Hydrocarbon Fires

In the early days of the siege, Antigonus was reminded of his naval weakness when Seleucus deliberately sailed past at the head of a Ptolemaic fl eet. No doubt some of the ships peeled off to deliver sup-plies to the semi-beleaguered town before rejoining the main fl eet. Its mission was to establish the island of Cos as a secure Ptolemaic base, and from there to raid Antigonid possessions in Asia Minor. When Polemaeus moved into the region in response to these raids, Seleucus withdrew. But fi rst he stopped at the famous sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus, where the shrine had recently been magnifi cently refounded by Alexander the Great, since it had proclaimed him a son of Zeus. The oracle reputedly hailed Seleucus as “king”; ⁵ it was only a little premature.

Polyperchon’s son Alexander reached Antigonus at Tyre, and not long after his arrival, Antigonus launched a propaganda offensive against Cassander. He summoned an assembly of all the Macedonians he had under arms, or who had become military colonists in the area, and issued the “Decree of the Macedonians,” more commonly known as the

“Proclamation of Tyre.” ⁶ The fi rst task of the assembled Macedonians was to try Cassander in absentia for all his anti-Argead crimes: killing Olympias (though, ironically, she had been condemned herself in just such a show trial by Cassander’s Macedonians), detaining Rhoxane and Alexander IV (whose release “to the Macedonians” Antigonus demanded), forcing Thessalonice to marry him, rebuilding Thebes, and so on. This was a more public version of the bullying tactic Antigonus had tried out with Seleucus the previous year. But Cassander was never going to submit; his war with Antigonus lasted another fourteen years.

The deal with Polyperchon and Alexander became clear too. The appointment of Polyperchon as “General of the Peloponnese” was meant to replace, not supplement, his regency. Antigonus now declared that he had himself “taken over responsibility for the monarchy,” so that, in addition to being “Royal General of Asia,” he was now also the self-proclaimed legitimate regent. Antigonus recognized that Polyper-chon’s claim to the regency was empty, and that by virtue of his con-trol of the king, Cassander had usurped it. It was Cassander, then, who was named as the pretender. There could hardly be any doubt that Antigonus’s intention was to rule the entire Macedonian empire.

The fi nal article of the proclamation declared that the Greek cities were to be free, autonomous, and ungarrisoned. Antigonus had already begun to foster such autonomy in the cities within or just outside his reach, but now he was making it offi cial policy. It was good propa-ganda and good sense. He needed the goodwill of the cities, so that they would supply him with Greek manpower and expertise, and it was cheaper to manage the cities without garrisons.

In the short term, however, the chances of Greek freedom were remote, even within Antigonus’s own domain, since he must have gar-risoned many of the cities of Asia Minor and the Cycladic islands in case of invasion. But of course, as well as being a manifesto, the decla-ration was aimed, as Polyperchon’s had been a few years earlier, at his enemies. He was still trying to secure the loyalty of the Greek cities of Cyprus, by encouraging those that were ruled by princelings loyal to Ptolemy to throw them out, and he needed to undermine Cassander’s hold on the cities of Greece. The proclamation economically served more than one purpose.

Cynicism is easy, but Antigonus does seem to have done his best to keep this promise of autonomy within his own realm—as well as using it as a sweetener for potential allies. It was not always possible, however. I have already referred, a little earlier, to a couple of letters from Antigonus, written around 303 bce to the cities of Lebedus and Teus. Antigonus wanted to unite the two communities at or near the site of Teus, while Lebedus was to be altogether abandoned. It is clear from the tone of the letters that Antigonus was pushing this plan through against the will of the inhabitants, and that his intention was to ensure that his coffers would continue to be fi lled by taxes from the new joint city. In practice, the cities’ “freedom” was often an illusion.

But Antigonus’s declaration worried Ptolemy enough for him to respond immediately with a proclamation of his own, affi rming his commitment to the freedom of the Greek cities. Coming from Ptol-emy, this is doubly strange: in the fi rst place, he was already master of Greek cities, in Cyprus and Cyrenaica, in which he had installed garrisons, and so the speciousness of the propaganda was self-evident;

second, Cassander had cities on the Greek mainland under his sway, just as Antigonus did in Asia Minor and Greece, so Ptolemy risked damaging the interests of his ally as much as those of his enemy (sup-posing anyone took his manifesto seriously). It is hard, then, to know what to make of Ptolemy’s declaration. But if, as is likely, he had his Macedonian troops approve the proclamation, as Antigonus had done, then at least part of the point was not to let Antigonus get away with claiming to be the offi cial spokesperson for Macedon. Whoever con-trolled Macedon and the king in theory concon-trolled Egypt, as one of the satrapies of the king’s empire.

As they often do in times of war, the abstract generalizations of these manifestos disguised horrors. Antigonus was encouraging, and Ptolemy was in danger of encouraging, the democratic elements within the Greek cities controlled by Cassander to rise up against their ad-ministrations. Any who did so would embroil their cities at the very least in the banishment of prominent citizens, and very likely in assas-sination and even civil war. Old feuds were refreshed, and in a number of Greek cities atrocities were carried out in the name of one political system or the other. In the summer of 315, for instance, very shortly after the Declaration of Tyre, fi ve hundred democratic rebels were rounded up and massacred at Argos by Cassander’s garrison com-mander. ⁷