Antipater

Antipater was a senior Macedonian general and statesman who served Philip II and Alexander the Great. While Alexander campaigned in Asia, Antipater governed Macedonia and Greece, suppressing revolts and maintaining Macedonian authority.

After Alexander’s death he defeated the Greek coalition in the Lamian War and became regent of the empire in 321 BC. His death in 319, and his decision to favour Polyperchon over his son Cassander, intensified the wars of the successors. Antipater was born in Paliura and died in Macedonia.

Diodorus Siculus’s The Library, Books 16-20 records Antipater as Macedon’s senior authority during Alexander’s absence and then as one of the central actors in the Lamian War and the first struggles among the Successors. Mary Renault’s Funeral Games dramatises his place in the collapse of Alexander’s household, with Antipater, Cassander, Olympias and rival generals manoeuvring around an empire without an effective king. Harry Sidebottom’s The Shadow King uses the same successor world for fiction, while Quintus Curtius Rufus’s The History of Alexander supplies the earlier narrative of the monarchy in which Antipater first exercised power.