The mood must have been gloomy, but everyone protested their loyalty. Below the surface, though, these high officials of empire were weighing their options. Darius’s withdrawal after Gaugamela had depressed morale, and Alexander’s obvious desire for continuity meant that jobs, position, life could be maintained under the new regime. Treason could be presented as being in the public interest.
Artabazus gave a rousing speech: “We shall follow our king into battle,” he said, “dressed in our richest robes and equipped with our finest armor.” But with no troops forthcoming from the east, the satraps saw little advantage in throwing away good men after bad. They sat on their hands.
Behind the scenes, Nabarzanes and Bessus made common cause. They decided to arrest the Great King. Curtius writes:
They reasoned that if Alexander overtook them they could ingratiate themselves with the victor by handing over their king alive—he was sure to set great store by the capture of Darius—whereas, if they managed to get away from him, they would kill Darius, seize his kingdom themselves and restart hostilities.
These were ruthless and ambitious grandees, but they genuinely believed that Darius’s cause was lost. They would be patriots if possible. Otherwise they would look out for themselves.
Nabarzanes laid the ground for their plan, turning to Darius and addressing him directly: “Temporarily transfer your authority and your command to another, who can carry the title of king only until the enemy quits Asia. When victorious, he can then return your kingdom to you.”
His intention was to raise the notion of regime change without risking a charge of betrayal, but seldom has advice been less convincing. The Great King lost his temper. He drew his sword and threatened to cut down the speaker. Bessus and some Bactrians crowded around him. Ostensibly, they were upset; they begged the Great King to stay his hand. He did so, but if he had persisted they would have arrested and chained him.
The gathering began to break up. Nabarzanes slipped away and was soon joined by Bessus. They decided to move the men under their command away from the main body of the army. Meanwhile, Artabazus did his best to placate the Great King, telling him that he could not afford to estrange any of his supporters. Darius agreed, but, depressed and despairing, withdrew into his tent.
No one seemed to be in charge. Patron was worried by the turn of events. He told his Greeks to get their weapons from the baggage train, where they were stored during a long march, and await his orders. The Persian troops remained loyal, believing that “it was impious to desert a king.” Artabazus assumed the role of commander-in-chief and worked hard to build their morale.
The conspirators decided it was time for action. They knew that the Greek mercenaries and the Persians were still loyal and dared not arrest Darius openly. When Artabazus told them that he had mollified the Great King, they put on a show of weeping and begging for forgiveness. A night passed; with dawn, they moved their men back into the camp and presented themselves at the door of the royal tent. They prostrated themselves in front of Darius.
Having accepted their apologies, the apparently unsuspecting Darius gave the order to march on and climbed onto his chariot in the usual way.
* * *
—
PATRON SUSPECTED THAT BESSUS and Nabarzanes meant the Great King harm. He walked as near as was permissible to Darius’s carriage (Darius had left the uncomfortable chariot) and looked out for a chance to talk to him. But Bessus, fearing that the Greek was planning to betray his plot, would not step away from the Great King; he behaved more like a guard than a traveling companion.
Patron hesitated and sometimes fell back, not daring to speak. At last Darius noticed him and told an official to ask Patron whether he had anything to tell him. Patron replied that he did, but only in the absence of others. He was told to step forward without an interpreter. Alone in his entourage, Darius spoke some Greek, so the two men were able to converse in plain sight with nobody else able to understand what they were saying.
Patron asked him to pitch his tent in the Greek area of the camp, where he would be properly guarded. Darius asked why, and Patron told him that Bessus and Nabarzanes were plotting against him. The monarch replied that he was well aware of the mercenaries’ loyalty but that it would be very difficult for him to leave his compatriots. He made a good point, for his Persian soldiers were doubtless considering their position and any sign that the Great King no longer had confidence in them could loosen theirs in him.
* * *
—
BESSUS WAS ON TENTERHOOKS; he knew no Greek but the setting aside of the interpreters made him certain that Patron was giving him away. He once more loudly protested his loyalty and warned that a mercenary like Patron would do anything for hire. Darius gave him a look that signified acceptance. In fact, he had accepted the truth of Patron’s accusations: he later said as much to Artabazus. The old nobleman advised him to move across to the Greeks, but he again refused.
Night gathered and silence fell throughout the camp. Men in the bodyguard began to make themselves scarce. A few eunuchs stood around in the royal tent, not knowing what to do. Darius told them to leave and look after themselves. They began wailing and others joined in.
Misinterpreting the noise, soldiers reported to Bessus and Nabarzanes that Darius had committed suicide. They mounted their horses and, with a picked group of supporters, rushed to the royal tent, where they found that Darius was alive. They ordered him to be arrested and bound (in gold fetters, it was said).
The conspirators and their forces rejoined the highway and began marching east toward Bactriana, Bessus’s province on the edge of India.
Darius was brought with them, still wearing his official robes. He was transported in an old wagon, which was covered in dirty animal skins so that its occupant should not be recognized. He must have told himself that his future would be bleak and short.
* * *
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IN MAY OR EARLY June 330, Alexander was at last able to leave Persepolis. The snows had shrunk if not altogether vanished and the approaching harvest would help to provide supplies of food and fodder.
He was to march north to Ecbatana at the head of seventeen thousand men. He decided to take with him some of the money surrendered to him; with this, he would pay his army. The remainder of the money he ordered to be stored under guard at Ecbatana’s citadel. To carry it all there, a vast number of mules, as well as three thousand camels, were recruited from Susa and Babylonia. Parmenion was placed in charge of the operation and ordered to hand over the treasure to the repentant and reinstated Harpalus. After that he launched a punitive expedition against the aforementioned Cadusii, a hostile tribe of mountaineers by the Caspian Sea.
Along the way, the king kept picking up contradictory rumors. Were the Macedonians to advance, he was told, Darius would abandon Ecbatana, fleeing eastward and ravaging the land as he went. Later it was said that the Great King meant to offer battle. Then, when Alexander was three days’ march from the city, he was met by a renegade Achaemenid, who was an illegitimate son of the previous Great King, Artaxerxes Ochus. He reported that Darius had been expecting reinforcements, but when they failed to arrive had left Ecbatana four days previously, taking with him seven thousand talents from the exchequer.
Ecbatana was a remarkable sight, if we are to believe Herodotus, writing in the fifth century:
Its walls are of great size and strength, rising in circles one within the other. The plan of the place is that each of the walls out-tops the battlements of the one beyond it….There are seven circles, the royal palace and the treasuries standing within the last.
Apparently, the battlements were each painted in different colors—to start from the outside, white, followed by black, scarlet, blue, and orange. The inner two battlements were coated with silver and gold.
Alexander’s priority was to catch Darius and once he had arr
ived at the city he spent as little time as possible admiring it before moving on. However, he chose this moment to introduce an important military reform. He demobilized all the League of Corinth troops, including the Thessalian cavalry. It was his final signal, after the burning of Persepolis, that the crusade was over. He treated the men with typical generosity: as well as all his back pay, each cavalryman received an enormous bonus of one talent; foot soldiers were awarded the smaller but still lavish sum of one thousand drachmas.
Many of these men had spent years in foreign service and will not have welcomed the prospect of a long march home to their small native city-states, where jobs were scarce. The king had something to offer them. They were invited to reenlist, and those who did so were given a handsome “golden hello” of three talents (eighteen thousand drachmas).
But from now onward they would exchange their Hellenic allegiance for loyalty to Alexander alone. He had in mind an army of professional soldiers, disciplined and well-trained according to his rule book. They would be ready and willing to go wherever he chose to lead them. They would fight alongside other recruits from the empire he had just vanquished, barbarians and Greeks marching together.
* * *
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ALEXANDER WAS NOT INTERESTED in money, but now he had it in almost uncountable quantities. He was a masculine version of the nymph Danaë on whom Zeus—his father—had showered gold. His wealth allowed him to display munificence. This was a quality expected of a king which he will have learned from his famously openhanded father.
Plutarch discusses the topic in his biography: “Alexander was by nature exceptionally generous and became even more so as his wealth increased. His gifts were always bestowed with grace and courtesy, and it is this alone which truly makes a giver’s generosity welcome.”
However, he had no compunction in using prodigality as a weapon of control, and his gifts often had a bullying undertone. They were delivered to the recipient with the force of a blunt instrument. On one occasion the king saw a Macedonian soldier who was driving a mule laden with Persian gold. The animal was exhausted and the man took the load onto his own shoulders and tried to carry it. He was obviously in difficulty and Alexander called out to him: “Hold on, keep going, and you can take what you are carrying to your own tent.”
When a Companion asked for help with dowries for his girls, Alexander presented him with the enormous sum of fifty talents. The Companion replied that ten would be more than enough, upon which the king remarked dryly: “Enough for you to accept, but not enough for me to give.”
People close to the king registered their anxiety about what they saw as his excessive liberality. Olympias for one gave him a piece of her mind. She wrote: “I wish you would find other ways of rewarding those you love and respect: as it is, you are making them all the equals of kings and enabling them to make plenty of friends, but leaving yourself without any.”
(Olympias knew nothing of today’s dismal science of economics. If she had, she would also have been able to point out to her son that in time, the release of so much money into the classical marketplace was highly inflationary.)
Alexander himself noticed that some of those around him had developed a taste for vulgar and extravagant lifestyles. Hagnon survived his faux pas of offering the king a beautiful boy and remained an influential courtier; as a mark of conspicuous waste, he wore silver nails in his boots. Leonnatus was one of Alexander’s closest friends from their schooldays and had been with him on the day of Philip’s assassination. He was brave, hardworking, and true, but he was also very fond of Persian luxury. He enjoyed wrestling as a pastime and had special dust sent from Egypt to sprinkle on his body before a bout. His armor was ornately decorated and his horses’ bridles gilded. Senior Macedonians cossetted themselves, hiring masseurs and personal servants.
The king noticed such things, but expressed no more than gentle disapproval. He asked: “How can a man look after his horse, or keep his spear and his helmet clean and bright, if he has lost the habit of using his hands to look after his own adorable body?” Plutarch, ever the moralist, believed that inordinate wealth sapped the fighting spirit of the Macedonians. He claimed that “[the king’s] friends, because of the wealth and pomp with which they were surrounded, wished only to lead a life of luxury and idleness. They found his expeditions and campaigns an intolerable burden, and little by little went so far as to abuse and find fault with the king.”
The evidence points in the opposite direction. Alexander’s long run of victories, forced marches, and exposure to climatic extremes is proof enough that there was nothing degenerate about the Macedonian army. The king did not countenance poor performance when his men were on duty, and self-indulgence was unthinkable. When at leisure, though, they could let their hair down. As we have seen, Philip’s court was notoriously filled with warriors who delighted in bling and excess. Alexander had no quarrel with that. Like father, like son.
* * *
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AT ECBATANA THE MACEDONIAN army came back together again as an integrated whole. Word came that Darius was in full retreat and was heading for the satrapies of Parthia, Hyrcania, and, at the farthest edge of empire, the rich and powerful province of Bactriana. He was believed to be in danger of assassination, but at this point he still seemed to be in full command of his forces. His followers were losing heart, though, and many deserted, traveling back to their home regions. Quite a few voluntarily surrendered to Alexander, who as a result was kept well-informed about Darius’s progress.
He set off in hot pursuit. He took with him only the Companion cavalry; the scouts or light cavalry and the mercenary horse; some of the phalanx; the archers; and the Agrianians—in sum, the fastest troops at his disposal. The rest of the army was to follow at its own pace.
The king set a course for Rhagae, a town with Zoroastrian associations (near today’s Teheran). About 240 miles from Ecbatana, it stood on an ancient highway south of the Caspian Sea and the Elburz mountain range, brown and bone-dry below snowcapped peaks. It was only a day’s march to the Caspian Gates, a mountain pass that opened the way to the eastern parts of the empire. Alexander wanted to get there before Darius.
The Macedonians proceeded at a punishing pace, with men falling behind and horses dying. They arrived at their destination after eleven days of forced marches only to find that Darius had already passed through the Gates. It was clear that he could not be easily overtaken. So Alexander gave his men five days’ rest to recover from their exertions. He took the opportunity to appoint a Persian called Oxydates as satrap of Media; he had been imprisoned by Darius at Susa and condemned to death (for what offense we do not know), which, Arrian writes, “inclined Alexander to trust him.”
The Macedonians resumed their march via the Caspian Gates and into cultivated territory. The next stage of their journey was to be across desert; the king sent Coenus, Parmenion’s reliable son-in-law and one of his most trusted lieutenants, with a small party to forage for supplies. Soon afterward, one of Mazaeus’s sons and a Babylonian nobleman, both escapees from the Great King’s disconsolate army, presented themselves to Alexander and gave him the startling news of Darius’s arrest by Nabarzanes and Bessus.
This galvanized Alexander. He had to reach and rescue the Great King before, as seemed very likely, his captors killed him. That way lay disaster, for some other Achaemenid would surely lay claim to the vacant throne and the struggle would resume. But with a living and breathing Darius in his possession, Alexander would be able to command events and find some way of persuading his prisoner to give up his crown in his own favor.
He pressed on without waiting for Coenus to return, taking with him only the Companions, the light cavalry, and some infantry chosen for their stamina and speed on the march. They had nothing with them apart from their weapons and two days’ worth of food. The rest of the army was told to come after him at their ordinary speed.
The party traveled all through the night and till noon the following day. After a short rest, they resumed their journey and marched through the next night. At first light they arrived at the camp from which the renegade Achaemenid had set out to find Alexander. Darius’s interpreter, ill and unable to keep up with the Persian force, was caught and was debriefed on the latest developments, the most important of which was that the Bactrian cavalry had acclaimed Bessus as supreme commander. He had declared himself Great King, giving himself the regnal name of Artaxerxes V and wearing the upright tiara of office. Artabazus and his troops, together with the Greek mercenaries, were furious. However, there was nothing they could do to reverse the coup, so they left. They turned off the main road and made for the hills. The Persians soon drifted back, for “they had no one else to follow.”
Having heard all this, the king saw there was not a moment to be lost. He had to carry on: men and horses were exhausted, but he insisted. After another night and morning march, the Macedonians arrived at the place where Bessus and Darius had camped the day before. From the locals Alexander learned that the Persians were traveling by night. When he asked whether there was a shortcut to catch up with them, he was told that there was, but it was waterless.
That did not discourage Alexander. He selected five hundred of his toughest infantrymen and mounted them on the best of the surviving horses. He instructed Parmenion’s son Nicanor, commander of the hypaspists, and the Agrianian chief to lead the rest of the attack force along the road taken by Bessus. He himself and his elite troop, assisted by a guide, rode from dusk for forty-five miles through the desert. It was an extraordinary feat. At dawn they came across the Persian rear. The soldiers were straggling and few of them had weapons. They offered no resistance and fled.
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