In addition to these defensive moves, Antigonus also took direct action against Cassander. He sent Aristodemus of Miletus, one of the Greeks in the inner circle of his court, to the Peloponnese with plenty of money and instructions to establish a working relationship with Polyperchon and his son Alexander. Eight thousand mercenaries were raised and Polyperchon was named “General of the Peloponnese” for the Antigonid cause, with the job of opening up a second front in Greece, to keep Cassander occupied there. Alexander sailed south for a meeting with Antigonus to confirm the arrangements—specifically, no doubt, the division of the spoils.
Along with these measures against Cassander, Antigonus took steps to challenge Ptolemy’s naval supremacy. As a first step toward gaining a fleet, he persuaded the Rhodians to build ships for him, from raw materials that he would supply. We can only guess what arguments were used to turn the Rhodians, who were theoretically neutral, although for commercial reasons they were closest to Ptolemy. Rather than argument, the decisive factor was probably fear of what would happen to them if they refused. Rhodes was not only an island state, and their possessions on the mainland opposite the island were vulnerable. Antigonus also sent agents to Cyprus, where the currently dominant king was an ally of Ptolemy. If Antigonus’s intention was to gain control of the island, he failed, because Ptolemy responded in strength, and was able over the next few years to make the island effectively his. But if his intention was simply to tie up some of Ptolemy’s forces, the plan worked perfectly, and Antigonus was able to move south against Ptolemy’s possessions in Phoenicia.
Given that Ptolemy’s annexation of Palestine and Phoenicia in 320 had been achieved relatively easily and that Eumenes’ visit in 318 was brief, the region had last seen major trouble in 332, when the prolonged resistance of Tyre and the lesser resistance of Gaza had provoked Alexander the Great to atrocities that were repellent even by his standards: a mass crucifixion on the seashore at Tyre and having the garrison commander of Gaza dragged behind a chariot. The garrisons that had been installed by Ptolemy now withdrew in the face of Antigonus’s overwhelming army and its reputation, taking Ptolemy’s Phoenician fleet with them.
City after city capitulated without resistance, but, probably gambling on Antigonus’s current naval inferiority, the garrison of Tyre chose to resist. Tyre was the most important city in the region, a major mercantile center (especially for the Arabian spice trade) with a good port. It had taken Alexander seven months to take the stubborn island city, and then only after he had demolished the mainland town and used the rubble to build a causeway across the few hundred meters separating the island from the mainland. It was to take Antigonus fifteen months, but until his control of the sea was as secure as his hold on the land, there was little he could do against blockade runners. Even so, the siege was curiously unadventurous. Alexander, for instance, had made use of a specialist naval siege unit for his assault on Tyre, but Antigonus preferred to establish a simple blockade rather than take the city by storm.
Antigonus badly needed this stretch of coastline. As long as he lacked a fleet that could challenge Ptolemy’s, his territories would be vulnerable to seaborne raids, or even invasion, and the merchants who left his shores would be harassed or worse. All the facilities and the expertise he needed could be found in Phoenicia’s flourishing shipyards and ports, and the raw materials, especially the famed (and rapidly diminishing) cedars of Lebanon, were not far inland. Antigonus’s propaganda, designed to terrify his enemies, let it be known that he was preparing a fleet of five hundred warships and, unrealistically, that they would be ready that very summer. For this purpose, he established three shipyards in Phoenicia and another in Cilicia; we have already seen that the Rhodians were building a few more for him. The whole eastern Mediterranean seaboard was dedicated to this one task. While maintaining the siege of Tyre, Antigonus also cleared the Ptolemaic garrisons out of cities as far south as Gaza, thus gaining another wealthy mercantile port.
ANTIGONUS’S RESOURCES
With the annexation of Phoenicia and Palestine and the alliance of Polyperchon and Alexander, in 315 Antigonus was at the height of his power. In addition to the eastern satrapies, he controlled all Syria, all Asia Minor, and southern Greece. He had capital reserves amounting to billions of dollars (mostly left over from the treasuries of the Achaemenid empire), and a very healthy annual income from taxes. A slim volume wrongly included in the corpus of works by Aristotle gives us some idea of the range of taxes Antigonus employed, since it lists six forms of tax exacted by his satraps: on agricultural produce, on livestock, on natural resources, on profits from trade, on profits from the local sale of agricultural produce, and finally a poll tax. 2As the Achaemenids had done before him, Antigonus left it up to his satraps or governors to raise the taxes from their subjects and pass the revenue on to him for use and redistribution.
A preserved inscription affords us a window onto Antigonus’s economic intentions. The cities of Teus and Lebedus in Asia Minor had asked permission to import grain from abroad. In his reply Antigonus explicitly says that he does not usually allow this, since he would rather they took grain from within his own realm, but that in this case he magnanimously gives his permission. 3He wanted to be an exporter, not an importer of grain. But he also recognized that foreign grain was cheap; he himself had forced the price down by his embargo on it.
Mountains within his realm held minerals and metals, and grew every kind of timber he might need; there was no shortage of fertile river valleys and plateaus; he commanded almost all the overland and sea–river trade routes from the east to the Mediterranean; and he could call on enough manpower to meet any emergency. All the Successors did their best to make their lands self-sufficient, not just because this was the instinctive goal of ancient economic policy but because they did not want to help their rivals by paying them for imports. Antigonus even developed Syria’s native papyrus production, so as not to be so dependent on Egypt even for that. 4In Antigonus’s case, self-sufficiency was not an altogether unrealistic goal, and many communities within his empire made considerable profits from trading surpluses or exporting commodities that were unavailable elsewhere.
Antigonus now had a healthy slice of the grain market, and controlled almost all the main sources of timber. Just as his inroads into the grain market put commercial pressure on Ptolemy, since Egypt was by far the largest grain exporter in the eastern Mediterranean, so Ptolemy was also his target of his attempt to monopolize timber. This was precisely what the annexation of the Phoenician ports was for: to enable Antigonus to build a fleet and to deny Ptolemy access to timber. Egypt itself had no timber to speak of, and Ptolemy was forced to rely on imports from his ally in distant Macedon and on the less productive but closer forests of Cyprus, with their pine and cedar. Before long, Antigonus would make Cyprus a primary target.
This is not the last time we will see Antigonus using economics as a form of warfare against Ptolemy, his rival in the eastern Mediterranean. And he had good reasons to be money-minded. His realm could be approached by enemies from three directions. A vast army was needed to defend it—and if the opportunity arose, to expand it. Such an army was very expensive; Antigonus was simply making sure that he had the means.