Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  By advancing northwards, Alexander was putting his quartermasters under severe strain. Persian documents prove that the main roads out to the Oxus were equipped with post-houses at every stage of the journey so that officials could enjoy regular meals if they had the right credentials. Alexander's generals, then, could be sure of food whatever the landscape, but the men had their wagons and little else, for the traders who followed the army would not find it easy to offer them the customary market in a land of desert tribes and no cities. They were entering months of short rations where the army would survive best if divided, and there was also the problem of pay. The wonderfully lavish donations at Hamadan promised well for the future, but there is nothing to show how Alexander paid his men for the next six years. Some treasure, at least, seems to have accompanied him, and a travelling mint was used by later kings; the gold bullion for a year's army pay would not have been impossibly bulky to transport from Hamadan to India, and a currency of silver ingots, valued by weight, appears to have been used across upper Iran under the Persian kings. The troops could be paid in this raw metal, for the total finds of Alexander's coinage in upper Iran are not impressive, and the small units of everyday exchange are particularly rare. Plunder and payment in kind must have been extremely important, although we hear most about them only in later Roman narratives, and perhaps the men served for a promise of huge rewards on returning home. But the amounts and availability of money can never be calculated, and a crucial side to the king and his soldiers' relationship is an insoluble mystery. At standard rates, which Alexander no doubt improved, the next six yean were immensely expensive; the treasury could stand them, but even if the methods of their funding are unknown, and likely to remain so, its intricacies and accounting should not be forgotten.

  For eleven days Alexander led a force picked for its mobility northwards at furious speed from Hamadan; as Arab caravans later allowed nine days for the journey, he must have turned off the main road, perhaps hoping to catch Darius down a sidetrack. Disappointed, he returned to the Royal Road and rode into Rhagae where he rested for five days; many soldiers had already dropped out exhausted and several horses had been galloped to death.

  It was stragglers once more who revealed what had happened. Two Babylonians, one of them Mazaeus's son, gave news of the arrest of Darius, and with a few picked horsemen Alexander at once raced eastwards to overtake the traitors. After two days' reckless gallop, resting only in the afternoon heat, he had reached Darius's last known camp on the edge of the Dasht-i-Kavir: Darius, he heard, had been stowed in a wagon and hustled as if for Shahroud by murderers who would abandon him in the last resort. Any time saved in the desert could prove decisive, so the fittest light infantry were mounted on horseback and ordered to follow a bold short cut across its fringes. Between dusk and dawn, forty miles of the salt-waste were covered, and at last as the morning heat began to take hold, a convoy of carts was to be seen in the green distance, shambling eastwards down the main road near modern Damghan. For the last time, the horses stumbled into a canter, enough at least to raise a dust and scare their unsuspecting prey. Only sixty men were at Alexander's side as the convoy was halted and the carts stripped for inspection. But search though they might, Darius was nowhere to be found.

  Wearily, a Macedonian officer strayed to look for water by the roadside; searching, he came upon a mud-daubed wagon, abandoned by its team-He looked inside, and there lay a corpse, bound in the golden chains which signified a Persian king: like Yazdagird III, last of the Sassanid dynasty, in flight from the Arab invaders a thousand years later, Darius III, last of the Achaemenid kings, had been stabbed and deserted by his

  own courtiers. Only in legend was he left enough breath to greet his discoverer and command Alexander's nobility. Serving officers insisted, conveniently, that Darius had died before Alexander could see him. The assassins had fled too far to be caught.

  Left with his enemy's dead body, Alexander behaved remarkably. He stripped off his own cloak and wrapped it round the corpse. Darius was to be taken to Persepolis for a proper royal burial. The Persian prisoners were interviewed and the nobles were separated for release: the grand-daughter of Darius's royal predecessor was restored to her husband, a local aristocrat, and within days, Darius's own brother was enrolled as a Macedonian Companion. And yet, alive, Darius had been denounced as Alexander's enemy, 'who began their enmity in the first place', who 'would regain his family and his possessions only if he surrendered and pleaded on their behalf: it was a complete change of tone, and the soldiery must have watched it with amazement. Hugely generous gifts from the treasure captured with the convoy were distributed to reassure them.

  By the death and capture of Darius, Alexander saw himself made heir to the empire which he had formerly come to punish. But the kingship of Persia was not to be assumed lightly; its roots went deep into history, and like the empire's government it had drawn freely on the background of its subject peoples. Alexander was about to succeed to traditions which he had already affronted. He would never come to terms with them, but it is important to realize what their example meant, and why he could not do them justice.

  If Greeks had long denounced the Persian monarchy as slavish, and even explained it in terms of Asia's enfeebling climate, it was nonetheless a commendably versatile government. 'The Persians', Herodotus had written, 'admit foreign customs more readily than any other men', and the more that is known of them the more he is proved right. Two hundred years before Alexander, they had overthrown the empire of the Medes and annexed the ancient civilization of Babylon, but in each case they had availed themselves of their subjects' experience. From the Medes, they had acquired the arts of courtly comfort and secluded kingship, besides a legacy in language and architecture which is only now beginning to be recovered: from Babylon and Assyria, they had borrowed the ancient royal myths, whether the Tree of Life or the slaying of the Winged Lion of evil, which gave such sanctity to Persepolis, while at a humbler level, they had absorbed the law and bureaucracy for which their own illiterate pastoral life had not equipped them. As always, new needs had been met internationally: scribes from Babylon and Susa had kept the king's accounts in a language he could not speak, Greeks had served as his doctors, sculptors, interpreters and dancers, Carians and Phoenicians had manned his navy; the Magi of the Medes had managed his prayers and sacrifices, at least initially, while garrison service in the satrapies had brought Indians to Babylon, men from the Oxus to Egypt, Greek sailors to the Persian Gulf and Bactrians from outer Iran to Asia Minor. But skills and government service were not the end of this exchange.

  Moving west to rule in foreign Babylonia, the Persian nobility had freely intermarried with their subjects. Within two generations, the native business documents are rich in mixed Persian and Babylonian names, while even among the nobility, a Persian might marry a Jewess, an Armenian or an Egyptian and have his marriage legally witnessed by Babylonians, Arabs or Hebrews. Under Persian rule Babylonia had become a land of half-castes, while even the Persian king had been known to maintain a Babylonian mistress. In the capitals of the Empire, in Memphis no less than Babylon, there were foreign quarters named after the nationality of their inhabitants, exactly as in the cities of Alexander and the Greek kings which succeeded them, but these segregated areas had not isolated one people from another and Persian Babylon, especially, was an integrated world. This integration did not stop at marriage: at the Persian court it can still be detected in the carvings of Persepolis, an accurate record of the Persian empire's officials. The Royal Guards of the private palace quarters are all of them Persians, distinguished by their gold spear-butts and commanded by Persian Staff Bearers. But immediately outside, in the public halls and along the grand staircases, the staff-bearers are often Medes, while Median spearmen are mixed with subjects from Susa, scat of the old Elamite empire, in the nine other 'thousands' of the Immortal Guards, who serve as the elite troops of the king. With the court police, the pattern is even more impressive. The king e
mployed Whip-bearers who controlled the crowds when he processed in public; besides their whips of office, they carry carpets and the royal chair, proof that they also supervised the king's comfort. And yet, at Persepolis, every one of these high officials is shown by his cape and spherical headdress to be a Mede; just as Medes supervise the king's footstool, so Median grooms arrange for his horses, while Elamites from Susa attend to his chariots. Half the envoys from the empire are ushered in to the king by Persian ushers, half by Medes; before the King, the Steward of the Household makes his report, bowing slightly in audience, and yet he, the highest court official, is a Medc. The Persians had not excluded the peoples whose empires they supplanted: from the natives of Susa, they had recruited scribes and foot-guards, as well as borrowing the style of their pleated robes and mantles, their daggers, bow cases and buttoned shoes. From the Medes, well known for their use of cosmetics, their gaily coloured trousers, earrings and high-heeled boots, they had attracted officials to make their court comfortable and to maintain their king in properly secluded style.

  Without this Persian background Alexander's own plans for government have been made to seem unnecessarily radical. Already in summer 330 there were signs that the wisdom of such integration was no more lost on him than on his Persian predecessors: he was reappointing Orientals to the satrapies east of Babylon, where they knew the language and the tribesmen, and even the most conservative Greek pamphleteer had advised such a policy to Philip, fighting the Greeks' crusade; he had maintained Persians as Honoured Friends around him; he now respected the dead Darius, just as Darius's ancestors had once respected the kings they replaced, whether live or dead. To administer his conquests he needed the same expertise as the Persians before him, both locally in Babylonia, where taxes passed through a complex sequence of collectors and canton officials, and also at the seats of government, Susa or Hamadan, where the silent majority of supply officers, treasurers, foremen, land agents and accountants had long served the Persian nobility, entirely ignored by Greek historians. Local documents prove that under Persian rule as many as 1,350 labourers from the treasury could be despatched on a single consignment from Persepolis, while a backlog of work could keep scribes up to six years behind with receipts and registrations. Like the Persians, Alexander would surely reappoint this foreign bureaucracy and workforce of serfs, if only for the sake of his taxes and supplies: what he did for the chancellery, he should now do, logically, for his court, and as the Persians had once treated the Medes, so now he should go on to treat the Persians.

  But the sequence was not so smooth as it sounded. On his own side stood the veterans of thirty years' fighting, brought up under Philip and often resentful of Greeks, let alone of Orientals. They had not spent their youth with friends who could speak Persian or with tutors who wrote on the Magi. They wanted power for themselves, treasure and perhaps an end to their marching. They had not expected to share their monarchy, any more than the Greeks had expected their crusader to become the Persian King. Educated Greeks had shown no more fondness for the idea of the barbarian than for that of the lower classes: there were Macedonian officers who might feel likewise, especially if Alexander threatened their status with Orientals.

  Their agreement would only be hastened by the features of Persian kingship, for if the Persian court was a mixed society, the king himself was set above it in venerable seclusion. Access to him was controlled by Staff Bearers and Chamberlains, and during an audience the visitor's hands were to be kept strictly inside his cape. It was believed by Greeks that no man could be admitted unless he had first washed and dressed in white raiment; certainly, it was death for a subject to sit on the King's golden throne or walk down the royal carpet. Once admitted, he brought his hands to his lips in a respectful gesture which Greeks reserved for their gods, while suppliants or the very humblest classes also went down on their knees. During the court's official dinners, the king dined behind a veil in the company of his wife, mother and royal brothers: he drank specially boiled water, ate a cake of barley and only took wine from an egg-shaped cup of gold. Members of the court might even set aside food from their table as an offering to his revered spirit. Throughout the king's lifetime, a royal fire was kept alight in his honour and only dowsed when he died: at his funeral, his surviving staff-bearers were killed beside his pyre. Though not worshipped as a living god, he was the chosen and protected favourite of Ahura-Mazda and he dressed to suit his majesty. He rode in an ornate chariot, pulled by white horses; his tunic was striped with white and purple and worn beneath the robe of gold embroidery reputed to be worth 12,000 talents; his necklace and bracelets were gold; he was shaded by a parasol and accompanied by a fly-whisk, while his headdress was smooth and rounded, like a tall but brimless top-hat; his shoes were padded and dyed pale saffron, without buckles or buttons and his girdle was woven of pure gold thread. He moved like a god among men, distant but lonely and often insecure.

  However respectful of the dead Darius, Alexander could never compete with this religious aura. His officers would not understand it, and already after Gaugamela, his publicity was flouting it deliberately: his coinage from mints in western Asia showed a lion-griffin, Persian symbol of chaos and evil, but so far from being stabbed, as at Persepolis, by the Persian king, the griffin was itself shown slaying Persians, a direct reversal of their royal myth. When a Persian king took the throne, he attended Pasargadae, site of King Cyrus's tomb, and dressed in a rough leather uniform to eat a ritual meal of figs, sour milk and leaves of terebinth. This ancient ceremony recalled old legends of Cyrus's youth in the once nomadic society of Persia; after his meal, the new king even assumed King Cyrus's cloak. Alexander knew from Greek authors and Persian friends how Cyrus's memory was revered by Persians, and soon he would show a concern for Cyrus in his own publicity. But only in his Romance is he said to have issued a proclamation to all Persians as the new King of Asia that he would

  maintain their traditions as before. He is not known to have learnt to speak Persian fluently and although he soon employed eastern Magi, he never ordered this traditional royal ceremony for himself. He was a foreigner who had burnt Persepolis and he could not understand such old nomadic rituals. But the rituals were to survive long after his achievements had been forgotten.

  However, he was also approaching outer Iran where a due measure of tradition would be expected of any claimant to the Persian kingship. In the process Alexander might offend his elderly generals, but it ought to be possible to compromise between Macedonian scruples and Oriental expectations. Had he been feeble or unimaginative, he would never have tried. He was neither, and within weeks his court was alive with gossip and conjecture.

  First he made sure of his circumstances. Leaving the site of Darius's murder, he returned to the main body of his troops and after a short rest led them up from the edges of the desert to the passes of the Elburz mountains, heading north for the Caspian Sea through forests of oak and chestnut, hill ravines and the lairs of wolves and tigers. Darius's courtiers and the Greek troops who had served him to the end were known to have fled to these thickets for refuge. Within a week, the former Vizier, one of Darius's murderers, had promised surrender in return for a pardon which was later attributed to the charms of his accompanying eunuch. The pardon belonged to a less self-indulgent policy, whereby those who surrendered should be spared, for Alexander began by caring less for the punishment of Darius's murderers than for the luring of Persian nobles out from the forests on to his staff, where they could help with the problems of language and government. The eunuch was indeed a figure to be respected, for of all the finds in the months near the Caspian, none was to prove more precious or remarkable; with Bagoas the Persian, Alexander began an affair which lasted for life.

  The name Bagoas was rich in recent and unpleasant memories; some ten years earlier, a Bagoas, also a eunuch, had made his name as a Persian general in Egypt and then served in western Asia where he had sent Hermeias, Aristotle's first patron to his death. He had then poison
ed Darius's predecessor and made Darius king, only to be poisoned himself, some said, by way of thanks; his famous tree park at Babylon had now been bestowed upon Parmenion. But Alexander's Bagoas is said to have been young and extremely handsome - a list of Alexander's officers honours 'Baguas, son of a certain Phamuches', who perhaps had connections with the hellenized coast of Asia. If so, he might have been bilingual and was probably no more than a young court eunuch beloved for his airs and graces. What Hephaistion thought of him can only be imagined, for the high importance of Bagoas was left in decent silence by Alexander's friends. So the most startling of all Alexander's intimates is also the least known, but his role must not be played down; a willing source of Persian information, he was also the bluntest proof that Alexander found Orientals' company congenial, and within weeks, Bagoas could be seen as the earliest sign of new times.

  Continuing to lure supporters from the wilds, Alexander offered terms of new employment to the 1,500 Greek mercenaries who had stayed devotedly beside Darius. First, they argued; then they took up the suggested bargain, which still recognized Alexander as allied Leader. Those who had joined Persia before Philip had declared war were to be left free, while those who had fought against the decrees of the Greek allies were to enlist in Alexander's army at the same rate of pay. Rich and unchallenged, Alexander had moved far from the massacre of Greek 'rebels' at the Granicus; he then left briefly to hunt out the surrounding hill tribes; for one glorious moment, they managed to ambush Bucephalas, but a furious threat of devastation from Alexander caused them to surrender and give the horse back. This brusque treatment of the mountain tribesmen could only have impressed his new Persian friends, for their kings' authority had long foundered against such inaccessible peoples.