Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. The wine tasted good as it passed the old soldier's lips and slid down into his gullet. He only drank good wine these days, pressed from his own grapes.
No longer did he have to drink the sour old horse urine he had so often been forced to consume during the long years of campaigning under old King Philip, his son Alexander, and their many successors. From his sunkissed vantage point overlooking the Mediterranean,
a house on a hill a short distance outside the city of Ephesus, those days seemed very far away. Forty years. That was how long he had hefted a pike in the service of his kings, marching everywhere from the Danube to the Oxus to the Nile. And now he was done. At first, the transition had been difficult. He had walked across half of Asia to reach Ephesus, carrying a fortune in gold and silver, and had to defend his winnings with his sword on more than one occasion.
But his money was good here. The house, olive groves, small vineyard, and fields had cost him only a little, the slaves to work them a bit more. Here, he was just another old soldier. one of many spending the pay they had accumulated in the service of the Argyads and their heirs. But waking up in the same place every day with no horns blaring or officers shouting, on a comfortable bed instead of rocky ground, took some getting used to.
The dreams still came to him at night, awful dreams full of the screams of burning villagers and the stink of a fresh battlefield piled with the dead and dying. He didn't regret those years, not when he was awake. But at night, he questioned every thrust of his pike and swing of his sword. There were children running around the little estate now, his children, which was not something he had ever anticipated.
He had probably fathered many over the years, somewhere between Macedonia and Bactria, but he knew none of them. These three, however, were his, born to a former slave from the mountains of Persia he had freed and then married. He cared for her, and he hoped she cared for him, though he couldn't be sure. She was kind to him, better than he deserved, and he thanked the gods for that each and every day. He poured another cup of wine from the jug next to him, a jug he made sure was always full.
The pain was constant. His back was the worst, sending fiery jabs up and down his spine every time he bent or twisted, and his ankles and knees were nearly as bad. Old wounds still ached when the weather turned, especially where he'd taken a spear in the leg 30 years before. For a moment, the pain receded, driven back by the wine. He closed his eyes and felt the sun on his face. Dreamless sleep soon followed. The old soldier never woke up.
The death of Alexander the Great set off the most intense succession struggle the world had ever seen. Without an obvious error, the Conqueror's generals fought it out not for months or years, but decades. attempting to carve up the vast territories won by the Macedonian king amongst themselves. By 311 BC, those wars had already been raging for more than 10 years, and it would be another 10 of fire and blood before the boundaries between emerging kingdoms became clear.
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Hi, everybody. From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today. When Alexander the Great died in June of 323 BC, just before his 33rd birthday, He left behind not a coherent state, but a motley collection of half-plundered provinces under the loose control of his generals. Those generals, companions, and bodyguards of the now-dead king wasted no time in splitting that ramshackle empire amongst themselves.
using all the resources and experience they had gained in decades of constant warfare. Three major wars between those successors, Diadochi, as they're commonly known in the scholarship, followed in the next 12 years. By 311 BC, the unity of Alexander's empire was an increasingly distant memory. So too was the royal house, the Argead dynasty, that had ruled Macedonia for the past two centuries or more. There was still one survivor.
Alexander IV, the now 12-year-old son of the great king. But he and his Bactrian mother Ruxana were prisoners in an out-of-the-way Greek city. Alexander's formidable mother, Olympias, was years in the grave after her final doomed grab for control of her grandson. The real power lay with the generals. Cassander in Macedonia in Greece, Antigonus the One-Eyed in most of Asia,
Ptolemy in Egypt, and a plethora of potential risers in the east, most notable among them Seleucus, the satrap of Babylon. Perhaps the real power had always lain with them. Real centralized royal authority in Macedonia was Philip's invention, largely carried on unchanged by Alexander, plus whatever administrative structures he incorporated wholesale from the Persian satrapies he occupied.
After Alexander's death, without a legendary figure at the heart of things to hold it together with charisma and new gifts to bestow, the Macedonian elites simply reverted to the cultural patterns they preferred. It was every man, every aristocratic kin group, every faction of would-be dynasts for themselves. The difference was that now they were competing for control over half the world.
using armies and hordes of treasure that previously only the great kings of Persia could have assembled. In that life-or-death struggle, few of the major players survived long. By 311 BC and the end of the Third War of the Successors,
Only Ptolemy and Antigonus the One-Eyed were left of those who had begun the race a dozen years before. A new generation of contenders was beginning to rise, people whose loyalties to a bygone age were growing ever more tenuous as the new Hellenistic world came into being.
They wouldn't even be generals for long. Kingship, long a dirty word in most of the Greek world, was returning as the dominant form of government. In the words of the historian Andrew Erskine, the helidistic world was, quote, above all, to be a world of kings.
That's where we'll pick up today on Tides of History. A quick note here, I'm relying on Robin Waterfield's excellent narrative history of this period dividing the spoils throughout today's episode. Where I'm drawing on other secondary sources, I'll note that, as always.
When we last left off, Antigonus the One-Eyed had just come to an uneasy peace with his main rivals, Cassander in Greece and Macedonia, and Ptolemy in Egypt, leaving him with control over most of the West Asian dominions that had formerly belonged to the Persians.
There were others as well, Lysimachus in Thrace and Seleucus in Babylon, and nobody, whether their current portion was great or small, was satisfied with the outcome. Nobody thought that this would be the end of the wars. For one thing... All the generals wanted more than they already had. For another, they were, as that title implies, generals. They wanted to fight because they were lifelong soldiers who were used to using armies to conquer, destroy their enemies, and seize power.
That was a feature, not a bug, of the Hellenistic world as it emerged. The military origins of these monarchies and the states they ruled were fundamental to understanding how they operated. It was one of the major legacies, the successors, the Diadochi, would bequeath to their successors over the coming centuries. The first war to break out in the aftermath of this quote-unquote peace was between Antigonus and Seleucus.
In fact, it began while the representatives of the greater powers were still negotiating the final details of their settlement in late 311 BC. Babylon was like an unfriendly thorn poking into the underbelly of Antigonus' Asian Empire. a rich populist power base in close proximity to his vulnerable territories, lying astride the roots connecting the eastern and western portions, controlled by a man fundamentally inimical to Antigonus and his designs.
Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about this conflict aside from its broadest outline. We know that in a bold knight attack, Seleucus defeated an army sent by Antigonus and commanded by two of his satraps. More devastating than the victory was the fact that Seleucus promptly incorporated most of that force, more than 15,000 men, into his army. He then used that new force to march east and take the rich province of Susiana, the gateway to all the satrapies of the east.
Seleucus was obviously planning further campaigns to detach Media, Bactria, Sogdiana, and anything else he could take from Antigonus' grasp. That was, in fact, what he would do in the years to come. So Antigonus sent his son Demetrius to seize Babylon in response. Demetrius captured half the city and then returned to Syria, leaving behind a substantial force to continue besieging the citadels of Babylon.
When Seleucus returned from Susiana, however, it took him only a brief time to eject the besiegers and reclaim his capital. Over the next two years, Antigonus counterattacked and once again took Babylon, then suffered a defeat at Seleucus' hands. The details of their eventual truce are unclear, but it seems that they came to terms with Antigonus retreating to Syria and effectively abandoning his claim on the east.
So Lucas then stepped into the void, taking control of the eastern satrapies one by one. Knowing his limitations with Antigonus and Ptolemy right on his western borders, and the difficulties of controlling the vast east, Seleucus ceded the territories in India to the new Maurya emperor, Chandragupta, about whom we'll have much more to say down the road. So, in just a few years, Seleucus had transformed himself from a refugee who was barely able to muster a thousand soldiers to retake Babylon.
to the ruler of the entire east. This was the beginning of the Seleucid Empire, which would last for the next 250 years. Not for nothing was Seleucus known as Nikator, the bringer of victory. The Fourth War of the Successors would soon follow the Third, but before that happened, Cassander finally took the logical step that had been staring him in the face for years. He had young Alexander IV and his mother Roxanna poisoned.
The truce to which all parties had agreed in 311 was clear, that when he came of age, Alexander the Great's son would inherit. But the reality was that everyone knew that was if he came of age, not when. Cassandra and the others had no interest in sharing power with a boy, whatever his parentage. That scenario simply raised too many questions about both the present and the things the successors had done in the intervening years.
If the young Alexander turned out to be weak and pliable, then whoever controlled him would have a strong claim to legitimacy as regent. If he turned out to be anything like his father, well, that was even worse for Cassander, Antigonus, Ptolemy, and the rest. These men had all known Alexander, and they surely remembered his infinite capacity for revenge over even the smallest perceived slights.
Not just their power, but their lives and those of their entire families, the would-be dynasties they'd been trying to create for 15 years now, would be forfeit. And so Cassander did the natural thing, which was to affirm the status quo through a pair of rather mundane and out-of-the-way deaths. What were two more corpses among all these thousands?
In fact, we don't even know exactly when Cassander ordered the deed to be carried out. It was probably sometime in 310 or 309 BC during the war between Antigonus and Seleucus. But if so... Cassander continued to mint coins and issued decrees in the dead king's name for another few years. Eventually, Cassander had the boy and his mother buried in the royal tomb of the Argeads, where their remains were eventually discovered by archaeologists.
Even that was no marker of respect for their royal role or their lineage, but a claim on the throne of Macedonia for Cassander, because it was always the new king who buried the old. As relatively unimportant as Alexander IV's death was in the grand scheme of this conflict, it was an important ideological turning point. The successors were kings now, whether they claimed royal honors or not.
and their territories were spear-won kingdoms, just as Alexander's had been. Yet there was still one Argead left, and it's fitting that his fate too was to be used as a trump card by the successors, rather than a player in his own right. Around the time of Alexander's poisoning, the old regent Polypericon made a deal with Antigonus to bring the last surviving son of Alexander the Great, the unacknowledged Heracles, to Greece from Asia.
Polyparacon then marched north with a substantial army, some 20,000 men with Heracles, now in his mid-teens, at its head as king. This was likely the gravest threat Cassander had ever faced, and now his personal qualities or lack thereof, truly shown. Cassander made a deal with Polypericon. He offered him what amounted to a consolation prize and a safe retirement as the military governor of the Peloponnese. Polypericon agreed.
and Cassander had the young Heracles and his mother strangled at a banquet. There were no more male Argeads left, not a single one, and the successors could do as they wished with Alexander's empire. What they wanted to do was fight. Ptolemy continued to raid Antigonus' Asian possessions by sea in the years after the truce with almost no break, and was only barely held at bay by Demetrius.
Ptolemy had been a busy man in the nearly 15 years since Alexander's death. Some have painted him as less ambitious than his rival, someone who grasped strategic realities and was content with his extraordinarily wealthy corner of the world in Egypt. but it's more likely that he was simply waiting things out. With all the riches of Egypt behind him, Alexander's corpse in his possession, and borders that were easily defended by both land and sea,
He never had to rush off to battle the way Perticus, Eumenes, Antigonus, and Seleucus all did. There was no need to stake everything on a throw of the dice, not when the odds in the long term were so obviously favorable. But as the last Argeads went cold into the earth,
Cassander ruthlessly cemented his position, and Antigonus lost the east to Seleucus, it must have looked to Ptolemy like the time was ripe. He sailed north to the Aegean with an army and a fleet, and then landed unopposed in Greece at Corinth. The ruler of Egypt presumably thought that after years of Cassander's iron-fisted control, the Greek cities would welcome him as a liberator. He was sorely disappointed.
The Greek cities were either cowed or satisfied by the grants of freedom they'd received and had no interest in another war. In a fairly stunning anticlimax, Ptolemy made peace with his erstwhile ally Cassander and slunk off back to Egypt with nothing to show for it. There was to be no single ruler of the post-Alexander world. Not Alexander IV, not Antigonus, and not Taleb.
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on Wondery Plus, on Apple Podcasts, or the Wondery app. Cassander could now look forward to consolidating his control over the fractious Greeks, but he was not the only one who coveted that particular corner of Alexander's former empire. Thwarted by Seleucus in the east, Ptolemy in the south, and Lysimachus in Thrace,
Antigonus and his son Demetrius turned their attention toward Greece. Their target, probably in 307 BC, was Athens. In the aftermath of its dalliances with Cassander's many enemies, the famously democratic city was under the control of a tyrant.
which made it the perfect potential base of operations for Antigonus and Demetrius. They could claim to be protecting the quote-unquote freedom of the Greeks while securing a rich, powerful port to use as a jumping-off point for the conquest of the region as a whole. The whole freedom of the Greeks thing was propaganda, of course, but it worked because it appealed to the Greeks' most fundamental beliefs about their own rights and their own importance.
The historians Pat Wheatley and Charlotte Dunn put it like this in their wonderful biography of Demetrius, another book that I'm drawing on throughout today's episode. Quote, The catchphrase of freedom was nothing more than a cynical gambit by the dynasts. It cost nothing and did not necessarily require any follow-up or effort, but was recognized as being peculiarly effective in winning voluntary political support from the Greek police.
No matter how consistently they applied the policy, at no time did any of the senior diadoki intend to set the cities free as we might conceive the term. It was Demetrius' military muscle and money, not the freedom for Athens and other cities to dictate internal policies, that was going to determine the course of events in Greece.
And Antigonus' backing for his son was substantial, amounting to 250 ships and thousands of talents and funding to hire mercenaries and win friends. This was a serious attempt to make Greece an Antigonid possession, and it was immediately successful.
The tyrant fled Athens, giving Demetrius control of a city that fawned over him and his father. They were addressed as kings, given cult honors, and celebrated by the restored democracy, even as they plundered and fought in exactly the fashion they were accustomed to. Showing the skills at siege warfare for which he would soon become famous, Demetrius was able to take a few key strongpoints and then redeveloped Athens' dilapidated defenses to prepare for the inevitable counterattack.
Cassander's unpopular regime looked to be on the brink of defeat. And then Antigonus recalled Demetrius from Greece. He needed his son to lead an attack on the island of Cyprus, which was under the control of Ptolemy. and pointed directly at the heart of Antigonus' domains in the northeastern Mediterranean. Antigonus was by now nearing 80 years of age. Demetrius was not only his heir, but increasingly his co-ruler, and a campaign on the scale that the old general had in mind.
required both of them for success. Crossing the short distance between Cilicia and Cyprus with a substantial army and fleet, Demetrius faced Menelaus, Ptolemy's brother, whom the ruler of Egypt had left in charge. After years of more or less continuous fighting, Demetrius had learned valuable lessons. He built a fortified camp, then engaged Menelaus in battle.
Menelaus was defeated and retreated to the city of Salamis, the same name but not the same place where the allied Greeks had fought the Persians, where Demetrius then set about a siege. Now, if Menelaus could hold Salamis, all he had to do was wait for Ptolemy to arrive from Egypt with reinforcements. Then, they could crush the young Demetrius and teach him yet another lesson about the perils of confronting the companions of Alexander the Great.
dead now for 17 years. In the years to come, Demetrius would receive a nickname, Poliarchetes, the Besieger of Cities. Historians have argued incessantly about whether this was understood ironically in his time. As we'll soon see, two of his most famous sieges actually failed to take the cities in question. On the whole, however, it was almost certainly a serious appellation. Demetrius set about besieging Salamis meticulously.
using every lesson learned and technology developed over the past four decades. He built enormous siege towers, one of which was more than nine stories tall, in order to overtop the city's walls. Catapults, stone throwers, battering rams, and the more mundane trenches and counter fortifications essential to a successful investment all went up quickly.
They very nearly succeeded in taking Salamis, using the siege towers to clear the walls and the battering rams to break the outer defenses, but a last-moment sortie by Menelaus set fire to the siege engines. Earlier in his career, Demetrius would probably have succumbed to the desire to finish the job. He had come so close to taking Salamis, but not now. Rather than rebuild the destroyed equipment and continue the siege,
Demetrius turned his attention toward the imminent arrival of Ptolemy from Egypt with a daunting relief force. Ptolemy brought with him some 140 warships and 200 transports carrying more than 10,000 troops. Combined with the defenders of Salamis, Demetrius was now substantially outnumbered on land. Ptolemy lurked just 40 kilometers, about 25 miles down the coast, ready to pounce as soon as he and Menelaus could coordinate their efforts.
At sea, however, the odds were much better for Demetrius, at least if he could keep the ships currently penned in during the siege from joining Ptolemy's fleet. That was the opportunity Demetrius now seized on. Ptolemy's decision to wait rather than rushing into the harbor of Salamis was the right call. He wanted to sail close to Salamis during the night, then make the final dash once dawn broke. Then Demetrius would have to face their combined fleet, which would outnumber his own.
But Demetrius knew Ptolemy was coming, so he dispatched a small squadron of his ships to keep Menelaus bottled up in the harbor while the bulk of his fleet, equipped with siege engines and elite soldiers detached from the land battle, waited for the relief force. The result was the largest naval battle in more than a century, with 300 to 400 ships engaged in a vicious melee. Splintering oars, sinking ships, torsion artillery, slinging stones and massive bolts.
drowning men trying to keep their heads above water. Amid this chaos, Demetrius thrived, and the sources preserved descriptions of him as a heroic figure fighting bravely on the stern of his ship, surrounded by enemy vessels. The exact course of the battle is difficult to reconstruct from the sources we have, but there's no question about the outcome. Ptolemy's fleet was crushed, and he was even forced to leave behind his personal entourage while he fled back to Egypt.
At least some of his troops were tricked into landing on a seemingly deserted beach, where Demetrius' cavalry was hidden waiting for them. Ptolemy's brother, Menelaus, and all the remaining Ptolemaic garrisons on Cyprus were forced to surrender. Nearly 17,000 prisoners and dozens of cutting-edge warships fell into Demetrius' hands. Combined with the victory at Salamis itself,
the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean had suddenly shifted dramatically toward Antigonus and his ascendant son. When news of Demetrius' victory reached him in Syria, Antigonus took a truly fateful step. It had been lurking on the horizon for years, but nobody had taken the leap until Antigonus decided to do it. The messenger who brought news of the victory addressed him as King Antigonus. A diadem was soon found.
and the army present ratified the assumption of the kingship. Antigonus then immediately sent a diadem to Demetrius, crowning him as not just his heir, but as joint kings. Now, the old general had been planning this for some time, that much is obvious, and he was just waiting for the right moment. Obviously, the successors had been operating as independent rulers for years, in some cases since the moment of Alexander's death.
If you'd asked Seleucus or Ptolemy or Cassander in 306 BC, none of them would have admitted to being the subordinate of anyone else. But they hadn't called themselves kings. Not yet. That was the point of no return, and even if Antigonus believed that only he and his son were legitimate rulers, that was something they trumpeted in their propaganda, they must have known that the others would emulate them. Sure enough, that's precisely what happened.
The years that followed, the other major players followed suit. Seleucus, Ptolemy, Cassander, Lysimachus, and Thrace, and then others as well. A dozen royal dynasties would eventually produce some 200 Hellenistic kings and queens over the next 250 years, until the last of them, Cleopatra, was finally sent off into oblivion during the time of Augustus.
Kingship in the Hellenistic world is a big deal. This was a world of kings, soldiers, and cities, in that order, and the precedents and institutions created during this period will form the basis for imperial rule in the Roman Empire and far beyond. Scholars have written entire books about tiny aspects of Hellenistic kingship. Royal imagery, for example, or the king's role in administration, or how the king was supposed to be seen as a military leader.
The histories written of the Hellenistic period tend to be tightly focused on kings because their authors, whose works were used by later historians whose texts survive, were almost always associated with royal courts and royal propaganda. We'll talk a lot more about this in upcoming episodes, but I want to emphasize the centrality of kings all over what had once been Alexander the Great's territories. There were substantial differences from place to place, of course.
Hellenistic kings didn't present themselves the same way in Greece as they did in Babylon. Egypt was very different from Bactria. But there were commonalities inherited from the fusion of Macedonian military culture and the Persian Empire that all of them shared. The king's power was absolute, just like a general on campaign. Leading armies was the fundamental duty of Hellenistic kings, and that was true from the moment of Alexander's death all the way up to the very end.
Perhaps that was why Antigonus insisted on personally leading the follow-up campaign after Demetrius' victories in Cyprus. Despite now being 80 years of age, He couldn't allow himself to be seen as anything other than a soldier without risking his new position as king. Fittingly, the army Antigonus assembled for his invasion of Ptolemy's core territories in Egypt was gigantic.
probably the largest seen in the time of Alexander and his successors. Leading more than 90,000 men and accompanied by 150 warships, Antigonus marched south from Syria toward Gaza, the site of Demetrius' defeat six years before. From Gaza, the army crossed the desert toward the Nile while Demetrius led the fleet along the coast, overcoming bad weather but failing to find a place to land. Ptolemy had fortified the potential landing spots, and Antigonus' army languished in the desert.
unable to cross the Nile, which was similarly fortified. There was to be no triumphant invasion of Egypt, and the two newly made kings returned to the north without anything to show for it. Ptolemy may have lost Cyprus. but the borders of the newborn Hellenistic kingdoms were beginning to harden. At Matalan, red is the new black. Matalan Me members get 25% off almost everything, including sale items, when you spend £60 or more. Visit matalan.co.uk to access your discount. And there's up to...
T's and C's apply. Antigonus and Demetrius planned to renew their offensive on Egypt the following year, 305 BC, but eventually decided against it. The reason why they made that decision has everything to do with the strategic scale on which they and the other emerging Hellenistic kingdoms were operating. At this specific moment in time, the Antigonids had nearly total control over the eastern Mediterranean.
Ptolemy's fleet had been destroyed, and Cassander had nowhere near the naval power of his rivals. Seleucus was bottled up well inland, and while Egypt was so well defended that it would take a massive operation to get through, Ptolemy also wasn't going to get out to wreak havoc anywhere that mattered. But Antigonid dominance over the seas had one glaring issue, the island of Rhodes. Rhodes, located just off the southwestern coast of Asia Minor,
was one of the most important ports in the eastern Mediterranean. It had excellent shipyards and a substantial merchant fleet that generated tremendous wealth for the small island. Over the past couple of decades, the Rhodians had become the major suppliers of Egyptian grain to the Aegean.
meaning that the shipping from the newly built city of Alexandria to the rest of the Hellenistic world largely ran through Rhodes. Yet despite their close commercial ties with Egypt, The Rodians had maintained a determined neutrality through the previous years and never directly threw in their lot with any of the successors.
It may just have been greed that led Antigonus and Demetrius to turn their attention toward Rhodes, but it was probably a more sober calculation. Egypt's economic strength, and to some extent Ptolemy's influence outside his core area, depended on grain exports.
Ending those would dovetail nicely with the Antigonids' desire to cement their control over the seas. Demetrius, who led the assault on Rhodes, thought it would be an easy task. Take Rhodes and then a campaign in Egypt later in the year would still be on the table.
But the Rhodians were ready for him, and the result was an epic confrontation that captured the imagination of the Greek world. Our understanding of the siege is unusual. At best, for this period, we usually have a single source that is much later than the events it discusses. usually derived second or even third hand from witnesses who actually saw what happened. For the Siege of Rhodes, our major source, Diodorus Siculus, is still much later.
But Diodorus had access to written accounts from both the Rhodian and the Antigonid side, both of them of very high quality. The result is a strikingly detailed view of a key confrontation that doesn't especially favor either party, and that's something we almost never have in the time of the successors. The force Demetrius brought to Rhodes was enormous.
200 warships, including many with powerful catapults, along with 40,000 troops and a variety of Allied hangers-on who anticipated the sack of the rich island. They vastly outnumbered the defenders, who numbered perhaps 6,000 citizens and 1,000 non-citizens. Knowing that the greatest threat during a siege always came from within, a disaffected party who would betray the city to the besiegers,
the Rhodians expelled any foreigners who couldn't be counted on to resist. They also promised freedom to any slaves who were willing to fight, and generous benefits to the families of those who died during the siege. The Rodians also sent out envoys to the Antigonid's many enemies, all of whom would be happy to see their rivals bogged down in a difficult siege for as long as possible.
Ptolemy in particular responded to their pleas for aid, sending blockade runners to slip past Demetrius' fleet at night with badly needed soldiers and supplies. For his part... Demetrius intended to take the five major harbors on the island, isolating the defenders and eventually starving them into submission. That was easier said and planned than done.
The Rhodians already had substantial defenses, including a massive fortification wall that, in many places, rose directly up from the rough ground outside the city, while the harbors had their own walls, moles, and defensive siege engines. The first round of attacks lasted for eight days, beginning with Demetrius's floating siege engines, launching an assault on the large military harbor, and continuing with diversionary attempts on the landward walls.
The fighting was brutal, and the Rhodians didn't give an inch without making the Antigonids pay the price in blood. All four of Demetrius' sophisticated siege ships were eventually destroyed.
and the gains the attackers had made toward taking one of the harbors were rendered null when the Antigonid soldiers there were cut off and forced to surrender. As winter approached, with three or four months already passed, Demetrius had made no major progress despite throwing everything he had at the city.
The king then changed his approach and decided to focus on the landward walls rather than the harbors. Demetrius had previously employed an enormous siege tower during the siege of Salamis 18 months earlier, and he now built another. Like the first, it was reported to be nine stories tall, fitted out with its own artillery on each level as it rose, protected by iron plates and thick oxides. It required more than 3,000 men to push it forward.
And the siege tower was only one aspect of Demetrius' preparations. He also ordered the digging of a system of trenches and ditches to protect against sallies, miners to tunnel under the walls, and the construction of two truly enormous battering rams. each of which needed a thousand men to propel it toward its target. Somehow, once again, the Rodians managed to hold out. They countermined against the sappers, they launched sorties to delay the besiegers' progress whenever they could.
and they continued to harry Demetrius' supply lines at sea with great success. Assault after assault made both sides pay in blood, and slowly but surely Demetrius made progress. His rams destroyed portions of the city walls, and his siege engines brought down towers and killed the defenders in large numbers. The general, Strategos, as the Greeks said, commanding the Rhodians, was killed in one such attack, and Demetrius appeared to be on the brink of victory.
He launched one final attack at night using 1,500 picked men who would silently scale the breaches to get inside the city, while diversionary attacks drew the defenders' strength away. That elite group did manage to penetrate the city. They established a foothold near the theater.
and they might have won the day if the Rodians had panicked. But they didn't. The defenders threw all their reserves at the foothold, including 1,500 troops that had just arrived from Egypt, and cut nearly all of the attackers down in a bitter melee. When dawn broke the next day,
Roads still helped. Demetrius wanted to continue on. After all, he had very nearly taken the city. But circumstances beyond the island impinged on his task. Pressure was growing from the other parts of the Antigonid's domains.
Cassander was on the move in Greece and threatened Athens. Ptolemy's strength had recovered from his crushing defeats. It was time for Demetrius to come to an agreement with the Rhodians. He was able to leave claiming a victory, some hundred hostages and a conditional alliance, but…
The reality of the siege was obvious. The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the wonders of the ancient world, was actually built in celebration of this victory, partially paid for by the sale of Demetrius' siege engines, which he had left outside the city. This was the last time Demetrius Poliarchetis, the besieger of cities, was ever stopped by defenders. The historian Thomas Rose put it like this, quote,
but it's telling that no other city was able to implement it. The situation in Greece required Demetrius' personal attention. Cassander had besieged Athens, and at one point his brother Plastarchus even managed to get inside the city walls. With almost no break between campaigns, Demetrius made his way west and landed in Boetia, then pushed Cassander out of Attica and won a substantial battle, about which we know almost nothing, unfortunately, perhaps near Thermopylae.
He may also have seized Corinth's port on the eastern side of the Isthmus at this point late in 304 BC before retiring to Athens for the winter. While in Athens that winter, Demetrius' behavior became both legendary and notorious.
The Athenians allowed him to dwell in the Parthenon, the home of Athena herself, and he was showered with divine and semi-divine honors. His favorite courtesan, Lamia, acted like a princess and caused scandal with her sexual escapades in the hallowed grounds of the Parthenon.
Nor was Lamia the only object of his affections. The sources explicitly named nine or ten women with whom he was involved just during his time in Athens, and they were surely not the only ones. It's hard to tell exactly what happened here, but it's clear that Demetrius had a good time. and managed to offend the Athenians' delicate sensibilities. Early in 303 BC, Demetrius began a campaign south into the Peloponnese.
In a perfectly choreographed siege, he drove out the last remnants of Ptolemy's forces in Greece from Sicyon, which is near Corinth. He did even better at Corinth itself, which was a far more daunting obstacle. The city's citadel was reputed to be the strongest single fortification in Greece, and Demetrius took it with extraordinary speed. Over the next year, he took most of the Peloponnese, including the key city of Argos.
He and his father even felt confident enough to both rebuff a peace offer from Cassander and refound Philip's old league of Greek cities under their dominance. Demetrius then marched north later in 302 BC with his own troops and some 25,000 soldiers drawn from those Greek cities, looking to finish off Cassander once and for all.
But Cassander hadn't survived 15 years of vicious politicking and war by being a fool. He couldn't defeat the Antigonids on his own, but the old general and his brilliant son were in the Ascendant. and thus an obvious threat to each of the other successors, not just him. So Cassander sent envoys to all of them, Lysimachus in nearby Thrace, Ptolemy in Egypt, and Seleucus in Babylon.
He intended not just to resist Demetrius as he advanced north toward Macedonia, but to bring the war directly to the Antigonid's Asian possessions as well, forcing them to divide their strength and fight on multiple fronts. The stage was now set for the Fourth War of the Successors. Demetrius' northward push toward Macedonia was another masterpiece of strategic and tactical command.
He took cities, founded defensive strongpoints to secure his line of retreat and supply lines, he ejected Cassander's garrisons, and then used the threat of direct invasion to keep Cassander in one place while he cut his enemy's supply lines. Had he been able to stick around in northern Greece, he almost certainly would have succeeded in either forcing a decisive battle or penning Cassander into a city and then besieging it.
But events in Asia intervened, and Demetrius was forced to make another hasty and unsatisfying peace with Cassander. Lysimachus, the king of Thrace, had invaded the westernmost Antigonid possessions in Asia Minor. Antigonus marched west from Syria to meet him. The old general was now well past 80 years old, and even four years before he'd struggled to maintain command in the field.
Still, he was able to drive back Lysimachus, who retreated to the northern parts of Anatolia while he waited for Seleucus to arrive from Babylon. Ptolemy, for his part, launched a somewhat half-hearted invasion of Phoenicia and then withdrew before the winter.
Demetrius quickly recovered the coastal cities that had either outright fallen to Lysimachus or had wavered in their loyalties to the Antigonids, and he joined his father in winter quarters as 302 BC turned into 301. At some point in there, it's not exactly clear when,
The younger king found time to defeat an army led by Cassander's brother, Plastarchus, capturing some 6,000 soldiers as they attempted to disembark from their ships. Winter weather wrecked most of the rest of the fleet before they even made it ashore. Only 33 of the 500 ships survived, and Plastarchus made it to shore by clinging to a piece of wreckage. The Allied successors struggled to keep their armies together over the winter.
Many of Lysimachus' forces deserted to Antigonus, and the king of Thrace had thousands of their countrymen executed as a lesson to the others. Seleucus was reported to have 500 elephants at the beginning of his campaign, but 100 of them died over the difficult winter in Cappadocia. But 400 of the elephants did survive, and in the spring,
Lysimachus linked up with Seleucus somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Ankara. The two armies maneuvered over the summer of 301 BC and eventually met sometime in late August or early September of that year on the plain of Ipsus. Again, we can't be sure of its precise location, but Ipsos was probably somewhere in Phrygia, in the central part of Anatolia. The two armies were truly enormous. Antigonus and Demetrius had 80,000 soldiers under their command.
While Lysimachus and Seleucus had probably 75,000, but their 400 elephants substantially outnumbered the 75 available to the Antigonids. Our sources for the battle aren't great, but the dispositions of the armies seem to have been pretty standard. with the infantry phalanxes in the center and then the cavalry on the flanks. Demetrius commanded almost all of the Antigonid heavy cavalry and faced Seleucus' son, Antiochus. Demetrius charged in and scattered the Allies' cavalry.
but he was unable to break the central phalanx. So Lucas's elephants managed to screen him and keep him away from the main battle, and it was there that the decisive action took place. Antigonus himself was in command of his infantry phalanx in the center. which broke under pressure from Lysimachus and the elephants. The old general refused to leave the battlefield, and he went down fighting, pierced by a hail of javelins.
He had been waiting for his son to come to his rescue, one source says, and died before Demetrius could get there. The outcome of the battle was clear. The king was dead. Most of Antigonus' army was dead on the battlefield with him, or captured by the victors, or they had run so far that they couldn't be rounded up. Demetrius himself fled with whatever he could scrape together, a little over 5,000 men, a tiny fraction of the total that had begun the campaign.
and managed to reach Ephesus, where his fleet was waiting. But he had left his father's body behind on the battlefield of Ipsos. One king was dead, the last of the old guard who had served both Philip and Alexander. and Demetrius had a long road to walk to get back to relevance in the great power games. Thanks to this crushing victory, Seleucus and Ptolemy were now secure in their kingdoms. In fact,
The basic boundaries of the Ptolemaic kingdom would be more or less stable from this point until its end with the death of Cleopatra 270 years later. The outlines of the Hellenistic world, which would last for another two centuries or more, were becoming clear. That's where we'll pick up next time on Tides of History, with the final round of wars between the successors and the world they were in the process of building.
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