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.
