In search of the Lost testament of Alexander the great

‘I shall make just as pretty a cupbearer as you – and not drink the wine myself. For it is the fact that the king’s butler when he offers the wine is bound to dip a ladle in the cup first, and pour a little in the hollow of his hand and sip it, so that if he has mixed poison in the bowl it will do him no good himself.’²

‘It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.’³

The sacred medical oath of Hippocrates of Kos commenced with: ‘I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygeia, and Panacea, and all the gods and goddesses…’, and its fourth paragraph pledged: ‘I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.’ The deities must have been mortified, for Persia, Greece, and then imperial Rome, saw the oath abandoned to aconite, arsenic and antimony, the toxic salt and pepper (and eyebrow cosmetic) of emperors, tyrants and kings.⁴

Although it is ascribed to Hippocrates, the oath likely has its roots with the Pythagoreans’ own moral code, the so-called Golden Verses, whose original and less poetic geometric pledge put great store in a numerical triangle, the Tetraktys.⁵ The ‘father of medicine’ and the ‘father of numbers’ had a fascination with death, Hippocrates with its prevention, and Pythagoras with its mitigation through the transmigration of the soul. Both sought harmony, whether in the four humours of the body or with the number four itself; for Hippocrates imbalance was dyskrasia, and for Pythagoras it was simply discordant, for he was the first music therapist and master of the quadrivium.⁶ Each had influential or even mystical associations by Alexander’s day, and more significantly to our investigation, they both shared uncertain, though legendary, deaths.

Many legendary figures suffered posthumous reconstructions, and from the Homeric past through to Athens’ Golden Age, colourful examples are not difficult to find. Empedocles the ‘purifier’, a cosmogenic philosopher from Sicily who put his ideas into verse and became known as the ‘wind-forbidder’, is said to have jumped into the fire of Mount Etna to ensure his apotheosis. Once charged for stealing the discourses of Pythagoras, who clearly influenced his ideas, Empedocles was trying to arrange a heavenly disappearance after a banquet but was apparently betrayed by one of his distinctive brass-soled slippers he misplaced on the climb up. This was not the finite conclusion it suggests, for he, like Pythagoras, believed in reincarnation.⁸ With no volcano at hand, the Romance captured Alexander’s attempt at a similar vanishing act by using the River Euphrates (T1, T2). Where Empedocles gained a cult, Alexander gained the ill-timed intervention of Roxane, his pregnant wife. The Romance compilers (though this particular detail may be Pamphlet-derived) were not so original in their imagery and most elements can be found in earlier tales whilst much was regurgitated later, in Suetonius’ biographies of the Roman Caesars, for example, or more pertinently, in the Scriptores Historiae Augustae.⁹

These vivid and influential Greek characters were already associated with magic by Aristotle’s day; Empedocles, the founder of the Italian school of medicine, raised the dead and was said to be able to manipulate the weather; he was possibly the first philosopher to propose the existence of four divine primordial cosmic elements: earth, wind, fire and water, and his passing provides us with an early example of the ‘multiple death tradition’.¹⁰ Pythagoras was in two places at once, sported a golden thigh and reportedly once turned a wild bear to vegetarianism, so the legends go,¹¹ and after his death, honey growing on Hippocrates’ grave was, unsurprisingly, said to have medicinal powers.¹²

Hippocrates, already epitheted ‘the great’, according to Aristotle, had several deaths too – at the ages of 80, 90, 104, and 109. The latter numbers were apparently shared with his friend, Democritus of Abdera, so meriting a place in Pseudo-Lucian’s Makrobioi, a compendium of the ‘long lived’,¹³ Pythagoras’ own numerical preoccupation concluded with the statement ‘all things are numbers’ and he is oddly said to have lived to 104 as well, sharing the illustrious age with Hieronymus the Cardian historian.14 That may not be coincidence: as pointed out by the historian Truesdell Brown, 104 – thus the 105th year – is a mystical numerical combination and the sum of the first fourteen integers.¹⁵

Competing stories in circulation would have us believe that Pythagoras was slain twice: he was either foiled by a bean field he refused to enter leading to his capture and burning at the stake; alternatively, he withered away from a self-imposed starvation when philosophically pondering a world that had rejected him.¹⁶ Yet ‘any chronology constructed for his life is a fabric of the loosest possible weave’,¹⁷ a conundrum facing Hermman Diels when attempting to separate direct quotations (‘B’ fragments) from the later testimonia (‘A’ fragments) related to the Samian polymath and other pre-Socratic thinkers in his 1903 Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.

Doxographies, as we have noted, were apparently highly exploitable and early doxographical material was particularly susceptible to becoming pseudepigrapha, for so little was known about the lives and writings of Neo-Platonist philosophers, who, by then, were already wrapped in the climbing ivy of myth. The Neo-Pythagorean scholars, for example, tended to attribute their own written treatises back to Pythagoras himself. Prizing apart the originals from the latter-day treatises demands every weapon Quellenforschung and the ancillary disciplines of historiography can muster in stripping away the accretion. Diels, the originator of the term ‘doxography’ which was originally linked to philosophical opinions (doxai) on theology, cosmology, metaphysics and other sciences, attempted to narrow down their tenets to the original sources in his monumental 1879 Doxographi Graeci.

And here we encounter the first of many of history’s many ironies, as none of the influential philosophers, including Pythagoras himself, preserved their own doctrines in writing either. Anaximenes, Socrates, Thales (ca. 624-546 BCE), Arcesilaus (ca. 316-241 BCE), Carneades and Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360-270 BCE) each relied on oral tradition, and yet their ideas are better preserved than written works of ‘Philippic’ proportion, Theopompus’ fifty-eight-book Philippika amongst them.¹⁸ But do the doxographies we have truly preserve ‘their’ ideas? Or are they the oversimplifications, or later interpretations of the students and disciples that were neatly systemised by Theophrastus in his Physikon doxai, often translated as Tenets of the natural philosophers?

Diogenes the Cynic had an assortment of conflicting demises that spawned a whole literary genre, with none of them taking place in his famous Corinthian barrel. One version claimed he was seized with colic after eating a raw octopus, and another beleived he was actually feeding the octopus to a group of dogs, one of which fatally bit the sinew of his foot. A variation proposed his last wish was to be thrown naked to the hungry pack; the canine attachment is surely an allusion Diogenes’ dog-like behaviour, his epithet kynikos, and possibly to his consent of cannibalism.²⁴ A further tradition claimed he died by voluntarily holding his breath for two days; his friends found him wrapped in his cloak intact whereafter they quarrelled over the honours to bury him, despite his wish to be thrown in a ditch for nature to consume him.²⁵ He was reportedly aged eighty-one, or perhaps ninety.²⁶ Ironically, for all his cynical attributes, he was ‘canonised’ by the Stoics, though both philosophical sects must have found some personal harmony in his ideas, for many of them lived long as well and qualified for inclusion in the Makrobioi, a point its author duly noted.²⁷

Portentous births and mysterious deaths – life’s beginning and end – were fully exploited for their didactic contents and for the symmetry that the Epicurean Lucretius (ca. 99-55 BCE) philosophically likened to ‘nature’s mirror’; after all, ‘the art of living well and the art of dying well are one.’²⁸ Do dying men speak, even those who have been poisoned? Well, apparently Socrates did after a shock dose of hemlock; his last recorded words were: ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?’²⁹ It was the perfect utterance from a man at peace with himself and possibly an allusion to life’s debt to the healing god.³⁰ The words were immortalised by Plato (whose real name was Aristocles) in his Phaedo, a notable yet unlikely absentee from Socrates’ final hour. Plutarch added that after Socrates had downed the fatal draught, ‘he engaged in philosophy and invited his companions to do the same.’³¹

The great speaker Demosthenes was, as we might imagine, credited with rather immortal lines for his epitaph, when Archias, the thespian-turned-assassin, had him surrounded in the (supposedly sacred) Temple of Poseidon on the island of Calauria (Poros). Contemplating the pledges of fair treatment Antipater was delivering via his ‘exile hunter’, Demosthenes replied with, ‘Archias, I was never convinced by your acting, and I am no more convinced by your promises’, whereupon he sucked poison from his reed pen and rounded off with a speech from Sophocles’ Antigone as the effects took hold.³⁵

Tradition was not content with the one recital (which may have originated with Duris’ allusion to tragic drama) and Plutarch dedicated the next chapter to recording its many pluralities. The wording on the bronze statue supposedly erected by the Athenians to his memory is even questioned and it was rumoured that Demosthenes composed the eulogy himself.³⁶ Lucian took up the mantle in his usual satirical style, claiming Antipater did indeed lament the death of the anti-Macedonian orator:

Archias! methinks you comprehend neither the nature of Demosthenes, nor my mind. No man that ever lived do I admire more than Demosthenes… the Attic orators are but babes in comparison with his finish and intensity, the music of his words, the clearness of his thoughts, his chains of proof, his cumulative blows…³⁷

Aristotle was to follow Demosthenes to the Elysian Fields soon after: ‘Eurymedon, the priest of Deo’s mysteries, was once about to indict Aristotle for impiety, but he, by a draught of poison, escaped prosecution. This then was an easy way of vanquishing unjust calumnies.’ The charge of impiety (asebeia) was difficult to counter; Aristotle ended his life by taking aconite at the age of seventy at Chalcis in 322 BCE. Of course, a host of other sources simply claimed he died of a stomach ailment after placing ‘a skin of warm oil on his stomach’ to alleviate the pain.³⁸

The Death of Demosthenes. Litho illustration from Hutchinson’s History of the Nations, ca. 1910, after a picture by Bramtott. He reportedly took poison in the Temple of Poseidon on the island of Calauria.

The classical portrayal failed to deter Shakespeare from giving us the immortal epitome of betrayal, the macaronic line, ‘et tu Brute? Then fall, Caesar’; it was a pastiche already popular in the bard’s day.⁴⁰ In the six of his plays that were constructed around Greek and Roman historical themes, Shakespeare gave new lives, deaths and voices to characters from the past, and he didn’t get away scot-free himself; his tomb at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, bears a highly inauthentic sounding god-fearing curse that was supposedly the bard’s very own.⁴¹

It is not Caesar, however, but Cicero who has a special bearing on our case, for the conclusion to his story was reported by a corpus of heavyweight historians: Plutarch, Appian, Cassius Dio, Seneca, Asinius Pollio (a successful defence lawyer in accusations of poisoning) and Livy.42 Cicero’s departure has been described as ‘the most widely-evidenced of “famous deaths” in the ancient world’, in which ‘obfuscation, anomalies and contradictions exist, suggesting blatant manipulation of his story’.⁴³ Cicero had pointed out that all who wish death upon a man, whether they clutch the knife or not, are as guilty as one another; this was a dangerous premise to make considering Brutus, who was in fact rumoured to be Caesar’s son (from the dictator’s affair with Servilia), had called for him to restore the republic when plunging his dagger into Caesar.⁴⁴ In a later letter to Scribonius, one of the conspirators, Cicero, who already enjoyed the honorific Pater Patriae for his part in suppressing the Cataline conspiracy, began with: ‘How I could wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’⁴⁵

Cicero labelled his subsequent attacks on Mark Antony in the Senate ‘Philippics’ in emulation and admiration of Demosthenes’ earlier verbal assaults on Alexander’s father. An unsurprising victim of the proscriptions of Antony and Octavian, Cicero is credited with six deaths, just ahead of Callisthenes’ five and the four attached to Pyrrhus of Epirus.⁴⁶ Cicero was beheaded and had his hands chopped off, for they were the damning instruments that penned his scathing polemics against the wayward triumvir. They were nailed to the rostra, either one, or both.⁴⁷ His last words are recorded as, ‘There is nothing proper about what you are doing soldier, but do try to kill me properly.’ In yet another version, Fulvia, Antony’s wife, pulled out his tongue and repeatedly stabbed it with a hairpin.⁴⁸ The popularity for oratorical declamation against Cicero’s killers seems to have added new wood to the allegorical fire and his death soon frayed into many competing strands.⁴⁹ Octavian is said to have hesitated for two days before adding Cicero to those sentenced, and so regretted the act in later years that he assisted Cicero’s son to a co-consulship.⁵⁰

Roman deaths were brutal and just as vividly reported. The emperor Valerian (ca. 190s-260s CE) was skinned and stuffed with straw, whereas the decapitated head of Gaius Gracchus was filled with molten lead to a weight of ‘seventeen and two-third pounds’ to exploit the promise that it would be worth its weight in gold once handed to his enemies.⁵¹ Of course, less dramatic versions existed, and there are claims Valerian’s death was simply the stuff of Christian propaganda. Others were ‘cleaned-up’ before sale in their endeavour to instruct. No one mentioned the real effects of hemlock, the ‘sin of Athens’: choking, nausea, bile and convulsions, for none wished to imagine Phocion or Socrates writhing on the floor in their own vomit.

Aristophanes had described the drug’s more benign symptoms in his Frogs written six years earlier,⁵² and, in fact, Plato’s Phaedo, which described Socrates’ final hours in 399 BCE, has led to the question of whether hemlock was used at all, for it was never specifically named.53 Theophrastus helps us out with his suggestion that a cocktail of hemlock, poppy and herbs would render death more peaceful.⁵⁴ Phocion, once a pupil of Plato and who had been elected city strategos forty-five times (once turning down a 100-talent gift from Alexander), was to suffer for his pro-Macedonian policy; condemned to die on the day of the Athenian festival of Olympia, he had to pay 12 drachmas to his executioner for more hemlock to be bruised.⁵⁵

Although Plato gave Socrates some dignity, hemlock was unpredictable. When Nero ordered Seneca’s death, his stoic teacher severed the arteries of his own arms, legs and knees, but his frail body lingered on, and so he resorted to asking a friend to provide the poison of ‘those condemned in Athens’. It failed to take hold because his limbs were too cold for the blood to circulate and he had to be content with suffocating from the steam of the bathhouse, according to Tacitus’ account.⁵⁶

The use of hemlock and other poisons was widespread; when laying out the basis of his ideal state, Plato had divided magic into two categories, and the first focused on harm to the body caused by food, drinks and unguents – pharmaka deleteria, thus by poisons.⁵⁷ A 5^th century BCE Athenian law prohibited their use, as did the Tean Curses, read each year by city officials and banning production of harmful drugs.⁵⁸ Hippocrates had reported on the use of arsenics for skin ulcers and the methods to control the absorption of poisons a century and a half before Alexander’s day.

Strabo claimed that more than sixty citizens of the island of Kea were ordered to take the poison in the 4^th century BCE during a food shortage to ensure the survival of others.⁵⁹ Theophrastus (and later Juvenal) described the skills behind aconite poisoning along with masking techniques, recommending strychnine for practical purposes since the poison’s taste, pertinently, could be disguised in wine.⁶⁰ Ovid dated the use of aconite (also named wolfsbane) back to the Bronze Age, terming the plant the ‘stepmother’s favourite brew’.⁶¹ In legend its effect commenced when Heracles dragged the hellhound, Cerberus, from the underworld to the daylight; the beast was so terrified that foam from its slavering mouth took root in the soil and spontaneously grew into the plant.⁶² Perhaps Ovid even contemplated taking it himself after his life banishment by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea at the fringe of the Roman Empire; now a relegates, he published his Tristia, a sorrowful ‘exile poetry’ that was in fact a veiled suasoria (‘persuasion’) in pleading his case to the emperor against the still unknown charges.⁶³

In the Odyssey Homer related that Odysseus made a special voyage to obtain supplies of a deadly poison to coat the bronze tips of his arrows, and he further described the ‘drugs mixed together, many good and many harmful’ that were used when Helen spiked the drinks of Telemachus and Menelaus.⁶⁸ Heracles famously dipped his arrows in the poison of the slain Lernean Hydra and Alexander’s troops suffered the consequences of malevolent archery in India when both the enemy arrows and sword blades were coated with viper and cobra venom; this was in contravention to the Hindu Laws of Manu, for Brahmins and the higher castes prohibited their use. Local Indian physicians had to be employed by the Macedonians to neutralise the effects and in the Vulgate texts Ptolemy almost succumbed before Alexander reportedly found an antidote, though this sounds suspiciously like Cleitarchean propaganda.⁶⁹

Diodorus described the snakes behind the various venoms used and the Indian custom of burning wives on the dead husband’s funeral pyre; supposedly it was to discourage them from poisoning their spouses:

The country, indeed, furnished no few means for this, since it produced many and varied deadly poisons, some of which when merely spread upon the food or the wine cups cause death. But when this evil became fashionable and many were murdered in this way, the Indians, although they punished those guilty of the crime, since they were not able to deter the others from wrongdoing, established a law that wives, except such as were pregnant or had children, should be cremated along with their deceased husbands…⁷⁰

Plutarch and Ctesias reported that Queen Parysatis, mother of Artaxerxes II, fatally intoxicated her daughter-in-law by means of a carefully prepared knife; venom was administered by her maidservant to the side of a blade used to cut a bird in half. Taking the untainted meat, Parysatis chewed in pleasure while her daughter-in-law choked on her inheritance; Hesiod’s advice was never more relevant: ‘Invite your friend to supper, not your enemy.’ Revenge can, however, be a double-edged sword, for Plutarch went on to explain that: ‘The legal mode of death for poisoners in Persia is as follows. There is a broad stone, and on this the head of the culprit is placed; and then with another stone they smite and pound until they crush the face and head to pulp.’ That was the fate of the maidservant, while Parysatis was packed off to Babylon in shame.⁷³

Prolific as poisoning was, there can equally be no doubt that assassination was an integral part of Macedonian machinations; Badian noted: ‘Only two of Alexander’s predecessors in the 4^th century BCE had not died by assassination… and only three among all the successors of Darius I.’⁷⁴ Alexander and his father, Philip II, had contributed generously to the death toll of candidates (and their supporters) for the throne, and Pausanias alleged Cassander used poison when murdering both of Alexander’s sons: Alexander IV and Heracles.⁷⁵

Plutarch and Arrian knew of a tradition – an offshoot of the Pamphlet’s finger pointing (T1, T2) – that claimed Aristotle gathered the poison from the River Styx by the cliffs of Nonacris (in the northern central Peloponnese) and he had it ferried to Babylon in a mule’s hoof, for this was the only vessel capable of holding the ferment.⁷⁹ The only cure, proposed Lucian in his satirical Dialogues of the Dead, was repeated draughts of Lethe water from the river of oblivion, defying the mantra of Orphic mythology.⁸⁰ Plutarch claimed that three days after Alexander had been pronounced dead, his body, which had been left untreated in the stifling June heat, remained in perfect condition.⁸¹ Curtius incorporated typical Vulgate thauma – the king kept his vital look for a full six days, to the extent that the embalmers dared not touch him fearing he may still be alive; Aelian mentioned an even more discreditable thirty days, unless this is a later manuscript corruption.⁸²

This condition, as many toxicologists would confirm, is an argument for, not against, the presence of chemical poison (if not methanol toxicity): ‘a remarkable preservation of the body is commonly, but not constantly, observed’, concluded one authoritative publication on arsenic use.⁸³ Milne has argued for strychnine use at Babylon, though Engels proposed malaria to explain the preservation; both conditions, when resulting in either cyanosis or deep coma, could have led to the delayed putrefaction of the body.⁸⁴

However, a recent study of the episode in New Zealand by the National Poisons Centre in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at the University of Otago, perhaps the most detailed literary autopsy since the 1996 clinicopathological report prepared for the New England Journal of Medicine, argues against the above conclusions. It states that ‘lethal doses of strychnine’ would ‘typically cause death within 3-5 hours’, not longer. Moreover, in cases of arsenic poisoning ‘death occurs within 24h to 4 days’; ‘these symptoms do not match those displayed’ by Alexander ‘and can therefore also be discarded.’⁸⁵ Although the Greeks would have had access to a wide range of attested toxic plants such as (using today’s scientific botanical labels) aconitum (aconite), conium maculatum (hemlock), artemisia (wormwood), hyoscyamus niger (henbane), and colchicum autumnale (autumn crocus), a better fit to Alexander’s relatively long decline would be the alkaloids present in veratrum, notably veratrum album: white hellebore.

Plutarch recorded that Alexander had earlier written to Pausanias, the physician treating Craterus, to remind his veteran general to be vigilant in his use of hellebore, widely used as a self-induced purge, as was antimony.86 ‘Its emetic properties were well known to the Hellenes and it was readily available from Alpine pastures of Europe and Asia.’⁸⁷ A key symptom of veratrum poisoning is the onset of epigastric pain that may also be accompanied with nausea and vomiting, and though victims can become completely incapacitated and even unable to move or speak, they do remain conscious. The National Poisons Centre report concluded that ‘veratrum alkaloids are readily extracted into alcohol by fermentation, and it is therefore possible’ that Iolaos spiked Alexander’s wine ‘with a volume of fermented veratrum extract.’⁸⁸

‘THY SECRET FIRE BREATHE O’ER HER HEART, TO POISON AND BETRAY’: THE TALE OF TOXIC ROME⁸⁹

We may never know what truly killed the Macedonian king at Babylon, but reports of poisoning in Roman and Hellenistic history suggest the ancient art of toxicology was long established in the West. Archagathus, the grandson of Agathocles the tyrant of Syracuse, arranged for his grandfather’s eromenos (a younger male lover), Menon, to load his king’s tooth-cleaning quill with a putrefactive drug. As a result, Agathocles was unable to utter a sound, even when being burned alive by Oxythemis, the envoy of Demetrius Poliorketes, the patron of the Cardian historian Hieronymus.⁹⁰ Once again, this is just one tradition and alternative endings exist. Inevitably the art of poison arrived in Rome; her ever-practical hand was employed in its development and it was to become big business across the empire.

As early as the drafting of the laws of Twelve Tables (ca. 450 BCE) special dispositions were put in place for cases of murder from drugs.⁹¹ The first recorded Roman crime involving accusations of poisoning dates back to 331 BCE (the same year Alexander defeated Darius III at Gaugamela) when a suspiciously high mortality rate pointed to the guilt of 190 Roman matrons who were then forced to drink their own cocktails.⁹² Similar cases in 186 BCE and 182 BCE resulted in the implication and death of over 5,000 alleged conspirators, again many of them women, when illustrious magistrates, consuls and men of rank mysteriously died. In 154 BCE two more ex-consuls were poisoned by their spouses and so prevalent was the use of poison by disgruntled wives that by Quintilian’s day the term ‘adulteress’ was apparently synonymous with the term ‘poisoner’.⁹³ Cicero, Juvenal, and Tacitus reported various cases of patricide, matricide and even filicide using toxic substances, and they also named the women who provided the tools for a fee.⁹⁴

Pliny was particularly lucid on the sources and types used, including a vivid description of hemlock, cicuta in Latin, now so widespread that in 82 BCE the dictator Sulla (ca. 138-78 BCE) promulgated a strict law against its use.95 The Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis at this point categorised poisoners, assassins and magicians together.⁹⁶ The term scelus, a crime, was employed by historians like Tacitus to indicate murder by poison, and the pigmentarii, the druggists behind them, were similarly restrained by law.⁹⁷

Mithridates VI of Pontus (ruled ca. 120-63 BCE), himself an adept in the art of poisons, had Crateus, his talented polypharmakos (broadly a ‘herbalist’), ever by his side.⁹⁸ He was perhaps following Attalus III of Pergamum (ca. 170-133 BCE) who, according to Plutarch, ‘… used to grow poisonous plants, not only henbane and hellebore, but also hemlock, aconite, and dorycnium, sowing and planting them himself in the royal gardens, and making it his business to know their juice and fruits, and to collect these at the proper season.’⁹⁹

The redoubtable Mithridates, who claimed descent from both Alexander and Darius I, and who reintroduced a Macedonian-styled phalanx formation when facing Sulla in battle, was so fearful of assassination that he self-vaccinated with a daily dose of a wide range of known toxins in search of the universal antidote, the theriac, an illusive mix that became known as antidotum mithridatium.¹⁰⁰ Rome granted Gnaeus Pompey wide-ranging powers to capture the Pontic king through the Lex Manilia. Pompey initially delayed any action, preferring first to establish useful alliances with the dynasts of the East in his own imitatio Alexandri. When finally caught, Mithridates had apparently built up such a constitution that he was unable to commit suicide by taking poison and had to resort to falling on the sword of a Celtic bodyguard, Bituitus, taking the knowledge of twenty-one languages with him.¹⁰¹ A less romantic tradition had him dying at the hand of the troops deserting to his son, Pharnaces; ambivalent on how he died, Rome granted Pompey honours for terminating the Pontic threat.¹⁰²

The Julio-Claudians used poison as liberally as garlic in defiance of Sulla’s decree.¹⁰³ Germanicus, Nero’s grandfather, was rumoured to have fallen foul of the famous venefica, Martina, an accomplished maker of drugs and invocator of curse tablets.¹⁰⁴ Tacitus dedicated considerable space to the intrigues and suspicions that fell upon Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, Munatia Plancina, and ultimately their employer, the emperor Tiberius, in the wake of Germanicus’ death; the toxic term venenum (possibly derived from ‘Venus’ and originally meaning a love potion) appears on forty-four occasions in Tacitus’ Annals.¹⁰⁵ Nero and Agrippina had the infamous Locusta in their service and they both kept the venefica gainfully employed after she (allegedly) assisted in the deaths of Claudius and his son; Locusta later opened an academy of poisons and tested her arts on convicted criminals. Agrippina went on to accuse Lollia Paulina, a rival for the position as fourth wife to Claudius, of black magic, and confiscated her property without trial.¹⁰⁶

It is the emperor Claudius once again who interests us the most in any comparison to the reporting of Alexander’s illness. Suetonius recorded that ‘most people thought he had been poisoned’ and by his official taster no less.¹⁰⁸ Suetonius followed with, ‘… an equal discrepancy exists between the accounts of what happened next. According to many, he lost his power of speech.’¹⁰⁹ Suetonius described a painful night and brief recovery, followed by a second dose of poison and then a coma. Tacitus reported that the second dose was administered to Claudius on a feather, a technique used to induce vomiting and a standard part of the physician’s purge.¹¹⁰ Compare this to the Metz Epitome and the Romance texts (T1, T2), which extend the Vulgate recounting of the conspiracy in Babylon. Here we have the description of the second poisoning from a feather by Alexander’s cupbearer, Iolaos (Chares interestingly claimed Ptolemy had been Alexander’s taster), along with the king’s final night of agony and speechless condition, juxtaposed beside the Journal’s claim that Alexander was speechless for the final two days and nights (T3, T4):¹¹¹

In the meantime, Alexander was in a sorry state. He wanted to vomit and so asked for a feather: Iolaos gave the king a feather smeared with poison. When he put this down his throat… he was continuously racked with renewed and ever more excruciating pains. In this condition, he passed the night.¹¹²

Had Roman biographers taken their lead from Pseudo-Callisthenes, or was the Romance itself a hydroscopic palimpsest (it had already absorbed the Pamphlet) that continued to absorb Roman biographical trends before adopting its final form in which less-colourful Pamphlet claims had been embellished? Perhaps, like the ever-present storms at sea in Greek plays (replayed in Virgil’s Aeneid), the central themes of the classical world simply infected and inhabited any biography with a low immune system. In which case Marcus Aurelius’ philosophical reflection comes readily to mind: ‘Constantly reflect on how all that comes about at present, came about just the same in days gone by…. [at] the whole court of Philip, or Alexander, or Croesus, for in every case the play was the same, and only the actors were different.’¹¹³

Claudius had reportedly dined on fatally seasoned mushrooms, a last meal Nero termed ‘the food of the gods’,¹¹⁵ and tradition gives us a death that implicated three assassins.¹¹⁶ Nero, whose name theatrically stood for ‘strong’ or ‘valiant’ in the Sabine tongue, had his personal guard, the Phalanx of Alexander, to call upon, so any rumour of Agrippina’s hand in the murder was surely ‘suppressed by the power of the people implicated by the rumour’, to repeat Curtius on Cassander’s suppression of the Pamphlet rumours.¹¹⁷

Having murdered his mother, possibly two wives, as well as two literary intellectuals, along with countless other prominent citizens who were sacrificed to divert the wrath of an approaching comet, Nero finally went mad and planned to poison the entire Senate.¹¹⁸ Deserted by his bodyguard, Nero discovered that the golden box containing Locusta’s poison had abandoned him too. After a dramatic earthquake and a lightning storm accompanied his hurried flight from Rome, he had a grave dug, exclaiming: ‘Qualis artifex pereo!’ – ‘What an artist dies in me!’ As horsemen could be heard fast approaching, Nero recalled the Iliad: ‘The thunder of galloping horses is beating against my ears’, and when his pursuers finally closed in, he is said to have stabbed himself in the throat, and yet managed to utter: ‘Too late! But ah, what loyalty!’ It was a thanks to the centurion attending him.¹¹⁹ His death fell on June 9^th, or more curiously, possibly on the 11^th of the month (in the year 68 CE), for the latter day of the year was portentously shared with Alexander.¹²⁰

But the artist in Nero never died; his death inspired ongoing rumours that captured the imaginations of his biographers and the artistry began in earnest. More in keeping with Nero’s reputation, an alternative version has him smashing two invaluable Homeric crystal goblets to deny his successors their use upon hearing of the defecting legions.¹²¹ Nero had intended to throw himself into the Tiber, and history really ought to have granted the self-proclaimed ‘great tragic actor’ a more extended soliloquy. Alas that would not do, as it was well known Agrippina had forbidden philosophy from his classes, just as Seneca had hidden all rhetorical works from his avowed pyromaniac pupil.¹²²

Death in itself does not sell scrolls unless the literary taxidermist has stuffed the corpse with a didactical potpourri, for the final pages of a parchment had to justify the price; and whether to eulogise or to condemn, the classical era demanded that the death suitably picture-framed the life. So underlying all great exits were fitting allegorical stories that alluded to deeper meanings, sometimes subtle and oft-times blatant. The bean field was a foil to ridicule Pythagoras’ strict vegetarian doctrine, a stance summed up by Ovid with ‘what a heinous crime is committed when guts disappear inside a fellow-creature’s guts’;¹²⁷ Pythagoras had warned against the kuanos, kidney pulses or broad beans, after he noted its organ-like shape, providing Plutarch much to ponder in his treatise On the Eating of Flesh.¹²⁸

Socrates’ nobility in the face of hemlock magnified Athens’ sin against philosophy, though somewhat more satirical was Lucian’s summation:

Yes; and very serviceable his dissertations on Justice were to him, were they not, when he was handed over to the Eleven, and thrown into prison, and drank the hemlock? Poor man, he had not even time to sacrifice the cock he owed to Asclepius. His accusers were too much for him altogether, and their philosophy had Injustice for its object.¹²⁹

Cicero’s humble courage sat beside a warning on political meddling, and Nero’s poor theatrics recalled his destructive self-deluded life on both the political and thespian stages. As far as his final exclamations, it has been pointed out that they were ‘self-consciously bathetic’ and doused in a sarcasm to highlight how far he had tumbled. Qualis artifex pereo, alluding to his dying artistic talent, was, according to Cassius Dio, oft-quoted and in general use. And quite in contrast, Demosthenes’ clever and pithy riposte to Archias recalled the opening of a prosecutor’s speech worthy of the formidable logographos.¹³⁰

Pyrrhus, who fought at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE at the tender age of eighteen beside his new patron and brother-in-law, Demetrius Poliorketes, was to become one of history’s greatest commanders. He resembled Alexander ‘in appearance swiftness and vigorous movement’ as well as in his descent from the heroes Achilles and Heracles. ‘The other kings, they said, represented Alexander with their purple robes, their body-guards, the inclination of their necks, and their louder tones in conversation; but Pyrrhus, and Pyrrhus alone, in arms and action.’¹³⁴ He went on to gain a reputation for unsustainable ‘Cadmean’ (today we use ‘Pyrrhic’) victories in Italy.¹³⁵

Having himself skirted with death by poison at the hand of his cupbearer (who in fact betrayed the plot arranged by his co-king, Neoptolemus, the son of Cleopatra, Alexander’s sister), and in return for all his hubris and unrelenting hostility, Pyrrhus was finally felled by a roof tile that defied the stoutness of his iconic goat-horned helmet; it was thrown down by an old woman defending her son when Pyrrhus was trapped in the narrow streets of Argos after his famous elephants had fallen and blocked the escape route out of the city’s main gate.¹³⁶ Pyrrhus finally collapsed and fell from his horse by the tomb of the Homeric Licymnius, an Argive warrior killed by Heracles son, Tlepolemus, who was then banned from the polis for the homicide.¹³⁷ Pyrrhus’ own instruments of war finally had sealed his fate and the grave on which he crumpled sang of his own sin against the city.

The Successor Wars in which Pyrrhus and Demetrius Poliorketes immortalised themselves were brutal, and the penalty for speaking out inappropriately was just as harsh: we recall that Hyperides, who is said to have proposed honours for Alexander’s poisoner, reputedly lost his tongue on Antipater’s orders; if anecdotal it surely captured the danger of the day.¹³⁸ Anaxarchus, a campaign philosopher who had accumulated great wealth, supposedly suffered the same fate when Nicocreon the Cypriot tyrant ordered him crushed by mortar and pestle after his tongue had been non-surgically removed; it was all for an indiscretion in which he had earlier suggested to Alexander at Tyre that he should serve up Nicocreon’s head on a platter.¹³⁹ Diogenes Laertius recorded Anaxarchus’ bold, but unlikely, retort: he bit off his own tongue and spat it at his tormentor. This too was a less than original epitaph for it was one he shared with Zeno of Elea.140 Known in life as eudaimonikos, ‘a happy one’, the rendering of Anaxarchus’ execution was, no doubt, a contrived lesson on careless talk and perhaps on the false tenets of eudaimonic philosophy.¹⁴¹

Ultimately death does not belong to the deceased but to those recording it, whether accompanied by a ‘do kill me properly’, ‘a cock to Asclepius’, or an empire ‘to the strongest’. In Alexander’s case, the reply (to the question on succession) was something of an hysteron proteron, a rhetorical device that places the later event first, for his vision of posthumous ‘funeral games’ had already been uttered. Those words, if ever said, would have been an act of ‘consummate irresponsibility’, as one scholar points out.¹⁴² But these details, in Plutarch’s opinion, graced the scrolls because ‘… certain historians felt obliged to embellish the occasion, and thus invent a tragic and moving finale to a great action.’¹⁴³ The real deaths, and the actual last words, are lost from biographies; they were most likely panic-stricken, god-fearing, bile and blood-spitting utterances that served no rhetorical purpose. A quick read of Ovid’s depiction of Heracles’ agony from the poisoning of the Learnean Hydra would well illustrate the point.¹⁴⁴

So what of Cyrus the Great and his tranquil deathbed meditations on a fulsome life, as presented in Xenophon’s eulogy of the Achaemenid king? Well, other accounts corroborate a blood-soaked death at the hands of Tomyris, queen of the promiscuous, carnivorous and bronze-bladed Massagetae; his severed head was pushed into a skin filled with human blood, after which the queen proceeded to harangue him.¹⁴⁵ Another version, captured in Ctesias’ Persika, saw Cyrus perish when fighting the Hyrcanian Derbices in the Upper Provinces, whilst Berossus claimed the kill came from Dahae archers near the Caspian Sea. Both Ctesias and Xenophon were present at, or fought in, the formative battle at Cunaxa, but with opposing armies, Xenophon fighting for the later pretender to the throne – Cyrus the Younger – and Ctesias allied to his throned brother, King Artaxerxes II. Ctesias’ report of Cyrus’ death in the battle was so drawn-out that Plutarch quipped: ‘As with a blunt sword, he is long in killing Cyrus, but kills him at last.’ So it is unsurprising that their history of Cyrus the Great maintained a similar conflict to the end.¹⁴⁶ Ctesias claimed the Susa archives as his source for detail – spuriously so. Xenophon claimed nothing except a heightened sense of theatre; nevertheless, it is his account that has gained the greater literary following.¹⁴⁷

The Athenian-born Xenophon, almost ‘immortalised’ in his capacity as the only 4^th century historian whose accounts survive, also chose epitaphs that suited his pro-Spartan biographies. In his Agesilaus he omitted his patron’s death altogether so as not to detract from the impact of his life, just as he did for Alcibiades in his Hellenika.¹⁴⁸ Even Xenophon’s Anabasis is missing three months; a gap that suggests it was a ‘black period’ for the 10,000 stranded Greeks.149

The Death of Archimedes. Engraving by the French painter Gustave Courtois (1853-1923). His alleged last words to an approaching soldier were: ‘Do not disturb my circles’.

Birth was just as exploitable as death, both its timing and genealogy. But the dating of birth and death was not determined by science and was often guided by the author’s floruit, literally his ‘flowering’. For without an attested date, standard procedure was to deduct fifty years from the production of a first masterpiece to arrive at the author’s birth, and then to add on the attested lifespan to arrive at his date of death. Thus we arrive at the tenuously approximated arrivals, alongside the spurious expirations, of Thucydides, Aristophanes and Aeschylus.¹⁵⁰ Suspiciously, Socrates’ birth was said to have been on the 6^th of the month of Thargelion, and the Persians were defeated at Marathon on the 6^th of Beodromion, the day of the month that Alexander reportedly faced Darius at the Granicus River, and the day (the 6^th) the Macedonian king was said to have been born.¹⁵¹ But where the former events brought luck to Athens, the last date did not. As conspicuously dubious was the birth of Euripides, allegedly born on Salamis the very day of the epic sea battle against Xerxes on 23rd September 480 BCE in the Euripus Strait (hence his patronymic); though the coincidence may have been propitious in the psyche of the Macedonian king, the Parian Chronicle records that Euripides arrived some years before.

Birth, death and genealogy: the malleable clays pinched, kneaded, spun, and finally fired into the legendary earthenware in which colourful lives, deaths, and the posthumous philosophical debates on them, were finally served up. The Pythagorean Golden Verses were almost certainly a later syncretic compilation; Pythagoras most likely took the ideas of a ‘numerological harmonious’ celestial world from Mesopotamia, transposing them into his ‘music of the spheres’.¹⁵⁵ Plato then absorbed his teachings into his own metaphysical concepts, culminating with his declaration that ‘God forever geometrises’.¹⁵⁶ And for all Pythagoras’ ‘greatness’, anti-Pythagorean rebellions expelled their communities from southern Italy, sick of their secret elitist cliques with oligarchic aspirations, a picture which rather undermines the tradition of their ascetic vegetarian advice. Pythagoras was, as Bertrand Russell once termed him, a ‘… mixture of philosopher, prophet, man of science and charlatan.’¹⁵⁷

Hippocrates’ revered medical teachings were far from universally accepted; his school on Kos, and the rival school at Cnidus, vied for credibility over the merits of ‘prognosis’ and ‘diagnosis’, though neither could perform an autopsy on one another’s opinions for the code was strictly opposed to post-mortems. The penultimate verse of the Hippocratic Oath reads (broadly) in translations: ‘All that I may see or hear (even if not invited)… I will keep secret and will never reveal.’ And he was true to his pledge, for whilst medicine and Hippocrates are inseparable today, very little is actually known about what he truly advocated in his lifetime, and none of the Hippocratic Canon can be attributed to him for certain. As with the corpus of Aristotle’s extant treatises, much material is surely the product of ‘disciple’ notes and not his original ink.¹⁵⁸

The attested ‘lives’ of Hippocrates, Asclepiades and Pythagoras the meta-physicist who dreamed up the kosmos, were proto-romances, and if not as fulsome as Alexander’s, they were sufficiently developed for their deaths to take on an air of mystery. But our attempts at classical myth-busting are certainly not new. True to his iconoclastic style, Timaeus rejected Empedocles’ volcanic end by claiming he simply went to the Peloponnese,¹⁶¹ whilst a notebook with the formula to Mithridates’ mysterious mithridatium, the supposed super antidote of legendary efficacy, was unearthed by Pompey and found to be a simple mix of rue, salt, nuts and figs which suggests it was no more effective than a cup of Hyppokras.¹⁶² Mithridates most likely had a duck do his toxic ingesting for him, but not to be outdone, according to Celsus’ De Medicina, the Romans added new ingredients to his recipe to bring them up to thirty-six in total; Galen (ca. 130-200 CE), whose own medical treatises remained in use for over 1,300 years, signed it off, and Agrippina supposedly enjoyed its benefits, vexing Nero’s attempts at matricide, and no doubt Locusta’s efforts too.¹⁶³

Pliny asked: ‘Which of the gods, in the name of Truth, fixed these absurd proportions?’ It could have been a statement about the empirical weight of dubious deaths, but in fact he was referring to mithridatium itself. Somewhat appropriately, when Pliny recorded the ingredients of the Pontic formula, he included the phrase ‘to be taken with a grain of salt’, Rome’s cum grano salis, from which we derive our sceptical expression. And that is surely how we should read the description of Mithridates’ own toxin resistance when finally captured, for Rome was rather good with poison by then.¹⁶⁴

When describing the source of the drug that professedly felled Alexander, it appears that the obviously educated originator of this story (which now implicated Aristotle) was exploiting a well-known legend. In Greek mythology the gods swore their oaths upon the dark waters of the Styx (possibly the modern Mavroneri River) at Nonacris; if their word was broken, Zeus forced them to drink a cup of the icy cold flow causing coma and loss of speech.¹⁶⁵ Pliny, Aelian and Strabo all report the tradition of deadly sulphurous streams trickling from the mountains; Pausanias commented the ‘lethal power’ of the Styx, ‘seemingly invented for the destruction of human beings’, was first recognised after goats drank from the watercourse and subsequently perished.¹⁶⁶ Through time the locals renamed it the ‘Black’ or ‘Terrible Waters’ in support of its deleterious effects on metals and clay containers.¹⁶⁷ If there is any truth to this, there must have been many who would have suffered the consequences.

But history doesn’t recognise the ‘middle men’, the ‘un-dead’. There are, for example, scant references to the fate of the wounded on Alexander’s campaign; the snow-blinded, frostbitten, the leprosy-afflicted, or the malaria-ridden who languished forever in a mud-brick Alexandria rather than returning to families across the Hellespont.168 None of the opomachoi, those unfit for battle, the bone-shattered, limb-lost and dysentery-emaciated infantrymen, were feted by fanfare or captured by Lysippus and Apelles in bronze or paint. Nor were the vulnerable skeuophorio, the baggage handlers targeted in the thick of the fight when possession of booty could decide a battle’s outcome. For there was no epideictic value in those whom fame had bypassed and Tyche had neglected. The Macedonian conqueror was indeed fortunate to have died so thoroughly, for a partial recovery, or even maiming, might have taken the ‘Great’ out of his name.

But Alexander did not endure completely unscathed. Plutarch’s sources claimed the king became excessively paranoid, assuaging his fears with drinking and sacrifices and with ‘foolish misgivings’ concerning his hetairoi, and it has also been suggested that this was the direct effect of mind-altering drugs covertly administered by those planning his death. Alexander filled the palace at Babylon with soothsayers of every description, and ‘now distrustful of the favour of Heaven and suspicious of his friends’ he became a ‘slave to his fears’; an intruder in the throne room was ‘put out of the way’ when possibly doing nothing more than enacting the ancient ritual of the ‘substitute king’ in the Babylonian New Year festival.¹⁶⁹ We have, it seems, been passed the description of a man losing his sanity; it captured something of the excess and paranoia of Caligula (who reportedly died leaving a trunk filled with poisons behind) and Nero rolled into one.¹⁷⁰ And in Alexander’s case, the poison, the intrigue and his famous last words were all stirred together in a rhetorical mortar and pestle and ground into a textual mithridatium that inoculated history against the truth in an era of stoic reflection.

Stoicism has been termed ‘a system put together hastily, violently, to meet a bewildered world’; it was more of a therapy than a philosophy, and that was certainly needed, for following Alexander’s death, the world was thrown into turmoil by the early unsettled Hellenistic monarchies, ‘when political freedom became a simple political catchword, rather than a battle cry’; the polis, the Greek city state, became subordinated to new and revived leagues, kingdoms and the ever eastward-lengthening shadow of Rome.¹⁷¹

Zeno of Citium (in Cyprus) established the school of the Stoikoi in 301 BCE from his Stoa Poikile, the painted arch in the Athenian Agora, directly after the Battle of Ipsus. Thereafter almost all of the successors of Alexander professed to be Stoics who believed logos could explain the order and coherence of the universe in which a man could plan and rationalise against overwhelming odds.172 Stoicism became the dominant philosophy for the Roman era literati once Panaetius arrived from Athens for a tour of indoctrination, despite the century and a half of attempts by the Sceptics (and Cato) to combat the spreading doctrine. The Stoa managed to maintain its existence until 529 CE when Justinian (ca. 482-565 CE) closed the philosophical schools at Athens to prevent ‘paganism’ undermining the purity of the Christian Church; it was an event that was to usher in the Dark Ages of Europe.¹⁷³

Panaetius befriended Scipio Aemilianus, whose Scipionic Circle of intellectuals included the poet Terence (ca. 195/185-159 BCE, collected as a slave on the campaign against Carthage), Sempronius Asellio, and the once-hostaged Polybius. Polybius’ own outlook, and his frequent use of tyche, appears to have stemmed from here.¹⁷⁴ Panaetius’ wisdom later found fertile ground in Cicero, in whose Paradoxa Stoicorum we find a plain-language explanation of the doctrine.¹⁷⁵ Cicero claimed ‘some Stoics are practically Cynics’.¹⁷⁶ The schools had indeed been connected through Crates of Thebes, a follower of Diogenes the Cynic and teacher to Zeno.¹⁷⁷

Stoicism helped shape the suasoria of Seneca, who used Cato the Younger (grandson of the elder paladin of the republic) and his ‘heroic suicide’ as a righteous example of the opposition to tyranny. The imperial tendrils of Stoic prohairesis (moral choices) crept in through Augustus’ teacher, Athenodorus of Tarsus, and ultimately it laid the foundations for the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the last of the ‘five good emperors’, nostalgically written in Greek and housing reflections on a life that witnessed an empire at its peak.

Ataraxia (tranquillity), autarkeia (self-sufficiency) and eudaimonia (loosely, ‘happiness’) all took on new relative weights in their associations to Tyche, now Fortuna, and moirai, now fatum, but their roles remained essentially the same. The vocabulary encompassing new doctrines (areskontai) was certainly not new, but only its emphasis, for no radical new philosophies emerged in the Hellenistic era; Pythagoras had already made the distinction that: ‘Fate is determined, orderly and consequent, while fortune is spontaneous and casual.’¹⁷⁸ What we classify today as Cyrenaicism, Pyrrhonism, Peripateticism, Epicureanism and Stoicism developed like a palimpsest of derivative anecdotes piled on one another and subtly realigned with the metaphysical inclinations of each new sage. ‘Slight changes were made… in the superstructure. But nobody thought of examining the foundations.’¹⁷⁹

The Megarian school of Stilpo, personally known to Ptolemy and attended by Demetrius Poliorketes, Zeno and Cleitarchus, has, for example, been described as ‘a hybrid produced by grafting ‘Socratic ideas on the Eleatic trunk’; Stilpo himself ‘attempted to fuse Megarian dialectic with the Cynic way of life’.180 What we term Middle Platonism, which absorbed Stoic and Peripatetic doctrine, was another hybrid result, and though ‘men give more renown to that song which comes newest to their ears’, the development of Western philosophy has been described as consisting of nothing more than a ‘series of footnotes to Plato’, who most likely borrowed ideas from Zoroastrianism.¹⁸¹

Despite the philosophical background noise and their elitist pretensions, Arrian and Plutarch, for example, ought to have raised their heads above the epideictic din to question why Alexander made no attempt to formally arrange his far-reaching estate, and neither of them considered that the king’s Journal they cited is by definition a propaganda document of a royal court. But Ptolemy’s pedestrian treatise appealed to Arrian’s military palate so that he mistook platitudinous competency for historical fidelity. As has been neatly pointed out, what Ptolemy had not written, Arrian could not have read, so he and Plutarch fell into the same Journal-baited trap.¹⁸²

Arrian’s misplaced faith took the form of a liturgy to the fidelity of basileia:

…but my view is that Ptolemy and Aristobulus are more trustworthy on their narrative. Aristobulus accompanied Alexander on his campaigns. Ptolemy not only campaigned with Alexander, but as a king himself, it would have been more dishonourable for him than for anyone else to provide untruths; moreover both wrote when Alexander was dead and so there was no compulsion nor anything to gain from writing anything but what actually happened…¹⁸³

The sentiment from Arrian recurs in the speech given by Alexander to his untrusting and debt-burdened men after mass weddings at Susa.¹⁸⁴ In his How to Write History Lucian wryly noted: ‘The impossible was believed of Achilles because Homer, preserving his deeds posthumously, would therefore have no motive for lying.’¹⁸⁵ Lucian had identified an Achilles’ heel in historical method, and it sounds remarkably similar to Arrian’s prolalia. Had Ptolemy himself opened with a similar self-declaration on his content? We might try and approximate it:

I write as a King whose word and honour counts above all things, and as a Companion and Bodyguard of King Alexander III of Macedonia, privileged myself to be present at and a part of great events; and just as Homer recorded the deeds of Achilles with no agenda – for his subject was then long dead – I write an account only of things that truly took place, as I witnessed them.

In stark contrast to the views of Plato and Pythagoras, the Stoics (and Epicureans) were tolerant of suicide in extreme circumstances, considering it an appropriate escape from the frustrations of the world.¹⁸⁷ Not only was suicide the man’s right, it was also considered a rational means of achieving ataraxia, freeing the soul from the suffering body, if moira or fatum, the Greek and Roman embodiments of ‘inevitability’ and the twist of fate, had decreed an impossible position.¹⁸⁸ Although Tacitus, as one example, placed little value on ‘self-murder’, which he considered politically useless, he did incorporate its detail to add dramatic tones to his chapters. He also reported on more widespread suicides which were prompted by the fact that Wills remained valid (and so bequeathed assets) for those who killed themselves, whereas those condemned to death by execution forfeited their estates if they did not.¹⁸⁹

Pliny came to regard suicide as the greatest gift amid life’s hardships.¹⁹⁰ Livy recorded that the residents of Marseilles (excluding soldiers and slaves for whom suicide was illegal) had petitioned the Senate and were given permission to end their life by taking hemlock that was provided to them by the state free of charge. At home ‘patriotic suicide’ became widespread; a high proportion of well-known philosophers ended their lives this way (some forced to) including Seneca and Lucretius whose poem On the Nature of Things introduced Epicureanism to Roman culture.¹⁹¹

The Roman intellect was therefore receptive to what we might term Alexander’s ‘succession suicide’ and his vision on posthumous chaos; his last words, more cynical than useful, somehow became a demonstration of katheikon, moral duty, stoic behaviour espoused by Cicero in his posthumously published De Officiis, encapsulating his own moral code and definitions of moral duty. Moreover, Alexander’s words suggested he was dying content, as Epictetus proposed everybody should.¹⁹² Plato had proposed: ‘If a man has trained himself throughout his life to live in a state as close as possible to death, would it not be ridiculous for him to be distressed when death comes to him?’¹⁹³

But where did the Vulgate allusion to ‘funeral games’ originate? If Onesicritus had provided a fearful and guarded narrative on Alexander’s passing, as the Pamphlet detail from the Metz Epitome claimed,¹⁹⁴ and if the title of his book, On the Education of Alexander, did indeed set out to emulate Xenophon’s account of Cyrus, then Cleitarchus might have been able to extract useful reflections from there.¹⁹⁵ For Cyrus, on his deathbed, demanded his sons to throw ‘entertainment that is fitting in honour of a man’. The narrative concluded with: ‘But no sooner was he dead than his sons were at strife, cities and nations revolted, and all things began to decay.’¹⁹⁶ It required the lightest touch of the stylus by a historian schooled by the Cynics (as he was) and with a good knowledge of Xenophon to conjure up the now-famous premonition of posthumous chaos.

It is perhaps a Homeric allusion to the brief return of Protesilaus from the dead and it might have been another product of Lucian’s satirical imagination.¹⁹⁸ But it hints that Onesicritus was somehow associated with the coverage of Alexander’s death and perhaps he truly did steer clear of revealing too much; was Onesicritus’ closing chapter longer than we suppose? For though Thucydides noted that: ‘fear drives out memory’, Plutarch added, ‘unless philosophy has drawn her chords about them’.¹⁹⁹

We might similarly question who, or what, inspired Cleitarchus to equip Alexander with the now immortal Vulgate reply – ‘to the strongest’ – when questioned on succession (T6, T7, T8, T9). These words may indeed have actually been said, or rumour had it they were uttered, though in a very different context. But if Cleitarchus had been obliged to erase the testament from his account, the vacuum at Babylon needed filling with another epitaphic construction. What further inspiration did Cleitarchus have before him?

Onesicritus’ sixth question to the wisdom-laden gymnosophists in India – how might a man most endear himself to mankind? – carried the reply, ‘if he were the strongest, and yet an object of fear to no one’.²⁰⁰ In addition, he had the immortal lines originating with Euripides, but possibly recirculating in Cleitarchus’ day with a story now relating to Pyrrhus: for the Epirote king had three sons, named Ptolemy, Alexander and Helenus, by three different wives, and as a boy one of them is said to have asked his father which son would eventually inherit his kingdom. Pyrrhus replied: ‘To that one of you who keeps his sword the sharpest.’ Plutarch revealed: ‘This, however, meant nothing less than the famous curse of Oedipus in the tragedy: “with whetted sword”, and not by lot, the brothers should divide the house. So savage and ferocious is the nature of rapacity.’

The line came from The Phoenician Women of Euripides, the tragedian Alexander seems to have been most attached to. The play continued with: ‘So they [his sons] were afraid that the gods might fulfil his prayers if they dwell together.’²⁰¹ It is noteworthy that Cassander, at the centre of the conspiracy, and who did wipe out Alexander’s Argead line, had offered a reward of 200 talents for the infant Pyrrhus so that he could terminate the Pyrrhidae too.202 So was Cleitarchus’ syncretic conclusion a classic oratio oblique built on indirect inferences to already ‘classic’ but well-worn tragic endings, with an outcome that would have freed him from attempting to capture an unspeakable truth? If a part of his intent was to portray a death resonating of selfishness in the face of impending chaos, then Stoicism simply re-rendered that as ‘selflessness’ and that interpretation stuck.

Alexander’s death scene is of course a didactic pastiche, and yet Justin’s summation provided a perfect example of the Stoic interpretation:

While they (the soldiers) all wept, he not only did not shed a tear, but showed not the least token of sorrow; so that he even comforted some who grieved immoderately, and gave others messages to their parents; and his soul was as undaunted at meeting death, as it had formerly been at meeting an enemy.²⁰³

The Dying Alexander Receiving his Soldiers by Andre Castaigne, painted 1898-1899.

Actions do not disturb people,
but opinions about actions;
for example, death is nothing terrible,
or else it would have appeared so to Socrates also,
but the opinion about death, that it is terrible,
that is what is terrible.²⁰⁴

The liberally sprinkled Hellenistic attributions to pothos, an inner yearning that attached itself to Alexander, and to tyche that was first showcased in Demetrius of Phalerum’s Peri Tyches which so impressed Polybius, took on the new mantle of stoic vocabulary and digressions on divine Fate, Providence and Destiny, uniting the various philosophical loose ends.²⁰⁶ Alexander’s campaign historians were not alone in introducing pothos to a tale longing to be told;²⁰⁷ Thucydides, Herodotus and Pindar had all employed it before them.²⁰⁸ However pothos is a misleadingly gentle word for that age of destruction, when pleonexia and philochrematia, greed and the love of money, might have been used instead.

If the ‘yearning for more’ became the stock rationale for Alexander’s otherwise unacceptable behaviour, then the Greek term pothos, and the Roman equivalent, ingens cupido, have much to answer for. In Greek mythology, Pothos was the son of Zephyr the Westerly Wind, though somewhat more relevantly, it was also the name of the Delphinium flower that Greeks placed on an ancestor’s tomb.²⁰⁹ Its stoical overtones seem to have given off a fragrance that sidetracked investigative minds, leaving Alexander with an unmarked grave and a makeshift headstone with the indelible intestate graffiti, ‘to the strongest’, scrawled awkwardly across it (T6, T7, T8, T9).

2.Xenophon Cyropaedia Book 1.3.8-10, translated by HG Dakyns, Project Gutenberg.

4.According to Pliny 33.33-34 antimony found in silver was used as eyebrow cosmetic.

5.Guthrie-Fideler (1987) p 28. The oath was sworn to the discoverer of the Tetraktys, the triangular formation of the first ten numbers. See also Riedweg (2002) p 29. It was also known as the Mystike Tetras.

6.Dyskrasia is a term attributed to the Hippocratic imbalance of The Four Humours of the body. Iamblichus Life of Pythagoras 15 and 25. The quadrivium disciplines were: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

7.Seneca On the Shortness of Life, translation by CND Costa, Penguin edition, London, 1997, p 10.

8.Diogenes Laertius Empedocles. See discussion in Gottschalk (1980) pp 14-20. Heracleides reported Empedocles’ death in his treatise On Diseases.

9.Much of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae tends towards romance: examples of pre-death portents can be seen at The Two Maximini 31, Severus Alexander 60, Caracalla 11 and Commodus 16.

10.Empedocles is considered the first philosopher to bring all four basic elements in a creation theory; see discussion in Collins (2008) p 32.

11.Aelian 2.26 citing Aristotle’s lost work, On the Pythagoreans (Fr. 191 R). Russell (1946) p 60 ff for Empedocles’ career.

12.Felix Martí-Ibanez A Prelude to Medical History, MD Publications Inc, New York, 1961, Library of Congress ID: 61-11617.

13.For Democritus’ age at death see Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 18 citing 104 and Diogenes Laertius 9.43 for age 109. The ‘pseudo’ attached to Lucian here denoting that the prosopography is possibly another spuriously assigned work. For reference to Aristotle’s claim see Jones (1886). For several deaths see Margotta (1968) p 66. Soranus penned a doxography and the Suda has further conflicting detail.

14.Photius Life of Pythagoras 1 and Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 22 for Hieronymus’ age.

18.Diodorus 16.3.8 for the length of Theopompus’ Philippica; discussion in Plutarch Moralia 328a-b or Fortune 4 for the philosophers who did not write anything of their doctrine down.

23.Plato Symposium 223d: ‘Socrates was driving them to the admission that the same man could have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy – that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well.’ Translation by NH Fowler, Harvard University Press, 1925.

26.Censorinus De Die Natali 15.2 stated age eighty-one and Diogenes Laertius Diogenes claimed ‘nearly ninety’.

27.See discussion in Brown (1949) p 29 and p 31 for ‘canonised’. The Academy’s rejection of Diogenes is credited for his elevation by the Stoics. Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 2.18-22.

28.Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus for nature’s mirror. Lucretius preserved much of Epicurus’ doctrine in his epic poem On the Nature of Things. The ‘symmetry’ argument was supposed to take away the fear of death.

30.See discussion in Griffin (1986) p 199 for reference to Socrates’ alleged last words in Plato’s Phaedo.

31.Plutarch Moralia 607f or On Exile 17, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, Vol. VII, 1959.

32.Quoting S Kreis (2000) Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History, Lecture 9, From Polis to Cosmopolis: Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World, 323-30 B.C., updated 2010.

33.Plutarch The Younger Cato 68.2 and 70.1 for Cato’s reading of Plato’s Phaedo.

35.Plutarch Demosthenes 29.3 translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition Vol. VII, 1919.

36.Plutarch Demosthenes 30.5-6. Kebric (1977) p 23 footnote 30 for possible origins with Duris.

37.Lucian Demosthenes: An Encomium 31-32 translation by HW and FG Fowler, Clarendon Press, 1905.

38.Diogenes Laertius Aristotle 8, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1925, and Aristotle 7 for his death by aconite. Chroust (1970) p 650 footnote 90 for the alternative traditions. Eurymedon (or Demophilus) had tried to associate Aristotle’s encomium (or hymn) to Hermias with impiety for casting Virtue as a goddess and for the inscription on his statue at Delphi; Diogenes Laertius Aristotle 5-6.

39.Suetonius Caesar 82.2 and Plutarch Caesar 66.9. Kai su is more convincingly a threatening accusation than a philosophical lament. Ovid Metamorphoses book 15 lines 794-797 for ‘upheavals’.

40.The existing popular line of Shakespeare appeared in Richard Fede’s Latin play Caesar Interfectus of 1582 and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke & co of 1595, a source work for Henry VI, Part 3. See discussion in Malone The Works of William Shakespeare, Chapman and Hall, London, 1866, p 648.

41.The words read ‘Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.’

42.Kaufman (1932) p 165 for Asinius Pollio’s role as a defence lawyer in accusations of poisoning.

43.Discussion in Wright (1995) and also Roller (1997) pp 109-130. A fulsome account of the death is Plutarch Cicero 46.3-5. For the proscriptions see Cassius Dio 47.8.4.

46.For Callisthenes’ death see Lane Fox (1980) chapter 3, footnote 15. For Pyrrhus’ death see Hornblower (1981) citations p 248, Plutarch Pyrrhus 34, Pausanias 1.13.8 gave two accounts; Hieronymus provided another derivative.

47.Livy claimed both hands were cut off. Appian, Cassius Dio and Valerius Maximus claimed just one.

51.For Valerian’s death see Lactantius De Mortibus Persecutorum 5; Plutarch Gaius Gracchus 17 for reports of Gracchus’ death.

53.The nature of Socrates’ poison has been disputed since the publication of Johannes Weepers’ treatise Cicutae aquaticae historia et noxae, Basel, 1679. See full discussion in Brickhouse-Smith (2001). Full paper of the authors titled Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth? can be read in the Journal of the International Plato Society, State University of New York at Buffalo.

55.Plutarch Phocion 36.3-4. The executioner refused to ‘bruise’ more hemlock unless he paid 12 drachmas. Blackwell (1999) p 63 for discussion of Phocion’s career. Aelian 11.9 for Phocion’s gift from Alexander.

60.Theophrastus Enquiry into Plants 9.16.2 for aconite and 9.11.5-6 for strychnine, referenced in Engels (1978) pp 224-228 although this apparently refers to the non-lethal and less bitter variety. See Kaufman (1932) p 164 for discussion about masking poison in wine and Juvenal 1.69-70 and 6.663

61.Ovid Metamorphoses 7:404-424 where Medea attempted to poison Theseus with an aconite mix.

62.Full story in Ogden (2001) p 169; Ovid Metamorphoses 7.406 ff and Pliny 27.4 for the link to Cerberus and Heracles.

63.Quoting D Feeny in the Introduction XIX to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Penguin Classics edition, 2004. Whilst the charge against Ovid is unknown, it seems his Ars Amatoria, The Art of Love, offended the conservative Augustus.

64.Mayor (2003) p 72 for ‘spear poison’. In Latin strychnos (the root of strychnine) – ‘a king of nightshade’ – became the generic word for plants with similar effects. Pliny 21.177-182 and Celsus stated that what the Greeks knew as strychnos (acrid) was known as solanum by the Romans.

66.The compact Scythian bow was so-called due to its double-curved shape, reminiscent of a heart. Discussion of its effectiveness in Snodgrass (1967) p 82. The arrows were most likely held in the draw-hand for rapid horseback firing.

68.Homer Odyssey 1.300-310. Helen’s actions discussed in Collins (2008) p 144 quoting Homer Odyssey 4.230.

70.Diodorus 17.90.5-6 and 17.103.5 for the venomous snakes and the preparation of poison, and quoting 19.33.2-4.

73.Hesiod Work and Days 342, Photius Epitome 72 of Ctesias’ Persica, 29; Plutarch Artaxerxes 19 for Parysatis’ poisoning of Stateira.

74.The list of assassinations discussed in Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 53; Anson (2013) pp 80-81 for a list of the Argead kings who died in court intrigues.

75.Pausanias 9.7.2 for the allegation of poison at the death of Alexander IV and Heracles.

78.See Atkinson-Yardley (2009) pp 148-149 and Atkinson (2009) pp 28-46 for a useful summary of the theories propounded to date on a natural death. Renault (1975) pp 228-230.

79.A mule or ass’s hoof according to Plutarch 77.4, Pliny 30.149, Vitruvius 8.3.16; Justin 12.14; Pausanias 8.17-18; the Romance 3.31 on the other hand claimed lead inside an iron container was used; it made no mention of Aristotle. The Metz Epitome stated that Antipater ‘prepared some poison in a small iron box. This he locked within an ass’s hoof with an iron clasp, that the virulence of the poison might be contained.’

80.Lucian Dialogues of the Dead 13. The Lethe was one of the five rivers of Hades, also referred to as Ameles potamos, the river of oblivion (the broad translation of lethe). Orphic mythology demanded the dead drink not from Lethe (Forgetfulness) but from the pool of Mnemosyne (Memory). Author’s interpretation – Lethe water as a cure for Aristotelian ‘Goods’ (plural) rather than ‘Good’ and here seen as a sarcastic play upon the poison Aristotle allegedly furnished to Cassander from the Styx…thus he refers to hellebore in the previous sentence as it was a known purge and assisted in vomiting to empty the stomach of poison.

81.Plutarch 77.5, Aelian 12.64 claimed thirty days unburied; Aelian 13.30 for Olympias’ grief upon hearing it.

84.Milne (1968) pp 256-6 argued for strychnine poisoning; Engels (1978) pp 224-228. See Atkinson-Yardley (2009) pp 232-233 and Atkinson (2009) p 26 for the coma theory. Curtius 10.9.1, Plutarch 77.5 and Aelian 12.64 for references to the corpse remaining fresh for days (or a month – Aelian) after being pronounced dead. The clinicopathological protocol was established by Dr DW Oldach in the New England Journal of Medicine 338, no. 24 (11 June 1998), pp 1764-1769.

86.Plutarch 41.7. For antimony use see U Arndt The Philosopher‘s Magnet – Alchemic Transmutation of Antimony, first published in the magazine Paracelsus, November 2005, pp 12-17.

89.Virgil Aeneid 1.657-694, translation by Theodore C Williams, Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston, 1910.

92.Full discussion of the early tradition of poison in Kaufman (1932) pp 156-157.

95.Many references appeared in Pliny 2.197; at 20.197-199 he recorded suicide by opium; 21.177-182, the use of deadly nightshade; 25.35-27 henbane, 25.47-61 hellebore; 16.50-51 and the effects of yew; 22.92-99 toxic mushrooms; 24.93-96 Spanish fly; 29.66-68 snake venom; various other references are made to spiders and other venomous animals, see Kaufman (1932) pp 161-164 for full details. Pliny’s vivid description of hemlock can be found at 25.151-154.

97.See Kaufman (1932) p 166 for Sulla’s law and its ramifications and also Cilliers-Retief (2000) p 89 referring to Tacitus 1.5.2, 4.10.2, 6.33.1, 12.66.3.

99.Plutarch Demetrius 20.3-4. Translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1920.

100.Hojte (2009) pp 121-130. Snodgrass (1967) p 129 for Mithridates’ battle technique involving the Macedonian sarissa-type phalanx. The antidote was also referred to as mithridatacum.

101.Cassius Dio 37.13, also Appian Civil Wars 16.111. Full discussion of Pompey’s imitatio Alexandri in Hojte (2009) pp 121-130.

105.Tacitus 12.66 and 13.15 recorded that Martina was suspected of poisoning Germanicus. Citing the observation made in Atkinson (2009) p 239 on venenum. Cilliers-Retief (2000) p 89 for the possible roots of venenum.

111.For Iolaos as official cupbearer see Romance 3.31.4, Metz Epitome 96, Arrian, 7.27.2 and Plutarch 74.2. For Ptolemy’s role as ‘taster’ see Robinson (1953) p 78 for full citation from Chares.

112.Metz Epitome 99, translated from Heckel-Yardley (2004) pp 218-289; also Romance 3.32.

114.Translates loosely as ‘what an artist dies in me’; Nero’s alleged last words.

115.Suetonius Nero 33, confirmed by Cassius Dio 60.35 who stated Nero’s quip meant that once Claudius had eaten the mushrooms he joined the gods.

116.Suetonius Claudius 44 claimed he was in Rome whereas Tacitus 12.66 stated he was in Sinuessa. His death is additionally recorded by Josephus 20.148 and 151, Cassius Dio 60.34, Pliny 2.92, 11.189, 22.92 citing Halotus, his taster, Xenophon, his doctor and Locusta as the assassins.

117.Suetonius Nero 1 for the origins of Nero’s name. Suetonius Nero 19 for his personal phalanx. Curtius 10.10.18-19.

118.Suetonius Nero 35-39 and for his planned poisoning of the Senate, Suetonius Nero 43.

120.Alexander died either on June 10^th or 11^th. If the 10^th, it is likely, from the body’s continued state of preservation, that physical death took place hours after it was announced. Modern astronomical calculations suggest the 11^th rather than the 10^th; full chronological discussion in Depuydt (1997) pp 117-135, Hannah (2005) p 95, Stoneman (1991) p 159. For Nero’s death on the 11^th see C Murison, Galba, Otho and Vitellius: Careers and Controversies. Spudasmata 52. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1993, p 6.

121.The goblets were smashed in a rage when Nero heard of the defection of his northern Italian legions. The goblets were termed ‘Homeric’ as they were engraved with scenes from Homer’s poems. For recent reinterpretations of Nero’s exclamations see Pitcher (2009) pp 50-51.

128.Pythagoras allegedly forbade the consumption of kidney beans. The Egyptians did the same relating its shape to the male testicle. In fact there may have been sound medical grounds for the advice or it may have been religious and to do with transmigration: ‘eating broad beans and gnawing on the head of one’s parents are one and the same’; Grmek (1989) p 218 and pp 210-244. On the Eating of Flesh appears in Plutarch Moralia.

132.Pliny 10.3.6-8; Aelian De Natura Animalium 7.16, Valerius Maximus Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium 9.12.2 also has a version in which blinded by the sun’s reflection from Aeschylus’ bald head, the eagle was dazzled into dropping the tortoise. For his part at Marathon, see Lattimore (1953) pp 1-3. Aeschylus’ reference to Homer is at Athenaeus 8.347e.

133.Plutarch Marcellus 19.4-6. The text describes how Archimedes defied arrest telling the soldier he was in the middle of a mathematical problem. These were Archimedes’ last words. The reply has since evolved.

134.Plutarch Pyrrhus 8.1. Translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1920. Plutarch Pyrrhus 1.4 and Justin 17.3.4 for Pyrrhus’ descent.

135.See discussion in Green (2007) pp 46-48. Pyrrhus allegedly exclaimed ‘another such victory over the Romans and we are ruined!’ after the battle at Asculum; Plutarch Pyrrhus 17.4 and 21.4 ff. The ancient Greeks would have termed a self-defeating victory ‘Cadmean’ after Cadmus’ loss of all his companions when trying to slay the water-dragon.

136.Plutarch Pyrrhus 5.3-7. Pyrrhus always wore a helmet with goat horns protruding.

138.Plutarch Demosthenes 28.4, Arrian Events After Alexander 1.13 for the cutting out of Hyperides’ tongue and Plutarch Moralia 849f or Life of the Ten Attic Orators 9, Hyperides, for linking that to his proposing honours for Iolaos.

139.A claim possibly inspired by or backed up by Plutarch 28.4 in which Alexander claimed Anaxarchus wanted to see a row of satrap heads on the dinner table, rather than humble fare. Diogenes Laertius 9.59 and Valerius Maximus 3.3.ext 4 for the ‘tale’ of his biting off his own tongue.

140.Diogenes Laertius Anaxarchus 9.2-3. Also Zeno 9.5. According to Hermippus he was crushed with mortar and pestle but the common tradition was that Zeno bit off his own tongue and spat it at ‘the tyrant’.

141.Borza (1995) pp 175-176 for discussion of the Eudaimonic school of philosophy.

145.Herodotus 1.204-216. The Massagetae was a tribe with close links to the Scythians. See Arrian 4.11.9 and 5.4.5 for Cyrus’ death at the hands of the Scythians. Also referred to in Lucian’s Charon of the Observers 13.

146.Xenophon Cyropaedia 1.7.9. For Ctesias see Photius Epitome 72 of Ctesias’ Persika, in which Cyrus dies in battle against the Derbices of Hyrcania. Also Cook (1983) p 21 for the Cunaxa references.

147.Diodorus 2.32.4, discussed in Grafton (1990) p 9. Herodotus 1.214 for Cyrus’ death.

148.Xenophon Agesilaus as proposed by Brown (1949) p16. For Alcibiades see Xenophon Hellenika 11.1.25.

150.Pausanias 1.23.9 claimed Thucydides was murdered on his return to Athens, which, due to his exile, must have been after the city’s surrender in 404 BCE. However evidence exists that he lived past 397 BCE. Plutarch claimed he was interred in Cimon’s family vault; Plutarch Cimon 4.1.

151.Plutarch Camillus 19 for the date of Marathon; Plutarch dedicated the paragraph to how unlucky the month of Thargelion was for ‘barbarians’.

152.Plutarch Antony 4 for his emulation of Heracles, and for Commodus see Cassius Dio 72.15.5 and Historia Augusta, Commodus 9. For a summary of the Roman emulation of Alexander, see discussion in De Polignac (1999) p 8.

154.The Return of the Heracleidae is also known as the Dorian invasion, when the scattered sons of Heracles come home to claim their rightful ancestral lands, including Sparta; see Herodotus 8.73, Pausanias book 1.32, 1.41, 2.13, 2.18, 3.1, 4.3.3, 4.30.1; Euripides Herakleidai 6.52 and 9.27.

157.Theopompus proposed Pythagorean philosophy was not more than an attempt at tyranny, FGrHist 115 F73, also Diogenes Laertius Pythagoras 8.39, discussed in Riedweg (2002) pp 101-108. See further discussion in Riedweg (2002) Preface, p X, quoting Russell (1946) p 60.

158.See discussion in J Chadwick and WN Mann The Medical Works of Hippocrates, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1950 pp 1-3.

160.Pliny 26.7. Discussion of Asclepiades rhetorical career in E Rawlinson The Life and Death of Asclepiades of Bithynia, Classical Quarterly 32 (ii), 1982, pp 358-370. Plato described Hippocrates as an Asclepiad in his Protagoras suggesting he was a priest of the Asclepion of Kos.

161.Diogenes Laertius Empedocles 5 and 8.69-71. See discussion in Gottschalk (1980) pp 14-20.

162.Suetonius Nero 33-34. For mithridatium see Cilliers-Retief (2000) p 90 and Mayor (2003) p 150 ff. Hyppokras was a spiced wine traditionally credited to Hippocrates.

163.Pliny described how mithridatium actually contained the blood of ducks that had been fed multiple poisons, also cited by Aulus Gellius 17.16. Agrippina took antidotes and Nero, despite repeated attempts, was unable to poison her; see Suetonius Nero 33-34. For the Roman-expanded recipe for mithridatium see also Celsus De Medicina V.23.3, Cassius Dio 37.13. Galen prepared mithridatium for Nero and Marcus Aurelius too.

164.Two versions of the origination of the expression exist. The etymologist C Ammer traced it back to the Latin expression cum grano salis, citing Pliny’s description of mithridatium in Natural History, 29.24-25, which first used the expression; the alternative tradition traces its first use in the English language back to 1647, see Oxford English Dictionary, as simply the flavouring for bland dishes.

167.Full discussion of the waters of the Styx at Nonacris in Mayor (2010) pp 1-29. Modern theory suggests that if indeed this was its source, the effects came from naturally occurring corrosive acids, lethal minerals from (non-evident) ancient mining close by, toxic salts from the venting of a thermo-active fault-line, or the seasonal flooding and washing-in of local toxic plants. A case has also been made for the presence of the killer bacteria Calicheamicin occurring in Micromonospora echinospor thought to be present in adjacent limestone and soils. Discussed in Mayor (2010) pp 9-13.

169.Atkinson (2009) pp 35-36 for discussion of mind-altering drugs. For his paranoia and fears Plutarch 74.2-5, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1919 and Plutarch 73.7-9. Arrian 7.24-25 described that Alexander and his friend, whilst playing ball, beheld a man seated on the king’s throne, in silence, wearing the royal diadem and robes. He claimed the god Serapis had come to him and bid him sit on the throne. Alexander had him ‘put out of the way’ as advised by his seers. The whole episode sounds remarkably like the Babylonian ritual of the substitute king; following Oates (1979) p 140, Green (1974) p 472.

170.For paranoia see Suetonius Caligula 56-57 and on his excesses 52,54,58; for paranoia, see Suetonius Nero 46 and for excesses Nero 42.

172.See discussion Bury-Barber-Bevan-Tarn (1923) p 26. The name Stoicism comes from the Stoa Poikile or ‘painted arch’ from where Zeno commenced teaching in the Agora at Athens. That the early successors declared themselves Stoics was observed by Murray (1915) p 47. Long (1986) p 18 for explanation of logos.

173.Following Tarn (1927) p 325 and the comment that the school of Plato (after 266 BCE when Arcesilaus centred Platonism on Scepticism) became a ‘parasite upon the Stoa’. Long (1986) p 235 for the fate of the Stoa.

174.See discussion on Polybius’ use of tyche in Brouwer (2011) pp 111-132 and McGing (2010) pp 195-201.

175.Cicero’s references to Panaetius can be found in his De Finibus 4.9 in the De Officiis 1.26, Laelius De Amicitia 27; Pro Murena 31; De Natura Deorum-Velleius 1.13.3.

177.Brown (1949) for the career of Crates and his links to both philosophical schools.

181.Quoting Whitehead (1929) p 63 and Homer Odyssey 1.351-2. Plato’s borrowings from Zoroaster were parodied by the Epicurean Colotes; discussed in Momigliano (1977) pp 18-19.

183.Arrian excerpts from 1.1.1-3. Here basileia meaning ‘kingship’ not queen, differentiated in Greek by a diacritic (not used here).

185.Lucian How to Write History 2.40-41 noted that many people believed Homer’s account of Achilles’ deeds as he wrote long after the hero’s death and hence had no agenda as a historian. Arrian stated something similar in his opening page of his Alexander biography.

186.Lucian and Arrian were broadly contemporaries. However Lucian outlived him and made reference to Arrian’s works with which he was undoubtedly familiar. We propose Arrian’s opening statement about Ptolemy’s may in fact mirror Ptolemy’s opening, which Lucian may also have read.

187.Both Plato and Pythagoras objected to suicide except in exceptional circumstances. See Plato Phaedo 61d-e; Pythagoras prohibited suicide; see discussion in Riedweg (2005) p 110.

188.Discussed in Long (1986) p 206. Also see Cicero De Finibus 3.60-61. The Moirae were the three parthenogenous daughters of the Goddess of Necessity: Clotho, Lacheis and Atropus. Under the Roman Stoic doctrine, the meanings of fate and fortune became hardly discernible. See discussion in Levene (1993) p 13.

189.Tacitus 6.29; see Griffin (1986) p 193 for full discussion on Tiberian treatment of suicide.

192.From the Stoic term kathekon; Cicero ambiguously translated it as officium. For discussion see Shipley (2000) pp 188-190. Zeno first developed the term along with apatheia, from which we derive ‘apathy’. The teachings of Epictetus were preserved by Arrian in the Discourses and Encheiridion Epictetou.

194.Metz Epitome 97 for the allegation that Onesicritus avoided naming guests at Medius’ party. This might be a later addition or it might have originated with the author of the Pamphlet.

195.Justin replaced the allusion to ‘games’ with a wholly darker premonition on the bloodshed and slaughter that would follow, but this could have originated with Trogus, not Cleitarchus.

197.Lucian How to Write History 40-41, translation from Brown (1949) p 5. See discussion of the authenticity of this extract in Brown (1949) p 2.

198.Homer Iliad 2.705 for his slaying by Hector. Protesilaus was Thessalian and the first Greek to step ashore at Troy. His wife negotiated his leave to visit her from Hades for a few hours. This was referred to in many later works, for example Lucian’s Charon of the Observers 1 and Ovid’s Heroides 13.

199.Thucydides 2.87 and Plutarch Moralia 333c (On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander).

200.Onesicritus’ dialogue with the Indian sages preserved in Strabo 15.1.63-65; discussion of question 6 in Brown (1949) p 47.

201.Plutarch Pyrrhus 9-10 for the story of Oedipus and his advice to his sons. Taken from Euripides’ Phoenissea line 68. Translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1920. Oedipus had invited his sons, unwittingly fathered with his own mother, to fight for the kingdom to the death, which they were to do.

206.See Baynham (1995) p 105 for a discussion of tyche important in Hellenistic biography. Demetrius of Phalerum Peri Tyches 29.21 1-7 discussed in Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 295. Also Billows’ discussion on Polybius and tyche referenced in Bosworth-Baynham (2000) pp 294-295.

207.See Atkinson (2009) pp 161-162 for a useful summary of Curtius’ use of pothos and other motifs of ‘common desire’.

208.Thucydides 6.24.3, Pindar Pythian 4.184-5. Pothos is a hapax in Thucydides and certainly conspicuous. The term appeared often in Herodotus. See discussion in Hornblower (2004) p xv, and p 454.

The lion hunt floor mosaic found in the so-called House of Dionysus in Pella, dating to ca. 325-300 BCE. Some scholars believe it depicts Alexander being assisted by his veteran general, Craterus, in a game park in Syria, based on similar bronze figures at Delphi, dedicated by Craterus or his son. The design could suggest that Alexander’s left foot had been trapped by the lion’s paw, but the identifications remain unsubstantiated. Archaeological Museum, Pella.

The fresco on the northern wall inside Tomb I at ancient Aegae depicting the mythical Abduction of Persephone by Hades. This remarkable decoration in what is known as The Tomb of Persephone is possibly the ‘restrained palette’ of Nicomachus of Thebes, and points to the importance of its inhabitant, once thought to be King Amyntas III or King Alexander II. Discussed in Postcript. Of Bones, Insignia and Warrior Women: The Return to Aegae.

The entrance of Tomb II at of ancient Aegae, widely held to be the tomb of Philip II, Alexander’s father. The iron and gold-encrusted breastplate, along with the gold larnax below that contained the cremated bones of a male thought to be in his forties when he died, were found in the main chamber.

The Scythian gorytos (quiver) and a pair of ornate greaves were photographed as they were found lying in the antechamber. One of the greaves is shorter and narrower than the other; recent analysis of the bones confirm the female, estimated to have been in her early or mid-thirties at death, had experienced a major fracture to her left tibia. See Press Report: The Tomb of Philip II Confirmed and Postcript. Of Bones, Insignia and Warrior Women: The Return to Aegae.

The so-called ‘Alexander Sarcophagus’ which takes pride of place in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Made from Pentelic marble, it was discovered with three others in a necropolis near Sidon in 1887 and has been linked to Abdalonymus, appointed king of Sidon by Alexander in 333 BCE, or Darius’ former satrap, Mazaeus. It is noteworthy that within the Greek workmanship and carved on one pediment is a relief thought by some to depict the murder of Alexander’s former chiliarch, Perdiccas. Its background and history discussed in chapter titled Lifting the Shroud of Parrhasius.

The Palaces of Nimrud Restored, a reconstruction of the palaces built by Assurbanipal on the banks of the Tigris, from Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon by Austen Henry Layard, 1853, colour litho. At the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh clear signs of horticulture and an irrigation system exist, with descriptions confirmed by tablets and in panel sculptures. These intricate gardens also existed at Kalhu, later named Nimrud, and Dur-Sharrukin, the ‘Fortress of Sargon’, modern Khorsabad. The ‘Hanging Gardens’ of Babylon may have been located at Nineveh, known as ‘Old Babylon’ in antiquity. Discussed in chapter titled Babylon: Cipher and Rosetta Stone.

A map annotated in Latin dating to 1807 showing Alexander’s route (in red) through the Persian Empire. Nearchus’ naval voyage from the Indus delta to the Persian Gulf is also shown (in black).

A page from the Greek Alexander Romance manuscript MS Bodleian 264, folio 218, recto, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. The manuscript illuminations in gold (gilding), silver and vibrant inks, were produced by the workshop of the Flemish illuminator, Jehan de Grise, between 1338 and 1344, and were ubiquitous through the Gothic period. By kind permission of Oxford University Press. See detail in chapters titled Mythoi Muthodes and the Birth of Romance and The Precarious Path of Pergamena and Papyrus.

An ekphrasis in late-medieval art was reasserted throughout the Renaissance merging contemporary and classical themes. One example is Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus painted in 1529 and commissioned by Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria. Soldiers wear turbans in Turkish style and women wear feathered toques in the fashion of the German court. Painted when the Turkish push towards Vienna threatened apocalyptic events, Altdorfer’s canvas has been described as capturing a ‘cosmic Armageddon’. More in chapter titled The Reborn Wrath of Peleus’ Son.

The kingdoms of Alexander’s successors after the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE. The map is reproduced from the Historical Atlas by William Shepherd (1923-26). For the background to the successor kingdoms see chapter titled Sarissa Diplomacy: Macedonian Statecraft.

A map of the Macedonian-governed empire ca. 200 BCE at the beginning of the struggle with Rome. Both maps provided by the kind permission of University of Texas at Austin.