Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  Porus is a splendid-looking fellow, a foot taller than I. His arms are as big as my calves. His hair is jet, bound in a spotless linen tiara. It has never been cut. His skin is so black, it’s blue, and his teeth, inset with gold and diamonds, dazzle when he smiles, which he does often, unlike any other potentate I have met. His tunic is bright green and yellow; he carries not a scepter but a parasol, which the Indians call a chuttah.

  Porus is not a name, it seems, but a title, comparable to Raj or King. His real name is Amritatma, which means “boundless soul.” He laughs like a lion and rises from his chair like an elephant. It is impossible not to like the fellow.

  His gift to me is a teak box, inlaid with ivory and gold. For a thousand years lords of the Punjab—he explains through an interpreter—have been presented with such a casket on the morn of their accession.

  “What,” I ask, “does one keep in it?”

  “Nothing.” The box is meant, Porus declares, to remind the sovereign of man’s proper portion.

  My gift to him is a bridle of gold, which had been Darius’s.

  “Why this?” he inquires.

  “Because, of all I own, it is the most beautiful.”

  Porus receives this answer with a brilliant smile. At this point, I confess, I find myself as nonplussed as ever in any negotiation. For, although the conventions by which the Raj and I correspond are familiar and the offices of respect unexceptional, the man himself confounds me with his easy, personable nature and his utter lack of pretense.

  He speaks of Darius, whom he knew and respected. They have been friends. Porus, in fact, had dispatched a thousand of his Royal Horse and two thousand ksatriyas, Royal Archers, to reinforce Darius at Gaugamela.

  Yes, I tell him, I remember them. His Indian cavalry broke through our double phalanx and raided our forward camp; in their fighting withdrawal, they nearly killed me. And the archers were the most formidable we had ever faced.

  He, Porus, had not been at Gaugamela. But, he says—indicating two dashing-looking officers, nearly as imposing as he—his sons had. He declares he has studied my generalship of that fight, or as much as he could piece together from reports, and proclaims it inspired. I am, in his phrase, “the very incarnation of the warrior commander.”

  I thank him and offer my own compliments.

  Now things begin to run awry.

  Porus has been sitting across from me, on a couch by himself, beneath the brightly colored canopy that shades both us and the company. He has just finished inviting me to tour his lands with him; it will be illuminating for me, he says, to see with my own eyes how well ordered is his kingdom, how productive the land, how happy the people, and how much they love him. He rises and crosses to the couch on which I sit, taking the place directly beside me. It is a disarming gesture, an act not just of affability but of affection.

  “Stay with me,” he proposes of a sudden, gesturing to the far shore, beyond which extend his lands and kingdom. “I give you the hand of my daughter and declare you my own heir and successor. You shall be my son and inherit my kingdom”—he indicates his two splendid-looking scions—“even before these children of my own flesh.”

  I am struck dumb at such munificence.

  Porus flashes his dazzling smile. “Study with me,” he continues, setting a hand warmly upon my knee. “I will teach you how to be a king.”

  I have glanced to Hephaestion in the interval; at these words I see his eyes go black with anger. Craterus beside him flinches, as if stung by a lash.

  I feel my daimon enter, like a lion into a parlor.

  I ask the interpreter to repeat the last phrase.

  “‘I will teach you,’ he enunciates in excellent Attic Greek, ‘how to be a king.’”

  I am furious now. Telamon shoots me a glare that commands, Contain yourself. I do, barely.

  “Does His Majesty believe”—I address the interpreter, not looking at Porus—“that I am not a king?”

  “Of course you are not!” springs the answer from Porus, succeeded by a laugh and a genial swat of my knee. The idea that he has insulted me, I see, has not even crossed his mind. He believes not only that I share his view of my lack of kingliness but that I welcome the opportunity, proffered by him now, to set this deficit aright.

  Hephaestion strides before Porus. The vein in his temple stands out like a rope. “Do you dare, sir, impute a deficiency of kingly virtue to this man? For by what measure does one identify a king, save that he rout in the field every monarch on earth?”

  Porus’s sons have stalked forward. Craterus’s hand moves to his sword; Telamon steps into the breach, restraining.

  Porus has turned to the interpreter, who is rattling off the translation as fast as his tongue can untangle. The Raj’s expression is one of puzzlement, succeeded by a grand and mellifluous laugh. It is a laugh loosed among friends, whose meaning is, Oh come come, fellows, let us not be upset by trifles!

  With a gesture, Porus mollifies his sons and the other princes of the Indian party. He himself resumes his seat on the couch across from me, though this time leaning forward, so that our knees nearly touch alongside the table set with pitchers and refreshments.

  “Your friend springs to your defense like a panther!” Porus gifts Hephaestion with another radiant smile. My mate withdraws, suddenly sheepish.

  Porus apologizes to him and to me. Perhaps, he suggests, his expression has been imprecise. He has studied my career, he affirms, with a thoroughness that might surprise me.

  “What I meant, Alexander, is that you are the supreme warrior, conqueror, even liberator. But you have not yet become a king.”

  “Like yourself,” I suggest, barely containing my wrath.

  “You are a conqueror. I am a king. There is a difference.”

  I ask what this might be.

  “The difference between the sea and the storm.”

  I regard him, less than edified. He explains.

  “The storm is brilliant and terrifying. Godlike, it looses its bolts of power, rolling over all in its path, and passing on. The sea, in contrast, remains—profound, eternal, unfathomable. The tempest hurls its thunder and lightning; the ocean absorbs all, unmoved. Do you understand, my friend? You are the storm. I am the sea.”

  Again he smiles.

  My jaw is clenched so tight I could not reply if I wanted to. Only one aim animates me: to get clear of this parley before I dishonor myself by shedding my host’s blood.

  “Still I see,” the Raj continues, though somewhat less amiably, “from the umbrage you take at my words, the color that flushes your breast, and the anger that you can barely contain, that it is important to you to be a king, and that my words have offered offense, though, if your heart sets store by candor, you must confess, they sting only by their truth.” This need be no cause for distress, Porus continues, when one takes into account my extreme youth. “Who is a king at thirty, or even forty? That is why I have invited you to study with me, whose years might make me your father, mentor, and guide.”

  Craterus’s eyes have read mine. He comes forward. “With respect, sir,” he says, addressing the Indian king, “this interview is over.”

  The party of Macedon stands.

  Our boats are hailed.

  Porus’s smile has vanished. His jaw works and his eyes go hooded and dark.

  “I have offered you the hand of my daughter and the heirship to my kingdom,” he declares, “to which you have responded only with sullen and wrathful silence. Therefore I make you another offer. Return to the lands you have conquered. Make your people free and happy. Render each man lord over his own household and sovereign over his own heart, instead of the wretched slaves they are today. When you have done that, then come back to me, and I will set myself to study at your feet. You will teach me how to be a king. Until then—”

  I have turned my back on him. Our party has boarded the barge. The boatmen shove off.

  Porus looms at the rail, commanding as a fortress tower.

 
; “How dare you advance in arms against my kingdom? By what right do you offer violence to him who has never harmed you or even spoken your name except in praise? Are you a law unto yourself? Have you no fear of heaven?”

  I would strike him down now, but for the spectacle of leaping boat to boat like a pirate.

  “I said you are no king, Alexander, and I repeat it. You do not rule the lands you have conquered. Neither Persia, nor Egypt, nor Greece from whence you came, which hates you and would eat you raw if she could. What offices have you established to promote your people’s weal? None! You have set in power only those same dynasts who oppressed the populace before, and by the same means, while you and your army pass on, like a ship that is master only of that quadrant of ocean upon which it sails, and no more. You command not even here in your own camp, which boils over with sedition and unrest. Yes, I know! Nothing happens in my country that is not reported to me, not even within your own tent.”

  I stand in our boat’s prow. Every man’s blood is up. Along both riverbanks, the armies cry out in anger and distress.

  “So we shall have war, Alexander. I see you will stand for nothing else. Perhaps you shall win. Perhaps you are invincible, as all the world attests.” His dark eyes meet mine across the chasm between us. “But though you stand over my dead body and set your heel upon the throat of my realm, you will still not be a king. Not even if you march, as you intend, to the Shore of the Eastern Ocean itself. You will not be a king, and you know it.”

  Once, when I was fourteen and served my father as a Page, I followed Philip as he stalked in fury to his quarters after an embassy with the Athenians. Hephaestion attended then as a Page, too, as did Love Locks and Ptolemy; we were all on duty that night, assigned to stand guard over the king’s sleep.

  “So Athens wishes peace? I’ll give her hell first.” Philip slung his cloak in anger. “Peace is for women! Never permit there to be peace! The king who stands for peace is no king at all!” Then, turning to us Pages, my father launched into a monologue of such blistering ire that we lads stood there, each fixed upon his post, held spellbound by his passion. “The life of peace is fitting for a mule or an ass. I would be a lion!” Who prospers in peace, Philip demanded, save clerks and cowards? And as for the welfare of his people: “What do I care to ‘rule’ or ‘govern’? Blast them both and all the mealy arts of amity! Glory and fame are the only pursuits worthy of a man. Happiness? I piss upon it! Was Macedon happier when our frontiers were straw, to be cast down by any foe—or now, when the wide world trembles before us? I have seen my country be the plaything of enemies. I shall never permit that state again, and neither will my son!”

  We touch shore after the fiasco with Porus. I still have not spoken. My generals wish to confer at once. No. I insist on inspecting the works diverting the river. Diades, the engineer, is hailed and hastens to us. We descend to the site in a freight rig, suspended by tackle stout enough to support an ox. The works themselves are spectacular, a hundred feet deep and broad as a small city. At their head, where the floodgates will be opened to draw the river into the channel, stand two tablets of sandstone fifty feet tall. Sculptors labor on scaffolding, carving an image into the rock.

  “Whose face is that?” I inquire.

  Diades laughs. “The king’s, of course.”

  “Which king?”

  “Why, you, lord.”

  I look again. “That is not my face.”

  All color drains from the engineer. He glances to Hephaestion, as if appealing for aid. “But it is, sire. . . .”

  “Do you tell me I lie?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “It is my father’s face. The masons carve the profile of Philip.”

  The engineer shoots another frightened glance, this time to Craterus.

  “Who told you to engrave my father’s face?”

  “Please! Look, lord. . . .”

  “I am looking.”

  “Philip wore a beard. See, the image is clean-shaven!”

  The lying bastard. I punch him in the face. He shrieks like a woman and drops like a slaughtered sow.

  Craterus and Telamon seize my arm. On towers and scaffolds, men are gaping by the thousands.

  Hephaestion’s hand presses my brow. “You have a fever.” Then, loudly, for all: “The king is burning up!”

  Ptolemy helps Diades to his feet. The lift has halted forty feet into the pit. “Take us up!” Hephaestion commands.

  At the top, we are met by a wall of gawking faces.

  “The king has swallowed river water; he has taken ill,” Hephaestion declares for publication. He calls for my physicians; I am spirited clear, out of the sun.

  Inside the tent, I welcome the chance to feign incapacity; I drink till I’m blind, then pass out with relief. Hephaestion will not leave; he banishes the Pages and sleeps all night in the chair. Waking, I am riven with grief and remorse. My first thought is to recompense Diades with gold or honor for the outrage I have offered. Hephaestion calls me off; he has already done it.

  We trek with the seers for dawn sacrifice. My brow feels as if a spike had been driven into it. Have I lost command, not only over this army but over myself? Can I rule, at this late hour, not even my own heart? It is minutes before I can even speak.

  “Do you remember, Hephaestion, what you said on the eve of Chaeronea?”

  “That by battle’s end, we would be different people. Older, and crueler.”

  A long moment passes. “It gets easier.”

  “What?”

  “To take the action.”

  “Nonsense! You are tired.”

  “I used to be able to separate myself from my daimon. It’s harder now. I can’t tell, sometimes, where he leaves off and I begin.”

  “You are not your gift, Alexander. You employ your gift.”

  “Do I?”

  When we started out, I say, I valued in my friends courage and wisdom, spirit and humor and audacity. Now all I ask is loyalty. “In the end, I have heard, a man cannot trust even himself. Only his gift. Only his daimon.”

  The day I reach that state, I will have become a monster.

  “The daimon,” I declare, “is not a being that can be appealed to. It is a force of nature. To call it not human is only half-exact. It is inhuman. You make a pact with it. It gifts you with omniscience. But you ally yourself with the whirlwind and make your seat upon the tiger’s back.”

  Day’s end, I return with Hephaestion to Diades’ excavation site. Indeed the face carved into the stone is my own.

  Next morning I convene the council. “I have decided against diverting the river. Reassemble the boats brought from the Indus. We’ll cross, when we do, by waterborne assault.”

  Eighteen

  SPOILS OF WAR

  WITH THE CAPTURE OF THE PERSIAN CAMP after Issus, certain correspondence fell into my hands. These were propositions addressed to Darius from various city-states of Greece, conspiring for my overthrow. Indeed the haul included a gaggle of envoys in the flesh, of Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, Elis, and Athens, all of whom stood present in the Persian camp on missions of treachery toward me.

  I am no neophyte at politics. I count myself slave to few illusions. Indeed, virtually every aspect of the Aegean campaign, from depriving the expeditionary force of half its Macedonian strength—eight brigades of sarissa infantry and five squadrons of Companion Cavalry, left behind as a garrison force with Antipater in Greece—to the tedious and costly neutralization of the seacoast; my personal clemency and attentiveness to Athens; the pardons of those working against me among the Greek cities; all this, I say, was in consideration only of propitiating home opposition, the necessity of securing my base against insurrections of the states of Greece, alone or in alliance with the king of Persia, and to check the opening of a second front in my rear. I knew the Greeks resisted me. I knew they despised my race. Still part of me must have been naive; part must have believed I could make myself loved by them; that I could, by great and noble acts performe
d in emulation of our common Hellenic ancestors, induce them to take to their hearts if not Macedon, then me personally.

  My blood ran hot when I read these letters, whose prose, whether crafted with the unctuous sycophancy of the courtier, the incendiary malice of the provocateur, or the bald power politics of the prime minister, fairly blazed with perfidy and malevolence. I read plots in which I was to be poisoned, stabbed, stoned, hanged, shot with bolts, arrows, and darts, set afire, drowned, trampled. I was to be smothered with a carpet, garroted with a cord, weighted with stones and hurled into the sea, assassinated at sacrifice, in my sleep, while heeding nature’s call. Of the lexicon of epithets applied to me, I note only “this beast” and “the Malign One” (which I confess might, with some aptness, be applied to my horse), passing on to those reserved for my father (understandable), my sister (a mystery) and, vilest of all, my mother.

  “Compliments,” says Craterus, dismissing these.

  Ptolemy calls them “the scorn of the sedge for the oak.”

  “At least,” observes Parmenio, “we know whom to hang.”

  What infuriates me beyond all else is that these Greeks, before whom I have practically genuflected soliciting their good opinion, prefer union with the Persian barbarian to alliance with me! I show the letters to Telamon, knowing he will view them from a perspective all his own. “Which item of the soldier’s kit,” I ask my mercenary mentor, “should I be discarding now?”

  “That part,” Telamon replies, “which takes offense personally.”