The plain fact was that Bessus had failed to unite the province he was supposed to govern behind a common plan of defense. He had only managed to recruit seven thousand cavalry and some Sogdian levies, insufficient to meet an army many times the size.
Bactria’s northern frontier was the wide-flowing river Oxus, beyond which lay a land of extremes, alternating between the lush, irrigated green of river valleys and the dry ochre of deserts. This was the satrapy of Sogdiana, inhabited by nomads. Bessus, having lost confidence that he could hold his province, withdrew to Sogdiana. This was a sensible move, but it meant that his Bactrian troops deserted him.
Alexander did not relent in his advance; he soon captured Bactra, the provincial capital, and another town on first assault. Before following his adversary into Sogdiana he passed the administration of Bactria into the safe hands of Artabazus. He was then faced with the task of reaching the Oxus across a waterless desert. He took with him detachments of light troops, leaving the main army behind. It was now June and the heat was so unbearable that his troops were compelled to travel during the only slightly cooler night. The sand itself was scorching. Having just recovered from frostbite, soldiers now faced the prospect of heatstroke. Early one evening, Alexander arrived at the river, but many groups were straggling and fires were lit to guide them to the camp after nightfall. He stood in his armor to welcome them and took no refreshment until the entire column had arrived.
It was at this surprising point that the king demobilized and sent home older Macedonians who were unfit for military duty, as well as Thessalian cavalry volunteers. These men were presumably either sick or mutinous; whichever the correct explanation, they had had enough. It was in Alexander’s interest that they leave in good humor, so he made sure to give them generous bonuses.
The next challenge was the river. It was three quarters of a mile wide and surprisingly deep. Bessus had burned all the riverboats after using them to reach Sogdiana. As previously, the king had the men collect their leather tent covers, stuff them with light rubbish, and sew them up. It took the army five days to cross the river on these improvised rafts.
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SPITAMENES WAS ONE OF Bessus’s leading supporters and a close friend. He was also a patriot who thoroughly disapproved of Alexander, but he and two Sogdian noblemen saw that the cause of Artaxerxes V was hopeless. They decided to surrender him to the enemy. That would both remove an incompetent leader and mollify the Macedonian king.
The conspirators tricked Bessus into granting them a private audience. Once they had him on his own, they overpowered him. They tied him up, took the diadem off his head, and removed his royal robes. Spitamenes informed Alexander that they would hand over Bessus if he sent a small contingent of troops to pick him up.
The king immediately dispatched Ptolemy, a Macedonian friend from his teens, with sixteen hundred cavalry and four thousand infantry (no small contingent, for he suspected a trap). The conspirators had second thoughts and were reluctant to play a direct part in the surrender. So they left Bessus on his own in a small village. The inhabitants, probably greatly relieved, handed over their involuntary captive and the royal insignia to Ptolemy at the first opportunity.
Ptolemy sent a messenger ahead to ask the king how Bessus should be brought into his presence. In his new role as avenger of Darius, Alexander ordered him to be placed on a roadside, which he and his army would be marching past. Bessus should be entirely stripped of his clothes, fettered, and tied to a post with a slave’s wooden collar around his neck.
These instructions were followed to the letter. Alexander rode up in a chariot—an unusual vehicle for him, which he chose because it symbolized his role as Great King. He halted beside Bessus and asked him to justify Darius’s murder. Bessus replied, lamely, that he had only claimed the crown to give it to Alexander. Under the supervision of Darius’s brother, Oxyathres, now a Companion, the regicide was flogged. He was then taken to Bactra, where some months later Alexander put him on trial and charged him with treason against Darius. The city’s population was invited to attend, not as jurors but as witnesses. The king was the sole judge. Bessus’s nose and ears were sliced off, the terrible Persian penalty for traitors. He was then put to death in public. He may have had to endure the culminating cruelty of impalement up the anus.
Mutilation shocked Greeks and Macedonians. Arrian observed: “For my part, I cannot approve of this excessively severe punishment of Bessus, but regard the mutilation of extremities as a barbaric practice.” If this criticism had been put to Alexander, he would have replied that he had no choice. Whatever his personal feelings, he was ruler of the Persian empire and felt obliged to follow traditional practice.
The ancient authors had little time for Bessus, and indeed he was neither effective nor lucky. He failed to take Alexander’s measure. But for a Persian patriot, he may have acted less from personal ambition than in the national interest, as he saw it. He deposed and assassinated Darius in the hope that under his leadership the fortunes of war would turn in the Achaemenids’ favor. The Bactrians took a more realistic view of their chances against the Macedonian conqueror and declined to enroll under his standard.
Bessus’s moment came too late, for the Fates had already cut the empire’s thread with their shears.
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THE KING BELIEVED THAT only firm measures would pacify the eastern end of the empire. The cruel handling of Bessus was meant to set an example that would daunt anyone else who was planning an insurgency.
There were other demonstrations of Macedonian brutality at this time, of which the most extraordinary concerned a small town in Sogdiana. Its inhabitants were bilingual and turned out to be the descendants of the Branchidae, a noble clan members of which used to administer the oracle, sacred spring, and temple of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus. During the Persian invasions of Greece in the fifth century B.C., they were said to have sided with the Great King (either Darius I or Xerxes) when he destroyed the temple and made off with its contents, among them a cult statue of the god. The spring dried up and the oracle fell silent.
The Branchidae feared the wrath of their fellow citizens and persuaded the Persians to resettle them in some remote corner of the empire, where they hoped to live quietly and undetected.
After Alexander’s arrival at the siege of Miletus, the water flowed again. Later the cult statue was recovered at Ecbatana and sent back to Didyma. The oracle was back in business. Now that the Branchidae had been found, what should be done with them? Alexander consulted Milesians in the army. They did not give a clear answer, so the king said he would decide the matter.
It is uncertain whether the allegations against the Branchidae were true or false, but it was possible that with the reopening of the oracle they might put in a claim to resume control. That may have been a factor in the king’s mind: the ruling democracy would not stand for a return of the Branchidae. In any event, the Macedonian phalanx was ordered to surround the town, and at a given signal the city was sacked and every male inhabitant was killed. Curtius writes:
Neither community of language nor the olive-branches and entreaties of the suppliants could curb the savagery. Finally the Macedonians dug down to the foundations of the walls in order to demolish them and leave not a single trace of the city.
If ever there was a case of visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation, this was it. Public opinion was shocked. Here was one more piece of evidence that Alexander had rejected reconciliation and was acquiring a reputation as a despot.
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AFTER THE ARREST OF Bessus in the late summer of 329, Alexander set off across Sogdiana to the river Jaxartes (now the Syr Darya), the satrapy’s northwestern boundary. On his way he visited the capital, Maracanda (today’s Samarkand). His intention was to calm the people’s angry mood and impo
se his control over the entire province. He brought his cavalry back to strength with local horses, having lost a good number during the crossing of the Hindu Kush and the comings and goings to and from the Oxus.
On the way, a party of Macedonians went on a foraging expedition and was set upon by a horde of Sogdians (perhaps as many as twenty thousand or thirty thousand, we are told). Many Macedonians were killed or taken prisoner, after which the attackers withdrew to a rocky crag. The king led several assaults, but was driven back by showers of arrows. He himself took an arrow through his leg which broke part of his fibula and was hard to dislodge. We hear nothing more of this wound, so presumably it healed quickly. Eventually the Macedonians captured the position, cutting down some of the enemy while others threw themselves off cliffs to their death.
Alexander was a fast learner and had mastered the principles of military action against irregular forces. He established a series of seven strongpoints to maintain his control of territory gained and prevent armed groups from moving about wherever and whenever they wished. These included existing townships, such as Cyropolis, founded by Cyrus the Great in 544 B.C., and completely new settlements, among which was Alexandria Eschate, or Furthermost, on the southern bank of the Jaxartes. With a circumference of five and a half miles, it was a substantial settlement. Its walls were built in three weeks. Once the work was complete the king made his usual sacrifices to the gods and staged athletic and equestrian competitions. This new Alexandria was to guard against incursions by nomads from beyond the Jaxartes; it was peopled with Greek mercenaries, some local inhabitants for cheap labor in the fields, and Macedonians who were no longer fit for service.
The king sought the help of Bessus’s onetime supporter Spitamenes and his friends. He invited them to a conference at Bactra but, alarmed by his severity, they stayed away. Then, to his astonishment, they launched an insurrection across Sogdiana and Bactria. Hostile tribes overwhelmed the recently established strongpoints, and Spitamenes placed Maracanda’s citadel and its Macedonian garrison under siege.
At first sight, this development fell from a blue sky. Up until then the Sogdians and Bactrians had been quiet. They had no particular objection to Alexander’s replacement of Darius, nor had they supported Bessus; as for the Macedonian army, it was a temporary inconvenience and they believed it would soon go away. They did not feel threatened for themselves and their way of life. However, the establishment of Alexandria Eschate was a serious inroad into local liberty, signaling Alexander’s intention to remain as a permanent presence. That could not be allowed, and so the provinces rose up in arms.
Alexander sent a modest relief force of sixty Companion cavalry, eight hundred mercenary cavalry, and fifteen hundred mercenary infantry to raise the siege of Maracanda. Then he divided his army in two groups. Craterus, who was filling the space left by Parmenion, laid siege to Cyropolis, while the king reduced the other forts at a rapidfire pace in two days. Their mud-brick walls were easy prey for his artillery. Alexander then rejoined Craterus and brought up siege engines to demolish the city wall. He noticed a dried riverbed beneath the wall. It left just enough room for men to crawl inside.
This was an opportunity too good to miss. An elite assault team was assembled, led (of course) by Alexander, who was not going to leave the thrill and the glory of an adventure to somebody else. The team squeezed into Cyropolis without difficulty. The defenders realized that all was lost, but some of them counterattacked the Macedonians.
Craterus was hit by an arrow and Alexander suffered a heavy blow to the head and neck. Everything went dark and he collapsed. As he lay senseless, the army thought he was dead and men wept openly for him. He regained consciousness, concussed, and with his voice almost inaudible. Typically, he insisted on returning to duty before his wound was healed. The city fell. Approximately eight thousand tribesmen lost their lives.
No wonder that the king was in an unforgiving mood. He put to death all adult males and sold into slavery the women and children of Cyropolis and the other garrison towns that had been recaptured. The conventions of war permitted besiegers who encountered resistance to act in this way, but this did not reduce the rising unpopularity of the Macedonians in Sogdiana.
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ALEXANDER LIKED TO TAKE things in their proper order. Alexandria Eschate was attracting hostile attention from Scythian nomads who lived in the grassy steppes north of the Jaxartes. They were formidable horsemen and archers, whose technique was to gallop up to the enemy at speed, let loose a shower of arrows, and then turn tail. A large number had gathered and shouted insults over the water. The threat they posed needed to be dealt with before Alexander went to help dowse the flames in the south.
Somehow Alexander had to transport his army safely across the Jaxartes. The river was narrow near Alexandria Eschate, and the Macedonians would be vulnerable to the worst that archery could do while they crossed to the Scythian bank. Once they had reached it, they would have to face the mounted archers, who would surround them like a swarm of hornets.
The king was not deterred. Using the same method as at the Oxus, the Macedonians took only three days to prepare twelve thousand leather floats and rafts capable of carrying horses and catapults. The operation promised to be a risky one; when the king sacrificed for a successful crossing, his resident seer, Aristander, reported that the omens were unfavorable and prophesied danger to his own person.
Setting aside his piety for once, Alexander declined to cancel the attack. He said: “I would rather face the greatest possible peril than, as conqueror of virtually the whole of Asia, have the Scythians make a laughingstock of me.”
An artillery barrage opened the action. The Scythians were amazed at the distance covered by the salvos and withdrew from range. This gave the Macedonians the opportunity they needed to negotiate the river, with the king out in front. The archers and slingers formed the first wave and joined the catapults to keep the enemy at bay.
Once the army had made it safely to the far bank, the Macedonians had to find a way of bringing the ever circling enemy horsemen to battle. The king had a plan. He ordered forward a weak cavalry contingent. The enemy horse took the bait and started riding around the Macedonian horsemen in their usual way. Not far behind, a screen of lightly armed foot soldiers, archers, and Agrianians advanced in a crescent formation. The Scythians went on galloping through the space between cavalry and infantry.
Then, in a surprise move, three regiments of Companion cavalry and mounted javelin men charged through the infantry screen and attacked the enemy horse from the wings. Many of the Scythians now found themselves surrounded on all sides and broke down into a disorderly, jostling crowd. About a thousand were killed. Although the Scythian army as a whole had not been defeated, it withdrew from the field, mightily impressed by this display of Macedonian power.
Alexander had hoped to lead a pursuit, but soon called it off. He had drunk some foul water and was incapacitated by a violent attack of diarrhea. Also his recent wound was still unhealed and painful. He was carried back to the camp in a critical state. Aristander notched up another accurate prediction.
The king’s intention was never to annex the territory of the Scythian nomads. He simply wanted to demonstrate that it was unwise to provoke the Macedonians, who knew how to foil the nomads’ hit-and-run tactics. His point was quickly taken, for Scythian envoys soon arrived, full of apologies. The recent incident had not been officially approved, they claimed, and the mistake would not be repeated. Alexander saw no advantage in rejecting this explanation and both sides agreed to forget a regrettable misunderstanding.
The campaign confirmed that, for all his other difficulties, the king was still at the top of his game. As before he had inspected the enemy with an open, inquisitive eye and confronted a novel problem with a novel solution. The military historian J.F.C. Fuller writes astutely that Alexander
grasped the condition
s which had hitherto rendered the Scythians invincible, and because he so shrewdly penetrated them, he compelled them to do the very thing they did not want to do—enter a circle of trained, disciplined, and better-armed soldiers. They set out to circle round the Macedonians, then suddenly their imagined circumference became the center of a hostile ring.
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TERRIBLE DISPATCHES ARRIVED FROM Maracanda. The Macedonian relief force had been wiped out, almost to a man. It had been very poorly led by Pharnuches, a Lycian interpreter who was probably the father of the king’s lovely Bagoas. Pharnuches had little experience of military command, but was expert in the languages of Bactria and Sogdiana. It would appear that the king appointed him anticipating negotiation with Spitamenes rather than fighting. Pharnuches knew he was out of his depth and tried to resign, but his subordinate officers, fearful of going against the king’s wishes, all refused the command.
As the Macedonians approached the city, Spitamenes immediately abandoned his siege of the citadel and fled into the desert. The Macedonians wanted to expel the nomads permanently from the region and chased after them. Spitamenes added some six hundred Scythian cavalry to his force and halted on level ground, where he awaited his pursuers. He kept his horsemen circling in and out, firing their arrows into the infantry column. The Macedonian horse attempted countercharges, but the mounts were weakened from too much travel and too little fodder. The enemy was able to keep clear of them and came back hard when the Macedonians stood their ground or retreated.
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