The men on the island cast away their weapons and armor, companions of more than a decade of campaigning, and dove into the swirling current. Stronger swimmers could make it across, but others were pulled downstream, tumbling and flailing as they were swept out of sight. Perdiccas’ situation had become nightmarish, but the worst horror was yet to come. The thrashing of drowning men attracted Nile crocodiles, which arrived in swarms and began to feed on both the living and the dead. More than two thousand men were lost, either to the rushing waters or to the snapping jaws of the beasts.

In camp that evening, the surviving infantrymen raised loud, hoarse lamentations for their comrades and shouted curses at Perdiccas. Perhaps a third of their number had been lost that day, comrades who had served beside them for thirteen years or more, without so much as an inch of progress. The Egyptian campaign had come to nothing; and Asia too had been lost, or so the troops feared, for word had not yet arrived of Eumenes’ stunning victory over Craterus and Neoptolemus. Had this victory been known, Perdiccas would instantly have seen his authority restored, but in this, as in much else, the gods seemed to be against him. The news arrived just one day too late.

Ptolemy could now be seen on the opposite bank, doing his best to increase Perdiccas’ disgrace. His troops were gathering the bodies of the drowned and cremating them with honorable rites. With unerring instincts for self-promotion, Ptolemy was sending a message that he held the soldiers’ lives sacred, unlike Perdiccas, who had so recklessly thrown them away. Perhaps he also meant to show he was clement to his enemies and would treat well any who deserted. Almost certainly, he was already spreading that message by way of agents in Perdiccas’ camp.

Perdiccas had proved a false Alexander. He had failed at the very maneuver at which Alexander had so brilliantly succeeded. He had hurled more lives into the river than Alexander had lost in all his great battles. Not even Perdiccas’ senior officers, paid off with gifts and favors to support the Egyptian invasion, could countenance its disastrous outcome. Three of these—Peithon, Antigenes, and Seleucus—backed by a hundred followers, went to the tent of Perdiccas that very night and stabbed him to death. First to strike was Antigenes, leader of the Silver Shields. He understood the soldiers’ code of loyalty to an officer, but also understood the officers’ code that forbade the squandering of soldiers.

So ended the brief reign of Perdiccas, Alexander’s top-ranking Bodyguard and inheritor of his signet ring. He had begun his time in power by killing his own men under the feet of elephants and ended by killing them in the maws of crocodiles. The compromise government he had forged at Babylon, designed to preserve the balance and unity of the continents, had been smashed to ruins; the empire was utterly divided and leaderless and spattered with the blood of the generals who had founded it. These men had made all of western Asia their battleground. Soon the violence would spread to Europe as well, engulfing Athens, the Greek world generally, and the Macedonian homeland itself.

The reign of the joint kings went on into its third year.

7

The Fortunes of Eumenes

Egypt, Western Asia, and Macedonia

SUMMER 321–SPRING 319 B.C.

The empire no longer had a center. Alexander had moved the royal seat from Pella to Babylon, but now Babylon had been emptied of the elements that defined royalty: the royal army, the crowned heads themselves, and Alexander’s mummified body. The latter two were now in Egypt but separated by the enormous gulf of the Nile. As for Alexander’s army, it had become fragmented as never before. One part was following Eumenes in Anatolia, another was in Egypt, while a third had become mixed with fresh troops from Europe and was now with Antipater in Cilicia. No part was large enough to constitute the assembly that traditionally acclaimed new leaders; and who could propose a new leader for acclamation, a replacement for the fallen Perdiccas, even if a quorum could be gathered somewhere?

Like Babylon, the royal city of Pella in Macedonia had been stripped of its centering figures. No Argeads dwelled there. Olympias had long ago fled to Epirus, and Cleopatra, Cynnane, and Adea had departed into Asia. Old man Antipater too, for years the only general who stayed in a fixed location, had joined the others and gone on the move. His surrogate, Polyperchon, held nominal command in Pella, but he was a second-rank officer with little of Antipater’s gravitas, as the years to come would demonstrate all too clearly.

The only real capital the empire now had was the place the joint kings were stationed, wherever that might be. For the moment, that meant the encampment of an exhausted, bloodstained, and leaderless band of men, a desolate spot opposite Memphis on the east bank of the Nile.

1. PTOLEMY, PEITHON, AND ARRHIDAEUS (EGYPT, SUMMER 321 B.C.)

On the morning after the murder of Perdiccas, Ptolemy crossed the Nile to the army that had twice failed to vanquish him. He had almost certainly been in contact with Peithon, his former fellow Bodyguard, to make sure of a friendly reception. Whether such contacts preceded, or even arranged, Perdiccas’ murder is not known, but the two men had much to gain by colluding in this deed: Ptolemy wanted to be rid of the army of invasion, while Peithon, the same man who had tried to bring the rebellious Greeks over to his side, wanted more power. The murder of Perdiccas was a good first step toward both goals.

Ptolemy brought with him food for the depleted troops and the cremated bones of the men recovered from the river. These remains were distributed to friends and kinsmen of each soldier, a humane gesture designed to win over the rank and file. Ptolemy knew he had support in Perdiccas’ army, for these troops had already refused to condemn him at the trial Perdiccas had held some days before. But they had also agreed to attack him, and many no doubt still resented his theft of their monarch’s corpse. Ptolemy delivered a carefully balanced speech before the assembled army, defending his separatist actions of the past two years and assuring Perdiccas’ loyalists that they would not be subject to a purge. Perhaps he demonstrated good faith by arranging honorable rites for Perdiccas’ body, though there is no record of what became of it or of the ill-omened signet ring it presumably still bore on its lifeless hand.

Ptolemy’s speech was a resounding success. The army seemed about to offer him Perdiccas’ old post, guardianship of the joint kings. But Ptolemy had already resolved not to accept. He instead put forward Peithon, leader of the mutiny against Perdiccas, for that job, along with Arrhidaeus, former custodian of Alexander’s corpse. The soldiers gave their acclaim to this pair, though only on a temporary basis. They were aware that their decisions were contingent on events in Asia: two far loftier authorities, Antipater and the beloved Craterus, were on the march there, and report had it that Craterus was preparing to fight Eumenes, Perdiccas’ Greek consigliere—a battle Craterus was sure to win.

But while Ptolemy was still conferring with the army of invasion, news came that Craterus had been killed in that battle, along with Neoptolemus. A wave of shock and outrage went through the troops. The idea that Eumenes, a humble Greek, had brought down the most revered of Alexander’s generals, while serving the now-discredited Perdiccas, was intolerable. The army demanded vengeance. A death sentence was passed in absentia on Eumenes and fifty other leaders of Perdiccas’ government, including Alcetas, Perdiccas’ brother. His sister Atalante was immediately seized and executed. There would be no mending of fences now, no effort to knit the empire back together. The war would go on until Eumenes, and anyone else who had aided Perdiccas, was destroyed.