In the early summer of 302, Lysimachus invaded Asia Minor. It was the first time for many years that Asia Minor had seen war. While he headed east into Hellespontine Phrygia, Prepelaus took an army south down the coast. Both had the same aim, to win over as many as possible of the Greek cities of Asia Minor before the Antigonids had a chance to respond. They quickly gained a few important cities, and some significant allies among the Antigonid governors of Asia Minor who were terrified into surrendering. But those cities that were not immediately threatened, or felt they could endure a siege, preferred to wait and see what would happen rather than risk Antigonid wrath if they gave in prematurely.
Antigonus, feeling the burden of his eighty years, was forced to break his retirement and move north into Asia Minor. He knew he was no longer fit for battle, and had been involved in more peaceful pursuits. In fact, he had been about to stage a superb international athletic competition, to prove to the world that Antigonea was a Greek city to be reckoned with, but he had to cancel it. It was as shocking—and as expensive, in terms of compensation—as if the host nation of a modern Olympic festival canceled at the last moment. But Antigonus was never one to duck a fight.
Once Antigonus reached Asia Minor, Lysimachus’s and Prepelaus’s tactics had to change: they were no match for him in the field—not until Seleucus arrived. As Antigonus advanced, threatening their supply lines, they fell back north, avoiding pitched battle by keeping safe behind a series of entrenched camps. This also served the purpose of drawing the Antigonid forces farther away from Seleucus’s arrival point in Asia Minor, which they knew to be Cappadocia. They held Antigonus at bay at Dorylaeum, and then winter intervened and both sides separated. While Antigonus retired to Celaenae, Lysimachus and Prepelaus fell back on the plain south of Heraclea Pontica. Lysimachus confirmed his alliance with Heraclea—and its detachment from the Antigonid cause—by marrying its current ruler, Amastris. Control of Heraclea gave him an extra source of timber, but also an extra lifeline back home to Thrace, the importance of which became clear that very winter.
In order to be certain of victory, Antigonus needed reinforcements. He ordered Demetrius to make a truce with Cassander, so that he could join him in Asia Minor. Once Demetrius had set sail, Cassander recovered Thessaly, retained a force to protect Macedon, and sent a second tranche of troops by land under his brother Pleistarchus to support Lysimachus and Prepelaus. Meanwhile, Demetrius landed at Ephesus, recovered the city immediately, and then moved up the coast, undoing all Prepelaus’s gains. He made his winter quarters at Chalcedon and guarded the strait.
So when Pleistarchus and his army reached the north coast of the Propontis, they found that Demetrius had already secured the southern coastline. Pleistarchus therefore marched up the west coast of the Black Sea to Odessus and prepared to embark his forces there and sail for Heraclea. There were not enough ships at Odessus for a single crossing. The first contingent made it safely to Heraclea; the second was captured by Demetrius; the third was smashed by a storm, with Pleistarchus among the few who made land safely. Fully six thousand of the twenty thousand troops he was bringing died or fell into Demetrius’s hands. But during the winter, news arrived that Seleucus had reached Cappadocia. Even an Antigonid raid on Babylon from Syria had failed to deflect him from his purpose. He had avoided the route through Syria and traveled to Cappadocia via Armenia.
In the meantime, while Antigonus’s Syrian army was busy in Babylonia, Ptolemy played his part by invading Phoenicia. But on receiving misinformation that his allies were losing the war in Asia Minor, he prudently or lamely withdrew for the winter to Egypt, leaving garrisons in the cities he had taken. It was not much of an effort, and Tyre and Sidon, the most important ports, remained in Antigonid hands. Seleucus, by contrast, had made an epic journey in a few months, and so was waiting to join up with Lysimachus when he marched south in 301 from his winter quarters.
Battle was joined at Ipsus in Phrygia; each side was commanded by two kings and fielded about eighty thousand men. It was the greatest battle of the Successors numerically, and the most significant. Lysimachus and his allies would either crush the Antigonids or be crushed by them. If they lost, only Ptolemy would stand in the way of the Antigonids’ long-held desire for world domination.
But it was an outright victory for the anti-Antigonid alliance. Octogenarian Antigonus died appropriately in a shower of javelins, while Demetrius escaped by the skin of his teeth. Hostile propaganda afterward said that he had performed badly—that he had raced with his cavalry too far in pursuit of a fleeing enemy contingent to be in a position to support his father when the crisis came. But it is equally likely that Seleucus’s elephant drivers skillfully blocked the attempts of Demetrius’s victorious cavalry to return to the battlefield and relieve his father. Demetrius’s cavalry, on the right wing, had been expected to win; details of the battle are uncertain, but it may even have been a deliberate tactic by Lysimachus and Seleucus to let him drive their left wing back far enough for them to deploy their elephants to block his return. Then, while he was held at bay, Antigonus and his men either surrendered or were cut down. Demetrius prudently fled, but his heart must have been filled with dread, anger, and sorrow in equal measures: he and his father were famously close. 18So died one of the most determined, successful, and gifted of the Successors. At the age of sixty, circumstances had given him the opportunity for imperial rule; he had seized it eagerly and had exercised vast power for twenty years. To minds not already besotted with power, Antigonus’s fall from such a great height might have taught moderation.
The Kingdoms of Ptolemy and Seleucus
ONE OF THE most important effects of the battle of Ipsus was that it left Seleucus and Ptolemy in firm control of their kingdoms. This is a good point, then, at which to pause from war narrative and take a closer look at those kingdoms, insofar as we have evidence. Many conclusions must remain tentative, but we are even worse off for other Successor kingdoms. Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt remain our best chances for investigating the important topic of what the Successors made of their realms once they had carved up Alexander’s empire.
After Ipsus, the Ptolemaic kingdom remained unchanged, in terms of core territory, until the Roman takeover in 30 BCE. The Seleucid kingdom suffered more from shifting borders, and there were mountain tribes in several parts of the empire that were never altogether tamed. We have already seen that in 304 Seleucus ceded the satrapies bordering India to Chandragupta, and he and his descendants had to put up with several independent or semi-independent kingdoms in Asia Minor, such as Bithynia. For much of the third century, Persis was semi-independent, and around the middle of the third century, the Seleucids lost Bactria, which went independent under Greek leadership. Worse was to follow: the Parthian satrap declared his province free of Seleucid rule in 246, but within ten years had lost it to invaders from the north, who held it for thirty-five years. Seleucus’s great-great-grandson, Antiochus III, recovered it, but only temporarily, and by the middle of the second century BCE the invaders had annexed Media, and Babylonia and Mesopotamia became the front line of their ongoing war with the Seleucids. The remains of the Seleucid empire were finally broken up by the Romans in 62 BCE, and the Euphrates became the border between the Roman and the Parthian empires.