After Alexander's death, the diadochi, that is, his generals, got into a thousand and one disputes to divide up the empire, unable to reach an agreement on the succession. As is known, Ptolemy kept Egypt but was about to lose it to the invasion initiated by one of his companions, Perdiccas, when the other "stole" the body of the Great while he was transferred to Macedonia. However, that campaign ended in disaster:the invading army was disrupted by a flood of the Nile and its soldiers devoured by crocodiles, which led the survivors to kill Perdiccas himself.
Perdiccas, a native of Oréstide (a Macedonian region), where he was born around 355 BC, was the son of the nobleman Orontes and had a brother named Alcetas (who, in turn, was also Alexander's general) and a sister named Atalante (who married Attalus, another army officer). Appointed hipparchus (cavalry commander), he distinguished himself in the battle of Thebes in command of a phalanx battalion, being seriously wounded but recovering and receiving as a reward the fact of joining the cadre of somatophylakes or bodyguards, along with Leonato, Hefestión, Lisímaco, Aristonoo, Demetrio and Peitón.
The somatophylakes they also held the generalship and in 324 BC, the same year he married the daughter of Atropates (the Persian satrap of Media), he was named chiliarch , an office adopted from the Achaemenid administration equivalent to that of vizier, replacing the late Hephaestion. In 323 the one who died was Alexander, who before his death gave his ring to Perdiccas and he convened a meeting of diadochi to find a successor while they awaited the birth of the baby carried by Roxana, the royal widow.
Perdiccas would act as tutor and regent until the age of majority of what should be Alexander IV, but there was no agreement because the veteran Meleager believed that the heir should be Philip III Arrideo, stepbrother of Alexander the Great, who Philip had illegitimately had with a dancer from Thessaly and that he was intellectually disabled. Opinions were polarized and the infantry supported him while the cavalry preferred Roxana's son. A compromise solution was reached by proclaiming both kings. As expected, Arrideo's limitations made him a puppet in the hands of Perdiccas, who even married him to a relative of his, Eurydice.
Olympias, the mother of the Great, solved the matter by ordering his death. Dissensions began to escalate. When Perdiccas made a fellow somatophyla satrap of Phrygia x, Leonatus, and he preferred to go to Macedonia to marry Cleopatra, Alexander's sister and widow of the king of Epirus, Perdiccas mobilized his army against him and Leonatus was killed in combat, leaving his enemy as a candidate at the hand of the girlfriend.
However, the entry of the regent's troops into Cappadocia -which was still Persian- was considered a threat by Antigonus I Monophthalmus, Macedonian satrap of Lycia and Pamphylia, who took refuge in the court of Antipater, king of Macedonia. Nor was General Craterus resigned to Perdiccas' maneuvers, the last of which was to marry Cleopatra, so he joined the others in plotting a rebellion. This is how things stood in 321 B.C. when the regent ordered the transfer of the embalmed corpse of Alexander to Egas, the original capital of Macedonia, where the royal family was traditionally buried. The person in charge of escorting the funeral procession was General Arrideo (not to be confused with Philip III).
When he passed through Syria, Ptolemy bribed him to give him his body and take it to Egypt, the land that he had had to rule in the distribution, to bury him in Memphis. Ptolemy was another diadochus added to the conspiracy. As expected, this was seen by Perdiccas as a provocation that he could not let pass under penalty of everyone beginning to disobey him, so he set out to carry out a punitive action that, incidentally, would give him control of the rich Egyptian resources. . With a large army including cavalry and elephants, he set out from Babylon and entered Ptolemy's domain in 321 BC, moving inland. It was the beginning of the first of the Diadochi Wars.
The invading troops reached the easternmost branch of the Nile in the summer of the following year, ready to fall on Tanis and Ávaris, cities of the delta. But they found that a fort prevented them from passing, as Ptolemy had distributed garrisons along the channel and was himself in the center. Perdiccas could not delay long because he knew that Antipater was preparing to move against him (in fact, he sent his right-hand man, Eumenes, to stop him), so, to cross the river, he chose a point guarded by a fortress called the Camel Wall which he attacked with three lines, the first with elephants to break down the gates, the second with infantrymen (the Argyraspids or Silver Shields, his elite force) equipped with steps to save the walls, and the third with cavalry to enter through the gates. gaps. However, at the last moment Ptolemy arrived with reinforcements and the position held.
The situation was complicated for Perdiccas, who needed to find another place to cross and thought he found it in Memphis:there the river was wider and deeper, in addition to having a stronger current but, in exchange, there was a river island in the middle that could be of help. Recovering a tactic devised by Alexander ten years earlier to cross the Tigris, he placed his elephants as a screen to contain the water, so that its force would decrease and allow the infantrymen to pass. Further down he placed the cavalry in the same way, with the mission of picking up those who lost their footing and were dragged. It was a great plan that, however, failed when something unforeseen happened.
Hundreds of soldiers had already reached the island, where the main camp was to be established, when the sandy bottom of the Nile began to give way under the weight of the pachyderms and horses; thus, the section where the army crossed sank little by little, increasing the level of the water around the men. In a short time, the depth and current became excessive again and the operation had to be interrupted. The bad thing was that a good part of the troops were already on the opposite bank, which divided the army in two, leaving it vulnerable. Even more so when a cloud of dust was seen approaching on the horizon, an unequivocal sign that Ptolemy was coming to take advantage of the occasion.
Perdiccas, desperate at the possibility of disaster, ordered that vanguard to cross again in the opposite direction. The soldiers obeyed, but the current and the depth no longer allowed them to do so on foot, but rather to swim. Those who knew stripped off their armor and succeeded, but most insisted on wading as before and evidently failed. Many drowned right there and others were swept downstream by the water, being returned to the same western bank and, therefore, being left at the mercy of the enemy.
That last group would be the worst off, as the crocodiles feasted on them. Two thousand men lost their lives in that trance, half of them devoured, in which Perdiccas suffered almost as many casualties as if he had gone into battle. The irony was that that threatening cloud that precipitated the events did not correspond exactly to Ptolemy's troops but was a deception concocted by him:various cattle gathered and incited to, dragging branches, raise dust and give the impression of being a great army. Because, even more ironically, Ptolemy was short-handed and would not have been able to successfully confront even that vanguard that arrived on the island.
For Perdiccas there were more serious consequences. Dire, in fact, as his own soldiers blamed him for the tragedy and refused to continue a campaign that had been a failure. Paradoxically, Eumenes had defeated Antipater but he never found out, because his trusted officers betrayed him:Peiton (another of the somatophylakes , son of Craterus and satrap of the southern Media), Antigenes (also a general, satrap of Elam) and Seleucus Nicator (who was the instigator of the mutiny and who would later receive the satrapy of Babylon as a prize, founding the Seleucid Empire and the homonymous dynasty ).
Ptolemy not only saved the situation but strengthened his power, proclaimed himself pharaoh becoming de facto independent and also established a dynasty that reached the famous Cleopatra VII. He would be the only one of the diadochi who died a natural death.