DIVIDING THE SPOILS

Ancient Warfare and Civilization

SERIES EDITORS:

RICHARD ALSTON  ROBIN WATERFIELD

In this series, leading historians offer compelling new narratives of the armed conflicts that shaped and reshaped the classical world, from the wars of Archaic Greece to the fall of the Roman Empire and Arab conquests.

Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great’s Empire

Robin Waterfield

ROBIN WATERFIELD

DIVIDING THE SPOILS

The War for Alexander

the Great’s Empire

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further

Oxford University’s objective of excellence

in research, scholarship, and education.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore

South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

www.oup.com

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Waterfield, Robin, 1952–

Dividing the spoils : the war for Alexander the Great’s empire/Robin Waterfield.

p. cm. — (Ancient warfare and civilization)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-19-539523-5

1. Greece—History—Macedonian Hegemony, 323–281 B.C. 2. Macedonia—History—Diadochi,

323–276 B.C. 3. Generals—Greece—Biography. 4. Generals—Macedonia—Biography. 5. Greece—

Kings and rulers—Biography. 6. Macedonia—Kings and rulers—Biography. 7. Mediterranean Region—

History, Military. 8. Mediterranean Region—History—To 476. I. Title.

DF235.4.W38 2011

938’.070922—dc22   2010030834

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

FOR MY FATHER

AND IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Maps

1. The Legacy of Alexander the Great

2. The Babylon Conferences

3. Rebellion

4. Perdiccas, Ptolemy, and Alexander’s Corpse

5. The First War of the Successors

6. Polyperchon’s Moment

7. The Triumph of Cassander

8. Hunting Eumenes in Iran

9. Antigonus, Lord of Asia

10. The Restoration of Seleucus

11. Warfare in Greece

12. The End of Antigonus

13. The Kingdoms of Ptolemy and Seleucus

14. Demetrius Resurgent

15. The Fall of Demetrius

16. The Last Successors

Time Line

Cast of Characters

Genealogies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book tells the story of one of the great forgotten wars of history. It took more or less forty years after the death of Alexander the Great for his heirs (the Diadokhoi, the Successors) to finish carving up his vast empire. These years, 323–281 BCE, were filled with high adventure, intrigue, passion, assassinations, dynastic marriages, treachery, shifting alliances, and mass slaughter on battlefield after battlefield. And while the men fought on the field, the women schemed from their palaces, pavilions, and prisons; this was the first period of western history when privileged women, especially from the royal families, began to play the kind of major political roles they would continue to play throughout the future history of Roman, Byzantine, and European monarchies.

My period has a natural starting point—the death of Alexander in June 323—and an equally natural end. The year 281 saw the violent deaths of the last two direct Successors of Alexander, those who had known and ridden with him. The next generation—the Epigonoi, as Nymphis, a historian of the second century BCE, called them in a lost work—may have been just as ambitious as their fathers, but the world had changed. It was no longer realistic to aim for dominion of the whole of Alexander’s empire; instead, their first aim was to hold on to their core territories—Macedon for the Antigonids, Asia for the Seleucids, and Greater Egypt for the Ptolemies. Of course, they and their descendants would regularly attempt to take over some of a neighbor’s territory, but no individual any longer realistically aspired to rule the whole known world. There would never again be a time like the time of the Successors, forty years of almost unremitting warfare aimed at worldwide domination.

In their day, the Successors were household names, because they held the fate of the world in their hands. If their fame has become dimmed over the centuries, that is a result of historical accident (the loss of almost all our sources for the period) and of our perennial obsession with Alexander the Great, in whose shadow they have been made to stand. My main purpose in this book has been to revive the memory of the Successors. A narrative account is enough on its own to demonstrate that the early Hellenistic period was not an anticlimax after the conquests of Alexander, and certainly not a period of decline and disintegration. In fact, Alexander had left things in a mess, with no guaranteed succession, no administration in place suitable for such an enormous empire, and huge untamed areas both bordering and within his “empire.” A detailed and realistic map of Alexander’s conquests would show him cutting a narrow swath across Asia and back, leaving much relatively untouched. So far from disintegration, then, the Successors consolidated the Conqueror’s gains. Their equal ambitions, however, meant that consolidation inevitably led to the breakup of the empire and the foundation of lesser empires and kingdoms.