The World

His two-year Indian campaign only penetrated what is now Pakistan and appears in no Indian sources because he never threatened the Nanda or Gangaridai kingdoms of northern and eastern India, but the Macedonians also encountered city states resembling Greek poleis. Alexander defeated the army of the raja of the Pauravas, the seven-foot Puru who fought from the back of one of his war elephants. Alexander may have sent Chandragupta to negotiate an alliance with Puru; he was certainly eager for further conquests. Nearing Amritsar, the army was now close to mutiny. At a council, the older generals advised a return to the Mediterranean, promising to join Alexander against Carthage: even his friends Hephaistion and Ptolemy said nothing. After an Achillean sulk in his tent, Alexander agreed to leave India, but in his own adventurous fashion, solving the mystery of the South Ocean by descending the Indus to the Gulf of Arabia and thence to Babylon. On the way, still infuriated by the reluctance of his troops to storm a hostile city, he scaled the ladders first and then jumped down almost alone into the fray. An arrow hit him in the side, puncturing his lung, and he collapsed, only just rescued by his frenzied troops who slaughtered the defenders in revenge. Air bubbled bloodily out of the wound – yet Alexander recovered.^*

After just surviving a desert crossing, Alexander made it back to Susa, where the royal Persian women awaited him. There, ever practical, he decided to merge the elites of his new empire, Macedonians and Persians, in a mass multicultural wedding. The Macedonians hated this forced splicing. Such relationships between conquered and conqueror were a way of founding enduring empires through children with a familial stake in a hybrid realm. During a three-day fiesta, a hundred couples were married on a hundred couches, with wedding presents, silver and purple robes, silverplate and jewels, and a Persian bridal tent for each. At its heart was the ultimate royal marriage: Alexander married Darius’ daughter, young Stateira, and Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes III. Kings, distrusting their own families, have to make their own: Hephaistion married Darius’ other daughter Drypetis. Alexander was crafting an Argead–Haxamanishiya world dynasty.

DEATH IN BABYLON: THE KILLING COMMENCES

Instead of administering his empire from his capital Babylon, Alexander could not resist more expeditions, sailing down the Tigris towards the Gulf and back up to Opis, where his army mutinied. Alexander ordered Seleukos,^* commander of the Silvershield guards, to execute the rebels and then, after addressing the troops on the achievements of his father and himself, he was reconciled with his army. Paranoid about the loyalty of his satraps in an atmosphere of rising menace and megalomania, he purged his entourage, killing four of his satraps, sacking four (four more died or were executed), and recalled his longstanding Macedonian viceroy, Antipater.

Suddenly he lost the man he most trusted: Hephaistion died after a drinking bout. Alexander was poleaxed, murdered Hephaistion’s doctor, cut the manes off his horses, extinguished the sacred fires of Persia, the signal for the death of a king, and ordered the carving of a lion sculpture that still stands in Hamadan.

Back in Babylon, where he lived in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace with wives, mistresses, eunuchs and Companions Ptolemy and Seleukos, Alexander – in between wild drinking bouts, gambling parties and boating trips, sometimes dressing up with horns as the god Amun-Ra – received ambassadors, threatened the Carthaginians with conquest, planned a new expedition into Arabia and proposed the building of an Egyptian pyramid bigger than Giza. He was unsentimental about love but he needed an heir and now he conceived a child with Queen Roxane.

Four days before he was due to invade Arabia, he fell ill with a fever. With his courtiers panicking and conspiring, his soldiers filed past his bed, as doctors bled and purged him. He requested he should buried divinely and pharaonically – at Siwah in the Libyan desert – then gave his ring to his long-serving Bodyguard Perdiccas, chiliarch since Hisphaiston’s death, to enable him to conduct business while he was ill. He joked weakly but with characteristic realism that he left everything ‘to the strongest’ or ‘the best’. His successors would have to compete like contestants at a funeral games. Then he sank into a coma, dying, whether of booze, poison, typhoid or old wounds reinfected, at thirty-two.

The killing started at once. Family rivalry and cold politics were entwined: the pregnant Roxane, convinced she was carrying a boy, heard that Stateira was pregnant – any child of hers would be certain to succeed. Forging a royal order in the chaos, she invited the Persian queens to Babylon and poisoned both Stateira and Parysatis, daughters of Darius III and Artaxerxes III, while Sisygambis starved herself to death – thereby ending the dynasty.