Alexander the Great's Legacy: The Decline of Macedonian Europe in the Wake of the Wars of the Successors

by Mike Roberts

Overview

Why was it that 2400 years ago the people who had recently conquered the world were unable to stop barbarian Galatians from looting the tombs of their revered royal line? Why was it that the Macedonian state virtually created by Philip II and taken to the heights of epochal triumph by his son Alexander the great had, hardly two generations after his death , became a weaker entity than it had been when the young conqueror had crossed the Hellespont?

This was a period during which Cassander and Lysimachus had seemed about to construct durable Europe based polities and had seen the likes of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Pyrrhus of Epirus battling and besieging across Macedonia,Thrace and Greece.

The story that unfolds here explores how both the unique character and the particular legacy left when Alexander died at Babylon in 323 ,at the romantically youthful age of 32 , ensured that his homeland failed to gain the kind of imperial dividend that accrued to others of the world’s great Empires. For Macedon there was not the thousand years of glory that was the extraordinary destiny of the Romans, nor even the two hundred years of Persian primacy, only 50 or so years of strife and trauma ending in a Galatian deluge that threatened the sacred site at Delphi and had remarkable parallels to the earlier Persian invasions of the Greek world that Alexander had claimed to avenge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526788528
Publisher:	Pen and Sword
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mike Roberts is a social worker by training but has had a long-standing interest in the military history of the Classical world. He is the co-author (with his good friend Bob Bennett) of several well-received books: The Wars of Alexander’s Successors (volumes I and II); The Twilight of the Hellenistic World and The Spartan Supremacy. He lives in Dudley.

Table of Contents

Introduction x

Chapter 1 An Old, Old Man 1

Chapter 2 Forging the Fetters 25

Chapter 3 Cassander and Lysimachus 42

Chapter 4 Demetrius Rex 71

Chapter 5 Now an Old Man Moves 108

Chapter 6 A Passing Thunderbolt 137

Chapter 7 A Gallic Fury 164

Chapter 8 An Improbable Hero 193

Chapter 9 The Last of an Eagle 220

Epilogue 249

Notes 269

Bibliography 274

Index 277

Editorial Reviews

Mike Robert’s work can be regarded as an accessible introductory read to the epoch. It is recommended for its target audience, non-specialist readers who favor an engagingly written narrative with a focus on military encounters. The depictions of the battles represent the best parts of the book, as the author succeeds in making the dynamic and intensity of the fighting tangible.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review