Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  So they sat, king and admiral, and watched their festival games in the royal palace of Kirman. Flutes struck up a tune for the choral dance and actors prepared to compete with their plays and recitations. But however spiritedly they performed there were facts which all could see for themselves. The Companion Cavalry had been halved; the ranks of the Foot Companions were far below strength: the Shield Bearers only seemed numerous because so few had been detached into Makran. The highest officers were still alive and so was Alexander, but they had suffered a disgrace which was agonizingly irreversible. They had marched an army into the most murderous desert in Asia and had failed to meet the fleet for supplies as they had intended. Their errors and misfortunes can only be grasped in outline, and complexities remain which will never be understood; the men had followed for eight weeks, when even two days of Makran's desert should have been enough to make them rebel; when the convoy of supplies had failed to arrive at the first point, more prudent generals would surely have left a detachment to warn the fleet and then turned back to the river Hab as soon as their sufferings became apparent. Alexander had gone on and, amazingly, neither men nor officers had mutinied against him. The one truth, perhaps, was that prudence never swayed Alexander when a glorious plan had been laid in detail. Like Achilles, he put prowess before sound counsel and his staff felt the same; it was left to a desert to humble the mood which had helped to conquer Asia.

  It was among these bitter truths that the acting stopped in Kirman's palace and the music and dancing died away. Prizes were awarded as usual, none more prominent than those to the Persian Bagoas, the eunuch who had served Darius and had risen as high in the new king's loving favour. Dressed in his garlands of honour, he 'passed through the theatre and took his seat, as a champion of the dance, by Alexander's side; the Macedonians saw and applauded and shouted to the king to kiss the victor, until at last, he threw his arms round Bagoas and kissed him again and again'. In a moment of elation, all had almost been forgotten. Almost, but not quite. The king might kiss his Persian favourite and reward him for a dance which only a man of the East had the skill to perform, but thousands of the men who had fought to punish Persia lay dead and buried in the Gedrosian sand. Alexander the Invincible, the new Dionysus triumphant, had sent his bravest supporters to their death, and if the Persian empire's history had one lesson to teach, it was that the news of royal disaster worked on men's disloyalties, and that failure was always followed by revolt.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  To anxious watchers in Asia, the Makran disaster was less of a shock than the simple fact that Alexander had returned. Few of his satraps and fewer still of those in Greece and Europe had expected to sec him again: in eastern Iran, unrest had been fostered by news of his wound. Incredibly, he had reappeared and the history of the next six months of his career turns on a problem which he had brushed aside by marching east: how to retain a vast and varied empire in the face of foreign language, heat and slow communications.

  The problem has not gone short of answerers. 'The best course,' the Aristotle of Persian legend advised him once again, 'is to divide the realm of Iran among its princes and to bestow the throne on whomsoever you appoint to a province; give none ascendancy or authority over another, that each may be absolute on the throne of his own domain. ... Then will appear among them so much variance and disunity, so much presumption and haughtiness, rivalry about power, bragging about wealth, contention over degree and so much arguing over retainers that they will not seek vengeance or recall their past. When you are at the farthest bounds of the earth, each would menace his fellow with your dread, invoking your power and support.' This clear statement of a Persian gentleman's attitude would not have pleased Machiavelli. Rightly impressed by Asia's long obedience to Alexander's successors, he explained it as the surrender of a kingdom of servants, not of barons. Unlike barons, servants cannot be played against their masters, but once they fall, they fall for ever, finding no love among the people. Darius had ruled among servants and their defeat handed Alexander a kingdom with no resources for revolt.

  Of the two philosophers, this Aristotle showed more grasp of Alexander's predicament, but he too had missed the Iranians' will to rebel. While Alexander sailed on the Indus, observers in Asia would only have agreed on one probability: his empire was likely to fall apart.

  As he rested briefly in Kirman, fourteen of the twenty-three provinces of the empire were showing the marks of disturbance and revolt. The problem was not a new one, as it had troubled Alexander ever since the year of Gaugamela, and only one of his many governors, Antigonus the one-eyed, was to retain the same satrapy throughout his reign. The local causes varied. In Bactria, where the natives had been suppressed in two years' warfare, it was the hired Greek settlers who had rebelled. They had believed Alexander to be dead, they had elected an experienced Athenian as king and had seized Balkh in autumn 325. Then they had quarrelled, and by the time Alexander was returning, they had not escaped from the Alexandrias they detested. Mercenaries were also to blame in India. As soon as Alexander had turned for home, they had risen up and murdered Philip the satrap. The news only reached Alexander in Kirman, and at once he ordered the province to be shared between a Thracian and the rajah Ambhi. Bodyguards had already punished the ringleaders.

  In the Hindu Kush it was different again. In spring 325 word had come through Roxane's father that the Iranian governor of its heartland was showing himself to be turbulent. It was not the fust time that problems of independence had broken out among these mountain tribesmen; the man was deposed and Roxane's father took control of a province so important for the roads to Balkh and India. Meanwhile south of these roads, in the Helmand valley, chance had spurred on rebellion: the Macedonian satrap had died of sickness and before the request for a replacement could reach Alexander, Iranian chieftains had tried to seize power. But Alexander had the measure of them. When he had detached his veterans and elephants from the march into Makran, he had sent them by the Helmand valley to settle the trouble on their easy way home. This they did, and the Iranian culprits were brought to Kirman, chained and ready for execution.

  Odiers soon arrived to join them. A pretender had set himself up among the Medes, 'wearing his tiara upright and giving himself out to be King of the Medes and Persians', but the local satrap, though Iranian, had reason to be loyal, so he had put him in chains together with his Iranian associates. The governor of neighbouring mountain tribes, also an Iranian, had repeatedly refused to answer orders and had fled from a final summons three years before: only now was he caught and sent to his king, to be ordered to an overdue death. In Kirman itself, home of the headhunting tribesmen, the ruler was plausibly charged with insubordination, for Alexander had never conquered the country and its aggressive habits lent support to the suspicion. As Nearchus returned from the palace to the fleet, the new governor, he found, had still not pacified the tribesmen, who had seized the local strongholds and were continuing to prove as troublesome as their reputation suggested.

  Westwards the outlook was similar. The Persians' own homeland had been seized by an aristocratic pretender; the province of Susa and its neighbouring tribes were held by two suspect Iranians who had formerly been servants of Darius and who were likely to find Alexander's absence tempting. To the north-west, in the highlands of Armenia and Cappadocia, Alexander's governors had never become established and power had passed back to Iranians and their refugees; in Phrygia by the sea, adjoining tribesmen had been unruly, probably killing the satrap, while in Europe Thracian tribes had overthrown much that Philip and Alexander had striven to retain by colonies and tribute for the past twenty years. They had been encouraged by an ambitious failure in Alexander's name; during the past year one of his generals had crossed with a large army from Europe against the nomads around the Black Sea, whom Alexander had mentioned to the king of Khwarezm as a possible target. Weather and native resistance had wiped out his army, a disaster which had encouraged a Thracian uprising and which many observers b
elieved Alexander might now return to avenge. In the nine more peaceful provinces, such familiar figures as Ada the queen mother and Mazaeus had died, while the experiment with native governors in Egypt had not lasted long. The fight for the empire could not be said to have ended with Gaugamela.

  The proof of an empire's strength lies in its powers of survival. On paper, Alexander's seems dangerously fragile, only held by some 40,000 provincial troops, two dozen or so Alexandrias and a high command which had included nine of Darius's former satraps. And yet none of the pretenders or turbulent satraps had managed to organize a popular revolt, except among pockets of hill tribesmen. It is a mistake to describe their rebellions as nationalist, as if Asia were nineteenth-century Europe. The Iranian peasant did not feel part of a nation whose boundaries were worth defining: he only knew that the greater part of his produce went to his distant masters, as three-quarters of it still does, and the identity of these masters was more or less a matter of indifference. The struggle, as Alexander returned unexpectedly, was not between nations or classes, but within the high command, where it centred on prominent Iranians. Six years had passed since Gaugamela and Darius's noblemen had not been as supine as Machiavelli suggested.

  Such a crisis of loyalty can be viewed from two directions, from the provinces, where it originated, or from Alexander, where it was suppressed. It is true that Alexander had just left Makran and was living with the memory of conspicuous disaster; his nerves on first emerging had been delicate, and so he had arrested the first messenger of Nearchus's return because the man seemed to have brought him unjustified news of success. But the messenger had been released when proved right, and weeks of celebration had done much to improve the army's morale; to a new Achilles, by a twist of a hero's logic, the escape from Makran could begin to seem like a personal triumph, a survival where Semiramis had failed and a victory in the struggle against the grimmest forces of geography. 'I am more delighted at the news of your return than at the conquest of all Asia,' Nearchus remembered Alexander saying, and Asia had thus been narrowed to include no more than the army's march. Nowadays such self-defence seems thin and distasteful; nonetheless, it goes flatly against the partem of all the evidence to blame the arrests which followed only on Alexander's presumed sense of insecurity or on a new and capricious mood of suspicion. Arrests were no new departure for the survivor of Parmenion, the pages or Philip's murder, let alone for any other Macedonian king, but not a single one of the courtiers, attendant Companions or staff-advisers is known to have lost his job or life during the coming year. If Makran had needed to be blamed on a scapegoat, it was among these assistants that a purge should first have been conducted. The arrests did not affect the court; they followed the fringes of the provincial high command, and it is from the provinces that their sequence must be interpreted. In each case, accusations were laid against the victims, and although such charges need not be truthful, there is often an independent background to make them entirely credible. Iranian revolt and satrapal turbulence were countered by gestures to the provincials' own sympathies, for against a pattern of Iranian rebellion, a union of satraps and subjects was a risk which Alexander could not afford.

  As the rebel Iranians arrived to be sentenced in Kirman, the unlikelihood of any such union became obvious. Among the governors who came bringing the requested food and baggage animals, there appeared the Thracian and Macedonian generals from Hamadan, who had not seen their king for the past six years. Their last known dealings had concerned Parmenion's murder, when they had disposed of the elderly general in obedience to Alexander's letter: four of them had remained in Media ever since, at the central point of the empire's communications to upper Iran, where they must have received regular orders for forwarding men and equipment. Six thousand soldiers accompanied them from their garrison, but complaints were swiftly raised about their conduct. Native accusers insisted that the generals had allowed the plunder of temple properties, a particularly emotive offence against local opinion; evidently they were guilty, for when a Greek invasion entered Hamadan over a hundred years later they noticed how silver roof tiles and precious stones had been stripped from the temple by Alexander's men, a sacrilege which 406 cannot belong with Alexander's own benign visits. His generals must have been responsible and they were also accused of the rape of respectable ladies, a crime which Alexander is always said in anecdotes to have detested. Their senior officer, brother of the same Coenus who had spoken up on the river Beas, 'had excelled them all in his mad passions, even to the point of assaulting an aristocratic virgin and giving her afterwards to his slave as a concubine'. These outbursts of violence were serious, but not surprising: two of the generals were commanders of Thracians, to whom such excesses had never been distasteful. When these blunt incriminations had been heard, 600 of the troops were put to death, a reprisal which could hardly have been conducted in the exempted presence of 5,000 of their fellows unless there had been grounds, and a distinction, to justify it. In a similar mood of inquiry and justice the four commanders were arrested and two of them executed on Alexander's orders. Complaints against a third did not seem convincing, and he was detained, although nobody had shown the slightest regret for the death of his fellow criminals. They had outraged the natives and they had given free rein to their ambitions at the pivot of the empire's roads. On both accounts, they were better out of the way, and the vast majority of their troops condoned their passing.

  The misbehaviour of four generals and 600 soldiers would soon encourage a more audacious order: like the last successful king of Persia, he would 'order his satraps to disband their mercenary armies'. This briefly reported order is obscure and in need of qualification. Settlers in Alexandras would be exempted because they were citizens, not mercenaries, and they are known to have stayed their ground until Alexander's death. It is not clear whether the provinces' standing armies were still mercenaries or whether they now served Alexander as part of his central army. Nor is the order clearly dated to any one of the next six months. News of the mercenary rising in India, the Greek revolt in Bactria and the purge of criminals from Hamadan must already have formed the idea in Alexander's mind; economy and the need to replenish his own royal army were also motives for centralizing troops. The idea has been criticized as ill-conceived, but he must have known there was no point in issuing an order from a distance unless it could be expected to be obeyed; 10,000 mercenaries, at most, would roam wild as a result of it, many of them natives, not Greeks. They would loot for a living, but their effects were mostly felt in Asia Minor, where larger hordes of vagrants were all too familiar. It was more important that no satrap would refuse the order, once issued: it only needed one more disturbance for Alexander to take the chance and issue it. With mercenaries on his mind Alexander took leave of Kirman, sent Nearchus back to the fleet and set out westwards by the long used road into Fars for the great Persian palaces in the centre of his empire. It was nearly seven years since he had last passed through them, and he can only have wondered what he would find; he was entering the second, most delicate, stage of his return.

  The march from Kirman to the province of Persia is not a hard one, and in early spring 324, Alexander found himself already at Pasargadae, barely fifty miles from Persepolis. For once his steps can be followed exactly, for at Pasargadae he was to stand on the threshold of Cyrus's tomb, a building which his officers had already visited six years earlier and which still survives on its stone platform very much as he then saw it. Inside the narrow doorway of its pedimented entrance, he found unmistakable signs of vandalism. On their first visit, officers had talked of a golden sarcophagus with a bed beside it and a covering, carpets and purple hangings. The king's cape, his trousers, his blue-dyed tunics, his necklaces and scimitars and his jewelled earrings had all been lying on the bed and its table; now they had disappeared. The sarcophagus had been chipped and Cyrus's skeleton had been scattered carelessly on the floor.

  As Alexander had long proclaimed himself to be Cyrus's heir, he was d
eeply perturbed at this disrespect. He tortured the Magi, who traditionally guarded the tomb for the fee of a sheep and a horse as a monthly sacrifice, but they named no culprits and the inquest was dropped. The historian Aristobulus was ordered to see to the repairs, replace the royal clothing and block the door with clay and stone, sealing it with the king's seal, and in the course of his work, he described the building accurately enough for explorers to recognize it two thousand years later: he even paraphrased King Cyrus's epitaph in Greek. And he understood the likely causes of the robbery: 'It was plainly not the work of the satrap,' he wrote, but of bandits, as they left behind whatever they could not easily carry away. It was one more example of the rebellious disturbances during Alexander's absence in Bactria and India.' A Macedonian was eventually put to death for the offence, perhaps with justice.

  But the satrap's hour was soon to come. Of the very noblest Iranian family, he had taken command of Persia when Alexander's own nominee had died; his action was arbitrary, so he came to meet the army with huge presents of gold, coin, horses, furniture and jewelled tableware in order to excuse his self-promotion. He was received as he hoped, and from the hills near Pasargadae, he marched with the king to Persepolis, where he might have survived, had the natives and the buildings not served as evidence against him. He was found to have 'plundered the shrines and the royal tombs', which overlook the terrace of Persepolis, and to have 'murdered many Persians unjustly'. He had also been a usurper in Asia's one dangerously nationalist province, and the charges were enough to sec him hanged, with Bagoas acting as interpreter and perhaps as accuser. He was replaced by Peucestas, the officer who had helped to save Alexander's life at Multan, and had since been made a personal Bodyguard in recognition. The choice was tactful in a province where the Persians' traditions ran strongest, for Peucestas followed up his appointment by wearing oriental dress and learning the Persian language, much to the natives' satisfaction. In a continuing mood of reconciliation, Alexander distributed the traditional presents of money to the women of Persia as he passed through their province, a custom which recalled King Cyrus's history, but had been neglected by recent Persian kings. He also expressed regret that the royal palace of Persepolis had ever been set alight; it was too late to undo the effects of a woman and a banquet, but as his respect for the memory of Cyrus suggested, his myth had moved far since those early days of the invasion. When satraps were suspect, it paid, as with the Hamadan generals, to flatter their subjects' sense of propriety. A reigning Persian king had seldom been seen in Persia for the past thirty years.