The Last Will and Testament of Alexander the Great

The Truth Behind the Death that Changed the Graeco-Persian World Forever

David Grant

• Editorial: Pen and Sword Military
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526771278
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military & Maritime History

Alexander the Great conquered the largest empire the world had ever seen while still in his twenties but fell fatally ill in Babylon before reaching 33 years old. His wife Roxanne was still pregnant with what would be his only legitimate son, so there was no clear-cut heir. The surviving accounts of his dying days differ on crucial detail, with the most popular version claiming Alexander uttered ‘to the strongest’ when asked to nominate a successor on his deathbed. Decades of ‘civil war’ ensued as Alexander’s hard-won empire was torn asunder by generals in the bloody ‘funeral games’ his alleged final words heralded in. The fighting for supremacy inevitably led to the extermination of his bloodline. But was Alexander really so short-sighted and irresponsible? Finally, after 2, 340 years, the mystery is unravelled. In a forensic first, David Grant presents a compelling case for what he terms the ‘greatest succession cover up of all time’. Alexander’s lost Last Will and Testament is given new credibility and Grant deciphers events that led to its erasure from history by the generals who wanted to carve up the empire for themselves.

1

INTRODUCING THREE WARRING WITNESSES

Who reported on Alexander’s death?

The ancient texts describe Alexander dying in three distinct ways, each of them contradicting the other. Here I review what the surviving accounts provide us with and where this gender-ridden reporting originated.

...the uncomfortable fact remains that the Alexander Romance provides us, on occasion, with apparently genuine materials found nowhere else, while our better-authenticated sources, per contra, are all too often riddled with bias, propaganda, rhetorical special pleading or patent falsification and suppression of evidence.¹

Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon

When Alexander III of Macedon took the throne at age 20 in 336 BC, no one – perhaps with the exception of Alexander himself – could have foreseen the magnitude of change he would bring to the Graeco–Persian World. That shift in power and in his cultural surrounds inevitably caused his own personality to evolve, as well as the mindset of his men and their command structure. Alexander’s reign spanned almost thirteen years, eleven of which were spent marching through the Asian provinces of the former Persian Empire. His Macedonian-led army, supported by grudging Greek mercenaries from the garrisoned Hellenic world and auxiliaries from subjugated Balkan states and tribes, toppled 220 years of Achaemenid rule, only to face the prospect of the new world order imploding at Alexander’s death in Babylon in June 323 BC. He was aged 32.

Today, some 2,343 years on, a few barely intact accounts survive to tell the almost coherent story. While at times in close agreement on certain campaign episodes, they are more frequently at odds with one another. What remains of a once-more-extensive library that narrated Alexander’s final days concludes with a contradictory and suspicious set of claims and death-scene rehashes. One portrayed him dying silent and intestate, he was Homeric and vocal in the next, whilst a third detailed Alexander’s last will and testament, though it is now attached to the end of a book of fables: a ‘romance’. Which account can we trust?

It has long been recognized that the surviving sources are riddled with disinformation. ‘Know your enemy’, military historians advise. This is never a more sound tenet than when applied to the men who campaigned with Alexander and wrote their eyewitness pages: these are referred to as ‘primary sources’, and the resulting testimony from them was nothing short of ‘civil war’ being waged on papyrus.

To make sense of all this, I had to drill down through the fabric of personal agenda of these primary sources and then strip away the rhetoric from interested onlookers, as well as keeping on the lookout for the dramatical garnishes added by later historians trying to make a name for themselves. Determining how Alexander truly died was akin to deconstructing and deciphering an ancient code within a paradigm. From the knotted evidence, I was able to conclude that the time-worn manuscripts have brought us three distinct and competing witnesses all the way from Babylon in June 323 BC, as the testimony they contain likely originated with the very men who were standing beside Alexander’s deathbed.

The first of the three comes in the form of what I will refer to as the ‘Journal’, which documented Alexander’s final twelve-day decline.² The Journal detail was allegedly extracted from an impeccable contemporary source – the official campaign ‘royal diaries’ (Ephemerides in Greek) – and it is found most lucidly in the final pages of the Roman-era historians Arrian (ca. AD 86–160) and Plutarch (ca. AD 46–120), as well as in the Historical Miscellany of the Roman antiquarian Aelian (AD 175–235 AD) (see T3, T4, T5).

The Journal’s dry, laconic and deadpan prose sits in stark contrast to the vivid portrayals of pre-death portents appearing elsewhere in the biographers’ previous pages, and it makes no reference at all to a transfer of power; Alexander, it claimed, was comatose and speechless through his final two days and nights. Known for his attention to detail and meticulous military planning, the Journal implied the dying king used none of these famous faculties, leaving neither a will nor any succession instructions for either the home kingdom or his newly conquered Asian empire. It was this state of affairs, historians have since assumed, that led to infighting immediately after, and soon to Macedonian ‘civil war’.³

It was left to what I have termed the ‘Pamphlet’ to provide a more detailed and colourful account of Alexander’s death (T1, T2). This apparently partisan political document is thought to have originated in the first decade of the Successor Wars waged by Alexander’s generals for their share of the divided empire. The Pamphlet alleged there was nothing natural or even supernatural (as other sources imply) to Alexander’s death, for it revealed a conspiracy to poison him at an impromptu banquet in Babylon thrown by a prominent court friend. Many attendees were implicated, including the king’s royal Bodyguards corps (in ancient Greek the Somatophylakes, traditionally seven in number; the top echelon of power) and his closest Companions (high-ranking officers and other court notables, military and political), whilst six of the guests were cited as innocent and ignorant of the plot.⁴

The Pamphlet explained the motives behind the assassination and the poison used. It detailed the drafting and then the reading of a lucid last will and testament in which Alexander distributed the empire to the most prominent men at court as his end approached. This was not a formal ‘partitioning’ or breaking up of the newly conquered lands, but rather the regional governance of an intact empire on behalf of his son (or sons).⁵ The will bequests were listed beside commemoratives and donations to leading cities and religious sites, and Alexander paired the surviving royal women with carefully chosen generals to secure the safety of the princes, born or still in utero, for they were the future of the Macedonian Argead royal line.⁶ In fact, the will stands as a voice of reason against the backdrop of competing narratives in which anarchy and treasonous power plays dominated the scene in other versions of his death.

Some indeterminate years later, this Pamphlet–originating detail appears to have been absorbed by the quasi-historical, highly rhetorical and eulogistic template of Alexander’s deeds once erroneously credited to the official campaign historian Callisthenes; hence it was once referred to as a ‘Pseudo–Callisthenes’ production. In circulation, the colourful tale soon absorbed the wonders that were attaching themselves to Alexander, and in quick time it metamorphosed into something of a book of fables popularly referred to today as the Greek Alexander Romance (T2).⁷

Confined to this literary coffin, Alexander’s death was not immune to the encroachment of these fabulous elements, and the Romance texts we read today conclude with him addressing his warhorse Bucephalus, which was standing obediently by his death bed. So once the Pamphlet version of Alexander’s last days and the attached conspiracy had been wholly absorbed by the Romance, Alexander’s last will and testament became, unsurprisingly, a pariah to scholars and historians, something unworthy of further consideration. As a result, the biographies, monographs, universal histories and academic studies over the past two millennia have concurred on one key issue: Alexander the Great died intestate and never made a will. The irony – a positive one for my contention – is that these fanciful multi-cultural romance versions (known as ‘recensions’), so welcomed in the Middle Ages and translated into myriad languages, significantly outsold them all.

Unlike his rejected will, the plot to poison Alexander was too alluring to be exiled by other eager writers keen on attaching controversy to his death. So this conspiratorial section of the Pamphlet was swept up by ‘mainstream’ history, and it became a colourful adornment to the closing pages of the Roman-era Vulgate accounts (T6, T7, T8), the third witness thread we have. The use of the term ‘Vulgate’ here suggests the ‘popular’ or the ‘widely-accepted’ genre, and is represented by the surviving texts of Curtius Rufus (likely published mid-first century AD), Diodorus Siculus (published between 60 and 30 BC) and Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus (late first century BC), whose lost work is preserved in an epitome (a highly compressed précis) by an otherwise unknown Roman writer named Justin (likely third century AD). Their textual similarities and style points to a common, if not exclusive, earlier source for campaign information, and many scholars conclude that was the Alexandria-based historian Cleitarchus, a likely contemporary of Alexander’s veterans or their sons.⁸

According to the Vulgate tradition, Alexander’s final words left his kingdom (not specifically the ‘empire’) to ‘the strongest’ or ‘most worthy’ of his men.⁹ The dying king was still sufficiently lucid to add that he foresaw the ‘funeral games’ which would follow.¹⁰ Here, rather than referring to the posthumous Homeric contests honouring the fallen heroes – like those games Achilles had held for Patroclus at Troy in the Iliad, for example – it seems Alexander was cynically referencing the power struggle that would inevitably follow.¹¹ The highly rhetorical epitome of Justin was more lucid on the import of these ‘games’: ‘[Alexander] could foretell, and almost saw with his eyes, how much blood Macedon would shed in the disputes that would follow his death, and with what slaughters, and what quantities of gore, she would perform his obsequies.’ The account of Curtius went on to paint a picture of Persian mourning and dissent amongst the assembled generals, whereas Justin went as far as suggesting the Macedonians were glad to see Alexander go.¹²

The rumours of the conspiracy to poison Alexander at Babylon reverberated far and wide; even Arrian and Plutarch, adherents to the Journal’s silence on a will and dismissive of these more-sensational Vulgate claims, nevertheless felt duty-bound to report the detail of his poisoning (T9, T10). Plutarch was even more specific, adding that some five years after Alexander had been embalmed, his mother Olympias exacted revenge on the architects of the assassination by ‘putting many men to death’.¹³

Diodorus and Curtius believed that contemporary historians had dared not write of the plot while the men at the heart of the conspiracy were still fighting to become first among equals in their bid for the Macedonian throne or control of the Asian empire (or both), and ‘whatever credence such stories gained, they were soon suppressed by the power of the people implicated by the rumour’. More specific was the claim (possibly in the original Pamphlet itself) that the court philosopher and late-campaign historian Onesicritus deliberately avoided naming the banquet guests for fear of reprisals. The Pamphlet was clearly virulent, and one of our aims is to identify its still-anonymous author in our bid to navigate back to Alexander’s original will.¹⁴

Then we need to factor into the unsolved equation the mindset of Alexander himself; the mortal man, not a god in the making, as he was popularly portrayed in antiquity. In my earlier treatise, I summed him up with a paragraph which, paradoxically, makes it clear he cannot be summed up at all:

Alexander was an elusive equation: a calculable axiom of Aristotle’s empirical and categorising present, and an indefinable irrational number from the Homeric past. He was a mythopoeic conqueror who at once lived by the tenets of the strategically sound and the proportionally outrageous; a tribal leader recalling heroic deeds, and a mortal seeking apotheosis through his progression from Macedonian king to commander-in-chief of the Greeks, de facto pharaoh of Egypt and a Persian King of Kings. Indeed, his was the blood of a mortal and an immortal essence (ichor) mixed in one, and I suggest the content of his testament would have been no less ambitious.¹⁵

What becomes clear from reading any biography or campaign account, whether penned in the ancient world or by modern historians overlaying their own interpretations on events, is that the prince who came to power at the age of 20 was not the same man who re-entered Babylon aged 32. There were too many scars – mental and physical – too many losses despite the gains, too many rejections beside successes and too many who wanted him dead despite his loyal support, for Alexander not to have been irrevocably changed.

Regardless of whoever he had become, my contention is that Alexander was never a person to let fate decide an outcome; not in lineage, memory nor battle, and certainly not in death. Death is an episode most easily manipulated; the protagonist is, after all, deceased and cannot plead his case. In reply to those historians today who still accuse Alexander of unforgivably dying intestate and failing to name a successor, guilt can only be established when the supporting evidence is beyond reasonable doubt. So here, like a judge presiding over a long-closed case, I bring the subject of historical fraud, duplicity and political manipulation into the vortex of my argument. Following a decade studying the evidence, I believe that one unavoidable verdict emerged: after these 2,340 years, the last will and testament of Alexander III of Macedon needs to be extracted from ‘romance’ and reinstated to its rightful place in mainstream history.

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Foreword
• Publisher’s Note
• A Reader’s Resource
• Chapter 1: Introducing Three Warring Witnesses
• Chapter 2: The Portentous Prelude To Death
• Chapter 3: The Assassins' Assembly; Path To Civil War
• Chapter 4: Wills And Testaments In Classical Greece
• Chapter 5: Death And Poison: The Toxic Cup
• Chapter 6: Hunting The Architects Of Deceipt
• Chapter 7: Royal Secretary, Royal Seal, Royal Charade
• Chapter 8: How, Why And When The Will Emerged
• Chapter 9: The Overlooked Evidence
• Chapter 10: Epitaph In Rome, Obituary Today
• Reference Notes
• Bibliography