The Fight for Alexander's Spoils

A History of Mankind (146)

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If Alexander’s campaigns were a unique moment in history when the most daring, capable and physically brave of all warlords in contention (Alexander himself) won and won against the odds, the Wars of the Diadochi represented a reversion to the mean – as treason, luck, bribery and coincidence, rather than skill and charisma, dictated the order in which wannabe Macedonian dynasts were felled by their rivals.

Perdiccas, Alexander’s leading cavalry commander, took the lead in the fight for succession when he arranged for Arrhidaeus, Alexander’s mentally defective brother, to rule jointly with Alexander’s yet-to-be-born child, and conducted the first purge of opposing Macedonian officers, including general Meleager.

Perdiccas’ cronies and supporters were rewarded with chunks of land to rule, but few were able to hold on to them for long. Macedon’s ruler Antipater emerged as the most dangerous player, and gained the support of Ptolemy and others to oppose Perdiccas, who tried to play dynastic politics by marrying Alexander‘s sister Cleopatra, and ended up murdered.

Ptolemy, who had stolen Alexander’s body and hid it in Egypt, settled there and effectively became a Hellenized pharaoh, while most Diadochi were left to fight confusing wars against each other on multiple fronts. They all used the treasury accumulated by Alexander’s victories to raise new armies against each other; in fact, they spent so much on hiring the best troops that the deluge of silver coins into the economy led to significant price inflation across the Fertile Crescent, evident in the prices recorded in Babylon markets¹.

When the elderly Antipater died in 319 BC at just over eighty years of age, the slightly younger Antigonus One-Eyed, born in the distant 382 BC, became Greece’s leading Diadochus. Antigonus tussled briefly with the only non-Macedonian Greek Diadochus, Eumenes of Cardia, a curious character who had risen to the status of warlord from that of Alexander’s personal assistant, but the scholarly Eumenes was no match for the murderous Macedonians: he was defeated in battle and killed in 316 BC, six years before Alexander’s own son by Roxana, and supposed heir, was murdered too.