Theoretically, Craterus could have planned it from a distance; but towards him Alexander never showed the least impairment of trust, which shows that any conflict between him and Hephaestion must long since have blown over. It was Eumenes who lived in terror from day to day. His feud had been recent, long and hot. Plutarch, who wrote a separate Life of him, says Alexander had quickly regretted having supported him against Hephaestion. Regret had now turned to wormwood. He was harsh to anyone who had been at odds with the dead man, but most to Eumenes, whom he suspected of rejoicing. Considering his state of mind, Eumenes must have wondered how soon he would wake up one morning convinced that he knew the murderer. The secretary, a prudent man of affairs, protected himself by instituting elaborate and costly memorial dedications. Alexander, who had known him all his life, must, as he came to himself, have abandoned his suspicions; for he relented at these tributes, and devoted himself to his own offerings. To a man of his time they were a form of communication with the departed, the only one now left him; and, in spite of Calanus’ teachings, action was the only release he knew.
He forbade all music in court and camp; he ordered mourning in every city of the empire; he dedicated to Hephaestion his late regiment, to bear his name in perpetuity and carry his image as its standard. Architects and sculptors were set designing memorial shrines and statues for the larger cities. Alexandria’s were to be outstanding; and here the extravagant Pseudo-Callisthenes is for once of value; he can at least be listened to when describing his native town. Arrian quotes, and rightly deplores, a letter purporting to be from Alexander to Cleomenes, satrap of Egypt, the man later turned out by Ptolemy. It says that in return for the proper care of Hephaestion’s shrines, Cleomenes will be granted immunity for all offences, past or future. The document is of some importance, since if Alexander wrote it he must have been temporarily insane; but in the form here given it is certainly spurious (there is a reference to the Pharos, built eighty years later); and the nature of the immunity really granted can be guessed from Pseudo-Callisthenes. Describing Ptolemy’s foundation of a state cult temple to Sarapis and Apis, he defines the status of its High Priest, his regalia, and his stipend. “And he would be inviolate and free from every obligation.” Alexander knew as much as Ptolemy about Egyptian religious procedure; his real instruction must have been to set up such an inviolate priesthood for the cult of Hephaestion.
Saddest and most desperate was an embassy to Amnion’s oracle at Siwah, asking for Hephaestion to be granted divine honours. (Hence of course the priesthood.) It was more than an aggrandizement of the dead. How else could the deified son of Ammon be reunited, in the world to come, with the mortal son of Amyntor of Pella?
Concerned with all this he forgot his distraught suspicions. Among those on whom they fell, there is no word of the one with the strongest motive of all; who, comforting him in his loss, must have most rejoiced at it. He was not to know that she had resolution and ruthlessness enough to have brought it about. That was not revealed till after he was dead. Then it was clear that no one can have hated Hephaestion as bitterly as did Roxane, who murdered his young widow the moment her hands were free.
Before leaving Ecbatana, the crowd of artists gathered for the festival was summoned from its mourning silence to compete in funeral games. The funeral itself was to be in Babylon, by Homeric fire. The embalmed body was entrusted to the convoy of Perdiccas, the new Chiliarch, a connection of the Macedonian royal house and bearing one of its traditional names. Alexander himself, restless to be gone and dull his grief with action, led an expedition against a brigand tribe, the Cossaeans, who had long plagued the road between Babylon and Susa. The Persian kings had never succeeded in subduing them, finding it cheaper to buy them off. He went after them in their winter forts—in summer they lived as nomads—and forced them to surrender. (With his usual respect for the brave, he recruited a corps of them later.) Ptolemy, his co-commander, reported it a tough mountain campaign, in which Alexander was active. His chest wound must have been relieved by the months of physical rest. Yet this war may have been his death warrant. It kept him in the hills for two months at the time when Persian kings had held court in Babylon for its mild winter season. He reached it in spring, and stayed on into its hot, unhealthy summer.
“We defy augury,” says Hamlet just before his death; recalling Alexander, whose noble dust he mused upon in the graveyard. Alexander had had his first augury already. A certain Apollodorus, who had a bad conscience about some peccadillo of his committed in Babylon while Alexander was in India, asked his brother Peithagoras, a haruspex diviner, to read his future in the sacrificial entrails, explaining that he stood most in fear of Hephaestion and the King. The seer wrote to his brother, by then in Ecbatana (there had perhaps been a wait for an auspicious day), saying he need not fear Hephaestion; the lobeless liver of the victim foretold his death. He died the day after Apollodorus got the letter; which so impressed him that he wrote back to Babylon, asking what the omens might be for Alexander. In due course the same reply came back. Evidently in the meantime Apollodorus had got over whatever fear of the King had troubled him; he went to him in sincere concern, and begged him to beware of dangers, though without disclosing the full story of the omen, or its gravity. Alexander thanked him kindly, and rode off, taking no notice, to the Cossaean war. More auguries now awaited him.
The first were fortunate. Coming down into the Euphrates plains, he was met by envoys from peoples beyond the frontiers of his empire: Carthaginians, Libyans and Ethiopians; Scythians, Celts, and the semi-barbarous Italian Tyrrhenians, Bruttians and Lucanians. They not only asked for treaties of friendship with him; they brought him their disputes to settle, as if he were an oracle above contention. Later, Arrian says, it was much disputed whether Rome had sent an embassy; he himself thought not. But Alexander certainly knew something of the Romans; his brother-in-law and uncle, Alexandros of Epirus, had fought for two years in Italy on the side of the Tarentine Greeks against the Bruttian and Lucanian incursions, till killed by treachery. He had been in alliance with Rome, and his dispatches must have reached both his sister Olympias and Alexander himself, who, whether the Romans sent him envoys or not, must already have had his eye on them—especially if not. Here history’s greatest If briefly appears, and vanishes.
Men from these faraway places had never been seen by him or his people before. With new vistas, new prospects opened. But his next message from fate was personal. Nearchus, who had preceded him to Babylon, came anxiously to meet him. (Nearchus’ memoirs are a deplorable loss to history. Their surviving fragments show a vivid style, a talent for description, and a deep, perceptive affection for Alexander.) He brought a message from the priests of Bel, the great god of Assyrian Babylonia, who divided sky from earth and set the courses of the stars. His priests were astrologers; and they had descried a most adverse aspect of the heavens for the King’s entry into Babylon. They begged him to pass it by.