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By Root 711 0

opposed to his strange visions of shared empire and cultural fusion. Many such reactionaries had been purged, though one remained in power: old man Antipater, at this point past seventy, who had loyally guarded the Macedonian home front on Alexander’s behalf for twelve years, with help from his son Cassander, a man just Alexander’s age. But the king had resolved to unseat Antipater, either by retirement or a more extreme method. Alexander sent orders for him to surrender his post and report to Babylon, but for unknown reasons the senior general stayed put in Macedonia, sending his son in his stead. Cassander, who was known to dislike Alexander and to scorn the newly Asianized ways of the court, had arrived in Babylon only just before Alexander fell ill. Might he and his father, either out of hatred for what Alexander had become or out of fears for their own safety, have conspired to murder their king?

Many Greeks and Macedonians answered yes to these questions, in particular the latter. Rumors circulating at the time of Alexander’s death claimed that a lethal drink, collected by Aristotle from a spring that supposedly gave rise to the river Styx, had been brought to Babylon by Cassander at the behest of his father. The numbingly cold toxin, according to these rumors, had been transported inside a mule’s hoof, since it was said to eat through any other vessel, even solid iron, with its corrosive power. Then it had been slipped into Alexander’s cup by Cassander’s brother Iolaus, who, all too conveniently, was at that time the king’s wine pourer. The theory made sense from the standpoint of motive, means, and opportunity. It was so widely believed that Alexander’s mother, as will be seen, had Iolaus’ buried remains dug up and scattered as punishment for his presumed part in the plot.

How much credence should be given to these rumors is unclear. Those who stood by Alexander in his final days would go on to control his image and to vie for his power; they manipulated the published records of his death (and indeed of his entire reign) to suit their own purposes. They were even capable of circulating false accounts to implicate rivals. (The stories in the so-called Liber de Morte or Book About the Death, a lurid narrative purporting to reveal the poisoning conspiracy, seem to have arisen in this way.) In the years following 323, the question of who killed Alexander, or whether he died of natural causes, would be spun one way and another for political advantage, making the truth very hard to recover.

One document has particularly bedeviled modern interpreters. The Ephemerides, or Royal Journals, is now lost but was drawn on by both Plutarch and Arrian in their accounts of Alexander’s last days. The Journals depicted Alexander as gradually succumbing to a long fever, not at all the quick, violent demise of a poisoning victim, and makes no mention of a suspicious detail reported by other sources, that Alexander cried out from a stabbing pain in his back after drinking a huge goblet of wine. The document is thought to have been composed by Eumenes, Alexander’s Greek scribe, a witness to the events it records and therefore, in some eyes, a sound authority. But it also might have been forged, or Eumenes himself might have tampered with it to cover up a plot. Further complicating the question are the differences, some of them significant, between the summaries Arrian and Plutarch give of the Journals. Clearly one of the two writers was looking at an altered copy—or both were.

The disputes among Alexander’s contemporaries over the cause of his death make it hard to accept any evidence on its face. This is a hall-of-mirrors world where the more convincing an account seems, the more it might be suspected to be the work of clever assassins concealing their crimes. But historical research has to begin somewhere; if nothing can be trusted, nothing can be known. The events described here are based on Arrian’s summary of the Royal Journals, but with an awareness that none of our sources has an absolute claim on truth.

After the meeting