Ophellas of Cyrene

Macedonian officer of Alexander the Great's eastern campaigns who in the post-Alexander succession period became governor of Cyrene under Ptolemy I. By 310 BCE Ophellas had governed Cyrene for over a decade and aspired to a kingdom of his own; when Agathocles, then operating in Africa against Carthage, proposed an alliance and a future partition, Africa for Ophellas, Sicily and Italy for Agathocles, Ophellas agreed. He raised approximately 10,000 troops and a similar number of colonists and their families, and led them in a remarkable two-month desert march from Cyrene westward across the Libyan coast to join Agathocles in 308 BCE. The army arrived exhausted but intact. A few days after the rendezvous, Agathocles invited Ophellas to a banquet, attacked him at table, and killed him, then absorbed the surviving Cyrenian army into his own. The episode (Diodorus 20.40–42) is one of the more conspicuous instances of treachery in early Hellenistic warfare, even by the standards of an era not notable for its political restraint, and is treated by ancient and modern sources alike as morally definitive of Agathocles's character.