Most of Eumenes’ coalition entered the service of Antigonus, giving the one-eyed general a fantastically potent army. Peucestas and Teutamus, who in different ways had secured Eumenes’ downfall, both received high appointments, though Peucestas—whose ambitions were transparent—was also stripped of his power base in Persis. Coalition leaders who could not be reconciled to Eumenes’ defeat were eliminated. Eudamus the elephant master was among these, as was another officer, otherwise unknown, named Celbanus. Antigenes, the captain of the Silver Shields, who had backed Eumenes on many occasions and had taken no part in betraying him, received the cruelest death of any who landed on the wrong side of the succession struggle. One-eye had him burned alive in a pit.

As for the Silver Shields, who had at Gabene shown all their qualities in high relief—arrogance, willfulness, and invincible combat prowess—Antigonus brought their illustrious history to a close. He felt that the empire, now practically hisempire, would be safer without this ungovernable band of supermen. The platoon was broken up, and most of the men were dispatched to remote garrisons throughout Asia. The most unruly were sent to Arachosia, what is now eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. The satrap there, Sibyrtius, was given secret orders by Antigonus to send these men out, in ones and twos, on missions from which they would never return. Like the man they betrayed, they were denied the battlefield deaths that would have suited their glorious careers. Their strength merely seeped away into the dry sands of the East.

3. OLYMPIAS AND CASSANDER (PYDNA AND PELLA, WINTER, EARLY 316 B.C.)

Though she was too far from Gabene to know yet what had taken place there, Olympias had suffered a huge setback with Eumenes’ defeat and death. During the days that Antigonus had wavered over the Greek’s fate, the fate of the royals too was hanging in the balance, for Eumenes was the last general in the field with the ability, and will, to defend them. Perhaps, had Antigonus leaned a hair further toward clemency and taken Eumenes on as consigliere, things might have turned out differently for the Argeads. Eumenes had a gift for argument and persuasion, as well as for deception and manipulation. He might have convinced Antigonus that the united empire could be sustained only under a thriving Argead house. He might have once again erected his magical tent and initiated Antigonus into the cult of Alexander, opening a path toward relief of the conqueror’s mother and son.

But as things were, relief was nowhere in sight. The royal family was beginning to starve. The grim logic of warfare by famine was making its inexorable progress through the city of Pydna. Olympias’ indomitable will meant that the entire population, combatants and civilians alike, was doomed to see the ordeal through to the end, and the end would be terrible indeed.

The town’s meager supplies were stretched to their utmost to permit the survival of the royals and their troops. Enlisted soldiers were allotted about a quart of grain each week, only a few mouthfuls a day. Irregular troops and civilians were given no grain at all. Some survived on butchered horses and pack animals, others on the flesh of those who had already perished. The fodder of the elephants proved the greatest challenge to Pydna’s defenders. Desperate not to lose a precious military resource, they sawed up wood and fed sawdust to the wretched beasts, then watched helplessly as they weakened and died.

At last there was no food at all for the soldiers, and with touching deference they asked Olympias for release from service in order to surrender to Cassander. The queen granted their request. There was not much for them to do anyway, except to hoist dead bodies over the walls when these became too numerous to bury.

What comfort could be offered now to the young Alexander as he stared out at the sea, watching for the masts of a rescue fleet? In theory, his power was such that he could command that sea to drain away, leaving a path of escape back to Asia, the place of his birth. But now his circle of empire had shrunk to a walled-up town filled with bloated, stinking corpses. He was surrounded by a thousand shapes of death, barely preserving his own life with a tiny ration of grain. He was not yet seven years old.

Communications with the royal family’s two principal generals, Polyperchon and Aristonous, were difficult to maintain behind the siege curtain. Aristonous was ably leading the defense of Amphipolis, a Greek city not far to the east, and had inflicted a severe defeat on Cratevas, the general sent by Cassander to attack him. At last, but too late, Olympias had found a soldier with real skill. Polyperchon, her less competent senior commander, continued to hold out in the mountains west of Macedonia but was unable to make headway. His son Alexander, whose name belied both his talents and his fortunes, was still battling fruitlessly in the Peloponnese, trying to enforce his father’s freedom decree. The royalist forces were thus widely scattered, unable to link up with one another or with the Argeads.

As the situation in Pydna grew desperate, Polyperchon devised a plan for the royal family to escape at night in a single warship. He sent a courier to sneak past Cassander’s cordon and deliver a letter to Olympias, informing her when and where the ship would land. This man either was caught or abandoned Polyperchon as so many had done; in either case, his message was intercepted and brought to Cassander. An adept at the use of disinformation, Cassander had the message resealed and delivered to Olympias but also seized the warship on its way to the rendezvous. He aimed not merely at preventing Olympias’ escape but also at destroying her will to resist. The queen went out at night to meet her rescuers, only to find the beach deserted. Her hopes were crushed. She no longer knew whether Polyperchon, whose seal was on the letter, had gone over to the enemy and was leading her into a trap.

Hunger, despair, and isolation finally conquered the proud will of Olympias. Shortly after the night of the missing warship, she sent envoys and opened negotiations with Cassander for surrender. She had nothing to bargain with yet insisted on receiving a guarantee of her own safety. What arrangements she sought, if any, for the young Alexander are not mentioned in our sources. Perhaps she thought her grandson’s chances already so meager that there was no point.

Cassander granted the queen’s demand, presumably swearing an oath that she would not be harmed. Despite all the treacheries of the previous six years, the Macedonians still stood by the value of oaths, fundamental buttresses of the social contract. After his recent victory outside Amphipolis, Aristonous had released his defeated enemy, Cratevas, on the strength of his oath that he would not fight again for Cassander. Even Eumenes, master of deceptions and ruses, prided himself on fidelity to oaths; to win release from the fortress at Nora, he had rewritten the oath of Antigonus rather than swear falsely to the original. Olympias thus had reason to trust that Cassander’s promise would preserve her life. The same could be said of Aristonous, who, after Cassander likewise guaranteed his safety, agreed to surrender Amphipolis.

But the pledges made to these two prisoners were short-lived. Cassander moved quickly to eliminate Aristonous, fearing that the prestige of a former Bodyguard might stir up resentment against him. He turned Aristonous over to the relatives of Cratevas—ironically, the very man whom Aristonous had spared—for judgment. A death sentence was easily obtained and carried out. This aged veteran, the only one of Alexander’s generals who had sought a return to private life, had in the end been drawn back into the power struggle and destroyed by it. There were to be no peaceful retirements for any of Alexander’s top staff.