Roxane, the daughter of a Baktrian noble Oxyartes. In due course she bore him a son,
later killed at the age of eleven along with his mother in the intrigues among those
jostling for power after Alexander’s death. His progress was stopped when his troops
refused to go further.
On his return to Susa, Alexander who, like his father, was polygamous married
the eldest daughter of Darius, and presided over a mass marriage ceremony involving
some ninety of his elite companions, hetairoi,to daughters of the Persian nobility. His
career of conquest came to an abrupt end when, contemplating a campaign against
the Arabs, he died of a fever at Babylon in 323 aged 33.
His conquests and a policy of establishing new cities like Alexandria, which was
the most famous, began to extend the Greek language and Greek institutions over
the eastern world. At the same time, though he had not devised a system for
governing the empire, he was clearly striving for some sort of union between Greek
and oriental, symbolized by his marriages and those he arranged for his chosen
companions.
The Hellenistic Kingdoms
Alexander had not named a successor and after his death a power struggle followed
for control of his empire between his regional governors involving Antigonus in
Phrygia, Lysimachus in Thrace, Seleucus in Babylonia, and Ptolemy in Egypt. At first,
the most powerful of these proved to be Antigonus ‘the one-eyed’. He and his son
Demetrius declared themselves kings in 305 after which Ptolemy, Lysimachus and
Seleucus followed suit. But Antigonus was defeated at the battle of Ipsus in 301 by
the combined forces of Seleucus and Lysimachus. Thereafter it was apparent that no
one was powerful enough to maintain overall control of what had been Alexander’s
empire. Three dynastic kingdoms gradually emerged under the control of Ptolemy
in Egypt, Seleucus in the old Persian empire and the east, and the successors of
Antigonus in Macedonia and Greece.
Greece under the Antigonids
The Antigonids controlled Macedonia and mainland Greece. The Macedonian city
of Pella, where earlier Euripides had written four of his tragedies and ended his life,
also grew in population and was a magnet for visiting intellectuals and artists, for
example the painter Zeuxis and the poet Aratus. Sacked by the Romans in 168, little
of it remains though the remarkable floor mosaics uncovered by archaeologists in the
1970s (see fig. 74) are an indication of its former splendour. The port of Thessaloniki
founded in 316 and Aegae (modern Vergina), the ancient capital of the royal
84 THE GREEKS