BEFORE & AFTER ALEXANDER THE LEGEND AND LEGACY OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT RICHARD A. BILLOWS 25 b&w images and 5 maps I n the arc of western history, Ancient Greece is at the apex, owing to its grandeur, its culture, and an intellectual renaissance to rival that of Europe. So important is Greece to history that figures such as Plato and Socrates are still household names, and the works of Homer are regularly adapted into movies. The most famous figure of all, though, is Alexander the Great. While historians have studied Alexander’s achievements at length, author and professor Richard A. Billows delves deeper into the less studied periods before and after Alexander’s reign. In Before and After Alexander, Billows explores the years preceding Alexander, who, without the foundation laid by his father, Philip II of Macedon, would not have had the resources or influence to develop one of the greatest empires in history. Alexander was groomed from a young age to succeed his father, and by the time Philip was assassinated in 336 BC, his great empire was already well underway. The years following Alexander’s death were even more momentous. In this ambitious new work, Richard Billows robustly challenges the notion that the political strife that followed was for lack of a leader as competent as Alexander, pointing out instead that there were too many extremely capable leaders who exploited the power vacuum created by Alexander’s death to carve out kingdoms for themselves. Since Alexander’s son and heir was a baby incapable of ruling, the temptation for the generals to operate on their own behalf was too great to pass up. Above all, in Before and After Alexander, Billows eloquently and convincingly posits a complex view of one of the greatest empires in history, framing it not as the achievement of one man, but the culmination of several generations of aggressive expansion toward a unified purpose. Copyright This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2018 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. NEW YORK 141 Wooster Street New York, NY 10012 www.overlookpress.com For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected] or write to us at the above address. LONDON 30 Calvin Street London E1 6NW [email protected] www.ducknet.co.uk Copyright © 2018 by Richard A. Billows Maps by Roddy Murray, copyright © 2018 The Overlook Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. ISBN: 978-1-4683-1641-4 For Clare, at last … CONTENTS COPYRIGHT DEDICATION INTRODUCTION MAPS 1. Macedonia before Philip II 2. Philip’s Childhood 3. The Reign of Philip 4. Philip’s New Model Army and New Model State 5. The Reign of Alexander 6. The Wars of the Successors 7. The Hellenistic World and Hellenistic Civilization 8. Aftermath: The Lingering Impact of Hellenistic Culture ACKNOWLEDGMENTS END NOTES GLOSSARY GENEALOGIES TIMELINE BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR INTRODUCTION I N JUNE 323 BCE, IN A PALACE IN BABYLON, A YOUNG MAN LAY DYING. Around his bed were a host of attendants, doctors, and generals, concerned about the imminent death of the ruler of their world. The young man was Alexander the Great, and though he was just thirty-two years old, he had already conquered one of the largest empires in history and made himself forever famous as one of history’s greatest military leaders. For the generals gathered at his bedside, however, Alexander’s death presented a huge problem: he had no clear successor. There was a vast empire to be organized and ruled, and no one knew how it was to be done or by whom. In the end, it took forty years of rivalry and warfare among Alexander’s generals to sort out the succession to his power. One hundred and fifty years later a new power, the young Roman state, began to expand into and take over the lands that Alexander had conquered and ruled so briefly, and they found in the eastern Mediterranean region a civilization based on the Greek language, Greek cities, and Greek culture, established there by the work of Alexander’s Successors. That Greek-based civilization is known today as the Hellenistic civilization, and though taken over by the Romans it endured as the civilization of the eastern Mediterranean world for another five hundred years or so, until the triumph of Christianity and, eventually, Islam brought about radical changes. As the conqueror who made this great era of Hellenistic civilization possible, Alexander the Great’s life, career, and achievements have been studied over and over by historians, giving rise to literally hundreds of books and probably thousands of detailed articles about the great conqueror. Much less studied, however, are the development of the Macedonian state and army under Alexander’s father Philip II, which made Alexander’s career possible, and the activities and policies of Alexander’s Successors, which created the organizational framework in which Hellenistic civilization developed and flourished. The aim of this book is, first, to offer a detailed study of the career of Philip II (Chapters 1–4). The state of Macedonia before Philip’s succession to the throne was a disorganized and disunited backwater, peripheral to the local great powers of Athens, Sparta, and Persia. Philip II built up an entirely new type of army with a new style of warfare, and through this army united Macedonia, expanded its borders, and turned it into the greatest power in the ancient world by his death at the age of forty-seven, assassinated by a disgruntled officer in his own bodyguard. It was the state and army built by Philip that provided Alexander with the tools to undertake his career of conquest. After a relatively brief review of Alexander’s conquests (Chapter 5), the book treats in some detail the forty years after Alexander’s death, showing how his greatest generals—men who, like Alexander, had been trained in the army and wars of Philip II—took control of Alexander’s conquests and built the three great Hellenistic empires in those lands: the Antigonid Empire in the Balkan region, the Seleucid Empire in western Asia, and the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt and Libya. By settling tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Greek colonists, for whom they built hundreds of new Greek cities in western Asia and Egypt, and by encouraging many natives to settle in these new cities too, adopting Greek names, the Greek language, and Greek culture as their own, these rulers helped to establish Hellenistic civilization as the culture of the eastern Mediterranean world for over half a millennium (Chapters 6–7). This book thus covers a topic of enormous interest and importance to the history of western civilization, that of the establishment of Greek culture as a universal culture from the rivers of Iraq to the Adriatic Sea, and from the Black and Caspian Seas to the deserts of Arabia and the border of the Sudan. Everywhere within this vast and diverse territory, between 300 BCE and 300 CE (and later) there were to be found Greek cities with Greek citizens, speaking and reading the Greek language, and living their lives according to the social, cultural, and political patterns established in Classical Greece in the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE. This remarkable civilization left, as is well known, a rich cultural heritage that has deeply influenced western (and indeed Muslim) culture and civilization ever since. It is as the facilitators who made possible this spread of Greek culture, and its establishment throughout the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia as the dominant culture, that Philip II of Macedonia, his son Alexander, and Alexander’s Successors remain an important and fascinating topic of study. MAPS MAP 1: Greece - 5th century MAP 2: Macadonia