III. THE DEATH OF A GOD

He had now spent nine years in Asia, and he had changed the continent by his victories less than it had transformed him by its ways. He had been told by Aristotle to treat Greeks as freemen, “barbarians” as slaves. But he had been surprised to find among the Persian aristocrats a degree of refinement and good manners not often seen in the turbulent democracies of Greece; he admired the manner in which the Great Kings had organized their empire, and wondered how his rough Macedonians could replace such governors. He concluded that he could give some permanence to his conquests only by reconciling the Persian nobles to his leadership, and using them in administrative posts. More and more charmed by his new subjects, he abandoned the idea of ruling over them as a Macedonian, and conceived himself as a Greco-Persian emperor governing a realm in which Persians and Greeks would be on an equal footing, and would peaceably mingle their culture and their blood. The long quarrel of Europe and Asia would end in a wedding feast.

Already thousands of his soldiers had married native women, or were living with them; should he not do likewise, marry the daughter of Darius, and reconcile the nations by begetting a king who would unite both dynasties in his veins? He had already married Roxana, a Bactrian princess; but this was a negligible impediment. He broached the plan to his officers, and suggested that they, too, should take Persian wives. They smiled at his hopes of uniting the two nations, but they had been a long time away from home, and the Persian ladies were beautiful. So in one great nuptial at Susa (324) Alexander married Statira, daughter of Darius III, and Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes III, attaching himself in this way to both branches of Persian royalty, while eighty of his officers took Persian brides. Thousands of similar marriages were soon afterward celebrated among the soldiers. Alexander gave each officer a substantial dowry, and paid the debts of the marrying soldiers—which amounted (if we may believe Arrian) to twenty thousand talents ($120,000,000).²⁹ To further this union of peoples he opened lands in Mesopotamia and Persia to Greek colonists, thereby reducing the pressure of population in some of the Greek states, and mitigating the class war; now began those Hellenized Asiatic cities which were to be a vital part of the Seleucid Empire. At the same time he drafted thirty thousand Persian youths, had them educated on Greek lines, and taught them the Greek manual of war.

Possibly his wives had something to do with his rapid adoption of Oriental ways; possibly it was a failure of modesty, or a part of his plan. “In Persia,” says Plutarch, “he first put on the barbaric” (i.e., foreign) “dress, perhaps with the view of making the work of civilizing the Persians easier, as nothing gains more upon men than a conformity to their customs. . . . However, he followed not the Median fashion . . . but taking a middle way between the Persian mode and the Macedonian, so contrived his habit that it was not so flaunting as the one, and yet more pompous and magnificent than the other.”³⁰ His soldiers saw in this change the conquest of Alexander by the Orient; they felt that they had lost him, and they mournfully missed the signs of solicitude and affection which he had once showered upon them. The Persians made every obeisance to him, and flattered him to his heart’s content; the Macedonians, themselves softened by Oriental luxury, grumbled at the tasks that he laid upon them, forgot his beneficence, murmured of desertion, and even plotted against his life. He began to prefer the society of the Persian grandees.

His culminating apostasy, or diplomacy, was his announcement of his own divinity. In 324 he sent word to all the Greek states except Macedonia (where the insult to Philip might have aroused resentment) that he wished hereafter to be publicly recognized as the son of Zeus-Ammon. Most of the states complied, feeling it to be merely a form; even the obstinate Spartans agreed, saying, “Let Alexander be a god if he wants to.” It was not so much for a man to be a god in the Greek sense of the term; the chasm between humanity and deity was not as wide then as it was to become in modern theology; several Greeks had overleaped it, like Hippodameia, Oedipus, Achilles, Iphigenia, and Helen. The Egyptians had always thought of their Pharaohs as gods; if Alexander had neglected to rank himself similarly the Egyptians might have been disturbed by so bold a violation of precedent. The priests at Siwa, Didyma, and Babylon, who were believed to have special sources of information in this field, had all assured him of his divine origin. That (as Grote thought³¹) Alexander actually believed himself to be a god in a more than metaphorical sense is quite unlikely. It is true that after his self-deification he became increasingly irritable and arrogant; that he sat on a golden throne, wore sacred vestments, and sometimes adorned his head with the horns of Ammon.³² But when he was not playing his divinity for world stakes he smiled at his own honors. Being injured by an arrow, he remarked to some friends, “This, you see, is blood, and not such ichor as flows from the wounds of the Immortals.”³³ That he had not taken too seriously his mother’s tale of the thunderbolt appears from his flaming anger at Attalus’ imputations on his birth, and his remark about the need of sleep as distinguishing man from the gods. Even Olympias laughed when she heard that Alexander had made her legend official. “When,” she asked, “will Alexander stop slandering me to Hera?”³⁴ Despite his godhead Alexander continued to offer sacrifice to the gods—an unheard-of thing for a divinity. Plutarch and Arrian, able to judge the matter as Greeks, took it for granted that Alexander deified himself as a means to easier rule over a superstitious and heterogeneous population.³⁵ Doubtless he felt that the task of unifying two hostile worlds would be facilitated by the reverence which the common people would give him if his claims to divinity were accepted by the upper classes. Perhaps, indeed, he thought to overcome the disruptive diversity of faiths in his empire by providing, in his own person, the beginning of a sacred myth and a common unifying faith.*

The Macedonian officers could not fathom Alexander’s policy. The Greek spirit had touched them to the point of mental emancipation, but not to the point of philosophical toleration; they found it humiliating to prostrate themselves, as he now demanded, in approaching the King. One of his bravest officers, Philotas, son of his ablest and most favored general, Parmenio, entered into a conspiracy to kill the new god. Alexander got wind of it, had Philotas arrested, and wrung from him by torture a confession implicating his own father. Philotas was forced to repeat the confession before the soldiers, who, in accord with their custom in such cases, at once stoned him to death; Parmenio was executed by messenger as probably guilty, and in any case a presumptive enemy. From that moment to the end, the relations between Alexander and his army became increasingly strained—the troops ever more discontent, the King ever more suspicious, severe, and lonely.

His solitary exaltation and the growing multitude of his cares inclined him to seek forgetfulness in heavy draughts of wine. At a banquet in Samarkand Cleitus, who had saved his life at the Granicus, drank himself into such candor as to tell Alexander that his victories had been won by his soldiers rather than by him, and that Philip’s achievement had been much greater. Alexander, equally drunk, rose to strike him, but Ptolemy Lagus (soon to be ruler of Egypt) hurried Cleitus away. Cleitus, however, had more to say; he escaped from Ptolemy, and went back to finish his tirade. Alexander hurled a lance at him and killed him. Overcome with remorse, the King secluded himself for three days, refused to eat, fell into hysteria, and tried to end his own life. Soon afterward Hermolaus, a page whom Alexander had unjustly punished, formed another conspiracy against him. The boy was apprehended, and under torture made a confession incriminating Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes. The latter, who was accompanying the expedition as official historian, had already offended the King by refusing to prostrate himself before him, openly criticizing him for his Oriental ways, and boasting that Alexander would be known to posterity only through Callisthenes the historian. Alexander had him put in prison, where, seven months later, he died.* This incident put an end to the friendship between Alexander and Aristotle, who had for years been risking his life to defend Alexander’s cause in Athens.

In the end the discontent in the army verged on open mutiny. When the King announced that he would send back to Macedon the oldest of the soldiers, each richly paid for his services,† he was shocked to hear many muttering that they wished he would dismiss them all, since, being a god, he had no need of men to realize his purposes. He ordered the leaders of the sedition executed, and then addressed to his troops an affecting (but probably apocryphal) speech³⁹ in which he reminded them of all that they had done for him, and he for them, and asked which of them could show more scars than he, whose body bore the marks of every weapon used in war. Finally he gave them all permission to go home: “Go back and report that you deserted your king and left him to the protection of conquered foreigners.” Then he retired to his rooms, and refused to see anyone. His soldiers, stricken with remorse, came and lay down before the palace, saying that they would not leave till he had forgiven them and reaccepted them into his army. When at last he appeared they broke into tears and insisted on kissing him; and after being reconciled with him they went back to their camp shouting a song of thanksgiving.

Deceived by this show of affection, Alexander dreamed now of further campaigns and victories; he planned the subjugation of hidden Arabia, sent a mission to explore the Caspian regions, and thought of conquering Europe to the Pillars of Hercules. But his strong frame had been weakened by exposure and drink, and his spirit by the conspiracies of his officers and the mutinies of his men. While the army was in Ecbatana his dearest companion, Hephaestion, fell sick and died. Alexander had loved him so much that when Darius’ queen, entering the conqueror’s tent, bowed first to Hephaestion, thinking him Alexander, the young King said, graciously, “Hephaestion is also Alexander”⁴⁰—as if to say that he and Hephaestion were one. The two often shared one tent, and drank from one cup; in battle they fought side by side. Now the King, feeling that half of him had been torn away, broke down in uncontrolled grief. He lay for hours upon the corpse, weeping; he cut off his hair in mourning, and for days refused to take food. He sentenced to death the physician who had left the sick youth’s side to attend the public games. He ordered a gigantic funeral pile to be erected in Hephaestion’s memory, at a cost, we are told, of ten thousand talents ($60,000,000), and sent to inquire of the oracle of Ammon whether it was permitted to worship Hephaestion as a god. In his next campaign a whole tribe was slain, at his orders, as a sacrifice to Hephaestion’s ghost. The thought that Achilles had not long survived Patroclus haunted him like a sentence of death.

Back in Babylon, he abandoned himself more and more to drink. One night, reveling with his officers, he proposed a drinking match. Promachus quaffed twelve quarts of wine, and won the prize, a talent; three days later he died. Shortly afterward, at another banquet, Alexander drained a goblet containing six quarts of wine. On the next night he drank heavily again; and cold weather suddenly setting in, he caught a fever, and took to his bed. The fever raged for ten days, during which Alexander continued to give orders to his army and his fleet. On the eleventh day he died, being in the thirty-third year of his age (323). When his generals asked him to whom he left his empire he answered, “To the strongest.”⁴¹

Like most great men he had been unable to find a successor worthy of him, and his work fell unfinished from his hands. Even so his achievement was not only immense, but far more permanent than has usually been supposed. Acting as the agent of historical necessity, he put an end to the era of city-states, and, by sacrificing a substantial measure of local freedom, created a larger system of stability and order than Europe had yet known. His conception of government as absolutism using religion to impose peace upon diverse nations dominated Europe until the rise of nationalism and democracy in modern times. He broke down the barriers between Greek and “barbarian,” and prepared for the cosmopolitanism of the Hellenistic age; he opened Hither Asia to Greek colonization, and established Greek settlements as far east as Bactria; he united the eastern Mediterranean world into one great web of commerce, liberating and stimulating trade. He brought Greek literature, philosophy, and art to Asia, and died before he could realize that he had also made a pathway for the religious victory of the East over the West. His adoption of Oriental dress and ways was the beginning of Asia’s revenge.

It was just as well that he died at his zenith; added years would almost surely have brought him disillusionment. Perhaps if he had lived he might have been deepened by defeat and suffering, and might have learned—as he was beginning—to love statesmanship more than war. But he had undertaken too much; the strain of holding his swollen realm together, and watching all its parts, was probably disordering his brilliant mind. Energy is only half of genius; the other half is harness; and Alexander was all energy. We miss in him—though we have no right to expect—the calm maturity of Caesar, or the subtle wisdom of Augustus. We admire him as we admire Napoleon, because he stood alone against half the world, and because he encourages us with the thought of the incredible power that lies potential in the individual soul. And we feel a natural sympathy for him, despite his superstitions and his cruelties, because we know that he was at least a generous and affectionate youth, as well as incomparably able and brave; that he fought against a maddening heritage of barbarism in his blood; and that through all battles and all bloodshed he kept before his eyes the dream of bringing the light of Athens to a larger world.