The Nature of Alexander

The March to Babylon

IF THE MACEDONIANS EXPECTED an easy march through the Khyber and peaceful Sogdiana, they had reckoned without Alexander, who told them acidly that they must at least allow him to leave India, not bolt from it. He had just had reliable information that the Indus did not flow into the Nile, but into the Endless Ocean. Baulked of reaching it eastward, he would not be stopped from getting to it in the west. There was more to this than the thirst of the explorer; like most of his “longings,” it had a practical side. From the Indus mouth he had been told of a seaway direct to Persia. It was said in his day that “the sea unites, the land divides”; it was quicker by water wherever water was, and frequently less dangerous. There was promise of a splendid trade route, cutting out the long, hard caravan trail beset with bandits; the coast road was said to be difficult; the obvious answer was the sea. Some states in the western Punjab had not paid allegiance yet; he would therefore voyage down the river till he met resistance, deal with it, reach the Ocean, and send the fleet to Persia while he marched beside it to keep it supplied from land, noting future sites for harbourage. His friend Nearchus, from the seafaring island of Crete, was given the post of admiral.

For the intermediate Indus voyage, Hephaestion would march along the left bank, in command of most of the army, the elephants, and the huge train of noncombatants; including, presumably, Roxane after another brief reunion. Her husband can hardly have taken her to the Beas through swollen torrents and drenching rain; nor would he be taking her now in a war galley on a crocodile-infested river known to have dangerous rapids. For something like a year, she must have spent more time in Hephaestion’s custody than in his. On the right bank, Craterus would lead a rather smaller force. Hephaestion was now his equal in rank; rivalry had been felt, and there had been some kind of friction, which Alexander had smoothed over with mingled firmness and tact. This separation gave them time to cool off, and no more is heard of it.

While the fleet was preparing, one more name was added to the long roster of the dead from sickness, of whom Coenus had spoken: Coenus himself. Cholera was no doubt endemic in India then as now. He had voiced the men’s discontent, not incited it; and Alexander gave him a state funeral.

The embarkation was a spectacle on which Nearchus’ memoir lingered. They were seen off in state by Porus; on whom Alexander had bestowed no mere satrapy, but a tributary kingship over all the conquests between Taxila and the Beas. There were 80 warships, but the whole fleet reached a miscellaneous 2,000. The horses were on rafts, probably Hephaestion’s pontoons again, decked over; a marvel to the Indians, who had never seen a horse afloat. Nearchus gives the names of the trierarchs, honorary commanders of the processional ships (the working captains were the pilots) and privileged to decorate them: mostly high-ranking Macedonians, including Hephaestion, who must have joined his contingent later, and Ptolemy. Besides some Greeks, there was, perhaps significantly, one Bagoas “son of Pharnuces” (so spelled by Nearchus); not the young favourite, but a Persian prince. Pharnaces, brother of Darius’ wife and half-sister Stateira, had fallen at the Granicus. This compliment to the cousin of Alexander’s future bride—the only Persian so honoured—may show his dynastic plans already forming.

At the dawn embarkation, Alexander poured libations to the river spirits, to Heracles, and the gods he usually honoured. In the first light the trumpets sounded, the chantymen timed the rowers; the high river banks gave back the sound; the Indians on shore, entranced by the show, followed it singing for miles.

Alexander stopped along the way to receive homage from various towns which had already promised it. Then they came to the dreaded confluence of the Hydaspes and Akesines, where the gorge was deep and narrow. “Even from far off one can hear the tumult of the waves.” The scared rowers paused; the pilots shouted to them to pull as never before, to avoid being slewed abeam into the rapids. Somehow they shot them (the horses must have been disembarked) at the cost of some broken oars and one collision, from which part of the crews were saved. Alexander made camp, sent on the ships, and assembled his troops from both sides of the river. Ahead were the lands of the recalcitrant Mallians who had defied his envoys. In no mood for delay, he did not offer a second parley. Leaving Craterus in charge of his base and the noncombatants beside the river, he advanced with a pincer movement, sending Hephaestion five day’s march ahead and telling Ptolemy to keep three days behind. Alexander and his men, avoiding the beaten road, made a short gruelling dash through desert, the quarter whence he would be least expected. His cavalry surprised the men of the first Mallian city still in the fields, and mowed them down as they were. He was as impatient, now, as his men to be done with India.

If he had hoped that one harsh example would end resistance, he was wrong. He had only hardened it. This was Brahmin country, and religion increased hostility.

A savage new campaign was more than his men had bargained for. Retreat would have been suicidal now; but as they stormed walled town after walled town, he found a loss of élan. For him there was only one answer to this—example. When they hung back from a breach, he leaped into it alone, and held it till they were shamed into pressing round him. The breach was forced, and many Indians burned themselves in their houses. Those who fled far were mopped up by Ptolemy and Hephaestion; but many took refuge in their chief city, on the site of modern Multan.

Leading ahead with his cavalry, Alexander managed to contain a greatly superior force which intercepted him, till the phalanx arrived to complete the rout. He then invested the city. It was the last focus of resistance, so Ptolemy and Hephaestion were sent back to the base. Alexander’s second-in-command was Perdiccas, with whom he now divided his forces so as to assault the city from two sides. (Ptolemy, though absent, does not fail to point out that his hated rival was late for his assignment.) When Alexander forced a gate in the outer wall, the Mallians all fled to the inner citadel. He chased them through the streets to its walls, and ordered an immediate escalade.

Scaling ladders were brought, but, he thought, were being set up half-heartedly. He snatched one himself, planted it against the wall, and ran straight up it, holding his shield over his head, without a look to see if anyone followed. Reaching the battlements he used the shield to shove off the men above him, clawed his way on to the wall, and cleared a space with his sword. Now three of his officers scrambled up to his help: Peucestas, Leonnatus, and Abreas, a tried hero whose exploits had been recognized with double pay. The men below, seeing them stand on the wall a mark for every missile, began crowding up the ladder. Alexander had worked his spell again, but all too potently; the overburdened ladder broke, before any could reach the top. The four remained stranded; Alexander already recognized by the enemy, “not only by the splendour of his arms but by his superhuman courage.” Their section of wall was in missile range from adjacent towers; also from below, there being a mound on the inner side. On to this mound, into the thick of the enemy, he jumped down alone.

Arrian gives his reasons, so typical that he may have told them himself to Ptolemy or Nearchus. “He felt that by staying where he was, he would be at great risk without achieving anything fameworthy; but if he leaped down inside the wall, that in itself might scare the Indians; and if he had to be in danger he might then sell his life dearly, after doing great deeds fit to be heard of by men to come.” He did indeed scare the Indians to a distance, after killing some hand to hand; but from there they pelted him with weapons, while he had only stones to throw back. Meantime his brave companions jumped down beside him. Peucestas carried the Homeric shield from Troy, apparently his usual office though this is the first we hear of it. By the time he lifted it over Alexander, it sheltered a man at the point of death. The Mallians were big men, using powerful longbows; a three-foot arrow had gone through his corselet into his lung.

Even then he had fought on, dragging himself erect by clutching at a tree he had been using to guard his back. The movement caused a massive haemorrhage, with pneumothorax, a collapse of the punctured lung; on which he fell senseless. “Air along with blood blew out of the wound,” says Arrian, a very good observation of the bloody bubbles seen in this injury, often fatal even without subsequent exertion. The gallant Abreas died from another “clothyard shaft” which pierced his skull.

All this time the Macedonians were frantically clambering up on each other’s shoulders or anything they could find. From the top, they stared at the inert body with cries and wails, which changed to frenzied battle yells. Transported with fury, grief and shame, they went through the citadel like some scourge of the Apocalypse, killing everyone they found, even the children.

Alexander, the arrow still in his lung fixed by its barb, was carried out of the battle. The cultured Curtius gives him a polished little speech, encouraging his friends to operate. Their hesitation, at least, must have been real, since the wound must be cut open to release the barb, whose withdrawal was likely to kill him on the spot. He was still pinned to his corselet. Feebly drawing his dagger, he signed with it to saw through the shaft, since the flights would not pass the hole in the cuirass. They managed this; Perdiccas later claimed that it was he who, at Alexander’s special request, opened up his side. Someone else (possibly Ptolemy!) said a doctor did it; the likeliest hero is Peucestas on the spot. The barb was tugged out; the inevitable fresh haemorrhage followed; blood loss, agony and shock induced nature’s anesthetic, and he lost consciousness again.

When the soldiers, returning from their massacre, learned he was still alive, they stood about his tent all day and through the night, till told that he was sleeping. His amazing constitution had won, for now; but like Achilles he had paid for glory with length of days. He had almost certainly a splintered rib; certainly a torn lung, its pleura perforated through both walls; and lacerated intercostal muscles. In healing, all these damaged layers, normally mobile, would knit together with adhesions of tight, ragged scar tissue. Arrian, the only reliable source here, does not say which side it was; but with every arm movement and any hard breathing he must henceforth have felt the wound; and in three years it would kill him.

Meantime, as in his own camp hope revived, the army at the base had had word that he was dead. A reassurance was sent, but disbelieved; the men took for granted that news so appalling would be concealed by the high command. They expected not only a general Indian rising, but, being Macedonians, an immediate internecine struggle for power. We hear nothing, however, of any rivalry being renewed between Craterus and Hephaestion; he must have been too grief-stricken to care. All this could not long be kept from Alexander; who at once decided that if nothing but his physical presence would convince the army, the army would have to see him. With a week-old unhealed wound into his lung, he had himself carried to the river, about ten miles, to make the journey by water. Going upstream, the heave of the oars must have jarred him; but in a few days he was there. Nearchus described the scene.

As soon as the ship bearing the King began to near the camp, he ordered the awning to be furled from the stern, so that all could see him. Even then the men doubted, thinking Alexander’s corpse was being brought there; till at last, when the ship had moored [his sense of theatre had not deserted him] he raised his hand to the crowd; and they cried aloud, some holding up their hands to heaven, some towards Alexander; and uncontrollable tears were shed in their astonished joy. Some of the bodyguard brought him a litter as he was being carried off the ship; but he ordered a horse to be fetched him. And when he mounted it, and everyone saw him, the whole army clapped their hands repeatedly, and the banks and river-glades threw back the sound. Then when Alexander was near his tent he got off his horse, so that the army could see him walking. They all ran to him from every side, some touching his hands, some his knees, some his clothing; others just looked from near by and blessed him as he went; some threw garlands on him, of whatever Indian flowers were then in bloom.

Physically it must have half-killed him; emotionally it must have been meat and drink. However, he had given them the fright of their lives; and, not unreasonably, the officers reproached him. His part was taken by a rustic Boeotian subaltern, who said in the broad speech of his people that deeds are the measure of a man. Alexander expressed his gratitude; but a more solid comfort was the unconditional surrender of all the Mallians, whether from awe of his valour or terror of his men. Their powerful neighbours, the Oxydracae, against whom he had not struck a blow, surrendered also. No doubt he gave impressive audiences, seated, to envoys unaware that he was as weak as a child and coughing blood at every effort. The relative cool of winter helped his long convalescence. He never relaxed control of the campaign. As soon as he could be moved, he continued his progress down river, along the way receiving embassies from his new lands, with princely gifts of every kind from pearls to hand-reared tame tigers.

He had also a visit from his father-in-law, Oxyartes. Some homesick troops of the Bactrian Alexandrias had tried to desert on the rumour of the King’s death; but probably the real motive was to learn if his daughter was pregnant yet. Since leaving Taxila, with one brief interval Alexander had been at war in conditions which could not have admitted of taking her along; and since his wound he would scarcely yet be ready for an active sex life. He extended Oxyartes’ satrapy to the edge of the Hindu Kush, with nominal rule over the still unsubdued lands down river. His garrisons would of course be Macedonian commanded. He could hardly have been installed much further away from court. Alexander may already have had thoughts of a second, more royal marriage.

While convalescing at a camp somewhere below the Indus-Chenab confluence, he redisposed his forces. Despite his wound, despite—no doubt because of—warnings about a dangerous route, he was still resolved on leading the coastal march in support of Nearchus’ fleet. It offered an irresistible mix of usefulness, challenge and romance. Cyrus the Great, and Semiramis the warrior Queen of Assyria, were both said to have come to grief there, barely getting through alive. His own plans elaborately laid, he looked forward to the triumph of bringing his expedition through safe and sound. It must, however, be light and mobile; it was to be provisioned by supply columns sent after it from the base.

There could be no question of bringing the main army with its elephants, masses of heavy transport, time-expired veterans, walking wounded, and noncombatants of every kind. Apart from the gruelling conditions, it could not be fed. It was now entrusted to Craterus, to be returned to Persia with the minimum of hardship. Once more Roxane was someone else’s charge; only the much-enduring women of the common soldiers would follow their men along the coast.

Arrian says the whole force was rafted over to the left bank of the river—an operation which must have taken weeks—because the going that side was easier and the tribes more peaceful. This clearly points to a riverside march into Taxila, where the needed stores could be picked up before tackling the Khyber, the main road Alexander had been at such pains to make secure. Yet it has been supposed that he launched this huge, slow-moving and highly vulnerable force directly northward (away from the river) into country never traversed by his troops, uncharted, mountainous and partly desert: the trail over the Mulla and Bolan passes to Kandahar, on which, as recently as the eighteenth century, a Persian army was in desperate straits. The “land of the Arachotians,” which Arrian says Craterus traversed, is very vaguely defined and probably reached the Indus. He and his force reached their Persian rendezvous late, but in excellent fettle, testifying to a roundabout and less inhospitable route. After their departure along the river, Hephaestion remained as Alexander’s undisputed second-in-command; a rank he would hold for what was left of his life.

The last obstacle between Alexander and the sea was the land of the lower Indus and its ancient, now shifted delta. One of the rajahs there, Musicanus, had withheld submission, but gave it when Alexander came; the next made but brief resistance; the third, Sambus of Sind, had sent homage beforehand, hoping for the destruction of Musicanus, his hated enemy. Angry and alarmed to find him spared, and incited by the local Brahmins, Sambus revolted, then took fright and fled. His family surrendered, blaming the Brahmins, whom Alexander hanged. During these operations Musicanus, breaking his treaty, rose in arms; probably his own Brahmins had proclaimed a holy war. As always after breach of faith, Alexander attacked à l’outrance; the towns were stormed, the men killed, the women enslaved. The Indians’ use of poisoned weapons embittered the war. These lands were vital to his communications for the coastal march, and he was determined to secure them. (In this he was unsuccessful.) No personal exploit of his is here recorded, though he took the field. For the first time he must have felt the loss of that inexhaustible energy he had taken for granted all his life. He was to need all that remained, in the months ahead. Of the disabled men shepherded home by Craterus, not a few must have been fitter than the King.

The country once subdued, Hephaestion took charge of turning the chief city of Pattala into a fortified port; but no doubt he joined Alexander for his long-awaited visit to the Ocean. So, probably, did the young Bagoas, whom Alexander had not dispatched with Craterus’ convoy. A dancer who kept up his practice, he had a resilience which would stand him in good stead.

The royal flotilla sailed down the north arm of the delta; but the monsoon had come round again, and it was met by a storm of wind. The ships were driven aground, and several wrecked; the natives had fled, and no local guides could at first be found. While they waited, a more dreadful portent than the storm occurred: the water sank away. Acquainted till then only with the landlocked seas, they were unaware that for the first time in their lives they were seeing the ebb tide. Greece being the seismic area that it is, some must have heard about the sinister withdrawal which precedes the tsunami. But after some anxious hours, the waters returned, and stayed at their former bounds. The gods had been kind, but no one had known enough to secure the stranded ships, which were badly knocked about. At length, pilots found and repairs done, Alexander put out to an offshore island, where he sacrificed to the gods whom, he said, Amnion had instructed him to honour. Then at last he emerged into open sea. Here two bulls were slaughtered and thrown in for Poseidon; and along with his libations Alexander offered the golden bowls he poured them from.

But it was only half the event he had hoped to celebrate. This should have been the eastern ocean, and its shore the end of the world; better recompense for short breath and a chronic catch in his side. It was about the time of his birthday; he was thirty-one.

Since it was for the sake of the seaway that Alexander had planned his march, the interests of the fleet were paramount. Greek ships avoided moving at night, even in known waters; in these, where the very stars were strange, it was unthinkable. Their inability to carry more than a few days’ stores has already been noted; hence the necessity of victualling them from land, and protecting them when they had to beach. Thus the march had to follow the coast, not seek the easiest route inland. As long as the monsoon blew, the wind would be adverse for the ships; the march must therefore start in early autumn. Though Alexander had been warned about desert conditions, his Indian experience probably caused him to expect much more relief from autumn than he would get: cooler weather, and water from mountain snow torrents, such as were still swelling the Punjab streams. He filled in the end of summer with operations against the tribes to the north of the ancient Indus mouth and on the site of its present one, in order to secure his new harbours. Over these people, the Oreitians, he left a Macedonian satrap, who had charge of a supply train for the expedition. After it had set out, there was a revolt and this man was killed. The supplies were no doubt looted; none reached Alexander, nor, till afterwards, did the explanation.

The men of the fleet, setting out into unknown waters, were heartened to know that Nearchus, one of the King’s best friends, was being hazarded in command of them—at his own eager insistence, as he himself recorded. In the event, the fleet had by far the best of it. Their hardships were dreadful, their perils great; they got from Alexander neither the provisions he had meant to leave for them, nor the wells he had meant to dig; to survive they turned pirate, raiding the sparse hovels of palaeolithic aborigines for their wretched food; they ended the voyage sun-blackened, gaunt, salt-crusted, unrecognizable ragamuffins; but almost all survived. Nearchus had twelve healthy years ahead of him.

Arrian writes that of all his sources, only Nearchus said that the full difficulties of the route were not known to Alexander. But Nearchus would have known best: Alexander’s co-leader, with whom he had plotted the expedition, the arrangements for food depots, watering stations, seamarks and rendezvous. And Nearchus must be right; for had Alexander foreseen the horrors awaiting him, he would not have let camp followers join the march, still less the women and families of the soldiers. Nearer and further Asia must have been scattered already with the unmarked graves of these poor victims, not all of whom had even chosen their lot; many women had been carried off from fallen towns by men of alien races without a word of their native speech, whose children they had borne behind the nearest bush, dying or trudging on. But neither Bactrian frosts nor Indian fevers had taken the toll of them which was now to come.

The army set out with a flourish. Phoenician merchants followed it, having heard rumours of spices, one of their most precious trade goods. They were rewarded at first by a wilderness of myrrh and spikenard, whose bruising by the soldiers’ feet scented the air. But it was already inhospitable land, whose thorn bushes were so savage they could drag a man from his horse. Soon it was true desert, and no food convoys had come. Alexander as arranged sent troops to look for harbours, water and forage. What they found would have helped only the still unborn science of anthropology; the coast dwellers, as Nearchus later agreed, were “more like beasts than men”; covered with hair on body as well as head, using no tools but stones, living on raw fish, drinking from brack pools dug out with their clawlike nails; quite possibly an isolated pocket of Neanderthals. When a few victuals were found inland, Alexander kept faith with the fleet, and sent down a load to the shore to be left with a seamark; but on the way, the half-starved troops of the convoy broke the seals and ate it all. Their officers reported their need; Alexander accepted it and gave no punishments. It was growing clear already that the ships must shift for themselves; he would have enough to do with those in his own charge. They had sixty days of it; the most dreadful in most of their lives.

They came into a waste of soft, wind-piled sandhills, “letting them sink as if into wet mud or untrodden snow.” Horses and mules sank deeper than the men, and were more distressed, labouring over the ridges under burning sun. Autumn had brought no coolness. At long intervals there was water; the scouts would announce the length of the next march; though they moved by night, the sun was often up before they got there, and they had to press on or die. Mules and horses, foundering from exhaustion, were at once devoured, and soon their death was being expedited. Alexander was told, but turned a blind eye. His self-reproach is evident only from his conduct. He could not allow himself, as after Cleitus’ killing, the luxury of seclusion.

The loss of the baggage animals and their useless carts had a grim consequence: there was no transport for the sick, or those who collapsed from sunstroke. They could not be carried by men who could barely walk. Once fallen out, they simply waited for death; “most of them sank into the sand like men lost at sea.” Many died too from immoderate drinking when they came to water; they would wallow in it, fouling it for the rest. Later Alexander camped some distance from it; though not till after the march’s worst disaster. They had found a wide stream bed with a summer trickle, and made camp on the scoured sands. Rain falling in distant hills caused a sudden flash flood. Instead of the hoped-for relief it was lethal. He had ordered a night of rest; the surviving women and children had dossed down close to the stream; without warning, the wall of water carried more than half away. Next day was spent in the gruelling heat searching for the dead, to give them some minimal rite of passage. Had Alexander not been up in spite of his own fatigue, he too might have been drowned; his tent was swept off, and he lost all he had in it, depending on his friends for a change of clothes. He must have needed the small comforts that were gone; the ordeal would long since have begun to tell on him. Though at least he could be sure of a decent horse, he cannot have been fit for an all-night ride under such conditions; and all responsibilities fell on him. He was lucky to have brought Hephaestion; if only he had lived to write his memoirs! The value of his support, never put on record by his rivals, is shown by Alexander’s marks of honour later.

The column dragged on, the dying fell out, crying their names in case some friend might hear before the vultures settled. Despair was killing like a disease. Till now Alexander had ridden, and must have found that more than enough. Now he did what his nature compelled him to: dismounted, and began to lead the march on foot.

He did it, Arrian says, “with great difficulty, and as best he could.” This fixes the incident to its proper place in his story, for at no earlier time is such an observation likely to have been made. Arrian adds that he did it so that the troops should bear their toil more easily from seeing it shared by all; in other words, he had dismounted all the officers and would not make an exception of himself. On one of the long marches which went on into the heat of the day, he was seen to be “much distressed with thirst,” as well he might be; a man gasping for breath cannot shut his mouth against dust. He must have been much distressed with pain too, which he did not mention. His plight was evident; for when some of the skirmishers found a tiny puddle in a stony spruit, they hurried to him at once with the contents scooped in a helmet. It was an act of self-sacrifice to which he responded in kind; he thanked them, and poured away the water. It was as good as a share, Arrian says, to every man who saw it.

The account is detailed and factual; both Ptolemy and Aristobulus were on the expedition, and Nearchus got his information just after it. Yet there has been an odd tendency among biographers to suppose that because a slightly similar incident happened at the Oxus crossing, the story must have been transferred. It could rather be claimed that the first supports the second. The Oxus incident was largely his common form. It has been well said that when he had outdistanced other rivals he would still be the rival of himself; and in the Makran desert he was under special pressure to be so. At the Oxus the whole situation is less extreme, the hardship temporary; he does not pour away the water, for there will soon be enough for everyone, but just sends it on to the children it had been meant for; a fit young man, acting like a good officer. In Makran, he is half-dead on his feet, every breath an agony; he cannot conceal it from the onlookers. But men are dying like cattle, arguably through his misjudgment; he will not be seen taking privileges which might have saved their lives; and, even if it kills him, he will not fall below his legend. Nothing could be more typical. If one thing is certain about Alexander, it is that he valued his pride above his life.

As well as his pride he had kept his head. Dismounting the officers, which made him feel forced to walk, was much more than a gesture. Led, not ridden, a few horses were kept fit enough for work in an emergency. To this piece of foresight, what was left of the expedition was to owe survival. The crowning misery of a violent dust storm changed the contours of the area, and wiped out all the landmarks known to the guides. They had no knowledge of steering by the stars, and owned that they were lost Alexander saw, in this despairing moment, that if they wandered about they were doomed. The sea was on their left and they could steer to it by the sun. With the last usable horses, he led the scouting party himself. Man after man fell behind as in the noon heat the horses failed; with the last five he reached the sea. There was greenery near the shore; they dug and found fresh water. The news was brought to the army, and its ordeal was over. The guides now knew the way, and they were soon in inhabited land.

Alexander had bettered the disastrous records of Cyrus and Semiramis, whom, Nearchus’ memoirs said, it had been his ambition to outdo; but not by much. He had brought more survivors through; but it had still been a débâcle. Two factors had gone to it: the inadequate intelligence about the route which Nearchus speaks of, and the failure of supplies. The Macedonian satrap responsible for the stores was dead, as Alexander learned when he sent to have him arrested. For the rest of the disaster he sought no scapegoat; during the march and after, he took the whole burden on himself. He did not even blame the gods for it.

At last, however, abundant supplies were coming in from the regions round; and in Carmania he saw to it that his men were feasted, rested and amused. All the sources speak of a Dionysiac progress towards the capital, with free drinks at every halt; also of Alexander travelling with friends on a purple-winged dais lashed to two chariots. Arrian adds that Ptolemy and Aristobulus omit this last; yet it would be very like Alexander thus to disguise the fact that he had barely the strength to sit a horse. If the Mallian arrow had left him with any hope of making old bones, he had poured it away, like the water, on the Makran sands.

Any rest he got now was purely physical; he began at once to learn that while some loyal or prudent satraps had been collecting horses, camels and stores for him, others had written off his return and freely abused their powers. He heard evidence and prepared to do justice; but he kept the festival going, and found time to join in. To this we owe a remarkable testimony to the popularity which his conduct in the desert had won him, despite all that his men had suffered. Plutarch (supported by the anecdotist Athenaeus) says he watched a dancing contest in which Bagoas—who must quickly have got into shape again—carried off the prize. Still in his costume he crossed the theatre to Alexander, who kept him to sit beside him. “At which the Macedonians clapped and shouted out telling him to kiss him, till finally he took him in his arms and kissed him warmly.” This story says a good deal for Bagoas, who must have refrained from everything which gets royal favourites hated; but even more for the deep affection felt for Alexander himself, extending its indulgence to whatever he set store by, even his “barbarian” eunuch.

At about this time, Craterus arrived with his multiracial army, the elephants, Roxane, and several rebellious or oppressive satraps arrested on the way. Alexander put to death, for gross injustice to their subjects, one Persian and one Macedonian; his equal esteem passed the acid test of an equal standard. Arrian says that the chief reason for his rule being accepted by the diverse peoples he had conquered was that “he would not let them be wronged by those set over them.”

But such cares were trivial compared with his anxiety for the still missing fleet. He had marched to provision and protect it, and had done neither; the thought of all these lives, among them an old and close friend’s, being added to the toll, was preying on him. At last a local governor dashed in with the news that the fleet was beached; but in his eagerness to get in first for the reward, he had sent them no help or transport, so nobody arrived. Alexander, furious for his false hopes, had the man kept under arrest. At last Nearchus and a few friends, getting along as best they could, were passed by some of the scouts sent out to look for them, who had taken them for ragged vagrants. They made themselves known and were conveyed to Alexander, who embraced Nearchus and burst into tears, supposing them the sole survivors. When he heard the whole fleet was safe he wept still more with relief, saying that since its loss would have cancelled all his previous good fortune, this news was worth more to him than the conquest of all Asia. Few Greeks, and certainly not Alexander, cultivated a Roman gravitas; but this scene suggests the nerve storm of a debilitated system after almost unbearable strain.

There was a thanksgiving festival with a great procession, Nearchus, kempt and garlanded, riding in front with the King. Among the prizes and promotions, Peucestas, who had held the Trojan shield over Alexander at Multan, was appointed to the small top-ranking Royal Bodyguard till he could be given his real reward—the satrapy of Persia, held by a usurper with whom Alexander had yet to deal. Hephaestion was now sent off with most of the army by the pleasant coast road to Susa, to give the men from the desert a further rest. Alexander’s rest, such as it was, was over. He rode up country to the royal heartland of Persia, Cyrus the Great’s Pasargadae, Darius the Great’s Persepolis. On whether he took Roxane, the sources are silent He did take Bagoas, and Calanus the Indian philosopher; each in his own way must have proved himself in the fiery test of the desert. At Pasargadae, the satrap of Media brought him one Baraxis, perhaps a relative of the royal house, who had proclaimed himself king in Alexander’s absence. He hanged him, and executed several governors who had outraged their vassals. His severity did him no harm in folk tradition; one of his epithets in the Persian romance is “redressor of wrongs.” But it was exploited by the Athenian propagandists; and here the credulous Curtius, checked against first-hand evidence, shows how far they were prepared to go.

Aristobulus the architect described in his memoirs how eager Alexander had been to visit Cyrus’ tomb as soon as he had conquered Asia. Presumably he did, while near by at Persepolis, for Aristobulus was then commissioned to inventory its contents: a typical Achaemenean royal burial, with a gold sarcophagus on a dais, surrounded with rich grave goods, jewels, weapons, and sumptuous clothes. Alexander had continued the traditional sacrifice to the hero’s spirit of a horse a month. Most of the mausoleum still stands, and testifies to Aristobulus’ accurate description. Its builders, as a precaution against grave robbers, had narrowed the entrance after the sarcophagus was inside. But Alexander on his return found it broken into and plundered; chunks even hacked off the coffin to get it through the door, and Cyrus’ bones scattered about. Alexander would have honoured him even as an enemy (he would probably have preferred him to Darius); the callous insult to his (and Xenophon’s) ideal hero enraged him. The shrine’s guardian magi claimed total ignorance, and torture got nothing out of them. (Some time later the crime was traced to a Macedonian.) Aristobulus describes in detail how he was instructed to make all good exactly as he had first noted it, even to the ribbons spread upon the dais, and then to wall up the doorway. A later generation of robbers had to burrow under its threshold.

Alexander proceeded to Persepolis, where the usurping satrap Orxines was brought before him. He had appointed himself on the lawful satrap’s death, and his subjects now accused him to Alexander of “killing many Persians without cause,” and of plundering temples and royal tombs, presumably the rock-cut tombs of Persepolis. He was convicted, hanged, and succeeded by Peucestas, who was already thoroughly Persianized, spoke fluent Persian, and became highly esteemed.

Curtius’ version was clearly concocted a very long way from Persia. But calumny often exploits a scrap of truth, and it may be a fact that Bagoas took some part in Orxines’ trial; he had known, and could identify, Darius III’s palace treasures, some of which may have been among the looted grave goods. The Curtius story is as follows. Orxines, a noble and virtuous satrap, public-spiritedly takes charge of Persia during Alexander’s absence; and, on his return, arrives to do homage with a train of splendid gifts for him and all his retinue—except Bagoas, to whom he sends a special message that he does not honour catamites. After this typically Oriental approach to a royal favourite, the naïve and trusting Orxines awaits the reward of probity. Soon after, the tomb of Cyrus is opened (for the first time, it is here assumed); and the dead monarch, in the best traditions of Sparta or republican Rome, is found interred with only his old scimitar, bow and arrows. Alexander, utterly besotted with Bagoas, believes his lying story that Darius had told him the tomb was full of gold; this must be the source of Orxines’ wealth. On this evidence he is condemned; Bagoas approaches him as he is led away, at which he exclaims scornfully that it is a new thing in Persia for a eunuch to rule. This at a court where, not two decades back, a eunuch Grand Vizier had been supreme, and had killed two kings! It is seldom that the process of blackwashing Alexander can be traced in such close detail.

At Persepolis, viewing the fire-blackened palace ruins, he expressed regrets. It would no longer have seemed to him the ideal climax for even the most successful party. But, as he made his way down to Susa, another burning lay before him. Calanus, who had never been ill in India, had some grave internal malady, perhaps cancer. Impatient of a long-drawn end disturbing to tranquillity, he asked of Alexander his own chosen death. Alexander pleaded with him in vain; then, knowing he would contrive it if it was refused, resolved it should be worthily done. At Susa, he commissioned Ptolemy to erect a splendid pyre. The cavalry and the royal elephants paraded. Calanus, too weak to mount the horse provided for him, was carried on a litter, singing hymns to his gods. Alexander had supplied rich funeral offerings to be burned with him, but he gave them away to friends and disciples, having no more need of possessions in death than in life. Telling them to rejoice, not mourn for him, he lay down on the pyre. When it was kindled, Alexander ordered the trumpets to sound, and the elephants to blare their royal salute; but there were no cries to drown, Calanus burned unflinching. Arrian says that Alexander was distressed because of his friendship; the rest “felt nothing but astonishment.” However, the drinking bout for the wake suggests a fairly violent reaction. Alexander as usual got himself up to bed (the most hostile sources have no instance of his ever being carried there); but thirty-odd men died “of the chill”; probably from finishing under the tables on a winter night.

Arrian and Plutarch both refer to a story that Calanus’ friends came up to take leave of him as he approached the pyre; but he would bid no farewell to Alexander, saying that they would meet again in Babylon.

A happier feast was the reunion with Nearchus and his fleet, which had arrived by river; the men of this much-enduring Odyssey got another festival. Awards for valour in India were given; and Hephaestion was now raised over even the highly valued Craterus to be chief Chiliarch; in Persian terms, Grand Vizier. Till now, no office had carried absolute precedence next after Alexander; he had smoothed the earlier rivalry by saying that Craterus was the King’s friend, Hephaestion was Alexander’s. But a shared ordeal leaves its mark on any human relationship; and this tribute must have expressed Alexander’s feelings after the desert march. That Craterus accepted it without pique is evident from the perfect trust in him which Alexander showed to the end.

In Susa a few more untrustworthy satraps were deposed or, when too criminal and dangerous, killed. The replacements were, overall, more often Macedonian than Persian; men proved in command under his eye. These choices turned out well; but any Greek hopes that he would now discard “barbarian ways” soon faded. Hurried along, like so many short-lived men of genius, by a kind of creative urgency, he was planning for a new generation in which such distinctions should disappear.

Before marching east he had left in the Susa palace the Queen Mother, Sisygambis, and her grandchildren. The boy, who would now be about fourteen, does not reappear in history; he must simply have been merged in the Iranian nobility during the succession wars. Both his sisters were of marriageable age. Alexander now married the elder one, at a ceremony of such importance that she could only henceforth be regarded as his chief wife. For this was much more than a wedding; unlike the burning of Persepolis, it was a genuine manifesto. Eighty other couples shared it; chief officers and friends to whom he gave, with large dowries, girls from the highest families in Persia.

Roxane must have been in the city. What she said is unknown; what she thought, she wrote in blood after his death. She bided her time. None of the chosen bridegrooms, nor the kin of the chosen brides, demurred; Alexander’s will sufficed. His own bride was called either Stateira (her mother’s name) or Barsine; the sources differ. Her sister, Drypetis, was given to Hephaestion; Alexander wanted them to be linked in kinship through their children. Craterus got a niece of Darius; Ptolemy a daughter of Artabazus; Nearchus a grandchild of his by the Greek general Memnon and the other Barsine, alleged (though improbably in her lifetime) to be the mother of the dubious pretender. The list reveals that all this time the children of the dead guerrilla chief, Spitamenes, had lived under Alexander’s protection; his daughter was given to Seleucus, who, unlike most of the others, did not desert her when Alexander was dead, or set her aside for a more politic marriage; she became a queen and the mother of a dynasty.

The court chamberlain, Chares, wrote a book of anecdotes called Stories of Alexander; among its surviving fragments is an account of the wedding feast. On the wide platform before the palace was erected a pavilion 800 yards in circumference. Its columns were 20 cubits high (the cubit varied; they would have stood about 30 feet) jewelled and gilded. Gilded curtain rods supported side curtains woven in patterns. There were a hundred couches with silvered legs for the chief guests; the carpets were of purple, scarlet and gold. Arrian says the weddings were solemnized in the Persian manner; chairs were placed for the bridegrooms in order of rank; after the healths had been drunk, the brides entered and sat down each by her groom, who took her by the hand and kissed her, Alexander doing so first. The army and the lesser guests were entertained in the court outside. Even the bridal chambers were provided by Alexander, including bedsteads plated with silver (the royal one had gold). The feast lasted five days, said Chares; the most famous exponents of every art performed. Once more Alexander honoured the actor Thettalus, who had taken such risks for him in Caria long ago. The subject-allies sent gold crowns to the huge value of 15,000 talents; these masterpieces were probably melted down to meet the still huger expenses.

Aristobulus averred that Alexander also linked himself with the older royal line of Ochus, by marrying his daughter Parysatis. If he did, it is unlikely to have been on this occasion, unless on a later day of the feast. He was sensitive to ridicule, and the only precedent for simultaneous royal bigamy had been set by the wildly unpopular and much-satirized Syracusan tyrant, Dionysius I. There is no word from Ptolemy, one of the bridal party, about this marriage. Yet it is hard to see why Aristobulus should have invented it.

The manifesto of the weddings was on the grandest scale. Alexander regularized, and dowered, the marriages of all his common soldiers who had taken Persian concubines, some 10,000. Not a few had wives in Macedon; but it legitimized the children, whom he looked upon as his wards.

Even less is known of his relationship with Barsine-Stateira than with Roxane. The one established fact is that in the following year, when Alexander died in Babylon, Roxane was there, but Stateira was at Susa. Remembering his lack of height, it is worth noting that Darius, a very tall man, had married his half-sister; so this family trait is likely to have been passed on. Roxane’s name means “Little Star.”

Among Alexander’s boyhood friends, honoured with the noblest brides, one face was missing. Harpalus had fled. In Alexander’s absence he had moved to Babylon with its enormous treasure hoard, and had had charge of the mint. Already an aesthete, he had discovered in himself a love of profusion equal to Alexander’s own; and the difference of his now owning the money must have seemed trivial when were was so much. He had annoyed, rather than oppressed, the people, who resented being asked to pay semi-divine honours to two Athenian courtesans whom he had successively set up like royalty. It is uncertain whether he had counted on Alexander’s death, or just on his indulgence. They had been very close; Harpalus had stuck to him through his disgrace and exile, a thing he never forgot. In spite of colossal peculations, confession and charm would probably have got the sinner off lightly, if he had kept his head. He lost it when he heard about the purge of disloyal satraps, and bolted to Greece with 6,000 talents of specie, 30 ships, presumably bought in Asia Minor, and about 6,000 Greek mercenaries of similar provenance. He had earlier shipped grain to Athens to relieve a famine, and counting on goodwill there, had formed the harebrained plan of financing a revolt. More than 300 talents went in bribes to politicians (Demosthenes got the most, to his later downfall). After complex intrigues, they decided against it but kept the money. Olympias, a more terrifying enemy than Alexander, had ordered Harpalus’ arrest, and he fled by sea with his men, one of whom eventually murdered him in Crete, no doubt for his gold. If Alexander had made any real effort he could have had him seized, and his trial would have been a mere formality; even after disillusion, something of old gratitude must have remained. But the offering by a court dramatist of Agen—a satire-farce on Harpalus and his goddess queens, with a passing swipe at the Athenians, and Alexander as deus ex machina—was not unwelcome, for fragments still survive.

After the dowry payments, Susa overflowed with money; and the traders who lived off the soldiers thought it opportune to foreclose on their ruinous debts. They had lived with the riches and recklessness of buccaneers. They were now in trouble; and Alexander with one of his huge gestures announced he would settle up for them all. But they took it with a new suspicion. At Susa he had acquired not only a Persian bride but, automatically, a Persian court; over and above which, he had introduced Persian soldiers into the most exclusive regiments. The Macedonians began to feel slighted. He was, and ought to remain, their Alexander, not the barbarians’ Great King. Word went round that his offer had been made in order to find out, for disciplinary reasons, which of them were overspending their pay. Names were slow to come in. When he learned why, it hurt both his feelings and his pride. He said with dignity that the King must never lie, nor should his subjects ever suppose it. The sentiment was so Persian that it might have come from Cyrus; but he backed it up with proof. Writing things were removed from the money tables; any man who produced a debtor’s bond was paid, in the certainty that no record had been made of it. It cost him 10,000 talents, some of it in false pretences; and for the time it won them over. But their amour-propre was soon to be shocked again.

Five years before, while still in Bactria, he had laid down a project which now matured: 30,000 Persian boys had been enrolled in their several provinces, trained in the use of Macedonian weapons (which had seemingly included teaching them Greek) and put into Macedonian dress. This seedling army was now ripe, and had been brought to Susa for his approval. Now about eighteen, they had been hand-picked for grace and physique. When in their handsome panoplies they manoeuvred before Alexander, he was so pleased with their dash and skill that in an unguarded moment he called them his Successors.

How many of these boys, half a century on, must have told their grandsons that once in their youth, in distant Susa, with their own eyes they had beheld Sikandar! Thus are legends born. But the veterans of India, weatherworn, gnarled and scarred, looked sourly at the polished parade. There were already far too many Persians in the army. A campaign wife had been all very well in Bactria; a Persian royal wedding was another thing. They hated seeing a good Macedonian soldier like Peucestas cheerfully setting up a satrap’s court with the King’s approval, talking Persian like a native, going about disgustingly in trousers. They had been furious when a mixed regiment with Macedonians in it had been put under Persian officers. Now came a whole corps of Hellenized Persians, presuming to wear their clothes and show off with their weapons. It was not Alexander’s successors they saw here, but then-own; he was “devising every means of doing without Macedonians”; he was “getting entirely barbarized.” Old grouses and new were angrily milled over, but discipline still held.

Alexander, as it happened, was occupied just then as a Greek with Greeks. He had sent to the cities of the League of Corinth—the states which had originally appointed him as war leader—requiring them to give him divine honours.

There are rooted misinterpretations of history with which the truth seems never to catch up. There will always be people who believe that Canute was serious when he ordered the tide to turn, though all his own contemporaries knew it was a moral object lesson; and people who will go on supposing that this request of Alexander’s marked the onset of megalomania. Not only had such honours voluntarily been offered him years before by several liberated cities of Asian Greece; they had often been conferred on men with poorer claims. The oligarchs of Samos, less than a century earlier, had granted them to the brutal Spartan general, Lysander, for maintaining their tyranny. In a moment of sentiment, Harpalus had even set up a posthumous cult of his first hetaira as Aphrodite; he had been laughed at, not stoned for blasphemy. Divine honours, however solemnly awarded, carried no specific rights or immunities. To the rationalist intellectuals of the day, they were an important distinction, like a Nobel Prize; to the many for whom religion still had meaning, they implied that the recipient had risen above the normal limitations of humanity, to a point where the gods must have had a hand in it. The birth legends which so swiftly adhered to Alexander after his death were not propaganda, but hagiography.

He himself, as so often, was thinking on two planes at once. Within, he felt in himself the divine spark hailed by Amnion. Objectively, he needed for purely political reasons the status its recognition would give. He did not ask it in Persia or Macedon, in neither of which, for different reasons, it would have been understood; in Egypt, he already had it; he wanted it in Greece where it could be used. And he got it without trouble, not because he had inspired any reverence there, but because Greek politicians were profoundly cynical. What they did respect was power. Even Demosthenes shrugged it off with “Let Alexander be the son of Zeus. And Poseidon’s too if he likes.” Ritual religious embassies, with the ritual tributes, were planned to set out next spring. Without awaiting them, Alexander moved at once to the real object of the exercise. Unconstitutionally, but imperiously, he ordered the cities to receive back their exiles.

No other man could have done it. Exiles were products of the blood feud. Party strife in the Greek city-states went back to before the time of the sixth-century tyrants, whom it had put in power. After every fifth-century coup, leaders of the ousted party were expelled, lest they get even with their enemies. So, often, were too-powerful rivals; some had retaliated by getting even with their country, like that baleful meteor Alcibiades. Others had welcomed foreign invaders in return for support. In the fourth century it had continued; Greek Asia was full of exiles. Darius’ 50,000 mercenaries had been partly made up of them; lest Alexander should have let the problem slip his mind, he had lately learned that Harpalus had been able to raise no less than 6,000 of such desperate men for his wildcat gamble. And there were still some 20,000 of them adrift, ready tools for any adventurer who could feed them. Alexander’s demand for their recall meant, of course, recall with immunity; common murderers and temple robbers were barred. When the herald gave out the news at the next Olympic Games, there was a furor of cheering.

Overall it worked, averting much misery. But in the cities there was some perturbation. In that individualistic society, it meant getting back one’s personal enemy, knowing just who had worked his downfall; biding his time, and his sons along with him. Sometimes it meant the unwelcome restitution of his land. Last, and most seriously, it undermined the policies of Antipater in the southern states. He had ensured their subservience to Macedon by supporting many harsh oligarch governments, and large numbers of the exiles had been expelled by them. Alexander was getting into touch with the West after a long and busy absence; firmly, though civilly, he was letting it be known that he did not approve of everything that had been done in his name.

In the spring of 324, after several months crowded with these activities, he made his way towards the beautiful hill palace of Ecbatana, the Persian kings’ summer resort. Probably he felt the need of rest. At all events, he had one of his longings, to explore the Tigris; it would take him the first stage by boat, while the army marched under Hephaestion’s command. Before making for the hills, they were to rendezvous at Opis. This river town lay on the Royal Road to the Mediterranean; and it was here that Alexander planned to discharge his oldest veterans, with substantial long-service bonuses. It took him a good deal out of his way; but it was unthinkable to him that anyone else should see them off.

After a couple of weeks of almost unprecedented leisure, doing nothing more active than seeing waterways cleared, he got to Opis and ordered the parade. But in his short absence, the Macedonians on the march had had time to work up their grievances. Once freed from the disagreeable prospect of the Ganges campaign, and fresh after the easy return west with the inland contingent, tough old sweats in their seventh decade had no wish whatever to be discharged; they took it as an insult, prompted by his barbarian leanings, and they had enlisted their comrades’ sympathy. Unsuspecting, Alexander mounted the dais on the parade ground, and thanked them for their faithful service. He had just promised them bonuses which would make them the envy of their neighbours at home, when the storm broke about his head. His voice was drowned by furious shouts from the serving troops of “You can discharge the lot of us!” and “Go marching with your Father!”

This was the kind of situation in which Roman emperors were to die like butchered boars; or, if strong enough, restore control with a bloodbath of decimations, beheadings, floggings to death. What Alexander did was to leap straight down off his dais at the yelling crowd.

His generals jumped down after him. (Hephaestion, standing next him, would have been the first.) If he had been mobbed, there would have been nothing they could do but die with him. Nobody touched him. Striding here and there he pointed out the ringleaders (so Arrian says, and Ptolemy must have been down there) and ordered their arrest. They were led away, no one obstructing. He then went back on the dais and made a speech. The army listened. Whether, in the short remainder of his life, he looked back on this as more remarkable than the storming of the Birdless Rock, there is no knowing. Perhaps he simply took it for granted.

It would be strange if his speech had not stuck in Ptolemy’s memory till old age. It is magnificent, with a natural momentum far different from the frigid, baroque flourishes of Curtius’ compositions; it should be read in full in Arrian. They could discharge themselves one and all, he told them; but let them first remember how Philip and Alexander had raised them from the poverty of mountain shepherds harassed by neighbour enemies (“of whom you were scared to death”) to be masters of the world. It was a resounding roll of victories. He challenged them to name any wealth he had not shared with them, or hardships either. (“See here—let anyone who has wounds strip and show them, and I’ll show you mine. I’ve no part of my body without them—at least, in front.”) He reminded them that not a man had been killed in flight as long as he had led them. After a ringing peroration, he bade them go back and boast in Macedon of having abandoned him among the races they had conquered. “You will be famous among men and a pleasure to the gods when you tell the story. Go!” He flung off the platform, rode back to the royal lodging, and slammed his door.

He had made his impact. The Macedonians hung about in camp, not knowing what to do with themselves next. Nobody left. For two days he did not appear. Then Persians were seen going in. Rumour came out. He had taken the troops at their words; he was replacing them. Alongside the great traditional Macedonian regiments, the Foot Companions, the Silver Shields, the Companion Cavalry, there would be Persian corps bearing their names. Only those who were now his kindred (the Royal Kin of the Persians, and his fellow bridegrooms) were entitled to give him the greeting kiss. The Macedonian rank and file, many of whom had joined the shouting in a mere gust of crowd excitement, now pictured young Successors marching under their old standards before they had reached the sea.

Then came the climax of this extraordinary episode. The Macedonians ran in a body to the royal terrace. They flung down their weapons and their shields, the sign of surrender in the field. As unarmed suppliants, they stood before the doors, crying to be let in. They promised to condemn the men who had incited them. They vowed to remain there day and night, till Alexander pitied them. After a while he came out. By then they were weeping, and he could not hold back his tears. He stepped forward, struggling for words. A cavalry officer called Callines spoke first. What had hurt them, he said, was his having made Persians his kin with leave to kiss him, a privilege no Macedonian had enjoyed.

Alexander answered, “But I make you all my kinsmen, I call you that from now on.” When he had said this, Callines came up and kissed him, and anyone kissed him who wished. Then they took up their arms again, and went back cheering and singing paeans to the camp.

The instigators of the mutiny were condemned to death as agreed. Arrian comments on Alexander’s having ordered their arrest, “For his temper had worsened at this time”; a startling light upon his earlier tolerance, but probably true; increased fatigue and recurrent pain do make for irritability. T. E. Lawrence says in The Mint, “After that Handley crash in Rome the X-ray showed one rib furred like the bristles of a toothbrush against the wall of my chest, and much lung-pumping thrusts its thin dagger-pain into my heart.” The wall of Alexander’s chest had been perforated; his rib is more likely to have had spikes than bristles; and his X-ray would probably have shocked a thoracic surgeon. But whatever his recent anger, its sequel had deeply touched the romantic in him. He had made it up like a lovers’ quarrel; but it needed a bigger gesture. With his usual mixture of drama and practicality, he offered public thanksgiving at which both Greek seers and Persian magi officiated, followed by an enormous open-air feast of reconciliation. All the Macedonians (Arrian must mean all the officers) sat round him; next came the Persians; the foreign auxiliaries took precedence by their military records. He and his comrades drank from the same loving cup. “And he prayed for all kinds of blessings, and for harmony; above all between Greeks and Persians in their common land. It is said that nine thousand shared the feast.”

After this, 10,000 elderly mercenaries were affectionately seen off without trouble; paid for their travel time, with a bounty of a talent each. Alexander took into his care the children of their campaign wives; he knew what their lives would be as foreign bastards in Macedon, and promised to have the boys brought up as Macedonians and good soldiers. He would present them to their fathers when they were men. Why not? He was only thirty-two.

Contained in the veterans’ departure was an act of great political significance. They went under the command of Craterus, allegedly in need of sick leave (perhaps really so; he was given a deputy in case of his incapacitation); but appointed, when he reached Macedon, to assume the Regency.

Antipater had held this office ever since Alexander’s boyhood in every absence of two successive kings, except when it was held by Alexander. For ten years he had been the virtual master of Greece. He was now ordered to come out with the draft of fresh troops from Macedon. What plans Alexander had for him is uncertain, since he never came. Alexander may have merely wished to separate him from Olympias as he had once temporarily separated Craterus and Hephaestion. The constant friction between Queen and Regent was an old story; but new factors had accumulated. There was the restoration of the exiles thrown out by Antipater’s puppet regimes; there was his continued close friendship with Aristotle, from whom since the squires’ conspiracy Alexander had been estranged. Olympias, though mischievous, was not a fool, and may have sent information which her son took seriously. Arrian says that he never at any time expressed the least ill will to Antipater; who, however, was extremely perturbed when the royal courier reached him. While Craterus was crossing Asia at the easy pace his health and his veterans’ needed, the Regent sent off his son Cassander to plead his cause. The two men must have met somewhere along the road; and the encounter can hardly have been amicable.

Meantime, Alexander was traveling on from Opis to Ecbatana; and here Arrian, nearly all of whose text has survived, has a frustrating gap in an important human story. The text reads, after the tear in it, “… Hephaestion. It is said that yielding to these words, Hephaestion was reconciled with Eumenes; unwillingly, Eumenes being willing.” It may be inferred that these words were Alexander’s. Plutarch, an inveterate muddler whose chronology hardly exists, says that during the Indian campaign Hephaestion and Craterus drew their swords upon each other and a faction fight was about to start, when Alexander rode up and stopped it, rebuking Hephaestion publicly and Craterus in private. The course of subsequent events makes it seem much more likely that this incident belongs to Hephaestion’s quarrel with Eumenes.

Eumenes was a distinguished Greek, one of the Susa bridegrooms. He had been private secretary in turn to Philip and Alexander, and under the latter had held command in the field as well. He was a shrewd and capable man, active later in the succession wars. He had had a little brush with Alexander which has had serious consequences for history. After the desert march, Alexander’s immediate supply of money had run out, and he asked his friends for a whip-round loan. Eumenes’ contribution was very mean; and since Alexander was known to return such favours with interest, he was annoyed. With simple, not to say crude, Macedonian humour, he arranged for Eumenes’ tent to catch fire, in order to observe the salvage. It amounted to 1,000 talents in specie, an enormous fortune; but the royal archives and correspondence had gone up in smoke, a loss scholars are still lamenting. If Eumenes already disliked Hephaestion he may have blamed him for the idea. Later, when Susa was crowded out for the festival, Hephaestion, then high in power, had billeted a visiting musician in the house reserved by Eumenes; and there had been a row, in which blame cannot be apportioned since no more details survive. This feud must have smouldered on the march to Opis; and seemingly in the incident missing from Arrian it broke out in flame. Alexander may have lost his temper—especially if he thought that faction among the troops had contributed to the mutiny—or he may have acted in cool-headed judgment to prevent a dangerous brawl. Arrian’s account of his words would be worth much more than Plutarch’s, who says, in his Craterus version of the story, that Alexander reminded Hephaestion to whom he owed his position, and threatened death to whichever of the men opened the feud again. Whatever really happened would be of deep interest, especially in view of its sequel.

Alexander with his court, including Roxane but not Barsine-Stateira (she must have remained with her grandmother in the Susa harem), rode up towards Ecbatana, viewing on the way the royal horse herds, and a parade of “Amazons” laid on by a local satrap, of whom he had once inquired about this fabled race; perhaps the idea of them appealed to his ambisexual nature. They now appeared, classically correct down to the bared right breast, and armed with the traditional small axe. Though they manoeuvred dashingly, Alexander did not think their unaccustomed weapons would avail them much against sex-starved soldiers, and had them escorted protectively out of camp.

Ecbatana, the beautiful city romantically described by much-travelled Herodotus, must have been a cold lodging for poor Darius’ last winter; it was in summer perfection now. Alexander, though busy with future plans (he wanted the Caspian explored in the hope of a northeast passage to India), relaxed at last in this Persian paradise—the word itself is Persian, and means a beautiful park. Ever averse to doing nothing, he invited along the usual crowd of distinguished artists, and held competitions, banquets and games. No doubt drink flowed freely, though not more than often before. It is important to remember that the behaviour pattern of heavy drinkers, after the point of disinhibition has been reached, is always essentially repetitive. Had Alexander become increasingly addicted, we should certainly hear of outbreaks of violence, similar to the one which caused Cleitus’ death. It may be inferred that his penitence was more than temporary; it taught him a dreadful lesson.

During these festivities, Hephaestion went down with a fever, but after a week was mending. Alexander left the palace to preside over an athletic contest for boys. A message reached him that Hephaestion was suddenly worse. “They say the stadium was full of people”; leaving them to stare at his abrupt departure, he hurried to the sickbed, but was still too late.

Against danger, wounds, extremes of weather, hardship, fatigue, sickness, the pressure of responsibility, the fear of his own death, he had willed himself into invulnerable fortitude. This blow struck him where he was without defence, and his reason barely withstood it. For a day and a night he lay upon the body, till his friends dragged him off by force; for three days he could only he weeping or mute, fasting and unapproachable. The tragedy he had enacted to impress the soldiers at Opis was changed to bitter reality. When he roused himself it was to a wild extravagance of mourning. He sheared all his hair like Achilles for Patroclus (the usual tribute was a single lock, tied into a grave wreath). He had the manes and tails of all the horses clipped as well, and the ornaments removed from the city walls.

The sources give no reason to suppose that the lovers had been still estranged when Hephaestion died. But the self-reproaches of bereavement are pitilessly retrospective; everything is remembered. Not long since, Alexander had put kingship before friendship, perhaps with good cause; but such things are re-lived with agony. Certainly for a time he was barely rational. It is, however, by no means certain that he was irrational to hang Hephaestion’s doctor.

Plutarch says that while this doctor (a Greek called Glaucias; the trusted Philip must have been dead) was at the theatre, the patient broke his diet (unspecified) and had for breakfast a chicken and a bottle of wine. (The Greeks normally took wine at breakfast.) Arrian mentions wine alone. Whatever he had, he died very soon after, since Alexander lay on the body “the greater part of the day.” Arrian, who uses a number of sources for this event which unluckily he does not name, quotes one as saying that Alexander put the doctor to death for giving a noxious drug. Not only was this a reasonable suspicion then; it still is today.

This sudden crisis in a young, convalescent man is very hard to account for. Peritonitis from burst appendix is not an instant killer. Typhoid suggests itself; it causes hunger pains, solid food will perforate the ulcerated intestine and the patient can die of bleeding; but this process would be considered rapid if it took as little as six hours; and Alexander must have galloped back from the stadium in something more like minutes. Such a swift collapse could be produced by an atypical, massive haemorrhage; but it is far more consistent with poisoning, and would certainly seem so to Alexander with the medical knowledge of his day. The doctor’s position was invidious. He could have given the wrong medicine while everyone was at the festival; told the patient (afterwards denying it) that he might take a meal, which could then be blamed for the death; and then gone off where he could not be found—this was anyway reprehensible—leaving the drug to work. It was no doubt the vain search for him which caused the fatal delay in sending for Alexander. Like all powerful men Hephaestion had enemies, and this Alexander knew. Patroclus must be avenged, and Achilles was in no state to split hairs about it. But after his first frenzy he would know that Glaucias, if guilty, could only have been an agent; and with him had died the knowledge of his principal.

Theoretically, Craterus could have planned it from a distance; but towards him Alexander never showed the least impairment of trust, which shows that any conflict between him and Hephaestion must long since have blown over. It was Eumenes who lived in terror from day to day. His feud had been recent, long and hot. Plutarch, who wrote a separate Life of him, says Alexander had quickly regretted having supported him against Hephaestion. Regret had now turned to wormwood. He was harsh to anyone who had been at odds with the dead man, but most to Eumenes, whom he suspected of rejoicing. Considering his state of mind, Eumenes must have wondered how soon he would wake up one morning convinced that he knew the murderer. The secretary, a prudent man of affairs, protected himself by instituting elaborate and costly memorial dedications. Alexander, who had known him all his life, must, as he came to himself, have abandoned his suspicions; for he relented at these tributes, and devoted himself to his own offerings. To a man of his time they were a form of communication with the departed, the only one now left him; and, in spite of Calanus’ teachings, action was the only release he knew.

He forbade all music in court and camp; he ordered mourning in every city of the empire; he dedicated to Hephaestion his late regiment, to bear his name in perpetuity and carry his image as its standard. Architects and sculptors were set designing memorial shrines and statues for the larger cities. Alexandria’s were to be outstanding; and here the extravagant Pseudo-Callisthenes is for once of value; he can at least be listened to when describing his native town. Arrian quotes, and rightly deplores, a letter purporting to be from Alexander to Cleomenes, satrap of Egypt, the man later turned out by Ptolemy. It says that in return for the proper care of Hephaestion’s shrines, Cleomenes will be granted immunity for all offences, past or future. The document is of some importance, since if Alexander wrote it he must have been temporarily insane; but in the form here given it is certainly spurious (there is a reference to the Pharos, built eighty years later); and the nature of the immunity really granted can be guessed from Pseudo-Callisthenes. Describing Ptolemy’s foundation of a state cult temple to Sarapis and Apis, he defines the status of its High Priest, his regalia, and his stipend. “And he would be inviolate and free from every obligation.” Alexander knew as much as Ptolemy about Egyptian religious procedure; his real instruction must have been to set up such an inviolate priesthood for the cult of Hephaestion.

Saddest and most desperate was an embassy to Amnion’s oracle at Siwah, asking for Hephaestion to be granted divine honours. (Hence of course the priesthood.) It was more than an aggrandizement of the dead. How else could the deified son of Ammon be reunited, in the world to come, with the mortal son of Amyntor of Pella?

Concerned with all this he forgot his distraught suspicions. Among those on whom they fell, there is no word of the one with the strongest motive of all; who, comforting him in his loss, must have most rejoiced at it. He was not to know that she had resolution and ruthlessness enough to have brought it about. That was not revealed till after he was dead. Then it was clear that no one can have hated Hephaestion as bitterly as did Roxane, who murdered his young widow the moment her hands were free.

Before leaving Ecbatana, the crowd of artists gathered for the festival was summoned from its mourning silence to compete in funeral games. The funeral itself was to be in Babylon, by Homeric fire. The embalmed body was entrusted to the convoy of Perdiccas, the new Chiliarch, a connection of the Macedonian royal house and bearing one of its traditional names. Alexander himself, restless to be gone and dull his grief with action, led an expedition against a brigand tribe, the Cossaeans, who had long plagued the road between Babylon and Susa. The Persian kings had never succeeded in subduing them, finding it cheaper to buy them off. He went after them in their winter forts—in summer they lived as nomads—and forced them to surrender. (With his usual respect for the brave, he recruited a corps of them later.) Ptolemy, his co-commander, reported it a tough mountain campaign, in which Alexander was active. His chest wound must have been relieved by the months of physical rest. Yet this war may have been his death warrant. It kept him in the hills for two months at the time when Persian kings had held court in Babylon for its mild winter season. He reached it in spring, and stayed on into its hot, unhealthy summer.

“We defy augury,” says Hamlet just before his death; recalling Alexander, whose noble dust he mused upon in the graveyard. Alexander had had his first augury already. A certain Apollodorus, who had a bad conscience about some peccadillo of his committed in Babylon while Alexander was in India, asked his brother Peithagoras, a haruspex diviner, to read his future in the sacrificial entrails, explaining that he stood most in fear of Hephaestion and the King. The seer wrote to his brother, by then in Ecbatana (there had perhaps been a wait for an auspicious day), saying he need not fear Hephaestion; the lobeless liver of the victim foretold his death. He died the day after Apollodorus got the letter; which so impressed him that he wrote back to Babylon, asking what the omens might be for Alexander. In due course the same reply came back. Evidently in the meantime Apollodorus had got over whatever fear of the King had troubled him; he went to him in sincere concern, and begged him to beware of dangers, though without disclosing the full story of the omen, or its gravity. Alexander thanked him kindly, and rode off, taking no notice, to the Cossaean war. More auguries now awaited him.

The first were fortunate. Coming down into the Euphrates plains, he was met by envoys from peoples beyond the frontiers of his empire: Carthaginians, Libyans and Ethiopians; Scythians, Celts, and the semi-barbarous Italian Tyrrhenians, Bruttians and Lucanians. They not only asked for treaties of friendship with him; they brought him their disputes to settle, as if he were an oracle above contention. Later, Arrian says, it was much disputed whether Rome had sent an embassy; he himself thought not. But Alexander certainly knew something of the Romans; his brother-in-law and uncle, Alexandros of Epirus, had fought for two years in Italy on the side of the Tarentine Greeks against the Bruttian and Lucanian incursions, till killed by treachery. He had been in alliance with Rome, and his dispatches must have reached both his sister Olympias and Alexander himself, who, whether the Romans sent him envoys or not, must already have had his eye on them—especially if not. Here history’s greatest If briefly appears, and vanishes.

Men from these faraway places had never been seen by him or his people before. With new vistas, new prospects opened. But his next message from fate was personal. Nearchus, who had preceded him to Babylon, came anxiously to meet him. (Nearchus’ memoirs are a deplorable loss to history. Their surviving fragments show a vivid style, a talent for description, and a deep, perceptive affection for Alexander.) He brought a message from the priests of Bel, the great god of Assyrian Babylonia, who divided sky from earth and set the courses of the stars. His priests were astrologers; and they had descried a most adverse aspect of the heavens for the King’s entry into Babylon. They begged him to pass it by.

At the Tigris crossing they met him themselves, and, says Arrian, drew him apart from his companions. Presumably through an interpreter, they warned him not to continue his westward march, but to turn east. At that time of year this would have been the normal progress of a Persian king going to Susa. This one, however, had plans which could only be carried out in Babylon. He replied with a line of Euripides which said (whatever the interpreter made of it) that the best prophecies are those that come true. A sceptic he had never been; but he liked his own way, and had survived bad omens before. He had had one at Gaza, and had not bled quite to death; he had had one at the Oxus, and recovered from his cholera or whatever he had got. Yet at Multan, where he had been a hair’s breadth from death, he had had no warning at all. And he had a present suspicion of ulterior motives. His vast gift to the temple restoration fund at his earlier visit had produced, he heard, no temple. Bel’s tithes had been coming in ever since Xerxes’ demolition; when the new structure rose, they would have to go to its upkeep instead of to the priests. After Harpalus’ defalcations, he must have wondered about the building fund itself. Babylon had no reputation for austerity.

But even a suspect god should be given some benefit of doubt; so he decided to enter the city, at least, from the eastern side. He led his men round, but found the way barred by swamps. Floundering about in Euphrates mud, in deference to a mercenary ruse, would have been humiliating; it made up his divided mind. Arrian, perhaps here echoing Nearchus, says, “So partly from choice, and partly not, he disobeyed the god.” Not long after his entry into the city, he sent for Apollodorus’ brother, the seer Peithagoras, and asked what sign had made him send his warning. Evidently Apollodorus had been afraid to say; but one man of integrity perceived another. The omen was described; Alexander asked its real meaning, and was told, “Something very grave.” His only outward response was to express respect for the seer’s honesty. Aristobulus said in his memoirs that Peithagoras himself had told him this.

Ever since Hephaestion died and he hanged the doctor, it cannot have been far from Alexander’s mind that Achilles had not long outlived Patroclus. Immortal Thetis, reading the fate of her mortal son, had warned him that if he avenged his friend his own death came next; he had paid the blood debt, and its price. But only a part of Alexander’s mind lived with Homeric parallels. Swift-footed Achilles, a poet’s great creation, had not himself ever created anything. He had not been a king, an explorer, a builder of cities or of peoples. Alexander looked westward, and planned for his next few years.

Roxane had come to Babylon, obviously by the easy Royal Road from Ecbatana, for she cannot have gone roughing it in the winter war. She was pregnant. Odd, and perhaps very significant, is the absence of any comment from Alexander, any known word about his plans if the child were male. And here a look at the map suggests an important possibility. He had “rested his men” after the campaign; and the easy route back to Babylon would be by way of Susa. Here were installed Barsine-Stateira, the young Drypetis (perhaps only since Hephaestion’s death), and Sisygambis, whose influence had always been so great. If he passed through, he must have visited them; and he may then have decided that his heir should be of royal Persian blood. It is possible that at the time of his death, Darius’ daughter was some months pregnant. This would make Roxane’s motive for her murder much more pressing than mere revenge.

Babylon was geographically central to Alexander’s empire; he intended it for the capital. Soon after he was gone it would sink into provinciality; by the first century it was in ruins. He had created in Alexandria the true centre of the Hellenistic world. But the Babylon of his day retained the traditions of royal pomp which Persia had inherited from Assyria. He half-Hellenized and enhanced it. His state pavilion was set up in the “paradise”; around him on couches with silver feet (probably the ones from the Susa wedding) sat his chief officers and friends. Near his throne stood the perfumed incense burners, ancient protection of Persian kings from the almost universal human stink (the courtier addressing Darius the Great on the Persepolis relief is holding up his hand to ward off his breath from the royal face). The beloved Bagoas now took his doubtless exalted place in a whole hierarchy of palace eunuchs, many of whom must have held office since Ochus’ reign. Here was the royal harem, which they had probably taken upon themselves to replenish with youthful beauty of either or neither sex.

To the state pavilion came the sacred embassies from Greece, to acknowledge the son of Ammon. Their tributes were mainly the exquisite golden crowns of which a few lesser examples have survived to hint at the best; wreaths of wheat or barley ears, berried olive sprays, flowers, wrought with the delicacy of nature. Here too, at a time not exactly known, came Antipater’s son Cassander as his father’s envoy.

He was a man in his prime, very able, and with no aversion to war; yet Alexander when setting out for Asia had left behind his Regent’s eldest son. Since Antipater was no invalid needing support, a long-standing antipathy seems the only explanation. Indeed, the unsuitability of Cassander for his mission made his father’s motive in sending him dubious to the ancient world, which suspected his real task of having been more sinister. But Antipater had no one else to send, his two other sons being already with Alexander; one, Iollas, serving as his cupbearer. Ten years had passed and boyhood quarrels might have been forgotten.

Ten years had passed, for Cassander, in Macedon; excluded from the great adventure with its resplendent prizes; fighting the Spartans in a war which comparison had made to seem provincial; watching Olympias’ constant intrigues against his father, whose policies had just been undermined by the Exiles’ Decree. Then had come the shattering blow of his replacement and summons to court; to men already resentful and uneasy, a move of implicit threat. Neither father nor son had seen Alexander in a decade; both had contacts with the Lyceum to which the dead Callisthenes had belonged. Now, in the exotic magnificence of Babylon, Cassander saw the men who had been boys when he was a boy seated in state among the incense burners as generals and satraps; and enthroned in gold the precocious lad he had hated and envied in old days at Pella, a world ruler, a god.

Alexander for his part found Cassander no more attractive than before. Their exchanges became hostile almost at once. That Cassander jeered at a Persian doing the proskynesis, and that Alexander banged his head against the wall, is probably a transferred anecdote, but scarcely looks far-fetched. Long after Alexander’s death, says Plutarch, the sudden sight of his statue at Delphi threw Cassander into a cold sweat. Later he killed Olympias, Roxane and her son; that he would have liked to kill Alexander is beyond question; naturally enough he is Plutarch’s favourite suspect. Even now, in the teeth of the medical evidence, he cannot be acquitted without reluctance.

With no intention of removing the trusty Craterus from his new appointment, Alexander had small time for Cassander anyway; his own concerns were too large. His westward movement was about to start. Its first phase would be a coastwise exploration of the unknown Arabian Peninsula, in search of a navigable route to Egypt. The Egyptian end of the Red Sea he knew about already; also about Darius the Great’s canal from near Suez into the Nile, which only needed clearing to let a navy through. Among the papers said to have been found after his death was a plan for the exploration of the North African coast and construction of a road as far as the Strait of Gibraltar. His next objective would probably have been Sicily, a land then in vulnerable fission; its history had been among the books sent him by Harpalus; it would have made a good springboard for Italy. As the embassies had shown, his reputation had already half-won his future campaigns. The Carthaginians and the Romans would have given him hard work; if he lived through that, there was nothing much to stop him from getting to Britain.

The harbour of Babylon was being enlarged, and a new fleet built there; the indomitable Nearchus was ready to command it; Peucestas was training a loyal and disciplined Persian army; an army of young Macedonians was due to come out with Antipater. The adventure would start with a march of about three hundred miles from Babylon to the mouth of the Euphrates. Here they would rendezvous with the fleet, and turn southward, Alexander making the supporting march by land. The narrowness of the Gulf was already known; this time, if the coast should turn out desert, supplies could reach them by sea. The formidable southern and Red Sea coasts were terra incognita; far further from help than Makran, they might have involved him in appalling disasters, though he had probably learned by now when to turn back.

Arrian comments that he was insatiable of conquest. True as this is, his whole career shows that for him power was not an end but a tool. He longed to discover, and what he found to shape creatively. The romantic love of personal heroism, which shortened his life, was also the spell which caused his men to follow him, and is inseparable from his destiny.

But all these great plans fell into the background when Deinocrates, the artist commissioned to design Hephaestion’s pyre, dismissed his swarming workmen and announced that it stood complete. All was ready for what still remains the most spectacular funeral known to history. Alexander’s own is no exception; his body was too sacred a relic, too great a political status symbol, to be destroyed. Patroclus was to go in the archaic way of heroes; but accompanied by a holocaust of Babylonian riches and Hellenistic art.

That so grandiose a construction was designed for burning, and built in the available time, has attracted doubt only in our century which has seen the death of handcraft. It could have been achieved, if not with ease, certainly with success, at all those courts of sixteenth-century Europe whose huge triumphal spectacles—contests in royal splendour—can still be studied in their architects’ detailed drawings. All were created for occasions as ephemeral as this one. Alexander could call upon infinitely greater resources.

The form was Babylonian, a stepped pyramid or ziggurat; the art was Greek. It stood some two hundred feet high, upon a platform a furlong square, set into the vast Babylonian outer wall. The lowest tier was of combustible palmwood columns, left open for fuel and updraught. Then the carvings began in ascending, narrowing tiers; ship prows bearing armed figures, with red felt banners hanging between to be lifted by the rising heat; then twenty-foot wreathed torches supporting eagles; then a hunting scene; then a battle of centaurs; then alternating bulls and lions; then trophies of arms; at the top, the woman-headed birds the Greeks called sirens, hollowed behind so that, before the burning, hidden singers could give them voices to praise the dead. No apex is described; this must have been the body on its bier. The use of quick-burning softwood would much hasten the task of the hundreds of craftsmen and their army of assistant slaves. Parts were gilded; the rest would have been painted, mainly in crimson and blue. For weeks, as the tiers rose, it must have drawn swarms of sightseers; one of whom, like a modern tourist taking snapshots, must have sketched or written the detailed description used by Diodorus. Alexander’s plans purposed a permanent memorial, perhaps on the same site; whatever its form, the work not of weeks but years.

This, it might seem, was the one occasion on which he used his almost limitless power in the cause of pure self-indulgence. But for the modern sceptic one factor has disappeared: the continued presence of Hephaestion himself, wandering as Patroclus did while he awaited the fire’s release; knowing of the plea for his divinity which would rescue him from some separating, inferior station in the land of the dead; understanding—had he not always understood?—the tokens of devotion and offerings of remorse.

The site of the pyre had been covered with baked tiles, to preserve the ancient Babylonian brickwork, mortared with bitumen, from the fierce heat. For the men from the west, the stupendous spectacle of the blaze must have been the memory of a lifetime; and Alexander’s other tribute, a quiet and solemn little ceremony, would largely have passed them by. But for the Babylonians, it may have been more startling than the other. He ordered that during the day of the funeral the sacred fires in the temples should be extinguished. It was the logical expression of what he had said to Sisygambis years before: “He too is Alexander.” Custom reserved this rite for the death of the Great King.

Alexander plunged back immediately into action. He looked forward, indeed, for as long as he had breath to tell his mind. Even the intention of the funeral had been concerned with Hephaestion’s present and future fame on earth, and his enduring life in Elysium.

All this time, the new fleet had been training on the Euphrates. Himself intensely competitive, Alexander seems to have been adept in stimulating among his men keen rivalry without ill feeling; the contests with which he now enlivened the work, turning exercises into races with trophies to be won, were very popular. He was busy too with the reorganization of the army. His racial fusions were starting to work more smoothly. Peucestas had arrived with his high-grade Persian troops; promptly, and it seems with no opposition, Alexander began assigning them to units under a mixed officer corps of Persians and Macedonians. Troops from the satrapies of Asia Minor were pouring in.

The Persian Gulf expedition was almost ready to start. Today it can be safely assumed that uninhabited land is uninhabitable; there was then plenty of spare room, and on his coastal march he planned to make harbours and found colonies. His North African scheme did not, of course, depend on an Arabian sea route; if this search had to be abandoned, he could simply have started his march from Egypt. Once more exploration and pioneering were paramount in his mind.

Nothing is so wise after the event as legend. But it seems that several, at least, of Alexander’s death omens were recognized as sinister at the time. It has been noted that Aristobulus had the testimony of the diviner at first hand. Another portent was the occupation of the throne, during the King’s brief absence, by some man of obscure condition who seems to have been deranged; he had been under arrest for some unknown offence, but had got away and wandered into the throne room, while everyone’s attention was relaxed, Alexander and his officers having taken a refreshment break elsewhere. His first warning of the event was the distraught wailing of the court eunuchs—Bagoas no doubt among them—who had seen the dreadful augury but “because of some Persian custom” could not remove the man; perhaps their incomplete manhood would have made the omen worse. Long before he conquered Persia, Alexander had known that to sit on the Great King’s throne was a capital offence; he had said so in joke to the frost-numbed soldier he had been warming in his chair. Now the seers told him it was something worse than disrespect, a symbol of disaster. The man was tortured, to learn if he was the instrument of a plot; the poor wretch could only say that he had felt like sitting there, he knew not why. This made the bad luck more threatening, and to avert it he was killed; probably a kinder fate than the lot of a madman in those days.

It has been suggested that, because of previous bad omens, some Persian well-wishers had sent the man, an expendable criminal, to act as a royal scapegoat (as the disingenuous Bessus had proposed to stand in for Darius); and that Alexander had him killed in error, instead of letting him carry the bad luck away. But there seems no reason why this prophylactic measure on his behalf should not have been discussed with Alexander beforehand and the right procedure explained. It would appear that the incident was one of those portents, the product of genuine chance, which in the ancient world carried the greatest weight.

Nearer to the mark, in a realistic sense, was a sign less forcible to those who saw it; for us it has the force of being connected with the likeliest actual cause of Alexander’s death.

Among the countless activities which make it incredible he could have found time for the dissipations alleged in Athens, he was concerned for the farmers on the land downstream from Babylon. They got poor irrigation, because the Euphrates was inclined to drain uselessly away from them into bogs and lakes. He took a flotilla and sailed down that way with his engineers to see what could be done. A practical system, which could be adjusted to the flow, was worked out; while he was about it he saw a good site for a town, and arranged to found one. Then he sailed back towards Babylon by way of the floodlands. Their channels were winding and complex; some of the ships were temporarily lost in them; over the years they had invaded the ancient burial grounds of the Assyrian kings, who had ruled there before the conquests of Cyrus the Great.

Alexander, who seems always to have enjoyed messing about in boats, had taken the tiller of his own ship, then under sail in a bit of wind. He was wearing the petasos, or Greek sun hat, with a hatband in the royal colours, purple and white. The wind caught the hat, whirled the band off, and tangled it into a clump of rushes beside a tomb. Hindsight remembered the tomb as ominous; the chief concern at the time was the loss of the royal diadem, the symbolic mitra. A ready seaman swam over and retrieved it; then, to keep it dry going back, tied it unthinkingly around his head. This was agreed by the seers to be not only a shocking solecism but a dire omen. He was beaten for it; but Alexander, typically thinking that his initiative should be recognized as well as his fault, gave him a talent of silver. (Some unnamed sources had him beheaded; but Aristobulus the engineer, who must have been on the expedition, is here to be believed.) None of the ancient writers recognized, even by hindsight, the more significant fact that into these swamps and channels must have drained the entire sewage effluent of densely populated Babylon.

The authenticity of the Royal Journal, which gives the daily course of Alexander’s last illness, has been much debated. Some scholars point out that it is improbably frank for a court document; others suggest that it was expanded later, to refute the rumours that he had died by poison. So indeed it does; and it is hard to believe the whole account is not genuine, seeing that the case history it describes is so straightforward as to be almost classic, with a consistency far beyond the medical knowledge of the time to invent

Whether it would have made any difference if he had taken care of himself at the outset is anybody’s guess; as are the reasons why he did not. Certainly his conscious mind was not seeking death. He had conceived enough new plans to have filled a normal life span. We are here on psychosomatic ground where we know, essentially, no more than did Pythagoras, if as much. Alexander’s whole life story shows that his sense of his own being was often mysterious even to himself. But it had a power he felt like a force of nature. Something more basic than vanity, something of which vanity was no more than a side effect, had brought Ammon’s oracle home to him with recognition. He had grown beyond, but never out of, Homer; and a central part of him had been Achilles ever since he had sat on old Lysimachus’ knee. Patroclus had died; as far as vengeance could reach, he had been avenged; the terms of Achilles’ death fate had been fulfilled. While still a boy, Alexander must have known by heart the words of the ghost returning as a dream:

And I call upon you in sorrow, give me your hand; no longer

shall I come back from death, once you give me my rite of burning.

No longer shall you and I, alive, sit apart from our other

beloved companions and make our plans, since the bitter destiny

that was given me when I was born has opened its jaws to take me.

And you, Achilleus, like the gods, have your own destiny …

The rite of burning was over. From such a furnace no pinch of mortal dust can have been recovered; much is said of Hephaestion’s monuments, nothing of his tomb. Now Alexander was in a state of constant movement; by day organizing a fleet and an army, giving ceremonious audiences in the pavilion of the silver couches; at night, plunging into the distractions of the symposium or the banquet, the only way of unwinding his tensions he had ever known. If he was ready to die, his intellect had not acknowledged it. But his instincts were always powerful, often strikingly perceptive. For a decade and more his body had been cruelly overloaded; his mind for much longer, probably most of his life. While his mind pondered the omens of a throne or a purple ribbon, his instincts may have been wiser; a message may have reached them that it was his mind which could wear out first.

What he is likely to have said to himself, as he dressed for dinner and felt the first shivers of fever, is simply that it was nothing much; like something he had picked up in Bactria and thrown off in a couple of days; nothing to make a fuss about. But it is perhaps significant that the last event of his life which Arrian records before its onset is the return of the envoys from Siwah, bringing Amnion’s oracle about Hephaestion. He did not quite qualify for a god; but he could be worshipped as a divine hero. His cult was authorized; his shade had the entry to the Elysian Fields; and the difference of rank had never mattered much. This may have been the occasion of the letter to Cleomenes in Alexandria. It was decreed also by Alexander that all business contracts, whose form invoked gods to witness them as God is invoked on the witness stand today, should be inscribed “In Hephaestion’s name.”

Plutarch and Arrian, between them, tell the rest of the story. Plutarch says that Alexander gave a splendid entertainment in honour of Nearchus. Arrian says he had held ceremonies that day, on his soothsayers’ advice, to ward off the evil omens. Both agree that when bedtime came, Medius of Larissa invited him to a late-night party, promising it would be a good one.

This is the first we hear in the sources of Medius, except for the fact, recorded by Nearchus, that he had enjoyed the privilege of commanding a trireme on the Indus cruise, indicating, since he held no high command, that he must have been one of Alexander’s friends. He was accused by ancient writers of flattery, perhaps in a book he wrote which has disappeared, or perhaps merely because he had won Alexander’s favour. To have become a valued companion since his bereavement must surely have needed more than flattery; some imagination and tact; even the most hostile sources make no sexual suggestions. Unlike Cassander, Medius had no known motive whatever for wishing Alexander dead, and every reason for wanting him alive; he was a generous friend. In Cassander’s record, one murder more or less can be only a matter of detail; but Medius, whether or not an admirable man, is almost certainly a gravely slandered one.

As Alexander’s host two evenings running, he had opportunity. That he was the lover of Iollas, Alexander’s cupbearer, is most likely a canard meant to furnish him with a motive; Iollas, even if guilty, could have acted on his own at any time, nor could a festive occasion have freed him from responsibility. Both Arrian and Plutarch dismiss as absurd the tale that Alexander was poisoned at Medius’ party; as, on the medical evidence, well they may. Both therefore mention only to reject it a story that on draining a “cup of Heracles” Alexander gave a sharp cry of pain, and had to leave the feast. It may indeed be just a propaganda story concocted during the succession wars to smear Medius or Perdiccas; but it is interesting that, if true, it would fit the clinical picture very well. It goes without saying that any poison which could produce such an effect as soon as it was swallowed would have its victim dead in convulsions well within the hour. But a “cup of Heracles” was a very large beaker, drained without heeltaps. In a Babylonian summer the wine was probably well chilled from a snow pit. A draught like this, flung down on a hot night by a man with a rising temperature, could easily cause an instant, violent stomach cramp. On no other occasion is Alexander ever said to have cried out with pain; anything so uncharacteristic has a certain persuasiveness, for in such a spasm it could have been involuntary.

If it happened, nothing much need have been thought of it at the time. Later, it would have raised dreadful doubts in the minds of Medius and his guests; mutual suspicions; personal fears. Small wonder if the incident was hushed up, and the hushing up bred sinister rumour.

Enwrapped in much mumbo-jumbo, Plutarch has probably preserved an essential truth: “the poison was water.” Most likely it was only the water of downstream Euphrates, laden with the untreated excreta of a dozen diseases. But this, of course, is not what Plutarch meant; and Iollas, Cassander’s brother, the royal cupbearer, remains a dubious figure still. Man did not wait for Pasteur to learn that water could be lethal; he could connect cause and effect. Florence Nightingale, who to the end of a long life refused to believe in germs, was well aware that certain pumps and wells in London were dangerous. Empiric knowledge like this must go back to the dawn of civilization; it was common currency in classical times. It is an extraordinary fact that not only did the kings of Persia have their drinking water drawn from a special spring; they had it boiled. No one knows why, or whether the lost science of some earlier age had been preserved as ritual. Nor is it known whether Alexander kept it up at his Persian court; very likely it was just continued as routine. But, unless turbid, all water looks much alike. It may have been the instrument of many undiscovered murders which have passed for—as in a sense they were—natural deaths. Its disadvantage was that it was not infallible; the infection might not take, or the victim might recover. Its advantage was the enormous one of being undetectable—unless someone talked; and, according to Plutarch, someone did. That the poison was water was, he said, confided by Antigonus One-Eye to a certain Hagnothemis, of whom, unfortunately, nothing else is known.

He claimed that the water was sent by Antipater on Aristotle’s advice, and carried by Cassander. It was alleged to have been drawn from an outlet of the Styx at Nonacris, its lethal power residing in its intense cold, which would eat through anything except an ass’s hoof, in which it was conveyed.

Antigonus is little heard of while one of Alexander’s officers; he became a king in nearer Asia. He bears a good character, but had later contacts with Antipater and could have heard something then. The Styx is innocuous; the obscure Hagnothemis may have been a compulsive liar; but Pseudo-Callisthenes, in a fanciful account of the murder, puts in the remarkable detail that the ass-hoof container had been boiled. Just as country wise women were using substances containing penicillin long before its principles were known to science, so malevolent empiricists may have found that a boiled container would preserve a microbiotic strain from destructive contact with other organisms; while the jelly formed in the hoof would make a perfect culture. Tainted water could surely have been found within a few miles of Babylon. Many such infections produce no dysentery, only fever and increasing weakness, just as the Journal describes; without a timely antibiotic, they can still end fatally.

After the party, Alexander slept most of the day. This statement has made the Journal suspect to some historians, who take it simply as the description of an all-day hangover. But extreme fatigue is typical at the onset of severe infections, often the first thing complained of. Feeling tired and off-colour, he spent the day in bed to be rested for the evening. Medius had asked him to dinner, and he went.

It is this second party which brings in question his psychological state. Here is a man with a religious respect for omens. He has had several bad ones, warning him of the gravest danger. He has spent part of the previous day in solemn ceremonies to avert it. He is planning to start on a major expedition within two weeks. He has had as good a grounding in medical science as any layman of his time. He knows he is starting to run up a fever. Yet he gets up, goes off to an informal dinner party of no ceremonial importance, and sits up half the night over the wine. All in all, it seems very odd behaviour.

Though he left late, he left before the end. Late as it was he had a bath, and for the first time felt really ill; he had a bed made up for him in the bath house by the pool, and spent the rest of the night there. In the morning he had to be carried by litter to perform the daily offering at the household altar; but he proceeded as if he had a trifling indisposition which need not impede his plans. The march was still scheduled to start in three days and the fleet to sail in four. In the sweltering heat he took another bath, after which he felt much worse; it probably brought on a rigor. He was now in high fever, but continued to organize the expedition, only postponing its departure by a few days. He began to seek in the grilling river plain the cool and shade he had known in boyhood, having himself ferried across the Euphrates to the “paradise” with its trees, and sleeping at night beside the palace bathing pool. By the ninth day he could scarcely make the offering when he had been carried to the shrine, but was still briefing his officers. Nothing is said of any doctor attending him; he may have lost faith in them since Hephaestion’s death. Had he had one, the man, however blameless, would surely have been named in legend as a party to his murder. The whole account presents an extraordinary picture: stubborn mistreatment of an illness he should by now have known was dangerous; and stubborn refusal to admit the danger into his conscious thought.

Plutarch has a detail here which again casts a shadow on Iollas: “Aristobulus says that when he was lightheaded with fever, he drank wine and thereon grew violently delirious.” This certainly suggests that he had not been regularly drinking it; people with fever usually lose all craving for alcohol and reject it in favour of something more refreshing; a wise provision of nature. If it was offered him when his mind was wandering, no matter by whom, there is a strong suspicion of malice. For a man in his condition it was little short of poison, and may have had a critical effect.

His delirium cannot have lasted long; but his sickness was advancing, and on the tenth day he could deceive himself no longer. He ordered all his chief officers to be summoned before him, and the junior ones to assemble outside the doors; and had himself carried back from the garden to address them. But before he got there, the fatal complication, whose approach he must have felt when he gave the order, had taken hold. He could not make himself heard.

A man with lower powers of resistance would have developed pneumonia much sooner. Now it would have spread from his damaged lung into the scar tissue of his chest wound, and invaded the lung lining as pleurisy. He was probably in great pain. It is evident that though his mind was clear at the end, from this time on he could only manage a whispered word or two.

He was now too ill to be moved from the royal bedchamber. All this time, the soldiers who had seen him carried about had been fairly optimistic; most of them must have had a bout of fever somewhere in Asia. But what the officers had seen could not be kept secret. When on the second day he did not appear, the men began to say, as they had said three years before upon the Indus, that his death was being concealed from them. They mobbed the palace gates and demanded to see him for themselves. They were just in time.

It can only have been on his orders that they were let inside. A door was opened at the far end of the room, so that they could pass through in single file; and thus Alexander held his last parade. As the first man entered, he turned himself towards them, and held himself there till the last man had gone by. Not one of them went without acknowledgment; “he greeted them all, lifting his head though with difficulty, and signing to them with his eyes.”

Ever ready to die in war, he must long have been prepared to die in pain, and resolved it should not diminish him. The exhaustion must have shortened his last hours, but it is unlikely that at this stage he could have recovered. The necessary suffering he accepted in return for what had been essential to him all his life: to be equal to his legend; to be beloved; and to requite it extravagantly, regardless of expense. Whether sustained by pride, by philosophy, by belief in the immortality of his fame or of his soul, he met his end with no less dignity, fortitude and consideration for others than Socrates himself. And he, till he drank the quick painless hemlock, was a healthy man with a long, fulfilled life behind him; Alexander carried it through with a great design in ruins, and in the distress of a mortal sickness.

No pretence was now maintained that he was not near death. Peucestas and six other friends spent the night in prayer for him at the temple of Sarapis, a much-metamorphosed Egyptian Asclepius whose cult Alexander seems to have brought to Babylon, where it was merged in that of some local god. Asclepius’ patients slept in his sanctuary to have healing dreams; Sarapis was consulted by vigil, giving his oracular verdict at dawn. In unselfish concern for the friend whose life he had saved in India, Peucestas was absent from the death chamber, and from the shadowy power struggle already forming.

Alexander is credited with remarking ironically that he foresaw a great contest at his funeral games, but it falls a little too pat; he had never been a wit and had now no breath to spare for it. He took off his royal ring and handed it to Perdiccas, which in itself did no more than appoint a temporary deputy—he did not give up easily—though it was accepted as the appointment of a Regent. But the time came, as it was bound to come, when his generals asked him, “To whom do you leave your kingdom?”

It has been widely assumed that he was being asked to choose a successor from among his chief officers. But by now, if Barsine-Stateira was pregnant, he may have confided a secret of such dynastic importance to high-ranking friends like Perdiccas and Nearchus. If so, he had two unborn children of unknown sex; and, in case they should both be male, was being confronted by Macedonians with the age-old question of the polygamous Macedonian kings.

Arrian gives his answer: “Hoti to kratisto”—to the strongest; words which acquired the force of prophecy during the succession wars. But it can also mean, “To the best.” He was dying; explanations were beyond him; he may have meant that when the children were of age, the Macedonian Assembly should choose between them. Superlative for comparative in colloquial speech was probably used as loosely then as now. That is, if “kratisto” was what he really said.

Normally pronounced, “kratisto” and “Kratero” are not very much alike. But whispered by a man rattling and gasping with pneumonia they could be confused quite easily; especially if it was convenient. Craterus was the man highest in Alexander’s trust. He had already been appointed Regent of Macedon. If he was now meant to take over the Regency of the empire, on behalf of the unborn heirs, it would hardly be welcome news to Perdiccas, present holder of the royal ring. Probably Alexander’s words were barely audible, except to someone leaning over him. There may have been an expedient mistake.

Early next morning, Peucestas and his friends returned from the healing shrine. They had asked the god whether it would help Alexander if he were carried into the sanctuary; but the oracle had replied that it would be better for him where he was.

No doubt the deity was concerned for his professional reputation; but his advice was sound. It allowed Alexander to produce, for the last time, that basic ingredient of all the multiform legends which his death was in process of bringing to birth—his indestructible sense of style. Curtius, for once renouncing rhetoric, gives his parting words. When Perdiccas asked him at what times he wished to have his divine honours paid him, he answered, “When you are happy.”

A dark mist crossed the sky, and a bolt of lightning was seen to fall from heaven into the sea, and with it a great eagle. And the bronze statue of Arimazd in Babylon quivered; and the lightning ascended into heaven, and the eagle went with it, taking with it a radiant star. And when the star disappeared in the sky, Alexander too had shut his eyes.

The legend had begun.