Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Some time after the party and its related misadventures, perhaps days, perhaps months, the main army were quartered near a small Bactrian village. While four divisions fanned out to arrest the last of Spitamenes's accomplices on the edge of the Red Sand desert, a serious plot was uncovered in camp against the king's life: it could hardly have been more remote from the old and unadaptable. It broke among the Macedonian royal pages, boys of fifteen or so, who had been sent out to join the army three years before. According to the story, perhaps mere guesswork, one of them, son of a prominent cavalry commander, had blotted his record out hunting: a wild boar had been flushed out in Alexander's direction and before the king could take a shot at it the page had speared it to death. Alexander was annoyed that someone for once had been quicker than himself. He ordered the page to be whipped, while the other young boys looked on. He even took away his horse.

  Here too, Persian customs may be relevant. On a Persian hunt it had always been agreed that the king should be allowed the first shot at game, whereas those who broke the rule had been known to be flogged: in Macedonia, there may have been a similar rule, but the killing of a wild boar had a special significance, the act by which a young man won the right to recline at dinner. Whether victim of a Persian outrage or not, the page felt he had a grievance, so he enrolled seven associates in a plot to murder the king. Now, the royal pages were very well placed to effect this. They served on night duty outside Alexander's tent and were in close daily access to his person, but as they numbered about fifty, the night guard would fall to one of the eight conspirators during the next fortnight. The night of Antipater, son of Asclepiodorus, was soon due and as only one page is likely to have stood guard at a time, he could easily admit his associates.

  Eventually, Antipater's night came round. The plan was a simple one, to enter the royal bedroom and stab Alexander in his sleep. No mention is made of Roxane, probably because she was already sleeping in quarters of her own, perhaps away from the army altogether; but more worrying than a wife was Alexander's habit of not returning to bed before dawn, for at dawn the guard was changed. However, the risk was worth taking and when Alexander left in the early evening for the usual dinner with his friends the pages' hopes were high. But dinner proved very attractive and the king stayed drinking and watching entertainments: the conduct which led to the burning of Persepolis and the murder of Cleitus was, third time lucky, to save his life. Dawn found him still carousing with Companions a fact which so shocked the eighty-year-old Aristobulus that in his history he invented an excuse. Alexander, he wrote, did leave the table at a reasonable hour, but on his way to bed he met a Syrian prophetess. She had long been following the army and would wail words of warning, a habit which at first Alexander and his friends had thought amusing, but when all her warnings came true Alexander had taken her seriously and even allowed her to watch beside his bed while he slept. This time she implored him to go back to his drinking; he obeyed, not because he liked wine but because he trusted the woman, and so he grew more and more drunk against his will until dawn. This apology for his late-night habits is very remarkable: Alexander, Aristobulus maintained, would only sit over his wine for the sake of conversation, like a portly academic: facts were against him, but even after Alexander's death such apologies were felt to be needed by those who had known the man in person.

  Drunk, not meekly superstitious, Alexander returned to his tent in daylight. A new page had replaced Antipater, and Alexander could go inside to bed, safer than he knew. Once again, his enemies could not keep a secret. In a matter of hours, one of the pages had told the plot to his current boyfriend, or so rumour believed: the boyfriend told the page's brother; the brother told two Bodyguards, one of them Ptolemy. At once the news was brought to Alexander who arrested all those named and put them to the torture. The informants were acquitted; the rest, said some, were tried before the soldiery and stoned to death. If true this punishment implies that the audience believed wholeheartedly in their crime. But a private execution is as likely.

  The pages, though guilty beyond doubt, were in need of a motive; once again, posterity's guesses centred on politics, casting Alexander as the type of an eastern tyrant. In self-defence, their leader is said to have declaimed against tyranny, the wearing of Persian dress, the continuing practice of proskynesis, heavy drinking and the murders of Cleitus, Parmenion and all the rest: he and his friends were striking a blow for freedom and futhermore, said their Roman speechwriter, they would not stand for all the talk of Ammon any longer. But these speeches have no authority whatsoever, and there are details which may also bear on the pages' discontent. Their leader had been flogged degradingly, but he also had a father who had held a high command in the Companion cavalry ever since Alexander had come to the throne. A month or so before the plot, his father had been sent back to Macedonia, stripped of his position, 'in order to fetch reinforcements'; he never reappeared in camp. Another conspirator was son of the former satrap of Syria: he had recently left his province and joined Alexander with the last reinforcements, but he had not been returned to his governorship or given another command. In the two cases where anything is known of the pages' fathers, both can be shown to have changed their jobs in the past three months; a third was son of a Thracian, not a man to fuss about the betrayal of the Macedonians' traditions. But the informer is the important exception. As his brother was not in the plot, their family honour was not at stake. Hence, perhaps, his indiscretion. As with the deaths of Parmenion and Cleitus, the pages' plot probably turned in the end on the same old problem: the downgrading of officers who thought they deserved a longer or better service. Parmenion had been old, Cleitus, whatever the personal reason, had been falling out of favour; the pages' fathers were victims of unknown changes in the high command. Young boys of fifteen care more for themselves and their fathers' status than for the principles of Greek political thought: beyond that, their motives cannot be traced.

  The plot itself was carried further. The mystery remained its background, for how could five young men have decided on murder and planned it carefully without considering the consequences? Perhaps they had only followed their emotions, rallying to an insulted friend and striking a blow for their fathers' reputations; perhaps, but it was also plausible to look for an elder statesman, and this time, the choice did not fall on a Macedonian: it was Callisthenes who was arrested, tortured and put to death. 'The pages admitted', wrote Aristobulus, 'that Callisthenes had urged them on to their act of daring', and Ptolemy wrote much the same. But others were more sceptical.

  There is indeed a case to be made for the historian's arrest. He was condemned as an instigator, not a participant, and the leading page was said to have been his pupil, so that Greeks later maintained that it was his studies in liberal philosophy which had roused him to kill Alexander the tyrant. Their relationship is probably true, as Callisthenes would have finished his Deeds of Alexander down to the ending of the Greek allies' service, the natural place for the panegyric to stop, and as the pages had arrived in camp only shortly before the material for his book had ended, he would have been free to take charge of the young nobility's education. Disgusted by proskynesis, the drinking of unmixed wine and Alexander's oriental policy, he could have worked on the feelings of six young pupils who had reasons of their own for disaffection. But except for the word of Alexander's serving officers, there is nothing to prove his guilt, and as their word is not by itself enough, the truth remains uncertain.

  It is conceivable that Alexander resented Callisthenes's opposition, that his retort 'the poorer by a kiss' had been too accurate to be forgotten and that the first opportunity was seized to rid the court of an enemy's presence; conceivable, maybe, but still unproven. Callisthenes's importance was easily exaggerated, and it is very doubtful whether his solitary show of stubbornness mattered enough to cause his unfounded murder. But the pages had conspired, and their plot made all the more sense if encouraged by their disgruntled tutor. Four hundred years later a letter co
uld be quoted as if from Alexander, which, if genuine, would strongly support the historian's innocence. It was addressed to three Commanders of the foot-phalanx, almost certainly out of camp at the moment of the plot: 'Under torture', it said, 'the pages have confessed that they alone had plotted and that nobody else knew of their plans.' It is, however, extremely improbable that private correspondence between Alexander and his officers survived for the use of historians, let alone a note whose contents were so dangerously frank. Forgeries abounded, and on the disputed death of Aristotle's kinsman, Greeks had every cause to invent a proof of his innocence. Alexander had no need to write to three generals a mere week or so away from base and implicitly accuse himself of murder. If there was a genuine letter of the moment, it was perhaps the one said to have been written to Antipater, who is known to have edited his own correspondence: in it, Alexander is made to accuse Callisthenes of plotting and affirm that he meant to punish 'those who had sent the sophist out in the first place', presumably a threat against Aristotle. The execution of Aristotle's kinsman cannot have helped relations between Alexander and his former tutor and as a first annoyed reaction, Alexander might indeed have vowed revenge. But Aristotle's son-in-law remained in high favour at court, and these threats never came to anything: on such a favourite topic of legend the menacing letter too may only be a later invention.

  The last and only certain word went, fittingly, to Anaxarchus the contented. 'Much learning', he wrote, 'either helps a man greatly or harms him greatly: it helps the shrewd but harms the easy talker, who says whatever he pleases wherever he is. One must know the proper and appropriate measure of all things: that is the definition of wisdom.' The distrust of the academic had long been a feature of Greek thought and it is tempting to see it here as a topical allusion. Callisthenes, his rival, had been the clever man who could argue about earthquakes, derive place names from known Greek words and work out a date for the Fall of Troy; he died in the end for his indiscretion, opposing a policy which he thought to be barbaric, because he was stopped, like other Aristotelians, by a narrowly Greek outlook from seeing what was appropriate. His tale is a strange one: the flatterer who wrote up a crusade of Greek revenge in the most glowing terms, hailed its leader as the son of a god, slandered the Parmenion whom his patron had killed, and finally changed his mind when the Crusader became a king. It is for their early years that he and Alexander should be remembered, as king and Aristotelian scholar had made their way through Asia Minor, the king in rivalry with his beloved Achilles, the scholar improving his text of Homer and pointing out sites linked with Homer's poems. But patronage, as often, soured. 'Alexander and Alexander's actions', Callisthenes is said to have remarked, 'depend on me and my history: I have come not to win esteem from Alexander but to make him glorious in the sight of men.' When the historian died, not even those who knew the truth agreed on the manner of his death.

  According to Ptolemy, Callisthenes was tortured and hanged, as a guilty conspirator deserved; according to Aristobulus, who involved Alexander less directly, Callisthenes was bound in fetters and taken round with the army until he eventually died, not on Alexander's orders but from disease. Chares the court Chamberlain disagreed: Callisthenes was 'kept in fetters for seven months so that he could be tried by the allied council in Greece in the presence of Aristotle', a careful retort, no doubt, to associates of Aristotle who were already complaining that Callisthenes had been murdered without a fair trial. Theophrastus, pupil of Aristotle, even wrote a pamphlet called Callisthenes, or On Mourning, in which he complained that Alexander was a 'man of the highest power and fortune, but did not know how to use his assets'. Not a bit of it, Chares the Chamberlain maintained: Callisthenes became 'excessively fat and ridden with lice', being flabby and lousy anyway, and died more than a year after his disgrace, before he could be tried in public. Apologetic tales of a lingering sickness were soon reversed: Callisthenes, said some, was mauled limb by limb: his ears, nose and lips were cut off: he was shut in a pit, or a cage, with a dog, or a lion, and only rescued by the high-minded Lysimachus, a future king in Europe, who slipped him a dose of poison.

  When witnesses could make up such elaborate stories, the impact among Greek schoolmen of Callisthenes's death was neither short-lived nor insignificant; hence neither Ptolemy nor Aristobulus recorded his refusals of proskynesis in order to deny him the glamour of a hero. He had flourished in flattery, died in controversy, and there are few plainer insights into the hazards of a search for Alexander than that his own historian was said by informed contemporaries to have died in five different ways.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The court disturbances near Balkh did not set the Macedonians against their king: the soldiery remained contented, the officers were not reshuffled, and despite the rigours of the past two years Alexander felt safe enough to retrace his tracks for the grand adventure of his lifetime. He would cross the Hindu Kush and march east into India, a kingdom whose traders and spice plants had already been seen on the Oxus but whose way of life was known to the Greeks only through the fabulous tales of early romancers.

  So far, Alexander's ambitions had been easily understood. He had first conquered Darius, then claimed his empire, marching out to its north-cast frontier but going no farther. West Pakistan, which the ancients called India, had also been a part of the Persian empire, but the frontier which had once stretched into the Punjab had been lost for a hundred years, and if Alexander knew this fact of Persian history it is doubtful whether it influenced his Indian plans. In India he would soon go beyond the Persians' boundaries where there was no longer an empire to be reclaimed. His motives need a little imagination; they will never be certain, as historians can read a man's documents but never read his mind. Throughout history, armies have been drawn from Kabul into India as if by a continuing tide, and Alexander was anticipating Mongols and Moghuls, Bactrian Greeks, Kushans, White Huns and the others who have spilled into India for conquest from the Hindu Kush; he did not invade for a cause or an idea, but no successful invader ever has, and the slogans are only ambition's cloak before the simpleminded. 'You, Zeus, hold Olympus,' ran the verse on one of his official statues, ‘I set the earth beneath me.' 'The truth', wrote an admiring officer, 'was that Alexander was always straining after more.' Except for Amnion's alleged assurance that he would conquer the world, which was surely the posthumous guess of his soldiers, there is no other evidence that Alexander had dreamt of world domination or was fighting to realize such a vague ideal. It is more to the point that he restored the rajahs whom he conquered; he did not inflict his own superiority on his subjects or work off a lasting sense of frustration at the expense of the vast majority of those who surrendered. Patriots and rebels were killed and enslaved by the thousand as always, but

  there is more of the explorer than the tyrant in the history of the campaign. For boredom is the force in life which histories always omit; Alexander was twenty-nine, invincible and on the edge of an unknown continent; to turn back would have been impossibly tame, for life in Asia could promise little more than hunting and the tedious tidying of rebellions and provincial decrees. Only in a speech to his troops is mention made of a march to the Eastern Ocean, edge of the world as the Greeks conceived it; though the speech is certainly not true to life it is tempting, not only because it is romantic, to believe that this detail is founded on fact. If the edge of the world was Alexander's ambition, it was a goal which appealed as much to his curiosity as to a longing for power.

  To a curious mind this strange new world was irresistible, and of Alexander's curiosity there can be no doubt. 'His troops', said a contemporary, well placed to know, 'took a very hasty view of India, but Alexander himself was keen to be more exact and therefore arranged for the land to be described by those who knew it.' The Greek tales of India were part of any prince's education; his staff had heard the rumours of India's gold, said to be dug by gigantic ants or guarded by vigilant griffins: they would be keen to see the truth of the Sciapods, men who la
y on their backs and shaded themselves from the sun with their one large foot. In India, men were said to live for two hundred years, making love in public, living according to caste and weaving their clothes from wool-bearing trees: there had been tales of falconry, fine purple, scents and silver: unicorns with red heads and blue eyes, pygmies and a sort of steel which could avert a storm. Like the first Christian missionaries to visit India, who explained the Hindus as descendants of St Thomas, the Greeks went east with their own myths and history and related what they saw to what they knew already. Nothing prepared them more than their own Herodotus; the flooding of the rivers, the Indians' dress and their wild plants were described in Herodotus's terms and as for his gold-digging ants, 'I did not see any myself, wrote Nearchus, Alexander's officer, 'but many of their pelts were brought into the Macedonian camp.' It took more than a personal visit to kill off the creatures of Greek fable; 'In a valley of the Himalayas', wrote one of Alexander's surveyors on his return, 'live a tribe whose feet are turned back to front. They run very fast, but because they cannot breathe in any other climate none of them could be brought to Alexander.' So begins the history of the Abominable Snowman.