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By Root 709 0

imperfectly, since ancient accounts vary widely. Indeed the week following June 11 in Babylon was so violent and chaotic that no two witnesses could have recalled it in quite the same way. The divergent reports in three ancient chronicles—Arrian’s Events After Alexander, Diodorus’ Library, and Justin’s summary of Pompeius Trogus—are like three strands from which a modern historian must weave a braid of likelihood. Complicating this task is a fourth source that, for these first days of the post-Alexander period, gives a highly detailed account of events but is often at variance with the other three. Quintus Curtius, a Roman statesman living under the early Caesars, continued his history of Alexander’s life for several weeks past the king’s death, fascinated, as a Roman of that era would be, by the perils of a power vacuum. But Curtius’ readiness to see Roman patterns in Macedonian history, or even to superimpose them, calls his reliability into question.

It is certain that on June 12, a council of high officers met in the room where Alexander lay in state, the throne room of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace. The seven Bodyguards were there, along with a handful of others, armed as if for battle to highlight the urgency of the moment. Perdiccas, according to Curtius, had prepared a startling backdrop for this meeting: Alexander’s empty throne, now decked with the king’s diadem, armor, and robes. It was as though he wanted Alexander’s ghost to preside over the deliberations. Curtius reports that Perdiccas even placed Alexander’s signet ring, his own great token of authority, among those relics—a remarkable gesture of humility, if true.

Perdiccas opened the proceedings by taking up the most pressing matter facing the generals, the selection of a successor to the throne. Alexander’s wife Rhoxane, he pointed out, was in her final weeks of pregnancy. If her child was male and survived, the Macedonians would have a legitimate heir. The best thing now, Perdiccas said, was for the army to wait and hope for both those outcomes.

Nearchus, Alexander’s top naval officer, spoke next. He was not among the Bodyguards, but Alexander had counted him a close friend. Nearchus now proposed that the child named Heracles, Alexander’s son by a mistress named Barsine, be proclaimed the new king. After all, he argued, here was a living, breathing heir—perhaps four years old at this time—not just an even chance at one. Nearchus was, however, interrupted by a disapproving din from the other officers. Not only had he proposed a child who was illegitimate and therefore not eligible for the throne, but, as a Greek in an assembly of Macedonians, he was speaking very much out of turn. Perhaps too he was suspected of self-interest, for in the Susa mass marriage he had wed a daughter of Barsine, so that Heracles was now his half-brother-in-law.

An infantry captain named Meleager spoke next, bluntly raising the problem of Euro-Asian fusion that had deeply troubled the army. Both Heracles and Rhoxane’s unborn child, he observed, had mothers who were at least part Asian (Barsine was half Greek) and who belonged to races conquered and ruled by the Macedonians. Perhaps Alexander had wanted such boundaries ignored, but not all could follow his lead, least of all Meleager and his infantry comrades. Why not an heir of purer blood, a son of Philip by a European wife, and one already grown to manhood: Alexander’s half brother Arrhidaeus? The man was right there in Babylon, accompanying the army, ready to take power in an instant.

Now it was Ptolemy’s turn to speak and to voice an awkward truth. Arrhidaeus was not mentally competent to rule. He could speak and function reasonably well, but his capacity was that of a child—in modern terms he was developmentally disabled—and like a child he would need a guardian or regent. Rather than hand power to such a surrogate, Ptolemy said, the Macedonians should appoint a board of top-ranking generals to govern instead of a king. These men could meet before Alexander’s empty throne, as they now were meeting, and take decisions by majority