Antipater went on his way to prepare for the battle with Eumenes. Cleopatra, the damsel in the tower keep, stayed where she was, once again friendless, husbandless, and alone.

7. PTOLEMY (SYRIA AND JERUSALEM, SUMMER 320 B.C.)

Seeing his former comrades busy fighting one another, Ptolemy, safely ensconced in Egypt, chose once again to pursue his own interests. His new realm was ample, nicely enlarged by the additions of Cyprus and Cyrene, but a choice tract to the east, now nearly vacant of Macedonian forces, seemed the perfect way to complete his empire-in-miniature. His predecessors the pharaohs had long coveted Syria and Palestine and had often occupied them; wealthy provinces with well-equipped ports, they provided a valuable buffer against attacks from the east. Ptolemy had narrowly survived such an attack, and though his father-in-law, Antipater, was for the moment an ally, he might not always be one—especially since Ptolemy planned to insult the old man’s daughter by making a queen of her bridesmaid, Berenice.

In the north of the realm that Ptolemy sought lay the small walled city of Jerusalem, populated by a race of curious monotheists whom the Greeks would soon know as Ioudaioi.The Jews had thus far remained nearly invisible to Alexander and his generals, though the Macedonians had crossed right through their territory and even, perhaps, entered the holy city. Not a single historian of the Alexander period mentions the Jews or Jerusalem, an omission that a later writer, the Romanized Jew Josephus, takes as a sign of ill will. Indeed, no Greek writer before Alexander’s time shows any awareness of the Jews, except Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle’s, and he seems to have encountered only expatriates living in Egypt.

Ptolemy, however, knew a lot about the Jews, enough to use their own religious practices against them. He had learned that their calendar was divided into seven-day weeks, each one containing a Sabbath on which all labor, including the bearing of arms, was forbidden. Ptolemy therefore planned his entry into Jerusalem to coincide with a Sabbath day. The Jews stood by their ancient code and did not raise their hands against him. Ptolemy gained a bloodless victory and a rich new addition to his territory. Alexandria, Ptolemy’s new capital, began to fill up with Jewish captives and emigrants, soon becoming the most vital Jewish center outside Jerusalem itself.

Thus do the Jews make their entry onto the stage of European history, as pious dupes, conquered by one of Alexander’s generals because they would not abandon Moses’ laws.

8. EUMENES, ANTIGONUS, AND ANTIPATER (

ANATOLIA, WINTER, LATE 320 B.C.)

There is a legend that circulated in the ancient world, that while Alexander the Great was alive, a captured pirate was brought before him for punishment. Alexander was outraged by the man’s depredations and asked what right he had to trouble the seas. “The same right you have to trouble the world,” the pirate replied. “Only since I do so with a small ship, I’m called a robber; you use a great fleet and are called a ruler.” The anecdote may be spurious but makes an important point. Even while Alexander lived, the political goals of his campaign were not always easy to discern; a cynic might regard it as a global plundering raid. Now that he was dead, the piratical side of the Macedonian army was coming increasingly to the fore.

The three generals now stalking through Asia Minor—Eumenes the outlaw and his pursuers Antipater and Antigonus One-eye—understood the terms on which the coming war would be fought. Strength depended on troop loyalty, and loyalty depended on loot. Soldiers who had served with Alexander already owned piles of loot, their share of the riches stripped from the Persians, and they hauled this around through Asia in great, bulky baggage trains. But somehow their stash never seemed large enough. Lacking any home or national cause, lacking any sense of what the Argead royal house wanted from them, they had only money as their raison d’être. They would fight for the generals who provided it, against others who did not.

Antigonus One-eye had the upper hand in this new kind of warfare, since he had the right, as commander in chief of Asia, to draw from imperial treasuries. His written orders, signed by compliant King Philip, could unlock burgeoning storehouses of silver like the one in Cyinda, guarded by the impassable Silver Shields. With such wealth he could try to buy a victory over Eumenes rather than win one on the battlefield—for there he would have to face Eumenes’ highly trained cavalry. That corps had already brought down Craterus, the best field general of Alexander’s staff, and trampled him under its pounding hooves.

Eumenes, for his part, was poor, but being an outlaw, he could steal from the rich. Asia Minor was filled with wealthy estates and towns populated by potential slaves. In Alexander’s day, the army had been allowed to reap such plunder only on enemy territory. But for Eumenes the whole empire was enemy territory, since the empire had condemned him to death. He began allowing his men to seize estates in Anatolia and sell them back to their owners for extortionary sums, thereby raising a sizable war chest. This strategy had a double benefit in that it embarrassed his enemies Antipater and Antigonus, who were in charge of Asian affairs but unable or unwilling to stop the shakedowns. It was theywho were held responsible by the peoples of Anatolia, not Eumenes. Indeed the popularity of the outlaws only increased as they picked their enemies’ pockets.

Antigonus One-eye tried to fight fire with fire by offering a price for Eumenes’ life. One day Eumenes returned to camp to find his soldiers studying leaflets: Antigonus would give a hundred talents for Eumenes’ severed head—a prize that would test any man’s loyalty, unless Eumenes did something to counter it. The wily Greek hastily convened an assembly of the troops and stood to speak before them. He thanked them for standing by their oaths of allegiance—no one, of course, had yet had time to do otherwise—and “revealed” that he had circulated the leaflets as a test, a test his army had passed admirably. Antigonus could never have written them, he reasoned; any general who offered bounties would create a weapon that could be turned back against him. Perhaps some of Eumenes’ listeners bought that logic, and perhaps others admired the cleverness of his ruse; but all were convinced by the recent raids that their best hope of riches lay in protecting Eumenes, not killing him. They voted on the spot to vastly increase their leader’s security, supplying him a bodyguard of a thousand picked troops.

Eumenes struck back against Antigonus by moving to Celaenae in Phrygia, One-eye’s own vacant capital, and plundering his satrapy all through that winter. Antigonus did not challenge him there, but Antipater, with his more seasoned troops, made several sallies. The contest in Phrygia between Eumenes and Antipater, old enemies since the days before Alexander’s march, is known in great detail, thanks to two precious pages of Arrian’s Events After Alexanderfound in a medieval palimpsest (a parchment rubbed out and overwritten by economy-minded scribes). The erased passage has just now awakened from its millennium-long sleep, thanks to digital-imaging technologies. It gives a painful glimpse of how much was lost with the extinction of this work.

Eumenes continued his hit-and-run raids on a wider scale than before, striking in many directions at once so Antipater could not pin him down. He gave his captains use of his siege machines to make their job easier. In a short time they collected some eight hundred talents from the hapless peoples of Phrygia and distributed this loot among the delighted rank and file. Eumenes grew in stature as his men grew richer, while Antipater began to look like a paper tiger. “In full view of Antipater and his army, the [Phrygians] were being seized, their estates were burned down, and their goods were sold off as booty,” Arrian wrote. “They regarded Antipater as nothing more than a spectator of their misfortunes.”