Among the objects on display in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens is a modest vase from the second half of the fifth century BCE, its white sides painted with fine dark lines and delicate coloured tints.1 The scene which forms the main part of the decoration depicts a seated woman and an armed man, most probably a husband and wife. The man glances lovingly at the beautiful woman; she smiles, her foot resting against the instep of her husband, who holds out his helmet towards her. She wants him to stay. But this is a departure, a definite departure. The vase was a funerary offering, most likely left at the grave of a fallen soldier. Ancient Greece was a martial society. Still, the painter of this vase, who lived just before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (431–404), makes a statement: however much a society gets used to war, one never gets accustomed to personal loss, the death of relatives, families being ripped apart – even if it is for the sacred duty of defending one’s country.
History books often present this Peloponnesian War as the bedrock of Western strategic culture, a culture defined by anarchy and by a fixation with the balance of power. The rise of one state, it presupposes, must be a threat to the other. Yet, as this chapter shows, this obsession was not present only in ancient Greece. Asian civilizations, like China and India, became possessed by it too, as they saw the ideal of imperial harmony collapse into chaos.
The world in around 500 contained one large empire. Ruled by the Persian Achaemenid Dynasty, and building on the traditions of Babylon, Assyria, and the Medes, it subjugated a realm of unprecedented scale, encompassing the rich irrigation economies of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the east–west trade routes between Central Asia and the Mediterranean and the north–south ones between the Pontic-Caspian Steppe and the Indian Ocean. After the empire’s downfall, and its short occupation by Alexander the Great (336–323), the Middle East would not be so unified again until the early Islamic conquests of the seventh century CE, more than 900 years later.
The century after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE was characterized by fighting between city states in the Mediterranean, South Asia, and the North China Plain. Diplomatic relations between these city states twisted and turned, with federations being built and destroyed, peace treaties signed and abandoned. This turmoil slowly gave way to a Eurasian order dominated by two of the dynasties that fought over the remains of Alexander’s empire – the Ptolemies and the Seleucids – as well as by the Romans in the Western Mediterranean, the Maurya Dynasty in India, and the Han Dynasty in China. The appearance of the world was also markedly different: expanding populations in Europe, China, Southeast Asia, and Central America had by now transformed a large part of the primeval forest into farmland.
The Fall of Persia
In 522, after a series of successful campaigns in Egypt, King Cambyses II of Persia died in circumstances that remain unclear. Even less clear is the turmoil that followed. We do know that a usurper ruled the Persian Empire for almost seven months, rallying support mostly by promising tax relief to the poor. Seeing the threat posed to their privileges, and the empire at severe risk, a small group of leading Persian families backed the rival claim of a young soldier called Darius.
It was a decisive moment in the history of the Persian Empire. When Darius I (522–486) succeeded to the throne, he was confronted by insurrections in Babylon, Elam, Assyria, Egypt, Parthia, and Bactria. Remarkably, Darius overcame them all. After a long siege, Babylon fell back into submission. Other rebels were crushed as Persian troops marched against the kingdom of Bactria, and even crossed the Hindu Kush to reach the River Indus in 515. Barely two years later, Darius spurred his troops west, crossed the Bosporus over a pontoon bridge, and pushed the Scythians back deep into the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Having fortified the border, he promptly swung back south to batter the Greek city states of Ionia into obedience.
The Persian victory on the eastern shores of the Aegean Sea, however, was short-lived. The cities of the Greek islands and mainland supported their brothers’ resistance, partly because they wanted to keep Persia at bay, partly because of trade interests, and partly because the Persian king had by now become the most hated figure in the Greek world. With the exception of a few aristocrats and intellectuals, most Greeks imagined the Persian monarch to be decadent, deceitful, and tyrannical. In 499, the Ionian Revolt broke out when several of the Greek cities in Asia Minor rebelled, supported by forces from Greece. The Persians acted vigorously. The Ionians and their allies were defeated at the Battle of Ephesus in 498, recovered, and were finally destroyed four years later at the Battle of Lade. The revolt was over, but Darius realized that he had to go after its sponsors.
What followed was not Persia’s only border war, but it was certainly its best-documented border war, appearing in most history books as the Persian Wars (499–449). In 491, Darius dispatched envoys to Greece to demand water and earth, the symbols of submission. Although many cities gave in, there were two notable exceptions: Sparta and Athens. The Spartans threw the envoys into a well and told them to find earth and water there. Six months later, a punitive expedition was under sail. After the Persian troops had disembarked in the Bay of Marathon, near Athens, they were heavily defeated by predominantly Athenian forces, who held the slightly higher ground above the beachhead.
Darius’ attempt to mount a second invasion was thwarted by his death in 486. Rebellions against Persian rule broke out in Egypt and Babylon. The new king, Xerxes (486–465), Darius’ son, soon crushed them, and shortly after began preparations to punish those Greeks who had so brazenly humiliated his father. When the vast Persian army finally marched in 480, it invaded Greece by land, from the north. The Greeks attempted to halt their advance at Thermopylae, a narrow plain with mountains on one side and sea on the other. Despite the favourable geographical conditions, the Greek army led by King Leonidas and a small unit of Spartan spearmen could delay the Persian troops for only three days. The turning point came a few weeks later, when the Greek fleet, led by Athens, defeated the Persians in the narrow Bay of Salamis. The following year, the Persian army in Greece was decisively defeated at Plataea and its fleet destroyed at Mycale.
Although the invasion of Greece was over, the conflict with Persia was not. Rebellion reignited all over Asia Minor. The Delian League – the large anti-Persian alliance of Greek states led by Athens – went on to support uprisings in Cyprus and Egypt in the 470s and 460s. Only in 449 did hostilities formally end when Persia and Athens signed the Peace of Callias. It provided autonomy for the Greek cities in Asia Minor. The Aegean Sea became a buffer zone. The Persians promised to stay out as long as Athens and the Delian League did not interfere with Egypt and Cyprus.
Decadence: that was how ancient Greek writers explained the troubles that dogged the Persian Empire in the fifth century. Hence, they thought, the numerous court intrigues. This theory was not entirely accurate. The Persian court was no more unstable than in the past. There may have been widespread unrest, but it was not necessarily worse than in previous times. There is evidence of inflation, higher interest rates and tax revolts in the late fifth century, but administrative archives also show that commercial life continued to flourish.2 And the Persians were still able to field vast armies. At the Battle of Papremis in 460, hundreds of thousands of soldiers crushed an Egyptian revolt.
Persian rulers were also strategically astute. They took advantage of the Peloponnesian War – fought between Athenian-led and Spartan-led alliances – to play the Greek cities off against each other. In 413, Persia sent a delegation to Sparta with the aim to seal an alliance against Athens. In 409, Persian troops put down a rebellion in Asia Minor, as well as ones in Egypt, and the eastern part of the empire. Finally, in 387, Persia forced a revision of the Peace of Callias upon the exhausted Greeks so that it regained full control over Asia Minor.
In the first half of the fourth century, the Persian kings Artaxerxes II (404–359) and Artaxerxes III (359–338) were able to devote enormous resources to the seemingly endless struggle to keep Egypt as part of the empire. In 343, resistance was finally crushed when Artaxerxes III deployed 330,000 troops in Egypt, ousted the last native pharaoh, and tore down the city walls of Memphis.
Contrary to being effete and ineffective leaders, therefore, these Persian kings displayed a great deal of vigour. In the mid-fourth century, their empire remained by far the greatest power in the region. It controlled an enormous agricultural economy. It dominated many of the gateways for trade, and facilitated commerce wherever it benefited the imperial coffers, modernizing the Royal Road and maintaining a canal between the Nile Delta and the Red Sea. The size of its armies was still unmatched. Nothing indicated that the Persian Empire was about to face a greater danger than ever before.
Alexander the Great
This apparent strength is probably what made King Darius III (336–332) underestimate the threat posed by the accession of a new, immensely ambitious king in the northern Greek state of Macedon: Alexander the Great. It would be a fatal error.
Conflict with Macedon had slowly been brewing for a long time. Alexander’s father, King Philip II (350–336), conquered a large part of the Greek Peninsula and advanced the Macedonian border towards the Hellespont, the modern Dardanelles. In 341 the father of Darius III, Artaxerxes III, responded positively to an Athenian request for support against Macedon. When Philip closed in on the Hellespont in 340, Artaxerxes ordered his satrapies to supply mercenaries and weapons. At that moment, nobody would have bet money on a Macedonian victory. Artaxerxes had proved himself to be a capable commander and his forces dwarfed those of Philip.
But, in 338, Artaxerxes was murdered. The same year, Philip defeated the Athenians and their allies, leaving his hands free to exploit the turmoil at the Persian court. Acting swiftly, in the spring of 337, he formed the League of Corinth to unite the Greeks in a sacred war against the Persians and liberate their compatriots in Asia Minor. That autumn, he dispatched two generals across the Hellespont to establish a bridgehead. In the spring of 336, they advanced with 10,000 troops south along the coast of Ionia as far as Magnesia. It was one of these moments when a whole region braced for the coming collision.
In the summer, Macedonian troops clashed for a first time with mercenaries in the service of Persia. While the swords were being unsheathed, a new wave of astonishment rippled across the Aegean: King Philip had been murdered. Alexander, then only twenty-one years old, faced rebellion and unrest. He dealt with them briskly and continued preparations for the sacred war against Persia. His dynamism revealed his training as a prince, his education by the finest teachers, including Aristotle, and the fact that he had commanded his first battles at the age of sixteen.
In 334, Alexander crossed the Hellespont. Darius, however, still left the defence of Asia Minor to Greek mercenaries, who suffered defeat on the muddy banks of the River Granicus, near the site of Troy. The region’s cities swung over to Alexander one after the other, leaving Darius’ satraps powerless. Once Asia Minor had been secured, Alexander forged on to the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, where he decisively defeated Persian troops under the command of Darius himself at the Battle of Gaugamela in the autumn of 331. The heartlands of the Persian Empire now lay open before the advancing Macedonians. By 328, the last organized Persian resistance was defeated. Once again, Mesopotamia had fallen to a lesser power on its fringes.
Historians still debate what made the Macedonian victory possible. That Alexander would come to rule an empire even bigger than Darius III’s was as improbable as Cyrus II establishing the Persian Empire in the sixth century in the first place. The discovery by the conquering Macedonians of vast amounts of gold in the Persian royal treasuries showed that the empire still had plenty of reserves to draw upon. Even during the last battles, Darius commanded hundreds of thousands of troops; although he bemused his opponents by entering the field with hundreds of personal cooks and dozens of servants to perfume him. Darius’ biggest mistakes, however, were undoubtedly allowing the Macedonians to gain a foothold across the Hellespont and leaving the defence of Asia Minor to mercenaries. He was certainly too slow in shifting the bulk of the Persian armed forces to try to deter and defeat Alexander.
Once the Persians were on the defensive, Alexander proved a superior commander. He inspired his troops by leading from the front, surrounded himself with capable generals, carefully cultivated his image as a demigod, and used propaganda to present each victory as a personal achievement. He benefited from the magnificent army he inherited from his father: above all, the formidable Macedonian phalanx, but also elite cavalry and highly skilled military engineers. But his political leadership did not match his military astuteness. When Alexander died in Babylon in 323, aged thirty-two, cracks were appearing in both his reputation and his empire. He had neglected to consolidate his conquests, failing to replace the Persian imperial administration with his own or to make efforts to win the loyalty of subjugated peoples. His biographer, the Greek author Plutarch, described how Alexander succumbed to Persian luxury, estranged his Macedonian troops, and grew arrogant and tyrannical. Above all, he neglected to designate a successor. As Alexander lay dying, he merely whispered that his empire should be inherited by ‘the strongest’.
The Persian Imperial Tradition
So strong was the Persian imperial tradition that it entirely captivated Alexander. Persepolis, the ceremonial capital, left an enormous impression. It was a dazzling architectural representation of how the Persians dreamt of ruling their empire for eternity. Its giant walls gave way first to an inner court and the Gate of All Nations, guarded by two intimidating pairs of human-headed winged bulls. This led to a second court, where visitors would look up to the Apadana, a vast columned hall. Its base, three metres high, was decorated with endless rows of carved Persian spearmen and tribute bearers from all parts of the empire, including Scythians, Parthians, Ionians, and many more. Having climbed the broad processional stairs, visitors arrived at a pair of bronze doors and finally entered the great audience hall itself, with its heavily decorated coffered ceiling supported by thirty-six columns over twenty metres high. Hidden behind the Apadana were the private palaces, the harem, and, most importantly, the royal treasury. Alexander had to employ a thousand camels to carry all its gold away.
Persepolis was a temple as much as a palace. The Persian kings ruled over the world with divine blessing. Nothing illustrates this better than the carved frontage of the rock tomb of Artaxerxes II. At the top is the god Ahuramazda and below him stands the king on a platform that is carried by two rows of subjects. On Mount Behistun, a rock relief shows Darius I, enthroned beneath the wings of Ahuramazda, inspecting a line of nine bound and captive rulers. Below this scene, Darius explains how, by the grace and with the aid of Ahuramazda, he restored the universal order that was lost through the misconduct of previous kings and maintained the wellbeing of his subjects.
The Persian kings preserved much of the imperial traditions of Babylon and Assyria. The ancient Epic of Gilgamesh and Code of Hammurabi continued to circulate widely. The iconography of the Assyrian god Ashur was even adopted to represent Ahuramazda. Mesopotamia remained the empire’s demographic and economic centre. We see its influence throughout the art of the Persians, their architecture, infrastructure, agriculture, bureaucracy, and the organization of their empire. Royal depots and garrisons were scattered over the empire, connected by the same roads and routes that linked together the major cities in previous times.
In the same way that the Assyrians divided the realm into provinces administered by governors, the Persians divided it into satrapies. The satraps who ruled these provinces were responsible for taxation, maintaining stability, upholding law, monitoring events beyond the empire’s border, and reporting anything of importance to the court. They received delegations from subject peoples. An early fourth-century frieze from Xanthos in south-western Asia Minor depicts a satrap – or a local ruler who acted like one – seated under a royal parasol, admonishing a Greek embassy.3 But the Persians also expected such delegations regularly to attend on the ‘king of kings’ himself in order to pay homage – and tribute. The works of Greek historians like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon bear witness to a maze of diplomatic activity, with embassies being sent hither and thither between the Persian court and places as far afield as India. The strategy was to treat leniently those who accepted Persian rule and harshly those who resisted it. ‘The man who cooperates,’ Darius I proclaimed in his epitaph, ‘him according to his cooperative action, him thus do I reward.’4 In his idealized biography of Cyrus II, Xenophon explained the Persian rationale: ‘There are two things that it were well for us to look out for: that we make ourselves masters of those who own this property, and that they stay where they are. For a land destitute of people becomes likewise destitute of produce.’5
When the Persians encountered unrest, their first response was for the local satrap to restore order. The crackdown against the Ionian Revolt, for example, was depicted as just such a restoration of justice. The satrap Mardonius imposed agreements on the Ionian cities that replaced their hated tyrants with democratically elected leaders, made them swear an oath of perpetual peace with each other, facilitated trade between them, and obliged them to settle their border disputes through Persian arbitration, abide by a common law, and tear down their walls. Local self-government under Persian supervision: that was the objective. It was probably what the Persians had had in mind when they dispatched their envoys to demand water and earth from the city states on the other side of the Aegean. When Sparta and Athens refused, the Persians responded by trying to divide the league that had been established to defend Greece. Before long, they succeeded: Thessaly, the gateway to central and southern Greece, sent a messenger to Darius to propose an alliance. Argos and Thebes soon followed.
One of the Persians’ chief diplomatic weapons was money. Near the end of the Persian Wars, when Athens, as leader of the Delian League, seemed to be emerging as the main beneficiary of the conflict, Artaxerxes I tried to win over the Spartans, who were not members of the league. In 456, he ordered an official called Megabazus to bribe them to attack Athens so as to stop the latter’s campaigns in Cyprus and Egypt. In 449, when the Athenian general Callias returned with the terms of the treaty he had agreed with Persia to bring the fifty-year hostilities to a formal close, he was accused of bribery by his fellow citizens who deemed the concessions he had negotiated insufficient.6 Persia’s policy of divide-and-rule saw it first subsidize Sparta’s fleet, then aid Athens when Sparta supported a revolt against Artaxerxes II. In 395, the Persians sent an agent called Timocrates – who was a Greek from Rhodes – to Greece with gold to distribute among politicians in Athens, Thebes, Corinth, and Argos to try to persuade them to form an alliance against Sparta.
The Persians liked to cajole the Greek cities with ‘special relationships’, sometimes based on the emotional appeal of common ancestors, at others on pragmatic arguments of common interests. Yet occasionally Greek diplomacy could leave the Persians bewildered. After the Spartans sent a mission to Persia in 425, the Persian king wrote a letter in reply urging them in future to speak with one voice: ‘The King did not understand what they wanted, since the many ambassadors who had come to him all said different things.’7
The Greek March into Disaster
Scandalous! That was the Greek verdict on diplomats who succumbed to the allure of Persian gold. In Athens, a comic dramatist called Plato mocked the prominent populist politician Epicrates for being more obsessed with Persian luxury than with the city’s interests, while an envoy called Timagoras was put to death after he returned not only with gold but also with a Persian bed – an insult to the frugal Greek lifestyle. Nothing disturbed Greek intellectuals more than the lack of Hellenic unity. Herodotus championed the cause of a common front against the barbarian Persians, emphasizing the kinship of all Greeks. But Hellenic unity never really existed. Even Athens, a flourishing commercial city connected to all corners of the Greek world, was often profoundly nativist. Immigrants from other cities were frequently expelled, had their property expropriated, or were even murdered.
Inter-Greek tensions reached their apogee with the Peloponnesian War. The Athenian historian Thucydides (460–400) portrayed the conflict as an unprecedented tragedy, a march into disaster. ‘The state of affairs everywhere in Hellas was such that nothing very remarkable could be done by any combination of powers,’ he wrote. ‘For a short time the war-time alliance held together, but it was not long before quarrels took place and Athens and Sparta, each with her own allies, were at war with each other.’8 In Aristophanes’ comic play Lysistrata (411), the women of Greece stage a sex-strike to stop the fighting. In his Peace (421), an Athenian farmer is so desperate to end the conflict that he flies to heaven on a giant dung beetle in order to free Irene, the goddess of peace, who is being held in a cage by Polemos, the god of war. Spears are turned into vine props, breastplates into pots, and war trumpets into scales for weighing figs. In 415, Euripides staged his tragedy The Women of Troy to protest against the massacres and the destitution that the Greeks were inflicting on themselves. Even after the Peloponnesian War had nearly destroyed Athens, the politician Demosthenes thundered at the Greek cities for neglecting to act against the threat now posed by Macedon. The lack of orchestrated response – the desire to avoid war even if territory was chipped away and trade interfered with – was ‘an act of stupidity’.9
Although many Greeks longed for unity and peace, most thinkers remained sceptical they could ever be achieved. The Athenian philosopher Plato (424–348) insisted that all people depended on each other, yet greed and envy prevented them from seeing the merits of a harmonious city where inhabitants coexisted in peace and good health before dying at a ripe old age; instead they lived in ‘fevered’ cities ravaged by infighting. The only way to attain the harmonious city was to educate all citizens properly, train them to be soldiers, and cherish peace as the bedrock of political legitimacy. ‘Being Greeks they should not ravage Greece,’ he asserted.10
Plato’s former pupil, the philosopher Aristotle (384–322), endorsed this view; but, far more than his old master, he counselled the statesman to watch the balance of power. ‘He should know whether the military power of another country is like or unlike that of his own; for this is a matter that may affect their relative strength.’11 War, Aristotle continued, was often necessary to defend freedom. But, he added cynically, the pursuit of peace was a powerful cause of war. We do business in order that we may have leisure, he summarized, and we fight wars in order to have peace. A preoccupation with the balance of power was also present in Herodotus’ history. ‘The power of Persia was steadily increasing,’ he wrote. ‘This gave Croesus food for thought, and he wondered if he might be able to check Persian expansion before it had gone too far.’12
In very similar terms, Thucydides explained the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides posited that human nature was dominated by fear, honour, and self-interest, but that what most fundamentally shaped international politics was the balance of power. ‘What made war inevitable,’ he famously declared, ‘was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.’13 Thucydides went on to explain the contribution of the lesser powers to the outbreak of war. Open hostilities were triggered by unrest in the small town of Epidamnos. One party gained the support of Corcyra, which in turn appealed for support from Athens. The opposing party in Epidamnos meanwhile called on Corinth, which called on its ally, Sparta. And Sparta called for Persian support.
Thucydides also exposed the limits of law, arbitration, and justice in relations between states. Even though arbitration was a common practice, Corcyra and Corinth disagreed about its terms. The lengthy speeches of the Corcyrans and Corinthians before the assemblies of Sparta and Athens showed how the validity and justness of treaties could be subject to the way opposing sides interpreted them in the light of past and present events. ‘The Spartans voted that the treaty had been broken and that war should be declared not so much because they were influenced by the speeches of their allies as because they were afraid of the further growth of Athenian power, seeing, as they did, that already the greater part of Hellas was under the control of Athens.’14 Although Thucydides concluded sceptically that it had always been the natural order of things for the weak to be subject to the strong, he insisted: ‘This is what a leader should do – to look after his own interests as everyone else does, but also, in return for all the honour he receives from others, to give a special consideration to the general interest.’15
The permanent state of threat that existed between states turned Greece into a laboratory of diplomacy. As monarchs and tyrants were replaced by assemblies based on greater or lesser degrees of popular representation, cities during diplomatic missions turned to the most gifted communicators to plead their case before these citizen bodies. Thucydides repeatedly showed how such orators passionately defended the interests of their cities before the assemblies of Athens and Sparta, observing in turn how the leading politicians of Athens and Sparta had to try and steer the assemblies’ responses to such rhetoric. There were also more familiar types of diplomat: message bearers with very limited mandates to negotiate; true envoys with the authority to agree terms within parameters established by their assembly; and proxenoi, who were a kind of honorary consul. From the state whose interests they represented, proxenoi could receive official protection or tax-exemptions in exchange for assisting negotiations, providing grain, or contributing ships. They could be ordinary citizens, eminent generals, or even kings or poets.16 The Acropolis Museum in Athens contains several relief panels commemorating the contributions of these ‘official friends’, including one depicting the proxenos standing as symbolic intermediary between the patron goddesses of two cities, whose hands rest meaningfully on him.17 Treaties were sworn with binding oaths before the gods and chiselled into stone, so that citizens could read them. But, as Thucydides put it, they had often been violated before the parties had even left the shrine.
Far more ambitious in scope were the leagues formed around a hegemonic power, such as the famous Delian League around Athens, the rival Peloponnesian League around Sparta, or the League of Corinth around Macedon. The smaller members usually had to pay taxes, and contribute troops, to the leading state, which provided security in return. Both Athens and Sparta also tried to install sympathetic regimes with similar political constitutions in fellow league members. Interestingly, one of the first attempts to form a union after the Amphictyonic League was the attempt by the Persian satrap Mardonius to make the Greek cities of Asia Minor cooperate in the aftermath of the Ionian Revolt. But there were also leagues formed against possible hegemons: the league formed to defend Greece against the Persian invasions in the early fifth century was perhaps the most notable one.
Some smaller leagues achieved a remarkable degree of integration. The Arcadian League (370–230), for example, required cities to surrender a significant degree of their autonomy if they wanted to join, to subscribe to a democratic constitution, to designate representatives to a council in the newly founded capital of Megalopolis, and to conduct a common foreign and security policy. The Achaean League (281–146) took matters even further and developed a quasi-federal government. The Epirote League (around 300–170) also had a federal constitution, a council with regular meetings, joint rules on taxation, a common currency, freedom of personal movement, and was one of the first polities to give citizenship to women.
We know of numerous peace treaties from the period of the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, as well as an almost equal number of breaches. The Peace of Callias held for only two years. In 446, Sparta and Athens agreed a thirty years peace that confirmed the division of most of the Greek world into Athenian and Spartan spheres of influence. It was violated four years later. In 421, the agreement of seventeen cities to the Peace of Nicias brought a partial end to the Peloponnesian War. Intended to last for fifty years, it was completely abandoned six years later. In 387, the Treaty of Antalcidas introduced the idea of the ‘common peace’, based on the principle of autonomy for all city states but with Sparta guaranteeing it as a sort of hegemon. But at a peace conference in 371, Sparta was famously criticized by Autocles, an Athenian envoy: ‘Now you always say, “The cities must be independent,” but you are yourselves the greatest obstacle in the way of their independence. For the first stipulation you make with your allied cities is this, that they follow wherever you may lead. And yet how is this consistent with independence?’18 The Theban ambassador Epaminondas added that there could be peace only if the Spartans recognized their own provincial towns as free communities. The conference ended in war. Nevertheless fresh attempts were made in 363 and 338 to establish a ‘common peace’, the latter occasion in response to the rise of Macedon.
The idea of peace was closely related to the idea of free trade. One of the first Greeks to promote its importance was Xenophon:
Whereas in other trading cities merchants are forced to barter one commodity for another, in regard their coin is not current abroad, we abound not only in manufactures, and products of our own growth, sufficient to answer the demands of foreign traders, but in case they refused to export our goods, in return for their own, they may trade with us to advantage, by receiving silver in exchange for them, which transported to any other market, would pass for more than they took it for at Athens.19
The Persian Peace of the Ionian states, the Peace of Antalcidas, championed free trade as well. The Peace of Callias aimed to guarantee that ‘all might sail without fear’.20 Alexander the Great is reported to have issued an edict to his Persian subjects: ‘I intend to bring prosperity to your lands and to see that the roads of Persia are used for trade and business in total peace, so that people from Greece may trade with you and you with them.’21 But mutual commercial interests seldom prevented Greek states from going to war again and again.
Rome’s First Steps to Primacy
With the death of Alexander the Great in 323, the prospect of unity in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East disappeared. In the wars fought between his former generals to succeed him, the empire became divided into four main parts. Eventually, after much blood had been spilled, the Antigonid Dynasty ruled over the Macedonian heartland, the Attalids over Asia Minor, the Ptolemies over Egypt, and the Seleucids over Mesopotamia. The unipolar era was over, making way for an age of multipolar regional orders. In 306, Antigonus was the first openly to proclaim himself king and heir of Alexander. Together with his son, Demetrius, he gained control over the Levant, Asia Minor, Cyprus, and a part of the Peloponnese. It was not enough: Babylon remained the ultimate prize. As much as it had captivated Alexander, and all the other great Mesopotamian rulers of the past, Antigonus too was determined to conquer it.
He came close, but at the Battle of Ipsus in 301, he was defeated by a coalition of his rival dynasts, and killed. They pushed the Antigonid realm, now under Demetrius, out of the Levant and Asia Minor. In 281, one of these dynasts, King Seleucus, took sole control of Asia Minor. As he prepared to cross the Hellespont in order to add Macedon to his domains, he was assassinated. His son, Antiochus I, had the greatest difficulty standing his ground against the hugely ambitious King Ptolemy II, who ruled Egypt. In an echo of events from centuries ago, once again a king of Egypt was fighting a king of Mesopotamia for control of the Levant. These wars between the successor dynasties of Alexander would continue for another century, until the growing power of Rome eclipsed them all.
In the third century, Rome gradually emerged as the leading state in the Western Mediterranean. The small city on the banks of the River Tiber had come to maturity through centuries of warfare. After having dealt a series of defeats to the Etruscans, Rome was faced by the fearsome threat posed by the Gallic migrations. Numbering in their hundreds of thousands, the Gauls crossed the Alps into present-day France, Spain, Italy, and the Balkans. In 387, Rome only escaped total destruction when the Gallic leader Brennus, who had captured the city, was bribed to withdraw from it. The Gauls had been repelled, but Rome still faced other dangers. The Volsci and the Etruscans still resisted Roman hegemony in the north. In the south, Rome competed with mercantile powers like the Greek cities of Syracuse and Tarentum, and the former Phoenician colony of Carthage, each of which contained more than 100,000 inhabitants. In 348, Carthage was able to impose a humiliating treaty that locked Rome out of Sardinia and North Africa. In 303, Rome had to accept an agreement with Tarentum that limited its access to the Ionian Sea.
Still, the balance of power was slowly altering. By the beginning of the third century, Rome had emerged as the victor of a series of wars with a coalition of Samnites, Gauls, and the Etruscans, giving it effective control over most of the Italian Peninsula. The last meaningful resistance came from King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who sailed across the Ionian Sea to the aid of Tarentum in 280. Despite his twenty war elephants – the first encountered by the Romans in battle – not even this experienced general was able to turn the tide against Rome’s seemingly endless supply of manpower. ‘[Even] if we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans,’ he stated, ‘we shall be utterly ruined.’22
In 264, the Sicilian city of Messina appealed to Rome for support in a conflict with Syracuse. Carthage considered this appeal a violation of earlier treaties and occupied Messina itself, provoking Rome to respond. This chain of events marked the start of the Punic Wars (264–146), a struggle for control of the Western Mediterranean that lasted more than a century and transformed Rome into Europe’s foremost power. The Greek historian Polybius, who provided a first-hand account of the latter stages of the conflict, explained the underlying causes:
[The Romans] saw that Carthaginian aggrandisement was not confined to Libya, but had embraced many districts in Iberia as well; and that Carthage was, besides, mistress of all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian seas: they were beginning, therefore, to be exceedingly anxious lest, if the Carthaginians became masters of Sicily also, they should find them very dangerous and formidable neighbours, surrounding them as they would on every side, and occupying a position which commanded all the coasts of Italy.23
Initially, the power struggles in the Western Mediterranean involving Rome and the power struggles in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East between the successor dynasties of Alexander the Great were not connected. This changed, first when Pyrrhus crossed the Ionian Sea, and then in 273, when Ptolemy II sought an alliance with Rome to check his powerful North African neighbour, Carthage. As the First Punic War (264–241) advanced, though, Ptolemy changed sides and lent Carthage money.
Between 500 and 250, the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa continued their slow transformation into a single vast arena of power politics. This metamorphosis had been instigated by the Persian Achaemenid Dynasty’s wars west of the Aegean Sea and in Egypt. The Achaemenids combined hard power with the mollifying effects of gold, both of which were funded by a tributary order that reconnected with the imperial traditions of Assyria and Babylon and followed in the footsteps of their earlier efforts to control trade. For a moment, in the mid-fourth century, it looked as if Alexander the Great would permanently establish an even larger empire. After his death, however, the region fractured politically, while remaining connected through rivalry, trade, and travel. Rome, meanwhile, took a growing interest in securing trade through the Adriatic Sea, which would be followed in the next centuries by the conquest of Greece and the whole Eastern Mediterranean.
Writers from this era have left us with a stream of information about this intriguing theatre of diplomacy. From their works, it becomes clear that republics and monarchies, democracies and oligarchies, were not that different in their zeal for power. Even if some thinkers stressed the importance of welfare, free trade, and cooperation, they also placed a great deal of emphasis on maintaining the balance of power. Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian War, explored the tragic dilemmas that arise when two powers try to defend overlapping interests; and Polybius, in discussing the tensions between Rome and Carthage over Sicily, highlighted the tendency of lesser powers to play larger states off against each other and the destabilizing effects of commercial ambitions. ‘Thus,’ concluded Xenophon, ‘strife and anger beget war, avarice stifles benevolence, envy produces hate.’24
The Maurya Empire
Beyond the borders of Persia, east of the River Indus, a new empire was slowly being shaped. Already, in 326, its might was such that Alexander the Great’s soldiers refused to march beyond the Beas River lest they encountered the army of the Nanda kingdom, which they believed numbered more than 200,000 warriors and 3,000 war elephants.25
The Nanda kingdom had been established in the preceding decades by Mahapadma Nanda (345–321). Mahapadma – the name means ‘ruler of great wealth’ – had seized the throne of the Magadha kingdom, which had been founded by King Bimbisara. By the time that Mahapadma came to power, the realm already encompassed a large part of the plain along the middle reaches of the Ganges. He expanded it all the way to the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush and the Deccan Plateau. The Nanda triumph was short-lived: Mahapadma’s heirs were overthrown by Chandragupta Maurya (324–298). He would turn India into a true empire, one of the largest that the world had seen.
Little is known about how Chandragupta became powerful enough to seize the Nanda kingdom; he probably made use of widespread resentment against the dynasty to start a guerrilla campaign, and bribed the regime’s generals. But once the Nanda had been dethroned, Chandragupta marched west in order to prevent King Seleucus from carrying out Alexander’s dream of conquering India. After two years of war, a peace treaty was signed in 303 and sealed with a marriage alliance. In return for 500 war elephants – which were instrumental in the defeat of Antigonus at Ipsus in 301 – Seleucus ceded to Chandragupta control of the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush, the crossroads between Southern, Central, and Western Asia. The Maurya king instantly set to work developing a new highway – the Grand Trunk Road – and deploying soldiers to guard it. From then on, trade between Southern Asia and the Middle East flourished. Chandragupta’s son, Bindusara Maurya, expanded the realm to the south and sealed alliances with the Tamils and the Cholas. When Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka (268–232), came to the throne, the Maurya Empire stretched from the Zagros Mountains to the Brahmaputra River.
For most of Ashoka’s lengthy reign, the subjects of the Maurya Empire enjoyed peace. This remarkable achievement was at least partly attributable to the royal advisor Kautilya, whose treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, is still read today. Kautilya was most respected for his ‘mandala’ system, a scheme of concentric geopolitical circles which showed kings that the way to keep a neighbour in check was to form alliances with the states situated on its other borders. But his principal advice was to keep society at home satisfied. ‘A wise king can make even the poor and miserable elements of his sovereignty happy and prosperous,’ he explained; for ‘strength is power and happiness is the end.’26 Land had to be cultivated, wild beasts kept at a distance, conspirators eliminated, and treasure built up. Powerful kings could embark on conquest, whereas weak kings needed to sue for peace. The Arthashastra lists the many ways to enforce a peace treaty: swearing by fire or on the shoulder of an elephant, by giving children or adult members of the royal family as hostages – although Kautilya judged a hostage princess more trouble to the recipient than a hostage prince. But whatever form guarantees took, Kautilya warned, rising powers could not be prevented from breaking a peace agreement.
King Ashoka replaced this realist strategic culture, which emphasized the state of anarchy existing between many small polities, with a true doctrine of empire, which presupposed hierarchy under a major power. After the defeat of the stubborn kingdom of Kalinga, Ashoka adopted the tenets of Buddhism. Renouncing violence, he propagated a benign form of rule over his subjects. He became the chakravartin – ‘he who lets the wheel roll throughout the whole world’ – the Buddhist symbol for the precepts that lead to enlightenment. Since its origins in northern India in the fifth century, Buddhism had spread widely across Southern Asia. Now, its doctrine of universal truth and harmony proved convenient for legitimizing the emperor. All over the Maurya Empire, pillars were erected with Ashoka’s Buddhist edicts. ‘In the past, kings used to go out on pleasure tours,’ we read. ‘I consider the welfare of all to be my duty.’27 The thirteenth of these ‘rock edicts’ speaks of ‘moral conquest’; to put that into practice, envoys (dutas) were dispatched not only across the empire, but as far afield as Sri Lanka, Greece, and Egypt, in order to preach Buddhism, set up hospitals, and cultivate gardens. But Ashoka’s doctrine of harmony still rested on hard power. He maintained a well-structured military establishment of 600,000 soldiers. He continued to use a large network of spies and royal emissaries, the so-called pulisanis, to keep him informed about the situation in the empire’s four provinces. Each province was administered by a governor-prince, the kumara, who was responsible for maintaining order and levying taxes.
At the heart of the empire, which contained between 50 and 60 million inhabitants, was the capital, Pataliputra, near modern Patna. According to Megasthenes, a Greek diplomat residing at the Maurya court, Pataliputra and its wooden palaces were rivalled in splendour only by the great cities of Persia. It was a centre of politics, culture, and science, attracting intellectuals like Aryabhata, the mathematician and astronomer who calculated pi to four decimal places. Bindusara Maurya asked the Seleucid king Antiochus I for sweet wine, dried figs – and a philosopher. The sudden flourishing of the arts under the Maurya still puzzles historians. In less than a century, primitive works of clay had been replaced by elaborate stone carvings, such as the capitals of the Pillars of Ashoka – which clearly show Persian influences – or the voluptuous Yakshi goddesses. The Maurya cities had become the world’s new crucibles of culture and science. In the wake of its Buddhist monks, its influence spread from Greece to Southeast Asia. The centre of the world had shifted from the Middle East to India.
Warring States
The contrast between India during the Ashokan era of harmony and China at the same time could not have been more stark. Here, relentless struggle defined the age. Ever since the Zhou Dynasty lost its heavenly mandate in the eighth century, the North China Plain had been convulsed by city states and slightly larger kingdoms competing for primacy. Formally, there was still a Zhou king, but his status was ceremonial and he depended entirely on the support of other rulers. Numerous diplomatic conferences were held, to talk about disarmament, for example, or about the rules of war, or even to try and agree peace. But, more often than not, they were in vain. ‘While the conference was still in session, and before the ceremonies recognizing the new status of Wu were completed,’ we read in the annals about the congress held at Huangchi in 482, ‘word came that King Goujian had invaded Wu, captured its capital, and ravaged the country. King Fuchai killed the messenger who brought the news in hopes of keeping it a secret until the conference ended, but the information leaked out and he was forced to beat a hasty retreat.’28
Between the fifth and the third centuries, the pack of warring states after whom this era is named, was thinned down from fourteen to seven, and then down to one. The Warring States period (476–221) started with the split of the Jin state into three parts: Wei, Zhao, and Han. The rest of the North China Plain was divided between the Chu, the Qin, the Qi, and the Yan, and, at the centre, the shrivelled rump state of the Zhou, whose king was now held in almost negligible esteem. This was the cultured world; beyond it lurked barbarians: the Gojoseon, who controlled the Korean Peninsula; the nomadic Xiongnu in the north; in the west, the Wuzhong mountain tribes and the Qiang; in the south, the Shu, the Yelang, the Dian, and the diverse conglomeration of Yue tribes that reached beyond the Red River.
After the state of Jin split, the Wei were the first to benefit. Records explain how Marquess Wen of Wei shrewdly played off the Zhao against the Han, and sacked one of the Xiongnu states in 406. It was the state of Zhao, however, that outsmarted the others by integrating the mounted archery of the Xiongnu into its army. It was a masterstroke that gave it a decisive advantage against chariots, which often proved sluggish on mountainous battlefields. In 354, the Zhao pulverized the Wei in the Battle of Guiling; but, by that time, a new pretender had already thrown down the gauntlet: Duke Xiao of Qin. The Qin had several advantages over other states. Their motherland along the Wei River was protected from the plains by mountain passes. Behind this barrier, the Qin developed a flourishing agricultural economy by recognizing land ownership in exchange for tax and services, resettling farmers from overpopulated areas, and providing advanced irrigation. ‘Thereupon the land within the passes became a fertile plain, and there were no more bad years,’ the records report. ‘Qin thus became rich and powerful.’29 On the battlefield, the Qin benefited from lightly armoured cavalry, again inspired by the Xiongnu. Their soldiers fought in small units, often drawn from one family or village. In 260, about half a million Qin troops and a similar number of Zhao men took up positions near Changping. The ensuing confrontation was fiercely fought and decisive. Hundreds of thousands of Zhao soldiers were killed; the advance of the Qin was now unstoppable. In 221, the Qin Empire was established.
When the Qin Empire was founded, bringing to an end the Warring States period, the population of China had reached approximately 40 million. The many conflicts had slowed population growth and inflicted enormous damage. Technological innovations, however, were plentiful. As in other parts of the world, iron became more commonly used. In farming, crop rotation and fertilizers were introduced, alongside feudal land holding, which gave families some security of tenure. Cities grew. The largest of them was the Qi capital of Linzi, with over 350,000 inhabitants. ‘If the people only lifted their sleeves, they would cover the sky,’ a visitor wrote. ‘If they shook the sweat from them, it would appear to rain.’30 Protected by lofty walls and towers, Linzi was laid out around a grid of avenues, some more than twenty metres wide. Central to such cities was the market place; here, besides the traditional staple crops, an increasingly diverse array of products was found – furniture, iron utensils, silk, and, of course, jade. Powerful tycoons emerged, like the infamous Lu Buwei, who bought himself the position of prime minister of Qin.
As trade grew, court advisors wondered how to manage it. The famous Qin counsellor Shang Yang insisted that statecraft remained a matter of ‘promoting farming and confining trade’.31 But Confucian thinkers believed that a new sort of political harmony would evolve, under the king, if states specialized in what they produced. ‘The north sea has running horses and barking dogs,’ summarized the Confucian philosopher some 2,000 years before the English economist David Ricardo formulated his theory of economic specialization: ‘The south sea has feathers, plumes, elephant tusks, rhinoceros hides, copper, and cinnabar … The eastern sea has purple-dye plants, white silks, fish, and salt … The western sea has skins, hides, and patterned yak tails.’32 Mencius thought that a kingdom would attract traders and travellers if no taxes were charged at frontier gates; while the Book of Rites advised that tariffs at border crossings should be reduced, so that merchants come from the most distant parts and ‘the resources of the government do not fail’.33
Commerce with other continents, however, was negligible: if trade in luxury goods connected India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, China was not yet a part of this network, or at best only very marginally. But the Chinese states did start to extend their might to areas where it had previously been unknown. In 316, the Qin defeated the state of Shu and, two years later, the last hostile Rong tribe. In 300, the Yan invaded the Gojoseon kingdom in Korea. In 257, Shu refugees, headed by Prince Thuc Phan, founded the Au Lac state in the north of modern Vietnam.
Because there was still no single unified state, a dynamic intellectual diversity – the so-called Hundred Schools of Thought – could flourish. Wandering thinkers travelled from court to court, attracted more often than not by how much kings would pay. There was intense and sophisticated debate about governance, diplomacy, war, and peace. The violent context led some thinkers to urge for law and order. These ‘legalists’, such as Shang Yang and Han Fei, asserted that, in the absence of a strong ruler, humans’ innate selfish nature led to chaos, and that there could be no peace without power. ‘Generally, war is a thing that people hate,’ argued Shang Yang. ‘He who succeeds in making people delight in war, attains supremacy.’34 ‘Men of remote antiquity strove to be known as moral and virtuous; those of the middle age struggled to be known as wise and resourceful; and now men fight for the reputation of being vigorous and powerful,’ asserted Han Fei. ‘Peoples everywhere that could be reached by transportation came to pay homage. They were not won over by Qin’s goodness, but were intimidated by its military power. Whoever has great strength sees others visit his court; whoever has little strength visits the courts of others.’35
As the Zhou kings lost all authority, and other lords did not even bother to be proclaimed hegemon any more, scholars contemplated how to manage relations between states. Realists advocated so-called ‘horizontal alliances’, which implied that the weak should side with the strong. Others promoted ‘vertical alliances’, in which the weak would join forces against the strong. Even many Confucian scholars shifted towards realism. Xunzi wrote that struggle was inevitable. Men are evil, he stated, because of their innate greed, sensuality, and quarrelsomeness. But these realist Confucians still maintained that kings should be morally superior. ‘You speak of the values of plots and of moving by sudden attack,’ Xunzi observed, ‘but these are matters appropriate only to lesser lords. What is really essential is to be good at winning the support of the people.’36
No matter how wise the advice of philosophers and sages, it made little difference. The annals of this period are a catalogue of wars and broken treaties, even more so than the Spring and Autumn Annals. This passage summarizes it all perfectly:
Envoys rush along the roads in such haste that the hubs of their carriage wheels bumped against each other. Bound by each other by means of conversations, they form alliances, specious ministers in collusion cleverly gloss their artful schemes. The code of laws is in order, but the many people act falsely. The official documents are numerous but obscure. The hundred families are in want. There are arguments by scholars in their strange dress, but wars do not cease.37
Strength and Happiness
For most of the period between 500 and 250, the Eastern Hemisphere was afflicted by political fragmentation. The North China Plain suffered from the warring states and their violent attempts at unification. The empire of the Achaemenids and Alexander the Great imploded. This left the densely populated Indo-Gangetic Plain under its Maurya kings as the centre of power and a vital conduit between the East Asian and Middle Eastern worlds.
During this era, there was also a slow change in political organization. In between tiny polities and vast empires, a growing number of middling large states emerged. The Eastern Mediterranean after the death of Alexander the Great, for example, was dominated by the successor kingdoms of the Seleucids and Attalids in Asia Minor, the Ptolemies in Egypt, and the Antigonids in Macedon; while the Western Mediterranean was shared between Carthage and the growing power of Rome. In East Asia, the number of Chinese warring states was first whittled down to seven, and then to one, the Qin, and the Korean Peninsula became dominated by the kingdom of Gojoseon.
As regards thinking about politics, the Mesopotamian imperial tradition was continued by the Achaemenid Dynasty right to the end, before Alexander the Great also invested heavily in it during his brief reign. Much as with the Zhou kings’ heavenly mandate in China, Persian monarchs based the legitimacy of their rule on divine approval of the way they fostered the welfare of their citizens. Preserving harmony inside the realm was key, but so was preserving security along the border. Both the suppression of the Ionian Revolt and the consequent interventions in Greece were seen as efforts to restore the just order. The Maurya Dynasty in India, meanwhile, founded its own imperial tradition on Buddhism. Ashoka saw himself as the chakravartin, duty-bound to nurture the welfare of the whole world. The Maurya kings also drew on the teachings of the Arthashastra, a text that today is mostly known for its realist divide-and-rule strategy towards neighbouring states, but which is fundamentally concerned with wise and righteous government and the pursuit of public wellbeing.
Beyond the peaceful empires, in regions scarred by war, people also pondered the nature of politics. In both Greece and China, pacifism grew in popularity. Intellectuals like Xenophon and Xun Kuang highlighted the importance of trade for facilitating cooperation between states. Others, such as Thucydides and Han Fei, were more jaundiced, arguing that the selfishness and opportunism of human nature wrought havoc. In reality, wars were fought for many reasons: some shift in the balance of power, tensions between overlapping spheres of influence, competition over trade, not to mention the long legacy of nationalism, distrust, and hatred.
Nevertheless, diplomatic efforts were often intense; although even here cynicism and idealism both found free rein. International conferences intended to settle disagreements were often regarded with distrust. States formalized relationships between each other by establishing leagues: some were voluntary, with common institutions; others were hegemonies in all but name, subservient to the interests of the most powerful member. The Persians employed gold and offers of special partnership both to mollify the Greek city states and to undermine Hellenic unity. Around the Mediterranean, citizen assemblies increasingly had a say in decisions relating to war and peace – and often demonstrated a ruthlessness and aggressiveness to match even the most warmongering of monarchs.