Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [63]
When Leonnatus woke and found Eumenes gone, it was clear that the die had been cast. The secret of his plans to seize control in Europe would soon be out, and a showdown with Perdiccas was surely coming. But as the favorite of Olympias and Cleopatra, the man they had selected to father the next heir to the throne, he had good hopes of prevailing in that contest. He made haste to cross the Hellespont and return to Europe, where his destiny, and his queen, were waiting.
4. ARISTOTLE (CHALCIS, 322 B.C.)
While this fissure was opening in the ranks of Alexander’s Bodyguards, the philosopher Aristotle died in his adopted home on the island of Euboea. Throughout his life he had suffered from a stomach ailment, and this had grown more severe after his departure from Athens. Perhaps the change of diet and routine hastened his demise. He was sixty-two years old.
Aristotle’s wife, Pythias, had died long before, while the family was in Athens. Thereafter, Aristotle had shared his bed with Herpyllis, a former slave to whom he had given freedom. Perhaps it was Herpyllis who bore his son, Nicomachus, still a youth at the time Aristotle died; his daughter, Pythias, was also young, not yet in her teens. In his will—a document that survives complete, quoted by the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius—Aristotle placed both children in the care of his adopted son, Nicanor, the man who had read aloud the Exiles’ Decree to the Greeks at Olympia. The will instructs Nicanor to look after Aristotle’s children as though he were both their father and their brother, but, in a shift of roles not uncommon in the Greek world, to marry Pythias as soon as she came of age.
The will contains detailed arrangements for Aristotle’s property, including his slaves, many of whom were to be freed. For Herpyllis, the ex-slave who had become his consort, Aristotle made generous provisions. He instructed Nicanor to look after her well, “because she cared for me sincerely,” and to provide her with a home, new furnishings, and, should she choose to marry, a dowry and a staff of servants. At the same time he asked that the bones of his wife, Pythias, interred long before at Athens, be exhumed and reburied beside him. This, he points out, had been Pythias’ instruction in her own will.
As chief executor of these arrangements Aristotle appointed Antipater, the great Macedonian soldier-statesman whose friendship had been so important to him. He had paid dearly for that friendship, losing his home of twelve years and his precious Lyceum largely because of it. Now, in his last days, he relied on it as a safeguard for the family he was leaving behind. He seems to have been unconcerned that Antipater, at that time penned up in Lamia with supplies running out, had scant hope of living much longer himself, unless one of Alexander’s generals returned from Asia in time to save him.
5. LEONNATUS (MACEDONIA AND POINTS SOUTH, LATE SPRING 322 B.C.)
Leonnatus’ entry into Pella, the Macedonian capital, must have been a magnificent event. Riding proudly in the vanguard of a splendid cavalry corps, his hair flipped back at the forehead, Leonnatus looked like a second Alexander—precisely what he hoped to be. His own horse, a rare Nesaean, had its bit and bridle cast from glittering gold and silver, testimony to the wealth won in the conquest of the Persian empire. The Macedonians must have gaped. This was the first great general, and some of the first troops, to return to the homeland, of all the tens of thousands that had left it over the past twelve years.
To Leonnatus, by contrast, the royal seat of the Macedonians must have seemed hopelessly provincial. The palace he hoped soon to inhabit was far smaller than the one he had slept in the previous summer, the Southern Palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, and that had been only one