birth, but Demetrius Poliorcetes was its king for six years (294-288
B.C.).[120] As such he showed conclusively that he had no intention
to reign there patriarchally, as Cassander and Antipater, following
the example of Philip II and his predecessors, had done. He displayed
an utter disregard for the established customs of the court and for
the limitations imposed by usage upon his royal authority. The court
he surrounded himself with was the richly appointed, ceremonious,
uniformed affair devised by Alexander in his later, more splendid, more
arrogant days; and by requiring proskynesis of the Macedonian noblemen
and commons, he offended, unnecessarily, as it proved, the sturdiest
sentiment of the nation.[121] His attempt to establish absolute
monarchy in unsophisticated Macedon was the most direct cause of the
loss of his kingdom; for when his foreign enemies, anticipating the
attack which he designed against them, assailed him from all sides, his
subjects hastened to abandon him and joined hands with the invaders.
They had no longer heart for the wild imperialistic projects into
which, almost without perceiving it, they had been led by Alexander the
Great.
* * * * *
Antigonus Gonatas had never known the lure of the East. He had spent
his early manhood in Athens (294-290 B.C.), where an unworthy liaison
with the courtesan Demo and an intimacy that does him honor with Zeno,
the founder of the Stoa, attest the range of his activity. He won his
spurs in his father's Boeotian campaigns of 292-291 B.C., and spent
the formative years of his career as a general and statesman in Greece
(288-280 B.C.). Only once, when hard pushed in 280B.C., did he show
that the blood of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Antigonus I flowed in his
veins, namely, when he tried to seize Asia Minor, then temporarily
without a master. Normally, he acted like the child of Phila and the
heir of the policy of Cassander and Antipater. And it was in the spirit
of his mother's line that he established his government in Macedon on
expelling the Celts in 277 B.C.
His reign opened auspiciously. Having obtained--how, when, and at what
price, we do not know--the friendship of Egypt, he got the opportunity
to order affairs to his liking in Greece. On the other hand, his
accession to the throne was accompanied by his marriage to Phila, his
own niece, the sister of Antiochus I, the new king of Asia. This union
sanctioned an agreement by which Antigonus abandoned his claim to Asia
Minor and Antiochus his right, as Seleucus's son, to the Macedonian
throne. It inaugurated a policy by which Macedon secured for eighty
years (277-197 B.C.) immunity from attack or intrigue on the part of
the Seleucids. His friendship with Egypt was less enduring, but it
gave him ten years (277-267 B.C.) in which to consolidate his power--a
period of quiet activity, interrupted only by the return of Pyrrhus
from Italy and the startling upheaval in Macedon and Greece (274-272
B.C.) which accompanied that adventurous monarch's vigorous assertion
of his right to rule those countries. The fall of Pyrrhus in battle at
Argos relieved the tension of this situation, but till the time of his
death thirty-two years afterwards, Antigonus had always to count Epirus
among his possible enemies when it was not actually his assailant.
On his northern frontier he faced the threatening Dardanians, and on
the northeastern the marauding Celts, who had reduced Thrace to the
condition of barbarity that prevailed throughout Central Europe. By
keeping these peoples in check he did a great service to Greece, which
he thereby protected; but for it he got little gratitude, and it was
his suzerainty over Greece which brought to him and his successors most
of their many troubles.
Just as he was faithful to the traditional policy of the Macedonian
kings in his dealings with his own people, so, too, in regard to the
Greeks the plan he followed was in general the old-fashioned one,
of making them his dependent allies. In states ostensibly free and
self-governing he secured a preponderating influence by designating an
individual as his representative and making him practically governor.
Naturally, the domestic opponents of such a person called him a tyrant,
and such, in fact, the nature of his position forced him to become,
since he could not hold his place without breaking both the public and
private laws. But outward appearances were preserved, even when he
called in Macedonian troops to his aid, by the old practice whereby he
and his adherents assumed the responsibility for their coming.
Antigonus Gonatas and some at least of his governors were pupils of
Zeno. That meant in this connection that, whereas Alexander the Great,
for example, had been obliged to discard what was most characteristic
in the politics of Aristotle when he identified himself with the man
of transcendent virtue, who, his teacher had urged, should be made
absolute monarch when found, Antigonus drew from his philosophy an
obligation to let none but the sage rule.[122] As against the wisdom
of the ideal wise man the laws of states which he ignored or broke had
no avail; for, according to his creed, they were unnatural and hence
unwholesome. The wise man could do no wrong. In his actions, since
he was a law unto himself, morality triumphed over mere legality.
Antigonus Gonatas disdained to seek a justification for his acts by
claiming, though a man, the prerogatives of the gods, and, though
there was nothing in the pantheistic theory of Stoicism to prevent
his being worshiped if people wanted to worship him, he was under no
legal necessity to pose as a god; whereas, had he done so, he must have
come into conflict with the religious conservatism of his philosophy.
He, accordingly, had no difficulty in rendering an account to his own
conscience for setting up "tyrants" in his Greek dependencies and for
practicing or authorizing lawlessness. But he was too shrewd a man
to suppose that because Zeno and he thought his conduct justified he
could do what he pleased to the Macedonians or Greeks with impunity.
They could not be expected to know that their ruler was a Stoic sage
who could do no wrong, or to make allowances for his behavior on that
account. Hence, while he could justify his system of government on
philosophic grounds, there is no evidence that he was not a scrupulous
Macedonian king and a considerate suzerain of Greece. And had he been
left alone to work out the problem of Hellenic administration without
outside interference it is probable that his high sense of duty and his
skill and forbearance would have given Greece a long period of peace.
The founder of the first Macedonian empire, Philip II, had been opposed
in Greece by Persia, but the resistance he had encountered because of
the diplomacy of Artaxerxes Ochus was as nothing when compared with
the difficulties raised up for Antigonus Gonatas's uncle, Cassander,
by the promises and armies of his grandfather, Antigonus I, or with
the obstacles he himself had to meet in the intrigue, money, and
expeditions of Ptolemy Philadelphus.
The situation which existed in the first ten years of his reign
(277-267 B.C.) was not of Antigonus's creating, nor was Philadelphus
responsible for it. It was Ptolemy I Soter who had seized the dominion
of the sea on the final _débâcle_ of Demetrius Poliorcetes (287-286
B.C.) and with it the control of the league of the Islanders. This
established a long and, in fact, indefinable frontier between the
realm of Philadelphus and that of Antigonus. The lordship of the sea
Gonatas seems not to have bothered about at first, and, indeed, the
great war which broke out in 266-265 B.C. between the two monarchs--the
so-called Chremonidean War--was clearly incited by Egypt and not by
him. Notwithstanding that she was dead four years when the actual
conflict began, its real instigator was, doubtless, Arsinoë, the
sister-queen of Philadelphus. Acting on her policy, Philadelphus first
formed an alliance with King Areus I of Sparta and his allies (Achæa,
Elis, Mantinea, Phlius, and part of Crete) and with Athens, and then
backed them up in the concerted effort they decided to make to free
Greece from Antigonus and his "tyrants." What the real object of the
"brother-gods" was, is a matter of conjecture. All they accomplished,
in any case, was to give Antigonus five years of hard fighting[123] and
to complete the ruin of Athens and the enforced quietude of Sparta.
Therewith was accomplished, what had been long in the preparing, the
overthrow of the leadership which city-states had held from time
immemorial in European Greece. Henceforth it was not from cities
that significant movements sprang, but from ethne. Macedon itself was
an ethnos, or, at least, a group of ethne, and it seemed possible to
enlarge it by adding to it all the other ethne in the peninsula. The
difficulty was that two other ethne, Ætolia and Achæa, the first in
Central Greece and the second in the Peloponnesus, had each a similar,
if less far-reaching, ambition; and while the aspirations of Ætolia to
acquire territory in the Peloponnesus, and the aspirations of Achæa to
expand into Central Greece, kept them normally in conflict with one
another; and while each in turn (Ætolia in 245-241, Achæa in 220-217
and 212-206 B.C.) got the help of Macedon against the other, and both
united only once (238-229 B.C.) in a war against Macedon, Achæa offered
till 224 B.C. and Ætolia till 200 B.C. an attractive alternative for
Macedonian suzerainty to ethne and city-states which could not stand
alone. The natural desire of the new ethne, as of the old city-states,
was, however, to be independent--a sentiment which Ætolia and Achæa
shared completely; and against this powerful force Antigonus had to
contend, after the Chremonidean War no less than before it.
He had come so brilliantly out of the Chremonidean War, however, that
ten years elapsed before his suzerainty was again challenged. His most
formidable enemy, Ptolemy Philadelphus, was absorbed meanwhile with a
dangerous disturbance in Ionia, occasioned by the revolt of Ptolemy,
his "son", and Timarchus, his admiral, to whose aid his watchful enemy,
Antiochus II, and his daring maritime rivals, the Rhodians,[124] had
come (258 B.C.); but when this outbreak was brought to a close with
the peace of 255 B.C.,[125] Antigonus had to anticipate a renewal of
his troubles in Greece. He, accordingly, determined to cease being
the anvil and to become the hammer. That meant the construction of a
fleet with which to take from Egypt control of the Ægean, which had
been possessed prior to 288-287 B.C. by his father and grandfather. To
accomplish this end he renewed his alliance with Syria, and arranged
a marriage between his son and heir, Demetrius, and Stratonice,
Antiochus's sister. This being done, he sought out the admirals of
Ptolemy at Leucolla near Cos, and defeated them in a great naval battle
(253 B.C.). Suzerainty over the league of the Islanders was the most
striking gain; but a more substantial advantage was that with his fleet
he could now ward off trouble in Greece and stir it up in Ptolemy's
realm. The latter he accomplished by dispatching his half-brother,
Demetrius the Fair, to Cyrene and by snatching that kingdom, which had
just been vacated by the death of Magas (251-250 B.C.), from the grasp
of Egypt. In the former he had a rather surprising lack of success.
For in 251 B.C. Aratus, the somewhat melodramatic hero of the Achæan
league, on mastering his native city Sicyon by a coup d'état, not only
chose to accept a subsidy from Philadelphus rather than from himself,
but added Sicyon to the neighboring ethnos of the Achæans. And almost
immediately thereafter Ptolemy struck a second blow which made the
first of importance. In 250 B.C. Alexander, Antigonus's nephew and
chief lieutenant in Greece, egged on by Egypt doubtless, revolted and
set himself up as an independent monarch, with Corinth and Calchis,
which he had held for his uncle, and the Macedonian fleet of which
these were the naval stations, as his basis for action. He at once
allied himself with the Achæans and forced Argos and Athens to pay
him tribute (before 250-249 B.C.). This rebellion paralyzed the naval
power of Antigonus. It was doubtless precipitated by the disloyalty of
Antiochus II to Macedon; for that monarch (now, in or before 249 B.C.)
broke faith with Antigonus and allied himself with Egypt, retaining
the conquests he had made during the war and receiving in marriage
Berenice, the only daughter of Philadelphus, whose intrinsic worth was
augmented by an enormous dowry. This base and, as it proved, foolish
action freed Ptolemy to devote all his energies to the war with
Macedon. The fleet of Egypt once more mastered the Ægean and regained
control of the league of the Islanders (249 B.C.). Simultaneously,
the pro-Egyptian party in Cyrene slew the fair Demetrius, and by the
marriage of their young queen Berenice to Philadelphus's heir, effected
the reunion of the two kingdoms, which had been estranged since the
revolt of Berenice's father, Magas, in 274 B.C.[126] The triumph of
Ptolemy was complete, and when his daughter promptly bore to her
Seleucid husband a son, who by the marriage stipulation was to be his
heir, the future of the Ptolemies seemed bright indeed.
Between 250 and 245 B.C. the fortunes of Gonatas were at a low ebb.
He evidently bent before the storm, unable to confront Alexander and
Aratus in Greece and the admirals of Philadelphus in the Ægean. Relief
came to him from an unexpected source--the renewal of the war between
Egypt and Asia, when, on the death of Antiochus II, his sister-wife
Laodice took up arms against the Egyptian queen and her babe on behalf
of her son Seleucus Callinicus. For, helped by the untimely death of
Philadelphus, and despite the intervention of the Egyptian fleet, she
succeeded in compassing the death of her rivals;[127] whereupon the new
Ptolemy, Euergetes, took the field in person and made a general attack
by land and sea upon her and her adherents. This tragic incident was
one of the few pieces of good luck experienced by Antigonus. Another
was the premature death of his nephew Alexander (246 B.C.), followed
as it was by the Ætolian conquest of Boeotia, and the decision of
Nicæa, Alexander's widow, to surrender Corinth and the rest of her
kingdom to Macedon, the arrangement being that she was to take the
place of the barren and discredited Stratonice as wife of the crown
prince Demetrius. In 245-244 B.C. the balance in Asia inclined sharply
in favor of Laodice, and at the same time Antigonus, aided by his
patron god Pan, recovered Delos and the Islands. Having thus regained
what the rebellion of Alexander had cost him, and having settled his
account with Egypt, Antigonus had now to deal with Aratus of Sicyon
alone. The Achæan was too quick for him, however. By a night attack,
in time of peace, he treacherously seized Corinth (243 B.C.), and at
once added it, together with Megara, Epidaurus, and Troezen, to the
Achæan league. The response of Antigonus to this audacious coup was
to form a pact with his old friends the Ætolians to divide Achæan
territory between them; whereupon, as the only escape from so great a
peril, Aratus put the responsibility where the responsibility really
belonged, by having Ptolemy Euergetes elected general of the Achæan
league on land and sea for 242 B.C. Euergetes brought the Laodicean
War to a point where an advantageous peace was possible by a victory
over Callinicus in this critical year; but his attempt to help
Aratus, who tried to "liberate" Athens while his "commander" engaged
Gonatas in the Ægean, was frustrated by the defeat sustained by his
admiral Sophron at the hands of the veteran Antigonus off the island
of Andros. Macedon still held the Ægean. In the mean time its allies
the Ætolians, already dangerously strengthened by the occupation of
Boeotia, had worsted Olympias, the queen regent of Epirus, in several
engagements, and were on the point of incorporating all of Acarnania
in their league. Antigonus thought the time had come to call a halt.
Euergetes and Callinicus were of the same mind. Accordingly, the long
war was concluded in 242-241 B.C. by a general peace arranged on the
basis of _uti possidetis_. Antigonus held Argos, Hermione, Phlius,
Ægina, Megalopolis, and Orchomenus in the Peloponnesus, in Central
Greece Athens alone, and in the Ægean Euboea and the Cyclades, as well,
seemingly, as Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, the colonies of Athens.
Thessaly was of course his. His garrisons stood in Demetrias, Chalcis,
and Piræus. Of the "shackles" of Greece Corinth alone was out of his
hands. In 240-239 B.C. he died at the age of eighty, having been a king
forty-seven years, all but ten of them in Macedon.
* * * * *
I have sketched the career of Antigonus Gonatas in some fullness
chiefly because it has only recently become possible to give anything
like chronological precision to an account of this remarkable
man.[128] His reign deserves detailed consideration, however, because
of the position it occupies at one of the culminating points of Greek
imperialism, the only other point of equal importance being that in
which Alexander the Great introduced deification of rulers. The record
given above shows clearly, I think, that the power of Macedon did
not suffice to hold Greece in subjection on the principles followed
by Antigonus Gonatas, and against the opposition of Egypt. Even the
final triumph of 242-241 B.C. left Egyptian garrisons in Thrace, the
Hellespont, Ionia, and islands as far advanced into the Ægean as Thera
and Astypalæa, Samos and Lesbos, Thasos and Samothrace. It left Achæa
in possession of Corinth and Megara, Epidaurus and Troezen, as well as
Sicyon and at least a foothold in Arcadia. It left Ætolia in possession
of part of Acarnania, Dolopia, Æniania, Malis, Doris, Locris, Phocis,
and in close alliance with Boeotia. Heraclea at Thermopylæ and Delphi
with its Amphictyonic council were Ætolian. Hence when the new king
of Macedon, Demetrius II, married Olympias's daughter Phthia, and
took Epirote Acarnania under his protection (240-239 B.C.); and when
Ætolia, thus check-mated, entered into a defensive and offensive
alliance with Achæa, the territory of the two leagues, now united in
opposition to Macedon, met, and inclosed completely the Corinthian
Gulf. The one had grown strong despite Antigonus and the other with
his connivance. He had been forced to give Ætolia a free rein from
need of its aid against Egypt, Epirus, and Achæa. Now the policy of
Epirus was subservient to that of Macedon as it had been prior to the
accession of Pyrrhus to its throne in 295 B.C., but the two leagues
were able to fight on fair terms with the two monarchies, and in 238
B.C. they defied Macedon, now supported by Epirus, without having Egypt
as their ally. The failure of the Greek policy of Antigonus Gonatas may
be best gauged by the fact that twenty-seven years earlier Athens and
Sparta had dared to do the like, but only when Egypt, and probably also
Epirus, were fighting on their side.
The chief reason for this striking difference is that in the interval
the Achæans, following the lead given to them by the Ætolians, had
come to life and shed their ethnic cocoon. They had long since been
a _koinon_, or league; but up to 251 B.C. their league, like that of
Boeotia prior to 387 B.C., like that of the Ætolians prior to the
seizure of Delphi in 292 B.C., had been confined strictly by the limits
of their ethnos. The Ætolians had enlarged their territory under the
ægis of the Delphian Amphictyony. The Achæans had no such favoring
circumstance. In their case expansion by the incorporation of "foreign"
peoples was the policy and achievement of a citizen of the first
"foreign" city to be absorbed, Aratus of Sicyon, who saw a greater
opportunity for power as the head of the neighboring league than as
the "tyrant" of his native state, holding office, like the priest at
Nemi, till murdered, or till he had lost the confidence of Antigonus.
At his instigation the Achæan league was carried into the territory
of the "foreigner," the necessary prerequisite for such a development
being, however, that the ethnic bond between the Achæan cities had
been canceled and replaced by a federal bond. The tenacious theory
that common citizenship presupposed community of descent was therewith
discarded. Its abandonment opened to the league possibilities of growth
never possessed by either the city-state or the ethnic state. Of these
the Ætolians and the Achæans took advantage to the best of their
abilities.
They were wise enough, moreover, to perceive that not only were city
institutions indispensable for an up-to-date polity--whence the
Ætolians on forming their league in 322-314 B.C. abandoned their three
ancient tribes and their multitudinous villages and organized in their
stead a score or two of cities[129]--but also that their federal system
must recognize and accept the preexistent city-states as its units.
This, as we have seen,[130] had not been done in Boeotia or in the
Hellenic league organized by Philip II, in each of which the federal
synod, being constructed on the idea of representation according to
population, made districts and not cities the units; so that the
smaller cities felt themselves discriminated against and tended to
rebel against being clubbed together. How far equality of cities
prevailed among the Achæans it is impossible to say with certainty:
we are simply informed that the voting there was by cities. But we
are, I think, permitted to infer that the principle followed was
"one city one vote." For it is unlikely that the old Achæan cities,
on admitting Sicyon, Corinth, Megalopolis, and Argos, deliberately
exposed themselves to the fate of the little lake cities in Boeotia by
giving these large "foreign" cities voting power proportionate to their
populations. This conclusion holds, I believe, both for the Achæan
representative assembly, or synod, which was made up, seemingly, of
successive fractions of the citizens of the constituent cities,[131]
and for the Achæan primary assembly, or _syncletus_, which was open
to all citizens over thirty years of age. It holds, too, it seems,
for the two Ætolian assemblies, the ordinary and the extraordinary,
which were both primary,[132] but not for the Ætolian council which
was constituted of delegates apportioned to the constituent cities
according to their size. The Achæan and the Ætolian leagues represent
in this respect a reaction from the earlier leagues. Their hope was
to change the stress of the cities, which came into play, from a
centrifugal into a centripetal force by basing their federations
squarely on the city-states.
This they could do, up to a certain point, the more easily because
each ethnos had lacked a city-state of outstanding political and
economic power. Equality of city-states did not conflict flagrantly
with realities in either Achæa or Ætolia. Hence the principle that each
city-state, irrespective of strength in the Aristotelian sense, should
have a single vote in the federal assembly, and an equal voice in the
choosing of the federal cabinet (_demiurgi_; _apocleti_), and the
federal executive (_strategus_, hipparch, secretary of state, treasurer
or treasurers) appeared equitable. In Boeotia and Hellas in the earlier
time the league had been created by the superior strength of Thebes
and Macedon respectively; and these capital states had taken care that
the initial leadership should be preserved by the institutions of the
leagues. The Achæan and the Ætolian leagues, on the other hand, were
partly, no doubt, the result of a compromise between the constituent
units, but mainly the consequence of foreign pressure. The federal
movement was not based primarily upon the activity of any one city, but
upon a need generally felt. Hence the capital of the Achæan league
was Ægium, and the capital of the Ætolian league Thermon--neutral
meeting-places, like Washington, Ottawa, and Canberra. That was
something new in the annals of the Greek leagues.
The creative force of foreign policy is manifest in still other
characteristics of these Hellenistic leagues. It was almost
inevitable that in those days of executive efficiency states should
be monarchically organized. Hence, whereas there had been eleven
Boeotarchs in the Boeotian league and seven generals in early
third-century Acarnania, a single general stood at the head of
the Ætolians from the founding of their league and at the head of
the Achæans after 255 B.C. That gave a unity of action otherwise
impossible, the lack of which, though negligible perhaps in domestic
affairs, had been found disadvantageous in foreign affairs. It was a
necessary concession to a monarchical age, one which, however, had been
made reluctantly and with an important reservation which took from
the serum its malignancy: the generalship could be held by the same
individual only every alternate year. He might be the uncrowned king of
the league one year; the next he must be a private citizen.