LAST ILLNESS
The preparations for the projected campaign were now so far advanced, that Alexander celebrated a solemn sacrifice for its success. He at the same time entertained his principal officers at a banquet, and continued drinking with them to a late hour of the evening. As he was retiring to rest, he was invited by Medius—who it seems had of late been admitted to an intimacy with him something like Hephæstion’s—to a revel, which was to be followed by a fresh drinking-bout. He complied, and the greater part of the night seems to have been thus spent. The next evening he again banqueted at the house of Medius, and again the carousal was prolonged.
It was at the close of this banquet, after he had refreshed himself with a bath, that he felt the symptoms of fever so strongly as to be induced to sleep there. The grasp of death was on him, though his robust frame yielded only after a hard struggle to the gradual prevalence of the malady.
We have a minute and seemingly complete account of his last illness, in an official diary which Arrian transcribed. Nevertheless various reports, which it does not sanction, were current in ancient times, and one of them, which ascribed his death to gross intemperance, has always been very generally believed. Another, which has been as generally rejected, attributed it to a dose of poison,[39] contrived by Aristotle, conveyed by Cassander, and administered by Iollas, another of Antipater’s sons, who filled the office of cup-bearer to the king. As this report was undoubtedly invented by Cassander’s enemies, so the other may have been first circulated by him and his partisans. It represents Alexander as having drained an enormous cup, a bowl of Hercules, as it was called, and as having instantly sunk as from a sudden blow. This incident certainly would not have appeared on the face of the journal; but neither does it seem quite consistent with Alexander’s habits, who, according to Aristobulus, drank chiefly for the sake of prolonging conversation, nor with other details which have been preserved concerning the banquet. If he had been in his usual state of health, the debauch described in the journal would probably have produced no effect on him. It may however both have hastened the outbreak of the fever, and have rendered it fatal. Aristobulus related another fact, which the journal passed over in silence; that in a paroxysm of the fever, the patient quenched his thirst with a large draught of wine.[b]