His grief was as uncontrolled as the rumours of it, the like of which had not been heard since the hours after Cleitus's murder; some said he lay day and night on the body, refusing to be torn away; others that he hanged the doctor for negligence and ordered a local temple to the god of healing to be destroyed in mourning. Certainly, he refused to eat or drink for three days after the event, whereupon envoys were sent to Amnion's distant oracle at Siwah to ask if it was proper to worship the dead man as a hero. At this moment of tragedy, the king was turning once more to his personal comforters, for it was said, probably truly, that he cut his own hair in Hephaistion's memory and clipped off the tails and manes of the horses in camp. The ritual has a Persian precedent but more tellingly, it also has a parallel in Homer's Greece: in the Iliad, Achilles had shorn his horses in honour of his dead and beloved Patroclus, and as Hephaistion had long been recognized as the new Patroculus to Alexander's Achilles, it is entirely appropriate that first Ammon, then Homer, came to the surface of Alexander's sorrow.

In his wild lamentation, Alexander was to show how much he minded about the one sure relationship of his life. For a week or more, he was in no state to take a decision; Bagoas, Roxane and the comforts of the Bodyguards meant nothing to him, and preparations for the funeral were left to be finalized at Amnion's bidding. The courtiers could only wait and suggest that Hephaistion needed a local memorial; it was a fortnight before Alexander had recovered enough to sanction it and decree that like other fallen Companions, Hephaistion should be honoured with a large stone carving of a 1 ion: it still stands to this day, the Lion of Hamadan, more or less where Alexander ordered. Lion monuments were the one

Macedonian legacy to art, extending out to India from a kingdom where lions still abounded; centuries later, when Hephaistion had long been forgotten, the ladies of Hamadan would smear the nose of their lion with jam, hoping for children and easy childbirth. Hephaistion had ended his fame as a symbol of fertility.

There was no such perspective to comfort Alexander. He was a distraught man, stripped of all externals: he felt the loss of his love more bitterly than anything in his career and it did not seem as if time or renewed ambitions could ever reconcile him to sudden bereavement. Within the month, he braced himself to leave the Hamadan which he had come to hate, but a new and chilling feature had entered into the mood of the court, new but not entirely unexpected; Hephaistion was dead, Alexander almost despaired of living, and one man, at least, had been proved most curiously right. Five months before, when the rebellious satraps were being purged, the commander of Babylon had asked his brother, a prophet, to test the omens in the city; in due course, a sacrifice had been offered, first to consider the fate of Hephaistion. The victim's liver had been seen, surprisingly, to be without a lobe; hastily, the prophet had sent a letter to his brother, now in Hamadan, advising him that he need have no fears of Hephaistion as death was very near. Hephaistion had died, as predicted, the day after the letter had been opened in Hamadan; the commander was impressed by his brother and meanwhile, unknown, the brother had sacrificed again. This time, the offering was for Alexander and once more, the liver had no lobe; a letter was already on the road for Hamadan, predicting further doom. Only in a crisis do prophets detect bad omens: there was death in the air, and men were beginning to remember how Calanus the Indian had mounted his pyre and taken a cryptic farewell; he was said to have told the king he would be seeing him again in Babylon. It was all very strange: the liver had had no lobe, the Hindu sophist had talked, it seemed, of death and a Babylonian funeral, and now from Hamadan, a mere month later, Alexander was about to begin a roundabout march down through the hills of Luristan, south-west across Mesopotamia, and so to the very Babylon he had hitherto avoided. Nobody knew where the next year would lead them, whether to Greece or the Caspian, west to Carthage or south to the Arabs of the Hadramut valleys. The decision was Alexander's, but however firm he stood against Hephaistion's loss, the omens had implied he would never take it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Nothing is harder than to appreciate Alexander after Hephaistion's death. He was a man living on a stupendous scale, but then he had the resources to support it and the years of achievement to justify it. Psychologically, there is no doubt that he had been shattered, but so have many others at the death of the person they love, even without the memory of a disastrous desert march a year before; it is a very different question how long the effects lasted. By the end of the year Roxane was pregnant, so one side of Alexander's life had not been interrupted and there was a comforting permanency in thoughts of a son and heir. He had changed over the years, inevitably, but the change is most apparent not so much in the unknowable recesses of his mind, where Ammon and Achilles still ranked prominently, as in the public and inarguable style of his life. This pomp is the focal point of Alexander's last days and deserves to be considered.

If a courtier had left us his memoirs, he would surely have commented on the past year that festival had followed festival as never before in Greek history. The tendency had always been present in Philip and Alexander's reigns, but Alexander was now bound for Babylon where such display could call on the full machinery of centralized despotism, which had long grown up round an economy of royal canals. The gangs of royal workers, the treasuries and, no doubt, the old bureaucracy would have survived Darius's fall. Since Makran, the army had lived for the grand occasion, the Susa weddings, the Opis banquet, the fateful games of Hamadan: Babylon's system could outdo them all in its last rites for Hephaistion. Three thousand athletes and artists were gathered for the games. A full funeral was to be celebrated at Babylon, by which time the envoys would have returned from Amnion with news of the proposed worship of Hephaistion as a hero. 10,000 talents were rumoured to be needed from king and subjects for the occasion; after Patroclus's death, it had been Achilles's prime concern to be seen to pay him fitting honour as much for his own public prestige as for the dead man's comfort. This same heroic attitude now came out in Alexander.

Though this expense was extraordinarily lavish, Alexander could well afford his share of it. His attitude to money was no different to that of his father Philip or indeed of any well-to-do gentleman in the classical world; money in so far as it was used at all, existed to be spent, not saved, so that conspicuous consumption was an enduring feature of the life of ancient city aristocracies, whether Greek, Roman or Byzantine. For the men of antiquity, there was a judicious art in going bankrupt publicly, and Alexander was true to this attitude on the grandest possible scale. The only figures for his treasure reserves may well be unreliable, but of the 180,000 talents said to have been captured from the Persians' palaces, only 50,000 were said to have remained at his death. Embezzlement no doubt played its part, but as the few known expenses for the past six months totalled about 50,000 talents, some such capital outlay may not be too far from the truth, however dubious its source and statistics. Such resolute draining of reserves was nothing new to Greeks, especially in the absence of double entry accounting; Pericles, that over-praised Athenian politician, had followed a policy which would rapidly have bankrupted Athens of her deposits, had he not died in time. But the remaining 50,000 talents and a yearly tribute of another 12,000 or more still made Alexander far and away the most monied king in the world. Payments in kind mattered more than those in money and for these, there are no figures; he also received huge presents from envoys, and all the while, he could cut new coins from the raw metal ingots which the Persian kings had stored in their halls and bedrooms as decoration. Melting, engraving, stamping and the cutting of dies: these were the busy and essential processes which must have long been occupying Greek experts in the background of Alexander's empire. Thanks to their skills, not even Harpalus and his 6,000 stolen talents were mourned as a serious loss; the finances at Babylon were now entrusted to a Greek from the island of Rhodes who at once showed the typical shrewdness of his countrymen by initiating a scheme for fellow-officers to insure against the loss of their runaway slaves.