Darius had wintered in the old Median capital of Ecbatana in northern Iran, along with Bessus and the forces from the eastern satrapies. When news arrived in spring 330 that Alexander was moving north to confront them, they fled eastwards towards Bactria. Learning on his march that Bessus and Darius had fled eastward with the royal treasure from Ecbatana, Alexander ignored the Median capital, sending Parmenio to occupy it, and set off in swift pursuit with his most mobile forces, including the hypaspistai and the Agrianians. Among the Persians there was dissension: the eastern satraps acknowledged Bessus as the new ruler; a few loyalists, most notably the western satrap Artabazus and some Greek mercenaries who had remained with the king, still clung to Darius. Many of the soldiers in the small force simply defected as they learned of Alexander’s inescapable pursuit. Darius was first placed in chains; then news of Alexander’s approach with a large force of cavalry led the eastern satraps to mortally stab the ex-king, and flee onward to Bactria with Bessus as their new king. Artabazus and the Greek mercenaries split away north-westward toward the Elburz region. Alexander caught up with Darius at last only shortly after the king had expired. The chase was over. Of the Persian Empire only the eastern satrapies, Bactria being by far the largest and most important, remained as yet unconquered. Parmenio’s position in Media was regularized: he was made its governor with oversight of the Iranian lands, and he never saw Alexander again. Freed of the perhaps somewhat oppressive presence of his father’s old marshal, Alexander promoted Craterus to be effectively his military second-in-command, and decided he could not rest until the entire Persian Empire was his. Despite the reluctance expressed by many of his soldiers in a near rebellion, Alexander insisted that the campaign must continue until at least Bactria was conquered. And so the army moved further east.
The conquest of Bactria and the surrounding satrapies proved no easy matter. It had taken Alexander four years to conquer the western and central portions of the empire; it took almost as long to conquer the lands that now make up Afghanistan: 330 to 327. Bessus and the other eastern leaders realized it would be folly to engage Alexander’s army in battle. Instead they turned to what today would be called guerrilla tactics. Alexander was obliged to divide and re-divide his forces to take the Bactrian lands valley by valley, often having to double back to re-take a previously conquered valley that rebelled as soon as his forces moved on. It was hard, dangerous, exhausting work, and the Macedonian losses were relatively heavy. But Alexander was relentless. It was during this Afghan campaign that two of Alexander’s most notorious crimes occurred, which illustrated his increasing tendency to cruelty and autocracy. A minor conspiracy of officers supposedly hoping to assassinate Alexander was brought to light, and it was alleged that Parmenio’s son Philotas—Craterus’ chief rival in the army now Parmenio himself had been left behind—had known about it but failed to report it. Details are obscured by the fact that our sources are all visibly tainted by anti-Philotas prejudice. At any rate, Craterus persuaded Alexander to arrest Philotas and torture him. After a show trial in front of a few thousand gathered Macedonian soldiers, the broken Philotas was stoned to death. Swift riders were sent to Media to order the execution (murder in effect) of the wholly innocent Parmenio too: he could not be allowed to live on after his son’s execution. As Antipater is said to have muttered when news of Parmenio’s death reached Macedonia: “If Parmenio was disloyal, then who can be trusted? If he was not, then what is to be done?” Every senior Macedonian leader had to wonder about his own safety now. To drive the point home, Alexander the survivor of the three Lyncestian brothers—it will be recalled that the elder two were executed by Alexander at the start of his reign—was now also summarily executed. Alexander had never trusted him.
The second great crime has already been mentioned: the murder of Cleitus the Black, commander of the royal squadron of the Companion Cavalry, who had saved Alexander’s life at the battle of the Granicus. Alexander was drunk again, during a great feast at Marakanda (Samarkand) in eastern Bactria, when this murder occurred, the occasion being Cleitus’ defiant defense of Philip as a greater ruler than Alexander. Some may see drunkenness as some sort of excuse; but though intoxication lowers the inhibitions, it surely only reveals what is in a man’s character when the normal civilized restraints are off. From this point on Alexander became increasingly intolerant and harsh. He adopted elements of Persian royal dress and ceremony, demanding that all who approached him must perform the ritual obeisance of proskynesis (bowing to the ground), which Macedonians and other Greeks found deeply humiliating. In the end, opposition led by Callisthenes forced Alexander to relent on this, but he never forgave Callisthenes, who was later arrested at the time of the “conspiracy of the paides” and caused to disappear. Stories of his fate vary, but most agree that he died a cruel and lingering death.
Eventually, of course, opposition to Alexander’s rule over Bactria was overcome. Bessus was captured and brutally executed, and Alexander was left as acknowledged ruler over the entire Persian Empire. To cement the good will of the now pacified Bactrian barons, Alexander married the daughter of one of the most powerful of them: Roxane, daughter of Oxyartes. By the spring of 327 Alexander was ready to move on, but he did not turn back westward, as the army hoped. Instead he passed south through the Khyber Pass to continue conquering in north India, even beyond the Persian Empire. It was apparently Alexander’s aim to conquer all of Asia to the great surrounding ocean: little did he know of the huge interior spaces of central Asia, and the vast Chinese lands beyond. In north India, in the valley of the River Indus, Alexander found a group of principalities at war with each other. The greatest of them, around the rivers Hydaspes and Hyphasis, was ruled by a king named Porus. Nearer to the Khyber Pass a group of smaller rulers had allied together under one Taxiles, who saw in Alexander’s army an opportunity to break the power of Porus. Taxiles surrendered to Alexander, agreed to become a governor under him, and provided him with crucial intelligence about Porus and his forces.
Alerted concerning Alexander’s approach, Porus had gathered his army on the south-east bank of the River Hydaspes, which was in full flood as it was the rainy season. Since the numbers in our sources are unreliable, we cannot say exactly how large Porus’ army was, but it was a considerable one, and he had eighty-five war elephants, the first such force Alexander had encountered. Alexander faced two problems: how to get his army across the river safely, and how to deal with the elephants. The Hydaspes was not, in its flood, a river that could be forded in the face of enemy opposition. If Alexander had been willing to wait a few months, until the dry season, the river would have become fordable; but waiting was not his style. Alexander split his forces, and for a week or two had units march by night to different spots along the river bank and stage noisy demonstrations, causing Porus to send forces to confront what seemed to be an attempt to cross. No attempt to cross was made, and inevitably Porus’ forces wearied of these pointless night marches. When Alexander judged that the enemy was sufficiently softened up, he split his army into three. The main force—hypaspists, several phalanx battalions, and the heavy cavalry—he led quietly to a spot where several islands in the stream covered his actions, and there embarked his forces on river boats and got them safely across. A large force of mercenaries staged a diversion elsewhere along the bank. Craterus, with a mixed force of pike battalions and cavalry, stayed at the camp with orders to cross if/when Porus’ army moved away and he heard a battle starting. This worked perfectly: Alexander got his main force across under cover of night and advanced to engage Porus’ army, and Craterus crossed to attack Porus’ army from behind once the battle had started.
14. Coin of Alexander showing the king on horseback attacking Porus on an elephant
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image from PHGCOM)
As to the elephants, Alexander had already learned about these beasts and their military weaknesses. Unlike a horse, which can be mounted and ridden by any competent rider, an elephant can only be
controlled by a human it has bonded with, known in Hindi as its mahout. Kill or incapacitate the mahout, and the elephant becomes uncontrollable. Consequently, Alexander’s men had been prepared in advance not to be terrified of the elephants: they were to stab upwards with their pikes at the mahout on the elephant’s neck, and/or at the faces of the elephants. Javelineers and archers were to concentrate their fire on the same targets. Once the mahout was gone, the elephant—fearful of the noises and smells of battle, and with long pikes jabbing at its face and eyes—would turn to flight, trampling its own people in its urge to get away. In this way Porus’ elephant corps was rendered useless. Attacked from in front by Alexander’s pike phalanx and heavy cavalry wedges, the Indians proved no more of a match in equipment and fighting style for the army designed by Philip than the Persians had been. Craterus’ attack from the rear only confirmed and made more decisive the victory already won by Alexander’s main force. Porus was captured alive and treated well by Alexander, who left him in command of his realm as a subordinate king, under Macedonian oversight.
Alexander now learned of another great river, equal to the Indus, with a flourishing civilization and multiple kingdoms along its course: the Ganges, which he understood flowed down to the encircling ocean at last. His aim, consequently, was to advance into the Ganges valley and conquer it, thereby completing his conquest of the eastern part of the world as he saw it. At the bank of the River Hyphasis, however, the army mutinied and refused to cross. The soldiers found the heat and humidity of India in the monsoon season deeply dispiriting, and they had no appetite for further conquest. The Persian Empire was theirs, and even lands beyond it in the Indus valley. It was enough: they wished to turn west and begin the march back home. They had glory enough, they had booty to last a lifetime, they longed for the familiar climate and lifestyle of the Mediterranean and home. After ranting ineffectively at the soldiers for their disloyalty and sulking in his tent for days in the hope of making them change their mind, Alexander had to face the hard truth: the army would go no further, and therefore he had no choice but to turn back. Being Alexander, he could not just accept this gracefully and take the easy route: he insisted on making things hard for the army and for himself. First, the army, accompanied by a fleet of river boats, would march down the River Indus to the ocean, so that he could claim to have reached “the end of the earth” after all. From there, he would lead the army along the shore of the Persian Gulf back to Mesopotamia, while a large fleet of ships accompanied it with ample supplies. That sounded fairly simple in theory, but proved to be anything but that in practice.
In the first place, Alexander insisted on conquering all lands and peoples along the march down the Indus valley. Some of those peoples, naturally resenting being conquered, put up a stiff resistance; and the army had little appetite for conquering people who had, after all, little or nothing to offer that the army wanted. At the town of a people the Greeks called the Malli, things came to a head. Alexander insisted the town must be captured; the soldiers showed little inclination to risk life and limb on this quite unnecessary project. Irritated and headstrong, Alexander decided to show his men how it should be done: with a handful of companions he stormed up a siege ladder onto the enemy wall and called to his soldiers to follow him. It is not a general’s business, of course, to be the first up onto an enemy wall. Anxious for their leader’s safety, the Macedonian soldiery thronged the siege ladders, which broke under the strain, leaving Alexander himself isolated on the wall with only three companions. He promptly jumped down into the enemy town, followed by his three companions. In a desperate fight there, one of his companions was killed, and Alexander himself was struck in the chest by an arrow which pierced his lung. He collapsed, and his companion Leonnatus was also wounded, leaving only one remaining companion, Peucestas, to cover the wounded Alexander with his shield and somehow fight off the enemy soldiers. Amazingly, Peucestas succeeded. Somehow, when the frenzied Macedonians broke down the city gate and streamed in, they found Peucestas still standing over the body of Alexander, protecting the apparently dying king with his shield and fighting off a crowd of enemies. The Macedonians went wild: every living creature in the town was killed.
Alexander was placed on a shield and carried to his tent, where it was found that he was still alive but in a very bad way. The camp doctors, summoned to attend the king, concurred that the arrow would have to be extracted from Alexander’s chest, but none was willing to perform the operation: there was a very clear risk that, once the arrow was drawn from the wound, Alexander would suffer a fatal hemorrhage. No doctor wanted to be the man charged with having killed Alexander. It was the senior officer present, Perdiccas, who finally extracted the arrow. Alexander fainted away from the loss of blood that followed, but the doctors were able to stanch the flow and save Alexander’s life. After he had been patched up somewhat and revived, there was the condition of the army to be considered. The soldiery were in a panic, with the rumor spreading that Alexander was dead: they saw themselves cut off at the ends of the earth with no commander to control things and lead them home. Messages assuring them that Alexander yet lived did not still the panic and despondency, as they were not believed. Eventually Alexander had to have himself carried onto a river barge and placed as upright as possible on a large bed, and so rowed past the encampments of his soldiers, displaying himself to them and waving to assure them he was alive and on the mend. The men were appeased; but Alexander’s senior officers rightly upbraided him severely for running such unnecessary risks, putting the whole expedition in danger by behaving more like a common soldier than a general.
When Alexander and the army reached the mouth of the Indus, the expedition was divided for the return westwards. A substantial part of the army, including the heavy baggage and older veterans, was placed under the command of Craterus with orders to march west along a safe, well-populated route inland. A large fleet of warships and supply ships was placed under Nearchus’ command with orders to sail up the Persian Gulf, stopping at set intervals to rendezvous with a military expedition marching by land. This last expedition, commanded by Alexander himself, would march along the coast of the Gulf through the Makran desert (ancient Gedrosia), meeting with the ships to receive supplies. Supposedly no previous conqueror had managed to traverse the Makran, so Alexander would outdo them all. Things went wrong very quickly. Alexander’s army and the fleet lost touch with each other almost at once, and the planned meetings never occurred. The army suffered horrendously on its march through the Makran, and in the end Alexander was quite fortunate to reach ancient Carmania in fall of 325 with more than half his force still intact. As to the fleet, it finally arrived at the head of the Persian Gulf weeks late, having suffered from storms, navigational problems, and encounters with whales. Alexander, having feared it was lost for good, was just glad to see it arrive at all. Once again, in pursuit of his own yearning to achieve more than anyone before him (or as some would say, in pursuit of his megalomania), Alexander had exposed many thousands of his soldiers and sailors to danger and suffering for no good reason at all: just to show that he could do it. Not surprisingly, the men of the expedition were now growing more and more fed up with Alexander’s style of leadership: the more arrogant and demanding he became, the more they suffered.
After meeting up with Craterus’ force, which had made its march perfectly safely, Alexander proceeded through Persia to the great Persian capital of Susa. There he had the governor put to death for supposedly exceeding his power, and indeed conducted a veritable purge of his western governors, discussed further in section 3 of this chapter. Also while at Susa Alexander held a grand wedding ceremony, at which he himself married two Persian princesses and he obliged the Persian and Median aristocracies to produce some eighty of their young daughters to be married off to selected Macedonian officers: a neat symbolism of Macedonian supremacy in the new empire. Many of his soldiers had already, during the years of conquest, taken Asian wives for themselves and had children b
y them: Alexander now regularized these unions, gave the soldiers wedding gifts, paid off any debts they had, and promised to see to the proper education of the mixed ethnicity children of his soldiers’ Asian unions. All of this was doubtless to bolster a popularity among the men that he must have perceived he had damaged by his actions.
If that was his aim, he failed to achieve it. After Alexander had moved on in spring 324 from Susa to Opis, the army mutinied: the second great mutiny Alexander had to face. The Macedonians had long been angered by Alexander’s increasing affectation of Persian customs and dress, and his appointment of Persians to positions in the army and administration. The arrival of, reputedly, thirty thousand Asian youths who had been equipped and trained to fight in the Macedonian fashion, coinciding with Alexander’s decision to send thousands of Macedonians back home, made the soldiers feel that Alexander had no further use for them. The result was that all Macedonians demanded to return home, jeering that Alexander could continue his conquests without them. Alexander was furious, and had thirteen men he regarded as ringleaders of the mutiny immediately executed. The stand off between Alexander and his army lasted several days until the soldiers begged Alexander’s forgiveness, which he was pleased to give. Ten thousand veteran pikemen and fifteen hundred cavalry were deputed to return to Macedonia under Craterus’ leadership. They were to be replaced by an equal number of new Macedonian replacement soldiers, whom Antipater was to bring. It seems Alexander no longer trusted Antipater to be his regent in Macedonia. When news of this reached Antipater he, mindful of the fate meted out to Parmenio, declined to obey, sending his son Cassander instead to find out what Alexander’s intentions were.
Alexander moved on to Ecbatana, the old Median capital in northern Iran, where a series of parties and entertainments were held. During these, Alexander’s long-time lover Hephaestion fell ill and, neglecting his doctor’s advice to rest and abstain from alcohol, essentially drank himself to death. Alexander’s grief was as extravagant as everything he did. Sequestering himself for days without food and drink, when he emerged he ordered fantastically expensive funeral rites and gave instructions that Hephaestion was in future to be worshipped as a hero. The end was now nigh for Alexander himself. Once somewhat recovered from his grief, he resumed his round of parties and excessive drinking. The court and army moved down from Ecbatana to Babylon, where Alexander received embassies from all around the Mediterranean world and began plans for an expedition to conquer Arabia. He reputedly sent orders around his empire, and particularly to Greece, that he was now to be worshipped as a god. But, un-godlike, he fell ill after several all-night drinking parties and developed a high fever. After several days of fever and illness, he felt sufficiently better to attend another all-night drinking party given by his Thessalian friend Medeius. There, after particularly heavy drinking, he fell ill again and had to be carried to his bed. The illness and fever did not abate. When it was clear the king was dying, the senior officers present surrounded his bed and attempted to ask his instructions for the future. The soldiery insisted on seeing their king, and for hours Alexander was propped up in his bed as soldiers filed by, essentially saying farewell. After this exertion, Alexander was much weakened. His last act, reputedly, was to take off his royal seal ring and hand it to Perdiccas, the senior officer present. When Perdiccas asked to whom Alexander left his power, he is said to have murmured “to the strongest.” He then slipped into a coma from which he did not emerge. He breathed his last on 13 June 323 BCE, just short of his thirty-third birthday.
Before and After Alexander Page 19
