The Nature of Alexander

by Mary Renault

  It is unlikely she had any female predecessor. Recent archaeology has revealed the proud, aristocratic refinement of the ideal type admired by the Persian rulers of these regions; and she was an acknowledged beauty. Perhaps she reminded him of his mother, with whom she had traits in common, whether or not he had time to find it out. After such a childhood, it is a wonder his heterosexual instincts were not destroyed instead of merely retarded. The epicene graces of Bagoas may have been tilting, imperceptibly, his sexual bias.

  Roxane’s father was summoned, made alliance and gave consent. The Macedonians, after the initial shock, would have remembered Philip’s succession of campaign wives, and presumed that his son would choose in due course a proper consort. The Persians, their royal house passed by, must have raised their eyebrows. (The highborn family of Artabazus remained tranquil, suggesting that the seduction and humiliation of his daughter Barsine was still unborn in the mind of its propagandist author; in real life they could not have swallowed the insult.) The Sogdians were delighted. At the marriage feast the young girl was handed her ritual piece of the bridal loaf by the strange fair-haired chieftain who had sliced it with his sword—ancient and still-surviving symbol of his power to protect and maintain her. Tasting the bread, she pledged herself to a man with five years to live, during most of which he would be on campaign in conditions where only his fighting force could follow him. Her married life must have been measured in months.

  Within weeks, he was off to another siege of sensational difficulty. His new father-in-law having mediated a peace treaty, he returned to his bride. The story of the marriage is much neglected by the sources, in itself significant. Only an accident of history has disclosed that in a month or two he was already sleeping alone.

  That it took him four years to give her a child admits of various explanations. She is said to have had a stillbirth in India, begotten therefore early in their marriage; we hear of no others. He may have been attentive, but infertile; her attraction may have been fitful; or it may have long ceased, and only some premonition of his early death made him bestir himself to beget an heir. The certainty is that he never became uxorious. With Hephaestion he remained in love, at a depth where the physical relationship becomes almost irrelevant; and years later Bagoas was still his recognized eromenos. He had been disinhibited, not reversed, and had now achieved the normal Greek bisexuality.

  Among those most scandalized by the match must have been Callisthenes. Like his teacher Aristotle, he saw Alexander’s mission as that of Hellenic war leader, and thought he had long since betrayed it; Macedonian tolerance of royal polygamy was not shared by southern Greeks, and the thought of Greek lands being some day ruled by a scion of barbarian stock must have been monstrous. Callisthenes adopted an ostentatious austerity of life; a protest admired by the disaffected. Alexander himself paid it little heed. With the spring he had moved from Sogdiana south into Bactria to consolidate his conquests, India in the forefront of his mind. Between this and his new wife, he had enough to think of without the tedious scholar, who was left undisturbed to his instruction of the squires.

  His most receptive student, a youth called Hermolaus, was one day attending Alexander at a boar hunt, when for reasons never made clear he speared a boar which the King had marked as his own quarry. For this he got an exemplary sentence: a beating before his fellows, and forfeiture of his right to ride. Since officers who over-punish in fits of petulance are not regarded by their men as Alexander was, it would seem obvious that Hermolaus had been accumulating a bad record. Not enough is known of the royal hunting etiquette to show whether Alexander was now being hard on him for something which might otherwise have been overlooked, or if his offence was flagrant. He was bitterly resentful, and, according to the depositions later, complained to Callisthenes, who spoke in praise of tyrannicides. At all events, Hermolaus formed a plot with five other squires, one of whom was his lover, to kill Alexander as he slept. Six squires made up a night watch; they had therefore to get themselves into the same watch, unobtrusively, one by one.

  The ease with which they did so would have staggered any one of the Greek tyrants, of whose precautions such fascinating accounts exist. The squires’ arrangements took them about a month. Night duty was only served for one night at a time, which meant that they must act on their night assigned, or wait the best part of a fortnight for their next turn. Yet their plans took no account whatever of Roxane or her anteroom attendants. She had been consigned to the harem, where the assassins had no apparent fears of her husband sleeping.

  The lack of evidence about their relations leaves an important gap in our knowledge of Alexander. It is clear, however, that close and affectionate communication had been integral to his other loves. To Hephaestion he confided everything; Bagoas had been encouraged to reminisce about his former life. Roxane cannot have had a word of Greek; the sources are silent about Alexander’s Persian. Beyond a few endearments picked up from Bagoas, it was probably elementary. Beauty, however dazzling its first impact, may have turned out to be not enough.

  On the night arranged for his murder, Alexander was at a party. The squires awaited him, hoping he would be drunk. Fairly late he got up to leave, but was waylaid going to bed by a slightly crazy Syrian woman, a clairvoyant he had taken up because she had given him some true predictions. He let her hang about his quarters, the third of his mother-figures. Ptolemy, much inclined to ignore Alexander’s more disreputable connections, does not admit, as does Aristobulus, that she told him it would be bad luck to turn in before the morning. A born night bird in any case, he got the party going again, and came to bed at dawn. The relief guard arrived, but the anguished conspirators on some pretext still stood by, hoping against hope for their chance. He was sober enough to thank them charmingly for their courtesy in waiting up for him, and give each a tip, before he fell into bed. Hermolaus was ready to wait till their turn came round again; but one of the others now felt unhappy enough to confide in a lover of his, from whom he had kept the secret. The youth was at once sent off to make a clean breast of everything; which he did, in great distress, to Ptolemy whom he found in the royal tent. Alexander, when with some difficulty he had been shaken awake, pardoned the youth, and ordered all the others arrested. Curtius includes Callisthenes; in Arrian, he is only accused after the interrogation of the squires, and Ptolemy does not hesitate here to speak of torture.

  They, as Macedonians, were tried before the Assembly. Hermolaus’ defence is said to have been a denunciation of Alexander; just possible in a fanatic with nothing left to lose and no concern for his fellows. They were all condemned by general assent to stoning, which the Assembly carried out. Callisthenes, a non-Macedonian, had no title to a trial and got none. According to Ptolemy he was first tortured—probably to learn if the plot had its roots in Athens—and then hanged. Whether or not he had helped to plan the murder, he had created its moral climate. Alexander’s logic made no distinction between the theorist killer and the man with the knife.

  If he had spent longer in Athens, he might have known what this act would cost him, and thought twice. He had embittered the most influential body of opinion formers in his world. Anti-Macedonian and anti-monarchist already, the men of the Academy and the Lyceum now sank their rivalries to execrate in concert the martyrdom of free-minded philosophy. His barbarian marriage was derided; wild rumours of sexual debauch were swallowed whole; military operations were converted to atrocities. Blatantly forged letters of his abounded. One of them purported to say that the squires had not implicated Callisthenes; even the absurdity of his exonerating a man he had just condemned was not questioned by the logicians, it would have been ideological heresy. The Athenian Alexander, passed on to Rome, has bedevilled history ever since.

  His death had been devised with treachery and cowardice, things he abhorred and could not understand. But killing Callisthenes was the one great strategic blunder of his career. He did not live to know the worst of it.

  * In a fictional account of
this incident (The Persian Boy) a different explanation of Bagoas’ arrival was given. Later reflection, however, has persuaded me that the one above is more consistent with the evidence. M.R.

  India

  IN 327 ALEXANDER MOBILIZED his largest army, augmented with troops from all his new dominions, perhaps as many as 120,000 men, for his march on India.

  It had every lure to which his nature responded. Darius the Great had failed to hold on to his Punjab satrapies, and now could be surpassed. Heracles, one of Alexander’s great exemplars, had been there; so had Dionysus, that god of half-human birth, wandering in his divine madness. (Alexander’s instinctive genius preserved him from ever trying to suppress the Dionysiac in his nature—that way real madness would have lain.) India called also to the explorer in him. Not only were its marvels legendary; its further shore was, in all Greek belief, the end of the earth.

  By now he must have crossed caravan routes that led to China. He may have seen and fingered its silk. But trade goods changed hands along the way, often with the simplest barter signs; the Persians did not know much more than he. His geographers noted all information within their reach; none of it had shaken his belief that the endless Stream of Ocean, the world’s girdle, lay a few months’ march away. He had no notion of the southward depth of the Indian subcontinent, and supposed that from its eastern shore it would be no great voyage to the Euphrates. Having learned that the Indus harboured crocodiles, he believed for some time that it flowed into the Nile.

  In Sogdiana he had had his first contact with the fabled land, a state visit from the King of Taxila in the Punjab; a former satrapy, which its present ruler did not want to lose. He bore splendidly exotic gifts, “such as the Indians most prize,” which no doubt included pearls and rubies. His train of twenty-five painted and bedizened elephants made a great impression; astutely, as a last prodigal gesture he sent them back over the passes on his return home. This foretaste sharpened Alexander’s appetite for discovery, and his men’s for loot.

  The quality of Hephaestion’s military record now appears. Under him and Perdiccas, Alexander put more than half the army; including apparently most of the new levies, a touchy job. In his charge were the noncombatants, among whom must have been Roxane; Alexander could not have taken her where he was going, which was to control the flanks of the immemorial gateway by which all the rest would enter.

  Sir Robert Warburton, who had a similar task in the 1880s, wrote in his memoirs: “To those who are not acquainted with this highway, I must explain that formerly the Khyber Pass, thanks to the quarrels and exactions of the Afridis, was always closed to caravans, trade and travellers, except when some strong man forced them to keep it open for the time being; and when he passed away, or the whim left him, the pass was closed again.” This one, when he passed away, was remembered for two millennia.

  The campaign began in autumn. Sir Robert, describing operations in winter, says, “So cold was it that the rushing water froze on my pony’s feet and flanks wherever it touched the animal.” Alexander had much fierce fighting among the hill forts, where the tribesmen shut themselves up at his approach, ready to emerge behind him. Demands for their surrender were taken in bad part; but they were unused to sophisticated siege techniques and most of the assaults were brief. He got two arrow wounds, in the shoulder and ankle; neither of them severe, but his men reacted savagely, as they did to anything that endangered him. He had one narrow escape when an assault bridge, thrown across to the walls of Massaga, collapsed under the weight of men pressing up to fight beside him; luckily the drop was not too deep. On the death of the tribal chief the rest surrendered; including a force of about 7,000 mercenaries from another region. Alexander granted a truce, and negotiated with these men to join his army, which they agreed to do. In the night, however, they started to make off. Alexander decided he could not expose his men to the risk of treachery; he surrounded the Indians and cut them down. It must have been a grim enough business; but not deserving of the propagandist version given by Diodorus, which, disregarding Ptolemy’s first-hand witness, makes it an act of calculated revenge.

  The brave and attractive Sir Robert, seeking to defend the tribesmen of his manor from the charge of irremediable savagery, writes,

  The Afridi lad from his earliest childhood is taught by the circumstances of his existence and life to distrust all mankind; and very often his near relations, heirs to his small plot of land by right of inheritance, are his deadliest enemies. Distrust of all mankind, and readiness to strike the first blow for the safety of his own life, have therefore become the maxims of the Afridi. … It took me years to get through this thick crust of mistrust …

  All frontier campaigners agree that the fate of their prisoners was appalling.

  When you’re wounded an’ left on Afghanistan’s plains,

  An’ the women come out to cut up what remains,

  Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains …

  This last resort of Kipling’s soldier was not. available to Alexander’s. Though—as Ptolemy admits—the mercenaries may have meant only to get away home, it is understandable that he would not take a chance on it.

  Alexander’s famous exploit of this campaign was the assault upon Aornus, the “Birdless Rock,” a 7,000-foot massif in a curve of the Indus, its precipices carved by primeval floods. The feat astonished Sir Aurel Stein, who rediscovered it. It was unbesiegeable, having natural springs and space for farmland. It could not be bypassed, being full of warriors from miles around who would have threatened his communications. It could only be stormed. Guided by natives hostile to the defenders, Ptolemy seized an outer spur. Alexander brought up his forces, but a wide ravine still barred the way. He got his men to fell the neighbouring pinewoods, and heap up loads of timber with earth thrown on; from this mound his catapults could reach the walls while he filled in the gorge. When missiles started reaching them, the defenders began slipping away at night; he let them go, glad to make the assault less costly to his men, and was the first in the steep climb to the top. Many of the enemy were overtaken. There was an Indian legend that “Heracles” (probably the mighty bowman Rama, with his monkey bridge builders) had attempted the Rock in vain.

  Effort and triumph must have left their traces. The ruler of Nysa and his nobles, anxiously seeking peace, came to his tent and found him still in his armour, dusty from the ride and spear in hand. “They were wonderstruck at the sight of him, and fell to the ground, and were a long time silent.” He raised them up and reassured them. Prompted no doubt by some astute Greek trader or settler—many such had preceded the Macedonians—they begged him to spare their city because Dionysus had founded it; hence their abundant ivy, unique in those parts. Their goodwill was their soundest recommendation; but Alexander and the Companions had a delightful ramble in the sacred park of the local Indian god, hailing Dionysus in ivy crowns.

  Meantime, the experienced Hephaestion had run a pontoon bridge across the Indus; no mean achievement, for it would bear an army across a wide and powerful stream. Alexander, reunited with his lover and (though not for long) with his bride, was received by King Omphis of Taxila with such a huge parade, complete with war elephants, cavalry, drums and gongs, that it looked like an advancing army, and a dreadful misunderstanding was averted just in time by Omphis’ riding out in front unarmed. Alexander reciprocated; friendly signs sufficed till the arrival of the interpreters.

  Nearchus, Alexander’s admiral and one of his exiled boyhood friends, wrote a monograph on India, from which it seems that the Macedonians made contact chiefly, perhaps only, with the Aryan conquerors from the north, who still preserved traditions of their ancient nomadic life. The Nyseans were so fair they were not known to be Indians; the men of the Punjab are described as very tall. Community of race, however, had not kept the Punjab kingdoms, any more than the Greek states, from chronic war; a fact Alexander already knew and had exploited. Alliance with Omphis meant the enmity of his powerful neighbour Porus, whose land lay
east of the next river arm, the Hydaspes. Alexander, after putting on an impressive parade, began to prepare for battle.

  He made a point, however, of visiting the local ascetics, or naked philosophers as his men called them. Buddhism was now two centuries old, and though its sphere was further east, its influence may have inclined these Hindus towards the “middle way”; they did not practise crippling mortifications, but lived without possessions, fed by the community, in detachment from worldly desires. Arrian (who generally uses Nearchus for descriptive passages on India, Ptolemy for war) says that in rebuke of Alexander’s ambition they struck their feet upon the ground, meaning that only the earth under his soles could be his for all his restlessness. He admired their independence, and persuaded one of them to join his court, despite the others’ reproofs. Known to the Macedonians as Calanus, he was in his sixties; Strabo says that he had taken in his twenties a forty-year vow which had now expired, and was free to do as he chose. It is a great pity we have no record of what he and Alexander discussed together. The strange friendship lasted, as its dramatic end was to prove.

  A formal request for Porus’ allegiance produced the expected defiance. Alexander mobilized with Omphis; paying little heed to the entrance on the scene of a more insidious foe, the monsoon rains.

  He was realistic about human enemies; unlike Demosthenes he never underrated them. This good judgment failed him more than once in respect of weather. His rigorous training by Leonidas in childhood may have conditioned him to think of it in terms of hardship to be put up with, rather than real strategic threat. Someone must have told him how long and heavy the rains would be; he would have replied that soldiers must expect to get wet sometimes, and they all knew he would get wet with them. They had had rest time after their hard fights in the hills (Hephaestion’s army had had some too, passed over almost in silence by Ptolemy, who gave his own exploits generous coverage). Any further delay would look like weakness. Through a growing downpour, Alexander led his men to the Hydaspes. It was beginning to rise. Hephaestion had had his pontoons carted from the Indus; but it was already too late to use them except as rafts. Opposite, at the easiest crossing point, King Porus and his army waited, with two hundred war elephants.