Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (24 page)

There was a telling lack of protest or reaction from the others. Surely this, if anything, should have triggered war. From time to time, when it had made practical sense, they had all professed themselves loyal to the Argead line. Where was the Antigonus of 315, who had condemned Cassander for killing Olympias? Had he and the others given Cassander the nod at the 311 conference? Probably nothing needed to be said openly; they would all benefit from the freedom of no longer being constrained by the existence of a royal family to whom they owed nominal allegiance. “Since there was no longer an heir for the empire,” Diodorus observed, “all those who held nations or cities began to hope for royal power, and began to regard their subordinate territories as a spear-won kingdoms.”
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From now on, the Successors made less use of the magic of the Argead name to legitimate their positions; they were in effect kings in their own right, with kingdoms consisting of what they could gain and hold by force of arms. And, before long, they would all begin to style themselves kings.

The precise date of Cassander’s removal of the boy king is uncertain. His basic tactic was obfuscation; he already had him and Rhoxane in seclusion, and the killings were carried out in secret by a trusted agent. He may even have denied that they had died, or spread the rumor that they had escaped, because coins and documents from various parts of the empire still used the name of Alexander IV for a few years yet.
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Even though Cassander had been the one who ordered the murders, the victims were later buried in a suitably royal fashion (in Tomb 3, the “Prince’s Tomb,” at Aegae), and presumably by Cassander himself—a public act designed not just as a display of piety, but also as a brazen way of disassociating himself from their deaths. Moreover, by Macedonian tradition, the burial of a king was undertaken by the next king: Cassander was further staking his claim to Macedon.

The removal of Alexander IV did not quite end Cassander’s problems with the Argead dynasty. Waiting in the wings was Heracles, the bastard son of Alexander whose claim to the throne had been half-heartedly defended by Nearchus at the original Babylon conference. Since then he had been more or less ignored; no one needed a third possible king, and especially one with dubious credentials. But the death of the last legitimate king brought Heracles, who had now almost come of age, out of the shadows. He was resident in Pergamum, and in 309, presumably with Antigonus’s compliance, Polyperchon summoned him to the Peloponnese. It was a good time to play this trump card, since Cassander had just been further weakened by a major invasion by tribes from the northwest.

Seventy-five-year-old Polyperchon revived his dreams of glory, after a miraculous year or two of relative peace on the Greek mainland and a hiatus of four or five years in his own activities, and marched north toward Macedon with an army of twenty thousand to proclaim Heracles king. He had prepared the way over the previous months by soliciting as much support as he could from the Greek states (the most important gain was realliance with the Aetolians) and within Macedon itself. He established himself in the canton of southwest Macedon of which he was the hereditary ruler, and prepared to do battle with Cassander.

Cassander defused the threat. He avoided combat (in case his men were tempted to desertion by the prospect of an Argead king) and used diplomacy instead, offering the old soldier peace, the restoration of his estates in Macedon, and the great gift of several thousand Macedonian troops, if he would consent to be his military governor of the
Peloponnese—the generalship Polyperchon had once held for Antigonus. Polyperchon accepted this grant of semi-independent rulership. The betrayal of Antigonus was easy, because for some years Polyperchon had been pursuing an independent course in the Peloponnese. One hopes that he at least hesitated over the other consequence of his rapport with Cassander, the removal of Heracles. Polyperchon had him and his mother Barsine strangled during a banquet. It was a terrible act, and became a paradigm of the evil consequences of moral weakness.
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It was the end of the Argead line, which over three hundred years of rulership had produced some remarkable Macedonian kings, culminating in Philip and Alexander. Though Argead blood still flowed in the veins of Cleopatra’s children by her Epirote first husband, there were no remaining children of male Argeads. The Successors were now truly free to divide among themselves the spoils of Alexander’s empire.

Cassander’s position in Greece was greatly strengthened by his alliances with Polemaeus and Polyperchon. He had given Polyperchon enough troops to make serious trouble for the Antigonids in the Peloponnese, and he could hope that in central Greece Polemaeus could contain the Aetolians. His road to recovery, however, was fated to be less smooth. Polemaeus, acting with unusual fickleness even in these days of tested loyalties, seems to have become rapidly dissatisfied with his alliance with Cassander. Perhaps the elevation of Polyperchon disturbed him, or perhaps he had come to see Cassander’s cause as hopeless in the long run. At any rate, he made the momentous decision to abandon Cassander when he responded positively to an approach by Ptolemy.

Demetrius’s repulse of Ptolemy’s army from northern Syria in 311 did not dampen the Egyptian ruler’s ambitions. In the years 310 and 309, he continued to attack Antigonus, his only rival at sea. He brutally reestablished his hold over Cyprus, against Antigonus’s intrigues there, and continued to make war on Antigonid territory in Lycia and Caria from his bases on Cyprus and Cos. Demetrius did what he could to defend southwest Asia Minor while his father was tied up in Babylon. He saved Halicarnassus, for instance, when it was being besieged by Ptolemy’s troops in 309. But Ptolemy’s gains were considerable, and, given Rhodian neutrality, he effectively dominated the approaches to the Aegean.

The usual picture of Ptolemy makes him only moderately ambitious, at any rate compared to an Antigonus.
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He was certainly cautious: he refused the regency in 320, and meticulously created buffer zones around his core territory, as if he entertained no ambitions beyond securing Egypt. But, by hijacking Alexander’s corpse, he had declared himself Alexander’s heir—and Alexander’s heir should inherit Alexander’s aggressiveness.

Rather than having moderate aims, it is more reasonable to think that he was just being patient. And there is no way to explain his actions at this time except as indicating a sustained program to gain control of Greece. First, he softened up the Greek cities under Cassander’s and Lysimachus’s control in 310 by asking them not to be tempted by the Antigonid promise of freedom, and to join his alliance instead—a move that was designed to undermine not just his old enemy Antigonus but also his former allies, Cassander and Lysimachus. Then he gained control of the southern approaches to the Aegean, and then he detached Polemaeus from Cassander. Moreover, he even approached Cleopatra, resident in Sardis, to ask for her hand in marriage. She agreed; they saw themselves soon being enthroned as the king and queen of Macedon.

Polemaeus sailed to Cos to discuss the terms of the pact with Ptolemy. The island had entered into an alliance and trading agreement with Ptolemy, and was currently Ptolemy’s advance post in the Aegean. Ptolemy’s son, the future Ptolemy II, was born there in 309, where his mother could get the best medical attention then available. Praxagoras of Cos was still alive, and laying the foundation for the remarkable anatomical work of the next century: the discovery of the nervous system and of the diagnostic value of the pulse, and the differentiation of the functions of the inner organs. While Polemaeus was there, however, Ptolemy forced him to kill himself. The pretext given out to the public was that Polemaeus was intriguing with Ptolemy’s army officers to divert their loyalty from Ptolemy to himself, but it is just as likely that Ptolemy wanted to eliminate a future rival in Greece. Yet another great general was undone by dreams of empire.

Greece was in considerable turmoil, then, when Ptolemy set sail, toward the end of 309, with an invasion-sized force. On the way, he detached the island of Andros from Antigonus’s Cycladic League. Greece was ripe for invasion: Cassander was in recovery, Lysimachus’s focus was still restricted to his own province, Antigonus was battling Seleucus in Babylon, and Demetrius was in Syria. Even Polyperchon was helpless; on his way back from Macedon the previous year, after
the assassination of Heracles, he had been pinned in central Greece by the Boeotians, and he had not yet arrived in the Peloponnese. He may even have returned to his mini-kingdom in Macedon.

Ptolemy landed unopposed at Corinth. Since as a matter of policy Antigonus had not installed garrisons in the Peloponnesian cities under his control, Polyperchon’s absence meant that there was no effective force in the Peloponnese. Cratesipolis was terrified into surrendering Corinth and Sicyon. Making Corinth his base, Ptolemy planned “to free the other Greek cities as well.”
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It is likely that he intended to revive the old Hellenic League, or League of Corinth, that had been founded by Philip II.
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All the Successors competed with one another for Greek manpower; the revival of the league, with Ptolemy at its head, would compel member cities to provide him with troops when he needed them, and deny them to his rivals. Ptolemy would have complete control of the sea.

It was indeed a great opportunity for Ptolemy—an opportunity for grand imperial power—but it came to nothing. The response to Ptolemy’s appeal by the Greek cities was less than tepid. The Peloponnesian cities were already free, and felt no need to exchange one overlord for another; the mainland cities that might have been interested were simply too few to make a difference, and too vulnerable to Cassander, now that Polemaeus was dead, to be able to respond positively. And then new crises loomed for Ptolemy elsewhere. First, Antigonus returned to Syria at the end of his unsuccessful war with Seleucus. Second, Ptolemy’s governor of Cyrenaica launched a bid to take over the whole North African coast from Cyrenaica to Carthage as his own independent empire. As it turned out, the rebellious governor was assassinated by his allies before his plans had come to fruition. But it was clear that the extent of Ptolemy’s commitment in Greece would make him vulnerable elsewhere, and he was concerned about his enemies’ ability to exploit this.

So he came to terms with Cassander and returned to Egypt, leaving garrisons in Sicyon and Corinth. He may even just have rehired the mercenaries Cratesipolis had been using to protect her enclave. Of course, garrisons and his talk of Greek freedom were somewhat incompatible, but with conditions as they were in the Peloponnese, the cities may even have asked for them. Ptolemy had had a fleeting glimpse of supreme power, but in the end he gained little. He even lost Cleopatra. On Antigonus’s orders, she was prevented from leaving Sardis to join her future husband, and was soon killed.

Poor Cleopatra, always on the edge of greatness. Her brother’s death in 323, when she was already a royal widow in her early thirties,
condemned her to become a pawn in the Successors’ bids for legitimation. She was the perfect catch, a queen in her own right and the sister of the Conqueror; she held the key to all the Successors’ ambitions. Leonnatus had accepted her, but died before the marriage; then Perdiccas too had prematurely died. At one time or another other Successors had sounded her out with a view to marriage. Finally, aged about forty-five and past the age for child-bearing, she awarded herself to Ptolemy, only to be thwarted by Antigonus’s determination not to allow such a prize to fall into anyone else’s hands.
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But he tried to disassociate himself from the murder by a show trial of the killers and by awarding Alexander’s sister a noble funeral. He remembered the trouble that the killing of Cynnane had given Perdiccas.

In the west, with Polemaeus out of the way and fresh alliances in place with Ptolemy and Polyperchon, Cassander could look forward to building up his strength again in Greece. However, he was unlikely to receive much help from his allies, who were obliged to help him in emergencies only.
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Besides, for the foreseeable future Lysimachus was engaged as usual with freedom-loving tribes within his province; he was also in the process of building a new capital city, Lysimacheia, on the neck of the Thracian Chersonese. And Seleucus, who had also been a member of the anti-Antigonid coalition in the last phase of the war, was for the present too focused on the east to jump into this affair. He was in the early phases of the protracted campaign to subdue and stabilize the eastern provinces.

Antigonus decided in 307 that the time was right for a preemptive strike against Cassander, with the immediate purpose of reestablishing a solid base in Greece and the longer-term purpose of making Greece his once and for all, now that it had been abandoned by Ptolemy. We could take this as the true start of the Fourth War of the Successors, in the sense that intermittent warfare was replaced by a fight to the finish. At any rate, as if we can isolate affairs in Greece from what was happening elsewhere, it was the start of what is called the Four-Year War on the Greek mainland.

Perhaps the most blatant transgression of the supposed freedom of the Greeks was the presence of Cassander’s tyrant Demetrius of Phalerum in Athens—not because there were not tyrants or oppressive regimes elsewhere, but because Athens was Athens. Continuing to
proclaim the freedom of the Greeks, Antigonus sent his son Demetrius, with a fleet of 250 ships and a purse of 5,000 talents (around three billion dollars), to restore democracy in Athens. It was clear that the Antigonids meant business.

While the main fleet sheltered at Cape Sunium, at the beginning of June 307 Demetrius took twenty ships and sailed north up the Saronic Gulf. Little notice was taken of such an unthreatening flotilla; the ships were assumed to be Ptolemy’s, heading for Corinth. At the last minute, Demetrius turned and sailed straight into Piraeus. Cassander’s garrison commander chose inaction, and within a few days Demetrius of Phalerum’s position in Athens had become untenable. He was granted safe conduct out of the city to Thebes, where he lived for the next ten years. By then it was clear that he was never going to get back to Athens, and he made his way to Alexandria in Egypt. He might have been pleased to know that his grandson would hold a position of authority in Athens in the 260s.
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