Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  So, through the baroque imagination of a Greek master, 'Alexander's Wedding to Roxane' won a prize at the festival games of Greek Olympia and survived through a Roman visitor's description to influence Sodoma and Botticelli.

  Like Achilles, men said, Alexander had married a captive lady. But in politics, if not in personality, the new Achilles had conic far since his pilgrimage to Troy. Nobody could have guessed that a pupil of Aristotle, who had once refused to take a wife, would fall passionately in love with a lady from outer Iran, marry her and use her as proof of goodwill to the conquered Iranian barony; his father-in-law, moreover, had been Bessus's close associate in a rebellion which had detained him for two awkward years. There was only one embarrassment. As father of Barsine, Alexander's

  first Persian mistress, Artabazus may have been disappointed by the decision to marry Roxane, especially as Barsine was known to be bearing her first child. However, he had already resigned his command in Bactria, pleading old age before the marriage was in view; the satrapy which had first been offered to Cleitus now went to another Macedonian with a suitably large force of hired Greeks. Artabazus would never be grandfather of Alexander's recognized heir, but he is not known to have borne any lasting resentment and his sons continued to be honoured. He was retired to the governorship of the first Sogdian rock in place of the baron Ariamazes who had been crucified. Ironically it was the rock on which Roxane had been captured.

  Alexander's plans were already extending beyond marriage. At Balkh, he ordered 30,000 native boys to be chosen for military training; their weapons were to be Macedonian and their language Greek. It was the most determined attempt at a wide Hellenization of Iran to be made by any western king: like Philip's royal pages, not only would the boys be hostages against their fathers' misbehaviour, they would also become the dependent soldier class of the future, when the Macedonian veterans retired and the army could be filled with westernized Orientals. From a year of frustration, even of murder, a creative plan had at last taken shape; the Iranians, so far from being treated 'as plants and animals', would be called to share in the empire, obliged to Alexander alone and educated away from their tribal background. Whether the boys and their parents were grateful is another matter. At the same time, Alexander's courtiers too were to feel the change: while the cavalry officers were rearranged, Hephaistion had needed promotion in order to preserve his special dignity, and it was perhaps now that he became Alexander's official second-in-command. His title was Chiliarch, his job had military responsibilities. But both job and title had been created by the Persian kings.

  To any such change, there were bound to be complications.

  In my case, the efforts for these years to live in the dress of Arabs and to imitate their mental foundation quitted me of my English self.. .; at the same time, I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only.... Sometimes these selves would converse in the void, and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.

  Though Lawrence of Arabia comes nearer to one side of Alexander than any man since, he theorized where Alexander only acted for the moment.

  But with Alexander too there were now two veils to life, and the two selves did converse, if not in the void of madness, at least on an everyday level where tensions are no less real for being public. At Balkh in spring 327, with Roxane as bride and Hephaistion perhaps as Vizier, tension was to break into conflict and its victim would be a man whom the fighting of the past two years had so far left alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In Persian legend, Alexander was said to have soon sent Roxane away to Seistan, where he gave her its citadel as a wedding present to keep her safe when the men withdrew to the Punjab; this, however, is dubious, as Roxane did come to India and the walls of Seistan's capital probably belong to a later date. Presumably, she stayed in camp, where she would have assisted at one of the most misrepresented episodes in her husband's life. This cannot be understood without its Persian background, proof of the change in Alexander's plans. Once understood, it is a small but revealing glimpse of his mood: it turns on the matter of a courtly kiss.

  Unlike the Chinese, who had no word for kissing, the kingdoms of the ancient east had long included a term for kissing gesture in their court vocabularies. This gesture was practised in Assyrian royal society, whence it was adopted first by the Medes, then by the Persians; its equivalent was known in Greece, probably as a borrowing from the East, and the Greeks described both their own and the Orientals' practice by one and the same word, proskynesis. The only descriptions of it were written under the Roman empire, but they fit well enough with early Greek and Persian sculpture: the payer of proskynesis would bring a hand, usually his right one, to his lips and kiss the tips of his fingers, perhaps blowing the kiss towards his king or god, though the blowing of kisses is only known for certain in Roman society. In the carvings at Persepolis, the nobles mounting the palace staircase or the attendants on King Artaxerxes's tomb can be seen in the middle of the gesture, while the Steward of the Royal household kisses his hand before the Great King, bending slightly forwards as he does so. These Persian pictures and the Greeks' own choice of words show that in Alexander's day, proskynesis could be conducted with the body upright, bowed or prostrate. The Romans believed that when Alexander asked for proskynesis from his closest friends, he expected them to grovel before him. But in Persia, as in Greece, it was only the suppliant or abject inferior who would go down on his hands and knees. Only if courtiers and aristocrats fell into disgrace or begged a favour would they prostrate themselves before the king. Proskynesis itself did not require it.

  In Persia and Greece its social uses varied. In Greece it was a gesture reserved for the gods alone, but in Persia it was also paid to men: 'When the Persians meet one another in the street,' wrote Herodotus, with one of those deep insights into foreign customs which make him far the most congenial of Greek historians, 'in the following way, a man can tell whether they meet as social equals. If they are equal, they kiss each other on the mouth, instead of speaking a word of greeting; if one is slightly inferior to the other, he only kisses him on the check; if he is far less noble, he falls down and pays proskynesis to his superior.' There was another category, not to be seen in the street: a meeting with the Great King himself. Because the king was superhuman in his majesty, he received proskynesis from everybody; however, courtiers and royal Relations were noble enough to be spared the accompanying curtsey or prostration, and so they merely bowed. The Greeks noted this custom, and because they themselves paid proskynesis only to the gods, by a little sophistry some could suggest that the Persian king was considered to be a god himself. Intelligent Greeks knew this to be mistaken: in Persia proskynesis was also paid by the lower classes to the upper class, and not even in Persia was the entire upper class divine. It was a social gesture, but nonetheless a deeply traditional one.

  At Balkh, Alexander decided to try out proskynesis among his Macedonian friends. The decision was a bold one: proskynesis had caused trouble in the past when Greek met Persian, and it was open to misinterpretation, for whatever the Persians thought, it was not the way that a free Greek liked to greet a mortal. It had been left to the most radical of the Athenian dramatists, Euripides, to show proskynesis being paid on the stage to a man and even then he produced it as a foreign extravagance. At Persepolis, in the Treasury, the hands of officials paying proskynesis are the worst-damaged feature in sculptures which are otherwise well preserved: Alexander's army may have mutilated them on purpose, thinking this one gesture absurd. Greek ambassadors to the Persian court had been known on occasions to take an equally defiant stand: one had sent a letter in to the king, rather than pay proskynesis before him, and another was said to have dropped his signet ring, so that he could bow down to pick it up and seem respectful by his movement, though the true kissing gesture was missed in the course of bending forwards. Suc
h stubborn refusals were less a matter of religion than of pride; if Greeks also came to Persia as prisoners or suppliants, at least in the eyes of the king, they were expected to go down on hands and knees as well as paying proskynesis, and the double disgrace had been known to prove too much for them. Aristotle had been told of an elephant trained to pay proskynesis to a king, no doubt by blowing the kiss with its trunk as Aristotle did not believe that elephants could

  bend both their front legs at once. But free Greeks were not brutes, and what befitted an elephant did not become a Hellene.

  Nevertheless, Greeks like Themistocles and Alcibiades had been sensible enough to do as the Persians when in Persia, and it was in this spirit that Alexander broached the subject of proskynesis to his Companions. As Darius's heir, he would have been receiving such homage from his Iranians for the past three years: it came naturally to them, just as it did to Darius's queen when taken prisoner at Issus. Alexander had continued to attract more and more Iranians as hostages or helpers. Iranian brigades had been recruited to fight in India and at court the seven sons of elderly Artabazus had now been joined by Roxane's brothers and sisters, Spitamenes's daughter, many local barons and a grandson of the last King Artaxerxcs; Alexander even had his own two Magi and a fugitive rajah from the Punjab. If these Orientals saw the Macedonians greeting him without first paying their respects, they might begin to wonder whether he was a proper king; this belief' would have started among the servants and quickly spread everywhere', and at the end of a long and bloody native revolt, that was not a risk worth taking. New reinforcements and the recruiting of Greeks and Orientals meant that the Macedonians were now heavily outnumbered in the army; before invading India, the Macedonian courtiers should give way to their new supporters and take up their customs for the sake of social uniformity. But as in the case of Cleitus, later writers saw the tension differently; by ordering proskynesis, they insisted, Alexander was not considering court etiquette: he was intending to be worshipped as a god.

  It is true that in Greece proskynesis was only paid to the gods, and that Alexander was doubtless aware of this. But in outer Iran, it was not Greek practice which was at issue. He was King of Asia, and his courtiers ought to tolerate an Asian social custom; in much the same way, he had been wearing the diadem, which among Greeks was a claim to represent Zeus, among Persians a claim to be king, but he had treated it entirely from a Persian point of view as heir of Darius, not rival of the gods. It was to be the same with proskynesis: his own Master of Ceremonies described the first attempt to introduce it and as the incident took place at a dinner party, he would have been present in the dining-room and able to sec the result for himself. It was a far cry from Alexander the tyrant, seeking to become divine.

  Alexander, said his servant, had ordered a banquet and was presiding over the after-dinner drinking: the guests had been carefully chosen and warned what was expected of them. A golden cup, filled with wine, was passed down from his seat and each guest stood up and drank from it, facing the hearth which perhaps stood behind the royal table; they either drank a toast or poured a libation, but so far all had happened in the manner of a normal Greek drinking-party. Then they went Oriental: they paid proskynesis to Alexander, kissing their hand and perhaps bowing slightly like the sculptured Persian officials. After this gesture, they walked up to the royal table and exchanged kisses with Alexander, perhaps on the mouth, more probably on the cheek. This unassuming little ceremony went the round of all the guests, each drinking, kissing his hand and being kissed in return by the king, until it came to Callisthenes, cousin of Aristotle. He drank from the cup, ignored the proskynesis and walked straight up to Alexander, hoping to receive a proper kiss. Alexander happened to be talking to Hephaistion and did not notice that his court historian had deceived him. But a Bodyguard leant across to point out the error and as Callisthenes had not complied, Alexander refused to kiss him. 'Very well,' said Callisthenes, 'I go away the poorer by a kiss.'

  This after-dinner episode explains Alexander's intention beyond all doubt. Before enforcing proskynesis, he wished to experiment in private with a few selected friends: first, they were to pay him homage, just as the average Iranian had always paid it to his king, and then, because they were his Macedonians with whom he had shared so much, they were to be rewarded by a kiss which, among Persians, was only exchanged between social equals or between the king and his royal Relations. The kiss restored them to their former dignity and refuted any possible suggestions that Alexander sought proskynesis because he wished to seem divine: no god has ever destroyed his own illusion by giving his worshippers a privileged kiss. The plan could hardly have been tried more reasonably and despite the indignation of Romans, philosophers and others since who have missed its Persian background, Alexander came out of it all remarkably well. It was a social experiment, and for once a witness had described exactly what he was doing.

  There remained the uncooperative Callisthenes. As a 'flatterer who had tried to make a god out of Alexander', he would have been the very last person at court to have spoken out against divine honours for a living man, but as a Greek who had worked with Aristotle, he saw this social custom as a different matter. To pay proskynesis to a man had long seemed slavish, at least to the Greeks, and whatever else, Callisthenes had been brought up to believe in the values of Greek culture; he knew and analysed the details of Greek myths; he agreed with the view that certain Egyptians were really descended from an Athenian: he even claimed that the name Phoenicia was derived from the Greek word for a palm tree (phoinix).

  Like his kinsman and associate, Aristotle, he saw the barbarian world as the Greeks' inferior and so in an earlier part of his history, he seems to have described the waves of the Lycian sea as bowing to the king, as if doing proskynesis before him. That was fair enough for barbarian waves, but for a Greek, steeped in the Greek past, it was a gesture which smacked of slavishness. Educated Greeks should have no truck with oriental decadence: kissing the hand be damned, he would refuse, and trust to the consequences.

  It is not easy to plot his recent relationship with Alexander, not least because Alexander's officers never referred to it in their histories. Six months before, said others, Callisthenes's comforts had counted for much as Alexander despaired of lile after murdering Cleitus; fellow-Greeks and philosophers later disagreed, unwilling to believe that Aristotle's kinsman would ever have consoled a man whom they reviled as a tyrant. There was another Greek philosopher at court, Anaxarchus, who had come from a Thracian town and was known because of his opinions as the 'contented': it was he, said admirers of Aristotle, who had revived Alexander after the murder by teaching him the classic doctrine of an oriental tyrant, that whatever a king did was just and fair. 'Anaxarchus', wrote a later follower of Aristotle, 'only rose to a position of influence through the ignorance of his patrons: his wine would be poured out by a naked girl, chosen for her beauty, though all she in fact revealed was the lust of those whom she served.' Callisthenes, by contrast, was extolled for his austerity and self-sufficiency, as befitted Aristotle's kinsman; his fame as a wanton flatterer was conveniently overlooked. Not for the last time academic rivalries impinged on the writing of history, abusing Anaxarchus and idealizing his rival Callisthenes. But Anaxarchus would one day die a hero's death, owing nothing to Aristotle's schoolmen, while Callisthenes would be best remembered for hailing his patron as the new son of Zeus.

  Since the comfortings which followed Cleitus's murder, there are signs, undated, that king and historian had been at variance elsewhere. Once at dinner, wrote Alexander's Master of Ceremonies, a cup of unmixed wine had come round to Callisthenes, who was nudged by a neighbour and asked why he would not drink. 'I do not wish,' he replied, 'to drink from Alexander and then need the god of medicine.' Like proskynesis, the drinking of undiluted wine was not a Greek practice and once again Callisthenes had refused to betray his Greek ideals. Philosophers told a second story, which Callisthenes was said to have confided to the slave who read aloud to h
im: during the after-dinner drinking, Callisthenes was once asked to speak in praise of the Macedonians, which he did so fulsomely that all the guests applauded and showered him with flowers. Alexander then asked him to denounce them no less fluently, and Callisthenes pitched into the subject and distressed his audience by his evident taste for it. If true, this unlikely story says much for Callisthenes's sophistry, and Aristotle was said to have remarked on hearing it that his cousin was a capable speaker but sadly lacking in common sense. If this incident followed the affair of the proskynesis, Alexander may also have played on his historian's defect in order to discredit him in public.

  For it was the proskynesis affair, surely, which had first marked the parting of the ways between the two men. Hitherto, Callisthenes would hardly have earned much affection among the Macedonians, whose fun he spoilt at parties and whose individual heroics he described incorrectly though he never took to the battlefield himself. But now there were others who did not think very far: one of the older Macedonians had mocked a Persian for his proskynesis and told him to hit the ground harder with his chin, as he went down on hands and knees to pay the exaggerated respects of an abject inferior. The story was retold of several officers, and on each occasion Alexander was said to have lost his temper with the Macedonian concerned. That was fair enough. If Macedonians started to poke fun at oriental life, then the harmony at court to which Alexander was pledged would never come about: it was the older men, by and large, who found it hardest to adapt to oriental customs, though that did not stop several thousand veterans from continuing to serve contentedly or an officer like Craterus, fiercely tenacious of his Macedonian habits, from rising rapidly despite his principles. The issue was not an absolute division, and only if it had been mishandled could it have become very awkward. Grumble though the old men might, when it came to the choice a few weeks later, it was Callisthenes they saw unaided to his death, and though legend maintained that Callisthenes's one refusal deflated all plans for proskynesis, it is far from certain that the custom was ever dropped. Neither Ptolemy nor Aristobulus mentioned the attempt to introduce it, perhaps because they thought it insignificant. But their silence is more likely to have been deliberate, one more proof of the feelings which the affair could arouse in certain quarters. To a Greek public, a frank description would have put the sequel in a sinister light and neither historian wished to expose Alexander to the criticism of those who had not served with him.