by Amanda
Plutarch which apparently originate from a single earlier source. However,
one cannot ignore the fact that other sources, both the speeches of
contemporary Greek orators and Alexander historians, are silent on this
issue. The same sources provide extensive information on the exile decree
and there is no reason why they should fail to mention Alexander’s whish
or demand to be worshiped as a god. On the basis of all the evidence found
in extant sources it is equally probable that the idea of deifying Alexander
originated in fact from the Greeks wishing to win the powerful king over
in the time when they had much to gain in the exiles debate. Alexander’s
invincibility on the battlefield was a convenient reason to declare him a
god. However, the statue in Athens of ‘Alexander the invincible god’ did
not have a cult status, probably to deliberately weaken the charge that this
was sacrilegious deification of a living mortal.63
61 Hyp., 6.21; Ael., VH, 2.19; Plu., mor. , 219e; Paus., 8.32.1; Arr., An. , 7.23.2.
62 Suda., s.v. Ant∂patroj. Blackwell 1999, p. 155. Alexander’s cult in Asia Minor
and in islands: Habicht 1970, pp. 17-22, 26-28; Stewart 1993, pp. 98-102, 419-420;
Badian 1996, pp. 24-25; Nawotka 2003a, p. 33; Dreyer 2009, pp. 222-228.
63 Ael., VH, 2.19; Plu., mor. , 219e. Tarn 1948, ii, pp. 370-373; Wilcken 1967, p.
210; Habicht 1970, pp. 17-36; Schachermeyr 1973, pp. 525-431; Hamilton 1973,
pp. 138-139; Goukowsky 1978, p. 61; Bosworth 1988, p. 288; Stewart 1993, pp.
100-101; Hammond 1996, pp. 257-258; Fredricksmeyer 2003, p. 276. Contra:
Balsdon 1950; Blackwell 1999, pp. 152-153; Brun 2000, p. 101; Worthington 2004,
pp. 192-193.
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Naturally modern scholars would wish to know Alexander’s own
thoughts on the controversial subject of his reputed divinity. Unfortunately,
the sources do not refer to this issue directly, whereas the conduct and
opinions of Alexander that they cite leave us with an equivocal impression
of what he really thought. He certainly allowed flatterers to make positive
comparisons between him and Dionysus or Heracles. At Opis Alexander
clearly demonstrated how seriously he treated the stories about the god
Ammon being his father. In the years 324-323 he appeared in public with
the insignia of that god and allowed or even encouraged those around him
to behave as if he had divine status; wherever he went incense was burned
and a pious silence was maintained. On the other hand, in more sober
moments, such as at the Battle of Massaga, he could berate a sycophant for
calling his blood ichor, the liquid Homer claims flowed through the veins
of the Olympian gods. Moreover, throughout his life he was exceptionally
scrupulous in paying respect to the Greek gods, to Ammon at Siwah as
well as the gods of whatever region he happened to be in. It is hard not to
notice in such behaviour very traditional piety and fear of committing
hubris – the offence of transgressing the boundary between mortals and
gods.64
6. The death of Hephaestion
In the late summer of 324, having dispatched Craterus and the veterans,
Alexander and the rest of the army set out for Media. The reason for this
was probably to distribute between more than one satrapy the burden of
feeding Alexander’s troops and royal court. The army marched slowly. On
the fourth day it crossed the Tigris and reached a place called Sambana,
where it stayed for seven days. After another three days of resumed
marching the Macedonians arrived at Kelonai – a place inhabited by the
descendants of Boeotian collaborators, whom Xerxes had evacuated from
Greece and settled there after the 480-479 war. Here the march was once
again halted and then the army left the main route to reconnoitre
surrounding areas. Thus the Macedonians reached Bagastana (today
Bahistun) – ‘Place of the Gods’, where amid magnificent orchards and
gardens there was Darius I’s famous monumental inscription as well as a
sanctuary that the Greeks associated with Heracles. It was during the
stopover at Bagastana that an angry dispute erupted between the royal
secretary Eumenes and an arrogant Hephaestion, who had just expelled
64 Bosworth 1988, pp. 281-288; O’Brien 1992, pp. 202-203; Stewart 1993, pp. 96-
99; Fredricksmeyer 2003, pp. 227-278.
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Eumenes’ men from their living quarters. King had to personally intervene
and force the two officials to reconcile their differences. The next stopover
was on the Nesaian Plain in Media, where a herd of magnificent horses
grazed. Reports stated there were as many as 150,000 of them, but in
reality it turned out there were only 50,000 to 60,000 at the most. The
herders claimed that thieves had stolen the rest during the times of war and
civil disorder when such crimes could be committed with impunity. Some
modern scholars believe the robbers were Cossaeans from the Zagros
Mountains. However, there is not enough evidence in the sources to
confirm this and it is equally probable that the earlier reports of 150,000
horses were merely a joyful invention of creative Achaemenid bureaucrats.65
After 30 days spent on the Nesaian Plain the army resumed the march
to the Median capital, Ecbatana, which it reached seven days later in the
autumn of 324. Alexander would usually mark an accomplished mission
with sports and artistic competitions and this is what indeed happened at
Ecbatana; 3,000 performers from Greece were said to have taken part in
the celebrations. An inseparable part of all Macedonian festivities were
banquets involving heavy drinking. I was most probably as a result of such
alcoholic overindulgence that in November that year Hephaestion fell ill.
His physician, a man called Glaucus or Glaucias, instructed him to follow
a very strict diet. Unfortunately, the young warrior proved incapable of
putting up with such a regime for long. On the seventh day of his illness,
during the physician’s absence, he consumed an entire hen, washed it
down with a pitcher (c. 2 litres capacity) of wine and subsequently passed
away.66 The death of his very closest friend was a deeply profound shock
to Alexander. The first thing he did was to have the hapless physician
executed, in keeping with Persian custom, by crucifixion. He himself is
said to have hugged Hephaestion’s body for two days. Then, once he
overcame the first shock of bereavement, Alexander ordered official
mourning throughout the his empire on a scale befitting the death of a
monarch or at least an heir to the throne. Among other things, he ordered
the Persians to quench their ‘sacred fires’. This was something that
normally only happened after the king’s death and therefore to be told to
do it on account of the death of an ordinary man was for the Iranians quite
incomprehensible and even insulting. According to Diodorus (or rather
Ephippus, who was most probably his source) the quenching of the sacred
fires was interpreted at time as an omen of Alexander’s own imminent
65 Diod., 17.110.3-6; Arr., An. , 7.13.1; Plu., Eum. , 2.1-
2. Bosworth 1988, p. 163.
66 Ephippus, FGrH, 126; Arr., An. , 7.14.1; Diod., 17.110.8; Plu., Alex. , 72.1-2.
Heckel 1992, pp. 87-88; Hammond 1998; Hamilton 1999, p. 199; Heckel 2006, p.
126, s.v. ‘Glaucias’ [3].
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363
death, though this interpretation may have only appeared after Alexander’s
death. In the meantime Alexander had his hair cut in honour of his
deceased companion. He also had the mains and tails of horses and mules
cut for the same reason. Even more dramatically, he had the defensive
walls of neighbouring towns demolished and a temple of Asclepius or
some local deity identified with Asclepius by the Greeks razed to the
ground. Wishing to institute a divine cult for Hephaestion, Alexander sent
a special delegation with such a request to the oracle he trusted the most,
at Siwah. Up until its return he forbade his soldiers to play musical
instruments, especially not the aulos. Ultimately the Ammon of Siwah
permitted Hephaestion to have only a heroic cult. The sources relate that
such a cult was introduced in Athens and Pella. Those who wished to gain
Alexander’s favour, such as Perdiccas, made vows to all the gods and
Hephaestion.67 A letter was sent to Cleomenes of Naucratis to construct a
magnificent heroon to Hephaestion at Alexandria and another one on
Pharos Island. A measure of the importance Alexander attached to
establishing a heroic cult for his companion is the reward Alexander was
offering Cleomenes for completing these tasks: forgiveness for what was
in all probability very considerable financial abuses committed during the
king’s absence.68
The warrior also honoured the death of another warrior with war, thus,
in a way both offering up the bodies of those slaughtered as sacrifice for
the companion’s spirit as well as finding a way of occupying his mind in
the psychologically most difficult phase of his bereavement. Sometime in
mid winter, probably January-February 323, Alexander launched a
campaign against the Cossaeans, one of the mountain tribes who, like their
neighbours the Uxians, had held on to independence under Achaemenid
rule on account of greater expenditure for the total conquest than the
tribute might bring the king. This time, however, the best army in the
world of those days conducted a 40-day manhunt of the hapless Cossaeans
merely to amuse its commander. Those who survived the slaughter
acknowledged Alexander’s suzerainty and agreed to adopt a settled
lifestyle. But by the diadochi period the Cossaeans regained their
independence and again posed a threat to travellers on the road from Susa
67 Hyp., Epit. , 20-21; Arr., An. , 7.14.2-7; Diod., 17.114.4-5, 17.115.6; Plu., Alex. , 72.3; Plu., Pel. , 34.2; Ael., VH, 7.8; Luc., Cal. , 17; Just., 12.12. Heckel 1992, pp.
89-90; Hammond 1995; Briant 1996, pp. 260-262; Badian 1996, p. 25; Hamilton
1999, pp. 200-201; Pelagia 2000, p. 168; Reames-Zimmerman 2001; Brosius 2003,
p. 181.
68 Arr., An. , 7.23.7-8.
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to Ecbatana. Therefore the conquest of their land was not permanent. But,
then again, that was not Alexander’s real objective.69
After the campaign Alexander returned to the matter of organizing a
funeral ceremony. He instructed Perdiccas to transport Hephaestion’s body
to Babylon; for a time the king himself held the reins at the head of the
procession. It is possible that the still extant stone Lion of Hamadan was
commissioned to mark the place where Hephaestion died. In Babylon
Alexander ordered the construction of a giant pyre that reportedly cost
between 10,000 and 12,000 talents. Some scholars have considered the
extraordinary structure described by Diodorus as an ecphrasis of
something that may have been planned but was never realised. It has also
been frequently confused with the tomb which Alexander had planned to
build for Hephaestion but died before work on its construction work
actually began.70 Yet we now know that a pyre was actually raised for the
remnants of a 7.5-metre high platform were discovered by archaeologists
in Babylon. This was an enormous rectangular pyre a stade (180 m) long
and over 130 cubits (65 m) high, and comprising a skeleton structure of
bricks from a demolished fragment of the city’s wall. This skeleton
structure was filled with the trunks of palm trees, which were used as the
fuel; in the intense heat of the subsequent conflagration they left an
impression on the thus deformed bricks. The walls of the pyre were
adorned with the gilded prows of ships alluding to Hephaestion’s military
commands, the attributes of the gods (the eagles of Zeus, the snakes of
Ammon and the torches of Dionysus), a relief depicting a hunting scene
and another one presenting a Centauromachy (a traditional allegory to the
Greek-Persian wars), depictions of Persian and Macedonian armour as
well as the images of Babylonian gods and their symbols. The
Macedonians cast their weapons and other valuables onto the pyre,
presumably more in order to ingratiate Alexander than to express genuine
sorrow for the departure of the generally disliked Hephaestion. The
cremation of his corpse was accompanied by the sacrifice of 10,000
animals.71
Hephaestion’s funeral pyre and all the other aspects of mourning his
death were already considered excessive by contemporaries. Modern
69 Arr., An. , 7.15.1-3; Arr., Ind. , 40.7-10; Diod., 17.111.5-6; Str., 11.13.6; Plu., Alex. , 72.4. Bosworth 1988, p. 165; Hamilton 1999, p. 201.
70 Diod., 17.115.1-5; Plu., Alex. , 72.5. Lane Fox 1980, pp. 384-385; Bosworth
1988, p. 164; Hammond 1995; McKechnie 1995; McKechnie 2001; Pelagia 2000,
pp. 167-168.
71 Diod., 17.115; Arr., An. , 7.14.9; Ael., VH, 7.8. Heckel 1992, p. 89; Pelagia 2000, pp. 167-173.
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365
studies have now also stressed a progressive irrationality in Alexander’s
behaviour and some have even applied quasi-psychological methods to
‘diagnose’ such conduct as a symptom of paranoia or alcoholism. Yet it is
generally accepted that for up to a year after the death of someone
particularly close people very frequently behave irrationally. An analysis
made by J. Reames-Zimmerman has revealed that certain seemingly
unusual aspects Alexander’s behaviour were typical of the ancient Greek
and Macedonian way of mourning. What made Alexander stand out was
the ability to express his grief on a grand scale befitting a great monarch.
Particularly in the last phase of his life Alexander had many grand designs,
of which Hephaestion’s extravagant funeral was just one. On top of this,
there was Alexander’s characteristic tendency to model his life on those of
mythological heroes; here Achilles’ sorrow after Patroclus’ death as
presented in the Iliad was an obvious point of reference.72 Most scholars
nowadays have also interpreted Alexander’s ostentatious sorrow as an
expression of his homosexual relationship with Hephaestion. Bearing in
mind Greek and Macedonian sexual behaviour, it is likely although far
from proven given the fuzzy accoun
t of our sources which allude to it in a
veiled fashion. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Hephaestion
was by far the closest of Alexander’s friends; in psychology relationship
as close as these are labelled ‘twinship’. Therefore Hephaestion’s
premature death had a devastating effect on Alexander in the last months
of his life.73
7. Return to Babylon
After ending his campaign against the Cossaeans, Alexander led his army
back to Babylon. The march was again very slow and included many
breaks. Even before he reached Babylon, Alexander granted audiences to
numerous embassies arriving from various parts of the world and such
diplomatic meetings continued in Babylon as well. The sources mention
embassies from Libya, from Italy (including the Bruttians, Lucanians,
Etruscans and Romans), from Ethiopians, Carthage, European Scythians,
72 Arr., An. , 7.14; Plu., Alex. , 72. Alcoholism: O’Brien 1992. Paranoia: Badian 1961; Worthington 1999a. But see: Bosworth 1988, pp. 164-165; Reames-Zimmerman 2001.
73 Ael., VH., 12.7; Epictetus, Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, 2.22.17-18; Luc., DM, 297; Diogenis Sinopensis Epistulae, 24.1. Homosexuality: Heckel 1992, pp.
65-66; Hamilton 1999, p. 130; Reames-Zimmerman 1999. Contra: Konstan 1997,
p. 108. For a balanced view see Ogden 2009, pp. 210-212. ‘Twinship’: Kets de
Vries 2004, pp. 72-73, 80-82.
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Celts from the Balkans and Gaul, Iberians as well as numerous Greek
poleis (all trying to gain some concessions regarding the return of the
exiles). The embassies were accepted according to a fairly frequently used
formula in the Classical era. The first issues to be broached were religious
and next gifts were accepted, then more earthly issues were considered:
disputes with neighbouring states, internal conflicts as well as the matter
of returning exiles. The arrival of so many embassies to the then most
powerful ruler in the world is not surprising, especially as Alexander had
