Nearer to the mark, in a realistic sense, was a sign less forcible to those who saw it; for us it has the force of being connected with the likeliest actual cause of Alexander’s death.
Among the countless activities which make it incredible he could have found time for the dissipations alleged in Athens, he was concerned for the farmers on the land downstream from Babylon. They got poor irrigation, because the Euphrates was inclined to drain uselessly away from them into bogs and lakes. He took a flotilla and sailed down that way with his engineers to see what could be done. A practical system, which could be adjusted to the flow, was worked out; while he was about it he saw a good site for a town, and arranged to found one. Then he sailed back towards Babylon by way of the floodlands. Their channels were winding and complex; some of the ships were temporarily lost in them; over the years they had invaded the ancient burial grounds of the Assyrian kings, who had ruled there before the conquests of Cyrus the Great.
Alexander, who seems always to have enjoyed messing about in boats, had taken the tiller of his own ship, then under sail in a bit of wind. He was wearing the petasos, or Greek sun hat, with a hatband in the royal colours, purple and white. The wind caught the hat, whirled the band off, and tangled it into a clump of rushes beside a tomb. Hindsight remembered the tomb as ominous; the chief concern at the time was the loss of the royal diadem, the symbolic mitra. A ready seaman swam over and retrieved it; then, to keep it dry going back, tied it unthinkingly around his head. This was agreed by the seers to be not only a shocking solecism but a dire omen. He was beaten for it; but Alexander, typically thinking that his initiative should be recognized as well as his fault, gave him a talent of silver. (Some unnamed sources had him beheaded; but Aristobulus the engineer, who must have been on the expedition, is here to be believed.) None of the ancient writers recognized, even by hindsight, the more significant fact that into these swamps and channels must have drained the entire sewage effluent of densely populated Babylon.
The authenticity of the Royal Journal, which gives the daily course of Alexander’s last illness, has been much debated. Some scholars point out that it is improbably frank for a court document; others suggest that it was expanded later, to refute the rumours that he had died by poison. So indeed it does; and it is hard to believe the whole account is not genuine, seeing that the case history it describes is so straightforward as to be almost classic, with a consistency far beyond the medical knowledge of the time to invent
Whether it would have made any difference if he had taken care of himself at the outset is anybody’s guess; as are the reasons why he did not. Certainly his conscious mind was not seeking death. He had conceived enough new plans to have filled a normal life span. We are here on psychosomatic ground where we know, essentially, no more than did Pythagoras, if as much. Alexander’s whole life story shows that his sense of his own being was often mysterious even to himself. But it had a power he felt like a force of nature. Something more basic than vanity, something of which vanity was no more than a side effect, had brought Ammon’s oracle home to him with recognition. He had grown beyond, but never out of, Homer; and a central part of him had been Achilles ever since he had sat on old Lysimachus’ knee. Patroclus had died; as far as vengeance could reach, he had been avenged; the terms of Achilles’ death fate had been fulfilled. While still a boy, Alexander must have known by heart the words of the ghost returning as a dream:
And I call upon you in sorrow, give me your hand; no longer
shall I come back from death, once you give me my rite of burning.
No longer shall you and I, alive, sit apart from our other
beloved companions and make our plans, since the bitter destiny
that was given me when I was born has opened its jaws to take me.
And you, Achilleus, like the gods, have your own destiny …
The rite of burning was over. From such a furnace no pinch of mortal dust can have been recovered; much is said of Hephaestion’s monuments, nothing of his tomb. Now Alexander was in a state of constant movement; by day organizing a fleet and an army, giving ceremonious audiences in the pavilion of the silver couches; at night, plunging into the distractions of the symposium or the banquet, the only way of unwinding his tensions he had ever known. If he was ready to die, his intellect had not acknowledged it. But his instincts were always powerful, often strikingly perceptive. For a decade and more his body had been cruelly overloaded; his mind for much longer, probably most of his life. While his mind pondered the omens of a throne or a purple ribbon, his instincts may have been wiser; a message may have reached them that it was his mind which could wear out first.
What he is likely to have said to himself, as he dressed for dinner and felt the first shivers of fever, is simply that it was nothing much; like something he had picked up in Bactria and thrown off in a couple of days; nothing to make a fuss about. But it is perhaps significant that the last event of his life which Arrian records before its onset is the return of the envoys from Siwah, bringing Amnion’s oracle about Hephaestion. He did not quite qualify for a god; but he could be worshipped as a divine hero. His cult was authorized; his shade had the entry to the Elysian Fields; and the difference of rank had never mattered much. This may have been the occasion of the letter to Cleomenes in Alexandria. It was decreed also by Alexander that all business contracts, whose form invoked gods to witness them as God is invoked on the witness stand today, should be inscribed “In Hephaestion’s name.”
Plutarch and Arrian, between them, tell the rest of the story. Plutarch says that Alexander gave a splendid entertainment in honour of Nearchus. Arrian says he had held ceremonies that day, on his soothsayers’ advice, to ward off the evil omens. Both agree that when bedtime came, Medius of Larissa invited him to a late-night party, promising it would be a good one.
This is the first we hear in the sources of Medius, except for the fact, recorded by Nearchus, that he had enjoyed the privilege of commanding a trireme on the Indus cruise, indicating, since he held no high command, that he must have been one of Alexander’s friends. He was accused by ancient writers of flattery, perhaps in a book he wrote which has disappeared, or perhaps merely because he had won Alexander’s favour. To have become a valued companion since his bereavement must surely have needed more than flattery; some imagination and tact; even the most hostile sources make no sexual suggestions. Unlike Cassander, Medius had no known motive whatever for wishing Alexander dead, and every reason for wanting him alive; he was a generous friend. In Cassander’s record, one murder more or less can be only a matter of detail; but Medius, whether or not an admirable man, is almost certainly a gravely slandered one.
As Alexander’s host two evenings running, he had opportunity. That he was the lover of Iollas, Alexander’s cupbearer, is most likely a canard meant to furnish him with a motive; Iollas, even if guilty, could have acted on his own at any time, nor could a festive occasion have freed him from responsibility. Both Arrian and Plutarch dismiss as absurd the tale that Alexander was poisoned at Medius’ party; as, on the medical evidence, well they may. Both therefore mention only to reject it a story that on draining a “cup of Heracles” Alexander gave a sharp cry of pain, and had to leave the feast. It may indeed be just a propaganda story concocted during the succession wars to smear Medius or Perdiccas; but it is interesting that, if true, it would fit the clinical picture very well. It goes without saying that any poison which could produce such an effect as soon as it was swallowed would have its victim dead in convulsions well within the hour. But a “cup of Heracles” was a very large beaker, drained without heeltaps. In a Babylonian summer the wine was probably well chilled from a snow pit. A draught like this, flung down on a hot night by a man with a rising temperature, could easily cause an instant, violent stomach cramp. On no other occasion is Alexander ever said to have cried out with pain; anything so uncharacteristic has a certain persuasiveness, for in such a spasm it could have been involuntary.