The Persian Boy (51 page)

There is a widespread modem delusion that all eunuchs became gross and flabby. To correct it one need go no further back than the eighteenth century and its famous operatic castrati, whose romantic looks caused them to be much pursued by women of fashion. A portrait of the greatest, Farinelli, done in early middle age, shows a handsome sensitive face, and a figure many modern tenors might envy. The diarist Dr. Burney, writing of him still later, said, “He is tall and thin, but looks very well for his time of life, is lively and well bred.”

The story of Darius’ last days occurs only in Curtius. It is vivid and detailed; is irrelevant to the bias for which Curtius is notorious, and is probably authentic. If so, the final scenes can only have been supplied to some early chronicler by one of Darius’ eunuchs, who were the only witnesses; it is reasonable to suppose by Bagoas himself. With his favored place at court he must have been known to all Alexander’s contemporary historians.

History next knows Bagoas some six years later, when the anecdote of the kiss in the the?ater is given both by Plutarch and Athenaeus. The location in Karmania is highly significant; there Alexander still had with him only those who had followed him through India and the desert march. After all these vicissitudes, Bagoas was not only still high in his affection, but evidently well liked even by the xenophobe Macedonian troops, in itself surprising. Alexander always repaid with lifelong loyalty a personal devotion, and this seems the likeliest explanation of such a long attachment.

The young eunuch’s origins are unknown; but the conjecture that he was of good birth is not fanciful. Such boys, whose looks had been taken care of and not spoiled by malnutrition or hardship, once enslaved were always at the highest risk of prostitution. Sokrates’ disciple Phaidon (Phaedo) is the best-known case.

Bagoas’ last appearance has been irretrievably garbled by Curtius; one can only do one’s best with it. Luckily for Bagoas’ reputation, we have the first-class evidence of Aristoboulos the architect, who actually restored Kyros’ tomb for Alexander, that he went there when first at Persepolis, saw for himself the valuable grave-goods, and had them inventoried by Aristoboulos, whose description is preserved by Arrian, along with his account of the desecration. In Curtius, Alexander only goes to the tomb on his return from India, and finds it bare because Kyros has been buried only with his simple weapons; a notion which would no doubt delight Roman sentiment but surprise an archaeologist. Bagoas, who has a spite against Orxines for not having sent him a bribe, invents a nonexistent treasure and accuses him of its theft. None of the crimes for which Orxines was in fact punished are mentioned; he is supposed an innocent victim. When the impossible is discarded from this tale not much is left. I have assumed that Bagoas did somehow enter the scene, having some grievance against the satrap with which Alexander sympathized. In view of Orxines’ murderous record, I have supplied the commonest grudge of the ancient world, a family blood-feud.

Muddled sensationalism is typical of Curtius, an unbearably silly man with access to priceless sources now lost to us, which he frittered away in the cause of a tedious literary concept about the goddess Fortune, and many florid exercises in Roman rhetoric. (Alexander, exhorting his friends kindly to remove the arrow stuck in his lung, is impressively eloquent.) The favors of Fortune being conducive to hubris and nemesis, Alexander’s story is bent that way by recourse to Athenian anti-Macedonian agitprop, written by men who never set eyes on him, and bearing about as much relation to objective truth as one would expect to find in a History of the Jewish People commissioned by Adolf Hitler. This had been revived in Augustus’ time by Trogus and Diodorus, who found in a king three centuries dead a safe whipping-boy for the divine pretensions of the living ruler. No attempt is made at consistency with the undisputed facts. A corrupted tyrant would have been cut down by the Opis mutineers the moment he stepped down among them; they could have done it with perfect impunity (the fate of more than one Roman emperor) and elected a new King, as was their right. That instead they complained to Alexander of not being allowed to kiss him is not fiction but history.

As regards the ancient world, the political motives of these unconvincing attempts to show Alexander corrupted by success are clear enough. More puzzling is a present-day outbreak of what one may call black-washing, since it goes far beyond a one-sided interpretation of facts to their actual misrepresentation. A recent popularization says only of Philotas’ execution that it was “on a trumped-up charge,” though his concealment of the assassination plot is agreed on by all the sources. (What would be the position of a modern security guard who, informed there was a bomb on the royal plane, decided not to mention it?) Hephaistion is “fundamentally stupid,” though in not one of his highly responsible independent missions, diplomatic ?as well as military, was he ever unsuccessful. Alexander is baldly accused of compassing his father’s death, though not only is the evidence, literally, nil; Philip had not even a viable alternative heir to supply a motive. “Severe alcoholism” is said to have hastened Alexander’s end; any general practitioner could explain what a severe alcoholic’s work capacity is, and what his chance of surviving lung perforation, unanaesthetized field surgery, and a desert march. After the gesture of the troops at Alexander’s deathbed, an event unique in history, it is somewhat surprising to be told that few people mourned him. That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.

In the same spirit, the most sinister motives have been sought for his policies of racial fusion. Yet no one took less trouble to conceal his aversions than he; it is staringly obvious that, once among Persians, he simply found he liked them. Surely in our day it takes a somewhat insular mind to find this either discreditable or strange.

Though accounts of Alexander’s general deterioration do not hold water, there seems little doubt that he did suffer some severe mental disturbance just after Hephaistion’s death. Whether such a breakdown could have recurred cannot be known. Alexander’s nature was a kind of self-winding spring. The tensions of his childhood demanded compensation in achievement; achievement accumulated responsibilities, at the same time suggesting further achievements; the spiral was inexorably ascending, and one cannot be sure this process could have continued through a normal life-span without disaster. Perhaps Kalanos’ parting words were more promise than warning.

Bury and other historians have pointed out the connection between a tainted water supply and heavier wine-drinking in the army. Aristoboulos, who was at court through Alexander’s reign, says his usual habit was to sit over his wine talking into the night, but without getting drunk. According to Plutarch he got rather euphoric towards the end of the session; a phenomenon which can be observed today in persons not given to excess. Occasional drinking-bouts were however characteristically Macedonian, as we already find before Alexander’s accession.

Rumors that he was poisoned, rife for centuries after his death, do not tally with the detailed case history of his last illness. His loss of voice points to the most common fatal complication right up to the discovery of antibiotics-pneumonia. Pleurisy would be a certain sequel in view of his Mallian wound. Aristoboulos says that when in high fever he drank wine and became delirious; he is not said to have demanded it. If it was conveyed to him in malice then he was, morally speaking, poisoned, and the presence of a mortal enemy like Kassandros should not be overlooked.

Curtius has preserved a story that his body was found uncorrupted, in spite of the summer heat and of a long delay in fetching the embalmers, due to the chaos following his death. The period given, six days, is of course absurd; but it is quite possible that a deep coma deceived the watchers a good many hours before clinical death occurred. The embalmers did their work with skill. Augustus Caesar, visiting his tomb at Alexandria, admired the beauty of his features after three hundred years.

The account of Hephaistion’s end suggests he had typhoid, where, though appetite often returns before the lesions in the gut have healed, solid food causes perforation and swift collapse. In our own century typhoid patients have been killed in hospital by misguided relatives smuggling them food. Hephaistion’s boiled fowl, about the size of a modern bantam, would be more than enough.

Arrian has been followed for the squires’ conspiracy, except for my own guess that letters from Aristotle were found among Kallisthenes’ papers. Alexander’s friendly correspondence with his tutor ceased from this time.

The romantic figure of Roxane has not been treated with a groundless skepticism. Th?ere is no need to dismiss the marriage as political; her rank was middling and her beauty famous. But about two months later, the squires could count upon finding Alexander in bed without her; and we know what she did when he died. She can have wasted no time in mourning. She sent, with such speed that it outstripped the news, a letter to his royal wife Stateira, written in his name, summoning her at once to Babylon; and had her murdered as soon as she arrived.

Sisygambis, the Queen Mother of Persia, when told of Alexander’s death, bade her family farewell, shut herself up without food, and died five days later.

Events this book has no room for, or which Bagoas would not have known of, have been taken into account in the portrayal of Alexander. It needs to be borne in mind today that not till more than a century later did a handful of philosophers even start to question the morality of war. In his time the issue was not whether, but how one made it. It is noteworthy that the historians most favorable to him, Ptolemy and Aristoboulos, were those who knew him in life. They wrote when he was dead, with no incentive but to do him justice.

When his faults (those his own times did not account as virtues) have been considered, we are left with the fact that no other human being has attracted in his lifetime, from so many men, so fervent a devotion. Their reasons are worth examining.

Sources for the General Reader

The best is Arrian, who drew mainly on the lost memoirs of Ptolemy and Aristoboulos, and wrote with a high sense of responsibility. His Life of Alexander is available in the Penguin Classics (as The Campaigns of Alexander), or in the Loeb Classical Library with Greek and translation interleaved, and notes. Plutarch, whose Lives is published by Everyman, is colorful, but made little effort to evaluate his evidence, and should not be swallowed whole.

Proper Names

It is of course implausible to have a Persian using Persian names in their Greek forms; but since in the Persian they would be unrecognizable and unpronounceable to almost all general readers (Darius for example is Darayavaush) I have retained the usual convention. Roxane is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARY RENAULT was born in London, where her father was a doctor. She first went to Oxford with the idea of teaching, but decided that she wanted to be a writer instead, and that after taking her degree she should broaden her knowledge of human life. She then trained for three years as a nurse, and wrote her first published novel, Promise of Love. Her next three novels were written during off-duty time when serving in the war. One of them, Return to Night, received the M.G.M. award. After the war, she went to South Africa and settled at the Cape. She has traveled considerably in Africa and has gone up the east coast to Zanzibar and Mombasa. But it was her trip to Greece, her visits to Corinth, Samos, Crete, Delos, Aegina and other islands, as well as to Athens, Sounion and Marathon, that resulted in her previous brilliant historical reconstructions of ancient Greece, The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, The Mask of Apollo and Fire from Heaven.

Table of Contents