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DIVIDING THE SPOILS

Ancient Warfare and Civilization

SERIES EDITORS:

RICHARD ALSTON  ROBIN WATERFIELD

In this series, leading historians offer compelling new narratives of the armed conflicts that shaped and reshaped the classical world, from the wars of Archaic Greece to the fall of the Roman Empire and Arab conquests.

Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great’s Empire

Robin Waterfield

ROBIN WATERFIELD

DIVIDING THE SPOILS

The War for Alexander

the Great’s Empire

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Waterfield, Robin, 1952–

Dividing the spoils : the war for Alexander the Great’s empire/Robin Waterfield.

p. cm. – (Ancient warfare and civilization)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-19-539523-5

1. Greece—History—Macedonian Hegemony, 323–281 B.C. 2. Macedonia—History—Diadochi,

323–276 B.C. 3. Generals—Greece—Biography. 4. Generals—Macedonia—Biography. 5. Greece—

Kings and rulers—Biography. 6. Macedonia—Kings and rulers—Biography. 7. Mediterranean Region—

History, Military. 8. Mediterranean Region—History—To 476. I. Title.

DF235.4.W38 2011

938’.070922—dc22   2010030834

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

FOR MY FATHER

AND IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Maps

1. The Legacy of Alexander the Great

2. The Babylon Conferences

3. Rebellion

4. Perdiccas, Ptolemy, and Alexander’s Corpse

5. The First War of the Successors

6. Polyperchon’s Moment

7. The Triumph of Cassander

8. Hunting Eumenes in Iran

9. Antigonus, Lord of Asia

10. The Restoration of Seleucus

11. Warfare in Greece

12. The End of Antigonus

13. The Kingdoms of Ptolemy and Seleucus

14. Demetrius Resurgent

15. The Fall of Demetrius

16. The Last Successors

Time Line

Cast of Characters

Genealogies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book tells the story of one of the great forgotten wars of history. It took more or less forty years after the death of Alexander the Great for his heirs (the Diadokhoi, the Successors) to finish carving up his vast empire. These years, 323–281 BCE, were filled with high adventure, intrigue, passion, assassinations, dynastic marriages, treachery, shifting alliances, and mass slaughter on battlefield after battlefield. And while the men fought on the field, the women schemed from their palaces, pavilions, and prisons; this was the first period of western history when privileged women, especially from the royal families, began to play the kind of major political roles they would continue to play throughout the future history of Roman, Byzantine, and European monarchies.

My period has a natural starting point—the death of Alexander in June 323—and an equally natural end. The year 281 saw the violent deaths of the last two direct Successors of Alexander, those who had known and ridden with him. The next generation—the Epigonoi, as Nymphis, a historian of the second century BCE, called them in a lost work—may have been just as ambitious as their fathers, but the world had changed. It was no longer realistic to aim for dominion of the whole of Alexander’s empire; instead, their first aim was to hold on to their core territories—Macedon for the Antigonids, Asia for the Seleucids, and Greater Egypt for the Ptolemies. Of course, they and their descendants would regularly attempt to take over some of a neighbor’s territory, but no individual any longer realistically aspired to rule the whole known world. There would never again be a time like the time of the Successors, forty years of almost unremitting warfare aimed at worldwide domination.

In their day, the Successors were household names, because they held the fate of the world in their hands. If their fame has become dimmed over the centuries, that is a result of historical accident (the loss of almost all our sources for the period) and of our perennial obsession with Alexander the Great, in whose shadow they have been made to stand. My main purpose in this book has been to revive the memory of the Successors. A narrative account is enough on its own to demonstrate that the early Hellenistic period was not an anticlimax after the conquests of Alexander, and certainly not a period of decline and disintegration. In fact, Alexander had left things in a mess, with no guaranteed succession, no administration in place suitable for such an enormous empire, and huge untamed areas both bordering and within his “empire.” A detailed and realistic map of Alexander’s conquests would show him cutting a narrow swath across Asia and back, leaving much relatively untouched. So far from disintegration, then, the Successors consolidated the Conqueror’s gains. Their equal ambitions, however, meant that consolidation inevitably led to the breakup of the empire and the foundation of lesser empires and kingdoms.

Military narrative features prominently in the book, but has been broken up by “asides” on cultural matters. For, astonishingly, this period of savage warfare was also characterized by brilliant cultural developments, especially in the fields of art, literature, and philosophy. The energy released by world conquest was not all absorbed on battle-fields, and the culture the Successors brought in their train flourished, thanks especially to royal patronage. Although they were warlords, the Successors were not uncultured. Alexander himself was said to have slept with a copy of Homer’s Iliadunder his pillow—along with a knife. ¹Without the consolidation the Successors brought to Alexander’s gains, the spread of culture would have been impossible; there is no civilization without structure.

So as well as an account of the military action, this book also contains an outline of its cultural impact. A new world emerged from the dust and haze of battle—a world with distinct territories each ruled by its own king, but with a common culture. That common culture is what entitles us to speak generally of “the Greek east,” distinct from “the Roman west,” and it was the Successors, therefore, who set up the world-changing confrontation between these two power blocs. The result, of course, was Roman dominion over the entire Greek world. The takeover culminated in 30 BCE with the annexation of Egypt, and this date is generally taken to mark the end of what scholars call the “Hellenistic” period—the period, starting with the death of Alexander, when the Greek culture that the Successors fostered came to dominate the world from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan.

My main intention has been to write an accurate and enjoyable book—to make sense of a very difficult period of history. The over-arching story is implied by my title and subtitle. The spoils weredivided. We see the emergence, out of Alexander’s single empire, of a multistate political order and of a developing balance of power. At one time or another, all the Successors tried to emulate their dead leader and conquer the entirety of the empire, but none of them succeeded. We witness what realist historians would describe as a law of history: contiguous powers with imperialist ambitions are bound to clash and so limit those ambitions. At the beginning of our forty-year period, grand imperialism was a possibility, but not at the end. The action of this law is the thread that runs through the book.

If an empire is the political, economic, and military domination of disparate populations by a distinct ruling class, with the whole administered from a geographically remote center, Seleucus won an empire (large chunks of the former Achaemenid empire of Persia), Ptolemy won an empire (Greater Egypt, as I call it from time to time in the book), and the Antigonids won a kingdom, as well as hegemony (the ability to command obedience on the basis of a real or implied military threat) over much of Greece. Very few, then, of the fifteen or so Successors succeeded in fulfilling their ambitions with any degree of stability or endurance. The law of history I mentioned just now plays itself out in various ways. Empires can be won or lost by caution, luck, treachery, military brilliance, megalomania. The forty years of the Successors display all of these dramas.

There had been empires in the world before. The Persian empire of the Achaemenids (550–330 BCE) was the one of most significance for the neighboring Greeks; it was preceded in its turn, on a far smaller scale, by the Neo-Assyrian empire (934–610), which was preceded by the Hittite empire (1430–ca. 1200) and the Akkadian empire (late third millennium). Farther east, there may have been something describable as an empire in northern China during the Shang and Zhou periods (1766–1045; 1045–256), though the evidence is difficult to assess. But Alexander’s Successors created the first empires whose rulers and dominant culture were European; the so-called Athenian “empires” of the fifth and fourth centuries were not really empires, above all because subjects and rulers shared a common ethnic background. ²

Of course, Alexander himself was the conqueror in whose imperialist footsteps the Successors trod, but his empire was cut short by his death after a mere ten years, and can hardly be described as an empire anyway, for the reason I have already given: he was too busy conquering to give much thought to the perpetuation of his rule. It was the Successors who created the first stable empires with a European flavor. This was indeed a significant period of history, and it has been overlooked only because of the difficulties in recovering it. Historians of imperialism simply skip from Alexander to Rome; I aim to set the record straight.

In order to make the book as accessible as possible, I have chosen to focus on individuals; while maintaining a forward thrust, chronologically speaking, most of the chapters hinge on the adventures of one or two of the protagonists. To some readers, this may seem an old-fashioned approach. In emphasizing the role of individuals like this, am I not following the bias of ancient historians and writing “great man” history? History, it is said, is not driven by individuals so much as by economic, technological, and other, more abstract imperatives; individuals do not make society, but society makes individuals. There is truth in this, and I have tried to bring out at least some of the economic aspects of the Successors’ warfare. At the same time, however, it needs to be remembered that these men were absolute rulers, a hard fact that many critics of “great man” history tend to ignore. The Successors’ egos and desires could and did alter the course of history.

As soon as Alexander died, his empire began to crumble; he, not economic forces, had been holding it together. If Antigonus had not desired to emulate Alexander, if Demetrius the Besieger had not succumbed to megalomania toward the end of his life, if Seleucus had not had the courage to reclaim Babylon with a minimal force . . . a hundred such “ifs” could be written, each demonstrating that the Successors’ personal ambitions and passions could and did determine what happened. History is not made only by great men, it is true, but nor is it made entirely by profit–loss calculations. More irrational and less predictable factors often play a part (as satirized in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22), and they certainly did in the early Hellenistic period covered in this book. The very ideology of early Hellenistic kingship, as we shall see, encouraged individual ambitions. I make no apology, then, for having chosen to focus on individuals. It may or may not be true that “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” ³At any rate, a surprising amount of the history of many countries, from Greece to Afghanistan, began in the hearts and minds of the Successors of Alexander the Great. Their stories deserve to be better known.

Acknowledgments

I gathered a great deal of research material by writing out of the blue to scholars around the world and asking for offprints of articles. I met with nothing but kindness during this process, and so I first thank collectively all those who helped me in this way. Much research was carried out in Athens, where the staff of the Blegen Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and of the Library of the British School at Athens, were their usual helpful selves. I am grateful to James Romm for early sight of a late draft of his book Ghost on the Throne(we swapped), and to William Murray likewise for sending me a chapter of his forthcoming book on Hellenistic warships. The comments of Oxford University Press’s anonymous reader were very useful, and I also profited from improvements suggested by my editor Stefan Vranka, my friends Paul Cartledge and Andrew Lane, and my wife Kathryn Dunathan. There are, of course, so many other reasons why I am in Kathryn’s debt.

Lakonia, Greece, January 2011

PICTURE CREDITS

1. Alexander the Great. The National Archaeological Museum, Naples. Alinari 23264. © Alinari Archives, Florence.

2. Olympias. Walters Art Museum inv. no. 59.2. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, acquired by Henry Walters.

3. Ptolemy I of Egypt. British Museum no. CGR 62897. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

4. Seleucus I of Asia. The National Archaeological Museum, Naples. Scala 0149108g. © 2010 Scala, Florence, courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali.

5. Demetrius Poliorcetes. The National Archaeological Museum, Naples. Scala 0149109g. © 2010 Scala, Florence, courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali.

6. A Lysimachan “Alexander.” British Museum no. AN 31026001. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

7. The Taurus Mountains. © Robin Waterfield.

8. The Acrocorinth. © Kathryn Waterfield.

9. The Temple of Apollo at Didyma. www.irismaritime.com.

10. The Arsinoeion. From A. Conze, Archäologische Untersuchungen auf Samothrake, vol. 1 (1875), pl. 54. © The British Library Board (749.e.4).

11. Indian War Elephant. © Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

12. Salamis Commemorative Coin. British Museum no. AN 3179001. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

13. The Lion Hunt Mosaic, Pella. Bridgeman 332175. © Ancient Art and Architecture Collection, Bridgeman Art Library.

14. Ivories from Vergina. © Ekdotike Athenon s.a.

15. Wall Painting from Vergina (detail). Bridgeman 60120. © Bridgeman Art Library.

16. The Fortune of Antioch. Vatican Museums. Scala 0041467M. © 2010 Scala Archives, Florence.

List of Illustrations

1. Alexander the Great.

2. Olympias.

3. Ptolemy I of Egypt.

4. Seleucus I of Asia.

5. Demetrius Poliorcetes.

6. A Lysimachan “Alexander.”

7. The Taurus Mountains.

8. The Acrocorinth.

9. The Temple of Apollo at Didyma.

10. The Arsinoeion.

11. Indian War Elephant.

12. Salamis Commemorative Coin.

13. The Lion Hunt Mosaic, Pella.

14. Ivories from Vergina.

15. Wall Painting from Vergina (detail).

16. The Fortune of Antioch.

A. Alexander’s empire

B. Macedon, Greece, and the Aegean

C. Asia Minor and the Black Sea

D. Syria and Egypt

E. Mesopotamia and the Eastern Satrapies

F. The Empire after the Peace of the Dynasts (311 BCE)

G. The Empire after Ipsus (301 BCE)

H. The Empire ca. 275 BCE

I. Roads and Resources

DIVIDING THE SPOILS

The Legacy of Alexander the Great

THE WORD SPREAD rapidly through the city of Babylon and the army encampments around the city: “The king is dead!” Bewilderment mingled with fear, and some remembered how even the rumor of his death, two years earlier in India, had almost provoked mutiny from the Macedonian regiments. They had been uncertain as to their future and far from home; their situation was not much different now. Would the king stage yet another miraculous recovery to cement the loyalty of his troops and enhance his aura of divinity? Or was the rumor true, and was bloodshed sure to follow?

Only two days earlier, many of his men had insisted on seeing him with their own eyes. They were troubled by the thought that their king was already dead, after more than a week of reported illness, and that for complex court reasons the truth was being concealed. Apart from rumors, all they had heard were the bland bulletins issued by Alexander’s staff, to the effect that the king was ill but alive. Knowing that he was in the palace, they had more or less forced their way past his bodyguards. They had been allowed to file past the shrouded bed, where a pale figure waved feebly at them. ¹But this time there was no contradictory report, and no waving hand. As time passed, it became clear that this time it was true: Alexander the Great, conquering king and savior god, was dead.

At the time of his death in Babylon, around 3.30 p.m. on June 11, 323 BCE, Alexander was just short of thirty-three years old. He had recklessly exposed himself to danger time after time, but apart from war wounds—more than one of which was potentially fatal, especially in those days of inadequate doctoring—he had hardly been ill in his life and was as fit as any of the veterans in his army.

How had such a man fallen ill? True, there had been a lot of drinking recently, both in celebration of the return to civilization and to drown the memory of Hephaestion’s death (which, ironically, had been brought on or caused by excessive drinking). This boyhood friend had been the only man he could trust, his second-in-command, and the one true love of his life. But heavy drinking was expected of Macedonian kings, and Alexander had also become king of Persia, where, again, it was considered a sign of virility to be able to drink one’s courtiers under the table. If anyone was inured to heavy drinking, it was Alexander, and his symptoms do not fit alcohol poisoning. Excessive drinking, however, along with grief and old wounds (especially the lung that was perforated in India), may have weakened his system.

The accounts of his symptoms are puzzling. They are fairly precise, but do not perfectly fit any recognizable cause. One innocent possibility is that he died of malaria. He had fallen ill ten years previously in Cilicia, which was notorious for its malaria up until the 1950s. Perhaps he had a fatal recurrence of the disease in Babylon. ²More dramatically, the reported symptoms are also compatible with the effects of white hellebore, a slow-acting poison. The incomprehensibility of Alexander’s death to many people, and its propaganda potential, led very quickly to rumors of poisoning, especially since this was not an uncommon event among the Macedonian and eastern dynasties. And, as in an Agatha Christie novel, there were plenty of people close at hand who might have liked to see him dead. It was not just that some of them entertained world-spanning ambitions, soon to be revealed. It was more that Alexander’s recent paranoid purge of his friends and officials, and his megalomaniacal desire for conquest and yet more conquest, could have turned even some of those closest to him.

Now or later, Alexander’s mother stirred the pot from Epirus, southwest of Macedon. For some years, Olympias had been in voluntary exile from Macedon, back in her native Molossia (the mountainous region of Epirus whose kings, at this moment in Epirote history, were the de facto rulers of the Epirote League). On his departure for the east, Alexander had left a veteran general of his father’s, Antipater, as viceroy in charge of his European possessions for the duration of his campaigns—Macedon, Thessaly, Thrace, and Greece. Unable to be supreme in Macedon, and irrevocably hostile to Antipater, Olympias returned to the foundation of her power. But she never stopped plotting her return to the center. She was widely known to have been involved in a number of high-profile assassinations, and was a plausible candidate for the invisible hand behind the murder of her husband, Philip II, in 336, since it seemed as though he was planning to dislodge her and Alexander from their position as favorites.

Olympias, then, knew exactly where to point the finger over her son’s death. And she had a plausible case: not long before his death Alexander had ordered Antipater replaced, largely on the grounds of his “regal aspirations.” ³Like many of Alexander’s actions in his last months, this order was not easily justifiable: already over seventy-five years old, Antipater had served three Macedonian kings and, despite limited resources, he had done a good job of leaving Alexander free to concentrate on eastern conquest. He had defeated the Persian fleet at sea and quelled a Thracian rebellion and a major Greek uprising (though even then, in 331, Alexander had sneeringly dismissed this as a “battle of mice”). ⁴Nevertheless, Antipater was to be relieved by Craterus, Alexander’s favorite since the death of Hephaestion, and was to bring fresh Macedonian troops out to Babylon.

Recently, however, such summonses had acquired the habit of turning into traps. Antipater had good reason to think that he would be executed on some charge or other, just as other powerful and seemingly loyal officials had been. Unhinged by Hephaestion’s death in October 324, Alexander had instigated a veritable reign of terror against even incipient signs of independence among his marshals. Moreover, to strengthen Olympias’s case, two of Antipater’s sons had long been in Babylon—and one of them, Iolaus, was well placed to act as a poisoner, since he was Alexander’s cupbearer. And Alexander’s fatal illness had begun immediately after a heavy drinking session. Indeed, shortly after news of Alexander’s death reached Athens, the anti-Macedonian politician Hyperides proposed honors for Iolaus precisely for having done away with the king. Yet another of Antipater’s sons, Cassander, had arrived only a few weeks earlier, presumably to plead for his father’s retention in Macedon. His mission had not gone well. Unfamiliar with the changes that had recently taken place in Alexander’s court, he had fallen out with the king over his insistence on obeisance from his courtiers, and Alexander had publicly humiliated him in return. ⁵

Whatever the facts, it was a perfect opportunity for Olympias to sow mischief against her chief enemies. Antipater was compelled to respond: before long, someone in his camp published an account of Alexander’s last days that was supposed to be the official diary of the king’s secretary, Eumenes of Cardia. The document downplayed the idea that the king had died an unnatural death, and stressed the heavy drinking, while appearing to suggest that this was nothing unusual; it hinted at Alexander’s grief over Hephaestion, and at an unspecified fever that carried him off. ⁶

But even if Olympias was wrong about Antipater and his sons, there were plenty of others who could feel uncomfortable if people started speculating and looking for motives. And even if she was wrong that Alexander’s death was part of a power play by certain individuals, she was right that his death would free the ambitions of those who had been closest to her son—those, at any rate, who were still alive after thirteen years of hard campaigning and ruthless purges. As it turned out, even bloodthirsty Alexander would have been proud of the scope of their ambitions: they embroiled the known world in decades of war.

THE CONQUESTS OF ALEXANDER

Philip II came to the Macedonian throne in 359. Within four or five years, by a combination of diplomacy, assassination, and military force, he had warded off internal and external threats and united the various cantons under his autocratic rule. It became clear that the Greek states to the south were his next target. He improved on Greek infantry tactics and developed the army until he had a stupendous fighting force at his personal command. He could call on two thousand cavalry and thirty thousand soldiers trained to high professional standards and equipped with superior weaponry. Many Greek states would have to unite in order to field an army of comparable size. Their failure to do so meant that he could pick them off one by one, or league by league.

Athens became the focus of what little resistance there was to Macedon, but it was the last gasp of traditional Greek city-state autonomy. War, financed in part by Persia, was waged in a ragged fashion by Athens and its allies against Philip, until in 338 he marched south. Alongside Boeotian troops, Athenians faced the Macedonians at Chaeronea in Boeotia. Numbers were almost equal. The battle was so hotly contested that the elite Theban Sacred Band died nearly to a man, and the Athenians too suffered crippling casualties.

Almost the first action Philip took as ruler of southern Greece was to form the conquered states into a league, the Hellenic League or League of Corinth, with himself at its head. Interstate conflict was outlawed, and so Philip, a Macedonian king, took the first step toward Greek statehood, finally attained over two thousand years later. In return for votes on the league council, every state was obliged, when called upon, to supply troops for military expeditions. He next got the league to appoint him supreme commander for the long-promised “Greek” war against Persia, in retaliation for a century and a half of Persian interference in Greek affairs and two destructive invasions, in 490 and 480 BCE. Though that was distant history, the Greeks had never forgotten or forgiven; Persia was the common enemy, and public speakers ever since had fanned the flames of Greek supremacism and revenge.

But Philip was murdered in 336, on the eve of his journey east, at his daughter Cleopatra’s wedding party. It is a sordid tale, but worth repeating for the insight it affords into the Macedonian court. The killer, Pausanias, was one of Philip’s Bodyguards and his lover. He had aroused the ire of Attalus, one of Philip’s principal generals, and Attalus allegedly arranged for Pausanias to be gang-raped. ⁷Philip refused to punish Attalus at this critical juncture, when he was about to lead a division of the army of invasion. Pausanias therefore killed the king. The water is further muddied by the fact that Attalus was a bitter enemy of Olympias and Alexander; it is not implausible to suggest that Olympias encouraged Pausanias’s desire for revenge.

In any case, both the Macedonian throne and the eastern expedition devolved on Philip’s son, Alexander III, soon to be known as “the Great.” In 334, Alexander crossed the Hellespont into Asia. His first act was to cast a spear into the soil: Asia was to be “spear-won land,” his by right of conquest. In a series of amazing and closely fought battles, he crushed the Persians and took control of the empire.

The battle at the Granicus River in 334 took care of the Persian armies of Asia Minor; four satraps (provincial governors), three members of the king’s family, and the Greek commander of the Persians’ mercenaries lay dead on the battlefield. The remnants of the king’s western army were ordered to fall back to Babylonia, where a fresh army was mustering. In 333 Alexander annihilated the Persians near Issus, not far from the border between Cilicia and Syria. It was a notable victory: not only were Persian losses serious, but eight thousand of Darius’s mercenaries deserted in despair after the battle, the Persian king’s immediate family were captured, and Alexander enriched himself with the king’s war chest.

Alexander returned to Phoenicia and protected his rear by taking Egypt in 332. By the time he returned from Egypt and marched east again, Darius had had almost two years in which to gather another army. Battle was joined near the village of Gaugamela, close to the Tigris, on October 1, 331. As usual, in addition to the formidable Macedonian fighting machine, both luck and superior strategy were on Alexander’s side, and despite its vastly superior numbers the Persian army was eventually routed. It was the end of the empire; it had been ruled by the Achaemenid house for over two hundred years. The king fled to Ecbatana in Media, and Alexander proclaimed himself Lord of Asia in Darius’s stead. Babylon and Susa opened their gates without a fight, and the rest of the empire lay open to his unstoppable energy. A minor defeat near Persepolis hardly delayed his taking the city, the old capital of the Persian heartland. In the summer of 330 he marched on Ecbatana. Darius fled before him with a scorched-earth strategy, but was killed by some of his own satraps and courtiers.

The conspirators fought on, in a bloody and ultimately futile war, basing themselves in the far eastern satrapy of Bactria. By 325 Alexander had pacified Bactria and extended the empire deep into modern Pakistan (ancient “India”), but his troops had had enough and he was forced to turn back. An appalling and unjustifiable desert journey decimated his ranks and undermined his popularity, which was further weakened by measures that were perceived as an attempt to share power with native elites. In Susa, in April 324, he and all the senior Macedonians and Greeks in his retinue took eastern wives. Alexander, already married to a Bactrian princess called Rhoxane, took two further wives, daughters of the last two Persian kings. But to many Macedonians and Greeks, all non-Greeks were by that very fact inferior beings.