Military narrative features prominently in the book, but has been broken up by “asides” on cultural matters. For, astonishingly, this period of savage warfare was also characterized by brilliant cultural developments, especially in the fields of art, literature, and philosophy. The energy released by world conquest was not all absorbed on battle-fields, and the culture the Successors brought in their train flourished, thanks especially to royal patronage. Although they were warlords, the Successors were not uncultured. Alexander himself was said to have slept with a copy of Homer’s Iliadunder his pillow—along with a knife. ¹Without the consolidation the Successors brought to Alexander’s gains, the spread of culture would have been impossible; there is no civilization without structure.

So as well as an account of the military action, this book also contains an outline of its cultural impact. A new world emerged from the dust and haze of battle—a world with distinct territories each ruled by its own king, but with a common culture. That common culture is what entitles us to speak generally of “the Greek east,” distinct from “the Roman west,” and it was the Successors, therefore, who set up the world-changing confrontation between these two power blocs. The result, of course, was Roman dominion over the entire Greek world. The takeover culminated in 30 BCE with the annexation of Egypt, and this date is generally taken to mark the end of what scholars call the “Hellenistic” period—the period, starting with the death of Alexander, when the Greek culture that the Successors fostered came to dominate the world from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan.

My main intention has been to write an accurate and enjoyable book—to make sense of a very difficult period of history. The over-arching story is implied by my title and subtitle. The spoils weredivided. We see the emergence, out of Alexander’s single empire, of a multistate political order and of a developing balance of power. At one time or another, all the Successors tried to emulate their dead leader and conquer the entirety of the empire, but none of them succeeded. We witness what realist historians would describe as a law of history: contiguous powers with imperialist ambitions are bound to clash and so limit those ambitions. At the beginning of our forty-year period, grand imperialism was a possibility, but not at the end. The action of this law is the thread that runs through the book.

If an empire is the political, economic, and military domination of disparate populations by a distinct ruling class, with the whole administered from a geographically remote center, Seleucus won an empire (large chunks of the former Achaemenid empire of Persia), Ptolemy won an empire (Greater Egypt, as I call it from time to time in the book), and the Antigonids won a kingdom, as well as hegemony (the ability to command obedience on the basis of a real or implied military threat) over much of Greece. Very few, then, of the fifteen or so Successors succeeded in fulfilling their ambitions with any degree of stability or endurance. The law of history I mentioned just now plays itself out in various ways. Empires can be won or lost by caution, luck, treachery, military brilliance, megalomania. The forty years of the Successors display all of these dramas.

There had been empires in the world before. The Persian empire of the Achaemenids (550–330 BCE) was the one of most significance for the neighboring Greeks; it was preceded in its turn, on a far smaller scale, by the Neo-Assyrian empire (934–610), which was preceded by the Hittite empire (1430–ca. 1200) and the Akkadian empire (late third millennium). Farther east, there may have been something describable as an empire in northern China during the Shang and Zhou periods (1766–1045; 1045–256), though the evidence is difficult to assess. But Alexander’s Successors created the first empires whose rulers and dominant culture were European; the so-called Athenian “empires” of the fifth and fourth centuries were not really empires, above all because subjects and rulers shared a common ethnic background. ²

Of course, Alexander himself was the conqueror in whose imperialist footsteps the Successors trod, but his empire was cut short by his death after a mere ten years, and can hardly be described as an empire anyway, for the reason I have already given: he was too busy conquering to give much thought to the perpetuation of his rule. It was the Successors who created the first stable empires with a European flavor. This was indeed a significant period of history, and it has been overlooked only because of the difficulties in recovering it. Historians of imperialism simply skip from Alexander to Rome; I aim to set the record straight.

In order to make the book as accessible as possible, I have chosen to focus on individuals; while maintaining a forward thrust, chronologically speaking, most of the chapters hinge on the adventures of one or two of the protagonists. To some readers, this may seem an old-fashioned approach. In emphasizing the role of individuals like this, am I not following the bias of ancient historians and writing “great man” history? History, it is said, is not driven by individuals so much as by economic, technological, and other, more abstract imperatives; individuals do not make society, but society makes individuals. There is truth in this, and I have tried to bring out at least some of the economic aspects of the Successors’ warfare. At the same time, however, it needs to be remembered that these men were absolute rulers, a hard fact that many critics of “great man” history tend to ignore. The Successors’ egos and desires could and did alter the course of history.

As soon as Alexander died, his empire began to crumble; he, not economic forces, had been holding it together. If Antigonus had not desired to emulate Alexander, if Demetrius the Besieger had not succumbed to megalomania toward the end of his life, if Seleucus had not had the courage to reclaim Babylon with a minimal force . . . a hundred such “ifs” could be written, each demonstrating that the Successors’ personal ambitions and passions could and did determine what happened. History is not made only by great men, it is true, but nor is it made entirely by profit–loss calculations. More irrational and less predictable factors often play a part (as satirized in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22), and they certainly did in the early Hellenistic period covered in this book. The very ideology of early Hellenistic kingship, as we shall see, encouraged individual ambitions. I make no apology, then, for having chosen to focus on individuals. It may or may not be true that “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” ³At any rate, a surprising amount of the history of many countries, from Greece to Afghanistan, began in the hearts and minds of the Successors of Alexander the Great. Their stories deserve to be better known.

Acknowledgments

I gathered a great deal of research material by writing out of the blue to scholars around the world and asking for offprints of articles. I met with nothing but kindness during this process, and so I first thank collectively all those who helped me in this way. Much research was carried out in Athens, where the staff of the Blegen Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and of the Library of the British School at Athens, were their usual helpful selves. I am grateful to James Romm for early sight of a late draft of his book Ghost on the Throne(we swapped), and to William Murray likewise for sending me a chapter of his forthcoming book on Hellenistic warships. The comments of Oxford University Press’s anonymous reader were very useful, and I also profited from improvements suggested by my editor Stefan Vranka, my friends Paul Cartledge and Andrew Lane, and my wife Kathryn Dunathan. There are, of course, so many other reasons why I am in Kathryn’s debt.