Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [72]
It took decades for Demochares to rehabilitate his uncle’s reputation, but he finally succeeded, near the end of his life, in persuading Athens to erect a commemorative statue. The portrait was done in bronze by Polyeuctus, a famous Athenian sculptor of the day; it survives in several Roman-era stone copies. Demosthenes is shown standing erect but with head downcast; his careworn face wears a pensive expression; he holds in both hands a papyrus scroll, no doubt a speech to be delivered in the Assembly. The portrait gives a vivid impression of strength, conviction, and seriousness of purpose, but also of tragic futility. It depicts a man whose goals are doomed never to be achieved.
Demosthenes, as depicted in a Roman copy of the commemorative statue by Polyeuctus (Illustration credit 5.1)
The statue’s original was set up in the Athenian market square, with a rueful verse inscription on its base:
If only your strength, Demosthenes, had been equal in force to your judgment,
Greece would have never been ruled by Macedonian Ares.
6
A Death on the Nile
Western Asia and Egypt
SUMMER 322–SUMMER 321 B.C.
During the year since his death, Alexander’s mummified body had lain in a coffin of hammered gold, covered by a purple cloth embroidered with gold, in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. Throughout that year and most of the next, Arrhidaeus, the officer appointed by Perdiccas, oversaw construction of a magnificent hearse to bear the body to its final home.
Preservation of corpses was new to the Macedonians. Before Alexander, only Hephaestion had been embalmed, and only briefly, to keep his body from decay while an elaborate funeral pyre was made ready. Alexander’s case was different. As weeks stretched into months and then past a year, the purple-clad casket must have become an eerie fixture of the palace complex, inspiring comfort or fear in those who passed near it. It seemed to contain a god, yet gods were supposed to dwell beneath the ground or in the sky, not under the same roofs as men.
It was the custom of the Macedonians before Alexander’s day to inter their kings in chamber tombs in the royal city of Aegae, usually after cremation. That was the protocol for Alexander’s father, Philip, whose remains were found in one of the two tombs discovered at Vergina in 1977 (though just which one, Tomb 1 or Tomb 2, is still debated). It was to Aegae that Alexander’s body would finally be sent, not by the king’s own wishes but by the will of Perdiccas’ government, after the completion of his catafalque.
But Alexander’s corpse would never make it to Aegae. A different burial site was being arranged for it by Ptolemy, satrap of Egypt, even as the magnificent hearse was being built. Those arrangements were as yet a secret, and would remain so until the moment they were put into effect, for any disclosure might be reported to Perdiccas, head of the beleaguered Babylon government, and the consequences were sure to be severe.
1. CLEOPATRA (SARDIS, AUTUMN 322 B.C.)
It was not a funeral but a wedding—her own—that was on the mind of Alexander the Great’s sister, Cleopatra, as she journeyed from Macedonia to the city of Sardis (in what is now western Turkey). She and her mother, Olympias, had failed in their first bid to arrange a marriage, when Leonnatus, their chosen bridegroom, got himself killed in battle. Now the two royal women, Alexander’s closest kin, were determined to try again. This time, rather than lure a potential husband to Europe, Cleopatra herself came into Asia, where Alexander’s generals were thickest. Her family’s fortunes depended on her attracting one of these, and the sooner the better, for their nemesis, old man Antipater, was quickly cornering the marriage market. Craterus in Europe was already wed to Antipater’s eldest daughter, Phila; Ptolemy in Egypt was awaiting the arrival of his youngest, Eurydice; and to Perdiccas, the most powerful of them all, he had promised Nicaea.