He established his empire with small means, and for the greater part of his life he was reasonable enough to be satisfied with his dominion. It was not till his old age that ambition overcame him and carried him away, though, perhaps, not without some deeper motive and the desire to save himself. He once crossed the Danube in the vain attempt to make conquests in the country beyond the river; this may, perhaps, have been only an attempt to keep off the invading nations of the north. He had a difficult problem to solve, to conquer the wild and warlike Thracians, whose country appears to us northern people as a fair southern sort of paradise, but was terrible to the Greeks on account of the severe arctic cold; and the terror was increased by the savage manners of the inhabitants. On the coast, however, there were large and magnificent Greek cities, and the beautiful Chersonesus. We know little of the reign of Lysimachus, and we are not even informed whether he resided at Byzantium or elsewhere. In later times, during the war against Antigonus, his residence seems to have been in Asia, at Sardis or at Ephesus.
CASSANDER IN POWER
[316-307 B.C.]
When Cassander was once in possession of Macedonia, he extirpated the family of Alexander, without a hand being raised in their defence. Aristobulus, who wished to interfere, was delivered up and sacrificed. Hence it is remarkable that he married Thessalonice, the only surviving daughter of Philip; but this may have arisen from the pride of the usurper, or from the hope of thereby establishing his dominion. His government of Macedonia was at the same time a perfect dominion over Greece, with very few exceptions, one of which was Sparta.
Thebes had been restored by Cassander immediately after the conquest of Macedonia (316 B.C.), for, in his hatred of Alexander, he undid all that Alexander had done. By their possession of the Theban territory the Bœotians were so much bound up with the interests of Macedonia, that it became a question as to whether it was prudent to restore Thebes. It is not certain whether they had incurred the suspicion of Cassander. It was a matter of great difficulty to induce the Bœotians to consent to the restoration; in all of the rest of Greece it was regarded as an act of the greatest justice, and it seems to have been a general national consolation.
About the same time Cassander founded Cassandrea, a remarkable proof that he was a man of practical sagacity. Philip had extirpated or sold the Greek population on the Macedonian coast, with the exception of that of Amphipolis and Pydna. One of these destroyed cities was Potidæa, which had at first been a Corinthian colony, but afterwards belonged to Athenian cleruchi. Now, on that site, Cassander assembled, not only many strangers, but all the Greeks, especially those Olynthians who were still surviving from the destruction of their city, and built Cassandrea. On the site of the insignificant town of Therma, he founded Thessalonica, which he called after the name of his wife. This act also shows great practical wisdom. Thessalonica, situated on a fine harbour, and in a fertile district, being now extended, became the chief commercial place in Macedonia, a rank which it has maintained down to the present day. Cassandrea (now Cassandra) soon became great and powerful; it has often been destroyed, but was always restored again; and its situation was so happily chosen, that it naturally always recovered.
This was the condition of Greece at the time when the appearance of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the son of Antigonus (307 B.C.), stirred up everything without doing any good. He had even before been actively engaged in a war against Ptolemy.
The defeat and death of Eumenes put Antigonus in possession of a vast monarchy, extending from the Hellespont as far as India. According to the early invented principle of the balance of power, the others now demanded that he should give up a part of his conquests; they even thought it necessary, for the sake of justice and for the balance of power, that the countries of upper Asia should form a separate state.
Seleucus, the child of fortune, was destined to obtain that empire; a man who was the pet of fortune, but in no way distinguished as a hero or statesman. In the same year (316 B.C.) in which Cassander had conquered Macedonia, and Antigonus, after the conquest of Eumenes, returned from Upper Asia, Antigonus intended to order Seleucus to be arrested at Babylon. But he escaped, and the Chaldeans now foretold Antigonus, that the fate of his family was involved in the affair. It was easy to foretell the beginning, but not the end, for the Seleucidæ did not overthrow Antigonus. Seleucus now went to Ptolemy whom he urged on to wage war against Antigonus.
Thus arose, in 316 B.C., the second or third great internal war among the Macedonian princes—we say the second or third, because the recommencement of the war in 318 B.C. may either be regarded as a continuation of the first or as a second war. In this war, Antigonus fell out with Cassander, and Ptolemy allied himself with Cassander and Lysimachus against Antigonus. Lysimachus, however, was cunning enough to keep aloof as much as he could, and Cassander, too, at first took much less part in it than Ptolemy. In the beginning it was, properly speaking, only Antigonus and Ptolemy that were arrayed against each other.