Alexander smiled, ‘I don’t believe you, but it’s nice to hear you say that.’
His condition worsened terribly the following day.
‘Save him, iatre,’ Roxane implored Philip. ‘Save him, I beg you.’ But Philip shook his head to indicate his impotence, while Leptine wept as she bathed Alexander’s forehead in a vain attempt to give him some relief.
By the following day he could no longer stand up and the fever was truly violent. They carried him on a stretcher to the summer palace where there was some fresh air towards evening, and Philip made sure he was given cold-water baths to bring his temperature down, but all the physician’s efforts proved useless now. Roxane, in utter despair, would not leave him even for an instant and she covered him with kisses and caresses. His Companions watched over him day and night without ever resting, without eating.
Seleucus ran to the sanctuary of the god Marduk, patron of the city, a healing god, and asked the priests to take Alexander into the temple so that he might be healed, but the priests replied, ‘The god does not want Alexander to be moved here.’
He returned disconsolately to the palace and met with the Companions and Philip to report on his mission.
‘You should have killed those priests – if they don’t know how to cure the King, why do they exist?’ exclaimed Lysimachus.
‘I think he’ll pull through this time as well,’ said Perdiccas. ‘Don’t worry, he’s got over much worse than this.’
Philip stared at him with great sadness in his eyes and then entered the King’s bedchamber. Alexander asked for water in a voice that was now almost imperceptible.
On the following day the King could no longer speak.
News had spread among the men that the King was very ill; some were saying he was already dead. Large groups of them appeared before the entrance to the palace and threatened to break down the doors if no one let them in.
‘I’ll go and see,’ said Ptolemy, and he went down to the guardhouse.
‘We want to know how the King is!’ shouted a veteran.
Ptolemy lowered his head. ‘The King is dying,’ he said. ‘If you wish to see him, come up now, one by one, but in silence. Let him have some peace in his last hours.’
The soldiers went up, in single file, one after the other, up the stairs and along the corridors, to the King’s deathbed. They walked before him in tears, saying goodbye with a gesture of their hands. And for each and every one of them Alexander had a look, a nod, a barely perceptible movement of the lips.
His men were all there before him, the soldiers who had accompanied him through a thousand adventures – the men of iron who had tamed the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Indus. He saw their faces marked by ice and sun, he saw their bristly cheeks wet with tears and then suddenly he no longer saw anything. He heard Roxane’s desperate crying and Leptine’s sobbing and then Ptolemy’s voice saying, ‘It is over . . . Alexander is dead.’
*
He thought of his mother, he thought of how bitter and vain her wait had proved to be. He thought he could see her, way up in a tower of the palace, shouting and crying as she called him in desperation: Alexandre, don’t go . . . come back to me, I beg you!’ That shout seemed to call him back for a moment, but only for a moment. Now those words, those shouts and that face faded away, far away, until they were lost in the wind . . . Now he saw before himself a limitless plain, a flower-filled meadow, and he heard a dog barking, but this was not the dark howling of Cerberus the watchdog – it was Peritas! He was running towards him, mad with joy just like the day when he had returned from exile, and then across the endless prairie came a thunderous gallop and suddenly an echoing neigh. It was Bucephalas running towards him with his mane blowing in the wind, and he climbed astride him just as he had done that day in Mieza. And he shouted, ‘Go, Bucephalas!’ And the steed set off, like some burning Pegasus, in a reckless gallop towards the final horizon, towards the infinite light.
EPILOGUE
‘YOUR BODY WAS still warm and we were already arguing over who was to succeed you and we fought over this for years. You weren’t with us any more and with you the dream that had held us together had gone. Leptine chose to follow you and we found her dying at the foot of your bed, her wrists cut. The Queen Mother, Sisygambis, covered her face with a black veil and starved herself to death. Roxane chose to live in order that your child might live.
‘Perdiccas finally realized his dream and married Cleopatra, but he was the first to fall in the attempt to keep your empire together. He fell in battle against my armies. Poor Perdiccas!
‘The strange thing is that although we fought bitterly, making and undoing alliances, we never actually hated one another. The fact is that in a certain sense we all remained friends. Once, years after your death, we all met together at Babylon to seek some sort of agreement, but the meeting quickly degenerated into a fight. Eumenes appeared suddenly from behind a door and threw your cloak and your sceptre on to your empty throne; the arguing ceased as if by magic, our voices calmed down, our looks and the expressions suddenly became pensive. Even if only for a moment, you had come back among us and we stood there, before that cloak and that empty throne as though you had suddenly reappeared, miraculously.
‘We were not worthy of you, and yet we sought to imitate you in everything: we had ourselves depicted in the same poses, our heads tilted slightly towards our right shoulders, our hair combed high off our foreheads, even those of us who had very little hair, but it was all simply to try and exploit your image. We did not even have the courage to save your family – destroyed, annihilated mercilessly by a footnote at the bottom of a treaty: “If any misfortune should befall the child, Mace-don will go to . . .” which was like condemning him to death. What horror – your wife, your mother, your child – all dead. Our thirst for power had left our souls parched, it had transformed us into monsters.
‘And almost all of us wasted no time in repudiating the Persian wives you had chosen for us, apart from Seleucus who loved his Apama and dedicated beautiful cities to her.
‘Seleucus . . . for some time he was the new Alexander and he almost succeeded in breathing life back into your empire. Now he is old like me, and full of aches and pains. We have waged war more than once, or rather our armies have clashed at the border with Celesyria, a frontier that was left too ill defined and too vague after another treaty, one of the many, but we have always been on good terms, like old friends.
‘I don’t know how he is now, but I suppose he too is nearing the end. As for me, it is two years since I left the sceptre and the realm to my son, Ptolemy II, so that I could write this story. The only thing I can be proud of, apart from having known when to relinquish power before death forced me out, was to have brought you here, to your Alexandria, the only place worthy of you. Oh! How I would like you to be able to see it now! It is truly beautiful. It is a wonderful, thriving city, just as you dreamed it would be, remember?
‘We were young men back then, and our souls burned with the dreams that you painted for us; we were like gods when we rode by your side, resplendent in our armour.
‘Now I have written this the last chapter of my history and, as I was writing, it all echoed in my mind – almost as though it were all happening once again. I heard our conversations, the arguments, the jokes, Leonnatus horsing around, do you remember it all? Of course, it will all be transcribed properly; it will be a good text, edited in accordance with the rules taught us by our teachers at Pella and Mieza. But I prefer to remember it this way, our story, just as I have relived it, day-by-day, moment-by-moment, as I wrote it.
‘I have done everything I had to and today, when I felt Thanatos’s cold breath on my neck, I decided to come here so I could forget everything that happened after you left us, so I could fall asleep peacefully next to you, my dear friend.
‘It is time now for Alexander’s troop to reassemble, just like that day when we came to meet you in Illyria on that frozen lake, in the snow as it f
ell in sheets. It is time now for us to close our eyes, those of us who have lived too long, and when we wake up we will be together once more, all young and handsome as we once were, ready to set off with you, to ride by your side towards the final adventure. And, this time, it will be for ever.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
MY AIM IN writing this ‘romance’ of Alexander in a contemporary style has been to recount, in the most realistic and involving way possible, one of the greatest adventures of all time. I have always sought, however, to remain as faithful as possible to the sources, both literary and material.
I have made use of a language that is, overall, relatively modern – because the Hellenistic world was ‘modern’ in many ways: in artistic expressionism, in architectural innovation, in technical and scientific progress, in a taste for the new and the spectacular – trying, nevertheless, to avoid the use of gratuitously anachronistic expressions. For example in the military field I have used modern terms such as ‘battalion’ or ‘general’ to render lóchos or strategós, words which are perhaps difficult for most readers, and in the medical field words such as ‘scalpel’ to indicate a surgical instrument that is well documented in archaeological study. Wherever an ancient term remains understandable to today’s reader, I have chosen to retain it.
I have also sought to restore the language typical of certain circles and of various characters (women, men, soldiers, prostitutes, doctors, artists, soothsayers). In doing so I have turned to the comic poets (particularly Aristophanes and Menander) and the epigram writers above all others, because these writers were required by their art to reproduce a realistic language, even in its popular and vulgar aspects. The same poets were a precious source regarding many aspects of daily life – fashion, cuisine, sayings and proverbs.
At certain moments when one character addresses another I have used the Greek vocative case in order to render a particular sense of intimacy or intensity, or of acclamation, such as Alexandre (Alexander), iatré (doctor), heghemón (commander).
As for historical events, principally I have made use of Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Arrian and Curtius Rufus, with occasional references to Trogus and the Romance of Alexander. For anthropological and behavioural background, I turned above all to the liveliest anecdotal evidence in certain passages of Pliny, Valerius Maximus, Theophrastus, Pausanias, Diogenes Laertius, but I also made use of a variety of sources such as Xenophon, Helian, Apollodorus, Strabo and, naturally, Demosthenes and Aristotle, as well as fragments of Greek historians’ lost works. Archaeological sources generally provided support for the reconstruction of settings, interiors, furnishings, weaponry, decoration, furniture, machinery, utensils; and the recent discovery of the royal tomb at Verghina allowed me to reconstruct realistically the funeral of Philip II.
Where the story of the Macedonian leader moves into its truly historical vein, I had to make certain narrative choices that subsequently proved to be historical choices, sometimes going beyond traditional interpretations. A case in point is the battle on the Granicus, where I preferred to apply what I believe is a more realistic reconstruction that owes little to Callisthenes’ celebratory text.
I have amalgamated two distinct characters – Alexander of Lyncestis and Amyntas – into the single character of Amyntas so as to avoid confusion for the reader who already has to deal with two ‘Alexanders’. In doing so, however, I have maintained the situational problems (dynastic, political, psychological) that arose around the two men.
I took great care with the topographical, tactical and strategic reconstruction of the sieges of Miletus, Halicarnassus and Tyre, as too with the battle of Issus, which involved a field visit. The literary sources of the second part are on the whole those already cited, with the addition of references from Herodotus (the flying snakes) and quotations from Homer and Hesiod, as well as some reference to the technical pages of the Aeneas Tacticus and Frontinus’s Strategemata. Many material sources have also been used and the more alert reader will recognize some of them in works of art, coins and mosaics. Portrait work has been a constant inspiration, together with recent information from excavations in the various places named. Comprehensive field studies have been carried out on various occasions in all of these places.
*
The final part of Alexander’s story is perhaps the most complex and the most demanding from the interpretative point of view. Indeed, many events in the sources are not clear at all, such as the fire at Persepolis, the death of Cleitus the Black and the two conspiracies – the one involving Philotas and the other involving the ‘squires’. Although it is not the task of a novel to unravel problems that have been widely debated in the historical literature, the narrative here offers considerable interpretative scope, precisely because it has to keep in mind a more general vision that is often lacking in specialist research. This is the case in the scene in which Parmenion asks Alexander for the reasoning behind the destruction of Persepolis.
The Macedonian conqueror is in any case depicted faithfully even in the most unattractive and least honourable moments of the story. Only some episodes, clearly presented with a negative slant in the sources, have been slightly improved to present what might have been the original and most authentic scenario.
Readers male and female, but above all else female, will have the impression that some women characters could have had a more significant place in the soul of our protagonist, but here again it was my intention to present matters as faithfully as possible with regard to the real situation of society at that time, and with regard to Alexander’s character. In the ancient sources the female characters, even the most important, are barely mentioned; I have tried to give them some weight and to reconstruct, following logical processes, their presence and their influence on events narrated here.
The topographical reconstructions on the whole can only be considered approximate; unfortunately the loss of the Ephemerides, probably written by Eumenes of Cardia, and the reports of the Bematists (‘march officers’ in this book), which provided extremely accurate descriptions of the itinerary, prevent us from building a more realistic picture.
*
I would like to thank all of those friends who have helped and advised me, in particular Lorenzo Braccesi who has kept me company on this long and not always easy journey tracing Alexander’s steps, and Laura Grandi and Stefano Tettamanti who have followed, page by page one might say, the birth of this novel.
Special thanks also go to Iain Halliday, English translator of this book, for the intelligent patience with which he has sought to follow my advice, and for striving to translate my text in the most faithful yet most creative way.
VALERIO MASSIMO MANFREDI
Endnotes
1 Euripides, Hecuba (lines 444–445), translated by E. P. Coleridge (1938).
2 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, (lines 88-90, 31-35), translated by Herbert Weir Smyth.
ALEXANDER: THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
VALERIO MASSIMO MANFREDI is professor of classical archaeology at the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan. Further to numerous academic publications, he has published thirteen works of fiction, including the Alexander trilogy, which has been translated into thirty-four languages in fifty-five countries. His novel The Last Legion was released as a major motion picture. He has written and hosted documentaries on the ancient world, and has written screenplays for cinema and television.
IAIN HALLIDAY was born in Scotland in 1960. He took a degree in American Studies at the University of Manchester and worked in Italy and London before moving to Sicily where he now lives. As well as working as a translator, he currently teaches English at the University of Catania.
Also by Valerio Massimo Manfredi
ALEXANDER: CHILD OF A DREAM
ALEXANDER: THE SANDS OF AMMON
SPARTAN
THE LAST LEGION
HEROES
(formerly The Talisman of Troy)
TYRANT
THE ORACLE
EMPIRE OF DRAGONS
THE TOWER
PHARAOH
THE LOST ARMY
THE IDES OF MARCH
First published 2001 by Macmillan
This edition published 2002 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books
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ISBN 978-0-330-53891-6 PDF
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Copyright © Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. 1998
Translation copyright © Macmillan 2001
Originally published 1998 in Italy as Alexandros: Il Confine Del Mundo by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano
The right of Valerio Massimo Manfredi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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