Unity and Disunity | The Diadochi
The boys entered a large paved arena with stone benches arrayed in a circle. They were sweating from the morning’s exercise and chatting excitedly about who had won the most recent wrestling match. Their teacher, an elderly man with a stern face but kind eyes, rapped his walking stick on the stone for silence. The boys quieted down, and the lesson began. History, the teacher said, was written by the victors, men whose deeds echoed across time and shaped the destinies of all. And these boys would one day do just that.
The battlefield stank of death, and the cries of the wounded filled the hot, dusty air. It was far more gruesome than the old arena in which the men had wrestled each other as children. Some of their number were among the fallen, but in the hour of victory each looked to their leader. His blond hair was matted with sweat and colored red with the enemy’s blood, but his fierce eyes seemed to shine out through his helmet as he looked upon his companions. History, they knew, was being made by the sinews of their arms and the swords each of them carried.
What was once a vast meeting hall had become a place of grief. A bed placed near the wall beneath a window held the frail body of the man whom history had blessed. Now he lay still, dying of an illness no doctor could cure. The king, a man whose armies had crossed the world and triumphed over every enemy, was now passing into the next world. His companions, their faces downcast in sadness—real or feigned—eyed each other as they stood around their master. Who among them, they wondered, would take up the mantle of history and preserve the conquests they had won?
Alexander of Macedon stands among history’s greatest conquerors. But his legacy was marred almost as he drew his last breath in Babylon in 323 BC by the events that shattered his empire over the next quarter-century. His generals, known to history as the “Diadochi” or “successors,” could not preserve his dream of a unified Greek-speaking empire that spanned the known world. Their greed and hubris meant that the world Alexander had built would not long survive him.
Among the Diadochi were five men whose actions shaped the future course of the Greek world. Antigonus Monophthalmus, the “one-eyed,” had commanded many Greek infantrymen in the campaigns to the end of the world and won the respect of his chief in battle. Cassander was a latecomer to Alexander’s court, arriving in Babylon after his father, Antipater, had sent him to protect the family’s interests in the newly-won empire. Lysimachus had spent his youth with Alexander and, despite a turbulent relationship, grew to become one of the king’s favorites. Ptolemy was one of Alexander’s original seven bodyguards and among his closest friends. There were even rumors that he was a bastard son of Philip II, the great king’s father. He had served capably on the battlefield and been entrusted with several independent commands, including the one that had secured Alexander’s kingship over Persia. Seleucus, like Cassander a latecomer to the Macedonian court, had caught Alexander’s eye for his bravery in battle, fierce demeanor, and large physical presence.
The Succession Crisis
Alexander’s untimely death left a power vacuum in the court at Babylon. There were two claimants to the throne: the king’s mentally-challenged half-brother, Philip Arrhidaeus, and his yet-unborn child with the Persian princess Roxana of Bactria. In his final hours, Alexander had entrusted the kingdom to Perdiccas, like Ptolemy one of his early bodyguards and probably the most capable potential successor in the court. The initial agreement among the generals was that Phillip Arrhidaeus would be crowned king, though Perdiccas would rule as regent since the new sovereign was not able to rule in his own right. If Queen Roxana gave birth to a son, Arrhidaeus would rule alongside the new prince until he came of age. Each of Alexander’s generals would receive a “satrap,” a province in the now-destroyed Persian Empire, or province in Greece or Macedon to rule.
This arrangement, known as the “Partition of Babylon,” lasted less than a year. In 322 BC, the Greek city-states rebelled against Antipater, Cassander’s father who sat the Macedonian throne in Alexander’s home of Pella. Antipater crushed this revolt quickly, but Perdiccas saw an opportunity to elevate himself above the other Diadochi. He proposed a marriage to Cleopatra of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s older sister. This would have given him the right to rule the empire, but the other generals recoiled at this prospect. Ptolemy, now governor of Egypt, stole the king’s body and moved it to his capital at Alexandria, and this effort to protect the empire from Perdiccas sparked a general uprising. Cassander, Antigonus, and Ptolemy opposed the regent publicly, while Seleucus supported him and Lysimachus remained neutral. But Seleucus was only feigning loyalty—two years into the revolt, he and other senior officers murdered Perdiccas to protect the empire from his grasping hands. (In all of this upheaval, King Philip Arrhidaeus remained quiet, likely not understanding the events that were swirling around him.)
The Diadochi now looked to Cassander’s father, Antipater, for guidance. His status as an elder-statesman who had advised both Alexander and his father Philip II meant he was the only man in the empire who could have held it together. Unfortunately, Antipater died a year later, and his grasping son Cassander—whom many of the Diadochi believed had poisoned Alexander the Great—saw his chance. On his deathbed, Antipater had passed over Cassander and elevated one of his army officers, Polyperchon, to be the new governor of Macedon. Cassander raised an army and attacked Polyperchon, who fled south to the Kingdom of Epirus on the west coast of Greece. There dwelt the dowager Queen Olympias, widow of Philip II and mother of Alexander the Great. Her forces rose to protect Macedon from Cassander and marched toward the capital, Pella. Along the way, King Philip Arrhidaeus met Olympias and Polyperchon with his royal army. He intended to assert his right to rule the vast empire and confront his stepmother and her minion, but his soldiers switched sides and betrayed their king. Olympias imprisoned Arrhidaeus and his wife in Epirus for a year before ordering their deaths in 317 BC. Ultimately, Cassander’s lust for power drove him to victory in Macedon and Greece. He defeated Polyperchon, who went into exile, and ordered Olympias to be executed in 316 BC. Not satisfied with the death of Alexander’s mother, he then extinguished the direct line of Macedonian successors six years later with the murder of the ten-year-old Alexander IV and his mother, Queen Roxana of Bactria.
The Wars of the Diadochi
Cassander’s brutal victory drew the attention of rival generals. He had allied with Antigonus Monophthalmus to win control of the empire’s European territories. Antigonus was to be “king of Asia” under the Partition of Babylon, and Cassander hoped to sooth his legendary temper by helping him maintain this position against the other Diadochi. But greed and hubris soon burned within Cassander’s heart, and he betrayed Antigonus and invaded Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). Antigonus, already contesting his southern border with Ptolemy and Seleucus, now faced an enemy in the north. His armies marched back and forth across Asia Minor, winning and losing battles in equal measure, but his strength gradually began to fade. Cassander’s forces soon fell apart and he sued for peace, but Antiochus refused and invaded Greece in 309 BC. Ironically, this attack put Cassander and Ptolemy on the same side, and the Egyptian ruler’s intervention on the island of Rhodes to destroy Antigonus’ navy kept Cassander alive. Lysimachus, who ruled lands north of Macedon in Thrace, then jumped into the conflict against Antigonus, who found himself beset on all sides. Only Seleucus was still neutral in the burning conflict that consumed some of the empire’s best lands; the two generals had fought to a draw over control of northern Babylonia years earlier but had come to an uneasy peace.
That changed in 301 BC, when Seleucus’ armies marched northwest from Babylon into Asia Minor. Antigonus had been on a victorious tear through the coastlands, driving off an attack from Cassander across the Ionian Sea and fending off Ptolemy’s invasion from Syria. He had Lysimachus surrounded at Issus, site of one of Alexander the Great’s earliest victories over Persia, and seemed to be on the verge of victory. At a decisive moment, while Antigonus and Lysimachus were locked in combat, Seleucus and his soldiers arrived on the battlefield and smashed into the one-eyed general’s flank. His soldiers ran for their lives, and Antigonus Monophthalmus fell. Only four of the great Diadochi remained.
Seleucus and Ptolemy held supreme mastery in the east and Egypt, respectively, and declared themselves kings in their lands. Events built toward a new conflict over the empire’s European lands (Greece, Macedon, and Thrace) in the next decade. Cassander died of “dropsy,” swelling under the skin that today is known as “edema,” in 298 BC. His two sons were ineffective rulers and fought each other in brief conflicts for control of Macedonian Europe. Seeing an opportunity to reassert his family’s power, Antigonus’ son Demetrius raised an army and invaded Greece alongside Pyrrhus, King of Epirus. The two allies marched northward and rooted out Cassander’s sons from their strongholds in Macedon. Sensing new opportunities, the other three Diadochi—Lysimachus, Ptolemy, and Seleucus—all pounced on their rivals and seized control of Antigonid lands in Asia Minor. The war lasted for twelve long and bloody years, ending when Seleucus captured Demetrius in 286. The three victors then left Greece and Macedonia in the hands of Antigonus Gonatas, son of Demetrius and grandson of Antigonus Monophtalmus.
With two of the original five Diadochi dead, the three remaining entered a period of restless peace. Minor border disputes in Syria and Asia Minor continued, and Lysimachus and Seleucus both plotted to seize each other’s territories in Turkey. Lysimachus also dealt with his own succession crisis by murdering his eldest son, believing his younger brother to be a better ruler. The Thracian people were horrified at their ruler’s act of filicide, as was Seleucus, and he marched for Thrace in 282. A year later, as his armies crossed the Hellespont, Seleucus fell victim to an assassin. Lysimachus then advanced into Asia Minor along the same route but died in the campaign’s first battle. With their deaths, and the peaceful passing of Ptolemy a year earlier, the last of the first-generation Diadochi was gone. Their successors would now write their own histories and try to deal with each other and a rising threat in the west.
Disunity and Destruction
A small city with what the Greeks saw as a quaint but ineffective form of government far from the centers of power in the east grew in might as the successor kingdoms fought each other over Alexander’s empire. That power’s first conflict with the Greek-speaking world came in 280 BC when Pyrrhus of Epirus crossed the Adriatic Sea and landed in southern Italy. The king fought against this foe’s allies and eventually triumphed for a time, but his losses were so great that history records them as a “pyrrhic victory.” In the end, the Epirene attack on the Roman Republic only served to attract the attention of a ravenous wolf.
As the Republic recovered from the horrors brought to its doorstep by Hannibal Barca in the Second Punic War, the Senate learned that the Antigonid dynasty of Macedon had offered the Carthaginian warlord support and money. Roman blood had paid the price for this act, and now the Macedonians would reap the whirlwind. Rome’s eyes turned eastward, and its legions soon marched for the Adriatic ports to cross a narrow sea and deliver justice to its enemies.
The first war between Rome and a Diadochi kingdom ended indecisively in 205 BC. But a generation later, the Republic intervened in a conflict between Ptolemaic Egypt on one side and both Antigonid Macedonia and Seleucid Asia on the other to protect the small, independent Greek kingdoms that littered the Mediterranean coast. When Macedonia refused to bow to a Roman demand that the war with Egypt stop, Rome invaded and defeated Macedon’s armies. On their victory in 198 BC, the Romans forced Macedon to swear neutrality in all further Greek-on-Greek wars.
With Macedon humbled, the Seleucids now rose to challenge the ascendant Romans. Like their brethren to the northwest, they failed, and their conflict allowed the Republic to spread its economic and political influence across the Eastern Mediterranean. Their kingdom soon fell apart due to both internal pressures among squabbling dynasts and outside attacks from the independent Kingdom of Pontus in Asia Minor, the rising Parthian Empire in modern-day Iran, and a revolt in Judea led by the Maccabees. Macedonia then tried to reclaim its independent status among the Mediterranean powers in the mid-second century, only to be utterly crushed in 148 BC and see its lands divided up into Roman provinces.
Only Ptolemaic Egypt, wealthiest of the Diadochi kingdoms because of its immense grain reserves and pan-Mediterranean trade network, remained independent of Roman power. Its kings (sometimes referred to as “pharaohs” by later historians, though this is an anachronistic use of the word) maintained their freedom by paying homage to Rome and selling the Republic grain at discounted prices. But the Romans gradually chipped away at its territory, transferring its lands west of the Nile to the Numidian and Carthaginian provinces and seizing control of Syria and establishing a client-state in Judea under the Hasmoneans and Herodians. When the Roman civil wars began, Egypt was the Republic’s “breadbasket,” and both Gnaeus Pompey Magnus and Gaius Julius Caesar hoped to win the loyalty of the Ptolemies. On Caesar’s death in 44 BC and the rise of his successor, Gaius Octavian, Queen Cleopatra VII threw her support to his rival, Mark Antony. This was the end of the Ptolemies—the Romans annihilated Egypt’s military at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC; Antony and Cleopatra died by their own hands the next year; and Octavian annexed Egypt as his personal property. Because of greed, hubris, and blind disloyalty to one another, the Diadochi successor kingdom of Alexander the Great faded from history.
Good Idea, Bad Idea
Though Roman red soon eclipsed Macedonian purple on the map of the ancient world, the Greeks’ legacy endured. One of Alexander the Great’s most important contributions to history was “Hellenization,” the blending of Greek and Eastern cultures. He encouraged (and sometimes forced) his soldiers to marry non-Greek women and settle in the many cities founded during the Macedonian conquest. The Greek language, known to history as “Koine” to distinguish it from other sub-types, became the lingua franca of the day. Much of the history we know of this long period comes to us from ethnically-Eastern but Greek-speaking historians. As Joe and I discussed last week, the cities and infrastructure left behind by the Greeks allowed the eastern provinces of Rome’s empire to grow immensely wealthy, and the roads built by Alexander’s soldiers and maintained by Caesar’s legions allowed trade and culture to flourish. The earliest missionaries of the Christian faith traveled these routes to spread their “good news,” and the fact that nearly everyone spoke the same language meant that this gospel took root in the hearts of new converts very quickly.
Of course, most good ideas also have bad elements, and cultural blending is no exception. The Macedonian conquest of the East destroyed countless indigenous treasures—artistic, literary, and customary. The loss of life under Alexander, during the Diadochi wars, and as Rome spread its power across the Mediterranean was immense, and these men and women could not enjoy the benefits of Hellenization. New cultural and religious trends also brought fresh conflicts over rival conceptions of god and competing ways of life. Joe and I will have much more to say about all of this in next week’s discussion, and we encourage you to join us in that with questions and comments. Were the Macedonian and Roman conquests and the many Diadochi wars good ideas or bad ideas? As always, we leave that to you.
