personally) to lead a punitive attack on the Scythians across the Jaxartes. The river crossing was
achieved under cover of a volley of missiles launched from catapults, a first in the history of warfare.
Once on dry land again, Alexander quickly adjusted to the encircling tactics of the nomadic
cavalrymen, throwing together a mobile force of archers, Agrianians, light troops, and cavalry that
prevented the Scythians from using their favorite tactic of wheeling around as they were being
assaulted simultaneously by the rest of the cavalry. About 1,000 of the Scythians fell and 150 were
taken prisoner; but dysentery, brought on by drinking the bad water of the region during the hot
pursuit, prevented Alexander from pursuing and wiping out the rest. Alexander, in fact, had to be
carried back to camp in serious danger. Aristander had been proved a true prophet, but Alexander had
put an end to the Scythian insults.
Scythian envoys soon appeared, blaming the whole incident on brigands. What had happened, they
said, was not the policy of the Scythian community. Their king also expressed a willingness to carry
out whatever instructions Alexander might give. In reality, Alexander had won a brilliant victory
against the nomads, and their leaders now wanted to be left alone.
Matters went far less well at Maracanda. Spitamenes broke off the siege at the approach of the
relief force, but during his retreat was joined by 600 Dahae, the westernmost of the Sacae nomads.
Now reinforced, Spitamenes waited for the pursuing Macedonian force to catch up to him. Once the
Macedonians came into contact, the Scythians wheeled around and went on the offensive. The
Scythians rode around and harassed the Macedonian infantry until the latter were forced to retreat in a
square to the river Polytimetus (Zeravshan).
Caranus, in command of the cavalry, attempted to cross the river to safety with his men, but failed
to inform Andromachus. Spitamenes’ cavalry and the Scythians attacked them as they emerged from
the river and while they were still in the water. All of these were shot down, and the few prisoners
who were taken were quickly put to death, too.
According to another ancient account, the Macedonians had been caught in an ambush. The
Scythians were concealed in a wooded park and fell upon the Macedonians when they were already
engaged. To make matters worse, at that very moment Pharnuches, the translator, was trying to
surrender his command to the Macedonian officers sent with him, on the grounds that his job was to
establish relations with the locals, not lead troops in battle, since he was altogether ignorant of
military tactics.
Pharnuches’ colleagues, Andromachus, Caranus, and Menedemus, refused to accept the command,
in order to avoid responsibility for a personal decision not covered by Alexander’s orders. They did
not want to incur individual blame in case of defeat and they did not want to expose themselves to the
charge of poor leadership. While this argument was going on, the Scythians pounced, and only 40
cavalry and 300 infantry survived.
When Alexander received the news of this debacle, he marched an astonishing 185 miles in three
days with half the Companion cavalry, the Guards, the Agrianes, the archers, and most of the infantry,
looking to settle accounts with Spitamenes, who had returned to besiege Maracanda once again. When
Alexander appeared close to the city at dawn on the fourth day, Spitamenes promptly vanished,
leaving Alexander to take revenge on the local natives who had joined in the attack on the
Macedonians. These were butchered.
Alexander then spent the depth of the winter of 329–28 at Zariaspa in Bactria, where Arsaces and
Barzanes, who had been appointed satrap of Parthia by Bessus, were brought to Alexander by
Phrataphernes and Stasanor. Reinforcements totaling around 19,000 men also arrived, including
infantry mercenaries and cavalry, Lycians, Syrians, and Greeks sent by Antipater.
His force thus augmented, as soon as the weather permitted, Alexander set about a pacification
program in the foothills along the Oxus Valley and then into Sogdiana. North of the Oxus, six military
garrisons were established to serve as strongpoints for the occupying forces to be left behind. Then
Alexander headed once again toward Maracanda after dividing his forces under the command of
himself, Hephaestion, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Coenus, and Artabazus. These commanders systematically
crushed all opposition in Sogdiana.
THE ROCK OF SOGDIANA
It was during this campaigning season in the summer of 328 that Alexander and the Macedonians
captured the Rock of Sogdiana, a sheer citadel that rose up to a height of 18,000 feet. No fewer than
30,000 Sogdians had fled to the rock, which Arimazes was occupying as commander. Among the
refugees were Oxyartes, his wife, and his daughter Roxane. According to the men who took part in the
campaign, Roxane was the loveliest woman in Asia, save Darius’ wife.
Alexander had sent Arimazes a message, urging him to surrender. Arimazes had replied with a
question: could Alexander fly? The king was so incensed that he told his friends that by the following
night the barbarians would believe that Macedonians indeed could fly.
He then detailed 300 expert rock-climbers to scale the Rock of Sogdiana, promising twelve talents
to the first man up. Although thirty men lost their lives during the ascent, the climbers finally made it
to the very peak, above Arimazes. They signaled their success to Alexander below by waving linen
flags. Alexander then sent his messenger back to Arimazes. Pointing out Alexander’s soldiers on the
summit, the messenger triumphantly declared to Arimazes that, as he could now see for himself,
Alexander’s soldiers did have wings. Arimazes promptly gave up.
When Alexander saw Roxane among the captives, he fell in love with her immediately, we are
told, and decided to take her in marriage. For the moment, however, the wedding had to be delayed;
he still had business in Maracanda.
At the end of the summer of 328, Alexander’s forces returned to Maracanda to regroup. There the
king was visited by envoys from the European Scythians and the king of the Chorasmians. Friendship
and alliance with the Scythians were cemented. Pharasmanes’ offer to guide Alexander if he wished
to subdue the various peoples between the Scythians and the Black Sea, however, was put on hold;
the king’s thoughts were occupied with India. Once India was his, Alexander replied, he would return
to Greece and then make an expedition to the Black Sea by way of the Hellespont and the Propontis.
At that point he would take Pharasmanes up on his offer. So, by the summer of 328 at the latest,
Alexander was planning the conquest of India.
THE DEATH OF CLEITUS
Unfortunately, Maracanda proved to be an ill-fated city for Alexander and his friends. After an
enormous hunt in the game reserve of Bazaira, during which he killed a lion with a single stroke,
Alexander returned to Maracanda in the autumn of 328 and assigned Artabazus’ province of Bactria
to Cleitus, who had served as a commander of the Companion cavalry since 330. Artabazus had asked
to be relieved on the grounds of advanced age.
Instead of sacrificing to Dionysos on the customary day, we are told that Alexander then sacrificed
to Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioscuri. Cleitus, meanwhile
, was ordered to prepare to march the
following day; he was then invited along to one of Alexander’s early-starting banquets.
At the banquet heavy drinking ensued, in the course of which the topic of the Dioscuri came up in
conversation, particularly the now common attribution of their parentage to Zeus instead of to
Tyndareus.
Some of the company declared that there was no comparison between the deeds of the Dioscuri and
Alexander. During the drinking others did not refrain from making invidious comparisons with
Herakles. Only envy deprived the living of the honors due to them from their friends, they suggested.
At that point, Cleitus, who for some time had been aggrieved by Alexander’s adoption of a “more
barbaric style” and by the words of Alexander’s flatterers, intervened. He said that he would not
permit Alexander’s flatterers to show such disrespect for the divine power, or to belittle the deeds of
heroes of old to do Alexander a favor that in fact was none. In any case, they exaggerated the nature of
Alexander’s achievements, Cleitus opined, none of which were mere personal triumphs. On the
contrary, those great deeds were the work of the Macedonians as a whole.
Undeterred, some of the guests, hoping to gain favor with Alexander, brought up the subject of
Philip, and suggested that his achievements were neither great nor marvelous.
At this Cleitus could no longer govern his emotions. He spoke up in favor of Philip’s achievements,
making light of Alexander and his deeds and reminding him that he, Cleitus, had saved his life during
the cavalry battle at the Granicus River.
“This very hand,” Cleitus cried, while raising his right hand, “saved you, O Alexander, at the
time.”
To this ugly and painful scenario of flattery, drunken insults, and anger, Plutarch adds even more
explosive details. At the banquet a singer began to sing the verses of a certain Pranichus (or Pierio),
lines written to shame and mock the generals who recently had been defeated by the barbarians. It is
very likely that the commanders who had led the ill-fated mission to relieve Maracanda the year
before were the subject of the singer’s ridicule.
Among those commanders was a man named Andronicus. Almost certainly, this Andronicus was
the husband of Lanice, Alexander’s childhood nurse. Much more importantly, we know that Lanice
was also the sister of Cleitus. Andronicus, in other words, was Cleitus’ brother-in-law, his sister’s
husband. Thus, Cleitus and his friends among the older Macedonian officers may have had personal,
as well as political and cultural, reasons for reacting to the mocking verses of the singer as they now
did.
The older members of the party understandably were offended by Pranichus’ song and displayed
their resentment of both poet and singer. But Alexander and those around him listened with pleasure
and urged the singer to continue.
Cleitus then shouted out that it was not well done for Macedonians to be insulted among barbarians
and enemies, even if they had met misfortune, for they were better men than those who were laughing
at them.
Alexander replied that if Cleitus was trying to disguise cowardice as misfortune, he must be
pleading his own case. Alexander, in other words, was asserting that the commanders at Marcanda
had died because of their own cowardice. This barb also neatly shifted the responsibility for the
disaster away from Alexander, who had sent the relief force out, perhaps without a clear structure of
command, and onto the commanders themselves. Cleitus, however, heard only a painful insult to
himself and to his family.
To Alexander Cleitus replied,
“Indeed, this cowardice saved your life, you who call yourself the son of the gods, when you were
turning your back to Spithridates’ sword. And it is by the blood of these Macedonians and by their
wounds that you have become so great that you disown your father Philip and make yourself the son of
Ammon.”
Alexander’s reaction was incendiary.
“Wretched fellow,” he cried out, “do you think that you can keep on speaking of me like this, and
cause trouble among the Macedonians, and not pay for it?”
Cleitus replied,
“But we do pay for it, Alexander! Just think of the rewards we get for our efforts: the dead are the
happy ones, because they did not live to see Macedonians beaten with Median rods or begging
Persians for an audience with our king.”
Alexander’s friends then jumped up and began to abuse Cleitus, while the older men tried to calm
everyone down. Alexander then turned and asked two of the guests at the banquet, Xenodochus of
Cardia and Artemius of Colophon, “Do not the Hellenes seem to you to walk about among the
Macedonians like demi-gods among wild animals?”
But Cleitus refused to stand down, indeed called on Alexander to say whatever he had to say in
front of the company or else not to invite freeborn men to dinner who spoke their minds. Better,
Cleitus said, for Alexander to live among barbarians and slaves, who would bow down before his
white tunic and his Persian girdle.
At this remark, Alexander threw an apple at Cleitus and looked around for his sword. One of his
bodyguards wisely had moved the weapon away, and others begged Alexander to be quiet. But
Alexander leapt up, and in the Macedonian dialect shouted for the guards to turn out. Alexander’s use
of his native tongue meant that he now considered this to be a moment of personal peril. When no one
obeyed his order, Alexander cried out that “he had come to the same pass as Darius, when he was led
prisoner by Bessus and his confederates, and that he had nothing now left but the name of king.”
Alexander then ordered the trumpeter to sound (the alarm). When he refused, Alexander struck him
with his fist. Cleitus’ friends managed to shove Cleitus out of the room, but he soon came back
through another door. When he returned, Cleitus recited a line spoken by Peleus in Euripides’ drama
the Andromache:
“Alas, in Hellas what an evil government!”
The context of the line was one in which Peleus observed that while it was the army which set up
the victory trophy over an enemy, it was the general who received the honor.
This apposite quotation cost Cleitus his life. For Alexander knew his Euripides just as well as
Cleitus did. After he heard what Cleitus had said, he grabbed a pike from one of his guards, met
Cleitus just as he was drawing aside the curtain before the door, and ran him through.
When Alexander realized what he had done, his first reaction was to try to kill himself, because “it
was not honorable for him to live after killing a friend in his cups.” But his guards stopped him.
Alexander then took to his bed and lay there mourning, crying out the names of Cleitus and Lanice,
who had nursed him when he was young. What a fine return he had given for Lanice’s nursing now
that he was a man, he lamented. She had seen her sons die fighting for him and now, with his own
hand, he had killed her brother. Again and again calling himself the murderer of his friends, for three
days Alexander refused all food or drink and neglected all bodily needs.
At last worn out, Alexander lay speechless, groaning deeply. Alarmed, his friends forced their way
into his quarters. To what most of them said, he paid no att
ention. But Aristander reminded Alexander
of a vision of Cleitus he recently had seen, and of an omen, assuring Alexander that these events had
long ago been decreed by fate.
The story was that, some days before Cleitus’ death Alexander had called Cleitus away from a
sacrifice he was conducting to look at some fruit he, Alexander, had been brought; three of the sheep
on whom libations preparatory to their sacrifice had been poured followed Cleitus. Aristander and
Cleomantis, a seer from Lacedaemon, pronounced this interrupted sacrifice a bad omen for Cleitus,
and Alexander promptly had ordered a sacrifice for Cleitus’ safety. Two days before that, Alexander
had had a dream in which he had seen Cleitus sitting with the sons of Parmenio in black robes; all
were dead.
Callisthenes and the philosopher Anaxarchus were also brought in to help Alexander conquer his
shame. Callisthenes reportedly skirted the subject to spare Alexander’s feelings. Anaxarchus, on the
other hand, made the argument that just as Zeus had justice and law at his side, so what the king did
was lawful and just. By these arguments, Plutarch comments, Anaxarchus relieved Alexander’s
suffering, but made him more proud and lawless than before.
It is hard to know how seriously to take these reports of how Aristander, Callisthenes, and
Anaxarchus managed to help Alexander restore his own self-image after such a horrific and
inexcusable crime. As so often, Arrian perhaps provides the most insight into the man at this low
point. He reports that Alexander’s soothsayers suggested that the god Dionysos was angry because
Alexander had failed to offer him sacrifice; and that when at last Alexander was persuaded by his
friends to take food and attend in some measure to his bodily needs, he did offer the neglected
sacrifice. Doubtless, Alexander was not unwilling to have his deed attributed to the wrath of a god.
But, as Arrian also reports, he did not attempt to justify his crime. Rather, he simply admitted that,
being no more than human, he had done wrong.
Alexander’s admission of wrongdoing is indeed a historically rare example of a man in a powerful
position admitting to making a grave mistake; and it is especially remarkable when we consider that
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