by David Grant
Even philosophy did not escape their control; the historian Hieronymus (ca. 350s-250s BCE) who wrote a unique eyewitness account of these Diadokhoi Wars, now a long-time client of the Antigonids, witnessed the suppression of the Lyceum and its Peripatus as well as the competing Academy under a decree from Demetrius requiring all such schools to have a licence; the Lyceum had previously been supported (and no doubt milked for philosophical approbation) by Cassander’s regime, and this recalls Aristotle’s friendship with his father. It was Demosthenes’ nephew, Demochares, who was involved in the proposal to expel all philosophers from Attica, preferring oratorical eloquence over dangerous ideas that might undermine any continued veneer of Athenian democracy; it was a stance that seems to have been threaded through his own ‘rhetorical and combative’ writing.
Demetrius of Phalerum, the recently deposed philosopher-statesman installed in Athens by Cassander, had, apparently, behaved in just as depraved a fashion as Poliorketes, and he eventually fled to Ptolemy in Egypt after a decade in power.246 The learned polymath secured himself a legacy, if not a happy end, for the ‘gracelid’ statesman was historically deemed to have been a ‘tyrant’ in the city of Athena.247 Fortune’s movements, as Euripides knew, are indeed inscrutable;248 some 300 (or more) statues that the city had once dedicated to him were summarily pulled down when he departed (some were allegedly turned into chamber pots).249
Although Plutarch reported ‘the government was called an oligarchy, but in fact, was monarchical, for the power of Demetrius of Phalerum met with no restraint’, Strabo suggested Demetrius ‘did not put an end to democracy but even restored its former power’ during his tenure of Athens. Once a student of Theophrastus, Demetrius certainly supported the Peripatetics (and they reciprocated) and Cicero, Diodorus and Diogenes Laertius spoke positively of him.250 Peter Green more soberly concluded that the years of his rule ‘… are chiefly remarkable as evidence for what was liable to happen when a philosopher-king got a hand in real life.’251 Demetrius was, nevertheless, sentenced to death in absentia.252
The eventual reinvasion of Asia Minor by Demetrius Poliorketes in 287/6 BCE, after being ousted from Macedonia, saw the city of Priene devastated when it held out for Lysimachus; when he finally managed to relieve it a cult was established and a bronze statue erected in Lysimachus’ image following Samothrace’s lead.253 As for the heroisation of Seleucus, in Syria where he tried to breed elephants, and in the deeper regions of his empire, Seleucus’ own cult came to hail him as Zeus Nikator (‘Victor’). It was here that his propaganda team claimed his mother, Laodice, conceived him with Apollo; his aforementioned anchor device allegedly depicted the carving on the ring gifted to her by the god for her compliance in the union.254 It may well have been at this point that the story of his retrieving Alexander’s diadem in the marshes of Babylon was spread, for that augured in his ‘vast kingdom’.255 Seleucus’ son, Antiochus I, gained a cult at Ilion after having come to terms with the Ionian League,256 and toasts were now being drunk from drinking vessels named the ‘Seleucis’ and (previously) the ‘Antigonis’; divine honours, sacrifices and even the linen headband ‘diadems’ were overshadowed as stephanephoria adorned the wreath-clad heads of the Diadokhoi.257
The grateful Rhodians bestowed the epithet Soter (‘Saviour’) upon Ptolemy for his part in lifting the siege of Demetrius, whose discarded Helepolis (‘city-taker’), a nine-story armoured siege tower mounted with torsion catapults, helped fund the construction of their iron-framed and bronze-plated Colossus erected close to the harbour entrance.258 After consulting the oracle at the sacred precinct at Siwa, a Ptolemaion was built in the Rhodian capital whereafter Ptolemy was worshipped as a new deity at the annual festival. By 279 BCE he was posthumously deified at home in Alexandria at the first festival of Ptolemaia.259
An artist’s impression of the siege of Rhodes by Demetrius Poliorketes in 305-304 BCE showing his famed Helepolis (‘city-taker’), the nine story armoured siege tower. The year-long siege failed to take the city and the left behind siege engine helped fund the construction of the bronze-plated Colossus built close to the harbour entrance. The strategic importance of Rhodes’ harbours, navy and ship building facilities saw the island courted and invaded through the Successor Wars.
How regally sanctioned were the epithets ‘city-taker’ (poliorketes), ‘saviour’ (soter), ‘benefactor’ (euergetes) that became attached to the Hellenistic kings, and whether they were simply popular sobriquets that stuck or were home-grown Ptolemaic devices (in the case of the latter two), remains open to debate, but few of them made it to their coinage; this is perhaps indicative that the kings themselves held loftier pretensions.260 In this environment it is likely the isegoria that saw common infantryman slap the king on the back, or even take him to task, probably disappeared, though Polybius suggested it resurfaced in the leaner days in Macedonia before its eventual fall to Rome.261
In stark contrast, ‘the European at heart’ Cassander, who had seen little of Asia but who knew his local market, appears to have shied away from the loftier regal attachments, refusing the diadem and signing official correspondence without royal title. Cassander had nevertheless buried King Philip III (Arrhidaeus) in the style befitting a ‘royal’ successor, so in the eyes of the Macedonians he actually ‘reigned’ from that point onwards, and probably from the time of his marriage to Thessalonice; he certainly presided over the Nemean Games dedicated to Heracles, suggesting he was broadcasting basileia, though only bronze coinage was ever struck with his own name.262
If conservative Macedonia had not itself been ready for the oriental-style godhead, Cassander didn’t hesitate in joining the other Diadokhoi in the establishment of their eponymous cities and those of their wives and sons.263 So there emerged Thessalonica, a synoikismos of twenty-six smaller (and no doubt unwilling) towns, and Cassandreia. The perennially ill Cassander had expediently named two of his sons (by Thessalonice) Philip and Alexander ‘to establish a connection with the royal house’, for, as Carney points out, he was the ‘first non-Argead to attempt the permanent rule of Macedonia rather than maintaining an existing hereditary role’.264
Ironically, though somewhat symbolically in the context of Cassander’s role in the Pamphlet (T1, T2), their third son, Antipater (married to a daughter of Lysimachus), murdered Thessalonice for the favour she showed to the younger Alexander (married to a daughter of Ptolemy), though not before she had seen the two of them become kings (297-294 BCE) who fought over what soon became a Macedonia divided at the River Axius, care of Pyrrhus’ annexation of the western cantons closest to Epirus.265 Both of Cassander’s remaining sons were to eventually die at the hands of Demetrius Poliorketes and Lysimachus when advancing their own designs on the throne. It brought the first conflict to Macedonian soil since Cassander consolidated his position some twenty years before; by 294 BCE the power once wielded by the house of Alexander’s former regent, Antipater, was finally spent.266 Demetrius lasted on the throne until Lysimachus and Pyrrhus invaded from east and west in 288 BCE; once more the nation that had ruled from Epirus to India was domestically cut in two.
In Asia there emerged the eponymous successor cities of Ptolemais, the various Lysimachias, Apameas, an Arsinoea (at Ephesus’ expense), the Antigoneas, Seleucias, Laodiceas and others which formed part of the Seleucid Syrian stronghold. Seleucus would eventually found more than fifty settlements, naming nine of them after himself, three after his wife and Antiochia was named after his father; even ancient Achaemenid Susa was renamed Seleucia-on-the-Euleaus.267 Some were synoecisms, others katoikiai, military colonies like Alexander’s earlier settlements. Antigonus had destroyed much of Seleucus’ former capital at Babylon in the brutal Mesopotamian campaign of 310-309 BCE, so the sweetest moment for his heirs must have been transferring the population of Antigonus’ former capital, Celaenae (along with a Jewish population), to the close-by Apamea (often referred to with the epithet Kibotos, chest or coffer, suggesting its wealth) established by his son, Antio
chus I.268
This was not the first major post-Alexander resettlement in the empire: Seleucus had already dismantled Antigonea in Upper Syria with its seventy-stade perimeter to found Antiochia, now full of resettled veterans.269 The site is probably identifiable with Thapsacus, the principal Euphrates River crossing of antiquity, a settlement that was possibly renamed Zeugma in the Roman period.270 Additionally, around 304 BCE, Antigonus had been planning to synoecise the Ionian League cities of Lebedos and Teos as part of his grand infrastructure plan (Lysimachus later moved the population of Lebedos to Ephesus in 292 BCE). In fact, Antigonus had ironically furrowed the hard-tilled ground in which Seleucus planted his own empire, a point often overlooked by history. Antigonus’ Hellenisation of Asia Minor and Syria formed what has been termed a ‘bridge between Philip and the Achaemenids’ in which his administrative reforms, city building, and colonisation had achieved far more than Alexander had managed in his tenure of Persia.271
Only Egypt remained untrampled by the Diadokhoi Wars although its overseas possessions were tugged at from all sides. Of all the original generals who governed a fragment of Alexander’s empire, only Ptolemy and the old regent Antipater (and possibly Polyperchon who followed him) died in bed of what appear to be natural causes.272 Arguably, Demetrius Poliorketes joined them, though in somewhat different circumstances; after one reversal of fortune too many, he submitted himself to Seleucus’ mercy and requested ‘… a petty empire among the barbarians in which he might end his days.’273 His son, Antigonus II Gonatas, pleaded for his life, while Lysimachus offered 2,000 talents for his immediate execution; a supposedly indignant Seleucus (now Demetrius’ elder son-in-law) had him quarantined in luxury in the Syrian Chersonese until he drank himself to death in 283 BCE.274 As with his father before him, and as perhaps for all the Diadokhoi who had accompanied Alexander on campaign, a kingdom in Asia was irresistible and more attractive than Macedonia itself.
‘O CHILD OF BLIND AND AGED ANTIGONUS, WHAT ARE THESE REGIONS WHITHER WE ARE COME?’
Demetrius is said to have reflected upon his greatest reversals of fortune with, ‘my flame thou fannest, indeed, and thou seemest to quench me, too’, recalling a tragic line from Aeschylus. He should have stuck to the sea where his power was unmatched: as an ancient proverb warned, ‘For useless is a dolphin’s might upon dry ground.’275
Viewed from afar, Demetrius’ efforts to re-establish himself across the Aegean look ill-conceived and futile; his disgruntled troops, being dragged to the East in one last bid for supremacy, are said to have confronted him with lines adapted from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus: ‘O child of blind and aged Antigonus, what are these regions whither we are come?’276 And yet there must have been a core of lingering support for him through his father’s veterans in Asia Minor, moreover, he partook of a generation that knew it took no more than a lucky javelin strike, a penetrating cavalry charge or a defecting crack regiment to alter the fate of an empire. Demetrius was buried in his eponymous city in Thessaly and his five, or possibly six children, took his line down to King Perseus (reigned 179-168 BCE) who was finally subdued by Rome.277
Ptolemy I Soter passed away in the same year as Demetrius, 283 BCE, when his own Will was surely read out; Alexander’s general, biographer and rumoured half-brother knew full well that no king leaves his life’s work with a quip ‘to the strongest’, and that no father quoted the curse of Oedipus to sons holding sharpened swords.278 He nominated power not to his eldest son, Ptolemy Keraunos (‘Thunderbolt’), who was conceived with Cassander’s sister, Eurydice, but to his already co-regent second son, Ptolemy II Philadelphos, who had been co-ruler since 285 BCE. Some years earlier, Philadelphos had murdered another half-brother (again born to Eurydice), who may well have been in league with Keraunos, for inciting the Cypriots to revolt.279
Ptolemy I Soter may have married Eurydice as early as 322 BCE, and he appears to have had repudiated her (or sidelined her, if not formally divorced her) by 316 BCE in favour of Berenice, Eurydice’s lady-in-waiting who ‘had the greatest influence and was foremost in virtue and understanding’; Pyrrhus had cunningly singled her out for his affections when he was a hostage in Egypt, knowing she held sway with Ptolemy.280 Berenice was, nevertheless, still from the Antipatrid house; her paternal grandfather was the brother of Antipater. The displaced Eurydice, who was based at Miletus in Caria by 287 BCE, had brokered a useful alliance with Demetrius Poliorketes by offering him her daughter, Ptolemais; she had been pledged to him as early as in 298 BCE, supposedly on the instigation of Seleucus when he married Demetrius’ daughter, Stratonice.281
Following the accession of Ptolemy II Philadelphos in 282 BCE, the rebuffed Keraunos was forced to seek a career with Lysimachus, then married to Philadelphos’ sister, Arsinoe; with the alliance came the use of his navy which was later put to good use against Antigonus II Gonatas in 280 BCE. After a series of dynastic intrigues in Thrace that saw Lysimachus execute his own son – the popular heir apparent Agathocles (Keraunos’ brother-in-law) – Keraunos next sought employ with the still ambitious though aged Seleucus, a position from which he could potentially launch his bid for Macedonia or Egypt.282
Seleucus saw an opportunity to intervene in Thracian politics, perhaps noting the recent defeats Lysimachus had suffered at the hands of the Getae, as well as the waning support for his regime after Agathocles’ death; Seleucus was, no doubt, also influenced by the pleas of assistance from Agathocles’ widow, Lysandra, a daughter of Ptolemy I Soter and Eurydice.283 Seleucus and Lysimachus, the former Bodyguards of Alexander and once colleagues in arms, faced off at Curopedion near Sardis in 281 BCE in the ‘last major battle of the Diadokhoi’. The Thracian dynast, once married himself to a sister of Cassander (Nicaea), and who had by then tragically lost fifteen children, was by now seventy-four, and Seleucus was seventy-seven, though both still ‘had the fire of youth and the insatiable desire for power’.284 Lysimachus was felled by a javelin and left to rot on the battlefield until a Pharsalian, curiously named Thorax, saw to his burial. The identification is curious because a same-named Thessalian (from Larissa) is said to have stood over Antigonus at Ipsus twenty years before.285
The temporary vacuum in Asia Minor allowed Philetaerus, Lysimachus’ resourceful eunuch general, to establish the Attalid dynasty at Pergamum on the cone-shaped mountain peak that had acted as a treasury for 9,000 of Lysimachus’ talents. Destined to build a great library and enter into isopolity with strategically aligned cities, Pergamum was now watched over by Athena, Demeter, Heracles and son, and no doubt by the heirs of Seleucus with whom Philetaerus had intrigued.286
Lysimachus’ widow, Arsinoe, encouraged to marry her half-brother, Ptolemy Keraunos, following Persian and Phaoronic custom, was clearly dissatisfied at his growing power; she conspired against him and it precipitated his retaliatory murder of her two youngest sons. She fled to Egypt and married her own full-brother, Ptolemy II, becoming Queen Arsinoe II and triggering the use of his epithet, Philadelphos.
Ptolemy Keraunos, then based at Lysimachia, showed his gratitude to Seleucus by murdering him and having the army pronounce him King of Macedonia based at the new capital, Cassandreia. He lasted two years and was decapitated in the Gallic invasions in 279 BCE; Eurydice’s second son, Meleager, lasted two months until he was forced to relinquish the crown. Antipater Etesias, the son of Cassander’s brother, soon followed them with a reign lasting just forty-five days – ‘as long as the Etesian Winds blew’. There followed an interregnum in which Sosthenes become strategos and de facto ruler of Macedonia from 279-277 BCE (he was possibly a former general of Lysimachus with no ancestral or dynastic claim to the throne) until he was overwhelmed by the still-at-large Gauls under Brennus. The next few years saw an ‘independent’ Cassandreia fall to the ‘bloody’ tyrant Apollodorus (through 279-276 BCE) the leader of a local proletariat revolt.287
The turmoil in Macedonia through the period of incursions by the Celtic Gauls, during which even Athens lost her shackles for s
everal years, enabled Antigonus II Gonatas to make a bid for the throne. Pyrrhus’ absence in Italy and a significant victory by Antigonus against the once ‘great expedition’ of Galatae (reportedly once as large as 150,000 infantry and perhaps 15,000 cavalry, though now decimated and reduced in number to 15,000 infantry and 3,000 horsemen) near Lysimachia in 277 BCE, when Gonatas was probably returning from a peace treaty in Asia Minor with Antiochus I (Seleucus’ son, and which included marriage to his daughter), gave him a foothold back in Macedonia that would eventually herald in a reign that saw him on the throne to the age of eighty.288
Antigonus was, nevertheless, temporarily displaced by Pyrrhus who defeated him at the Aous River in 274 BCE, at which point his authority was restricted to the coastal cities whilst Pyrrhus controlled Aegae, a lamentable period that witnessed the plundering of the royal tombs by his Gallic mercenaries. The Epirote, who died at Argos in 272 BCE, was surely paying for their services with the promise of royal loot, a sad state of affairs when considering that he had fought alongside Antigonus’ father (Demetrius Poliorketes, by then Pyrrhus’ brother-in-law) at Ipsus.289 Notably, Gonatas had previously retained a significant Gallic contingent himself and he was to rely on their services again; this was the precursor for Pyrrhus hiring his own Gauls.290 Allegedly making little attempt to stop the plundering at Aegae, Pyrrhus was perhaps testing King Perdiccas I’s prophecy that held: ‘As long as the relics of his posterity should be buried there, the crown would remain in the family.’291
This extremely compressed and necessarily simplified summary of the intrigues within intrigues of the Macedonian royal lines through the two decades between the ‘Battle of the Dynasts’ at Ipsus in 301 BCE, and the national divisions following the final gasp of the first generation Successor Wars at Curopedion in 281 BCE (‘the plain of Cyrus’), portrays a period ‘lacking none in dishonorable comparison’, and yet it was a period in which all the heads of the Diadokhoi kingdoms became related to one another.292 Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius and Life of Pyrrhus paint a vivid picture of the Hellenenistic world as one extended family at war, when fathers were challenged by jealous sons and intriguing daughters whose internecine rivalries and alliances were secured by a ‘labyrinthine’ series of intermarriages. The era that followed was just as dynastically toxic as the epigonoi of the Successors commenced their bids to become primi inter pares, with much of its early detail neatly captured in Nepos’ De regibus Exterarum Gentium.293