Even a goddess needed to be replaced. Applying once more to Athenian brothels, Harpalus had lured the well-known prostitute Glycera eastwards and left Babylon in order to meet her on the Asian coast; they had repaired to Tarsus, where 'Glycera was hailed as queen and received proskynesis from the people; it was forbidden to pay Harpalus a crown of honour without paying her one too. In a nearby town, he set up a bronze image to her, instead of to Alexander.' Romance kept him far from the treasury of Babylon, but as Tarsus was an important monetary centre, and there was a large local storeroom nearby, he could still give an air of attending to monetary duties. Proof of his irresponsibilities can still be seen in a rare series of silver coins, issued at Tarsus, which bear none of Alexander's types but return to the old Persian designs of the days when satraps were independent; when Alexander's governors had lost the right to issue their own silver money, such defiance meant open revolt. The longer he dallied with his lady, the closer his king had come to home. He would not stand for any 'king and queen' in Tarsus.

Whether or not Alexander received Theopompus's letter on returning to his Persian palaces is unimportant. Probably it arrived later, but even without it, Harpalus knew that such charges could be laid against him. When news of the purge in the east and the king's uncompromising mood reached Tarsus, he had every reason for alarm: he too had once been in Hamadan, where four generals and six hundred soldiers had now been executed for misconduct. He had two brothers, but one was no longer at court to plead for him, as he had been left to his death as satrap of western India; the other, leader of the archers, was either dead or busy on the borders of Makran. Worst of all, the king was approaching Babylon, where his absence, let alone his monument to Pythionicc, were proof enough of his misbehaviour. Through his mistresses, he was well connected at Athens and he had donated a token present of grain to help the city in her time of persistent famine; he had been made an honorary citizen in return and it was not surprising when he decided to take his baby daughter, save what soldiers and money he could, and make for Athens across an early summer sea.

When the news reached Alexander, probably in May near Susa, it took him by surprise. Harpalus, said two messengers, had fled with 6,ooo mercenary soldiers and as many talents of money and was heading for Athens, presumably with the intention of bribing the citizens to defend him. Alexander thought this incredible and put the messengers in chains. But confirmation earned them their release, and this latest menace from mercenaries finally caused him to order the dismissal of his other satraps' mercenary troops. Harpalus could not be treated so lightly. He knew too many Macedonian officers and he had enough money, unlike Agis or the Persian admirals; orders for his arrest were hastened to Athens both from Olympias the queen regent in Macedonia and from the senior governor on the coast of Asia. Athens, therefore, had reason to hesitate, and Alexander by now had his reasons for a closer interest in the affairs of Greece.

Together with news of Harpalus's flight, he happened to have received a European letter, not from the indignant Theopompus, but from the council of the allied Greek cities. In his absence, Greek politics are too obscure to be followed in detail, but Macedonian leadership had only served to aggravate the broader tendencies of their past two hundred years. Since Philip's conquest of Greece, there had been coups and counter-coups against a background of seven years' drought and famine; exiles and personal incrimination had not been stopped by Philip's allied council, least of all in the face of the revolts by Thebes and Sparta, for it suited the Macedonians to see their enemies expelled. Three years of Spartan discontent in southern Greece and the resulting battles in the year of Gaugamela had exposed the few Spartan allies to reprisals from Antipater and his generals, who had naturally tightened their hold by deposing former rebels and inserting juntas they felt they could trust. Unease, new governments and a major war had meant, as always, that the defeated parties found themselves in exile; they could expect no assistance from Antipater's generals, who had helped to drive them out, and despite the clauses of the 'common peace among allies', the delegates of Philip's Greek council either could not or would not intervene. More than 20,000 Greeks in all roamed homeless on the mainland, as so often in the past fifty years, and at a time of severe famine, their misery, though not a force for revolution, could well become a menace. The Council's letter presumably stressed the danger, and in reply Alexander intervened with the most misunderstood measure of his reign: he sent a proclamation which, among much else, ordered exiles from his allied Greek cities to be restored home.

This sudden order caused a stir which can still be sensed in the speeches of the Greek orators; each city was affected differently, and it is tempting to take the sharpest comments as the sum of its reception. The Exiles' Decree has thus been seen as the final outrage of a despot or as the effort of a frightened tyrant to restore a balance which he himself had upset. In fact, the problem was local and the decree was within legal limits; for the most part, it was welcomed. He did not issue a direct order to each city, but a general proclamation which left the governments free to carry it out according to their local laws. In practice, the distinction between order and proclamation was academic, as the king's word was backed by the sarissa. But the theory had been agreed by the Greek allies when they swore to obey Macedonians, and Alexander's successors would revive it when they wished to please Greek liberal opinion. For in theory a city was free to refuse the announcement, just as others obeyed 'according to their own decision and law'. Technically, their right to self-government had not been infringed by a proclamation whose contents were covered by Alexander's powers as leader of the Greeks. The allied council had a duty to prevent 'illegal deaths or exiles in member cities', but this ideal had scarcely been practicable in the face of Sparta's rebellion and the security measures of a Macedonian marshal and generals who were known to favour juntas. It was left to Alexander, as the allied leader, to intervene and uphold the oaths of his covenant, just as after the Persian war in the Aegean, he had formerly intervened in unsettled member islands. The firmness of his intervention reflects not on a new tyranny of method but on the powers of the sworn constitution of his Greek alliance; these, to be sure, were extreme, but fourteen years before their constitution had been the work not of Alexander but of his father Philip.

The decree was confined to allied dries and to exiles banished during the Greek peace's brief life: an accompanying request for the local Greek leagues to be broken up, though most advantageous to Alexander, was no less in keeping with the alliance's promise of local independence, a slogan which Philip had already used against Greece's leagues and empires.

In most cities, the decree was welcomed, but legality, as usual, had its quirks. Alexander did not wish to restore the Thebans to the city he had ruined, and as the allied council had ratified its ruin anyway, he felt no scruples about announcing their exemptions. His purpose, however, ran deeper than such convenient niceties. Many of the families he was restoring had formerly been his enemies, but they would mostly change their opinions in return for the most effective windfall which a politician could promise: the case of Theopompus, first a slanderer, then a panegyrist, was proof enough of that. Alexander could claim, correctly, that he had not been responsible for the exiles' banishment, for their cities had mostly caused it by their own decrees. At the same time he could take credit for their return, with the help of Antipater, to whom he had written with further instructions. Exiles had been restored often enough in Greek history, but never had a man been powerful enough to restore his past enemies and know he would benefit; such a sweeping gesture was sure to win favour, especially among the weaker cities. Its swift enforcement was complicated and obedience sometimes painful, but nobody could accuse Alexander of breaking his oath as allied leader: he chose an adopted son of his tutor Aristotle to take the proclamation to Greece and read it to the assembled exiles at the Olympic Games in early August. Six years as King of Asia had not made the Leader of the Greeks and the sacker of Thebes any more of a despot to his allies than before.