produced from his official papers and put to the troops: Hephaistion's pyre was to be completed regardless of cost; a thousand warships, larger than triremes, were to be built in the Levant for a campaign against Carthage, along north Africa, up to the Straits of Gibraltar, back down the coast of Spain and so to Sicily; roads and docks were to be distributed along the north African coast; six temples were detailed for Greek and Macedonian religious centres at huge expense; the largest possible temple was to be set at Troy and Philip should have a tomb equal to the biggest Egyptian pyramid; last, but not least, 'cities should be merged and slaves and manpower should be exchanged between Asia and Europe, Europe and Asia in order to bring the greatest two continents to common concord and family friendship by mixed marriages and the ties of kith and kin.'

None of these plans is unlikely in spirit or outline. A harbour for a thousand ships had already been ordered at Babylon and after Arabia, the conquest of Carthage and the West was surely a reasonable plan, modest even, for a young man with time and money on his side and a record of victory which stretched as far as the Punjab. The opposition was not strong, and such was Carthage's low ebb that she had been raided and occupied by Sicilian adventurers within twelve years of his death. As for the buildings, if Alexander could afford anything he wanted, then six big temples and a gigantic one at Troy were intelligible ambitions, besides bringing welcome business to the workmen and citizenry of his chosen sites; a pyramid to Philip was not an inept idea for a son who may have been booed by his veterans for preferring his 'father' Zeus Ammon ever since his visit to the land of the Pharaohs. The merging of Europe and Asia is the plan which catches the attention; 'common concord' was a political catchphrase of the time, and therefore empty, but the plan of mixed marriage and forcible transfer of peoples befitted the man who had ordered the Levant to be drained of settlers for his new towns on the Persian Gulf, who had approved the oriental wives of his soldiers and who had forced Iranian brides on his Companions. It was a memorable plan, but an alarming one; its announcement, however, was not above suspicion.

When the last plans were read to the soldiery, the officers had reason for wanting their cancellation. In the west, Antipater's intentions were not certain, and Craterus had already reached the Asian coast with Alexander's orders and the 10,000 veterans he was leading home; there was no reason yet to mistrust his ambitions, but he did hold the balance between Asia and Macedon if their very different courts could not cooperate. Meanwhile, it was a time of consolidation, until Roxane's baby arrived and the guardianship could be seen to work; rivals, however, might claim that Alexander had wished it otherwise. Craterus or Antipater were the danger, for they might publicize papers which Alexander had left them; it suited their fellow officers that all such documents should be aired first in Babylon and agreed to be impractical before anyone tried to invoke their authority. The plans were read by Perdiccas, friend and patron of Eumenes the royal secretary; what Eumenes may have done to the Diaries of Alexander's last days he may also have done to the plans, inflating their scale to ensure that the troops would reject their excesses. The 240-foot high pyre for Hephaistion, the cost of the temples and the size of Philip's pyramid are not unthinkable extravagances, nor are they proof that Alexander had lost all sense of the possible, for Pharaohs had built pyramids before him and colossal architecture was nothing new for kings who lived in Babylon or Susa. But in their political context, they perhaps owe more to Perdiccas's invention than to Alexander's wishes; the man who read them out did not intend to hear them approved, and 'mass transfers and marriages between Asia and Europe' were a powerful threat to troops who had just refused a son of Roxane as their sole Iranian heir. Possibly, Perdiccas made up the suggestion: 'They realized, despite their deep past respect for Alexander that these plans were excessive, and so they decided that none should be carried out.' But the plans had had to seem plausible to their announcers and audience; western conquest, honour for the Greek gods, a tribute to Philip that was perhaps too insistent to be sincere, and above all, the dreaded union and city-settlement of Asia and Europe on a huger scale than ever before, these were what friends and soldiers believed to have preoccupied their king at the end of his life. There is no surer evidence of how Alexander was eventually seen by his men than the spirit, if not the detail, of these final plans.

Men who turned his plans to their purpose could also make play with his remains. Possession of Alexander's corpse was a unique symbol of status, and until the west and Antipater seemed certain, no officer at Babylon was likely to let it go from Asia; there was talk of a Siwah burial to keep the soldiery quiet, and for two years, workmen were busied with elaborate plans for the funeral chariot. Meanwhile the situation in Macedonia was tested and found to be friendly, so much so that the corpse could at last be sent home. It was to lie among spices in a golden coffin with a golden lid, covered with purple embroidery on which rested Alexander's armour and famous Trojan shield; above it, a pillared canopy rose 36 feet high to a broad vault of gold and jewels, from which hung a curtain with rings and tassels and bells of warning; the cornice was carved with goats and stags and at each corner of the vault there were golden figures of Victory, the theme which Alexander had stressed from Athens across Asia and into the Punjab. Paintings were attached to mesh-netting down either side of the vault, Alexander with his sceptre and his Asian and Macedonian bodyguards, Alexander and his elephants, his cavalry, his warships; gold lions guarded the coffin and a purple banner embroidered with an olive wreath was spread above the canopy's roof There were precedents for such a chariot, not least in Asia where it recalled the ritual chariot of the god Mithras, a divine nuance which was perhaps intended for Alexander's Persian admirers; the chariot was built in Persian style and its decoration of griffins, lions and a canopy recalled the throne ornament of the Persian kings. Sixty-four selected mules drew four separate yokes in Persian fashion; the ornate wheels and axles had been sprung against potholes, while engineers and roadmenders were to escort them on their way. When the whole was ready, Perdiccas its guardian was fighting the natives of Cappadocia, the one gap in Alexander's western empire; his back was turned, and Egypt's new satrap Ptolemy befriended the cortege's officer-in-command. Macedonia was not consulted; the chariot set out in secret for Egypt, where Ptolemy came to meet the spoils which would justify his independence. He had stolen a march on rivals who had talked too blandly of Siwah, and instead of sending the coffin into the desert, he displayed it first in Memphis, then finally in Alexandria, where it was still on show to the young Augustus when he visited Egypt three hundred years later. It will never be seen again. Despite fitful rumours, modem Alexandria has not revealed the site of its founder's remains; probably his corpse was last visited by Caracalla and was destroyed in the city riots of the late third century a.d.

Servant in death of Ptolemy's independence, Alexander had fought through ten years of his life for broader ends. Unlike Ptolemy, he had believed it possible for one power to rule from the Mediterranean to the far edge of India, by basing an empire on Macedonia and on the inexhaustible abundance of Babylon and her surrounding farmland. To this end and to ease the importing of Indian and Eastern luxuries, he had planned to reopen the old sea routes which had formerly met in the Persian Gulf. Once this was done, he had believed that the conquered Iranian nobility should share in their victors' court and government and that the army and the future of the empire depended on westernized native recruits and the children of soldiers' mixed marriages brought up in Macedonian style. Above all, he had believed that culture and government meant cities as all Greeks knew them, a belief to which the infinitely older and more adaptable style of the nomads was no exception. It has often been said that these three beliefs were sure to founder on the prejudice of his successors or the realities of any age that followed. Alexander was not such a shallow or unworldly judge.