Jeff Champion

After Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 BCE, the Macedonian empire was divided among his generals. The ancient authorities disagree on who got what; however the general consensus is Antigonus Monophthalmus got a big chunk of Asia Minor – what’s now Turkey. It didn’t last; the diadochi (“Successors”) were almost instantly at each other’s throats, pitting Macedonian phalanxes and whatever local troops could be scraped up against each other. Author Jeff Champion calls Antigonus “the greatest of the Successors”; he had the handicap of being surrounded – or the advantage of interior lines, depending on how you look at it. At any rate Antigonus managed to hold off other successors and expand his own territory, until a final defeat by Cassander, Lysimachus and Seleucus at the battle of Ipsus, dying under a hail of javelins at age 80. Champion has to deal with a paucity of historical sources – various fragmentary Greek and Latin histories; sometimes several years of Antigonas’ life are unaccounted for. It does come through that he was a fairly decent guy for the time and place: he only occasionally executed captured enemies; he was popular with his troops, often making “barracks room jokes” with them; he was hailed as “liberator” of Greece because when he captured a Greek city from another Successor he didn’t install a new garrison (although if a city rebelled, he garrisoned it); and he was unusually faithful to his wife, Stratonice - the other Successors tended to accumulate harems. It’s notable that the Successor wars tended to be just as hard on women as men: Cleopatra, Alexander’s sister, was murdered by her own female attendants; Olympias, Alexander’s mother, was stoned to death by the relatives of her victims; Cynane, Alexander’s half-sister, was murdered by Alcetus, another Successor; Eurydice, Cynane’s daughter, was murdered by Olympias (Olympias sent Cynane a sword, a rope, and a bottle of poison with a note that said “Pick One”; Cynane hanged herself); Roxane, Alexander’s Persian wife, was poisoned by Cassander, another Successor – after she had murdered Statiera, another of Alexander’s Persian wives; and Thessalonice, Cassander’s widow and another of Alexander’s half-sisters, was murdered by her own son, Antipater.

Champion does a good job with the sparse material; he has a whole appendix detailing what the sources are, how complete they are, and where they disagree. Heavily footnoted and a long bibliography. There are general maps of the areas of Antigonus’ campaigns and schematic maps of his major battles – as near as can be interpreted from written descriptions in the ancient sources.… (mer)

Continues to story down to the end of independent Syracuse during the 2nd Punic War in very much the same style as volume one (see my review of which). Perhaps surprisingly, the 3rd century in Sicily is often more obscure than the 5th and 4th, fewer surviving ancient histories covering it in depth. Due to the nature of the sources the focus tends to move away from Syracuse itself during the later part of the book - historians naturally being more interested in rising Rome and mighty Carthage than fading Syracuse.… (mer)

The title is practically a summary, although the 480 is misleading; the first several chapters deals with the time from the Greek settlement of Sicily in the 8th century down to 480 and the battle of Himera.

I bought the book more because I'm distantly acquainted with the author than out of any very great interest in the subject, but it turns out to be pretty good (albeit necessarily somewhat repetitive - Himera was assaulted how many times?). It deals a good deal with socio-economic conditions in addition to the military and political stuff, which makes it easier to make sense of the later.… (mer)