Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [27]
Now it was Perdiccas’ turn to face down a mutinous army. Clearly those who had challenged him had to pay the price and pay it in full view of others. But his power to punish was nothing like what Alexander’s had been. An immediate attack was out of the question; his authority was still too shaky, and besides, how could he succeed amid Babylon’s streets and palaces? Cavalrymen needed level plains on which charges could be mounted. And so Perdiccas, together with his fellow cavalry leaders, hatched a plan.
From its earliest days, the Macedonian army had practiced a ritual called lustration to purify itself in sight of the gods. A dog was killed and cut in two, and the halves were dragged to two sides of a field. The entire soldiery then marched between them in full armor. Sometimes a feigned battle between cavalry and infantry took place after this march was concluded. Perdiccas now ordered that such a lustration be held in the fields outside Babylon, to cleanse the armed forces of the taint of mutiny. All would gather in one place for the ritual, cavalry ranged opposite infantry.
Meleager no doubt suspected Perdiccas’ intentions, but a further stratagem secured his cooperation. Perdiccas planted agents to mutter loudly against Meleager’s elevation in the power-sharing deal. Getting wind of these grumbles, Meleager complained to Perdiccas that the malcontents must be punished. Perdiccas proposed that the upcoming lustration, when the cavalry would be deployed in an open field with full tactical advantage, would offer a good opportunity to make arrests. Meleager agreed to the plan, hoping it would result in the destruction of his opponents. In fact it was aimed at his supporters.
The infantry marched outside Babylon’s walls, into the stronghold of the cavalry, to enact the solemn rite of lustration. From the opposite side of the field, the cavalry came forward in full armor, led by a wedge of war elephants. This exotic weapon had terrified the Macedonians when they first encountered it in India, but they had quickly learned how to check it, then mastered it themselves. Elephants had since become an accustomed sight in Macedonian camps, but to see them marching in a lustral procession was strange and, no doubt, disquieting.
As the distance between ranks closed, Perdiccas sprang his trap. He sent King Philip over to the infantrymen with a prepared speech demanding surrender of the leading mutineers—the very men who had put him on the throne and given him his name—and to threaten a devastating cavalry charge if they refused. Meleager had been double-crossed but could do nothing about it. His thirty staunchest supporters were handed over, bound, and, as the assembled infantry looked on, cast under the feet of the elephants and trampled to death. With a single macabre stroke, the army was purged of its most troublesome members. But Perdiccas’ duplicity was not without its costs. From this point on, the chiliarch became “suspected by all and full of suspicions,” says Photius, summarizing the view of Arrian in the lost Events After Alexander.
Meleager himself escaped the lustration, but a few days or perhaps a few hours later his own reckoning with Perdiccas arrived. When officers appeared accusing him of treachery, Meleager did not bother to defend himself. He fled to a nearby temple, trusting in the ancient taboo against harming those seeking sanctuary at altars of the gods. But such taboos were a luxury that could not be afforded in the current crisis. Perdiccas ordered his troops to enter the enclosure and drag Meleager away. King Philip,