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
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 oars wow 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 oars and stuff these massive like things and practically some of them didn't work very well but his ships were big enough
And he gets his nickname as the besieger for his massive siege of Rhodes that took over 18 months and failed. And so Heckel 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. Yeah. Ptolemy is called the Admiral because he loses a massive sea battle against Demetrius.
And Seleucus 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 tows 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 ramborn 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 helipolis the city besieger there's this massive 40 story tower that is so big it needs oxen to pull it into place and that's what he relies on taking roads with and when the rhodians
dislodge some iron plates and set it 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, right?
I don't know if he's compensating for something, but he is certainly into the huge ships and these huge siege towers.
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 ipsus in 301 the titanic final battle isn't it yes like this huge climatic battle is huge armies like there's a hundred thousand maybe even 120 000 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 cassandra in macedon by simicus 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 Seleucus when Cassander is got rid of comes to take over Macedon and has to go through Thrace and we get the battle of
where Seleucus fights Lysimachus and you 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 Karanus, who just gets around causing trouble everywhere. And so Seleucus's death is generally taken as sort of the end of the successors 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' reconquest of Macedon from Pyrrhus, and then Pyrrhus' death when he's trying to conquer Argos and Greece from Demetrius and his son Antigonus, that we really see the end of the successive 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, because 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 purist, 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 Hellenistic 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 too, 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 Hellenistic world becomes about solidifying culture rather than reunifying Alexander.
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