The citizen body was exclusive rather than commercial. Macedonian veterans, Greeks and prisoners, perhaps too a contingent of Jews, were detailed as the new citizens, and native Egyptians were mostly added as men of lesser status. The laws and charter of the city are very far from certain; it perhaps had an assembly and council from the start but their qualifications for membership are nowhere mentioned. The architect was a Greek from Rhodes and the building was entrusted to Cleomenes, a Greek from Naucratis with a shrewd head for finance. As the barley-meal was sprinkled to mark out the city in the shape of a Macedonian military cloak, Aristander the prophet is said to have predicted that 'Alexandria would be prosperous in other respects, but especially in the fruits of the earth'; home-grown food was the city's first concern, not balanced trade or the c port of Egypt's sail-ropes, drugs and spices and the import of Greece's wine and painted pottery.

As the building work began, Alexander was rewarded by a pleasant surprise. From the Aegean, so early in the season, one of his admirals sailed in to deliver prisoners and report on his campaign; now that the Cypriot, Rhodian and Phoenician fleets had changed sides, the news could only be welcome. The Persian admirals were left with dwindling money, a mere 3,000 Greek mercenaries and only as many boats as they could enlist from Aegean pirates. Their tyrants and oligarchs had been expelled from the cities of Tenedos, Lesbos, Chios and Cos, usually to the delight of the mass of their citizens: pirates and one of the two Persian admirals had been ambushed in Chios's harbour. However, the Persian admiral had since escaped and his fellow was somewhere in hiding; Chares the Athenian, who had seized one of Lesbos's cities, was also ranging free, and by no means the last had been heard of them. For the moment it was more alarming that Aegean shipping was still at the mercy of pirate long-boats. Less serious were reports that Agis King of Sparta, whose negotiations with the Persian admirals had come to nothing, had since transferred 8,000 Greek fugitives from Issus to Crete and won over Crete's towns and fortresses with Persian help. Persian desperadoes would flock there now that the Aegean war was over, but if Agis shipped his bandits back to Greece, they were unlikely to cause uncontrollable revolt. Against Antipater and the allies, their numbers were negligible and their pay would soon start an argument, especially as Sparta used no coinage and had no ready means to finance a hired army. Among the spoils of Issus Alexander had captured Spartan ambassadors to Darius; two more had been sent since then but they were unlikely to meet with any more help from a king whose strategy now centred on Asia.

As leader of the Greek allies. Alexander arranged the punishment of all his Aegean prisoners. The pirates were executed and most of the tyrants were sent back for trial in home cities whose democracies had been restored; there was no comfort in legality, for in one freed town the two pro-Persian terrorists were condemned to death by 883 votes to 7, resounding proof of the hatred with which a democratic court regarded them. The ringleaders from Chios had been so dangerous that Alexander dealt with them personally, sending them in chains to serve in an old Persian garrison on the Nile's first cataract; other Chian offenders were to be tried locally or refused asylum if they fled. Alexander did not await reports of their sentence; in early spring, while the building began in his Alexandria, he marched westwards along the coast of the Mediterranean, leaving his army to speculate about his intentions. With their speculation, the problems of his personality begin.

In the next month, Alexander was to travel westwards with a small group of attendants and then turn south for three hundred miles through an eerie stretch of desert in order to put certain questions to the oracle of Ammon, a ram-headed god who was worshipped in the oasis of Siwah on the remote western border of Egypt and Libya. In his lifetime, Alexander was to reveal neither the questions nor the answers, but clues to their content have been drawn from his own behaviour and from the way his historians have described it. Only once before in Asia had Alexander diverged from the route required by strategy, and then only for his pilgrimage to Troy; this suggests that whatever drove him to Ammon's oasis, it was nothing easily satisfied. In the fullest surviving account of his motives, given by Arrian five hundred years later on the basis of wide and varied reading, he is said to have been seized by a burning desire to go 'because he was already referring part of his parentage to Ammon ... and he meant either to discover about himself or at least to say that he had done so'.

This challenging remark is an introduction to the strangest strand in Alexander's life and legend. As a result of his visit to the oasis, at several points in his various histories he will be said to have disowned his father Philip and come to claim Ammon as his father. On coins, especially those issued by his Successors, he is shown round-eyed and mystical, adorned with a curling ram's horn, symbol of the god Ammon. In the Alexander romance, he writes letters addressed from Ammon's son; in the Bible's Book of Daniel, he appears in the guise of the ram-horned conqueror. In his legend, from early Moslem Syria to Modern Afghanistan, he is remembered as Iskander Dhulkamien, Alexander the Two-horned, who is identified with the two-homed prophet in the Koran, who searches for the Springs of Immortality, defies the barbarians beyond Iran and still guards the north-east frontier against Russian invasion. Because of this one adventure in the desert, Alexander has exchanged fathers and sprouted horns, but it is a separate question how far these developments are true to his character.

Historically, the visit to Ammon's oasis has long been the victim of hindsight and legend and nowhere is this plainer than in the disputed motives for the expedition. According to Callisthenes, who wrote what Alexander wished to be known, 'it was Alexander's glorious ambition to go up to Ammon because he had heard that Perseus and Heracles had gone there before him'; although this rivalry with two Greek heroes was to Alexander's liking, Callisthenes was writing some twenty months after the event. Both Perseus and Heracles were agreed to be sons of the god Zeus and as Alexander was recognized as a son of Zeus after his visit, it made sense for a flatterer to read back the visit's result into his motives for setting out; Callisthenes 'tried to make a god out of Alexander' and gave him the attributes of Zeus, so he presented the Siwah pilgrimage as the rivalry of one son of Zeus with another from the very start. While it is of the first importance that this motive was later to Alexander's liking, Perseus and Heracles are also an interesting pair. Heracles was ancestor of the Macedonian kings and regularly honoured by Alexander, but Perseus appears nowhere else in his myth. It is not even certain that he was previously believed to have visited Siwah. Perhaps he had other attractions; it is a revealing fact about the Greeks that they would trust the simplest puns or word-plays, especially where place names of foreign peoples were concerned. By a pun, foreign names could be linked with the circles of Greek culture and in this sense, it was seriously believed by the Greeks that the Persians were descended from their own Greek hero Perseus, just as the Medes were descended from Medea. This belief was shared by Xenophon who knew and admired the Persians, also by Plato, and Herodotus, and was even upheld by the Persians themselves while, locally after Alexander, Perseus would recur as a symbol of city myths and coinage at many sites in Asia Minor where Greeks and Persians are known to have been living side by side. In short, Perseus became the hero of integration between East and West and for Alexander, the first king ever to rule both peoples at once, a rivalry with Perseus and Heracles was not irrelevant. In Greek eyes, they were his ancestors as the Persian and the Macedonian king, and when Callisthenes wrote up the visit to Siwah, Alexander had already replaced Darius as king of Asia and come to be heir to both heroes at once. A year and a half before, when he set out for Siwah, the two of them are unlikely to have weighed heavily on his mind.