THE GREEK REBELLION IN THE WEST

While their compatriots in the east were being slaughtered on Perdiccas’s orders, the Greeks of the Balkan peninsula were also preparing for rebellion. As we have seen, Alexander’s Exiles Decree had stirred them up, and especially the Aetolians and Athenians, who had the most to lose. Those who had already suffered most (the Spartans, defeated by Antipater in 331) or profited most (the Boeotians, who had been freed of Theban hegemony by Alexander’s destruction of the city in 335), stayed aloof from the Greek cause, but for the rest it was a last push for autonomy. Hence the Greeks referred to the war as the Hellenic War, the war for Greek freedom, but it has come to be known as the Lamian War after the site of its most critical phase. ¹⁴Encouraged by Athens and the Aetolians, and seizing the opportunity created by Alexander’s death, a large number of Greek cities joined the rebels. Apart from hostility toward the Exiles Decree, the whole of mainland Greece had been suffering from a severe shortage of grain, and deeply resented the fact that Alexander had denied them supplies while sending tons east to support his campaigns. They were not yet ready to face the economic realities of the new world.

The Athenians employed the skilled mercenary commander Leo sthenes as commander in chief of the allied forces. With the help of some of Harpalus’s money, opportunistically confiscated by the Athenians, he recruited a substantial force, consisting largely of mercenaries disbanded a few months earlier by Alexander’s order from his satraps’ private armies. Further major contributions came from Athens and Aetolia, while other cities did what they could. A formidable army of more than twenty-five thousand marched north to confront Antipater. Olympias, meanwhile, did her best to get her fellow Epirotes to aid the rebels by invading Macedon from the west. ¹⁵

Antipater lacked the forces to be at all certain of defeating the Greeks, and some would have to be left behind to defend Macedon itself. So before doing anything else, he summoned Craterus and Leonnatus, sweetening the appeal in both cases with offers of marriage to daughters of his. Military help was supposed to flow both ways between in-laws. The immediate context of the alliance was the Greek rebellion, but all three had reasons to be dissatisfied at their treatment by Perdiccas in the final Babylon settlement, and the alliance was certainly intended to outlast the immediate turmoil in Greece. Recognizing this, Perdiccas approached both the Aetolians and the Athenians for alliances against the Antipatrid coalition that was forming against him. No one was trying to pretend anymore that civil war between Macedonians was not inevitable.

Craterus was an obvious choice for Antipater, since he was in any case due to repatriate the 11,500 Macedonian veterans under his command; but he still did nothing for months. Was this an Achillean sulk, or appropriate caution? Or, by the time he was ready, was it simply winter, making it difficult to travel across the Taurus Mountains of southeastern Asia Minor?

Craterus finally set out for Greece in the spring of 322—and even then he seems to have been prompted to move only by another factor: Perdiccas was on his way to Asia Minor to install Eumenes in Cappadocia, which meant he would pass through Cilicia. Craterus did not want his troops to be commandeered by Perdiccas in the name of the kings. At the same time, he sent Cleitus with the bulk of the Macedonian fleet to the Aegean; with the Athenians involved, naval warfare was sure to play a part. So Craterus took about six thousand of his men to help Antipater. They were seasoned campaigners, having in many cases served with Alexander ever since the beginning; many of them were in their fifties, some even in their sixties, but they were supreme battlefield warriors. In ancient battles, experience and training often outweighed youth.

Leonnatus came from Phrygia, where he had joined Eumenes in obedience to Perdiccas’s orders, prior to their invasion of Cappadocia. In part, Perdiccas’s Babylonian manipulations had annoyed him, especially because he did not come off as well as expected; in part, Eumenes had informed him that Alexander’s sister Cleopatra was prepared to become his wife. This was undoubtedly Olympias’s doing; having sided with the rebels, she needed to have Antipater replaced in Macedon or face his retaliatory wrath. Cleopatra’s offer decided Leonnatus, and so he rejected Antipater’s daughter and came not so much as an ally of Antipater as a potential usurper of the Macedonian throne; already related to the Argead royal family, he would also be married to Alexander’s blood sister and have the backing of Alexander’s mother. He had long affected a number of mannerisms and extravagances that spoke of royal pretensions. ¹⁶While preparing to go to Greece, he sounded out Eumenes, suggesting that he should join him in his attempt to seize the Macedonian throne. Eumenes must have been tempted, because he was close to Olympias and Cleopatra, but he remained Perdiccas’s man. He not only refused Leonnatus’s offer, but personally traveled to Babylon to inform Perdiccas of Leonnatus’s designs.

Meanwhile, however, before the arrival of either Leonnatus or Craterus, Antipater had marched south to preempt a Thessalian rebellion. Leosthenes marched steadily northward, easily defeating the Boeotians and occupying the vital pass of Thermopylae, the only feasible entrance into central Greece for a land army from the north. The two armies met not far north of Thermopylae. Leosthenes defeated Antipater in battle—the first defeat of a Macedonian army for thirty years—and bottled him up in the town of Lamia. Success bred success: some Thessalians deserted from Antipater’s army and swelled Leosthenes’ ranks, while others barred Antipater’s escape route to the north. Macedon itself was vulnerable—except that Leosthenes could not afford to leave Antipater behind him in Lamia. Antipater managed to secure the town, but spent the winter of 323/322 in danger of being starved out. Leosthenes, however, died in a skirmish outside the town. The burial of his body and those of other early victims of the war occasioned a magnificent funeral speech in Athens from Hyperides, one of the most famous orators of the day. It was the swan song of Athenian democracy and independence. ¹⁷

The new commander of the Greek forces was not the man Leosthenes had been, and the Aetolians were forced by the threat of invasion to return home. The remaining Greeks were still optimistic, but in the early summer of 322 Leonnatus arrived with massive reinforcements. The Greeks attacked before Leonnatus could join up with Antipater in Lamia. The infantry were evenly matched, but the Thessalian cavalry overwhelmed Leonnatus’s cavalry and killed Leonnatus himself. He was not destined after all to become one of the pretenders. But the next day his infantry forced their way into Lamia and Antipater was saved. Given Leonnatus’s ambitions, Antipater was saved in another sense too. The Macedonian army promptly pulled back north with the rescued regent. Central and southern Greece were briefly free of Macedonian control. These were heady but anxious times for the champions of Greek freedom.

Meanwhile, at sea, the main theater of war was the Hellespont, where the Athenian fleet planned to defend their grain route from the Black Sea and do what they could to hamper the progress of the reinforcements coming from Asia with Craterus. The Athenians sent a large fleet to destroy Antipater’s Hellespontine fleet. But Cleitus arrived from Cilicia, and when his ships joined Antipater’s the combined fleet defeated the Athenians twice in short order in June 322, off Abydus in the Hellespont and then off the Aegean island of Amorgos.