Antigonid Macedon

The country he started from

Drafted from Errington, Hellenistic Culture and Society (1990)formation

This region is called The Eastern Mediterranean after Alexander and its blurb describes the countries Alexander took and did not keep. Macedon is neither. It is the country he started from, and the one thing the Argeads had held before any of it.

The record is filed here anyway and the reason is worth stating rather than hiding in a data comment. This kingdom's entire history is the Aegean, the Greek leagues, the Ptolemaic fleet and the wars with Rome that came through Illyria — and one of the other two Successor kingdoms, Ptolemaic Egypt, is on this shelf. Putting Macedon in a region of its own for the sake of a name would be tidier and less useful. Anyone who disagrees is disagreeing with a judgement rather than with a fact, which is the right way round for a judgement to be left.

Forty years of nobody

What happened to Macedon between Alexander's death in 323 and 277 is difficult to summarise because it is mostly a list. Regents, generals and sons of generals held it in succession; Cassander killed Alexander's mother, widow and son; Demetrius the Besieger held it for seven years and lost it; two kings divided it and one killed the other; and in 279 a Gallic invasion came down through the Balkans, killed King Ptolemy Keraunos in battle and put his head on a spear.

Then in 277 Antigonus II Gonatas, Demetrius's son, destroyed a Gallic army near Lysimacheia in the Chersonese and was accepted as king of Macedon on the strength of it. He held it for thirty-eight years and his family held it for another seventy.

That is where the dynasty starts, and the founding fact is that the kingship was won by beating an invasion rather than inherited. The Attalids of Pergamum have the identical founding fact thirty-nine years later and eight hundred kilometres away: Attalus I took the royal title after beating the same people. In the third-century Aegean world, killing Galatians was how you became a king.

What it had

A population, and silver.

The population is the thing that separates this kingdom from every other Hellenistic state, and it made its army a different kind of thing: a national levy, in a period that did not otherwise have one. The Seleucids and the Ptolemies fought with mercenaries and with military settlers planted on granted land, because they ruled enormous populations that were not theirs and could not be armed. Macedon fielded a phalanx of Macedonian farmers who went home after the campaign.

The consequence runs through everything that follows. Macedon could field one army at a time and could not replace it quickly, and it spent a century facing first the Greek leagues and then a Roman republic that had lost three armies to Hannibal in as many years and raised more.

The silver is Pangaion and the Strymon country, mined since before Philip II, along with the timber that every fleet in the Aegean needed and only Macedon had in quantity. Land and mines, in other words, and the Roman senate's decision after Pydna to close the mines for a decade rather than work them is the clearest statement anyone ever made of what they were worth.

A red coat on a spear

Drafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)expansion

In 222 BC an Antigonid king destroyed a Spartan army in the field and entered Sparta, which no enemy had done in its history. Plutarch tells the battle twice, in two different lives, and the two accounts together are the best picture there is of what Macedonian hegemony in Greece actually consisted of.

Cleomenes had seized the passes and was posted on the hills at Sellasia. Antigonus Doson came up and drew out opposite him, meaning to force the position. On the Macedonian side the Achaean contingent and the Illyrian foot were held in reserve with orders not to engage until they saw a red coat raised on a spear point from the wing where the king was fighting in person.

The Achaeans obeyed. The Illyrians did not — their own officers led them forward — and Cleomenes' brother Euclidas, seeing the foot separated from the horse, sent his best light troops round to take them in the rear. At that point a young Achaean officer named Philopoemen went to the king's staff to tell them what the moment needed, and was ignored as a hare-brained fellow, having as yet no reputation that would make anyone listen. So he charged with his own citizens instead, broke the light troops, and then got off his horse to fight on foot in horseman's armour over broken ground, and had both thighs pinned by a thonged javelin thrown hard enough to come out the other side. He stood there a while, as if shackled, unable to move.

From the other side, Plutarch tells it as a disaster with a specific cause. Cleomenes, watching from high ground, could not see the Illyrians and Acarnanians and guessed they had been sent round; he called for the officer whose job was exactly that and told him to watch his rear. The officer — bribed by Antigonus, according to one source Plutarch names — told him all was well and to mind the enemy in front. So Cleomenes charged, pushed the Macedonian phalanx back half a mile, then looked across, saw his brother's wing surrounded, and cried out that he was lost. Six thousand Spartans were killed. Two hundred survived.

Then the detail that makes the whole campaign an accident. Letters recalling Antigonus to Macedonia — a barbarian invasion at home — had been on the road and almost reached him before the battle; if they had, he would have marched away and left the Achaeans to manage alone. The messengers arrived immediately after Cleomenes had lost his army and his city. Had Cleomenes retreated two days longer, Plutarch writes, he need not have fought at all and could have had what terms he liked. He fought because he had run out of money to pay his mercenaries, with twenty thousand men against thirty.

Cleomenes rode back into Sparta and advised the citizens he met to receive Antigonus, and then left for Egypt.

That is the Antigonid kingdom at its greatest reach, and everything about how it got there is in the account: a king who ruled Macedonia and was also the elected hegemon of a Greek league, fighting a Greek war on Greek ground with Illyrian and Acarnanian mercenaries, whose signal system failed, whose victory turned on an Achaean officer nobody had heard of, and who won because his opponent could not afford another fortnight. Ten days later he was needed a long way north, which is where Macedonian kings were usually needed, and which is the reason the hegemony of Greece was never a thing the dynasty could hold with both hands.

The kingdom he had

Drafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)peak

Philip V came to the throne at seventeen and was, in the phrase Polybius uses of his early years, the darling of Greece — a young king of an old kingdom, energetic, personally brave, and better liked than a Macedonian had been for a long time.

Polybius watched him closely and disliked what he became, and the value of the account is that it is written by a Greek from a rival league who nonetheless records what the kingdom could actually do.

What that was

It could put a fleet to sea and did, repeatedly, in the Aegean and off Asia. It could campaign in Illyria, in Thessaly, in the Peloponnese and against the Aetolians in the same decade. It could take cities: Polybius describes Philip delighted at capturing one as though the whole war had been settled by it, which is a criticism of the man and a statement of the fact.

And it could operate at range. When Rome and Carthage were fighting in Italy, Philip made a treaty with Hannibal — a Macedonian king negotiating a partition of the western Mediterranean with a Carthaginian general — and later he was anxious above all things to anticipate the Romans in getting to a position first, which is Polybius's way of saying that by then the calculation ran the other way.

The limitation, stated early

Set against all of that is the thing Polybius keeps returning to whenever he describes a Macedonian army in the field: the phalanx.

Nothing in the world could stand against it in a straight line on level ground. Polybius says so as a professional soldier who had seen both systems, and his comparison of the phalanx and the legion is the most quoted passage he ever wrote. He also says the other half, which people quote less: the formation is useless in broken country, and armies do not get to choose the ground.

That is not hindsight applied after Pydna. Polybius sets it out as a general principle about the two military systems, and it explains why a kingdom that could beat any Greek opponent, hold Thessaly, garrison the Peloponnese and treat with Hannibal was nonetheless going to lose to Rome the first time the two met somewhere hilly.

What the peak actually looked like

A kingdom of perhaps a few hundred thousand people, fielding an army of its own farmers, holding the passes into Greece and the three fortresses the Greeks called the fetters of Hellas, financed by its own silver mines, with a fleet and a foreign policy that reached from the Adriatic to the coast of Asia.

It is small by the standards of the other Successor kingdoms and it lasted longer than either of them in Alexander's own country. What it could not do was lose an army, because the men in it could not be replaced — and it was about to meet a state that could lose several.

The phalanx and the legion

Drafted from Errington, Hellenistic Culture and Society (1990)contraction

Philip V is the dynasty's high point and he spent his reign losing. He held Thessaly and garrisons in Greece, built a fleet, allied with Hannibal after Cannae, and fought three wars against Rome; the last of them ended in 197 at Cynoscephalae in Thessaly, in fog, on broken ground, when the two armies stumbled into each other over a ridge.

The Macedonian right formed up and drove the Roman left back. The Macedonian left was still coming up in column when the Roman right went through it, and an unnamed tribune took twenty maniples out of the pursuit and hit the victorious right wing in the rear. The phalanx, which cannot turn, was destroyed where it stood.

Polybius on why

The comparison of the two systems is one of the set pieces of ancient historiography and Polybius wrote it as a Greek explaining a defeat to Greeks. His argument is that the phalanx is invincible frontally on ground that suits it and that ground that suits it is rare — that a formation sixteen deep with five-metre pikes needs a level plain with no ditch, no watercourse, no rock and no gap, and that no commander can guarantee one. The legion, in maniples with a sword, can fight on anything and can be detached in pieces.

He is describing a technical difference and he is also describing the fate of the kingdom. Macedon's army was its adult male population. Rome's was a system that could absorb Cannae and produce another consular army the following year. Philip lost Greece, his fleet, his foreign policy and eight hundred talents at Cynoscephalae, and kept his throne for twenty-nine more years because Rome had not yet decided what to do with defeated kings.

Perseus

His son tried again, which is the part that reads as either courage or miscalculation depending on the historian. The Third Macedonian War ran from 171 to 168 and Perseus won a cavalry engagement early and could not convert it. At Pydna the phalanx again broke on uneven ground, Aemilius Paullus said afterwards that he had never seen anything more terrifying than its advance and had never seen anything collapse faster, and the Macedonian army ceased to exist in about an hour.

That is the military problem the kingdom could not solve, and it had been visible for thirty years before anybody had to solve it. The phalanx was unbeatable on the ground it was designed for, and Macedonia could not choose the ground.

Pydna

Drafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)end

Aemilius Paullus destroyed the Macedonian army at Pydna in 168, and what Rome did afterwards is better documented than the battle, because Rome made a spectacle of it.

Perseus surrendered. He was brought to Italy and kept for the triumph, which took three days, and Plutarch describes the third.

The procession

First the plate: gold coin divided into seventy-seven vessels of three talents each; a consecrated bowl of ten talents set with precious stones; the cups of Antigonus and of Seleucus, and the Thericlean ware, and all the gold service from Perseus' own table.

Then the king's chariot, with his armour laid in it and his diadem on top of the armour.

Then, after a pause, the children — two sons and a daughter — led as captives with their attendants, their tutors and their teachers, all weeping and holding out their hands to the spectators and making the children beg too. They were too young to understand what was happening to them, which Plutarch says made it worse to watch. Many Romans wept. Perseus himself walked behind them and was scarcely looked at.

He came last of the family, dressed in black, wearing the boots of his own country, and looking, in the account, like a man stunned out of his reason.

The request

Before the triumph Perseus had sent to Aemilius asking to be left out of it.

The reply is the coldest sentence in the chapter. Aemilius answered, deriding his cowardice and his fondness for life, that as for that, it had been before and was still in his own power — meaning that a man who did not wish to be displayed could avoid it by dying.

Perseus did not have the spirit for it, and, in Plutarch's phrase, allowed himself to appear as a part of his own spoils.

What the money did

Behind the captives came four hundred gold crowns sent by Greek cities to congratulate the victor, and then Aemilius in a purple robe worked with gold, holding a laurel branch, with the whole army following and singing.

The consequence of all that treasure is stated by Plutarch as a plain fact and it is the most far-reaching thing in the chapter. Aemilius brought so much money into the public treasury from Macedonia that the Roman people paid no direct tax again until the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa — which is to say, for the next hundred and twenty years, down to the first war between Antony and Caesar.

The Macedonian monarchy did not merely fall. It funded the republic that abolished it, through the whole of that republic's greatest period, until the republic itself came apart.

Not claiming Alexander

Drafted from Errington, Hellenistic Culture and Society (1990)aside?What aside means

The Antigonids ruled Macedonia from Pella for a hundred and nine years, and did not claim descent from Alexander, or from Philip II, or from the Argead house at all.

They had no grounds to. Antigonus One-Eye was a Macedonian noble and one of Philip's officers; his family's claim is to itself. The descent they asserted was from Antigonus and Demetrius, four and three generations back, and nothing older.

That is worth dwelling on, because the expected thing would have been to invent something. A dynasty that finds itself holding a famous predecessor's ground almost always reaches for the predecessor: the Sasanians claimed the Kayanids, the Ottomans took Kayser-i Rûm, Cyrus called himself king of Anshan in a city he had just taken, and the kings of Pontus claimed descent from Darius I and from Alexander, neither of which anyone could check.

The people actually ruling Alexander's capital, with his tomb's contents in another kingdom and his mother's grave a day's ride away, claimed nothing.

The silence, and what it is worth

Nobody claimed the Antigonids either, which is unremarkable — a dynasty put down by Rome and legislated out of existence leaves nothing to claim.

What is remarkable is the other silence. Alexander's own house was claimed by half the ancient world, and the people best placed on earth to claim it — in possession of his capital, a day's ride from his mother's grave, ruling the country he was born in — declined to.

The most plausible reason is that they could not have got away with it in Macedonia. Everyone there knew who Antigonus had been. A Sasanian in Persia could claim the Kayanids because the Kayanids were legendary and nobody could check; an Antigonid in Pella claiming to be an Argead would have been claiming something his own nobility knew to be false. The dynasties that invent an ancestry are the ones far enough away from it, in time or in distance, that the invention is safe. This one was standing in the room.

Why not

Errington's account suggests the answer is that it would not have helped.

Macedonian kingship was not a mystical office and the Macedonians were not a population that needed convincing a king was descended from a god. What a Macedonian king needed was to hold the frontier against the Illyrians, Thracians and Gauls, to pay and lead the levy, and to not lose. Gonatas got the throne by destroying a Gallic army and his descendants kept it by governing competently until Rome arrived. The claim they made was the claim that was true, and it was sufficient.

Set against the two records entered beside this one it is a striking contrast. The Attalids, holding a kingdom founded on a stolen treasury, spent a century and a half arguing in marble that they were the defenders of Greek Asia. The Pontic dynasty, ruling a corner of Anatolia, claimed two of the largest lineages in history at once. The dynasty that actually had Alexander's kingdom said it was the family of Antigonus, and left it there.

A clerk to the magistrates

Drafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)afterlife

Perseus was moved out of the common prison at Rome, the Carcer, into somewhere cleaner and more humane, because Aemilius Paullus pitied him and could obtain nothing better. He died there.

Plutarch gives two accounts of how and declines to choose. In one, he starved himself. In the other, the soldiers guarding him conceived a spite against him, and finding no other way to torment a prisoner they were forbidden to harm, they kept him from sleeping — disturbing him whenever he lay down, inventing contrivances to keep him permanently awake — until he was worn out and died.

Two of his children died soon after him.

The third

The third was called Alexander, and Plutarch records what became of him in a single sentence that says more about the end of Macedon than the battle does.

He became an accomplished craftsman in turning and engraving small figures; he learned to speak and write Latin so perfectly that he was made clerk to the Roman magistrates; and he performed the work with great skill and good conduct.

The great-great-grandson of Antigonus Gonatas, and the last male of the house that had governed Alexander's homeland for a hundred and ten years, spent his adult life making ornaments and keeping records for the officials of the city that had taken his father's kingdom, and by the account was good at it.

What Rome did to the country

The kingdom itself was not transferred to anybody. It was dismantled.

Macedonia was divided into four republics forbidden to trade or intermarry across the new internal borders. The royal land was taken and the mines shut. The leading men of the Greek states were deported to Italy in their thousands — a group that included Polybius, which is the only reason a detailed account of any of this survives.

Rome had removed kings before and had always put someone in the place: a brother, a son, a client, a settlement. Here it abolished the office. Twenty years earlier that had not been in the repertoire; twenty years later it was what Rome did to Carthage and Corinth in the same year.

And the money

The last consequence is the longest-running. The treasure Aemilius brought back from Macedonia was so large that the Roman people paid no direct tax again for something like a hundred and twenty years.

So the practical afterlife of the Antigonid kingdom is this: its silver relieved Roman citizens of taxation for four generations, its aristocracy's deportation produced the greatest historian of the Roman rise, its country was legislated into four pieces that could not trade with each other, and its last prince engraved small figures and kept the minutes.