What happened after Alexander the Great died?On June 11, 323 BC, at just 32 years old, Alexander left an empire without a clear heir, sparking chaos among his generals. Tristan Hughes and Dr. Graham Wrightson explore the immediate aftermath of his death, the power struggles among his top generals, and the rise of new kingdoms from the fractured empire.The fascinating and brutal Wars of the Successors is a real life Games of Thrones with multiple family sagas, broken allegiances and murders, as the generals battle it out to become Alexander the Great's sole successor.MOREAlexander the Great:https://open.spotify.com/episode/0z8hT2mn3bV4QCFSkoyk4AAlexander the Great's Sex Life:https://open.spotify.com/episode/3CYOYc97yU9Y9rdQelirJ9?si=f821a2f87f7a40e4&nd=1&dlsi=ab1ef58e265748bfPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Nick Thomson, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK
Chapter 1: What were Alexander the Great's last words?
Those were the immortalized, fabled last words of Alexander the Great, when he died in Babylon after a short and sudden illness on the 11th of June 323 BC, aged just 32. In his 13-year reign, he had conquered the mighty Persian Empire and forged one of the largest empires the world had yet seen, stretching from Greece to the Indian subcontinent.
His achievements have been the talk of countless books and podcast episodes, but the story of the chaos that erupted after his death is even more fascinating. This chaos is epitomised by those fabled last words themselves, to the strongest – These words were an answer, an answer by Alexander to one of his generals who had approached his deathbed.
The general had asked to whom Alexander left his empire. Alexander had simply replied, To Kratisdo, to the strongest. Now unfortunately, it's very likely that Alexander did not pass from this world with those legendary final words. However, fictional or not, they have come to epitomise the titanic struggle for power that followed his death. Alexander's death was unexpected.
Aged just 32, he left no clear heir to the throne. His only son was illegitimate. His wife, a Bactrian princess called Roxana, was pregnant at the time of Alexander's death and she would ultimately give birth to a son. But that son, although Alexander's sole legitimate heir, would be incapable of ruling for years. Alexander also had a brother, an elder half-brother in fact, called Aridaeus.
But Aridaeus had a condition that meant that he was incapable of ruling without help. It had also saved his life, Alexander therefore had not considered Aridaeus a threat to his rule. It would ultimately be the incapable Aridaeus and Roxana's newborn son, who the Macedonians would name as Alexander's regal successors, joint-kings, but everyone knew that their actual power was non-existent.
Real power lay with Alexander's former generals, experienced commanders who had served with Alexander throughout his campaigns and been critical to the king's many military successes. It was these generals, all larger-than-life figures, who would decide the fate of Alexander's empire and help forge the Hellenistic world that emerged from it.
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Chapter 2: Who were the main successors after Alexander's death?
These were the successors, and it's their story that we are covering today. After putting down a soldier mutiny almost immediately after Alexander died, the generals who had outlived their king in Babylon divided the spoils of Alexander's empire amongst themselves. Regions were given out to these generals almost as prizes for their senior positions and for outliving Alexander.
But Macedonian control over many of these regions was incredibly fragile. These generals would have to deal with rebellions and revolts that quickly broke out across the empire, stretching from Bulgaria to Afghanistan. The biggest rebellion broke out in Greece, where a number of city-states spearheaded by Athens launched a massive revolt.
It was called the Lamian War, after a city in northern Greece where the central siege of this revolt took place. This revolt would ultimately be put down. Athens would surrender. But only after several battles on land and sea and over a year of fighting. In the initial years after Alexander the Great's death, his fracturing empire was effectively ruled by his three most senior surviving generals.
Chapter 3: What challenges did the generals face in the aftermath?
The two kings were totemic figureheads. Real power lay with these commanders. These three generals were Perdiccas, Antipater and Craterus. Perdiccas ruled in Asia, east of the Aegean, and controlled what had been Alexander's all-conquering army – Antipater ruled in Europe, in Alexander's home region of Macedonia.
He was the eldest of the three, a wily old statesman in his seventies who had served Alexander as governor of Macedonia for more than a decade. Supporting Antipater was Craterus, the most revered general that had served Alexander the Great. The idea was that all three would rule Alexander's empire until Alexander's son, the boy king, confusingly also called Alexander, came of age.
All three were united through marriages. Both Perdiccas and Craterus married daughters of Antipater. Think of this almost as a Macedonian triumvirate. But, despite this apparent closeness, the relations between these three were strained from the beginning, and they were unable to contain the desires of equally ambitious generals that supposedly served them.
These were generals like Antigonus, governor of an important province in Asia Minor, present-day Anatolia, who became an enemy of Perdiccas. There was also Ptolemy, arguably the man who triggered the first great war between these successors barely two years after Alexander the Great's death. Almost as soon as Alexander the Great died, Ptolemy had seized control of the wealthy province of Egypt.
Over the following years, he strengthened up his power base in the region, determined to oppose Perdiccas and his supremacy. In 321 BC, Ptolemy made his move. At that time, Alexander the Great's body was being transported from Babylon to be buried in Macedonia on Perlicus's orders. Alexander's body had been placed in a beautiful carriage, adorned with gold and shaped like a temple.
It had taken two years to build. Whilst this elaborate temple on wheels was slowly making its way through Syria, Ptolemy hijacked it. He had already bribed the soldiers guarding the carriage and then proceeded to escort it back to Egypt where he oversaw Alexander's burial, an incredibly symbolic and prestigious event. The die was cast.
Perdiccas reacted by launching a full-scale invasion of Egypt with his army, more than 50,000 strong, determined to depose Ptolemy and retrieve Alexander's body. But Perdiccas soon found himself fighting on two fronts. In the meantime, his alliance with Antipater and Craterus had broken down, the triumvirate had shattered.
Antipater and Craterus had become convinced that Perdiccas was plotting against them. And to be fair, Perdiccas hadn't helped matters. Because in the meantime, he had aligned himself with another faction. a royal one. Alexander the Great's male relatives might have been weak and controllable, but the women in his family were a different story.
Olympias, the formidable mother of Alexander the Great and adored matriarch of the Macedonian Empire, teamed up with her sole surviving child. Her name was Cleopatra, the full sister of Alexander the Great. Both Olympias and Cleopatra hated Antipater. In their efforts to survive in this turbulent post-Alexander world, they made an irresistible offer to Perdiccas.
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Chapter 4: What sparked the Lamian War?
An offer of marriage to the princess Cleopatra. Perdiccas agreed to it. It was an offer that this ambitious general simply could not turn down. By doing this he married into the royal family, but he also shunned his current wife, Antipater's daughter, and made his desires for the throne clear to see. Such overt imperial desires threatened Antipater and Craterus and forced them to act.
And so, at the same time that Perdiccas invaded Egypt, hundreds of miles to the north, Antipater and Craterus crossed into Asia with their own army to battle Perdiccas' forces, increasing the size and scale of this first great civil war, the First Successor War.
Perdiccas and Craterus would both perish during this civil war, one murdered by his own officers, the other trampled underfoot and falling from his horse in a cavalry clash. Antipater would survive, but not for long. Within a year, he too was dead, dying of old age. He attempted to create a new imperial order after the war at a place called Triparadasis, keeping Alexander's empire together.
But it proved a forlorn hope. Within a year of Antipater's death, civil war had broken out once more. The empire would permanently fracture as various generals rose to the fore and attempted to carve out their own territories. Antigonus, Eumenes and Seleucus in Asia, Cassander and Polyperchon in Greece and Macedonia, Ptolemy in Egypt and so on.
The following years would be marked by unrivalled chaos in ancient history. Generals who had once served alongside each other under Alexander the Great as brothers in arms would now lead armies tens of thousands strong over thousands of kilometres to fight each other.
From the plains of Persia to the narrow strait of the Dardanelles, titanic battles occurred on land and at sea, alongside sieges of cities with monumental new contraptions, think catapults and iron-plated towers. The wars of these successors are some of the most extraordinary yet brutal in history.
Within a decade, these successors had murdered almost all surviving members of Alexander the Great's royal family, and the winners of this chaotic struggle became kings in their own right, forging the famous kingdoms of the Hellenistic world, the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt, the Antigonid Kingdom in Macedonia, and the Seleucid Empire in Asia.
Alexander the Great may have forged a massive empire, but the legacy of his conquests were determined by his successors, some of the most remarkable military figures in ancient history.
The historian Justin, writing much later famously remarked, "...never before indeed did Macedonia or any other country abound with such a multitude of distinguished men, whom Philip I and afterwards Alexander had selected with such skill that they seemed to have been chosen not so much to attend them to war as to succeed them on the throne."
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Chapter 5: How did the power struggle unfold among the generals?
Who then can wonder that the world was conquered by such officers, when the army of the Macedonians appeared to be commanded not by generals but by princes, men who would never have found antagonists to cope with them if they had not quarreled with one another?
While Macedonia would have had many Alexanders instead of one, had not fortune inspired them with mutual emulation for their mutual destruction?
Today, we're going to delve into the story of these generals, these successors. My guest is Dr. Graham Wrightson, Associate Professor of History at South Dakota State University. Graham is an expert on ancient warfare at the time of Alexander and his successors and has written extensively on the military campaigns of these fascinating figures that followed Alexander.
Graham, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Now, we have on The Ancients recorded more than 550 episodes over the last five years, Graham. And I've yet ever to do an episode on what I would say is perhaps my favourite pet topic in all of ancient history until today.
The successors of Alexander the Great, Graham, personally, I feel that this is a topic that more and more people, general public, are starting to hear about and are starting to get more interested in. And you always hear phrases like it's more Game of Thrones than Game of Thrones. But I think there's some truth to it.
I think people didn't realise how extraordinary this period of ancient history is.
Yeah. As you say, this rotation of kings and the Game of Thrones and all the assassinations and all that different stuff, even within the successes, even the first 10 years or so is just a crazy, exciting period. And then it sort of tails off a little bit when they all start dying and you get fewer power players involved.
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Chapter 6: What sources do we have for the history of Alexander's successors?
It feels like the logical place to start would be actually with the death of Alexander the Great. Graham, can you first of all give us a sense of the geopolitical context of the world that has been carved out by Alexander just before he died? Let's say May 323 BC. What does the world look like?
For those who don't remember your school education, but you have the Greek city-states never unified as one country of Greece. So you have Athens and Sparta and Thebes, your three main ones at the end of the, or the beginning of the 300s through the mid-4th century.
And Alexander's father, Philip II, took over, took Macedon as this little kingdom, and then progressively, over his long reign, conquers all these different regions, mostly the Greek city-states and the areas they controlled. At the Battle of Chaeronea in 338, he defeats the Theban-Athenian alliance and then takes rule of Greece as hegemon, as leader, and creates the League of Corinth.
And rather than necessarily conquering Greece, Macedon is the forcibly elected leader of an amalgamation of Greek states. And for Philip, the invasion of Persia, which he plans and begins, is this propaganda to cement his role as leader of Greece that he's going to then invade Persia. So that's the Greek context. Rome is doing its own thing over in Italy.
And you have the Greek city-states in Sicily that are connected but separate. And then you have the Persian Empire that is the biggest in the world at the time, controls most of Western Asia and Egypt. And Macedon have been in contact with Persia for a while, as have the Greeks and all sorts of different background stuff that we won't deal with.
But Alexander begins the invasion of Persia as a continuation of his father's policies to cement his new position as the forcibly elected ruler of this League of Corinth empire.
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Chapter 7: How did the empire eventually fracture?
alliance of Greek states and the Greeks are not happy to start with so he has to put down the revolt of Thebes almost as soon as he becomes king and destroys the entire city and enslaves everybody except for Pindar's house, the poet, because he loves Pindar and so that sort of keeps the Greeks in line and he forces them to send him 7,000 soldiers as their contribution to the campaign army and then they go off and invade Persia and so it's initially planned as a punishment for the Persian wars against Greece
But Alexander just keeps on going and he conquers the whole Persian Empire and refuses Darius's offer of splitting the kingdom and marriage with his daughter and all this other different stuff that goes on early on. And he conquers and there's a split in the scholarship as to whether he chooses to turn around in India or whether he's forced to turn around by his own soldiers.
I'm on the choice side because my supervisor... is the main proponent of that, Waldemar Haeckel. So he, in my view, rightfully continued the argument raised by others earlier that Alexander, if you go around the borders of all of Alexander's empire, he goes about two kilometers, I think it is, out past the Persian army and then makes sacrifices and then changes direction.
He does the same thing in India and there's various other different arguments. So Alexander conquers Persia and goes a little further to make his empire bigger. And then he turns around and has his new plans. When he comes back to Babylon, the center, the just new center of his new empire, as opposed to Persis, which was the center of the Persian empire.
He specifically chooses Babylon as his to connect with the, the hanging guns, Babylon and all the Babylonian history of Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi and all that stuff. And then he dies when he's in there. So he, He dies very shortly after finishing his Indian conquests. But by the time he dies, you know, Egypt. Western Asia, they've been ruled by the Macedonians for over a decade by this point.
So they're not necessarily close to leaving. He's founded cities in all these places. He's implemented Greek settlers in all these places. So he's begun the process in his Western conquests of integration of conquered peoples with the Hellenistic culture that comes around. So when he dies, there's no real...
threat in most places anyway of separation from alexander right and part of that is his propaganda presenting himself as the savior of these places he modeled himself on cyrus the great who famously freed the babylonians from their evil uh persian dominance even though he's doing the same thing and he you know you get cyrus cylinder where he claims that he has
He was welcomed in as a friend to Babylon without a fight and all this other propagandistic, ridiculous concepts. So Alexander does the same stuff with his personal historians, saying that he's the savior, freeing the people from Persian dominance. But now you have a new... And you're just not supposed to realize that point. So in most of those areas, it's fine. In India, it's newly conquered.
But because it's newly conquered, they still have the same loyalty to the people that Alexander put in charge for the most part. And obviously, he's left garrisons and new cities in all these different places that he's been to. So when he dies in 323, it creates a vacuum, not...
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