At Persepolis, viewing the fire-blackened palace ruins, he expressed regrets. It would no longer have seemed to him the ideal climax for even the most successful party. But, as he made his way down to Susa, another burning lay before him. Calanus, who had never been ill in India, had some grave internal malady, perhaps cancer. Impatient of a long-drawn end disturbing to tranquillity, he asked of Alexander his own chosen death. Alexander pleaded with him in vain; then, knowing he would contrive it if it was refused, resolved it should be worthily done. At Susa, he commissioned Ptolemy to erect a splendid pyre. The cavalry and the royal elephants paraded. Calanus, too weak to mount the horse provided for him, was carried on a litter, singing hymns to his gods. Alexander had supplied rich funeral offerings to be burned with him, but he gave them away to friends and disciples, having no more need of possessions in death than in life. Telling them to rejoice, not mourn for him, he lay down on the pyre. When it was kindled, Alexander ordered the trumpets to sound, and the elephants to blare their royal salute; but there were no cries to drown, Calanus burned unflinching. Arrian says that Alexander was distressed because of his friendship; the rest “felt nothing but astonishment.” However, the drinking bout for the wake suggests a fairly violent reaction. Alexander as usual got himself up to bed (the most hostile sources have no instance of his ever being carried there); but thirty-odd men died “of the chill”; probably from finishing under the tables on a winter night.
Arrian and Plutarch both refer to a story that Calanus’ friends came up to take leave of him as he approached the pyre; but he would bid no farewell to Alexander, saying that they would meet again in Babylon.
A happier feast was the reunion with Nearchus and his fleet, which had arrived by river; the men of this much-enduring Odyssey got another festival. Awards for valour in India were given; and Hephaestion was now raised over even the highly valued Craterus to be chief Chiliarch; in Persian terms, Grand Vizier. Till now, no office had carried absolute precedence next after Alexander; he had smoothed the earlier rivalry by saying that Craterus was the King’s friend, Hephaestion was Alexander’s. But a shared ordeal leaves its mark on any human relationship; and this tribute must have expressed Alexander’s feelings after the desert march. That Craterus accepted it without pique is evident from the perfect trust in him which Alexander showed to the end.
In Susa a few more untrustworthy satraps were deposed or, when too criminal and dangerous, killed. The replacements were, overall, more often Macedonian than Persian; men proved in command under his eye. These choices turned out well; but any Greek hopes that he would now discard “barbarian ways” soon faded. Hurried along, like so many short-lived men of genius, by a kind of creative urgency, he was planning for a new generation in which such distinctions should disappear.
Before marching east he had left in the Susa palace the Queen Mother, Sisygambis, and her grandchildren. The boy, who would now be about fourteen, does not reappear in history; he must simply have been merged in the Iranian nobility during the succession wars. Both his sisters were of marriageable age. Alexander now married the elder one, at a ceremony of such importance that she could only henceforth be regarded as his chief wife. For this was much more than a wedding; unlike the burning of Persepolis, it was a genuine manifesto. Eighty other couples shared it; chief officers and friends to whom he gave, with large dowries, girls from the highest families in Persia.
Roxane must have been in the city. What she said is unknown; what she thought, she wrote in blood after his death. She bided her time. None of the chosen bridegrooms, nor the kin of the chosen brides, demurred; Alexander’s will sufficed. His own bride was called either Stateira (her mother’s name) or Barsine; the sources differ. Her sister, Drypetis, was given to Hephaestion; Alexander wanted them to be linked in kinship through their children. Craterus got a niece of Darius; Ptolemy a daughter of Artabazus; Nearchus a grandchild of his by the Greek general Memnon and the other Barsine, alleged (though improbably in her lifetime) to be the mother of the dubious pretender. The list reveals that all this time the children of the dead guerrilla chief, Spitamenes, had lived under Alexander’s protection; his daughter was given to Seleucus, who, unlike most of the others, did not desert her when Alexander was dead, or set her aside for a more politic marriage; she became a queen and the mother of a dynasty.
The court chamberlain, Chares, wrote a book of anecdotes called Stories of Alexander; among its surviving fragments is an account of the wedding feast. On the wide platform before the palace was erected a pavilion 800 yards in circumference. Its columns were 20 cubits high (the cubit varied; they would have stood about 30 feet) jewelled and gilded. Gilded curtain rods supported side curtains woven in patterns. There were a hundred couches with silvered legs for the chief guests; the carpets were of purple, scarlet and gold. Arrian says the weddings were solemnized in the Persian manner; chairs were placed for the bridegrooms in order of rank; after the healths had been drunk, the brides entered and sat down each by her groom, who took her by the hand and kissed her, Alexander doing so first. The army and the lesser guests were entertained in the court outside. Even the bridal chambers were provided by Alexander, including bedsteads plated with silver (the royal one had gold). The feast lasted five days, said Chares; the most famous exponents of every art performed. Once more Alexander honoured the actor Thettalus, who had taken such risks for him in Caria long ago. The subject-allies sent gold crowns to the huge value of 15,000 talents; these masterpieces were probably melted down to meet the still huger expenses.
Aristobulus averred that Alexander also linked himself with the older royal line of Ochus, by marrying his daughter Parysatis. If he did, it is unlikely to have been on this occasion, unless on a later day of the feast. He was sensitive to ridicule, and the only precedent for simultaneous royal bigamy had been set by the wildly unpopular and much-satirized Syracusan tyrant, Dionysius I. There is no word from Ptolemy, one of the bridal party, about this marriage. Yet it is hard to see why Aristobulus should have invented it.
The manifesto of the weddings was on the grandest scale. Alexander regularized, and dowered, the marriages of all his common soldiers who had taken Persian concubines, some 10,000. Not a few had wives in Macedon; but it legitimized the children, whom he looked upon as his wards.
Even less is known of his relationship with Barsine-Stateira than with Roxane. The one established fact is that in the following year, when Alexander died in Babylon, Roxane was there, but Stateira was at Susa. Remembering his lack of height, it is worth noting that Darius, a very tall man, had married his half-sister; so this family trait is likely to have been passed on. Roxane’s name means “Little Star.”
Among Alexander’s boyhood friends, honoured with the noblest brides, one face was missing. Harpalus had fled. In Alexander’s absence he had moved to Babylon with its enormous treasure hoard, and had had charge of the mint. Already an aesthete, he had discovered in himself a love of profusion equal to Alexander’s own; and the difference of his now owning the money must have seemed trivial when were was so much. He had annoyed, rather than oppressed, the people, who resented being asked to pay semi-divine honours to two Athenian courtesans whom he had successively set up like royalty. It is uncertain whether he had counted on Alexander’s death, or just on his indulgence. They had been very close; Harpalus had stuck to him through his disgrace and exile, a thing he never forgot. In spite of colossal peculations, confession and charm would probably have got the sinner off lightly, if he had kept his head. He lost it when he heard about the purge of disloyal satraps, and bolted to Greece with 6,000 talents of specie, 30 ships, presumably bought in Asia Minor, and about 6,000 Greek mercenaries of similar provenance. He had earlier shipped grain to Athens to relieve a famine, and counting on goodwill there, had formed the harebrained plan of financing a revolt. More than 300 talents went in bribes to politicians (Demosthenes got the most, to his later downfall). After complex intrigues, they decided against it but kept the money. Olympias, a more terrifying enemy than Alexander, had ordered Harpalus’ arrest, and he fled by sea with his men, one of whom eventually murdered him in Crete, no doubt for his gold. If Alexander had made any real effort he could have had him seized, and his trial would have been a mere formality; even after disillusion, something of old gratitude must have remained. But the offering by a court dramatist of Agen—a satire-farce on Harpalus and his goddess queens, with a passing swipe at the Athenians, and Alexander as deus ex machina—was not unwelcome, for fragments still survive.