Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [141]
Communications with the royal family’s two principal generals, Polyperchon and Aristonous, were difficult to maintain behind the siege curtain. Aristonous was ably leading the defense of Amphipolis, a Greek city not far to the east, and had inflicted a severe defeat on Cratevas, the general sent by Cassander to attack him. At last, but too late, Olympias had found a soldier with real skill. Polyperchon, her less competent senior commander, continued to hold out in the mountains west of Macedonia but was unable to make headway. His son Alexander, whose name belied both his talents and his fortunes, was still battling fruitlessly in the Peloponnese, trying to enforce his father’s freedom decree. The royalist forces were thus widely scattered, unable to link up with one another or with the Argeads.
As the situation in Pydna grew desperate, Polyperchon devised a plan for the royal family to escape at night in a single warship. He sent a courier to sneak past Cassander’s cordon and deliver a letter to Olympias, informing her when and where the ship would land. This man either was caught or abandoned Polyperchon as so many had done; in either case, his message was intercepted and brought to Cassander. An adept at the use of disinformation, Cassander had the message resealed and delivered to Olympias but also seized the warship on its way to the rendezvous. He aimed not merely at preventing Olympias’ escape but also at destroying her will to resist. The queen went out at night to meet her rescuers, only to find the beach deserted. Her hopes were crushed. She no longer knew whether Polyperchon, whose seal was on the letter, had gone over to the enemy and was leading her into a trap.
Hunger, despair, and isolation finally conquered the proud will of Olympias. Shortly after the night of the missing warship, she sent envoys and opened negotiations with Cassander for surrender. She had nothing to bargain with yet insisted on receiving a guarantee of her own safety. What arrangements she sought, if any, for the young Alexander are not mentioned in our sources. Perhaps she thought her grandson’s chances already so meager that there was no point.
Cassander granted the queen’s demand, presumably swearing an oath that she would not be harmed. Despite all the treacheries of the previous six years, the Macedonians still stood by the value of oaths, fundamental buttresses of the social contract. After his recent victory outside Amphipolis, Aristonous had released his defeated enemy, Cratevas, on the strength of his oath that he would not fight again for Cassander. Even Eumenes, master of deceptions and ruses, prided himself on fidelity to oaths; to win release from the fortress at Nora, he had rewritten the oath of Antigonus rather than swear falsely to the original. Olympias thus had reason to trust that Cassander’s promise would preserve her life. The same could be said of Aristonous, who, after Cassander likewise guaranteed his safety, agreed to surrender Amphipolis.
But the pledges made to these two prisoners were short-lived. Cassander moved quickly to eliminate Aristonous, fearing that the prestige of a former Bodyguard might stir up resentment against him. He turned Aristonous over to the relatives of Cratevas—ironically, the very man whom Aristonous had spared—for judgment. A death sentence was easily obtained and carried out. This aged veteran, the only one of Alexander’s generals who had sought a return to private life, had in the end been drawn back into the power struggle and destroyed by it. There were to be no peaceful retirements for any of Alexander’s top staff.
The fate of Olympias proved harder to resolve. In two recent cases where royal women had been killed—Alcetas’ murder of Cynnane, and the suicide forced on Adea by Olympias—their murderers had paid a steep political price. Cassander was determined to get a jury to condemn Olympias rather than execute her outright. But he took the precaution of arranging the trial such that Olympias could not speak in her own defense;