READING HALL

THE DOORSOF WISDOM

ANTIGONUS GONATAS

CHAPTER III.

THE EMPIRE OF DEMETRIOS OVER THE SEA

Such being the state of things on the mainland, the position of Demetrios at sea and in the islands has to be considered; for this purpose it will be necessary to go back a little.

The three fleets of any importance in the Eastern Mediterranean in the latter part of the fourth century had been the Persian, the Athenian, and the Macedonian. The former had become absorbed by Alexander upon his conquest of the Persian Empire; and the Athenian fleet, which remained intact until after Alexander’s death, had finally gone down before Antipatros’ admiral, Kleitos, in the two days’ battle off Amorgos which ended the Lamian war. Kleitos may well have assumed the insignia of Poseidon; for the seas east of the Carthaginian-Syracusan sphere were now definitely Macedonian. But as on land, so on the water, the question soon arose who was to govern, and how; for several of the contending generals had fleets at their disposal, notably Kassandros and Ptolemy.

It was the elder Antigonus, however, who showed the firmest grasp of the meaning of sea-power and the firmest resolution to win it. In 315, when he had disposed of Eumenes, was master of most of Asia, and was definitely aiming at the whole empire, he had found himself confronted by a coalition of Ptolemy, Kassandros, and Lysimachus. To make head against them he required in the first place that Kassandros should not control the material forces of Greece, and in the second, that he should be cut off from his allies, and they from each other. Either purpose could only be achieved by obtaining command of the sea, or at any rate local command in the Aegean; only thus could Antigonus reach Greece himself and cut the oversea lines of communication which bound the coalition together. For this purpose the prime necessity was a powerful fleet, and he at once set to work, collecting what ships he could and building others, till he had raised 240 altogether, some of large size. But Antigonus, a man of considerable ideas, desired more than this, something which force could not give him. He wanted public opinion on his side; and there was only one public opinion in the world at the time; it was alike formed and expressed by the states of the Greek homeland, and primarily by Athens. It was not only the desire to damage Kassandros, it was also the desire to stand right with Greece, which led Antigonus to issue his famous proclamation that the Greek states should thenceforth be free, ungarrisoned, and self-governing; with the unexpressed corollary that he would free them.

Probably Antigonus really meant what he said. It is of great interest to see him, in the political struggle, making the same moves against Kassandros as Ptolemy II was afterwards to make against Antigonus’ grandson when he sat on Kassandros’ throne. But it is sufficient here to note that his proclamation hit one of the marks aimed at. Delos had long hated the Athenian domination; and she seized the opportunity of shaking herself free from her ancient mistress, then ruled by Demetrios of Phaleron in Kassandros’ interest. This move of necessity imported alliance with Antigonus; with Delos went some of the Cyclades; and one of Antigonus’ squadrons, commanded by his nephew Dioskourides, at once appeared in the Aegean, in order to ensure that every island which had as yet neglected to do so should forthwith become ‘free’—that is, should join its liberator. Thereupon, either at once, or within the next few years, the ‘League of the Islanders ’ took shape.

The idea of some form of combination among the Islands of the Aegean was very old, dating in fact from the original independent Ionian amphictyony of the Cyclades, known to us from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which had its centre in Delos. The fifth century had seen the great Athenian confederation, known as the Confederation of Delos; here again Delos was the nominal centre, and at first the treasury. This confederation, it may be remarked, had nothing federal about it. It was an alliance, not a league; and the smaller islands soon passed from the position of allies of Athens into that of tributaries. From the point of view of the Islanders, the difference from the original Ionian amphictyony was great indeed independence had passed away, and the confederation included islands of Dorian, no less than those of Ionian, blood.

By the end of the fourth century it seemed clear that independence had passed away for good and all: for no state which islands like the Cyclades could form, of however loose a construction, could exist save under the aegis of some protecting power. Nevertheless, the islands were of importance. The Aegean was the home-sea of the Greek world, and the islands provided, not only excellent harbours, but as it were stepping-stones to cross that sea in every direction, no small thing in the days of galleys. But their real value was that they included Delos and the temple of the Delian Apollo. For centuries, under diverse political forms, Delos had been in law and in sentiment the centre of the home-sea; and admiral after admiral, from Nikias and Lysandros downward, makes his offering in her temple, till we can almost trace sea-power by an examination of the votive offerings there brought  to Apollo. This was a sentiment which grew only stronger with time; and in that long connected period of naval history which opens with the annihilation of the Athenian sea-power by Macedonia at Amorgos, and closes with the final defeat of Antiochus III by Rome at Myonnesos, every conqueror at sea, from Kleitos to each of the Roman admirals of the Syrian war, brings his gift to Delos. For this is the period during which, put concisely, men of Macedonian blood dominated the Aegean; and the Macedonian, a comparative stranger, felt more strongly even than the Greek the need of propitiating the local god. On the home-sea, Apollo was at home; none could rule there save in his name.

Now, when independence seemed gone for good, came the proclamation of the strongest ruler in the world, calling all Greeks to freedom. Did the Islands, under that proclamation, federate themselves? The answer is to compare any existing Greek federation with the League of the Islanders; the first glance shows that, in the latter, we are dealing with g new political type. The ordinary Greek federation of city states was formed to safeguard the freedom and autonomy of its several members; and the whole (unless brought into subjection by some other power) composed a free federal community, a distinct state vis-à-vis other states, holding its own federal assembly, coining its own money, electing its own civil head and military officers, raising its own armed forces, maintaining its own independence as best it could. But the League of the Islanders was nothing of the kind. So far as we know, it had no ekklesia or assembly; it neither raised nor disposed of armed forces,—anyhow till its reconstruction in the second century under the headship of Rhodes,—and consequently had no military officers to elect; no civil head is heard of; the money it used was that of its master; and its master provided for its security in face of the rest of the world, Most important of all, it paid to that master taxes. It enjoyed, indeed, a considerable measure of autonomy; to independence it possessed no claim whatever at any time of its history.

How and why then was it formed, seeing that the usual reason for the formation of a federation mutual protection against enemies—did not come into play? It should be obvious from this alone that the constituent islands cannot have formed the League by themselves of their own mere motion; states do not form a league merely that it may repose under the protecting aegis of a great Power. That the League began by reposing under the aegis of Antigonus and Demetrios seems certain; and it must therefore, if not formed by the constituent states, have been actually formed by Antigonus himself. Nor is the reason far to seek.

Antigonus required the command of the sea, and the good-will, active or passive, of the Greek states. Into each of these two very practical objects of statecraft a question of sentiment entered. In the latter case, the sentiment was that curious feeling which throughout history urged the Macedonian to stand well, if he could, with the Greek; the Greek states were, therefore, to be ranged on his side, not by conquest, but by gratitude for the proclamation of their freedom. In the former case, the sentiment was the one previously alluded to, that in order to control the Aegean one must stand well with the local god; Apollo of Delos must be, in some visible way understood by the world, one’s own god and not the god of one’s opponent. Mere sea-power was a matter (let us suppose) of acquiring bases, building ships, winning victories —things to be obtained by force; but to be stable, it involved the control of the Delian Apollo, and that could not be obtained by force. Delos had just been invited to free herself from Athenian domination; on this and similar facts Antigonus was depending to draw the Greek world to his side; if he took forcible possession of any liberated island, and most of all of Delos, he more than stultified himself in the eyes of the Greek world. But if he did not take possession of Delos, someone else, probably Ptolemy, most certainly would and could; and in that case what would become of the gratitude of Apollo?

In these circumstances Antigonus devised and formed the League. The small weak islands of Ionian blood grouped round Delos were combined into a federation, autonomous indeed and as free as circumstances would permit, but entirely dependent, as against other powers, on Antigonus’ protection. It solved the double problem very neatly; in form, Apollo was free before the world; in fact, he was bound to Antigonus.

The formation of the League by Antigonus, in the circumstances already described, explains the peculiar fact that it was formed upon a purely Ionian basis. As we find it under Philadelphus, the islands actually known to be members, apart from Delos itself, are Andros, Naxos, Kythnos, Amorgos, Herakleia, Mykonos, and Keos. There can be no real doubt of the membership of Paros, Ios, and Syros, though exact demonstration is lacking. Tenos and Siphnos are demonstrated only for the period of Rhodian hegemony, but were probably members throughout; of Seriphos, Gyaros, and Oliaros nothing is heard. There is nothing whatever to show that the Egyptian headquarters in the Aegean, Samos and Thera, were ever members. Now while many different lists of the Cyclades exist in ancient writers, it is quite certain that Amorgos and Herakleia were never reckoned among them; and the Island League is therefore the wider term of the two, though no doubt the islands of the League were often referred to as ‘the Cyclades’. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the non-inclusion of islands of Dorian, or even of non-Ionian, blood,—the Lemnian Sikinos, for example. As nothing in Dorian sentiment was opposed to such inclusion—for instance, the great Dorian islands of Rhodes and Kos, during the most flourishing period of the League, sent yearly theoriai to Delos—the reason must be sought elsewhere; and the explanation is, that the founder of the League desired to avoid the associations of the two confederacies that had been formed in the fifth and fourth centuries under the presidency of Athens—confederacies which had included islands of non-Ionian blood—and therefore went back for his model to the original purely Ionian amphictyony. This exactly agrees with the position of Antigonus in the years following 314, when Delos had just revolted to him from Athens, and Athens, governed in the interests of Kassandros, was his enemy.

One of the first acts of the newly formed League was to do honour to its founder. Antigonus had grasped one of the ideas of Alexander, that an excellent way of holding together a complex of autonomous cities was to become their god, thus gaining in each city a footing which from the political point of view was impossible of acquisition; and he accordingly took his place beside Apollo as one of the gods of the Islanders. The exact date of the foundation of the federal fete of the Antigoneia cannot be ascertained, but it was probably coeval with the foundation of the League; and it is heard of as being celebrated every second year when, shortly after the great victory at Salamis, the Islanders gave similar divine honours to Demetrios and commenced to celebrate his festival, the Demetrieia, in alternate years with that of his father.

The Island League, naturally, could only be controlled by Antigonus if and so long as he possessed the command of the sea. The command of the sea, in the history of this time, is a phrase to be used with considerable caution. In the first place, sea-service was not yet specialized; the same men commanded afloat and ashore; and as, given timber, a fleet of galleys could be easily and quickly improvised, any power that possessed enough fighting-men, and controlled a few Greek cities to supply trained steersmen and masters, could at any time challenge the ruling sea power with a fair prospect of success. Moreover, owing to the small radius of action of the galley, tied to her water supply and unable to face a storm, the sea was not one sea but many, and a power might control one compartment without in the least affecting another; for instance, the complete authority which for forty years Ptolemy II exercised over the Eastern Mediterranean never affected the seas west of Syracuse. Again, no power kept the sea in any force in time of peace; true standing fleets were unknown prior to Augustus, and galleys, when laid up, quickly deteriorated. The command of the sea, then, in the only sense in which it can be used in this book, means a purely local command in the Eastern Mediterranean or the Aegean, as the case may be, and means also, not that the power exercising it really controlled even that part of the sea in our sense, but that such power had a very good prospect, if challenged, of getting to sea a fleet that could defeat the challenger.

From this point of view, Antigonus hardly commanded the sea from 315 to 306. Ptolemy, though not particularly successful, managed to keep the sea in his despite down to the peace of 311; and in 308, when possibly Antigonus was not yet ready for a new war, Ptolemy sailed to Greece and attempted to unite the Greek States, on pretext of freedom, under his own leadership. It was an important expedition, for it formulated for the first time what became the standing policy of Egypt for two generations; to stir up trouble for the Antigonid in Greece by posing as the champion of Greek freedom. Ptolemy, however, failed; he had no resource left but to fight seriously; fortune threw into the scale against him a really great admiral; and the result was Demetrios’ victory over him at Salamis in 306, one of the most decisive naval battles of antiquity. Never again, while he lived, did Demetrios have to fight at sea.

Thenceforth Demetrios ruled the Aegean absolutely down to his fall in 288, or even later. Ipsos, which destroyed the Asiatic empire that his father and himself had built, seems to have made no difference in this respect, for Ptolemy could not face him at sea in 294. He lost territory once and again, as Cyprus; but his grip on the sea itself remained unshakened by any vicissitudes on land. Though only one inscription—the before-mentioned decree of the Islanders voting him divine honours—has survived to attest his suzerainty of the Island League, the fact cannot be doubted. His money circulated in the Islands, a circumstance in itself sufficient to imply political domination; an island is found doing honour to a Macedonian proxenos; Demetrios had in his sendee an official called nesiarch or governor of the islands; a Delian inventory refers to him simply as ‘the king’; and when, at one of his lowest ebbs of fortune, he was rehabilitated by Seleucus’ marriage with his daughter, the ruler of Asia celebrated his alliance with the sea-king by dedicating two silver models of warships in the natural centre of a sea-king’s rule, the temple at Delos.

An estimate of the naval strength of Demetrios and of his principal rival, Ptolemy I, can be made with confidence. There is no need now to insist on the general excellence of the nineteenth and twentieth books of Diodorus; and the fleet figures which he gives are moderate in themselves, agree well with one another, and are careful to distinguish wars-hips from transports or service vessels, a very rare blessing in an ancient writer. This last fact shows incontrovertibly that the items in Diodorus have come down from some prac­tical man who knew; it is hardly possible therefore that their source can be any one but Hieronymos, a sufficient guarantee of their general trustworthiness.

Taking these figures, and reckoning warships only, it appears that in 315 Antigonus controlled 240 warships; in 313 about 250;at Salamis Demetrios had 118 ships in action, raised to 198 after the battle, which would give a total of somewhere about 330 ships in the possession of the two kings at the end of 306. For the expedition against Egypt Demetrios mobilized 150 ships, of which a good many were lost in a storm, and next year against Rhodes 200, which still left a certain reserve. Here Diodorus’ figures unfortunately fail us. When Plutarch says that Demetrios sailed to Greece in 304 with 330 ‘ships’, he of course includes transports. But we know that Demetrios did some building between 306 and 288; and though Plutarch’s statement that in 294, after losing most of his fleet in a storm, he was still able to collect 300 ships, must be exaggerated, it is certain that the fleet so collected was large enough to cause an Egyptian fleet of 150 sail to retire without risking an action. When to it were added what remained of the fleets of Kassandros and Athens, Demetrios as king of Macedonia may well have again controlled 300 warships, an overwhelming force.

The strength of Egypt at sea up to Salamis is consistently represented as a maximum of 200 ships. After that battle the only fleet of which the number is known was 150 strong. It is interesting therefore to note that, prior to the final fall of Demetrios, the full strength of Egypt is about the same as the full strength of Carthage at the time of the first Punic war, 200 warships, while Demetrios, in number of vessels, was distinctly more powerful on paper than Rome ever was in the third century. But numbers do not quite give the relative measure of Demetrios’ strength as king of Macedonia. His empire included all the best material—Athens, Corinth, Sidon; for marines he could ship Macedonian troops. He controlled the western seaboard of the Aegean from Nauplia to Abdera, with all its harbours and naval bases; Macedonia and Magnesia gave him unlimited timber, the islands provided his galleys with stepping-stones across the sea. Above all he (or his father) had been the first to realize that quadriremes and quinqueremes were not the extreme limit of human progress. These galleys, rowed by some twenty-five oars aside, with four or five men to each oar respectively, formed the fleets of Egypt till after Salamis, and formed the fleets of Rome, Carthage, and Rhodes, throughout the third and second centuries. History in the long run has justified the nations that adhered to moderate sized vessels; but on this obscure subject it is not possible to do more than point out that while the question of large versus moderate-sized warships was never properly tried to an issue, our scanty records of such trials as were made in the Eastern Mediterranean in the third century point to a certain measure of advantage in the larger vessels. The performance of Demetrios’ heptereis at Salamis certainly revolutionized existing ideas in the kingdoms of the Successors, and a race in building large ships began. Demetrios’ fleet, therefore, when he was king of Macedonia, must undoubtedly have contained many ships larger even than heptereis; his flagship, as early as 300, had been a triskaidekeres These ships were adapted to carry, not only heavy catapults, but also a large force of fighting-men; and it is consequently impossible to estimate the power of Demetrios’ fleets merely by the number of ships, as we should estimate a fleet of the fourth or fifth century, though it is tolerably certain that the average size would fall short of the quinquereme.

One note of caution, however, must be sounded, in an estimate of Demetrios’ strength. His total force cannot be ascertained by adding together the army and the fleet, for they overlapped to an unknown extent. To get to sea a fleet of 200 large warships, properly equipped with fighting men, entailed a considerable drain on the land forces; and no power in the third century except Rome was ever able to put out its full strength on land and sea at the same time.

No other organized state, save Egypt, was ever in a position to think of challenging Demetrios at sea; no other state had a fleet of the first class. Seleucus had little coast line and no naval force worth speaking of. Lysimachus must have had some ships; but his strength at sea cannot have been great till he acquired Herakleia, and the importance of his navy dates from after Demetrios’ fall. Probably the most important state navies, other than those of Demetrios and Egypt, were still owned by three independent Greek towns. Herakleia and Byzantion could each dispose of an effective, if moderate, force; while Rhodes, though not yet the Rhodes of the second century, and though her strength on paper was never really great, had already given the world an object-lesson of what one free city could still do, and had begun to make good the proud boast that every Rhodian was worth a warship.

But if Demetrios held absolute command of the sea as against any organized state, the Aegean was nevertheless infested by an irregular and very active sea-power, that of the pirates; and they maintained themselves in force throughout the third century, careless of whether the Macedonian or the Egyptian were nominally lord of the sea. Piracy had been endemic in the Eastern Mediterranean from the dawn of history; the rulers of the Aegean in the third century could not suppress it, and it does not even appear that they took such serious steps to hold it in check as were taken from time to time by the little island of Rhodes. The evil had been a growing one toward the end of the fourth century, in spite of the strong Athenian navy. We hear of triremes being sent out expressly to watch for corsairs; and about 325/4 Athens was founding a colony on the shores of the Adriatic, under a leader of the auspicious name of Miltiades, to form a base whence corn ships could be protected against the pirates of Etruria. For this was the time when the Etruscans were the most dreaded of sea-rovers;—and at the beginning of the third century they were invading the Aegean. Demetrios had to complain to Rome of the depredations of their confederates the Antiates; and in 298 Delos borrowed a large sum from Apollo to put herself in a condition of defence against the Etruscans,—a year, be it noted, when Demetrios was in Asia. Demetrios had no desire for foreigners poaching in his sea; but indeed the power of Etruria was fast failing, and the Aegean was soon to be left to the home-bred buccaneer. One of the last acts of the broken Athenian navy, at the time when Antigonus was beginning to grasp at sea-power, had been to rescue the island of Kythnos from a pirate named Glauketas, capturing him and his ships, ‘and making the sea safe for those that ‘sailed thereon.’ Glauketas was probably acting in Antigonus’ interest; for it is certain that Demetrios, while lord of the sea, so far from repressing home-grown piracy in the Aegean, was on extremely good terms with those who professed it. The arch-pirate Timokles aided him in the siege of Rhodes with some excellent ships; and 8,000 pirates formed part of the army with which, in 302, he invaded Thessaly, a figure which, if even approximately correct, shows that the rovers of the sea disposed of no contemptible force.

All through the third century numerous traces of their activity are found. In Lysimachus’ reign one Pythagoras attempted to plunder the sanctuary at Samothrace, but was caught by the king’s troops. A new arch-pirate, Ameinias of Phocis, whose force included ‘pirates’ from Aetolia, took Kassandreia  for Antigonus Gonatas. Ptolemy II also employed them, both in his war against Antiochus I, and to aid Alexander of Corinth against Gonatas. But this did not hinder them from plundering Ptolemy’s possessions when they had a mind. Twice they attacked Thera, the Ptolemaic headquarters in the Aegean; on one occasion they landed at Oia, in the north of the island, and were beaten off by the Egyptian nauarch, Hermaphilos, son of Philostratos, who fortunately happened to be there; at another time pirates from Allaria in Crete carried off some men, whether citizens of Thera or mercenaries is uncertain, and persuaded them to turn pirate also. The Ptolemaic strategos of the Hellespont had to fortify Samothrace against them; a little later they succeeded in sacking Aigiale in Amorgos. At the end of the century Rhodes took energetic measures; a treaty remains, made between her and Hierapytna in Crete, which provides for joint action against pirates and for the disposal of the captives and their vessels, doubtless only one of many similar treaties made by Rhodes with a view to getting the scourge under. But it still persisted; for in 190 another arch-pirate, Nikandros, aided Antiochus III in his war against Rome, putting himself under the orders of Antiochus’ admiral.

What is to be understood by ‘piracy’ in any case is a difficult question, since the Greek language has only one term for pirate and privateer. The Aetolian pirates, for instance, were privateersmen, like that Dikaiarchos who about 205 received twenty ships from Philip V with the congenial order to go a-pirating in the Aegean, raid the islands, and help the Cretans against Rhodes. Aetolia had no state navy, and privateering was her recognized method of marine warfare. The corsairs of Illyria and Crete were sometimes authorized by their governments, such as they were; but if sometimes privateersmen, they were generally pirates pure and simple, and even in the case of Aetolia the distinguishing line was often remarkably thin. Naturally states backward in civilization drew no very fine distinctions; some of the Cretan towns cannot have been much better than Algiers, and even more respectable communities than the Cretan may not have been above winking at the sea-captain who for the nonce turned buccaneer. After all, it was not so long since even Athens had given her blessing to those of her citizens who might contemplate a short cruise at their neighbours’ expense.

But the pirates who furnished Demetrios with ships against Rhodes and troops against Kassandros, who took Kassandreia for Antigonus, and fought for Antiochus against Rome, always under the orders of an arch-pirate, were none of these. These must have been broken men, escaped slaves, bankrupt debtors, with a sprinkling perhaps of exiles and unemployed mercenaries,—at their head some who found organized society tedious and desired a life of adventure,—men who lived in this or that little stronghold round the Aegean, avoiding cities, but recognizing a community of interest and a chief. No doubt the governments could have put them down; but all the governments had their hands pretty full, and it suited them better to wink at the evil. For pirates could be capable allies on occasion, and one had not to be too particular as to what percentage of loss fell on them. Besides, apart from warfare, the pirate had a most useful place in the economy of the old world; he was the general slave merchant. But for him and his living cargoes, State mines might have to close down and State forests remain unfelled; so long as he did not do too much harm to one’s own subjects, he was rather a person to be encouraged. Probably ‘arch-pirate’ was a very honourable appellation. It was only states like Rhodes, subsisting entirely on sea­borne commerce, or Athens, dependent on sea-borne corn, that felt any real interest in clearing the seas.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FALL OF DEMETRIOS

ANTIGONUS GONATAS