Conclusion

After Philip II, the father of Alexander, defeated the Greeks at Chaeronea in 338 bc, he established the League of Corinth. The League was intended as an instrument of Macedonian control over the poleis, but also as a forum for settling disputes among them, a way of enforcing a koine eirene, a Common Peace; in exchange for submission to Philip’s domination and the loss of their beloved freedom of action, the city-states would for the first time in their history gain peace among themselves.84 And if Alexander had lived, his gigantic Greco-Macedonian empire, stretching by 323 from Greece to the Indus, would have been a harsh despotism, but it would at least have provided relative peace to the peoples of this enormous region.

The above discussion of the realities of hellenistic monarchy suggests that the dynastic realms that emerged after Alexander’s premature death mostly lived up to the despotic potential of the projects of Philip and Alexander, but failed the potential which those projects held for bringing peace to an anarchic world. No doubt many kings were hard-working rulers (one thinks of Seleucus I, Attalus I, Hiero II, Philip V, Antiochus III); they were generally able to impose a modicum of internal order within their large realms; and royal despotism was somewhat ameliorated by an ideology that stressed justice and self-restraint - or occasionally by some hard facts of power (as with Seleucus II’s relations with the city of Smyrna). But at heart the kings were all warlords. Their power was based on usurpation through military violence, their legitimacy was unstable, their territory was ‘‘spear-won land,’’ their public appearance was militaristic, their main task was military campaigning. Alexander’s vast empire had fallen apart into large, rivalrous, and often mutually hostile kingdoms. This division of power among the three great dynasties allowed political space for lesser powers to have some freedom of maneuver, and even for smaller Greek city-states, for example, those on the western coast of Asia Minor, to negotiate an ameliorated political status with their overlords. But the royal rivalries also led to destructive wars. If either Philip or Alexander had lived long enough, the Greeks might have traded freedom and anarchy for peace under despotism; but instead, they faced despotic power while anarchy and war continued.

The greatest of the dynasties never stopped dreaming of the reunification of the imperial space that had once belonged to Alexander. At the end of the third century, Philip V and Antiochus III banded together to destroy the realm of the Ptolemies, which was in the hands of a child (see above). If these ruthless and ambitious rulers had succeeded, then the history of the Mediterranean would have been dramatically different: the Greek state system might have evolved from a tripolar balance of power (Antigonids, Seleucids, Ptolemies) into a bipolar structure dominated by two great monarchical states of enormous strength, or perhaps (after another round of massive war), either the Antigonid or the Seleucid dynasty would have emerged as sole hegemon over the Greek world. But as it was, the action of the desperate second-tier states in calling in the Republic of Rome when confronted by the tremendous power and aggression of Philip and Antiochus eventually led to Roman domination of the entire East. By 188 bc, after a surprising sequence of events, the Romans had defeated both Philip and Antiochus.85 From that point onward the Romans were increasingly able to impose peace (the pax Romana) upon the previous anarchy that had always characterized the eastern Mediterranean - and eventually they would impose an emperor as well.