He was steering his own trireme and, we can suppose, thoroughly enjoying himself. He wore a felt sun hat with the royal diadem, a cloth headband, attached to it. A sudden gust of wind blew it off. The hat itself fell in the water, but the diadem was carried away on the breeze and caught on some reeds near one of the ancient tombs.
For a symbol of royalty to be associated with a grave was a bad enough omen, but worse was to come. A helpful Phoenician sailor swam out to recover the diadem. Wanting to keep it dry, he put it on his head and brought it back to his ship. This was lèse-majesté at its worst; the seers ruled that the head that had worn the diadem could not be permitted to stay on its shoulders. So the king gave him one talent for his prompt action and then had the hapless man decapitated. Another source says that he was merely given a good flogging.
Not long afterward the king was personally supervising some troop allocations when another alarming incident took place. He felt thirsty and walked away from the dais where he was sitting to get a drink. Some “insignificant man” saw that the throne was unoccupied, walked through a guard of eunuchs, and sat down on it. This was sacrilege and the eunuchs were prevented by Persian custom from removing him. All they did was beat their breasts and faces as though some terrible disaster had struck. When Alexander was told, he had the man tortured on the rack, but all he would say was that the idea had come into his mind and he had acted on it. It was clear that he was acting alone. The seers again advised the death penalty, which was carried out.
As we have seen, Alexander was rationally devout and took omens with a pinch of salt. But this catalogue of portents began to unnerve him. According to Plutarch,
Alexander had become overwrought and terrified in his own mind, and now abandoned himself to superstition. He interpreted every strange or unusual occurrence, no matter how trivial, as a prodigy or a portent, with the result that the palace was filled with soothsayers, sacrificers, purifiers and prognosticators.
However, there was plenty of good news to lift the gloom. Army reinforcements arrived in large numbers. Brave Peucestas, who had been seriously wounded when fighting to save the king’s life at the Mallian town and was appointed satrap of Persis, arrived with an army of twenty thousand troops drawn from the local population, which were incorporated into the Companion infantry or phalanx, and a substantial number of warlike mountaineers. Mercenary forces also came from Caria and Lydia under their satraps’ command, and some cavalry recruits arrived from Macedonia.
Embassies from Greece presented themselves at court and were well received. During his invasion in 490, the Great King Xerxes looted the cities he captured, making off with many works of art. Alexander entrusted all these statues, images, and votive offerings into the envoys’ care, to be returned to their original owners.
In May, Alexander’s messenger to Siwah arrived after his long journey and announced the priests’ decision to allow Hephaestion a hero cult. Alexander put aside his mourning and celebrated with sacrifices and drinking parties. Happy days were here again.
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THEN TIME CAME TO A STOP. A slight indisposition led to a rising fever. The king took to his bed. For a fortnight of blinding Mesopotamian days and baking nights, he wavered between life and death. An endless line of soldiers walked past his prostrate form and took their leave. The end came on June 11.
The destroyer of the Achaemenids had himself been destroyed. Good riddance, thought many Hellenes. The Athenian politician Demades summed up the general mood. “Alexander dead? Out of the question. The stink of his corpse would have filled the whole world by now.” In surprising contrast, when the dowager queen, Sisygambis, Darius’s mother, heard the news, she went into mourning and refused food (and, we must assume, water). She died five days later.
A strange story soon began to spread: Alexander had not succumbed to natural causes as had appeared to be the case, but had been poisoned. The royal helmsman, Onesicritus, was the first to make this claim, but he was afraid of reprisals and declined to name the perpetrators. Nothing seems to have come of this at the time; if Plutarch is right, the rumor mill only began to grind five years later. A detailed narrative then emerged.
Two men were behind the assassination. The first was Antipater. His recall as regent of Macedonia and replacement by Craterus made him fear that he might be imprisoned for opposing Olympias, or might even be put to death if he obeyed the king and made his way to Babylon. At least, that was a rumor doing the rounds. The trouble was that Alexander had form. Antipater had not forgotten the murders of Parmenion and Cleitus in the king’s drunken rages, nor the execution, even if justified, of his son-in-law for treasonous communication with the enemy. He profoundly disapproved of the multicultural policy at court.
The second plotter was the greatest philosopher of the age, Aristotle, who had tutored Alexander in his teens, but now was an embittered opponent. The regent was a close friend and agreed to be the philosopher’s executor. Aristotle had not forgiven the king for the fall of Callisthenes; nor had Alexander forgiven Aristotle for recommending Callisthenes as his historian and public relations adviser in the first place. He suspected that Aristotle had been involved in some way in the conspiracy of the Royal Pages.
The two men agreed that it was time to terminate with extreme prejudice the world conqueror. Antipater’s sons, Cassander and Iolaus, were to do the deed.
The regent’s excuse for refusing to join the king that the Greek city-states were restive was false. His true reason was to save his career, and possibly his life.
Cassander, the son whom he sent in his place, was probably about thirty years old and a less than impressive specimen. He had suffered from poor health as a boy. Even when he was grown-up, his father forced him to sit on an upright chair at dinner as if he were still a child, instead of reclining on a couch as adults did. This was because he had failed to pass a Macedonian rite of passage by killing a wild boar without a hunting net.
He brought an important item in his baggage—namely, poison supplied by Aristotle, which
consisted of ice-cold water drawn from a certain cliff near Nonacris [near the river Styx, which leads down into the underworld], where it was gathered up like a thin dew and stored in an ass’s hoof. No other vessel could hold the liquid, which was said to be so cold and pungent that it would eat through any other substance.
Cassander handed the poison to his younger brother, Iolaus, who was a Royal Page and official wine-pourer for the king. Iolaus had a grudge against Alexander, who had hit him over the head with a stick for some mistake. He was the lover of Medius, with whom he plotted Alexander’s death and whose drinking party was to be the scene of the crime. The conspiracy included others in Alexander’s immediate entourage, and many of those at the party, including Leonnatus and the admiral Nearchus, recent recipient of a golden crown for his services, knew what was about to happen. The senior generals Eumenes, Perdiccas, Ptolemy, and a few other guests were kept in the dark.
Iolaus slipped the poison into the wine; as the king downed a beaker, he screamed. He was in agony and his skin was painful to the touch. He decided to make himself vomit and asked Iolaus for a feather. The Royal Page found one, but before bringing it to Alexander he dipped it in the remaining poison. The king doubled up with pain.
He realized that he was dying and decided to make a mysterious end—to vanish from the earth and, it might be supposed, ascend into heaven. He crawled to a door that opened onto the Euphrates, intending to drown himself in its waters. But his wife Rhoxane found him and he returned to his bed.
The king’s health gradually improved, but when he asked for a drink of water Iolaus brought him a poisoned cup. After draining it, he cried out again with pain. Death quickly supervened.
Meanwhile Cassander rode off to the mountains of Cilicia, where he would not be noticed and could wait undisturbed upon events. Some days later, after
hearing from Iolaus in Babylon, he sent a coded message to his father in Macedon that “the business is concluded.”
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HOW MUCH OF THIS account is true? Was Alexander poisoned? Was there a conspiracy to put an end to him? Or can we trust the account with which this book opened? The reader who has followed his career in these pages is in a strong position to judge the general likelihood of an assassination plot.
The history of the king’s campaigns shows how good he was to his men. He gave them frequent holidays, held athletic competitions, and staged arts festivals. He honored conspicuous bravery in the field with generous gifts. He paid much attention to supplies and his army seldom starved. Intensive deployment of scouts meant that the enemy delivered few surprises. Casualties were kept to a minimum.
Also, Alexander led from the front. He would never ask his soldiers to risk their lives without him risking his. His many scars were not simply evidence of an absurd valor, they were a means of forging loyalty.
The “mutinies’ in India and at Opis were, in effect, lovers’ quarrels. Once they were over, the affection and fundamental loyalty of the rank and file resumed.
Alexander’s senior officers also had little to complain about. They served a brilliant commander and had the satisfaction of taking part in victorious campaigns. They also acquired riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Best of all, the king’s habit of dividing his army into independent detachments meant that, within a clear strategic framework, commanders were often operationally independent. Job satisfaction must have been high.
Of course, there were complaints, as a rule privately expressed. Philotas and Cleitus were old-fashioned Macedonians who objected that their employer took too much of the credit for their victories. This was mostly barroom banter, although it could and did get out of hand and end in drunken disaster, as in the case of Cleitus.
In many ways, Alexander was a typical Macedonian king. Like Philip, he headed a boozy, rowdy court where noblemen spoke their minds freely to a monarch who was first among equals. Opposition grew among conservative Macedonians as Alexander took on the ceremonial formality and splendor of a Great King. However, an even-minded observer would understand that a Persianizing policy was inevitable. There were not enough experienced Macedonians capable of managing the vast Persian empire. In any event, few of them spoke the relevant languages. Without the cooperation of the old Persian elites the conquest would fail.
There were two serious conspiracies to assassinate Alexander, but they were amateur affairs organized by very young men. We know little about them, but they seem to have been powered by a combination of public and private motives.
Some modern scholars have detected bias in the ancient histories against Parmenion and his sons, Nicanor and Philotas. They speculate that Alexander wanted to replace his father’s men with his own and schemed patiently for many long years to find a way of destroying them. According to this theory, the Philotas crisis in 330 was a put-up job. It was not a plot against Alexander, but by him. The evidence for this is thin. Great weight is placed on the times the king regularly rejected Parmenion’s advice. True enough, but on other occasions his opinions were accepted and acted on—for example, the decision to delay the Battle of Gaugamela.
The fact is that for years the king placed the old general and his sons in crucial positions of command and that they rewarded him with sterling service. Had he wanted to eliminate them, he could surely have found a way whenever he wished.
In sum, the claim that a number of the king’s generals were party not simply to a drinking session but to his murder is altogether out of character. They had enjoyable and lucrative jobs. Why should they put them at risk? Nearchus, to cite just one of them, was an old friend of Alexander and used to discuss maritime matters with him at length. He was in charge of the armada that was due in a few days to invade Arabia. He had no cause to kill.
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AS FOR THE NARRATIVE of the assassination itself, it is infused with unlikelihood. Let us begin with Antipater. We know that he was shocked by Parmenion’s death, but he was an old hand at Macedonian politics and understood its violent realities; indeed, he had taken part in them. He had spent the last ten years as a more or less independent agent and will not have welcomed his recall, but the excuses he gives for sending his son to Babylon in his place were plausible and very probably true. Alexander had no real grounds for complaint against his regent and was chiefly concerned to distance him from Olympias. Arrian observes:
It could well be that Antipater’s recall was not intended as a demotion, but as a means of preventing the quarrel between those two turning nasty on both sides, beyond any reconciliation that even Alexander could effect.
Neither man had anything much to fear from the other.
As for Aristotle, he and the king did indeed fall out over the destruction of Callisthenes, and it is true that this doctor’s son knew something about poisons. Diogenes Laertius, the biographer, reports that he committed suicide in the year after Alexander’s death by drinking aconite. This lethal plant is known by many names—among them, wolfsbane and queen of poisons. It can kill in two to six hours and in a large dose almost instantaneously.
If Antipater had intended to murder the king, he might well have asked Aristotle for advice, although at this time he was running his philosophical school at the Lyceum in Athens and, on such a highly confidential matter, may not have been immediately available for consultation to the regent in Macedonia.
Of one thing we can be sure. Had the philosopher offered information on handy toxins, he would not have proposed a draft from the river Styx. There is no known liquid that remains ice cold and can be safely kept only in the hoof of a dead donkey.
Plutarch writes: “Nobody had any suspicion at the time that Alexander had been poisoned.” We remember Onesicritus’s halfhearted attempt to sound the alarm, but it took five years before the possibility of foul play was taken seriously. In all probability it was a political move against Antipater, mounted by whom else but Olympias, still raging against him. Whether she believed the charge of murder or made the story up herself, we cannot tell. But she acted with her usual fury. Iolaus the onetime cupbearer, whom the Athenians honored for his role in the assassination, had died in the meantime, of what cause we do not know, but the vengeful dowager overturned his tomb and put his brother Nicanor (not to be confused with Parmenion’s son of the same name) to the sword.
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ALEXANDER’S DECLINE AND DEATH lasted thirteen days, according to the lost document known as the Royal Journal (or Ephemerides), from which our two chief sources, Arrian and Plutarch, quote. Presumably the journal reported the king’s daily doings throughout his Asian campaign. It must have been the “memory” of the court and, one supposes, was necessary to ensure the smooth running of the king’s business. Its main author was the royal secretary Eumenes.
Our sources trust the Royal Journal and we have little choice but to follow suit. If it were an invention, contemporaries would have been sure to cry foul. Arrian and Plutarch quote selectively from a lost original and use their own words. There are some inconsistencies, perhaps due to carelessness or to errors of transmission in some intermediary text. Broadly speaking, though, we can accept the sequence of events as given.
The main point we take from the journal is the extraordinary length of time the king took to die. The ancients were familiar with poisons, but not those with a slow effect over days or weeks.
A large or fatal dose of strychnine administered in unmixed wine has been suggested, but its bitter taste would be detectable. Symptoms of ingestion include muscular convulsions within a quarter hour or half an hour, soon followed by unconsciousness and death. If repeated small doses are given over time, the victim develops a slightly raised but not feverish temperature, muscular rigidity, and excessive
sensitivity to light and sound. None of these is consistent with Alexander’s symptoms—a raging but intermittent fever, loss of speech, and a sharp pain after drinking.
Two further relevant factors must be taken into account. Alexander’s was the most public of dyings. The king was very seldom on his own. Every minute of the day, he was surrounded by Companions, officials, guards, and strapping young pages. He could have been stabbed or cut down with pluck and luck, but the assassin would have lived only a few seconds longer than his victim. More likely he would have been intercepted before reaching his target; and it would be next to impossible to administer poison regularly without being caught. Who would accept such a suicidal commission?
Also, Alexander had witnessed enough conspiracies in his lifetime to be wary of any unusual food or drink. If he had noticed something suspicious, he would have been the first to protest. He did not do so.
Plutarch wrote two thousand years ago that “most authorities consider that this tale of poisoning is pure invention.” We do not need to disagree with their judgment.
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THERE IS NOTHING TOTALLY certain in classical studies. Too much time has passed and too much evidence been lost. No investigation was held at the time, no postmortem. But we can say, on the balance of probability if not without a reasonable doubt, that the king was not poisoned.
So what did kill him?
Before identifying the direct cause, we must recognize that Alexander’s formidable constitution had been weakened by the many wounds he had sustained during years of fighting. The arrow that pierced his lung at the town of the Malli in India had very nearly killed him two years previously and it left a permanent legacy of pain. It was immediately followed by the impact of the Gedrosian disaster on his health. Since then, he had not been seriously campaigning. As usual when he had time on his hands, he spent much of it downing heroic quantities of wine.
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