Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/399

 DEATH OF EUMENES. 367 arable famine to surrender. Kassander promised her nothing more than personal safety, requiring from her the surrender of the two great fortresses, Fella and Amphipolis, which made him master of Macedonia. Presently however, the relatives of those numerous victims, who had perished by order of Olympias, were encouraged by Kassander to demand her life in retribution. They found little difficulty in obtaining a verdict of condemna- tion against her from what was called a Macedonian assembly. Nevertheless, such was the sentiment of awe and reverence con- nected with her name, that no one except these injured men themselves could be found to execute the sentence. She died with a courage worthy of her rank and domineering character. Kassander took Thessalonike to wife — confined Roxana with the child Alexander in the fortress of Amphipolis — where (after a certain interval) he caused both of them to be slain.^ While Kassander was thus master of Macedonia — and while the imperial family were disappearing from the scene in that country — the defeat and death of Eumenes (which happened nearly at the same time as the capture of Olympias") removed the last faitliful partisan of that family in Asia. But at the same time, it left in the hands of Antigonus such overwhelming preponderance tliroughout Asia, that he aspired to become vicar and master of the entire Alexandrine empire, as well as to avenge upon Kassander the extirpation of the regal family. His power appeared indeed so formidable, that Kassander of Macedonia, Lysimachus of Thrace, Ptolemy of Egypt, and Se- leukus of Babylonia, entered into a convention, which gradually ripened into an active alliance, against him., During the struggles between these powerful princes, Greece appears simply as a group of subject cities, held, garrisoned, grasped at, or coveted, by all of them. Polysperchon, abandon- ing all hopes in Macedonia after the death of Olympias, had been forced to take refuge among the -^tolians, leaving his son Alex- ander to make the best struggle that he could in Peloponnesus ; 1 Diodor. xix. 50, 51 ; Justin, xiv. 5 : Pausan. i. 25, 5 ; ix. 7, 1. of Amphipolis in her interest, considered Eumenes to he still alive (Diodor xix. 50).
 * Even immediately before the death of Olympias, Aristonous, governor