The crisis came to a head when Alexander decided that now was the moment to decommission many of his veterans and send them home. He had traveled north from Susa up the Tigris to the town of Opis to supervise the removal of dams the Persians had constructed on the river to hinder any naval force invading Mesopotamia from the south. These dams made shipping on the Tigris difficult and were, as Alexander said, marks of an empire lacking military supremacy. He summoned his Macedonian troops to him at Opis and announced that he was sending away all who were unfit for further service due to age or injuries. They would be amply rewarded for their past service, while those that remained would become so rich that they would be the envy of all in Macedonia. The king had assumed his news would be greeted with joy by those leaving and staying alike, but his words met with stony silence. The soldiers who had fought so long with him were brokenhearted at being dismissed, even though they had long wanted to go home. Those who were selected to remain could only wonder when he would decide to be rid of them as well. Alexander’s integration of foreign forces into the army, his adopting Persian ways, his forced marriages—all of this was at last too much for the common soldiers. Instead of applause for the king, shouts arose from the troops calling on him to send them all home since he didn’t need them anymore. Let him fight alongside his new father, Ammon, some cried.
Alexander grew furious at this insubordination and leapt off the platform where he had been standing. He ordered his guards to arrest the dozen or so most prominent agitators and haul them off for immediate execution. Then he climbed back on the stage and began one of the most impassioned speeches of his life to the stunned soldiers before him. He chastised them for their gross ingratitude after all he had done for them. He reminded them that they were nothing before his father, Philip, accepted them into his army, only goatherds clothed in animal skins fighting off wolves and Illyrian bandits. Under his father they had spread Macedonian power throughout Greece and the Balkans. Then under his own banner they had invaded Asia and taken the Mediterranean from Troy to Cyrene, adding the Aegean coast, Syria, Phoenicia, and Egypt to their empire. From there it was on to Persia itself, followed by Bactria, Sogdiana, and India. They had become rich men while he kept no luxuries for himself. He had eaten the same food and shared the same labors as the lowliest infantryman. Did they have wounds to show him? He would strip and show them his injuries as well. There were scars on every part of his body just as on theirs. He had toiled with them through everything. He had paid their debts and legitimized the children they had fathered with camp followers. If any man among them had died along the way, he was honored with a splendid funeral and his family back home in Macedonia spared from future taxes. Therefore, he shouted, all of you get out of my sight. Every one of you go home to Macedonia whether you are old and infirm or not. I don’t need you anymore. Just be sure to tell your families back home that you deserted your king, handing over him and the empire you won to the care of the very barbarians you defeated.
Alexander then stomped off the platform and retired to his tent for three days, refusing to see anyone. This was the same trick he had used at the Hyphasis River in India to prompt his army to march down the Ganges. It had failed miserably then, but Alexander now knew the measure of his men. To drive home his point, he called in his Persian followers and began to divide up command of the army among them. By this time, all the Macedonians were beside themselves and had gathered outside his headquarters, having thrown down their weapons, begging him to see them. They declared they would stay there day and night until the king admitted them. At last Alexander emerged and saw his repentant soldiers before him. One of their number, an old Macedonian cavalryman named Callines, came forward to speak for the men. He urged the king to reconsider sending them all home and take pity on them for their rash words earlier. They could not bear to see him embracing Persians while they stood by shunned. Alexander then took Callines in his arms and kissed him to the wild applause of the crowd as tears rolled down their faces. The king wept as well and welcomed all of them to come and receive his blessing with a kiss. All was forgiven. Only those who were truly unable to fight any longer were sent home to Macedonia and these went willingly, with plenty of gold and silver in their saddlebags. His faithful comrade Craterus would accompany them home as a sign of the honor he held them in. Alexander asked only that they leave their camp wives and children with him rather than take them home. In Macedonia, these foreign wives and offspring would stir resentment among their kin. He would see to their care and raise their sons as true Macedonian soldiers, proud heirs of the fathers who had sired them. There must have been many tears as the native wives and children said their good-byes, but the soldiers knew that the king was probably right. Better to start again with the old wife or a new young bride in Macedonia rather than bring a wild Bactrian or Indian woman and her children home to meet the family.
Back in Macedonia, Craterus was also to handle a delicate situation that had arisen between Alexander’s mother, Olympias, and his aging regent, Antipater. These two headstrong personalities had never liked each other but were forced to endure one another’s company while the king was away on his eastern conquests. Both had sent a constant stream of letters to Alexander all the way from the Hellespont to the Indus and back accusing the other of every imaginable impropriety. Antipater claimed that Olympias was a willful, sharp-tempered shrew, forever interfering in the affairs of government. Olympias shot back that Antipater had forgotten who appointed him and that he was behaving more like a king than a governor. Alexander had listened to this verbal war for the last decade from a blissful distance, but now it was time to settle the troublesome affair once and for all. Antipater had been a loyal and useful servant during the expedition to Asia, but he was still a threat. With Parmenion’s faction eliminated, only Antipater and his well-entrenched family back in Macedonia could endanger Alexander’s control of the homeland. The king could not easily repudiate his own mother, as much as he might like to at times, so he chose to remove Antipater from power. He sent orders to his regent to turn the governance of Greece and Macedonia over to Craterus once he arrived and make his way to Babylon along with a new draft of Macedonian troops. There he would be greatly honored for his service and enjoy a blissful retirement amid the gardens of the city. When Antipater received the letter, he knew it was his death warrant.
Rather than surrender to fate, Antipater sent his son, Alexander’s boyhood friend Cassander, to Babylon to negotiate with the king and buy time. This meeting went exceedingly poorly when Cassander was led before the king and laughed at a group of Persians bowing their faces to the ground. Alexander jumped up from his throne, grabbed Cassander by the hair, and smashed his head against a wall. Antipater’s son recovered soon enough, but years later back in Greece the sight of a painting or statue of Alexander would still send him into a fainting spell. Even with Cassander fearful, it remains that Antipater’s other son, Iolaus, was cupbearer to the king—a trusted position in which the holder of that office could easily slip a lethal potion into the royal wine bowl. Antipater may well have decided that if negotiations failed, he would have Alexander poisoned before the king could kill him.
To escape the heat of the approaching summer, Alexander did what all the Persian kings before him had done and retreated to the royal capital of Ecbatana in the cool mountains of Media far above the Mesopotamian plain. There he held splendid athletic and musical competitions during the day for his men and epic drinking parties at night for his companions. Three thousand actors and artists arrived from Greece for the festivities, which went on for days at a time. Alexander’s closest friend, Hephaestion, was more interested in the evening revelries than the contests, but the king attended most of the contests himself with genuine enjoyment. After one party, Hephaestion fell ill with a fever and was sternly warned by his personal physician, Glaucias, not to indulge himself further at the risk of his health. Hephaestion grudgingly agreed while the doctor stayed by his bed for seven days, but
as soon as Glaucias was confident that Hephaestion would recover and had departed for the theater himself, Alexander’s friend jumped out of bed and ran to the dining room. There he ate a whole boiled chicken and drank an entire container of chilled wine at one sitting. He collapsed almost at once and was rushed back to bed. Alexander quickly received word that Hephaestion was gravely ill and ran from the stadium to his companion’s side, but by the time he arrived his dearest love was dead.
The ancient sources relate different versions of what happened next, but all agree that Alexander was beside himself with grief. He immediately had Hephaestion’s doctor crucified, blaming him for not caring for his patient properly. He then ordered all the manes and tails of the horses and mules shorn as a token of mourning after a custom practiced by Thracians and Persians alike. He commanded that all music in the city cease and the temple to Asclepius, the god of healing, in Ecbatana be burned to the ground. For the next day he lay prostrate, weeping, on the body of his friend, neither eating nor drinking until his companions finally had to carry him away. At last, like his hero Achilles lamenting for his own Patroclus, slain by Hector before the walls of Troy, Alexander cut his hair and drove the body of Hephaestion himself in the funeral procession.
Alexander sent to the oracle at Siwa in Egypt to ask if Hephaestion might be honored as a god, but this was too much even for the compliant priests of Zeus-Ammon to endorse. They did, however, consent that his friend might be honored as a divine hero with his own cult. The king settled for this, at least at first, and ordered that shrines be constructed in Egypt and elsewhere for Hephaestion. His friend’s post as military commander was left vacant in his honor and extravagant funeral games were planned. The king’s surviving companions tried to outdo each other in showing respect to Hephaestion, dedicating themselves and their arms to his memory while commissioning ivory and gold statues of the deceased. A few bold friends tried to comfort Alexander with the suggestion that he had others, such as Craterus, who cared for him as much as Hephaestion had. He responded that Craterus loved him as king, but Hephaestion had loved him for himself. His boyhood friend had even stood up to Alexander’s mother—who was always jealous of the close relationship between the pair—and warned her in a letter to cease from trying to stir up enmity between them, for Alexander meant more to him than anything in the world.
The king commanded a tomb be built for Hephaestion that rivaled any previous memorial in cost and lavishness. It was to be in the shape of a Babylonian ziggurat with a base more than six hundred feet square and ascending levels almost two hundred feet in height. The best artists were imported for its decoration, which included carvings of warring archers, wild animal hunts, and eagles with outspread wings. On the monument were the golden prows of ships, lions and bulls in Persian fashion, and hollow sculptures of Sirens, in each of which a living person could stand and sing songs of lamentation for his dead friend. Even for those of Alexander’s supporters who had liked Hephaestion, this was all too much—though they did not dare to share their thoughts with the king. Aristotle had taught both Alexander and Hephaestion as young men that friendship was one of the greatest goods in the world, but that moderation in all things was the goal of a worthy man. To all who watched the funeral preparations for Hephaestion, it was clear that Alexander had gone too far. Such ostentatious grief for a friend, even with the best of intentions, was an affront to the gods. And as they all knew, the gods would have their revenge.
Alexander’s mourning for Hephaestion continued for weeks into the winter until everyone in the court realized they had to find a way to bring him out of his depression. Fortunately an opportunity for military action—the one thing guaranteed to appeal to the king—presented itself at this moment in the form of a rebellious tribe known as the Cossaeans who lived in the mountains southwest of Ecbatana. Like their neighbors the Uxians, whom Alexander had faced years before, these highland warriors had never submitted to the Persians but had demanded payment from the royal treasury for passage across their land. When approached by Macedonian envoys demanding their surrender, the Cossaeans refused. For Alexander, this was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Much to the relief of his companions, the king rose from his despair with a renewed spirit and determination to teach these mountain tribesmen a lesson. In the past the Cossaeans had retreated deep into the hills of their homeland when confronted by an army, only to reappear and renew their raids when the threat was past. But now Alexander, aided by Ptolemy, surrounded their lands and isolated their villages, then launched a series of devastating attacks against the Cossaeans throughout the snow-covered mountains for forty days. Alexander declared that those slain were offerings to the spirit of Hephaestion, just as Achilles had sacrificed Trojan youths to the dead Patroclus. The few who survived the Macedonian assaults were captured and enslaved, so that soon their leaders sued for peace. They agreed to become subjects of Alexander and submit to his authority thereafter.
As spring was beginning and the Zagros Mountains were blooming with wildflowers, Alexander at last began the march from Ecbatana to Babylon. Along the way envoys arrived from distant lands to offer their congratulations on his many conquests and to express their sincere hopes that he would form ties of friendship with them. At the very least, they wanted to gauge his intentions and prepare themselves for any conflict to come. There were ambassadors from Africa west of Cyrene bearing a crown of submission and Ethiopians from the lands south of Egypt. The Carthaginians also came, with more reason to worry than most. The tribes of Italy were there as well—Bruttians, Lucanians, and Etruscans—including envoys from Rome, according to some Greek sources, though later Roman records omitted any reference to homage they might have offered Alexander. The Celts sent ambassadors, just as they had done during the king’s first campaign along the Danube twelve long years before. Iberians arrived from distant Spain, as did Scythians from the lands to the north of the Black Sea. Some of these peoples Alexander had met before, but others were new to the Macedonians. The king welcomed them all with good cheer and warm assurances of friendship, along with promises of peace that could be broken later if he deemed it expedient.
As Alexander at last drew near to the walls of Babylon, he was met by a group of Chaldean priests, who begged him not to enter the gates of their city. They had received an oracle, they claimed, from the great god Bel-Marduk warning the king that he should avoid Babylon at all costs. Alexander respected the Chaldeans, indeed he had taken a party of them with him on his march to the East, but he was also suspicious of their motives. He knew from reports that his command to restore the temple of Bel-Marduk had been ignored during his trek to India and that the priests were quiet happy with this situation. The enormous amount of money set aside for the restoration still remained in the temple treasury, available for use and abuse by the Chaldeans. If the king entered Babylon and forced them to start construction, their riches would rapidly dwindle. At first Alexander tried to laugh off the prophesy, quoting a line from the Greek playwright Euripides that the best prophet is one who guesses well, but he was still a man of his times and superstitious enough to be cautious when it came even to questionable warnings from the gods. When the Chaldeans saw that their plan wasn’t working, they quickly changed tactics and urged the king at least not to enter the city facing the west and the setting sun, the universal symbol of death in the ancient world. This was a clever ploy to keep Alexander out of Babylon altogether as the priests knew their city was surrounded by a huge marsh, making entry from another direction difficult. The king therefore sent some of his men into the city while he led the rest around through the swamps to approach the town from the opposite side. If the Chaldeans thought they would keep Alexander out so easily, they were sadly mistaken. A few days later he walked through the gates of Babylon and took up residence at the royal palace.
But once inside the city, the ill omens from the gods only increased. When one of his friends was sacrificing on behalf of the king, the animal was discovered to ha
ve a malformed liver, always an ominous sign. One day ravens fought with one another above Alexander’s head and some fell dead at his feet. Then the largest and most handsome lion in his private zoo was attacked by a tame donkey and kicked to death. A few days later Alexander briefly left the city to sail along the river, guiding the lead boat himself after the pilot became lost. He was sailing past the flooded tombs of some ancient Assyrian kings when suddenly the wind snatched the cap from his head along with the crown he had jauntily placed on top of it. The diadem caught on a sturdy reed that grew out of an old tomb so that one of the sailors jumped in to rescue it. The man snatched the treasure from the plant, but found he couldn’t swim while holding it above the water. He therefore put the crown on his head, swam back to the boat, and handed it to the king. Alexander was grateful and gave him a rich reward, but he also ordered him punished for daring to place the diadem on his own head. Some sources say the man was flogged, while others say he was decapitated. Whatever the punishment, the king evidently saw the incident as a warning that he was in danger of losing his crown permanently.
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