We have a a lot more evidence for Egypt, thanks to the preservation of papyri in the dry heat, than we do for Asia. Almost all this evidence, however, dates from later than the first forty years of the Hellenistic period with which I am concerned in this book. It may be legitimate, in some cases, to project what we know from a later period back on to an earlier period, but this can be no more than intelligent guesswork. As the history of early modern Europe shows, the processes whereby states become increasingly centralized, territorialized, and bureaucratized are complex and develop over time, but we do not have enough evidence for early Ptolemaic and Seleucid history to see the processes in detail. At any rate, I shall assume that, in our period, the administration of the kingdoms was in the process of development rather than settled. Ptolemy and Seleucus spent a great deal of their time on a war footing, and it is likely that their first administrative measures were designed mainly to ensure that their kingdoms were internally stable enough to guarantee them sufficient income to continue to make war.

In each case, as one would expect, the administration blended Macedonian with local institutions. ¹In Asia, “local” largely meant

Achaemenid, since Antigonus’s regime had left hardly a mark (or, if it did, it is impossible to distinguish it), but the Persians themselves had necessarily worked with local subsystems in the further-flung parts of their empire. Egypt held a mix of Egyptian and Achaemenid systems, since it had intermittently been under Persian administration for two hundred years. In each case, the Macedonians came as conquerors, with their own way of doing things, but in order not to ruffle too many feathers, and to keep their lives simple, they took over local structures, which had proved their effectiveness for decades, if not centuries. It follows that we should expect to find both similarities and differences between the administrations of the two kingdoms, with the similarities being due to the Macedonian background and the similar situations in which the kings found themselves, and the differences to inherited local practices or other local conditions, such as the relative sizes of the two kingdoms.

Egypt was a relatively self-contained unit, both geographically and ethnically; it consisted of the Nile delta and a thin fertile strip a thousand kilometers (620 miles) up the river, never wider than thirty kilometers (twenty miles) at any point, and bounded by desert to the east and west. Seleucid Asia, however, was a sprawling empire, consisting of huge territories and varied peoples, each with its own traditions and subcultures. In modern terms, they held much of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, and bits of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Seleucus and his son achieved the remarkable feat of coming as conquerors and holding all this together for fifty years before it began to break up in the east. The size of the empire meant that wherever the king happened to be at the time was the center. In Ptolemy’s case, after 313, the center was Alexandria, but Seleucus had palaces or residences all over the kingdom. He was most likely to be found in Antioch, but Susa, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, Celaenae, and Sardis were also royal residences.

THE MACEDONIAN BACKGROUND

Macedon basically consisted of a large and fertile plain to the west of the Thermaic Gulf, ringed by mountains (Upper Macedon). The country was rich in all the essentials: timber, grain, and minerals. It was still very largely rural, with a history of barons and princelings ruling cantons of upland farmers and peasants. These cantons were subject to frequent raids from their neighbors; as a result, military prowess was a dominant virtue in Macedonian culture, and kings and barons were expected to be powerful and successful war leaders as well as performing their administrative and religious duties. Each local princeling relied on the advice of a group of close friends, but was the sole decision maker. Every man bearing arms had the right to assemble, but such an assembly had little independent power; it was formed at the ruler’s behest, and its job was to approve his decisions.

When Philip II united the country under central leadership, he retained the same essential structure: king, friends, assembly of citizens. The assembly consisted of whatever citizens were to hand; out on campaign, then, it consisted of however many Macedonian soldiers were to hand. Citizenship and military obligation were very closely allied: in order to be a citizen, you had to be awarded a grant of land by the king, and being the king’s tenant in this way simultaneously committed you to paying your taxes and serving in the army when needed. Sons inherited their father’s obligations along with the land. The king nominally owned all the land (at least in the sense that it was his to dispose of), but parceled it out as he chose. The assembly was not the source of the king’s legitimacy, but could be a critical factor at times of uncertain succession, or if a king proved weak. We have already seen this, at Babylon after Alexander’s death. The increase in the use of army assemblies by the Successors is a sign of their insecurity; it was a kind of insurance.

But the overriding dynamic of any Macedonian king’s administration lay not so much in his relations with the peasantry and soldiers but in his relations with the barons, many of whom formed his inner circle of advisers and lieutenants. In the first place, these Friends were military leaders in their own right, in command of divisions raised from their own cantons. Even the king’s relations with the army, then, were largely mediated by his barons. Since the barons also ruled regions of Macedon, they formed the basic structure of the state, and they also took on any other jobs within the administration that the king required. There must have been a bureaucracy, to promulgate decisions, arrange for the shipment of goods, conscript troops, and so on, and there were local administrative structures for each town and canton, but there was no overall administration as such other than the king and his Friends.

In theory each king’s power was absolute, but in practice he had to defer to his advisers; after all, he could not know everything that was going on everywhere in the kingdom. He also had to defer to the general populace, in the sense that it helped to retain popularity if from time to time he did so. However, few of those who presented themselves at court got to see the king in person rather than, at best, one of his Friends. The barons therefore acted as intermediaries not only between the king and the army but between the king and his citizens. Without the barons’ goodwill he could hardly function.

In critical situations, a Macedonian king might also decide to call an assembly so that his subjects would be fully informed as to what was about to happen, and have fewer grounds for complaint afterward. So, for instance, when Alexander the Great revealed his plans to march farther east than anyone had expected, he first ran the decision past his men; ²and we have seen how several of the Successors had their troops conduct show trials of their opponents to legitimate their wars and assassinations.

Macedon was a tempered monarchy, then, but not a constitutional monarchy. The king was the executive head of state and the chief religious official. It was his right to decide matters of policy, both foreign and domestic (such as levels of taxation); it was his right to form and break alliances and to declare war and peace, and he was commander in chief of the armed forces. He was also the chief judge, with the power to decide whether or not to hold a trial in any given situation, or even whether to order a summary execution. The Homeric model of kingship was close; in Homer’s poems, the elders advise, the people listen and shout out their views, but the final decisions rest entirely with the king. ³