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between the two leaders revealed the artificiality of their dispute. Far from acknowledging his crimes against the state, Eumenes asked for full restoration as satrap of Cappadocia, even though this would mean joining the regime officially committed to killing him. He did not even mention the death sentence passed in Egypt, as though this had been an obvious mistake. Antigonus, for his part, did not reject Eumenes’ proposal, showing that he too was dubious about the grounds for the current hostilities. He offered to refer the request to Antipater for adjudication and sent a messenger to Macedonia for this purpose. Eumenes sent his own envoy as well, a close friend and countryman, to plead his side of the case. This was none other than Hieronymus of Cardia—the man who, with his inside view of the post-Alexander power struggle, would one day write the now-lost memoir on which most surviving accounts are based.

As these envoys headed for Europe, Eumenes and Antigonus parted as friends and resumed their appointed roles as enemies. Antigonus finished walling off Nora to prevent outbreaks from within or rescue attempts from without. Then, certain that his hold over Eumenes was secure, he took his army west in pursuit of the remaining Perdiccans. These were still gathered in Pisidia, and Antigonus prepared to lead his young recruits there by a grueling forced march, hoping to reach his foes before they suspected he was coming.

Eumenes, beaten but unbowed, climbed back into his fortress and barred its gates. After marching some twenty thousand miles with Alexander and helping him rule three continents, after being consigliere to Perdiccas with sovereignty over the whole known world, he now had a scant four acres of rocky crag as his dominion. But his enclave was secure from attack and well stocked with food and fuel. Despite abandonment by his former allies, demonization by the royal army, and a crushing defeat at Orcynia, Eumenes had managed to survive. He settled in for a long stay with his six hundred loyalists and awaited the next throw of Fortune’s dice.

8

The War Comes Home

Greece, Macedonia, and Western Asia

SPRING 319–SPRING 318 B.C.

Life for citizens of Athens went on much as it had before the Hellenic War—that is, for those who were citizens of Athens. The city’s poor had lost their citizenship rights, and many of these, perhaps thousands, had relocated to Thrace on the wintry northern frontier of the Greek world. Old man Antipater had provided them with land there, after forcing Athens to change its constitution and disenfranchise them. “They were like refugees forced out from a city that had fallen in a siege,” says Plutarch, even though Athens had in fact avoided a siege by agreeing to Antipater’s terms, with its two chosen representatives, Phocion and Demades, leading the negotiating team.

Only those with estates worth at least two thousand drachmas, a sizable fortune, could now take part in government. This amounted to about nine thousand people, less than half the citizen body under the old democracy. The rest—those who chose to stay rather than emigrate—suffered what the Athenians called atimia, or “loss of honor,” meaning loss of the right to bring legal cases, to hold office or serve on jury panels, or to vote in the Assembly, the body that debated and decided all matters of state. Atimia was political excommunication, formerly imposed only on criminals or bankrupts, and the Athenian poor hated it.

Only twice before in nearly two centuries had Athens’ democratic constitution been replaced by an oligarchy. Both times, the change was made under pressure of war with Sparta, and both times it was reversed as soon as that pressure abated. In the second instance, in 403 B.C., a garrison of Spartan soldiers had kept the oligarchic regime in power; democracy was restored as soon as the garrison was withdrawn. The poor and landless of Athens had shown they could not be denied a voice for long. Their boisterous energy made the city prosperous, and their strong arms, manning the oars of its warships,