Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Reunited, Alexander and his troops marched down the mountain slopes to Zadracarta, Gurgan's capital, close to the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. He had entered the lush jungle of a tropical landscape, abounding in supplies and freshened by the luxury of summer rains: no Greek had seen it before, and his officers were suitably impressed: they noted its silver firs, its sappy oak-trees, and the precipices by the seashore, over which the 'rivers poured, leaving room for the natives to feast and sacrifice in the caves below, basking in the sun-light and looking up at the water passing harmlessly above, while before them, stretched the sea and a shore so damp that it was grassy and alive with flowers'. The sea itself was no less intriguing. By command of the first King Darius, it had been explored two hundred years before by Scylax, a sailor from Caria, whose small boat had reached its northern shores and proved that another land-mass lay beyond. The facts were not well known in Greece, though Aristotle could have told them to his former pupil, and as many believed that the Outer Ocean of the world flowed round the northern coast of Asia, Alexander now wondered whether the Caspian was perhaps a gulf of Ocean. For the first time, he had the sensation of standing at a possible edge of the world, and whether or not such excitements mattered to him, at the end of his life he would return to a plan to discover its truth. His followers, meanwhile, had tasted the Caspian's water and noted its extreme sweetness, still manifest today; they were also amused by the number of its small water-snakes. But they left its extent uncertain, and for fifteen days they relaxed at Zadracarta while Alexander sacrificed to his customary gods and held the first athletic games the people of Gurgan had ever witnessed. During that fortnight two events are reported, the one as romantic as the other was momentous.

  To the shore of the Caspian, it was said, came the Queen of the Amazons, accompanied by 300 women whom she prudently left outside the Macedonian camp. Single-breasted and trained in war, she told Alexander she wished to bear his child. Bagoas notwithstanding, 'the passion of the woman, being keener than the King's, made him spend thirteen days in satisfying her desires'. But none of Alexander's staff historians was prepared to support this disputed story, not even his chief court usher who might have admitted the queen to his presence, and it must therefore be dismissed as a legend. The Greeks had long located the Amazons near the Black Sea, not without reason as the tribes there were matriarchal and ruled by women. But the Black Sea was hundreds of miles away from the Caspian, and the visit of the Amazon queen was invented by two historians who had first confused this geography. Perhaps a nearby queen did call on the camp; certainly, the Amazons were too famous for romantics to admit that Alexander had not received them.

  Though spared an affair with an Amazon, Alexander had not been sitting idle. At Zadracarta, Persian noblemen continued to join him from their refuges in the Elburz foothills: some of them were former satraps; one, Artabazus, was a former guest-friend of Philip's court. Father of Barsine, Alexander's Persian mistress taken at Issus, he brought no less than seven sons, the interpreters and minor officials of the future. The policy of free pardons and the affair with Barsine had usefully added to Alexander's growing stock of Orientals. This same pool of Persian collaborators remained central to his plans for his Empire throughout his life. It was prudent and polite to make this new nobility feel at home, and in conversation, they would have discussed what they had always known in the days of a Persian king. Alexander hesitated no longer; as Darius's heir and Bagoas's admirer, he began to wear certain parts of the Persian royal costume.

  It is important to realize exactly how he did it. He refused such Median excesses as the royal trousers or sleeved overcoat and he is never known to have worn the rounded tiara or royal headdress. He contented himself with the purple-and-white striped tunic, the girdle and the head-ribbon or diadem which had formerly been worn by the king and by his Royal Relations. Now, the diadem was confined to the king alone and cither worn round his purple Macedonian hat or on occasions wound round his bare head. His Companions were given similar purple hats and cloaks bordered with purple, like the official Wearers of the Purple at the Persian court; they were invited to adorn their horses with ornate Persian harness and saddlery. Henceforward access to Alexander was controlled, as in Persia, by ushers and Staff Bearers, whose chief officer was the Greek Chares from Lesbos, presumably bilingual, who later wrote colourful memoirs. Darius's concubines are also said to have been reinstated, 'three hundred and sixty-five in all', according to the Greeks, who liked to number Persian habits as equal to the days in the Babylonian year which they followed. The concubines are never mentioned again and they are unlikely to have been at hand in the wilds of the Caspian Sea. But sooner or later, no doubt, Alexander did recruit them.

  Such a rearrangement was bound to cause comment. 'It was now', wrote his Roman historian, four hundred years later, 'that Alexander gave public rein to his passions and turned his continence and self-control to haughtiness and dissipation.' This well-worn theme entirely missed the point, for Alexander was not even the first Greek king to have worn the diadem or Persian dress. For the past sixty years, the tyrants of Syracuse in Sicily had successively taken it up, not because of any connection with Persia, but because they believed, wrongly, that the Persian king was thought to be a living god, and they too wished to be seen by their dress to represent the god Zeus on earth. These nuances of religion must not be discounted for the casual Greek observer who now saw Alexander in a diadem and knew already how he emphasized his relationship with Zeus. They were not a part of Alexander's purpose: that was political, but nonetheless modest. He had refused the showiest Persian clothing because his officers would resent it, and he only intended to wear the remainder in the presence of Orientals. But by the diadem alone he set a lasting fashion: it would be worn by his Successors, when each laid claim to his Asian heritage, and 150 years after his death it was still being imitated by the distant Greek kings of Bactria, cut off from the West in outer Iran. He himself is said to have called it 'the spoils of victory', but it was also a concession to his new position: as a king, not the agent of Greek revenge, he was bound for the heartland of Iranian tribes and he had assumed for sparing use a part of the costume to which his subjects were accustomed. After three heavy victories, these few Persian customs may seem an irrelevant gesture. But more were to follow, and even these few mattered: when Julius Caesar planned to invade the Parthian empire in Alexander's footsteps, there were those at Rome who wished him, as a fit precaution, to be attired in the diadem and Persian costume before he even entered Asia.

  To Alexander's staff these changes told of new ambitions. Alexander had already talked of conquering Asia, but as heirs of Darius, they now saw that Asia would mean the whole Persian empire and that they could not turn back until this much, at least, had been made their own. It would be a hard march, for Alexander had set his heart on two kingdoms, and a detail from his chancellery made this all too clear. Letters, as always, needed his daily attention, but no longer did he head them with the forms of polite greeting, except when writing to Antipater and to Phocion, a trusted Athenian politician; elsewhere, throughout, he used the royal 'we', the title of an absolute monarch. Letters which were bound for Europe he sealed with his former ring, but those which referred to Asia were stamped with the ancient seal of the Persian kings.

  Such ambitions would not have developed unless Alexander had tested his ground. Three weeks before, he had been awaiting the rest of his army after Darius's capture near Damghan; he was tired and he had just received news that his brother-in-law, Alexander, King of Epirus, had died in battle in southern Italy. He rested his men for mourning by the road which led to Khavar; for three days they encamped in a fortress which they renamed Hecatompylos, 'city of a hundred gates', because of its position on the local roads. A century later, the fortress had grown to become the earliest capital of the Parthian empire, and though many had searched for its famous site, it was not until 1966 that the disputed measurements of Alexander's own surveyors helped
in its rediscovery. Three miles south of the road to the Caspian Gates stand a group of tall mounds at Shah-i-Qumis, thrown into clifflike prominence by the flatness of their arid plain. To the north and west rise the distant peaks of the Elburz mountains, but on all other sides the landscape is bare to a treeless plateau and the salt waste desert of Dasht-i-Kavir. It was here that Alexander assembled his troops and asked them for silence beneath the July sun. In the Hundred-gated city he told his men of their many past victories, of the need to follow up a conquest, of the case with which the East would be theirs. They had seen their crusade end, and already Darius's death had started them talking of home But Alexander made light of such common rumour. He carried his soldiery with him until their exhaustion left them and their ambitions seemed to stretch to the far horizon. Then, having roused their fervour, he paused. There was a hush, the reward of the greatest speeches: like the swell on the sea, came the answering shout of agreement: Lead us; lead us, wherever you will.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  By wearing the diadem Alexander had laid claim to the whole of Darius's empire. To earn it, he would have to strike eastwards into the fastnesses of Afghanistan through mountain-passes and steppes of sand. 'In Khorasan', runs the Persian proverb, 'the staging posts of the Royal Road are as endless as the chatter of women,' and ahead lay a world of vast space and slowness where the only bustle was the royal courier on the one Royal Road. There was nothing to be gained from Iran's central basin to the south and south-east of him, as it belonged to the Deserts of Salt and Death and was therefore ignored by roads and settlers. Like every traveller, he would skirt it; so, eastwards from his base in Gurgan he marched across a landscape of infinite Harness, hot, hungry but aware that this was only a preliminary to a world of tribes and barons hitherto unknown to the Greeks.

  Short of supplies he had to inarch fast and it was as well that the army was still slimmed of the sections detailed to Hamadan; after four hundred miles he paused at modern Meshed where his Persian Companions explained to the camp surveyors that they now had a choice of two routes. One, the future Silk Road from China, led north-east through hill and desert past the oasis of Mcrv to the province of Bactria, where the rebel Bessus, a murderer of Darius, was reported 'to have worn his tiara upright', a symbol of royalty, 'and proclaimed himself King of Asia' with the help of Persian refugees, nomads and the local nobility. The other, also to Bactria, turned due south from Meshed towards the dunes and prairies of Seistan and then crooked north-eastwards up the Helmand valley, into the heart of the Hindu Kush mountains and so by any one of four high passes down into Bessus's new dominions along the banks of the river Oxus. For the moment, Alexander preferred the first of these two alternatives, halt as long as the southern detour.

  He was encouraged in his choice by a local windfall. Meshed lay on the border of the ancient satrapy of Aria, which the Persians called Hariva, and as its name implied, it was a heartland of Iranian tribesmen who had lived there for at least five hundred years; the title Ariana, whence modem Iran, was already applied to the eastern lands beyond it, even as far as the Punjab borders. Possibly it was from Aria, centred on the oasis Hariva and watered by the Hari-Rud river that the Iranians had first swept westwards in their early tribal wanderings: such a history would have made it an awkward province for Darius's heir to pass through, let alone to control, had not its satrap Satibarzanes come to Meshed and surrendered on the border. Leader of the Arians' cavalry at Gaugamela and then, like Bessus, a murderer of Darius, he was nonetheless restored to his high office and given an advance squadron of mounted javelin-throwers, Iranians like himself, to police the Macedonians as they passed along the edge of his province, only too keen to plunder it for supplies. Favouring one royal assassin, therefore, Alexander prepared to pursue another, but first all excess baggage was piled on to wagons and massed in the centre of the camp; Alexander then set fire to it, his own wagon first, the others only when his own example had been observed. From now on, pack-animals would serve as transport on roads too rough for wheels. The army acquiesced in the sudden loss of their luggage, knowing that Alexander had suffered too; at least they were allowed to keep their native concubines.

  Satibarzanes left with his guards for the distant capital of his province and from Meshed in mid-August, Alexander continued east towards the Silk Road, still meaning to dislodge the pretender Bessus from his distant base at Balkh. He had not gone far along the edge of the Arians' satrapy when grave news compelled him to hurry south to its heart; Satibarzanes had murdered his guards, raised 2,000 horsemen in revolt and blockaded his capital's fortress. In two days Alexander raced a picked force southeast down the seventy miles to Artacoana, the capital city, where reprisals could only be merciless as trust had been badly betrayed. The rebels took refuge on a steeply wooded hill, but the undergrowth was fired until those who stood their ground were smoked and burned to death; at Artacoana, siege towers breached the city walls and all troublemakers were set aside for death or enslavement. Alexander ordered the rest to be resettled on the site which was to be renamed Alexandria and strengthened by new walls and Macedonian veterans. The result still survives in Herat, its modem successor, but not for the last time in the East, an Alexandria had merely developed the buildings of an ancient Persian citadel and satrapal court. Satibarzanes, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found. On news of Alexander's advance he had escaped up the Hari Rud valley and disappeared into the foothills of the Hindu Kush to collaborate with Bessus. He had been a bad mistake, and he was to prove persistent.

  Rather than pursue him Alexander reversed his plans. He would no longer return to the north-eastern Silk Road and approach Bessus's henchmen directly; he would entrust Aria to a Persian, perhaps the son of Artabazus, his most trusted Oriental, and follow the more devious route due south, to Seistan, the Helmand valley and eventually the passes over the central Hindu Kush. It was a momentous decision, rich in surprises and hardships but not without strategic sense. Satibarzanes was still un-captured on the shorter alternative road and Alexander would not have wished to encounter him and Bessus for the first time in late autumn, in an arid valley which allowed an ambush. Seistan's satrap, too, was known to have murdered Darius. If ignored he might rally to Bessus and block Alexander's rear. Of the three enemies he should be routed first.

  Emboldened by 6,000 reinforcements who had arrived from Antipater and the West, Alexander marched as he pleased from Herat to the borders of Seistan, so scaring its satrap, also a murderer of Darius, that the man fled away to the nearest Indians of the Punjab. But they soon arrested him and sent him back to be executed 'for his crime against Darius'; Alexander, by then, had learnt the perils of mercy and preferred to appear as Darius's righteous avenger. In early autumn, Seistan is not a place in which to give enemies a second chance: its dusty plains are scoured by the seasonal Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, which pipes down through the cliffs and sand-dunes of the north-west and rolls the earth into such clouds of greyness that a man has to struggle to stand, let alone to march with a sarissa. Tufts and bushes of greenery are stripped of their leaves, a discomfort for Alexander's horses which had already browsed imprudently among the poisonous spurges near Herat. As for the 32,000 troops, they were short of food in a land where the harvest is garnered early in order to escape the cutting winds: tents, therefore, were tugged down for nine days' rest at Farah, site of the local satrap's palace on the northern edge of modern Seistan.

  Hungry and buffeted by the wind, the troops might be forgiven for envying Parmenion his opportune absence in Hamadan. For the past three months the elderly general had remained on communications, perhaps a sign of impending retirement, for he was already in his seventieth year. His absence tended to support this suspicion. His last known orders had been to join Alexander in Gurgan in July but he had never arrived and it was charitable to guess that the orders had been cancelled in favour of staying his ground. He had been left with some 25,000 men, the Thracians, the veteran mercenaries, the Thessalians, the Paconia
n horsemen and 6,000 Foot Companions whose four battalions had been ordered to supervise the arrival of the treasure in Hamadan. Cleitus had been instructed to take these four battalions ahead as soon as their job was finished, but they had not reached Alexander by the time he arrived in Seistan. Even if they were already on the road from Hamadan, Parmenion retained a sizeable force. He still controlled nearly twenty thousand troops at a time when Alexander had little more than thirty thousand in his own camp. The balance of forces happened to be nearly equal between king and general; at Farah the general was to spring for the last time into memorable prominence: 'Safe from outside, Alexander was suddenly attacked from within his household.' It was a most mysterious affair. Those who might have known the truth said little about it: others elaborated, guessing freely on the basis of rumour and hearsay.