Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  When such a quarrel breaks, it can light up the past like a flash of lightning and release thunder which has been long brooding in the air. But with Cleitus and Alexander there are several forks to the lightning, and the thunder has often been misunderstood. Far from the dining-room at Samarkand, Greeks were free to guess the quarrel's causes: they had no love for Alexander, and where historians had only seen a personal brawl, touched off by insults to the soldiers' reputations, they idealized the conflict and cast Alexander as a tyrant. Cleitus as the champion of freedom who persistently opposed all Oriental customs; he protested because he hated flattery and its fulsome parallels with Ammon, gods and heroes. 'The two friends who quarrelled were not really the two men; rather they were two different views of the world which exploded with elemental violence.' If this were correct, it would indicate a deep source of conflict in the court life of the past two years. But the evidence is fiction, the quarrelers were heavily drunk, and instead of high principles there were facts, ignored, in their background.

  Days before the drinking-party, Cleitus had been given a new commission. He was to govern Bactria, a satrapy behind the lines. For a former Hipparch of the Companions, this was a poor reward: though Bactria would be staffed with some 15,000 Greek troops, an important responsibility, a soldier's life in its outbacks was notoriously grim, not helped by the knowledge that Alexander never appointed his closest friends to any satrapy away from court. Cleitus, therefore, was being downgraded: a fellow-officer, also commissioned for Bactria, had preferred to refuse and be executed rather than leave the centre of affairs. While his fellow Companions earned glory in India, Cleitus would live and grow old by the Oxus, where a man's one hope of distinction was the occasional repulse of unknown nomads. Retired against his will, he took to drinking, and heavy in his cups, he at last burst out into abuse.

  His fall must have had a cause. After Philotas's plot he had been promoted to command the Companions with Hephaistion for reasons, perhaps, not all in Alexander's control. Clcitus was the most experienced cavalry leader. He also commanded the 6,000 Macedonians, then temporarily in Hamadan. They were crucial for Parmenion's removal, and they arrived to find a new Persian monarchy and the general's family purged. Their loyalty needed recognition, and perhaps Alexander trod carefully. Hephaistion sympathized with Persian customs; many Macedonians did not. The second Hipparch should be a staunch Macedonian, Philip's man. Cleitus was both, so he took the job. Even so, he had preferred his king to Parmenion and Alexander had not behaved more orientally since Seistan. Perhaps Cleitus would not have cared if he had: he would never have been retired to Bactria, the Iranian baronry's stronghold, if he seriously believed Iranians to be contemptible. Other staunch Macedonians continued to serve loyally. Clcitus's problems were more personal. He was ageing and had been ill; in the past year he had not held the highest field commands and when the reinforcements reached Balkh, six or more Hipparchs had probably been raided to replace him. Perhaps he had been wounded; perhaps he had been rude to Hephaistion,

  whom others too detested. His demotion may well have been personal: it certainly did not spring from a hatred of diadems and Persian ushers or a sudden passion for freedom, as philosophic Greeks implied. A temporary choice to steady Seistan's crisis, he had already been retired.

  'Wine', said the Greeks, proverbially, 'is the mirror of the mind', and in a very drunken quarrel, its reflections should be especially clear; we only regret what we say in a moment of passion because we expose so much more of ourselves than of our victims. The gist of the taunts which caused Cleitus's murder can still be recovered, but their details remain obscure: they enflamed, like all chance remarks, because they caught on long latent obsessions, and reputation, not politics, was surely at the root of them. Alexander, some said, was listening to an after-dinner ballad which mocked the generals whom Spitamenes had destroyed a year before: such satire of delicate mishaps is known elsewhere in Alexander's circle, and it would be welcome light relief in a case where Alexander could secretly blame himself for the disaster. Others, less plausibly, said that Alexander was decrying his father Philip or approving flatterers who did the same. Certainly the past was mentioned, though Philip may not have been so bluntly insulted; soon Cleitus stood up to challenge the facts; he was a veteran and he had saved Alexander's life at the Granicus; he did not like to hear past glories belittled, so he championed the feats of the older men. Alexander's glory, he insisted, was Macedonian glory; the king took credit for what he had not done. After a year's hot and tiresome struggle against rebels, this old man's criticism was all the more enraging for being well-aimed; the rivalries with heroes, the flatteries of Callisthenes, are proof of Alexander's concern for his personal reputation, and at Samarkand in a year of little progress, it was easy to suggest that his pride in his generalship might yet be misplaced. A deep sensitivity had been affronted: young men and old began to shout, until they went wild with the threats to their own self-importance. No matter that their final jibes are unknown, for they were drunk and they had begun on each other's achievements. Sexual incompetence, Alexander's small stature, Cleitus's ageing courage, the failure to catch Spitamenes: they had plenty to bandy at each other, try though the older guests might to stop them. Cleitus, no doubt, made fun of father Ammon, and then suddenly he found himself speared with a sarissa, unable to take it all back.

  Alexander's outburst was unforgivably horrific; as Aristotle would have taught him, 'the man who sins when drunk should be punished twice over, once for sinning, once for being drunk'. Yet it can be understood. Alexander's ideals were those of Homer's Achilles, devoted to glory and defended by personal achievement, however violent; in Homer's Iliad, even Patroclus, Achilles's lover, had first left his father's home for a murder committed in youth. To call Cleitus's murder Homeric is not to condone it, but it is to set the pattern for what followed. Alexander took to his bed, like Homer's Achilles on the death of Patroclus,

  And shed warm tears remembering the past,

  lying now on his side, now, again, on his back,

  Now on his face;

  then, he would stand upright

  And pace to and fro distraught,

  by the shore of the boundless sea ...

  Worse than Achilles, he had not sent a Companion to his death in battle: he had murdered him before his guests at dinner. Apologists, perhaps, exaggerated his instant wish to die, but it is foreign to the few known threads of Alexander's character to belittle his three days' self-punishment or dismiss them as calculated play. He did not pretend to torture himself, as if to scare his soldiers and officers with the fear that he would never revive; the common foot-soldiers, understandably, had shown not the slightest distress at the accidental death of an ageing cavalryman, and if the officers had been likely to conspire, nothing could have been more foolish than to retire to bed for three whole days and leave them alone with their plans. It was not as if Cleitus had been spokesman of a principled opposition; no officer is known to have lost his job for a friendship with him, and as if to appease Alexander's conscience, Cleitus's own nephew continued in high favour among the king's friends for the rest of the reign. The murder was so painful precisely because it was a personal and accidental disgrace; Alexander suffered, as he lived, on the grandest scale, and a personal crisis drove him not to oriental tyranny, but to his Homeric attitude to life.

  But that night of terror also revealed what every young man knows to be true: there is a deeper rift between old and young than between class and class, or creed and creed, and no successful son can be harangued on how much more his father's generation has achieved. It was not that veterans found Alexander changed for the worse: they continued to serve him and even to rise to high commands, but henceforward they would surely hesitate before overpraising their past with Philip to a man who felt, rightly, that he owed as much to his own initiative and to the guidance of Zeus Ammon as to any earthly father. Alexander did not disown Philip, any more than he had betrayed his father's ambitions; h
e merely excelled him. There is no reason to suppose that Philip too would not have been happy to overrun all Asia, wear the Persian diadem and stress his relationship with Zeus, but there is room for doubt that he ever had the necessary dash to do so. Whatever Cleitus said, Alexander had proved he could do it, and his astonishing success made an old man's comparisons all the more wounding for being untrue. There is no gainsaying the qualities of Philip's men, but they had achieved far more in five years with Alexander than they had in Philip's twenty: the months after Cleitus's murder show most pointedly why Alexander's sense of style still fascinated the classical world long after his father's energies had been forgotten.

  With Cleitus dead, Alexander's misfortune began to wane. Remaining Sogdians were subdued and fortified in a matter of weeks, and their surrender at once cut Spitamenes off from his most promising source of support. As his 8,000 nomad horsemen were heavily outnumbered, he was reduced to raiding Balkh behind the lines, where he ambushed its few troops and invalids and killed most of them, including Aristonicus, harpist both to Philip and Alexander, who died 'fighting not as a musician might, but as a brave man'. The raid was a well-judged surprise, but it did little to advance his cause; as he tried to vanish westwards back into the desert, he was intercepted by Craterus, returning from the Merv oasis, who fiercely harried his Scyths in a cavalry charge. By now, Sogdians and Bactrians were serving in Alexander's army and Spitamenes seemed more of a bandit than a rebel-leader. He had little hope but to repeat his surprise raids behind the lines; at the first attempt he ran into Alexander's rear division and was routed completely despite his enlistment of 3,000 vagrant Scythians. Even these surviving desperadoes lost heart, and for the third time in two years Alexander's enemy was betrayed by associates. They cynically murdered their Persian leader and as autumn ended, Spitamenes's head was sent as proof to the Macedonian army.

  Typically, Alexander was not yet satisfied. Three of Spitamenes's henchmen, all former minions of Bessus, were still at large in the area, while the eastern half of Sogdia had never submitted in the first place. Rebels had retreated there for safety, and so after a mere two months in their winter camp the army was set on an eastward trail, still discomforted by hunger as local supplies were long since dwindling. As they marched the snow lay thickly on the hillsides, and within three days a massive thunderstorm had driven them back under cover as thunderbolts flashed and hailstones bombarded their armour. Alexander took the lead and directed them to native huts where a fire could be kindled from the surrounding forest: he even gave up his royal chair by the fireside to a common soldier whom he saw shivering and exhausted. But 2,000 camp followers had been lost, and 'it was said that victims could be seen still frozen on to the tree trunks against which they had been leaning’.

  Near modern Hissar, on the Koh-i-nor mountains, a final cluster of Sogdian rebels were reported to have found refuge with the local baronry. Their natural fortress seemed impregnable to watchers who guessed that 'its height was more than three miles, its circumference at least fifteen', and when Alexander asked the leaders to a parley and offered them, through one of Artabazus's sons, a safe pass in return for surrender, they only laughed and told him to go and find troops with wings. Alexander hated to be mocked, let alone to be told what he could not do. If his men could not fly, they could at least climb; when the envoys had left, heralds invited mountaineers to stand forward from the ranks.

  Their rewards were in keeping with the danger. The first to scale the rock would receive twelve talents, twelve times the bonus paid to the allied troops for four years' Asian service; the rest would be paid according to their position in the race to the summit. The three hundred experienced climbers who volunteered were told to equip themselves with flaxen ropes and iron tent-pegs, and that same winter's night, by the pale light of the stars, they moved round to a rock-face far too forbidding to be guarded.

  They climbed with the patience of hardened alpinists. Every yard or so, they hammered tent-pegs into the crevices and frozen snow-drifts, lassoed them and hauled themselves up on the end of their ropes. On the way to the top, thirty of them slipped to their death and buried themselves beyond recovery in the snow beneath, but as the first streaks of dawn showed through the sky, the remaining 270 attained the summit. It was no time for celebration: smoke curling up from the funnels of rock beneath them showed that the Sogdians were already stirring. They had to be quick if they were not to be outnumbered; they had arranged to signal with linen flags to Alexander, who had been keeping watch all night at the foot of the rock-face. Bluffing, he sent heralds to invite the native pickets to look up and see his flying soldiers; they turned round and seeing the climbers high above them they surrendered, believing them to be an army. Baronial families who left their fortress were spared for the future, but search though the troops might, there were no large caches of food to be found.

  A second rock was hardly less spectacular. Some fifty miles south-east of Leninabad, where the road to Boldzhuan crosses the Vachshi river stands the crag called Koh-i-nor, a common name in the area which says nothing for its extreme height and inaccessibility: 'about two miles high and six miles round', it was protected by a deep ravine whose only bridge had been destroyed. It always took the challenge of a siege to bring the best out of Alexander's boldness. The troops were ordered to work in relays night and day until they had felled enough pine trees to span the abyss with a makeshift causeway. First, they climbed down the cliffs on ladders and drove stakes into the rock-faces at the ravine's narrowest point; then hurdles of willow-wood were laid on the network and surfaced with a thick layer of earth as a level road for the army and their weaponry. 'At first, the barbarians kept ridiculing the attempt as utterly hopeless', but like the people of Tyre, they soon began to see what a son of Zeus could do to the landscape. The bridge across the ravine was finished and arrows, perhaps from catapults, began to shoot into their lairs; their own shots in reply bounced idly off the Macedonian sheds and screens. Engineering had scared them, although their lair was still as inaccessible to troops, and it was only left to Oxyartes the baron, a prisoner from the first rock, to shout to their leader to surrender and save his skin: there was nothing, he called, which could not be captured by Alexander's army, something of a bluff as the rock was still impregnable although open now to shots from catapults. Sisimithres the leader agreed, and when Alexander brought 500 guards to inspect his fortress, he duly gave himself up. To please his captors, he also made mention of his larder, which was stored with corn, wine and dried meats, quite apart from the herds of livestock he stabled: there was enough, he boasted, to feed all Alexander's army for at least two years. He could have said nothing more opportune. After two hungry years the recurrent worry of stores for the camp had at last been resolved. There was no need to starve again, and Sisimithres, a baron who had married his own mother, perhaps because he was a Zoroastrian, was gratefully restored to his rock by a king who had reason enough for his mildness.

  On the high note of these successes, the struggle for outer Iran was ended, and after two years of bloodshed and arbitrary depopulation on a grand scale, it was time to return to Balkh and consider the future of provinces which the Persian kings, far distant in Susa, had tended to entrust to a member of their own family. Iranians were to retain the local aorts as Sogdian governors and the old Persian citadel beside the Oxus and the river Kokcha was to be rebuilt as a huge Alexandria with a palace and a formal street plan; Alexander had no responsible relations left alive, so he linked the Sogdian nobility to his own person in the time-honoured way. Among the captives from the first rock were the daughters of the Sogdian baron Oxyartes; one of them, Roxane, was said by those who saw her to be the most beautiful lady in all Asia, deserving her Iranian name of 'little star'. All were agreed that Alexander was entranced by her, some saying that he first met her eyes at a banquet and at once fell passionately in love. Nowadays, it is fashionable to explain away the passion and emphasize its politics, but that was not how contemporarie
s saw it. Marriage certainly made political sense but there were other Iranian ladies who would have served the purpose as well. Alexander may have followed his head but, aged twenty-nine, he was agreed to have chosen the only girl who fired his heart.

  Rich in supplies, Alexander arranged a lavish wedding banquet on the summit of Sisimithres's sky-high fortress. His sense of style had not deserted him and the occasion had a decided touch of chivalry, for Alexander and Roxane symbolized their match before their guests by cutting a loaf of bread with a sword and each eating half as bride and groom. The sharing of the loaf was the Iranian custom which is still practised in Turkestan, though the sword was a military detail which could be Alexander's own. But the mood of the moment was best caught by the experienced and contemporary Greek painter Aetion: in his painting of Alexander's wedding, sadly lost, he depicted a very beautiful bedroom, with a wedding bed on which Roxane was sitting; she was an extraordinarily lovely girl but, modestly, she looked down at the ground, feeling shy before Alexander who stood beside her. Smiling cupids were in attendance: one stood behind and pulled back the veil from her face; another removed her shoe, while a third was tugging Alexander towards her by the cloak. Alexander, meanwhile, was offering her a garland, while Hephaistion assisted as best man, holding a blazing torch and leaning against a young boy, probably Hymenaios, the god of weddings. On the other side more Cupids were playing, this time among Alexander's armour; two heaved his spear, two dragged his shield by the hand-grips, on which sat a third, presumably their king; another had hidden under the breastplate, as if to ambush them.