Raging against a River
The year is 324 BCE.
The body of a general
lies cold in his chambers.
The love of his King
whose mind has broken down.
There is no music drifting
through the Macedonian camp.
There is blood and the stench
of death wafting across Ecbatana.
Hephaistion, Alexander's most loyal,
was taken ill not long past.
The physician's body rested
upon the stake impaling it.
The horses were shorn,
a sign of mourning.
The king and his lover were no more.
He was Akhilleus without Patroklos.
The madness of loss ate away
the sanity left within him.
No longer was Hephaistion merely
a reckless, crazy fool who was
nothing without Alexander.
Alexander was a bloodthirsty
fool without his Hephaistion.
The king took his anger,
his grief,
to the battle fields.
He conquered the Cossaeans,
slaughtered all their men
as an offering to his dead love.
He was Akhilleus hacking into Xanthos;
fighting against a mighty river
to release the pain,
the rage,
that stemmed from the death
of a single man.
Without his Hephaistion,
Alexander the Great
is not the same man.
Author notes
In 324 BCE, Hephaistion, one of the generals of Alexander the Great, died of an illness after taking a meal of boiled chicken and wine after contracting a fever. His death lead to an upset in the king's behaviors. This is, supposedly, because the two were lovers from boyhood.
My information comes from study of Plutarch's Life of Alexander from book XXI of Homer's Iliad.