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  Plutarch which apparently originate from a single earlier source. However,

  one cannot ignore the fact that other sources, both the speeches of

  contemporary Greek orators and Alexander historians, are silent on this

  issue. The same sources provide extensive information on the exile decree

  and there is no reason why they should fail to mention Alexander’s whish

  or demand to be worshiped as a god. On the basis of all the evidence found

  in extant sources it is equally probable that the idea of deifying Alexander

  originated in fact from the Greeks wishing to win the powerful king over

  in the time when they had much to gain in the exiles debate. Alexander’s

  invincibility on the battlefield was a convenient reason to declare him a

  god. However, the statue in Athens of ‘Alexander the invincible god’ did

  not have a cult status, probably to deliberately weaken the charge that this

  was sacrilegious deification of a living mortal.63

  61 Hyp., 6.21; Ael., VH, 2.19; Plu., mor. , 219e; Paus., 8.32.1; Arr., An. , 7.23.2.

  62 Suda., s.v. Ant∂patroj. Blackwell 1999, p. 155. Alexander’s cult in Asia Minor

  and in islands: Habicht 1970, pp. 17-22, 26-28; Stewart 1993, pp. 98-102, 419-420;

  Badian 1996, pp. 24-25; Nawotka 2003a, p. 33; Dreyer 2009, pp. 222-228.

  63 Ael., VH, 2.19; Plu., mor. , 219e. Tarn 1948, ii, pp. 370-373; Wilcken 1967, p.

  210; Habicht 1970, pp. 17-36; Schachermeyr 1973, pp. 525-431; Hamilton 1973,

  pp. 138-139; Goukowsky 1978, p. 61; Bosworth 1988, p. 288; Stewart 1993, pp.

  100-101; Hammond 1996, pp. 257-258; Fredricksmeyer 2003, p. 276. Contra:

  Balsdon 1950; Blackwell 1999, pp. 152-153; Brun 2000, p. 101; Worthington 2004,

  pp. 192-193.

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  361

  Naturally modern scholars would wish to know Alexander’s own

  thoughts on the controversial subject of his reputed divinity. Unfortunately,

  the sources do not refer to this issue directly, whereas the conduct and

  opinions of Alexander that they cite leave us with an equivocal impression

  of what he really thought. He certainly allowed flatterers to make positive

  comparisons between him and Dionysus or Heracles. At Opis Alexander

  clearly demonstrated how seriously he treated the stories about the god

  Ammon being his father. In the years 324-323 he appeared in public with

  the insignia of that god and allowed or even encouraged those around him

  to behave as if he had divine status; wherever he went incense was burned

  and a pious silence was maintained. On the other hand, in more sober

  moments, such as at the Battle of Massaga, he could berate a sycophant for

  calling his blood ichor, the liquid Homer claims flowed through the veins

  of the Olympian gods. Moreover, throughout his life he was exceptionally

  scrupulous in paying respect to the Greek gods, to Ammon at Siwah as

  well as the gods of whatever region he happened to be in. It is hard not to

  notice in such behaviour very traditional piety and fear of committing

  hubris – the offence of transgressing the boundary between mortals and

  gods.64

  6. The death of Hephaestion

  In the late summer of 324, having dispatched Craterus and the veterans,

  Alexander and the rest of the army set out for Media. The reason for this

  was probably to distribute between more than one satrapy the burden of

  feeding Alexander’s troops and royal court. The army marched slowly. On

  the fourth day it crossed the Tigris and reached a place called Sambana,

  where it stayed for seven days. After another three days of resumed

  marching the Macedonians arrived at Kelonai – a place inhabited by the

  descendants of Boeotian collaborators, whom Xerxes had evacuated from

  Greece and settled there after the 480-479 war. Here the march was once

  again halted and then the army left the main route to reconnoitre

  surrounding areas. Thus the Macedonians reached Bagastana (today

  Bahistun) – ‘Place of the Gods’, where amid magnificent orchards and

  gardens there was Darius I’s famous monumental inscription as well as a

  sanctuary that the Greeks associated with Heracles. It was during the

  stopover at Bagastana that an angry dispute erupted between the royal

  secretary Eumenes and an arrogant Hephaestion, who had just expelled

  64 Bosworth 1988, pp. 281-288; O’Brien 1992, pp. 202-203; Stewart 1993, pp. 96-

  99; Fredricksmeyer 2003, pp. 227-278.

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  Eumenes’ men from their living quarters. King had to personally intervene

  and force the two officials to reconcile their differences. The next stopover

  was on the Nesaian Plain in Media, where a herd of magnificent horses

  grazed. Reports stated there were as many as 150,000 of them, but in

  reality it turned out there were only 50,000 to 60,000 at the most. The

  herders claimed that thieves had stolen the rest during the times of war and

  civil disorder when such crimes could be committed with impunity. Some

  modern scholars believe the robbers were Cossaeans from the Zagros

  Mountains. However, there is not enough evidence in the sources to

  confirm this and it is equally probable that the earlier reports of 150,000

  horses were merely a joyful invention of creative Achaemenid bureaucrats.65

  After 30 days spent on the Nesaian Plain the army resumed the march

  to the Median capital, Ecbatana, which it reached seven days later in the

  autumn of 324. Alexander would usually mark an accomplished mission

  with sports and artistic competitions and this is what indeed happened at

  Ecbatana; 3,000 performers from Greece were said to have taken part in

  the celebrations. An inseparable part of all Macedonian festivities were

  banquets involving heavy drinking. I was most probably as a result of such

  alcoholic overindulgence that in November that year Hephaestion fell ill.

  His physician, a man called Glaucus or Glaucias, instructed him to follow

  a very strict diet. Unfortunately, the young warrior proved incapable of

  putting up with such a regime for long. On the seventh day of his illness,

  during the physician’s absence, he consumed an entire hen, washed it

  down with a pitcher (c. 2 litres capacity) of wine and subsequently passed

  away.66 The death of his very closest friend was a deeply profound shock

  to Alexander. The first thing he did was to have the hapless physician

  executed, in keeping with Persian custom, by crucifixion. He himself is

  said to have hugged Hephaestion’s body for two days. Then, once he

  overcame the first shock of bereavement, Alexander ordered official

  mourning throughout the his empire on a scale befitting the death of a

  monarch or at least an heir to the throne. Among other things, he ordered

  the Persians to quench their ‘sacred fires’. This was something that

  normally only happened after the king’s death and therefore to be told to

  do it on account of the death of an ordinary man was for the Iranians quite

  incomprehensible and even insulting. According to Diodorus (or rather

  Ephippus, who was most probably his source) the quenching of the sacred

  fires was interpreted at time as an omen of Alexander’s own imminent

  65 Diod., 17.110.3-6; Arr., An. , 7.13.1; Plu., Eum. , 2.1-
2. Bosworth 1988, p. 163.

  66 Ephippus, FGrH, 126; Arr., An. , 7.14.1; Diod., 17.110.8; Plu., Alex. , 72.1-2.

  Heckel 1992, pp. 87-88; Hammond 1998; Hamilton 1999, p. 199; Heckel 2006, p.

  126, s.v. ‘Glaucias’ [3].

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  363

  death, though this interpretation may have only appeared after Alexander’s

  death. In the meantime Alexander had his hair cut in honour of his

  deceased companion. He also had the mains and tails of horses and mules

  cut for the same reason. Even more dramatically, he had the defensive

  walls of neighbouring towns demolished and a temple of Asclepius or

  some local deity identified with Asclepius by the Greeks razed to the

  ground. Wishing to institute a divine cult for Hephaestion, Alexander sent

  a special delegation with such a request to the oracle he trusted the most,

  at Siwah. Up until its return he forbade his soldiers to play musical

  instruments, especially not the aulos. Ultimately the Ammon of Siwah

  permitted Hephaestion to have only a heroic cult. The sources relate that

  such a cult was introduced in Athens and Pella. Those who wished to gain

  Alexander’s favour, such as Perdiccas, made vows to all the gods and

  Hephaestion.67 A letter was sent to Cleomenes of Naucratis to construct a

  magnificent heroon to Hephaestion at Alexandria and another one on

  Pharos Island. A measure of the importance Alexander attached to

  establishing a heroic cult for his companion is the reward Alexander was

  offering Cleomenes for completing these tasks: forgiveness for what was

  in all probability very considerable financial abuses committed during the

  king’s absence.68

  The warrior also honoured the death of another warrior with war, thus,

  in a way both offering up the bodies of those slaughtered as sacrifice for

  the companion’s spirit as well as finding a way of occupying his mind in

  the psychologically most difficult phase of his bereavement. Sometime in

  mid winter, probably January-February 323, Alexander launched a

  campaign against the Cossaeans, one of the mountain tribes who, like their

  neighbours the Uxians, had held on to independence under Achaemenid

  rule on account of greater expenditure for the total conquest than the

  tribute might bring the king. This time, however, the best army in the

  world of those days conducted a 40-day manhunt of the hapless Cossaeans

  merely to amuse its commander. Those who survived the slaughter

  acknowledged Alexander’s suzerainty and agreed to adopt a settled

  lifestyle. But by the diadochi period the Cossaeans regained their

  independence and again posed a threat to travellers on the road from Susa

  67 Hyp., Epit. , 20-21; Arr., An. , 7.14.2-7; Diod., 17.114.4-5, 17.115.6; Plu., Alex. , 72.3; Plu., Pel. , 34.2; Ael., VH, 7.8; Luc., Cal. , 17; Just., 12.12. Heckel 1992, pp.

  89-90; Hammond 1995; Briant 1996, pp. 260-262; Badian 1996, p. 25; Hamilton

  1999, pp. 200-201; Pelagia 2000, p. 168; Reames-Zimmerman 2001; Brosius 2003,

  p. 181.

  68 Arr., An. , 7.23.7-8.

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  to Ecbatana. Therefore the conquest of their land was not permanent. But,

  then again, that was not Alexander’s real objective.69

  After the campaign Alexander returned to the matter of organizing a

  funeral ceremony. He instructed Perdiccas to transport Hephaestion’s body

  to Babylon; for a time the king himself held the reins at the head of the

  procession. It is possible that the still extant stone Lion of Hamadan was

  commissioned to mark the place where Hephaestion died. In Babylon

  Alexander ordered the construction of a giant pyre that reportedly cost

  between 10,000 and 12,000 talents. Some scholars have considered the

  extraordinary structure described by Diodorus as an ecphrasis of

  something that may have been planned but was never realised. It has also

  been frequently confused with the tomb which Alexander had planned to

  build for Hephaestion but died before work on its construction work

  actually began.70 Yet we now know that a pyre was actually raised for the

  remnants of a 7.5-metre high platform were discovered by archaeologists

  in Babylon. This was an enormous rectangular pyre a stade (180 m) long

  and over 130 cubits (65 m) high, and comprising a skeleton structure of

  bricks from a demolished fragment of the city’s wall. This skeleton

  structure was filled with the trunks of palm trees, which were used as the

  fuel; in the intense heat of the subsequent conflagration they left an

  impression on the thus deformed bricks. The walls of the pyre were

  adorned with the gilded prows of ships alluding to Hephaestion’s military

  commands, the attributes of the gods (the eagles of Zeus, the snakes of

  Ammon and the torches of Dionysus), a relief depicting a hunting scene

  and another one presenting a Centauromachy (a traditional allegory to the

  Greek-Persian wars), depictions of Persian and Macedonian armour as

  well as the images of Babylonian gods and their symbols. The

  Macedonians cast their weapons and other valuables onto the pyre,

  presumably more in order to ingratiate Alexander than to express genuine

  sorrow for the departure of the generally disliked Hephaestion. The

  cremation of his corpse was accompanied by the sacrifice of 10,000

  animals.71

  Hephaestion’s funeral pyre and all the other aspects of mourning his

  death were already considered excessive by contemporaries. Modern

  69 Arr., An. , 7.15.1-3; Arr., Ind. , 40.7-10; Diod., 17.111.5-6; Str., 11.13.6; Plu., Alex. , 72.4. Bosworth 1988, p. 165; Hamilton 1999, p. 201.

  70 Diod., 17.115.1-5; Plu., Alex. , 72.5. Lane Fox 1980, pp. 384-385; Bosworth

  1988, p. 164; Hammond 1995; McKechnie 1995; McKechnie 2001; Pelagia 2000,

  pp. 167-168.

  71 Diod., 17.115; Arr., An. , 7.14.9; Ael., VH, 7.8. Heckel 1992, p. 89; Pelagia 2000, pp. 167-173.

  The Last Years

  365

  studies have now also stressed a progressive irrationality in Alexander’s

  behaviour and some have even applied quasi-psychological methods to

  ‘diagnose’ such conduct as a symptom of paranoia or alcoholism. Yet it is

  generally accepted that for up to a year after the death of someone

  particularly close people very frequently behave irrationally. An analysis

  made by J. Reames-Zimmerman has revealed that certain seemingly

  unusual aspects Alexander’s behaviour were typical of the ancient Greek

  and Macedonian way of mourning. What made Alexander stand out was

  the ability to express his grief on a grand scale befitting a great monarch.

  Particularly in the last phase of his life Alexander had many grand designs,

  of which Hephaestion’s extravagant funeral was just one. On top of this,

  there was Alexander’s characteristic tendency to model his life on those of

  mythological heroes; here Achilles’ sorrow after Patroclus’ death as

  presented in the Iliad was an obvious point of reference.72 Most scholars

  nowadays have also interpreted Alexander’s ostentatious sorrow as an

  expression of his homosexual relationship with Hephaestion. Bearing in

  mind Greek and Macedonian sexual behaviour, it is likely although far

  from proven given the fuzzy accoun
t of our sources which allude to it in a

  veiled fashion. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Hephaestion

  was by far the closest of Alexander’s friends; in psychology relationship

  as close as these are labelled ‘twinship’. Therefore Hephaestion’s

  premature death had a devastating effect on Alexander in the last months

  of his life.73

  7. Return to Babylon

  After ending his campaign against the Cossaeans, Alexander led his army

  back to Babylon. The march was again very slow and included many

  breaks. Even before he reached Babylon, Alexander granted audiences to

  numerous embassies arriving from various parts of the world and such

  diplomatic meetings continued in Babylon as well. The sources mention

  embassies from Libya, from Italy (including the Bruttians, Lucanians,

  Etruscans and Romans), from Ethiopians, Carthage, European Scythians,

  72 Arr., An. , 7.14; Plu., Alex. , 72. Alcoholism: O’Brien 1992. Paranoia: Badian 1961; Worthington 1999a. But see: Bosworth 1988, pp. 164-165; Reames-Zimmerman 2001.

  73 Ael., VH., 12.7; Epictetus, Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, 2.22.17-18; Luc., DM, 297; Diogenis Sinopensis Epistulae, 24.1. Homosexuality: Heckel 1992, pp.

  65-66; Hamilton 1999, p. 130; Reames-Zimmerman 1999. Contra: Konstan 1997,

  p. 108. For a balanced view see Ogden 2009, pp. 210-212. ‘Twinship’: Kets de

  Vries 2004, pp. 72-73, 80-82.

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  Chapter VII

  Celts from the Balkans and Gaul, Iberians as well as numerous Greek

  poleis (all trying to gain some concessions regarding the return of the

  exiles). The embassies were accepted according to a fairly frequently used

  formula in the Classical era. The first issues to be broached were religious

  and next gifts were accepted, then more earthly issues were considered:

  disputes with neighbouring states, internal conflicts as well as the matter

  of returning exiles. The arrival of so many embassies to the then most

  powerful ruler in the world is not surprising, especially as Alexander had