He was disinherited from the Egyptian throne, organized an expedition to overthrow his brother-in-law in Thrace, murdered the ally who helped him, married his own stepsister, killed her children, briefly ruled in Macedonia, and ultimately lost his life because, in his reckless impetuosity, he did not wait for reinforcements in his last battle, ending with his head displayed on a pike. Thus can be summarized the crazy existence of Ptolemy Ceraunus, son of the founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty who, among other things, has gone down in history for having been the one who ended the last general of Alexander the Great.
He must have been born between the years 279 and 281 B.C. It was in Alexandria (or perhaps in Memphis), as he was the firstborn of the Pharaoh of Egypt, Ptolemy I Soter (Alexander’s general), who had him with his second wife, Eurydice (the first had been Artakama, granddaughter of the Persian king Artaxerxes II). Eurydice was the daughter of another diadoch, Antipater (regent of Macedonia and Greece during Alexander’s expedition), and she gave her husband three other children: Meleager (who would take the throne in Macedonia after his brother, though only for two months because the army deposed him), Ptolemais (who married Demetrius I of Macedonia), and Lysandra (who first married Alexander V and then Agathocles).
As the eldest, the succession initially fell to Ptolemy Ceraunus. But things turned out differently because his mother’s repudiation led his father to remarry in 317 B.C., and his new wife, Berenice, a cousin and lady-in-waiting of the former, bore her own children: two girls, Arsinoe II and Philotera, and a boy, Ptolemy II. The first would marry Lysimachus, king of Thrace, while the other never married, probably due to some physical defect, perhaps why her brother established a cult to her when he came to power.

Because, as expected, Berenice did everything she could to ensure that one of her children succeeded Egypt’s leadership, and she succeeded. Despite being the firstborn, Ptolemy Ceraunus was ultimately passed over for his half-brother Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who had already been associated with the throne by his father in 285 B.C. and three years later, upon his father’s death, became the sole Pharaoh. Seeing himself in danger, Ptolemy Ceraunus left the country and settled in Thrace, taken in by his stepsister Arsinoe II.
Her husband, Lysimachus, had repudiated his previous wife, the Persian Amastris, niece of Darius III, to marry her for strategic reasons (an alliance with Egypt). But he was almost an old man, and though the previous marriage lasted little, barely a couple of years, it was enough time for a daughter to be born who would become Ptolemy Ceraunus’s first wife. He also had a son, according to one version with a common woman and according to another with Nicaea, the daughter of Antipater of Macedonia. His name was Agathocles and he was very popular.
Seeking the interest of her own descendants, Arsinoe II intrigued as much as she could against Agathocles. First, she tried to poison him and, upon failing, convinced her husband that he was involved in a conspiracy against him. Agathocles was arrested and imprisoned in a dungeon, where he was ultimately murdered in 282 B.C. According to Memnon of Heraclea, by Ptolemy Ceraunus, who was in league with his stepsister; according to other sources, it was not him, as he supported Agathocles because he was married to his blood sister Lysandra.

Regardless, Arsinoe II’s plan would not go as well as she thought because the widow, who had a tense relationship with her due to the succession issue, felt threatened and fled the Thracian court with her children, aided by her brother-in-law Alexander. She found refuge at the court of Seleucus I Nicator, king of Babylon and Syria, who, seeing the popular displeasure generated by that crime, saw an opportunity to intervene and conquer Thrace. And indeed, in 281 B.C., he faced Lysimachus in the Battle of Corupedium, defeating him.
Since the Thracian monarch died in combat and many cities, unhappy with Lysimachus, opened their gates to the invader (including Pergamon, where Philetaerus took control in a daring coup, as we saw in another article), Seleucus annexed the kingdom to his empire and prepared to continue the campaign towards Macedonia, which also formed part of the domains of the deceased Lysimachus and where the old general aspired to be buried, given his advanced age.
He could not wait for a natural death; while in Argos preparing his attack plan, he was assassinated by Ptolemy Ceraunus, whom he had pardoned as a courtesy to his father, his old companion Ptolemy I. With Seleucus died the last remaining successor who had originally divided the empire of Alexander the Great. Ceraunus, who had incited the army for his regicide, escaped to Lysimachia (the northwest extremity of the Thracian Chersonese) and managed to convince the troops to accept him as king, probably thanks to the fact that they were Thracian soldiers, who thus could return to their homes.

Now that he had a kingdom, he no longer needed the Egyptian, whose rights he formally renounced. But he had to defend the new one from foreign greed, which, taking advantage of the chaos, soon incarnated in Antigonus II Gonatas, whose father, Demetrius I Poliorcetes, had reigned in Macedonia between 294 and 288 BC. Ceraunus sailed from Heraclea Pontica with a fleet that forced Antigonus to retreat to Boeotia, ultimately confining him to Demetrias (Thessaly). The first threat was averted, but more would soon come.
One of them was led by Antiochus, the son of Seleucus, who also got burnt. Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, posed more difficulty; between 288 and 284 BC, he had seized the western part of Macedonia and had a formidable force with which he aspired to conquer the Italian peninsula, wresting it from the Roman Republic. Aware of these plans, Ceraunus signed a peace treaty with him, sealed by marrying one of his daughters to Pyrrhus and providing five thousand infantry, four thousand cavalry, and fifty elephants for two years.
Not all historians agree with this, as there are no records of the daughter in question, nor do they find it credible that Ceraunus could part with so many troops. However, it is also possible that he did not consider them trustworthy and preferred to have them far away, or they constituted the core of Lysimachus’s veterans, whose salaries were excessively burdensome for the state of the treasury at that time. If so, Ceraunus solved two problems at once and could focus his attention inward.

To that end, he married his half-sister Arsinoe II, who, during the Seleucid invasion, had managed to flee to Ephesus with her children and was then expelled, ending up in Cassandreia (Macedonia). As a condition for the marriage, she only demanded guarantees for the safety of her offspring, something Ceraunus agreed to with a solemn oath. He lied because a few weeks after the wedding, while visiting Cassandreia at his new wife’s invitation, he murdered the two youngest children in front of her while his soldiers seized the city, his real objective.
It is speculated that, with such cruelty, Ceraunus intended to avenge Agathocles or the loss of the Egyptian succession, since, let us remember, Arsinoe II was the daughter of Berenice and sister of Ptolemy II. The fact is that she, terrified, escaped to Egypt via Samothrace and was sheltered by her brother. They married sometime between 275 and 272 BC, following the pharaonic tradition. Although they had no offspring, they were happy, and indeed, the nickname Philadelphus, which both carried thereafter, means “he/she who loves his/her brother/sister”.
Meanwhile, Ceraunus continued his convoluted reign facing a new danger: a son of Lysimachus, probably Ptolemy Epigonus, Lysimachus’s eldest son with Arsinoe, marched against him claiming his crown, supported by the Illyrian king Monunius, in whose court he had taken refuge after his father’s death. The war lasted almost all of 280 BC, and at its end, Ceraunus was still king of Thrace and Macedonia. It seemed he had managed to save another delicate situation, but…

That conflict caused a diversion of forces that prompted the Gauls (or Galatians, Celtic peoples) to undertake the so-called Great Expedition against Macedonia in 279 BC. Led by chieftains Bolgios, Brennos, and Kerethrios, and coming from Pannonia, they entered the Macedonian kingdom from the north and proposed to negotiate a tribute in exchange for halting the campaign. According to Justin, Ptolemy Ceraunus lived up to his nickname (Ceraunus means “thunderbolt” and alludes to his temperamental character) and not only rejected the proposal in an undiplomatic manner but also demanded the barbarians lay down their arms and leave hostages. In other words, he chose the warpath.
Convinced of his superiority, he marched to meet the enemy without waiting for the bulk of his troops and even rejected the help of twenty thousand men offered by the Dardanians, who feared they would be the next target if the invaders were not stopped. Ceraunus fell victim to his arrogance: the Galatians defeated him disastrously, and he himself was wounded, being captured on the battlefield. They decapitated him on the spot and paraded his head impaled on a pike. They then continued to occupy Greece and, after suffering a setback in Delphi, moved on to Asia Minor.
Ceraunus was succeeded on the throne by his younger brother, Meleager, who reigned for no more than two months because the army deposed him for being deemed incapable. This led to a chaotic period of two years, during which Antipater Etesias and the general Sosthenes briefly succeeded each other, until Antigonus II Gonatas, the one whom the Macedonian fleet had thwarted years earlier, managed to stop the Gauls and was recognized as sovereign of Macedonia and all Greece, just as his father had been.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on July 9, 2024: La frenética vida de Ptolomeo Cerauno, el hombre que acabó con el último sucesor de Alejandro Magno
SOURCES
Justino, Epítome de las “historias filípicas” de Pompeyo Trogos
Plutarco, Vidas paralelas: Pirro
Diodoro de Sicilia, Biblioteca histórica
Paul Goukowsky, Claude Mossé y Édouard Will , El mundo griego y el Oriente II
Elizabeth Donnelly Carney, Arsinoë of Egypt and Macedon. A royal life
Víctor Alonso Troncoso, La paideia de los primeros ptolomeos
Andrew Smith (trad.), Memnón de Heraclea. Historia de Heraclea
Livius.org, Ptolemy Keraunos
Wikipedia, Ptolomeo Cerauno
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