Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great (40 page)

Yes, I see that my time is almost up. I suppose I had flattered myself to think I had the same skill as Aeschines in sensing when his water has run low. And to think I haven’t even killed Alexander yet—so to speak! Relax, Aeschines…that was a joke, not a confession! So I must conclude:

As he alienated his wife, Alexander made additional trouble for himself with his veteran soldiers. It had now been ten years since the Greeks had crossed into Asia. Since many of Alexander’s men were then too old or too weak to serve him further, he ordered ten thousand Greeks cashiered from the army, albeit with a fortune of one talent each as a bonus for their service. Craterus was given the task of leading these veterans home.

The veterans, having already seen their commanders take Persian wives, and their positions taken by barbarian levies, were in no mood to accept dismissal. As Alexander took the rostrum to praise them, the men responded with jeers, performing mock prostrations, asking him if he would prefer an army full of Persians and, yes, calling him ‘Darius Alexander.’ The King did not perceive these things at first, speaking as if in a dream from which he was reluctant to awake. When he did notice them, however, his face flashed a deep red, and he looked directly at those who insulted him.

“What injustice have I done you,” he asked, “that you dishonor this leave-taking? Speak out like men, not children, for after our service together you owe me as much!”

“The dishonor is done upon us,” said a voice from the crowd. “For Alexander has forgotten the men who gave him the land of Asia, and thinks they may be bought off for mere gold.”

“Maybe he thinks he will invade Africa by himself!” cried another.

This remark made the rest of the men laugh. Alexander did not laugh, however, but instead called his Agrianian guards. The instigators were arrested in a dead silence, as King and army eyed each other. Their mutual hostility was strange in light of all they had accomplished together. It was as if the mortal body resented its divine head, and the divine head spurned its body. Alexander moved to speak, but was seized by a violent coughing that lasted a while; as he convulsed, he grasped his side, over the place where the Mallian spear had punctured his lung.

“This is a fine day, my companions. For this is the day I found out your true estimation of me. You gave me Asia, you say? I gave you respect! I took a race of cowardly, dung-smeared vagabonds and forged an army! I gave you lifetimes of memories to grace the heritage of your families. For you will return to Macedonia with much more than a talent of gold in your hands. You return with the kind of esteem that is unassailable for the rest of your days! And for what have I asked in return? A bit of purple to wear, and the kisses of my dear companions! Beyond these, I have demanded no special privileges—I have known the rigors of the camp and the march as well as any of you. In the Gedrosian desert, I could have taken water, but did not, because there was not enough for us to share—can any of you deny it? So what will you say now, when people remind you that you consigned me to our enemies? How will you explain the end of Alexander? Go then! Go back to your small lives, your ordinariness! Sustain yourselves with wisecracks instead of honor! I have nothing more to say to you.”

Thereupon he spat on the ground and retreated to his tent. As he had done before, on the death of Cleitus and when he was forced back from India, he took no food and saw no visitors for the next day. For a good number of the men this temper had a too-familiar ring, and they did not respond to it. Yet for others, particularly those of weak or compliant minds, the King’s upset was intolerable. Alexander increased their discomfort by issuing new commissions for officers: most of the names on the list were Persian ones, and some of the nicknames of the regiments had been transferred to their Persian counterparts.

Again, for those who had set their hearts against him, who considered their divorce to be final, the commissions only confirmed their suspicions. But for some this estrangement had gone too far—abandoning their pride, they surrounded Alexander’s tent and called for his forgiveness. When he did not answer, they broke down entirely, making such a riot of pitiful wailing that the King’s heart softened. Appearing before them, he honored all by receiving their kisses, and wept tears of good fellowship with them, saying—without irony this time—that it was indeed a good day.

Of course, not all the ten thousand veterans came to Alexander’s tent that night, or even most of them. But instead of dwelling on the absence of their comrades, the King chose to recognize the humility of the few hundred who did come, and in so doing to excuse the lot. The incident perfectly typifies the dilemma of his leadership. Among his veterans, as in this city, his hegemony did provoke bitter and, in some respects, unjustified hostility. To both challenges Alexander responded wisely, choosing not to force his will when a simple declaration of victory would do.

The other important part of this incident was that Perdiccas and Ptolemy managed to maneuver Craterus into leading the veterans home. Alexander presented it as an honor to his old comrade, and under other circumstances it would have been. I am suspicious, though, that this honor absented Craterus from the scene just as Alexander fell sick at Babylon. When the veterans marched at last, I saw Craterus embrace Alexander for what seemed like a long time. Then the King kissed him, and brushing away a tear, Craterus barked an order to the men, who also had tears flowing down their cheeks. And so the weeping army departed for Cilicia, where they would construct a fleet to sail home. None of them would see Alexander alive again.

But it is late in our story. After years on campaign, Alexander’s exhaustion manifested at every level a man may show it—physical, intellectual, emotional. Since his latest injury, he leaned on suppliants who came to receive the royal kiss, and seemed to cling to his horse instead of ride it. For those with eyes to see them, the signs of his end were increasingly at hand.

At that time the King, who was on his way to Ecbatana, paused in Media to inspect the stock of wild horses in that country. He was entertained there by the governor, Atropates son of Attalus, in an unusual way: into his camp, they say, marched ten files of armored, spear-bearing Amazons. Their leader, who called herself Queen Hyster, was presented to Alexander. After the obligatory prostration, she thereafter addressed him as an equal, declaring that those in her faraway country had heard something of his prowess, and that she wished to take her pleasure with him. If their joining produced a daughter, she would be fit to rule her tribe; if a son, he would be delivered to his father to be raised, for—as we all know—the Amazons do not nurture their sons but expose them.

By all accounts this Queen Hyster was most beautiful, her charms revealed by her short tunic and the tightness of her leather girdle, which showed to best advantage the surprising prodigiousness of Amazon breasts. These were exposed and utterly complete, in contradiction of the legends that one breast was always removed. This fact, along with the high heels on their boots, suggested to some that Hyster’s company were not real Amazons at all, but devised as a joke by Atropates. Yet Alexander, for his part, accepted Hyster as a genuine Queen. He acceded to a political alliance with her, but declined any further entanglement, noting that he was already married more than once. This excuse was received with regret by Hyster, who led her pendulous sisters away from the baying worship of the Macedonian soldiers. It seemed clear to other witnesses, however, that the tired, wheezing Alexander refused her invitation because he was simply unfit to take it up. And indeed, hers was the only challenge from which the conqueror of Tyre and the Rock of Sogdia had ever shrunk.

It is a truism that men enjoying good luck turn skeptical of prophecies. Tyche’s graces are understood as the fruits of hard work, wise planning, or whatever virtues men like to attribute to themselves, and not the whims of the gods. Since the news for Alexander had been very good for a long time, he lately had little use for the services of the soothsayer Aristander. The King attended the regular morning sacrifices as a duty, though his face showed his mind was elsewhere, and the seer seemed to take the hint, producing auguries that provoked little comment one way or the other. It was therefore something of a surprise when, during the reading of a ram’s entrails at the palace at Ecbatana, Aristander paused over the liver. The King asked what troubled him.

“This liver has but two lobes—and look here, how the vein is distended.”

Alexander looked. He was no judge of such things, but knew very well that it portended an event of significance. Euripides wrote of a similar sign in
Electra
, when Aegisthus sacrificed a calf with a lobeless liver just before Orestes killed him with an ax.

“It could be an ill-omen, or just as well not,” said Aristander, evidently not sure what the King wanted to hear. “It suggests a disappearance of some kind. But what shall disappear is not evident.”

Alexander was preoccupied with the planning of a sea expedition on the Caspian. That his whole fleet might disappear was worrisome, but Aristander found nothing inauspicious about the King’s relations with Poseidon. For lack of a specific sign, Alexander contented himself with the usual precautions—extra dedications to all the gods—and instructed Aristander to sacrifice again. When the second try showed nothing amiss, Alexander seemed to put the incident out of his mind.

At this time his relations with Hephaestion had lapsed into a kind of tense formality. With the arrival of Bagoas, then Rohjane, then Barsine, the King’s intimacies became increasingly subordinate to the rule of his empire. His old companion was assigned a series of important but distant tasks—to build a bridge here, to settle some provincial dispute there—which kept him away from the Greek court for longer and longer periods. To be sure, Hephaestion relished these opportunities to show his competence: no doubt he was sensitive to insinuations that he was little more than Alexander’s bedfellow. In any other army, beside a leader of merely human brilliance, Hephaestion would have been a formidable presence. However, on campaign with Alexander, whom he never ceased to love, this uncommon man understood the greater virtue of serving the throne before himself.

Nevertheless, what mortal would not resent being supplanted in the familiarity of a god by eunuchs and barbarians? When he did come to attend the court, Hephaestion said little, and when he did speak his voice was laced with sarcasm. Perceiving his jealousy, Alexander would spare his feelings by sending him away again, until the next time he would come, and his hostility was still deeper. Witnesses say that even strangers became uncomfortable around them, so palpable was the strain.

Alexander’s continued affection was clear when his old companion was suddenly taken ill at Ecbatana. When his fever stretched into a second and then a third day, the King sent his own personal doctor to tend to him. Hephaestion rallied, his appetite returning. Alexander, meanwhile, was obliged to attend athletic games he had organized for Persian boys, whom he had observed lacked civilized pursuits. It was while he presided over these games that word came that Hephaestion had relapsed.

Abandoning the event he had worked so hard to organize, Alexander rushed back to his friend’s side, but he was too late. Hephaestion was gone, the dregs of a pitcher of wine he had ill-advisedly taken with lunch still at his side.

Alexander behaved at first as if he would not believe it. He carried on with talking to the dead man, breaking his monologue only to snarl at anyone who approached the body. After some hours this banter lapsed into inconsolable despair. Casting himself on the corpse, Alexander wept without shame, crying out his regret at this or that disagreement going back to their boyhood. At length he bellowed for a knife, and those around him became genuinely fearful that he would do harm to himself. But instead Alexander sliced off all the hair on his head, including his eyebrows, and retreated, crazed and bloody, to his bedchamber.

Alexander and Hephaestion had not be been close in their final years. It took all of us by surprise, then, that the King went so entirely to pieces over his loss. He ceased to wash. His skin again became covered with the spots I had first seen on him years before, at Chaeronea. In that time he passed just two orders: first, the doctor who tended Hephaestion, Glaucias, was to be executed. This suggests that the King at best suspected incompetence in the manner of his lover’s death, and at the worst actual malice. For all were agreed that despite his illness the victim was sound of body, very much in his prime, and for such a man to descend so acutely was most suspicious. The dregs of the wine pitcher were examined with no conclusion reached one way or the other. Yet there are many poisons known that would leave no obvious trace.

His second order was for all the fires in Babylon’s temples to be snuffed out in Hephaestion’s honor. Despite invasions, earthquakes, and every other kind of disaster, many of these fires had not been allowed to go out in a thousand years. This decree, which was made with no apparent concern for the Babylonians, was alone enough to put the natives in a deadly mood.