Dr. Graham Wrightson
speaker
123 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Graham Wrightson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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 Arian 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 Perdiccas, or a life of Craterus, or a life of Antipater even, or a life of Cassander, we could fit all these different people into the place. But because we have these, just Diodorus, 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 successors in particular is very problematic. And we don't really get useful sources again until...
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 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're all fighting each other so we start off with the three at the top and everybody else underneath is nominally underneath but then very quickly that changes and the ones at the top disappear and
which is the problem, I guess, that I already mentioned Antipode, Craterus and Perdiccas are our 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.
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.
Yeah, the crocodiles eat the 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, Perdiccas, the two main ones, and Neoptolemus, leaving Eumenes behind as this non-Macedonian Greek general with an army and no boss.
Now that Perdiccas dies elsewhere, because that battle takes place in Asia Minor while Perdiccas invades Egypt. When Perdiccas dies and that news arrives to Eumenes, he's like, oh, what do I do now? So we get this whole change. We get Triparadaisos 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 age, as you 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 and 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, um, And Alexander obviously has, you know, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world with the lighthouse of Pharos and stuff, right?
And it becomes, well, the cultural center of the Hellenistic world with its library and university that's all connected to Alexander's memory, right? They are specifically connected to that. And Pertikas... 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. Yes. 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 Aridaeus, the brother's wife, Eurydice, Cleopatra.
Cleopatra and Eurydice supposedly lead armies against each other, and they take a battle against each other, and Cleopatra's
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