HISTORICAL NOTE
Writing a novel - several novels, I hope - about
the wars of the Diadochi, or Successors, is a difficult game for an
amateur historian to play. There are many, many players, and many
sides, and frankly, none of them are ‘good’. From the first, I had
to make certain decisions, and most of them had to do with limiting
the cast of characters to a size that the reader could assimilate
without insulting anyone’s intelligence. Antigonus One-Eye and his
older son Demetrios deserve novels of their own - as do Cassander,
and Eumenes and Ptolemy and Seleucus - and Olympia and the rest.
Every one of them could be portrayed as the ‘hero’ and the others
as villains.
If you feel that you need a scorecard, consider
visiting my website at www.hippeis.com where you can at least
review the biographies of some of the main players. Wikipedia has
full biographies on most of the players in the period, as
well.
From a standpoint of purely military history,
I’ve made some decisions that knowledgeable readers may find odd.
For example, I no longer believe in the ‘linothorax’ or linen
breastplate, and I’ve written it out of the novels. Nor do I
believe that the Macedonian pike system - the sarissa armed phalanx
- was really any ‘better’ than the old Greek hoplite system. In
fact, I suspect it was worse - as the experience of early modern
warfare suggests that the longer your pikes are, the less you trust
your troops. Macedonian farm boys were not hoplites - they lacked
the whole societal and cultural support system that created the
hoplite. They were decisive in their day - but as to whether they
were ‘better’ than the earlier system - well, as with much of
military change, it was a cultural change, not really a
technological one. Or so it seems to me.
Elephants were not tanks, nor were they a magical
victory tool. They could be very effective, or utterly ineffective.
I’ve tried to show both situations.
The same can be said of horse-archery. On open
ground, with endless remounts and a limitless arrow supply, a
horse-archer army must have been a nightmare. But a few hundred
horse-archers on the vast expanse of a Successor battlefield might
only have been a nuisance.
Ultimately, though, I don’t believe in ‘military’
history. War is about economics, religion, art, society - war is
inseparable from culture. You could not - in this period - train an
Egyptian peasant to be a horse-archer without changing his way of
life and his economy, his social status, perhaps his religion.
Questions about military technology - ‘Why didn’t Alexander create
an army of [insert technological wonder here]?’ - ignore the
constraints imposed by the realities of the day - the culture of
Macedon, which carried, it seems to me, the seeds of its own
destruction from the first.
And then there is the problem of sources. In as
much as we know anything about the world of the Diadochi, we
owe that knowledge to a few authors, none of whom is actually
contemporary. I used Diodorus Siculus throughout the writing of the
Tyrant books - in most cases I prefer him to Arrian or
Polybius, and in many cases he’s the sole source. I also admit to
using (joyously!) any material that Plutarch could provide, even
though I fully realize his moralizing ways.
For anyone who wants to get a quick lesson in the
difficulties of the sources for the period, I recommend visiting
the website www.livius.org. The
articles on the sources will, I hope, go a long way to
demonstrating how little we know about Alexander and his
successors.
Of course, as I’m a novelist and not an
historian, sometimes the loopholes in the evidence - or even the
vast gaps - are the very space in which my characters operate.
Sometimes, a lack of knowledge is what creates the appeal. Either
way, I hope that I have created a believable version of the world
after Alexander’s death. I hope that you enjoy this book, and the
three - or four - to follow.
And as usual, I’m always happy to hear your
comments - and even your criticisms - at the Online Agora on
www.hippeis.com. See you
there, I hope!