Текст книги "Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire"

Автор книги: Robin Waterfield

Соавторы: Robin Waterfield,Robin Waterfield,Robin Waterfield
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The alliance between Ptolemy and Lysimachus left Seleucus isolated, surrounded by potential enemies, and in urgent need of a navy himself. To whom else could he turn except Demetrius, the old enemy? So, a couple of years later, Seleucus approached Demetrius for the hand of Stratonice, a prime dynastic catch—not just Demetrius’s daughter, but also the granddaughter of Antipater and niece of Cassander. This was Seleucus’s first foray, aged about fifty-five, into the Successors’ endogamous marriage circus. No doubt he was as little averse to polygamy as the rest of the Macedonian dynasts, but as it happened, his Iranian wife, Apama, had died a year or two earlier. So, thanks to the antagonism between Seleucus and Ptolemy, Demetrius was back in the fold.

Demetrius understood Seleucus’s need for a navy, and sailed to celebrate the wedding with an impressive fleet. Before picking up Stratonice and Phila from Cyprus, he found time to land a force in Cilicia and remove the last 1,200 talents of his father’s bullion from the Cyinda treasury. Pleistarchus’s protests to Seleucus fell on deaf ears: he needed the alliance of Demetrius more than the friendship of Pleistarchus. So Demetrius landed at Rhosus, where he was greeted as a king and an equal by Seleucus. The wedding celebrations took place on board Demetrius’s enormous flagship, one of the largest vessels ever built up to that time.

By 298, then, two factions had already emerged: Lysimachus and Ptolemy against Seleucus and Demetrius. The new allies’ attention was on Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, which is why Cassander was not involved. He had problems of his own, with a new Boeotian–Aetolian alliance cutting him off from southern Greece. There may have been other reasons; Cassander had been plagued all his life by tuberculosis, and it is likely that by now the disease had a terminal grip on him. Under the circumstances, he preferred to wait and see what might fall his way as a result of these alliances.

As if to underline the aggressive purpose of these alliances, Seleucus and Demetrius wrote around to the Greek cities within Lysimachus’s kingdom with assurances of their goodwill toward them. Before long, Demetrius turned his attention to his and Seleucus’s other opponent, and carried out raids in southern Syria. War looked imminent, but Ptolemy suspected that Seleucus would want peace for a while yet, to finish the consolidation of his kingdom. At Ptolemy’s instigation, Seleucus brokered a pact of friendship between Demetrius and Ptolemy, centered on the betrothal of Demetrius to one of Ptolemy’s daughters, called Ptolemais. War in the Middle East was averted, for the time being.

AN UNEASY PEACE

The peace that ensued, however, was marred by constant infringements. Immediately after the Rhosus wedding in 298, Seleucus took his new bride to the building site that was Antioch, and Demetrius turned once again to warfare. Having already probed Cilicia on his way to Rhosus, he now occupied it with his forces. Pleistarchus fled to his friend Lysimachus’s court. Apart from this passive support, however, no one took up arms. Cassander should have helped his brother, but Demetrius sent Phila to Macedon to appease him. No doubt she pointed out the danger of going against the formidable new coalition of Demetrius and Seleucus, but the deciding factor was undoubtedly that Phila’s advice matched his own policy of waiting on the sidelines. In fact, though, as we have already seen, Seleucus next brokered a marriage alliance between Demetrius and Ptolemy, so that there was actually a breathing space, with no large-scale fighting going on, except that Lysimachus’s gradual takeover of Antigonid cities in Asia Minor continued.

Having eliminated Pleistarchus, Demetrius made Cilicia his headquarters from 298 to 296. These were vital years for him, and he used them well to build up his strength. The cedars of Lebanon were still being cut down for shipbuilding at Tyre and Sidon, and he had recruited a land army too, making use of the bullion he had taken from Cyinda, turned into coin at his new mint in Tyre. All the other Antigonid mints were in territory that was lost after Ipsus. Of course, this resurgence worried everyone else, including his erstwhile ally Seleucus, who now began to regret his part in allowing Demetrius to recover. He tried to bring Demetrius to heel by offering to buy Cilicia from him, and, when Demetrius refused, by demanding the surrender of Tyre and Sidon. Demetrius is said to have responded by saying that he would never pay for the privilege of having Seleucus as his son-in-law. ⁸

By 296, however, his position in Cilicia had become untenable. He saw it only as a place to exploit, and his rule had not proved popular. And Lysimachus had already intervened militarily once, in an attempt to relieve a town that Demetrius had under siege. It is likely, though we have no direct evidence, that Seleucus was ready to abandon his supposed ally, and cooperate with Lysimachus to get rid of Demetrius. At any rate, when Demetrius withdrew from Cilicia and moved to Cyprus instead, Seleucus did nothing to help, and then, by agreement with Lysimachus, took Cilicia for himself. Lysimachus gave Pleistarchus a safer (and much smaller) realm in western Caria. ⁹But Demetrius did not stay long on Cyprus. The situation in Greece was calling out for him.

INSTABILITY IN GREECE AND MACEDON

The Athenians’ bid for neutrality had not gone very well. The problem with neutrality was that they automatically lost the benefactions of a protector king. Before long, several bad harvests stressed their neutrality beyond breaking point. They could hardly turn to Demetrius, so they asked Lysimachus for help. He was able to supply them with grain, but if he hoped for more—perhaps for an alliance—he was foiled. After a period of civic unrest the city fell under the control of the pro-Macedon faction, led by a man called Lachares. By 296, Lachares’ opponents had left Athens and made Piraeus a democratic enclave, so that the city and the port were once again divided. Lachares declared a state of emergency and made himself the effective ruler of Athens. The schism in Athens tempted Demetrius. Perhaps, as in the 300s, he could make the city his headquarters again and recover Greece.

And Macedon too was in turmoil. Cassander died, as expected, of tuberculosis in 297. He had been regent since 315 and king since 305, and had kept Macedon’s borders secure. No battles had been fought on Macedonian soil for twenty years, but his death ushered in two decades of instability and occasional chaos for Macedon. For all its inopportune and brutal start, then, Cassander’s rule had been good for Macedon, and he had proved himself, after all, a worthy successor to his father. In eliminating all rivals to the throne, he was no more ruthless than many a Macedonian predecessor.

His eldest son inherited the throne as Philip IV, but also died of tuberculosis four months later. Philip’s illness must already have been obvious, and before his death Cassander had arranged marriages for his younger sons, even though they were still teenagers, in an attempt to ensure a succession. Antipater took a daughter of Lysimachus, and Alexander a daughter of Ptolemy.

Antipater I and Alexander V reigned jointly, under the regency of their mother Thessalonice, but not amicably. The country fell apart, depending on where the two brothers found the most support: Alexander reigned in western Macedon and Antipater in the east, with the river Axius as the boundary between them. Macedon was divided between two squabbling teenagers, and civil war was imminent.

When Demetrius returned to Greece in 296, he must at least in part have wanted to be in a position to keep a close eye on events in Macedon. For years, he had maneuvered for the chance to make himself king of the homeland—the homeland he scarcely knew, since he had left there as a young child to join his father in Phrygia. But his immediate target was Athens, where he hoped (somewhat in vain, as it turned out) for help from Lachares’ opponents. On the way, however, a storm destroyed many of his ships. On landing in Greece, he sent urgently to Tyre and Sidon for replacements, and occupied his time, while waiting for their arrival, by attacking some of the cities of the Peloponnese, very nearly losing his life in the course of a siege when a catapult bolt pierced his jaw and mouth.

The bulk of the new fleet had not yet arrived when he renewed his assault on Athens in 295. This time he was more successful, and cut off all the supply routes to the city. Before long, Athens was in the grip of a deadly famine. Anecdotes tell of a father fighting his son over the corpse of a mouse, and of the philosopher Epicurus counting out the daily ration of beans for the members of his commune. ¹⁰

ATHENIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Epicurus was not the only philosopher resident in Athens, which as yet had no rivals as the university town of the Greek world. His parents were Athenian settlers on Samos, and Epicurus had originally come to the city as a young man when all the Athenians left Samos in accordance with Alexander the Great’s Exiles Decree. In 306 he returned and bought some property which he turned into a commune for himself and his followers, called “the Garden.” Only a few years later, a young thinker from Citium in Cyprus, called Zeno, founded his own school; many of the school’s lectures and discussions took place in one of the famous stoas of the Athenian agora, and so the school came to be known as the Stoa, or Stoicism. ¹¹Two older schools—the Academy originally founded by Plato, and the Aristotelian Lyceum—were still going strong, and since the city was the acknowledged cultural center of the world, it attracted philosophers and teachers of all other persuasions too. The most popular philosophers were superstars, with their lectures attracting audiences of hundreds or even thousands.

The new philosophies, of which the most successful were Epicureanism and Stoicism, differed from one another and argued, often with considerable rancor. Nevertheless, there was common ground. As we have seen when surveying the Hellenistic aesthetic, artists were increasingly focusing on the expression of individual emotions. A focus on the individual also characterized the philosophical schools. Philosophy climbed down from the abstract realms of Platonic metaphysics or Aristotelian polymathy, and learned also to appeal to a wider audience with promises of self-improvement. This is why we can still apply the names of the new Hellenistic schools to ordinary people; even though the meanings of the words have shifted over the ages, we still say that people are stoical or epicurean (or skeptical, or cynical), but not usually Platonist or Aristotelian. The new emphasis on the common man made provincial Athens a more congenial environment for most philosophers than the courts of kings.

All the schools set out to demonstrate how individual human beings should live and provided methods for achieving this goal. They all saw philosophy as the remedy for human ills, but differed in what they saw as the fundamental problems and in how to go about attaining enlightenment. The three main branches of philosophy in Hellenistic times were logic (understood as the way or ways of discovering the truth of any matter), physics (the nature of the world and the laws that govern it), and ethics (how to achieve happiness). The first two branches were subordinate to the third. For Epicurus, for instance, the point of understanding the nature of the world was to free your mind from fear, as an aid toward attaining mental tranquility. ¹²

Philosophy was critically different, then, from today; it was not conceptual analysis, undertaken in libraries and classrooms, although all three branches of philosophy involved intricate and complex theories and argumentation. These are the aspects of ancient philosophy which primarily engage philosophers today, but in those days philosophy was a way of life as much as an academic discipline. Hence philosophers presented a public image that stressed poverty, or at least frugality, as a way of advertising the success of their teaching: they themselves had moved beyond the superficial values of the world, and could teach others to do so too. The pupils they wanted were those who already felt somewhat at odds with the world.

It is hard not to read this trend as a reaction to the violence and uncertainty of the times. Ordinary individuals were impotent to change the world at large, but they could at least try to change themselves and their inner worlds. There lay the appeal of the new philosophies. None of the schools, in this early period, encouraged their students to play an active part in politics. Philosophy was largely for dropouts, and so dovetailed with the escapism that we have already seen was a dominant feature of the literature of the time.

The great era of the philosophical schools lasted throughout the third and second centuries. Teaching and erudition began to be seen as professions in their own right, not mere eccentricities; schools disputed points great and small with one another; learning became systematic, spread around the Hellenistic world, and for the first time became valued as a way to get on in the world. This did little to alter elementary schooling, but gradually an intermediate stage evolved, between the elementary schools and attendance at the feet of a philosopher or a teacher of rhetoric. In his teens, then, a boy might learn grammar, rhetoric, logic, and geometry, as well as receiving further military training, to supplement the schooling of his younger years, with its emphasis on the three Rs and acculturation. Education was one of the prime engines of hellenization, and it is no surprise to find that Hellenistic gymnasia around the world expanded their curricula beyond physical fitness to encompass more aspects of Greek culture.

If there was originality within the philosophical schools, however, the same cannot be said of rhetoric, which began to form a major element in higher education. Quite early in the Hellenistic period, a canonical list was drawn up of the ten Athenian masters of rhetoric, ¹³and their speeches were endlessly studied and imitated. Pedantic purists refused to use vocabulary or figures of speech which did not have precedents in the works of these masters. “Atticism,” as their style was called (Attica being the district whose urban center was Athens), was worshipped as good in itself, and there were bitter fights, by word and occasionally fist, between its exponents and those of the florid Asianic style. Still, the schools of rhetoric flourished and polished their discipline, until writers of all stripes fell under their spell as much as orators and politicians.

But it must have been hard for even the philosophers resident in Athens to maintain their saintly detachment in the face of starvation; to many, it must have seemed the end of the world. Demetrius was poised to retake the city, and no one was coming to their help. Lachares did not give up easily, however. He quelled a near mutiny among his troops by robbing temples of their treasures and melting them down into bullion. Even the world-famous statue of Athena in the Parthenon, the symbol of Athenian greatness, was stripped of its golden robe. Ptolemy sent help in the form of a substantial fleet of 150 ships, but just as it approached Demetrius’s replacement fleet hove into view, double the size of Ptolemy’s fleet, which prudently withdrew. Lachares fled, and the starving Athenians opened their gates to Demetrius in April 295. They had insulted him in 301, and expected little mercy.

Demetrius staged a dramatic entry into Athens. Having ordered a general assembly in the Theater of Dionysus, he posted guards around the area, entered from the rear, and walked in silence down the steps, past the seated crowd, until he reached the stage. He announced the immediate distribution of plenty of grain—that was the good bit—but also the installation of garrisons not only in Athens and Piraeus, but in several outlying towns and fortresses. Now was not the time to let the ideology of freedom impede his progress. He also ensured that an oligarchy of his supporters formed the ruling elite. There could be little doubt that this time, his third period of residence in the city, he came not as a liberator but as an occupier of Athens.

The Fall of Demetrius

DEMETRIUS WAS BACK in Athens, and took immediate steps to regain other cities in Greece. His neighbors in Macedon and Asia Minor were too busy with their own affairs to intervene. The Peloponnesian cities were Demetrius’s first targets in 294, but toward the end of his campaign there he was diverted by news from Macedon. The homeland was in the kind of trouble he had been waiting for. As soon as he could, he marched north.

In Macedon, Antipater, the elder of the two boy kings, had naturally assumed that, on attaining his majority, he would inherit the whole kingdom; Thessalonice, however, continued to insist on his sharing the kingdom with his rother. Antipater therefore had his mother murdered (an unusual crime even for the Macedonian royal family, and she was a half sister of Alexander the Great), expelled his brother from the western half of the kingdom, and made all Macedon his. Alexander accordingly invited Demetrius to help him recover the throne. Demetrius left his twenty-five-year-old son Antigonus Gonatas resident in Athens and in charge of affairs in Greece and marched north to take part in the War of the Brothers.

But it had taken him time to wrap things up in the south, and in the meantime Alexander had also looked for help elsewhere. Pyrrhus of Epirus, a great-nephew of Olympias and cousin of Alexander the Great, had been an enemy of Cassander, who had successfully supported his dynastic rival in Epirus. In 303 Demetrius had married one of his sisters, Deidameia, and so when Pyrrhus had fled from Epirus he had lived in exile in Demetrius’s court and had fought on the Antigonid side at Ipsus, aged eighteen. In 299, as part of a short-lived attempt to get on with Ptolemy, Demetrius had sent him young Pyrrhus as a kind of hostage, a pledge of his goodwill. Pyrrhus had become close to Ptolemy, and had married one of his daughters. After the death of Deidameia in 298, Pyrrhus felt he no longer had any reason to be close to Demetrius, and it was as Ptolemy’s ally, and with Ptolemy’s financial help, that in 297 he reconquered Epirus. This was the powerful neighbor whom Alexander V had asked for help.

The price for Pyrrhus’s help was enormous, but he was able to supply it quickly. He asked for, and received, the two cantons of Macedon that bordered his kingdom of Epirus, along with various other Macedonian dependencies that would serve his aim of developing Epirote rule in western Greece. These were mostly territories that had been annexed by Philip II and Cassander.

Pyrrhus easily drove Antipater out of western Macedon, but did no more. Lysimachus was Antipater’s father-in-law, and Pyrrhus had no desire to provoke Lysimachus, even though he was currently busy quelling an uprising led by the warlike Getae. The threat of future intervention was enough for Lysimachus to persuade Pyrrhus to withdraw his troops—without, of course, abandoning his new territories. Pyrrhus’s withdrawal paved the way for the two brothers to be reconciled. Lysimachus hoped he had done enough to secure Macedon against Demetrius’s imminent arrival.

So when Demetrius reached Dium, on the borders of Macedon, Alexander thanked him and told him he was no longer needed. No one treated Demetrius like that—and certainly no Antipatrid teenager. Demetrius pretended that he was unconcerned and had other business to attend to down south. He invited the young king to a farewell banquet and had him killed. Minnows should not swim with sharks. In a show trial, forced on him by his insecurity, Demetrius gave it out before the Macedonian troops that he was acting in self-defense—that Alexander had been planning to murder him. It may have been true. There was so much mutual mistrust between them that, during the banquet, when Demetrius got up to leave the room, Alexander followed, not wanting to lose sight of him. At the doorway, Demetrius muttered to his guards as he passed: “Kill the man who follows me.” ¹

Antipater abandoned his half of Macedon and fled to Thrace, where Lysimachus persuaded him that resistance was futile. Lysimachus quickly arranged a peace treaty with Demetrius; he knew from recent bitter experience how aggressive his new neighbor could be, and the situation gave him the leverage to persuade Demetrius to renounce his claim to the Greek cities of Asia Minor that had fallen to Lysimachus after Ipsus. But the peace made Antipater redundant, and Lysimachus had him killed, now or within a few years. It was the end of the Antipatrid line that had ruled Macedon, as viceroys and kings, for the best part of forty years.

DEMETRIUS I, KING OF MACEDON

The grail was his: Demetrius was king of Macedon. Immediately after the murder of Alexander V, the nobles present—members of Alexander’s court, now surrounded by Demetrius’s forces—agreed to his kingship, and he was duly acclaimed by the assembled army. But there were still hearts and minds to be won in Macedon itself, and Demetrius went about this by the traditional combination of action and words. He quelled an uprising in Thessaly and took steps to improve the security of central Greece, where the alliance between the Boeotians and Aetolians had been renewed in response to Demetrius’s and his son’s conquests in the south. In the Peloponnese, only the Spartans now held out against him, and they were no more than a nuisance.

At home, he played all the cards that supported his claim to the throne. He stressed his father’s loyal service to the Argeads and the illegitimacy of the Antipatrid regime, and missed no opportunity to recall Cassander’s murder of Alexander IV. His long marriage to Phila helped as well; as Cassander’s sister, she provided an appearance of continuity, now that Cassander had no surviving descendants. Ironically, through Phila, Demetrius was the heir of those to whose ruin he and his father had devoted so much time and energy.

In order to help secure Thessaly, and to give himself another port, one of Demetrius’s early acts as king was to found the city of Demetrias. The site, at the head of the Gulf of Pagasae (near modern Volos), was well chosen. The city was hard to assault, and served successive Macedonian kings for decades as one of the “Fetters of Greece”: ²as long as they controlled the heavily fortified ports of Demetrias, Chalcis, and Corinth (Piraeus was desirable too), they could move troops at will around the Greek mainland and restrict other shipping. And most commercial traffic in those days was seaborne.

A sign of how critical all this was for him was that he ignored what was going on elsewhere in the world—or maybe he just did not have the forces to cope. He had already, I think, effectively ceded the Asiatic Greek cities, and Lysimachus completed his takeover there by the end of 294. In the same year, Ptolemy, to his huge relief, regained Cyprus. The defense of the island had been in the hands of Phila, but in the end she was pinned in Salamis and forced to surrender. Ptolemy courteously allowed all members of Demetrius’s family safe conduct off the island and back to Macedon, laden with gifts and honors. The Ptolemies would now retain Cyprus until the Roman conquest of the island two hundred and fifty years later.

Lysimachus, as already mentioned, was chiefly occupied with a war against the Getae in northern Thrace, around the Danube. In 297 the warlike Getae had taken advantage of the fact that Lysimachus’s attention was focused on Asia Minor to go to war. Lysimachus sent his son Agathocles to deal with the Getae, but it had not gone well: Agathocles had been captured, and Lysimachus had been forced to come to terms, which included marrying one of his daughters to the Getan king and returning territory he had occupied. But in 293, once he had more or less settled his affairs in Asia Minor, Lysimachus took to the field to recover the territory he had been forced to give up. Again, the war went badly; we know no details, but it is surely to the credit of the Getan king Dromichaetes that he was able twice to defeat as brilliant a general as Lysimachus. This time, it was Lysimachus himself who was taken prisoner. He was held at their capital, Helis (perhaps modern Sveshtari, where a tomb has been discovered which might be that of Dromichaetes and Lysimachus’s nameless daughter). ³It was the best part of a year before his captors were induced to let him go, and again Lysimachus lost territory to them, and had to leave hostages to ensure that he would not attack again. It was the last of his attempts to gain control of inner Thrace.

In 292, while Lysimachus was tied up, Demetrius, short on gratitude to the man who had so rapidly recognized his rulership of Macedon, took an expeditionary force into Asia Minor and Thrace. It was a sign of his future intentions, a declaration of war. Fortunately for Lysimachus, a united uprising by the central Greek leagues, backed by his friends Pyrrhus and Ptolemy, recalled Demetrius to Greece. As it happened, before he got back his son Antigonus Gonatas had succeeded in defeating the Boeotians and putting Thebes under siege (it fell the following year). But Demetrius was unable to return to his abandoned campaign, because Pyrrhus chose this moment to invade Thessaly. Demetrius advanced against him in strength; Pyrrhus, his work done, withdrew.

Pyrrhus’s retreat was tactical; he had no intention of giving up his attempt to expand the frontiers of Epirus at Demetrius’s expense. Two years later, in 290, he inflicted a serious defeat on Demetrius’s forces in Aetolia (the victory was so spectacular that he was hailed as a second Alexander), ⁴but lost the island of Corcyra (Corfu). The island was betrayed to Demetrius by Pyrrhus’s ex-wife Lanassa (whose domain it was), allegedly because she was irritated at being ignored by her husband. ⁵She married Demetrius instead. In 288, while Demetrius was laid low by illness, Pyrrhus seized the opportunity to invade Thessaly and Macedon. Demetrius hauled himself out of bed and drove Pyrrhus out.

The two kings had pummeled each other to exhaustion, and they made a peace which recognized the status quo in respect of Demetrius’s possession of Corcyra and Pyrrhus’s of the Macedonian dependencies given him by Alexander V in his hour of desperation. Demetrius was left in a powerful position. Macedon, though slimmer, was united under his rule; there was a treaty in place with his most formidable enemy; in central Greece, only the perennial hostility of the Aetolians remained; and he had done enough to secure the Peloponnese for the time being. He had the best fleet, and could call up a massive army. It was quite a turnaround for the Besieger, and he began to dream his father’s dreams. Perhaps Demetrius was his own worst enemy.

DEMETRIUS’S PRIDE

The style of Demetrius’s kingship was typically flamboyant, and he demanded obsequiousness from his subjects. An incident from 290 is particularly revealing. It was the year of the Pythian Games—the quadrennial festival and athletic games held at Delphi, second only to the Olympics in prestige. But the Aetolians controlled Delphi, and restricted access to the festival to their friends. A few weeks later, then, Demetrius came south to host alternate games in Athens.

He and Lanassa entered the city in a style that reminded many of Demetrius’s outrageous behavior a dozen or so years earlier, when he had made the Parthenon his home and that of his concubines. They came, bringing grain for ever-hungry Athens, as Demetrius, the aptly named savior god, and his consort Demeter, the grain goddess. They were welcomed not only with incense and garlands and libations, but with an astonishing hymn that included the words: “While other gods are far away, or lack ears, or do not exist, or pay no attention to us, we see you present here, not in wood or stone, but in reality.” ⁶Obsequiousness indeed, but the point became clearer as the hymn went on to request of the king that he crush the Aetolian menace.

Many Athenians regretted such excesses, and all over the Greek world resentment built up against the new ruler. It was impossible for Demetrius to present himself as the leader the Greeks had been waiting for when he had to crack down hard on incipient rebellion and tax his subjects hard to pay for yet more war. Talk of the freedom of the Greek cities faded away, and between 291 and 285 Ptolemy deprived Demetrius of the Cycladic islands and the rest of his Aegean possessions, thus regaining the control over the entrance to the Aegean that he had lost in 306 and furthering his aim to control as much of the Aegean seaboard as he could. The promise of relief from taxes and a measure of respect for local councils was just as important in this enterprise as military muscle. Dominance in the Aegean was to serve successive Ptolemies well, both strategically and commercially.

Ptolemy also confirmed his control of Phoenicia by finally evicting Demetrius’s garrisons from Sidon and Tyre. But these were pretty much Ptolemy’s last actions; in 285, feeling the burden of his seventy-plus years, he stood down from the Egyptian throne in favor of Ptolemy II. Maybe he had a terminal illness, because only two years later he died—in his bed, remarkably enough for a Successor. But then “safety first” had been his motto, for most of his time as ruler of Egypt.

Despite these losses, Demetrius might have hung on in Macedon. But he was a natural autocrat, and that was not the Macedonian way. Demetrius never managed the kingly art of finding a balance between being loved and being hated, or at least feared. His subjects came to resent his luxurious ways and his unapproachability. Macedonian kings were supposed to make themselves available to petitions from their subjects, yet Demetrius was rumored on one occasion to have thrown a whole bundle of them into a river—or at least to be the sort of person who might. ⁷This kind of talk, charging him with eastern-style monarchy, did his reputation no good. Nor did the fact that he wore a double crown, indicating rulership of Asia as well as Europe. ⁸