Judaean prince, the son of Herod the Great by his first wife. He conspired against his half-brothers and had them executed, then plotted against his father, and was himself executed five days before Herod died.
397 BC — 319 BC) was a Macedonian general and a supporter of kings Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great. In 320 BC, he became regent of all of Alexander's empire.Career under Philip and Alexander
Nothing is known of his early career until 342 BC, when he was appointed by Philip to govern Macedon as his regent while the former left the country for three years of hard and successful campaigning against Thracian and Scythians tribes, which extended the limits of Macedonian rule as far as the Hellespont. In the autumn of the same year Antipater was at Delphi, as representative of Philip in the Amphictyonic League, a religious organization in which Macedon had been admitted just in 346 BC.
After the triumphal Macedonian victory at Chaeronea in 338 BC, Antipater was sent as ambassador to Athens (337–336 BC) with the finality of negotiating a peace treaty and bringing home the bones of the Athenians who had fallen in the battle.
He started as a great friend to both the young Alexander and the boy's mother, Olympias; He aided Alexander in the struggle to secure his succession after Philip's death, in 336 BC.
He joined Parmenion in the ineffectual advice to Alexander the Great not to set out on his Asiatic expedition till he had provided by marriage for the succession to the throne; and, on the king's departure, 334 BC, he was left regent in Macedonia and made "general (strategos) of Europe", positions he was to full till 323 BC. Even if he did not participate to the great campaign, even the European front was to prove initially quite agitated, and Antipater did also have the duty to send reinforcements to the king, as he did while the king was at Gordium in the winter of 334–333 BC.
The Persian fleet under Memnon and Pharnabazus was apparently a considerable danger for Antipater, bringing war in the Aegean sea and threatening to bring war in Europe. Luckily for the regent, Memnon died while intent in the siege of Mytilene in the isle of Lesbos and the remaining fleet disintegrated in 333 BC, after Alexander's victory at Issus.
The Spartans, who were not members of the League of Corinth and had not participated in Alexander's expedition, saw in the Asian campaign the long attended chance to resume control over the Peloponnese after the disastrous defeats of Leuctra and Mantinea.
So to not have two enemies contemporarily, Antipater pardoned Memnon and even let him keep his office in Thrace, while great sums of money were sent him by Alexander. the latter's answer was to treat the peace terms directly with the league of Corinth, but the Spartan emissaries preferred to treat directly with Alexander, who imposed on Sparta's allies a penalty of 120 talents and the entrance of Sparta in the league.
Alexander appears to have been quite jealous of Antipater's victory;
Antipater was disliked for supporting oligarchs and tyrants in Greece, but he also worked with the league of Corinth built by Philip. Whether, however, from jealousy or from the necessity of guarding against the evil consequences of the dissensions between Olympias and Antipater, the latter was ordered to lead into Asia the fresh troops required by the king, 324 BC, while Craterus, under whom the discharged veterans were sent home, was appointed to the regency in Macedon, but Antipater was able to forestall the transference of power when Alexander suddenly died in Babylon (323 BC).
The fight for succession
The new regent, Perdiccas, left Antipater in control of Greece.
Regent of the Empire
In the treaty of Triparadisus (321 BC) Antipater participated in a new division of Alexander's great kingdom. He appointed himself supreme regent of all Alexander's empire and was left in control of Greece as guardian of Alexander's son Alexander IV and brother Philip III. Having quelled a mutiny of his troops and commissioned Antigonus to continue the war against Eumenes and the other partisans of Perdiccas, Antipater returned to Macedonia, arriving there in 320 BC (Justin xiii.
Though the debate surrounding the cause of Alexander's sudden death has never been clearly resolved, all of our ancient sources—even those who reject the notion of murder and assign the death to natural causes—mention that rumours abounded in the late fourth century BC that Antipater had been responsible for poisoning the great king. Shortly before Alexander's demise, Antipater's position had recently come under threat, as Alexander's mother Olympias had been writing to her son that Antipater was fomenting unrest and disloyalty in Macedon.
User Comments Add a comment…