Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 16 FUNERAL GAMES

Nobody had the first idea what to do now.

The power vacuum created by the king’s unexpected death was testimony to the innocence of his marshals. After Philip’s assassination, Antipater had superintended the transition to Alexander with exemplary efficiency, and if he had instigated a poison plot he would have made arrangements for a smooth succession.

Demades compared the Macedonian army without its leader to the blinded Cyclops, blundering about in agony. A confused and emotional conference in the royal tent led quickly to violence. Perdiccas, as holder of the signet ring that Alexander in extremis had passed to him, took charge. His proposal was to wait and see if the heavily pregnant Rhoxane gave birth to a boy. If she did, he would be king and, it went without saying, Perdiccas would be his protector until he came of age sixteen years or so into the future.

A commander of the phalanx called Meleager unexpectedly proclaimed Alexander’s half-brother, Arrhidaeus, as king. Arrhidaeus suffered from an incurable mental illness of some kind and had been brought along on the Asian campaign (presumably to prevent him from becoming a magnet for disaffection). The startled Perdiccas and the cavalry rode out into the countryside while Meleager and the infantry stayed in Babylon. The standoff was soon settled when Meleager was tricked and killed.

In the event, the dowager queen gave birth a few months later to a boy, Alexander, and a compromise dual monarchy was agreed. With one king a baby (albeit “our expected hope” as the rhetoric had it) and the other an incompetent, whoever happened to be their guardian exercised their authority—Perdiccas and, a couple of years later, Antipater.

The Babylon conference agreed on the distribution of satrapies to leading generals, and the Macedonian assembly canceled all Alexander’s ambitious future plans. None of the commanders had the pothos for more conquests. They would need their armies to fight each other.

Six days of angry argument elapsed before anyone thought of Alexander’s body and its disposal. Curtius writes of its surprisingly good condition:

Nowhere are more searing temperatures to be found than in Mesopotamia, where they are such as to cause the deaths of many animals caught on open ground—so intense is the heat of the sun and the atmosphere, which bakes everything like a fire….When Alexander’s friends eventually found time to attend to his corpse, the men who had entered the tent saw that no decay had set into it and that there was not even the slightest discoloration. The vital look that comes from the breath of life had not yet vanished from his face.

If we are to believe this eerie tale, it must be that the king had not died when originally thought to have done so, but had sunk into a deep deathlike coma. We can only hope he expired before the embalmers were allowed in to gut him.

The mummified Alexander, wearing a golden breastplate and covered with a purple-and-gold robe, was placed in a coffin of hammered gold filled with sweet-smelling spices. Although the king may have wished to be buried at Siwah, where he had learned of his divine paternity, it was decided to transport the body to Macedonia and lay it in the royal tombs at Aegae.

It was carried on a large and elaborately decorated carriage drawn by sixty-four mules. The roof was made of gold, with golden statues of Victory at the corners, and was supported by golden cornices. On the sides were four paintings of Alexander on a chariot, elephants armed for war, cavalry in battle formation, and warships ready for battle. A purple banner featuring a gold-woven olive wreath fluttered above the carriage. Large bells hung from tassels and alerted people to the carriage’s approach. Huge crowds came to watch it pass on its long journey to Macedonia.

At the allocation of satrapies, Ptolemy had been given (or perhaps asked for) Egypt. This was a good choice, for the country was easily defensible. Rather than compete with all the other marshals for the entire empire, he had the more modest aim of establishing Egypt as an independent realm, with himself and his descendants as the ruling dynasty. He added to it Cyprus, Palestine, and parts of the Asia Minor coast.

The new mercantile settlement of Alexandria was already prospering, and the canny Macedonian chose it for his capital. In the south he would be pharaoh, but here in the Nile Delta he would rule as a civilized Hellene. The city needed a “unique selling point,” some feature that would mark it out from all the other Alexandrias and place it on the same level as Athens or Babylon.

That selling point was to be Alexander himself. Ptolemy led an army into Asia, intercepted the lumbering hearse, and hijacked its precious cargo. It rested for a time in Memphis before it was moved to its permanent home in a specially built mausoleum in the center of Alexandria.

In the first century B.C., the gold coffin was melted down and replaced by a glass one. The ultimate fate of Alexander’s tomb is unknown. It disappeared long ago and may have been destroyed in war or by earthquake.

In the early twentieth century, the young E. M. Forster spent time in Alexandria; he tells a story that all students of Alexander will dearly wish to be true. In 1850—so Forster was told—a dragoman from the city’s Russian consulate said that he was looking through unexplored cellars beneath the mosque of the Prophet Daniel in the city center when he saw through a hole in a wooden door “a human body in a sort of glass cage with a diadem on its head and half bowed on a sort of elevation or throne. A quantity of books or papyrus were scattered around.”

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ALEXANDER PROPHESIED TRULY WHEN he predicted funeral games after his death. The generals formed shifting coalitions and conducted an intermittent but brutal civil war. In 317 Olympias, as ever ferocious, put to death King Arrhidaeus and his wife, Philip’s granddaughter. She was captured by Cassander and was arraigned before the Macedonian assembly, which condemned her to death. The soldiers detailed to carry out the sentence were so overawed in her presence that they withdrew without touching her. Relatives of her victims did the deed themselves. She did not flinch.

The other king, Alexander IV, fell afoul of Cassander as well; in 310, when he was thirteen, he and his mother were put to death. At the end of her affair with Alexander, Barsine and Heracles, her son by Alexander, withdrew to the city of Pergamum in Aeolis, where they lived quietly. Heracles’ claim to the Macedonian throne was generally discounted on the grounds that he was a child and illegitimate.

However, the boy seemed to have some promise and in 309/308, when he was about seventeen, Heracles was taken to Greece. The plan was to install him as king of Macedonia. Cassander, who followed Antipater—dead presumably of old age—as the kingdom’s current ruler, did not take kindly to the idea. He suborned Heracles’ patron to poison him one night at dinner.

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ALEXANDER HAS ENJOYED A remarkable—and fantastic—afterlife.

In A.D. 221, someone claiming to be Alexander and looking very like him appeared beside the river Danube with a troupe of four hundred revelers dressed as followers of Dionysus. They wandered down to Thrace, took ship at Byzantium and crossed the Bosporus to Chalcedon. Here they conducted some sacred rites, buried a wooden horse—and disappeared. The oddest part of the story is that the public authorities through whose territories they passed gave them food and drink and provided them with lodgings as if the Macedonian king still commanded obedience—almost exactly five hundred years after his death.

All kinds of fanciful legends have attached themselves to the king’s name, and with the passage of centuries his adventures transformed him into an early version of Sinbad the Sailor or Baron Munchausen. These tall tales bear no relation to reality, of course, but some of them give the flavor of the king’s personality—inquisitive, disenchanted, decisive, open, and yearning for the apparently impossible.

We learn that on his travels he encountered: people who were thirty-six feet tall, with forearms and hands like saws; fleas as big as frogs; beautiful women warriors, the Amazons. He once fed a naked woman to an ogre. He visited a spring of immortality (when his chef dipped a dried fish into the water, it came to life and jumped out of his hands). He placed red-hot life-size bronze statues in the front line of battle.

The king constructed a prototypical bathysphere—a large glass jar with a plug inside an iron cage—and descended in it to the bottom of the sea. He only just escaped with his life when a giant fish took the cage in its mouth and threw it onto a beach. He told himself: “Alexander, you must give up attempting the impossible.”

When in India he cross-examined some Brahmins and received telling answers to his questions.

“Which is the wickedest of creatures?”

“Man,” the naked philosophers answered.

“Why?”

“Learn from yourself the answer to that. You are a wild beast.”

This mythical monarch retains his power to enrage or engage. He is embedded in the cultures of lands as far apart as Spain and Malaysia. Hebrew tradition makes him a prophet; for Christian Greeks, he is an obedient servant of God; among some Persians, he is a malicious demon who destroyed Zoroastrian altars, but in their national epics he is a legitimate king, being the son not of Philip, but of Darius.

As recently as the twentieth century, on stormy nights in the Aegean anxious women used to shout from the seashore to their fishermen husbands:

“Where is Alexander the Great?”

They would reply, in ritual exchange:

“Alexander the Great lives and reigns.”

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IN THE MIDDLE AGES, the king was one of the Nine Worthies, and a pattern of knightly chivalry. His doings were a regular theme of Renaissance art. Handel devoted two operas to him. He has been the subject of feature films and, even, the hero of a rock opera. A heavy metal band, Iron Maiden, has composed a song about him. He has been the hero of historical novels (notably by Mary Renault).

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HOW ARE WE TO assess the historical Alexander?

He lived the most extraordinary life, winning battle after battle, undefeated and perhaps invincible. He overthrew a great empire and was perhaps the most talented field commander of all time.

Even the ancients were in two minds. For many he was a hero of the first water. He was much admired by the imperialists of ancient Rome. Pompey the Great imitated his hairstyle and the way he held his head to one side. However, in others his glorification of war aroused distaste and even disgust; they saw his career as a long killing spree. Many thousands of deaths can be laid at his door. It could be argued that Homer was his evil genius. The Iliad, masterpiece though it be, gave cover for his bellicosity and for the long bloodbath of his career. Although he often behaved chivalrously by the standards of his time, even his contemporaries condemned his cruelty, and today he would undoubtedly qualify as a war criminal.

St. Augustine of Hippo tells of an entertaining exchange between the king and a pirate he had captured.

When he asked the man what he meant by taking over the seas, the man answered boldly and proudly: “What do you mean by taking over the whole earth? Because I only have a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who command a great fleet are called emperor.”

Critics rightly point out the crucial role of his father. To Philip is due the credit for reviving Macedonia from its sleepy past, creating the most efficient army of the age, and establishing himself as the dominant power of the Greek world. His son sometimes undervalued his achievements, but without them the overthrow of the Persian empire is inconceivable.

At first sight, the king’s premature death seems to have undone many of his achievements. His generals abandoned the Arabian expedition and his other plans. The empire split into separate, warring states. But, as ever, it is unwise to underestimate Alexander. He and Philip had transformed the world of the eastern Mediterranean. The old Persian order was gone for good and the once powerful Greek city-states became provincial backwaters. Eventually the fractured monarchy settled down into three stable entities—Macedon including Greece, Asia (that is, the Middle East), and Egypt under the Ptolemies. In the long run, Alexander’s multicultural policy transformed the lands that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River. He was probably only motivated by practical concerns, but the proliferation of Greek-style “cities” and the promotion into government of local talent helped to fuse the cultures of Greece and “barbarian” Persia.

This process touched only the ruling elites, and its impact was weaker in the eastern provinces. Plutarch patronizes and exaggerates, but the essential point he makes has merit:

Alexander…taught the Gedrosians the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles….Thanks to Alexander, Bactria and the Caucasus peoples worship the gods of Greece….He planted Greek institutions all across Asia, and thus overcame its wild and savage way of living….His enemies could not have been civilized if they had not been beaten.

The fact is that the king set the scene for the Hellenistic civilization that dominated the next few centuries. His nascent concept of a divine monarchy was enthusiastically developed by the successor kings in Asia and the eastern Mediterranean and lasted till the arrival of the Romans. The Egyptian Alexandria was a success and became the acknowledged center of Greek learning and arts. A form of Attic or Athenian Greek became the universal language or koinē (from koinos, the Greek for “common” or “shared”). This linguistic culture, which Alexander brought into being (without altogether understanding what he had done), survived the arrival of the Romans and in its final manifestation flourished in the empire of Byzantium until the fifteenth century A.D.

Alexander was essentially a soldier, but he was also a serious explorer. If we compare maps of the ancient world, we gain a clear idea of the new geographical knowledge for which he was responsible. In the world picture proposed by Hecataeus of Miletus two centuries before Alexander’s time, the river Ocean wraps round a world disc with nothing much beyond Persia; a century after his death, Eratosthenes allocates nearly half the world to India, identifies the Persian Gulf, and distinguishes the Asian subcontinent from Africa. Alexander had made the world bigger.

Many people have regarded Alexander’s invasion of India as a waste of lives and treasure. He won battles wherever he went, but could not always hold on to his conquests. That said, he understood the imperatives of international trade and opened up the subcontinent to Western commercial interests. This was no mean accomplishment.

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WHAT WOULD ALEXANDER HAVE done if he had lived?

His plans for the conquest of Arabia and northern Africa suggest that he meant to go on and on, seeking out new enemies and overwhelming them. There is no particular reason to suppose he would have failed, although the simple technology and communications of his day must surely have placed a limit on what he could accomplish.

He was an eminently practical man, but his dominant motive was pothos, a longing for the unattainable. Had he survived into old age, he would have resembled Tennyson’s superannuated Ulysses, still ready for adventure alongside his grizzled mariners, whose purpose held

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

Could the aged Alexander even have made it to America?