Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  “What?” asks Telamon. “Hand over the crown?”

  “That, his betrayers had already taken. Perhaps just to keep running.”

  We have gawked enough. It is unseemly. I order the body bathed and wrapped; we will bear it to the queen mother, for burial at Persepolis in the Tomb of Kings. I read the question in the sergeants’ eyes. “Carry him on a litter,” I say, “swathed in my cloak. Treat his remains as you would my own.”

  Reunited with the army at Hecatompylus, I am seized with a melancholy beyond any I have known. The next challenge, clearly, will be reframing for the corps the object of the expedition. Darius dead, they’ll believe the chore over. They’ll want to go home. I can forestall unrest temporarily by pursuit of Bessus, who will doubtless back his pretense to the throne by raising another army farther east. But beyond that, what? How?

  Still, my despair is past this. I beg the company’s indulgence; I ask to be left alone, save Hephaestion, Craterus, and Telamon.

  In my quarters with them, I am too stricken to speak, even to drink. I read apprehension in my friends’ eyes. They fear for my state of mind. Each tries by turns to put words to my despondency, as if by defining and articulating it, they can free me from its grip.

  “It’s a terrible thing, the death of a king,” offers Craterus. “A world ends.”

  Telamon: “One realizes he’s just a man. He bleeds like us, and dies like us.”

  “And if one is a king himself,” Hephaestion adds, “he cannot help but read in his fellow monarch’s end his own.”

  No. That’s not it.

  My mate continues. “For one of your noble temperament, Alexander, the evil here may be not so much the fact of Darius’s death as the way he met it. Murdered by his own men, in chains, on the run.”

  He notes further that had we taken Darius alive, the continuity of the empire could more easily have been maintained; the king could have performed such rituals and offices as would be unbecoming, enacted by a Macedonian. His perpetuation, as titular lord of Persia beneath my sway, would have taken the pressure off me and off the army.

  “We have lost our enemy,” Craterus assays. “The object of our exertions is gone—and we have nothing to set in his place.”

  A silence succeeds.

  “Success,” says Telamon, “is the weightiest burden of all. We are victors now. All our dreams have come true.”

  “That too is a death,” Hephaestion agrees. “Perhaps the sternest of all.”

  The night trails and wanes.

  “Forgive me, my friends,” I say, breaking the silence at last. “Go to your rest. I am all right.”

  It takes minutes to convince them, and minutes more to get them out the door. When I crack the portal, I glimpse thousands, banked about the building in alarm for my state.

  I catch Hephaestion’s arm.

  “It’s him,” I say. “Just that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Darius. I wanted to talk to him. To hear his views. He is the only man, do you see, who has occupied the pinnacle on which I now must stand.”

  My mate searches my eyes. Am I truly well?

  “I wanted so much,” I say, “to make him my friend.”

  Thirty

  PAGES

  A YEAR PASSES. Our arms continue all-victorious. Half again as much territory has been brought into subjection since Gaugamela as in all the prior campaigns. But the glory has gone out of it. The glory and the legitimacy.

  I have felt it for months in my own tent, among the Royal Pages. With Darius’s death, the object of our expedition has been accomplished. We have plundered Persia’s capital and razed her palace, symbol of crimes committed against Greece and Macedon in the past. It is over. The king is dead.

  Our force pursues the pretender Bessus now; he wears the royal tiara and calls himself Lord of Asia. We have entered the Afghan kingdoms. Half my original corps has been released with honor. Our superb Thessalian cavalry: All eight squadrons have been sent home with fortunes. Seven thousand Macedonian infantry have taken their bonuses and discharges. League allies and many of the mercenaries have been told off as well, with more treasure than they can carry. Their places are taken by volunteers of their own units, electing to stay on for pay, and by new arrivals from home and from Asia Minor. The autumn after Darius’s death, three thousand Lydian cavalry and infantry join us; in winter we pick up another thousand Syrian horse and eight thousand foot from Syria and Lycia. Eager volunteers pour in from Greece and Macedon. Why not? I’ve got all the money in the world. At Zadracarta in Hyrcania, the regiment trained by Tigranes comes out to us; for the first time the corps has a unit entirely Persian. We have Egyptian lancers now, and Bactrian, Parthian, and Hyrcanian cavalry. Noble Persians, abhorring the usurper Bessus, make their tokens and come in. I welcome the mercenary Patron and his fifteen hundred professionals formerly in Darius’s service. The army brims with new faces and new corps-at-arms. We need them, chasing Bessus across these deserts and mountains.

  The administrative staff of the empire as I now reconstitute it is nine-tenths Persian (who else can run so vast and alien an enterprise?), including Artabazus, Barsine’s father (whom I first knew as a boy at Pella, when he took refuge with Memnon at my father’s court), and the noble Autophradates, both of whom, having fought for Darius with exceptional loyalty, have come in and been appointed by me to governors’ posts. And I have attached to my School of Pages a number of youths of the Persian nobility, including Artabazus’s son Cophen, two of Tigranes’ lads, and three of Mazaeus’s. In all, eleven of forty-nine. Another seven are Egyptian, Syrian, Median. I am not so blind as not to reckon the uproar this must incite, but, I confess, I overestimate my capacity to contain it.

  What has happened is this. For each foreign Page I take on, I must exclude a Macedonian. This produces disgruntlement at home, as each spurned family takes its son’s rejection as an affront to honor, and in camp, as my countrymen perceive me to favor aliens. Further, Pages take lovers. This is a fact of life. These lads, thirteen and fourteen when they come out from Macedon, are readily seduced by high-ranking officers ten and twenty years their senior. Sex is the least of it. Politics is all. Pages arrive from home already acquainted with the officers who will become their mentors; this is often not only known to the lads’ fathers but encouraged and even insisted upon by them. Such bonds yoke families. Thus boys acquire champions for their careers; as Cleitus was lover to Philip when he was a Page (which in no small measure contributed to his subsequent appointment as commander of the Royal Squadron), so he now takes a Page named Angelides as his protégé. Each Page gives his mentor a seat, so to say, within my tent.

  All is well, as long as I include only Macedonians. The introduction of foreigners overturns the cart. Macedonian officers refuse to take these outlanders under their care (as the boys themselves are terrified of the Macedonians). Worse are the consequences of perceived preferential treatment. Let me show favor to a son of Tigranes; Cleitus and every other homegrown now fear their own lads have been disesteemed, and they bear this hard.

  Money magnifies all ills. It is one thing to succeed, and another to succeed on the scale that we have. The fault is mine. I have failed to produce a vision for the army grand enough to replace the one lost with the death of Darius. And in pursuing the object of Persian-Macedonian amity, I have gone too far, in Macedonian eyes, in adopting customs and fashions of the foe.

  To make up for this, I load my countrymen with riches. Aretes’ valor at Gaugamela I reward with five hundred talents; the fortune I bestow upon Menidas would dwarf the treasury of Agamemnon. Installing Parmenio as governor at Ecbatana, I give him a bed of gold. To my mother at home I send galleys of frankincense and carnelian, cinnamon and cassia. She chides me by return post.

  Alexander from Olympias, greetings.

  My son, your largesse has made petty kings out of once-exemplary officers. Your gifts to your friends, however well intentioned, produce consequences that cannot help y
ou. You are corrupting them. For now each fancies himself a lord, and his kin at home put on airs and exalt their expectations. Each general you so favor exaggerates his contributions to your victories and believes himself not only indispensable but also slighted and passed over when you honor others before him. Their skins grow thin. They pout and sulk. And their wives and kin at home aggravate this by their correspondence. The more you give, my son, the more you enflame their ambition. Ptolemy wants Egypt; Seleucus covets Babylon. Who are these dwarves to indulge such fancies, who would be nothing without you?

  From the same letter:

  When they were starving, your officers were a corps of comrades. But now each has grown touchy and quick to take insult. They are no longer mates, but rivals. You give them so much money, you make them independent of you. Give them land, my son, or women or horses. Grant them provinces, but don’t give them gold. Gold buys adherents; it turns good men arrogant and bad men ungovernable.

  I have enemies now within my own tent. Those whose charge it is to serve and protect me become spies with interests divergent from my own. It is not the Pages who hatch plots, but my own officers, as long-dormant rivalries reemerge, and each, in fear of the others, schemes to strike and preempt.

  I know your heart, my son. It is too kind. The love you bear toward your mates blinds you to their capacity for perfidy. Success has made each jealous of his place and each fearful of the other’s depredations. Your tent has become a royal court, like it or not, and your warriors flatterers and sycophants.

  One night in the Afghan kingdoms a Royal Page, in great agitation, breaks in upon me in my bath. A plot has been hatched against my life, the lad declares. His mate has reported this to Philotas some days past, expecting Philotas to carry the account to me at once. Philotas has not.

  I convene the council of Macedones. Philotas is brought in, bound. His father Parmenio is six hundred miles west, in command of the treasury at Ecbatana. I command Philotas to offer his defense. The plot, he says, was too trivial to report. A joke. He did not take it seriously.

  “Thou villain!” roars Craterus. “You dare play dense before the king!”

  Fourteen Pages are interrogated. Nine have mentors, officers of the Companions and the Royal Guard; every boy comes from a princely family back home. They all lie through their teeth.

  “Torture them,” says Ptolemy. “As we would an enemy at war.”

  All night I meet with my core commanders, Hephaestion and Craterus, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Coenus, Seleucus, with Eumenes, Telamon, and Love Locks. “I will not,” I declare, “try these boys on the wheel.”

  “Then pack them home,” enjoins Perdiccas. Disgrace will finish them, he means, as surely as execution.

  I am in despair at the fact of treachery. “By Zeus, I wish we had never won this war! I would rather have taken a spear in the guts than live to see those I love plot against my life!”

  I dread too the discovery of Philotas’s guilt. “What will you do,” Hephaestion asks, “about Parmenio?”

  I cannot execute the son and let the father live. No king can.

  And Parmenio has power. I have made him governor of Media; he commands at Ecbatana now, with twenty thousand troops, many of whom revere him, and the royal treasury, 180,000 talents.

  I order Philotas racked. He cracks with the first bone. Seven are implicated. The council deliberates less than twenty minutes. All will be put to death.

  What will I do about Parmenio?

  Thirty- One

  THE AGONY OF RULE

  ALL DAY AND NIGHT SUCCEEDING THE TORTURE of Philotas, I confer with my generals in my headquarters at Phrada. Hephaestion: true as the sun. Craterus: more mine than his own. Telamon: loyal to his own code, but a code that sanctions no treachery. Perdiccas loves the king; Coenus, Ptolemy, Seleucus the commander. Cleitus burns so hot, he can blurt nothing but the truth. Beyond these, and Eumenes and Peucestas, I trust no one.

  “No man speaks the truth to a king.” The hour is late and I am drunk. “And the greater the king, the less the candor. Who dares utter, ‘You err, sire’? This was always our strength, we of Macedon. Our tongues were rough but true. A man rose before Philip and spoke his mind. My friends, you have done so, always, with me. No longer.

  “What do the men say of me? I need not hear to know. ‘Alexander has changed. Conquest has corrupted him. He is not the man we loved.’ Why? Because I lead them from triumph to triumph? Because I deliver the wide world into their arms? Because I lade them with treasure and send them home propped on pillows?”

  I am ranting. I see it in my mates’ eyes. Ptolemy is the keenest of my marshals. “Alexander, may I state the peril as I see it?”

  “Please do.”

  I have been pacing. I take my seat.

  “And, brothers”—Ptolemy turns to his fellow generals—“call me to book if I speak false, but second me if I tell true.”

  He turns to me.

  “My friend, each of us fears you now.”

  I am struck, as by a blow.

  “It is true, Alexander. Believe it. Every officer feels the same.”

  I scan my comrades’ faces. “But how, my friends? Why?”

  “We fear you—and one another. For now it seems you, who were once our mate and comrade, have ascended to the firmament. We dreamt as brothers all our lives to unseat the Lord of Asia. Now you have become him.”

  “But I am not, Ptolemy. I am who I was.”

  “No! How can you be?” His gesture takes in the chamber in which we convene. It has been Darius’s. “By the gods, look at this place! The pillars are cedar; the vault is ivory.”

  “But it is still us beneath.”

  “No, Alexander.” I see it takes all his courage to continue. “I speak with candor, hazarding your displeasure. What if you take my words ill? Tomorrow you seize my corps and give it to Seleucus. . . .”

  “Can you believe me capable of such inconstancy?”

  The room falls silent.

  Philotas.

  My countrymen are thinking of our former mate, in chains, awaiting execution. And more. His kin and comrades throughout the army: Amyntas Andromenes and his brothers Simmias, Attalus, Polemon; my own bodyguard Demetrius; thirty captains; a hundred lieutenants. Must I take all their lives? And that of Philotas’s father, Parmenio, as well?

  Perdiccas speaks. Next to Craterus, he is my toughest general.

  “Alexander, we confer as brothers here. No blame obtains. We seek solutions. Ptolemy spoke; I envied his courage.” A moment, then: “The men say this of you: that you believe yourself a god. . . .”

  I make to protest. Perdiccas’s urgency overrides me.

  “I dismiss this,” he says. “We all do. But here is the point, Alexander, and it is freighted with even graver peril: In the truest sense, you have become a god. You have wrought that which no man believed or even dreamed.” He indicates his fellow generals. “Each of us owns pride, each knows his gifts, each believes himself capable of greatness. Yet all concur: No one could have achieved what you have. Not your father. Not one of us; not all of us together. Not any man, or men, who ever lived. Only you could have done it.” He meets my eye. “We fear you, Alexander. We love and fear you, and know no longer how to act before you.”

  “Perdiccas,” I say, “you break my heart.”

  “And this is not the keenest woe. That is, our fear makes us conspire. We cannot help it. I speak to Ptolemy apart. ‘If they come for my head, will you take my cause?’ We ask one another, Shall we act preemptively? Must we strike, before another strikes us?”

  My vision blurs. Tears sheet. “Gladly would I have perished before hearing such words.”

  “They are true,” Craterus confirms. “We are in hell.”

  Once, when I was a boy, I broke in upon my father in his study as he composed a letter. His Pages sought to chase me, but Philip overrode them and called me in to his side. When he had finished writing, he handed me the roll to read. It was addressed to a certain ally
and was to be delivered by one of the princes of Philip’s court; beneath the valediction were these instructions: “Kill the man who brings this letter.”

  When I had read and absorbed this, Philip, who had risen and begun dressing for the evening’s entertainment, gave me to know that he would soon be going downstairs to meet that very man, whose end this letter commanded, as well as the man’s father and brother. I was appalled and asked how he would act toward the man. “I will laugh and drink with him,” Philip declared, “and make him believe we are the best of mates.”

  Parmenio chanced to enter then, fitted out for the evening’s ball. He alone of my father’s generals eschewed dress armor, the lightweight stuff, for banquets and such; no matter how unmilitary the occasion, he always wore field plate. I admired him for this. He crossed now to my father; the pair embraced: I felt the love and respect between them. Then Parmenio saw that I held the letter. Clearly he was aware of its contents and reckoned now that Philip had opened it to me. He stepped before me. “Alexander,” he said, and nothing more. It was an acknowledgment, I felt, of a kind of passage.

  Ten years later, when Philip was assassinated and I acceded to the throne, I dispatched such a letter to Parmenio, instructing him to take into custody and put to death his son-in-law Attalus for complicity. He did.

  Ten more years have passed. This time I write to Parmenio different letters, dispatching them on racing camels (to beat the news of Philotas’s execution), borne by mates dear to him, so as not to excite his suspicions. While he reads these letters, his friends, at my orders, will take his life.

  “To be royal,” Sisygambis has said, “is to tread barefoot upon the razor’s edge.”

  Thirty- Two

  BADLANDS

  THE LANGUAGE OF AFGHANISTAN IS DARI. Dari and five thousand others. Every tribe has its own tongue, and each is indecipherable alongside every other. But then you know this, Itanes. This is your country; it is here I fought your father and married your sister.