Ancient Coin Stories

The plan had seemed so simple to Polyperchon. He had nearly every city in Greece quaking at his feet. Kassander was still around, but it was only a matter of time. There was just one hold out – some city called Megalopolis in the Peloponnese. All he had to do was shut them up, and it was game over.

In order to ensure the job got done, Polyperchon brought more than enough soldiers, along with his shiny war elephants to stomp them into submission. He put them under siege.

However, it turned out there were several flaws with this plan. First, unbeknownst to Polyperchon but beknownst to the Megalopolians (is that even a word?), one amongst them had fought with Alexander and knew how to defeat the elephants. Interestingly, Alexander himself owned war elephants but preferred not to use them. He viewed them as inefficient war animals, since they spooked easily and often wound up killing as many friends as foes.

After his death, though, many of his former generals didn’t share that view. Pyrrhos used them to devastating effect on the Romans, though after two defeats they figured them out.

Now, I like elephants, so I won’t go into details on how Megalopolis stopped them. It wasn’t very nice, but it was effective. Luckily for Polyperchon, though, he had a large army…except the elephants wound up trampling a good number of them.

This brings up the second flaw in the plan: Polyperchon was a horrible military commander. Even with all his advantages, the siege was an utter failure. His forces were exhausted and humbled, and the rest of Greece, seeing how he had failed to accomplish what should have been a routine siege, switched over to Kassander.

After several poor moves in the siege of Megalopolis, Polyperchon moved from sudden victory to eminent defeat.