But its very brutality caused the move to backfire. When news of the killing arrived in Babylon, the Macedonian army recoiled from the murder of a daughter of Philip. As they had done in the days after Alexander’s death, they rebelled against Perdiccas’ leadership and rallied to the royal family. Perdiccas found his new-won military glory slipping away. To mollify the troops, he reversed course and had Adea brought to his camp. At his direction, she married her uncle, the half-wit king, Philip.
No older than fifteen, orphaned by two political murders, Adea claimed the prize her mother had died to obtain for her, a share of the Macedonian throne. She took her place amid a strange assortment of crowned heads: a grown man with the mind of a child, a Bactrian woman with strange manners and speech, and a two-year-old boy, her own cousin, only now learning to walk and talk. She quickly saw that she was the only one among them competent to wield power. She also must have seen, based on the army’s support for her marriage to Philip, that the rank-and-file soldiery could be won over to her side. It was they who had put Philip on the throne and given him his name, hoping to reclaim the glories of a greater Philip, his father. They might now embrace Adea, granddaughter of that greater Philip, for the same reasons.
As though to gratify these longings for the past, Adea too changed her name, becoming Eurydice as she took her place on the throne. It was a name with good Argead pedigree, one that had belonged to her grandfather Philip’s mother. It was better suited to her new station than Adea, which was (probably) an Illyrian name. She too, like the Philip who had once been Arrhidaeus, was now a standard-bearer of the old Argead traditions, the generations before Alexander’s move into Asia. The heritage of her mother and grandmother, Illyrian warrior-women, was put aside in favor of the legacy she had through her grandfather.
But though she might advertise herself as native-born royalty, Adea still retained the warlike ways in which Cynnane had raised her. Her Illyrian roots had not been severed with a mere change of name. Alexander’s top generals were about to tangle with one of history’s toughest teenage girls.
4. ANTIGONUS, CRATERUS, AND ANTIPATER (NORTHERN GREECE/WESTERN ASIA WINTER, LATE 322 B.C.)
Cynnane’s murder held particular significance for a man who had been keeping a close eye—the one eye he still had—on Perdiccas’ doings.
Proud Antigonus, satrap of Phrygia, had already ignored Perdiccas’ orders concerning the reconquest of Cappadocia. That set him at odds with the Babylon government, and since then antipathy on both sides had grown. Perdiccas had issued a summons to Antigonus to appear before a judicial proceeding, intending to settle the question of hierarchy once and for all. But Antigonus was contemplating a different plan. News of Cynnane’s death helped further that plan and guarantee its success.
Somehow, Antigonus had learned of Perdiccas’ intention to swap wives, trading Nicaea for Cleopatra, Antipater’s daughter for Alexander’s royal sister. Courtship of Cleopatra was strong evidence of the ambitions of Perdiccas, and the murder of Cynnane—which certainly looked to Antigonus like Perdiccas’ handiwork, even if Alcetas had performed it—sealed the case. Antigonus could not stand by and watch one man raise his head above the heads of the other generals, especially above his own. Departing covertly with his family aboard Athenian ships, Antigonus slipped away from the coast of Asia and headed for northern Greece. He made his way to the two generals who would be most alarmed to hear his news, the commanders of Europe, old man Antipater and his son-in-law Craterus.
He found them in Aetolia, hunkered down in snowy mountain camps as they prosecuted the last, grim phase of the Hellenic War. The Aetolians had helped start that war two years earlier, banding together with the Athenians, but had left the front lines before the war’s conclusion and had never formally surrendered. They had since retreated to high hills in their native territory, but Antipater and Craterus followed them there and cordoned them off, maintaining pressure even during harsh winter months. The Aetolians were just running out of food, and options, when Antigonus arrived in the Macedonian camp with word of events in the East.
The news hit home and hit hard, as Antigonus intended it to do. Perdiccas’ secret pact with Cleopatra spelled betrayal of Antipater in both political and personal terms; it meant the alignment of the Babylon regime with Olympias, Antipater’s bitter rival, as well as the insulting rejection of a father’s daughter. The additional fact of the murder of Cynnane showed that Perdiccas’ regime had lost its bearings and would do anything to strengthen itself. Antipater was livid, and, together with his son-in-law Craterus and Antigonus the bearer of bad tidings, he decided to throw the arrogant, ambitious Perdiccas out of power. Now in his late seventies, having barely prevailed in the Hellenic War the previous year, Antipater steeled himself once more for full-scale conflict. He resolved to invade Asia, a continent he had never set foot on before.
The bond of faith between two great blocs of Alexander’s empire was broken. Perdiccas had tried to avoid a showdown by sharing sovereignty, giving Antipater and Craterus control of Europe while he confined himself to Asia. Perhaps this division could have remained stable had Perdiccas not made a play for the whole, or perhaps it was doomed to break down in any case. The blow that destroyed it seemed almost banal, a piece of gossip about a man’s interest in a woman other than his wife. But where royal women represented legitimacy, and marital alliance security, the personal and the political had become fused. A bridegroom’s change of affection now had the potential to embroil the empire in civil war.
His tale-telling mission accomplished, Antigonus sailed back across the Aegean to rally the satraps of Asia Minor. Their support of the invasion forces, and willingness to abandon Perdiccas, would be crucial. Antipater and Craterus, meanwhile, concluded a hasty truce with the Aetolians. Punishment of the last Greek rebels would have to wait for a more opportune moment. Right now the generals’ course was set for Asia, and they began gathering troops for a crossing of the Hellespont.
Antipater appointed a subordinate named Polyperchon, an Alexander veteran who had come west with Craterus, to mind matters in Macedonia while he and Craterus headed east. A mid-level officer with an undistinguished record, now taking up his first command in his sixties, Polyperchon was destined to play a larger role in Macedonia than anyone knew or might have wished. Antipater also sent a messenger south, to Egypt, to firm up his alliance with Ptolemy. He needed to make sure that the two would collaborate, uniting Europe and Africa against Perdiccas in Asia, in the coming war.
5. ALEXANDER’S CORPSE (BABYLON AND POINTS SOUTH, SPRING 321 B.C.)
In Babylon, meanwhile, a team of craftsmen had finished the funeral cart of Alexander. The magnificent vehicle was now ready for its journey through the Asian countryside, bearing Alexander’s mummy back to his homeland.
The hearse was built in the shape of a box, about twelve feet wide and eighteen feet long, with a barrel-vaulted roof. This roof was covered in gold plates overlapping like shingles, with precious stones set between them. At each of its corners stood a statue of Nike, the winged goddess personifying victory, also covered in gold. Atop its peak, fashioned from gold leaf, stood an enormous olive wreath, the crown of victory given at Greek athletic contests, glittering so brightly that observers compared it to a flash of lightning.
The roof of the chamber was supported by golden columns in imitation of a Greek temple, except that spaces between columns were not left open but bridged by a meshwork of golden ropes. Each column had a bas-relief acanthus vine climbing up it. Atop this colonnade, where a Greek temple might carry a sculptural frieze, four painted panels displayed the military might Alexander had wielded in life. One portrayed ships ready for combat; another, a squad of cavalry waiting to charge; a third, elephants clad in war gear, leading an infantry phalanx. The fourth panel showed Alexander himself, seated in a chariot ornamented with bas-relief, holding a scepter and surrounded by attendants and honor guards.