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Updated: May 28, 2025
Those who practise the first system are able, by aid of God or man, to mitigate in some degree their rule, as Agathocles did. It is impossible for those who follow the other to maintain themselves.
Ptolemy Ceraunus quitted Egypt in disgust, and fled to the court of Lysimachus; and Arsinoe, the wife of Lysimachus, jealous of her stepson Agathocles, the heir apparent to the throne, and desirous of securing the succession for her own children, conspired with Ptolemy Ceraunus against the life of Agathocles.
It was a time for action, not thought, yet even at the moment Drusus's schoolboy Polybius was running through his mind the description of the great riot when Agathocles, the wicked regent of Ptolemæus Philopator, and his sister Agathocleia, and his mother Oenanthe, had been seized by the multitude and torn in pieces, bit by bit, while yet they lived.
His fate, however, was still more striking as an illustration of the manner in which the old age of ambitious and unprincipled men is often embittered by the ingratitude and wickedness of their children. Agathocles had a grandson named Archagathus, who, if all the accounts are true, brought the old king's gray hairs in sorrow to the grave.
The story is well known in Ionia. This Agathocles was a native of Samos, and lived not many years ago. Though his conduct showed him to be the best of friends, he was of no better family and in no better circumstances than the generality of the Samians. From boyhood he had been the friend of Dinias, the son of Lyson, an Ephesian.
Cineas completed and closed the arrangements for this purpose, and then sent messengers to various other cities on the northern side of the island, making known to them the design which had been formed of raising an heir of King Agathocles to the throne, and asking their co-operation in it.
On both sides armies of mercenaries were employed to fight their battles by Timoleon and Agathocles, as well as by the Phoenician generals. And as like means were employed on both sides, so the conflict had been waged on both with a disregard of honour and a perfidy unexampled in the history of the west. The Syracusans were the weaker party.
Pyrrhus felt how matters stood: weary of his victories and despising his allies, he only persevered because military honour required him not to leave Italy till he should have secured his clients from barbarian assault. Relations of Sicily, Syracuse, and Carthage Pyrrhus Invited to Syracuse After the death of Agathocles the Greeks of Sicily were without any leading power.
Seleucus, indeed, had already, by Apama the Persian, a son named Antiochus, but he was possessed of territories that might well satisfy more than one successor, and he was the rather induced to this alliance with Demetrius, because Lysimachus had just married himself to one daughter of king Ptolemy, and his son Agathocles to another.
He was in no hurry to undertake a war in which he might expect more blows than booty, but preferred to make common cause with the Lucanians against Metapontum, and made himself comfortable in that city, while he talked of an expedition against Agathocles of Syracuse and of liberating the Sicilian Greeks.
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