Alexander was now 31. He had survived fevers and wounds but each must have weakened his extraordinary constitution. Heavy drinking with his commanders was doing further damage. Yet the immense task of consolidating his conquests lay ahead. After his victories those Persian satraps who had pledged loyalty had been allowed to remain in place with Macedonians appointed alongside them as military commanders and collectors of taxes. However, with plunder available to meet all his needs Alexander had paid little attention to good government. In his absence corruption and oppression had increased. In a frenzied purge over the winter of 325/324, Alexander dismissed most of the Persians, replacing them with Macedonians. At the same time Macedonian commanders in Media, who were accused by local notables of sacrilege and rape, were summoned to Alexander and executed. An atmosphere of fear spread through the empire as a response to Alexander’s increasingly unbalanced behaviour.
The Macedonians may well have wondered what their position in the new empire would be. In February 324 Alexander reached Susa, and here he set himself up in the style of the Persian monarchy. He now wore the white-striped purple tunic of the kings with the Persian diadem. Darius’ royal bodyguard was re-formed and served alongside Alexander’s own Macedonian guard. Then the 30,000 Bactrian youths whom Alexander had left to be trained in Macedonian drill and tactics arrived. They were an impressive force and a potential challenge to the battleworn Macedonian forces. Yet Alexander still seemed to believe in an inherent Macedonian racial superiority that could be imposed through the mixing of Macedonian and Persian blood. He took two more Persian wives, one a daughter of Darius, for himself, and in a ceremony of glittering extravagance married off ninety of his commanders to daughters of the Persian nobility. The strategy was ill judged and few of the marriages lasted.
In the spring of 324 Alexander left Susa for the Persian Gulf. From here he sailed up the Tigris into Mesopotamia. At one of the inland coastal towns, Opis, he announced that all Macedonians who were unfit for further service because of age or injury would be demobbed and allowed to return home. It was a sensible move. The men had been ten years away from home and there would be time to replace them with fresh troops from Macedonia before the next campaigning season began. In the circumstances it was seen as a gesture of rejection. There were shouts of anger, even taunts that Alexander should go it alone with his father Zeus. Alexander’s nerve gave way. Thirteen of the ringleaders were executed and replaced by Persians. At this the mutiny collapsed and, as the tension broke, there was an emotional reconciliation. Ten thousand men were discharged, but each was sent home with a handsome payment.
Alexander’s behaviour became increasingly absolutist. At the Olympic Games of 324 Bc a letter from him was read out which proclaimed that all Greek exiles could return to their native cities. There were many thousands whom misfortune, political upheavals, and power struggles had driven from their cities. (Twenty thousand alone turned up at Olympia to hear the decree being read out.) Alexander may have been trying to win popularity by sending them home, but he had made no consultation with the cities and the result was to disrupt their economies and political stability as the exiles returned. Once again he had shown how detached he had become from political reality.
The summer heat now drove Alexander and the enormous entourage that travelled with him northwards to the cooler air of the Zagros mountains. His destination was the old summer residence of the Persian kings at Ecbatana in Media. The satrap welcomed him with unparalleled extravagance and there were heavy feasting and games. A casualty of one drinking session was Hephaestion, one of the few
Companions who had remained an intimate of Alexander’s despite all the stresses and hardships of the campaigns. Alexander was devastated. He ordered the execution of Hephaestion’s physician and, in a manner contemporaries compared to Achilles’ grief for Patroclus, he fasted over the body for three days. A cult was to be set up to honour the dead hero and plans put in order for the building of a vast monument at Babylon, where the court made its way in early 323.
Alexander’s grief for Hephaestion showed how, in the last year of his life, he seems increasingly to have lost touch with reality. Whether he actually believed he was a god or not, he certainly associated himself with symbols of divinity. On coins minted at Babylon he is depicted with a thunderbolt, the emblem of Zeus, in his hand. At banquets he wore the purple robes and ram’s horns of Zeus Ammon, and one account talks of incense being burnt before him. There is some evidence that the Greek cities were ordered to give him divine status (a debate, the result of which is unknown, took place on the subject in Athens). What is certain is that the Hellenistic monarchs, and following them the emperors of Rome, learned from Alexander the importance of claiming and advertising divine support in a way never known before in the Greek world.
Alexander remained in Babylon to plan an invasion of Arabia. The riches of the Arabian peninsula were legendary and reconnaissance of the area suggested settlement there would be possible as well. During the early months of 323 a vast harbour, able to take 1,000 warships, was being dredged out of the Euphrates and men were being gathered from the empire. There were also rumours that once Alexander had conquered the peninsula he would turn west into the Mediterranean, and a stream of embassies, from Greece, Etruria, Libya, Carthage, and even, it was said, Spain, made their way to Babylon to offer reverence.
The end to this frenetic activity came suddenly. One evening late in May 323 Alexander was drinking with his companions. In one final bout he is said to have drunk the contents of a bowl that could take twelve pints. According to one account, which may have been trying to prove that he was poisoned, he collapsed and died almost immediately. Other sources say that he lingered on alive for several days. Whatever the reality of his illness, by 10 June he was dead. In Athens they could not believe the reports. If he was, surely the whole world would stink from his corpse, said the Athenian politician Demades. A revolt in Athens which greeted the news (a sign if any was needed of how far Alexander had alienated himself from the Greek world) was put down by Macedonian troops and by the next year, 322, Athenian democracy was finally extinguished.
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