But it must have been hard for even the philosophers resident in Athens to maintain their saintly detachment in the face of starvation; to many, it must have seemed the end of the world. Demetrius was poised to retake the city, and no one was coming to their help. Lachares did not give up easily, however. He quelled a near mutiny among his troops by robbing temples of their treasures and melting them down into bullion. Even the world-famous statue of Athena in the Parthenon, the symbol of Athenian greatness, was stripped of its golden robe. Ptolemy sent help in the form of a substantial fleet of 150 ships, but just as it approached Demetrius’s replacement fleet hove into view, double the size of Ptolemy’s fleet, which prudently withdrew. Lachares fled, and the starving Athenians opened their gates to Demetrius in April 295. They had insulted him in 301, and expected little mercy.

Demetrius staged a dramatic entry into Athens. Having ordered a general assembly in the Theater of Dionysus, he posted guards around the area, entered from the rear, and walked in silence down the steps, past the seated crowd, until he reached the stage. He announced the immediate distribution of plenty of grain—that was the good bit—but also the installation of garrisons not only in Athens and Piraeus, but in several outlying towns and fortresses. Now was not the time to let the ideology of freedom impede his progress. He also ensured that an oligarchy of his supporters formed the ruling elite. There could be little doubt that this time, his third period of residence in the city, he came not as a liberator but as an occupier of Athens.

The Fall of Demetrius

DEMETRIUS WAS BACK in Athens, and took immediate steps to regain other cities in Greece. His neighbors in Macedon and Asia Minor were too busy with their own affairs to intervene. The Peloponnesian cities were Demetrius’s first targets in 294, but toward the end of his campaign there he was diverted by news from Macedon. The homeland was in the kind of trouble he had been waiting for. As soon as he could, he marched north.

In Macedon, Antipater, the elder of the two boy kings, had naturally assumed that, on attaining his majority, he would inherit the whole kingdom; Thessalonice, however, continued to insist on his sharing the kingdom with his rother. Antipater therefore had his mother murdered (an unusual crime even for the Macedonian royal family, and she was a half sister of Alexander the Great), expelled his brother from the western half of the kingdom, and made all Macedon his. Alexander accordingly invited Demetrius to help him recover the throne. Demetrius left his twenty-five-year-old son Antigonus Gonatas resident in Athens and in charge of affairs in Greece and marched north to take part in the War of the Brothers.

But it had taken him time to wrap things up in the south, and in the meantime Alexander had also looked for help elsewhere. Pyrrhus of Epirus, a great-nephew of Olympias and cousin of Alexander the Great, had been an enemy of Cassander, who had successfully supported his dynastic rival in Epirus. In 303 Demetrius had married one of his sisters, Deidameia, and so when Pyrrhus had fled from Epirus he had lived in exile in Demetrius’s court and had fought on the Antigonid side at Ipsus, aged eighteen. In 299, as part of a short-lived attempt to get on with Ptolemy, Demetrius had sent him young Pyrrhus as a kind of hostage, a pledge of his goodwill. Pyrrhus had become close to Ptolemy, and had married one of his daughters. After the death of Deidameia in 298, Pyrrhus felt he no longer had any reason to be close to Demetrius, and it was as Ptolemy’s ally, and with Ptolemy’s financial help, that in 297 he reconquered Epirus. This was the powerful neighbor whom Alexander V had asked for help.

The price for Pyrrhus’s help was enormous, but he was able to supply it quickly. He asked for, and received, the two cantons of Macedon that bordered his kingdom of Epirus, along with various other Macedonian dependencies that would serve his aim of developing Epirote rule in western Greece. These were mostly territories that had been annexed by Philip II and Cassander.

Pyrrhus easily drove Antipater out of western Macedon, but did no more. Lysimachus was Antipater’s father-in-law, and Pyrrhus had no desire to provoke Lysimachus, even though he was currently busy quelling an uprising led by the warlike Getae. The threat of future intervention was enough for Lysimachus to persuade Pyrrhus to withdraw his troops—without, of course, abandoning his new territories. Pyrrhus’s withdrawal paved the way for the two brothers to be reconciled. Lysimachus hoped he had done enough to secure Macedon against Demetrius’s imminent arrival.

So when Demetrius reached Dium, on the borders of Macedon, Alexander thanked him and told him he was no longer needed. No one treated Demetrius like that—and certainly no Antipatrid teenager. Demetrius pretended that he was unconcerned and had other business to attend to down south. He invited the young king to a farewell banquet and had him killed. Minnows should not swim with sharks. In a show trial, forced on him by his insecurity, Demetrius gave it out before the Macedonian troops that he was acting in self-defense—that Alexander had been planning to murder him. It may have been true. There was so much mutual mistrust between them that, during the banquet, when Demetrius got up to leave the room, Alexander followed, not wanting to lose sight of him. At the doorway, Demetrius muttered to his guards as he passed: “Kill the man who follows me.” ¹

Antipater abandoned his half of Macedon and fled to Thrace, where Lysimachus persuaded him that resistance was futile. Lysimachus quickly arranged a peace treaty with Demetrius; he knew from recent bitter experience how aggressive his new neighbor could be, and the situation gave him the leverage to persuade Demetrius to renounce his claim to the Greek cities of Asia Minor that had fallen to Lysimachus after Ipsus. But the peace made Antipater redundant, and Lysimachus had him killed, now or within a few years. It was the end of the Antipatrid line that had ruled Macedon, as viceroys and kings, for the best part of forty years.

DEMETRIUS I, KING OF MACEDON

The grail was his: Demetrius was king of Macedon. Immediately after the murder of Alexander V, the nobles present—members of Alexander’s court, now surrounded by Demetrius’s forces—agreed to his kingship, and he was duly acclaimed by the assembled army. But there were still hearts and minds to be won in Macedon itself, and Demetrius went about this by the traditional combination of action and words. He quelled an uprising in Thessaly and took steps to improve the security of central Greece, where the alliance between the Boeotians and Aetolians had been renewed in response to Demetrius’s and his son’s conquests in the south. In the Peloponnese, only the Spartans now held out against him, and they were no more than a nuisance.

At home, he played all the cards that supported his claim to the throne. He stressed his father’s loyal service to the Argeads and the illegitimacy of the Antipatrid regime, and missed no opportunity to recall Cassander’s murder of Alexander IV. His long marriage to Phila helped as well; as Cassander’s sister, she provided an appearance of continuity, now that Cassander had no surviving descendants. Ironically, through Phila, Demetrius was the heir of those to whose ruin he and his father had devoted so much time and energy.

In order to help secure Thessaly, and to give himself another port, one of Demetrius’s early acts as king was to found the city of Demetrias. The site, at the head of the Gulf of Pagasae (near modern Volos), was well chosen. The city was hard to assault, and served successive Macedonian kings for decades as one of the “Fetters of Greece”: ²as long as they controlled the heavily fortified ports of Demetrias, Chalcis, and Corinth (Piraeus was desirable too), they could move troops at will around the Greek mainland and restrict other shipping. And most commercial traffic in those days was seaborne.