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By Root 757 0

unless Eumenes did something to counter it. The wily Greek hastily convened an assembly of the troops and stood to speak before them. He thanked them for standing by their oaths of allegiance—no one, of course, had yet had time to do otherwise—and “revealed” that he had circulated the leaflets as a test, a test his army had passed admirably. Antigonus could never have written them, he reasoned; any general who offered bounties would create a weapon that could be turned back against him. Perhaps some of Eumenes’ listeners bought that logic, and perhaps others admired the cleverness of his ruse; but all were convinced by the recent raids that their best hope of riches lay in protecting Eumenes, not killing him. They voted on the spot to vastly increase their leader’s security, supplying him a bodyguard of a thousand picked troops.

Eumenes struck back against Antigonus by moving to Celaenae in Phrygia, One-eye’s own vacant capital, and plundering his satrapy all through that winter. Antigonus did not challenge him there, but Antipater, with his more seasoned troops, made several sallies. The contest in Phrygia between Eumenes and Antipater, old enemies since the days before Alexander’s march, is known in great detail, thanks to two precious pages of Arrian’s Events After Alexander found in a medieval palimpsest (a parchment rubbed out and overwritten by economy-minded scribes). The erased passage has just now awakened from its millennium-long sleep, thanks to digital-imaging technologies. It gives a painful glimpse of how much was lost with the extinction of this work.

Eumenes continued his hit-and-run raids on a wider scale than before, striking in many directions at once so Antipater could not pin him down. He gave his captains use of his siege machines to make their job easier. In a short time they collected some eight hundred talents from the hapless peoples of Phrygia and distributed this loot among the delighted rank and file. Eumenes grew in stature as his men grew richer, while Antipater began to look like a paper tiger. “In full view of Antipater and his army, the [Phrygians] were being seized, their estates were burned down, and their goods were sold off as booty,” Arrian wrote. “They regarded Antipater as nothing more than a spectator of their misfortunes.”

But Eumenes’ tactics could not succeed forever. His enemies would eventually corner him, or cut him off from food and plunder, thus robbing him of his army’s loyalty. Already he had seen disaffection among his troops; a corps of three thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry had deserted from Celaenae and gone on the move, their camp some distance away. Eumenes, borrowing one of Alexander’s signature stratagems, sent an elite force of strong, fleet men on an all-night march. These took the deserters entirely by surprise and captured them without bloodshed. Eumenes executed the leaders of the mutiny but reabsorbed the troops, dispersing them among more reliable units and courting their favor with handouts. With both Antipater and Antigonus coming after him, he could not afford to lose experienced soldiers.

Eumenes’ best hope was to join forces with his fellow outlaws, the other former leaders of Perdiccas’ regime. Each of them still controlled an army of his own: Alcetas, Perdiccas’ brother, had considerable forces, while Perdiccas’ brother-in-law Attalus had money to spare from the funds he had seized. Eumenes reached out to these two highborn Macedonians as well as to two other Perdiccans, Polemon and Docimus, all four of whom were gathered in nearby Pisidia. Eumenes’ strategy proposal is preserved in the now-legible palimpsest. If all five combined forces, Eumenes argued, they could control western Asia for a long time, living off the land and embarrassing their enemies. Antipater and Antigonus would be despised for their weakness, and defections from their armies would increase. Eventually, these two would negotiate a peace in which the Perdiccans would be pardoned and restored to the posts they held under the Babylon settlement. Significantly, Eumenes