12 October 2003
The Times Online (The Sunday Times Magazine) - click
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Cover story: Death of a tyrant
Richard Girling investigates
Alexander the Great died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 32.
Now, 23 centuries later, the case is reopened.
Once upon a time there was a long-haired homosexual midget with a very bad temper. When he drank too much, which was often, he was prone to bouts of extreme and uncontrollable violence. His destiny, which he pursued with the zeal of a madman, was to rule the world. Given time, he was bound to come to the attention of the police.
But even he, a master of the unexpected, would have blinked at some of the evidence on the investigators' file. Crows, owls and hawks dropping from their perches in the Bronx zoo. Horses being 'euthanised' across the United States. A mad rhinoceros breaking its neck. Soldiers paralysed by their soup.
He was 32 when life finally caught up with him and his enemies could enjoy the spectacle of his exquisitely lingering death - a death that, in the opinion of a leading forensic psychiatrist, had been made inevitable by the loss of his long-term gay lover.
According to an inscribed clay tablet in the British Museum, Alexander the Great breathed his last on June 11, 323BC. The event is laconically recorded - "there were clouds and the king died" - though there can have been no doubt about its world-changing enormity. Nobody at the time knew what had finished the tyrant off, but - given that his last conscious act had been to drink himself stupid - there was more than a suspicion that strong Macedonian wine had done its worst.
But it leaves open the crucial question: why did he take 12 days to die? Modern pathology suggests very few causes of death that fit the pattern, and none of them involves red wine. Some of them, however, do involve poison. If you are an experienced 21st-century policeman, this is exactly the kind of thing that makes your antennae twitch. You have a death. You have suspicious circumstances. You have a lot of people with good reason to dance on the victim's grave. You have a case.
Not a hopeless one, either, for although there is no body to examine, and no crime scene, there is plenty of evidence that has never faced the scrutiny of a professional investigator wise in the ways of unnatural death.
John Grieve, CBE, QPM, BA(Hons), M Phil, is wise in other ways too. When he retired in May 2002 he was deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. What he left behind him was not so much a track record as a comet tail. A reputation for the unorthodox, plus cerebral tastes in literature and art, his rumpled appearance and lugubrious manner, brought the inevitable comparisons to Inspector Morse. He groans at the memory. "When journalists want me to be Morse," he says, "I drive an old Jaguar, drink warm beer and like opera. The fact is, I don't drive, I like rock'n'roll and I don't touch beer because I'm a diabetic."
There are more important differences too: his career in the Met took him to places that Morse could only have had nightmares about. As head of anti-terrorism he cracked two of the IRA's top operational units and effectively put an end to the mainland bombing campaign. As head of the Yard's Racial and Violent Crime Task Force he had the unenviable but vital task of formulating the Met's response to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Further back, he had pitched himself against the criminal gangs of London's East End, and knocked off murderers and drug dealers with the efficiency of a crime-seeking missile.
The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens, did not risk controversy when he described him as "one of the best, if not the best, detectives ever to have worked at Scotland Yard".
And now here he is, at the invitation of a film company, leading a worldwide investigation into a fatality that occurred 323 years before the birth of Christ. He treats the job the only way he knows: seriously. "It is an opportunity," he says gravely, "to stop and think about the philosophy of investigation."
To hear him speak, you might believe he never thinks about anything else. Sitting in the west London conference room of the film company he is working with, Atlantic Productions, he is in no mood to be hurried. His intention, he says, is to assemble enough evidence to put before a jury - and by "evidence" he means exactly that. He'll not be satisfied with conjecture, no matter how eminent the historian putting it forward, and he is not going to cut corners. "I don't care how obvious it may look to other people," he says. "I'm maintaining an open mind." It's not that he dismisses historical orthodoxy: rather that he regards it as just another tool in the box. At dictation speed he recites the list of specialisms he will bring into play: "Forensic science, pathology, psychiatry, logic, medicine, botany, ethics, epidemiology, history, toxicology, archeology..."
Like any policeman at a briefing, he refreshes himself from his notebooks. Here is a surprise, though. Instead of the expected scrawl, there are beautiful coloured illustrations and carefully lettered diagrams in a vivid spectrum of inks. He seems genuinely surprised that I don't recognise them for what they are: mind maps. These, he says, are one of the many things in his life that (a favourite expression) have "bent his head" - a graphic and, hence, more memorable way of recording information.
On the page, he prints a main subject heading in bold capitals. Lines radiating from this are labelled with the most important subheadings, with smaller branches and twigs to represent lesser subdivisions, each one crisply identified by a single word, concise phrase or graphic symbol. Different colours help both to clarify the map and to make it easier to remember. Being a talented amateur painter, Grieve adds impact with coloured miniatures that catapult the practice of criminal investigation across the line from science to art. Small wonder that "creativity" occurs so often in his conversation.
As it happens, Grieve already has a professional interest in Alexander the Great, whose example he likes to quote in lectures on leadership. "Alexander," he says, "is the leader as hero, leadership at the point of the spear. Or, as I translated it, leadership within hearing of the click of the handcuffs."
And this was Alexander's true genius. In killing or carousing, he always led from the front. The conquests of Greece, Egypt and the Persian empire were the results of some of the boldest strategies in military history - risks routinely calculated to within a hair's breadth of disaster. This was no donkey leading lions, but the fiercest and the most deeply scarred lion in the pride.
Charismatic, point-of-spear leadership had cost him serious injuries to his legs, chest and head, prompting his biographer Robin Lane Fox to describe him as "the toughest thing on two legs".
Alexander in his twenties became not only the most powerful man in the world but the most powerful man the world had ever known. Though small - when he sat on the throne of the Persian king, he was famously unable to reach the footstool - he was broad-shouldered and had a kind of beaky handsomeness that made him attractive to men and women alike. "He was the leader of the most successful armed gang in the history of the universe," says Grieve, "and also probably the richest and most predatory global company." Such men make fortunes for themselves, their families and the members of their inner circles. They also make enemies.
Suggestions of murder arose soon after Alexander's death, but the sources were unreliable and the idea remains controversial. In the opinion of Lane Fox, the odds-on favourite is fever.
"The stories of poisoning are absolutely fatuous - just one little detail from a completely scurrilous pamphlet of uncertain origin written by a fantasist." Grieve, however, allows himself to imagine Alexander's much-bereaved family now petitioning him for justice. "When a 32-year-old man dies suddenly, and his uncle's been murdered, his father's been murdered, his wife and son are going to be murdered - none of which anyone disputes - then the family and lawyers are going to come to you and say, 'What's your problem with investigating this as a suspicious death too?'"
What, then, do we know for certain? That after years of hard military campaigning, Alexander died in Babylon, chief city of Mesopotamia, deep inside modern Iraq. That he was not stabbed or in any other way violently assaulted. That he fell into a high fever after a hard night's drinking with cronies, and lay for 12 days until he died. The question is: what brought on the fever? Was it perhaps the festering of an old injury?
As a war wound would have brought the Alexandrian romance to a perfect poetic climax, it is impossible to believe that any chronicler would have ignored it. Alcohol, then? Some people at the time were certainly prepared to believe that he had drunk himself to death. There is no doubt that Alexander was a prodigious imbiber or that his collapse was preceded by a mighty intake of wine. This was entirely in keeping with his character.
"As a hero," says Grieve, "perhaps you have to do more of everything than everyone else and show that you do leadership from the front - leadership even at the point of the bottle." Nevertheless, this "toughest thing on two legs" was a hardened drinker who was not likely to have been knocked off his perch by just another skinful.
Natural causes? There would certainly have been plenty of disease about. Malaria, for example, has its advocates. Unlike, say, tuberculosis, it leaves no mark on its victims' bones, but it's reasonable to assume that it would have been as common in ancient Mesopotamia as it is in modern Iraq. Here, John Grieve's expert witness is Dr John Marr, director of epidemiology at the Virginia Department of Health in Richmond, Virginia, and an authority on infectious diseases.
Marr explains that only one fatal form of the disease - falciparum, or cerebral, malaria - occurs in the region, and that its effects are dramatic. Patients are hammered every third day by fever spikes, while parasites consume the red cells and convert the blood into thick black soup. Heart, brain, kidneys and lungs all begin to falter, and the urine, too, turns black. As the records imply a sustained high fever without malaria's characteristic spikes, and as there is no mention of any blackening of the urine or of others dying at the same time, Marr advises that malaria is unlikely.
He turns next to typhoid. The broad outline certainly fits. "You have abdominal pains, you have a fever. Over a week or two the fever slowly rises until, by about the end of the second week, it may be 104 or 105, and the person is delirious and goes into almost a coma-like state." So far, so convincing. But there are other crucial signs that are missing from the record. "For example," says Marr, "one of the classic symptoms is the so-called rose spot, a sort of a rash that develops on the thorax and abdomen. And that probably would have been noticed. Also, there tends to be a passage of blood from the rectum. I think that would have been mentioned if Alexander had typhoid."
Flu, then? No, the timing is all wrong. "If you're going to die of influenza, you die after two or three days, or at most a week."
Like Grieve, Marr is inclined to think laterally. As an epidemiologist, he wants to look at the entire context in which a mystery disease occurs. "I looked at the weather, the environment, the fauna and flora, to see if there might be another clue that people had missed."
And there was. It was recorded that, as Alexander approached Babylon, an omen occurred. He saw some ravens pecking at each other in the sky. According to Plutarch, "They fell to his feet and they were dead." To modern science, of course, omens are superstitious nonsense. But rejecting superstition need not mean dismissing the event itself. Suppose birds really did fall to the ground. What then?
As it happens, birds in America are doing exactly that, right now. It began in 1999 in the Bronx zoo, when both captive and wild birds - particularly crows, owls and raptors - began to die in the first stages of an epidemic that now threatens the whole of the US, Canada and Mexico (there have even been a few cases in the UK). Soon humans, too, were hit by a mystery virus: they complained of fever, headaches, chills, sore throats, conjunctivitis, rashes, nausea, diarrhoea and wheezing. Most recovered but a few older people did not, prompting the Daily News to wonder: "Could the same virus kill Bronx Zoo birds and senior citizens in Queens?" The answer soon became clear: yes, it could. And not only birds and humans. Horses, too, began to develop the symptoms and had to be put down. Even a rhinoceros died: maddened by disease, it tossed a log into the air and broke its own neck.
The virus was identified as an exotic import, familiar to doctors in the Middle East but hitherto unknown in America: West Nile virus. The disease, transmitted initially by mosquitoes to birds and some mammals, was named only in 1937 after an outbreak in Africa, but there is no reason to believe that the virus itself had not been busy in the Nile region for millennia. How does it fit with the circumstances of Alexander's death? "Like a hand in a glove," says Marr. "You get a high fever, and a complication of that is encephalitis [inflammation of the brain], in which the patient's sensorium dramatically changes. He may not be able to talk, he may not be able to hear. He may have seizures and tics, but essentially he is in a coma. People with encephalitis can linger for a few days, a few weeks or a few months, and then either they get better or they die."
It would explain the "omen" of dead birds dropping from the sky. It would explain the suddenness of Alexander's illness. "When a person gets encephalitis," says Marr, "one hour they're normal and the next time you look they're almost in a coma."
It explains the fever and the drawn-out death. It is geographically accurate, and might even explain why no other deaths were recorded at the time. Only a minority of people infected by the virus develop symptoms, and less than 1% become seriously ill. Death in fit young men, though not unknown, is rarer still. Grieve therefore faces a conundrum. West Nile fits the facts, but against this must be weighed its extreme rarity as a killer of any but the very old and the very young. Statistically, murder is much more likely.
Kingship in the ancient world was not just a matter of inheritance, and family trees were commonly pruned by homicide. Alexander himself had shown no reluctance to dispose of those who obstructed or annoyed him - notoriously, he speared an old friend of his father's after a drunken argument, and he is reputed to have crucified the doctor who failed to save the life of his lover Hephaistion. There would have been nothing "unthinkable" about murder in the mind of anyone who opposed him.
And you do not have to look far for motives. There is jealousy, there is ambition, there is revenge.
Even in the military command, even among Alexander's closed inner circle of lifelong hunting friends, you find disaffection. Having conquered the Persian empire, Alexander had recruited Persian officers to his own army - something the traditional Macedonian officer cadre, racial supremacists to a man, regarded as little short of traitorous. Worse, at a mass wedding he had forced 92 Macedonian officers to take Iranian and Asiatic wives - women from alien cultures who did not even speak the same language. And now, within days, he was planning to invade Arabia.
Men whose part in previous campaigns had already placed them among the richest in the world might have preferred to rest awhile, and enjoy the spoils of earlier wars, rather than face yet another dangerous campaign.
The murder theory is often dismissed because of its scurrilous origins. But if rumour is not evidence of murder, then neither is it evidence to the contrary. It must simply be ignored. Objectively, one cannot discount the possibility of poison. The question is: was there any substance known at the time that could have caused the symptoms? None of the old favourites - arsenic, strychnine, hemlock - fits the bill, but might there have been something else in the Macedonian pharmacopoeia that would have done the trick?
On the other side of the globe, at the world-famous National Poisons Centre in Dunedin, New Zealand, the toxicologist Dr Leo Schep is John Grieve's next expert witness. The NPC's database, which lists all known poisons and their symptoms, is massive, and it takes a while to search it. When the two men meet in the Botanic Garden at Winterbourne in Birmingham, however, Schep is smiling broadly. In his hand is an entire plant, complete with roots. It is about 1.5 metres tall and has distinctively pleated leaves. This, says Schep, is Veratrum album, or white hellebore, a meadow-growing native of central and southern Europe, well known in ancient Macedonia. "It looks innocent," he says, "but it's nasty." In the roots are toxins that, if ingested, cause precisely the kind of fever and prolonged death that Grieve is trying to understand.
"The poison acts very quickly, reducing blood pressure and heart rate. It causes pain in the sub-sternal region, and sweating. Victims can faint, they get weak, and they need medical intervention pretty quickly. There's a lot of distinct characteristics, all symptoms that line up with Alexander the Great." Even now, antidotes have to be administered very quickly if survival is to be assured. In the Korean war, for example, a mishap occurred when soldiers drank vegetable soup to which hellebore had been added by mistake. They were saved by prompt treatment, but their symptoms - loss of blood pressure, reduced heart rate, sweating - were fully consistent with those reported in Alexander. Other cases in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tell a similar story.
All this is valuable evidence but it still falls a long way short of proof. "I need to know more about how hellebore works," says Grieve. "And I need to know whether you could conceal it in wine. It's a distinct possibility, but that's all it is at the moment - a possibility." Into his notebook, nevertheless, goes a lovingly detailed, beautiful coloured illustration of Veratrum album.
There are historical questions too. Did the ancients actually know about white hellebore, or even have a medicinal use for it? This time it is Dr Robert Arnott, founder-director of Birmingham University's Centre for the History of Medicine, who provides the answers. From as early as 1100BC, white hellebore was in widespread use as a purgative. Alexander would have certainly have known and used it - his personal tutor, after all, had been Aristotle, the foremost botanist as well as scientist and thinker of the day.
It is also clear that hellebore in large doses was recognised as a poison. For example, there is an account of the Athenian statesman and lawmaker Solon, in the 6th century BC, having a river filled with it in order to poison a besieged city's water. The story may be apocryphal but the message is unequivocal: hellebore kills. Crucially, too, it may not require a heavy dose. Indeed, it was the very narrowness of the margin between therapeutic and toxic doses, and the damaging side effects, that caused the abandonment of a clinical trial in the 1950s when it was tested as a potential treatment for high blood pressure.
One requirement of an efficacious murder weapon, therefore, is amply fulfilled. But how easy would it have been to administer? White hellebore has a bitter taste, which Alexander would have been bound to recognise. Would red wine really have been enough to get it past his nose? "It depends how much you use," says Arnott. "It's possible, if you use a small amount, to disguise it with watered-down wine or honey." And, as Schep's experiments show, a fatal dose need not be large. About 71.3mg, distilled down from 4oz of root, should be enough to kill - barely a teaspoonful. If the victim is as drunk as Alexander probably was, then the murderer's job looks easy.
Easy, however, does not necessarily mean likely. Murdering a king involved a certain heroic etiquette. Killers sprang forward with blades. They did not lurk in the shadows with poison bottles (Alexander's own father, Philip, for example, was publicly stabbed to death at a wedding). It is mainly for this reason that Professor Elizabeth Carney, an expert on the Alexandrian period at Clemson University in South Carolina, is reluctant to believe in murder. "This is a culture where a fairly strong line exists for what gets done by gender," she says. "Men should get killed with a knife or a sword in public." Political murder is also unlikely, because the only certain outcome is violent disorder. There are no beneficiaries.
Robin Lane Fox agrees. "I don't believe that a potential successor would want to strike now. There is chaos on Alexander's death. Nobody could predict how the riots would end... Nothing is prepared. They are absolutely bewildered."
Yet the suspicion will not go away. Let us not forget: this was a ruthless age in which taking life was a normal transaction of human commerce. And there is no shortage of suspects.
Alexander had recently sent for Antipater, the elderly general he had left in charge of Macedonia. This old campaigner - over 70 now, and old enough to have been a distinguished general in the army of Alexander's father - would have been under no illusion about what he faced. His time was up. Having been the second most powerful man in the empire, he was - at best - going to be sacked. At worst... well, the empire was not short of fatherless families who had felt the full force of Alexander's wrath. And according to some sources, Alexander's mother, Olympias - a wilful eccentric who reputedly slept with snakes - had repeatedly written to him complaining about Antipater, whom she blamed for her exile.
Small wonder that Antipater delayed his coming.
Small wonder, too, that the conspiracy theorists pause here to tap their noses. Alexander's cup-bearer or butler - the very man responsible for his wine - was none other than Antipater's son Iollas. More: Iollas's brother Cassander had recently arrived in Babylon bearing, so legend has it, a mule's hoof containing a casket of poison (reputedly water from the mythic river of death, the Styx).
Later, Cassander will complete the slate-wiping by killing also Alexander's mother, wife and son. Why look further?
All this John Grieve has to consider. But he must consider also that poisoning is not necessarily deliberate. White hellebore is a powerful drug rejected by modern medicine precisely because of the risk of accidental overdose. "The question to be asked," says Robert Arnott, "is, if a patient has it regularly as a purgative, as I'm sure Alexander did, whether it builds up and even a small overdose may have been just enough to put him over the edge."
Neither was this the only risk. White hellebore, says Leo Schep, was often mistaken for gentian - and the main use of gentian was for fermenting into wine. As the Korean-war soup story makes clear, a bit of hellebore in the mix can pass without notice, and the consequences can be catastrophic.
Grieve must also inquire into Alexander's state of mind. Eight months earlier, his closest friend and lover Hephaistion had died, plunging him into violent grief. In the view of Dr Harold Bursztajn of Harvard Medical School, one of the world's leading forensic psychiatrists and criminal-profilers, this is the key to the case. Bursztajn believes that Alexander's world-conquering zeal was driven largely by the pain and shame of having witnessed his own father's murder and been unable to prevent it.
"When he loses Hephaistion, the one person who he has loved and has loved him, then it's likely the pain and the shame will be magnified. That he will drink more, that he will take care of himself less, he'll take more risks and drive people who have already have been alienated even further away from him... It left Alexander much more vulnerable to envy, to rage and to fear among his inner circle. With Hephaistion gone, all that was left for him was drinking, basically. Drinking, and to conquer yet another land."
The drinking and the grief, says Bursztajn, were signs of weakness that would have been seized upon by his enemies. "It was a sign that perhaps now was the time to remove him."
Whatever the immediate cause of death, Bursztajn is convinced that it was precipitated by the loss of Hephaistion. Grief made Alexander more vulnerable to illness, more likely to drink excessively, more likely to swallow an accidental overdose, more likely to excite the attention of murderers. Grieve listens attentively (he was, after all, the officer who introduced offender profiling to the UK in the early 1980s). "I think it's an interesting thought," he says, "that Alexander died of a broken heart. It sort of overlays across drinking, the possibility of fever, self-medication... You can include anything in there. He was down and, whatever it was that clobbered him, he would have been more vulnerable."
An interesting thought, but, as it applies just as well to any cause of death you care to mention, it leaves him still looking for an answer. Who or what killed Alexander the Great? In the end, mind maps and simple, step-by-step logic bring Grieve to the same ineluctable conclusion. Alexander's symptoms and 12-day descent into death; the ubiquity of hellebore in the Macedonian medicine chest; the wafer-thin margin between therapeutic and toxic doses: all point to death by poisoning. There was no murder. Alexander physically was at a low ebb, and would have been anxious to repair his body in time for his next great campaign in Arabia. He was still a young man in a hurry. In his characteristic impatience, and in the mistaken belief that a large dose would do him more good than a small one, he simply took too much of the drug he thought would make him better.
Verdict: misadventure.
The Mysterious Death of Alexander the Great... Revealed, produced by Atlantic Productions, is on Five on October 22, at 9pm. A one-hour special edition is available on VHS for £13.99 including postage and packing (UK mainland only). To order, telephone 020 7371 3200, quoting The Sunday Times Magazine.