Antipater and His Family: A Case Study

Antipater, previously a close collaborator of Philip II, was appointed by Alexander as governor of Macedonia. He had furious clashes with the king’s mother, Olympias, who had also been left in Macedonia, and did not relish the process of progressive orientalising of the court brought about by Alexander in order to potentially integrate the Macedonian winners with the defeated Persians. After Alexander’s death, Antipater, who had fathered many sons and daughters, mostly used his daughters Phila, Nicaea and Eurydice to foster matrimonial ties with the main protagonists of the age of the Successors: Phila became the wife of Demetrius Poliorcetes, Nicaea the wife of Lysimachus, and Eurydice the wife of Ptolemy. This paper highlights the importance of these ties insofar as they marked and sealed fruitful political-military alliances in the aristocratic and archaic Macedonian society of the second half of the 4th century BC. All these marriages profoundly marked the fates of those who contracted them. Among Antipater’s grandsons, Agathocles, son of Nicaea and Lysimachus, was executed by order of his father, and Ptolemy Ceraunus, son of Eurydices and Ptolemy I, was repudiated by his father who favored Ptolemy II, his son by Berenice. Only Antigonus Gonatas, son of Phila and Demetrius Poliorcetes, did succeed in becoming king, merging two dynasties which had been mutually hostile for several years. In practical and legal terms, he was the sole heir of the Antigonids and the Antipatrids but, as is common in patriarchal societies like the Macedonian one, the name that eventually survived over time was that of the Antigonids and not of the Antipatrids.