Antipater stood before the assembled army and tried to address their demands. He promised to tally up the royal treasuries and make good what was owed, though he admitted that for the moment his resources were thin. The huge caches of gold and silver won in Alexander’s conquests were far away, in the great cities of Persis; it would take time to transfer them to depleted western depots. The troops listened but were not mollified. Adea again stirred up their mistrust and goaded them into rage, speaking openly against Antipater and pointing to Attalus, Perdiccas’ brother-in-law, as an alternative. Finally their anger spilled over into full-scale revolt. They seized Antipater and threatened him with immediate stoning if he did not pay up.
As before at Lamia, Antipater needed help from one of his confederates, and the rescue effort this time was led by his new junior partner, Antigonus One-eye. Antigonus had just returned from his campaign in Cyprus and had made camp with Antipater’s forces, on the opposite side of a river from the mutinous troops. Watching from this camp across the stream, Antigonus could see that Antipater had been taken prisoner by the rebels and was in grave peril. Given the prowess of the royal army and the invincible Silver Shields, Antigonus had few options except bluff and deceit, but those were his strengths. He donned a full suit of armor, mounted his horse, and rode grandly across the bridge that connected the two camps, accompanied by a few select cavalrymen.
The royal army had not seen Antigonus for more than a decade. The unexpected arrival of the huge one-eyed man, impressively clad in full battle gear, awed the rebels and they parted ranks, making a space for him to address them. As he passed the captive Antipater, he somehow signaled the old man to be ready to make an escape. He then stood before the soldiers and delivered a long speech on Antipater’s behalf (seconded by Seleucus, one of their own leaders), drawing out his words filibuster-style until an opening arose. Finally he saw Antipater’s guards becoming distracted. At a signal his cavalrymen grabbed Antipater away from them and rushed him across the bridge to safety.
Antigonus and Seleucus nearly lost their lives in the ensuing melee, for the troops saw they had been tricked. Somehow both men managed to escape unharmed. Antipater, now back among his own loyal army, set about to restore order. Summoning the leaders of the rebellion to his side of the river, he browbeat them back into obedience. Probably he had some choice words about the folly of following a teenage girl, even one who happened to be queen of the Macedonians.
Adea had nearly pulled off a coup that would have given her control of the kings and the army. With just a few more soldiers on her side, she might have outdone Eumenes, victor over Neoptolemus and Craterus, and brought down threetop generals—Antipater, Antigonus, and Seleucus—in a single day. Her contest with old man Antipater, whom she had looked up to since childhood as her grandfather Philip’s senior statesman, had been fought with intensity and vigor, the qualities her warlike mother had instilled in her. The bitterness with which she resumed her former role as ward—of Antigonus this time, for it was he who was now made custodian of the joint kings—can only be imagined.
As at Babylon three years earlier, a new order had to be created out of the havoc that mutiny had wrought. Antipater firmed up his control of the state by distributing satrapies to reward friends and dispossess enemies. The officers who had deserted to him from Perdiccas—Cleitus, the admiral of the Hellespont fleet; Antigenes, the captain of the Silver Shields; and Seleucus, who had helped murder Perdiccas and save Antipater from the mob—received satrapies for the first time, while other allies were confirmed in old posts. Back in Egypt, Ptolemy, now Antipater’s son-in-law, was given a free hand; North Africa was granted to him as “land won by the spear,” in recognition of his defense against Perdiccas’ invasion. Rule over Cappadocia went to a certain Nicanor, perhaps Antipater’s own son (but it is hard to sort out the ten or more Nicanors who played important roles in this period). Its former satrap, Eumenes, now branded an outlaw and a traitor, could not be allowed to retain power there, or anywhere, for that matter.
Antigonus One-eye, who had in the past year emerged as Antipater’s principal ally and most talented general, received two prize appointments under the new order: not only guardian of the kings, but strat¯egos, or “commander in chief,” of all Asia. He was given orders to hunt for Eumenes, Alcetas, and the other condemned Perdiccans and was allotted eighty-five hundred veteran infantry, plus cavalry and elephants. He also received a new junior officer, Antipater’s son Cassander, as his second in command. This was in part an honor but also an implicit check. Antigonus would have tremendous power in his new role, and Antipater wanted a reliable pair of eyes to watch over his one-eyed partner.
The bond between Antigonus and Antipater was cemented in time-honored Macedonian fashion, through marriage. Thanks to the death of Craterus, Antipater again had a marriageable daughter. His eldest, Phila, twice widowed and now raising the son she had borne to Craterus, was still of childbearing age. She might have made a good partner for Antigonus himself, but instead she was given to One-eye’s debauched teenage son, Demetrius—a horrible mismatch of both ages and temperaments. When Demetrius complained to Antigonus about marrying a woman more than ten years older, a high-minded noblewoman to boot, his father twitted him by spoofing a line from Euripides. In the tragedy The Phoenician Women, an exiled king, Polynices, explains how he submitted to a life of poverty, biding his time before trying to win back his throne: “One must become a slave, despite oneself, for the sake of gain.” Antigonus quoted the line to Demetrius, whom he by now must have hoped to someday put on a throne, with a change of one word: “One must become a spouse, despite oneself, for the sake of gain.”
There remained the question of the mutinous royal army and its demands for pay. The Silver Shields, under the command of Antigenes, were dispatched to Susa, the wealthiest of the old Persian capitals, with orders to transfer funds to a fortress at Cyinda in Cilicia. This move had a double benefit for the new leadership: money would be more available, and the Silver Shields, the most headstrong of Alexander’s veterans, would be out of their hair. The remaining members of the rebellious army were assigned to follow Antigonus One-eye and the kings and to help prosecute the war against Eumenes. They too needed to be kept busy, and now there was a new enemy for them to fight.
A second blueprint had been drawn up for the post-Alexander world, as though Perdiccas’ reign had been only a bad false start. But the great problem that had scuttled the old settlement, the relationship between Europe and Asia, was replicated in the new. The two great blocs of the empire were once again in fatal counterpoise, Antipater holding sovereignty in one bloc, Antigonus controlling the kings and the royal army in the other. The ultimate questions posed by Alexander’s conquests had again been dodged: Was the new empire a European state, controlling Asian territory many times its own size? Or was it essentially Asian, a new incarnation of the Persian empire, with a small European appendage? Lacking a clear answer, the architects of Triparadeisus, Antipater and Antigonus, designed a structure that would straddle the straits of the Hellespont. Their sons would still be contesting the issue at the battle of Ipsus in 301 B.C., after two more decades of war.
There was one further development before the leaders decamped from Triparadeisus. Perdiccas had not had the chance to destroy his papers before being murdered in Egypt, and Antipater now got control of these, presumably receiving them from Peithon and Arrhidaeus. Among them he found a letter from Athens, from Demades, one of his two most trusted political agents (the other was Phocion). Antipater discovered in this document that Demades had plotted against him, instigating Perdiccas, by way of a caustic joke, to invade Europe: “Our cities are held together only by an old and rotting rope.” Antipater was not amused by this mocking reference to his advanced age, and neither was his hotheaded son Cassander. There would be a score to settle with Demades when Antipater returned home—if the old man lived long enough to do so.