The Antigonids agreed to recognize Rhodian autonomy, and the Rhodians agreed to help the Antigonids in any of their campaigns, except against Ptolemy. This was some gain for the Antigonids, but hardly compensation for what they had lost—not just money, men, and prestige, but the opportunity to attack Egypt. There was, not unnaturally, delirious joy in Rhodes at the outcome. The most striking manifestation of this was the construction of the Colossus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, to stand near the harbor mouth (not overthe harbor mouth, as some fanciful pictures have it). They raised money in part by selling siege equipment abandoned by Demetrius’s forces.

The Colossus was a bronze statue of their presiding deity, Helios, the sun god; it stood thirty-two meters tall (about 105 feet), and was built on such a scale that only those with the longest reach could get their arms around even one of its thumbs. They matched the Besieger’s gigantism with their own, and made the point by using a local man as chief designer. At any rate, they were right to celebrate, because Rhodian neutrality was the foundation for the island’s subsequent prosperity. But the symbol of the foundation of that prosperity snapped at the knees and fell during an earthquake in 226 BCE. The toppled remains were a tourist attraction for hundreds of years, until they were removed in the seventh century ce after the Arab conquest of the island.

THE END OF THE FOUR-YEAR WAR

The situation in Greece was indeed dire, from the Antigonid perspective. Polemaeus’s defection and subsequent death had let Cassander back into central Greece, and he had compelled the Aetolians to break off their alliance with Athens. Early in 304 Cassander put Athens under siege, and in addition to the usual hardships, the city was disturbed by political feuding between Antigonid supporters and opponents. Athens came dangerously close to falling. Cassander’s brother Pleistarchus even managed at one point to breach the walls before being repulsed by the cavalry.

Demetrius arrived in force and landed in central Greece. Cassander abandoned the siege at his approach and retreated to Macedon. The Aetolians and Boeotians swiftly came to terms, and Demetrius marched south. Athens was saved—at least from Cassander’s predations. But Demetrius was a king now, and expected to be treated as such. At least he continued to benefit the city in material terms.

Demetrius spent the winters of 304/3 and 303/2 in the city he considered his royal seat. Since the Athenians had already agreed, by making him the founder of one of their civic tribes, that he was more or less a god, he set up house in the Parthenon—the temple of Athena, his “older sister.” ¹³More specifically, he seems to have considered himself an avatar of Dionysus (which licensed a series of celebrations). Two of his concubines were identified with Aphrodite; they must have been good at their work. All our sources insist that Demetrius was a good-looking man, ¹⁴and he was never short of women to share his bed. Menander wryly listed the famous beauties of the day and ended: “You’ve had ‘em all.” ¹⁵Even his cohorts were awarded heroic honors as the liberators of Athens, while a cult was established at the very spot on Attic soil where Demetrius had first descended from his chariot on arrival, as if it were a divine epiphany. By now he had three cults in Athens; before long, after Sicyon fell to him, the Sicyonians added a fourth.

Militarily speaking, Demetrius was unstoppable. Having driven Ptolemy’s garrison out of Sicyon in the spring of 303, he went on to do the same at Corinth, where Cassander’s general Prepelaus had hugely reinforced Ptolemy’s garrison. At the specific request of the Corinthians themselves—or so his propaganda stressed—Demetrius installed his own garrison on the Acrocorinth instead. Ptolemy had only briefly kept a toehold on mainland Greece, but the Antigonid garrison remained in place for sixty years, a thorn in many sides.

The Four-Year War ended later that year with the defeat of Cassander’s brother Pleistarchus in the Peloponnese. Polyperchon watched helplessly from Messenia. Fortune had briefly made him a major player, but, lacking sufficient killer instinct and megalomania, it was not a role for which he was temperamentally suited. His story has a relatively happy ending, however; this “jackal among lions” ¹⁶died, within a year, of nothing more serious than old age.

While in the Peloponnese in 303, Demetrius found time also to add to his collection of wives the sister of Pyrrhus of Epirus, a young woman called Deidameia—an important catch, because she was a cousin (once removed) of Olympias and had previously been betrothed to Alexander IV. Pyrrhus was the ambitious king of the Molossians, the most powerful Epirote tribe, and hence head of the Epirote League. The Epirotes were lining up once again against Cassander.

Demetrius was poised to invade Macedon itself. Cassander sued for peace, but the Antigonids rebuffed him by demanding unconditional surrender. After all his success in Greece, in spring 302 Demetrius refounded Philip II’s Corinthian League, with him and his father (and then their successors) as life presidents. This was exactly what Ptolemy had tried and failed to do a few years earlier. A large number of Greek states were involved, so that Demetrius effectively controlled Greece; Sparta refused to join, but Sparta was so insignificant at the time that it made little difference. The immediate aim of the league was to defeat Cassander, and as long as they were on a war footing, the Antigonids retained a firm grip on the league. ¹⁷Since the league lasted only a couple of years, we have no way of knowing quite how it was to function in peacetime. The league duly appointed Demetrius commander in chief, and he marched north against Cassander. It looked as though the final showdown for possession of Macedon itself was about to take place.

THE BATTLE OF IPSUS

The intransigence of the Antigonids in their peace talks with Cassander may have been a mistake; since all-out war was now inevitable, Cassander summoned help. Lysimachus was very ready to oblige, especially since Cassander seems to have offered him Asia Minor as his reward. The Antigonids made efforts to placate him, but every one of their successes increased the likelihood that he would be the next target of their aggression, once they held neighboring Macedon as well as Asia Minor. The decisive difference between this phase of the war and earlier was precisely Lysimachus’s greater involvement, since for the first time for years he was relatively free of trouble within Thrace itself. And he was such a great general that it was he who led the anti-Antigonid forces.

Ptolemy, of course, was a natural ally (though in the event he was not especially helpful), and Seleucus had at last freed himself from his eastern wars and offered his assistance too. At the conclusion of their conflict, Chandragupta had given him five hundred elephants and their handlers, a stupendous gift, though not as valuable as the territories Seleucus had had to give up. He would bring most of the beasts west with him. Cassander, Lysimachus, Ptolemy, Seleucus—it was the same grand anti-Antigonid alliance as in 315–311.

Cassander sent an army under Prepelaus to Lysimachus and marched south from Macedon. He confronted Demetrius in Thessaly, but the campaign was ineffective from both sides. They built enormous military camps and eyeballed each other, but both armies were so terrifyingly huge that neither was in a hurry to start the offensive, but preferred to wait for news from Asia Minor. Cassander commanded over thirty thousand men, Demetrius over fifty-five thousand. Both had good supply lines and were securely encamped on high ground. Neither had a good reason to risk battle against such formidable forces. The battle that should have taken place for control of Macedon never happened.