CHAPTER 30
THOMAS R. MARTIN
THE career of the Macedonian general Demetrius Poliorcetes, the “Besieger,” (ca. 336–ca. 282 B.C.; all dates that follow are B.C.), son of Antigonus Monophthalmos, offers much material pertinent to the discussion of the problematic idea of Hellenistic warfare. At the same time, it is also obvious that one case study is certainly far too limited to decide the question of whether there is sufficient evidence to establish Hellenistic warfare as something distinctly different from classical warfare, or the warfare of any other era in ancient history (to say nothing of the question of the potentially misleading implications of the modern periodization of ancient history, whose chronology defines the “Hellenistic age”). How best to identify what might be new or distinctive in Hellenistic warfare is certainly a major underlying issue for the studies in this volume and indeed is much discussed in scholarship in general (e.g., Bar-Kochva 1976: 203–5; Austin 1986; Sage 1996: 197–227; Hamilton 1999; Beston 2000; Baker 2003; Chaniotis 2005; Bugh 2006).1 For the sake of clarity, I take the conventional position that Hellenistic warfare designates warfare as conducted and conceptualized in the aftermath of the lifetime of Alexander the Great.
The particular aspects of warfare illustrated by the career of Demetrius Poliorcetes that seem to me significant for any possible definition of Hellenistic warfare line up under two general headings: the practices of war and the meanings of war. Since Demetrius’s career comes at the opening of the Hellenistic period, the practices and meanings of war revealed by his history obviously do not represent developments that slowly emerged over time during the centuries that we today ascribe to the Hellenistic era. Rather, they must either represent traditions from earlier times (whether recent or distant), or innovations. Perhaps it would be best to posit Demetrius as a transitional figure, a general-become-king who straddles the (modern) divide between the classical and Hellenistic periods. In the end, his career finished in failure and shame, but nevertheless his experiences did indicate some of the important military, political, and religious directions that other aspiring monarchs would need to pursue in the future to achieve and maintain legitimacy and power as Hellenistic rulers.
In some cases, as will become clear, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether it makes more sense to label an aspect of warfare in Demetrius’s career as traditional or innovative. A corollary question, given this volume’s goal of studying warfare as it was conducted throughout the entire Hellenistic period, is to what extent any new development in warfare from the time of Demetrius persists after his career and can therefore be considered “Hellenistic” in general, as opposed to only “early Hellenistic” or indeed merely “Demetrian.” In the end, the value of this case study lies in the attempt to identify the most striking practices and meanings of warfare that Demetrius’s military successes and failures present, whatever one may identify as the origins or earlier history of these practices and meanings, or as their persistence or evanescence.
SOURCES
A constant refrain of scholarship on the period of Demetrius Poliorcetes bears repeating: the fragmentary state of the relevant ancient sources means that we are poorly equipped to reconstruct a precise account of the events and chronology of Demetrius’s career. The two principal extant ancient sources for this history are much later than the time of Demetrius. In the first century Diodorus Siculus wrote his annalistic Library of History as a so-called universal history. A substantial part of his narrative of the events of Demetrius’s lifetime survives in Books 18 to 20 (for Books 18 and 19, see the annotated editions of Goukowsky 1978 and Bizière 1975 respectively). The surviving text of Diodorus unfortunately breaks off after his narrative of the events of 302 (the end of Book 20), which means that we have no year-by-year narrative for the last two decades of Demetrius’s life. Only a few mentions of Demetrius appear among the surviving fragments of the rest of the Library (see the annotated edition of Goukowsky 2006). Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius (paired with the Life of Mark Antony) is our other major source for Demetrius’s career; it was written in the second century A.D. as a study of character rather than as a historical narrative observing an annalistic chronology, like all of Plutarch’s biographies of prominent Greeks and Romans (as the biographer explicitly tells his readers, e.g., at Alexander 1; see the annotated editions of Flacelière and Chambry 1977; Andrei 1989; Amantini 1995).
Both Diodorus and Plutarch compiled their accounts based on the work of earlier authors, whose histories are no longer extant (Sweet 1951; Wehrli 1968: 19–29). Originally the most important source for Demetrius’s career seems to have been the history of the Diadochs penned by Hieronymus of Cardia, a contemporary of Demetrius who first served under Eumenes of Cardia but then, following Eumenes’s death in 316, changed sides to serve under Antigonus and Demetrius (Hornblower 1981; Bosworth 2002: 169–209). It is therefore particularly unfortunate that Hieronymus’s work is among the sources that are seemingly lost forever. Diodorus, however, is thought to have followed Hieronymus closely in his account of Demetrius’s history, and it is from the surviving portion of theLibrary that we have the only battle descriptions from Demetrius’s career that supply any degree of detail (at least as that term applies to ancient Greek history). For information on Demetrius’s career after 302, we are largely dependent on Plutarch’s biography.
Fortunately, for the purposes of this chapter, it is not necessary to discuss the exceedingly difficult problems of source criticism and chronology that confront anyone trying to narrate the career of Demetrius in detail (Dimitrakos 1937; Elkeles 1941; Manni 1951; a historical biography of Demetrius is under preparation by Patrick Wheatley, www.otago.ac.nz/classics/staff/wheatley.html; see Braund 2003 for a recent brief narrative of the period). The assessment of the mixture of the old and the new in warfare as conducted during the concluding decades of the fourth century and the opening decades of the third century that I wish to offer here will emerge from a survey of salient events in Demetrius’s riches-to-rags history as a commander, king, and god, without the necessity of entering into the intractable obscurities of the chronology of Demetrius’s career post-302. Given the state of the sources, I think it will be more effective to present my observations in a topical rather than a chronological arrangement. I hope that they will not lack cogency because of the absence of a precision in chronological and narrative detail that we do not have and will not have, short of the unlikely rediscovery of Hieronymus’s work, or at least the lost portions of Diodorus.
PRACTICES OF WAR: OLD OR NEW?
The practices of war after the death of Alexander, as often pointed out, do not present a clear case for regarding Hellenistic warfare as something unprecedented or even highly novel. Nevertheless, as far as quantitative measurements are relevant to the question, it does seem to me that the scale of war did increase overall in the Hellenistic period, whether the issue is the number of troops regularly deployed on the battlefield, the extent of geography covered by the warring sides, the development of technology and military engineering, or the amount of money expended in war. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that the scale of warfare in the Hellenistic period was not without precedent in earlier warfare, as Thucydides polemically argued was true of the history of the Peloponnesian War in comparison to warfare before that time. The mid-fifth-century campaigns of the Delian League (Thuc. 1.104, 109–10), the Athenian expedition to Sicily during the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 6.31–32; Hanson 2005), and, most spectacularly, Alexander’s expedition to Asia—all these wars took place over vast distances, took years to complete, and involved enormous expenditures of resources, both human and financial. Nevertheless, if we take into consideration the frequency of major wars between Hellenistic kings and would-be kings, and then factor in the military campaigns of the Romans in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean region (which deserve to be counted as Hellenistic history), the Hellenistic period does seem to have been characterized by more large-scale wars (as well as by the continuation of frequent wars between Greek city-states) than was the case in earlier Greek history (Delbrück 1975: 235–52; Bar-Kochva 1976: 7–19; Ma 2000; Bosworth 2002: 64–98; Baker 2003). After all, wars run on money, and the major commanders in the period following Alexander’s conquests were embarked on spending the accumulated treasures of some of the ancient world’s richest empires.
In any case, even if it is true that the Hellenistic period saw a number of larger battles than before and a greater number of large-scale battles in general, this would be only a quantitative difference from earlier times and not a qualitative change, in the sense of innovative thinking about the conduct of warfare. Scale certainly matters in war, as in physics, but states or warlords striving to make their armies larger seems a natural, evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary innovation. In any case, Alexander’s siege of Tyre in 332 was monumental in its scale and duration (Bosworth 1988: 64–8), and the battle at Gaugamela in 331 probably involved a very large number of combatants (we have no precise figures; Brunt 1976: 1, 509–14; Bosworth 1988: 74–85; Sage 1996: 192).
Demetrius’s career offers several examples of the momentous scale that Hellenistic battles could reach. Demetrius’s first experience of combat, so far as we know, came in the battle of Paraetacene (between the regions of Media and Persia, today western Iran), which took place in (probably) 317 when Antigonus confronted Eumenes in yet another encounter in the ongoing conflict among Alexander’s former generals over who would control what parts of Alexander’s empire (Diod. 19.26–32; Billows 1990: 94–8; Bosworth 2002: 124–41; on Eumenes, Schäfer 2002 and Anson 2004). We have no details on Demetrius’s actions in the battle, except that he served as a cavalry commander (Diod. 19.29.4). The battle involved mercenary troops and mixed arms (light and heavy infantry, light and heavy cavalry, and war elephants), but these contingents were not new factors in war, nor was the challenge of using them simultaneously in successful tactics on the battlefield. The scale of the confrontation was, however, noteworthy. Although the nature of our sources makes it treacherous to place trust in the precise numbers reported for troops or casualties in this, or any other, ancient battle (e.g., Krentz 1985; Rubincam 1991), Antigonus fielded probably more than forty thousand men, plus sixty-five elephants, while Eumenes had at least that number of troops and nearly twice the number of elephants. The battle of Gabiene that took place between the same opponents not long thereafter in the same region also featured opposing contingents of similar magnitude to those of the previous encounter (Diod. 19.39–44; Billows 1990: 99–104; Bosworth 2002: 141–59).
Not all Demetrius’s operations in his early career were on a large scale (Wheatley 2001b), but Antigonus’s protracted siege of Tyre in 314 and 313, which ended in the submission of the starving city, as well as Demetrius’s liberation of Athens from Cassander’s control in 307 were large-scale operations (Billows, 1990: 105–51; Bugh 2006: 283–4). When Antigonus dispatched Demetrius to Cyprus in 306 to continue their war against Ptolemy, the scale of Demetrius’s force, the size of the siege machines, and the tonnage of the warships (he commanded a “seven”) were undeniably large (Diod. 20.46.5–53, Plut. Demetr. 15–16; Wheatley 2001a; Bugh 2006: 275, 285). To attack the walls of Cypriot Salamis, Demetrius built a helepolis (a mobile, armored siege tower housing artillery to attack a city’s fortification walls and their defenders) whose dimensions reached forty-five cubits (nearly seventy feet) on a side and ninety cubits (roughly 135 feet) high, divided into nine stories (Diod. 20.48.2; Marsden 1969: 105). This giant weapon rolled into action on wheels eight cubits (roughly twelve feet) in diameter. The armored tower’s heavy ballistae could launch projectiles weighing as much as three talents (170 to 180 pounds) against the enemy’s parapets.
Demetrius’s most grandiose employment of military technology came in the siege of Rhodes in 305/4 (Kern, 1999: 237–48). His helepolis in this case was even larger than on Cyprus, with sides forty-eight cubits long, a height of ninety-six cubits, and so heavy that it took 3,400 men to propel it on its eight iron-plated wheels two cubits thick (Diod. 20.91.2–3, 91.7; Plut. Demetr. 21.1; Marsden 1969: 105–8; Marsden 1971: 84–6, with references to the other extant sources; Campbell and Delf 2003: 9–12). Nevertheless, not even this famous device represented a qualitatively new kind of military engineering. Rather, it was a quantitative augmentation of previously invented technology (Tarn 1930: 101–22; Marsden 1971: 84–6; Campbell 2005). Earlier siege towers had also been large and mobile. Dionysius of Syracuse in Sicily had conducted sieges with wheeled, missile-firing siege machines six stories in height (Diod. 14.51.1; Campbell 2005: 26–8). Philip II of Macedon reportedly constructed siege towers eighty cubits high to attack Perinthus (Diod. 16.74.3; Campbell and Delf 2003: 5–6, 2005: 30–1). Moreover, the technical writer Biton describes a large helepolis built for Alexander (Marsden 1971: 71–3; Campbell and Delf 2003: 6–9). So even if Demetrius’s siege of Rhodes was more spectacular and, it seems likely, more expensive than previous attacks of this kind (the ancient sources do not give enough details to allow a reliable calculation), and even if he designed and constructed siege machines greater in height, weight, complexity, and firepower than previously employed, this episode nevertheless reveals only a quantitative change in preexisting military technology rather than a radically different approach to warfare.
The fateful battle of Ipsus in 301, which saw the coalition of Seleucus and Lysimachus defeat Antigonus and Demetrius (and also, as later events showed, ended any dreams of a single leader resurrecting Alexander’s empire), involved huge opposing forces. According to Plutarch (Diodorus’s account is again not preserved), each side brought to the battle some eighty thousand infantry and cavalry, with more than four hundred elephants taking the field for Seleucus and Lysimachus and seventy-five for Antigonus and Demetrius (Demetr. 28–29; Bar-Kochva 1976: 105–10; Billows, 1990: 181–5; Lund 1992: 77–9). If Plutarch took this information from Hieronymus, there is at least a chance that the numbers are not wildly wrong. Plutarch also reports that, in Demetrius’s last great attempt to take control of Asia in opposition to the coalition of Seleucus, Ptolemy, Lysimachus, and Pyrrhus, Demetrius reportedly assembled an astonishingly large army consisting of ninety-eight thousand infantry and twelve thousand cavalry, as well as starting construction on a huge fleet of five hundred warships, some as large as “fifteeners” and “sixteeners” (Demetr. 43–44; Lund 1992: 98–100). Regardless of whether Plutarch (or his source) exaggerated the numbers for Demetrius’s final campaign, it does seem that Demetrius’s career provides evidence for the propensity for large-scale battles to occur in Hellenistic warfare.
To be sure, our sources are too sketchy to allow us to say with certainty how frequently this scale of battle was maintained in the wars of the centuries following Demetrius’s career. The battle of Raphia in 217 famously involved some 140,000 men (Polyb. 5. 79–87; Bar-Kochva 1976: 128–41; Chaniotis 2005: 79), but this scale of action was clearly not an everyday occurrence. On the other hand, military technology continued to play a major role in later Hellenistic warfare, from the growing size of warships to the invention of devices such as those attributed to Archimedes in the defense of Syracuse (Marsden 1969: 108–9; Bugh 2006: 275–7, 287). In truth, the impoverished nature of the extant sources makes it impossible to resolve, on objective criteria, the question of whether the quantitative aspects of Hellenistic warfare are by themselves sufficiently distinctive or sufficiently long-lasting to mark it out as warfare significantly different from earlier warfare. Like so much else in Hellenistic history, this evaluation must necessarily remain a matter decided by each historian’s subjective judgment.
PRACTICES OF WAR: OLD AND NEW
To turn now to what I am calling qualitative aspects of the practices of war in the Hellenistic period, many of them seem a continuation of developments from the classical period and, especially, the career of Alexander. For example, the employment of mercenaries, the coordination of land and sea forces, the deployment of mixed arms in land battles—all these practices have their roots in earlier warfare.
Demetrius’s career does, however, include one practice of war that might be considered novel, although admittedly it is an evolution of earlier practice rather than a wholly new invention. That practice is the mounting of artillery on warships to attack other ships in a naval battle rather than only to fire projectiles from aboard ship against the walls and defenders of an enemy fortification on land. (Tarn 1930: 122–52 remains a useful introduction to Hellenistic naval warfare.) Demetrius in his Cypriot campaign against Ptolemy’s forces in 306 was evidently the first person to mount artillery on warships for this purpose (Diod. 20.49.4, 51.2). His new tactic was soon imitated, for example, when Ptolemy turned it against him and Antigonus during their subsequent attack on Egypt (Diod. 20.76.3). The use of ship-mounted missile-firing machines thereafter became standard in Hellenistic naval warfare (Marsden 1969: 169–73; Morrison, 1996: 369–70).
It is difficult to decide whether to regard this development as an innovation. There is a long history preceding Demetrius of the tactic of employing men to throw missiles or shoot arrows from the decks of their warships not just at enemies on land but also against men on opposing ships in a naval battle (e.g., Hdt. 8. 90.2; Thuc. 7.25.6, 62.2, 67.2; van Wees 2004: 227). During his siege of Tyre, Alexander mounted missile-firing machines and placed archers on deck on some of his ships as part of his attack on the walls and defenders of the city (Arr. Anab. 2.21.1–2, 22.3; Casson 1971: 122 n. 88). It is not reported that Alexander intended to, or actually did, employ the machines or the archers to fire on enemy ships rather than just on the land fortifications. On the other hand, there seems to be no reason to think that he would have hesitated to use that tactic if the situation had demanded or allowed it. Given this background, perhaps we should regard Demetrius’s apparent innovation in the use of artillery in naval battle as a natural extension of earlier practice, albeit an apparently effective one that persisted in naval warfare after his time.
Moving beyond military technology in the assessment of the practices of war in Demetrius’s time, it is clear that the important role of prominent women in arranged marriages meant to cement political alliances that is evident during his career was also a continuation of earlier practice that nevertheless gained greater prominence in the Hellenistic period. Greek aristocrats had long been in the habit of making useful marriages with foreign women, and Philip of Macedon was notorious for his political marriages. Alexander’s adoption by Ada of Caria (Arr. Anab. 1.23.8; Plut. Alex. 22.7) and his marriage to Roxane (Arr. Anab. 4.19.5; Plut. Alex. 47.7; Curt. 8.4.23) belong in the same category. Moreover, even the appearance in Demetrius’s time of Macedonian royal women commanding armies (Loman, 2004: 45–6), or of Greek women such as Cratesipolis (Diod. 19.67, 20.37; Plut. Demetr. 9.5–6; Wheatley 2004) as political rulers, was not entirely new, at least not if we are willing to cite Tomyris and Artemisia as precedents, even though they were neither Greek nor Macedonian (Hdt. 1.214, 7.99, 8.87–8; Hornblower 1981: 22–6).2
Politically motivated marriages defined Demetrius’s family life. Antigonus married Demetrius at “a young age” to Phila, the thirty-something widow of the Macedonian commander Craterus (Plut. Demetr. 14.2; Demetrius was probably sixteen: Flacelière and Chambry 1977: 34; Wehrli 1964; Billows 1990: 368; Carney 2000: 165–9; Heckel 2006). Phila proved herself a courageous and loyal woman ready and able to discipline ill-behaved soldiers, arrange advantageous marriages, undertake a diplomatic mission of the highest importance to her brother (an enemy of Demetrius), and commit suicide rather than endure disgrace after her husband lost his power (Diod. 19.59.3–6; Plut. Demetr. 32.4, 45.1). Antigonus missed any chance to marry Demetrius to the much-sought-after Cleopatra, Alexander’s sister, when she decided to desert to Ptolemy’s side and was killed by Antigonus’s governor in Sardis (Diod. 20.37.3–6). Demetrius did succeed in marrying the Athenian widow Eurydice, a descendant of the famous Miltiades (Plut.Demetr. 14.1), and the Epirots Deidameia and Lanassa (Plut. Demetr. 25.2, Pyrrh. 4.3, 10.7). He also agreed to marriage alliances with Seleucus and Ptolemy (with less than perfect political results, from his point of view; Plut. Demetr. 31.5–33.1, 38, 46.5). The continuing importance of queens, especially in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, certainly merits nomination as a characteristic of the Hellenistic period, although it would be stretching the point to connect this phenomenon too closely to warfare per se (Pomeroy 1990: 3–40; Carney 2000). Suffice it to say that the direct influence of Greco-Macedonian women on high-level politics and warfare seems more marked in the Hellenistic period than in earlier times and that Demetrius’s career illustrates this trend (Cohen 1974).
Another aspect of the practices of war that appears prominently in Demetrius’s career is the use of propaganda to justify war, which was of course completely traditional. Nevertheless, one implication is worth noting of Antigonus and Demetrius’s employment for this purpose of the hoary cause of the freedom of the Greeks as a way to try to win allies among the city-states (e.g., Diod. 19.61.3; Billows 1990: 189–236; Wheatley 2001b: 14–16). Legitimizing war by proclaiming that the fight was for the freedom of Greeks had a long background in archaic and classical Greek history, and in the fourth century non-Greeks—Philip II, Alexander, and Polyperchon—continued to make use of it. This cause turned out to have staying power as a propaganda tool in the struggle for power between subsequent Antigonid and Ptolemaic regimes (Gabbert 1997:66; Shipley 2000: 73–4; Chaniotis 2005: 229–30).
The implication I want to note concerns the concepts of identity and loyalty. As background for discussing this point, I want to emphasize that Plutarch apparently believed that Antigonus and Demetrius were serious in their promotion of the cause of freedom for Greeks: he opines that, when in 307 Antigonus sent Demetrius to wage war “to free all of Greece from its ‘enslavement’ to Cassander and Ptolemy, none of the kings fought a finer and more just war than this one” (Demetr. 8; cf. Diod. 20.45). Furthermore, Plutarch adds, Demetrius very reluctantly obeyed his father’s order to leave Athens to attack Cyprus in 306 because “he was upset at leaving the war on behalf of Greece, which was finer and more splendid” (Demetr. 15.1). In 302, Antigonus and Demetrius founded their own Hellenic League, which made the freedom of the Greeks an official part of its charter (Schmitt 1969: no. 476; Billows 1990: 228–30). Later events, as we will see, imply that Demetrius truly believed in the efficacy of this cause to win goodwill and therefore loyalty from those whom he liberated. Demetrius had certainly learned early in life that both Greeks and non-Greeks were often willing to fight hard to preserve their freedom even when faced with powerful opponents (Diod. 18.10.2, 18.22.3, 18.51.3, 19.97.3–5). Whether Demetrius’s commitment to this cause as a justification for war was at its foundation cynical and solely self-interested we will never know, but there can be no doubt that Demetrius was seriously invested in it, at least until he learned better.
Demetrius made this investment, I suggest, because he lived in a time when warfare changed the concepts of personal identity and loyalty for leaders and soldiers who were no longer closely linked to their homeland or city-state. First of all, it is important to recognize that Demetrius did not spend his youth or receive his military education in his homeland. Instead, he came to maturity as a young man and learned to command soldiers in his father’s forces while living in a foreign land, at a busy crossroads of western Anatolia. He grew up in the military garrison at Celanae that Antigonus commanded for Alexander (Arr. Anab. 1.29.3; Plut. Demetr. 2–4; Wheatley 1999; Billows 1990: 48 n. 92). Demetrius’s early life therefore marked him as a new kind of man in the sense that he never got to know his ancestral roots as most Macedonians and Greeks before his time had done; that is, he had no extended, direct, and on-the-ground experience of identifying with a particular place or ancestral community. Admittedly he lived with his parents, both Macedonians, but nevertheless he never knew his “home” in Macedonia. His youth was spent as a largely rootless occupier of someone else’s land. This upbringing made him what I would call a “Hellenistic” man because it was later to become a characteristic of the lives of many Hellenistic Macedonians and Greeks living in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms that they would never know their ancestors’ homelands in Macedonia and mainland Greece. This experience made people such as Demetrius “strangers in a strange land,” at least until the time when the Hellenistic kingdoms were well established and a Greek or Macedonian born in one of them could feel some kind of identification with a place and a culture. The circumstances of Demetrius’s upbringing, I believe, had a psychological effect on how he thought about his identity, namely that it was a phenomenon more fluid and open to definition than had been traditional in his world previously.
How identity is conceived has consequences for how loyalty is conceived, as Demetrius’s career illustrates. At the age of fourteen (322), he was forced from fear for his life to leave the only home he had ever really known, accompanying Antigonus in headlong flight from Asia Minor to Europe to escape attack from a fellow Macedonian commander. This resulted from the violent turmoil among Alexander’s generals after the king’s sudden death and no plans for a peaceful succession and transfer of political power (Diod. 18.23.3–4). Strife among Macedonian nobles was certainly nothing new, but it was new that Antigonus and Demetrius, living as they did as foreign occupiers far from their ancestral homeland, were so devoid of any traditional sources of support, such as relatives, retainers, or their local community, that they had to seek safety with other foreigners. They were carried to safety aboard an Athenian ship, betting their lives on the loyalty of these Greeks (Diod. 18.23.4). Demetrius, it seems fair to conclude, learned through bitterpersonal experience in this episode that his Macedonian identity was no guarantee of personal security among his countrymen and that Greeks, in particular Athenians, could be life-saving sources of help to him in times of dire trouble. Both of these lessons were not entirely new, of course; anyone studying Macedonian and Athenian history could have learned them. Demetrius, however, learned them at an impressionable age under the unforgettable pressure of mortal fear. From this early life experience, he learned, I submit, that identity and loyalty were now, at least for those like himself and his father who were aiming at supranational leadership, personal and created rather than communal and inherited.
As events were to show, the concept of loyalty for the Diadochs and their troops no longer meant what it had usually meant in earlier times. That is, defections or switches of commanders and of troops from one side to another became common, whether before, during, or after battle, as did the penchant of victorious commanders to absorb enemy troops into their own forces. Demetrius learned this lesson while still a young man when his father successfully induced a cavalry commander to bring his troops over from Eumenes’s side to his own at a decisive moment in battle (Diod. 18.40.5). The lesson was repeated frequently throughout Demetrius’s career (Diod. 18.50.1, 91.11.2–3, 20.28.1, 20.53.1, 20.75.1, 20.107.3). The importance of this new development culminated in Demetrius’s career ca. 288 when his Macedonian troops deserted first to Lysimachus and then, catastrophically, to Pyrrhus (Plut. Demetr. 44.3–11, Pyrrh. 11). This wholesale change of loyalty by his army robbed Demetrius of his rule as king of Macedonia (295–287) and started his decline into political insignificance, which was sealed a few years later when his troops again changed sides at a critical moment, this time in confrontation with Seleucus (Demetr. 48.5). Demetrius had expected his Macedonian troops to prefer him as king to the immigrant and foreigner Pyrrhus. Instead, they deserted Demetrius so that Pyrrhus could be their commander and king because the Alexander-like Epirot seemed the best fighter and therefore “the most kingly” (Plut. Demetr. 44.6–8,Pyrrh. 8).
Granted, treachery and desertion had always been part of Greek warfare, but the circumstances of earlier wars had for the most part limited these acts to individuals or small groups and had not involved large numbers of soldiers simply changing sides. It would have been unthinkable in the fifth century for, say, an Athenian army to transfer its loyalty to become a Theban army, or a Corinthian one to become Argive, and so on. Now, however, with the Diadochs assembling armies from diverse sources, including multiple city-states, whose troops were no longer strongly tied to an ancestral community or region, it became possible for Greco-Macedonian armies to change sides to fight under a commander they liked better and who would, they hoped, better protect their possessions. This latter point carried special weight in these early Hellenistic campaigns because the troops, seeing war as a chance to acquire capital, tried to amass and carry with them valuables as the fruits of conquest, their so-called baggage.
This desire to safeguard baggage (or should it be “soldiers’ mobile capital”) became so strong that it could tip the balance of loyalty. For example, at the battle of Gabiene Demetrius observed his father’s successful stratagem of diverting forces from the main battlefield to seize the enemy’s baggage train, which in this case included not just women, children, slaves, and possessions, but also the money that Eumenes’s troops had acquired on campaign. This action won the battle for Antigonus because Eumenes’s troops were willing to make a deal to betray their commander so that they could recover their property and savings (Diod. 19.42–43; Plut. Eum. 16–17; Polyaenus 4.6.13; see further Heckel, 173–6). In 312 Demetrius lost Gaza to Ptolemy after a portion of his cavalry left the ranks to protect their precious baggage (Diod. 19.84.7–8; Bosworth 2002: 225–8). The connection of troops to treasure they were carrying around with them seems closer in these new circumstances than in the past, and this difference perhaps suggests one change in post-Alexander warfare. In any case, Demetrius could have been offered no clearer proof that now his army’s loyalty depended above all on the personal interests of the soldiers, not on traditional or ethnic ties to any person or place. This transformation of loyalty underlay the relations between Hellenistic kings and their armies and therefore reflects a new aspect of warfare in this period.
THE MEANINGS OF WAR
If we turn from the practices of war to its meanings, it seems possible to identify two new aspects, one relevant to politics and one to religion, that seem characteristic of the Hellenistic period. They arise from victory in war and grand gestures by the victor becoming sources of personal status and, ultimately, of political legitimacy for self-identified kings, as well as a spur to the divinization of living human beings. To be sure, these developments in politics and religion have some connection to earlier events, as is always pointed out on the countless occasions when they have been discussed in scholarship on the Hellenistic period. Nevertheless, it seems to me that these particular changes, which are unmistakable in the case of Demetrius, are sufficiently new to make them distinctive markers of what indeed might be characteristic of warfare in the Hellenistic period, at least in terms of its possible meanings.
It goes without saying that war had always been a duty of kings in the monarchies of the ancient Near East and Macedonia, as well as of the Spartan officials called kings (who were of course not monarchs). Alexander the Great, by replacing Darius as Persian king, had recently demonstrated the brutal truth that even a foreigner could lay claim to an existing kingship by defeating the reigning king and taking his place. Something similar may have occurred when the Persians greeted Antigonus as a king in 315 (Diod. 19.48.1). At least the Persians seemed to think that he had replaced whoever they thought had previously been king in Asia during this turbulent period.
The new political aspect of victory in war appeared early in Demetrius’s career when Ptolemy and Seleucus made the grand gesture of returning Demetrius’s captured baggage and the prisoners of war who were closest to him (Diod. 19.85.3) after the defeat of the young commander at Gaza. This ostentatiously magnanimous generosity was meant to demonstrate Demetrius’s inferiority to his victorious rivals, as he clearly understood. According to Plutarch (Demetr. 5–6), Demetrius burned to rebalance the equation. Therefore, as soon as he had defeated Ptolemy’s general Cilles in northern Phoenicia in 311, he sought and obtained his father’s permission to return the captured general to Ptolemy, along with other prisoners dear to the king, all of whom he fitted out with showy gifts. Demetrius’s tit-for-tat gesture shows that warfare now had as one of its purposes the establishment of the rival commanders’ personal status relative to one another. This personalizing of certain aspects of war, whether in terms of determining commanders’ status or protecting troops’ personal possessions, should perhaps count as a novel aspect of warfare that emerged, or at least was very greatly strengthened, in the Hellenistic era.
Demetrius’s military operations in the years immediately following the (hollow) Peace of 311/10 are poorly documented (Wheatley 2001b), but we do know, as previously mentioned, that he sailed for Greece in 307 to pursue his (and his father’s) war of Hellenic liberation, directed against the interests of Cassander and Ptolemy. Demetrius took the previously invincible harbor fortifications of Athens through the adroit and relentless use of siege technology, and following his victory he made good on the promise of liberation: on behalf of his father and himself he restored their freedom and ancestral democracy to the Athenians, who had been living under a collaborationist tyranny backed by a Macedonian garrison. To make the contrast unmistakable between Antigonid policy and Cassander’s, Demetrius stationed no troops in the city. He then did the same for Megara by expelling its Macedonian garrison, restoring freedom to its citizens, and leaving it ungarrisoned (Diod. 20.45–46.3; Plut. Demetr. 8–10). Soon thereafter Antigonus removed his garrison from Imbros and returned it to the control of the Athenians. At the same time, he made an enormous gift to the Athenians of 7,200,000 daily rations of grain and timber for building one hundred warships (Diod. 20.46.4). This extravagant gesture, like Ptolemy’s and Demetrius’s earlier returns of prisoners and possessions, was intended to demonstrate personal status and build loyalty between parties who had no intrinsic reasons to have ties to one another (cf. Bringmann and von Steuber 1995).
There was apparently no talk of freedom for the Cypriots as a gesture of magnanimity following Demetrius’s victory there in 306, but the symbolic significance that Antigonus and Demetrius ascribed to this triumph was manifested when Demetrius imitated—and topped—Alexander’s sending three hundred sets of armor to Athens after the battle of Granicus (Arrian Anab. 1.16.7) by sending four times as many (Plut. Demetr. 17.1). The significance of victory attained a striking new level when their success in the Cyprus campaign led to Antigonus and Demetrius being proclaimed—which is to say proclaiming themselves—as kings. (Plut. Demetr. 10.3 is presumably proleptic in implying that the Athenians had acclaimed Antigonus and Demetrius as kings in 307; Billows 1990: 155–60 provides full details; for the Diadochs and the royal title before 306, see Wheatley 2001a: n. 69.)
It certainly seems to be a new meaning of warfare that victory could now create a new king ex nihilo, that is, even where there was no pre-existing royal line to displace and no previously established royal territory to occupy. War now could be taken to establish a victorious commander’s claim to rule as a king based solely on his martial accomplishments, rather than on inheritance from his ancestors or control of a specific territory. As many others have said, this more personal monarchy was a political innovation; the important point to reiterate for present purposes is the link between this personal monarchy and victory in war and generous gestures. No longer did asserting kingship require the defeat of a currently established king and the conquest of his already existent kingdom. Instead, the victor could be declared a king, either on the initiative of those whom his victories had benefited, or on his own initiative, perhaps disguised as the genuine wishes of others (Bosworth 2002: 246–78).
Over time, through continuing success in war and showy generosity to his followers, a charismatic commander-become-king could establish a royal dynasty with sufficient legitimacy to pass on the title to his descendants in an institutionalized fashion. Hence arose a source of legitimation for the new Hellenistic kingdoms, to help buttress whatever legitimacy they hoped to gain by aligning themselves with the traditions of Macedonian, Persian, and Egyptian monarchy respectively. It was certainly true that failure in war could unmake a king in earlier eras and that victorious commanders could be eager to proclaim their superior personal status, such as the Spartan Pausanias in the aftermath of the battle of Plataea with his inscription on the “Snake Column” at Delphi (Thuc. 1.132.2–3). The Spartans had rebuked Pausanias for his individualistic pretensions, however, and it seems reasonable to say that, before the Hellenistic period, success in war had not been a normal, de jure, route to becoming a recognized king, no matter how important de facto it had been for remaining a successful king who enjoyed loyalty from his subjects and a stable reign.
To move on to religion, it is also during Demetrius’s career that an even more significant (and much discussed) change seems to come to fruition: victory that leads to the restoration of freedom (whose precise content could be a contested issue) to the oppressed or tyrannized could now elevate a living man to the status of a deified savior. Alexander’s claim to divinity, whatever it may have been in detail, was not based on this justification, but that of Demetrius and his father certainly was (Habicht 1970, still the fundamental study; Chaniotis 2003 and 2005: 143–65). It was of course the Athenians who acclaimed Demetrius and his father as divine saviors following Demetrius’s defeat of Cassander’s forces at Athens in 307 (a victory repeated in 304), which resulted in the liberation of Athens from a collaborationist tyranny, the expulsion of a foreign garrison, and the restoration of the city-state’s treasured democratic government (Diod. 20.46; Plut. Demetr. 10.4; Billows 1990: 147–50, 169–70; Habicht 1997: 67–77; Lape 2004: 52–9). Since Demetrius on Antigonus’s orders had accomplished what the traditional gods had not been able to make happen over the fifteen years since Antipater had originally deprived the Athenians of their liberty and their democracy in 322 (Diod. 18.18.1–6; Plut.Phoc. 28), hailing Demetrius and Antigonus as gods was at least not illogical by the standards of ancient Greek religion. Whether this acclamation by the Athenians was sincere or hypocritical or in some way arose from a mixture of motives is an issue too complex to explore here, but I believe that Demetrius himself took his and Antigonus’s divinization very seriously as the supreme proof of the Athenians’ loyalty.
The evidence for this belief I find in Demetrius’s shocked and sorrowful reaction to the Athenians’ expulsion of his family and supporters and refusal to give him refuge following the terrible defeat at Ipsus and his father’s death there (Plut. Demetr. 30–31.1). Demetrius, who had reason to regard himself as a homeless and rootless commander fighting what amounted to a world war against a coalition of formidable enemies, had believed that he had achieved a secure tie to those whom he had benefited so dramatically; he had believed that the Athenians would maintain the loyalty to him that they had first exhibited in saving him from death as a teenager and had recently expressed in the strongest way possible by divinizing him. He was of course sadly mistaken, perhaps miscalculating Athenian opinion about the new Hellenic League (Martin 1996). In Demetrius’s future dealings with Athens, he tempered his generosity with realism by keeping a garrison in place to try (without lasting success) to prevent the city-state from rebelling against him (Plut. Demetr. 34, 46.1–3; Habicht 1997: 87–97). Whether we wish to conclude that Demetrius was pathologically naïve or foolishly deluded about the Athenians’ loyalty to him, the fact remains that the divinization of Hellenistic monarchs, at least in Egypt and Asia, did not disappear with Demetrius’s fall from grace and power. Over time, as the new monarchies became institutionalized rather than dependent on charisma for legitimacy and as royal succession became an inherited right, the original close link between victory in war and divinization was attenuated. Divine status for kings (at least some of them) became an inherited condition. Again, then, an innovation arising from war that first appears during Demetrius’s lifetime changed into a standardized Hellenistic institution and therefore was no longer a meaning of war, strictly speaking. Still, divinization of the liberating victor seems a qualitative aspect of war that helps distinguish Hellenistic warfare from the warfare of earlier periods.
CONCLUSION
What, then, does a case study of Demetrius’s military career suggest about the nature of Hellenistic warfare? As far as the practices of war are concerned, the large numbers of combatants and the spectacular use of military technology in his most famous battles align with the idea that Hellenistic warfare featured on the whole a larger scale of combat than in earlier periods. Certainty concerning this quantitative aspect of war is, however, impossible, given the state of the sources for ancient Greek warfare both during and before the Hellenistic period. In any case, if the only difference between Hellenistic warfare and earlier warfare was that the former was conducted on a larger scale than the latter, this change would seem to be only natural and evolutionary, and therefore not in itself particularly significant.
Qualitatively, the practices of Hellenistic war also seem for the most part to continue earlier developments. Demetrius’s innovation in using ship-mounted artillery to fire on other ships during naval battles was an extension of the previous use of missile-firing machines on land and at sea. His numerous politically motivated marriages also continued the earlier tradition of leaders trying to forge personal alliances by wedding important women, although we cannot overlook the larger role in politics and society that queens were to play in the Hellenistic kingdoms, especially the Seleucid and Ptolemaic. Demetrius’s attempt to legitimize war against other Diadochs by proclaiming adherence to the cause of freedom for Greeks was also a continuation of long-established propaganda, but, hard as it may be to accept this suggestion, the evidence implies that he believed that his promotion of this cause would earn him genuine and lasting goodwill from his Greek allies, in particular Athens. That he would believe this was the result of the conditions of warfare having transformed traditional concepts of identity and loyalty as close ties to an ancestral community and land into fluid concepts more narrowly defined by personal interest, as far as the Diadochs and their troops were concerned.
Demetrius’s career provides striking evidence for changes in the possible political and religious meanings of war. As often pointed out, his history clearly demonstrates how victory in war and large-scale gestures of generosity to followers and allies could elevate a commander—or should it be “warlord”—to the status of an acknowledged king who had possessed no inherited claim to royalty. In time this personal monarchy could become institutionalized as a more traditional form of royal rule, with succession by right of inheritance. Most remarkably, Demetrius’s career brought to culmination the process by which a living human being could be acclaimed as a god on earth. The Athenians made Demetrius and Antigonus gods, at least for a while, in recognition of the Macedonians’ gift of freedom to them. From the perspective of hindsight, we can see that over the long term the divinization of a living human being who promised liberation was the most enduring and most consequential outcome of the changes in the meanings of war in the Hellenistic period.
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