The fight had gone on for much of the day without resolution, and neither general was willing to break off. Both Eumenes and Antigonus, now three miles from their original positions, once again drew up their lines, this time only four hundred feet apart. The full moon gave enough light for night combat, and it seemed that the battle would begin all over again. Then, suddenly, both sides stood down and grounded their weapons. They were exhausted and starved, having had no real provisions for days. The engagement was ended by mutual consent.

Who had won? Eumenes had inflicted greater casualties and had prevailed in the crucial infantry clash. But when he ordered his men to return to the battlefield and camp there, the prerogative of the victors, they refused. Their worldly goods were with their baggage train, in a different location, and they did not want to be far from these. With rival leaders vying for his men’s favor, Eumenes had to accede. Antigonus, with no such constraints on his authority, marched his weary troops three miles back to where the bodies lay strewn and pitched camp. “Whoever is master of the fallen is winner of the fight,” he declared, though he made haste to cremate his dead the next day, before Eumenes could learn their number.

Even if they had won by a technicality, Antigonus’ troops felt defeated. Antigonus was determined to get them out of the area, lest they need to fight again with low morale. When Eumenes’ heralds arrived to arrange recovery of the dead, Antigonus set the ritual for the following day, but broke camp during the night and marched off at top speed. It was the final trick in a campaign that had seen many tricks, feints, and night marches. Eumenes, told by his scouts that Antigonus was gone, did not attempt to pursue. His men were exhausted. He would let them rest for the winter and prepare for the next showdown.

Antigonus and Eumenes had shown in Paraetacene they were well-matched opponents, both shrewd and inventive men. Each by now knew the other’s strengths and weaknesses. Their record against each other was dead even, counting Orcynia as a victory for Antigonus, the Coprates River as a victory for Eumenes, and Paraetacene as a tie. There was a collective sense in their two camps that a great duel was under way, with the future of the Argead dynasty hanging in the balance. Eumenes, it was understood, backed Olympias and the young Alexander. In victory he would defer to the Argeads, if only because he could not become one himself. Antigonus, as was equally well known, deferred to no one. His plans for the empire, were he to prevail over Eumenes, were unclear, but they surely did not include taking orders from a seven-year-old half-Bactrian boy.

As the troops of both men went into separate winter quarters, it was clear to all that a resolution of the duel was not far off. But just how close it was, or what form it would take, could not have been foreseen by any of them.

10

The Closing of the Tombs

316–308 B.C

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More than six years after his death in Babylon, Alexander still held the world in thrall. In Europe, Olympias and the young Alexander had briefly been thrust to the peak of power, largely by virtue of their kinship with him. In Asia, Eumenes had won crucial allies by meeting with them in the presence of Alexander’s ghost. In Egypt, Ptolemy guarded Alexander’s corpse, the sacred object he would soon house in an enormous memorial called simply the Sema, or Tomb. The body would continue to attract pilgrims at this site until the third century A.D., after which it disappeared, perhaps destroyed in the religious riots that were then roiling the city.

Everywhere in the empire, veterans of Alexander’s campaign found they were regarded as heroes and supermen, and none were more heroic than the Silver Shields. The whole world knew of the trust Alexander had placed in them, the perilous assignments he had given them, the honor he had paid them by coating their gear with silver. Six years after the king’s death, they were the last unit of his veterans that remained intact, undiluted by more recent recruits. Their unity gave them political power. In army assemblies, the Shields made their voices heard loud and clear, all three thousand seeming to speak as one through their captains, Antigenes and Teutamus. Their privileges were beyond dispute. So was their devastating effectiveness in battle, the result of decades of fighting together as a corps d’elite.

By the time of the battle of Paraetacene, the Silver Shields were old men. Alexander had sent them home eight years earlier, along with the other veterans decommissioned at Opis, but they had not gotten far before the king died and the resulting power struggle brought them back into action. There was no longer any retirement in view for them, nor any home or family to return to. The army camp had become their home. It was their family as well, for many of them had wives or mistresses, and a few had children, accompanying them on their marches. These were toted along behind the army in a vast baggage train, which also held piles of treasure they had amassed from plunder, pay, and the rewards bestowed on them by commanders, some by Alexander himself.

The Shields had followed Eumenes for almost three years before the battle of Paraetacene, ever since Polyperchon first ordered them to do so. Their allegiance had withstood threats, bribes, and challenges, a striking example of constancy in a treacherous era. Some followed Eumenes out of reverence for the joint kings; others, because he paid well; others, because they thought he would win in the end and improve all their fortunes. But true loyalty was not among their motives. They revered no commander except the dead Alexander; indeed, they scorned others for failing to compare with him. Eumenes had resorted to flattery to control them, addressing them as “my protectors” and “the last hope for my survival,” and reminding them constantly of their glorious past. It was theywho had made Alexander great, Eumenes told them. Above all he used the Alexander tent, the penumbra of the conqueror’s spiritual power, to bind their two senior officers, Antigenes and Teutamus, to his service.

By thus wheedling, fawning, and manipulating, Eumenes had retained the right, granted to him by Polyperchon, to lead the Silver Shields. But it was a strange sort of leadership, provisional and weak. It had to be reinforced by oaths of allegiance, administered by Eumenes to the Silver Shields at regular intervals. The bonds that tied Alexander’s greatest warriors to a Greek, a former bookkeeper, a man two decades their junior, were not adamantine. The bribes and threats of four Macedonian generals had thus far failed to break them. But the greatest of those, Antigonus One-eye, had not yet given up the attempt.

1. THE BATTLE OF GABENE (WINTER, EARLY 316 B.C.)

As he rested his army in Media, Antigonus looked back on the battle of Paraetacene with misgivings. He had been outfought and was now outnumbered as a result. His infantry phalanx had given way at its first contact with the Silver Shields and hereafter would be even more intimidated by them. Antigonus faced uncertain odds in another open-field battle—but perhaps that was a risk he didn’t have to run. He still had recourse to his favorite stratagem, already used against other foes to great effect: the surprise attack.

From Antigonus’ winter quarters to those of Eumenes was a march of almost a month through arable country but only nine days through a sulfurous wilderness where nothing grew or lived. No one could expect an army to come through that desert, and no one would expect an attack during winter, a piercingly cold season in these parts. Eumenes was so sure of his safety that he had divided his army into widely spaced camps stretching more than a hundred miles, as Antigonus had learned from his spies. If taken by surprise, the troops in these camps would never have time to combine forces. Unit by unit, they would surrender, until Eumenes, and his incomparable Silver Shields, could be ensnared.