balance, in their competing skills.288
As one example, the 100-talent bribe Antigonus offered for non-lethal defection at Orcynia appears to have been recorded by Hieronymus; it was an offer that the cavalry officer, Apollonides, readily accepted, though he was captured by Eumenes and summarily hanged.289 But to balance the books and throw some legitimacy Antigonus’ way, Hieronymus made it clear he was heavily outnumbered, thus justifying the clandestine necessity.290 And though Eumenes and Antigonus were undoubtedly prepared to destroy one another’s army, a complete absence of personal hatred is implied by Hieronymus’ account; differences were purely political and battle was the unfortunate consequence of that.
So there remained an overall dikaiosune, ‘justness’, to the confrontations and once again this might have represented an autobiographical perspective. The detail of Antigonus’ attempts to bribe Eumenes’ men to deliver up his head come from Justin and Plutarch, not Diodorus (thus probably not from Hieronymus); it may be another anti-Macedonian device of Duris whose life was pulled apart by the Diadokhoi feuding over his home at Samos, even if they had managed to keep the island out of Athenian hands.291
Inevitably, there must have been occasions when Hieronymus, like Arrian, was not able to reconcile the deeds of his masters to the realities of war and the more nefarious tactics of battle. The potential use of caltrops or abatis (akin to wooden crisscrossed ‘barbed wire’) to slow the advance of cavalry and elephants was never mentioned. Such tactics were reserved for later confrontations, when Ptolemy employed ‘a studded chained boom’ against Demetrius’ war elephants at Gaza, for example, and when ‘tormented by their wounds’ the beasts ground to a halt and were captured. Damis, a veteran who fought in Alexander’s elephant corps in India, had shown the way at the siege of Megalopolis in 318 BCE when he himself ‘studded many great frames with sharp nails and buried them in shallow trenches, concealing the projecting points’ to stop the elephants that had returned to Arcadia for the first time in perhaps 300,000 years.292 Damis’ effective defence contributed to Polyperchon’s failure to take the city, after which he was regarded with contempt by Greek and Macedonian alike.293 Would Eumenes and Antigonus, who exploited all the weapons, strategies, and cunning at their disposal, have neglected the havoc of what amounted to ‘anti-tank mines’ in their broad strategemata?
Diodorus’ texts are strikingly light on the detail surrounding what may have been a planned, and then delayed, invasion of Macedonia in late 313 BCE by Antigonus, when Cassander sent reinforcements into Caria to distract him from crossing to Europe, for Antigonus was next reported heading to Phrygia into winter quarters.294 Similarly,
a two-year campaign against Seleucus in Babylonia spanning the years 311/310-309/308 BCE appears to have been almost passed over by Hieronymus.295 Diodorus’ annalistic framework once again confused chronology by running the archon years of 313/312 and 312/311 together, but as Plutarch captured the conflict in greater detail, the full extent of the campaign appears misrepresented.296 The reliable and (we assume) agenda-free Babylonian astronomical diaries, alongside the (less impartial) Babylonian Chronicle (Babylonaika) dating to ca. 280 BCE (possibly housing detail compiled by Berossus) confirmed the confrontation too.297
With Antigonus wintering at Celaenae, and Demetrius in Cilicia still smarting from his defeat at Gaza in spring 312 BCE, Seleucus took the opportunity to reclaim Babylon and invade the upper satrapies, while Ptolemy raped Phoenician Syria and the coastal cities of Palestine.298 In Seleucus’ absence in the East, Demetrius opportunistically seized the Babylon citadel in spring 311 BCE in a ‘lightning raid’, only to be ousted upon Seleucus’ return; this set the scene for the full Antigonid invasion the following year.299
But as Plutarch revealingly commented: ‘By ravaging the country Demetrius was thought to admit that it no longer belonged to his father.’300 The fragmentary Babylonian Chronicle, whilst difficult to decipher, appears to focus on the chaos caused by Antigonus’ invasion. If the destruction of the city was as extensive as archives suggest, then its compiler had every reason to adopt what we might conclude was a pro-Seleucus stance, and more so if Seleucus was the rightful inheritor of Babylonia, as we will propose.301 The Chronicle and astronomical diaries recorded ‘panic was present in the country’ and ‘weeping and mourning in the land’ with further fragments suggesting food stores and treasuries were raided through 310/309 BCE (possibly from September 310 BCE to the following August). It ended with a final head-on clash in which Seleucus caught the army of Antigonus unawares at early dawn. He had partly razed Babylon and it was now full of rubble forcing Seleucus to found a new capital, Seleucia-on-Tigris, some 40 miles to the north. The new city covered 550 hectares and the populations of Borsippa, Babylon and Kytha were transported there to populate it.302