Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [125]
The Athenians opened talks with Cassander, though they had little to bargain with. Cassander insisted on restoring the oligarchy imposed by his father, again disenfranchising the poor. Hagnonides and his followers, now out of power, were tried and put to death. A new leader, one of Phocion’s partisans who had managed to escape when the oligarchy fell, was brought back and given plenipotentiary power over the city. Athens underwent its third change of government in as many years, and its chain of metamorphoses was not nearly at an end. In decades to come, each fresh attempt to dominate Europe would start with yet another purge of weary, battered Athens.
Nicanor, victorious at the Hellespont and in higher repute than ever, sailed back into Piraeus to resume his former command there. But his very success made him suspect to Cassander, who knew the strength of the fortified harbor Nicanor would soon control. He resolved to get rid of a threat before it emerged, and to do so quietly, without commotion. Cassander made ships ready as though to sail for Macedonia and instructed a messenger to bring him forged letters while he was walking with Nicanor. The letters invited him to assume the Macedonian throne. Cassander read these missives aloud and excitedly embraced Nicanor, promising to make his faithful lieutenant a sharer in his new power. Then, at this moment of ebullience and feigned partnership, he conducted Nicanor into a nearby house under pretense of holding a parley. Picked troops were waiting there; Nicanor was arrested and sentenced to death.
Though Cassander’s letters were forged, their message contained a certain truth. Antipater’s old allies in Macedon were indeed urging Cassander to return there, while Polyperchon was bogged down in the Peloponnese. Cassander gratified them by staging a brief, defiant visit to his homeland, a demonstration of political strength. New adherents flocked to his side, including, above all, King Philip and his grasping queen, Adea. This royal pair now openly proclaimed themselves Cassander’s partisans. Adea made so bold as to write to Polyperchon in Greece and strip him of all administrative powers. Though her words had no effect, she ordered him to stand down and hand over his army to Cassander, whom she had appointed the new custodian of King Philip.
Cassander now had half the monarchy in his camp, while, with fatal symmetry, the other half declared firmly for Polyperchon. Olympias, the dowager queen, at last gave up her neutrality. She agreed to become Polyperchon’s partner and steward of the young Alexander, her grandson. The fissuring of the royal family was complete. Two monarchs, each with his own queen as surrogate and his own general as champion, had ended up on opposite sides of the civil war. There was no alternative now to a direct clash between them. Polyperchon, who seems at this point to have gone to Epirus to join Olympias, began preparing to lead a march eastward to Macedonia, to unseat Philip and install the young Alexander in his place.
As if throwing a new gauntlet at Adea, Olympias chose a member of the Molossian royal family, her young grandniece Deidameia, as a future bride for her grandson. She aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the Macedonians: Alexander and Deidameia could look forward to children and the preservation of the royal house; Adea and Philip were barren. She also aimed at enlisting her nephew Aeacides, king of the Molossians and Deidameia’s father, in the upcoming struggle.
What could the five-year-old Alexander, united for the first time with Olympias and her family, have made of his new surroundings? He had lived all his life in a military camp, dragged about first through western Asia, then Egypt, then Asia again, then Greece, and now a mountainous wilderness called Epirus, covered in unfamiliar pine trees. The one constant in his life had been the person least able to help him, his mother, Rhoxane. He had had four generals in five years as his keepers and finally had landed with his grandmother, only to find