Are you a Ptolemy or an Antigonos?

When Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C.E. with no competent heir, his generals fought over the corpse -- both of Alexander and of Alexander's empire. A few -- Ptolemy song of Lagos being the most noteworthy -- took an office and settled for that and quietly went about their business. In Ptolemy's case, the office he took was, in effect, Viceroy of Egypt. He managed that well enough that his dynasty would rule Egypt for almost three hundred years.

Most of Alexander's other generals, including Antigonos One-Eyed, gambled on taking over the whole thing. The story of the twenty years after Alexander's death was everyone's struggle to hold off Antigonos; after he was killed, they spent another twenty years fighting each other. And their attempts to capture the whole Empire didn't work; in the end, there were three major Successor monarchies: the Ptolemies in Egypt; the Antigonids (descendents of Antigonos's grandson Antigonos Gonatas) in Macedonia and Greece, and the Seleucids in Asia and Syria and Babylon. There were a lot of smaller nations -- indeed, pieces kept declaring independence from the Big Three -- but those three empires were the Successor States, and it was they, far more than Alexander, who distributed Greek culture around the world. It was they who created the Hellenistic Age, and it was their politics that decided what did and did not happen in this era.

It was a chaotic period -- take, for example, the reign of Ptolemy VI, in the mid-second century B.C.E. He, like many of the Ptolemies, married his sister, Cleopatra II; they had a daughter, Cleopatra III. But Ptolemy VI's brother Ptolemy VIII (all male Ptolemies were named Ptolemy; you told them apart by their nicknames, such as Ptolemy Fatso, Ptolemy Chick-Pea, Ptolemy the Flute-Player -- and, yes, those are all real nicknames!) also wanted the throne, and got involved in a struggle with Ptolemy VI. That didn't work well for Ptolemy VIII -- until Ptolemy VI was killed in an unrelated fight with the Seleucids and Jews. Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra II both tried to take over; Ptolemy VIII won, took Cleopatra II as his wife -- and then murdered her so that he could marry her daughter Cleopatra III instead.

Fun folks, those later Ptolemies. Believe me, Cleopatra VII -- Julius Caesar's and Mark Antony's Cleopatra -- was a real improvement.

But you'd never know it from this book. It's intended to be short, so it couldn't cover everything -- but I can't help but wish the balance were otherwise. In a book that has just 134 pages of narrative (in the edition I have), did we really need to devote two dozen of them to life in the city of Priene, a place that has no historical significance at all? It's a chance to look at life in the Hellenistic era, but it's pretty definitely not representative. Or did we need to spend twenty pages on various travels around the boundaries of the Hellenistic states? Or another twenty mostly on Eratosthenes and Hellenistic philosophy and science?

Don't get me wrong. If this book were about six times as long, the section on Priene and all the rest would have been wonderful, and could have been made longer. Eratosthenes, too, was well worth the time spent on him, and could easily have been granted many more pages. But not at the expense of the history! Author Thonemann has been an Antigonos, and tried to cover everything, and so didn't really cover anything (except Priene). I was left wanting more -- but if I had come to this topic without knowing about Seleucids and Ptolemies and Antigonids, I'm quite sure this book would not have piqued my interest. If I can't have more, I'd rather have less -- I'd rather be a Ptolemy and have 134 pages of history rather than half that.

Others, of course, might prefer more archaeology or whatever. That's fair. But you won't find the depth in those areas, either. This is a decently-written, easy-to-understand book. But it just doesn't have enough content for the size of the topic it's taking on. Only an Antigonos could love it -- and only an Antigonos with a really short attention span. ( )