The World

Perdiccas, chiliarch, claimed the regency and murdered an officer who challenged him. The meetings of the grandees were tense. Perdiccas assigned jobs and provinces: Seleukos became chiliarch; Ptolemy asked for and received Egypt. While Egyptian sacred taxidermists embalmed Pharaoh Alexander’s body, the paladins debated who should succeed him, considering his five-year-old son Hercules by his Persian lover Barsine, but Alexander’s brother Arrhidaios was present. He was not capable of ruling but they chose him as Philip III – to share the throne with Roxane’s unborn foetus. Weeks later she gave birth triumphantly to the joint king Alexander IV. Far away in Greece, Olympias, Alexander’s mother, offered Alexander’s sister Cleopatra to Perdiccas who, in possession of one dead king and two live ones as well as the main army and backed by his able chiliarch Seleukos, was poised to rule the empire until the baby Alexander IV grew up. As the king had predicted on his deathbed, the swaggering paladins who had conquered the world – ‘men whose greed recognizes no limits set by sea, mountain or desert and whose desires overleap even the boundaries that define Europe and Asia’, in the words of the historian Plutarch – were unlikely to be confined to any small province, and all of them, infected with the World Game of Alexander, rushed to seize whatever they could.

The shrewdest, Ptolemy, boyhood friend of Alexander, Bodyguard and Companion, now departed to take possession of Egypt.

In 321, as Perdiccas tried to win control of Anatolia, Philip III, baby Alexander IV and Queen Roxane escorted Alexander’s colossal and sumptuous hearse. Gold-embossed, myrrh-scented, sculpted with Ionic columns, figurines of Nike at each corner and busts of Ammon’s sacred horned ibex, friezes of elephants and lions, the vast hearse containing Alexander’s Egyptian human-shaped coffin and embalmed mummy, pulled by sixty-four bejewelled mules, and a guard of honour of elephants and guardsmen, wended its slow glorious way towards Aegae. As it hove into view, it must have presented a fabulous spectacle, but it was even more welcome to Ptolemy.

Somewhere in Syria, Ptolemy kidnapped the sarcophagus – history’s ultimate corpse-napping – and escorted it back to display in Memphis. Although the kings arrived safely in Greece, Perdiccas, outraged, marched down to Egypt to steal back the world-conquering mummy, but Ptolemy defeated him, whereupon Seleukos assassinated Regent Perdiccas. In the carve-up of empire that followed, Ptolemy kept Egypt, Seleukos was given Babylon and the long-serving general One-Eyed Antigonus controlled central Anatolia. In the ensuing wars, Seleukos lost Iraq, returning to serve Ptolemy in Egypt, and Antigonus emerged as a surprise winner.

The fighting between the paladins was complex, vicious and ever changing. Each time one gained ascendancy, the others banded together to stop him. Olympias, now fifty-five, was the homicidal equal of the men. In 317, the queen seized Macedonia to support baby Alexander IV and his mother Roxane, opposed by her stepson Philip III. Olympias won and at once murdered Philip, but within months another general had seized and tried her. When the soldiers refused to shed Alexander’s blood, they instead stoned her to death. King Alexander IV and Roxane were imprisoned; meanwhile Hercules and his mother Barsine lived quietly in Anatolia. But no one had forgotten them. Alexander’s family was dwindling in a cut-throat competition to liquidate all rivals.

 

 

* Mrduniya was son of the Great King’s nephew as well as his son-in-law, husband of Darius’ daughter, Artozostra. In one of the few family tablets found in royal archives, Darius dictates: ‘Darius the King commands “Give 100 sheep in my estate to my daughter Artozostra. April 506.”’ The letter, written not in the Persian of his royal inscriptions but in Elamite, reveals how he gave orders orally that were then written on to tablets by his courtiers and dispatched.

* ‘Go tell the Spartans, passer-by,’ read the poignant inscription, ‘that here obedient to their laws we lie.’