On the night the great pyre burned I was standing next to Rohjane. Her mood was as buoyant as I’d seen it in months. With the rest of us, she watched as the lights were extinguished in the temples, and the stars appeared with a brilliance rarely glimpsed by the citified Babylonians. I heard her gasp with delight as the conflagration wafted Hephaestion’s spirit to Heaven. But just as the athletic games were about to begin, the Queen excused herself. She complained of a headache. Yet after spending more hours with the woman than her husband, I could sense her insincerity.
“Yes, you should retire,” the King told her with fraternal warmth. “I will come and see you after.”
“Yes, you will,” she replied, the tartness in her voice entirely escaping him.
I followed an hour later. Her apartment was in a remote wing of the palace, as far as possible from the nuptial beds of Barsine and Parysatis. When I found Rohjane, she was lying on a drinking couch opposite Youtab. There was an open brazier beside them, bread and eel on a table between them, and drinking cups in their hands.
“Is this some barbarian custom, to make a celebration at the time of a funeral?” I asked.
“Pah! Who invited sourpuss?” cried Youtab.
The Queen laughed, stretched her arms. “We are having a symposium! Or haven’t you ever seen a drinking party just for women?”
“The premise, milady, is absurd.”
“Oh, stop being the tutor! Yes, there is a funeral on, and yes, Hephaestion was a fine fellow. But the innocent suffer all the time, don’t they Youtab?”
“They suffer particularly.”
“Yes, particle…partickle…particularey…by the gods, what is in these cups!”
Then the women laughed in that way I had seen so often among Alexander and his companions, when the craters were running low and there was nothing very funny to laugh at. I crossed my arms and waited for their attention.
“It has always been my intent to help the Queen understand her responsibilities in the Greek style,” I said. “And so I must tell you now that this behavior is entirely inappropriate. To retire to your tent is perhaps understandable…but to carouse in this way? I think not.”
“Isn’t it funny how he speaks of what a wife should do, but never the responsibilities of the husband?” Rohjane asked Youtab, as if I was not standing there.
“Maybe he means that you should consider yourself lucky to be dishonored by a husband like the great Alexander,” answered Youtab.
“You mean, dishonored by a god?”
“Reduced to an ass!”
“Ravished by a swan!”
“Seduced and abandoned!”
“On a beach on Naxos!”
“The very son of Zeus!”
“Lord of the mountaintops!”
“Master of the backcountry!”
They leaned into their pillows in their hysterics, until Youtab raised her head and cried through her laughter, “Oh, that’s too much. Too much! I’ve wet myself!”
I turned to leave them. Rohjane called after me.
“Machon, only friend, come drink with us!”
“Yes, come back! Just watch what you drink from around here!”
I again call your attention to Youtab’s words: “watch what you drink from.” This seemed rather a morbid thing to say, given the circumstances of Hephaestion’s death. Of course, it doesn’t constitute evidence that Rohjane or her servant was responsible. It may have just been a bad joke. Nor was any poison ever found, in the dead man or anywhere in the palace. But I can tell you that Rohjane was not over the insult of Alexander’s other marriages, which occurred just a few months before Hephaestion’s death. Youtab’s choice of humor-and the poor timing of their “women’s symposium”-were suspicious.
It is true that Alexander sent a request to the Ammon temple in Siwah that Hephaestion be accepted as a god in his own right. All of us-his advisors, his family, the priests of Ammon-indulged him this, taking it as a harmless, if somewhat indiscreet, testament to his love. What was not so easy to excuse, though, is a letter the King sent to Cleomenes, his governor in Egypt. Remember that this was the same Cleomenes who, upon taking control of Egypt in Alexander’s name, cornered the grain market in that country. I am told this raised the price of bread tenfold here in Athens. I submit a copy of this letter into evidence, with the magistrate’s permission.
“The clerk will read the letter,” said Polycleitus. When the recitation was done, Swallow, Deuteros and the rest of the jury were stunned.
This is the exact text of Alexander’s letter. I was there when he dictated it, and obtained my copy from Eumenes. Yes, Alexander orders Cleomenes to construct a marble monument to Hephaestion in Alexandria, and promises that if the construction pleases him, he will pardon all of the governor’s past malfeasance-his expropriation from the temples, his looting of the public treasury…and the famine he caused here and elsewhere in Greece. What is more, Alexander also promises to ignore any future crimes.
You heard that right. Can you imagine such a promise coming from a man you all agreed to take as a god? Indeed, that it could be bestowed on a creature so villainous, so reprobate, that not even Ptolemy could stand him? The latter, as you recall, had him killed soon after he arrived in Egypt. Yet it seems that a pardon was exactly what Alexander gave to Cleomenes.
I will say no more about Alexander’s letter. There is no need to gild that lily-memories of the pain of your empty stomachs, and the cries of your underfed children-shall be emphasis enough. But out of curiosity, how high did the price of wheat go in the market just a few feet from where we sit here, Aeschines? Three drachmas for a capithe? Four?
“Higher!” someone cried from the back of the room.
Higher still! But we must forgive Aeschines his ignorance, for he was not here to suffer with you. Nor was I, for that matter. The difference, I submit to you, is that I am not here extolling the virtues of the man-I mean, the god-who offered pardon to a man who brought famine to this city, or promised to look the other way when a villain like Cleomenes committed any other crimes that might have entered his head.
As deep as his grief was for Hephaestion, there should be no doubt that Alexander did recover from it. At last he resumed work on his many projects; it was at this time, for instance, that he undertook a detailed examination of the shipping channels downstream from Babylon, thinking he would instruct the engineers on the best route by which deep-draught vessels might enter his harbor.
As he often did, the King took the helm of his boat himself, showing as much skill afloat as he did directing armies on land. It so happened, however, that he rode up on an obstruction in the shallows, which knocked everyone on the deck to their knees. After his sojourn in the Gedrosian desert, Alexander had taken to wearing a hat to protect his neck and shoulders from the sun. With the shock of running aground this hat flew off his head and landed in the water some distance away. Before the current carried the hat too far, a slave on board took it upon himself to swim after it.
This man’s initiative was especially welcome, as the hat was fixed with a royal coronet of gold. Allowing this emblem of universal kingship to wash up on some dung-strewn shore would have been awkward indeed. Yet all were equally appalled when the slave plucked the hat from the water and, perhaps thinking he would keep it from further damage, put it on his own head for the swim back. The Macedonians were murmuring, and the Persians gesticulating at him to remove it, but he came on and climbed up anyway, conscious of nothing but his pride. He was oblivious, that is, until he saw the circle of frowning faces around him.
Now I know that it has been a long time since we Athenians have had kings. It has not been too long, however, for you all to imagine the magnitude of this disaster: for this slave to put the royal device on his head was just as ominous a sign as a servant taking the throne, or walking on the royal carpet. Nor was Alexander immune from such concerns, for it was now obvious in his mind that Hephaestion’s death was connected to the discovery of the ram with the deformed liver. So where before he would have forbidden the presumptuous slave to be punished, this time he allowed him to be severely beaten; the hat was then tossed back into the water, where it was retrieved properly by a sailor with a better grasp of the side-stroke. Later Alexander regretted the beating, and rewarded the slave’s good intentions with a fortune of thirty minas in silver. That particular coronet, however, was locked away, never to be worn again.