Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (35 page)

From Cassandreia, Demetrius joined Gonatas in southern Greece. He was reduced once again to his fleet, his Companion Cavalry, and however many mercenaries he could afford to keep. Astonishingly, and
with the help of his capacious treasury, he was able to keep himself relatively secure in Corinth, and over the next two years even built up his land army again. Athens seized the moment, however, and rose up against him in the spring of 286. Those of the Antigonid garrison who refused inducements to defect were defeated in battle. Ptolemy allowed Callias of Sphettus, an Athenian in his service, to detach a thousand elite troops from the Cyclades to protect the harvest against attacks by troops from Demetrius’s other garrisons.

Demetrius arrived, with a larger army than expected, and the besieged Athenians sent for help from Pyrrhus. But then a Ptolemaic fleet appeared off Piraeus, so that Demetrius, who was in any case still insanely anxious to take the war to Asia, could see that he would be tied up in Athens for ages. He came to terms with Ptolemy and Pyrrhus, who appear to have been just as anxious not to fight. Athens would remain ungarrisoned, but Demetrius was allowed to keep his other garrisons in Piraeus and in fortresses nearby. As far as Athens was concerned, this made it a truce, not a treaty. When Pyrrhus arrived, he is said to have recommended that the Athenians never admit a king within their walls again.
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Perhaps it was a warning against his own ambitions. Demetrius left his remaining European possessions in the hands of Gonatas and set out immediately for Asia Minor. Disturbingly for Lysimachus, Ptolemy’s Aegean fleet made no attempt to impede the invasion. Miletus defected to Demetrius, presumably by prearrangement, and gave him a first base. At Miletus, he was met by Eurydice, Ptolemy’s ex-wife, and sister of Phila. She brought her daughter Ptolemais, to whom Demetrius had been betrothed in 298, and they now married. But the marriage was no kind of rapprochement with Ptolemy; things had changed in the twelve years since the couple were first betrothed. Eurydice was in exile, estranged from Ptolemy, and she had other designs. She saw alliance with Demetrius as a way to give her son a chance at power, since his prospects in Egypt were not good: Ptolemy had long favored his other wife Berenice and her offspring. The very next year, in fact, Ptolemy abdicated in favor of his son by Berenice, who became Ptolemy II. Eurydice’s son was called Ptolemy Ceraunus, the Thunderbolt—named not “for his unpredictable and sinister character,” as hostile propaganda claimed,
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but for the power he wielded.

The campaigning season of 285 started well for Demetrius. He regained a few coastal towns, including Ephesus (presumably by treachery, if the Lysimachan fortifications briefly described earlier were already in place), and subsequently Lysimachus’s governors in
Lydia and Caria surrendered their territories wholesale. There is no way to explain these rapid successes except by assuming that he was welcomed. Before Ipsus, Asia Minor had been under Antigonid rule for a long time, and had prospered; it seems that enough of the inhabitants wanted to turn back the clock.

Meanwhile, Pyrrhus invaded Thessaly, which drew Gonatas’s attention northward, and Athens made an attempt to dislodge the Antigonid garrison in the Piraeus. The year before, they had persuaded one of the garrison commanders in Athens to defect with some of his men. They tried the same tactic again in Piraeus, but this time it ended in disaster. The man only pretended to go along with their plan. He opened the fortress gates to the approaching Athenian soldiers by night—but only to trap them inside and cut them down.

In Asia Minor, despite his first successes, Demetrius was losing the initiative. Lysimachus’s son Agathocles was demonstrating that he had inherited his father’s skills as a general. He drew Demetrius ever farther inland—the same strategy the Turks used in 1920–21 against the Greek invasion—while cutting him off from the coast by retaking the territories now in his rear that he had just taken himself, including Sardis and Miletus. Demetrius’s fleet at Miletus either fled to safe refuges farther down the coast or surrendered. With their supply lines cut and their hopes rapidly fading, Demetrius’s mercenaries began to desert him. Their commander claimed to be unconcerned, on the grounds that he could always find more men to recruit in Media, which he planned to reach via Armenia. By now he seems decidedly unbalanced; not content with being defeated by Agathocles, he was threatening Seleucus too, but with diminishing forces.

Demetrius was perhaps intending to encourage the often restless eastern satrapies to rise up and, with his help, overthrow Seleucus. But this was an unlikely scenario, not least because Seleucus had elevated his son Antiochus—”the only anchor for our storm-tossed house”
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—to joint kingship in 294 or 293 and sent him east to quell any storm. In the longer term, it made sense to have a coruler for such a vast kingdom, and for the east, one who was half-Iranian and had been brought up in Babylon. At the same time, Seleucus gave Antiochus his wife Stratonice. Despite fanciful stories of illicit passion,
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what was uppermost in his mind was probably to try to ensure stability within his household, since otherwise any son Stratonice might have borne him would have been a rival to Antiochus. It was also a way of keeping Demetrius within the family, so to speak, while simultaneously announcing a certain cooling of their relationship.

So no uprising took place in the eastern satrapies to aid Demetrius’s plans. Instead of heading for Armenia, he turned south, with disease and desertion decimating his numbers. Agathocles let him cross the Taurus Mountains into Cilicia, and strengthened the fortresses on the passes against his return. He was Seleucus’s problem now. Seleucus tolerated Demetrius’s presence for a while, but had to take steps in the spring of 284 to contain him in the mountains. Demetrius reacted with some vigorous guerrilla warfare, and even threatened to enter Syria until he was laid low once again by illness.

While Demetrius lay sick, more and more of his men deserted. Even so, after he recovered, he kept pushing for a decisive battle. It was insanity; he had too few men. Seleucus refused to meet Demetrius in battle, preferring to wait for the low morale in the enemy camp to take its toll. The end, then, came with a whimper, not a bang. The two armies were close by, and Seleucus is said to have walked bareheaded himself up to Demetrius’s lines to appeal to his men to lay down their arms. Recognizing that Seleucus was doing his best to spare their lives, they finally abandoned Demetrius.
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Seleucus put his former father-in-law under comfortable but closely guarded arrest in Apamea on the banks of the Orontes. While Gonatas petitioned Seleucus for his father’s return, Lysimachus begged him to have the man put to death. Seleucus refused both requests, and accused Lysimachus of behaving like a barbarian.
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In reality, however, he wanted Demetrius alive and in his keeping, in case he could use him in some way against his remaining adversaries. Humiliated by becoming no more than a pawn in others’ games, Demetrius wrote to Greece, abdicating his kingship, such as it was, in favor of his son. By March 282 drink, and perhaps the illness that had been plaguing him for some years, took him to his grave. He was not much over fifty years of age. His ashes were released, and in due course of time Gonatas affirmed his kingship by the rite of burying the previous king.

Restless greed for imperial power had been Demetrius’s undoing: he should have consolidated in Macedon and Greece rather than entertaining more grandiose dreams. He never truly had an opportunity for world conquest, the kind of gift of Fortune that came the way of Alexander, Antigonus, and, as we shall shortly see, Seleucus. Demetrius’s reign had lasted only six years, but his pride would have been assuaged had he known that it would help his son Antigonus Gonatas later to legitimate his claim to the Macedonian throne. And then his descendants ruled the homeland until the dynasty’s final overthrow by the Romans in 168
BCE
.

T
HE THRACE THAT
Lysimachus took over in 323 resembled Thessaly, the most backward of the Greek districts, about a hundred years earlier: it was split up by its terrain and history into separate cantons, each ruled by its own dynasty of chieftains, but tended toward some kind of unification whenever one chieftain got the better of his neighbors. Lysimachus’s governorship happened to coincide with the peak of power of one such chieftain, Seuthes III, the Odrysian leader, who ruled from a richly endowed citadel at Seuthopolis.
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Seuthes held most of the immediate inland, reducing Lysimachus, on his arrival, to the coastline, where the Greek settlements were, and to fortresses on riverbanks as far upstream as possible. In theory, there was a nonaggression pact in place, but the news of Alexander the Great’s death prompted Seuthes to full-scale rebellion. This was the first thing Lysimachus had to deal with when he took up his appointment. It was a serious conflict—serious enough to make it impossible for Lysimachus to help Antipater in the Lamian War. Lysimachus won, and forced Seuthes once again to recognize Macedonian suzerainty in Thrace, but it was not a decisive victory, and Seuthes retained much of the Thracian hinterland. Ten years later, encouraged by Antigonus the One-Eyed, he rose up again, only to be defeated once more by Lysimachus.

But Seuthes was only one of Lysimachus’s recurrent problems. Beyond the Odrysians and the Haemus mountains, farther north around the Danube, were the Getae, a warlike tribe who made frequent incursions into Lysimachus’s territory, with or without Seuthes’ connivance and the help of other tribes. When Philip II had annexed
Thrace around 340, he had left the Getae unconquered and had simply come to some accommodation with them. For Lysimachus too, negotiation proved to be more effective than warfare.

Even the local Greeks were unfriendly. They inhabited outposts of the Greek world, and had long been accustomed to making their own way in a hostile environment; few felt the need to pay for protection, and anti-Macedonian politicians found a receptive audience. But taxing their wealth—earned chiefly from the trade in slaves and grain—was his only reliable source of revenue. Lysimachus had no choice but to use force to establish control, and to maintain it with garrisons. It was not a popular strategy.

The old picture, willfully perpetuated by the Greeks themselves, of the Thracians as primitive tribes ruled by warrior chieftains is a huge simplification. They certainly had a martial culture, but then so did the Macedonians—who also, like the Thracians, used Greek as their administrative language, employed Greek craftsmen and artisans, and were extremely wealthy in natural resources. If Seuthes had not been curbed by Lysimachus, he might have done for Thrace what Philip II did for Macedon. It is an index of Thracian martial prowess and resourcefulness that, although sandwiched between the Persian empire to the east, the equally expansionist Greek cities to the south, and the warlike Scythians to the north, they carved out and maintained their own culture and territory.

The constant warfare and his inability to dominate the inland tribes left Lysimachus perennially short of resources. He never fully controlled the interior, and essentially his province consisted of the Chersonese and the coastlines. But archaeology, so often our only resource for areas Greek writers were less interested in (as with Ai Khanum, we would not otherwise even know of the existence of Seuthopolis), has shown that, despite Lysimachus’s failure to conquer the Thracian tribes, there was considerable cultural influence. The Macedonian presence nurtured rapid change, in terms of urbanization, monetization, and the exploitation of natural resources. Ironically, all these developments helped Seuthes defend his land against the very intruders who had brought them about.

By around 310, however, Lysimachus had won sufficient security for him to focus on consolidation, as represented by his building his new capital, Lysimacheia; within a few years he was styling himself king,
which also suggests that he felt he had subdued his core territory. By 302, he was free enough to devote time and energy to wider concerns than just Thrace. The rewards were immediate and impressive. He led the coalition forces to victory against the Antigonids at Ipsus, and added Asia Minor to his realm.

Since then, he had managed to secure his new territory (not least by a vigorous program of city foundation or refoundation and military colonization) and had grouped the Asiatic Greek cities into leagues, under governors of his choosing, to simplify administration.
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In 284 he gained Paphlagonia and regained the independent city of Heraclea Pontica, where the ruler, his wife Amastris, had died under suspicious circumstances. In retaliation, Lysimachus killed his two stepsons as the alleged murderers, and reannexed the wealthy city. Most importantly, however, in 288 he added the eastern half of Macedon. He had a fabulous kingdom now, and it should have been enough, but for too long he had been kept busy in his miserable satrapy, fighting and negotiating with barbarians. For too long also, he had been no match for the other Successors in terms of wealth and ability to hire mercenaries, but he gained a fortune from the treasuries of Asia Minor, and was able to tap its resources for a generous annual income.

His rule was little harsher than that of his predecessors, but he maintained a firm control over the Greek cities within his domain. He did not want any trouble; he needed security. For by the middle of the 280s, Lysimachus, aged about seventy, was in a hurry. His building program included at least one Alexandria, and his coinage portrayed him as Alexander’s heir, hinting at a hunger for further conquest. Ptolemy II was secure in Greater Egypt; Seleucus was a neighbor, but not one it would have been sensible to attack in the first instance. Antigonus Gonatas, however, held little more than a fleet and the Fetters of Greece—like his father after Ipsus, he was down but not quite out, clinging on to his few possessions with the help of his mercenaries—and Pyrrhus’s possession of half of Macedon was an anomaly. Lysimachus’s attention was inevitably drawn west.