Successors of Alexander the Great

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To the strongest.

Those were the immortalized, fabled last words of Alexander the Great.

When he died in Babylon after a short and sudden illness on the 11th of June 323 BC, aged just 32.

In his 13-year reign, he had conquered the mighty Persian Empire and forged one of the largest empires the world had yet seen, stretching from Greece to the Indian subcontinent.

His achievements have been the talk of countless books and podcast episodes, but the story of the chaos that erupted after his death is even more fascinating.

This chaos is epitomized by those fabled last words themselves, to the strongest.

These words were an answer, an answer by Alexander to one of his generals who had approached his deathbed.

The general had asked to whom Alexander left his empire.

Alexander had simply replied, To cratis do, to the strongest.

Now unfortunately, it's very likely that Alexander did not pass from this world with those legendary final words.

However, fictional or not, they have come to epitomise the titanic struggle for power that followed his death.

Alexander's death was unexpected.

Aged just 32, he left no clear heir to the throne.

His only son was illegitimate.

His wife, a Bactrian princess called Roxana, was pregnant at the time of Alexander's death, and she would ultimately give birth to a son.

But that son, although Alexander's sole legitimate heir, would be incapable of ruling for years.

Alexander also had a brother, an elder half-brother in fact, called Arideus.

But Arideus had a condition that meant that he was incapable of ruling without help.

It had also saved his life.

Alexander therefore had not considered Aridaeus a threat to his rule.

It would ultimately be the incapable Arideus and Roxanna's newborn son, who the Macedonians would name as Alexander's regal successors, joint kings.

But everyone knew that their actual power was non-existent.

Real power lay with Alexander's former generals, experienced commanders who had served with Alexander throughout his campaigns and been critical to the king's many military successes.

It was these generals, all larger-than-life figures, who would decide the fate of Alexander's empire and help forge the Hellenistic world that emerged from it.

These were the successors, and it's their story that we are covering today.

After putting down a soldier mutiny almost immediately after Alexander died, The generals who had outlived their king in Babylon divided the spoils of Alexander's empire amongst themselves.

Regions were given out to these generals almost as prizes for their senior positions and for outliving Alexander.

But Macedonian control over many of these regions was incredibly fragile.

These generals would have to deal with rebellions and revolts that quickly broke out across the empire, stretching from Bulgaria to Afghanistan.

The biggest rebellion broke out in Greece, where a number of city-states spearheaded by Athens launched a massive revolt.

It was called the Lamian War, after a city in northern Greece where the central siege of this revolt took place.

This revolt would ultimately be put down.

Athens would surrender, but only after several battles on land and sea and over a year of fighting.

In the initial years after Alexander the Great's death, his fracturing empire was effectively ruled by his three most senior surviving generals.

The two kings were totemic figureheads.

Real power lay with these commanders.

These three generals were Perdiccas, Antipater and Craterus.

Perdicus ruled in Asia, east of the Aegean, and controlled what had been Alexander's all-conquering army.

Antipater ruled in Europe, in Alexander's home region of Macedonia.

He was the eldest of the three, a wily old statesman in his 70s, who had served Alexander as governor of Macedonia for more than a decade.

Supporting Antipater was Craterus, the most revered general that had served Alexander the Great.

The idea was that all three would rule Alexander's empire until Alexander's son, the boy king, confusingly also called Alexander, came of age.

All three were united through marriages.

Both Perdiccas and Craterus married daughters of Antipater.

Think of this almost as a Macedonian triumvirate.

But, despite this apparent closeness, the relations between these three were strained from the beginning, and they were unable to contain the desires of equally ambitious generals that supposedly served them.

These were generals like Antigonus, governor of an important province in Asia Minor, present-day Anatolia, who became an enemy of Perdiccas.

There was also Ptolemy, arguably the man who triggered the first great war between these successors barely two years after Alexander the Great's death.

Almost as soon as Alexander the Great died, Ptolemy had seized control of the wealthy province of Egypt.

Over the following years, he strengthened up his power base in the region, determined to oppose Perdicus and his supremacy.

In 321 BC, Ptolemy made his move.

At that time, Alexander the Great's body was being transported from Babylon to be buried in Macedonia on Perdiccas' orders.

Alexander's body had been placed in a beautiful carriage, adorned with gold and shaped like a temple.

It had taken two years to build.

Whilst this elaborate temple on wheels was slowly making its way through Syria, Ptolemy hijacked it.

He had already bribed the soldiers guarding the carriage and then proceeded to escort it back to Egypt where he oversaw Alexander's burial, an incredibly symbolic and prestigious event.

The die was cast.

Perdicus reacted by launching a full-scale invasion of Egypt with his army, more than 50,000 strong, determined to depose Ptolemy and retrieve Alexander's body.

But Perdiccas soon found himself fighting on two fronts.

In the meantime, his alliance with Antipater and Craterus had broken down, the triumvirate had shattered.

Antipater and Craterus had become convinced that Perdiccas was plotting against them, and to be fair, Perdiccas hadn't helped matters, because in the meantime, he had aligned himself with another faction, a royal one.

Alexander the Great's male relatives might have been weak and controllable, but the women in his family were a different story.

Olympias, the formidable mother of Alexander the Great and adored matriarch of the Macedonian Empire, teamed up with her sole surviving child.

Her name was Cleopatra, the full sister of Alexander the Great.

Both Olympias and Cleopatra hated Antipater.

In their efforts to survive in this turbulent post-Alexander world, they made an irresistible offer to Perdicus.

An offer of marriage to the Princess Cleopatra.

Perdiccas agreed to it.

It was an offer that this ambitious general simply could not turn down.

By doing this he married into the royal family, but he also shunned his current wife, Antipater's daughter, and made his desires for the throne clear to see.

Such overt imperial desires threatened Antipater and Craterus and forced them to act.

And so, at the same time that Perdiccas invaded Egypt, hundreds of miles to the north, Antipater and Craterus crossed into Asia with their own army to battle Perdiccas's forces, increasing the size and scale of this first great civil war, the first successor war.

Perdiccas and Craterus would both perish during this civil war, one murdered by his own officers, the other trampled underfoot and falling from his horse in a cavalry clash.

Antipater would survive, but not for long.

Within a year he too was dead, dying of old age.

He attempted to create a new imperial order after the war at a place called Triparadasus, keeping Alexander's empire together.

But it proved a forlorn hope.

Within a year of Antipater's death, civil war had broken out once more.

The empire would permanently fracture as various generals rose to the fore and attempted to carve out their own territories.

Antigonus, Eumenes and Seleucus in Asia, Cassander and Polyperchon in Greece and Macedonia, Ptolemy in Egypt, and so on.

The following years would be marked by unrivalled chaos in ancient history.

Generals who had once served alongside each other under Alexander the Great as brothers-in-arms must now lead armies tens of thousands strong over thousands of kilometers to fight each other.

From the plains of Persia to the narrow strait of the Dardanelles, titanic battles occurred on land and at sea, alongside sieges of cities with monumental new contraptions, think catapults and iron-plated towers.

The wars of these successors are some of the most extraordinary yet brutal in history.

Within a decade, these successors had murdered almost all surviving members of Alexander the Great's royal family, and the winners of this chaotic struggle became kings in their own right, forging the famous kingdoms of the Hellenistic world, the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt, the Antigonid Kingdom in Macedonia, and the Seleucid Empire in Asia.

Alexander the Great may have forged a massive empire, but the legacy of his conquests were determined by his successors, some of the most remarkable military figures in ancient history.

The historian Justin, writing much later, famously remarked,

Never before, indeed, did Macedonia or any other country abound with such a multitude of distinguished men, whom Philip I and afterwards Alexander had selected with such skill that they seemed to have been chosen not so much to attend them to war, as to succeed them on the throne.

Who then can wonder that the world was conquered by such officers, when the army of the Macedonians appeared to be commanded not by generals but by princes, men who would never have found antagonists to cope with them if they had not quarreled with one another.

While Macedonia would have had many Alexanders instead of one, had not fortune inspired them with mutual emulation for their mutual destruction.

Today, we're going to delve into the story of these generals, these successes.

My guest is Dr.

Graham Wrightson, Associate Professor of History at South Dakota State University.

Graham is an expert on ancient warfare at the time of Alexander and his successors, and has written extensively on the military campaigns of these fascinating figures that followed Alexander.

Graham, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Thank you.

Pleasure to be here.

Now, we have on the ancients recorded more than 550 episodes over the last five years, Graham.

And I've yet ever to do an episode on what I would say is perhaps my favourite pet topic in all of ancient history until today.

The successors of Alexander the Great, Graham.

Personally, I feel that this is a topic that more and more people, a general public, are starting to hear about and are starting to get more interested in.

And you always hear phrases like it's more Game of Thrones than game of thrones but i think there's some truth to it i think people didn't realize how extraordinary this period of ancient history is yeah as you say this rotation of kings and the game of thrones and all the assassinations and all that different stuff even within the successes even the first 10 years or so is just a crazy exciting period and then it sort of tails off a little bit when they all start dying and you you get fewer power players involved It feels like the logical place to start would be actually with the death of Alexander the Great.

So, Graham, can you first of all give us a sense of the geopolitical context of the world that has been carved out by Alexander just before he dies?

So, let's say May 323 BC, what does the world look like?

For those who don't remember your school education, but you have the Greek city-states never unified as one country of Greece.

So, you have Athens and Sparta and Thebes, your three main ones at the end of the or the beginning of the 300s through the mid-4th century.

And Alexander's father, Philip II, took over, took Macedon as this little kingdom, and then progressively, over his long reign, conquers all these different regions, mostly the Greek city, states, and the areas they controlled.

At the Battle of Chaeronea in 338, he defeats the Theban-Athenian alliance and then takes rule of Greece as hegemon as leader and creates the League of Corinth.

And rather than necessarily conquering Greece, Macedon is the forcibly elected leader of an amalgamation of Greek states.

And for Philip, the invasion of Persia, which he plans and begins, is this propaganda to cement his role as leader of Greece, that he's going to then invade Persia.

So that's the Greek context.

Rome is doing its own thing over in Italy.

And you have the Greek city-states in Sicily that are connected but separate.

And then you have the Persian Empire that is the biggest in the world at the time, controls most of Western Asia and Egypt.

And Macedon has been in contact with Persia for a while, as have the Greeks and all sorts of different background stuff that we're going to deal with.

But Alexander begins the invasion of Persia as a continuation of his father's policies to cement his new position as the forcibly elected ruler of this League of Corinth alliance of Greek states.

And the Greeks are not happy to start with, so he has to put down the revolt of Thebes almost as soon as he becomes king and destroys the entire city and enslays everybody except for Pindar's house, the poet, because he loves Pindar.

And so that sort of keeps the Greeks in line, and he forces them to send him 7,000 soldiers as their contribution to the campaign army, and then they go off and invade Persia.

And so it's initially planned as a punishment for the Persian wars against Greece.

But Alexander just keeps on going and he conquers the whole Persian Empire and refuses Darius's offer of splitting the kingdom and marriage with his daughter and all this other different stuff that goes on early on.

And he conquers, and there's a split in the scholarship as to whether he chooses to turn around in India or whether he's forced to turn around by his own soldiers.

I'm on the choice side because my supervisor is the main proponent of that, Waldemar Heckel.

So he, in my view, rightfully continued the argument raised by others earlier that Alexander, if you go around the borders of all of Alexander's empire, he goes about two kilometers, I think it is, out past the Persian army and then makes sacrifices and then changes direction.

He does the same thing in India, and there's various other different arguments.

So Alexander conquers Persia and goes a little further to make his empire bigger, and then he turns around and has his new plans.

When he comes back to Babylon, the center, just new center of his new empire, as opposed to Persis, which was the center of the Persian Empire, he specifically chooses Babylon as his to connect with the the Hangans of Babylon and all the Babylonian history of Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi and all sort of stuff.

And then he dies when he's in there.

So he dies very shortly after finishing his Indian conquests.

But by the time he dies, you know, Egypt, Western Asia, they've been ruled by the Macedonians for over a decade by this point.

So they're not necessarily close to leaving.

He's founded cities in all these places.

He's implemented Greek settlers in all these places.

So he's begun the process in his Western conquests of integration of conquered peoples with the Hellenistic culture that comes around.

So when he dies, there's no real threat in most places anyway, of separation from Alexander, right?

And part of that is his propaganda, presenting himself as the savior of these places.

He modeled himself on Cyrus the Great, who famously...

freed the Babylonians from their evil Persian dominance, even though he's doing the same thing.

And he, you know, you get the Cyrus Cylinder where he claims that he has

welcomed in as a friend to Babylon without a fight and all this other propagandistic, ridiculous concepts.

So Alexander does the same stuff with his personal historians, saying that he's the savior, freeing the people from Persian dominance, but now you have a new overlord, right?

And you're just not supposed to realize that point.

So in most of those areas, it's fine.

In India, it's newly conquered, but because it's newly conquered, they still have the same loyalty to the people that Alexander put in charge for the most part and obviously he's left garrisons and new cities in all these different places that he's been to so when he dies in 323 it creates a vacuum not that leads to separation of the whole empire but a vacuum for who's going to rule the empire in his stead because his one illegitimate son is a child and his wife is pregnant still with what turns out to be his legitimate only legitimate son and so his generals who've been the ones fighting for him obviously they didn't expect him to die so young and they didn't expect this power vacuum at the very top of the kingdom to appear and in all argiad history it's a whole history of civil war violence of brothers killing brothers and all sorts of fun stuff going on in the early macedonian history and that was when it was a small kingdom so now it's a massive empire it's even more to the fore as to what's going to happen and so The cultural context is that he's begun the integration in these different places with all these cities he's founded, and that that remains through the hellenistic period especially in asia um and egypt the one problem area was greece uh which we'll come back to but his generals have to decide what are we going to do do we favor the illegitimate son that's already alive do we favor the pregnant wife or do we favor his brother who happens to be older but is not trusted because of his epilepsy or whatever other

he's got something which means that he can't rule without help he needs he needs help to rule yeah just like Henry VI in England, for those British folk who know that stuff, right?

He has bouts of

whatever it is, mental disorder, where he disappears from being able to rule.

And so the generals aren't sure that he's a reliable king.

And so there's a dispute between, even amongst the generals themselves, over who they follow.

And also who is the most important general.

Alexander never had.

necessarily a designated right-hand man after his friend Hephaestion dies, just before he does.

does.

It's Perdiccas, and we get the statement that Perdiccas was handed the ring by Alexander on his deathbed and said, Perdiccas, supposedly, according to Plutarch, says, who does this go to?

And he says, to the strongest, and he's giving it to Perdiccas, so Perdiccas takes that to mean that he is the designated chosen successor as the strongest.

And the others say that that's not what he meant at all, and that...

you were supposed to give it to the person who proved themselves to be the strongest.

And that's assuming you take Plutarch and the other sources at their word that this actually happened.

We don't know what actually happened in Alexander's deathbed room.

So the generals fight amongst themselves, and immediately after Alexander dies, we get this sort of mini rebellion between Meleager, this really insignificant general, who claims that he's speaking for the common soldier when he wants one person, and that the main generals are the elite cavalry general people who are too fancy for the common soldiers.

And so Meleager posits himself in opposition to Perdiccas.

And there's this mini-civil war, and then Perdiccas forces them to hand over Meleager, who he and his ringleaders get trampled by elephants in execution for their resistance and all that fun stuff.

So, there's all sorts of different things going on.

So, immediately after his death, it's who is going to be the next king that the generals will back.

That's their main decision that they have to make.

Graham, I think, in that, I think, even just highlighting that immediate bloodshed that occurs right after Alexander the Great's death, you've highlighted straight away that the chaos that really emerges and happens throughout this period following his death.

But it feels like then that with Alexander the Great's death, unexpectedly, aged 32, the fact that he has no clear successor in the fact that he says he's got one child who's illegitimate, his wife is pregnant, but they don't know at that time if it is going to be a son, although it will be a son, and a brother who is older, but as you say, a guy called Arideas.

but is incapable of ruling on his own.

And then you throw into the mix these generals who'd been fighting for Alexander.

And I guess being with the context, you know, they are, I always like picturing them as mini Alexanders because they're kind of the same kind of charismatic leaders fighting in the front ranks of their men, very confident, and you can say very arrogant leaders too, willing to serve under Alexander.

But as you say, if the hierarchy amongst generals is there and there's no clear air,

is it that they quickly go from brothers in arms to kind of the most hostile of enemies because they're not willing to serve amongst one of their fellow former generals.

They don't see one of their former generals as more superior to them kind of thing.

Is it that kind of ideology we need to understand that kind of mindset with these generals?

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, these generals, Alexander sort of created a somewhat level playing field amongst his commanders so that the army functions better in that context.

Earlier in the army, he had Parmenion, who was his father's general, who was clearly the number two.

But later on, it seems to be a a phaision but phaistion's not the best commander so it's sort of perdicas and craterus at the same time and he has sort of a cavalry general and an infantry general but it's not clear which one is superior so that when alexander dies there's no phaistion which makes it easier for the squabbles to begin i guess perdicas claims it's him because he's there when alexander dies craterus the infant old infantry general has been released from service with 10 000 veterans like a year before and he's halfway back to macedon when he learns of alexander's death he's like well i'm just as important as Perdiccas why is Perdiccas in charge and so these generals they believe strongly that they are you know no worse than the other person they are they're equals and so they fight for recognition there's two levels of generals I guess you get at the top you have Craterus and Perdiccas who fought with Alexander as his main generals then you have Antipater who has been governing Macedon previously he worked for Philip II Alexander's father and was the same level as Parmenian.

He sort of views himself as the most important individual left behind because he's senior to everybody and he's the generation above all these different upstarts.

Like he's not fought with Alexander, right?

And then below that, you have the generals who are named and had positions but weren't like senior commanders, like Ptolemy, who goes on to take Egypt and Seleucus and Lysimachus and Leonatus, the bodyguard, and Polypercone, who comes out later, and Pusestas, the bodyguard, who's become governor of one of the satrapies.

So you get those level people, and Antigonus, who's a governor of a satrapy, they decide that they want to strike out to better their own positions, too.

And so Ptolemy heads off to claim Egypt before anyone can tell him not to.

And Seleucus heads off to claim Babylon before anyone can tell him not to.

And Craterus declares his independence.

And the complicating factor is the rebellion of the Greeks.

Immediately after Alexander dies, dies, Greece rebels, at least through Athens, and they begin what we call the Lamian War, because of the main battles around the siege of the city of Lamia in northern Greece, in Thessaly.

And it's headed by, you know, a successful general Antipater, as the governor of Macedon and Greece has to deal with that.

And he goes down and fights and loses to start with.

So he calls for assistance.

And Cratras is the closest.

So he comes with Neoptolemus, another general, and Leonatus, and they go and they fight.

Leonatus already, it seems, is aiming at kingship himself because he's put Philas out to marry Alexander's sister, who becomes a key figure in these early successor squabbles.

Who gets to marry Cleopatra, Alexander's sister, because that's the closest you can get to the royal family, right?

As a man, you can't marry the sons, right?

So you've got to marry the sisters.

And Alexander doesn't have a daughter.

He dies in battle against the Greeks, so that gets rid of one of these upstart generals.

These generals start biting the dust very quickly, either when they're trying to carve out their own power in this difficult time, or when there is no clear royal success of Alexander the Great.

They're all trying to get that prestige and vying for power.

And there's that clear rivalry between all of them.

And Leonardus is a case in point, one of these figures very early on, who in and which you've also highlighted right there, Graham, it's not just internal troubles that seize this empire straight away with all these competing generals and people thinking, well, I should be responsible for this and so on.

You also have, I guess, those external threats in regards to those people who had been in the empire now see a chance with this instability to revolt.

And the Greek cities are a good example of that.

Yeah, exactly.

So the Lamian War is this,

it's a crucial event, not because the Greeks win their freedom, but because they win their first couple of engagements, and that changes the presentation.

and propaganda ability of the generals who are involved.

So Antipater loses some face because he can't defeat the Greeks by himself.

So, he has to invite Craterus in for assistance.

And Leonatus dies, obviously, so that doesn't help.

But Craterus wins the battle, wins the war, but he has to call in help from White Cletus, who brings the navy.

Another name, right?

Yeah.

And he was a battalion commander who arrives late.

There's two Cletuses.

The Black Cletus is the one killed by Alexander.

White Cletus survives.

So he wins the Lamian War on the navy.

Craterus wins on land, and they subdue Athens in the name of Antipater, who's still nominally in charge.

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So, Graham, I think you've highlighted there: you know, there are numerous characters, there are numerous events that happen almost straight away following Alexander the Great's death, and too many figures to follow in one episode.

But let's talk about the sources first of all, because if we have so many names surviving, do we actually have quite a rich record of sources covering these successes and the years that follow Alexander the Great's death and what happens?

Yeah, so we have five main sources for Alexander himself.

So we have Arian, Plutarch's Life of Alexander that's paired with Julius Caesar, Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, and then there's Justin's summary of the history of Pompeius Trogus.

But all five historians are Romans, and they might be writing in Greek, some of them for a Greco-Roman audience, but they're still primarily Romans writing after the Romans have taken over everything.

And they're they're using contemporary sources of Alexander, but they're none of them are closer than 250 years after Alexander died.

So for modern historians, for my students, when I teach them, this is hard for them to get their head around that, like they're reading primary sources of a period that is very distant from what they're writing about, right?

It's like studying American history, I always say, when you have only modern sources talking about the American Revolution, that there's no contemporary documents from the event that created created America as the USA that is now not surviving.

So it's a strange concept to think about primary sources as not being connected directly to their period.

But Alexander is comparatively very well resourced that we have these five sources.

After Alexander, we hardly have any sources at all that tell us what's going on with the successes.

We have Diodorus, and we have to rely on him because he's pretty much our only one.

And we have the fragmentary history of Arian successes, And we get Plutarch's lives of a few of these famous generals, like Demetrius and Eumenes.

But he unfortunately doesn't give us lives of all of the generals, which would be helpful, right?

If we had a life of Perdiccas or a life of Craterus or a life of Antipater even, or a life of Cassander, we could fit all these different people into the place.

But because we have these just Diodorus who gets things wrong and misses things out, it's hard.

piece together.

So I became an ancient historian because I like jigsaw puzzle with history, that you have some aspects of the knowledge and you have to piece together and interpret what it actually says in terms of where

and when we put all these things together.

And so, that's interesting.

Diodorus, for example, there's this concept of high chronology and low chronology in the successes that he might have missed an entire year of history that he's describing in his text, and that our dating for stuff is completely off because he's messed things around.

So, our sources for the successes in particular is very problematic, And then we don't really get useful sources again until the

well 220s really, when you get into the Roman historians of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies.

So we have this sort of

almost a century of stuff where we don't really know what's going on.

And with the successes, that's an interesting aspect.

So we have to not only those written sources, but we have to piece together inscriptions and other archaeology from areas that these people are conquering that allow us to sort of figure things out slowly or paparai evidence comes in and letters and so on.

So, our sources are very difficult to piece together, especially when we have so many moving parts, as we've already said, with all these different names doing all these different stuff.

Some of them last like a month, some of them last six months, some last a few years.

You know, they're all fighting each other.

So, we start off with the three at the top, and everybody else underneath is nominally underneath.

But then very quickly, that changes, and the ones at the top disappear, which is the problem, I guess, that I already mentioned Antipater, Craterus, and Perdiccas are our three at the top, and they sort of remain.

But then when all three of them die relatively quickly in space of time, everybody else is of the same level.

But that is important to highlight straight away, isn't it, Graham, without going into too many names, but those initial years following Alexander the Great's death, there are those three senior generals of Antipater, still in Macedonia, Craterus, the old infantry general, and Perdiccas.

But all of them, within four years of Alexander the Great's death, they are all dead, either assassinated, killed on the battlefield, or in Antipater's case, seems to die of old age.

So good old Antipater, that seems to be a bit of an exception from the rule.

And then, as you say, following that, you get the rise to the fore of these other big figures who come to dominate the successors, like, as you say, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Seleucus, Eumenes, Demetrius, Lysimachus, and so on.

We could talk about all those generals in depth each, but I don't think we have the time to.

What I would like to ask, though, overarching what they will do and the fighting they will do and the carving out of their own parts of what was once Alexander the Great's empire, how important for all of them is Alexander the Great's memory?

Because this feels central.

Yeah, it is central.

I mean, Perdiccas, who is sort of our big player for the first year until he invades Egypt and then his own troops kill him because he crossed the Nile not once, but twice and watched his own men get eaten by crocodiles and all the funerals.

It was crocodiles, wasn't it?

Yeah, the river-dwelling creatures.

Crocodiles, yeah.

Yeah, the crocodiles eaten soldiers.

And so his own soldiers kill him for having them eaten by crocodiles, basically.

So he disappears from the playing field.

Craterus tries to invade on behalf of Antipater, but he loses in battle against Eumenes and gets trodden under his own horse when he's leading a cavalry charge.

He falls off and gets trampled to death.

And in the same battle, Neoptolemus is on the other wing, fights a personal duel with Eumenes.

Apparently, Eumenes kills Neoptolemus in this Homeric duel of generals.

So, three generals disappear very closely together: Craterus, Perdiccas, the two main ones, and Neoptolemus leaving Eumenes behind as this non-Macedonian Greek general with an army and no boss now that Perdiccas dies elsewhere because that battle takes place in Asia Minor while Perdiccas invades Egypt.

When Perdiccas dies and that news arrives to Eumenes, he's like, oh, what do I do now?

So, we get this whole change.

We get Triparadasos trying to make this organization cementing Ptolemy in Egypt because he's now unremovable.

And so they have to decide, okay, we've got to let Ptolemy keep Egypt because we can't get rid of him.

So what are we going to do with the rest of you guys?

And so Antipater tries to broker a piece between everybody.

And then Antipater dies of old age, as he said shortly afterwards.

And then everybody's just out for themselves at that point.

And so they're all off doing their own thing.

They start picking up where they left off, basically, fighting as they go.

But Alexander's memory is a key point, right?

That's why Ptolemy steals his body and takes it to Alexandria in Egypt, because he knew his power in Egypt depended on Alexander as the pharaoh before him.

So by creating a shrine to Alexander's memory in the city founded by Alexander as the new capital city of this new

Ptolemaic Egypt.

And Alexandria obviously has, you know, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world with the lighthouse of Pharos and stuff, right?

And it becomes, well, the cultural center of the Hellenistic world with this library and university.

That's all connected to Alexander's memory, right?

They are specifically connected to that.

And Perdiccas,

his downfall often comes from his threat to execute one of Alexander's relatives, and his own soldiers and the other generals are like, no, you can't do that.

And so he has to backtrack on his supposed threat.

And he tries to marry Alexander's sister.

and at that point his soldiers are unhappy because it seems like he's aiming for the kingship himself rather than governing for the boy that he's supposed to be doing and so that's part of the reason why he gets killed and then Cassandra does the same thing later in trying to marry in and we get Alexander's mother who we haven't mentioned yet who's also a big power player in trying to clear the playing field for her grandson and play these generals off against each other long enough that her son can come of age.

Her grandson, sorry.

And that backfires horribly.

And there's Philip Aridaeus, the brothers, wife, Eurydice, Cleopatra.

Cleopatra and Eurydice supposedly lead armies against each other and they take a battle against each other.

And Cleopatra's army is persuaded to switch sides.

And so Eurydice gets executed and all sorts of fun stuff.

And then Olympias kills Cassandra's family.

And Cassandra then kills Olympias and her family, all sorts of fun stuff.

But for them, it's all about Alexander, right?

The whole concept of this initial period of the successes is how do we best connect ourselves to Alexander?

Whether that's through marrying his sister, through being married to his brother, through being also descended from his father, so being one of his cousins, basically, right?

Or step-siblings or half-siblings.

All these different people are trying to connect themselves to Alexander in some way or other.

either through control of his sons, through marriage to his relatives, or through being his relative as his mother, right?

And that's arguably why the end of the successor period when we leave and go to sort of them founding their independent kingdoms, that doesn't really happen until all these generals not only killed each other, but they've wiped out Alexander's entire family, basically.

Right.

So Olympias gets murdered.

Cleopatra gets killed.

Philip Aradeus's brother gets killed.

The two sons get killed.

So once the entire family is done, then it shifts away from Alexander's memory.

It's like, because we've murdered these people, we can't connect to Alexander's memory because then you remember that we murdered his family.

So now we have to build a different connection to our own personal governance of these kingdoms.

And so it becomes less about family ties and to the propagandistic ideals of Alexander the Great now as the wonderful conqueror.

And that's where we get the idea, at least I think that's where we get the ideas of Alexander being a god coming in too, that you're connecting your kingship to this divine figure this semi-divine heroic figure right you get the heroic cult of Alexander is promoted instead of the literal family connection that is the case for the early successes then we get Ptolemy especially promotes the divine aspect in Egypt where you have divine pharaohs anyway marrying as gods and you get the Seleucids promoting connection to divine Alexander and he's on their coins as this Dionysus Heracles figure in their iconography And you get the Antigonids doing the same thing, that they claim to be the rulers of Macedon through this connection to divine Alexander, even though they're not directly connected.

Just to kind of summarize there, because you touched on so many great points, Graham.

Even though Alexander the Great doesn't leave any adult sons who would immediately take over, although that would have been troublesome anyway, the fact that there are all those relatives of Alexander the Great who have massive roles in those early years of the successors, including his sister, his full sister, who's called, confusingly, is also called Cleopatra.

But as you say, the women around Alexander the Great, his mum Olympias, famously played by Angelina Jolie in the Alexander 2004 epic, and his full sister Cleopatra become major players.

Generals wanting to marry Cleopatra, as you mentioned earlier.

Olympias being this formidable figure herself and actively leading in battle and trying to secure the throne for her grandson.

But as time goes on, these generals, if they can't align themselves with Alexander the Great's royal family, they kill off these royal family members brutally.

And does that pave the way that, you know, after a few decades or so, those generals, those successors who have managed to survive, like Ptolemy in Egypt and so on, now they no longer have any of those royal figureheads, they've done away with them.

Is that when they go from trying to align themselves with royalty to actually deciding, I might as well declare myself a king in my own right.

Yeah, so Cassander marries Thessaloniki.

He's one with his successful marriage eventually as the half-sister of Alexander.

So she's another daughter of Philip II.

And obviously, he founds the city, modern city of Thessalonica, is named after Thessaloniki, right?

The one survival of the Cassandrian stuff.

But his death and all his brothers are killed by Olympias, and then he is eventually killed too.

And so his dynasty with Thessaloniki as a connection to Alexander is ended.

And Demetrius comes back and takes over kingdom of Macedon, squabbling a little bit with Pyrrhus, but eventually it ends up with Demetrius' successors, the Antigonids, becoming kings of Macedon because that last connection is disappeared.

But it's not until we get to these squabbles of our sort of what I call the four main surviving successor kings, where you get five initially.

So you have Cassander in Macedon and Greece, Antigonus and and Demetrius, who rule in what is now Turkey.

You have Lysimachus ruling in Thrace.

Then you have Seleucus in Babylon and Ptolemy in Egypt are your five main kings.

And they rule throughout the rest of the next 20 years, basically, in their little kingdoms.

And they all fight with each other over who's the most powerful.

And after Antigonus defeats Eumenes and takes over his army, he becomes the most powerful in Asia Minor.

And he starts trying to dictate to the other kings.

And so we get this alliance of the other kings against Antigonus that ends with the Battle of Ipsus in 301, where Antigonus is killed and Demetrius doesn't get back in time to save his father and flees and becomes the definitive pirate king for about a decade, where he's a king in name, but has no country except for his ships and he sails around.

But Antigonus is the first one to actually use the title king for the first time in the 310s after the death of all these different family members.

is really when the last son is dead, and Polypercone and Olympias are dealt with.

Then he has himself and his son Demetrius declared kings, and then the other successors follow suit.

They're like, well, if Antigonus can be king, we can be kings too.

And so they declare themselves Pharaoh of Egypt and then king of Babylon.

And then Lysimachus becomes king of Thrace, and Cassander makes himself king of Macedon.

And so Antigonus is sort of the catalyst for these actions in

thinking he has enough power now that he can stand by himself.

And he's still trying to

attack these other kings to reintegrate the empire of Alexander.

Like Antigonus viewed himself as the reinstigator of the full empire.

Although he has his area, he wants to conquer Egypt, which he invades a couple of times, and Babylon, which he successfully invades.

And Seleucus flees to Egypt for safety on one occasion.

So he is trying to reunify Alexander's empire.

And when he's in his most successful period, that's when he calls himself king.

He thinks

he's sufficiently powerful to do that.

And then the others follow suit.

And then, of course, Antigonus dies.

But Demetrius calls himself king, inherited from Antigonus his father, even though he has no kingdom.

It's only when he comes back and takes Macedon from Pyrrhus and Cassander that then he can call himself king of Macedon.

Graham, it's one other thing to highlight there, isn't it?

The geographic areas that they're campaigning in are massive you know a lot of time around the eastern mediterranean but sometimes they you have armies marching from the borders of india all the way back to asia minor so i mean geographically it's such a large area if there's so much warfare do we know much about the makeup of these armies and I guess the navies too of these various successors as generals and then as kings.

Do we know much about the military aspect of their armies that they're using to fight one another?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because that's my specialist area.

So, the Ptolemies in particular, we know quite a lot about Egypt because we have a lot of papyrus evidence that talks about even low-level officers in terms of the grants of land they have.

And we have a few papyri that tell us about musters of troops.

So, we get some names of people and how many soldiers and the specific titles they have and the land they own and all that different stuff.

So, we can reconstruct the Ptolemaic army pretty well from the papyri.

And there's a great book, he'll be annoyed if I don't mention it by my good friend Paul Giostono.

We have a lot of disagreements about stuff, but he has an awesome book on the Egyptian army through pen and sword.

So it's very available.

It's very good.

And so we know a lot about that.

And we have this one interesting text later in the period at the infamous Battle of Raphia, where the Ptolemies fought the Seleucids in this huge battle in the 320s, where Polybius, another Greco-Roman historian who I have an ongoing dispute with, he has this whole text where he describes the Ptolemaic army completely reforming itself.

And they go to Greece and ask for Greek mercenaries, generals, to come and reform and perfect the Egyptian army because it's not as good as it used to be.

And so we have names of these generals, and he gives a description of their training methods and how they were divided into different units and all this different stuff, which we don't have for our other armies.

So for the most part, our knowledge comes from a few battle descriptions where they describe the sizes of the units and at the very least, the type of unit that is involved.

So the most part of all of these from Philip II onwards is a sarissophalanx, which is my special area.

My research was involving reconstructing 48 actual sarissas and then training people to march around as a phalanx to see how easy it was to do that and how quick you could become a functioning phalanx and walk up hills and over rivers and stuff.

And that book I haven't quite finished yet, but it'll be out in a couple of years so they're all sarisophalanx so the main contingent of all of these hellenistic armies all the way through down to even Mithridates of Pontus fighting the Romans in the first century their main unit is their sarissophalanx and so most of our armies throughout the hellistic world regardless of your country that's what they're built on and then they add onto the side of it you know your light cavalry your heavy cavalry your archers your javelin men all these other different components right and my book on combined arms talks about how this this integration happened through the Macedonian system and then takes place in the Hellistic era.

So almost all of the armies are very similarly constructed.

We know that from their heritage and from these battles that they take place.

And they also integrate elephants and the Sebusids have scythe chariots, much to their cost.

And so we know sort of what the unit types are.

And we can somewhat trust our sources when they give us numbers for these units, although numbers in ancient sources are problematic in general.

What we don't have is how you recruited these in all the different places, how they trained, how long they trained for, if the recruitment matches the name of the unit, right?

If we say this unit is called this region, does that mean all its soldiers come from that region, or is it just a name that they've inherited because it originally came from that region?

We don't know.

For sure, the officer levels, that's what I work on right now, is trying to piece together if we can associate that we don't even know the size of the basic regimental unit and all these different things there's still dispute about the size of even regiments in alexander's army so so we have evidence for some stuff

and then there's very sparse evidence for other aspects of armies well when you look at say the roman army for example we know how they trained we know how they were gathered we know how their muster worked we know how they were commanded, where they came from, how they camped, how many people went into each tent and all this different stuff, right?

We don't know any of that for the Macedonian ones.

So, as you say, when it comes to marching over these massive areas, the logistics is crazy to comprehend because we do not know really how these armies marched in these areas.

And there's great books on logistics, famously by Engels on Alexander's army.

And for other different campaigns, we have some evidence like the Anabasis for Xenophon of the 10,000 marching back from Asia Minor back to Greece and the logistics that go into that.

So, we know some of it, and we can comparative look at other armies as I and other scholars do to compare, you know, how much fodder does a horse need, how many camp followers are coming with you.

So when we talk about armies marching, we focus, at least I focus on in battle of the 70,000 soldiers, and you forget that there's at least another 70,000 people in the army going with them as slaves or attendants or their families going on, right?

We know the families were there because

at the famous battle between Eumenes and Antigonus, the two greatest generals of the successors, Eumenes wins the battle, but he gets handed over to execution by his own soldiers because Antigonus captures the baggage train and he captures the families of Andeumenes' soldiers.

And so they, to get their families back, they give up their general.

So we know these armies on campaign are marching with massive numbers of tag-alongs, right?

Whatever you want to call them.

And that's not just in the ancient world.

That happens throughout history.

It's often not written about, but when an army is on campaign, it has a massive train of people going with it.

Even the Seleucid Empire in itself, that goes from Jerusalem at one point out to India, is the biggest of all these successor kingdoms, and it's just huge.

And they start being unable to control their distant territories that become independent because it's just too big.

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Can we talk a bit about the ships as well and the naval elements?

Because is this a period where it's like bigger is better?

Let's get a massive ship and put some catapults and stuff on it and send it against a city or against another army full of big ships.

Yeah, so the navy is very interesting.

There's big naval battles like there have been throughout the Greek world, right?

The Peloponnesian Wars was a big fight between

naval powers in the end, right?

That's what decides it between Athens and Sparta.

But because of the economics of these countries, that they are huge, they have access to the Silk Route now, their own connections, and more merchants, more trade, more wealth in general than the smaller Greek cities, they can put out huge navies and they have huge armies to go with it.

And so we start to see this inclination that bigger is better, as you say.

And so we get these presentations of Demetrius the besieger in particular.

We'll come back to his sieges in a minute, but for navy purposes, he is famous in our historians, even in the Roman historians, for building massive ships.

Normally, you get your triremes, which are your three-decked oars.

By the time we get to the fourth century, we have five pentaremes, hexaremes, which are six decks.

Demetrius supposedly had a heptaremes quite commonly, and then he even goes to an octorme and a nonorem, which are like nine banks of oars in his one ship.

And there's even been a suggestion that he went for a ceremonial ship up to like 18 to 20 banks of oars and stuff, these massive like things.

And practically, some of them didn't work very well, but his ships were big enough.

And he gets his nickname as the besieger for his massive siege of Rhodes that took over 18 months and failed.

And so Heckel and I argue that the nickname he gets is ironic, that he's not a good besieger.

That's why he's called the besieger.

Ptolemy is called the Admiral because he loses a massive sea battle against Demetrius.

And Seleucus is called the elephant general because he gives up India.

for a bunch of elephants.

So these are ironic nicknames the other kings give to each other.

So he's a besieger because he's bad at besieging, but he does have massive siege weaponry.

So he has huge ships.

He ties these massive ships together and puts massive siege towers on the ships and then tows them to the walls of these cities to attack.

He has catapult fire firing catapults on his ships and underwater rams to sort of knock the wall in with this

ram-born ship and stuff.

All the stuff that you can see in the new gladiator movie, The Gladiator 2.

That stuff is basically like Demetrius besieging stuff.

And on land, he builds what's called the Helpolis, the city besieger.

There's this massive 40-story

tower that is so big it needs oxen to pull it into place.

And that's what he relies on taking roads with.

And when the Rhodians dislodge some iron plates and set it on fire, he pulls it out of the way because he doesn't want his pet toy to be destroyed and stuff.

And so he never manages to capture the city because of his uselessness.

And I've written on his ineptitude before on this very subject.

But for him, it seems that size matters, right?

I don't know if he's compensating for something, but he is

certainly into the huge ships and these huge siege towers.

And they don't do very well, it seems

for the most part, which is ironic.

How does it come to an end?

The wars of the successors?

What is ultimately the outcome of this turbulent period?

So, the successor period, either you take it with the death of all the age of generals, or you take it on

when they

become happy with the status quo, I guess.

So my first book and my PhD thesis took the end of the main successor period being the Battle of Ipsus in 301.

The Titanic final battle, isn't it?

Yes, like this huge climatic battle is huge armies.

Like there's 100,000, maybe even 120,000 on one side and almost 80,000 on the other, including all Seleucus's 500 elephants.

Huge battle.

We haven't had that in any Greek warfare beforehand or since on the Greek side, right?

Obviously against the Persians, they had massive armies for Alexander, but the death of Antigonus and the exile of Demetrius as his pirate king sort of establishes the status quo that these other four allied kings, Cassander in Macedon, Wysimachus in Thrace, Seleucus in Asia, and Ptolemy in Egypt, once Antigonus is defeated, they sort of accept each of their status quo.

for the most part, but then they go off and fight each other.

Seleucus, when Cassander is got rid of, comes to take over Macedon and has to go through Thrace.

And we get the Battle of Coropedium, where Seleucus fights Lysimachus.

And you get these two octogenarians leading cavalry charges at the front of their cavalry on horseback with spears and stuff.

As well, I think Seleucus is 79 and Lysimachus is 81 or something.

And they are fighting in the battle, right?

And Lysimachus dies.

in the cavalry charge, supposedly personally killed by Seleucus.

And then Seleucus wins in triumph.

He's going going to march into Macedon and reunify all of Alexander's empire.

And then he's murdered by his corrupt, evil nephew, one of the great villains of the successor period, Ptolemy Caranus, who just gets around causing trouble everywhere.

And so Seleucus's death is generally taken as sort of the end of the successes of the generals of Alexander.

But then you could take Demetrius and Pyrrhus, as I said, who are the next generation, but they are in the same time frame.

And so most people accept that it's Demetrius's reconquest of Macedon from Pyrrhus, and then Pyrrhus's death when he's trying to conquer Argos and Greece from Demetrius and his son Antigonus.

That we really see the end of the successor period with Pyrrhus's death, because then we're into the established kingdoms of the Antigonids in Greece and Macedon, the Seleucids in Asia, and the Ptolemies in Egypt.

And by 270-ish, when Pyrrhus dies, that's when we get the Hellenistic period is established.

No more really is there a realistic concept of the different kings taking over each other's kingdoms and reunifying the mythical empire of Alexander, right?

That whole concept of the propaganda of Alexander now disappears.

And it's no longer an idea of reunifying Alexander's empire, but of establishing your own kingdom.

And that's really the big difference, because Pyrrhus is still trying to theoretically reconstitute Alexander's empire as Alexander's last surviving relative, as his nephew.

But his death, as this sort of ADHD Pyrrhus, as I call him, where he fights all these campaigns and never finishes any of them because a better one comes along, his death sort of ends this era of the concept of a Greek unified empire.

And we get into what we call the Hellenistic period of the kingdoms where they are independent and doing their own thing.

And we get a whole bunch of other different kingdoms arrive in the 270s too, like Pergamum, Greco-Bactria, Parthia, Pontus, all these different ones sort of formulate.

As these kingdoms become isolated or sort of inward-looking, they no longer have the power to call on to

externally conquered places.

And so that changes our viewpoint.

And so then the Hellistic World becomes about solidifying culture rather than reunifying Alexander.

It is so interesting when you look at it seeing on a map, like when Alexander dies in 323 BC, so so that being one empire and then fast forward as you say to the death of pyrrhus so let's say 270 so we've got you know 50 years later and you see how fractured it is but into these different kingdoms but ultimately those kingdoms are the ones that will come into contact with roman and be leading lights in the in the hellenistic period and also as you say there is no longer kind of that that family of alexander the greats you know they've all perished they've been used and they and they've perished in in those years of those successes i mean graham i wish i could ask you more about the economies, about the city-states and other factors, but we have to wrap it up there because it feels almost unfair that I've asked you to do the successes of Alexander the Great in one shot because there are so many names, so many stories and so many things we can talk about.

But hopefully it's given people an idea of just how extraordinary this period is, isn't it?

It is like despite the relative lack of sources we have, there is still so much to talk about about these figures who it feels like they are unparalleled in the whole of ancient history yeah exactly i mean i i've always loved the successive period because there are gaps but there's so much to talk about within those gaps sometimes in ancient history you get gaps and you don't really know what's going on and there's not much going on as far as we can tell right hence the concept of dark ages appearing and all that different stuff right but here there's so much going on it's surprising that we don't know so much and we get that 50 year gap from choropidium down to salasia in two hundred twenty including while Pyrrhus is in Rome, where we don't really know what's going on in Greece.

We have like a 50-year period where we have nothing really that explains all the changes we see in the 220s.

So it's fascinating.

And there's so many stories, especially in the first, I mean, even the first two years after Alexander dies, it's absolute chaos and carnage.

There's people everywhere.

There's all sorts of stuff going on in all these different places around his empire.

But it's, you know, it's fascinating.

We could do another podcast just on those two years and it would take up another two hours or whatever right as you say like you know all those figures and a really amazing period in history and graham it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast and going into this nerdy deep dive with me today on this period which is absolutely incredible yeah you're welcome anyone who wants to contact me please do i'd be happy to talk for hours on these subjects that's why i became a lecturer on it so i can just talk and talk until i'm forced to dragged away from the podium

Well, there you go.

There was Dr.

Graham Wrightson giving you an introduction to the turbulent, fascinating world of the successors of Alexander the Great.

There are so many events, so many characters, so much turmoil in this period of ancient history that I've no doubt we'll revisit this topic in the future and tell its story in the detail that it deserves.

But until then, I hope you enjoyed the episode.

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