ALEXANDER’S POSTHUMOUS PLANS
Priestess
(After Hope)
There still remained a question on which he felt it necessary to consult the army, that he might relieve himself from a dangerous responsibility. Papers had been found in Alexander’s cabinet, containing the outlines of some vast projects. It would seem that they might easily have been suppressed; but it was known that they corresponded in part with the instructions which had been given to Craterus, and therefore they could not safely be neglected without the general consent. Some related to the equipment of a great armament—a thousand galleys, it is said, of the largest size—destined for the conquest of Carthage, and of the whole coast of Africa on the Mediterranean as far as the Straits, and those of Spain and the adjacent maritime regions, as far as Sicily: for which end a road was to be made along the African shore. Others were plans for new colonies, to be planted in Asia with Europeans, and in Europe with Asiatics. There were also directions for six new temples to be built in Europe—at Delos, Delphi, Dodona, Dium, Amphipolis, and Cyrrhus—each at the cost of fifteen hundred talents, beside one of extraordinary magnificence to the goddess of Ilium, and for a monument to his father in Macedonia, which was to equal the largest of the Egyptian pyramids in its dimensions.
It must be owned, that there are some points in these schemes which look suspicious, and which, even if they had crossed Alexander’s mind, we should not have expected he would have committed to writing. But the part relating to the temples can scarcely have been fabricated, and was probably contained in the instructions given to Craterus. The plan for an interchange of population between Europe and Asia is also quite conformable to the views which Alexander disclosed in his life-time. This however, and that of the expedition to Africa, could not any longer have entered into any one’s thoughts, and might have been silently dropped. But perhaps Perdiccas apprehended that the sums destined for the other objects might be demanded from him by his colleagues, and therefore deemed it advisable formally to annul the whole by the highest authority. That he forged the project of the expedition, to render the real contents of the papers the less acceptable to the Macedonians, seems a very improbable conjecture. All were laid before a military assembly, and rejected as impracticable or useless.
During the tumultuous scenes which followed Alexander’s death, his body had lain in the palace unburied. There are various reports as to the place selected for its interment. According to one, it was to have been transported to the sanctuary of Ammon. But the more probable is, that it was determined it should be deposited in the sepulchre of his ancestors at Ægæ. And Aristander the soothsayer is said to have declared that it had been revealed to him, the land where it rested was destined to be ever prosperous and secure from invasion: which however was no more than an ancient Greek superstition as to the virtue of a hero’s relics. Orders were now given to construct a funeral car worthy of these precious remains, and the general Arrhidæus was appointed to escort them towards the western coast.[b]
The description by Diodorus (XVIII, 3) of this funeral pomp is so gorgeous that as a farewell sunset of Alexander’s day it merits insertion here:[a]