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THE SELEUCID EMPIRE. 358-251 BC. HOUSE OF SELEUCUS

CHAPTER 3

PERDICCAS

(c. 360-321 B.C.)

It would not be easy to name any other period of ten years in the history of the world beside the reign of Alexander in which as momentous a change passed over as large a part of the earth—a change which made such difference in the face of things. Suddenly the pageant of the greatest empire ever known had been swept away. And the power that took its place was ruled by ideas which were quite new to the most part of mankind, which had hitherto only been current in the petty republics of the Hellenes. In the spring of 323 before Christ the whole order of things from the Adriatic away to the mountains of Central Asia and the dusty plains of the Punjab rested upon a single will, a single brain, nurtured in Hellenic thought. Then the hand of God, as if trying some fantastic experiment, plucked this man away. Who could predict for a moment what the result would be? (May or June 323 BC)

The master was removed, but the instrument with which he had wrought, the new force he had wielded, was still unimpaired—the Macedonian army. It was still only necessary to get command of that in order to rule the world. The Macedonian chiefs took council together near the dead King’s body in Babylon. To all of them the prospects opened out by the sudden turn things had taken must have been at that time confused and strange, lightened only by adventurous hopes and shadowy ambitions. The question which required instantly to be met was what head was to be given to the Empire. He must be of the royal house; so far everyone was agreed. But the royal house did not offer a brilliant choice—Philip Arrhidaeus, a half-witted son of the great Philip by a Thessalian wife, the son still unborn of Alexander and the Iranian princess Roxanne (if it proved to be a son), and Heracles, the son of Alexander and the Persian Barsine, a boy of about three years. The last was not yet seriously put forward, being apparently considered illegitimate. None of the vast populations over whom the new king would reign had any voice in choosing him; the Macedonians encamped in the plains of Babylon, men who, eleven years before, knew nothing outside the narrow borders of their own land, now chose a king for half the world as absolutely as if he were to be only king of the Macedonians as of old. Discords immediately appeared. The cavalry, our books say, determined to wait for the son to whom it was hoped Roxanne would give birth; the infantry were bent on having Philip Arrhidaeus. This distinction of cavalry and infantry was not military only, but social. Just as the mediaeval knight was of a higher grade in society than the foot-soldier, so it was the petite noblesse of Macedonia who followed the king as troopers, his ‘Companions’; the rank and file of the foot were drawn from the peasantry. There are indications that it was especially the narrow-minded, free-spoken Macedonian pikemen, less open than the class above them to liberal influences and large ideas, who had been alienated by the restless marchings of Alexander and the Oriental trappings he had put on. King Philip was still to them the pattern king; they would not endure to see their old master’s son passed over in favor of the half-barbarian, still prospective issue of Alexander. They had, moreover, nothing to gain, as many of the nobles had, by a break-up of the Empire, and they suspected that the proposal to wait for the delivery of Roxanne veiled a design to deprive the Empire of a head altogether. Not till it had come near bloodshed was the dispute settled by a compromise. Philip Arrhidaeus and the son of Roxanne were both to reign conjointly. Perdiccas, a member of the old ruling house in the Orestis region of Macedonia, the foremost of all the chiefs gathered in Babylon, was to be Regent.

There were many other great lords and generals in the realm, in Babylon, in Macedonia, in the provinces, to whom the death of Alexander brought new thoughts. Would the Empire hold together, and, if so, what would their position in it be? Would it fall to pieces, and, if so, what could each lay hands on for himself? The agreement between cavalry and infantry was followed by a redistribution of the satrapies. To say nothing of the possibilities of aggrandizement, no one of mark would be safe in such times as those which were coming on, unless he could dispose of some power of his own. And no power could be well grounded unless it had a territorial support—a basis for warlike operations and a source of revenue. It was such considerations which now made several of the great chiefs, whose commands had hitherto been purely military, desire the government of a province. The first to see clearly what was required by the new conditions, our authors tell us, was Ptolemy the son of Lagus, the most cool-headed and judicious of Alexander’s generals. It was he, they say, who first proposed a resettlement of the satrapies and brought the Regent over by representing it as his interest to remove possible rivals to a distance from himself. As a defensible base, at any rate, and a source of revenue, no satrapy could have been more sagaciously chosen than the one he marked out for himself, Egypt, fenced as it was with waterless deserts and almost harbourless coasts, and at the same time rich exceedingly, opening on the Mediterranean, and suited to become one of the world’s great highways. But for the most part the new settlement was a confirmation of the status quo; nearly all the existing satraps were left in possession, the only new appointments which we need remark here being that of Eumenes, Alexander’s Greek secretary, to Cappadocia, that of Pithon the son of Crateuas to Media, and that of Lysimachus to Thrace.

Among the notable figures of the great assemblage in Babylon that summer of 323 was one which commands our special attention in this book—a robust young officer of good Macedonian birth, of about an age with the dead King, who had come to win honor under Alexander, as his father Antiochus before him had won honor under Philip. This young man’s name was Seleucus. He had accompanied the King at his first setting out into Asia in 334. In the Indian campaign of 326 he had been advanced to a high command. Services for us unrecorded among the hills of Afghanistan and Bokhara had doubtless disclosed to the quick eye of Alexander a substantial ability in this lieutenant of his. He was commander of the Royal Hypaspistai, and attached to the King’s staff. At the crossing of the Hydaspes one boat carried Alexander, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Lysimachus and Seleucus—a suggestive moment, if the later history of these five men is considered—and in the battle with the Paurava king, which followed, Seleucus fought at the head of his command.

He is next heard of two years later (324) at the great marriage festival in Susa, when Alexander, on his return from India, took to wife the daughter of Darius, and caused his generals to marry each an Iranian princess. And the bride allotted to Seleucus shows how high a place the young commander of hypaspistai held in the circle about the King. Among the most strenuous opponents of the advance of Alexander had been two great lords of Further Iran, Spitamenes and Oxyartes. When Alexander captured the rock-castle of Oxyartes the family of this chief had fallen into his hands. Oxyartes had then made his peace. His confederate, Spitamenes, had already been killed. The daughter of Oxyartes, Roxanne, was Alexander's chief queen; the daughter of Spitamenes, Apama, was given at Susa to Seleucus.

It has been remarked as curious that of the eight or nine Persian princesses mentioned in this connection only two reappear later on. One of these exceptions, however, is Apama. There can be no question that her marriage with Seleucus was a real thing. She is the mother of his successor, and her husband founded three cities, according to Appian, bearing her name. The Seleucid dynasty, while one of its roots is in Macedonia, has the other in the ancient families of Eastern Iran.

Seleucus was not one of the principal actors in the events of the next ten years. But among the secondary figures he plays a part which now and again arrests our attention. Even did he not, it would be necessary to review in a general way the course of these events in order to understand the situation when the time comes for Seleucus to step forward as protagonist. The first thing that strikes us when we take up a historian of this epoch is that the history of the world seems to have reduced itself to a history of the Macedonian army and its chiefs. But already in 323 two episodes give a sign that the predominance of the Macedonian army is to suffer reduction, that the elements of the old world it has supplanted will perhaps succeed in reasserting themselves. The Empire of Alexander suppressed the old barbarian East, and it suppressed the old free Hellas. At his death the former does not as yet stir; there are no immediate attempts on the part of the Oriental peoples to shake off the Macedonian yoke. But both in East and West the Hellenes think they have their freedom back again. In Greece itself Athens calls the states to arms, and we have the Lamian war, or, as the Greeks themselves called it, the Hellenic war. In the far East the Hellenes whom Alexander transported en masse to Bactria determine to renew the enterprise of Xenophon and march home across Asia. A great body of them, over 20,000 foot and 3000 horse, breaks away. Both these movements the Macedonian chiefs are still able to repress. Athens and her allies are crushed next year (322) by Antipater and Craterus. The Bactrian Greeks are met by Pithon, the new satrap of Media, and, by the Regent’s orders, annihilated. One revolt the Macedonians fail to suppress, that of Rhodes, which, on the news of Alexander’s death, expels the Macedonian garrison, and begins to stand out as a free Greek state able to deal on equal terms with the Macedonian world-rulers.

The compromise arrived at by the cavalry and infantry took effect. Roxanne was duly delivered of a son—King Alexander from the womb. But it was not long before troubles began. It soon became apparent that the predominant position of Perdiccas was more than the other Macedonian chiefs would endure. Before eighteen months from the death of Alexander were out, two antagonistic parties had defined themselves in the realm. On the one hand Perdiccas represented the central authority; the simpleton and the baby, who were called Kings, were in his keeping. Olympias, the mother of Alexander, supported him with the whole strength of her influence. The cause of the royal house was in fact bound up with that of Perdiccas. Leagued against him were most of the other Macedonian chiefs. The soul of the opposition was Antigonus, the satrap of Phrygia, but the party included Antipater, Philip's old general, who had commanded in Macedonia since Alexander left it, and had just suppressed the rising of the Greek states; it also included Craterus, one of the chiefs most popular with the Macedonian soldiery, and Ptolemy, the satrap of Egypt. These chiefs did not professedly oppose the royal authority, but Perdiccas only; their action was none the less bent in effect against any central authority whatever. Even among those who remained at the side of the Regent there were many whose hearts, as the event showed, were with the opposition. Of the great men of the realm only one beside Perdiccas was earnest in the royal cause, Eumenes of Cardia, Alexander’s chief secretary, who had been given the satrapy of Cappadocia. His invidious position as a Greek among the Macedonian nobles made his chances in a general scramble poor; for him all depended on the authority of the Kings being maintained.

In 321 the antagonism came to open war. The casus belli, as far as Antigonus was concerned, was his refusal to obey the Regent’s summons, followed by his flight to Macedonia, where Antipater and Craterus openly espoused his quarrel. With Ptolemy the casus belli was his seizure of the body of Alexander, a fetich which gave immense prestige to its possessor. Antigonus, Antipater and Craterus took the offensive by crossing from Macedonia into Asia Minor; Ptolemy remained on the defensive in Egypt. To crush this double rebellion the Regent divided his forces. Eumenes was left in Asia Minor to drive back the invaders. Perdiccas himself, with the Kings, marched upon Egypt. Those of the Macedonian chiefs who still obeyed him, but were too powerful to be safe, he kept by his side under observation. He had tried the policy of removing possible rivals to a distance!

And Seleucus, whom we last saw as a young man of brilliant prospects in Babylon—what line was he taking during these first years of anarchy that followed Alexander's death? In the settlement which had given so many of his fellow-chiefs a portion of the conquered lands he had received no province. He had been given instead a high command in the imperial army under the Regent. It can hardly be that, had he wished it, he could not have secured a province like the rest. Lysimachus, who had got Thrace, was perhaps younger than he. Many of the satraps in possession were not persons of sufficient importance to help giving place, should a young man like Seleucus press his claims. It must be that the high command which he took seemed to him more advantageous than a provincial governorship. It was certainly a more splendid office, if the authority of the Kings, of the Regent, held. Yes, there we have it; he had laid his plans for the continuance of the Empire, he had thrown in his lot with the Regent, he had missed his chance in the settlement of 323.

But that was two years ago, and if he had not then shown the same intelligent anticipation of events as Ptolemy he had been learning since then. He accompanied the Regent in the expedition against Egypt. Perhaps he was among those whom Perdiccas considered dangerous. Pithon, the satrap of Media, went too, and Antigenes, who commanded the Silver Shields, the Macedonian foot-guards. The campaign was to prove an object-lesson of another sort than any the Regent intended. The contrast was to be driven home to Seleucus between his own position, bound as he was by his office to perpetual subordination to the central power, and that of Ptolemy, who demonstrated his ability on a wisely-chosen and wisely-prepared ground to hold his independence against all attacks. Three times Perdiccas made an attempt to cross the arm of the Nile which separated Egypt from the desert, each time with enormous loss. His army was soon completely demoralized; numbers went over to Ptolemy; those who did not looked askance at their leader. In this predicament the temper of the unhappy man passed beyond his control. His relations with the Macedonian chiefs whom he had gathered about him became embittered. It was the last straw. Seeing that his cause was a lost one, and repelled by his demeanor, the Macedonian chiefs quickly agreed to put an end to an impossible situation. Pithon, the satrap of Media, and about a hundred more officers openly mutinied. Seleucus took his stand with the winning side. And he followed up his choice with remorselessly energetic action. He himself led the body of cavalry officers who broke into the Regent’s tent. The men of the body­guard joined them, and Antigenes, their commander, himself dealt Perdiccas the first blow. Then the mass of his assailants flung themselves upon him and ended the work. The army at once made its peace with Ptolemy, and returned with the Kings to join the forces of Antipater and Antigonus which were advancing from the North. Pithon and another chief called Arrhidaeus assumed the command of the army and the guardianship of the Kings.

Craterus, the popular general, who had left Macedonia with Antipater, was now no more. His division had been signally defeated by Eumenes, and he himself had fallen (May 321). But this victory of Eumenes did not make him strong enough to arrest Antipater, who traversed Asia Minor by land, or Antigonus, who moved along its coasts by sea. Antipater found the army, which had been that of Perdiccas, encamped at Triparadisus in Northern Syria.

The Macedonian infantry was still in a chafed and suspicious mood. In the murder of Perdiccas its part seems to have been mainly passive; it was the nobles and the cavalry who had acted over its head. And although it had acquiesced in the change of command, it could not help feeling it was somehow being got the better of by its leaders. It responded readily to Eurydice, the ambitious wife of Philip Arrhidaeus, when she began to complain that Pithon was encroaching upon the rights of its idol, the poor half-witted King. It was pacified somehow by Pithon and Arrhidaeus resigning the regency; they continued only to exercise their powers till Antipater should come, whom the army forthwith elected Regent in their place. Antipater, the great representative of the old days of Philip, would put everything right.

But now that Antipater was come, the result was that he too fell foul of the Macedonian soldiery. It was a question of money, which Alexander had promised, and which Antipater either would or could not immediately pay. Eurydice and the adherents of Perdiccas worked them up into a fury. The army was encamped on the banks of a river. On the other side lay the forces which Antipater had brought from Macedonia. The allegiance of these new recruits was safe enough, but the grand army, which included the veterans who had conquered the world, which had chosen the Kings and considered itself the sovereign disposer of the Empire, was in open mutiny. When Antipater crossed over to reason with them he was received with stones. Two men confronted the angry mob and saved him. One was, like himself, a general of Philip’s time, Antigonus, the satrap of Phrygia, the other belonged to the new generation, and stood in the brilliance of youth and military prestige, Seleucus, the commander of the horse. These two had influence enough to hold the attention of the angry multitude whilst Antipater fled over the bridge to his own camp. There the officers of the cavalry joined him, and before the united will of their hereditary leaders the infantry shrank grumbling into submission. The accession of Antipater to the regency brought with it, as the accession of Perdiccas had done, a resettlement of the dignities of the Empire. The functions which had been united in Perdiccas were divided between Antipater, who became guardian of the Kings, and Antigonus, who was made commander-in-chief of all the Macedonian forces in Asia, with the task of crushing Eumenes and the rest of the old royalist party. Antigonus continued, of course, to hold his original satrapy of Phrygia, to which this new general authority was superadded. Various changes were at the same time made in the other satrapies. The value of a territorial base had become far more evident than it had been three years before. Pithon went back to Media; Arrhidaeus got Hellespontine Phrygia. To Seleucus the settlement of Triparadisus brought back the chance which he had missed at the settlement of Babylon. The part he had lately taken in saving Antipater’s life put him in a strong position. There were probably few satrapies he might not now have had for the asking. His choice shows to what purpose he had studied the example of Ptolemy. Resigning his command of the ‘Companion’ cavalry to Cassander, the son of Antipater, he set out to govern the province which, of all parts of the Empire, had most features in common with Egypt, the province of Babylonia.

In view of the immense importance of Babylonia among the provinces, it is at first surprising to find it assigned in the settlement after Alexander’s death to any but one of the greatest chiefs. It had been given to a certain Archon of Pella. The explanation is surely that Babylon was to be the seat of the Regent’s government, and Perdiccas did not want any too powerful chief in his immediate neighborhood. The satrap of Babylonia must be a mere subordinate even in his own capital. Archon did not relish his circumstances if we may judge by the fact that he had ranged himself two years later with the opposition to Perdiccas, or Perdiccas, at any rate, believed that he had done so. The Regent—then in Cilicia on his way from Asia Minor to Egypt—sent one of the officers on whom he could depend, Docimus, to supersede him; the ex-satrap was to become merely collector of the provincial revenue. Archon tried to hold his province by force of arms. The Regent’s emissary, however, was joined by a portion of the native population, and in an engagement,  which took place Archon fell mortally wounded. After this Babylon received Docimus with open arms, who held it for Perdiccas, till a few months later the situation was suddenly transformed. The Regent lay, struck through with many wounds, on the banks of the Nile, and the opposition had triumphed. It could not be expected that Docimus would be left in possession. Babylonia was transferred by the chiefs at Triparadisus to Seleucus.

What ensued at this juncture between Docimus and Seleucus we do not know. Next year Seleucus was in possession of Babylon, and Docimus, with others of the late Regent’s partisans, had taken to the Pisidian hills. The position of the satrap of Babylonia had gained in importance by the new arrangements. He was no longer overshadowed by the imperial court. The two chiefs who had succeeded to the power of Perdiccas had one his seat in Macedonia and the other in Celaenae (Phrygia). Seleucus was now master in the house of Nebuchadnezzar. On the same terraces where Nebuchadnezzar had walked three centuries before and said, ‘Is not this great Babylon which I have built for the royal dwelling-place by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?’, the young Macedonian now walked as lord, and looked over the same Babylon spreading away to the south, as over his own domain.