Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 15 LAST THINGS

It was time for a proper holiday. The last few months had been painful physically (the Gedrosian desert) and psychologically (the Opis mutiny) and a period of recovery and revelry was in order.

The king and his army marched north across the Zagros Mountains and arrived in Ecbatana some time during the late summer or autumn of 324. He staged a massive arts and athletics festival, with many plays and spectacles. Three thousand performers were imported from Greece, presumably most of the theatrical and musical professionals of the day.

There were also constant drinking parties. It is time to consult the Royal Journal, a day-by-day narrative of the king’s actions. Aelian cites an extract which describes Alexander’s carousing and probably dates to this stay in Ecbatana.

On the fifth day of the month of Dius [October/November] he drank to excess at Eumenes’ [Eumenes was the king’s chief secretary or grammateus], on the sixth day he slept off the alcohol, and was sufficiently refreshed to get out of bed and give orders to his commanders for the next day’s exercises, saying that they should set out very early. On the seventh he feasted with Perdiccas, and again drank heavily. On the eighth he slept. On the fifteenth day of the same month he drank again, and slept through the next day. On the twenty-fourth he dined at Bagoas’s place about ten stades from the palace. The following day he slept.

Although he is not mentioned, we can assume that Hephaestion attended such binges.

One day he caught a fever and was placed on a strict dietary regime. Glaucias, his doctor, kept an eye on him to make sure he followed it to the letter. On the seventh day of his illness, the stadium was packed for boys’ sports. Alexander was there, and so was Glaucias, who had left his patient unsupervised. This was unwise, for Hephaestion enjoyed filling himself with food and drink whenever opportunity offered. He was feeling better and, in the doctor’s absence, he sat down to breakfast. He devoured a boiled fowl and washed it down with half a gallon of chilled wine. He immediately fell ill again.

The king received a message that Hephaestion’s condition was grave and deteriorating and he hurried to his side, but by the time he reached him the young man was dead.

The exact nature of Hephaestion’s illness was unknown at the time and is irretrievable now, but the literary sources strongly imply that it had to do with excessive drinking. Nobody at the time raised the possibility of unnatural causes. The modern doctor would observe that Hephaestion’s symptoms were consistent with a serious bowel infection (for example, typhoid). This produces a protracted bout of fever and often leads to stomach ulcerations. During recovery the sufferer should avoid doing anything that might perforate the damaged bowels—for example, eating a heavy meal. A perforation could quickly cause collapse, internal bleeding, shock, and death. For recovery to begin after seven days seems unusually early, but the fever could well have set in sometime before a busy and preoccupied patient reported it.

None of this was known to ancient medicine. Blame was thrown on the physician, either for prescribing the wrong medication or for allowing his patient access to alcohol.

Alexander’s grief was total, inconsolable, and uncontrollable. Arrian remarks: “I believe he would rather have been the first to go than live to suffer that pain, like Achilles, who would surely have preferred to die before Patroclus.” In imitation of the Greek warrior, Alexander sheared off his hair above his dead lover. As at other moments of crisis he withdrew into himself. He spent a night and a day lying on Hephaestion’s body, weeping, until his Companions dragged him off. He took no food and did not attend to any of his bodily needs. Plutarch writes:

As a token of mourning, he commanded that the manes and tails of all horses should be shorn [this was a Persian and a Thessalian practice], demolished the battlements of all the neighboring cities, crucified the luckless physician and forbade the playing of flutes or any other kind of music for a long time.

A local temple of Asclepios, the god of healing, was destroyed as his punishment for not having saved Hephaestion.

The corpse was embalmed and Perdiccas, his successor as chiliarch, was ordered to accompany it to Babylon. Here a vast funeral pyre was to be constructed at the cost of ten thousand or more talents. Diodorus claims:

Alexander collected artisans and an army of workmen and tore down Babylon’s wall to a distance of ten furlongs. He collected the baked tiles and levelled off the place which was to receive the pyre, and then built it in the shape of a cube, each side being a furlong in length. He divided up the area into thirty compartments and[,] laying out the roofs upon the trunks of palm trees[,] wrought the whole structure into a square shape.

The elaborate design was to take the form of a ziggurat with gigantic sculptural displays on each floor—golden ships’ prows; statues of soldiers; torches; eagles with outstretched wings and serpents at their feet; a wild-animal hunt; golden centaurs at war; lions and bulls; and Macedonian and Persian weapons and armor. At the top of the monument would stand statues of Sirens, hollowed out to allow singers inside to chant laments.

Mourning was decreed throughout the empire. Persians were ordered to quench temple fires until the funeral, a custom previously reserved for the death of a Great King. Hephaestion had not been universally popular, and astute courtiers with whom he had quarreled fell over themselves to display their sorrow. Many Companions dedicated themselves and their arms to his memory. Everyone of note commissioned images of him in gold and ivory. It became fashionable to swear an oath with the phrase “by Hephaestion.” Eumenes was one of those who could not stand him, and he knew that the king knew it. He was careful to propose honors that would be most likely to enhance the dead man’s memory, and he made a very generous contribution to the costs of the pyre.

Alexander was disempowered by his grief for some time. He left Ecbatana and set out unhurriedly south toward Babylon. As a distraction, he launched a winter campaign against the Cossaei, a warlike tribe that inhabited the highlands between Susa and Media; they made a living from brigandage but had been tolerated by the Achaemenids. He massacred the entire male population from teenagers upward. According to Plutarch, this was termed “a sacrifice to the spirit of Hephaestion,” for it echoed the incident in the Iliad when a vengeful Achilles slaughtered twelve young Trojans and cremated them alongside Patroclus on his pyre.

The king’s grief may have been excessive, but it was sincere. The ancient world was in no doubt that Alexander was “ruled by Hephaestion’s thighs.” We do not know their respective ages or even which of them was the older (Curtius observes in passing that the couple were coeval). However, as we have already discussed, it is plausible that in their teens, or at least in Alexander’s teens, they followed aristocratic Greek practice and were pederastic lovers.

Alexander regarded Hephaestion as his alter ego. However, for many years he was careful not to promote him beyond his abilities and devoted time and energy to calming down colleagues whom he had annoyed. Hephaestion was a competent officer, but no more. He was never appointed to crucial positions, but was capable of handling complex administrative tasks. He matured and after the departure of Craterus for Arachosia and Drangiana in 325, he rose to the position of chiliarch and the king’s deputy.

His finest quality was his adamantine devotion to his lover and friend.

—

ALEXANDER WANTED TO DO something unique for Hephaestion. An emissary was dispatched to the priests of Ammon at Siwah, where the king had learned of his “true” paternity. He asked whether divine honors could be paid to Hephaestion. The oracle said no, but prudently permitted the institution of a hero cult.

The king was delighted by this response, when it arrived after some months, and (cheekily slipping in the word “god”) immediately arranged for Hephaestion to be worshipped as Associate God and Savior. He wrote to Cleomenes, governor of the Arabian portion of Egypt and treasurer for the entire country, and ordered the construction of hero shrines to Hephaestion in the Nile Delta city of Alexandria and on the island of Pharos. No expense was to be spared.

As we have seen, Cleomenes was much complained of by the Egyptian public, probably because he was corrupt. Alexander always took care to be well informed and now applied a metaphorical thumbscrew to guarantee the official’s good behavior. He added to his letter: “If I find the temples in Egypt and these shrines to Hephaestion in good order, I shall ignore your previous offenses and guarantee that any future offense, of whatever nature, will not meet with any disagreeable consequence at my hands.” Cleomenes understood the king’s meaning and we may be sure that he moved fast to obey his terrifying master.

The question of Hephaestion’s semidivine status turned, or returned, Alexander’s attention to the possibility of his own divinity. Since his visit to the oracle at Siwah, this was a topic that attracted his full attention. He saw himself as the son of Zeus Ammon, but the claim was self-contradictory, for he did not seriously disavow Philip. As pharaoh of Egypt, however, he was an incarnation in some sense of Horus and acted as an intermediary between the gods and mortals.

How literally did the king, or anyone else at court for that matter, take all this? A hostile witness describes his behavior at banquets.

Alexander used to wear even the sacred vestments at his banquets; and sometimes he would wear the purple robe, and slit sandals, and horns of Ammon, as if he had been the god; and sometimes he would imitate Artemis, whose dress he often wore while driving in his chariot; having on also a Persian robe, but displaying above his shoulders the bow and javelin of the goddess.

Apparently he also used to appear as Hermes, messenger of the gods, and Heracles with a lion’s skin and a club. If there is any truth in this account, it gives the impression of a costume party rather than a serious bid for godhood.

The witness continues:

Alexander also had the ground sprinkled with expensive perfume and sweet-smelling wine, and myrrh and other fragrant substances were burned in his honor, and everyone present remained respectfully silent out of terror, because he was impossible and bloodthirsty, and appeared to be un-balanced.

Yet again a traditionalist Hellene has placed the worst possible interpretation on Alexander’s sensible but unpopular policy of adopting the rituals of a Persian Great King. The growing formality at court does not prove that the king had lost his mind and been transformed into a mad tyrant.

However, the coins he issued, or that were issued posthumously, show the king with divine attributes. Decadrachms struck at the mint in Babylon have him crowned by Nike, the personification of victory, and brandishing a thunderbolt as if he were the father of the gods, Zeus. As we have seen, Apelles, the most celebrated artist of the day, showed the king with the divine thunderbolt in his painting for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and received a handsome payment for the commission. In the famous tetradrachms of Lysimachus, Alexander is wearing the horns of Ammon, which also feature in portraits of him (for example, in the “Alexander Sarcophagus,” a late-fourth-century-B.C. stone sarcophagus adorned with bas-relief carvings).

Coins express the propaganda of the day and are not necessarily evidence of intent; they neither request nor require their owners to worship a new deity. But it does appear that, with the passage of time, Alexander became increasingly serious when he claimed his divinity. En route from Ecbatana to Babylon for Hephaestion’s funeral, he was met on the way by embassies from Greece. Arrian reports (with a smile, one senses) that “the delegates wore ceremonial wreaths and offered Alexander golden crowns, to all appearances as if these were official pilgrimages to honor a god.” Word percolated through the Greek city-states that Alexander expected to be recognized, and indeed worshipped, as a god. Our information is fragmentary, but the king may have sent out an official letter of request. An Athenian orator hints, bitterly, at coercion:

The practices which even now we have to countenance are proof enough: sacrifices being made to men; images, altars, and temples carefully perfected in their honor, while those of the gods are neglected, and we ourselves are forced to honor as heroes the servants of these people.

The orator wisely spoke in general terms, but everyone knew that the only men receiving such cultic devotions were Alexander and the late Hephaestion.

The Hellenes were in no position to resist the pressure. In Athens it was proposed in the ecclesia to erect a statue of “Alexander the Invincible God.” Demades, the realist who had always got on well with Philip and his son, moved a decree conferring divine honors. The great opponent of the Macedonians, Demosthenes, conceded sarcastically that “Alexander might be the son of Zeus and Poseidon too if he wished.” A witty Spartan summed up the general attitude. “Alexander wants to be a god? Very well, let’s call him a god!”

As for the rest of Greece, there is little additional information, but we may assume similar honors were proposed and similar cynical remarks made.

—

WHAT DID HIS DIVINITY mean to Alexander? Much of the data is missing, but we know enough to sketch the outline of an answer. He seems to have filled his mind with mutually exclusive concepts. On the one hand, he was sincerely religious, believed in the Olympian deities, and was certain that he was descended from Heracles. For him the war at Troy was a historical event. Achilles and Patroclus had once walked on earth. He was a punctilious celebrant of religious rites, slaughtered hecatombs of sacrificial beasts, and regularly consulted the soothsayers who accompanied him on campaign.

On the other hand, he was a subtle and ruthless manager of men. So, for example, the context strongly implies that his personal seer, Aristander, produced bad omens to order when the king needed an excuse to retreat from India. Alexander made it clear that if he was a god, he was neither invulnerable nor immortal like Zeus and Apollo. He could bleed and die like any of his soldiers.

Alexander’s success was truly astonishing, and even hostile contemporaries were profoundly, albeit unwillingly, impressed. His godhead was a memorable symbol which would express and promote his overwhelming power. When he let it be known, whether formally or informally, that the Greek city-states should establish his cult, this was less for religious than for political reasons. It would allow him to impose obedience more effectively than in his role as elected leader of the League of Corinth.

In this as in so many other matters, Alexander was following in his father’s footsteps. The Philippeum at Olympia and the carrying of his statue alongside those of the Olympians in the theater at Aegae show that Philip was already flirting with the idea that his kingship had a divine dimension.

Maybe Alexander did not altogether know what his being a god might mean. Did dressing up as Zeus or Artemis or his ancestor Heracles, if correctly reported, hint at a certain playfulness, a lack of complete commitment to the project of deification?

—

HEPHAESTION WAS DEAD, but Alexander was still very much alive. He was in his early thirties and he intended to fill the years ahead with new and ambitious plans of conquest.

That was exactly what the Mediterranean world feared. On his way to Babylon, he was met by a multitude of embassies, eager to discover his intentions and to offer nervous congratulations. There were so many of them he had to arrange a schedule specifying the order in which he would see them. (He gave the highest priority to those who wanted to raise religious issues.)

The envoys came from every direction—from Ethiopia, from European Scythia, from the lands of the Celts and Iberians. The Libyans presented him with a crown as king of Asia. Envoys arrived from the Bruttians, Lucanians, and Etruscans, all Italian peoples. Delegates from the North African state of Carthage, the greatest maritime power of the age, put in an appearance; they were right to be apprehensive, for they had supported their mother city of Tyre during the siege and some of their citizens had been captured when the city fell. As ever, Alexander never forgot or forgave a disservice.

Intriguingly, some classical historians mention emissaries from the then little known city of Rome, which at the time was a middling Italian state embroiled with the fierce mountaineering Samnites. Most of these historians, writing after Rome had acquired an empire even larger than Alexander’s, added all kinds of rhetorical and anachronistic flourishes. However, the king’s contemporary Cleitarchus mentioned the visit without comment, so it is very probably historical.

Arrian notes that the arrival of these embassies marked the moment “when Alexander himself and those around him fully realized that he was indeed master of every land and every sea.”

Of course, he was an explorer as well as a general. He seems to have envisaged a circumnavigation of Africa. He also sent a Greek officer with a party of shipwrights to the Caspian Sea. They were to build a flotilla and sail on a voyage of discovery. Their task was to establish whether the Caspian was linked to the Black Sea and whether one or both were inlets of the great river Ocean, which surrounded all land on earth.

The king’s next important project, an invasion of Arabia, was imminent. Preparations for it had been made well in advance. His purpose was not conquest for its own sake, but rather the establishment of a secure trade route from India to Egypt. For this he would need to vanquish the Arabians, not to expropriate the entire peninsula but only to guarantee control of the coastline and offshore islands. He would govern existing ports and found new ones. Eventually there would be a chain of trading posts from the Indus Delta to the Red Sea.

Scouts were sent out to assess conditions and measure distances before launching the campaign. Three ships left on separate voyages of exploration, one of which sailed a good way up the Red Sea before returning to base. Nearchus also organized a reconnaissance of the immediate coastal areas. It transpired that Arabia was prosperous and was well endowed with many kinds of spice. The coastline was very long, with fine natural harbors and suitable locations for new cities.

A huge array of warships was gathering at Babylon. Nearchus’s fleet was complemented by a flotilla from Phoenicia—two quinqueremes, three quadriremes, twelve triremes, and some thirty triaconters. They were transported in sections from the Mediterranean to Thapsacus on the Euphrates and reassembled. They then sailed down the river to join the armada. Meanwhile, a harbor and dockyards were constructed at Babylon large enough to house at anchorage one thousand warships.

—

IF THE ANXIOUS EMBASSIES had known what was in Alexander’s mind, they would have found their fears amply justified. Alexander set out his strategy on paper; it had two related parts—conquest of the western Mediterranean and exploration.

A war with Carthage was envisaged, for the king had indeed not forgiven the city for the moral encouragement it gave Tyre. With this in mind he intended to build a thousand warships, all of them larger than triremes. They were to be made in the dockyards of Phoenicia, Syria, Cilicia, and Cyprus.

The defeat of Carthage would be only one element in a more ambitious plan to bring the entire coastline of northern Africa and Sicily inside his empire. As with the Persian Gulf and Arabia, economic development and international trade were the chief priorities. A great highway was to be constructed from Egypt to the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), which would be punctuated at suitable intervals with ports and shipyards. It is said that Alexander also had plans for Iberia (the Spanish peninsula), although his geographical knowledge of it must have been sketchy at best.

The king also intended to erect six colossal, and colossally expensive, temples—on the sacred island of Delos, the birthplace of the god Apollo; at the world-famous oracle at Delphi; at the oracle at Dodona, second only to Delphi; dedicated to Zeus at Dium in Macedonia; to Artemis Tauropolos (Huntress of Bulls) at Amphipolis, a city in Thrace under Macedonian rule; and finally to Athena at Cyrnos in Macedonia, who was also to be honored with a shrine at Troy.

As a reminder that whatever his relation to Zeus Ammon, he was still deeply indebted to his natural father, Philip, Alexander would build him a tomb that would rival the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Most interestingly, the king intended to build on his policy of ethnic integration. Diodorus writes that he would “establish cities and to transplant populations from Asia to Europe and in the opposite direction from Europe to Asia, in order to bring the largest continents to common unity and to friendly kinship by means of intermarriages and family ties.”

In the spring of 323, Alexander crossed the Tigris and approached Babylon, which he appears to have chosen as his permanent administrative base. He was met by some Chaldean seers, doubtless the astronomers in the city who (as we have seen) recorded movements in the heavens and from these measurements provided the governing authority with interpretations and predictions.

They advised the king to halt his march, for entry into the city would be “dangerous for him.” At the time of the Battle of Gaugamela the astronomers had already offered a prophecy that Alexander would “exercise kingship for eight years.” Because Callisthenes had been given access to these records, it is possible that Alexander saw them. If he had, he will have known that the eight years allotted to him were nearly up.

However, he politely turned away the seers with a quotation from Euripides: “The best of prophets is the one whose guess comes good.” This admirable summation of the rationalist’s opinion of clairvoyance suggests that Alexander had not sat at Aristotle’s feet for nothing.

The seers persevered. “At least, your majesty, avoid the west and enter from the east.” The king politely complied, only to find that the eastern side of Babylon was impassable by the army because of marshes and pools of standing water.

He suspected that the Chaldeans’ motives were self-serving. For during his first visit to Babylon after Gaugamela, the king had promised to rebuild the Esagila, a vast ziggurat dedicated to Babylon’s divine patron, Marduk. In the intervening years, nothing had been done. Now was the time for action, and orders were given to clear the site of a great pile of rubble and bricks. The temple priests and administrators received an annual income from an endowment to defray the cost of running the temple and conducting sacrifices, and since its demolition they had had nothing on which to spend this revenue—except themselves. If Alexander could be dissuaded from settling in the city, there was a good chance the rebuilding scheme could be postponed again and their emoluments would remain untouched.

At about this time one of the king’s Companions, Apollodorus, a Macedonian from Amphipolis, became anxious about his future. He was the commanding officer of the Babylon garrison and had watched with rising alarm the recent cull of the satraps. Was he next on the list for investigation and punishment? He wrote to his brother, Peithagoras, a seer who also lived in Babylon and practiced divination on the internal organs of sacrificial victims. He asked him to predict if he was in any danger. Peithagoras replied asking who was posing the threat and Apollodorus wrote back naming Hephaestion and Alexander.

So Peithagoras conducted a sacrifice to assess any threat from Hephaestion. The animal’s liver did not have a lobe, so he assured his brother that there was nothing to fear from that direction. Hephaestion would soon be out of his way. As his letter arrived the day before the chiliarch’s death, the ritual of divination had hardly been necessary to forecast a fatal outcome of his illness. Then the seer sacrificed concerning Alexander, and the results were the same. He sent the bad news to his brother.

There is little more dangerous than to write an autocrat’s horoscope or to speculate on the date of his death. It may be seen as verging on an assassination plot and is often a capital offense. But Apollodorus trusted his king and immediately passed on to him the contents of his brother’s letter.

Alexander thanked Apollodorus and once back in Babylon interviewed Peithagoras. What did the absence of a lobe signify? he asked. “Something very serious,” came the reply. So far from being angry, the king was grateful to be told the unvarnished truth.

There is little reason to doubt the historicity of these tales, while keeping faith with Euripides. They are circumstantial and have the ring of truth: the prophecies may be menacing but they are also astutely vague. A professional seer would know that it was likely enough that “something very serious” would take place at some point in the not-too-distant future. Most people believed that there was a supernatural world and that the gods permitted glimpses of the future. A prophecy that did not come to pass could be reasoned away or simply forgotten.

These particular lucky guesses have been remembered because of their aftermath, and it is not necessary to suppose that they were planted later, when what they “foresaw” had actually taken place.

—

ALEXANDER IGNORED THE PROPHETS of doom and entered Babylon from the west, where he was briefed on the state of readiness of both the fleet and the army for the Arabian expedition.

While work proceeded, the king kept himself busy by sailing down the Euphrates, where he improved the river’s drainage system. During seasons of flood, a canal diverted excess water to marshes and lakes. When the level was low, sluices were closed to shut off the canal. Because the soil was a soft, muddy clay this was a very difficult task. Three and a half miles downstream, the king noticed that the soil was hard and stony. He had a cutting dug there, which joined the canal and made it much easier to block the outlet and prevent leakages.

Having entered and then left Babylon without incident, Alexander believed he had evaded whatever grisly fate the Chaldeans had had in mind for him. Nevertheless, now that he was back from his river trip, he decided, obediently, to try again to return to the city from its eastern side. He sailed through a swamp, where lay centuries-old tombs of Assyrian kings. Some of the fleet got lost in narrow channels and the king sent them a guide to bring them back to the main waterway.

He was steering his own trireme and, we can suppose, thoroughly enjoying himself. He wore a felt sun hat with the royal diadem, a cloth headband, attached to it. A sudden gust of wind blew it off. The hat itself fell in the water, but the diadem was carried away on the breeze and caught on some reeds near one of the ancient tombs.

For a symbol of royalty to be associated with a grave was a bad enough omen, but worse was to come. A helpful Phoenician sailor swam out to recover the diadem. Wanting to keep it dry, he put it on his head and brought it back to his ship. This was lèse-majesté at its worst; the seers ruled that the head that had worn the diadem could not be permitted to stay on its shoulders. So the king gave him one talent for his prompt action and then had the hapless man decapitated. Another source says that he was merely given a good flogging.

Not long afterward the king was personally supervising some troop allocations when another alarming incident took place. He felt thirsty and walked away from the dais where he was sitting to get a drink. Some “insignificant man” saw that the throne was unoccupied, walked through a guard of eunuchs, and sat down on it. This was sacrilege and the eunuchs were prevented by Persian custom from removing him. All they did was beat their breasts and faces as though some terrible disaster had struck. When Alexander was told, he had the man tortured on the rack, but all he would say was that the idea had come into his mind and he had acted on it. It was clear that he was acting alone. The seers again advised the death penalty, which was carried out.

As we have seen, Alexander was rationally devout and took omens with a pinch of salt. But this catalogue of portents began to unnerve him. According to Plutarch,

Alexander had become overwrought and terrified in his own mind, and now abandoned himself to superstition. He interpreted every strange or unusual occurrence, no matter how trivial, as a prodigy or a portent, with the result that the palace was filled with soothsayers, sacrificers, purifiers and prognosticators.

However, there was plenty of good news to lift the gloom. Army reinforcements arrived in large numbers. Brave Peucestas, who had been seriously wounded when fighting to save the king’s life at the Mallian town and was appointed satrap of Persis, arrived with an army of twenty thousand troops drawn from the local population, which were incorporated into the Companion infantry or phalanx, and a substantial number of warlike mountaineers. Mercenary forces also came from Caria and Lydia under their satraps’ command, and some cavalry recruits arrived from Macedonia.

Embassies from Greece presented themselves at court and were well received. During his invasion in 490, the Great King Xerxes looted the cities he captured, making off with many works of art. Alexander entrusted all these statues, images, and votive offerings into the envoys’ care, to be returned to their original owners.

In May, Alexander’s messenger to Siwah arrived after his long journey and announced the priests’ decision to allow Hephaestion a hero cult. Alexander put aside his mourning and celebrated with sacrifices and drinking parties. Happy days were here again.

—

THEN TIME CAME TO A STOP. A slight indisposition led to a rising fever. The king took to his bed. For a fortnight of blinding Mesopotamian days and baking nights, he wavered between life and death. An endless line of soldiers walked past his prostrate form and took their leave. The end came on June 11.

The destroyer of the Achaemenids had himself been destroyed. Good riddance, thought many Hellenes. The Athenian politician Demades summed up the general mood. “Alexander dead? Out of the question. The stink of his corpse would have filled the whole world by now.” In surprising contrast, when the dowager queen, Sisygambis, Darius’s mother, heard the news, she went into mourning and refused food (and, we must assume, water). She died five days later.

A strange story soon began to spread: Alexander had not succumbed to natural causes as had appeared to be the case, but had been poisoned. The royal helmsman, Onesicritus, was the first to make this claim, but he was afraid of reprisals and declined to name the perpetrators. Nothing seems to have come of this at the time; if Plutarch is right, the rumor mill only began to grind five years later. A detailed narrative then emerged.

Two men were behind the assassination. The first was Antipater. His recall as regent of Macedonia and replacement by Craterus made him fear that he might be imprisoned for opposing Olympias, or might even be put to death if he obeyed the king and made his way to Babylon. At least, that was a rumor doing the rounds. The trouble was that Alexander had form. Antipater had not forgotten the murders of Parmenion and Cleitus in the king’s drunken rages, nor the execution, even if justified, of his son-in-law for treasonous communication with the enemy. He profoundly disapproved of the multicultural policy at court.

The second plotter was the greatest philosopher of the age, Aristotle, who had tutored Alexander in his teens, but now was an embittered opponent. The regent was a close friend and agreed to be the philosopher’s executor. Aristotle had not forgiven the king for the fall of Callisthenes; nor had Alexander forgiven Aristotle for recommending Callisthenes as his historian and public relations adviser in the first place. He suspected that Aristotle had been involved in some way in the conspiracy of the Royal Pages.

The two men agreed that it was time to terminate with extreme prejudice the world conqueror. Antipater’s sons, Cassander and Iolaus, were to do the deed.

The regent’s excuse for refusing to join the king that the Greek city-states were restive was false. His true reason was to save his career, and possibly his life.

Cassander, the son whom he sent in his place, was probably about thirty years old and a less than impressive specimen. He had suffered from poor health as a boy. Even when he was grown-up, his father forced him to sit on an upright chair at dinner as if he were still a child, instead of reclining on a couch as adults did. This was because he had failed to pass a Macedonian rite of passage by killing a wild boar without a hunting net.

He brought an important item in his baggage—namely, poison supplied by Aristotle, which

consisted of ice-cold water drawn from a certain cliff near Nonacris [near the river Styx, which leads down into the underworld], where it was gathered up like a thin dew and stored in an ass’s hoof. No other vessel could hold the liquid, which was said to be so cold and pungent that it would eat through any other substance.

Cassander handed the poison to his younger brother, Iolaus, who was a Royal Page and official wine-pourer for the king. Iolaus had a grudge against Alexander, who had hit him over the head with a stick for some mistake. He was the lover of Medius, with whom he plotted Alexander’s death and whose drinking party was to be the scene of the crime. The conspiracy included others in Alexander’s immediate entourage, and many of those at the party, including Leonnatus and the admiral Nearchus, recent recipient of a golden crown for his services, knew what was about to happen. The senior generals Eumenes, Perdiccas, Ptolemy, and a few other guests were kept in the dark.

Iolaus slipped the poison into the wine; as the king downed a beaker, he screamed. He was in agony and his skin was painful to the touch. He decided to make himself vomit and asked Iolaus for a feather. The Royal Page found one, but before bringing it to Alexander he dipped it in the remaining poison. The king doubled up with pain.

He realized that he was dying and decided to make a mysterious end—to vanish from the earth and, it might be supposed, ascend into heaven. He crawled to a door that opened onto the Euphrates, intending to drown himself in its waters. But his wife Rhoxane found him and he returned to his bed.

The king’s health gradually improved, but when he asked for a drink of water Iolaus brought him a poisoned cup. After draining it, he cried out again with pain. Death quickly supervened.

Meanwhile Cassander rode off to the mountains of Cilicia, where he would not be noticed and could wait undisturbed upon events. Some days later, after hearing from Iolaus in Babylon, he sent a coded message to his father in Macedon that “the business is concluded.”

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HOW MUCH OF THIS account is true? Was Alexander poisoned? Was there a conspiracy to put an end to him? Or can we trust the account with which this book opened? The reader who has followed his career in these pages is in a strong position to judge the general likelihood of an assassination plot.

The history of the king’s campaigns shows how good he was to his men. He gave them frequent holidays, held athletic competitions, and staged arts festivals. He honored conspicuous bravery in the field with generous gifts. He paid much attention to supplies and his army seldom starved. Intensive deployment of scouts meant that the enemy delivered few surprises. Casualties were kept to a minimum.

Also, Alexander led from the front. He would never ask his soldiers to risk their lives without him risking his. His many scars were not simply evidence of an absurd valor, they were a means of forging loyalty.

The “mutinies’ in India and at Opis were, in effect, lovers’ quarrels. Once they were over, the affection and fundamental loyalty of the rank and file resumed.

Alexander’s senior officers also had little to complain about. They served a brilliant commander and had the satisfaction of taking part in victorious campaigns. They also acquired riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Best of all, the king’s habit of dividing his army into independent detachments meant that, within a clear strategic framework, commanders were often operationally independent. Job satisfaction must have been high.

Of course, there were complaints, as a rule privately expressed. Philotas and Cleitus were old-fashioned Macedonians who objected that their employer took too much of the credit for their victories. This was mostly barroom banter, although it could and did get out of hand and end in drunken disaster, as in the case of Cleitus.

In many ways, Alexander was a typical Macedonian king. Like Philip, he headed a boozy, rowdy court where noblemen spoke their minds freely to a monarch who was first among equals. Opposition grew among conservative Macedonians as Alexander took on the ceremonial formality and splendor of a Great King. However, an even-minded observer would understand that a Persianizing policy was inevitable. There were not enough experienced Macedonians capable of managing the vast Persian empire. In any event, few of them spoke the relevant languages. Without the cooperation of the old Persian elites the conquest would fail.

There were two serious conspiracies to assassinate Alexander, but they were amateur affairs organized by very young men. We know little about them, but they seem to have been powered by a combination of public and private motives.

Some modern scholars have detected bias in the ancient histories against Parmenion and his sons, Nicanor and Philotas. They speculate that Alexander wanted to replace his father’s men with his own and schemed patiently for many long years to find a way of destroying them. According to this theory, the Philotas crisis in 330 was a put-up job. It was not a plot against Alexander, but by him. The evidence for this is thin. Great weight is placed on the times the king regularly rejected Parmenion’s advice. True enough, but on other occasions his opinions were accepted and acted on—for example, the decision to delay the Battle of Gaugamela.

The fact is that for years the king placed the old general and his sons in crucial positions of command and that they rewarded him with sterling service. Had he wanted to eliminate them, he could surely have found a way whenever he wished.

In sum, the claim that a number of the king’s generals were party not simply to a drinking session but to his murder is altogether out of character. They had enjoyable and lucrative jobs. Why should they put them at risk? Nearchus, to cite just one of them, was an old friend of Alexander and used to discuss maritime matters with him at length. He was in charge of the armada that was due in a few days to invade Arabia. He had no cause to kill.

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AS FOR THE NARRATIVE of the assassination itself, it is infused with unlikelihood. Let us begin with Antipater. We know that he was shocked by Parmenion’s death, but he was an old hand at Macedonian politics and understood its violent realities; indeed, he had taken part in them. He had spent the last ten years as a more or less independent agent and will not have welcomed his recall, but the excuses he gives for sending his son to Babylon in his place were plausible and very probably true. Alexander had no real grounds for complaint against his regent and was chiefly concerned to distance him from Olympias. Arrian observes:

It could well be that Antipater’s recall was not intended as a demotion, but as a means of preventing the quarrel between those two turning nasty on both sides, beyond any reconciliation that even Alexander could effect.

Neither man had anything much to fear from the other.

As for Aristotle, he and the king did indeed fall out over the destruction of Callisthenes, and it is true that this doctor’s son knew something about poisons. Diogenes Laertius, the biographer, reports that he committed suicide in the year after Alexander’s death by drinking aconite. This lethal plant is known by many names—among them, wolfsbane and queen of poisons. It can kill in two to six hours and in a large dose almost instantaneously.

If Antipater had intended to murder the king, he might well have asked Aristotle for advice, although at this time he was running his philosophical school at the Lyceum in Athens and, on such a highly confidential matter, may not have been immediately available for consultation to the regent in Macedonia.

Of one thing we can be sure. Had the philosopher offered information on handy toxins, he would not have proposed a draft from the river Styx. There is no known liquid that remains ice cold and can be safely kept only in the hoof of a dead donkey.

Plutarch writes: “Nobody had any suspicion at the time that Alexander had been poisoned.” We remember Onesicritus’s halfhearted attempt to sound the alarm, but it took five years before the possibility of foul play was taken seriously. In all probability it was a political move against Antipater, mounted by whom else but Olympias, still raging against him. Whether she believed the charge of murder or made the story up herself, we cannot tell. But she acted with her usual fury. Iolaus the onetime cupbearer, whom the Athenians honored for his role in the assassination, had died in the meantime, of what cause we do not know, but the vengeful dowager overturned his tomb and put his brother Nicanor (not to be confused with Parmenion’s son of the same name) to the sword.

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ALEXANDER’S DECLINE AND DEATH lasted thirteen days, according to the lost document known as the Royal Journal (or Ephemerides), from which our two chief sources, Arrian and Plutarch, quote. Presumably the journal reported the king’s daily doings throughout his Asian campaign. It must have been the “memory” of the court and, one supposes, was necessary to ensure the smooth running of the king’s business. Its main author was the royal secretary Eumenes.

Our sources trust the Royal Journal and we have little choice but to follow suit. If it were an invention, contemporaries would have been sure to cry foul. Arrian and Plutarch quote selectively from a lost original and use their own words. There are some inconsistencies, perhaps due to carelessness or to errors of transmission in some intermediary text. Broadly speaking, though, we can accept the sequence of events as given.

The main point we take from the journal is the extraordinary length of time the king took to die. The ancients were familiar with poisons, but not those with a slow effect over days or weeks.

A large or fatal dose of strychnine administered in unmixed wine has been suggested, but its bitter taste would be detectable. Symptoms of ingestion include muscular convulsions within a quarter hour or half an hour, soon followed by unconsciousness and death. If repeated small doses are given over time, the victim develops a slightly raised but not feverish temperature, muscular rigidity, and excessive sensitivity to light and sound. None of these is consistent with Alexander’s symptoms—a raging but intermittent fever, loss of speech, and a sharp pain after drinking.

Two further relevant factors must be taken into account. Alexander’s was the most public of dyings. The king was very seldom on his own. Every minute of the day, he was surrounded by Companions, officials, guards, and strapping young pages. He could have been stabbed or cut down with pluck and luck, but the assassin would have lived only a few seconds longer than his victim. More likely he would have been intercepted before reaching his target; and it would be next to impossible to administer poison regularly without being caught. Who would accept such a suicidal commission?

Also, Alexander had witnessed enough conspiracies in his lifetime to be wary of any unusual food or drink. If he had noticed something suspicious, he would have been the first to protest. He did not do so.

Plutarch wrote two thousand years ago that “most authorities consider that this tale of poisoning is pure invention.” We do not need to disagree with their judgment.

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THERE IS NOTHING TOTALLY certain in classical studies. Too much time has passed and too much evidence been lost. No investigation was held at the time, no postmortem. But we can say, on the balance of probability if not without a reasonable doubt, that the king was not poisoned.

So what did kill him?

Before identifying the direct cause, we must recognize that Alexander’s formidable constitution had been weakened by the many wounds he had sustained during years of fighting. The arrow that pierced his lung at the town of the Malli in India had very nearly killed him two years previously and it left a permanent legacy of pain. It was immediately followed by the impact of the Gedrosian disaster on his health. Since then, he had not been seriously campaigning. As usual when he had time on his hands, he spent much of it downing heroic quantities of wine.

As long ago as the nineteenth century, it was noticed that Alexander’s symptoms before his death were very like those of malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum, regarded today as the deadliest parasite in humans. Typical symptoms of Plasmodium malaria are a fever with lucid intervals, speechlessness, and a sharp back pain when the malaria infects the spinal cord. The king seems to have contracted the disease twice. As reported, the first time was at Tarsus shortly before the Battle of Issus, and he was lucky to recover.

On this second occasion, we know that the king took boating trips among the swamps outside Babylon. The mosquitoes that communicate the parasitic infection to human beings are especially common in June or July. It looks very much as if the king died of an insect bite.

Alexander was a little short of his thirty-third birthday when he died. It seems appropriate, for he was not a man to settle down. He did not seek a long life. Hence his almost suicidal bravery in the field.

Like his hero, Achilles, he was doomed to die young.