In the first place, there was no obvious heir. It was unthinkable that the next king should not be an Argead, born from a male Argead, for the house had ruled Macedon for over three hundred years, but there were few candidates. Alexander had left few rivals alive. He had a half brother Arrhidaeus, roughly the same age as himself, from another of Philip’s many wives, but Arrhidaeus suffered from some mental defect—not enough to incapacitate him, but enough to make him liable to embarrassing behavior on public occasions. ¹⁰We will never know all the details, but that he wasdefective in some way is clear from the facts that Alexander had let him live and that, even though he was an adult, the question of his succession to the throne was always accompanied by debate over who should be his “protector.” He seems never to have acted of his own accord rather than being manipulated by those close to him.

Then there was a four-year-old boy called Heracles, a good Argead name, since Heracles of legend was supposed to be their remote ancestor. His mother was Alexander’s former mistress, Barsine. No one doubted that Heracles was Alexander’s son, but Alexander had never married Barsine or formally acknowledged the boy as his own, and so he was an unlikely candidate. Besides, he had the black mark against him of being not fully Macedonian, since his mother was half Iranian. Of Alexander’s three wives, Rhoxane was pregnant, and due to deliver in a couple of months’ time. If she came to term—she had already miscarried once—and if the child was male, he would become a serious claimant to the throne, though again he would be a half-breed.

In the second place, Alexander left no will, or rather failed to make his will known. A will appeared some years later, but it was certainly a forgery, cleverly designed for propaganda purposes. ¹¹But why did he not write one in those last days, when he must have suspected that he was dying? Either he was too weak (he seems to have lost the power of speech, but he was able, as already mentioned, to gesture at his men), or it was suppressed by schemers close to him, or he was just irresponsible. But in his dying moments he silently passed his signet ring to his second-in-command in Babylon, Perdiccas, as though to assign him the responsibility for whatever would happen next.

In the third place, the crisis had blown up in Babylon, but Babylon was only one of three centers of power. Roughly the same number of Macedonian troops were to be found in mountain-girt and mineral-rich Cilicia and in Macedon itself. Craterus was in Cilicia, where he had an army of more than ten thousand veterans and the armament that Alexander had been building up for his next world-conquering project. He also had access to the financial resources of one of the main treasuries of the empire, secure in the mountain citadel of Cyinda (location unknown). And then, scarcely less wealthy in natural resources than Babylonia, there was Macedon itself, where Antipater ruled supreme. Whatever solution was found to the succession problem was going to have to take account of many disparate interests.

THE THREAT OF CHAOS

Even apart from the specific problem of the succession, which urgently needed to be addressed by the senior officers and courtiers assembled in Babylon, there was the general background problem. Alexander’s “empire” was an unstable and unformed entity. As it stood, it was an artificial aggregate of the twenty satrapies (often nation-sized in themselves) of the Achaemenid empire and a multitude of minor principalities, tribal unions, confederacies, city-states, and so on, with varying relationships and strategies toward the central power. If it was to be a whole, it was critically in need of organization, or at least official endorsement and maintenance of the status quo, but Alexander’s exclusive focus on campaigning and conquering had precluded his doing much beyond a little tinkering. For instance, while taking over the existing satrapal structure of the Persian empire, he divided administrative from military functions within the satrapies, so that each could check the other and there would be at least one senior Macedonian in each place. But, generally speaking, Alexander’s empire had not advanced beyond the stage of military occupation; there was no capital city, little civil service, and little administration beyond the emergency preparations any commander takes to protect his rear while he continues on campaign.

Alexander did, however, have a loyal and intelligent secretary, Eumenes of Cardia. The Greek had also served Philip II in the same capacity for the last seven years of the great king’s life. All the official correspondence of the empire came through his office. He could keep the empire running, short of emergencies, but he could not make the critical decisions, which needed a king’s attention. Alexander had also created a central finance office, run by his long-trusted friend Harpalus. But when Alexander returned from the east, Harpalus absconded. He had been setting himself up almost as a king in Babylon, and he saw how Alexander was treating even those whom he merely suspected of independent ambitions. Harpalus took with him five thousand talents (with the spending power of about three billion dollars) ¹²and six thousand mercenaries. Even worse, he took his expertise. For all intents and purposes, then, there was no administration beyond the will of the king himself. L’état, c’est moi, as a later absolute monarch was to claim; Alexander was the administration, but he was dead.

Shortly after Alexander’s death, Eumenes gave Perdiccas Alexander’s “Last Plans,” sketched out over the past few months—at any rate, before Alexander knew he was dying, since all the plans had him at their helm. ¹³The only important one, militarily and politically speaking, was the plan to conquer all of North Africa, including the flourishing Phoenician-founded city of Carthage (and then Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy); this involved not just amassing a huge army and solving its supply problems, but the construction of a vast fleet of one thousand warships in Cilicia and Phoenicia and laying a trans-African road along the north coast from Egypt to Carthage and beyond. Other plans focused on piety: grand temples were to be constructed, an enormous pyre was to be raised in honor of Hephaestion, a pyramid was to be built for Philip II. A final set of plans involved the foundation of further cities. Alexander had already founded a number of cities—Alexandria in Egypt being the most important, but there were others in the eastern provinces ¹⁴—but this time there was a new twist: any city founded in the west of the empire was to gain a portion of its population from the east, and vice versa, to encourage intermingling and intermarriage, and presumably also to break up potentially troublesome populations.

None of these plans seems to have as their purpose the stabilization of the empire. On the contrary, the most significant of them would, in the short term, destabilize it. What provisions would Alexander have taken for the administration of the notoriously rebellious satrapies of the east while he was thousands of miles away attempting to conquer the western Mediterranean? How would he persuade people to move from their homes and populate his new foundations? The movement of native populations would surely have required military force, or its threat, just as Adolf Hitler’s Lebensraumprogram of the displacement of native populations in Eastern Europe by Germans was predicated on German military superiority. It seems that Alexander had chosen to conquer the world rather than consolidate his vulnerable gains.

The brilliant youth who had set out to conquer the east in 334 had, as we have seen, come to adopt a more autocratic, Persian style of kingship. Perhaps the most immediately disruptive of the new acts of autocracy was the so-called Exiles Decree. ¹⁵The league of Greek cities that Philip had put in place in 338 was hardly a league of equals, since Philip himself was the leader and arranged things so that his wishes would be carried out. Nevertheless, the setup was that every member state had a voice, and decisions were reached by consultation and approval at one of the league’s regular meetings. This may have been a charade, but it was one which all the parties were prepared to work with. Despite this, early in 324 Alexander took a unilateral decision that would have a drastic effect on a number of Greek states.