Alexander the Great

by Philip Freeman

  But the most disturbing episode came one day when Alexander had returned to the city and was playing ball with his friends. Spring had arrived with a vengeance and the weather was unbearably hot, so the king had taken off his robes and laid them on the back of his nearby throne. When he returned from exercise, he saw a man sitting on his royal chair wearing his cloak and crown. The intruder seemed strangely dumbfounded and responded to questions only after a round of intense torture. His name was Dionysius and he hailed from the Greek city of Messenia, near Sparta. He said he was an escaped prisoner and had long been bound in chains, but a god had come and freed him, bidding him to put on the king’s attire and sit silently on the throne. As Alexander may have known, the episode bore an uncanny resemblance to a local Babylonian custom in which a condemned criminal acted as a substitute king to draw down the wrath of heaven on himself and spare the real king misfortune. Alexander was uncertain whether the incident was a stroke of good fortune or not, but he played his part and had the scapegoat prisoner executed, hoping that the sacrifice of this one man would satisfy the gods.

  As May turned to June, Alexander busied himself with plans for his upcoming expedition to Arabia. Hundreds of ships were given their final fittings and the crews drilled with races along the Euphrates River. Scouts reported that there was fresh water along the Arabian coast, as well as offshore islands along the Persian Gulf convenient for anchorage. It would be a grand expedition down the gulf and through the straits, then around the southern shore of the peninsula, seizing the lands of frankincense and myrrh, then up the Red Sea to Egypt. The king could not wait to begin.

  Alexander spent his days organizing the details of the voyage, but the nights were replete with banquets and drinking parties in true Macedonian style. One evening the king gave a feast for his admiral Nearchus, then was heading home to bed when he ran into his friend Medius from Thessaly, who invited him to a late soiree with a few companions. Alexander joined them till the wee hours, but was up early the next morning to perform the customary sacrifices. The next evening he was back at the house of Medius for a celebration in honor of Hercules. There he topped off the night by drinking a whole beaker of unmixed wine in a single gulp, after which he shrieked as if hit by a blow and was led back to his bed by his friends. The next morning he was suffering from a fever, though he still was scrupulous about the required sacrifices to the gods even though he had to be carried to the altar on a litter. He issued orders to the fleet concerning the departure for the Arabian expedition a few days hence and commanded the infantry to be ready a day before the sailing. He was then borne to the river and rowed across to a favorite garden to bathe and rest. The next day he was still incapacitated, but carried out the sacrifices and ate only sparingly. He told his officers to meet him the next day for a conference, but spent the whole night with a high fever. He rose the next morning to perform the sacrifices, then bathed and talked with Nearchus about the departure of the fleet. The following day he carried out his duties to the gods, though he was growing ever weaker. He still believed he would rise again soon to sail with his ships to Arabia, though his companions were now becoming deeply concerned. He was so stricken with fever that he took to resting in the cool bath house instead of his room at the palace. For the next few days he carried on his routine of sacrifices, military meetings, bathing, and resting, all while his generals began to gather around him.

  Word had spread to the army that the king was gravely ill. Some even suggested, as they had in India, that he had already died and his demise was being covered up by his senior officers. To put an end to these rumors, Alexander ordered the soldiers admitted to his presence to see for themselves that he was still alive, though by that point he was struggling even to speak. The men filed past his bed in silence and tears, each receiving a nod or at least a smile from their commander and king. No one could believe that the great Alexander, who had outwitted death on the battlefield at every turn, would die in his bed in Babylon. Some of his companions wanted to carry him to a nearby temple in hope that the gods would spare his life, but others thought it best not to move him. His fever raged on, the pain increased, and soon even Alexander—just short of his thirty-third birthday—knew that the end was near. He took off his royal signet ring and gave it to his friend Perdiccas so that he might act temporarily as regent, but the ultimate succession was unclear. His Bactrian bride Roxane was pregnant, he hoped with a boy, though the child would not be of age for many years to come even if the Macedonians would accept a half-barbarian ruler on the throne. The situation promised chaos for the empire unless the king made clear his wishes. At last, his companions approached his bedside and implored him to name his successor: To whom do you leave your kingdom?

  They leaned close to hear his words. With great effort Alexander answered in a whisper: To the strongest.

  With that, the king of the world closed his eyes and breathed his last.

  11

  TO THE ENDS

  OF THE EARTH

  IT SEEMS THAT THERE WAS NO NATION, NO CITY

  IN THOSE DAYS, NO PERSON IN ANY LAND THAT

  THE NAME OF ALEXANDER HAD NOT REACHED.

  —ARRIAN

  Even before the body of Alexander had grown cold, rumors began to circulate that the king had been murdered. Stories grew that Antipater had ordered the poisoning through the agency of his son Cassander, who was still in Babylon recovering from the beating he had received from Alexander. As Antipater was highly motivated to save his own life and as he had access to the king’s wine through his younger son, the royal cupbearer Iolaus, it was a plausible accusation to many. Some sources say the poison, perhaps strychnine, was smuggled into the palace in the hollowed hoof of a pack mule. The fact that the lover of Iolus was none other than Medius—who had invited Alexander to the fateful party in which he cried out in pain after drinking—made the charges more credible. Whether or not Aristotle, a friend of Antipater, was involved at a distance in the assassination of his former pupil continued to be debated in ancient times.

  As attractive as conspiracy theories are in any age, it is just as likely that Alexander died of natural causes. He may have suffered from malaria for years, at least since his collapse in the Cydnus River at Tarsus just before the battle of Issus. He had cheated death a dozen times since with wounds and illnesses that would have killed most men. The endless bouts with dysentery and especially the punctured lung he suffered in India at the city of the Malli would have weakened his resistance to disease. Add to this the sheer exhaustion of twelve long years of marching through swamps and over mountains along with the heavy drinking expected of any Macedonian king and it’s a wonder Alexander lived as long as he did. If malaria, a lung infection, or liver failure didn’t kill him, typhoid fever is another possibility, given the symptoms of abdominal pain and high fever during his final days.

  There is a sad and charming story that when Alexander realized he was dying, he secretly dragged himself from his sickbed out of the palace to throw himself into the Euphrates so that he might vanish from the world without a trace. He hoped it would strengthen his claim to be the son of a god if he disappeared mysteriously rather than died like any other man. But the story has it that his wife Roxane saw him at the last moment struggling toward the water and stopped him, prompting Alexander to complain that she was denying him the eternal fame he so desired. In any case, whether by poison or the infirmities of disease that claim most mortals, the king was dead and the living remained to mourn him.

  Macedonians and natives alike wept at the news of Alexander’s death, running through the streets in panic. Persian subjects shaved their heads, as was the custom on the Great King’s passing, while the mother of Darius reportedly starved herself to death as if she had lost her own son. The Macedonian soldiers quickly fell to fighting among themselves about whose faction they would support—Perdiccas, the ambitious ring bearer; Meleager, the infantry commander and conservative stalwart; or perhaps general Ptolemy, the childhood friend o
f the king. After much blood was spilled, the different leaders agreed to meet in peace to decide how to rule the empire. The soldiers then marked the death of the king with an ancient Macedonian custom of marching between the two halves of a disemboweled dog on the plain outside Babylon. At the subsequent meeting, it was agreed that Alexander’s mentally handicapped half brother Arrhidaeus, who was resident in Babylon, would ascend to the throne as King Philip III until such time as Roxane’s expected child, should it be a boy, would come of age and take his father’s place. No one took Arrhidaeus seriously as a ruler, viewing him only as a temporary and expendable symbol of the Macedonian royal dynasty. What the major players needed was time to consolidate their own positions in the part of the empire each desired for himself. Neither did the generals expect Roxane’s child to be anything more than a political pawn. Alexander’s illegitimate young son Hercules by his Persian mistress Barsine was not even worth considering as a possible heir.

  One outcome of the meeting was a division of the empire. Ptolemy received Egypt, while Seleucus, a friend of Perdiccas, would hold the bulk of Asia for the time being. Antipater and his son Cassander would retain Macedonia and Greece, and the king’s former bodyguard Lysimachus would take over Thrace. Alexander’s body would be embalmed and returned to Macedonia for a royal burial, though this plan was thwarted when Ptolemy hijacked the funeral procession and took the king’s remains to Egypt. There his tomb in Alexandria remained a favorite destination for Greek and Roman tourists, among them the emperor Augustus, until the early Christian era.

  Civil wars soon began in earnest when Perdiccas had Meleager murdered in the sanctuary of a temple where he had sought refuge. Many of Meleager’s followers were cast before the army’s elephants to be trampled. It was an inauspicious beginning to years of fighting in which each side sought only to strengthen itself, with little care for the fate of the millions under their rule. Of those who had known and served Alexander, few died peacefully in their beds. Roxane quickly poisoned Stateira, the daughter of Darius whom Alexander had married in Susa, along with her sister and threw the bodies of both women down a well, all with the approval of Perdiccas. The Bactrian queen’s own child turned out to be a boy and was named Alexander IV. Perdiccas championed both mother and child to further his own ends until he himself was killed in Egypt fighting Ptolemy. Roxane and the young prince fled to Macedonia and were welcomed by Olympias. But soon Cassander, who had taken over Macedonia after the death of his father, Antipater, had them murdered, thus ending the line of Alexander. Olympias continued to plot throughout the struggles of succession, killing many of the nobility of Macedonia and earning their undying hatred. When finally she was captured by Cassander, who had promised to spare her life, the soldiers he sent to slay her admired her dignity in her last moments and watched while she arranged her hair and clothes even as she bled to death from the wounds they had given her.

  The fate of most of the remaining friends and family of Alexander was equally violent. The king’s half bother Arrhidaeus was slain by a Thracian guard after he returned to Macedonia, reportedly under orders from Olympias. Barsine and Alexander’s surviving son Hercules were apparently poisoned at Pergamum in Asia Minor, where they had retired in a futile attempt to live a quiet and deliberately apolitical life. Aristotle was forced to flee from Athens in the wake of anti-Macedonian uprisings following the death of Alexander. Referring to Socrates, he claimed he didn’t want to give the Athenians a second chance to sin against philosophy. Instead he died in exile of a digestive disease. The orator Demosthenes, Alexander’s most vociferous foe in Greece, also escaped Athens after he was accused of bribery in the Harpalus affair and committed suicide on a small Aegean island, assassins sent by Antipater hot on his trail. Craterus, Alexander’s loyal lieutenant who had fought with such vigor during the eastern campaign, died in battle early in the wars when he was thrown from his horse. King Porus of India held on to his satrapy after the death of Alexander, only to be treacherously killed several years later by one of Alexander’s generals. One-eyed Antigonus, left behind in Asia Minor early in the campaign to deal with rebellious natives, turned his province into a private kingdom until he grew so fat he could no longer lead troops in battle. Seleucus, having rid himself of his friend Perdiccas, extended his personal rule over much of Alexander’s former empire, from the Aegean to the steppes of central Asia. The dynasty he established would continue for many years to come, until engulfed by the Parthians in the east and Rome in the west. Ptolemy likewise consolidated his control of Egypt and lived to write his memoirs of the great campaign with Alexander from the Danube to the Indus. His family passed on the throne of the pharaohs for generations until the death of his descendant Cleopatra, who killed herself with the bite of an asp and surrendered Egypt to Rome.

  The legacy of Alexander and the powerful influence of Greek culture that he initiated with his short-lived empire spread quickly over Asia, Africa, and Europe in the following centuries. It seems safe to say that without the Macedonian king and his conquests, the philosophy, art, and literature of ancient Greece that have so influenced our lives for more than two thousand years would instead have been only one of many voices in a chorus of ancient civilizations. Alexander’s plan to spread Greek culture across three continents was never anything more than a practical and limited means of military control over a diverse population. Like the Persians before him and the Romans after, he didn’t particularly care which language the natives spoke or which gods they worshiped as long as they followed his rules. The Hellenic customs he introduced into cities across his realm were largely for the benefit of his Macedonian and Greek colonists, who became the ruling citizens of their regions. He wanted his followers to feel at home whether they served him in Bactria or Babylon. Even the thousands of native youths he trained in the Greek language as part of his new officer corps were never meant to be cultural ambassadors to their people. But the successors of Alexander, especially the heirs of Seleucus, turned the spread of Greek civilization into a tool of sometimes ruthless political dominance, aided greatly by the members of the local nobility who saw that adopting Greek ways was the key to power, wealth, and prestige in the new Hellenistic age.

  In India, the influence of Greek culture spread even as direct political control by the Macedonians waned. The kingdoms of the Ganges valley fell under the sway of a powerful ruler named Chandragupta, who founded the Mauryan empire and extended his rule to the Indus River. Twenty years after Alexander had fought so hard to gain control over the area, Seleucus met Chandragupta and ceded sovereignty of his Indian possessions up to the Hindu Kush in exchange for five hundred war elephants to use against his enemies in the west. Seleucus sent an ambassador named Megasthenes to the Indian court who, like Herodotus before him, mixed firsthand observations with dubious local stories to produce the most extensive and influential account of India available to the ancient Mediterranean world.

  But even with the withdrawal of Seleucid power from the Indus valley, Greek culture and influence survived in the distant East for centuries. The great Buddhist king and grandson of Chandragupta, Ashoka, expanded the Mauryan empire over much of the subcontinent and set up inscriptions in Greek proclaiming his power. Under the influence of Hellenic artists, images of the Buddha appeared for the first time, dressed like the god Apollo in Greek clothing. The descendants of Macedonian and Greek soldiers continued to dwell in the many Alexandrias the king had established in the East. The largely male population of settlers married local women and created a vibrant hybrid culture. Archaeological excavations at Ai Khanum on the Oxus River have revealed a magnificent city with a Greek theater, a gymnasium, and a mint producing Greek-inscribed coins. In time the Mauryan empire lost control of the upper Indus valley to a series of Greco-Bactrian states ruled by Greek-speaking descendants of Alexander’s colonists. Rulers such as Demetrius I maintained contact with the Aegean world, but were much more at home among their mixed Greek and native courts in Bactria and Sogdiana. Even after
the rise of the Parthians in Persia severed relations between the Greco-Bactrians and the Mediterranean, the heirs of the original veterans and merchants flourished. The greatest of the Greek rulers of the East was Menander, born near Kabul, who conquered the Punjab and invaded the Ganges valley. He became a Buddhist in spite of his success at war and sponsored a fusion of Greek and Indian art and culture that would long survive the collapse of the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms two hundred years after the death of Alexander.

  In Persia, Alexander has long been remembered as both a hero and villain. In the medieval Shahnameh, Alexander—or Iskandar, as he came to be known in the Middle East—is a noble Iranian prince of the royal line, but is also vilified as the destroyer of Persian power. The slightly later Iskandarnameh portrays the king as an ideal ruler of Greek origin, a philosopher and scientist as well as a warrior, who marries Roxane, daughter of the Great King Darius, and takes the throne, then travels to China and journeys to Mecca. But to the Zoroastrians who still practice the old religion of the Persian kings, he is Alexander the accursed, who destroyed their holy books and soaked the earth in blood. The burning of Persepolis is not forgotten as they tend the sacred fire of Ahuramazda yet today. Even among Muslims in modern-day Iran, Alexander appears as a character in village parades along with the wicked scoundrels of history including Uncle Sam, while mothers threaten naughty children that Iskandar will get them if they misbehave.

  Throughout the Middle East, the legacy of Alexander endures. He appears in the Koran as Dhul-Qarnayn, literally “the two-horned one,” in reference to his image on ancient coins wearing the horns of his divine father Zeus-Ammon. In the words recorded by Mohammed, he was a philosopher-king “whom God made mighty in the land and gave the means to achieve all things.” The Greek learning Alexander introduced into the region survived well into Muslim times and exercised a particular influence on the intellectual history of Shiite Islam.