Political expediency has been suggested, but does not convince. No doubt had she been disastrously unsuitable—married for instance—he would have mastered his feelings; but everything points to an authentic coup de foudre. The obvious state marriage would have been with Darius’ daughter, as he knew, for he later made it. Any daughter of Artabazus would have been more eligible than this chieftain’s child. It would seem that falling in love with a woman was a new and exhilarating experience, and, ever the explorer, he was eager to pursue it without delay.
It is unlikely she had any female predecessor. Recent archaeology has revealed the proud, aristocratic refinement of the ideal type admired by the Persian rulers of these regions; and she was an acknowledged beauty. Perhaps she reminded him of his mother, with whom she had traits in common, whether or not he had time to find it out. After such a childhood, it is a wonder his heterosexual instincts were not destroyed instead of merely retarded. The epicene graces of Bagoas may have been tilting, imperceptibly, his sexual bias.
Roxane’s father was summoned, made alliance and gave consent. The Macedonians, after the initial shock, would have remembered Philip’s succession of campaign wives, and presumed that his son would choose in due course a proper consort. The Persians, their royal house passed by, must have raised their eyebrows. (The highborn family of Artabazus remained tranquil, suggesting that the seduction and humiliation of his daughter Barsine was still unborn in the mind of its propagandist author; in real life they could not have swallowed the insult.) The Sogdians were delighted. At the marriage feast the young girl was handed her ritual piece of the bridal loaf by the strange fair-haired chieftain who had sliced it with his sword—ancient and still-surviving symbol of his power to protect and maintain her. Tasting the bread, she pledged herself to a man with five years to live, during most of which he would be on campaign in conditions where only his fighting force could follow him. Her married life must have been measured in months.
Within weeks, he was off to another siege of sensational difficulty. His new father-in-law having mediated a peace treaty, he returned to his bride. The story of the marriage is much neglected by the sources, in itself significant. Only an accident of history has disclosed that in a month or two he was already sleeping alone.
That it took him four years to give her a child admits of various explanations. She is said to have had a stillbirth in India, begotten therefore early in their marriage; we hear of no others. He may have been attentive, but infertile; her attraction may have been fitful; or it may have long ceased, and only some premonition of his early death made him bestir himself to beget an heir. The certainty is that he never became uxorious. With Hephaestion he remained in love, at a depth where the physical relationship becomes almost irrelevant; and years later Bagoas was still his recognized eromenos. He had been disinhibited, not reversed, and had now achieved the normal Greek bisexuality.
Among those most scandalized by the match must have been Callisthenes. Like his teacher Aristotle, he saw Alexander’s mission as that of Hellenic war leader, and thought he had long since betrayed it; Macedonian tolerance of royal polygamy was not shared by southern Greeks, and the thought of Greek lands being some day ruled by a scion of barbarian stock must have been monstrous. Callisthenes adopted an ostentatious austerity of life; a protest admired by the disaffected. Alexander himself paid it little heed. With the spring he had moved from Sogdiana south into Bactria to consolidate his conquests, India in the forefront of his mind. Between this and his new wife, he had enough to think of without the tedious scholar, who was left undisturbed to his instruction of the squires.
His most receptive student, a youth called Hermolaus, was one day attending Alexander at a boar hunt, when for reasons never made clear he speared a boar which the King had marked as his own quarry. For this he got an exemplary sentence: a beating before his fellows, and forfeiture of his right to ride. Since officers who over-punish in fits of petulance are not regarded by their men as Alexander was, it would seem obvious that Hermolaus had been accumulating a bad record. Not enough is known of the royal hunting etiquette to show whether Alexander was now being hard on him for something which might otherwise have been overlooked, or if his offence was flagrant. He was bitterly resentful, and, according to the depositions later, complained to Callisthenes, who spoke in praise of tyrannicides. At all events, Hermolaus formed a plot with five other squires, one of whom was his lover, to kill Alexander as he slept. Six squires made up a night watch; they had therefore to get themselves into the same watch, unobtrusively, one by one.
The ease with which they did so would have staggered any one of the Greek tyrants, of whose precautions such fascinating accounts exist. The squires’ arrangements took them about a month. Night duty was only served for one night at a time, which meant that they must act on their night assigned, or wait the best part of a fortnight for their next turn. Yet their plans took no account whatever of Roxane or her anteroom attendants. She had been consigned to the harem, where the assassins had no apparent fears of her husband sleeping.
The lack of evidence about their relations leaves an important gap in our knowledge of Alexander. It is clear, however, that close and affectionate communication had been integral to his other loves. To Hephaestion he confided everything; Bagoas had been encouraged to reminisce about his former life. Roxane cannot have had a word of Greek; the sources are silent about Alexander’s Persian. Beyond a few endearments picked up from Bagoas, it was probably elementary. Beauty, however dazzling its first impact, may have turned out to be not enough.
On the night arranged for his murder, Alexander was at a party. The squires awaited him, hoping he would be drunk. Fairly late he got up to leave, but was waylaid going to bed by a slightly crazy Syrian woman, a clairvoyant he had taken up because she had given him some true predictions. He let her hang about his quarters, the third of his mother-figures. Ptolemy, much inclined to ignore Alexander’s more disreputable connections, does not admit, as does Aristobulus, that she told him it would be bad luck to turn in before the morning. A born night bird in any case, he got the party going again, and came to bed at dawn. The relief guard arrived, but the anguished conspirators on some pretext still stood by, hoping against hope for their chance. He was sober enough to thank them charmingly for their courtesy in waiting up for him, and give each a tip, before he fell into bed. Hermolaus was ready to wait till their turn came round again; but one of the others now felt unhappy enough to confide in a lover of his, from whom he had kept the secret. The youth was at once sent off to make a clean breast of everything; which he did, in great distress, to Ptolemy whom he found in the royal tent. Alexander, when with some difficulty he had been shaken awake, pardoned the youth, and ordered all the others arrested. Curtius includes Callisthenes; in Arrian, he is only accused after the interrogation of the squires, and Ptolemy does not hesitate here to speak of torture.
They, as Macedonians, were tried before the Assembly. Hermolaus’ defence is said to have been a denunciation of Alexander; just possible in a fanatic with nothing left to lose and no concern for his fellows. They were all condemned by general assent to stoning, which the Assembly carried out. Callisthenes, a non-Macedonian, had no title to a trial and got none. According to Ptolemy he was first tortured—probably to learn if the plot had its roots in Athens—and then hanged. Whether or not he had helped to plan the murder, he had created its moral climate. Alexander’s logic made no distinction between the theorist killer and the man with the knife.