The problem of whether to grant Alexander’s bizarre request was one of many the Bodyguards faced on the night of June 11. They would not be able to address it for some time, since more pressing problems were soon to demand their attention. Two years hence, it was to be resolved in a way none of them, or Alexander himself, could have foreseen. Alexander’s corpse, like his dynasty and his empire, was about to embark on a perilous and unprecedented journey.

2

The Testing of Perdiccas

Babylon

JUNE 11–LATE SUMMER 323 B.C.

In his last days of life, according to several ancient accounts, Alexander made his only attempt to deal with the power vacuum his illness had created. From his sickbed he passed to his senior Bodyguard, Perdiccas, the signet ring with which he sealed his executive orders. The significance of this gesture was clear. Alexander had given Perdiccas authority to oversee the army and the empire, until either Alexander recovered or a new king emerged.

Alexander’s army had no clear hierarchy that made one individual second-in-command, but the post of chiliarch, the head of the first squadron of the elite Companion cavalry, stood highest in rank. Until the previous autumn, Hephaestion had occupied it, but his death from illness had left it vacant. Alexander, grieved at the loss of his closest friend, at first decreed that no one else should lead this top cavalry squadron, so that it would forever bear the name of Hephaestion. But eventually he appointed Perdiccas to take Hephaestion’s place and put Eumenes, his own Greek secretary, into the cavalry command held by Perdiccas.

Perdiccas was a natural but not inevitable choice to succeed Hephaestion as top-ranking officer. Perdiccas had royal blood, from one of the now-obsolete dynasties that had ruled the mountainous regions outside central Macedon. His career of service was long and distinguished. He had become a Bodyguard some five years into the Asian campaign, a mark of his unstinting loyalty to the king. In India, Perdiccas led several critical operations, including the crucial task, shared with Hephaestion, of bridging the Indus River. One ancient source reports that it was Perdiccas who extracted the arrow from Alexander’s chest in India, a task that most were too terrified to perform for fear of causing the king’s death (others say it was a Greek doctor named Critodemus).

There were several Companions who must have been dismayed to see Perdiccas made chiliarch and not themselves. Of these, Craterus perhaps had the most grounds for envy. He was older than the rest, in his late forties, with an authority greatly revered by troops and officers alike. Alexander often relied on Craterus to bring up the phalanx, gear wagons, and elephant train while he dashed ahead with more mobile troops. But though Craterus had fulfilled every commission with distinction, he was known to oppose Alexander’s program of Euro-Asian cultural fusion, and that made him an outsider at court. Ultimately, Alexander had sent him home at the head of the veterans returning to Macedonia, with orders to assume command of Europe—an honorable discharge from the royal army.

Ptolemy, too, might have hoped to be marked as Alexander’s most favored. Ptolemy had risen to high rank only late in the Asian campaign but since then had progressed from strength to strength. He was among the king’s oldest and most trusted friends, and trustworthiness, more than any other factor, determined promotion at Alexander’s court. And what of Leonnatus, who had proved his trustworthiness by protecting Alexander’s prostrate body with his own after the king was wounded in India? Leonnatus too had dreams of higher station. For some time now he had patterned his clothes after Alexander’s and even his hair, flipping it back from his forehead on both sides in the king’s signature style.

In the end it was Perdiccas who succeeded Hephaestion as chiliarch, and to whom Alexander, in his last days of life, passed the signet ring. But in taking that ring from the king’s hand, Perdiccas took it away from all the others, even from Craterus, then hundreds of miles away on the march toward Macedon. Each was worthy, in his own eyes at least, of the highest honor the king could bestow. During his campaign Alexander had kept them in a careful equipoise, distributing marks of favor evenly so as not to give any (except Hephaestion) too great a sense of entitlement. “They were so equal in his honor that you might have thought each one a king,” writes Justin of Alexander’s top officers, though he misses the point by attributing to a malign Fortune, rather than to state policy, the balance of their strengths.

Perdiccas had shown on many occasions his ability to manage a crisis, and never more than in the panicky moments after Alexander was wounded in the Indian town—if it was indeed Perdiccas who performed emergency surgery on the king. Alexander had been dragged out of harm’s way with a three-foot arrow still protruding from his chest. The arrowhead was lodged in his breastbone, and no one dared saw off the shaft for fear the bone would splinter. Alexander, still conscious, tried to cut the shaft with his own dagger, but loss of blood had already sapped his strength. Some onlookers began to weep, and others drew back in terror, while Alexander rebuked them as cowards and traitors. To step forward at such a moment, as one source says that Perdiccas did—using his sword as a scalpel when there was no time to find proper instruments—took exceptional steeliness of nerve. Doctors, under the rough justice administered by angry Macedonians, could be killed for not saving the lives of their patients.

A medallion struck by Alexander depicting an Indian archer of the type who dealt him his near-fatal chest wound (Illustration credit 2.1)

Now a new crisis was at hand, and Perdiccas needed all his steadiness of nerve. He would be blamed in this case not for Alexander’s death but for not being Alexander. His every move would draw the jealousy and resentment of his rivals. The army in Babylon, perhaps six thousand Macedonian infantry, barely trusted him; only yesterday they had defied his orders and forced past him to see Alexander on his sickbed. Their behavior had become alarmingly headstrong in recent years, even toward Alexander. From whom would they take orders now that their only master was dead?

The steps taken by Perdiccas to deal with the crisis of 323 are known only imperfectly, since ancient accounts vary widely. Indeed the week following June 11 in Babylon was so violent and chaotic that no two witnesses could have recalled it in quite the same way. The divergent reports in three ancient chronicles—Arrian’s Events After Alexander, Diodorus’ Library, and Justin’s summary of Pompeius Trogus—are like three strands from which a modern historian must weave a braid of likelihood. Complicating this task is a fourth source that, for these first days of the post-Alexander period, gives a highly detailed account of events but is often at variance with the other three. Quintus Curtius, a Roman statesman living under the early Caesars, continued his history of Alexander’s life for several weeks past the king’s death, fascinated, as a Roman of that era would be, by the perils of a power vacuum. But Curtius’ readiness to see Roman patterns in Macedonian history, or even to superimpose them, calls his reliability into question.

It is certain that on June 12, a council of high officers met in the room where Alexander lay in state, the throne room of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace. The seven Bodyguards were there, along with a handful of others, armed as if for battle to highlight the urgency of the moment. Perdiccas, according to Curtius, had prepared a startling backdrop for this meeting: Alexander’s empty throne, now decked with the king’s diadem, armor, and robes. It was as though he wanted Alexander’s ghost to preside over the deliberations. Curtius reports that Perdiccas even placed Alexander’s signet ring, his own great token of authority, among those relics—a remarkable gesture of humility, if true.