Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (9 page)

Naturally, this trickle-down was limited, in the sense that it was largely restricted to the cities, and to elites within the cities. The 80 or 90 percent of the population who were peasant farmers found their daily lives more or less untouched by regime changes and international markets. They were still selling their products locally, mostly by barter; their ignorance of the Greek language was an uncrossable barrier. If their lives changed at all, it was as a result of different taxes, increased monetization, and the introduction of Greek agricultural stock and methods.

Nevertheless, there was a certain diffusion of Greek culture, even if limited, so that in due course of time, the term “Greek” came to designate not blood but education and mental outlook. And so an unintended result of the foundation of new cities such as Ai Khanum, whose first purpose was to secure the land, was the diffusion of Greek culture all over the world. The enterprise to which all the energy of the forty years following Alexander’s death was devoted was, as it turned out, the enterprise of creating the Hellenistic world out of Alexander’s inchoate ambitions.

While their compatriots in the east were being slaughtered on Perdiccas’s orders, the Greeks of the Balkan peninsula were also preparing for rebellion. As we have seen, Alexander’s Exiles Decree had
stirred them up, and especially the Aetolians and Athenians, who had the most to lose. Those who had already suffered most (the Spartans, defeated by Antipater in 331) or profited most (the Boeotians, who had been freed of Theban hegemony by Alexander’s destruction of the city in 335), stayed aloof from the Greek cause, but for the rest it was a last push for autonomy. Hence the Greeks referred to the war as the Hellenic War, the war for Greek freedom, but it has come to be known as the Lamian War after the site of its most critical phase.
¹⁴
Encouraged by Athens and the Aetolians, and seizing the opportunity created by Alexander’s death, a large number of Greek cities joined the rebels. Apart from hostility toward the Exiles Decree, the whole of mainland Greece had been suffering from a severe shortage of grain, and deeply resented the fact that Alexander had denied them supplies while sending tons east to support his campaigns. They were not yet ready to face the economic realities of the new world.

The Athenians employed the skilled mercenary commander Leo sthenes as commander in chief of the allied forces. With the help of some of Harpalus’s money, opportunistically confiscated by the Athenians, he recruited a substantial force, consisting largely of mercenaries disbanded a few months earlier by Alexander’s order from his satraps’ private armies. Further major contributions came from Athens and Aetolia, while other cities did what they could. A formidable army of more than twenty-five thousand marched north to confront Antipater. Olympias, meanwhile, did her best to get her fellow Epirotes to aid the rebels by invading Macedon from the west.
¹⁵

Antipater lacked the forces to be at all certain of defeating the Greeks, and some would have to be left behind to defend Macedon itself. So before doing anything else, he summoned Craterus and Leonnatus, sweetening the appeal in both cases with offers of marriage to daughters of his. Military help was supposed to flow both ways between in-laws. The immediate context of the alliance was the Greek rebellion, but all three had reasons to be dissatisfied at their treatment by Perdiccas in the final Babylon settlement, and the alliance was certainly intended to outlast the immediate turmoil in Greece. Recognizing this, Perdiccas approached both the Aetolians and the Athenians for alliances against the Antipatrid coalition that was forming against him. No one was trying to pretend anymore that civil war between Macedonians was not inevitable.

Craterus was an obvious choice for Antipater, since he was in any case due to repatriate the 11,500 Macedonian veterans under his command;
but he still did nothing for months. Was this an Achillean sulk, or appropriate caution? Or, by the time he was ready, was it simply winter, making it difficult to travel across the Taurus Mountains of southeastern Asia Minor?

Craterus finally set out for Greece in the spring of 322—and even then he seems to have been prompted to move only by another factor: Perdiccas was on his way to Asia Minor to install Eumenes in Cappadocia, which meant he would pass through Cilicia. Craterus did not want his troops to be commandeered by Perdiccas in the name of the kings. At the same time, he sent Cleitus with the bulk of the Macedonian fleet to the Aegean; with the Athenians involved, naval warfare was sure to play a part. So Craterus took about six thousand of his men to help Antipater. They were seasoned campaigners, having in many cases served with Alexander ever since the beginning; many of them were in their fifties, some even in their sixties, but they were supreme battlefield warriors. In ancient battles, experience and training often outweighed youth.

Leonnatus came from Phrygia, where he had joined Eumenes in obedience to Perdiccas’s orders, prior to their invasion of Cappadocia. In part, Perdiccas’s Babylonian manipulations had annoyed him, especially because he did not come off as well as expected; in part, Eumenes had informed him that Alexander’s sister Cleopatra was prepared to become his wife. This was undoubtedly Olympias’s doing; having sided with the rebels, she needed to have Antipater replaced in Macedon or face his retaliatory wrath. Cleopatra’s offer decided Leonnatus, and so he rejected Antipater’s daughter and came not so much as an ally of Antipater as a potential usurper of the Macedonian throne; already related to the Argead royal family, he would also be married to Alexander’s blood sister and have the backing of Alexander’s mother. He had long affected a number of mannerisms and extravagances that spoke of royal pretensions.
¹⁶
While preparing to go to Greece, he sounded out Eumenes, suggesting that he should join him in his attempt to seize the Macedonian throne. Eumenes must have been tempted, because he was close to Olympias and Cleopatra, but he remained Perdiccas’s man. He not only refused Leonnatus’s offer, but personally traveled to Babylon to inform Perdiccas of Leonnatus’s designs.

Meanwhile, however, before the arrival of either Leonnatus or Craterus, Antipater had marched south to preempt a Thessalian rebellion. Leosthenes marched steadily northward, easily defeating the Boeotians and occupying the vital pass of Thermopylae, the only feasible
entrance into central Greece for a land army from the north. The two armies met not far north of Thermopylae. Leosthenes defeated Antipater in battle—the first defeat of a Macedonian army for thirty years—and bottled him up in the town of Lamia. Success bred success: some Thessalians deserted from Antipater’s army and swelled Leosthenes’ ranks, while others barred Antipater’s escape route to the north. Macedon itself was vulnerable—except that Leosthenes could not afford to leave Antipater behind him in Lamia. Antipater managed to secure the town, but spent the winter of 323/322 in danger of being starved out. Leosthenes, however, died in a skirmish outside the town. The burial of his body and those of other early victims of the war occasioned a magnificent funeral speech in Athens from Hyperides, one of the most famous orators of the day. It was the swan song of Athenian democracy and independence.
¹⁷

The new commander of the Greek forces was not the man Leosthenes had been, and the Aetolians were forced by the threat of invasion to return home. The remaining Greeks were still optimistic, but in the early summer of 322 Leonnatus arrived with massive reinforcements. The Greeks attacked before Leonnatus could join up with Antipater in Lamia. The infantry were evenly matched, but the Thessalian cavalry overwhelmed Leonnatus’s cavalry and killed Leonnatus himself. He was not destined after all to become one of the pretenders. But the next day his infantry forced their way into Lamia and Antipater was saved. Given Leonnatus’s ambitions, Antipater was saved in another sense too. The Macedonian army promptly pulled back north with the rescued regent. Central and southern Greece were briefly free of Macedonian control. These were heady but anxious times for the champions of Greek freedom.

Meanwhile, at sea, the main theater of war was the Hellespont, where the Athenian fleet planned to defend their grain route from the Black Sea and do what they could to hamper the progress of the reinforcements coming from Asia with Craterus. The Athenians sent a large fleet to destroy Antipater’s Hellespontine fleet. But Cleitus arrived from Cilicia, and when his ships joined Antipater’s the combined fleet defeated the Athenians twice in short order in June 322, off Abydus in the Hellespont and then off the Aegean island of Amorgos.

The opening of the sea made it possible for Craterus to complete his trek; he diplomatically placed his forces at Antipater’s service. The Macedonian veterans had at last come home. In the heat of August the combined Macedonian army, now with enormous numerical superiority,
confronted the Greeks at Crannon in Thessaly. Antipater had already bribed some Greek cities into withdrawing their troops from the forces opposing him. It was not a massacre, but the Greeks lost, and the war was over. Antipater rapidly quelled the Thessalian rebellion, and then turned his attention toward punishing and pacifying the Greek states. He marched south toward Athens.

Many Athenians expected their city to be razed, as Alexander had razed rebel Thebes in 335. After intense negotiations, the terms were scarcely less harsh: Athens was to become a second-class city. The Athenians were to dissolve their famous democratic constitution in favor of a limited franchise, accept a Macedonian garrison in Piraeus (which would control the city by controlling its lifeline to the sea), not rebuild their lost warships, and pay a massive indemnity. They also lost some disputed land to their northern neighbors, the Boeotians. Naturally, the most prominent anti-Macedonians were to be killed, including Demosthenes, who in a series of impassioned speeches stretching back almost thirty years had been warning his fellow citizens about the Macedonian menace. Demosthenes fled the city, but there was no escape, and he killed himself rather than fall into Antipater’s hands. Some time later, the Athenians erected a bronze statue in his honor, with the following inscription:
¹⁸

Within a few months the Athenians also learned that their petition to make their possession of the island of Samos a special case, exempt from Alexander’s Exiles Decree, had failed: Perdiccas ordered the Athenian settlers off the island. Thousands of Athenians were forcibly deported to colonize parts of Thrace for the Macedonians, though many may have been glad to escape the overcrowding generated by the returning Samian Athenians and the poverty resulting from the huge indemnity.

Garrisons could stimulate the local economy to a certain extent in places smaller than Piraeus and Athens, but generally they were a hated burden and a humiliating symbol of subordination to a foreign power. The mercenaries who were employed on garrison duty were often little better than “murderers, mutilators, thieves, and housebreakers.”
¹⁹
A lead curse tablet has been found in Athens, dating from the end of the fourth or beginning of the third century, that had originally been placed in a grave. The intention was to harness the underworld power of the grave’s ghost to make the curse effective,
and this particular curse was aimed at the garrison in Piraeus and four named senior Macedonians, who were clearly supposed to be representative. The meaning was “Curse the whole damn lot of those Macedonians!”
²⁰

Nor was just Athens reduced. Philip II had put the League of Corinth in place as an alliance of nominally free cities. Now, after the end of the Lamian War, the league was dissolved in favor of more direct means of control. Antipater imposed garrisons on all the critical cities and made sure that they were governed by pro-Macedonian oligarchies or tyrannies. One of the principal consequences of the Lamian War, then, was that Macedonian rule of southern Greece became considerably less benign than it had been under Philip or Alexander. Since many Greek states plainly refused to accept Macedonian rule, Antipater had no choice. The Aetolians were the only ones who, recognizing this, refused to negotiate; for their pains, they had to endure a Macedonian invasion. Incredibly, they managed to survive, but only because the invaders, Antipater and Craterus, were called away by more pressing business in Asia.

The marriage of Craterus to Antipater’s daughter Phila sealed their new alliance. Ptolemy, who, as we have already seen in Babylon, had no love for Perdiccas, also aligned himself with the emerging coalition, by accepting another of Antipater’s daughters, called Eurydice. These were the first of the interdynastic and often polygamous marriages by which the Successors created a complex network of blood relationships among themselves. This served not just as a form of alliance, “ bedroom diplomacy,” but also to exclude foreigners and ensure that Macedonians remained the ruling class all over the known world (somewhat like early modern Europe, where nearly all the ruling families were closely interrelated). The Macedonian aristocracy had always been predominantly endogamic, and this instinct survived the massive expansion of their territory. It created multiple links, often forged in the first place for some temporary gain, though the marriages usually persisted even when, say, a son-in-law was again at war with his father-in-law. Polygamy was a sign of the instability of the times, and one could almost say that the more wives a king had in the early Hellenistic period, the less stable he felt his position to be. After Alexander’s immediate successors, polygamy became much rarer.
²¹

Craterus was now in a far stronger position than he had been in Cilicia and, in defiance of his official restriction to Europe, he entertained hopes of getting back to Asia, with Antipater’s help. They had more than twenty thousand Macedonian troops between them, and
the finances to hire mercenaries, but they may still have been hoping for a peaceful solution. If Antipater kept Europe and Craterus was responsible for Asia, Perdiccas could retain his nongeographical commission as regent for the kings, and the triumvirate originally planned at the Babylon conferences would remain in place, but under terms that were more favorable to Craterus. Fond dreams!