Alexander the Great

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 a

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, i

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 ru

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 u

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 ma

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.

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 co

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 ca