Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [94]
Eumenes still considered Cleopatra and her mother, Olympias, his patrons, and himself their champion. But the question of who had the right to fly the Argead banner had become tortured and complex. Now the joint kings were in the hands of Eumenes’ foes, who likewise portrayed themselves as defenders of the royal house. To them, he was a pretender who had used the kings to advance a bid for power; to him, they were kidnappers who had abducted the kings from their rightful keepers.
Even had he wanted to, Eumenes could not now withdraw from the struggle. The chances of war had fallen out such that he had killed Craterus, a crime that would follow him everywhere. He had no choice but to fight and to hope that the showdown with Antigonus, whenever it came, would be on flat ground favorable to his cavalry corps. But what could Eumenes expect from a victory? Barred from the throne by his Greek birth, without any capo in view to whom he could be consigliere, Eumenes knew his long-term outlook was dim. If young Alexander could survive long enough to rule in his own right, Eumenes might serve as his closest adviser, the post for which he was best suited. But that prospect was still more than ten years off. Could anyone hold out for so long, even with a superior army, if he had no constitutional office and was a declared enemy of the state?
Such was the strange position Eumenes found himself in amid the turmoil of the civil war. He alone of all the leaders in that war had gained a major battlefield victory. Yet he had ended up without a country, cause, or commander to fight for. His cavalry was good enough to win against any challenger—but just what he could win was beyond anyone’s surmise.
Fearing his soldiers would be panicked by the perils ahead, Eumenes called them together to report Perdiccas’ death and their own outlaw status. He did not know how his men would respond and freely offered them the chance to leave his service. Perhaps he also mentioned some pointed details of the mutiny at Triparadeisus and the impoverished state of Antipater’s finances. In any case, no one took up his offer. His troops urged him to lead them with all speed against the royal army, vowing to shred its decrees with the points of their spears.
That was all Eumenes needed to hear. He struck camp and moved westward to await the arrival of his foes. If he could fight for nothing else, he would fight for his own survival, for the moment he surrendered, or ran, he was sure to die.
5. THE PROPAGANDA WAR (EMPIRE-WIDE)
Now that old man Antipater and his son Cassander had thrown themselves into the power struggle, questions about Alexander’s death began to resurface. Had Alexander been poisoned? If so, had Antipater and his sons been involved, perhaps with help from Antipater’s Greek crony Aristotle? The rumors that had circulated in the Greek world cast a dark pall over the new de facto leader of the empire. Antipater’s enemies moved to exploit these rumors, and Antipater himself tried to fend them off, in an exchange of forged and leaked documents designed to win the hearts and minds of the Greek-reading public.
Already by this time the Hellenic world had read the memoir of Onesicritus, a Greek sea captain who had served in Alexander’s fleet. This memoir claimed that Alexander was poisoned by the guests at a dinner he attended the night he fell ill, but it refused to name the guilty parties for fear of reprisals. Onesicritus’ implication was that the assassins were still at large and able to wreak revenge, an indirect way of accusing the generals then in power—which in the Greek world meant, above all, Antipater.
Shortly thereafter—the exact date is a matter of dispute—an anonymous Greek treatise appeared that named the names Onesicritus had kept hushed. The original version of the treatise, sometimes called The Last Days and Testament of Alexander, is lost, but a later Latin translation survives, the Liber de Morte. It claims that Antipater, summoned by Alexander to Babylon and certain that