Cleopatra must have known that the arrival of Perdiccas’ bride was expected in Babylon at any moment. She may have been present in Pella when Iolaus, Antipater’s son, arrived from Asia to fetch Nicaea, or when the two siblings departed for the Hellespont, accompanied by that most trustworthy of Macedonian agents, Archias the Exile-chaser. If so, Cleopatra must have hastened her own departure in hope of forestalling the wedding. She must have either left in secret or given some pretext to Antipater, who had the means to prevent her departure. Perhaps she claimed only to want to see her infant nephew, the king in swaddling clothes, one-year-old Alexander—a request that Antipater, still a servant of the royals though locked in a desperate rivalry with them, could hardly refuse.

So Cleopatra said farewell to Europe, and the mother she would never see again, and arrived in Sardis, the city she would never leave.

2. PERDICCAS (WESTERN ASIA, AUTUMN 322 B.C.)

To be simultaneously sought by two brides, one of them a princess, might seem to some men an enviable fate, but not to Perdiccas. The unexpected landing in Asia of Cleopatra, at the same time as the long-awaited arrival of Nicaea, posed a delicate political problem. To marry into one powerful family meant, inevitably, to disrespect the other. The question he now confronted was, which would be which?

Perdiccas could see why Alexander had wed no Macedonian women but a Bactrian and two Persians. Though Asian queens in the Argead house had offended the nobles back home, at least all had been equally offended. Alexander had caused no factional splits among the baronial families of Macedon, each seeking favor in the eyes of the king. Now Perdiccas, the closest thing the empire had to a ruler, was staring at a split that would have filled Alexander with dread. The dowager queen Olympias and the aging patriarch Antipater, mortal enemies to each other, both sought him as their son-in-law. He could not accept one without badly alienating the other.

Perdiccas’ choice was not just between wives and in-laws but also between two political futures: a limited, Asia-based sovereignty or dominion over the entire empire. Antipater had been given control over Europe in the settlement crafted at Babylon, together with Craterus, now related to him by marriage. Perdiccas had ceded this control because he had been too weak to contest it; merely managing Asia was challenging enough. If he were now to marry Nicaea and ally with Antipater, and by extension with Craterus as well, he would reaffirm that settlement and the division of the world it implied. Cleopatra, by contrast, represented a power that transcended continents and borders. As Cleopatra’s husband, Perdiccas could claim a throne in Pella as easily as in Babylon—or, for that matter, in Egypt, where Ptolemy was growing disturbingly strong willed.

Was he to take the lion’s share of Alexander’s empire, the Asian portion, or rule all three continents together? It was an agonizing dilemma, made worse by the divided counsels of his advisers. Eumenes the Greek, Alexander’s former scribe and now Perdiccas’ right-hand man, urged marriage to Cleopatra. Eumenes was a monarchist who saw the world in dynastic terms; power, in his eyes, came from a title and a scepter as much as from an army. Perdiccas’ younger brother Alcetas kept pulling him in the other direction. Marriage to Nicaea would bless the status quo with amity and concord, Alcetas believed. Antipater would live and let live, his ambitions fulfilled in Europe, while Perdiccas could stay in Asia and harvest its enormous wealth. Perdiccas was still weak, Alcetas argued; he could not afford to throw over Nicaea and risk a clash of continents.

Perdiccas hadbeen weak when he first asked for Nicaea’s hand, in those desperate days when he had cast his own troops under trampling elephants. But much had changed since then. Perdiccas had led a campaign in Cappadocia on behalf of Eumenes—Antigonus One-eye and Leonnatus both having spurned their assigned commands there—and had prevailed in a tough fight. Ariarathes, leader of the Persian holdouts looking to undo Alexander’s conquests, had put an army of thirty thousand in the field, including large cohorts of Greek mercenaries, but Perdiccas had defeated them in two major battles, and impaled Ariarathes as a lesson to his supporters. Then he had gone to Cilicia and added to his forces the magnificent corps of veterans left there by Craterus, the Silver Shields. This crew of three thousand, led by an oak-hearted captain named Antigenes, were thought to be the best infantry soldiers in the known world. Indeed they had beaten virtually every foe in that world, during three decades of active service.

Perdiccas’ strength had increased, and along with it the stature of Eumenes, who had shown he could wield a cavalry lance every bit as well as his secretarial stylus. When trouble had arisen in Armenia from unruly troops, and the regional commander there, Neoptolemus, was making a hash of things, Perdiccas dispatched little Eumenes to set things right. With judicious grants of free horses and tax amnesties, Eumenes quickly raised a decent Cappadocian cavalry force. He drilled and trained these horsemen to fight like Macedonians, and using this cavalry, he soon set Armenia in order. Perdiccas found he had gained not just a devoted ally and wise counselor in Eumenes but a fine field commander as well. Eumenes, for his part, found he had gained a new enemy—for Neoptolemus did not like being upstaged on his own turf by a Greek.

Recently, Perdiccas had claimed yet another victory, over troublesome Pisidian tribesmen who had long defied authority. It was the Pisidians who had killed Balacrus, the first husband of Antipater’s daughter Phila, a few years earlier, and now Perdiccas made them pay the price—though in the end they robbed him of the full satisfaction of vengeance. There were two main towns in Pisidia, and after Perdiccas captured the first, he imposed summary punishment, executing all male inhabitants and enslaving women and children. Those in the second city resolved on a more dignified end. As Perdiccas’ army attacked, they collected their families into a few houses and set the buildings on fire, then threw into the flames all their possessions. Defenders manning the walls held off Perdiccas’ men until this mass immolation was complete, then leaped into the conflagration themselves. The next day the Macedonians entered the smoking ruin and picked through charred bones for puddles of congealed gold and silver.

Despite this dismaying conclusion, the campaign had been a success, making three victories for Perdiccas in the past year. His hand had been greatly strengthened in the contest for Alexander’s power, since, to the soldiers on whom power depended, good generalship—and the booty it provided—meant everything. Perdiccas had even begun to plan how he would answer the challenge thrown at him by Antigonus One-eye. That man’s refusal to obey orders could not be overlooked. A summons would be sent to Antigonus to appear before an army assembly in Babylon. If Antigonus would not come, he would be attacked; if he fled to Europe, Perdiccas would be rid of him for good.

Perdiccas had other irons in the fire as well, though few as yet knew of them. He had received secret letters from Athens, from Demades, a politician who had long collaborated with Antipater but who was now seeking to change masters. Demades, for reasons unknown—perhaps because Phocion, his partner in the puppet government at Athens, had the lion’s share of power—urged Perdiccas to cross the Hellespont and oust Antipater, claiming he would have the support of the Greeks if he did so. “Our cities are held together only by an old and rotting rope,” Demades wrote to Perdiccas, referring contemptuously to Antipater. A vigorous new leader, a man like Perdiccas, could easily wrest Europe from that aging and detested warhorse.