#hellenistic age

i assume they passed away too young to tell for sure. but they were both very, very smart to have gotten so far at such young ages, and mistakes are bound to happen, right? i’m certain, given time and maturity, they’d have been able to more squarely wrap their minds around long-term politicking and compromise. but yeah. it’s a big question mark. curious to know your thoughts.

Would Alexander's Empire Have Collapsed Anyway?

The answer to this question, which—as you guessed—has been considered by historians, rests largely on how any given historian evaluates the state of ATG’s empire at the time of his death.

And THAT boils down to one question: Was collapse inevitable? (Regardless of who was in charge.)

To answer that question requires some comparison.

Maps of Alexander’s empire are, inevitably, wrong, in part because they don’t show “disputed territory” and “conquered but not secured” which was true for a lot of regions from the interior of Asia Minor (which Antigonos, et al., wrestled with long after ATG was off fighting in the Persian interior) to the edges of Sogdiana and the Punjab, to the disputed borders in Armenia, to rebellious Thracian tribes.

It's one thing to win a battle. It’s another to hold a region. The Persians discovered this, as had the Neo-Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians before them. Now, so was Alexander. As would the Seleucids after him, and then Rome after that.

Alexander was a “conquering machine,” not an “empire-building machine.” He had more in common with Caesar than Augustus, and had already turned his sights on the west by the time of his death, not thinking (too) much about how to shore up what he’d just acquired. For a multinational state/empire to succeed, it needs both a “conqueror” and an “administrator.” Hephaistion was the administrator for Alexander, but he died before we get much sense of what he could actually do. For the sake of argument, let’s assume he would prove capable. He seems to have performed his military logistical and diplomatic duties with aplomb. Also, Alexander had called Antipatros to Babylon, sending Krateros back to replace him as regent in Macedonia (although I think Krateros’s real job was to prep a navy to take against Carthage). Nonetheless, rather than a “punishment” as this is often seen, a sign of ATG not trusting Antipatros, it seems, rather, a sign of great trust.

He called for the one man he was pretty damn sure could administer his empire. So yes, he was trusting Hephaistion as Chiliarch…but he was also calling in the cavalry for Hephaistion, to give him the best help possible: Antipatros.

The real problem involves the size and scope of what Alexander had conquered. The same problem (and then some) that Persia had already faced and been only moderately successful about retaining. Rome would face similar later, but they had the Mediterranean in the middle for easy sea passage. Land-based empires were intrinsically more difficult to maintain due to the simple fact of TRAVEL difficulties in that period.

These are the very pragmatic problems ATG faced. Conquering an area didn’t mean one retained the area. This goes back into the bronze age when sieges were a matter of who blinked first. But the same conflict might be fought the very next year, or year after. So when we talk about Alexander’s conquest of regions, especially border regions, we must ask how deep or secure such conquest was.

The first question we must ask, as noted above, is whether Alexander’s empire would have survived, whether or not he lived. How far into Baktria, how far into the Punjab of India would he have been able to retain control if he turned his attention west?

Maps of the Seleucid Empire typically show it extending to India and Baktria (top map, kingdom at death of Seleukos I). But that’s “at the absolute greatest extent on an optimistic day,” not reality. The Greco-Baktrian kingdom fell away by 250, and even earlier, India broke free. The Seleucids could loosely still claim the Iranian plateau down to about 150, and after the Battle of Magnesia (190/89) kicked the Seleucids out of Asia Minor, their power did slide more eastward, even though their attention remained on the Ptolemies and Rome in the west. (Second map, empire c. 200)

This is the sort of reality ATG would have had to face within his own empire. It was pretty much impossible to look east and west at once. Too much land to control.

He’d married his way into the Baktrian-Sogdian warlord system to pacify that region and his friendship with Poros gave him the SW edge of the Punjab, but he needed to understand the Persian royal house system, and he didn’t. (See Maria Brosius.) He remained an alien as King of Asia. Could he fix that? Maybe. But I’m not sure he understood the importance, or wanted to invest the time necessary. He’d rather go and conquer new land.

Tarn has striking said: “If Macedonia produced perhaps the most competent body of men the world had yet seen, the women were in all respects the men’s counterparts.” Yet in spite of the notable achievements of women, which Tarn summarizes in his following sentence, the truth is that very few of the queens in Macedonia and in Seleucid Syria possessed any political power at all and that only gradually in Egypt did a woman become the equal of a man as ruler.

From the latter part of the fourth century B.C. for about three hundred years before the Christian era women of Macedonian blood in the Hellenistic kingdoms established by the Successors of Alexander the Great showed a remarkable capacity for ruling in the manner of the kings of whom they were wives and daughters. They possessed to an extraordinary degree, “greater than the measure of women”, as is said of them in ancient historians, the qualities of energy, political foresight, daring, and courage which distinguished the men who took the world in their hands after Alexander’s death. These women had great prestige and influence and in some case great political power, though this last did not come to them as it came to the men by direct inheritance or by conquest, but through the doorway of marriage, which often afforded them opportunity to act as regent for an absent husband, or for a minor child, or as co-regent with a husband whose weakness of character allowed a queen of strong nature to come forward as co-ruler. If, as happened in the last period of the Lagid rule in Egypt, the throne came to a daughter in default of male heirs, a husband as closely connected as possible with the reigning house was sought with all haste as consort for the queen.

The influence of these queens upon the events of their times and the history of their countries was very great. The earliest Macedonian woman to take a part in political affairs of whom history tells is Eurydice, mother of Philip the Second, the last is the famous Cleopatra VII of Egypt. Cleopatra has never lacked historians, poets, and dramatists to tell the story of her life, but many of her predecessors are all but completely ignored by historians ancient and modern and are, when mentioned, often condemned en masse as unscrupulous, cruel, and wanting in all the gentler virtues […] The crime of which they are accused are dynastic murder and infidelity to their marriage vows. Tarn however has noted the fact that they were not licentious; – “no lover is anywhere recorded” for the third century queens. Those whose actions appear most culpable followed in their feminine way the rules of political procedure established and observed by kings whose cruelties are often condoned by the words “political necessity”. Among these queens are some women notable for loyalty and kindness and others whose lives were lived in quietness, of whom we know little or nothing except that they were the wives of kings. It has often been noted that especially among the Lagids in Egypt the queens remained vigorous and capable at a time when the kings were degenerate and worthless.

Hi there! I am not, alas, that up on the Diadochs. That said, several of my colleagues who do Alexander also write on the Hellenistic era, incluing Elizabeth Carney, Edward Anson, Waldemar Heckel, Daniel Ogden. Pat Wheatley co-authored a great book on Demetrios Poliorketes, and Ed has a book on Eumenes. Beth has quite a few books on various Hellenistic Queens, Daniel has written on Seleukos, and Waldemar's encyclopedia of ATG's court was recently updated to include the Hellenistic era. Monica D'agostini was lead author on Beth Carney's festshcrift that had a lot of Hellenstic era chapters.

But a place you may want to look is Facebook's academic page on the Hellenistic world, where various new publications get announced, etc. https://www.facebook.com/groups/hellenisticgroup

Everything he'd hoped for turned out wrong. He'd seen himself doing great things, ending the humiliation that had kept his country down ever since the battle of Magnesia- seen himself making Syria a powerful state again, with her armies, her fleets, her big fortresses, her wealth. He'd suffered in Rome, become bitter when he sensed in the talk of friends, young men of the great families, that in spite of all their delicacy, their politeness toward him, the son of King Selefkos Philopator- when he sensed that in spite of this there was always a secret contempt for the Hellenized dynasties: their heyday was over, they weren't fit for anything serious, were completely unable to rule their peoples. He'd cut himself off, indignant, swearing it would be quite different from the way they thought. Why, wasn't he himself full of determination? He would act, he would fight, he would put it all right again. If he could only find a way of getting to the East, only manage to escape from Italy, then all this inner strength, all this energy, he'd pass on to his people. Only to be in Syria! He was so young when he left his country he hardly remembered what it looked like. But in his mind he'd always thought of it as something sacred that you approach reverently, as a beautiful place unveiled, a vision of Greek cities and Greek ports. And now? Now despair and sorrow. They were right, the young men in Rome. The dynasties resulting from the Macedonian Conquest can't be kept going any longer. It doesn't matter. He'd made the effort, fought as much as he could. And in his bleak disillusion there's only one thing in which he still takes pride: that even in failure he shows the world his same indomitable courage. The rest: they were dreams and wasted energy. This Syria -it almost seems it isn't his country- this Syria is the land of Valas and Herakleidis.

The final campaigns of Pyrrhus in many ways epitomize the criticisms of his leadership that is a constant theme of the ancient historians, that he could win victories but not turn them into permanent gains. This attitude is perhaps best summed up by Antigonus Gonatas who claimed that he was like 'a player with dice who makes many fine throws but does not understand how to use them when they are made.' Pyrrhus had won impressive victories in battle over both the Spartans and Antigonus, but had singularly failed to follow them up by knocking either completely out of the war ...

It is perhaps, because of these flaws that Pyrrhus failed in his attempts to build a substantial empire. A more meaningful assessment of his life and achievements would be, however, to consider the role he was born to, that as king of Epirus. Pyrrhus had come to the throne when the kingship of Epirus was divided between two feuding branches of the royal family. The kings had, thereby, become largely puppets of foreign powers [...] By the end of his reign, Pyrrhus had both united Epirus under a single king and increased both the size and wealth of his kingdom. He left his son Alexander a kingdom strong enough to continue to challenge for the control of Macedonia. As Justin claims, Pyrrhus had 'rendered his country, which was before but mean and obscure, renowned throughout the world by the fame of his exploits and the glory of his name.' By the standards of his time, his rule over Epirus must be seen as a success.

-- Jeff Champion, Pyrrhus of Epirus

The Macedonians

“Μακεδόνες”

A historically northern Greek people.