In Greece, the defeat at Chaeronea in 338 BC and the foundation of the League of Corinth had put an end to the era of political independence of the various poleis. Alexander’s measures in 336-334 BC only underscored that reality. Whereas on paper the poleis might have retained their independence, as members of a league under Macedonian leadership they had in fact become subjects of Macedon. To the Greek cities in Asia Minor, Alexander had in 334 BC brought “freedom and autonomy,” but that too meant only local selfgovernment, certainly not the freedom to disobey Alexander. That became clear in 324 BC when Alexander demanded to be recognized as a god by the Greek cities, and these cities, both in Greece and in Asia Minor, dutifully sent their ambassadors to Babylon to convey the divine honors. When after Alexander’s death the diadochoi waged their near-permanent wars among themselves, the same cities became pawns in the power struggles between the rivals, who especially begrudged each other the old political and cultural centers in Greece.
Initially, Athens and several other poleis in Greece had reacted to the news of Alexander’s death with a rebellion against the vice-regent left by Alexander with plenipotentiary powers in Macedon and Greece. The war did not last long. The Athenian navy was destroyed by the Macedonian fleet in a sea battle, which marked the end of Athens as a maritime power, and the city had to capitulate (323-322 BC). The Macedonian victors abolished the democracy; Athenians belonging to the class of the thetes even lost their citizenship. Although a few decades later, the democracy in Athens would be restored for a short period, the year 322 BC was a milestone in the history of Athens and indeed of Greece: the classical period was definitely over, and the time of the territorial monarchies had arrived. In those monarchical states, there was no place anymore for a polis democracy, since a people’s assembly was unpredictable, often fickle, and less easy to incorporate in the governing plans of a distant monarch than was a small group of oligarchs doing his bidding. That was the reason why the Macedonian kings obstructed democracies in Greece and enforced wherever possible the introduction of oligarchic regimes—the Romans later would do exactly the same. The term democracy, though, often remained in use, but underwent a gradual shift in meaning. It came to denote a “republic,” that is, a non-monarchical form of government that had some of the trappings of a democracy, such as an assembly electing the magistrates, but did not allow the assembly any further say in the government, while the persons eligible for office all had to come from the higher propertied classes, making the system in fact an oligarchy, just as Macedon, and Rome later, wished.
After Alexander’s death, the Greek cities in Asia Minor fell under the sway of various rival generals and kings in succession: Antigonus, Ptolemy, the rulers of Thrace and Macedon, and after 281 BC for a short while even the Seleucids. But around 270 BC in the west of Asia Minor, a new state seceded from the Seleucid Empire: Pergamon, which was a fortress where one of the former rival kings had lodged much of his treasure. Its ruler managed to extend his realm quickly in the areas surrounding his hill fortress with the help of mercenaries paid for by the treasure of which he had taken possession, and before long most poleis in the region acknowledged the king of Pergamon as their sovereign. In European Greece, in the years after the suppression of the anti-Macedonian rebellion in 322 BC, the cities initially had to deal with rival Macedonian vice-regents and kings, a situation that played into the hands of Demetrius, the son of Antigonus, who succeeded in becoming the master of most of southern Greece shortly before the end of the century. The old League of Corinth in which the cities were linked with Macedon had been abolished by then. Eventually, after some more chaotic years, Antigonus, the son of Demetrius, was in 277 BC recognized as the king of Macedon. By then, Athens and the cities of the Peloponnese had regained de facto independence.
Typically for this period, a group of poleis in the Peloponnese united to form a political federation, the so-called Achaean League (280-146 BC). Only by pooling their forces could these cities could retain some influence. The league was set up as a military organization, not so much against Macedon as against another league: the Aetolians. The Aetolians in the rather backward northwest of Greece had already founded their league in the 4th century BC and had suddenly emerged as a military power in the 3rd century. They made themselves feared and hated over a wide area by their frequent plundering raids. Their actions contributed to the general impoverishment that came to characterize Greece from the late 3rd century BC as a consequence of mass emigration and population decline. Inevitably, power shifts occurred between the old poleis. Athens in the course of the 3rd century BC lost much of its political importance but retained its artistic and intellectual reputation. In Sparta, two kings in succession tried in the second half of the 3rd century to revive its moribund institutions, but just when success seemed within reach, other states became alarmed, and the Spartan experiment was crushed by a coalition of Macedon and the Achaean League in a great battle in northern Laconia in 222 BC. Sparta formally remained independent, just as Athens was, but it was no longer a power of any significance. The new powers in Greece proper were the Achaean and the Aetolian Leagues, and from the economic standpoint, the cities of Corinth and Rhodes, which were both excellently situated for maritime trade. On the whole, in the 3rd century BC, the Greek city-states still managed to play a limited role on the international stage, but in the 2nd century they would quickly succumb to the aggression of Rome. This development was understandable, since in the Hellenistic age warfare had become more and more a matter of large armies and enormous sums of money for mercenaries or battleships: the impoverishment and population decline in Greece, therefore, made the decay of the old poleis more or less inevitable.
In Macedon, after nearly half a century of dynastic conflicts and wars, some calm had returned with the accession of Antigonus Gonatas in 277 BC. Macedon was by itself capable of dominating North and Central Greece, but the interventions of other powers, the rise of the Aetolians, and the foundation of the Achaean League prevented the total submission of the whole of Greece that had been achieved by Philip II and Alexander. To the north, meanwhile, Macedon functioned as a bulwark for Greece against the “barbarians” of Central and East Europe. In the early 3rd century BC, it was the Celts who undertook large-scale plundering raids across the Balkans. In 279 BC, they even traversed Macedon and plundered Central Greece, coming close to the rich oracle-sanctuary of Delphi. Pushed back with some difficulty from Greece, these Galatians or “Gauls” crossed over to Asia Minor the next year, where they settled in the heart of the peninsula and eventually would become Hellenized. Sometimes more or less independent, sometimes subject to the Seleucids or the kings of Pergamon, they would in the end share the fate of all states and peoples here and be absorbed into the growing empire of the Romans. Of the great Hellenistic monarchies, Macedon was the first to fall to Rome.
In the 3rd century BC, Rome extended its rule over the whole of Italy, and in two great wars it broke the power of Carthage and brought the western basin of the Mediterranean under its domination. An Aetolian politician toward the end of the century warned his compatriots in vain of the darkening cloud rising in the west. In 200 BC, Rome declared war on Macedon. It was ostensibly a matter of revenge (for King Philip V had assisted Carthage in the last war), but in fact it was sheer imperialism. The ruling Roman aristocracy was always belligerent and after the victory over Carthage in search of new adventures that could provide booty, honor, and glory. The Aetolian Greeks—and later when it was clear the Romans were victorious, the Achaean League—contributed to the Roman invasion force. Philips’ army was defeated, and in 196 BC the Romans dictated the conditions for peace. Macedon had to surrender its fleet and to pay a war indemnity, while the Greek cities were all declared to be “free,” and Roman garrisons at some strategic points would guarantee their “freedom.” In Roman eyes, this meant a “gift” for which the receivers should behave
With proper gratitude, and hence be obedient clientes toward their new patronus Rome. The Greeks did not immediately understand it that way and took their “freedom” rather literally. New tensions would arise between them and Rome.
When Philip’s successor seemed after a while busy rearming Macedon, the suspicious Romans declared war on him (171-167 BC). At the battle of Pydna in southern Macedon in 168 BC, the famous Macedonian phalanxes were decisively beaten by the Roman legions. Under the peace treaty, the country was divided into four nominally independent republics. The commercial city of Rhodes was punished by the Romans for its audacity in proposing mediation between the warring parties by the establishment in 166 BC of a free port on Delos, a tiny island in the middle of the Aegean belonging to Athens. A last revival of Macedonian resistance against Rome finally led to its formal annexation in 148 BC as a Roman province (the provincia Macedonia).
In the meantime, the actions of the Romans had inspired more resistance to them in the Greek cities, both on the part of those who still dreamed of former glory and of those who turned against the land-owning oligarchies supported by Rome under the slogan of all revolutionaries in antiquity: land distribution and cancellation of debts. The war against Rome in some parts of Greece, therefore, had a socioeconomic aspect to it. The Greeks were mercilessly crushed. The Achaean League was dismantled, and the city of Corinth, the heart of the resistance, was in 146 BC razed to the ground. With these events, the history of independent Greek city-states had come to an end. The country was annexed to the Roman province of Macedonia, except for a few now powerless cities that were still called “free” and “autonomous,” such as Athens and Sparta, but which had to resign themselves completely to the wishes of Rome, their official “friend.” Exactly 100 years later, in 46 BC, the then Roman dictator Julius Caesar would decide to re-found the city of Corinth as a Roman colony, in large part populated by immigrants from Italy, and in 27 BC South and Central Greece would be united in one provincia Achaea. From then on, the country could to some extent recover from the destruction of the past few centuries, but it would never again attain the importance in the Mediterranean area that the Greeks of the classical period and even those of the 3rd century BC had enjoyed.
World History
