Cleitus broke free and ran back inside, shouting a line from Euripides, “Alas, what evil government in Hellas!” Alexander grabbed a sword from one of his guards and stabbed Cleitus to death. Alexander regretted his actions as soon as he sobered up. He refused food and drink for three days, and ordered a huge state funeral for Cleitus, but the damage was done. From then on there was always an element of distrust between the old army and the new one. The Greeks, for their part, realized that they were thousands of miles from home and that the only person who stood between them and annihilation was Alexander. They needed to make their peace with him.33
Tajikistan and Afghanistan were then much as they are now, tribal societies with strong kinship bonds. It was a world of warlords. (The prime difference between Afghan society in the fourth century BC and Afghan society today is the absence in antiquity of the opium trade. It was the British in the 1840s who got the Afghans to cultivate this drug cash crop, which they British then exported to China.) The warlords’ bands and families offered only moderate resistance to Alexander.
One particular stronghold, known as the Soghdian Rock, was controlled by a warlord named Oxyartes. The rock itself was considered impregnable, so Alexander offered rewards to the first twelve men who could scale the sheer cliffs behind the fortress. When the men got to the top, they were to wave white flags. About thirty fell to their death during the night climb, an awesome task even with modern equipment, but at dawn white flags were seen from below. Oxyartes was so flabbergasted at the presence of Alexander’s men on his rock that he immediately surrendered his fortress.
That night at a banquet, Alexander met Oxyartes’ daughter for the first time. Roxane was considered the most beautiful woman in Asia, with the possible exception of Darius’s wife. It is doubtful if Alexander fell head over heels in love, as has been suggested in some fanciful romances since, but he saw the expeditious advantage in marrying her. So there, on the outskirts of the known world of the time, the most eligible bachelor in the world married the most beautiful woman in the world. It appears that she accompanied him into India and bore him two children. To add a little irony to the situation, Hephaestion was his best man.
Then, in the outback of Iran, Alexander decided to try an experiment that he had obviously been toying with for some time, and that once and for all indicated to the Macedonians what their king had in mind. He decided to try out the practice of proskynesis on his Macedonian friends. Since the king was superior to everyone, everyone had to pay him proskynesis. The Greeks, who had been in the habit of giving this sort of worship only to their gods, had always had trouble bowing and scraping before mere mortals. To the Persians it was a matter of etiquette; to the Greeks it was confused with homage owed to the gods. This leads to the conclusion that Alexander’s deification was in his mind only, and that his men still considered him just a great man.
Alexander decided to try the proskynesis experiment out at a banquet. It started like any Greek banquet, with toasts and the cup of wine passed from hand to hand. All Alexander’s intimate friends were aware of what the king wanted from them, and they decided to humor him. After they had drunk from the libation cup, they kissed their fingertips and gestured toward Alexander. They then approached him and he kissed them in return; this kiss was tantamount to saying that he had accepted their fealty.
When Callisthenes, who was the court historian and Aristotle’s nephew, approached the king, he omitted the proskynesis. Alexander refused to kiss him. Even though Callisthenes, in his official history, allowed Alexander a divine nature, actually demonstrating it in public was apparently more than he could stomach. He believed that paying proskynesis to a mere mortal was degrading and inappropriate.
Not long after this unfortunate incident, a serious plot was discovered against Alexander’s life. A group of Macedonian boys about fifteen years of age had been sent out to join the army as pages. A hunt was in progress, and one of the boys got to the boar ahead of the king and delivered the killing blow. Considering that his royal prerogative had been flouted, Alexander ordered the boy beaten. The page now had a distinct grievance, and he persuaded seven other boys to join him in a plot to assassinate the king.
This would actually have been a rather simple task, because the pages were sometimes the only ones on duty at night in Alexander’s tent. They had a rotating schedule, and sooner or later the conspirators would be there in large enough numbers to overpower the sleeping king. The only problem was that Alexander rarely came to bed before dawn, which was also when the guard changed. The night of the planned attack, Alexander was later than usual coming to bed, the guard had changed, and the page on duty knew of the plot. He told his current boyfriend, who told his brother, who told two bodyguards, who told Ptolemy—and hence the word got back to Alexander.
When the pages were questioned, it was learned that the teacher of one of them was Callisthenes, and he was implicated as the adult who had instigated the entire assassination plot. Since Alexander resented Callisthenes anyway for his singular opposition to proskynesis, he had him arrested, tortured, and put to death. How this played back in Athens is unclear.
Alexander’s picture of India was strange, to say the least. The Greeks of his day, and Aristotle in particular, believed that India was a shallow peninsula bounded on the north by the Hindu Kush and on the east by the ocean. They had no knowledge whatsoever of China or Malaysia or any lands farther to the east. This lack of information made India Alexander’s breaking point, as Russia would prove to be centuries later to Napoleon Bonaparte. For the present he seemed to have been motivated by curiosity about the unknown and a burning desire to be lord of the entire world as he saw it.
He marched out at the head of his army into the great unknown with confidence and dreams of grandeur. It is hard to estimate accurately the size of Alexander’s army as it headed into India. According to Green,
Alexander had with him not more than 15,000 Macedonians, of whom 2,000 were cavalrymen. Total cavalry estimates, however, range between 6,500 and 15,000. The infantry figures are equally uncertain, varying from 20,000 to 120,000. Tarn’s guess of 27,000–30,000 operational troops is almost certainly too conservative. On the other hand it has been suggested, with some plausibility, that 120,000 represents an overall total, including camp-followers, traders, servants, grooms, wives, mistresses, children, scientists, schoolmasters, clerks, cooks, muleteers, and all the other members of what had by now become “a mobile state and the administrative centre of the empire.”34
With this army, he fought against the tribal barbarians. But he did not need an embodiment of the enemy. The sheer physical task of climbing mountains, going through narrow defiles, and encountering terrible thirst and hunger in the desert—this was challenge enough. If the tribal barbarians crossed his path, so much the better. He could cut them down and leave bodies in the mountain passes and in the desert to be bleached by the pitiless East Asian sun or eventually to be covered by sandstorms.
On the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Alexander encountered stiff resistance. He was now on what the Victorian British called the fearsome North-West Frontier. He was moving down toward the Punjab in the Indus Valley. The British in the nineteenth century had mixed experience fighting in these difficult areas. So did the Russians in the twentieth century and the Americans in the twenty-first. And so did Alexander. Afghanistan remains today, as it was in Alexander’s time, a graveyard for soldiers.
Across Tajikistan, across Afghanistan, and down into Pakistan his army moved, by now living mostly on what the land produced. Rarely in the history of antiquity, with its tortuous wars, had an army as dedicated and determined as the one that followed Alexander assembled and thrust forward into the unknown. There was no strategy except the attraction of far-off, fabled India. Alexander himself had taken command of what had been Cleitus’s half of the remaining companions, and Hephaestion commanded the other half.
One of the most interesting details of this campaign was the introductio
n of elephants to the West. These animals could be used in battle, their tusks sharpened and laced with poison; they could also be used to fell trees to build roads and encampments. Alexander was the first Western commander to do serious battle using elephants. He was so impressed with them that he sent them back home with their trainers, the mahouts. Eventually they found their way to Carthage and thence into the army of Hannibal, who used them with great efficiency to terrify Roman forces. Horses were scared of elephants and usually bolted at the sight of a line of elephants approaching them—a problem that filled Alexander with some apprehension.
For these reasons, Alexander was gratified to hear that several local rajahs were coming over to his side, along with twenty-five war elephants. He was warned that an adjoining Indian prince by the name of Porus was well armed and would undoubtedly oppose him. Envoys were sent to Porus asking him to come to meet the Macedonian king and bring tribute. Porus replied that he would come, but the only tribute he would bring was his army. War was the only recourse left to Alexander at this point.
Alexander and Porus faced each other across the Hydaspes River. Alexander had to cross the river with his army in one way or another. Porus himself sat on his horse in front of his army and his force of elephants waiting for the Greeks to cross. His intention was to slaughter them as they came out of the water. The elephants bothered Alexander the most because he knew that if he crossed the river there, his horses most likely would refuse to leave the water and would turn around and create chaos.
Eventually, Alexander split his army and crossed, but he was met by the son of Porus. Alexander was wounded in this skirmish and Bucephalus was killed. But the Indian army, seeing Alexander himself at the head of the cavalry, turned and ran. Alexander personally pursued Porus’s son and killed him.
Porus had an immense army consisting of some 30,000 cavalry, 300 chariots, 200 elephants, and 30,000 infantry. His strategy was to bring the elephants up into the battle, hoping they would intimidate the horses and force the Greek army to attack between elephants. His infantry was stationed between the elephants and on the wings beyond the elephants.
When Alexander saw the battle formation of the opposing army, he decided that heading for the center would be suicidal, and because he believed his cavalrymen were superior, he took most of them and rode to the left with 1,000 archers on horseback. Porus never expected that his own formation would break, but when the archer cavalry attacked, the Indian cavalrymen were facing in both directions. They fell back in disorder among the elephants. The Macedonian phalanx marched toward the elephants, attacking the mahouts and subjecting the elephants to volleys of weapons from all sides.
The elephants panicked, and as they twisted and turned, they trampled their own men as well as those of Alexander. Eventually most of the drivers were dead or injured, and the elephants were exhausted and driverless. Finally, they retreated in haste.
Porus had lost some 23,000 men; all his chariots were destroyed; two of his sons were killed; and the captains and generals of his army were dead as well. Unlike Darius, however, Porus chose to stay in the field. He attempted to bring some semblance of order among his men and urged them to keep fighting. He turned from the field only when he himself was wounded.35
Alexander admired Porus and his greatness in battle and wanted him kept alive. When Porus rode toward him as if to surrender, Alexander was amazed at the man’s size. He stood about seven and a half feet tall and was very handsome. He refused to be cowed and, in fact, seemed to act like an equal meeting an equal after a great battle, rather than like a defeated foe. Alexander asked Porus what kind of treatment he wanted, and when Porus asked to be treated like a king, Alexander was so impressed that he not only allowed Porus to live but granted him sovereignty over the Indians of his realm and added more lands to what he already had. In this way, he made an ally out of his fiercest adversary. From then on, Porus was completely loyal to Alexander.36
After this fateful battle Alexander allowed his men the luxury of a month’s vacation, during which time he gained more men, sent Porus to get more elephants for him, and in general gave the impression that renewed attacks were being mounted somewhere else. A few minor skirmishes gave Porus more territory, and he was content to help Alexander with the latter’s plans. It was not the same with the Greek and Macedonian troops, however They were near the breaking point—tired of the whole thing and ready to go home. So far their obedience, discipline, and loyalty had kept them going, along with the desire for plunder, but there was no clear end in sight. Their sense of adventure and exploration of the unknown for the sake of adventuring had never been their vision; it had been Alexander’s.
His men had marched 11,250 miles in eight years, regardless of the season or landscape; official figures were to claim that they had killed at least 750,000 Asians. Twice they had starved, and their clothing was so tattered that most were dressed in Indian garments; the horses were footsore and the wagons were unusable in plains that had turned into swamps. It was the weather that had finally broken their spirit. For the past three months, the rains had doused them through and through. Their buckles and belts were corroded, and their rations were rotting as mildew ruined the grain. Their boots leaked, and no sooner had their weapons been polished than the damp turned them green again with mold. And the river Beas rolled on before them, defying them to cross it in search of a battle with elephants, not in tens or hundreds but in thousand upon thousands.37
Torrential rains brought snakes inside—pythons, scorpions, and cobras—the size of which the Greeks had never seen before. Between the monsoon, the snakes, and the fear of encountering more elephants, the Macedonians rebelled. In what is today northwestern Pakistan Alexander delivered a grand speech to his army urging them to press on into India. Alexander stated:
In my case, there is no part of my body—not at the front, in any case—that has been left without a wound, and there is no kind of weapon, be it for hand-to-hand fighting or throwing, whose scars I do not have on myself. I have sword gashes from hand-to-hand fighting, arrow wounds, injuries from artillery projectiles; and I have been struck in many places by stones and clubs. All this for you and your glory.38
For once his eloquence and charisma failed to rouse his troops to follow him any farther. Once they had crossed the Beas, they were at the end of the world as the Greeks knew it. Rumors abounded about the ferocity of the people on the other side. These people had 4,000 fighting elephants and thousands upon thousands of men, all younger and more energetic than Alexander’s. One of the old soldiers, a man named Coenus, who was dying anyway, got up the nerve to address Alexander. He gave the speech of his life, ending with these words: “Sir, if there is one thing above all others a successful man should know, it is when to stop.”39
Alexander sulked for two days but then tried to find a way to make this defeat appear to be a victory. He had never faced defeat before, and it was not something he dealt with easily. As he had always done before a battle or a major decision, he called his seers and prophets. For once the omens went against him, so with face-saving aplomb, Alexander bowed before the will of heaven, definitely not his men. Twelve great altars representing the twelve Olympic gods were built beside the river, and after sacrifices were made, he announced that they would be going home. His soldiers laughed and cried and, hysterical with relief, called down blessings on his head. For his part Alexander never got over his humiliation and never forgave the men who led the revolt.
The expedition ended a mere six hundred miles from its goal—the ocean, which would have been the end of the earth. Because of faulty geography and poor military intelligence, Alexander never knew this. It was probably a good thing. His dream was gone.
FOUR
The Last Years
ALEXANDER STARTED home in the fall of 326. For his veterans, home was Macedonia; for Alexander it was Babylon. He never stepped on Greek soil again, nor did he ever appear to want to.
The army marched back to the Jhelum Riv
er, where a naval flotilla awaited them. These ships had been built earlier with the intent of pursuing conquest down the Ganges, but they were now to be used to carry the army home. Reinforcements arrived, along with medical supplies and clothing. Before the departure the eloquent Coenus died, giving rise to the idea that anyone who courted Alexander’s displeasure would not live long.
At this point the Jhelum was about two and a half miles wide, so the flotilla was able to travel with forty oared galleys abreast. Natives ran along the banks, and sometimes even joined the parading troops. Hephaestion was on one side of the river with the main body of troops and two hundred elephants; his archenemy, Craterus, was on the other.
The first difficulty arose with the fast current and whirlpools where the Jhelum met the Chenab River. The light galleys bobbed around like corks, and oars snapped in the current. The flagship, carrying Alexander, nearly sank, and he, who could not swim, was barely saved.
Reports came that two tribes were massing for an attack to stop the flotilla’s advance. The men were so demoralized by the news that they would have to fight again that it took all the inspiration Alexander could dredge up to get them to go into battle. Twice they refused to go up scaling ladders against an armed fortress, and Alexander was so annoyed with them that he led the way personally and shamed them into following him.
For once the soothsayer-in-residence went against Alexander and warned him that he would be injured if he continued with this assault. Alexander is supposed to have responded, “If anyone interrupted you while you were about your professional business, I have no doubt you would find it both tactless and annoying, correct?” The seer agreed. “Well,” continued the king, “my business—vital business—is the capture of this citadel; and I don’t intend to let any superstitious crackpot stand in my way.”1
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