Characteristics of Hazardous Material Releases, Fires,
5.2. GASEOUS RELEASES
In the spring of 316 Antigonus started out from Ecbatana on his jour-ney home. At Persepolis, he set up a kind of court—only a kind of court, because one night in 330 Alexander had gone along with a
drunken escapade to destroy the main royal palace. 9 Antigonus sum-moned the eastern satraps from Eumenes’ coalition and dictated their futures from his throne, in a manner deliberately reminiscent of the imperial power Antipater had assumed at Triparadeisus. Many satraps retained their earlier posts; not surprisingly, Eumenes’ chief ally, Peu-cestas, found himself out of a job. The fact that he was allowed to remain alive at all is powerful evidence that his poor performance at Gabene was deliberate, that he had been suborned. At any rate, Antig-onus took him back west with him on his staff, and he remained as a close adviser fi rst to Antigonus and then to his son Demetrius. It was a climbdown for the former Bodyguard of Alexander, but it was safe:
though he more or less drops out of the historical record, we still hear of him alive in the 290s. 10
When Antigonus reached Susa, he appointed a permanent satrap there as well. Seleucus, who had already returned to Babylon, was no longer needed; the garrison commander of the citadel of Susa had sur-rendered as soon as news arrived of Eumenes’ defeat. And so the trea-sury of Susa fell into Antigonus’s hands. With Eumenes’ death, none of the treasurers of Asia would refuse to open their doors to their new master. Antigonus helped himself to the resources stored at Ecbatana, Susa, and Persepolis, to the tune of twenty-fi ve thousand talents (about fi fteen billion dollars), and the territories he controlled, at their largest extent, brought in an annual income of a further eleven thousand talents.
Antigonus’s wealth fueled his ambition and his ambition fed his wealth. Apart from anything else, he was able to maintain a huge standing army of forty thousand foot and fi ve thousand horse, at a cost in the region of 2,500 talents a year. He brought west with him on his return from the eastern satrapies all the bullion he had taken from the east, and stored it in his key treasuries in Cilicia and Asia Minor. He was not intending to return that far east, and needed the money to retain control of his core realm, Asia west of the Euphrates. For the next dozen or so years, this heartland of his was remarkably free of warfare (though he was often at war beyond its borders), and he used this time of peace to develop and administer it, while still keeping an eye open, as did all the Successors, for occasions for expansion. 11
But even though Antigonus ruled the entirety of the former Persian empire, apart from Egypt, he was not yet ready to call himself king, not while Alexander IV was still alive. That would have invited trouble—
certainly from his rivals, who would pounce on the chance to use it against him, and probably from his troops, many of whom were still
fi ercely loyal to the Argead line. He allowed himself to be recognized by his native subjects as the successor to the Achaemenid kings and Alexander (who had also used the title “Lord of Asia”), 12 but in public he maintained the fi ction that he was just some kind of super-satrap, the Royal General of Asia, holding the former Persian empire for the kings.
Antigonus was now living up to his alternative nickname—not just
“the One-Eyed,” but “Cyclops,” after the famous one-eyed giants of myth. Both he and his son Demetrius were exceptionally tall and strongly built, but now Antigonus had become a metaphorical colossus too. Would the others tolerate it? Could a balance of power emerge, so soon after Alexander’s death? It did not take Antigonus long to show that he was not interested in balance—he wanted the totality of Alexander’s empire.
F
rom susa, antigonus journeyed west to Babylonia, with all his bullion and booty carefully guarded in the caravan, the moving equivalent of the strongholds that made up the empire’s trea-suries. The size and strength of the army, and its voraciousness, were plain tokens of Antigonus’s naked ambition. Woe betide anyone who stood in his way, or who might even have the potential to stand in his way. Seleucus was the next to fi nd this out.When Antigonus reached Babylon, Seleucus honored him as a king, but it was not enough to appease the great man. The relation-ship deteriorated until Antigonus demanded from Seleucus, as though he were king and Seleucus a mere satrap, an account of his adminis-tration of the satrapy, and an audit of his fi nances. With considerable courage, Seleucus resisted Antigonus’s bullying. He said he had been awarded Babylonia legitimately at Triparadeisus (subtly reminding Antigonus that the Triparadeisus conference was also where he had received his commission), in recognition of his services to Alexander, and that Antigonus did not have the right to interfere. In effect, he claimed a kind of seniority to Antigonus, who had scarcely been involved in Alexander’s campaigns, since he had been posted in Asia Minor throughout. At the same time, Seleucus sensibly made plans to escape, and before long he fl ed for safety to Egypt with his family and a small escort.
In Egypt, Ptolemy welcomed Seleucus as a friend, but was no doubt also aware of the propaganda value of sheltering someone who could be portrayed as a victim of tyranny. When Seleucus reached Egypt, he told Ptolemy that Antigonus now wanted “the entire kingdom of