There remained the uncooperative Callisthenes. As a 'flatterer who had tried to make a god out of Alexander', he would have been the very last person at court to have spoken out against divine honours for a living man, but as a Greek who had worked with Aristotle, he saw this social custom as a different matter. To pay proskynesis to a man had long seemed slavish, at least to the Greeks, and whatever else, Callisthenes had been brought up to believe in the values of Greek culture; he knew and analysed the details of Greek myths; he agreed with the view that certain Egyptians were really descended from an Athenian: he even claimed that the name Phoenicia was derived from the Greek word for a palm tree (phoinix).

Like his kinsman and associate, Aristotle, he saw the barbarian world as the Greeks' inferior and so in an earlier part of his history, he seems to have described the waves of the Lycian sea as bowing to the king, as if doing proskynesis before him. That was fair enough for barbarian waves, but for a Greek, steeped in the Greek past, it was a gesture which smacked of slavishness. Educated Greeks should have no truck with oriental decadence: kissing the hand be damned, he would refuse, and trust to the consequences.

It is not easy to plot his recent relationship with Alexander, not least because Alexander's officers never referred to it in their histories. Six months before, said others, Callisthenes's comforts had counted for much as Alexander despaired of lile after murdering Cleitus; fellow-Greeks and philosophers later disagreed, unwilling to believe that Aristotle's kinsman would ever have consoled a man whom they reviled as a tyrant. There was another Greek philosopher at court, Anaxarchus, who had come from a Thracian town and was known because of his opinions as the 'contented': it was he, said admirers of Aristotle, who had revived Alexander after the murder by teaching him the classic doctrine of an oriental tyrant, that whatever a king did was just and fair. 'Anaxarchus', wrote a later follower of Aristotle, 'only rose to a position of influence through the ignorance of his patrons: his wine would be poured out by a naked girl, chosen for her beauty, though all she in fact revealed was the lust of those whom she served.' Callisthenes, by contrast, was extolled for his austerity and self-sufficiency, as befitted Aristotle's kinsman; his fame as a wanton flatterer was conveniently overlooked. Not for the last time academic rivalries impinged on the writing of history, abusing Anaxarchus and idealizing his rival Callisthenes. But Anaxarchus would one day die a hero's death, owing nothing to Aristotle's schoolmen, while Callisthenes would be best remembered for hailing his patron as the new son of Zeus.

Since the comfortings which followed Cleitus's murder, there are signs, undated, that king and historian had been at variance elsewhere. Once at dinner, wrote Alexander's Master of Ceremonies, a cup of unmixed wine had come round to Callisthenes, who was nudged by a neighbour and asked why he would not drink. 'I do not wish,' he replied, 'to drink from Alexander and then need the god of medicine.' Like proskynesis , the drinking of undiluted wine was not a Greek practice and once again Callisthenes had refused to betray his Greek ideals. Philosophers told a second story, which Callisthenes was said to have confided to the slave who read aloud to him: during the after-dinner drinking, Callisthenes was once asked to speak in praise of the Macedonians, which he did so fulsomely that all the guests applauded and showered him with flowers. Alexander then asked him to denounce them no less fluently, and Callisthenes pitched into the subject and distressed his audience by his evident taste for it. If true, this unlikely story says much for Callisthenes's sophistry, and Aristotle was said to have remarked on hearing it that his cousin was a capable speaker but sadly lacking in common sense. If this incident followed the affair of the proskynesis, Alexander may also have played on his historian's defect in order to discredit him in public.

For it was the proskynesisaffair, surely, which had first marked the parting of the ways between the two men. Hitherto, Callisthenes would hardly have earned much affection among the Macedonians, whose fun he spoilt at parties and whose individual heroics he described incorrectly though he never took to the battlefield himself. But now there were others who did not think very far: one of the older Macedonians had mocked a Persian for his proskynesisand told him to hit the ground harder with his chin, as he went down on hands and knees to pay the exaggerated respects of an abject inferior. The story was retold of several officers, and on each occasion Alexander was said to have lost his temper with the Macedonian concerned. That was fair enough. If Macedonians started to poke fun at oriental life, then the harmony at court to which Alexander was pledged would never come about: it was the older men, by and large, who found it hardest to adapt to oriental customs, though that did not stop several thousand veterans from continuing to serve contentedly or an officer like Craterus, fiercely tenacious of his Macedonian habits, from rising rapidly despite his principles. The issue was not an absolute division, and only if it had been mishandled could it have become very awkward. Grumble though the old men might, when it came to the choice a few weeks later, it was Callisthenes they saw unaided to his death, and though legend maintained that Callisthenes's one refusal deflated all plans for proskynesis,it is far from certain that the custom was ever dropped. Neither Ptolemy nor Aristobulus mentioned the attempt to introduce it, perhaps because they thought it insignificant. But their silence is more likely to have been deliberate, one more proof of the feelings which the affair could arouse in certain quarters. To a Greek public, a frank description would have put the sequel in a sinister light and neither historian wished to expose Alexander to the criticism of those who had not served with him.

Some time after the party and its related misadventures, perhaps days, perhaps months, the main army were quartered near a small Bactrian village. While four divisions fanned out to arrest the last of Spitamenes's accomplices on the edge of the Red Sand desert, a serious plot was uncovered in camp against the king's life: it could hardly have been more remote from the old and unadaptable. It broke among the Macedonian royal pages, boys of fifteen or so, who had been sent out to join the army three years before. According to the story, perhaps mere guesswork, one of them, son of a prominent cavalry commander, had blotted his record out hunting: a wild boar had been flushed out in Alexander's direction and before the king could take a shot at it the page had speared it to death. Alexander was annoyed that someone for once had been quicker than himself. He ordered the page to be whipped, while the other young boys looked on. He even took away his horse.

Here too, Persian customs may be relevant. On a Persian hunt it had always been agreed that the king should be allowed the first shot at game, whereas those who broke the rule had been known to be flogged: in Macedonia, there may have been a similar rule, but the killing of a wild boar had a special significance, the act by which a young man won the right to recline at dinner. Whether victim of a Persian outrage or not, the page felt he had a grievance, so he enrolled seven associates in a plot to murder the king. Now, the royal pages were very well placed to effect this. They served on night duty outside Alexander's tent and were in close daily access to his person, but as they numbered about fifty, the night guard would fall to one of the eight conspirators during the next fortnight. The night of Antipater, son of Asclepiodorus, was soon due and as only one page is likely to have stood guard at a time, he could easily admit his associates.