As we have seen, Cleomenes was much complained of by the Egyptian public, probably because he was corrupt. Alexander always took care to be well informed and now applied a metaphorical thumbscrew to guarantee the official’s good behavior. He added to his letter: “If I find the temples in Egypt and these shrines to Hephaestion in good order, I shall ignore your previous offenses and guarantee that any future offense, of whatever nature, will not meet with any disagreeable consequence at my hands.” Cleomenes understood the king’s meaning and we may be sure that he moved fast to obey his terrifying master.
The question of Hephaestion’s semidivine status turned, or returned, Alexander’s attention to the possibility of his own divinity. Since his visit to the oracle at Siwah, this was a topic that attracted his full attention. He saw himself as the son of Zeus Ammon, but the claim was self-contradictory, for he did not seriously disavow Philip. As pharaoh of Egypt, however, he was an incarnation in some sense of Horus and acted as an intermediary between the gods and mortals.
How literally did the king, or anyone else at court for that matter, take all this? A hostile witness describes his behavior at banquets.
Alexander used to wear even the sacred vestments at his banquets; and sometimes he would wear the purple robe, and slit sandals, and horns of Ammon, as if he had been the god; and sometimes he would imitate Artemis, whose dress he often wore while driving in his chariot; having on also a Persian robe, but displaying above his shoulders the bow and javelin of the goddess.
Apparently he also used to appear as Hermes, messenger of the gods, and Heracles with a lion’s skin and a club. If there is any truth in this account, it gives the impression of a costume party rather than a serious bid for godhood.
The witness continues:
Alexander also had the ground sprinkled with expensive perfume and sweet-smelling wine, and myrrh and other fragrant substances were burned in his honor, and everyone present remained respectfully silent out of terror, because he was impossible and bloodthirsty, and appeared to be un-balanced.
Yet again a traditionalist Hellene has placed the worst possible interpretation on Alexander’s sensible but unpopular policy of adopting the rituals of a Persian Great King. The growing formality at court does not prove that the king had lost his mind and been transformed into a mad tyrant.
However, the coins he issued, or that were issued posthumously, show the king with divine attributes. Decadrachms struck at the mint in Babylon have him crowned by Nike, the personification of victory, and brandishing a thunderbolt as if he were the father of the gods, Zeus. As we have seen, Apelles, the most celebrated artist of the day, showed the king with the divine thunderbolt in his painting for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and received a handsome payment for the commission. In the famous tetradrachms of Lysimachus, Alexander is wearing the horns of Ammon, which also feature in portraits of him (for example, in the “Alexander Sarcophagus,” a late-fourth-century-B.C. stone sarcophagus adorned with bas-relief carvings).
Coins express the propaganda of the day and are not necessarily evidence of intent; they neither request nor require their owners to worship a new deity. But it does appear that, with the passage of time, Alexander became increasingly serious when he claimed his divinity. En route from Ecbatana to Babylon for Hephaestion’s funeral, he was met on the way by embassies from Greece. Arrian reports (with a smile, one senses) that “the delegates wore ceremonial wreaths and offered Alexander golden crowns, to all appearances as if these were official pilgrimages to honor a god.” Word percolated through the Greek city-states that Alexander expected to be recognized, and indeed worshipped, as a god. Our information is fragmentary, but the king may have sent out an official letter of request. An Athenian orator hints, bitterly, at coercion:
The practices which even now we have to countenance are proof enough: sacrifices being made to men; images, altars, and temples carefully perfected in their honor, while those of the gods are neglected, and we ourselves are forced to honor as heroes the servants of these people.
The orator wisely spoke in general terms, but everyone knew that the only men receiving such cultic devotions were Alexander and the late Hephaestion.
The Hellenes were in no position to resist the pressure. In Athens it was proposed in the ecclesia to erect a statue of “Alexander the Invincible God.” Demades, the realist who had always got on well with Philip and his son, moved a decree conferring divine honors. The great opponent of the Macedonians, Demosthenes, conceded sarcastically that “Alexander might be the son of Zeus and Poseidon too if he wished.” A witty Spartan summed up the general attitude. “Alexander wants to be a god? Very well, let’s call him a god!”
As for the rest of Greece, there is little additional information, but we may assume similar honors were proposed and similar cynical remarks made.
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WHAT DID HIS DIVINITY mean to Alexander? Much of the data is missing, but we know enough to sketch the outline of an answer. He seems to have filled his mind with mutually exclusive concepts. On the one hand, he was sincerely religious, believed in the Olympian deities, and was certain that he was descended from Heracles. For him the war at Troy was a historical event. Achilles and Patroclus had once walked on earth. He was a punctilious celebrant of religious rites, slaughtered hecatombs of sacrificial beasts, and regularly consulted the soothsayers who accompanied him on campaign.
On the other hand, he was a subtle and ruthless manager of men. So, for example, the context strongly implies that his personal seer, Aristander, produced bad omens to order when the king needed an excuse to retreat from India. Alexander made it clear that if he was a god, he was neither invulnerable nor immortal like Zeus and Apollo. He could bleed and die like any of his soldiers.
Alexander’s success was truly astonishing, and even hostile contemporaries were profoundly, albeit unwillingly, impressed. His godhead was a memorable symbol which would express and promote his overwhelming power. When he let it be known, whether formally or informally, that the Greek city-states should establish his cult, this was less for religious than for political reasons. It would allow him to impose obedience more effectively than in his role as elected leader of the League of Corinth.
In this as in so many other matters, Alexander was following in his father’s footsteps. The Philippeum at Olympia and the carrying of his statue alongside those of the Olympians in the theater at Aegae show that Philip was already flirting with the idea that his kingship had a divine dimension.
Maybe Alexander did not altogether know what his being a god might mean. Did dressing up as Zeus or Artemis or his ancestor Heracles, if correctly reported, hint at a certain playfulness, a lack of complete commitment to the project of deification?
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HEPHAESTION WAS DEAD, but Alexander was still very much alive. He was in his early thirties and he intended to fill the years ahead with new and ambitious plans of conquest.
That was exactly what the Mediterranean world feared. On his way to Babylon, he was met by a multitude of embassies, eager to discover his intentions and to offer nervous congratulations. There were so many of them he had to arrange a schedule specifying the order in which he would see them. (He gave the highest priority to those who wanted to raise religious issues.)
The envoys came from every direction—from Ethiopia, from European Scythia, from the lands of the Celts and Iberians. The Libyans presented him with a crown as king of Asia. Envoys arrived from the Bruttians, Lucanians, and Etruscans, all Italian peoples. Delegates from the North African state of Carthage, the greatest maritime power of the age, put in an appearance; they were right to be apprehensive, for they had supported their mother city of Tyre during the siege and some of their citizens had been captured when the city fell. As ever, Alexander never forgot or forgave a disservice.
Intriguingly, some classical historians men
tion emissaries from the then little known city of Rome, which at the time was a middling Italian state embroiled with the fierce mountaineering Samnites. Most of these historians, writing after Rome had acquired an empire even larger than Alexander’s, added all kinds of rhetorical and anachronistic flourishes. However, the king’s contemporary Cleitarchus mentioned the visit without comment, so it is very probably historical.
Arrian notes that the arrival of these embassies marked the moment “when Alexander himself and those around him fully realized that he was indeed master of every land and every sea.”
Of course, he was an explorer as well as a general. He seems to have envisaged a circumnavigation of Africa. He also sent a Greek officer with a party of shipwrights to the Caspian Sea. They were to build a flotilla and sail on a voyage of discovery. Their task was to establish whether the Caspian was linked to the Black Sea and whether one or both were inlets of the great river Ocean, which surrounded all land on earth.
The king’s next important project, an invasion of Arabia, was imminent. Preparations for it had been made well in advance. His purpose was not conquest for its own sake, but rather the establishment of a secure trade route from India to Egypt. For this he would need to vanquish the Arabians, not to expropriate the entire peninsula but only to guarantee control of the coastline and offshore islands. He would govern existing ports and found new ones. Eventually there would be a chain of trading posts from the Indus Delta to the Red Sea.
Scouts were sent out to assess conditions and measure distances before launching the campaign. Three ships left on separate voyages of exploration, one of which sailed a good way up the Red Sea before returning to base. Nearchus also organized a reconnaissance of the immediate coastal areas. It transpired that Arabia was prosperous and was well endowed with many kinds of spice. The coastline was very long, with fine natural harbors and suitable locations for new cities.
A huge array of warships was gathering at Babylon. Nearchus’s fleet was complemented by a flotilla from Phoenicia—two quinqueremes, three quadriremes, twelve triremes, and some thirty triaconters. They were transported in sections from the Mediterranean to Thapsacus on the Euphrates and reassembled. They then sailed down the river to join the armada. Meanwhile, a harbor and dockyards were constructed at Babylon large enough to house at anchorage one thousand warships.
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IF THE ANXIOUS EMBASSIES had known what was in Alexander’s mind, they would have found their fears amply justified. Alexander set out his strategy on paper; it had two related parts—conquest of the western Mediterranean and exploration.
A war with Carthage was envisaged, for the king had indeed not forgiven the city for the moral encouragement it gave Tyre. With this in mind he intended to build a thousand warships, all of them larger than triremes. They were to be made in the dockyards of Phoenicia, Syria, Cilicia, and Cyprus.
The defeat of Carthage would be only one element in a more ambitious plan to bring the entire coastline of northern Africa and Sicily inside his empire. As with the Persian Gulf and Arabia, economic development and international trade were the chief priorities. A great highway was to be constructed from Egypt to the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), which would be punctuated at suitable intervals with ports and shipyards. It is said that Alexander also had plans for Iberia (the Spanish peninsula), although his geographical knowledge of it must have been sketchy at best.
The king also intended to erect six colossal, and colossally expensive, temples—on the sacred island of Delos, the birthplace of the god Apollo; at the world-famous oracle at Delphi; at the oracle at Dodona, second only to Delphi; dedicated to Zeus at Dium in Macedonia; to Artemis Tauropolos (Huntress of Bulls) at Amphipolis, a city in Thrace under Macedonian rule; and finally to Athena at Cyrnos in Macedonia, who was also to be honored with a shrine at Troy.
As a reminder that whatever his relation to Zeus Ammon, he was still deeply indebted to his natural father, Philip, Alexander would build him a tomb that would rival the Great Pyramid at Giza.
Most interestingly, the king intended to build on his policy of ethnic integration. Diodorus writes that he would “establish cities and to transplant populations from Asia to Europe and in the opposite direction from Europe to Asia, in order to bring the largest continents to common unity and to friendly kinship by means of intermarriages and family ties.”
In the spring of 323, Alexander crossed the Tigris and approached Babylon, which he appears to have chosen as his permanent administrative base. He was met by some Chaldean seers, doubtless the astronomers in the city who (as we have seen) recorded movements in the heavens and from these measurements provided the governing authority with interpretations and predictions.
They advised the king to halt his march, for entry into the city would be “dangerous for him.” At the time of the Battle of Gaugamela the astronomers had already offered a prophecy that Alexander would “exercise kingship for eight years.” Because Callisthenes had been given access to these records, it is possible that Alexander saw them. If he had, he will have known that the eight years allotted to him were nearly up.
However, he politely turned away the seers with a quotation from Euripides: “The best of prophets is the one whose guess comes good.” This admirable summation of the rationalist’s opinion of clairvoyance suggests that Alexander had not sat at Aristotle’s feet for nothing.
The seers persevered. “At least, your majesty, avoid the west and enter from the east.” The king politely complied, only to find that the eastern side of Babylon was impassable by the army because of marshes and pools of standing water.
He suspected that the Chaldeans’ motives were self-serving. For during his first visit to Babylon after Gaugamela, the king had promised to rebuild the Esagila, a vast ziggurat dedicated to Babylon’s divine patron, Marduk. In the intervening years, nothing had been done. Now was the time for action, and orders were given to clear the site of a great pile of rubble and bricks. The temple priests and administrators received an annual income from an endowment to defray the cost of running the temple and conducting sacrifices, and since its demolition they had had nothing on which to spend this revenue—except themselves. If Alexander could be dissuaded from settling in the city, there was a good chance the rebuilding scheme could be postponed again and their emoluments would remain untouched.
At about this time one of the king’s Companions, Apollodorus, a Macedonian from Amphipolis, became anxious about his future. He was the commanding officer of the Babylon garrison and had watched with rising alarm the recent cull of the satraps. Was he next on the list for investigation and punishment? He wrote to his brother, Peithagoras, a seer who also lived in Babylon and practiced divination on the internal organs of sacrificial victims. He asked him to predict if he was in any danger. Peithagoras replied asking who was posing the threat and Apollodorus wrote back naming Hephaestion and Alexander.
So Peithagoras conducted a sacrifice to assess any threat from Hephaestion. The animal’s liver did not have a lobe, so he assured his brother that there was nothing to fear from that direction. Hephaestion would soon be out of his way. As his letter arrived the day before the chiliarch’s death, the ritual of divination had hardly been necessary to forecast a fatal outcome of his illness. Then the seer sacrificed concerning Alexander, and the results were the same. He sent the bad news to his brother.
There is little more dangerous than to write an autocrat’s horoscope or to speculate on the date of his death. It may be seen as verging on an assassination plot and is often a capital offense. But Apollodorus trusted his king and immediately passed on to him the contents of his brother’s letter.
Alexander thanked Apollodorus and once back in Babylon interviewed Peithagoras. What did the absence of a lobe signify? he asked. “Something very serious,” came the reply. So far from being angry, the king was grateful to be told the unvarnished truth.
These particular lucky guesses have been remembered because of their aftermath, and it is not necessary to suppose that they were planted later, when what they “foresaw” had actually taken place.
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ALEXANDER IGNORED THE PROPHETS of doom and entered Babylon from the west, where he was briefed on the state of readiness of both the fleet and the army for the Arabian expedition.
While work proceeded, the king kept himself busy by sailing down the Euphrates, where he improved the river’s drainage system. During seasons of flood, a canal diverted excess water to marshes and lakes. When the level was low, sluices were closed to shut off the canal. Because the soil was a soft, muddy clay this was a very difficult task. Three and a half miles downstream, the king noticed that the soil was hard and stony. He had a cutting dug there, which joined the canal and made it much easier to block the outlet and prevent leakages.
Having entered and then left Babylon without incident, Alexander believed he had evaded whatever grisly fate the Chaldeans had had in mind for him. Nevertheless, now that he was back from his river trip, he decided, obediently, to try again to return to the city from its eastern side. He sailed through a swamp, where lay centuries-old tombs of Assyrian kings. Some of the fleet got lost in narrow channels and the king sent them a guide to bring them back to the main waterway.
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