In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 86
But it was here that Eumenes’ ethnic dilemma as a Greek commanding Macedonians began to manifest itself: Alcetas ‘… flatly refused to serve in the campaign on the ground that the Macedonians under him were ashamed to fight Antipater, and were so well disposed to Craterus that they were ready to receive him with open arms.’ The rift with Alcetas had widened over Eumenes’ advising Perdiccas to seek Cleopatra’s hand (Alcetas argued for the marriage to Nicaea) and it was unlikely to heal now. In addition, Neoptolemus was already hatching plans to undermine Eumenes’ new command because it subordinated his own authority in Armenia.37 Eumenes summoned him on suspicion of treachery and drew up his forces for a confrontation; his cavalry routed Neoptolemus’ infantry though he managed to flee with three hundred horsemen to the fast approaching regent and Craterus.38
Envy, it is said, slays itself by its own arrows. Neoptolemus, a notable archihypaspistes – a commander of the mobile infantry – and possibly a scion of the royal house of Epirus, had famously mocked the Cardian after Alexander’s death: he proposed that where ‘he had followed the king with shield and spear, Eumenes had followed with stylus and tablet’.39 But the pen he slighted was to become Eumenes’ most effective weapon, and it helped him survive these few remarkable years in which the Pamphlet was launched.
A head-on clash with Craterus was now inevitable, and it came in May 320 BCE (perhaps ten days after the initial confrontation with Neoptolemus) somewhere close to Cappadocia.40 Prior to the battle and to raise the spirits of his men, Eumenes exploited his former intimacy with Alexander; he described his portentous dream vision in which two images of the king had confronted one another, one helped by Athena and the other by Demeter. Demeter prevailed, and ‘… culling ears of grain, she wove them into a victory wreath.’ Having learned that the enemy’s synthematon, its watchword, was ‘Athena and Alexander’, and, moreover, since they were fighting for grain-planted land, Eumenes spurred his army on towards a god-augured mission, ordering ‘… all his men to crown themselves and wreath their arms with ears of grain.’
It is probably no coincidence that this appears an emulation of Philip II, for he had once played a similar laurel-wreathed card when ‘marching his soldiers to battle as if under the leadership of a god’ (Apollo) before the Battle of the Crocus Field in 353/2 BCE in the Third Sacred War; Alexander himself had also declared a ‘victory dream’ when besieging Tyre.41 And here on the plains that favoured cavalry manoeuvrability, and to guard against any drop in morale, Eumenes made sure his men were still unaware that it was the much-loved Craterus who his Macedonian contingent would be riding out to fight.
Neoptolemus and Eumenes spotted one another and ‘their horses dashed together like colliding triremes’; ‘carried away by their anger and their mutual hatred’, they let the reins fall from their left hands and grappled each other to the ground.42 Although he sustained wounds in his arms and the thigh, Eumenes dealt a deathblow to the neck and reportedly stripped his dying opponent of his armour in the style of the Homeric heroes (Ptolemy appears to have provided himself similar Iliadic honours in India).43 Neoptolemus had simply failed to appreciate that ‘to hold a pen is to be at war’; he preferred the oils of Apelles to paint him on horseback when commemorating his part in Alexander’s campaign.44
Eumenes had wisely deployed his Asiatic squadrons against Craterus, who was dumbfounded as to why Eumenes’ ‘Macedonians’ did not desert; Craterus and his purple kausia fell en homiloi, ‘in the crowd’, and his wounded body, trampled by his own horse, was not immediately recognised, though he ended up dying in Eumenes’ arms.45 Despite this resounding and unexpected victory, the Perdiccan alliance was fractured with the chiliarch’s death in Egypt just a few days later, following which the reconciled Macedonian factions by the Nile levied a death sentence on Eumenes as soon as they learned of Craterus’ death.46 For it was alleged that in Egypt some fifty of Perdiccas’ supporters had been condemned to die.47 The list included Perdiccas’ sister, Atalante, fatally then in camp and by now married to the newly pro-Perdiccas Attalus, and the proscriptions list targeted Eumenes too.48 It was a wholesale effort to wipe out any support for the royalist faction.
The next synedrion of the anti-Perdiccan coalition, in late summer of 320 BCE (adhering to the ‘low’ chronology), took place at Triparadeisus, a convergence of a trio of ancient game parks probably close to the source of the Orontes River in northern Syria. Old acquaintances were reunited, the most prominent being those of Peithon, Antigenes and Seleucus who greeted Antipater for the first time in some fourteen years. Almost as many years had passed since the campaign train had marched south out of Asia Minor leaving Antigonus in command of a region centred on Phrygia. Some veterans of the united phalanx must have met young sons they had left behind in Macedonia, but now as grown men in arms.
Antipater, approaching eighty years old, appointed a younger generation of personal Bodyguards to the kings (Arrhidaeus, now Philip III, and Roxane’s son, Alexander IV) who had been taken to Egypt in Perdiccas’ campaign entourage; the new Somatophylakes included Lysimachus’ youngest brother, the brother of the absent Peucestas, Antigonus’ nephew and Polyperchon’s son.49 The royal roles once united in Perdiccas – chief guardian of the kings, overseer of the realm and commander-in-chief of the royal army in Asia – were now divided between Antipater and Antigonus Monophthalmos. It was here that the one-eyed veteran was, in fact, provided with plenipotentiary powers that would result in him founding his own dynasty, a somewhat ironic outcome if the regent already suspected his expansionist ambition:
As general of the royal army he appointed Antigonus, assigning him the task of finishing the war against Eumenes and Alcetas; but he attached his own son Cassander to Antigonus as chiliarch, so that the latter might not be able to pursue his own ambitions undetected.50
Antigonus was, as Diodorus put it, ‘… chosen supreme commander of Asia…and at the same time he had been appointed general of a great army.’ In fact Diodorus later referred back to this appointment as ‘regent (epimeletes) of the kingdom’.51 Antigonus assumed the role with enthusiasm and there soon began a number of skirmishes and set-piece battles with Eumenes that extracted the best, and arguably the worst, from the former Pellan court associates. Our extant sources severely compressed the eyewitness testimony of Hieronymus of Cardia, then serving Eumenes; nonetheless, what we do have suggests he must have originally given vivid descriptions of these complex battles, the detail and tactical observations perhaps only rivalled by the accounts of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey.
The more subtle part of the machtpolitik that saw Eumenes and Antigonus searching for ‘royal legitimacy’, as well as military supremacy on the plains of Asia, employed magnanimous gestures that gave the illusion of official sanction to their respective campaigns; each was presenting himself as a constitutionalist legitimised by the kings.52 Typifying the charade, Eumenes requisitioned new cavalry in the Troad to equip his hipparchos, the cavalry officer Apollonides:
When Eumenes fell in with the royal herds of horse that were pasturing about Mount Ida, he took as many horses as he wanted and sent a written statement of the number to the overseers; at this, we are told, Antipater laughed and said that he admired Eumenes for his forethought, since he evidently expected to give an account of the royal properties to them, or to receive one from them.53
Having narrowly avoided an earlier ambush by Antigonus, Eumenes journeyed once more to meet Alexander’s sister, Cleopatra, still based at Sardis.54 The meeting was brief; Cleopatra warned him off fearing it would further antagonise the regent who was fast approaching with his army on its way northward from Syria. A battle on the plains outside the city was averted but she and Antipater, nevertheless, clashed, though she ‘defended herself vigorously’ and ‘brought counter-charges against him’. He may have upbraided her for her attempted liaisons with Leonnatus and then Perdiccas; she would have reminded him that she was royalty where he was not. She would have likely said more besides: her w
ish to enter into a union with Alexander’s chosen epitropos and parley with her brother’s former secretary, Eumenes – now unlawfully proscribed in her opinion – was her decision to make. Furthermore, Antipater’s proffering his daughters to the leading Diadokhoi was threatening her dead brother’s wishes and his last instruction which had demanded he step down as regent in Macedonia in favour of Craterus.55
We may imagine them storming at one another about much else, and what was reportedly an amicable-enough parting would be their last meeting ever. Had the infantry not already revolted over the death of Philip’s other daughter, Cynnane (killed recently by Perdiccas’ brother Alcetas), and if the Perdiccans had already been fully rounded up, who knows what measures the regent might have taken right there to silence Cleopatra for good.56
With the newly united royal army seeking him out, Eumenes occupied Antigonus’ winter base at Celaenae in Phrygia, ‘a landscape more of villages than cities’, in late 320 BCE. The surrounding plains were fertile and the city stood on the crossroads of the ancient highways to Ephesus to the west, and to the narrow defile of the Cilician Gates to the east, and to Synnada and Telmessus on the north-south route. Alexander had first taken Celaenae (broadly occupied by modern Dinar in southwest Turkey) in 333 BCE after a sixty-day ‘truce’ in which the citizens put their faith in the strength of the walls and in military aid they were expecting.57 Antigonus was given 1,500 troops to see out the siege and the city had been a Macedonian stronghold, as well as Antigonus’ winter quarters, ever since.58
A map of Asia Minor showing Antigonus’ sphere of influence under Alexander. Image from Antigonos the One-Eyed and the Creation of the Hellenistic State by Richard Billows (1990). Provided with the kind permission of The University of California Press.
Celaenae had both a legendary and a historic legacy; it was here that Apollo flayed the satyr Marsyas after their ill-fated musical contest, and the city was once the mustering place of the Greek mercenaries (mostly Peloponnesians) fighting for Cyrus the Younger. The famous ‘10,000’ included a then little-known Xenophon whose Anabasis remains the only eyewitness account of a mercenary army at war.59 The city was also renowned for its enormous game park fed by the River Meander (today’s Buyuk Menderes) and the River Marsyas which flowed through the middle of its fortifications.60 Eumenes’ occupation of Celaenae was undoing a decade of Antigonid control. It was as symbolic a gain as it was practical, and he set about rewarding his troops with homesteads and castles from the spoils, and distributing ‘purple caps [the Macedonian kausiai] and military cloaks’; these were ‘a special gift of loyalty among Macedonians’ which signified the bearers as philoi and hetairoi of the king or their leader.61
To spike the gathering of ‘outlaws’, Antigonus is said to have smuggled letters into the camp offering 100 talents for Eumenes’ death, though Plutarch is vague on exactly where this occurred and we don’t know where he sourced it. The move apparently backfired as spectacularly as if it had been a ruse of Eumenes himself: once the letters were found, ‘his Macedonians were highly incensed and made a decree that a thousand of the leading soldiers should serve him continually as a body-guard, watching over him when he went abroad and spending the night at his door…’62 If the textual recovery of the Gothenburg Palimpsest is correct, he, or perhaps Antipater, had good reason for the assassination attempt; either en route from Lydian Sardis to Phrygia, or in the environs of Celaenae itself, Eumenes made a mockery of Antipater’s forces (if this is not a misspelling of ‘Antigonus’); his army was too fast and too mobile and it eluded the regent’s greater numbers, taking 800 talents in booty leaving Antipater as ‘nothing but a spectator’ to the suffering of his outmanoeuvred men.63
With success under his belt, Eumenes had called together the scattered Perdiccan remnants to Celaenae: Alcetas, Perdiccas’ brother-in-law Attalus (who had briefly held Tyre with the remnants of the Perdiccan fleet in the wake of Perdiccas’ death), his brother Polemon, and Docimus the deposed governor of Babylonia; they either arrived in person or communicated through envoys.64 Despite Alcetas’ initial enthusiasm (which may simply have been a ruse to commandeer command), the Perdiccan generals refused to unite under Eumenes and they moved southwest into Caria, leaving him without the benefit of their combined numbers. The chance for a ‘royal synaspismos’ was gone, and closing in was Antigonus now strengthened by a further 8,500 of Antipater’s infantry (the regent himself was heading to Macedonia with the kings) along with a mounted contingent. Eumenes had no choice but to head to the plains of Cappadocia where his own superior cavalry could operate at full potential and perhaps exert what influence he wielded in his expansive ‘home’ satrapy.65
As Alexander had demonstrated in the set-piece confrontations with Darius, accomplished horsemanship could turn battles, despite huge disparities in infantry numbers. Yet even mounting a horse with traditional cavalry weapons – a bow, short sword (the xiphos or curved kopis and machaera favoured by Xenophon who Hipparchicus menacingly advised charging at the enemy with lances pointed forward between the horses’ ears), spear (hasta) and javelins (akon or palton, often two) or the longer lance (xyston) carried by sarissophoroi – required skill and experience.66 Although Alexander’s Companion Cavalry and perhaps other ‘heavy’ regiments had worn metal corselets (Thucydides had mentioned the breastplates on the horsemen of two generations before), the king is himself portrayed as wearing what appears to be a linothorax of linen (metal plates may have been hidden inside) painted with the head of Medusa and with shoulder pieces (epomides) extending above; Curtius claimed Alexander rarely wore a cuirass and only then on the insistence of his friends.67
But here in the heat of Asia, any armour worn by local levies beneath a clamys or chiton was probably no more than that or a spolas, a leather jerkin often with hanging pinions of metal; certainly the lightly armed cavalry, the prodromoi, valued speed and agility over defensive panoply. The burning of old armour when Alexander had entered India suggests the army was predominantly outfitted in combustible material rather than metal.68 A broader-rimmed Boeotian-style bronze cavalry helmet sometimes replaced the taller Phrygian type and it gave better visibility as well as reasonable protection against sword-slashes to the face, though the broader-rimmed soft hat, the petasos, was reportedly worn as often (perhaps in scouting rather than battle).69 To provide some degree of lower protection, leather riding boots (or high strapped and socked sandals) were preferred because protective bronze grieves were impractical as lower leg movement was needed to control the horse when thighs kept a tight grip on its flanks. So these body parts also remained unprotected by a parameridion, a thigh guard often seen in 6th century art, due to the need for flexibility.
Mounted skirmishers, hippakontistai, wore little more than padded cloth and there is no mention at all of protection for their mounts – the apron-like parapleuridia that Xenophon described on Persian heavy cavalry, for example, and also described by Curtius at the battle of Issus. They were so heavily clad that the Thessalian cavalry were able to outmanoeuvre them, an image that conjures up the heavily protected cataphract-like cavalry of the Roman era.70 Saddles and stirrups had not yet been developed; riders sat on skin shabraques or lined cloths and relied on reins attached to the sidebars of snaffle-bits and harsher spiked rollers, along with prick-spurs attached to boots, to control the horse.71 So accurate javelin throwing in a rising position required balance and coordination, and so did lance thrusting sideways and over the head. Pulling off wheeling tactics and keeping in tight formation was critical to survival, as were well-trained horses responsive to aids (the rider’s commands). Asian bloodstock and experienced riders were invaluable to both armies as a new generation of multi-tasked xystophoroi, mounted spearmen, emerged in the battles across the Hellenistic world.
Eumenes’ cavalry command in India and his acquisition of Perdiccas’ hipparchy make it clear that he was obviously a seasoned campaigner on horseback who must have mastered the techniques of the flying wedge and the oblique
order flank-guard introduced by Philip and Alexander.72 Eumenes would now need to call on that experience; it was early 319 BCE and he wisely prepared his forces on favourable Cappadocian ground where his mounted brigades could be effectively deployed. It became clear that battle was inevitable once scouts confirmed Antigonus’ approach, and Plutarch displayed his open admiration of, or sympathy for, Eumenes in what occurred next:
A carved figure of a Macedonian or perhaps a Thessalian cavalryman in Boeotian helmet on the Alexander Sarcophagus. The shape of the helmet was formed by hammering out sheets of bronze on a carved stone former. Apart from that the rider is unprotected. The infantryman, possibly a hypaspist, wears a Phrygian helmet more typical of the sarissa-bearing phalangites. The spears they once wielded have broken off the carving. Istanbul Archaeological Museum.
Now, prosperity lifts even men of inferior natures to higher thoughts, so that they appear to be invested with a certain greatness and majesty as they look down from their lofty state; but the truly magnanimous and constant soul reveals itself rather in its behaviour under disasters and misfortunes. And so it was with Eumenes. For, to begin with, he was defeated by Antigonus at Orcynia in Cappadocia through treachery.73
That treachery, according to Justin, included more bribes for Eumenes’ head. Finding the covert correspondence, Eumenes claimed these were his own forged tell-tales to gauge the strength of loyalty in the ranks, which somewhat casts some suspicion on the veracity of the other reported rewards for his death.74 Loyalty proved thin: shortly before battle Eumenes witnessed the defection of an officer with 3,000 infantry and 500 mounted men, whilst Antigonus corrupted Apollonides with ‘great promises’ and ‘secret persuasion’ to defect once fighting had commenced.75