Antigonus I and Demetrius Poliorcetes had formed their political ambitions and ideas during the age of the _diadochi_, when the empire of Alexander stood in all its magnificence and promise as a golden prize for the able, courageous, and unscrupulous. They had aspired to rule as god-kings over a world in which men and cities rendered homage (proskynesis) to them, as they had rendered it to Alexander. They had viewed Greece and Macedon as alike desirable,[119] the common charm being that they were the mother of the soldiers and settlers of whom their limitless realm had need. They may have coveted Greece even more than Macedon. Certainly, Athens, not Pella, was the city of Demetrius's dreams. He had gloried in being its liberator in 307 B.C., and when it dashed his hopes by excluding him after his defeat at Ipsus, he had suffered bitter disappointment. None the less, and despite the desperate resistance which it had offered to him in 295-294 B.C., he treated it with clemency when he was once again its master. What his father had thought of the approval of Athens he expressed by calling it the beacon tower of the world. How highly he had esteemed the culture of its inhabitants he demonstrated by making a colony of Athenians the nucleus of Antigonia (later Antioch), which he founded as the new capital of the empire that had been Alexander's, but was now, he hoped, to be his. Antigonus I had never had the good fortune to rule in the land of his birth, but Demetrius Poliorcetes was its king for six years (294-288 B.C.).[120] As such he showed conclusively that he had no intention to reign there patriarchally, as Cassander and Antipater, following the example of Philip II and his predecessors, had done. He displayed an utter disregard for the established customs of the court and for the limitations imposed by usage upon his royal authority. The court he surrounded himself with was the richly appointed, ceremonious, uniformed affair devised by Alexander in his later, more splendid, more arrogant days; and by requiring proskynesis of the Macedonian noblemen and commons, he offended, unnecessarily, as it proved, the sturdiest sentiment of the nation.[121] His attempt to establish absolute monarchy in unsophisticated Macedon was the most direct cause of the loss of his kingdom; for when his foreign enemies, anticipating the attack which he designed against them, assailed him from all sides, his subjects hastened to abandon him and joined hands with the invaders. They had no longer heart for the wild imperialistic projects into which, almost without perceiving it, they had been led by Alexander the Great. * * * * *