Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [18]
A long line of soldiers and Companions filed past the wasted figure on the deathbed, who summoned enough strength to shift his eyes or move his head in greeting to each man. It was clear to all that death was inevitable. This was their last farewell, unless, as Calanus had hinted before his fiery suicide, they might embrace again in some world beyond the grave.
The end came on June 11, toward evening. On this day a nameless Babylonian scribe made a note in his astronomical diary, a log used by seers to correlate political and celestial events. Pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet, fragments of which are now in the British Museum, he created the most toneless and indifferent, but in some ways the most powerful, of the records that survive from the age of Alexander. In the entry for that date, Aiaru 29 according to the Babylonian calendar, he wrote: “The king died.” Then, explaining his inability to make observations of the night sky, he added, simply, “Clouds.”
Some three and a half centuries earlier, a different Macedonian king, Alexander’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, lay on a different deathbed, and gave instructions to his son regarding his burial. That son, named Argaeus, about to become king in his own right, was told to found a royal cemetery in the city where he then lived, Aegae. The kings of Macedon must all be buried there, Argaeus was warned, for the dynasty would end if any were entombed elsewhere.
Aegae was at that time the royal seat of the Macedonians. The name of the town reveals much about the humble origins of the people, for it closely resembles the Greek word meaning “goats.” Herdsmen for much of their history, the Macedonians suddenly, almost miraculously, transformed themselves into warriors and conquerors under Philip and Alexander. A legend recorded by the Roman historian Justin speaks of this transformation as something foreseen, if not decreed, by the gods. An ancient oracle declared that goats would lead the Macedonians to a great empire. One of their early kings, recalling this oracle, founded Aegae where he saw a herd of wild goats and thereafter always led his warriors into battle with goats depicted on his standards. Thus the name of Aegae came to stand for the imperial destiny of this world-conquering people, rather than their goat-herding past.
The name of King Argaeus, too, carried mythic weight for the Macedonians, for it seemed to trace their monarchy to the Greek city of Argos. Argaeus’ father had been an exile from Argos, according to legend, and had won control of Macedonia by force of arms, thus establishing a Greek royal house in a non-Greek region. No one in the Greek world knew whether to credit this myth (though it was accepted around 500 B.C. by a panel screening out non-Greeks from the Olympic Games), and modern scholars tend to regard it as propaganda. But the Macedonian kings took pride in the link to Argos that Argaeus’ name seemed to imply, along with the name of an even more remote ancestor, Argeas, said to be a grandson of Zeus. The royal family came to call themselves by a collective name, the Argeads, that stressed their connection to this ancestor and to the Argive Greeks.
For three and a half centuries before Alexander, the Argeads formed the central pole of Macedonian political life. They were the sole legitimate government, for all appointments and offices were at the discretion of the king. In a land divided by geography into fractious cantons, the royal house defined national identity; one was Macedonian if one was ruled by an Argead. The monarchy became a hallowed institution in the eyes of its subjects, their principal way of understanding who they were. They arranged themselves into concentric rings around the reigning king; the highborn styled themselves his “friends” and “companions,” drank with him at riotous banquets, joined him on boar hunts, and sent their young sons to the palace to serve as “the king’s boys.”
But the Argeads were not an easy lot to revere. Lacking a system for selecting