Alexander the Great

by Anthony Everitt

  The words may be fictional, but the cynicism is supported by a recorded remark quoting the Iliad, which the king made when wounded by an arrow and in great pain: “What you see flowing, my friends, is blood, not ‘ichor, which flows in the veins of the holy gods.’ ” He hardly ever mentioned his godhead when in Greek or Macedonian company, but used it regularly to impress “barbarians.”

  Plutarch sourly commented that it was clear that the king was “not at all vain or deluded, but rather used belief in his divinity to enslave others.”

  In sum, Alexander may well have regarded himself as special, isotheos, and as having gods among his ancestors. His aching scars, however, reminded him that he was mortal.

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  THE ROYAL PAGES LIVED busy lives. They were the sons of Macedonian aristocrats and their presence at court was in part a guarantee of their fathers’ good behavior, but they also played an essential role in the general administration of Alexander’s daily routine.

  Their duties were menial. They spent the night on watch outside the door of the royal bedchamber. They escorted in sexual partners by a private entrance out of sight of the official armed bodyguards. In the daytime they brought the king’s horses to him and helped him mount one of them. It was widely seen as a special honor that they were allowed to sit and eat with Alexander. They accompanied him in battle and at the hunt. They were also expected to show an interest in cultural matters.

  Access to the king was strictly controlled and the pages had a front-row view of everything that went on. In effect, they were apprentices in government, in the arts of war and peace, and could expect promotion in due course to important jobs in the regular army.

  One day in 327 an incident took place when the pages were out hunting with Alexander that set off a tragic chain of events. One of their number was Hermolaus, a student of philosophy and an admirer of Callisthenes. He foolishly speared a boar that the king had marked down for himself. This act of lèse-majesté received condign punishment: the boy was flogged in front of his fellows.

  Smarting from the humiliation, Hermolaus complained to another page called Sostratus, who was passionately in love with him. After they had exchanged oaths of loyalty, Sostratus persuaded Hermolaus to join him in a plot to assassinate the king at night in his bed. They enlisted seven other pages to join them.

  It was a feasible scheme, but there were obstacles. The conspirators were on duty on different nights. The plan was to alter the work rota so that on a given night they would all be on duty together and able to murder the king without opposition. However, two official bodyguards also slept in the room and would have to be killed too. It took a month before the rota could be fixed. That left plenty of time for a security leak.

  The conspirators were in luck, for none of them wavered and morale was high. On the evening when the assassination was to be carried out, the king was holding a dinner party and the pages stood outside the door into the dining room, intending to lead him to bed when the meal was over. But the company drank more deeply than usual and played party games. Time ran on; the pages feared that Alexander and his guests would continue drinking until morning, when they were due to hand over to a new shift.

  In fact, the party broke up shortly before dawn and it looked as if there would be just enough time for the attempt. At this moment a mentally deranged woman appeared on the scene. She was a regular visitant and seemed to have been religiously inspired. She claimed to foretell the future and the king, impressed by some of her predictions, allowed her to wander about at will.

  She was unusually agitated and as the king took his leave she threw herself in his way, telling him to return to the party. “The gods always give good advice,” he remarked laughingly, and obeyed.

  Alexander did not make up his mind to go to bed until about seven or eight in the morning. By then the hapless conspirators had lost their chance, but could not bring themselves to go away after being relieved. When the king finally emerged from the dining room they were still hanging around. He told them to go and rest since they had been on their feet all night. Ironically, he praised them for their commitment and arranged for them to receive a gratuity.

  The assassination was rescheduled. While the boys waited for the next opportunity, one of them, a certain Epimenes, had a change of heart. Perhaps he was touched by the king’s kindness or, more probably, the events of the night persuaded him that the gods opposed the plot. Whatever the motive, he confided in his brother Eurylochus.

  The specter of Philotas’s fate was still hanging before everyone’s eyes; Eurylochus knew better than to delay. He grabbed his brother and brought him at once to the royal quarters. There he found two Companions, Ptolemy and Leonnatus, who immediately opened the bedroom door, took in a lamp, and with some difficulty woke the king from a deep drunken sleep.

  Once Alexander had regained consciousness, the two brothers gave a full account of the conspiracy. Alexander lost no time in pardoning Eurylochus and giving him fifty talents and the estate of a prominent Persian who had fallen from favor. The generosity of this reward seems excessive. It must be a measure of the king’s shock to discover that those who spent most of their time in his company wanted him dead.

  The guilty pages were quickly rounded up. The king asked what he had done to merit this treatment. Hermolaus was unabashed. “You ask as if you didn’t know,” he answered. “We plotted to kill you because you have started to behave not as a king with his free-born subjects, but as a slave owner.”

  Hermolaus was repudiated by his father. He and the other boys were tortured by their fellows and stoned to death, according to Macedonian practice.

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  THERE ARE NO DOUBTS about the Royal Pages affair. It was a serious plot and came within an inch of success. What is less than certain, though, is the motive that powered it. It confirmed the old adage that no man is a hero to his valet, but even if Alexander was a difficult employer there was more to the business than domestic backbiting: there was also a political dimension. The pages agreed with the king’s Macedonian critics. As ever, the trouble lay with the king’s policy of reconciliation with the enemy. Curtius has Alexander speak against Hermolaus, who claims that

  I am foisting Persian habits on the Macedonians. That is true, for I see in many races things we should not be ashamed of copying. The only way this great empire can be satisfactorily governed is by our transmitting some things to the natives and learning others from them ourselves.

  The king detected a figure standing in the shadows—namely Callisthenes, now fallen from grace. Unfortunately, it was difficult to link him directly to the plot. It seems clear that the boys did not implicate him in their confession. This is confirmed by Plutarch, who writes that

  not one of Hermolaus’ accomplices, even in extremis, denounced Callisthenes. Indeed, Alexander himself, in the letters which he wrote at once to Craterus, Attalus and Alcetas, says that the youths had confessed under torture that the conspiracy was entirely their own idea and that nobody else knew about it.

  However, it appears that Callisthenes cultivated young upper-class soldiers and shared with them his criticisms of the regime. He and Hermolaus were on friendly terms.

  Callisthenes was his own worst enemy. He was tactless and saw no danger in antagonizing Alexander. Once he was invited to deliver a speech in which he eulogized the Macedonians. This he did to great applause, upon which the king said: “Show us the power of your eloquence by criticizing the Macedonians.” His vanity flattered, Callisthenes accepted the challenge. He did this so well that he infuriated all his Macedonian listeners, Alexander included. Aristotle, who was his uncle and had been his teacher, said that he possessed great eloquence, but lacked common sense.

  Rumors and accusations about Callisthenes were rife. Like Socrates, he was believed to be a corrupter of the young. Although there was no conclusiv
e evidence of his disloyalty to Alexander, there was enough to persuade the king. Furthermore, he suspected a Greek connection; sophisticated opinion among city-states such as Athens laughed at Alexander’s alleged aspirations to divinity and opposed his policy of reconciliation with barbarians.

  Alexander was sure that Aristotle was behind much of this talk and was pouring poison into his nephew’s ears. In a letter to Antipater at Pella, he reported:

  The youths were stoned to death by the Macedonians, but as for the sophist [i.e. Callisthenes], I shall punish him myself, and I shall not forget those who sent him to me, or the others who give shelter in their cities to those who plot against my life.

  This sounds as if the philosopher, being Greek, was not brought before the Macedonian assembly, but was dealt with on the king’s authority. Various versions of his fate have survived. He was tortured, he was crucified, he died of obesity or of an infestation of lice. The likeliest explanation is that he was arrested and died some time later in captivity.

  We cannot easily tell how widespread was the discontent that the affair of the Royal Pages exposed, but it was probably limited to Macedonian noblemen, amplified and distorted by their teenaged offspring. That said, it does not appear to have weakened their resolve in battle or in using their initiative when operating independently from the main army. Alexander was extremely popular with the Macedonian rank and file and, so far as we can see, with private soldiers of whatever ethnic origin. His attention to their working conditions, avoidance of casualties, and insistence on leading from the front, whatever the danger, bound them to him. The new “barbarian” troops were presumably unaffected by what one might call the Macedonian infection, as were the Greek mercenaries.

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  INDIA WAS A SMALL triangular peninsula with high mountains to the north. It was longer than its width and a suite of great rivers, including the Indus, ran south through it. Not far beyond was the end of land, the farthest reach of the world. Here flowed the vast waters of the river Ocean, which surrounded the island of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

  This was what Alexander and his contemporaries believed. They knew very little of the subcontinent and the void was filled in with fantasy. Giant ants dug in the desert sands for gold. Indians copulated in the open, like cattle, and their semen was black. Cannibals killed their old people before they fell ill and began wasting away, so that their meat was not spoiled.

  After arriving in India, Alexander drafted a proud letter to his mother in which he boasted that he had discovered the source of the Nile. He supposed that the Indus was a higher reach of the Nile, which ran through a long desert before reaching Egypt. As evidence, he mentioned that he had seen some crocodiles in the Indus. He was soon reliably informed that the Indus was a river in its own right, which flowed into the Ocean rather than the Mediterranean. By good luck he had not yet sent off his letter; he silently removed the passage about the Nile.

  Clearing up the geography of India was one of the tasks that the king hoped the experts he had brought along with him to Asia would undertake. He wanted to know where everything was and how long it would take to get there.

  Gods visited India. During his visit the semi-divine Heracles spent much of his time impregnating local women. Only one of his offspring was a daughter, born late in his life. Unable to find a suitable husband for her, he had sex with the girl himself when she was only seven, so that his line would continue. Some said that Dionysus spent his childhood in the Punjab. He conquered India, founded cities, and taught the inhabitants the art of farming—and also of perfumery. It was from here that he started his celebrated procession through Asia to Greece where he introduced his worship and the blessings of viticulture.

  According to Herodotus, India was the most populous nation in the known world and was reputed to be rich in gold, often sieved from the rivers. It paid in annual tribute to the Great King 360 talents in gold dust. Curtius notes that

  the extravagance of [the Indians’] royalty…transcends the vices of all other peoples. When the king deigns to be seen in public, his servants carry silver censers along and fill with incense the entire route along which he has decided to be carried. He lounges in a golden litter fringed with pearls, and he is dressed in linen clothes embroidered with gold and purple. The litter is attended by men-at-arms and by his bodyguard among whom, perched on branches, are birds which have been trained to sing in order to divert the king’s thoughts from serious matters. The palace has gilded pillars with a vine in gold relief running the whole length of each of them and silver representations of birds (the sight of which affords them greatest pleasure) at various points.

  Darius I had taken the boundary of his empire to be the Indus, but it is unclear how far his writ ran in practice. The Great King sent a maritime expedition down the river, which made its way as far as the Red Sea. By Alexander’s day imperial control cannot have extended much farther than the Kabul Valley.

  Although he seems not to have spelled out his thinking, the invasion of India was intended to achieve two objectives—one sentimental and the other practical. He had an overpowering desire, a pothos, to reach the river Ocean. With that achievement he would surpass Heracles and Dionysus. More basically, he longed to see the world’s edge because it was there.

  A more immediately pressing task was to restore the empire’s authority in these remote marches. It is clear from the king’s actions that he intended the Indus to be its permanent frontier. Defending it would not be a problem in the south, for it ran alongside the great Thar Desert. To the north, though, various independent native kingdoms flourished. Alexander aimed to crush them militarily, but not to annex them. They were to function as obedient buffers between the empire and whatever land waited to be discovered beneath the rising sun. As the Macedonians approached India, they learned that there was much more of that land than they had originally expected.

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  BY THE EARLY SUMMER OF 327, Alexander was ready for the new campaign. India promised mystery and glamour. He had heard the stories of the immense wealth of its rulers, and of their warriors gleaming in gold and ivory. Unwilling to be outdone, at least in appearances, he silver-plated his soldiers’ shields and decorated their body armor with gold or silver. This may or may not have impressed the enemy, but it surely cheered up his men.

  The army had ballooned; we are told that after the latest substantial reinforcements, which had joined him at Bactra, and the recruitment of many native fighters, it was 120,000 strong. This seems a rather high estimate and probably includes noncombatants in the baggage train. These were numerous, for the army was a mobile state, or at least city. Soldiers themselves probably numbered not more than sixty thousand. The king foresaw the need for more soldiers and gave orders for the recruitment of thirty thousand men from the provinces.

  Northwestern India opened out before the conquerors. It was a patchwork of jostling riverine kingdoms, whose rulers were well aware of the imminent Macedonian threat. They could live with it and indeed work it to their advantage. They guessed that it was a violent form of state visit and would soon pass. A local dynast, Sisikottos (or Shashigupta) informed Alexander that Taxiles, the king of Taxila, whose realm lay between the Indus and Hydaspes (today’s Jhelum) Rivers, would be seeking Alexander’s friendship and his help against Porus, king of the Pauravas east of the Hydaspes.

  A meeting was arranged; when Taxiles turned up he was in full battle array, with gaily decorated war elephants, and for a moment Alexander feared he was coming under attack. This was a dangerous misunderstanding, but was quickly cleared up and the two men got on very well. Taxiles, who was shortly to die and was succeeded by his equally accommodating son, insisted he was not spoiling for a fight. He said: “If I possess more than you, I am ready to be generous toward you, and if I have less, I shall not refuse any benefits you may offer.” The kings began presenting each
other with more and more valuable gifts. Alexander, competitive to the last drop of blood, ended by giving Taxiles a thousand talents in coin, much to the annoyance of his circle. One of his marshals, Meleager, drank too much at dinner and remarked sarcastically to him: “At least in India you have found a man worth a thousand talents!”

  At last the Macedonians were ready to set off. They recrossed the Hindu Kush and called in at the new garrison town of Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus, where Alexander summarily dismissed the incompetent governor. Then they marched down into the Indus Valley. Applying the lessons learned in Bactriana and Sogdiana, the king again divided his army into smaller sections as called for by the occasion. His tactic was to assault and capture an enemy fortress-town, inducing others in the neighborhood to surrender without a fight. He founded a new settlement to watch for insurgencies. At one siege an arrow pierced his breastplate and wounded him slightly in his shoulder.

  Alexander’s first destination was the broad-flowing Indus. Fed by the snows and glaciers of the Himalayan, the Karakoram, and the Hindu Kush ranges of Tibet, it is the longest river in Asia. The king sent Hephaestion with a substantial force to prepare for a crossing by building a bridge across the river. The remainder of the army was put to laying a road and constructing a flotilla of boats and thirty-oared galleys, which were to sail down the river to the bridge and help convey personnel and impedimenta over the water.

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  THE KING RESUMED HIS POLICY of exemplary brutality. He had trouble with the Assacani, a tribe in the Lower Swat Valley. Their army, not being large enough to meet the invader, dispersed to various strongholds, one of which, Massaga, Alexander invested. The formidable Macedonian siege machines were brought into operation.