LITMIR.BIZ

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      The second major cycle of colonial conquest thus derived from the rural northern periphery of Greek civilization, with its greater demographic and peasant reserves. The Macedonian Empire was in origin a tribal monarchy of the mountainous interior, a backward zone which had preserved many of the social relations of post-Mycenaean Greece. The Macedonian royal state, precisely because it was morphologically much more primitive than the city-states of the South, was not subject to their impasse and so proved able to overleap their limits in the new epoch of their decline. Its territorial and political basis permitted an integrated international expansion, once it was allied to the far more developed civilization of Greece proper. Macedonian kingship was hereditary, yet subject to confirmation by a military assembly of the warriors of the realm. All land was technically the property of the monarch, but in practice a tribal nobility held estates from and claimed kinship with him, forming an entourage of royal ‘companions’ which provided his counsellors and governors. The majority of the population were free tenant peasants, and there was relatively little slavery.¹ Urbanization was minimal, the capital of Pella itself a recent and slender foundation. The ascent of Macedonian power in the Balkans in the reign of Philip II acquired an early and decisive thrust with the annexation of the Thracian gold mines – the bullion equivalent of the Attic silver mines in the previous century – which provided Macedonia with the indispensable finance for external aggression.² The success of Philip’s armies in over-running the Greek city-states and unifying the Hellenic peninsula was essentially due to its military innovations, which reflected the distinct social composition of the tribal interior of Northern Greece. Cavalry – an aristocratic arm always previously subordinated to hoplites in Greece – was renovated and linked elastically to infantry, while infantry shed some of its heavy hoplite armour for greater mobility and the massed use of the long lance in battle. The result was the famous Macedonian phalanx, flanked by horse, victorious from Thebes to Kabul. Macedonian expansion, of course, was not merely due to the skills of its commanders and soldiers, or its initial access to precious metals. The precondition of its eruption into Asia was its prior absorption of Greece itself. The Macedonian monarchy consolidated its advances in the peninsula by creating new citizens from Greeks and others in the conquered regions, and urbanizing its own rural hinterland – demonstrating its capacity for extended territorial administration. It was the political and cultural impetus it acquired from the integration of the most advanced city centres of the epoch that then enabled it to accomplish in a few years the lightning conquest of the whole of the Near East, under Alexander. Symbolically, the irreplaceable fleet which transported and supplied the invincible troops in Asia was always Greek. The unitary Macedonian Empire which emerged after Gaugamela, stretching from the Adriatic to the Indian Ocean, did not survive Alexander himself, who died before any coherent institutional framework could be given to it. The social and administrative problems it posed could already be glimpsed from his attempts to fuse Macedonian and Persian nobilities by official intermarriage: but it was left to his successors to provide solutions to them. The internecine struggles of these contending Macedonian generals – the Diadochi – ended with the partition of the Empire into four main zones, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Asia Minor and Greece, the first three henceforward generally outclassing the last in political and economic importance. The Seleucid dynasty ruled Syria and Mesopotamia; Ptolemy founded the Lagid realm in Egypt; and half a century later, the Attalid kingdom of Pergamum became the dominant power in Western Asia Minor. Hellenistic civilization was essentially the product of these new Greek monarchies of the East.

      The Hellenistic States were hybrid creations, which nevertheless shaped the whole historical pattern of the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries thereafter. On the one hand, they presided over the most imposing surge of city-foundations than hitherto seen in classical Antiquity: major Greek cities sprang up, by spontaneous initiative or royal patronage, throughout the Near East, making it henceforward the most densely urbanized region of the Ancient World, and durably hellenizing the local ruling classes everywhere they were planted.³ If the number of these foundations was less than that of Archaic Greek colonization, their size was infinitely greater. The largest city of classical Greece was Athens, with a total population of some 80,000 in the 5th century B.C. The three greatest urban centres of the Hellenistic world – Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia – may have had up to of 500,000 inhabitants. The distribution of the new foundations was uneven, since the centralized Lagid State in Egypt was suspicious of any polis autonomy and did not sponsor many new cities, while the Seleucid State actively multiplied them, and in Asia Minor the local gentry created its own cities in imitation of Hellenic example elsewhere.⁴ Everywhere, these new urban foundations were settled with Greek and Macedonian soldiers, administrators, and merchants, who arrived to furnish the dominant social stratum in the epigone monarchies of the Diadochi. The proliferation of Greek cities in the East was accompanied by an upswing of international trade and commercial prosperity. Alexander had dethesaurized Persian royal bullion, releasing accumulated Achaemenid hoards into the exchange system of the Near East, and thereby financing a steep increase in the volume of market transactions in the Mediterranean. The Attic monetary standard was now generalized throughout the Hellenistic world, with the exception of Ptolemaic Egypt, facilitating international trade and shipping.⁵ The triangular sea-way between Rhodes, Antioch and Alexandria became the axis of the new mercantile space created by the Hellenistic East. Banking was developed to levels of sophistication never later surpassed in Antiquity, by the Lagid administration in Egypt. The urban pattern of the Eastern Mediterranean was thus successfully set by Greek emigration and example.

      Yet at the same time, the anterior Near Eastern social formations with their very different economic and political traditions – imperviously resisted Greek patterns in the countryside. Thus slave-labour notably failed to spread to the rural interior of the Hellenistic East. Contrary to popular legend, the Alexandrine campaigns had not been accompanied by mass enslavements, and the proportion of the slave population does not seem to have risen appreciably in the path of Macedonian conquests.⁶ Agrarian relations of production were consequently left relatively unaffected by Greek rule. The traditional agricultural systems of the great riverine cultures of the Near East had combined landlords, dependent tenants and peasant proprietors with ultimate or immediate royal property of the soil. Rural slavery had never been economically very important. Regal claims to a monopoly of land were centuries old. The new Hellenistic States inherited this pattern, quite alien to that of the Greek homelands, and preserved it with little alteration. The main variations between them concerned the degree to which royal property over the land was actually enforced by the dynasties of each realm. The Lagid State in Egypt – the wealthiest and most rigidly centralized of the new monarchies – exacted its claims to a legal monopoly of land, outside the boundaries of the few poleis, to the full. The Lagid rulers leased out virtually all land in small plots on short-term leases to a miserable peasantry, rack-rented directly by the State, without any security of tenure and subject to forced labour for irrigation works.⁷ The Seleucid dynasty in Mesopotamia and Syria, which presided over a much larger and more rambling territorial complex, never attempted such a rigorous control of agrarian exploitation. Royal lands were granted to nobles or administrators in the provinces, and autonomous villages of peasant proprietors were tolerated, side by side with the dependent laoi tenants who formed the bulk of the rural population. Significantly, it was only in Attalid Pergamum, the most westerly of the new Hellenistic States, which lay immediately across the Aegean from Greece itself, that agricultural slave-labour was used on royal and aristocratic estates.⁸ The geographical limits of the mode of production pioneered in classical Greece were those of the adjacent regions of Asia Minor.

      If the towns were Greek in model, while the countryside remained Oriental in pattern, the structure of the States which integrated the two was inevitably syncretic, a mixture of Hellenic and Asian forms in which the secular legacy of the latter was unmistakeably predominant. The Hellenistic rulers inherited the overwhelmingly autocratic traditions of the riverine civilizations of the Near East. The Diadochi monarchs enjoyed unlimited personal power, as had their Oriental predecessors before them. Indeed, the new Greek dynasties introduced an ideological surcharge on the pre-existent weight of royal authority in the region, with the establishment of officially decreed worship of rulers. The divinity of kings had never

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