It is not convincing to dismiss all the Diaries as a later forgery by one of the several unknown writers credited with works of a similar title. Their detail is too life-like, even down to the geography of Babylon which does not conflict with the city's probable street plan in the year of Alexander's death. The falsity, rather, is one of tone. If the Diaries were issued by Eumenes, the former royal secretary, they must have been supported by Perdiccas, his master after Alexander's death; they both respected Alexander's memory as heirs to his empire and would never have issued such a compromising account of his final month of debauchery unless there had been some point in it. The Diaries seem pointless, except as an answer to gossip that the officers had poisoned Alexander; even here they are strangely irrelevant. Having dwelt in detail on a month of heavy drinking they insist he only died of a fever; men concerned to uphold Alexander's name and rebut the charge of poisoning need only have chronicled the course of this serious illness, perhaps with a bulletin from the royal doctors. The drinking could be explained away as a consequence of the sick man's thirst, exactly the line which was followed forty years later by the ex-officer Aristobulus, defending his master's sobriety. The Diaries' month of debauchery suits neither Eumenes's attitude to Alexander nor the case against poison which he was presumably intending to plead.
There remains, however, the mysterious co-author Diodotus. He is said to have come from Erythrae, a Greek city in Asia Minor; only one Diodotus is known in the lives of Philip and Alexander, and he was remarkably appropriate. An able and educated Greek, he had served Greek dynasts in Asia Minor, whence he was recommended as an aide to Anti-pater; the Macedonians' closest Asian connection was the ruler of Erythrae, so it is very possible that this Diodotus first came to their notice through his home tyrant. It is a very attractive guess that he became a staff secretary, a Eumenes to the deputy Antipater. If so, his authorship of the Diaries falls into place. They were issued as if through the two Greek secretaries of Perdiccas and Antipatcr and would seem to belong within two years of Alexander's death. After that, Eumenes was busied away from court and Antipater and Perdiccas took to fighting each other. The Diaries, then, would seem to be a very early work. There are hints, but no proof, that rumours of poisoning reached Greece very quickly, and the Diaries may have been an immediate refutation.
Strong objections, however, tell against this. The Diaries' tone and contents are not those of an officer's self-defence; there is also the bias of the pamphlet. This pamphlet was obviously conceived by supporters of Pcrdiccas after they turned against Antipater; it stresses Perdiccas as Alexander's heir, even as his chosen husband for Roxane, and denounces Antipater's family as Alexander's poisoners. Perdiccas cannot, therefore, have recently published Diaries through his secretary which flatly disproved the subsequent slanders of his officers' pamphlet; the one would have made the other too unconvincing to be worthwhile. The Diaries, it seems, did not appear in his lifetime, a likelihood which is supported by a historian writing around 312 and giving alternative accounts which he had read of Alexander's death. He refers disbelievingly to the story of Antipater and the poison, which he would have read in the Perdiccan pamphlet, but he shows no knowledge, in so far as his history can be traced, of any of the Diaries' details. If the Diaries had already been published it would hardly have been possible to ignore their massive weight, among the alternative stories.
The Diaries were only necessary to refute the rumours of poison, so they must be tied to a man whom these rumours are known to have affected. If they do not belong to Antipater, slandered by Perdiccas, they might concern his son Cassander, who was fiercely accused of murder by Olympias seven years after Alexander's death; another nine years after that, prominent members of Aristotle's school, also associates of Cassander, were attacked as Alexander's poisoners by his veteran officer Antigonus the One-eyed, then ruler of Asia. The two lines meet in Cassander, the favourite candidate as Alexander's poisoner. Perhaps he first circulated the Diaries as his answer; he could claim to have found them among Diodotus's papers, especially if Diodotus had been his father's aide. Alone of the Successors, Cassander both opposed Alexander's memory and needed to rebut the charge of his murder; he would be happy to cast Alexander's final month as a long debauch, while maintaining that he died of fever, not of something he had drunk. His friends from Aristotle's circle had a similar interest. Many disliked Alexander, not least for murdering their fellow-philosopher Callisthenes, and although there was no truth in Antigonus's answering slander that Aristotle poisoned his royal pupil, its memory lived on for five hundred years and was even held against the Aristotelian school by the Roman emperor Caracalla. The philosophers too had an interest in an alternative account.
Among these Aristotelians none is more interesting than Cassander's associate Demetrius, who fled Athens under the slander from Antigonus that Aristotle had mixed the fateful poison. Demetrius was a prolific author; he fled to Egypt and wrote the earliest book on the new god Serapis, detailing the many cures which the god had brought about through dreams. Serapis's mention in the Diaries has always seemed an awkward intrusion; a man like Demetrius, acutely concerned with the detail of Alexander's last days, might have inserted the name of the new healing god whom he championed so fervently in place of an unfamiliar Babylonian deity. Moreover, three of the four officers who are said to have consulted Serapis about the best treatment for Alexander are famous victims or enemies of Antigonus, who encouraged the slander of poisoning against Demetrius and his master Aristotle; Cassander, too, had joined an alliance against Antigonus to defend or avenge these three high officers' maltreatment. Other details, the 'house of Bagoas', for instance, were known independently to Aristotelians in Cassandcr's circle. To remove the slander against themselves and Cassander, it is very possible that they published or elaborated Diaries in the name of the regents' secretaries. The Diaries' tone, dating and contents would fit their purpose neatly.
If the pamphlet began as Perdiccan propaganda and the Diaries were perhaps worked over by Cassander and his circle, the various causes of Alexander's death can only be judged on their merits, not on their authorities. Drink can be dismissed as the main cause, just as the ex-officer Aristobulus knew that it should; the Diaries are the only hint that Alexander drank more heavily before his death, and they were probably written by men who loathed him. It is probably irrelevant that one of his personal doctors wrote as an expert on drunkenness, though it is interesting that he believed in protecting against poison by the futile prescription of a regular diet of radishes. Fever seems far more plausible than drink. Alexander had been boating on the Babylonian canals where malaria had long been endemic and although his sudden decline after a week's sickness is not a common malarial pattern, the effects of his chest wound may have made themselves felt. He was, said Ephippus, 'melancholic'; it is an attractive, but mistaken, theory that the ancients' disease of melancholia was identical with malaria, whose symptoms it often shared, and Ephippus anyway meant by the word 'hot tempered'. This, rather, suggests poison, of a king who was 'unbearable and murderous .
However, there is no evidence that the officers conspired among themselves or with Antipater before Alexander's death. True, the hot and demanding march to Arabia was only a week away; the pamphlet also refers, tantalizingly, to names of the guests at Medius's party 'whom Onesicritus the royal helmsman refused to cite for fear of their revenge'. Onesicritus published his book within two years of the event, but the pamphlet's words do not entail that he openly mentioned poison. He may well have begun the stranger story, repeated later by authors who used him, that Alexander drank from the cup of Heracles, cried as if struck by an arrow and then collapsed. Others believed this without even accepting the poisoning rumour; so too may Onesicritus, but he may not have dared to mention poison any more than the guests, and thus only dared to record that something dramatic happened at the party. He was an officer and contemporary, but a most unreliable witness; he is the one support for the possibility of poison and na
turally, his word is not enough.
Conspirators apart, the poison itself is technically implausible. In an age which lacked any clear concept of disease or of the dangers of bad food and water, it was understandable that sudden illness should be blamed so often on slow-acting poison, a cause which was only identified after a chain of mysterious effects had been seen to their fatal conclusion. But unless slow poisons are sophisticated they cannot be guaranteed to be lethal: an acid, for example, could have caused Alexander to 'cry aloud as if struck by an arrow' and then worked slowly inside him until it eventually punctured his stomach or burnt his vocal chords to stop him speaking, but it is very doubtful whether ancient medicine was acquainted with an acid of the necessary powers. The poisons of herbalists were swift and irremediable, whether hemlocks, hellebores or belladonnas, and except as an explanation of mysterious illness, a slow poison met no need in the poison-chests of ancient Greece. If Alexander had been poisoned, he should surely have been given a massive dose which was absolutely certain to kill him at once. And yet Diaries, pamphlets and official calendars insist that twelve days elapsed between Medius's fateful banquet and the death of the king.
It is hardly possible to escape this. The Diaries' detailed narrative is not quite explicit that for the last five days of his life Alexander gave certain proof of being alive; however, on 9 June the troops processed past his bed and saw, allegedly a slight movement of his head and eyes while the king 'made a sign to them', in a Greek word which most naturally means a gesture of the right hand. He said nothing; he lay motionless in bed; but this sign implies he was still alive and that no poison had been given to him as long beforehand as 29 May. There have been too many allegations of poisoning in history before the nineteenth century for Alexander's to survive this damaging contradiction in the case.
Those who are accustomed to the deaths of powerful men will not be surprised that Alexander's is a mystery which is hard to solve beyond all dispute. History here has often been repeated, but of the attendant mood and circumstances, there is more to be usefully said: Alexander had died, a man 'generally agreed to be of a greater nature than is given to a mortal'} his divine dress would never be worn in entirety again, and watchers, though spared a march to Arabia, were left frightened and bewildered in a land very far from home. Outside the royal bedroom, nobody was sure what had happened; when the end was announced on 10 June, an ominous darkness fell on the battlements and broad streets of Babylon. Men strayed through the city, not daring to kindle a light: it was not that their invincible god had died, but he had, so they said, 'departed from life among men' and himself a sun-like deity, he had robbed them of light as his soul ascended to a home among the stars. His soul was immortal, but his body lay exposed in the desolate halls of Nebuchadnezzar's palace, and while the common soldiers fretted for their future, officers were already rumouring their divine king's last words. 'When they asked him to whom he had left his kingdom, he replied "to the strongest". He added that he foresaw that his prominent friends would stage a vast funeral contest in his honour. Whether through fever or poison, Alexander had died unable to speak, so that all such remarks can only be treated as legends. But he was watching, his men believed, from the heavens, and within a week, the second of his two alleged last sayings was already proving more true than the first. The funeral contest had begun, but many years would pass before the strongest could be seen to have emerged.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Men believed that Alexander had ascended to heaven, but for the next twelve years it must have seemed equally likely that all who had helped him were under a curse. The situation at Babylon was proof of the price that a king must pay for killing all rivals at his accession, a policy which strengthens the throne briefly, then delivers it into the hands of its barons. When Alexander died, Roxane was pregnant and her baby was not due for at least six weeks; it might anyway prove to be a girl. Alexander had also left a bastard son Heracles by his first Persian mistress Barsine, but the three-year-old boy had been ignored and no Macedonian took him seriously. Officers as prominent as Perdiccas, Leonnatus or the elderly Polyperchon claimed royal blood through their local dynasties in highland Macedonia; their claims were remote, had not Philip's bastard son Arrhidacus been the only male alive in Alexander's royal family, an adult but also a half-wit. A choice had to be made, and as Alexander had bequeathed his ring to his Vizier Perdiccas, his was the first decision; disdaining the idiot Maccedonian, he encouraged the Bodyguards and cavalry to favour Roxane's unborn child. But the Foot Companions were roused by their brigadier Meleagcr to call for Arrhidaeus, a face they knew and for all his deficiencies, not of Oriental blood. The common man's hatred of Alexander's Oriental policy had not disappeared with his death. Meleager, too, had once complained of undue honours bestowed on conquered Indians.
The result was a quarrel which surprised even the officers. Perdiccas and Ptolemy fled with their friends to the chamber where Alexander was lying in state, only to find that the door was smashed in by Meleager's infantry who started to pelt them with spears; they were stopped, just, and Perdiccas withdrew with his cavalry to the fields outside Babylon where he began an insidious revenge. All food was blocked from reaching the city until Meleager and the infantry were starved into an agreement that Arrhidaeus should share the kingship if Roxane bore a son and that infant and half-wit should be guarded by Perdiccas and Meleager in partnership. According to custom, the army was then purified from the taint of Alexander's death by marching between the two halves of a disembowelled dog; when everyone was off their guard, Perdiccas had thirty of Meleager's faction seized and thrown to the elephants for execution. Meleager took his own life, seeing his cause was hopeless. All too plainly, order had broken down, although Alexander had only been dead for a week. This was indeed the 'age of paradox', for on the news of his death, the Greeks were roused to rebellion by Athens and her general Leosthenes, whereas the Persians shaved their heads and lamented the passing of a fair-minded king; Sisygambis, mother of Darius, fasted to death after only five days, mourning the man whose chivalry she had respected ever since her capture at Issus. It was the most telling tribute to Alexander's courteous way with women, and with the camp in disorder she could not be blamed for her gloomy view of the future.
Within a year the turbulence of Macedonia's baronry had burst over Asia and the Mediterranean. For many the empire was a unity, and should remain so; for a few, there were kingdoms to be carved out, whether in Egypt where Ptolemy first seized a satrapy and made it independent or in Maccedonia where Antipater's death raised hopes of a separate realm. For the next twenty years, separatism grew to overpower unity, until the world had been split into four: in Egypt, Ptolemy; in Asia, Seleucus, once leader of Alexander's Shield Bearers; in Thrace, Lysimachus, a former Bodyguard, and in Macedonia whichever king could raise and hold support. They were years of war and murder on the grand scale, and they swept men along with them; six years after Alexander's death, an army from the upper satrapies met an army from western Asia in the wild mountains of inner Media, perhaps near modem Kangavar, and began their massive battle in mid morning. When each side had routed one of the other's wings, night was already falling and they had strayed three miles from the battlefield. They rallied and by common consent drew up their lines again, elephants and all, to continue their fight by the light of the moon. Only at midnight did they stop to bury their dead; throughout there were Macedonian units slaughtering each other on either side.
The spell of disaster began at once among Alexander's associates. In Babylon Roxane sent for his second wife, now called Stateira, Darius's daughter, and poisoned her, with Perdiccas's approval. Roxane's baby turned out to be a son, Alexander IV, who was given Perdiccas as a guardian; within three years Perdiccas had been stabbed by his guards after asking them to cross the Nile against its crocodiles and sandbeds. Craterus, loved by the troops as a true Macedonian, was trampled to death in the same month, his horse having tripped in battle; his troops were conquered by
Eumenes the secretary, who knifed a commander of the Shield Bearers in the course of victory. Already Ptolemy had murdered the financier Cleomenes and seized Egypt; he went on to murder Perdiccas's relations, various kings of Cyprus and Syria's satrap Laomedon, one of Alexander's oldest friends. Anaxarchus the contented refused to flatter a Cypriot king, was killed for his obstinacy and had his tongue pounded in a pestle and mortar; Peucestas was removed from Persia to the fury of the Persians who loved him; Porus was killed by a Thracian who coveted his elephants; the original Shield Bearers returned to the Asian battlefields at the age of sixty and more and fought with decisive ferocity, until one of their generals was thrown into a pit and burnt alive. The rest of the unit were dismissed to the satrap at Kandahar who was ordered to use them in twos and threes on particularly dangerous missions to be sure that they never combined and returned. Thais, meanwhile, saw her children prosper and her Ptolemy take political wives; Pyrrho the philosopher, who had accompanied Alexander, returned to Greece and founded the school of the sceptics who professed to know nothing for certain. Nobody referred to Bagoas again.
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