The last period of Lysimachus' life is darkened by the intrigues of Arsinoe, his third wife and the daughter of Ptolemy I. Lysimachus had renamed Ephesus after her and given her three cities on the Black Sea, as well as Cassandreia, a city in northern Greece.

She strives to secure the succession of the Thracian kingdom for the eldest of her three sons by accusing the heir apparent, Agathocles, the king's eldest son by an earlier marriage, of conspiring with Seleucus to commit treason.

Agathocles is popular among his subjects, but his stepmother has prejudiced the mind of his father against him and after an unsuccessful attempt to poison him, the old and suspicious king orders him executed and casts him into prison, where he is murdered.

Ptolemy Keraunos sides with his other sister (from the same mother) Lyssandra, who was Agathocles' wife, and accompanies her to the court of Seleucus in the East to solicit his aid.

Alexandria has profited from the demise of Phoenician power after Alexander’s sack of Tyre in 332 and from Europe's growing trade with the East via the Nile and the canal that currently links it with the Red Sea.

The details of Ptolemy's participation in the economic exploitation of Egypt cannot be determined because of the lack of firsthand information.

It is certain, however, that discrimination against the Egyptians takes place during his reign.

Ptolemais in Upper Egypt is the only town he founds.

He probably places Macedonian military commanders alongside the Egyptian provincial administrators and intervenes unobtrusively in legal and financial affairs.

In order to regulate the latter, he has introduced coinage, which until this time has been unknown in Egypt.

Ptolemy has also founded the Museum (Mouseion), a common workplace for scholars and artists, and established the famous library at Alexandria.

Besides being a patron of the arts and sciences, he is a writer himself.

Ptolemy in the last few years of his life writes a history, thought to be generally reliable, of Alexander's campaigns. (Although it is now lost, it can be largely reconstructed through the extensive use made of it later by the historian Arrian.)

Pyrrhus is back in his Hellenistic kingdom of Epirus, having been driven from Macedonia in 284 by Lysimachus.

Ptolemy I Soter, a shrewd and cautious ruler, has emerged at the end of forty years of war with a compact and well-ordered realm.

The Ptolemaic kingdom is ethnically diverse.

During this initial period of Macedonian rule, Greek troops under Ptolemy have been given land grants and brought their families, encouraging tens of thousands of Greeks to settle the country making themselves the new ruling class.

These early Greek settlers have done little to hide their disdain for the Egyptian population that surrounds them, people they think to be barbaric.

Ptolemy is eighty-four in the winter of 283/282, when he dies in bed, the only one of Alexander's successors to do so.

He leaves a history of Alexander's campaigns that has not survived—it is to be a principal source for the surviving account by Arrian of Nicomedia.

Ptolemy's provision for the Egyptian succession, which is based on examples from the time of the pharaohs, makes possible a peaceful transition.

Certain classes of people had proclaimed Ptolemy a deity several times during his life, and after his death, all the Egyptians raise him to the level of a god.

Ptolemy II Philadelphus, now sole ruler of Egypt, purges his family of possible rivals.

Arsinoe, daughter of King Lysimachus of Thrace, is married in about 282 to Ptolemy as part of the alliance between Thrace and Egypt against Syria.

The citizens of Rhodes, between 294 BCE and 282 BCE, erect the famous Colossus, a bronze statue rising to some one hundred feet (thirty meters) or higher that is dedicated to the sun god Helios, in commemoration of their successful resistance to the determined siege by Demetrius Poliorcetes in 305 BCE.

Although many stories exaggerate the size of the statue, it must be approximately one hundred and twenty feet (thirty-six meters) high on a base of white marble twenty to twenty-five feet (six to seven and a half maters meters) high and thus larger than any other statue.

Reinforced with stone and iron, the Colossus stands beside, not over, the harbor.

The Mamertini (Mamertines), the body of Campanian mercenaries who had been employed by Agathocles and now, having seized the stronghold of Messana, dominate northeastern Sicily.

In 282, the aid Phintias of Agrigento, who had founded a city next to the modern Licata, in ruthlessly destroying destroyed Gela to crush its power forever.

The city subsequently disappears from the chronicles.

Phintias founds the city of Licata on the site of archaic settlements on the right bank of the Salso in 282 BCE, who named it for himself, razing the city of Gela and resettling its population at his new settlement.

Phintias lays it out on a great scale, with its walls, temples, and agora.

As late as the first century BCE, inscriptions and coins show that the inhabitants retained the name Geloi.

…Byzantium, and …

The victory at Corupedium has given Seleucus, the last of the diadochi, nominal control over nearly every part of Alexander's empire, save the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, but his victory is short-lived.

After crossing the Hellespont to take possession of Lysimachus' European possessions not long after the battle, Seleucus is assassinated at the end of August or beginning of September by Ptolemy Keraunos, the Thunderbolt, who has the support of Lysimachus' army.

Macedon swiftly becomes independent once again.

It is typical of the times that these two former companions and former allies should, as old men in their seventies, end up fighting each other to the death.

(The generation of the Diadochi—Antigonus, Antipater, Demetrius Poliorcetes, Lysimachus, Perdikkas, Ptolemy, and Seleukos—is taken to end with Seleucus' death.)