Ptolemy landed unopposed at Corinth. Since as a matter of policy Antigonus had not installed garrisons in the Peloponnesian cities under his control, Polyperchon’s absence meant that there was no effective force in the Peloponnese. Cratesipolis was terrified into surrendering Corinth and Sicyon. Making Corinth his base, Ptolemy planned “to free the other Greek cities as well.” ⁵It is likely that he intended to revive the old Hellenic League, or League of Corinth, that had been founded by Philip II. ⁶All the Successors competed with one another for Greek manpower; the revival of the league, with Ptolemy at its head, would compel member cities to provide him with troops when he needed them, and deny them to his rivals. Ptolemy would have complete control of the sea.

It was indeed a great opportunity for Ptolemy—an opportunity for grand imperial power—but it came to nothing. The response to Ptolemy’s appeal by the Greek cities was less than tepid. The Peloponnesian cities were already free, and felt no need to exchange one overlord for another; the mainland cities that might have been interested were simply too few to make a difference, and too vulnerable to Cassander, now that Polemaeus was dead, to be able to respond positively. And then new crises loomed for Ptolemy elsewhere. First, Antigonus returned to Syria at the end of his unsuccessful war with Seleucus. Second, Ptolemy’s governor of Cyrenaica launched a bid to take over the whole North African coast from Cyrenaica to Carthage as his own independent empire. As it turned out, the rebellious governor was assassinated by his allies before his plans had come to fruition. But it was clear that the extent of Ptolemy’s commitment in Greece would make him vulnerable elsewhere, and he was concerned about his enemies’ ability to exploit this.

So he came to terms with Cassander and returned to Egypt, leaving garrisons in Sicyon and Corinth. He may even just have rehired the mercenaries Cratesipolis had been using to protect her enclave. Of course, garrisons and his talk of Greek freedom were somewhat incompatible, but with conditions as they were in the Peloponnese, the cities may even have asked for them. Ptolemy had had a fleeting glimpse of supreme power, but in the end he gained little. He even lost Cleopatra. On Antigonus’s orders, she was prevented from leaving Sardis to join her future husband, and was soon killed.

Poor Cleopatra, always on the edge of greatness. Her brother’s death in 323, when she was already a royal widow in her early thirties, condemned her to become a pawn in the Successors’ bids for legitimation. She was the perfect catch, a queen in her own right and the sister of the Conqueror; she held the key to all the Successors’ ambitions. Leonnatus had accepted her, but died before the marriage; then Perdiccas too had prematurely died. At one time or another other Successors had sounded her out with a view to marriage. Finally, aged about forty-five and past the age for child-bearing, she awarded herself to Ptolemy, only to be thwarted by Antigonus’s determination not to allow such a prize to fall into anyone else’s hands. ⁷But he tried to disassociate himself from the murder by a show trial of the killers and by awarding Alexander’s sister a noble funeral. He remembered the trouble that the killing of Cynnane had given Perdiccas.

DEMETRIUS ON THE OFFENSIVE: ATHENS

In the west, with Polemaeus out of the way and fresh alliances in place with Ptolemy and Polyperchon, Cassander could look forward to building up his strength again in Greece. However, he was unlikely to receive much help from his allies, who were obliged to help him in emergencies only. ⁸Besides, for the foreseeable future Lysimachus was engaged as usual with freedom-loving tribes within his province; he was also in the process of building a new capital city, Lysimacheia, on the neck of the Thracian Chersonese. And Seleucus, who had also been a member of the anti-Antigonid coalition in the last phase of the war, was for the present too focused on the east to jump into this affair. He was in the early phases of the protracted campaign to subdue and stabilize the eastern provinces.

Antigonus decided in 307 that the time was right for a preemptive strike against Cassander, with the immediate purpose of reestablishing a solid base in Greece and the longer-term purpose of making Greece his once and for all, now that it had been abandoned by Ptolemy. We could take this as the true start of the Fourth War of the Successors, in the sense that intermittent warfare was replaced by a fight to the finish. At any rate, as if we can isolate affairs in Greece from what was happening elsewhere, it was the start of what is called the Four-Year War on the Greek mainland.

Perhaps the most blatant transgression of the supposed freedom of the Greeks was the presence of Cassander’s tyrant Demetrius of Phalerum in Athens—not because there were not tyrants or oppressive regimes elsewhere, but because Athens was Athens. Continuing to proclaim the freedom of the Greeks, Antigonus sent his son Demetrius, with a fleet of 250 ships and a purse of 5,000 talents (around three billion dollars), to restore democracy in Athens. It was clear that the Antigonids meant business.

While the main fleet sheltered at Cape Sunium, at the beginning of June 307 Demetrius took twenty ships and sailed north up the Saronic Gulf. Little notice was taken of such an unthreatening flotilla; the ships were assumed to be Ptolemy’s, heading for Corinth. At the last minute, Demetrius turned and sailed straight into Piraeus. Cassander’s garrison commander chose inaction, and within a few days Demetrius of Phalerum’s position in Athens had become untenable. He was granted safe conduct out of the city to Thebes, where he lived for the next ten years. By then it was clear that he was never going to get back to Athens, and he made his way to Alexandria in Egypt. He might have been pleased to know that his grandson would hold a position of authority in Athens in the 260s. ⁹

In the short term, however, Cassander could send no help, because he was tied up with a campaign in Epirus, and the loss of Athens was compounded by the loss of Piraeus, where the garrison fell rather rapidly in August 307 to Demetrius’s assault. At the next assembly of Athenian citizens, through his agents Demetrius declared the city free, and guaranteed not to impose a garrison. He razed to the ground the Piraeus fortress, the hated symbol of foreign occupation. He also promised them timber, grain, and cash, all vital commodities of which Athens was always short and often starved. He returned the islands of Lemnos and Imbros, which his father had taken from them seven years earlier. Most importantly, he restored the democratic constitution that had been suspended ten years earlier.

The Athenians were jubilant—and obsequious. They silenced politicians who were opposed to the Antigonid cause, awarded Antigonus and Demetrius divine honors as savior gods, instituted an annual festival in their joint names, and appointed a priest for their cult; even Phila, Demetrius’s first wife, gained cult honors as Aphrodite, the goddess of loving marriage. They addressed both Antigonus and Demetrius as “kings,” ¹⁰and two new civic tribes, named after them, were added to the ten that had stood since the beginning of Athenian democracy two hundred years earlier. They even wove Antigonus’s and Demetrius’s features into the sacred robe with which the cult statue of Athena, the city’s goddess, was ceremonially draped. When a freak storm burst on the procession bearing the robe toward Athena’s temple, the robe was ripped.

There were of course those who chose to see this incident as ominous, but there was a sense in which Antigonus and Demetrius were truly Athens’s saviors (though Demetrius of Phalerum’s regime had scarcely been harsh), and deserved at least some of the honors they received. By restoring the democracy, they restored Athenian pride. It also helped that Athenian shipyards were soon busy rebuilding the fleet that Cassander had repressed. No longer would all that Athenian naval expertise go to waste. But the restoration of democracy was more symbolic than real, and rearmament was not meant to help Athens itself. During his periods of residence in the city, Demetrius treated it as the capital of his kingdom, and expected his orders and even his whims to be carried out. Athens, under Demetrius, was to be the western capital of the Antigonid empire.