Menander explained to Antigonus that Perdiccas’s and Antipater’s rapprochement was not going to last—that Perdiccas had accepted the inevitability of war and was actively courting Cleopatra. Antigonus had already decided that, if it came to war, he would not side with Perdiccas. He therefore ignored Perdiccas’s summons (which would probably have led to his death) and fled to Greece instead, abandoning his satrapy. He found Antipater and Craterus in the middle of their Aetolian campaign.

At the news that Antigonus brought, about the death of Cynnane and Perdiccas’s designs on Cleopatra, they immediately came to terms with the Aetolians and returned to Macedon to prepare for war with Perdiccas. The first thing they did was write to Ptolemy, to see where he stood. No doubt the reply they received was encouraging. They would be able to force Perdiccas to fight on two fronts. But many subsequent Macedonian kings would regret that the Aetolians had not been subdued once and for all; their inveterate hostility, combined with their dominance of central Greece, was a perennial problem.

THE LAST STRAW

Two factions, then, had emerged, both well equipped militarily. Perdiccas and his staff had the kings and all the resources of the royal treasuries of Asia; on the other side were Antipater and Craterus, along with their allies. Neither Antipater nor Craterus had been present at the Babylon conferences, and both felt that their dignity had not been properly acknowledged. Besides, it seemed that Perdiccas wanted war—the war that Olympias had hinted at when she offered Cleopatra to him. Now it was only a question of what would trigger it.

After Alexander the Great’s death, a Macedonian notable called Arrhidaeus had been put in charge of preparing the funeral cortège. The body was in Babylon, due to be transported to Macedon. Ptolemy had other plans, however, and he had already seeded the idea that Alexander had wanted to be buried at the oasis of Siwah, in remote northwestern Egypt (about 450 kilometers, or 280 miles, southwest of Alexandria). This was the location of an oracle of Zeus Ammon that Alexander felt had confirmed that his father was Zeus. ⁶

It had taken Arrhidaeus almost two years to prepare the casket and the catafalque, which was as elaborate and expensive as one might expect—and far more gaudy. Within a golden coffin, the embalmed body rested on precious spices, and a pall of gold-embroidered purple covered the casket. Around the coffin a miniature golden temple had been built, whose entrance was guarded by golden lions. Ionic columns, twined with relief sculptures of climbing plants, supported a barrel-vaulted roof of gold scales set with jewels; the roof was topped with a golden olive wreath. At each corner of the roof stood a golden Victory holding a battle trophy. The cornice of the miniature temple was embossed with ibex heads from which hung, on each side, a multicolored garland, looped through gold rings. From the tasseled ends of the garlands hung bells, which tinkled as the catafalque moved. On each side of the temple, under the cornice, were friezes. One showed Alexander in a stately chariot with a scepter in his hand, surrounded by Macedonian and Persian bodyguards; another showed a procession of Indian war elephants; the third portrayed the Macedonian cavalry in battle array, and the fourth a fleet of ships. The open spaces between the columns were hung with golden nets to shade the casket but allow spectators a glimpse inside. The catafalque was pulled by sixty-four mules, each with a gilded headpiece, a golden bell on either cheek, and a collar set with gems. ⁷

So in the late spring of 321 Alexander’s corpse began its leisurely, glittering, tinkling journey from Babylon, under the command of Arrhidaeus. A considerable body of cavalry supplied by Perdiccas escorted it, and workmen were sent ahead to repair the roads as necessary, though the carriage was fitted with a new invention: shock absorbers. ⁸Thousands lined the route to witness the temple on wheels, the temple of a god. When the cortège reached southern Syria in July, it was met by a troop of Ptolemy’s soldiers, who drove off Perdiccas’s escort and hijacked the corpse. Ptolemy had decided that Egypt was to be the final resting place of Alexander’s body. He understood how important the issue of legitimacy would be to him and his fellow Successors. Whoever buried the dead king made himself, by that very act, the legitimate successor of the king. Besides, one of the aristocrats present at the Babylon conferences is said to have prophesied that “the land that received the corpse would remain for ever blessed and unravaged.” ⁹

The theft of the body was more or less an act of war. On top of Ptolemy’s appropriation of the Egyptian treasury (the contents of which, strictly speaking, belonged to the kings, and were therefore Perdiccas’s by right of regency) and annexation of Cyrene, it was extremely provocative. Of course, Perdiccas (still in Pisidia at the time) sent an army to try to recover the body, but it was too late. The theft of the corpse made Ptolemy Perdiccas’s prime target; when war broke out, he would attack Egypt first.

Ptolemy probably never intended the corpse to rest in remote Siwah. He wanted it by his side. Alexandria, the projected capital of Egypt, was still a vast building site, and so Ptolemy kept the body first in the old capital of Memphis and moved it some years later, when the palace compound at Alexandria was ready. He celebrated the arrival of the body in Memphis with games, and instigated a cult of Alexander as founder of Alexandria. He also began at much the same time to issue coins with Alexander’s head, the first of the Successors to do so.

When the body eventually moved to Alexandria, a new national cult was initiated of the deified Alexander. Close to the palace he constructed a kind of tomb-cum-shrine—a most un-Macedonian miscegenation, an invention of Ptolemy’s to emphasize the divine blessing his rule was receiving. Henceforth Alexandria, not Memphis, would be not only Ptolemy’s capital, but also implicitly the center of the empire Alexander had created.

In due course of time, Alexandria became famous for four prominent statues of Alexander, as well as a number of paintings: the cult statue; an equestrian statue of Alexander as founder; a nude (the most common form of statue for Hellenistic kings); and an ensemble, housed in the sanctuary of Fortune, showing Alexander being crowned by Earth, who was in turn being crowned by Fortune, who was flanked by two statues of Victory. ¹⁰The Greek and Macedonian communities of Alexandria were not to forget that the Ptolemies were Alexander’s heirs. Fortune had blessed Alexander, and now Alexander’s Fortune blessed the Ptolemies. Their possession of the body let the world know that they and Alexander were inseparable.

LEGITIMATION

Each of the Successors exploited the image and memory of Alexander to legitimate his bid for power. Ptolemy’s hijacking of the corpse and subsequent adornment of Alexander’s city with statues of its dead founder were simply the most blatant and outrageous. ¹¹Perdiccas, as we have seen, preferred not to manage the Babylon conferences in his own name, but in the presence of Alexander’s throne. Before long, we will find Eumenes doing much the same, in response, he said, to instructions received from Alexander himself in a dream. Seleucus too claimed that Alexander had appeared to him in a dream and predicted future greatness. Just as it was well known that Olympias claimed to have conceived Alexander by Zeus, so Seleucus let it be known that his true father was Apollo. ¹²

All the Successors did their best to ally themselves as closely as possible with members of the Argead house; all of them, if they could, made sure that everyone knew how important a role they had played in the eastern campaigns. Ptolemy even wrote an account of the campaigns, which emphasized his own role, of course, ¹³and he or someone in his court later spread the story that he was actually an illegitimate child of Philip II, and so Alexander’s half brother. Craterus marked the end of the Lamian War with a large monument at Delphi, sculpted by the best artists of the day, that showed him saving Alexander’s life during a hunt, and he dressed in Alexander’s style. Leonnatus too dressed and wore his hair like Alexander. Cassander commissioned a huge picture showing Alexander and Darius in battle, which may have been the original of the famous Alexander Mosaic in the Naples Archaeological Museum. Alcetas’s tomb was adorned with Alexander motifs. ¹⁴All those who came to establish kingdoms founded cities bearing Alexander’s name and minted coins with Alexander’s head in the place of divinity (the obverse, or “heads” side), to announce to their subjects and to the world at large their allegiance to his memory and protection by his ghost. When they portrayed themselves on their coins, there were still significant echoes of Alexander—his distinctive clean-shaven face, the tilt of his head, the longer hair that helped to mark him out as superhuman.