Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [145]
The silver hydria containing the last remains of Alexander IV (Illustration credit 10.2)
A marble door between the antechamber and main tomb was closed and sealed. A sacrifice was held on the roof of the building, as though to a god. Then the whole structure was covered with earth, just as the tombs adjoining it had been covered. The dead king would have no visitors, in contrast to his mummified father, by this time housed in the Sema at Alexandria, a shrine designed by Ptolemy for throngs of pilgrims to enter and stand amazed.
It was perhaps forty years later, after invaders had vandalized much of the royal burial ground, that the mound covering the Aegae tombs was itself buried under the Great Tumulus. Hundreds of workers heaped on thousands of tons of earth, clay, sand, and gravel, not to hide the tombs but to make them forever inaccessible. The Macedonians were resolved to protect the successors of Alexander the Great, even if that meant never seeing again the beautiful buildings that sheltered them. They would at least know that somewhere at the heart of the mound, wrapped in purples and encased in gold and silver, the bones of the last Argeads lay at peace, in darkness and silence. Absent the corpse of Alexander himself, these were all that remained to them of the monarchy that had made them masters of the world.
Epilogue
The slow-motion execution of Alexander the Great’s family required one or two more years to complete. Once the death of the young Alexander was known for certain, two surviving members of his family, both long sidelined from the succession struggle, suddenly came into prominence once again. It was clear now that they preserved the last, slim hopes of the survival of the Argead house.
The boy named Heracles, fathered by Alexander the Great perhaps a decade before his death but never acknowledged by him, had grown up untouched by politics. He lived a quiet life with his mother, the half-Persian, half-Greek noblewoman Barsine, in the city of Pergamon. Only once had he been mentioned as a possible heir to the throne, in Babylon on the day after Alexander’s death, and that suggestion had been quickly dismissed. But as Alexander’s only living descendant, he could not have stayed out of the power struggle forever. It was only a matter of time before one of the generals used him to advance his cause. As luck would have it, the first to do so was the one least apt to succeed, the hapless former regent Polyperchon.
Polyperchon had survived the defeat of his coalition partners, Olympias and Aristonous, and had gone to Asia to join with Antigonus One-eye. In 309 or 308, Polyperchon, now past seventy, made one final bid to knock his old enemy Cassander out of power in Macedon. He summoned Heracles, then in his late teens, from the seclusion of Pergamon and brought him to Europe, after writing ahead to his former allies to revive the royalist cause. They lined up an army of more than twenty thousand in Europe to await Heracles’ arrival.
The power of the Argead name was still strong in Macedonia, and Cassander had reason to be concerned. He took his own forces to meet Polyperchon’s on Macedonia’s borders, and there, as the armies prepared for battle, he offered a bargain to his enemy: if Polyperchon would murder Heracles, Cassander promised to make him a firm ally and bestow high honors and office upon him. Polyperchon accepted the deal.
Plutarch records a chilling account of the assassination, though there is no way to gauge its veracity. Polyperchon invited Heracles to a dinner party, an ominous move on the eve of a battle. Heracles