Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  After all his many mysteries, it would be improper if Alexander had died straightforwardly. Never simple, he did nothing of the sort. It was not that his death was forgettable. Quite the contrary: its memory was too dangerous to be freely discussed, and at first, his officers discouraged publication of the details; they knew how they stood to lose, if only from slander built on the facts. But then their secrecy itself bred rumours and soon they found they were quarrelling among themselves. Alexander's death became involved in their quarrels, and they used it as a crime to blame on each other without respect for the truth. The last days in Babylon tell as much of the Successors as of Alexander, a bias which does not bode well for the one important problem: what, at the age of thirty-two, caused Alexander to die?

  Any answer must begin on 29 May. Amid omens and dark prophecies, Alexander had tried to avert bad fortune, if not by a substitute king, at least by a series of sacrifices; in apparently generous mood, he turned to amusements and festivities, setting aside Hephaistion's funeral and encouraging the court to the future. Nearchus was crowned as admiral of the campaign against Arabia, and preparations were to go ahead for the voyage to begin on 4 June. Leaving the crowd who had gathered to pay honour, he dined, drank far into the night and attended a late party given by Medius, a Companion from Thessaly: some said Medius had happened to waylay him; others, more cunningly, said that the party had long been arranged, as the day was the Thessalian festival in honour of the death of Heracles and Medius remained true to his home traditions. All are agreed that the drinking which followed was prolonged, but its pattern was vigorously disputed; on it, turns the truth of Alexander's death.

  The earliest description which can be dated with any certainty is terse and unfriendly. Alexander, in the course of Medius's dinner. demanded a three-quart cup of wine and pledged a toast to Proteas; in reply, Proteas took the cup, hymned the King fulsomely and drained the contents amid general applause. A little later, Proteas pledged a toast from the same cup to Alexander. Alexander took it, drank heartily, but could not stand the strain.

  He fell back onto his cushion, where he 'ropped the cup from his hands. As a result of this he fell sick and during his sickness, he died.

  His death occurred 'because of Dionysus's anger against him for besieging his native city of Thebes'. There was irony in this absurd explanation. Dionysus's anger had formerly been invoked to excuse the drunken murder of Cleitus: Proteas who helped drink Alexander to death was Cleitus's nephew.

  While it is not impossible that Alexander died in part of drink it is improbable that this flippant account is true; its author, once more, was Ephippus, nothing more than a scurrilous spreader of gossip. Others saw the debauch differently. 'At the final dinner with Medius,' wrote an unknown author, later called Nicobule, 'Alexander recited an extract from Euripides's play Andromeda, which he had memorized; afterwards, he drank the health of all twenty guests in unmixed wine. They each pledged him to an equal amount, and when he left the party, it was not long afterwards that he began to go into a decline.' After toasting twenty guests, that is not surprising. At once, the question arises: apart from Medius the host, who were the other nineteen?

  It is here that the story quickens and the two most curious documents in Alexander's career come into play. The first is a pamphlet, not to be found in any history. It is embedded in the largely fictitious Alexander Romance, a work of notorious imagination, most of which was compiled some five hundred years after Alexander's death. It survives in four varying texts, three of which end with a detailed account of Alexander's death. Their outline and personal information demonstrably belong within ten years of the event; it is as if new evidence on the death of Stalin were only to be found in a posthumous book of Russian nursery tales. Each text has been altered or expanded by a later hand and their manuscripts are often corrupt, but their outline goes back to the original pamphlet and deserves to be taken seriously. It gives what contemporaries, as it admits, had been afraid to publish: a complete list of the twenty guests at Medius's dinner and an explanation of their motives.

  The twenty names are convincingly chosen, among them Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Eumenes the royal secretary, Philip the royal doctor, Philip the Greek engineer, Nearchus the admiral and Peucestas the persophile. All twenty men are known independently to have had reason to be at Babylon and most of them may have been at Medius's dinner. Fourteen of them, moreover, are said to have had the strongest possible reason for attending. That night, there was a devious plot to poison the king. They knew about it and they approved.

  The plot itself is said to have been planned in Europe months before, where it centred on Antipatcr's family. As the pamphlet points out, motives for Antipater are not hard to imagine: the endless abuse of the reigning queen Olympias, the slow but menacing approach of Craterus and the veterans, the orders for his summons to Asia, the execution of old friends like Parmenion or relations like Alexander the Lyncestian, all these grievances might have urged him to self-defence. Two of his sons were already at Babylon and he had recently sent Cassander, the third and most forceful, to join them. He was equipped, said the pamphlet, with a small iron casket of poison, encased in the hoof of a mule, the only material which was strong enough to contain it. Many later believed that this poison was ice-cold water from the deadly river Styx, which flowed through the mountains of Arcadia before going down to the Underworld; but Arcadia was far from Antipater, and the modem Mavroneri falls, site of the ancient Styx, belie the ancients' belief in the power of its hellish water.

  Cassander's arrival at Babylon in the last months of Alexander's life is a historical fact: it is true, too, that seven years later, he would show himself to be an implacable opponent of the king's memory and even murder Olympias, while gossip maintained that he could not look on Alexander's statue without feeling faint and uneasy. Once there, the pamphlet continued, he was to hand the poison to his brother Iollas and make ready his escape, as Iollas was butler to the king and could mix the poison into the royal wine without being noticed: all he needed was the occasion, none more convenient than Medius's banquet, as Medius, said the pamphlet, was in love with him. If the party was in honour of Heracles's death, there would be no risk of a change in Alexander's drinking habits. 'A cup of Heracles' was traditionally circulated and Alexander, rival and descendant of Heracles, was sure to be the first to drink from it. The poison's entry seemed assured.

  The pamphlet mentions more accomplices than Medius and the butler. Of the twenty guests, only six are said to have been innocent: Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Eumenes and three others. The remaining fourteen, Nearchus and Philip the doctor included, were to keep up a suitable conversation while their Alexander drank doctored wine. They had all sworn oaths of secrecy and they hoped to profit personally from a change of king.

  On the night of the banquet, said the pamphlet, all went as planned. Alexander drank from his cup and 'all of a sudden, he shouted with pain as if struck through the liver with an arrow'. After a few minutes, he could bear it no longer. He told the guests to continue drinking and he left for his bedroom, a doomed man. Amid all tins sensational detail only one fact is certain: those who had been present at the banquet did not wish their names to be published. They may have been guilty; they may only have feared the inevitable slander. The sequel alone can help to decide.

  If Alexander had indeed been poisoned, the dose must have been enough to kill him beyond any doubt. There was no point in giving him half or doubtful measures, and even without cyanide the ancient world had enough herbal knowledge to produce an infallible poison. Strychnine, for instance, had long been extracted from nux vomica, known to Aristotle's school, and it would certainly have killed a young Macedonian. But its effects are more or less instantaneous, and here the timing of Alexander's death becomes important; fortunately, its published date is the one well-attested fact in the whole affair. From a contemporary Babylonian calendar, Alexander is known to have died on 10 June, whereas Medius's ban
quet, according to its only precise date, took place on 29 May; the king, therefore, had been reported ill for more than ten days, and whatever killed him, it cannot have been strychnine or any other instant poison. There are other possibilities, more remote, and there are confusions in ancient medicine which may be relevant, but in the absence of a ready poison, the alternative document deserves to be considered. It is nothing less than Alexander's Royal Diaries.

  Round these Diaries, believed in antiquity to have been published by Eumenes the royal secretary and a certain Diodotus, there hangs an air of insoluble mystery. Quite suddenly, in the last days of the reign, the Diaries are quoted by later secondary sources for a day-by-day account of Alexander's business; to the frustration of historians, for whom only three long quotations now survive, they show him hunting birds and foxes, banqueting or playing dice, and all these activities seem to concentrate on his final month in Babylon. So, perhaps, did the whole work, but those who could read it in its entirety had noted how it kept referring to the king's recurrent drinking parties, even to his all-day sleeping in order to recover from a nocturnal debauch. This frankness is very remarkable. Alexander's drinking habits rapidly became a delicate subject, partly because of gossip, partly because the murderer of Cleitus had not always embraced sobriety: twenty-five years or so later, Aristobulus would plead, against the facts, that 'Alexander only sat long over his wine for the sake of conversation', like a portly country gentleman. And yet here, allegedly, was Eumenes the former secretary publishing a detailed diary of the king's continual carousing; our three brief extracts describe five debauches in the last month, each of which took thirty-six hours to sleep off before Alexander could begin to hunt, drink and dice again. The purpose of this strange publication can only be deduced from its contents.

  These contents are insistent to the point of tedium. The month of the king's death began, it said, with a string of drinking-parties, one with Eumenes, another with Perdiccas, another at the 'house of Bagoas', not the eunuch but the former Vizier, whose country seat near Babylon was famous for rare date-palms and agreed to be royal property. It was eight years since Alexander had bestowed it on Parmenion as a reward. On each occasion Alexander spent the whole of the next day asleep, recovering his strength. On 29 May, after this series of nightly debauches, Alexander dined very late with his friends, drank still later with Medius, left the room unharmed, bathed, slept and returned the following day to 'drink once more far into the night'. This time, he left for the bath, ate a little but fell asleep in the bathroom, 'because he was already beginning to feel feverish'. Medius's party, so far from proving fatal, was followed by a repeat on the very next day and only then did Alexander sicken, not after a cup of poison, but after a bath, a sleep and a fever.

  It is very hard not to sense a deliberate bias in the tone of such a Diary. Alexander, it seems to stress, did nothing unusual by drinking hard at Medius's banquet, for he had been drinking hard throughout the preceding month. Moreover, drink did not kill him, but an incidental sickness. The accounts of the following days are equally silent about poison. The next day, Alexander was carried out on a stretcher to sacrifice to his usual gods, Ammon no doubt among them, and he then lay in his bedroom instructing his officers in detail about the expedition to Arabia which he still intended to begin in four days' time. He was later carried by boat to the park on the far side of the Euphrates, probably the summer palace of Nebuchadnezzar in the cooler and northerly city-quarter; there, he continued to sacrifice, bath, talk to the officers and play dice with Medius, though his fever lasted all night. But the next day he took a marked mm for the worse and could not even manage to sacrifice. A move to the 'palace near the swimming-pool' did not improve him, though for the next two days, the Diaries still insist that he continued to instruct the officers about the voyage. At last, even the officers were ordered to wait outside in the courtyard and on 7 June a very sick king indeed was moved back by boat to the main palace where his fever had first broken out. When his officers came to see him he could no longer speak; on 8 and 9 June it was the same, and on the evening of the 9th, there occurred the only incident on which the Diaries and the pamphlet agreed: the common troopers rioted.

  For the past ten days they had only seen the royal barge floating up and down the Euphrates. Their officers had told them that Alexander was ill but alive, and yet as the days passed without him, they were more and more inclined to disbelieve. They thought they were being deceived by the Bodyguards, so they gathered outside the palace doors and started to browbeat the officers of the watch. It was now two days since these lesser officers had last seen Alexander, and then only as a speechless invalid; they too might suspect a conspiracy of silence by their seniors, and so they let the troopers in. 'One by one, they all filed past Alexander's bed, dressed in their military tunics; he could no longer speak, but he made a sign to each of them, lifting his head with the greatest difficulty and gesturing to them with his eyes.' Quietly, they filed out through the far door. The next day, towards evening, it was announced, said the Diaries, that Alexander had died.

  Except for the men's parade, which could hardly be denied, the Royal Diaries bear no resemblance to the pamphlet in their description of the days after Medius's banquet. In the pamphlet, there are no conversations with the officers, no games of dice with Medius and no sailing to and fro on the Euphrates: instead, there are scenes with Roxane and with Perdiccas. After his poisoning, said the pamphlet, Alexander had felt restless and unable to bear his friends and doctors: he wanted to vomit and, innocently, he asked the culprit Iollas to tickle his throat with a feather, which Iollas as a true son of Antipater had already coated in more poison. Alexander then sent his friends away, except for Perdiccas whom he designated his Successor; he passed a restless evening and at nightfall he set out on a memorable last exertion.

  There was a door in the palace which led to the river Euphrates; this Alexander had ordered to be opened and left without its usual guard. When all his friends had departed and the hour of midnight was come, he rose from his bed, snuffed out the candle and crawled through the door on all fours, because he was too weak to walk. Gasping as he went, he made for the river, meaning to throw himself into it and disappear on its current. But when he drew near, he looked round and saw his wife Roxane running towards him.

  She had found his room empty and guessed that he was gone to a farewell worthy of his courage; by following the sound of his groans, she had tracked him down to the river bank where she embraced him and begged him, through her tears, to desist. Complaining that she had impaired his glory, Alexander allowed himself to be led by his wife back to bed.

  Whether or not this was true, it was relevant and influential. As the pamphlet realized, Alexander was believed to be a god, and gods do not do themselves credit by dying in public; in Rome, when Caesar died, his body remained for inspection, but it was not the least important of his claims to divinity that a comet soon appeared in the sky and allowed men to focus their belief in his immortal soul on this sudden new home for it Just as Caesar had gone to heaven, so Alexander would go to the water: other new divinities were later thought to have done likewise, and such was the impact of Alexander's 'departure' that six hundred years later, Christian bishops could still be unnerved by suggestions that the Emperor Julian the Apostate had not really died but had disappeared like Alexander into the waters of the Tigris, whence he might one day resume his life's work of persecution.

  Restored to bed, said the pamphlet, Alexander wrote his will and lingered for another nine days with the help of Roxane's drugs and poultices: eventually, having taken farewell of his soldiers among copious tears, he gave his ring to Perdiccas in the last hours and died on receipt of a third dose of poison: 'In the throes of death, he put Roxane's hand in Pcrdiccas's and commended him to her with a final nod: then, as his strength failed, Roxane closed his eyes and kissed his mouth to catch his departing soul.' So, in a manner fit for a Homeric hero, Alexander's soul left his body 'and the king le
ft life to go to the gods'.

  Conspicuously, therefore, the pamphlet and the Royal Diaries dispute both the cause and the course of Alexander's illness. Where they disagree, the authoritative name of Eumenes and the coherent detail of the Diaries have often seemed to carry more weight, and so from the Diaries alone the history of Alexander's last days is usually written. And yet neither the Diaries nor Eumenes and his helper Diodotus are authorities beyond reproach. The Diaries have certainly been altered since Eumenes's lifetime; on the night of Alexander's death, a group of his friends, they say, consulted the god Serapis in his Babylonian temple as to the wisest course of treatment. Serapis is not considered to have existed at the time, for he seems to have been created as a Greco-Egyptian god by Ptolemy some twenty-five years later. If Serapis had intruded into the Diaries, so perhaps has much else.