The wearing of divine clothes, too, was a familiar libel. Enemies, for example, later maintained that the young Augustus had dressed as Apollo and held a sacred banquet among twelve friends dressed as the gods. But in Greece, not Rome, it did have intelligible roots, and despite Ephippus's bias, Alexander may well have adorned himself as his works of art repeatedly suggest. There were eastern precedents, too, for these fancy headdresses, while Bucephalas had probably worn horns, and Philip's image had been carried, no doubt with much decoration, among the twelve Olympian Gods. In outline, therefore, Ephippus may have been telling the truth, a truth, moreover, about Alexander's divinity among his friends. Whether he was also 'unbearable, murderous and evidently melancholic' cannot be decided from Ephippus alone; melancholia, in antiquity, meant a volatile and hasty nature more than a mood of listless ennui. There are no signs that Alexander was any quicker-tempered than at his accession. So far from cowing his courtiers into silence, he still hunted, diced, played ball, joked and banqueted freely with his Companions. Once again, not one of them is known to have lost his life or job in the coming months. As he had said, blood, not ichor, flowed in his veins.

But the fact remains that Hephaistion's death had unnerved him and that for a year, the Makran disaster had remained the last adventure of the 'conqueror of all Asia'. No doubt, too, there had been heavy drinking since the tragedy of Hamadan, though the only hint that Alexander had collapsed into extreme indulgence occurs in the Royal Diaries, a suspect witness whose purpose will soon emerge. The vast expense at court, the full play of pomp could be afforded, the divinity understood, yet they too raised the question whether the old genius was gone. But that inner genius can only be judged from events, for lack of other evidence. Their message remains crisp.

Within six weeks of Hephaistion's death, he had left Hamadan by the Royal Road to the south and briefly invaded the nomads who flanked its passes in the hills of Luristan. Attacking them in winter, he surprised and routed them in under six weeks: 'The men here had been independent since the earliest times, and they live in caves, eating acorns and mushrooms and the smoked meat of wild animals.' The Persian kings had always agreed to bribe them in return for use of the Royal Road, but Alexander refused, and 'planned to settle these nomads into cities so that they might become settled tillers of the fields'. When Greek city culture first met nomads, it failed to understand them and tried, arrogantly, to fit them into its own scheme of life. The plan, as Reza Shah was to find in the 1930s, meant personal suffering to its victims and the destruction of a way of life which uniquely fitted the landscape: Alexander could not even promise better medicines or the spurious lure of richer employment. He wanted to settle these free and proud wanderers into cities, simply because they imperilled his highway. He failed, inevitably, and seven years later, the same nomads were blocking the Royal Road with a vengeance against his Successors.

Returning towards Babylon, winter residence of the Persian kings, he was met by embassies from all over the world. Libyans, Ethiopians and Carthaginians crowned him and pleaded friendship; Celts and Scyths paid their respects, as did Iberians from Spain, only known previously to the Greeks through the armies of Sicilian tyrants. From south Italy, came envoys of the tribes with whom his brother-in-law had been recently fighting; among them, some said, came ambassadors from Rome, a city as yet of some 150,000 inhabitants, who had mastered their neighbouring Latins in the year that Philip had mastered Greece, but were involved in war with the nearby Samnites. Alexander had already corresponded with Rome over the regulation of piracy in the Adriatic; his brother-in-law had made a temporary treaty with her, and it was understandable that even in a crisis, she should send envoys to guard her position abroad. The Romans who later preferred their own heroes to Alexander, did not take kindly to the suggestion of any such mission. Ptolemy did not even single them out as especially noteworthy, while to Aristotle's pupils Rome seemed nothing more than a Greek city.

These distant envoys at once raised the issue of what Alexander would do next, an indication of his state of mind. If Carthage, Libya and Spain promised friendship there was little to stop him marching west through Egypt, along to the Pillars of Hercules, nowadays the Straits of Gibraltar, and skirting up through Spain to Italy where his brother-in-law had lost his life on an expedition. Rumour spread that western conquest was his new ambition; some even suggested that he meant to sail completely round Africa and enter the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. This extraordinary journey had already been made by a Carthaginian captain, who took two years to complete it and suffered appalling hardship, well known at court from Herodotus's history. It is just possible that Alexander had considered it, for the rumour of the plan may perhaps go back to Nearchus, with whom he had discussed plans at Kirman in the previous spring. Knowledge and rumours of Africa were abroad in the camp, but as explorers were being sent to sail round Arabia and up into the Red Sea, it is more likely that if Alexander had plans for the west, he would attack more directly through the Suez Canal and west through the Mediterranean. Possibilities are one thing, intentions another, and it is idle to guess what a man might eventually do with his life; more immediately, his plans were beyond all doubt. A Macedonian was ordered to take shipwrights north to Gurgan and fell timber from the thickly branched forests he had visited seven years before. Longboats were to be built to explore the Caspian, and see 'whether it united with the Black Sea or with the outer ocean which flowed round the world and bordered India'. In Babylonia cypresses were being cut for a mass of new warships: quinquiremes and quadriremes were already being dismantled and carted overland from the Lebanon and Cyprus, all in aid of an expedition at the opposite side of the outer ocean to Gurgan. There were even to be septriremes, which Alexander sponsored for the first time. After 'mastering all Asia', as he put it, Alexander had fixed his ambitions on the Arabs; with these preparations the court at last realized where their next year would be spent. Hot, sandy and remote, the deserts of southern Arabia were to claim them.

In a famous picture painted by Apelles, Alexander was shown in a chariot, followed by a prisoner with his hands bound behind his back; Romans of the age of Caesar interpreted this prisoner as War and Alexander, therefore, as the king who triumphed over fighting, an allegory, which Virgil took up and applied through the picture's details to Augustus as a prophecy that under his empire war would be no more. This Roman fancy had left its original very far behind: if there was one activity which Alexander could never have abandoned, it was fighting, and even at the end of his life he showed none of the signs of triumphing over his bellicosity. The Arabs had been friendly allies of several Persian kings, especially when Egypt had needed attention: on the tomb of Artaxerxes III, recent reconqueror of Egypt, an Arab was shown as one of the only two foreign dignitaries to wear the gold necklace and bracelet of high honour, perhaps because his tribe had assisted the Egyptian invasion. Alexander had 'heard that these Arabs only worshipped the sky and Dionysus, and he supposed that he would not be unwordly to be worshipped as their third god if he conquered them and gave them, like the Indians, their former and customary right of self-government'. He was not fighting in order to demand his own worship: he was observing, rightly, that if he succeeded, he would have deserved divine honours, just as his similar 'liberation' had deserved them in Asian Greek cities. But only by a distorted view of Persian and Arab history, which had already coloured his Indian expedition, could his purpose be described as the restoration of his victims' ancient independence.