The Historians' History of the World 04

The warfare between Cassander and Polysperchon became now embittered by a feud among the members of the Macedonian imperial family. King Philip Arrhidæus and his wife Eurydice, alarmed and indignant at the restoration of Olympias, which Polysperchon was projecting, solicited aid from Cassander, and tried to place the force in Macedonia at his disposal. In this however they failed.

Olympias, assisted not only by Polysperchon, but by the Epirot prince Æacides, made her entry into Macedonia out of Epirus, apparently in the autumn of 317 B.C. She brought with her Roxane and her child—the widow and son of Alexander the Great. The Macedonian soldiers, assembled by Philip Arrhidæus and Eurydice to resist her, were so overawed by her name and the recollection of Alexander, that they refused to fight, and thus insured to her an easy victory. Philip and Eurydice became her prisoners; the former she caused to be slain; to the latter she offered only an option between the sword, the halter, and poison. The old queen next proceeded to satiate her revenge against the family of Antipater. One hundred leading Macedonians, friends of Cassander, were put to death, together with his brother Nicanor; while the sepulchre of his deceased brother Iollas, accused of having poisoned Alexander the Great, was broken up.

During the winter, Olympias remained thus completely predominant in Macedonia; where her position seemed strong, since her allies the Ætolians were masters of the pass at Thermopylæ, while Cassander was kept employed in Peloponnesus by the force under Alexander, son of Polysperchon. But Cassander, disengaging himself from these embarrassments, and eluding Thermopylæ by a maritime transit to Thessaly, seized the Perrhæbian passes before they had been put under guard, and entered Macedonia without resistance. Olympias, having no army competent to meet him in the field, was forced to shut herself up in the maritime fortress of Pydna, with Roxane, the child Alexander, and Thessalonice daughter of her late husband Philip, son of Amyntas.

Here Cassander blocked her up for several months by sea as well as by land, and succeeded in defeating all the efforts of Polysperchon and Æacides to relieve her. In the spring of the ensuing year (316 B.C.), she was forced by intolerable famine to surrender. Cassander promised her nothing more than personal safety, requiring from her the surrender of the two great fortresses, Pella and Amphipolis, which made him master of Macedonia. Presently however the relatives of those numerous victims, who had perished by order of Olympias, were encouraged by Cassander to demand her life in retribution. They found little difficulty in obtaining a verdict of condemnation against her from what was called a Macedonian assembly. Nevertheless, such was the sentiment of awe and reverence connected with her name, that no one except these injured men themselves could be found to execute the sentence. She died with a courage worthy of her rank and domineering character. Cassander took Thessalonice to wife, confined Roxane with the child Alexander in the fortress of Amphipolis—where (after a certain interval) he caused both of them to be slain.

While Cassander was thus master of Macedonia, and while the imperial family were disappearing from the scene in that country, the defeat and death of Eumenes (which happened nearly at the same time as the capture of Olympias) removed the last faithful partisan of that family in Asia. But at the same time it left in the hands of Antigonus such overwhelming preponderance throughout Asia, that he aspired to become vicar and master of the entire Alexandrine empire, as well as to avenge upon Cassander the extirpation of the regal family. His power appeared indeed so formidable that Cassander of Macedonia, Lysimachus of Thrace, Ptolemy of Egypt, and Seleucus of Babylonia, entered into a convention, which gradually ripened into an active alliance against him.

[317-315 B.C.]

During the struggles between these powerful princes, Greece appears simply as a group of subject cities, held, garrisoned, grasped at, or coveted, by all of them. Polysperchon, abandoning all hopes in Macedonia after the death of Olympias, had been forced to take refuge among the Ætolians, leaving his son Alexander to make the best struggle that he could in Peloponnesus; so that Cassander was now decidedly preponderant throughout the Hellenic regions. After fixing himself on the throne of Macedonia, he perpetuated his own name by founding, on the isthmus of the peninsula of Pallene and near the site where Potidæa had stood, the new city of Cassandrea.