Antigonid dynasty

The Antigonids were a Macedonian royal family descended from Antigonus I, nicknamed Monophthalmus, "the One-eyed", one of the generals who fought over the empire of Alexander the Great. Antigonus first built a vast realm stretching from the Aegean into the Middle East; after his death his descendants made Macedon and much of mainland Greece their kingdom, ruling there from 294 BCE, with interruptions, until Rome destroyed the dynasty in 168 BCE.

After Alexander died in 323 BCE, his commanders fought a long series of conflicts, the Wars of the Diadochi. Antigonus emerged as the strongest of them in Asia. In 307 BCE his son Demetrius, later called Poliorcetes, "the Besieger", drove Cassander's governor out of Athens, and the next year he defeated Ptolemy at Salamis and took Cyprus. Antigonus then took the title of king, ruling from the Aegean to Syria, where he founded a capital, Antigoneia.

His ambition to reunite Alexander's empire united his rivals. Cassander, Ptolemy, Seleucus and Lysimachus joined forces and defeated him at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE, where Antigonus was killed and his lands in Asia were divided. Demetrius escaped and, exploiting quarrels among Cassander's heirs, made himself king of Macedon in 294 BCE. His grand preparations for further conquest, including a fleet of hundreds of ships, alarmed his neighbours, and in 288 to 287 BCE Lysimachus and Pyrrhus of Epirus invaded and his army deserted him. He died a prisoner of Seleucus in 283 BCE.

Macedon then fell into chaos. Ptolemy Keraunos seized the throne but was killed in 279 BCE when Gauls under Brennus swept down from the north. Demetrius's son Antigonus II Gonatas won a decisive victory over a Gallic army near Lysimachia in 277 BCE, and by the end of 276 BCE held most of Macedon. He ruled until 239 BCE, governing the Greek cities through garrisons, notably at Corinth, and friendly local rulers rather than direct rule, while Ptolemaic Egypt encouraged Athens and Sparta to resist him.

When Demetrius II died in 229 BCE his son Philip was only nine, and the nobility chose a cousin, Antigonus III Doson, first as regent and then as king. Invited in by the Achaean League, he crushed Cleomenes III of Sparta at Sellasia in 222 BCE and gathered most Greek states into a new league under Macedonian leadership. His successor, Philip V, allied with Hannibal during the Second Punic War, which brought on the First Macedonian War with Rome, ended indecisively in 205 BCE. A second war went badly: the Roman consul Flamininus defeated Philip at Cynoscephalae in 197 BCE, and Philip had to give up his conquests in Greece.

Philip's son Perseus, king from 179 BCE, tried to rebuild Macedonian influence. Rome declared war in 172 BCE, and in 168 BCE its legions shattered the Macedonian phalanx at the Battle of Pydna. The monarchy was abolished and the kingdom split into four client republics. A pretender, Andriscus, claiming to be Perseus's son, led a final revolt from 150 to 148 BCE, after which Macedon became a Roman province under the Roman Republic.

Shown on our maps as the Kingdom of Antigonus, it appears only on the 300 BCE map, beside the Seleucid Empire and the Ptolemaic Kingdom. The name recalls the realm of Antigonus I, whose Asian lands were in fact divided after Ipsus in 301 BCE, a year before the map's date.