Alexander’s close call in India was a dress rehearsal for his death, and it did not go well. Alexander had trained a superb senior staff but had made no one his clear second; he had divided top assignments among many lieutenants, deliberately diffusing power. Without his centering presence, the rank and file had become despondent and mistrustful and had looked in vain for a clear-cut chain of command. Only the king’s reappearance had prevented total collapse.

Alexander gradually recovered from his lung wound. In the summer of 325 he took his army out of India, sending some by land across the mountains and others by ship through what is now the Arabian Sea. He led his own contingent through the desert region called Gedrosia (today Baluchistan in southern Iran), exposing them to horrors of privation and heat as supply lines and support networks failed. A depleted and diminished column emerged from this grim wasteland and reentered the fertile lands at the center of the old Persian empire. Restored and reunited with their comrades, they followed Alexander back to the scene of their glorious celebration seven years earlier, the city of Nebuchadnezzar, the home of the Hanging Gardens, wealthy Babylon.

On the seventeenth of the Macedonian month Daisios, the first of June 323 B.C. by the modern calendar, the Macedonian troops at Babylon got their first sign that Alexander was ill. The king appeared outside Nebuchadnezzar’s palace to lead that day’s sacrifice to the gods, his duty as head of the Macedonian nation, but had to be carried on a bier. He had been drinking at a private party the night before with his senior staff, and after returning to his quarters, he had become feverish. By morning he was too ill to walk.

After this brief and disquieting appearance, Alexander withdrew into the palace and rested. In the evening his officers were summoned to his quarters to discuss a campaign against the Arabs that was scheduled to begin three days later. There was as yet no change in the plans for this campaign, no suggestion that Alexander’s condition would be a hindrance.

The men who attended that meeting were Alexander’s inner circle, above all, his seven Somatophylakes, or Bodyguards. Far more than a security detail, these were his closest friends, the sharers of his counsels, and, in battle, the holders of his top commands. Most were about his own age, and several had grown up with him. Not all were great generals or tacticians. They didn’t have to be, since Alexander devised tactics for them. But all were distinguished by their rock-solid loyalty to Alexander and his cause. They understood the king’s goals and backed them unstintingly; they supported him through every crisis, against all opposition. Alexander could trust them implicitly, even though they did not always trust, or like, one another.

Ptolemy was there, a close comrade of Alexander’s since boyhood, a man perhaps a few years older than the thirty-two-year-old king. Ptolemy had been with the Asian campaign from the start but for years had held no command post; his nature and temperament were not obviously those of a warrior. Alexander had made him a Bodyguard midway through the campaign based purely on personal ties and thereafter began giving him combat assignments as well. In India he assigned Ptolemy his first critical missions, thrusting his old friend into ever-greater dangers. In one Indian engagement, Ptolemy was struck by an arrow said to be tipped with poison; legend later reported that Alexander himself administered the antidote, after extracting juice from a plant he had seen in a dream. Ptolemy was hardly the most skilled of Alexander’s officers, but perhaps the cleverest, as his subsequent career would prove.

Perdiccas, by contrast, had been in the army’s top ranks from the start of the campaign and had by now accrued the most distinguished service record of those in Babylon. It was he who had taken charge, probably on his own initiative, when Alexander’s lung wound was healing in India. Perdiccas was perhaps a few years older than the king, one of the aristocratic youths who had grown up at the palace as pages of Alexander’s father, King Philip. Indeed, his first act of prowess had come in his teens, when, as an honorary attendant to Philip in his final public appearance, he chased down and killed Philip’s assassin. Perdiccas belonged to one of the royal families that had once ruled independent kingdoms in the Macedonian highlands. These families had been stripped of power as Philip’s empire grew, but their offspring retained a privileged place at Alexander’s court so long as they were loyal, and Perdiccas was certainly that.

Leonnatus was another of Philip’s former pages, also sprung from royal blood, and had helped Perdiccas dispatch the king’s escaping assassin. He had risen to top commands late in the Asian campaign but in India had covered himself in glory at the siege where Alexander was shot. Leonnatus was one of the three men cut off with the king in the besieged town; he had incurred serious wounds while using his own body to shield the fallen Alexander, a signal display of heroism and devotion. Another soldier, Peucestas, had done likewise in that same action; Alexander had rewarded him with promotion to the Bodyguard, creating an unprecedented eighth slot.

Also present was Nearchus, a Greek, one of Alexander’s oldest and closest friends, but not a member of the Bodyguard (Greeks were a kindred but foreign race in Macedonian eyes and not permitted into the charmed circle of seven). Alexander had summoned Nearchus from a rear-guard post and brought him to India, eventually assigning him to captain the huge fleet that sailed down the Indus and back to Persis. It was the hardest assignment any subordinate ever received. The voyage went awry from the start, and Nearchus’ ships endured long stretches without food or water. When the fleet and the land army linked up once again, Alexander at first failed to recognize his wasted and weatherworn friend, then took his hand, shedding tears of relief.

There was another Greek at that meeting, Eumenes, thirty-seven years old with a boyish face and a slender build, who also had known Alexander from childhood but whose services to him had been of a different kind. Alexander’s father had long before made Eumenes royal secretary, a new post created to handle the complex paperwork of a growing empire. According to one report, Philip had simply liked the look of the boy when he spotted him winning a pancration, a no-holds-barred wrestling match, and hired him on the spot. During the Asian campaign, other Companions smirked that Eumenes followed Alexander with pen and writing tablet rather than with sword and shield, and sometimes forcefully put him into what they saw as his place. In India, Eumenes received a painful slight when Hephaestion, Alexander’s favorite, took away his designated quarters and reassigned them to a common flute player. Eumenes complained bitterly to Alexander, who at first took his scribe’s part and scolded Hephaestion but later changed sides and railed at Eumenes for demanding royal protection. No one knew quite where to rank a Greek foreigner, and a noncombatant, in a Macedonian hierarchy based on military valor.

Ultimately, Alexander decided that Eumenes, too, might possess that valor, or might be allowed to earn it. In India Alexander entrusted his scribe with a minor cavalry command, assigning him to lead a troop of horsemen to two rebel towns and demand their submission. As it turned out, the townspeople had fled before Eumenes arrived, but the mission nonetheless allowed Eumenes to lead men in hostile territory and demonstrated that Macedonian cavalry, if ordered by Alexander, would accept a Greek as their captain. Then, in the last year of his life, Alexander made a much more dramatic move, appointing Eumenes commander of an elite cavalry unit formerly headed by lofty Perdiccas. No Greek had held such a distinguished post in Alexander’s army before. Little Eumenes had risen high, indeed—and was destined to rise still higher.