Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Perdiccas kept council deliberations private. No common soldiers attended, no Persians, no Babylonians, and perhaps no Greeks other than Nearchus and Eumenes. Only one bodyguard, Leonnatus, attended, for the others were protecting the embalmers. To help the councilors concentrate—or to allay Alexander’s ghost—Perdiccas put Alexander’s throne, diadem, and signet ring in front of them and nailed Alexander’s armor to the throne.9

  The king’s Asian regalia and armor were Alexander’s personal property, but the empire was not. It belonged to the companions, especially the councilors. The Macedonian throne belonged to the Temenid family, and the council could choose whom to elevate. The new king would become priest of the cult of the companions. The cult of Alexander as son of Zeus-Amon had never taken hold, and the council could leave it in abeyance.

  Perdiccas proposed that the council name some senior commander as regent. This companion would take the lead in naming a new king and dealing with the funeral and the empire. Perdiccas wanted the post for himself. Nearchus and others argued that they must first name a successor. Alexander’s son by Barsine would do. If the pregnant Roxana bore a son, he might become king. By naming a king first, and not a regent, the council would provide religious continuity. Ptolemy and others wanted to name a successor, too, but not one born to a Central Asian mother. These councilors preferred someone less foreign (Nearchus in particular preferred a son of Barsine’s, for he was married to Barsine’s daughter).

  Another top commander, Meleager, suggested Arrhidaeus, who had accompanied them from the start of the expedition. Arrhidaeus would require a regent, just as a child would, but he could perform some sacrificial duties. Some councilors feared that Arrhidaeus might be hard to control. Incapable of leading troops, he was nevertheless a physically healthy, middle-aged prince perfectly capable of marrying. Philip had wanted to marry him to the daughter of Pixodarus. (That had motivated Alexander to try to marry the daughter himself.) If Arrhidaeus wanted a wife, he would find plenty of candidates, and no one could force him to marry the stupidest and the weakest. He might marry a termagant like Olympias, and she might interfere with the regent, and even with the council.

  Egos clashed; precaution won. The council dismissed Nearchus’s idea of promoting the son of Barsine, a woman without important relatives, and decided that if Roxana did bear a son, he would become king. If Roxana did not, they would revisit the matter. Meanwhile, there would be no king. Perdiccas and Leonnatus, a general and a bodyguard, would be co-regents. Craterus, Antipater, and Antigonus must accept this fait accompli.10

  The council also made several other decisions. First, they abandoned Alexander’s Arabian invasion and other plans. Second, they left the satrapies mostly as they were. Perdiccas arranged for some of the bodyguards, a set of ambitious men, to get posts in the provinces. He did not want them at court, and so he told them there would be no king worth guarding. Ptolemy got Egypt, and part of Anatolia went to Eumenes, a lifelong bureaucrat who now wanted out of Babylon. Last, the council disposed of Alexander’s women. Roxana would live in Babylon and Barsine in Anatolia, where she had been before the war. The council did not have to concern themselves with two others: Darius’s daughter, whom Alexander had married at Susa, and Darius’s mother, Sisygambis. Roxana killed the daughter as soon as Alexander died, and Sisygambis killed herself for fear of what the companions might do with her.11

  By now, the Egyptian surgeon was finishing his chef d’oeuvre. After cleansing the innards with palm wine, he poured in myrrh mixed with cassia, and sewed up the wound with linen thread. Alexander had never had so many stitches. Would the council let the troops into the palace to admire them? Not yet, came the answer. The doors remained closed.12

  Some 10,000 Macedonian troops still guarded Babylon. The cavalry, who served under Perdiccas and thought of themselves as the original companions, accepted his decision. So did the shield bearers, led by Seleucus. By yielding to Perdiccas, they endorsed the arrangements he and the council had made for the empire.

  The heavy infantry defied Perdiccas. They marched on the palace, and the frightened councilors locked themselves in the room where the body lay. The infantry pursued them and broke down the doors. Arrhidaeus encouraged the infantry, and so did Meleager, the councilor who nominated Arrhidaeus as king. The troops saw the body of their king and demanded that another Temenid, someone as closely related to Alexander as possible, replace him. Put Arrhidaeus on the throne. Cavalry and heavy infantry, who had fought separately on the battlefield, thought differently about the monarchy.13

  At one point the two sides camped separately, cavalry outside the city and infantry inside. The disagreement between them might lead to fighting, and the cavalry, facing the infantry’s long spears, might not prevail. Very reluctantly, Perdiccas and the council majority agreed to make Arrhidaeus king. They insisted, however, that Arrhidaeus share the throne if Roxana bore a son. If there were two kings, the council could better control Arrhidaeus. Perdiccas himself would become the one and only regent.14

  Within days, Perdiccas retaliated against his foes. He ordered that the army assemble to be purified, a ritual accomplished by marching the troops between the severed parts of a bitch. Arrhidaeus killed the dog, and Perdiccas killed Meleager after Arrhidaeus denounced him as unpurifiable. That put an end to the political aspirations of the infantry, much as Alexander had put an end to infantry opposition when he killed the ringleaders at Opis. Perdiccas had maintained council unity and his own position.15

  He delayed the funeral for similar, practical reasons. Yet he also had a religious, even superstitious reason for delaying the funeral. As long as he and his fellow generals kept the body, they kept the power that emanated from it. They remained suspended, and protected, within the prolonged last rites for Alexander.16

  all companions swore to give dead comrades a funeral. Alexander had done this duty again and again—for Nicanor, Erigyius, Coenus, and Hephaestion. Now Alexander’s body lay in the palace in Babylon week after week. The embalmers, who had already preserved the body well enough so that it could travel, set themselves a new task. Knowing that Alexander wished to be laid to rest at Siwah, they prepared him for the trip to the oasis.

  They asked for divine blessings on their efforts, and then they opened the dead man’s eyes, one at a time, followed by the ears, nostrils, and mouth. When Alexander was pharaoh, he opened the mouths of statues in the same way. Both statues and corpses were inert bodies to be revived. For the next five weeks, the embalmers performed a ceremony for each of the four main organs, for each arm and leg, and for the back. Then they cleared away the soda ash in which the body had lain. After seventeen ceremonies in seventy days, they declared themselves ready to mummify Alexander so that he might travel to Egypt. The goddess Isis required that the incarnation of Horus, her son, return to his homeland.

  Then Perdiccas pretended to discover what he had known all along—the companions had no hearse in which to transport Alexander. Disingenuously, he invited Arrhidaeus to build one. Arrhidaeus would need extra time, Perdiccas warned him, to accomplish what should be the stupendous task of building a four-wheeled palace worthy of a transcontinental emperor. Perdiccas assigned him a ranking companion as a subordinate, and supplied ample funds.17

  Nearly two years after Alexander’s death, Arrhidaeus finished his task. The Egyptians had contributed a sarcophagus of human shape, as was their custom. They embossed it with gold leaf, a symbol of divinity, filled it with myrrh, and added a golden lid. Around it Greek craftsmen had built a small temple, adorned with sculptured lions guarding the entrance. A barrel vault studded with jewels rested atop Ionic columns; Apollo’s olive wreath topped the roof. At each corner a figure of Nike stood holding a battle trophy—one for the Granicus, one for Issus, one for Arbela, and one for the Jhelum. The animal that was the familiar of Amon, the Nubian ibex, peered out from the cornices, and tinkling bells hung from garlands draped around each curling horn. Friezes ran from one beast to the next. In one, Alexa
nder rode in a chariot followed by Persian as well as Macedonian guards. Others showed parading war elephants, the companion cavalry, and a fleet of ships.18

  Perdiccas and his supporters had run out of excuses. The body must go somewhere, so he decided to send it where it would do him the most military good. That was Anatolia. Antigonus was warring against Perdiccas’s forces there, as were Antipater, Craterus, and Polyperchon. Soon after assigning the task of building the hearse to Arrhidaeus, Perdiccas himself had gone to Anatolia with most of the 10,000 Macedonians stationed in Babylon.

  Perdiccas formed a two-step plan. First, he would order his subordinates in Babylon to bring the body and the royal family to him. His enemies would not dare to stop him, let alone fight. The cortege would serve as a talisman. Next, he would take the cortege and the royals to Aegae, where he would serve as master of ceremonies while Arrhidaeus interred the sarcophagus in the family vault. Perdiccas would stage games in Alexander’s honor, and inaugurate worship of him as a hero. Since heroes loitered around their tombs, Perdiccas would benefit from Alexander’s aura. He could become king in all but name. To improve his chance of success, Perdiccas arranged to marry one of Alexander’s sisters.19

  Sometime in 321, the cortege left Babylon and set off to join Perdiccas in Anatolia. An honor guard led the way, and sixty-four mules pulled the catafalque by collars set with gems. Perdiccas ordered the royal family to travel some ways behind. He did not want them closely associated with the body. He would bring Roxana to Macedon, to live under the gaze of Olympias, and Barsine and her son would retire in Anatolia.

  Aboard the catafalque, the embalmers periodically checked the body and the jars intended for the organs. The weather was hot, the pace slow. The mules could not travel more than a dozen miles a day. As the cortege traveled north, through Mesopotamia and Syria, crowds gathered in Babylonian towns, Macedonian outposts, and Arab caravansaries. They admired Nike with her trophy and the other showy Greek features of the catafalque. Few if any saw the lid of the sarcophagus, where Alexander’s face appeared like that of a pharaoh.

  After a journey of three months, the cortege reached Syria. Perdiccas had achieved a coup de théâtre, and the Egyptian embalmers, still tending to the body, could boast that their pharaoh had weathered a preliminary afterlife of two years. The cortege should arrive in Anatolia in a few more weeks.

  Then a messenger from Syria arrived in Anatolia with shocking news. Ptolemy had bribed the companion who assisted Arrhidaeus. The honor guard withdrew, and Ptolemy made away with the hearse. The body of Alexander was now traveling to Egypt. Just as Perdiccas wished to use the body to gain legitimacy throughout the empire, Ptolemy wanted Alexander to help him govern Egypt.20

  The embalmers accompanied the body back to their native land. They expected Ptolemy to entomb Alexander at Siwah, but Ptolemy disappointed them as well. He put the sarcophagus on display in the Greek quarter of Memphis, before a temple of Amon. This location, next to the Asian quarter, was respectable but not obtrusive. Greeks and Macedonians could sacrifice to Alexander as a hero—Ptolemy certainly would—and Amon would approve.21

  Perdiccas marched south to reclaim the body, and his army arrived opposite Memphis in the summer of 320. Ptolemy’s army awaited them on the other side of the Nile. Perdiccas did not display Alexander’s knack for water crossings. He did find a ford, and deployed his elephants upstream to slow the current. Seleucus’s shield bearers and some others managed to cross in spite of the chest-high water. Then the weight of the elephants caused the streambed to deepen and the rest of the army could not cross. Isolated, the men who had crossed tried to swim back. Two thousand drowned.22

  Ptolemy met secretly with Seleucus and other senior officers, offering generous peace terms. He would not attack the invaders, and he would let all Macedonians come to Memphis to pay their last respects to Alexander. Knowing Perdiccas would not accept these terms, Seleucus and some shield bearers put him to death, and then the invaders withdrew from Egypt.23

  That summer, the leading generals met near Damascus at Trisparadeisos, “the place with three Persian royal gardens,” where they redistributed the empire. Antipater became regent and got custody of the royals, plus the elephants used by Perdiccas. When Antipater died a few years later, his son Cassander replaced him. Antigonus became chief commander, and also got elephants. Ptolemy kept the body. Seleucus, the assassin of Perdiccas, got Babylon as his reward. In military terms, they had nothing to fear but each other. The Macedonian army had been the best before Alexander, and it would be the best after him.24

  Without the body nearby, Alexander’s family lost the aura of divinity that had protected them, and they became vulnerable to machinations in the Macedonian court. Arrhidaeus had finally married, and his ambitious wife made an enemy of Olympias, who had the pair of them assassinated. Roxana gave birth to Alexander IV, but he survived only until age thirteen, when Cassander executed him and his mother. Cassander did not forget the inveterate intriguer Olympias. He arranged for the relatives of her victims to put her to death. Of Alexander’s wives, only Barsine remained, living privately with her seventeen-year-old son Heracles in Anatolia.25

  Polyperchon, a Macedonian traditionalist and one of the last of Philip’s generation of soldiers, wanted Heracles to succeed to the throne. He brought the young man to Greece and presented him to Macedonian troops as a Temenid fit to be king. Unwilling to share power, Cassander outmaneuvered Heracles. He promised Polyperchon control of southern Greece in exchange for killing the prince and his mother. Polyperchon agreed and killed the pair of them, but he never got southern Greece. The Greeks kept him out of most of the region, and Macedonian rivals kept him out of the rest.26

  The empire broke up into familiar pieces: Egypt under Ptolemy, Mesopotamia under Seleucus, Anatolia under the sexagenarian Antigonus. The kingdom of Macedon fell to Cassander, and then to a son of Antigonus. The new political map resembled a time before Alexander made his conquests, and even a time before Cyrus the Great. The two conquerors seemed to have accomplished nothing. They were not even properly buried. Cyrus’s tomb was empty. Alexander’s was in the wrong place.

  The companions had deprived Alexander of his army, crowns, women, and children.27 They even did away with the cult of the companions. They no longer used this term, preferring the saccharine “friends.” Yet millions now began to worship Alexander. His afterlife had just begun.28

  alexander’s ascent began slowly, before his death. After he marched through Asia Minor, some Greeks cities revised their calendars and made the time of his arrival Year One. Immediately after his death, all the cities named after Alexander began to worship him as a hero. So did the people of Macedon. The original Alexandria, in Egypt, honored him on the anniversary of his death. Worshipping him as a god probably began somewhat later. (The Greek and Persian oracles in Asia Minor had told Greeks to honor Alexander as a god, but did not instruct cities when or where.) Sometime after his death, the island of Thasos erected a temple and sacrificed to him. A league of Greek cities including Miletus and Ephesus probably did, too. Six years after his death, a satrap and his troops honored Alexander as a god (and honored Philip as well—these troops were Macedonian veterans).29

  Anonymous line drawing of Alexander’s catafalque, 1888.

  Photograph: Franz Heinz-Deitler, Alamy Stock Photographs.

  For the most part, the leading companions did not dare imitate Alexander by making themselves gods while they were alive, but after their deaths they gained a share of Alexander’s symbolic spoils. Their descendants worshipped them alongside Alexander. Rather than gods in their own right, Alexander’s generals became companion gods.30

  In Asia, Seleucus and his successors founded Greek cities that eventually worshipped both Alexander and Seleucus. These cults, one for Alexander and one for the ruler, legitimized rulers, but also benefitted the worshippers. When kings ranked as gods, they were more obliged to help their subjects. Realizing this, Greek cities took the lead in establish
ing the new cults. Athens worshipped Alexander alongside Antigonus while Antigonus was still alive, and the city worshipped Antigonus’s son, too. This cult began when Antigonus briefly controlled Athens.31

  Ptolemy accomplished more, by making use of Alexander’s sarcophagus. In Memphis, it had lain in public view for several decades, one pharaonic memorial among many. Ptolemy moved the sarcophagus to Alexandria and made it the centerpiece of a royal precinct in the city. Ptolemy’s grandson removed the gold lid, with its Egyptian image of Alexander, and replaced it with a glass cover. Visitors could now see Alexander’s face for the first time. Eventually the royal precinct grew to accommodate the tombs of Ptolemy, his son Ptolemy II, and their successors. Egyptians would call this place Soma (the body), meaning the body of the kings, but especially of Alexander. Elsewhere in the city, statues of Alexander dominated main intersections and shrines—an equestrian statue honoring him as city founder, a cult statue in his temple, and an ensemble showing Alexander being crowned by the Earth herself, attended by Luck and Victory.32

  Displaying an Egyptian touch, Ptolemy II ordained worship of his own mother as well as of his father and Alexander. To celebrate all three new gods, he established an annual festival, the Ptolemaia. A Greek travel writer who attended in 274 described the extravaganza. A long parade wound through the city and into a stadium before arriving at a royal pavilion where Ptolemy II and his “friends” recreated the court of Alexander. They dined and drank on 300 couches in a circle. Two gold tripods for making small sacrifices stood by each couch. So did silver tables and accouterments weighing, the writer claimed, an entire ton. Wooden columns, carved like palm trees or like staffs used in Dionysiac ritual, rose fifty feet in the air. These alluded to Alexander’s imitating Dionysus in India and in the Persian wine country.33