Antigonus Gonatas had never known the lure of the East. He had spent his early manhood in Athens (294-290 B.C.), where an unworthy liaison with the courtesan Demo and an intimacy that does him honor with Zeno, the founder of the Stoa, attest the range of his activity. He won his spurs in his father's Boeotian campaigns of 292-291 B.C., and spent the formative years of his career as a general and statesman in Greece (288-280 B.C.). Only once, when hard pushed in 280B.C., did he show that the blood of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Antigonus I flowed in his veins, namely, when he tried to seize Asia Minor, then temporarily without a master. Normally, he acted like the child of Phila and the heir of the policy of Cassander and Antipater. And it was in the spirit of his mother's line that he established his government in Macedon on expelling the Celts in 277 B.C. His reign opened auspiciously. Having obtained--how, when, and at what price, we do not know--the friendship of Egypt, he got the opportunity to order affairs to his liking in Greece. On the other hand, his accession to the throne was accompanied by his marriage to Phila, his own niece, the sister of Antiochus I, the new king of Asia. This union sanctioned an agreement by which Antigonus abandoned his claim to Asia Minor and Antiochus his right, as Seleucus's son, to the Macedonian throne. It inaugurated a policy by which Macedon secured for eighty years (277-197 B.C.) immunity from attack or intrigue on the part of the Seleucids. His friendship with Egypt was less enduring, but it gave him ten years (277-267 B.C.) in which to consolidate his power--a period of quiet activity, interrupted only by the return of Pyrrhus from Italy and the startling upheaval in Macedon and Greece (274-272 B.C.) which accompanied that adventurous monarch's vigorous assertion of his right to rule those countries. The fall of Pyrrhus in battle at Argos relieved the tension of this situation, but till the time of his death thirty-two years afterwards, Antigonus had always to count Epirus among his possible enemies when it was not actually his assailant. On his northern frontier he faced the threatening Dardanians, and on the northeastern the marauding Celts, who had reduced Thrace to the condition of barbarity that prevailed throughout Central Europe. By keeping these peoples in check he did a great service to Greece, which he thereby protected; but for it he got little gratitude, and it was his suzerainty over Greece which brought to him and his successors most of their many troubles.