Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  The western provinces were faring only a little better. Building continued at the site of Alexandria in Egypt. Antigonus controlled most of Anatolia, but Persian relicts controlled the rest. One companion had marched north, beyond Macedonian territory, and crossed the Danube, into the steppes of the Ukraine. Bad weather and the Scyths annihilated his small army.45

  While in Susa, Alexander took countermeasures. He executed the pretender in Media, and he executed the disloyal Susa satrap and gave the region to a Macedonian companion. At Bagoas’s suggestion, he executed the satrap of Persia and gave the post to Peucestas, the one linguist among the companions. He executed the sacrilegious generals in Media, even though they had brought him food after the march through the Makran. He blamed some of their troops as well, and executed them, too.46

  To deter future rebellions, Alexander decided to militarize the administration of the marcher territories of the empire. For that he needed veteran commanders, but he had fewer than before. Among the top commanders traceable down to the year 324, a half dozen had died of illness or wounds; two more, serving in Media, had been put to death for sacrilege; just one had been sent home; and four had died at the hands of Alexander and fellow councilors. In all, Alexander had lost a third of his top talent.47

  Among less important commanders, he had suffered more losses. He could not look to Persian commanders to make up the difference. He had put five of them to death, including two who fought at Gaugamela. One who fought for him had retired.48

  He chose to combine the most demanding assignments. He gave two rebellious satrapies, Areia and Drangiana, to a Cypriot who had performed well in the fighting there. He combined part of the Caucasus with central Iran, putting both under one of the few trustworthy Persians. He combined sparsely populated Kandahar and the Makran into a single, mammoth satrapy given to a Macedonian. In India, Alexander combined territories running from Begram to the eastern Punjab, and gave this vast region to the Macedonian lieutenant of the satrap murdered by the Indian mercenaries. Recognizing that this assignment was too much for one man, Alexander named Ambhi as co-satrap. Throughout the easternmost part of the empire, satrapal boundaries dating back centuries gave way to zones of occupation. In India, these zones amounted to buffers.49

  These administrative difficulties sprang from Alexander himself. He ruled India in the name of Dionysus but did not explain Dionysus to the Indians. Although he ignored the leading Persian gods, he expected his subordinates to respect them. The companions were his mainstay, except when Asiatics were. A veteran officer sent to some remote purlieu did not know which Alexander he represented—the agent of Dionysus, the son of Amon, or the self-appointed sheriff of Asia.

  several years before, in Central Asia, Alexander had recruited Iranian cavalry by promising plunder and marrying a warlord’s daughter. This policy had served him well in both Central Asia and India. Now, in Susa, he decided to recruit more Iranians. Besides adding Iranian units to his army, he would establish mixed units. In the infantry the Iranians would serve in the middle of each file, with Macedonian officers at the front and the back. The higher-ranking officers and garrison commanders would, of course, remain Macedonian. Satrapies would remain mixed, but more Macedonian than in the years just before the invasion of India.50

  Alexander also decided to create more Persian companions. So far, he had created only one, Darius’s brother, who switched sides after Issus. (The only other foreign companion was Puru.)51

  Reprising his marriage to Roxana, he decided to wed Darius’s daughter, one of the captives he left in Susa in 330. That ought to pacify the girl’s obstreperous mother, Sisygambis, who had rejected his gifts, called him a slave master, and yet somehow induced him to call her “mother.” To involve the companions, he decided to give them Persian wives, too. No one would need to divorce his present wife, any more than Alexander would divorce Roxana. Like Philip and Alexander, the companions would turn polygamous. The new wives would breed reinforcements to the Macedonian elite.

  Alexander was no egalitarian. He did not intend to let Iranian men marry Greeks or Macedonians. Like other Macedonians (and like the Persians), he was patriarchal: the son of a Macedonian was a Macedonian, and never mind the mother. Otherwise, Alexander would be an Epirote, like Olympias. As for the complication of his being the son of Amon, he kept it to himself. The Persians would not understand this subject any better than the Macedonians and Greeks did.

  The king now staged the most costly of his celebrations. The quartermasters rounded up the cattle and Alexander sacrificed at an altar in plain view of Inshushinak, the local Zeus, and the other Elamite gods. Ambassadors from the Greek world and elsewhere attended the ceremonies, contributing 15,000 talents to defray the costs. Thirty thousand young Iranians recruited into Alexander’s service stood guard. Some thousands of Macedonians commanded (or stood guard over) the Iranians. Persians as well as Macedonians guarded Alexander. Nearchus and the column leader Leonnatus received the usual Greek honors—money, golden crowns, accolades. Some of Nearchus’s captains and sailors got honors, too, but Craterus and his men, who had not discovered any new lands or fought any fish-eaters, got nothing more than the ample sacrificial meal given to all of Alexander’s tens of thousands of troops.52

  Next came the group wedding. The wedding tent held a hundred couches, and each couch came with paraphernalia worth a fifth of a talent. That was a Persian touch. So were the silver and the purple clothes and cloths, and the gold and silver plating for the tent pillars, inlaid with jewels, and the curtains embroidered with figures of wild animals. Alexander ordered a bridal chamber built for every couple. He might have used the Susa palace, but he preferred a tent, the kind of place he had lived in for most of the last ten years.53

  Alexander took not one but two Persian wives, Darius’s daughter and also a daughter of Darius’s predecessor, Artaxerxes. (This second thought occurred to him when he recalled that Darius’s family were usurpers.) Alexander assigned a daughter of Darius to Hephaestion. That would make Alexander and Hephaestion in-laws. Craterus got a niece of Darius. Two top companions, Ptolemy and Eumenes, got daughters of Artabazus, Alexander’s father-in-law as well as the first important Persian to take Alexander’s side. The regimental commander Perdiccas, a veteran of all the big battles, got a daughter of the Persian satrap of Media, and another commander got a daughter of Spitamanah, the Bactrian insurgent. That match showed the Central Asians that Alexander remained friendly toward them. Eighty more companions got wives from leading Persian families.

  Every one of these ninety-odd couples got a dowry from the king and a bedchamber in the tent. In addition, all men with concubines got a gratuity. Through these acts of largesse, Alexander provided for any and every Asian son of a ranking Macedonian, even those born out of wedlock. His own Barsine had just presented him a son he named Heracles.

  Where did Alexander get the idea for these marriages? Not from the brides. He got it from Philip, who had married a Scyth as well as an Epirote and several Greeks. Alexander now had an informal harem of his own.

  After the ceremony, Chares presented conjurors from Sicily and Iona, harpists and flautists from Athens and elsewhere, and actors in scenes from Euripides and other tragedians. A Macedonian touch was a drinking contest—unmixed wine, which might discourage Greek competitors who customarily diluted wine with water. The winner received a talent for his feat of drinking three gallons of wine, but died of the aftereffects. Chares, who was a Greek, claimed that forty-one contestants died. Most were Macedonian soldiers, the same as the winner, the Homerically named Promachos, “fighter in the front rank.”54

  To give his Macedonian soldiers something to celebrate, Alexander offered to discharge their debts, but they did not wish to tell him how much they owed. He promised to pay in full, no matter what, and then they informed him. Alexander disbursed 10,000 talents, or 5,000 less than the contributions by the ambassadors. He was still the richest man in the world—the richest who had ever been. The coins he mi
nted for his troops and government contained more gold and silver than the U.S. currency of the sound-money decades after the Civil War. That made him richer than all Gilded Age American millionaires put together.55

  only one leading companion in the eastern part of the empire failed to attend the weddings. Harpalus had managed imperial finances for seven years from his post in Babylon. When Alexander emerged from the desert and began to punish wayward administrators, Harpalus decided to flee to the west.

  Harpalus was a lifelong companion of Alexander’s. When Alexander and Philip quarreled about the prince’s getting married, Harpalus had gone into exile with Ptolemy, Nearchus, and Alexander’s other intimates. In 333, before the battle at Issus, he fled, thinking Darius would defeat the Macedonians, but Alexander coaxed him to return two years later. After that, he performed well as a financier. He took the money seized at Ecbatana—the last great haul of gold and silver—to Babylon and centralized finances there. He paid for Alexander’s expedition to India, sending the king fancy gear for 25,000 men and 7,000 mercenaries. And he kept some monies for himself. All companions did. Cleomenes kept more, and Harpalus kept the most.56

  Much went to the upkeep of Pythonice, the Athenian courtesan who lived with him in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. He erected statues of her and himself, as would be normal if he were king of Babylon and she were queen.57 Although she was a slave and the daughter of a slave, Harpalus eventually married her, and she bore him a daughter. When she died, he erected cenotaphs to her in both Babylon and Athens. He paid the nephew of an important Athenian politician a hefty thirty talents to build the Athenian memorial. For centuries it remained the biggest private funerary monument in Greece.58

  Unlike the administrators Alexander punished after arriving in Iran, Harpalus had not rebelled or neglected his duties, and so he did not fear Alexander for these reasons. He fled for the same reason that the army wished to stop going eastward. He was quitting, and he feared that once Alexander returned to Babylon, he would never be allowed to quit, or would have to give up the money he had amassed. Although his limp made him unfit for fighting, he thought like an Argonaut. He had captured his snatch of the Golden Fleece, and he wished to go back to Greece.

  In early 324 he headed for Athens with 5,000 talents and about as many troops. Once there, he would face a choice. He could present himself in proper, diplomatic fashion and ask to become a permanent resident of Athens. For that, he would have to supplicate. Or he could barge into the city. If he preferred supplicating, he must leave his troops behind, enter Athens without fanfare, and take refuge in a shrine. (The Acropolis would be rather showy; better a shrine in the port of Piraeus.) While the Athenian assembly considered his case, he would be safe from arrest by the Macedonian garrison stationed in town.

  Harpalus should have supplicated, but he was Harpalus, and so in May 324 he paraded into the harbor with thirty warships. The chief of the Macedonian garrison warned the city not to admit him. Realizing his mistake, Harpalus withdrew to Taenarum, a Peloponnesian port of call for mercenaries, and paid off his men. He returned to Athens with just three ships but most of his money. He supplicated and began to distribute bribes to further his cause.59

  Athenian politics now enmeshed Harpalus. Leading Athenians feared that Alexander and his viceroy Antipater would make war on the city unless Athens surrendered Harpalus to the Macedonians. Antipater soon requested that the city extradite Harpalus, and so did Alexander’s mother, Olympias. The orator Demosthenes maintained that Antipater and Olympias did not matter. Only Alexander did, and he was months away. Let the king send a message demanding the extradition of Harpalus. Until then, Harpalus should remain in the city. The Athenians agreed. Some had already pocketed bribes from Harpalus, including Demosthenes.60

  When news of Harpalus’s flight to Athens reached Alexander, the king was furious. A rumor circulated that he killed the messenger who brought the news. Alexander threatened to besiege the city. The flight of Harpalus obsessed him so much that his armorer, hoping to win favor, offered to donate the siege equipment.61

  The Athenians temporized. First they posted guards around the shrine where Harpalus was staying (or sometimes staying, allowing for trips to drinking parties), and then they let him escape. He sailed back to Taenarum, where he picked up a few mercenaries and embarked for Crete, where he turned freebooter. Soon after, Athenians heard that his slaves had murdered him but could not find his money. Some said that Harpalus’s steward absconded with the money and sailed to Rhodes, where a Macedonian official caught him. But what became of Harpalus? Perhaps he fell in with a Spartan soldier of fortune who killed him after robbing him but getting no money.

  Unable to bag Harpalus, Alexander asked Antipater to pursue Demosthenes. When Antipater told the Athenians to surrender him, they hesitated, giving Demosthenes a chance to escape. The orator fled the city and supplicated in a rural shrine of Poseidon on the far side of the Saronic Gulf, some forty miles away. Antipater, white on the outside, would never arrest a suppliant in a shrine. Instead he blockaded the shrine, cutting off Demosthenes’s supply of food. Demosthenes faced the choice of starving or surrendering to Antipater, who would surely execute him. He decided to poison himself. The priests at the shrine hastened to remove him before his death on holy ground offended the god. They hauled the dying man, convulsed by poison, out of the little temple with its serene view of the sea, and heaved him in front of the Macedonian troops who had surrounded the place.62

  Demosthenes expected to die, but Harpalus expected to survive through supplication. Then Alexander rendered supplication ineffectual. Harpalus’s large fortune did not rescue him. Although Alexander made large fortunes possible, he also made these fortunes insignificant in the face of overwhelming military power. He caused the suppliant Harpalus to die in obscurity.

  Distorting the rite of supplication was a new kind of religious misstep. In the past, Alexander had offended or ignored foreign gods such as Anahita. Now he put himself at odds with Zeus, who expected suppliants to be treated with respect, if not kindness. Alexander himself apparently did not grasp this change. He had come to see Zeus as Zeus-Amon, or simply Amon, a god with other attributes.

  the persian-language poet Nizami, writing in the Middle Ages, said that Alexander invented the mirror and along with it the custom of using mirrors at wedding ceremonies. This episode occurs in “Alexander the Great as a Prophet,” part of Nizami’s Sikander Nama, or Book of Alexander.

  When Sikander became the key to the world, the first mirror image appeared. He saw it when he had a sword made and looked at the reflection on the blade. He had never seen the like, and so he decided to create a true and perfect mirror. First, his men cast gold and silver into a mold and polished it to a high sheen, but no recognizable image appeared. They tried several metals from Alexander’s mines, but the metals showed weird images.

  Finally, they tried iron. Rassam, the blacksmith, polished it until it shone. The character of the metal emerged, and Rassam saw identifiable shapes. Yet no matter what Rassam did, he did not see an accurate likeness. If he broadened the mirror, it made the face look too broad; if he lengthened it, it made the forehead long. Then, when he made it round, he saw accurate likenesses. No matter how he took it up and held it, he saw himself as he was. He had perfected the mirror. Through knowledge of geometry—and out of the pith of the iron—Sikander’s servant wrought a display of true forms.

  Pleased at seeing his own image, Sikander gave a kiss to the back of the mirror. Ever since, brides do the same thing on their wedding day. They give a kiss as a present to the mirror that displays their faces.63

  Other Persian and Arabic tales explain how Alexander used the mirror. In one, the mirror caused everyone who looked at it to die, so Alexander put it atop a tower in hopes that a dragon would see it. The dragon did, and perished, but so did curious passers-by. In several tales, the whole world appeared in Alexander’s mirror, and so Alexander kept the mirror secret until his death. Afterward, th
e companions discovered the mirror and looked into it, but its magical power vanished and they saw only themselves.64

  11

  The Waters of Life

  in the spring of 324 Alexander confronted the first enemy he could not vanquish—his responsibility to rule an empire. In the two years since the generals compelled him to turn back at the river Beas in India, he had avoided this invisible opponent. He sailed down the Indus rather than leave India the way he came. Once at the mouth of the Indus, he slogged through the desert rather than take the whole army on the short, safe route assigned to Craterus. He delayed again by cavorting in the Persian wine country. In Susa, he diverted himself with mass marriages. Now he must go and sit on the throne once held by Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar, and become a ruler rather than a commander and an adventurer. Rather than risk his life, he must risk being bored.1

  The generals welcomed the return to Babylon, the city chosen as the capital of the empire. It was rich, central, and cosmopolitan. Harpalus, one of the top administrators, had lived like a king there, and they expected to do likewise. Babylon had treated the generals better than any other captured city, and they knew that if they and the army went home, Antipater and his forces would make them superfluous, if not unwelcome.

  The infantry and cavalry wanted to bypass Babylon and go home to Macedon and Greece. They wanted Alexander to go home with them, and play Jason to their Argonauts. In spite of everything, they thought of him as the epic chieftain of the Macedonians, not as king of Babylon or Egypt.

  What did Alexander want? To resume exploring, and probe the obstacles to navigation discovered by Nearchus in lower Mesopotamia. He headed south by boat and left Hephaestion the task of marching the main body of the army into the marshes of lower Mesopotamia. The current wafted Alexander and a light force all the way to the Persian Gulf while Hephaestion battled mosquitoes, snakes, and crocodiles. Next Alexander sailed along the coast and up the Tigris, removing barriers to navigation as he went. Hephaestion strove to keep up.2