Bubores, dead in the desert. Astibus, at the foot of a wall that didn’t need to be stormed. Charmides, who shat himself to death in Bactria. Dion, who died at Guagamela.
And another million men and women.
It was me.
After Hephaestion died, I was invited to the banquets again. It was odd – it was as if the gods gave him to me. At the funeral banquet, he put a hand on my shoulder and called me his ‘last friend’.
Once I would have wept at those words.
I had no more tears to shed.
I sent Thais away, but I kept her things. I was a student of Aristotle, and a good one – I have a curious mind, and I like to read.
It is not difficult, if your target drinks unwatered wine. And Alexander drank more and more – more every night, and longer, while he planned his next extravagant conquest.
I am not ashamed to say that I tried twice. Twice, I went to his parties, lay on a couch near him, and I could not do it. I conjured the death of Cleitus – the death of Philotas, the death of Amyntas. The murder of Coenus. His attempt on my life. The march through the Gedrosian. The massacre of the Mallians.
It is hard to kill even the shell of something you love.
But some weeks after the funeral for Hephaestion, Cassander came. He was a nervous youth who was too used to having his own way too close to his school days. He came from Macedon – from Antipater – to negotiate. The old man knew Alexander wanted him dead, and with the same callous indifference to other men’s lives that he always showed, he stayed home and sent his young son.
Cassander is and was no man’s friend. He was a boy on a dangerous mission. He was a fool then and he’s not much better now.
But . . .
He came into the dining hall with a clatter, because he’d tripped over his own feet at the entrance, and the men near the door laughed at him. I was lying three couches from the king – Bagoas was sharing his couch, painted like a woman.
Cyrus – now a squadron commander in his own right – approached the king, and threw himself on his face – full proskynesis in order to approach and receive the kiss of a king’s friend.
Cassander laughed. It was a nervous, reedy laugh, but I suppose he meant it – he had never seen such a thing in all his life.
Alexander rose to a sitting position on his couch, and then kissed Cyrus and exchanged a comment or two, all the while beckoning to Cassander to approach. When the young man came, Alexander smiled at him – smiled and held his glance, still beckoning, until Cassander came close enough to kiss.
Alexander grabbed his ears and smashed his head into the marble floor – not once, but five or six times, until the blood poured from the boy’s scalp, and he shrieked and soiled himself.
Alexander rose to his feet and kicked him in the crotch, and then turned and ordered the body removed. His expression was one of mild distaste.
That night, I opened the gold container I had found among Thais’s belongings, and poured the powder of strychnos nuts carefully into the king’s wine after his taster sniffed it and set it at the king’s side on a low table by his couch.
He developed a high fever, went to the bathhouse and sweated it off.
I was haunted by the notion that he was, in fact, greater than human.
But I knew better. And I believed then, and still believe, that all that was greatest in Alexander – the part that was greater than merely human – left him after Hydaspes. Perhaps it was his apotheosis. And afterwards, only the bestial shell – less than human – was left.
Listen to me – the philosopher.
You can purchase anything in Babylon.
I purchased fresh nuts and ground them myself, as Alexander and I had learned to do at Aristotle’s hands. As I had seen Thais do, before Memnon died.
Instead of dry powder, I had a damp mush.
I dried it in the sun, and put it in his wine. He was drinking deep, unwatered wine straight from the amphora, and it was the work of a moment to brush the foul stuff into his cup.
Why wasn’t I caught?
Because the gods willed it so.
And because, by that summer in Babylon,
I thought of my conversation with Cleitus, the day Philip was murdered.
Of what could justify regicide.
Boy, if I ever act the tyrant that he was, you have my permission to kill me.
He lay near death for two days. The soldiers – the same Macedonians he had already disbanded and ordered home – crowded around the palace doors, openly praying for his survival.
Because that is how men are.
The old circle gathered by his bedside, and it was telling – I think we all thought it – that there were no Persians at all to attend his last days. He lay, barely able to move or speak.
When he asked for wine, I gave it to him.
With more poison.
Craterus was beside himself – he, alone of us, wanted to conquer more worlds, march farther. He was unchanged. His feelings for the king were unchanged. But he had missed the Gedrosian Desert.
He leaned over the king and asked, ‘Lord – who should inherit your kingdom? To whom should it go?’
There was silence for so long that we all, I think, assumed the king was too far gone to speak.
But he did not speak. He giggled.
His head rose a fraction, and his eyes met mine squarely. As if he knew . . . everything.
‘To the strongest,’ he said.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Writing a novel – several novels, now – about the wars of the Diadochi, or Successors, is a difficult game for an amateur historian to play. There are many, many players, and many sides, and frankly, none of them are ‘good.’ From the first, I had to make certain decisions, and most of them had to do with limiting the cast of characters to a size that the reader could assimilate without insulting anyone’s intelligence. Antigonus One-Eye and his older son Demetrios deserve novels of their own – as do Cassander, Eumenes, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Olympia and the rest. Every one of them could be portrayed as the hero and the others as villains.
If you feel that you need a scorecard, consider visiting my website at www.hippeis.com where you can at least review the biographies of some of the main players. Wikipedia also has full biographies on most of the players in the period.
From a standpoint of purely military history, I’ve made some decisions that knowledgeable readers may find odd. For example, I no longer believe in the linothorax or linen breastplate, and I’ve written it out of the novels. Nor do I believe that the Macedonian pike system – the sarissa armed phalanx – was really any better than the old Greek hoplite system. In fact, I suspect it was worse, as the experience of early modern warfare suggests that the longer your pikes are, the less you trust your troops. Macedonian farm boys were not hoplites – they lacked the whole societal and cultural support system that created the hoplite. They were decisive in their day but as to whether they were ‘better’ than the earlier system . . . well, as with much of military change, it was a cultural change, not really a technological one. Or so it seems to me.
Elephants were not tanks, nor were they a magical victory tool. They could be very effective, or utterly ineffective. I’ve tried to show both situations.
The same can be said of horse-archery. On open ground, with endless remounts and a limitless arrow supply, a horse-archer army must have been a nightmare. But a few hundred horse-archers on the vast expanse of an Alexandrian battlefield might only have been a nuisance.
Ultimately though, I don’t believe in ‘military’ history. War is about economics, religion, art, society – war is
