Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire Read Free Page A

anti-Macedonian politician Hyperides proposed honors for Iolaus precisely for having done away with the king. Yet another of Antipater’s sons, Cassander, had arrived only a few weeks earlier, presumably to plead for his father’s retention in Macedon. His mission had not gone well. Unfamiliar with the changes that had recently taken place in Alexander’s court, he had fallen out with the king over his insistence on obeisance from his courtiers, and Alexander had publicly humiliated him in return. 5
    Whatever the facts, it was a perfect opportunity for Olympias to sow mischief against her chief enemies. Antipater was compelled to respond: before long, someone in his camp published an account of Alexander’s last days that was supposed to be the official diary of theking’s secretary, Eumenes of Cardia. The document downplayed the idea that the king had died an unnatural death, and stressed the heavy drinking, while appearing to suggest that this was nothing unusual; it hinted at Alexander’s grief over Hephaestion, and at an unspecified fever that carried him off. 6
    But even if Olympias was wrong about Antipater and his sons, there were plenty of others who could feel uncomfortable if people started speculating and looking for motives. And even if she was wrong that Alexander’s death was part of a power play by certain individuals, she was right that his death would free the ambitions of those who had been closest to her son—those, at any rate, who were still alive after thirteen years of hard campaigning and ruthless purges. As it turned out, even bloodthirsty Alexander would have been proud of the scope of their ambitions: they embroiled the known world in decades of war.
THE CONQUESTS OF ALEXANDER
     
    Philip II came to the Macedonian throne in 359. Within four or five years, by a combination of diplomacy, assassination, and military force, he had warded off internal and external threats and united the various cantons under his autocratic rule. It became clear that the Greek states to the south were his next target. He improved on Greek infantry tactics and developed the army until he had a stupendous fighting force at his personal command. He could call on two thousand cavalry and thirty thousand soldiers trained to high professional standards and equipped with superior weaponry. Many Greek states would have to unite in order to field an army of comparable size. Their failure to do so meant that he could pick them off one by one, or league by league.
    Athens became the focus of what little resistance there was to Macedon, but it was the last gasp of traditional Greek city-state autonomy. War, financed in part by Persia, was waged in a ragged fashion by Athens and its allies against Philip, until in 338 he marched south. Alongside Boeotian troops, Athenians faced the Macedonians at Chaeronea in Boeotia. Numbers were almost equal. The battle was so hotly contested that the elite Theban Sacred Band died nearly to a man, and the Athenians too suffered crippling casualties.
    Almost the first action Philip took as ruler of southern Greece was to form the conquered states into a league, the Hellenic League or League of Corinth, with himself at its head. Interstate conflict was outlawed, and so Philip, a Macedonian king, took the first step towardGreek statehood, finally attained over two thousand years later. In return for votes on the league council, every state was obliged, when called upon, to supply troops for military expeditions. He next got the league to appoint him supreme commander for the long-promised “Greek” war against Persia, in retaliation for a century and a half of Persian interference in Greek affairs and two destructive invasions, in 490 and 480 BCE . Though that was distant history, the Greeks had never forgotten or forgiven; Persia was the common enemy, and public speakers ever since had fanned the flames of Greek supremacism and revenge.
    But Philip was murdered in 336, on the eve of his