Alexander the Great

by Anthony Everitt

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  MOST ANCIENT HISTORIANS CLAIM that from around this time Alexander began to drink more heavily than in the past. Had he practiced moderation, he would have “stopped short of killing his friends at dinner.” So opines Curtius, a strict moralist, who asserts that the king’s fine qualities were ruined by alcohol.

  Alexander had some great natural gifts: a noble disposition…; resolution in the face of danger; speed in undertaking and completing projects; integrity in dealing with those who surrendered and mercy toward prisoners; restraint even in those pleasures which are generally acceptable and widely indulged. But all these were marred by his inexcusable fondness for drink.

  Plutarch takes a different view. He acknowledges that the king could sometimes behave like an offensive and arrogant drunk, but claims that as a rule he was a moderate drinker.

  The impression that he was a heavy drinker arose because when he had nothing else to do, he liked to linger over each cup, but in fact he was usually talking rather than drinking: he enjoyed holding long conversations, but only when he had plenty of leisure. Whenever there was urgent business to attend to, neither wine, nor sleep, nor sport, nor sex, nor spectacle could ever distract his attention.

  It is impossible to come to a firm judgment on so personal a matter as Alexander’s alcohol consumption and the pressures or stresses that may or may not underpinned it. Even at the time observers had different views on the subject, but we can be sure that Alexander was not an alcoholic. For most of the time he was too busy and faced too many demands to sit around quaffing unmixed wine (a Macedonian custom in an age when wine was weakened with water). Mostly he was on campaign and needed, often round the clock, all the physical energy and mental acuity he could summon.

  During intervals of rest and relaxation, Alexander may very well have often drunk in moderation as Plutarch says. However, evidence such as the Cleitus affair shows that on vacation he could be a binge-drinker. He was still in his twenties and, like many young adults throughout the ages, on a day off he liked to drink to get drunk.

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  AFTER TWO FRUSTRATING YEARS of hard fighting in cruel terrain, it was time to put an end to Spitamenes. The irrepressible rebel, with the assistance of the Massagetae, a Scythian nomadic tribe, overran a Bactrian outpost, killed its defenders, and moved on Bactra. The tiny garrison bravely counterattacked, with some success. However, it was caught in an ambush on the way home and suffered very heavy casualties. Craterus and his contingent were nearby; they arrived quickly on the scene and drove off the enemy. The network of fortresses was proving its worth.

  The five sections of the army made a planned rendezvous at Maracanda. Alexander took over Cleitus’s command of the Companion cavalry, and most of the army moved into winter quarters at the Sogdian settlement of Nautaca. Coenus was left in command of a substantial force at Maracanda with instructions to keep watch over the region and do his best to destroy the insurgents.

  With his freedom of maneuver almost completely restricted, Spitamenes, who had recruited a large troop of Scythian horse, decided to launch an attack on Coenus. A fierce battle ensued, resulting in a decisive Macedonian victory. Spitamenes was deserted by most of his nomadic allies. Some Bactrians and Sogdians stayed with him, but lost heart when they heard that Alexander was on the move in their direction. So they beheaded Spitamenes.

  According to Curtius, the story had a domestic twist. It was Spitamenes’ wife who did the deed while he was in a deep sleep. Still wearing blood-drenched clothes, the widow brought the head to the Macedonian camp. So ended the most formidable and determined of all Alexander’s opponents.

  The insurgency was drawing to its close. With the arrival of spring 327, the king set off to mop up continuing resistance in the mountains. After surviving a fearful electrical storm, he came across the enemy in jaunty occupation of a natural fortress.

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  “YOU’LL NEED SOLDIERS WITH WINGS if you want to take this place!” shouted the defender peering down at the Macedonians from the lofty outcrop.

  Alexander was inclined to agree. He had carefully scrutinized the Sogdian Rock, as it was called, and it seemed impregnable. The cliffs on every side were sheer, and a solitary path led up to the top. The Rock was a refuge for a large number of rebellious Sogdians who wanted to keep out of Alexander’s way. Although winter was over, a heavy fall of snow impeded the approaches. The Sogdians had laid in copious provisions. They could melt the snow if water ran out.

  However, the sneering response to his request for a parley irritated the king. He changed his mind. He would find a way. He announced a prize of twelve talents for the first man to scale the Sogdian Rock, an almost incredible sum for a private soldier, with lesser but still generous prizes for runners-up. Three hundred volunteers were recruited, all of them men who had experience of rock climbing. They gathered a supply of small metal tent pegs to serve as pitons, and stout linen ropes so that they could fasten themselves together. To avoid discovery, the ascent took place at night. It was an almost suicidal mission and was the only special operation during Alexander’s career which he did not lead in person. Arrian picks up the story:

  Fixing their pegs where they could, sometimes into solid ground wherever it showed through, sometimes into the snow where it seemed least likely to crumble, they hauled themselves up the rock by various routes. About thirty of them fell to their death in the climb, and their bodies, lost in the snow where they happened to fall, could not be found for burial. The rest completed the ascent toward dawn [and] established possession of the summit of the Rock.

  The ascent was a remarkable achievement. It is interesting to observe that climbing techniques and equipment have not changed in their essentials over the centuries.

  A peak loomed above a large cave where the Sogdians had their headquarters. Once on the summit, the climbers waved pieces of white cloth to alert the king to their presence. He had a herald shout to the Sogdians that they should surrender without further ado, for Alexander had found the men with wings.

  The defenders turned round and looked up. They saw with amazement the young men on the crag above. A trumpet sounded in the Macedonian camp, loud shouting was heard, and an assault seemed imminent. The Sogdians panicked and surrendered on condition that their lives be spared. In fact, their situation was not hopeless at all; the mountaineers were heavily outnumbered and Alexander had found no way up the Rock for his army.

  The operation displayed to advantage one of the king’s special qualities as a military commander: he understood that psychological insight into the mind of the enemy could be as important to victory as conventional military strength.

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  AS THE FIGHTING IN Sogdia and Bactria drew to a close, Alexander could announce a victory, but it contained the seeds of defeat. He had come to see that his angry hard-line policy of pacification by force had failed. At the first opportunity the nomadic tribes would rise again. Before leaving the region for India, he gave Amyntas, its new satrap (after Artabazus), a substantial garrison force of ten thousand infantry and thirty-five hundred cavalry. That was necessary but not sufficient. Macedonian rule would never be accepted unless brutality was replaced with the respect and reconciliation that he had successfully applied to his new Persian subjects.

  The wife and daughters of a local baron called Oxyartes were among the refugees on the Sogdian Rock. One of his daughters was an attractive sixteen-year-old—of marriageable age by contemporary standards—called Rhoxane. She caught Alexander’s eye and, although Arrian insists that he did not tamper with her, it is telling that the king compared the two of them to Achilles and Briseis in the Iliad. Briseis was a beautiful captive who was given to the warrior as a slave for his sexual use.

  Oxyartes was alarmed to learn that members of his family were in Macedonian han
ds, but once he heard of the king’s interest in Rhoxane he arranged to meet him and was well received. To further the affair, he staged, writes Curtius primly, “a banquet of typically barbaric extravagance” at which his daughter made a starring appearance. Alexander told Rhoxane’s father that he was willing to formalize their relationship. He ordered a loaf of bread to be served, in accordance with Macedonian tradition, which he cut in two with a sword for himself and Oxyartes to taste. The marriage agreement was a decision taken by men; Rhoxane had nothing to do with it.

  The army was displeased. Why did the king not take a Macedonian wife, as his predecessors had done? soldiers asked. This was an unfair question—Olympias, after all, was a foreigner, from Epirus. What the complainants really disliked was a barbarian wife from a conquered people. Probably in an attempt to calm these racist objections, the king insisted that this was a love match.

  It was, of course, a political union. The eastern end of the Persian empire had long been quasi-autonomous, only half tamed. Painful experience over the last couple of years had taught Alexander that he could not alter this state of affairs, at least in the short run. His choice of Rhoxane was an implicit apology: it was a signal that he would no longer be a destructive foreign devil, but a respectful monarch who would leave the ruling elites in place and not interfere in the details of daily life.

  Oxyartes helped the king deal with another, even larger mountain fortress. This was the Rock of Chorienes, some four thousand feet high and about seven miles in circumference. The Macedonians built a wooden bridge across a deep ravine on top of which an earth ramp was laid, thus enabling an assault on the stronghold. This risky plan was not put to the final test, for Oxyartes, now a traveling companion of the king, persuaded the Rock’s commander to surrender on honorable terms.

  He did more than surrender. The Macedonians were in a poor way. During the siege they suffered badly from a heavy snowfall, and there had been a shortage of food (one of the few occasions when Alexander’s usually efficient logistics faltered). The commander offered to provision the army for two months and made an immediate distribution to each mess of grain, wine, and salted meat from his supplies on the Rock.

  Craterus was sent to mop up two remaining rebel leaders and at last the great rebellion was over.

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  NOW, FINALLY, ALEXANDER COULD shake the dust of Bactria and Sogdiana from his feet. He readied himself for the expedition to India he had long dreamed of. The army he led would be very different from the expeditionary force of Macedonians and Greeks that had crossed the Hellespont a little more than five years previously. Now growing numbers of Asians were being recruited—among them, Lycians and Syrians and recently recruited cavalry from Bactria and Sogdiana.

  He was still short of men. The pool of human capital in Macedonia was now more or less dry. As Alexander conquered wider and wider swaths of territory, the empire had to be guarded. Troops, often Greek mercenaries, were made over to satrapal armies and garrisons. Then there was “natural wastage”: men grew old and retired, were killed in battle, or suffered disabling wounds.

  Sometime in 327, satraps from the recently conquered territories and the numerous garrison towns brought thirty thousand local boys to Alexander. They were all about the same age and on the verge of puberty. They were to be taught Greek writing and the use of Macedonian weapons and tactics. A large number of instructors were employed for the purpose. After three years, the students would be conscripted as full-time soldiers.

  They were called the Epigoni: the Successors. They were to be personally loyal to Alexander. The direct link to Macedonia would be broken. Their title was a clear hint that the king intended to create a brand-new army, designed no longer to conquer but to protect the empire.

  CHAPTER 13

  A PASSAGE TO INDIA

  It was all a great misunderstanding, the quarrel about proskynesis.

  The word literally means “kissing toward” and designates an act of homage from a social inferior to his superior. However, there were two different ways in which the term could be applied—the Persian and the Greek. According to Herodotus,

  When the Persians meet one another in the street, you can see whether those who meet are of equal status. For instead of a verbal greeting, they kiss each other on the mouth; but if one of them is inferior to the other, they kiss one another on the cheeks, and if one is of much less noble rank than the other, he falls down before him in profound reverence.

  The Great King expected full prostration from his subjects unless they were relatives or close friends, in which case a slight bow and the blowing of a kiss would suffice. The point of the ritual was secular, not religious. There was no question of the monarch being regarded as divine.

  For Greeks, though, proskynesis was far more than an elaborate method of asserting class distinction. It was an act of worship that was due to the gods alone. It was generally performed standing up with hands raised to the sky, more rarely kneeling on the ground. For a free human being to prostrate himself to another was a humiliation. For a mortal to accept proskynesis was hubris.

  As matters stood Persians regularly did obeisance and Macedonians regularly laughed when they saw it. Alexander wanted to unify court practices and so ensure that Macedonians and Persians felt that they were on equal terms in his presence. He persuaded his inner circle to accept proskynesis as a universally applied greeting, for Macedonians and Persians alike, when meeting the king.

  An experiment was arranged. At a banquet proskynesis would be introduced without fuss or announcement, after which it would become a routine part of court etiquette. Presumably this was not to be the full prostration, but a bow. Or so it was hoped. Alexander drank from a gold loving cup and passed it to one of his friends, who stood up to face the household shrine, did obeisance to the king, received a kiss, and resumed his place on his dining couch.

  The Greek court philosopher and historian Callisthenes deeply disapproved not only of the practice but of the entire Persianizing policy. Like his mentor, Aristotle, he believed that the Great King’s subjects were in effect slaves whereas Hellenes, including Macedonians, were free men. When the cup came round, he drank from it, but, without doing obeisance, stepped up for a kiss. Alexander happened to be chatting with Hephaestion at the time and did not notice that the proskynesis had not been performed. However, one of the Companions told the king, who then refused to kiss him. Callisthenes replied: “Very well, I shall go back, the poorer by one kiss.”

  The incident attracted attention. The philosopher was well liked by the younger soldiers and the king decided, much to his annoyance, that he would have to let the matter drop.

  The objection to obeisance was in part based on a fundamental error. The Great King did not see himself as a god and prostration before him was politeness rather than adoration. The Greeks wrongly applied their cult definition of the term to the Persian social context.

  However, in another sense they may have had a point. In the background of the debate lay a growing suspicion that Alexander was beginning to think he was a god. The experience at Siwah had had a profound effect on him. Perhaps he was literally, not just symbolically, the son of Zeus, although this would not remove his mortality. Alexander’s relationship to the god was why he was distancing himself from Philip.

  The Greeks did not draw a line between the human and the divine. Great men were able to cross it and become isotheoi, equals of the gods or demigods. Heracles, whom Alexander was proud to count among his ancestors, became a demigod and was given the very rare accolade of immortality. The great Theban poet Pindar sets out the relation between the human and the divine in an ode celebrating the winner of the boys’ wrestling at the Nemean Games:

  Single is the race, single

  of men and gods;

  from a single mother we both draw breath.

  But a difference of pow
er in everything

  keeps us apart;

  for the one is as Nothing, but the brazen sky

  stays a fixed habitation forever.

  Yet we can in greatness of mind

  or of body be like the Immortals.

  Alexander’s achievements were colossal in the eyes of his contemporaries and it would not be unreasonable for him to claim that they were at least the equals of Heracles’ labors. There were historical precedents for the establishment of cults of godlike human beings. The famous Spartan commander Lysander, who won the decisive sea battle at Aegospotami in the long war between Sparta and Athens, was awarded cult honors by Hellenic cities. He was probably the first living Greek to have altars erected in his name and sacrifices offered to him; the island of Samos changed the name of its national festival, which became the Lysandreia. Alexander’s father Philip seems also to have received honors bordering on those accorded to the divine.

  Ancient authors suggest that Alexander came to believe himself to be a god like Dionysus or Apollo. It is more likely, though, that he had no personal belief in his divinity, but saw political advantage in the establishment of a ruler cult devoted to him. Curtius has him say in a speech that the father of the gods

  held out to me the title of son; accepting it has not been disadvantageous to the operations in which we are engaged. I only wish the Indians would also believe me a god! For reputation determines military success, and often even a false belief has accomplished as much as the truth.