Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 10 “PASSING BRAVE TO BE A KING”

What was Alexander to do now?

He had three choices, the first of which he rejected at once. He knew that many officers and rank-and-file soldiers wanted him to declare peace immediately and go home happy and glorious. To silence them, he stuffed gold into their mouths. Plutarch writes: “Alexander was proclaimed king of Asia, and after offering splendid sacrifices to the gods, he proceeded to reward his friends with riches, estates and governorships.” His men knew how much trouble he took over their comforts, and he was very popular with them. He made it clear that he would soon give them the holiday of a lifetime. For the time being, this calmed any nascent dissent.

The Macedonian king was well aware that the war was not yet over. An alternative was to continue the hunt for Darius, who was plunging eastward past Media through a rough and unfertile landscape which a large army would find awkward to cross. His aim was to put as much distance as possible between him and his pursuers, buying time to raise a third army.

The Great King had with him Bessus’s Bactrian cavalry, which had withdrawn from the battle relatively unscathed, a retinue of senior Persians, and a few of the Golden Apple guards. During his flight he was joined by some two thousand Greek mercenaries who had regrouped after the battle.

This was not a large force and, ideally, the Great King remained Alexander’s chief strategic target. But we may safely assume that the Macedonians had little topographical knowledge of the eastern half of the empire, and Alexander made a point of not straying into territory which had not undergone a logistical analysis. In his military career so far, he had always sent scouts ahead of the main body of the army and tasked them to assess the nature of the terrain and negotiate supplies from the locals. No exception was to be allowed on this occasion.

There was a third and more attractive option, and this was the one Alexander chose. It was to march south down through Mesopotamia to the fabled city of Babylon with its Hanging Gardens and luxurious lifestyle. He intended to encamp his army outside the city walls for a month’s relaxation inside them and then proceed to Susa and palatial Persepolis.

The enemy corpses on the battlefield were beginning to stink in the heat, and the Macedonians did not linger. Pausing only to pick up the treasure Darius had abandoned at Arbela, they marched south. The distance from Gaugamela to Babylon was nearly 290 miles and, when necessary halts are taken into account, the journey through the fertile lands of Mesopotamia lasted three weeks.

It would take a further three weeks to reach Susa, and the king was worried that the treasure stored there might be removed and taken east to Darius. So he sent a senior officer to ride at top speed to Susa to warn against this and to require the city’s capitulation.

—

THE MACEDONIANS SAW THE high walls of Babylon appear in the distance. Alexander had formed them up in battle order, just in case of any trickery. Through a gate, a long procession was winding its way toward them. Priests and government officials led, and every sector of the community, bearing gifts, was represented. There in the throng was Mazaeus. After Gaugamela he had fled to the city, with which he had a personal association as his wife was Babylonian. Together with his grown-up children, he presented himself as a suppliant and formally surrendered the city to the Macedonian conqueror. The defection of a member of the Great King’s inner circle was a coup for Alexander and had presumably been negotiated in advance. It was a blow to Darius’s authority and would encourage others to follow suit.

The Persian in charge of the citadel and the Babylonian exchequer was highly competitive and refused to be outdone by Mazaeus. He carpeted the road with flowers and garlands. At intervals on either side, he set up silver altars and heaped them with frankincense and all kinds of perfume. Behind him as he walked came a moving zoo—lions and leopards conveyed in cages and, more usefully, cattle and horses. This was his present for Alexander—generous if inconvenient.

Zoroastrian wise men, or magi, chanted holy songs; after them walked Chaldean astronomer-priests, whose role (as we have seen) was to reveal and interpret heavenly movements and seasonal changes. Musicians followed; they usually sang the praises of Persian kings, but presumably rewrote their lyrics in favor of the Macedonian conqueror.

The cavalcade was rounded off by Babylon’s cavalry; dressed in exotic uniforms they were chocolate soldiers rather than serious warriors.

The king rode into the city on a chariot, passing through the huge Ishtar Gate, with its glazed lapis-lazuli bricks, with its animals and rosettes, into a grand processional avenue that had been built by Nebuchadnezzar in the seventh century B.C. Alexander immediately took possession of the Southern Palace and the treasury. He may have had himself crowned king of Babylon.

—

FAR FROM ENCOUNTERING ANY HOSTILITY, the Macedonians were welcomed with open arms. Babylonians fondly remembered their glorious past. They had twice had their own empire, first of all briefly in the eighteenth century B.C. under the famous lawgiver Hammurabi; then, for a hundred years from the last quarter of the seventh century, they had ruled a wide-stretching territory from Egypt in the west to the Persian homeland, Persis, in the east. It was during this last period that the Hanging Gardens were built, and it has been estimated that for a time the city was the largest in the world, boasting a population of more than 200,000.

In 539 Babylon fell to the Persians and was governed thereafter by the Great King. At first sight, Alexander’s arrival promised freedom from the foreign yoke. Sensitive to local feelings, he met the astronomer-priests and took their advice on appropriate sacrifices to the gods and in particular to Bel-Marduk, the city’s guardian deity, whom Greeks saw as a barbarian version of Heracles.

In a bid for popularity he ordered the rebuilding of the great temple of Marduk, the Esagila. The Great King Xerxes is reported to have destroyed it, but it may simply have fallen into decay with the passage of time. Either way, Babylon’s new ruler wanted it put to rights. The gesture may have been less appreciated when he made it clear that the local authority would have to pick up the bill.

We are not told if the Chaldeans briefed him on their astronomical records of the recent lunar eclipse and its political significance. It would seem likely that they did, for it was their duty to make their revelations available to the government of the day. In that case, Alexander will have learned at this early stage that his luck would continue for eight years, but no more. Iron must have entered the soul. In consolation, he must have gratefully recognized the parallel with Achilles, who preferred to die young but famous rather than long-lived and unknown. It is said that the court historian, Callisthenes, commissioned translations of the Astronomical Diaries and sent Aristotle a list of lunar eclipses in past centuries.

In the short term, there were issues to be addressed at once. What was to be done about the administration of the city and the province of Babylonia? Mazaeus had already taken control and Alexander named him as his permanent satrap (to guarantee security, Macedonians were given matching military responsibilities). They had probably been in confidential contact in the weeks following Gaugamela before coming to an understanding. But the appointment was unpopular in every quarter. For the patriotic Persian, Mazaeus was a deserter; for the Babylonian, who had thought he had been liberated, he was a symbol of Persian oppression; and for the true-blooded Macedonian he was living evidence that their king was going native.

But what else could Alexander have done? As the army marched farther and farther east it met fewer and fewer Greek-speakers. Even the king’s cloud of traveling experts knew little of the peoples through whom they passed, nor were they personally familiar with local elites. The Babylonians spoke a version of Aramaic and only a tiny minority will have understood Macedonian or Greek. Their chief secondary language must have been Persian. It is highly unlikely that any Macedonian officer was fluent in either tongue, although interpreters were on the payroll.

From a practical point of view, a senior and trustworthy Persian nobleman was an obvious solution to the problem. Mazaeus turned out to be loyal and dependable; before he died in office a few years later, he was living evidence that further resistance was pointless, for the Macedonian king intended to retain Darius’s officials in important posts provided they cooperated.

Alexander also appointed Mithrenes as satrap of Armenia. He was the Persian who had surrendered Sardis, the capital of Lydia, to him three years previously. The promotion was a mixed blessing, for Armenia had not yet been conquered and the new governor was obliged to fight for his job. We hear no more of him, so he was probably killed in the attempt. These two senior Persians were the first of many to be promoted to senior positions under the new regime.

While the business of government was being conducted at the palace, the army was encouraged to relax. Other-rankers were probably encamped outside the city, but spent their leisure in town having a good time. The local inhabitants feasted them lavishly.

The prudish Roman historian Curtius expressed his feelings about Babylonian degeneracy:

The moral corruption there is unparalleled….Parents and husbands permit their children and wives to have sex with strangers, provided this wickedness is paid for….The Babylonians are especially addicted to wine and the excesses that go along with drunkenness. Women attend dinner parties. At first they are decently dressed, then they remove all their top-clothing and by degrees disgrace their respectability until (I apologize to my readers for spelling it out) they finally discard their most intimate garments. This revolting conduct is characteristic not only of prostitutes, but also of married women and young girls, who regard such disgusting fornication as “being friendly.”

It may be that this garishly colored account reflects the ritual of divinely endorsed prostitution, which seems to have been an immemorial tradition in Babylon. Many centuries before, the lawgiver king Hammurabi gave protection to the women involved. Premarital sex was practiced with strangers, although it was followed by strict conjugal chastity. Apparently, the act was associated with the divinity Mylitta (whom the Greeks identified with their goddess of love, Aphrodite). We are told that it had to be done at least once in a woman’s life and was compulsory; earnings were handed over to the goddess. More probably, the custom may have been restricted to sexual priestesses.

Writing in the fifth century B.C., Herodotus evoked the scene:

There is a great multitude of women coming and going; passages marked by line run every way through the crowd, by which the men pass and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has tossed silver into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the precinct; but while he throws the money, he must say, “I invite you in the name of Mylitta.”…It does not matter what the fee is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred.

Whatever we make of these claims, Babylon was evidently a free-and-easy billet and, like all soldiers, the Macedonians enjoyed breaking a period of enforced celibacy.

—

AFTER A MONTH’S HOLIDAY, the Macedonians were on the move again. Their destination was Susa.

Alexander was approaching the empire’s heartland. Until now he had crossed through subject populations who regarded him with goodwill, but now he faced opposition from inhabitants for whom he was the enemy. In effect, his army was a moving island in a hostile sea. He had always made sure to obtain advance information on roads, resources, terrain, and climate, but in future this would be much more difficult, albeit more essential than ever.

The march led through abundant country, and supply was easy enough for the time being, but after Susa Alexander tended to divide his troops into two or more groups. Each would take a different route and so would need to consume less food and water. Sometimes the main body would stay behind and Alexander would advance alone with a fast-moving special force. Only when he had subdued a hostile territory would he call forward the rest of the army.

During the march Alexander was joined by Amyntas, son of Andromenes, with substantial reinforcements from Macedonia. Amyntas had been dispatched after the siege of Gaza and now returned with 500 Macedonian cavalry and 6,000 infantry, 4,100 Thracian cavalry, and 4,000 infantry and just under 1,000 cavalry levied from friendly states in the Peloponnese. Alexander took the opportunity to review the performance of his senior officers, making promotions on merit rather than seniority. In the cavalry he abolished tribal groupings, and squadrons were led by men of his own choosing He also introduced improvements to the living conditions of the rank and file. All received generous bonuses from the money surrendered at Babylon.

Soldiers in the ancient world expected their wages to be supplemented by the rewards of victory—plunder plucked from the flames of enemy cities. But Alexander had no intention of letting his men loose on the empire’s rich and civilized urban centers. To do so would simply create unnecessary political, economic, and social difficulties for the Great King, a post he expected soon to hold.

Diodorus comments: “He brought the whole force up to an outstanding devotion to its commander and obedience to his commands, and to a high degree of effectiveness, looking toward the battles to come.” Up to a point. His men did adore him and he did look after them well, but underneath the cheeriness and pride in victory, early stirrings of opposition could be detected. Some asked themselves whether this war would ever end.

Amyntas brought with him fifty grown-up sons of Macedonian noblemen to act as an intimate bodyguard. These were the Royal Pages. They served the king at dinner, brought him his horses when he went into battle, and accompanied him on the hunt. They also took turns to be on guard outside his bedroom door. These young men were, in the politest sense, hostages for their fathers’ good behavior, but they also marked a stage in the development of Alexander from an informal leader, a first among equals, to a ruler with a formal court where access to the king’s person was ever more carefully controlled.

With Amyntas and his men came some potentially very bad news. Alexander had learned as long ago as the siege of Tyre that Greece was unsettled and Sparta was agitating for revolt. Now he was told that a general he had appointed as a governor in Thrace was involved in an insurgency. The threat this posed was very real, and Antipater had been compelled to lead a substantial force against him and to raise a fleet (which in due course won a convincing victory). Meanwhile Alexander had ordered reinforcements for his Persian campaign. Soldiers were beginning to be in short supply.

King Agis saw that these pressures on Macedonian military capacity gave him a unique opportunity. He left Asia Minor for Crete, where his brother was bringing the island under Spartan control. Here he signed up eight thousand Greek mercenaries who had taken refuge there and, probably in spring 331, sailed with them to the Peloponnese. Despite Sparta’s unpopularity among its neighbors he negotiated an anti-Macedonian alliance with a number of them and was soon leading an army of twenty thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry. Agis inflicted a stunning defeat on a Macedonian force, which greatly enhanced his credibility among mainland Greeks.

Sparta’s chances were improving. As an Athenian orator put it later: “Alexander had withdrawn to the uttermost regions of the North Star, almost beyond the borders of the inhabited world, and Antipater was slow in collecting an army. The whole outcome was uncertain.”

—

IT WAS AT THIS POINT that Amyntas left for the east. He knew nothing of subsequent events and, unsurprisingly, his report alarmed Alexander. There was little he could do to help, but around this time he wrote to the Hellenic city-states announcing that all tyrannies had been abolished and that they lived under their own laws (this was more public relations than fact, for a number of tyrannies backed by Macedonia existed on the Greek mainland). As a reminder of the official purpose of the war, he commanded the citizens of Plataea to rebuild their tiny ruined town in Boeotia, as a symbol of the great victory nearby which saw the end of the Persian invasion in 479.

At his next stop, the empire’s administrative capital, Susa, Alexander ordered a senior officer to take to Antipater the considerable sum of three thousand talents, to be used at will. At Susa he discovered a pair of statues looted from Athens by the Great King Xerxes in 480. They commemorated two youths, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who assassinated the brother of the then tyrant of Athens—an event that paved the way to the creation of a democracy. Harmodius and Aristogeiton were heroes of the people and Alexander took care to send the statues back to Athens. This was the latest of a number of conciliatory gestures. They seem to have worked. When Agis attempted to win the city to his alliance, it continued with its cautious policy of nonalignment.

The Spartan made a bad mistake when he used force to gain allies in the Peloponnese. He laid siege to Megalopolis, the leading city of Arcadia in the north of the peninsula. People began to wonder whether his true objective was less to confront Alexander than to recover Sparta’s old domination of southern Greece.

The siege came to nothing and wasted valuable time. Above all, it allowed Antipater to come to terms with the Thracians, recruit soldiers from states in the north, and march down to confront Agis. Soon Antipater commanded an army of about forty thousand men.

At a battle outside Megalopolis, Agis and his troops fought the Macedonians bravely, but he was badly wounded in the thigh and bled heavily. He was taken back to his camp, but the battle was lost. When he saw enemy soldiers approaching, Curtius writes that he “gave orders that he be put down.” Not being obeyed, he covered himself with a shield and started brandishing his spear. Nobody would risk hand-to-hand combat with him, and he was killed at long range with javelins.

With this defeat the insurrection ended and Greek city-states made what peace they could with their Macedonian overlord. Alexander received the good news on the way from Susa to Persepolis. He ought to have been grateful, but he liked to make light even of a threat that could have brought his Persian campaign to a halt. He commented on Antipater’s victory: “It would seem, my men, that while we were conquering Darius here, there has been a battle of mice over there in Arcadia.” But when he first learned of Agis’s campaign he had been rightly alarmed. What would the point have been of conquering Persia if he lost Macedonia?

Antipater was no fool. Sensitive to his master’s amour propre, he handed over the peace negotiations to the council of the League of Corinth. They were equally cautious, merely giving the Spartans permission to put their case to Alexander in person.

The story is a sad one. Agis was as courageous as Alexander, but less lucky. His springboard was not a rich and thriving state like Macedonia, but a small provincial power past its peak. He did his best.

—

AN INSCRIPTION FROM 330 or the early 320s reveals that there was a famine in Greece. We know little about it, or indeed about civilian life in general during these years, but the disruptions to trade caused by Agis’s revolt and more widely by Alexander’s campaigning seem a likely cause. The stone tablet lists the states supplied with grain by the Hellenic city of Cyrene, on the coast of northern Africa west of Egypt. The city probably charged the usual price, in an attempt to discourage inflation.

Only two individuals are cited by name as recipients or purchasers—Olympias and her daughter Cleopatra. Although the details are unclear, they had a fraught relationship. The mother exercised influence, if not power, in Macedonia alongside Antipater. Meanwhile Cleopatra ruled as regent in Molossia when her husband (and uncle) went to southern Italy as a condottiere in the service of the powerful port of Tarentum. He was killed in battle. His body was mutilated and cut in half. What was left of him was cremated and the bones sent home to Molossia.

Presumably these royal women distributed the grain they purchased to the populations of their respective kingdoms. That they were singled out for mention in this fashion shows that they were well-known international political figures.

At some stage, Olympias fell out badly with Antipater. She seems never to have accepted that her son had placed him in charge of European affairs. After the end of the Agis rebellion Antipater was in a strong position to act as he wanted and there was no advantage in undermining him. Olympias disappeared to Epirus, where she took over the government. She and her daughter acted in concert for a while. However, there usually being no room for two queens in one beehive, Cleopatra decamped to Pella.

At some point, the young queen had sex with a good-looking man. Olympias found out about it, but for once reacted calmly, observing that her daughter ought to get some enjoyment from her royal rank.

—

ON THEIR WAY TO Susa, the Macedonians came across unrefined petroleum oozing from the soil, so copiously that it formed a small lake. The substance was highly inflammable and could be set alight, Plutarch observes, “by a flame’s radiance without actually touching it.” One evening as it was growing dark, some Persians arranged a demonstration. They sprinkled a small quantity of petroleum, or naphtha, along the street that led to the king’s quarters and then set light to it at one end. In a fraction of a second the flames flashed to the other end, an effect that the ancient world had never before witnessed.

On another occasion, a servant boy called Stephanus was in attendance while the king took a bath and rubbed himself down with olive oil. Thinking that the flames moved so fast that they would not burn flesh, a courtier suggested that naphtha be tried out on Stephanus. Surprisingly, he agreed to the experiment and coated himself with the liquid. The fire took and Stephanus was enveloped in flames. Alexander was horrified, and if servants had not been able to put the fire out by pouring water over the boy, he would have died. As it was, he was badly burned.

Scientific experts of the day speculated (wrongly, it goes without saying) that naphtha flows from soil that is oily and combustible. It was no accident, they flatteringly inferred, that their king’s own nature was equally fiery. No wonder he was conquering the combustible soil of Mesopotamia with such ease. Although the sources do not name him, this was just the kind of sycophantic idea that Callisthenes would have thought up.

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THE FIRST TRACES OF human habitation at Susa have been dated to about 7000 B.C. Over that time a Neolithic village gradually grew into the leading city of the Elamite civilization, in the far west and southwest of today’s Iran. Its fortunes fluctuated as conquerors came and went, and the city was razed three times.

One of these Ozymandiases was the Neo-Assyrian monarch Ashurbanipal. He sacked the city and boasted about it:

Susa, the great holy city, home of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods and wealth were amassed….I destroyed the ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to nothing; their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds.

Alexander may have been the latest in a long line, but, as he had demonstrated in Babylon, he was more interested in maintenance than destruction.

In early December he arrived outside Susa’s walls. He was met by the son of Abulites, the Persian satrap for the region, and the Macedonian officer he had sent to the city after Gaugamela, and was presented with speedy dromedaries and a dozen elephants. The surrender took place as had been agreed and was peaceful. On entry, Alexander sacrificed in the traditional Macedonian manner, held a torch race for the men, and, as ever, staged an athletics competition. The contents of the treasury were handed over. These amounted to the staggering sum of more than forty thousand talents of gold and silver bullion that had accumulated untouched over many years, and nine thousand talents of minted gold in the form of gold darics.

Important appointments were made, confirming the king’s policy of reconciliation with senior Persians. Abulites was confirmed in place. We hear of no protests, but throughout the army there will have been widespread puzzlement at best, and at worst silent resentment. As counterweights, the garrison command was given to a Companion and overall military authority to a Macedonian.

Alexander had been taken aback by Darius’s luxurious lifestyle when on campaign. He was now shown round the “fabulous royal palace” and received a lesson about the trappings of majesty at home. He found a daily bill of fare for the Great King’s lunch and dinner engraved on a brass column. Huge quantities of culinary ingredients were listed, including four hundred geese, three hundred turtles, three hundred goslings, thirty horses, and many kinds of herb (among them an aromatic plant called silphium, which, it was believed, conveniently doubled up as an aphrodisiac and a contraceptive, but is now regrettably extinct).

Evidently, the exchequer funded all the meals of a numerous court. The expense was colossal. Alexander knew how to be generous (always for a purpose, of course), but he disapproved of waste. Convinced that cowardice was the sure consequence of luxury and dissipation, he ordered the metal menu to be destroyed. In the royal bedroom a golden vine studded with clusters of jewels hung over the bed. An inventory conducted a decade or so later listed a large number of objets d’art together weighing fifteen thousand talents.

Alexander seated himself on the Great King’s throne. It was too high for him and his feet did not touch the floor. One of the Macedonian pages saw this and pulled up a table beneath his dangling legs. It fitted and Alexander was pleased by the boy’s presence of mind. Then he noticed that a eunuch on the palace staff was crying and asked him what the matter was. It was from that table, the man replied, that the Great King used to eat, and he was upset by the disrespectful use to which it was now being put. Alexander was embarrassed and, no doubt, did not want a reputation for impertinence to spread through the Persian court. He ordered the table to be removed.

Philotas, Parmenion’s son, interrupted. “Don’t do that, Sir. Take this as another omen, that the table on which Darius once dined is now your footstool.” On second thought, the king agreed and kept the table where it was. This casual incident was to be understood as a divine sign of approval for the transmission of power.

Demaratus, the aged fixer from Corinth, believed in the revenge justification for the war. When he saw Alexander in Susa, he wept. Through his tears, he said that all the Greeks who had died before this hour had been deprived of a great joy, since they had not seen Alexander sitting on the throne of Darius.

—

A CLOUD BRIEFLY SPOILED the fine weather. The dowager queen, Sisygambis, and her granddaughters were still with the army and Alexander decided to park them permanently in Susa. He gave them tutors to teach them the Greek language. He was still on excellent terms with Sisygambis, but nearly ruined the relationship by committing a faux pas.

The king had been sent examples of national dress from Macedonia and a large amount of valuable purple fabric had been found in the palace. He ordered it all to be presented to the dowager queen, together with the women who had sewn the clothes. He added a message that if she liked the Macedonian garments, she would be able to have her granddaughters trained how to make them. Alexander still had much to learn about Persian cultural attitudes. Sisygambis took the gift as a grave insult, for high-status Persian females would have been humiliated if compelled to work with wool. Alexander was mortified when he learned of his mistake. Although “Sorry” was not in his usual vocabulary, he went to her in person to apologize. Greek women, like his sisters, he explained, were brought up to weave and spin and he had been led into error by his own customs. He begged her to excuse his ignorance of hers. Warmth returned between them. He went on calling her mother.

—

FOR A VICTORIOUS ARMY, the journey to Persepolis, the empire’s ceremonial capital, was surprisingly hard going.

In the ancient world, wars were usually fought only between spring and autumn, but Alexander needed to reach Persepolis before anyone else took the opportunity to make off with the treasury. The Zagros Mountains stood in his path, and the passes were covered in snow. It is a mark of his urgency that he left Susa during the depths of winter in mid-January 330.

The distance from Susa is some 370 miles and the Macedonians marched through the land of the Uxii, a corridor that led to Persis, the Persians’ “sparse and rugged” motherland. Some of these tribespeople lived in a fertile plain; they were governed by a Persian satrap and paid their taxes. The mountain Uxii were a different matter; they were not subjects of the Great King and fiercely maintained their independence. They made their living from taxing travelers—or, more exactly, from organized brigandage. The Persian authorities thought it would be too much trouble to subdue them and agreed to pay a toll.

After the king entered the Uxiis’ territory, the dwellers on the plain immediately capitulated. However, those who lived in the mountains controlled a strategic pass leading eastward, and they insisted on levying their customary charge. Alexander told them to meet him at the pass, “where he would pay them what was owing.” They assumed he meant to give them their money.

That was a mistake. The king advanced at top speed with only a portion of his army, up to fourteen thousand men in total, comprising nine thousand infantry, three thousand mercenary archers, one thousand javelin-throwing Agrianes, and one thousand Thracian horses. They fell on the Uxii villages, destroying and pillaging. Then Alexander marched to the pass, arriving before the tribesmen, shocked by the attack on their homesteads, had taken up position. He sent Craterus forward to occupy the heights to which he guessed the tribesmen would withdraw when hard pressed, and then he launched a full-scale assault. As he had predicted, they scattered in Craterus’s direction and either were cut to pieces or fell to their deaths from cliff paths.

The Uxii were allowed to live in peace on payment of an annual tribute of one hundred horses, five hundred draft animals, and, cripplingly one assumes, thirty thousand sheep. An irritant which Great Kings had put up with for centuries had been removed in a few days.

The king then split the army between himself and Parmenion. The old general was given command of the Thessalian cavalry, the more heavily armed infantry, and the baggage train, and took the high road to Persepolis. They would inevitably proceed slowly. Meanwhile Alexander chose a more direct route with the remaining infantry, the Companion cavalry, the light cavalry used for skirmishing, the Agrianians, and the archers, and made a forced march to the Persian Gates, a narrow and easily defended gorge between high mountains. It was six miles long and at its narrowest six feet wide, cliff to cliff. The satrap of Persis, one Ariobarzanes, had guessed the impatient Macedonian’s journey plan and occupied the pass with a substantial force of 25,000 men and some cavalry. Worse, he had had a wall built across it.

Alexander faced an awkward problem. He meant to defeat Ariobarzanes, but he would have to do so in a way that prevented the satrap from making a getaway. If the Persians withdrew in good order, they would most probably speed to Persepolis. Once there they would either defend the city or, much worse, take possession of the hoard of bullion reported to be stored there and run off with it. If they could deliver the gold and silver to Darius, who was skulking somewhere in the eastern wastes, the defeated monarch would be able to afford a new army.

Alexander started badly. With typical overconfidence, he launched a direct assault on the wall, but his men were bombarded from above by catapults, slingers, and archers. Large rocks were tumbled down onto their heads. The king had no choice but to sound the retreat, leaving his dead behind in the defile. It was a humiliating setback. To abandon the bodies was unthinkable, but a second assault would be pointless. What was to be done? How was Ariobarzanes to be defeated quickly and decisively before he withdrew to Persepolis?

The Macedonians built a fortified camp a few miles back and waited for a while. The king cross-examined some prisoners of war, who volunteered to show him a rough and narrow path that would take him round behind the Gates. Ever the risk-taker, he immediately accepted the offer. He placed Craterus in charge of the camp, leaving him a couple of phalanx brigades, some archers, and five hundred cavalry. He was to keep up the camp’s usual appearance and increase the number of fires so that it would appear that nothing had changed.

At nightfall he led the rest of the army along the secret path. As they climbed, snowdrifts held them up and progress was slow. After eleven miles, the king divided his forces once again. For himself he selected a flying column consisting of the hypaspists, a phalanx brigade, the lightest-armed of the archers, the Agrianians, and two cavalry squadrons. He ordered the remaining troops, led by three senior generals, Philotas the cavalry commander, his friend Amyntas, son of Andromenes (now back in post after having brought the reinforcements from Macedonia), and Coenus, Parmenion’s son-in-law, to march down into the plain on the far side of the Gates. They were then to build pontoon bridges over a river that would have to be crossed before reaching Persepolis.

The motive for this third detachment was presumably to ensure that there was a substantial force blocking the way to Persepolis, should the Macedonians fail to crush Ariobarzanes at the pass.

Alexander and his elite unit struck out along a rough and difficult track through dense forest. About midday they halted for a meal and some sleep. Darkness had fallen when they set off again. Just before dawn they came out onto a high point at the back of the Gates, overlooking an enemy outpost. They quickly annihilated it and also killed many in a second outpost. At the third, most of the guards escaped, but into the mountains rather than to the main camp. So, luckily, the alarm was not raised. Then Alexander led an attack on the enemy camp. At the perimeter ditch he had a trumpet sound as a prearranged signal to alert Craterus, who immediately launched a frontal assault.

Surprise was complete and the Persians, seeing that they were surrounded, panicked and fled. Many were killed. Ariobarzanes himself escaped into the hills with forty cavalrymen and five thousand foot. Just as the king had feared, he pushed on to Persepolis, but the authorities were realists and refused to let him in. He turned to face his Macedonian pursuers and fell fighting alongside his men.

It would have been an eccentric fate if the victor of Issus and Gaugamela had been defeated in a skirmish. Impetuosity had led the king into serious trouble, but if that quality was a fusion of speed and determination it had also rescued him.

Resistance being over, the royal treasurer surrendered the city to Alexander. The king had spared Babylon and Susa, but he had something different in mind for Persepolis. As Xerxes had sacked Athens all those years before, the Persians were now to suffer the same fate in a symmetry of punishment.

—

MOST GREAT CITIES GROW over the centuries from small beginnings. Persepolis was different, for it was invented by Darius the Great, the invader of Greece.

He envisaged the need for a splendid collection of palaces where festivals could be staged, grand receptions held, foreign ambassadors received, and religious ceremonies conducted. Here Great Kings could be buried in suitable splendor. Persepolis was to be the symbol and showcase of empire and was designed to evoke awe and respect. (But its remote location meant that it never grew into an urban community with its own character and social momentum.)

A huge platform, 450 by 300 meters in extent, was constructed, which abutted against a mountain. On it was built an audience hall approached by grand stairways; its roof was made from cedar, ebony, and teak and was supported by seventy-two columns twenty-five meters high. It could accommodate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. Nearby a treasury was used to store war booty and tax receipts. A large collection of cuneiform clay tablets has survived which shows that a bureaucracy of more than a thousand employees was responsible for the empire’s financial management. Fine bas-reliefs, probably carved by Greek sculptors, depict all the different peoples of the Persian empire as they bring tribute to the Great King. These include, cheekily, the Ionian Greeks, whose rebellion set off the historical process, now reaching its climax with Alexander’s doom-bringing arrival.

Darius’s successors on the throne further developed the site, commissioning their own palaces and halls. His son Xerxes was an energetic builder and boasted in an inscription:

I am Xerxes, the great king, the king of all countries and all languages, king of this great and wide world….When I became king, I did much that was excellent. What had been built by my father, I protected, and I added other buildings. What I built, and what my father built, all that by the grace of Ahuramazda [the creator and sole god of Zoroastrianism, the official religion of the Achaemenids] we built.

Alexander sent advance guards to take possession of the city, after which he climbed up onto the high terrace. According to Plutarch, he came across a statue of Xerxes that had been toppled from its pedestal and was lying on the ground.

He stopped and spoke to it as though it were alive. “Shall I pass by and leave you lying there because of your invasion of Greece, or shall I set you up again?” For a long while he gazed at the statue and reflected in silence. Then finally he walked on.

The treasury was found to contain the phenomenal sum of 120,000 talents in gold and silver coin and bullion. A further six thousand talents was removed from the vaults of Pasargadae, the empire’s original capital some fifty miles from Persepolis where the tomb of Cyrus its first ruler was (and is still) to be found.

Once the entire army had come up, Alexander gave his men permission to loot the city for twenty-four hours, but not to touch the royal precinct, which was his share of the spoils. He authorized them to kill any adult males they met, and all prisoners were slaughtered on his orders, according to Plutarch, “because he thought that would help his cause.” The Persians of Persis were bitterly hostile to their new master and no doubt would rise up against him if given the chance. Devastating their sacred city would, the king felt, show them that their days of grandeur were over and that resistance was futile. The rape of Thebes had aroused as much disgust as fear, but Alexander knew that terror would enforce submission.

Pillage was a military perk and the soldiers had not been allowed a good sack since the fall of Gaza. They seem to have gone berserk. The city was emptied of valuables and inhabitants. Those who had not escaped into the countryside were dead.

Once the bloodletting was done, the king held games in honor of his victories, as was his custom. He performed costly sacrifices to the gods and staged lavish entertainments.

What happened to the palaces is not so clear. According to one story, shortly before the army’s departure from Persepolis in April, Alexander and his intimates were holding a party in one of the staterooms. Drink flowed. Some young men “giddy with wine” persuaded a reluctant Alexander to let them stage a komos. This was a ritual drunken procession, celebrating a wedding, athletic success, or, no doubt as now, victory in war. A chorus of men would sing rousing victory hymns (epinikia).

The constituents of a komos were quickly assembled—torches for all the guests and musicians (the female players who had been performing for the king’s party). Unusually some other women were present as guests, along with their patrons or lovers. One of these was Thais, a hetaira (a female companion or courtesan) from Athens. She was to become the mistress, and later the wife, of Ptolemy.

The tipsy king led them all from room to room to the sound of singing and flutes and pipes. Thais organized the procession and was the first, after Alexander, to fling her blazing torch into one of the buildings. Everyone else followed suit. The wooden roofs caught fire and soon a large part of the complex was in flames.

The army was encamped outside the city. It was evening and when a brightening of the sky was noticed, soldiers ran to help put out the flames. Once they saw that in fact the king was directing the conflagration, they dropped the water they had brought and began throwing dry wood onto the blaze themselves.

—

THERE IS ANOTHER VERSION of what took place. This makes the arson an act of policy rather than an accident of alcohol. Immediately on arrival in the city, the king convened a meeting of his generals and set out his position. Curtius writes that he restated the obsolete war aim of retribution for the Persian invasion. He wanted to punish the Persians for wrecking Athens and its temples. No city was more hateful to the Greeks than Persepolis, he said. To appease the spirits of their forefathers they should wipe it out.

This not only gave his troops permission to pillage, as we have seen, but also announced his own decision to demolish Persepolis, just as he had Thebes. Parmenion urged him to change his mind. There could be little point in destroying what was now his own property. He added an argument close to the king’s heart. The peoples of the empire would be less inclined to accept him as their ruler if they thought he had no plan to govern them, but, in Arrian’s phrase, was simply there for “a tour of conquest.”

The king had maneuvered himself into an impossible position by running two contradictory strategies at the same time—revenge and reconciliation. On the one hand he continued giving jobs to the Achaemenid elite and appointed a Persian as satrap of Persis. He very probably agreed with his wise old general. On the other hand, he had an acute sense of symbolism. In his eyes, east and west had fought one another tit for tat down the ages, and now a new Achilles had retaken Troy. He convinced himself that the Hellenic world would be dismayed if the leader of the League of Corinth failed to deliver a coup de théâtre that would bring the millennial drama to a conclusion. And such a gesture might remind any remaining Greek rebels of what had happened to Thebes; some were still sore and resentful after Antipater’s victory at Megalopolis and would profit from a fiery assertion of who was master.

Even if the destruction was ill-advised in the medium to long term, we should note that Darius’s personal authority was damaged by the surrender of the empire’s four great cities without a fight and by the flames of Persepolis. It must have been about now that some high officials decided to switch sides to Alexander and that others began to consider secretly the deposition of the Great King.

The hypothesis that the fire was the outcome of policy is borne out by evidence on the ground. It is telling that many structures on the raised platform were left intact. The fire-raisers focused their attention on Darius’s great audience hall, the palace of Xerxes, and the treasury. These were the two guilty men, and the buildings they created were compelled to pay postmortem for their crimes.

The ashes of the Acropolis were matched by the ashes of Persepolis, as modern archaeologists can confirm, for they have found scorch marks on columns and layers of charred detritus at both sites. The flames rhymed.

The two versions of the sack of Persepolis turn out not to be mutually exclusive. In its essentials Alexander’s komos is best regarded as a historical event, but not so much an improvisation as a carefully staged performance.

And what was more natural than to dance around a bonfire?

—

ON THE MORNING AFTER the party, though, the king is reported to have had second thoughts. He came to regret what he had done. This is the last time we hear him talk of his crusade against barbarians. He was learning that if he was to be the Great King he had to behave like a great king. To ensure his power, military force was not enough. He would have to win the consent of those he ruled.

Burning down palaces was not the way.