In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 13
So it was with Alexander, whose geography, or the geography he chose to believe in, was finite; for him the Oikoumene, the whole inhabited world, was engulfed by an endless Stream of Ocean mentioned by Hesiod, Homer and Herodotus.362 Psychologically, it magnified his ambitions, for this perspective made even the aim of becoming kosmokrator possible despite Herodotus’ warning of the things he had heard: ‘I know of no river of Oceanus existing, but I think that Homer or one of the poets who were before him invented the name and introduced it into his verse.’363
In India, Alexander did witness crocodiles in the Hydaspes (the Jhelum River) and what appeared to be Egyptian beans in the Acesines River; thinking he had discovered the source of the Nile in India, he prepared for a river voyage that would take him back to Egypt. Knowledge, it is said, is the enemy of faith, and Nearchus’ report captured the reality and disappointment once things became clear. Alexander soon realised such a journey was impossible, for Strabo, quoting Nearchus’ Indike, explained, ‘… for great rivers stand in between, and fearsome streams; first, Ocean into which all the Indian rivers empty…’ As Green put it, the ‘… diplomatic lie had been nailed, once and for all, by the brute facts of geography.’364
A map of the known world drafted according to Herodotus’ geographical descriptions ca. 450 BCE. When the Macedonians arrived in India they started to appreciate the boundless East with the Ganges clearly referenced in extant texts. Whether the land of the Seres (China) was mentioned to them we can only speculate.
There were additional reports arriving of the River Ganges, some four months to the east, and probably tales of lands beyond from the traders they encountered or from remnants of the reports of Scylax of Carianda who (debatably) explored the Indian river systems for Darius I ca. 515 BCE.365 This gave rise to a spurious tradition that Alexander even reached the Ganges’ banks.366 The Roman Empire was to learn the true scale of things with the arrival of silk from the Seres and through Egyptian commerce to the south and Parthian trade routes to the north.367 But when Alexander departed Europe he enjoyed a cartographic naivety stemming from maps and notions dating back to Ephorus and Hecataeus’ Periodos Ges (or Periegesis, broadly World Survey) based on Anaximander’s design, an Iliad and Odyssey that looked to the East no further than Colchis on the Black Sea (today’s southern Georgia), Xenophon’s Anabasis which had turned back at the Tigris, a Pseudo-Periplous which advanced nowhere east of Phoenicia, and a Persika from Ctesias which contradicted the claims of both Herodotus and Xenophon.368
Eudoxus of Cnidus’ no-longer extant Tour of the Earth and Aristotle’s Meteorologica apparently proved no more help locating Oceanus, supposedly just beyond the Punjab if his distances were correct. Alexander was confounded; upon returning to Babylon in 323 BCE he sent shipwrights to the Hyrcanian Sea (the Caspian) to find its source and determine exactly where it connected to the encircling stream, which was becoming as illusive as the rising pneuma of priestess Delphian Pythia.369 Tarn, dampening any suggestion that Alexander was hell-bent on conquering the world, saw the planned Arabian expedition as another ‘voyage of discovery’.
As Alexander ventured ever eastward, Aristotle’s declaration that Greeks were born to rule through a superior Hellenic civilisation was being severely undermined by epigraphy and by Alexander himself. The stele listing the Laws of Hammurabi, dating back 1,500 years, proclaimed the sophistication of Babylonian civil codes at a time when Greece was learning to smelt iron, presumably from the Ideaen Dactyls of Mount Ida.370 In India the Macedonians encountered Brahmin sages whose material simplicity made Diogenes’ Corinthian barrel and loincloth appear an extravagance, and whose truth-twisting sophistry matched any Athenian prosecutor.371 Pythagoras, who had been captured at the school of Egyptian mysteries by Cambyses II and ferried as a prisoner to Babylon to the presence of Chaldean prophets, already knew it, of course, some two centuries before, and yet the hellenocentric Aristotle must have been disturbed at the reports arriving in Athens. The campaigning ‘student’ may have dumped his former teacher when he caged Callisthenes in favour of a far more eclectic philosophy born of a much wider Peripatus.372
It follows that Alexander’s belief codes, rooted in Greek propaganda, must have perished at some point in the odyssey that took him beyond the Indus, and this may well have contributed to his gradual orientalisation, or as his men thought, ‘barbarisation’, his poignant retort to the Hellenic lie. What the Macedonians encountered next left Pyrrho of Elis demonstrably sceptical, despite (or possibly because of) the 10,000 gold pieces Alexander is said to have offered him at their first meeting.374 For if any illusion of campaigning glory still carried any currency, India crashed the exchange rate. Victory was tarnished as the highly choreographed battles on open plains were replaced by poisoned arrowheads, snakebites, dysentery and monsoon mud. Rain rusted what shining metal was left in panoplies, and pike heads, swords blades and spear tips were of weatherable iron, and tougher steel (though still weatherable) was almost unheard of in Europe at that time.375 Cavalry officers were now climbing scaling-ladders, and the orderly phalanx formation turned into street-to-street fighting with religious fanatics; when the walls were finally scaled, honourable surrender became nothing less than mass slaughter.376
The 2.25-metre tall diorite column in the shape of an index finger recording the Laws of Hammurabi, the sixth Babylonian king, dating to ca. 1750s BCE. Discovered in 1901, the inscription in Akkadian commences with a record of his deeds and then details the 282 laws defining his Babylonian social order. Perhaps originally erected at Sippar, it was discovered on the site of ancient Susa. Xenophon’s eulogistic tribute to Cyrus commented that the ‘Persian laws try, as it were, to steal a march on time, to make their citizens from the beginning incapable of setting their hearts on any wickedness or shameful conduct whatsoever.’ Now in the Louvre, Room 3, Mesopotamia.373
Alexander had finally marched a river too far and his army refused to follow him further east; as Bosworth pointed out, the court propaganda that saw him as ‘… superhuman, had long ago worn thin amongst the men upon whose efforts his godhead rested.’377 By now, Alexander had been faced with ‘… storms, droughts, deep rivers, the heights of the Birdless Rock [Aornus], the monstrous shapes of savage beasts, an uncivilised manner of life, the constant succession of petty kings and their repeated treachery.’378 Alexander’s near-death wound in the city of the Mallians in today’s southern Punjab would only reinforce their doubts; Alexander was not aniketos (invincible) after all.
The beginning of the Mallian episode has the ring of Philip’s siege of Methone (354 BCE) when he withdrew the scaling ladders once his men had climbed the wall ‘leaving the assailants no hope of safety but in their courage’, though here played in reverse. Two ladders had collapsed leaving Alexander himself exposed upon the citadel wall; furious with the hesitation of his men (who had recently threatened to mutiny), he jumped down the enemy side whereupon he was attacked and almost killed.379 Lucian satirically captured the state of affairs again: (father to son) ‘You were passing for a God; and your being wounded, and carried off the field on a litter, bleeding and groaning, could only excite the ridicule of the spectators…’ Nevertheless, Alexander’s ‘miraculous’ healing, as Brian Bosworth has pointed out, rivalled that of Ares in the Iliad when ‘divine ichor flowed’ and yet it healed as ‘swiftly as fig-juice thickens milk that curdles when stirred’.380
But Phegeus’ well-calculated report (with Porus’ affirmation) of two great rivers and the 200,000 strong army of Xandrames with its 2,000 chariots and 400 war elephants that lay directly in their path, probably had the desired effect,381 and Alexander may have been as relieved as his men to be retracing his steps at last, for the recent clash with Porus and his ‘city of elephants’ had shaken the Macedonian army.382 Bucephalus had been run through at the grand old horse-age of thirty and the gods had finally punished the new Bellerophon for attempting to ride his Pegasus up Mount Olympus, and like the fabled slayer of monsters, Alexander had t
umbled back to Earth.383
He remained haunted, perhaps for the very first time, by an ambition unaccomplished, and neither was he able to give the superficial impression to the world that had he had fulfilled it. If his two-day sulk on the banks of the Hyphasis (now the Beas River in Northern India) was reminiscent of Achilles’ own tented isolation, it was again a well-worn picture; the Spartan general Clearchus had done the same to avert mutiny under Cyrus. The Hyphasis may have been the boundary of the empire of Darius I; if the troops knew it, they would have considered their job completed.384
Alexander’s next instructions were similarly theatrical, if they are to be believed. Sensing that he may never return, he ensured his men paid for their dissent; he commanded that twelve stone altars some 50 cubits high (approximately 75 feet) be built to Olympian gods, and he set about exaggerating the stature of the ‘giants’ who erected them: oversized weaponry, equipment, couches, and beds were left behind. The altars were apparently still standing in Plutarch’s day before the Hyphasis changed its course. Curtius concluded of the whole affair: ‘He was preparing to leave posterity a fraudulent wonder.’385 Alexander had already, and somewhat symbolically, destroyed Cyra, the city that marked the furthest foundation of Cyrus’ earlier empire, and these altars were to be the new eastern boundary marks.386 Arrian, thus we assume his favoured source, Ptolemy (and perhaps Aristobulus too), was predictably silent on any suggestion of ‘fraud’, focusing their texts on memorials to ‘victorious progress’ instead.
But this time victory came at a price. The ‘commoner’ Coenus, whose family had received significant land in Macedonia, had spoken out on the dissatisfaction of the regular infantryman in what became an immortal speech.387 He was a brother-in-law of the executed Philotas as he had married one of Parmenio’s daughters, whose previous husband was most likely the also executed Attalus.388 The incompliant Coenus was precariously placed; now a distinguished infantry hyparchos who had sarcastically congratulated Alexander for giving 1,000 talents to the Indian rajah of Taxila, he next pointed out the poor condition of his men and their weapons in India. He too, suspiciously, died a few days later on the banks of the Acesines (today’s Chenab); Alexander is said to have adorned his ‘grief’ with, ‘It was for the sake of a few days that Coenus had made his long harangue, as if he alone were the one who would see Macedonia again.’389
The retracing of steps westwards ceased at the River Hydaspes when Alexander ordered the famous 1,800-vessel flotilla to be built on which they would head south to the sea; he, like Achilles, would do battle with a river, or at least emulate Scylax’s voyage of discovery. In the rapids at the confluence of the Hydaspes and Acesines, he certainly fought for survival, and once more at the delta of the Indus when tides never imagined nearly scuttled the whole fleet. On the voyage, Alexander’s men would embark upon the most bloody campaigning to date, while a young Chandragupta (Sandrokottos to the Greeks), who reportedly once approached Alexander for help, watched on as he planned his own Indian dominion.390 But aware that Darius I had conquered the Indus Valley, Alexander could do no less, and he attempted to extract the veneer of fealty from the river-bordering tribes.
We may doubt that he knew that some 2,000 years earlier a great Indus Valley civilisation had existed; it was once twice the size of that of Egypt and Mesopotamia and it was only discovered in the 1920s along with the dry beds of the once great Saraswati River. A thousand settlements, the largest at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, extending over 500,000 square miles, once proliferated the fertile basin with some one million inhabitants with an elaborate and unrivalled system of drainage and sanitation, and a still-undeciphered script.391
Blind to that ancient past, Arrian, we imagine drawing principally from Ptolemy (though with a weather-eye on Cleitarchus when information was scant) littered his fifth and sixth chapters with terms associated with the carnage that followed no fewer than sixteen times from the aftermath of the Hydaspes battle with Porus, through the slaughter in Mallia, to Alexander’s flotilla finally arriving at the Indus Delta: translations give us ‘crushed’, ‘cut down’, ‘put to death’, ‘subdued’, ‘attacked unarmed men’, ‘onslaught’, ‘massacred’, ‘enslaved’, ‘trapped’, ‘stormed’, ‘plundered’ and ‘hanged’.392 Campaigning in Gedrosia added to the death toll and Diodorus recorded that: ‘Every spot was filled with fire and devastation and great slaughter.’393
Remarkably, Arrian recounted this period in an easy and matter-of-fact way despite the enemy casualties (reportedly) falling in the tens of thousands. But this was typical of Arrian’s stoic principles: ‘never say an action is bad’, and so the death count was simply labelled ‘high’. Tarn, in a similarly characteristic stance, claimed Cleitarchus ‘had a taste for inventing, or adopting inventions of, massacres’, though did agree that the period was ‘unique in its dreadful record of mere slaughter’.394 Then again, we must recall that ‘India’ had become a byword for thauma and the exaggeration of scale; living dragons, 300-year-old elephants and 200-foot-long serpents epitomised the inflation of misunderstood fact.395 The twelve oversized temples and numbers attached to the massacres may simply be its by-product, and after all, chronic policy failure was rarely reported as simply that.
The river-based ‘campaign’ took seven months, and once the fascinations of the Indus delta had been left behind and sacrifices to Tethys and Oceanus had been made, the army was to suffer from Alexander’s worst decision of all: the crossing of the arid Makran desert region of Gedrosia.396 Arrian provided another sanitised rationale for the disastrous choice of route:
It was not that Alexander chose this route unaware of its difficulty (only Nearchus claims this), but because he had heard that no one had yet succeeded in getting an army through the region safely. Semiramis had travelled this route on her forced retreat from India, but locals reported that even she made it through with twenty survivors from the entire army, and Cyrus the son of Cambyses suffered the same with only seven to tell the tale.397
Alexander was evidently lost to the West and he was being consumed by the East; it was Cyrus and the Assyrian queen who occupied his nostalgia. Babylon had seduced, India had scarred, and finally Gedrosia attempted to swallow the Macedonian-led army. The desert did not step aside in obeisance as the sea had in Pamphylia, and the ‘yearning’ (pothos) Nearchus attributed to the choice of route looks like the cover-up of another huge blunder that ‘proved fatal to a large proportion of the army’; ‘most were lost in the sand, like sailors lost overboard at sea’.398 Notably many must have been Greek mercenaries.399 Of the 125,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry Alexander once commanded in India, Plutarch believed one-quarter survived (though he didn’t directly attribute the loss to this disaster alone). These overall numbers appear grossly exaggerated (even accounting for a ‘moving state’ of non-combatants) but it was, nevertheless, a devastating outcome.400
The despondent king soon began executing misbehaving officials who must have doubted he would return; ‘In short, the whole empire was in turmoil, and an atmosphere of instability prevailed everywhere’, claimed Plutarch.401 Curtius reported that over 600 transgressors were executed in Carmania for malversation, including the scapegoat administrators Alexander pinned blame on for the poor Gedrosian logistics; the death list included Persian satraps and common soldiers alike, as well as the four men Alexander had earlier enlisted to murder Parmenio, one of them Coenus’ brother.402 The ever-trustworthy general, Craterus, brought two Persian nobles who had planned to revolt to Alexander in chains, whilst Leonnatus had suffered heavy losses when attacked by local tribes. At this point there was still no news of whether Nearchus’ fleet had survived its journey; the disaster could be greater still.
Harpalus, Alexander’s boyhood companion and now the gazophylax (treasurer) in Babylon who had probably colluded in the maladministrations, saw the writing on his accounts ledger and summarily fled for the second time; he received a lukewarm reception in Athens despite the honorary citizenship the city had bestowed
on him for supplying much-needed grain.403 ‘He dreaded his master, who had by then become an object of terror even to his friends’; the executed Cleander (the brother of Coenus) was surely one of them for he had held a similar treasury role in Media, and both men heralded from the canton of Elimea in Upper Macedonia.404 The state of affairs prompted Apollodorus, the strategos overseeing the government of Babylon, to request his brother, the seer Pythagoras, to divine for him whether he was also in danger now that the king was returning.405
At Opis (or Susa, there is some chronological uncertainty) Alexander received a long-overdue reality check in the form of a second (or third) troop mutiny.406 Having infiltrated the Companion Cavalry with Persians as early as 329 BCE, Alexander had nevertheless refrained from arming and equipping them in Macedonian style. But the arrival at Susa of 30,000 epigonoi, the cadets representing the next generation of Asiatic soldiers, was a step too far for the veteran infantrymen whose unique status with their king was being undermined. According to Diodorus, the epigonoi were to ‘serve as a counterbalance to the Macedonian phalanx’, which implied Alexander’s lack of trust in his domestic ranks; perhaps it also pointed at their dispensability now the Achaemenid threat was gone.407
‘Foreigners’ now carried Macedonian lances in place of the thonged javelins of their native lands, a Persian battalion of Silver Shields was formed (previously an elite hypaspist unit), and Arrian suggested that even the melophoroi, the golden apple-bearing Immortals, had been assimilated, though he predictably saw this as Alexander prudently distancing himself from chauvinism.408 Persian cavalry, in small numbers, had been serving with the army since 330 BCE, but here we have the first signs of dissent from the king’s own mounted units which were being diluted by ‘barbarian’ regiments from Bactria, Sogdia, Arachosia, Zarangiana (Drangiana), Areia, Parythaea (Parthia) and the elite Euacae from Persia; as a result a fifth hipparchy (cavalry squadron) emerged.409