Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 12 WAR WITHOUT END

In spring 330, Alexander joined up with the army units he had left behind during his pursuit of Darius. Also, on the sensible grounds that action lifts morale, Parmenion’s troops were ordered to make their way to him. But instead of marching east to catch up with the usurper at the earliest opportunity, the king led his army of twenty thousand foot and three thousand horse north into Hyrcania (in its Persian form, the name translates as “Country of Wolves”).

Alexander had good reason to turn toward Hyrcania. After Darius’s murder, many of his courtiers had taken refuge there, together with the remainder of his loyal Greek mercenaries, and the king wanted to force their surrender. This would eliminate the danger of enemies in his rear before moving on.

The province lies between the southeastern end of the Caspian Sea and the rugged Elburz mountain range. Where it is not bare crag and cliff, it is tropically fertile, with a riot of vegetable color. Groves of tall trees abound in valleys. Vines and branches interweave, and sometimes pathways are hard to find or penetrate. The Macedonians were surprised to see the trees dripping with honey (the product of the Caspian honeylocust tree’s sap, it is used today to make candy).

The army divided into two parts and the province was soon reduced. The king entered the Hyrcanian capital, Zadracarta—Yellow City, after the oranges, lemons, and other fruit that flourished in its outskirts. He found a group of Persian grandees waiting for him. Realizing they were cornered, they had come down from the hills to hand themselves in.

They had no cause to be nervous about their fates. They were quite a catch and, following his policy to conciliate the old ruling class, the king received them warmly. The largest fish to be hooked was Darius’s chiliarch, Nabarzanes. With Bessus he had plotted the arrest and killing of Darius, and he took the sensible precaution of writing to Alexander in advance to ascertain his welcome. The king had no qualms about providing assurances of his personal safety.

The chiliarch presented Alexander with lavish gifts, one of which was to transform Alexander’s personal happiness. This was an exceptionally beautiful eunuch “in the flower of his youth” (his emasculation probably entailed the removal of his testes). Called Bagoas, he was no relation, so far as we know, of his namesake, the poison-bearing kingmaker. He had been bedded by Darius.

Despite his past disapproval of those who used attractive slaves as sexual partners, Alexander fell head over heels in love with the boy. Little is said about Bagoas in the ancient histories, and what is said is disobliging. He makes few appearances in these pages, but the reader should bear in mind that he was present all the time, in the shadows, for the rest of the king’s story.

Like most court eunuchs throughout the ages, Bagoas unjustly acquired a sinister reputation, but the rank and file regarded him with affectionate jocularity. We are not told what Hephaestion or (for that matter) Barsine made of him, but neither can have been pleased. He seems not to have sought a political role and to have retained Alexander’s lifelong love. He survived the king, but his ultimate fate is unknown. It was probably nasty.

Two local satraps, Phrataphernes and Autophradates, surrendered and the king immediately reconfirmed them in office. An especially welcome arrival was the philoprogenitive Artabazus, accompanied by nine of his eleven sons. True to the last to the ancien régime, he now recognized that the Achaemenids’ day was done and was transferring his loyalty to Alexander. This was not too hard a choice, for he had known Alexander since the distant years spent in exile at the court in Pella. As his new master’s mistress Barsine would surely smooth her father’s path into his favor. Artabazus joined the select circle of Alexander’s most trusted advisers.

Messengers arrived from the sad remainder of Darius’s Greek mercenaries, seeking an amnesty. Only fifteen hundred of them were left, but they were a force to be reckoned with. Alexander was unforgiving. Under no circumstances would he make any sort of terms with them. They had rejected the Greek consensus at Corinth and fought for the barbarians against their compatriots. They must surrender unconditionally, he insisted. A pause for thought ensued.

While in Hyrcania, the king launched a successful five-day expedition against a poor but fierce local tribe called the Mardians (not to be confused with the Mardi on this page), although his motive is obscure. They were “a culturally backward race,” according to Curtius, who made a living from brigandage. The Great King had never managed to conquer them. They had done nothing at all to provoke Alexander, but they could field eight thousand capable warriors and were a potential threat. He probably saw the brief campaign as an adventure and a training exercise.

He may have had an additional motive. Apparently the Mardians were enthusiastic horsemen. Many Macedonian cavalry mounts having died of heat and exhaustion during the hunt for Darius, the king may have decided to round up replacements.

The Mardians retaliated in kind by kidnapping Alexander’s much-loved Bucephalas. Although he was now elderly, he would not let anyone else ride him and remained the king’s favorite animal. On hearing the news, Alexander exploded with rage. He sent an interpreter to deliver an ultimatum: either the Mardians gave back his horse, or he would annihilate the entire tribe, including their women and children. The tribesmen saw that he was serious and immediately returned Bucephalas, with gifts. Soon afterward they capitulated. Now that he had gotten exactly what he wanted, Alexander was all charm. He even paid the Mardians a ransom.

Alexander returned to his camp, where he found the Greek mercenaries waiting for him. Brought in with the assistance of (and doubtless good advice from) Artabazus, they had decided that further resistance was futile and placed themselves entirely at the king’s disposal. In a generous frame of mind, he freed those who had joined up before the decision to go to war with Persia and incorporated the rest of them into his own army. The young men of Asia Minor were training in the Macedonian way of war, but were not yet ready for military service; perhaps Alexander was running out of experienced troops and was prepared to take in any that were available.

—

ALEXANDER SPENT TWO WEEKS in Zadracarta. During his stay, his sight began to fail, which probably explains the unusually long period of inaction. The cause was likely conjunctivitis or some other eye infection, a common affliction in the ancient world. For a time he was haunted by the fear of blindness, but in the event his eyes recovered.

As usual when resting his army, he offered sacrifices to the gods and staged an athletics competition. Then, in late August 330, spirits reignited, he set off with his entire army in search of Bessus, who was now recruiting horsemen in his satrapy of Bactria. So much booty had been won that the column could hardly move under the weight. The king ordered it all to be burned and, to dampen criticism, he put a torch to his own baggage first. The Macedonians gritted their teeth and marched eastward through Parthia to Areia, probably following the ancient Silk Road.

Some reinforcements caught up with the army, as did the satrap of Areia, Satibarzanes, who surrendered in person to Alexander. Like other senior Persians, he was given his old job back, but as soon as the Macedonians had gone on their way, he raised the standard of revolt. He massacred the few Macedonians left with him as a guard and proceeded to assemble an army.

A furious Alexander hardened his policy toward the regicides. There were to be no more accommodating deals for them. From now on, the king presented himself not only as Darius’s successor but as his merciless avenger. He took a picked, fast-moving force (leaving Craterus with the rest of the army to besiege the provincial capital) and chased after the Areians. After two days and nights of forced marching he found them.

The astounded Satibarzanes slipped away with two thousand cavalry to neighboring Bactria, leaving the rest of his men to fend for themselves. Noncombatants and thirteen thousand troops took refuge on a large flat-topped mountain with steep cliffs and an extensive grassland plain at the summit. It was a natural citadel and Alexander was at a loss what to do. Luck came to his rescue. His soldiers cut down trees to make a ramp up a precipice. The wood accidentally caught fire and the blaze soon enveloped the entire mountain, roasting to death most of the defenders.

The king appointed another Persian as satrap and founded Alexandria Areion, the first of seventy or so garrison towns (either new or renamed). He was beginning to learn the novel art of guerrilla or asymmetric warfare. For the time being there was no place for the set-piece battle in which many thousands of men fought for a decisive result. Disaffection was spreading across the eastern half of the empire. Small groups of mounted fighters, swimming in the sea of the people, harassed the Macedonians, appearing and vanishing without warning. Alexander learned that territory won could easily be lost when his back was turned. It was essential to plant fortresses whose presence would deter a renewal of revolt.

There was a further obstacle to effective campaigning. Alexander and his generals had little or no knowledge of the geography and climate of the eastern half of the empire, much of which consisted of either mountains or deserts. The scientific experts accompanying the army were no better informed until they had conducted their researches. We have already observed that the Macedonians neither spoke nor even understood the languages of the peoples whose lands they were passing through—hence their dependence on not necessarily reliable Persians for data on routes and local power politics as well as for day-to-day interpreting.

Alexander did not feel ready to move directly against Bessus. Winter was approaching and it was essential to find an extensively cultivated region that could feed his army during a long stay. With this in mind, he turned south into the province of Arachosia. His destination was Lake Seistan, the land around which was populous and fertile, albeit plagued by midges, mosquitoes, horseflies, and venomous snakes, not to mention parching sandstorms.

Arachosia’s satrap, a Persian regicide called Barsaentes, had declared for Bessus and needed to be dealt with. When the Macedonians approached, he fled to the safety of a neighboring Indian tribe. A few years later he was handed over to Alexander, who had him put to death.

On their way to the lake, the army passed through a place called Phrada. This was where the Philotas scandal played itself out and for a few days Bessus was forgotten. The king decided that Phrada should be renamed Alexandria Prophthasia, or Anticipation, in memory of the crisis. He was by no means ashamed of what had taken place and wanted the world to know that he would always be one move ahead of his enemies.

In January or February 329, the army began a two-month journey through the territory of the Ariaspi, also called the Benefactors because they had helped supply Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian empire, when he and his soldiers were in extremis. Alexander was impressed by this long-ago good deed and rewarded the tribesmen with money and additional land.

Bad news arrived: Satibarzanes was back on the warpath, this time supplied with cavalry by Bessus. The king refused to halt now to deal with the uprising and dispatched a mobile force under Erigyius, an experienced commander well into middle age, to confront and destroy the former satrap. The army from Media (formerly under Parmenion’s command) was on its way to join Alexander and would be able to help secure the south. Phrataphernes was asked to assist, but local troubles prevented him. Evidently the eastern provinces were in a fragile and unstable condition.

The two sides met and a fierce battle ensued. When Satibarzanes saw his fighters flag, he rode up to the front ranks, took off his helmet, and said that he would fight a duel with anyone the enemy put forward. Irritated by the man’s bravado, Erigyius himself volunteered. Curtius writes:

The barbarian threw his spear first. Moving his head slightly to the side, Erigyius avoided it. Then, spurring on his horse, he brought up his lance and ran it straight through the barbarian’s gullet, so that it projected through the back of his neck. The barbarian was flung from his mount, but still fought on. Erigyius drew the spear from the wound and drove it again into his face. Satibarzanes grabbed it with his hand, aiding his enemy’s stroke to hasten his own death.

Resistance immediately ended and Areia was quiet again. The dead man’s head was cut off and sent to Alexander. He was pleased with this display of old-fashioned, Homeric valor, recalling as it did the hand-to-hand combats on the windy plain of Troy.

A Macedonian was appointed as satrap of Arachosia, and for Areia a Cypriot replaced Satibarzanes. It looks as if the Persian policy was temporarily on hold.

—

IT WAS TIME AT last to confront Bessus. After founding another garrison town to watch over Arachosia, Alexander marched his Macedonians north 325 miles to the mountains of the Hindu Kush, beyond which lay Bactria, the pretender’s base. They labored through harsh treeless highlands, inhabited only by an impoverished and backward tribe, the Parapamisadae. The ground was covered by a permanent frost and the sky was usually overcast. The army had a terrible time of it. According to Curtius, “The numbing cold of the snow, of which they had no experience, claimed many lives; for many others it brought frost-bite to the feet and for a very large number snow-blindness.” The conditions were especially deadly for men suffering from exhaustion. Soldiers nearly lost consciousness from the cold. The only remedy was to force them at all costs to stay awake and keep going.

Toward the end of March, the shivering army reached an abundant and friendly valley where it rested for a few days. In front of them they saw their next daunting destination. This was the continuous chain of the Hindu Kush, which rises 16,872 feet above sea level. It was then mistakenly thought to be part of the Caucasus. It was here that Prometheus, one of the old gods, the Titans, who preceded the Olympians, was chained to a high rock. Each day an eagle swooped down and ate his liver, which regenerated overnight only to be eaten again the next day. This was Prometheus’s punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to human beings, who used combustion to nurture the technologies of war and peace. Local people pointed out his cave, the bird’s nesting place, and the marks of his chains on the rock.

As usual Alexander sacrificed to the customary gods and founded another garrison town, Alexandria of the Caucasus. He could not spare any Macedonians, but settled seven thousand local people, who looked after food production; three thousand camp followers; and volunteers from among the mercenaries.

Then Alexander led his men across the lowest but longest pass through the mountains. This took sixteen or seventeen tedious days. The weather was atrocious. Many horses died, the grain ran out, and the men were reduced to eating herbs. The king ordered his soldiers to kill the baggage animals and eat them raw.

Emerging into Bactria, he found that the enemy had adopted a scorched-earth policy and supplies were still scarce. Arrian writes of a grueling march through thick snow, “but still they came on and on.” The Macedonians had arrived in the province much sooner than Bessus expected and this unsteadied his nerves. At a drunken feast, one of his supporters, a Mede called Bagodaras, advised him to surrender to Alexander and seek mercy. Bessus lost his temper and had to be restrained from killing the man. Out of control, he rushed from the banquet. Bagodaras wisely took the opportunity to slip away. He handed himself in to Alexander, who took care to treat him kindly. His warm reception did not go unnoticed by other followers of the soi-disant Great King.

The plain fact was that Bessus had failed to unite the province he was supposed to govern behind a common plan of defense. He had only managed to recruit seven thousand cavalry and some Sogdian levies, insufficient to meet an army many times the size.

Bactria’s northern frontier was the wide-flowing river Oxus, beyond which lay a land of extremes, alternating between the lush, irrigated green of river valleys and the dry ochre of deserts. This was the satrapy of Sogdiana, inhabited by nomads. Bessus, having lost confidence that he could hold his province, withdrew to Sogdiana. This was a sensible move, but it meant that his Bactrian troops deserted him.

Alexander did not relent in his advance; he soon captured Bactra, the provincial capital, and another town on first assault. Before following his adversary into Sogdiana he passed the administration of Bactria into the safe hands of Artabazus. He was then faced with the task of reaching the Oxus across a waterless desert. He took with him detachments of light troops, leaving the main army behind. It was now June and the heat was so unbearable that his troops were compelled to travel during the only slightly cooler night. The sand itself was scorching. Having just recovered from frostbite, soldiers now faced the prospect of heatstroke. Early one evening, Alexander arrived at the river, but many groups were straggling and fires were lit to guide them to the camp after nightfall. He stood in his armor to welcome them and took no refreshment until the entire column had arrived.

It was at this surprising point that the king demobilized and sent home older Macedonians who were unfit for military duty, as well as Thessalian cavalry volunteers. These men were presumably either sick or mutinous; whichever the correct explanation, they had had enough. It was in Alexander’s interest that they leave in good humor, so he made sure to give them generous bonuses.

The next challenge was the river. It was three quarters of a mile wide and surprisingly deep. Bessus had burned all the riverboats after using them to reach Sogdiana. As previously, the king had the men collect their leather tent covers, stuff them with light rubbish, and sew them up. It took the army five days to cross the river on these improvised rafts.

—

SPITAMENES WAS ONE OF Bessus’s leading supporters and a close friend. He was also a patriot who thoroughly disapproved of Alexander, but he and two Sogdian noblemen saw that the cause of Artaxerxes V was hopeless. They decided to surrender him to the enemy. That would both remove an incompetent leader and mollify the Macedonian king.

The conspirators tricked Bessus into granting them a private audience. Once they had him on his own, they overpowered him. They tied him up, took the diadem off his head, and removed his royal robes. Spitamenes informed Alexander that they would hand over Bessus if he sent a small contingent of troops to pick him up.

The king immediately dispatched Ptolemy, a Macedonian friend from his teens, with sixteen hundred cavalry and four thousand infantry (no small contingent, for he suspected a trap). The conspirators had second thoughts and were reluctant to play a direct part in the surrender. So they left Bessus on his own in a small village. The inhabitants, probably greatly relieved, handed over their involuntary captive and the royal insignia to Ptolemy at the first opportunity.

Ptolemy sent a messenger ahead to ask the king how Bessus should be brought into his presence. In his new role as avenger of Darius, Alexander ordered him to be placed on a roadside, which he and his army would be marching past. Bessus should be entirely stripped of his clothes, fettered, and tied to a post with a slave’s wooden collar around his neck.

These instructions were followed to the letter. Alexander rode up in a chariot—an unusual vehicle for him, which he chose because it symbolized his role as Great King. He halted beside Bessus and asked him to justify Darius’s murder. Bessus replied, lamely, that he had only claimed the crown to give it to Alexander. Under the supervision of Darius’s brother, Oxyathres, now a Companion, the regicide was flogged. He was then taken to Bactra, where some months later Alexander put him on trial and charged him with treason against Darius. The city’s population was invited to attend, not as jurors but as witnesses. The king was the sole judge. Bessus’s nose and ears were sliced off, the terrible Persian penalty for traitors. He was then put to death in public. He may have had to endure the culminating cruelty of impalement up the anus.

Mutilation shocked Greeks and Macedonians. Arrian observed: “For my part, I cannot approve of this excessively severe punishment of Bessus, but regard the mutilation of extremities as a barbaric practice.” If this criticism had been put to Alexander, he would have replied that he had no choice. Whatever his personal feelings, he was ruler of the Persian empire and felt obliged to follow traditional practice.

The ancient authors had little time for Bessus, and indeed he was neither effective nor lucky. He failed to take Alexander’s measure. But for a Persian patriot, he may have acted less from personal ambition than in the national interest, as he saw it. He deposed and assassinated Darius in the hope that under his leadership the fortunes of war would turn in the Achaemenids’ favor. The Bactrians took a more realistic view of their chances against the Macedonian conqueror and declined to enroll under his standard.

Bessus’s moment came too late, for the Fates had already cut the empire’s thread with their shears.

—

THE KING BELIEVED THAT only firm measures would pacify the eastern end of the empire. The cruel handling of Bessus was meant to set an example that would daunt anyone else who was planning an insurgency.

There were other demonstrations of Macedonian brutality at this time, of which the most extraordinary concerned a small town in Sogdiana. Its inhabitants were bilingual and turned out to be the descendants of the Branchidae, a noble clan members of which used to administer the oracle, sacred spring, and temple of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus. During the Persian invasions of Greece in the fifth century B.C., they were said to have sided with the Great King (either Darius I or Xerxes) when he destroyed the temple and made off with its contents, among them a cult statue of the god. The spring dried up and the oracle fell silent.

The Branchidae feared the wrath of their fellow citizens and persuaded the Persians to resettle them in some remote corner of the empire, where they hoped to live quietly and undetected.

After Alexander’s arrival at the siege of Miletus, the water flowed again. Later the cult statue was recovered at Ecbatana and sent back to Didyma. The oracle was back in business. Now that the Branchidae had been found, what should be done with them? Alexander consulted Milesians in the army. They did not give a clear answer, so the king said he would decide the matter.

It is uncertain whether the allegations against the Branchidae were true or false, but it was possible that with the reopening of the oracle they might put in a claim to resume control. That may have been a factor in the king’s mind: the ruling democracy would not stand for a return of the Branchidae. In any event, the Macedonian phalanx was ordered to surround the town, and at a given signal the city was sacked and every male inhabitant was killed. Curtius writes:

Neither community of language nor the olive-branches and entreaties of the suppliants could curb the savagery. Finally the Macedonians dug down to the foundations of the walls in order to demolish them and leave not a single trace of the city.

If ever there was a case of visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation, this was it. Public opinion was shocked. Here was one more piece of evidence that Alexander had rejected reconciliation and was acquiring a reputation as a despot.

—

AFTER THE ARREST OF Bessus in the late summer of 329, Alexander set off across Sogdiana to the river Jaxartes (now the Syr Darya), the satrapy’s northwestern boundary. On his way he visited the capital, Maracanda (today’s Samarkand). His intention was to calm the people’s angry mood and impose his control over the entire province. He brought his cavalry back to strength with local horses, having lost a good number during the crossing of the Hindu Kush and the comings and goings to and from the Oxus.

On the way, a party of Macedonians went on a foraging expedition and was set upon by a horde of Sogdians (perhaps as many as twenty thousand or thirty thousand, we are told). Many Macedonians were killed or taken prisoner, after which the attackers withdrew to a rocky crag. The king led several assaults, but was driven back by showers of arrows. He himself took an arrow through his leg which broke part of his fibula and was hard to dislodge. We hear nothing more of this wound, so presumably it healed quickly. Eventually the Macedonians captured the position, cutting down some of the enemy while others threw themselves off cliffs to their death.

Alexander was a fast learner and had mastered the principles of military action against irregular forces. He established a series of seven strongpoints to maintain his control of territory gained and prevent armed groups from moving about wherever and whenever they wished. These included existing townships, such as Cyropolis, founded by Cyrus the Great in 544 B.C., and completely new settlements, among which was Alexandria Eschate, or Furthermost, on the southern bank of the Jaxartes. With a circumference of five and a half miles, it was a substantial settlement. Its walls were built in three weeks. Once the work was complete the king made his usual sacrifices to the gods and staged athletic and equestrian competitions. This new Alexandria was to guard against incursions by nomads from beyond the Jaxartes; it was peopled with Greek mercenaries, some local inhabitants for cheap labor in the fields, and Macedonians who were no longer fit for service.

The king sought the help of Bessus’s onetime supporter Spitamenes and his friends. He invited them to a conference at Bactra but, alarmed by his severity, they stayed away. Then, to his astonishment, they launched an insurrection across Sogdiana and Bactria. Hostile tribes overwhelmed the recently established strongpoints, and Spitamenes placed Maracanda’s citadel and its Macedonian garrison under siege.

At first sight, this development fell from a blue sky. Up until then the Sogdians and Bactrians had been quiet. They had no particular objection to Alexander’s replacement of Darius, nor had they supported Bessus; as for the Macedonian army, it was a temporary inconvenience and they believed it would soon go away. They did not feel threatened for themselves and their way of life. However, the establishment of Alexandria Eschate was a serious inroad into local liberty, signaling Alexander’s intention to remain as a permanent presence. That could not be allowed, and so the provinces rose up in arms.

Alexander sent a modest relief force of sixty Companion cavalry, eight hundred mercenary cavalry, and fifteen hundred mercenary infantry to raise the siege of Maracanda. Then he divided his army in two groups. Craterus, who was filling the space left by Parmenion, laid siege to Cyropolis, while the king reduced the other forts at a rapidfire pace in two days. Their mud-brick walls were easy prey for his artillery. Alexander then rejoined Craterus and brought up siege engines to demolish the city wall. He noticed a dried riverbed beneath the wall. It left just enough room for men to crawl inside.

This was an opportunity too good to miss. An elite assault team was assembled, led (of course) by Alexander, who was not going to leave the thrill and the glory of an adventure to somebody else. The team squeezed into Cyropolis without difficulty. The defenders realized that all was lost, but some of them counterattacked the Macedonians.

Craterus was hit by an arrow and Alexander suffered a heavy blow to the head and neck. Everything went dark and he collapsed. As he lay senseless, the army thought he was dead and men wept openly for him. He regained consciousness, concussed, and with his voice almost inaudible. Typically, he insisted on returning to duty before his wound was healed. The city fell. Approximately eight thousand tribesmen lost their lives.

No wonder that the king was in an unforgiving mood. He put to death all adult males and sold into slavery the women and children of Cyropolis and the other garrison towns that had been recaptured. The conventions of war permitted besiegers who encountered resistance to act in this way, but this did not reduce the rising unpopularity of the Macedonians in Sogdiana.

—

ALEXANDER LIKED TO TAKE things in their proper order. Alexandria Eschate was attracting hostile attention from Scythian nomads who lived in the grassy steppes north of the Jaxartes. They were formidable horsemen and archers, whose technique was to gallop up to the enemy at speed, let loose a shower of arrows, and then turn tail. A large number had gathered and shouted insults over the water. The threat they posed needed to be dealt with before Alexander went to help dowse the flames in the south.

Somehow Alexander had to transport his army safely across the Jaxartes. The river was narrow near Alexandria Eschate, and the Macedonians would be vulnerable to the worst that archery could do while they crossed to the Scythian bank. Once they had reached it, they would have to face the mounted archers, who would surround them like a swarm of hornets.

The king was not deterred. Using the same method as at the Oxus, the Macedonians took only three days to prepare twelve thousand leather floats and rafts capable of carrying horses and catapults. The operation promised to be a risky one; when the king sacrificed for a successful crossing, his resident seer, Aristander, reported that the omens were unfavorable and prophesied danger to his own person.

Setting aside his piety for once, Alexander declined to cancel the attack. He said: “I would rather face the greatest possible peril than, as conqueror of virtually the whole of Asia, have the Scythians make a laughingstock of me.”

An artillery barrage opened the action. The Scythians were amazed at the distance covered by the salvos and withdrew from range. This gave the Macedonians the opportunity they needed to negotiate the river, with the king out in front. The archers and slingers formed the first wave and joined the catapults to keep the enemy at bay.

Once the army had made it safely to the far bank, the Macedonians had to find a way of bringing the ever circling enemy horsemen to battle. The king had a plan. He ordered forward a weak cavalry contingent. The enemy horse took the bait and started riding around the Macedonian horsemen in their usual way. Not far behind, a screen of lightly armed foot soldiers, archers, and Agrianians advanced in a crescent formation. The Scythians went on galloping through the space between cavalry and infantry.

Then, in a surprise move, three regiments of Companion cavalry and mounted javelin men charged through the infantry screen and attacked the enemy horse from the wings. Many of the Scythians now found themselves surrounded on all sides and broke down into a disorderly, jostling crowd. About a thousand were killed. Although the Scythian army as a whole had not been defeated, it withdrew from the field, mightily impressed by this display of Macedonian power.

Alexander had hoped to lead a pursuit, but soon called it off. He had drunk some foul water and was incapacitated by a violent attack of diarrhea. Also his recent wound was still unhealed and painful. He was carried back to the camp in a critical state. Aristander notched up another accurate prediction.

The king’s intention was never to annex the territory of the Scythian nomads. He simply wanted to demonstrate that it was unwise to provoke the Macedonians, who knew how to foil the nomads’ hit-and-run tactics. His point was quickly taken, for Scythian envoys soon arrived, full of apologies. The recent incident had not been officially approved, they claimed, and the mistake would not be repeated. Alexander saw no advantage in rejecting this explanation and both sides agreed to forget a regrettable misunderstanding.

The campaign confirmed that, for all his other difficulties, the king was still at the top of his game. As before he had inspected the enemy with an open, inquisitive eye and confronted a novel problem with a novel solution. The military historian J.F.C. Fuller writes astutely that Alexander

grasped the conditions which had hitherto rendered the Scythians invincible, and because he so shrewdly penetrated them, he compelled them to do the very thing they did not want to do—enter a circle of trained, disciplined, and better-armed soldiers. They set out to circle round the Macedonians, then suddenly their imagined circumference became the center of a hostile ring.

—

TERRIBLE DISPATCHES ARRIVED FROM Maracanda. The Macedonian relief force had been wiped out, almost to a man. It had been very poorly led by Pharnuches, a Lycian interpreter who was probably the father of the king’s lovely Bagoas. Pharnuches had little experience of military command, but was expert in the languages of Bactria and Sogdiana. It would appear that the king appointed him anticipating negotiation with Spitamenes rather than fighting. Pharnuches knew he was out of his depth and tried to resign, but his subordinate officers, fearful of going against the king’s wishes, all refused the command.

As the Macedonians approached the city, Spitamenes immediately abandoned his siege of the citadel and fled into the desert. The Macedonians wanted to expel the nomads permanently from the region and chased after them. Spitamenes added some six hundred Scythian cavalry to his force and halted on level ground, where he awaited his pursuers. He kept his horsemen circling in and out, firing their arrows into the infantry column. The Macedonian horse attempted countercharges, but the mounts were weakened from too much travel and too little fodder. The enemy was able to keep clear of them and came back hard when the Macedonians stood their ground or retreated.

Tormented by the arrows, Pharnuches formed his troops into a square and withdrew into a wood beside a river, where he hoped for some relief from the incessant cascade of missiles. The cavalry commander decided to fend for himself and tried to cross the river without orders or even consultation. He was followed by the panic-stricken infantry. The Scythians cannot have believed their luck. They shot at the enemy from the banks and went down into the water itself to take easier aim. The Macedonians took refuge on a small island in the river, but their situation was hopeless. The Scythians surrounded them and shot them down. A few were taken prisoner, but they too were put to death. No more than three hundred foot soldiers and forty cavalrymen survived.

This was the greatest disaster to have befallen Alexander in his entire career; indeed, it was the first recorded defeat of Macedonians since the year 353. It was more than a debacle, it was a massacre. As soon as he learned what had happened, the king rapidly concluded a deal with the Scythians and marched at top speed to Maracanda, where the victorious Spitamenes had returned and resumed the siege. Alexander covered 172 miles in three days, arriving at the city just before dawn on the fourth.

Once again, the ultra-mobile Spitamenes disappeared into the desert and lurked in small oases. If he was out of reach, the populace of Sogdiana was not. Alexander visited the scene of the catastrophe and buried the rotted corpses still lying on the ground. He determined on bloody reprisals. He systematically laid waste to the satrapy’s most fertile land along the course of the gold-bearing river Polytimetus (a Greek word meaning Very Precious; Zarafshan today), overcame enemy strongholds, and butchered the inhabitants. Constant setbacks seemed to be brutalizing the king’s nature.

There was nothing more he could do, so he spent the winter in Bactria’s capital. Nearchus, a boyhood friend of Alexander, and Asander, probably Parmenion’s brother and (remarkably) still loyal to the king, arrived with a substantial and welcome reinforcement of Greek mercenaries, and the satrapy of Syria presented newly trained native soldiers—in total, 19,400 infantry and 2,600 cavalry. To build up his forces he also recruited Bactrians and Sogdians locally.

A tribal chieftain from the lower Oxus paid a visit to the Macedonian court. In a friendly conversation, Alexander revealed his advance thinking. Once he had completed the conquest of the Persian empire, he intended a campaign in India. He went on to make his first recorded allusion to a plan for world dominion. According to Arrian, he replied to the chieftain’s offer of military support that

with India subdued he would then be in possession of the whole of Asia; with Asia in his control he would return to Greece and launch from there a full-scale naval and land campaign against the Black Sea regions through the Hellespont and the Propontis; and he asked Pharasmanes to save his present offers for redemption when that time came.

With the beginning of spring 328, the ice floes on the Oxus began to melt and Alexander crossed the river and returned to Sogdiana. Fruitless years were passing by and he resolved once and for all to put an end to the insurgency. What he had learned about asymmetric warfare he intended to practice. The king became a guerrilla.

As soon as he had entered Sogdiana, he broke down his army into five independent divisions, one of which he commanded; the remainder were placed under the general supervision of the (by now) indispensable Craterus, whose task was to guard Bactria. Alexander divided his own share of the army into five detachments. Keeping one for himself, he gave the command of the others to Hephaestion, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, and Coenus in association with Artabazus, who was doubtless included to assist with negotiations. Arrian writes that the divisions all

pursued their own line of invasion as and where opportunity presented itself, sometimes using force to annihilate groups concentrated in the strongholds, sometimes winning them over in voluntary surrender. Between them these divisions covered most of Sogdiana, and when his entire armament had reconvened at Maracanda Alexander sent out Hephaestion with a commission to repopulate the garrison towns already founded in Sogdiana.

This was a project of outright colonization that was achieved through ruthless military means. Gulliver-like, the satrapy was now pinned down by a network of strongholds and garrison towns and there was less and less free space in which Spitamenes and his fighters could hide or exploit as a base for his raids.

However, the rebel leader was still at large, bloody but unbowed. A frustrated Alexander spent the heat of the summer in the Sogdian capital. Here he accepted the resignation of Artabazus as satrap of Bactria on the grounds of age (he was in his early sixties). We know nothing of the rest of his eventful life. We may assume that his daughter, Barsine, was disappointed by the arrival of Bagoas and later by Alexander’s marriage. However, members of his family remained high in favor. Two of his sons held commands in the army, and another daughter married the king’s close associate Ptolemy. We may guess at a happy ending.

—

IN THE INTERVALS OF relaxation between campaigning, the king and his Companions loved nothing better than hunting. If they could not fight human beings, they would take on animals. In Greece the sport was largely utilitarian—for the pot and the table. Men with spears or bows and arrows hunted game such as hares and, more dangerously, wild boars.

In the Persian empire the Great King and his nobles built walled game parks or estates, inside which they pursued large game—deer, for example, and according to ancient sources the lion, king of beasts. Sometimes they were on horseback, sometimes on foot. Hounds and nets were used.

A finely carved marble sarcophagus dating from the end of the fourth century B.C. shows along one of its sides the king on a rearing horse as he spears a Persian at the Battle of Issus. On the opposite side he is seen hunting down a lion, as if the two encounters were of equal value.

Bravery at a hunt was a kingly virtue; Alexander was always out in front endangering his life. He strongly objected to other huntsmen getting in his way. Curtius describes a hunt on foot in Sogdiana when the king

issued orders for the animals to be beaten from their coverts throughout its length. Among these animals was a lion of unusual size which came charging forward to pounce on the king himself. Lysimachus [a somatophylax, or bodyguard] happened to be standing next to Alexander, and had started to aim his hunting spear at the beast when the king pushed him aside, told him to get out of the way, and added that he was as capable as Lysimachus of killing a lion single-handed.

This was an unkind reminder of a hunt some time before in Syria, when Lysimachus had killed a lion of extraordinary size on his own. However, his left shoulder had been lacerated right down to the bone and he had come within an inch of losing his life. Alexander backed up his taunt with action, for he went on to dispatch the animal with a single stroke—and without injury to himself.

Despite this victory, the army was displeased to see the king taking unnecessary risks away from the battlefield. A general Macedonian assembly decreed that in future he should not hunt on foot or unaccompanied by a select group of officers or Companions—a rare example of anyone telling Alexander what to do.

—

AFTER ITS LONG JOURNEY from the Mediterranean, a consignment of Greek fruit was delivered to the king at Maracanda. He was delighted by the fruit’s beauty and freshness and decided to share it with the man he had just appointed to replace Artabazus in Bactria.

This was Cleitus, a grizzled warrior and a Macedonian of the old school. He spoke his mind as if doing so were a civic duty. Brave and loyal, he had thrived under Philip, and in the thick of the fray at the Granicus he had saved Alexander’s life, lopping off the arm of a Persian nobleman who was on the point of striking Alexander with his sword. He liked to call the king by his given name rather than his title and he thoroughly disapproved of the policy to conciliate Persians. He was a conservative egalitarian, out of tune with the times, bitter as only a betrayed loyalist can be.

The new satrap of Bactria was ordered to prepare for a march on the following day. This, together with the opportune arrival of the fruit, was a good enough excuse for one of the king’s early-starting banquets the previous afternoon.

Wine flowed and Alexander, a little tipsy, began to boast at length about his achievements, to the irritation of many guests. It was he, not King Philip, who had won the Battle of Chaeronea. Flatterers expressed their considered opinion that Philip had done nothing remarkable or great. Someone began to sing satirical verses about the Macedonian commanders who had been defeated by Spitamenes. Older members of the party took offense and booed. But Alexander and those sitting near him were obviously amused and asked the singer to carry on.

For true Macedonians, a party was not a party unless everyone got drunk as quickly as possible. The rules of polite behavior were suspended. This could be dangerous and few will have forgotten the disastrous banquet when Philip tried to kill Alexander in an alcohol-fueled rage.

Cleitus, who by now was not altogether sober, shouted that it was wrong for Macedonians to be insulted in front of barbarians and enemies, even if they had had some bad luck. Alexander retorted that by disguising cowardice as bad luck, Cleitus was pleading his own case. Cleitus jumped up and bellowed back sarcastically: “Yes, of course, it was my cowardice that saved your life at the Granicus.” He went on to criticize the king for disowning his father Philip and claiming to be the son of Ammon.

“You scum,” the king cried out. “Do you imagine you can go on saying things like this, stirring up trouble among the Macedonians—and not pay for it.”

“But we do pay for it,” replied Cleitus and blurted out his resentment against all the Persians at court. “We have to beg Persians for an audience with our own king.”

Alexander’s friends jumped up, while more responsible guests tried to calm both sides down. Now violently drunk, Cleitus refused to take back a single word and challenged the king to say in public whatever was on his mind, or else not invite to his table freeborn men who said whatever was on theirs. Otherwise Alexander ought to go and live among barbarians and slaves who were willing to throw themselves flat on the ground in front of his white tunic and belt, the insignia of a Persian monarch.

It looked as if the king would be able to manage his temper, but unhappily Cleitus had not finished. Some slurred praise of Parmenion and Attalus, both of them victims of the king, was the last straw.

At this point Alexander lost control of himself. He hurled one of the apples lying on his table at his tormentor and then looked round for his dagger. One of his personal guards had already taken the precaution of moving it out of harm’s way. Companions crowded round and begged him to be quiet.

He leaped to his feet and screamed in Macedonian for the corps of guards, the signal for an extreme emergency, and ordered his trumpeter to sound the alarm. When the man courageously refused to obey he struck him with his fist. Afterward the trumpeter was warmly complimented for his conduct, for it was mainly due to him that the army was not thrown into an uproar.

Cleitus refused to shut up, but eventually his friends succeeded in pushing him out of the banqueting room and beyond the wall and ditch of the citadel where these events were unfolding. However, a little later he came back in by another door and quoted in a loud, insolent voice a line from Euripides: “There is a bad custom which now obtains in Hellas.”

Euripides was the prolific Athenian author of more than ninety tragedies, of which nineteen have survived to the present day. He was very popular and many in the Greek world learned passages from his works by heart. Among the library of books Alexander took with him to Asia, Euripides held an honored place.

The sentence that Cleitus cited comes from the Andromache, a drama that addresses the demoralization and dehumanization of war. It does not seem at first sight to be especially offensive, but in truth it delivered a wounding blow. Cleitus did not quote the lines that followed, but the king and many others at the feast will have known them very well. The passage continued:

When an army wins a victory over the enemy,

No one gives credit to the men who sweat and fight;

The general reaps the glory. Yet he, after all,

Wields only one sword.

This was exactly Cleitus’s argument: the army had dwindled into a one-man band.

Guests, embarrassed or alarmed or both, began to make their excuses and leave. Alexander grabbed a lance from one of the duty guards and tried but failed to wound Cleitus. Leonnatus wrenched the lance from his hand, while Ptolemy and Perdiccas held him by the waist. Alexander may have feared he was the victim of an assassination plot. In any case, he now broke free. He seized another spear, stood at the exit door leading to the vestibule, and watched those queuing to depart. Cleitus was last. The king challenged him and Cleitus answered: “Here I am, here is your Cleitus.” As he spoke, Alexander plunged the spear into his side, saying (so we are told): “Now go and join Philip, Parmenion and Attalus!”

The vestibule was drenched in blood. Shocked and looking dazed, guards and Companions kept their distance from the king. He realized that he had done something terrible. His mood switched instantly to suicidal misery. He pulled the spear from the body and turned it on himself. Guards rushed at him and pulled away the weapon. They picked him up and carried him to his bed. He broke down in tears and wept noisily all night long, tearing at his cheeks with his nails as if he were a mourner at a funeral. He looked at his friends’ grim faces and wondered whether they would ever speak to him again.

The inconsolable king had the corpse brought to his tent, but after a time his friends arranged for its removal. He grieved not only for the dead man, but also for Lanice, Cleitus’s sister: she had been Alexander’s nanny when he was an infant. She had already lost two of her three sons at the siege of Miletus and now, thanks to him, her brother was gone too. Alexander shut himself away for three days and refused to eat or drink. He also “neglected all other bodily needs.” Gradually the people around him came to suspect that he really was set on dying and begged him to take nourishment. Eventually he agreed to do so, and the crisis eased.

Callisthenes, the expedition’s chief philosopher, historian, and public relations officer, paid the king a visit, but to little effect, for he adopted a gentle bedside manner and failed to raise the subject of Cleitus’s murder because he wanted to spare Alexander’s feelings. Practical advice was required, not soft words. However, another philosopher friend did better. This was Anaxarchus, whose blunt manner hid a flattering heart. He criticized the king for “lying on the floor weeping like a slave, terrified of the law and of what men will say of him. And yet all the time it should be he who represents the law and sets up the criterion of justice.” In other words, by virtue of his kingship, Alexander was unable to break the law. He was clear of guilt. This was a convenient and comforting doctrine indeed, which Alexander did not forget. It would have its uses in later times.

To add belt to braces, the Macedonian general assembly, distraught at the prospect of losing its leader in a remote and friendless part of the world, discussed the killing and formally declared that Cleitus’s death was justified.

—

WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE of this unedifying episode? First of all, beneath the Hellenic high-cultural veneer, Alexander showed himself to be a typical Macedonian monarch in that he ran an alcoholic court. Its members played and drank hard. According to a contemporary historian, Ephippus the Olynthian, who joined the Asian expedition, they “had no notion of moderation in drinking, but started off at once with enormous drafts before eating, so as to be drunk before the first course was off the table, and to be unable to enjoy the rest of the banquet.”

Alexander was a citizen-king, who by convention was obliged to tolerate the appearance of equality with the plain-speaking noblemen who served under him. He was expected to endure gracefully the odd hot-tempered remark when they were in their cups. It was a pity he had not done so on this occasion. The consequence of the death of Cleitus, following on as it did from the Philotas “conspiracy,” was that respect among his subordinates began to be replaced by fear.

More significantly, it underscored the fierce opposition among some of the king’s commanders not only to his slow transformation into an honorary Persian, but also to his increasingly autocratic manner. According to Arrian, he became quicker to anger; the obsequiousness in which he was now enveloped cost him the “old, easy relationship” with his Macedonians.

The disastrous evening at Maracanda brought out into the open three broadly defined groups: friends of the king (in particular, Asians of various national or ethnic types, and Greek mercenaries); Macedonians; and experienced soldiers of no fixed political views.

These divisions were replicated in his inner circle. Hephaestion supported the king’s strategic approach to running the empire, while Craterus, by far the ablest of his commanders, was a Macedonian conservative.

As for ordinary soldiers, there is little firm information. We have seen that the king paid close attention to their interests. He gave them their regular holidays and entertainments, encouraged marriage and family life, kept casualties to a minimum, and set a personal example of endurance and valor. They followed willingly where he led, although the time might come when they lost patience. So long as the connection between him and his men remained secure, he could safely ignore his disputatious officers.

The king drew an important conclusion from the Cleitus episode. It did not persuade him to return to the old Macedonian ways, as one might have expected. Rather, by temporarily abdicating in a hysterical sulk as he had done on more than one occasion, he saw he could bully, even blackmail, those around him into accepting whatever he did, even committing murder. Despite the long history of assassinations in the Macedonian royal family, he did not listen to his critics. Although he still behaved, more or less, as a first among equals during drinking sessions, he continued to transform himself for the world at large into a Great King, an imperial despot.

—

MOST ANCIENT HISTORIANS CLAIM that from around this time Alexander began to drink more heavily than in the past. Had he practiced moderation, he would have “stopped short of killing his friends at dinner.” So opines Curtius, a strict moralist, who asserts that the king’s fine qualities were ruined by alcohol.

Alexander had some great natural gifts: a noble disposition…; resolution in the face of danger; speed in undertaking and completing projects; integrity in dealing with those who surrendered and mercy toward prisoners; restraint even in those pleasures which are generally acceptable and widely indulged. But all these were marred by his inexcusable fondness for drink.

Plutarch takes a different view. He acknowledges that the king could sometimes behave like an offensive and arrogant drunk, but claims that as a rule he was a moderate drinker.

The impression that he was a heavy drinker arose because when he had nothing else to do, he liked to linger over each cup, but in fact he was usually talking rather than drinking: he enjoyed holding long conversations, but only when he had plenty of leisure. Whenever there was urgent business to attend to, neither wine, nor sleep, nor sport, nor sex, nor spectacle could ever distract his attention.

It is impossible to come to a firm judgment on so personal a matter as Alexander’s alcohol consumption and the pressures or stresses that may or may not underpinned it. Even at the time observers had different views on the subject, but we can be sure that Alexander was not an alcoholic. For most of the time he was too busy and faced too many demands to sit around quaffing unmixed wine (a Macedonian custom in an age when wine was weakened with water). Mostly he was on campaign and needed, often round the clock, all the physical energy and mental acuity he could summon.

During intervals of rest and relaxation, Alexander may very well have often drunk in moderation as Plutarch says. However, evidence such as the Cleitus affair shows that on vacation he could be a binge-drinker. He was still in his twenties and, like many young adults throughout the ages, on a day off he liked to drink to get drunk.

—

AFTER TWO FRUSTRATING YEARS of hard fighting in cruel terrain, it was time to put an end to Spitamenes. The irrepressible rebel, with the assistance of the Massagetae, a Scythian nomadic tribe, overran a Bactrian outpost, killed its defenders, and moved on Bactra. The tiny garrison bravely counterattacked, with some success. However, it was caught in an ambush on the way home and suffered very heavy casualties. Craterus and his contingent were nearby; they arrived quickly on the scene and drove off the enemy. The network of fortresses was proving its worth.

The five sections of the army made a planned rendezvous at Maracanda. Alexander took over Cleitus’s command of the Companion cavalry, and most of the army moved into winter quarters at the Sogdian settlement of Nautaca. Coenus was left in command of a substantial force at Maracanda with instructions to keep watch over the region and do his best to destroy the insurgents.

With his freedom of maneuver almost completely restricted, Spitamenes, who had recruited a large troop of Scythian horse, decided to launch an attack on Coenus. A fierce battle ensued, resulting in a decisive Macedonian victory. Spitamenes was deserted by most of his nomadic allies. Some Bactrians and Sogdians stayed with him, but lost heart when they heard that Alexander was on the move in their direction. So they beheaded Spitamenes.

According to Curtius, the story had a domestic twist. It was Spitamenes’ wife who did the deed while he was in a deep sleep. Still wearing blood-drenched clothes, the widow brought the head to the Macedonian camp. So ended the most formidable and determined of all Alexander’s opponents.

The insurgency was drawing to its close. With the arrival of spring 327, the king set off to mop up continuing resistance in the mountains. After surviving a fearful electrical storm, he came across the enemy in jaunty occupation of a natural fortress.

—

“YOU’LL NEED SOLDIERS WITH WINGS if you want to take this place!” shouted the defender peering down at the Macedonians from the lofty outcrop.

Alexander was inclined to agree. He had carefully scrutinized the Sogdian Rock, as it was called, and it seemed impregnable. The cliffs on every side were sheer, and a solitary path led up to the top. The Rock was a refuge for a large number of rebellious Sogdians who wanted to keep out of Alexander’s way. Although winter was over, a heavy fall of snow impeded the approaches. The Sogdians had laid in copious provisions. They could melt the snow if water ran out.

However, the sneering response to his request for a parley irritated the king. He changed his mind. He would find a way. He announced a prize of twelve talents for the first man to scale the Sogdian Rock, an almost incredible sum for a private soldier, with lesser but still generous prizes for runners-up. Three hundred volunteers were recruited, all of them men who had experience of rock climbing. They gathered a supply of small metal tent pegs to serve as pitons, and stout linen ropes so that they could fasten themselves together. To avoid discovery, the ascent took place at night. It was an almost suicidal mission and was the only special operation during Alexander’s career which he did not lead in person. Arrian picks up the story:

Fixing their pegs where they could, sometimes into solid ground wherever it showed through, sometimes into the snow where it seemed least likely to crumble, they hauled themselves up the rock by various routes. About thirty of them fell to their death in the climb, and their bodies, lost in the snow where they happened to fall, could not be found for burial. The rest completed the ascent toward dawn [and] established possession of the summit of the Rock.

The ascent was a remarkable achievement. It is interesting to observe that climbing techniques and equipment have not changed in their essentials over the centuries.

A peak loomed above a large cave where the Sogdians had their headquarters. Once on the summit, the climbers waved pieces of white cloth to alert the king to their presence. He had a herald shout to the Sogdians that they should surrender without further ado, for Alexander had found the men with wings.

The defenders turned round and looked up. They saw with amazement the young men on the crag above. A trumpet sounded in the Macedonian camp, loud shouting was heard, and an assault seemed imminent. The Sogdians panicked and surrendered on condition that their lives be spared. In fact, their situation was not hopeless at all; the mountaineers were heavily outnumbered and Alexander had found no way up the Rock for his army.

The operation displayed to advantage one of the king’s special qualities as a military commander: he understood that psychological insight into the mind of the enemy could be as important to victory as conventional military strength.

—

AS THE FIGHTING IN Sogdia and Bactria drew to a close, Alexander could announce a victory, but it contained the seeds of defeat. He had come to see that his angry hard-line policy of pacification by force had failed. At the first opportunity the nomadic tribes would rise again. Before leaving the region for India, he gave Amyntas, its new satrap (after Artabazus), a substantial garrison force of ten thousand infantry and thirty-five hundred cavalry. That was necessary but not sufficient. Macedonian rule would never be accepted unless brutality was replaced with the respect and reconciliation that he had successfully applied to his new Persian subjects.

The wife and daughters of a local baron called Oxyartes were among the refugees on the Sogdian Rock. One of his daughters was an attractive sixteen-year-old—of marriageable age by contemporary standards—called Rhoxane. She caught Alexander’s eye and, although Arrian insists that he did not tamper with her, it is telling that the king compared the two of them to Achilles and Briseis in the Iliad. Briseis was a beautiful captive who was given to the warrior as a slave for his sexual use.

Oxyartes was alarmed to learn that members of his family were in Macedonian hands, but once he heard of the king’s interest in Rhoxane he arranged to meet him and was well received. To further the affair, he staged, writes Curtius primly, “a banquet of typically barbaric extravagance” at which his daughter made a starring appearance. Alexander told Rhoxane’s father that he was willing to formalize their relationship. He ordered a loaf of bread to be served, in accordance with Macedonian tradition, which he cut in two with a sword for himself and Oxyartes to taste. The marriage agreement was a decision taken by men; Rhoxane had nothing to do with it.

The army was displeased. Why did the king not take a Macedonian wife, as his predecessors had done? soldiers asked. This was an unfair question—Olympias, after all, was a foreigner, from Epirus. What the complainants really disliked was a barbarian wife from a conquered people. Probably in an attempt to calm these racist objections, the king insisted that this was a love match.

It was, of course, a political union. The eastern end of the Persian empire had long been quasi-autonomous, only half tamed. Painful experience over the last couple of years had taught Alexander that he could not alter this state of affairs, at least in the short run. His choice of Rhoxane was an implicit apology: it was a signal that he would no longer be a destructive foreign devil, but a respectful monarch who would leave the ruling elites in place and not interfere in the details of daily life.

Oxyartes helped the king deal with another, even larger mountain fortress. This was the Rock of Chorienes, some four thousand feet high and about seven miles in circumference. The Macedonians built a wooden bridge across a deep ravine on top of which an earth ramp was laid, thus enabling an assault on the stronghold. This risky plan was not put to the final test, for Oxyartes, now a traveling companion of the king, persuaded the Rock’s commander to surrender on honorable terms.

He did more than surrender. The Macedonians were in a poor way. During the siege they suffered badly from a heavy snowfall, and there had been a shortage of food (one of the few occasions when Alexander’s usually efficient logistics faltered). The commander offered to provision the army for two months and made an immediate distribution to each mess of grain, wine, and salted meat from his supplies on the Rock.

Craterus was sent to mop up two remaining rebel leaders and at last the great rebellion was over.

—

NOW, FINALLY, ALEXANDER COULD shake the dust of Bactria and Sogdiana from his feet. He readied himself for the expedition to India he had long dreamed of. The army he led would be very different from the expeditionary force of Macedonians and Greeks that had crossed the Hellespont a little more than five years previously. Now growing numbers of Asians were being recruited—among them, Lycians and Syrians and recently recruited cavalry from Bactria and Sogdiana.

He was still short of men. The pool of human capital in Macedonia was now more or less dry. As Alexander conquered wider and wider swaths of territory, the empire had to be guarded. Troops, often Greek mercenaries, were made over to satrapal armies and garrisons. Then there was “natural wastage”: men grew old and retired, were killed in battle, or suffered disabling wounds.

Sometime in 327, satraps from the recently conquered territories and the numerous garrison towns brought thirty thousand local boys to Alexander. They were all about the same age and on the verge of puberty. They were to be taught Greek writing and the use of Macedonian weapons and tactics. A large number of instructors were employed for the purpose. After three years, the students would be conscripted as full-time soldiers.

They were called the Epigoni: the Successors. They were to be personally loyal to Alexander. The direct link to Macedonia would be broken. Their title was a clear hint that the king intended to create a brand-new army, designed no longer to conquer but to protect the empire.