ALEXANDER THE GREAT'S LEGACY: The Decline of Macedonian Europe in the Wake of the Wars of the Successors

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Explores how both the unique character and the particular legacy left when Alexander died at age of 32 in Babylon in 323BC, 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 200 years of Persian primacy, only 50 or so years of strife and trauma ending in a Galatian invasion. 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.

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 essentially 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?