Eumenes took over the administrative reins in Cappadocia, but there was still plenty of work to be done in the area, and Perdiccas stayed near at hand. First, having opened up the Royal Road by conquering Cappadocia, he did the same for the main southern artery to Syria, which ran through arid Lycaonia, a land more of nomads than settlers. It was another brutal campaign, in which the inhabitants of one town preferred mass suicide to mass execution. Then he moved south to winter quarters in Cilicia, and early the next year continued the work of pacification in eastern Pisidia, another region that Alexander had bypassed. But Armenia remained troubled: the remnants of the rebel Cappadocian army rallied there, and Neoptolemus, the general Perdiccas had sent to the province, began behaving more like a satrap than a general. He was, after all, a proud scion of the Molossian royal house. Perdiccas instructed Eumenes to help Neoptolemus pacify Armenia, and at the same time to check his ambitions. There was no reason for him to doubt the wisdom of such a move, but within a year the personal animosity between his two lieutenants would bear bitter fruit. Nevertheless, Perdiccas could be pleased with his work; by the summer of 321, Asia Minor was a tidier bundle than it had been before.

The tensions between the major players, however, were only getting worse. Perdiccas’s breach with Antipater and Craterus was now almost irreparable, with only the prospect of his marriage to Nicaea to redeem the situation. And over the past few months news had been arriving of disturbing events in Egypt. Ptolemy had been instructed to retain the former satrap, Cleomenes, as his second-in-command, but instead he had him killed, on the charge of embezzlement, while presenting the killing to his new subjects as the removal of a harsh and hated administrator. This was sheer propaganda, since Ptolemy kept all the money Cleomenes had raised, and would prove to be just as exploitative of Egypt’s resources. More to the point were his suspicions that Cleomenes had been in touch with Perdiccas, hoping to retain Egypt for himself, or at any rate that he was “a friend of Perdiccas and therefore no friend of his.” ²

Moreover, in 322 Ptolemy also annexed the five cities of Cyrenaica (northeast Libya, in modern terms) as a province of Egypt, in order to control the caravan trade from the interior of Africa, and especially the export of silphium, a plant (now extinct), unique to the region, that was widely used around the Mediterranean for culinary and medicinal purposes, especially contraception. The constitution of the cities was changed and a pro-Ptolemaic oligarchy put in place, supported by garrisons and a military governor. ³This irritated Perdiccas. In the first place, it went against his abandonment of Alexander’s “Last Plans” and his general focus on consolidation rather than expansion. In the second place, Ptolemy did not ask anyone’s permission before attacking his neighbors; he just went ahead and did it, on the pretext that he had been invited by the oligarchic faction of the cities. Satraps were expected to protect their borders, and if pushed Ptolemy would have argued that that was all he was doing, but still, it rather looked as though he was flexing his muscles, as an equal rather than a subordinate of Perdiccas.

PERDICCAS’S CHOICE

Olympias was still nervous about Antipater. Once he had finished settling affairs in southern Greece, he was bound to punish her for her support of the Greek rebellion. She came up with a bold ploy. Knowing that Nicaea was betrothed to Perdiccas and was even now on her way to Pisidia for the wedding, she simultaneously sent Cleopatra to Sardis, and wrote to Eumenes suggesting that Perdiccas might like to marry her daughter instead. She needed Perdiccas to be Antipater’s enemy, not his son-in-law. She needed Antipater to be distracted by war in Asia and unable to turn his attention to Epirus. The plan worked perfectly.

Olympias’s overall intention, now and in the following years, was to see her grandson Alexander IV gain the Macedonian throne, even though the chances of his attaining his majority must have appeared very bleak. Offering Cleopatra to Perdiccas was a major plank in the scheme. She wanted to see Perdiccas arrive in Macedon married to Alexander’s sister, welcomed by Alexander’s mother, with two kings and Alexander’s corpse in his train, and at the head of the army with which Alexander had conquered the east. Under such circumstances, Antipater would have had no future. Barring unforeseeable accidents, Perdiccas would have been the sole ruler of the empire until Alexander IV came of age, with Olympias by his side.

Perdiccas was tempted: marriage to Cleopatra would accelerate the fulfillment of his own wishes. While his brother Alcetas insisted on the prudence of marrying Nicaea, Eumenes pointed out the advantages of Cleopatra. The marriage to Nicaea went ahead, with due ceremony and courtesy, but before long Perdiccas sent Eumenes to Cleopatra in Sardis with gifts and an offer of marriage. He seemed prepared to put aside his new bride almost immediately. He obviously felt full of confidence and well able to handle all his rivals. There is no other explanation for his behavior. His marriage to Nicaea was the one chance for peace between himself and Antipater. He cannot have thought that he could be married to both Nicaea and Cleopatra: they were contradictory strategies. Marriage to Nicaea would make him Antipater’s equal; marriage to Cleopatra would be a springboard to the throne or regency of Macedon. He would rule not only Asia but Europe as well, all of Alexander’s empire. Perdiccas was at last declaring his hand, as if it had not been obvious from the start. Alcetas might argue that his peaceful return to Pella depended on a rapprochement with Antipater, and that Eumenes’ course meant war, but Perdiccas no longer cared, or was prepared to take the risk.

A puzzling incident, however, suggests that he had not secured the full loyalty of his army. Two more formidable Macedonian women were involved. Cynnane was the half sister of Alexander the Great and the widow of Amyntas, one of the possible rivals who had been assassinated on Alexander’s orders. Cynnane had fallen out with Antipater, and decided to take herself and her daughter off to Perdiccas in Asia Minor. Naturally, Antipater did not want to see Perdiccas’s court enhanced by yet another member of the royal family, and he tried, but failed, to use force of arms to stop Cynnane leaving.

So Cynnane arrived in Asia Minor along with her daughter Adea and a strong escort. So far from welcoming her, Perdiccas sent Alcetas to try to dissuade her. Whenever precisely the incident took place—it was not long after his marriage to Nicaea—he must still have been concerned not to anger Antipater. If he already had designs on Cleopatra, he was not yet ready to make them public. But Cynnane’s bodyguards resisted Alcetas, and in the fracas Cynnane was killed. ⁴

Perdiccas’s Macedonian troops, still loyal to the Argead house, were outraged by the murder and rioted. Cynnane had intended for Adea to marry Philip III, and the only way Perdiccas could calm things down was by letting the marriage go ahead. The situation must have been truly desperate for him to agree. He knew that, even though still a teenager, Adea (who took the name Eurydice on her marriage) was not to be trifled with. Both she and her mother had been trained in the arts of war. This union of “an Amazon and an idiot” ⁵was sure to undermine Perdiccas’s control of the king, but at least he had restored order, for a while, among his troops.

In the meantime, his marriage to Nicaea afforded the world a breathing space from war. But it proved to be brief. In the autumn of 321, back in Sardis after his campaigns, Perdiccas summoned Antigonus, to question him about his failure to support Eumenes in Cappadocia. But Perdiccas had tactlessly insulted Menander, the satrap of Lydia, the capital city of which was Sardis. Cleopatra was used to wielding power: she had ruled Molossia as queen for a number of years after the death of her husband. In order to flatter her, Perdiccas had put her in charge of the province, and demoted Menander to be her second-in-command, responsible for the military but not for the administration.