Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Bodyguards were not the only intimates. Ever since his childhood Alexander had been well disposed to Greeks from the outside world and enough of this earliest circle still lived to share the hopes and troubles of the day. Nearchus was safely and happily at court, a friend for life; the bilingual Laomedon, whose even dearer brother Erigyius had been buried in state six years before, was available to reminisce on all they had been through in the past decades. Eumenes, the Greek secretary, had first served Philip, then earned Alexander's closest confidence: his wiles had long worked in private and aroused both jealousies and firm allegiance, until his influence caused him to clash pettily and constantly with Hephaistion. Others of Philip's Greeks were loved for less menacing talents. Thettalus the tragic actor had always been a favourite of Alexander, a lifelong friendship which his prizes on the Athenian stage had done nothing to cool. He was still with the king at Opis, ready for a talk about Euripides or a recitation after dinner. The philosopher Anaxarchus offered civilized companionship and the Greek engineers could always be questioned on their new machines of war. Architects and artists, musicians and poets of all kinds were keen for friendly patronage, while the Greek doctors and seers could claim high rank by their essential skills. Aristander the prophet was loved and alive, Philip the doctor and his associates still worked on, imperative friends for a king in a country of sicknesses and poisons. Pages and ball-boys were favoured, if more capriciously; Chares the Greek master of ceremonies was as appreciative as his high position demanded, while Greek aristocrats from Thessaly were always ready for a drink or a game of dice, and had prospered accordingly. Among Greeks alone, even if his officers had deserted him, the king had no cause to feel bereft of friends.

  Officially, Alexander would dine among sixty or seventy Companions every day, and here, too, there were friends who deserved their courtesy title. The regiments were in impressively safe hands, especially now that eight of their oldest commanders had set out for Macedonia: men like Seleucus, future king of Asia, or Alcctas, brother of Perdiccas, sympathized with the plan of sharing their status with chosen Iranian nobles. They were easy to like for their opinions, while the Iranians themselves were a fresh source of conviviality, not only the favoured Bagoas, but also Roxane's family, the sons of Mazaeus and Darius's own brother, still a Companion: Darius's mother Sisygambis held Alexander in specially high regard. The 10,000 veterans had been replaced by 10,000 Iranian Immortal Guards from Susa, a thousand of whom served in their glorious embroidery beside the most intimate corps of the Macedonian Shield Bearers as a new Guard of Honour outside the king's tent. Harpalus, maybe, had let his friend Alexander down, but what with his new Iranian attendants and old Macedonian intimates, not to mention the copious concubines of the royal harem, three oriental wives, Bagoas and a mistress, it was not a lonely Alexander who reflected on his treasurer's brusque desertion. He lived among three groups of friends, Greek, Macedonian and oriental, where his worry was the jealousies and incompatibility of a varied company. Men who love a powerful or popular man do not therefore love each other, and it is no surprise that Craterus, for example, hated Hephaistion, Hephaistion hated Eumenes and Eumenes hated the leader of the Shield Bearers. Alexander, at the centre, did not spare himself in their interest. He had shown he would weep when taking his leave of veteran friends; now, he had more money than any man in the world and he was commendably willing to spend it. Emotionally and financially generous, he had the qualities to fete his court, never more so than with the desert behind him. In return, they gave him devotion and except for but Hephaistion had caught a fever and retired to bed; the games continued without him, and his doctor confined him to his room and put him on a strict diet. As it did not seem too serious, the doctor left to attend the theatre; equally untroubled, Hephaistion ignored his orders, ate a boiled chicken and washed it down with a flagon of wine. Disobedience aggravated the fever, perhaps because it had become typhoid and reacted to any sudden intake of food; the doctor returned to find his patient critical and for seven more days the illness showed no sign of abating. The games went on, however much Alexander worried; there were concerts and wrestling matches, but on the eighth day, when the crowds were watching the boys' races in the stadium, news arrived to the royal seats that Hephaistion had suffered a grave relapse. Alexander hurried to his bedside, but by the time he arrived it was too late. His Hephaistion had died without him, and it was on this cruel note that Alexander broke down for the second, and most serious, time in his life.

  His grief was as uncontrolled as the rumours of it, the like of which had not been heard since the hours after Cleitus's murder; some said he lay day and night on the body, refusing to be torn away; others that he hanged the doctor for negligence and ordered a local temple to the god of healing to be destroyed in mourning. Certainly, he refused to eat or drink for three days after the event, whereupon envoys were sent to Amnion's distant oracle at Siwah to ask if it was proper to worship the dead man as a hero. At this moment of tragedy, the king was turning once more to his personal comforters, for it was said, probably truly, that he cut his own hair in Hephaistion's memory and clipped off the tails and manes of the horses in camp. The ritual has a Persian precedent but more tellingly, it also has a parallel in Homer's Greece: in the Iliad, Achilles had shorn his horses in honour of his dead and beloved Patroclus, and as Hephaistion had long been recognized as the new Patroculus to Alexander's Achilles, it is entirely appropriate that first Ammon, then Homer, came to the surface of Alexander's sorrow.

  In his wild lamentation, Alexander was to show how much he minded about the one sure relationship of his life. For a week or more, he was in no state to take a decision; Bagoas, Roxane and the comforts of the Bodyguards meant nothing to him, and preparations for the funeral were left to be finalized at Amnion's bidding. The courtiers could only wait and suggest that Hephaistion needed a local memorial; it was a fortnight before Alexander had recovered enough to sanction it and decree that like other fallen Companions, Hephaistion should be honoured with a large stone carving of a 1 ion: it still stands to this day, the Lion of Hamadan, more or less where Alexander ordered. Lion monuments were the one

  Macedonian legacy to art, extending out to India from a kingdom where lions still abounded; centuries later, when Hephaistion had long been forgotten, the ladies of Hamadan would smear the nose of their lion with jam, hoping for children and easy childbirth. Hephaistion had ended his fame as a symbol of fertility.

  There was no such perspective to comfort Alexander. He was a distraught man, stripped of all externals: he felt the loss of his love more bitterly than anything in his career and it did not seem as if time or renewed ambitions could ever reconcile him to sudden bereavement. Within the month, he braced himself to leave the Hamadan which he had come to hate, but a new and chilling feature had entered into the mood of the court, new but not entirely unexpected; Hephaistion was dead, Alexander almost despaired of living, and one man, at least, had been proved most curiously right. Five months before, when the rebellious satraps were being purged, the commander of Babylon had asked his brother, a prophet, to test the omens in the city; in due course, a sacrifice had been offered, first to consider the fate of Hephaistion. The victim's liver had been seen, surprisingly, to be without a lobe; hastily, the prophet had sent a letter to his brother, now in Hamadan, advising him that he need have no fears of Hephaistion as death was very near. Hephaistion had died, as predicted, the day after the letter had been opened in Hamadan; the commander was impressed by his brother and meanwhile, unknown, the brother had sacrificed again. This time, the offering was for Alexander and once more, the liver had no lobe; a letter was already on the road for Hamadan, predicting further doom. Only in a crisis do prophets detect bad omens: there was death in the air, and men were beginning to remember how Calanus the Indian had mounted his pyre and taken a cryptic farewell; he was said to have told the king he would be seeing him again in Babylon. It was all very strange: the liver had had no lobe, the Hindu sophist had talke
d, it seemed, of death and a Babylonian funeral, and now from Hamadan, a mere month later, Alexander was about to begin a roundabout march down through the hills of Luristan, south-west across Mesopotamia, and so to the very Babylon he had hitherto avoided. Nobody knew where the next year would lead them, whether to Greece or the Caspian, west to Carthage or south to the Arabs of the Hadramut valleys. The decision was Alexander's, but however firm he stood against Hephaistion's loss, the omens had implied he would never take it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Nothing is harder than to appreciate Alexander after Hephaistion's death. He was a man living on a stupendous scale, but then he had the resources to support it and the years of achievement to justify it. Psychologically, there is no doubt that he had been shattered, but so have many others at the death of the person they love, even without the memory of a disastrous desert march a year before; it is a very different question how long the effects lasted. By the end of the year Roxane was pregnant, so one side of Alexander's life had not been interrupted and there was a comforting permanency in thoughts of a son and heir. He had changed over the years, inevitably, but the change is most apparent not so much in the unknowable recesses of his mind, where Ammon and Achilles still ranked prominently, as in the public and inarguable style of his life. This pomp is the focal point of Alexander's last days and deserves to be considered.

  If a courtier had left us his memoirs, he would surely have commented on the past year that festival had followed festival as never before in Greek history. The tendency had always been present in Philip and Alexander's reigns, but Alexander was now bound for Babylon where such display could call on the full machinery of centralized despotism, which had long grown up round an economy of royal canals. The gangs of royal workers, the treasuries and, no doubt, the old bureaucracy would have survived Darius's fall. Since Makran, the army had lived for the grand occasion, the Susa weddings, the Opis banquet, the fateful games of Hamadan: Babylon's system could outdo them all in its last rites for Hephaistion. Three thousand athletes and artists were gathered for the games. A full funeral was to be celebrated at Babylon, by which time the envoys would have returned from Amnion with news of the proposed worship of Hephaistion as a hero. 10,000 talents were rumoured to be needed from king and subjects for the occasion; after Patroclus's death, it had been Achilles's prime concern to be seen to pay him fitting honour as much for his own public prestige as for the dead man's comfort. This same heroic attitude now came out in Alexander.

  Though this expense was extraordinarily lavish, Alexander could well afford his share of it. His attitude to money was no different to that of his father Philip or indeed of any well-to-do gentleman in the classical world; money in so far as it was used at all, existed to be spent, not saved, so that conspicuous consumption was an enduring feature of the life of ancient city aristocracies, whether Greek, Roman or Byzantine. For the men of antiquity, there was a judicious art in going bankrupt publicly, and Alexander was true to this attitude on the grandest possible scale. The only figures for his treasure reserves may well be unreliable, but of the 180,000 talents said to have been captured from the Persians' palaces, only 50,000 were said to have remained at his death. Embezzlement no doubt played its part, but as the few known expenses for the past six months totalled about 50,000 talents, some such capital outlay may not be too far from the truth, however dubious its source and statistics. Such resolute draining of reserves was nothing new to Greeks, especially in the absence of double entry accounting; Pericles, that over-praised Athenian politician, had followed a policy which would rapidly have bankrupted Athens of her deposits, had he not died in time. But the remaining 50,000 talents and a yearly tribute of another 12,000 or more still made Alexander far and away the most monied king in the world. Payments in kind mattered more than those in money and for these, there are no figures; he also received huge presents from envoys, and all the while, he could cut new coins from the raw metal ingots which the Persian kings had stored in their halls and bedrooms as decoration. Melting, engraving, stamping and the cutting of dies: these were the busy and essential processes which must have long been occupying Greek experts in the background of Alexander's empire. Thanks to their skills, not even Harpalus and his 6,000 stolen talents were mourned as a serious loss; the finances at Babylon were now entrusted to a Greek from the island of Rhodes who at once showed the typical shrewdness of his countrymen by initiating a scheme for fellow-officers to insure against the loss of their runaway slaves.

  Private funerals at huge public expense were nothing new to the Persian empire, but at court Hephaistion's last rites had also opened up enticing possibilities. Hephaistion had died a Chiliarch, or Grand Vizier, with control over the Companion Cavalry and access to Alexander's private favour; in the event of campaigns in Arabia or the West, Alexander might well follow Persian precedent and designate a Royal Deputy to share an empire which, as his Successors soon found, was too burdensome for any one man. The office of Chiliarch was worth having, but it cannot have been a surprise when the royal-born Perdiccas was elevated to take it: his friends and relations already dominated the few high offices left at court, and he had long been loyal to Alexander and his oriental policies.

  Perdiccas's cavalry command was given to Eumenes the secretary, a more controversial appointment. There were Macedonians who hated such an educated Greek outsider; they could, moreover, point to Eumenes's hatred of Hephaistion, which had caused them to quarrel constantly, even over such trifles as the housing of their slaves and the honours of a young Greek flute-player. But Eumenes had adapted himself to his king's oriental plans: he was a valuable man and a wily one. He therefore cleared his name by dedicating himself and his weapons to the dead Hephaistion, presumably acknowledging that he was now a divine hero. Other Companions felt obliged to follow suit: the secretary could not be allowed to steal a march.

  Apart from the loss of Hephaistion, the courtiers looked out on very different surroundings. In the army, Macedonians were now outnumbered more than ten to one by orientals, and with this fundamental shift of power the new style of kingship which had developed since Darius's death was thrown into greater prominence. Alexander now did business from a golden throne and though dressed, as before, in the Persian diadem, girdle and striped tunic, he wielded a golden sceptre: his official tent was supported by golden pillars and roofed with a richly spangled baldachin, while inside, the five hundred remaining Shield Bearers kept guard over the silver-legged sofas, aided by a thousand oriental bowmen dressed in flame-scarlet, vermilion and royal blue. Five hundred Persian Immortals stood behind them, flaunting their glorious embroidery and their spear-butts, carved like a pomegranate; outside the tent, the Royal Squadron of elephants barred the path of unauthorized visitors, attended by 1,000 Macedonians, 10,000 lesser Persian Immortals and 500 privileged Wearers of the Purple. Magi, concubines, staff-bearers and bilingual ushers continued to play the prominent part they had earned in Persia for the past 200 years.

  By this splendour, Alexander and his courtiers were involved in the old externals of a Persian monarchy. When they held audience in their park, reclining on ornate sofas, they were following a long-lived Persian precedent; the king's throne and audience tent had deep roots in the Persian past, as did the incense-burners which smoked by his side. Visitors would pay him their Persian proskynesis: he would ride in the privileged chariot, symbol of king and conqueror, and be drawn by the white team of heavy Median horses which had such sacred overtones for his followers. Like a Persian King, he celebrated two birthdays and was honoured by a personal Royal Fire; sacrifices were offered by oriental courtiers to his august spirit, while even his robust drinking habits had links with the necessary virtues of Persian kingship. To an unaccustomed Greek visitor these

  Oriental privileges had nuances which are difficult to appreciate. If he had ever seen such pomp before, it would only have been on the stage, where Greek dramatists had presented it as Asiatic excess and conceit. There was a decided touch of
the theatre in Alexander's new magnificence, but the conceit was politically excusable: he was wisely playing the Persian monarch to his fast-increasing ranks of orientals. They expected it: he, no doubt, enjoyed it, though the deeper religious overtones were sadly lost on him: Alexander never gave proof of understanding the god Ahura-Mazda, protector of the Persian kings. This ignorance had not cost him a superhuman aura. What he missed in his Persian background, were a king's majesty derived from the fact of his royalty, he received instead from Greeks; in grateful Greek cities of his empire, he was being freely acclaimed for his achievements as if he were a god.

  Like the dead Pythionice, mistress of Harpalus, Alexander had already been receiving divine worship from Asian Greeks before he ever reached Hamadan. It was not a new solace, only demanded when Makran or Hephaistion's death had begun to make him feel inadequate. It was a free expression of tactful admiration: cities offered sacrifice in his name, especially on his birthday, or celebrated games called Alexandreia, or set aside a sacred precinct and an altar for his honour or carried his image in a procession of the other twelve gods of Greek Olympus. The city, not the private worshippers, set up this cult in return, or in hope, for Alexander's benefaction; to the plain man, it meant the pouring of libations at the altar outside his door on the days of the great processions when the king or his image was escorted through the streets. He would pour to the king from a flat bowl of cheap glazed pottery, stamped with the royal portrait; one such bowl to Alexander has come from Egypt's Alexandria, implying worship of the founder in his lifetime. Divine honours, as in primitive Rome, had long been paid to dead notables, where they merged with the similar cult of heroes, but Alexander was being worshipped in his lifetime, an honour whose origins and impact have been vigorously discussed, denounced or even explained away.