by F S Naiden
No supplies came from the Persian appointed satrap in Susa, to the west. He, too, had heard the rumors, but believed them to be true.18
Many or most of Alexander’s soldiers had survived, even if no animals remained to eat the fodder. The leading companions had all survived, and some Phoenicians, too. Many or most camp followers died. The survivors marched a joyfully banal 400 miles to another outpost, where they waited for Craterus. They had nothing to fear from any enemy. Save for Cyrus, no large army had ever entered this region, and none would try for many centuries.19
Hundreds of miles to the north, Craterus faced the obstacle of too many men rather than too little food. He was leading three of the six phalanx regiments, about 500 archers, some 10,000 superannuated companion cavalry, and other Macedonians destined for home, plus some 200 elephants needing up to 500 pounds of grain and 60 gallons of water a day. Camp followers raised the total to some 50,000 people and several thousand animals of all kinds. Alexander’s two wives, Barsine and Roxana, went with him. Parmenio had led that many people only once, when he followed Alexander into the Zagros, and he had no royal wives to escort. After marching up the Indus and crossing at a ford, Craterus would have to wedge this mass through the Bolan Pass.20
The Bolan was much like the Cilician Gates—a gorge between perpendicular walls 200 or 300 feet high, crisscrossed by a brisk stream almost too cold to drink and just deep enough to ruin men’s boots. The worst danger was the occasional flood when there was no sign of rain. The army learned to camp strung out over many miles of conglomerate rocks jutting into the gorge. That would protect them against floods, yet tempt no enemies, for the Macedonians’ reputation preceded them. Beyond the pass lay the Iranian tableland they had seen five years before. There was no timber there or even brush for fuel, but the pasture was rich, and the flocks of sheep and goats were large and numerous: a good country for mealtime sacrifices. They reached Kandahar about the same time of year as in 330, and this time, unlike that one, the army stopped and stayed for the winter. The little colony of Macedonians still held the place. These men were among those Alexander had suspected of being loyal to Parmenio and had punished by assigning to remote outposts.
Alexander and the council assumed they had subjugated this region, but Craterus discovered that the commander, Menon, had died fighting rebels the year before. Craterus himself now defeated the rebels and compelled their chiefs to surrender. When he headed west, to meet Alexander, he left a strengthened guard at Kandahar and took the captive chiefs with him. He had cleaned up part of the mess left by an army too small to occupy what it conquered. His own casualties were negligible, and he found leading an army from atop an elephant agreeable. On his march westward, no one presumed to molest him. He soon caught up with Alexander, and learned to his surprise that his own forces now outnumbered those of the king. The reconstituted army was now smaller than it had been since before the invasion of India.21
Marching east, the Macedonians acquainted themselves with yet another Persian province, Carmania, famed for its wines and its system of water pipes. The population was Persian, the climate Greek, the mines and smithies efficient enough for a Greek to envy. The satrap, one of the Persians Alexander had kept in office five years before, had more or less encouraged rebels operating in the mountains, and so Alexander executed him and replaced him with a Macedonian.22
The king then announced a celebratory vacation. With no concession to things Egyptian or Babylonian (let alone Persian or Indian), Alexander’s chamberlain, Chares, organized the largest Greco-Macedonian sacrifice since the expedition left the shores of the Mediterranean seven years before. Unlike all its predecessors, this festival celebrated survival, not victory, and it did not involve a large civilian population.
With no big city to parade in, Alexander and his companions dawdled in the wine country for a week, riding about on wagons. Eight horses drew the royal car, which held a dais where the king and his companions drank from golden bowls and goblets. Slaves waved boughs to shelter the carousers. Wagons with more companions, but covered merely by purple canopies, strove to keep up. The enlisted men had to walk, but thanks to the casks of wine and the mixing bowls rolling beside them, they gratefully fell out of line to be rescued by flute girls and camp followers. From time to time the revel stopped and the king ordered contests in singing and dancing. When his favorite, the Persian eunuch Bagoas, won the prize, he sat Bagoas beside him and gave him a kiss, to the cheers of the Macedonians.23
This revel beat Babylon, and so did Alexander’s next marvel, imitating Dionysus. He got off the dais and rode in a chariot drawn by asses, the same as the god.24 Wearing a wreath in his hair and a leopard skin over his shoulders, he christened the camp followers Bacchants, and put bowls of wine before the doors of houses on the route. Then he poured libations, as gods often did (gods never sacrificed animals). Dionysus was a son of Zeus, as Alexander wanted to be, but he was more military than Horus, the son of Amon, and more convivial than Heracles, who was not a god of wine country. Once the performance ended, Alexander resumed his usual duties and presided over sacrifices and games.25
The soldiers relished this spectacle. They had recovered their king. Their refusal to worship him had given way to a horror of parting with him. Estranged from many of his officers, Alexander was now closer to his men than ever.
nearchus made the slowest progress of the three commanders. By the time he learned about the winds, it was too late to give up. Alexander had left for the desert, so he would have to try to catch him. He knew he ought to rendezvous with Alexander at certain valleys and other points, but he did not know exactly where these places were, any more than Alexander did. He must ward off any attackers, but not pursue them and fall farther behind. He must return with interesting specimens and useful information about the naval and commercial potential of the route he was traveling, but he did not know how hard he would have to look, or how far out of his way he would need to go. To satisfy the curiosity of Alexander’s surveyors, he operated what may have been the first nautical odometer. He would have been better off if he had the first compass, a device that had not yet been invented.26
In the first place, of course, he would have to sacrifice on behalf of the expedition. That meant replacing Alexander. Nearchus celebrated games, and so he replaced Alexander as organizer and chief judge. Everything that followed would require replacing Alexander, too.27
It took the fleet a week to reach the mouth of the Indus, where the crews had to stop and dig a channel through a reef blocking the way. Adverse winds kept them in camp for a month. Food ran low; the men fished to survive and drank brackish water. Finally the wind changed, and they reached the edge of the Indus delta at a harbor called the Ladies’ Place, now Karachi. Nearchus did not find a trace of any Persian occupation—no men, weapons, Persian coins, or imperial documents.28
Day after day they passed sandstone cliffs with no sign of animals, plants, or human beings. Then good luck arrived. Halfway between Karachi and the Strait of Hormuz, they reached a rendezvous and met Leonnatus and a detachment sent by Alexander. Assuming that Leonnatus’s march was less arduous than a sea voyage, Nearchus gave his sick or injured sailors to Leonnatus in exchange for fresh men.29
Bad luck soon proved his assumption right. At one anchorage, Nearchus could not land because 600 locals ran out of their seaside huts and lined the shallow waters along the beach, brandishing lances. The lances lacked metal tips and the warriors wore no metal gear of any kind. Nearchus ordered the ships to advance close enough so that his men could safely jump overboard but stay far enough away to be out of range. Once they got off, they had to stand or tread water as the rest joined them. Then they had to swim or trudge to shore while under fire. Nearchus had apparently sent them to their deaths. Then good luck again: the enemy could not believe that the Greek marines, in their heavy armor, were advancing through the surf. They shouted and gesticulated but did not attack. Nearchus, who had already primed his catapults, ordered the
m to fire, and a shower of iron bolts fell on the natives. Some fell, some ran, and some mounted camels and fled. The men they took prisoner had fingernails long and tough enough to gut fish, but no knives.30
After winning the battle, the Macedonians put their own tools to work repairing their ships. They could not afford to keep the prisoners as slaves. Nearchus ordered the men set free as though they were suppliants. The Macedonians never laid eyes on any women and children.
Later, coasting along a fertile country, Nearchus caught sight of a town. He told the fleet to wait a little ways offshore, as though they would not land, and then swam to the beach with a handful of men and asked the people to let him visit. Nearchus gladly accepted their tuna, cakes, and dates, but as soon as he got inside the main gate, he ordered two of his archers to climb to the top and stand guard. Once they had secured the spot, Nearchus joined them and sent a prearranged signal to the ships. The sailors came ashore on the run and the townspeople, amazed, flew to arms. Still atop the gate, Nearchus told his interpreter to make an offer: no attack on the town in return for one particular kind of food, fish meal. This was the only food that would keep and let them avoid frequently coming ashore. The people denied they had any, and tried to ascend the town walls and take up positions in order to ward off the sailors. Nearchus’s archers shot them down. The sailors were now drawing near the town. Fearing that they might be enslaved as well as defeated, the people begged the Macedonians to take what meal they had and spare the place.
Nearchus agreed. After the fleet sailed away and came upon a nearby shrine, they landed and ate their fill. The gods no doubt received their share of the fish meal, a very un-Macedonian offering.31
The fleet was now approaching the mouth of the Persian Gulf. They heard about an island local mariners called enchanted: every ship that anchored there disappeared. Nearchus himself had just lost a vessel, and when the island came into view his crews panicked. He insisted on landing in order to prove the legend false. It was characteristic of him, and of his contemporaries, that when he wrote about this island he added an appendix about a local nymph who turned everyone who shared her company into fishes. The sun god rebuked her, and in response she turned the people of the coast into eaters of fish meal. In a second appendix, Nearchus discredited this story. He believed in the gods implicitly, but interrogated the beliefs of others.32
He had not made a rendezvous with Alexander’s force for hundreds of miles. Then, after more weeks of voyaging, a scouting party came upon a man wearing Greek clothes. When he spoke Greek in reply to their questions, they burst into tears. With whoops and hollers they brought him to Nearchus. Nearchus reluctantly ordered all his men to stay behind and guard the ships as he set out with a small party. On the way inland a detachment of Alexander’s men found them but did not recognize them. When they arrived in Alexander’s camp, the king first thought only these few men had survived and the fleet was lost. After learning the truth, he played the same game with Nearchus as he had at the start of the expedition. He told his admiral he did not have to sail onward, to Mesopotamia, and Nearchus insisted on doing so.33
Nearchus returned to the fleet with supplies. Once again he replaced Alexander and led a collective sacrifice for good luck during the rest of the voyage.34
Next Nearchus reached islands in Persian Gulf, some of them prosperous because of the cultivation of dates and a pearl fishery. Phoenician crewmembers told him this region was their ancestral home. The Persian Gulf was then known as the Red Sea, and hospitable locals led him to the tomb of the Phoenician ancestor who had given his name to the gulf, a King Rufus or Red. The temples looked Phoenician but were built of wood, not the stone that Greeks and Phoenicians both preferred. At the head of the gulf, near the mouth of the Euphrates, Nearchus discovered an island emporium that brought incense and myrrh from Arabia to Babylon, whence the Phoenicians carried them to Greece. Nearly every lump of incense, the most common sacrificial offering—far more common than animals, which were troublesome and costly—reached the Greeks from this source. Nearchus discovered that the gods had the tastes of Arabs.35
After traveling up the Persian Gulf, he entered the river Pasatigris, east of the Tigris and Euphrates. It led to Susa, but Alexander did not meet him in the city. Instead Alexander intercepted him downstream, by a pontoon bridge on the Susa highway. The king staged games and sacrifices without any of the excesses of Carmania, but with perfect generosity. It all could have been much worse. Craterus returned with almost no losses, and Nearchus with only a few. Unlike Alexander’s hero Achilles, no leading companion had died in combat.36
Alexander and the surveyors debriefed Nearchus. The Greeks and Macedonians, Nearchus told them, misunderstood the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Although the Euphrates flowed into the Gulf, the Tigris flowed into a lake, and so did the Pasatigris. The two rivers became one. Several channels connected the lake to the Persian Gulf. Other waterways led into interminable marshes. The fleet had been lucky to reach the lake. On the way, marshes and rocky shallows forced the ships to advance single file.37
From this conversation, among others, emerged Alexander’s biggest building project, a canal that would give Babylon easy access to the sea. Earlier rulers had built a canal of this kind, but the shifting of the rivers and Persian neglect made it impassable. Alexander would build another. He was not like an American soldier who regards the Corps of Engineers as an inferior branch of service.
Nearchus had traveled in a way that differed from the one Parmenio imagined when he sacrificed to Jason at Abdera, and also from the one that Alexander took when he sacrificed to Achilles at Troy. Parmenio followed the guideposts of religious conservatism and solidarity among cult members. Alexander, who in some ways might have imitated Agamemnon, leader of the Trojan expedition, preferred to imitate Achilles, who had a divine parent and cherished companions who were close friends, like Patroclus. Nearchus took a path of religious exploration, as Odysseus had done.
Each path had its dangers. That of Nearchus was the most adventurous yet the least aggressive.
while the army marched on to Susa, Alexander detoured to Pasargadae. He wanted to revisit the sepulcher of Cyrus and also the rest of this ceremonial center, which resembled the palace at Aegae in Macedon. Compared to the great palaces of the Near East, both were small and intimate. The similarity between them may have suggested to Alexander how much Cyrus was like Philip. Both men were founders of armies and builders of empires and both were indispensable to Alexander’s achievement. Cyrus gave him something to conquer, and Philip gave him something to conquer it with.
At Pasargadae, Alexander and his companions learned, the Persian whom he left as satrap had died while the army was in India. No Macedonian had stepped forward to replace him, and so a Persian officer who had fought at Arbela took charge. Amid the disorder in the province, robbers had come and ransacked Cyrus’s tomb, carrying away everything but the sarcophagus and the couch. Cyrus’s body lay on the floor, mutilated after being wrenched from the sarcophagus. The sarcophagus had fallen victim to the robbers, too. To make it easy to carry, they had hacked off corners and crushed the lid. Then they had given up trying to remove it, and abandoned it. Alexander covered the remains with his cloak, doing for Cyrus what he once had done for Darius.38
Enraged, he ordered his men to torture the priests and learn who had robbed the tomb, but the priests refused to say. One companion remembered later that Alexander blamed a Macedonian official for neglecting his duty and put him to death. Other companions blamed the disorder that the invading army inevitably left behind it. Aristobulus got orders to restore everything, down to the last detail, save for the door, which should be walled up. Alexander put the shrine under a stronger guard, so that no harm would come to the compound, and departed without the satisfaction of encountering Cyrus on what Alexander, after seizing the empire, would regard as equal terms.39
He had never become king of the Persians—never succeeded Cyrus. Now it was too late. The desecra
tion of the tomb made Alexander’s coronation unthinkable.40
At Pasargadae, Calanus, the one Indian who had gained Alexander’s trust, killed himself. He had become sick during the trip through the desert, and when his condition worsened, he committed suicide Heracles-style, as a Greek would say, by burning himself to death atop a pyre. Since he was a Brahmin, his choice of a fiery death implied that he felt he had committed some kind of impiety. He did not say what it may have been. His last words were only that he would soon see Alexander in Babylon. What did he mean? Since he believed in reincarnation, as other Indian ascetics did, was he predicting that he would somehow rejoin Alexander once the king reached Babylon? Or did he imply that Alexander would die there, as Calanus died at Pasargadae? The companions apparently did not record any answers to these questions.41
The events at Pasargadae betokened larger troubles for Alexander’s rule. Since Alexander had not let himself be crowned, many Persians thought him illegitimate, and some of them rebelled. Shatibrzana had come first. After Parmenio’s death, a pretender to the Persian throne raised a rebellion in Media. In the eastern Caucasus, Alexander’s satrap had defied him.42
In India, Roxana’s father held the approach to the Khyber Pass, but the Macedonian satrap put in charge of the west bank of the Indus had died fighting rebels. Indian mercenaries murdered the Macedonian satrap in charge of the east bank. Without Macedonian officials nearby, Alexander’s two allies, Ambhi and Puru, would likely renounce their allegiance. Calanus had predicted these difficulties, using the cowhide as an object lesson.43
After Alexander traveled on to Susa, he learned the tomb of Cyrus was not the only important site recently desecrated. Both Macedonian and Persian officials had plundered tombs, shrines, and palaces throughout Iran. The generals put in charge of Media after the death of Parmenio plundered the palace and shrines in Ecbatana. Alexander learned from Bagoas that the Persian satrap who failed to protect the tomb of Cyrus despoiled other royal tombs. These acts of sacrilege would alienate worshippers and gods alike.44
