THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTIGONIDS

Of the Hellenistic empires the one from which Rome suffered most and learned least was that of the Antigonids in Macedon and Greece. We say "Macedon and Greece": the kings of Macedon from Philip II to Perseus said "Hellas"; for they never ceased to claim that Macedon was a part of Hellas—the part of Hellas which had earned by the achievements of Philip II and Alexander the right of hegemony for its kings. It was an imperial nation for which its king, nobles, and commons had an intense loyalty and pride, but which stood in their thinking to Hellas as Virginia did to the United States in the ante-bellum days, or as Prussia does to Germany, rather than as Austria does to the Austro-Hungarian empire.

It taught the Romans least because it had least to teach them. The one thing in which the Macedonians were masterful was the art of war; yet in this the Romans by native accomplishment were their superiors. They invented the phalanx, but the phalanx succumbed to the legion. In the art of government the Antigonids were resourceful, but to lift up a jellyfish on a spear-point is an impossible task. Yet that is what they had to do in Hellas. The only lessons of government they could teach were lessons of failure; but that this is not to their discredit is shown by the inability of Rome itself to cope with the same situation till Hellas was dead and desiccated. They were sagacious enough to realize that for a people with the customs, piety, and bluntness of the Macedonians a kingship was best which, to speak with Aristotle, was a perpetual magistracy and not an absolute monarchy. Hence they were under no necessity to demand that the Macedonians worship them as gods, and the Macedonians, having inherited rights which no Antigonid dared to ignore,[116] were under no legal necessity to thrust divinity upon their rulers. Hence the Antigonids alone of the Hellenistic dynasties governed as men supported by their people's loyalty, and not as gods to whom all things were permitted. They, moreover, organized no official cult of their family in Hellas, for reasons which will appear later. It was not Macedon but Greece which took the proud Roman victor captive and bore the arts to rustic Latium. For the Macedonians remained themselves a rustic people, and added little or nothing to the poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and science of Hellas.[117] Their Élite were rulers and officers, their commons farmers and soldiers. From the time Philip II came to the throne (359 B.C.) to the battle of CynocephalÆ (197 B.C.), it is impossible to find a decade, and not easy to find half a one, during which the able-bodied men of Macedon were not called to the standards at least once either to defend their country against foreign attack or to march north, south, east, or west against their lord's enemies.[118] Their dead were to be found in every valley of Hellas, and their emigrants in every land of Asia; but theirs was a prolific race, so that, despite their many losses in the interval, they put 29,000 Macedonians in the field in the last struggle with Rome, or 2000 more than stood under the command of Alexander the Great when he had completed his arrangements for the conquest of Asia.

Rome suffered more from the Antigonids than from any other Hellenistic dynasty because it had there alone to do with a nation of veterans under arms. The Macedonians were, as has been said, an imperial people, loyal to their kings, and ambitious to maintain their ascendancy in the world. While at war with Rome—the wielder of armies 100,000 strong—they were assailed simultaneously by their Hellenic vassals and rivals and attacked or abandoned by their Macedonian kinsmen in Asia and Africa; yet they held out under the Antigonids, in the first struggle for eight years (212-205 B.C.), in the second for four (200-197 B.C.), in the third for still another four (171-168 B.C.); and even after one half of their men of military age had fallen at Pydna, and their last king had died in captivity and his only son as a clerk at Alba Fucens, their conquerors were so seriously disturbed by the "throbbings of their ancient loyalty" that the Senate had finally to place a Roman proconsul on the throne of the great Alexander (148 B.C.).

Though sprung from a Macedonian stock, the dynasty of the Antigonids was bred in Asia, and it was transplanted into Macedon only in its third generation. That came about in the following way. The first Antigonus was made ruler of Phrygia when Alexander the Great left Asia Minor in 333 B.C., and he was still in possession of that satrapy when his sovereign died ten years later. With Phrygia as a starting point and a nomination as commander-in-chief of the royal forces in Asia as a pretext, he planned and fought with such success in the next decade that in the spring of 312 B.C. he seemed destined to add Macedon to Asia, which he already possessed; and with it to support and not to oppose him, he counted on being able to master the whole of Alexander's empire. We have already seen why this project failed, and also how a later attempt to accomplish the same purpose cost him his life and his Asiatic realm. He may have been over-ambitious. Possibly no one could have prevented the dismemberment of the GrÆco-Macedonian world. Perhaps the centrifugal tendencies would have proved too strong for Alexander himself had he lived long enough to test them. That, however, does not make the issue less of a calamity for the Hellenes; for on the battle-fields of Gaza and Ipsus it was decided that the alien Romans and not the kindred Macedonians were to unite the world under a single government. With the person of the first Antigonus went to the grave the hope of a great people.

The sharer of his aspirations and the cause in considerable measure of his defeat was his son Demetrius, surnamed Poliorcetes, or "Taker-of-Cities." By his disobedience to orders at Gaza and his impetuosity in action at Ipsus, he had done most to lose his kingdom; but after the death of his father he still retained the dominion of the sea, and, with it, value as an ally and ability to use his forces at such points as he himself chose. After some years of aimless adventuring and galling inactivity he chose to use them in the attempt, twice vainly made already in coÖperation with his father, to seize Greece and Macedon. His strength was incomparably inferior to that used on the earlier occasions and he had still watchful enemies on all sides. The essential difference was that the house of Antipater, which had ruled Macedon and Greece since Alexander the Great had crossed into Asia, was now represented, not by Antipater's able son, Cassander, who died in 297 B.C. after a reign of nineteen years, but by his weakly and dissentious children. These looked on inactive while he blockaded Athens (295-294 B.C.) and starved it into submission; whereupon he brushed them aside and took their place as king of Macedon and suzerain of Greece. Since his wife was Phila, Cassander's sister, his son, Antigonus, surnamed Gonatas, was a grandson of Antipater I, no less than Antipater II, who was now the sole survivor of Cassander's family. Hence, if the right of Demetrius Poliorcetes to the Macedonian throne rested upon nothing more substantial than the frustrated ambition of his father, the right of his son was flawless after the death of Antipater II. This, however, occurred in 288-287 B.C. at the very time when Demetrius, on being expelled from Macedon, abandoned Greece and went to meet captivity in Asia for the rest of his life. Left behind in Greece, Antigonus Gonatas exercised a watchful suzerainty there without being king of Macedon, which Pyrrhus of Epirus and Lysimachus of Thrace shared for a few years (288 to 284-283 B.C.), Lysimachus, Seleucus, and Ptolemy Ceraunus held alone in rapid succession for another interval (283-280 B.C.), and Celts from the north plundered and harried for three years. It was not till 277 B.C. that Antigonus succeeded in freeing it from its troubles and making it the base of his operations in Greece. He therewith planted in Europe the dynasty which ruled Macedon till the Roman conquest (168 B.C.).

Antigonus I and Demetrius Poliorcetes had formed their political ambitions and ideas during the age of the diadochi, when the empire of Alexander stood in all its magnificence and promise as a golden prize for the able, courageous, and unscrupulous. They had aspired to rule as god-kings over a world in which men and cities rendered homage (proskynesis) to them, as they had rendered it to Alexander. They had viewed Greece and Macedon as alike desirable,[119] the common charm being that they were the mother of the soldiers and settlers of whom their limitless realm had need. They may have coveted Greece even more than Macedon. Certainly, Athens, not Pella, was the city of Demetrius's dreams. He had gloried in being its liberator in 307 B.C., and when it dashed his hopes by excluding him after his defeat at Ipsus, he had suffered bitter disappointment. None the less, and despite the desperate resistance which it had offered to him in 295-294 B.C., he treated it with clemency when he was once again its master. What his father had thought of the approval of Athens he expressed by calling it the beacon tower of the world. How highly he had esteemed the culture of its inhabitants he demonstrated by making a colony of Athenians the nucleus of Antigonia (later Antioch), which he founded as the new capital of the empire that had been Alexander's, but was now, he hoped, to be his.

Antigonus I had never had the good fortune to rule in the land of his 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.

In still another respect distrust of monarchy and aversion to the "tyranny" on which Antigonus Gonatas had based his Greek empire, are betrayed in the institutions of the AchÆans. The rule of a city by a tyrant and membership in the league were regarded as incompatible with one another. This was, doubtless, a requirement of the federal laws, which, consisting of treaties negotiated between the original cities in 275 B.C. and at the admission of new cities thereafter, of oaths by which these treaties were sanctioned, and of general enactments made from time to time by special legislative process, bound the citizens of the individual cities no less than did the local laws which they themselves passed. Otherwise the city-states were at liberty to adopt whatever form of government they chose. The league championed neither democracy nor oligarchy, though its working favored the well-to-do classes. At most it compelled a certain uniformity in local administration, its general attitude being admirably symbolized by its monetary arrangements, wherein the standard was determined by the federal authority while the coins were issued by the constituent cities.[133]

The very constitutions of the AchÆan and the Ætolian leagues disclose the importance of the part which the Greek policy of Antigonus Gonatas played in the creation of these dangerous adversaries of himself and his country. It is true that his son, Demetrius II, fought them to a standstill, wrested from Ætolia a large part of its acquisitions, and might have dissolved both leagues by force, had not Epirus deserted him and gone over to their side; had not the Illyrian pirates whom he let loose on this new enemy provoked the Romans to cross the Adriatic; and had not the Dardanians moved down on Macedon and defeated and killed him in battle. Such "had nots" belonged, however, to the constant possibilities, and complications of this sort were ever occurring in the struggle of Macedon for the hegemony of Greece. On this occasion their issue was so disastrous for Macedon that the hour of the two leagues seemed come.

But what should have been their triumph proved to be their destruction. For the frustration of their hopes Polybius,[134] who voices the opinion of Aratus, held the Ætolians responsible, and it is likely that he was in the main right. For just at this critical moment, when the AchÆans were face to face with the most serious problem which their federal system presented, namely, the reluctance of states, like Sparta and Athens, which were markedly stronger than the common run of the AchÆan cities, to accept mere equality with them, the Ætolians not only left them in the lurch and made an advantageous peace for themselves with Antigonus Doson, the new king of Macedon, but, by ceding to Sparta their Arcadian cities (Tegea, Mantinea, Orchomenus, and CaphiÆ), they made it possible for Cleomenes, the young Spartan monarch, to rally round himself all the Peloponnesian opposition to the AchÆans, and to make a brilliant effort to establish once again the Spartan hegemony in the peninsula. Another view of the matter is that the downfall of the AchÆan league—which, to escape Cleomenes, threw itself into the arms of Antigonus Doson—was due to the intervention of Ptolemy III, who backed up Sparta, Athens, and Ætolia by his friendship and his money,[135] and would have gladly seen AchÆa eliminated in order that Greece might present a united front to Antigonus Doson. In any case it was Antigonus Doson who reaped the benefits, and it seems unlikely that they were wholly an unearned increment. What he was capable of he had already shown by joining heartily in the international guarantee of the neutrality of Athens which had robbed Aratus of that choice prize. He was clearly no common man, and had he not died an untimely death shortly after the great victory he gained over Cleomenes at Sellasia (222 B.C.), he would probably have been much better known in history. His energetic and tactful conduct in this crisis contrasts sharply with the nerveless backdown of Egypt, for which the only excuse was the imminent demise of Euergetes and the threatening attitude of Antiochus the Great. It cannot be denied that Antigonus Doson made a good use of all his opportunities.

His settlement of Hellenic affairs was characterized by the revival of the general synod established by the great Philip.[136] Representatives of the Hellenic states met in formal assembly at Corinth (224 B.C.), and chose the king of Macedon as their hegemon. Subsequently the synod was to meet at a time and place to be designated by its head. A mere enumeration of the states which took this action tells the story of the constitutional development of Hellas in the Macedonian age. They were Macedon, Thessaly, Epirus, Acarnania, Locris, Phocis, Boeotia, Euboea, AchÆa, and probably the Islanders. Of these the first was a kingdom,[137] but all the others were leagues. The city-states, which had been everything in Philip's synod, have disappeared, swallowed up in the federations. Whether each of the units had now an equal number of votes, or, as in the time of Philip, a number proportionate to its size, we do not know, though the second alternative is the more probable one. In both cases Macedonian deputies took part in the meetings of the synod and served as heads of the Macedonian interest. Together with the deputies from Thessaly and other subservient states they probably formed a majority in the synod. In both Philip II and Antigonus Doson, Macedon had, accordingly, at once hegemons and kings. We hear of nothing in the revived Hellenic league comparable with the Committee of Public Safety of the old one; but nothing similar was now required, since the generals of the constituent leagues were the natural representatives of these bodies when the synod was not in session. They had thus a place provided for them in the scheme of Antigonus Doson.

The republican reaction against the policy of Antigonus Gonatas had by no means spent its force. This is shown in the seriousness with which it was now reckoned with by Antigonus Doson. He could not ignore the well established practice of the league assemblies to decide all important questions of foreign policy. Hence his synod differs from that of Philip II particularly in this important respect, that its action in declaring war, concluding peace, and other like matters was taken subject to ratification by the league authorities, and was, seemingly, binding only on such of them as ratified it.[138] His synod, in other words, stood to the league assemblies as the AchÆan synod stood to the AchÆan syncletus. Naturally, the confederates could not withdraw from the hegemony at pleasure, much less join its enemies; so that the refusal of a league to accept a decision of the synod to declare war meant only that it assumed a position of neutrality. In Philip's time each city had had to pay per day a fine of thirty drachmÆ for every horseman, twenty drachmÆ for every hoplite, ten drachmÆ for every light-armed soldier, and seven or eight drachmÆ for every sailor who was absent from a duly authorized expedition.[139] Now the leagues could refuse to coÖperate without suffering any penalty. They surrendered their liberty to fight one another, and their right to contract alliances with outside states; but they did not surrender their diplomacy entirely to the hegemon, though they agreed to enter into no negotiations with any outside king.[140] They gave their hegemon no right whatever to interfere in their local concerns.[141]

Such were the generous concessions to local sentiment by means of which Antigonus Doson sought to place the hegemony of the kings of Macedon in Hellas on a secure basis. Never before in the history of the people had a conqueror made so noble a use of his power. Antigonus Doson went in fact so far in conciliating the Greek states that had he withdrawn Macedonian troops from Demetrias, Chalcis, and Corinth,—the three shackles of Hellas,—added new conquests like Orchomenus, Sparta, and Messene to the constituent leagues instead of to the central organization, and possessed less personal prestige, it is difficult to imagine how the Hellenic league could ever have been brought into action. Probably all that he cared to be absolutely sure of was the neutrality of the confederates who did not support him in the field.

In any case that was all that his successor Philip V was able to accomplish, when, in 220 B.C., he had the Hellenic synod accept the repeated challenge of war offered to him by the Ætolians, who, taking advantage of the accession of a young and untried king to the throne of Macedon, assailed his hegemony in Greece while it was still precarious. Had Doson lived to wage the Social War (220-217 B.C.), he might have crushed the Ætolians by sheer weight of numbers, and have completed the unification of Hellas. Philip V fought bravely and skillfully and won the respect of both his friends and his foes; but before any definite issue of the struggle had arrived, the campaign between Hannibal and the Romans had reached such a point that the hegemon of Hellas dared not neglect it any longer.

"Let Greece," said Agelaus of Naupactus at the peace conference which followed,[142] "be united; let no Greek state make war upon any other; let them thank the Gods if they can all live in peace and agreement, if, as men in crossing rivers grasp one another's hands, so they can hold together and save themselves and their cities from barbarian inroads. If it is too much to hope that it should be so always, let it at least be so just now; let Greeks, now at least, unite and keep on their guard, when they behold the vastness of the armies and the greatness of the struggle going on in the West. No man who looks at the state of things with common care can doubt what is coming. Whether Rome conquers Carthage or Carthage conquers Rome, the victor will not be content with the dominion of the Greeks of Italy and Sicily; he will extend his plans and his warfare much further than suits us or our welfare. Let all Greece be on its guard, and Philip above all. Your truest defense, O King," he continued, "will be found in the character of the chief and protector of the Greeks. Leave off destroying Greek cities; leave off weakening them till they become a prey to every invader. Rather watch over Greece, as you watch over your own body; guard the interests of all her members as you guard the interest of what is your own. If you follow such a course as this, you will win the good will of Greece; you will have every Greek bound to you as a friend and as a sure supporter in all your undertakings; foreign powers will see the confidence which the whole nation reposes in you, and will fear to attack either you or them. If you wish for conquest and military glory, another field invites you. Cast your eyes to the West; look at the war raging in Italy; of that war you may easily, by a skilful policy, make yourself the arbiter; a blow dealt in time may make you master of both the contending powers. If you cherish such hopes, no time bids fairer than the present for their accomplishment. But as for disputes and wars with Greeks, put them aside till some season of leisure; let it be your main object to keep in your own hands the power of making war and peace with them when you will. If once the clouds which are gathering in the West should advance and spread over Greece and the neighboring lands, there will be danger indeed that all our truces and wars, all the child's play with which we now amuse ourselves, will be suddenly cut short. We may then pray in vain to the Gods for the power of making war and peace with one another, and indeed of dealing independently with any of the questions which may arise among us."

The speaker was right, and Philip took his advice. But when he became embroiled with Rome, it was the speaker's own countrymen, the Ætolians, who, by attacking Macedon in the rear, contributed most to the dreaded sequel: that never after 212 B.C. did the Greeks have an opportunity of dealing independently with any of the questions which arose among them. At the time of the Social War Macedon missed its last chance of establishing a single state in European Hellas.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Droysen, J.G. Geschichte des Hellenismus,^2 III: Geschichte der Epigonen (1877).

2. Freeman, E. History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy² (1893). Ed. by J.B. Bury.

3. Niese, B. Geschichte der griechischen und makedonischen Staaten. Especially vol. II (1899).

4. Beloch, J. Griechische Geschichte, III (1904).

5. KÄrst, J. Geschichte des hellenistischen Zeitalters, II, I (1909).

6. Ferguson, W.S. Hellenistic Athens (1911).

7. Pozzi, Emilio. Le Battaglie di Cos e di Andro e la Politica marittima di Antigono Gonata. In Memorie della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino: serie II, tom. LXIII (1912).

8. Tarn, W.W. Antigonus Gonatas (1913).