Antigonid Kingdom

The Macedonian successor state, and the one that ended up ruling Macedon itself. Antigonus the One-Eyed was Alexander's satrap of Phrygia and the general who came closest to holding the whole empire together under one man - which is exactly why the others combined against him. He took the title of king in 306, and at Ipsus in 301 a coalition of Seleucus, Lysimachus and Cassander killed him at eighty-one and divided his territory. His son Demetrius the Besieger lost Asia and spent his life taking and losing cities, but the dynasty survived, and his grandson Antigonus Gonatas secured Macedon in 277 by destroying a Gallic army that had invaded the Balkans. From then the Antigonids ruled the Macedonian homeland as a national monarchy rather than a conquest state - smaller than the Seleucid or Ptolemaic realms, poorer, and more stable than either. Their strength was the phalanx and the fortresses of Greece, which they held to keep the Greek cities from combining. That policy brought them into the Roman orbit: Philip V allied with Hannibal after Cannae, and Rome fought Macedon four times in fifty years. The phalanx was broken at Cynoscephalae in 197 and finally at Pydna in 168, where Perseus lost the kingdom and walked in a Roman triumph. Rome divided Macedon into four republics forbidden to trade with one another, then annexed it as a province in 146. The Antigonids are the shortest-lived of the great Hellenistic houses and the only one Rome destroyed outright rather than absorbed by inheritance or by war on a client. Their end is conventionally where the independent history of Greece stops.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history