Such a plan was workable, but it relied on complete trust. The massive festival of the funeral was a dangerous background, and as it came to a head an omen occurred which spoke plainly for the mood behind the scenes. During the ceremonies, Alexander left his throne, some said to drink.

An unknown man, who some believed to be a prisoner, saw the throne empty and the silver-legged sofas vacated by the Companions: passing through the guard of eunuchs, he walked up to the throne and sat on it and began to put on royal dress. But the eunuchs tore their robes and beat their breasts and refused to drag him away, because of some eastern custom. Alexander ordered the man to be tortured, as he feared a plot, but the man would only say he had done it because it had suddenly come into his head. Whereupon, the seers prophesied that this implied even more disaster in store.

This curious incident is hard to interpret. The Babylonians had long celebrated an ancient festival, whereby a slave would dress as a king or master and hold sway for a single day, but this festival belonged in early autumn and cannot be relevant to Alexander's actions in late May. The New Year festival at Babylon is better timed, but then the king was not displaced; he merely went down on hands and knees before the statue of the god Bel. On only one occasion would the king make way for a commoner: when the astrological tables boded badly for his future. Then a substitute would take his place for up to a hundred days and assume the burden of the king's misfortune: if the king died in the meantime, the substitute would become king, even if he was nothing more than the royal gardener. This substitution is last known to have been practised by the Assyrian kingdoms four hundred years earlier, but the Babylonian priesthood may have kept its memory alive and even applied it to Alexander. If the substitute had acted inadvertently, so much the worse, as the seers realized, for he would not have diverted the royal doom which the stars predicted. Perhaps the priests had instructed him, and he had been sent to take the throne because they feared for Alexander's future: so, at least, the eunuchs assumed, bewailing the sight of a royal scapegoat, and perhaps their lament was justified.

Within weeks, eunuchs and horoscopes were to be proved alarmingly right. An uneasy mood was still stirring in the byways of the court, amid its festivals and new ambitions: there was the omen of the liver without lobes, of the diadem lost on the river and now, of the substitute who had mysteriously taken the throne. Perhaps men feared that Alexander's energy could never last, that it was only a cover for a king who had lost his beloved Hephaistion. On the other hand the recent decisions were hardly those of a broken leader: Arabia, Carthage, Sicily, the Caspian, none was as wild an ambition as the first invasion of Asia with few ships, money or men. Richer than any other man alive, Alexander now united his empire in his person alone: 'In Egypt, a god and an autocrat; in Persia, an autocrat but not a god; among Greeks, a god but not a despot, and in Macedonia, neither god nor despot but a quasi-constitutional king.' The broad categories of history are always bloodless, never discerned by those who occupy them, and uneasiness persisted. Hephaistion's funeral had been huge. The plans for Arabia were hugcr. There was a rumour that Babylon would become the empire's centre, superbly placed for the sea route eastwards of which the troops had the grimmest memories. Above all, there were the rumours about Alexander himself. From Phaselis to Samarkand, on almost every occasion on which he is now seen at leisure by historians, he is flushed with wine of an evening. There are reports that Babylon had brought this drinking to nightly excess, scarcely slept off on the following day. Against the plans for Arabia, these reports became crucial. Alexander had been wounded in nine different places in the past twelve years, he was bereaved of his lover, and now the prophets had predicted a doom which his courtiers could not avert. The interesting question was the one which the stars could not answer: whether, at last, they had acted to put him out of the way.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

After all his many mysteries, it would be improper if Alexander had died straightforwardly. Never simple, he did nothing of the sort. It was not that his death was forgettable. Quite the contrary: its memory was too dangerous to be freely discussed, and at first, his officers discouraged publication of the details; they knew how they stood to lose, if only from slander built on the facts. But then their secrecy itself bred rumours and soon they found they were quarrelling among themselves. Alexander's death became involved in their quarrels, and they used it as a crime to blame on each other without respect for the truth. The last days in Babylon tell as much of the Successors as of Alexander, a bias which does not bode well for the one important problem: what, at the age of thirty-two, caused Alexander to die?

Any answer must begin on 29 May. Amid omens and dark prophecies, Alexander had tried to avert bad fortune, if not by a substitute king, at least by a series of sacrifices; in apparently generous mood, he turned to amusements and festivities, setting aside Hephaistion's funeral and encouraging the court to the future. Nearchus was crowned as admiral of the campaign against Arabia, and preparations were to go ahead for the voyage to begin on 4 June. Leaving the crowd who had gathered to pay honour, he dined, drank far into the night and attended a late party given by Medius, a Companion from Thessaly: some said Medius had happened to waylay him; others, more cunningly, said that the party had long been arranged, as the day was the Thessalian festival in honour of the death of Heracles and Medius remained true to his home traditions. All are agreed that the drinking which followed was prolonged, but its pattern was vigorously disputed; on it, turns the truth of Alexander's death.

The earliest description which can be dated with any certainty is terse and unfriendly. Alexander, in the course of Medius's dinner. demanded a three-quart cup of wine and pledged a toast to Proteas; in reply, Proteas took the cup, hymned the King fulsomely and drained the contents amid general applause. A little later, Proteas pledged a toast from the same cup to Alexander. Alexander took it, drank heartily, but could not stand the strain.

He fell back onto his cushion, where he 'ropped the cup from his hands. As a result of this he fell sick and during his sickness, he died.

His death occurred 'because of Dionysus's anger against him for besieging his native city of Thebes'. There was irony in this absurd explanation. Dionysus's anger had formerly been invoked to excuse the drunken murder of Cleitus: Proteas who helped drink Alexander to death was Cleitus's nephew.

While it is not impossible that Alexander died in part of drink it is improbable that this flippant account is true; its author, once more, was Ephippus, nothing more than a scurrilous spreader of gossip. Others saw the debauch differently. 'At the final dinner with Medius,' wrote an unknown author, later called Nicobule, 'Alexander recited an extract from Euripides's play Andromeda , which he had memorized; afterwards, he drank the health of all twenty guests in unmixed wine. They each pledged him to an equal amount, and when he left the party, it was not long afterwards that he began to go into a decline.' After toasting twenty guests, that is not surprising. At once, the question arises: apart from Medius the host, who were the other nineteen?

It is here that the story quickens and the two most curious documents in Alexander's career come into play. The first is a pamphlet, not to be found in any history. It is embedded in the largely fictitious Alexander Romance , a work of notorious imagination, most of which was compiled some five hundred years after Alexander's death. It survives in four varying texts, three of which end with a detailed account of Alexander's death. Their outline and personal information demonstrably belong within ten years of the event; it is as if new evidence on the death of Stalin were only to be found in a posthumous book of Russian nursery tales. Each text has been altered or expanded by a later hand and their manuscripts are often corrupt, but their outline goes back to the original pamphlet and deserves to be taken seriously. It gives what contemporaries, as it admits, had been afraid to publish: a complete list of the twenty guests at Medius's dinner and an explanation of their motives.