of their Asian campaign.) This grievous loss precipitated a severe mental collapse in the King, who had, in any event, grown increasingly unstable and paranoid. Not without reason: there were at least two major conspiracies against his life after Gaugamela, both incited by close associates who’d grown disgruntled with his increasingly pro-Persian policies.
Within a year, he himself was dead – perhaps of poison, as some have insisted on believing, but far more likely of the cumulative effects of swamp fever (he’d chosen, foolishly or perhaps self-destructively, to pass the summer in sultry, fetid Babylon), a lifetime of heavy drinking, and the physical toll taken by his various wounds. He was thirty-two.
There can be no doubt that the world as we know it would have a very different shape had it not been for Alexander, who among other things vastly expanded, through his Hellenization of the East, the reach of Western culture, and thus prepared the soil, as it were, for Rome and then Christianity. But as extraordinarily significant as this story is, little of it would be very interesting to anyone but historians and classicists were it not for a rather curious additional factor of what the Greeks called pothos – ‘longing’. The best and most authoritative of the ancient sources for Alexander’s career are the Anabasis (‘March Up-Country’) and Indica (‘Indian Affairs’) by the second-century-AD historian and politician Arrian, a Greek from Nicomedia (part of the Greek-speaking East that Alexander helped to create) who was a student of Epictetus and flourished under the philhellene emperor Hadrian. Throughout his account of Alexander’s life, the word pothos recurs to describe the yearning that, as the historian and so many others before and after him believed, motivated Alexander to seek far more than mere conquest.
The word is used by Arrian of Alexander’s yearning to see new frontiers, his dreamy desire to found new cities, to loosen the famous Gordian knot, to explore the Caspian Sea. It is used, significantly, to describe his striving to outdo the two divinities with whom he felt a special bond, Herakles and Dionysos, in great deeds. An excerpt from the beginning of the final book of Arrian’s Anabasis nicely sums up the special quality that the pothos motif lends to Alexander’s life, making its interest as much literary, as it were, as historical:
For my part I cannot determine with certainty what sort of plans Alexander had in mind, and I do not care to make guesses, but I can say one thing without fear of contradiction, and that is that none was small and petty, and he would not have stopped conquering even if he’d added Europe to Asia and the Britannic Islands to Europe. On the contrary, he would have continued to seek beyond them for unknown lands, as it was ever his nature, if he had no rival, to strive to better the best.
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