The first few decades of the third century in Macedonian Europe seemed peopled by folk of extremes. It was a time when the depths of wickedness were plumbed. Ptolemy Ceraunus, no one was in any doubt, was an iniquitous man whose behaviour over more than a decade not only showed consistently egregious but ushered in an appalling crisis for not only his own homeland but for the countries all around. Yet even his depravity, wallowing in assassination, familial murder and deepest treachery, was trumped by the likes of Apollonius who, when tyrant of Cassandreia, is accused of orchestrating cannibal feasts. They were up to their necks in a kind of behaviour redolent of exotic eastern courts that had occupied palaces at Sardis, Babylon, Ecbatana or Susa with even a suggestion that they might represent a falling of standards that some would claim as a hallmark of what is called the Hellenistic age. Cassander and Lysimachus, if reported as more solid citizens, still emerge as pretty unlovable, if not worse, though it must be understood that their reputations are largely transmitted via a prism that was attached to the entourage of their bitterest enemies. There were other extraordinary characters around like Cassander’s brother Alexarchus who invented a solar religion and is mentioned as the founder of a utopian community called Ouranoupoli in Chalcidice, and amazing women like Arsinoe who, first as Lysimachus’ queen, was deeply implicit in his dreadful downfall before returning to Egypt to marry her brother Ptolemy II and act as a crucial player at that prince’s remarkable court for several years before her death sometime in the 260s.
Apart from descent into iniquity or eccentricity, it was the extremes of ambition and risk-taking and the ups and downs of fortune that characterized the two individuals for whom we have the most detail in these years. They had been a pair, these two kings, even if they did play in slightly different leagues. To continue the analogy, Demetrius is easy to see as the Real Madrid of the Galactico era, always competing for world domination and occasionally reaching the heights for a time but still so essentially unbalanced; all glitz and glamour with little heart for the mundane routine fare, so any position at the very pinnacle of the domestic game was seldom long sustained. Pyrrhus, like Ajax of Amsterdam during the twenty-first century who, despite being supremely talented and always ambitious, just did not have the resources, apart from very occasionally and for very short periods, to ever be able to compete at the highest level. Both had sat on the Macedonian throne, both imagining a great Balkan state and more, but failing in the end to achieve it. There was also ignominy at the end of both these lives. Demetrius had terminated by drinking himself to death in a morass of ennui, and hardly ten years later Pyrrhus had been vanquished, not honourably by a foeman’s spear or sword but by a roof tile; not only that, but one flung by of all things an old lady or, if Cassius Dio is to be believed, the even greater indignity of the old lady slipping off the roof and falling on top of him. The Eagle king being dead obviously did not have to worry personally, but it is easy to imagine the embarrassment his shade felt as he contemplated his earthly reputation from any afterlife.
The lives of Demetrius and Pyrrhus had been a picaresque of power, and with the death of the latter it seemed the end of an era when larger-than-life characters stalked the Hellenistic stage, the butt end of an epic, yet an epic nonetheless. They had been unscrupulous, dangerous and unpredictable, but had painted in broad brush strokes that impacted so many in the world both near and far. It also marked the demise of the only truly formidable enemy of the man who sat on the Macedonian throne when the sands settled. He was a new sort of ruler who had never seemed to fit naturally into a world of grand schemes and castles in the air; so different from both his father and his greatest enemy, he existed on a much more human scale. This ruler who condescended to encourage his soldiers to play ball games1 fitted better into the cultural milieu exemplified by the New Comedy where family troubles and love affairs took over from the great themes of the mythical past. The character who emerges is less physically imposing than his father and from several anecdotes showed considerable humour and self-awareness, quipping that the man who emptied his chamber pot had not noticed he was a god, regarding the royal diadem as just a rag and the life of kingship as one of glorious servitude, glorious certainly but servitude nonetheless, nothing like the extravagant pageant envisaged by his father.
He would not initiate any monumental extravaganza to commemorate the survival of a barbarian Armageddon such as the Athenians eventually constructed on their burned Acropolis to celebrate the endurance of their home twice razed by the Persians. Despite Thermopylae being central to both campaigns and however hard the likes of Pausanias tried to draw parallels, the contest with the Gauls never garnished the glory of the earlier epic and its aftermath was never wreathed in the same garlands of triumph. After Xerxes’ defeat the victors proceeded to centuries of impressive political, cultural and military achievement, but the world that survived the Gallic wreckage never hit such highlights. Antigonus also left it to the rulers of Pergamon to put up great altars to commemorate victory over the Gauls and, despite a penchant for collecting philosophers, he saw no need to establish a great cultural centre like Alexandria, Antioch or Pergamon; any cities that he planted were modest affairs, Antigoneas whose stories hardly rang down the centuries.
Whether psychology or happy coincidence, Antigonus appears as the polar opposite of his father, so unlike the anti-role model that was Demetrius; only in his filial affection did he show those traits that had been legend in the family. It was even there in their looks: taking few of his father’s genes when it came to appearance, Demetrius was almost beautiful while his son was snub-nosed and not much to look at, but it was in personality and policy that the chasm was most marked. There was no thirst for deification and he did not crave the visibility of his handsome father or the overweening power of his grandfather, while his interested, versatile mind was reflected in the coterie of thinkers with whom he was to be found during all his long life. He could certainly practice realpolitik, showing cunning and cynicism, particularly when late in his reign he proposed an arrangement with the Aetolians to invade and partition the Achaean League. Yet this was inevitable for a man in his position and anyway, never covered in any envelope of reserve, he would often unbend to show a far from unusual Macedonian tendency to indulge in heavy drinking, and the lavish birthday party he gave for the prince Halcyoneus was infamous. However, despite imbibing unwatered wine in all-night parties, like his father he did not let such inclinations much affect his actions. It was an off-duty interest and one that Demetrius only took to extremes when fortune ensured that he had no more duties to perform.
Antigonus himself would probably have wanted to be remembered as a sort of philosopher prince if anything; after all, he had trained with Zeno in his turbulent early years and if, when the balmy times came at Pella, he could never persuade the old man to visit himself, his spirit certainly travelled, personified by the presence of Persaeus of Citium who had come at Zeno’s request to substitute for his teacher. This stand-in seems to have been very much a man of the world who loved heavy drinking with Antigonus and, after tutoring the king’s son, ended in control of Corinth where he was killed when Aratus took over there. An idealistic appeal to other thinkers made for something of a Cynic and Stoic admixture at the court of this cerebral monarch, and sending out invitations to great names in philosophy was intended to give his headquarters real kudos, perhaps in an effort to compensate for a realized decline from earlier days. It ended by garnering the likes of Bion of Borysthenes, a Pontic Greek and real globe-trotter who sampled every variety of Philosophic school in Athens before staying a while at the court of the royal intellectual, Timon of Phlius, a one-eyed octogenarian who began as a dancer and ended as a renowned thinker of sceptical leanings. There was a coterie of philosopher-poets too, like the eel-loving Antagoras of Rhodes, Alexander Aetolus who had supped at the Alexandrian muse for years before arriving at Pella, and Aratus of Soli, famed for cosmological verse and praise-singing about the great victory over the Gauls at Lysimachia.
This was the man who would steer Macedonia into largely peaceful waters in an extravagantly long reign of almost forty years, ending in 240 or 239 when he was 80 years of age, although there is something of a conundrum about what occurred in Macedonia at the start of Antigonus’ latest and final stint as ruler of the country. How much ground had he recovered after his two defeats while Pyrrhus was away in the Peloponnese? Was he largely re-established before heading off to confront his adversary at Argos? We cannot be sure, but certainly after his rival’s death the veil lifts to reveal Antigonus fully in control, ready to consolidate the opportunities that had become available after Pyrrhus’ ignominious dispatch. Not that much detail can be discerned by peering into opaque and trifling sources for the last decades of his reign. We can recognize that he retained a tenuous hegemony in much of Greece, with the Fetters, the forts in Attica, Megara, perhaps Troezen, Epidaurus and Hydra to control the entrance of the Saronic Gulf and make life difficult if the Lagids fancied stirring the pot by flexing their naval muscle, while the old trick of Antipater and Cassander of sponsoring friendly tyrants was not infrequently played, particularly in the Peloponnese. Antigonus was also fortunate that of the four most significant Greek powers – Aetolia, Athens, Boeotia and Sparta – only two ever joined against him at any one time, although when Sparta and Athens did conjoin, it resulted in one of the major conflicts in his last thirty years of power.
One slight island of information stands out a little in the murky ocean that is the period after Pyrrhus’ death and appropriately it centred around that city where Antigonus had received much of his education and spent many years of his young life, a place he understood perhaps much better than most of his forebears on the Macedonian throne. This man who loved to spend so much of his time among philosophers, many of whom had strong links with, if they did not actually come from Athens, would end remembered and vilified for this war against the city and indeed his general intrusion into the Greek world. Athenian war aims remained what they had been for years: to regain Piraeus and the other forts that had been retained in Antigonid hands after the revolution of 287. They had hoped Pyrrhus might have helped with removing these muzzles to their independence when their envoys approached him in the Peloponnese in 272, but he had other things on his mind at that time and now a few years later he was no longer a factor. However, the conflict hotted up within that other perennial context within which so many Macedonian rulers had to try to exist: hostility from the incumbent at Alexandria. This Chremonidean war was sparked sometime in the mid-260s, named for an Athenian diplomat who had spent much of his career as a condottieri in the employ of the Ptolemies. If the conflict was partly a proxy business fuelled by Ptolemy II, when it came to fighting the Lagids did little more than send an admiral called Patrocles who camped on a small island opposite Cape Sunium and largely remained quiet after discovering that Antigonus saw no benefit in fighting a sea battle. Yet at least on land Lagid agents with bottomless pockets had sponsored a considerable coalition with those beyond the Attic capital who answered the call including Sparta, the Achaeans, Elis, the Tegeans, Mantineans, Arcadians and a few Cretans, all of whom signed up after seeing the glint of Lagid gold.
The Spartan king who had given so much trouble to Pyrrhus took the lead, initially making an abortive attempt to pass the isthmus defensive line based on the Acrocorinth to aid an Attic ally who was bound soon to be threatened by Antigonid armies once they had dealt with the distraction of an Epirot raid led by Pyrrhus’ son Alexander. The next year Areus was killed after again committing to battle against Antigonus outside Corinth, an occasion when his son Halcyoneus2 may also have lost his life. A defeat that saw not just the decisive termination of the Peloponnesian League efforts, particularly after the next king of Sparta, Acrotatus, the hero of Pyrrhus’ siege, was himself killed in a defeat against the forces of Megalopolis, but also the withdrawal of the Lagid fleet. So with two more Spartan kings perishing in battle, siege lines, already in place since 263, had been drawn tight around Athens, such that late in the summer of 262 the defenders surrendered with a Macedonian garrison re-established on the hill of the Muses and a state of dependency made apparent with the induction of the grandson of Demetrius of Phalerum to partly reprise the role of his forebear who had managed Athens in the interests of Cassander; a punctuation mark in the city’s story emphasized by the death around this time of Zeno, the last of the great initiators of philosophic institutions in ancient Athens. Antigonus’ hegemony over Greece had never been complete, particularly tight or oppressive; far more a thing of manipulation, of personal connections rather than Ptolemaic-style direct administration, but the Chremonidean War had made it clear that none of the other Hellenistic kings could effectively compete with him for influence in this particular arena. They might like to make friends among the great historic cities but the only man who really counted ruled at Pella, who if he eschewed direct rule in most places and accepted his prerogatives were considerably constrained by the Achaeans and Aetolians flexing their muscles, still remained the context and could not be crossed with impunity.
Not that the years after the submission of the Athenians were ever likely to be problem-free, and if the evidence is gossamer-thin, we know that the late 250s saw rebellions by Craterus’ son Alexander ensuring that for quite some time Antigonus lost control of Acrocorinth, Chalcis and Eretria. This Alexander, so unlike his faithful father, declared himself king in his own right after suborning the commanders of the Euboean fortresses, allied himself with the Achaean League and made trouble for Antigonus’ friends in Athens and Argos before being bought off. Yet this turned out to be only a blip, if a five-year one, and on Alexander’s death Antigonus, his cunning little blunted by age, duped his widow Nicaea with an offer of his son’s hand in marriage. During the festivities and despite his almost seventy summers, he walked up the steep path to the Acrocorinth with some steady men to be let in by the celebrating garrison before taking over the crucial citadel. This key stronghold always seemed to be at the centre of things in Antigonus’ later years and 243 saw the ageing king suffer a considerable blow with the emergence of Aratus of Sicyon heading up a resuscitated Achaean League that permanently dented the Macedonian Peloponnesian presence.
This man had been a friend of Antigonus in the past, but this did not stop him, flush with Lagid money, from taking the Acrocorinth by a coup de main. He climbed at night ninja-like into the fortress with the help of some bought members of the garrison, taking over and killing the officers Antigonus had left to hold the place. Nor was this the end as he wooed the likes of Troezen, Epidaurus and even Megara into his expanding league. Whether these places had been garrisoned by the Antigonids is not known, but what is clear is that the king’s relations with other Peloponnesian big hitters like Elis, Megalopolis and Argos were far less steady after this time, though that they were never stern enemies is made probable by their distaste for a Sparta which always regarded Antigonus as a dangerous foe. What was not in question was that Macedonian power and influence in the key region of the Argolid, Isthmus and Megarid which had been so solid and so important for so long was now at least shared with a rising Archean polity.
Not that the long years of entrenchment involved just looking south. Antigonus in many ways had a personality more suited to the normal role of commanding a marcher state than many of his recent predecessors and if his concerns were greater than just defending the civilized littoral from savage men to the north, still he knew that he needed to keep an eye on the ambitions of not just Gauls but other older bugbears populating the borderlands. Antigonus would have appreciated as much as an Achaean historian
how highly should we honour the Macedonians, who for the greater part of their lives never cease from fighting with the barbarians for the sake of the security of Greece? For who is not aware that Greece would have constantly stood in the greatest danger, had we not been fenced by the Macedonians and the honourable ambition of their kings? The best proof is this. The moment that the Gauls after defeating Ptolemy Ceraunus conceived a contempt for the Macedonians, Brennus making light of all other opponents, marched into the middle of Greece with his army, a thing that would often have happened if our frontiers were not protected by the Macedonians.3
Yet despite making every effort to hold the line against anybody trying to follow in the steps of Bolgius and Brennus, he was never able to completely reconstruct the barrier that had been broken with the demise of Lysimachus. Dardanians, Illyrians and Thracians and Celts would occasionally crack the brittle northern carapace of his kingdom, though no further existential menace emerged in the lifetime of this man who as often stood guard by the unhealthy freshwater lake of Pella, watching his polities’ northern fringes, as he did attending to the southern world of Hellenes from his other capital of Demetrias.
It was from that city at the head of the Pagasaean Gulf that the armadas were dispatched to do battle against the Ptolemies at Cos and Andros during the 250s and 240s before Lagid attention was drawn again to interminable conflicts with the Seleucids over Coele-Syria. This was a contest that matched the other two long-lived monarchs whose lives and reigns closely mirrored that of Antigonus Gonatus. Ptolemy II Philadelphus was made joint king with his father around 283 and lasted until 246. Apart from bothering Antigonus, Africa took much of his attention, with his half-brother Magus of Cyrene a source of trouble, while he also found time to invade Nubia, devoting considerable resources to opening up the Red Sea, founding trading posts to cash in on the Arabian and Indian ocean spice trade as well as getting African bush elephants to beef up his military. Antiochus I Soter, like the other two, had also served an apprenticeship under the progenitor of his dynasty. He had been Seleucus’ co-ruler responsible for the Eastern Seleucid territories since around 292 before starting a solo reign in 281 that lasted through to 261. Apart from his duel with Ptolemy, problems with rampaging Galatians, independent Anatolian dynasts and Eastern provinces that were never secure ensured he had plenty to occupy a reign which, after the brief confrontation of the early 270s, was pretty quiet on the Macedonian front. Equally, if ideas of going east to secure an effective border or to gain control of the key trade routes and cities may have attracted his descendant Antiochus III, such grand strategic thinking that always fell foul of those old enemies’ time and distance, was not a possibility in the middle of the third century.
After decades of war, treachery and trauma, the empire that the great Alexander had secured had finally settled into three discrete entities, each conveniently established on the different continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. The dynasties that ruled them had each sprung from one of those great marshals who had found themselves heir to a considerable portion of the whole when the first dismemberment occurred at Babylon in 323. Ptolemy had received the satrapy of Egypt, and apart from expanding into the lands of the Levant and the waters of the East Mediterranean and Aegean, there he largely remained. Seleucus had initially continued as second-in-command to Perdiccas before being designated as governor of Babylonia at Triparadisus in 321. From then came exile and return before winning for himself an Eastern realm sufficiently puissant that with his partners Lysimachus and Cassander he could wreck the high ambitions of Antigonus the One-Eyed at Ipsus, a victory that first won for him most of west Asia outside Anatolia before the final campaign of the old adventurer took his frontiers to the shores of the Hellespont. The last of the three was the grandson of the same man defeated at Ipsus, but the road that took him to Pella was so topsy-turvy, convoluted and chaotic that it is suggestive of the whole story of the particular section of the Macedonian Empire of which he ended being in charge.
What of this state nurtured by such a conscientious and long-lived monarch? The legacy of the Imperial years and the contests of colossi that came after, all ensured that despite the wealth that had seeped back after the conquests of the Persian Empire, his kingdom was considerably weaker than when Philip had passed it to his son as a tool to shape a new world. There were no more gold strikes in the Pangaion Mountains above Amphipolis or gold coins minted, with only amounts of silver, iron and lead still being processed in the last king Perseus’ time; a condition of economic weakness that is emphasized by the claim that his yearly revenue amounted to only an unbelievably derisory 200 talents.4 This was despite there having been some territorial recovery with the retrieval of the rump of the upper cantons, including the strategically crucial Aous pass, after the defeat of the Epirots by Antigonus’ son Demetrius and with Paeonia and other posts on the northern frontier reclaimed. And what had always been very apparent was that if Antigonus Gonatus had survived terrible trials in his first decade in power, it was not so much due to the resources of the northern kingdom but largely because of the vigour of his holdings in Greece and the effectiveness of his old strategy of waiting out others who might be more talented and powerful.
That just the phrase ‘grassy knoll’ conjures up a whole world of conspiracy is not only because of the glamour of J.F. Kennedy, the strangeness of the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald and the years of investigation into what really happened; it is partly because the assassination of a world leader is not a very frequent event. The death of Philip II was also wrapped in mystery, with stories of the perpetrator having had a personal gripe because Philip had scornfully dismissed his claims of being raped by a great man of the court or that Olympias or even Alexander had been involved in urging the assassination. What is common to both is that they were not inevitable: Kennedy might easily, if events had fallen out differently, have lived to serve two terms and Philip could have enjoyed a couple more decades or longer to see out his already launched Persian project. If the former circumstance had not occurred, it would probably not have made a massive difference to how the 1960s panned out in America and the world after. Johnson would likely have carried out his civil rights legislation as vice president and all the evidence suggests that Kennedy would not have resisted being sucked into the morass of Vietnam. No president would have been prepared to preside over another Communist success in the Far East on the model of China until years of awful bloodshed had made inevitable what the evidence had always indicated.
With Philip, the situation was different. If he had not been killed, the Macedonian Persian war might have taken a significantly dissimilar direction; he was, after all, a very different man from his son, far less astonishing in his inclinations. The invasion of Darius III’s empire would have been headed up by Philip, no doubt with Parmenion as a steady second and Alexander in the same kind of subordinate role he had occupied at the Battle of Chaeronea. In these circumstances it is easy to imagine significantly different outcomes for the great enterprise. It is probable that Philip would have achieved much the same as his extraordinary son in the first few years, defeating the satraps and mercenaries who would have faced him over the Hellespont and gone on to overrun most of Anatolia; after all, 100 years earlier a king of Sparta had showed this level of ambition.5 Equally, that the allure of the Levant and perhaps Egypt would have drawn him is quite credible, taking over territory that it would take years to suppress, organize and digest, but would he have gone further? This is impossible to know, but what is surely certain is that he would have called a halt well before Macedonian arms had reached the Zagros highlands, never mind the Hindu Kush or the Indus valley. Most of his followers could not have conceived that the high walls of Babylon or the palaces of Persepolis would not mark an end to what by any standards had been unparalleled and almost unbelievable achievements. With Philip we cannot envisage him dreaming of reaching the ocean at the end of the world and dragging his dazed and crazed Macedonians on a journey through Mesopotamia, Iran, Bactria, Sogdiana and the Punjab, actions that even contemporaries certainly saw as those of a man either not quite sane or touched by deity.
Like Parmenion, Philip might well have been happy to agree to a peace with the great king that would have established a Macedonian frontier west of the Euphrates and would have avoided the final showdown that eventually occurred at Gaugamela. This would have left a rump Persian Empire ranging from Mesopotamia to Bactria and Sogdiana but still would have ensured that the sunburst banner of Macedonia would have flown over country stretching from European Macedonia, through the massively wealthy provinces of Anatolia to the Levant. This much less stretched realm, each part easily and swiftly able to communicate via the sea lanes, would surely have been less frangible than the one that was eventually bequeathed by Philip’s son. Alexander, growing older as a crucial military subordinate but not allowed to have his latent megalomania run free, might with the passing years have become something closer to what was expected of a Macedonian monarch, perhaps fathering an heir who could, by the time Philip had died and certainly when his son had, would have been sufficiently mature to accrue all the benefits of legitimacy, sufficient to keep the new Macedonian Empire from splintering apart.
This established Macedonian dynasty could conceivably have retained control, maintaining the loyalty of its conquering marshals, and been puissant enough to sufficiently suppress centrifugal tendencies, either independence movements by conquered peoples or attempts by ambitious commanders and officials to set up as independent rulers. Even if Mesopotamia had been conquered with the treasure houses of Susa, Babylon and Ecbatana emptied, it is still possible to imagine a unitary state surviving. Antigonus almost achieved this himself with no golden glow of legitimacy to smooth his way and in a world where the poison of faction fighting was already well established. Yet even he was unable to keep hold of the upper satrapies or Babylonia for long and the same would surely have been the case, even if an heir of the legitimate line had come into his own. To illustrate this possibility, a version of this kingdom did emerge just before the final shattering. Lysimachus, having taken over the throne of Macedon from Pyrrhus in 284 and incorporating Paeonia and Thessaly into his realm, possessed just such a state stretching from Epirus to the Taurus and almost from the Danube down through much of the north Aegean. If the old king had not indulged in such poisonous familial machinations but instead handed over this extensive rich and powerful realm to his mature and talented son Agathocles, it is conceivable that a strong legitimate line could have retained control of this extensive, powerful but tight imperial entity.
A reasonable orthodoxy suggests that much of Rome’s success in taking over the Hellenistic East forty years after the demise of Antigonus Gonatus had been, just as it had been in winning the Hannibalic War, dependent on her ability to draw on the resources of the numerous and warlike peoples of Italy that she had brought under her sway over the previous couple of centuries. It was a matter of arithmetic; she had the numbers: she could afford the awful bloodlettings of the Punic War years when so many of her armies were eliminated by an opponent whose soldiers might not have individually been better than the legions, but in combination and led by the likes of Hannibal were devastatingly effective. This was due to an ability to recruit from both an expanding pool of citizens and subject allies from central and south Italy: fighters from the plains of Apulia, the hills and glens of Lucania, Bruttium, Samnium and north through Latium, Samnite country up to Cisalpine Gaul, north of Etruria and Umbria, who provided at least half the infantry and much more of the horse that saved the city from Hannibal and fed the conflicts that took Roman power across the Adriatic and as far as the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia in less than a generation. This was a polity that could send 40,000 men across the Adriatic, then send another when the attrition of several years’ campaigning in mainland Greece against Philip V of Macedonia had worn it out, so that when a final great battle was fought at Cynoscephalae she could, with a small number of local allies, field an army slightly larger than her enemy in their own back yard. Then, within a very few years, dispatch even larger forces to take on Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch of Asia who had just returned from a great conquering promenade around the upper satrapies of Iran, Bactria and Sogdiana that had earned him the sobriquet ‘the Great’.
However, something else is demanded other than just maths; numbers might have been absolutely crucial in allowing Rome to expand so swiftly and decisively east into the Greek and Hellenistic heartland, but it had been about division too. In dealing with these two Hellenistic powers, Rome had been able to take them on one at a time, indeed with encouragement from the non-belligerent who welcomed the idea of a regional rival being taken down a peg or two without anticipating that such encouragement would end with the fox taking up residence in the hen coop. What must exercise the imagination is what would have occurred if the Hellenic power that Rome faced comprised the kind of compact but extensive East Mediterranean power that might have developed without a world-conquering Alexander as the driving force. A Macedonia controlling Macedonian Europe, Anatolia and perhaps even the Levant and Egypt with all the resources monetary, military and naval these would have provided might have been able to face with greater success the Roman storm from the west. Certainly such an entity would have been able to raise another army after a defeat even as total as Cynoscephalae, just as Rome had after the Trebbia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae, while control of the Hellespont and, perhaps being the major naval power in the Aegean, in the way Philip V or Antiochus III never were, might have suggested a different outcome. Such a polity that was more dominant in Greece and Anatolia also might have meant the Romans would have had less opportunity to exploit the potential of places like Aetolia, Achaea, Pergamon and Rhodes as significant auxiliaries in the wars against the Hellenistic kings. That all this might have made a difference is predicated on the existence of a form of Macedon very much beefed up from the entity that stood exposed as resource-weak and fairly friendless against a Rome able to call on the hundreds of thousands of warrior peoples of central and south Italy, honed and hardened after more than fifteen years of warfare against the terrible Hannibal. Such a single Hellenistic kingdom could mobilize her deep barrel of military manpower from not just the Macedonian heartland, with the sarissa-wielding soldiers of the phalanx and the urban foundations of soldier settlers around some of the most fertile and strategically significant sites in the Eastern Mediterranean, but from the Greeks of Anatolia and Europe whose ethos always saw the citizen as solid warrior when the time required. On top these would have been seconded by hordes of tough warriors from the tribes of Thrace and hard-fighting Galatians; a military potential seconded by a first-rate marine founded on a combination of Greek Aegean and Phoenician and Levantine talents and assets, all defending a state that might perhaps have the wherewithal to buy sufficient time to learn the techniques and find a weakness in the juggernaut of hatchet-wielding killers coming their way.
Counter-factual yet interesting, it is possible to make reasonable calculations about the sort of military response that such a Macedonian could mobilize in the face of the direst threat, but was there perhaps something else that made the difference? Can a case be made that it was the particular military system of the Romans that ensured success? This matter had been under discussion since the days of Polybius, who saw Rome as deploying a political system that produced both the leadership and the military machine particularly suited for world conquest, while Livy could happily speculate on the likelihood of a Roman victory had Alexander turned from his eastern conquests to invade the Italian peninsula. These mechanistic explanations saw the Roman military way as the key; that those states that fell to Rome practised an art of war that just could not take what the legions could throw at them, particularly that the Roman soldier organised in centuries and maniples had the edge over the phalanx in a way that was always bound to be decisive. History clearly indicates that on occasions military systems can be decisive; that ways of fighting in particular settings and particular contexts can frequently be pivotal. Thus, while the Roman legion proved impressive against so many of the enemies it encountered in Europe, Africa and Asia, the systemic use of horses, archers and cataphracts practised in armies from steppe nomads through to the Parthians and Sasanian Persians generally proved very effective against this same enemy when deployed on their home ground.
So it is possible that even if a Macedon with the manpower resources of a much greater European and Asian state could have faced up to Roman numbers, this other factor would have ensured their defeat anyway. Polybius stressed that the peculiarities of the legion, its flexibility and that it could fight in uneven terrain in large or small bodies were the explanation of what most considered its extraordinary achievement in defeating the Macedonian-style phalanx. He contended the secret was that within its three lines, each legion had reserves that would not engage with the phalanx when contact occurred and that when the phalanx moved, either in difficult ground or in forcing its foe back or retreating, it would become disordered and move away from the auxiliary troops supporting it, so the spare Roman warriors could occupy the ground in the phalanx’s flank and rear to attack the pikemen where they were vulnerable. It was the phalanx’s inability to act and fight in separate smaller squads that meant they were unable to counter this threat.
Yet that the phalanx was so easily disarranged and only truly effective on flat, level ground does not seem to fit with the evidence from the whole career of the Macedonian phalanx from Phillip II through to the great second-century battles. Here there are multiple examples of it staying solid and functioning effectively in all sorts of country, from Philip’s phalanx marching backwards uphill to entice the Athenians to follow them at Chaeronea, to Alexander’s phalanx fighting against Illyrians and Thracians in hilly wooded terrain. Then in his Persian Wars, his phalanx attacked successfully across both the Granicus and Issus rivers and many years later the phalanx of Antigonus III Doson advanced uphill to get at the Spartans at Sellasia with little loss of effectiveness. There does seem to be enough evidence to squash the well-held contention that the only place where the phalanx was effective was on level ground. This is not to say that the formation might not suffer on difficult terrain or when trying to push forward rapidly; in these circumstances their ranks would certainly have become disordered and gaps appear in the bristling hedge of pikes. However, the key factor in most of these contests was that the troops opposing the phalanx were unable to effectively exploit this tendency.
Yet in the heavily-armoured swordsmen of Rome, the phalanx found a kind of nemesis almost designed to exploit its weakness and enabling the legion to hand out an almost unbroken line of defeats. The process was simple but devastating for a soldier who knew how to fight as an individual duellist. The legionary, after gaining sufficient experience to realize the ploy was possible, could, after pulling his shield to cover his front, push down between the rows of pikes facing him and, once reaching the phalanxite, stab him with his heavy short sword. Having downed the man in his front and perhaps more, this would have then made the gap between the pike heads larger, allowing more of his comrades to penetrate. This intruder would be well-placed even if his opponent dropped his pike and defended himself with his own short sword, a circumstance in which the legionary’s skill as a swordsman would give him an edge while his body shield provided much better protection than the other’s smaller round pelte. Not only would it be probable that he would beat his man, but the very fact that the other had dropped his pike would be bound to cause disruption among his comrades on each side, ensuring even more gaps for enemies to pour in. It is easy to see that it would not take many swordsmen wrecking havoc among almost unprotected phalanxites to cause fatal disorder in the heart of the formation.
This would not generally have been the case for the other opponents faced by the phalanx. A Persian bow and spear man, a Greek hoplite, a Thracian peltast, a Gallic warrior or the later ubiquitous thureophoroi, peltasts with larger Gallic-style shields, faced with a gap in the lines of pikes facing them were none of them especially well equipped to exploit it. Persian infantry were not generally close-quarter combatants, while the hoplite used to fighting as a unit would not naturally push between rows of spear points, even if his large round shield didn’t make it physically difficult. Then, just like a peltast with his javelin, the hoplite with his spear would, if he could penetrate the hedge of pikes, find it more difficult to strike his opponent when he defended himself with his own short sword. The same problem would face the thureophoros, and as for the Gallic warrior, he would have little room to swing his long slashing sword among a forest of sarissas. So while the phalanx worked well against these various warrior types, even on terrain that did not ideally suit it, when it came to facing the legionary it was different, although this had not been the case straight away. When they faced Pyrrhus’ veteran Epirot phalanx in three battles, the Roman swordsmen either were defeated or failed to achieve complete success. They needed experience to learn how to deal with the formidable hedgehog as it approached them; indeed, even at Pydna their commander Aemilius Paullus would declare his own terror just at the sight of the glistening hedge of spear points.6 Fortunately for him, his men proved less intimidated and with more than a century of phalanx-fighting experience to draw on, they saw off a very high-quality Macedonian phalanx on a battlefield, much of which was flat and clear.
It seems that Rome’s legionaries exposed a fatal flaw in the phalanx system for which they were never able to find an answer, but nothing is a given; chance can take a hand and a larger, more resource-rich Macedonian kingdom might have benefited from an ability to learn from defeat. What is noticeable is that in each of the great Roman campaigns against Hellenistic enemies at Cynoscephalae, Magnesia and Pydna they were decided by one great battle, after which Rome’s enemy was never able to come back for a second and third round in the way the Romans themselves had done against first Pyrrhus and then most famously against Hannibal in the Second Punic War. The legions failed in battle at both Heraclea in Magna Graecia and Asculum in Apulia, while Benevento in Samnium was perhaps something like a draw, but that they could return to battle meant they were able to work out methods of dealing with the novel test posed by great phalanxes, elephants and well-armoured cavalry that they found themselves facing. The Hellenistic kingdoms never had this luxury, but had there been a state founded on the resources of a great Balkan and East Aegean empire to face the threat from over the Adriatic, things might have been different. It is interesting that a capacity to learn might be distinguished in the war between Rome and Antiochus fought only a few years after the Second Macedonian War. Realizing the danger from the terrible butchers with their short Spanish swords noticed by their own observers or officers transferring from Philip’s defeated military, it is interesting that the Antigonids’ first response in 191 was to face the new enemy at the pass of Thermopylae where they could establish a static defence with their flanks protected. In this place, standing strictly on the defensive with legionaries throwing themselves onto its spears, the phalanx worked well:
Battle being joined, the light-armed troops assailed Manius first, rushing in from all sides. He received their onset bravely, first yielding and then advancing and driving them back. The phalanx opened and let the light-armed men pass through. It then closed and pushed forward, the long pikes set densely together in order of battle, with which the Macedonians from the time of Alexander and Philip have struck terror into enemies who have not dared to encounter the thick array of long pikes presented to them.7
The problem with this bulwark was, as with Xerxes and the Gauls in earlier instalments, a way was found around when Cato the Elder with a strong detachment turned their flank and, once exposed, Antiochus’ men blocking the pass had no choice but to withdraw. Anyway, Thermopylae was not a normal battlefield and it was hardly possible to fight the Romans only in mountain passes and in very specific circumstances where flanks were absolutely covered and the Romans prepared to attack them frontally. Equally a purely defensive strategy was bound to hand the initiative to the enemy, exposing the homeland to being ravaged and its cities to being besieged without any response. Apart from these obvious disadvantages for the civilian population, for the army it would bound to have a damaging effect, not just on the esprit de corps of the men but on the reputation of the commander, with the imminent danger of allies deserting to an enemy who seemed far more active, more likely to win and more capable of defending their friends. So for a Hellenistic high command to stay perpetually on the tactical defensive was bound to be hugely problematic. The project also depended on the Romans attacking an essentially static phalanx head-on and, apart from against an opponent without any sort of military brain, this was unlikely to occur. Most Roman commanders were well aware of how dangerous this was likely to be, so the best that might be expected was a stalemate until the defenders were manoeuvred out of their position, as however well-protected a defender’s flanks might be, finally almost any position could be turned.
Failure at Thermopylae did not subtract from concerns already felt about the propriety of deploying a phalanx in the open against legionnaires, particularly as the fact that Seleucid soldiers had only been present in small quantities was part of the reason for fighting there. Not that paucity of numbers would be in the least the case in the next great test at Magnesia on the plains of Lydia, yet here again it is clear that Antiochus and his generals were sufficiently concerned to deploy their phalanx in an innovative manner. They split up the pikemen into a number of blocks with elephants deployed between the sections in a manner described as being like towers in a defensive wall. The great advantage of this deployment with individual phalanxes having a shorter front would mean it would be less likely that order would disintegrate as they moved into the attack. That they chose elephants must have seemed high-risk to any who knew the propensity of such beasts to run amok, but presumably it was expected that with their accompanying light infantry they would be sufficiently intimidating to stop enemy troops slipping between the bodies of phalanxites and threatening their vulnerable flanks, a tactic not too dissimilar to that employed by Pyrrhus at Asculum when he deployed his allied Italian infantry between blocks of Epirot pikemen. Even if at Magnesia the phalanx performed reasonably well for most of the battle, with the final defeat assured by events in other parts of the field, whether a learning process would have been effective is doubtful, particularly as a glimpse into the few generations after may suggest a general failure to find a formula to combat the legion. Seleucid and indeed Mithridatic militaries would come up with no satisfactory answers, and the only truly significant development was the tendency to just try to replicate, to produce sorts of ersatz legions, many of which in the Mithridatic Wars were trained by Roman officers but none of which seemed to have had a significant impact in the conflicts in which they were employed. Not that the victors held the defeated in contempt: Alexander’s phalanx kept its aura of world-conquering glamour down the ages, with attempts at resuscitation of the antique formation being tried by several Roman emperors from Nero onwards.
Yet in following up some of these ideas, the obvious must not be forgotten: that Rome never did have to contend with that larger, wealthier, more populous state that has been posited. The Macedon of Antigonus Gonatus, Philip V and Perseus was no such grand polity; the extraordinary character of the founder of the Macedonian Empire had ensured this. It had been Alexander’s particular curse upon his homeland; functioning as he did like very few men in history, it was always likely that his impact would be commensurate with his character; but for him, things might have been different. Extravagant ambition is not unusual or military talent, but for the most extreme of these to be combined in one man whose crazed narcissism conditioned a whole world is uncommon. The nature of the individual who had generated the Hellenistic world ensured that no unified Macedonian Empire could exist to be tested by a future that included a rampant Italian power. The upshot of his extraordinary life was that despite allowing the development of a Greek koine (shared language) from southern France to the Indus, he also ensured an enfeebled homeland that, if it enjoyed the immediate baubles of conquest, never benefited from the usual long-term dividends of empire. A great conqueror he had been, but not a great consolidator, partly because he had no great interest in such prosaic stuff, partly because he died too young to establish a stable succession, but also because the colossal entity he had conquered was just so big there was almost no chance that anybody following him would be able to hold the most significant parts of it together. So his own people hardly experienced that flowering that the progenitors of empire usually do, at least for a few generations, and despite the extraordinary expansion of the Macedonian world, the actual state based on the conqueror’s homeland had ended reduced and feebler than in the reign of his father. It was a state in which the economic base was considerably reduced, and the Philippine ascendency in Thrace reinforced and expanded by Lysimachus was long gone. Even the Odrysians were broken, with only the smoking wrecks of Seuthopolis showing what once had been, and just indigenous local entities left with the Gallic kingdom of Tylis plumped down in the middle. The story of decline had been about much more than the Gallic intrusion that had broken the mould; it had been the decades of brutal and destructive conflict that consumed so much of Greece and the Balkans that had undermined the edifice. This outcome of ages of chaos synchronized with a considerable outbreak of kakistocracy, that surfacing of the corrupt, incompetent and shameless rulers with which we are not unfamiliar in our own time.