Argead rule in Asia
…this sanctuary of the Lord of the Heavens, Zeus-Oromazdes, has been established during the thirty-second year of Ptolemaios Eupator, descendant of Philippos Nikator and Kyros Megas, in the one-hundred- eleventh year of the dynasty in the city of Nikopolis in the satrapy of Assyria. The Great King has ordered Menandros, son of Pheres, phrourach of Nikopolis and oikonomos of the royal estates of the satrapy, to restore and expand the temple. This he has done: he has expanded the temenos, he has furnished the sanctuary with gold and silver and he has set up statues of the royal ancestors. This he has done in the third year of Mithradates Nikephoros Soter, in the two-hundred-and-fifth year of the dynasty.
- Argead inscription at the temple of Zeus-Oromazdes at Nikopolis
You, who shall be king hereafter, be firmly on your guard against the Lie. The man who shall be follower of the Lie – punish him well.
- Part of Darius the Great’s inscription at Behistun
A multitude of rulers is not a good thing, let there be one ruler, one king
- Iliad 2.204-205
The 80 years between Philip Nikator’s entrance into Babylon, in 333 BCE, and the end of the First War of Argead Succession marked an extraordinary period in the history of not only the Hellenes, but of all the lands that they saw as the
oikoumene, the inhabited world: from the pillars of Herakles to the valley of the Ganges. The Argead conquest, typified by the relentless advance of the phalanx and the galloping charge of the
hetairoi, had expanded the horizons of the Greeks from the Ganges to Sicily, and extraordinarily, even managed to hold that area in a cohesive empire, if only for a short while. The implications of these extraordinary events were great for politics and commerce, but perhaps the most lasting was cultural: Greek styles, traditions and customs were introduced into lands such as Syria, Babylonia and Bactria, and would leave a lasting mark.
The Greeks, of course, were no stranger to settling foreign shores: their homeland, agriculturally handicapped and often overpopulated, gave ample reason to look overseas. And thus, in various waves, they had settled: from the Cimmerian Bosporos to Cyrene, from Emporion to Cyprus, the shores of Mediterranean were lined with Greek cities: ‘as frogs around a pond’ [1], as Plato had said. However those Greeks who left behind the Aegean did not find great empires on distant shores: the
polis, and its hinterland, the
chora, although often much larger than in the Hellenic homeland, remained the centrepiece of those states. Empire, which had swept across Asia in its Achaemenid incarnation, did not come so easily to the Hellenes: closest, before the Macedonians, were perhaps the Athenians with their Delian League, Dionysius II of Syracuse, whose mercenary militarism brought most of Sicily and parts of Italy under his sway, might be another candidate. Theirs was a world of squabbling states, instable leagues and shifting alliances, after the failure of both Athens and Sparta to establish some kind of lasting hegemony, and the successful Achaemenid attempts to keep the Hellenes divided, the eventual unification of the Hellenes of the Aegean, even if only temporary, must have seemed unlikely indeed.
The momentous, and unlikely, lives of Philip Nikator, Alexander the Great and Philip Euergetes are well-documented elsewhere, and thus require no repetition: it is sufficient to mention that Philip started his life as the youngest son of the King of Macedonia, a state regarded as a rural backwater by most Greeks, beset on all sides by enemies; when he died 52 years later he was the Great King of Asia and had successfully toppled the Achaemenids, his son and grandson consolidated and expanded upon his achievements and ruled a realm that stretched from Sicily to the Himalayas and from the Jaxartes to the cataracts of the Nile. To them and their men, veterans who fought Lucanians, Libyans, Thracians, Persians and Indians, the vastness of the world was revealed: how then were they to react to what they had conquered and subdued?
During Philip Nikator’s initial conquest there were some who urged the king to pillage and loot; who had hoped that Philip’s campaign would be a raid that would see them emptying the treasuries of Babylon and Persepolis and allow them to return to Macedonia as rich men. And perhaps, initially, this was also what Philip himself had envisioned: securing the Greek cities of Anatolia and then ransacking Syria and Babylonia, if possible. But the relative ease with which he swept aside the Achaemenid armies, and the willingness of satraps to defect to him, gave him pause: perhaps he could seize the throne of Asia for himself? Visits to Babylon and Persepolis seemed to have an impact on the king, impressed by their size and wealth, he was now eager to pose as heir to the ancient traditions of Persia and Babylon, of Assyria, Akkad and Sumer: his triumphant entrance into Babylon in May 333 BCE marked the end of two centuries of Achaemenid rule, and the start of two-and-a-half centuries of Argead kingship in Asia.
Aristotle had once postulated that it was fitting for Greeks to rule over barbarians, in the same way that human should rule over beast and man over woman: it was the natural order of things. For the inhabitants of a Greek
polis it was a convenient way of viewing the world, but not so much for the world-conquering Argeads: while they might perhaps have agreed with the sentiment and while they did very much favour the Macedonian elite they could not entirely disregard their Asian subjects. Persian and Median noblemen, Babylonian priests, Bactrian princes, Indian potentates: all were granted in a place in the Argead system, often by giving them local autonomy and office. Of course during the early Argead era the most striking attempt at reconciling the Greek and the Persian side of things was the dynastic marriage between Alexander and Artakama, daughter of Artabazus, the last Achaemenid king. For the Persians it gave the Argeads a certain respectability and a sense of continuity, despite all that had happened, and while for the Argeads themselves at first it must have seemed an easy way to associate themselves with the Achaemenids it ended up being one of the genuine bedrocks of their rule, especially during the later years of the dynasty when it had lost access to the Mediterranean and became based around Babylonia, Iran and Bactria.
It might have seemed as if the great imperial project of the Argeads would leave little room for the classical Hellenic
polis, but that view would be a mistake: the early Argeads proudly considered themselves Macedonians first and thus considered themselves to be the great protectors and benefactors of Hellenic culture. Land was granted to veterans, new cities were built as testament to the power and vigour of the new dynasty and as a consequence another wave of migration came in from the overpopulated cities of Greece. Some tried their luck in the already existing poleis of Anatolia, but others settled in one of the many cities built by the Argeads: a great string of settlements, from Cilicia to Bactria, with each city representing an outpost of Hellenic culture. These were often founded in areas that were of strategic importance to the empire: northern Syria, for example, saw the foundation of several cities, most famous Nikatoris-on-the-Orontes, as it functioned as the link between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia and the Upper Satrapies further east. Other areas of settlement were several cities on the Royal Road, from Ekbatana through Northern Iran towards Bactria and Sogdiana, Assyria and Bactria itself. In Babylonia Greeks mostly settled in already-existing cities, most notably Babylon itself, where they formed a distinct community. The great exception in Babylonia was of course Eupatoria, explicitly founded by Ptolemaios II as a new capital for the Argead Empire.
These cities, even on the distant Jaxartes or on the banks of the Indus, retained elements which any Corinthian or Athenian would recognise: citizens, at first exclusively Greeks and Macedonians, would meet in an Assembly, a gymnasium for exercise and leisure was often present and shrines and temples to the Olympian deities were constructed. These were, initially, islands of Hellenic culture amidst the myriad peoples of the east: while the Argead dynasty itself attempted to pose as legitimate heirs to the Achaemenids the Macedonians and Greeks who settled in the new cities of the east certainly did not view the inhabitants of Asia as their compatriots. The Babylonians, Medes and Persians might have achieved great things, their civilization older, wealthier and more sophisticated than that of their conquerors, but to the vast majority of the Hellenes they remained
barbaroi: they had been defeated, their land won by the spear, their inferiority to their new rulers was plain for all to see.
During the early days of Argead rule, when Philip Nikator and Alexander the Great ruled and conquered, their realm was thus one of disparate peoples: the Greeks and Macedonians lording over the former subjects of the Achaemenid kings, with only a slightly elevated status for the Medes and Persians. It would take time before Asians outside the highest echelons of Persian and Median nobility could rise above local offices to find acceptance at court and in the royal administration: from Philip III onwards most of the satraps in the Upper Satrapies, the areas east of the Zagros, were of Iranian descent, but even they were often looked down upon by those of Macedonian descent. During the first eighty years of the dynasty, arguably its zenith, it was thus the Hellenes who were in charge, with only some slight accommodations to the Asian subjects of the Great King. As time passed however that started to change: cities once exclusively populated by immigrants from the Aegean saw increasing settlement by the local population, in the countryside Macedonian settlers started to intermarry into local communities, Babylonian priests took Hellenic names and Greek notables started dedicating shrines to local cults and deities. It was a glimpse of the syncretism that was to come. Crucial for this all was the fact that ever since the First War of the Argead Succession the Argeads of Asia had been cut off from the traditional centres of Hellenic culture, and while contact was never truly severed, as shown by the continuous donations of the Great Kings to various shrines in Greece, from Ptolemaios II onwards the focus was very much on Asia itself.
The Argeads had thus irrevocably changed Asia, but as one Great King was succeeded by another so too did Asia influence the Graeco-Macedonian Argeads. The most notable changes were in two, often overlapping, areas: religion and the monarchy itself. ‘The word of the king’, so mentions the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in one of his inscriptions, ‘is as perfect as that of the gods’: in this he encapsulates well the essence of kingship in Mesopotamia, one which with the Argeads, ultimately, would not disagree. From Sargon to Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar and Darius the Great: to the inhabitants of the alluvial plains of the Euphrates and the Tigris the rule of a strong man must have seemed as natural as the flow of its rivers. When Cyrus conquered the world and his successors inherited his dominions they too looked towards the venerable example of Mesopotamian kingship, but their realm, expanded far beyond anything a Assyrian or Babylonian ruler could imagine, required a different kind of kingship. The Achaemenids, at least from Darius onwards, presented themselves as the champions of truth and order,
arta, against the vile and insidious lie,
drauga, and posed as universal sovereigns of a new and timeless order: they show themselves not revelling in the slaughter of a conquered city, like the Assyrians would, but instead peacefully receiving tribute from the various subjugated peoples of the realm. As King of Kings they ruled the peoples of Asia, and beyond, and therein they had generally ruled well: it is little wonder then that it was their example of ruling such a vast realm which would most influence that of their Argead successors.
Monarchy however, despite its dazzling achievements among the peoples of the east, had never found much acceptance among the Hellenes: in the distant, semi-mythical past there had been kings but among the Greek states only the ever-peculiar Spartans and, crucially, the Macedonians, retained the institution. Aristotle, despite his presence at the Macedonian court, regarded hereditary monarchy as barbarous and this seems to have been a common opinion the Hellenes, who saw it as an essentially eastern style of government. When Philip Nikator managed to unite the Greeks he did so not under a single crown but as commander of a league of states: never would the Argeads claim some kind of kingship over all Greeks. Once established as Great Kings of Asia the Argeads still paid lip service to the independence of the Hellenic states and any intervention was not based on their royal authority but on their authority as head of the Hellenic League. Of course those who migrated to the east, to the new cities of Syria and Babylonia or beyond, did find themselves subject to the rule of the Great King: if any had moral objections to the rule of a monarch it is not known, perhaps because the practical benefits of being a Greek settler in the Argead Empire managed to outweigh such considerations.
That doesn’t mean however that there weren’t those who wondered about the rule of their king and their place in the world: the fact that a descendant of Herakles now ruled as the heir of Cyrus and Xerxes was remarkable enough that some started to contemplate its consequences. Kallimedes of Eurydikeia was a Macedonian aristocrat who had served in the cavalry under Alexander the Great and Philip Euergetes, he had fought against the Carthaginians, Indians and Egyptians and ended up as an advisor at the court of Philip Euergetes. It was during that time, when the Argead Empire was at its greatest extent, that Kallimedes wrote down his theories: in the heavens, it was well known, the stars were obedient to circular orbits, eternal and unchanging. So too, Kallimedes theorised, it could be on earth: the establishment of the Argead Empire as the greatest realm of all, as the culmination of Greek and Asian, of east and west, would be its realisation. In the same way that the heavens revolve around the earth so too would the various other states of the world revolve around the Argead Empire, a true Middle Kingdom, as the inhabitants of another civilization might call it. It seems his ideas never gained broad acceptance, and certainly the splintering of the empire would have given any adherent severe doubts, but it was in some ways a sign of things to come: the dream, and pretensions, of a universal order were never far away for the Argead Great Kings, even if they sought their justification in dynastic pretences rather than the patterns of the stars.
To rule then as Great King of Asia was often to pander to different audiences: he was a Macedonian descendant of Philip and Alexander to the Macedonians, to the Greeks he was a benefactor and upholder of their rights, to the Persians and Medes he was the descendant and rightful heir to the Achaemenids. So too it was in the religious sphere: dozens of temples, shrines and sanctuaries were being sponsored by the Great King all over his empire. Shrines to Zeus and Apollo were erected on the banks of the Jaxartes and among the mountains of Bactria, and in due time so too would temples to Mithras and Anahita appear on the shores of the Aegean. It was during the rule of Ptolemaios II that the royal cult was well truly established: Philip and Alexander were deified, temples constructed and games instated, and after several generations the incumbent Great King would count himself as a god manifest upon earth. In religion, as in many other things, it seems that around the end of the first century of Argead rule the contours of what was about to come became visible, at least to those with the benefit of hindsight.
Footnotes
- Phaedo 109b
