Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Alexander sailed as far as Opis, at the head of navigation, and pitched camp. From Opis one road went to Iran and another went north to Europe and south to Babylon. Once the troops of Mazdai had guarded this spot. Now Alexander and Hephaestion’s waterlogged men rested there under the dry Mesopotamian summer sun.

  The king now sprang another surprise on his army. Summoning his officers, he ordered them to send the older Macedonians and Greeks home with bonuses. Young soldiers would remain with Alexander in Mesopotamia. So would most of the officers, and all the Iranians, who would replace the departing veterans.

  Dividing the army by age insulted the older men, and preferring Iranians insulted everyone. The soldiers replied that they wished to go home together, and threatened to quit. Let Alexander manage without them and ask his “father,” Amon, for help. Agitators emerged among the troops, and some lower-ranking officers expressed sympathy with their men.3

  Alexander responded by calling a meeting of officers and soldiers. The generals, led by Craterus and the regimental commanders Perdiccas and Polyperchon, stood beside him on the dais. Around the dais stood the lead company of the shield bearers. The ex-bodyguard Seleucus commanded this elite light infantry, which Parmenio’s son Nicanor had led until he died in the Iranian desert.

  Alexander turned to the generals beside him and ordered them to arrest the leading agitators, including some lower-ranking officers. The generals said and did nothing. Rather than repeat his order, Alexander peered into the crowd, picked out thirteen agitators, and ordered the shield bearers to arrest them. Seleucus and his lieutenants marched into the crowd. Raising his voice, Alexander ordered Seleucus to lead the thirteen away and execute them. Seleucus complied. Everyone else was struck dumb.4

  The king now made the army a speech showing what he had learned from the fiasco in India.5 He began by acknowledging Philip was his father. He eulogized Philip for enriching the Macedonians, for rescuing them from their neighbors, and for enlarging the kingdom, defeating one enemy after another. Then Alexander turned to the subject of his own reign. When he took the throne he owed some 1,200 talents, but since then had acquired the wealth of Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, and Persia. He had paid his debts and his men, and given them offices, concubines, and lands. He had nothing more to show for his labors than a priest would—a place of honor, a purple cloak, and a diadem—and, like a priest or the head of a modest household, he ate and drank what his companions did.6

  He then turned to the subject of his military service. He fought as hard as the men had, he said, and was wounded as often. He buried the dead with honor. Although he sometimes quarreled with his companions, he always provided for them.

  Nothing about Egypt, Babylon, the crown of Persia, or the follies of India; no Amon, Marduk, Heracles, or Dionysus. There was no empire of Alexander, only the expedition of Alexander and the Macedonians.

  He had them now, and he knew it. He told them all to go home, with bonuses. If that was the sort of companions they were—deserters and traitors—he would not complain. He would stay behind, stuck with soldiers who were Persians and barbarians.

  With that he sprang down from the platform and went to his quarters. Lest the men think he would change his mind, as he had in India, he ordered leading Persians to come to the tent and accept commands replacing Macedonians. Using Persian terms, he called these officers kinsmen. When the Macedonians learned of this, they became distraught. How could their king treat the Persians as kinsmen and deny them this honor?7

  A veteran officer, the cavalry commander Callines, now went among the men, and encouraged them to go to Alexander’s quarters and beg to be reconciled with him. They came en masse and threw their weapons on the ground, supplicating. Until Alexander took pity on them, they said, they would not budge.8

  Alexander opened the door, and when he saw some of them weeping he wept himself. All of you are my kinsmen, he told the Macedonians. Callines approached him and kissed him. Then Alexander let any Macedonian who wished approach and kiss him. Although he comforted them, he did not accede to their wishes. Only the old soldiers would go home. The rest would remain, alongside Persians, and so would he.

  They had succumbed to Alexander as though he were a god. Yet they never would have succumbed had he insisted on being treated as a god. On that score, they had always resisted him. They adored him only when he sank down on the brink of death, on the battlefield, or now, when he threatened to withhold his affection and they begged for his blessing.9

  An arduous day had only begun. Alexander sacrificed to Zeus, Heracles, and Dionysus but invited Persian priests to participate. He had never done that before. Then he prayed aloud for the Persians, Greeks, and Macedonians to be like-minded. He was not making an egalitarian gesture. He was praying to his own gods, not those of the Persians. He was, however, trying to undo the harm done to Iranian religion at Persepolis, Pasargadae, and Bactra.10

  At the feast afterward, he put Macedonians in the best places, but Persians in the second-best. Next came donatives—the promised bonuses for those who would go home, and help for soldiers worrying about how they would support illegitimate children born in Asia. The king would provide for these children by paying for their upbringing and keeping them in Babylon.

  Alexander promised all departing soldiers a safe return. If these men were exiles from their own cities, he ordered the cities to welcome them. He also made sure that civilians displaced by war could return home. Going farther still, he ordered cities to allow exiles of all kinds to return. The number of returning soldiers, refugees, and exiles under Alexander’s protection would reach tens of thousands. The governments of these cities would object to welcoming home so many, especially the hardened soldiers, but Alexander allowed exceptions only for murderers and traitors. Those who were hateful to Zeus because of these two crimes should remain in exile. All others deserved help, and they would get it from Alexander and Zeus both. Alexander had these orders announced soon afterward at the Olympic Games, the largest gathering in the Greek world. Stunned, the Greeks delayed complying.11

  Alexander, of course, had created the problem he was trying to solve. Some of the returning soldiers were men he was pensioning off. Others were mercenaries who had been serving his satraps but found themselves dismissed the previous year, in 325. Alexander did not want his satraps to have so much manpower. Still others were mercenaries who had served under Darius. Harpalus probably recruited all three types.12

  Alexander sprang more surprises at Opis. He ordered Craterus and Polyperchon, two of his leading subordinates, to leave court. He gave them the honorable exit of taking the returning veterans home. When they arrived in Macedon, Craterus would take charge there. Alexander also ordered Antipater out of Macedon, which the old man had governed for ten years, and summoned him to Babylon to assume unnamed responsibilities. Antipater must bring all his troops with him and turn them over to Alexander. Along with breaking up the army, Alexander was breaking up the companions.13

  His last surprise reflected the same suspicious attitude toward subordinates. Alexander ordered several satraps to stay with him rather than go to their posts. He was filling his court with men he had promoted but would not put to work.14

  The king triumphed: a mass supplication, an opulent sacrifice, a horizon without enemies. Next he should go to Babylon to establish a central administration with Antipater as lord president of the council. Yet he did not. He was already inviting sixty or seventy to meals. Why go to Babylon, where he would have to invite more?15

  Alexander preferred to go sightseeing. As soon as Craterus and the retirees marched away, he and his light force headed up the road from Opis to Iran. The weather was better than in 330, when they first traveled this way, and they had no one like Darius to chase. The stony road—better stones than dust—wound up the hills past skirts of wildflowers and fields of hollyhock. Bees teemed by day, stars by night. Days later they reached Ecbatana, in a valley of country estates, all greensward and vineyards, occupied b
y Parmenio’s old officers. The exuberant army celebrated a seven-day festival to the Olympian gods, and also an annual feast in honor of Dionysus.16

  During the holiday, Alexander’s lifelong friend Hephaestion fell ill. Alarmed, Alexander prayed to a local god he took to be Asclepius, but Hephaestion died some days later. Alexander’s grief was Homeric, down to cutting the manes of his horses. He had always modeled himself on Achilles, and now he had lost Hephaestion, just as Achilles lost Patroclus. And, like Achilles, he was to blame: Achilles had let Patroclus die in his place, and Alexander had let Hephaestion take part in this ill-fated trip.

  Boredom gave way to frenzy. Alexander killed Hephaestion’s physician and destroyed the shrine of the mistaken god. Turning on the Persians, he ordered them to put out the sacred fires of their religion. They found this request ominous. If the fires went out, that would harm Alexander, the king. Alexander even pressured the oracle of Amon in distant Siwah. He asked the oracle to raise Hephaestion to the godhead. The oracle surely said no, but the messenger Alexander had sent told him Amon had said yes.17

  For the funeral, he ordered an altar brought up from Babylon at a cost of 10,000 talents. He had the body embalmed, not cremated, as though Hephaestion were Egyptian royalty. He more or less bullied the companions into dedicating their weapons to Hephaestion, an honor Greeks gave heroes. After the funeral, Alexander staged games with 3,000 competitors from throughout the empire. The prizes far exceeded any offered in Greece.18 Next Alexander started two memorials, a shrine in Alexandria and a mausoleum in Babylon shaped like a mini-ziggurat to resemble the tomb of Cyrus in Pasargadae. That would show Harpalus. He also sent an ironic offering to the chief shrine of the uncooperative Asclepius, in Epidaurus. The god did not deserve it, Alexander said, but would get it anyway.19

  Alexander rued losing his friend, just as he resented having to turn back in India. He expressed his chagrin through an insult. According to Macedonian custom, Alexander should have given Hephaestion’s cavalry unit the name of its new leader, Perdiccas, but he refused. Having lost Hephaestion, he did not value other companions as highly as before.20

  The funeral and the shrines consumed the summer of 324. To get Alexander out of Ecbatana, the companions proposed a military campaign against a tribe of highwaymen living near the Babylon-Ecbatana road. He annihilated them in just a month that fall. Alexander did not know it, but he had fought his last battle. Now he must go to Babylon and be king.21

  as long as Alexander was away, the Babylonian priests paid little attention to him. They busied themselves with perpetual repairs to Babylon’s crumbling mud-brick shrines. Alexander helped fund the work, but they supervised—after an exorcist dressed in white laid the first brick while toting his ceremonial leaden axe. Provided the priests knew where Alexander was, they routinely mailed him cuts of sacrificial meat. They prospered during price rises caused by Alexander’s new currency. Even during a shortage of barley, the staple of the Babylonian diet, they amassed enough gold to make Marduk a new crown.22

  As Alexander drew near the city, ending his seven-year absence, priests began issuing warnings and reporting omens. After checking the stars, top astronomers advised the king that entering the city would be inauspicious. A Babylonian liver-reader told the companion in charge of the city garrison that Alexander’s very life was in danger. A prestigious deputation said Alexander should not enter from the east, with his face toward the setting sun. Instead he should enter from the west and face the rising sun. Otherwise the sun would set on his reign, as had happened to Darius. Alexander tried to comply, but marshes blocked the western approaches, forcing him to enter from the east.23

  Alexander moved into the palace of Nebuchadnezzar with his wives, bodyguards, and a handful of close companions. He lived more modestly and less gaily than Harpalus, the previous occupant. During the heat of the day he held court outdoors, reclining on a silver-footed couch beside the artificial streams in the palace gardens. Mesopotamian dignitaries arrived from many cities, asking for tax exemptions and other privileges given to Babylon. Alexander dispatched Aramaic-speaking companions to the palace library, where they consulted the scribes in charge of vast stores of clay tablets on every subject from royal land holdings to the size and shape of the world (including maps). He needed to form a mental picture of his empire and especially of his new capital.24

  Alexander and his companions had never lived in a large city. They had merely visited Susa, Memphis, and Tyre, all smaller and less diverse. Now Babylonian priests, officials, and merchants crowded into the palace. How many Babylonians should he add to the imperial elite? He had replaced the now dead Mazdai with a Macedonian, but he assigned Mazdai’s half-Babylonian son to the companion cavalry. He decided that no one, either Macedonian or Babylonian, should replace Harpalus as financier for the entire empire.25

  Foreign emissaries pressured him, too. Greek ambassadors arrived, bringing gifts and making requests for help in dealing with returning soldiers and exiles. They thanked him for the temples he had built or expanded in Greece, but they failed to honor him as a god. When Carthaginian ambassadors came hoping to establish peaceful relations, he chastised them for aiding the enemy during his siege of Tyre. Then he threatened to make war on them, adding he would pardon them for the time being. When Arab sheiks came out of the desert bringing impressive gifts such as frankincense, he demanded that they submit to him. To his amazement, they refused.26

  News from Macedon and Greece also disappointed him. Besides refusing to adore him in person, the Macedonians and Greeks did not build altars to him and worship that way. The Macedonians worshipped Hephaestion as a hero, but not Alexander. Spartans gave a laconic reply to a suggestion about divine honors. Alexander, one of them said, could be “called” a god. Some Athenian citizens or other residents worshipped at an altar for Alexander and Hephaestion, but the community did not. Instead it watched the proceedings with dismay. One orator said the worshippers should purify themselves after each sacrifice. Another brought a lawsuit against an Athenian who had proposed that the community join in. A third joked that he did not care whose son Alexander was—Amon’s, Zeus’s, or Poseidon’s.27

  Alexander did not expect good religious news from Asia. A Greek oracle from western Asia Minor declared him to be a god, but a Persian oracle circulating there said that the Persians would overthrow the Macedonians. The Phoenicians thought of him as a mere priest-king, and he now knew what the Arabs thought of him.28

  Countless administrative decisions ensnared him. One concerned a slave who deserted his master, a eunuch in the service of the goddess Artemis at her Ephesus shrine. This runaway had fled to another shrine and taken refuge. The eunuch knew that simply removing the slave from the place would be wrong. Instead he wrote Alexander and asked for royal permission to do it. Don’t, Alexander replied. Give the slave a hearing, as was customary. Although Alexander sometimes took liberties with suppliants, he prudently did not allow others to. Yet he was to blame. If he had been less powerful, a eunuch in faraway Ephesus never would have written in the first place.29

  He could strike back, but only with artwork. The painter Apelles painted him with a thunderbolt in his hand, the same as on the Indian commemorative medallions, and Alexander donated the picture to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Greek viewers paid this work the compliment of saying it was lifelike, not godlike. They did not worship it.30

  For the first time, Alexander had to wait for news about his army rather than create the news himself. He still had 10,000 Greeks and Macedonians in and around Babylon, but some of his best officers and men were on their way home with Craterus. Alexander did not know where Craterus was, for that matter, nor when Antipater would reach Babylon with reinforcements.31

  As a respite, Alexander took short boat trips. He sailed downstream to inspect the ruined canal beside the Euphrates, and visited the Alexandria lately established by Hephaestion in the delta. He resumed looking for royal tombs, an interest that would grow into an obsession.
When he got back, he entertained a sculptor’s proposal to turn Mount Athos, in northern Greece, into a colossal statue of him. No, he decided, but he listened to proposals for some other extravagant projects.32

  To keep his companions busy, he sent some on exploratory expeditions to supplement Nearchus’s discoveries. One companion sailed into the Persian Gulf and reached Bahrain and the pearl fishery. Another sailed to the Strait of Hormuz, and a third started in Egypt and apparently reached Yemen. These voyages gave Alexander and his surveyors their first good information about the Arabian Peninsula.33

  As he studied his improved maps, Alexander seized on a way to escape from Babylon: the tidy conquest of Arabia. While leaving the main body of the army in the city with Antipater, he could lead a light force of some thousands. Nearchus could accompany him with a fleet. To raise the troops, he would pursue his plan to enroll Iranians in the phalanx. Newly promoted Macedonians would train the recruits and teach them enough Greek to follow orders. If necessary, he could recruit more non-Macedonian officers like Mazdai’s son.34

  To get ships, Alexander ordered forty-seven Phoenician vessels disassembled and brought eastward, and he had a harbor dredged at Babylon to house them. To improve navigation along the Euphrates, he repaired the long-impassible drainage canal. In flood season, it would fill with water and carry Alexander’s scouts toward Arabia. After flood season, the marshes would dry out, and troops could disembark along the canal and march into the interior. A lock would keep the canal deep enough to be navigable.35