The Ancients - Successors of Alexander the Great

Episode Date: May 25, 2025

What happened after Alexander the Great died?On June 11, 323 BC, at just 32 years old, Alexander left an empire without a clear heir, sparking chaos among his generals. Tristan Hughes and Dr. Graham Wrightson explore the immediate aftermath of his death, the power struggles among his top generals, and the rise of new kingdoms from the fractured empire.The fascinating and brutal Wars of the Successors is a real life Games of Thrones with multiple family sagas, broken allegiances and murders, as the generals battle it out to become Alexander the Great's sole successor.MOREAlexander the Great:https://open.spotify.com/episode/0z8hT2mn3bV4QCFSkoyk4AAlexander the Great's Sex Life:https://open.spotify.com/episode/3CYOYc97yU9Y9rdQelirJ9?si=f821a2f87f7a40e4&nd=1&dlsi=ab1ef58e265748bfPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Nick Thomson, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the ancient ad free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting HistoryHit.com slash subscribe. To the Strongest Those were the immortalised, fabled last words of Alexander the Great, when he died in Babylon after a short and sudden illness on 11th June 323 BC, aged just 32. In his 13 year reign he had conquered the mighty Persian Empire and forged one of the

largest empires the world had yet seen, stretching from Greece to the Indian subcontinent. His achievements have been the talk of countless books and podcast episodes, but the story of the chaos that erupted after his death is even more fascinating. This chaos is epitomised by those fabled last words themselves, to the strongest. These words were an answer, an answer by Alexander to one of his generals who had approached his deathbed. The general had asked to whom Alexander left his empire. Alexander had simply replied, To Kratisdo, to the strongest. Now unfortunately, it's very likely that Alexander did not pass from this world with

those legendary final words. However, fictional or not, they have come to epitomise the titanic struggle for power that followed his death. Alexander's death was unexpected. Aged just 32, he left no clear heir to the throne. His only son was illegitimate. His wife, a Bactrian princess called Roxana, was pregnant at the time of Alexander's death and she would ultimately give birth to a son. But that son, although Alexander's sole legitimate heir, would be incapable of ruling for years. Alexander also had a brother, an elder half-brother in fact, called Aridaeus. But Aridaeus had a condition that meant that he was incapable

of ruling without help. It had also saved his life, Alexander therefore had not considered Aridaeus a threat to his rule. It would ultimately be the incapable Aridaeus and Roxana's newborn son, who the Macedonians would name as Alexander's regal successors, joint kings. But everyone knew that their actual power was non-existent. Real power lay with Alexander's former generals, experienced commanders who had served with Alexander throughout his campaigns, and been critical to the king's many military successes. It was these generals, all larger than life figures, who would decide the fate of Alexander's empire and help forge the Hellenistic world that emerged from it. These

were the successors, and it's their story that we are covering today. After putting down a soldier mutiny almost immediately after Alexander died, the generals who had outlived their king in Babylon divided the spoils of Alexander's empire amongst themselves. Regions were given out to these generals almost as prizes for their senior positions and for outliving Alexander. But Macedonian control over many of these regions was incredibly fragile. These generals would have to deal with rebellions and revolts that quickly broke out across the empire, stretching from Bulgaria to Afghanistan.

The biggest rebellion broke out in Greece, where a number of city-states spearheaded by Athens launched a massive revolt. It was called the Lamian War, after a city in northern Greece where the central siege of this revolt took place. This revolt would ultimately be put down. Athens would surrender, but only after several battles on land and sea and over a year of fighting. In the initialed years after Alexander the Great's death, his fracturing empire

was effectively ruled by his three most senior surviving generals. The two kings were totemic figureheads, real power lay with these commanders. These three generals were Perdicus, Antipater and Craterus. Perdicus ruled in Asia, east of the Aegean, and controlled what had been Alexander's all-conquering army. Antipater ruled in Europe, in Alexander's home region of Macedonia. He was the eldest of the three, a wildly old statesman in his seventies, who had served Alexander as governor of Macedonia for more than a decade. Supporting Antipater was Craterus, the most revered general that had served Alexander

the Great. The idea was that all three would rule Alexander's empire until Alexander's son, the boy king, confusingly also called Alexander, came of age. All three were united through marriages. Both Perdiccas and Craterus married daughters of Antipater. Think of this almost as a Macedonian triumvirate. But despite this apparent closeness, the relations between these three were strained from the beginning and they were unable to contain the desires of equally ambitious generals that supposedly served them.

These were generals like Antigonus, governor of an important province in Asia Minor, present-day Anatolia, who became an enemy of Perdiccas. There was also Ptolemy, arguably the man who triggered the first great war between these successors, barely two years after Alexander the Great's death. barely two years after Alexander the Great's death. Almost as soon as Alexander the Great died, Ptolemy had seized control of the wealthy province of Egypt. Over the following years, he strengthened up his power base in the region, determined to oppose Perdiccas and his supremacy. In 321 BC, Ptolemy made his move.

At that time, Alexander the Great's body was being transported from Babylon to be buried in Macedonia on Perdicus' orders. Alexander's body had been placed in a beautiful carriage, adorned with gold and shaped like a temple. It had taken two years to build. Whilst this elaborate temple on wheels was slowly making its way through Syria, Ptolemy hijacked it. He had already bribed the soldiers guarding the carriage and then proceeded to

escort it back to Egypt where he oversaw Alexander's burial, an incredibly symbolic and prestigious event. The die was cast. Perdiccas reacted by launching a full-scale invasion of Egypt with his army, more than 50,000 strong, determined to depose Ptolemy and retrieve Alexander's body. But Perdiccas soon found himself fighting on two fronts. In the meantime, his alliance with Antipater and Craterus had broken down, the Triumvirate had shattered. Antipater and Craterus had become convinced that

Perdiccas was plotting against them, and to be fair, Perdiccas hadn't helped matters. Because in the meantime, he had aligned himself with another faction, a royal one. Alexander the Great's male relatives might have been weak and controllable, but the women in his family were a different story. Olympias, the formidable mother of Alexander the Great and adored matriarch of the Macedonian Empire, teamed up with her sole surviving child. Her name was Cleopatra, the full sister of Alexander the Great. Both Olympias and Cleopatra hated Antipater. In their efforts to survive in this turbulent post-Alexander world, they made an irresistible

offer to Perdiccas. An offer of marriage to the Princess Cleopatra. Perdiccas agreed to it. It was an offer that this ambitious general simply could not turn down. By doing this he married into the royal family, but he also shunned his current wife, Antipater's daughter and made his desires for the throne clear to see. Such overt imperial desires, Antipater and Craterus crossed into Asia with their own army to battle Perdiccas' forces, increasing

the size and scale of this first great civil war, the First Successor War. Perticus and Craterus would both perish during this civil war, one murdered by his own officers, the other trampled underfoot and falling from his horse in a cavalry clash. Antipater would survive, but not for long. Within a year he too was dead, dying of old age. He attempted to create a new imperial order after the war at a place called Teparadesis, keeping Alexander's empire together. But it proved a forlorn hope. Within a year of Antipater's death, civil war had broken out once more. The empire would permanently fracture as various generals rose to the fore and attempted to carve out their own territories. Antigonus, Eumenes and Seleucus in Asia, Cassander and

Polyperchon in Greece and Macedonia, Ptolemy in Egypt and so on. The following years would be marked by unrivalled chaos in ancient history. Generals who had once served alongside each other under Alexander the Great as brothers in arms, would now lead armies tens of thousands strong, over thousands of kilometres, to fight each other. From the plains of Persia, to the narrow strait of the Dardanelles, titanic battles occurred on land and at sea. Alongside sieges of cities with monumental new contraptions, think catapults and iron-plated towers. The wars of these successors are some of the most extraordinary yet brutal in history.

Within a decade, these successors had murdered almost all surviving members of Alexander the Great's royal family and the winners of this chaotic struggle became kings in their own right, forging the famous kingdoms of the Hellenistic world, the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt, the Antigonid kingdom in Macedonia and the Seleucid empire in Asia. Alexander the Great may have forged a massive empire, but the legacy of his conquests were determined by his successors, some of the most remarkable military figures in ancient history. The historian Justin, writing much later famously, remarked,

Never before, indeed, did Macedonia, or any other country, abound with such a multitude of distinguished men, whom Philip I and afterwards Alexander had selected with such skill that they seemed to have been chosen not so much to attend them to war as to succeed them on the throne. Who then can wonder that the world was conquered by such officers, into the story of Alexander's death. Alexander's death was a tragic event. It was a tragic event that was a great opportunity for the people of Macedonia to be able to see the world through the eyes of the people of Macedonia. had not fortune inspired them with mutual emulation for their mutual destruction. Today we're going to delve into the story of these generals, these successors. My guest is Dr Graham

Wrightson, Associate Professor of History at South Dakota State University. Graham is an expert on ancient warfare at the time of Alexander and his successors and has written extensively on the military campaigns of these fascinating figures that followed Alexander. Graham, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you, pleasure to be here. Now, we have on the Ancients recorded more than 550 episodes over the last five years, Graham, and I've yet ever to do an episode on what I would say is perhaps my favourite pet topic in all of ancient history until today.

The successes of Alexander the Great, Graham, personally, I feel that this is a topic that more and more people, general public, are starting to hear about and are starting to get more interested in. And you always hear phrases like it's more Game of Thrones than Game of Thrones, but I think there's some truth to it. I think people didn't realise how extraordinary this period of ancient history is. Yeah. As you say, this rotation of kings and the Game of Thrones and all the assassinations

and all that different stuff, even within the successors, even the first 10 years or so is just a crazy, exciting period. Then it sort of tails off a little bit when they all start dying and you get fewer power players involved. It feels like the logical place to start would be actually with the death of Alexander the Great. So Graham, can you first give us a sense of the geopolitical context of the world that has been carved out by Alexander just before he dies? So let's say May 323 BC. What does the world look like? For those of you who don't remember, your school education, but you have the Greek city

states never unified as one country of Greece. So you have Athens and Sparta and Thebes, your three main ones at the end of the, or the beginning of the three hundreds through the mid fourth century. And Alexander's father, Philip the second took over, took Macedon as this little kingdom and then progressively over his long reign conquers all these different regions, mostly the Greek city states and the areas they controlled. The back of Carinthia, 338, he defeats the Theban-Athenian alliance and then takes rule of Greece as hegemon, as leader,

and creates the League of Corinth. And rather than necessarily conquering Greece, Macedon is the forcibly elected leader of an amalgamation of Greek states. And for Philip the invasion of Persia which he plans and begins is this propaganda to cement his role as leader of Greece that he's gonna then invade Persia so that's the Greek context Rome is doing its own thing over in Italy and you have the Greek city

states in Sicily that are connected but separate and then you have the Persian Empire that is the biggest in the world at the time controls most of western Asia and Egypt and Macedon have been in contact with Persia for a while as have the Greeks and all sorts of different background stuff that we're going to deal with but Alexander begins the invasion of Persia as a continuation of his father's policies to cement his new position as the forcibly elected ruler of this League of Corinth alliance of Greek states. And the Greeks are not happy to start with, so he has to put down the revolt of Thebes almost as soon as he becomes king and destroys the entire city and enslaves everybody except

for Pindar's house, the pirate, because he loves Pindar. And so that sort of keeps the Greeks in line and he forces them to send him 7,000 soldiers as their contribution to the campaign army and then they go off and invade Persia. And so it's initially planned as a punishment for the Persian Wars against Greece, but Alexander just keeps on going and he conquers the whole Persian Empire and refuses Darius' offer of splitting the kingdom and marriage with his daughter and all those other different stuff that goes on early on. And he conquers and there's a split in the scholarship as to whether he chooses to turn around in India or whether he's forced to turn around by his own soldiers. I'm on the choice side

because my supervisor is the main proponent of that. Waldemar Heckel. So he, in my view, rightfully continued the argument raised by others earlier that Alexander, if you go around the borders of all of Alexander's Empire, he goes about two kilometers. I think it is out past the Persian army and then make sacrifices and then change his direction. He does the same thing in India and there's various other different arguments.

So Alexander conquers Persia and goes a little further to make his empire bigger. And then he turns around and has his new plans. When he comes back to Babylon, the center, the new center of his new empire, as opposed to Persis, which was the center of the Persian Empire, he specifically chooses Babylon as his to connect with the the hanging guns Babylon and all the Babylonian history of Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi and all that and stuff. And then he dies when he's in there.

So he died very shortly after finishing his Indian conquests. But by the time he dies, you know, Egypt, Western Asia, they've been ruled by the Macedonians for over a decade by this point. So they're not necessarily close to leaving. He's founded cities in all these places. He's implemented Greek settlers in all these places. So he's begun the process in his Western conquests of integration of conquered peoples with the Hellenistic culture that comes around.

So when he dies, there's no real threat in most places anyway of separation from Alexander, right? And part of that is his propaganda presenting himself as the Savior of these places. He modeled himself on Cyrus the Great who famously freed the Babylonians from their evil Persian dominance, even though he's doing the same thing. And he, you know, you get the Cyrus Cylinder where he claims that he has he was welcomed in as a friend to Babylon without a fight and all this other

propagandistic ridiculous concepts. So Alexander does the same stuff with his personal historians saying he's the savior freeing the people from persian dominance. But now you have a new over lord right you just not supposed to realize that point so most of those areas is fine in india it's newly conquered but because it's newly conquered they still have the same. loyalty to the people that alexander put in charge for the most part and he obviously he's left garrison's and new cities in all these different places that he's been to say when he dies in three twenty three. It creates a vacuum not that leads to separation of the whole empire but a vacuum for who's gonna rule the empire in his stead because his one illegitimate son is a child and his wife is pregnant still with what turns out to be his legitimate only legitimate son and so his generals who've been the ones fighting for him. Obviously they didn't expect him to die so young and they didn't expect this power vacuum at the very top of the kingdom to appear and in all Argiad history, it's a whole history of civil war violence of brothers killing brothers and all sorts of fun stuff going on in the early Macedonian history.

That was when it was a small kingdom, so now it's a massive empire. It's even more to the fore as to what's gonna happen. And so the cultural context is that he's begun the integration in these different places with all these cities he's founded and that remains through the Hellenistic period, especially in Asia and Egypt. The one problem area was period, especially in Asia and Egypt. The one problem area was Greece, which we'll come back to, but his generals have to decide what are we going to do? Do we favor the illegitimate son that's already alive?

Do we favor the pregnant wife or do we favor his brother who happens to be older but is not trusted because of his epilepsy or whatever other. He's got something, which means that he can't rule without help. He needs, he needs help to rule. Yeah. Just like Henry the sixth in England for those British folk who know that stuff. Right. You, he has bouts of whatever it is, mental disorder where he disappears from being able

to rule. And so the generals aren't sure that he's a reliable king and so there's a dispute between even amongst the generals themselves over who they follow and also who is the most important general Alexander never had necessarily a designated right-hand man after his friend Hephaestion dies just before he does it's Pertikas and we get the statement that Pertikas was handed the ring by Alexander on his deathbed and said Pertikas supposedly according to Plutarch says who does this go to and he says to the strongest and he giving it to Pertikas so

Pertikas takes that to mean that he is the designated chosen successor as the strongest and the others say that that's not what he meant at all and that you were supposed to give it to the person who proved themselves to be the strongest and that's not what he meant at all and that you were supposed to give it to the person who proved themselves to be the strongest. And that's assuming you take Plutarch and the other sources at their word that this actually happened. We don't know what actually happened in Alexander's death bedroom. So the generals fight amongst themselves and immediately after Alexander dies, we get this sort of mini rebellion between Meliager, this really insignificant general who claims that he's speaking for the common soldier when he wants one person and that the main generals are the elite cavalry general people who are too fancy for the common soldiers.

And so Meliaga posits himself in opposition to Pertikas. And there's this mini civil war and then Pertikas forces them to hand overellie, who he and his ringleaders get trampled by elephants in execution for their resistance and all that fun stuff. So there's all sorts of different things going on. So immediately after his death, it's who is going to be the next king that the generals will back. That's their main decision that they have to make. Graham, I think in that, I think even just highlighting that immediate

bloodshed that occurs right after Alexander the Great's death, you've highlighted straight away that the chaos that really emerges and happens throughout this period following his death. But it feels like then that with Alexander the Great's death, unexpectedly aged 32, the fact that he has no clear successor in the fact he says he's got one child who's illegitimate, his wife is pregnant, but they don't know at that time if it is going to be a son, or though it will be a son, and a brother who is older, but as you say, a guy called Aridaeus, but is incapable of ruling on his own. these generals who'd been fighting for Alexander. I guess, given the context, I always like picturing them as mini-Alexanders because they're the same kind of charismatic leaders fighting in the front ranks of their men, very confident, and you can say very arrogant leaders too, willing to serve under Alexander. But as you say, if the hierarchy amongst generals is there and there's no clear air, is it that they quickly

go from brothers in arms to to kind of the most hostile of enemies because they're not willing to serve amongst one of their fellow former generals they don't see one of their former generals as more superior to them kind of thing is it that kind of ideology we need we need to understand that kind of mindset with these generals yeah for sure i mean these generals a Yeah, for sure. I mean, these generals, Alexander sort of created a somewhat level playing field amongst his commanders so that the army functions better in that context. Earlier in the army, he had Parmenion, who was his father's general, who was clearly the number two, but later on, it seems to be a Faistian, but Faistian's not the best commander, so it's sort of Perticasse and Craterus at the same time, and he has sort of a cavalry general and an infantry

general, but it's not clear which one is superior. So that when Alexander dies, there's no physteine, which makes it easier for the squabbles to begin, I guess. Perdecas claims it's him because he's there when Alexander dies. Craterus, the old infantry general, has been released from service with 10,000 veterans like a year before and he's halfway back to Macedon when he learns of Alexander's death. He's like, well, I'm just as important as Perdecas. Why is Perdecas in charge? And so these generals, they believe strongly that they are, you know, no worse than the other person. They are, they're equals. And so they fight for recognition.

There's two levels of generals, I guess. You get at the top, you have Craterus and Perticast who fought with Alexander as his main generals. Then you have Antipater, who has been governing Macedon. Previously, he worked for Philip II, Alexander's father, and was the same level as Parmenion. He sort of viewed himself as the most important individual left behind

because he's senior to everybody and he's the generation above all these different upstarts, but he's not fought with Alexander. Right. And then below that you have the generals who are named and had positions, but weren't like senior commanders like Ptolemy. He goes on to take Egypt and Seleucus and Lysimachus and Leonidas, the bodyguard and Polyperchon who comes out later and Prusestas, the bodyguard, who's become governor of one of the satrapies. So you get those level people and Antigonus, who's a governor of

a satrapy, they decide that they want to strike out to better their own positions too and so Ptolemy heads off to claim Egypt before anyone can tell him not to and Sir Lucas heads off to claim Babylon before anyone can tell him not to and Craterus declares his independence and the complicating factor is the rebellion of the Greeks. Immediately after Alexander dies Greece rebels, at least through Athens, and they begin what we call the Lamian War because of the main battles around the siege of the city of Lamia in northern Greece, in Thessaly, and is headed by a successful general. Antipater, as the governor of Macedonia and Greece, has to deal with that, and he goes down and fights and loses to start with. So he calls

for assistance, and Craterus is the closest. So he comes with Neotolimus, another general, and Leonatus and they go and they fight. Leonatus already, it seems, is aiming at kingship himself because he's put feelers out to marry Alexander's sister, who becomes a key figure in these early successor squabbles. Who gets to marry Cleopatra, Alexander's sister, because that's the closest you can get to the royal family right as a man you can't marry the sons right so you gotta marry the sisters. I'm an Alexander's have a daughter he dies in battle power and there's that clear rivalry between all of them. of these figures very early on, which you've also highlighted right there, Graham, it's not just internal troubles that seize this empire straight away with all these competing generals and people thinking, well, I should be responsible for this and so on. You also have, I guess, those external threats in regards to those people who had been in the empire now see a chance with this instability

to revolt and the Greek cities are a good example of that. Yeah, exactly. So the Lamian War is this, it's a crucial event, not because the Greeks win their freedom, but because they win their and the Greek cities are a good example of that. Yeah, exactly. So the Lamean War is this. It's a crucial event, not because the Greeks win their freedom, but because they win their first couple of engagements. And that changes the presentation and propaganda ability of the generals who are involved. So Antipater loses some face because he can't defeat the Greeks by himself. So he has to invite Craterus in for assistance. defeat the Greeks by himself. So he has to invite Craterus in for assistance and Leonardo dies, obviously, so that doesn't help. But Craterus wins the battle, wins the war, but he has to call in help from White Cletus, who brings the navy. Another name, right? Yeah. And he was a battalion

commander who arrives late. There's two clituses. The black clitus is the one killed by Alexander. White clitus survives. So he wins the Lamean war on the navy, Craterus wins on land, you know, there are numerous characters, there are numerous events that happen almost straight away following Alexander the Great's death and too many figures to follow in one episode. But let's talk about the sources first of all, because if we have so many names surviving, do we actually have quite a rich record of sources covering these successes and the years that follow Alexander the Great's death and what happens? Yeah. So we have five main sources for Alexander himself. So we have Arian, Plutarch's Life of

Alexander that's paired with Julius Caesar, Dido Asiculus, Quintus Certius, Rufus, and then there's Justin's summary of the history of Pompeius Trogas. But all five historians are Romans and they might be writing in Greek, some of them for a Greco-Roman audience, but they're still primarily Romans writing after the Romans have taken over everything. And they're using contemporary sources of Alexander, but they're, none of them are closer than 250 years after Alexander died. So for modern historians, for my students, when I teach them, this is hard for them to get their head around that, like, they're reading primary sources of a period that is very distant from what they're writing about.

Right. It's like studying American history. I always say when you have only modern sources talking about the American Revolution, that there's no contemporary documents from the event that created America as the USA that is now not surviving. So it's a strange concept to think about primary sources as not being connected directly to their period. But Alexander is comparatively very well resourced that we have these five sources. After Alexander, we hardly have any sources at all that tell us what's going on with the successors.

We have Diodorus and we have to rely on him because he's pretty much our only one. And we have the fragmentary history of Aryan successes. We have Diadorus and we have to rely on him because he's pretty much our only one. And we have the fragmentary history of Aryan successes and we get Plutarch's lives of a few of these famous generals like Demetrius and Eumenes, but he unfortunately doesn't give us lives of all of the generals, which would be helpful, right? If we had a life of Perdicast or a life of Craterus or a life of Antipater, even, or a life of Cassandra. We could fit all these different people into the place. But because we have these just Diadoorus who gets things wrong and misses things out, it's hard pieced together.

So I became an ancient historian because I like jigsaw puzzle with history that you have some aspects of the knowledge and you have to piece together and interpret what it actually says in terms of where and when we put all these things together and so that's interesting Diodorus for example there's this concept of high chronology and low chronology in the successors that he might have missed an entire year of history that he's describing in his text and that our dating for stuff is completely off because he's messed things around. So our sources for the successes in particular is very problematic. And then we don't really get useful sources again until the well, two twenties, really, when you get into the Roman historians of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies. So we have this sort of.

Almost a century of stuff where we don't really know what's going on and with the successes, that's an interesting aspect. So we have to not only those written sources, but we have to piece together inscriptions and other archaeology from areas that these people are conquering that allow us to sort of figure things out slowly or papyri evidence comes in and letters and so on. So our sources are very difficult to piece together, especially when we have so many moving parts, as we've already said, with all these different names in and letters and so on. So our sources are very difficult to piece together, especially when we have so

many moving parts, as we've already said, with all these different names doing all these different stuff, some of them last like a month, some of them last six months, some last a few years, you know, they were all fighting each other. So we start off with the three at the top and everybody else underneath this nominally underneath, but then very quickly that changes and the ones at the top disappear which is the problem I guess that I already mentioned Antipater Cradarus and Perdicis are at three at the top and they sort of remain but then when all three of them die relatively quickly in space of time everybody else is of the same level.

But that is important to highlight straight away isn isn't it, Graham, without going into too many names, but those initial years following Alexander the Great's death, there are those three senior generals of Antipater, Stidinomacedonia, Craterus, the old infantry general, and Perdicus. But all of them, within four years of Alexander the Great's death, they are all dead, either assassinated, killed on the battlefield, in Antipater's case seems to die of old age. So good old Antipater, that seems to be a bit of an exception from the rule. And then as you say, following that you get the rise to the four of these other big figures who come to dominate the successors like, as you say, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Seleucus, Eumenes, Demetrius, Lysimachus and so on. We could talk about all those generals in depth each but I don't think we have the time to. What I would like to ask though, overarching what they will do and the

fighting they will do and the carving out of their own parts of what was once Alexander the Great's empire, how important for all of them is Alexander the Great's memory because this feels central. Yeah, it is central. I mean, Pertikas, who is sort of our big player for the first year until he invades Egypt and then his own troops kill him because he crossed Nile not once but twice and watched his own men get eaten by crocodiles and all the fun stuff. It was crocodiles, wasn't it? Yeah, the rivets running creatures, crocodiles. Yeah, the crocodiles eating soldiers and so his own soldiers kill him for having them eaten by crocodiles basically.

So he disappears from the playing field. Craterus tries to invade on behalf of Antipater, but he loses in battle against Eumenes and gets trodden under his own horse when he's leading a cavalry charge. He falls off and gets trampled to death. And in the same battle, Neoptolemus is on the other wing, fights a personal duel with Eumenes, apparently. Eumenes kills Neoptolemus in this Homeric duel of generals. So three generals disappear very closely together, Craterus, Perticast,

the two main ones, and Neoptolemus leaving Eumenes behind as this non Macedonian Greek general with an army and no boss. Now the Pertikas dies elsewhere because that battle takes place in Asia Minor while Pertikas invades Egypt. When Pertikas dies and that news arrives to human is he's like, Oh, what do I do now? So we get this whole change. We get triparidase source trying to make this organization cementing Ptolemy in Egypt because he's now unremovable. And so they have to decide, okay, we've got to let Ptolemy keep Egypt because we can't get rid of him. So what are we going to do with the rest of you guys?

And so Antipater tries to broker a peace between everybody and then Antipater dies of old ages, he said shortly afterwards, and then everybody's just out for themselves at that point. And so they're all off doing their own thing. They start picking up where they left off, basically fighting as they go. But Alexander's memory is a key point, right? That's why Ptolemy steals his body and takes it to Alexander in Egypt because he knew his power in Egypt depended on Alexander as the Pharaoh before him. So by creating a shrine to Alexander's memory in the city founded by

Alexander as the new capital city of this new Ptolemaic Egypt. And Alexander obviously has, you know, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world with the lighthouse of Pharaohs and stuff, right? And it becomes the cultural center of the Hellenistic world with its library and university. That's all connected to Alexander's memory, right? And it becomes, well, the cultural center of the Hellenistic world with this library and university that's all connected to Alexander's memory, right? They are specifically connected to that. The Perticass, his downfall often comes from his threat to execute one of Alexander's relatives and his own soldiers and the other generals like, no, you can't do that. And so he has to backtrack on his supposed threat.

And he tries to marry Alexander's sister. And at that point, his soldiers aren't happy because it seems like he's aiming for the kingship himself rather than governing for the boy that he's supposed to be doing. And so that's part of the reason why he gets killed. And then Cassandra does the same thing later in trying to marry in. And we get Alexander's mother, who we haven't mentioned yet, who's also a big power player in trying to clear the playing field for her grandson and play these generals off against each other long enough

that her son can come of age, her grandson, sorry. And that backfires horribly. And there's Philip Aradais, the brothers wife, Eurydice E. Cleopatra, Cleopatra and Eurydice supposedly lead armies against each other and they take a battle against each other and Cleopatra's army is persuaded to switch sides. And so Eurydice gets executed and all sorts of fun stuff and then Olympias kills Cassandra's family and Cassandra then kills Olympias and her family and all sorts of fun stuff. But for them, it's all about Alexander, right?

The whole concept of this initial period of success is how do we best connect ourselves to Alexander, whether that's through marrying his sister, through being married to his brother, through being also descended from his father. So being one of his cousins, basically, right. Or step siblings or half siblings. All these different people are trying to connect themselves to Alexander in some way or other, either through control of his sons, through marriage to his relatives, or through being his

relatives as his mother, right? And that's arguably why the end of the successor period, when we leave and go to sort of them founding their independent kingdoms, that doesn't really happen until all these generals not only killed each other, but they've wiped out Alexander's entire family, basically. Right. So Olympus gets murdered. Cleopatra gets killed.

Philip Aradeus, his brother, gets killed. The two sons get killed. So once the entire family is done, then it shifts away from Alexander's memory. It's like because we've murdered these people, we can't connect to Alexander's memory, because then you remember that we murdered his family. So now we have to build a different connection to our own personal governance of these kingdoms. And so it becomes less about family ties and to the propagandistic ideals of Alexander the Great now as the

wonderful conqueror. And that's where we get the idea. At least I think that's where we get the ideas of Alexander being a god coming into that you're connecting your kingship to this divine figure, this semi-divine heroic figure, right? You get the heroic cult of Alexander is promoted instead of the literal cult of Alexander is promoted instead of the literal family connection

that is the case for the early successes. Then we get Ptolemy especially promotes the divine aspect in Egypt where you have divine pharaohs anyway marrying as gods. And you get the Seleucids promoting connection to divine Alexander and he's on their coins as this Dionysus Heracles figure in their iconography.

And you get the Antigonids doing the same thing that they claim to be the rulers of Macedon through this connection to divine Alexander, even though they're not directly connected. Just to kind of summarize there, because you touched on so many great points Graham, even though Alexander the Great doesn't leave any adult sons who would immediately take over, although that would have been troublesome anyway. The fact that there are all those relatives of Alexander the Great who have massive roles in those early years, the successes, including his sister, his full sister, who's called, confusingly, he's also called Cleopatra, but as you say, the women around Alexander the Great, his mum Olympias, famously played by Angelina Jolie in the Alexander 2004 epic, and his full sister Cleopatra become major players. Generals wanting to marry Cleopatra, as you mentioned earlier, Olympias being this

formidable figure herself and actively leading in battle and trying to secure the throne for her grandson. But as time goes on, these generals, if they can't align themselves with Alexander the Great's royal family, they kill off these royal family members brutally. And does that pave the way that after a few decades or so, those generals, those successors who have managed to survive, like Ptolemy in Egypt and so on, those successors who have managed to survive, like Ptolemy in Egypt and so on, now they no longer have any of those royal figureheads they've done away with them. Is that when they go from trying to align themselves with royalty to actually deciding, I might as well declare myself a king in my own right? Cassandra marries Thessaloniki. He's one with his successful marriage eventually as the half sister of Alexander. So she's another daughter of Philip the second. And obviously he founds the city. Modern city of Thessalonica is named after Thessaloniki survived the one survival of

the Cassandrian stuff, but his death and all his brothers are killed by Olympias. And then he is eventually killed too. And so his dynasty with Thessaloniki as connection to Alexander is ended and Demetrius comes back and takes over kingdom of, of Macedon, squabbling a little bit with Pyrrhus, but eventually it ends up with Demetrius successors, the Antigonids becoming kings of Macedon because that last connection is disappeared but it's not until we get to these squabbles of our sort of what I call the four main surviving successor kings where you get five initially so

you have Cassander in Macedon and Greece, Antigonus and Demetrius who rule in what is now Turkey, you have Lysimachus ruling in Thrace, then you have Seleucus in Babylon and Ptolemy in Egypt are your five main kings and they rule throughout the rest of the next 20 years basically in their little kingdoms and they all fight with each other over who's the most powerful and after Antigonus defeats Eumenes and takes over his army, he becomes the most powerful in Asia Minor and he starts trying to dictate to the other kings. And so we get this alliance of the other kings against Antigonus that ends with the Battle of Ipsos in 301, where Antigonus is killed and Demetrius doesn't get back in time to save his father and flees and becomes the definitive

pirate king for about a decade where he's a king in name, but has no country except for his ships and he sails around. But Antigonus is the first one to actually use the title King for the first time in the 310s after the death of all these different family members is really when the last son is dead and Polypurgon and Olympias are dealt with, then he has himself and his son Demetrius declared kings. And then the other successors follow suit. They're like, well, if Antigonus can be king, we can be kings too. And so they declare themselves Pharaoh of Egypt and then king of Babylon. And then Lysimachus becomes king of Thrace and Cassander makes himself king of Macedon. Simicus becomes king of Thrace and Cassander makes himself king of Macedon.

And so Antigonus is sort of the catalyst for these actions in thinking he has enough power now that he can stand by himself. And he's still trying to attack these other kings to reintegrate the empire of Alexander. Like Antigonus viewed himself as the reinstigator of the full empire. Antigonus viewed himself as the reinstigator of the full Empire. But although he has his area, he wants to conquer Egypt, which he invades a couple of times and Babylon, which he successfully invades and Seleucus flees to Egypt for safety on one occasion. So he is trying to reunify Alexander's Empire. When he's in his most successful period, that's when he calls himself king.

He thinks he's sufficiently powerful to do that. And then the others follow suit. Then of course, Antigonus dies. But Demetrius calls himself king inherited from Antigonus, his father, even though he has no kingdom. It's only when he comes back and takes Macedon from Pyrrhus and Cassander that then he can call himself king of Macedon. Graham, it's one other thing to highlight there, isn't it? The geographic areas that they're

campaigning in are massive. A lot of time around the Eastern Mediterranean, but sometimes you have armies marching from the borders of India all the way back to Asia Minor. So geographically, it's such a large area. If there's so much warfare, do we know much about the makeup of these armies and I guess the navies too of these various successors as generals and then as kings? Do we know much about the military aspect of their armies that they're using to fight one another? - Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because that's my specialist area. So the Ptolemies in particular, we know quite a lot about Egypt because we have a lot of papyrus evidence that talks about even low-level offices in terms of the grants of land they have and we

have a few papyri that tell us about musters of troops so we get some names of people and how many soldiers and the specific titles they have and the land they own and all that different stuff so we can reconstruct the Ptolemaic army pretty well from the papari, and there's a great book, he'll be annoyed if i don't mention it, by my good friend paul giastono. we have a lot of disagreements about stuff, but he has an awesome book on the egyptian army, through pen and sword, so it's very available, it's very good, and so we know a lot about that. And we have this one interesting text later in the period of the infamous battle of Raffia, where the Ptolemies fought the Seleucids in this huge battle in the 320s, where Polybius, another Greco-Roman historian

who I have an ongoing dispute with, he has this whole text where he describes the Ptolemaic army completely reforming itself and they go to Greece and ask for Greek mercenaries Generals to come and reform and perfect the Egyptian army because it's not as good as it used to be and so we have names Of these generals and he gives description of their training methods and how they were divided into different units and all this different stuff Which we don't have for our other armies so for the most part our knowledge comes from a few battle descriptions where they describe the sizes of the units and at the very least the type of unit that is involved. So the most part of all of these from Philip the second onwards is a sericephalanx, which

is my special area. My research was involving reconstructing 48 actual Sarissas and then training people to march around as a phalanx to see how easy it was to do that and how quick you could become a functioning phalanx and walk up hills and over rivers and stuff. That book, I haven't quite finished yet, but it'll be out in a couple of years. So they're all Sarissa phalanx. So the main contingent of all of these Hellenistic armies all the way through down to even Mithridates of Pontus fighting the Romans in the first century. Their main unit is their Sarisa phalanx and so most of our armies throughout the Hellenistic world, regardless of your country, that's what they're built on. And then they add onto the side of it, you know, your light cavalry, your heavy cavalry, your archers, your javelin

men, all these other different components. And my book on combined arms talks about how this integration happened through the Macedonian system and then takes place in the Hellistic area. So almost all of the armies are very similarly constructed. We know that from their heritage and from these battles that they take place. And they also integrate elephants and the usids have side chariots much to their cost. And so we know sort of what the unit types are. And we can somewhat trust our sources when they give us numbers for these units, although numbers in ancient sources are

problematic in general, what we don't have is how you recruited these in all the different places, how they trained, how long they trained for. If the recruitment matches the name of the unit, right? If we say this unit is called this region, does that mean all its soldiers come from that region or is it just a name that they've inherited? Cause it originally came from that region. We don't know for sure the officer levels.

That's what I work on right now is trying to piece together. If we can associate that, we don't even know the size of the basic regimental unit. All these different things, they're still dispute about the size of even regiments in Alexander's army. So so we have evidence for some staff and then there's very sparse evidence for other aspects of armies. Well, when you look at say the Roman army, for example, we know how they trained. We know how they were gathered. We know how their must have worked. We know how they were commanded, where they came from, how they camped, how many people

went into each tent and all this different stuff, right? We don't know any of that for the Macedonian one. So as you say, when it comes to marching over these massive areas, the logistics is crazy to comprehend because we do not know really how these armies marched in these areas. And there's great books on logistics, famously by Engels on Alexander's army and for other different campaigns. We have some evidence like the anabasis for Xenophon of the 10,000 marching back from Asia Minor back to Greece and the logistics to go into that. So we know some of it and we can comparative look at other armies, as I and other scholars

do, to compare how much fodder does a horse need, how many camp followers are coming with you. So when we talk about armies marching, we focus, or at least I focus on in battle of the 70,000 soldiers. And you forget that there's at least another 70,000 people in the army going with them as slaves or attendants or their families going on, right? We know the families were there because I'm at the famous battle between human ease and Antigones, the two greatest generals of the successes, human ease wins the battle, but he gets handed over to execution by his own soldiers because Antigonus captures the baggage train and he captures the families of and Eumenes of soldiers. And so they to get their families back, they give up their general.

So we know these armies on campaign are marching with massive numbers of tagalongs, right? Whatever you want to call them. And that's not just in the ancient world that happened through our history. campaign are marching with massive numbers of tag alongs, right? Whatever you want to call them. And that's not just in the ancient world that happens through our history. It's often not written about, but when an army is on campaign, it has a massive train of people going with it. Even the Seleucid empire in itself that goes from Jerusalem at one point out to India is the biggest of all these successor kingdoms and it's just huge. And they start being unable to control their distant territories that become independent because it's just too big.

Can we talk a bit about the ships as well and the naval elements? Because is this a period where it's like bigger is better? Let's get a massive ship and put some catapults and stuff on it and send it against a city or against another army full of big ships. Yeah. So the Navy is very interesting. There's big naval battles like that have been throughout the Greek world. The Peloponnesian Wars was a big fight between naval powers in the end, right? That's what decides it between Athens and Sparta. But because of the economics of these countries that they are huge, they have

access to the Silk Route now, their own connections, the more merchants, more trade, more wealth in general than the smaller Greek cities. They can put out huge navies and they have huge armies to go with it. So we start to see this inclination that bigger is better, as you say. So we get these presentations of Demetrius the besieger in particular. We'll come back to the seizures in a minute, but for navy purposes he is famous in our historians,

even in the Roman historians, for building massive ships. Normally you get your triremes, which are your three decked oars, by the time we get to the fourth century we have five pentaremes, hexaremes, which are six decks. Demetrius supposedly had a heptaremes quite commonly, and then he even goes to an octareme and a nonareme, which are like nine banks of ores in his one ship. And there's even been a suggestion that he went for a ceremonial ship up to like 18 to 20 banks of ores and stuff, these massive like things. And practically some of them didn't work very well well but his ships were big enough in he gets his nickname as the besieger for

his massive siege of roads that took over 18 months and failed and so heckle and I argue that the nickname he gets is ironic that he's not a good besieger that's why he's called the besieger. Colomy is called the Admiral because he loses a massive sea battle against Demetrius. And Sir Lucas is called the Elephant General because he gives up India for a bunch of elephants. So these are ironic nicknames the other Kings give to each other. So he's a Besieger because he's bad at besieging, but he does have massive siege weaponry. So he has huge ships.

He ties these massive ships together and puts massive siege towers on the ships and then toes them to the walls of these cities to attack. And he has catapult fire firing catapults on his ships and underwater rams to sort of knock the wall in with this this ram born ship and stuff. All the stuff that you can see in the new gladiator movie the gladiator 2 that stuff is basically like Demetrius besieging stuff and on land he builds what's called the hell apple is the city procedure is this massive 40 story. It needs Oxen to pull it into place, and that's what he relies on taking roads with. And when the Rodians dislodge some iron plates and set on fire, he pulls it out of the way because he doesn't want his pet toy to be destroyed and stuff. And so he never manages to capture the city because of his uselessness.

And I've written on his ineptitude before on this very subject. But for him, it seems the size matters. I don't know if he's compensating for something, but he is certainly into the huge ships and these huge siege towers. And they don't do very well, it seems, for the most part, which is ironic. How does it come to an end, the Wars of the Successors? What is ultimately the outcome of this turbulent period? So the successor period, either you take it with the death of all the age of generals or you take it on when they. Become happy with the status quo I guess so my first book and my PhD thesis took the end of the main successor period being the battle of Epsis in 301 the Titanic final battle isn't it like this huge climatic battle is huge armies like there's a hundred thousand maybe even a hundred and twenty thousand on one side and almost 80,000 on the other including also Lucas's 500 elephants.

Huge battle. We haven't had that in any Greek warfare beforehand or since on the Greek side, right? Obviously against the Persians, they had massive armies for Alexander, but the death of Antigonus and the exile of Demetrius as his pirate king sort of establishes the status quo that these other four allied kings, Cassander in Macedon, Vesimachus in Thrace, Seleucus in Asia and Ptolemy in Egypt. Once Antigonus is defeated, they sort of accept that each of their status quo for the most part, but then they go off and fight each other. So Lucas, when Cassander is got rid of comes to take over Macedon and has to go through Thrace and we get these two octogenarians leading cavalry charges at the front of their cavalry on horseback with spears and stuff as well.

I think Seleucus is 79 and Lysimachus is 81 or something and they are fighting in the battle, right? And Lysimachus dies in the cavalry charge, supposedly personally killed by Seleucus and then Seleucus wins in triumph. He's going to march into Macedon and reunify all of Alexander's empire. And then he's murdered by his corrupt evil nephew, one of the great villains of the successor period, Ptolemy, who just gets around causing trouble everywhere. And so Seleucus's death is generally taken as sort of the end of the successes

of the generals of Alexander. But then you could take Demetrius and Pyrrhus as I said, who are the next generation, but they are in the same time frame. And so most people accept that it's Demetrius is reconquered of Macedon from Pyrrhus and then Pyrrhus is death when he's trying to conquer Argos and Greece from Demetrius and his son Antigonus that we really see the end of the successor period with Pyrrhus' death because then we're into the established kingdoms of the Antigonids in Greece and Macedon, the Seleucids in Asia

and the Ptolemies in Egypt. And by 270-ish when Pyrrhus dies, that's when we get the Hellenistic period is established. No more really is there a realistic concept of the different kings taking over each other's kingdoms and reunifying the mythical Empire of Alexander, right? That whole concept of the propaganda of Alexander now disappears and it's no longer an idea of reunifying Alexander's empire, but of establishing your own kingdom. And that's really the big difference.

Cause Pyrrhus is still trying to theoretically reconstitute Alexander's empire as Alexander's last surviving relative as his nephew, but his death as this sort of ADHD Pyrrhus, as I call him, where he fights all these campaigns and never finishes any of them because a better one comes along his death sort of ends this era of the concept of a Greek Unified Empire and we get into what we call the Hellistic period of the kingdoms where they are independent doing their own thing And we get a whole bunch of other different kingdoms arrive in the 270s to like Pergamum Greco Bactria Parthia Pontus all these different ones sort of formulate as these kingdoms become isolated or sort of inward looking they no longer have the power to call on to externally conquered places. And so that changes our viewpoint.

And so then the holistic world becomes about solidifying culture rather than reunifying Alexander. It is so interesting when you look at it seeing on a map, now when Alexander dies in 323 BC, so that being one empire and then fast forward as you say to the death of Pyrrhus, so let's say 270. So we've got 50 years later and you see how fractured it is but into these these different kingdoms. But ultimately, those kingdoms are the ones that will come into contact with Roman and be leading lights in the Hellenistic period. And also, as you say, there is no longer kind of that family of Alexander the Great. They've all perished, they've been used, and they've perished in those years of those successes. I mean, Graham, I wish I could ask you more about the economies, about the city-states and other factors, but we have to wrap it up there because it feels almost unfair that I've asked you to do the successes of Alexander

the Great in one shout because there are so many names, so many stories and so many things we can talk about. But hopefully it's given people an idea of just how extraordinary this period is, isn't it? It is like, despite the relative lack of sources we have, there is still so much to talk about about these figures who it feels like they are unparalleled in the whole of ancient history. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I've always loved the Succesor period because there are gaps, but there's so much to talk about within those gaps. Sometimes in ancient history you get gaps and you don't really know what's going on, and there's not much going on as far as we can tell,

hence the concept of dark ages appearing and all that different stuff, right? But here there's so much going on, it's surprising that we don't know so much. And we get that 50-year gap from Corapidium down to Silesia in 220, including while Pyrrhus is in Rome, where we don't really know what's going on in Greece. We have like a 50-year period where we have nothing really that explains all the changes we see in the 220s. So it's fascinating and there's so many stories, especially in the first, I mean even the first two years after Alexander dies, it's absolute chaos and carnage. There's people everywhere. There's all sorts of stuff going on in all these different places around his empire. But it's fascinating. We

could do another podcast just on those two years and it would take up another two hours or whatever. As you say, all those figures and a really amazing period in history. And Graham, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast and going into this nerdy deep dive with me today on this period which is absolutely incredible. Yeah, you're welcome. Anyone who wants to contact me, please do. I'd be happy to talk for hours on these subjects. That's why I became a lecturer on it, so I can just talk and talk until I'm forced to drag it away from the podium. forced to drag it away from the podium.

Well, there you go. There was Dr Graham Wrightson giving you an introduction to the turbulent, fascinating world of the successors of Alexander the Great. There are so many events, so many characters, so much turmoil in this period of ancient history that I've no doubt will revisit this topic in the future and tell its story in the detail that it deserves. But until then I hope you enjoyed the episode, thank you for listening.

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