Alexander the Great Discussion Series Part 8
PAUL CARTLEDGE Call me an old sceptic, Jamie, but somehow poison has to me much more of a Roman than a Greek ring to it, and it's a fact that all our surviving narrative and other accounts of Alexander come from what's usually called the Roman period (1st century BCE to end of the 3rd CE). Obviously, the Greeks knew enough about poisons to concoct a fatal dose of hemlock for Socrates, but the killing of a king or emperor secretly by poison is an almost hackneyed theme from Mithridates King of Pontus to Roman Emperor Commodus, so I'd need pretty good objective evidence to convince myself that Alexander too met his end that way. But unless we can find his mummy, as you say, we're not going to nail his cause of death via DNA. Instead, I'd like to hear your reaction to a couple of the more recent – and imaginative – theories. One is supposedly impersonal and medical: West Nile Virus encephalitis. The other is a rather startling spin on the old Cassander theory – that what killed Alexander was bacterium-ridden water drawn from the River Styx in Arcadia (Peloponnese) brought to Alexander in Babylon by Cassander – in a mule's hoof.
ng on the posthumous Alexander legends and fantasies, and Leo Scheps I would judge to be an equally well regarded toxicologist, but the Atlantic Productions documentary of 2003 in which his theory was exploited seemed to me one of the worst kinds of sensational treatments of Alexander's death. A senior ex-policeman was hired to host the show, as if he were carrying out a non-medical coroner's autopsy, in a sort of parody of a (living) 'reality' programme. To me the main problem with any such pseudo- or quasi-scientific approach is that, as you say, Alexander's terminal symptoms are very differently described by the extant sources – which are we to believe? So, I tend to restrict my own enquiries to a simple dichotomy – murder or death by 'natural' causes, and I tend to think that by June 323 Alexander's body had taken so much (non-legal) punishment over so many years that it was a bit of a miracle he was still alive rather than that he should have died so relatively 'young' at 32 going on 33. Not that there weren't members of his immediate entourage who weren't all that sorry that he should have died when and where he did, and some of whom would not have scrupled at resorting to poison or whatever – you'll know their names …
JR I too prefer clean dichotomies, but the old poison/illness argument has been getting more complicated lately. I refer not only to the hellebore thesis but to an intriguing 2009 Acta Classica article by John Atkinson, "Malaria and mind-games?" The article rehearses all the theories as to what killed Alexander and adds a new one: After the king became ill, his inner circle pushed him toward death by withholding treatment and robbing Alexander of his will to live. It's speculative, but Atkinson is an expert who has the right to speculate. His assumption, also the assumption of Brian Bosworth in an influential 1973 article, is that Alexander's top generals wanted their king dead, as that was the only way they could stop the now-endless campaign of conquest. I'm opposed to that view myself, but impressed at how much traction it has gained.
PC You are quite right about the traction, Jamie – and if we may refer to the broadest of mass media circulation, it's a version of it that is expressed by Oliver Stone's narrator Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) in his controversial movie *Alexander* (on which I co-edited a volume of academic 'Responses' published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2010: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-07-14.html).