Diadocomachia

Diadocomacia Record of the Wars of the Diadochi

There are innumerable myths surrounding the time of the death of Alexander, King of the World, or very nearly. Some claim, for example, that Kalanos, the alleged Brahmin, said to Alexander from the flames of the funeral pyre Ptolemy had built, “I’ll see you in Babylon”; but this is a lie, and Kalanos did not die then but was spirited away by Alexander’s old advisor, who collected such odd things, for, when the fancy took her, Ikulu found everything she sought except the fifty names of power, and these she never found. But she hid everything else in such secret places, and therefore told their location to the priests of Persian god Mithras, to keep them safe.

For there have been many stories of Alexander, and these have been entrusted to secret places as well, so that only whispers remain about the Kukuth and the speaking eyeball and Kaikoseros’ chariot of birds and the horn of Tengree. For Alexander found everything he needed except one thing, and that was so secret he never knew what it was; nor is it recorded, save that perhaps it would have pointed to the fifty names. And the secret places of the earth remain secret. How many know where Nectanebos’ daughter Amenartes went? How many know the songs the sirens sang? How many know what the wraith of the deep knows?

Now, Alexander’s march towards Babylon, the Gate of the Gods, was marked by innumerable dire auguries and portents. An ass kicked to death a chained lion. Peithagoras the seer slew a goat with a lobeless liver. The Chaldaeans warned Alexander not to enter the city of fire, a warning he obeyed only briefly. While boating, then, the wind blew Alexander’s purple-ribboned diadem across the lake and into some reeds by the tombs. Seleucus, commander of the cavalry, who, by virtue of his prodigious strength and slender build, was a swimmer unsurpassed, dived into the lake, swam to the diadem, and, in the process of bringing it back, placed it on his own head, that it might not get wet. Alexander awarded Seleucus a talent for his service, and then ordered him flogged for donning the royal diadem. But many viewed this as prophecy.

But it was in seven-circled Ecbatana, city of Deioces the judge, where Alexander had once adorned himself, while pursuing Darius, as the living god Mithras Petragonos, that he met with his greatest setback since the River of Stones, for here Hephastion, his best friend and alter ego, died, some say as a dress rehearsal for assassination. The city’s outer five concentric walls, traditionally painted white, black, red, blue, and orange, he commanded all painted black, in mourning; surely no other act of vengeance could have harmed Alexander more. By the time the king reached Babylon, that malingerer Harpalus had fled to Crete with the Armenian ghost dwarf Antanolia, because of his tricks against the witch Ikulu; Alexander, maddened by Dionysus for destroying his sacred city Thebes, one of the famed twin eyes of Hellas, in a splendid reply to her request, himself had long since slain, with the magic spear he later gave to Porus, the brother of his wet nurse Lanike, Cleitus the Black, whose cloak and mantle were eventually assumed by his young friend Cassander; now that Hephastion was gone, the three he trusted more than anyone, excepting his terrible mother, were removed from him, and Alexander, saluted as the invincible conqueror by the whole world, kowtowed to by the masses of Persia, and already worshiped as a god in Egypt and Taxila, was finally alone. All three absences, it will be perceived, or at least it has been perceived by others and written by them, have ultimately a common source. Recently Plutarch has written that ambition and temper were Alexander’s two greatest vices, although they were not the two that caused his failure and death; nevertheless, they are the two that left him sad and lonely. And many viewed this as prophecy as well.

Also, the loyal Craterus was away in Cilicia, bogged down in the snares Harpalus had left. The eye, or some say Ammon, had prophesied that Alexander would be slain by a river; and Babylon lay along a great one. Everywhere Alexander saw shadows, the betrayals that Antanolia had first shown him.

It was then that a simple hunchback named Dionysius wandered into the throne room and was found frisking on Alexander’s throne. He could only reply, before his sentence of execution, that ancient Serapis in a dream had told him to sit there. Many whispered over the sentence, for they well remembered the incident, years before, when Alexander on campaign in the mountains had sat a freezing soldier in his fireside chair, to thaw him, and had chided the fellow, when he came to, for starting, at perceiving his seat; for, he said, what would have been death to a Persian was a courtesy to a free man of Macedon. Now Alexander only replied that a man with a different name would have received a different sentence, for he knew his mother’s patron still sought vengeance for seven-gated Thebes; but Dionysius disappeared mysteriously before the execution.

Alexander, naturally, by that time was so protected by amulets and men and his good right arm that almost nothing could kill him, including all forms of magic and poison, except Styx water, which is so potent that it can only be carried in the hoof of an ass, for it sunders all other containers. Ptolemy was of course his wine taster, but Ptolemy, all unknowing, had been given as a gift a periapt that protected him, which he later lost at sea, and which Ikulu’s daughter then reclaimed by deadly Khalk Ru’s servants and returned to the demonness who had fetched it from that region of Hades. Also, Ptolemy—while crossing the Gerdosian desert, a feat that had stymied Semiramis, gift of the sea (who did what Aiesia could not do yet could not do what Aiesia did), and great Cyrus, but a feat which Alexander’s troops had had to undertake for the sake of a paw they carried that could not be transported by water—had, ailing still from a wound inflicted by the venomous claws of the Indian priests, and now nigh on death, been given by Alexander some miraculous herbs from the desert’s heart, located by a dragon in a dream, which, applied to the wound, gave him future resistance to many ill effects and rendered him, unknown to all, singularly unsuitable to be a wine taster. Alexander drank the Styx water at a party given by Medius the Sycophant in honor of Admiral Nearchus. No unseen or invisible force could stand in Alexander’s presence; surely Iolaus knew; soon he was dead. The hoof rolled aside, under the table. But thus the ass kicked the lion.

This book is not, however, a history of the secrets of Alexander’s life and death, but a very brief history of the games of his Successors, a name Alexander gave to the war-dancers, the Persian youths he trained for his army, but which history has given to those who fought over his empire after he died.

Peithon, Perdiccas, Ptolemy, his brother Menelaus, Leonnatus, Seleucus, Lysimachus Phoenix, Peucestas, Nearchus the Cretan, Asander brother of Parmenion, Eumenes, Attalus the Lesser, Meleager the Wrestler, Menander, Proteas, champion toper of all Macedon, and therefore the world, the physician Philip of Acarnania, mysterious Olcias, Stasanor, Ariston, Cassander in chains, his brother, Alexander’s cupbearer, Iolaus, and Medius himself, who loved Iolaus desperately, were, with Alexander, the guests at Alexander’s final drinking party. It is of them I write.

Perdiccas, Leonnatus, and Attalus the Lesser were the three who slew the assassin Pausanias.

Hephastion, Perdiccas, Leonnatus, Coenus, who alone gave voice to the will of the army when they mutinied at Hyphasis, and died soon thereafter, and Erigyius were the five Alexander consulted with before deciding the fate of Philotas.

Queen Olympias, Hephastion, Harpalus, Cleitus the Black, and to a lesser extent Craterus were the people Alexander trusted above all others.

Ptolemy, who had been exposed as an infant by his stepfather Lagus and only survived because a mother eagle nursed him on grubs, Hephastion, Harpalus, and Cassander the Black, then Cassander the Gray, studied with Alexander under Aristotle at the Gardens of Midas, also known as the Grove of Nymphs, at Mieza. Alexander was not the youngest of them. But it was Theophrastus, the great perceiver, who took over the Lyceum from Aristotle, and Strato the Physicist, who found Gorgonophontes, after him.

Alexander, Perdiccas, Lysimachus, Seleucus, and Ptolemy crossed the Hydapses in the royal triakonton. Alexander winded his battle horn as they rowed. The extent of the empire, and most of their happy times, lay behind them. How they laughed together at death that day!

Menander, who was the father of the notorious page Charicles, had just arrived in Babylon the day before the fatal dinner party, bearing with him the prisoner Diodorus the Ephesian, assassin of Hegesias. Others say another assassin, arrived in his company, but she in disguise.

In disguise, some say, she attended Medius the Sycophant’s dinner party.

Worried that Alexander would die, the bodyguards freed Antipater’s son Cassander (age 27 at the time of Alexander’s death), whom Alexander had been dragging around and occasionally torturing. They did not want the wrath of Antipater to fall upon them; the wrath of Cassander was not yet feared. The musician Evius they also freed, that he might sing their deeds in later days, which he did, and much of this chronicle that has remained obscure in other writers was illuminated by his songs. Everyone except Seleucus and Peucestas prepared to repudiate their Persian wives.

Philip of Acarnania had once been accused by Parmenion’s letter of endeavoring to poison Alexander at Darius’ behest, but the king thought him so above suspicion that he passed the note to Philip to read as he himself, without hesitation, drank down the medicine the physician had prepared. The doctor who had attended on Hephastion, Glaucias, Alexander had crucified, but Philip he trusted to attend to him alone; yet in vain. A sad Philip (age 49 at the time of Alexander’s death) returned silently to Acarnania after his failure; but who can purge Styx water?

All sources misunderstand and agree that Alexander (very nearly age 33 at the time of his own death), writhing in pain on his death bed, which was set up, for his convenience, in a latrine, requested that his body be thrown into the river, to thwart, it is supposed, those who would seek to possess it. When Perdiccas (age 30 at the time of Alexander’s death) asked him to whom he left his empire, for there was as yet no heir, Alexander said, “To the strongest.” But to Perdiccas he gave his signet ring, for Perdiccas had been to the grove of the sun and the moon. His rasping last words were, “All my friends will hold great funeral games for me,” and history would prove him right, for the funeral games went on for decades, and the prize was to be the greatest of all empires.

His death was long and slow and quite painful.

Such was the achievement of Alexander of Macedon, called the Great. Many have claimed overweening ambition as his greatest vice, but as we have seen his failure was really due to the twin horns of incontinence: impatience and lust.

The question of a successor was now no longer academic. Hephastion had but recently died, and Alexander’s finest general and chiliarch Craterus (age 47 at the time of Alexander’s death, although he looked ten years older, so hard had he campaigned) was heading with his second-in-command Polyperchon (age 71 at the time of Alexander’s death) and their aide Philoxenus (age 34 at the time of Alexander’s death) to Pella, to take over the stewardship there, so Perdiccas was ranking commander; furthermore, he held the ring.

Nearchus the Cretan (age 37 at the time of Alexander’s death), Alexander’s admiral and indisputably a liar, proposed as heir Heracles (age 4 at the time of Alexander’s death), Alexander’s bastard son, and surely already an excellent choice, for he had proved to be a strong and quick-witted child. Perdiccas, however, spoke more persuasively (as was his wont) and pointed out that Alexander’s lawful wife Roxane (age 24 at the time of Alexander’s death) was pregnant, and may yet produce a legitimate heir. A long regency would offer power to the regents, and their friends, and in the end the nobles and the cavalry decided, at the suggestion of Alcestas (age 28 at the time of Alexander’s death) that said regents should be Perdiccas, Craterus, Leonnatus, Alexander’s boyhood friend (age 34 at the time of Alexander’s death, and 35 at the time of his own), and Antipater (age 74 at the time of Alexander’s death), who had backed Alexander’s bid for the Macedonian throne many years ago and who had been steward in Macedonia during the king’s long absence. Of these, only Leonnatus and Perdiccas were present for the decision. Alcestas was Perdiccas’ younger brother.

Also not present, although very nearby, was the infantry, who had their own candidate in Arrhidaios, Alexander’s idiot half-brother, Philip’s bastard son and a harmless madman prone to divine fits and strange delusions (age 36 at the time of Alexander’s death). They feared a long regency would undermine the legitimacy of the dynasty, and perhaps they respected Arrhidaios, for he was touched by the gods; certainly they loved him; also, he longed for distant Macedon, just as the infantry did. And so, led by the irate wrestler General Meleager, (probably age 45 at the time of Alexander’s death), who always had a scowl and a cynical word when not in the ring, they took up arms against the cavalry, which, being unmounted at the time, fled before them, and the foot soldiers, chanting the name of their unwitting king, “Philip Arrhidaios! Philip Arrhidaios!” when they found they had separated Perdiccas from the rest, surrounded him, seeking to slay him. But by chance Perdiccas was armed, and, swinging his great sword, he held them off long enough that they might hear his honeyed words. And he spoke prettily to them until they set aside their weapons, and together they proclaimed an idiot and a hypothetical son co-rulers of the empire. Eumenes the Greek (age 39 at the time of Alexander’s death), Alexander’s personal secretary and the cleverest man in the empire after Harpalus, drafted a proclamation declaring Arrhidaios King Philip III and the unborn child King Alexander IV. Perdiccas was to be their “guardian.”

Nearchus, Barsine, and Heracles boarded a boat and sailed away. Meleager was slain as he tried to take refuge in the temple of Serapis, the first of the Diadochi to fall. They had tried to drag him from the altar, but no one could break his wrestler’s grip, so the fickle infantry slew him there; even after death he would not release the altar, and they had to hack his hands off to bear the body away.

Perdiccas then called a council in Babylon, where so many fearful events had taken place, to assign command of the various satrapies. Antipater retained stewardship of Macedon, instead of Craterus, perhaps as recompense for the suffering of Antipater’s son, Cassander the Black. Instead Craterus, a good-natured warrior beloved by his men above any other general, was given a symbolic position as special protector of the kings (one of them newly born). Alexander’s boyhood friend and classmate at the Gardens of Midas, Ptolemy the Savior (age 44 at the time of Alexander’s death), received at his request the satrapy of Egypt, the wisest request of any of the Diadochi, for Ptolemy alone of them died peacefully in bed. Lysimachus Phoenix (age 37 at the time of Alexander’s death), former bodyguard of both Philip and Alexander, and onetime tutor, became satrap of Thrace, and Leonnatus satrap of Lesser Phrygia, just across the Hellespont, while Laomedon (age 37 at the time of Alexander’s death) received Syria. Antigonus Monophthalmos (age 59 at the time of Alexander’s death), a burly and jovial man who had been left by Alexander in Anatolia to safeguard his supply route, and who alone of Alexander’s generals had never lost an encounter with the enemy, gained the satrapies that he had been ruling already for years: Pamphylia, Lycia, and Greater Phrygia. He and Perdiccas hated each other passionately, and Antigonus did not even deign to attend the conference. Asander brother of Parmenion (age 59 at the time of Alexander’s death) took the ancient kingdom of Caria, to the detriment of Queen Ada (age 61 at the time of Alexander’s death), whom Alexander had called mother. The heartland of Persia was divided between Peithon (age 32 at the time of Alexander’s death), with the enormous satrapy of Media, and Peucestas (age 27 at the time of Alexander’s death), who became satrap of Persis, for he was the only Diadochus who had learned to speak and read Persian. Menander retained the satrapy of Lydia, although Perdiccas said he should receive nothing, for it was not by chance that he arrived in Babylon the day Alexander took ill; but he had come from Lydia, and not from Nonacris, near Pheneus in Arcadia, as others had. Stasanor the Cypriot (age 36 at the time of Alexander’s death) took Drangiana, and there were many satrapies assigned in the east. Eumenes, finally, whom everyone except Perdiccas hated, was given Cappadocia and Paphlagonia, two Asian regions that were not even part of the empire; the council all laughed, and told Eumenes to claim them if he could; for it was known that Eumenes was no warrior. And Perdiccas stayed in Babylon with his two kings.

To simplify matters, Strateira, Alexander’s second wife, still a virgin, who had taken shelter in the inviolate depths of Alexander’s harem, was murdered in her sleep with a pillow by a very pregnant Roxane, at Perdiccas’ orders.

The prisoner Diodorus (age 24 at the time of Alexander’s death) was a hairsbreadth away from being done away with as well. He and his two brothers, Anaxagorus and Codrus, had, out of patriotism to Ephesus, the year before assassinated with three javelins the tyrant Hegesias, who Alexander had set over the Ephesians. Philoxenus, who was satrap of Ionia at the time (this was before he departed with Craterus), demanded the assassins, but the Ephesians, heady with newfound freedom, refused to give them up, whereupon Philoxenus stormed Ephesus and captured the three sons of Echeanax. He sent the three to Sardis, there to await trial, but after a heavy rain the brothers leapt from a high window into a shallow ditch filled with mud. Diodorus was lamed in the jump, and he never again walked without a limp; and, in the pursuit across Lydia, he fell behind his brothers, who arrived after great peril in Athens; Diodorus was captured by Menander, and brought to Babylon. Many thought he should be killed, for his arrival had proved unlucky for Alexander. But Perdiccas, who pronounced the sentence of death and went to slay Diodorus himself, found he could not strike down a crippled man, or so he said, and so he sent Diodorus to Ephesus to be tried.

At this point the satrapies of Themiscrya and Melitene split off from the empire, claiming that their agreements had died with Thalestris and Alexander, for they had owed their allegiance to Alexander alone, and not to his Diadochi, who were proven murderers besides; they could scarcely be reconquered, and so were permitted to leave. They kept to their borders, or rather to their internecine warfare, for never again were they a united kingdom, and played no part in the empire’s subsequent history.

Perdiccas, Ptolemy, Peithon, Peucestas, Leonnatus, and Lysimachus were, with Hephastion, the Seven Bodyguards of Alexander.

Peithon, Peucestas, Attalus the Lesser, and Seleucus Nicator (age 35 at the time of Alexander’s death) were the four who, in the week before Alexander’s death, slept in the temple of Serapis and consulted its oracle, instituted by Prometheus’ son Ahla.

Peucestas and Leonnatus were the two who saved Alexander’s life when he stood alone against an army of Malians inside the walls of the city of Multan, standing over him as bled out and guarding his unconscious form, despite their many wounds, with the magical shield of Achilles. Peucestas was a nobody whose fortune was made at that moment, but Leonnatus had known Alexander since his youth, when he had loved his sister Cleopatra. Leonnatus still rubbed his body with Macedonian soil sent fresh from the west, for, he said, it was ground that Cleopatra may have trod upon. The infantryman Abreas stood at Multan, too, but he was killed there for his pains, and does not feature in our narrative.

Ptolemy, Nearchus, Harpalus, Erigyius, who defeated Satibarzanes in single combat, and his brother Laomedon were the friends of Alexander exiled by Philip when they tried to intercede for him in the marriage of Pixodarus’ daughter Artremisia. Erigyius had already died of a fever, and Harpalus had slipped away by the time Alexander died. But we can see the favor in which Alexander held those who suffered for him once.

It will be noted that reconfirming Antipater as steward of Macedon went against Alexander’s specific wish that Craterus take the appointment. Many of Alexander’s other wishes were similarly flouted. He had intended to subjugate Arabia; to build there an enormous fleet of quadriremes and, rounding Africa, sail along the River Ocean in the region of Atlas, where sea monsters dwell, then through the Pillars of Heracles, to catch Carthage in a surprise pincher attack, Rome, or rather all the Transadriatic barbarians, having already fallen from the west; to build a tomb for his father larger than the pyramids; and to construct a series of fabulous temples, the largest at Troy, and cities, one of which was to be hewn from Mount Athos into a statue of Alexander himself, holding in one hand a city large enough to house 10,000 men, in the other a lake in a bowl, tipping out into a waterfall.

Also abandoned was his plan to have his body thrown into a river. The carcass miraculously did not decay, even in the summer heat of Persia, and those priests sent to embalm it were too afraid even to touch it. Perdiccas sent it back to Aegae in Macedonia, pulled in a golden casket with a marvelous parade of attendants and wild asses bedecked in obsidian shards. But Ptolemy the Savior sent his general Cilles and brother Menelaus, who intercepted the casket and brought the body to Egypt, for Ptolemy claimed that Alexander had wanted to be interred here, in the land of the river. Some said that Ptolemy did this from ambition, for by custom a Macedonian king’s first duty is to bury his predecessor, and Ptolemy could claim therefore that he alone of the Diadochi had done what was right and regal; but Ptolemy later proved that his ambitions did not extend far beyond Syria. Some say Ptolemy wanted certain things that were hidden in the casket. And others simply that Alexander had been his life-long friend, for whom he had suffered exile and ignominy in his youth and the hardships of campaigning in his majority, and he did not wish to be parted from him. Cilles and Menelaus sent as decoy, under Ophellas, a magnificent procession towards Egypt, led by tumblers riding hippopotami that dragged behind them an empty casket of gold, and this procession Craterus, riding full bore from Babylon, intercepted for Perdiccas; while Cilles and Menelaus by stealth brought the body, and other things, in a sack to Alexandria, the city Alexander had founded with Sinkartis, Aryanaos, and Baryathmin, which Aristotle cautioned him against, for where best he built there he would lie. Another golden casket was set up in the Sema, or Tomb, displaying the miraculously preserved corpse decked in Hephastean armor and the shield of Achilles, which Caligula later stole, and with, it is said, the body beneath; and Perdiccas never forgave Ptolemy.

Harpalus’ dwarf knew, and Kalanos knew, and the Autochthonoi of Salmoxis, who are known as the Getae, knew, just as the Imaziga who harried Carthage knew—that is, they did not know they knew. But Ptolemy had been to India.

Cleitus the Black never fully understood.

Then it was that Greece, with Athens as ever at her forefront, for she was its sole remaining eye, rose up in revolt against the empire, perhaps funded by Harpalus, and certainly incited by Anaxagorus and Codrus, the sons of Echeanax, who desired the return of their brother; and Antipater, with Leonnatus and the able Craterus, went to put the troublemaking city down once and for all. Leonnatus had vowed to marry the sweetheart of his childhood, Alexander’s beautiful sister Cleopatra (recently widowed), after the war, an act that may have given him some dynastic claim to the empire, but in Thessaly, dressed in Persian finery, he was killed leading a cavalry charge against an Athenian general idoneously named Antiphilus. The sons of Echeanax and a small band slipped into Ephesus and, with local partisan help, spirited their brother Diodorus away. Antipater, too, suffered some setbacks, and was put to flight, taking refuge in the mountain fortress of Lamia, where his son Cassander the Black, exploring in the boredom of the besieged the ancient dungeons within, released the ancient evil of Irithizon, from which some say he barely escaped with his life and from whom some say he learned much. But Craterus’ fleet under Cleitus the White (age 37 at the time of Alexander’s death), who, to bring the blessings of Poseidon, carried the Trisula, a trident he had won in the East, destroyed the Athenians’, their pride and best hope, and Athens surrendered. Demosthenes, prince of orators, who had spoken against Macedon for the thousandth, and last, time, killed himself, while other ringleaders were put to death. Athens had not been truly important politically since the Peloponnesian War, but it had removed Leonnatus from the board.

Rhodes as well expelled its Macedonian garrison and for years walked a dangerous diplomatic tightrope, offering nominal fealty to any overlord of the moment but refusing him all concessions.

In the East, meantime, the Macedonian veterans garrisoned there, who long had desired to return home, began to march west. Peithon was sent to subdue them and return them to their posts. Against Perdiccas’ orders, Peithon, victorious, made a liberal settlement with the veterans; however, his men, flouting his command and believing the veterans had sewn gold into their clothing, began a massacre, and many died before Peithon could stop it. In this way, Peithon got the reputation of being both overly kind and overly cruel, and now Perdiccas felt he could not trust him for two reasons. Relations between them cooled.

The only man trusted by everyone at this point was Philip Arrhidaios, the genial idiot. The troops especially loved him, treating him as a sort of mascot and good luck charm, and used to line up to rub his belly before battle. But the woman warrior Cynna (age 35 at the time of Alexander’s death), Alexander’s half-sister and widow of Philip II’s nephew, saw Arrhidaios as a way to gain power for her daughter, Adea, herself known to be the best sword in the empire (age 12 at the time of Alexander’s death). Cynna and Adea slipped into Sardis unseen and began to court Philip Arrhidaios in secret. Cynna, caught by the guard outside Arrhidaios’ chamber door while Adea was within, died, in the resulting altercation, stabbed by Alcestas, Perdiccas’ brother. When news of this skirmish reached the troops, they immediately fomented rebellion, for, they said, their mascot should never be thwarted in love. Adea, now taking the royal name of Eurydice, married Philip Arrhidaios, and now the only trustworthy man in the empire had a wife that no one trusted.

Meanwhile, Perdiccas had girl trouble of his own. Alexander’s mother, Olympias Myrtale (age 53 at the time of Alexander’s death), had long nursed plots against Antipater, just as she had once plotted against Philip. She suspected him of seeking the succession, which she wanted for her grandson, and so, to help secure the power of Perdiccas, whose voice alone championed Alexander IV, she convinced her daughter Cleopatra, still grieving over Leonnatus, to seek the hand of Perdiccas. Perdiccas, like Craterus and Ptolemy, was already married to one of the innumerable daughters of Antipater, and, if he should throw her over to marry Cleopatra, Olympias would not lose any sleep over the humiliation.

The line of communication between Cleopatra and Perdiccas, however, passed through the territory of Antigonus Monophthalmos, and Perdiccas feared the fat man would learn of their plotting. He therefore ordered Antigonus to go off and help Eumenes conquer Cappadocia and Paphlagonia. Antigonus smelled a trap, perhaps thanks to the council of his wife Stratonike, and he fled to Macedonia with his beautiful and brilliant young son Demetrius the Besieger (age 15 at the time of Alexander’s death). Perhaps it was through Antigonus that Antipater learned Perdiccas’ new marriage plans. In any event, Antipater, offended for his daughter, quickly convinced some of the other Diadochi that Perdiccas was making his move for the empire by marrying into the family of the kings. Both sides made ready for war. On one side stood Antipater (with Antigonus), Ptolemy, Lysimachus, and the redoubtable Craterus, whom Perdiccas had once accidentally wounded in the leg with a spear while hunting, when both went for the same boar. Perdiccas’ admiral, Cleitus the White, also immediately defected to Antipater, with his navy. On the other side were Perdiccas with the two kings, Peithon, Eumenes (now possessor of a subdued Cappadocia and Paphlagonia, conquered for him, everyone assumed, by Perdiccas), Neoptolemus the satrap of Armenia, Laomedon, and a reluctant Peucestas, who would have preferred to remain neutral. But Peucestas was ever being thrust into the center of things without his consent, ever since he made the fateful decision to leap down behind the walls to save his king at Multan. Menander was nominally with Perdiccas, but he rankled at Perdiccas’ old accusations, and did not in fact lift a finger for or against him.

Ptolemy struck first, capturing Syria and its satrap Laomedon before retreating, ahead of Perdiccas’ forces, into a more defensible position in Egypt.

But Perdiccas was a formidable opponent, fearless in battle beyond all men; when Alexander had been wounded at Multan, every physician in the army had refused to remove the arrow, each fearing lest his hand, slipping, should be the one that slew Alexander, and Perdiccas alone had remained steady and cut the arrow out with his own great sword.

His strategy now was threefold: Neoptolemus was to prevent Antipater and crew from crossing the Hellespont, while Eumenes made a secret trip to smuggle Cleopatra into Asia, to hasten the marriage, which was, after all, the cause of the war. Perdiccas, meanwhile, led an expedition into Egypt to bring the war to Ptolemy and reclaim the body. Neoptolemus was known for his valor, and had been awarded the satrapy of Armenia by Alexander because he had been the first to scale the walls at Gaza; nevertheless, perhaps out of contempt for Eumenes, of which he made no secret, he defected to Antipater immediately, as did the soldiery of Asia Minor, and Eumenes, who managed to bring Cleopatra into Sardis, where she deposed Menander and proclaimed herself satrap of Lydia, was left to take over the defense of Asia; Menander then also defected to Antipater. The eastern satrapies had not yet mobilized, and Alcestas refused to serve under the Greek, preferring to campaign alone and irrelevantly in Caria, so Eumenes had only a small rag-tag force with which to stop the advance of Craterus, Alexander’s greatest general, whose force was now combined with Neoptolemus’.

In Egypt, Perdiccas was making little headway, for every time he tried to cross the Nile it would rise up and wash his troops away, and meantime those on the banks were constantly being eaten by armies of crocodiles; for Ptolemy had already made himself ally of the lords of Abyssinia, who control the Nile, and the priests of Suchos. Perdiccas’ men decided that they would all die in a futile endeavor, for the treason of Neoptolemus and the inevitable doom of the weak and untried Eumenes were well known, unless Perdiccas was stopped. They therefore plotted to slay Perdiccas in his tent, but before they went in to him they stuffed their ears with wax, so that he could not persuade them to desist, as he had once before. So fell Perdiccas, guardian of the empire.

But some say he was slain not by his own men but rather by sons of Proteus, whom Ptolemy had already enslaved, and to whom information on Perdiccas had been treacherously supplied by Peithon.

The next day news arrived in Egypt that Eumenes had somehow accomplished a crushing defeat of Craterus’ and Neoptolemus’ forces, slaying the traitor Neoptolemus with his own hand after wrestling him while mounted, falling with him to the earth as the horses rode away in different directions, slicing off his leg when Neoptolemus rose first, and, finally, dispatching him as they both rolled in the dirt. Neoptolemus only managed to wound Eumenes, with a final blow under the cuirass as Eumenes was stripping his body; but it was not a serious wound. Craterus, too, perished in the battle, falling from his horse, which then trampled him, with an arrow in his chest. Had the news of this miraculous victory arrived a day earlier, none would have despaired and slain Perdiccas.

Alcestas disengaged from Caria, where he had been fighting a successful but extraneous campaign against Asander; he met up with Laomedon, who had miraculously managed to escape Ptolemy’s clutches, and the two fled into Asia. But, when Antigonus Monophthalmos began pursuit, he quickly came across the dead body of Alcestas, with Laomedon nowhere to be found. Ptolemy smiled knowingly at the news; surely here he had used the sons of Proteus wisely. Alcestas’ death was chalked up to suicide. For three days Antigonus abused the corpse, before grudgingly permitting its burial.

Attalus the Lesser, who had briefly fallen in with Alcestas, suffered a long series of ill-fated adventures that had no impact on history.

A peace was called. Ptolemy was selected to take Perdiccas’ place as guardian, but he, alone of the Diadochi, was of such a mind that he turned it down, offering it instead to Peithon. Soon a second council, however, stripped Peithon of the guardianship and, despite the vehement and nearly violent protests of Adea Eurydice, gave it to Antipater, who quickly restored order to the empire. All of Perdiccas’ allies were pardoned except Eumenes, who was sentenced to death in absentia. As punishment for backing Perdiccas, however tepidly, Menander was not reinstated as satrap of Lydia, which was, instead, granted to Cleitus the White, so called simply to distinguish him from the late Cleitus the Black, for Cleitus the White wore no white cloak, but a purple one, and was known more for his trident. Antipater set up Seleucus Nicator, who had once been a young page in Philip’s service before becoming Alexander’s commander of the cavalry, as the new satrap of Babylon, and more importantly set Antigonus Monophthalmos as the head of the armies of Asia, and charged him to seek out and slay Eumenes. Although many small satrapies remained, the main foci of power now were Antipater and Lysimachus Phoenix in Europe, Antigonus and Seleucus in Asia, and Ptolemy in Egypt. Everyone was eying each other warily. Antipater sent Cassander the Black along with Antigonus on his mission, to keep an eye on him; he also married his daughter Phila, Craterus’ widow, to Demetrius the Besieger, Antigonus’ young son; for he feared above all else Antigonus and his ambitious wife. Phila was twenty-two years Demetrius’ senior, and he objected to the match, but Antigonus persuaded his son to marry with quotations from Euripides; Phila was already in love with the young man, known to be the handsomest in the empire. Antipater also took the two kings, Philip Arrhidaios and Alexander IV, back to Pella, where later they would be murdered. With Arrhidaios went his fuming wife Adea Eurydice, who alone in the empire, Olympias excepted, hated Antipater above all men.

With his crafty tricks, Eumenes led Antigonus on a merry chase through Asia, but what forces he had kept deserting him, for they hated being led by a Greek, especially a cultured Greek intellectual whose refinement only highlighted what the Macedonians lacked. Antigonus despised the dog Eumenes as much as he had despised the master Perdiccas, and said the Greek campaigned with a writing tablet. Eventually Eumenes, abandoned by all but a few hundred men, barricaded himself in the fortress of Nora, to which Antigonus laid siege. Antigonus’ forces had proved so successful, and had so swelled with deserters from the armies Eumenes managed to assemble, that he was now far and away the most powerful man in Asia. He believed in an empire that would unify mankind, and vowed that, although he himself lacked ambition, it was sadly the case that only he had the power to preserve the empire’s unity. Like Antigone before him, he would do his unpleasant duty. But he did not yet share these thoughts with anyone except perhaps Stratonike and Demetrius, not even Nearchus the Cretan, who had returned with Heracles to tutor Demetrius in the arts of war and water, and had become Antigonus’ most trusted advisor.

In the meantime, Peithon took advantage of the chaos in Asia caused by the adventures of Eumenes and Antigonus and tried to expand the satrapy of Media by conquest. The other eastern satrapies united against him under his old friend Peucestas and managed to drive him back. Wary now, however, the united satrapies kept their standing army, which, being comprised of several satrapies’ worth of men, was enormous. Stasanor now somehow managed to contrive to exchange his small satrapy for the plums of Bactria and Sogdiana. He arranged himself in the mountains there so securely that no one ever bothered trying to root him out, even though Antigonus and Seleucus, each a Lord of All Asia, both wanted him dead.

During the fighting, the Indian Sandrokoptos the Peacock Tamer (age 16 at the time of Alexander’s death), who the year before had seized control of a large part of India, including the semiautonomous Alexandrine India, in the name of some barbaric religious sect that numbered among its improbable gods the Apotheosis of Alexander, marched into the chaos and claimed the satrapy of Taxila, a holy land where Sandrokoptos as a young prince had seen Alexander himself. Seleucus Nicator later tried to recapture the satrapy, but met with limited success. Sandrokoptos paid Seleucus a tribute in elephants, and thereafter Sandrokoptos and Seleucus were fast friends. The elephants would later make Seleucus into Seleucus Nicator, or the Victorious. Sandrokoptos emulated his god Alexander, and, by the time he was thirty, he had conquered all of India, the first mortal, Megasthenes says, ever to do so.

Antipater died soon after, of old age, and on his death bed he left the stewardship of Macedon and guardianship of the kings, now openly recognized as the position of regent, and therefore de facto the throne of the empire, not to his son Cassander, whose dabbling in the black arts he had come to distrust since the Hellenic war, but to Craterus’ old second in command, Polyperchon, an uninspired old warhorse. Cassander, unwilling to settle for the secondary role of chiliarch and seeking the throne for himself, immediately formed a coalition against Polyperchon, whom he called “a jackal among lions,” to wage the second war of the Diadochi. He set aside his gray cloak and took up Cleitus’ black one, that was full of stars; and this is when he got his name.

Cassander called Antigonus away from Nora to help him, thereby saving Eumenes; Ptolemy and Lysimachus joined Cassander in the hopes of getting more land, for Ptolemy, like every Pharaoh from Menes to Nectanebos, believed Syria a lawful part of Egypt, while Lysimachus wanted control of both sides of the Hellespont. But perhaps Lysimachus habitually overestimated his own power and judgment; after all, he had been bodyguard to two kings who had been assassinated. He had also been Alexander’s tutor, for he was above all men well versed in philosophy, from which he had learned nothing, and taken the name Phoenix from the Iliad. Against these four, Polyperchon easily managed to recruit Cleitus the White, who was already fighting Antigonus over border disputes, and Eumenes, who had nothing, after all, to lose, and who came up with a clever plan. He got Philip Arrhidaios, who naturally sided with the lawful regent and viewed Cassander as a dangerous usurper, to draft a letter placing Eumenes in charge of the armies of Asia and ordering Antigonus’ troops to desert to him, their rightful leader. He then had copies of this letter spread by agents far and wide, while he himself managed by craft to raid a secret treasury that Alexander had hidden in the wilds. The foot soldiers loved Philip Arrhidaios irrationally, and bowed to his will, and many deserted Antigonus for Eumenes’ so-called imperial army. Now at last Eumenes the Greek had troops and a vast cache of money. Brimming with plans, he immediately drove Ptolemy back across Sinai by force of arms and began constructing a navy.

Cleitus the White meanwhile, defeated by Antigonus in Asia Minor, fled to Macedon, where Polyperchon gave him command of what ships he already had. He sailed into the Propontis and, waving the Trisula, defeated Cassander’s brother Nicanor in a short sea engagement. Nicanor escaped, however, and Polyperchon’s fortunes turned.

Polyperchon had tried to win the backing of the cities of Greece by promising them concessions, but his promises were so parsimonious that many Greek cities sided with Cassander instead, on the assumption that he could hardly be less generous. The old general’s campaigning in the Peloponnese did not go very well, and Cleitus the White, who had developed the reputation of being invincible at sea, was defeated by Antigonus, who sent lightly armored men to swim to Cleitus’ ships in mooring of Mysia, surprising and annihilating the fleet; what few ships escaped were destroyed by Nicanor’s navy. Cleitus, meanwhile, threw himself overboard and managed to swim, in a feat worthy of Seleucus, all the way across the Propontis to Thrace. Poseidon protected him that far, but when he came ashore in Thrace he met with Lysimachus’ men, whom he kept at bay with the Trisula, and then Lysimachus himself, summoned to the fight. No trident could keep Lysimachus at bay, and Cleitus the White died fighting like a lion. The Trisula was buried with him. Sulon means “the right to seize a ship’s cargo,” so the name Tri-sula may be interpreted that three times its wielder could plunder ships before it failed him; but others say that Poseidon had no power on land.

Meanwhile, Eumenes’ fleet washed away in a freak storm before he even had a chance to launch it, and his men, whispering that the Greek was cursed, began to desert again. But perhaps the greatest setback was that Philip Arrhidaios’ vengeful wife Adea Eurydice, probably simply because Antipater had wanted Polyperchon for the regency, convinced her husband to switch sides and throw in for Cassander.

Earlier Polyperchon had sent Roxane and Alexander IV to Epirus, to take refuge with Olympias, under the protection of the Epirot King Aeacidas, her cousin, who had reclaimed the throne after Cleopatra’s husband, the usurper, died warring in Italy; “Alexander in Asia fought only women, but in the west I struggle against men,” the usurper had said in the days before his death. Polyperchon and Cassander were away, so Olympias, who would do anything to keep young Alexander on the throne, started a campaign of her own, marching on Pella with an Epirot army. She was met by an army led Philip Arrhidaios, riding his horse backwards, and Adea Eurydice, clad magnificently in magical bronze plate armor, charging at the head of her men. But despite Eurydice’s gallant display, the capers a grinning Philip Arrhidaios cut on his horse that day were so foul and impious that the offended troops pulled up short, and Eurydice charged alone into the phalanx, where, surrounded by a mound of Epirot corpses, she eventually was beaten unconscious and taken prisoner. Philip Arrhidaios’ men then deserted to Olympias, who, entwined with snakes and clad only in the mantle of her motherhood, marched triumphantly into Pella. Arrhidaios and Adea were imprisoned in a cell too small to sit in, and kept without sufficient food or water, until finally Olympias sent Adea Eurydice a dagger, a rope, and some hemlock, telling her to choose. “I leave the blade and poison for you,” Adea said, and, disdaining even the rope, hanged herself with her own garters. It would be pleasant to relate that Philip Arrhidaios, like Brutus, had only been feigning idiocy, as part of a clever plan of survival, but, tragically, it seems he had no such plan, and, as he sang to himself a song Nectanebos had taught him as a child, “And so I sing, any food, any feeding, feeding, drink, or clothing,” Olympias murdered him. Her six-year-old grandchild was now the sole ruler of the greatest empire in the world. She celebrated by ordering the massacre of Cassander’s followers, and his brother Nicanor, recently returned from his sea victory. She then plundered his ancestors’ graves in Aegae and scattered the remains, slandering them as assassins. The remains of Iolaus were singled out for desecration.

This was the worst thing that could have happened to Polyperchon. His cause appeared now to be bathed in blood and predicated on savagery; what Greek allies he had left him, and his own men, who after all had loved the simple king Polyperchon was supposed to be protecting, began to wonder if they had chosen the right side. All was disaster, and, as Antigonus approached Syria, Eumenes abandoned the half-rebuilt navy and fled east for a desperate gamble

Raging, Cassander hastened back to Pella, and Olympias fled before him, to Pydna Harbor, at the base of Mount Olympus. King Aeacidas from the west and Polyperchon from the east each tried to extricate her, but Cassander held them off and starved out Olympias, who had hoped for Eumenes’ never-completed navy to save her. Cassander had promised to spare her life, but in Pella he had her stoned to death, himself standing among the throng, hurling the largest stones and shouting, mysteriously, “Thus do I avenge myself on your son, just as she did.” Olympias’ body he threw in a swamp.

He had already decided that Alexander IV would never reach puberty.

While Polyperchon fled, Eumenes, despite a high fever, headed east. Seleucus Nicator, deciding at the last minute to throw in his Phrygian cap with Cassander—or rather, in Asia, Antigonus Monophthalmos—sent an army to intercept him, but Eumenes proved as slippery as ever. He made it to the eastern satrapies, which had been avoiding the conflict altogether under the advice of Peucestas, and living in relative peace since the defeat of Peithon. There he presented Philip Arrhidaios’ letter again. The letter was hardly germane, since Philip Arrhidaios was first of all on Cassander’s side and second of all dead. But it is unclear how fast the recent news traveled; and certainly Eumenes had acquired the trait of traveling faster than almost anyone. In any event, he doubtless passed off all rumors as false as he appealed for the immense eastern army. Although Peucestas had once been Eumenes’ closest friend, for neither fit in among the Macedonian nobility, he again preached neutrality, for he, too, dreamed of an empire united and in his heart desired for the success of Antigonus, the only man capable of ruling it now that Antipater and Perdiccas, and perhaps Leonnatus, were gone; for Ptolemy was too complacent, Cassander too wicked, and Lysimachus too rash, while the regent Polyperchon was a mediocrity, and the two kings were a child and a dead idiot. Eumenes had never sought rulership for himself, but only fought for Alexander’s heir. So, had Antigonus asked for the army, Peucestas may have assented, but he would not have it for Eumenes. But Peucestas was just one of many satraps, and, anyway, the foot soldiers did not see it his way, and, out of love for Philip Arrhidaios, they obeyed the letter. Eumenes returned west at the head of a giant army, and this time Seleucus wisely let him through.

Now began the long and bloody campaign for Asia. Both Eumenes and Antigonus called themselves the Lord of All Asia now, but of course neither claim was true. While Eumenes drew Antigonus to the mountainous north, where he could employ his tricks with most efficiency, many said that Antigonus had been blessed by his witch-woman mother-in-law such that he could never lose a battle as long as he lived. The best Eumenes could get from their encounters was a draw. Asia seemed to be in a stalemate, for Antigonus could not lose, and the Greek fox was too crafty to. Only the soldiers kept dying in droves. It is said that Eumenes fretted that their armies would be whittled down until there on the battlefield stood only Eumenes and Antigonus left to fight; in which case Eumenes would lose, for, though he had proved himself capable of defeating Neoptolemus in single combat, Antigonus was a giant of a man in every direction, and the best fighter in the empire now that Adea Eurydice was dead. Eumenes had learned everything about every Macedonian leader in his days as Alexander’s secretary, and knew what Antigonus was capable of.

In Greece, meanwhile, Cassander had consolidated his power such that Lysimachus gained nothing from the war. Polyperchon was cowering in the hinterlands. Cassander’s brother Philippus, once Alexander’s page, invaded Epirus and defeated Aeacidas, who died in combat at Oeniade, whereat Cassander massacred the dead king’s family, and put a puppet on the throne of Epirus; but his infant heir Pyrrhus was smuggled away and hidden. Cassander also appointed rulers to the Greek city-states that appealed to his morbid sense of humor. On Athens he afflicted the philosopher Demetrius of Phaleron, a student of Aristotle’s and a self-styled philosopher king after the fashion of The Republic. His philosophical reign did not prove popular.

Cassander and Lysimachus were natural opposites, and their alliance, the firmest among the Diadochi, was a marvel. Lysimachus had read every philosophical text from Thales to Cleanthes (the chronological spectrum), and had, alongside Pyrrho, studied with wise men from Egypt to India (the geographical spectrum); Cassander despised philosophy as a weak sister to the true wisdom that brings power, the wisdom of the path of blood, as can be seen in his humorous employ of the philosopher from Phaleron. Cassander even at the age of thirty-five had to sit upright like a child at his father’s table, for he had not earned the right to recline at meals by killing a boar alone without a net or necromancy. He began to recline, of course, after Antipater’s death, when there was no one to bring up the shortcoming. Lysimachus was impetuous in the hunt, and in Syria he had by himself slain with a short sword an enormous lion that had in the process mauled him; scarcely having learned a lesson, in Sogdiana, exploring with Alexander, he had gone after a passing lion with nothing but a dagger, and the king had had to restrain him, pulling aside Lysimachus’ scarf to expose the scars across his neck, clawmarks of the Syrian lion, as a reminder of the fruits of impetuosity. As they hunted, so they reigned; in perfect opposition; and yet they never came to blows.

Finally, Antigonus and Eumenes met in decisive battle at Gabiene. Eumenes appeared on the cusp of victory when Peucestas withdrew his troops from the flank, permitting Antigonus’ cavalry, under command of Demetrius the Besieger, to encircle his foe. Eumenes’ Silver Shields unit, Alexander’s old elite, perceiving that the battle was lost and escape impossible, took Eumenes captive and handed him over to Antigonus, demanding twenty talents in return for the service. Demetrius requested that the prisoner be treated with respect due a valiant enemy, and Nearchus pleaded that at least the Greek’s life be spared, but Eumenes’ own troops, knowing well that their leader was too crafty to be held long, and tiring of constant warfare that his escape would only reignite, insisted that he must be put to death; and, although he begged for his life, he was. His last words were spoken to Demetrius’ wife Phila, revealing where he had hidden her dead husband’s bones; she sent Ariston to dig them up for her. Now Antigonus really was the Lord of All Asia, and he set his sights on the rest of the empire.

At a dinner party, which Peithon had attended, Antigonus publicly deposed and then later quietly executed the unfortunate satrap, on the legitimate but almost-forgotten charge that he had once risen up against the other eastern satrapies; he then appointed a native satrap, Orontobates, in his place, the first Persian given a position of power since Alexander’s death. Orontobates had been one of Alexander’s most implacable foes; he had fought alongside Memnon at Halicarnassus, against Ptolemy and Asander at Salmacis, and later alongside Darius at Gaugamela; he had married Artremisia, the daughter of Pixodarus, brother of Maussolus of Halicarnassus, that Alexander and Arrhidaios had both courted; but Antigonus had begun to see that Persians were more trustworthy than the ambitious Macedonians. The Silver Shields were particularly suspect, and Antigonus dispersed them to the far reaches of empire, with secret instructions that they be sent on suicide missions. Since there was no one to stop him, he raided the empire’s treasuries, commandeering what vast wealth of the Archaemenids Alexander and his successors had not squandered. He easily won over Menander, who had had nothing to rule since being deposed as satrap of Lydia years before, with promises of Ionia. He summoned Seleucus, demanding to know why he had let Eumenes pass, and Seleucus, remembering the fate of Peithon, fled and took refuge with Ptolemy. Antigonus similarly reconsolidated and reordered the rest of Asia, for the only man he trusted there, his family and Nearchus aside, was Peucestas, who betrayed Eumenes for ideology and not for gold, and who was popular with the Persian subjects, for he spoke Persian fluently and had learned all their lore and customs. Antigonus set him up as steward in his absence; then he marched west.

Seleucus Nicator warned the other Diadochi of Antigonus’ approach, and immediately another coalition formed of Antigonus’ former allies Cassander, Lysimachus Phoenix, and Ptolemy. Antigonus in turn sent money to Polyperchon, encouraging him to restart his campaign against Cassander; he also issued a proclamation declaring all Greek cities free, autonomous, and ungarrisoned. Cassander immediately issued an identical counterproclamation, but, as Antigonus had long since freed all the Greek cities of Asia Minor while Cassander consorted with demons, the Greeks adjudged Antigonus as the more sincere (correctly, it turns out), and sided with him almost unanimously, the islands, the mainland, and Ionia alike. Diodorus, the limping assassin, even led a special company of Ephesians to fight for Antigonus, who put them under the command of his son. Antigonus now had more men, more land, and more money than all his opponents combined, although far fewer ships. He marched into Syria, easily defeating Ptolemy’s men there, took Joppa and Gaza, set up shipyards to construct a fleet, and conquered all Phoenicia except Tyre, which remained loyal to Ptolemy. Antigonus settled in for a siege. In the meantime, Cassander and Lysimachus found themselves harried by the free Greeks. Only Seleucus, who had nothing to lose, met with success. He borrowed ships from Ptolemy and managed to conquer Cyprus, which had allied itself with Antigonus. Then he went to the Branchidaean Oracle at Didyma, and learned in prophecy that he would become king. This was the first time anyone had mentioned kingship as a goal for anyone but the heirs of Alexander; hitherto everyone had been fighting merely for the regency. Seleucus was so excited by the oracle’s words that he vomited. But after that he kept his mouth closed, and told no one of his prophetic destiny.

Tyre held out for over a year, longer than it had against Alexander, a significant setback for Antigonus. It gave time for Ptolemy to levy an army he led himself, which Demetrius and Nearchus were sent to stop. They met Ptolemy in Gaza, and were defeated after a hard fight, only escaping though a withdrawal deep into the desert. Ptolemy seized Demetrius’ tent with all his possessions, and chivalrously had it returned to him. Demetrius gnashed his teeth and swore that he would not rest until he could repay Ptolemy with as great a kindness. Antigonus said, “Ptolemy has defeated boys; now let us see how he fares against men.” But Demetrius begged him to let him make a second attempt himself.

And indeed soon Demetrius contrived to fall on Ptolemy’s army as it advanced into Syria under General Cilles, winning a stunning victory against him and taking the general and 7,000 soldiers prisoner, along with all his baggage, which included the gem Alexander had brought back from India, which stood at the head of his coffin, which was made from the fingernail of the barbaric god Vala, and which, they said, would permit the bearer to see through the mother of Hermes, whose name has strange meaning in their language. It was a garnet, but not red as other garnets are, but bled free of all color, and Cilles was taking it to the mountains to seek the Hunbarbaridae. Demetrius immediately sent back all the prisoners and possessions with a brave flourish; but his mother had stolen the fingernail of Vala and replaced it with a copy. So Ptolemy never found the Hunbarbaridae, and it was well for him that he had already tamed the sons of Proteus. But Demetrius considered his debt paid. He had invented a way of using a series of signal beacons to send messages, and he proudly sent by beacon the news of his success to his father.

For among the Antigonids existed a family loyalty unknown in any other Diadochian dynasty; in fact, they alone never committed the crimes of parricide or filicide. A story is told that once, when ambassadors from Cassander were speaking with Antigonus Monophthalmos, Demetrius happened to come back from hunting and, still carrying his javelins, entered the meeting, kissed his father and sat by his side. This event made a large impression on the ambassadors, who had never before seen a man let his son enter his presence armed. Only in the context of the Diadochi can failure to murder relatives be seen as a remarkable virtue; but Demetrius had learned true loyalty from both his parents, who had each taken remarkable risks from familial duty. Demetrius was not as tall as his father, for no man in the empire was, but he was tall, and exceedingly handsome. He and Lysimachus bore a great hatred for each other and each had vowed to slay the other even if it meant his own doom.

Ariston had once, in the battle of the Tigris, slain Satropates in single combat and brought his head to Alexander; after Medius’ dinner party he carried the dying Alexander to bed; now he had borne Craterus’ bones to Phila. He had no more great deeds left in him, and he disappeared from history. The next great man to die would have no one to bear his body until Gonatus interred him at Aegae.

Ptolemy had local problems now, in his maverick general Ophellas, a man too popular, because of his conquest of the Dodekaschoenoi and adventures on the Gezira Island, to kill, but who was unable to keep secret his ambition for the double throne. But Seleucus Nicator, meanwhile, took advantage of Ptolemy’s initial victory to slip into Asia, where he returned to Babylon and retook it by swimming in through a culvert from the Euphrates, and rallying his followers on the inside. Demetrius, flush form his victory over Cilles, hastened inland and conquered Babylon again; but Seleucus was not there, he was off in the east with Sandrokoptos the Peacock Tamer. Returning with 500 elephants, buoyed by the prophecy, Seleucus began a guerrilla campaign in the wilds around Babylon, harrying Demetrius’ garrisons and then fading away. As the Branchidaean Oracle spoke for Apollo Didymaios, father of Branchus, Seleucus Nicator now took Apollo as his patron god.

Babylon is a city of such prodigious size that after Demetrius recaptured it, a full two days passed before the news spread through all its neighborhoods.

Cassander, pushed back into Macedon by the free Greeks, finally murdered Alexander IV and Roxane, lest they fall into their hands, by the unique expedient of forcing them to eat each other piecemeal, and then finishing off the leftovers himself. Antigonus then sent Nearchus with Heracles by ship to Polyperchon with the suggestion that he declare Heracles, who was, after all, the only surviving heir, king, and Polyperchon his guardian. Polyperchon achieved some success with this gambit, but Cassander had faced off against the old general enough to take his measure: he offered him command of Greece in exchange for Heracles’ head. Nearchus got wind of the plan and sailed away with the young heir, taking him east beyond the borders of the empire, where he would be safe. Polyperchon sent another’s head to Cassander, who pretended to be taken in, but he nevertheless sent to all his generals and allies messages with the simple inscription: “Find Heracles.” For he had married Alexander’s illegitimate half-sister Thessalonike (age 19 at the time of Alexander’s death) and intended his heirs to be the only survivors of the Philipid dynasty, to which Heracles had a better claim. “Find Heracles.” But they never did.

And Cassander further usurped the traditional privilege of Macedonian kings by founding two cities, Cassandreia and Thessalonica, named for him and his wife. His brother, the brilliant, mad Alexarchus, founded a city as well, in Athos, Ouranopolis, the City of Heaven, under the banner of the sun, and created there a utopia based on novels he had read, where all property and woman and children were held in common. Alexarchus had a theory that the evils of the world came from language, and he therefore invented a new language, untainted by the tongues of man, to be spoken only in his city. Its citizens were, Pyrrho said, like the tribe of Karen, who had forgotten the names of all things, but others said they were like the Atarantes. Within a generation, the men of Ouranopolis were unrecognizable as human to their fellow Greeks; within three they had disappeared from history into a cloud of their own election. All Cassander’s sisters had married other Diadochi; although he sill had one brother left, Philippus, he knew that he himself would need heirs to preserve the Antipatrian line, and he prayed to his chthonic gods for sons. He had three, and all became kings. So did the son of Philippus.

Demetrius, with his lieutenant Alcimus the Epirot, the strongest man in Greece, who wore for armor such a massive combination of iron and bronze that no other man could stand under it, made some other bold forays, the greatest of which was liberating Halicarnassus from Asander brother of Parmenion, who fled, a broken man, to his ally Ptolemy. In all the wars of the Diadochi, Asander had lost every battle he’d been in. But Antigonus could not gain the upper hand in Greece any more than Cassander or Ptolemy could in Asia, and soon an armistice was called. Then, as Cassander and Polyperchon were now allies, and the murders and marriage and the city planning had brought Cassander’s dynastic claim into the open, Ptolemy, who cared nothing for a united empire but wanted to prevent anyone from growing strong enough that they might threaten Egypt, forged a brief and strange alliance with Antigonus, and Demetrius, never one to stand on the niceties of monogamy, was even betrothed to his daughter Ptolemais (Demetrius married five women in his life, including both the sister and the ex-wife of Pyrrhus). But the alliance could not last, for Ptolemy and Antigonus had opposite goals; indeed, it ended before the marriage could take place (Demetrius finally married Ptolemais for real a decade later). The armistice would not last much longer.

But while it lasted, the problem of the enormous number of unemployed mercenaries in Greece, chafing at the peace, was cleverly solved by Ptolemy by dispatching them under his general Ophellas to fight Carthage off in Cyrenaica, on his western border. This plan also got rid of Ophellas, joined soon by the tyrant adventurer Agathocles of Syracuse, who promptly murdered him, took over his army, and fought the Carthaginians inconclusively before returning to his city, falsely claiming the mantle of conqueror. Ophellas was besotted in love with Agathocles’ young son Heracleides, and trusted the father too much. Ptolemy in gratitude married the tyrant to his bastard daughter Theoxene, and Agathocles went on to seize the island of Corcyra from Sparta, at Ptolemy’s request, because Cassander had sought to capture it himself, to spread his rule to the Adriatic. Agathocles as last had a kingdom; at last the self-styled conqueror had conquered. Ptolemy continued to play his deep game.

Cleopatra, meanwhile, had been courted by Cassander, Antigonus, and Ptolemy, but she had seen enough heartbreak and refused all of them. She had holed up in the citadel of Sardis, also known as Hyde, in Lydia, and lived there for years, unable to leave but untouched while she remained. Antigonus, spurned, at once accused Cleopatra of being complicit in the death of her half-sister Cynna, an accusation not as ridiculous as it appeared on the face of it. Finally, one day Cleopatra was found in the citadel slain and dismembered; the perpetrator was never caught.

Soon, persuaded, some say, by the grateful citizens of Halicarnassus, Antigonus vowed to free Greece, which had been freed by proclamation already but languished under Cassander regardless. With his new fleet, Demetrius sailed to Greece and liberated Athens from his namesake, the terrible philosopher king Demetrius of Phaleron, who fled, at Theophrastus’ advice, to Ptolemaic Egypt. “Fortune does not conform to the laws of the world, and often demonstrates her power by frustrating our expectations,” he wrote, there, in his treatise On Tyche. The Athenians were so thankful that they accorded both Antigonus and Demetrius divine honors, built temples to them and erected statues which they set up next to the Olympians’. Also, far more radical and startling, they proclaimed the pair kings. For the first time, and four long years after Cassander had eaten the flesh of young Alexander, someone not of Alexander’s family was called king. Once hearts had been broken, so to speak, though, everyone became a king, even Agathocles, who ruled only a city but nevertheless proclaimed himself king of Syracuse. Seleucus proved the oracle right by crowning himself in Babylon, retaken again; Ptolemy the Savior was now pharaoh of Egypt (and began to claim that he was secretly Philip’s bastard son), Lysimachus king of Thrace, Seleucus king of Babylon, and Cassander, after some initial self-righteous refusals, king of Macedonia and all Greece. But the last two, at least, desired a larger kingdom. Even Ptolemy, through stratagems and diplomacy, had managed some time before to add Cyprus and a few ports on the Greek mainland to his little empire, and these were very precious to him, for Egypt had but few harbors, and Ptolemy commanded a large fleet.

Ptolemy also took Cyprus for revenge: King Nicocreon of Cyprus, who had been an ally of Alexander, had been insulted by the philosopher Anaxarchus, a friend of Ptolemy’s who ridiculed Nicocreon’s claim to divine origin (as he had similarly ridiculed Alexander’s), and subsequently, capturing Anaxarchus, who washed ashore on Cyprus after a shipwreck, had ordered him pounded to death in a huge mortar; Anaxarchus had scoffed at the sentence, whereat Nicocreon had ordered his tongue cut out, but Anaxarchus immediately bit it off and spat it in Nicocreon’s face. Later, when most Cypriots had allied themselves with Antigonus Monophthalmos, Nicocreon sided with Seleucus, operating from the fortress of Salamis, which had not fallen to siege since the Persian days of Artaxerxes. But Ptolemy, feigning friendship and promising Nicocreon rulership over the whole island, had captured him and forced him to commit suicide; as he bled to death, Ptolemy said, “That is blood, and not divine ichor,” echoing the famous witticism of Anaxarchus. Thus did a former student of Aristotle’s avenge a philosopher.

Diodorus the assassin had fought beside Demetrius in many battles, and, as a reward for his loyal service, he was left in command of Ephesus while the Besieger was in Greece. But Menander was commander of Lydia, and Diodorus had long nursed plans of revenge against him.

Demetrius was in the main known for magnanimity. The anecdote is often told that once his friend Mithridates came under suspicion of Antigonus Monophthalmos because of troubling dreams, in which Mithridates would found a field of gold that he would bequeath to the sea [Pontus], and Antigonus confided in his son that, on the strength of these dreams, and at the advice of his terrible wife, he intended to have Mithridates executed, but he made Demetrius swear that he would not breathe a word of the plan; Demetrius then sought out Mithridates and with the butt of his spear traced out in the dust the word “Flee,” thereby keeping his promise. Mithridates went to Cappadocia, where he set up on a field of golden grain; his descendents were the kings of Pontus. In Athens, however, Demetrius showed the negative side of his character, and succumbed to a life of debauchery. He had taken as a mistress Irithizon, known as the Lamia for the city she hailed from, and she seemed to sap from him something, many said, which made him behave more foolishly than before. He installed her in the Parthenon, and so scandalized the Athenians with his orgies before Pallas that some whispered that they longed for the priggish days of Demetrius of Phaleron, when gynaikonomoi [woman-inspectors] would wander the streets eyeing hemlines. Even those outside the city were shocked by Demetrius’ behavior; Lysimachus pointedly contrasted the scars on his own neck, gained in single combat with a lion, with the effete scars on Demetrius’, the bite marks of the horrible Lamia. Wine and women and splendor marked the Besieger’s time in Athens, and, as they had already hailed him as a god, who could preach moderation to Demetrius the Besieger? While his son Antigonus studied philosophy in the Painted Colonnade under Zeno the Stoic, and his assistant and eventual successor at the Stoa, the ex-boxer Cleanthes, Demetrius set up an Oriental court and wallowed in lust, flattery, pomp, dissolution, and crapulence.

After Cleanthes, who refuted the heliocentric astronomy of the atheist Aristarchus, the Stoa was headed by the long-distance runner Chrysippus, who wrote 705 books, none of them dedicated to any king, because Ptolemy Philadelphos had confiscated his father’s land, and who, like the cynics, advocated cannibalism because why not? Zeno made no paradoxes; he was merely the namesake of the philosopher from Elea. He, like Chrysippus, and Cleanthes more or less, committed suicide at an advanced age, in his case by holding his breath after breaking a toe. The heads of the Academy after Plato were his nephew Speusippus, a pseudo-Pythagorean who declared all pleasure evil, Xenocrates, whom Philip II, ever handy with a bribe, called the only untouchable ambassador in Greece, the alcoholic turned teetotaler Polemo, Crates, neither the mad hunchback nor the Stoic, and Crantor. But the greatest of philosophers was the ex-painter Pyrrho, who traveled to India with Alexander and there mastered their strange wisdom, as recorded by Timon Monophthalmos of Phlius, and Athens, the dancer, in his satires. Pyrrho took Timon’s eye, for he had learned things, and not just in India. The strain of man’s bred out into baboon and monkey. Much of Pyrrho’s wisdom is lost, but it is said that he said that we might as well surrender. He said, Timon wrote, “I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind; for your part, I do wish you were a dog, that I might love you something.” And Pyrrho knew.

Still, even the decadence of Athens could not hold Demetrius long. Now he and Antigonus rampaged around Greece, hailed everywhere as liberators, and Cassander and Lysimachus melted away before them. Demetrius wanted to raid Thrace, and kill Lysimachus, but Antigonus, who despised this vendetta and was a practical man, sent Demetrius to Cyprus, which was held by Ptolemy’s brother, Menelaus. Demetrius landed and won a great battle, but Menelaus escaped and took refuge in the impregnable fortress of Salamis. Demetrius immediately began to construct siege engines of many and wondrous kind, most of his own invention, air catapults and repeating ballista, and pounded the walls of Salamis day and night, such that people said the pestle of Anaxarchus did not pound harder. It is thus he got the name “the Besieger.” Still the fortress did not fall, despite all his inventions, and Ptolemy, meanwhile was coming by ship, leading his vast armada and an army twice the size of Demetrius’. But as Ptolemy approached the harbor of Salamis, Demetrius suddenly ordered his siege engines turned on Ptolemy’s ships, and in the subsequent bombardment they sank almost to a man, Ptolemy only escaping in a rowboat. In this way Ptolemy lost his marvelous fingernail of Vala, which he never learned was fake, to the waves, although the box he kept it in miraculously washed ashore, and Demetrius duly returned it to Ptolemy, who later gave it as a gift to Cassander the Black, fascinated as he was with all things of magic or blood. Menelaus, in any event surrendered, and Demetrius sent him back with honor and all his possessions to Egypt, which he thereafter refused to leave. Cyprus belonged to Demetrius.

Diodorus had meanwhile taken advantage of the access granted his position to murder Menander as he slept, and, fearing that Demetrius would uncover his crime, he then sent to Lysimachus offering to sell him access to Lydia for fifty talents. But Demetrius, probably with the help of his mother, learned of this betrayal, and hidden on a boat with Alcimus the Epirot, who was disguised as Lysimachus, strutting and frothing, he sailed alone into the harbor to bargain with Diodorus. Diodorus came alongside in a small boat, which Demetrius, leaping from his hiding place, sank with a trebuchet on deck. Diodorus’ lame leg prevented him from swimming to shore, and he drowned.

Demetrius wanted then to invade Egypt, but his mother convinced him it would be foolhardy without the true fingernail of Vala, which she had passed on to her mother, and which would have to be brought back from Thessalonica. And so, while his father settled affairs and won skirmishes in Asia Minor, he satisfied himself for the moment in harassing the Egyptian coast, before moving on, at Antigonus’ command, to Rhodes. For Rhodes had been independent since the death of Alexander, and, trading with all sides and becoming immensely rich in the process, had proved too willing to accommodate Antigonus’ enemies. If Antigonus was going to control the sea-lanes, as his strategy required, he would need to subdue Rhodes. He sent them a series of demands, to all save one of which they agreed: they would not give him one hundred finest hostages from among their nobility. Without the hostages, all chance for peaceful settlement vanished, and Demetrius went to Rhodes with a large army and his famous siege engines, including his masterpiece, the hundred-foot-high Helepolis, constructed on his design by Epimachus the Athenian. Once again Demetrius found himself quickly master of the island except one fortress, this one at the city of Rhodes. Once again his marvelous siege engines, which hurled flaming rocks and glass orbs filled with acid, worked slowly against the walls. Ptolemy, who relied on Rhodes for trade, all the more now that Cyprus had fallen, kept the Rhodians provisioned, and lent them military aid and crocodiles. He had learned from the fiasco at Salamis, and brought these in by small boats, under cover of darkness. For this service, the grateful Rhodians gave Ptolemy the name Savior, which he proudly used from then on. Alcimus the Epirot, despite his massive armor, was eaten by a crocodile, leaving Seleucus the strongest man in the Greek lands. Nevertheless, after a year, the walls were crumbling and the Rhodians were looking for a deal. Demetrius, although he desperately wanted to see the siege through to the end, had received frantic pleas for help from Athens, retaken by Cassander. And so he struck a bargain: Rhodes provided the hundred hostages and the promise to help Antigonus in any future wars, except against Ptolemy, and Demetrius lifted the siege and left, hostages in tow, for Athens. The Rhodians, who had been convinced they were doomed, saw their deliverance as a miracle, and, selling what siege machines Demetrius had left behind, in his haste, to fund the project, built a 112-foot high statue of Helios, the sun, traditional god of Egypt, straddling their harbor, the famous Colossus of Rhodes. Later the statue came to life and walked away into the sea.

For sometimes statues have strange powers, such as the statue of Alexander at Delphi, which was so faithful a likeness that Cassander the Black, when he happened to behold it, fell into a swoon of fear at the sight of the man who had once tortured him, the wrong brother, out of suspicion. Other statues have been made that live, that come in pairs, and are so crafted that should one fall the next receives its power; Archimedes’ creations would perhaps have been a match for them. Others, especially in Abyssinia, are not statues at all.

Demetrius moved up through Greece, once again liberating in a stroke the cities that Cassander had laboriously subdued over the last year. He had taken under his wing the brilliant young king of Epirus, Pyrrhus son of Aeacidas (who had not yet been born when Alexander died), and the lad, who had been exiled at age two, and king since age twelve, accompanied him in his battles, first as aide and later as a commander. Then Demetrius, reinforced now by Antigonus, moved north into Macedonia, to finish off Cassander the Black. Cassander offered to be their loyal subject, but they, full of righteous fury, demanded unconditional surrender, and Cassander instead called on Ptolemy, Lysimachus, and Seleucus to help him. Although the four had nominally been allied against Antigonus all along, they had mainly busied themselves staying out of his way; now, finally, encouraged by Peithagoras, they decided to cooperate in full. Abandoning Greece, Lysimachus and Seleucus invaded Asia Minor, while Ptolemy advanced through Syria, to draw Antigonus into one decisive battle. They did this not without trepidation, for Antigonus had never been defeated; but the fat man was almost eighty, and the coalition desperately wanted an end to this war.

Antigonus Monophthalmos and Demetrius the Besieger met Lysimachus and Seleucus Nicator, with his 500 elephants, in Phrygia, on the plain of Ipsus, and here the final battle was joined. Demetrius led the most spectacularly successful action of the encounter, a cavalry charge against his mortal enemy Lysimachus that broke his ranks and put the King of Thrace himself to flight. But, in his desire to pursue and strike down his foe, Demetrius did not perceive how hard pressed his father was by Seleucus’ elephants. Antigonus, meanwhile, held his ground instead of falling back, because he believed Demetrius would return at any moment. “Fear not, Demetrius will come,” were his last words, before the elephants fell on him. Demetrius, returning too late, was prevented by the elephants from even reclaiming his father’s body, and eventually had to flee. Lysimachus, now crowing about his brilliant tactic, and Seleucus utterly annihilated Antigonus’ panicking, leaderless army. It was the only battle Antigonus ever lost.

Lysimachus and Seleucus split Asia Minor, east and west, between then, while Ptolemy kept Syria; Seleucus now ruled the largest kingdom in the world. One of the prisoners from the battle, Pyrrhus, who had refused to retreat, was sent to Egypt as a hostage. He was seventeen years old. Ptolemy was soon charmed by the young man, and taught him the secrets of Egypt and of warfare, and showed him the pride of Alexandria: its Pharos lighthouse, its Museum, its 100-cubit-long golden phallus, and its Great Library. Demetrius of Phaleron tutored him, and, in an uncharacteristically wise and circumspect moment, advised him to read books on kingship, for they may contain information no subject would ever dare say to his face; the former philosopher king had written such a book himself. Pyrrhus, scion of the true house of Epirus, which had been deposed by Philip II in favor of Alexander the husband of Cleopatra, who had died years ago on foreign shores, forfeiting the throne, but whose heirs coveted it in Pyrrhus’ absence, returned to Epirus to reclaim the kingdom after marrying one of Ptolemy’s daughters who was not insane with ambition. Lysimachus, in contrast, married Ptolemy’s daughter Arsinoe, later called Arsinoe Philadelphos. Pyrrhus later married, and then divorced Agathocles of Syracuse’s daughter Lanassa; the island of Corcyra was her dowry.

The first director of the library was the Homerist Zenodotus, followed by Apollonius of Rhodes, scribe of the Argo, and then Eratosthenes the geographer, who drew a line between Alexandria and wild Kieb, and Aristophanes of Byzantium; never Callimachus. The library continued to grow, and Ptolemy’s grandson borrowed from Athens for copying, with a fifteen-talent deposit, the official texts of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; but once he had them, Ptolemy III forfeited the deposit and kept the texts. Indeed, such was his bibliomania that he impounded all books passing though Alexandria, had them copied, and returned the copies to the owners, keeping the originals for the Library, which grew into 490,000 volumes and one of the marvels of the world, until Julius Caesar accidentally burned it down.

With Antigonus died the dreams of a united empire. Stratonike despaired, as her mother had despaired after Alexander’s death. Mankind would never be unified. Ikulu, tolerated, to no one’s surprise, by Cassander, had commissioned a tomb for Stratonike to be built in Thessalonica by the Frozen Beards, a race of pygmies who live in the mountains of the west, among the Helvetii, near the lake of the Argo. Once these Frozen Beards had been numerous, but afterwards a rotting disease afflicted them, destroying their bones, and their numbers soon dwindled. Some say that Stratonike was walled up alive in the tomb; others say that the tomb merely points to another tomb’s location, and this one the true tomb. In any event, within a few years, Demetrius’ mother disappears from history.

But Demetrius did not. Turned away now even by Athens and the other Greek city-states that had lately hailed him, he had no land save the island of Cyprus, but he still had his fleet, and the title of king. He became a pirate king; Cyprus was not his kingdom, the whole Aegean was. He still insisted that he, and he alone, now that his father was dead, was the rightful ruler of Alexander’s empire. Cyprus was a fitting base of operations; Salamis had been founded by Teucer, brother of Ajax, a king with no kingdom.

Indeed, Demetrius did rather splendidly as a pirate king. For six years he delighted in raiding Thrace, much to Lysimachus’ consternation, and became so respected and even feared that Seleucus married his daughter, named Stratonike after her cruel but beloved grandmother. He even contrived several bases on the coast of Asia Minor. Then he turned his sights on Athens, currently under Cassander’s control, which had so recently betrayed him, and implemented a blockade, forbidding any food from entering the city. The famine there was so great that, it is written, a father and son beat each other senseless over the corpse of a mouse. Epicurus, who came to Athens after Perdiccas had expelled his family from Samos twenty years earlier, had managed to hoard a great supply of beans, and these he doled out in minute portions to his students every day. Ptolemy’s immense fleet of relief ships were routed by Demetrius’ pirate navy in an embarrassing turn, and finally Athens, which had previously imposed the death penalty on anyone even suggesting compromise with Demetrius, capitulated. Demetrius immediately, upon entering the city, decreed that all the citizenry assemble in the vast theater of Dionysus. This they did, somewhat fearfully, for the inevitable purges could fall on anyone. But Demetrius, who entered the amphitheater through the actors’ passages, reprimanded the Athenians gently for their fickleness and gifted them a hundred thousand bushels of wheat. He then garrisoned Athens, to the acclaim of its people once more, and moved against Sparta, a city never before taken by force of arms. He defeated the Spartans twice, and, as he marched on the city, its slaves threw open the gates in panic and despair. But before he could enter, Demetrius received news that Lysimachus had conquered his bases in Asia Minor, and Ptolemy had taken all of Cyprus save Salamis, in which Demetrius’ family was besieged. Demetrius turned to regroup, and, by this miracle, Sparta was saved.

Never has fortune toyed so capriciously with a man. For, just as he was plummeting from the height of glory, her wheel brought Demetrius upwards again. It happened that Cassander had finally succumbed to his wickedness, and a demon had dragged him down to Tartarus along with his eldest son, and, for a year, co-ruler, Philip IV. Antipater and Alexander, Cassander’s two younger sons immediately began to squabble over the succession. Thessalonike suggested that they share the kingdom, and was naturally supported in this proposition by the younger brother, Alexander; whereupon the elder, Antipater, now King Antipater I of Macedon, murdered his mother and set his brother to flight. Alexander then called for help from the two strongest men around, Pyrrhus, now comfortable in his kingdom Epirus, and Demetrius. Epirus arrived first; he sent Antipater fleeing to Lysimachus, whose daughter he married, set Alexander V up on the throne, and, with a canniness he had learned from Demetrius and Ptolemy, immediately annexed several provinces of Macedon as payment. When Demetrius arrived, late, Alexander V, fearful of losing more land to any other “helpers,” made plans to kill him. But Demetrius, staying on in Pella, caught wind of the plot one night, and, contriving to leave the banquet with Alexander V trailing after him, he whispered to one of his guards as he passed, “Kill the man who follows me.” Alexander V’s last words, as he was struck down, were, “You have been one day too quick for me.” The Macedonians, tired of the fiend Cassander and his murderous descendents, proclaimed Demetrius king of Macedon. After all, his first wife Phila was Antipater’s daughter, his son Antigonus Gonatus Antipater’s grandson. Old Phila arrived in Macedon, sent by Ptolemy by arrangement with the new king of Macedon in return for Salamis. Demetrius held most of Greece already.

In Babylon, meanwhile, Seleucus’ son Antiochus found he had fallen in love with his stepmother. He attempted to kill himself, in shame, by starvation, feigning illness; but the attending physician, Erasistratus, had read Sappho and, recognizing the symptoms of love from her descriptions, deduced that it was Stratonike, Demetrius’ daughter, that he loved. Erasistratus, who later dissected brains in Alexandria and discovered that the heart pumps pneuma, went to Seleucus and told him that his son would die because he loved another man’s wife. Seleucus immediately issued a proclamation ordering that whoever Antiochus loved must forthwith divorce her husband and marry Antiochus. When he found out it was his own wife he divorced her and she married the lad. Seleucus then proclaimed Antiochus and Stratonike king and queen of Babylon; he and Antiochus were co-rulers. Seleucus by this time was claiming that Apollo was his true father; certainly the god himself had given Seleucus’ mother Laodice the marvelous ring whose device, an anchor, matched the mark on the baby’s thigh, and every Seleucid king, each bearing the anchor mark, wore the ring in turn; although it would be many years before Seleucus’ great-great-grandson, Antiochus III, discovered the true power of the gift.

Ptolemy had also been beset by the problems of wanton Eros. He had fallen in love with his second wife Berenice, never a smart move, and decided that the pharaonic succession should pass to his younger son, by Berenice, known to history for shameful reasons as Ptolemy Philadelphos, and not his elder, by Eurydice the daughter of Antipater, another Ptolemy, this one surnamed Keraunos, the Thunderbolt. Philadelphos was tutored by Strato, third head of Aristotle’s Lyceum, and groomed to be Ptolemy II of the double crown; the Thunderbolt, rightful heir by the laws of primogeniture, went untutored. The former philosopher king Demetrius of Phaleron, sober but imprudent as ever and now blind, championed the Thunderbolt’s cause to Ptolemy the Savior, and was rebuffed; perhaps Ptolemy had perceived the steak of madness and violence that would give the Thunderbolt his name. Having perfunctorily done his duty to uphold tradition, the philosopher forgot all about it. But Ptolemy Philadelphos did not forget.

Lysimachus had had three children by Arsinoe, the daughter of Ptolemy and Berenice, and it was because of her, we hear, that he who had once helped the philosopher Callisthenes find surcease from suffering, and who had patronized the philosopher Onesicritus, Diogenes’ pupil and Nearchus’ pilot, through the completion of his book on Alexander, finally turned his back on philosophy, which some say he read copiously but never understood; for Lysimachus mutilated and imprisoned the philosopher Telesphoros of Rhodes, when the latter wrote scurrilous verses ridiculing Arsinoe for her propensity to spontaneous emesis at inopportune times, and subsequently banished all philosophers from Thrace forever, lest singling out Telesphoros should seem to indicate to the world that the verses were true, which they were. Arsinoe bent over her chamber pot and thanked Lysimachus for defending her fame; his trouble was coming.

Theoxene, Ptolemy’s bastard daughter, returned to Alexandria from Syracuse, sent home by her husband the tyrant Agathocles when he realized that he was dying of a swelling of the jaw. One of his sons had assassinated the other, and his relatives all hovered around his bed like vultures, their claws reflexively twitching for the scepter, so Agathocles, on his death bed, proclaimed the kingdom of Syracuse now a democracy, thereby thwarting them all, and incidentally plunging the city into civil war. On the island of Corcyra, west of Epirus, his daughter Lanassa, divorced from Pyrrhus, still reigned.

Far to the East, Sandrokoptos, meantime, had lived a life as he thought his god Alexander would have lived his, and, after a long reign, he turned his kingdom over to his son and retired to a cave to live the life as a gymnosophist, a hermit in service to the gods Alexander and Nirikrantha. He ate only flowers and fruit, lived naked in abject poverty, and never again killed a living thing, until the day he lay down between a tree and an anthill and died of starvation.

Demetrius of Phaleron declared that Serapis had restored his failed sight, and composed a hymnal to use in praise of that god, which Ptolemy had brought to Egypt and had no songs in Greek.

On the island of Chios, near Asia Minor, at around this time, or somewhat earlier, a fugitive slave named Drimikos gathered other fugitives around him in the hills and organized them into a bandit force of unprecedented military efficacy. After several failed and costly attempts by the Chians to destroy his bandit kingdom, during which jubilant runaway slaves swelled Drimikos’ ranks, the bandit king made a treaty with the legitimate authorities, gaining autonomy in the mountains and in return conceding that he would temper his banditry with moderation and that he would in the future only accept into his kingdom runaway slaves who could prove they had been abused, sending all others back. Some say that Drimikos, unbeaten on the battlefield and unrivalled in his mercy and justice, would have been the best choice to succeed Alexander; but Drimikos had no such ambition. He and the citizens of his free state continued to live in a society outside of society and to ply their chosen trade, perhaps in moderation, for many years, until Drimikos finally died of old age. On his deathbed he instructed his catamite Herondas, also called Herodas, to remove his head and carry it to the Chians, claiming the massive reward they had offered, which the catamite did, and used the money to travel to Athens and attain an education at the Academy; he later became a popular writer of mimes. This colorful story, though hardly important in itself, spread in fame, and in Cassandreia, at least, many found the career of Drimikos inspiring, and brooded on a time they could reenact it. Among them was a failed politician named Apollodorus.

But meantime the Macedonians learned to their chagrin that while Demetrius at war was a man of chivalric virtue, Demetrius at peace was a dissolute sybarite. Once again the king brought to his court a parody of Oriental splendor, with naked sex parades and blasphemy in the temples of the gods. The Macedonians had hoped, after the Cassander years, for a return to the austerity of Antipater; what they got was something less dangerous than Cassander, but much more offensive.

Pyrrhus, meantime, chafed at the proximity of his one-time mentor. Demetrius and Pyrrhus were too ambitious to be good neighbors, and soon they were not even good friends, falling out over border squabbles. Demetrius then married Pyrrhus’ ex-wife Lanassa, Queen of Corcyra, and, with the addition of her dowry, Demetrius’ kingdom now flanked his protoge‘s. Pyrrhus, who held Delphi, heard the oracle prophesy that the Antigonid dynasty would long rule in Macedon until the country was destroyed by Trojans who had turned Pyrrhus himself back; in anger, Pyrrhus banned Demetrius and all his allies from the Pythian Games. Demetrius instituted rival games in Athens, which he presided over dressed as Zeus, with Lanassa as Demeter, each in a golden chariot. An ithyphallic Athenian chorus sang a hymn to Demetrius the sole true god:

You alone of the gods are real, The other gods are all asleep, Or journeying, or non-existent, Or merely made of wood or stone, While you alone are here before us, Beautiful, benevolent, To save us from the coming sphinx.

The sphinx was Pyrrhus. Everyone knew war was inevitable.

Demetrius, perhaps deep in an alcoholic fog, did not see it coming. Pyrrhus had made a treaty with Lysimachus to fall on Macedon simultaneously from both sides, taking Demetrius completely by surprise. The Macedonians, weary of Demetrius’ antics and angry that he had taken yet another wife in disrespect of Queen Phila, hardly resisted. Demetrius threw off his royal finery, donned one of Cassander’s black cloaks, and disappeared into the night. His long-suffering wife Phila, who loved him desperately, and had endured so many vicissitudes with him, finally despaired and committed suicide. Surely, everyone thought, Demetrius would follow suit, for surely his fortunes were at an end.

But Demetrius never despaired. As Lysimachus and Pyrrhus divided Macedon, Lysimachus murdering Antipater when he asked for a share, Demetrius, with nothing to offer but his own charisma, collected an army and freed a rebuilt Thebes from Macedonian control. Depicting himself once again as a liberator, with some plausibility for even as king he had insisted on the freedom and autonomy of the Greek cities that paid him taxes and only garrisoned the ones that rebelled against this slight yoke, he moved south through Greece to Corinth. He still had men more loyal to him than to Pella in many cities, but others saw a chance to free themselves from Macedonian hegemony once and for all, and declared against both sides. In Athens, the fickle mob turned against the Demetrius partisans, who sent to Demetrius to aid them. Demetrius once again found himself besieging the city that had called him the one true god. Ptolemy, always willing to help anyone who fought against his rivals, sent another fleet to aid Athens, and this time Demetrius had too few men to stop it. The philosopher Crates the Cynic, Zeno’s teacher, spoke to Demetrius outside the walls of Athens and demonstrated with syllogisms that it would be in everyone’s best interest to reach a settlement before Ptolemy arrived. After a quick compromise that left Demetrius in charge of Piraeus, Athens’ sister city, Demetrius moved on. Ptolemy was the big winner here, as he was once again hailed as savior, and most cities of southern Greece bound themselves to his empire voluntarily. It now stretched from past Cyrenaica to the Carthaginian lands to the west to Syria in the east, from the Peloponnese in the north to Upper Nubian Ethiopia in the south.

Almost friendless in Greece, now, Demetrius decided to cross to Asia Minor and fight there. He left his son, the smart-mouthed stoic Antigonus Gonatus (“Knock-kneed”), in charge of his few remaining Greek holdings, Piraeus, Corinth, Calcis, and of course Demetrias, the so-called “Fetters of Greece,” and set off to try his fortune.

Raiding Lysimachus’ territory was an old profession of his, and immediately Demetrius met with success, capturing Sardis and winning over many of Lysimachus’ local commanders. But Lysimachus sent a large army across the Hellespont, led by his son Agathocles, that rarest of combinations: a popular and honest man. Demetrius only had a skeleton force, insufficient for pitched battle, and so he sent his fleet to harry Lysimachus’ coastline, while he struck inland. He intended to make for the eastern satrapies, which he had not yet alienated. His old friend Peucestas was still out there, living in the Persian manner in Kalas now, and Nearchus had gone somewhere to the east to finish the memoirs he had used to read to Alexander in the evenings, maybe he was there, too. Surely he could raise a proper army in the east, for he was the son of the Lord of All Asia.

But Seleucus, hardly willing to tolerate such mischief in his eastern territories, set his son, the half-Bactrian King Antiochus, for his mother Apame was the daughter of great Spitamenes, after Demetrius. Agathocles the son of Lysimachus cut his supply line, and Demetrius’ forces, hungry and buffeted by the elements in the mountains, on the run and demoralized by the wild goose chase they were on, began to desert. Demetrius was forced to turn back, and, finally facing Antiochus in the Mountains of Taurus, routed his forces. A new strategy suddenly occurring to him, Demetrius marched towards Babylon. After all, he’d taken it before.

Here Demetrius’ fortune spun him downward once more. For, as he approached Babylon, the unhealthy climate of the east laid him low, and Demetrius spent a week delirious with fever. His troops, giving him up for dead and hardly willing to storm Babylon with no leader, left Demetrius on the plains and fled. When Demetrius came to himself he was lying all alone with nothing but a cloak and a sword. Never one to despair, he pressed on eastward, alone, but finally collapsed from hunger. Antiochus found him, and took him to Babylon at last. Seleucus greeted him as a king, and set him up near the new Seleucid city of Antioch, in Apamea, where he stationed his older elephants, until they wander away to the graveyard at Tengrea. Demetrius was a captive, but a pampered one, and he was allowed to set up his traditional court of decadence. Lysimachus offered Seleucus 2000 talents for his nemesis’s head, but Seleucus, in a curt letter, declined, calling Lysimachus a filthy savage for good measure. Lysimachus was not one to listen to lectures on morals, and only got filthier. Demetrius, given absolute freedom in indulging his passions if nothing else, soon drank himself to death. Lysimachus felt he had been robbed of vengeance on his greatest enemy, and swore revenge on Seleucus. Seleucus, for his part, had once told his Persian subjects that he had not come to bring them foreign laws, Greek or Macedonian, but only one universal law, that what the king does is right; and just this once he proved the thesis correct.

Demetrius’ pirate fleet, under Admiral Medius the Sycophant, masterless now and hardly willing to turn itself over to a powerless Antigonus Gonatus, went over to Ptolemy. The Athenians reacted to Demetrius’ death by attempting to take Piraeus, but Gonatus proved he had at least some of his father’s mettle, and defeated them with a ruse: pretending that the city was being given to the Athenians by a traitor, he raised the gates, and, when the Athenian forces rushed in they found themselves in a stockade the Piraeans had built; the gate was dropped, and the Athenians in the trap were massacred from above. While Pyrrhus, remembering the prophesy of an Antigonid dynasty in Pella, sent a large donation to Delphi, wishing the oracle better luck next time. But he had little chance to be smug; Lysimachus was about to strike with a thunderbolt.

For meantime the disenfranchised Ptolemy the Thunderbolt had gone to Seleucus to beg help in reclaiming the throne, but Seleucus had put him off with vague future promises; surely he did not wish to antagonize his old comrade Ptolemy. So the Thunderbolt had left Seleucus for Lysimachus, who was, of course, much rasher. Lysimachus was hardly more encouraging, but the Thunderbolt, touring the kingdom with Lysimachus, began to desire, over the throne of Egypt, the throne of Macedon. The only problem was that there were so many people with a better claim to it than the Thunderbolt; he decided to eliminate them one by one.

First he persuaded Lysimachus that he should be sole king of Macedonia. Lysimachus and the Thunderbolt attacked Pyrrhus and drove him back to Epirus. Lysimachus declared himself king of Macedon, Thrace, and Asia Minor. His ambition was obvious. It was also obvious to his wife Arsinoe, who was jealous that her stepson Agathocles would inherit the kingdom over her own children. The Thunderbolt passed his half-sister a copy of Euripides’ Hippolytus, and soon Arsinoe, coming to Lysimachus vomit-stained and in tears and claiming that his son Agathocles had tried to rape her, persuaded the king to put his own son to death. Agathocles’ widow Lysandra, who had hated her half-sister Arsinoe since childhood, fled to Seleucus, begging him to avenge this heinous crime.

Nor was she the only voice crying out. Lysimachus’ subjects had loved the prince, and they were horrified by the deed. In an effort to quell nascent rebellion, Lysimachus executed those who spoke out against him. This only added to the dissatisfaction, and Lysimachus soon found himself in the middle of a large-scale and escalating purge. When Seleucus, heeding Lysandra’s call, marched into Lysimachus’ domains in Asia Minor, he was greeted everywhere by a people suddenly grown afraid their king.

Lysimachus Phoenix, an octogenarian now, marched into Asia Minor, the Thunderbolt by his side, hoping to defeat Seleucus Nicator in one decisive battle. He left his wife Arsinoe at Ephesus (briefly renamed Asinoea in her honor), near Belevi, where he had built a magnificent tomb for himself, and began the campaign to determine who would rule the greater part of Alexander’s empire. Seleucus had worn the diadem once, swimming in Babylon, but Lysimachus could claim a similar precedent: when the troops had mutinied, Alexander and Lysimachus had explored alone beyond the Hyphasis, and only turned back when Alexander’s spear, which had slain Cleitus despite his cloak, accidentally transfixed Lysimachus, passing through his doublet as though it were papyrus; no doctor could seal the wound, until Pyrrho, who had learned much from the Indian priests and philosophers, deduced that a royal wound required a royal cure, and immediately Alexander, in the presence of the army, set his diadem on Lysimachus’ head, staunching the wound, whereupon Alexander gave Pyrrho 10,000 gold pieces. On such accidents were their claims based.

The two forces met at Corupedia, and Lysimachus charged into the thick of battle, seeking Seleucus, whom he vowed to slay with his own hand. But Seleucus merely moved his banner back, so that Lysimachus advanced far ahead of his own men, and the King of Macedon, Thrace, and Asia Minor was struck down and died. The Thunderbolt immediately surrendered, and Seleucus, as was customary with him by now, treated his captive royally.

Arsinoe suddenly found herself the least popular woman in the Greek world. She knew, as soon as she learned of Lysimachus’ death, that the people of Ephesus would try to kill her, so she dressed her handmaid Corde in royal finery, encrusted with vomit, and fled herself in the rags of a beggar woman, with her three children. Corde was torn to death by a mob, but Arsinoe was far enough away by that time that she could not hear the screams. She did not stop running until she reached Cassandreia, where she still had some support.

The body of King Lysimachus, at the request of his own men, was tossed into a mass, unmarked grave, and the magnificent tomb at Belevi on a bluff overlooking Ephesus, hewn from the living rock into chambers eighty feet high, remained empty until Antiochus Theos, Seleucus’ grandson and the enemy of Ptolemy Philadelphos, elected to be buried there.

Lysimachus’ kingdom now had no heir, and the people unanimously called for Seleucus to be their king. For the first time since Alexander, Greece and Asia, almost as far as India, were unified. Seleucus, with the Thunderbolt by his side, made a triumphal march along the coast of Asia Minor, and crossed the Hellespont. As he set foot on European soil, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt stabbed him dead, and proclaimed himself King of Macedon and Thrace. A confused populace assented. Antiochus, incidentally, was now Lord of All Asia.

Of course, not even Alexander, or Cyrus before him, had truly been Lord of All Asia, for no one has ever conquered the sacred, hairless Argippaei, for example, or the desert-loving Arabs, or the inhabitants of far Hind who live on the roof of the world near the shaggy white apemen; and even in Persia Alexander never ruled over the Otanids. For he respected the custom, which derived from the time of the first Darius, when he plotted against the usurpers, who were Medeans, descendants of the daughter of Aia; for his friend Otanes had instigated the conspiracy against the Medes because he dreamed that Persia might be made a democracy; and, when the other six conspirators decided that Persia should have a monarchy instead, and that one of the Seven should be king besides, Otanes swore that he would neither be a king nor serve under one; and in return for withdrawing his name from the running he earned this concession: that he and his descendents would never be ruled by the Great King, but should live in Persia subject only to their own laws. This custom pertained through the reigns of the Diadochi until Antiochus now tried to exercise power over the Otanids, whereupon they left Persia as one and disappeared; and as they were a wealthy and clever people, the glory of Antiochus’ kingdom was never equal to the glory of his fathers’, and the glory of Persia never again attained the heights it reached in the days of Xerxes and Darius.

With the deaths of Seleucus and Lysimachus, the first generation of Diadochi, the generation that had adventured with Alexander, came to an end. For Ptolemy the Savior had died peacefully in his bed not long before, his memoirs nearly completed. His son and successor, Ptolemy II Philadelphos, for his first official act, imprisoned the erstwhile philosopher king Demetrius of Phaleron, who had counseled against him for the succession, and who died in prison. After that inauspicious beginning, however, Ptolemy II proved a fairly temperate ruler, a patron of the arts and an amateur scientist. The case of the poet Sotades, who wrote of the Philadelphoi that one “had plugged with vile stopper an unnatural barrel,” and was subsequently imprisoned, whereupon he escaped into the Mediterranean, was captured by the admiral Patroclus, and drowned in a lead coffin, was an exception. Ptolemy’s was a simple, uncontroversial, and uncontested succession.

Contrast with the Thunderbolt’s position, which would not be secure until he dealt with the more legitimate heirs. He immediately proposed marriage to his half-sister Arsinoe, promising to make her children his heirs, passing the whole thing off as a bid for legitimacy by marrying the old queen. Arsinoe’s eldest son, Ptolemy of Telmesson, warned her that it was a trap, so Arsinoe assented only under the provision that the marriage must take place in an open and public ceremony in Cassandreia, under the watch of the army, which she knew loved the Thunderbolt no more than her. Young Ptolemy of Telmesson still refused to go, choosing instead exile in Illyria. Their blood relationship notwithstanding, Ptolemy the Thunderbolt and Arsinoe’s marriage went off without a hitch, and everyone breathed easier and went home. After a wedding night in Pella that must have been a model of duplicity, the Thunderbolt murdered his two new stepsons, and went for Arsinoe, but she, awoken early by the buzzing of a bee, contrived to escape to Samothrace, where she built, as thanks for her delivery, the Tholos, a sanctuary to the gods in the form of a beehive and the largest circular building in all the Greek lands. However, wags said, the bee was sacred to Arsinoe because its vomit is honey.

Ptolemy the Thunderbolt then turned to Demetrius’ son. Antigonus Gonatus could not have been less like his father: short, ugly, austere, unpopular, and intellectual. With his snub nose and bandy legs, he was said to resemble Pan, and he thereupon took Pan as his patron god, an unusually minor figure for a patron when the Ptolemies had Aphrodite, the Seleucids Apollo, Athens Athena, Thebes Dionysus, Crete Zeus, and Rome Ares; and perhaps Pan was already dying. Gonatus went out with a fleet to meet the Thunderbolt’s assault and to no one’s surprise was put to flight and took refuge in the city Demetrias. But before the Thunderbolt could follow up on this victory, he was called back to Macedon by a strange new threat. Hordes of barbarians from the north, called Galatians, were spilling into the Greek lands. The Thunderbolt met them in battle, but for once had found a foe more ruthless than he. They routed his forces, took him prisoner, tortured him to death, cut off his head and carried it with them as a standard. The Galatians who later penetrated deep into Caria brought it with them and taught it to speak. The Thunderbolt’s schemes for the throne of Macedon had all gone off flawlessly, but there was one thing even he could not have accounted for in his plans.

The Diadochi were no longer fighting for power but rather for the survival of civilization; and the Greek’s traditional leader, Macedon, was without a king, although several proclaimed themselves king or regent briefly, before marching against the Galatians and dying. Sosthones, who refused the title of king, was the most successful, holding the Galatians at bay for years before eventually falling before them. Cassander’s nephew, son of his brother Philippus, Antipater the Etesian Wind was the least, reigning fort forty-five days before being driven out by common consent.

In Cassandreia, Apollodorus, a disenfranchised noble and demagogue, seizing his chance, persuaded the slaves and poor to let the Galatians into the city and overthrow the current magistrates, whereupon, he promised, he would institute a new regime of freedom and equality, patterned after the bandit kingdom of Drimikos in Chios. The memory of Drimikos’ paradise was seductive, and the poor and the slaves threw open the gates. Of course, once the glutted Galatians left the city, Apollodorus set up a tyrant state, under his despotic rule, whose only connection to Drimikos’ kingdom lay in habitual bandit raids on its neighbors. Apollodorus sacked Thessalonica while the Macedonian army was busy fighting the barbarians; when the Macedonians wheeled and marched into Chalcidice, Apollodorus took refuge in Cassandreia, and the Galatians, unchecked, plundered the sacred burial grounds of Aegae, and then moved south, towards Delphi, the most sacred and richest spot in Greece. Pyrrhus, galvanized into action, took a grossly inadequate army, for most of his men were busy holding the Galatians in the northwest, and force marched them Delphi, but, when he got there, the oracle told him to leave, for Delphi would be defended by an army clad in white. Indeed, when the Galatians made for the oracle’s cave, in search of booty, a sudden blizzard sprung up, and the Galatians, blinded and freezing, were forced to retreat with heavy losses. Pyrrhus, witnessing the power of Delphi, began to wonder about the Antigonids. He worried he would never again sit on the Macedonian throne. This was the first great defeat of the Galatians, but greater were coming.

Meanwhile, Antiochus the Seleucid had declared war on Antigonus Gonatus, hoping to finish off a rival that the Thunderbolt had left him, although he was now too busy fighting Galatians in Asia Minor actually to pursue the war he had declared. Gonatus hoped to take advantage of Antiochus’ weakness by crossing the Hellespont and claiming some territory that the Galatians had despoiled, for above all else he needed land. As he marched his men up into Thrace, he came by chance on an army of some 16,000 Galatians, heading for the same goal. Gonatus managed to surround and entrap and then massacre the invaders to a man. Pan was said to have appeared on the battlefield and driven the Galatians so mad with panic that they dropped their weapons. It was the first significant military victory against the Galatians, and was celebrated with a jubilation not seen in Greece since Marathon. Gonatus somehow found himself a hero. The Macedonians, desperate to have someone fill their throne, summoned Antigonus Gonatus, who was after all the son and grandson of Macedonian rulers, to be their king.

Gonatus’ victory proved decisive not just for his career, but also for Greece. The Galatians had lost their air of invincibility, and the Aetolians soon invented a successful method of fighting them that involved using phalanxes in hit-and-run attacks. Antiochus could not drive the Galatians from Asia Minor, but he managed to restrict them to their own semiautonomous kingdom in the central mountains, from which they still made occasional forays. Gonatus, with Pan, it is said, ever accompanying him, at least on the pipes, then went on to defeat and slay the other claimants for his crown, Arsinoe’s sole surviving son Ptolemy of Telmesson and Antipater the Etesian Wind, named for the Etesian winds that blow forty days then stop, and then reconquered rebellious Thessaly and overthrew Apollodorus’ tyranny of Cassandreia. He invited poets and philosophers, including his mentor Zeno, who declined, to live in court, and he finally put Cassander’s forbidden tomes to good use. He called kingship “noble servitude,” and bore it stoically.

Arsinoe, her hopes for Ptolemy of Telmesson dashed, turned her sights elsewhere. She returned to Alexandria, where her brother Ptolemy II Philadelphos was reigning, married to another Arsinoe, Lysimachus’ daughter. Our Arsinoe soon poisoned her brother against his current wife, convincing him that she had plotted his death, whereupon he sent her into exile and, although they were full-blood siblings, married our Arsinoe, hereafter Arsinoe II; it was thus that both acquired their name Philadelphos. Now, it has long been the way of the pharaohs to marry their siblings, but to the Greeks this was anathema, and many have said that the Ptolemies, who lived in a Greek city and spoke only Greek, could not have gone native in one generation, and proposed an alternative explanation. They claim that soon after the elderly Ptolemy disinherited the Thunderbolt, surely in retrospect a wise decision, Ptolemy Philadelphos died, leaving Ptolemy the Savior with no proper heir. But he reached an agreement with the sons of Proteus, and one secretly took the form and place of Ptolemy Philadelphos. His marriage to Arsinoe Philadelphos was therefore not incestuous, but part of Ptolemy I’s plan to ensure that the Ptolemaic line would include his blood, albeit through his daughter. If this had been his plan, it did not succeed, for Arsinoe had no more children, remarking, cynically, that children, inevitably, only grew up to murder their parents.

Harpalus had faked his death in Crete some time before, but only later met his fate, when Ikulu slew Antanolia by wearing Cassander’s black cloak that Cleitus had won from Spithridates at Granicus. She then went north.

The division of the empire now looked stable, with Asia, Egypt, and Macedon in hegemony over Greece comprising its three sections; Asia was the largest portion, Egypt the richest, but Macedon the homeland, which gave it pride of place. The eastern satrapies were slowly, one by one, drifting out of Seleucid control, but that hardly affected the rest of the empire. Yet there was still one wild card in Pyrrhus, who coveted the throne in Pella, and perhaps beyond. Before he could act on his ambition, however, he received, from Taras, now Tarentum, a Greek city in Italy, a plea to come serve as their general and save them from the conquest of the upstart Romans. They had earlier summoned to their aid Pyrrhus’ countryman, King Alexander, who had once been the ally of, and married Cleopatra, the sister of, Alexander the Great; but Alexander of Epirus had immediately set himself up as warlord, and the Tarentines were so mortified by his imperial designs that they scarcely grieved when the Romans slew him in battle by the river Acheron. Foolishly hoping that a second Epirot would prove more tractable, the Tarentines, after fifty years, turned to Epirus again. Without his help the Greeks might fail.

Pyrrhus wavered in indecision; the other Diadochi, eager to ditch this loose cannon, encouraged him to go west, offering him men and equipment and, in Antiochus’ case, nineteen elephants; the Delphic oracle prophesied that Pyrrhus would vanquish in the west and be vanquished in the east; but even without this pressure he probably would have gone west. For it was a defect of Pyrrhus’ character that though he could never turn down a call for help from a Greek, he never saw anything through and was therefore, in the end, never much help at all.

When Pyrrhus arrived in Italy, the Tarentines were understandably wary, for they had only sought a general, not a conqueror with his own army, and the memory of the excesses of Alexander still smarted. Pyrrhus fought the Romans, at first successfully, getting to within two miles of Rome, but his enemies refused his offer to partition Italy between him and them, and then he got another call for help, from the Greeks of Sicily, who were fighting the Carthaginians. He immediately left Italy with his lieutenant Hieron, waged a brilliant campaign in Sicily, refused the Carthaginians’ offers of a settlement, and then, when Sicily was almost his, abruptly returned to Tarentum, where he fought the Romans again until he defeated them at Maleventum at such heavy loss to his own forces, for the Roman general M. Curius Dentatus had studied Ptolemy’s history of Alexander to learn how to fight elephants, that Pyrrhus exclaimed, “One more victory like that and I am finished!” The Romans changed the name of the town to Beneventum in celebration; and similarly the term “Cadmean victory” changed to “Pyrrhic victory” on the lips of all men. When Antigonus Gonatus refused his appeal for more funds, Pyrrhus left the job half finished and returned to Epirus, from which he launched an attack on Macedon. After a heroic rear-guard action failed, Gonatus fled, and Pyrrhus had the Macedonian throne again at last. But Gonatus, unlike Pyrrhus, had learned the value of tenacity from Demetrius, and fled to Thessalonica, still claiming the mantle of king. Pyrrhus soon marched south, leaving Macedon in the hands of another son, under whose watch a new wave of Galatians plundered Aegae, a public relations catastrophe but hardly the tragedy it was made out to be, for Antigonus Gonatus, fearing such a contingency might reoccur, had earlier consolidated most of the remaining tombs’ contents into the impenetrable Great Tumulus, which he disguised as the natural hill Heroön; but the Galatians never plundered the Macedonian archives at Larissa, which remained untouched until Philip V burned them, after Cynoscephalae, to keep them from the Romans. While Pyrrhus campaigned in Greece, by and large successfully but fruitlessly, Gonatus reconquered Athens from his base in Piraeus, and moved to Argos. Heeding yet another plea for help, Pyrrhus also raced to Argos, where, his force and Gonatus’ having been let into the city by opposing partisan factions, the battle degenerated into street fighting, in the course of which Pyrrhus was struck in the head by a shingle a woman threw from an upper window. One of Gonatus’ men found him lying in the gutter unconscious and dispatched him. He had indeed been vanquished east of Delphi. Antigonus Gonatus returned to Pella as lord of Greece, and never left. Although Antigonus Monophthalmos’ dream of an earth united had failed, his descendants remained on the throne of Alexander and Philip, amassing glory—such that Demetrius’ grandson Antigonus Doson became the first man ever to conquer Sparta—until the Romans, Trojans through Aeneas, who had indeed turned Pyrrhus back, conquered and eliminated Macedon.

Magna Graecia, the Greek colonies of the west, never a part of Alexander’s empire, was lost altogether to the Greeks when Pyrrhus abandoned them, and, although Pyrrhus’ lieutenant Hieron conquered Sicily from his base in Syracuse and reigned there fifty years, his son Hieronymus, born when Hieron was over 75 years old, perhaps closer to 80, was quickly assassinated during the second Punic War, and, despite the war machines and mechanical suits built by Archimedes, the future of these lands belonged to Carthage and Rome, and then just Rome.

The remaining Diadochi and their dynasties increasingly turned their hands not merely to war, but to patronage of philosophy and art, and brought the light of culture to the barbarian world. Seleucus Nicator had had the fire priest Berossos write in Greek a complete Persian history and sent the great Megasthenes to Sandrokoptos the Peacock Tamer to record the customs of India, while Ptolemy the Savior encouraged the Egyptian Manetho, a priest of Serapis, to compose a history of his country in Greek, projects the conquered peoples had never thought to undertake on their own. They turned their thoughts away from conquest; with the death of Pyrrhus

Alexander’s funeral games ended. Although there would be the usual disputes over borders and successions, and Antiochus is already executing his first-born for treason, and the Ptolemies are already marching for Syria again, and the Athenians are already trying to oust their Macedonian garrison, the Diodachi’s tripartite division of the Greek world would last until the world became Roman.