Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [20]
There were several Companions who must have been dismayed to see Perdiccas made chiliarch and not themselves. Of these, Craterus perhaps had the most grounds for envy. He was older than the rest, in his late forties, with an authority greatly revered by troops and officers alike. Alexander often relied on Craterus to bring up the phalanx, gear wagons, and elephant train while he dashed ahead with more mobile troops. But though Craterus had fulfilled every commission with distinction, he was known to oppose Alexander’s program of Euro-Asian cultural fusion, and that made him an outsider at court. Ultimately, Alexander had sent him home at the head of the veterans returning to Macedonia, with orders to assume command of Europe—an honorable discharge from the royal army.
Ptolemy, too, might have hoped to be marked as Alexander’s most favored. Ptolemy had risen to high rank only late in the Asian campaign but since then had progressed from strength to strength. He was among the king’s oldest and most trusted friends, and trustworthiness, more than any other factor, determined promotion at Alexander’s court. And what of Leonnatus, who had proved his trustworthiness by protecting Alexander’s prostrate body with his own after the king was wounded in India? Leonnatus too had dreams of higher station. For some time now he had patterned his clothes after Alexander’s and even his hair, flipping it back from his forehead on both sides in the king’s signature style.
In the end it was Perdiccas who succeeded Hephaestion as chiliarch, and to whom Alexander, in his last days of life, passed the signet ring. But in taking that ring from the king’s hand, Perdiccas took it away from all the others, even from Craterus, then hundreds of miles away on the march toward Macedon. Each was worthy, in his own eyes at least, of the highest honor the king could bestow. During his campaign Alexander had kept them in a careful equipoise, distributing marks of favor evenly so as not to give any (except Hephaestion) too great a sense of entitlement. “They were so equal in his honor that you might have thought each one a king,” writes Justin of Alexander’s top officers, though he misses the point by attributing to a malign Fortune, rather than to state policy, the balance of their strengths.
Perdiccas had shown on many occasions his ability to manage a crisis, and never more than in the panicky moments after Alexander was wounded in the Indian town—if it was indeed Perdiccas who performed emergency surgery on the king. Alexander had been dragged out of harm’s way with a three-foot arrow still protruding from his chest. The arrowhead was lodged in his breastbone, and no one dared saw off the shaft for fear the bone would splinter. Alexander, still conscious, tried to cut the shaft with his own dagger, but loss of blood had already sapped his strength. Some onlookers began to weep, and others drew back in terror, while Alexander rebuked them as cowards and traitors. To step forward at such a moment, as one source says that Perdiccas did—using his sword as a scalpel when there was no time to find proper instruments—took exceptional steeliness of nerve. Doctors, under the rough justice administered by angry Macedonians, could be killed for not saving the lives of their patients.
A medallion struck by Alexander depicting an Indian archer of the type who dealt him his near-fatal chest wound (Illustration credit 2.1)
Now a new crisis was at hand, and Perdiccas needed all his steadiness of nerve. He would be blamed in this case not for Alexander’s death but for not being Alexander. His every move would draw the jealousy and resentment of his rivals. The army in Babylon, perhaps six thousand Macedonian infantry, barely trusted him; only yesterday they had defied his orders and forced past him to see Alexander on his sickbed. Their behavior had become alarmingly headstrong in recent years, even toward Alexander. From whom would they take orders now that their only master was dead?
The steps taken by Perdiccas to deal with the crisis of 323 are known only