# Dividing the Spoils  ## Metadata - Author: [[Robin Waterfield]] - Full Title: Dividing the Spoils - Category: #books ## Highlights - It was the Successors who created the first stable empires with a European flavor. This was indeed a significant period of history, and it has been overlooked only because of the difficulties in recovering it. Historians of imperialism simply skip from Alexander to Rome; I aim to set the record straight. ([Location 101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=101)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The astonishing energy of the campaigns was due entirely to Alexander’s character. He was a driven man, and world conquest was his focus. He slaughtered by the thousands those who stood in his way. He thinned the ranks even—especially—of those closest to him at the slightest suspicion of conspiracy, or even disagreement with major policy decisions. ([Location 276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=276)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The practice of obeisance (proskynsis) was particularly infuriating to his Macedonian and Greek courtiers. They bowed to no one except the gods—but that was the point: Alexander now felt himself to be a god. ([Location 299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=299)) - Tags: [[blue]] - all the Bodyguards were together in Babylon: Aristonous, Leonnatus, Lysimachus, Peithon, Perdiccas, Peucestas, and Ptolemy. All of them were roughly the same age as Alexander, in the prime of their lives. Five of them would strive to become kings in their own right; two would succeed; only one would establish a dynasty. ([Location 439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=439)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By virtue of their elevation by Alexander, each of them was the head of his clan, and therefore a potential dynast. Their personal ambitions were bound by an oath of loyalty to Alexander, but the bond had dissolved on his death. Now, given the certainty of a troubled succession, each of them had to decide where to place his loyalty and that of his subordinates, or whether to make a bid for power himself. ([Location 448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=448)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If any of Alexander’s successors was to succeed, he would need the wealth and military charisma to gain and keep troops, as well as the ruthlessness to use them against fellow Macedonians. ([Location 487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=487)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Ptolemy’s impractical solution met, to Perdiccas’s irritation, with considerable approval, presumably because more people present saw it as a way of gaining a slice of the pie themselves. ([Location 532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=532)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: What is most “fair” is not what is always best. Self interest must at times be crushed for the good of the whole - Peithon, however, spoke for many in dismissing the idea that a half-wit should occupy the Macedonian throne. He suggested a less radical way out of the impasse than had been mentioned before, and one that recognized his friend Leonnatus’s stature: Perdiccas and Leonnatus, as the two with the highest credentials, should act in Asia as regents for the boy king, Rhoxane’s child, when he was born, while Antipater and Craterus should similarly be the guardians of the kingdom in Europe. After a little more debate, this was the position on which this first meeting settled. ([Location 547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=547)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If anyone had stopped to think, it must have been obvious that the existence of four regents for the next eighteen years or so (or three regents, once aged Antipater had died) was no recipe for peace. And, although Perdiccas’s lobby in the meeting had been powerful—in addition to Aristonous and Eumenes, he had the support of several very highly respected senior officers, including his younger brother Alcetas and Seleucus—he was not likely to be happy with the outcome. He had glimpsed and laid claim to sole power, only to be denied it. In short, the outcome of the first meeting looks like a temporary measure. Scheming undoubtedly continued behind the scenes. ([Location 552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=552)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Your solution can’t be a temporary one when power hangs in the balance. It needs to be dealt with swiftly - Every ancient commander had to come to terms with the fact that his forces consisted of two groups who were perennially divided: the cavalry and all the senior officers came from the highest social classes, while the infantry was made up of peasant farmers. The two did not always see eye to eye, and sometimes even had to be coerced into making up a single fighting unit. ([Location 561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=561)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Meleager and Attalus saw an opportunity for themselves. As matters stood, they were not going to be major beneficiaries of the new dispensation. But perhaps the passion of the infantry could sweep them to power. Instead of merely reporting the decision to the troops for their acclamation, they threw in their lot with the infantry. Before long, they returned to the palace at the head of an armed mob, insisting that Arrhidaeus be made king; they had chosen the name “Philip” for him, to remake him in the image of his heroic father, so that he would be Philip III, King of the Macedonians. Meleager had Arrhidaeus prominently displayed beside him, dressed as Alexander, while he himself wore the insignia of a Bodyguard of the new king. Disturbingly, the infantry had usurped the barons’ role and turned kingmaker, for the first time in Macedonian history. They had the right to acclaim a king, but never before had they effectively chosen one. Alexander’s death had shaken fundamental structures. ([Location 564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=564)) - Tags: [[pink]] - With hindsight, it is easy to see that Perdiccas never intended to honor this agreement.8 His concession was meant only to defuse the current crisis and buy him time. ([Location 589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=589)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Meleager was the first to try to ride to power on the waves of chaos created by Alexander’s death. Those with latent ambitions looked on. Perdiccas’s cruelty taught them an important lesson: the only right would be might. ([Location 599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=599)) - Tags: [[blue]] - At the top of the tree, then, the final Babylon conference established an unequal triumvirate of Perdiccas, Antipater, and Craterus. Perdiccas had taken all Asia for himself; Antipater and Craterus had been restricted to Europe, where Perdiccas was content to leave them to find some way to work together, or to wait for Antipater to die. ([Location 613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=613)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As Perdiccas saw it, and as testified by his desire to bring Cappadocia within the imperial domain, the job now was consolidation, not expansion. But consolidation brought risks: the restless energy of the senior officers would now have no external outlet; it would inevitably be turned upon themselves. ([Location 657](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=657)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: External enemies prevent internal divisions from arising - Alexander’s Successors were far more interested in controlling the east than in blending it with the west. Few of them had any intention of sharing power with the locals, except where necessity compelled them. ([Location 664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=664)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Short sighted thinking. They wanted dominance rather than helping an empire take root - The uniformity of Greek culture all over the new world is remarkable. On the face of it, one might imagine that literature and art in Afghanistan would have developed in different directions from those they took in Egypt. But this was not so. As art historian Martin Robertson says: “Absorption of or modification by oriental influence . . . is a trivial and marginal element in Hellenistic art.” ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=745)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the first years after his death there were only a few regions that were untroubled enough for trade to pick up. In fact, one of the goals of the contending Successors was to control regions that could provide them with the most vital commodities, such as timber, minerals, and grain—to try to corner the markets and deny them to their opponents. ([Location 757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=757)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Mobility led to the erosion of old family-based structures, not just in the sense that families themselves were physically broken up as one or more members emigrated in search of opportunities abroad, but also because these emigrants were uprooted from their ancestors and their kinship groups, with all that this implied in terms of family pride and cult. Hence, in part, the importance of gymnasia and social clubs in these far-flung foundations: they were substitutes for extended families. In the era of the Successors, emigrants were usually single men, but there were also a few widows looking for better opportunities for their children, as well as unmarried women. Having left their menfolk behind, they had to be allowed to manage their own assets, which was traditionally the job of the nearest male relative, and so women gradually won greater freedom and responsibility for their own affairs. But they never gained a significant political role. ([Location 772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=772)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Greek and Macedonian communities of Alexandria were not to forget that the Ptolemies were Alexander’s heirs. Fortune had blessed Alexander, and now Alexander’s Fortune blessed the Ptolemies. Their possession of the body let the world know that they and Alexander were inseparable. ([Location 1030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1030)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It is easy to see the motive behind these moves: to win the support of actual or potential subjects. In much the same way, American presidential candidates from time to time subtly model themselves on the talismanic John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. Alexander was talismanic in the first instance simply because of the enormous pride that everyone involved felt at having been associated with a man who had achieved so much. The particular magic of his name and image was due to the fact that, for his achievements, he was recognized after his death as a god. The Successors did not invent the use of propaganda, but they made more extensive use of it than anyone in western history had before. The evocation of Alexander’s spirit was an important element.15 ([Location 1050](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1050)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One of the most striking aspects of the Hellenistic period, by comparison with what came earlier, is its focus on the human individual. ([Location 1059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1059)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The relative disempowerment of citizens as political agents made it possible for them to see themselves, to a greater extent, as individuals, rather than just as contributors to the greater good. ([Location 1083](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1083)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The emphasis on ordinary people and ordinary emotions stands in striking contrast with the grandeur typical of Greek poetry, painting, and sculpture of earlier eras. It is hard to conceive that classical artists would have dedicated their skills to portraying social inferiors such as laborers and slaves, women and children, and even animals; but all of these subjects feature prominently in the early and later Hellenistic periods. ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1124)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Successors trampled on such views. For them, and for all the Hellenistic kings who came after them, greed was good. Individualism and egoism are close cousins. ([Location 1149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1149)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was civil war, Macedonian against Macedonian, but on such a scale that it truly deserves to be called a world war. First, the action took place all over the known world, shifting between the Greek mainland and islands, North Africa, Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Iran. Only the western Mediterranean was spared the Successors’ attentions, but it was no less disturbed.1 Second, the objective of a number of the participants was world domination. Thousands upon thousands of lives were lost on battlefields; our sources leave us merely to imagine the suffering and loss of life among civilians. One of the most savage periods of human history was ushered in by the ruthless ambitions of the Successors. ([Location 1155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1155)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As he advanced toward Craterus, he took pains to conceal from his men, especially the Macedonian troops, just whom they were going to face. He made out that Neoptolemus, a Molossian, was the enemy commander—and added that Alexander had appeared to him in a dream and promised him victory. ([Location 1193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1193)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The main weakness of the phalanx was that it became very vulnerable if its formation was lost as a result of lax discipline, failure of nerve, or uneven terrain. It was rightly considered a sign of fine generalship to force a confrontation on terrain that gave his men the advantage. ([Location 1223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1223)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Who would now be regent of the kings? The post was offered to Ptolemy. He was a senior man, who had the necessary cachet of having served Alexander long and well, and the added prestige of having been a boyhood friend. But, in a momentous decision, he refused. Why? Subsequent events showed that he was not short of ambition, so perhaps he felt the time was not yet right, that matters were too fluid and unstable. Most probably, he did not want to fall out with Antipater and Craterus (not yet knowing that Craterus was dead), and wanted more than anything to be left alone. He did not want to become a target, and thought he could build Egypt into a powerful stronghold for himself and his heirs. He was right, but there was a long way to go yet before such visions could be fulfilled. ([Location 1294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1294)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A week earlier, Eumenes and the rest had been on the side of the angels, protected by Perdiccas’s legitimate regency; now the loyalists were the outlaws. ([Location 1306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1306)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The spontaneous condemnation of the surviving Perdiccan leaders by the army in Egypt was now confirmed and ratified. Antigonus would have right on his side, even though right, as granted by possession of the kings, had been on the other side a few weeks earlier. Antigonus, then, for so long just outside the very center, had found his way right to the heart of matters. At an age when many of us are thinking of retirement, he was entertaining dreams of world dominion. His commission to mop up the remaining Perdiccans was just the instrument he needed. ([Location 1355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1355)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For the present, both the kings were alive and safe. The summit meeting at Triparadeisus carefully preserved the pretense that there was a single empire, the empire of Philip III and Alexander IV. But under the surface, the meeting had also come close to recognizing Ptolemy as a wholly independent agent in Egypt, and had, at least temporarily, abandoned all Asia to Antigonus. The broad outcome of the conference at the triple paradeisos was a foreshadowing of the future triple division of the empire. ([Location 1365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=1365)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Wit, learning, experimentation, and technical mastery were the hallmarks of Alexandria. ([Location 2661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=2661)) - Heredity was irrelevant to the Successors because they were the pioneers; their achievements, not their blood, made them kings. ([Location 2734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=2734)) - A king in the Macedonian style was the possessor of all the Homeric, manly virtues, and liked his subjects to know it. Lysimachus let it be known that he had killed a savage lion, Seleucus that he had wrestled a bull to the ground with his bare hands; hunting and fighting are the most common motifs in royal artwork; statues of kings, and written descriptions, portray them as young and virile (whatever the truth), and by far the most common way of sculpting kings was as heroic nudes. The culture of heavy drinking that all Macedonian nobles took for granted was part of the same spectrum of virility. But the chief manifestation of his virility, and a king’s chief virtue, was military prowess. ([Location 2741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=2741)) - These cantons were subject to frequent raids from their neighbors; as a result, military prowess was a dominant virtue in Macedonian culture, and kings and barons were expected to be powerful and successful war leaders as well as performing their administrative and religious duties. ([Location 2978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=2978)) - The king’s position could be likened to that of a head of a household: he was decidedly the head, but there were plenty of occasions when he had to negotiate potential opposition to see that he got his way. A lot depended, then, on the personality and will of the king. If he was passionate enough and committed enough to a project, there was no person and no body that could stop him. He could do whatever he could get away with. ([Location 3009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3009)) - The immigrant population was never more than 10 percent in either kingdom. They were heavily outnumbered. And so they took more radical measures to avoid displeasing at least the more powerful among the native populations—the merchants and landowners, and especially the priests, who were in effect the only political group in both Egypt and Babylonia. If resistance was going to emerge, it would most likely be fomented by the priests, as the leaders of their people—and as the managers of wealthy temple estates with a lot to lose. A king who did not have the support of the priesthood would not last long; he would not even be considered a true pharaoh. ([Location 3075](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3075)) - Both Ptolemy and Seleucus minted gold and copper or bronze coinage, but silver was the preferred metal—rare enough for the coins to have value, but common enough for even people low down the economic scale to participate in the monetary economy. ([Location 3154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3154)) - The Janus nature of Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt—the choice not to impose uniformity—meant that kings had to be adaptable in their official discourses. It depended on who they were talking to: should they be king, conqueror, or god? In Egypt, if they presented themselves as kings, should it be in the Macedonian style or as a pharaoh? In some parts of the empire, they presented themselves as promoters of hellenization and spoke of defending the empire against barbarians; other parts, however, were populated precisely by “barbarian” peoples, and so in these areas the kings came across as preservers of local traditions and guarantors of freedom. ([Location 3201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3201)) - They were authoritarian rulers and could easily have been despots, but both of them chose the less risky course of appeasement, so that at the same time they could accelerate change in the area that concerned them most—improving the state’s profitability and taxations systems. ([Location 3214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3214)) - It is hard not to read this trend as a reaction to the violence and uncertainty of the times. Ordinary individuals were impotent to change the world at large, but they could at least try to change themselves and their inner worlds. There lay the appeal of the new philosophies. None of the schools, in this early period, encouraged their students to play an active part in politics. Philosophy was largely for dropouts, and so dovetailed with the escapism that we have already seen was a dominant feature of the literature of the time. ([Location 3417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3417)) - Not many decades earlier, Socrates had been taken to court for not worshipping the gods of the city; such a trial rapidly became unthinkable, as personal forms of religion proliferated alongside the old and new civic cults. In addition to ensuring that the gods protected their communities and their leaders, people simply wanted the gods to bless them as individuals.11 ([Location 3570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3570)) - By far the most widespread of these cults was that of Fortune. In a world of rapidly changing circumstances, the only certainty was uncertainty. Fortune was a great, irrational, female principle, and the spread of the worship of Sarapis and Isis around the world was helped by the early identification of Isis with Fortune. ([Location 3601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3601)) - Restless greed for imperial power had been Demetrius’s undoing: he should have consolidated in Macedon and Greece rather than entertaining more grandiose dreams. He never truly had an opportunity for world conquest, the kind of gift of Fortune that came the way of Alexander, Antigonus, and, as we shall shortly see, Seleucus. ([Location 3682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3682)) - It is striking testimony to the endurance of Alexander’s influence over the Successors that the attempt to emulate him died along with those who had actually known him. ([Location 3941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Y4UTBI&location=3941))