Robin Waterfield - Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Greats Empire (Ancient Warfare and Civilization)

DIVIDING THE SPOILS

Ancient Warfare and Civilization
SERIES EDITORS:
RICHARD ALSTON ROBIN WATERFIELD

In this series, leading historians offer compelling new narratives of the armed conflicts that shaped and reshaped the classical world, from the wars of Archaic Greece to the fall of the Roman Empire and Arab conquests.

Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Greats Empire
Robin Waterfield

ROBIN WATERFIELD

The War for Alexander
the Greats Empire

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Waterfield, Robin, 1952
Dividing the spoils : the war for Alexander the Greats empire/Robin Waterfield.
p. cm. (Ancient warfare and civilization)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539523-5
1. GreeceHistoryMacedonian Hegemony, 323281 B.C. 2. MacedoniaHistoryDiadochi,
323276 B.C. 3. GeneralsGreeceBiography. 4. GeneralsMacedoniaBiography. 5. Greece
Kings and rulersBiography. 6. MacedoniaKings and rulersBiography. 7. Mediterranean Region
History, Military. 8. Mediterranean RegionHistoryTo 476. I. Title.
DF235.4.W38 2011
938.070922dc22 2010030834

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

FOR MY FATHER
AND IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

This book tells the story of one of the great forgotten wars of history. It took more or less forty years after the death of Alexander the Great for his heirs (the Diadokhoi, the Successors) to finish carving up his vast empire. These years, 323281 BCE, were filled with high adventure, intrigue, passion, assassinations, dynastic marriages, treachery, shifting alliances, and mass slaughter on battlefield after battlefield. And while the men fought on the field, the women schemed from their palaces, pavilions, and prisons; this was the first period of western history when privileged women, especially from the royal families, began to play the kind of major political roles they would continue to play throughout the future history of Roman, Byzantine, and European monarchies.

My period has a natural starting pointthe death of Alexander in June 323and an equally natural end. The year 281 saw the violent deaths of the last two direct Successors of Alexander, those who had known and ridden with him. The next generationthe Epigonoi, as Nymphis, a historian of the second century BCE, called them in a lost workmay have been just as ambitious as their fathers, but the world had changed. It was no longer realistic to aim for dominion of the whole of Alexanders empire; instead, their first aim was to hold on to their core territoriesMacedon for the Antigonids, Asia for the Seleucids, and Greater Egypt for the Ptolemies. Of course, they and their descendants would regularly attempt to take over some of a neighbors territory, but no individual any longer realistically aspired to rule the whole known world. There would never again be a time like the time of the Successors, forty years of almost unremitting warfare aimed at worldwide domination.

In their day, the Successors were household names, because they held the fate of the world in their hands. If their fame has become dimmed over the centuries, that is a result of historical accident (the loss of almost all our sources for the period) and of our perennial obsession with Alexander the Great, in whose shadow they have been made to stand. My main purpose in this book has been to revive the memory of the Successors. A narrative account is enough on its own to demonstrate that the early Hellenistic period was not an anticlimax after the conquests of Alexander, and certainly not a period of decline and disintegration. In fact, Alexander had left things in a mess, with no guaranteed succession, no administration in place suitable for such an enormous empire, and huge untamed areas both bordering and within his empire. A detailed and realistic map of Alexanders conquests would show him cutting a narrow swath across Asia and back, leaving much relatively untouched. So far from disintegration, then, the Successors consolidated the Conquerors gains. Their equal ambitions, however, meant that consolidation inevitably led to the breakup of the empire and the foundation of lesser empires and kingdoms.

Military narrative features prominently in the book, but has been broken up by asides on cultural matters. For, astonishingly, this period of savage warfare was also characterized by brilliant cultural developments, especially in the fields of art, literature, and philosophy. The energy released by world conquest was not all absorbed on battle-fields, and the culture the Successors brought in their train flourished, thanks especially to royal patronage. Although they were warlords, the Successors were not uncultured. Alexander himself was said to have slept with a copy of Homers Iliad under his pillowalong with a knife. Without the consolidation the Successors brought to Alexanders gains, the spread of culture would have been impossible; there is no civilization without structure.

So as well as an account of the military action, this book also contains an outline of its cultural impact. A new world emerged from the dust and haze of battlea world with distinct territories each ruled by its own king, but with a common culture. That common culture is what entitles us to speak generally of the Greek east, distinct from the Roman west, and it was the Successors, therefore, who set up the world-changing confrontation between these two power blocs. The result, of course, was Roman dominion over the entire Greek world. The takeover culminated in 30 BCE with the annexation of Egypt, and this date is generally taken to mark the end of what scholars call the Hellenistic periodthe period, starting with the death of Alexander, when the Greek culture that the Successors fostered came to dominate the world from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan.

My main intention has been to write an accurate and enjoyable bookto make sense of a very difficult period of history. The over-arching story is implied by my title and subtitle. The spoils were divided. We see the emergence, out of Alexanders single empire, of a multistate political order and of a developing balance of power. At one time or another, all the Successors tried to emulate their dead leader and conquer the entirety of the empire, but none of them succeeded. We witness what realist historians would describe as a law of history: contiguous powers with imperialist ambitions are bound to clash and so limit those ambitions. At the beginning of our forty-year period, grand imperialism was a possibility, but not at the end. The action of this law is the thread that runs through the book.