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 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.)

The formidable task of holding together the empire falls to the son and successor of Seleucus on his father's assassination in 281 BCE.

Antiochus entombs his father's ashes in Seleucia, initiates (probably) the posthumous cult of his father, and orders his veneration as Zeus Nicator.

He is soon compelled to make peace with his father's murderer, Ptolemy Keraunos, apparently abandoning Macedonia and Thrace.

In Anatolia he is unable to reduce Bithynia or the Persian dynasties that rule in Cappadocia.

Antiochus is immediately beset by revolts in Syria (probably instigated by Egypt) and by independence movements in …

…northern Anatolia, whose states (led by Heraclea, …

…Bithynia, and …

…Pontus), form a league against the Seleucid king.

Pontus, with its capital at Amaseia (modern Amasya) established at the end of the fourth century in the wake of Alexander's conquests, is superficially Hellenized, but the kingdom retains its Persian social structure, with temple priests and Persianized feudal nobles ruling over a heterogeneous village population.

Seleucus, seeing an opportunity to intervene for his own gain in the politics of both Lysimachan Thrace and Ptolemaic Egypt, prepares an expedition against Lysimachus, personally leading an army from Syria.

The two armies meet in 281 at Corupedium, near Sardis, in Lydia.

Almost nothing is known about the battle itself save that Seleucus won.

According to Memnon of Heraclea's History of Heraclea Pontica, Lysimachus was killed by a javelin thrown by Malacon, a Heracleian soldier serving under Seleucus.

Seleucus’ army routs the Macedonian forces.

With the death of Lysimachus and the capture of Thrace, his queen flees to Macedonia.