On the evening of May 29, 323 BC, at Babylon, Alexander the Great attended a banquet.
The guests – all generals and potentates of the empire – drank freely in the usual
Macedonian way, toasting the king and each other with goblet after goblet of unmixed
wine.
Toward the end of the banquet, after yet another round of toasts, Alexander began to feel ill.
The next morning, he woke with a fever.
At first, Alexander ignored his illness, busying himself with preparations for his upcoming
expedition to Arabia.
But his fever worsened, until he could no longer get out of bed.
His voice failed.
He lapsed into unconsciousness.
On the tenth day after the banquet, Alexander breathed his last.
He was 32 years old.
Since becoming King of Macedon 12 years before, Alexander had conquered the largest empire
to that point in history.
He had burned Thebes and Persepolis.
He had defeated the gargantuan armies of the King of Kings, the horsemen of the steppes,
and the elephants of the Indian princes.
He had been acclaimed pharaoh.
He had declared himself a god.
And now, he was dead.
The initial reaction was shock, followed by a mad scramble for power.
Alexander’s embalmed body lay at Babylon for two years, as his former generals schemed
and squabbled.
At last, during a lull in the in-fighting, the king’s remains began the long recessional
to Macedon in a gargantuan carriage drawn by 64 mules in gilded harness.
In Syria, the carriage and its honor guard were diverted south by forces loyal to Ptolemy,
the general who had seized control of Egypt.
The king’s coffin was brought to Memphis, ancient capital of the pharaohs, while Ptolemy
built a suitably impressive mausoleum in Alexandria, the new Greek metropolis on the mouths of
Nile.
Alexander’s Mausoleum – which came to be known as the Soma – was part of the palace
complex Ptolemy and his successors built in the heart of Alexandria.
The interior was dominated by a sarcophagus of solid gold, later replaced – when one
of Ptolemy’s successors found himself strapped for cash – by a crystal casket.
There Alexander’s body remained, revered by the world, for centuries.
Augustus had the lid of the casket removed so that he could gaze upon the conqueror.
He laid flowers on the mummified torso, fitted a golden circlet on the head, and – according
to one source – managed to break the nose when he bent to kiss the withered cheeks.
Two and a half centuries later, Caracalla – whose hero-worship was so intense that
he believed himself to be Alexander reborn – visited the tomb with his retinue.
The lid was lifted again, and Caracalla saw his idol, face to nose-less face.
He draped his cloak over the wizened body, and let his golden rings fall, one by one,
into the crystal casket.
Caracalla is the last person known to have entered the tomb of Alexander.
In 272, during a catastrophic riot, fire swept over the whole palace quarter, destroying
most of it.
If Alexander’s tomb survived the flames, it may have perished a generation later, when
the armies of Diocletian sacked Alexandria.
A more literal wave of destruction followed in 365, when a tsunami came roaring over the
harbor, plucking ships from their moorings, battering down buildings, and burying most
of the city beneath a wall of water.
Speaking of water damage…
Do you have trouble with water in your house?
If your pipes or drains are clogged, and you live in or near Astoria, Queens, call Steve
at Woosh, and make it drain.
And since Steve, like Alexander, understands that speed is the essence of an effective
campaign, we now return to our topic.
Perhaps it was the tsunami that finally destroyed Alexander’s tomb.
Perhaps it was the sack, or the fire, or any of the countless episodes of urban unrest
that bloodied the streets of Alexandria in late antiquity.
One late fourth-century author implies that the tomb still existed in his time.
Another, however, rhetorically asks whether anyone knows where Alexander lies.
Whatever the cause, no source mentions the tomb after the end of the fourth century.
Many attempts have been made to locate Alexander’s tomb.
The sanest have focused on central Alexandria, where the palace quarter of the ancient city
is assumed to have stood.
Even here, however, practical difficulties make the search almost impossible.
A densely-populated city is not an easy place in which to dig; and any remains that still
exist have likely been damaged or destroyed by the deep foundations of modern buildings.
If the remains of Alexander’s tomb are ever found, they are not likely to be impressive.
The tomb would not have been allowed to sit as a ruin; its stone would have been carted
away for re-use, and the site built over.
Whatever may still survive of the tomb, Alexander’s body will almost certainly not be discovered
inside.
It was too famous, too talismanic to have been left in the rubble – or so, at least,
the best-known theory about the body’s fate suggests.
In 2004, British researcher Andrew Chugg made headlines by announcing that the body of Alexander
was in Venice.
Sometime in the fourth century, he claimed, the conqueror’s remains had been secretly
transferred from the Soma to the nearby Church of St. Mark.
There they remained for a half-millennium or so, until two merchants – mistaking Alexander
for St. Mark – brought them to Venice.
Although it’s certainly possible that Alexander’s body was salvaged from its tomb, it’s unlikely,
to say the least, that the remains of a pagan king with divine pretensions would have been
brought to Alexandria’s most important church.
And it’s even less likely that the conqueror’s body was ever mistaken for the evangelist’s.
These, after all, were very high-profile corpses.
Nobody even knows whether the body beneath the altar of St. Mark’s is the one that
was brought from Alexandria.
When the basilica was reconstructed in the eleventh century, that body was lost, and
only rediscovered – according to tradition – by miraculous intervention.
Whomever it once belonged to, the body currently identified as St. Mark has not fared well
over the centuries: by the time it were moved to its current location under the altar, little
remained but a damaged skull and a few shattered bones.
If Alexander’s body is anywhere, it is in Alexandria.
Perhaps it lies in some drowned catacomb.
Perhaps it was pulled apart by late antique relic seekers, and survives as anonymous bits
of bone in a hundred buried mansions.
But I prefer to imagine a dramatic end.
I imagine the walls of the mausoleum glowing with heat, the marble cracking and calcifying,
the sarcophagus melting into puddled glass.
Or I picture a wall of water exploding through the door, mirrored for an instant on the face
of the crystal coffin; and then, after a burst of elemental fury, the sea receding from an
empty room, the golden rings of the emperors scattered over the marble floor.
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