Dividing the Spoils

by Waterfield, Robin

  His rule was little harsher than that of his predecessors, but he maintained a firm control over the Greek cities within his domain. He did not want any trouble; he needed security. For by the middle of the 280s, Lysimachus, aged about seventy, was in a hurry. His building program included at least one Alexandria, and his coinage portrayed him as Alexander’s heir, hinting at a hunger for further conquest. Ptolemy II was secure in Greater Egypt; Seleucus was a neighbor, but not one it would have been sensible to attack in the first instance. Antigonus Gonatas, however, held little more than a fleet and the Fetters of Greece—like his father after Ipsus, he was down but not quite out, clinging on to his few possessions with the help of his mercenaries—and Pyrrhus’s possession of half of Macedon was an anomaly. Lysimachus’s attention was inevitably drawn west.

  The partitioners of Macedon had a peace treaty in place, but that was mere expediency. Pyrrhus found that his former allies, Ptolemy and the Aetolians, drifted away. The Aetolians were effectively bought off by Lysimachus’s generosity, and Ptolemy was reluctant to antagonize Lysimachus, in case he ever needed his help against Seleucus in Syria. Lysimachus entered into an alliance with Athens, which completed Pyrrhus’s exposure on the Greek mainland, and launched a propaganda campaign within Macedon, crudely depicting the Epirote as a foreign interloper.

  In one of those volte-faces that characterize the entire period, Pyrrhus accordingly allied himself with Gonatas, as if to try to unite the Greek mainland against Lysimachus. Pyrrhus received some of Gonatas’s mercenaries, but in 284, when it came to a confrontation, many of his men deserted to Lysimachus, who took over western Macedon and Thessaly. This not only restricted Pyrrhus to Epirus but drove a wedge between him and Gonatas. It was effectively the end of Pyrrhus’s attempts to expand within the Greek mainland. Before long he turned his attentions west instead—and achieved considerable success for a while against the up-and-coming Romans. Called in to help the Greeks of southern Italy against galloping Roman imperialism, Pyrrhus actually managed to defeat the Romans in three successive battles, but still lost the war. The Romans always had more men on whom they could call, while Pyrrhus had been bled dry. That is why we use the term “Pyrrhic” for a victory that amounts to defeat.

  A DIVIDED COURT

  So Macedon had a new king, the fifth in ten years. Worse was to follow. In 287, Lysimacheia was badly damaged by an earthquake. It was soon rebuilt, but there were those who were inclined to read it as ominous that Lysimachus’s new capital should fall.3 Alarmed by his awesome power and evident ambitions, mighty enemies were lining up against him. All that was needed was a catalyst.

  In 300, Ptolemy I had given his then teenaged daughter Arsinoe to the sexagenarian Lysimachus; in 293 or so, he had given Lysandra (previously married to Alexander V) to Lysimachus’s son and heir Agathocles. Lysandra was a daughter of Ptolemy’s first wife Eurydice, Arsinoe of his second, and preferred, wife Berenice. Ironically, Berenice, Eurydice’s niece, had been in her retinue, and that is how she had come to Ptolemy’s attention.

  Long before 285, when Ptolemy named Ptolemy II as his successor, Berenice’s faction at court had completely defeated that of Eurydice. It was a typical amphimetric dispute, the consequence of the Successors’ propensity for polygamy: sons born of the same father but different mothers became rivals for the throne. Eurydice’s son Ptolemy Ceraunus, who as the eldest son felt robbed of the Egyptian throne, was also currently resident at Lysimachus’s court. He was living proof that the eldest son does not necessarily succeed to the throne.

  Agathocles may have been disappointed that, while Ptolemy had abdicated in favor of his son and Seleucus had named Antiochus joint king, his own aged father had not seen fit to honor him in the same way. Even Antigonus had done as much for Demetrius. And Lysimachus, for his part, may have been concerned at Agathocles’ royal pretensions, since he had named a city after himself and wore a diadem on his coins. The fact that he had done these things without his father’s permission shows that he already had a semi-independent existence within Asia Minor, with his own treasury, mint, and presumably troops. His success in driving Demetrius out of Asia Minor had won him the allegiance of the Greek cities and of large numbers of prominent men, who formed, as it were, his court. But whatever the pretext—the occupation of the Egyptian throne by Arsinoe’s brother may also have had something to do with it—Lysimachus now chose to favor the sons Arsinoe had borne him over Agathocles, his only son by Nicaea.

  Agathocles rallied his supporters and launched a coup. Our sources are so scant for this period that we do not even know whether it came to battle. But, whether as a result of conflict or intrigue, Agathocles fell into his father’s hands and was imprisoned. Before long, Lysimachus had him killed, possibly using Ceraunus as his hit man.4 This terrible act did Lysimachus’s cause no good, and he was faced with further unrest, which was brutally crushed. Those who survived the purge fled. Many found their way to Seleucus’s court, including Lysandra; she hated her half sister Arsinoe as much as her mother hated Arsinoe’s mother. Their appeals for help, sowing the seeds of renewed war, fell on fertile ground.

  It was certainly a time for ambitions to be fulfilled. A man called Philetaerus, no friend of Arsinoe, was among those who found his way to Seleucus’s court. Originally an Antigonid officer responsible for Pergamum, he had gone over to Lysimachus not long before Ipsus, and after the battle Lysimachus had reappointed him to the governorship of the city. One of the most important things about Pergamum was its relative impregnability; both Antigonus and Lysimachus kept one of their main treasuries there. At the time in question, the treasury held nine thousand talents (somewhat over five billion dollars). Philetaerus offered to draw on this to hire troops for Seleucus, on the understanding that, once Lysimachus was defeated, he could rule over an independent Pergamum. Seleucus agreed—a sound short-term decision, perhaps, but one that his successors would rue, since the Attalid kingdom of Pergamum prospered and soon came to challenge the Seleucids for much of Asia Minor. Its wealth and splendor may be gauged by the extant remains, and especially by the astonishing Altar of Zeus in the Pergamum Museum of Berlin, dating from the first quarter of the second century.5 The kingdom survived until it was bequeathed to the people of Rome in 133 BCE.

  LAST MAN STANDING

  The chaos within Lysimachus’s realm attracted Seleucus. He had spent the years since Ipsus stabilizing and securing his empire and he was now ready to extend it. Any of the Successors would have done the same if they had the resources of Seleucus and were handed such an opportunity—even if, like him, they were closer to eighty than seventy. As far as they were concerned, that was the whole point of having resources: to use them to gain more land and more resources. And Seleucus’s propagandists had paved the way for grand imperialism; he had been born in the same year as Alexander, they said, and he had once rescued Alexander’s diadem after an accident and briefly worn it. As well as spreading stories, he also had politicians promoting his interests in the Greek cities of Asia Minor.

  Seleucus mustered his army, elephants and all (he had established a breeding farm at Apamea in Seleucis),6 and in July 282 set out for Asia Minor. Ptolemy II, nominally Lysimachus’s ally, did nothing, perhaps in the hope that Seleucus would at the same time rid him of his troublesome half brother. Seleucus crossed the Taurus well before winter set in and spent some time in winter camp on the Asia Minor side of the Taurus, within Lysimachus’s kingdom. This was a bold strategy, but seems to have met with no opposition. The area must have been dominated by men loyal to Agathocles.

  At the end of January 281, Seleucus took to the field, and at the same time sent his fleet on ahead to the west coast to lend help to his supporters in the Greek cities. He had softened the cities up by means of generous benefactions, and he used the old Antigonid gambit that they would find him a more congenial king than Lysimachus. A few of the cities did indeed erupt into factional strife, though more of them waited for the outcome of the inevitable decisive battle
before committing themselves.

  Seleucus’s progress was unimpeded. Lysimachus had chosen to wait for him in western Asia Minor. This may have been a tactical decision, in order to be able to maintain some kind of control over the Asiatic Greek cities, but at the same time Lysimachus seems to have been helpless, and plagued by desertion. The decisive battle of the sixth and final war of the Successors was fought at Corupedium, the “Plain of Plenty” west of Sardis, in February 281. No details are known, but it was a complete victory for Seleucus. Aged Lysimachus died on the field. His wife Arsinoe persuaded an attendant to dress as her, while she slipped away from Ephesus (which had briefly borne her name), dressed in rags. The attendant was indeed killed, and Arsinoe fetched up in Macedon, in Cassandreia, where her late husband had been worshipped as a god and she could expect refuge. She took with her a considerable fortune and some of the mercenaries left over from Lysimachus’s army, to improve the city’s chances of remaining independent of Macedonian rule. Seleucus was the last of Alexander’s Successors, and he was poised to fulfill the dream of empire on Alexander’s scale.

  THE CULT OF LIVING RULERS

  The end of Lysimachus’s rule in Asia Minor was widely welcomed by his former subjects—not so much because it had been especially harsh, but because, unluckily, it had seen almost constant warfare, after years of peace under Antigonus. Plutarch preserves a tale in which a peasant, digging a hole, is asked what he is doing; “Looking for Antigonus,” he replies.7 Lysimachus’s demise and replacement promised peace; naturally, the cities were effusive toward their new master. The island of Lemnos even awarded Seleucus cult honors.

  From time to time throughout this book we have met with the worship of the Successors, not just after their death, but, as with Seleucus in this instance, while they were still alive. Leaving aside the fact that, as a pharaoh, Ptolemy was recognized by at least the traditionalists among his native subjects as a god, he was also worshipped as Savior in Rhodes, as were Antigonus and Demetrius in Athens. Antigonus also received divine honors at Scepsis in northwestern Asia Minor, and Demetrius ended up with three cults in Athens. Alexander the Great demanded at the Olympic Games of 324 that all the Greek cities recognize his divinity, as a few already had of their own accord. During the brief period of Cassandreia’s independence, Lysimachus was worshipped there, as he was also at Priene in Caria. Games were instituted in honor of Antigonus and Demetrius on the island of Delos. The awarding of divine honors to Alexander and the Successors was far from universal, but it was a widespread practice.8

  Alexander and the Successors were not the first living individuals to be awarded divine honors. At the end of the fifth century, the Spartan general Lysander received cult honors as a savior for freeing the island of Samos from Athenian dominion. In the middle of the fourth century, Dionysius I, tyrant of the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily, obliged his subjects to award him divine honors.9 All that we find in the Successor period is a huge acceleration of the phenomenon, and that is easily explained by the extraordinary nature of the times.

  Homer’s Odyssey, written around the end of the eighth century BCE, was one of the foundation documents of Greek thinking about the gods. At one point Odysseus has been washed up on a shore, more dead than alive. He is rescued by the beautiful, fey princess Nausicaa, and he tells her that if he gets back home, “I will pray to you as a goddess for all my days, for you gave me life.”10 In a polytheistic world, the gods could take on all kinds of guises, and even appear as human beings. An embodied god was simultaneously divine and mortal. When an embodied god was recognized as such at the time (as opposed to with hindsight), it was, naturally, an intensely moving experience.

  But how could you tell you were faced with a god? By his or her fruits, by the extraordinary, superhuman nature of what he or she was doing. The gods broke human barriers and saved people in extraordinary and unexpected ways. When Ptolemy saved Rhodes, or Demetrius Athens, they achieved something remarkable, even miraculous, and in so doing they proved that they were embodied gods, no less than Nausicaa in fiction. This is particularly clear in a decree from Scepsis, dating from 311: Antigonus is awarded divine honors precisely because he has brought peace and autonomy.11 In almost every case, the awarding of divine honors to a Successor followed his winning a major victory.

  The Successors stirred deep emotions. “He sat [on his horse] in the full realization of all that soldiers dream of—triumph; and as I looked up at him in the complete fruition of the success which his genius, courage, and confidence in his army had won, I thought that it must have been from such a scene that men in ancient days rose to the dignity of gods.”12 This description of Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville, by one of his aides, captures a similar emotional experience. We might describe it simply as a reaction to military charisma, but the ancient Greeks would have described it as the presence of a god.

  The fact that in Greek religion it was possible to merge the subjective and the objective in this way—so that if Lee is perceived as embodying divinity, he does embody divinity—helps to explain why such cults tended to last only a short time. When the first rush of emotion had passed, and especially when geopolitical circumstances had changed, it became possible to see the deified human being as no more than a human being, and to listen to those who had been skeptical from the start. The god had passed out of his temporary vehicle.

  The deification of the Successors, then, was in origin a spontaneous emotional reaction to a life-saving or otherwise astonishing event. Hence it was not just cities that instituted cults, but there is evidence even of private worship.13 All those who felt particularly touched by whatever remarkable event had just taken place were moved to give thanks. When a king himself ordered the institution of a cult, it was invariably the cult of a dead ancestor or of the dynasty as a whole, not of himself. It was others who recognized living kings as gods.

  The kings played the part, however, in the ways they presented themselves. Hence, for instance, the array of headdresses we find on coins: lion scalp, elephant scalp, ram’s horns, bull’s horns, goat’s horns, rayed diadem, winged diadem. Each evoked particular divine associations.14 The very fact that some of them showed their own heads on their coinage was telling, since that was traditionally where a deity was portrayed. The Successors were well aware of the political advantages to be gained by their elevation to superhumanity, as were their ultimate heirs, the kings of early modern Europe, with their adherence to the belief in the divine right of kings.

  The cult of rulers as gods was eased by a number of factors. First, there was hero worship; even successful athletes could receive cult honors after their deaths as heroes, to acknowledge that they had done something superhuman, even if not quite divine, and above all that they had benefited their community. Second, there was the long tradition, both in Macedon and the East, for kings to be regarded as especially favored by the gods and for majesty to be considered a reflection of divinity.15

  Third, the basis of Greek religion was largely ritualistic, with little dogma involved. Long training in ritual had inculcated the essential attitude: you act “as if” the thing were real—as if the bread and wine were flesh and blood, as if the smoke of sacrifice really carried your prayers and petitions to the gods. Then the ritual acquires potency and emotional depth. It was only a small step to act as if a man were a god. It was not that he had to be one or the other; he could be both. Many readers may find this outrageous, and many scholars try to lessen its impact. Perhaps we should think of the Successors as receiving divine honors but not actually being thought of as gods. But in a religion founded on acts, the act of awarding divine honors is precisely a recognition of divinity.

  Fourth, as mentioned also in the previous chapter, there was a certain weakening of and skepticism about the Olympian religion. A contemporary utopian writer, Euhemerus of Messene (a friend of Cassander), influentially revived the old fifth-century theory that the Olympian gods were no more than human beings who had achieved remarkable thin
gs—as Demeter, say, had discovered how to cultivate cereal crops, or Dionysus had discovered viticulture. In fact, he even specified “generals, admirals, and kings” as such gods in the making.16 In the hymn the Athenians sang for Demetrius when he entered the city in 297, the Olympian gods are said to be remote. In a world at war, such a view is unsurprising: despite all their sacrifices and prayers, the Athenians were still starving—until Demetrius came and saved them.

  If we shed Judeo-Christian preconceptions (especially monotheism, with its corollaries of divine omniscience and omnipotence), it is not difficult to understand the deification of the Successors as a spontaneous reaction to their superhuman and lifesaving achievements, aided and abetted by more than a soupçon of the desire to appease a power that could as readily destroy the city as save it. Nor is it hard to understand such a reaction; even in our own sophisticated times, people have been known to regard as gods whoever or whatever gives them the greatest rush of emotion. In an era of disillusionment, the orthodox churches often fail to deliver such ecstasy, and so exotic gurus and Elvis Presley become gods. In any case, the early Hellenistic world did not subscribe to Judeo-Christian principles; the Successors stirred deep enough emotions to pass as gods.