Antipater was no fool. Sensitive to his master’s amour propre, he handed over the peace negotiations to the council of the League of Corinth. They were equally cautious, merely giving the Spartans permission to put their case to Alexander in person.
The story is a sad one. Agis was as courageous as Alexander, but less lucky. His springboard was not a rich and thriving state like Macedonia, but a small provincial power past its peak. He did his best.
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AN INSCRIPTION FROM 330 or the early 320s reveals that there was a famine in Greece. We know little about it, or indeed about civilian life in general during these years, but the disruptions to trade caused by Agis’s revolt and more widely by Alexander’s campaigning seem a likely cause. The stone tablet lists the states supplied with grain by the Hellenic city of Cyrene, on the coast of northern Africa west of Egypt. The city probably charged the usual price, in an attempt to discourage inflation.
Only two individuals are cited by name as recipients or purchasers—Olympias and her daughter Cleopatra. Although the details are unclear, they had a fraught relationship. The mother exercised influence, if not power, in Macedonia alongside Antipater. Meanwhile Cleopatra ruled as regent in Molossia when her husband (and uncle) went to southern Italy as a condottiere in the service of the powerful port of Tarentum. He was killed in battle. His body was mutilated and cut in half. What was left of him was cremated and the bones sent home to Molossia.
Presumably these royal women distributed the grain they purchased to the populations of their respective kingdoms. That they were singled out for mention in this fashion shows that they were well-known international political figures.
At some stage, Olympias fell out badly with Antipater. She seems never to have accepted that her son had placed him in charge of European affairs. After the end of the Agis rebellion Antipater was in a strong position to act as he wanted and there was no advantage in undermining him. Olympias disappeared to Epirus, where she took over the government. She and her daughter acted in concert for a while. However, there usually being no room for two queens in one beehive, Cleopatra decamped to Pella.
At some point, the young queen had sex with a good-looking man. Olympias found out about it, but for once reacted calmly, observing that her daughter ought to get some enjoyment from her royal rank.
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ON THEIR WAY TO Susa, the Macedonians came across unrefined petroleum oozing from the soil, so copiously that it formed a small lake. The substance was highly inflammable and could be set alight, Plutarch observes, “by a flame’s radiance without actually touching it.” One evening as it was growing dark, some Persians arranged a demonstration. They sprinkled a small quantity of petroleum, or naphtha, along the street that led to the king’s quarters and then set light to it at one end. In a fraction of a second the flames flashed to the other end, an effect that the ancient world had never before witnessed.
On another occasion, a servant boy called Stephanus was in attendance while the king took a bath and rubbed himself down with olive oil. Thinking that the flames moved so fast that they would not burn flesh, a courtier suggested that naphtha be tried out on Stephanus. Surprisingly, he agreed to the experiment and coated himself with the liquid. The fire took and Stephanus was enveloped in flames. Alexander was horrified, and if servants had not been able to put the fire out by pouring water over the boy, he would have died. As it was, he was badly burned.
Scientific experts of the day speculated (wrongly, it goes without saying) that naphtha flows from soil that is oily and combustible. It was no accident, they flatteringly inferred, that their king’s own nature was equally fiery. No wonder he was conquering the combustible soil of Mesopotamia with such ease. Although the sources do not name him, this was just the kind of sycophantic idea that Callisthenes would have thought up.
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THE FIRST TRACES OF human habitation at Susa have been dated to about 7000 B.C. Over that time a Neolithic village gradually grew into the leading city of the Elamite civilization, in the far west and southwest of today’s Iran. Its fortunes fluctuated as conquerors came and went, and the city was razed three times.
One of these Ozymandiases was the Neo-Assyrian monarch Ashurbanipal. He sacked the city and boasted about it:
Susa, the great holy city, home of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods and wealth were amassed….I destroyed the ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to nothing; their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds.
Alexander may have been the latest in a long line, but, as he had demonstrated in Babylon, he was more interested in maintenance than destruction.
In early December he arrived outside Susa’s walls. He was met by the son of Abulites, the Persian satrap for the region, and the Macedonian officer he had sent to the city after Gaugamela, and was presented with speedy dromedaries and a dozen elephants. The surrender took place as had been agreed and was peaceful. On entry, Alexander sacrificed in the traditional Macedonian manner, held a torch race for the men, and, as ever, staged an athletics competition. The contents of the treasury were handed over. These amounted to the staggering sum of more than forty thousand talents of gold and silver bullion that had accumulated untouched over many years, and nine thousand talents of minted gold in the form of gold darics.
Important appointments were made, confirming the king’s policy of reconciliation with senior Persians. Abulites was confirmed in place. We hear of no protests, but throughout the army there will have been widespread puzzlement at best, and at worst silent resentment. As counterweights, the garrison command was given to a Companion and overall military authority to a Macedonian.
Alexander had been taken aback by Darius’s luxurious lifestyle when on campaign. He was now shown round the “fabulous royal palace” and received a lesson about the trappings of majesty at home. He found a daily bill of fare for the Great King’s lunch and dinner engraved on a brass column. Huge quantities of culinary ingredients were listed, including four hundred geese, three hundred turtles, three hundred goslings, thirty horses, and many kinds of herb (among them an aromatic plant called silphium, which, it was believed, conveniently doubled up as an aphrodisiac and a contraceptive, but is now regrettably extinct).
Evidently, the exchequer funded all the meals of a numerous court. The expense was colossal. Alexander knew how to be generous (always for a purpose, of course), but he disapproved of waste. Convinced that cowardice was the sure consequence of luxury and dissipation, he ordered the metal menu to be destroyed. In the royal bedroom a golden vine studded with clusters of jewels hung over the bed. An inventory conducted a decade or so later listed a large number of objets d’art together weighing fifteen thousand talents.
Alexander seated himself on the Great King’s throne. It was too high for him and his feet did not touch the floor. One of the Macedonian pages saw this and pulled up a table beneath his dangling legs. It fitted and Alexander was pleased by the boy’s presence of mind. Then he noticed that a eunuch on the palace staff was crying and asked him what the matter was. It was from that table, the man replied, that the Great King used to eat, and he was upset by the disrespectful use to which it was now being put. Alexander was embarrassed and, no doubt, did not want a reputation for impertinence to spread through the Persian court. He ordered the table to be removed.
Philotas, Parmenion’s son, interrupted. “Don’t do that, Sir. Take this as another omen, that the table on which Darius once dined is now your footstool.” On second thought, the king agreed and kept the table where it was. This casual incident was to be understood as a divine sign of approval for the transmission of power.
Demaratus, the aged fixer from Corinth, believed in the revenge justification for the war.
When he saw Alexander in Susa, he wept. Through his tears, he said that all the Greeks who had died before this hour had been deprived of a great joy, since they had not seen Alexander sitting on the throne of Darius.
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A CLOUD BRIEFLY SPOILED the fine weather. The dowager queen, Sisygambis, and her granddaughters were still with the army and Alexander decided to park them permanently in Susa. He gave them tutors to teach them the Greek language. He was still on excellent terms with Sisygambis, but nearly ruined the relationship by committing a faux pas.
The king had been sent examples of national dress from Macedonia and a large amount of valuable purple fabric had been found in the palace. He ordered it all to be presented to the dowager queen, together with the women who had sewn the clothes. He added a message that if she liked the Macedonian garments, she would be able to have her granddaughters trained how to make them. Alexander still had much to learn about Persian cultural attitudes. Sisygambis took the gift as a grave insult, for high-status Persian females would have been humiliated if compelled to work with wool. Alexander was mortified when he learned of his mistake. Although “Sorry” was not in his usual vocabulary, he went to her in person to apologize. Greek women, like his sisters, he explained, were brought up to weave and spin and he had been led into error by his own customs. He begged her to excuse his ignorance of hers. Warmth returned between them. He went on calling her mother.
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FOR A VICTORIOUS ARMY, the journey to Persepolis, the empire’s ceremonial capital, was surprisingly hard going.
In the ancient world, wars were usually fought only between spring and autumn, but Alexander needed to reach Persepolis before anyone else took the opportunity to make off with the treasury. The Zagros Mountains stood in his path, and the passes were covered in snow. It is a mark of his urgency that he left Susa during the depths of winter in mid-January 330.
The distance from Susa is some 370 miles and the Macedonians marched through the land of the Uxii, a corridor that led to Persis, the Persians’ “sparse and rugged” motherland. Some of these tribespeople lived in a fertile plain; they were governed by a Persian satrap and paid their taxes. The mountain Uxii were a different matter; they were not subjects of the Great King and fiercely maintained their independence. They made their living from taxing travelers—or, more exactly, from organized brigandage. The Persian authorities thought it would be too much trouble to subdue them and agreed to pay a toll.
After the king entered the Uxiis’ territory, the dwellers on the plain immediately capitulated. However, those who lived in the mountains controlled a strategic pass leading eastward, and they insisted on levying their customary charge. Alexander told them to meet him at the pass, “where he would pay them what was owing.” They assumed he meant to give them their money.
That was a mistake. The king advanced at top speed with only a portion of his army, up to fourteen thousand men in total, comprising nine thousand infantry, three thousand mercenary archers, one thousand javelin-throwing Agrianes, and one thousand Thracian horses. They fell on the Uxii villages, destroying and pillaging. Then Alexander marched to the pass, arriving before the tribesmen, shocked by the attack on their homesteads, had taken up position. He sent Craterus forward to occupy the heights to which he guessed the tribesmen would withdraw when hard pressed, and then he launched a full-scale assault. As he had predicted, they scattered in Craterus’s direction and either were cut to pieces or fell to their deaths from cliff paths.
The Uxii were allowed to live in peace on payment of an annual tribute of one hundred horses, five hundred draft animals, and, cripplingly one assumes, thirty thousand sheep. An irritant which Great Kings had put up with for centuries had been removed in a few days.
The king then split the army between himself and Parmenion. The old general was given command of the Thessalian cavalry, the more heavily armed infantry, and the baggage train, and took the high road to Persepolis. They would inevitably proceed slowly. Meanwhile Alexander chose a more direct route with the remaining infantry, the Companion cavalry, the light cavalry used for skirmishing, the Agrianians, and the archers, and made a forced march to the Persian Gates, a narrow and easily defended gorge between high mountains. It was six miles long and at its narrowest six feet wide, cliff to cliff. The satrap of Persis, one Ariobarzanes, had guessed the impatient Macedonian’s journey plan and occupied the pass with a substantial force of 25,000 men and some cavalry. Worse, he had had a wall built across it.
Alexander faced an awkward problem. He meant to defeat Ariobarzanes, but he would have to do so in a way that prevented the satrap from making a getaway. If the Persians withdrew in good order, they would most probably speed to Persepolis. Once there they would either defend the city or, much worse, take possession of the hoard of bullion reported to be stored there and run off with it. If they could deliver the gold and silver to Darius, who was skulking somewhere in the eastern wastes, the defeated monarch would be able to afford a new army.
Alexander started badly. With typical overconfidence, he launched a direct assault on the wall, but his men were bombarded from above by catapults, slingers, and archers. Large rocks were tumbled down onto their heads. The king had no choice but to sound the retreat, leaving his dead behind in the defile. It was a humiliating setback. To abandon the bodies was unthinkable, but a second assault would be pointless. What was to be done? How was Ariobarzanes to be defeated quickly and decisively before he withdrew to Persepolis?
The Macedonians built a fortified camp a few miles back and waited for a while. The king cross-examined some prisoners of war, who volunteered to show him a rough and narrow path that would take him round behind the Gates. Ever the risk-taker, he immediately accepted the offer. He placed Craterus in charge of the camp, leaving him a couple of phalanx brigades, some archers, and five hundred cavalry. He was to keep up the camp’s usual appearance and increase the number of fires so that it would appear that nothing had changed.
At nightfall he led the rest of the army along the secret path. As they climbed, snowdrifts held them up and progress was slow. After eleven miles, the king divided his forces once again. For himself he selected a flying column consisting of the hypaspists, a phalanx brigade, the lightest-armed of the archers, the Agrianians, and two cavalry squadrons. He ordered the remaining troops, led by three senior generals, Philotas the cavalry commander, his friend Amyntas, son of Andromenes (now back in post after having brought the reinforcements from Macedonia), and Coenus, Parmenion’s son-in-law, to march down into the plain on the far side of the Gates. They were then to build pontoon bridges over a river that would have to be crossed before reaching Persepolis.
The motive for this third detachment was presumably to ensure that there was a substantial force blocking the way to Persepolis, should the Macedonians fail to crush Ariobarzanes at the pass.
Alexander and his elite unit struck out along a rough and difficult track through dense forest. About midday they halted for a meal and some sleep. Darkness had fallen when they set off again. Just before dawn they came out onto a high point at the back of the Gates, overlooking an enemy outpost. They quickly annihilated it and also killed many in a second outpost. At the third, most of the guards escaped, but into the mountains rather than to the main camp. So, luckily, the alarm was not raised. Then Alexander led an attack on the enemy camp. At the perimeter ditch he had a trumpet sound as a prearranged signal to alert Craterus, who immediately launched a frontal assault.
Surprise was complete and the Persians, seeing that they were surrounded, panicked and fled. Many were killed. Ariobarzanes himself escaped into the hills with forty cavalrymen and five thousand foot. Just as the king had feared, he pushed on to Persepolis, but the authorities were realists and refused to let him in. He turned to face his Macedonian pursuers and fell fighting alongside his men.
It would have b
een an eccentric fate if the victor of Issus and Gaugamela had been defeated in a skirmish. Impetuosity had led the king into serious trouble, but if that quality was a fusion of speed and determination it had also rescued him.
Resistance being over, the royal treasurer surrendered the city to Alexander. The king had spared Babylon and Susa, but he had something different in mind for Persepolis. As Xerxes had sacked Athens all those years before, the Persians were now to suffer the same fate in a symmetry of punishment.
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MOST GREAT CITIES GROW over the centuries from small beginnings. Persepolis was different, for it was invented by Darius the Great, the invader of Greece.
He envisaged the need for a splendid collection of palaces where festivals could be staged, grand receptions held, foreign ambassadors received, and religious ceremonies conducted. Here Great Kings could be buried in suitable splendor. Persepolis was to be the symbol and showcase of empire and was designed to evoke awe and respect. (But its remote location meant that it never grew into an urban community with its own character and social momentum.)
A huge platform, 450 by 300 meters in extent, was constructed, which abutted against a mountain. On it was built an audience hall approached by grand stairways; its roof was made from cedar, ebony, and teak and was supported by seventy-two columns twenty-five meters high. It could accommodate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. Nearby a treasury was used to store war booty and tax receipts. A large collection of cuneiform clay tablets has survived which shows that a bureaucracy of more than a thousand employees was responsible for the empire’s financial management. Fine bas-reliefs, probably carved by Greek sculptors, depict all the different peoples of the Persian empire as they bring tribute to the Great King. These include, cheekily, the Ionian Greeks, whose rebellion set off the historical process, now reaching its climax with Alexander’s doom-bringing arrival.
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