On the floor of the tomb, amid the decayed remains of the wooden couch they had once adorned, Andronikos found five delicately carved ivory heads (nine more were eventually recovered). These miniature masterworks portrayed a gallery of heroic male types, two of them bearded and grave, the others smooth cheeked, limpid, and youthful (a few have been seen as women). The sense of character emanating from the portraits was startling. Given that pottery finds dated the tomb between 350 and 315 B.C., Andronikos quickly identified one bearded portrait as Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, assassinated in 336. Another head, that of a slender, beardless youth with his neck bent at an odd angle, seemed an image of Alexander himself. Andronikos took these portraits to his quarters and spent a sleepless night of fervid excitement gazing into what seemed to be the faces of the two greatest Macedonian kings and their comrades.

Across the facade of the tomb (now known as Tomb 2), Andronikos’ team found a remarkable painted frieze. When cleaned and stabilized, it revealed a hunting tableau, with ten powerful figures stabbing and spearing various kinds of game. Once again the faces seemed expressive and lifelike, perhaps individual portraits; Andronikos again thought he recognized Philip and Alexander, portrayed as a mature man of forty and a youth of twelve or thirteen. The other figures in the hunt scene, beardless youths slightly older than “Alexander,” he identified as royal pages, the sons of nobility who, as we know, grew up at Philip’s court and later became Alexander’s close friends.

Alexander’s Companions

The ivory portraits recovered from Tomb 2 by Manolis Andronikos (Illustration credit itr.1)

The finds of 1977 posed enough riddles to last any scholar a lifetime, including the question—still unresolved after more than three decades—of the identity of the tomb’s occupants. But Andronikos was not done exploring the Great Tumulus. Eighteen months later, digging elsewhere in the mound, he unearthed a third structure, Tomb 3, which he came to call the Prince’s Tomb. Its contents too had remained intact, protected by the immense thickness of earth above. They were less sumptuous than those of the neighboring tomb but still, by any measure, spectacular. This tomb held the remains of a single occupant, housed in a large silver drinking vessel rather than a gold chest; analysis indicated a boy in his early teens. Given evidence that dated the tomb to the late fourth century, this could only be the son and successor of Alexander the Great, killed by his political enemies in 309 or 308 B.C.

It had become clear by this point that the Great Tumulus was, in effect, a time capsule of the tumultuous period following Alexander’s death. Here was the boy-king whose lot it was to follow the most potent conqueror the world had known, thrust by his lineage into a maelstrom of dynastic turmoil. Here too were the portraits, in both paint and ivory, of the Companions of Alexander, the intimates who grew up with him, fought under him, and survived him to become his too-faithful followers, bloodying his empire again and again in their bids to control it. Here also, if one leading theory about the occupants of Tomb 2 is correct, were Alexander’s half brother and niece, two royals who had been killed trying to lay sole claim to Alexander’s throne. The bones of this couple seemed to bear witness to the troubled times in which they lived, for one expert judged they had undergone “dry” cremation, after the flesh upon them had already decayed. Had they been buried here, in this sumptuous tomb, only after first being left to rot elsewhere?

The facade of Tomb 2, with the frieze of the royal hunt across the top (Illustration credit itr.2)

Those whose bones and images emerged from the Great Tumulus were Alexander’s contemporaries, and their fame has largely been eclipsed by his. Yet their tales are among the most tempestuous and tragic in any of history’s tomes. They were the ensemble cast in a great drama of downfall: they saw the rending of an empire, the collapse of a political order, and the death of a dynasty that had endured almost four centuries. Their faces can be seen today at Vergina, once Aegae, in the museum that houses Andronikos’ finds. Their stories are told in the pages that follow.

1

Bodyguards and Companions

Babylon

MAY 31–JUNE 11, 323 B.C.

No one knew what was killing Alexander. Some thought he could not die; his conquests during his twelve-year reign had been more godlike than mortal. It was even whispered he was the son not of Philip, his predecessor on the throne of Macedonia, but of the Egyptian god Ammon. Now, as Alexander grew more sickly during the first week of June 323, it seemed that he coulddie, indeed, was dying. Those closest to Alexander, his seven Bodyguards, and the larger circle of intimates called his Companions watched his decline helplessly, and watched one another carefully. They were able commanders, leaders of the most successful military campaign ever fought, and were accustomed to managing crises. At this moment, to judge by later events, none knew what to do, what the others had in mind, or what would happen next.

Amid the gloom of the deathbed watch, their thoughts went back to the previous year and to an incident that had seemed unimportant at the time. Alexander’s army was then on the march, returning from India (eastern Pakistan today), the farthest reach of its conquests. (Maps at the beginning and end of this book show all the major regions of Alexander’s empire.) Accompanying the troops was an Eastern holy man named Calanus, an elderly sage who had become a kind of guru to some of the senior officers. But Calanus fell ill as the army reached Persis and, foreseeing a slow decline toward death, arranged to commit suicide by self-immolation. In a solemn ceremony he said farewell to each of his devotees, but when Alexander approached, he drew back, saying cryptically that he would embrace the king when he saw him in Babylon. Then he climbed atop a tall pyre before the entire Macedonian army, and all forty thousand watched as he burned to death, sitting calmly and still amid the flames.

Now they had come to the wealthy city of Babylon (in the south of modern Iraq), and Calanus’ words had begun to make sense. Other recent incidents, too, suddenly took on ominous meaning. A few days before Alexander fell ill, an interloper never seen before dashed into the palace throne room, put on the diadem and royal robes—left by Alexander when he went to take exercise—and seated himself on the throne. Under interrogation he claimed to have followed the instructions of an Egyptian god called Serapis, or perhaps (according to a different account) merely to have acted on a whim. Alexander, however, suspected a plot and ordered the man’s execution. Whatever its motives, the act seemed vaguely threatening, a portent of danger to the state.

The ancient city of Babylon, digitally reconstructed, seen from the north (as Alexander would have seen it on his first approach) (Illustration credit 1.1)

The throne room in which the bizarre episode took place was famous for such portents. The great Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had built this room three centuries earlier as the grand central hall of his palace. It was here that Belshazzar, his descendant, held a vast banquet at which guests saw a disembodied finger write a mysterious sentence on the wall: Mene mene tekel upharsin.The message, decoded by a seer named Daniel (one of the Hebrew captives taken to Babylon from Jerusalem), was that Belshazzar had been weighed in the balance and found wanting; his empire would fall and be divided among the new powers contesting dominion in Asia, the Medes and the Persians. The prophecy came to pass that very night, according to the biblical version of the tale. Belshazzar was killed in a sudden invasion, and his throne was occupied by Persian kings—Cyrus the Great, Darius, Xerxes, and others—for more than two hundred years.