Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire Read Free

was inured to heavy drinking, it was Alexander, and his symptoms do not fit alcohol poisoning. Excessive drinking, however, along with grief and old wounds (especially the lung that was perforated in India), may have weakened his system.
    The accounts of his symptoms are puzzling. They are fairly precise, but do not perfectly fit any recognizable cause. One innocent possibility is that he died of malaria. He had fallen ill ten years previously in Cilicia, which was notorious for its malaria up until the 1950s. Perhaps he had a fatal recurrence of the disease in Babylon. 2 More dramatically, the reported symptoms are also compatible with the effects of white hellebore, a slow-acting poison. The incomprehensibility of Alexander’s death to many people, and its propaganda potential, led very quickly to rumors of poisoning, especially since this was not an uncommon event among the Macedonian and eastern dynasties. And, as in an Agatha Christie novel, there were plenty of people close at hand who might have liked to see him dead. It was not just that some of them entertained world-spanning ambitions, soon to be revealed. It was more that Alexander’s recent paranoid purge of his friends and officials, and his megalomaniacal desire for conquest and yet more conquest, could have turned even some of those closest to him.
    Now or later, Alexander’s mother stirred the pot from Epirus, southwest of Macedon. For some years, Olympias had been in voluntary exile from Macedon, back in her native Molossia (the mountainous region of Epirus whose kings, at this moment in Epirote history, were the de facto rulers of the Epirote League). On his departure for the east, Alexander had left a veteran general of his father’s, Antipater, as viceroy in charge of his European possessions for the duration of his campaigns—Macedon, Thessaly, Thrace, and Greece. Unable to be supreme in Macedon, and irrevocably hostile to Antipater, Olympias returned to the foundation of her power. But she never stopped plottingher return to the center. She was widely known to have been involved in a number of high-profile assassinations, and was a plausible candidate for the invisible hand behind the murder of her husband, Philip II, in 336, since it seemed as though he was planning to dislodge her and Alexander from their position as favorites.
    Olympias, then, knew exactly where to point the finger over her son’s death. And she had a plausible case: not long before his death Alexander had ordered Antipater replaced, largely on the grounds of his “regal aspirations.” 3 Like many of Alexander’s actions in his last months, this order was not easily justifiable: already over seventy-five years old, Antipater had served three Macedonian kings and, despite limited resources, he had done a good job of leaving Alexander free to concentrate on eastern conquest. He had defeated the Persian fleet at sea and quelled a Thracian rebellion and a major Greek uprising (though even then, in 331, Alexander had sneeringly dismissed this as a “battle of mice”). 4 Nevertheless, Antipater was to be relieved by Craterus, Alexander’s favorite since the death of Hephaestion, and was to bring fresh Macedonian troops out to Babylon.
    Recently, however, such summonses had acquired the habit of turning into traps. Antipater had good reason to think that he would be executed on some charge or other, just as other powerful and seemingly loyal officials had been. Unhinged by Hephaestion’s death in October 324, Alexander had instigated a veritable reign of terror against even incipient signs of independence among his marshals. Moreover, to strengthen Olympias’s case, two of Antipater’s sons had long been in Babylon—and one of them, Iolaus, was well placed to act as a poisoner, since he was Alexander’s cupbearer. And Alexander’s fatal illness had begun immediately after a heavy drinking session. Indeed, shortly after news of Alexander’s death reached Athens, the