Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [22]
Many no doubt cast sidelong glances at Perdiccas while Ptolemy spoke. It was Perdiccas, as Alexander’s chiliarch and the man who had received the ring, who, logically, would be guardian of an infant or a mental invalid. Ptolemy’s proposal to decentralize authority, even to eliminate the monarchy, was, by any reading, a hit at Perdiccas. Ptolemy himself must have known what impact his words would have. He had thrown the first gauntlet in what was to be a fight to the death between these two leading Bodyguards.
There may have been more speeches at that fateful meeting (Curtius reports a proposal that Perdiccas be crowned, but this seems a Roman fantasy imported into the Macedonian setting). In the end, Perdiccas’ plan was adopted. The army would wait for Rhoxane to give birth, and if she had a son, that boy would be king. The infant’s guardians (who also would presumably rule if the child was a girl) would be a board of four: Bodyguards Perdiccas and Leonnatus, plus Craterus, now in western Asia slowly leading his column of veterans homeward, and Antipater, the grand old man of Macedonian politics, who for the past twelve years had been in charge of the European home front. Ptolemy, who ranked not far below three of these men and higher than Leonnatus, was somehow left out of the arrangement. Probably he was already regarded as a dangerous rival by Perdiccas.
A rough division of sovereignty was laid out for these four regents: Craterus and Antipater would hold command in Europe, Perdiccas and Leonnatus in Asia. Craterus was accorded some vague executive status, entitling him to act as the king’s representative and therefore to draw on the royal treasuries. This was a sop to the well-loved older general who, with ten thousand decommissioned veterans under his command, possessed the greatest troop strength of any Macedonian leader. Craterus could easily storm into Babylon and seize sole power, once he learned of Alexander’s death, as he would do in a day or two.
Those in the throne room swore an oath of loyalty to the board of four, and then the entire cavalry, summoned to the courtyard outside the palace, took a similar oath. The generals hoped to get the cavalry in line behind the scheme and then present it to the infantry—by far the larger of the two branches of the army—as a fait accompli. But they badly misjudged their ability to win over the rank and file. For even while they were in session, reports arrived that the infantry, meeting separately, had made a different choice of monarch—Arrhidaeus, Alexander’s mentally impaired half brother. Perdiccas dispatched Meleager, the infantry officer who had already spoken in favor of Arrhidaeus in the council session, as emissary to the foot soldiers—the first error of the many he would commit as head of the new regime.
It is unclear how far the infantry was from the palace or how much the foot soldiers knew of the cavalry’s decisions. Justin implies the two groups had no contact, while Curtius puts the infantrymen right outside the throne room, listening to the speeches there and finally breaking in as a violent mob. Whatever their physical distance, the two groups were miles apart in outlook. The gulf that had opened in India, when the foot soldiers had nearly rioted against cavalry officers whom they thought were concealing Alexander’s death, had only grown wider in the intervening two years. Now the time for choosing Alexander’s successor was at hand, a task that by custom required a broad army assembly, but the army had not been convened. In the crisis atmosphere, it was easy for the infantry to assume the worst about their generals’ intentions.
Mistrust of superiors came easily to these foot soldiers. Alexander had routinely promoted those he cherished from infantry to cavalry, leaving the former feeling passed over and estranged from their higher-ups. The greatest estrangement had resulted from the king’s experiments in cultural