by Mary Renault
I woke to the slanting light of evening. No one had come. The air was heavy with heat. I thought, They must come soon, his body will not withstand it. But no breath of corruption came from him; he seemed no more than sleeping.
Always the life in him was stronger than in other men. I felt at his heart in vain; his breath did not mist the mirror; yet somewhere deep within him the soul might still remain, preparing to depart, but not yet gone. I spoke to that; not to his ears, I knew they would not hear me, but to whatever of him might hear.
“Go to the gods, unconquered Alexander. May the River of Ordeal be mild as milk to you, and bathe you in light, not fire. May your dead forgive you; you have given more life to men than you brought death. God made the bull to eat grass, but the lion not; and God alone will judge between them. You were never without love; where you go, may you find it waiting.”
At this, the memory came to me of Kalanos singing on his flower-wreathed bier. I thought, He has kept his word; he has put off for his sake being born again; himself having passed in peace through fire, he is here to lead him across the River. It eased my heart, to know he was not alone.
Suddenly, in this stillness, a great clamor approached the room. Ptolemy and Perdikkas rushed in with a band of soldiers, and the royal squires. Perdikkas shouted, “Bolt the doors!” and they crashed them to. There were shouts and hammerings; those outside broke in the doors. Perdikkas and Ptolemy called to their men to defend the King’s body from traitors and pretenders. I was almost crushed as they backed around the bed. The wars for the world had started; these people were fighting to possess him, as if he were a thing, a symbol, like the Mitra or the throne. I turned to him. When I saw him still lie calm, bearing all this without resentment, then I knew he was truly dead.
They had begun to fight, and were throwing javelins. I stood to shield him, and one of them grazed my arm. I have the scar to this day, the only wound I ever took for him.
Presently they parleyed, and went away to go on with their dispute outside. I bound up my arm with a bit of towel, and waited, for it was not proper he should be without attendance. I lit the night-lamp and set it by the bed, and watched with him, till at morning the embalmers came to take him from me, and fill him with everlasting myrrh.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ALL PUBLIC ACTS OF Alexander here recounted are based upon the sources, the most dramatic being the most authentic. It has been impossible to find room for all the major events, even, of his crowded life, or to demonstrate the full scope of his genius. This book attempts only an angle shot, with certain highlights.
Source histories all commend the “moderation” of his sex life. None suggest that he was celibate; had he been, it would of course have been assumed that he was impotent; the Christian ideal of chastity was still unborn. A general pattern emerges of a fairly low physical drive—unsurprising, when such immense energies were spent elsewhere—coupled with a passionate capacity for affection. We know as little as we do of his love affairs, partly because they were few, partly because he was a good picker; none of his partners involved him in scandal.
That Hephaistion was his lover seems, on the evidence, probable to the verge of certainty, but is nowhere actually stated. Plutarch’s account of a child by Memnon’s widow after the fall of Damascus is, for sound reasons, doubted by modern historians, and there is no other record of his having had a mistress. Bagoas is the only person explicitly named in the sources as Alexander’s eromenos.
He first appears in Curtius: Nabarzanes, having received a safe-conduct, met him [Alexander] bringing great gifts. Among these was Bagoas, a eunuch of remarkable beauty and in the very flower of boyhood, who had been loved by Darius, and was afterwards to be loved by Alexander; and it was especially because of the boy’s pleadings that he was led to pardon Nabarzanes. This last is typical Curtius embroidery; the safe-conduct shows that Alexander was willing to hear Nabarzanes’ account of himself, and no doubt this decided the issue. How Bagoas came into his hands, when none of Darius’ suite were allowed with him after his arrest, and Nabarzanes himself escaped with only six hundred horsemen, is not explained.
There is a widespread modern delusion that all eunuchs became gross and flabby. To correct it one need go no further back than the eighteenth century and its famous operatic castrati, whose romantic looks caused them to be much pursued by women of fashion. A portrait of the greatest, Farinelli, done in early middle age, shows a handsome sensitive face, and a figure many modern tenors might envy. The diarist Dr. Burney, writing of him still later, said, “He is tall and thin, but looks very well for his time of life, is lively and well bred.”
The story of Darius’ last days occurs only in Curtius. It is vivid and detailed; is irrelevant to the bias for which Curtius is notorious, and is probably authentic. If so, the final scenes can only have been supplied to some early chronicler by one of Darius’ eunuchs, who were the only witnesses; it is reasonable to suppose by Bagoas himself. With his favored place at court he must have been known to all Alexander’s contemporary historians.
History next knows Bagoas some six years later, when the anecdote of the kiss in the theater is given both by Plutarch and Athenaeus. The location in Karmania is highly significant; there Alexander still had with him only those who had followed him through India and the desert march. After all these vicissitudes, Bagoas was not only still high in his affection, but evidently well liked even by the xenophobe Macedonian troops, in itself surprising. Alexander always repaid with lifelong loyalty a personal devotion, and this seems the likeliest explanation of such a long attachment.
The young eunuch’s origins are unknown; but the conjecture that he was of good birth is not fanciful. Such boys, whose looks had been taken care of and not spoiled by malnutrition or hardship, once enslaved were always at the highest risk of prostitution. Sokrates’ disciple Phaidon (Phaedo) is the best-known case.
Bagoas’ last appearance has been irretrievably garbled by Curtius; one can only do one’s best with it. Luckily for Bagoas’ reputation, we have the first-class evidence of Aristoboulos the architect, who actually restored Kyros’ tomb for Alexander, that he went there when first at Persepolis, saw for himself the valuable grave-goods, and had them inventoried by Aristoboulos, whose description is preserved by Arrian, along with his account of the desecration. In Curtius, Alexander only goes to the tomb on his return from India, and finds it bare because Kyros has been buried only with his simple weapons; a notion which would no doubt delight Roman sentiment but surprise an archaeologist. Bagoas, who has a spite against Orxines for not having sent him a bribe, invents a nonexistent treasure and accuses him of its theft. None of the crimes for which Orxines was in fact punished are mentioned; he is supposed an innocent victim. When the impossible is discarded from this tale not much is left. I have assumed that Bagoas did somehow enter the scene, having some grievance against the satrap with which Alexander sympathized. In view of Orxines’ murderous record, I have supplied the commonest grudge of the ancient world, a family blood-feud.
Muddled sensationalism is typical of Curtius, an unbearably silly man with access to priceless sources now lost to us, which he frittered away in the cause of a tedious literary concept about the goddess Fortune, and many florid exercises in Roman rhetoric. (Alexander, exhorting his friends kindly to remove the arrow stuck in his lung, is impressively eloquent.) The favors of Fortune being conducive to hubris and nemesis, Alexander’s story is bent that way by recourse to Athenian anti-Macedonian agitprop, written by men who never set eyes on him, and bearing about as much relation to objective truth as one would expect to find in a History of the Jewish People commissioned by Adolf Hitler. This had been revived in Augustus’ time by Trogus and Diodorus, who found in a king three centuries dead a safe whipping-boy for the divine pretensions of the living ruler. No attempt is made at consistency with the undisputed facts. A corrupted tyrant would have been cut down by the Opis mutineers the moment he stepped down among them; they could have done it w
ith perfect impunity (the fate of more than one Roman emperor) and elected a new King, as was their right. That instead they complained to Alexander of not being allowed to kiss him is not fiction but history.
As regards the ancient world, the political motives of these unconvincing attempts to show Alexander corrupted by success are clear enough. More puzzling is a present-day outbreak of what one may call blackwashing, since it goes far beyond a one-sided interpretation of facts to their actual misrepresentation. A recent popularization says only of Philotas’ execution that it was “on a trumped-up charge,” though his concealment of the assassination plot is agreed on by all the sources. (What would be the position of a modern security guard who, informed there was a bomb on the royal plane, decided not to mention it?) Hephaistion is “fundamentally stupid,” though in not one of his highly responsible independent missions, diplomatic as well as military, was he ever unsuccessful. Alexander is baldly accused of compassing his father’s death, though not only is the evidence, literally, nil; Philip had not even a viable alternative heir to supply a motive. “Severe alcoholism” is said to have hastened Alexander’s end; any general practitioner could explain what a severe alcoholic’s work capacity is, and what his chance of surviving lung perforation, unanaesthetized field surgery, and a desert march. After the gesture of the troops at Alexander’s deathbed, an event unique in history, it is somewhat surprising to be told that few people mourned him. That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.
In the same spirit, the most sinister motives have been sought for his policies of racial fusion. Yet no one took less trouble to conceal his aversions than he; it is staringly obvious that, once among Persians, he simply found he liked them. Surely in our day it takes a somewhat insular mind to find this either discreditable or strange.
Though accounts of Alexander’s general deterioration do not hold water, there seems little doubt that he did suffer some severe mental disturbance just after Hephaistion’s death. Whether such a breakdown could have recurred cannot be known. Alexander’s nature was a kind of self-winding spring. The tensions of his childhood demanded compensation in achievement; achievement accumulated responsibilities, at the same time suggesting further achievements; the spiral was inexorably ascending, and one cannot be sure this process could have continued through a normal life-span without disaster. Perhaps Kalanos’ parting words were more promise than warning.
Bury and other historians have pointed out the connection between a tainted water supply and heavier wine-drinking in the army. Aristoboulos, who was at court through Alexander’s reign, says his usual habit was to sit over his wine talking into the night, but without getting drunk. According to Plutarch he got rather euphoric towards the end of the session; a phenomenon which can be observed today in persons not given to excess. Occasional drinking-bouts were however characteristically Macedonian, as we already find before Alexander’s accession.
Rumors that he was poisoned, rife for centuries after his death, do not tally with the detailed case history of his last illness. His loss of voice points to the most common fatal complication right up to the discovery of antibiotics—pneumonia. Pleurisy would be a certain sequel in view of his Mallian wound. Aristoboulos says that when in high fever he drank wine and became delirious; he is not said to have demanded it. If it was conveyed to him in malice then he was, morally speaking, poisoned, and the presence of a mortal enemy like Kassandros should not be overlooked.
Curtius has preserved a story that his body was found uncorrupted, in spite of the summer heat and of a long delay in fetching the embalmers, due to the chaos following his death. The period given, six days, is of course absurd; but it is quite possible that a deep coma deceived the watchers a good many hours before clinical death occurred. The embalmers did their work with skill. Augustus Caesar, visiting his tomb at Alexandria, admired the beauty of his features after three hundred years.
The account of Hephaistion’s end suggests he had typhoid, where, though appetite often returns before the lesions in the gut have healed, solid food causes perforation and swift collapse. In our own century typhoid patients have been killed in hospital by misguided relatives smuggling them food. Hephaistion’s boiled fowl, about the size of a modern bantam, would be more than enough.
Arrian has been followed for the squires’ conspiracy, except for my own guess that letters from Aristotle were found among Kallisthenes’ papers. Alexander’s friendly correspondence with his tutor ceased from this time.
The romantic figure of Roxane has not been treated with a groundless skepticism. There is no need to dismiss the marriage as political; her rank was middling and her beauty famous. But about two months later, the squires could count upon finding Alexander in bed without her; and we know what she did when he died. She can have wasted no time in mourning. She sent, with such speed that it outstripped the news, a letter to his royal wife Stateira, written in his name, summoning her at once to Babylon; and had her murdered as soon as she arrived.
Sisygambis, the Queen Mother of Persia, when told of Alexander’s death, bade her family farewell, shut herself up without food, and died five days later.
Events this book has no room for, or which Bagoas would not have known of, have been taken into account in the portrayal of Alexander. It needs to be borne in mind today that not till more than a century later did a handful of philosophers even start to question the morality of war. In his time the issue was not whether, but how one made it. It is noteworthy that the historians most favorable to him, Ptolemy and Aristoboulos, were those who knew him in life. They wrote when he was dead, with no incentive but to do him justice.
When his faults (those his own times did not account as virtues) have been considered, we are left with the fact that no other human being has attracted in his lifetime, from so many men, so fervent a devotion. Their reasons are worth examining.
Sources for the General Reader
The best is Arrian, who drew mainly on the lost memoirs of Ptolemy and Aristoboulos, and wrote with a high sense of responsibility. His Life of Alexander is available in the Penguin Classics (as The Campaigns of Alexander), or in the Loeb Classical Library with Greek and translation interleaved, and notes. Plutarch, whose Lives is published by Everyman, is colorful, but made little effort to evaluate his evidence, and should not be swallowed whole.
Proper Names
It is of course implausible to have a Persian using Persian names in their Greek forms; but since in the Persian they would be unrecognizable and unpronounceable to almost all general readers (Darius for example is Darayavaush) I have retained the usual convention.
Roxane is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable.
Funeral Games
A Novel of Alexander the Great
Mary Renault
“I foresee great contests at my funeral games.”
—Reported deathbed words of “Alexander the Great
Contents
Principal Persons
323 B.C.
322 B.C.
321 B.C.
319 B.C.
318 B.C.
317 B.C.
316 B.C.
315 B.C.
310 B.C.
Author’s Note
Principal Sources
Principal Persons
INVENTED CHARACTERS ARE ITALICIZED; all those in roman type are historical. Persons marked * are dead before the story opens. Minor characters making a brief appearance are omitted.
ALEXANDER III The Great. All further references to Alexander refer to him unless his son, Alexander IV, is specified.
ALEXANDER IV His posthumous son by Roxane.
ALKETAS Brother of Perdikkas, the general.
*AMYNTAS Son of Philip II’s elder brother, King Perdikkas. An infant when Perdikkas died, he was passed over in favor of Philip, after whose murder he was executed for treason. Husband of Kynna, father of Eurydike.
&n
bsp; ANTIGONOS General of Alexander; Satrap of Phrygia. Later a king, and founder of the Antigonid dynasty.
ANTIPATROS Regent of Macedon during Alexander’s years in Asia, and at the time of his death.
ARISTONOUS A staff officer of Alexander; later loyal to Alexander IV.
ARRIDAIOS See Philip III.
ARYBBAS A Macedonian nobleman, designer of Alexander’s funeral car. His real name was Arridaios; he is here given a rather similar Epirote name to distinguish him from Philip Arridaios.
Badia A former concubine of King Artaxerxes Ochos of Persia.
BAGOAS A young Persian eunuch, favorite successively of Darius III and Alexander. Though a real person, he vanishes from history after Alexander’s death, and his appearance in this Story is fictional.
*DARIUS III The last Persian Great King; murdered by his generals after his defeat by Alexander at Gaugamela.
DEMETRIOS Son of Antigonos. (Later known as The Besieger, he became King of Macedon after Kassandros’ death.)
DRYPETIS Younger daughter of Darius III; widow of Hephaistion.
EUMENES Chief Secretary and general of Alexander; loyal to the royal house.
EURYDIKE Daughter of Amyntas and Kynna. Her given name was Adeia; Eurydike was the dynastic name conferred on her at her marriage (or betrothal) to Philip III. She was the granddaughter of Philip II and of Perdikkas III, his brother.
*HEPHAISTION Alexander’s lifelong friend, who died a few months before him.
IOLLAS Son of Antipatros the Regent of Macedon, younger brother of Kassandros; formerly Alexander’s cupbearer.
KASSANDROS Eldest son of Antipatros; lifelong enemy of Alexander. (Became King of Macedon after the murder of Alexander IV.)