Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [77]
Alcetas, in this case, was determined to exert not only control but domination. He ended the encounter between his forces and Cynnane’s—no account of which has survived—by having Cynnane killed, when he might have taken her prisoner or sent her back to Europe under escort. Perhaps he was stung to fury by Cynnane’s reproaches, or perhaps he acted on instructions given by his brother Perdiccas. Both armed columns and the young girl Adea looked on in horror. It was a brutal demonstration of resolve, more brutal even than the elephant-trampling executions Perdiccas had orchestrated two years earlier.
But its very brutality caused the move to backfire. When news of the killing arrived in Babylon, the Macedonian army recoiled from the murder of a daughter of Philip. As they had done in the days after Alexander’s death, they rebelled against Perdiccas’ leadership and rallied to the royal family. Perdiccas found his new-won military glory slipping away. To mollify the troops, he reversed course and had Adea brought to his camp. At his direction, she married her uncle, the half-wit king, Philip.
No older than fifteen, orphaned by two political murders, Adea claimed the prize her mother had died to obtain for her, a share of the Macedonian throne. She took her place amid a strange assortment of crowned heads: a grown man with the mind of a child, a Bactrian woman with strange manners and speech, and a two-year-old boy, her own cousin, only now learning to walk and talk. She quickly saw that she was the only one among them competent to wield power. She also must have seen, based on the army’s support for her marriage to Philip, that the rank-and-file soldiery could be won over to her side. It was they who had put Philip on the throne and given him his name, hoping to reclaim the glories of a greater Philip, his father. They might now embrace Adea, granddaughter of that greater Philip, for the same reasons.
As though to gratify these longings for the past, Adea too changed her name, becoming Eurydice as she took her place on the throne. It was a name with good Argead pedigree, one that had belonged to her grandfather Philip’s mother. It was better suited to her new station than Adea, which was (probably) an Illyrian name. She too, like the Philip who had once been Arrhidaeus, was now a standard-bearer of the old Argead traditions, the generations before Alexander’s move into Asia. The heritage of her mother and grandmother, Illyrian warrior-women, was put aside in favor of the legacy she had through her grandfather.
But though she might advertise herself as native-born royalty, Adea still retained the warlike ways in which Cynnane had raised her. Her Illyrian roots had not been severed with a mere change of name. Alexander’s top generals were about to tangle with one of history’s toughest teenage girls.
4. ANTIGONUS, CRATERUS, AND ANTIPATER (NORTHERN GREECE/WESTERN ASIA WINTER, LATE 322 B.C.)
Cynnane’s murder held particular significance for a man who had been keeping a close eye—the one eye he still had—on Perdiccas’ doings.
Proud Antigonus, satrap of Phrygia, had already ignored Perdiccas’ orders concerning the reconquest of Cappadocia. That set him at odds with the Babylon government, and since then antipathy on both sides had grown. Perdiccas had issued a summons to Antigonus to appear before a judicial proceeding, intending to settle the question of hierarchy once and for all. But Antigonus was contemplating a different plan. News of Cynnane’s death helped further that plan and guarantee its success.
Somehow, Antigonus had learned of Perdiccas’ intention to swap wives, trading Nicaea for Cleopatra, Antipater’s daughter for Alexander’s royal sister. Courtship of Cleopatra was strong evidence of the ambitions of Perdiccas, and the