But the several declarations of kingship were, above all, declarations of independence; the Successors were no longer satraps within someone else’s empire but kings in their own right, obedient to themselves and to no other authority. The timing of this assumption of royal status is significant; had he lived, Alexander IV would have come of age in 305, aged eighteen. Cassander therefore had to admit openly by then that the king was dead—hence the “big bang,” ⁵the phenomenon of all the Successors beginning to style themselves kings in a very short space of time.

As a result of the assumption of kingship, territorial divisions became clearer. Plainly, they could not all be kings of one empire. By declaring themselves as royal as Antigonus and Demetrius, the other Successors were claiming possession of the territory they currently occupied—and to whatever else they could win by the spear. There no longer was any single Macedonian empire that held the loyalty of officers or men. The disintegration of the overall empire meant that their loyalty became more parochial, something to be given only to themselves or their paymaster, their king.

The Successors may by now have felt their territories to be relatively settled, but they still wanted more. That was their job as kings. Royal status was gained by war and maintained by war, and all Hellenistic kings, in our period and beyond, presented themselves, even by the clothes they wore, as men of war. In a never-ending, bloody cycle, military success brought wealth (from plunder and indemnities) and increased territory, which enabled a king to create more revenue, to pay for more troops, and hence to gain more military successes. That was the royal ideology; that was why the kings always clashed with one another. It took years for this destructive cycle to be broken, and for a balance of power to be recognized that would allow heredity rather than victory to determine kingship. Heredity was irrelevant to the Successors because they were the pioneers; their achievements, not their blood, made them kings.

The major contenders had often acted like kings before; they had even come close to naming themselves as such (Antigonus was already “Lord of Asia,” Ptolemy the de facto pharaoh of Egypt), or being acclaimed as such (Seleucus at Didyma, Antigonus and Demetrius at Athens), but these few years saw the official birth of the kind of monarchy that became the constitutional norm in Hellenistic times, when a dozen dynasties spawned over two hundred kings and queens. Almost two centuries of development were to follow, but even at this early stage many of the characteristics of Hellenistic monarchy are evident. Its roots lay not just in the Successors’ common Macedonian background but in the more autocratic blend of eastern and Macedonian kingship that, as we have seen, Alexander had developed. It was the beginning of the model of absolute kingship that was inherited, via the Roman principate, by medieval and early modern European kings.

A king in the Macedonian style was the possessor of all the Homeric, manly virtues, and liked his subjects to know it. Lysimachus let it be known that he had killed a savage lion, Seleucus that he had wrestled a bull to the ground with his bare hands; hunting and fighting are the most common motifs in royal artwork; statues of kings, and written descriptions, portray them as young and virile (whatever the truth), and by far the most common way of sculpting kings was as heroic nudes. The culture of heavy drinking that all Macedonian nobles took for granted was part of the same spectrum of virility.

But the chief manifestation of his virility, and a king’s chief virtue, was military prowess. ⁶It was always thus in premodern societies: “A Prince,” Machiavelli wrote in 1532, “should have no care or thought but for war . . . and should apply himself exclusively to this as his peculiar province.” ⁷Hence, in every case where we know the details, the Successors’ assumption of kingship followed significant military success. The conquest of Cyprus was the trigger for the Antigonids; the repulse in 306 of the Antigonid invasion of Egypt for Ptolemy; for Seleucus, the subjugation of the eastern satrapies, complete by 304; successes against native Thracian dynasts for Lysimachus; and (speculatively) successes in the Four-Year War for Cassander.

The charisma of successful military leadership was so important that, whatever other noble qualities the king might possess, if he was poor or unlucky at warfare he risked being replaced, as Perdiccas’s failure in Egypt led to his assassination. But a king needed other attributes. He had to display generosity, not just in rewarding his troops and especially his courtiers (who expected to get very rich indeed) but in making time to hear petitions, for instance. There is a nice story about Demetrius: an old woman repeatedly asked for a hearing, and when Demetrius replied that he was too busy, the woman said, “Then don’t be king.” ⁸Seleucus is said to have remarked that the endless bureaucracy and paperwork involved in kingship would put people off if they knew of it. ⁹The king had to find the balance between accessibility and maintaining by ceremonial means the dignity of his position. Other forms of generosity included charitable deeds and sponsoring cultural activities within their courts and kingdoms, acting as arbitrators in disputes within their kingdoms, founding cities to help alleviate poverty, and providing financial aid to cities.

A king made sure that his subjects were aware of his kingly qualities by means of magnificent processions and frequent campaigns, by donations and monuments, by getting poets to praise him and painters and sculptors to portray him, and by establishing priests of his or his dynasty’s cult. The apparent altruism of some kingly qualities is illusory; everything fed back into maintaining the position of the king himself. Sponsoring cultural activities, for instance, or performing magnificent sacrifices to the gods, were forms of display that enabled a king to gain and maintain stature at home and abroad. Nevertheless, it was the appearance of altruism that made it possible for individuals and communities to petition kings, since the pretence had to be followed through. Political thinkers added an ethical dimension, that kings should rule for the good of their subjects and not themselves, but the Successors almost totally ignored it. They were setting up empires, not protectorates.

The name of the game was income generation, and ultimately there was only one beneficiary: the king himself. As a rule, the Hellenistic kings owned their kingdoms as their personal fiefs; hence, for instance, in 133 BCE the last king of Pergamum simply bequeathed his entire kingdom to the Roman people. All individual landowners, and every institution such as a landowning temple, were just more or less privileged tenants. The kings could give and take away at whim.

Early Hellenistic monarchy was absolute, an extension of the king’s power as commander in chief out on campaign; Seleucus is said to have held that “What the king ordains is always right.” ¹⁰Treaties were made with the king in person, not with his state, so that on his death all treaties became null and void. There was not even a permanent council of advisers, but rather a loose group of “Friends,” who were as likely to meet and conduct business over drinks as in a council session. The use of the term “Friends” or “Companions” for a king’s closest advisers and bodyguard again reveals the personal nature of early Hellenistic kingship. The glory of victory was personal too: it was Ptolemy who won a victory, not “Egypt.” It showed that he was favored by the gods, and, if the victory was significant enough, almost a god himself. Absolute monarchy suited the Successors perfectly. They took it to be a license to give their ambitions their head.