Lubricating Oils and Greases

Olympias took the royal court to Pydna, where she holed up with a considerable and loyal army. After Polyperchon’s fl ight, she could pin her hopes only on her generals, but they had problems of their own.

So, over the late autumn and winter of 317/316, Cassander besieged her forces in Pydna to the point of desertion and starvation, and Olym-pias was captured while trying to escape by ship. Pydna fell, and Cas-sander gained by force the right to be the protector and guardian of the young king. Aristonous held on to Amphipolis until ordered by Olympias to give up the unequal struggle, but both Olympias and he were promptly killed by Cassander, despite assurances of safety.

In Olympias’s case, Cassander felt the need to cover himself with a cloak of legality. He was no Argead, nor had he been a companion of

Alexander the Great, and he was uncertain of his standing among the Macedonian troops and barons, even though he could claim that he was killing the killer of the joint king of Macedon. So he got an army assembly to condemn her on the basis of a show trial, and, in order to make sure that no Macedonian loyal to the Argead line got cold feet, he had her put to death by relatives of those she had killed during her purge. ¹¹ She was not quite sixty years old, and had been at or close to the center of Macedonian affairs since, as a teenager, she had become the bride of Philip II. Though the six-year-old king was too young to know it, the execution of his grandmother savagely reduced the chances of his full succession. She had been his principal and most infl uential champion ever since his birth.

Cassander’s military skills had endeared him to the army, who always responded to a strong general, and over the next few years he continued to make war on his enemies in the Peloponnese and central Greece and to secure Macedon’s borders. He was also generous in awarding his supporters positions of responsibility, where they could hold power and enrich themselves. But above all he chose the usual way to legitimate his rule—by associating himself closely with the Argead line. In the fi rst place, he held elaborate state funerals for Philip III and Adea Eurydice, and even for Cynnane, six years dead.

Philip and his wife are the probable occupants of the incomparable Tomb 2 at Vergina; on the hunt fresco that dominates the tomb, Philip was portrayed not as an imbecile, but as a Macedonian hero. ¹² In the second place, he took as his wife a half sister of Alexander the Great called Thessalonice, who had been a member of Olympias’s entourage.

Cassander was now de facto regent, even though, with Polyperchon still alive, there were delicate questions of legitimacy to be ignored by everyone. But no doubt he already envisaged his sons by Thessalonice occupying the throne of Macedon. He treated Rhoxane and Alexander IV badly, keeping them for years under house arrest on the citadel of the merchant town of Amphipolis, without pandering to their royal status. He gave out that their isolation in Amphipolis was for their own safety.

There is a fi ne line between regency and full kingship, as Philip II had found to his advantage. And Cassander very soon began to act like a king, above all by founding three cities within a single year, 316, the fi rst full year of his reign. The two cities that were founded within Macedon—Cassandreia and Thessalonica—were Macedon’s fi rst major urban centers. Apart from Pella, the country was still almost

entirely rural; Cassander’s foundations represented a major step for-ward in Macedonian history.

Cassandreia was founded on the site of Potidaea, and incorporated other nearby villages, including the remnants of the once important town of Olynthus. Thessalonica, named to fl atter his Argead wife, was founded by the amalgamation and incorporation of twenty-six small towns and villages at the head of the Thermaic Gulf; as the glorious future history of the city shows—it became joint capital with Constan-tinople of the Byzantine empire—the site was well chosen. ¹³ These two ports hugely helped Cassander to develop a navy. He also refounded the Boeotian city of Thebes; he needed a bulwark of loyalty in central Greece against the unremitting hostility of the Aetolians.

As well as serving practical purposes, all three of these foundations or refoundations were symbolic. Philip II and Alexander the Great had been the fi rst to found cities in their own names and those of their family members. Cassander was implying that he was at least their equal—and even their superior: Philip had reduced Potidaea and destroyed Olynthus, and Alexander had razed Thebes to the ground.

Cassander now dared to undo these acts of his Argead predecessors.

Whether or not Alexander the Great had been right to judge that Anti-pater had regal pretensions, AntiAnti-pater’s son certainly did.

I

n the summer of 318, Antigonus, poised to invade Europe across the Hellespont, had chosen to leave Polyperchon to Cassander, while he set out instead to tackle Eumenes in Cilicia. Without a fl eet after Byzantium, Polyperchon and Eumenes were isolated from each other and could be dealt with separately. The strategy turned out to be sound. Only a little over a year later, in the winter of 317/316, Cassander had Olympias under siege in Pydna, and Polyperchon had abandoned Macedon. Meanwhile, three thousand kilometers (1,800 miles) farther east, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, Antigonus and Eumenes were poised for the third and fi nal battle in one of the great forgotten campaigns of world history. ¹

In Cilicia, Eumenes had spent the kings’ money well, to bring his forces up to strength. The word went out and mercenaries poured into the eastern Mediterranean ports, where his recruiters collected them. But Eumenes was still plagued by challenges to his leadership and felt he had to take steps to prove to Antigenes and the other Macedonian offi cers that he did not feel that he was their superior, despite the fact that Polyperchon had named him General of Asia. It was worth his while to appease them—he badly needed their Macedo-nian troops.

He came up with an extraordinary ruse. He claimed that in a dream he had seen Alexander the Great, dressed in his regal robes, giving orders to a council of senior commanders. Eumenes suggested, then, that he and the Macedonian offi cers should simulate this scene, and should meet, as such a council, before one of Alexander’s thrones, on which would be placed the dead king’s regalia. There was nothing very

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In document HANDBOOK OF FIRE AND EXPLOSION PROTECTION ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES - DENNIS P. NOLAN (página 90-93)