Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (19 page)

If the satraps stayed in the east while Eumenes and Antigenes fought their way west, the chances were that neither division of the army would be strong enough to attain its objectives. Eumenes therefore gave in and stayed, though he too moved away from the worst heat. The army went to Persepolis, which had been one of the capital cities
of the Achaemenid empire and was now the capital of Peucestas’s province, nearly a month’s journey away to the southeast. Peucestas had a further ten thousand light infantry waiting there, including a contingent of the renowned Persian bowmen. Peucestas allowed the men to forage as they wished in the countryside, and once they reached Persepolis he treated the entire army to a splendid feast. All the many thousands were seated in four vast concentric circles, from the rank-and-file soldiers on the outside to the senior officers and dignitaries on the inside. The center of the circle consisted of altars to the gods, including Philip and Alexander, where Peucestas performed a magnificent sacrifice. Secure on his own turf, he launched another attempt to undermine Eumenes’ command.

The degree of disloyalty and contentiousness that Eumenes had to face from his fellow generals was quite extraordinary, but he responded with typical cunning. He produced a forged letter to the effect that Cassander was dead and Olympias in charge in Macedon, and that Polyperchon had already invaded Asia Minor. Clearly, news had not yet reached them of the true state of affairs in Europe, where, on the contrary, Cassander had Olympias under siege in Pydna. The letter restored the army’s confidence, since they now believed that Eumenes’ allies had the upper hand. Under these circumstances, it made no sense to undermine Eumenes’ authority as Royal General of Asia, and he was briefly able to assert his authority as commander in chief.

All intrigues were sidelined, however, when news came that Antigonus had left Media and was advancing on Persis. Leaving a token force to defend Persepolis, Eumenes set out to meet him. Almost ninety thousand men and two hundred elephants were to clash on the edge of the Iranian desert. For the first time in western history, elephants would be involved on both sides of a battle.

For several days after the armies drew close to each other in the district of Paraetacene, late in October 317, nothing happened apart from a little skirmishing. The terrain (near modern Yezd-i-Khast) was rugged and unsuitable for a decisive battle. Antigonus continued his vain attempts to have Eumenes betrayed to him. Joining battle was also hampered by the fact that both armies soon became critically short of supplies, and many men were assigned to foraging duties. The nearest
fertile district was Gabene (near modern Isfahan), some three days’ journey away to the southeast.

Antigonus was about to set off there, but Eumenes heard of his plans from deserters. In return he sent false deserters to Antigonus’s camp. This was the most common and effective way to feed the enemy with misinformation, in this case that an attack on Antigonus’s camp was planned for that very night, so that Antigonus would be vulnerable if he was breaking camp as planned. Antigonus fell for it and stayed put, and it was Eumenes who left in the night and got a head start toward Gabene. When Antigonus discovered the ruse, he personally led a cavalry detachment to hold some high ground along the route, while Peithon brought up the infantry. Eumenes spotted the cavalry and, assuming that Antigonus’s entire army had arrived, drew up his men for battle. The terrain meant that he could hardly be outflanked, but he had the disadvantage of facing uphill, so he waited. Before long, the rest of Antigonus’s army arrived, and took up their positions.

Antigonus’s heavy infantry in the center outnumbered Eumenes, but he took care that Macedonians would not directly face Macedonians, in case they refused to fight one another. He deployed his light cavalry in large numbers on the left wing, commanded by Peithon, and his heavy cavalry on the right, under the command of his son Demetrius, still only nineteen years old. His elephants were mostly posted on the right and in the center, whereas Eumenes had adopted a more orthodox and evenly balanced formation. Antigonus advanced down the hill toward the enemy lines, and battle was joined.

On Antigonus’s left, Peithon’s light cavalry were routed, after an exceedingly close-fought contest. In the center, the elephants proved ineffective and were withdrawn, and the phalanxes became engaged in a bloody battle. Here Antigenes’ crack veterans did what they did best, and broke Antigonus’s phalanx. But as they pressed forward, they opened up a gap between themselves and the left wing. Antigonus had kept the cavalry on his right wing screened by elephants, but now he ordered them to charge, and before long Eumenes’ left was in disorder.

Both sides regrouped and faced each other again, but despite tactical movements and countermovements they could do little in the gathering gloom, and after nightfall the exhausted and hungry armies disengaged by the light of a full moon. Eumenes’ men insisted on returning to their camp, leaving Antigonus in possession of the field and therefore of the battlefield spoils, the usual tokens of victory. But he had lost four times as many men as Eumenes and gained nothing. In fact, after seeing to his dead, he withdrew, leaving Gabene to
Eumenes for the winter, and went northeast to take up winter quarters in Media. The two armies were perched on two spines of the Zagros foothills, with an arid salt plain between them.

Eumenes’ winter quarters were scattered. His army was as fragmented as usual, and separate divisions were encamped far and wide. And in those pre-Roman days, camps were scarcely fortified. This attracted Antigonus’s attention, but even so, given that he was now outnumbered, the attack he planned was predicated on surprise. He decided not to wait for spring but to attack during the winter, and to come at Eumenes from an unexpected direction. He would take his army across the salt plain that lay between the two armies. This would cut his journey down to about nine days, as opposed to over three weeks if they went around the desert—and Eumenes in any case had pickets in place all along the routes approaching his position from other directions.

They set off around December 20. The plan was to travel by night and rest by day. The troops carried prepared rations and plenty of water for the arid desert. Antigonus issued strict orders that no fires were to be lit, despite the subzero temperatures at night. Any fires on the plain would cut through the darkness and be clearly visible from the surrounding hills. Everything went well at first. They were more than halfway across when the cold tempted some of the men to light fires. No doubt the men themselves were thankful for the warmth, but the point may have been to keep the elephants alive, since they would have been suffering badly. In any case, the fires were spotted by some local villagers, who warned Eumenes.

But it already seemed too late. Antigonus was only four days away, and the furthest-flung of Eumenes’ divisions was six days away. Peucestas recommended a tactical withdrawal, to buy time. But Eumenes had fires of his own lit on the hills, enough to make it seem as though a major division of his army was protecting the direct route across the plain and occupying the high ground. Antigonus’s men were compelled to turn, and they reached the edge of the desert north of Eumenes’ position. Antigonus had lost the element of surprise, and Eumenes had gained the time to regroup his army.

The elephants were the last to reach the huge fortified camp Eumenes built. But by then Antigonus’s troops were refreshed and on the move south, and he sent a strong unit of cavalry and light infantry to intercept the elephants. Eumenes deployed a stronger counterforce, and suffered nothing worse than a few losses and some wounded beasts. But morale in Eumenes’ camp was lower than at Paraetacene. In the
intervening period, rumors had reached them that Eumenes’ commission had been revoked, when Adea Eurydice had her husband disown Polyperchon. But Antigenes compensated with a nice coup just before the battle. He sent some of his Macedonian veterans to shout out to Antigonus’s Macedonians: “You assholes are sinning against your fathers, the men who conquered the world with Philip and Alexander!”
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They faced each other across several miles of salt plain; the battle would be fought on level ground, with the only difficulty the terrain offered being the terrible dust for which the salt plains or
kavirs
of the Iranian plateau are infamous. Antigonus adopted pretty much the same formation as at Paraetacene. Eumenes, in response, bulked up his left wing with the majority of the elephants and cavalry, and took joint command there with Peucestas. He was directly facing Antigonus, who commanded his right wing, as was usual. After the initial skirmishing, Antigonus and his cavalry attacked Eumenes’ left. Peucestas caved in suspiciously quickly, but Eumenes took up the struggle and kept Antigonus at bay for a while. Meanwhile, in the center, Antigenes’ veterans were as successful as at Paraetacene. It was a massacre: thousands of Antigonus’s men died, compared with a few hundred of Eumenes’. Eumenes seemed assured, if not of outright victory, then at least of the upper hand, and he rode around to the right wing, to take command there for the final push.

But as it turned out, the decisive move had already taken place off the battlefield. Antigonus had risked sending a sizable cavalry squadron from his left wing around the battlefield, under cover of the choking dust cloud created by thousands of men and horses on the move, to take Eumenes’ undefended baggage train. By the time Eumenes became aware of what had happened, it was too late to do anything about it. Night was falling, and Peucestas refused to join him for the cavalry push on the right.

Eumenes was forced to disengage. He had fallen foul of the very stratagem he had used against Neoptolemus in 320, but there was a more significant precedent. The same thing had happened to Alexander the Great at Gaugamela, and had evoked a famous
mot
from the Conqueror: he had ordered his officers to ignore the threat to their baggage, on the grounds that “the victors will recover their own belongings
and
take those of the enemy.”
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Eumenes gave the same response, in much the same words, but without the same result.

Antigonus’s phalanx had been shattered, and Eumenes could fairly look forward to victory the next day. But the Macedonian veterans
refused to carry on, knowing that their wives and children had been captured, and the satraps insisted on withdrawing, to fight another day. Unknown to Eumenes, they had already decided, before the battle, to do away with him after the victory they had expected. Eumenes’ appeals therefore fell on deaf ears, and messengers were secretly sent to Antigonus’s camp to enquire after the safety of the Macedonians’ families. Antigonus promised their return—once Eumenes had been handed over.

Within a few days of his being surrendered, Eumenes and several of his senior officers were put to death. Antigenes came off worst, despite his advanced age (he was about sixty-five): he was thrown alive into a pit and burnt there, in revenge for the slaughter his veterans had wrought on Antigonus’s men. Eumenes’ grand army, elephants and all, deserted en masse to Antigonus. Ever loyal to Olympias, Alexander IV, and the legitimate Argead cause, Eumenes had proved himself an excellent general and the most successful of the loyalists. His death ushered in a new era, in which, rather than working for the surviving king, Antigonus and his peers would strive to establish their own rights to kingship. The deaths of Olympias and Eumenes left the world in the hands of men who owed no loyalty except to themselves.

By the end of 317, then, Antigonus had carried out his commission. But it had been clear, ever since his purge of the Asia Minor satraps, that he had far outstripped his Triparadeisus commission. His mastery of Asia seemed solid, his ally Cassander was in charge in Macedon, and Ptolemy was quiet in Egypt. It almost looked as though a balance of power might emerge, miraculously soon after Alexander’s death. After the battle, Antigonus retired to winter quarters near Ecbatana, with the bulk of his now huge army dispersed far and wide over Media or repatriated to their satrapies. In the spring he would head west, but first he had a little housekeeping to take care of.

Peithon was an ambitious man, and could have been a contender—one of the great few who strove for control of large chunks or even the whole of Alexander’s empire. He had played a considerable role at both Paraetacene and Gabene, was popular with the troops, and was satrap of wealthy Media, one of the heartlands of the former Persian empire. He had become involved in Antigonus’s war against Eumenes in the first place only as a means to renew his bid for independence for
the eastern satrapies, with him as their king, and he spent the winter after Eumenes’ defeat trying to persuade as many of Antigonus’s troops as possible to stay in the east and work for him.
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But Antigonus was not ready to lose the eastern satrapies, a valuable source of revenue. He summoned Peithon to Ecbatana and, assured of his safety, Peithon guilelessly went. He was promptly arraigned before a council of Antigonus’s Friends, accused of treachery (of trying to detach some of Antigonus’s troops for his own purposes), and executed. Some of his lieutenants went on the warpath in Media, but were soon crushed. With the same presumption of authority that he had already displayed in Asia Minor, Antigonus appointed a new satrap for Media.

Another residual problem was Antigenes’ veterans. They had been nothing but trouble since Triparadeisus, and now, by betraying Eumenes to him, they had proved their corruptibility. They had been bound by oaths of loyalty to Eumenes, but they had broken these oaths, albeit when faced with terrible personal loss. But then, Eumenes himself had broken his oath to Antigonus at Nora. Antigonus decided to dissolve the regiment. He packed some of them off to the remote east, to serve in Arachosia. The rest he kept with him, but as he returned west in the spring, he dispersed them here and there, as settlers to police potential trouble spots within his territories. In Arachosia, they were given jobs more suitable to mercenaries—garrisoning frontier towns, scouting in enemy territory. Antigonus’s ruthless instructions to the satrap were to make sure that they did not survive their missions.
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