Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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Seeing a chance of favour, natives, generals, envoys and soldiers competed in gifts for the funeral celebrations and with their help the expense eventually totalled more than 10,000 talents. Gold and ivory images of Hephaistion were carved in plenty; the provinces were ordered to quench the Royal Fire, until the ceremony had ended, a remarkable privilege which if Alexander understood its meaning, suggests that Hephaistion had been considered to be his successor and royal deputy, for the Royal Fires were only dowsed when a king died. A fortunate arrival gave profound meaning to the occasion: envoys returned from Siwah with news that Ammon had approved the worship of Hephaistion, if not as a god, at least as a hero. Such honours to the distinguished dead were nothing unusual in Greek tradition, but Alexander added his full enthusiasm to the new yearly cult. Ten thousand sacrificial animals were roasted and sacrificed as a first honour to its hero, and other cities in the empire would doubtless follow suit in the hope of reward. Probably, prominent Macedonians had already been worshipped locally as heroes after their death, just as Harpalus had worshipped his mistress; possibly even Athens now felt obliged, out of tact, to treat Hephaistion as his lover had publicly indicated.

But very properly, the cult had been delayed until approved by an oracle: Alexander, though divine, had lost none of his respect for the gods, especially when the god was Ammon. Through Hephaistion's funeral, Alexander too was to have his last dealings with Eygpt and his Alexandria: since his departure as Pharaoh, the Greek Cleomenes had risen from the rank of treasurer to satrap and had begun to show that same sense of a financial monopoly which later would be developed by the rule of the Ptolemies. In times of famine, he had dealt astutely in corn; as a result, he had amassed some 8,000 talents in Egypt's treasury and laid the foundations of its state economy. To this sharp financier Alexander now wrote a letter, requesting him to build Hephaistion two shrines in Alexandria and spare no expense in their design: Hephaistion's name, it was said, was now to be entered on all contracts between the city's merchants, an honour which was later paralleled under the Ptolemies. In return, reported Ptolemy himself, who was soon to have Cleomenes murdered, 'Clcomenes's past and future misdeeds would be pardoned*. Too much must not be made of this very suspect offer, especially in a letter rephrased and reported by a biased contemporary; the morality also had its precedent in the ancient East. 'I approve,' Herodotus had written, 'of the following custom: in Persia, the king will not kill a man, nor will the nobles punish a servant, for a single accusation. But instead, they think the matter through, and if they find that the man's misdoings are more or greater than his services, only then do they resort to revenge; otherwise, they let him off.' To Alexander, no service was now greater than a willing respect for the dead Hephaistion.

Among the challenging decisions of the past three months, this cardinal point could not be overlooked. For Hephaistion's memory, Alexander was stretching power to its limit. Elsewhere his plans were ambitious and plausible, but the loss of Hephaistion would have to be controlled if they were to be fulfilled. For Alexander had not lost his personal hold. The outlines of the Arabian campaign concerned him deeply and he intended to sail with the fleet in person: departure was scheduled for mid-June, the hottest season in the Persian Gulf. This timing did not invite a second Makran. If the fleet was ever to sail round Arabia and enter the Red Sea, as its explorers had tried but failed, it needed to reach the cast tip of its Aden promontory by early October, when the monsoon winds tack round and blow ships north-west to the Suez Canal. The June departure, therefore, was well advised. But a land-army was also asked to follow as the fleet sailed from Failaka island to Bahrein and Aden. This was alarming. After Makran, it is amazing that troops would ever be detailed to a known sand desert in summer again. The order, whose reception is unknown, is a reminder that the daring explorer in Alexander still meant to triumph over natural hardship.

Such a plan was workable, but it relied on complete trust. The massive festival of the funeral was a dangerous background, and as it came to a head an omen occurred which spoke plainly for the mood behind the scenes. During the ceremonies, Alexander left his throne, some said to drink.

An unknown man, who some believed to be a prisoner, saw the throne empty and the silver-legged sofas vacated by the Companions: passing through the guard of eunuchs, he walked up to the throne and sat on it and began to put on royal dress. But the eunuchs tore their robes and beat their breasts and refused to drag him away, because of some eastern custom. Alexander ordered the man to be tortured, as he feared a plot, but the man would only say he had done it because it had suddenly come into his head. Whereupon, the seers prophesied that this implied even more disaster in store.

This curious incident is hard to interpret. The Babylonians had long celebrated an ancient festival, whereby a slave would dress as a king or master and hold sway for a single day, but this festival belonged in early autumn and cannot be relevant to Alexander's actions in late May. The New Year festival at Babylon is better timed, but then the king was not displaced; he merely went down on hands and knees before the statue of the god Bel. On only one occasion would the king make way for a commoner: when the astrological tables boded badly for his future. Then a substitute would take his place for up to a hundred days and assume the burden of the king's misfortune: if the king died in the meantime, the substitute would become king, even if he was nothing more than the royal gardener. This substitution is last known to have been practised by the Assyrian kingdoms four hundred years earlier, but the Babylonian priesthood may have kept its memory alive and even applied it to Alexander. If the substitute had acted inadvertently, so much the worse, as the seers realized, for he would not have diverted the royal doom which the stars predicted. Perhaps the priests had instructed him, and he had been sent to take the throne because they feared for Alexander's future: so, at least, the eunuchs assumed, bewailing the sight of a royal scapegoat, and perhaps their lament was justified.

Within weeks, eunuchs and horoscopes were to be proved alarmingly right. An uneasy mood was still stirring in the byways of the court, amid its festivals and new ambitions: there was the omen of the liver without lobes, of the diadem lost on the river and now, of the substitute who had mysteriously taken the throne. Perhaps men feared that Alexander's energy could never last, that it was only a cover for a king who had lost his beloved Hephaistion. On the other hand the recent decisions were hardly those of a broken leader: Arabia, Carthage, Sicily, the Caspian, none was as wild an ambition as the first invasion of Asia with few ships, money or men. Richer than any other man alive, Alexander now united his empire in his person alone: 'In Egypt, a god and an autocrat; in Persia, an autocrat but not a god; among Greeks, a god but not a despot, and in Macedonia, neither god nor despot but a quasi-constitutional king.' The broad categories of history are always bloodless, never discerned by those who occupy them, and uneasiness persisted. Hephaistion's funeral had been huge. The plans for Arabia were hugcr. There was a rumour that Babylon would become the empire's centre, superbly placed for the sea route eastwards of which the troops had the grimmest memories. Above all, there were the rumours about Alexander himself. From Phaselis to Samarkand, on almost every occasion on which he is now seen at leisure by historians, he is flushed with wine of an evening. There are reports that Babylon had brought this drinking to nightly excess, scarcely slept off on the following day. Against the plans for Arabia, these reports became crucial. Alexander had been wounded in nine different places in the past twelve years, he was bereaved of his lover, and now the prophets had predicted a doom which his courtiers could not avert. The interesting question was the one which the stars could not answer: whether, at last, they had acted to put him out of the way.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

After all his many mysteries, it would be improper if Alexander had died straightforwardly. Never simple, he did nothing of the sort. It was not that his death was forgettable. Quite the contrary: its memory was too dangerous to be freely discussed, and at first, his officers discouraged publication of the details; they knew how they stood to lose, if only from slander built on the facts. But then their secrecy itself bred rumours and soon they found they were quarrelling among themselves. Alexander's death became involved in their quarrels, and they used it as a crime to blame on each other without respect for the truth. The last days in Babylon tell as much of the Successors as of Alexander, a bias which does not bode well for the one important problem: what, at the age of thirty-two, caused Alexander to die?

Any answer must begin on 29 May. Amid omens and dark prophecies, Alexander had tried to avert bad fortune, if not by a substitute king, at least by a series of sacrifices; in apparently generous mood, he turned to amusements and festivities, setting aside Hephaistion's funeral and encouraging the court to the future. Nearchus was crowned as admiral of the campaign against Arabia, and preparations were to go ahead for the voyage to begin on 4 June. Leaving the crowd who had gathered to pay honour, he dined, drank far into the night and attended a late party given by Medius, a Companion from Thessaly: some said Medius had happened to waylay him; others, more cunningly, said that the party had long been arranged, as the day was the Thessalian festival in honour of the death of Heracles and Medius remained true to his home traditions. All are agreed that the drinking which followed was prolonged, but its pattern was vigorously disputed; on it, turns the truth of Alexander's death.

The earliest description which can be dated with any certainty is terse and unfriendly. Alexander, in the course of Medius's dinner. demanded a three-quart cup of wine and pledged a toast to Proteas; in reply, Proteas took the cup, hymned the King fulsomely and drained the contents amid general applause. A little later, Proteas pledged a toast from the same cup to Alexander. Alexander took it, drank heartily, but could not stand the strain.

He fell back onto his cushion, where he 'ropped the cup from his hands. As a result of this he fell sick and during his sickness, he died.

His death occurred 'because of Dionysus's anger against him for besieging his native city of Thebes'. There was irony in this absurd explanation. Dionysus's anger had formerly been invoked to excuse the drunken murder of Cleitus: Proteas who helped drink Alexander to death was Cleitus's nephew.

While it is not impossible that Alexander died in part of drink it is improbable that this flippant account is true; its author, once more, was Ephippus, nothing more than a scurrilous spreader of gossip. Others saw the debauch differently. 'At the final dinner with Medius,' wrote an unknown author, later called Nicobule, 'Alexander recited an extract from Euripides's play Andromeda , which he had memorized; afterwards, he drank the health of all twenty guests in unmixed wine. They each pledged him to an equal amount, and when he left the party, it was not long afterwards that he began to go into a decline.' After toasting twenty guests, that is not surprising. At once, the question arises: apart from Medius the host, who were the other nineteen?

It is here that the story quickens and the two most curious documents in Alexander's career come into play. The first is a pamphlet, not to be found in any history. It is embedded in the largely fictitious Alexander Romance , a work of notorious imagination, most of which was compiled some five hundred years after Alexander's death. It survives in four varying texts, three of which end with a detailed account of Alexander's death. Their outline and personal information demonstrably belong within ten years of the event; it is as if new evidence on the death of Stalin were only to be found in a posthumous book of Russian nursery tales. Each text has been altered or expanded by a later hand and their manuscripts are often corrupt, but their outline goes back to the original pamphlet and deserves to be taken seriously. It gives what contemporaries, as it admits, had been afraid to publish: a complete list of the twenty guests at Medius's dinner and an explanation of their motives.

The twenty names are convincingly chosen, among them Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Eumenes the royal secretary, Philip the royal doctor, Philip the Greek engineer, Nearchus the admiral and Peucestas the persophile. All twenty men are known independently to have had reason to be at Babylon and most of them may have been at Medius's dinner. Fourteen of them, moreover, are said to have had the strongest possible reason for attending. That night, there was a devious plot to poison the king. They knew about it and they approved.

The plot itself is said to have been planned in Europe months before, where it centred on Antipatcr's family. As the pamphlet points out, motives for Antipater are not hard to imagine: the endless abuse of the reigning queen Olympias, the slow but menacing approach of Craterus and the veterans, the orders for his summons to Asia, the execution of old friends like Parmenion or relations like Alexander the Lyncestian, all these grievances might have urged him to self-defence. Two of his sons were already at Babylon and he had recently sent Cassander, the third and most forceful, to join them. He was equipped, said the pamphlet, with a small iron casket of poison, encased in the hoof of a mule, the only material which was strong enough to contain it. Many later believed that this poison was ice-cold water from the deadly river Styx, which flowed through the mountains of Arcadia before going down to the Underworld; but Arcadia was far from Antipater, and the modem Mavroneri falls, site of the ancient Styx, belie the ancients' belief in the power of its hellish water.

Cassander's arrival at Babylon in the last months of Alexander's life is a historical fact: it is true, too, that seven years later, he would show himself to be an implacable opponent of the king's memory and even murder Olympias, while gossip maintained that he could not look on Alexander's statue without feeling faint and uneasy. Once there, the pamphlet continued, he was to hand the poison to his brother Iollas and make ready his escape, as Iollas was butler to the king and could mix the poison into the royal wine without being noticed: all he needed was the occasion, none more convenient than Medius's banquet, as Medius, said the pamphlet, was in love with him. If the party was in honour of Heracles's death, there would be no risk of a change in Alexander's drinking habits. 'A cup of Heracles' was traditionally circulated and Alexander, rival and descendant of Heracles, was sure to be the first to drink from it. The poison's entry seemed assured.

The pamphlet mentions more accomplices than Medius and the butler. Of the twenty guests, only six are said to have been innocent: Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Eumenes and three others. The remaining fourteen, Nearchus and Philip the doctor included, were to keep up a suitable conversation while their Alexander drank doctored wine. They had all sworn oaths of secrecy and they hoped to profit personally from a change of king.

On the night of the banquet, said the pamphlet, all went as planned. Alexander drank from his cup and 'all of a sudden, he shouted with pain as if struck through the liver with an arrow'. After a few minutes, he could bear it no longer. He told the guests to continue drinking and he left for his bedroom, a doomed man. Amid all tins sensational detail only one fact is certain: those who had been present at the banquet did not wish their names to be published. They may have been guilty; they may only have feared the inevitable slander. The sequel alone can help to decide.

If Alexander had indeed been poisoned, the dose must have been enough to kill him beyond any doubt. There was no point in giving him half or doubtful measures, and even without cyanide the ancient world had enough herbal knowledge to produce an infallible poison. Strychnine, for instance, had long been extracted from nux vomica, known to Aristotle's school, and it would certainly have killed a young Macedonian. But its effects are more or less instantaneous, and here the timing of Alexander's death becomes important; fortunately, its published date is the one well-attested fact in the whole affair. From a contemporary Babylonian calendar, Alexander is known to have died on 10 June, whereas Medius's banquet, according to its only precise date, took place on 29 May; the king, therefore, had been reported ill for more than ten days, and whatever killed him, it cannot have been strychnine or any other instant poison. There are other possibilities, more remote, and there are confusions in ancient medicine which may be relevant, but in the absence of a ready poison, the alternative document deserves to be considered. It is nothing less than Alexander's Royal Diaries.

Round these Diaries, believed in antiquity to have been published by Eumenes the royal secretary and a certain Diodotus, there hangs an air of insoluble mystery. Quite suddenly, in the last days of the reign, the Diaries are quoted by later secondary sources for a day-by-day account of Alexander's business; to the frustration of historians, for whom only three long quotations now survive, they show him hunting birds and foxes, banqueting or playing dice, and all these activities seem to concentrate on his final month in Babylon. So, perhaps, did the whole work, but those who could read it in its entirety had noted how it kept referring to the king's recurrent drinking parties, even to his all-day sleeping in order to recover from a nocturnal debauch. This frankness is very remarkable. Alexander's drinking habits rapidly became a delicate subject, partly because of gossip, partly because the murderer of Cleitus had not always embraced sobriety: twenty-five years or so later, Aristobulus would plead, against the facts, that 'Alexander only sat long over his wine for the sake of conversation', like a portly country gentleman. And yet here, allegedly, was Eumenes the former secretary publishing a detailed diary of the king's continual carousing; our three brief extracts describe five debauches in the last month, each of which took thirty-six hours to sleep off before Alexander could begin to hunt, drink and dice again. The purpose of this strange publication can only be deduced from its contents.

These contents are insistent to the point of tedium. The month of the king's death began, it said, with a string of drinking-parties, one with Eumenes, another with Perdiccas, another at the 'house of Bagoas', not the eunuch but the former Vizier, whose country seat near Babylon was famous for rare date-palms and agreed to be royal property. It was eight years since Alexander had bestowed it on Parmenion as a reward. On each occasion Alexander spent the whole of the next day asleep, recovering his strength. On 29 May, after this series of nightly debauches, Alexander dined very late with his friends, drank still later with Medius, left the room unharmed, bathed, slept and returned the following day to 'drink once more far into the night'. This time, he left for the bath, ate a little but fell asleep in the bathroom, 'because he was already beginning to feel feverish'. Medius's party, so far from proving fatal, was followed by a repeat on the very next day and only then did Alexander sicken, not after a cup of poison, but after a bath, a sleep and a fever.

It is very hard not to sense a deliberate bias in the tone of such a Diary. Alexander, it seems to stress, did nothing unusual by drinking hard at Medius's banquet, for he had been drinking hard throughout the preceding month. Moreover, drink did not kill him, but an incidental sickness. The accounts of the following days are equally silent about poison. The next day, Alexander was carried out on a stretcher to sacrifice to his usual gods, Ammon no doubt among them, and he then lay in his bedroom instructing his officers in detail about the expedition to Arabia which he still intended to begin in four days' time. He was later carried by boat to the park on the far side of the Euphrates, probably the summer palace of Nebuchadnezzar in the cooler and northerly city-quarter; there, he continued to sacrifice, bath, talk to the officers and play dice with Medius, though his fever lasted all night. But the next day he took a marked mm for the worse and could not even manage to sacrifice. A move to the 'palace near the swimming-pool' did not improve him, though for the next two days, the Diaries still insist that he continued to instruct the officers about the voyage. At last, even the officers were ordered to wait outside in the courtyard and on 7 June a very sick king indeed was moved back by boat to the main palace where his fever had first broken out. When his officers came to see him he could no longer speak; on 8 and 9 June it was the same, and on the evening of the 9th, there occurred the only incident on which the Diaries and the pamphlet agreed: the common troopers rioted.

For the past ten days they had only seen the royal barge floating up and down the Euphrates. Their officers had told them that Alexander was ill but alive, and yet as the days passed without him, they were more and more inclined to disbelieve. They thought they were being deceived by the Bodyguards, so they gathered outside the palace doors and started to browbeat the officers of the watch. It was now two days since these lesser officers had last seen Alexander, and then only as a speechless invalid; they too might suspect a conspiracy of silence by their seniors, and so they let the troopers in. 'One by one, they all filed past Alexander's bed, dressed in their military tunics; he could no longer speak, but he made a sign to each of them, lifting his head with the greatest difficulty and gesturing to them with his eyes.' Quietly, they filed out through the far door. The next day, towards evening, it was announced, said the Diaries, that Alexander had died.

Except for the men's parade, which could hardly be denied, the Royal Diaries bear no resemblance to the pamphlet in their description of the days after Medius's banquet. In the pamphlet, there are no conversations with the officers, no games of dice with Medius and no sailing to and fro on the Euphrates: instead, there are scenes with Roxane and with Perdiccas. After his poisoning, said the pamphlet, Alexander had felt restless and unable to bear his friends and doctors: he wanted to vomit and, innocently, he asked the culprit Iollas to tickle his throat with a feather, which Iollas as a true son of Antipater had already coated in more poison. Alexander then sent his friends away, except for Perdiccas whom he designated his Successor; he passed a restless evening and at nightfall he set out on a memorable last exertion.

There was a door in the palace which led to the river Euphrates; this Alexander had ordered to be opened and left without its usual guard. When all his friends had departed and the hour of midnight was come, he rose from his bed, snuffed out the candle and crawled through the door on all fours, because he was too weak to walk. Gasping as he went, he made for the river, meaning to throw himself into it and disappear on its current. But when he drew near, he looked round and saw his wife Roxane running towards him.

She had found his room empty and guessed that he was gone to a farewell worthy of his courage; by following the sound of his groans, she had tracked him down to the river bank where she embraced him and begged him, through her tears, to desist. Complaining that she had impaired his glory, Alexander allowed himself to be led by his wife back to bed.

Whether or not this was true, it was relevant and influential. As the pamphlet realized, Alexander was believed to be a god, and gods do not do themselves credit by dying in public; in Rome, when Caesar died, his body remained for inspection, but it was not the least important of his claims to divinity that a comet soon appeared in the sky and allowed men to focus their belief in his immortal soul on this sudden new home for it Just as Caesar had gone to heaven, so Alexander would go to the water: other new divinities were later thought to have done likewise, and such was the impact of Alexander's 'departure' that six hundred years later, Christian bishops could still be unnerved by suggestions that the Emperor Julian the Apostate had not really died but had disappeared like Alexander into the waters of the Tigris, whence he might one day resume his life's work of persecution.

Restored to bed, said the pamphlet, Alexander wrote his will and lingered for another nine days with the help of Roxane's drugs and poultices: eventually, having taken farewell of his soldiers among copious tears, he gave his ring to Perdiccas in the last hours and died on receipt of a third dose of poison: 'In the throes of death, he put Roxane's hand in Pcrdiccas's and commended him to her with a final nod: then, as his strength failed, Roxane closed his eyes and kissed his mouth to catch his departing soul.' So, in a manner fit for a Homeric hero, Alexander's soul left his body 'and the king left life to go to the gods'.

Conspicuously, therefore, the pamphlet and the Royal Diaries dispute both the cause and the course of Alexander's illness. Where they disagree, the authoritative name of Eumenes and the coherent detail of the Diaries have often seemed to carry more weight, and so from the Diaries alone the history of Alexander's last days is usually written. And yet neither the Diaries nor Eumenes and his helper Diodotus are authorities beyond reproach. The Diaries have certainly been altered since Eumenes's lifetime; on the night of Alexander's death, a group of his friends, they say, consulted the god Serapis in his Babylonian temple as to the wisest course of treatment. Serapis is not considered to have existed at the time, for he seems to have been created as a Greco-Egyptian god by Ptolemy some twenty-five years later. If Serapis had intruded into the Diaries, so perhaps has much else.

It is not convincing to dismiss all the Diaries as a later forgery by one of the several unknown writers credited with works of a similar title. Their detail is too life-like, even down to the geography of Babylon which does not conflict with the city's probable street plan in the year of Alexander's death. The falsity, rather, is one of tone. If the Diaries were issued by Eumenes, the former royal secretary, they must have been supported by Perdiccas, his master after Alexander's death; they both respected Alexander's memory as heirs to his empire and would never have issued such a compromising account of his final month of debauchery unless there had been some point in it. The Diaries seem pointless, except as an answer to gossip that the officers had poisoned Alexander; even here they are strangely irrelevant. Having dwelt in detail on a month of heavy drinking they insist he only died of a fever; men concerned to uphold Alexander's name and rebut the charge of poisoning need only have chronicled the course of this serious illness, perhaps with a bulletin from the royal doctors. The drinking could be explained away as a consequence of the sick man's thirst, exactly the line which was followed forty years later by the ex-officer Aristobulus, defending his master's sobriety. The Diaries' month of debauchery suits neither Eumenes's attitude to Alexander nor the case against poison which he was presumably intending to plead.

There remains, however, the mysterious co-author Diodotus. He is said to have come from Erythrae, a Greek city in Asia Minor; only one Diodotus is known in the lives of Philip and Alexander, and he was remarkably appropriate. An able and educated Greek, he had served Greek dynasts in Asia Minor, whence he was recommended as an aide to Anti-pater; the Macedonians' closest Asian connection was the ruler of Erythrae, so it is very possible that this Diodotus first came to their notice through his home tyrant. It is a very attractive guess that he became a staff secretary, a Eumenes to the deputy Antipater. If so, his authorship of the Diaries falls into place. They were issued as if through the two Greek secretaries of Perdiccas and Antipatcr and would seem to belong within two years of Alexander's death. After that, Eumenes was busied away from court and Antipater and Perdiccas took to fighting each other. The Diaries, then, would seem to be a very early work. There are hints, but no proof, that rumours of poisoning reached Greece very quickly, and the Diaries may have been an immediate refutation.

Strong objections, however, tell against this. The Diaries' tone and contents are not those of an officer's self-defence; there is also the bias of the pamphlet. This pamphlet was obviously conceived by supporters of Pcrdiccas after they turned against Antipater; it stresses Perdiccas as Alexander's heir, even as his chosen husband for Roxane, and denounces Antipater's family as Alexander's poisoners. Perdiccas cannot, therefore, have recently published Diaries through his secretary which flatly disproved the subsequent slanders of his officers' pamphlet; the one would have made the other too unconvincing to be worthwhile. The Diaries, it seems, did not appear in his lifetime, a likelihood which is supported by a historian writing around 312 and giving alternative accounts which he had read of Alexander's death. He refers disbelievingly to the story of Antipater and the poison, which he would have read in the Perdiccan pamphlet, but he shows no knowledge, in so far as his history can be traced, of any of the Diaries' details. If the Diaries had already been published it would hardly have been possible to ignore their massive weight, among the alternative stories.