De novis libris iudicia / J. Atkinson / Mnemosyne 66 (2013) 885-888 885

Roisman, J. 2012. Alexander’s Veterans and the Early Wars of the Successors. Austin, University of Texas Press. xiv, 264 pp. Pr. $55.00. ISBN 9780292735965.

The story of the development of the Macedonian army is highly complicated, and Joseph Roisman duly starts in the introduction with a sketch of its organisation at the time of Alexander’s death in terms of structures and weapons. Roisman’s record of publications in the field attests his qualification to tackle the subject of what happened to Alexander’s veterans in the power struggle after his death. The first substantive chapter, Motives and Bias in the History of Hieronymus of Cardia, is an extended version of the paper which Roisman published in Carney, E., Ogden, D. (eds.) 2010. Philip II and Alexander the Great (Oxford), 135-48 and 285-6. It sets the tone for Roisman’s critical approach to the source material, and espe- cially to Diodorus who, it is argued, reflected the bias and elitism of his main source for this period, Hieronymus. He cites Badian as an example of the regrettable ten- dency to take “Hieronymus’ name as a guarantee of good faith and reliable report- ing” (p. 10, quoting Badian, E. 1968. A King’s Notebooks, HSCP 72, 183-204, at 190). In the second chapter, Alexander and Discontent, Roisman switches to a focus on the veterans themselves and their experience of military life in the last four years of Alexander’s life. This takes in the ‘mutinies’ at the Hyphasis and at Opis. They come across as basically very decent chaps, able to give free expression to their emotions, and indeed the sources allow the presentation of some rather maudlin crowd scenes. But realities of modern warfare (and indeed of policing in violent situations) might justify the hypothesis that Alexander’s army produced its fair share of psychological casualties. Shell shock, war neurosis, Gulf War syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder presumably have an ancestry. After the stand- off at the Hyphasis Alexander had his men engage in a series of massacres (Arrian 6.6.3-6; 7.6; 8.3; 11.1), and again after the clash at Opis (Arr. 7.15.3). This was surely devised to brutalise the men again and re-establish a competitive model of the honour code and so counter the drift towards a more democratic group identity, where the men were more concerned to assert their own entitlement to respect as a mark of honour.1) Of course there are factors that would distinguish the experience of modern soldiers from the situation of troops in Alexander’s army: these would include dif- ferent models of conscription, training, and discipline, the distance between the men in action and those directing the hostilities, the alienation of society from the military action initiated by the government, and the problems of reintegrating into civil society after demobilisation. Nevertheless, as Roisman shows, following

1) I have developed this point in Honour in the Ranks of Alexander the Great’s Army, Acta Classica 53 (2010), 1-20.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/1568525X-12341457 886 De novis libris iudicia / J. Atkinson / Mnemosyne 66 (2013) 885-888 the sources, the Macedonians were not just being wilfully unruly: they were alien- ated from Alexander’s leadership style and orientalising policies. Furthermore, if we consider the situation from the viewpoint of the ordinary soldiers, we should assume that they were perfectly capable of doing their own risk calculations. Pressure against further advance increased from the time of Darius’ death, and was made clear at the Hyphasis. And most significantly after Alexan- der’s death his plans for further campaigns were quickly abandoned. Then the veterans’ perception of the futility of carrying on with Alexander’s expanded war aims might reasonably imply that they had already become disenchanted with Alexander’s open-ended plans. Again after the murder of Perdiccas they made it clear that they were opposed to continuing the invasion of Egypt. Thus I think a stronger case could be made for the line that the Macedonian veterans had become perfectly capable of weighing up the odds, and at Babylon had every good reason for communicating their opposition to more of the same. Indeed Roisman fairly comments that one should not deny the veterans “the motivation and the ability to think on behalf of the kingdom, beyond their basic needs.” (p. 83).2) On the period after Alexander’s death Roisman makes a good job of tracing the political history while analysing the shifting dynamics in the interplay between the different groups of Macedonian veterans. Thus, insofar as the slender source material allows, his book complements studies on the political history which focus more on the major role players (such as Bosworth, A.B. 2002. The Legacy of Alexander (Oxford)). So on the political contest between Eumenes and Peucestas in the period before the battle of Paraetacene Roisman necessarily covers the ground in simpler terms than does Bosworth, and on the banquet organised by Peucestas at Persepolis while Bosworth highlights Eumenes’ fury at being upstaged by Peucestas, Roisman stresses Peucestas’ care to symbolise by organising the Silver Shields in a circle that all were of equal honour, which again means a con- trast between the competitive, vertical concept of honour and in the case of the troops honour on the horizontal plane. In the non-material field Roisman finds as the key to this history the veterans’ attachment to the Macedonian tradition of monarchy, and their allegiance to the Argead royal house even if this meant pledging allegiance to the somehow chal- lenged Philip Arrhidaeus and Rhoxane’s infant son, which is implied in the odd references to Antipater and Antigonus in 320 having “the backing of the two kings” (146), and to Ptolemy as “securing the friendship of the kings” (106), and to Eumenes’

2) Others have put it that the Macedonians had increasingly begun to act like mercenaries, as Anson put it (Anson, E.M. 1991. The Evolution of the Macedonian Army Assembly (330-315 B.C.), Historia 40, 230-247, at 230). Roisman here duly notes Badian 1968, 200.