Astride the straits of the Hellespont (the Dardanelles), two other Bodyguards, Lysimachus and Leonnatus, took up new commands. This crossing point between Europe and Asia held enormous strategic importance, bridging the vast Asiatic portion of the empire and the Macedonian homeland. The western side of the divide, Thrace, was a rough place, home to many warlike tribes; Lysimachus was charged with the stern job of pacifying it. To the east, Hellespontine Phrygia, a small and only modestly wealthy province, went to Leonnatus. Leonnatus had already, as part of the bargain Perdiccas struck with Meleager, accepted demotion from the governing board of the empire. Perdiccas might have supposed—wrongly, as things turned out—that his longtime supporter would be content with such a paltry prize.
Positions assigned to the leading generals by the Babylon settlement, and the accidental position of Craterus, who was en route to Europe when Alexander died (Illustration credit 2.2)
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A big winner in this territorial lottery was Eumenes, Alexander’s Greek secretary and, recently, a cavalry officer as well. For his diplomacy during the infantry mutiny, and in recognition of the favor Alexander had shown him, Eumenes received cavalry-rich Cappadocia (in what is now eastern Turkey). This was a remarkable honor, for only two Greeks before this had become satraps, and both in the remote East. But there was a hitch. Cappadocia had not been fully subdued by Alexander and was now home to a feisty Persian warlord named Ariarathes. This man rejected Macedonian sovereignty and had an army of fellow resisters. Eumenes would need to fight his way into power, a tall order for a man who had never yet led troops in battle. Perhaps Perdiccas intended a test, to see if this clever Greek, an expert thus far only at paperwork, had the right stuff for armed combat.
To aid Eumenes, Perdiccas directed two neighboring satraps to bring their troops forward, Leonnatus from one side and Antigonus One-eye, satrap of Phrygia (today southwest Turkey), from another. Antigonus, a bear of a man who had lost an eye in battle in his youth, had long been sidelined from Alexander’s army, left behind to manage western Asia while the campaign headed east. He and the other generals had not seen one another in a decade, so it was no doubt with some uncertainty that Perdiccas now wrote to Antigonus, a man twenty years his senior, to issue his orders. Perhaps he counted on Antigonus’ fondness for Eumenes to ensure his support, for the two men, though opposites in size, rank, and power, had been friends long ago at the Macedonian court. Or perhaps this too was a test, for Perdiccas needed to know whether he could command the respect of existing satraps, who had been absent from the new regime’s founding and had not given it their assent.
Two other powerful men had to be accommodated by the apportionment plan, though they too were too far from Babylon when it was drafted. Craterus, making slow progress on his homeward journey, was camped in Cilicia with his supposedly decommissioned veterans, and in Europe old man Antipater, faithful guardian of the Macedonian homeland, remained in the post from which Alexander had sought to remove him. Already these two men were included in the executive council running the empire, but they had been largely relegated to Europe while Perdiccas managed Asia. In the final settlement, Antipater was confirmed as head of Macedonia, Greece, and the Balkan territories. Craterus’ assignment was less clear; Perdiccas no doubt left it vague, wary of offending a general who was both beloved of the soldiers and, by accident of timing, in control of a huge number of them. Probably he encouraged Craterus, as gently as he could, to proceed to Europe and share power with Antipater. He did not want such a talented general lurking in Asia with an army of ten thousand.
Perdiccas himself took no satrapy. His role was custodian of the joint kings and commander of the royal army, the two nodes of executive power now located in Babylon. He shored up his position by making a trusted subordinate, Seleucus, his second in command, appointing him to the post of chiliarch he himself had once held. Perdiccas was now the closest thing the empire had to a central authority, with power to disburse funds from the royal treasuries, great depots of precious metals housed in closely guarded forts throughout the empire. This power of the purse formed a crucial prop to Perdiccas’ leadership. The army had already made clear, while Alexander was alive, that it would fight only for rich rewards, either pay or plunder and preferably both. Any ruler who sought to retain its loyalty was going to need ready cash.
And so the generals at Babylon, like gods claiming chunks of the cosmos, took charge of the pieces of Alexander’s empire that best matched their power, temperament, and rank. The newly crowned king Philip—following Perdiccas around like a spear-carrier, a mute extra, in a play, as Plutarch wryly observes—gave his all-too-ready approval to the apportionment scheme.
Before the generals departed for their new posts, Perdiccas convened an assembly of the army to consider Alexander’s last plans. According to Diodorus, Perdiccas had found a document containing these plans among the papers in the royal chambers. It described a set of projects of such astounding scope and scale that some modern scholars believe it a forgery, though most accept it as genuine. Perdiccas wanted these plans quashed, but in the charged atmosphere at Babylon he could not contravene the dead Alexander without the support of the army. And so he had the document read aloud to an assembly of troops, revealing to them the intentions of their now-mummified monarch.
Alexander had wanted a thousand warships built, to be used in a campaign in the West. The coastal towns of western Asia were to supply lumber for these ships, all to be larger than the standard-size trireme with its three banks of rowers. The objective of the new fleet would be Carthage and the rest of North Africa, along with Sicily, the Iberian Peninsula, and the European coastline between them. To support the fleet, a road was to be built through North Africa as far as the Pillars of Heracles (Strait of Gibraltar), with ports and dockyards at intervals suitable for trade and naval operations. Alexander, if we believe the last plans to be genuine, was planning a second, western campaign of conquest as extensive as the first, eastern one.
Alexander further wanted the construction of vast, costly temples at sites in Greece and Macedonia. A temple to Athena, “not capable of being surpassed by any other,” was to be built at Troy, the place Alexander had made a monument to Greek aspirations of foreign conquest. Great sums were to be spent on memorials to those closest to Alexander in life, his father, Philip, and his best friend, Hephaestion. Philip’s tomb, the document specified, was to be built on a scale rivaling the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
Finally, and most ambitiously, Alexander’s plans called for the movement of European peoples into Asia and Asians into Europe, with the goal, as Diodorus transmits it, of “bringing the two major continents, by way of intermarriages and family bonds, into a common harmony and a brotherly affection.” It is hard to imagine what this plan entailed or how it would have been carried out. Clearly it represents a new and hugely ambitious stage of Alexander’s cultural fusion program, an expansion to global scale of the mixed marriages at Susa.
The reading of the document allowed those present to take the full measure of the leader they had lost. It was an astonishing vision that stood behind the plans: a single world-state stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, its cultures severed from continental moorings, its expanses knit together by roads and sea-lanes and bestrode by colossal monuments. It is a vision that inspires both wonder and terror from a distance of twenty-three hundred years, for it anticipates both the Christian New Jerusalem and the warped utopias of Fascist dictatorships.