BEFORE & AFTER ALEXANDER
THE LEGEND AND LEGACY OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
RICHARD A. BILLOWS
25 b&w images and 5 maps
In the arc of western history, Ancient Greece is at the apex, owing to its grandeur, its culture, and an intellectual renaissance to rival that of Europe. So important is Greece to history that figures such as Plato and Socrates are still household names, and the works of Homer are regularly adapted into movies. The most famous figure of all, though, is Alexander the Great.
While historians have studied Alexander’s achievements at length, author and professor Richard A. Billows delves deeper into the less studied periods before and after Alexander’s reign. In Before and After Alexander, Billows explores the years preceding Alexander, who, without the foundation laid by his father, Philip II of Macedon, would not have had the resources or influence to develop one of the greatest empires in history. Alexander was groomed from a young age to succeed his father, and by the time Philip was assassinated in 336 BC, his great empire was already well underway.
The years following Alexander’s death were even more momentous. In this ambitious new work, Richard Billows robustly challenges the notion that the political strife that followed was for lack of a leader as competent as Alexander, pointing out instead that there were too many extremely capable leaders who exploited the power vacuum created by Alexander’s death to carve out kingdoms for themselves. Since Alexander’s son and heir was a baby incapable of ruling, the temptation for the generals to operate on their own behalf was too great to pass up.
Above all, in Before and After Alexander, Billows eloquently and convincingly posits a complex view of one of the greatest empires in history, framing it not as the achievement of one man, but the culmination of several generations of aggressive expansion toward a unified purpose.
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2018 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
NEW YORK
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected] or write to us at the above address.
LONDON
30 Calvin Street
London E1 6NW
[email protected]
www.ducknet.co.uk
Copyright © 2018 by Richard A. Billows
Maps by Roddy Murray, copyright © 2018 The Overlook Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1641-4
For Clare, at last …
CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
MAPS
1. Macedonia before Philip II
2. Philip’s Childhood
3. The Reign of Philip
4. Philip’s New Model Army and New Model State
5. The Reign of Alexander
6. The Wars of the Successors
7. The Hellenistic World and Hellenistic Civilization
8. Aftermath: The Lingering Impact of Hellenistic Culture
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
END NOTES
GLOSSARY
GENEALOGIES
TIMELINE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
IN JUNE 323 BCE, IN A PALACE IN BABYLON, A YOUNG MAN LAY DYING. Around his bed were a host of attendants, doctors, and generals, concerned about the imminent death of the ruler of their world. The young man was Alexander the Great, and though he was just thirty-two years old, he had already conquered one of the largest empires in history and made himself forever famous as one of history’s greatest military leaders. For the generals gathered at his bedside, however, Alexander’s death presented a huge problem: he had no clear successor. There was a vast empire to be organized and ruled, and no one knew how it was to be done or by whom. In the end, it took forty years of rivalry and warfare among Alexander’s generals to sort out the succession to his power.
One hundred and fifty years later a new power, the young Roman state, began to expand into and take over the lands that Alexander had conquered and ruled so briefly, and they found in the eastern Mediterranean region a civilization based on the Greek language, Greek cities, and Greek culture, established there by the work of Alexander’s Successors. That Greek-based civilization is known today as the Hellenistic civilization, and though taken over by the Romans it endured as the civilization of the eastern Mediterranean world for another five hundred years or so, until the triumph of Christianity and, eventually, Islam brought about radical changes. As the conqueror who made this great era of Hellenistic civilization possible, Alexander the Great’s life, career, and achievements have been studied over and over by historians, giving rise to literally hundreds of books and probably thousands of detailed articles about the great conqueror. Much less studied, however, are the development of the Macedonian state and army under Alexander’s father Philip II, which made Alexander’s career possible, and the activities and policies of Alexander’s Successors, which created the organizational framework in which Hellenistic civilization developed and flourished.
The aim of this book is, first, to offer a detailed study of the career of Philip II (Chapters 1–4). The state of Macedonia before Philip’s succession to the throne was a disorganized and disunited backwater, peripheral to the local great powers of Athens, Sparta, and Persia. Philip II built up an entirely new type of army with a new style of warfare, and through this army united Macedonia, expanded its borders, and turned it into the greatest power in the ancient world by his death at the age of forty-seven, assassinated by a disgruntled officer in his own bodyguard. It was the state and army built by Philip that provided Alexander with the tools to undertake his career of conquest.
After a relatively brief review of Alexander’s conquests (Chapter 5), the book treats in some detail the forty years after Alexander’s death, showing how his greatest generals—men who, like Alexander, had been trained in the army and wars of Philip II—took control of Alexander’s conquests and built the three great Hellenistic empires in those lands: the Antigonid Empire in the Balkan region, the Seleucid Empire in western Asia, and the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt and Libya. By settling tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Greek colonists, for whom they built hundreds of new Greek cities in western Asia and Egypt, and by encouraging many natives to settle in these new cities too, adopting Greek names, the Greek language, and Greek culture as their own, these rulers helped to establish Hellenistic civilization as the culture of the eastern Mediterranean world for over half a millennium (Chapters 6–7).
This book thus covers a topic of enormous interest and importance to the history of western civilization, that of the establishment of Greek culture as a universal culture from the rivers of Iraq to the Adriatic Sea, and from the Black and Caspian Seas to the deserts of Arabia and the border of the Sudan. Everywhere within this vast and diverse territory, between 300 BCE and 300 CE (and later) there were to be found Greek cities with Greek citizens, speaking and reading the Greek language, and living their lives according to the social, cultural, and political patterns established in Classical Greece in the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE.
This remarkable civilization left, as is well known, a rich cultural heritage that has deeply influenced western (and indeed Muslim) culture and civilization ever since. It is as the facilitators who made possible this spread of Greek culture, and its establishment throughout the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia as the dominant culture, that Philip II of Macedonia, his son Alexander, and Alexander’s Successors remain an important and fascinating topic of study.
MAPS
MAP 1: Greece - 5th century
MAP 2: Macadonia
MAP 3: Alexander
MAP 4: Diadoche
MAP 5: Helenistic
CHAPTER 1
Macedonia before Philip II
THE NORTH-WEST BEND OF THE AEGEAN SEA FORMS A GREAT GULF—the Thermaic Gulf—enclosed by land on three sides. To the west, sweeping northwards from the foothills of majestic Mount Olympus, lie the gently rolling plains of Pieria and Emathia; to the north the rich Amphaxitis plain, on either side of the broad Axius River, extends upward from the coast to the hills of Almopia and Messapion; and to the east the Chalcidice peninsula projects into the Aegean like a squat, three-tined fork (see map 1). In the fourth century BCE these lands were occupied by one of the most remarkable people in western history: the Macedonians.
1. WERE THE MACEDONIANS GREEK?
Who were the Macedonians? The question is simple, but it is anything but simple to answer, since the issue of the ethnic and linguistic identity of the ancient Macedonians has been caught up in the identity politics of the modern peoples and states of the southern Balkan peninsula. As the great Ottoman Empire slowly decayed and crumbled away in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the southern Balkan region four key local peoples sought to establish nation-states encompassing as much territory as possible, and their respective claims collided in Macedonia: the Greeks to the south, the Albanians to the north-west, the Serbs to the north, and the Bulgars to the north-east. In this territorial rivalry, the Greeks used history to bolster their claim to Macedonian lands, making the following argument: the ancient Macedonians were Greek; Macedonia is thus a historically Greek land; Macedonia should therefore, like other historically Greek lands, be part of the modern Greek state. The response to this argument from the Serbs and the Bulgars was, in great part, built around denying the Greekness of the ancient Macedonians, and they found some strong evidence and notable scholars to support that part at least (the non-Greek identity of the ancient Macedonians) of their claims. Thus arose the “Macedonian question” which still arouses partisan passions in the southern Balkan region: were the ancient Macedonians Greek or were they not?
One of the approaches scholars have made to try to answer this question is through archaeological data. If it could be somehow proved archaeologically that the ancient Macedonians belonged to the Greek peoples of archaic and classical times (the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE), or that they did not, the Macedonian question would be answered. As a result, a good deal of time and effort has been spent on studying the Macedonian region and its surroundings, in an attempt to show the origin of the ancient Macedonian people. Much has been learned from this archaeological exploration but, despite some confident claims, nothing has been proved about Macedonian origins. In order to establish such proof, we would need to find some clear markers in the archaeological record that could be tied to Macedonian identity: a distinctive style of pottery, for example, or method of disposing of the dead, or technique of house-building. Any such thing that could be traced in archaeological explorations, shown to be distinctively Macedonian, and then linked to other peoples or regions, would make possible a tracing of Macedonian origins and (perhaps) identity. But no distinctive Macedonian marker of this sort exists.
In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the Macedonians did, we know, have some very distinctive features. There was a peculiar, beret-like Macedonian hat called the kausia (ill. 1). There was a distinctive Macedonian shield: small and round, and decorated with medallion-like elements around its rim (ill. 2). Unfortunately, though archaeologists have found images of these Macedonian features on gravestones, coins, and the like from the fourth century and later, there is no trace of them before the fifth century. It would be even better if we could find inscriptions mentioning the presence of Macedonians, either in Greek or in a non-Greek language. But again, archaeology has not found such inscriptions earlier than the late fifth century. The results of archaeological exploration, full of interest as they are, do not help settle the Macedonian question. What we see is that the southern Balkan region was, in the first half of the first millennium BCE, home to various groups of people who had similar material culture, no doubt learning from and influencing each other, moving about the Pindus and Rhodopi ranges and their upland plateaus, or down into their neighboring coastal plains. Who these people or peoples were can only be determined, however, when we start to get written records. And those written records were produced by Greeks, beginning about 750 BCE.
1. Coin of Bactrian-Greek ruler Antimachus wearing a Macedonian kausia
(Author’s photo, taken at Metropolitan Museum, NY)
2. Coin of Macedonian king Antigonus II Gonatas showing Macedonian shield with head of Pan
(Wikimedia Commons from cgb.fr)
The earliest surviving Greek inscriptions, mostly very brief groups of letters, date from the middle and second half of the eighth century; and the earliest surviving works of Greek literature, the Homeric epics, also date from the second half of the eighth century, by most scholars’ reckoning. Nowhere in these early inscriptions do we find mention of Macedonians: as already mentioned, Macedonians are not mentioned in any inscriptions earlier than the fifth century. Nowhere in Homer’s two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are Macedonians mentioned either. That is especially notable for the Iliad, because in its second book there is to be found a kind of geography of Greece: the so-called Catalogue of Ships. Ostensibly a list of the “heroes” and peoples who fought in the Trojan War, the Catalogue is in fact a kind of survey of Greek communities and peoples, first of central and southern Greece, and then of northern Greece. It probably derives from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, since its pattern shows two itineraries around Greece, both starting from the region of the oracle; and it probably reflects the state of Greece around the end of the eighth century, when the oracle was first becoming important. The survey of northern Greece is basically limited to Thessaly and its immediate surroundings; it does not extend as far north as Macedonia, but then neither does it extend west into Epirus or Acarnania. Similarly, a small appendix, as it were, mentions a few of the Aegean islands, but leaves out most of the Cyclades and all of the Sporades. In other words, the author of the Homeric epics ignores Macedonia, but his geography of Greece is certainly incomplete, however you look at it, so the absence of Macedonia need not imply anything about Macedonian identity.
The first literary reference to Macedonia comes in one of the texts belonging to what is known as the Hesiodic corpus, the so-called Catalogue of Women. Though there is broad consensus among most scholars dating Hesiod around 700, there is considerable uncertainty about the date of this Catalogue, because we cannot be sure whether it was really composed by Hesiod, that is, by the author of the two surviving epic poems that come to us under the name of Hesiod—the Theogony and the Works and Days. The Catalogue of Women survives only in fragments, and while it is attributed to Hesiod in ancient sources, it may in fact have been composed up to 150 years later by an anonymous poet. But whether we call it Hesiod’s work and date it ca. 700, or place it around 550, or somewhere in between, it contains the earliest surviving reference to Macedonia either way.
The first fragments of this Catalogue of Women deal with the origins of the Greek people, specifically with the “eponymous ancestors” of the Greek people. Ancient (and modern) Greeks called themselves “Hellenes” and considered themselves to be descended from a common ancestor named Hellen son of Deucalion (not to be confused with the infamous Helen of Troy, who
se name was properly Helene). This kind of genealogical expression of identity is not familiar to us today, except perhaps to readers of the Bible. For there, in the book of Genesis, is to be found a very similar sort of account of the origin of the Israelite people. The patriarch of this people was—we are told—Jacob son of Isaac, who had another name: Israel, after which his descendants were called Israelites. Jacob Israel was the father of twelve sons, the eponymous ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel: the Levites, named for Jacob’s son Levi; the Judaeans, named for his son Judah, and so on. Just so, Hellen was the ancestor of the Hellenes (Greeks), through his children: his son Aeolus was the ancestor of one great branch of the Greek people, the Aeolians; his son Dorus was the ancestor of the Dorians; and his son Xouthus was the father of Ion, ancestor of the Ionians.
And the war-loving ruler Hellen engendered
Dorus and Xouthus and horse-loving Aeolus.
The sons of Aeolus, law-setting rulers,
Were Cretheus and Athamas and clever Sisyphus,
Unjust Salmoneus and overbold Perieres.
(Catalogue of Women Fragment 4)
Such is the Hesiodic genealogy of the Greek people, or rather a small fragment of it. And it is in this context that we first meet with the name Macedon. Fragments 1 and 3 of the Catalogue of Women offer the following:
Hesiod in the first book of the Catalogue says that Deucalion was the son of Prometheus and Pronoea, and that Hellen was the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha.
(Scholiast to Apollonius Rhodius 3.1086)
and:
The land of Macedonia was named after Macedon, the son of Zeus and
Thyia, daughter of Deucalion, as Hesiod tells:
She conceived and bore to thunderbolt-loving Zeus
Before and After Alexander Page 1
