• Alexander the Great wasn’t the only person to get a honey of an afterlife. Various personages, famous and not-so-very, went for mellification.
• Certain Spartan kings in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, including Agesilaus, chose that method of interment. One of several prominent Greeks named Aristobolus went the same route. Columella, a writer from Roman Spain, gave honey embalming several mentions in his book On Agriculture.
• Well-known women  also got the honey treatment. Mariamne, the favorite wife of Herod the Great, was honey embalmed (although it’s doubtful it was at her request, since Herod murdered her.) In a similarly grisly scenario, Emperor Nero’s trophy wife Poppaea may have been mellified. After kicking her to death when she nagged him for coming home late after the chariot races, Nero got the guilts. To make amends, he ordered up a splendiferous funeral in what historian Tacitus called “the foreign style, her body filled with fragrant spices and embalmed,” and later put into the sepulchre of the Julii.
• At times mellification involved a topcoat of wax with the honey. First, however, the brain, lungs, and the contents of the dearly departed’s abdomen were removed, and aromatic spices plus honey and cedar oil packed into the body cavity. The corpse of Alexander the Great apparently rested in white honey, but other customers might have gotten wrapped with honey-soaked bandages, mummy style.
• Does the whole process sound messy and a bit far-fetched? Read on. In the early decades of the 20th century, famed Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge saw some sweet evidence himself. At an ancient Egyptian necropolis, a couple of his workers got the munchies and it so happened that they came across an old jar of honey. A very old jar. One dipped his bread in; the bread emerged with some hair on it. (I really hope they stopped eating at that point.) Inside the jar, Budge found the well-preserved, centuries-old body of a small child, adorned with high-quality grave ornaments indicating her status.
• In ancient times and among many long-ago cultures, honey had a sacred role in life. And in death. Jars of it were placed in Egyptian tombs; honey was poured over Greek graves to honor the dead. Long-ago folklore even hinted that embalming someone in honey allowed that soul to reincarnate. Maybe Alexander the Great knew he was onto a good thing. After all, his afterlife proved to have the same kind of excitement and mystery as his mortal life.

Wife Poppy before murder and mellification

Nero, blue over that other murder—Mom.

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