LXXV.  After Alexander had once lost his confidence and become suspicious and easily alarmed, there was no circumstance so trivial that he did not make an omen of it, and the palace was full of sacrifices, lustrations, and soothsayers.  So terrible a thing is disbelief in the gods and contempt for them on the one hand, while superstition and excessive reverence for them presses on men’s guilty consciences like a torrent of water[434] poured upon them.  Thus was Alexander’s mind filled with base and cowardly alarms.  However when the oracular responses of the gods about Hephaestion were reported to him, he laid aside his grief somewhat, and again indulged in feasts and drinking bouts.  He entertained Nearchus and his friends magnificently, after which he took a bath, and then, just as he was going to sleep, Medius invited him to a revel at his house.  He drank there the whole of the following day, when he began to feel feverish:  though he did not drink up the cup of Herakles at a draught, or suddenly feel a pain as of a spear piercing his body, as some historians have thought it necessary to write, in order to give a dramatic fitness and dignity to the end of so important a personage.  Aristobulus tells us that he became delirious through fever, and drank wine to quench his thirst, after which he became raving mad, and died on the thirtieth day of the month Daisius.

LXXVI.  In his own diary his last illness is described thus:  “On the eighteenth day of Daisius he slept in the bath-room, because he was feverish.  On the following day after bathing he came into his chamber and spent the day playing at dice with Medius.  After this he bathed late in the evening, offered sacrifice to the gods, dined, and suffered from fever during the night.  On the twentieth he bathed and sacrificed as usual, and while reclining in his bath-room he conversed with Nearchus and his friends, listening to their account of their voyage, and of the Great Ocean.  On the twenty-first he did the same, but his fever grew much worse, so that he suffered much during the night, and next day was very ill.  On rising from his bed he lay beside the great plunge-bath, and conversed with his generals about certain posts which were vacant in his army, bidding them choose suitable persons to fill them.  On the twenty-fourth, although very ill, he rose and offered sacrifice; and he ordered his chief officers to remain near him, and the commanders of brigades and regiments to pass the night at his gate.  On the twenty-fifth he was carried over the river to the other palace, and slept a little, but the fever did not leave him.  When his generals came to see him he was speechless, and remained so during the twenty-fifth, so that the Macedonians thought that he was dead.  They clamoured at his palace gates, and threatened the attendants until they forced their way in.  When the gates were thrown open they all filed past his bed one by one, dressed only in their tunics.  On this day Python and Seleukus, who had been to the temple of Serapis, enquired whether they should bring Alexander thither.  The god answered that they must leave him alone.  The eight and twentieth day of the month, towards evening, Alexander died.”