The King's Letter

Cut into stone on Chios, and surviving, is a document that begins with a dating formula and a name:

It is Alexander the Great's settlement of the island, issued in 332 BC, and it is one of a very small number of royal letters of Alexander to come down to us in anything approaching their original form. Not a later historian's paraphrase, not a rhetorical set-piece composed for a biography — the actual administrative instrument, published on stone in the city it governed, in the language its clerks used.

Its provisions run roughly as follows. All exiles from Chios are to return. The constitution of Chios is to be a democracy. Lawgivers are to be appointed to draft and revise the laws — and their draft is to be submitted to Alexander for approval. Those who betrayed the city to the Persians and have fled are to be exiles from every city in Alexander's alliance and liable to seizure anywhere; those still on the island are to be arrested and sent for trial before the Council of the League of Corinth. Any dispute between the returning exiles and those who stayed is to be judged by Alexander in person. Chios is to provide twenty triremes, fully manned at its own expense, to serve with the Greek fleet for as long as the rest of the naval alliance is at sea. And, until harmony is restored on the island, a garrison is to be maintained there, paid for by the Chians.

It is worth reading that list twice, because it is a masterpiece of a particular genre. Every one of Alexander's stated purposes is liberation: the exiles come home, the tyrants are punished, democracy is restored, the traitors face justice. And attached to each of them, like a shadow, is an instrument of control: the laws are subject to royal approval, the disputes are reserved to royal judgement, twenty warships are requisitioned, and there is a garrison in the citadel which the liberated are required to pay for.

Historians of Hellenistic kingship return to this inscription constantly, because it shows with unusual clarity what the great slogan of the age — the freedom of the Greeks — meant in practice when a king was saying it. Chios got its democracy. Chios also got the bill.

For the island, the practical effect was reintegration into a Greek world now organised around Macedonian power, and it proved durable. Chios kept its institutions, its wealth, and its fleet through the long confusion of the Successors, aligning as circumstances required with whichever great power — Antigonid, Ptolemaic, Seleucid, later Attalid — happened to be locally dominant, striking its coinage, honouring its benefactors, maintaining its sanctuaries, and shipping its wine. It is in this period that the island's intellectual reputation received its most enduring monument, the Apotheosis of Homer relief; and it is in this period that Chian merchants first appear in the surviving records of the great Hellenistic entrepôts, at Delos and Rhodes and Alexandria, doing what Chian merchants would still be doing two thousand years later.