5 “To the strongest”:The word kratistosin the saying, as reported by Arrian ( Anabasis7.26.3) and Diodorus (17.117.4), is usually translated “strongest” but can also mean “best,” and indeed Diodorus elsewhere quotes the same saying with a different word, aristos, unambiguously meaning “best” (18.1.4). Quintus Curtius uses the Latin word optimus, “best,” in his version of the story (10.5.5).
6 the Babylonians welcomed him:Their exuberance at the arrival of Alexander is most fully described by Quintus Curtius 5.1.17–23. The Persian-appointed governor of the city, Mazaeus, took the lead in switching sides.
7 Perhaps he began to believe himself:Alexander’s own beliefs about his divine nature are probably unrecoverable, but we do know that his troops twitted him about his descent from Ammon (see Arrian’s Anabasis7.8.3) and that, in the last year of his life, several Greek cities were debating a proposal to grant him the rites appropriate to a god (see this page).
8 they reached their breaking point:I follow the traditional understanding of the events at the river Hyphasis. An alternate theory that the so-called mutiny was in fact a staged event designed to allow Alexander to reverse course without losing face has recently been advanced and is to my mind unconvincing.
9 Panic seized the army:The details that follow are taken from Arrian, Anabasis6.12–13, where it is clear that Alexander needed to take extraordinary measures to calm his own troops. Quintus Curtius, by contrast, stresses his need to make a show of his strength to the surrounding hostile peoples (9.6.1).
10 On the seventeenth of the Macedonian month Daisios:The date is arrived at by starting from the date of Alexander’s death, generally agreed (on Plutarch’s testimony) to be Daisios 28, and counting backward by the days of illness Arrian records in Anabasis7.25–26, apparently eleven (though the text is somewhat unclear). Plutarch, however, has a different count of sick days, and records the date of the first sign of illness as Daisios 18 rather than 17 ( Alexander76.1).
11 the first of June 323 B.C.:This date has been arrived at by another backward count, starting from the date of Alexander’s death, which has been fixed at June 11 by the use of a Babylonian astronomical text (see Depuydt, “Time of Death of Alexander the Great”), and again reckoning Arrian’s illness days at eleven. It is not possible to make hard-and-fast correlations between Greco-Macedonian dates like Daisios 18 and modern ones. Peter Green uses a different set of modern dates from mine in Alexander of Macedon, pp. 473–75, in part because at the time he wrote, the Babylonian text in question was thought to indicate a date of June 10; the interpretation has since changed.
12 their rock-solid loyalty to Alexander:In portraying the Bodyguards as a cadre loyal to Alexander, I am clearly rejecting the hypothesis that they collectively acted to bring about his death, either by poisoning him (asserted by Bosworth in “Death of Alexander”) or by denying him moral support or medical attention (Atkinson’s scenario in “Alexander’s Death”). The evidence supporting a broad conspiracy is very slim. Only one ancient document, the Last Days and Testament(preserved as part of the Liber de Morte), indicts a large number of insiders in a murder plot, but the testimony of such an otherwise unreliable text is nearly worthless. Conspiracy theories have always flourished after the sudden demise of a great leader. The question in Alexander’s case, to my mind, comes down to this: Would an aristocracy that had never known any system but hereditary monarchy, recognizing that its king had no viable heir, take a blind leap into the unknown by committing regicide? To answer yes, one could have to assume that Alexander had become so unstable as to make the status quo unbearable (a situation like that which prompted the Praetorian Guard at Rome to assassinate Caligula). I see no grounds for this assumption, even if Alexander was undeniably impetuous and prone to suspicions in his final year. The Bodyguards and other insiders could never have imagined that their fortunes would be improved by his death. There are better grounds for thinking that a small number of outsiders, Europe-based generals like Antipater and Cassander (always the ancient world’s prime suspects, as I discuss later), killed Alexander to prevent him from taking the Asianization of the empire any further, but even this hypothesis cannot be supported by evidence, despite the assertion by Adrienne Mayor (“Deadly Styx River”) that the river from which Antipater was said to have collected his poison may in fact have contained toxic bacteria.
13 a man perhaps a few years older:There is no firm evidence for the date of Ptolemy’s birth. It is often given as 367 B.C. on the basis of one very dubious ancient report (Pseudo-Lucian Macrobioi12), but many historians feel that the relationship between Ptolemy and Alexander seems to be that of two men close in age. Helmut Berve dated Ptolemy’s birth not earlier than 360, making him no more than four years Alexander’s senior.
14 legend later reported:Diodorus 17.103 and Quintus Curtius 9.8.22–27.
15 Perdiccas was perhaps a few years older:There is no evidence at all on which to date Perdiccas’ birth, but it seems probable he was in his twenties, as Berve speculates, at the time of Philip’s assassination.
16 Greeks were a kindred but foreign race:The question of the Greekness of the Macedonians is a vexed one, both in classical scholarship and in modern Balkan politics. I make no claims here that the Macedonians were, or were not, a branch of the Greek people, as I think the evidence is not decisive. But at many points in the ancient accounts of Alexander’s army, both before and after the king’s death, it is clear that Greeks were regarded by the Macedonians as a separate race. Many Greeks believed the same about the Macedonians, though there were also some, like Isocrates the Athenian, who endorsed the Greekness of the Macedonian royal house—not the entire people—in order to advance a political agenda.
17 then took his hand, shedding tears of relief:Recounted by Arrian in his chronicle of Nearchus’ voyage, Indica, chap. 35.
18 Philip had simply liked the look of the boy:Perhaps this is only a legend contrived to highlight Eumenes’ humble origins, like the even more dubious report that Eumenes’ father was a wagon driver or a funeral musician (both found in Plutarch Eumenes1). Anson, in Eumenes of Cardia, assumes that Eumenes could only have found his way into Philip’s employ had he belonged to a noble and well-connected family.
19 In India, Eumenes received:The episode is recounted by Plutarch Eumenes2, and possibly referred to by Arrian, Anabasis7.13.
20 appointing Eumenes as commander:Plutarch Eumenes1.5. The appointment is not discussed in any of the Alexander histories, and nothing they tell us adequately accounts for it.
21 In the royal pavilion he set up in Persis:Described by Ephippus of Olynthus, as quoted by Athenaeus 12.53.
22 probably to the little Summer Palace:The movements of Alexander through Babylon in June 323, and later the location of his corpse, though reported only vaguely by Arrian and Plutarch, have been reconstructed in detail by Schachermeyr in the first four chapters of Alexander in Babylon.
23 Rumors circulating at the time of Alexander’s death:The evidence for these is discussed in Chapter 7, section 5.
24 Eumenes himself might have tampered with it:This is the hypothesis of Bosworth in “Alexander’s Death.”