The Nature of Alexander

by Mary Renault

  Ever since Hephaestion died and he hanged the doctor, it cannot have been far from Alexander’s mind that Achilles had not long outlived Patroclus. Immortal Thetis, reading the fate of her mortal son, had warned him that if he avenged his friend his own death came next; he had paid the blood debt, and its price. But only a part of Alexander’s mind lived with Homeric parallels. Swift-footed Achilles, a poet’s great creation, had not himself ever created anything. He had not been a king, an explorer, a builder of cities or of peoples. Alexander looked westward, and planned for his next few years.

  Roxane had come to Babylon, obviously by the easy Royal Road from Ecbatana, for she cannot have gone roughing it in the winter war. She was pregnant. Odd, and perhaps very significant, is the absence of any comment from Alexander, any known word about his plans if the child were male. And here a look at the map suggests an important possibility. He had “rested his men” after the campaign; and the easy route back to Babylon would be by way of Susa. Here were installed Barsine-Stateira, the young Drypetis (perhaps only since Hephaestion’s death), and Sisygambis, whose influence had always been so great. If he passed through, he must have visited them; and he may then have decided that his heir should be of royal Persian blood. It is possible that at the time of his death, Darius’ daughter was some months pregnant. This would make Roxane’s motive for her murder much more pressing than mere revenge.

  Babylon was geographically central to Alexander’s empire; he intended it for the capital. Soon after he was gone it would sink into provinciality; by the first century it was in ruins. He had created in Alexandria the true centre of the Hellenistic world. But the Babylon of his day retained the traditions of royal pomp which Persia had inherited from Assyria. He half-Hellenized and enhanced it. His state pavilion was set up in the “paradise”; around him on couches with silver feet (probably the ones from the Susa wedding) sat his chief officers and friends. Near his throne stood the perfumed incense burners, ancient protection of Persian kings from the almost universal human stink (the courtier addressing Darius the Great on the Persepolis relief is holding up his hand to ward off his breath from the royal face). The beloved Bagoas now took his doubtless exalted place in a whole hierarchy of palace eunuchs, many of whom must have held office since Ochus’ reign. Here was the royal harem, which they had probably taken upon themselves to replenish with youthful beauty of either or neither sex.

  To the state pavilion came the sacred embassies from Greece, to acknowledge the son of Ammon. Their tributes were mainly the exquisite golden crowns of which a few lesser examples have survived to hint at the best; wreaths of wheat or barley ears, berried olive sprays, flowers, wrought with the delicacy of nature. Here too, at a time not exactly known, came Antipater’s son Cassander as his father’s envoy.

  He was a man in his prime, very able, and with no aversion to war; yet Alexander when setting out for Asia had left behind his Regent’s eldest son. Since Antipater was no invalid needing support, a long-standing antipathy seems the only explanation. Indeed, the unsuitability of Cassander for his mission made his father’s motive in sending him dubious to the ancient world, which suspected his real task of having been more sinister. But Antipater had no one else to send, his two other sons being already with Alexander; one, Iollas, serving as his cupbearer. Ten years had passed and boyhood quarrels might have been forgotten.

  Ten years had passed, for Cassander, in Macedon; excluded from the great adventure with its resplendent prizes; fighting the Spartans in a war which comparison had made to seem provincial; watching Olympias’ constant intrigues against his father, whose policies had just been undermined by the Exiles’ Decree. Then had come the shattering blow of his replacement and summons to court; to men already resentful and uneasy, a move of implicit threat. Neither father nor son had seen Alexander in a decade; both had contacts with the Lyceum to which the dead Callisthenes had belonged. Now, in the exotic magnificence of Babylon, Cassander saw the men who had been boys when he was a boy seated in state among the incense burners as generals and satraps; and enthroned in gold the precocious lad he had hated and envied in old days at Pella, a world ruler, a god.

  Alexander for his part found Cassander no more attractive than before. Their exchanges became hostile almost at once. That Cassander jeered at a Persian doing the proskynesis, and that Alexander banged his head against the wall, is probably a transferred anecdote, but scarcely looks far-fetched. Long after Alexander’s death, says Plutarch, the sudden sight of his statue at Delphi threw Cassander into a cold sweat. Later he killed Olympias, Roxane and her son; that he would have liked to kill Alexander is beyond question; naturally enough he is Plutarch’s favourite suspect. Even now, in the teeth of the medical evidence, he cannot be acquitted without reluctance.

  With no intention of removing the trusty Craterus from his new appointment, Alexander had small time for Cassander anyway; his own concerns were too large. His westward movement was about to start. Its first phase would be a coastwise exploration of the unknown Arabian Peninsula, in search of a navigable route to Egypt. The Egyptian end of the Red Sea he knew about already; also about Darius the Great’s canal from near Suez into the Nile, which only needed clearing to let a navy through. Among the papers said to have been found after his death was a plan for the exploration of the North African coast and construction of a road as far as the Strait of Gibraltar. His next objective would probably have been Sicily, a land then in vulnerable fission; its history had been among the books sent him by Harpalus; it would have made a good springboard for Italy. As the embassies had shown, his reputation had already half-won his future campaigns. The Carthaginians and the Romans would have given him hard work; if he lived through that, there was nothing much to stop him from getting to Britain.

  The harbour of Babylon was being enlarged, and a new fleet built there; the indomitable Nearchus was ready to command it; Peucestas was training a loyal and disciplined Persian army; an army of young Macedonians was due to come out with Antipater. The adventure would start with a march of about three hundred miles from Babylon to the mouth of the Euphrates. Here they would rendezvous with the fleet, and turn southward, Alexander making the supporting march by land. The narrowness of the Gulf was already known; this time, if the coast should turn out desert, supplies could reach them by sea. The formidable southern and Red Sea coasts were terra incognita; far further from help than Makran, they might have involved him in appalling disasters, though he had probably learned by now when to turn back.

  Arrian comments that he was insatiable of conquest. True as this is, his whole career shows that for him power was not an end but a tool. He longed to discover, and what he found to shape creatively. The romantic love of personal heroism, which shortened his life, was also the spell which caused his men to follow him, and is inseparable from his destiny.

  But all these great plans fell into the background when Deinocrates, the artist commissioned to design Hephaestion’s pyre, dismissed his swarming workmen and announced that it stood complete. All was ready for what still remains the most spectacular funeral known to history. Alexander’s own is no exception; his body was too sacred a relic, too great a political status symbol, to be destroyed. Patroclus was to go in the archaic way of heroes; but accompanied by a holocaust of Babylonian riches and Hellenistic art.

  That so grandiose a construction was designed for burning, and built in the available time, has attracted doubt only in our century which has seen the death of handcraft. It could have been achieved, if not with ease, certainly with success, at all those courts of sixteenth-century Europe whose huge triumphal spectacles—contests in royal splendour—can still be studied in their architects’ detailed drawings. All were created for occasions as ephemeral as this one. Alexander could call upon infinitely greater resources.

  The form was Babylonian, a stepped pyramid or ziggurat; the art was Greek. It stood some two hundred feet high, upon a platform a furlong square, set into the vast Babylonian outer wall. The lowest ti
er was of combustible palmwood columns, left open for fuel and updraught. Then the carvings began in ascending, narrowing tiers; ship prows bearing armed figures, with red felt banners hanging between to be lifted by the rising heat; then twenty-foot wreathed torches supporting eagles; then a hunting scene; then a battle of centaurs; then alternating bulls and lions; then trophies of arms; at the top, the woman-headed birds the Greeks called sirens, hollowed behind so that, before the burning, hidden singers could give them voices to praise the dead. No apex is described; this must have been the body on its bier. The use of quick-burning softwood would much hasten the task of the hundreds of craftsmen and their army of assistant slaves. Parts were gilded; the rest would have been painted, mainly in crimson and blue. For weeks, as the tiers rose, it must have drawn swarms of sightseers; one of whom, like a modern tourist taking snapshots, must have sketched or written the detailed description used by Diodorus. Alexander’s plans purposed a permanent memorial, perhaps on the same site; whatever its form, the work not of weeks but years.

  This, it might seem, was the one occasion on which he used his almost limitless power in the cause of pure self-indulgence. But for the modern sceptic one factor has disappeared: the continued presence of Hephaestion himself, wandering as Patroclus did while he awaited the fire’s release; knowing of the plea for his divinity which would rescue him from some separating, inferior station in the land of the dead; understanding—had he not always understood?—the tokens of devotion and offerings of remorse.

  The site of the pyre had been covered with baked tiles, to preserve the ancient Babylonian brickwork, mortared with bitumen, from the fierce heat. For the men from the west, the stupendous spectacle of the blaze must have been the memory of a lifetime; and Alexander’s other tribute, a quiet and solemn little ceremony, would largely have passed them by. But for the Babylonians, it may have been more startling than the other. He ordered that during the day of the funeral the sacred fires in the temples should be extinguished. It was the logical expression of what he had said to Sisygambis years before: “He too is Alexander.” Custom reserved this rite for the death of the Great King.

  Alexander plunged back immediately into action. He looked forward, indeed, for as long as he had breath to tell his mind. Even the intention of the funeral had been concerned with Hephaestion’s present and future fame on earth, and his enduring life in Elysium.

  All this time, the new fleet had been training on the Euphrates. Himself intensely competitive, Alexander seems to have been adept in stimulating among his men keen rivalry without ill feeling; the contests with which he now enlivened the work, turning exercises into races with trophies to be won, were very popular. He was busy too with the reorganization of the army. His racial fusions were starting to work more smoothly. Peucestas had arrived with his high-grade Persian troops; promptly, and it seems with no opposition, Alexander began assigning them to units under a mixed officer corps of Persians and Macedonians. Troops from the satrapies of Asia Minor were pouring in.

  The Persian Gulf expedition was almost ready to start. Today it can be safely assumed that uninhabited land is uninhabitable; there was then plenty of spare room, and on his coastal march he planned to make harbours and found colonies. His North African scheme did not, of course, depend on an Arabian sea route; if this search had to be abandoned, he could simply have started his march from Egypt. Once more exploration and pioneering were paramount in his mind.

  Nothing is so wise after the event as legend. But it seems that several, at least, of Alexander’s death omens were recognized as sinister at the time. It has been noted that Aristobulus had the testimony of the diviner at first hand. Another portent was the occupation of the throne, during the King’s brief absence, by some man of obscure condition who seems to have been deranged; he had been under arrest for some unknown offence, but had got away and wandered into the throne room, while everyone’s attention was relaxed, Alexander and his officers having taken a refreshment break elsewhere. His first warning of the event was the distraught wailing of the court eunuchs—Bagoas no doubt among them—who had seen the dreadful augury but “because of some Persian custom” could not remove the man; perhaps their incomplete manhood would have made the omen worse. Long before he conquered Persia, Alexander had known that to sit on the Great King’s throne was a capital offence; he had said so in joke to the frost-numbed soldier he had been warming in his chair. Now the seers told him it was something worse than disrespect, a symbol of disaster. The man was tortured, to learn if he was the instrument of a plot; the poor wretch could only say that he had felt like sitting there, he knew not why. This made the bad luck more threatening, and to avert it he was killed; probably a kinder fate than the lot of a madman in those days.

  It has been suggested that, because of previous bad omens, some Persian well-wishers had sent the man, an expendable criminal, to act as a royal scapegoat (as the disingenuous Bessus had proposed to stand in for Darius); and that Alexander had him killed in error, instead of letting him carry the bad luck away. But there seems no reason why this prophylactic measure on his behalf should not have been discussed with Alexander beforehand and the right procedure explained. It would appear that the incident was one of those portents, the product of genuine chance, which in the ancient world carried the greatest weight.

  Nearer to the mark, in a realistic sense, was a sign less forcible to those who saw it; for us it has the force of being connected with the likeliest actual cause of Alexander’s death.

  Among the countless activities which make it incredible he could have found time for the dissipations alleged in Athens, he was concerned for the farmers on the land downstream from Babylon. They got poor irrigation, because the Euphrates was inclined to drain uselessly away from them into bogs and lakes. He took a flotilla and sailed down that way with his engineers to see what could be done. A practical system, which could be adjusted to the flow, was worked out; while he was about it he saw a good site for a town, and arranged to found one. Then he sailed back towards Babylon by way of the floodlands. Their channels were winding and complex; some of the ships were temporarily lost in them; over the years they had invaded the ancient burial grounds of the Assyrian kings, who had ruled there before the conquests of Cyrus the Great.

  Alexander, who seems always to have enjoyed messing about in boats, had taken the tiller of his own ship, then under sail in a bit of wind. He was wearing the petasos, or Greek sun hat, with a hatband in the royal colours, purple and white. The wind caught the hat, whirled the band off, and tangled it into a clump of rushes beside a tomb. Hindsight remembered the tomb as ominous; the chief concern at the time was the loss of the royal diadem, the symbolic mitra. A ready seaman swam over and retrieved it; then, to keep it dry going back, tied it unthinkingly around his head. This was agreed by the seers to be not only a shocking solecism but a dire omen. He was beaten for it; but Alexander, typically thinking that his initiative should be recognized as well as his fault, gave him a talent of silver. (Some unnamed sources had him beheaded; but Aristobulus the engineer, who must have been on the expedition, is here to be believed.) None of the ancient writers recognized, even by hindsight, the more significant fact that into these swamps and channels must have drained the entire sewage effluent of densely populated Babylon.

  The authenticity of the Royal Journal, which gives the daily course of Alexander’s last illness, has been much debated. Some scholars point out that it is improbably frank for a court document; others suggest that it was expanded later, to refute the rumours that he had died by poison. So indeed it does; and it is hard to believe the whole account is not genuine, seeing that the case history it describes is so straightforward as to be almost classic, with a consistency far beyond the medical knowledge of the time to invent

  Whether it would have made any difference if he had taken care of himself at the outset is anybody’s guess; as are the reasons why he did not. Certainly his conscious mind was not seeking death. He had conceived enough
new plans to have filled a normal life span. We are here on psychosomatic ground where we know, essentially, no more than did Pythagoras, if as much. Alexander’s whole life story shows that his sense of his own being was often mysterious even to himself. But it had a power he felt like a force of nature. Something more basic than vanity, something of which vanity was no more than a side effect, had brought Ammon’s oracle home to him with recognition. He had grown beyond, but never out of, Homer; and a central part of him had been Achilles ever since he had sat on old Lysimachus’ knee. Patroclus had died; as far as vengeance could reach, he had been avenged; the terms of Achilles’ death fate had been fulfilled. While still a boy, Alexander must have known by heart the words of the ghost returning as a dream:

  And I call upon you in sorrow, give me your hand; no longer

  shall I come back from death, once you give me my rite of burning.

  No longer shall you and I, alive, sit apart from our other

  beloved companions and make our plans, since the bitter destiny

  that was given me when I was born has opened its jaws to take me.

  And you, Achilleus, like the gods, have your own destiny …

  The rite of burning was over. From such a furnace no pinch of mortal dust can have been recovered; much is said of Hephaestion’s monuments, nothing of his tomb. Now Alexander was in a state of constant movement; by day organizing a fleet and an army, giving ceremonious audiences in the pavilion of the silver couches; at night, plunging into the distractions of the symposium or the banquet, the only way of unwinding his tensions he had ever known. If he was ready to die, his intellect had not acknowledged it. But his instincts were always powerful, often strikingly perceptive. For a decade and more his body had been cruelly overloaded; his mind for much longer, probably most of his life. While his mind pondered the omens of a throne or a purple ribbon, his instincts may have been wiser; a message may have reached them that it was his mind which could wear out first.