READING HALL

THE DOORSOF WISDOM

ANTIGONUS GONATAS

CHAPTER XIV.

THE YOUNGER GENERATION

Here the history of Antigonus Gonatas should end. Everything, and more than everything, that he had set himself to do was finished. From the most unpromising beginnings he had refashioned a strong and united Macedonia, restored its ancient boundaries to their fullest extent, and seated himself too firmly on the throne for anything to overthrow his dynasty but overwhelming force: he saw Aetolia his all but ally, Athens and Boeotia governed by his friends, Epirus sailing humbly in his wake; he saw his Peloponnesian system, to all appearance, firmly based upon capable and devoted rulers in Argos and Megalopolis; above all, he had brought his ; duel with Egypt to an end by regaining for his house control of Delos and reconquering the command of the sea. The erstwhile exile from Macedonia had reached the highest pinnacle of success; and with success he had also peace on every hand. The drama is played out; the curtain should be rung down.

But the dramas of real life do not conform to the rules. Seldom enough do they close with the cockpit of the Victory, and the hero, who should have died at the crisis of his fate, is apt to survive his Waterloo and suffer his St. Helena. The great scene comes too early in the play ; and the curtain rises again upon a tedious fifth act, with which we would often gladly dispense.

Antigonus lived for six years after his crowning victory. But he is no longer a leading figure on the stage; the interest begins to shift to others. The younger generation are knocking at the door; and they will not be denied. There are not only new men in the world; there are new ideas. Men begin to look on the old king as the survivor of a past age, a relic of the things that are gone. He has not only outlived every one of his contemporaries; he has in most cases outlived their sons also. Pyrrhus of Epirus and his son Alexander; Antiochus Soter of Syria and his son Antiochus the god; Areus of Sparta and his son Akrotatos; Krateros, viceroy of Corinth, and his son Alexander; Magas of Cyrene and his successor Demetrios the Fair; all these belonged to the past, and had followed to the grave the philosophers and historians who had been Antigonus’ friends. Only one of his coevals had had a reign at all comparable to his; and the death of his younger rival Ptolemy Philadelphus in 246 had removed the last of the great figures who during his life had played their parts on the political stage. A new age had arrived; and that year had seen new kings reigning in both the great empires. Only one ruler then living had occupied his throne as far back even as the taking of Athens; and Eumenes of Pergamon, like the old philosopher Arkesilaos, was yet to die before Antigonus. No wonder that these facts impressed themselves on the popular mind; men came to refer to the Macedonian king as Antigonus the Old Man.

Age, too, begins to tell. He does not appear to have taken the field again himself after 245; an enterprise is heard of as undertaken, left to allies, then abandoned, a thing strangely at variance with the career of one of the most persevering and tenacious figures in history. At the time of the battle of Kos he was about seventy-three or seventy-four years of age; his life had been one of the most strenuous known; small wonder if he lost something of his great energy.

It is possible, too, that a certain deterioration of character can be traced in these last years of his life. A more than full share of those disappointments of manhood which are said to succeed the illusions of youth may well have worked some change. The replacement of the influence of Menedemos and Zeno by that of Persaios and Bion was hardly to the good; the revolt of Krateros’ son might have soured any nature. But indeed we know too little to say. Not merely is our principal source, Aratos, bitterly biased, but both our contemporary sources are entirely careless of what passed in the north, and only accord a passing reference to Macedonia when her path happens to cut across that of local Peloponesian affairs. Polybius indeed tries to be just, and it is simply upon one fact recorded by Polybius that any view of Antigonus’ last years must be based; but the formal commencement of Polybius’ history falls many years after Antigonus Gonatas’ death, and any references to him are merely incidental, and necessarily based not upon Polybius’ own knowledge. The whole of the history of the years after 245 is utterly out of focus. The centre of gravity of the Balkan peninsula had not suddenly shifted to Achaea merely because the story of Achaea happens to be known disproportionately well; neither was Macedonia falling into the background because she no longer had a historian of her own to tell her own story from her own official archives, as Hieronymus had done. Such considerations are indeed most obvious; but insistence upon them may not be without its use, seeing the way in which the Achaean League has sometimes been handled as though it were Hellas, and as though every word that Aratos wrote bore its face value.

Antigonus had already reckoned with every possible opponent, save one; and it happened naturally that that one was the one who mattered most. Aratos had already secured his position in the Achaean League; and though his first generalship in 245 does not seem to have been particularly successful, he had already more than laid the foundations of his own peculiar and amazing influence over the federated cities. By the constitution of the League a year had to elapse before the same man could hold the generalship a second time; Aratos henceforth was elected every second year to that, the highest civil and military office, combining so to speak the functions of president and commander-in-chief. For the present, too, he shaped the League’s policy in the intervening years; there was no one of weight to alternate with him, as Lydiades was to do later. Consequent!y, at this time, to a very large extent, the Achaean League was Aratos.

In May 243 Aratos entered upon his second term of office, and was able to make a real start with the carrying out of his policy. He seems to have seen clearly that, if he wanted to free the Peloponnese, he must go direct to the centre of the situation, and not fumble over the fringes; this is one of the things which marks him out as a considerable statesman. It did not take an Aratos to see what was the key of the position; given Corinth, everything else must, sooner or later, follow of itself. It was very necessary, therefore, to win Corinth; and to win it in open war against Antigonus was hopeless. Aratos took characteristic measures.

It must be clearly borne in mind that, up to now, there had been no open war between Antigonus and the League, and no antagonism at all since Alexander’s death; and it did not follow that there ever would be any. The aid rendered by Achaea to Boeotia had indeed been directed against Antigonus’ friend; but in the Boeotian war Antigonus had not been directly concerned, and anyhow it was over and done with. To suppose that Antigonus and the League were in a condition of hostility, real, if half suppressed, ever since 251, arises both from misapprehension of Antigonus’ Peloponnesian policy, a policy which has already been explained, and from applying later events to a situation which they do not fit. Antigonus had never sought any conquests south of Corinth; there he only needed allies to act as a check upon Sparta. He had never interfered actively in Peloponnese; he had absolutely acquiesced in the independence of the League of the ten Achaean towns; and if Sicyon became a member of the League, it was no business of his, and he never considered it such. So long as Argos and Megalopolis were in the hands of his friends, that was all that he desired or required. Consequently, though Aratos knew well before 243 that a conflict in good earnest with Antigonus was inevitable, that fact depended solely on the temper and purpose of the man Aratos, and was not common knowledge, though doubtless communicated to his friends. Antigonus may or may not have had a shrewd suspicion of it; but nothing had as yet been translated into action, and at the beginning of the year 243 the relations between Antigonus and the League were entirely peaceful; men from Corinth were coming and going as they pleased between Corinth and Sicyon. It was in these circumstances that Aratos planned the surprise of the fortress.

Of what took place we have Aratos’ own account. Through a not too scrupulous money-changer in Sicyon he made the acquaintance of some ‘Syrians’ in Corinth, who had succeeded in pilfering some of the king’s money, and used to come to Sicyon to exchange the Macedonian pieces for some­thing less compromising. These were four brothers, perhaps Asiatic Greeks, one of them a mercenary in Antigonus’ garrison; Aratos, who seems to have had an inexhaustible purse, bought those of them whom he required, and their leader, Erginos, remained with him afterwards and became a useful instrument in other undertakings. By his aid Aratos obtained the measurement of the walls at their lowest point, and in him he secured a sure guide. On the appointed night, leaving the Achaean army to wait at Sicyon till signalled for, Aratos took 400 picked men, of whom only a few knew their destination, and with scaling-ladders approached the gate on the side of the Heraion. It was midsummer, and there was a bright moon; but they had the good fortune of a heavy cloud as they approached. Erginos and seven others, dressed as travellers, knocked at the gate; the door-keeper opened, and was at once cut down with his companions. Aratos with 100 men scaled the walls; and taking the ladders, and bidding the other 300 follow, he set off for the citadel of Akrokorinthos.

On the way he saw a picket of four men approaching, and ambushed them in the darkened street. Three fell dead on the spot; but the fourth escaped with a broken head and gave the alarm. In a few minutes the city had sprung to life; the trumpets of the garrison sounded to arms, and lights began to appear in the fortress on the crest of Akrokorinthos. But Aratos and his hundred were already scrambling up the great hill, stumbling about in the darkness, and perpetually losing the steep and winding track, when the moon shone out again; she lighted them right up to the wall, and then kindly hid herself once more, as Aratos began his assault upon the citadel.

Meanwhile Aratos’ three hundred, left outside the Heraion gate without a guide and with no orders but ‘Follow’, had lost themselves in the city, unable to find which way Aratos had gone, and confused by the lights and the various noises. It was a better piece of good fortune than Aratos deserved: for had they followed him, his career would probably have ended then and there. As it was, they crouched in a shadow and waited for something to happen. What happened was that the Macedonian general Archelaos came hurrying through the city with his men, to take Aratos in the rear. Whereupon, as he passed, the three hundred rose up and smote him in flank, breaking and scattering his troops by their unexpected onset. Hard upon their success Erginos came down from the fight above to hasten them up the hill; they were needed to reinforce Aratos. A stiff fight followed at the wall of the citadel; but as day dawned the Achaeans forced their way over, and the sun rose upon a free Corinth. On the news the Corinthians opened their gates, and admitted the Achaean army, which came over from Sicyon. Archelaos was captured and released; another officer, Theophrastos, showed his devotion to Antigonus by refusing quarter. Persaios escaped to Kenchreai and took ship to Antigonus; the malicious gossip of a later day invented the story that his friends used afterwards to chaff him with a saying of Zeno’s, that the Stoic sage was the only good general.

The Corinthians streamed together into the theatre, and Aratos came straight down from the captured fortress to meet them. A body of Achaean troops held either side of the stage; and between them Aratos came forward in his armour, weary and war-stained, and stood a little while in silence, leaning on his spear, till the cheering died away. It was the proudest moment he was ever to know. Then, collecting himself, he spoke to the people and persuaded them to join the Achaean League: and he put into their hands the keys of their city. They had not handled them for the better part of a hundred years.

Such is Aratos’ story. We may wonder, if we will, that the man who could perform such an astounding feat of arms could ever have been a coward in a pitched battle; but what is necessary to consider here is the circumstances of the attack. Plutarch extols it to the skies as a noble action; yet Plutarch has himself left indisputable evidence that the Greeks of the third century regarded an attack made in time of peace as a disgraceful thing. Polybius, the devoted friend of the Achaeans, who is far nearer in time than Plutarch, and who understands the facts better, does not mince words; it was a deliberate act of wrong, a breach of the law of nations; nay more, he seems to make Aratos admit this. No doubt, if questioned, Aratos would have said that, in itself, such a thing was wrongful; but that though Antigonus, in what concerned Macedonia, was a legitimate king, in what concerned Corinth he was merely a tyrant and as such outside all law. This of course would be a quibble; and Greek usage was clear. The Greeks expected a formal declaration of war, and thought badly of Sparta because she had discovered the enormous advantage of not issuing one. Pyrrhus had indeed done the same thing against Sparta, professedly copying the tactics of his opponent. But, Sparta apart, Greek international law was perfectly plain; full notice was obligatory, and it was looked on as a very noteworthy thing, if not as rather sharp practice, that Demetrios on one occasion was in a position to commence hostilities the day after his herald had delivered his declaration. To us, Demetrios’ action seems merely usual and prudent: and it is certain that in the future, as often in the past, the first blow will, at the least, instantly follow the rupture of diplomatic relations, while, as is well known, there are some who contemplate that it may actually precede it, so enormous is the advantage of that first blow. The surprise of Corinth, as a method of declaring war on Antigonus, would probably be less repugnant to one modern school of thought than it could ever have been to any Greek, even though Aratos could plead Spartan precedent. While then the absolute justice of Polybius’ judgement from his own standpoint is recognized, Aratos may be permitted to keep what shreds of his glory he can ; there was to be little enough of it in his later life.

Naturally, Antigonus did not see things in this light. What the old king felt we can only conjecture from his action; and his action shows that the iron had entered very deeply. He does not appear to have attempted to regain Corinth; the Achaeans had not only garrisoned it strongly with Achaean troops, refusing to trust to mercenaries, but maintained there a large number of big dogs as an effectual preventative against any surprise; he evidently considered its recapture by direct means impossible. Neither did he attempt to attack the other towns, Megara, Troizen, Epidauros, which had revolted upon the loss of Corinth. His answer to Aratos was to turn to the Aetolians and to effect a real alliance with them, on terms that they together should conquer and partition Achaea. It was the negation of all his previous policy; it was a project of mere revenge, which he had never hitherto sought, and of territorial acquisition in Peloponnese, from which he had hitherto scrupulously held aloof. There is no doubt that the moving impulse to this treaty came from the Aetolians; partitions were a well-known instrument of their policy, and it is indeed expressly stated that the invitation came from them. Nevertheless Antigonus acquiesced, and was severely blamed. To annex territory after a war was, and always had been, an everyday matter for every Greek; but it seems that a project of partition of another state, announced beforehand, shocked the Greek mind no less than ours; and Polybius describes this proposal by the same word as he uses to stigmatize Aratos’ attack on Corinth; it was an act of wrong, a transgression against the law of nations. It was.

The position had in fact become a vendetta, where each succeeding act of wrong calls forth another. The original wrongdoing had probably been that of Demetrios, when he continued to hold Corinth after the expiration of the term for which the Corinthians had asked him to garrison it; though, in saying this, it is necessary to note that it is not known to what extent the League of Corinth of 303 may have regularized Demetrios’ position. Then came Aratos’ act of reprisal, as no doubt many a Greek called it; and then that of Antigonus. In a continuing vendetta, modern thought cares nothing who began; each fresh murder is just a murder. And Polybius here is splendidly inconsistent. He has risen above party and above himself; each fresh move he has branded as an act of wrong, though that was not the general Greek idea. To the ordinary Greek, custom sanctioned retaliation; an eye was to be for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; the vendetta between Aratos and Antigonus was a simple exemplification of this law. Under this law, each fresh move in a vendetta is at once both justified and an invitation for a corresponding move from the opponent. And the amazing thing is that, on another occasion and in other circumstances, that law has never found a more passionate defender than Polybius himself. Here and there in Greek history some one refused to avail himself of it, or to base his action upon the idea of revenge; but that was entirely his own personal matter. Antigonus had himself given more than one example of a better standard of conduct, notably after the death of Pyrrhus, when he had had both the pretext and the power for reprisals, and had held his hand. But very many years were still to elapse before a better-known Stoic ruler than Antigonus was to pronounce the brutal old law morally wrong, even for the Pagan world.

As a matter of fact, very little came of the wretched business. It never passed from project into performance. Aratos of course looked at once for allies, and found them readily in the powers that were always hostile to Macedonia, Sparta and Egypt. Agis, the noble young king who was engaged in attempting to reform Sparta, led an army to his assistance; and in return for an alliance Aratos made Ptolemy III generalissimo of the Achaean League by land and sea. It must have been largely an empty form, and Achaea thereby lost something of what she would have gained by adhering resolutely to independence of action; but there is one point in the story which perhaps suggests that Egypt may have sent a fleet to sea, though she naturally was not going to try conclusions again with Antigonus merely to please Aratos. She may, however, have compelled Antigonus to put to sea, thus drawing him off from the war on land; further than this we cannot suppose that Egypt went, if indeed she took any action at all; for she was still engaged in war with Seleucus II.

In the spring of 241 the Aetolians came south by way of the Isthmus, and Aratos and Agis united their forces at Corinth to meet them. Agis was eager to fight; but Aratos absolutely refused, and insisted on retreat. It has been suggested that he was more afraid of the new ideas of the young Spartan than he was of the Aetolians. Thereupon Agis went home; he had come to help his allies to fight, and, very naturally, did not see what he was there for, if there was to be no battle. Aratos too retired, amid the curses of his troops, thus made to appear cowards in the eyes of Greece; the Aetolians streamed through the pass, invaded Achaea, attacked and took Pellene, and sacked it. While they were in disorder and laden with plunder Aratos fell upon them; his own account is that he defeated them completely with a loss of 700 men. Anyhow they went home again, and Aratos, justified of the event, absolutely regained his position with the League. What the ruined people of Pellene thought on the subject is naturally not recorded.

This is all that is really known of the war, though it may have led directly to further Aetolian inroads into the Peloponnese. One of Aetolia’s ambitions was to control the west of the peninsula, and she had to retaliate on Sparta for her interference ; beside her relationship to Elis, she had already acquired influence in Phigaleia and Messene, which were on terms of friendship with her, and a little later she is found unsuccessfully invading Laconia, with a view to restore the Spartans exiled in the troubles that led to the death of Agis. But this expedition, which cannot fall in Agis’ lifetime, almost certainly did not take place till after the accession of Demetrios II to the throne of Macedonia; and it had no connexion with the alliance between Aetolia and Macedonia at all. Antigonus’ story is in no way concerned with the obscure subject of the Aetolian movements in the Peloponnese.

The winter of 241/40 saw peace, which included Antigonus and the Aetolians on one side, and the Achaean League and its allies on the other; the event showed that it embraced also the towns subject to or friendly to Antigonus, such as Athens and Argos. It had in fact the effect of a general truce throughout the Greek world. Aratos, nevertheless, used the early months of 240, when he was still general, in an attempt on Argos; he had already tried in vain to assassinate Aristomachos, and after the death of the latter at the hands of his slaves he now made a similar attempt on his successor Aristippos, accompanying it by an attack on Argos which failed. Aristippos made his complaint to the Achaean government of this attack in time of peace, presumably after Aratos went out of office, and the Achaeans acted rightly in submitting to arbitration; the arbitrators, the citizens of Mantineia, fined them thirty talents. Naturally this did not satisfy Aristippos, who tried in turn to assassinate Aratos, or so Aratos said; the story of the latter, that Antigonus was privy to the attempt, is at best an unfounded suspicion, and at worst a kind of moral murder. It was probably, too, at the end of this generalship, which he did not vacate till the end of May, that Aratos made that celebrated attack on Athens in time of peace which brought such obloquy upon the Achaean name. He laid the blame of it on a mistake made by Erginos; but no one believed him. For the president of a model power, Aratos was doing very well : he was in a fair way to put even a decent pirate to the blush.

The peace showed that Antigonus had accepted the situation. When his first wrath was over, he must have seen that, provided he could not retake Corinth, any other course was out of the question. This seems to be the best explanation of this abortive war, in which such fighting as was done was left entirely to the Aetolians. His age, of course, may have counted for something; he may, for all we know, have been at sea, watching the Egyptian fleet. But the truest reason of his inactivity, whether he was at sea or not, may well have been this, that he knew the war to be useless. His resources, by land and sea, were ample to have enabled him to crush Aratos and the youthful Achaean League, had he so desired; but that would not have given him Corinth. The siege of Corinth would be a long and difficult business; who could tell to what new complications and wars it might lead, and what damage might be inflicted upon Macedonia? He may already have been distrustful of Aetolia; that power may have considered herself insufficiently supported in the campaign of 241, in addition to her former grievance, and it is known that very soon after Antigonus died, she joined the Achaeans and attacked his successor. Mere revenge could not help him; to conquer Achaea without Corinth was useless, as useless as he had always known conquest in the Peloponnese to be. It is true that the actual defections following upon the taking of Corinth had so far not been very serious; Argos and Megalopolis were still in the hands of his friends; but Antigonus realized perfectly that without Corinth his Peloponnesian system must fall to pieces. He was beaten; and he knew it. Had he been younger, he might have faced Aratos and begun again; but what had beaten him was, not Aratos, but an idea; against this he could not fight. Hence he made peace.

It was the end of Antigonus’ system in Greece, the system that reposed upon the support of tyrants. Argos and Megalopolis were now absolutely isolated; and what would happen was merely a question of time. Demetrios II made the best struggle he could; but in the course of a few years the tyrants of both cities were to abdicate voluntarily and to become instead the elected generals of the Achaean League; any of the smaller cities of Arcadia and the Argolid that had not already done so were to come in; and with the loss of Athens—a loss that stands on a different footing, as Athens did not join the League—Macedonia at the beginning of Doson's reign was to hold nothing south of Thessaly save Euboea and the Cyclades, which she could cover with her fleet. It is a strange case of historical justice. As regards Macedonia, Antigonus had followed throughout a sound and just idea of government; and all that he did for Macedonia prospered. But in the Peloponnese, though he found himself there from necessity rather than from choice, he had employed an unjustifiable system; he lived long enough to see it collapse.

That collapse was brought about by the new spirit of which Aratos was the embodiment. Whether it should be called the spirit of liberty or of republicanism may be doubted; possibly the one passed into the other. It looks indeed as if Aratos, beginning with the quest for liberty, went on to aim at the extension of the power and influence of the League, and ended, soon enough, by aiming at the extension of the power and influence of Aratos. But whatever the case, and whatever enthusiasm the Achaean League may arouse in students of constitutional history, its possibilities of usefulness in the history of Greece were severely conditioned and limited from the first. It never had any chance of revivifying Greece as a whole; it had not the driving force even to withstand Cleomenes. It did good, of course, as every League did, by withdrawing from a number of individual cities the right to make war on and ruin each its neighbour at pleasure; but a great number of leagues in Greece had already done this with success. The truth is that, whatever the conditions that brought about the union of four Achaean towns in 280, the greater League fashioned by Aratos originated in a reaction against Macedonia, and never really got beyond that limitation. It never had the least chance of carrying out by itself its programme of the unification of the Peloponnese; for, apart from the uncompromising hostility of Sparta, Elis and Messene resolutely refused to join until forced in by Rome. The only peoples in the Peloponnese that came heartily into the League, or that even cared to be members, were the peoples who had been under the rule of Demetrios the Besieger, the peoples among whom Antigonus Gonatas had maintained his garrisons or erected his system. Achaea, Megalopolis and part of Arcadia, Argos and the Argolid, Corinth, Megara—these were the lands in which the Macedonian had for generations sought a counterpoise to Sparta, and these were the League. Even in Arkadia, Sparta’s traditional friend Mantineia was a terrible thorn in the League’s side. The League in fact was a bit of the Macedonian empire broken off and fitted with a new constitution. The reason of its existence as a part of that empire had been to act as a counterpoise to Sparta; and this remained its function.

The League in fact prevented the unification of the Peloponnese; Cleomenes could and would have actually carried out this dream of centuries, had not Aratos first refused his overtures for union and afterwards called in Antigonus Doson to check the great Spartan king. Much as we may blame Aratos, it is to be clearly borne in mind that his action was but the expression of a political necessity which had lain deep in the nature of things for nearly a century; Aratos in this merely acted as a personification of those deep-seated natural forces which compelled certain states of the Peloponnese into union with whatever ruler was strong in the North, were he Epaminondas or Demetrios, Gonatas or Doson. This aspect of the Achaean League has hardly received sufficient attention.

And it is just this aspect of the Achaean League which demonstrates the historical falsity of the view that the aim of Macedonia should have been to become ‘the chosen head of a body of free and willing Greek confederates’. The curse of Greece went too deep; the thing was utterly impossible. Nothing but overwhelming force applied from without could ever fuse those jarring atoms that composed Hellas, or quench their eternal longings for the old particularist liberty; and that force Macedonia never possessed. To attempt a general federation was a mere waste of time and energy. Demetrios had dreamt of it; and all men knew the result. Antigonus Doson was to attempt it, at his back the stronger Macedonia which Gonatas had fashioned, his front free from the hostility of the great sea-power which Gonatas had broken ; and after a momentary semblance of success—a semblance only, for Aetolia was hostile, and Sparta was compelled—his work, too, fell to pieces. Antigonus Gonatas made no such attempt; for he had seen and understood his father’s failure. He understood, or so it seems, that between the Macedonian and the non­Macedonian sections of Hellas the political position was and must be a stalemate. Even in the realm of immaterial things neither side could prevail. If science and the arts, and even history, were electing to flourish in the new kingdoms, the noblest and the least noble of all the intellectual manifestations of the Greek race still clung in pathetic devotion to the old form of the free city ; and if the Roman Empire was the lineal successor of the Hellenistic kings, the free cities could claim that it was from their last great exemplar, Rhodes, that philosophy and rhetoric passed to the conqueror of the world. We can say, if we please, that Antigonus Gonatas was not a man of great ideas; he would probably have put it, that he was not a man of impossible ideals. He was in truth a man of one fixed idea, the good of his own land and kingdom of Macedonia as he understood it. This was an idea which he thought he could translate into practice; and with what strength and tenacity of purpose he did in fact translate it into practice, this book has attempted to show.

The general truce which in the winter of 241/40 had ended for the time all struggles in Hellas did not stand alone. The year 240 saw one of those strange episodes, which did occasionally occur, of entire peacefulness throughout the civilized Mediterranean world. The war in Syria was over, and peace had been made between Ptolemy and Seleucus. The war in Asia between Seleucus and his brother had not yet broken out. Rome and Carthage had ended the first round of their tremendous struggle; and Carthage had yielded up Sicily and the sea, leaving to Hamilcar the vision of calling up out of the far west a new world to redress the balance of the old. In this momentary cessation of the clash of arms, sometime in the year 240/39, Antigonus died, eighty years of age. Much of his life had been spent fighting; a fresh outbreak of bloodshed was to follow quickly upon the accession of his son. But most of his wars had been forced upon him by others; for war in itself he had no love. Rather, it can be truly said of him that he had sought peace for the kingdom of which he was the second founder; and it was most fitting that in peace he should die.

ANTIGONUS GONATAS