Alternate History Thread V

[Dachs]

I'll just leave this here.

And, yes, before you mention it, it did suffer from standard "I said I was going to make it short and sweet but I lied" Dachs syndrome.

The Seleukid Civil Wars

A great deal of ink has been expended over the past two millennia to describe the demise of the united Seleukid state. The most commonly held reason was that it was simply “too big”, as if there were ever such a thing as an empire that was of the proper size. Other historians located the cause in an increase in regionalization among imperial elites: Greece and Baktria were, ostensibly, just too separate from the rest of the empire. Of course, the fact that the empire’s aristocracy and government were considerably less regionalized than they had been in the earlier stages of Seleukid expansion is not mentioned. In the late nineteenth century, the thesis of external pressure was popular: the Wusun in the east, Qarthadastim and Etruscans in the west, Hai and Getai in the north, created an aggregate of threats that forced Alexandros I and Antiochos VI to decentralize the empire in order to deal with them. But none of those threats was particularly militarily taxing, and the extent of the decentralizing tendency is dubious. The claim of some contemporary chroniclers, like Athenagoras of Tripolis, that the whole series of events was sparked by Tyche can, of course, be readily ignored.

It is simplest and most correct, then, to put imperial collapse down to a failure of elite management. While ascribing the contraction of the largest empire in history up to that point to a sordid brothers’ quarrel might seem historically lazy, it is the only cause that does not conflict with the evidence. Institutionalizing elite management was essentially impossible at that time: it relied on the character of the people involved, and Demetrios just didn’t have it.

Of course, Demetrios’ inability to force Attalos and Seleukos to submit to his will by argument or manipulation or force of character did not mean that he was incapable of forcing them to submit to his will by military action. Attalos stole a march on his eastern brother by quickly gaining control of Babylonia, Syria, and Egypt, but was hard pressed to halt the invasion through the Zagreus. He also had to try to deal with Seleukos, who was quietly building up his power in Greece and Anatolia. Attalos tried an invasion in 22 BC that ended in a minor disaster at Sardis and left him wide open to an invasion from the east. But Demetrios’ attempt at a riverine campaign in Babylonia also came to a dramatic end at Apameia in Charakene the following year, where – according to Athenagoras – sixty thousand of his troops were forced to surrender to the Attalid forces.

Yet Demetrios was quite capable of destroying any follow-up force that Attalos might send east (and did just that, on two occasions). And he refused to surrender his birthright, despite his lack of any military ability to reclaim his whole inheritance. It was not until his generals assassinated him and acclaimed his son Apollodotos in his place that Attalos could come to some sort of settlement in 17 BC, which retained both himself and his nephew as kings of a theoretically united Seleukid state, with Attalos retaining precedence. Then came time to deal with Seleukos, and after a four-year Anatolian campaign the younger brother was finally defeated in an epic naval battle off Telmessos (12 BC), and shortly thereafter killed as Attalos’ forces made a triumphant entry into Athens. In the sequel, Attalos crushed a few uprisings by Seleukos loyalists in Makedonia, and eradicated the Achaian league once and for all.

Attalos’ united empire was brief, though. Apollodotos apparently harbored some resentment over his subordinate role, the exact extent of his domains, and his ability to make law. War broke out again following a crisis in 8 BC; depending on the author, it was either because of Attalos contracting some sort of illness or because of a dispute over the Armenian satrapy. Attalos’ mobility and command abilities were apparently impaired to some extent, allowing the Apollodotid forces to bog him down in inconclusive campaigning from Margiane to Gabiene and back. Ultimately, Apollodotos broke the deadlock by offering formal support to Seleukos’ young son Perseus, who had been hiding out with the Getai since his father’s defeat off Telmessos. Perseus returned to Athens, his father’s old stronghold, and raised a fresh rebellion in 1 AD. Combined with Qarthadastim/Capuan pressure in southern Italy, the new threat overwhelmed Attalos’ attenuated western armies, and soon Perseus was able to lead an invasion of Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt. Attalos – by this point unable to walk, relegated to a sedan chair – was defeated outside his colony-city of Attaleia with his last great army, trying to restore the situation, and not long afterwards died.

The treaty that Apollodotos and Perseus agreed to at Edessa in that dramatic year was what finally broke the Seleukid Empire apart for good. Simply put, everything west of the Euphrates went to Perseus, and everything to the east was Apollodotos’. In common parlance, the western state became known as the Perseid empire and the eastern remained the Seleukid one. Of course, the treaty did not end all of the ancillary fighting associated with the war. Much of northern Anatolia was dominated by a slave-king named Mithridates, whose extermination took up a good three years of Perseus’ time. Egypt had ‘seceded’ under the rule of the general Andromachos, who claimed to be descended from the Ptolemaioi; he also took several years to defeat. The erstwhile Seleukid territories in Italy had been overrun and had to be taken back. For his part, Apollodotos had to restore order in Armenia – which was almost a total loss – and faced a serious revolt in the Paropamisadai in favor of the Indohellenic ruler Eupator III; Demetrias-Chach had also been seized by the Wusun and had to be reclaimed.

But even though all of these things had yet to be accomplished, there was still some residual dissatisfaction with the agreement on both sides. Armenia and eastern Anatolia were something of a sticking point. Apollodotos also seems to have harbored ambitions about Syria, and in his paranoia ascribed similar ones to Perseus (who seems to have focused chiefly on the West); when Perseus was forced to intervene in the Bosporan kingdom in 7, the eastern king took it as an indicator of world-spanning ambitions. War broke out the following year. Unlike the other wars, it started out in dramatic fashion, as Apollodotos’ general Sostratos irresistibly swept over the Levant. In 9 he successfully assaulted Antiocheia, and by 13 he was besieging Pelousion, the gateway to Egypt. A tyro Seleukid fleet on the Mediterranean shocked a much larger Perseid navy in that same year off Kanobos in the Delta. But Apollodotos’ generals could not maintain the pace of that initial furious onslaught. Sostratos’ armies bogged down in Egypt, and none of the attempts to raid across the Taurus were successful. In 19, the Wusun confederacy fell apart and the resulting migratory crisis sparked a rebellion against Apollodotos in Baktria. Seleukid resources were drawn down in the west to shore up the east, and Perseid troops pushed back. By 23, it appears that the two sides had agreed to a status quo ante bellum peace, which pretty much ended the fighting. The last gasp of the fighting, from 28 to 31, was in itself rather unimportant and chiefly consisted of several large raids to little purpose.

As is the usual case when one discusses certain cataclysmic historical events, the question of what actually changed during the civil wars, and for whom, tends to be rather heated. Two mutually exclusive claims – that the new Perseid state dispensed with the old quasi-feudal Seleukid framework in favor of a New Autocracy, and that it discarded the broken Seleukid autocracy with a focus on consensus personal politics – can be safely ignored. The fragmentation of the imperial bureaucracy and its partial replacement/revamping, however, did occur and seem to have played a fairly large role in the subsequent affairs of both states. The Seleukid state of Apollodotos failed to establish ways to repopulate the bureaucracy, and may even have witnessed a sharp decline in aristocratic literacy; the Perseids did not, and were consequently better off going forward. At the same time, widespread devastation in Perseid territory hamstrung the empire for some years, restricting immediate options to retrenchment – but this seems to have been a blessing in disguise, because it prevented overextension in the immediate aftermath of the war.

The Greek polis tradition wasn’t totally dead, but many have argued that the fighting marked something of a watershed in the relationship of the empire to the cities. Citizenship, minus the benefits and responsibilities it carried, was kind of pointless. It was a peculiarity of history that citizenship, at this point in time, carried more weight in Greek India than it did elsewhere in the oikoumene. At any rate, many of the poleis in Apollodotid Seleukid territory lost the pretenses of autonomy they had once held. This was arguably the apex of a trend that had been picking up steam since Alexander: the slow end of civic relevance. First they had lost out in power politics, then they had lost out in independence, and now even their autonomy was eroding away.

Finally, there is something to be said for the character of the respective monarchies. Obviously, the Perseid territories contained a great deal more Greeks per capita than did the Seleukid ones. It has been claimed that the essential – and by implication, essentially good – character of the Seleukid monarchy, the antinationalistic notion of heterogeneity, was strengthened by the loss of the Greek West. The Perseid state was – supposedly – naked Greek imperialism; the Seleukid, not so much. This is going a great deal too far. The Perseids’ Syrian, Egyptian, Anatolian, and Italic inhabitants were quite as diverse as the Baktrians, Iranians, Babylonians, Armenians, and so on of the East. And unlike the Seleukid Greeks, the Greeks of the West were far from a homogeneous cultural monolith.

The Rise of the New Hegemons

When, in 67, Perseus II finally ended the Perseids’ retrenchment and isolationist period, he had something of a glut of targets. The Getai, to the north, were kind of falling apart, hammered by Saurometai raiding and riven by internal faction. The Seleukids were stumbling along ineffectually, and were facing a major revolt in Armenia. Recent raiding by Meroitic Kush had opened up the possibility of a major counter-invasion, albeit tempered by the difficulties of campaigning up the Nile.

Possibly the juiciest was southern Italy, formerly under Seleukid administration but lately the focus for wars between Qarthadast and the Italian powers. The Qarthadastim, who had better things to do (like defend their Iberian colonies from the protagonism of Numantia), only halfheartedly continued the contest. Losing meant little, but so did winning – for the Punic forces lacked the numbers and support to exploit the victories they gained (when they gained them). Between 18 BC and 50 AD no fewer than four wars were fought over possession of Metapontion, in itself a moderately useful port that nevertheless assumed a political importance vastly out of proportion to its actual value. The end result was to turn the Capuans and Samnites into the equivalent of punch-drunk boxers, barely staying on their feet; Qarthadast, to continue the analogy, was barely in the fight at all.

The pervasive influence of the “new military history” has induced some to believe that victory or defeat in war had to have some sort of long term cause. Perhaps tactics or training were better on one side or another because of a given reform, or maybe geography conditioned a certain kind of fighting force that matched up well against another. Put simply, in the case of the Perseid conquest of Italy, all that stuff is garbage. Tactical formations or equipment on either side didn’t really matter. The Perseids were commanded by able officers – most notably Arkesilaos and Iamboulos – they were undistracted, and there were more of them. From 67 to 69, Arkesilaos flattened Capua in a series of ferocious battles in Campania; when the Samnites intervened in 68, he crushed them, too, at Aquilonia. Qarthadast, which had formed alliances with the poleis of Brettia, stayed out of the war initially, until Malieis was captured and sacked (70), at which point the softim quixotically declared war out of fear that they would be next; Iamboulos summarily defeated them and brought the Brettian cities into alliance.

In 74, the Insubres launched a series of attacks on the Etruscans, with the aid of, apparently, groups of Kimbroz. After meeting disaster at the Battle of the Utis River in 77, the Rasna leagues began to fragment. Many of the southern leagues asked for Perseid protection, failing to realize what that ‘protection’ entailed; an aging Arkesilaos promptly led an army into Etruria, annihilated a league army that tried to block his path at Volsinii, and then beat back the Insubres. The group that ultimately won out in the Po Valley was, however, the Batroi. Riding a wave of urbanization and monetization – chauvinistic Greeks persistently claimed that it was because of the civilizing influence of their Massiliot allies – and possessed of an unusually competent series of strong leaders, the Batroi destroyed the former Aeduoi quasihegemony and then ‘rescued’ their Massiliot allies from the ‘depredations’ of the Auernoi. By the late 70s, the Batroi had established a coherent kingship and line of succession, and ruled virtually all Gaul into the bargain. They took quick advantage of the Insubres’ defeats against the Perseids to invade and establish a sort of hegemony there.

Belatedly, the Qarthadastim began to take security measures against the Perseids in Sicily. Unfortunately, their security measures included a few rather foolish measures, like ending the autonomy of the Greek poleis in Sicily in order to set up an all-encompassing military governorship as in Iberia. Unsurprisingly, this sparked a rebellion that made for a dandy casus belli for the Perseids. Nikephoros I himself campaigned in Sicily during the long and bloody Trinakrie War (84-95) that ultimately ended in a massive naval battle off Plemmyrion and Perseid control of the entire island.

By contrast, the Seleukid Empire had a terrible first century. Apollodotos was compelled to resort to the usual expedients to cover the loss of much of the empire’s heartland – increased taxation, robbing temples, and the like. Further fiscal problems were sparked by the political implications of the loss of the western provinces, since now new political groups in Mesopotamia and Armenia had to be conciliated with privileges to improve the empire’s capability to defend its frontiers. While Apollodotos managed to keep a lid on most of those tensions and maintain imperial security, his successor Alexandros II (32-63) was not so successful. By the end of his reign, he had been forced to grant Arsham Khorkhoruni, leader of a long-running rebellion, control of the satrapy of Armenia. The Gerrhaian cities had also broken away from Seleukid rule.

And more humiliations were to come. In 84, Arsham’s son Vardan launched a bid for independence, taking the ascension of the young Demetrios II as a sign of weakness. Demetrios’ advisor and epistates Mnesiptolemos redirected most of the Seleukid army to face this new threat, weakening the frontier defenses in Central Asia and sparking a massive Baktrian rebellion. Eupator VI soon dispatched armies across the Hindu Kush, which shored up the frontier defenses and defeated the first halfhearted Seleukid counterattacks. A much larger Seleukid force was destroyed by the Eupatrid general Heliodoros in Tapouria in 86. It was soon horribly apparent that Seleukid control beyond the great Iranian salt desert was, to all intents and purposes, gone. Mnesiptolemos’ regime was soon overthrown by the general Telemachos, who managed to limit the damage done by the Khorkhoruni (independence was recognized, but still within fairly limited borders).

Eupator VI, for his own part, ruled a revived Baktria at the height of its power. His predecessors, most notably Platon I (12-29), had taken advantage of the collapse of the Sunga state to snap up territory down the length of the Indos, as well as the northern reaches of the Gangetic Plain. Magadha itself was pretty much off limits to everybody, even the powerful Satavahanas, ruled by a series of warlords capable of allying against anybody but themselves. Platon, who had placed his capital at Mathura, continued the trends of Buddhist proselytization and Hellenization that had obtained earlier. New Greek poleis sprang up at the mouth of the Indos, and even along the coast of Maharashtra. Eupator’s control of Baktria itself permitted even more colonization. Of course, Buddhism failed to gain much of a foothold in Baktria itself – where the mystery cult of Artemis-Anahita remained predominant – but, via trade, it did insinuate itself among the Tarim Basin oasis cities and several of the steppe groups to the north.

But that is to get ahead of our material. Anyway, in China, little changed: the Han remained predominant, and continued to integrate their new territories in the south. The Yuezhi confederacy, which overwhelmed and assimilated many of the Xianbei, also remained strong. In the 90s, the Yuezhi forced Han garrisons to withdraw from the Ordos, a troubling sign but still not indicative of any serious military malaise…yet.

It was during the second century that the Perseids reached the height of their power and territorial extent. Benefiting from the collapse of the Getai, they seized control of the Thracian territories south of the Danube and began to colonize the region with decidedly mixed results. In the 120s, Amyntas I led a Black Sea expedition to conquer the Bosporan kingdom, and a few years later successfully wrested part of upper Mesopotamia from the weakened Seleukids. It was his son Perseus III who launched the largest of the Perseid expansions, though. Ostensibly over a dispute in Kyrenaia, he went to war with Qarthadast, first with the justification of conquering Libya, and, by the time that had been secured (143) he was already planning the conquest of Qarthadast itself. Unfortunately for him, the Qarthadastim managed to mobilize their citizenry and defeated an early probing attack near the walls in the spring of 144. Perseus was forced to capture Atiqa instead, to serve as a forward supply base, and only then begin a formal siege. In 147 the Perseid forces finally broke the Punic walls and stormed the city, slaughtering many. Much of the city was destroyed by either the invaders or the defenders, and the whole thing turned into a holocaust reputed as one of the classical world’s worst atrocities. Eventually, the violence subsided, but Qarthadast itself was a shadow of its former size and population.

The conquest of the Punic colonies on Sardinia and Corsica had been finalized by 150, and much of the western coastline also fell into Perseid hands. But in Iberia, the Punic army seized control under the leadership of one Bodmelqart. Employing the rhetoric of war-time security, Bodmelqart conveniently transformed his proconsular office into a military dictatorship. The Punic cities more or less accepted his remit, although there was some confused fighting on his death (161) in which his lieutenant Annibas gained control and established a hereditary monarchy backed by a council of civic representatives from the major colonies e.g. Qarthadast (not the African one, but the Iberian one), Malaka, Lixus, and Gader.

Despite the impressive military victory, the Perseids have been argued to have been structurally unsound. When Perseus III Megas died in 172, his sons – Diodotos, Antiochos, and Philippos – fought a vicious two-year civil war over the throne, which Philippos eventually won. Of course, such could be the natural state of any hereditary monarchy. Still, in apparently foreshadowing later events, the civil war seemed to indicate just how fragile the enlarged empire really was.

A state that was unquestionably fragile was that of the Han. Yuezhi control of the Ordos apparently played havoc with the irrigation networks further down the Huanghe, although not in a systematic way. It’s never been clear whether military defeat caused the collapse of Han agriculture or the other way around; the best guess is that they were a positive feedback loop, which the Han entered during a period of unusual malaise at the top. From 124 to 139, six emperors ruled in Chang’an, the result of illnesses and assassinations. When Shangdi (the Chinese emperors tended to get more and more ostentatious titles as their real power declined) ascended to the throne in 140 he had the capital moved further east, to Luoyang, in order to be better protected from the Yuezhi. This was not one of his more inspired moves, since Luoyang, albeit further away from the border, was significantly less defensible than the western city. In 143 the Yuezhi took advantage of the error by invading; within two months they had stormed and sacked the city, killing the young emperor. A fresh wave of peasant rebellions swept over the Huanghe valley, and two new dynasties emerged – the Qi, centered on Chang’an, and the Shen, in Jianye. Some remaining Han-loyal generals attempted to revive the dynasty under Shangdi’s young cousin Zhidi, but after seizing control of Ba in 145 they were crushed by the Qi at the Battle of Jiangchu, finally ending the Han dynasty.

Initially, the Qi were more concerned with defeating the Shen than with dealing with the Yuezhi. The second Qi emperor, Taiwudi, tried to co-opt the Yuezhi after they derailed an expedition into Chu against the Shen. He created the position of Prince of Zhao for their ruler Qiujiuque in 170 and managed to gain their support in several campaigns against the Shen. But when Taiwu died in 176, the Qi began to falter militarily, and the Yuezhi took advantage. Qiujiuque occupied Luoyang permanently in 178 and proclaimed the Wei dynasty from there the following year. Wei assaults broke the back of the Qi armies and forced them to retreat into Shu. Before he died in 189, Qiujiuque – posthumously, Wei Wudi – conquered the remainder of the Huanghe valley and the Central Plains. His successors’ Wei state was the single most powerful in China by the close of the century.

In India, the Eupatrid state continued to expand, albeit by proxy. Since the fourth century BC, Kambojas had been widely employed in subcontinental armies, and the migratory activity did not cease later on. By the second century, these Kambojas – along with not-insubstantial numbers of Greeks, Sakas, and Gandharans, albeit all lumped into the same group by indifferent Indians – had created a disparate collection of feuding states that dominated Malwa. The Satavahanas and the Magadha kings called them the Ksatrapas, after the Greek title of satrapes that most of them claimed. Many of the ksatrapas were at least loosely allied to the Eupatrid empire, but most were not, and the region was a bit of a tinder box. From 155 to 162, one of the ksatrapas, one Dhimmiyaka (Greek Demetrios?) united the region and claimed the title of mahaksatrapa, launching a war of conquest in the Vindhyas and against the Eupatrid-controlled coast. Ultimately, he was defeated, but his campaigns demonstrated the military weakness of the Satavahana state. Rocked by defeats both at his hands and at those of the Pallavas of the south, the Satavahana empire began to dramatically contract in the latter half of the second century. It remained fairly large in 200, but it had lost control of the Eastern Ghats and of the Pandya territories.

The Seleukids continued to have fairly serious internal problems. Antiochos VIII (134-157) extended the ruler cult, converting much of what used to be bureaucracy into priestly positions. While this made sense from an efficiency standpoint – since the priesthood was better educated, at this point, than a large chunk of the aristocracy – it caused rebellion in Hyrkania and Media, both of which remained Zoroastrian. The Median revolt was partially crushed, although Adurbagadan fell under Khorkhoruni control. Hyrkania, however, completely seceded, a project made much easier when Antiochos’ death sparked the Four Revolutions in Seleukeia (157-165). The sad remnant of the Seleukid Empire only ruled western Iran and southern Mesopotamia by the end of the century, although at least those territories remained fanatically loyal, to say the least.

 

[Dachs]

The Emergence of Sophism

Whether the third century crisis in the Perseid Empire was a direct consequence of Sophism or not remains a fairly contentious scholarly debate. On the one hand, the Perseids did seem to be militarily exhausted by the end of the second century. The conquest of Africa was long, brutal, and bloody, and fighting with the Masaesylim and emergent Puno-Numidian warlords in Maqom Hadesh and Tiskat continued to prevent the region from being profitable. Fiscal problems had forced the empire to downgrade its military presence on the Danube, subcontracting out to groups like the Saurometai and the Markomanna. The civil war of the 170s certainly indicated that things could go pear-shaped, and quickly.

But at the same time, that civil war had not caused any security problems. The empire’s army remained larger than any of its immediate foes. None of the satrapies had any particular inclinations towards independence; gone were the days of using them as appanages for discarded members of the dynasty, and the days of creating mega-satrapies to “rationalize” government. There were no obvious fissiparous tensions. And, although the fiscal situation looked bleak, the economic situation was not: the introduction of new agribusiness to Africa (especially olive oil) especially promised good returns, ceteris paribus.

Before the 220s, the Perseid state had had a fairly relaxed attitude vis-à-vis religion. The emperor remained the focus of the state cult, but unlike in the Seleukid Empire, the cult was fairly rudimentary, predominating not in Greece but in Syria and Egypt. Much of the empire actually subscribed to various polytheistic beliefs, especially in Africa, or mystery religions. Dionysos was an old favorite in Anatolia, although the inhabitants of western Anatolia tended towards a revamped cult of Kybele. In much of Greece, an outgrowth of the Dionysiac mysteries centered on Athena – who facilitated the god’s resurrection – gained in popularity during the early period of the Perseid monarchy. Despite being rather similar to other mystery religions in its focus on a powerful female protagonist and on egalitarianism, the Athenaic mysteries had unusual pull in the Perseid army due to Athena’s recognized martial qualities; on top off the usual purification and communal feasting rituals, army clubs oriented around the mysteries tended to add in trials and sparring.

Sometime during the second century, the Athenaic mysteries began to change. By the 170s there were already references to a goddess Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, instead of merely Athena. Although worship of Sophia retained many of the rituals of the Athenaic mysteries – initiation by olive oil, communal meals, several of the same festival processions, much of the same liturgy – it was, notably, not actually a mystery religion: its rites were not secret, and did not become ‘more’ revealed as one ascended the tiers of the faithful, giving it a decidedly egalitarian flavor. Although the rituals were what tied the developing religion together, it did incorporate some holy texts, mostly hymns to the goddess in her various aspects, some of which had also been used by the earlier Athenaic mystery worshipers. It’s never been clear how demographically popular Sophism was in the early third century; while there are textual references to strong support in elements of the army, there were other units that very clearly opposed the introduction of the new religion, and of course rural life is a black hole of evidence. Estimates range anywhere from a tenth of the population of the Perseid Empire to a third, but all are just shots in the dark.

In 216, the Perseid prince Lysias was admitted into a Sophist worship group while in command of an army on campaign against the Markomanna in Dalmatia. This probably wouldn’t have led to anything had his two elder brothers not died in the massive plague (the Demetrian Plague, named after Lysias’ father, Demetrios II (r. 210-223), and hypothesized, probably incorrectly, to have been a bubonic plague) that struck the Mediterranean world in the late 210s. This catapulted Lysias into prominence rather rapidly as the new crown prince; when he ascended to the throne in 223, Sophism gained a tremendous opportunity. The new ruler quickly dispensed with the coin-types of his father and grandfather (the Makedonian – formerly Argead – sun-burst) and used Athena Alkis instead, a clear portent of the future. The following year, he orchestrated an ostentatious ceremony on the occasion of his marriage; for the ceremony, which took place on the akropolis, Lysias had his bride Anastasia costumed as the goddess herself. The act of ‘wooing’ Athena, let alone marrying her, had been a proverb for hybris since Demetrios Poliorketes in the third century BC, and in addition to Lysias’ obvious Sophist symbolic meaning behind the ceremony he seems to also have relished the pun. Within a few months, the Perseid ruler had launched an ambitious project to convene a synod to normalize and formalize Sophist ritual and establish a sort of state-church hierarchy to coordinate it all. The hierarchy that emerged was reliant on local synods of clergy, to meet yearly, each of which to send representatives to a general synod should one be called by the emperor to determine the outcome of doctrinal disputes. Interestingly, Lysias co-opted much of the priesthood of Athena into the Sophist clergy; although the rites had incorporated gender egalitarianism as far back as the days of the Athenaic mysteries, the fact that female ordination was now state-sanctioned had, according to many modern gender-studies scholars, an important impact on gender relations going forward.

Reportage on subsequent events was pretty heavily colored by future (largely Sophist) historians, who regarded the series of wars that followed Lysias’ flurry of Sophist activity to be iniquitous betrayal against the faithful, a reaction of the adherents of the Old Gods against progression, and all the other great stereotypes that have little or nothing to do with reality. It is true that the fighting pitted Sophists against non-Sophists, but, while not irrelevant, it had little to do with the causes of the fighting. The first war, the rebellion of Amyntas, satrap of Egypt, had more to do with fiscal-military problems. Egypt had always subsidized the rest of whatever empire it had belonged to. But the Demetrian Plague had ravaged the Perseid armies, especially in the Balkans, and with little fiscal capability to recruit, the last of the taxeis in Egypt were being withdrawn to shore up the northern defenses. And while the state adoption of Sophism itself may or may not have been an issue, the fact that it would mean an extension of central control over the outlying satrapies could only have meant trouble for Amyntas. So the Egyptian satrap kept the troops, declared himself king, and promptly (226) invaded Kyrenaia and the Levant.

Despite the parlous financial state of the Perseid Empire, Lysias – now with the epithet Sophophoros – had more than enough troops to crush the Egyptian rising. Early on, that’s precisely what happened. Despite the resistance of the Jewish community, Perseid forces crushed the Egyptians in Syria-Koile and rolled south to Pelousion. But Amyntas had been banking on foreign intervention, and he landed it: namely, an attack by Seleukos VII on Perseid possessions in Mesopotamia and Syria. Lysias had been forced to gamble that he could finish the Egyptians before any of the Perseids’ many enemies took note and, well, he lost. Still, the Perseid fortification belt in Syria was quite extensive and the Seleukids would take a long time to batter their way through it regardless of numerical superiority. Lysias simply went on the defensive in Ioudaia, shored up the Syrian defenses, and attacked Egypt navally. After an early victory over the extemporized Egyptian fleet off Paraitonion in 229, the Perseids more or less had the run of the coast, wreaking havoc on Egyptian commerce, although they failed in a descent on Alexandreia the following year.

But thick and fast they came at last, and more and more and more; with Lysias engaged in fighting a holding action in the east, the Qarthadastim took the opportunity to invade the (loosely Perseid- and Batroi-allied) Greek colonies in northeastern Iberia. The Massiliots, theoretically in charge of the league, were soon overwhelmed. With Ibero-Punic troops swarming through the Pyrenean passes, the Massiliots accepted Batroi “protection”. In addition, Punic-funded privateers launched a wave of raids on commerce, sparking a Perseid naval buildup. Synlekteinos, nesiarch of the western seas, interpreted his orders liberally and sailed his Perseid fleets into a confrontation with the Qarthadastim off Rusadir in 232. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be a trap (well, unsurprisingly to everybody but the nesiarch), resulting in the destruction of the Perseid western fleets, a gaping hole in the navy, and a state of war between the Perseids and the Qarthadastim.

Even the death of Lysias (239), at least initially, did not seriously damage the Perseid cause. He left behind an infant son (Theophilos), but his widow Anastasia dominated the regency council, and it seems that it was her diplomatic virtuosity that permitted the Perseids to successfully fob the Seleukids off with a few Mesopotamian fortresses. The queen mother, who had formed something of a political alliance with the general Achaios Didymikos, then organized yet another counteroffensive against Amyntas, which had succeeded in capturing Alexandreia and many of the Delta forts by 244. On the strength of this victory, Anastasia purged the regency council of her rivals and declared herself co-ruler with her son in 245, taking the epithet Theotropa (goddess-like). Divinity, unfortunately, did not provide her with immortality; her enemies regrouped and orchestrated a coup in 247, in which she and Didymikos were murdered, along with several of their supporters. It’s not clear that their successor on the regency council, Hermaios Neapolites, directly caused the military collapse that happened next; arguably the army in Egypt was already overextended on a fruitless campaign in the chora to try to hunt Amyntas down. But Hermaios’ rise did involve a lot of turnover at the top, and not merely from the coup itself: he was decidedly non-Sophist, and while he stopped far short of criminalizing the religion, he cut off state subsidies, removed many Sophists from public office and military positions, and generally inspired gratuitous opposition. Perhaps victories could have salved the wounds that Hermaios opened afresh in the Perseid polity, but those were in short supply.

With Seleukid connivance, the Khorkhoruni arkah Tigran II launched an invasion of Paralian Pontos in 251, taking advantage of unrest in the Perseid eastern armies. Since Trapezous was one of the few major centers of Sophist worship outside the Aegean littoral, elements of the Perseid army mutinied in order to protect the area, since Hermaios was unwilling to devote troops to its defense at the expense of Egypt. This only further fragmented Perseid central control. Something much worse happened in Italy. Hermaios – and, incidentally, the Anastasian regime – had both made agreements with the Batroi to keep Italy secure. In practice, this amounted to organized pillage in northern Italy, something that embittered the local populace against the Perseid rulers considerably. Hermaios, to his credit, recognized that that solution wasn’t working, and took the opportunity afforded by the collapse of Batroi power in northern Italy in the early 250s to restructure the Italian defenses. In what he probably thought was a cunning plan, he shored up the Italian army’s manpower with recruits from the Markomanna and the various Celts of the Po. And, for a time, it worked reasonably well. It was certainly cheaper than most of the alternatives.

The early 250s also saw the Perseid high tide in Egypt ebb. Amyntas’ 252 counteroffensive forced the Perseid forces in the Delta into battle at Letopolis and resulted in a crushing victory, after which much of the Delta forts, along with the key city of Leontopolis, fell back into Amyntid hands. Although the Perseids retained control of Alexandreia, along with the two gates to the country in Paraitonion and Pelousion, they were increasingly outnumbered by Egyptian forces. Amyntas, too, seemed to be getting more popular by the day, riding a wave of Coptic sentiment and playing pharaoh and basileus alternately with great success. Still, the Perseids had naval supremacy (albeit considerably diminished from the days before the Battle of Rusadir) and it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to expect them to be able to keep Alexandreia. But the garrison of the great city went over to Amyntas in 256, citing Hermaios’ tyranny and seeking better terms. (Apparently the issue of Sophism did not play a role in the defection.) The Egyptians triumphantly reentered the city and quickly began building up a fresh fleet to pry the remaining coastal Perseid garrisons out of their spider-holes.

The collapse of the Egyptian army was bad enough, but more defections abounded in Anatolia, where the ambitious general Menoikios Karikes rebelled in 255 and joined forces with the troops fighting against the Khorkhoruni in Pontos. Karikes quickly established control over virtually the entire peninsula and declared himself king of Phrygia, placing his capital at Ankyra. At least initially, he adroitly avoided the issue of Sophism by focusing on the threat of Hermaios and the Armenians. Combined with the farcical defense of Alexandreia, this was the last straw. With the connivance of the commanders of the army on the Danube, Theophilos – now twenty – launched a palace coup and deposed his regent in the spring of 257. Sophism was restored to its previous preeminence, and things settled down considerably, at least in Greece.

Of course, the situation in Egypt had not improved. The on-again off-again pirate war against the Qarthadastim was still going badly. Anatolia was still in the hands of a rebel. And in 258, most of Italy broke away from the empire after an apparent plot to get rid of some of Hermaios’ old partisans in the army backfired. The Markomanna, who had only made up a significant portion of the army in Italy for the past decade, were suddenly thrust into the spotlight as the most obvious new power brokers. One of the Markomannic officers in the army, ostensibly descended from the Somnonoz families that had briefly created an empire in the north back in the first century BC (another of those lovely foundation myths, of course, perhaps spiced with a bit of legitimate oral history) took power as king of the Markomanna, Etruscans, Latins, and Sabellians (the full title almost certainly being a later invention as well on the grounds that it’s an anachronistic mouthful). This Hermerikos seems to have had significant success in welding the military into an entity with a more or less unified ethnicity – regardless of initial ethnicity – separate from civilians, who continued to identify as Latin, Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, or what have you. At any rate, Perseid authority in Italy collapsed almost completely, with only Campania and Brettia at least raising local militias in support of the Theophilan regime.

In 259, with the twenty years’ peace concluded between the Seleukids and the Perseids at an end, Seleukos VII, now an old man, chose to invade the tenuous Perseid territories in Syria once again. This time, it was basically a walk in the park: the Perseids simply didn’t have troops there anymore in any real numbers. Seleukos faced most of his opposition from the Phrygians, who attempted to bar the Kilikian Gates, and from the Egyptians, who had launched an all-out drive to secure Syria-Koile once again. The Perseids left them to scrap amongst themselves; instead, Theophilos worked to strengthen the defenses of Kypros and Kyrenaia, rebuild the navy, and ensure control of Africa. Apparently it was also under his reign that the army posts on the Danube were moved back south to the Haimos; certainly the few major settlements north of the Haimos were increasingly depopulated starting between the 240s and the 260s, and security threats from the Saurometai to the north may very well have played a role in those abandonments. In addition, military pay was slashed, both in overall terms – increasing reliance on seasonal mercenaries over long-service professionals – and in terms of the physical salaries paid to soldiers. Troop quality was kept up by making up the difference in cash salary with payment in kind, at least part of which was a regular state issue of weapons and armor. Retrenchment was the order of the day.

Theophilos mostly restricted his campaigning to naval affairs, descents on the Levantine and Egyptian coasts, securing the Aegean, and so forth. Menoikios’ successor as king of Phrygia, Timarchos, fought a naval war for control of the Hellespont with the Perseids, in which the Anatolian fleets were ultimately worsted in a long war of attrition. Theophilos carefully husbanded his resources, and only launched limited counteroffensives aimed at recapturing coastal territory that was easily defensible. In this way Bithynia, Mysia, and Aiolis were recovered in the late 260s. Timarchos finally backed out of the fighting in 268, and soon made peace with the Seleukids on the line of the Taurus. It took much longer to end the Armenian war, but eventually (273) the Paralian cities were split down the middle between the two countries, with Trapezous going to the Khorkhoruni. The Perseids managed to hold on to Campania and the other Greek colonial cities in southern Italy, and came to an accord with the Markomanna in 269. And finally, the Seleukid wars with the Egyptians petered out in the mid-270s, with the Seleukids in control of Ioudaia and Amyntas II (who ascended the throne in 271) forced back to Pelousion.

The last gasp of the so-called Sophist Wars was in fact in Africa. Already by the 270s, Africa had been given a great deal of autonomy, due to the decreased ability of the authorities in Athens to remain in mutual contact with Palaiopolis. Theophilos had correctly judged his man when he appointed Epikrates Gazikos to an extraordinary super-satrapal command over Africa back in 260, but in 274, Gazikos died, and one of his (non-Sophist) officers, Niketas Heraios, displaced the other (loyal, Sophist) officers and satraps to seize control of Perseid Africa, along with the Perseid fleet. Niketas fought a naval war with Theophilos for seven years before mutual exhaustion ended the fighting; Perseid forces successfully repelled invasions of Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily to at least retain a shell of the old western empire.

Usually, the Sophist Wars are held to have ended in that year, 281, having lasted, on and off, for fifty-five years and cost the Perseid Empire countless lives and most of its territory. All other classical conflicts pale in comparison. Estimates of millions dead from both the wars and the preceding Demetrian Plague are not far-fetched at all. Yet attempting to fit this into a long-term narrative about the state of power in the Mediterranean, or snide comments about what the growing popularity of Sophism meant about Sophists’ and non-Sophists’ “moral fiber” or somesuch would be silly. The events that followed are best viewed on their own terms, and on the terms of the people living at the time.

Compared to the cataclysmic events in the Mediterranean, most other occurrences seem pointless or, at best, sideshows. But for some states, even those peripherally engaged in the fighting, the Sophist Wars themselves were secondary concerns. The Qarthadastim, for instance, found themselves locked in ferocious fighting with an emergent Gallaecian group called the Namorannan. Funded by the exploitation of mining in northern Iberia, the Namorannan developed a sort of high-kingship and united many of the Gallaecians and Celtiberians against the Qarthadastim. They recaptured Numantia, although its site was barely inhabited at that point, in 253, crushed Punic forces on the Tagos two years later, and sacked Gader in 258. The crisis did much to strengthen the civic advisory council against the kings (specifically, in this case, Himilco II) and ultimately, with the aid of stolid urban militias, the Namorannan were held back. Most of the Tagos valley was lost for the foreseeable future, though. Further constitutional crises portended in the 270s when the partially autonomous Greek poleis of the northeast – especially Emporion – fell into stasis over the question of demanding exclusion from the council and a more direct line to royal authority, or inclusion. Ultimately (by the end of the decade) they opted for the former, but not without considerable bloodshed.

During the 250s and 260s, the Batroi suffered a severe breakdown in their ability to maintain the hegemony they had built up over Gaul. The Tasciovanid dynasty (184-270) initially had attempted centralizing reforms, but apparently fell foul of vested military interests and the shamanistic and enigmatic druids, although the reasons for why this happened remain unclear: the only sources are Qarthadastim and Greek ones, and they differ rather dramatically (some even alleging, ridiculously, that Mulgotoros, the ruler of the Batroi in the 230s, fought the druids because he wanted to introduce Sophism!) and are generally unreliable anyway. Whatever the reason, the Batroi became embroiled in a series of bloody civil wars that badly fractured the state and may have virtually destroyed the traditional religious structure of Gaulish society. The next real description of Gaulish religion dates to 303 and emphasized two popular belief systems: a sort of ascended cult of Cernunnos and imported Sophism via Massalia, with little mention of polytheism or druids. In political terms, of course, the centralization reforms badly backfired; several territories practically seceded and seem to have been referred to as independent ‘tribes’, the most important of which were the Sequa of eastern Gaul and Salya of southern Gaul, the latter of which conquered northern Italy in the confusion left in the wake of the Markomanna and established a strong independent power base for itself. In addition, a major Belgic agglomeration began to emerge in the north, apparently going under the (classicizing?) name of the Ambianoi.

The Seleukids probably underperformed during the single worst crisis to hit the Perseid Empire since…well, ever. While they did manage to seize the Levant and Syria, there has been a consistent feeling among historians that they missed a shot at even more than that – a feeling arguably started by the (probably fourth-century) anonymous author of the (speculative title) Lives of the Later Seleukid Kings. Perhaps that might be the case, but Seleukos VII kept what he had, made the gains he could when he could, didn’t shake things up too much, and generally ran a tight ship. It’s clear that, under his leadership, the Seleukids dealt with the fallout from the plague much more effectively than did their western neighbors. And the dating is uncertain, but Seleukos might also have been the one to recover central and southern Iran; most scholars would date that event to the 290s, based on the Karmanian coin-hoard find in 1962, but there are decent arguments for the 270s as well. At any rate, aside from the intermittently furious fighting in the west, the Seleukids enjoyed a relatively quiet period, for once.

The 270s were far from quiet for the Baktrians, though, who finally saw their central Asiatic hegemony evaporate into thin air with the arrival of the Yancai. Theories about their appearance run the gamut from bog-standard tropes such as climate patterns changing and necessitating a move to, quite literally, greener pastures, to slightly more developed theses about Baktrian army experiments (in the institutional sense, not the medical sense) gone wrong. It is not clear how they gained predominance north of the Iaxartes, much less the steps between the dissolution of the Wusun and their own ascendancy. Their first textual appearance appears to be in the correspondence of Atrosokes, a notable of Antiocheia in Margiane (fl. 260s-290s), who describes a state of war and systematic raids as a normal fact of life in 273, giving little information as to how the fighting actually started. (His earlier writings are of more interest for describing the conflict between Zoroastrianism, of which he was an adherent – his name is practically proof of that – and the cult of Artemis-Anahita, which apparently sparked gang warfare in Baktra and Antiocheia-Margiane. State Buddhism apparently had little reach that far west, although it was quite strong in Drangiane and Areia, and slightly less so in Baktria proper.) Later works, such as the aforementioned Lives, offer up implausible or clichéd stories about tribal betrayals, assassinations, or even a hunting chase gone wrong.

At any rate, Atrosokes described the then-current state of affairs in the early 270s and then the rather sudden turn towards an offensive campaign when a new chieftain, Borgoros, was able to assert greater control over the Yancai confederate tribes. In 277 the Yancai captured Demetrias and kept it, apparently with the connivance of the inhabitants; in the following year, apparently, Borgoros began to set himself up as a Greek-style king. His offensive campaigns accelerated as the Eupatrid state continued to break down. Belatedly, Antialkidas II moved the imperial residence back to Baktra, and began to shore up the field armies north of the Hindu Kush, but it was too little, too late. In 280, Borgoros won a decisive victory against the Eupatrid forces at Stratopolis, during the course of which Antialkidas was assassinated by one of his own generals. In the sequel, the Yancai moved against several Baktrian cities simultaneously (including Antiocheia-Margiane) and by the end of the next year were preparing for the epic siege of Baktra itself.

In India during the relevant decades, there was generally more of the same. While the western ksatrapas were no longer the potent threat they had been a century before under Dhimmiyaka, they still annoyed everybody to the extent that the carrot-and-stick approach employed by Narayana, first notable ruler of the Kanva dynasty, succeeded in unifying Magadha by 268. And, predictably, the ksatrapas had precisely the opposite effect on the Satavahanas, who continued to muddle around semi-competently and fail to really shore up the foundations of the state. The threat of Kanva expansionist power did, however, allow the Pallavas to establish a sort of protectorate over Kalinga during the 270s. Of slightly more interest were the renewed efforts at Buddhist proselytization, which may or may not have been state-sponsored by the Eupatrids. Apparently disagreements over the construction of a stupa in Ujjain led to a serious dispute between the local ksatrapa, one Vaskusana, and the Eupatrids, who dispatched an plenipotentiary named Aryandes to resolve it, but the only information we have is a badly defaced inscription left by Aryandes on the occasion of the resolution of the crisis, however it turned out.

China, on the other hand, became decidedly more bipolar with the extinguishment of the Qi in 254 after a six-year campaign. The Wei, who grabbed the lion’s share of the prize, soon began preparing a massive invasion fleet to cross the Chang Jiang and bring the war to the south. But the architect of the plan, Wei Xuanwudi, died of what may have been a massive stroke in 257, and the invasion was put off indefinitely. His successor, Xiaowendi, mostly let the war with Shen bog down in desultory fighting in Ba. The Shen responded by creating a system of decentralized military governorships in Ba, the Western Commanderies, as a way of hermetically sealing the area and limiting the financial and military costs of fighting (and also easing the burden on the badly overworked and understaffed bureaucracy). By the 280s, the generals in the west had pretty much pushed the Wei back out of Shu and Ba.

 

[Dachs]

The Last Seventy Years

In contrast to the preceding several decades, the major geopolitical events of the late third century occurred in Central Asia. As previously noted, the Yancai had dealt a very serious blow to the Eupatrid Baktrian state; in 280 the chieftain Borgoros had crushed a Eupatrid army at Stratopolis and conquered several of the region’s greatest cities, and in 282 he finally descended on Baktra itself.

Of all the cities of the old Seleukid Empire, Baktra was probably the most well-defended. The historian Hipparchos Mysiakes’ account of Antiochos Megas’ great siege of the city after the Battle of the Areios River was still the archetype of epic warfare scenes in Hellenistic historical literature (and, as was the custom for Hellenistic historians, they frequently cribbed from Hipparchos’ writing when describing any other great sieges). The 282 siege also promised to be epic. Baktra’s massive circuit walls and multiple lines of defense would have made it impregnable so long as there was a field army to cover the city, but the Eupatrid field army had been utterly annihilated and the situation in India was bad enough to prevent a fresh one from being sent. To all intents and purposes, the Baktrians were on their own, and that was the only thing that really gave the Yancai a shot at taking the city.

The assassination of Antialkidas II in 280 had pretty much wiped out the Eupatrid dynasty; he had been twenty-four, and had no issue. Competing cousins had soon raised armies in India to battle each other over the real core of the empire; the dust hadn’t fully settled by 282, but it looked like Triballos I was going to win, as he had control of virtually everything important south of the Hindu Kush save Mathura. Accordingly, Lykomedes Areios, the ranking officer at Baktra, sent Triballos a letter asking for aid against the Yancai. No copy of the imperial response has ever been recovered, but it was paraphrased by the author of the Lives of the Later Seleukid Kings as “look to your own devices”.

With that in mind, Lykomedes prepared his defense. Much of the remaining story comes through the correspondence of Atrosokes of Antiocheia-Margiane, who was employed as a translator and diplomat by Borgoros and who was present at the siege for nearly its entire ten-month length. Atrosokes gave particular attention to the ability of the Yancai to construct siege engines, a capability he said had never been demonstrated by the steppe people before. He attributed this ability to Greek engineers, but the only engineer he ever named (Sambidos) clearly had a non-Greek name. At any rate, the Yancai clearly had the ability to press the attack and not wait until the city starved or ran out of water. The problem, as usual, was converting theory into reality. Lykomedes mounted a very active defense and the defenders were able to consistently sabotage Borgoros’ siege engines. By late summer, the Yancai had been delayed for so long at so high a cost in lives that the Greeks had managed to collect a motley army in Areia, further south, and planned to counterattack, with the barbarians so weak from wasting their troops against Baktra’s walls.

Ultimately, the plan came to nothing. The Areian army was too fractious to get much of anything done, and after the withdrawal of one of the key supporters, the general Alexandros Anassaios, the relief force was smashed by Yancai raiders. When the Yancai finally seized control of a section of the walls and managed to hold onto it for several days, the end was obviously at hand. The siege quickly degenerated into unorganized, sporadic, yet vicious resistance, along with disjointed attempts at surrender and general chaos. Several fires started, apparently by accident, and of course they ran out of control and destroyed large chunks of the city. It was, in no uncertain terms, an unholy mess. But by the end of it, the Yancai were in control, and had begun to sweep south to annihilate what was left of the Greek resistance.

Yet that didn’t happen, for a variety of reasons. Borgoros soon had to deal with armed resistance in the previously-pacified north of the country, which diverted many of his forces. Geographically, southern Baktria was much less congenial to his army than was the north. In the myriad of small mountain passes, Greek forces could mount a long, determined resistance against dramatically greater numbers and succeed. Most importantly, though, the south seemed to not be worth it. The failed relief effort had seemingly proved that Greek Baktria was a spent force. It would be pointless to waste even more troops on such a clearly beaten enemy.

In the years immediately following the fall of Baktra, Borgoros spent his time setting up collaborationist warlords over much of northern Baktria. The Yancai themselves withdrew to the north, beyond the Iaxartes. Many of them were settled on old Greek katoikiai; Borgoros himself ruled from Demetrias-Chach (frequently, from that point on, referred to as Zheshi in the only – Chinese – chronicles that talked about the place with any regularity). In the 290s, he bestirred himself to assault the trading towns of the Tarim Basin, ending the power vacuum that had persisted in the area since the departure of the Yuezhi a few centuries before. They all submitted under varying levels of autonomy before Borgoros died in 297.

The decision to ignore the hill-towns of Drangiane, south of Areia, has been rehashed countless times in various fora. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was popular to deride Borgoros as an indolent fool who ignored the potential threat of allowing one’s enemy time to regroup. Most modern historians would tend to disagree. For one thing, there never were all that many Yancai, and a lot of the ones that Borgoros did have were killed in the assault on Baktra. For another, as previously noted, a campaign against the Greeks of the south would not be anything close to a walkover, for reasons of terrain and the nature of the Yancai army. In addition, Borgoros did not have the unquestioned authority over the Yancai that, for instance, Triballos I had over the Greeks of India; he couldn’t simply order the steppe warriors to undertake a campaign for little loot against a nonthreatening enemy far from their home base and from the terrain congenial to their mounts.

And, to be honest, Borgoros, had he made his decision based on those reasons, would have been right. The Greeks that collected in Drangiane during the 280s had little money, few soldiers, few citizens of any kind, and were politically divided. Initially, the region was governed by a fractious synod of military leaders, the bouleutai of Prophthasia, and some of the Buddhist priesthood. This formula soon proved to be a terrible idea, as the synod merely served as a forum for enhancing mutual disagreements over a future course of action. There was one semi-beneficial side effect – the infighting caused a general rise in the size of the military forces at the Greeks’ disposal – but since they weren’t being turned against anyone, and were of dubious-to-poor quality for offensive actions anyway, that mattered little. And it was hard for anyone stuck in that hellhole to see the big picture behind the piles of corpses.

It was hardly as though the Greeks of India were coming to help. Triballos I’s civil war, appropriately enough, had gone somewhat off the rails after the early 280s. His sole opponent, at the time of the siege of Baktra, had been his cousin Sosipatros, who had been holed up at Mathura. But in 284, as Triballos prepared to launch his final offensive, Sosipatros sought the aid of the Kanva ruler Susarman, who made Mathura into a protectorate and invaded up the Ganges. Susarman’s armies were backed up by many of the Kamboja warriors of the ksatrapal armies, some hired out as mercenaries, some as allies. They dealt Triballos’ army a severe blow on the Yamuna River in 286 and pushed north into Greek Kulindrene. Although Triballos’ generals were apparently able to arrest the collapse of the eastern defenses, a new rebellion erupted further south, in Patalene, assisted by the satrap of Gedrosia (who had de facto seceded sometime between 270 and 282). Much of the fighting stabilized south of Kulindrene, centering around the fortress-colony of Machetopolis, apart from one attempt by the Greek general Nikeratos Kapisaios to break the stalemate by attacking Saketa in 293, but he was defeated and eventually, sometime between 295 and 298, hostilities ended. Triballos was able to crush the Patalan uprising, although Gedrosia remained out of his reach; he soon turned his attention to the competition for the loyalty and/or control of the ksatrapas, who now seemed to be a military resource worth exploiting.

The Seleukids, who were at least a potential contender in the region, also did not attempt to use the opportunity to establish dominance over the Drangianan Greeks. For one thing, the Areians were awfully puny and unimportant. More importantly, though, Antiochos IX was campaigning in the west. After achieving his majority in 296, he spent about two years purging the priestly bureaucracy and the military of his various opponents, then promptly embarked on a war with Phrygia. The Phrygians had failed to really stabilize their state in the fifty years since its inception. In the 290s alone they had already lost two wars, one with the Khorkhoruni over the Paralian cities (in which they ceded most of their remaining share of the region) and one with the Perseids over Karia, Lykia, and Pamphylia (in which they lost control of the area entirely, including Attaleia). And initially, the Phrygians broke before the Seleukid onslaught as well, yielding virtually all of Kappadokia and then losing Galatia as well.

In 301, the Phrygian king Klearchos was assassinated, ending the reign of the Menoikian dynasty in Anatolia. A cabal of generals seized power and attempted to make peace with the Seleukids, offering submission to the imperial ruler cult in exchange for satrapal autonomy. To buttress their peace efforts, they launched a campaign of persecution in western Anatolia against the Sophist community in the region. This was probably not their best move, as it brought immediate Perseid retaliation, in the form of an invading army that captured Ankyra and deposed the cabal. The Perseid emperor, Diodotos II, sent his second son Pantaleon to Anatolia to be made a Sophist sub-king of Phrygia, with instructions to shore up the defenses and proselytize the true faith. One of the two missions was hard enough to accomplish as it was; both of them at the same time were nearly impossible, but Pantaleon did a decent job, aided by the Phrygian Sophist statesman and philosopher Hermodoros and the Perseid officer Leosthenes Pagasaios. A drawn battle at Taouion in 304 prevented the Seleukids from pushing beyond Kappadokia; ultimately, by the peace of Ariaratheia in 306, the Perseids and the Seleukids split the Phrygian state more or less in half, with the Perseid half remaining autonomous under Pantaleon.

Outside of the Phrygian intervention, the Perseids under the Three Diodotoi (286-322) were relatively quiet in foreign affairs. Diodotos I inherited an utterly abysmal budget from Theophilos, despite the latter’s military reforms, and ended up following a fairly strict spending regimen. His son was slightly more profligate, having to cover the costs of the Phrygian war, but still didn’t splurge at all. While the period was one of retrenchment and consolidation in the fiscal sphere, though, it was a more dynamic one in religious matters. Disputes broke out over the nature of the initiation (on subjects ranging from the mundane – what sort of olive oil to use – to the pressing – what, precisely, the delineation between uninitiated and initiated was) and over the ecclesiastical governance of synods outside the Perseid Empire. Many of them were solved by the ecumenical synod on the Pnyx in 317 (held in the massive temple built there under Lysias), but concerns over extraimperial synodal governance sparked civil unrest on Cyprus in 319 that required armed force to put down.

It was only in the 320s that the extension of Perseid power into the Black Sea really accelerated. Although it had been a semi-continuous process for decades prior, expansion was hampered by the problem of just how to go about it. During the Sophist Wars, the Perseid Black Sea coastline cities had effectively seceded, as had several cities in Bithynia. Some of these had been reclaimed by Theophilos during the 260s (namely, Byzantion and the Bithynian poleis), and due to military exigency, they had been assigned a semi-separate allied status. In the 280s, some of the Lesser Skythian poleis along the coast south of the Danube also joined due to Sophist proselytization. Diodotos III had initiated some abortive contacts with the Bosporan cities, but nothing of substance resulted from them until after he died. His son, Perseus IV Aniketos, made the Black Sea the cornerstone of his foreign policy. With the aid of the large financial reserve his ancestors had built up, Perseus constructed a sizable fleet to buttress his policy, and began to build up a network of “Friends” (philoi) in the key Bosporan cities.

Of course, in some respects this bent to Perseid policy was inevitable. With the collapse of many of the Mediterranean trade routes in the mid-third century, many Greek merchants had gone seeking alternative markets, and the relatively isolated (and therefore, relatively wealthy) Bosporan cities had been one of the first areas targeted. With trade went the spread of religions; there were non-negligible Sophist communities in Olbia, Pantikapaion, and Phanagoria already by 300, and a temple to Sophia in Chersonesos seems to date from about 315 (although the inscription has been badly damaged). Still, despite the tangible ties, nothing would have come of them without some sort of concerted political effort. And, as it happened, even that was nearly not enough.

But as it happened, turmoil in the steppe aided Perseus’ expansionary plans considerably. According to the eminent (and Greek-polytheistic) historian Dioskourides Edessaios, political restructuring in the steppe during the 310s produced groups of winners and losers; by the mid-320s, some of the losers ended up north of the Bosporan cities and started raiding widely. According to Dioskourides, these barbarians were Saka, a description that has been widely regarded as a classicization but, given the similarity between the few named leaders he mentions and Saka names of the third century BC, not out of the question. (One that pops up frequently is Azilises, a Grecification of ayilisa, “commander-in-chief”; another, Spalahores, is close to the word for “army commander”.) These Saka, at any rate, provided a convenient stick; Perseus was quick to dangle carrots. By 328, all of the Bosporan cities had made bilateral agreements with the Perseids. The struggle with these neo-Saka took considerably longer, but after a seesaw war the Perseid troops finally succeeded in trapping a large proportion of the Saka in a swamp near Gorgippia in 336. Many of the Saka were slaughtered, and a significant portion of the remainder surrendered and was enrolled in the Perseid military.

That same steppe disturbance that produced the Saka invasions resulted in a coalescence of tribes around the enigmatic Hephthalitai (Chinese Yanda or Uar), variously identified with the Yuezhi, Sogdians, and a group north of China during the Han period called the Hoa. Sometime in the late 320s, they began to fight a war with the Yancai over Chorasmia; by 332, the Yancai had clearly lost, and were forced to enlist the aid of their Baktrian Greek vassals in defending Margiane and Sogdiane. Fortunately for the Yancai, the conquest of Chorasmia brought the Hephthalitai in conflict with the Hyrkanians as well; unfortunately, that did not seem to slow them down at all. Even worse, in 335 the Drangianan Greeks finally bestirred themselves. The fractious synod finally managed to agree to send an army north to liberate the rest of Areia (and then, perhaps, even Baktria itself). This army, under the command of the notable Telephos, stumbled its way north, and probably would’ve been annihilated by any concerted resistance by the Yancai or their puppets – but since none appeared, Telephos soon found himself in control of Areia.

Of course, the loss of Areia mattered little to the Chorasmian war; the Yancai couldn’t be bothered to get the place back, and Telephos’ army was far from a threat after securing Alexandreia-Ariana (indeed, it only existed on paper at that point). But it mattered a great deal for the internal politics of the Drangianan Greeks. Telephos soon (338) launched a coup d’état with the resources of his new conquests, overthrowing the synod and establishing himself as king (taking the title Nikephoros, in the old tradition of pint-pot conquerors giving themselves over-the-top titles). He soon began making plans to encourage resettlement by Buddhist Greeks living under the rule of some of the Zoroastrian rulers of northern Baktria to increase the tax base and fulfill manpower needs.

It was not until 337 that the Hephthalitai finally made a breakthrough in the war by crushing the Hyrkanians at the Battle of the Atrek River. Within a year, the Hyrkanians had submitted as a Hephthalite protectorate, and the invaders quickly turned their full forces against the Yancai. But by then, the Yancai had finally tapped into their main advantage, manpower (in the form of their Greek puppets, anyway). Despite losing battles on the Ochos and at Sousia, the Yancai managed to bleed the Hephthalitai badly enough for them to wind up the invasion. Intermittent raiding continued, of course, but there were few concerted invasions and in general things returned to ‘normal’ in Central Asia. Around 347, things began to heat up again, as the Yancai were forced to deal with Tiele raiding in the Tarim Basin, but as of 350 nothing had come of it.

The early fourth century was not a good time for the Wei, who had been on the cusp of total victory in China a scant few decades before. Wei Xiaowendi had tacitly agreed to the loss of Shu and Ba to the Western Commanderies; his son and grandson, who lacked for martial vigor themselves, soon found themselves hard pressed to deal with invasions from the north by the Xianbei. A more systemic explanation for the military defeats that the Wei soon sustained was simple military exhaustion. Their army remained effectively based on the same system of steppe levies that it had been ever since they were just the Yuezhi, and their manpower reserves had run dangerously low. To counter this, Xiaozhuangdi, Xiaowendi’s grandson (r. 311-325), began to try to use Xianbei and Tujue steppe tribes as disposable manpower. This backfired badly in 321 when the Tujue in charge of the mouth of the Huanghe rebelled. Within a year, they had created the state of Lü and (successfully) sought Shen protection. The Wei sustained a further blow in 323 when they lost control of the Ordos to the Xianbei; four years later, several Xianbei tribes pulled together and formed the state of Xia. The secessions piled on one after the other; more Tujue in the furthest eastern part of the Wei domains rebelled and formed the state of Yan in 330, and the army of Yuezhi sent to defeat them rebelled under its commander Bodiao and seized control of Luoyang the following year; Bodiao in turn founded a new dynasty of his own, the Liang.

The Shen did a remarkably poor job of taking advantage of this sudden Wei collapse, aside from gaining the allegiance of Lü. For one thing, much of the Shen army was in fact uselessly hanging out in Ba and Shu under the Western Commanderies, and there was zero prospect of getting it back. The feeble attempts to invade the Central Plains that the Shen did make were therefore easily repulsed by the Wei and, later, the Liang. Some scholars have attributed the failures of the Shen at attracting any defections from the Yuezhi warriors of the Wei to a sort of backfiring protonationalism, but that is probably placing a far-too-heavy burden on the sources. Attempts to find the solution in some sort of tactical malaise, with the Shen unable to figure out a counter to the heavily armed Yuezhi horse-archers, are better suited to the nineteenth century than to modern scholarship; the Shen armies were able to win victories on the tactical offensive and defensive, but simply failed to convert these victories into any sort of lasting advantage.

After 332, the pendulum began to swing the other way for the Wei. (Har.) The consolidation of Tiele tribes into a single confederacy meant that they had a one-time influx of new skilled recruits (i.e. the losers from the Tiele political struggle), and Wei Wuchengdi (r. 333-348) put them to good use. Some of the losses sustained against the Xia and Liang were reversed by vigorous campaigning in the Ordos. Alarmed by this Wei revival, the Xia and Liang formed a coalition with the goal of reversing these past defeats and putting paid to the Wei once and for all, but Wuchengdi crushed his two opponents in the Five Great Campaigns (336-340), which culminated in victory at the Battle of Hezhong. For much of the remaining decade, Wuchengdi focused on military reforms and on building a tenuous alliance with the Yan, who had carved themselves a sizable empire in Korea and were looking to expand further west. As the 340s ended, it appeared that the Wei were ready for military protagonism once again.

 

[Dachs]

After Triballos I, the Greeks of India (hereafter referred to as the state of Kaspeireia, since that was the region of heaviest Greek settlement and the location of the capital, Boukephala) spent a few decades in introspection. The main goal of Triballos II was defense, and to that end he created a chain of military governorates in the Hindu Kush to bar the way against any Yancai or Areian attack. (It speaks volumes about the Kaspeireians’ lack of knowledge about the west that they thought that such an attack was even possible for either of those powers.) He also cut and ran after losing a brief war with the Kanva-allied ksatrapas in the Thar Desert, ceding a belt of more or less useless territory. His early death from plague in 321 brought his widow, Isidora, to the forefront of government. After crushing an attempt by some of the Buddhist clergy of Boukephala and Sagala to launch a coup and replace her with the more pliable general Kallisthenes, Isidora embarked on a series of brief, low-risk, low-reward offensive campaigns in the south. In 327 her forces forced Gedrosia back into the fold, and from 328 to 335 the Kaspeireians forced several of the Surastran Greek trading ports back into alliance. This latter action, as it happened, was the final straw for the ailing Satavahanas (see below), but in the short run it helped the Kaspeireian fisc tremendously. Isidora took that opportunity to make use of the trend towards mercenary organizations in northern India, sponsoring the creation of Indian-style “guilds” as useful auxiliaries to the Kaspeireian army.

The Satavahana collapse had long been foretold, but took bloody freakin forever to actually happen. In 336, faced with impending financial disaster due to the Kaspeireian control over the ports of Surastrene, Vashishtiputra Satakarni cut the standard issue of gifts to many of his feudatories. Predictably, this kicked off a massive rebellion throughout Maharashtra. The Pallavas took advantage of the infighting by seizing several frontier territories, but the main threat was the rebels themselves, led by the Vakataka clan, which crushed the sad remnant of the Satavahana army and, by 339, had seized the capital, Pratisthana, and demolished it. The Vakatakas soon turned this large new army against their immediate neighbors. They ran up against Isidora’s large new mercenary-bolstered army and suffered a key defeat at Barygaza, weakening the force of their attack on the Pallavas. The furious fighting was over nearly as soon as it started, with the Vakatakas managing to reclaim most of the territories that the Satavahanas had held in the previous decade, but ultimately coming up short of full recovery. Their military buildup did not cease in the meantime, though, and by 350 India was bracing for another Vakataka mass invasion.

Further west, the Seleukids found themselves in much the same position as the Yancai. A promising start to the fourth century – the conquest of much of Anatolia, for instance – turned nasty rather quickly upon the ascension of Alexandros IV in 312. As a relatively young emperor, he was soon the target of a coalition between Amyntid Egypt and the aging sub-king Pantaleon of Phrygia; even the Khorkhoruni jumped in. Aided by an alliance with the Banu Qassam, a key clan of Jewish Arabs in the northern Hijaz, the Egyptians did the worst damage, rolling through Ioudaia from 314 to 318 and crushing Alexandros IV’s personally-led army at the Battle of Orthosia in 317. Alexandros soon faced rebellions in both Anatolia and Iran, and was forced to defuse them by increasing satrapal autonomy in those areas, a move that temporarily arrested military defeat in Phrygia (where Pantaleon’s gains were rather modest compared to the impressive Egyptian victories further south) but was probably going to end up biting the Seleukids in the ass sometime later. Still, Alexandros managed to retain Syria-Koile after a particularly inspired bit of campaigning by his general, Achaios Elymaikos, and managed to successfully back out of the war with a shred of honor intact in 323, although the price ended up being Ioudaia, Phoenike, and a hefty indemnity.

He promptly busied himself with restoring Seleukid military power and fiscal solvency; unfortunately, his methods of doing so included such desperate measures as raiding non-state temples, which brought him into conflict with the Seleukids’ Jewish community (usually a fairly stalwart supporter of the emperors). He was assassinated in 325, and the regency council for his son, Seleukos X, was a stereotypically ramshackle, unstable affair that ended up resulting in a civil war (327-332) between Achaios and the other regents; Achaios won, but his victory was a hollow one and the country ended up even more of a mess. Worse, the increasingly autonomous Upper Satraps and Anatolian Satraps had more or less continuously plotted with the Khorkhoruni nakharars to intervene, frequently switching sides and generally making a pig’s breakfast of the whole thing. Achaios’ troubled regency finally ended voluntarily in 338, but his erstwhile nakharar allies invaded Seleukid Media anyway, seeking compensations of some kind from Seleukos X. Embarrassingly, the army couldn’t even stand up to the Armenians, and in 341 Seleukos was forced to yield Adiabene in the humiliating Peace of Arbela. A punitive expedition into the Upper Satrapies to restore imperial prestige and unseat the overweening satrap of Khoarene, Pherekles, ended in a draw (effectively failure) in 344. Over the next several years, Seleukos lurched from project to unsuccessful project, attempting to recover a semblance of honor or power. Of course, he failed to really do so, and his successor was left in 349 with a nearly empty treasury, an atrociously bad military, mutinous satraps, and greedy neighbors. Yet, on some level, the feeling has persisted that the Seleukid state is simply too big and too old to fail. That might even be true.

By comparison, Amyntid Egypt was everything that the Seleukids were not: quietly successful and more or less politically unified. Under Amyntas III (r. 308-343) Egypt gained a considerable swath of territory in the Levant, successfully intervened in the south (setting up a federate monarchy in Makouria), and improved its budgetary and infrastructural situation. The Mediterranean fleet was rebuilt, and while it still didn’t rival the Perseid navy in size, it came close in terms of quality. But just like its eastern neighbor, the Amyntid Empire was shot through with serious flaws. The most obvious were religious: Egypt was a mishmash of more or less every creed in the area. Jews made up a sizable minority in most of the country, especially the urban areas, and they were always more loyal to the Seleukids than to anybody else. (Irritatingly, the Banu Qassam began “asking” for the ability to rule Jerusalem shortly after it was captured in 314. The question, never really answered, increasingly caused a rift between the Egyptians and their allies.) In addition, the Sophist Question remained unresolved. Amyntas II and III had avoided persecution of the Sophist community, but they had paid the price for it: the notoriously rowdy Alexandreian mob went after state forces as often as it attacked Jews or Sophists during the first half of the fourth century. And it was not merely a problem in Alexandreia: Sophists made up large proportions of the population in Paraitonion, Leontopolis, and Helioupolis as well. Even Buddhism and Zoroastrianism had made appearances, although they were mostly concentrated in the Red Sea ports. There were other problems, too: a stagnating (not) declining) economy, a general decline in literacy among the aristocracy, linguistic regionalization along the Nile (making Coptic Egypt rather more of a Sprachraum), and a general lack of experience and professionalism in the army. Again, these statements only temper the appraisal of a period that was as much of a golden age as a medium sized power can be expected to have.

The measured expansion of the Perseids under Perseus IV in the 320s and 330s gave way in the early 340s to a minor military disaster. Italy had long been neglected by the Perseids, especially since the territories that they held in the south were really just the coastal stretches and little else. And to their gratification, the Markomanna had as much trouble holding the fractious peninsula together as they themselves had. The Markomannic king Rhaos, who ascended to power in 339, had unusual success in beating the rebelliousness out of most of the peninsula. Indeed, Rhaos’ early purges had so alarmed Perseus IV that he strengthened the Italian field army for the first time in decades. (Historians have put together a wild series of speculations about Rhaos’ power base in decentralized, divided Italy, with the most popular answer being the support of the powerful Marcelli, who owned major estates in the north and west.) But Perseus, who was prone to epilepsy, died during one of his seizures in 342, and Rhaos immediately saw an opening for an invasion. He attacked Campania in 343 and seized control of most of it easily, crushing the local outposts at Nola. Perseus’ nephew and successor, Theodotos, personally led the Italian army, plus reinforcements, in a counteroffensive in southern Campania in 345, but Rhaos managed to trap the Perseid army at Stabiai and crush it. Theodotos managed to flee, but he was unable to devise any alternative means of reclaiming Campania. In 347 he finally ceded the region to Rhaos, along with access to the Gulf of Taras via Thourioi, provided it retained some sort of corporate autonomy within the Markomannic state.

A large chunk of the history of the Niketid empire after the end of the Sophist wars relies on poor and narrowly focused sources, some which seem to be contradictory, and completely decontextualized epigraphy. For instance, there is an inscription not far from Palaiopolis commemorating a victorious naval battle fought against an enemy that is assumed to be the Perseids in 303, but there are no other references to a war between those two states that can be found in any other sources at that time. In another instance, there are the remains of a temple to Sophia in Maqom Hadesh that seems to have been used almost exclusively by Punic worshipers, potentially indicating a much wider Sophist appeal outside the Greek community than has been generally thought, but the ruin is hard to date and the problem of determining the worshipers’ ethnicity has been found to be much more intractable than it first appeared. At the very least, the Niketid state’s internal political history is reasonably complete. Niketas’ son Mnesiptolemos did a reasonably good job of balancing the various religious and ethnic communities in Greek Africa, even in the midst of a major naval war with the Qarthadastim (of which more later) from 292 to 296; his reputation was such that he gained the posthumous title Dikaios (“the Just”) and made a cameo in a seventh-century philosophical treatise by Theophylaktos Athenaios.

Mnesiptolemos’ successor, his nephew Epimachos, lacked his uncle’s charisma and, presumably, his ability to juggle the needs of the Punic and Greek populations. He achieved a reputation for indolence, idiocy, and frivolity that has echoed down through the ages (along with a reputation as the ultimate ‘whipped’ husband, something that is not nearly as contradictory as it would seem). Yet he reigned for eighteen years with nary a hiccup, and it was only at the end of his reign that the conspiracies and riots against him began to multiply. We can only speculate on the reasons for this, which range from trite Marxist suggestions that he attempted to ally with the Punic underclass against the Greek settler population and aristocracy, to some sort of “culminating point” of stupid minor decisions. Regardless, in 320 he and his wife Selene were murdered by some of their retainers, who brought a cousin of the emperor’s, known only as Niketas II, to the throne. This Niketas seems to have been something of a cipher, although the records for his reign are poor in coverage and rather polemical; the chief figure of government was clearly the architect of the coup, Diokles, described as a Garamantean in most sources. Diokles seems to have been militarily competent enough – in another of the naval wars with Qarthadast, he masterminded the conquest of the Balearic Islands and briefly captured Lixus – but that meant that he stood a good chance of launching a coup to place himself on the throne, and his co-conspirators could hardly abide that. He was therefore assassinated in 327, and replaced at the forefront of government by the eunuch Pleistarchos.

Pleistarchos was unpopular enough (and bad enough at this ‘war’ business, as the Baleares and Lixus were lost under his government) that the mass of the populace seems to have turned to Epimachos’ daughter Tryphaina, in exile in Syrakousai, as a savior. The admiral Praxagoras ‘Grypos’ (Hook-nose, a nickname courtesy of the wits of Palaiopolis) therefore brought her back to Africa and launched a coup against Pleistarchos in 333. Niketas II was executed as well, for good measure; although Praxagoras had thought of orchestrating some sort of marriage between the cousins, he eventually decided against it on the grounds that it wasn’t worth it. So Tryphaina took the throne, and seems to have pulled out of the war with the Qarthadastim as well after Praxagoras scored a badly-needed defensive victory off Sardinia. Unfortunately, she also seems to have been a Sophist (an unexpected gift from her Perseid exile) and, worse, was good at the mob politics of Palaiopolis. Apparently there was a growing population of Sophists in Africa at that point anyway (the Maqom Hadesh temple evidence notwithstanding) and many of them were concentrated in the capital. Praxagoras, of course, did not share her religious inclinations, and attempted to unseat her by a coup in 335. Warned by one of the admiral’s co-conspirators, Tryphaina was able to foil the assassination attempt and tried her own counterassassination (targeting her cousin Niketas, Praxagoras’ obvious choice at successor), and when that didn’t come off, Africa was embroiled in a four-year civil war. Eventually, though, Praxagoras’ lieutenant Archelaos (the admiral himself having died in the naval battle of Adrameton in 338) was able to capture Palaiopolis, execute Tryphaina, and place Niketas (III) on the throne. Widespread purges of the Sophist community ensued, although, according to the letters of Annibas, a Punic notable in Muxsi, they seem to have backfired; the example of the martyred priestess Euphrosyne of Siga, publicly executed in 345, was a particular touchstone for the African Sophist community.

While Sophism played a significant role in African politics, it was effectively irrelevant to the Qarthadastim, who instead continued to worship the henotheistic cult of Ba’al Milk-Qart, centered on the temple and pilgrimage sites at Gader and Qarthadast. Sophism also did not play much of a role in the Greek ports of northwestern Iberia. But Emporion in particular was well connected via trade and political affiliation to the Niketid state in general and Palaiopolis in particular, generating considerable friction between the Niketids and the Qarthadastim. The efforts of the safot, the civic advisory council, to extend its remit over Emporion under the reign of Himilco III (r. 285-301) led directly to the Niketid-Qarthadastim naval war of the 290s. After a failed war with the Namorannan in the late 310s, the Greek mercenary leader Kleitarchos took his unpaid troops and attempted to carve out a Greek civic polity in the same region. Kleitarchos, predictably, managed to gain Niketid support, sparking the Long War (322-334); while Kleitarchos was defeated, Tryphaina managed to get the Greeks’ political autonomy restored. The Qarthadastim therefore retrenched under Carthalo in the late 330s and 340s, readying themselves, doubtless, for a revanchist war to reconquer the Tagos valley.

For the most part, the Batroi spent the early part of the fourth century floundering around, attempting to find a handhold. Much like the Satavahana (the comparison is accurate in more facets than one), they failed; unlike the Satavahana, the failure was not fatal (yet). Acco moc Cunobelin (r. 304-336), who under any other circumstances would’ve been an energetic and skillful rix, ended up spending virtually all of his reign either fighting to maintain his hold on power or implementing schemes for expanding it that had to be abandoned partway through. At the very outset of his reign, he was forced to fight a war with the Salya, who had pointedly refused to acknowledge his ascension to the throne; at various points, he had to put down rebellions among the Ausqua of the southwest, fend off an invasion by the Ambianoi, crush Sophist Greek rebellions in the Rhodanos Valley, and fight off an insurgency in the west by a group that may have either been discontented landowners implicitly seceding or peasant bandits (the noun used in the history is a hapax legomenon and unclear from context). He had barely managed to keep his head above water all the same; his son Diviciacos was much less lucky (or skillful, depending on your point of view). He seems to have instituted a systematic practice of eradicating local tribal councils, where they existed, and replacing them with ‘big men’ that he could better control. Institutionally, it was effectively a step aimed at reducing the difficulty of elite management; politically, it turned out to be suicidal, and provoked a rebellion led by Sedullos of the Caturoi in 341. Diviciacos managed to put down the rebellion, but only prevented further violence by formally abandoning his reform plan, effectively returning the Batroi to square one. Things got worse in 343 when, for reasons that are still widely debated, the Hatta, a tribe from just across the Rhine, migrated into Vindelicia and invaded the territory of the Sequa, who promptly called for royal aid; heavy fighting did little but limit the Hatta gains, and failed to prevent the loss of Vesontio.

---

Hmm. Post the map and watch nobody read the actual TL, or don't post the map...and watch nobody read the actual TL?

Right, then.

Spoiler World Map 350 BC Labeled :

 

[Kraznaya]

yay you're back :3

the whole "yancai crossing the iaxertes" does become a little awkward though

 

[Thlayli]

Could you give more details on the Perseid-Phrygian relationship? How much control does the Perseid center have over what Phrygia does? Does Phrygia provide nominal or substantial tribute? And why didn't the Perseid center help their sub-king in the last war?

Also, I assume Pantaleon died and had an orderly succession, but details there would be good too.

 

[bombshoo]

I think I'll wait for the PDF version.

 

[Dachs]

yay you're back :3

the whole "yancai crossing the iaxertes" does become a little awkward though

Awkward? You mean, literarily?

Could you give more details on the Perseid-Phrygian relationship? How much control does the Perseid center have over what Phrygia does? Does Phrygia provide nominal or substantial tribute? And why didn't the Perseid center help their sub-king in the last war?

Also, I assume Pantaleon died and had an orderly succession, but details there would be good too.

I could.

It's a puppet state, or, perhaps more accurately, a catspaw for Perseid policy in the Eastern Med. Athens says "jump", Ankyra says "how high?" Plus, they're family.

Phrygia is central Anatolia. You know, the Plateau. It's not really capable of providing 'substantial' tribute.

The Perseids didn't help the Phrygians because a) the Seleukids were losing and the territorial integrity of Phrygia was not threatened and b) entering the war would've forced the Perseids into a rather large naval war in the Eastern Med that they really would've rather avoided. Retrenchment and all that.

Pantaleon did die (in 327) and did have an orderly succession. Information on the successor(s) is deliberately vague so that whoever ends up running the show there in the eventual KrazNES can name his own ruler and whatnot.

I think I'll wait for the PDF version.

hahahahahahano

 

[Thlayli]

Is Sophism going to be left deliberately vague, too, or is there an actual hierarchical structure this time? (That is to say, what the hierarchs names are.)

It seems to me that a lot of people might see Sophism as a lever of Perseid state control, since what is clear about the faith is that it's controlled by (and loyal to) the Perseid Emperor.

 

[Dachs]

Is Sophism going to be left deliberately vague, too, or is there an actual hierarchical structure this time? (That is to say, what the hierarchs names are.)

I've already said that the hierarchy - such as it is - effectively consists of regional synods, organized with respect to the boundaries of Seleuko-Perseid satrapies and eparchies, which meet yearly beginning on 3 Skirophorion. Each synod elects a presiding officer from among the attending priest(esse)s, the episkopos (name chosen on the grounds that there really wasn't a better one), for a term of one year. This episkopos also has the authority to resolve disputes that crop up in the year following the convention of the synod.

In the event that the Emperor calls an ecumenical synod to resolve outstanding doctrinal or political issues, each regional synod elects a hieromnemon to attend that council.

It seems to me that a lot of people might Sophism as a lever of Perseid state control, since what is clear about the faith is that it's controlled by (and loyal to) the Perseid Emperor.

Yes. With that said, it is beginning to become apparent that Sophism is spreading faster than the Perseid Empire is, and the issue of potentially creating a religious hierarchy for territories outside the Empire has been mooted, but never really resolved.

 

[Thlayli]

So just to summarize, outside of the Perseid Empire, the regions of greatest Sophist concentration are in North Africa, though Egypt is sort of unclear, and I guess there are groups of crypto-Sophists in the Seleukid regions too. What about Italy? (And anywhere else I might have overlooked.)

 

[Yui108]

So for my AP Euro class after the exam we essentially get the rest of the school year to do a project in any subject and medium of our choosing. So I have basically lucked into an hour a day to work a new alternate timeline for a whole month. I'm leaning towards the abortive but seriously planned Austro-Russian partition of the Ottoman Empire (or having it fail gloriously if that seems likelier/more interesting). I'll also probably work in the Bavarian-Belgian exchange off butterflies. I'm choosing this one because
1.) Inherent coolness
2.) It has to be from the 14th to the 21st centuries in Europe


Does anyone have any thoughts (like thumbs-up, thumbs-down on the idea)

 

[Dachs]

Which partition were you thinking of?

 

[Yui108]

Which partition were you thinking of?

"The proposal of Joseph and some Austrian generals to join Russia in partitioning the Ottoman Empire was rejected by Maria Theresa on religious and political grounds."
-Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848 by Schroeder p. 26
That one, circa 1781

or perhaps

"Potemkin's Greek Prokect, which proposed the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of a Greek-Byzantine Kingdom as a Russian apanage...she was certainly interested..required that Austria be gained as an ally"

Schroeder p. 20
I suppose I might play with the Russo-Turkish war 1768-1774, and how a strong russo-Austrian alliance might butterfly bits of the American War of Independence


EDIT: or, now that I look at it, I could play with the conflict from 1787-1792

 

[Dachs]

das already did that exact thing with the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774.

 

[Yui108]

das already did that exact thing with the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774.

Darn, do you have a link?
As hesitant as I am to retread hallowed ground, I'd like to say how far my ideas diverge from his.

 

[Dachs]

Just search for "Tsar Pavel's War" - it was one of his best timelines. I've got it all printed out from back in high school, actually.

 

[Milarqui]

Not sure if anybody will be interested, but I am posting an alternative history in AH.com, called The Legacy of the Glorious. It is about how Prussian Prince Leopold zu Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen could have become the King of Spain in 1870, and the consequences. So far, it is 1870 and Leopold has been voted in. I hope to be able to finish re-writing Chapter 3, dealing with the immediate consequences of Leopold's accession to the throne, in a few days. If you check it, please give me your opinion!

 

[Dachs]

That is a lot of pictures.

 

[Disenfrancised]

Only losers post graphics/at all on AH.com