Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [75]
Perdiccas had other irons in the fire as well, though few as yet knew of them. He had received secret letters from Athens, from Demades, a politician who had long collaborated with Antipater but who was now seeking to change masters. Demades, for reasons unknown—perhaps because Phocion, his partner in the puppet government at Athens, had the lion’s share of power—urged Perdiccas to cross the Hellespont and oust Antipater, claiming he would have the support of the Greeks if he did so. “Our cities are held together only by an old and rotting rope,” Demades wrote to Perdiccas, referring contemptuously to Antipater. A vigorous new leader, a man like Perdiccas, could easily wrest Europe from that aging and detested warhorse.
Then, too, Perdiccas had control of the body of Alexander, his greatest political asset, and the fabulous hearse that would soon transport it back to the Macedonian homeland. What if Perdiccas were to accompany that hearse, riding at the head of the Companion cavalry, and lead the burial rites of the great king? What if he brought the new kings, the imbecile Philip and the infant Alexander, along with him, like followers in his train? Would it not be clear to all that he, not Antipater, represented the leadership of the empire? Might not even Craterus, who had staged his own heroic homecoming the previous year, acknowledge his supremacy?
Then why should he not also wed Cleopatra and make the triumph complete with an open claim on the throne? The question haunted Perdiccas, even as Nicaea drew nearer. How great was the danger in taking Eumenes’ advice, clasping Alexander’s sister by the hand and joining the ranks of the royals? It was the same choice Leonnatus had faced when Cleopatra promised to marry him. Leonnatus had seized what was offered, thinking a royal bride worth the cost of universal mistrust.
But Perdiccas, on the brink of a similar leap onto ambition’s summit, found he could not make up his mind. He could not break with Antipater and declare a civil war, even if it was a war he was likely to win. But neither could he let slip the chance offered him by Cleopatra. The counsels of Eumenes and Alcetas both had their hold on him; neither could be dismissed.
So Perdiccas married Antipater’s daughter Nicaea but also sent Eumenes to Sardis with a covert message for Cleopatra, that he intended to reject his new bride and marry her instead. He would bide his time and keep both his options open. The best choice for now was no choice at all.
3. CYNNANE, ADEA, AND ALCETAS (WESTERN ASIA, AUTUMN 322 B.C.)
Just after the arrival of Cleopatra in Sardis, a new entrant in the marital lists landed in Asia, quite unexpectedly. The stratagems of Olympias had pointed the way for another royal mother, Cynnane, to seek power by way of another daughter, a girl in her early teens named Adea. But this mother-daughter team had set their sights even higher than Olympias and Cleopatra. They aimed not to marry a general to a princess but to marry a princess to a king. Cynnane had chosen Philip, the mentally impaired half brother of Alexander (and her own half brother as well), as bridegroom for her daughter (also Philip’s niece).
Cynnane knew well the politics of dynastic marriages; she was the product of one. Her mother, a princess of Illyria (today part of Albania), had come to Macedonia to wed Alexander’s father, Philip, and seal an alliance between two contentious nations. Cynnane grew up at the Macedonian court but stayed true to her maternal traditions, for Illyrian women were famously tough, capable of going to war as men did. In her teens Cynnane is said to have accompanied the Macedonian army on a campaign into Illyria and to have slain a queen of that country—perhaps one of her own relatives—in hand-to-hand combat. Unfortunately, no account survives of that encounter between two armed female leaders, the first such encounter known to European history