Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [30]
To aid Eumenes, Perdiccas directed two neighboring satraps to bring their troops forward, Leonnatus from one side and Antigonus One-eye, satrap of Phrygia (today southwest Turkey), from another. Antigonus, a bear of a man who had lost an eye in battle in his youth, had long been sidelined from Alexander’s army, left behind to manage western Asia while the campaign headed east. He and the other generals had not seen one another in a decade, so it was no doubt with some uncertainty that Perdiccas now wrote to Antigonus, a man twenty years his senior, to issue his orders. Perhaps he counted on Antigonus’ fondness for Eumenes to ensure his support, for the two men, though opposites in size, rank, and power, had been friends long ago at the Macedonian court. Or perhaps this too was a test, for Perdiccas needed to know whether he could command the respect of existing satraps, who had been absent from the new regime’s founding and had not given it their assent.
Two other powerful men had to be accommodated by the apportionment plan, though they too were too far from Babylon when it was drafted. Craterus, making slow progress on his homeward journey, was camped in Cilicia with his supposedly decommissioned veterans, and in Europe old man Antipater, faithful guardian of the Macedonian homeland, remained in the post from which Alexander had sought to remove him. Already these two men were included in the executive council running the empire, but they had been largely relegated to Europe while Perdiccas managed Asia. In the final settlement, Antipater was confirmed as head of Macedonia, Greece, and the Balkan territories. Craterus’ assignment was less clear; Perdiccas no doubt left it vague, wary of offending a general who was both beloved of the soldiers and, by accident of timing, in control of a huge number of them. Probably he encouraged Craterus, as gently as he could, to proceed to Europe and share power with Antipater. He did not want such a talented general lurking in Asia with an army of ten thousand.
Perdiccas himself took no satrapy. His role was custodian of the joint kings and commander of the royal army, the two nodes of executive power now located in Babylon. He shored up his position by making a trusted subordinate, Seleucus, his second in command, appointing him to the post of chiliarch he himself had once held. Perdiccas was now the closest thing the empire had to a central authority, with power to disburse funds from the royal treasuries, great depots of precious metals housed in closely guarded forts throughout the empire. This power of the purse formed a crucial prop to Perdiccas’ leadership. The army had already made clear, while Alexander was alive, that it would fight only for rich rewards, either pay or plunder and preferably both. Any ruler who sought to retain its loyalty was going to need ready cash.
And so the generals at Babylon, like gods claiming chunks of the cosmos, took charge of the pieces of Alexander’s empire that best matched their power, temperament, and rank. The newly crowned king Philip—following Perdiccas around like a spear-carrier, a mute extra, in a play, as Plutarch wryly observes—gave his all-too-ready approval to the apportionment scheme.
Before the generals departed for their new posts, Perdiccas convened an assembly of the army to consider Alexander’s last plans. According to Diodorus, Perdiccas had found a document containing these plans among the papers in the royal chambers. It described a set of projects of such astounding scope and scale that some modern scholars believe it a forgery, though most accept it as genuine. Perdiccas wanted these plans quashed, but in the charged atmosphere at Babylon he could not contravene the dead Alexander without the support of the army. And so he had the document read aloud to an assembly of troops, revealing to them the intentions of their now-mummified monarch.
Alexander had wanted a thousand warships built, to be used in a campaign in the West. The coastal towns of western Asia were to supply lumber for these ships, all to be