THE DEFEAT OF THE PERDICCANS

Antipater left the bulk of his army with Antigonus, taking home mainly men who were due for repatriation. Antigonus was adequately equipped and funded for the coming conflict—and hugely helped by the failure of the two rebel camps to unite. The issue was one that was to plague Eumenes on every campaign: challenges to his leadership. It may not have helped that he was a Greek among Macedonians. Alcetas felt himself to be the natural heir of his brother’s mantle and had more troops in his camp (though his position too was disputed by other senior Macedonians on his staff), but Perdiccas had entrusted the defense of Asia Minor to Eumenes and had expressly made his brother subordinate to him. Neither was prepared to yield overall command of the rebel forces to the other. Antigonus could deal with them s eparately.

He decided to start with Eumenes, who had withdrawn to Cappadocia. This was not a difficult decision, since Eumenes was vulnerable, thanks once again to the leadership issue. One of his senior commanders, a Macedonian, had taken three thousand men and set up on his own. Eumenes had put down the mutiny and punished the ringleaders, but Antigonus was aware of his difficulties. His preparations for battle therefore included approaches to more of Eumenes’ senior officers, and he did not contemplate giving battle until one of the cavalry commanders agreed to defect. Since Eumenes relied heavily on his cavalry and chose the battlefield with that in mind, the mid-battle defection gave Antigonus an easy victory.

Eumenes retreated toward Armenia, where he could find friends and forces, but Antigonus’s cavalry made it impossible for him to get through. For a while, Eumenes tried to survive by guerrilla tactics in the mountains of Cappadocia, but he found that his troops were drifting away. He dismissed the majority of his men, and late in the spring of 319 took refuge with just a few hundred of his officers and Companion Cavalry in the impregnable mountaintop fortress of Nora (in Cappadocia, but no one knows where). The dismissal of his men kept at least some of them loyal for the future, and relieved the pressure on Nora’s very limited space and resources. Space was so limited that Eumenes enforced a regime of vigorous walking for his men, and had the horses half suspended off the ground and goaded into thrashing around with their legs to keep them fit. ¹

Antigonus left a force to besiege Nora and turned his attention to Alcetas. He stormed into Pisidia, but found Alcetas waiting for him, occupying the valley through which he had to pass, near a town called Cretopolis. The rebels suffered a resounding defeat. Alcetas fled from the battlefield and committed suicide. The remainder of the senior former Perdiccans were imprisoned. A couple of years later, they managed to take control of their prison fortress, in a manner that would satisfy a scriptwriter of a Hollywood prison-breakout scene: bribed guards, weapons grabbed from the armory, the brutal warder hurled from the parapet to his death, burning buildings. But they still could not escape, and in the end they were betrayed by one of their number and died defending their former prison. ²

So ended the First War of the Successors. By the autumn of 319, Antigonus was in a hugely powerful position. Much of Asia Minor was under his control. His army, swelled by the remnants of both Eumenes’ and Alcetas’s forces, now numbered seventy thousand, and was strong in every division. And he could keep his troops because, as the official representative of the kings, he could draw on the otherwise impregnable royal treasuries to pay them. In a few months, he had leapt from being one satrap among many to a contender for Alexandrine supremacy, and doubtless that, or something like it, was exactly what was on his mind.

THE REGENCY OF POLYPERCHON

By the time eighty-year-old Antipater got back to Macedon, he had only a few months to live and was too ill even to avenge himself on Olympias for her support of his enemies and for spreading the rumor that he had been responsible for Alexander’s death. His death, in the late summer of 319, threw everything once more into chaos. On his deathbed, he decreed that he should be succeeded as European regent by Polyperchon, and that his son Cassander should be Polyperchon’s second-in-command.

On the face of it, this pair of decisions is puzzling. Why was Cassander, who had so often been his father’s aide, passed over? But when Alexander sent Craterus west to replace Antipater, he sent Polyperchon too, as Antipater’s replacement in the event of Craterus’s death. And indeed Craterus had died, even if not in a way that Alexander could have foreseen. So in appointing Polyperchon, Antipater was carrying out Alexander’s orders, and attempting thereby to legitimate Polyperchon’s regime in these troubled times. In any case, Polyperchon had an impeccable pedigree: he was a member of one of the old royal houses of Upper Macedon, he had been a competent general under both Philip and Alexander, and he had been left in charge of Europe while Antipater was campaigning and negotiating in Asia the previous year. He had risen to the challenge by crushing an uprising in Thessaly, the only outcome of Perdiccas’s attempts to create a second front in Greece.

Cassander was passed over because Antipater wanted to avoid giving the impression that he was trying to set up an Antipatrid dynasty. That would not have gone down well with the Macedonian barons. At any rate, Cassander, consumed by resentment, spent the first few weeks of Polyperchon’s rule trying and failing to drum up sufficient internal support for a coup. He also looked for help from abroad, and naturally first approached those who had shown themselves to be his father’s allies by marrying into the family. But both his in-laws, Ptolemy and Lysimachus, were otherwise engaged, and could do no more than give him their tacit blessing; they did not want to commit themselves militarily. Antigonus, however, was more forthcoming, and when Cassander left Macedon in the autumn of 319, he went to join Antigonus’s court at Celaenae. They put aside their former differences and began a propaganda campaign against Polyperchon, claiming that Antipater had no right to appoint a successor on his own.

After just a few months of “peace,” war was about to break out again. Antigonus set about securing his position in Asia Minor by eliminating potential enemies, particularly the satraps put in place by Antipater the year before at the Triparadeisus conference, who effectively ringed his domain. In Hellespontine Phrygia, Arrhidaeus got wind of his plans and tried by force of arms to take over the independent city of Cyzicus as a bolt-hole. He failed in this, and also in an attempt to rescue Eumenes from Nora, but he provided Antigonus with the pretext he needed to send an army against him. Once Antigonus had pinned Arrhidaeus inside the city of Cius, a city under independent rulership, east of Cyzicus on the Propontis, he marched against Cleitus in Lydia. Cleitus secured his most important towns with garrisons and fled to Macedon. The news he brought left Polyperchon in no doubt about Antigonus’s intentions.

Nicanor, the son of Antipater, fled to Macedon at much the same time. He knew his days were numbered as satrap of Cappadocia. The ongoing negotiations between Antigonus and Eumenes came to a conclusion in the spring of 318. The deal was that if Eumenes would agree to serve him, Antigonus would end the siege of Nora and restore Eumenes to his satrapy, with some additional territories. Nicanor was therefore redundant, in Antigonus’s Asia Minor. Antigonus could afford to be generous with his old friend Eumenes, because now that his breach with Polyperchon was public knowledge, he was doing his best to limit the number of allies his opponent could call on. Eumenes agreed to work with Antigonus, and swore an oath to that effect. Antigonus left him in Cappadocia, where he rounded up the remnants of his former army and held them in readiness for Antigonus’s orders.