Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  16. The Lion of Hamadan, probable monument to Hephaistion.

  17. The funeral chariot to take Alexander's body from Babylon. The detailed

  ancient description is the basis for this outline reconstruction by G. Niemann.

  with the diadem and, after plunder, a return to western Asia. Conspiracy followed fast on the change in Alexander's myth: 'Alexander was right', wrote Napoleon, in retirement on St Helena, 'to have Parmenion and his son killed, because they were blockheads who considered it wrong to abandon the customs of the Greeks.' When two events are so close in time, it is indeed attractive to link them as cause and effect.

  This background of principles and personalities makes Philotas's guilt very plausible, but it is not enough to prove it. For in Philotas's case, so far as it is known, there were few solid truths which the informers could have adduced. They cannot have known him to be involved in the conspiracy, for they chose him as the fit man to expose it to Alexander; there were further accomplices of whom they were unaware at the time, but their ignorance about Philotas cannot have lent support to their other evidence. Had Philotas indeed been plotting, he would have welcomed the informer's approaches as a stroke of extraordinary luck; he could have arranged for them to be silenced or at least acted swiftly before they turned to anyone else. But he had done neither: he had simply suppressed their rumour, and although this negligence was held against him it strongly suggests that he had no part in the conspiracy. He did not take it seriously, because he did not care: that, perhaps, was criminal in its own right, especially to Alexander's friends who hated him anyway. In Seistan influence ran strongest among the bodyguards and baronial leaders of the phalanx, Craterus again most prominent among them. But Philotas was a cavalryman, whose platoons had been subdivided a year ago between minions chosen for merit, not nobles distinguished by birth. He was vulnerable, therefore, and unpopular: enemies led by Craterus, may have seized their chance to bring him down.

  Even so the affair is more of a mystery than a scandal. A letter is said to have been cited, written by Parmenion to his two sons, at least a month before: 'First, take care for yourselves, for in that way, we shall bring off our plans.' Even if genuine, it was most ambiguous: it helped little that Philotas, as a last resort, blamed the design on a certain Hegelochus, as Hegelochus was recently dead. Nobody believed that Philotas was innocent and it is absurd to idealize him as a martyr to Alexander's ruthlessncss simply because the histories explain so little. Neither the timing nor the method of his death suggest the affair was a ruthless purge. Had Alexander wished to kill an innocent man, he could have poisoned him, exposed him in battle or quietly lost him on the next mountain march; he had no need to prosecute him clumsily in a public trial, where other suspects contrived to acquit themselves despite his prosecution. Above all, the moment was far from ripe for sly murder. A ruthless intriguer would first have detached Parmenion from his resources, waited for Cleitus and the 6,000 veterans and then pounced secretly: the man who staged an inopportune trial in Seistan must surely have believed that right, and a grievance, were suddenly on his side. Numbers, certainly, were not.

  Whatever its precise justice, condemnation of Philotas made Parmenion's murder inevitable. It was a grave risk but it had to be taken, for Parmenion was the most powerful figure in the entire army, well up to the art of judicial murder himself and he could not possibly have been left alive to use his resources and supporters for a rebellion based on Hamadan. A fight against Cleitus's veterans and 20,000 troops was not to be relished, especially when they held the money and could find more food. Parmenion, powerful father to a condemned son, was a threat quite unprecedented since Alexander's accession, and it is not in the least surprising that in self-defence Alexander arranged his assassination. It is irrelevant to complain that he might have mistaken his general's ambitions; among Macedonians, the king who waited in a crisis in order to be certain would find himself dead first. There was no law to protect and limit the monarchy: custom could be ignored by a strong character, and self-preservation went just as far as the people would condone. It was said, perhaps correctly, that the soldiery in Seistan had approved Parmenion's murder before it was ordered: certainly, most of them cared little when they heard of it, and even the troops in Hamadan were pacified. Alexander had friends there, among them Harpalus the treasurer, and they had seen him through; doubtless by royal request, it was now that Parmenion's memory would be blackened in court histories. The victory on the Granicus, the burning of Persepolis were probably rewritten against a murdered general.

  Among the officers there was consternation. The noblemen in the cavalry panicked and began to fly to the desert, fearing their past friendships in the light of what had happened. Alexander was forced to announce that relations of the conspirators would not now be punished, although his rapid treatment of Philotas's father had implied exactly the opposite. In an emergency nothing breaks quicker than a clique of family and friends: Philotas, for example, had been accused most vigorously by his own brother-in-law, while Parmenion had been murdered by this same turncoat's brother in Hamadan. Such men were scared of their former connections, and they betrayed them decisively. Others, absent from camp, could not be so bold; Asander, perhaps the brother or nephew of Parmenion, was away in the west raising reinforcements, but he is not known to have received another job when he arrived in camp a year and a half later. Possibly he died of sickness or a wound, but more probably Parmenion's name was held against him.

  With the plot only half-uncovered, Alexander could not afford to be too magnanimous. For some months the army's letters home had been opened and censored in secret: now Parmenion's few known sympathizers were separated into a unit known as the Disorderlies, along with any who had complained in their letters of military service. Their discipline was to be stern, but 'no group was ever keener for war: they were all the braver for being disgraced, both because they wished to redeem themselves and because courage was more conspicuous in a small unit': any who malingered could always be abandoned in the next Alexandria.

  There remained the Companion cavalry. They had been led by Philotas 'but it was not thought safe to entrust them now to any one man'. Hephaistion took half the command as an officer above suspicion and known to sympathize with Alexander's Persian customs; the other half was left open until the missing 6,000 Macedonians arrived from Hamadan. Their loyalty, or their ignorance, had helped to decide Parmenion's fate. Many were veterans, Philip's men, and they arrived to find a court much changed from the one they had left at Hamadan; their king had his eunuchs, ushers and diadem. Their loyalty had to be repaid and reassured; they had been led to camp by Cleitus, also a veteran and the most experienced leader of cavalry. Cleitus was named as the second Hipparch, beside Hephaistion who had never led horsemen. His promotion would steady a shaken high command, but it was a reward not altogether of Alexander's choosing.

  The last and only certain word went to Alexander himself. Before he left Farah he decided to rename it Prophthasia, a puzzle only until the name is translated. For Prophthasia is the Greek for Anticipation: here, then, is how Alexander saw himself, not as a judge with certain evidence, but as a king who had struck others before they could strike him first. The justice or injustice of Philotas's plot will never be known precisely, any more than Alexander had waited to know it precisely himself. But for the first time in history a conspiracy had been put on the map; its survivor had acted fast and as the Wind of Seistan at last began to drop, it was time for him to consider how best to advance his anticipation elsewhere.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Within days of his anticipation, Alexander set out on a march of exemplary daring. His aim was to capture Bessus and his Bactrian province, not to humble any latent mutineers: to this end, he abandoned the Iranian provinces behind him, though Satibarzanes was still uncaptured, and prepared for such cold and starvation as could never have been risked unless the men and the officers were believed to be trustworthy. Common morale and personal e
xample would alone bring them through: neither army nor leader disappointed.

  In late September 330, he left Farah and followed the regular desert road eastwards towards Kandahar and the outlying hills of the Hindu Kush range; Cleitus's 6,000 men joined him within a month, so he was leading more than 40,000 men into country where supplies could not be moved by wagon, where pack animals would find the going treacherous and where the oncoming winter would hinder him from living off the land. For the past two months, his army had been short of food and thus it was no surprise when Alexander favoured a tribe on the borders of Seistan, 'personally observing that they did not govern themselves like other barbarians in the area but claimed to use justice like the Greeks'. These fair-minded people were the Arimaspoi or Benefactors who had rescued Cyrus and his Persian army from starvation two hundred years earlier: by origin, they had been nomadic Scythians who perhaps had wrecked the early city-culture of Seistan, but on their second appearance in history, food as much as political theory caused Cyrus's self-styled heir to give them money and whatever lands they wanted. They were to be governed by Darius's former secretary.

  Nearer to Kandahar, the desert landscape breaks into comparative lushness round the middle course of the Helmand river. The province, called Arachosia, was known to the Persians as the well-watered land, a name which Alexander's staff transcribed into Greek: besides its fertility it also commands the narrow corridor between the peaks which stretch north-cast to inner Afghanistan. Persian history had long shown the importance of its satrap, and for the first time since Gaugamela Alexander removed a province entirely from Oriental hands, appointing an experienced Macedonian, perhaps to sole command; perhaps, too, the change reflected protests in the recent conspiracy. Troops were left to keep the communications open and the satrap was ordered to settle in modern Kandahar, now to be expanded with 4,000 troops and renamed Alexandria. In late November Alexander left the warmth of this low-lying land and began the severer route up country: he would cross the mountains of the Hindu Kush and search the surrounds of Balkli for Bessus. The march was tactical but nonetheless remarkable. The Hindu-Kush runs north and south like a dragon's backbone between India and Iran; it first earned its modern name, meaning Hindu-killer, from the heavy death-rate of the Indian slave-women who were herded into Iran through its passes by mediaeval entrepreneurs. Among ancient mountaineers, it is Hannibal who nowadays holds pride of place for his crossing of the Alps. But Alexander's army was larger than the Carthaginian's and his road was no less spectacular. Unlike Hannibal, he had the sense to leave elephants out of an uncongenial adventure; any present in his army could have been loosed in the elephant parks to the west of Kandahar, known to the Persians and still patronized by the Ghasnavid kings some 1500 years later. There they could wallow in swamps of warm mud, happy in the winter comforts which they needed.

  The men and their pack-animals were less fortunate. News arrived, unpleasantly, that Satibarzanes had indeed returned to the tribesmen round Herat and begun to raise another revolt among the Iranians of Parthia and Aria. Alexander must have regretted his initial trust in him, as he was now threatened in his rear by a valuable source of support for Bessus, who had given the rebel help and horsemen from his base at Balkh. Short of troops, he could only detach a mere 6,000 troops to protect Herat's garrison; the main army of at most 32,000 were ordered to continue their long hard course up the Helmand valley, menaced by winter, famine and rebellions ahead and behind them. Their numbers had hardly sunk so low before. They are unlikely to have followed the line of the modern road from Kandahar to Kabul, the 320-mile stretch which was to be made so famous to Victorian Englishmen of the 1880s by the relief march of General Roberts; native guides and the old Persian road kept them on the rougher and more mountainous ground to the east and must have brought them up by the long-used road through Gardez, later a Greek city, and so briefly on to the shoulders which descend on their eastern slope to the valleys of the Punjab. It was here that they met with a tribe which the Persians knew as Indians, a loose description of an outlying people from the plains of West Pakistan, but as food was very scarce there was no time to waste on these first indications of a world beyond. The winter skies hung morosely over thick-lying snow and the more the soldiers climbed the more they were distressed by the thinness of the atmosphere. Stragglers were soon lost in the murky light and left to frostbite and a certain death; others blundered into snowdrifts which were indistinguishable from the level whiteness of the ridges. Shelter was sought wherever possible, but it needed sharp eyes to pick out the native huts of mudbrick whose roofs, as nowadays, were rounded into a dome above the deepening snows. Once found, the natives were amenable and brought as many supplies as they could spare: 'Food,' wrote the officers, 'was found in plenty, except', nostalgically, 'for olive oil'. But there is no means of huddling 32,000 men away from the winter in the gorges which led towards Begram and Kabul; the army's one hope of relief was to keep on moving, while Alexander did what he could to keep up morale: he helped along those who were stumbling and he lifted up any who had fallen. Self-denial had long been a principle of his leadership.

  But the march was not a wanton struggle against nature. By moving in winter, Alexander had surprised the mountain tribes and as British armies were to discover, snow and ice were far preferable to ambush by natives who knew and cared for the surrounding hills. There was also the likelihood of catching Bessus unawares. Safe beyond the Hindu Kush, he might expect to be left alone or at least not invaded until late summer; meanwhile, when the snow had melted, he could ride due west to Herat through the passes he had closed and join Satibarzanes in the revolt which had even spread to Parthia, a grave threat. Then if Alexander came down into Bactria his communications with the west could be cut and he could be isolated in the hot nomadic satrapies along the river Oxus. Foolishly, but understandably, Bessus made no attempt to block the Hindu Kush's northern passes so early in the year. He did not believe that his enemy would brave them, but with Alexander, nothing was safely incredible: his anticipation was not confined to members of Parmenion's family, and so as soon as possible he attempted the mountain-barrier.

  East of modern Kabul, the army returned to the valleys along the modern main road into India and relaxed in smoother ground. They were still ringed round by mountains, but with the worst of the journey before them, they were allowed a three-month winter camp at the Persians' satrapal capital of Kapisa. Again, Alexander was moved to refound a Persian fort, settling it as a Greek city with 7,000 natives and with veterans and such hired troops as he could spare from his dwindling army. The result, known as Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus, has never been found on the ground, though brief French excavations at Borj-i-Abdulla south of modern Begram have uncovered traces of Greek towers and the wall of a city which succeeded Alexandria 150 years later. On the gentle slopes of these foothills, the most abundant basin in the area, the city was surely intended to guard the ancient routes through the Hindu Kush, for in the valleys of Bcgram and Kabul no less than three main roads converge, while the citadel overlooked the confluence of two main rivers, the Persian's favourite site for such a fort. For the past two hundred years since Cyrus, the Persians had maintained a garrison town on the same strategic site; Alexander, as so often in the far east, had taken the cue for an Alexandria from his Persian predecessors. The new town's style of life, if not its site, was entirely different: there had never been a theatre in a Persian outpost, but 150 years after Alexander, Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus still contained carvings of Greek comic actors, dressed for the stage which had flourished inside its walls. Even by a road-post for veterans the banner of Greek culture was defiantly raised in an Afghan valley.

  Not until May, a seven-month delay, would Alexander have 'sacrificed to the usual gods', the most easterly sacrifice that had yet been wafted to the Olympians, and exhorted his army to the climax of their march. Like Tamurlane after him, he was to climb the northern buttress of the Hindu Kush by the Khaiwak pass, which rises to a height of
11,000 feet before dropping down to the plains of Bactria and further Asia beyond. The south and nearer face, which rears to the sky beyond Begram, was not attempted until the snows began to melt. Hunger, not cold, was the problem. The march to the summit took a week, and supplies throughout were desperately scarce except for the plants of terebinth and asa foetida, savoury but insubstantial herbs. Though the histories hurry over the experience a background of landscape can still be restored. There is an intensity of sunrise and sunset in these Afghan mountains which even the hill-farmers of upper Macedonia cannot have watched unmoved. The light throws patches of blue and violet on to the melting snow, striking the pink mountain rock and the grey clumps of prickly thrift, a plant as sharp as a hedgehog which carpets the slopes and discomforts the unwary traveller. 'A thin purple veil', a German explorer has written, travelling, like Alexander, through the Hindu Kush in the early season, 'very subdued and as misty as a breeze was daily drawn across the eastern sky. As I gazed, the clouds turned to flame and blood-red; the snowy peaks were glowing while a deep and inexpressible yearning filled me through and through.' That same sense of yearning was seen in Alexander by his fairest Roman historian, perhaps correctly; it was an emotion which drove him in search of myth or places of mystery; it was proper to a king living out the Homeric past. In the Hindu Kush myth and landscape combined as if to bring it into play.

  'In the middle of the mountains, there was a rock half a mile high in which the cave of Prometheus was pointed out by the natives, along with the nest of the mythical eagle and the marks of his chains.' In Greek legend, the hero Prometheus was punished for his inventive intelligence and imprisoned by Zeus on an eastern rock where an eagle would gnaw at his liver; here in the Hindu Kush, the site of his punishment seemed at last to have been discovered. But this greatest of all myths had always been placed in the Caucasus, miles away to the north-west; in order to reconcile myth and geography, Alexander's staff maintained that the Hindu Kush was attached to the Caucasus as an easterly continuation. Ever since, scholars ancient and modern have treated their mistake unkindly, dismissing it as a flattery which deliberately brought Alexander into contact with the distant Caucasus mountains, an area which he never reached. But that is to misunderstand a very human error. The Greek name for the Hindu Kush, the Paropamisus, was derived from the Persian word 'uparisena', meaning 'peak over which the eagle cannot fly'. The eagle was part of local knowledge, and as with Prometheus it was a symbol with a history of its own; in local Iranian myth, the eagle Sena had saved the hero Dastan, son of Sam, from cruel imprisonment. Alexander's staff were evidently told the story by the natives and at once equated the details with their own Prometheus; if these mountains confined the mythical eagle, they must be the Caucasus whatever the geography, for that was where Prometheus and his eagle were known to lie. The marks of the chains were easily detected in the jaggedness of a Hindu Kush rockface: to Alexander's officers, geography was only accurate if first it fitted myth, and although the Hindu Kush is grander than Greek mountains and as weathered a brown as its natives' bread, it is a landscape with a definite feel of Greece.