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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Appearances
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 all sorts of fun stuff but for them it's all about Alexander right the whole concept of this initial period of the successors is how do we best connect ourselves to Alexander whether that's through marrying his sister or
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 relative 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. So Olympias gets murdered. Cleopatra gets killed. Philip Aridaeus, 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,
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 family connection that is the case for the early successors. 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.
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 yeah so cassandra marries thessaloniki he's the one with his successful marriage eventually as the the half sister of alexander so she's another daughter of philip ii and obviously he founds the city modern city of thessalonica is named after thessaloniki
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 Thessaloniki.
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 has disappeared. But it's not until we get to these squabbles 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 Ipsus 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 three tens after the death of all these different family members is really when the last son is dead. And Antigonus,
Polyperchon 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 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 that although he has his 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
He's sufficiently powerful to do that. And then the others follow suit. And 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.
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 papyri. And there's a great book. He'll be annoyed if I don't mention it by my good friend, Paul. Just don't know.
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