If there is one character in history who has managed to confuse and divide his chroniclers, it is Alexander the Great. There is still no agreement among students of Alexander's life on the details of his untimely death in 323BC. He is generally supposed to have been poisoned at a feast in Babylon, but the great mystery is how he survived for 11 days after supposedly receiving a lethal dose of some native poison. Most of the toxic materials available at the time were calculated to stop the victim in his tracks, and subtlety was not considered.
Another mystery has been discussed in Science for April 21. It concerns skeletal evidence drawn from a tomb at Vergina in Macedonia in 1977. At the site there were three royal tombs. One is attributed to Alexander's father Philip II or alternatively to Philip III, commonly called Arrhidaeus, the elder half-brother of Alexander, the bastard son of Philip II, who was murdered by Alexander's mother Olympias in 317BC.
The so-called Royal Tomb II was divided into two chambers, one containing a marble sarcophagus with the almost completely cremated bones of a man, the other a similar sarcophagus with the cremated bones of a woman. Grave goods were sumptuous and included two ivory heads, one depicting Philip II, the other Alexander himself.
Andronicos, the original discoverer of the Vergina tomb in 1977, dated it to about 336BC, but later evidence suggested 317BC, indicating that the remains were those of Arrhidaeus, Alexander's half-brother. It is known that Philip II was wounded many times in warfare whereas Arrhidaeus had never received a wound. The male skeleton from Vergina showed no evidence of a wound such as would be made by the arrow injury to his right eye which Philip II is known to have sustained in 354BC. Moreover, it is recorded that Philip III Arrhidaeus had been buried for six months prior to his cremation. The bones of the Vergina skeleton were in a condition consistent with depletion of soft tissue prior to eventual cremation.
The elaborate artefacts within the tomb, it is thought, may well have belonged to Alexander himself, who is known to have been buried in Egypt before his body finally disappeared from history. But a degree of controversy persists over whether the human remains in Vergina are really those of Philip II or of Philip III.