Dr. Graham Wrightson
Appearances
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
But Alexander just keeps on going and he conquers the whole Persian Empire and refuses Darius's offer of splitting the kingdom and marriage with his daughter and all this other different stuff that goes on early on. And he conquers and there's a split in the scholarship as to whether he chooses to turn around in India or whether he's forced to turn around by his own soldiers.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
I'm on the choice side because my supervisor... is the main proponent of that, Waldemar Haeckel. So he, in my view, rightfully continued the argument raised by others earlier that Alexander, if you go around the borders of all of Alexander's empire, he goes about two kilometers, I think it is, out past the Persian army and then makes sacrifices and then changes direction.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
He does the same thing in India and there's various other different arguments. So Alexander conquers Persia and goes a little further to make his empire bigger. And then he turns around and has his new plans. When he comes back to Babylon, the center, the just new center of his new empire, as opposed to Persis, which was the center of the Persian empire.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
He specifically chooses Babylon as his to connect with the, the hanging guns, Babylon and all the Babylonian history of Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi and all that stuff. And then he dies when he's in there. So he, He dies very shortly after finishing his Indian conquests. But by the time he dies, you know, Egypt. Western Asia, they've been ruled by the Macedonians for over a decade by this point.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So they're not necessarily close to leaving. He's founded cities in all these places. He's implemented Greek settlers in all these places. So he's begun the process in his Western conquests of integration of conquered peoples with the Hellenistic culture that comes around. So when he dies, there's no real...
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
threat in most places anyway of separation from alexander right and part of that is his propaganda presenting himself as the savior of these places he modeled himself on cyrus the great who famously freed the babylonians from their evil uh persian dominance even though he's doing the same thing and he you know you get cyrus cylinder where he claims that he has
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
He was welcomed in as a friend to Babylon without a fight and all this other propagandistic, ridiculous concepts. So Alexander does the same stuff with his personal historians, saying that he's the savior, freeing the people from Persian dominance. But now you have a new... And you're just not supposed to realize that point. So in most of those areas, it's fine. In India, it's newly conquered.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
But because it's newly conquered, they still have the same loyalty to the people that Alexander put in charge for the most part. And obviously, he's left garrisons and new cities in all these different places that he's been to. So when he dies in 323, it creates a vacuum, not...
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
that leads to separation of the whole empire, but a vacuum for who's going to rule the empire instead, because his one illegitimate son is a child and his wife is pregnant still with what turns out to be his legitimate, only legitimate son. And so his generals, who've been the ones fighting for him, obviously they didn't expect him to die so young.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And they didn't expect this power vacuum at the very top of the kingdom to appear. And in all Argiad history, it's a whole history of civil war, violence of brothers killing brothers and all sorts of fun stuff going on in the early Macedonian history. And that was when it was a small kingdom. So now it's a massive empire. It's even more to the fore as to what's going to happen.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And so the cultural context is that he's begun the integration in these different places with all these cities he's founded. And that remains through the Hellenistic period, especially in Asia and Egypt. The one problem area was Greece, which we'll come back to. But his generals have to decide... What are we going to do? Do we favour the illegitimate son that's already alive?
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Do we favour the pregnant wife? Or do we favour his brother, who happens to be older but is not trusted because of his epilepsy or whatever other... He's got something which means that he can't rule without help.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah, just like Henry VI in England, for those British folk who know that stuff, he has bouts of...
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
whatever it is mental disorder where he disappears from being able to rule and so the generals aren't sure that he's a reliable king and so there's a dispute between even amongst the generals themselves over who they follow and also who is the most important general alexander never had necessarily a designated right-hand man after his friend hefeistian dies just before he does
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
it's Pertikas and we get the statement that Pertikas was handed the ring by Alexander on his deathbed and said Pertikas supposedly according to Plutarch says who does this go to and he says to the strongest and he's giving it to Pertikas so Pertikas takes that to mean that he is the designated chosen successor as the strongest and the others say that that's not what he meant at all and that you were supposed to give it to the person who proved themselves to be the strongest and that's assuming you take Plutarch and the other sources at their word that this actually happened
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
We don't know what actually happened in Alexander's deathbed room. So the generals fight amongst themselves.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And immediately after Alexander dies, we get this sort of mini rebellion between Meleager, this really insignificant general who claims that he's speaking for the common soldier when he wants one person and that the main generals are the elite cavalry general people who are too fancy for the common soldiers. And so Meleager posits himself in opposition to Pertikas.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And there's this mini civil war and then Pertikas forces them to hand over Meliega, who he and his ringleaders get trampled by elephants in execution for their resistance and all that fun stuff. So there's all sorts of different things going on. So immediately after his death, it's who is going to be the next king that the generals will back. That's their main decision that they have to make.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah, for sure. I mean, these generals, Alexander sort of created a somewhat level playing field amongst his commanders so that the army functions better in that context. Earlier in the army, he had Parmenion, who was his father's general, who was clearly the number two. But later on, he seems to be a Feistian, but Feistian's not the best commander.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So it's sort of Pertikas and Craterus at the same time. And he has sort of a cavalry general and an infantry general, but it's not clear which one is superior. So that when Alexander dies, there's no Feistian, which makes it... Easier for the squabbles to begin, I guess. Perdiccas claims it's him because he's there when Alexander dies.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Craterus, the old infantry general, has been released from service with 10,000 veterans like a year before. And he's halfway back to Macedon when he learns of Alexander's death. He's like, well, I'm just as important as Perdiccas. Why is Perdiccas in charge? And so these generals, they believe strongly that they are, you know, no worse than the other person. They are...
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
They're equals, and so they fight for recognition. There's two levels of generals, I guess. You get at the top, you have Craterus and Perdiccas, who fought with Alexander as his main generals. Then you have Antipater, who has been governing Macedon. Previously, he worked for Philip II, Alexander's father, and was the same level as Parmenion.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
He sort of viewed himself as the most important individual left behind, because he's senior to everybody, and he's a generation above all these different upstarts. But he's not fought with Alexander, right?
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And then below that, you have the generals who are named and had positions but weren't like senior commanders, like Ptolemy, who goes on to take Egypt, and Seleucus, and Lysimachus, and Leonartus, the bodyguard, and Polyperchon, who comes out later, and Prusestas, the bodyguard, who's become governor of... one of the satrapies.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So you get those level people, and Antigonus, who's a governor of a satrapy, they decide that they want to strike out to better their own positions too. And so Ptolemy heads off to claim Egypt before anyone can tell him not to. And Seleucus heads off to claim Babylon before anyone can tell him not to. And Craterus declares his independence and
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And the complicating factor is the rebellion of the Greeks. Immediately after Alexander dies, Greece rebels, at least through Athens, and they begin what we call the Lamian War because of the main battles around the siege of the city of Lamia in northern Greece, in Thessaly. And it's headed by a successful general. Antipater, as the governor of Macedon in Greece, has to deal with that.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And he goes down and fights and loses to start with. So he calls for assistance. And Craterus is the closest. So he comes with Neoptolemus, another general, and Leonartus, and they go and they fight. Leonartus already, it seems, is aiming at kingship himself because he's put feelers out to marry Alexander's sister, who becomes a key...
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
figure in these early successor squabbles who gets to marry Cleopatra Alexander's sister because that's the closest you can get to the royal family right as a man you can't marry the sons right so you've got to marry the sisters and Alexander doesn't have a daughter he dies in battle against the Greeks so that gets rid of one of these upstart generals
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah, exactly. So the Lamian War is this... It's a crucial event, not because the Greeks win their freedom, but because they win their first couple of engagements. And that changes the presentation and propaganda ability of the generals who are involved. So Antipater loses some face because he can't defeat the Greeks by himself. So he has to invite Craterus in for assistance.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
and leonardus dies obviously so that doesn't help but craterus wins the battle wins the war but he has to call in help from white clitus who brings the navy another name right yeah and he was a battalion commander who arrives late there's two clituses the black clitus is the one killed by alexander white clitus survives so he wins the lamian war on the navy craterus wins on land and they subdue athens in the name of antipater who's still nominally in charge
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah, so we have five main sources for Alexander himself. So we have Arian, Plutarch's Life of Alexander that's paired with Julius Caesar, Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curcius Rufus, and then there's Justin's summary of the history of Pompeius Trogus. But all five historians are Romans, and they might be writing in Greek, some of them for a Greco-Roman audience, and
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
But they're still primarily Romans writing after the Romans have taken over everything. And they're using contemporary sources of Alexander, but none of them are closer than 250 years after Alexander died. So for modern historians, for my students, when I teach them, this is hard for them to get their head around that, like they're reading primary sources of a period.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
that is very distant from what they're writing about, right? It's like studying American history, I always say, when you have only modern sources talking about the American Revolution, that there's no contemporary documents from the event that created America. as the USA that is now, not surviving.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So it's a strange concept to think about primary sources as not being connected directly to their period. But Alexander is comparatively very well resourced that we have these five sources. After Alexander, we hardly have any sources at all that tell us what's going on with the successors. We have Diodorus, and we have to rely on him because he's pretty much our only one.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
and we have the fragmentary history of Arian successes, and we get Plutarch's lives of a few of these famous generals, like Demetrius and Eumenes, but he unfortunately doesn't give us lives of all of the generals, which would be helpful, right?
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
If we had a life of Perdiccas, or a life of Craterus, or a life of Antipater even, or a life of Cassander, we could fit all these different people into the place. But because we have these, just Diodorus, who gets things wrong, and misses things out, it's hard pieced together.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So I became an ancient historian because I like jigsaw puzzle with history, that you have some aspects of the knowledge and you have to piece together and interpret what it actually says in terms of where... and when we put all these things together. And so that's interesting.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Diodorus, for example, there's this concept of high chronology and low chronology in the successors that he might have missed an entire year of history that he's describing in his text, and that our dating for stuff is completely off because he's messed things around. So our sources for the successors in particular is very problematic. And we don't really get useful sources again until...
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
well, two twenties, really, when you get into the Roman historians of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies. So we have this sort of almost a century of stuff where we don't really know what's going on. And with the successes, that's an interesting aspect.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So we have to not only those written sources, but we have to piece together inscriptions and other archaeology from areas that these people are conquering that allow us to sort of figure things out slowly or papyri evidence comes in and letters and so on. So our sources are very difficult to
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
piece together especially when we have so many moving parts as we've already said with all these different names doing all these different stuff some of them last like a month some of them last six months some last a few years you know they're all fighting each other so we start off with the three at the top and everybody else underneath is nominally underneath but then very quickly that changes and the ones at the top disappear and
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
which is the problem, I guess, that I already mentioned Antipode, Craterus and Perdiccas are our three at the top and they sort of remain. But then when all three of them die relatively quickly in space of time, everybody else is of the same level.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah, it is central. I mean, Pertikas, who is sort of our big player for the first year until he invades Egypt and then his own troops kill him because he crossed Nile not once but twice and watched his own men get eaten by crocodiles and all the fun stuff.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah, the crocodiles eat the soldiers, and so his own soldiers kill him for having them eaten by crocodiles, basically. So he disappears from the playing field. Craterus tries to invade on behalf of Antipater, but he loses in battle against Eumenes and gets trodden under his own horse when he's leading a cavalry charge. He falls off and gets trampled to death.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And in the same battle, Neoptolemus... is on the other wing, fights a personal duel with Eumenes, apparently. Eumenes kills Neoptolemus in this Homeric duel of generals. So three generals disappear very closely together, Craterus, Perdiccas, the two main ones, and Neoptolemus, leaving Eumenes behind as this non-Macedonian Greek general with an army and no boss.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Now that Perdiccas dies elsewhere, because that battle takes place in Asia Minor while Perdiccas invades Egypt. When Perdiccas dies and that news arrives to Eumenes, he's like, oh, what do I do now? So we get this whole change. We get Triparadaisos trying to make this organization cementing Ptolemy in Egypt because he's now unremovable.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And so they have to decide, okay, we've got to let Ptolemy keep Egypt because we can't get rid of him. So what are we going to do with the rest of you guys? And so Antipater tries to broker a peace between everybody. And then Antipater dies of old age, as you said, shortly afterwards. And then everybody's just... out for themselves at that point. And so they're all off doing their own thing.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
They start picking up where they left off, basically fighting as they go. But Alexander's memory is a key point, right? That's why Ptolemy steals his body and takes it to Alexander in Egypt and because he knew his power in Egypt depended on Alexander as the Pharaoh before him.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So by creating a shrine to Alexander's memory in the city founded by Alexander as the new capital city of this new Ptolemaic Egypt, um, And Alexander obviously has, you know, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world with the lighthouse of Pharos and stuff, right?
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And it becomes, well, the cultural center of the Hellenistic world with its library and university that's all connected to Alexander's memory, right? They are specifically connected to that. And Pertikas... His downfall often comes from his threat to execute one of Alexander's relatives and his own soldiers and the other generals like, no, you can't do that.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And so he has to backtrack on his supposed threat. And he tries to marry Alexander's sister. And at that point, his soldiers aren't happy because it seems like he's aiming for the kingship himself. rather than governing for the boy that he's supposed to be doing. And so that's part of the reason why he gets killed. And then Cassandra does the same thing later in trying to marry in.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And we get Alexander's mother, who we haven't mentioned yet, who's also a big power player in trying to clear the playing field for her grandson. Yes. and play these generals off against each other long enough that her son can come of age. Her grandson, sorry. And that backfires horribly, and there's Philip Aridaeus, the brother's wife, Eurydice, Cleopatra.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Cleopatra and Eurydice supposedly lead armies against each other, and they take a battle against each other, and Cleopatra's
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
army is persuaded to switch sides and so Eurydice gets executed and all sorts of fun stuff and then Olympias kills Cassandra's family and Cassandra then kills Olympias and her family all sorts of fun stuff but for them it's all about Alexander right the whole concept of this initial period of the successors is how do we best connect ourselves to Alexander whether that's through marrying his sister or
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
through being married to his brother, through being also descended from his father. So being one of his cousins, basically, right. Or step siblings or half siblings, all these different people are trying to connect themselves to Alexander in some way or other. either through control of his sons, through marriage to his relatives, or through being his relative as his mother, right?
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And that's arguably why the end of the successor period, when we leave and go to sort of them founding their independent kingdoms, that doesn't really happen until all these generals not only killed each other, but they've wiped out Alexander's entire family, basically. So Olympias gets murdered. Cleopatra gets killed. Philip Aridaeus, his brother gets killed. The two sons get killed.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So once the entire family is done, then it shifts away from Alexander's memory. It's like, because we've murdered these people, we can't connect to Alexander's memory because then you remember that we murdered his family. So now we have to build a different connection to our own personal governance of these kingdoms. And so it becomes less about family ties and,
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
and to the propagandistic ideals of Alexander the Great now as the wonderful conqueror. And that's where we get the idea, at least I think that's where we get the ideas of Alexander being a god coming into that you're connecting your kingship to this divine figure, this semi-divine heroic figure, right?
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
You get the heroic cult of Alexander is promoted instead of the literal family connection that is the case for the early successors. Then we get Ptolemy, especially promotes the divine aspect in Egypt, where you have divine pharaohs anyway, marrying as gods.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And you get the Seleucids promoting connection to divine Alexander, and he's on their coins as this Dionysus Heracles figure in their iconography. And you get the Antigonids doing the same thing, that they claim to be the rulers of Macedon through this connection to divine Alexander, even though they're not directly connected.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
royal figureheads they've done away with them is that when they go from trying to align themselves with royalty to actually deciding i might as well declare myself a king in my own right yeah so cassandra marries thessaloniki he's the one with his successful marriage eventually as the the half sister of alexander so she's another daughter of philip ii and obviously he founds the city modern city of thessalonica is named after thessaloniki
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
The one survival of the Cassandrian stuff, but his death and all his brothers are killed by Olympias and then he is eventually killed too. And so his dynasty with Thessaloniki as connection to Alexander is ended and Demetrius comes back and takes over kingdom of Thessaloniki.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
of Macedon, squabbling a little bit with Pyrrhus, but eventually it ends up with Demetrius' successors, the Antigonids, becoming kings of Macedon, because that last connection has disappeared. But it's not until we get to these squabbles of what I call the four main surviving successor kings, where you get five initially. So you have Cassander in Macedon and Greece,
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Antigonus and Demetrius who rule in what is now Turkey. You have Lysimachus ruling in Thrace. Then you have Seleucus in Babylon and Ptolemy in Egypt are your five main kings. And they rule throughout the rest of the next 20 years, basically in their little kingdoms. And they all fight with each other over who's the most powerful.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And after Antigonus defeats Eumenes and takes over his army, he becomes the most powerful in Asia Minor. And he starts trying to dictate to the other kings. And so we get this alliance of the other kings against Antigonus that ends with the Battle of Ipsus in 301.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
where Antigonus is killed and Demetrius doesn't get back in time to save his father and flees and becomes the definitive pirate King for about a decade where he's a King in name, but has no country except for his ships.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And he sails around, but Antigonus is the first one to actually use the title King for the first time in the three tens after the death of all these different family members is really when the last son is dead. And Antigonus,
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Polyperchon and Olympias are dealt with then he has himself and his son Demetrius declared kings and then the other successors follow suit they're like well if Antigonus can be king we can be kings too and so they declare themselves pharaoh of Egypt and then king of Babylon and then Lysimachus becomes king of Thrace and Cassander makes himself king of Macedon and so Antigonus is sort of the
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
catalyst for these actions in thinking he has enough power now that he can stand by himself. And he's still trying to
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
attack these other kings to reintegrate the empire of alexander like antigonus viewed himself as the reinstigator of the full empire that although he has his his area he wants to conquer egypt which he invades a couple of times and babylon which he successfully invades and seleucus flees to egypt for safety on one occasion so he is trying to reunify alexander's empire when he's in his most successful period that's when he calls himself king he thinks he's
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
He's sufficiently powerful to do that. And then the others follow suit. And then, of course, Antigonus dies. But Demetrius calls himself king inherited from Antigonus, his father, even though he has no kingdom. It's only when he comes back and takes Macedon from Pyrrhus and Cassander that then he can call himself king of Macedon.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because that's my specialist area. So the Ptolemies in particular, we know quite a lot about Egypt because we have a lot of papyrus evidence that talks about even low level offices in terms of the grants of land they have. And we have a few papyri that tell us about musters of troops.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So we get some names of people and how many soldiers and the specific titles they have and the land they own and all that different stuff. So we can reconstruct the Ptolemaic army pretty well from the papyri. And there's a great book. He'll be annoyed if I don't mention it by my good friend, Paul. Just don't know.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
We have a lot of disagreements about stuff, but he has an awesome book on the Egyptian army through pen and sword. So it's very available. It's very good. And so we know a lot about that. And we have this one interesting text here.
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Successors of Alexander the Great
Later in the period, the infamous Battle of Raphia, where the Ptolemies fought the Seleucids in this huge battle in the 320s, where Polybius, another Greco-Roman historian who I have an ongoing dispute with, he has this whole text where he describes the Ptolemaic army completely reforming itself. And they go to Greece and ask Polybius,
The Ancients
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for Greek mercenaries, generals to come and reform and perfect the Egyptian army because it's not as good as it used to be. And so we have names of these generals and he gives description of their training methods and how they were divided into different units and all this different stuff, which we don't have for our other armies.
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Successors of Alexander the Great
So for the most part, our knowledge comes from a few battle descriptions that where they describe the sizes of the units, and at the very least, the type of unit that is involved. So the most part of all of these, from Philip II onwards, is the Sarissa Phalanx, which is my special area. My research was involving reconstructing
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
48 actual Sarissas and then training people to march around as a phalanx to see how easy it was to do that and how quick you could become a functioning phalanx and walk up hills and over rivers and stuff. And that book, I haven't quite finished yet, but it'll be out in a couple of years. So they're all Sarissa phalanx.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So the main contingent of all of these Hellenistic armies, all the way through down to even Mithridates of Pontus fighting the Romans in the first century, their main unit is their Sarissa phalanx. And so most of our armies...
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throughout the holistic world regardless of your country that's what they're built on and then they add on to the side of it you know your light cavalry your heavy cavalry your archers your javelin men all these other different components right and my book on combined arms talks about how this integration happened through the macedonian system and then takes place in the holistic area
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So almost all of the armies are very similarly constructed. We know that from their heritage and from these battles that they take place. And they also integrate elephants and the Seleucids have side chariots, much to their cost. And so we know sort of what the unit types are.
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Successors of Alexander the Great
We can somewhat trust our sources when they give us numbers for these units, although numbers in ancient sources are problematic in general. What we don't have is how you recruited these in all the different places, how they trained, how long they trained for, if the recruitment matches the name of the unit.
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If we say this unit is called this region, does that mean all its soldiers come from that region, or is it just a name that they've inherited because it originally came from that region? We don't know for sure. The officer levels, that's what I work on right now, is trying to piece together.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
If we can associate that, we don't even know the size of the basic regimental unit and all these different things. There's still dispute about the size of even regiments in Alexander's army. So we have evidence for some staff, and then there's very sparse evidence for other aspects of armies. Well, when you look at, say, the Roman army, for example, we know how they trained.
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Successors of Alexander the Great
We know how they were gathered. We know how their muster worked. We know how they were commanded, where they came from, how they camped, how many people went into each tent and all this different stuff, right? We don't know any of that for the Macedonian ones. So as you say, when it comes to marching over these massive areas, the logistics...
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is crazy to comprehend because we do not know really how these armies marched in these areas. And there's great books on logistics famously by Engels on Alexander's army. And for other different campaigns, we have some evidence like the analysis for Xenophon of the 10,000 marching back from from Asia Minor back to Greece and the logistics that go into that.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So we know some of it, and we can comparative look at other armies, as I and other scholars do, to compare how much fodder does a horse need, how many camp followers are coming with you. So when we talk about armies marching, I focus on embattled of the 70,000 soldiers, and you forget that there's at least another 70,000 people marching
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Successors of Alexander the Great
in the army going with them as slaves or attendants or their families going on. We know the families were there because at the famous battle between Eumenes and Antigonus, the two greatest generals of the successors, Eumenes wins the battle, but he gets handed over to execution by his own soldiers because Antigonus captures the baggage train and he captures the families of Eumenes' soldiers.
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Successors of Alexander the Great
And so to get their families back, they give up their general. So we know these armies on campaign are marching with massive numbers of tagalongs, right? Whatever you want to call them. And that's not just in the ancient world. That happens throughout history. It's often not written about. But when an army is on campaign, it has a massive train of people going with it.
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Even the Seleucid Empire in itself that goes from Jerusalem at one point out to India is the biggest of all these successor kingdoms. And it's just huge. And they start being unable to control their distant territories that become independent because it's just too big.
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Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah, so the navy is very interesting. There's big naval battles like they're happening throughout the Greek world. The Peloponnesian Wars was a big fight between... naval powers in the end, right? And that's what decides it between Athens and Sparta.
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Successors of Alexander the Great
But because of the economics of these countries, that they are huge, they have access to the Silk Route now, their own connections, and more merchants, more trade, more wealth in general than the smaller Greek cities. They can put out huge navies and they have huge armies to go with it. And so we start to see this inclination that bigger is better, as you say.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And so we get these presentations of Demetrius, the besieger in particular. We'll come back to his sieges in a minute. But for Navy purposes, he is famous in our historians, even in the Roman historians, for building massive ships. Normally, you get your tri-rings, which are your three-decked oars. By the time we get to the 4th century, we have five oars.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
pentaremes hexaremes which are six decks demetrius supposedly had a heptaremes quite commonly and then he even goes to an octareme and a nonareme which are like nine banks of oars wow in his one ship and there's even been a suggestion that he went for a ceremonial ship up to like 18 to 20 banks of oars and stuff these massive like things and practically some of them didn't work very well but his ships were big enough
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And he gets his nickname as the besieger for his massive siege of Rhodes that took over 18 months and failed. And so Heckel and I argue that the nickname he gets is ironic, that he's not a good besieger. That's why he's called the besieger. Yeah. Ptolemy is called the Admiral because he loses a massive sea battle against Demetrius.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And Seleucus is called the Elephant General because he gives up India for a bunch of elephants. So these are ironic nicknames the other kings give to each other. So he's a besieger because he's bad at besieging, but he does have massive siege weaponry. So he has...
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
huge ships he ties these massive ships together and puts massive siege towers on the ships and then tows them to the walls of these cities to attack and he has catapult fire firing catapults on his ships and underwater rams to sort of knock the wall in with this
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
this ramborn ship and stuff all the stuff that you can see in the new gladiator movie the gladiator 2 that stuff is basically like demetrius besieging stuff and on land he builds what's called the helipolis the city besieger there's this massive 40 story tower that is so big it needs oxen to pull it into place and that's what he relies on taking roads with and when the rhodians
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
dislodge some iron plates and set it on fire, he pulls it out of the way because he doesn't want his pet toy to be destroyed and stuff. And so he never manages to capture the city because of his uselessness. And I've written on his ineptitude before on this very subject. But for him, it seems the size matters, right?
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
I don't know if he's compensating for something, but he is certainly into the huge ships and these huge siege towers.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
So the successor period, either you take it with the death of all the age of generals, or you take it on when they...
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
become happy with the status quo i guess so my first book and my phd thesis took the end of the main successor period being the battle of ipsus in 301 the titanic final battle isn't it yes like this huge climatic battle is huge armies like there's a hundred thousand maybe even 120 000 on one side and almost 80 000 on the other including also lucas's 500 elephants
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
huge battle we haven't had that in any greek warfare beforehand or since on the greek side right obviously against the persians they had massive armies for alexander but the death of antigonus and the exile of demetrius as his pirate king sort of establishes the status quo that these other four allied kings cassandra in macedon by simicus in thrace
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Seleucus in Asia and Ptolemy in Egypt once Antigonus is defeated they sort of accept that each of their status quo for the most part but then they go off and fight each other Seleucus when Cassander is got rid of comes to take over Macedon and has to go through Thrace and we get the battle of
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
where Seleucus fights Lysimachus and you get these two octogenarians leading cavalry charges at the front of their cavalry on horseback with spears and stuff as well. I think Seleucus is 79 and Lysimachus is 81 or something, and they are fighting in the battle, right? And Lysimachus dies in the cavalry charge, supposedly personally killed by Seleucus. And then Seleucus wins in triumph.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
He's going to march into Macedon and reunify all of Alexander's empire. And then he's murdered by his corrupt, evil nephew, one of the great villains of the successor period, Ptolemy Karanus, who just gets around causing trouble everywhere. And so Seleucus's death is generally taken as sort of the end of the successors of the generals of Alexander.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
But then you could take Demetrius and Pyrrhus, as I said, who are the next generation, but they are in the same time frame
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And so most people accept that it's Demetrius' reconquest of Macedon from Pyrrhus, and then Pyrrhus' death when he's trying to conquer Argos and Greece from Demetrius and his son Antigonus, that we really see the end of the successive period with Pyrrhus' death, because then we're into the established kingdoms of the Antigonids in Greece and Macedon, the Seleucids in Asia, and the Ptolemies in Egypt.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
and by 270 ish when pyrrhus dies that's when we get the hellenistic period is established no more really is there a realistic concept of the different kings taking over each other's kingdoms and reunifying the mythical empire of alexander right that whole concept of the propaganda of alexander now disappears
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And it's no longer an idea of reunifying Alexander's empire, but of establishing your own kingdom. And that's really the big difference, because Pyrrhus is still trying to theoretically reconstitute Alexander's empire as Alexander's last surviving relative, as his nephew.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
But his death as this sort of ADHD purist, I call him, where he fights all these campaigns and never finishes any of them because a better one comes along. His death sort of ends this era of the concept of a Greek unified empire. And we get into what we call the Hellenistic period of the kingdoms where they are independent, doing their own thing.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And we get a whole bunch of other different kingdoms arrive in the 270s too, like Pergamum. Greco-Bactria, Parthia, Pontus, all these different ones sort of formulate. As these kingdoms become isolated or sort of inward-looking, they no longer have the power to call on to externally conquered places. And so that changes our viewpoint.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And so then the Hellenistic world becomes about solidifying culture rather than reunifying Alexander.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I've always loved the successive period because there are gaps, but there's so much to talk about within those gaps. Sometimes in ancient history, you get gaps and you don't really know what's going on. And there's not much going on, as far as we can tell. Hence the concept of dark ages appearing and all that different stuff, right?
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
But here, there's so much going on, it's surprising that we don't know so much. And we get that 50-year gap from Coropidium down to Silesia in 220 AD. including while Pyrrhus is in Rome, where we don't really know what's going on in Greece. We have like a 50-year period where we have nothing, really, that explains all the changes we see in the 220s. So it's fascinating.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And there's so many stories, especially in the first, I mean, even the first two years after Alexander dies, it's absolute chaos and carnage. There's people everywhere. There's all sorts of stuff going on in all these different places around his empire. But it's, you know, it's fascinating. We could do another podcast just on those two years and it would take up another...
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
Yeah. As you say, this rotation of kings and the Game of Thrones and all the assassinations and all that different stuff, even within the successes, even the first 10 years or so is just a crazy, exciting period. And then it sort of tails off a little bit when they all start dying and you get fewer power players involved.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
For those who don't remember your school education, but you have the Greek city-states never unified as one country of Greece. So you have Athens and Sparta and Thebes, your three main ones at the end of the, or the beginning of the 300s through the mid-4th century.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And Alexander's father, Philip II, took over, took Macedon as this little kingdom, and then progressively, over his long reign, conquers all these different regions, mostly the Greek city-states and the areas they controlled. At the Battle of Chaeronea in 338, he defeats the Theban-Athenian alliance and then takes rule of Greece as hegemon, as leader, and creates the League of Corinth.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And rather than necessarily conquering Greece, Macedon is the forcibly elected leader of an amalgamation of Greek states. And for Philip, the invasion of Persia, which he plans and begins, is this propaganda to cement his role as leader of Greece that he's going to then invade Persia. So that's the Greek context. Rome is doing its own thing over in Italy.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
And you have the Greek city-states in Sicily that are connected but separate. And then you have the Persian Empire that is the biggest in the world at the time, controls most of Western Asia and Egypt. And Macedon have been in contact with Persia for a while, as have the Greeks and all sorts of different background stuff that we won't deal with.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
But Alexander begins the invasion of Persia as a continuation of his father's policies to cement his new position as the forcibly elected ruler of this League of Corinth empire.
The Ancients
Successors of Alexander the Great
alliance of Greek states and the Greeks are not happy to start with so he has to put down the revolt of Thebes almost as soon as he becomes king and destroys the entire city and enslaves everybody except for Pindar's house, the poet, because he loves Pindar and so that sort of keeps the Greeks in line and he forces them to send him 7,000 soldiers as their contribution to the campaign army and then they go off and invade Persia and so it's initially planned as a punishment for the Persian wars against Greece