That very morning, a day in mid-October, Archias the Exile-chaser was crossing over to Calauria accompanied by his Thracian spearmen. The search party soon made its way to Poseidon’s shrine and, for some reason unwilling to enter, hailed Demosthenes from outside. Archias told his quarry to come peacefully and promised that neither he nor Antipater would do him harm. Demosthenes retorted that he had never before found Archias’ acting convincing and did not now. He had surely learned what had befallen Hyperides a week earlier and was determined to make a better end.

When Archias began threatening to use force, Demosthenes, as though acknowledging defeat, asked to compose a letter to his family. Withdrawing into an enclosed part of the temple, he put the end of a reed pen to his mouth as he often did when writing and stealthily sucked out some poison he had hidden there. Then he covered himself with his cloak and put his head down, waiting for death to arrive.

The Thracians looking on from outside mistook his posture for supplication of the god and began to taunt him for cowardice. Archias entered the room and tried once again to convince Demosthenes that his life would be spared. But by now the poison had begun to work. Demosthenes uncovered his head and, with another barb at his captor’s former career, suggested that Archias could now play the part of Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone, the tyrant who exposes the corpse of his enemy for dogs to devour. Then he turned to the statue of Poseidon at the center of the shrine. “Good Poseidon, I will leave your temple still alive, though Antipater and the Macedonians would not have let it stay undefiled,” he said, and asked for help getting to his feet. He wanted to avoid polluting the holy precinct with his death, but as he staggered past the altar, he fell and groaned his last.

Plutarch, who like other Greeks regarded Demosthenes’ suicide as a heroic act of defiance, notes that there were various descriptions of the event. According to one, Demosthenes took poison not from the end of his pen but from a little cloth bag he wore tied to his waist. Another claimed the venom was contained in a hollow bracelet. Demochares, the nephew of Demosthenes who had tried to rally support in the Assembly, claimed that his uncle had not taken poison at all but had been delivered from his enemies by divine will; some god had sent him a painless death at the most opportune moment. It was comforting to think that after so much neglect of Athens’ fortunes, the gods had intervened to spare the dignity of the city’s last free man.

It took decades for Demochares to rehabilitate his uncle’s reputation, but he finally succeeded, near the end of his life, in persuading Athens to erect a commemorative statue. The portrait was done in bronze by Polyeuctus, a famous Athenian sculptor of the day; it survives in several Roman-era stone copies. Demosthenes is shown standing erect but with head downcast; his careworn face wears a pensive expression; he holds in both hands a papyrus scroll, no doubt a speech to be delivered in the Assembly. The portrait gives a vivid impression of strength, conviction, and seriousness of purpose, but also of tragic futility. It depicts a man whose goals are doomed never to be achieved.

Demosthenes, as depicted in a Roman copy of the commemorative statue by Polyeuctus (Illustration credit 5.1)

The statue’s original was set up in the Athenian market square, with a rueful verse inscription on its base:

                If only your strength, Demosthenes, had been equal in force to your judgment,

                Greece would have never been ruled by Macedonian Ares.

6

A Death on the Nile

Western Asia and Egypt

SUMMER 322–SUMMER 321 B.C.

During the year since his death, Alexander’s mummified body had lain in a coffin of hammered gold, covered by a purple cloth embroidered with gold, in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. Throughout that year and most of the next, Arrhidaeus, the officer appointed by Perdiccas, oversaw construction of a magnificent hearse to bear the body to its final home.

Preservation of corpses was new to the Macedonians. Before Alexander, only Hephaestion had been embalmed, and only briefly, to keep his body from decay while an elaborate funeral pyre was made ready. Alexander’s case was different. As weeks stretched into months and then past a year, the purple-clad casket must have become an eerie fixture of the palace complex, inspiring comfort or fear in those who passed near it. It seemed to contain a god, yet gods were supposed to dwell beneath the ground or in the sky, not under the same roofs as men.

It was the custom of the Macedonians before Alexander’s day to inter their kings in chamber tombs in the royal city of Aegae, usually after cremation. That was the protocol for Alexander’s father, Philip, whose remains were found in one of the two tombs discovered at Vergina in 1977 (though just which one, Tomb 1 or Tomb 2, is still debated). It was to Aegae that Alexander’s body would finally be sent, not by the king’s own wishes but by the will of Perdiccas’ government, after the completion of his catafalque.

But Alexander’s corpse would never make it to Aegae. A different burial site was being arranged for it by Ptolemy, satrap of Egypt, even as the magnificent hearse was being built. Those arrangements were as yet a secret, and would remain so until the moment they were put into effect, for any disclosure might be reported to Perdiccas, head of the beleaguered Babylon government, and the consequences were sure to be severe.

1. CLEOPATRA (SARDIS, AUTUMN 322 B.C.)

It was not a funeral but a wedding—her own—that was on the mind of Alexander the Great’s sister, Cleopatra, as she journeyed from Macedonia to the city of Sardis (in what is now western Turkey). She and her mother, Olympias, had failed in their first bid to arrange a marriage, when Leonnatus, their chosen bridegroom, got himself killed in battle. Now the two royal women, Alexander’s closest kin, were determined to try again. This time, rather than lure a potential husband to Europe, Cleopatra herself came into Asia, where Alexander’s generals were thickest. Her family’s fortunes depended on her attracting one of these, and the sooner the better, for their nemesis, old man Antipater, was quickly cornering the marriage market. Craterus in Europe was already wed to Antipater’s eldest daughter, Phila; Ptolemy in Egypt was awaiting the arrival of his youngest, Eurydice; and to Perdiccas, the most powerful of them all, he had promised Nicaea. Antipater had thus gained sons-in-law on all three continents, dangerously isolating Olympias, his ancient antagonist.

But Olympias and her daughter still held the trump card in marital politics, the blood royal. Unlike Antipater’s daughters, Cleopatra, now in her early thirties, could beget a legitimate heir to the throne. And, as Alexander’s only full sibling, she herself stood closest to that throne. Marriage to Cleopatra would instantly elevate any bridegroom to royal status and might even make him a king. Kingship of Macedon had never before been obtained through marriage, but neither had there ever been joint rule by two kings, nor a king with half Bactrian blood, nor a royal seat in far-off Babylon. The new age ushered in by Alexander had brought unthinkable things to pass, and many routes to the throne might now be fair game.

Cleopatra thus went to Asia, to see whether one of the generals there might marry her. As it happened, the best catch of them all was promised but not yet wed—Perdiccas, guardian of the joint kings and head of the central government.