was Antigonus king? The later career of Demetrius, who was for several years a king without a kingdom, is some indication that these monarchies were felt to be personal, and not closely linked with the lands where the king ruled. They constituted recognition of a claim based on high military achievement by men who through their efforts controlled ‘peoples or cities’. The exception was Macedonia and in the inscription quoted above in which Cassander calls himself ‘king of the Macedonians’, his purpose in doing so is perhaps to assert a unique position not open to any of his rivals (rather than simply to affirm his authority to validate a land-grant within the kingdom of Macedonia, as has been suggested).
Demetrius followed up his victory in Cyprus with the famous attack on Rhodes which brought him his title of Poliorcetes, the Besieger (305). This attack was a further provocation to Ptolemy, the close friend of Rhodes. The siege lasted a year and was celebrated for the siege-engines which Demetrius deployed, though unsuccessfully, in order to reduce the city. It ended in a compromise peace (304), in which the Rhodians gave 100 hostages and agreed to be ‘allies of Antigonus and Demetrius, except in a war against Ptolemy’ (Plutarch, Demetrius, 22, 4). In 304/3 Demetrius seized the Isthmus of Corinth and in 302, in preparation for war on Cassander, he resurrected the Hellenic League of Philip and Alexander ‘thinking that autonomy for the Greeks would bring him great renown’ (Diodorus, xx, 102, 1). An inscription found at Epidaurus (SVA, 446) contains the constitutive act setting up the League. In it provision was made for regular meetings of the Council and for Antigonus and Demetrius as leaders to exercise an even closer control than Philip and Alexander had done over their League of Corinth. The Epidaurus inscription is extremely fragmentary, but the information it contains can be supplemented from a Delphic inscription containing a letter written by Adeimantus of Lampsacus to Demetrius and an Athenian decree honouring Adeimantus (Moretti, i, 9; ii, 72). These inscriptions show that so long as the war with Cassander lasted, Demetrius appointed the presidium of the League personally and also that Adeimantus, known hitherto mainly as a flatterer of the king and friend of philosophers, played an important role as Demetrius’ representative at the council of the League and perhaps in proposing the institution of a festival in honour of the two kings.
The League however was not destined to last long, for in 301 a coalition consisting of Cassander, Lysimachus and Seleucus (who brought with him his 500 elephants) forced the combined armies of Antigonus and Demetrius (whom his father had summoned from Europe) to battle at Ipsus in Phrygia, and there inflicted a decisive defeat; Antigonus perished and Demetrius fled. In the sharing of spoils Lysimachus took most of Asia Minor as far as Taurus and Ptolemy, who had been campaigning separately in Palestine, took all the area as far north as the river Eleutherus (Nahr al-Kabir) as well as parts of Lycia and Pisidia. Ipsus marked the end of any pretence that there was still a single empire and despite the fact that Lysimachus’ kingdom straddled the straits, Asia and Europe now went different ways.
III
Between 301 and 286 Demetrius tried to restore his fortunes in Greece and for a time held Macedonia (after Cassander’s death) in spite of pressure from Pyrrhus. But from 289 onwards his position deteriorated. He lost his Aegean possessions and Athens to Ptolemy and was expelled from Macedonia by the combined forces of Lysimachus and Pyrrhus. In 285 Seleucus took him prisoner and he died of drink two years later. This episode left the possession of Macedonia still undecided. After the expulsion of Demetrius Lysimachus had first divided it with Pyrrhus and then, in 285, had contrived to annex the whole. But nemesis now overtook him. He was persuaded by his third wife, Arsinoe, to put his son Agathocles to death (to the advantage of Arsinoe’s children). Agathocles’ window Lysandra and her brother Ptolemy Ceraunus – they were half-brother and half-sister to Arsinoe, all three being children of Ptolemy – therefore incited Seleucus to challenge Lysimachus. In 282 Seleucus invaded Asia Minor and early in 281 at Corupedium Lysimachus was defeated and killed. But on crossing into Europe Seleucus, now redundant, was assassinated by his ally Ceraunus, who seized the throne of Macedonia.
Two years later (279), weakened by Lysimachus’ defeat, the country was overrun by an army of Gaulish marauders, part of a large-scale migration. Another group established a kingdom in Thrace, others reached Delphi but were destroyed by the Aetolians, and yet further bands crossed over into Asia Minor and settled in what was henceforth to be known as Galatia. What happened subsequently in Macedonia is obscure. A series of weak reigns with anarchic conditions gave Antigonus Gonatas, Demetrius’ son, who had managed to hold on to the strong-points at Corinth, Chalcis and Demetrias (his father’s foundation in the Pagasean Gulf), the opportunity for which he was looking. In 276, after winning a much publicized victory over the Gauls at Lysimacheia in 277, he established himself as king in Macedonia and Thessaly. Thus the dynasty founded by Antigonus the One-eyed gained possession of the last unpre-empted territory, the homeland of Macedonia.
Lysimacheia confirmed the result of Ipsus. The hellenistic world of territorial states was now in being, with the Antigonids in Macedonia, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in the area covered by Syria, Mesopotamia and Iran. In each monarchy the sons or (in the case of Macedonia) the grandson of Alexander’s successors were on the throne – Antiochus I, Ptolemy II and Antigonus II – and the dynastic principle was firmly established. Politically Alexander’s empire had fragmented but in many ways the new kingdoms had much in common. Before looking at the separate kingdoms, therefore, we shall in the next chapter consider to what extent the hellenistic world constituted a homogeneous whole, and how far the coexistence of Greeks and Macedonians alongside the indigenous populations created problems for both peoples.
4. The Hellenistic World:A Homogeneous Culture?
I
Towards the middle of the third century the inhabitants of a Greek city lying at the site of Ai Khanum beside the river Oxus (mod. Amu Darya) on the northern frontier of Afghanistan (its name is unknown) erected in a shrine in the middle of the city a pillar inscribed with a list of some 140 moral maxims copied from a similar pillar which stood near the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, over 3000 miles away. An adjoining verse inscription reads:
These wise words of famous men of old are consecrated in holy Pytho. Thence Clearchus took them, copying them with care, to set them shining from afar in the sacred enclosure of Cineas (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422 = Austin, 192).
Cineas – his name suggests that he was probably a Thessalian – will have been the city’s founder to whom the shrine was dedicated, and Clearchus has been identified by Robert as the Aristotelian philosopher, Clearchus of Soli, a man with an interest both in Delphi and in the religion and philosophy of the Indian gymnosophists, the Persian magi and the Jewish priests. If this Clearchus was indeeed he, we have here our first indication that he made a journey to the far east and there found distant Greek communities ready to hear him lecture and, at his prompting, to inscribe an authenticated copy of Delphic wisdom in the shrine of the city’s founder. To set up Delphic maxims, often in a gymnasium, was a common practice. Examples are known from Thera (IG, xii 3, 1020) and Miletopolis in Mysia (Syll., 1268). The list at Ai Khanum is fragmentary and in fact only five maxims now survive, but comparable lists elsewhere enabled the French epigraphist, Louis Robert, to reconstitute the whole collection – a striking illustration of how an inscription, of which the greater part is lost, can occasionally be restored with virtual certainty. An interesting feature of the Ai Khanum inscription is that despite the remoteness of this city the lettering is not at all crude or provincial. It is of the highest quality and in the best tradition of the Greek lapicide’s craft, worthy of the kingdom of Bactria, which also produced some of the finest Greek coins of the hellenistic period.
This inscription was discovered in 1966, and nearby, in the gymnasium of Ai Khanum, was another, containing a dedication by two brothers, ‘Triballus and Strato, sons of Strato, to Hermes and Heracles’ (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422), who were the patron gods of the gymnasium. Subsequent excavation has revealed the full plan of the gymnasium itself, which incidentally contained a sundial of a type known, but not hitherto found. There was also a theatre holding 5000 spectators and, dating from about 150, a large administrative centre