The Hellenistic World

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by Fontana 1981

Copyright © F. W. Walbank 1981, 1986, 1992

F. W. Walbank asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006861041

Ebook Edition © September 2013 ISBN: 9780007550982

Version: 2017-01-19

1. Introduction: The Sources

I

For rather more than a century – from 480 to 360 BC – the city-states of Greece pursued their rivalries and feuds without serious challenge from outside. But from 359 onwards the growing power of Philip II of Macedonia threw a shadow over the Greek peninsula. In 338, at Chaeronea in Boeotia, Philip decisively defeated the armies of Thebes and Athens and through a newly constituted Council at Corinth imposed peace and his own policy on most of the cities. Already Philip had his eyes on Persia, the great continental power beyond the Aegean, whose weakness had been dramatically revealed sixty years earlier, when a body of Greek mercenaries in the pay of an unsuccessful rebel prince and led by the Athenian Xenophon had marched all the way from Mesopotamia to the sea at Trebizond (400/399). Polybius writes later:

It is easy for anyone to see the real causes and origin of the war against Persia. The first was the retreat of the Greeks under Xenophon from the upper satrapies in which, though they traversed the whole of Asia, a hostile country, none of the barbarians ventured to face them (iii, 6, 10).

Encouraged by this and by the campaign of the Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia Minor shortly afterwards, Philip planned to invade the ramshackle Persian dominions of Asia Minor in search of money and new lands – though as a pretext he alleged the wrongs done to Greece during the Persian invasions of the early-fifth century. Philip did not live to carry out his plan. In 336 he was assassinated and the projected invasion of Persia was left as part of the inheritance of his son Alexander.

Alexander reigned for only thirteen years, but during that time he completely changed the face of the Greek world. In the great colonizing age from the eighth to the sixth centuries the shores of Spain, the Adriatic lands, southern Italy and Sicily, northern Africa and the Black Sea shores had been settled with Greek maritime colonies. The new expansion was of a different order. Advancing overland with his army – a mere 50, 000 at the outset – Alexander marched through Asia Minor and Palestine to Egypt, from there to Mesopotamia and eastward through Persia and central Asia to where Samarkand, Balkh and Kabul now lie; thence he penetrated the Punjab and after defeating the Indian king Porus brought his forces partly by land and partly by sea back to Babylon, where he died.

The vast land empire which he left to his successors was without parallel in Greek history. It was in fact the old Persian empire under Greek and Macedonian management and it formed the theatre within which the events of Greek history were to be enacted during the next 300 years. The Greeks who during the seventy or so years following Alexander’s death flocked southwards and eastwards to join new settlements or enlist in mercenary armies, hoping to make their fortunes, found themselves no longer insulated within the traditions of a city-state but living in any one of a variety of environments alongside native peoples of every race and nationality. The term ‘hellenistic’ – derived from a Greek word meaning ‘to speak Greek’ – is commonly used to describe this new world in which Greek was in fact the lingua franca. It carries a connotation, not so much of a diluted hellenism, but rather of a hellenism extended to non-Greeks, with the clash of cultures which that inevitably implies. There were of course still city-states in Greece and the Aegean – often powerful like Rhodes – and the relations between the cities of Greece proper and Macedonia, though often strained, were not seriously complicated by cultural differences. But within the kingdoms established by Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Asia, whether we look at the armies or at the bureaucracies, Greeks and Macedonians occupied positions of dominance over Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians and the diverse peoples of Anatolia. The relationships thus established were uneasy and far from static. From the outset there were tensions, and as the flow of Greeks dried up the relative position of Greeks and barbarians changed gradually in many ways. The pattern of this development varied from kingdom to kingdom. Greeks influenced barbarians, and barbarians Greeks. It is indeed in this clash and coming together of cultures that one of the main interests of the period lies.

From the late-third century onwards a new power appears in the hellenistic world, the Roman republic. The taking-over of one after another of the hellenistic kingdoms by Rome has already been recounted and discussed in another volume of this series (Michael Crawford, The Roman Republic) and will not be repeated here, though the cumulative effect of the first half-century of the process is discussed below in Chapter 13. The main emphasis in this book will be rather on the hellenistic kingdoms themselves and on their relations with each other and with the Greek cities in Europe and Asia. We shall be concerned with economic and social trends, with the cultural developments in the new centres set up at Alexandria and Pergamum, with the expanding (and contracting) frontiers of this new world, with its scientific achievements and with the religious experience of its peoples.

II

The evidence for the period is uneven. The career of Alexander himself presents a particular source problem. The most important surviving account of his expedition is that of Arrian, a Greek-speaking Roman senator from Bithynia in Asia Minor, who was active in the second century AD. Arrian opens his Anabasis of Alexander – the title echoes that of Xenophon’s Anabasis – with these words:

Wherever Ptolemy son of Lagus and Aristobulus son of Aristobulus are in agreement in their accounts of Alexander son of Philip, I record their statements as entirely true; where they disagree I have selected the version that seems to me more likely and at the same time more worth relating (Arrian, Anabasis, i, praef. I).

(We may note that ‘more likely’ and ‘more worth relating’ are concepts that do not necessarily coincide.) Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals, was later king of Egypt; his History, probably written many years later in Egypt, drew on Alexander’s official Journal, and Arrian was right to regard it as generally reliable. Aristobulus also accompanied the expedition, probably as a military engineer. Unlike Ptolemy he was a Greek, not a Macedonian, and wrote at least two decades after Alexander’s death. There were others who gave eyewitness accounts of the expedition. One was the official historian, Callisthenes, the nephew of Alexander’s tutor, the famous philosopher Aristotle, but his account broke off early for the sufficient reason that he was executed for treason in 327. Another was the Cretan Nearchus, who sailed the royal fleet back to Susa from the Indus, and composed a description of India and a record (which Arrian uses) of his voyage; he later fought in the wars of Alexander’s successors. Nearchus’ lieutenant Onesicritus, who was the helmsman of Alexander’s own ship on the voyage down the Jhelum (Arrian, Indica, 18, 1), also left an account but the surviving fragments do not make it easy to assess its character and it was not very influential. Finally mention should be made of the Alexandrian Cleitarchus, who though probably not a member of the expedition wrote a history of Alexander in at least twelve books. There is a vast literature on these lost sources. It is likely, but not certain, that Cleitarchus, Ptolemy and Aristobulus published their works in that order. Of the three Cleitarchus became the most popular, especially under the early Roman empire, though a discriminating writer like Arrian criticizes him (without actually naming him) for his many inaccuracies (Arrian, Anabasis, vi, 11, 8). Indirectly Cleitarchus’ history provided one element in the Romance of Alexander, which was developed in successive versions from the second century AD until the middle ages, eventually in more than thirty languages – a striking testimony to the impression made on both his immediate successors and subsequent generations by Alexander’s career and personality.

All these primary accounts are lost and our knowledge of them depends on later writers who used them and so indirectly caused them to be superseded. Apart from Arrian, the more important of these are Diodorus Siculus, a Greek who wrote a world history in the late-first century BC which, for Alexander, followed Aristobulus and Cleitarchus, Quintus Curtius (whose date and sources are both uncertain), Justinus, whose work epitomizes that of a lost Augustan historian from Gaul called Trogus Pompeius and in the second century AD Plutarch of Chaeronea, the popular philosopher and biographer, whose Life of Alexander (twinned with that of Caesar) mentions no less than twenty-four authorities – though how many of these he knew at first hand we cannot be sure. By Plutarch’s time a vast amount of material concerning Alexander was available in the writings of rhetoricians, antiquaries and gossip writers, many of whom are but names today. The value of much of this is slight.

Thus for Alexander’s career there is no lack of literary sources. The problem is to determine where they got their information from and to assess their merits and allow for their prejudices for or against the hero. For the period after Alexander’s death – the hellenistic age proper – the historian faces a very different situation. Until we can begin to use Polybius from 264 onwards, we are still, to be sure, dependent on secondary sources but they differ from those concerned with Alexander in that after Alexander’s death his empire was divided among his. generals, and writers now attached themselves to one court or another. For the history of the first fifty years of the new regimes our best tradition goes back to a great historian, Hieronymus of Cardia, who served first his fellow-citizen Eumenes, Alexander’s secretary, who fought loyally for the king’s legitimate heirs, and then, after Eumenes’ death in 316, Antigonus I, his son Demetrius I and his grandson Antigonus Gonatas (see pp. 50–9). Hieronymus’ lost account of the Wars of the Successors went at least as far as the death of Pyrrhus of Epirus in 272, and was used by Arrian for his work on Events after Alexander and, indirectly by Diodorus (books 18–20), as well as by Plutarch in several Lives (those of Eumenes, Pyrrhus and Demetrius). Unfortunately, from book 21 onwards Diodorus’ work survives only in fragments, of which the most important are from a collection of excerpts made on the orders of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in the tenth century.

Other lost writers were Phylarchus, who covered the years 272–219 in twenty-eight books and, according to Polybius (who was prejudiced against him for his support of Cleomenes of Sparta, the enemy of Achaea, ) wrote in a sensational and emotional manner. Polybius has a virulent attack on his account of the Achaean sack of Mantinea in 223:

In his eagerness to arouse the pity and attention of his readers, Phylarchus treats us to a picture of women clinging with their hair dishevelled and their breasts bare, or again of crowds of both sexes together with their children and aged parents weeping and lamenting as they are led away to slavery (ii, 56, 7).

Phylarchus’ methods were not peculiar to him, but represent a type of writing well represented in hellenistic historiography. One noted forerunner was Duris of Samos, a pupil of Theophrastus, who wrote a History in the early part of the third century dealing with Macedonian and Greek events down to 280 (as well as a history of Agathocles of Syracuse). Other third-century writers were Megasthenes, who visited Pataliputra as the ambassador of Antiochus I, and wrote a book about his journey which later writers used, and the Sicilian historian Timaeus from Tauromenium (mod. Taormina), who spent some fifty years in exile in Athens and is savagely criticized by Polybius as an armchair historian who never took the trouble to visit the places he was writing about or to acquire essential political experience. It is probably to Timaeus that we owe an innovation which brought an immeasurable gain to the historian’s craft, the adoption of ‘Olympiad years’, numbered from the institution of the Olympic festival in 776 to provide an era into which events all over the Greek world (and the Roman world later) could be fitted. Thus Polybius himself announces (i, 3, 1) that ‘the date from which I propose to begin is the 140th Olympiad’ (220–216) and after telling his readers (i, 5, 1) that he will begin his introductory books from ‘the first occasion on which the Romans crossed the sea from Italy’ (264) he goes on to explain that this follows on immediately from the close of Timaeus’ history and took place in the 129th Olympiad (264–260). It was a popular practice among Greek historians to begin their history where a predecessor left off.

Polybius himself is the most important source for the years 264 to 146. His special concern was with Rome and his object was to explain ‘by what means and under what kind of constitution the Romans in less than fifty-three years succeeded in subjecting the whole inhabited world to their sole government’ (i, 1, 5). But Polybius was himself an Arcadian from Megalopolis, which was a member of the Achaean Confederation (see pp. 154 ff.) and he describes the growth of that confederation and also many other Greek events not directly relevant to Rome, such as the war between Antiochus III of Syria and Ptolemy IV of Egypt, which ended in the former’s defeat at Raphia in 217. Unfortunately only the first five books survive intact; of the remaining thirty-five we have only fragments. Polybius is a sane and balanced writer (though not entirely free from prejudice). Without his work we should be infinitely poorer. ‘His books’, wrote the German historian Mommsen, ‘are like the sun shining on the field of Roman history; where they open, the mists . . . are lifted and where they end a perhaps even more vexatious twilight descends.’ They are no less valuable to the student of the hellenistic world generally. Poseidonius of Apamea, who lived for many years at Rhodes (whence he visited Rome), and was a philosopher as well as a historian, began his Histories (of which only fragments remain) at the point where Polybius left off. His work covered the Greek east and the western Mediterranean from 146 to the time of Sulla (d. 78) and was later drawn on by the Roman historians Sallust, Caesar and Tacitus and by Plutarch. Poseidonius gave a wealth of information especially about the west, and in some ways he became a spokesman for Roman imperialism.

For a consecutive account of events – something not available for all areas nor all periods of the hellenistic age – the historian must, however, turn to secondary authors, who include (as for Alexander) Diodorus, Arrian and Plutarch, and also Appian, an Alexandrian Greek, who in the second century AD composed a history of Rome tracing separately the histories of various peoples during the time when they were being absorbed into the Roman empire. Like Diodorus, Appian made great use of Polybius, though by no means exclusively nor always at first hand. Among Latin authors we have Justinus’ epitome of the so-called Philippic Histories of the Gaul Trogus Pompeius (the title of this ‘universal’ history indicates his approach, independent of the Roman patriotic tradition) and, more importantly, Livy, who fortunately used Polybius as his primary source for eastern affairs. But Livy’s history, written under Augustus, is itself fragmentary, for only books 1 to 10 and 21 to 45 survive, taking us to 168 and the end of the Third Macedonian War (172–168). Both the geographer Strabo, also writing under Augustus, and Pausanias, who composed his periegesis of Greece in the middle of the second century AD, furnish valuable historical and topographical information, while for Jewish history several books of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (especially the Maccabees) are of relevance, as is Josephus, who wrote his Jewish Antiquities under the Flavian emperors (AD 69–96) at Rome (see further pp. 222 ff.). Later Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea (c. AD 260–340), composed a chronicle of universal history which is important for chronology. It was translated into Latin and expanded by St Jerome.