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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Ignoring the rumbles of discontent, Demetrius began to prepare for a massive invasion of Asia. But the proud Macedonian barons resented their country’s being thought of as no more than a launching point for eastern invasion; they did not want to be on the periphery of some vast Asian kingdom. It was all right when Philip and Alexander had done it, because that was for the greater glory of Macedon. But this war would be fought against fellow Macedonians, for the greater glory of an unpopular king. The idea of taking thousands more Macedonians east, following the tens of thousands who had already gone, did not go down well either, since the country was already somewhat depopulated.

But Demetrius was no Cassander, content with Macedon alone; he was as addicted to warfare as Alexander the Great. Just as Alexander had set out from Macedon and seized all Asia from the Persian king, so Demetrius intended at least to deprive Lysimachus of Asia Minor. But whereas Alexander had invaded Asia with about thirty-seven thousand men and no fleet to speak of, Demetrius was amassing a vast army, over a hundred thousand strong, while a fleet of five hundred warships was being prepared in the shipyards of Macedon and Greece. In typical Besieger style, some of these ships were larger than any vessel that had ever been built before, and he used the best naval architects available. The precise design of these ships is a matter of intelligent guesswork, but it will give some idea of their scale to say that, whereas a normal warship had three banks of rowers in some arrangement (hence its name, “trireme”), Demetrius was having a “ fifteen” and a “sixteen” built. ⁹

Naturally, Demetrius’s preparations involved propaganda as well. Above all, he wielded the old, potent slogan of Greek freedom against Lysimachus. At a local level, a prominent public building in Pella displayed symbolic paintings, copies of which formed the wall paintings of a later Roman villa. ¹⁰One of the panels of the painting depicted Demetrius’s parents as king and queen of Asia, the idea being that he had inherited a natural claim, while other panels showed Macedon as the ruler of Asia by right of conquest. But history is littered with failed promises of manifest destiny.

EARLY HELLENISTIC RELIGIONS

Manifest or otherwise, Destiny, in its less implacable guise as Fortune, was to play a considerable role in the emotional life of the hellenized people of the new world the Successors were creating. But the rise of the cult of Fortune was only one of a number of new religious phenomena. The mobility of the early Hellenistic period uprooted people from their traditions and left them free, for the first time, to choose, to a greater extent than before, their own forms of worship. Not many decades earlier, Socrates had been taken to court for not worshipping the gods of the city; such a trial rapidly became unthinkable, as personal forms of religion proliferated alongside the old and new civic cults. In addition to ensuring that the gods protected their communities and their leaders, people simply wanted the gods to bless them as individuals. ¹¹

Greek religion was polytheistic, but one of the main innovations of the Hellenistic period was a henotheistic tendency. Influential philosophers earlier in the fourth century, such as Plato and Aristotle, had promoted a single supreme deity, and the idea found fertile soil. The fertility was due in part perhaps to increased intellectual sophistication, but mainly to social conditions, the larger world in which people now lived. In the past, deities and cults had often been tied to specific locations, even on occasion to specific families, but now more and more people were living away from their ancestral homes. New traditions were forged by the creation of clubs that combined religious and social purposes, always for relatively small congregations, but people were still worshipping at fewer shrines.

This reductionism was also aided by the strong cultural current in favor of individualism. We have already seen this current in both the aesthetic and the philosophy of the times. In religion, it meant not just that people increasingly settled on a smaller number of gods, those they found personally satisfying, but more importantly that they became more concerned with personal salvation. The cults that offered personal salvation, or at least a chance of a better afterlife, were known as the “mysteries”—that is, etymologically, “cults into which one was personally initiated.” The most famous, in the early Hellenistic period, were the cult of Demeter and Persephone at the seaside town of Eleusis, near Athens, and the cult of the Great Gods on the beautiful north Aegean island of Samothrace. Both shrines were of considerable antiquity—it was said that Jason and the Argonauts had stopped at Samothrace and been initiated before continuing their quest for the Golden Fleece, and Demeter herself was supposed to have instigated the Eleusinian cult—but their heyday was the Hellenistic period. Samothrace in particular was graced by devotion and benefactions from several members of the Macedonian royal families. Philip II commissioned the first stone buildings in the sanctuary, Antipater had a remarkable stone pavilion built in the names of the two kings Philip III Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV, and Lysimachus’s wife Arsinoe funded the construction of a unique circular, multistoried building, perhaps a hotel. ¹²

One of the most successful new quasi-monotheistic cults was that of Sarapis, a healing god and worker of miracles. The development of his cult was attributed to Ptolemy I, ¹³and the temple of Sarapis became one of the most splendid buildings in Alexandria. Sarapis already existed as a minor Egyptian deity (a sort of amalgam of Osiris and Apis, hence the name), but Ptolemy had the foresight to develop his cult in a European form. He borrowed the iconography of the god from the cult of Zeus of the Underworld in the Greek city of Sinope on the Black Sea. The cult of the new deity was conjoined, in a new form of mystery religion, with that of his sister-wife Isis. Devotees came to regard Sarapis and Isis as the primordial masculine and feminine principles of the universe. The combination of near monotheism with salvationism was irresistible, and a cult that Ptolemy originally intended to suit the multiculturalism of Alexandria spread throughout the entire known world.

The Olympian deities—Zeus and his extended family—continued to be worshipped both in private and in the public ceremonies of the Greek cities, and to be promoted by the Successors. Seleucus claimed immediate descent from Apollo; the Antigonids looked back to Heracles, and Ptolemy to Dionysus. But the Olympian religion seems to have exerted less of a hold over people’s emotions. The Olympian deities had always been thought of in a quasi-anthropomorphic manner, but now abstractions increasingly began to gain cults; personality-free deities such as Fair Fame, Rumor, Peace, Victory, Shame—all received their altars, if they did not already have them.

By far the most widespread of these cults was that of Fortune. In a world of rapidly changing circumstances, the only certainty was uncertainty. Fortune was a great, irrational, female principle, and the spread of the worship of Sarapis and Isis around the world was helped by the early identification of Isis with Fortune. Demetrius of Phalerum wrote a book about Fortune in which he drew on current events to reveal the potency of the goddess: only a few decades earlier, the Persians had been rulers of the world, while the Macedonians were unknown, but Fortune had made the world topsy-turvy. ¹⁴Seleucus adorned his new Syrian capital, Antioch, with a magnificent temple of Fortune, which contained a famous cult statue. Fortune was worshipped by private individuals, but also at a civic level, as the Fortune of entire cities or peoples (as Demetrius of Phalerum was speaking of the Fortune of the Persians and Macedonians). Wherever there were Greeks or hellenized peoples around the Mediterranean and beyond, the cult of Fortune was also to be found.

DEMETRIUS’S DOWNFALL

The scale of Demetrius’s buildup indicated ambitions that threatened all the other kings, and they formed a coalition against him for what we could call the Fifth War of the Successors. Once again, an Antigonid was the enemy who united all the other Successor kings. Pyrrhus, “bombarded by letters from Lysimachus, Ptolemy and Seleucus,” ¹⁵shrugged off the peace treaty he had made with Demetrius and joined the coalition. It was already clear that Demetrius did not stand a chance. It seems likely to me that he was suffering from megalomania.

Early in 288, while Ptolemy’s admiral sailed for southern Greece with the intention of stirring the Greek cities to rebellion, Lysimachus and Pyrrhus attacked Macedon from, respectively, the east and the west. Pyrrhus employed the old Successor tactic of claiming that Alexander the Great had appeared to him in a dream and promised his aid. Demetrius left Gonatas to take care of the Ptolemaic threat in southern Greece and, unaware of Pyrrhus’s treachery, concentrated his forces in the east to face Lysimachus. He learned just how unpopular he was when his Macedonian troops deserted, first to Lysimachus and then to Pyrrhus, when Demetrius heard of his invasion and turned to confront him.

It was the most effective coup imaginable. Demetrius was thrown out of his kingdom by the army, or its senior officers, after six years on the throne. But Macedon was left to endure, for a second time, the uncertainty of a dual kingship. Pyrrhus justified his rulership by citing his kinship to Alexander the Great (they were second cousins), and took western Macedon (and then Thessaly a few years later); Lysimachus gained the eastern kingdom—a significant gain for him, given the wealth of Macedon’s natural resources there. For instance, with what he already had in Asia Minor, he now monopolized the most accessible sources of gold.

Demetrius adopted a lowly disguise and fled to Cassandreia. Elderly Phila saw the end and took poison. Her marriage to Demetrius had been long and apparently stable, despite his tempestuous career. She was clearly a formidable woman; even when she was young, her father had consulted her on official business, and she came to have her own court, Companions, and bodyguard, as well as cults in Athens and elsewhere. She was an early prototype of the powerful and independent queens of the later Hellenistic period.

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. ¹⁶Perhaps 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, ¹⁷but 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” ¹⁸—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, ¹⁹what 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. ²⁰

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. ²¹In 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.

The Last Successors

THE 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. ¹

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.

LYSIMACHUS AT HIS PEAK

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. ²In 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.

The partitioners of Macedon had a peace treaty in place, but that was mere expediency. Pyrrhus found that his former allies, Ptolemy and the Aetolians, drifted away. The Aetolians were effectively bought off by Lysimachus’s generosity, and Ptolemy was reluctant to antagonize Lysimachus, in case he ever needed his help against Seleucus in Syria. Lysimachus entered into an alliance with Athens, which completed Pyrrhus’s exposure on the Greek mainland, and launched a propaganda campaign within Macedon, crudely depicting the Epirote as a foreign interloper.

In one of those volte-faces that characterize the entire period, Pyrrhus accordingly allied himself with Gonatas, as if to try to unite the Greek mainland against Lysimachus. Pyrrhus received some of Gonatas’s mercenaries, but in 284, when it came to a confrontation, many of his men deserted to Lysimachus, who took over western Macedon and Thessaly. This not only restricted Pyrrhus to Epirus but drove a wedge between him and Gonatas. It was effectively the end of Pyrrhus’s attempts to expand within the Greek mainland. Before long he turned his attentions west instead—and achieved considerable success for a while against the up-and-coming Romans. Called in to help the Greeks of southern Italy against galloping Roman imperialism, Pyrrhus actually managed to defeat the Romans in three successive battles, but still lost the war. The Romans always had more men on whom they could call, while Pyrrhus had been bled dry. That is why we use the term “Pyrrhic” for a victory that amounts to defeat.

A DIVIDED COURT

So Macedon had a new king, the fifth in ten years. Worse was to follow. In 287, Lysimacheia was badly damaged by an earthquake. It was soon rebuilt, but there were those who were inclined to read it as ominous that Lysimachus’s new capital should fall. ³Alarmed by his awesome power and evident ambitions, mighty enemies were lining up against him. All that was needed was a catalyst.

In 300, Ptolemy I had given his then teenaged daughter Arsinoe to the sexagenarian Lysimachus; in 293 or so, he had given Lysandra (previously married to Alexander V) to Lysimachus’s son and heir Agathocles. Lysandra was a daughter of Ptolemy’s first wife Eurydice, Arsinoe of his second, and preferred, wife Berenice. Ironically, Berenice, Eurydice’s niece, had been in her retinue, and that is how she had come to Ptolemy’s attention.

Long before 285, when Ptolemy named Ptolemy II as his successor, Berenice’s faction at court had completely defeated that of Eurydice. It was a typical amphimetric dispute, the consequence of the Successors’ propensity for polygamy: sons born of the same father but different mothers became rivals for the throne. Eurydice’s son Ptolemy Ceraunus, who as the eldest son felt robbed of the Egyptian throne, was also currently resident at Lysimachus’s court. He was living proof that the eldest son does not necessarily succeed to the throne.

Agathocles may have been disappointed that, while Ptolemy had abdicated in favor of his son and Seleucus had named Antiochus joint king, his own aged father had not seen fit to honor him in the same way. Even Antigonus had done as much for Demetrius. And Lysimachus, for his part, may have been concerned at Agathocles’ royal pretensions, since he had named a city after himself and wore a diadem on his coins. The fact that he had done these things without his father’s permission shows that he already had a semi-independent existence within Asia Minor, with his own treasury, mint, and presumably troops. His success in driving Demetrius out of Asia Minor had won him the allegiance of the Greek cities and of large numbers of prominent men, who formed, as it were, his court. But whatever the pretext—the occupation of the Egyptian throne by Arsinoe’s brother may also have had something to do with it—Lysimachus now chose to favor the sons Arsinoe had borne him over Agathocles, his only son by Nicaea.

Agathocles rallied his supporters and launched a coup. Our sources are so scant for this period that we do not even know whether it came to battle. But, whether as a result of conflict or intrigue, Agathocles fell into his father’s hands and was imprisoned. Before long, Lysimachus had him killed, possibly using Ceraunus as his hit man. ⁴This terrible act did Lysimachus’s cause no good, and he was faced with further unrest, which was brutally crushed. Those who survived the purge fled. Many found their way to Seleucus’s court, including Lysandra; she hated her half sister Arsinoe as much as her mother hated Arsinoe’s mother. Their appeals for help, sowing the seeds of renewed war, fell on fertile ground.

It was certainly a time for ambitions to be fulfilled. A man called Philetaerus, no friend of Arsinoe, was among those who found his way to Seleucus’s court. Originally an Antigonid officer responsible for Pergamum, he had gone over to Lysimachus not long before Ipsus, and after the battle Lysimachus had reappointed him to the governorship of the city. One of the most important things about Pergamum was its relative impregnability; both Antigonus and Lysimachus kept one of their main treasuries there. At the time in question, the treasury held nine thousand talents (somewhat over five billion dollars). Philetaerus offered to draw on this to hire troops for Seleucus, on the understanding that, once Lysimachus was defeated, he could rule over an independent Pergamum. Seleucus agreed—a sound short-term decision, perhaps, but one that his successors would rue, since the Attalid kingdom of Pergamum prospered and soon came to challenge the Seleucids for much of Asia Minor. Its wealth and splendor may be gauged by the extant remains, and especially by the astonishing Altar of Zeus in the Pergamum Museum of Berlin, dating from the first quarter of the second century. ⁵The kingdom survived until it was bequeathed to the people of Rome in 133 BCE.