Green - Alexander to Actium: the historical evolution of the Hellenistic age

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES

Title page: Tetradrachm of Demetrius I.
Photo by Ellen Kitzmiller.

The publication of this book was made possible in partby a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
1990 by Peter Green

Dis manibus
F. E. Adcock
G. T. Griffith
W. K. C. Guthrie
J. E. Raven
with gratitude for much wisdom freelyshared, and in affectionate memory

The historian may well interest himself in the state ofthings, the condition of society, the principles underlyinga system of government or a system of thought. But if heis to understand historically and practice historicalwriting, he will have to think of such analyses as steps in achain of events, as matters explanatory of a sequence ofhappenings. He will have to concentrate on understandingchange, which is the essential content of historicalanalysis and description. History treats fundamentally ofthe transformation of things (people, institutions, ideas,and so on) from one state into another, and the event isits concern as well as its instrument.

G. R. Elton,
The Practice of History

Chorus of all. All, all, of a piece throughout:

Thy Chase had a Beast in View;

Thy Wars brought nothing about;

Thy Lovers were all untrue.

Tis well an Old Age is out,

And time to begin a New.

Dance of Huntsmen, Nymphs,
Warriours, and Lovers
John Dryden, The Secular Masque

,,
,
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,
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Choerilus of Samos

The Hellenistic age has one great advantage for us: it is easily definable. Its unity wasfirst perceived, its limits set, even its name invented, by the nineteenth-centuryGerman historian Johann Gustav Droysen. For him, as for most subsequent students ofthe period, it began with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C., continuedthrough the rise, decline and fall of the great kingdoms carved by his marshals (knownas the Diadochoi, or Successors) from the empire he left, and ended withOctavians dissolution of the last of these, Ptolemaic Egypt, in 30 B.C., just under threecenturies later. This is a modern perspective: it is highly doubtful whether anyancient writer, from the Augustan age onwards, ever recognized the problem in theseterms. Romes triumph encouraged an innate natural tendency to take short views.

It follows that to attempt a East, had been inways badly misrepresented. Thus one of my objects in writing the present work is todraw a more realistic picture of the impact, nature, and limitations of this diffusion.

I must also, at the same time, emphasize that this does notsince I amold-fashioned enough to prefer operating with a free intellect, an open rather than a closedmindmean that I am either a declared or a covert Marxist, as should becomeabundantly clear in the course of this book. Throughout I have been in pursuit of thetruth, an aim much ridiculed today, for their own partisan purposes, by committedideologists; and though neither I nor any reasonable person would believe thatRankes ideal of writing history wie es eigentlich gewesen sei is attainablewhat idealis?that does not release the historian from the harsh obligation of striving for it tothe best of his or her ability. To do otherwise is as though (to draw a theologicalparallel) the concept of inherent human sinfulness and fallibility were taken as aself-evident reason neither to pursue virtue, nor to avoid error; or, worse, as indicatingthat the terms virtue and error had no significant meaning.

When I first embarked on the vast task that I had, with incurable optimism, setmyself, my primary aim was simple enough: to provide an up-to-date and unifiedsurvey of a period heavily worked by specialists, but still too often ignored by those(including many professionals) in the habit of skipping adroitly from Alexanderifnot from the defeat of Athens in 404to the rise of the Roman Republic. Such asynthesis must of necessity rest, to a great extent, on foundations laid by the greatpioneers in the field. Hellenistic history as we know it would be inconceivablewithout the work of such scholars as Droysen, Niese, Berve, Wilcken, Tarn, Rostovtzeff,Holleaux, Bouch-Leclercq, and Praux, not to mention countless others still living,all of whom have contributed so much in understanding to every aspect of thismultifaceted age. Yet, at intervals, a time arrives, for this as for other periods and areas,when it becomes desirable to pull all the threads together in the light of a mass ofnew discoveries and changing interpretations, and to attempt an interim overview,governed by a single outlook.

Specialists are, more often than not, loath to undertake such a task, for which,by temperament and training, they tend, in any case, to be ill suited; when othersperform it, they label it popularization or, with rather more charitable contempt,haute vulgarisation. This of course at once raises the question of the audience forwhich such books are written. The most common answer is, for the intelligentgeneral reader, and loose though this definition is, I would agree that if the findingsof ancient historians have any validity at all, they should most certainly bedisseminated among thinking peopleespecially if, as will be seen in a moment, they havesome application to the problems of our own world today. At the same time, closeand profitable contact, over nineteen years, with colleagues in a large, energetic, andvariegated Classics Department has convinced menot entirely on the quis custodietprinciplethat specialists, too, benefit at times from an attempt to impose some sortof coherent perspective on their activities. It is no bad thing, once in a while, to standback, take the long view, and meditate upon the sum of things.

I have, thus, written this book with both audiences always in mind. The maintext throughout remains free (I hope) of all arcane allusions, historiographical jargon,specialist shorthand, and quotationsfamiliar commonplaces apartin foreignlanguages. In the Notes and References, on the other hand, my one concession to layreaders is to make it easier for the curious to hunt down references to fragments bydirecting them, whenever possible, to the actual source of the quotation rather thanto the collections of Jacoby, Mller, Diels and Kranz, and others, which may be inevery academic library, but remain inaccessible to nonspecialists and baffling evenwhen found. Similarly, I have taken it for granted that my colleagues will knowwhich editions of ancient authors are the most reliable, whereas the general readerwill, nine times out of ten, simply go to the relevant Loeb or Penguin volume, ifavailable, and take potluck. But for both categories I have made my documentationof sources, both primary and secondary, as full and scrupulous as I could. Too manyHellenistic commonplaces