Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  In this crisis, they needed a man with a clear head to take charge and insist on the only calculation which could save them. How Alexander had been bearing the strain of Makran remains uncertain; there are stories of his self-sacrifice, but these probably belong on his earlier march to the Oxus, and as it was less than a year since his arrow-wound, the dust and the heat can only have exaggerated his pain. He knew that he could not be pampered and still continue to lead his troops, but he was no longer fit enough to go hungry or thirsty as an example. He did not walk, he rode; and his horses would take the worst of the discomforts. True, he did not hang back, but in the desert it pays to be the first, and when the guides announced they had lost the way, he took charge with his usual sense and authority, and led a party of horsemen away to the south of the main army until they regained the coast. It was the decision of a sound leader, for with the help of the stars the sea was one landmark they were bound to find; the ride was exhausting, but less so than waiting to die of thirst in camp. Digging in the shale by the sea's edge, his helpers found drinking water and arranged for word to be sent to the army behind; Alexander, meanwhile stayed thankfully beside the waterhole. In a crisis, scouting has its rewards.

  When the rest of the army arrived, they could only agree to follow the coastline and hope for the best. They were lost and starving, and for a week, they scrambled despairingly along the shingle. But suddenly, near Gwadar, the guides began to recognize the ground which rose on their right: it was the border of the one recognized track north up the valley. If so, they were close to the borders of Makran, and the fleet's well-being could now be forgotten. Risking their last strength for survival, they struck inland and to their relief, the landscape smoothed into a milder pattern: the scrub persisted, but here and there, the ground offered grazing to a few flocks, and the guides for once had been proved right. Another two hundred miles would bring them to the local capital at Pura and from there, it was an easy stage to their agreed meeting-point with fleet and reserves near Kirman. But heavy on Alexander's mind was the knowledge that his plans for supplies had failed and that the fleet was most unlikely to have survived.

  In fact, the fleet had been slow in starting. The wind had been blowing up the Indus, not down it, and the natives had returned to attack most vigorously as soon as Alexander had marched west. It was the second week in October, perhaps 13 October, before the ships could set sail and even then, they were held up for nearly five weeks at the edge of the Indian Ocean by adverse breezes from the sea; the sailors varied their rations by hunting the mussels, razor-fish and oysters of unusually large size which frequented the sea pools. When the wind tacked round in mid-November, they at last began sailing westwards in earnest, all too aware that Alexander was now near the end of his nightmarish march. Many of the flat-bottomed grain-lighters were entrusted to the open waters of the Indian Ocean in order to carry supplies which remained at Pattala and to deposit the army's food heaps along the shore; several of the fleet were triremes, or three-banked men of war, and therefore unable to house sufficient water for more than two clays' sailing, so that

  they, at least, depended on Alexander's plan to dig wells. Within the first week, they put in by the river Hab to collect ten days' rations from the depot he had left them near the new Alexandria; there, they heard the news that had escaped him, the major uprising of the Oreitans and their neighbours and the death of his official satrap. But all was quiet enough for them to continue; it was apparent that the plan for supplies had broken down and that even the army ahead was starving.

  As they stopped nightly and found neither stores nor promised water they too began to run short of their food-cargo. Within two weeks, they had turned arrow-shooting catapults against a crowd of Fish-Eaters and driven them back from the beach in order to steal their flocks; here, a few goats; there, a store of dates, but nowhere the heaps of com they had expected. A village was stormed for the sake of its powdered fish-meal; huts were raided in search of camels which were killed and eaten raw. There was no corn or firewood in a land encrusted with salt and sand, and the only excitement was the whales, which appeared for the first time to Greeks far out at sea, 'spouting water in such a way that the sailors were terrified and dropped the oars from their hands'. Nearchus, on native advice, replied by charging them boldly, trumpets blaring, oars splashing and sailors raising a full throated war-cry; naturally sharp of hearing, like their Arctic relations, the whales submerged in a hurry and only surfaced well behind the fleet where they continued spouting peacefully to rounds of applause from the crews. Not until two months later was a whale inspected at close quarters, when oft the coast of Persia, one was found stranded 'more than a hundred and thirty feet long, with a thick skin coated in oysters, limpets and piles of seaweed'. There was nothing here to set hunger at rest, and Nearchus, like Europeans in the Arctic, never dreamt that whales could be speared and eaten for their blubber.

  By now, some four hundred miles along the coast, interpreters and pilots had been recruited from the natives, and Nearchus would converse with them through Persian interpreters of his own. Their reports, when twice translated, caused alarm. Certain islands, they claimed, lay close to the coast of Makran and were haunted by evil spirits, whom the Greeks, reared on Homer's Odyssey, identified with the Sun and an unnamed sea nymph. Visitors to the Sun's island would vanish, while those who passed by the sea nymph would be lured to her rock, only to be turned into fish. The tale gained credit from the sudden disappearance of a warship and its Egyptian crew. The Sun, it was thought, had spirited them away, and as a metaphor, this was no doubt true. It was left to Nearchus to visit the island and refute the legend by surviving.

  If the islands did not live up to their fame, it was not many days before the pilots pointed to something stranger than even they suspected. In the straits of Hormuz, where the Indian Ocean narrows against the coast of Arabia and runs into the Persian Gulf beyond, they indicated the Arabian promontory of Ras Mussendam on the starboard bow and explained that 'from this point, cinnamon and other spices were imported into Babylonia'. A new and unimagined perspective stretched far behind their words.

  The report of this spice trade was true enough. It had been going on for more than a thousand years and it had already excited Alexander's curiosity. But among the spices, none was more rare or precious than this cinnamon, a plant whose natural home lies unbelievably far from the classical world. To the Greek historian Herodotus, cinnamon was a spice which grew beyond the sources of the Nile in a jungle protected by monstrous birds; the Romans, who bartered with the Arabs for as much as they could acquire, had a clearer idea of the facts behind the story, for they traced the cinnamon trade to the south-east coast of Africa and discovered that Madagascar island was involved. Rumour went further. Cinnamon, it was said, was shipped by raft across the eastern ocean on a journey which lasted five whole years, and for once, the rumours of ancient geography were justified. Cinnamon's natural home is not Arabia or even the African seaboard: it grows wild in the far-off valleys of Malaysia. In this one plant, the Greeks and Romans had reached unawares beyond their world. Once upon a time, it had been shipped across the Indian Ocean from Malaysia to Madagascar; from Madagascar, it had been attracted up the coast of Africa to Arabia and the Red Sea and so to the clientele of oriental palaces. By Alexander's day, the Arabs had naturalized it in their country, but the imports from the south's mysterious source continued; when Alexander's sailors were shown the cinnamon trade-route off Arabia, they were in contact with a product which had out-travelled their king. Cinnamon had once seen the truth which the munity on the Beas had saved Alexander from exploring. The world, it knew, went on beyond the Ganges.

  For the moment, the sailors passed it by. They had been commissioned to explore the coast of the Persian Gulf and they were too short of supplies to linger over exotic reports. It was now early December and they had been on board for over ten weeks; they were hot, cramped and hungry but the wind was still propelling them, and when the end cam
e, it came, as always, suddenly. Two days sailing into the Persian Gulf with a following breeze brought them at last to a friendly coastline: near Bander Abbas, they found com and fruit-trees and knew they would no longer starve.

  'All crops were born in abundance,' wrote their admiral, 'except for olives'—the deeply revealing complaint of a Greek who finds himself far from what he knows at home. But as a few of the sailors explored inland, they soon made up for this nostalgia: they met a man in Greek clothes who accosted them in Greek. It all seemed too marvellous to be true, and the sound of their native language brought tears to their eyes: tears turned to shouts of joy when they heard the man say he was a member of the army and Alexander himself was not far distant.

  Since finding the inland route when the guides had failed on the borders of Makran, Alexander had not been idle. It was now only a matter of a few days before he and his survivors would be clear of the desert, and he knew he would need food immediately. Camel riders, therefore, were ordered to gallop north, north-cast and north-west to as many provinces as they could reach, where they were to order baggage-animals and cooked food to be sent at once to the borders of Kirman. Such is the speed of a dromedary, especially over the salt waste of the Dasht-i-Kavir desert, that word even reached the satrap of Parthia near the Caspian Sea. The news caused commotion among men who had not expected to see Alexander alive, let alone returning from the ordeal of Makran. Three satraps, at least, obliged and when Alexander emerged from the desert in mid-November, he found supplies and baggage-animals waiting on the borders of Carmania. It was a sop to the repeated failures of the past eight weeks.

  Kirman itself was scrubland, distinguished only for its wells and grazing and its mines of red gold, silver, bronze and yellow arsenic. Its people were not attractive and inevitably, they had been unruly, especially as Alexander had not passed that way before:

  Because horses are scarce, most of the people there use donkeys even for war. The war-god is the only god they worship and they sacrifice a donkey to him too: they are an aggressive people. Nobody marries until he has cut off the head of an enemy and brought it to the King: the King then stores it in the palace, where he minces up its tongue, mixes it with flour and tastes it himself. He gives the remains to the warrior to eat with his family; the man who owns most heads is the most admired.

  And yet this wretched corner of the empire had its blessings: the natives grew vines.

  After sixty days in the desert, the survivors can hardly have dreamed that they would live to taste wine again. They had seen thousands die around them, perhaps half their fellow-soldiers and almost all the camp-followers. If 40,000 people had followed Alexander into the desert, only 15,ooo may have survived to see Kirman. All such figures are guesses, but there is no mistaking the men's condition. 'Not even the sum total of all the army's sufferings in Asia,' it was agreed, 'deserved to be compared with the hardships in Makran.' The survivors were broken and bewildered men who needed to assert their common identity; it was some consolation when the veterans and elephants met them on the borders of Kirman, safe and happy in their detour down the Hehnand valley, but even they brought news of unrest in the eastern satrapies. If anxiety could not be put away, it could at least be submerged in a show of relief, to nobody more welcome than to Alexander, who was racked by the growing conviction that he had launched his fleet to certain death. His close friends on the march were alive to a man, and that alone was a matter for thanks, if only by contrast with the fate of others: 'Sacrifices,' wrote Aristobulus, who saw them, 'were offered in gratitude for the victory over the Indians and for the army's survival for Makran.' There is a world of harsh experience left unsaid in those few words.

  Men who have escaped from death by thirst and starvation are not so reticent about their celebrations, for when civilization is at last to hand it is hard for an explorer to respect it or to greet its petty rules. So while there were athletic games and a festival of the arts, there was, naturally, also a revel.

  For seven days, they processed through Kirman; Alexander was carried slowly along by eight horses, while he feasted throughout the day and night with his Companions on a high and commanding dais, built in the shape of an oblong; dozens of wagons followed, some with canopies of purple and embroidery, others with roofs of branches kept fresh and green to shade off the sun. Inside, his friends and commanders lay garlanded and drinking wine. There was not a shield nor a helmet nor a sarissa to be seen, but all along the journey, the soldiers kept drawing wine in cups and drinking-horns and ornate bowls; as they walked or drove, they pledged a toast to one another. Pipes and flutes and stringed instruments played loudly and filled the countryside with their music; women raised the cry in honour of Dionysus and followed the procession in a route, as if the god were escorting them on their way.

  The reports of this famous triumph were to influence the course of royal pomp for centuries. In the history of Greek kingship, the return of a triumphant king and the manifestation of a god to his worshippers are ceremonies which come closer together after Alexander's death: the theme of Dionysus was a favourite one not only with Alexander but also with his Macedonians, and its heartfelt celebration after eight weeks' suffering is very understandable. Dionysus too had returned after victories in India, though not through a desert or with a lung-wound which made it more comfortable to process in an eight-horsed chariot; Alexander's rivalry with Dionysus was no idle legend, but a fact which the customs of Hindu India had helped to confirm. His was the only Greek precedent for an Indian triumph and as ancestor of the Macedonian kings and god of the victory which Alexander stressed throughout his career, it was natural to turn to his example for this extraordinary procession. But what began on an impulse after disaster passed to the Ptolemies in Alexandria and so to the generals of Rome, to the triumphs of Marius and Antony, the new Dionysus, and to the emperor Caracalla who claimed in his triumphs to drink from the cups which Alexander had used in India.

  Triumph though Alexander might, the fears for the fleet were overbearing. Again, communications were to blame, for as Alexander revelled his way through Kirman and tried to forget his worst suspicions, he could not know that a straggler from the army had already met the sailors down on the coast and that his worries were unfounded. Uninformed, the army still fretted anxiously in Kirman's capital, but not many miles away Nearchus was already blessing his good fortune and drawing up the ships to be repaired behind a double stockade and a stout mud wall. Suddenly, the message arrived in the army's camp; the governor near the coast had hurried inland with news which, he hoped, would earn him a rich reward, 'Nearchus,' he announced, 'is coming on his way from the ships.' Alexander wanted to believe him, but as the days went by and no Nearchus appeared, not even to the many search parties he had sent out, he began to despair, and even ordered the governor to be arrested for spreading a story which had only made the disappointment harsher. 'Both by his expression and his outlook, Alexander showed that he was greatly upset.'

  Down by the coast, one search-party had at last been more fortunate. They had met a group of five or six men 'long-haired, dirty, covered in brine, wizened and pale from sleepless nights and other hardships'. They had thought no more, even when the wanderers asked where Alexander was waiting; they rode on by towards the sea presuming the men to be local vagabonds. But as they left, one of the wanderers turned to another and said: 'Nearchus, I expect those men were travelling the same way as us for no other reason than to find us, but we are in such poor shape that they cannot recognize us. Let's tell them who we are.' Nearchus agreed, and no sooner had he spoken than the search-party realized that in their dishevelled questioner they had found the admiral of the fleet.

  Messengers ran ahead to Alexander, but in their excitement they could tell him no more than that Nearchus and five others had been found alive

  At once he presumed that only these few had survived from the entire expedition, and the news did little to lighten his mood, a despair which the sight of Nearchus, so long-haire
d and unkempt, did nothing to relieve. Giving his admiral his right hand, he led him aside and wept most bitterly: 'The fact that you, at least,' he said, 'and these others have come back to me is some consolation for the disaster; but how were the rest of the ships destroyed?' 'But, my lord,' Nearchus claimed to have replied, 'your ships are safe and sound and your army too; we have come with the news of their survival.' Alexander wept again, as his admiral told him they were being repaired at the river mouth. Then, in one of the rare insights into his way of thinking, 'he swore both by Zeus of the Greeks and Ammon of the Libyans that he was more pleased at this news than that he was returning, having conquered all Asia; his grief at the supposed loss of his fleet had outweighed all his other good fortune. In his extreme emotion, Zeus Ammon came naturally to the surface of his mind, and for once a friend recorded his words. But this 'conquest of all Asia' was a claim which could do little for the awful truth of Makran.

  The governor who had first brought the news was released and a second sacrifice was decreed for the safety of the army, heralding games and a musical festival at which Nearchus was to be guest of honour. Feted by his fellow-officers and showered with ribbons and flowers by the ranks, he took his scat of honour beside the king: ‘I will not allow you,' said Alexander, 'to run such a risk again: someone else shall lead the fleet upshore to Susa.' But Nearchus objected: 'My lord, I will obey you always, as that is my duty, but the difficult and dangerous task was entrusted to me, so please do not take away the easy sequel whose glory is readily won and put it into another's hands.' Alexander complied, and the fleet was left to its brave commander to bring it down the final stage of the monsoon journey from India to the Persian palaces.