How did the death of Hephaestion, Alexander's own death at Babylon in 323 BC and the succession crisis that followed shape the fate of his empire, and how have ancient and modern historians explained his death and the collapse of his settlement?
The last year of Alexander the Great: the death of Hephaestion in 324 BC and Alexander's grief; the final plans, including the Arabian expedition and the 'last plans'; his death at Babylon in June 323 BC aged 32 and the debate over its cause (fever versus the poisoning tradition); the succession crisis ('to the strongest' and the ring of Perdiccas); the settlement at Babylon under Philip III Arrhidaeus and the infant Alexander IV; the outbreak of the Wars of the Diadochi and the fragmentation of the empire; and the destruction of the royal family
A focused answer to the HSC Ancient History dot point on Alexander the Great's death - Hephaestion's death in 324 BC and Alexander's grief, the last plans and Arabian expedition, his death at Babylon in June 323 BC aged 32, the natural-causes versus poisoning debate, the succession crisis, and the Wars of the Diadochi.
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What this dot point is asking
NESA's closing strand for Alexander asks you to explain how his extraordinary career came to its abrupt end and what followed: the death of his closest companion Hephaestion in 324 BC and the ferocity of Alexander's grief; the plans still unfulfilled at his death, above all the Arabian expedition and the disputed "last plans"; his own death at Babylon in June 323 BC at the age of 32, and the long debate over its cause (a natural fever versus the hostile poisoning tradition); the succession crisis his death opened ("to the strongest" and the ring given to Perdiccas); the settlement at Babylon that made his incapable half-brother Philip III Arrhidaeus and his infant son Alexander IV joint kings; and the collapse of that settlement into the Wars of the Diadochi, the fragmentation of the empire, and the destruction of the whole royal family. You are then expected to weigh how ancient and modern historians have explained both the death and the swift disintegration of what he had conquered.
The answer
The death of Hephaestion, 324 BC
At Ecbatana in Media, in the autumn of 324 BC, Hephaestion - Alexander's lifelong companion, his second-in-command and, in the sources, the man he loved above all others - fell ill with a fever and died within days. Alexander's grief was overwhelming and, to ancient observers, alarming in its excess. The sources (Arrian, Anabasis 7.14; Plutarch, Alexander 72; Diodorus 17.110 to 115) report that he executed the attending physician Glaucias, refused food, lay on the body, cut off his own hair in the manner of Achilles mourning Patroclus, and ordered mourning across the empire. He commanded an immense and hugely expensive funeral pyre and monument to be raised at Babylon, held magnificent funeral games, and sent to the oracle of Ammon at Siwah, which granted that Hephaestion be honoured as a hero (a divine hero cult), the highest status the oracle would allow.
The episode matters for more than pathos. It shows Alexander at the end pressing the boundary between mortal and divine honours - for his friend and, increasingly, for himself - and it removed the one man of comparable authority who might have steadied the succession. Hephaestion died only about eight months before Alexander himself.
The final plans: Arabia and the "last plans"
When Alexander reached Babylon in the spring of 323 BC, the city was full of preparation for a new campaign. His immediate project was the Arabian expedition: a fleet under Nearchus was gathering to circumnavigate and subdue the Arabian peninsula, combining exploration, trade and conquest of the kind he had pursued from Egypt to the Indus. It was cut short by his death before it began.
Beyond Arabia, Diodorus (18.4) reports a set of grander schemes, the so-called "last plans" (hypomnemata), which Perdiccas is said to have laid before the army after Alexander died: a campaign against Carthage and the western Mediterranean, a thousand-ship fleet, a coastal road across North Africa, six colossal temples, and the transplantation of populations between Europe and Asia to fuse his empire. The army rejected them as ruinously extravagant. Their authenticity is debated: some historians accept them as genuine memoranda, others suspect Perdiccas exaggerated their scale precisely so the assembly would cancel them, and a few think them wholly a literary construction. Either way, they show how the ancient tradition imagined Alexander's boundless ambition and treated his death as the moment that vision was abandoned.
The death at Babylon, June 323 BC
In late May 323 BC Alexander attended a prolonged banquet hosted by Medius of Larissa, drank heavily, and afterwards developed a fever. Over roughly the next ten to twelve days the fever held and worsened; he continued at first to perform sacrifices and issue orders, then lost the power of speech, and the soldiers, fearing he was already dead, were allowed to file past his bed while he greeted each with his eyes. He died towards evening on 10 or 11 June 323 BC. The precise date is confirmed by an external, contemporary source independent of the Greek writers: the Babylonian astronomical diaries, cuneiform tablets that record the death of the king on the 29th of the month Aiaru.
Natural causes or poison? The modern medical debate
The prevailing scholarly view is that Alexander died of natural causes: an infectious fever, most often diagnosed as malaria or typhoid, quite possibly aggravated by the near-fatal chest wound he had suffered among the Malli in India (325 BC) and by his heavy drinking. The slow, roughly eleven-day course described in the Royal Journal tradition (preserved in Arrian 7.25 to 26 and Plutarch, Alexander 76) fits an infectious disease better than any fast-acting ancient poison, and the independent Babylonian date lends the natural account further weight. Retrospective diagnoses remain speculative because no body survives to examine: a 1998 study argued for typhoid fever, others for malaria, and a 2018 proposal even suggested Guillain-Barre syndrome, but all rest on literary symptoms alone and none can be proven.
Against this stands the poisoning tradition, preserved by Diodorus, Curtius, Justin and (with scepticism) Plutarch: that the regent Antipater, fearing recall and punishment, sent poison to Babylon by his sons Cassander and Iollas, the poison being water from the river Styx so cold it could only be carried in a mule's hoof. Arrian (7.27) records the story only to dismiss it. Modern historians almost unanimously treat it as hostile propaganda: the tale served the enemies of Antipater and his son Cassander, and was actively promoted by Olympias, Alexander's mother, in the propaganda wars of the Diadochi. The mule's-hoof and Styx-water details are folkloric, and no real poison acts over eleven days. The safest position for an exam is the natural-causes consensus, with the poisoning story identified and explained as a later, politically motivated tradition rather than dismissed in silence.
The succession crisis: "to the strongest"
Alexander died without a settled heir. His Bactrian wife Roxane was pregnant, but the child was unborn and might be a girl; his only adult male relative was his half-brother Arrhidaeus, generally described as mentally incapable of independent rule. Asked on his deathbed to whom he left his kingdom, Alexander is reported to have answered "to the strongest" (Greek toi kratistoi; Diodorus 17.117, Curtius 10.5, Justin), and to have foretold that his leading men would hold great funeral games over him - words that guaranteed a contest rather than a succession. He is also said to have handed his signet ring to Perdiccas, the senior cavalry commander present, though this gave Perdiccas practical primacy rather than any legal title. Arrian (7.26) reports the whole deathbed scene but pointedly doubts it, noting he records it only because it was "reported."
The settlement at Babylon, 323 BC
With no clear heir, Alexander's marshals nearly came to blows. The infantry phalanx, led by Meleager, demanded that Arrhidaeus be made king at once; the cavalry and senior officers, led by Perdiccas, wanted to wait for Roxane's child if it proved to be a boy. The compromise, known as the Partition of Babylon, made both candidates joint kings: the half-brother took the throne name Philip III Arrhidaeus, and Roxane's son, born later in 323 BC, became Alexander IV. Real power lay with Perdiccas as regent (guardian of the kings), Meleager was soon eliminated, and the great provinces were shared out as satrapies - Ptolemy took Egypt, Antipater held Macedonia and Greece, Lysimachus received Thrace, Antigonus the One-Eyed much of Anatolia, while Seleucus rose to command the elite Companion cavalry and would soon secure Babylon. Both kings were figureheads incapable of ruling; every satrap now held a province and an army loyal to himself. The settlement was a truce, not a succession.
The Wars of the Diadochi and the fate of the family
The truce did not hold. From 322 BC the marshals - the Diadochi, or "successors" - fought a series of wars that lasted, on and off, until about 281 BC. Perdiccas was killed by his own officers invading Egypt (320 BC); coalitions formed and reformed against whichever successor grew too strong, above all Antigonus the One-Eyed and his son Demetrius. The two figurehead kings did not survive the struggle. Philip III Arrhidaeus and his wife Adea Eurydice were put to death in 317 BC on the orders of Olympias, Alexander's mother, who was herself captured and executed by Cassander the following year (316 BC). Cassander held the child Alexander IV and his mother Roxane at Amphipolis and, once the boy neared the age at which he could claim real power, had both murdered around 310 BC; Alexander's illegitimate son Heracles was killed soon after. With the whole Argead royal house extinguished, the surviving successors dropped even the pretence of ruling for Alexander's line, and from about 306 to 305 BC took the title of king in their own right, founding the Hellenistic dynasties - Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid empire, and the Antigonid line in Macedon - that would dominate the eastern Mediterranean until the coming of Rome.
How to read a source on this topic
The narrative sources for Alexander's death are all much later than the events and derive, at several removes, from lost contemporary accounts, so the first task is to trace the chain of transmission. Arrian (writing around AD 145) is the most valued because he names his method and his sources: he followed above all Ptolemy and Aristobulus, two of Alexander's own officers who were present, treating their agreement as certain and flagging other material as merely "reported." Plutarch (around AD 100) wrote a moralising biography rich in anecdote; Diodorus (first century BC), Curtius and Justin preserve a more dramatic, rhetorical tradition, including the "last plans" and the poisoning story. Cutting across all of these is the Royal Journal (Ephemerides), a supposed court diary cited for the day-by-day course of the fever, whose authenticity is itself disputed. Standing entirely apart is the one genuinely contemporary, non-Greek document: the Babylonian astronomical diaries, whose independent date is decisive.
Three habits matter. First, weigh a source by its chain of transmission, not just its date on the page: Arrian is late but rests on participants, whereas a vivid detail in Curtius may be pure rhetoric. Second, ask what interest a story serves - the poisoning tale served Olympias and the enemies of Cassander, and Ptolemy shaped his account to justify seizing Egypt and Alexander's body. Third, separate an ancient statement from a modern reconstruction: the fever's day-count is ancient, but "typhoid" or "malaria" is a modern diagnosis, and the death toll of the later Diadoch wars, or the exact scale of the "last plans," should be labelled accordingly.
Practice questions
Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.
foundation4 marksOutline how Alexander reacted to the death of Hephaestion in 324 BC.Show worked solution →
A 4-mark "outline" needs the core reaction and three supporting details.
1 mark: Hephaestion, Alexander's closest companion and second-in-command, died of a fever at Ecbatana in Media in autumn 324 BC, and Alexander's grief was extreme and public.
1 mark: Alexander is reported (Arrian, Anabasis 7.14; Plutarch, Alexander 72) to have executed or crucified the attending physician Glaucias, cut short his own hair, and, in some accounts, banned music and cut the manes of horses and mules in mourning.
1 mark: he ordered an enormous funeral pyre and monument to be built at Babylon at vast expense, and held elaborate funeral games.
1 mark: he sent to the oracle of Ammon at Siwah and secured permission to honour Hephaestion as a hero (a hero cult), the highest status the oracle would grant.
Marker's note: rewards specific, dated actions (the physician, the pyre, the hero cult) rather than a vague statement that Alexander was "very sad"; naming Arrian or Plutarch strengthens the answer.
foundation4 marksSource A: an ExamExplained reconstruction of the type of hostile later tradition about Alexander's death that circulated in the decades after 323 BC: "The regent Antipater, fearing recall and punishment, sent poison to Babylon by the hand of his son. It was carried in a mule's hoof, being so cold it would shatter any other vessel, and was mixed into the king's wine at the banquet. Within days the conqueror of Asia was dead."
Using Source A and your own knowledge, outline what this evidence claims about Alexander's death and give ONE reason to treat it with caution.
Show worked solution →
A 4-mark answer needs the claims of the source plus a supported reason for caution.
1 mark: identifies the central claim - that Alexander was murdered by poison rather than dying naturally.
1 mark: identifies the alleged culprits and motive - Antipater, regent in Macedonia, acting out of fear of recall and punishment, using his son (Cassander or Iollas) as the agent.
1 mark: notes the fantastic detail - a poison so cold it had to be carried in a mule's hoof (in the fuller tradition, water from the river Styx), a legendary motif that signals folklore rather than report.
1 mark: gives a reason for caution - the poisoning story served the enemies of Antipater and Cassander and was promoted by Olympias, so it is hostile propaganda; most ancient writers (Arrian 7.27) and modern historians reject it in favour of natural fever.
Marker's note: full marks require BOTH the claim and a genuine evaluative reason (propaganda / hostile perspective / the impossibly slow action of any real poison), not merely a retelling of the source.
core6 marksExplain why a succession crisis followed the death of Alexander at Babylon in 323 BC.Show worked solution →
A 6-mark "explain" needs the causes of the crisis and their consequences, not just a narrative.
1-2 marks: the absence of a viable heir - Alexander died aged 32 with no adult successor. His wife Roxane was pregnant but the child was unborn (and might be a girl); his only other candidate was his half-brother Arrhidaeus, thought to be mentally incapable of ruling. Asked on his deathbed to whom he left the kingdom, Alexander reportedly said "to the strongest" (Diodorus 17.117; Arrian 7.26 is sceptical), settling nothing.
2 marks: the ambiguity of authority - he is said to have handed his signet ring to Perdiccas, but this conferred no clear title, so his leading marshals (the future Diadochi) each had a claim to power and an army loyal to himself.
2 marks: the split between the arms of the army - the infantry phalanx under Meleager demanded Arrhidaeus as king, while the cavalry and senior officers backed Roxane's unborn child, bringing Babylon to the brink of civil war before the compromise settlement.
Marker's note: rewards linking no-adult-heir + ambiguous "to the strongest" + rival marshals with armies to the near-collapse into violence, rather than simply narrating the deathbed scene.
core5 marksExplain the terms of the settlement at Babylon in 323 BC and why it proved unstable.Show worked solution →
A 5-mark "explain" needs the arrangement AND the reasons it could not last.
1 mark: the compromise made both candidates joint kings - Alexander's half-brother, now Philip III Arrhidaeus, and the child Roxane bore (Alexander IV, born later in 323 BC) - papering over the infantry-cavalry split.
1 mark: Perdiccas, holding the royal ring, became regent (guardian of the kings) with Meleager briefly as his deputy; Meleager was soon murdered on Perdiccas' orders.
1-2 marks: the empire was parcelled out as satrapies to the marshals - Ptolemy took Egypt, Antipater kept Macedonia and Greece, Lysimachus Thrace, Antigonus much of Anatolia, while Seleucus rose to command the Companion cavalry (gaining Babylon soon after).
1 mark: instability - both kings were figureheads incapable of ruling in their own right, and each satrap now held a province and an army, so the "regency" only lasted as long as the marshals tolerated Perdiccas; within two years the Wars of the Diadochi had begun.
Marker's note: rewards naming the two joint kings and Perdiccas as regent AND explaining that puppet kings plus independent, armed satraps made the settlement a temporary truce, not a stable succession.
core6 marksSource B: an ExamExplained paraphrase of the type of cautious statement Arrian makes about his deathbed sources: "Some have written that he shared out his kingdom to the strongest and foretold great funeral games over himself, but I set this down not because I believe it true, but because such things were reported. I have followed above all the accounts of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, who were present, and where they agree I take it as certain."
Using Source B and your own knowledge, assess the usefulness and reliability of Arrian for reconstructing Alexander's last days.
Show worked solution →
A 6-mark "assess" needs content, usefulness, reliability/limitation and a brief judgement.
1-2 marks: content - Arrian openly distinguishes what he believes from what was merely "reported," and names Ptolemy and Aristobulus, two of Alexander's officers who were present, as his preferred authorities, treating their agreement as certain.
2 marks: usefulness - this critical method makes Arrian the single most valuable narrative source. His use of Ptolemy (a general who became king of Egypt) and Aristobulus gives him near-contemporary, participant testimony for the illness and death, and he even draws on the Royal Journal (Ephemerides) for the day-by-day course of the fever.
2 marks: reliability and limitation - Arrian wrote around AD 145, over four centuries after the events, so he depends entirely on the reliability of his lost sources; Ptolemy had his own reasons to shape events (justifying his seizure of Egypt and Alexander's body), and the Royal Journal's authenticity is itself debated. Judgement: highly useful and unusually critical, but only as reliable as the vanished eyewitness accounts he transmits, which must still be weighed for their bias.
Marker's note: rewards separating "useful because critical and source-based" from "limited because late and dependent on partisan lost sources," and naming Ptolemy/Aristobulus or the Royal Journal.
exam10 marksSource C: an ExamExplained reconstruction of the day-by-day style of the Royal Journal (Ephemerides) as later writers report it: "On the eighteenth he slept in the bathing house because of the fever. On the following days the fever held; he was carried out to perform the sacrifices, then lay in the banqueting hall. By the twenty-fifth he could no longer speak. The soldiers, fearing he was already dead, filed past his bed, and he greeted each with his eyes. On the twenty-eighth, towards evening, he died."
Using Source C and your own knowledge, evaluate the usefulness of the ancient evidence for determining the CAUSE of Alexander's death.
Show worked solution →
A 10-mark response uses the source, adds own knowledge, and judges usefulness and its limits.
- Use the source
- Source C reflects the Royal Journal tradition preserved in Arrian (7.25-26) and Plutarch (Alexander 76): a fever lasting some ten to twelve days, progressive weakening, loss of speech, and death "towards evening." This clinical, undramatic day-count is the backbone of the natural-causes case.
- Corroborating own knowledge
- Alexander fell ill after a prolonged banquet hosted by Medius of Larissa in late May 323 BC and died on 10 or 11 June 323 BC, a date fixed independently by the Babylonian astronomical diaries (which record the king's death on the 29th of the month Aiaru). The gradual course over many days is consistent with an infectious fever.
- Usefulness
- The evidence is useful because it is detailed and, in the Journal, close to a contemporary record. Most modern scholars read the slow fever as malaria or typhoid, perhaps aggravated by earlier wounds (the near-fatal chest wound among the Malli) and heavy drinking; the independent Babylonian date strengthens confidence in the natural account.
- Limitations
- The evidence cannot fix a precise cause. The Journal names no disease and its very authenticity is questioned (some argue it was shaped to rebut poisoning rumours). The rival poisoning tradition - Antipater's family and the Styx-water - is preserved by Diodorus, Curtius, Justin and Plutarch, but is widely judged hostile propaganda serving Olympias and the enemies of Cassander. Retrospective diagnosis (typhoid in Oldach's 1998 study; malaria; even Guillain-Barre syndrome proposed in 2018) remains speculative because we have only literary symptoms, not a body.
- Judgement
- The ancient evidence is highly useful for establishing that Alexander died of a natural fever over about eleven days in June 323 BC, and for dating it exactly, but it is insufficient to settle the medical diagnosis, and the poisoning story tells us more about post-323 BC politics than about the king's illness.
Marker's note: Band 6 answers use the day-by-day source, cite the Babylonian diaries for the date, name at least one natural diagnosis and the poisoning tradition, and separate "useful for the fact and date of a natural death" from "insufficient for the exact cause."
exam25 marksESSAY. 'It was Alexander's death, not any failure in his lifetime, that destroyed his empire.' Evaluate this statement with reference to ancient and modern interpretations.Show worked solution →
A Band 6 essay sustains a judgement on the quoted claim, uses named dated evidence, and weaves ancient AND modern historiography. Plan plus model paragraph.
- Thesis
- The sudden death of a 32-year-old with no adult heir in June 323 BC was the immediate trigger of the empire's break-up, but the fatal weaknesses - no institution of succession, an empire held together by his person alone, and over-mighty marshals with loyal armies - were built during his lifetime; his death exposed a fragility he had never resolved rather than creating it.
- Argument line 1: death as trigger
- Alexander died leaving only an unborn child (Alexander IV) and an incapable half-brother (Philip III Arrhidaeus). The deathbed "to the strongest" (Diodorus 17.117) settled nothing, and the ring to Perdiccas conferred no title. Within days the infantry under Meleager and the cavalry were near blows; the Partition of Babylon (323 BC) was only a truce, and the Wars of the Diadochi (from 322 BC) fragmented the empire into the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Antigonid kingdoms.
- Argument line 2: failures already present
- Alexander built no machinery of succession, married late, and fathered no legitimate heir before his death; he had killed capable subordinates (Parmenion 330 BC, Cleitus 328 BC) and left a ring of ambitious marshals each commanding troops loyal to himself. The empire had no shared administration binding Macedon, Egypt and Babylon beyond his own charisma.
- Argument line 3: ancient interpretation
- The sources present the collapse as the loss of an irreplaceable man - Arrian and Plutarch write elegiacally of a genius cut off in his prime, and Diodorus (18.4) frames the rejection of the "last plans" as the marshals turning from his vision. This is admiring and treats the empire as coextensive with Alexander himself.
- Argument line 4: modern interpretation
- Modern historians press the structural view. A.B. Bosworth argues the empire was a militarised, personal conquest-state that could not outlive its conqueror; Ernst Badian stressed the atmosphere of terror and the destruction of rivals that left no orderly succession; Waldemar Heckel shows how the marshals' rivalries were already forming. Robin Lane Fox is more romantic, but even sympathetic accounts concede no successor structure existed.
- Model paragraph (line 2)
- The empire fell apart in 323 BC because Alexander had never made it able to survive him. In thirteen years of conquest he created a realm stretching from Macedon to the Punjab, yet it was bound together by nothing more durable than his own authority: he founded no council of succession, produced no adult heir, and had removed the very men who might have steadied a regency, from Parmenion to Cleitus. What he left instead was a group of brilliant, ambitious marshals - Perdiccas, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Seleucus, Lysimachus - each with an army that obeyed him personally. As Bosworth argues, such a conquest-state was structurally incapable of continuity; the moment the one man who commanded universal loyalty was gone, the loyalties fractured along the lines he had drawn. His death was the spark, but the powder had been laid throughout his reign.
- Conclusion
- The statement is half right: death was the trigger, and had Alexander lived to father and train an heir the outcome might have differed. But the empire's destruction flowed from lifetime failures - no succession, no institutions, over-powerful marshals - so his death exposed rather than caused the collapse. As Bosworth and Badian show, the fragility was Alexander's own creation.
Marker's note: Band 6 answers name at least three historians (two of Arrian/Plutarch/Diodorus as ancient; two of Bosworth/Badian/Heckel/Lane Fox as modern), use specific dated evidence (death 323 BC, Partition of Babylon, the Diadochi, the killings of Parmenion 330 BC and Cleitus 328 BC), and reach an explicit judgement on the quoted claim rather than narrating his career.