CHAPTER 24

“GLORIOUS SERVITUDE...”: THE REIGNS OF ANTIGONOS GONATAS AND DEMETRIOS II

R. Lane Fox

The fijirst hundred years or so of Macedon’s Antigonid dynasty begin and end with barbarian pressure, fijirst from Gallic invaders in 280/79 bc, fijinally from Romans in whose encroaching shadow Philip V died in 179 bc. The reigns of Antigonos Doson (229–221 bc) and Philip V (221–179 bc) have been excellently served by the monographs of Sylvie Le Bohec and F. W. Walbank respectively, affforced by the chapters by F. W. Walbank in his and Hammond’s History of Macedonia volume III. They need no new chapters here. Instead, I will concentrate on the fijirst fijifty-year period, although Walbank’s masterly chapters in the History of Macedo- nia addressed this complex period and its chronology and Gabbert’s life of Antigonos Gonatas is a brief political biography.1 Evidence has accumu- lated, even since Walbank wrote in 1988, and interpretations have been refijined since the memorable, but sometimes fanciful, biography of Anti- gonos by W. W. Tarn in 1913. These fijirst fijifty Antigonid years are also framed by barbarians. In early 279 bc, one wing of the invading Gauls, led by Bolgius, entered Mace- don, drew an army against them, and killed the unscrupulous Ptolemy Ceraunus, son of Ptolemy I’s fijirst (Antipatrid) wife. He had been king in Macedon for less than two years. According to Justin, perhaps ultimately using Hieronymus, Ptolemy was decapitated and his head was fijixed on a lance and “carried round to the terror of the enemy,” his surviving Mace- donians, some of them the sons of Alexander’s soldiers.2 Fifty years later, in early 229 bc, Demetrios II also died, perhaps not in battle but at the very moment when the new barbarians, the Romans, were preparing to cross the Adriatic for their fijirst-ever Illyrian war.

1 N. G. L. Hammond and F. W. Walbank, A History of Macedonia III (Oxford, 1988); J. Gabbert, Antigonus II Gonatas (London, 1997). 2 Justin 24. 5. 6. 496 r. lane fox

The Gauls’ defeat of Ptolemy Ceraunus left Macedonians fearing the sack of their cities: what would the Gauls have found? Far the most vivid glimpse of high society in Macedon in the 290s bc is the remark- able, but under-exploited, letter of Hippolochus to Lynceus (brother of Duris, a Samian) about the wedding-banquet of Caranos the Macedonian at an unspecifijied Macedonian site (Pella?).3 Nothing found by archaeolo- gists, not even in the tomb-paintings at Agios Athanasios, gives us such an impression of a grand Macedonian party. Slaves were in attendance throughout. The numbers and weight of the diners’ gold wreaths, the gold spoons, the gifts of big gold cups, the enormous size of the silver serving- plates, the gold and silver flasks for perfume are excelled only by the con- traptions which revealed statues of Naiads, Erotes, Artemis, Pan, Hermes, and so forth from behind thin curtains. The rich profusion of the food excels even Petronius’ imagination for Trimalchio, and the quantities of performance-artists make an Athenian symposion seem very feeble. The entertainments included musicians, Rhodian harp-girls (“they seemed naked to me, except that others said they were wearing tunics”), female acrobats blowing fijire from their mouths (these girls really were naked), a chorus of 100 men singing a wedding song, more girls dressed like Nereids and Nymphs, and “the clown Mandrogenes who made us break into bursts of laughter and kept on dancing with his wife who was more than 80 years old.” In conclusion, Hippolochus wished Lynceus a very happy time eat- ing simple thyme and bread in Athens while listening to Theophrastus’s philosophy-lectures. He and his fellow-guests had enjoyed such a “din- ner of riches, not leftovers” that they were looking for “houses, fijields, and slaves” to buy with the proceeds. A Gallic invasion, heading rapidly south, could never destroy such lux- ury in Macedon’s walled cities whose “masters of the universe” had made the kingdom the America of its age, vastly richer than any state in the south.4 After Ceraunus’ death in early 279, Meleager was king for only two months, Antipater king for a mere 45 days (“the Etesian king,” as he ruled only for as long as the Etesian winds blow later in the year), and Sosthenes, not even a prince or noble, presented himself as “general, not “king,” to the Macedonian army.5 Initially, Arsinoe was also nearby. She was Cerau- nus’s half-sister, being Ptolemy I’s daughter by his latest wife, Berenice,

3 Ath. 4. 128A–130D. 4 Justin 24. 5. 8 and 24. 6. 2 on city-gates as a defence against Gauls; 24. 6. 2 has them ravaging the countryside, not the cities. 5 Justin 24. 5. 12–14.