The Celts went on the rampage, but they lacked siegecraft. People huddled in terror in towns and fortresses while their land was plundered and spoiled. Cassandreia seized the opportunity to secede once again from Macedonian authority. Some of the Celts penetrated down into central Greece, but they were driven off by a combined Greek army led by the Aetolians. The massive horde dispersed; some established themselves in Thrace, while others, after ten years of brigandage on a grand scale in western Asia Minor, turned parts of Cappadocia and Phrygia into an independent kingdom called Galatia that lasted well into the Roman period.

ANTIGONUS GONATAS

Ceraunus had reigned for only two years and left no clear successor. Macedon descended into anarchy; five pretenders vied for the throne, and anyone who got it held it for no more than a few weeks. One of them, another Antipater (a nephew of Cassander), was derisively nicknamed “Etesias,” because his reign lasted no longer than the season of the etesian winds (the modern meltemi)—about four months at the most, from late May.

Antiochus himself left Syria and came west. In return for acknowledging Ptolemy’s possessions in Asia Minor and the Aegean, his fleet met with no opposition as it sailed to link up with his army in Sardis. Fortunately for Antiochus, Zipoetes had died, and his two sons were fighting over the kingdom. In fact, the Celts first entered Asia Minor at the invitation of one of the Bithynian brothers, to help him in his struggle. But even if Bithynia could be ignored for the present, the Celts were at large in Antiochus’s kingdom—and so was Antigonus Gonatas.

In view of his precarious position in Greece, where he had few possessions and many enemies (including a newly resurgent Sparta), and in view of the chaotic situation in Asia Minor, in 279 Gonatas decided, like his father before him, to extend into Asia Minor. The plan worked well, but perhaps not in the way he expected. When Antiochus arrived, they skirmished for a while, but then came to terms. The deal was that Gonatas would leave Asia to Antiochus, and Antiochus would not interfere in European affairs. This was a significant moment; if Gonatas could gain the throne, there would be, for the first time since Alexander’s death, a balance of power, with none of the three kings inclined to try to take over the kingdom of one of the others. Gonatas and Antiochus sealed the peace between them by becoming double brothers-in-law: Antiochus was already married to Stratonice, Gonatas’s sister, and Gonatas now married a sister of Antiochus.

Gonatas’s first invasion of Macedon from Asia was a failure. But then in 277, apparently by sheer chance, he met a force of eighteen thousand Celts in Thrace on their way out of Greece. He lured them into an ambush near Lysimacheia and wiped them out. The rout was so thorough that Gonatas attributed his victory to Pan, the god of, among other things, panic. He later had his court poet write a hymn to Pan, and struck coins with the god’s head on the obverse. Macedon lay open for Gonatas, now that he had eliminated the Celtic menace and could present himself as a successful warrior and their savior. In 276 (having expanded his army by hiring some of the defeated Celts) he drove out the last pretenders, regained Cassandreia and Thessaly, and had himself declared king. He took the year 283, when his imprisoned father had abdicated in his favor, as the official start of his reign. He died in 239, aged eighty, still on the throne of Macedon.

EPILOGUE

It is striking testimony to the endurance of Alexander’s influence over the Successors that the attempt to emulate him died along with those who had actually known him. Of course, there was warfare to come, but it was limited. Successive Seleucids certainly wanted to take southern Syria from successive Ptolemies, but generally they did not expect to take Egypt as well; Pyrrhus drove Antigonus Gonatas out of Macedon for a couple of years, but the conflict was confined to the Greek mainland. The pattern of the three great Hellenistic kingdoms was fixed: Ptolemy had Greater Egypt, Antiochus had Asia, Gonatas had Macedon, and no one seemed to want the lot anymore. In the past, a frontier had been only temporary, as each king expected to try to expand his territory; now, greater respect was paid to natural borders of sea, river, mountain, and desert. Alexander’s dream of a single Greek empire remained unfulfilled. In the end, the empire that spanned east and west was Roman.

The timetable of the Roman takeover tells its tale of ruthlessness. In 167, after long hostility, the kingdom of Macedon was replaced by four republics subject to Rome; twenty-one years later, the southern Greeks were finally quelled and the city of Corinth destroyed. In 133 Attalus III of Pergamum, fearing the consequences of Roman interest in Asia Minor, bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman people as a way of avoiding massive bloodshed. In 74 Nicomedes III of Bithynia followed suit. By 62 the last champion of Greek freedom, Mithradates VI of Pontus, had been forced to commit suicide, and the former Seleucid kingdom was split up into provinces of the burgeoning empire. In 58 the Romans annexed Cyprus, having already taken Cyrenaica from the Ptolemies about forty years earlier. In 30 the love affair of Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony doomed Egypt to following the other Successor kingdoms into extinction as a Roman province.

But even after the Roman conquest, there was still something essentially Greek about these eastern Roman provinces, and in due course of time (in 285 ce, and then more formally in 364) the Roman administration recognized this by dividing the empire into a western and an eastern half. The east, governed from Byzantium (now renamed Constantinopolis), outlasted the west by a thousand years, and came into conflict with successive powers from farther east: the Sasanians, the Arabs, and finally the Ottoman Turks. All these world-changing events were the legacy of Alexander and the Successors, since it was their energy and ambition that had created the Greek East.

But their legacy did not always involve conflict and loss of life. Much of the youthful energy of the new world they created was, it is true, absorbed by warfare, but there was still enough left to build on the past and create new ways of thinking about humankind and its role in the world, about how individuals might perfect themselves, about what counted as art and literature. Philosophy reached new heights of sophistication, while at the same time reaching out to ordinary people; artists worked with new canons of realism; science and technology progressed at a furious rate, often driven by the interminable wars. The irony is that the Hellenistic age, which saw all this brilliance and high culture, was ushered in by the cynical brutality of Alexander and his Successors. But perhaps, for that very reason, this period of history can teach us to hope that even when things seem at their darkest, the forces of greed and destruction will not entirely win.

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