After Alexander’s death his generals practiced, with all too great a fidelity, the lessons they had learned. They put cloned armies in the field, each with its phalanx, cavalry, and Hypaspist components, some also with elephant herds. They gave familiar names to these units—“foot companions,” “companion cavalry”—to remind veterans of their old assignments. They followed the routes and seasons of march Alexander had laid out, through fertile plains and valleys that could provision vast numbers, making campaigns across the length and breadth of Asia a routine affair. A new era in warfare had begun—the age of professionalized, internationalized, numerically supersized Hellenistic armies.
Alexander had also nurtured in his staff an endless appetite for command and conquest. Of his seven Bodyguards, only one, Aristonous—an older man who likely held his post from before Alexander’s reign—attempted something like a retirement, and that turned out to be short-lived, as will be seen. The other Bodyguards never ceased to build power, enlarge armies, and undermine rivals on the model of their master. Ptolemy seized North Africa, and Lysimachus Thrace; Peithon made a try for Bactria and failed but had not given up his ambitions there; Peucestas was enlarging power and popularity in his satrapy, Persis. Leonnatus and Perdiccas had been killed in attempts to gain, or preserve, control of the entire empire. Craterus, whose stature equaled theirs, though he did not belong to the Bodyguard, died trying to deprive Perdiccas of that control.
New contestants had emerged to replace those carried off the field. Antigonus, only a sidelined satrap at the time of Alexander’s death, established himself through shrewd generalship as the leading power in Asia. Polyperchon, another mid-level officer, was battling Cassander for control of Europe. Waiting in the wings was an even newer contender, Seleucus, as yet only satrap of Babylon serving more powerful masters but destined to fight Antigonus for almost two decades to come. And then there was Eumenes, anomalous Eumenes, the Greek who had gone from scribe to soldier to general to outlaw and finally to head of the royal army and standard-bearer of the kings. Though Eumenes claimed not to share the ambitions of the Macedonians, he somehow found himself in constant conflict with them, fighting in part for the royal family, in part for his own survival, and in part for the ghost of Alexander, whom he had enthroned as the spectral leader of his cause.
By the strange peripeties of the civil war, Antigonus and Eumenes had by turns held the same high office, commander in chief of Asia. Each could, and did, trumpet his own authority and attack that of the other. Eumenes bore letters carrying the seal of the kings, as well as others from Olympias, ordering the imperial bureaucracy to follow only him.Antigonus derided these orders, reminding all who would listen that Eumenes was a foreigner and a condemned criminal besides. At the heart of the dispute was the problem old man Antipater had created with his choice of successor: Did Polyperchon, the official appointee, speak for the monarchy? Or did Cassander, Antipater’s son, who claimed his father’s office as a kind of natural right?
In the five years since Alexander’s death the issue of legitimacy had become so vexed that, to some, it had no doubt ceased to matter. Yet the monarchy still existed; the joint kings possessed a legitimacy that would not die. The orders issued in their name opened the treasuries of Asia, and the years of their “reign” furnished the dates atop imperial documents. Their fate was central to the future of the empire, and that fate now rested on two pairs of antagonists, fighting parallel duels for control of two continents: Polyperchon and Cassander in Europe, and in Asia, their respective allies, the two greatest generals to emerge from Alexander’s military academy, Eumenes of Cardia and Antigonus One-eye.
1. THE ROYAL FAMILY (GREECE, SUMMER 318 B.C.)
Alexander’s son had reached his fifth birthday. He was old enough to be aware of his surroundings and his unique place in the world. He knew now why he had three armed noblemen stationed around him as Bodyguards, as well as highborn children who behaved more like servants than playmates. Perhaps he understood something of the turbulent currents that had swept him from one guardian to another and landed him with Polyperchon, the careworn general who now dragged him along on his campaign through Greece.
Alexander had been paired throughout his young life with his bizarre counterpart in joint rule, the half-witted Philip. That senior monarch held a higher rank and possessed four Bodyguards to Alexander’s three (the canonical number, seven, was split between the two). Some officials spoke and acted as though Philip had sole rule, with young Alexander his designated heir, but the situation was far from clear. At five years old Alexander perhaps already had more cognitive function than his debilitated half uncle.
It was inevitable that the two monarchs would come into conflict, especially after Philip wed the grasping, willful Adea. Philip’s interests, as Adea insistently defined them, diverged from his nephew’s. If Adea could but conceive—as she no doubt tried fervently to do—the hopes of the royal house would rest on her unborn child, a full-blooded Argead, rather than on the half-breed son of the dead conqueror. And if her child should then be born male, the young Alexander and his barbarian mother would be instantly disinherited, or killed.
But after three years as King Philip’s queen, Adea had not conceived. She clearly needed a new strategy in the great dynastic game. Events around her were moving fast, bringing opportunities as well as dangers. She knew that Polyperchon had written to the dowager queen Olympias, urging her to leave Epirus and take charge of her grandson in Macedon. Olympias had so far declined but might change her mind at any moment; Adea had no wish to compete with the only woman in Europe as tough as herself. But the offer also showed that Polyperchon was unsteady, set back on his heels by the rebellion of Cassander. That rebellion might in the end unseat him—especially if Adea threw her husband’s royal weight behind it. To Philip, all masters were alike, but to cunning Adea, a shift of allegiance might mean the difference between servitude and sovereignty.
Just how Adea got her husband out of Polyperchon’s grasp is unclear. The regent had initially toted Philip with him as he made his way into Greece, fighting now here, now there to install his allies and evict Cassander’s. Perhaps Polyperchon was distracted by these fights and neglected to watch his royal ward. Or perhaps he was glad to let Philip go after the disturbing episode at Phocion’s hearing, when he had prevented violence only by forcefully restraining the maddened monarch. However it happened, Adea got her husband clear of Polyperchon’s power and returned him to Macedonia. Working as his agent, she laid plans to ally with the rebel Cassander, now hunkered down behind the walls of Piraeus. Perhaps the son of Antipater might be her route to supreme power, in place of the son she now feared she would never have.
2. POLYPERCHON (
THE PELOPONNESE, SUMMER 318 B.C.)
Polyperchon began his campaign through Greece with many reasons to be confident. He carried with him the legitimacy bequeathed by Antipater and an army of more than twenty thousand Macedonians. He also brought with him, across the isthmus of Corinth and into the Peloponnese, his supreme weapon, a lumbering, trumpeting herd of Indian elephants, each ridden by its own mahout.
These stalwart beasts, acquired in India by Alexander, had over the past eight years walked the entire length of the empire. They had been brought westward by Craterus over the mountains of what is now Pakistan and through the deserts of Afghanistan and Iran. While Alexander lived, they stood in a circle around his tent, one of the concentric rings of his spectacular honor guard. In Babylon, Perdiccas had used them to trample the leaders of the infantry rebellion; in Egypt he sent them into the Nile, causing the erosion that destroyed his army and his reputation. After Perdiccas’ murder the herd was split between old man Antipater and Antigonus One-eye at Triparadeisus, and Antipater brought his half across the Hellespont. The survivors, sixty-five in number, now made the journey into southern Greece in the train of Polyperchon, the first of their species ever seen on European soil.