I wrote a long, considered thing some days ago, only to lose it when my browser jammed forcing me to restart.
The general theme was, I hardly want to dictate to the author how things ought to go but did want to point out critical choices that had to be made. As I was writing, the author made some of these.
In retrospect I wish the thing hadn't been lost because I had some remarks about the options of the various parties, and I think Carthage might have acted other than to ally with Rome--which I did consider a high probability to be sure. But a better move for them might have been to appeal to Ptolemy to reconsider his alliance with Massalia and then seek alliance with Rome to focus on crushing the League. A policy of friendship with Egypt by Carthage would amount to splitting the Med trade between them, Egypt holding the more lucrative Eastern trade. The advantage to Ptolemy would have been that Carthage already is established while the Massaliote Greeks are just getting into the northern territory. With Rome pinning down Massaliotes on their eastern end, Carthage could attack from Sardina and Corsica by sea, from Iberia by land, and harry the Greek trade missions in the north. Even only partial success would clip the League's wings and re-establish Carthage as monopolist of Atlantic coastal shipped goods, especially if in return for trading these to Egypt in high volume at moderate prices, the Punics got a monopoly on eastern goods going to western destinations.
This grand plan would of course require the effective nullification of the triple Greek alliance, with Pyrrhus standing idly by while Ptolemy profits. It would also leave the Italians under Rome as the presumptive new rivals for hegemony in the west.
I suppose then that the way things do go makes more sense, especially if we factor in Greek solidarity--which one should note, is something of a new thing; hitherto (and onward to Roman conquest OTL) Greeks have been terrible at getting their acts together. According to something I read in Arnold Toynbee's many volumes of "A Study of History," and this some decades ago, I gather there was once, in western coastal Thrace, a confederation formed between many small, obscure little polieses that vaguely resembled the USA of the 1786 Constitution--the many towns guaranteed some proportionality of representation in a central council that the cities undertook to support binding decisions from, with a more or less central executive appended to this legislature--I suppose perhaps this is where it differed, execution of central decisions being dispersed back to the league members. No one ever mentions this body, if Toynbee was even correct in believing it existed at all. Obviously it was atypical, organizations such as the Delian League showing what was far more likely to happen--that is, a bunch of small, weak polieses dominated by a big leading city (Athens, in this case) whose individual democracy (and more often, not even a democracy) undertook decisions mainly in its own interest, valuing the League as a mere appendage of its own hegemony. In resisting the onslaught of the Persians, the Greeks famously did achieve a sort of collective unity of acton on an ad hoc basis, but only temporarily until the object in view, defeat of a universally existential threat (and not decisive defeat but a mere check of its immediate ambitions) was accomplished, at which point the unity dissolved almost at once into rival factions that had temporarily set aside deep conflicts, and with the blocs opposed to each other themselves fragmented by the egotism of big and small cities alike. Had the Greeks been able to develop some sort of balanced federalism I suppose there would have been no question of coming under the domination of Macedon, but rather this hypothetical league might have eaten away at the kingdom piecemeal, carving off territories here and there and setting them up as new polieses presumably adhering to the League in the self-interest of avoiding re-subordination to Macedon. Perhaps a balance would have formed with monarchial Macedon forming a sharp limit in its direction, with Eprios similarly either getting absorbed or forming another boundary. If anyone were to replicate Alexander's feat in such a TL it might be the League perhaps allied with Macedon, but it seems more likely internal squabbling not unlike the mutual suspicion between northern free and southern slave states in the USA would limit unified expansionism into Anatolia, with the League perhaps picking off certain small city-states here and there opportunistically--but every major crisis of Persia that might be an opportunity for expansion that way would instead turn into a political crisis in the League, and Persian power, with the Greek threat effectively self-checked, might last longer on an increasingly rickety basis until it collapsed internally and fell to successors other than Greeks. Perhaps a great Hellenic League would instead incorporate and organize the scattered colonies in Italy, Africa, the Gaulish coast and Iberia--but it seems more likely to me either these would remain bastions of traditional poleis independence or perhaps form local leagues of their own.
What you have going here with the "Massaliote League" seems to be a late invention of this type. If Toynbee's obscure and apparently short-lived example stands, for what it is worth there seems to perhaps be a slim chance of general Hellenic identity trumping the stubborn ideal of city independence. The question still remains, just how is this ATL League organized? It would seem from the posts that Massalia has a strong leading role comparable to Rome in the Latin League or Carthage in her system, but I have to question how stable that would be. Of the other Gaulish Hellenic colonies, some I suppose were indeed offshoots of Massalia themselves, but even these seem likely to asset their independence. Others are quite recent creations of a process of defeat and decimation of particular Gaulic tribes, dispossessing them and bringing in new Greeks from overseas--some of these have kinship with Massalia, but many of the Greek settlers the League needs to dominate the territory on a chauvinistically Hellenic basis will not be from sister Phocean colonies. It all points to a new type of organization, in which those who settle far from the queen city have nevertheless some assurance of their dignity and rights as fellow Hellenes, and yet the whole can act with unity and not fall apart due to parochial interests. Yet these parochial interests cannot simply be suppressed and overridden either! According to Wikipedia, about a century before the events on hand here in this thread start, Massalia had a population of only 6000 people--perhaps that merely counts elite full-rights citizens and counting subordinated classes and hinterland dependencies it might have been much more. But I think that figure is meant to count women and children too. That city getting credit for being the most ancient in modern French territory, presumably the other city states of the League are in some combination much smaller than that or much newer.
In general in this TL I get a sense of massive, sweeping changes going on in south Gaul that amount to major political and social revolution. I keep wanting to make analogies to the United States in its early days. But the USA drew on emigration from a Europe itself undergoing massive upheaval due to the sweeping and accelerating changes of the Industrial Revolution. While the Hellenistic Era has some trace of such upheaval, very little of it was due to massive transformation in the fundamental modes of production. Something amazing that needs a lot of justification is happening in South Gaul; suggesting that Pyrrhus living somewhat longer can explain it seems pretty absurd to me. The divergence is something else entirely, with Pyrrhus's different fate presumably being a butterfly coming off of this. The radical new way of thinking and operating in South Gaul may have many of its elements foreshadowed and exemplified in OTL Hellenistic history--notably transformation of military tactics, and the rise of new larger states. But the latter political revolutions were always elsewhere a matter of tyrannies mostly spinning off the great tyranny of Alexander's empire.
I also suspect that even if we grant a lot of revolutionary vision to the enterprising leaders of Massalia, and a bold pioneering ambition as well, OTL the demographic base was weak for such sweeping effects. Bringing in immigrants from other city-states would I would think tend to homogenize their general mentality to that prevailing in the east, which is to say they'd settle on a tyrant and be done with it. Here we have no great tyrant comparable to Ptolemy or Pyrrhus to explain the foundation; instead it all seems collective somehow, and yet we do not, as was the case in the federal Union of the USA, see the great names and decisions spread around. To make an American analogy, it is like the 13 colonies all decide to simply follow the lead of whoever leads in Boston, New York or Virginia--just one of these, mind, not the three together! In US history certain big states did seem to dominate in certain ways--for quite a long time far more Presidents than not were natives of Virginia for instance, yet a cursory glance at the complex Federal system not to mention the development of private interests shows that power was very widely distributed and individuals from every state, pretty soon including new frontier ones, were very important in Washington and in the developing national economy, and we also see power swinging back and forth between different regions, with one set of interests getting their way on issues that deeply bothered others, and yet those others later asserting themselves and discomfiting the recently high-riding blocs in turn.
Perhaps this overview account of necessity omits all this sort of turbulent and yet ultimately unifying action for the sake of a quick description. Perhaps named individuals of importance are not all Massallian by birth at all? Certainly the League is shown to recruit and promote people born completely outside of it?
Another elephant in the room--the relations between Gaulish tribespeople and the Hellenes. I figured reading early entries that one trait of the League would have to be a certain degree of merger of identity and interest between some Gauls and the Hellenic immigrants. Clearly the League has advanced at the expense of other Gaulish tribes, who happened to be opposed to the plans of expansion of trade and power; these have been defeated in detail and their lands distributed to immigrants. But other Gaulish tribes are shown to be allies and indeed vital sources of League strength; large sections of victorious League armies are said to be tribesmen. This would make sense to me if we were also witnessing a two-sided cultural and social fusion going on; if allied Gauls were recognized as members of the League in similar standing to Hellenic city-states, if intermarriage were producing mixed-heritage individuals who bridge the gaps and highlight commonalities. It was along these lines that I figured the League might seek to woo the Biturges sitting on the good port of Bordeaux, which the transport artery of the Garrone flows directly to, and seek to recruit them as new League allies to be partially Hellenized over time--but also, to be lured in by the observation that other Gaulish towns enjoy equal status as League members and therefore they too could proudly remain Gaulish (with increasing tinges of advanced Greek culture to be sure!) while profiting from the League's benefits.
But instead, it is League policy to establish a new town, one with significant disadvantages that have to be overcome with presumably expensive efforts, to bypass and cut off these established Gauls. Presumably there will be resentment; such disgruntled Celtic towns are just the kind of allies the Carthaginians, or farther east Romans, might take advantage of to check, push back, and even dissect the League. Such an ultimately confrontational policy strikes me as contemptuous of the potentials of these Gaulish neighbors, and in the absence of any commentary on the rise of specific old Gaulish allies in the League interior nor seeing any Gaulish names, even Greekified, among the leaders of the League, I am developing a darker picture of even the most friendly and assimilated Celts as a bypassed, hemmed-in, disrespected people who either are in a cycle of dissolution and slow assimilation to Hellenic norms (after which they might indeed be among the leaders and profiting members of League society) or worse, a rising tension in which they see their second-class status and would reasonably come to increasingly resent it. Given that recruits from among these people are important as foot soldiers and sword fodder, but not apparently recognized as generals nor credited with new twists on tactics that might plausibly give League armies unique advantages, this seems dangerous to me, laying the groundwork for Social Wars that might be as disruptive as those that overtook Rome OTL. Of course the outcome might be similar--after taking damage the dominant culture asserts itself, takes the last-gasp desperation of the aliens among them as opportunity to reduce them to total submission and assimilation on dominant terms. But it would be pretty unfortunate for these matters to come to a head in the foreseeable near future, whereas if the League had stumbled on a more creative path many of the mysteries and conundrums hanging over this ATL entity rising so fast and so far in power would be creatively addressed. A Helleno-Celtic hybrid society, with the League a patchwork of Greek and Gaulish communities cooperating in common and Gaulish influence laying the groundwork for unique abilities, would explain what we see better I think than Hellenistic chauvinism.
And yet, if the League can accomplish the amazing feat of fusing together Greeks of many backgrounds, dispersed across wide territories, into acting as one self-interested nation, perhaps it is far too much to expect it to also make this other leap. In fact we have seen much emphasis placed on Greek chauvinism; it helps explain why the triple alliance holds for instance. Greek chauvinism does seem to be a major factor that cannot just be wished away and is to a degree as creative as it is destructive.
I merely share my observations. It looks to me like the evidence offered by the author suggests the League is a profoundly Hellenistic thing that definitely assumes anyone who deviates from Grecian norms must be a barbarian and inferior, even if useful and having shown valuable loyalty and service in the past. This latter is taken for granted as recognition of Greek superiority--and while this can plausibly work for a while and completely in some cases, in other cases it is a dangerous formula that seems liable to blow up with drastic consequences, and I would guess it ought to pretty soon if things are as bad as they look to me.
I'd like it otherwise because the idea of a very strong unified Greco-Gaulish state dominating the north Med west of Italy (and to my surprise, apparently Cis-Alpine Gaul is not already Romanized and is up for grabs too) and possibly taking on the role of Rome in the West, and possibly even the entire Roman Empire, is pretty exciting and romantic. And perhaps it can be done on the basis of uncompromising Hellenizing, but if so there must be some hard and dark years ahead.
The general theme was, I hardly want to dictate to the author how things ought to go but did want to point out critical choices that had to be made. As I was writing, the author made some of these.
In retrospect I wish the thing hadn't been lost because I had some remarks about the options of the various parties, and I think Carthage might have acted other than to ally with Rome--which I did consider a high probability to be sure. But a better move for them might have been to appeal to Ptolemy to reconsider his alliance with Massalia and then seek alliance with Rome to focus on crushing the League. A policy of friendship with Egypt by Carthage would amount to splitting the Med trade between them, Egypt holding the more lucrative Eastern trade. The advantage to Ptolemy would have been that Carthage already is established while the Massaliote Greeks are just getting into the northern territory. With Rome pinning down Massaliotes on their eastern end, Carthage could attack from Sardina and Corsica by sea, from Iberia by land, and harry the Greek trade missions in the north. Even only partial success would clip the League's wings and re-establish Carthage as monopolist of Atlantic coastal shipped goods, especially if in return for trading these to Egypt in high volume at moderate prices, the Punics got a monopoly on eastern goods going to western destinations.
This grand plan would of course require the effective nullification of the triple Greek alliance, with Pyrrhus standing idly by while Ptolemy profits. It would also leave the Italians under Rome as the presumptive new rivals for hegemony in the west.
I suppose then that the way things do go makes more sense, especially if we factor in Greek solidarity--which one should note, is something of a new thing; hitherto (and onward to Roman conquest OTL) Greeks have been terrible at getting their acts together. According to something I read in Arnold Toynbee's many volumes of "A Study of History," and this some decades ago, I gather there was once, in western coastal Thrace, a confederation formed between many small, obscure little polieses that vaguely resembled the USA of the 1786 Constitution--the many towns guaranteed some proportionality of representation in a central council that the cities undertook to support binding decisions from, with a more or less central executive appended to this legislature--I suppose perhaps this is where it differed, execution of central decisions being dispersed back to the league members. No one ever mentions this body, if Toynbee was even correct in believing it existed at all. Obviously it was atypical, organizations such as the Delian League showing what was far more likely to happen--that is, a bunch of small, weak polieses dominated by a big leading city (Athens, in this case) whose individual democracy (and more often, not even a democracy) undertook decisions mainly in its own interest, valuing the League as a mere appendage of its own hegemony. In resisting the onslaught of the Persians, the Greeks famously did achieve a sort of collective unity of acton on an ad hoc basis, but only temporarily until the object in view, defeat of a universally existential threat (and not decisive defeat but a mere check of its immediate ambitions) was accomplished, at which point the unity dissolved almost at once into rival factions that had temporarily set aside deep conflicts, and with the blocs opposed to each other themselves fragmented by the egotism of big and small cities alike. Had the Greeks been able to develop some sort of balanced federalism I suppose there would have been no question of coming under the domination of Macedon, but rather this hypothetical league might have eaten away at the kingdom piecemeal, carving off territories here and there and setting them up as new polieses presumably adhering to the League in the self-interest of avoiding re-subordination to Macedon. Perhaps a balance would have formed with monarchial Macedon forming a sharp limit in its direction, with Eprios similarly either getting absorbed or forming another boundary. If anyone were to replicate Alexander's feat in such a TL it might be the League perhaps allied with Macedon, but it seems more likely internal squabbling not unlike the mutual suspicion between northern free and southern slave states in the USA would limit unified expansionism into Anatolia, with the League perhaps picking off certain small city-states here and there opportunistically--but every major crisis of Persia that might be an opportunity for expansion that way would instead turn into a political crisis in the League, and Persian power, with the Greek threat effectively self-checked, might last longer on an increasingly rickety basis until it collapsed internally and fell to successors other than Greeks. Perhaps a great Hellenic League would instead incorporate and organize the scattered colonies in Italy, Africa, the Gaulish coast and Iberia--but it seems more likely to me either these would remain bastions of traditional poleis independence or perhaps form local leagues of their own.
What you have going here with the "Massaliote League" seems to be a late invention of this type. If Toynbee's obscure and apparently short-lived example stands, for what it is worth there seems to perhaps be a slim chance of general Hellenic identity trumping the stubborn ideal of city independence. The question still remains, just how is this ATL League organized? It would seem from the posts that Massalia has a strong leading role comparable to Rome in the Latin League or Carthage in her system, but I have to question how stable that would be. Of the other Gaulish Hellenic colonies, some I suppose were indeed offshoots of Massalia themselves, but even these seem likely to asset their independence. Others are quite recent creations of a process of defeat and decimation of particular Gaulic tribes, dispossessing them and bringing in new Greeks from overseas--some of these have kinship with Massalia, but many of the Greek settlers the League needs to dominate the territory on a chauvinistically Hellenic basis will not be from sister Phocean colonies. It all points to a new type of organization, in which those who settle far from the queen city have nevertheless some assurance of their dignity and rights as fellow Hellenes, and yet the whole can act with unity and not fall apart due to parochial interests. Yet these parochial interests cannot simply be suppressed and overridden either! According to Wikipedia, about a century before the events on hand here in this thread start, Massalia had a population of only 6000 people--perhaps that merely counts elite full-rights citizens and counting subordinated classes and hinterland dependencies it might have been much more. But I think that figure is meant to count women and children too. That city getting credit for being the most ancient in modern French territory, presumably the other city states of the League are in some combination much smaller than that or much newer.
In general in this TL I get a sense of massive, sweeping changes going on in south Gaul that amount to major political and social revolution. I keep wanting to make analogies to the United States in its early days. But the USA drew on emigration from a Europe itself undergoing massive upheaval due to the sweeping and accelerating changes of the Industrial Revolution. While the Hellenistic Era has some trace of such upheaval, very little of it was due to massive transformation in the fundamental modes of production. Something amazing that needs a lot of justification is happening in South Gaul; suggesting that Pyrrhus living somewhat longer can explain it seems pretty absurd to me. The divergence is something else entirely, with Pyrrhus's different fate presumably being a butterfly coming off of this. The radical new way of thinking and operating in South Gaul may have many of its elements foreshadowed and exemplified in OTL Hellenistic history--notably transformation of military tactics, and the rise of new larger states. But the latter political revolutions were always elsewhere a matter of tyrannies mostly spinning off the great tyranny of Alexander's empire.
I also suspect that even if we grant a lot of revolutionary vision to the enterprising leaders of Massalia, and a bold pioneering ambition as well, OTL the demographic base was weak for such sweeping effects. Bringing in immigrants from other city-states would I would think tend to homogenize their general mentality to that prevailing in the east, which is to say they'd settle on a tyrant and be done with it. Here we have no great tyrant comparable to Ptolemy or Pyrrhus to explain the foundation; instead it all seems collective somehow, and yet we do not, as was the case in the federal Union of the USA, see the great names and decisions spread around. To make an American analogy, it is like the 13 colonies all decide to simply follow the lead of whoever leads in Boston, New York or Virginia--just one of these, mind, not the three together! In US history certain big states did seem to dominate in certain ways--for quite a long time far more Presidents than not were natives of Virginia for instance, yet a cursory glance at the complex Federal system not to mention the development of private interests shows that power was very widely distributed and individuals from every state, pretty soon including new frontier ones, were very important in Washington and in the developing national economy, and we also see power swinging back and forth between different regions, with one set of interests getting their way on issues that deeply bothered others, and yet those others later asserting themselves and discomfiting the recently high-riding blocs in turn.
Perhaps this overview account of necessity omits all this sort of turbulent and yet ultimately unifying action for the sake of a quick description. Perhaps named individuals of importance are not all Massallian by birth at all? Certainly the League is shown to recruit and promote people born completely outside of it?
Another elephant in the room--the relations between Gaulish tribespeople and the Hellenes. I figured reading early entries that one trait of the League would have to be a certain degree of merger of identity and interest between some Gauls and the Hellenic immigrants. Clearly the League has advanced at the expense of other Gaulish tribes, who happened to be opposed to the plans of expansion of trade and power; these have been defeated in detail and their lands distributed to immigrants. But other Gaulish tribes are shown to be allies and indeed vital sources of League strength; large sections of victorious League armies are said to be tribesmen. This would make sense to me if we were also witnessing a two-sided cultural and social fusion going on; if allied Gauls were recognized as members of the League in similar standing to Hellenic city-states, if intermarriage were producing mixed-heritage individuals who bridge the gaps and highlight commonalities. It was along these lines that I figured the League might seek to woo the Biturges sitting on the good port of Bordeaux, which the transport artery of the Garrone flows directly to, and seek to recruit them as new League allies to be partially Hellenized over time--but also, to be lured in by the observation that other Gaulish towns enjoy equal status as League members and therefore they too could proudly remain Gaulish (with increasing tinges of advanced Greek culture to be sure!) while profiting from the League's benefits.
But instead, it is League policy to establish a new town, one with significant disadvantages that have to be overcome with presumably expensive efforts, to bypass and cut off these established Gauls. Presumably there will be resentment; such disgruntled Celtic towns are just the kind of allies the Carthaginians, or farther east Romans, might take advantage of to check, push back, and even dissect the League. Such an ultimately confrontational policy strikes me as contemptuous of the potentials of these Gaulish neighbors, and in the absence of any commentary on the rise of specific old Gaulish allies in the League interior nor seeing any Gaulish names, even Greekified, among the leaders of the League, I am developing a darker picture of even the most friendly and assimilated Celts as a bypassed, hemmed-in, disrespected people who either are in a cycle of dissolution and slow assimilation to Hellenic norms (after which they might indeed be among the leaders and profiting members of League society) or worse, a rising tension in which they see their second-class status and would reasonably come to increasingly resent it. Given that recruits from among these people are important as foot soldiers and sword fodder, but not apparently recognized as generals nor credited with new twists on tactics that might plausibly give League armies unique advantages, this seems dangerous to me, laying the groundwork for Social Wars that might be as disruptive as those that overtook Rome OTL. Of course the outcome might be similar--after taking damage the dominant culture asserts itself, takes the last-gasp desperation of the aliens among them as opportunity to reduce them to total submission and assimilation on dominant terms. But it would be pretty unfortunate for these matters to come to a head in the foreseeable near future, whereas if the League had stumbled on a more creative path many of the mysteries and conundrums hanging over this ATL entity rising so fast and so far in power would be creatively addressed. A Helleno-Celtic hybrid society, with the League a patchwork of Greek and Gaulish communities cooperating in common and Gaulish influence laying the groundwork for unique abilities, would explain what we see better I think than Hellenistic chauvinism.
And yet, if the League can accomplish the amazing feat of fusing together Greeks of many backgrounds, dispersed across wide territories, into acting as one self-interested nation, perhaps it is far too much to expect it to also make this other leap. In fact we have seen much emphasis placed on Greek chauvinism; it helps explain why the triple alliance holds for instance. Greek chauvinism does seem to be a major factor that cannot just be wished away and is to a degree as creative as it is destructive.
I merely share my observations. It looks to me like the evidence offered by the author suggests the League is a profoundly Hellenistic thing that definitely assumes anyone who deviates from Grecian norms must be a barbarian and inferior, even if useful and having shown valuable loyalty and service in the past. This latter is taken for granted as recognition of Greek superiority--and while this can plausibly work for a while and completely in some cases, in other cases it is a dangerous formula that seems liable to blow up with drastic consequences, and I would guess it ought to pretty soon if things are as bad as they look to me.
I'd like it otherwise because the idea of a very strong unified Greco-Gaulish state dominating the north Med west of Italy (and to my surprise, apparently Cis-Alpine Gaul is not already Romanized and is up for grabs too) and possibly taking on the role of Rome in the West, and possibly even the entire Roman Empire, is pretty exciting and romantic. And perhaps it can be done on the basis of uncompromising Hellenizing, but if so there must be some hard and dark years ahead.
