Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives, pairing Greek and Roman biographies of character, virtue, and vice. This page is Demetrius, the Greek he sets beside Mark Antony. The story belongs to the decades after Alexander the Great, across Greece, the Aegean, Macedonia, and the eastern kingdoms that cover what we now call Turkey, Syria, and neighbors.

Demetrius the Besieger, son of Antigonus and heir to a shard of Alexander’s empire, took cities with machines the size of temples and lost them as quickly. Athens called him a god; Rhodes kept him at arm’s length. At Ipsus his father was killed and the dream of one more universal kingdom broke apart. He won Macedonia and threw it away, married, drank, and fought in cycles, then lived caged at the court of Seleucus until idleness and wine ended him. Cities opened and shut for him like theatre doors: charm, siege-engines, and a ruin that starts as festival.