Among the Bodyguards gathered at Babylon’s Summer Palace, the pretense that Alexander would soon recover was by now hard to maintain. The king’s condition had not improved, and he was still carried on a litter when he performed each morning’s sacrifice. Yet he continued to hold councils of war to discuss the coming campaign.
After more than a week in seclusion, Alexander prepared to move back down the Euphrates to the Southern Palace, and he called for all battalion and unit commanders to stand ready there. Perhaps he was anticipating the start of the march against the Arabs. His condition was now very grave, and it seems beyond belief that he was prepared to board ship for barely known stretches of the Persian Gulf, but many of his feats of stamina surpass belief, such as his grueling march through the desert of Gedrosia only months after surviving a punctured lung. Alternatively, he might have realized he was near death and summoned his officer class to hear his directives for the coming transfer of power.
Whatever orders he meant to give were never given. By the next day Alexander had lost his power of speech. He was now in a constant high fever. A ship brought him down the Euphrates to central Babylon, and he was carried, by his Bodyguards, no doubt, back into the palace he had left a week earlier.
June 10 and 11 were dismal days for the Macedonians in Babylon. Alexander was unable to move or speak. Some of the Companions, desperate to help their king even by supernatural means, slept in the temple of a local deity after asking the god whether Alexander should be brought there. In dreams that night they received the reply: it would be better if he stayed where he was. Later, after Alexander died, this was interpreted to mean that in the eyes of the god, death was a “better” outcome than recovery.
Access to the king’s person was strictly controlled by the Bodyguards, and the soldiers began to chafe. Rumors spread that the king was already dead and that the high command was concealing that fact. Old mistrusts that the troops had felt in India began to resurface; their mood grew dark and violent. A crowd gathered outside the palace and demanded admittance, threatening the Bodyguards with force or, according to one report, breaking through a wall to defy their blockade. At last the senior staff bowed to necessity and let the troops enter the king’s chambers.
A Babylonian clay tablet recording the death of Alexander on a date corresponding to June 11, 323 B.C. (Illustration credit 1.4)
A long line of soldiers and Companions filed past the wasted figure on the deathbed, who summoned enough strength to shift his eyes or move his head in greeting to each man. It was clear to all that death was inevitable. This was their last farewell, unless, as Calanus had hinted before his fiery suicide, they might embrace again in some world beyond the grave.
The end came on June 11, toward evening. On this day a nameless Babylonian scribe made a note in his astronomical diary, a log used by seers to correlate political and celestial events. Pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet, fragments of which are now in the British Museum, he created the most toneless and indifferent, but in some ways the most powerful, of the records that survive from the age of Alexander. In the entry for that date, Aiaru 29 according to the Babylonian calendar, he wrote: “The king died.” Then, explaining his inability to make observations of the night sky, he added, simply, “Clouds.”
Some three and a half centuries earlier, a different Macedonian king, Alexander’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, lay on a different deathbed, and gave instructions to his son regarding his burial. That son, named Argaeus, about to become king in his own right, was told to found a royal cemetery in the city where he then lived, Aegae. The kings of Macedon must all be buried there, Argaeus was warned, for the dynasty would end if any were entombed elsewhere.
Aegae was at that time the royal seat of the Macedonians. The name of the town reveals much about the humble origins of the people, for it closely resembles the Greek word meaning “goats.” Herdsmen for much of their history, the Macedonians suddenly, almost miraculously, transformed themselves into warriors and conquerors under Philip and Alexander. A legend recorded by the Roman historian Justin speaks of this transformation as something foreseen, if not decreed, by the gods. An ancient oracle declared that goats would lead the Macedonians to a great empire. One of their early kings, recalling this oracle, founded Aegae where he saw a herd of wild goats and thereafter always led his warriors into battle with goats depicted on his standards. Thus the name of Aegae came to stand for the imperial destiny of this world-conquering people, rather than their goat-herding past.
The name of King Argaeus, too, carried mythic weight for the Macedonians, for it seemed to trace their monarchy to the Greek city of Argos. Argaeus’ father had been an exile from Argos, according to legend, and had won control of Macedonia by force of arms, thus establishing a Greek royal house in a non-Greek region. No one in the Greek world knew whether to credit this myth (though it was accepted around 500 B.C. by a panel screening out non-Greeks from the Olympic Games), and modern scholars tend to regard it as propaganda. But the Macedonian kings took pride in the link to Argos that Argaeus’ name seemed to imply, along with the name of an even more remote ancestor, Argeas, said to be a grandson of Zeus. The royal family came to call themselves by a collective name, the Argeads, that stressed their connection to this ancestor and to the Argive Greeks.
For three and a half centuries before Alexander, the Argeads formed the central pole of Macedonian political life. They were the sole legitimate government, for all appointments and offices were at the discretion of the king. In a land divided by geography into fractious cantons, the royal house defined national identity; one was Macedonian if one was ruled by an Argead. The monarchy became a hallowed institution in the eyes of its subjects, their principal way of understanding who they were. They arranged themselves into concentric rings around the reigning king; the highborn styled themselves his “friends” and “companions,” drank with him at riotous banquets, joined him on boar hunts, and sent their young sons to the palace to serve as “the king’s boys.”
But the Argeads were not an easy lot to revere. Lacking a system for selecting heirs, they easily fell into fratricide or civil war to decide dynastic disputes. Their polygamy generated multiple family lines that competed, sometimes viciously, over succession. Winners of such contests often wiped out rivals; Alexander did this when he succeeded his father, Philip, leaving the royal house perilously short of heirs. In the end, the Argead who took the throne was the one who couldtake it, and the people hailed their new ruler by vocal acclamation, a rite performed by an assembly of armed soldiers.
For three and a half centuries this quarrelsome family had ruled the Macedonian nation and buried its dead at Aegae, as Argaeus had been taught. Even when the royal seat was moved to Pella, a more outward-looking locale with easier access to the sea, the ancient capital continued to house their tombs. It was as though the family believed the prophecy Argaeus heard from his father, that their dynasty would endure only so long as they kept the royal burial site. The Argeads had clung to the tradition, and they had endured.
But now Alexander had chosen to break the chain. In some of his last instructions, he asked that his body be buried in western Egypt, near the desert oracle of the god Ammon. He had visited this shrine eight years earlier and consulted it about his origins; some said he was told he was Ammon’s son, not Philip’s. Whatever he heard there, he chose to spend eternity in one of the most inaccessible places in the world, today known as the oasis of Siwa. His corpse would dwell in splendid isolation, surrounded by trackless and forbidding wastes, rather than in the bosom of his ancestors at Aegae. It was as though he wanted only a god as his kin.