The Nature of Alexander (30 page)

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.