In the summer of 323, the Athenian Assembly voted to embark on the Lamian War, a somewhat impromptu attempt to liberate Greece from the Macedonian hegemony following the ominous news of Alexander’s death. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus, however, this decision was not the result of a renewed desire for freedom, but rather a consequence of the large number of citizens in the Assembly that day who had become accustomed to make their livelihood through war.Footnote ¹ In effect, earlier that summer, 8,000 men are said to have gathered at Cape Taenarum in the southern Peloponnese, where they were awaiting military employment – soldiers, who would soon find themselves among the ranks of passing warlords for decades to come.Footnote ²

These men and their search for employment typify the sweeping military and economic changes that engulfed the eastern Mediterranean from the rise of Macedonia onwards. By serving en masse in the royal armies, they became crucial agents in the Hellenistic period’s economic transformation, as their presence fundamentally contributed to the development of an increasingly connected, market-based society spanning the full extent of Alexander’s former empire from Cyrenaica to Afghanistan. While the profound connection between military and economic developments of the Hellenistic period has long been recognized, in this study I have aspired to provide a framework within which this relationship can be better understood and analysed. Using a labour history perspective, I have argued that the soldiers serving in the royal armies should be seen as the ancient world’s first significant and, indeed, the largest instance of wage labour, the emergence of which should be expected to have radically altered the course of any historical economy. Recognition of its presence in the ancient world, therefore, offers a key new variable in our understanding of its economic development.

In Greco-Roman antiquity, the economies of the Hellenistic world distinguish themselves insofar as they show signs of increasing integration, of growing specialization and production of goods for market-based exchange, and, furthermore, of profit-driven behaviour. As highlighted in my primary discussion, this evolution is widely acknowledged, but the factors underlying this evident transformation have long needed further exploration. An apparent lack of scholarly attention to shifts in the structural features of ancient economies can be attributed at least in part to the stalemate in the ongoing debate on the nature of the ancient economy, with vehement disagreement on the level to which the ancient world can be characterized as a so-called market society. Sometimes, verdicts are reached in relation to the whole of Greco-Roman antiquity, and questions of economic transformation therefore do not feature. At other times, the economies of the Greek and Roman worlds are viewed as fundamentally different, so that studies occur in isolation, and interactions and developmental links between the two tend not to be properly questioned. Of course, Moses Finley’s unfortunate dismissal of the Hellenistic economies set the scene for both problems, but more recent scholarship seeks to move beyond the parameters of the old debate; studies drawing on the methods developed by the so-called New Institutional Economics (NIE) are, perhaps, most representative of this approach. Nonetheless, while this relatively novel attitude has invigorated the study of the ancient economy, providing us with a wealth of new data, it can easily be argued that NIE’s implicit presumption of the universality of the market and economic behaviour disregards some of the key questions originally raised.

Adopting an alternative approach, I have argued that changes in labour necessarily correlate with developments in other aspects of economic activity. Most notably, when occurring on a large enough scale, wage labour especially has the power either to stimulate market-based activities or indeed to lead an economy’s so-called ‘disembedding’. The identification of a meaningful instance of wage labour in the ancient economy can therefore form a bridge between the opposing camps in the academic debate: when wage labour is present, either the economy transforms or it begins to show signs of marketization and grows more sophisticated. In this study, I have argued that such an instance of wage labour ought to be looked for in the military sphere.

As discussed in Chapter 2, while the essential role of wage labour in economic development is widely recognized, this is not always the case in analyses of the ancient economy. Some substantivist studies argue that it is futile to look for ancient wage labour, since this form of work is claimed to be a feature of market-based economies, and therefore a theoretical impossibility. The latter line of argument is not only dogmatic but also circular. Nonetheless, scholars ascribing to the formalist view of ancient economic behaviour tend to recognize evidence of wage labour – and, therefore, of a market-based economy – whenever the sources make mention of any sort of payment for any type of work carried out. Although pay for services rendered certainly constitutes an important aspect of the wage labour relationship, I have endeavoured to show that payment alone is not enough for work to qualify as such. Instead, for a form of work to be categorized as wage labour, it should involve a voluntary and equal transaction between workers and employers. Workers should hire out only their labour power, which is measured in time. Furthermore, the workers’ free status is key, since the price of their labour power, namely their wages, ought to be determined on the market.

When the criteria of workers’ free status and ability to have the price of their wages set on the market are not met, paid work should not warrant the label of wage labour. Thus, neither the paid work of slaves nor the provision of arbitrary payments for citizens’ service, such as assembly pay, should constitute evidence of a labour market, since neither represents the sort of wage labour relationship that has the power to generate further market-based economic activity. Nonetheless, wage labour has often been sought in the ancient economy, and can be found in highly professional occupations, or seasonally intensive sectors, such as agriculture or the building industry. These activities, however, occurred on a trivial scale, or episodically.

Having determined these criteria for wage labour, subsequent chapters assessed whether these can be said to be met in the use of soldiers in the service of the royal armies. Chapter 3 first questioned the troops’ free status and analysed the conditions of their initial enlistment and terms of service, distinguishing between conscript and ‘volunteer’ troops – that is to say, between soldiers whose citizenship meant that they had a civic duty to partake in military activity, and those troops usually called ‘mercenary’, who enlisted of their own accord in exchange for pay. By tackling service types and developments chronologically – ranging from the rise of Philip II of Macedonia to the first generations of Hellenistic kings – detailed analysis has revealed that there was indeed a close correlation between political conditions and methods of military recruitment. Thus, upon his accession to the Macedonian throne in 359, Philip II was under immense pressure from both hostile neighbours and rivals for the throne. His first plan of action was inevitably to reinforce the severely weakened Macedonian army. By actively attracting in and recruiting troops, he rapidly expanded not only his army but also the borders of his kingdom. While some of these troops were conscripted from both the Macedonian heartland and subject areas, there were evidently also many who joined of their own accord – a process that intensified from the moment Philip that gained access to silver and gold mines and thus to a source of wealth with which to tempt men to serve. By accepting non-citizens into the ranks of the Macedonian army, Philip not only significantly enlarged the pool from which manpower could be mustered, but also laid the foundations for changes in military service that would quickly become more prominent in later years, such as enlistment being open to all and encouraged with steady remuneration, or soldiers’ advancement in rank being based on skill, rather than background. Thus, already under Philip, we have records of Greeks serving among elite formations such as the Companion cavalry, alongside Macedonian nobility.

The need for manpower in the Macedonian army greatly increased under Alexander the Great, whose lengthy campaign eastwards intensified demands upon the troops’ service. While Alexander’s army initially comprised conscripts from Macedonia alongside those from subject and allied regions, the relationship of these soldiers to their general gradually changed over the course of the campaign. Thus, we can trace a major shift in the military labour relations in 330, when the conscript and allied troops are dismissed but invited to re-enlist as volunteers. Meanwhile, we see the Macedonian troops behaving increasingly like soldiers who enlisted of their own accord, demanding that their king grant them a say in the progression of the campaign, and over rations and for remunerations. Most dramatically, on several occasions, Alexander’s Macedonian soldiers even refused to continue the march so as to voice their concerns and complaints and to ask for their demands to be met.

The transition from conscript to free military labour and the concomitant assimilation of these troop types culminated under the Successors, whose efforts to secure their power base and to carve out their own territories following the death of Alexander exacerbated these developments in military labour relations. This development can be attributed to several factors that are characteristic of early Successor rule. Thus, their authority and legitimacy were largely legitimized by their military prowess – a credible Successor and eventual king needed to showcase supremacy on the battlefield. Furthermore, while some Successors, such as Ptolemy I, were settled in relatively stable former satrapies, others, such as Demetrius and Lysimachus, at times had no territorial claims or secure bases whatsoever. Such volatility in territory had implications for the Successors’ access to the manpower required to fill and maintain their continuously depleted, yet ever-expanding armies, and meant that the traditional form of recruitment through conscription became far less reliable. Simultaneously, voluntary forces grew increasingly specialist, and, as a result, more desirable. The armies of the Successors, therefore, became almost wholly reliant on voluntary forces, who were collected widely from across the Mediterranean and induced to enlist through generous remuneration and other benefits. Deprived for the most part of the traditional method of recruitment via conscription, and soon in fact coming to prefer the service of professional hired soldiers, the Successors effectively become almost wholly reliant on military wage labourers. Unsurprisingly, military labour contracts, specifying length and conditions of service, now appear in the textual record.

The territorial consolidation of the Hellenistic kingdoms then ushered in further changes to the nature of military service and accompanying labour relations, with the respective kings’ rule and the nature of their territorial holds giving rise to different trajectories of development in their armies. In each kingdom, for example, stable settlement prompted a return to at least some call on conscript soldiers. Widely diverging balances of conscript versus voluntary forces are in fact attested among the Hellenistic armies, with the almost entirely conscript army of the Antigonids at the one end, and the mostly voluntary army of the Attalids at the other. Nonetheless, voluntary recruits remain a very prominent aspect of all Hellenistic armies, whether as skilled recruits in the elite units, to provide garrisons, or as troops hired by individual kingdoms to fulfil obligations towards others, such as the provision of manpower in accordance with alliances made. Regardless of the balance between free and conscript soldiers, the sheer size of these armies, and accompanying need for manpower, meant that the option of a military career remained open to a wide range of individuals in the later Hellenistic period, especially to those with specialist skill sets.

Of course, in all cases, non-conscript soldiers had to be tempted to serve. Chapter 4 surveyed the evidence for the types of remuneration and showed that often this was, in fact, granted to all soldiers in continuous service. In this overview, we first discussed initial incentives, offered to soldiers upon enlistment, before turning to ongoing forms of payment. Among the initial incentives, we chiefly find grants of land and the provision of armour and equipment – both attested from the time of Philip II onwards. Both played a crucial role in expanding the Macedonian army, since they opened the possibility of a military career to all those who wanted one: members of the infantry no longer needed to be able to procure their own armour, while those deemed worthy of membership of the Companion cavalry did not necessarily have to be landholders upon recruitment. Both provisions endured in later years; the gift of land, sometimes taking the form of soldiers’ collective settlement, was especially prominent and a key strategy in ensuring continued troop loyalty.

A major development was the growing importance of coined wages offered for military service, regardless of soldiers’ status. No doubt on account of Philip’s demands for continuous service, wages came to be paid to both conscript and volunteer troops. Naturally, this was retained under Alexander, who further incentivized his troops with the award of additional bonuses – sometimes to reward extended service, sometimes to celebrate special achievements. Such payments continued under the Successors and Hellenistic kings, who not only offered handsome wages to their troops – often significantly higher than those paid out to soldiers opting to enlist in the citizen militia of the poleis – but also offered soldiers in rival armies considerable sums of money to tempt them to desert their employers. Alongside tax breaks and other social benefits, service in the royal armies might help to turn soldiers into prosperous members of society; combined with the potential for career progression, such incentives evidently tempted substantial numbers of able-bodied men into the service of the royal armies.

However, for paid work to constitute wage labour, the price of labour power would have to be determined on the market – and the presence of a military labour market therefore had to be ascertained. Chapter 5 showed the growing inclination of soldiers in the army ranks to negotiate improvements in the terms of their service, an attitude that was facilitated by the changing nature of military service and its evolution into a form of free labour. Nonetheless, while all soldiers surveyed in this study showed a propensity for negotiation – especially from the time of the campaigns of Alexander onwards – it was contended that the critical ingredients for the development of a military labour market emerged only during the wars of the Successors, when multiple potential employers can be seen competing for the service of soldiers, often from the same, limited pool of manpower. In this era, arguably, we see soldiers engaging in profit-driven enlistment, joining whichever army provided them with the most lucrative wage package – an attitude that surely indicates a fundamental change in the nature of service. In addition, the level of wages seemingly increased in line with higher demand for soldiers’ services, while the pay offered by the royal armies came to be significantly higher than that which the poleis could afford to offer either their citizens or voluntary recruits. The textual record furthermore shows that many of these paid recruits viewed the service as lucrative and an investment in their future.

Close analysis of the royal armies’ labour relations reveals that the distinction between volunteers and conscripts, between waged and unremunerated soldiers, did not in practice play out along the traditional divide between mercenary and citizen. Indeed, as I discussed, while the distinction continues to prevail in much modern literature on the subject, this is often too rigid and leads to misleading categorizations. Not only is the term ‘mercenary’ somewhat subjective and tainted with modern associations, but the soldiers described as such are not limited to those denoted as misthophoroi in the sources. We might, for example, think of the crews of the Athenian navy, who often comprised non-conscript foreigners whose enlistment was motivated solely by pay. This is even clearer in the royal armies: thus, already under Philip, we find voluntary recruits staffing the highest ranks of the Macedonian war machine, with their service incentivized and their loyalty secured by the king’s evident generosity. Elite troops are rarely described as misthophoroi, but their service could be non-conscript and remunerated. Under Alexander, meanwhile, we see no difference in the treatment of Macedonian conscript troops and others, while career progression and enlistment were seemingly open to all. The normalization of non-conscript, non-citizen service came to full fruition under the Successors, who, with no obvious claim upon anyone’s military service, had to rely on those who willingly enlisted to staff their armies. Crucially, by doing away with the traditional distinction between mercenaries and citizen troops, we can recognize more fully just how substantial the numbers of waged, voluntary soldiers were, certainly extending beyond the contingent of misthophoroi.

These men were able to serve under conditions that not only ensured their continued social mobility, but even offered them the opportunity to negotiate their terms of service – including, under Alexander, soldiers refusing service if their terms were not improved. Following Alexander’s death, the decades of inevitable warfare between his various Successors prepared the ground for further development of the military labour market: soldiers in the service of the competing royal armies then actively negotiated their terms and transferred their military employment elsewhere when not satisfied. Potential employers, meanwhile, came to confront each other both on the battlefield and on the market for soldiers. My exploration of market mechanisms in the recruitment of soldiers both within armies and between them has indicated that, within the armies, higher military ranks and growing career progression correlated with increased pay; this in turn inevitably generated competition between soldiers. This ongoing struggle between kings as employers led to increasingly elevated military wages, with the consequence of driving the price of military labour upwards.

Crucially, I argue that the presence of such a labour market is in fact central to explaining the development of the economies of the wider Hellenistic world. The soldiers’ labour relations, and the specific conditions that gave rise to their employment, generated precisely such a market – one that sprang into existence across the whole extent of Alexander’s former empire, involving an unprecedentedly large grouping of men. The expected structural impact of the development of wage labour on such a scale is the rise of market economies, either via economies’ disembedding or by acting as a catalyst in the growth and further development of markets. Associated elements, such as increasing monetization, more intensified production of commodities, and profit-driven behaviour, have been seen as the key to pinpointing this process. The arguments offered in Chapter 6 in connection with Hellenistic economic development are primarily arguments of scale: many of the examples discussed, whether military or economic, were, of course, already visible in the late Classical period. However, the magnitude of the royal armies – expressed both in numbers of men and in geographical coverage – may well have tipped the balance, thereby acting as the catalyst in the emergence of transformed, and fundamentally different, market-based economies.

According to Polanyi, the disembedding of economies does not come naturally, but is rather the result of ‘highly artificial stimuli administered to the body social’.Footnote ³ This is indeed reflected in each case of military labour considered in this study. Ranging from the hired crews of the Athenian navy to the soldiers of the royal armies, the military needs of what can be dubbed ‘super-states’ were the driving force behind such stimuli. For instance, in the case of Classical Athens, the navy was formed in response to the Persian threat; and the necessity of securing a successfully operating navy compelled the recruitment of paid, often voluntary, crews. Similarly, the political circumstances of Philip’s accession dictated the rapid assembly of a field-ready and loyal army, resulting in the creation of the highly professional Macedonian war machine and, eventually, the substantial market for military labour. As identified, this market thrived under the Successors and in the territorial chaos created by their attempts at gaining power. We see similar interaction between the type of military service and the political context in the later Hellenistic kingdoms, where those commanders with stable ground from which to recruit were more likely to rely on conscript troops. The poleis, on the other hand, saw in this an opportunity for the employment of their citizens, resulting, in various cases, in the emergence of highly localized military expertise, such as archers from Crete.

While Polanyi may have been mainly interested in the economic impact of these stimuli, we must recognize also how they had direct consequences for the political bodies that unleashed them. In the case of the Macedonian army, and its later embodiments under the Successors and Hellenistic kings, the power and survival of the kings were very much contingent upon their control of the armies, which offered both royal legitimacy and protection. However, soldiers in these armies were trained men, whose livelihoods were dependent on their ability to serve. As argued by Austin,Footnote ⁴ therefore, the very presence of these waged soldiers necessitated continuous warfare: not only did this ensure the kings’ continued authority and justification for their armies, but successful warfare could also finance the cost of such enterprises.

Of course, the influence of military needs on state policy was not unique to the royal armies discussed in the present volume, and comparisons with other so-called ‘super-states’ seem pertinent. We have already mentioned how both the creation and upkeep of the Athenian navy show much similarity with the processes discussed in relation to royal armies. However, looking beyond the Hellenistic age, an even more pertinent comparison might be drawn with the Roman empire, where military needs, economic developments, and political practice were closely related. In fact, Mattingly has argued that the expansion of the Roman army was ‘a singularly important shift’ in the development of Roman society and economy,Footnote ⁵ estimating that 85 per cent of the state’s total budget was used to fund its military enterprises. In order for this scale of investment to have been sustainable, Roman policy was inevitably strongly geared towards the extraction of the required resources from the various provinces and governed the structure of the ‘imperial economy’ which existed alongside economies active across the various provinces, as well as more localized economies within the provinces.Footnote ⁶ According to this model, Roman military development and accompanying economic requirements had a vital role to play in the structuring of the Roman empire’s economies, and did so in ways that may fruitfully be compared with the Hellenistic developments discussed in this study. Similarly, Carthage’s regular use of non-citizen troops, who were sometimes levied through alliances and often as voluntary recruits, existed in symbiosis with its maritime empire, within which a small citizen body seemingly had commercial rather than military duties and interests.Footnote ⁷ Carthaginian mercantile successes could support the recruitment of military professionals, and could sustain this model of military service if the required funds were in place.

The soldiers discussed in this monograph were levied first and foremost to protect and expand the territories of their employers, first Philip and Alexander of Macedonia, then the Successors, and eventually the Hellenistic kings. The military influence of each of these rulers was vast, as they came to redraw the map of the eastern Mediterranean forever, yet their enduring impact on society was felt much more widely. As this study has argued, the royal armies ought to be recognized as loci and instigators of major socio-economic change – first by revolutionizing the nature of military service by turning it into a profession open to all, and second, by necessitating the creation of markets to satisfy the needs of the royal soldiers, whose generous wages sustained both these markets and their producers. The period’s incessant warfare no doubt caused tragedy and loss for many individuals and their communities, yet the accompanying developments in the nature of military service also ushered in the economic transformation of the Greek world.