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By Root 676 0

on June 3, Alexander passed the night racked by fever but managed the next day to conduct the morning’s sacrifice and meet with his senior staff. On June 4 his condition was worse, but the next day he met again with the high command and continued to plan for the Arabian expedition (apparently postponed from its original launch date). So far, Alexander refused to admit that his condition might endanger the enterprise. In the past he had regarded campaigning as a kind of restorative. After the death of his closest friend, Hephaestion, had sent him into a prolonged depression, Alexander finally roused his spirits by charging off into the mountains of Media (now northern Iran), through deep snowdrifts, to attack a stiff-necked people called the Cossaeans, “using warfare to console his grief, as though going off on a hunt—a hunt of men,” as Plutarch says.

In the private quarters of the palace, meanwhile, at least one woman helped look after the ailing Alexander, if we can place any credence in the sources that mention her. Alexander’s wife Rhoxane, or Rauxsnaka (Little Star) as she was known in her native tongue, was much younger than Alexander, perhaps in her late teens, and as far removed from him in culture as Pocahontas from Captain John Smith. She came from a place (probably modern Uzbekistan) in the rugged, mountainous region the Greeks called Bactria. Alexander’s army had slogged through two tough years of guerrilla warfare there, and Rhoxane’s father, Oxyartes, had been one of its most determined enemies. After securing his surrender, Alexander had made him an ally, cementing the tie by marrying his daughter.

Rhoxane had become pregnant within a year of her marriage to Alexander, but the child either was stillborn or died in infancy. In June 323 she was in the third trimester of her second pregnancy. What passed between her and her dying husband during his illness is almost totally unknown, except that the Liber de Morte and the Alexander Romance, two works that contain much unreliable material, do record a bizarre and moving story involving the couple. According to their account, no doubt fictionalized but perhaps based on some real incident, Rhoxane entered the king’s sickroom one night to find his bed empty. Seeing a secret passageway standing open, she crept out of the palace in pursuit of her husband, catching up to him as he crawled feebly toward the Euphrates. There the two embraced, and Rhoxane, weeping, convinced her husband to give up what she realized was his plan to drown himself. “You have robbed me of immortality,” Alexander lamented as he obediently returned to the palace. He had been trying to make his body disappear, so that his followers might suppose he had really been a god.

Two other women besides Rhoxane must have monitored Alexander’s condition anxiously, for like Rhoxane they were totally reliant on him for their status, even their safety. These were Stateira and Parysatis, daughters of the last two Persian kings, who had become Alexander’s second and third wives about a year earlier. It is not clear whether the princesses were with their husband in Babylon, or had remained at Susa, one of the Persian royal capitals, where Alexander had kept them since 331 and where he had wed them in 324. Even at Susa, though, they must have known of Alexander’s illness within a day or two of its onset. News traveled quickly between the two cities, carried by the fleet Persian postal system and by fire signals.

Alexander’s marriages to the two Persian princesses were part of his effort to fuse his army’s leadership with the elites of Asia, to create a hybrid ruling class for his tricontinental empire. He had staged a mass wedding ceremony at Susa and had matched scores of his Companions with brides from the noble families of Persis and Bactria, carefully calibrating each bride with the favor he wished to bestow on the groom. He gave the greatest prize, the sister of his own bride Stateira, to Hephaestion, so that his children and Hephaestion’s would be first cousins. He singled others out as well for the high