#diadochi

[jeannereames]

I searched to see if you’ve answered this and didn’t see anything so hopefully you haven’t, but I was wondering how you think things would’ve gone if Hephaestion would’ve outlived Alexander. Partially through mourning or if Hephaestion would’ve stayed alive much longer, but also just wondering if he’d be a shoe in for succession. He was the second in command, but just from what I’ve gathered many people seemed jealous of him? For good reason, granted. And you’ve also mentioned before that he was isolated in court. So would he have been able to gather enough manpower and allies quickly while mourning Alexander to even be a successor? Or would he want to be? Though I feel like if he DIDNT he would’ve easily been killed by any of the others for one reason or another, or for being too much of a threat. Obviously there’s no historical evidence for this, but I’m curious

Actually, I did write on this one, but the Tumblr search engine is sometimes (oft times?) less-than-helpful.

If Hephaistion Hadn't Died....

But it doesn't address some of your question, specifically if he'd have been a shoe-in for the succession...

He couldn't be.

NONE of them could have been, unless they were an Argead. That's why there was such a furor at ATG's death: the choices were extremely limited.

Arrhidaios (who had some mental infirmity that rendered him unfit)

An unborn baby that might not be male

A compromise between the infantry and the cavalry finally put both on the throne, if the babe turned out to be male (which he did).

But NONE of the Successors, at least at first, called themselves "kings," even when they sometimes effectively ruled as if they were. As long as Arrhidaios and Alexander IV were alive, no non-Argead could be a king.

See my write up linked above where I suggest that ATG probably wouldn't have died if Hephaistion hadn't. But assuming he did anyway...honestly, there'd have been no doubt Hephaistion, as Chilliarch, would have become regent, especially with Krateros not in Babylon (the only other figure who could have challenged him while he was alive). I also doubt Roxana-Perdikkas would have been able to murder Statiera, so it's quite possible both children would have been born. If both were male, then Statiera's baby, having higher status, would have inherited, Roxana's as the back-up plan. (As just being born male didn't guarantee either would survive to adulthood.) Arrhidaios would have been merely a stop-gap.

Could Hephaistion have held his own against Meleagros (infantry) or Perdikkas (cavalry)? Absolutely. For one thing, he and Perdikkas has worked together before and were likely friends. He was also quite possibly friends with Ptolemy. Same with Lysimakhos and (maybe?) Leonnatos. Meleagros was a dick to everybody, but if the other Marshals backed up Hephaistion, he'd have been forced to back down. Meleagros wasn't nearly as influential as them.

The factions were so fractious (pun intended) in part because Hephaistion's death was recent and Krateros wasn't around.

That brings us to the groups not in Babylon: Antigonos, Antipatros, and Krateros. They would've been far more dangerous to Hephaistion than Meleagros. If Krateros went over to Antigonos (as he did in history), and they both united against Hephaistion, then he'd have had trouble, but I think there just would've been fewer factions, especially if H. controlled all the heirs. He was (imo) smarter than Perdikkas, and more clearly "in charge" by Alexander's own decree. Even if the tension between Olympias and Hephaistion were real, not a later fabrication, while he had her grandbabies, he had her loyalty.

In fact, I think it very possible that Hephaistion would've married either Kleopatra (a widow, but more useful as the full sister) or Thessalonike. I don't think he'd have done so, however, aiming to become king, but to consolidate his position and bind Olympias's faction more tightly to him. He may have also remained married to Drypetis, especially if Statiera's child were male. While that was polygamy, usually reserved for royalty, he may have tried to get away with it, at least for a while. If Statiera had a daughter, however, he'd probably have divorced Drypetis to marry one of the sisters (to avoid a big scandal at having two wives...like a king). As for Eumenes, again, I think he's have followed Olympias's lead.

So we might have wound up with two big divisions, not 4-5. Ha.

Yet I just don't think Alexander would have died, or at least, not so soon.

[tchai-castor]

One of my friends is a big fan of Lysimachus, so I drew the Diadochi with Alexander The Great. He posted it on reddit already atually, there were some comments on it, especially why Craterus is so short. Well, that's because I completely misjudged the height when I drew him. At a certain point I was done drawing all of them and I even already had base colors etc. and I noticed that Craterus was just floating around, he wasn't even touching the ground. So instead of elongating him with the select tool, I decided to just draw him a sort of stool, so it wouldn't be as obvious. So no he wasn't short in real life, I just miscalculated.

I actually drew this as a "strike a pose" concept, but someone said they look like a boyband and I actually like that better: Alexander and the Diodochs, performing on Queen levels is now by far one of my favorite things to think about.

[autodidactprofessor]

Battle of Ipsus: The Clash of the Successors and the Fate of Alexander's Empire

Background: The Fragmentation of Alexander’s Empire When Alexander the Great died unexpectedly in 323 BCE in Babylon, he left behind an empire that stretched from Greece and Egypt in the west to the Indus Valley in the east—a vast realm without a clear successor. His only heirs were his half-brother, Philip III Arrhidaeus, who suffered from mental disabilities, and his unborn son, Alexander IV,…

[preacherpollard]

Controversial Prophesy Alert

Dale Pollard Daniel 8  Daniel prophesied of the Persian and Greek eras of Israelite history. The angel interpreted that for us, so there’s no mystery there. That mean man of the Diadochi, Antiochus Epiphanes, is described with his persecution lasting 2300 days. It was concluded by the Rededication of the Temple by Judas Maccabee, and that day became the Jewish Festival of Lights (John…

[lesbianshepard]

"Empires only last 250 years" is a bullshit claim that gets passed around a lot, but I need you to see the data the guy (Sir John Glubb) was using because it is exceptionally clear that he was just pulling numbers out of his ass

[llitchilitchi]

never getting over how we know what so many of Alexander's generals looked like but Hephaistion, the one he loved and cherished most, the second most important man in the whole empire? we have no idea

[infirmux]

second show this year to contain unheralded opera segment perhaps it is indicative of some desire in the hearts of the youth?

[lightdancer1]

Incidentally while most of the Ancient Greeks and Romans were monogamous, the Macedonians were the big exception:

One of the key factors of Macedonian history and culture is that unlike the rest of the Greek world Macedonians happily, or at least the Royal Family happily, indulged in polygamy. This was a very key factor in shaping the destinies of women, and it both accounted for the kind of intrigues that are a dime a dozen in the various Iranian and Islamic states, and for that matter in China having parallels in Macedon that they ultimately do not in the rest of the Graeco-Roman world. This only makes the rise of Olympias, simultaneously mother and aspiring Diadochi and brief autocrat of Macedon, all the more impressive. She parlayed her son Alexander's success into her own claim, and proved that he got no small portion of what shaped him into the world-bestriding juggernaut who forged a new world at Gaugamela much as Khalid Ibn Al-Walid would at the Yarmuk from her.

She also was one of the losers and yet the reality is that a Queen played and was also one of the winners, and for longer than some of the more unfortunate players in the Diadochi Wars.

[whencyclopedia]

Library of Alexandria

The Library of Alexandria was established under the Ptolemaic Dynasty of Egypt (323-30 BCE) and flourished under the patronage of the early kings to become the most famous library of the ancient world, attracting scholars from around the Mediterranean, and making Alexandria the preeminent intellectual center of its time until its decline after 145 BCE.

Although legend claims the idea of the great library came from Alexander the Great, this has been challenged and it seems to have been proposed by Ptolemy I Soter (r. 323-282 BCE), founder of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and built under the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (282-246 BCE), who also acquired the first books for its collection. Under Ptolemy III Euergetes (r. 246-221 BCE), the library's collection increased as books were taken from ships at port, copied, and the originals were then housed in the stacks.

Under Ptolemy IV (r. 221-205 BCE) patronage continued, and Ptolemy V (r. 204-180 BCE) and Ptolemy VI (r. 180-164 & 163-145 BCE) made acquisitions for the library such a priority around the Mediterranean that scholars began hiding their private libraries to prevent their seizure. Ptolemy V, to undercut the prestige of the Library of Pergamon, prohibited the export of papyrus – necessary for producing copies of books, and inadvertently encouraged Pergamon's parchment industry.

The final fate of the Library of Alexandria has been debated for centuries and continues to be. According to the most popular claim, it was destroyed by Julius Caesar by fire in 48 BCE. Other claims cite its destruction by the emperor Aurelian in his war with Zenobia in 272 CE, by Diocletian in 297 CE, by Christian zealots in 391 and 415 CE, or by Muslim Arab invaders in the 7th century.

As the library still existed after the time of Caesar and is referenced during the early Christian era, the most probable explanation for its fall is a loss of patronage by the later Ptolemaic rulers (after Ptolemy VIII expelled foreign scholars in 145 BCE) and uneven support by Roman emperors leading to a decline in the upkeep of the collection and buildings. Religious intolerance, following the rise of Christianity, led to civil strife, which encouraged many scholars to find positions elsewhere, further contributing to the library's deterioration. By the 7th century, when the Muslim Arabs are said to have burned the library's collection, there is no evidence that those books, or even the buildings that would have housed them, still existed in Alexandria.

Library Established

After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, Ptolemy I took Egypt during the Wars of the Diadochi (Alexander's successors) and established his dynasty. He seems to have proposed the library as an extension of his overall vision for the city of Alexandria as a great melting pot, blending the cultures of Egypt and Greece, as epitomized by his hybrid god Serapis, a combination of Egyptian and Greek deities. According to the Letter of Aristeas, written between c. 180 and c. 145 BCE, the idea for the library was suggested by the Greek orator Demetrius of Phalerum (l. c. 350 to c. 280 BCE), a student of either Aristotle (l. 384-322 BCE) or Aristotle's student Theophrastus (l. c. 371 to c. 287 BCE), though the authenticity of this letter has been challenged.

If Demetrius did propose the idea of a universal library, however, it would easily explain the descriptions of the building which seem to mirror Aristotle's Lyceum, specifically the colonnade in which scholars could walk and discuss various issues, though the colonnade was hardly specific to Aristotle's school. Demetrius is also said to have organized the library as a home to every book ever written and proposed the name Mouseion, a temple to the Nine Muses, for at least one part of the library (the name later serving as the origin for the English word "museum"). In answer to the question, "Why was a universal library built in the relatively new city of Alexandria?", scholar Lionel Casson writes:

Egypt was far richer than the lands of their rivals. For one, the fertile soil along the Nile produced bounteous harvests of grain, and grain was to the Greek and Roman world what oil is to ours: it commanded a market everywhere. For another, Egypt was the habitat par excellence of the papyrus plant, thus ensuring its rulers a monopoly on the world's prime writing material. All the Hellenistic monarchs sought to adorn their capitals with grandiose architecture and to build up a reputation for culture. The Ptolemies, able to outspend the others, took the lead. The first four members of the dynasty concentrated on Alexandria's cultural reputation, being intellectuals themselves. Ptolemy I was a historian, author of an authoritative account of Alexander's campaign of conquest…Ptolemy II was an avid zoologist, Ptolemy III, a patron of literature, Ptolemy IV a playwright. All of them chose leading scholars and scientists as tutors for their children. It is no surprise that these men sought to make their capital the cultural center of the Greek world. (32-33)

Continue reading...

[jeannereames]

ATG Symposium

Just a reminder to all-and-sundry that I'm still covered up with the Alexander the Great conference, which begins TOMORROW, right here in Omaha. 30-something scholars from all over the world. Super-cool. Link to the full schedule below, if you're curious. Two keynotes, one experimental archaeology session and eleven regular paper sessions across 2.5 days. I may be dead by the time it's over. LOL

9th International Alexander the Great Symposium: Repercussions of Violence under Alexander and the Succesors

[ancient-rome-au]

What do you think the world would be like if Marc Anthony and Cleopatra had beaten Octavian?

The most proximate outcome would be that Antony and Cleopatra's plans to carve out kingdoms for their children would have gone ahead:

Alexander Helios was named king of Armenia, Media and Parthia [Mark Antony had only conquered Armenia; Media and Parthia were not his to give away]

Cleopatra Selene was to receive Cyrenaica and Libya

Ptolemy Philadelphus was awarded Syria, Phoenicia and Cilicia

Caesarion was proclaimed the son of the deified Julius Caesar, King of Kings and King of Egypt (co-ruler with his mother)

Assuming Octavian's defeat results in his death, the legacy of Julius Caesar would have in theory fallen to Caesarion, but I suspect he would have had trouble exploiting it in practice. He was an infant for the brief period he lived in Rome; the rest of his childhood and adolescence was spent in Egypt. I doubt he would have the fluency in Latin and familiarity with the Roman politics to successfully leverage his claim to be the son of Julius Caesar into political power within the Roman context (i.e. convince Roman legions to fight for him or Roman citizens to vote for him). Evidently he really did share appearances with Julius Caesar, so that has to count for something, but I would guess that he would be seen as an "Oriental Monarch," hostile to Roman liberty. A product of a Roman man who was seduced by an Oriental Monarch and acculturated to exotic customs.

So, basically, the Roman Republic's expansion in the Near East would be halted (for a time). The same fundamental political arrangements as prevailed under the Diadochi would continue, albeit with slightly re-arranged borders and a new dynasty. Egypt would have retained primacy over these kingdoms, at least until the familial ties holding them together decayed (e.g. Is Egypt going to send troops to help defend Armenia from Parthian invasion if the rulers are cousins? What about second cousins?)

I'm not sure if I truly grasp Antony's long-term plans. Did he intend for these new states ruled by his children to be allied with Rome? He probably would have accomplished that so long as he lived and remained the uncontested master of Rome. But after his death, Rome probably would have looked to reconquer what he gave away within a generation or two.

[kaibutsushidousha]

So does Minase joins Meteo of being a writer that picked a figure from regions that aren’t as used as much in TM with the Trung sisters belonging to him?

This one is just a self-answering yes-no question, so I'll instead use it as a platform for the Minase thoughts I've been having since the wombo-combo of the new mats, the anniversary interview, and the Dubai event. It's probably what the anon wanted out of it anyway.

My inner ramblings start from something Nasu said in last year's interview and made a point to reiterate this year.

Ordeal Calls are meant to be each writer's best and most emblematic piece. Their artistic identity taken to its peak. That's something I believe Sakurai accomplished and Minase didn't. That obviously raises one question: what would a real Minase masterpiece look like?

By the Ordeal Call's premise, it would still need to be something that gave the supplementary information we were missing about the Alterego class, but let's ignore that angle and focus only on the goal of expressing Minase's personality in the best way possible.

What works with Minase and what doesn't? Compare his worst and best pieces. Agartha sucks because it focuses on his opinions about women and those are categorically rancid. Yuga Kshetra succeeds because it focuses on his opinions about ableism, which are far more poignant and agreeable. Minase has enough care about the subject to ensure that the plot is a series of arrangements where the characters triumph not despite their so-called flaws but specifically because of them.

So an ideal Minase Ordeal would focus on a different subject that Minase recurrently displays passionate, empathetic, and agreeable opinions about. So what can we find in his roster of character? Minase made Servant versions:

Zenobia, whose historical significance is entirely about resisting Roman colonization, although she failed. Minase portrays as someone who literally wears her failure and tries to conduct herself with dignity regardless to prove the point that the Roman conquerors couldn't truly defeat her Palmyra spirit. I think this one is a bust execution-wise, but it's significant that the idea is there.

Lakshmi Bai, whose historical significance is entirely about resisting English colonization. Minase portrays her as someone who can't help but disdain the innocent English civilian Holmes and acknowledges the irrationality of it, but the entire surrounding cast including Holmes himself assure her that she is entitled to her feeling because colonization is that gruesome and traumatic of a process.

The Trung sisters, whose historical significance comes not exactly from resisting colonization, but from leading an independence war, which is similar enough in spirit.

Columbus, whose historical significance comes from being a colonizer. I don't need to tell you how Minase chose to portray him.

With Fate/ drawing its action cast from history books, it's inevitable that we get a decent amount of characters whose bulk of their offscreen backstory was spent conquering, slaughtering, and assimilating other cultures. Some certified colonizers, like Richard and Takeru, are very self-critical about it. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Iskandar, who gets flak from Faker and Ptolemy for his stupid decisions toward the Diadochi, but the journey of conquest and domination gets framed as the fun adventure no one is critical of. Either way, none of other characters not written by Minase get irredeemable treatment that Columbus gets.

The franchise's most prominent colonizer is, of course, Arthur(ia) Pendragon. Both versions are defined by the regret that comes with ultimately failing their kingdom, but their failings are never credited to the notion that violently conquering the British tribes and unifying the isles is an inherently bad thing. That's the image of greater good they fought for, and that part remains unchallenged. The closest Nasu got to criticizing Arthuria for being a colonizer is by showing the Round Table's brutal treatment of the Arabs in the Sixth Singularity. I'm mentioned this specially because this is Percival's first reaction to eating a mixed breakfast buffet in the current Minase-written Dubai event:

Minase's Percival is strongly defined by his respectful interest in foreign cultures and, fittingly enough for a knight who opposed the Lion King, he's maybe the first character to directly criticize Arthuria on her disregard for the traditions she trampled in the unification of Britain. That's a thing I'd appreciate more of and can only imagine Minase daring to touch on.

[queen-kassiopeia-the-5th]

With the return of House of the Dragon, there is something that always bothered me about the main idea of the show vs the book.

In the show, there is this dilemma of who has the right to become king – the firstborn daughter, when women were always denied the right to rule, or the eldest son, who is male and thus following tradition. There is the mix-up with Viserys talking to Alicent before on his deathbed in the show, and the plain fact of power hungry relatives pushing their chosen monarch in the intended direction, but fundamentally, the question boils down to – woman vs man, who should rule. Rhaenyra's side doubles down onto proving this female equality side, which is great, and I'm glad we get to see some badass women riding to war on dragons, and plotting, but it was never the main idea of the Dance of Dragons.

The reason for the Dance, in the book, is a pattern we see in throught the entire story. A strong monarch leaves behind a weaker monarch, who is unable to maintain peace, and war breaks out. We see it in Aegon the Conquer, with Aenys being a weak king and Maegor being a tyrant, partially in order to combat the unrest that Aenys created, and partially because he is trying to emanate or even exceed his father, unsuccessfully. Then we have the Jaehaerys, who in my opinion was one of the best, if not the best king of Westeros. He created a long time of peace and was a strong monarch. Then came Viserys, a weaker king – this is not to say completely incapable – who left behind a festering conflict that lasted years. The green and black camps were decided long before his death, and he didn't do much to combat this, or try and resolve the situation. We see a similar pattern in real life history, that we all know GRRM draws inspiration from. The Diadochi generals that inherited Alexander the Great's empire quickly began fighting among themselves in the Wars of the Diadochi, vying for control over the empire he created, ultimately to lose it; the Carolingian empire was divided a few years after the death of Charlemagne; Genghis Khan's children attempted to expand his empire, but it fragmented into several khanates and to China.

Ultimately, you can say that the show is a separate entity from the book, and I agree with that. I do think how the characters are written and developed in the show in some cases is much better than the book – see Viserys – and there are differences between them plot wise. I'm not saying I expect a word for word interpretation of the book. It's just an interesting angle that I got from the book, and that in my opinion the show has not touched on, and took into a completely different direction, which is still interesting. I think it would have been nice to have both, though.

[jstor]

Me consulting the wizard (local jstor employee):

I'm going crazy trying to find anything about the conditions of slavery in the achaemenid empire or the diadochi states afterwards, any idea where to even begin?

Assuming you have full JSTOR access, I was able to find this!

[qsycomplainsalot]

Macedonians: "we're greek" Greeks: "no you're not" - Diadochi states across the Middle East: "we're greek" Greeks: "no you're not" - Byzantines: "we're roman" Greeks: "what the fuck is happening"

[wonder-worker]

What of Olympias in her marriage to Philip II? It is said to be quite stormy and he has many other wives.

Hello! I love this period of history and have read up quite a bit about it, but I'm definitely not an expert. Most of my information from this answer has been taken from Olympias by Elizabeth D. Carney, which I enjoyed a great deal and would recommend.

To get straight to the point - polygamy was most probably a standard practice among Macedonian kings by the time Philip II came to the throne (see this article for more information on the topic), although it's certainly true that Philip practiced it on a particularly extravagant level: he had seven recorded wives, and many other lovers, possibly including Olympias' own brother. However, since Olympias was his fourth or fifth wife, she would have surely been aware of this and prepared for it before she married him. Even if it was a shock to her at the time of her marriage, she would have had almost two decades to become accustomed to it. She may have even been close to Nicesipolis, another one of Philip’s wives, as she might have raised her young daughter, Thessalonike, after Nicesipolis died in childbirth.

Moreover, these kinds of high-level marriages weren’t for love; they were for politics. The few ancient sources that frame Philip and Olympias’s union as love match have to be discarded: it’s logistically impossible for this to have been the case, as they had been betrothed since Olympias was a very young child.

After they married, they had two known children: Alexander and Kleopatra. It’s true that their marriage is (and was) often viewed as very volatile, but this is generally tied to the oft-repeated misogynistic view of Olympias as a difficult and temperamental woman. They seem to have gotten along for the most part, considering Philip II had an agent shopping for Olympias from Athens as late as 341 B.C.E. Moreover, we probably shouldn’t let Olympias’ later actions during Alexander’s reign and Wars of the Diadochi cloud our judgement of her earlier years – for most of her marriage, she seems to have played a generally expected role for a Macedonian royal woman (That does not mean she wasn't politically active, as she would have been protecting and advocating for her son and probably had her own "faction" of a sort). Either way, we don’t know what either spouse thought of each other on a personal level, and I don't think it would have mattered much on a practical level either way.

Eventually, Olympias became the dominant woman at court, as she was one of the only two wives of Philip who gave birth to a living son. More importantly, by the time he reached his teens, Alexander – the future Alexander III – was regarded as his father’s eventual heir. (His brother, Arrhidaeus, seems to have been mentally disabled in some way, which unfortunately affected how contemporaries viewed him). However, it’s important to note that this was not a formalized hierarchy or ranking system as it was in, say, Persia (there was no such thing as a “chief wife”), but inherenty informal, precarious and subject to change.

It’s true, though, that their marriage seems to have become very tense in later years. Namely, Philip II’s last marriage to Kleopatra-Eurydice provoked a visceral and negative reaction from both Alexander and Olympias. Again, this is not because Olympias was a volatile, jealous, power-hungry bitch as she is often depicted in ancient sources and historical fiction, but because the wedding resulted in dishonor to both her and Alexander. Attalus, Kleopatra Eurydice’s uncle and guardian, had apparently insulted and threatened both mother and son during the ceremony, which Philip II did not rebuke him for and thus tacitly condoned (That being said, Alexander's reaction to Attalus also out-of-line, as was Philip's reaction to Alexander). More crucially, the marriage placed Olympias and Alexander's own political positions in potential jeopardy should Kleopatra-Eurydice have a son (at least, based on the insults Attalus levelled at them). Accounts for the wedding incident somewhat differ, but all agree that it resulted in Alexander taking himself and his mother away from Macedon in protest. Justin then claimed that Olympias tried to persuade her brother in Molossia to declare war on Philip. We have no idea if this is true or not, but Carney believes that it is at least "somewhat convincing".

It is sometimes believed that the marriage Philip subsequently arranged between his and Olympias’ daughter, Kleopatra and Alexander I of Epirus (Olympias’s brother and Philip’s possible former lover) was meant to deprive mother and son of a potential ally. However, this is far likelier to have been Philip’s desire to effect a public reconciliation between them, demonstrating that his household troubles were over and mollifying his son and his wife for the humiliation they had endured. It was also probably an attempt to stabilize the somewhat rocky Molossian alliance. The vital importance of the wedding is demonstrated by how Philip transformed it into an international festival in its own right, complete with public performances and processions where Philip walked between the two Alexanders. That doesn't mean that there may not have been cracks and that the reconciliation efforts were partial rather than entirely sincere (as suggested by Plutarch), but progress was undoubtedly being made. At the very least, it seems pretty clear to me that Philip still considered Alexander his heir.

Ultimately, however, we will never know what would have happened next between Philip, Olympias and Alexander. Philip was murdered at his daughter's wedding by Pausanias (his former lover who he had wronged very badly) and Alexander took the throne in 336 B.C.E. And no, while we don't know what they felt about Philip's murder, it's very unlikely that Alexander or Olympias were actively involved in it. It can't be proven or disproven by any explicit evidence, but as Carney has observed, "the circumstances of the murder strongly argue against their participation."

I hope this was helpful! As I said, I have read up a lot about this era but am not an expert, so if I've gotten anything wrong or mixed up, do let me know!