THE DEBATE Who killed Alexander the Great? • Death In Babylon Alexander the Great died unexpectedly on June 11, 323 Be, in the l:! ., ancient Persian city of Babylon. The preceding eight years had .0 seen him crush the Pers 'ian I<ing Darius III at the Battle of ... S Gaugamela, capture his capital city of Persepolis, and overrun VI " c:: his empire as far as the Punjab. Then, "just when he seemed to Ql be at the peak of power and prosperity", wrote the historian Diodorus 5iculus, "fate cut short the lifetime granted to him by nature". Ancient writers were perplexed by his mysterious death, and scholars continue to offer various explanations without reaching much agreement. So, can we ever say, for certain, who or what killed Alexander the Great? By Duncan B. Campbell Bust of Alexander the Great. Greek bust now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. In his last days, Alexander the Great drank himself to death. This was the sober opin- ion of the eighteenth-century Scottish historian John Gillies, whose two-volume History of Ancient Greece (1790) was, inci- dentally, one of the first such works ever to appear. In it, he wrote: "'1-fe indufBed, without moderation, in that banquetilYJ and festivity to which, after the fatiBues of war, he had often shovvn himself too much addicted; and a fever, occasioned, or at (east increased, by an excessive abuse of wine, the vice of his nation and of his fami(y, yut a yeriod to {i.is (ife in the thiY!y-third year of his aBe, and in the thirteenth of {iis reiBl1 JJ 46 I Ancient Wa1are V-S Gillies was quite right to draw attention to Alexander's heavy drinking. Just over a week before his death, "Alexanderfeasted with his friends and drank far into the night." Moreover, when he eventually made his way to bed, he was diverted to another banquet by a companion named Medius and began drinking again, pausing only to bathe and nap, before continuing throughout the day and into the follow- ing night. By then, he had developed a fever and his health declined sharply. (The sequence of events is recorded by Arrian 7.24-25, Diodorus 17.117, Justin 12.13, and Plutarch 75. See the sidebar on "The Alexander historians".) The curse of Dionysus Alexander had a track record of over- indulging. Some said that the burning of the palace at Persepolis in 330 BC, far from being an act of calculated revenge for the Persian invasion of Greece a century-and- a-half earlier, was actually the result of drunken vandalism during "daytime drink- ing parties at which women were present". (The different versions of the event can be found at Arrian 3.18.11-12, Curtius 5-7-3-7, and Diodorus 1.7.72.) Drink was also to blame two years later, when Alexander ran Cleitus through with a spear for mocking him. Cleitus had objected either to the King adopting Persian customs or to the way he dispar- aged his father's successes. (The different versions are told by Arrian 4.8-9, Curtius 8.1, Justin 12.6, and Plutarch 50-51.) Either way, drunkenness clouded Alexander's judgement enough to allow the murder of an old and trusted companion. Paradoxically, drunkenness also saved Alexander's life. In 327 BC, the court his- torian Callisthenes, nephew of Aristotle (Alexander's childhood tutor) and another objector (like Cleitus) to the creeping ori- entalising of the Macedonian court, was implicated (rightly or wrongly) in a plot to kill the King in his bedchamber after dark. However, on the appointed night, Alexander had stayed up drinking until dawn, and thus the plot was foiled. (The details are related by Arrian 4.13.2-6, and Curti us 8.6.7-20.) The drinking continued. In 324 BC, after the gruelling Gedrosian desert march, once the army emerged into fertile Carmania, "it proceeded in a drunken revel for seven days", with Alexander dressed as the wine-god Dionysus. (The tale is told by Arrian 6.28.1-2, Curtius 9.10.24- 29, Diodorus 17.106.1., and Plutarch 67, although Arrian says that he did not believe it.) Again, prior to the army's arrival in Susa later that year, Plutarch describes