At the time of Antigonus Gonatas’s death in 239, Aratus—a general of great energy and vision, though reputedly prone to diarrhea before every major engagement1—had made the Achaean League a force to be reckoned with in mainland Greece. His capture of Acrocorinth in 243 (brilliant, though not preceded by any declaration of war, and carried out at the expense of a nominally friendly power)2 had fatally weakened Macedonia’s control over the Peloponnese.3 The rival Aetolian League had already put Boeotia hors de concours (245) and now controlled most of central Greece.4 In terms of local Greek power politics they were bound, sooner rather than later, to try their luck against Aratus. In 241 they did so, and were soundly beaten: Aratus allowed them an easy victory and then, knowing their lax discipline, took them by surprise while they were plundering the suburbs of Pellene.5 A year or so later the two confederacies were uneasily allied against Macedonia (239/8?). The relationship rested on nothing but temporary convenience, and could not last: it took a really undaunted political idealist to describe it as “the most hopeful Greek alignment of Hellenistic times,” and by 230 it was a dead letter.6
Antigonus, old and ill, made peace with Aratus in 241/0. Tarn, with fine hyperbole, writes of “a general truce throughout the Greek world,”7 but the treaty did little to check Aratus’s disruptive activities. These included abortive attacks, in the name of anti-Macedonian “freedom,” on Argos and Piraeus; for the latter he afterwards tried, in some embarrassment, to throw the blame on a colleague.8 The Athenians were in no mood to exchange their easygoing Macedonian control for Aratus’s brand of confederate adventurism. Aratus himself was regularly elected (every alternate year, the prescribed maximum) as commander-in-chief of the Achaean League—the League consisting of a group of cities united in a confederacy (sympoliteia), that is, with a common federal citizenship but retaining independent control of their internal affairs (cf. above, p. 139). This constitution has been the cause of much scholarly debate (its written terms do not survive), but the modern, if more complex, parallel of the United States is inescapable.
The alliances in Greece during the next couple of decades display a labile quality in which immediate convenience is the paramount factor, and principle conspicuous by its absence. In 240/39, before Antigonus Gonatas’s death, Macedonia and Aetolia were allied against the Achaean League; the League itself was largely financed by Ptolemy III (an encouragement to anti-Macedonianism) and uncertainly allied with Sparta. The Aetolians, however, though for long Macedonia’s allies,9 fell out with Antigonus’s successor, Demetrius II, over their aggressive policy in Epirus, and promptly, as we have seen, allied themselves instead with the Achaean League (239): the so-called War of Demetrius, which followed, lasted until 229. Aratus’s expansive plans for the League also, before long, came into collision with the ultra-Lycurgan ambitions of Cleomenes in Sparta: by 228 Sparta and the League were at war. Ptolemy III, calculating that a resurgent Sparta would prove a more effective ally against Macedonia than the League, transferred his backing from Aratus to Cleomenes, and the Aetolians, in effect, followed suit (though in their case there was always the likelihood of their selling their swords to the highest bidder). Finally, in a volte-face the shock of which still reverberates through our surviving sources, the League called in Antigonus Doson of Macedonia in order to crush Spartan imperialism before it got out of hand. This completed the ronde.
It is a melancholy progression, made worse by the fact that any trace of purported idealism, revolutionary or other, that we encounter during these fraught years turns out, on investigation, to be mere camouflage for the most squalid class warfare or ruthless Machtpolitik. This does not, however, imply total cynicism. Equality, even if it was equality for a privileged elite only, remained an ideal that men in Sparta would still fight and die for, not least when it was inextricably linked to the recovery of the old, proud, warrior regime associated with the name of Lycurgus. Even so, at times one momentarily sympathizes with the impatience of Arnold Toynbee, who, despite having lived through half a century of totalitarianism, both fascist and communist, found all this parochial squabbling distasteful in the extreme, and argued that the best possible solution for the Greek states was another strong external leader like Philip II.10
Sparta, in any case, was dangerously weakened by her peculiar internal stresses, both social and economic. There is daunting irony in the fact that this ultraconservative Greek state should have been the one to turn into what was widely regarded at the time as a hotbed of social revolution, though the change in question was actually a counterrevolution, or even, it has been argued, a mirage. We have already seen how her young king Agis IV got himself killed while trying to deal with the situation (p. 153).11 It would be misleading to suppose that either Agis or his later successor, Cleomenes III, was any kind of a radical in the modern sense. Most of their “revolutionary” moves (e.g., their repeated, and often illegal, attacks on the ephors, that group of five annually elected commissars who formed a constitutional counterweight to the monarchy)12 were primarily designed to increase their own unchallenged power. The violent opposition to their reformist movement was a case of conflict between degrees of elitism: it stemmed from a small caucus of ultraconservative property owners, perhaps not more than a hundred or so all told, into whose hands had fallen the best of the land and a vast preponderance of wealth, and who had not the slightest intention—despite the Lycurgan tradition—of surrendering their privileged status without a fight. It was this group, under Leonidas II, Cleomenes’ father, that not only killed Agis and fought Cleomenes, but also had Agis’s brother Archidamus assassinated, when Cleomenes in 227 tried to strengthen his hand by recalling him from exile in Messene (below, p. 257).13
The curious sense of unreality that permeates the so-called Spartan revolution during these decades (ca. 244–222) is directly due to the fact that its main object—reform rather than revolution—was to restore a near-fatally crippled elite.14 The famous homoioi, the “Equals,” the Spartiate warriors whose business was national defense (and, on occasion, national aggression), and who lived off the produce of their serf-worked estates, had by the third century fallen from an original (mid-seventh century) figure of some eight or nine thousand to no more than seven hundred.15 This fact alone at once suggests a new and dangerous vulnerability of the elite to all those inferiors, helots above all, who had for centuries been held down by well-organized force majeure. Not only were the numbers of the Spartiates diminished: their famous, and rigorous, Lycurgan training, the agōgē, had, perhaps in consequence of Sparta’s collapse as a leading Aegean power, largely gone by the board. The influx of wealth had played its part in the decline; it had also played havoc with Sparta’s always ramshackle ancient economy. More and more of the ancestral land, as we have seen, had fallen into the hands of a powerful minority, including women—a factor that seems to have been regarded as one of their major stumbling blocks by the reformists.16 Countless Spartiates had lost their landholdings (klaroi), and as a result, under Spartan law, had either lost their citizenship altogether, or had been reduced to the status of second-class citizens (hypomeiones). Others were hopelessly in debt.
In short, Sparta had at last reached the same agrarian-social crisis that had faced Athens three and a half centuries earlier, in Solon’s day. (At the same time it should be borne in mind that throughout Greece, by the mid-third century, almost nonstop warfare, with its accompaniment of rapine, cropburning, wanton destruction, and, above all, slave trading on a massive scale, had made fearful inroads into the agricultural economy, striking especially hard at the free smallholder, and sending a steady stream of destitute, desperate men into the great cities. The erosion of the yeoman class, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the degradation of once-independent farmers or landowners to proletarian status—all these phenomena, though observable in acute form at Sparta, formed part of a more general malaise.)17 When we hear of seemingly radical-sounding schemes to abolish debts in Sparta, to redistribute the land on a massive scale, even to free helots, we should not be misled. Short-term, these were preemptive, and sometimes desperate, measures designed to forestall and choke off a true revolution from below by making the fewest concessions possible. Long-term, they were all promoted in furtherance of a paradoxically reactionary dream: the reestablishment of a strong and privileged elite, the purging of Sparta’s new and effete luxuries, the return of the Lycurgan regime, complete with black broth, flogging, and barrack life; above all, the resurgence, in significantly increased numbers, of a matchless standing army.
The chief malcontents were, precisely, those déclassé Spartiates who wanted their privileges back, who deeply resented the economic collapse that had been helped on its way by Sparta’s crushing defeat at Leuctra in 371, her loss of Messenia with its free granary and rich klaroi, the establishment of Messene and Megalopolis as rival powers on her frontiers.18 The fierce conservative opposition to the reformers’ plans has a certain piquancy in that those plans aimed, by and large, at a full restoration of the ancien régime.19 It is also significant that when the reform bill came to a vote in the gerousia (council of elders), it was defeated by only one vote: Agis had substantial backing for his plans. No less ironic, in a different way, was the use of Stoic notions of concord (homonoia), with its program of equality, fellowship, and the abolition of class war, to provide intellectual justification for what Agis and Cleomenes were doing. (On the other hand, the Stoa had been heavily influenced by Sparta from the beginning in its formulation of the ideal state,20 and it seems clear that Cleomenes’ Stoic adviser, Sphaerus, was as eager as anyone for the restoration of the Lycurgan constitution.)21 Homonoia was, essentially, for the homoioi: what happened to the second-class citizens of Laconia, the dwellers round about (perioikoi), or, a fortiori, the helots, was quite another matter. The manpower shortage among Spartiates was so acute that numerous perioikoi of the “best sort” were indeed offered citizenship, but primarily, as Cleomenes himself stressed, for purposes of defense, not through any principle of brotherhood.22 Admission to the club would per se ensure their grateful loyalty to its founding members.
All animals might in theory be equal, but for Spartiates some were definitely more equal than others. Here the Stoic partiality for strong, wise, reasonable royal rulers—the rational earthly analogues of Zeus ordering the universe—will have very much worked to the advantage of a monarch such as Cleomenes.23 The common messes, the equal lots (klaroi), the rigorous training, the whole Spartan legend, applied solely to a minority, an elite cadre. It was in their interests that land was to be redistributed; it was their debts that were to be canceled (in any case the Spartan treasury could not have paid them). Freeing the helots had no place in the Lycurgan system, which indeed relied on their labor to survive; and even Stoic thinkers were chary of advocating mass emancipation, since until the Industrial Revolution there was no obvious alternative source of cheap labor. Sphaerus (b. 290?), the Stoic thinker from Olbia who advised Cleomenes, and had been one of Zeno’s most brilliant students, doubtless supplied his movement (if that is the right word for it) with such ideology as it had, besides constituting a major source for Phylarchus.24 He may well have utilized that fine old Stoic bromide about even the most downtrodden slave being a king over his own soul, and enjoying spiritual if not physical freedom. What the helots thought about this is not on record.
It is no accident that the Hellenic Leagues of both Philip II and Demetrius the Besieger (above, p. 34) had provisions for using all their federal resources to crush social revolutions from below: from first to last, this was a property owners’ world. Third-century conditions for the poor were appalling: the gap between wealth and indigence had widened dangerously with the emergence of large urban centers under authoritarian rule. It is thus symptomatic of the age that, despite its crypto-fascist motivation, Agis’s attempt at reform should have been countered so strongly by a wealthy propertied minority. His murder in 241 was almost inevitable. In the calculations of Macedonia, the Achaean League (chiefly in the person of Aratus), and the Aetolians, then, comparatively little part was played by Sparta—at least from Antigonus Gonatas’s death until the sudden career of conquest and reform embarked on by Cleomenes in 229/8.
Gonatas’s son and successor, Demetrius II (ca. 275–229), was a vigorous activist who had probably been co-regent with his father during the last few years of the latter’s reign. He had taken a leaf out of Philip II’s book by marrying an Epirot princess, Phthia, in 239—perhaps as insurance against the Illyrians, and in general to shore up his western frontier25—and in 238/7 naming the child of their marriage Philip also.26 This was the future Philip V: Greece was not slow to take the hint. The Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, as we have seen, now allied themselves, briefly but effectively, against Demetrius.27 The course of this war is obscure, its details unimportant. But Aratus was successful enough to make the tyrant of Megalopolis, Lydiades, think twice about his support of Demetrius, and in 235 bring Megalopolis over to the Achaean League.28 Lydiades, a shrewd and ambitious politician, at once became Aratus’s personal rival, alternating with him as elected League commander-in-chief for the next six years. He also argued that the League would be well advised to move against Cleomenes rather than, as Aratus wanted, Argos. His motivation was obvious and preemptive: any Spartan king with aggression in mind might be expected to make Megalopolis his first target for attack, and Cleomenes was no exception.29 Aratus, who had been allied with Agis IV against Aetolia less than a decade before, saw no advantage, and much danger, in supporting the Megalopolitan’s notorious (if understandable) anti-Spartan crusade.30 Personal pique also may have played its part here: Aratus was jealous, and it was at his insistent urging that Lydiades’ proposal was turned down.
The polarization of anti-Spartan and anti-Macedonian groups within the League had disruptive consequences later. When Argos was finally brought into the League, in 229, it was at the cost of cutthroat intrigue between Aratus and Lydiades: if her leader Aristomachus finally “achieved Aratus’s dream, he then took the pleasure out of it by firmly aligning himself with Lydiades’ anti-Spartan policy, and since he was elected League general for 228/7, the result was a dangerous split in the confederation’s leadership.”31 At the time, though, it must have looked very much as though Aratus—that inveterate opponent of all things Macedonian32—was right. In 233 Demetrius’s attempt to regain a position of strength in the Peloponnese looked like succeeding. His general Bithys defeated Aratus at Phylacia: this turn of events so delighted the Athenians, no lovers of the Achaean League, that they made Bithys an honorary citizen on the spot.33 Times had changed indeed since Demosthenes’ day.
Demetrius got no chance to follow up this success. That constant Macedonian hazard, a tribal invasion from the north, now intervened. Demetrius lost his western allies in Epirus, where a civil war, with revolutionary undertones, had broken out.34 With the assassination of its queen, Deidameia, the Epirot royal house was toppled, and the new republic federated itself with Acarnania (once part of the Epirot kingdom, then taken over by Aetolia, now independent).35 Demetrius, hard pressed, turned to the Illyrians for military aid. Their levies made short work of Epirus, still weak from internal dissension; then, under their queen, Teuta, and with no major naval power available to contain them, they embarked on such an orgy of looting and piracy down the Adriatic coast as to attract the attention of Rome (229). With Illyrian corsairs controlling both the Straits of Otranto and the Corinthian Gulf, Italian trade began to suffer. Worse, these successes gave Teuta imperial ambitions for the Illyrian royal house. Already in 231 Illyrian troops (paid for by Demetrius) had routed the army of the Aetolian League besieging Medeon, in Acarnania.36 A year later Teuta attacked Elis and Messenia, and joined with a band of roving Gauls to briefly capture Phoenice, the port of Epirus.37 The Epirotes and Acarnanians, ungratefully, then concluded alliances with Illyria against their rescuers, the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, while Teuta, having put down a rebellion at home, toyed with the idea of invading Greece, of making Illyria a major Greek power.38 “The Illyrians were transforming themselves from disreputable buccaneers to respectable imperialists.”39
Italian traders complained, and the Greeks resident along the Adriatic coast panicked; the Romans sent a mildly irritated embassy “to investigate.”40 Our understanding of what the envoys actually accomplished is clouded by Polybian rhetoric. They do not seem to have issued any sort of immediate ultimatum, since Teuta went straight on with her aggressive campaign regardless, attacking Epidamnus, Apollonia, and the vital island of Corcyra (early summer 229). Reinforced by an Acarnanian squadron, she then defeated a combined Achaean-Aetolian fleet, whereupon Corcyra surrendered.41 Epidamnus was already under siege. Only now, with the Adriatic Greeks in a state of sheer hysteria, did the Romans move. It is worth noting that, throughout this whole furor, neither Demetrius II nor his successor Antigonus Doson made any move to involve Macedonia.42 Why should they, when the Romans, eventually, cleared up a dirty and dangerous situation for them? Far from regarding the Roman intervention with hostility, as was once thought,43 they surely welcomed it.44 They will also have noted that when the Romans attacked, they did so with devastating speed, violence, and professionalism, not to speak of crushing numerical superiority.45 The Illyrians, whose forte was privateering rather than formal warfare, collapsed ignominiously, and a treaty was signed by early spring 228.46
Three points are worth noting about this so-called First Illyrian War. First, Rome was clearly loath to intervene, and would not have done so for the sake of a few disgruntled Italian merchants alone. It was only when the whole complex of trade and communications between the eastern Adriatic, the Corinthian Gulf, and the wealthy cities of Magna Graecia was seriously threatened with disruption that her expeditionary force went into action. Second, having dealt with Teuta, the Romans showed no signs of wanting to establish any kind of permanent presence in Illyria. They mulcted the Illyrians of a war indemnity to cover their expenses; they forbade them (in the interests of peaceful commerce) to send warships anywhere near the Straits of Otranto; they trimmed back Illyria’s frontiers in favor of their local ally Demetrius of Pharos (see p. 296), an act they afterwards had cause to regret. But that was all. There was no occupation; no “protective” garrisons remained behind. For the time being, at least, Rome disclaimed any acquisitive interest in the Balkans. Third, the significance that Polybius attaches to this otherwise unimportant intervention, as being essential for the understanding of Rome’s rise to power, has nothing to do with imperialism, as has so often been supposed.47 Its real importance lies, simply and solely, in the crushing military superiority and disciplined skill of the Roman legions—a lesson that two far from negligible Macedonian kings, Philip V and Perseus, were to learn the hard way.
That same year Demetrius was defeated and killed in a great battle against the Dardanians (229): his son and heir, Philip, was still only nine.48 He had as guardian Demetrius’s cousin, Antigonus, nicknamed Doson. The meaning of this epithet is uncertain. Since Antigonus undertook to step down in Philip’s favor when the boy came of age, “Doson” is often interpreted as the future participle of the verb didōmi (i.e., “he who will give”); he was also known as Epitropos, “Trustee” or “Guardian.”49 At one point, threatened by an angry mob, he came close to resigning his thankless office altogether.50 It is also sometimes alleged that he took the Macedonians, as represented by their army assembly, into some kind of constitutional co-partnership (koinon), so that his authority was shared with them, and that in return he was elected king as Antigonus III (228/7?). But this is highly speculative: Doson’s power would seem, from his career, to have been unhampered by any such restraints. His main handicap was that, like so many of his line, he suffered from inherited tuberculosis (above, p. 123).51
Macedonia’s weakness had immediate repercussions in Greece. Still in 229, after some lean years made tolerable only through the public munificence of her millionaire leader Eurycleides,52 Athens finally got rid of her Macedonian garrison in Piraeus. Since the Chremonidean War (above, p. 147) Macedonian control over Athens had been continuous, but seems to have varied considerably in strictness. In 256 Antigonus had lifted most restrictions, but a few years later they were back again (253/2), and remained in force, apart from a brief spell between 247 and 245, until the death of Demetrius.53 It was typical of the period that what, sixty-five years on from its installation, finally shifted the Piraeus garrison was hard cash. It cost 150 talents in soldiers’ pay to make the Macedonians go quietly.54 Part of this sum (20 talents) came as a gift from Aratus. Nevertheless, though Athens had broken with Macedonia, and taken Aratus’s money, her leaders still refused to join the Achaean League, opting instead for a watchful neutrality. Such cool pragmatism was more than understandable in a city that had been impoverished by constant wars; and it worked. Athens contrived to stay on good terms both with Macedonia and with Ptolemaic Egypt. The price was a violent falling-out with Aratus,55 but the Achaean League—over which Aratus’s control was now far from assured—took no action, for fear that Eurycleides and his associates might then bring Athens over to the League’s enemies. As a result Athens was largely left alone, an intellectual cul-de-sac of philosophers, a tourist city living on past glories (see p. 147).
Antigonus Doson meanwhile set about stabilizing Macedonia’s position. The invading Dardanian tribesmen—who reputedly came near washing-water only three times in their lives, at birth, marriage, and death56—were driven off. Thessaly, which had revolted, was won back, and Antigonus recovered the traditional office of chief (tagos) of the Thessalian League, held by most Macedonian kings since Philip II.57 Aetolia’s neutrality he bought, with damaging concessions in central Greece. He knew his own limitations; he was no overreacher. In Greece as a whole he certainly achieved, and probably hoped for, no more than a shaky maintenance of the status quo. Throughout most of his reign the chief focus of concern on the Greek mainland was the dangerously renascent Sparta of Cleomenes.
Cleomenes III (265/60–219) was an ambitious man, and the subject of violently partisan judgments during and immediately after his own lifetime, which makes any evaluation of his character or career hazardous.58 Leonidas II, his father, the Agiad king who had ruled with, and after, the Eurypontid Agis IV—had, indeed, been primarily responsible for his death—forced a marriage between Cleomenes and Agis’s widow, Agiatis, a wealthy heiress: to secure her holdings, it is said,59 but doubtless also to win added control over the dual kingship. Agiatis apparently shared her late husband’s reformist notions; and the young Cleomenes, so the tradition goes, fell deeply in love with her. We do not have to believe that he simply took over Agis’s plans, and wife, to forward his own ambitions for himself and his peers: anti-Spartan propaganda may well have been at work in the attribution of motives and responsibility. This is more than likely as regards the death of Agis’s infant son by Agiatis. Cleomenes was said to have had the child murdered; but, as has long been recognized, it is far more probable that Leonidas was responsible, and then put the blame on his son.60 Cleomenes, in any case, was, on his record, no killer.61 Nevertheless, the full truth in all likelihood can never be recovered.
Certainly many people in and around the Peloponnese came to believe, for a while, that what Cleomenes had in mind was populist revolution. The first few years of his reign, however, he waited, worked with the ephors, realistically recognizing them as the true power in the state,62 and consolidated his own backing. He knew, very well, not least with Agis’s fate to remind him, that what he wanted could be won only by force. The Aetolians ceded him several cities, including Tegea and Mantinea, and he may have set up an unofficial alliance with them.63 In 229, with Macedonia weakened by Demetrius’s defeat and death, and Argos, at last, a member of the Achaean League, he moved against Lydiades’ city of Megalopolis—a promising apertura into southern Arcadia.64 It was this, coupled with the widespread fear that he might be promoting social anarchy, that finally persuaded the Achaean League to declare war against him (spring 228?).65 Even so, the initiative once more came from Lydiades: Aratus did everything he could to avoid open conflict with Sparta, even to the point of avoiding engagements when they presented themselves.66 If he was really eager to extend the League’s territories,67 he had an odd way of showing it. Lydiades, who was serving as his cavalry commander, in fury made—without permission—a death-or-glory cavalry charge against Cleomenes’ troops, and as a result got himself killed.68 Aratus may well have felt that the censure he incurred at home for his lack of initiative was worth being thus rid of his most irksome political rival.
At the same time the tensions between various members of the League—Achaea, Argos, Megalopolis—remained deep and divisive. At one point during the campaign Megalopolis, under heavy pressure from Cleomenes, was persuaded by Aratus and authorized by the League synod to appeal for aid to Antigonus Doson in Macedonia; the appeal was duly made, and Antigonus, sensibly, agreed to intervene in the event of a formal request from the League.69 Such a request was brought forward for immediate discussion; but Aratus, who had been quite happy to use Megalopolis as a stalking-horse to sound out Antigonus’s plans, shied away from committing the League—at this stage—to the Macedonian connection. Let League members, he urged, save their own cities. The League synod voted accordingly.70 These are facts to be borne in mind when considering just how and why, four years later, the League reversed its decision, and indeed allied itself—at a price—with Macedonia in order to finish off Cleomenes.
Cleomenes now went back to Sparta to secure his own position (late summer 227), carefully leaving his Spartiate troops behind, and taking with him only his mercenaries, whose loyalty was to him personally rather than to the Spartan state. He might have learned something about the economics of primitive (and elitist) communism from his wife, or from Sphaerus, his Stoic tutor, or even, in a general way, from the Cynics;71 but what he wanted and needed, above all else, was a reborn Spartiate army with himself in sole command of it.72 Idealizing talk about the Lycurgan reforms or the ancestral constitution (patrios politeia) did not for one moment blind Cleomenes to the simple truth that the ancien régime could only be restored by a strong autocrat: the lesson of Agis’s failure had not been lost on him. His specious claim to win friends through persuasion rather than bribery (but see below, p. 259) was probably, in his impecunious state, making a virtue of necessity.73 It is notable that in 227/6 Sparta was conspicuously absent from the list of powers contributing to the restoration of Rhodes after that city’s near-total destruction by earthquake (see p. 381).
With the prestige of his military successes to help him, Cleomenes set about clearing the opposition.74 As soon as he got back to Sparta he carried out a lightning coup d’état. The ephors he simply eliminated: four of the current board of five were killed fighting, along with their supporters, and the office was abolished. Cleomenes seems also to have replaced, or possibly augmented, the gerousia (council of elders) with a new official, the patronomos, “paternal legislator,” a suggestive term.75 Cleomenes exiled some eighty of his main opponents, clearly the big property owners, and redistributed their land, together with his own and that of his supporters, into four thousand lots (klaroi).76 Exiles were recalled, and given holdings. Debts were rescinded. Citizenship was bestowed on a select group of foreigners and perioikoi: from the epithets used in our source, it is clear that the chief criterion was good family.77 Bearing in mind the Spartan tradition, this is exactly what we might expect: even in an emergency Cleomenes went by the studbook. Sphaerus was assigned the task of reviving the ancient Lycurgan training system (agōgē). That this crucial responsibility fell to a non-Spartan intellectual has occasioned surprisingly little comment: at the very least it hints eloquently at the degree to which the tradition had been abandoned.
None of this should distract us from the central fact that before the end of 227 Cleomenes had made himself sole ruler of Sparta. Polybius remarks, with complete accuracy, that Cleomenes turned legitimate kingship into a tyranny.78 His persistent monarchist propaganda only serves to confirm this (though one has a certain sympathy, when considering his successors, with Pausanias, who described him as the last king of Sparta).79 So does the strong possibility that he enrolled mercenaries as citizens, and put them through the agōgē, thus in effect (a point that would not have been lost on his opponents) procuring himself a private army within the state.80 There was to be no possible opposition. Cleomenes, as a counterstroke to the opposition’s murder of Archidamus (above, p. 250), even filled the vacant second kingship by appointing his own brother Eucleidas, as opposed to a Eurypontid candidate: as Plutarch observes, “this was the only time that the Spartans had two kings from the same house.”81 His sole aim in restoring the agōgē was to revivify Sparta’s legendary invincible army. His offer of citizenship to perioikoi and foreigners was essential if the depleted Spartiate body was to be brought back up to effective strength.82
Yet the immediate effect on the surrounding states (and in this deliberate propaganda must have played some part) was a conviction, doubtless encouraged by Sphaerus and his Stoic friends, that a real social revolution was in the air.83 Cercidas the Cynic seems to have been convinced of this,84 and it is easy enough to see why. Debts were being canceled in Sparta; perioikoi were being enfranchised; the land had been redistributed. Wishful thinking will have done the rest. It may even, for a while, have obscured the brutally obvious fact that Cleomenes at heart was an ambitious old-style imperialist, that social reform for him was no more than an instrument with which to achieve Spartan mastery over the Peloponnese, perhaps over all Greece.85 To begin with he seemed to be near achieving his ambition. He certainly impressed Ptolemy III, who by now had become convinced that Cleomenes was a far more promising ally against Macedonia than the Achaean League—rumors of a possible League rapprochement with Antigonus Doson cannot have failed to reach Alexandria—and had transferred his funding to Sparta as a result.86 We may note that he avoided open conflict with Antigonus by not giving Sparta any military aid; and how far he actually trusted Cleomenes can be judged from the fact that, as a condition of his support, he demanded—and got—the king’s mother, together with his children, as hostages.87 Cavafy, paraphrasing Plutarch (who in turn based his account on the Stoic-tinged version of Phylarchus), made two of his best poems out of this odd incident.88
In 226/5 Cleomenes and his now greatly strengthened standing army, equipped with the long Macedonian pike (sarissa), recaptured Mantinea from Aratus, and beat the Achaean League’s forces at Hecatombaion.89 As a result he came within an ace of forcing the League to make terms with him before he moved on Corinth and Argos. The League had already made contact with Antigonus Doson, probably in the winter of 227/6 (above, p. 256).90 An emergency embassy, with Aratus’s son as one of its members, now went north to appeal for Macedonian aid. Antigonus was willing enough to help, but his price of support was Acrocorinth—the most important of Macedonia’s lost Fetters of Greece—and that was a sacrifice the League was not, yet, prepared to make. The embassy confirmed the earlier alliance, but for the moment Antigonus stayed put.91 In the circumstances the League felt compelled to open negotiations with Cleomenes. A treaty was arranged, and only illness prevented Cleomenes from ratifying its terms.92 What these terms were remains uncertain: the relative success of Aratus and Cleomenes as negotiators depends very much on which source we follow. But it does look very much as though what Cleomenes wanted was permanent League leadership for himself, and unquestioned hegemony of the Peloponnese for Sparta, in return for no more than the cession of prisoners and occupied territory.93
Over the winter of 226/5 Aratus seems to have regained some of his dominance over the League: he was elected generalissimo for 225/4; he then tricked Cleomenes into breaking off negotiations (spring 225), presumably in the expectation of winning a better deal by force of arms. Clearly, too, Aratus was against any real rapprochement of Cleomenes with the League, since this would have weakened his own position. Arguably Aratus’s diplomatic tactics were mistaken, since in the campaign that followed Cleomenes had very much the best of it (summer 225).94 Further negotiations proved hopeless (late 225). Cleomenes now, understandably, wanted too much: not only hegemony of the League, but also joint control of Acrocorinth.95 The crude bribe he offered Aratus at the same time merely added insult to injury, and may well have been no more than a device to undermine his reputation in the League.96 Aratus himself, though stratēgos with emergency powers, was in despair at the turn events had taken, the shipwreck of his policies. Yet at the same time he, like all Greek men of property, was desperately scared of the Spartan’s revolutionary reputation, and the hopes this had aroused among the dispossessed. “The most dreadful charge he brought against Cleomenes,” Plutarch wrote, with Aratus’s Memoirs before him, “was his abolition of wealth and correction of poverty.”97
Cleomenes’ sweeping military successes in Achaea and the Argolid eventually forced the League’s hand. He pressured Argos into accepting a garrison and an alliance; he captured Corinth, and seemed all too likely to capture Acrocorinth as well.98 When he demanded its surrender from Aratus (it still had an Achaean garrison), Aratus replied, and afterwards recorded the reply in his Memoirs, that he “did not control events, but was rather controlled by them,” a response that Cleomenes regarded as frivolous, and that angered him into further aggression, this time against Aratus’s own home town of Sicyon.99 Aratus, who twenty years earlier had wrested Acrocorinth from Macedonian hands for the League (243/2: above, p. 151), now faced a bitter choice between losing that great stronghold to Cleomenes, or giving it away to Antigonus Doson as the price for his assistance, since no other help was forthcoming. (Both the Aetolian League and Eurycleides’ Athens had turned down the League’s appeals.) Under the iron pressure of circumstance, which Cleomenes had dismissed as mere mockery, Aratus finally chose Antigonus, and the pact with Macedonia was at last made operative. At the same time Aratus was made emergency dictator (stratēgos autokratōr) and provided—like any tyrant—with a bodyguard.100 Antigonus at once marched south, and Cleomenes broke off the siege of Sicyon to deal with this new threat.
The irony of a situation that could induce the League’s most embattled anti-Macedonian to bring in his archenemy, make him a present of Acrocorinth, and use his troops against a Spartan king—whatever the circumstances—was lost neither on Aratus’s friends, nor on his detractors, nor indeed (if we take his remark to Cleomenes at its face value) on Aratus himself, who was no more inclined, other things being equal, to destroy Cleomenes than he was to truck with Antigonus. In his Memoirs he complained of being driven by Necessity,101 a harsh taskmaster familiar to all Greek thinkers and statesmen. That surely is no more than the simple truth. Yet admirers and detractors alike regarded this volte-face as a supreme act of betrayal. The first group was desperately anxious to justify the decision as a planned and conscious act of policy; the second, equally eager to regard the decision as deliberate, used it to blacken Aratus’s name in retrospect, to dismiss him as a cynical exponent of Machtpolitik, a plausible long-term hypocrite using words like “freedom” and “democracy” for his own selfish ends.
Both sides were therefore ready to play up, in different ways, the rumors that claimed Aratus had been conducting secret diplomatic negotiations with Antigonus Doson ever since 227/6.102 For Phylarchus, the defeat of his hero Cleomenes was sheer disaster, and Aratus became the traitor whose unholy collusion with Macedonia had brought this disaster about, whose fear (and envy) of Cleomenes had made him, in effect, sell out the Greeks to Antigonus.103 Phylarchus would, obviously, see Aratus’s secret hand in the negotiations from the very beginning. Polybius took the same facts, but gave them a very different interpretation.104 For him the enemies of freedom were the Aetolians and Cleomenes (cf. below, p. 283), with the Achaean League as the champion of Greek liberties, and Antigonus Doson as a generous, honorable, high-minded monarch, whose intervention in the Peloponnese was made as a matter of principle, and who in effect freed Sparta from tyranny.105 The truth seems to have been that Aratus detested the solution forced on him, and had no illusions about the authoritarian tactics that Antigonus would employ once given a free hand in the Peloponnese; but he was by then in too vulnerable a position to make any other choice. Presumably he salved his conscience with the argument that, since it looked as though Cleomenes would capture Acrocorinth in any case, it might at least be turned over to a potential ally.
The masses everywhere saw what Cleomenes was doing in Sparta, misinterpreted his program completely, and thought (to begin with, at least) that he meant to carry the banner of social revolution through the length and breadth of the Peloponnese.106 This was even made a motive, in Plutarch’s account, for Aratus’s surrendering Acrocorinth to the Macedonians. Antigonus, too, must have dreaded something of the sort. Once having got the promise of Acrocorinth, he took the field with twenty thousand troops, to confront Cleomenes at the Isthmus.107 It soon became all too clear—not least in Argos—that whatever Cleomenes had in mind to achieve, social reform outside Sparta was not it.108 As a result, his mass support melted away as rapidly as it had grown: town after town changed sides.109 Cleomenes’ resurgent power had always been in a sense illusory, since it depended on mercenaries, and Cleomenes paid his mercenaries with the subventions he got from Ptolemy. Antigonus, who was well aware of this, may have ceded some territories in Asia Minor to Ptolemy to persuade him to withdraw his support from Sparta. In any case, Ptolemy must have seen for himself which way the wind was blowing in the Peloponnese: at all events, he stopped payments to Cleomenes.110 The results were immediate and dramatic. Cleomenes, in a desperate effort to raise both money and troops, is said to have sold six thousand helots their freedom at a flat rate of five minas (= 500 drachmas) a head, though where they got the cash from remains a puzzle.111 It should scarcely need emphasizing that this emergency act of manumission in no way constituted part of Cleomenes’ reform program, and cannot be construed as showing concern for helot equality.
Antigonus now reconstituted the Hellenic Leagues of Philip II and Demetrius the Besieger as a League of Leagues (autumn 224), including the federations of Macedonia, Thessaly, Achaea, Boeotia, and Epirus (but not, of course, that of Aetolia), with himself as hēgemōn.112 Members seem to have been left an unusual degree of autonomy, even in the matter of war or peace.113 For Antigonus, nevertheless, this new league remained primarily an instrument for the furtherance of Macedonian power. His insistence on the surrender of Acrocorinth (not to mention the destruction of the statues of those—Aratus alone excepted—who had liberated it),114 and the garrisons that he installed (see below), make that clear enough. To sweeten this somewhat bitter pill he carefully emphasized that his quarrel was not with Sparta, but with Cleomenes: in other words, this was a crusade to put down social revolution or tyranny, according to one’s viewpoint. Polybius certainly subscribed to such a view. Though he conceded Cleomenes some admirable qualities,115 he nevertheless condemned him politically as an ambitious, headstrong, violent, and perjured tyrannos, while regarding Aratus’s Memoirs as “exceptionally truthful and clear.”116 Pausanias, too, followed the pro-Achaean line.117
A string of reverses, and shortage of money for his troops, neither of which could be offset by the capture, and savage sack, of Megalopolis,118 drove Cleomenes—like Antigonus One-Eye in 301, or Lysimachus in 282—to stake everything on a major pitched battle. It took place in hilly terrain at Sellasia, some eight miles north of Sparta, in July 222.119 Cleomenes was outnumbered and, despite a brave stand, finally beaten. Accompanied by Sphaerus and others, he fled to Gytheion,120 and there took ship for Egypt.121 Ptolemy III received him and his party, gave them smiles and promises, but carefully left them powerless. When Euergetes died, his son Philopator did not prove so accommodating.122 A voluptuary ruled by women, Ptolemy IV was scared (and therefore resentful) of Cleomenes: the Spartan’s enemies soon had him under house arrest. His request to be allowed to return to Sparta and reclaim his throne fell on deaf ears: he knew far too much, now, about the Ptolemies’ weaknesses.123 A year or two later Cleomenes and his friends, in fine Stoic style, committed suicide after an abortive (and ludicrous) attempt to raise the Alexandrian mob against its new monarch (219).124
Antigonus Doson entered Sparta in triumph, the first foreign conqueror ever to do so. A flatterer assured him that his fortunes had been “Alexandrized”: the dead conqueror’s tychē was felt to rub off on his favored successors. A young Achaean cavalry commander called Philopoemen, of whom we shall hear more, distinguished himself in the battle.125 The Spartan Ephorate was restored, indeed given supreme power; but the kingship, predictably, was left in abeyance. Some at least of the social reforms seem to have survived.126 Antigonus kept Macedonian garrisons on Acrocorinth and in Orchomenos, and left a senior officer in charge of Peloponnesian affairs:127 he meant to make the most of his opportunity. Sparta’s bid for freedom and hegemony (if not, yet, her hope for a return to the old Lycurgan regime) was over. Instead, she was forced by Antigonus into alliance with—though not membership in—his new Greek confederacy.128 If Sellasia “signified the success of the new movement towards freedom and unity over the particularist imperialism of Sparta,”129 a claim that is, in whole or part, debatable, it remains a sad truth that the success was bought at an appallingly heavy price, and proved transitory in the extreme. In any case Antigonus was given no time in which to enjoy his victory. He was called back north at once by another barbarian invasion, suffered a severe consumptive hemorrhage on the battlefield, and survived long enough only to make all arrangements for the young Philip V to take his place. He died in the early summer of 221,130 still in his forties, leaving an invaluable fund of popularity and good will behind him.131
What, meanwhile, was the position in Egypt, and the vast, unmanageable empire of the Seleucids? Ptolemy III, as we saw earlier (p. 150), had lost command of the sea to Antigonus Gonatas—perhaps one among many reasons why he eventually switched his support in Greece from Sparta to Macedonia, cynically advising Cleomenes, at the same time, to come to terms with Antigonus Doson132—but still had a large fleet with which to harass the Seleucids in the eastern Mediterranean. He also retained control of Ephesus and Lebedos (now renamed Ptolemaïs), as well as cities in Thrace and on the Hellespont.133 His prudent rule at home is demonstrated (with due allowance made for flattering hyperbole) by the famous Canopus Decree of 4 March 238, made by the Egyptian priesthood in honor of the king and his wife, Berenice, as Theoi Euergetai, “Benefactor Gods.”134 (This Berenice, daughter of King Magas of Cyrene, and known to Hellenistic historians as Berenice II, was the battle-seasoned equestrienne who raced victorious chariot teams at Nemea, and whose dedicated lock of hair [p. 179] was immortalized as a constellation by Callimachus.) Ptolemy wins praise, not only (as we might expect) for benefactions to the temples and promotion of Egyptian cults135—especially those involving sacred animals—but also for maintaining peace by means of a strong national-defense system, and in general for good government. As an instance of the latter the decree singles out Ptolemy’s importation, at his own expense, of grain for the populace when an inadequate Nile flood threatened nationwide famine—“in return for which things the gods have granted stability to their royal rule, and will give them all other good things for ever hereafter.” It all smacks, not surprisingly, of paternalist estate management; but at least it can be said of the first three Ptolemies that they managed their estates with prudence, if not with foresight.
Ptolemy III also got credit for recovering, during a campaign abroad, certain sacred statues that the Persians had removed, and returning them to their temples. The campaign in question was the long, drawn-out Third Syrian (or Laodicean) War, against Seleucus II (above, p. 150). In 241 this war had finally ended in a peace treaty that ceded to Ptolemy an enclave including the great naval base of Seleucia-in-Pieria.136 Seleucid Syria still retained Laodicea-ad-Mare as a viable seaport. The vexed question of the Syrian frontier was to remain in abeyance, greatly to Alexandria’s benefit, for another twenty years, until the accession of a weak Ptolemy was offset by that of a strong and dynamic Seleucid (below, p. 288).
The decades following the Laodicean War had witnessed further erosion of the Seleucid empire. Seleucus II, having been forced by his mother, Laodice, to cede Asia Minor to his brother, Antiochus Hierax, found himself—inevitably—engaged thereafter in a fratricidal struggle with this all-too-hawkish sibling rival (above, p. 150). Ptolemy III, that adroit fisher in other men’s ponds, seems to have supported Hierax, doubtless hoping to strengthen his own position in Asia Minor and the Aegean.137 Seleucus, preoccupied by this War of the Brothers (239–236), had little time to attend to the great eastern satrapies: it was about now that Bactria and Sogdiana seceded, under Diodotus, the Seleucid general appointed by Antiochus II (ca. 250?), and that Parthia made its first moves toward independence. About 236 Seleucus made peace with Hierax, surrendering to him all Asia Minor north of the Taurus Mountains.138 The concession did nothing to assuage the Hawk’s ambitions. He was by now hand-in-glove with the Gauls (Galatians), who had taken to exacting protection money from all the Greek states of Asia Minor: this act of de facto brigandage on his part was not forgotten. He then compounded his offense by conspiring with the same Gauls to overthrow Attalus I of Pergamon.
Here, at last, Hierax had met his match. Attalus, as we have seen, had already once defeated the Gauls (above, pp. 150–51), and proclaimed himself king (237?); he now pursued Hierax (231–229?), with deadly and unrelenting hatred, from Phrygia to Lydia, from Lydia to Caria, then eastward, beating him in three major battles.139 By 228 Attalus had taken over all the Hawk’s briefly held territories in Asia Minor. A fine propagandist, he let no one forget his triumph, but—like Augustus after Actium (below, p. 679)—stressed only his victory over the forces of barbarism, not his defeat of a fellow countryman. Both in Athens and in Pergamon his ceremonial sculpture and architecture caught the prevalent mood by presenting him as a god manifest on earth (below, pp. 339 ff.).140 Do not climb the sky, Alcman had advised mere mortals in the sixth century; do not attempt to marry Aphrodite.141 As the Hellenistic age progressed, more and more rulers evinced an incurable determination to do both. The frontiers between the human and the divine, breached with arrogant panache by Alexander and the aetiologizing propaganda of Euhemerus (above, p. 55), were now being steadily further eroded.
Antiochus Hierax made one last desperate bid to recoup his fortunes. He approached, or was approached by, his aunt Stratonice, the ex-wife of Demetrius II (she had left Demetrius when he married Phthia, the future mother of Philip V).142 Between them they devised a scheme to overthrow Seleucus. While Stratonice led an insurrection in Antioch, Hierax moved eastward into Babylonia. Seleucus was forced to abandon his Parthian campaign by this diversion; but when he moved, it was to some effect. He drove Hierax out—the Hawk fled, first to Ptolemaic territory, probably Ephesus, where he was imprisoned but escaped; and then to Thrace, where he was soon murdered by the Gauls (227)143—and, this done, captured and executed Stratonice (who had seemingly nursed hopes of marrying her peccant nephew). His next target, predictably, was Attalus; but before he could move against him he died after an accidental fall from his horse (226).144 He was succeeded by his first son, who reigned as Seleucus III Soter for three years, and was then murdered by one of his own officers while conducting an ineffectual campaign against Attalus.145 (He was known by his troops, with heavy military irony, as Thunderbolt.)
At this point the Seleucid fortunes seemed to have reached their nadir. But Seleucus III’s cousin Achaeus, nominated as governor of Asia Minor, proved a man of remarkable energy and vision, coupled, unexpectedly, with apparent freedom from the usurper’s ambition. He had Seleucus III’s younger brother proclaimed king as Antiochus III (223). Achaeus then set about Attalus so vigorously that by 222 he had driven him back to Pergamon and recovered all the lost territories of Asia Minor.146 With the accession, now, of new young monarchs—two of them, Antiochus III and Philip V, men of great talent and personality—in all three Hellenistic kingdoms (Ptolemy III was succeeded by the weak and vacillating Ptolemy IV Philopator in 222/1),147 a watershed had been reached, as Polybius recognized, in the history of the Greek-speaking world. Yet—and he recognized this too—what in the long run was to have the greatest effect, and most radical impact, on that world was the intervention of Rome.