Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

Raised on rivalry between wives, between siblings and half-siblings, between dynastic families and warlords, it is hardly surprising that Philip and Alexander III competed in power first with the ancient city-states of Greece and then with the Persian king himself. The problem inherent in the Macedonians’ love of competition was that—at least from the moment that Philip became king in 359 BC—they were never satisfied with what they had already conquered. With their eyes always on the next rung of the ladder, they often forgot to look after the rungs they had already occupied. This hazard is most clearly seen in the enigmatic figure of Alexander, whose extraordinary conquests and permanent absence destabilized and impoverished both his home district of Macedonia and the rest of mainland Greece. His death left all the Greeks and all the peoples formerly under the Persian Empire in a state of anarchy, vulnerable to the mass destruction caused by the Wars of the Successors. Their descendants continued to murder each other, as well as intermarry, for several centuries, until the Romans annexed each one of their kingdoms in succession in the second and first centuries BC.