Perdiccas opened the proceedings by taking up the most pressing matter facing the generals, the selection of a successor to the throne. Alexander’s wife Rhoxane, he pointed out, was in her final weeks of pregnancy. If her child was male and survived, the Macedonians would have a legitimate heir. The best thing now, Perdiccas said, was for the army to wait and hope for both those outcomes.

Nearchus, Alexander’s top naval officer, spoke next. He was not among the Bodyguards, but Alexander had counted him a close friend. Nearchus now proposed that the child named Heracles, Alexander’s son by a mistress named Barsine, be proclaimed the new king. After all, he argued, here was a living, breathing heir—perhaps four years old at this time—not just an even chance at one. Nearchus was, however, interrupted by a disapproving din from the other officers. Not only had he proposed a child who was illegitimate and therefore not eligible for the throne, but, as a Greek in an assembly of Macedonians, he was speaking very much out of turn. Perhaps too he was suspected of self-interest, for in the Susa mass marriage he had wed a daughter of Barsine, so that Heracles was now his half-brother-in-law.

An infantry captain named Meleager spoke next, bluntly raising the problem of Euro-Asian fusion that had deeply troubled the army. Both Heracles and Rhoxane’s unborn child, he observed, had mothers who were at least part Asian (Barsine was half Greek) and who belonged to races conquered and ruled by the Macedonians. Perhaps Alexander had wanted such boundaries ignored, but not all could follow his lead, least of all Meleager and his infantry comrades. Why not an heir of purer blood, a son of Philip by a European wife, and one already grown to manhood: Alexander’s half brother Arrhidaeus? The man was right there in Babylon, accompanying the army, ready to take power in an instant.

Now it was Ptolemy’s turn to speak and to voice an awkward truth. Arrhidaeus was not mentally competent to rule. He could speak and function reasonably well, but his capacity was that of a child—in modern terms he was developmentally disabled—and like a child he would need a guardian or regent. Rather than hand power to such a surrogate, Ptolemy said, the Macedonians should appoint a board of top-ranking generals to govern instead of a king. These men could meet before Alexander’s empty throne, as they now were meeting, and take decisions by majority vote. In this way, Ptolemy reasoned, the Macedonians would gain leaders of proven talent, men who had already succeeded at exercising command.

Many no doubt cast sidelong glances at Perdiccas while Ptolemy spoke. It was Perdiccas, as Alexander’s chiliarch and the man who had received the ring, who, logically, would be guardian of an infant or a mental invalid. Ptolemy’s proposal to decentralize authority, even to eliminate the monarchy, was, by any reading, a hit at Perdiccas. Ptolemy himself must have known what impact his words would have. He had thrown the first gauntlet in what was to be a fight to the death between these two leading Bodyguards.

There may have been more speeches at that fateful meeting (Curtius reports a proposal that Perdiccas be crowned, but this seems a Roman fantasy imported into the Macedonian setting). In the end, Perdiccas’ plan was adopted. The army would wait for Rhoxane to give birth, and if she had a son, that boy would be king. The infant’s guardians (who also would presumably rule if the child was a girl) would be a board of four: Bodyguards Perdiccas and Leonnatus, plus Craterus, now in western Asia slowly leading his column of veterans homeward, and Antipater, the grand old man of Macedonian politics, who for the past twelve years had been in charge of the European home front. Ptolemy, who ranked not far below three of these men and higher than Leonnatus, was somehow left out of the arrangement. Probably he was already regarded as a dangerous rival by Perdiccas.

A rough division of sovereignty was laid out for these four regents: Craterus and Antipater would hold command in Europe, Perdiccas and Leonnatus in Asia. Craterus was accorded some vague executive status, entitling him to act as the king’s representative and therefore to draw on the royal treasuries. This was a sop to the well-loved older general who, with ten thousand decommissioned veterans under his command, possessed the greatest troop strength of any Macedonian leader. Craterus could easily storm into Babylon and seize sole power, once he learned of Alexander’s death, as he would do in a day or two.

Those in the throne room swore an oath of loyalty to the board of four, and then the entire cavalry, summoned to the courtyard outside the palace, took a similar oath. The generals hoped to get the cavalry in line behind the scheme and then present it to the infantry—by far the larger of the two branches of the army—as a fait accompli. But they badly misjudged their ability to win over the rank and file. For even while they were in session, reports arrived that the infantry, meeting separately, had made a different choice of monarch—Arrhidaeus, Alexander’s mentally impaired half brother. Perdiccas dispatched Meleager, the infantry officer who had already spoken in favor of Arrhidaeus in the council session, as emissary to the foot soldiers—the first error of the many he would commit as head of the new regime.

It is unclear how far the infantry was from the palace or how much the foot soldiers knew of the cavalry’s decisions. Justin implies the two groups had no contact, while Curtius puts the infantrymen right outside the throne room, listening to the speeches there and finally breaking in as a violent mob. Whatever their physical distance, the two groups were miles apart in outlook. The gulf that had opened in India, when the foot soldiers had nearly rioted against cavalry officers whom they thought were concealing Alexander’s death, had only grown wider in the intervening two years. Now the time for choosing Alexander’s successor was at hand, a task that by custom required a broad army assembly, but the army had not been convened. In the crisis atmosphere, it was easy for the infantry to assume the worst about their generals’ intentions.

Mistrust of superiors came easily to these foot soldiers. Alexander had routinely promoted those he cherished from infantry to cavalry, leaving the former feeling passed over and estranged from their higher-ups. The greatest estrangement had resulted from the king’s experiments in cultural fusion. Alexander had taken to wearing the purples of Persian royalty, had accepted the toadying of Persian courtiers, had even married a Bactrian and then two Persian women. Then he had moved, in the last year of his life, to mix Asian recruits into the ranks of his grande armée.He had formed a new phalanx, in their eyes a grotesque hybrid, made up of only one Macedonian for every three barbarians. (The cavalry too had been internationalized, but to a lesser degree; Macedonians and Greeks were still in the majority there.)

The foot soldiers had thus seen huge changes during their decade or more of service, and theyhad changed as well. Hardened by constant warfare, emboldened by their successful mutiny in India, they had become headstrong and intractable, demanding of pay and perquisites. They still revered the Argead monarchy and the towering figure of Alexander, but their reverence was more grudging than before, like that paid by a half-wild dog to a master who can hit it on the snout. The commander they loved, by contrast, was Craterus, the soldier’s soldier, who had given voice to their own feelings on several occasions when he had challenged Alexander’s Asianizing policies. In their eyes Craterus stood for a culturally pure past, when their identity, and that of their foes, had been both clear and morally gratifying.

Meleager, the top officer leading the infantry, had also criticized Alexander’s internationalism, and his plain speech had cost him dear. Years before, in India, Meleager had attended a banquet celebrating Alexander’s new alliance with Ambhi, a local raja. Alexander had lavished gifts on his Indian host, including the huge sum of one thousand talents of silver. Drunk, and embittered at seeing such wealth bestowed on a barbarian, Meleager let his irritation show. “How nice for you,” he sneered at the king in the hearing of all, “that finally in India you found a man worthy of one thousand talents.” Thereafter, Meleager’s career had languished. Of all those who started the Asian campaign as taxiarchs (captains of infantry brigades), only Meleager had stayed in that mid-level post, rather than moving up to the more distinguished cavalry.