Chapter XXII
Chapter XXII: The Gallilean Campaign
While affairs were being put into order in the east, a new fire erupted in the west during those very same months in 303, with Alexander IV, guided by the acumen of Perdikkas and Eumenes, taking advantage of Peukestas’s absence to launch an invasion of the Levant late in the season. The reasoning for this was twofold; the loss of Cyprus and much of the Levantine coast had deprived the legitimists of access to the cedar forests vital to the reconstruction of their battered navy. Furthermore, the geography of the region presented a bottleneck from which they could be held at bay from launching an offensive campaign into Mesopotamia and taking the initiative against Peukestas. With Peukestas away, the opportunity had arrived to both provide wood for the rebuilding of their fleet, and a springboard from which the could thrust into Mesopotamia at a later date.
Possessing relativelylimited forces in the region, Theramenes was nonetheless quick to respond, moving into Phoenicia but wisely adopting a defensive posture, wary of taking on two of the most talented commanders of their generation in a pitched battle, knowing he possessed an otherwise strong defensive position. It was for this same reason that Eumenes and Perdikkas wished to so desperately bring Theramenes to battle, where a decisive victory could allow them to sweep through the region and avoid a drawn-out campaign of sieges, where Theramenes could use the strong fortified centers and geographical bottlenecks to stymie any progress. With Theramenes strategically camped in the hills of Galilee, bringing him to battle would be a difficult endeavor, and required a bold and unorthodox strategy.
It was decided that the army would be split in two, with Perdikkas commanding the main army, including a contingent of 60 elephants and Eumenes and Alexander splitting off with slightly less than half their force to march through the interior, and flank around Theramenes’s position, with the intention of driving him from his well-placed position in the Gallilean hills. While Perdikkas moved up through Judea along the coast, Eumenes was diverted east, reaching the Jordan river and hugging that river on his march north.
It was not until Eumenes was nearly on top of him that Theramenes had been alerted to his march. Having until now been under the impression that the whole of the legitimist army had been with Perdikkas along the coast, he now assumed that had been a diversion and was not certain how large a force was bearing down on him. Fearing being caught in a trap, he attempted to withdraw north and re-assess the situation.
Applying judicious use of scouts who covered the countryside however, Eumenes became privy to this move, and was intent to not let him slip away. Gathering his cavalry, he left his infantry with Alexander to follow behind, and galloped ahead with his cavalry, stealing a march on Theramenes, who soon was surprised to enemy cavalry waiting for him at the crest of a hill directly in his path. Once again unsure if the rest of Eumenes’s army was waiting on the other side of the hill, he stopped his march north and encamped in a defensive position of his own, unwilling to risk a withdrawal so close to an enemy army.
Eumenes, of course, had no intentions of forcing a battle. Had Theramenes pressed the issue, Eumenes would have been forced to pull back, and is foe might of soon learned of the actual size of the force facing him. Even after Alexander caught up with his advance force, he would lack the numbers to fight the enemy army head on. Yet Theramenes’s caution played into Eumenes’s hands, and himself still unwilling to risk it all on a pitched battle, he used the cover of darkness to cloak his withdrawal that night. As seems to always be the case, the Kardian was not unaware of this movement either, but did nothing to counter it. Theramenes was withdrawing towards the coast, where he could better assess the situation and use his fleet to withdraw if absolutely necessary, or use the fortified cities along the sea to thwart his opponent if he so chose.
Instead Eumenes shadowed him, expecting Perdikkas’s army moving up along the coast to cut off his withdrawal. Sure enough, a by now absolutely baffled Theramenes was greeted with another army appearing in the horizon in the plains of coastal Phoenicia. Suspecting this could not possibly be the force that had pressured him in Galilee, Theramenes stopped his march altogether once more, now increasingly concerned that he was being caught in a pincer. This pause allowed for Eumenes to march his army overnight and rendezvous with the forces of Perdikkas, finally presenting a unified front capable of forcing a battle.
The enemy forces were now too near his own army for Theramenes to be able to safely withdrawal, either to the port of Akko[2] merely a few miles away, or further north. Having been thoroughly outwitted by his foes, he was forced to draw up for battle on the flat plains outside Akko. It was a battle he was loathe to fight, as the reputations of Eumenes and Perdikkas had well preceded them. Events would bear this battle weariness to be quite prudent indeed.
The two armies lined up in what had become a standard battle formation for Hellenistic armies. Stretched across the front lines of either army were their elephants, with 60 being fielded by the legitimists and 100 brought along by Theramenes. These beasts would be interspersed by light infantry attachments, and it is possible that at this stage javelineers were also present in towers atop their backs, using the height to reign down missiles on enemies.
Eumenes and Perdikkas concentrated the bulk of their heavy cavalry (around 4,500), including Eumenes’s loyal Kappadokians, alongside themselves on the left, where they planned the decisive cavalry thrust. On the right was Alexander, in the traditional place of honor for a king but commanding the weaker flank. Here he led an assortment of around 3,500 light and skirmisher cavalry, designed to avoid a decisive engagement and merely harass and prevent the enemy cavalry from achieving any breakthrough themselves. A troop of elephants extended out to the left flank, screening Eumenes and Perdikkas, with the intention of forcing Theramenes to draw his cavalry out further from his infantry to engage them on this flank. In the center was the core of 27,000 infantry, including a contingent of 1,000 men from the hills of Judea that Eumenes had recruited on his march.
Theramenes concentrated his cavalry on the right flank, opposite the legitimist left. Here were the crack heavy cavalry of Media and the Upper Satrapies that had been available to the Peukestids, numbering around 6,000. Expecting his opponents to weight their cavalry on their right, as was the norm, he extended his much larger elephant line around his left flank, which was also designed to do little more than keep the enemy at bay while the decisive encounter unfolded on the right. In the center was 30,000 infantry, with roughly the same number of phalangites as the legitimists.
The battle began with an inconclusive elephant duel, the giant beasts and their accompanying light infantry making for an awesome site for the troops that gathered on the dusty plains. On the Peukestid right, Theramenes swung his cavalry out to avoid the elephants, and the opposing cavalry forces clashed far out on the flank. This played out as the two phalanxes maneuvered through the elephants in the middle of the battle and began their own engagement. With his more numerous and qualitatively superior cavalry, Theramenes gained the upper hand in the main cavalry engagement, but his maneuvering had left a gap in his lines, one which Eumenes was quick to exploit.
While Perdikkas endeavored in the Herculean task of fending off the Peukestid cavalry, Eumenes rallied his Kappadokians and charged through the gap, descending on the flanks of the enemy infantry. They crashed into Peukestid right flank, quickly causing chaos as the flank disintegrated in disarray. Seeing this unfold, the rest of the Peukestid phalanx, who up until how had been in an evenly matched struggle, broke off and began a tactical retreat to their camp, warding off cavalry attacks with their wall of spears.
Theramenes had finally won the day on his flank, but with his infantry having been defeated he was unable to exploit this advantage. His now weakened army, having emerged with a bloody nose from the battle, now pondered their next moves. Retreat was a risky endeavor, with Eumenes and Perdikkas likely to pounce if they got wind up his extrication attempt. Yet risking another battle, with a now much weaker infantry force, would be courting with disaster. Instead he remained encamped, refusing battle and entrenching himself in his position.
Wary of being cut off from supplies and effectively besieged, and dealing with a trickle of deserters, Theramenes attempted another daring night-time escape. If there’s one theme that permeates throughout the life of Eumenes, it’s his extraordinary intelligence; his opponents could scarcely march anywhere without his being alerted to their movements. [3] Time and again he is tipped off to enemy movements, sometimes at the last moment, as was the case here. Theramenes left a skeleton force behind to set up enough fires to make it seem like a large army was still encamped, and attempted to slip away.
The legitimists however had been heavily guarding against such a maneuver, and Eumenes had an around the clock cavalry patrol circulating the perimeter that immediately caught wind of what was happening. Word was sent back to Eumenes, who along with Perdikkas gathered his cavalry and galloped off, leaving Alexander to muster the rest of the army. Taking advantage of the confusion of night, they swooped down on the marching soldiers, causing complete chaos in the Peukestid ranks. The entire column descended into anarchy, and, unaware they were only facing cavalry at this juncture, began in some cases attacking each other in the mayhem.
The army disintegrated as a cohesive unit into dozens of scattered pockets of resistance, some being cut down and many more surrendering to the marauding cavalry. Other pockets made it back to Akko, and still others limped back north to Tyre. Theramenes himself managed to lead a small group into the fortified defenses of Akko, having lost almost his entire army. Even then he was not permitted rest, as Eumenes’s Kappadokians were hot on his tail, and a fierce battle erupted at the gates of the city, which had not been closed in time. The battle raged into the morning, with him just barely able to secure the walls with what forces remained, as Eumenes’s men tired and the assault was called off.
Having suffered an unmitigated disaster, with not only his own army destroyed but his enemy’s army swelled by what were his own troops. Realizing his position in Akko was untenable, Theramenes slipped out of the city by sea with what few troops remained at his disposal, first to Tyre and then to Syria, where he raced back to Mesopotamia to try and cobble together a new force.
For the legitimists on the other hand, the campaign was a spectacular success. Their forces now enlarged by as many as 10-15,000 more men, they had increased army by around a third, and now found the whole of the Levant fall into their hands. Sidon, Byblos, Tripolis, and Damascus all opened their gates for the triumphant army, with only Tyre, safely protected by the sea, holding out in the region. The path into Syria was now wide open, with as detachments were sent north to secure Hama and Emesa along the Orontest River while the main army settled in for winter quarters outside Tyre.
The rebuilding of a navy capable of contesting the seas and retaking control of Tyre was already under way over the winter with fresh cedar wood from the forests of Phoenicia. An impatient Alexander however, wishing to speed up the process, had better ideas. While encamped over the winter, he sent out emissaries to half brother Herakles, who had, in the intervening years set himself up as a pirate king over the island of Krete.
Herakles had promised that what was an already fruitful trade for the cities and towns of Krete could be made into an even more lucrative venture if the Kretans pooled their resources together in a joint venture of piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Alone they could wreak significant, but manageable havoc, but together they could become the scourge of the seas. This was the early years of this highly profitable scheme, and the entirety of Krete had not yet been subsumed into this enterprise when Alexander’s ambassadors arrived with an offer that was hard to refuse.
Alexander needed a fleet, and preferably sooner than the time it would take to build one on his own. He offered to pay a pretty drachma for his half-brother to mobilize his own fleet towards assisting him. In effect, what Alexander was offering the sailors of Krete was an opportunity to sign on as a mercenary fleet, an adventure perhaps even more profitable than their sophisticated piracy network. Herakles recognized this, but it was not entirely his decision to make; he relied on a council of representatives from the cities and towns of Krete to make military decisions. They too understood the value of the opportunity being presented, and agreed to outfit a navy of 100 ships to sail to the Levantine coast and assist their new paymaster.
[1] Also referred to in this period as Ake, and would be renamed Ptolemais IOTL, though later known once more in Roman times as Akko. Modern day Acre.
[2] This may seem unrealistic-Eumenes always being one step ahead of his opponents and always being privy to their movements, but this was basically Eumenes’s story IOTL. He was arguably the best of the Diadochi, and in particular when fighting Antigonus, he always seemed to be one step ahead of him, possessed an extraordinary scouting network throughout that campaign, always being tipped off to Antigonus’s movements and stealing a march on him, or disrupting his own march. And Antigonus was no slouch himself when it came to campaigning-he would do much the same thing against Lysimachus in the Ipsus campaign, and it’s a testament to Lysimamchus’s own generalship that he was able to escape Antigonus’s clutches and survive into the winter during that campaign.
