Within a few days of his being surrendered, Eumenes and several of his senior officers were put to death. Antigenes came off worst, despite his advanced age (he was about sixty-five): he was thrown alive into a pit and burnt there, in revenge for the slaughter his veterans had wrought on Antigonus’s men. Eumenes’ grand army, elephants and all, deserted en masse to Antigonus. Ever loyal to Olympias, Alexander IV, and the legitimate Argead cause, Eumenes had proved himself an excellent general and the most successful of the loyalists. His death ushered in a new era, in which, rather than working for the surviving king, Antigonus and his peers would strive to establish their own rights to kingship. The deaths of Olympias and Eumenes left the world in the hands of men who owed no loyalty except to themselves.

HOUSEKEEPING

By the end of 317, then, Antigonus had carried out his commission. But it had been clear, ever since his purge of the Asia Minor satraps, that he had far outstripped his Triparadeisus commission. His mastery of Asia seemed solid, his ally Cassander was in charge in Macedon, and Ptolemy was quiet in Egypt. It almost looked as though a balance of power might emerge, miraculously soon after Alexander’s death. After the battle, Antigonus retired to winter quarters near Ecbatana, with the bulk of his now huge army dispersed far and wide over Media or repatriated to their satrapies. In the spring he would head west, but first he had a little housekeeping to take care of.

Peithon was an ambitious man, and could have been a contender—one of the great few who strove for control of large chunks or even the whole of Alexander’s empire. He had played a considerable role at both Paraetacene and Gabene, was popular with the troops, and was satrap of wealthy Media, one of the heartlands of the former Persian empire. He had become involved in Antigonus’s war against Eumenes in the first place only as a means to renew his bid for independence for the eastern satrapies, with him as their king, and he spent the winter after Eumenes’ defeat trying to persuade as many of Antigonus’s troops as possible to stay in the east and work for him. ⁵But Antigonus was not ready to lose the eastern satrapies, a valuable source of revenue. He summoned Peithon to Ecbatana and, assured of his safety, Peithon guilelessly went. He was promptly arraigned before a council of Antigonus’s Friends, accused of treachery (of trying to detach some of Antigonus’s troops for his own purposes), and executed. Some of his lieutenants went on the warpath in Media, but were soon crushed. With the same presumption of authority that he had already displayed in Asia Minor, Antigonus appointed a new satrap for Media.

Another residual problem was Antigenes’ veterans. They had been nothing but trouble since Triparadeisus, and now, by betraying Eumenes to him, they had proved their corruptibility. They had been bound by oaths of loyalty to Eumenes, but they had broken these oaths, albeit when faced with terrible personal loss. But then, Eumenes himself had broken his oath to Antigonus at Nora. Antigonus decided to dissolve the regiment. He packed some of them off to the remote east, to serve in Arachosia. The rest he kept with him, but as he returned west in the spring, he dispersed them here and there, as settlers to police potential trouble spots within his territories. In Arachosia, they were given jobs more suitable to mercenaries—garrisoning frontier towns, scouting in enemy territory. Antigonus’s ruthless instructions to the satrap were to make sure that they did not survive their missions. ⁶

CHANDRAGUPTA MAURYA

Arachosia was indeed troubled. Chandragupta Maurya, a conqueror who has every right to be considered as great as Alexander, was in expansionist mood.

The Indian satrapies won by Alexander bordered on a vast kingdom, ruled by the Nanda dynasty. Even in 326 and 325, while Alexander had been in India, he had been approached by a young man called Chandragupta (Sandrokottos to Greeks) for help in overthrowing the unpopular dynasty. Whatever Alexander may have thought about this, the mutiny of his men in India meant that he was unable to comply. After his departure, Chandragupta unified the warring northern tribes and did it himself. With the overthrow of the Nandas, he inherited a ready-made kingdom as his base.

Macedonian control over the Indian satrapies was tenuous. Two satraps had already been killed by 325, one in an uprising and the other by assassination. Alexander’s death allowed Chandragupta to foment further rebellion. By the time of the Triparadeisus conference in 320, the Macedonians more or less acknowledged the independence of the Indian satrapies by making no new provisions for them. By 317, still aged under thirty, Chandragupta had taken over the Indian satrapies, thus effectively controlling all northern India from the Khyber Pass to the Ganges delta, and was turning his attention northward, toward the satrapies that ringed his new empire from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea.

So when Antigonus made himself master of Asia, he inherited a number of provinces that were under constant pressure from the young Indian emperor. He did little to defend the region, but it remained fairly stable for a while, as long as Chandragupta was more concerned with securing what he had already gained. Unlike Alexander, Chandragupta put in place a complex, detailed, and precise administrative pyramid, to cover military, fiscal, and civil functions throughout his empire. He made his capital at Pataliputra (modern Patna) on the Ganges. ⁷

Antigonus was little interested in the far east of his kingdom, and the satrapies there were left pretty much to their own devices until Seleucus reconquered them. This brought Seleucus into direct conflict with Chandragupta, and in 304 a great battle was fought. Seleucus was defeated and forced to cede to Chandragupta eastern Arachosia, Gandaris, Paropamisadae, and parts of Areia and Gedrosia. These provinces were never recovered, nor was any attempt made to do so. Chandragupta then expanded south until he controlled almost all of India, and Pakistan and Afghanistan up to the Hindu Kush. His empire was larger than British India. Seleucus kept a permanent ambassador at Chandragupta’s court, a man called Megasthenes. We have no more than a few fragments of his account of India, ⁸unfortunately, but it seems to have contained a warning against trying to defeat the Maurya empire. Chandragupta himself resigned the throne and dedicated his final years to religious devotion. He died in 298, and his empire continued for more than a hundred years, until the rise of a new dynasty in 185 BCE.

LORD OF ASIA

In the spring of 316 Antigonus started out from Ecbatana on his journey home. At Persepolis, he set up a kind of court—only a kind of court, because one night in 330 Alexander had gone along with a drunken escapade to destroy the main royal palace. ⁹Antigonus summoned the eastern satraps from Eumenes’ coalition and dictated their futures from his throne, in a manner deliberately reminiscent of the imperial power Antipater had assumed at Triparadeisus. Many satraps retained their earlier posts; not surprisingly, Eumenes’ chief ally, Peucestas, found himself out of a job. The fact that he was allowed to remain alive at all is powerful evidence that his poor performance at Gabene was deliberate, that he had been suborned. At any rate, Antigonus took him back west with him on his staff, and he remained as a close adviser first to Antigonus and then to his son Demetrius. It was a climbdown for the former Bodyguard of Alexander, but it was safe: though he more or less drops out of the historical record, we still hear of him alive in the 290s. ¹⁰