Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (34 page)

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

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

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

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

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

Despite these losses, Demetrius might have hung on in Macedon. But he was a natural autocrat, and that was not the Macedonian way. Demetrius never managed the kingly art of finding a balance between being loved and being hated, or at least feared. His subjects came to resent his luxurious ways and his unapproachability. Macedonian kings were supposed to make themselves available to petitions from their subjects, yet Demetrius was rumored on one occasion to have thrown a whole bundle of them into a river—or at least to be the sort of person who might.
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This kind of talk, charging him with eastern-style monarchy, did his reputation no good. Nor did the fact that he wore a double crown, indicating rulership of Asia as well as Europe.
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Ignoring the rumbles of discontent, Demetrius began to prepare for a massive invasion of Asia. But the proud Macedonian barons resented their country’s being thought of as no more than a launching point for eastern invasion; they did not want to be on the periphery of some vast Asian kingdom. It was all right when Philip and Alexander had done it, because that was for the greater glory of Macedon. But
this war would be fought against fellow Macedonians, for the greater glory of an unpopular king. The idea of taking thousands more Macedonians east, following the tens of thousands who had already gone, did not go down well either, since the country was already somewhat depopulated.

But Demetrius was no Cassander, content with Macedon alone; he was as addicted to warfare as Alexander the Great. Just as Alexander had set out from Macedon and seized all Asia from the Persian king, so Demetrius intended at least to deprive Lysimachus of Asia Minor. But whereas Alexander had invaded Asia with about thirty-seven thousand men and no fleet to speak of, Demetrius was amassing a vast army, over a hundred thousand strong, while a fleet of five hundred warships was being prepared in the shipyards of Macedon and Greece. In typical Besieger style, some of these ships were larger than any vessel that had ever been built before, and he used the best naval architects available. The precise design of these ships is a matter of intelligent guesswork, but it will give some idea of their scale to say that, whereas a normal warship had three banks of rowers in some arrangement (hence its name, “trireme”), Demetrius was having a “ fifteen” and a “sixteen” built.
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Naturally, Demetrius’s preparations involved propaganda as well. Above all, he wielded the old, potent slogan of Greek freedom against Lysimachus. At a local level, a prominent public building in Pella displayed symbolic paintings, copies of which formed the wall paintings of a later Roman villa.
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One of the panels of the painting depicted Demetrius’s parents as king and queen of Asia, the idea being that he had inherited a natural claim, while other panels showed Macedon as the ruler of Asia by right of conquest. But history is littered with failed promises of manifest destiny.

Manifest or otherwise, Destiny, in its less implacable guise as Fortune, was to play a considerable role in the emotional life of the hellenized people of the new world the Successors were creating. But the rise of the cult of Fortune was only one of a number of new religious phenomena. The mobility of the early Hellenistic period uprooted people from their traditions and left them free, for the first time, to choose, to a greater extent than before, their own forms of worship. Not many decades earlier, Socrates had been taken to court for not worshipping
the gods of the city; such a trial rapidly became unthinkable, as personal forms of religion proliferated alongside the old and new civic cults. In addition to ensuring that the gods protected their communities and their leaders, people simply wanted the gods to bless them as individuals.
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Greek religion was polytheistic, but one of the main innovations of the Hellenistic period was a henotheistic tendency. Influential philosophers earlier in the fourth century, such as Plato and Aristotle, had promoted a single supreme deity, and the idea found fertile soil. The fertility was due in part perhaps to increased intellectual sophistication, but mainly to social conditions, the larger world in which people now lived. In the past, deities and cults had often been tied to specific locations, even on occasion to specific families, but now more and more people were living away from their ancestral homes. New traditions were forged by the creation of clubs that combined religious and social purposes, always for relatively small congregations, but people were still worshipping at fewer shrines.

This reductionism was also aided by the strong cultural current in favor of individualism. We have already seen this current in both the aesthetic and the philosophy of the times. In religion, it meant not just that people increasingly settled on a smaller number of gods, those they found personally satisfying, but more importantly that they became more concerned with personal salvation. The cults that offered personal salvation, or at least a chance of a better afterlife, were known as the “mysteries”—that is, etymologically, “cults into which one was personally initiated.” The most famous, in the early Hellenistic period, were the cult of Demeter and Persephone at the seaside town of Eleusis, near Athens, and the cult of the Great Gods on the beautiful north Aegean island of Samothrace. Both shrines were of considerable antiquity—it was said that Jason and the Argonauts had stopped at Samothrace and been initiated before continuing their quest for the Golden Fleece, and Demeter herself was supposed to have instigated the Eleusinian cult—but their heyday was the Hellenistic period. Samothrace in particular was graced by devotion and benefactions from several members of the Macedonian royal families. Philip II commissioned the first stone buildings in the sanctuary, Antipater had a remarkable stone pavilion built in the names of the two kings Philip III Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV, and Lysimachus’s wife Arsinoe funded the construction of a unique circular, multistoried building, perhaps a hotel.
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One of the most successful new quasi-monotheistic cults was that of Sarapis, a healing god and worker of miracles. The development of his cult was attributed to Ptolemy I,
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and the temple of Sarapis became one of the most splendid buildings in Alexandria. Sarapis already existed as a minor Egyptian deity (a sort of amalgam of Osiris and Apis, hence the name), but Ptolemy had the foresight to develop his cult in a European form. He borrowed the iconography of the god from the cult of Zeus of the Underworld in the Greek city of Sinope on the Black Sea. The cult of the new deity was conjoined, in a new form of mystery religion, with that of his sister-wife Isis. Devotees came to regard Sarapis and Isis as the primordial masculine and feminine principles of the universe. The combination of near monotheism with salvationism was irresistible, and a cult that Ptolemy originally intended to suit the multiculturalism of Alexandria spread throughout the entire known world.

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

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

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

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

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

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