The citizens of the bitumen-rich town were anxious to impress the king and so took buckets of the liquid and poured a trail of the sticky tar along the street leading to his quarters. When darkness fell, they lit the first patch near Alexander. He watched as a blazing trail erupted instantly in the dark night, moving faster than any fire he had ever seen. He then walked along the lighted pathway to his lodgings, following a continuous line of flames.
The king was so taken by this novel liquid that one of his bath attendants, an Athenian named Athenophanes, suggested they apply it to a homely servant named Stephanus to see what would happen when it burned on a human body. The young man was eager to please and gladly anointed himself with bitumen for the experiment. Alexander cannot have been so foolish as to think this would be harmless to the lad, but his curiosity evidently overcame both his compassion and common sense. When Stephanus, covered in pitch, touched a nearby lamp, he burst into flame. The king flew from his seat and tried to put out the fire, but it was like no other conflagration he had ever dealt with. Even the jars of water for his bath standing conveniently at hand were scarcely able to extinguish the flames. What had started as a humorous science experiment left a poor young man near death, covered with horrible burns.
Alexander continued the march south along the Tigris past Ashur and Takrit out of the highlands of Assyria into the broad and fertile land of Babylonia. The pastures between the Tigris and Euphrates were said to be so rich in nourishing grasses that the flocks of the area had to be restrained from eating themselves to death. Here in southern Mesopotamia, the two great rivers were only a few miles apart, so it was easy for Alexander to cross from the banks of the Tigris west to the Euphrates. Somewhere north of Babylon the Macedonians saw a fine procession approaching them. Mazaeus, satrap of the city, was at its head. There were priests from all the temples and leading officials bearing fabulous gifts for the new king. Mazaeus, who just a few weeks before had led his troops against Alexander at Gaugamela, prostrated himself before his new lord along with his grown sons. Parmenion in particular must have yearned to impale this turncoat on a pole after losing so many of his men to the Persian in battle, but Alexander was more circumspect. It is almost certain that the meeting of the king and the satrap had been preceded by days of negotiation. If not, it is unlikely that Mazaeus would have dared to risk his life by appearing before Alexander.
Mazaeus was above all a very practical man. He knew as soon as Darius fled the battlefield that the days of the Persian Empire were over. Alexander was now the most powerful man in the world—and Mazaeus wanted to make sure they were on the same side. Many other Persians must have felt the same way, but the Babylonian satrap led the way in switching his allegiance to the Macedonian king. What Mazaeus had to offer Alexander was the richest city in the world. The Macedonians could have taken Babylon by force, but it would have been an enormous effort. Much better to avoid another siege of Tyre and instead receive the town as a gift. The price Mazaeus exacted was the continuation of his role as governor of Babylon. That Alexander agreed to this deal is proof that his war against the Persians had now changed fundamentally.
Until this point, the Macedonian king had been a crusader in a foreign land slicing away bits of the Persian Empire to add to his own domain. Even in Egypt, the native rulers he appointed were figureheads under Greek and Macedonian domination. But Mazaeus was to be a genuine satrap with real authority over the most important city in Alexander’s realm. The king was no fool and appointed Macedonians as commanders of the military units in the area, but nonetheless the rise of Mazaeus marked an extraordinary change of policy. Alexander was no longer trying to conquer Persia and kill Darius—he himself was now Great King with all the privileges and responsibilities of that office. To rule the many lands of his empire he would need experienced men like Mazaeus, who knew the language, culture, people, and politics of each province. The Persians had for two centuries skillfully governed the largest dominion ever known. Their trained and capable officers were essential to Alexander—if he could gain their loyalty. By openly rewarding Mazaeus with control of such an important city, the king was sending an unmistakable signal to those who had once served Darius that the new lord of the lands was merciful and reasonable. If they joined him willingly, they could receive rich rewards for their service.
In favoring such administrators even above his own countrymen, Alexander was in no way abandoning his Macedonian roots; rather, it was essential that he begin to think of ruling in a radically new way. His realm was no longer just Macedonia and Greece, but a true international empire encompassing three continents and dozens of distinct kingdoms. Thracians, Lydians, Carians, Phrygians, Cappadocians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Jews, Arabs, Egyptians, and Babylonians were now under his direct rule with Medes, Elamites, Parthians, Bactrians, Scythians, and Indians yet to come. Although many of his Macedonian supporters vehemently resisted these changes, Alexander wanted to make them see that the feudal system used to govern their homeland was totally inadequate for ruling a vast empire. If he were to succeed in his grand ambitions, he would have to integrate native officials into his imperial government just as the Persians had before him. As he marched toward Babylon, he knew that the days of his father’s Macedonian kingdom were over—the age of Alexander’s Macedonian Empire had begun.
Babylon was an enormous city more than two thousand years old when Alexander approached its walls. According to legend, it was founded in the distant past by Queen Semiramis, who built massive dikes to control the floods that regularly swept down the Euphrates from the north. Herodotus claimed the city was shaped like a square, with its sides more than thirteen miles each, giving its walls an astonishing circumference greater than fifty miles, though the true figure was surely less. A deep moat formed its outer boundary next to the wall itself, which was reportedly more than seventy feet wide and more than three hundred feet high. On top of the entire perimeter of the wall was a road wide enough for a four-horse chariot to be driven. One hundred gates of bronze were said to lead into the city, but no entry was more spectacular than the fabulous Ishtar Gate, made up of hundreds of glazed blue tiles decorated with golden bulls and dragons, all surrounded by decorated bands and rosettes.
The Euphrates divided the city in half, but there was a bridge that connected the two sides. Unlike many ancient towns that had grown haphazardly over the centuries, Babylon was laid out in a grid with straight streets running either parallel or at right angles to the river. The thousands of houses inside the walls were three to four stories high, interspersed with businesses and shops that sold everything from Chinese silk to amber from the Baltic Sea. On the eastern side of the city was a second wall, surrounding the royal palace, and another protecting the central ziggurat, a steep pyramid containing the temple to Bel-Marduk, chief god of Babylon. The ziggurat was so high that the designers included a shelter halfway up to allow pilgrims to rest on their climb. On the summit was a temple that only the priests could enter. Inside was a huge bed covered with the finest linens next to a golden table, but—unlike in most temples—no statue as the god himself occupied the sanctuary. No one ever slept on the bed except a specially chosen woman who was said to be the bride of Bel-Marduk for that night.
More than a thousand years earlier, the city had been ruled by Hammurabi, who composed his famous code of laws for his subjects to follow. These were an important influence on many Near Eastern cultures for ages to come. On a stone stele beneath the figure of the sun god Shamash were carved the many laws that governed the land. Justice was simple and harsh under Hammurabi:
If a man destroys the eye of a another man, they shall destroy his eye as well.
If a man knocks out the tooth of another man, they shall knock out his tooth as well.
But there was also a degree of mercy in the code: “If the wife of a man is caught lying with another man, they shall bind them both and throw them into the water to drown. But if the husband wishes to spare his wife, the king may consent.”
Hammurabi’s kingdom gave way to the Assyrian Empire, then the Neo-Babylonian age under rulers such as Nebuchadnezzar, a great builder who restored the city to its glory before the Persians conquered Mesopotamia. The invaders from the east had been deeply resented by the natives as they showed little respect for the ancient religion of Babylon. As in Egypt, the Persians considered the rich city little more than a treasure trove to be plundered. Xerxes removed a solid gold statue of Bel-Marduk from the temple, killing the priest who tried to stop him, and melted it down into coins to pay for his wars. Xerxes offended the Babylonians on an even greater scale when he later destroyed much of the temple after a rebellion in the city, leaving it a ruin of its former glory.
Alexander, on the other hand, was determined to show respect for the religious traditions of Babylon, though he was also cautious. He gave strict orders to his men that there was to be no looting and that no Macedonian soldier would enter a Babylonian house uninvited. He hoped to take Babylon peacefully and maintain good relations with the natives, but he was ready for trouble if it occurred. Thus beneath the city walls crowded with thousands of men, women, and children throwing flowers to the soldiers below, Alexander entered the city that bright autumn day through the Ishtar Gate at the head of his troops in full battle formation. There was no hostility from the inhabitants, who, like the Egyptians, were pleased to see the Persians removed from power even though they did not yet know what sort of rule the Macedonians would impose. Instead of spears and arrows there were garlands and perfumes, followed by gifts of precious frankincense and cages filled with lions and leopards. The native priests sang hymns in ancient tongues to welcome the new king while music filled the air. The throngs of citizens joined in the procession behind the soldiers as if the entry of the army were a great holiday. Alexander had never seen anything to compare with Babylon. To his men from the poor villages of Macedonia, it was as if they had entered another world.
The king first went to the temple of Bel-Marduk and ordered the damage Xerxes had done to the sacred precinct repaired. Then, carefully following the instructions of the priests, he sacrificed to the god, surrounded by cheering natives. Then he and his officers retired to the palace at the northern end of the city near the Ishtar Gate and settled into a life of splendid luxury for the next month. He marveled at a pillar in the palace listing the dining requirements of Darius’ royal entourage, including dozens of cakes of honey, hundreds of bushels of flour, barrels of sesame oil and vinegar, and baskets of finely chopped cardamom. Alexander ordered the inscription destroyed to show a break with the wasteful Persian ways of the past and told his officers that those who indulged in such extravagant ways were quickly defeated in battle.
With his copy of Herodotus in hand the next day, Alexander toured the strange and wonderful city. As he passed through the streets, he noticed that family members and friends would carry sick people into public squares and leave them there to talk with those walking by. The Babylonians did not trust physicians, but instead relied on the advice of strangers, who would approach the sick and offer a remedy. Many had suffered from the same illness themselves and had learned firsthand an effective treatment, while others had heard of a cure elsewhere. Given the international nature of the city, with visitors from almost every land, there was no shortage of medical wisdom and quackery available to the sick.
One of the first places visited by Alexander’s men, if not by the king himself, must have been the temple of the goddess Ishtar, known to the Greeks as Aphrodite, who ruled over the sexual aspects of life. It was an unbreakable rule in Babylon that every woman of the city must sometime in her life offer herself to a man at the temple as an act of worship. Rich and poor women alike would come to the sacred precinct and sit with wreaths of cords on their heads to mark their availability. Visiting men would walk up and down the pathways among the women looking for an appealing devotee. When they found the right lady, they would toss silver into her lap and call her to come in the name of the goddess. A waiting priest would collect the money for the temple treasury and escort the couple to a nearby room in the temple. No woman could refuse any man, so that a poor shepherd in from the countryside could enjoy the favors of a noble lady of the court, at least on that single occasion. Beautiful women never had to wait long, but those lacking in appeal might sit in the temple courtyard for years before being chosen. Prudish Greek writers reported that the whole enterprise was nothing but prostitution on a grand scale, but to the citizens of Babylon it was as much an act of genuine devotion as the most solemn sacrifice to Athena or Zeus.
Alexander would least of all have missed the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, ranked along with the Great Pyramid at Giza as one of the wonders of the world. Centuries earlier, an Assyrian king ruling in Babylon had built the gardens for his foreign wife, who longed for the woods and groves of her native land. There in the middle of a desert city, the king built a series of raised platforms above the streets supported by massive columns. Tons of soil were carried to the terraces by an army of slaves and water was continuously piped in from the river and drawn up by huge screws to circulate through the gardens. Fruit trees, palms, and conifers were planted throughout, growing into a living forest rising high above the city. In the most intense heat of summer, visitors could walk through the cool groves and picnic in the shade on the lush grass.
As always, Alexander seems to have taken an interest in religious matters that went beyond the mere politics of ingratiating himself with the locals. There was in Babylon a special quarter of the city given over to the Chaldeans, the ancient priest-philosophers of Mesopotamia famed especially for their precise study of the stars. Their records of astronomical events reportedly went back thousands of years, but as they were written in a cuneiform script unknown to the Greek world, the king had to take the priests’ word on the matter. Unlike most numerical systems, mathematics as taught by the Chaldeans was based on the number sixty rather than ten—a way of measuring time and space passed on to later civilizations as the sixty-minute hour, the sixty-second minute, and the 360-degree circle (six times sixty). Long before Alexander, the Babylonians had discovered how to use complex fractions, quadratic equations, and what would come to be known as the Pythagorean theorem. Many of the advances in later Greek mathematics in fact derived from the encounter that began in Babylon that autumn with the arrival of the Macedonians. As the Chaldeans were also experts in divination, Alexander took several of them along with him for the rest of his campaign to read the signs of events to come. He must have also talked with them about their views of the gods and the origin of the world. If so, he would have learned of a remarkable similarity between Babylonian creation myths, with their stories of successive generations of gods battling one another for control of the universe, and the tales he had read in the Greek poet Hesiod of Cronos castrating his father, only to be violently displaced in time by his own son Zeus.
But Alexander could not spend all his time in Babylon seeing the sights and visiting with native scholars. There were also appointments to be made and military affairs to be arranged. Almost fifteen thousand new recruits had just arrived in the city following a long march from Macedonia. These included cavalry and infantry sent by Antipater and led by Amyntas, the veteran commander dispatched to Macedonia by Alexander many months before to bring back additional troops. The king was sorely disappointed that Amyntas had not arrived with the much-needed soldiers before the battle at Gaugamela, but he knew there would be plenty of opportunities for fighting yet to come. The commander also brought with him fifty sons of leading Macedonian nobles to serve as royal pages under the king. These lads were to wait on the royal table, attend the king in hunting and battle, and stand guard outside his chambers at night. It was an honored position for ambitious young men that served as an important training ground for future Macedonian leaders.
Before leaving the city, Alexander appointed Agathon from the coastal Macedonian town of Pydna as commander of the citadel at Babylon with a t
housand troops under him. Overall command of military affairs in Babylonia was assigned to another Macedonian, Apollodorus from Amphipolis, along with two thousand soldiers and money to hire more. Asclepiodorus, probably a Greek, was put in charge of collecting taxes from the province, while the former Persian satrap Mazaeus was reconfirmed in his previous office. To keep the army happy—and perhaps to lure them away from the pleasures of the city—he gave each of his Macedonian cavalry the equivalent of a year’s pay as a bonus. Foreign horsemen received almost as much and Macedonian infantry each pocketed more than they would earn in six months. Alexander wanted to give his men no cause to grumble as they continued the march into Persia. They knew there would be more to come from their generous king on the road ahead.
Once the last of his soldiers was rounded up from the brothels of Babylon, Alexander set out with his enlarged army to the winter capital of the Persian Empire at Susa. Darius was still at large in the snow-covered mountains of Media, but the most pressing matter for Alexander was to secure the treasuries at Susa and Persepolis as soon as possible. Susa was the closer of the two capitals, more than a hundred miles down the royal road that ran all the way back to Sardis in Lydia. The town was so notoriously hot in summer that lizards trying to cross its roads baked before they reached the other side, but in the cooler months it was a most pleasant city. The journey there took the Macedonians to the north of the endless marshes where the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates met the Persian Gulf, a land known in antiquity as Sumer. From here, the biblical patriarch Abraham was said to have set out on his journey to the land of Canaan. The Sumerians, who had built cities three thousand years before Alexander, were one of the oldest civilizations on earth. The king must have heard stories from his new Chaldean traveling companions about the glories of ancient Sumer. From the city of Uruk on the Euphrates, a great king named Gilgamesh once ruled. The story may have been lost by Alexander’s day, but if it had survived once again he would have been surprised by similarities with the earliest Greek literature. Gilgamesh, like Homer’s Achilles, was part god and part man, a great hero seeking glory who fought monsters and gods alongside his beloved friend Enkidu. Like Achilles’ companion Patroclus, Enkidu died suddenly, plunging his friend into deep despair. But unlike Achilles, who took out his frustration on the Trojan warrior Hector, Gilgamesh instead set out in search of eternal life. His quest at last took him to the island of Utnapishtim, a man who had once survived the great flood sent by the gods to destroy humanity and been rewarded with immortality. Gilgamesh failed the test that would grant him eternal life, but the lessons he learned were a comfort to readers for millennia.
Alexander the Great Page 22
