Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [97]
But Cleopatra, though she granted Eumenes an audience, was not willing to become his partisan. She was conscious of her duty to the state and did not wish to exacerbate its troubles by taking sides. She asked Eumenes to leave Sardis and seek battle elsewhere, far from her regal presence. Eumenes bade farewell to the princess and, as she had asked, led his army from Sardis.
Old man Antipater arrived in Sardis soon after and paid his own visit to Cleopatra. He had been informed of her colloquy with Eumenes, and he was not pleased. He could surmise what game the princess had been playing, first with Perdiccas and now with Perdiccas’ consigliere, and perhaps he knew about the dalliance with Leonnatus before that. With his authority already under challenge—another princess, the teenage Adea, had very nearly gotten him stoned to death—Antipater could not allow Cleopatra to flirt with his enemies. He scolded her for heedlessness of the royal house’s interests. He had loyally served that house for six decades, but it was being torn apart, as he saw it, by meddlesome, ungovernable women.
Cleopatra would have none of this. She was too proud to be talked down to by a man who had taken orders from her father and her brother. In a now-lost speech that a medieval reader, Photius, described as “beyond what one would expect of a woman,” Cleopatra hit back at Antipater with all the ammunition she had. Perhaps she too, like her mother, held this man responsible for her brother’s death and now accused him to his face. Antipater somehow mollified her, for the two parted as friends. The empire’s senior commander and its most high-ranking royal still needed each other. Cleopatra was unwilling to be blamed for civil strife, and Antipater had learned, through the wretched example of Perdiccas, the high price a soldier would pay for killing an Argead princess.
Antipater went on his way to prepare for the battle with Eumenes. Cleopatra, the damsel in the tower keep, stayed where she was, once again friendless, husbandless, and alone.
7. PTOLEMY (SYRIA AND JERUSALEM, SUMMER 320 B.C.)
Seeing his former comrades busy fighting one another, Ptolemy, safely ensconced in Egypt, chose once again to pursue his own interests. His new realm was ample, nicely enlarged by the additions of Cyprus and Cyrene, but a choice tract to the east, now nearly vacant of Macedonian forces, seemed the perfect way to complete his empire-in-miniature. His predecessors the pharaohs had long coveted Syria and Palestine and had often occupied them; wealthy provinces with well-equipped ports, they provided a valuable buffer against attacks from the east. Ptolemy had narrowly survived such an attack, and though his father-in-law, Antipater, was for the moment an ally, he might not always be one—especially since Ptolemy planned to insult the old man’s daughter by making a queen of her bridesmaid, Berenice.
In the north of the realm that Ptolemy sought lay the small walled city of Jerusalem, populated by a race of curious monotheists whom the Greeks would soon know as Ioudaioi. The Jews had thus far remained nearly invisible to Alexander and his generals, though the Macedonians had crossed right through their territory and even, perhaps, entered the holy city. Not a single historian of the Alexander period mentions the Jews or Jerusalem, an omission that a later writer, the Romanized Jew Josephus, takes as a sign of ill will. Indeed, no Greek writer before Alexander’s time shows any awareness of the Jews, except Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle’s, and he seems to have encountered only expatriates living in Egypt.
Ptolemy, however,