All Alexander's Women by Robbert Bosschart

Author:Robbert Bosschart [Bosschart, Robbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63003-154-1
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2013-06-20T04:00:00+00:00

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THE DEATH OF HEFAISTION

In October 324 BC, Alexander had accompanied Hefaistion to Ekbatana. They were organising a Games festival, when Hefaistion went down with fever. It seemed a perfectly normal case. Modern-day doctors have deduced from the symptoms, recorded by several historians, that it must have been a typhoid infection. Hefaistion was a strong man, usually in good health, so everybody –Alexander included– assumed he was healing when, after a week, the fevers began to abate.

That night, Alexander, instead of staying at his friend’s bedside as he had been doing during most of the week, left the palace. He went next morning to the festival to hand out the prizes at the Boy’s Games. But he was not the only one to leave Hefaistion alone. The Greek doctor, one Glaukias, also disappeared from the palace that night (later, he said he had gone to the theatre). When Hefaistion’s condition worsened next morning, he was nowhere to be found.

The time the servants lost looking around for the doctor also meant they were late in sending a warning to Alexander. He crossed the city on horseback at breakneck speed, but even so arrived too late. In the bedroom of the palace he found his soul mate dead. Glaukias was finally brought in, could not give any coherent explanation, and was executed out of hand. That was a serious error of judgement, which confirms that sorrow had driven Alexander out of his mind.

He should have had Glaukias thoroughly interrogated. If it were true that he had left the palace to go to a theatre, that was an unpardonable error in a doctor. But there also is the suspicious fact of such a sudden worsening in Hefaistion’s condition, that he died in the short time elapsed between a warning sent out, and Alexander crossing Ekbatana, not a big city. Such a lightning speed development in a ‘normal’ illness of a strong man might very well mean that he took a wrong medicine – or poison.

If Glaukias had remained at the palace, he could and should have prohibited his patient to take the breakfast –a boiled chicken and a bottle of wine, the servants reported– that accelerated the fatal disease. Modern day doctors say that, with the knowledge a medical man of Glaukias’ standing had, he should have ordered his patient not to eat anything, but only to drink clean water.

Once the fever symptoms had become unequivocally those of a typhoid case, which he certainly would have recognised, Glaukias should have prohibited the palace servants to bring him any food. He did not, and that was either out of malpractice, or on purpose. For the breakfast erased all trace of the medicine (or poison) administered. Many sources note that poisoning was suspected.

Hefaistion had made many enemies among the Makedonians and Greeks in the course of his ascent to the top. Frictions with Krateros during the Indian campaign had even pushed them into a hand-to-hand combat, with their troops ready to come to the aid of their respective leaders.

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