Artaxerxes III (359–338)—not even when Artabazus, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, who had revolted against royal authority (Heckel 2006, 55), found refuge with his huge family at Philip’s court. Arrian’s information about a philia kai symmachia between Philip II and Artaxerxes III may be plausible.33 However, the situation changed with Philip’s expansion into eastern Thrace. Artaxerxes III was disturbed by the eastern ambitions foreshadowed by Philip’s siege of Byzantium and Perinthus in 341/340. According to Diodorus, “Philip’s growth in power had been reported in Asia, and the Persian king, viewing this power with alarm, wrote to his satraps on the coast to give all possible assistance to the Perinthians” (16.75.1–2; trans. C.H. Oldfather). Philip’s ambitions regarding the Hellespontine sphere offered the first threat to the Persian–Greek balance of power established by the King’s Peace. Additionally, Artaxerxes III will have (rightly) feared that Philip’s next step would be to plunder the rich satrapies of Asia Minor, challenge the Persian control over the Greek cities, and make them pay their tribute to him. For a time, however, the Macedonians drew back. Philip imposed Macedonian hegemony on Greece in 338. Then, in spring 337, when Greek cities met in the context of the Corinthian League, war against Persia was declared and Philip was elected leader of the campaign (Diod. Sic. 16.89.3). Possibly, he planned to limit his war to the conquest of the coastal cities in order to secure the permanent income necessary for financing wars to maintain Macedon’s hegemony.34 Very probably, Philip’s negotiations with Pixodarus, the Carian satrap who might have participated in blocking the Macedonians at Perinthus and Byzantium, were connected with the Persian campaign and served to form an alliance with the man who was in control of the important naval base of Halicarnassus.35 However, the Persian king seems to have interfered and sent his own man, Orontobates, to Caria to watch over Pixodarus.36 A Macedonian force commanded by Parmenion and Attalus went ahead in order to secure the coastline (Diod. Sic. 17.24.1), but their initial conquests in Asia Minor, where several oligarchies and tyrannies favorable to the Persians were toppled and replaced by dependent democracies, were countered by the famous Rhodian mercenary Memnon, son-in-law of Darius’ influential courtier Artabazus. Memnon kept the Macedonians confined to a small beachhead at Abydus.37 In the meantime, Darius III (338–330) offered subsidies to the Greeks to induce them to revolt against the Macedonians and keep them busy in Europe. Demosthenes formed part of the Athenian political faction pleading in favor of anti-Macedonian cooperation with Persia.38
However, in the autumn of 336, Philip was assassinated and the Persian campaign, duly propagated as a panhellenic act of avenging Persian war atrocities and liberating the Greeks, fell to his son and successor, Alexander. Strictly speaking, the influential generals Parmenio and his son Philotas led the campaign in the beginning. They remained key figures until their elimination in 330.39
The Macedonian army supported by Greek contingents of the Corinthian League crossed the Hellespont undisturbed and defeated the satrapal armies of Asia Minor in 334 at the battle of Granicus. The Macedonians conquered Lydia, the leading Greek cities, Caria—but only parts of Halicarnassus—and also Lycia and Pamphylia before entering Cilicia in 333. As the fleet of the Macedonians was inferior in number, experience, and technique, they tried to avoid sea battles and neutralize the threat posed by the Persian fleet by capturing their naval bases. After the fall of Miletos, the expensive Macedonian fleet was disbanded but had to be reconstituted shortly afterwards when the Persian resistance in the Aegean put the Macedonians under pressure.40
Aeschines reveals that Persian–Athenian diplomatic exchanges did not cease until the eve of the battle of Issus in 333 (3.132, 164). However, after the Macedonian victory, Darius, who had managed to escape from the battlefield, dropped the plan to stir up revolts in Greece and focused on offering fierce resistance in his own empire. At Damascus, Darius’ royal camp including his family and treasure was captured. Curtius comments, “Scarcely any courtier’s household was unaffected by the disaster” (3.13.14). Rejecting Darius’ attempts to ransom his family members, the Macedonian regime held them as valuable hostages and as tokens of Alexander’s legitimization as the would-be king of Asia. The honorable treatment given to Darius’ relatives was “a display of domination, and humiliating to the Great King, who was fighting for his life and survival of his empire.”41 When Darius attempted to negotiate with the Macedonians in order to turn Alexander into a vassal confined to the Mediterranean littoral, Alexander responded with theatrical scorn.
The Macedonian generals decided to secure the Levantine coast, aiming at cutting off the Persians from the regional naval bases before pursuing the king. In spring 333, embarking from Cos, Memnon, Darius’ commander-in-chief in the Aegean, took the offensive there, having some 300–400 ships at his disposal. After Memnon’s early death in about summer 333 during the siege of Mytilene, his brother-in-law Pharnabazus and the admiral Autophradates, an offspring of another old satrapal family, took over and started “a series of aggressive, wide-ranging, and strategically intelligible actions.”42 The crucial base of Chios was in their hands. They seized Lesbos (where the Greek Chares, an old friend of Artabazus’ family, commanded 2,000 mercenaries for the Persians), Tenedos, Andros, and Siphnos. They recaptured partly lost Halicarnassus and perhaps Miletos (cf. Curt. 4.1.37), and entered into negotiations with Agis III of Sparta, ambitious to revolt against the Macedonians in Greece. Despite the defeat at Issus and setbacks in the Aegean where the new Macedonian fleet began to strike back, “the grand Persian strategy remained unchanged.” The end of the Aegean campaign came only in 332 when the Phoenician fleet defected to the Macedonians, and Tyre, a crucial port, was conquered after seven months of fierce resistance. Gaza and Egypt fell to the Macedonians.43 They could thus occupy the last Persian naval bases and get their hands on the grain from Cyrene.
In the meantime, Darius assembled another large army supported by the elite of Bactria and Sogdiana. In addition, Indian local dynasts and Scythian ethnics sent troops to him.44 Following the principle of learning from the enemy, Darius had also ordered military reforms in order to be equipped in a manner more suitable to counter the Macedonians.45 However, his army was defeated again at Gaugamela (Arbela) in late 331. Darius could escape while the Macedonians conquered the abandoned royal residences and plundered the treasuries. Still hoping to rebuild his army, he was assassinated in 330 when his own generals and courtiers conspired against him. For Alexander, the alleged panhellenic mission was accomplished: The conflict, however, went on, triggered by the acclamation of the Bactrian satrap Bessus, probably an Achaemenid adopting the throne name of Artaxerxes V in 330, and by fierce resistance in Bactria and Sogdiana to the Macedonians (329–328). The invaders conquered the eastern parts of the Achaemenid Empire to the river of Hyphasis in India and made their way back. Yet the Indian lands informally connected with the Achaemenid house before could not be ruled directly. Macedonian control faded away as soon as the army left. When Alexander died in Babylon in the summer of 323, his swiftly conquered empire was susceptible to unrest.46
In order to cooperate with the indigenous leading circles, Alexander adopted the Achaemenid system of administration, plus elements of court etiquette and royal representation, and integrated indigenous nobles into his court and soldiers into his army. This political continuity was, however, an illusion meant to legitimize the new monarch. Persian rule had been ended—by the army of a descendant of a former Persian hyparchos.
Notes
1 1 In fact, there was a gap between the actual Greek knowledge and attitude concerning the Persian Empire and its stereotypical depiction in political discourse and literature (Madreiter 2012, 180–184).
2 2 Van de Mieroop 2007, 287.
3 3 Imipious Persians: Briant 1996, 531–533. Countless, too: Hdt. 7.61–99; Aesch. Pers. 12, 56–57, 61, 929–930. Brave Greeks: Bridges 2015.
4 4 Graf 1984a, 15.
5 5 Hdt. 7.138; Thuc. 1.18.1–2; Aesch. Pers. 234.
6 6 Hdt. 5.73 with Zahrnt 1992, 256–257; Ruberto 2010, 4, 24.
7 7 Hdt. 5.30, 49–51; cf. Evans 1976 and Manville 1977. Discontent: Chapman 1972; Badian 2004.
8 8 Müller 2017, 76–77.
9 9