Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire by Robin Waterfield Read Free Book Online Page A

for the next eighteen years or so (or three regents, once aged Antipater had died) was no recipe for peace. And, although Perdiccas’s lobby in the meeting had been powerful—in addition to Aristonous and Eumenes, he had the support of several very highly respected senior officers, including his younger brother Alcetas and Seleucus—he was not likely to be happy with the outcome. He had glimpsed and laid claim to sole power, only to be denied it. In short, the outcome of the first meeting looks like a temporary measure. Scheming undoubtedly continued behind the scenes.
    Nevertheless, the Companions behaved as though they had found a solution. Delegates were chosen to present the decision of the meeting to the cavalry and the infantry. The cavalry made no demur, but the infantry was incensed. The officers who were sent to win them over, led by Meleager and a respected senior officer called Attalus, met with the overwhelming demand that Arrhidaeus be made king. The loyalty of the Macedonian infantry to the Argead line was impressive, and the fact that the cavalry was prepared to go along with the meeting’s decision would hardly have weighed with them at all. Every ancient commander had to come to terms with the fact that his forces consisted of two groups who were perennially divided: the cavalry and all the senior officers came from the highest social classes, while the infantry was made up of peasant farmers. The two did not always see eye to eye, and sometimes even had to be coerced into making up a single fighting unit.
    Meleager and Attalus saw an opportunity for themselves. As matters stood, they were not going to be major beneficiaries of the new dispensation. But perhaps the passion of the infantry could sweep them to power. Instead of merely reporting the decision to the troops for their acclamation, they threw in their lot with the infantry. Before long, they returned to the palace at the head of an armed mob, insisting that Arrhidaeus be made king; they had chosen the name “Philip” for him, to remake him in the image of his heroic father, so that he would be Philip III, King of the Macedonians. Meleager had Arrhidaeus prominently displayed beside him, dressed as Alexander, while he himself wore the insignia of a Bodyguard of the new king. Disturbingly, the infantry had usurped the barons’ role and turned kingmaker, for the first time in Macedonian history. They had the right to acclaim a king, but never before had they effectively chosen one. Alexander’s death had shaken fundamental structures.
    The cavalry, however, remained loyal to their officers and refused to accept the infantry’s choice. They were still committed to Rhoxane’sunborn child. Civil war was about to erupt between the cavalry and the infantry, as it almost had in India two years earlier, just at rumors of Alexander’s death. Within a day or two of his actual death, the champions of two rival candidates for the throne were poised to come to blows, and a mob was in the process of elevating a man who was not fully competent to kingship. These were not good omens for the future.
    Perdiccas and a number of others took refuge in the vast palace with its hundreds of chambers, but it was not hard for Meleager’s men to force their way in. There was no way that Perdiccas could win this confrontation, so he surrendered. Leonnatus led the cavalry units and the war elephants out of the city. Perdiccas stayed in an attempt to patch things up, but, feeling uncertain whether he would remain alive long in Meleager’s Babylon, he soon joined Leonnatus in camp outside the city.
    Meleager’s brief moment had arrived. He was the king’s right-hand man, he controlled Babylon, and he had possession of Alexander’s talismanic corpse. But this was illusory power. Leonnatus’s flight with the cavalry did not serve only to prevent Macedonians killing fellow Macedonians, but was also a tactical move. Their mobility enabled them effectively to put the