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.