Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [67]
The Amorgus battle had a peculiar denouement at Athens. A prankster named Stratocles, getting wind while abroad of the Athenian defeat, hastened back to Athens before other messengers could arrive there. He falsely reported that Athens had won the engagement and gadded about wearing a garland and proposing grateful offerings to the gods. The people celebrated his news, then turned on him angrily after the truth finally emerged. Stratocles was unrepentant. “What harm have I done if for two days you have been happy?” he asked his fellow Athenians. Thanks to him the city had enjoyed one last, brief illusion that its 150-year-old naval supremacy was intact.
Remarkably, a huge number of Athens’ warships sat idle in the Piraeus docks during the pitched struggle at sea. The city had managed to build a vast fleet but lacked rowers and steersmen to man it. The financial windfall it had gotten from Harpalus had been spent on Leosthenes and his mercenaries. Athens had not been able to afford a land and sea war at the same time.
8. END OF THE HELLENIC WAR (SUMMER 322 B.C.)
Craterus, roused at last from his long stasis in Cilicia, crossed the Hellespont with ten thousand infantrymen and a vital squadron of fifteen hundred cavalry. He met Antipater on the march in Thessaly and placed himself at the service of the older man, whom he now regarded not only as commander but as father-in-law-to-be. Craterus had made his choice of wives. He had brought Phila, Antipater’s daughter, with him from Cilicia as his intended bride. Amastris, the Persian princess whom Alexander had given him in marriage, he left on the Asian side of the Hellespont, after gallantly arranging her remarriage to a powerful ruler on the Black Sea coast. (The Turkish town of Amasra, on the site of a city she founded, still bears a corrupted version of her name.)
Antipater, having now absorbed the armies of both Craterus and Leonnatus, brought a force totaling almost fifty thousand to a place called Crannon on the Thessalian plain. He made camp a short distance from the Athenian-led coalition. Each morning, for the next few weeks, he made clear to the Greeks he was ready to fight, arranging his troops in formation in the plain between the camps.
Antiphilus and Menon, the Greek field commanders, debated whether to accept this offer of battle. Their twenty-five thousand infantry were badly outnumbered and outclassed in skill and experience, but their thirty-five hundred cavalry had better hopes of success. By waiting, they might increase their infantry numbers; messengers had been sent to the allied cities seeking new recruits and requesting the return of missing contingents, including those of the Aetolians. But the Greeks could not wait indefinitely. Morale was low. More contingents might head for home; their numbers might shrink rather than increase, as would their fighting spirit. Finally, near the beginning of August, the Greeks’ need for action overcame their need for reinforcement. Antiphilus and Menon brought their outnumbered army forward for battle.
All their hopes lay in the Thessalian cavalry, the same force that had beaten Leonnatus. As they had done before, the Greeks sent their cavalry out ahead and held their infantry back. But the Macedonians were not about to let the issue again be decided by cavalry alone. Antipater ordered his massive phalanx to advance. The approach of this mile-and-a-half-long wall of spearmen made a deeply unsettling spectacle, and at the first collision the Greeks began to falter. They drew back onto the high ground behind