Then, too, Perdiccas had control of the body of Alexander, his greatest political asset, and the fabulous hearse that would soon transport it back to the Macedonian homeland. What if Perdiccas were to accompany that hearse, riding at the head of the Companion cavalry, and lead the burial rites of the great king? What if he brought the new kings, the imbecile Philip and the infant Alexander, along with him, like followers in his train? Would it not be clear to all that he, not Antipater, represented the leadership of the empire? Might not even Craterus, who had staged his own heroic homecoming the previous year, acknowledge his supremacy?

Then why should he not also wed Cleopatra and make the triumph complete with an open claim on the throne? The question haunted Perdiccas, even as Nicaea drew nearer. How great was the danger in taking Eumenes’ advice, clasping Alexander’s sister by the hand and joining the ranks of the royals? It was the same choice Leonnatus had faced when Cleopatra promised to marry him. Leonnatus had seized what was offered, thinking a royal bride worth the cost of universal mistrust.

But Perdiccas, on the brink of a similar leap onto ambition’s summit, found he could not make up his mind. He could not break with Antipater and declare a civil war, even if it was a war he was likely to win. But neither could he let slip the chance offered him by Cleopatra. The counsels of Eumenes and Alcetas both had their hold on him; neither could be dismissed.

So Perdiccas married Antipater’s daughter Nicaea but also sent Eumenes to Sardis with a covert message for Cleopatra, that he intended to reject his new bride and marry herinstead. He would bide his time and keep both his options open. The best choice for now was no choice at all.

3.

CYNNANE, ADEA, AND ALCETAS (WESTERN ASIA, AUTUMN 322 B.C.)

Just after the arrival of Cleopatra in Sardis, a new entrant in the marital lists landed in Asia, quite unexpectedly. The stratagems of Olympias had pointed the way for another royal mother, Cynnane, to seek power by way of another daughter, a girl in her early teens named Adea. But this mother-daughter team had set their sights even higher than Olympias and Cleopatra. They aimed not to marry a general to a princess but to marry a princess to a king. Cynnane had chosen Philip, the mentally impaired half brother of Alexander (and her own half brother as well), as bridegroom for her daughter (also Philip’s niece).

Cynnane knew well the politics of dynastic marriages; she was the product of one. Her mother, a princess of Illyria (today part of Albania), had come to Macedonia to wed Alexander’s father, Philip, and seal an alliance between two contentious nations. Cynnane grew up at the Macedonian court but stayed true to her maternal traditions, for Illyrian women were famously tough, capable of going to war as men did. In her teens Cynnane is said to have accompanied the Macedonian army on a campaign into Illyria and to have slain a queen of that country—perhaps one of her own relatives—in hand-to-hand combat. Unfortunately, no account survives of that encounter between two armed female leaders, the first such encounter known to European history—though it would soon be followed by another.

When she came of age, Cynnane was given in a politically arranged marriage to her cousin Amyntas, an Argead in direct line of succession. She bore him a daughter, Adea. After the assassination of her father in 336 left the throne vacant, Cynnane might easily have become queen, had her husband acted quickly to make himself king, but instead his cousin Alexander seized the throne and had Amyntas done away with. Cynnane became a widow in her early twenties and stayed a widow thereafter, despite other offers of marriage. She focused her attention on Adea, rearing her after Illyrian fashion to be a huntress and warrior who could hold her own among men.

Cynnane was in her early thirties, and Adea barely past puberty, when Alexander died and a new Philip, an imbecilic parody of the old, was put on the throne. Cynnane was herself young enough to marry Philip and bear children, but she handed this opportunity down to her daughter, whose royal pedigree was purer than her own. In the second year after Alexander’s death, she and Adea left Macedonia to make their way into Asia, accompanied by a hired band of armed men. Cynnane intended to find Philip and get Adea married to him, thereby advancing her branch of the royal family, the branch sprung from a warlike woman of Illyrian blood.

Such a move would deeply unsettle the already shaky power structure resolved at Babylon. It would add legitimacy to one of the two reigning kings and strengthen the monarchy as a whole, thus reducing the influence of the generals. Indeed it might eliminate the board of four custodians altogether, since Adea, once queen, would be able to speak and act for her royal husband. Antipater, one of the members of that board, determined he would stop the marriage from taking place. He sent troops to turn the two women back as they made their way eastward through Thrace, but in a skirmish at the river Strymon (in what is now Bulgaria) Cynnane and her forces prevailed. The bridal procession continued on its way and crossed the Hellespont into Asia.

Perdiccas was just as troubled as Antipater by the prospect of Adea’s marriage to Philip but for different reasons. It was unclear whether Philip, with his mental impairment, was capable of begetting an heir, but should he do so, a son of his by Adea would have far greater legitimacy than Alexander’s son by Rhoxane. One of the two branches of the royal family, now poised in a hard-won balance of power, would prevail over the other. Cynnane and Adea would rise in stature, as grandmother and mother of the new monarch; Olympias and Cleopatra, on whom Perdiccas was now resting his own hopes for a throne, would be cast down. Perdiccas determined he could not let that happen. Since Antipater had failed to stop the bridal convoy in Europe, Perdiccas sent his own squad, under command of his brother Alcetas, to intercept it in Asia.

Somewhere on the Asian side of the Hellespont, where Alcetas and his troops met Cynnane and hers, a tragedy occurred that showed how much trust had been lost since Alexander’s death. Alcetas and Cynnane were almost exactly the same age and had known each other from childhood. They had grown up together at the palace in Pella, where Alcetas (almost certainly) was one of King Philip’s page boys, Cynnane the eldest of Philip’s children. They had both come of age at the same moment, she becoming a mother (and soon thereafter a widow), he a soldier in Alexander’s army. Under different circumstances, they might have been glad to see each other again, but their paths had diverged greatly in the twelve years of Alexander’s reign. Alcetas advanced with his troops arrayed for battle.

Cynnane was outraged by this implied threat. As she came close enough to Alcetas to be clearly heard, she stepped forward and delivered a stinging reproach of his ingratitude and disloyalty. It was the first of several proud speeches delivered by Argead women to Alexander’s generals, as the royals defiantly resisted the new realities of their situation. The courtly world Philip had built for them, a world in which soldiers revered Argeads as superhuman beings, was gone. The meteoric impact of the Asian campaign had burst it to bits. Now that Alexander had built an omnipotent army, an army capable of defying its creator, it was no longer clear who was in control of whom.

Alcetas, in this case, was determined to exert not only control but domination. He ended the encounter between his forces and Cynnane’s—no account of which has survived—by having Cynnane killed, when he might have taken her prisoner or sent her back to Europe under escort. Perhaps he was stung to fury by Cynnane’s reproaches, or perhaps he acted on instructions given by his brother Perdiccas. Both armed columns and the young girl Adea looked on in horror. It was a brutal demonstration of resolve, more brutal even than the elephant-trampling executions Perdiccas had orchestrated two years earlier.