The Hellenistic World

This rapid review of fragmentary sources, all of which present many problems of accuracy and reliability, must also include Memnon of Heraclea Pontica, who wrote an important history of his native city, probably in the first century AD, and Polyaenus, whose book on military stratagems was composed a century later. With the help of these, along with other, minor sources, uneven in scope and often quoting incidents out of context, it is possible to write some kind of history of some parts of the three hundred years which constitute the hellenistic age. Fortunately this can be supplemented from other sorts of historical evidence which, it is true, generate problems of their own, but allow us to check the statements of literary historians against more immediate and normally non-literary documents. It is thanks to the regular growth in the amount of such evidence that the history of this period (and of others in antiquity) is constantly being reshaped in detail as the availability of new information leads to the revision of current hypotheses.

III

This new material falls mainly into three categories. The first consists of inscriptions on stone or marble. The classical world was addicted to inscribing information on durable material of this kind. For the period with which we are concerned, including the reign of Alexander, the majority of these inscriptions are in Greek but from Egypt we have also Egyptian inscriptions in both the hieroglyphic and the demotic forms. The famous Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, is a piece of black basalt containing a decree passed by the Council of Priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 and enumerating the good deeds of Ptolemy V Epiphanes and the honours which they proposed to pay to him (OGIS, 90). The Greek version was followed by a translation into Egyptian, which was recorded in hieroglyphic and demotic, and it was this that enabled the French scholar Champollion, from 1820 onwards, to begin the long process of unravelling the Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are also a few Latin inscriptions but most of the documents which concern Roman relations with Greece come from Greece and are in Greek. They have been conveniently assembled in R. S. Sherk, Roman Documents from the Greek East. There are also several cuneiform inscriptions from Babylonia of relevance to the history of the Seleucids.

Inscriptions were set up for a variety of reasons. A few are directly concerned with recording historical facts, such as the so-called Parian marble, of which two fragments survive and which gave an account by an unknown author of

the dates from the beginning, derived from all kinds of records and general histories, starting from Cecrops, the first king of Athens, down to the archonship of [Ast]yanax at Paros and Diognetus at Athens (264/3) (Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 239).

But the majority are preserved for other reasons. Many register official matters such as a treaty or law or agreement to exchange citizenship (sympoliteia) or the findings of an arbitration; here the purpose is to set up a public record, available to all and sundry, of decisions taken publicly by sovereign and other bodies. For the hellenistic period a special group of inscriptions records relations between Greek cities and the kings; often a letter from a king is inscribed in full followed by decisions taken in accordance with its instructions. Some examples of these will be considered below in Chapter 8. Others record decrees passed by city assemblies honouring eminent citizens of the same or some other city for services rendered – financial, political and, especially, for serving on important embassies. There are also building inscriptions recording expenditure, details of loans incurred by cities, requests for grants of immunity from reprisals (see pp. 145 ff.) by temples, cities and other bodies, and records of their concession by kings and cities, details of embassies sent to solicit collaboration in the setting-up of new religious festivals or the up-grading of established ones, or of the manumission of slaves (in which temples like that of Apollo at Delphi were regularly concerned), and a score of other categories, all having one thing in common, someone’s need to keep a permanent record.

The historian requires a special technique and experience to extract the fullest information from this epigraphic material. The exact provenance of many inscriptions is uncertain and they are usually fragmentary or partially illegible. Happily they tend to be couched in somewhat stereotyped language and the study of the vocabulary and phraseology used in various contexts at various dates enables the skilled epigraphist to suggest plausible restorations to fill lacunae on the stone. It is however vitally important to distinguish clearly between what actually stands on the stone and what is someone’s more or less convincing restoration. To make such restorations it is of course essential to be able to date an inscription at least approximately and this can be done by taking note of the letter forms and the context and character of the inscription, including in some cases the names of the persons mentioned in it. But letter forms can persist over several decades and it is by no means always possible to identify an individual mentioned in an inscription with certainty, since many Greek names are quite common and boys were often named after their grandfather. For example, a series of eighteen Megarian decrees which mention a king Demetrius were for a long time habitually referred to Demetrius I Poliorcetes, who captured Megara towards the end of the fourth century, until in 1942 a French scholar argued that the Demetrius in question was Demetrius II, who ruled in Macedonia from 239 to 229. This hypothesis substantially modified our picture of the reign of Demetrius II and his activity in Greece. Quite recently, however, it has again been argued that the attribution to Demetrius I is correct and the history of the two reigns has thus once more been thrown into, the melting-pot.

If inscriptions require special care and knowledge for their effective use, they are nevertheless among the most important sources of new information. Moreover, because of their stereotyped form it is not only possible to use one to restore gaps in another, but inscriptions falling into certain categories – building inscriptions, manumissions, decrees in honour of doctors, funerary inscriptions, records of private associations, etc. – can be used together to furnish information on such diverse subjects as price levels, the status of occupations, the incidence of slavery or the structure of royal bureaucracies and, as we have just seen, the publication of new inscriptions (or the more accurate republication of old ones) often leads to the revision or abandoning of established theories and assumptions.

IV

A second category of document important for the study of this period consists of papyri, mainly from middle Egypt and especially the Fayum, where the dry soil and climate have preserved through the centuries scraps of paper consigned to rubbish tips or reused, for example in stuffing the mummy-cases of sacred ibises, cats or crocodiles. The information contained in these papyri is in many ways different from that furnished by inscriptions. The latter have survived because they were intended to be preserved, the former because they were discarded. Papyri, too, furnish information which is usually more local in its relevance. If we ignore the fragments containing extracts from literary works, which range from the discovery nearly a century ago of Aristotle’s lost Constitution of Athens to that, more recently, of long sections of lost plays by Menander, we are dealing in the main with the waste-paper baskets of minor civil servants – correspondence, petitions and drafts of replies, summonses, depositions, records of judgements, administrative details concerning the billeting of troops, the passing on of edicts and orders, the auctioning of leases, the making of contracts and submission of tenders, the uneasy relations with the temples and public announcements like that offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of a runaway slave. The papyri already discovered include several major finds, such as the archive of Zenon of Caunus, the agent of Apollonius, the dioiketes or head of the civil administration under Ptolemy II, which gives a detailed picture of the working of a great estate, a gift from the king, on which much took place that was not perhaps typical of life generally among the Greeks in Egypt (on this see further p. 106), or the so-called Revenue Laws of Ptolemy II (cf. Select Papyri, 203) introduced by Apollonius, which contain regulations for the control of the royal oil monopoly. We have also several royal ordinances and indulgences (concessions to the populace in the form of amnesties, tax remissions and the like). An example is that of 118, in which

King Ptolemy (Euergetes II) and Queen Cleopatra (II) the sister and Queen Cleopatra (III) the wife proclaim an amnesty to all their subjects for errors, crimes, accusations, condemnations and offences of all kinds up to the 9 Pharmouthi of year 52 except to persons guilty of wilful murder or sacrilege (Select Papyri, 210).

These concessions are then elaborated for another 260 lines. Another papyrus from Tebtunis (P. Tebt., 703) contains instructions sent by the dioiketes to a newly appointed subordinate in the Egyptian countryside (see pp. 106‘7).

The papyri thus throw light on everyday life as well as on official policy and activity. But they have to be used with circumspection. Since there are some 30, 000 Greek papyri available compared with only 2000 demotic, it is clear that the conclusions they lead to are likely to be heavily weighted towards the Greek minority, a situation which can be rectified only as more work is done on the still unpublished documents in Egyptian. Furthermore, the papyrological evidence concerns administration at the local end rather than the centre of government in Alexandria, where soil conditions have prevented the survival of papyri. What we have can only be used safely for the place and time to which it belongs, since we have reason to believe that conditions changed considerably from place to place and from decade to decade. Nevertheless, here, as on the stones, there is a growing mass of evidence invaluable for the study of Ptolemaic Egypt. Elsewhere this sort of material is not usually available, though in the Dead Sea scrolls and other similar documents the caves of the Jordan valley have supplemented the written authorities, usually for a period rather later than that with which we are concerned.

Coins also provide valuable evidence for the historian. In the classical world coins were more often minted to satisfy the needs of government than to facilitate trade (though of course they incidentally did this too). Hoards of coins hidden in a crisis and never recovered afford useful means of dating, and, where dates can be attached to particular issues, it is sometimes possible to correlate minting with general policy. The location of coin finds furnishes information on currents of trade, and the relative absence of Ptolemaic coins abroad illustrates the strict monopoly enforced by the Ptolemies upon those trading with Egypt (see p. 105). The coin-types minted also throw light on policy and attitudes. Thus Alexander’s decision to strike Persian-type darics after Darius’ death clearly indicates his claim to the Persian throne whereas the opening of mints at Sicyon and Corinth had the more practical aim of financing the recruitment of mercenaries. For some time after Alexander’s death his successors issued coins on the same standard in the name of the kings, that is Philip Arrhidaeus and later Alexander IV. But towards the end of the third century they began one by one to issue coins with their own heads on the obverse, thereby signifying their rejection of a united empire and claim to independent kingship. Thus coins provide evidence for political pretensions, military ambitions and of course economic policy but they require a certain expertise on the part of the historian to master the technical problems surrounding dies and mints, weight standards and, especially, dating.

Of less importance, but by no means negligible, are the documents that have turned up in other materials or tongues. As examples I will mention two. In 1954 A. J. Sachs and D. J. Wiseman published a cuneiform tablet from Babylon containing a list of kings reigning in the Seleucid dominions from Alexander the Great to the accession of Arsacid (Parthian) rule in Mesopotamia and providing new or confirming old dates for Seleucid reigns down to about 179 (Iraq (1954), pp. 202–12). Secondly, in 1976 J. D. Ray published an archive of documents on potsherds (ostraca) consisting of drafts of letters written by a certain Hor, an Egyptian from Sebennytus, who in support of his claims in a feud quoted his own prophecy that Antiochus IV, who was invading Egypt, would leave that country by sea before ‘Year 2, Payni, final day’ (30 July 168) and, on a separate ostracon, asserted that Antiochus had fulfilled his prophecy by leaving before that date. Thus from an obscure document in a curious context we obtain a firm date for an important event not only in Seleucid and Ptolemaic relations but in Mediterranean history generally.

The use of this non-literary evidence, which is essential to our growing knowledge of the period, depends upon its availability to the historian. Some of the main publications in which inscriptions, coins and papyri are assembled can be found listed in the bibliography but these quickly become out of date and have to be supplemented from articles in journals and such annual surveys of recent publications as the learned and comprehensive Bulletin épigraphique published annually by J. and L. Robert in the French quarterly Revue des Etudes Grecques.

Evidence of this kind supplements, but does not replace, the work of the ancient writers, even when these are mediocre, for only they can give us a narrative of events and they are usually essential for a chronological framework. But inscriptions and papyri provide a new perspective and often information which prompts the historian to ask a new type of question. They give a glimpse into the working of governments and sometimes enable us to attach names to the bureaucrats themselves. Occasionally they allow families to be traced from generation to generation; they provide evidence for social mobility in a particular community and by their help we can sometimes discover details of land tenure, social hierarchies, and the economic conditions of different groups and classes. Provided we exercise caution and remain aware of the vast gaps in our knowledge, it is still possible to attempt an answer, with far more nuances than in the past, to such questions as where, in this or the other monarchy, power really lay. But, as has already been indicated, answers to these questions are valid only for the time and place to which the evidence refers. The hellenistic world was a dynamic society, one which in some ways never achieved stability but carried on in a state of tension created on the one hand by the fact that the existing balance of power was only accepted faute de mieux and not as a recognized way of organizing international relations, and on the other by a shifting and uneasy relationship between the Greco-Macedonian ruling class and the native populations. Starting from the original impact of Alexander’s career the hellenistic world gradually ran down until eventually, shorn of everything east of the Euphrates, it was incorporated into the Roman empire. When in the fourth century AD the Roman empire itself split into two halves, the hellenistic world still enjoyed a ghostly existence in Byzantium.

2. Alexander the Great (336–323)

I

When Alexander succeeded his father Philip II as king of Macedonia in 336, he found it a country radically changed from what it had been when Philip assumed the crown twenty-three years earlier. Hitherto a backward frontier kingdom on the fringe of Greece proper, Philip had transformed Macedonia into a powerful military state with a tried army and well-chosen frontiers, dominating Greece through the League of Corinth (see p. 13) and all set for the invasion of Persia. The cultural level of the population had also risen. In a speech which Arrian (Anabasis, vii, 9, 2) puts into his mouth, Alexander described Philip’s transformation of the Macedonian people in these terms:

Philip found you vagabonds and poor, most of you clothed in sheepskins, pasturing a few sheep on the mountains and putting up a poor fight in defence of these against the Illyrians, Triballians and Thracians on your borders. He gave you cloaks to wear instead of sheepskins and brought you down out of the mountains into the plains, making you a match in battle for the barbarians who were your neighbours, so that now you trusted in your own courage rather than in strongholds. He turned you into city-dwellers and civilized you by the gift of good laws and customs.

When one has disallowed the rhetoric, this passage fairly describes the conversion of a pastoral people into settled farmers and town-dwellers, wearing woven clothing and enjoying the benefits of an ordered life. The population had also expanded. It has been calculated by G. T. Griffith on the basis of recorded troop figures that Philip’s economic policy brought about an increase of over 25 per cent in the numbers of men available for the army between 334, when Alexander mobilized 27, 000 Macedonians for his Persian expedition and for service in Greece (with some 3000 men already in Asia and perhaps 20, 000 old and young for home defence), and 323, when the figures reached about 50, 000 (including a margin for casualties meanwhile sustained in Asia).

Philip’s army had won him control over Greece, but he could not afford to leave it idle. No sooner had he established peace there than he planned to invade Persia. The idea was not new. Ten years earlier the Athenian publicist Isocrates had addressed a speech to Philip urging this very course.

I am going to advise you to become the leader both of Greek unity and of the expedition against the barbarians; it is advantageous to employ persuasion with Greeks and a useful thing to use force against barbarians. That is more or less the essence of the whole matter (Isocrates, Philip, 10).

Isocrates continues a little later in the same speech:

What opinion do you imagine everyone will form of you if you try to destroy the whole Persian kingdom or, failing that, to annex as much territory as you can, and to seize Asia, as some are urging you, from Cilicia to Sinope, and if as well you found cities in this region and settle in them there those men who are now wandering around through lack of their everyday needs, and doing outrage to whomsoever they fall in with? (Isocrates, ibid., 120).

It is likely that Philip saw Asia as a source of wealth and new lands in which to settle the many exiles and dispossessed people who were at this time a general threat to both Greece and Macedonia, given that there were states with sufficient wealth to hire them as mercenaries. Whether the territorial limits suggested by Isocrates formed part of Philip’s original plan we cannot tell. Isocrates later admitted that his advice merely chimed in with Philip’s own inclinations, and perhaps what matters most is that such ideas were in the air. Philip, however, saw his enterprise in a much more obviously Macedonian context than Isocrates had envisaged. When in 336 Philip was assassinated, an advance force of 10, 000 men was already across the Hellespont. Thus on his accession Alexander found the Persian War half-begun but it had his wholehearted approval, for by it he hoped to win personal glory – and also to strengthen his position vis-à-vis the senior advisers whom Philip had left him (for he was only twenty). His first two years (336–4) were spent securing his northern frontiers in Thrace and Illyria and suppressing a revolt in Greece. Then in spring 334 he crossed over into Asia with a modest force of about 37, 000 men, of whom 5000 were cavalry. There were 12, 600 Greeks (7600 sent by the League and 5000 mercenaries), about 7000 tribal levies from the Balkans, nearly 2000 light-armed and cavalry scouts from Thrace and Paeonia and the remaining 15–16, 000 were Macedonians and Thessalians. Europe he left in the charge of his general Antipater with an army of 12, 000 infantry and 1500 cavalry – about as many Macedonians as he took with him (Diodorus, xviii, 17, 3 and 5). His finances were shaky and on arriving in Asia he planned to live off the country.

Alexander’s army was to prove especially effective because of its balanced combination of arms. A great burden lay on the light-armed Cretan and Macedonian archers, Thracians and Agrianian javelin-men. But the striking force was the cavalry and, should the cavalry-charge leave the issue still undecided, the infantry phalanx, 9000 strong, armed with 15–18 foot spears and shields, and the 3000 hypaspists of the royal battalions would deal the final blow. The army was accompanied by surveyors, engineers, architects, scientists, court officials and historians. From the start Alexander seems to have envisaged an operation with no clear limits.

After a romantic visit to Troy he won his first battle at the river Granicus near the Sea of Marmara, and as a gesture sent 300 suits of armour from the spoils as a dedication to Athena at Athens by ‘Alexander, son of Philip, and the Greeks (except the Spartans) from the barbarians who inhabit Asia’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 16, 7). His intention, underlined by the omission of all reference to the Macedonians, was clearly to emphasize the ‘panhellenic’ aspect of the campaign. At Dium in Macedonia on the other hand he set up brazen statues of twenty-five Macedonians who fell in the first encounter (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 16, 4). The victory gave access to western Asia Minor and by the spring of 333 Alexander was master of the western seaboard, most of Caria, Lycia and Pisidia, and could press ahead through Gordium (where tradition told of his loosing – or cutting – the famous Gordian knot, a feat which could only by performed by the man who was to rule Asia) to Ancyra and thence into Cilicia. In autumn 333 he encountered Darius himself at Issus (near Iskenderun) and by a second great victory laid open the route into Syria. There Tyre held out for seven months, but Alexander did not relax the siege, and meanwhile received peace proposals from Darius, whose family had fallen into his hands at Issus. Darius offered him a ransom of 10, 000 talents for his family, the cession of all lands west of the Euphrates and a marriage alliance (Arrian, Anabasis, ii, 25, 1) but Alexander’s ambitions had now clearly expanded and he rejected the offer. By the winter of 332 all Syria and Palestine was in his hands and he was in Egypt, where he founded a new city, Alexandria, before making a journey through the desert to consult the famous oracle of Amon at Siwah. His strategic object at this time seems to have been to seize the whole sea-coast and so protect his base in Greece and Macedonia from any possible naval attack. For he had already taken a bold step: he had ‘decided to disband his navy both from lack of money at the time and also seeing that his fleet was not capable of an action against the Persian navy’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 20, 1). Perhaps too he mistrusted the Greeks who manned it. In fact, the death of Darius’ admiral Memnon in 333 had deprived the Persian fleet of most of its bite, and on land a Persian counter-attack in Asia Minor in winter 333/2 had been defeated.

In the summer of 331 Alexander once again met Darius’ army, this time at Gaugamela beyond the Tigris, not far from Nineveh. It was the decisive battle of the war and again Alexander was victorious, pursuing the retreating forces for thirty-five miles and then quickly advancing to occupy Babylon. Seizing the royal treasures, which amounted to 50, 000 gold talents, he advanced further into Persia proper, where he took Persepolis and Pasargadae. The burning of Xerxes’ palace at Persepolis was perhaps intended as a symbolic end to the war of revenge, the panhellenic war; such at least is Arrian’s view (Anabasis, iii, 18, 11), though other writers explain the incident, less probably, as arising out of a drunken escapade, inspired by a courtesan. At any rate, ‘on reaching Ecbatana Alexander sent back to the sea the Thessalian cavalry and the rest of the allies, paying each the agreed pay in full and himself making a largess of 2000 talents’ (Arrian, Anabasis, iii, 19, 5). Henceforth Alexander was to be waging a personal war. Placing the treasure under the control of Harpalus and leaving Parmenion, one of Philip’s generals, to control communications, he now pressed on at high speed after Darius. But Darius had been deposed by a usurper, Bessus, and Alexander found him stabbed and dying near Shahrud. Nothing now stood in the way of his claim to be the Great King, and a dedication of arms and bulls’ skulls at Lindus, probably in 330, was accompanied by the record: