Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [120]
By the strange peripeties of the civil war, Antigonus and Eumenes had by turns held the same high office, commander in chief of Asia. Each could, and did, trumpet his own authority and attack that of the other. Eumenes bore letters carrying the seal of the kings, as well as others from Olympias, ordering the imperial bureaucracy to follow only him. Antigonus derided these orders, reminding all who would listen that Eumenes was a foreigner and a condemned criminal besides. At the heart of the dispute was the problem old man Antipater had created with his choice of successor: Did Polyperchon, the official appointee, speak for the monarchy? Or did Cassander, Antipater’s son, who claimed his father’s office as a kind of natural right?
In the five years since Alexander’s death the issue of legitimacy had become so vexed that, to some, it had no doubt ceased to matter. Yet the monarchy still existed; the joint kings possessed a legitimacy that would not die. The orders issued in their name opened the treasuries of Asia, and the years of their “reign” furnished the dates atop imperial documents. Their fate was central to the future of the empire, and that fate now rested on two pairs of antagonists, fighting parallel duels for control of two continents: Polyperchon and Cassander in Europe, and in Asia, their respective allies, the two greatest generals to emerge from Alexander’s military academy, Eumenes of Cardia and Antigonus One-eye.
1. THE ROYAL FAMILY (GREECE, SUMMER 318 B.C.)
Alexander’s son had reached his fifth birthday. He was old enough to be aware of his surroundings and his unique place in the world. He knew now why he had three armed noblemen stationed around him as Bodyguards, as well as highborn children who behaved more like servants than playmates. Perhaps he understood something of the turbulent currents that had swept him from one guardian to another and landed him with Polyperchon, the careworn general who now dragged him along on his campaign through Greece.
Alexander had been paired throughout his young life with his bizarre counterpart in joint rule, the half-witted Philip. That senior monarch held a higher rank and possessed four Bodyguards to Alexander’s three (the canonical number, seven, was split between the two). Some officials spoke and acted as though Philip had sole rule, with young Alexander his designated heir, but the situation was far from clear. At five years old Alexander perhaps already had more cognitive function than his debilitated half uncle.
It was inevitable that the two monarchs would come into conflict, especially after Philip wed the grasping, willful Adea. Philip’s interests, as Adea insistently defined them, diverged from his nephew’s. If Adea could but conceive—as she no doubt tried fervently to do—the hopes of the royal house would rest on her unborn child, a full-blooded Argead, rather than on the half-breed son of the dead conqueror. And if her child should then be born male, the young Alexander and his barbarian mother would be instantly disinherited, or killed.
But after three years as King Philip’s queen, Adea had not conceived. She clearly needed a new strategy in the great dynastic game. Events around her were moving fast, bringing opportunities as well as dangers. She knew that Polyperchon had written to the dowager queen Olympias, urging her to leave Epirus and take charge of her grandson in Macedon. Olympias had so far