Rome suffered more from the Antigonids than from any other Hellenistic dynasty because it had there alone to do with a nation of veterans under arms. The Macedonians were, as has been said, an imperial people, loyal to their kings, and ambitious to maintain their ascendancy in the world. While at war with Rome—the wielder of armies 100,000 strong—they were assailed simultaneously by their Hellenic vassals and rivals and attacked or abandoned by their Macedonian kinsmen in Asia and Africa; yet they held out under the Antigonids, in the first struggle for eight years (212-205 B.C.), in the second for four (200-197 B.C.), in the third for still another four (171-168 B.C.); and even after one half of their men of military age had fallen at Pydna, and their last king had died in captivity and his only son as a clerk at Alba Fucens, their conquerors were so seriously disturbed by the "throbbings of their ancient loyalty" that the Senate had finally to place a Roman proconsul on the throne of the great Alexander (148 B.C.).
Though sprung from a Macedonian stock, the dynasty of the Antigonids was bred in Asia, and it was transplanted into Macedon only in its third generation. That came about in the following way. The first Antigonus was made ruler of Phrygia when Alexander the Great left Asia Minor in 333 B.C., and he was still in possession of that satrapy when his sovereign died ten years later. With Phrygia as a starting point and a nomination as commander-in-chief of the royal forces in Asia as a pretext, he planned and fought with such success in the next decade that in the spring of 312 B.C. he seemed destined to add Macedon to Asia, which he already possessed; and with it to support and not to oppose him, he counted on being able to master the whole of Alexander's empire. We have already seen why this project failed, and also how a later attempt to accomplish the same purpose cost him his life and his Asiatic realm. He may have been over-ambitious. Possibly no one could have prevented the dismemberment of the Græco-Macedonian world. Perhaps the centrifugal tendencies would have proved too strong for Alexander himself had he lived long enough to test them. That, however, does not make the issue less of a calamity for the Hellenes; for on the battle-fields of Gaza and Ipsus it was decided that the alien Romans and not the kindred Macedonians were to unite the world under a single government. With the person of the first Antigonus went to the grave the hope of a great people.
The sharer of his aspirations and the cause in considerable measure of his defeat was his son Demetrius, surnamed Poliorcetes, or "Taker-of-Cities." By his disobedience to orders at Gaza and his impetuosity in action at Ipsus, he had done most to lose his kingdom; but after the death of his father he still retained the dominion of the sea, and, with it, value as an ally and ability to use his forces at such points as he himself chose. After some years of aimless adventuring and galling inactivity he chose to use them in the attempt, twice vainly made already in coöperation with his father, to seize Greece and Macedon. His strength was incomparably inferior to that used on the earlier occasions and he had still watchful enemies on all sides. The essential difference was that the house of Antipater, which had ruled Macedon and Greece since Alexander the Great had crossed into Asia, was now represented, not by Antipater's able son, Cassander, who died in 297 B.C. after a reign of nineteen years, but by his weakly and dissentious children. These looked on inactive while he blockaded Athens (295-294 B.C.) and starved it into submission; whereupon he brushed them aside and took their place as king of Macedon and suzerain of Greece. Since his wife was Phila, Cassander's sister, his son, Antigonus, surnamed Gonatas, was a grandson of Antipater I, no less than Antipater II, who was now the sole survivor of Cassander's family. Hence, if the right of Demetrius Poliorcetes to the Macedonian throne rested upon nothing more substantial than the frustrated ambition of his father, the right of his son was flawless after the death of Antipater II. This, however, occurred in 288-287 B.C. at the very time when Demetrius, on being expelled from Macedon, abandoned Greece and went to meet captivity in Asia for the rest of his life. Left behind in Greece, Antigonus Gonatas exercised a watchful suzerainty there without being king of Macedon, which Pyrrhus of Epirus and Lysimachus of Thrace shared for a few years (288 to 284-283 B.C.), Lysimachus, Seleucus, and Ptolemy Ceraunus held alone in rapid succession for another interval (283-280 B.C.), and Celts from the north plundered and harried for three years. It was not till 277 B.C. that Antigonus succeeded in freeing it from its troubles and making it the base of his operations in Greece. He therewith planted in Europe the dynasty which ruled Macedon till the Roman conquest (168 B.C.).
Antigonus I and Demetrius Poliorcetes had formed their political ambitions and ideas during the age of the diadochi, when the empire of Alexander stood in all its magnificence and promise as a golden prize for the able, courageous, and unscrupulous. They had aspired to rule as god-kings over a world in which men and cities rendered homage (proskynesis) to them, as they had rendered it to Alexander. They had viewed Greece and Macedon as alike desirable,[119] the common charm being that they were the mother of the soldiers and settlers of whom their limitless realm had need. They may have coveted Greece even more than Macedon. Certainly, Athens, not Pella, was the city of Demetrius's dreams. He had gloried in being its liberator in 307 B.C., and when it dashed his hopes by excluding him after his defeat at Ipsus, he had suffered bitter disappointment. None the less, and despite the desperate resistance which it had offered to him in 295-294 B.C., he treated it with clemency when he was once again its master. What his father had thought of the approval of Athens he expressed by calling it the beacon tower of the world. How highly he had esteemed the culture of its inhabitants he demonstrated by making a colony of Athenians the nucleus of Antigonia (later Antioch), which he founded as the new capital of the empire that had been Alexander's, but was now, he hoped, to be his.
Antigonus I had never had the good fortune to rule in the land of his birth, but Demetrius Poliorcetes was its king for six years (294-288 B.C.).[120] As such he showed conclusively that he had no intention to reign there patriarchally, as Cassander and Antipater, following the example of Philip II and his predecessors, had done. He displayed an utter disregard for the established customs of the court and for the limitations imposed by usage upon his royal authority. The court he surrounded himself with was the richly appointed, ceremonious, uniformed affair devised by Alexander in his later, more splendid, more arrogant days; and by requiring proskynesis of the Macedonian noblemen and commons, he offended, unnecessarily, as it proved, the sturdiest sentiment of the nation.[121] His attempt to establish absolute monarchy in unsophisticated Macedon was the most direct cause of the loss of his kingdom; for when his foreign enemies, anticipating the attack which he designed against them, assailed him from all sides, his subjects hastened to abandon him and joined hands with the invaders. They had no longer heart for the wild imperialistic projects into which, almost without perceiving it, they had been led by Alexander the Great.
Antigonus Gonatas had never known the lure of the East. He had spent his early manhood in Athens (294-290 B.C.), where an unworthy liaison with the courtesan Demo and an intimacy that does him honor with Zeno, the founder of the Stoa, attest the range of his activity. He won his spurs in his father's Bœotian campaigns of 292-291 B.C., and spent the formative years of his career as a general and statesman in Greece (288-280 B.C.). Only once, when hard pushed in 280B.C., did he show that the blood of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Antigonus I flowed in his veins, namely, when he tried to seize Asia Minor, then temporarily without a master. Normally, he acted like the child of Phila and the heir of the policy of Cassander and Antipater. And it was in the spirit of his mother's line that he established his government in Macedon on expelling the Celts in 277 B.C.
His reign opened auspiciously. Having obtained—how, when, and at what price, we do not know—the friendship of Egypt, he got the opportunity to order affairs to his liking in Greece. On the other hand, his accession to the throne was accompanied by his marriage to Phila, his own niece, the sister of Antiochus I, the new king of Asia. This union sanctioned an agreement by which Antigonus abandoned his claim to Asia Minor and Antiochus his right, as Seleucus's son, to the Macedonian throne. It inaugurated a policy by which Macedon secured for eighty years (277-197 B.C.) immunity from attack or intrigue on the part of the Seleucids. His friendship with Egypt was less enduring, but it gave him ten years (277-267 B.C.) in which to consolidate his power—a period of quiet activity, interrupted only by the return of Pyrrhus from Italy and the startling upheaval in Macedon and Greece (274-272 B.C.) which accompanied that adventurous monarch's vigorous assertion of his right to rule those countries. The fall of Pyrrhus in battle at Argos relieved the tension of this situation, but till the time of his death thirty-two years afterwards, Antigonus had always to count Epirus among his possible enemies when it was not actually his assailant. On his northern frontier he faced the threatening Dardanians, and on the northeastern the marauding Celts, who had reduced Thrace to the condition of barbarity that prevailed throughout Central Europe. By keeping these peoples in check he did a great service to Greece, which he thereby protected; but for it he got little gratitude, and it was his suzerainty over Greece which brought to him and his successors most of their many troubles.
Just as he was faithful to the traditional policy of the Macedonian kings in his dealings with his own people, so, too, in regard to the Greeks the plan he followed was in general the old-fashioned one, of making them his dependent allies. In states ostensibly free and self-governing he secured a preponderating influence by designating an individual as his representative and making him practically governor. Naturally, the domestic opponents of such a person called him a tyrant, and such, in fact, the nature of his position forced him to become, since he could not hold his place without breaking both the public and private laws. But outward appearances were preserved, even when he called in Macedonian troops to his aid, by the old practice whereby he and his adherents assumed the responsibility for their coming.