The Classical World (36 page)

At his death, Alexander was planning further conquests in Arabia (whose scale he perhaps underestimated) and then possibly a march into the West against Carthage and north Africa. His aims, of course, are disputed, but in my view he had decided early on to march to the eastern edge of the world; when he was denied it, he went down to what he thought was a southern edge (the Indian Ocean); at his death he was exploring a possible northern edge (the Caspian Sea) and surely, therefore, thinking of conquering to the western edge (the Atlantic Ocean). His ‘geography’ was only slightly less mistaken than Aristotle’s, but it set his ambitions.

What was his sexual nature? He was not a one-way homosexual. During eleven years on the march, he married the Bactrian Roxane and two Persian brides, taking three wives as opposed to Philip’s seven. He also fathered a child on another Persian mistress, and perhaps one
on an Indian chieftain, and was said in court gossip to have slept for twelve days with a visiting ‘Queen of the Amazons’ near the Caspian Sea. Since early boyhood he had also loved Hephaestion, whose death before his own drove him to extreme grief. Plainly, there was a homo-erotic sexual element to his love for his ‘Patroclus’, but their love was more than just sex. In Asia, Alexander also had sex with a Persian court-eunuch, Bagoas, who joined him in 330 and was made one of the ship-captains, the only foreigner, when Alexander’s fleet turned for home down the river Indus in 326. The fairest modern label for his sex-life is ‘bisexual’: Philip was said to have behaved likewise, and homoerotic sex was part of the lifestyle of his Royal Pages. As in contemporary Athens, so in Macedon a sexual love for a boy was something which a man could profess openly, without discredit. We do not know what his accompanying Indians thought of it.

As a passionate man, Alexander had his drunken moments and his outbursts of rage; they culminated in the dark evening in late 328
BC
when he personally killed one of his father’s veteran Companions, Cleitus, at a party. His life was emphatically not lived without moral blots and stains; his ambition also killed tens of thousands of Indians who refused to surrender and be his subjects rather than subjects of their existing kings, and his army plundered the goods and supplies of countless families in order to feed themselves as they crossed Asia. However, after the initial conquest, further looting and violence were not Alexander’s idea of ruling his subjects. He had a magic which was personally exercised for the troops who loved him, and we must do justice to it too, and the accompanying extravagance of his youth. Such were his feats, his benefactions and his capacity for favours that some of the Greek cities spontaneously offered him ‘honours equal to those for the gods’. Sometimes they were offered in admiration or gratitude, at other times as hopeful flattery. Benefaction, in the sense of material favours, was central to Greek ideas of a god; Alexander was as capable of it as almost any Olympian god, while his prowess, as far as India, rivalled most Olympians’ known deeds. There had been divine cults previously for Greek men of power and achievement, but they only became an established practice among Greeks because of Alexander’s exceptional prowess. But he himself knew very well that he was mortal, and he continued to honour the immortal gods
and to obey their oracles. His own religious life remained traditional, rooted in Greek practice and precedent.

Above all, Alexander had an emotional bond with his men, maintained through storm and desert, wounds and hardship and the many moments when he and his commanders had no idea where they were on the map. They had marched on foot against vastly bigger armies and they had seen deserts, cities, mountains and elephants which none had ever imagined in his youth. Some of them had ridden without stirrups and without saddles, forming into pointed formations for the sudden shock of battle-charge, those moments of ‘all or nothing’ which are the moments for glory, to be won at the expense of enemies and sustained, for years, with ever-enlarging stories. When Alexander lay dying, ‘his soldiers longed to see him, some of them so as to see him alive, others because… they thought his death was being concealed from them by his bodyguards. Most of them were driven to see Alexander by grief and longing for their king. As the army processed past him, he was unable to speak, but he gestured to each of them, lifting his head with difficulty and signalling to them with his eyes.’
⁶
Like us, they were left unsure exactly what their king had in mind.

Alexander’s Early Successors

When Seleucus saw that his troops were terrified, he kept on encouraging them, telling them that it was not fitting for men who had campaigned with Alexander and been promoted by him for their courage to rely solely on power and money. They should use experience and clever understanding, the means by which Alexander, too, had accomplished his great and universally admired deeds… Alexander had stood beside him in a dream and clearly signified about the future leadership which he was destined to attain as time went by
…

Diodorus, 19.90, as Seleucus rides off to Babylon (312
BC
)

It was on 10 June 323 that Alexander died in Babylon. By a remarkable chance, we have the clay tablet on which a Babylonian scribe recorded the event in a day-by-day chronicle: ‘The King died,’ he noted. ‘Clouds…’
¹

None of the surviving Greek or Roman sources mentions the clouds. Instead, they dwell on the bonfire of personal ambition which the unexpected death of the king ignited. Alexander left no designated heir, but his Bactrian wife, Roxane, was already six months pregnant. He had a half-brother, Philip Arrhidaeus, who was also in his thirties, but this son of King Philip and a Thessalian mother was half-witted. Already there were the makings of a stupendous struggle. The unborn baby would be half-barbarian and, like the defective Arrhidaeus, it would need guardians to exercise real power in its name.

The first struggle, therefore, was for the ‘guardianship’ of the royal line. But which line? From 330
BC
onwards, young Alexander had
practised the ‘inclusion’ of Persians and other Iranians into positions of honour around him and eventually even into the inner, world-conquering units of his Macedonian army. He had married the Bactrian Roxane; he had loved the eunuch Bagoas; he had had 30,000 Iranian boys trained in Macedonian weaponry and entitled them his ‘Successors’; in one spectacular ceremony, he had even married off ninety-two of his Macedonian officers to Iranian brides (arranging that any children of his and Hephaestion’s brides should be cousins); at the same moment he had given presents to no less than 10,000 of his troops who had already ‘married’ Asian women too. This inclusion had gone way beyond a mere recruitment into supporting units so as to keep up his army’s manpower. It put barbarians into the great Companion cavalry and made a few of them Companion nobles. Alexander did not need to do this. It was a principle of the king, the recruitment of ‘Alexander’s men’, irrespective of origin, ethnicity and background, into an inclusive court and army of the future: ‘Zeus’, he was remembered as saying, ‘is the father of all men,’ as in Homer, ‘but he makes the best particularly his own.’
²
So, now, did Alexander, in an ‘empire of the best’. Some of his Macedonians, the older ones especially, hated the policy. They had no wish to fraternize with people they had once tried to kill. As soon as he was dead, this hatred erupted.

Others were more flexible, his younger and closer friends and his cavalrymen, who could accommodate any able fellow lover of horses: they were willing to wait for Roxane’s unborn son. Meanwhile, the older Macedonians and the veteran infantry, united by their thick Macedonian Greek dialect, agitated for a Macedonian heir, a son of King Philip, even if he was mentally unsound. There were riots, followed by a compromise: Roxane’s child would share the kingship with the half-wit, Philip Arrhidaeus. The most prominent advocate of the settlement was Alexander’s trusted Perdiccas, a noble Macedonian of royal highland descent. After Hephaestion’s death, Perdiccas was the man whom Alexander had appointed to be his next ‘chiliarch’, or second-in-command, with the charge of the most respected unit of cavalry. He was (later) said to have been given Alexander’s ring by Alexander himself and even to have received the job of caring for Roxane. On such matters, propaganda proliferated.

Within three days of Alexander’s death, the former Persian queen mother had starved herself to death, lamenting (men said) the loss of Alexander: only eight years before, he had been her son’s sworn enemy. Amongst Macedonians, there was a complication. Alexander had sent their respected general Craterus back to Macedonia with 10,000 elderly Macedonian veterans whom he had dismissed. Craterus was strongly conservative and was no friend to ‘inclusion’. Alexander had ordered him to ‘take care of the freedom of the Greeks’, a reminder of how that old ideal had now been diluted.
³
He was also to replace the elderly Antipater who had been commander in Greece in Alexander’s absence.

What orders from Alexander might Craterus invent or claim for himself? There was no precedent or system in Macedonian society for dealing with such a crisis. The early death of a childless king had left a vacuum, and somehow the gaps must be filled in. Titles of honour could be quickly invented to placate the senior figures, ‘guardian’ or ‘overseer’ or ‘chiliarch’ (in the sense of ‘deputy’). At Babylon, Perdiccas also claimed to have found Alexander’s ‘Last Plans’. He presented them to the troops, surely intending them to be cancelled: it is quite likely that he and his aides, including the artful Greek secretary Eumenes, had invented them in an evening of frantic improvisation. They were made to include fantastic building projects; one was a temple at Troy, another, a vast mound as ‘big as a pyramid’ in Philip’s honour in Macedon. Plans for Western conquest were added, stretching on through Carthage and beyond. The aim, surely, was that the troops should listen respectfully but reject them. The likes of Craterus could not then appeal to different ‘plans’ and claim that they were empowered by them. But would the troops be sure to reject even this much? So another vast plan was included: ‘transfers of population’ between Europe and Asia, so as to bring them into harmony by ‘intermarriage and assimilation’.
⁴
From a king who had stood up for inclusion, this plan was just credible: the Macedonians, ‘Asia-sceptics’, dreaded it, and rejected the ‘plans’, as intended.

Roxane’s baby, born in September, was a boy (Alexander IV). Meanwhile, Perdiccas took the lead in Asia with Antipater, now in his seventies, a ‘rotten thread’ in Macedonia.
⁵
Within twenty-two years, Alexander’s kingdom would have fragmented among quite
other generals: his lifelong friend Ptolemy, in Egypt; his infantry commander Seleucus, in Asia; his bodyguard, Lysimachus, in Thrace and north-west Asia; Antipater’s impetuous son, Cassander, in Macedon (as Alexander’s companion at Babylon, Cassander was alleged, even, to have helped to have him ‘poisoned’). For a while, other major competitors led troops and played for high stakes: the big, burly Antigonus, one-eyed, with a booming voice, the veteran who had commanded in western Asia throughout Alexander’s march east; his flamboyant son, Demetrius, ‘brave as a hero and beautiful as a god, of such majesty that strangers followed him merely to gaze’;
⁶
the artful Eumenes, no Macedonian himself, but a literate Odysseus of a Greek who had been Alexander’s secretary. Until 281
BC
wars were waged incessantly between the major participants and their followers.

The first of the long-term winners to show his hand was Ptolemy. He had known Alexander well since childhood; he had even been appointed as his food-taster (obviously a highly responsible job, in a world of poisons). At Babylon, he received rich Egypt as his governor-ship, but he entrenched himself there by conquests in the West (in Libya) and then by invading Cyprus. His weakest frontier lay in the East, causing him to invade Syria repeatedly in a pattern of ‘Syrian wars’ which would preoccupy his successors for a hundred years and more. Ptolemy was to found the dynasty, the Ptolemies, which ruled Egypt for three hundred years. One of his most artful moves was to seize Alexander’s dead body when Perdiccas sent it home from Babylon on a magnificently decorated funeral carriage. One story is that Ptolemy cheated his pursuers by substituting a sham corpse: they must have chased him, and so perhaps some such trick is historical.

At first, Ptolemy kept Alexander’s body in the old Egyptian capital at Memphis. Later, it was moved down the Nile to Alexandria where a subsequent king, Ptolemy IV, built a magnificent mausoleum, the
S
ā
ma
, for Alexander and the other dead Ptolemies. Rumours that Alexander’s tomb has been found continue to attract publicity, but they would have to involve the rediscovery of a huge dynastic monument under the built-up centre of Alexandria. As for his body, it continued to be displayed there to visitors, including the first Roman emperor Augustus, who laid flowers (in 30
BC
) on the coffin’s glass lid. It was said, perhaps rhetorically, to be still on display in
c.
AD
380,
but there is no specific reference to a visit to it after one in
AD
215.
⁷
The tomb and the corpse were almost certainly destroyed in one or other great city-riot in Alexandria.

Not until 306
BC
did Ptolemy copy his rivals and, in the absence of any young Macedonian princes, take the title of ‘king’. From 305 Egyptian scribes recognized him as a Pharaoh-king too. Meanwhile, he had fought off reprisals by Perdiccas and killed him (Perdiccas had lost too many of his troops in the Nile, to crocodiles). He had clashed with the armies of the emergent Antigonus and his son, the dashing Demetrius; he had also posed, less plausibly, as a champion of the ‘freedom of the Greeks’. Ptolemy needed Greek military settlers and Greek personnel for his armies and his new province; his plea for ‘freedom’, however, was not a committed plea for democracy.