by the Athenian admiral Conon and the Persian satrap Pharnabazus challenged Sparta’s position in the Aegean.30 Sparta’s fleet was crushed at Cnidus, Spartan officials (harmosts) and garrisons were expelled from the Aegean and Ionian cities. Thus, the Spartan sphere of influence was limited to the Hellespont. Persian money even enabled the completion of the rebuilding of Athens’ Long Walls torn down in 404.
Hard-pressed on several fronts, in 392, the Spartans sent Antalcidas, who advocated a moderate policy, to negotiate a settlement acknowledging Achaemenid control over the coastal cities. However, negotiations failed until 387/386, when the hostilities of the Corinthian War ended with the so-called Peace of Antalcidas or King’s Peace. A new strategy to control Greece as a hegemon was introduced: a panhellenic koine eirene.31 Sparta was the guarantor of the Peace in Greece, Persian was the beneficiary in Asia, claiming the mainland, Cyprus, and Clazomenae, and all other Greek cities were to be autonomous. Sparta lost her position in the Aegean but, bolstered by the King’s Peace, carried on her offensive strategy in Greece until the Theban victory near Leuctra in 371 ended her hegemony. According to an anecdote, after Leuctra, Artaxerxes II ignored Antalcidas (who asked him for money) and voiced his opinion that Spartans were the most impudent people of all (Plut. Art. 22).
During the following decades, the Greeks respected the clause of the King’s Peace placing the Ionians under Achaemenid power. Now and then, minor conflicts occurred. The obscure and scarcely documented so-called Satraps’ Revolt in the 360s (Diod. Sic. 15.90.1–92.5) seems to have attracted only minimal Greek interference. In the Social War, which the Athenians fought in 357–355, the local dynast and satrap Mausolus of Caria annoyed Athens by supporting Chios, Rhodes, Byzantium, and Cos—rebellious members of Athens’ Second Athenian Confederacy, founded in 377.32
Persia, Macedon, and Greece from Philip II to Alexander III
Before the end of the 340s, there are no traces of any tensions between Macedon, rising under the reign of Philip II (360/359–336), and Persia, consolidated under Artaxerxes III (359–338)—not even when Artabazus, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, who had revolted against royal authority (Heckel 2006, 55), found refuge with his huge family at Philip’s court. Arrian’s information about a philia kai symmachia between Philip II and Artaxerxes III may be plausible.33 However, the situation changed with Philip’s expansion into eastern Thrace. Artaxerxes III was disturbed by the eastern ambitions foreshadowed by Philip’s siege of Byzantium and Perinthus in 341/340. According to Diodorus, “Philip’s growth in power had been reported in Asia, and the Persian king, viewing this power with alarm, wrote to his satraps on the coast to give all possible assistance to the Perinthians” (16.75.1–2; trans. C.H. Oldfather). Philip’s ambitions regarding the Hellespontine sphere offered the first threat to the Persian–Greek balance of power established by the King’s Peace. Additionally, Artaxerxes III will have (rightly) feared that Philip’s next step would be to plunder the rich satrapies of Asia Minor, challenge the Persian control over the Greek cities, and make them pay their tribute to him. For a time, however, the Macedonians drew back. Philip imposed Macedonian hegemony on Greece in 338. Then, in spring 337, when Greek cities met in the context of the Corinthian League, war against Persia was declared and Philip was elected leader of the campaign (Diod. Sic. 16.89.3). Possibly, he planned to limit his war to the conquest of the coastal cities in order to secure the permanent income necessary for financing wars to maintain Macedon’s hegemony.34 Very probably, Philip’s negotiations with Pixodarus, the Carian satrap who might have participated in blocking the Macedonians at Perinthus and Byzantium, were connected with the Persian campaign and served to form an alliance with the man who was in control of the important naval base of Halicarnassus.35 However, the Persian king seems to have interfered and sent his own man, Orontobates, to Caria to watch over Pixodarus.36 A Macedonian force commanded by Parmenion and Attalus went ahead in order to secure the coastline (Diod. Sic. 17.24.1), but their initial conquests in Asia Minor, where several oligarchies and tyrannies favorable to the Persians were toppled and replaced by dependent democracies, were countered by the famous Rhodian mercenary Memnon, son-in-law of Darius’ influential courtier Artabazus. Memnon kept the Macedonians confined to a small beachhead at Abydus.37 In the meantime, Darius III (338–330) offered subsidies to the Greeks to induce them to revolt against the Macedonians and keep them busy in Europe. Demosthenes formed part of the Athenian political faction pleading in favor of anti-Macedonian cooperation with Persia.38
However, in the autumn of 336, Philip was assassinated and the Persian campaign, duly propagated as a panhellenic act of avenging Persian war atrocities and liberating the Greeks, fell to his son and successor, Alexander. Strictly speaking, the influential generals Parmenio and his son Philotas led the campaign in the beginning. They remained key figures until their elimination in 330.39
The Macedonian army supported by Greek contingents of the Corinthian League crossed the Hellespont undisturbed and defeated the satrapal armies of Asia Minor in 334 at the battle of Granicus. The Macedonians conquered Lydia, the leading Greek cities, Caria—but only parts of Halicarnassus—and also Lycia and Pamphylia before entering Cilicia in 333. As the fleet of the Macedonians was inferior in number, experience, and technique, they tried to avoid sea battles and neutralize the threat posed by the Persian fleet by capturing their naval bases. After the fall of Miletos, the expensive Macedonian fleet was disbanded but had to be reconstituted shortly afterwards when the Persian resistance in the Aegean put the Macedonians under pressure.40
Aeschines reveals that Persian–Athenian diplomatic exchanges did not cease until the eve of the battle of Issus in 333 (3.132, 164). However, after the Macedonian victory, Darius, who had managed to escape from the battlefield, dropped the plan to stir up revolts in Greece and focused on offering fierce resistance in his own empire. At Damascus, Darius’ royal camp including his family and treasure was captured. Curtius comments, “Scarcely any courtier’s household was unaffected by the disaster” (3.13.14). Rejecting Darius’ attempts to ransom his family members, the Macedonian regime held them as valuable hostages and as tokens of Alexander’s legitimization as the would-be king of Asia. The honorable treatment given to Darius’ relatives was “a display of domination, and humiliating to the Great King, who was fighting for his life and survival of his empire.”41 When Darius attempted to negotiate with the Macedonians in order to turn Alexander into a vassal confined to the Mediterranean littoral, Alexander responded with theatrical scorn.
The Macedonian generals decided to secure the Levantine coast, aiming at cutting off the Persians from the regional naval bases before pursuing the king. In spring 333, embarking from Cos, Memnon, Darius’ commander-in-chief in the Aegean, took the offensive there, having some 300–400 ships at his disposal. After Memnon’s early death in about summer 333 during the siege of Mytilene, his brother-in-law Pharnabazus and the admiral Autophradates, an offspring of another old satrapal family, took over and started “a series of aggressive, wide-ranging, and strategically intelligible actions.”42 The crucial base of Chios was in their hands. They seized Lesbos (where the Greek Chares, an old friend of Artabazus’ family, commanded 2,000 mercenaries for the Persians), Tenedos, Andros, and Siphnos. They recaptured partly lost Halicarnassus and perhaps Miletos (cf. Curt. 4.1.37), and entered into negotiations with Agis III of Sparta, ambitious to revolt against the Macedonians in Greece. Despite the defeat at Issus and setbacks in the Aegean where the new Macedonian fleet began to strike back, “the grand Persian strategy remained unchanged.” The end of the Aegean campaign came only in 332 when the Phoenician fleet defected to the Macedonians, and Tyre, a crucial port, was conquered after seven months of fierce resistance. Gaza and Egypt fell to the Macedonians.43 They could thus occupy the last Persian naval bases and get their hands on the grain from Cyrene.
In the meantime, Darius assembled another large army supported by the elite of Bactria and Sogdiana. In addition, Indian local dynasts and Scythian ethnics sent troops to him.44 Following the principle of learning from the enemy, Darius had also ordered military reforms in order to be equipped in a manner more suitable to
