But Eumenes’ tactics could not succeed forever. His enemies would eventually corner him, or cut him off from food and plunder, thus robbing him of his army’s loyalty. Already he had seen disaffection among his troops; a corps of three thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry had deserted from Celaenae and gone on the move, their camp some distance away. Eumenes, borrowing one of Alexander’s signature stratagems, sent an elite force of strong, fleet men on an all-night march. These took the deserters entirely by surprise and captured them without bloodshed. Eumenes executed the leaders of the mutiny but reabsorbed the troops, dispersing them among more reliable units and courting their favor with handouts. With both Antipater and Antigonus coming after him, he could not afford to lose experienced soldiers.
Eumenes’ best hope was to join forces with his fellow outlaws, the other former leaders of Perdiccas’ regime. Each of them still controlled an army of his own: Alcetas, Perdiccas’ brother, had considerable forces, while Perdiccas’ brother-in-law Attalus had money to spare from the funds he had seized. Eumenes reached out to these two highborn Macedonians as well as to two other Perdiccans, Polemon and Docimus, all four of whom were gathered in nearby Pisidia. Eumenes’ strategy proposal is preserved in the now-legible palimpsest. If all five combined forces, Eumenes argued, they could control western Asia for a long time, living off the land and embarrassing their enemies. Antipater and Antigonus would be despised for their weakness, and defections from their armies would increase. Eventually, these two would negotiate a peace in which the Perdiccans would be pardoned and restored to the posts they held under the Babylon settlement. Significantly, Eumenes envisioned not a final victory but a return to unity and the status quo ante. His crimes, perhaps, were not beyond forgiveness. The Macedonians had condemned him in a fit of rage and might relent; they might cease fighting him once they saw he had no wish to fight back.
Eumenes ended his appeal with deference, saying that anyone who had a better plan should bring his ideas forward. Humility was Eumenes’ best hope of success, for the men he was addressing did not like, trust, or respect him. Alcetas had once before refused to help Eumenes, even when Perdiccas ordered him to do so. If Alcetas hated Eumenes then, as a Greek who was too clever and had too much influence over his brother, he hated him more now that Eumenes had won great glory on the battlefield. Similar jealousies gnawed at Attalus, Polemon, and Docimus, members of an aristocratic warrior caste who did not like being put in the shade by an upstart foreigner.
The issue of who would command the joint forces was held hostage to these rivalries. Alcetas sought the top post for himself, aiming especially at control of the native Macedonians in Eumenes’ infantry, sturdy Alexander veterans all. But Eumenes was unwilling to concede command. In his own mind he was no longer court Greek, servant to the Macedonian warrior elite, but a high-ranking general with proven talents. He could accept being second to someone of Perdiccas’ stature, but surely not to an Alcetas or an Attalus. These men had been hissubordinates not long ago, or at least so Perdiccas, and Alexander himself, had wanted.
In the end there was no reconciling these divergent views of Eumenes’ rank, and the five-way parley broke up without agreement. The coalition that could have saved all the Perdiccans was never formed. All would face their enemies on their own terms, and Eumenes, for his part, would face them alone.
9. ANTIGONUS, CASSANDER, ANTIPATER, AND THE KINGS (
ANATOLIA, WINTER, LATE 320 B.C.)
Meanwhile, farther north in Anatolia, dissension and defection were also afflicting Eumenes’ enemies, the new custodians of the joint kings. Despite their control of the exchequer, old man Antipater and Antigonus One-eye could not suppress the message that Eumenes’ banditry had sent: piracy pays. Antigonus found some of his troops heeding that message and taking to the hills, just as Eumenes had foreseen in his proposal to Alcetas and the others. A troop of three thousand infantry broke away from Antipater’s army that winter, with them an officer, Holcias, known to be a Perdiccan sympathizer. They had occupied high ground in Cappadocia, a safe place from which to plunder surrounding lands. Antigonus feared they would join Alcetas’ or Eumenes’ army, but he could not incur ill will among his loyal troops by massacring their comrades.
In two years of civil war Antigonus had grown adept at covert operations, and the current crisis called for one of these. He sent out a high officer named Leonidas to the rebels, telling him to gain their trust by pretending to join their ranks. Warmly welcomed by the rebel band and even elected general, Leonidas led the men down from the heights and into an open plain. There, by prearrangement, Antigonus’ cavalry was waiting. With level ground on which to mount charges, Antigonus easily captured the rebel leaders and forced them to swear an oath: to depart Asia with their followers and never return. It was a shame to lose so many soldiers but better than having them join up with the Perdiccan armies.
A worse problem for Antigonus was the quarrel brewing between himself and old man Antipater. This rift had been brought on by Antipater’s son Cassander. The boy had come to mistrust Antigonus, to whom he had been made second-in-command, and had gone to see his father in Phrygia to complain (what his grounds were is unclear). Antipater trusted his son’s qualms enough to summon Antigonus to Phrygia and to change the balance of power resolved at Triparadeisus. Then, Antigonus had been given charge of the kings and leadership of the scrappy veterans of Alexander’s army. Now Antipater took away both these tokens of authority and brought them under his own control. In exchange he turned over to Antigonus the European recruits he himself commanded, swapping troops so that the royal army stayed with the kings. Antipater also made clear a change in his near-term plans. He would return to Europe and let Antigonus prosecute the war against Eumenes without him. After tangling ineffectually with that sly Greek for several long winter months, the aged soldier-statesman was ready to go home.
Antipater collected the royal family and his son Cassander and made for the Hellespont. Asia had brought him little but travail and humiliation since he first arrived there, and he was destined to suffer one last indignity on its shores. As his column made its way through Anatolia, Adea, King Philip’s grasping young wife, began reminding the soldiers of their long-deferred bonus pay. The royal army mutinied once again. Antipater could appease them only by feigning that money was waiting just ahead at Abydus, on the shores of the Hellespont. Having lured them to that crossing point, Antipater slipped across the straits in the dead of night with the kings and a few top officers. The stranded army had little choice but to follow the next day and return to Europe, where Antipater was better able to control them and their teenage queen.
The joint kings had left Asia for good, together with much of the grande arméethat had fought under Alexander. What their countrymen made of these unruly veterans on their return, or of the strange Bactrian woman and half-breed toddler, Alexander’s next of kin, whom they now beheld for the first time, or of the bizarre living war machines called elephants that lumbered in their train, has not been recorded by any ancient writer. Indeed ancient historians seem not to have marked the significance of this crossing, with the exception of Arrian, who chose it as the end point of his Events After Alexander.
It was indeed a terminus, the end of a daring experiment in cross-continental monarchy. Alexander the Great had started that experiment, and Perdiccas had tried, however incompetently, to maintain it. By a unilateral decision, Antipater ended it and repatriated the Argead house, severing it from Bactria and Babylon and restoring it to the foothills of the Balkans. Asia might remain part of the Macedonian empire, but it would never again be the center, as Alexander had dreamed and planned.