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They bade him sacrifice to the gods on a grand scale and with all speed, but he was then called away by Medius, the Thessalian, one of his Friends, to take part in a comus.1 There he drank much unmixed wine in commemoration of the death of Heracles, and finally, filling a huge beaker, downed it at a gulp.

1 Justin 12.13.7. These events are described from the royal journal more circumstantially by Plut. Alexander 75.3, and Arrian. 7.24.4-25.1. Medius belonged to a noble family of Larisa and had accompanied Alexander as a personal friend, not in a military capacity (Berve, Alexanderreich, 2, no. 521). Aelian Varia Historia 3.23 gives a day-by-day account of Alexander's drinking and resting during the last three weeks of his life, crediting this to Eumenes of Cardia, the keeper of the journal, but gives the month wrongly as Dius.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

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