This convention restored substantially at Athens the Antipatrian government; yet without the severities which had marked its original establishment—and with some modifications in various ways. It made Kassander virtually master of the city (as Antipater had been before him), by means of his governing nominee, upheld by the garrison, and by the fortification of Munychia; which had now been greatly enlarged and strengthened,[836] holding a practical command over Peiræus, though that port was nominally relinquished to the Athenians. But there was no slaughter of orators, no expulsion of citizens: moreover, even the minimum of 1000 drachmæ, fixed for the political franchise, though excluding the multitude, must have been felt as an improvement compared with the higher limit of 2000 drachmæ prescribed by Antipater. Kassander was not, like his father, at the head of an overwhelming force, master of Greece. He had Polysperchon in the field against him with a rival army and an established ascendency in many of the Grecian cities; it was therefore his interest to abstain from measures of obvious harshness towards the Athenian people.
Towards this end his choice of the Phalerean Demetrius appears to have been judicious. That citizen continued to administer Athens, as satrap or despot under Kassander, for ten years. He was an accomplished literary man, friend both of the philosopher Theophrastus, who had succeeded to the school of Aristotle—and of the rhetor Deinarchus. He is described also as a person of expensive and luxurious habits; towards which he devoted the most of the Athenian public revenue, 1200 talents in amount, if Duris is to be believed. His administration is said to have been discreet and moderate. We know little of its details, but we are told that he made sumptuary laws, especially restricting the cost and ostentation of funerals.[837] He himself extolled his own decennial period as one of abundance and flourishing commerce at Athens.[838] But we learn from others, and the fact is highly probable, that it was a period of distress and humiliation, both at Athens and in other Grecian towns; and that Athenians, as well as others, welcomed new projects of colonization (such as that of Ophellas from Kyrênê) not simply from prospects of advantage, but also as an escape from existing evils.[839]
What forms of nominal democracy were kept up during this interval, we cannot discover. The popular judicature must have been continued for private suits and accusations, since Deinarchus is said to have been in large practice as a logographer, or composer of discourses for others.[840] But the fact that three hundred and sixty statues were erected in honor of Demetrius while his administration was still going on, demonstrates the gross flattery of his partisans, the subjection of the people, and the practical abolition of all free-spoken censure or pronounced opposition. We learn that, in some one of the ten years of his administration, a census was taken of the inhabitants of Attica; and that there were numbered, 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics, and 400,000 slaves.[841] Of this important enumeration we know the bare fact, without its special purpose or even its precise date. Perhaps some of those citizens, who had been banished or deported at the close of the Lamian war, may have returned and continued to reside at Athens. But there still seems to have remained, during all the continuance of the Kassandrian Oligarchy, a body of adverse Athenian exiles, watching for an opportunity of overthrowing it, and seeking aid for that purpose from the Ætolians and others.[842]
The acquisition of Athens by Kassander, followed up by his capture of Panaktum and Salamis, and seconded by his moderation towards the Athenians, procured for him considerable support in Peloponnesus, whither he proceeded with his army.[843] Many of the cities, intimidated or persuaded, joined him and deserted Polysperchon; while the Spartans, now feeling for the first time their defenceless condition, thought it prudent to surround their city with walls.[844] This fact, among many others contemporaneous, testifies emphatically, how the characteristic sentiments of the Hellenic autonomous world were now dying out everywhere. The maintenance of Sparta as an unwalled city, was one of the deepest and most cherished of the Lykurgean traditions; a standing proof of the fearless bearing and self-confidence of the Spartans against dangers from without. The erection of the walls showed their own conviction, but too well borne out by the real circumstances around them, that the pressure of the foreigner had become so overwhelming as hardly to leave them even safety at home.
The warfare between Kassander and Polysperchon became now embittered by a feud among the members of the Macedonian imperial family. King Philip Aridæus and his wife Eurydikê, alarmed and indignant at the restoration of Olympias which Polysperchon was projecting, solicited aid from Kassander, and tried to place the force of Macedonia at his disposal. In this however they failed. Olympias, assisted not only by Polysperchon, but by the Epirotic prince Æakides, made her entry into Macedonia out of Epirus, apparently in the autumn of 317 B. C. She brought with her Roxana and her child—the widow and son of Alexander the Great. The Macedonian soldiers, assembled by Philip Aridæus and Eurydikê to resist her, were so overawed by her name and the recollection of Alexander, that they refused to fight, and thus ensured to her an easy victory. Philip and Eurydikê 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 Kassander, were put to death, together with his brother Nikanor;[845] 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 Kassander was kept employed in Peloponnesus by the force under Alexander, son of Polysperchon. But Kassander, 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 Roxana, the child Alexander, and Thessalonikê daughter of her late husband Philip son of Amyntas.[846] Here Kassander blocked her up for several months by sea, as well as by land, and succeeded in defeating all the efforts of Polysperchon and Æakides to relieve her. In the spring of the ensuing year (316 B. C.), she was forced by intolerable famine to surrender. Kassander 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 Kassander 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. Kassander took Thessalonikê to wife—confined Roxana with the child Alexander in the fortress of Amphipolis—where (after a certain interval) he caused both of them to be slain.[847]
While Kassander 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[848]) 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 Kassander the extirpation of the regal family. His power appeared indeed so formidable, that Kassander of Macedonia, Lysimachus of Thrace, Ptolemy of Egypt, and Seleukus of Babylonia, entered into a convention, which gradually ripened into an active alliance, against him.
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 Kassander 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 Pallênê and near the site where Potidæa had stood, the new city of Kassandreia; into which he congregated a large number of inhabitants from the neighborhood, and especially the remnant of the citizens of Olynthus and Potidæa,—towns taken and destroyed by Philip more than thirty years before.[849] He next marched into Peloponnesus with his army against Alexander son of Polysperchon. Passing through Bœotia, he undertook the task of restoring the city of Thebes, which had been destroyed twenty years previously by Alexander the Great, and had ever since existed only as a military post on the ancient citadel called Kadmeia. The other Bœotian towns, to whom the old Theban territory had been assigned, were persuaded or constrained to relinquish it; and Kassander invited from all parts of Greece the Theban exiles or their descendants. From sympathy with these exiles, and also with the ancient celebrity of the city, many Greeks, even from Italy and Sicily, contributed to the restoration. The Athenians, now administered by Demetrius Phalereus under Kassander’s supremacy, were particularly forward in the work; the Messenians and Megalopolitans, whose ancestors had owed so much to the Theban Epaminondas, lent strenuous aid. Thebes was re-established in the original area which it had occupied before Alexander’s siege; and was held by a Kassandrian garrison in the Kadmeia, destined for the mastery of Bœotia and Greece.[850]
After some stay at Thebes, Kassander advanced toward Peloponnesus. Alexander (son of Polysperchon) having fortified the Isthmus, he was forced to embark his troops with his elephants at Megara, and cross over the Saronic Gulf to Epidaurus. He dispossessed Alexander of Argos, of Messenia, and even of his position on the Isthmus, where he left a powerful detachment, and then returned to Macedonia.[851] His increasing power raised both apprehension and hatred in the bosom of Antigonus, who endeavored to come to terms with him, but in vain.[852] Kassander preferred the alliance with Ptolemy, Seleukus, and Lysimachus—against Antigonus, who was now master of nearly the whole of Asia, inspiring common dread to all of them.[853] Accordingly, from Asia to Peloponnesus, with arms and money Antigonus despatched the Milesian Aristodemus to strengthen Alexander against Kassander; whom he further denounced as an enemy of the Macedonian name, because he had slain Olympias, imprisoned the other members of the regal family, and re-established the Olynthian exiles. He caused the absent Kassander to be condemned by what was called a Macedonian assembly, upon these and other charges.
Antigonus farther proclaimed, by the voice of this assembly, that all the Greeks should be free, self-governing, and exempt from garrisons or military occupation.[854] It was expected that these brilliant promises would enlist partisans in Greece against Kassander; accordingly Ptolemy ruler of Egypt, one of the enemies of Antigonus, thought fit to issue similar proclamations a few months afterwards, tendering to the Greeks the same boon from himself.[855] These promises, neither executed, not intended to be executed, by either of the kings, appear to have produced little or no effect upon the Greeks.