Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [134]
Even if they had won by a technicality, Antigonus’ troops felt defeated. Antigonus was determined to get them out of the area, lest they need to fight again with low morale. When Eumenes’ heralds arrived to arrange recovery of the dead, Antigonus set the ritual for the following day, but broke camp during the night and marched off at top speed. It was the final trick in a campaign that had seen many tricks, feints, and night marches. Eumenes, told by his scouts that Antigonus was gone, did not attempt to pursue. His men were exhausted. He would let them rest for the winter and prepare for the next showdown.
Antigonus and Eumenes had shown in Paraetacene they were well-matched opponents, both shrewd and inventive men. Each by now knew the other’s strengths and weaknesses. Their record against each other was dead even, counting Orcynia as a victory for Antigonus, the Coprates River as a victory for Eumenes, and Paraetacene as a tie. There was a collective sense in their two camps that a great duel was under way, with the future of the Argead dynasty hanging in the balance. Eumenes, it was understood, backed Olympias and the young Alexander. In victory he would defer to the Argeads, if only because he could not become one himself. Antigonus, as was equally well known, deferred to no one. His plans for the empire, were he to prevail over Eumenes, were unclear, but they surely did not include taking orders from a seven-year-old half-Bactrian boy.
As the troops of both men went into separate winter quarters, it was clear to all that a resolution of the duel was not far off. But just how close it was, or what form it would take, could not have been foreseen by any of them.
10
The Closing of the Tombs
316–308 B.C.
More than six years after his death in Babylon, Alexander still held the world in thrall. In Europe, Olympias and the young Alexander had briefly been thrust to the peak of power, largely by virtue of their kinship with him. In Asia, Eumenes had won crucial allies by meeting with them in the presence of Alexander’s ghost. In Egypt, Ptolemy guarded Alexander’s corpse, the sacred object he would soon house in an enormous memorial called simply the Sema, or Tomb. The body would continue to attract pilgrims at this site until the third century A.D., after which it disappeared, perhaps destroyed in the religious riots that were then roiling the city.
Everywhere in the empire, veterans of Alexander’s campaign found they were regarded as heroes and supermen, and none were more heroic than the Silver Shields. The whole world knew of the trust Alexander had placed in them, the perilous assignments he had given them, the honor he had paid them by coating their gear with silver. Six years after the king’s death, they were the last unit of his veterans that remained intact, undiluted by more recent recruits. Their unity gave them political power. In army assemblies, the Shields made their voices heard loud and clear, all three thousand seeming to speak as one through their captains, Antigenes and Teutamus. Their privileges were beyond dispute. So was their devastating effectiveness in battle, the result of decades of fighting together as a corps d’elite.
By the time of the battle of Paraetacene, the Silver Shields were old men. Alexander had sent them home eight years earlier, along with the other veterans decommissioned at Opis, but they had not gotten far before the king died and the resulting power struggle brought them back into action. There was no longer any retirement in view for them, nor any home