II. _After Alexander._--The external fortunes of the Macedonian Empire
after Alexander's death must be briefly traced before its inner
developments be touched upon.[2] There was, at first, when Alexander
suddenly died in 323, no overt disruption of the empire. The dispute
between the Macedonian infantry and the cavalry (i.e. the commonalty and
the nobles) was as to the person who should be chosen to be the king,
although it is true that either candidate, the half-witted son of Philip
II., Philip Arrhidaeus, or the posthumous son of Alexander by Roxana,
opened the prospect of a long regency exercised by one or more of the
Macedonian lords. The compromise, by which both the candidates should be
kings together, was, of course, succeeded by a struggle for power among
those who wished to rule in their name. The resettlement of dignities
made in Babylon in 323, while it left the eastern commands practically
undisturbed as well as that of Antipater in Europe, placed Perdiccas
(whether as regent or as chiliarch) in possession of the kings' persons,
and this was a position which the other Macedonian lords could not
suffer. Hence the first intestine war among the Macedonians, in which
Antipater, Antigonus, the satrap of Phrygia, and Ptolemy, the satrap of
Egypt, were allied against Perdiccas, who was ultimately murdered in 321
on the Egyptian frontier (see PERDICCAS [4], EUMENES). A second
settlement, made at Triparadisus in Syria in 321, constituted Antipater
regent and increased the power of Antigonus in Asia. When Antipater
died, in 319, a second war broke out, the wrecks of the party of
Perdiccas, led by Eumenes, combining with Polyperchon, the new regent,
and later on (318) with the eastern satraps who were in arms against
Pithon, the satrap of Media. Cassander, the son of Antipater,
disappointed of the regency, had joined the party of Antigonus. In 316
Antigonus had defeated and killed Eumenes and made himself supreme from
the Aegean to Iran, and Cassander had ousted Polyperchon from
Macedonia. But now a third war began, the old associates of Antigonus,
alarmed by his overgrown power, combining against him--Cassander,
Ptolemy, Lysimachus, the governor of Thrace, and Seleucus, who had fled
before Antigonus from his satrapy of Babylonia. From 315 to 301 the war
of Antigonus against these four went on, with one short truce in 311.
Antigonus never succeeded in reaching Macedonia, although his son
Demetrius won Athens and Megara in 307 and again (304-302) wrested
almost all Greece from Cassander; nor did Antigonus succeed in expelling
Ptolemy from Egypt, although he led an army to its frontier in 306; and
after the battle of Gaza in 312, in which Ptolemy and Seleucus defeated
Demetrius, he had to see Seleucus not only recover Babylonia but bring
all the eastern provinces under his authority as far as India. Meanwhile
the struggle changed its character in an important respect. King Philip
had been murdered by Olympias in 317; the young Alexander by Cassander
in 310; Heracles, the illegitimate son of Alexander the Great, by
Polyperchon in 309. Thus the old royal house became extinct in the male
line, and in 306 Antigonus assumed the title of king. His four
adversaries answered this challenge by immediately doing the same. Even
in appearance the empire was no longer a unity. In 301 the coalition
triumphed over Antigonus in the battle of Ipsus (in Phrygia) and he
himself was slain. Of the four kings who now divided the Macedonian
Empire amongst them, two were not destined to found durable dynasties,
while the house of Antigonus, represented by Demetrius, was after all to
do so. The house of Antipater came to an end in the male line in 294,
when Demetrius killed the son of Cassander and established himself on
the throne of Macedonia. He was however expelled by Lysimachus and
Pyrrhus in 288; and in 285 Lysimachus took possession of all the
European part of the Macedonian Empire. Except indeed for Egypt and
Palestine under Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Seleucus now divided the empire
between them, with the Taurus in Asia Minor for their frontier. These
two survivors of the forty years' conflict soon entered upon the
crowning fight, and in 281 Lysimachus fell in the battle of Corupedion
(in Lydia), leaving Seleucus virtually master of the empire. Seleucus'
assassination by Ptolemy Ceraunus in the same year brought back
confusion.
Ptolemy Ceraunus (the son of the first Ptolemy, and half-brother of the
reigning king of Egypt) seized the Macedonian throne, whilst Antiochus,
the son of Seleucus, succeeded in holding together the Asiatic dominions
of his father. The confusion was aggravated by the incursion of the
Gauls into the Balkan Peninsula in 279; Ptolemy Ceraunus perished, and a
period of complete anarchy succeeded in Macedonia. In 276 Antigonus
Gonatas, the son of Demetrius, after inflicting a crushing defeat on the
Gauls near Lysimachia, at last won Macedonia definitively for his house.
Three solid kingdoms had thus emerged from all the fighting since
Alexander's death: the kingdom of the Antigonids in the original land of
the race, the kingdom of the Ptolemies in Egypt, and that of the
Seleucids, extending from the Aegean to India. For the next 100 years
these are the three great powers of the eastern Mediterranean. But
already parts of the empire of Alexander had passed from Macedonian rule
altogether. In Asia Minor, Philetaerus a Greek of Tios (Tieium) in
Paphlagonia, had established himself in a position of practical
independence at Pergamum, and his nephew, Attalus, was the father of the
line of kings who reigned in Pergamum till 133--antagonistic to the
Seleucid house, till in 189 they took over the Seleucid possessions west
of the Taurus. In Bithynia a native dynasty assumed the style of kings
in 297. In Cappadocia two Persian houses, relics of the old aristocracy
of Achaemenian days had carved out principalities, one of which became
the kingdom of Pontus and the other the kingdom of Cappadocia (in the
narrower sense); the former regarding Mithradates (281-266) as its
founder, the latter being the creation of the second Ariarathes
(?302-?281). Armenia, never effectively conquered by the Macedonians,
was left in the hands of native princes, tributary only when the
Seleucid court was strong enough to compel. In India, Seleucus had in
302 ceded large districts on the west of the Indus to Chandragupta, who
had arisen to found a native empire which annexed the Macedonian
provinces in the Panjab.
Whilst the Antigonid kingdom remained practically whole till the Roman
conquest ended it in 168 B.C., and the house of Ptolemy ruled in Egypt
till the death of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., the Seleucid Empire perished by
a slow process of disruption. The eastern provinces of Iran went in 240
or thereabouts, when the Greek Diodotus made himself an independent king
in Bactria (q.v.) and Sogdiana, and Tiridates, brother of Arsaces, a
"Scythian" chieftain, conquered Parthia (so Arrian, but see PARTHIA).
Armenia was finally lost in 190, when Artaxias founded a new native
dynasty there. Native princes probably ruled in Persis before 166,
though the district was at least nominally subject to Antiochus IV.
Epiphanes till his death in 164 (see PERSIS). In southern Syria, which
had been won by the house of Seleucus from the house of Ptolemy in 198,
the independent Jewish principality was set up in 143. About the same
time Media was totally relinquished to the Parthians. Babylonia was
Parthian from 129. Before 88 the Parthians had conquered Mesopotamia.
Commagene was independent under a king, Mithradates Callinicus, in the
earlier part of the last century B.C. Syria itself in the last days of
the Seleucid dynasty is seen to be breaking up into petty
principalities, Greek or native. From 83 to 69 is the transient episode
of Armenian conquest, and in 64 the last shadow of Seleucid rule
vanished, when Syria was made a Roman province by Pompey. From this time
Rome formally entered upon the heritage of Alexander as far as the
Euphrates, but many of the dynasties which had arisen in the days of
Macedonian supremacy were allowed to go on for a time as client states.
One of them, the royal house of Commagene, not deposed by the Romans
till A.D. 72, had Seleucid blood in its veins through the marriage of a
Seleucid princess with Mithradates Callinicus, and regarded itself as
being a continuation of the Seleucid dynasty. Its kings bore the name of
Antiochus, and were as proud of their Macedonian, as of their Persian,
descent (see the Inscription of Nimrud Dagh, Michel, No. 735).