After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, war broke out among his remaining Macedonian generals, referred to as the Diadochi, to determine the successor to the empire (Waterfield, 2011). The conflict spanned the years of 322 to 281 BCE, consisting of four wars fought between different contenders to the throne, each aiming to lay claim to more land than they were given in the partition of Babylon. One such general was Antigonus I Monophthalmus, who had notable success in the Third Diadoch War, commanding an army of his own soldiers and of mercenaries, many of whom came from Greece to fight under Antigonus’ command (Billows, 1997). Mercenaries, often paid to bolster an army during times of warfare, are known to be individualistic opportunists …show more content…
For him to have been this renowned after the war, it would not be a stretch to assume that the majority of the Greeks in Antigonus’ army were at least biased towards Antigonus’ war efforts in the Third Diadoch War, if not loyal to him, and that this could be extended to his Greek mercenaries. Under the belief that a pirate is an individual who raids and thieves violently by sea frequency, valuing individuality and having no bias towards rulers, the Greek mercenaries serving Antigonus during the Third Diadoch War could not have been considered pirates. While they certainly may have performed acts of violence and theft befitting a pirate, they had been performed majorly under the command of Antigonus for the sake of his campaign to succeed Alexander as