The Diadochoi found themselves Alexander’s heirs in more ways than they had anticipated, and the legacy proved itself—in every sense—a taxing one. Except in Macedonia, which had its own idiosyncratic problems (below, pp. 198 ff.), the new rulers were forced to deal with dilemmas inherent in Alexander’s career of conquest, and to adopt solutions very similar to those he himself had outlined. They stood, long after his death, in his tremendous shadow still. He had made them what they were; and however consciously they might try to jettison his alleged ideals—above all, the military and administrative fusion of races in universal empire—their fierce ambitions forced them to follow where he had led. The enormous prize he had left to them, the Achaemenid empire from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush and beyond, was in effect spear-won territory, the spoils of conquest. That one central fact conditioned the conduct, outlook, and administration of both the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid dynasties for the entire course of their existence: they treated the territories they controlled, however they might assign them, as royal estates.1
Neither empire, moreover, had any kind of a national foundation; neither was viewed with anything more positive than resentful acquiescence by the bulk of its indigenous inhabitants. The Seleucid empire, as we have seen, began to fragment as soon as it was formed: Bithynia, Pontus, Pergamon, Bactria, Cappadocia all split off, and not even the brilliant military-cum-diplomatic imperialism of Antiochus III (ca. 242–187) could reverse this trend for long (pp. 293 ff.). In Egypt it needed only a weakening of control at the top, from the time of Ptolemy IV (221–204), to produce a whole string of violent native insurrections (pp. 323 ff.), with the object of restoring Egypt’s own age-old pharaonic tradition, and shifting the cultural center of gravity back from Hellenic Alexandria to Egyptian Memphis. Thus in both cases (though the details varied considerably) we have the same fundamental situation: an occupying imperial minority of Graeco-Macedonian administrators and settlers, backed by a Macedonian-officered force of mercenaries, whose main object was to maintain their own powers and privileges, while at the same time making sizable fortunes. To do this involved them in an economically static cycle of extortion, bribery, and sweated labor. The key to their continued rule—since that rule did not in any sense depend on a willing consent, much less an active choice, by the governed—lay, of necessity, in the maintenance of a large standing army and paramilitary police force. These, the former especially, were also made essential by the non-stop border feuding and competitive warfare that went on between the dynasties, as each tried to strengthen its position, and to ward off encroachment, by extending its frontiers and overseas possessions.
Now, full-time armies are an expensive luxury, a vast drain on any exchequer, as Philip II and Alexander each discovered to his cost (Alexander landed in Asia Minor with no more than a fortnight’s pay for his men, and thirty days’ provisions: from the Granicus onwards, conquest balanced the books).2 It followed that the primary administrative activity of both Ptolemies and Seleucids was, in one way or another, financial. Even though their territories were wealthy estates, to be milked as they saw fit, much of the profits, far from being reinvested (not in itself a natural Greek activity; see p. 469), was of necessity spent on preserving and perpetuating the status quo. In particular, this self-perpetuating need fully explains the complex system of tariffs, monopolies, excise duties, and heavy taxation that characterizes the Successor kingdoms (pp. 368 ff.). It also, indirectly, explains their concern, at every level, with the exercise of justice. This has sometimes been taken by the guileless as proof of a punctilious respect for the rule of law and, above all, for Völkerrecht (below, p. 196). However, a piecemeal study of cases suggests, with some force, that the motivation was not so much concern for the individual’s rights, much less defense of interstate treaties—both of which were regularly ignored and abused—but a determination to impose, by force if need be, a legal code that consistently worked to the government’s advantage.
This, of course, included the repression of any kind of social revolution; but the intensity of official concern with this particular problem cannot escape our notice. While it remains a truism that no government ever encourages opposition, the degree to which that opposition is perceived as dangerous or disruptive will vary a good deal depending on circumstance, even in a world where any change is held to be for the worse. Now, if there is one common feature shared by all the authoritarian regimes of this period, in Greece as well as in Egypt or Asia (and indeed by some on the face of it not authoritarian at all, like the Greek leagues), it is a quite hysterical determination to prevent economic or political upset by any sort of populist movement (see below, Chap. 22, pp. 390 ff.). The regular slogans of such movements called for the abolition of debts and reallotment of the land, rallying cries that were anticapitalistic only in the sense that others wanted a slice of the capital, but antioligarchic in that fundamental social sense that always made of Greek politics a moral, rather than an economic, issue. As for the class problem, that was there too, but less in evidence from the third century on because of steadily increasing universal commercialism. If the peasantry was consistently exploited, if the division between city (polis) and countryside (chōra) grew ever wider, there was, by the same token, an ever-increasing number of ex-peasants on the make, only too willing to grind the faces of the poor from whose ranks they had risen.3 What we see here is the rise of the true Greek bourgeoisie—subsequently encouraged and abetted by its Roman counterpart—which systematically destroyed all those precarious, but genuine, advances in democracy and freedom for which earlier ages had fought so hard and so long.
Thus in both Alexandria and Antioch, and subsequently in minor kingdoms such as Pergamon or Bactria, we find a Macedonian, or less often a Greek, ruling dynasty, primarily dedicated to its own perpetuation, and draining both the economy and the public fiscal resources for this purpose. If we do not bear in mind the paradox of Hellenistic finance, the workings of the administration will often be very hard to fathom. Yet at the same time, human nature being what it is, these dynasts were most anxious to justify their rule on a religious, even on a philosophical basis.4 Some, like Antigonus Gonatas, were more sincere about this than others. It is no accident that the early Hellenistic period saw a proliferation of treatises on kingship.5 By a series of historical accidents, monarchy had once more come to be the most generally viable system of rule, and, as usual, intellectual justification had to be found for a political fait accompli. The trend is already apparent early in the fourth century, with the pamphlets of Isocrates6 and Aristotle’s somewhat embarrassed discussion of monarchy in the Politics:7 however personally congenial, it went against the intellectual democratic Zeitgeist. Still, Pella was funding Aristotle’s work, and he had, after all, been the young Alexander’s tutor; not only he but also Theopompus seems to have written a “Letter of Advice” to the crown prince.8
One thing that emerged from all this was the concept of the morally responsible ruler. Demetrius of Phaleron urged Ptolemy Soter to read treatises on kingship (p. 88), hinting that he might find there advice such as his courtiers would not dare to give him face to face.9 Not the Stoics only, but also the Peripatetics, even the Neo-Pythagoreans,10 began to promote the idea of meritocracy in kingship, the notion of the crown as something to be earned by noble deeds, coupled with a sense of royal responsibility to one’s subjects, Antigonus Gonatas’s creed of noble servitude.11 It is not hard to see how such an approach could also embody the Euhemeristic concept of deification as the reward for great deeds on earth: had not Heracles pointed the way? Kingship and divinization thus became a linked upward sequence in the same process, something akin to the later official Roman career plan, the cursus honorum.
It is interesting, especially in view of their economic preoccupations, that these rulers tried to avoid the historical justification—namely, that they wore their crowns by right of their, and Alexander’s, conquests—and preferred by far either the philosophical justification of power through good works, or, even more convenient, the concept, said to have been declared by Seleucus Nicator, that “it is not the customs of the Persians and other such races that I shall impose on you, but rather this law, common to all, that the king’s decrees are always just.”12 The best man is king; whoever becomes king has therefore proved himself the best, and, since he embodies the law (below, p. 200), can do no wrong, is inevitably just—a most useful syllogism for any royal arriviste. None of this was really new, except for the intellectual rationalization: most of it, in fact, was something more than archaic.13 The whole concept of right subsisting in the will of an anointed or otherwise specially privileged ruler went right back to primitive tribal custom. Compared with this, the Athenian achievement—nearly five centuries of painfully won civic justice, of legal codes, of equality under a common law (isonomia)—remained an anomaly. But then, it was even longer ago that Athens, for one, had got rid of her kings.
The pattern now evolving was, like so much else in the Hellenistic world, syncretic. With the extinction of the Argead line (above, p. 28), blood succession was, for a moment at least, in abeyance; however, all three main dynasties, once established, perpetuated themselves by filial inheritance. (The Ptolemies, who habitually practiced sibling incest, kept an even closer grip on the dynastic succession, though at the price, eventually, of a somewhat erratic gene pool.) The other sure route to kingship was conquest. Here the models that all Alexander’s marshals had to emulate were Philip II and Alexander himself. The Macedonian monarchy had retained numerous archaic, even Homeric traits:14 the prestige of the triumphant warrior; the symbolic use of the diadem, the royal robe, and the seal ring; personal command in war; a group of privileged and, most often, aristocratic Companions, or Friends (hetairoi, philoi), in battle, at dinner, to give advice as a royal council; the right to distribute booty (and to control looting); the duty, in general, of being what Homer called the “shepherd of the people,” handing out gifts and charitable patronage, winning renown as fighter and hunter, and through philanthropic generosity and cultural enhancement.15
This generosity also implied a great fund of wealth on which it could draw at will without impoverishing the donor; and the king’s style of life, with palace, pomp, display, and numerous servants, was expected to reflect his exalted status. At the same time excessive luxury was frowned on, in particular by Stoic theorists: moderation and self-control, a sense of justice in accordance with the divine harmony of things—such was the ideal at which a Hellenistic monarch, in theory at least, was expected to aim. Once a basis for the king’s function had been established, it was not hard for court moralists and philosophers to formulate more or less tactful rules of royal conduct. A king must honor truth; he must also be accessible to his subjects. Plutarch tells a famous anecdote about an old woman with a petition to Demetrius the Besieger. He brushed her aside with the excuse that he was too busy to attend to her. “Too busy?” the old woman snapped. “In that case, stop being king.”16 Hellenistic kings also, as we have seen, regarded themselves as guardians of culture—Greek culture, understood, though Ptolemy Soter did order the Egyptian priest Manetho to write, in Greek, a history of Egypt, perhaps because Seleucus Nicator had earlier commissioned Berossos (also a priest) to set down, again in Greek, a digest of Babylonian wisdom. The two works were finally dedicated, on completion, to Ptolemy II Philadelphos and Antiochus I.17
All this should be borne in mind when we consider the problems of the individual dynasties. Nothing so exposes the glory-seeking and xenophobia behind Alexander’s supposed Hellenizing mission to the East as the stubborn refusal of the civilizations he invaded to appreciate the higher things he offered them in return for their subjugation.18 The parallel with British India is inescapable. What the indigenous population got, in both cases, was technical expertise, a strangling bureaucracy, and a useful lingua franca—English in one case, the koinē in the other. The government was, similarly, imposed by the conquerors rather than nationally based. We must suppose that the likelihood of Ptolemy I’s ever advancing native non-Greek-speaking Egyptians to positions of high office always remained minimal, especially when we consider the total failure of Alexander’s experiments in this direction the moment he was dead. It was inevitable, from the beginning, that Ptolemy would employ a cadre of Macedonians and Greeks, who would then in turn transmit their orders—in the first instance via a corps of interpreters—to a largely unchanged system of Egyptian scribal administration, the infrastructure of local government.19
Ptolemaic Egypt offers us most of our firsthand evidence of the bureaucracy at work, though since the papyri deal in detail with one particular area (Philadelphia in the Fayyum), and information for Alexandria itself is largely lacking, the effect can be to drown us in a sea of local municipal detail—surveys, petitions, receipts, accounts, nominal rolls, petty litigation—rather than to afford us a broad overview. During the reigns of the first three Ptolemies, for which our evidence is fullest, the administration and economy were maintained in reasonable equilibrium. Egyptians were used to the notion of a king who personally owned their country; the early Ptolemies were still to some extent influenced and restrained by Greek precedent. Even so, there were no fewer than four dating systems employed simultaneously by Philadelphos’s officials, so that the recipient of a letter, like the modern scholar, had to work out, or guess, which system applied in each particular case.20
Regulations tended to be specific, rational, and, above all, efficient. Where Ptolemaic control took on a thoroughly un-Greek appearance was in its cavalier treatment of private property, its encroachment on laissez-faire economics with an all-pervasive system of state control. Such control, however, had to be competently as well as forcefully applied; and from the time of Ptolemy IV onwards, the Lagid monarchy’s declining prestige abroad was matched by faltering administrative machinery in Egypt itself. It is hard to decide whether constant dynastic intrigues, minority regencies, military reverses, and economic crises were primarily responsible for the breakdown of the system, or whether simmering anarchy and sullen antigovernmentalism (especially in the rural areas) contributed more, in the first instance, to this decline by substantially diminishing the royal revenues. In any case the two trends seem to have been symbiotic. After the battle of Raphia (217: see p. 289), when for the first time native Egyptian troops were recruited in large numbers, riots and revolts became endemic, and a good many concessions officially touted as philanthrōpia in fact represented tacit surrenders to force majeure.
Right from the beginning, as satrap, fifteen years or so before he declared himself king, Ptolemy I had seen very clearly that he was faced in Egypt with several intractable conditions that he might or might not be able to make work for his advantage. Because of the nature of Egypt’s fertility, which was wholly dependent on the Nile floods, the pharaohs had very early established a powerful centralized bureaucracy (essential for adequate irrigation and flood control), aligned with an equally powerful priesthood.21 Ptolemy had to take over the first, and avoid alienating the second (see below). Then as now, it paid to have the support of the mullahs. At the same time he could not rely on local resources to maintain his rule in any way; nor is it probable that such a notion ever occurred to him. He would have to retain a strong Graeco-Macedonian army, besides importing, or encouraging, a large, active colony of Greek businessmen, willing, initially, to invest Greek capital in the country. One primary reason for granting what amounted to privileged mass immigration, on very favorable terms, would be to ensure a flourishing and profitable export trade.22 Egypt produced no silver, and now, with the progressive exhaustion of the Nubian mines, very little gold of her own, either.23 That large, expensive army had to be paid, cash on the barrel, or else it became a dangerous liability; the export flow of grain, and papyrus, and other commodities (pp. 366 ff.), was essential to keep the royal exchequer in adequate funds, a goal that excise and direct taxation could not achieve unaided. As for Egypt’s agricultural and other home production, the Ptolemies took very good care to ensure that it was geared, first and foremost, to paying them. If Egypt was a royal estate, they were its landlords.
What kind of loyalty could the Ptolemies count on? Their Friends (who gradually expanded into a large administrative class) formed the original base of their support. The military, in every sense mercenaries, served for pay, while Macedonian regulars were further indebted to the crown for grants of land (klēroi) and free billets or lodgings:24 very often a family would serve in the army for generation after generation (again, the parallel of British India comes to mind). Foreign civilians granted citizenship and privileges would likewise support the regime with some enthusiasm. But with the native Egyptians it was quite another matter. Despite a policy (initiated by Alexander, and regularized by Ptolemy III and his successors) of the king’s also being consecrated as pharaoh on accession,25 the priesthood and population would very naturally have preferred Egyptian rulers. The priests could be, and were, won over temporarily by lavish concessions and benefactions, including the building of temples;26 but it seems clear that during the violent insurrection that erupted against Ptolemaic rule after Raphia the priests, like their Orthodox counterparts in the Greek War of Independence, played a leading role.27 The toiling fellahin—on whose constant labor the economy, in the last resort, has always depended28—had no say in the matter, but undoubtedly preferred indigenous to foreign masters. Adoption of the pharaonic cult, in fact, never reconciled Egypt to these adventitious Macedonian rulers. The Hyksos dynasty had, in the end, been driven out;29 might not the Lagids one day suffer the same fate?
Symbolic of their alien quality, of course, in sharp contrast to the age-old pharaonic city of Memphis, was Alexandria itself, the new foreign capital on the Mediterranean—polyglot, alien, whoring after strange gods, its tall lighthouse casting radiance far out over the waters of what the Egyptians, with parochial suspicion, described as the “Great Green.”30 Ptolemaic rule never really caught on in Egypt. That is significant, since the Ptolemies, unlike their Persian predecessors, were actually resident in the country—in it, yet not of it: insulated by their Greek-speaking court and bureaucracy, largely indifferent to Egyptian culture, exploiters in an alien world. Small wonder, in the circumstances, that no Ptolemy before Cleopatra VII learned to speak Egyptian. Modern parallels suggest themselves.
A great deal has been made of the complexity and centralization of Ptolemaic administration: it is often suggested that this (like it or not) was yet another example of Greek rational efficiency at work. Efficient at first it was (above, p. 191); but all too soon the bureaucracy became top-heavy, indecisive, and with a fatal tendency to strangle in its own red tape. The centralization, far from being the result of administrative streamlining, tended to be caused by a nagging (and well-justified) fear of fraud at every level. Everyone was on the take; each petty official was bent on feathering his own local nest. The result was a mass of directives, returns, and memoranda that equals anything a government agency can turn out today. Every department, from the state treasury to the ministry of justice, had as its prime objective the increasing of the king’s power and revenues. A nice instance of this is the famous oil monopoly enjoyed by Ptolemy II, and detailed at length in his revenue laws.31 Every price is specified; also what oil plant (sesame, castor, linseed, etc.) shall be sown in which area, how and where the oil workers are to register locally (it is a criminal offense for them to move from one nome, or district, to another). There are endless fines, for anything from buying non-government oil on the sly to withholding wages or seed at the prescribed time. We glimpse a whole swarm of petty officials in charge of this cumbersome operation: tax farmers, clerks, village headmen (kōmarchai), overseers, government agents, excisemen. Once again, the goal is the maintenance of the status quo. “The intention of these elaborate regulations was clearly purely fiscal: to ensure the king’s revenues, not to improve production.”32
Alexandria, as we have seen (above, p. 88), enjoyed titular independence: at least it possessed a council and assembly, though they probably exercised jurisdiction over municipal affairs only, and with notable exceptions even there.33 The royal palaces, the harbor, the army, and the foreign communities generally were under the direct control of the crown, and answerable to Greek laws. The Egyptian countryside (chōra), split up, as under the pharaohs, into nomes (nomoi, districts), was directly administered by a royal bureaucracy, the main concern of which was to screw tax quotas out of the inhabitants.34 The government of external possessions such as Cyprus, Cyrene, or Coele-Syria—which formed a closed-currency zone with Egypt (p. 373)35—was carried out by stratēgoi (military commanders) directly responsible to the throne: this system showed the Ptolemaic blend of central control and delegated authority at its most successful.36 The main value of these areas was strategic, though the copper mines, forests, and wheat of Cyprus also offered an economic bonanza.37 The stratēgoi were not, for obvious reasons, given too much financial independence: a strong commander still had to depend on the local treasurer (oikonomos) for funds, and the oikonomos was a crown appointee, reporting to Alexandria. Thus overambitious or would-be rebellious provincial administrators found it hard to build up any kind of independent power base against the central government. This may also have been one reason why, in Cyprus especially, democratic institutions were encouraged in the cities: a decentralized system of government was far harder to organize for effective rebellion.38
There seems, also, as we might expect, to have been some distinction between the long-term imperial holdings, such as Cyrene, and other, less permanent, areas of influence, especially those with a predominantly Greek population and a tradition of independence, such as the Cycladic islands or the coastal cities of Asia Minor. The latter tended to keep their own mints, and in general enjoyed a greater degree of real autonomy.39 The overall impression, however, certainly throughout Egypt itself, the heartland of the Lagid kingdom, is one of strangling royal interference in every area, of heavy taxation, of bureaucratic illiberalism run riot. Alexandria, with its luxury, culture, commerce, public shows, and relentless ostentation, was the playground and front window for an occupying power that never came to terms with, much less assimilated, the age-old native civilization on which it had imposed itself. Ironically, after a harsh period of Persian rule, punctuated with violent nationalist uprisings, the Egyptians in 332 had welcomed Alexander as a deliverer—a fundamental error of judgment with appalling consequences for the future.40 Too late, they found that what Macedonia brought was not freedom but systematic exploitation.
The Seleucid East, like Ptolemaic Egypt, was another case of spear-won territory held down by right of conquest, and similarly at the monarch’s arbitrary disposal, to veterans, cities, or private individuals, as gifts, or in return for cash or services.41 Again, there was no national power base, and no ethnic support. The Seleucids’ problems were worse than those facing the Ptolemies in that they did not control one well-defined and well-protected area, unified ethnically and virtually safe from invasion; what they had was a loose, heterogeneous, and rapidly shrinking mass of old Achaemenid satrapies, where communications were, at the best of times, hazardous. Macedonian by birth, the ruling dynasty always had its eyes to the west; yet even there its position was tenuous. The Seleucids never controlled the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis for all its length; from Antioch they were forced to loop south by way of Cilicia and the Taurus range, through lower Phrygia.42 Their administrative and military control was never as effective as the Ptolemies’, despite their policy of covering their vast territories with a network of Greek-controlled strongholds and post roads, once again in the hands of privileged immigrants, including numerous Ionians.43
These settlements ranged from military colonies (katoikiai), largely concentrated in Lydia and Phrygia, to villages (kōmai), garrison outposts (chōria or phrouria), and cities proper (poleis): the distinctions are those conferred by municipal status. The katoikiai never seem to have evolved into poleis, perhaps because the constant local warfare endemic to the area made too much autonomy seem undesirable in the eyes of the authorities.44 In any case even the poleis, being subject to the imposition of governors, garrisons, taxes, and arbitrary royal edicts, did very little better than the less-privileged communities. Just as the Ptolemies had a viceroy in southern Egypt at the new city of Ptolemaïs, so the Seleucids ruled their eastern satrapies from Seleucia-on-Tigris, leaving Antioch as their capital in the west (above, p. 164). The size of these imperial fiefs made secession by the local satrap—very often a member of the royal family—an ever-present possibility, as the cases of Antiochus Hierax and Achaeus all too clearly demonstrate (pp. 263, 291):45 a compelling reason for the regular separation of military and civil authority that, again, both Ptolemies and Seleucids practiced, a lesson learned (along with so much else) from the example of Alexander.46
The Seleucid royal court, household, and administration, insofar as evidence is available for them, seem to have closely resembled the Ptolemies’.47 Once again we find an independent Graeco-Macedonian cadre, its habits perhaps somewhat more Orientalized than those prevailing among Ptolemy’s bureaucrats. The chain of military settlements described above was capable of providing, in an emergency, up to about 47,000 infantry and 8,000 to 8,500 cavalry: it also had a very similar system of land grants for regular soldiers.48 The fleet seems to have been maintained by trierarchies, in the old Athenian manner. The Seleucids not only kept up a strong cavalry arm (one reason why they clung so desperately to the horse-breeding satrapy of Media),49 but also had a large corps of war elephants—another royal monopoly— stationed at Apamea.50
The Seleucids, again like the Ptolemies, also instituted a royal cult: the worship of kings was well acclimatized in the East. The Babylonians, for example, were quite ready to worship Seleucus Nicator (officially, now, descended from Apollo) along with their other gods.51 Ilion, similarly, offered him monthly sacrifices, and instituted quadrennial games in his honor.52 In various cities he had his own priest, was given the title of theos, and provided with a divine genealogy.53 It was only later, when Antiochus III and his successors began raiding native temples for their tithe as “gods manifest,”54 that they, like the later Ptolemies, ran up against a blank wall of religious hostility, once more with a strong nationalist ingredient to it. The Seleucids, like the Ptolemies, could conciliate a native priesthood, for the time being, by what amounted to large-scale bribery; but the moment they infringed unacceptably on religious or ethnic prerogatives, they were rapidly, and forcibly, reminded that they ruled only on sufferance, and by right of conquest. It is no accident that whenever the various parts of the empire felt they had a chance to break away they invariably did so (cf. p. 263).
At this point it will be convenient to examine the ambivalent position of the officially autonomous Greek poleis. Though various kings, as we have seen, talked a good deal about freedom and self-government in their dealings with the Greek cities under their control, it is safe to say that genuine liberty was never in question— certainly no more than suited the king’s policies. Eleutheria, in short, remained conditional upon the will and coercive strength of the sovereign.55 This was especially true in the cities of mainland Greece and western Asia Minor, where a tradition of autonomy had been long established (p. 25): all three Successor dynasties played variations on a complex freedom-charade in their dealings with these foundations. Small wonder that in Euhemerus’s utopia the inhabitants were specifically declared to be not only autonomous, but also kingless (abasileutoi).56
The degree to which the poleis enjoyed actual independence was directly dictated by one of two principal factors: their proven loyalty, or, in a case like that of Rhodes, their strength to resist attack. Both factors were predicated on the relative power or weakness of the individual monarch.57 This lesson had been strikingly demonstrated during Alexander’s march of conquest southward from the Granicus to Caria: surrender and cooperation were rewarded; resistance met with violent punitive measures, and in all cases Alexander himself was the judge, indeed often the creator, of that international law (Völkerrecht) on which, in theory, the relationship between monarch and city was to rest.58 The same remained true for the Successors. Technically, the Greek cities were left not only free, but in most cases democratic. Cassander’s rational experiment in governing through oligarchic juntas had proved immensely unpopular (above, p. 48),59 and while no autocrat would willingly surrender the realities of power, most of them (as should by now be clear) saw the advantages of catering to the nostalgic amour propre of local civic government. It cost nothing, provided excellent publicity, and, by decentralizing authority (above, p. 194), created an extra safeguard against sedition.
All this produced a kind of political mirage that it was in the interest of both sides to maintain.60 While the king, in the last resort, regarded the Greek cities as more or less privileged enclaves in territory over which his final word was law, the cities themselves, as has well been said, “while not disputing the sovereignty of the kings over their Macedonians and over the barbarians whom they had conquered, liked to regard themselves as sovereign states in alliance with the king.”61 The king, alert to public opinion, did not press the constitutional issue, and in any case saw autonomous local government as a useful instrument for simplifying his own administrative responsibilities.62 The cities went through the motions of freedom, but in the last resort they did so on sufferance. What they really felt about their de facto subjection can be inferred from the carefully euphemistic terminology employed in decrees of the early to mid-third century honoring Greek officials who served the Successors.63 Such service, though popular (Callias of Sphettos offers a good example), was felt to be a trifle embarrassing. Thus we find it said of such persons, in decrees intended for Greek public consumption, that they had “spent time with” the king, or had “gone abroad” with him, or had “enjoyed his friendship”: anything to circumvent the notion of paid service, and perhaps a residual unwillingness to face the grim fact of political impotence.64 It is significant that later this objection fades: by 200 the honorand’s court title is being expressed openly, without circumlocution.
It is surprising how many scholars till comparatively recent times showed themselves ready, indeed eager, to accept the mirage as sober fact. Today the mood is different. Wolfgang Orth’s Königlicher Machtanspruch und städtische Freiheit spells out, in detail and from a whole series of individual instances, the regular exercise of force majeure, by Seleucus Nicator and his immediate successors, upon Greek poleis that were in no position to resist. Sois mon frère, ou je te tue: behind the façade of theoretical freedom we find extortion, blackmail, press-ganging, and other similar practices,65 all predicated upon Machtpolitik. As Ernst Badian nicely put it, “Völkerrecht, in the world of the Hellenistic kings, was always a mixture between what we might call the balance of interests and the balance of terror.”66 The reluctance of earlier writers to recognize such unpalatable truths sprang in part from a quite remarkable faith in, and preoccupation with, the sanctity of Völkerrecht as an internationally accepted juridical force before which even the most powerful monarch must bow in acquiescence.
Undeterred by the modern example of the International High Court of Justice at the Hague (not a body famous for enforcing its beliefs, let alone its decisions, on anyone), Tarn took this thesis well beyond its logical conclusion, a reductio ad absurdum in every sense, by arguing that the reason why—in 324, after conquering the Achaemenid empire!—Alexander the Great requested deification was because otherwise, in insisting on the return of all exiles to their cities, he would be overstepping his legally constituted authority as hēgemōn (leader) of the League of Corinth.67 Unreal pedantry could scarcely go farther. Yet the most influential prewar monograph on the relations between cities and rulers in the Hellenistic period, Heuss’s Stadt und Herrscher des Hellenismus, is full of similar sophistries. It should scarcely need emphasizing at this point that even if we could trace a coherent system of international law covering the relations of the Seleucids, or any other Hellenistic power, with the Greek cities—which we cannot—its importance would still be limited to the degree to which the monarchs chose to observe it. In this respect Bikerman’s Institutions des Séleucides is a model of pragmatic realism.68
If the situation permitted, some cities could at least be relieved of those embarrassing outward signs of subjugation, for example garrisons and tribute quotas, under which many of them labored.69 The tribute, in any case, could always be made good by calling it something else, whether taxes or contributions (syntaxeis): where juridical autonomy, even in the technical sense, ended and arbitrary royal benevolence (eunoia) began was sometimes hard to determine. On the other hand, genuine freedom (once again the example of Rhodes comes to mind) could be a distinct embarrassment to any Hellenistic ruler whose airy talk about autonomy came up against the harsh realities of the power struggle. Antigonus One-Eye offers a good example. When he needed the Rhodian fleet to fight Ptolemy (above, p. 32), and Rhodes—whose leaders were in any case sympathetic with the Ptolemaic regime, for commercial if for no other reasons—preferred to stay neutral, he sent Demetrius to reduce the island stronghold by force.70 Even the titular democracies of the Greek cities, that of Rhodes included (p. 378), were to some extent a sham, since throughout the Hellenistic period their government was increasingly weighted in favor of the propertied classes, and as a rule ignored not only slaves and metics, but also, in colonial foundations, a substantial body of disfranchised indigenous inhabitants.71
This makes it even harder to understand the still-prevalent emphasis on the “self-governing” poleis, and the “formal complexities of Greek international life in the hellenistic period.”72 If this period is, in fact, “unthinkable without the poleis,” if “no contribution to the history of Völkerrecht which ignores the basic community-form in which most Greeks lived can claim to have more than scratched the surface of the complex legal, moral and traditional relationships which regulated inter-state intercourse in the hellenistic world,” if it was, finally, “the poleis which survived,” what does all this in fact mean? Merely that towns, whether in Hellenistic Greece, medieval England, middle America, or the Soviet Union, are more often than not (whatever their relative degree of bottom-line freedom) left to run themselves, at least at a municipal level, because to run them from outside is simply too much trouble. The minutiae of local government can be fascinating in their own right, but to treat them as the larger world in microcosm is to court disaster. The plain truth of this at once becomes apparent when we study the actual exchanges between, say, the cities of Asia Minor and the Seleucids. In pursuit of autonomy (i.e., the privilege of being left alone), and of sizable land grants attached, via their individual recipients, to civic territory, local embassies would lavish flattery, gold wreaths, birthday honors, and every kind of sycophantic toadyism on the monarch concerned.73
Last, a brief word—brief, because the evidence is minimal74—about Antigonid Macedonia. The great difference between the kingdom of Antigonus Gonatas and that of his Seleucid or Ptolemaic contemporaries is, of course, that unlike them he had a national power base: he was a Macedonian ruling Macedonians, and with a fair line of descent from Antigonus One-Eye and Antipater to justify his kingship. Alone among the Successors, the Antigonids were not, by and large, dependent upon spear-won territory, though now they held Chalcidice, Paeonia, Thessaly (where since Philip II’s day the Macedonian king had been ex officio archon for life, a pleasant, face-saving fiction),75 a buffer in Thrace, and a handful of important Greek cities. Thus they were not, in the full sense of the word, Hellenistic. Even though their own cities were by now standard Greek poleis, with mixed commercial populations, they did not carry their rule or their language abroad and attempt to impose them on a subjugated alien people. Nor were they prone to those devastating family intrigues that so weakened the Ptolemies and Seleucids. There was some, though not much, royal land available outside Macedonia for the ruler’s friends (such fiefs reverting to the crown upon the donor’s death), or for settlers, but no large-scale imperial exploitation.
The old Macedonian nobility that had been so powerful a force under Philip II and Alexander was now no more than a shadow of its former self. Many of the old-guard barons had fallen in battle, or been purged, during Alexander’s Eastern campaigns. Of those who survived, some stayed abroad, whether in or out of office, and the bulk of those who came back, as well as Antipater’s friends who stayed in Macedonia throughout, had died either during the wars of the Successors, or else fighting the Gauls. In any case by the mid-third century they were no longer a serious factor in Macedonian politics.76 This, together with the smaller territory involved, kept Macedonia free, by and large, from the complex court bureaucracies, and court intrigues, that plagued the Ptolemies and Seleucids. The country was split up, for administrative purposes, into cities or groups of cities, under overseers or governors (epistatai) directly responsible to the king.77 Antigonid control over the rest of Greece was now one of dominant influence rather than direct rule. The only points south of Thessaly where Macedonia still maintained such direct rule—and garrisons—were the so-called Fetters of Greece: Demetrias, Chalsis, Acrocorith, and, intermittently, Piraeus, similarly governed by epistatai, but with overall control vested in two military commanders. This, however, was a defensive arrangement only, aimed at preserving the status quo, and a certain degree of superiority through the possession of strategic fortresses—which had, indeed, more than justified the collective name by which they were known.
One effective check on any taste a Macedonian king might have for renewed expansionism was a shortage of funds. The Pangaeum mines had declined in productivity from about 300, after Philip II’s vigorous exploitation,78 till by the second century the Macedonian land tax (which included state revenue from the mines) yielded no more than two hundred talents.79 The vast wealth brought back after Alexander’s campaigns had been largely dissipated,80 and the prolonged ravages of the Gauls had further impoverished the economy. What remained was the timber and ship-chandling trade, plus a margin of exportable grain, which at least enabled Gonatas to maintain full production of an excellent gold and silver coinage,81 with regular commercial outlets via Rhodes and Delos.82
Antigonus Gonatas was also heir to the well-established pattern of the Argead dynasty whereby the king was primus inter pares, ruled by virtue of his bloodline, but exacted only as much respect as his personal charisma could command, and made no fuss about pomp and circumstance.83 He wore a purple cloak, a broad-brimmed hat, and on occasion a simple blue-and-white headband as diadem. His scepter was a staff, and he did not require prostration of his subjects, who addressed him without flowery honorifics. As for royal deification, the Macedonians had had quite enough of that with Alexander. Perhaps no other ruler could have got away with a request to be worshipped as a god among his own Macedonians; even so, Antipater for one flatly refused to accede (p. 143). Antigonus, the Stoic, preferred his kingship to be based on philosophical justification rather than on any supposititious assumption of godhead (p. 143)—which is not to say that the Ptolemies or the Seleucids would not take a good philosophical argument if it came their way: Antigonus was simply a little more scrupulous about it. Indeed, most of the philosophical schools, as we have seen (p. 189), were eagerly scrambling aboard the authoritarian bandwagon, finding proofs, to their own satisfaction, that monarchy was the best form of government, that the king embodied the state—L’état, c’est moi two millennia ahead of itself—and was, indeed, “law incarnate.”84
On all this Antigonus turned a cool eye, sardonic in the wisdom that only harsh experience can bring. To the flatterers who assured him that his deeds had made him divine he replied, drily, “My pisspot-bearer knows better.”85 Antigonus’s attitude looks forward to that of the dying Emperor Vespasian, well aware that he would automatically be deified on expiry, and muttering to those around him, in extremis, “Oh dear—I think I’m turning into a god.”86 There is a fundamental sanity about Antigonus’s attitude (whatever we may think of his Stoic pretensions) that comes as a relief after all the cultural and theocratic propaganda the Seleucids and Ptolemies employed to justify the territorial exploitations that they owed, in the last resort, to dead Alexander’s conquests.