Bahm Karl. Berlin 1945: The Final Reckoning
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pointing out that a review of several hundred persons known to have held important
positions in the Seleukid empire shows only some 2.5 percent to be of non-Greco-
Macedonian race, and that even these few representatives of the Asian peoples made
their mark almost exclusively in the third and subsequent generations after
Alexander.
[31]
Antigonos's policy in this respect was more like Alexander's than that of
the early Hellenistic monarchs: of the 128 friends and subordinates of Antigonos
whom I have been able to identify, the ethnic origin of 82 is known or can be
plausibly inferred; 9 of them were Asians—11 percent.
[32]
Though the sample is rather
small, it is nevertheless striking that the percentage is more than four times that
found by Habicht for the Seleukid empire, especially considering that our literary and
epigraphical sources are almost exclusively Greek and
[30][31][32]
― 307 ―
tend to mention only those subordinates of Antigonos involved with Greek affairs.
In other words, it looks as if Antigonos adopted a fairly liberal and conciliatory
policy towards the so-called "subject races" of the empire, that is, the various
indigenous Asian peoples. This is a significant fact, if true, since Antigonos has
sometimes been accused of being harsh and insensitive towards the Asian peoples, to
the detriment of his ability to establish firm rule over them.
[33]
This evaluation of
Antigonos's attitude towards the subject peoples is in essence based on a handful of
passages in the sources: Diod. XIX 48, 5, where Antigonos replaces the popular
Peukestas as satrap of Persia and violently quells dissent over this move; Diod. XIX
92,4, where it is said that many of the Persian soldiers in the army of Antigonos's
general Nikanor went over to Seleukos because they were offended by Antigonos's
conduct; and the events around Babylonia (recorded by the Bab. Chron., rev. lines 1–
43; Diod. XIX 90,1–91,2; Plut. Dem. 7, 3) from which it transpires that the
Babylonians preferred to be ruled by Seleukos rather than by Antigonos, and that
Antigonos's forces ravaged Babylonia during the war with Seleukos and caused
widespread destruction.
While all of this evidence does show that Peukestas and Seleukos were more
popular among the Persians and Babylonians than Antigonos, it says very little as to
his overall policy with regard to these peoples. The point is surely that as satraps of
specific regions, men like Peukestas and Seleukos could devote themselves to the
interests of the local inhabitants in a way Antigonos, who ruled these regions only
from a great distance and by proxy, could not. Hence he was very likely to be
relatively unpopular, an unpopularity probably caused more by his local satraps and
generals than by any action or policy of his own devising.
[34]
The fact that Antigonos in
315 appointed natives—Orontobates the Mede and Aspeisas of Susa—to rule the
important satrapies of Media and Susiane suggests that he wished to conciliate the
Asian peoples as much as possible; these two
[33][34]
― 308 ―
men were in fact the only non-Greeks (or Macedonians) we hear of as appointed to
such high offices by any of the Diadochoi after 320.
The appointment of these two Asians as satraps was not the only conciliatory
gesture made by Antigonos during his reign. Unlike Lysimachos, for example, he left
the Bithynian dynast Zipoites in undisturbed control of his native realm, being content
with making an alliance and receiving hostages (for Lysimachos's attempts to conquer
and oust the Bithynian dynast, see, e.g., Habicht, RE, s.v. Zipoites). Antigonos also
permitted the Persian Mithridates to remain in control of his small territory around
Kios, and even took Mithridates' homonymous nephew into his court circle (see app.
3, no. 73). The traditional city kings of Phoenicia were also permitted to remain in
power by Antigonos (Diod. XIX 58, 1–4), except at Tyre, which had a Ptolemaic
garrison and which he consequently had to capture by force. It is clear, in short, that
Antigonos tried to avoid upsetting the nationalistic sentiments of the Asian peoples, in
many cases allowing them to be ruled by men of their own race so that they should
not feel themselves to be under foreign oppression.
This point can be taken further, for the two local governors (chiliarchs) whose
names survive in the Mnesimachos inscription from Sardis seem to have been natives
of the region they governed, Lydia.
[35]
This is an important fact, since it is with the
chiliarchs, the commanders of the local garrisons and collectors of the taxes, that the
country inhabitants would have had most to do, and it hence shows sensitiveness to
their susceptibilities to have natives in such posts. At least as far as his selection of
administrative personnel went, Antigonos thus pursued a policy of conciliating and
encouraging the Asian peoples; and when we find a Persian like the younger
Mithridates prominent at Antigonos's court, and a Lykian named Demarchos, son of
Taron, captaining the bodyguard of Antigonos's daughter-in-law, Phila (see Syll., no.
333), it is reasonable to conclude that Antigonos had no strict policy of enforcing
Greco-Macedonian predominance or of excluding Asians from the upper echelons of
his service.
[35]
― 309 ―
Nevertheless, there can be no question that in various ways, but above all by his
policy of colonization and urbanization, Antigonos contributed considerably to the
hellenization of Asia. The handing over of huge tracts of Asian land as farms and
estates to Greek and Macedonian soldiers and officers, and the foundation of a
number of full-scale Hellenic poleis, with constitutions probably borrowed from one of
the old Greek cities,
[36]
could not help but lead to a certain Hellenization of the areas
affected. The question remains, however, to what extent Antigonos consciously aimed
at Hellenization. In fact, the settlement policy of Antigonos is largely attributable to
the requirements of security and administration rather than to a policy of
Hellenization. New Greek cities and Asian cities colonized with Greco-Macedonians
would both be bulwarks of the rule of the Macedonian monarchs, as the guarantors of
their possession of Asian lands, and would take care of the administration of the
territories in Asia allotted to them, thus lightening the administrative burden of the
king. Men granted estates, or kleroi, by Antigonos would likewise relieve him of the
administration of such areas of royal land, and would be loyally bound to the king by
these grants, since such estates were revocable, the king retaining a right of "eminent
domain."
[37]
Ultimately the question of the extent to which Antigonos had a policy of
Hellenization depends upon how one defines the term: if one means by it the
introduction of a substantial Greco-Macedonian element permanently settled in Asia,
then Antigonos was clearly a Hellenizer; but if one takes the term to mean a policy of
seeking to acculturize the Asians into Hellenic ways, it may be doubted whether
[36][37]
― 310 ―
he had any such policy. The Hellenization of Asia in this sense seems, to the extent
that it occurred at all, to have been merely an unpremeditated by-product of the fact
that the ruling class in Asia under Antigonos and the Seleukids was Greco-
Macedonian, which caused a number of ambitious Asians to adopt Greek names and
try to break into the circles of privilege by assimilating Hellenic culture. Since as far as
we can tell from our evidence Antigonos mostly used Macedonians and Greeks as high
officers and officials, he may well have been responsible for a certain amount of
Hellenization of this sort; but insofar as he was apparently readier to admit non-
Greco-Macedonians to his service and the circle of his philoi than were the early
Seleukids, he would have contributed relatively less than they to this form of
Hellenization.
In effect, though Antigonos saw that his power must be based on a substantial
stratum of Greeks and Macedonians in Asia who would be self-interestedly loyal to
Macedonian rule, he does not seem to have entirely abandoned Alexander's hope of
also being able to employ Asians in the running of his realm, and hence was not a
thorough or conscious Hellenizer. Antigonos's extensive use of Asian manpower in his
armies, in addition to his Asian officers and officials, is indicative of this. Lykians,
Pamphylians, Lydians, Phrygians, Parthians, and Medes are all explicitly attested as
serving in considerable numbers in Antigonos's armies, as are Karians and Kilikians in
his navies (see app. 2 below). And these were not just marginal light infantry, there
to make up numbers: the Medes and Parthians were among Antigonos's most
important cavalry units in the war against Eumenes, and the Lydians and Phrygians
were also cavalry; the Lykians and Pamphylians were heavy infantry, making up part
of Antigonos's phalanx along with Macedonians and Greek mercenaries. In addition a
substantial portion of Antigonos's heavy infantry phalanx was made up of men of
mixed—but certainly mostly Asian— races, armed in the Macedonian fashion: the so-
called pantodapoi .
[38]
By incorporating Asians into his phalanx in this way, to make up nearly half of its
total numbers, Antigonos made it clear, I think, that
[38]
― 311 ―
he meant to use and rely on the Asian peoples of his empire as well as the Greco-
Macedonians, even if as a Macedonian himself he must needs rely on the latter in the
first instance. In this, of course, he was following the example of the Achaemenids as
well as of Alexander, for they too had used subject peoples in their armies and had
allowed non-Persians to hold high offices in the empire: examples are the Karian
Hekatomnid family, who were satraps of Karia in the fourth century, and the
Kappadokian Datames, satrap of Kappadokia early in the same century. But of course
the Persians remained the dominant people in the Achaemenid empire, just as the
Greco-Macedonians were in the empire of Antigonos and the Seleukids.
Moving on to the question of whether Antigonos was a patron of arts and letters
and encouraged Hellenic culture in that respect, one may answer unequivocally that
he was and did. There is evidence in support of this statement, and though in sum it
hardly suffices to place him on a level with Ptolemy or the Attalids, it shows
nevertheless that Antigonos had a keen interest in Greek culture and fostered it at his
court. One may start by recalling that Antigonos was himself a man who had evidently
enjoyed a good education and showed a fair degree of wit and discrimination. Such
anecdotes as we have concerning Antigonos's court do not show him, like his son
Demetrios, indulging in excessive drinking or consorting with hetairai, but rather
listening to or conversing with men of letters.
Two examples are reported by Plutarch in Apophthegmata Antigonou numbers
13 and 14 (at Mor. 182d–e), the first of which records an occasion when a young
pupil of Anaximenes delivered an oration before Antigonos. When the latter sought
further information, the young man was silent, and he was thereupon chided by
Antigonos with a line from Euripides for declaiming by rote rather than from
knowledge of the subject. The second anecdote likewise concerns Antigonos listening
to an orator, whose pompous rhetoric he deflated. Another instance, also recorded by
Plutarch (Mor. 11b–c), is the pressing dinner invitation Antigonos sent to the sophist
Theokritos of Chios, who was evidently living at Antigonos's court at the time. The
picture that emerges is of a man who encouraged men of learning and letters to visit
his court, and who liked to listen to them declaim and to converse with them over
dinner. He also seems to have had an interest in music, to judge from an anecdote
preserved by Aelian (VH IX 36) about how Antigonos was listening to a harper and
kept correcting him, to the latter's irritation—though since the same story is told of
Philip, including exactly the same retort by the
― 312 ―
harper (see Plut. Mor. 179b), one cannot place much reliance on the genuineness of
this anecdote.
At any rate, Antigonos's interest in and encouragement of men of letters is well
attested and can be further illustrated from the number of historians who emerged
from his court circle. Besides the famous Hieronymos of Kardia, a philos and aide of
his in the period 315–301, who may well already have been working on his great
contemporary history during those years, one might mention Marsyas of Pella,
Antigonos's half-brother, and his friends Nearchos the Kretan and Medeios of Larissa.
Marsyas wrote a history of Macedon from early times down to 330, Nearchos wrote a
memoir on Alexander the Great and his own service under Alexander from the Indian
campaign (327) to Alexander's death in 323, and Medeios wrote a book from which
Strabo cites legends connecting the Armenians with Thessaly through a supposedly
Thessalian eponymous ancestor, as well as other quasi-geographical legends, which
seem to indicate that Medeios's book may have been a history of Alexander.
[39]
We
have no way of knowing when Medeios wrote his book, but it is very likely that
Nearchos and Marsyas wrote near the end of the fourth century, when they were at
Antigonos's court.
It seems, then, that there was quite a circle of literary men at the court of
Antigonos, and while there is no direct evidence that Antigonos actually encouraged
these men in their writing, it has been suggested that Nearchos made propaganda in
his book for the legitimacy of Alexander's supposed son Herakles in order to further
Antigonos's political schemes for this youth (thus Pearson, Lost Histories, pp. 116–
18), which would suggest that Antigonos may well have had some influence on the
writing of Nearchos at least. Besides his evident keenness on literary conversation
and his apparent interest in history writing, one may further point out that Antigonos
patronized the greatest painters of his day, Apelles and Protogenes, both of whom
painted portraits of him (Pliny NH XXXV 90; 96; and 106), a portrait of Antigonos by
Apelles having especial fame and being subsequently displayed in the Asklepieion at
Kos (Strabo XIV 657). Again, in 302 Antigonos planned to celebrate the founding of
Antigoneia-on-the-Orontes with games and a festival, for which he
[39]
― 313 ―
had gathered athletes, musicians, and actors from all over Greece; and though
military preoccupations forced him to abandon the festival, he distributed some 200
talents to the athletes and artists by way of compensation.
On the basis of the present evidence, one can hardly attribute to Antigonos a
consistent or coherent cultural policy like Ptolemy's in founding the Mouseion at
Alexandria, but it is reasonable to conclude that Antigonos had at least a strong
interest in cultural matters, and that his court was not without attraction and rewards
for men of literary, musical, or artistic accomplishment. Whereas Ptolemy after 301
enjoyed a long period of peaceful rule in which he could give his mind to peaceful
pursuits, Antigonos enjoyed no such respite from constant preoccupation with wars
and pressing political concerns, so that cultural interests can never have occupied
more than a small portion of his time. While this prevented him from developing a full
cultural policy, it makes the cultural interests that are attested for him all the more
worthy of remark.
― 315 ―
CONCLUSION
The picture of Antigonos as a state builder presented here in the last few chapters has
taken us a long way from the traditional picture of the hubristic Antigonos yearning
after Alexander's empire and ultimately failing. In a way the battle of Ipsos was for
Antigonos as much as anything a propaganda failure: its negative outcome has turned
historical enquiry away from investigation of his work in Asia and caused his
achievements there to be largely underestimated and overlooked. If the battle had
been won, Antigonos would be justly famous as the founder of an Antigonid empire in
Asia. Though this did not happen, the fact remains that Antigonos was a brilliant and
innovative general and a statesman whose career and policies profoundly affected the
course of history in his own time and later, and whose work of colonizing and
establishing an administrative system did not simply disappear, but became the basis
on which the Seleukid dynasty founded its empire.
There can be little doubt that Antigonos was a great general, probably one of the
best of the ancient world. His brilliant victories at Orkynia and Kretopolis in 319 and
against Kleitos on the Hellespont in 317, and his coolness and resourcefulness in the
long duel with Eumenes, highlighted by the great battles of Paraitakene and Gabiene,
prove that he was a superb battle leader: determined, decisive, inventive, and
controlled. He knew how to turn a setback into a victory and how to make a victory
decisive; and he understood the capacities and temper of his men, a quality Eumenes,
otherwise more or less Antigonos's equal as a general, seems to have lacked, to his
― 316 ―
undoing. Like the most famous generals of antiquity—Alexander and Caesar—
Antigonos knew the importance of daring and surprise in warfare, and that these can
best be achieved by speed; consequently he—again like Caesar and Alexander—
demanded great exertions of his men, but like them he softened this by undergoing
the same exertions himself (no mean feat for a man in his sixties) and by showing
great solicitude for his men's well-being.
[1]
Diodoros's account of the war between
Antigonos and Eumenes is a virtually unique document of ancient warfare in giving us
a detailed depiction of a war between two truly first-rate generals leading similarly
firstrate armies: perhaps only the accounts of the civil war between Caesar and
Pompey are comparable in this respect. Antigonos's duel with Eumenes thus gives us
uniquely valuable insights into the techniques and methods of early Hellenistic
warfare.
In his famous book Hellenistic Military and Naval Developments, W. W. Tarn
characterizes the spirit of warfare in the Diadoch period as one of professionalism and
intense thoroughness (see pp. 43–44). Antigonos may be classed as the supreme
professional in an age of professionals, and this is best illustrated by his attention to
the technical and technological aspects of warfare. If one considers the surprise
march across southern Asia Minor by which Antigonos was able to annihilate Alketas's
army in 319 with barely a blow being struck, one thing stands out clearly as a
prerequisite to this success, namely military intelligence: Antigonos had to know
where Alketas and his army were encamped and how best to get there unnoticed. In
premodern warfare there were basically three methods of intelligence gathering:
reconnaissance by troops sent out to scout in advance; the interrogation of prisoners
and deserters from the enemy; and the interrogation of natives and travelers in the
regions in which one was campaigning. Antigonos used all three to good effect in his
campaigns, with the result that he habitually knew a great deal about his enemies'
strength, whereabouts, and plans.
[2]
[1][2]
― 317 ―
Indicative of Antigonos's attention to the technological side of war is his employment
of field fortifications, apparently introduced into Greek warfare in the early fourth
century by the Athenian condottieri Chabrias and Iphikrates,
[3]
and attested several
times as used by Antigonos: it seems that it was his practice to fortify his camps with
a trench and palisade when on campaign (Polyainos IV 6,19; Diod. XIX 18,4), and he
also used similar field fortifications to besiege Nora in 319 (Diod. XVIII 41,6). Then
there is the use of the most advanced forms of siege technology, attested in the
Antigonid army under Demetrios on Cyprus and Rhodes in 306 to 304. Again, in the
sphere of naval warfare, it is in Antigonos's navy that we first hear of the use of the
extra-large ships that were a typical feature of Hellenistic naval warfare: it was in
Antigonos's shipyards in Phoenicia in 314 that the first ships larger than
quinqueremes seem to have been built (Diod. XIX 62,8), and hexereis and hepte reis
formed an important part of the Antigonid fleet at Cyprian Salamis in 306 (Diod. XX
50,3). In addition, the use of artillery—catapults and stonethrowers—in naval warfare
was apparently pioneered in Antigonos's navy at the battle of Salamis (Diod. XX
49,4), a point overlooked by Tarn, who claims (HMND, pp. 120 and 152) that the
Romans were the first to do this.
Turning to the field of strategy, again Antigonos has left clear evidence of being
a master. An example of his expertise is his move from the river Kopratas to Media in
316, forcing his enemy to leave a position of strength and move into the more open
Iranian plateau, where the battles of Paraitakene and Gabiene were fought. I have
described in chapter 3 above how in early 312 Antigonos used superior force and
exterior lines to annihilate Asandros in karia in only a few weeks: a minor strategical
masterpiece. The Third Diadoch War in general shows Antigonos's grasp of grand
strategy: in a classic exposition of the use of interior lines and sea power, he created
so much trouble for each of the dynasts allied against him that he broke
[3]
― 318 ―
their alliance and forced them to make peace without achieving any of the aims for
which they had gone to war. As a final point, one may note that Tarn (HMND, pp. 34–
35) places Antigonos and Eumenes at the beginning of the development that
gradually took the general out of the actual melee to a withdrawn position from which
he could control the entire battle, basing this on the control and awareness of their
entire armies and the course of the battles displayed by the two generals at
Paraitakene and Gabiene.
[4]
From all of the above, it will be clear that Antigonos fully
deserves the almost universal judgment of him as the ablest general among
Alexander's successors,
[5]
indeed one of the great generals of any period.
Moving to an evaluation of Antigonos as a politician and statesman, it must be
said that far from being the great hope for the maintenance of Alexander's empire
intact, Antigonos was one of the prime movers in its breakup. The main cause of the
outbreak of civil war in the Macedonian empire was an excess of ambition and an
insufficient commitment to harmony and unity on the part of all the major leaders.
The ambitions and lack of harmony among the major generals proved so important
because there was simply no person or institution of universally accepted legitimacy
and authority around whom or which the military forces of the empire could unite,
given the incompetence (literally) of the kings, the mentally retarded Philippos III and
the infant Alexandros IV. In this situation the soldiery inevitably ended up by simply
backing whatever general commanded
[4][5]
― 319 ―
and paid them, so long as he could show some claim to derive his authority from and
be exercising it in the interests of the Argead monarchy, and so long as he appeared
to be or to be likely to prove a successful leader. It should be emphasized that none
of the major leaders of the period can escape a share of blame for the conflicts that
divided the empire, including of course Antigonos, who played a major role in
precipitating the First Diadoch War and was a protagonist of all the subsequent
conflicts.
What need to be examined are Antigonos's guiding aims and policies during the
conflicts of the Diadoch period. The main ancient sources portray Antigonos as a man
of overweening pride and arrogance, driven by a ruthless ambition to rule the whole
empire of Alexander, and this picture of him has been accepted in the main by
modern scholarship, which generally regards the leitmotif of the Diadoch period as
being a struggle between centripetal leaders (Perdikkas and then Antigonos) seeking
to maintain Alexander's empire intact and rule all of it, and centrifugal figures
(Ptolemy, Kassandros, Lysimachos, Seleukos) who sought to divide up the empire and
rule over some part of it. However, I believe that the interpretation of Antigonos's
aims offered by the sources needs to be more carefully evaluated and considerably
revised.
In books XVIII–XX of Diodoros's history, there are some eighteen passages that
refer to Antigonos's excessive ambition, seven of them referring explicitly to a quest
for supreme power, and there are in addition two similar passages in Plutarch's
Eumenes and one in his Demetrios .
[6]
It must be noted, however, that all but six of
these twenty-one passages come from the accounts of Antigonos's duel with Eumenes
of Kardia, where they form a marked contrast to the much vaunted tact, diplomacy,
and dedication to the interests of the kings with which Eumenes is credited by the
sources.
[7]
A suspicion of bias naturally arises. Of the six passages attributing
excessive ambition to Antigonos that are not given in connection with the war against
Eumenes, three merely report the propaganda put out by the coalitions of Antigonos's
enemies in 315 and 302 (Diod. XIX 55,4–
[6][7]
― 320 ―
56,2; 61,4; XX 106,2–4), obviously not unbiased evidence of Antigonos's aims; one is
the accusation that all the Diadochoi, Antigonos included, sought to marry Kleopatra
in order to gain supreme power (Diod. XX 37,4), which is probably false;
[8]
and the
other two are the closing judgments of Diodoros (XXI 1,1) and Plutarch (Dem. 28,2)
that it was Antigonos's ambition which brought about his downfall in 301, judgments
which really only reflect on the last years of Antigonos's life. The picture of Antigonos
as arrogant and power-mad given by the sources, then, belongs essentially to the
story of his struggle against Eumenes, being a literary device whereby Antigonos's
rival was made to seem a hero. The originator of this contrast may well have been
Hieronymos of Kardia, who, though a loyal officer of the Antigonids during the second
half of his life, was a close friend and probably nephew of Eumenes of Kardia. It has
been plausibly argued by Jane Hornblower that Hieronymos's historical work
originated with an adulatory account of Eumenes' career, which eventually formed the
basis of the early parts of his Diadoch history, and that though loyal to Antigonos
after Eumenes' death, Hieronymos disapproved of his methods.
[9]
The picture of Eumenes as a man of heroic loyalty destroyed by the disloyalty of
others has been somewhat revised in recent works on his career,
[10]
and the same
needs to be done for the negative picture of Antigonos. Indeed, in a number of recent
works, a start has been made in nuancing our sources' characterization of Antigonos,
attempting to show how his aims, policies, and ambitions grew with and adapted
themselves to the changing circumstances with which he
[8][9][10]
― 321 ―
was confronted over the years 323–306,
[11]
but this needs to be taken further. A close
examination of Antigonos's career shows no sign of him being fired and guided by a
determined ambition to reunite and rule over the whole of Alexander's empire. His
policy was much more opportunistic than that: he sought, like the other dynasts, to
rule as much of the empire as he could bring under his sway and to deal with his
peers and rivals in whatever way seemed necessary to his interests, whether by
friendship and diplomacy or by war and confiscation.
Laying aside, then, the prejudices evoked by the (probably Hieronyman)
characterization of Antigonos's role and aims as Eumenes' opponent, it is clear that
like most successful political and military leaders in history, Antigonos was more
concerned with overcoming immediate problems and making the most of what
opportunities arose than with pursuing any grand design of universal conquest. Of all
the Diadochoi, it was Seleukos who modeled himself most closely on Alexander in his
aims and propaganda;
[12]
if one looks for a model for Antigonos, Philip is the far more
likely candidate. A case can be made suggesting that Antigonos's conception of
empire was modeled on that of Philip. The story of the peace terms proposed to
Alexander by Dareios after the battle of Issos, ceding all of Asia west of the Euphrates
to Alexander, and of Parmenion's advice to Alexander to accept, is well known (e.g.,
Arrian Anab. II 25,1–2). It is oft en thought that Parmenion, Philip's oldest and most
trusted general, hereby showed what the aims of Philip's expedition against the
Persians were to have been if he had lived to carry it out.
[13]
Antigonos was
fundamentally not very interested in holding territory in inner Asia, being interested
rather in western Asia, near the Mediterranean and Aegean seas, and in Greece and
Macedon. It may well be, then, that in so far as Antigonos had general policy aims
beyond seizing the
[11][12][13]
― 322 ―
opportunities that arose, these were to establish an empire in Asia Minor,
Syria/Palestine, and Greek lands, based on the political ideas of Philip, Antigonos's
contemporary and his leader for over twenty years.
But whatever his aims, it is clear that until the end of his life Antigonos was an
extremely successful politician and statesman; and this success was clearly based on
pragmatism, a great ability to perceive the potentialities and limitations in situations
that arose and act accordingly. Here again Antigonos was following the model of Philip
rather than of the romantic Alexander. The latter's exploits in Baktria and India might
be the stuff of legend, but they did not make strategic sense in terms of creating and
running a durable empire: those regions were simply too far away from Greece and
Macedon to be easily held as part of a Greco-Macedonian empire, and they offered no
advantages worth the cost of conquering and holding them. Antigonos's approach was
realistic: he removed the great Persian treasures of the east to western Asia, and for
the rest simply sought to prevent any power strong enough to become a threat to him
from arising in the far east. His loss of the battle of Ipsos and the subsequent
establishment of Seleukos as ruler of Asia meant a return to something more closely
approximating Alexander's policy.
This was not a boon for Greco-Macedonian power in Asia: the Seleukids'
involvements in the far east distracted their attention from Asia Minor, which was
allowed gradually to pass into the hands of a number of relatively minor dynasts.
Meanwhile the east simply ate up Seleukid energies and resources that might have
been better spent elsewhere; ultimately the east proved impossible for the Seleukids
to hold and was lost to the Greek world, but meanwhile the Seleukids had been
decisively weakened by many years of being overextended and were unable to resist
the new power of Rome advancing from the west. It was left to the Romans to reunify
Asia Minor and join it to Syria and Palestine to form the eastern part of their empire.
Though the Seleukids did not follow Antigonos's lead in their geographical
conception of empire, they do seem to have done so in their administrative practices.
As an administrator, Antigonos was also clearly pragmatic rather than idealistic or
original. His methods and practices were a mixture of adaptations from Philip and the
Achaemenids, as seemed best suited to the regions and problems they were intended
to deal with. In the fifteen or so years Antigonos ruled his western Asian empire, he
established a fully functional administra-
― 323 ―
tive system based on extensive colonization of Asia with Greek and Macedonian
manpower, on the division of the old Persian satrapies into smaller and more
manageable units, often called strategeiai, and on the creation of subdivisions of
these called chiliarchies (changed to hyparchies under the Seleukids), which actually
undertook the most important task, tribute collection. There can be no doubt that the
early Seleukids, especially Seleukos himself, largely rounded off work already well
advanced by Antigonos when establishing their administrative system in western
Asia—notably Syria and southern Asia Minor. All future study of administrative
practices and procedures in the Seleukid empire should henceforth begin with
Antigonos, if not further back with Philip and the Achaemenids.
Undoubtedly Antigonos's major lasting achievement was his administrative work
in Asia Minor and Syria, where he forms a bridge between Philip and the Achaemenids
on the one hand, and the early Seleukids on the other. The "Hellenization" of Asia
Minor and Syria was perhaps the most important achievement of the early Hellenistic
period, and Antigonos clearly deserves much of the credit for this. Wherever we have
evidence for colonizing activity by Antigonos, we also have evidence for further
activity by Lysimachos and/or the early Seleukids: Alexandria Troas, Nikaia, Antioch,
Apameia Kibotos, Apameia-on-the-Orontes, and Seleukia-in-Pieria are just the most
famous places where colonization by Antigonos seems to have preceded the more
widely known work of his successors. Some of the most famous cities of the
Hellenistic world thus owed their beginnings to Antigonos, whose importance in this
respect is surpassed perhaps only by Seleukos Nikator, the great continuator of his
colonization program.
If this were the only contribution Antigonos had made, it would be enough to
merit the attention of modern historians, but this is in fact far from being the case. As
the first of the Diadochoi to assume the status of basileus, Antigonos had a decisive
impact on the nature of Hellenistic kingship and royalist ideology, absolutist and
emphasizing the aristeia and andreia of the monarch, which gave him a personal
charisma justifying his elevation to superhuman status. With the possible exception of
Alexander, Antigonos was the first living monarch to be given divine honors and a cult
epithet by his Greek subjects and allies, which became standard features of Hellenistic
kingship. All of this had an important impact on philosophical ideas, treatises on
kingship becoming one of the standard types of philosophical writing
― 324 ―
in the Hellenistic period and beyond, virtually to the present day.
[14]
The revelation
that a man could become a king by his own merits had a profound effect on political
and ethical ideas; a small echo of the sensation caused by this act of Antigonos and
the other Diadochoi can be found as late as the Byzantine compendium known as the
Suda, which preserves (given the examples used evidently from an early Hellenistic
source) the following definition of kingship s.v. basileia: "It is neither descent [phusis
] nor legitimacy [to dikaion ] that gives monarchies to men, but the ability to
command an army and handle affairs competently. Such was the case with Philip and
with the Successors of Alexander."
Another important effect of Antigonos's assumption of royal status was the
status of his posterity as kings: though he was not personally responsible for
establishing his dynasty as kings of Macedon, and his own empire in Asia was lost to
his heirs, it is obvious that without Antigonos Monophthalmos's extraordinary career
and elevation of himself and his son to kingship, his grandson Antigonos Gonatas
would never have been in a position to make himself king of Macedon and settle the
dynasty firmly on that throne. And the influence of Monophthalmos on his
descendants should not be underestimated. Antigonos Gonatas's interest in sea power
and control of the Aegean is reminiscent of the policy of Monophthalmos; in 224/23
Antigonos Doson founded a Hellenic League in many ways similar to that founded
under Monophthalmos's auspices in 302; and it is only recently, with the Swedish
excavations under Crampa at Labraunda in Karia, that the continued Antigonid
interest down to the time of Doson and Philippos V in dominion over parts of Asia
Minor has come to be fully realized.
[15]
[14][15]
― 325 ―
The upshot of this study is, then, a total reevaluation of the career and significance of
Antigonos Monophthalmos: instead of the failed emulator of Alexander, we have the
founder of a dynasty, the successful general and statesman under whose auspices
new advances in military and naval techniques and technology were made, the
inventor of the political compromise under which the Greek city-states were
integrated into the Hellenistic state system down to the time of the Roman conquest,
the founder of cities and colonies, the dynast who helped to create and shape
Hellenistic kingship, and the statebuilder whose empire (under Seleukid control) was
one of the great powers of the Hellenistic world, and could perhaps have been greater
than it was if his geographical conception had been adhered to by the Seleukids. All of
this can be simply summed up, I think, by saying that Antigonos is to be understood
in terms of Philip's career rather than that of Alexander, and that it was Antigonos's
achievement to pass on to the Hellenistic world some of the tradition of thorough and
realistic statesmanship that marked Philip's brilliant career and achievements. It is in
this light that Antigonos should take his place as one of the seminal figures in creating
the Hellenistic world of the third and second centuries B.C.
APPENDIX I—
THE LITERARY SOURCES
A major problem every ancient historian must face is that of defining his or her
attitude towards the literary sources. This is more of a problem for some periods than
for others, according to the nature (primary, secondary, fragmentary, or whatever) of
the sources preserved, and their reliability. For the historian of the Diadochoi, a clear
statement of attitude towards the sources is of paramount importance, because none
of the primary sources have survived, and rival theories about the influence of the
lost primary sources on the surviving literary source material, and consequently of the
trustworthiness of the various secondary or even tertiary historical sources that are all
that survive, have proliferated to an alarming extent. Anyone writing about the
Diadochoi must therefore explain his or her attitude towards the many contradictory
tenets of Quellenforschung put forward by modern scholars, so as to make plain and
justify the relative importance he or she attributes to the various surviving sources.
It will not be possible here, for reasons of space, to give anything like a full
analysis of modern Quellenforschung: due to the number and complexity of the
theories proposed in the past hundred years or so, to do so would require an entirely
separate study. The interested reader can find a fairly full review of the scholarship on
the sources for this period in Seibert's Zeitatter der Diadochen, pp. 1–53. In general
one may legitimately say that many of the theories put forward as Quellenforschung
are more notable for ingenuity than for credibility. It does not speak well for the
methods employed by scholars engaged in source criticism that in all too many cases
the conclusions arrived at
― 328 ―
by able, and even eminent, scholars investigating the same problem by the same
methods are irreconcilably opposed: a case in point is the study of the sources used
by Diodoros for books XVIII–XX of his history, which has led scholars to divergent and
all too often fanciful conclusions (cf. the remarks of Seibert, pp. 32–35).
One factor contributing significantly to the situation outlined above is, I think, an
understandable desire on the part of modern researchers to arrive at definite
conclusions when studying problems, although often the available evidence is simply
inadequate to establish such conclusions. An indispensible quality for successful
source criticism is the ability to recognize when a problem is insoluble in the present
state of the evidence and a willingness to say so. To be of any use, Quellenforschung
must be conducted according to rigorous rules of logic: too many researchers show a
lamentable reluctance to wield Occam's Razor, which would certainly have eliminated
some of the more involved theories of scholars seeking to establish the links between
surviving secondary and lost primary sources.
This is particularly true of the tendency prevalent among certain scholars to posit
intermediary writers between primary sources and surviving secondary historians,
which intermediaries are then supposed to have done the actual work of collating and
condensing the primary sources.
[1]
For example, when Diodoros tells us in the
introduction to his history that he had read the works of a large number of earlier
historians, and condensed them into one manageable work of universal history (Diod.
1 3, 1–4,5), some scholars insist that in fact Diodoros did nothing of the kind, but
merely produced a shorter version of such a universal history written earlier by
Agatharchides of Knidos (thus, e.g., Beloch, GG, 4.2:5) or by an anonymous
Alexandrian (as is hypothesized by Vezin, Eumenes von Kardia, pp. 6–7). This kind of
thing seems to rest on no basis other than the long discredited Einquellenprinzip of
Heinrich Nissen,
[2]
and on a curious unwillingness to believe that any of our surviving
secondary historians can actually have done any work. Too little is known of the lost
histories of Agatharchides and other Hellenistic writers (e.g., Timagenes of
Alexandria) who have been brought forward as putative intermediaries between the
surviving sources and the primary historians; there is a vitiating circularity of
reasoning in concluding that Diodoros based
[1][2]
― 329 ―
himself on such intermediaries because of the way he wrote, for example, and then
deducing the methods and sources of the intermediaries from the methods and
sources apparent in Diodoros.
In short, then, my attitude to Quellenforschung tends to be conservative and
skeptical: conservative in that I prefer a simple and straightforward solution to a
problem rather than a complex one; skeptical in that I doubt modern theories that are
not based on fairly clear and unequivocal indications in the sources. So when Diodoros
states the beginning, end point, and subject matter of a famous work of history in his
book, I take this as an indication that Diodoros may actually have read that work of
history, rather than constructing a hypothesis on how Diodoros must have obtained
this information from an intermediary. Unless and until substantially larger remains of
the various putative third- and second-century intermediate authors such as
Agatharchides are found, it is simply impossible to determine whether and how and to