The harbour of Babylon was being enlarged, and a new fleet built there; the indomitable Nearchus was ready to command it; Peucestas was training a loyal and disciplined Persian army; an army of young Macedonians was due to come out with Antipater. The adventure would start with a march of about three hundred miles from Babylon to the mouth of the Euphrates. Here they would rendezvous with the fleet, and turn southward, Alexander making the supporting march by land. The narrowness of the Gulf was already known; this time, if the coast should turn out desert, supplies could reach them by sea. The formidable southern and Red Sea coasts were terra incognita; far further from help than Makran, they might have involved him in appalling disasters, though he had probably learned by now when to turn back.
Arrian comments that he was insatiable of conquest. True as this is, his whole career shows that for him power was not an end but a tool. He longed to discover, and what he found to shape creatively. The romantic love of personal heroism, which shortened his life, was also the spell which caused his men to follow him, and is inseparable from his destiny.
But all these great plans fell into the background when Deinocrates, the artist commissioned to design Hephaestion’s pyre, dismissed his swarming workmen and announced that it stood complete. All was ready for what still remains the most spectacular funeral known to history. Alexander’s own is no exception; his body was too sacred a relic, too great a political status symbol, to be destroyed. Patroclus was to go in the archaic way of heroes; but accompanied by a holocaust of Babylonian riches and Hellenistic art.
That so grandiose a construction was designed for burning, and built in the available time, has attracted doubt only in our century which has seen the death of handcraft. It could have been achieved, if not with ease, certainly with success, at all those courts of sixteenth-century Europe whose huge triumphal spectacles—contests in royal splendour—can still be studied in their architects’ detailed drawings. All were created for occasions as ephemeral as this one. Alexander could call upon infinitely greater resources.
The form was Babylonian, a stepped pyramid or ziggurat; the art was Greek. It stood some two hundred feet high, upon a platform a furlong square, set into the vast Babylonian outer wall. The lowest tier was of combustible palmwood columns, left open for fuel and updraught. Then the carvings began in ascending, narrowing tiers; ship prows bearing armed figures, with red felt banners hanging between to be lifted by the rising heat; then twenty-foot wreathed torches supporting eagles; then a hunting scene; then a battle of centaurs; then alternating bulls and lions; then trophies of arms; at the top, the woman-headed birds the Greeks called sirens, hollowed behind so that, before the burning, hidden singers could give them voices to praise the dead. No apex is described; this must have been the body on its bier. The use of quick-burning softwood would much hasten the task of the hundreds of craftsmen and their army of assistant slaves. Parts were gilded; the rest would have been painted, mainly in crimson and blue. For weeks, as the tiers rose, it must have drawn swarms of sightseers; one of whom, like a modern tourist taking snapshots, must have sketched or written the detailed description used by Diodorus. Alexander’s plans purposed a permanent memorial, perhaps on the same site; whatever its form, the work not of weeks but years.
This, it might seem, was the one occasion on which he used his almost limitless power in the cause of pure self-indulgence. But for the modern sceptic one factor has disappeared: the continued presence of Hephaestion himself, wandering as Patroclus did while he awaited the fire’s release; knowing of the plea for his divinity which would rescue him from some separating, inferior station in the land of the dead; understanding—had he not always understood?—the tokens of devotion and offerings of remorse.
The site of the pyre had been covered with baked tiles, to preserve the ancient Babylonian brickwork, mortared with bitumen, from the fierce heat. For the men from the west, the stupendous spectacle of the blaze must have been the memory of a lifetime; and Alexander’s other tribute, a quiet and solemn little ceremony, would largely have passed them by. But for the Babylonians, it may have been more startling than the other. He ordered that during the day of the funeral the sacred fires in the temples should be extinguished. It was the logical expression of what he had said to Sisygambis years before: “He too is Alexander.” Custom reserved this rite for the death of the Great King.
Alexander plunged back immediately into action. He looked forward, indeed, for as long as he had breath to tell his mind. Even the intention of the funeral had been concerned with Hephaestion’s present and future fame on earth, and his enduring life in Elysium.
All this time, the new fleet had been training on the Euphrates. Himself intensely competitive, Alexander seems to have been adept in stimulating among his men keen rivalry without ill feeling; the contests with which he now enlivened the work, turning exercises into races with trophies to be won, were very popular. He was busy too with the reorganization of the army. His racial fusions were starting to work more smoothly. Peucestas had arrived with his high-grade Persian troops; promptly, and it seems with no opposition, Alexander began assigning them to units under a mixed officer corps of Persians and Macedonians. Troops from the satrapies of Asia Minor were pouring in.
The Persian Gulf expedition was almost ready to start. Today it can be safely assumed that uninhabited land is uninhabitable; there was then plenty of spare room, and on his coastal march he planned to make harbours and found colonies. His North African scheme did not, of course, depend on an Arabian sea route; if this search had to be abandoned, he could simply have started his march from Egypt. Once more exploration and pioneering were paramount in his mind.
Nothing is so wise after the event as legend. But it seems that several, at least, of Alexander’s death omens were recognized as sinister at the time. It has been noted that Aristobulus had the testimony of the diviner at first hand. Another portent was the occupation of the throne, during the King’s brief absence, by some man of obscure condition who seems to have been deranged; he had been under arrest for some unknown offence, but had got away and wandered into the throne room, while everyone’s attention was relaxed, Alexander and his officers having taken a refreshment break elsewhere. His first warning of the event was the distraught wailing of the court eunuchs—Bagoas no doubt among them—who had seen the dreadful augury but “because of some Persian custom” could not remove the man; perhaps their incomplete manhood would have made the omen worse. Long before he conquered Persia, Alexander had known that to sit on the Great King’s throne was a capital offence; he had said so in joke to the frost-numbed soldier he had been warming in his chair. Now the seers told him it was something worse than disrespect, a symbol of disaster. The man was tortured, to learn if he was the instrument of a plot; the poor wretch could only say that he had felt like sitting there, he knew not why. This made the bad luck more threatening, and to avert it he was killed; probably a kinder fate than the lot of a madman in those days.
It has been suggested that, because of previous bad omens, some Persian well-wishers had sent the man, an expendable criminal, to act as a royal scapegoat (as the disingenuous Bessus had proposed to stand in for Darius); and that Alexander had him killed in error, instead of letting him carry the bad luck away. But there seems no reason why this prophylactic measure on his behalf should not have been discussed with Alexander beforehand and the right procedure explained. It would appear that the incident was one of those portents, the product of genuine chance, which in the ancient world carried the greatest weight.