Note: This is not a new project, Im just revisiting an old one while I wait for certain literature to come available for the current timeline. This is basically the setting for DaNES II, except I was unsatisfied with it for several reasons: firstly, because I never created an actual timeline for it; secondly, because many things were poorly fleshed out, such as Sophism; thirdly, because the entire setting was something of an anachronistic mixture. I hope to change that, especially since other people are interested in picking up the project and using it for their own nefarious purposes. So this is the first in a series of relatively concise installments that ought to bring the DaNES II world into a better place. I hope to return to the Late Antique/Early Medieval project as soon as I reasonably can.
With that said
The Great Aegean War 192-180 BC
In 197 BC, the armies of the Roman Republic, with their coats held by a coalition of Greek allies, defeated the forces of Philippos V, King of Makedon, at Kynoskephalai. The Makedonian king was humbled and forced to retreat into his old haunts in his homeland in the north, but Rome itself did not step into the void he left. Instead, Makedon was pared down, and the cities of the Greeks were declared free by Flamininus, hero of Kynoskephalai. Romes armies retreated across the Ionian Sea; the Greeks had both the veneer of freedom and, it seemed, the substance.
The Conscript Fathers had little choice in the matter, for Roman manpower was stretched increasingly thin too thin to maintain a standing presence among the troublesome Greeks. Hannibal and the Gauls before him had slaughtered many of Italys sons, and winning the war with Qarthadast had only increased Romes commitments. A fresh revolt in Iberia, recently wrested from Qarthadast, drew off more troops; in northern Italy, Hannibal had excited the Insubres, who remained restive and violent. And at any rate, the Romans were ill disposed to drag themselves into Greek quarrels. The decision to fight Philippos had not been made lightly, and there were plenty in the Senate who opposed having anything more to deal with the land across the Ionian.
But things would not stay the way Flamininus had ordered them forever. Both of the great leagues of Greece, Achaia and Aitolia, wished to extend their power over more of Greece, and Sparta, controlled by the tyrant Nabis, ached to return to its Kleomenean days of glory. With the cat away, the mice were wont to play. And if some polities had won out from the war with Makedon, others had lost: and they saw Romes exit from Greece as an opportunity. Into the vacuum left by Flamininus armies stepped Antiochos III, who called himself
Megas, the Great, ruler of the powerful Seleukid Empire. He had already won his fame by reviving the near-dead Seleukid Empire from civil war, then he created a hegemon with his eastern
anabasis, which brought rebelling Baktria and Parthia to heel, and then crushed the Ptolemaic armies at Panion in 200, which brought the whole of the Levant under his control.
Antiochos was more than willing to mess around in Greece if it were clear that Rome wasnt interested in upholding its settlement, and set off across the Aegean with a small expeditionary force to ally with the Aitolians and overawe the rest. But unexpectedly, Rome responded violently. In 192 BC the Romans declared war and dispatched a consular army and fleet to Greece. Antiochos troops were overwhelmed and forced to fall back, sustaining a defeat in the pass of Thermopylai. Cut off from his Aitolian allies, he fled across the Aegean to gather his strength and await the inevitable Roman follow-up invasion.
He was not disappointed; in 190 the Romans landed an army, commanded by L. Cornelius Scipio, brother of Africanus. Scipio linked up with Eumenes II, king of Pergamon and a consistent thorn in Antiochos side. To oppose them, Antiochos drew up an army of about equal size, aided by the exiled Qarthadastim general Hannibal himself. When battle joined, Antiochos, at the head of his formidable cataphract cavalry, broke the Pergamene cavalry led by Eumenes personally, just as he had done to the Egyptians at Panion. Then the Seleukid phalanx, augmented by elephants he had acquired in his Indian expedition, advanced on the Roman infantry. Surrounded by cavalry and pikemen, the Roman legionaries attempted to slash their way out, but were slaughtered. A shadow of the consular army survived to flee across the Aegean, leaving Eumenes to his fate.
With the prodigious port facilities of Anatolia and the Levant constructing fresh fleets for Antiochos, he took the offensive. Pergamon was stormed and Lysimacheia, Antiochos Thracian outpost, was recaptured. From Thrace, Philippos V was bludgeoned into abandoning his Roman allies with superior force: he could see where the wind was blowing. Then, Antiochos debouched into Greece, linking up with the Aitolians and dealing terrible blows to the Roman-allied Achaians, led by the
strategos Philopoimen. A Seleukid fleet beat the Romans off Oiniadai in 188 BC, and again the following year near Leukas. By 186, even the small Roman forces that remained to shore up the Achaians had been withdrawn, and the dam broke.
Rome couldnt fight and win a war against the Seleukids in Greece, keep the Insubres under control, and retain control of Iberia at the same time, not with four decades of incessant warfare having drained Italy of manpower. But without control of Greece, there was little the Romans could do to prevent Antiochos from raising the specter of revolt elsewhere. Qarthadast itself was the first target. In 185 Hannibal, with a portion of the Seleukid navy, and sizable financial and mercenary support, sailed to Africa, where he took control of Qarthadast and Atiqa in a popularly-supported coup. With no Romans to back up the Punic
softim, the putsch was barely opposed. Hannibal quickly set about reasserting authority over the coastal Punic colonies and gearing up to teach Masinissa of the Massylii Numidians a lesson. The fan of rebellion in Iberia was fanned, too.
In 186 the Insubres had burned Placentia; three years later, they sacked Arretium and Ariminum, and beat up a Roman army on the Arnus. A panic the proportions of 390 and 225 ensued at Rome, where Gn. Manlius Vulso was made dictator. His attempt to destroy the property qualifications for serving in the military were pooh-poohed, but accepted (being rather meaningless anyway without many state foundries); his attempt to widen the franchise, on the other hand, got him a knife in the back and bequeathed Rome a civil war. And the Gauls started raiding further south again, bolder than ever; one of their leaders, Enestinos, specifically targeted Roman coloniae to try to fracture the Roman alliance. And with Rome no longer able to help, many of the Italian allies started to form self-help groups and diverge on their own. Much of Sicily rebelled in 182, and southern Italy later the same year; Samnium and Campania were soon to follow.
With the allies deserting, the final blow, delivered in 180, was almost merciful. A Roman army, finally united (too little, too late), was shattered at Falerii, and Enestinos and his men stormed into Rome; this time the Senate could not buy them off. Rome burned on 3 July 180 BC. The oft-repeated stories about salted earth and massacred captives are nonsense. The site of Rome remained inhabited for years afterwards, and captives would have been sold or enslaved, not massacred. But to all intents and purposes, Rome was no more. The Republics fall became an object lesson in the dangers of stubbornness and overextension.
Aftermath: the Oikoumene in the second century BC
The immediate result of the destruction of Rome was to leave the Seleukid king of kings Antiochos undisputed master of Greece. He disposed the country to his liking by carving up most of the north and placing it under Aitolian and Makedonian control; leaving garrisons at the Akrokorinthos, at Peiraeios, and on the Athenian acropolis; and restoring Argos and Sparta to their former positions of power to counterbalance the sad remnant of the Achaian League, which was divested of most of its possessions. Rhodes, which had been stormed by a Seleukid army in 181, was firmly bound to the Seleukids and garrisoned as well, and became the headquarters of a revived Nesiote League (albeit this time under the Seleukid aegis, not the Ptolemaic one) that embraced most of the Aegean islands and Euboia. He also founded an Antiocheia in Thraike on the former site of Tylis to further bolster his Thracian possessions and better keep Philippos V in line. Then, he departed for the East, on the way summarily beating up the Galatians and forcing many to provide him with mercenary service.
Antiochos I and his father, the divine Seleukos, had done the work of settling and organizing the great eastern satrapies of Margiane, Baktria, and Sogdiane. What they had done in the East, Antiochos III did in the West, in the lands of the Levant and in Anatolia, settling and organizing colonies of Greeks and Syrians and Jews, groups of firm loyalty to the regime. He kept his armies sharp with repeated wars against the troublesome Galatians and against the restive would-be kings of Adurbagadan and Katpatuka. In the East, his son Seleukos ruled as co-king and viceroy, much as Antiochos I had served his own father, and it was Seleukos who defeated Phrâpâtes, shahrdar of the Ashkâniân, and broke up his Parthian kingdom, scattering the tribes to the four winds. And when Antiochos died in 174, it was Seleukos who ascended the throne as Seleukos IV, continuing his fathers work in Anatolia.
The inconstancy of allies bedeviled Seleukos, who lacked his fathers iron will and invincible reputation, even though he had laid waste to the Parthian kingdom and freed the northern frontier of nomadic depredations for decades to come. In the 160s, he found himself embroiled in a ferocious war with the Aitolian League, which had come under the influence of the
strategos Pantaleon. The Attic War that ensued after Pantaleon attempted to capture the Athenian acropolis by stealth (and failed) drew in Demetrios III, king of Makedon; it was seven long years before Seleukos could win a decisive military victory over his opponents at Kierion, dismantle the Aitolian League, and place Demetrios pro-Seleukid brother Perseus at the head of a dramatically shrunken Makedon. It was Seleukos, as well, who conquered Cyprus from the Ptolemaioi in 163, profiting from another rebellion amongst the restless Egyptian
machimoi, the indigenous soldier-caste.
Seleukos death in 159 prompted palace intrigue, which very nearly led to civil war before most of the rival claimants were assassinated. Eumenes I, his third son, took the throne, under the tutelage of the general Demodamas, who effectively ruled as regent. Demodamas governed the empire for most of the 150s, never sticking his neck out all that much, but his death in a suspicious falling accident led to the rebellion of Antimachos, the Euthydemid satrap of Baktria. None of the advisors who seized the regency for Eumenes in the subsequent years could halt the tide of Euthydemid troops swarming across eastern Iran, while Eumenes himself was an incompetent cipher who preferred to have nothing to do with armies and battlefields. It was not until 146 that Eumenes was finally deposed in the wake of the disastrous Battle of Apameia in favor of his imprisoned younger brother Demetrios.
Demetrios embarked on a whirlwind of reforms, reorganizing the army around a base of
thorakitai, heavily armored spearmen, more mobile than the standby syntagma that had dominated Greek armies for the past two centuries. These
thorakitai, similar in some ways to heavy Italian infantry, had the additional merit of being much easier to recruit, as their armor and panoply could be purchased much more easily than could the equipment of standard
phalangitai. Armed with this new tactical instrument and a fresh glut of manpower, Demetrios counterattacked and destroyed the Baktrian armies near Hekatompylos in a climactic battle in 144, then overran the entire country and abolished its long-held autonomy. He then turned against the Greek states, where Perseus son Neokles had launched his own rebellion against the Seleukid hegemony, overrunning much of Greece; Neokles and his Makedonian armies were conclusively beaten near Philippoi in 141, and Makedonia itself was incorporated into the Seleukid Empire as a satrapy.
The successors of Demetrios I
Megas, who died of apoplexy in battle against the Galatians, were content to rest on the laurels he had won. Eumenes II and Antiochos IV, insofar as they campaigned at all, fought chiefly against the Galatians, the local whipping boy, although Antiochos attempted to embark on a grand colonization project in Thrace, which never amounted to anything near the amount of expense poured into it. Seleukos V
Theos (122-116 BC) won the lottery, as it were, having married a Ptolemaic princess and thus placed in the perfect position to intervene in the civil war between Ptolemaios VII and the would-be Ptolemaios VIII; he simply cut the Gordian knot by having his troops occupy the whole country and proclaim
him pharaoh instead. His assassination by a member of the indigenous Egyptian priesthood paved the way for the ascension of Antiochos V
Epiphanes, who formally instituted the Seleukid imperial cult throughout the empire not just worship of past kings as gods, as with the divine Seleukos I, but worship of the current king as a living deity, not just in Babylonia and Egypt but by the Greeks of the empire as well.
Aftermath: the Western Mediterranean in the second century BC
Following the dramatic and rapid collapse of Roman authority in Italy and Spain in the years leading up to 180 BC, a mad scramble ensued among the few major players to grab what pieces could be grabbed. Most were hampered in this by the internal problems associated with setting up a new state. Hannibal, dictatorial
sofet of Qarthadast, had wanted his sons to succeed him, but the residents of Qarthadast and Atiqa had different ideas, and quickly reinstated the republic, kicking off a civil war with the Barqas and their adherents that immobilized Qarthadast for most of the 160s. Still, Qarthadast by virtue of its size and resources was the most successful at taking Romes place. By the 140s, the Qarthadastim had reclaimed their old colonies in Iberia, western Sicily, and the Sardinian coast.
They contended periodically with a loose league of Greek city-states, organized out of southern Italy and eastern Sicily, centered on Taras and usually embracing Brettia and Apoulia as well as Syrakousai and Messene. Early clashes between these Megale Hellenic states and the Qarthadastim over Akragas in the 150s went poorly for the badly-organized Greeks. Under the leadership of the Syrakousan elected
strategos Dionysios, the league pulled in several Campanian cities and managed to land a narrow victory over the Qarthadastim at Hybla in 147; the Campanians promptly left the league and returned to Capuas orbit, while the Megale Hellenes quickly found that they could not sustain their momentum against the Qarthadastim. After a series of humiliating defeats, including the Punic capture of Messene, the league collapsed in the early 120s BC. Qarthadast then began to set up a loose sphere of influence over Sicily and Brettia, luring individual poleis in and building up the old Punic commercial dominance.
Italy itself was divided between several small competing powers. Most of the north was under the loose sway of various Gallic groups in the Po valley, while Latium was the plaything of Capua, which manipulated the smaller Latin cities against each other to ensure that no new Rome rose from the ashes of the old. Further inland, a loose Samnite state re-emerged around several strongmen, which served the same role in Italy as the Galatians did in Anatolia: mean, nasty, perpetually raiding, but a useful source of mercenary manpower all the same. Insofar as anyone was dominant, the Capuans were, but only in a very loose, first-among-equals kind of way, and not until the 120s or so when the Megale Hellenic leagues collapsed and the remainder of the Campanian cities returned to the fold.
Finally, Massilia remained much as it had been since before the rapid rise and demise of Rome, namely, a key trading port and military power in southern Gaul; the Massiliotes built up their own little empire along the northeastern Iberian coast, incorporating Emporion into their little collective by the 150s and maintaining a semi-formal détente with Qarthadast around the Iberos or thereabouts. Insofar as the Massiliots were able, they played at politics and attempted to turn the various Gallic groups against each other, but the raw power, if not the organization, of the Aeduoi and Auernoi dwarfed anything the Massiliots could muster, such that they would remain bit players for the time being.
Aftermath: Central Asia and India in the second century BC
At the same time as Rome tumbled into ruin in the Mediterranean, another empire collapsed in India. The Maurya Empire, which was barely a century and a half old, had already contracted to the Gangetic plain after the death of the mighty Asoka, yielding the land south of the Vindhyas to the Satavahana feudatories. It may have even split apart before then along religious and internal political divisions between a Buddhist-dominated northwest and a Brahman-ruled east, but such can only be relegated to the field of speculation. Any pretense of an extant Maurya state ended in 184, though, with the assassination of the last samrat on the king-list by Pusyamitra Sunga, a general who promptly founded a new dynasty and launched a series of furious campaigns against his political rivals and the Satavahanas.
As tradition would have it, the Sunga dynast was virulently anti-Buddhist and singled them out as a convenient scapegoat, plundering the stupas scattered across northern India and executing Buddhist monks. The Sungas plundered the university at Taksashila, lately a pro-Buddhist enterprise, and quickly gained the approval and alliance of Seleukos IV. But try as he might, Pusyamitra could never destroy the Satavahanas, and his successors never had his energy and ambition. Within three decades, the Sunga rulers were losing their grip on Gandhara, which soon rebelled with the aid of Greek Baktrian mercenaries fleeing the destruction of the Euthydemid satrapy further west. By 100, the Sungas were lucky to be able to hold onto the Gangetic Plain.
Seleukos IVs victory over the Parthians in Traxiane in the early 170s sent the Central Asian steppe into turmoil. While the Dahai remained in more or less their old haunts in Khwarizm, many of the Parni fled Greek retribution northward, where they clashed with the Wusun and the two great branches of the Saka, the Ksaya Saka Rauka and the Haomavarga Saka around the Ferghana Valley. When the dust cleared, several groups of Saka and Parni had abandoned the area around Issyk Kul for greener pastures on the other side of the Tarim Basin trade routes. It was not until 140 that a new hierarchy emerged, with the Wusun dominating the territory north of Seleukid Ferghana and Sogdiane. Towards the 120s they began trying to opportunistically raid Greek territory, but never made any serious inroads.
Aftermath: the Far East in the second century BC
Gaodi of Han had few notable successors; the 180s were a revolving door of patsies for the Lu clan, none of whom measured up to the vigor and intelligence of the founder of the dynasty. Only in the 170s did a protagonist become Emperor, and by that point, he was overshadowed by more climactic events further west. The powerful Yuezhi, who controlled Gansu and the Tarim Basin towns, had lately been cowed by a series of powerful blows from the Xiongnu, a parvenu steppe confederacy from the north that had until recently been a tributary of the Yuezhi. But in the 170s the tables turned on Modu, the powerful Xiongnu chanyu, who found himself confronted by not merely Yuezhi, but fresh allies from across the Taklamakan, including Parni and Sakas. The powerful Parni
grivpanvar cataphracts ran roughshod over the Xiongnu whenever they fought; soon, Modu himself was killed and the Xiongnu broke apart.
The Yuezhi, with their newfound power, did not start raiding the Han immediately, but instead held their armies over Emperor Wens head like the sword of Damokles to extort the Han. Reluctantly, Wen put up with their pretensions, and instead tried to strengthen his position at home, for instance, introducing examinations for the civil service, an act that the nobility approved of because in reality it made it even easier to control the bureaucracy, since only the gentry could afford to study the classics. Wens successors, though, ached to spring upon the Yuezhi and defeat them in battle. Yuandi, who ascended the throne in 151, made increasing demands on the princes of China to supply troops and grain to campaign against the Yuezhi, though all of the campaigns either ended in failure to find the nomads or simply bloody, disastrous failure.
After one of these disasters, in 137 BC, Yuandi dispatched an emissary to the west to seek aid from the Wusun, of whom the Han had been dimly aware for some time; the emissary, Gan Yu, managed to evade the Yuezhi and reach the Wusun, who were uninterested in warring with the Yuezhi. Gan Yu continued south and reached Dayuan (the Ferghana valley), where he met with Seleukid emissaries who escorted him to visit Antiochos IV
Philopator in Daxia (Baktria), at that time merely Antiochos, son of the reigning Seleukid dynast Eumenes II
Euergetes. He remained at Antiochos viceregal court in Baktra for five years, conducting an ethnographical and geographical survey of the territory he called the land of a thousand cities, after being informed that the Seleukids had no interest in marching to the far end of the trackless Taklamakan. Gan Yu finally returned to China in 131, by which time the whole world had changed.
With Yuezhi pressure unabated and no Wusun alliance to draw them away from northwestern China, Yuandi had resorted to increasingly draconian measures to raise troops from the feudal princes Gaodi had placed in control of much of the country after his wars with Xiang Yu. In 134, the princes finally kicked off the Rebellion of the Ten Feudatories, which Yuandi signally failed to crush quickly after foolishly fighting the rebelling armies of Wu in a pitched battle, which played to the rebels strengths. At more or less the same time, the Yuezhi invaded the Huanghe valley and sacked many cities. Yuandi was assassinated in 132 and succeeded by a young puppet, Chongdi; real power was held by the official Zhou Rong.
Though the forces of the Han were badly battered, Zhou Rong managed to put up good resistance, enough so that the Yuezhi, interested in renewing their profitable trade with China (as the Yuezhi controlled most of the sources of jade), switched sides and lent aid to the Han instead. Most of the Ten Feudatories were destroyed outright within a few years; the rest were slowly choked to death by blockade and siege by 124. Han China had withstood the rebellion, but the country was nearly ruined, and even that had been on the sufferance of the powerful Yuezhi. Chongdis death of illness two years after the end of the rebellion caused yet another shakeup in the Han hierarchy. But by 100, much of the damage of the revolt had been repaired, or at least papered over.
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Comments and suggestions and questions and so on and so forth are, of course, welcomed.
