If it happened, nothing much need have been thought of it at the time. Later, it would have raised dreadful doubts in the minds of Medius and his guests; mutual suspicions; personal fears. Small wonder if the incident was hushed up, and the hushing up bred sinister rumour.
Enwrapped in much mumbo-jumbo, Plutarch has probably preserved an essential truth: “the poison was water.” Most likely it was only the water of downstream Euphrates, laden with the untreated excreta of a dozen diseases. But this, of course, is not what Plutarch meant; and Iollas, Cassander’s brother, the royal cupbearer, remains a dubious figure still. Man did not wait for Pasteur to learn that water could be lethal; he could connect cause and effect. Florence Nightingale, who to the end of a long life refused to believe in germs, was well aware that certain pumps and wells in London were dangerous. Empiric knowledge like this must go back to the dawn of civilization; it was common currency in classical times. It is an extraordinary fact that not only did the kings of Persia have their drinking water drawn from a special spring; they had it boiled. No one knows why, or whether the lost science of some earlier age had been preserved as ritual. Nor is it known whether Alexander kept it up at his Persian court; very likely it was just continued as routine. But, unless turbid, all water looks much alike. It may have been the instrument of many undiscovered murders which have passed for—as in a sense they were—natural deaths. Its disadvantage was that it was not infallible; the infection might not take, or the victim might recover. Its advantage was the enormous one of being undetectable—unless someone talked; and, according to Plutarch, someone did. That the poison was water was, he said, confided by Antigonus One-Eye to a certain Hagnothemis, of whom, unfortunately, nothing else is known.
He claimed that the water was sent by Antipater on Aristotle’s advice, and carried by Cassander. It was alleged to have been drawn from an outlet of the Styx at Nonacris, its lethal power residing in its intense cold, which would eat through anything except an ass’s hoof, in which it was conveyed.
Antigonus is little heard of while one of Alexander’s officers; he became a king in nearer Asia. He bears a good character, but had later contacts with Antipater and could have heard something then. The Styx is innocuous; the obscure Hagnothemis may have been a compulsive liar; but Pseudo-Callisthenes, in a fanciful account of the murder, puts in the remarkable detail that the ass-hoof container had been boiled. Just as country wise women were using substances containing penicillin long before its principles were known to science, so malevolent empiricists may have found that a boiled container would preserve a microbiotic strain from destructive contact with other organisms; while the jelly formed in the hoof would make a perfect culture. Tainted water could surely have been found within a few miles of Babylon. Many such infections produce no dysentery, only fever and increasing weakness, just as the Journal describes; without a timely antibiotic, they can still end fatally.
After the party, Alexander slept most of the day. This statement has made the Journal suspect to some historians, who take it simply as the description of an all-day hangover. But extreme fatigue is typical at the onset of severe infections, often the first thing complained of. Feeling tired and off-colour, he spent the day in bed to be rested for the evening. Medius had asked him to dinner, and he went.
It is this second party which brings in question his psychological state. Here is a man with a religious respect for omens. He has had several bad ones, warning him of the gravest danger. He has spent part of the previous day in solemn ceremonies to avert it. He is planning to start on a major expedition within two weeks. He has had as good a grounding in medical science as any layman of his time. He knows he is starting to run up a fever. Yet he gets up, goes off to an informal dinner party of no ceremonial importance, and sits up half the night over the wine. All in all, it seems very odd behaviour.
Though he left late, he left before the end. Late as it was he had a bath, and for the first time felt really ill; he had a bed made up for him in the bath house by the pool, and spent the rest of the night there. In the morning he had to be carried by litter to perform the daily offering at the household altar; but he proceeded as if he had a trifling indisposition which need not impede his plans. The march was still scheduled to start in three days and the fleet to sail in four. In the sweltering heat he took another bath, after which he felt much worse; it probably brought on a rigor. He was now in high fever, but continued to organize the expedition, only postponing its departure by a few days. He began to seek in the grilling river plain the cool and shade he had known in boyhood, having himself ferried across the Euphrates to the “paradise” with its trees, and sleeping at night beside the palace bathing pool. By the ninth day he could scarcely make the offering when he had been carried to the shrine, but was still briefing his officers. Nothing is said of any doctor attending him; he may have lost faith in them since Hephaestion’s death. Had he had one, the man, however blameless, would surely have been named in legend as a party to his murder. The whole account presents an extraordinary picture: stubborn mistreatment of an illness he should by now have known was dangerous; and stubborn refusal to admit the danger into his conscious thought.
Plutarch has a detail here which again casts a shadow on Iollas: “Aristobulus says that when he was lightheaded with fever, he drank wine and thereon grew violently delirious.” This certainly suggests that he had not been regularly drinking it; people with fever usually lose all craving for alcohol and reject it in favour of something more refreshing; a wise provision of nature. If it was offered him when his mind was wandering, no matter by whom, there is a strong suspicion of malice. For a man in his condition it was little short of poison, and may have had a critical effect.
His delirium cannot have lasted long; but his sickness was advancing, and on the tenth day he could deceive himself no longer. He ordered all his chief officers to be summoned before him, and the junior ones to assemble outside the doors; and had himself carried back from the garden to address them. But before he got there, the fatal complication, whose approach he must have felt when he gave the order, had taken hold. He could not make himself heard.
A man with lower powers of resistance would have developed pneumonia much sooner. Now it would have spread from his damaged lung into the scar tissue of his chest wound, and invaded the lung lining as pleurisy. He was probably in great pain. It is evident that though his mind was clear at the end, from this time on he could only manage a whispered word or two.
He was now too ill to be moved from the royal bedchamber. All this time, the soldiers who had seen him carried about had been fairly optimistic; most of them must have had a bout of fever somewhere in Asia. But what the officers had seen could not be kept secret. When on the second day he did not appear, the men began to say, as they had said three years before upon the Indus, that his death was being concealed from them. They mobbed the palace gates and demanded to see him for themselves. They were just in time.