The two armies met yet again in battle, this time at Gaugemela, all the way up on the north Tigris. Again the Persians were defeated; again Darius fled. Alexander’s men marched in triumph first to Susa, and then to Persepolis. Here, Alexander discovered a whole contingent of Greek prisoners of war, some of whom had been taken captive decades before in older wars, but all of whom had been made slaves. To keep them from escaping, their Persian masters had amputed whatever arms or legs they didn’t need to fulfill their tasks. Alexander, once again moved to fury, told his men to sack the city; they were allowed to burn, kill, and enslave, but he forbade them to rape any of the women.15 We have no way of knowing how far this order was followed, but the city was laid waste, and the palaces of Darius burned.
Darius himself ran towards Ecbatana. Alexander went after him with a small fast force, but before he could overtake the escaping Persian king, Darius’s own men turned against him. His cavalry commander and one of his satraps stabbed him, and left him in a wagon to die in the hot July sun.16
Alexander was now Great King, and his men hoped that their tour of duty was over.17 But Alexander was incapable of leaving land unconquered, and the northeastern satrapies, Bactria and Sogdiana among them, were not yet in his hands. He began campaigning farther and higher, above the high range that separated the Indian subcontinent from the central Asian lands. It was rough terrain, and over the next three years of fighting, his hold over his men’s loyalties began to slip. First Parmenio’s son was convicted of plotting against Alexander’s life; Alexander had him tortured to death, and then ordered his father put to death as well (a brutal but not uncommon practice in Macedonia).
Then he arranged to marry a princess of Sogdiana, the beautiful Roxane. This was an unusually late first marriage, for a man of his age; like his father, he had carried on affairs with both sexes, but he spent most of his energy in battle, with sex a secondary pleasure. Now his queen would be a girl from a tribe that the Macedonians thought of as slaves and barbarians. And combined with this was a growing resentment over Alexander’s increasing tendency to put on Persian dress and follow Persian customs. As far as they were concerned, he was becoming less and less Macedonian as he took more and more territory.
This resentment boiled out at a drunken dinner late in 328, when the very same Cleitus who had saved Alexander’s life at Granicus accused him of taking credit for victories won by the blood of loyal Macedonians. Alexander leaped up, searching for a weapon; Cleitus’s friends, who were slightly less drunk than he was, dragged Cleitus out of the room, but he insisted on returning by another door to taunt the king. Alexander grabbed a spear from his bodyguard and spitted his countryman.18
When he sobered up, he was horrified. But he did not give up his plans of campaigning farther east, even though his men were now following him with none of the joyful adoration that they had once shown. Whether or not they were fully with him, he intended to conquer India.
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the Indus river, the direct descendents of King Ajatashatru of Magadha (who had, so many years ago, conquered the surrounding kingdoms to make Magadha great) had lost their throne. In 424 BC, an illegitimate son of the royal line named Mahapadma Nanda had taken the crown of Magadha himself, and had gone on campaign.
He lived to be the greatest Indian conqueror yet. He was still fighting at the age of eighty-eight; and when he finally died, after decades of kingdom-building, he had pushed the territory of Magadha all the way down to the Deccan (the northern edge of the dry southern desert). He left the kingdom to his sons and grandsons. When Alexander came through the Khyber Pass into India, one of Mahapadma Nanda’s descendents, Dhana Nanda, was on the throne of Magadha.
Before he had any chance of reaching this richest and most powerful Indian kingdom, Alexander had to pass through the lands that lay between them. But he never got quite far enough to face Dhana Nanda in battle.
The first Indian kingdom that lay between him and the northern kingdoms of India was Taxila, whose king took its name when he acceded. The current King Taxiles met Alexander with gifts and tribute soldiers as soon as he had crossed the Indus (perhaps using a pontoon bridge, although details of the crossing are unknown).19 Taxiles hoped to make an alliance with Alexander against the next kingdom over: Hydaspes, which lay on the Jhelum river and was ruled by the seven-foot-tall King Porus.
Alexander took the gifts and soldiers, and agreed to help Taxiles against his enemy. The joint force of Indians and Macedonians marched to the Jhelum river, where they could see Porus and his army (which included “squadrons of elephants,” Arrian says)20 on the other side. With four of his hand-picked personal guard, men named Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Lysimachus, and Seleucus, he led his army across the river (some swimming, some wading, some on hastily built boats) and attacked both the elephants and the seven-foot Porus.
Both the Macedonians and the horses were a little alarmed by these monstrous beasts, but fought forwards and drove Porus’s forces closer and closer together, until his elephants were trampling his own foot soldiers. Finally Porus was forced to surrender; Alexander, impressed by his courage, spared his life.
But Alexander’s victorious army had suffered heavy losses; and when they found out that Alexander now intended to lead them across the Ganges river, which was even wider than the Indus and had more hostile Indian troops and elephants on the other side, they refused to go on.
This time, neither Alexander’s fury nor his charm could persuade them. Finally, Plutarch says, he “shut himself up in his tent and lay there in sullen anger, refusing to feel any gratitude for what he had already achieved unless he could cross the Ganges as well.”21 He remained in his tent sulking for two days. And then, realizing that he had lost this particular battle, he emerged on the third day and agreed to turn back.22
But rather than marching back through the Khyber Pass, he led his soldiers along the Indus, south to the sea, and then to the west. This turned into a wretched, soul-and body-killing, seven-month voyage. The men had to fight their way through hostile riverside towns on their march down to the coast; in one of these attacks, on the town of the Mallians, Alexander was struck in the chest by an arrow and for some hours seemed to be dead. When they resumed the march he could barely sit on a horse, and the wound never completely healed. And once they were at the coast, the march west took them through salt desert: “through an uncultivated country,” Plutarch says, “whose inhabitants fared hardly, possessing only a few sheep, and those of a wretched kind, whose flesh was rank and unsavoury, by their continual feeding upon sea-fish.”23 The heat was unbearable. All the water was salty. His men began to died fom starvation, thirst, and disease. Out of an army of 120,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry, barely 30,000 reached home. It was a dreadful end to a brilliant campaign.
Back in Susa, Alexander put the Indian campaign out of his mind, insofar as he could, and instead concentrated on his duties as king rather than conquerer. He married again, this time one of Darius III’s daughters, the princess Stateira (at least half a foot taller than he was). He also hosted a bizarre mass wedding between his Macedonian noblemen and hundreds of Persian noblewomen. To Hephaestion, his closest friend, his trusted general, and probably his boyhood lover, he awarded the privilege of marrying another one of Darius’s daughters: Stateira’s younger sister Drypetis.
The wedding festival was Alexander’s attempt to deal with the ongoing hostility between the Persians, who found Macedonians uncouth, and the Macedonians, who found Persians effeminate. He also rounded up thousands of Persian boys and put them under the command of Macedonian officers, to be trained in Macedonian fighting. Both experiments backfired. Most of the mass marriages fell apart with speed, and the Macedonian foot soldiers hated the Persian youths with such vehemence that they threatened to go back to Macedonia. “They desired him to dismiss them one and all,” Plutarch writes, “now he was so well furnished with a set of dancing boys, with whom, if he pleased, he might go on and conquer the world.”24
Mean
while, the idea that a joint Greek identity might somehow pull all of Alexander’s subjects together had almost disappeared from view. But not completely. Alexander made an emotional appeal to the Persians (“Foreign newcomers though you are, I have made you established members of my force: you are both my fellow-citizens and my soldiers”) and another to his old Macedonian comrades (“Everything is taking on the same hue: it is no disgrace for the Persians to copy Macedonian customs nor for the Macedonians to imitate the Persians. Those who are to live under the same king should enjoy the same rights”).25
When he had managed to convince both Macedonians and Persians to coexist a little longer, he travelled from Susa to Ecbatana, where he intended to host a great festival in Greek style. He hoped that this might smooth out the very visible joints in his kingdom. But at Ecbatana, in mid-festival, Hephaestion grew ill. He probably had typhoid; he was beginning to recover when, against the advice of his physicians, he had a huge meal of chicken and wine which perforated his stomach. He died just hours later.
Alexander never completely recovered from Hephaestion’s death. He left Ecbatana and went to Babylon in deep mourning. Here, he too grew ill. Plutarch says he had a fever, which began on the eighteenth day of the month and grew continually worse. Ten days later, he was dead. The year was 323; he was thirty-three.
His body lay in his bedchamber unburied for several days, while his commanders argued over who would take control of the empire; he had never named a successor, and as he had learned not long before that Roxane was pregnant with an heir, had dismissed any need to do so. “During the dissensions among the commanders,” Plutarch writes, “which lasted several days, the body continued clear and fresh, without any sign of such taint or corruption, though it lay neglected in a close sultry place.”26 Some took this as a miraculous sign; in all likelihood, Alexander was in deep coma for two or three days before finally dying. The delay saved him from being still alive when the embalming process finally began.
ALEXANDER’S CONQUESTS, made in a white heat of energy, had produced an empire with no administration to speak of, no bureaucracy, no organized tax system, no common system of communication, no national identity, and no capital city; Alexander himself, peripatetic, died in camp. It had been created at hyperspeed, and it did in hyperspeed what other ancient empires held together by dynamic personalities had done: it fell apart.
The disintegration began with Roxane. Five months pregnant, in a strange country, and familiar enough with Persian customs to feel entirely unsafe, she had just heard that Alexander’s Persian wife Stateira, still in Susa, was also pregnant. She had probably also heard Ptolemy’s remark that her own child, even if male, would be half-slave, and that no Macedonian would want to submit to him.27 Stateira, on the other hand, was the daughter of a Great King.
Roxane wrote her a letter in Alexander’s hand, under Alexander’s seal, inviting her to Babylon. When Stateira arrived with her sister, Hephaestion’s widow Drypetis, Roxane offered them both a cup of poisoned wine. Both were dead before night.28
Alexander’s only heir was now Roxane’s unborn child. But an unborn child could not rule, even through a regent. The empire needed a king before the news of Alexander’s death spread through all those hard-conquered lands. The Macedonian army, which had gathered outside Alexander’s bedchamber waiting for him to die, did not want to see anyone but a blood relative claim Alexander’s title. They began to shout for Alexander’s half-brother: the feebleminded child Philip, son of old Philip’s mistress, known as Philip Arrhidaeus. This boy, now in his early thirties, was easily deceived, easily persuaded, and easily guided. He was also in Babylon, where Alexander, who was fond of him, had brought him in order to keep him safe.
When the army began to shout for him, one of Alexander’s generals ran and got Philip, brought him out with a crown on his head, and managed to keep him quiet long enough for the army to acclaim him king. “But destiny was already bringing civil war,” writes Quintus Curtius Rufus, “for a throne is not to be shared and several men were aspiring to it.”29 The men who wanted a piece of Alexander’s conquests were the men who had spent the last decade fighting at his side: Ptolemy, a Macedonian who was rumored to be a bastard son of old Philip himself; Antigonus, one of Alexander’s trusted generals; Lysimachus, one of his companions on the Indian campaign; and Perdiccas, who had served as commander of cavalry and then, after Hephaestion’s death, as second-in-command.
Realizing that the mood of the army was against any one of them becoming supreme head of Alexander’s empire, these men accepted a compromise. Feebleminded Philip would continue as nominal king, and if Roxane’s baby was male, Philip and the infant would be co-rulers. Both would need a regent, and the man who took the job was Perdiccas.
He would stay in Babylon, which would serve as the center of the empire. The other men agreed to take positions as satraps, in imitation of the Persian system. Ptolemy would govern Egypt; Antigonus, most of Asia Minor (“Lycia, Pamphylia, and greater Phrygia,” Rufus says); Lysimachus got Thrace; Antipater, a trusted officer who had served Alexander as regent of Macedonia during the king’s absence, would continue in Macedonia and also keep tabs on Greece; Cassender, who was Antipater’s son, got Caria (the southern Asia Minor coast). Five other officers were granted control of other parts of the empire.
This division of Alexander’s domain into satrapies (the “Partition of Babylon”) was a direct path to war. “Men who had recently been subjects of the king had individually seized control of huge kingdoms,” writes Rufus, “ostensibly as administrators of an empire belonging to another, and any pretext for conflict was removed since they all belonged to the same race…. But it was difficult to remain satisfied with what the opportunity of the moment had brought them.”30 Neither their shared race nor their shared loyalty to Alexander could stave off the inevitable drama. The “Wars of the Diadochi,” or “Wars of the Successors,” broke out almost at once.
70.2 The Partition of Babylon
Scene One
Perdiccas’s power as regent was increased when Roxane’s baby, safely born, proved to be a boy: the infant Alexander IV of Macedonia. But Egypt had the potential to be the greatest military power of all the “satrapies” Ptolemy had marched down to take charge with only two thousand men, but when word spread that he was offering generous pay, Greek mercenaries flocked to him. When his strength was great enough, Ptolemy made his intentions clear by kidnapping Alexander’s body, which had been bound for Macedonia, and burying it in Egypt as though Alexander had been his ancestor.
Perdiccas knew that this was a move for control of the empire. He assembled his army and marched down to fight against Ptolemy. The attack was a disaster; Perdiccas’s forces were embarassed. After the retreat, Perdiccas’s officers banded together—led by the young officer Seleucus, who had also been with Alexander in Egypt—and assassinated him.
One general was now off the scene. Ptolemy ordered both Philip and the baby Alexander IV removed from Babylon and taken back to Macedonia, where they would be under the protection of Antipater. He rewarded Seleucus, who had gotten rid of Perdiccas, by giving him Babylon to rule—but as satrap, not as regent.
Scene Two
In 319, not long after, Antipater of Macedonia died. He left Macedonia not to his son Cassender (who already had Caria), but to another Macedonian. So both Ptolemy and Antigonus agreed to ally themselves with Cassander to help him capture his father’s territory.
But fierce old Olympias, Alexander’s mother, was still very much alive. She had her grandson Alexander IV brought to her own house at Pella, the royal capital of Macedonia, along with his mother Roxane. Then she rounded up supporters of her own to fight for control of Macedonia. Cassander’s victory would have meant the establishment of a new royal house, and Olympias was too accustomed to being the mother of the king to watch that happen.
Olympias didn’t manage to keep off the three powerful satraps for very long, but before they overran Macedonia, she did manage t
o get her hands on the feebleminded Philip. She had always hated him, and she loathed the idea that he would be co-king with her grandson. She had Philip stabbed to death before Cassander and his allies could arrive to rescue him. When Cassender did make it into Pella in 316, he arrested Olympias and ordered her stoned to death for murder. He put Roxane and young Alexander (now nine) under house arrest, theoretically for their own safety, in a castle called Amphipolis, overlooking the Strymon river.
Now the map had shaken itself out into five kingdoms: Cassender in Macedonia, Lysimachus in Thrace, Antigonus (nicknamed the One-Eyed, since he’d lost the other in battle) in Asia Minor, Seleucus controlling Babylon and the Persian heartland, and Ptolemy in Egypt.196
Scene Three
Up in Macedonia, in the castle of Amphipolis, the fate Roxane had feared ever since her husband’s death came on her. Sometime around 310, the cup of wine at dinner had poison in it; and both Roxane and Alexander IV died. Alexander’s only son was twelve years old, around the same age that his father had been at the taming of Bucephalus.
Cassander, who was acting as king of Macedonia, was undoubtedly the culprit. The other four generals knew exactly what had happened. But for the next half-decade, no one spoke of it. No one named himself king; no one abandoned the title of satrap. They all supported what they knew to be a lie: that young Alexander was still alive, in the fortress on the Macedonian river, and that they were all serving in his name. None of the five was willing to be the first to claim the title of king. Whoever first took it would find the other four allied against him.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 62
