The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (4 page)

 
And in that last line from Diogenes lay Alexander’s genius. While the Greeks could not easily accept that they were ruled by a living god, the Egyptians had kept this central to their beliefs for three thousand years. Herodotus said that the Egyptians were the most religious of all peoples, and their beliefs imbued every element of their society. Egypt was a theocracy where the majority of the large agricultural estates were owned by temples and managed by an elite caste of priests whose positions were often hereditary. The power built up by these institutions had grown century by century as the god-kings of the three ancient Egyptian kingdoms had granted them more and more land and rights. Between the pharaoh and the temples not only was the economy organized, but, in Egyptian eyes, the relationship between humans and gods was also managed. The ruler of Egypt was seen as Horus, the son of the god Osiris and the mediator between the worlds of the everyday and the divine. Through his interaction with the temples and his performance of the kingly rites in those temples, a state of harmony (
maat
) was maintained in the world—the stars would continue to circle in the heavens, the Nile would flood once a year, and so life in Egypt would go on as it had for thousands of years.

While the Greeks sneered at men who called themselves gods, the Egyptians actively required it of their rulers, so it served Alexander well to be considered divine in their eyes. Whether he believed it to be true himself is another and perhaps unknowable matter.

 
 
God or not, the oracle of Ammon inspired Alexander to keep up his relentless pace of conquest. Leaving Egypt, he finally and comprehensively defeated the Persians at the battle of Gaugamela before striking out east, through Medea, Parthia, and Scythia, on through Afghanistan and into India. His fleet crossed the Indian Ocean, from west to east and then back again—restless, relentless, and as unstoppable as the ever-shifting mind that drove it onward.

But he was chasing a desert mirage. By the time he was thirty-two years old his vast empire was already tottering, weighed down by self-interest and riven with factional infighting. As he returned to Babylon, omens of his impending death began to appear. Just outside the city a Chaldean astronomer appeared before him and warned him that entering the city (or in some versions of the story, entering the city from the east) would bring about his death. Alexander lived in a world of omens and oracles, and the prophecies of the celestial seers of Babylon, the “writers of the Book of Heaven,” were not lightly cast aside. Their
Astronomical Diaries
had proved so accurate that Alexander had ordered them translated into Greek and sent to his old tutor Aristotle for inspection. This led within a year to the complete reform of the Greek calendar. So powerful, so widely believed, were the prophecies of these men that they could easily become self-fulfilling. Their predictions of Darius’s doom may have helped to unsettle his army and hence put Alexander on the Persian throne in the first place. Now those prophecies were aimed against Alexander himself.

Alexander did, however, finally enter the city and in doing so embarked on the last days of his life, just as the astronomers had predicted. In these final moments legends begin to crowd in even more thickly around the man. The ancient sources now tell a strange tale. According to Arrian, Alexander went to inspect his soldiers, and while he was away from the throne room an escaped convict broke in, put on the insignia of the king, and sat on his throne. When discovered and asked why he was doing this he made no reply (or according to Plutarch he claimed he had been released by the supreme god). Alexander was troubled and consulted the wise men in Babylon, who advised that the man should be put to death so that the bad luck this foretold might fall on his shoulders and not the king’s. Recent research suggests, however, that this peculiar legend may be the surviving echo of an eyewitness account of an ancient Babylonian ritual which neither Alexander nor later classical writers understood. When Babylonian astronomers predicted inauspicious times it was the custom for the priests to release a convict and place him on the throne as a “substitute king” in place of the real ruler. Then, any bad luck that befell the kingdom during this ominous time would fall on the shoulders of the criminal, not the king and hence the state. When the danger passed, the criminal would be executed, taking his ill fortune to the grave with him.

This was then perhaps the scene that Alexander stumbled upon, but its resolution did not ease his foreboding. He now fell into a dark mood, mistrustful of his friends and fearful for his future. Plutarch says that the Babylonian palace soon filled with soothsayers and sacrifices and that the slightest strange thing would be taken by Alexander as an omen, and a bad omen at that. And he had every right to worry.

Alexander’s final illness came on during a drinking party, and his decline was then rapid. Diodorus Siculus takes up the story:

 
He died in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II on the afternoon of June 10, 323 BC. He was thirty-two years old. The cause of Alexander’s death has been disputed since the moment he breathed his last, and a full investigation is outside the scope of this book. Some ancient authors maintain he died of an illness, perhaps malaria or typhoid; others report that he was poisoned, perhaps with belladonna, since Plutarch states that he was unable to speak shortly before the end, and paralysis of the vocal cords is a symptom of poisoning with deadly nightshade. He further suggests, as does Arrian, that some thought the poisoning to have been carried out at the instigation of Aristotle, who feared that the king’s imprisonment of the chronicler Callisthenes for complaining about the king’s growing arrogance signaled that Alexander’s success had made him uncontrollable. In this version of events Aristotle procured a poison which was conveyed to Alexander’s court in the hoof of a mule. These possibilities have since been elaborately embroidered by centuries of storytellers until the astonishing tale of Alexander’s death has become filled with weeping horses, total eclipses, and speaking birds.

What did matter, regardless of the cause of his death, was that the largest empire on earth was now effectively leaderless, and there was a limited amount of time in which the king’s surviving family and generals could make their pitch for part or all of his inheritance. Exactly who should now rule in his place was not clear. Alexander had a half brother, Philip III Arrhidaeus, who was the son of Philip II and Philinna of Larissa, but he seems to have been simpleminded and incapable of taking on sole rule of so great an empire in anything more than name. Despite this he was the choice of the army in Babylon and hence nominally became Alexander’s heir. A few months after Alexander’s death his Bactrian wife, Roxana, gave birth to his son, who was immediately declared king and joined his uncle on the throne as Alexander IV of Macedon. So it came to pass that the heirs of the greatest ruler of the ancient world were a fool and a baby.

The vast empire he had held together with little more than the power of his own will almost immediately began to disintegrate. Infighting erupted among Alexander’s once loyal generals as each grasped feverishly for a piece of his crumbling inheritance. But there was little concrete to grab. For all his military brilliance, Alexander’s attempts at governing his empire had bred hostility and dissent. In Persia his willingness to take on Persian customs, both in government and in dress, might have helped him to hold on to those lands, as his adoption of a pharaonic style of government in Egypt ensured his popularity there, but both practices were highly distasteful to other Macedonians. They were the conquerors, and few saw why they shouldn’t rule the empire they had won in a Macedonian way. Their arrogance would ensure the fragmentation of Alexander’s world.

 
 
Only one man had realized the true nature of Alexander’s legacy—his childhood friend, confidant, and senior general, Ptolemy. He had been with Alexander from the start, and even accompanied him to the oracle of Ammon at Siwa. He was also present in Babylon when Alexander died, and a few days after the death called together the two other generals closest to Alexander. His view was that there was little hope in trying to maintain a leaderless single empire spanning Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and the eastern Mediterranean. Better to divide it up into its three principal constituent parts, which each one of them could rule. He suggested they form a ruling council which would meet regularly to keep affairs on an even keel.

This extraordinarily farsighted proposal anticipated the inevitable frictions between what were at that moment the three most powerful people in the world, and offered a solution to the problem. But both the other generals dreamed of succeeding Alexander as sole supreme emperor. They rejected Ptolemy’s proposal outright, thereby setting the stage for the centuries of interfactional warfare which would follow. Ptolemy, realizing full well that it was now each man for himself, left immediately for Egypt, the richest and most self-contained part of Alexander’s empire.

Meanwhile, Alexander’s body, already taking on the attributes of divinity, was prepared for travel, as Curtius Rufus recounts (although he claims that he for one does not believe the story):

 
Diodorus adds that after the embalmers had made the body sweet-smelling and incorruptible with the embalming materials of the region—frankincense, myrrh, beeswax, and honey—the whole body was wrapped in linen and sealed in exquisitely beaten gold sheets, so finely figured to his form that his features were still recognizable through them.

It was widely assumed that his corpse would be returned home to his birthplace—Macedon, in northern Greece. But Ptolemy realized that this was no ordinary body. Alexander, if not a god himself, had certainly seemed to have been touched by the gods, and the magical aura that surrounded him in life might also remain in death, in much the way that the bones of saints held a remarkable power over living minds in the Middle Ages. Other than an empire which was already tottering on the brink of civil war, the most valuable thing of Alexander’s, for any successor, was not his lands or money or fame, but his body—the ultimate icon of the ultimate ruler. Here was an object whose value would only grow as the years passed and the myths evolved. This realization had not been lost on Alexander’s friends even during his lifetime, when, according to a legend retold by Aelian, Alexander’s favorite soothsayer, Aristander, had predicted “that the country in which his body was buried would be the most prosperous in the world” (Aelian,
Varia Historia,
12.64).

Ptolemy knew what he had to do. He had to take for himself a part of Alexander’s empire he could rule and defend alone. And the jewel he would set in that new nation’s crown was the gold-clad body of Alexander himself.

CHAPTER TWO

STEALING A GOD

William Shakespeare,
Cymbeline

 
 
W
hile the fighting between the heirs of Alexander intensified, Ptolemy quietly secured his position as ruler of Egypt, as he was uniquely well equipped to do so, having been with Alexander from childhood. He had watched the man at work, learned from his successes, and learned still more from his failures.

Ptolemy was the son of a nobleman called Lagus, a member of a relatively obscure Macedonian family. Indeed, so obscure was it that when Ptolemy eventually achieved greatness himself, wild stories quickly became embroidered around the prosaic facts of his ancestry. The pro-Ptolemaic faction even claimed that he was the illegitimate son of Philip II. For their part, those ranged against Ptolemy told the story of how he had once asked a grammarian the famously difficult question “Who was the father of Pelops?” only to receive the reply “I will tell you as soon as you tell me who was the father of Lagus.”

But for all the obscurity of his ancestry, Lagus did ensure that his son received an education at Philip II’s court. Here he was appointed a page, during which time he became a close friend of the young Alexander and one of the group of five youths charged with mentoring the king’s son.

In this situation he was able to watch the impressive Philip at work, carving out a Macedonian empire and building the army that his son would one day unleash on the world. He must also have enjoyed the culture of the court and perhaps shared the privilege of being taught by the tutor Philip had appointed for his son Alexander—the great Aristotle.

But he had shared in Alexander’s tribulations as well as in his good fortunes. In the Pixodarus affair, Alexander had nearly been gulled into marrying the daughter of one of the heirs of King Mausolus, whose capital at Halicarnassus Alexander would later besiege. It was a match Philip knew to be inappropriate, and he managed to forbid it despite Alexander’s having apparently already agreed. For this the prince and his mentors, including Ptolemy, were exiled, only to return upon the old king’s death.