MACEDON IN TURMOIL
Cassander’s takeover of Athens was a major blow to Polyperchon, but worse was to follow. In the summer of 317, Polyperchon was in Epirus, with Alexander IV, negotiating with the Aetolians to the south and arranging for Olympias’s return to Macedon. She had finally agreed to take up his offer of being the official guardian of her grandson. One wonders what the first meeting was like between Olympias and the boy king—and his Bactrian mother. Taking advantage of Polyperchon’s absence, and his lack of success as a military leader, Adea Eurydice had her husband (a pawn, as throughout his life) write to all the major players, announcing that he was ordering Polyperchon to resign the regency and his command of the armed forces in favor of Cassander. At last she was operating with the degree of freedom she had tried to win at Triparadeisus. She was defeated then by Antipater, but clearly did not hold a grudge against his son. And now she was insisting that, in these troubled times, legitimacy lay with her and her husband, rather than with Alexander IV and Olympias.
The existence of two kings had always been anomalous, and potentially explosive. Now the two courts formed separate camps, and there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the final showdown had begun. Only one of the kings would survive this crisis. Cassander made a flying visit to Macedon to formalize his assumption of the regency, but then returned to his campaigns in the Peloponnese, where he was trying to recover the cities that Polyperchon had gained the year before. He expected to wrap things up soon, and then return to Macedon, but in the event he got held up at the siege of Tegea.
It did not take Polyperchon long to gather his forces to attack Adea Eurydice in Macedon, with Olympias at the symbolic head of an army that consisted largely of troops lent by the Molossian king. With Cassander tied up in the south, Adea came out to meet them at the head of her troops. Her bid for power came to an abrupt end when she was deserted by her men, who had no desire to fight the mother and son of Alexander. They had to choose between two Argead kings, and the presence of Olympias tipped the scales away from the half-wit. Besides, Philip had not and was presumably not likely to father any heirs.
Adea Eurydice and Philip III fell into Olympias’s ungentle hands, and found Polyperchon disinclined to interfere in her vengeance. She imprisoned them in tiny, windowless cells in Pydna, and set about a purge in Macedon. While removing dozens of potential enemies among the Macedonian nobility, she focused particularly on Antipater’s family, claiming that she was avenging the poisoning of her son. She had Nicanor killed and scattered the ashes of another of Antipater’s sons, Iolaus, who had been Alexander’s cupbearer and therefore the prime suspect in the alleged poisoning. If Heracles and Barsine were in Macedon, this is presumably when they fled to Pergamum, where they took up residence under Antigonus’s protection.
Olympias’s purge sped to its inevitable conclusion, and she took the momentous step of killing Alexander’s half brother, the legitimate king, and his royal wife. Reputedly, she sent nineteen-year-old Adea hemlock, a noose, and a sword, for her to choose. Adea chose the noose, but spited Olympias by using her own girdle. 10The fact that Philip was a king, and had been for over six years, did not deter Olympias; it was more relevant that he was the rival to her grandson, in whose name she was now the effective ruler of Macedon.
But this was her last stroke; Cassander had abandoned his war in the Peloponnese against Polyperchon’s son Alexander, and was on his way north. He knew he could expect support from the same factions in Macedon that had allowed Adea to declare for him, but his enemies raised three armies against him, and must have been confident of victory. The situation was critical; it would make or break either Polyperchon and Olympias, or Cassander.
Cassander displayed tactical genius. First, he bypassed the Aetolians, who were holding the pass at Thermopylae against him, by transporting his army by boat around them. He then split his army into three: one division checked the Molossian king in Epirus, another did the same to Polyperchon on the southern border of Macedon, and while these two enemies were occupied, he marched with the rest of his forces on Macedon itself, where Aristonous, perhaps with little more than his baronial forces, gave in more or less without a fight and retreated to Amphipolis. Polyperchon’s army was bribed away from him and he fled, ultimately to join his son in the Peloponnese, where a few cities remained loyal. One of Cassander’s first moves as the new ruler of Macedon was to foment rebellion in Epirus against the Molossian king and install a puppet on the throne in his place. His victory was swift and overwhelming. He was perhaps a little over thirty-five years old, and he would rule Macedon for almost twenty years, until his death in 297.
CASSANDER TAKES CONTROL
Olympias took the royal court to Pydna, where she holed up with a considerable and loyal army. After Polyperchon’s flight, she could pin her hopes only on her generals, but they had problems of their own. So, over the late autumn and winter of 317/316, Cassander besieged her forces in Pydna to the point of desertion and starvation, and Olympias was captured while trying to escape by ship. Pydna fell, and Cassander gained by force the right to be the protector and guardian of the young king. Aristonous held on to Amphipolis until ordered by Olympias to give up the unequal struggle, but both Olympias and he were promptly killed by Cassander, despite assurances of safety.
In Olympias’s case, Cassander felt the need to cover himself with a cloak of legality. He was no Argead, nor had he been a companion of Alexander the Great, and he was uncertain of his standing among the Macedonian troops and barons, even though he could claim that he was killing the killer of the joint king of Macedon. So he got an army assembly to condemn her on the basis of a show trial, and, in order to make sure that no Macedonian loyal to the Argead line got cold feet, he had her put to death by relatives of those she had killed during her purge. 11She was not quite sixty years old, and had been at or close to the center of Macedonian affairs since, as a teenager, she had become the bride of Philip II. Though the six-year-old king was too young to know it, the execution of his grandmother savagely reduced the chances of his full succession. She had been his principal and most influential champion ever since his birth.
Cassander’s military skills had endeared him to the army, who always responded to a strong general, and over the next few years he continued to make war on his enemies in the Peloponnese and central Greece and to secure Macedon’s borders. He was also generous in awarding his supporters positions of responsibility, where they could hold power and enrich themselves. But above all he chose the usual way to legitimate his rule—by associating himself closely with the Argead line. In the first place, he held elaborate state funerals for Philip III and Adea Eurydice, and even for Cynnane, six years dead. Philip and his wife are the probable occupants of the incomparable Tomb 2 at Vergina; on the hunt fresco that dominates the tomb, Philip was portrayed not as an imbecile, but as a Macedonian hero. 12In the second place, he took as his wife a half sister of Alexander the Great called Thessalonice, who had been a member of Olympias’s entourage.
Cassander was now de facto regent, even though, with Polyperchon still alive, there were delicate questions of legitimacy to be ignored by everyone. But no doubt he already envisaged his sons by Thessalonice occupying the throne of Macedon. He treated Rhoxane and Alexander IV badly, keeping them for years under house arrest on the citadel of the merchant town of Amphipolis, without pandering to their royal status. He gave out that their isolation in Amphipolis was for their own safety.