Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [148]
9 Panic seized the army: The details that follow are taken from Arrian, Anabasis 6.12–13, where it is clear that Alexander needed to take extraordinary measures to calm his own troops. Quintus Curtius, by contrast, stresses his need to make a show of his strength to the surrounding hostile peoples (9.6.1).
10 On the seventeenth of the Macedonian month Daisios: The date is arrived at by starting from the date of Alexander’s death, generally agreed (on Plutarch’s testimony) to be Daisios 28, and counting backward by the days of illness Arrian records in Anabasis 7.25–26, apparently eleven (though the text is somewhat unclear). Plutarch, however, has a different count of sick days, and records the date of the first sign of illness as Daisios 18 rather than 17 (Alexander 76.1).
11 the first of June 323 B.C.: This date has been arrived at by another backward count, starting from the date of Alexander’s death, which has been fixed at June 11 by the use of a Babylonian astronomical text (see Depuydt, “Time of Death of Alexander the Great”), and again reckoning Arrian’s illness days at eleven. It is not possible to make hard-and-fast correlations between Greco-Macedonian dates like Daisios 18 and modern ones. Peter Green uses a different set of modern dates from mine in Alexander of Macedon, pp. 473–75, in part because at the time he wrote, the Babylonian text in question was thought to indicate a date of June 10; the interpretation has since changed.
12 their rock-solid loyalty to Alexander: In portraying the Bodyguards as a cadre loyal to Alexander, I am clearly rejecting the hypothesis that they collectively acted to bring about his death, either by poisoning him (asserted by Bosworth in “Death of Alexander”) or by denying him moral support or medical attention (Atkinson’s scenario in “Alexander’s Death”). The evidence supporting a broad conspiracy is very slim. Only one ancient document, the Last Days and Testament (preserved as part of the Liber de Morte), indicts a large number of insiders in a murder plot, but the testimony of such an otherwise unreliable text is nearly worthless. Conspiracy theories have always flourished after the sudden demise of a great leader. The question in Alexander’s case, to my mind, comes down to this: Would an aristocracy that had never known any system but hereditary monarchy, recognizing that its king had no viable heir, take a blind leap into the unknown by committing regicide? To answer yes, one could have to assume that Alexander had become so unstable as to make the status quo unbearable (a situation like that which prompted the Praetorian Guard at Rome to assassinate Caligula). I see no grounds for this assumption, even if Alexander was undeniably impetuous and prone to suspicions in his final year. The Bodyguards and other insiders could never have imagined that their fortunes would be improved by his death. There are better grounds for thinking that a small number of outsiders, Europe-based generals like Antipater and Cassander (always the ancient world’s prime suspects, as I discuss later), killed Alexander to prevent him from taking the Asianization of the empire any further, but even this hypothesis cannot be supported by evidence, despite the assertion by Adrienne Mayor (“Deadly Styx River”) that the river from which Antipater was said to have collected his poison may in fact have contained toxic bacteria.
13 a man perhaps a few years older: There is no firm evidence for the date of Ptolemy’s birth. It is often given as 367 B.C. on the basis of one very dubious ancient report (Pseudo-Lucian Macrobioi 12), but many historians feel that the relationship between Ptolemy and Alexander seems to be that of two men close in age. Helmut Berve dated Ptolemy’s birth not earlier than 360, making him no more than four years Alexander’s senior.
14 legend later reported: Diodorus 17.103 and Quintus