Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  I will take the money and run.

  And yet to call the workings of the state corrupt would be a mischaracterization. I pass a memorable night in converse with the queen mother, Sisygambis, who has become a sort of mentor to me. “You do not understand, my son. In the East there exists no objective standard of achievement, no impartial measure by which a man may establish or advance his station. He cannot ‘get ahead.’ He cannot ‘succeed.’ It is not like the egalitarianism of your army, Alexander, which provides an unbiased arena, within which a poor man may make his fortune and a rich man prove worthy of his fame. Here no man exists, save in subordination to another.”

  Sisygambis details for me the labyrinthine protocol of power by which one sphere of society imposes its will upon another and is in turn imprisoned by that imposition. “A network of interlocking tyrannies extends from top to bottom and side to side, and in it each man is caught like a fly in a web. Here all a man thinks of is to please his master. He has no concept of what he himself wishes. Ask him. He cannot tell you. The very concept is beyond his imagination.”

  This is the East. On the right hand, one beholds opulence beyond imagination; on the left, destitution that beggars description. The long-suffering of the peasantry approaches the holy. Their carriage and bearing possess a dignity unmatched even by kings of the West. But it is the dignity of a stone, weathering centuries, not of a man, descended of heaven.

  I tell the queen mother that I wish Darius were here now, with us. “For what purpose?” she asks.

  “To learn how he governed such a world. And to hear the secrets of his heart upon it.”

  But the lady only turns aside in sorrow. “My lord, the sovereign of the East is the least free of men. His role is to be the Living Embodiment of all that is great and noble. The grandeur of his estate imbues the lives of his subjects with hope and meaning. Yet he himself is enslaved by his office. My son Darius would not wish to tell you of his life, Alexander, but to inquire, with envy, of yours.”

  Money. Because all wealth is inducted upward to the king, the people have evolved underground currencies to duck the tax agent. A black economy serves all, which is partly barter, but mostly achaema, “trust.” This takes the form sometimes of a local tender, which may be marked shards in one part of the city or bullets of lead in another, good only in the immediate neighborhood; but appears more universally as a promise-to-pay guaranteed by a kind of street-corner banker, who is either a member of one of the syndicates that run the city or operates under its protection. A fuller, shall we say, owns a shop making felt. He pays his taxes in kind, but how does he pay wages? Not in coin, for there is no such thing. He pays in chits, which are secured by the achaemist, the street-corner exchequer. Who protects the banker? The syndicate, which is shielded by the royal chancellors. The scheme is as complex as a galaxy and as impenetrable as the mind of God. A conqueror passing through barely fazes it. I am sure that in the broad expanse of Babylon, with its four million souls, three-quarters have never heard my name, let alone that of Darius. But the system is far more pernicious for the commons than the conqueror. Yes, a man beats his taxes. But at this cost: the stultification of all original thought and innovation. For each man is immured within his own quarter. He cannot think beyond the street in which he dwells; he has no hope and no ambition. Here is why so great a city can be carried as if its walls were of tissue.

  Then there is sex.

  In a society where a man’s spirit is crushed from birth; where hope is absent, suffering stupefying; where the diet is despair and every man a slave—in such a culture, the individual takes his pleasure when and where he can. Some joys are simple and wholesome. Most are cruel and corrupt.

  The vocabulary of depravity is nowhere as encyclopedic as at Babylon. Every imaginable spirit and intoxicant lies to hand, as does every posture of carnality and every instrument of desire; oils, scents, and lubricants, aphrodisiacs, stimulants, asphyxiants, resuscitants. Women and boys are trained in the arts of passion; shops abound, purveying devices of bondage, dominance, and submission, appliances to imprison and immobilize, to inflict pain and to relieve it. They are great love poets, the Assyrians and Babylonians. I can understand this, for in this realm alone are they free. The greatest buildings of the East are not their temples or even their palaces, but their seraglios.

  And yet, despite such woe, the place is a vibrant and colorful cosmos. The women are beautiful, the children dark-eyed and full of mischief. Business booms. Water taxis ply the Euphrates, selling fruit and vegetables and carrying lovers and merchants all over town with wonderful swiftness and ease. The gay colors of the riverfront, the raucous bustle of the mercantile mart, the smells of spitted meats and baking bread are nothing if not intoxicating. The great city, sweltering on the plain, lies asweat with sensation and sensuality. It is impossible not to fall in love with the place.

  Here is my quandary: I have discovered affection for these slender, dark-eyed Asiatics; it breaks my heart to behold them so wretched and unfree.

  Shortly after we enter Babylon, Bucephalus is stricken with sepsis. A wound from Gaugamela becomes infected; the malady advances from its source to his heart with such rapidity (he is nearly eighteen years old) that the physicians tell me he may not last the night. I rush to his side, informing those in whose care he stands that if he dies, they themselves will follow within the hour. The best men in the army are summoned, not only of veterinary but of general medicine; I put out a call to the city at large, offering his weight in gold to that tender, Greek or barbarian, who can preserve Bucephalus’s life.

  The equestrian world is a small one. Within hours, a messenger arrives from the Persian Tigranes, hero of Issus and Gaugamela. His home academy lies sixty miles up the Tigris at a village called Baghdad; in his service stands Phradates, the empire’s master veterinary surgeon. He is on his way, Tigranes’ courier declares. A horse-ambulance and a barge follow, to transport Bucephalus. I am struck dumb by this act of compassion from my enemy.

  It takes two days to work upriver. Bucephalus cannot stand; his weight must be taken by a belly sling. Phradates does not leave his side, nor do I. I speak softly to my horse and stroke his ears, as I have since I was a boy and he my greatest friend.

  The Persians are nothing if not connoisseurs of horseflesh. The barge barely touches dockside at Tigranes’ academy before Bucephalus vanishes amid a press of worshipers—grooms and exercise boys, veterinary students, cavalrymen in training—who have been informed of his approach and now crowd about, ecstatic at the apparition of such a specimen, even in his current desperate state. Bucephalus is like me—he thrives on attention. I look in his eyes and feel my breath return. He will recover.

  We stay fifteen days as guests in Tigranes’ home. The establishment is a riding academy and military school. The grounds are impeccable, with timbered barns, tracks, and lunging rings, but the spirit of the place has been devastated by war and defeat. Two walls of the stadium are hung with the bridles of comrades fallen in action; other horse warriors, crippled in battle, are housed in cottages on the grounds. All are fearful and demoralized.

  At once I pledge to reconstitute the place. I have never seen such splendid-looking fellows as the Persian youths in attendance about Tigranes. I call Hephaestion aside. “Here is the answer to the empire!”

  I implore Tigranes to serve with me. I wish him to raise a regiment and campaign at my side. But he will not take the field in pursuit of Darius, his king and kinsman; I can have his life, Tigranes declares, but not his service. This confirms me in my opinion that I have found, at last, a breed of noble who can lift the empire from its state of desolation.

  Do you know how Phradates cured Bucephalus? By the heavens. The doctor and all physicians of Persia are magi and expert cosmologists. “Stars, like men, are born and die, my lord. But no star comes into being alone. Each has its twin. When one flares or dims, the other alters with it, simultaneously, though they reside a sky apart. You and your horse are like that
. Bucephalus suffers, Alexander, because your heart is sick. He is you, this prodigy, and he will not find rest so long as your soul remains untranquil.”

  At this I break down like a child. I know at once what the physician means. We talk all night, he and I and Tigranes and Hephaestion.

  What distresses me so about the East, I declare, is the misery of her people and the supineness with which they endure it. “Is it I who am mad, who cannot bear their woe, or they, who can? Are freedom and aspiration but bubbles upon a timeless sea of suffering? I cannot tell you the state of gloom this has cast me into.”

  Cannot East and West be yoked, I ask. Can’t we of Europe take wisdom from Asia, and she learn liberty from us?

  “In hours of consternation,” Tigranes says, “I have often found a clue among children and horses. Perhaps your answer, Alexander, resides with these.”

  I ask what he means.

  “Your aim will never succeed with the standing generation. They are too bound up in their ways. But with the rising generation . . .”

  I beg him to continue.

  “Marry your men to our women, Alexander. Take a Persian bride yourself. You must not make whores of the daughters of Persia, but wives. It will work! In a single generation, the heirs of such unions will compose a freshly minted race, which cannot disown either of its progenitors without disowning itself.”

  In the meantime, Tigranes urges, I must not pursue Darius as a prize of conquest; rather, tender to him offices of reconciliation and accord. Restore him to his throne and make him my friend and ally. “Do not degrade the noble order of Persia, Alexander, but integrate her champions and commons into your corps-at-arms and from these—Persians and Macedonians alike—appoint men of integrity to administer your empire with justice.”

  He will raise a regiment of these Descendants, Tigranes pledges. “It will be my honor to assist at the nativity of this New World, and I swear to you, my lord, I can bring to its cause many and noble, whose despair would lift at once at such a prospect.”

  On the fourteenth day Parmenio arrives from Babylon. Somehow he has learned of my conversations with Tigranes. He conducts me aside like a father. Have I taken leave of my senses? The army of Macedon will not stand me treating Persians as equals. “Depart this site of folly at once, Alexander. Every hour you remain renders those who love you more anguished and distraught.”

  These are men of the East, Parmenio reminds me, of whom my illustrious tutor Aristotle admonished me:

  Behave to the Greeks like a leader, but to the barbarians like a master.

  And of whom the Spartan king Agesilaus, who knew them well, declared,

  They make good slaves but poor free men.

  “Dismiss this lunacy of interfusion, Alexander! These nobles of Persia, however nimbly they sit their horses, are incapable of self-rule. They are born to the courtier’s life; it is all they know, and all they ever will.”

  How do the Macedonians feel about the Persians? They despise them. They consider them less than women, with their trousers and their lockets of gold, and they conduct themselves toward them with insolence and contempt. Returning to the city, I must issue order and edict, and take it in person down to the level of captain and even sergeant, that these men we have defeated are not dogs; they are not to be beaten, or kicked out of the public way. But idleness and excess of cash have undone the army in other ways.

  On the twenty-seventh day I preside over games in honor of the fallen. Passing the Gate of Bel-Marduk in the aftercourse, I find the lane choked with soldiers, among whom I recognize the sergeant Gunnysack, who had made such a haul of treasure after Issus. He and his mates stand on line before a table manned by a street-corner banker, an achaemist.

  “What are you doing there, Gunnysack?” I hail, reining-in.

  “Standing in line, sire.”

  I tell him I can see that. “In line for what?”

  “Ain’t it like the cursed army, sir? Stand in line for chow, stand in line to piss, stand in line to get paid.”

  I see now that he is waiting to borrow from the achaemist. “Can you be out of money, Sergeant?” I recall to him that bonuses worth three years’ wages have been issued just twenty days past.

  “Gone, sire. All of it.” Gunnysack indicates the banker. “And we’re into these blackguards for half that again.”

  I order the sergeant and his mates to present themselves that evening for an accounting. It seems the whole army assembles, feigning nonchalance, outside my offices.

  In the corps of Macedon a squad of eight is called, as I have said, a litter. These fellows are the best of mates; they march together, pack their sarissas together, bunk, eat, and fight together. “And I see you have gone broke together.”

  “Aye,” Gunnysack confesses. His fellows, upon receiving their windfalls, took it upon themselves to “broaden their horizons.”

  “Spit it out, Sergeant.”

  “Well, sire, we wanted to see the town. So we needed a translator. You can understand that. And a guide to show us round.” The litter had found both in the same fellow, declared Gunnysack, and at quite a reasonable tariff. Then someone to refurbish the outfit, worn out on campaign. So, a tailor, a bootmaker, a haberdasher, to look spruce for the ladies. “Our guide’s brother-in-law was a money changer, which we needed to keep from getting fleeced—you see how these bastards are, sire. So he came too, and better still he knew the courtesans’ quarter. He showed us the ropes with the flute girls and day-raters. Good girls, just a bit down on their luck. We wanted to help ’em.”

  In the train of these trollops appear a perfumer, a cosmetician, a hairstylist. A barber for the men, who now look more like senators than sergeants. A bathhouse and bath master. All must dine, so a cook, a cook’s boy, baker, wine steward, pastry maker. Now a place to bunk. A villa on the river, a bargain, and it comes with chambermaids, a privy matron, doorman, and night porter. One cannot walk in this heat, so a carriage, and since such cabs cannot be counted upon to appear in some strange quarter at some even stranger hour, Gunnysack and his litter-mates hire the taxi full-time, with its driver and footman and a groom for the horses, who must be fed and stabled as well. Yes, they got robbed. Yes, they got looted. Yes, they bought land and livestock.

  “What, no racehorses?”

  “Only two, sire!”

  Three of the men have gotten married.

  “Don’t tell me. You’re supporting their families.”

  I cannot stay angry at my brothers and countrymen. But what can I do? I can’t award them grants of land; they’ll just convert them to cash from the syndicate agents and run through this second fortune as speedily as they’ve blown the first. The men like it here. They’re getting a taste for the easy life. Many even prattle of turning back—to Syria or Egypt, where they can throw their money around, or home, to pitch their yarns and set themselves up as petty lords. I issue a proclamation that duplicate bonuses will be paid to all, drachma for drachma, making up all that our fellows have squandered—but that the paymaster will set up his tables forty miles east down the road.

  In other words: We’re moving on, mates.

  The corps accepts this. They have heard rumors of even greater swag at Susa and Persepolis.

  Departing Babylon, I retain Mazaeus in the governorship he held beneath Darius. His treasurer, Bagophanes, I leave in place, beneath a Macedonian controller, and I keep on, as well, the chancellors Pharnaces and Adramates. The city, I garrison with veterans, mercenaries, and those whose military skills no longer fit in with the faster, more mobile corps I intend to employ in the campaigns to come.

  The city has come alive with our conquering army. The soldiers’ share of Darius’s treasure, passed by me to them and run through their hands to the population, has yielded abundance like a mighty silt-bearing river. This hoard of wealth has never seen daylight before; now the country is incandescent with it. Purses have never been so flush or times so gay. So that when, on the thirty-fourth day, our Macedonians pack up an
d pull out, as relieved as many of the natives are to see the occupying army decamp, so too are they made sad, as a great jolt of vitality goes out of their lives. They line the Royal Road, two million and more, hoarse with citation as the army marches out.

  The time ends with another clash between me and my commanders. Day thirty-three: We hold a memorial service, in which I order the ashes of Persian officers interred beneath a mound on the same site as those of the Macedonians. This is greeted with outrage by the corps. That night, our last in the city, I throw a feast for my officers in Darius’s great Banquet Hall, the one with the map of the empire on its marble and malachite floor.

  What infuriates my comrades is this: When eunuchs bar my door, and mates who have fought at my side across two continents must cool their heels and wait attendance. Black Cleitus cannot endure the sight of me in converse with Tigranes or Mazaeus or any Persian, and this night, drunk on date-palm wine, he stalks to the center of the room and explodes. “Will barbarians gain access to you before ourselves, Alexander? For I swear by the black breath of hell, I will not stand to see these trouser-wearing dandies pass through your door while I am held out.”

  I stride forward, offering my hand. “Cleitus, my friend. That right arm of yours preserved my life at the Granicus River. Can I forget that?”

  He evades my embrace, his glance shooting to others, seeking support. Clearly no few would give it, absent fear of me.

  “This is the East, Alexander. Its men are slaves and always have been. You wish to understand them? The thickest sergeant can make it plain. The place is corrupt! Each man steals from the man beneath him and pays off the man above. Treasure flows uphill to the king and each hand dips in the river as it passes by. That’s how it works. You will not change it. By Zeus, I would rather be a dog than one of these serfs or landsmen. And while you endeavor to turn these bootlickers into free men, passing your days sequestered with your purple-mantled servitors, those who love you and have shed their blood at your side go neglected. We are soldiers, Alexander, not courtiers. Let us be soldiers!”