Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

by Nicholas Nicastro

  Of course, not all the ten thousand veterans came to Alexander’s tent that night, or even most of them. But instead of dwelling on the absence of their comrades, the King chose to recognize the humility of the few hundred who did come, and in so doing to excuse the lot. The incident perfectly typifies the dilemma of his leadership. Among his veterans, as in this city, his hegemony did provoke bitter and, in some respects, unjustified hostility. To both challenges Alexander responded wisely, choosing not to force his will when a simple declaration of victory would do.

  The other important part of this incident was that Perdiccas and Ptolemy managed to maneuver Craterus into leading the veterans home. Alexander presented it as an honor to his old comrade, and under other circumstances it would have been. I am suspicious, though, that this honor absented Craterus from the scene just as Alexander fell sick at Babylon. When the veterans marched at last, I saw Craterus embrace Alexander for what seemed like a long time. Then the King kissed him, and brushing away a tear, Craterus barked an order to the men, who also had tears flowing down their cheeks. And so the weeping army departed for Cilicia, where they would construct a fleet to sail home. None of them would see Alexander alive again.

  But it is late in our story. After years on campaign, Alexander’s exhaustion manifested at every level a man may show it—physical, intellectual, emotional. Since his latest injury, he leaned on suppliants who came to receive the royal kiss, and seemed to cling to his horse instead of ride it. For those with eyes to see them, the signs of his end were increasingly at hand.

  At that time the King, who was on his way to Ecbatana, paused in Media to inspect the stock of wild horses in that country. He was entertained there by the governor, Atropates son of Attalus, in an unusual way: into his camp, they say, marched ten files of armored, spear-bearing Amazons. Their leader, who called herself Queen Hyster, was presented to Alexander. After the obligatory prostration, she thereafter addressed him as an equal, declaring that those in her faraway country had heard something of his prowess, and that she wished to take her pleasure with him. If their joining produced a daughter, she would be fit to rule her tribe; if a son, he would be delivered to his father to be raised, for—as we all know—the Amazons do not nurture their sons but expose them.

  By all accounts this Queen Hyster was most beautiful, her charms revealed by her short tunic and the tightness of her leather girdle, which showed to best advantage the surprising prodigiousness of Amazon breasts. These were exposed and utterly complete, in contradiction of the legends that one breast was always removed. This fact, along with the high heels on their boots, suggested to some that Hyster’s company were not real Amazons at all, but devised as a joke by Atropates. Yet Alexander, for his part, accepted Hyster as a genuine Queen. He acceded to a political alliance with her, but declined any further entanglement, noting that he was already married more than once. This excuse was received with regret by Hyster, who led her pendulous sisters away from the baying worship of the Macedonian soldiers. It seemed clear to other witnesses, however, that the tired, wheezing Alexander refused her invitation because he was simply unfit to take it up. And indeed, hers was the only challenge from which the conqueror of Tyre and the Rock of Sogdia had ever shrunk.

  It is a truism that men enjoying good luck turn skeptical of prophecies. Tyche’s graces are understood as the fruits of hard work, wise planning, or whatever virtues men like to attribute to themselves, and not the whims of the gods. Since the news for Alexander had been very good for a long time, he lately had little use for the services of the soothsayer Aristander. The King attended the regular morning sacrifices as a duty, though his face showed his mind was elsewhere, and the seer seemed to take the hint, producing auguries that provoked little comment one way or the other. It was therefore something of a surprise when, during the reading of a ram’s entrails at the palace at Ecbatana, Aristander paused over the liver. The King asked what troubled him.

  “This liver has but two lobes—and look here, how the vein is distended.”

  Alexander looked. He was no judge of such things, but knew very well that it portended an event of significance. Euripides wrote of a similar sign in Electra, when Aegisthus sacrificed a calf with a lobeless liver just before Orestes killed him with an ax.

  “It could be an ill-omen, or just as well not,” said Aristander, evidently not sure what the King wanted to hear. “It suggests a disappearance of some kind. But what shall disappear is not evident.”

  Alexander was preoccupied with the planning of a sea expedition on the Caspian. That his whole fleet might disappear was worrisome, but Aristander found nothing inauspicious about the King’s relations with Poseidon. For lack of a specific sign, Alexander contented himself with the usual precautions—extra dedications to all the gods—and instructed Aristander to sacrifice again. When the second try showed nothing amiss, Alexander seemed to put the incident out of his mind.

  At this time his relations with Hephaestion had lapsed into a kind of tense formality. With the arrival of Bagoas, then Rohjane, then Barsine, the King’s intimacies became increasingly subordinate to the rule of his empire. His old companion was assigned a series of important but distant tasks—to build a bridge here, to settle some provincial dispute there—which kept him away from the Greek court for longer and longer periods. To be sure, Hephaestion relished these opportunities to show his competence: no doubt he was sensitive to insinuations that he was little more than Alexander’s bedfellow. In any other army, beside a leader of merely human brilliance, Hephaestion would have been a formidable presence. However, on campaign with Alexander, whom he never ceased to love, this uncommon man understood the greater virtue of serving the throne before himself.

  Nevertheless, what mortal would not resent being supplanted in the familiarity of a god by eunuchs and barbarians? When he did come to attend the court, Hephaestion said little, and when he did speak his voice was laced with sarcasm. Perceiving his jealousy, Alexander would spare his feelings by sending him away again, until the next time he would come, and his hostility was still deeper. Witnesses say that even strangers became uncomfortable around them, so palpable was the strain.

  Alexander’s continued affection was clear when his old companion was suddenly taken ill at Ecbatana. When his fever stretched into a second and then a third day, the King sent his own personal doctor to tend to him. Hephaestion rallied, his appetite returning. Alexander, meanwhile, was obliged to attend athletic games he had organized for Persian boys, whom he had observed lacked civilized pursuits. It was while he presided over these games that word came that Hephaestion had relapsed.

  Abandoning the event he had worked so hard to organize, Alexander rushed back to his friend’s side, but he was too late. Hephaestion was gone, the dregs of a pitcher of wine he had ill-advisedly taken with lunch still at his side.

  Alexander behaved at first as if he would not believe it. He carried on with talking to the dead man, breaking his monologue only to snarl at anyone who approached the body. After some hours this banter lapsed into inconsolable despair. Casting himself on the corpse, Alexander wept without shame, crying out his regret at this or that disagreement going back to their boyhood. At length he bellowed for a knife, and those around him became genuinely fearful that he would do harm to himself. But instead Alexander sliced off all the hair on his head, including his eyebrows, and retreated, crazed and bloody, to his bedchamber.

  Alexander and Hephaestion had not be been close in their final years. It took all of us by surprise, then, that the King went so entirely to pieces over his loss. He ceased to wash. His skin again became covered with the spots I had first seen on him years before, at Chaeronea. In that time he passed just two orders: first, the doctor who tended Hephaestion, Glaucias, was to be executed. This suggests that the King at best suspected incompetence in the manner of his lover’s death, and at the worst actual malice. For all were agreed that despite his illness the victim was sound of body, very much in his prime, and for such
a man to descend so acutely was most suspicious. The dregs of the wine pitcher were examined with no conclusion reached one way or the other. Yet there are many poisons known that would leave no obvious trace.

  His second order was for all the fires in Babylon’s temples to be snuffed out in Hephaestion’s honor. Despite invasions, earthquakes, and every other kind of disaster, many of these fires had not been allowed to go out in a thousand years. This decree, which was made with no apparent concern for the Babylonians, was alone enough to put the natives in a deadly mood.

  When he emerged at last Alexander seemed to have aged ten years. His cheeks were sunken, and he held his side as if his Mallian wound was not months old, but fresh. Resuming something of his old decisiveness, he ordered the court moved back to Babylon, where he intended the funeral to be held. He also sent messengers to the sanctuary of Ammon at Siwah, with the request that Hephaestion be deified in death. The King did not wait for the god’s answer, however, offering immediate sacrifice to the memory of his departed friend, and speaking to him in the old, easy style they had known in happier times together.

  It is some three hundred miles as the crow flies between Ecbatana and Babylon. Alexander walked the entire distance in his bare feet, with just an old cloak over his head to protect him from the late spring sun. For the journey, Alexander had, according to the advice of his Egyptian ambassadors, placed his companion in a series of five nested sarcophagi, with a golden one closest to the body and a lead vessel outermost.

  The Egyptians are known masters of the embalmer’s art. When the sarcophagi were cracked open some weeks later all were amazed to see that Hephaestion’s body was utterly free of corruption. This preservation did not mean that Alexander had abandoned the rites we recognize as Greeks—Hephaestion would have his cremation. The pyre Alexander had in mind, however, would be unique in the history of the world.

  But before the King reached the gates of the city another portent darkened his path. A party of Babylonian magi—priests of the Temple-of-the-High-Head, whose reconstruction had not yet begun in the seven-and-a-half years since Alexander promised to restore it—approached him with a warning. Their god Bel had revealed to them that Alexander would meet his death if he entered their city. Instead of marching west, they said, the great Alexander should go to the east, where nothing but victory and good health would be his for the rest of his days.

  Still in the depth of his grief, the King had little patience for diversions of any kind. He understood that the Babylonians whom he had freed would prefer to enjoy their autonomy without their liberator’s actual presence. Yet the lands through which his army had marched were already stripped of useable stores—gods notwithstanding, he could not turn east. Hephaestion’s spirit, moreover, was destined to depart this earth from its very capital. No other place would do.

  Alexander did his best to accommodate Bel by marching around the city and entering through the Adad gate. In this way it could not be exactly said that he entered Babylon by marching west. The magi seemed unmoved by this logic, until the King facilitated the release of funds for work on their temple, after which they endorsed his acts without reservation. We might even suspect that this was the object of their embassy to him all along—if subsequent events did not prove the worth of their original warning after all.

  Other than assuring Hephaestion’s commemoration, few other matters preoccupied the King’s attention in his last days at Babylon. The only blemish on what he considered his ideal capital was her dilapidation under Persian rule; where the Great Kings kept the city a backwater, Alexander planned to bind it to his empire with a massive dredging and enlargement of her harbor. The new facilities would be filled with warships that would carry his rule to Africa and, ultimately, to Carthage, and Italy. To these ends he ordered further explorations of the lower reaches of the Euphrates river and beyond, to the coast of Arabia.

  The dredging and the shipbuilding paled in comparison to the titanic construction underway near the west sector of the city’s ring wall. There, Alexander ordered the erection of a pyre as massive as a Gizan pyramid, consisting entirely of the most precious offerings imaginable. Troops swept through the city to accept—or in some cases to compel—donations of rare furniture, statues, vehicles. These were assembled on a series of platforms increasingly set-back as they soared to the summit, where Hephaestion would lie on a gilded couch set inside a gilded room within an entire gilded house.

  When it was completed the pyre was more than 200 feet tall; the commissioned elements alone, including the wood and the gilded giants and faux ship’s rams and centauromachies, cost 10,000 talents. This figure does not include the value of all the private donations, or the cost of the funerary games the King held, which included thousands of athletes from as far as Sicily. All these together made Hephaestion’s funeral the most lavish dedication to fraternity in the history of the world.

  The time finally came when Hephaestion, dressed in his armor and still as beautiful as the day he died, was borne up to his bier. Four regiments of “inheritors” armed with bows were arrayed opposite each face of the pyramid. At a signal, the archers loosed flaming arrows; the sight of the blazing bolts simultaneously rising to ignite the pyre was unforgettable. The mass of wood, ivory, silver and gold erupted from all sides like a volcano, with a heat so intense it melted the bronze bosses on the wheels of the chariots parked a hundred feet away. The flames reached high enough to daub passing clouds the color of blood.

  The historians will forever report that Alexander constructed a pyre the size of Cheop’s pyramid to honor his dead friend, but that is only half the truth. The King made the pyre to honor himself too. Recall that he was fond of saying that “Hephaestion is also Alexander”; the vast, burning museum of treasure that he made for his friend was, in some sense, a way for him to stage-manage his own funeral.

  The manner of Hephaestion’s death called for an investigation. Alas, there were as many suspects as grains of sand on the beach. The nature of Hephaestion’s relationship with Alexander, which by its nature was difficult to rival, made him many enemies. That Alexander insisted on placing older, more capable men under the command of his lover built up resentment against him. Hephaestion’s personal qualities, his loyalty, his good-looks, had always attracted envious eyes.

  Gossips spoke of a feud between him and Eumenes, Alexander’s personal secretary. But would even a secretary be foolish enough to take action for such a public spat? Others said that Bagoas wanted him dead. Yet Bagoas had long before stolen Alexander’s intimacy, so what more did he have to gain by murder? I would have suspected Perdiccas and Ptolemy had a hand in it, to further assure the succession of either one of them to power. Which is to say, I would have suspected those two, if an incident had not occurred that convinced me, in this case, of their innocence.

  On the night the great pyre burned I was standing next to Rohjane. Her mood was as buoyant as I’d seen it in months. With the rest of us, she watched as the lights were extinguished in the temples, and the stars appeared with a brilliance rarely glimpsed by the citified Babylonians. I heard her gasp with delight as the conflagration wafted Hephaestion’s spirit to Heaven. But just as the athletic games were about to begin, the Queen excused herself. She complained of a headache. Yet after spending more hours with the woman than her husband, I could sense her insincerity.

  “Yes, you should retire,” the King told her with fraternal warmth. “I will come and see you after.”

  “Yes, you will,” she replied, the tartness in her voice entirely escaping him.

  I followed an hour later. Her apartment was in a remote wing of the palace, as far as possible from the nuptial beds of Barsine and Parysatis. When I found Rohjane, she was lying on a drinking couch opposite Youtab. There was an open brazier beside them, bread and eel on a table between them, and drinking cups in their hands.

  “Is this some barbarian custom, to make a celebration at the time of a funeral?” I asked.

  “Pah! Who invi
ted sourpuss?” cried Youtab.

  The Queen laughed, stretched her arms. “We are having a symposium! Or haven’t you ever seen a drinking party just for women?”

  “The premise, milady, is absurd.”

  “Oh, stop being the tutor! Yes, there is a funeral on, and yes, Hephaestion was a fine fellow. But the innocent suffer all the time, don’t they Youtab?”

  “They suffer particularly.”

  “Yes, particle…partickle…particularey…by the gods, what is in these cups!”

  Then the women laughed in that way I had seen so often among Alexander and his companions, when the craters were running low and there was nothing very funny to laugh at. I crossed my arms and waited for their attention.

  “It has always been my intent to help the Queen understand her responsibilities in the Greek style,” I said. “And so I must tell you now that this behavior is entirely inappropriate. To retire to your tent is perhaps understandable…but to carouse in this way? I think not.”

  “Isn’t it funny how he speaks of what a wife should do, but never the responsibilities of the husband?” Rohjane asked Youtab, as if I was not standing there.

  “Maybe he means that you should consider yourself lucky to be dishonored by a husband like the great Alexander,” answered Youtab.

  “You mean, dishonored by a god?”

  “Reduced to an ass!”

  “Ravished by a swan!”

  “Seduced and abandoned!”

  “On a beach on Naxos!”

  “The very son of Zeus!”