Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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The Diaries were only necessary to refute the rumours of poison, so they must be tied to a man whom these rumours are known to have affected. If they do not belong to Antipater, slandered by Perdiccas, they might concern his son Cassander, who was fiercely accused of murder by Olympias seven years after Alexander's death; another nine years after that, prominent members of Aristotle's school, also associates of Cassander, were attacked as Alexander's poisoners by his veteran officer Antigonus the One-eyed, then ruler of Asia. The two lines meet in Cassander, the favourite candidate as Alexander's poisoner. Perhaps he first circulated the Diaries as his answer; he could claim to have found them among Diodotus's papers, especially if Diodotus had been his father's aide. Alone of the Successors, Cassander both opposed Alexander's memory and needed to rebut the charge of his murder; he would be happy to cast Alexander's final month as a long debauch, while maintaining that he died of fever, not of something he had drunk. His friends from Aristotle's circle had a similar interest. Many disliked Alexander, not least for murdering their fellow-philosopher Callisthenes, and although there was no truth in Antigonus's answering slander that Aristotle poisoned his royal pupil, its memory lived on for five hundred years and was even held against the Aristotelian school by the Roman emperor Caracalla. The philosophers too had an interest in an alternative account.

Among these Aristotelians none is more interesting than Cassander's associate Demetrius, who fled Athens under the slander from Antigonus that Aristotle had mixed the fateful poison. Demetrius was a prolific author; he fled to Egypt and wrote the earliest book on the new god Serapis, detailing the many cures which the god had brought about through dreams. Serapis's mention in the Diaries has always seemed an awkward intrusion; a man like Demetrius, acutely concerned with the detail of Alexander's last days, might have inserted the name of the new healing god whom he championed so fervently in place of an unfamiliar Babylonian deity. Moreover, three of the four officers who are said to have consulted Serapis about the best treatment for Alexander are famous victims or enemies of Antigonus, who encouraged the slander of poisoning against Demetrius and his master Aristotle; Cassander, too, had joined an alliance against Antigonus to defend or avenge these three high officers' maltreatment. Other details, the 'house of Bagoas', for instance, were known independently to Aristotelians in Cassandcr's circle. To remove the slander against themselves and Cassander, it is very possible that they published or elaborated Diaries in the name of the regents' secretaries. The Diaries' tone, dating and contents would fit their purpose neatly.

If the pamphlet began as Perdiccan propaganda and the Diaries were perhaps worked over by Cassander and his circle, the various causes of Alexander's death can only be judged on their merits, not on their authorities. Drink can be dismissed as the main cause, just as the ex-officer Aristobulus knew that it should; the Diaries are the only hint that Alexander drank more heavily before his death, and they were probably written by men who loathed him. It is probably irrelevant that one of his personal doctors wrote as an expert on drunkenness, though it is interesting that he believed in protecting against poison by the futile prescription of a regular diet of radishes. Fever seems far more plausible than drink. Alexander had been boating on the Babylonian canals where malaria had long been endemic and although his sudden decline after a week's sickness is not a common malarial pattern, the effects of his chest wound may have made themselves felt. He was, said Ephippus, 'melancholic'; it is an attractive, but mistaken, theory that the ancients' disease of melancholia was identical with malaria, whose symptoms it often shared, and Ephippus anyway meant by the word 'hot tempered'. This, rather, suggests poison, of a king who was 'unbearable and murderous .

However, there is no evidence that the officers conspired among themselves or with Antipater before Alexander's death. True, the hot and demanding march to Arabia was only a week away; the pamphlet also refers, tantalizingly, to names of the guests at Medius's party 'whom Onesicritus the royal helmsman refused to cite for fear of their revenge'. Onesicritus published his book within two years of the event, but the pamphlet's words do not entail that he openly mentioned poison. He may well have begun the stranger story, repeated later by authors who used him, that Alexander drank from the cup of Heracles, cried as if struck by an arrow and then collapsed. Others believed this without even accepting the poisoning rumour; so too may Onesicritus, but he may not have dared to mention poison any more than the guests, and thus only dared to record that something dramatic happened at the party. He was an officer and contemporary, but a most unreliable witness; he is the one support for the possibility of poison and naturally, his word is not enough.

Conspirators apart, the poison itself is technically implausible. In an age which lacked any clear concept of disease or of the dangers of bad food and water, it was understandable that sudden illness should be blamed so often on slow-acting poison, a cause which was only identified after a chain of mysterious effects had been seen to their fatal conclusion. But unless slow poisons are sophisticated they cannot be guaranteed to be lethal: an acid, for example, could have caused Alexander to 'cry aloud as if struck by an arrow' and then worked slowly inside him until it eventually punctured his stomach or burnt his vocal chords to stop him speaking, but it is very doubtful whether ancient medicine was acquainted with an acid of the necessary powers. The poisons of herbalists were swift and irremediable, whether hemlocks, hellebores or belladonnas, and except as an explanation of mysterious illness, a slow poison met no need in the poison-chests of ancient Greece. If Alexander had been poisoned, he should surely have been given a massive dose which was absolutely certain to kill him at once. And yet Diaries, pamphlets and official calendars insist that twelve days elapsed between Medius's fateful banquet and the death of the king.

It is hardly possible to escape this. The Diaries' detailed narrative is not quite explicit that for the last five days of his life Alexander gave certain proof of being alive; however, on 9 June the troops processed past his bed and saw, allegedly a slight movement of his head and eyes while the king 'made a sign to them', in a Greek word which most naturally means a gesture of the right hand. He said nothing; he lay motionless in bed; but this sign implies he was still alive and that no poison had been given to him as long beforehand as 29 May. There have been too many allegations of poisoning in history before the nineteenth century for Alexander's to survive this damaging contradiction in the case.

Those who are accustomed to the deaths of powerful men will not be surprised that Alexander's is a mystery which is hard to solve beyond all dispute. History here has often been repeated, but of the attendant mood and circumstances, there is more to be usefully said: Alexander had died, a man 'generally agreed to be of a greater nature than is given to a mortal'} his divine dress would never be worn in entirety again, and watchers, though spared a march to Arabia, were left frightened and bewildered in a land very far from home. Outside the royal bedroom, nobody was sure what had happened; when the end was announced on 10 June, an ominous darkness fell on the battlements and broad streets of Babylon. Men strayed through the city, not daring to kindle a light: it was not that their invincible god had died, but he had, so they said, 'departed from life among men' and himself a sun-like deity, he had robbed them of light as his soul ascended to a home among the stars. His soul was immortal, but his body lay exposed in the desolate halls of Nebuchadnezzar's palace, and while the common soldiers fretted for their future, officers were already rumouring their divine king's last words. 'When they asked him to whom he had left his kingdom, he replied "to the strongest". He added that he foresaw that his prominent friends would stage a vast funeral contest in his honour. Whether through fever or poison, Alexander had died unable to speak, so that all such remarks can only be treated as legends. But he was watching, his men believed, from the heavens, and within a week, the second of his two alleged last sayings was already proving more true than the first. The funeral contest had begun, but many years would pass before the strongest could be seen to have emerged.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Men believed that Alexander had ascended to heaven, but for the next twelve years it must have seemed equally likely that all who had helped him were under a curse. The situation at Babylon was proof of the price that a king must pay for killing all rivals at his accession, a policy which strengthens the throne briefly, then delivers it into the hands of its barons. When Alexander died, Roxane was pregnant and her baby was not due for at least six weeks; it might anyway prove to be a girl. Alexander had also left a bastard son Heracles by his first Persian mistress Barsine, but the three-year-old boy had been ignored and no Macedonian took him seriously. Officers as prominent as Perdiccas, Leonnatus or the elderly Polyperchon claimed royal blood through their local dynasties in highland Macedonia; their claims were remote, had not Philip's bastard son Arrhidacus been the only male alive in Alexander's royal family, an adult but also a half-wit. A choice had to be made, and as Alexander had bequeathed his ring to his Vizier Perdiccas, his was the first decision; disdaining the idiot Maccedonian, he encouraged the Bodyguards and cavalry to favour Roxane's unborn child. But the Foot Companions were roused by their brigadier Meleagcr to call for Arrhidaeus, a face they knew and for all his deficiencies, not of Oriental blood. The common man's hatred of Alexander's Oriental policy had not disappeared with his death. Meleager, too, had once complained of undue honours bestowed on conquered Indians.

The result was a quarrel which surprised even the officers. Perdiccas and Ptolemy fled with their friends to the chamber where Alexander was lying in state, only to find that the door was smashed in by Meleager's infantry who started to pelt them with spears; they were stopped, just, and Perdiccas withdrew with his cavalry to the fields outside Babylon where he began an insidious revenge. All food was blocked from reaching the city until Meleager and the infantry were starved into an agreement that Arrhidaeus should share the kingship if Roxane bore a son and that infant and half-wit should be guarded by Perdiccas and Meleager in partnership. According to custom, the army was then purified from the taint of Alexander's death by marching between the two halves of a disembowelled dog; when everyone was off their guard, Perdiccas had thirty of Meleager's faction seized and thrown to the elephants for execution. Meleager took his own life, seeing his cause was hopeless. All too plainly, order had broken down, although Alexander had only been dead for a week. This was indeed the 'age of paradox', for on the news of his death, the Greeks were roused to rebellion by Athens and her general Leosthenes, whereas the Persians shaved their heads and lamented the passing of a fair-minded king; Sisygambis, mother of Darius, fasted to death after only five days, mourning the man whose chivalry she had respected ever since her capture at Issus. It was the most telling tribute to Alexander's courteous way with women, and with the camp in disorder she could not be blamed for her gloomy view of the future.

Within a year the turbulence of Macedonia's baronry had burst over Asia and the Mediterranean. For many the empire was a unity, and should remain so; for a few, there were kingdoms to be carved out, whether in Egypt where Ptolemy first seized a satrapy and made it independent or in Maccedonia where Antipater's death raised hopes of a separate realm. For the next twenty years, separatism grew to overpower unity, until the world had been split into four: in Egypt, Ptolemy; in Asia, Seleucus, once leader of Alexander's Shield Bearers; in Thrace, Lysimachus, a former Bodyguard, and in Macedonia whichever king could raise and hold support. They were years of war and murder on the grand scale, and they swept men along with them; six years after Alexander's death, an army from the upper satrapies met an army from western Asia in the wild mountains of inner Media, perhaps near modem Kangavar, and began their massive battle in mid morning. When each side had routed one of the other's wings, night was already falling and they had strayed three miles from the battlefield. They rallied and by common consent drew up their lines again, elephants and all, to continue their fight by the light of the moon. Only at midnight did they stop to bury their dead; throughout there were Macedonian units slaughtering each other on either side.

The spell of disaster began at once among Alexander's associates. In Babylon Roxane sent for his second wife, now called Stateira, Darius's daughter, and poisoned her, with Perdiccas's approval. Roxane's baby turned out to be a son, Alexander IV, who was given Perdiccas as a guardian; within three years Perdiccas had been stabbed by his guards after asking them to cross the Nile against its crocodiles and sandbeds. Craterus, loved by the troops as a true Macedonian, was trampled to death in the same month, his horse having tripped in battle; his troops were conquered by Eumenes the secretary, who knifed a commander of the Shield Bearers in the course of victory. Already Ptolemy had murdered the financier Cleomenes and seized Egypt; he went on to murder Perdiccas's relations, various kings of Cyprus and Syria's satrap Laomedon, one of Alexander's oldest friends. Anaxarchus the contented refused to flatter a Cypriot king, was killed for his obstinacy and had his tongue pounded in a pestle and mortar; Peucestas was removed from Persia to the fury of the Persians who loved him; Porus was killed by a Thracian who coveted his elephants; the original Shield Bearers returned to the Asian battlefields at the age of sixty and more and fought with decisive ferocity, until one of their generals was thrown into a pit and burnt alive. The rest of the unit were dismissed to the satrap at Kandahar who was ordered to use them in twos and threes on particularly dangerous missions to be sure that they never combined and returned. Thais, meanwhile, saw her children prosper and her Ptolemy take political wives; Pyrrho the philosopher, who had accompanied Alexander, returned to Greece and founded the school of the sceptics who professed to know nothing for certain. Nobody referred to Bagoas again.

In Greece, the pattern was hardly brighter. Leosthenes of Athens died in battle and his rebellion collapsed; Demosthenes, in exile, took poison; Aristotle was driven from Athens because of his Macedonian past and ended his life in his mother's house on the island of Euboea, saying that he grew fonder of the myths in his loneliness; when Antipater died of senility, Olympias promptly clashed with his son Cassander. With the help of her Thracians she killed king Arrhidaeus and a hundred of Cassander's friends and family; to Eurydice, great niece of Philip, she sent hemlock, a noose and a sword and told her to choose; Eurydice hanged herself by her girdle, whereupon Cassander retorted. He besieged Olympias in the coast town of Pydna and reduced her to feeding her elephants on sawdust; she ate those that died, along with the corpses of her maids. After nine months she surrendered and went to a proud death; Cassander killed off her family and turned against Roxane who was visiting Greece with her son; they were murdered by his henchmen twelve months after their imprisonment. Most ruthless of Antipater's children, Cassander disgraced a brother and sister who had nothing to do with him; his brother founded a drop-out community on Mount Athos and his sister alone stood out in these savage times, defending the innocent and helping penniless couples to get married at her own expense.

While the world was ripped apart by feuding and ambition, Alexander was not allowed to rest in peace. At Babylon, Egyptians embalmed him for posterity and while his officers wondered who would befriend them, they put it about that his dying wish had been to be buried at Siwah, conveniently distant from all their rivals. Meanwhile, his last plans were

produced from his official papers and put to the troops: Hephaistion's pyre was to be completed regardless of cost; a thousand warships, larger than triremes, were to be built in the Levant for a campaign against Carthage, along north Africa, up to the Straits of Gibraltar, back down the coast of Spain and so to Sicily; roads and docks were to be distributed along the north African coast; six temples were detailed for Greek and Macedonian religious centres at huge expense; the largest possible temple was to be set at Troy and Philip should have a tomb equal to the biggest Egyptian pyramid; last, but not least, 'cities should be merged and slaves and manpower should be exchanged between Asia and Europe, Europe and Asia in order to bring the greatest two continents to common concord and family friendship by mixed marriages and the ties of kith and kin.'

None of these plans is unlikely in spirit or outline. A harbour for a thousand ships had already been ordered at Babylon and after Arabia, the conquest of Carthage and the West was surely a reasonable plan, modest even, for a young man with time and money on his side and a record of victory which stretched as far as the Punjab. The opposition was not strong, and such was Carthage's low ebb that she had been raided and occupied by Sicilian adventurers within twelve years of his death. As for the buildings, if Alexander could afford anything he wanted, then six big temples and a gigantic one at Troy were intelligible ambitions, besides bringing welcome business to the workmen and citizenry of his chosen sites; a pyramid to Philip was not an inept idea for a son who may have been booed by his veterans for preferring his 'father' Zeus Ammon ever since his visit to the land of the Pharaohs. The merging of Europe and Asia is the plan which catches the attention; 'common concord' was a political catchphrase of the time, and therefore empty, but the plan of mixed marriage and forcible transfer of peoples befitted the man who had ordered the Levant to be drained of settlers for his new towns on the Persian Gulf, who had approved the oriental wives of his soldiers and who had forced Iranian brides on his Companions. It was a memorable plan, but an alarming one; its announcement, however, was not above suspicion.

When the last plans were read to the soldiery, the officers had reason for wanting their cancellation. In the west, Antipater's intentions were not certain, and Craterus had already reached the Asian coast with Alexander's orders and the 10,000 veterans he was leading home; there was no reason yet to mistrust his ambitions, but he did hold the balance between Asia and Macedon if their very different courts could not cooperate. Meanwhile, it was a time of consolidation, until Roxane's baby arrived and the guardianship could be seen to work; rivals, however, might claim that Alexander had wished it otherwise. Craterus or Antipater were the danger, for they might publicize papers which Alexander had left them; it suited their fellow officers that all such documents should be aired first in Babylon and agreed to be impractical before anyone tried to invoke their authority. The plans were read by Perdiccas, friend and patron of Eumenes the royal secretary; what Eumenes may have done to the Diaries of Alexander's last days he may also have done to the plans, inflating their scale to ensure that the troops would reject their excesses. The 240-foot high pyre for Hephaistion, the cost of the temples and the size of Philip's pyramid are not unthinkable extravagances, nor are they proof that Alexander had lost all sense of the possible, for Pharaohs had built pyramids before him and colossal architecture was nothing new for kings who lived in Babylon or Susa. But in their political context, they perhaps owe more to Perdiccas's invention than to Alexander's wishes; the man who read them out did not intend to hear them approved, and 'mass transfers and marriages between Asia and Europe' were a powerful threat to troops who had just refused a son of Roxane as their sole Iranian heir. Possibly, Perdiccas made up the suggestion: 'They realized, despite their deep past respect for Alexander that these plans were excessive, and so they decided that none should be carried out.' But the plans had had to seem plausible to their announcers and audience; western conquest, honour for the Greek gods, a tribute to Philip that was perhaps too insistent to be sincere, and above all, the dreaded union and city-settlement of Asia and Europe on a huger scale than ever before, these were what friends and soldiers believed to have preoccupied their king at the end of his life. There is no surer evidence of how Alexander was eventually seen by his men than the spirit, if not the detail, of these final plans.

Men who turned his plans to their purpose could also make play with his remains. Possession of Alexander's corpse was a unique symbol of status, and until the west and Antipater seemed certain, no officer at Babylon was likely to let it go from Asia; there was talk of a Siwah burial to keep the soldiery quiet, and for two years, workmen were busied with elaborate plans for the funeral chariot. Meanwhile the situation in Macedonia was tested and found to be friendly, so much so that the corpse could at last be sent home. It was to lie among spices in a golden coffin with a golden lid, covered with purple embroidery on which rested Alexander's armour and famous Trojan shield; above it, a pillared canopy rose 36 feet high to a broad vault of gold and jewels, from which hung a curtain with rings and tassels and bells of warning; the cornice was carved with goats and stags and at each corner of the vault there were golden figures of Victory, the theme which Alexander had stressed from Athens across Asia and into the Punjab. Paintings were attached to mesh-netting down either side of the vault, Alexander with his sceptre and his Asian and Macedonian bodyguards, Alexander and his elephants, his cavalry, his warships; gold lions guarded the coffin and a purple banner embroidered with an olive wreath was spread above the canopy's roof There were precedents for such a chariot, not least in Asia where it recalled the ritual chariot of the god Mithras, a divine nuance which was perhaps intended for Alexander's Persian admirers; the chariot was built in Persian style and its decoration of griffins, lions and a canopy recalled the throne ornament of the Persian kings. Sixty-four selected mules drew four separate yokes in Persian fashion; the ornate wheels and axles had been sprung against potholes, while engineers and roadmenders were to escort them on their way. When the whole was ready, Perdiccas its guardian was fighting the natives of Cappadocia, the one gap in Alexander's western empire; his back was turned, and Egypt's new satrap Ptolemy befriended the cortege's officer-in-command. Macedonia was not consulted; the chariot set out in secret for Egypt, where Ptolemy came to meet the spoils which would justify his independence. He had stolen a march on rivals who had talked too blandly of Siwah, and instead of sending the coffin into the desert, he displayed it first in Memphis, then finally in Alexandria, where it was still on show to the young Augustus when he visited Egypt three hundred years later. It will never be seen again. Despite fitful rumours, modem Alexandria has not revealed the site of its founder's remains; probably his corpse was last visited by Caracalla and was destroyed in the city riots of the late third century a.d.

Servant in death of Ptolemy's independence, Alexander had fought through ten years of his life for broader ends. Unlike Ptolemy, he had believed it possible for one power to rule from the Mediterranean to the far edge of India, by basing an empire on Macedonia and on the inexhaustible abundance of Babylon and her surrounding farmland. To this end and to ease the importing of Indian and Eastern luxuries, he had planned to reopen the old sea routes which had formerly met in the Persian Gulf. Once this was done, he had believed that the conquered Iranian nobility should share in their victors' court and government and that the army and the future of the empire depended on westernized native recruits and the children of soldiers' mixed marriages brought up in Macedonian style. Above all, he had believed that culture and government meant cities as all Greeks knew them, a belief to which the infinitely older and more adaptable style of the nomads was no exception. It has often been said that these three beliefs were sure to founder on the prejudice of his successors or the realities of any age that followed. Alexander was not such a shallow or unworldly judge.

Politically, his belief in one possible empire from the west Mediterranean to India was not refuted by the way that it failed within thirty years of his death. Those years were chaotic, but not once are the natives known to have risen seriously against Macedonian rule, except in the cities of mainland Greece which had never been firmly held anyway; there the uprising collapsed within a year. Egypt, a part of Iran and the Punjab were indeed lost to the court at Babylon, but Egypt was detached because its new satrap Ptolemy pursued his ambition of being an independent Pharaoh; some twenty years after Alexander's death, India, the Hindu Kush and probably the Helmand valley as far as Kandahar were abandoned for a price of 500 elephants to the new and ruthless empire of Chandragupta, admirer of Alexander and heir to the eastern kingdom of Magadha whose last ruler he had overthrown; if Alexander's men had not mutinied on the Beas, Magadha would have fallen to the west and Chandragupta's army would never have pressed so soon on the eastern frontier. Within eighty years of Alexander's death, Parthian tribesmen from the lower course of the Oxus had overrun new grazing-lands south and southwest of the river and cut off the one remaining land route to the rich upper satrapy of Balkh and Sogdia; there the Greek and Macedonian generals took the title of king, perhaps as much from helplessness as from sinister ambition. These Parthians, who later grew to rule Asia, were nomads and outsiders, men who would only have been forced into Alexander's satrapies by the uncontrollable pressures of weather and pasturage; as for the kings of Bactria, they were Greeks and Macedonians who wore the diadem like Alexander and went east to reclaim his Indian conquests in campaigns as surprising as they are obscure. Neither kings nor Parthians were native subjects; Alexander's empire was never challenged from beneath or within.

Secure from inside, his one kingdom could have been realized if only his high commanders could ever have agreed among themselves, for Ptolemy, Chandragupta and the Parthians only broke off their separate pieces at moments when the Asian Successors were absorbed elsewhere with struggles between themselves, their brothers and their wives. Reprisals came, but in each case too late and from kings who were pressed by rivals in western Asia; India and eastern Iran were not given up lightly as the huge price of 500 elephants was asked for them; it was proof of the kings' priorities that those elephants were promptly moved to the west, where they won the decisive battle that nude Seleucus the king of Asia. Caught between west and cast, the Successors put the west and its family struggles first; had Alexander lived, his personality would have towered over the Empire and held them together for the repulse of any nomads or Chandragupta. In another twenty years he could have schooled his sons to succeed him. As for the far west, the victories of Pyrrhus the Epirote and Agathocles the Sicilian in the next fifty years showed that the western plans which Alexander had begun through his brother-in-law and implied at the end of his life were not an impossibility. Both Pyrrhus and Agathocles linked themselves to Alexander's Mediterranean Successors; what was left to these two minor allies of his inheritance could surely have been achieved by Alexander himself and then entrusted to client kings. The 'frog-pond' of the Greeks would have extended from Sicily to the river Beas.

It was not, then, a grave lack of manpower or an outburst of native hatred which told against Alexander's aims; it was the older enemies of time and distance, combined against officers who fought amongst themselves through the accident of his early death. Because the Successors lost the east, they are often thought to have disdained it. This, however, is to pass improbable judgement on what is unknown. Alexander's belief that the court and army should include Iranians and a wide class of hellenized orientals has often been claimed as a victim of his officers' prejudices; again, the point is too complicated to go unqualified. By the third century the high court officials of the Successors' kingdoms were almost exclusively Greeks, attracted from the Aegean to a personal rank in royal service where neither class nor home were counted against them; even the Macedonians were relatively rare in administrative jobs outside the army. This open society did not extend beyond talented Greek immigrants. In the Ptolemies' Egypt, hellenized natives were very seldom admitted to high court rank; the name of Persian was confined to a privileged class of mixed senders. There is hardly an Iranian satrap or servant known at the western court of the Seleucids; they are only known to have used Iranians in their army where they were too valuable to ignore. So much, it might seem, for Alexander's 'concord and partnership in the empire'. The heirs to his colonists resorted to tortuous inter-marriage to avoid taking native wives into their family property; there are very few Greeks in eastern cities who are known to have married wives with native names. It was the prejudice of the ruling class which finally won.