Polyperchon responded by coming south in force to join his son for the blockade of Piraeus, but they achieved very little, since they could not control the sea. The Athenians were also finding it hard to feed the army of twenty-five thousand that was encamped on their land. Polyperchon therefore left Alexander with enough men to dissuade Cassander from venturing out of Piraeus by land, and marched into the Peloponnese.

Most of the Peloponnesian cities bloodily evicted the Antipatrid oligarchs on Polyperchon’s orders. The most important exception was Megalopolis in Arcadia, and Polyperchon put it under siege. The battle was protracted and closely fought, but in the end the defenders were successful. They even foiled a final push by Polyperchon’s elephants through the collapsed wall by laying spikes in the breach. ¹In frustration, Polyperchon left Megalopolis under siege (which was eventually broken off months later without having achieved its objective) and withdrew back to Macedon. Polyperchon’s failures at Piraeus and Megalopolis, despite the size of his army, drastically slowed the rate at which the cities threw in their lot with him. It now seemed more sensible for them to wait and see who would win the war in Greece.

With many of his troops tied up in the sieges of Piraeus and Megalopolis, Polyperchon turned his attention elsewhere. Still desperate for allies, he sent the naval expert Cleitus to relieve Arrhidaeus, under siege in Cius, and at the same time to guard against a possible crossing of the Hellespont by Antigonus, who was encamped not far from Byzantium. The expedition went well at first; Cleitus relieved Arrhidaeus and joined forces with him. And when Nicanor arrived from Piraeus with over a hundred ships to help Antigonus, Cleitus inflicted a severe defeat on him off Byzantium. But that very night Antigonus arranged an unexpected counterattack: while he set about Cleitus’s camp on land, Nicanor returned with the remnants of the fleet to disable the enemy ships as they lay beached or tried to escape. It was a complete victory. Arrhidaeus either died or surrendered. Cleitus’s flagship alone escaped, but when he landed in Thrace, he ran into a detachment of Lysimachus’s troops and was killed. It was a wretched end for the man who, after his earlier successes, had styled himself as Poseidon, the god of the sea, and had insisted on being treated as a god. ²Nicanor fared little better, since soon after returning to Piraeus he was killed on Cassander’s orders for being overambitious.

The loss of the fleet meant not just that Polyperchon was now cut off from Eumenes, but also that there was little to stop Antigonus crossing the Bosporus and coming at Macedon that way. But the deal the two allies had made assigned all Europe to Cassander, and Antigonus was not yet ready to leave Asia Minor. It was all under his control now—his personal control or that of allies such as Asander in Caria—from the Hellespont to the Taurus Mountains, but there was the matter of Eumenes just beyond the Taurus. He left most of his forces to protect Asia Minor, entrusted the war in Greece to Cassander, and marched southeast after the renegade Eumenes.

SEA BATTLE

Naval warfare had not changed much since the Classical period. The methods were still the same: skillful maneuvering so that you were in a position to disable an enemy ship by ramming (with or without subsequent boarding by marines) or by breaking its oars and oarsmen. The main innovations or developments in the early Hellenistic period stemmed from the same love of gigantism that produced—to name just a few outstanding examples—enormous armies, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, and the temple of Apollo at Didyma. Ever-larger vessels were being built. Unlike the sleek triremes of the Classical era, larger ships could deploy artillery on their decks—joined together catamaran-style, they might even carry massive siege towers with which to assault a port from the sea—and they could also carry more men. So the two chief developments in the early Hellenistic period were a greater reliance on long-range offensive weaponry, and more direct action. Instead of maneuvering to take an enemy ship from the side, the primary objective of Hellenistic naval warfare became frontal ramming, followed by boarding. ³

The increased sizes of Hellenistic warships hugely increased the expense of navies. A fleet of a hundred warships of varying sizes, from triremes upward, might employ around thirty thousand men as crew and marines. A single, enormous ship built toward the end of the third century BCE by Ptolemy IV had a crew of almost 7,500 men, including three thousand marines. This vessel was largely for show, but already in our period Demetrius the Besieger was building some lesser, sea-worthy monsters.

But even before the crews had embarked, ships were very expensive to produce. It was essential also to control the raw materials, or to have good trading relations with places that controlled them: wood for the hull, mast, and deck (preferably fir, cedar, or pine), for the keel (oak for warships), and for the oars (preferably fir); pitch for caulking and bitumen for coating the hull; hemp, esparto, or papyrus for the cordage; flax to make linen for the sailcloth. The cost of ships was such that enemy ships were extremely valuable booty for the enemy. Being made of wood, holed ships tended to founder rather than sink, and could then be captured and taken in tow.

It was essential also to have access to as many ports as possible, not just as dockyards but as havens. Ancient ships were very vulnerable to bad weather, did not ride comfortably at anchor in the open sea, and, given the sizes of their crews, needed to restock their provisions regularly. They also had a tendency to become waterlogged. This weakness of ancient warships—that they often needed to make land—made it desirable to control not just ports but whole stretches of coastline, as well as islands. Ships that were temporarily beached, away from the safety of a good harbor, were also vulnerable to attack from either land or sea, as Cleitus found to his cost.

ATHENS AND EARLY HELLENISTIC CULTURE

In Athens, constant military and diplomatic pressure from Cassander took its toll. Despairing of any effective action from Polyperchon, the Athenians decided to surrender and opened negotiations. After only a few months, in the summer of 317, the restored democracy fell again, this time in favor of dictatorship by a puppet ruler of Cassander’s choice. Cassander gave the job to the Aristotelian philosopher Demetrius of Phalerum, highly regarded, but still aged under forty. Demetrius ruled Athens for the next ten years, with the backing of the Macedonian garrison, of course. Piraeus and Athens were reunited, and gave Cassander a secure base in southern Greece.

Demetrius of Phalerum’s rule, though benign, sealed the end of Athens’s world-famous experiment in democracy. Although in later years from time to time the term was used for the constitution, the democratic organs of the state were actually dominated by a narrow group of wealthy families. This, as I have already remarked, is the pattern that came to exist within all the great cities of the Hellenistic world: power devolved upon those citizens who were wealthy enough to support the city both materially and through their channels of communication with distant kings.

Cassander’s protection ushered in a decade of relative peace for Athens. No wars were fought on Athenian soil, though of course the city took a keen interest in events elsewhere. Theophrastus (Demetrius of Phalerum’s teacher) wrote his Characters, light-hearted vignettes of different kinds of people, around this time, and his sketch of a rumor-monger shows him spreading the alarming (and untrue) report that “Polyperchon and King Philip have won a battle and Cassander has been taken prisoner” ⁴—a situation that would certainly have spelled trouble for Demetrius of Phalerum’s pro-Cassandrian Athens. But Athenians watched from the sidelines rather than being involved in the action, and this was a major change for a city that had been at the center of Greek affairs for almost two hundred years, until the Lamian War.