The Campaigns of Alexander: The Landmark Arrian, edited by James Romm, c. 2010, soft cover, $21.
Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire, Robin Waterfield, c. 2011
How was it decided that Ptolemy would get Egypt? No answered below but Waterfield will probably answer.
In Waterfield, beginning on page 27.
Alexander has died.
His Bodyguards and Companions have begrudgingly agreed to crown his dull-witted brother, Arrhidaeus (renamed Philip III). Perdiccas, one of Alexander's Bodyguards and who got the ring from Alexander, is the man in charge.
Spoils are divided.
Ptolemy gets Egypt. Of all the satrapies, it is hard to argue that any satrapy was worth more. Egypt has grain and money; and, most of all, the crossroads for trade between the west and the east. Plus much more.
Cleomenes of Naucratis was demoted (he had been the satrap of Egypt) and was appointed Ptolemy's second-hand man.
Rhoxane finally gave birth to a boy; named after his father. Now we had two kings: Alexander III (Arrhidaeus, the dull-witted brother of Alexander) and the infant, Alexander IV.
Chapter 3: Rebellion
Chapter 4: Perdiccas, Ptolemy, and Alexander's Corpse
Antipater and Craterus (Europe): united against Perdiccas
Ptolemy: kills his second-in-command, Cleomenes; invades, takes Cyrenaica (northeast Libya) as a province for Egypt in order to control the caravan trade from the interior of Africa, and especially the export of silphium, a plant, now extinct, unique to the region, that was widely used around the Mediterranean for culinary and medicinal purposes, especially contraception. We now have a pro-Ptolemaic oligarcy in neighboring areas: Ptolemy was expanding; this was in accordance with which Alexander wanted to do, but Perdiccas had stressed consolidation, not expansion.
From Arrian, page 322:
Following the Babylon conferences, back and forth wars among the successors. Alexander's former generals were supremely well suited to this new model of leadership (the ability to amass and deploy huge armies, and from the wealth to outfit them with increasingly exotic, expensive weapons of war). The four generals who did particularly well:
- Ptolemy
- Seleukos
- Lysimakhos
- Antiogonos
In the next two years, Ptolemy, Seleukos, and Lysimakhos followed that lead and had themselves crowned king.
Monarchy had been reinvented to give the Successors an office and a set of protocols. But in terms of global balance of power, nothing had changed.
The long struggle for Asia, chiefly pitting Antigonos and Demetrios against Seleukos, finally came to resolution in 301 at the battle of Ipsus -- here in Phrgia, in the biggest engagement the western world had yet seen, Lysiakos and Kassandros brought their forces to bear to support Seleukos, who was newly strengthened by his elephant herd. The combination was too much for Antigonos and his son. Antigonos was killed in battle and Demetrios was driven out of what had become his home base.
Later, the two greatest of the surviving Successors (Lysimakhos and Seleukos) went to war, and in 281 BC, at the battle fo Corupedium in western Asia Minor, Lysimakhos was killed. Seleukos enjoyed his victory for only a year before he was assassinated by one of Ptolemy's sons, Ptolemy Keraunos ("the Thunderbold").
Ptolemy himself (now known by the epithet Soter, or "savior") died of old age in 283BC, not quite the last of Alexander's generals but certainly the most successful.
Egypt remained his stable and secure power base through the half century of war and turmoil that afflicted the rest of the former empire. His dynasty, called Ptolemaic because every heir tothe throne invariably took the name Ptolemy, endured for almost three hundred years, until its last monarch, Cleopatra VII, surrendered it to the Roman conqueror Julius Caesar. The other provinces of what was once Alexander's empire, including Macedonia itself, had gradually succumbed to Rome or to internal conflict during the second century BCE.
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