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the death of Phocion, the rebel Cassander sailed into Piraeus with ships and troops supplied by Antigonus One-eye. He relieved Nicanor of his garrison command and assumed control of the port. His forces were still tiny compared with what Polyperchon could muster, but he held an impregnable base and could be resupplied by sea. The Athenian populace, deprived of their harbor, would need to rely on their own thin soil for nurture and share that meager resource with the army camped outside their walls. The democrats had enjoyed their counterrevolution, but they would have to go hungry as a result.

Polyperchon himself at last arrived outside Athens with another, larger army but found he could accomplish little except consume the food supply more quickly. His chance to take Piraeus had slipped past, for the forces Cassander had brought in had made the place unassailable. He marched on into the Peloponnese to deal with matters there, leaving his son Alexander behind to guard the countryside.

Cassander had gained his toehold in Europe. Phocion had lived just long enough, and had given Nicanor just enough support, to ensure that the rebellion against Polyperchon would survive. The European civil war would go forward to a new and more violent phase, and Phocion would be only one in a long line of its victims.

9

Duels to the Death

Europe and Asia

SUMMER 318–WINTER, LATE 317 B.C.

Alexander the Great had taught his disciples well. During his twelve-year Asian campaign, his officers had watched him manage with surgical skill the world’s most complex army. They had seen him orchestrate the phalanx bristling with spears, the cavalry strike force, and the quick-moving Hypaspists, or Shield Bearers; draw on one force or another, or combine the three, depending on terrain and opponent; synchronize their rates of travel; and keep them fed and provisioned by despoiling the route of their march. In India they had seen him master the only known war machine his army then lacked, the trained elephant. Alexander had brought some two hundred of these fortresslike beasts out of India, to terrorize the enemies he never got to fight—Arabs, Carthaginians, and other targets historians can only guess at.

After Alexander’s death his generals practiced, with all too great a fidelity, the lessons they had learned. They put cloned armies in the field, each with its phalanx, cavalry, and Hypaspist components, some also with elephant herds. They gave familiar names to these units—“foot companions,” “companion cavalry”—to remind veterans of their old assignments. They followed the routes and seasons of march Alexander had laid out, through fertile plains and valleys that could provision vast numbers, making campaigns across the length and breadth of Asia a routine affair. A new era in warfare had begun—the age of professionalized, internationalized, numerically supersized Hellenistic armies.

Alexander had also nurtured in his staff an endless appetite for command and conquest. Of his seven Bodyguards, only one, Aristonous—an older man who likely held his post from before Alexander’s reign—attempted something like a retirement, and that turned out to be short-lived, as will be seen. The other Bodyguards never ceased to build power, enlarge armies, and undermine rivals on the model of their master. Ptolemy seized North Africa, and Lysimachus Thrace; Peithon made a try for Bactria and failed but had not given up his ambitions there; Peucestas was enlarging power and popularity in his satrapy, Persis. Leonnatus and Perdiccas had been killed in attempts to gain, or preserve, control of the entire empire. Craterus, whose stature equaled theirs, though he did not belong to the Bodyguard, died trying to deprive Perdiccas of that control.

New contestants had emerged to replace those carried off the field. Antigonus, only a sidelined satrap at the time of Alexander’s death, established himself through shrewd generalship as the leading power in Asia. Polyperchon, another mid-level officer, was battling Cassander for control of Europe. Waiting in