The Grand Army of Demetrius Poliorcetes

Abstract

THE GRAND ARMY OF DEMETRIUS POLIORCETES

Demetrius Poliorcetes spent seven years of his turbulent life as the king of Macedonia and the ruler of a large part of Greece. Two sources by the same author, Plutarh of Chaeronea (the biography of Poliorcestes himself and that of his protégé and nemesis, Pyrrhus of Epirus), credit the king with extensive military preparations that allegedly resulted in the creation of one of the largest military and naval forces in the Ancient history. Supposedly, in the final years of his reign, Poliorcetes commanded power that dwarfed that of Philip II and rivaled the strength of Alexander the Great. Strangely, when the actual conflict finally began, these forces suddenly disappear from the narrative. Modern historians, although generally highly skeptical of military and population figures asserted by ancient authors, showed surprising tendency to believe Plutarch’s claims and to build wider theories around them. Thus, the grand army Poliorcetes allegedly built was heavily used as an argument in the debate surrounding the effects of Alexander’s conquest on Macedonia proper, and the demography of Macedonia in the 3rd century BC. Few scholars made attempts to question these figures, in spite of strong reasons to do so, and in spite of the fact that several ancient sources – including Plutarch’s biographies themselves! – do supply information that directly contradicts these claims. In this paper I claim that the whole story of Poliorcetes’ exceptional military preparations for the alleged reconquest of his father’s Asian Empire, as well as the very size of the supposed army, should be rejected as false, as is already the case with many such episodes in writings of Plutarch.