The Nature of Alexander

by Mary Renault

  Herodotus, writing a century earlier, said of Persian customs:

  When they meet each other in the streets, you may know if the persons meeting are of equal rank by the following sign: if they are, instead of speaking they kiss each other on the lips. Where one is a little the other’s inferior, the kiss is given on the cheek; when the difference of rank is great, the inferior prostrates himself on the ground.

  All Persians were inferior to the King, most of them greatly inferior; there is an area of debate about the depth of obeisance required of persons about the court. We read of Persians high enough placed to be Alexander’s dinner guests making full prostration before him; but he also took over the important institution of the Royal Kindred. The Persian kings had admitted to this privileged caste large numbers of noblemen to whom they were not related, thus making them “a little” his inferiors, with the right to kiss his cheek. Alexander must certainly have conferred this at once upon, for instance, the venerable Artabazus, and royal princes like Oxathres and Bistanes; probably on many more. But he kept it in his gift, not to be taken for granted.

  In the time of Darius the Great two Spartan envoys, men of the highest birth, had risked death sooner than make proskynesis before him (they were magnanimously spared). If any rite of bending was intermediate between prostration on the ground and the kinsman’s kiss, it was deep enough to give Macedonians the same sense of servility. About this Alexander had no illusions, as his proceedings show.

  Persians were willing to bow down before a king, Macedonians not. Neither race must be humiliated. The faces of Macedonians could be saved by upgrading the status of the person to whom they bowed. From a king, there was only one step up. Let them bow before a son of Ammon who partook of the god’s divinity.

  In an issue like this, the complex mind of Alexander, baffling to men who shared his culture, is inaccessible to ours. Except in Egypt, where it had millennial sanction, he had never made use of his divine prerogative. His use of it now was practical, statesmanlike, and in a sense highly civilized. On the other hand, it was not a form; he believed in it. It is worth remembering that millions of men, in three continents, would agree with him before many years were out.

  Having told his plan to his closest friends, apparently without opposition, he confided it to leading Persians; they had put up with enough and were due for some compensation. A number of them were invited to a banquet, along with Macedonians of rank. Arrian, who may here be using either Ptolemy or the chamberlain Chares, gives the most reasonable account of this event. The sophist Anaxarchus made a speech in praise of the King. (He came from the Thracian city of Abdera. The Athenian tradition called him a flatterer of Alexander. He ended up being pounded to death with iron clubs by a Cypriot king about whom he had been rude, a fate he met with defiant courage. If he did flatter Alexander it must have been because he liked him, a possibility which can never be excluded.) He listed his unexampled achievements, correctly predicted that he would be offered divine honours as soon as he was dead, and asked why he should not receive them in his lifetime. On cue, the friends jumped up with assenting cries, ready to make their reverence. At the critical moment, Callisthenes intervened.

  In a longish speech, he urged the impiety of offering gods’ rights to men. Most of the Macedonians had been taken unprepared by the proposal; at this support for their indecisive reluctance, they broke into applause. Alexander, faced with the prospect of an unpleasant scene, sent round word that he would not insist. Everyone sat down. Then the Persian guests, who knew the real intention and were determined to acknowledge it, got up and performed the proskynesis of their own accord. As one of them took his turn less gracefully than the rest, a Macedonian guffawed with laughter. It was the last straw for Alexander; he strode down the hall and threw the man off his banquet couch on to the floor—certainly, for the Persians, an innovation in court etiquette.

  This volte-face of Callisthenes’ may, or may not, have been simply maturing within him. All sources agree on the effusiveness of his official chronicle. But he was a product of the Lyceum, keeping in touch with Aristotle, who must have heard with mounting disgust of honours and offices conferred on Persians, the assumption of “barbarian” royal dress, and the scandalous Bagoas. After the long delays involved in getting private mail from Attica to the Oxus, Callisthenes may have been urged to make a stand.

  Alexander remained tenacious of his purpose. His next move cannot be called arrogant; it showed both sensitivity and tact. He arranged a small party, for distinguished Macedonians and Greeks alone. Hephaestion lobbied each beforehand, making sure they knew what to expect and would not object. One was Callisthenes.

  A brief ceremony was planned around the loving cup. Each guest would stand and drink, then make the proskynesis before Alexander, rise, and come forward to receive a kiss. Thus, in return for a single prostration formally acknowledging his right to it, Alexander would accept them all into the Royal Kin. His return of the kiss—in Persian terms the salutation of equals—was a personal gesture from friend to friends. Offering what was perhaps the most signal proof of his long devotion, Hephaestion bowed down the first of all.

  All went smoothly till it came to Callisthenes, when Alexander “happened” to be talking to Hephaestion, and “did not notice” that he came up for the kiss without first making his bow. That the obvious joker in the pack had really been overlooked is of course incredible. A neat little piece of face saving had been arranged, allowing Callisthenes to keep his philosophic pride without official cognizance. Any odium it incurred among the others was his own affair.

  Like many intelligent men, Alexander had not left margin enough for others’ dullness. As Callisthenes came for his kiss, someone called out that it had not been earned. Diplomacy thus frustrated, the King turned his face away. Callisthenes completed the social disaster by saying rudely, “So I go off short of a kiss.” Thus Chares the chamberlain, who must have been an eyewitness.

  Hephaestion, who had certainly done his best, had no alternative but to assure the other guests afterwards that Callisthenes had agreed to bow. He may indeed simply have changed his mind, a contingency provided for in vain. There was no further attempt to introduce proskynesis among the Macedonians.

  Alexander had now not only been twice snubbed publicly by Callisthenes; he had been baulked of an important political aim. Had he become the Oriental tyrant of Athenian propaganda, this offensive and obstructive person would speedily have suffered a fatal colic, so easily passed off as the virulent local dysentery. No clearer evidence is needed of Alexander’s aversion to secret murder than Callisthenes’ continued life. None of his privileges were withdrawn. He even kept his office of tutor to the royal squires. Alexander could still be trusting to the point of naïvety.

  He did test the sophist’s popularity by asking him one evening to give in sophistic style first a panegyric exhibition speech on the Macedonians, then a speech in their detraction. The second, which the company considered the more vigorous, was much resented. Alexander, striking while the iron was hot, remarked that it had simply shown ill will.

  The proskynesis issue was one handful of fuel on an already smouldering fire. It had not yet touched the rank and file, with whom Alexander’s stock had never been higher; but the staff was divided sharply. Young officers, like the frontier subalterns of Kipling’s India, could fraternize when East met West, and enjoy it among the other adventures with which Alexander had enriched their lives. Philip’s old guard clung bitterly to their victor’s status, and saw it daily eroded.

  It is fairer to see Alexander as a great original than to despise them for reaction. If prejudice is prejudgment, they could claim to judge by results. They had won against odds; had fought better, were better led, and thought they had better traditions. Macedonian restraints on the royal power, though crude, were valuable. The image of the Oriental was linked in their minds, not without the truth evident in Herodotus, to the cruel caprices of despotic power slavishly endured, of which
the prostration was a symbol. Alexander’s friends would have bowed, as they wore his presents of Persian dress, because they knew, loved, and partly understood him. To Philip’s men it was all anathema; and their condemnation made the King’s party sharply defensive. Though his personality kept it in check, friction bred faction, and still did when he moved his headquarters from the Oxus plains, where he had wintered, to the delightful climate of Samarkand. Ironically, when stress reached breaking point in tragedy, it was not because Alexander had distanced himself from his countrymen with a Great King’s hauteur, but precisely because he had not.

  Artabazus had lately asked leave to retire from the satrapy of Bactria, which he began to find fatiguing. This exalted and wealthy office had been conferred on Hephaestion’s co-commander and Alexander’s kinsman, Cleitus.

  If it seemed to discharge a debt of honour to him and to his sister, it also removed a vocal and stubborn conservative from the high command. Unlike Parmenion’s posting at Ecbatana—a staff job, officially temporary—it had high prestige, but was also permanent. Cleitus had rank already, military and social; he may not have found the golden handshake flattering. However, he accepted it, and would soon have gone his way. The anger of Dionysus determined otherwise.

  On the god’s Macedonian feast day Alexander gave a banquet, especially to share with his friends a consignment of prime Hyrcanian apples. For reasons unknown, he dedicated the feast to the divine warrior twins, Castor and Pollux. Cleitus, invited, had begun a sacrifice of his own, perhaps to the more orthodox divinity, when he heard the dinner trumpet and put it off. The two sheep he had ready to butcher, sheeplike, came trotting after him. Alexander thought this escort of sacrificial beasts a disturbing omen, and ordered the priests to pray for Cleitus’ safety.

  Accustomed by now to the axiom that “you can’t drink the water,” men must already have slaked their thirsts with wine before they arrived; and Macedonian feast days always meant heavy drinking. Someone sang a lampoon on the commanders who had failed to relieve the city; a tasteless black joke, seeing they had been killed, but countenanced by Alexander who had succeeded where they had failed. Feelings built up; his friends began to exalt his exploits over those of Castor and Pollux, perhaps with the proskynesis still in mind. With everyone drunk, the debate grew quarrelsome and aggressive; the friends, abandoning the Twins, turned to the still more explosive theme of how Alexander had surpassed his father.

  Cleitus noisily disagreed. Having lived close to the royal family through Alexander’s lifetime, he must have been dense not to know, even when in liquor, that he was playing with fire. He would have been safe with Alexander the King of Persia, whom he so resented. Fatally, he had aroused instead the furious youth who had hurled a goblet at his father’s wedding.

  Alexander’s response was wholly Macedonian. When Cleitus shouted and argued, he argued and shouted back. Cleitus mocked his Persian dress and his cult of Ammon; complained that “barbarians” must be petitioned for leave to see him; taunted him with having saved his life at the Granicus. Alexander shied an apple at his head, then, the insults continuing, looked about for a weapon. His friends, like true Macedonians, held him back by force while he cursed and struggled; resourceful Ptolemy eased the protesting drunk outside. This common barroom brawl ended as so many have done among lesser men. Cleitus came bursting in again with a new insult he had just thought of; Alexander, blind with rage, snatched a spear from the nearest guard and ran him through the heart. At the sound of his death cry, the noise in the hall was succeeded by a deep silence.

  Such was the act of homicide invariably called by historians “the murder of Cleitus.” Today, with equivalent evidence of drink and provocation, it would receive a sentence of two or three years, with remission for good conduct.

  No judgment on it has been harsher than Alexander’s own. He had killed Parmenion as a king, responsibly. This time he had killed as a man, who could not hold his drink or keep his temper. As a king, he had illegally killed a Macedonian asserting his right of free speech. As a Greek, he had killed a benefactor and a guest; aspects whose enormity we can scarcely now assess. His shame was proportioned to his pride; for a time he found himself intolerable. Plutarch may be right in saying that in the first shock he had to be restrained from running himself on the spear he had pulled out of Cleitus. For three days he would not eat or drink, till there were fears for his life, perhaps also for his sanity. People came to his room without his leave, as if he were helpless with some dangerous illness. The philosophers offered rational or soothing words. The Macedonian soldiers, alarmed by his desperation over what must have seemed to them a very common mishap, called an Assembly of their own accord, condemned Cleitus for treason, and sent to let Alexander know that his act had now been legalized. Consoling as their forgiveness must have been, he did not yet forgive himself, and met comfort with cries of self-reproach.

  More effective first aid was brought by the priest of Dionysus. Each of the Olympians had his own weapon of retribution: Zeus wielded thunderbolts, Poseidon waves and earthquakes, Aphrodite disastrous passions. Dionysus’ weapon was madness. Neglected on his feast day in favour of other deities, he had come like some uninvited fairy in those folk tales which are the detritus of old religions, and cast his malign enchantment. Alexander had done the deed when, literally, he was not himself.

  From this he took some salve to his self-respect, and gradually came back to life again. The theory had something in it, even though the spell had been cast on the god’s behalf by his votary Olympias, twenty-odd years before.

  Any fairly short account of Alexander’s crowded life must often seem to leap from drama to drama. Yet these events were brief in time; long weeks and months were spent in varied action, much of it now lost to us; in campaigning over wild and difficult country where, once off the caravan trails, men of his race had never stepped before. After operations of the most physically exacting kind, while his men were resting, he merely changed his tasks; seeing the usual envoys and petitioners and couriers, administering not only the old army but its constant inflow of foreign auxiliaries about whose methods and capacities he had to know; seeing that their native officers got along with his own commanders. He had to see surveyors’ reports, and those of the scouts on whose intelligence he would advance into uncharted lands. Everything of importance fell on him. He could not delegate to an establishment he was in process of constructing as he went.

  He was founding more cities, deeply concerned with them both as viable communities, and as his own memorials. Kandahar still echoes his name. On choice of site hung the settlers’ welfare, even their lives. That Hephaestion was often given a free hand to establish towns when Alexander was busy is striking evidence of his real abilities.

  Alexander had plenty to do. The character and terrain of these wars can best be reconstructed from the memoirs of nineteenth-century soldiers who found men and mores largely unchanged, and, coming from a society more sensitive to shock, took less for granted. We learn in passing that Alexander put down a local custom of leaving out the sick and senile for the hyenas. He could not wait to see whether survival offered them a better fate.

  His legend was already forming in his tracks. Two thousand years later, Afghan chiefs would be claiming descent from him, and even that of their horses from Bucephalas, rather elderly now to be at stud. Forces which had held out against his officers would melt into the hills at the mere rumour that he himself was on the march towards them. Spitamenes, one of Bessus’ betrayers, a tough and resourceful guerrilla leader, died of such news. His officers heard that Alexander was coming, and in panic sent him their chieftain’s head. Curtius says that his wife removed it while he slept; adding that she was also his mother.

  The country was full of precipitous cliffs and summits, fortified from remote antiquity in the perennial cycles of blood feud and tribal war. From time to time some especially sensational and ingenious siege gets detailed description. It was impossible for Alexander to hear that a s
trongpoint was impregnable without regarding it as a personal challenge. This showed a perceptive grasp of war psychology in Sogdiana, where courage, strength and success were essentials of status and of survival.

  The most notorious of such pinnacles was the Sogdian Rock; high, sheer, and riddled at the top with caves well stocked with food and water. Its chieftain, Oxyartes, was away raising the countryside, leaving his family and garrison in the charge of his son. The single path to the top was entirely commanded from above. The area was under snow.

  Alexander offered a parley. Two envoys climbed down, laughed in his face, and told him not to waste his time unless his men had wings. That settled the matter. He called for volunteers who were expert climbers, and got 300. At night, helped by the snow which would have etched out all the ledges, they were to ascend the steepest, unguarded face, a “very severe.” The first man up would get 12 talents, a sum on which to be comfortable for life; the next 11; and so through the first twelve. Iron tent pegs for pitons, mallets, and ropes got them up, in spite of snow-numbed fingers, with a loss of one in ten. In Sogdiana, to have conceded failure might have cost lives by the thousand.

  Stunned at dawn by the sight of an unknown force above him, the chief’s son surrendered, and everyone was spared. A feast was offered, at which the ladies of the family performed a dance for the conqueror. Among them was the chief’s daughter, Roxane. Alexander fell in love with her at first sight. Quixotically renouncing the right of capture which neither friend nor foe would have questioned, he asked for her hand in marriage.

  Political expediency has been suggested, but does not convince. No doubt had she been disastrously unsuitable—married for instance—he would have mastered his feelings; but everything points to an authentic coup de foudre. The obvious state marriage would have been with Darius’ daughter, as he knew, for he later made it. Any daughter of Artabazus would have been more eligible than this chieftain’s child. It would seem that falling in love with a woman was a new and exhilarating experience, and, ever the explorer, he was eager to pursue it without delay.