Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 13 A PASSAGE TO INDIA

It was all a great misunderstanding, the quarrel about proskynesis.

The word literally means “kissing toward” and designates an act of homage from a social inferior to his superior. However, there were two different ways in which the term could be applied—the Persian and the Greek. According to Herodotus,

When the Persians meet one another in the street, you can see whether those who meet are of equal status. For instead of a verbal greeting, they kiss each other on the mouth; but if one of them is inferior to the other, they kiss one another on the cheeks, and if one is of much less noble rank than the other, he falls down before him in profound reverence.

The Great King expected full prostration from his subjects unless they were relatives or close friends, in which case a slight bow and the blowing of a kiss would suffice. The point of the ritual was secular, not religious. There was no question of the monarch being regarded as divine.

For Greeks, though, proskynesis was far more than an elaborate method of asserting class distinction. It was an act of worship that was due to the gods alone. It was generally performed standing up with hands raised to the sky, more rarely kneeling on the ground. For a free human being to prostrate himself to another was a humiliation. For a mortal to accept proskynesis was hubris.

As matters stood Persians regularly did obeisance and Macedonians regularly laughed when they saw it. Alexander wanted to unify court practices and so ensure that Macedonians and Persians felt that they were on equal terms in his presence. He persuaded his inner circle to accept proskynesis as a universally applied greeting, for Macedonians and Persians alike, when meeting the king.

An experiment was arranged. At a banquet proskynesis would be introduced without fuss or announcement, after which it would become a routine part of court etiquette. Presumably this was not to be the full prostration, but a bow. Or so it was hoped. Alexander drank from a gold loving cup and passed it to one of his friends, who stood up to face the household shrine, did obeisance to the king, received a kiss, and resumed his place on his dining couch.

The Greek court philosopher and historian Callisthenes deeply disapproved not only of the practice but of the entire Persianizing policy. Like his mentor, Aristotle, he believed that the Great King’s subjects were in effect slaves whereas Hellenes, including Macedonians, were free men. When the cup came round, he drank from it, but, without doing obeisance, stepped up for a kiss. Alexander happened to be chatting with Hephaestion at the time and did not notice that the proskynesis had not been performed. However, one of the Companions told the king, who then refused to kiss him. Callisthenes replied: “Very well, I shall go back, the poorer by one kiss.”

The incident attracted attention. The philosopher was well liked by the younger soldiers and the king decided, much to his annoyance, that he would have to let the matter drop.

The objection to obeisance was in part based on a fundamental error. The Great King did not see himself as a god and prostration before him was politeness rather than adoration. The Greeks wrongly applied their cult definition of the term to the Persian social context.

However, in another sense they may have had a point. In the background of the debate lay a growing suspicion that Alexander was beginning to think he was a god. The experience at Siwah had had a profound effect on him. Perhaps he was literally, not just symbolically, the son of Zeus, although this would not remove his mortality. Alexander’s relationship to the god was why he was distancing himself from Philip.

The Greeks did not draw a line between the human and the divine. Great men were able to cross it and become isotheoi, equals of the gods or demigods. Heracles, whom Alexander was proud to count among his ancestors, became a demigod and was given the very rare accolade of immortality. The great Theban poet Pindar sets out the relation between the human and the divine in an ode celebrating the winner of the boys’ wrestling at the Nemean Games:

Single is the race, single

of men and gods;

from a single mother we both draw breath.

But a difference of power in everything

keeps us apart;

for the one is as Nothing, but the brazen sky

stays a fixed habitation forever.

Yet we can in greatness of mind

or of body be like the Immortals.

Alexander’s achievements were colossal in the eyes of his contemporaries and it would not be unreasonable for him to claim that they were at least the equals of Heracles’ labors. There were historical precedents for the establishment of cults of godlike human beings. The famous Spartan commander Lysander, who won the decisive sea battle at Aegospotami in the long war between Sparta and Athens, was awarded cult honors by Hellenic cities. He was probably the first living Greek to have altars erected in his name and sacrifices offered to him; the island of Samos changed the name of its national festival, which became the Lysandreia. Alexander’s father Philip seems also to have received honors bordering on those accorded to the divine.

Ancient authors suggest that Alexander came to believe himself to be a god like Dionysus or Apollo. It is more likely, though, that he had no personal belief in his divinity, but saw political advantage in the establishment of a ruler cult devoted to him. Curtius has him say in a speech that the father of the gods

held out to me the title of son; accepting it has not been disadvantageous to the operations in which we are engaged. I only wish the Indians would also believe me a god! For reputation determines military success, and often even a false belief has accomplished as much as the truth.

The words may be fictional, but the cynicism is supported by a recorded remark quoting the Iliad, which the king made when wounded by an arrow and in great pain: “What you see flowing, my friends, is blood, not ‘ichor, which flows in the veins of the holy gods.’ ” He hardly ever mentioned his godhead when in Greek or Macedonian company, but used it regularly to impress “barbarians.”

Plutarch sourly commented that it was clear that the king was “not at all vain or deluded, but rather used belief in his divinity to enslave others.”

In sum, Alexander may well have regarded himself as special, isotheos, and as having gods among his ancestors. His aching scars, however, reminded him that he was mortal.

—

THE ROYAL PAGES LIVED busy lives. They were the sons of Macedonian aristocrats and their presence at court was in part a guarantee of their fathers’ good behavior, but they also played an essential role in the general administration of Alexander’s daily routine.

Their duties were menial. They spent the night on watch outside the door of the royal bedchamber. They escorted in sexual partners by a private entrance out of sight of the official armed bodyguards. In the daytime they brought the king’s horses to him and helped him mount one of them. It was widely seen as a special honor that they were allowed to sit and eat with Alexander. They accompanied him in battle and at the hunt. They were also expected to show an interest in cultural matters.

Access to the king was strictly controlled and the pages had a front-row view of everything that went on. In effect, they were apprentices in government, in the arts of war and peace, and could expect promotion in due course to important jobs in the regular army.

One day in 327 an incident took place when the pages were out hunting with Alexander that set off a tragic chain of events. One of their number was Hermolaus, a student of philosophy and an admirer of Callisthenes. He foolishly speared a boar that the king had marked down for himself. This act of lèse-majesté received condign punishment: the boy was flogged in front of his fellows.

Smarting from the humiliation, Hermolaus complained to another page called Sostratus, who was passionately in love with him. After they had exchanged oaths of loyalty, Sostratus persuaded Hermolaus to join him in a plot to assassinate the king at night in his bed. They enlisted seven other pages to join them.

It was a feasible scheme, but there were obstacles. The conspirators were on duty on different nights. The plan was to alter the work rota so that on a given night they would all be on duty together and able to murder the king without opposition. However, two official bodyguards also slept in the room and would have to be killed too. It took a month before the rota could be fixed. That left plenty of time for a security leak.

The conspirators were in luck, for none of them wavered and morale was high. On the evening when the assassination was to be carried out, the king was holding a dinner party and the pages stood outside the door into the dining room, intending to lead him to bed when the meal was over. But the company drank more deeply than usual and played party games. Time ran on; the pages feared that Alexander and his guests would continue drinking until morning, when they were due to hand over to a new shift.

In fact, the party broke up shortly before dawn and it looked as if there would be just enough time for the attempt. At this moment a mentally deranged woman appeared on the scene. She was a regular visitant and seemed to have been religiously inspired. She claimed to foretell the future and the king, impressed by some of her predictions, allowed her to wander about at will.

She was unusually agitated and as the king took his leave she threw herself in his way, telling him to return to the party. “The gods always give good advice,” he remarked laughingly, and obeyed.

Alexander did not make up his mind to go to bed until about seven or eight in the morning. By then the hapless conspirators had lost their chance, but could not bring themselves to go away after being relieved. When the king finally emerged from the dining room they were still hanging around. He told them to go and rest since they had been on their feet all night. Ironically, he praised them for their commitment and arranged for them to receive a gratuity.

The assassination was rescheduled. While the boys waited for the next opportunity, one of them, a certain Epimenes, had a change of heart. Perhaps he was touched by the king’s kindness or, more probably, the events of the night persuaded him that the gods opposed the plot. Whatever the motive, he confided in his brother Eurylochus.

The specter of Philotas’s fate was still hanging before everyone’s eyes; Eurylochus knew better than to delay. He grabbed his brother and brought him at once to the royal quarters. There he found two Companions, Ptolemy and Leonnatus, who immediately opened the bedroom door, took in a lamp, and with some difficulty woke the king from a deep drunken sleep.

Once Alexander had regained consciousness, the two brothers gave a full account of the conspiracy. Alexander lost no time in pardoning Eurylochus and giving him fifty talents and the estate of a prominent Persian who had fallen from favor. The generosity of this reward seems excessive. It must be a measure of the king’s shock to discover that those who spent most of their time in his company wanted him dead.

The guilty pages were quickly rounded up. The king asked what he had done to merit this treatment. Hermolaus was unabashed. “You ask as if you didn’t know,” he answered. “We plotted to kill you because you have started to behave not as a king with his free-born subjects, but as a slave owner.”

Hermolaus was repudiated by his father. He and the other boys were tortured by their fellows and stoned to death, according to Macedonian practice.

—

THERE ARE NO DOUBTS about the Royal Pages affair. It was a serious plot and came within an inch of success. What is less than certain, though, is the motive that powered it. It confirmed the old adage that no man is a hero to his valet, but even if Alexander was a difficult employer there was more to the business than domestic backbiting: there was also a political dimension. The pages agreed with the king’s Macedonian critics. As ever, the trouble lay with the king’s policy of reconciliation with the enemy. Curtius has Alexander speak against Hermolaus, who claims that

I am foisting Persian habits on the Macedonians. That is true, for I see in many races things we should not be ashamed of copying. The only way this great empire can be satisfactorily governed is by our transmitting some things to the natives and learning others from them ourselves.

The king detected a figure standing in the shadows—namely Callisthenes, now fallen from grace. Unfortunately, it was difficult to link him directly to the plot. It seems clear that the boys did not implicate him in their confession. This is confirmed by Plutarch, who writes that

not one of Hermolaus’ accomplices, even in extremis, denounced Callisthenes. Indeed, Alexander himself, in the letters which he wrote at once to Craterus, Attalus and Alcetas, says that the youths had confessed under torture that the conspiracy was entirely their own idea and that nobody else knew about it.

However, it appears that Callisthenes cultivated young upper-class soldiers and shared with them his criticisms of the regime. He and Hermolaus were on friendly terms.

Callisthenes was his own worst enemy. He was tactless and saw no danger in antagonizing Alexander. Once he was invited to deliver a speech in which he eulogized the Macedonians. This he did to great applause, upon which the king said: “Show us the power of your eloquence by criticizing the Macedonians.” His vanity flattered, Callisthenes accepted the challenge. He did this so well that he infuriated all his Macedonian listeners, Alexander included. Aristotle, who was his uncle and had been his teacher, said that he possessed great eloquence, but lacked common sense.

Rumors and accusations about Callisthenes were rife. Like Socrates, he was believed to be a corrupter of the young. Although there was no conclusive evidence of his disloyalty to Alexander, there was enough to persuade the king. Furthermore, he suspected a Greek connection; sophisticated opinion among city-states such as Athens laughed at Alexander’s alleged aspirations to divinity and opposed his policy of reconciliation with barbarians.

Alexander was sure that Aristotle was behind much of this talk and was pouring poison into his nephew’s ears. In a letter to Antipater at Pella, he reported:

The youths were stoned to death by the Macedonians, but as for the sophist [i.e. Callisthenes], I shall punish him myself, and I shall not forget those who sent him to me, or the others who give shelter in their cities to those who plot against my life.

This sounds as if the philosopher, being Greek, was not brought before the Macedonian assembly, but was dealt with on the king’s authority. Various versions of his fate have survived. He was tortured, he was crucified, he died of obesity or of an infestation of lice. The likeliest explanation is that he was arrested and died some time later in captivity.

We cannot easily tell how widespread was the discontent that the affair of the Royal Pages exposed, but it was probably limited to Macedonian noblemen, amplified and distorted by their teenaged offspring. That said, it does not appear to have weakened their resolve in battle or in using their initiative when operating independently from the main army. Alexander was extremely popular with the Macedonian rank and file and, so far as we can see, with private soldiers of whatever ethnic origin. His attention to their working conditions, avoidance of casualties, and insistence on leading from the front, whatever the danger, bound them to him. The new “barbarian” troops were presumably unaffected by what one might call the Macedonian infection, as were the Greek mercenaries.

—

INDIA WAS A SMALL triangular peninsula with high mountains to the north. It was longer than its width and a suite of great rivers, including the Indus, ran south through it. Not far beyond was the end of land, the farthest reach of the world. Here flowed the vast waters of the river Ocean, which surrounded the island of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

This was what Alexander and his contemporaries believed. They knew very little of the subcontinent and the void was filled in with fantasy. Giant ants dug in the desert sands for gold. Indians copulated in the open, like cattle, and their semen was black. Cannibals killed their old people before they fell ill and began wasting away, so that their meat was not spoiled.

After arriving in India, Alexander drafted a proud letter to his mother in which he boasted that he had discovered the source of the Nile. He supposed that the Indus was a higher reach of the Nile, which ran through a long desert before reaching Egypt. As evidence, he mentioned that he had seen some crocodiles in the Indus. He was soon reliably informed that the Indus was a river in its own right, which flowed into the Ocean rather than the Mediterranean. By good luck he had not yet sent off his letter; he silently removed the passage about the Nile.

Clearing up the geography of India was one of the tasks that the king hoped the experts he had brought along with him to Asia would undertake. He wanted to know where everything was and how long it would take to get there.

Gods visited India. During his visit the semi-divine Heracles spent much of his time impregnating local women. Only one of his offspring was a daughter, born late in his life. Unable to find a suitable husband for her, he had sex with the girl himself when she was only seven, so that his line would continue. Some said that Dionysus spent his childhood in the Punjab. He conquered India, founded cities, and taught the inhabitants the art of farming—and also of perfumery. It was from here that he started his celebrated procession through Asia to Greece where he introduced his worship and the blessings of viticulture.

According to Herodotus, India was the most populous nation in the known world and was reputed to be rich in gold, often sieved from the rivers. It paid in annual tribute to the Great King 360 talents in gold dust. Curtius notes that

the extravagance of [the Indians’] royalty…transcends the vices of all other peoples. When the king deigns to be seen in public, his servants carry silver censers along and fill with incense the entire route along which he has decided to be carried. He lounges in a golden litter fringed with pearls, and he is dressed in linen clothes embroidered with gold and purple. The litter is attended by men-at-arms and by his bodyguard among whom, perched on branches, are birds which have been trained to sing in order to divert the king’s thoughts from serious matters. The palace has gilded pillars with a vine in gold relief running the whole length of each of them and silver representations of birds (the sight of which affords them greatest pleasure) at various points.

Darius I had taken the boundary of his empire to be the Indus, but it is unclear how far his writ ran in practice. The Great King sent a maritime expedition down the river, which made its way as far as the Red Sea. By Alexander’s day imperial control cannot have extended much farther than the Kabul Valley.

Although he seems not to have spelled out his thinking, the invasion of India was intended to achieve two objectives—one sentimental and the other practical. He had an overpowering desire, a pothos, to reach the river Ocean. With that achievement he would surpass Heracles and Dionysus. More basically, he longed to see the world’s edge because it was there.

A more immediately pressing task was to restore the empire’s authority in these remote marches. It is clear from the king’s actions that he intended the Indus to be its permanent frontier. Defending it would not be a problem in the south, for it ran alongside the great Thar Desert. To the north, though, various independent native kingdoms flourished. Alexander aimed to crush them militarily, but not to annex them. They were to function as obedient buffers between the empire and whatever land waited to be discovered beneath the rising sun. As the Macedonians approached India, they learned that there was much more of that land than they had originally expected.

—

BY THE EARLY SUMMER OF 327, Alexander was ready for the new campaign. India promised mystery and glamour. He had heard the stories of the immense wealth of its rulers, and of their warriors gleaming in gold and ivory. Unwilling to be outdone, at least in appearances, he silver-plated his soldiers’ shields and decorated their body armor with gold or silver. This may or may not have impressed the enemy, but it surely cheered up his men.

The army had ballooned; we are told that after the latest substantial reinforcements, which had joined him at Bactra, and the recruitment of many native fighters, it was 120,000 strong. This seems a rather high estimate and probably includes noncombatants in the baggage train. These were numerous, for the army was a mobile state, or at least city. Soldiers themselves probably numbered not more than sixty thousand. The king foresaw the need for more soldiers and gave orders for the recruitment of thirty thousand men from the provinces.

Northwestern India opened out before the conquerors. It was a patchwork of jostling riverine kingdoms, whose rulers were well aware of the imminent Macedonian threat. They could live with it and indeed work it to their advantage. They guessed that it was a violent form of state visit and would soon pass. A local dynast, Sisikottos (or Shashigupta) informed Alexander that Taxiles, the king of Taxila, whose realm lay between the Indus and Hydaspes (today’s Jhelum) Rivers, would be seeking Alexander’s friendship and his help against Porus, king of the Pauravas east of the Hydaspes.

A meeting was arranged; when Taxiles turned up he was in full battle array, with gaily decorated war elephants, and for a moment Alexander feared he was coming under attack. This was a dangerous misunderstanding, but was quickly cleared up and the two men got on very well. Taxiles, who was shortly to die and was succeeded by his equally accommodating son, insisted he was not spoiling for a fight. He said: “If I possess more than you, I am ready to be generous toward you, and if I have less, I shall not refuse any benefits you may offer.” The kings began presenting each other with more and more valuable gifts. Alexander, competitive to the last drop of blood, ended by giving Taxiles a thousand talents in coin, much to the annoyance of his circle. One of his marshals, Meleager, drank too much at dinner and remarked sarcastically to him: “At least in India you have found a man worth a thousand talents!”

At last the Macedonians were ready to set off. They recrossed the Hindu Kush and called in at the new garrison town of Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus, where Alexander summarily dismissed the incompetent governor. Then they marched down into the Indus Valley. Applying the lessons learned in Bactriana and Sogdiana, the king again divided his army into smaller sections as called for by the occasion. His tactic was to assault and capture an enemy fortress-town, inducing others in the neighborhood to surrender without a fight. He founded a new settlement to watch for insurgencies. At one siege an arrow pierced his breastplate and wounded him slightly in his shoulder.

Alexander’s first destination was the broad-flowing Indus. Fed by the snows and glaciers of the Himalayan, the Karakoram, and the Hindu Kush ranges of Tibet, it is the longest river in Asia. The king sent Hephaestion with a substantial force to prepare for a crossing by building a bridge across the river. The remainder of the army was put to laying a road and constructing a flotilla of boats and thirty-oared galleys, which were to sail down the river to the bridge and help convey personnel and impedimenta over the water.

—

THE KING RESUMED HIS POLICY of exemplary brutality. He had trouble with the Assacani, a tribe in the Lower Swat Valley. Their army, not being large enough to meet the invader, dispersed to various strongholds, one of which, Massaga, Alexander invested. The formidable Macedonian siege machines were brought into operation.

Someone on the wall shot an arrow at Alexander and wounded him in the leg. He reacted with typical, careless fortitude. Curtius writes that he

pulled out the barb, had his horse brought up and, without even bandaging the wound, rode around fulfilling his schedule no less energetically. But as his injured leg hung down and, after the blood dried, the wound stiffened, aggravating the pain, Alexander is reported to have said that, though he was reputed to be the son of Zeus, he could still feel the damage done by a wound.

He should have lain on his bed, but (as at Gaza) he refused to stay still and wait for a scab to form. Instead, he insisted on inspecting some engineering work.

The Assacenian king was killed by a stray catapult bolt and his mother, Cleophis, took charge. After a few days the defenders saw that their cause was hopeless. The terms of a surrender were negotiated and the queen dowager with her ladies-in-waiting presented herself to Alexander. She sought pardon and confirmation of her standing as ruler. The king gave her what she wanted. Apparently, she was good-looking and joined the lengthening list of women of a certain age who caught the king’s eye. A baby was born in due course, whom the queen named Alexander.

The Assaceni had hired seven thousand or so Indian mercenaries, who offered strong resistance, but came to an agreement with Alexander that their lives would be spared if they enrolled as regular members of his army. They came out of Massaga with their weapons and encamped with their families on a hill opposite the Macedonians. In fact, they planned to slip away under cover of darkness, for they had no wish to fight against other Indians.

The king got wind of this, ringed the hill with his forces, and slaughtered all the mercenaries. We can only suppose that the women and children were put up for sale. The incident shocked the civilized world and was another reminder of the destruction of Thebes. In extenuation, Alexander may have calculated that it was unwise to leave such a large body of hostile soldiers free to wreak havoc in his rear. The massacre was probably a case of cruel necessity rather than of gratuitous cruelty.

—

CRADLED IN A BEND of the Indus, a vertiginous massif rises to a height of five thousand feet above the river. It was called Aornos—Greek for “Birdless” because birds did not fly so high (it has been identified as today’s Pir-Sar, in Pakistan). The rock is crowned by a narrow plateau about one and a half miles long, containing good arable land and copious springs; it can be reached only by one difficult route. At the northern end, a much higher conical hill rises above the plateau and is separated by a deep ravine from another lofty crag, now called Uni-Sar.

Many tribesmen had congregated on the plateau to escape the attentions of the Macedonian army. A local legend had it that a god, probably Krishna, had once besieged Aornos, but had given up because of an earthquake. Once Alexander was informed that Krishna was an incarnation of Heracles, he developed a pothos to succeed where his great ancestor had failed. He was determined to capture the rock, whatever the cost.

But how to do it? Alexander marched to Aornos with a part of the army. A direct assault was out of the question. Advised by some locals, he sent Ptolemy with a lightly armed and agile advance guard to scale the neighboring Uni-Sar out of sight of the enemy. They scrambled up a rough and steep track, until they reached a spur facing Aornos. Here they could be seen and would have to defend themselves, so they made a camp with a surrounding stockade and ditch.

A prearranged beacon alerted the king that the advance guard had established itself and he led his troops up Uni-Sar in Ptolemy’s footsteps. However, tribesmen crossed over from the plateau and blocked his way. Alexander was forced to pull back. The tribesmen then about-turned and assaulted Ptolemy. They tried to pull down the stockade, but at sunset they gave up and withdrew.

During the night Alexander sent a trusted Indian deserter to carry a letter to Ptolemy, ordering him to go on the offensive the following day as soon as he saw the main force resume its advance. This would mean that the enemy would be sandwiched between two attacking forces. The tactic succeeded. The Macedonians drove off the enemy and reached a high top opposite the plateau.

However, a deep ravine separated the two rocks, Uni-Sar and Pir-Sar or Aornos. Alexander was undeterred; he ordered his men to construct a bridge or causeway, probably a wooden cribwork construction covered with earth. It must have looked like an early American railroad trestle bridge, in a modern scholar’s happy simile. After a few days the causeway began to stretch across the void. Slingers and artillery engines were at last able to fire at the defenders (a light catapult could hurl a metal bolt about 450 yards). A band of enterprising Macedonians scaled a small hill on the far edge of the ravine and level with the plateau. The causeway was not far off and would soon reach the hill.

The tribesmen were stunned by the Macedonians’ engineering skills and their giddying combination of determination and panache. They announced that they were ready to agree to terms of surrender; their intent was to waste the day in negotiation and then scatter to their homes during the night. The king was informed of this (we are not told how) and craftily removed troops guarding the exit route. After the tribesmen (literally) walked into his trap and began to leave the rock, he led seven hundred soldiers up the part of the plateau which they had vacated. At a signal, they attacked the retreating tribesmen and killed many of them.

According to Arrian’s laconic comment, “Alexander was now master of the rock which had defeated Heracles.” The king was modest enough, or perhaps sensible enough, not to boast about this. Nevertheless, Aornos was the most remarkable of his sieges and confounded the Indians. His reputation as a military leader was now such that many thought twice before opposing him.

—

THE ARMY WAS ACTING very oddly indeed.

Soldiers were roaming around lush mountain slopes in a drunken stupor and cavorting in clearings and shady thickets. Ivy (Dionysus’s signature plant) or something very like it was growing everywhere and the men made wreaths from it which they put round their heads.

Some lay stoned on beds of leaves. Others sang songs to Dionysus and behaved as if they were Bacchants, drugged worshippers of the divine patron of wine and ecstasy. Although they are not mentioned in the sources, women from the baggage train must also have played a part in these ecstatic orgies (they certainly did on similar occasions elsewhere).

It was as if the revelers were living out the god’s own behavior, as a hymn in his honor describes:

He spent all his time wandering through woody coombes, thickly wreathed with ivy and laurel. And the nymphs followed in his train with him for their leader; and the boundless forest was filled with their screams.

The explanation of these bizarre scenes can be traced back to an embassy to Alexander from the citizens of Nysa, a town near the Indus at the foot of a mountain rich in flora and fauna. The delegates asked him not to attack their city because it had been founded by Dionysus and was reputed to be his birthplace. The king, whose mother was, as we know, a follower of the god and had taken part in his rites, was mightily impressed and agreed that the Nysaeans should retain their independence.

Arrian and Curtius had little time for the Dionysus connection. They thought the envoys had exaggerated a local legend to please Alexander. Perhaps they had even made up the story for the occasion. One way or another, though, the king allowed himself to be taken in, because, as Arrian suggests, he wanted Nysa to have been founded by Dionysus: if that was true, it would mean that he himself had already traveled as far as Dionysus and would yet go beyond him. Alexander calculated that the Macedonians would not be so reluctant to follow him on grueling campaigns in still more distant places if the ambition to surpass Dionysus’s achievements spurred them on.

He announced a ten-day holiday and led his entire army up the mountain overlooking the town. There he sacrificed to Dionysus and held a lavish banquet. It must have been quite a party, for even senior Macedonians in his inner circle “became possessed by Dionysus, raised the cult cry of euoi, and fell into a Bacchic frenzy.”

If only the Indians had known that the invincible invaders were stuck in the middle of a forest and helplessly out of their minds, the expedition could have come to a premature end. At last, though, the king and his men pulled themselves together and came down from the mountain.

They marched onward to the Indus, where they found serviceable timber which was felled for shipbuilding. The resulting flotilla sailed down the river to the bridge Hephaestion had been ordered to construct (probably planking over tethered boats). Here the king sacrificed to all his usual gods (Dionysus and Heracles surely among them) and staged athletic and equestrian competitions beside the river. The omens were favorable and the Macedonians made their way across without incident. More sacrifices followed, in thanks this time rather than prayer.

—

THE SKIES WERE GRAY and lowered above the river Hydaspes, one of the five great tributaries of the Indus which pour south from the Himalayas. The air was thick with humidity. Anything made of metal— swords and armor—rusted without constant attention. Rain was falling, heavy, constant, everlasting rain. The date was July 326; the monsoon—unfamiliar to the Macedonians, and a nasty surprise—had started and would last till September.

Alexander intended to march eastward, which meant crossing the Hydaspes, so he arranged for his flotilla on the Indus to be dismantled, transported overland to the river, and reassembled. He suspected that the Indian king Porus would cause trouble. As mentioned earlier, Porus ruled Pauravas, a territory between the Hydaspes and the Acesines (today’s Chenab). Unaware that the Macedonian never took no for an answer, Porus alone of his fellow rajahs had refused Alexander’s invitation to a meeting. He had made up his mind to fight the invader and was awaiting reinforcement from Abisares, who ruled an area of hill country (Kashmir) near the Hydaspes.

The river was in full spate—swollen and muddy with a fast current—but Alexander hoped that he would be able to make use of a ford (near today’s railway station at Haranpur). When he arrived there, he found the entire Indian army lining the far, or eastern, bank. It was an alarming spectacle. And so, for that matter, was Porus himself. Curtius writes that he “rode an elephant which towered above the other beasts. His armor, with its gold and silver inlay, lent distinction to an unusually large physique. His physical strength was matched by his courage.”

The sources vary, but a rational guess posits thirty thousand infantry and a modest four thousand horse, together with three hundred chariots. Porus also had about 130 elephants, trained for warfare. Alexander was skeptical of their value, for they could do as much damage to friends as to foes; however, they would frighten his horses, on whom he would be depending once again for victory.

What was to be done? The king opted for deception. He split his army into smaller units, which he and his commanders led here and there in the countryside, laying waste to enemy territory and apparently searching for easier places to ford the river. Supplies of grain were brought in to give the impression that the Macedonians were digging in for a long stay, until the monsoon was over and the water level had dropped. As Arrian observes,

With his boats plying up and down, leather rafts being stuffed with straw, the whole bank visibly crowded with troops, cavalry here, infantry there, Alexander kept Porus unsettled and prevented him from selecting a single vantage-point in which to concentrate his defensive capability.

Then night after night the king had most of his cavalry ride up and down the bank shouting and making all sorts of noise that suggested an army getting ready to cross over. Porus reacted by following the commotion with his elephants and other troops. Eventually, he realized that these were false alarms and no longer paid them any mind.

Once he was sure the Indian king had been lulled into inattention, Alexander put into effect an ingenious stratagem. There was no time to lose, for he learned Porus’s ally Abisares was on his way to join him with a substantial force and would arrive within a couple of days.

The Macedonian scouts had discovered a pathless and uninhabited wooded island seventeen miles upstream (near today’s Jalalpur). It concealed a tree-covered inlet on the near bank. This was where the king intended to attempt a crossing. The plan was to divide the army in two. Through the night Alexander would lead some five thousand horse and at least six thousand foot soldiers to the island. These were modest numbers, but he must have calculated that they were enough for the task in hand, and at any rate they were the maximum he could transport within a single night.

The king would take a roundabout route to avoid discovery. His men would bring with them the leather raft casings, which had been restuffed. The reassembled Macedonian boats would be waiting out of sight behind the island.

The larger part of the army, under Craterus, was to remain where it was at the Haranpur ford. The men would behave as if they were about to launch an attack. The king’s pavilion would remain in place, and a double would wear the royal cloak and stand in for Alexander. Also, the Greek mercenaries were dispersed along the riverside. They too would cross the Hydaspes once it became clear that the forthcoming battle was on the point of being won.

The departure of the assault force would be masked by empty tents and blazing fires. The king gave Craterus strict instructions to stay where he was unless Porus marched off to confront Alexander or was in retreat. In what appear to be his written orders, he continued:

But if Porus takes part of his army against me and leaves part behind in the camp with elephants as well, you must still not make a move. If, though, he takes all his elephants with him against me, with some of the rest of his army left in the camp, then cross as fast as you can. It is only the elephants which make it impossible to land the horses—any other part of Porus’s army will pose no problem.

One night Alexander put his plan into operation. He set out secretly and arrived at the island some hours later, where he found everything present and correct. Shortly before first light the cavalry were on their rafts and the infantry in their boats. The crossing was under way.

As often happens with a careful plan, fate interposed an obstacle. A tremendous storm broke. Water flooded down from the sky, restricting vision and drenching the men. The general misery was at least alleviated by the knowledge that the claps of thunder and the drumming rain would camouflage the sounds of thousands of troops on the move.

Worse was to come. The boats and rafts made for the bank and all the men and horses disembarked, only to discover that they were in fact on the shore of another smaller island. This was a serious setback. It would soon be broad daylight and the advantage of surprise would be lost. There was no time to reembark, so the king and his men struggled across the island and waded through a fast-flowing channel. This was hard going, for the water came over the chests of the foot soldiers and only the horses’ heads were above the surface.

By now, the Macedonians had been observed by Porus’s scouts; it was essential that the entire assault force reach land as soon as possible and be ready to oppose the inevitable Indian attack. The whole process must have taken several hours. The king placed his cavalry in the front behind a screen of mounted archers. (From his guerrilla years in Bactriana and Sogdiana, he had learned the value of mounted archers skilled at dashing in, shooting arrows, and dashing out with impunity.) The infantry formed up behind the cavalry as they emerged sodden from the river.

Porus now faced a painful dilemma. He saw that the Macedonians had divided into two. One part must have been a feint, a ruse, and the other the main force. Which was which? Or, to put the question another way, where was Alexander—at the Jalalpur island or at the Haranpur ford? He spent time pondering the problem, for he knew that his fate and the issue of the forthcoming battle hung on his choice. Meanwhile he quickly sent one of his sons with two thousand cavalry and 120 chariots to see if he could drive the invaders back into the river.

At first sight Alexander thought this force was the advance guard of Porus’s entire army, but when he learned their true strength he decided to wipe them out. He immediately charged at the head of his cavalry. Once the enemy recognized Alexander, they pulled back in alarm. The chariots turned out to be useless, for their wheels sank into the monsoon-muddy ground. Porus’s son was killed, as were four hundred of his horsemen.

At last, Porus did the right thing, but he did it too late. His cavalry had been mauled. The Macedonians had extricated themselves from the Hydaspes and were preparing for battle. Alexander had been seen leading the charge in person against his son. The Indian king realized that the real threat came from the assault force and moved the bulk of his army against it. He left a small contingent and a few elephants to frighten Craterus’s cavalry away from the bank.

—

BOTH SIDES PREPARED THEMSELVES for a set-piece battle. Porus moved forward until he found a piece of well-drained ground where elephants and cavalry could maneuver safely. In his center he formed a line of between eighty-five and two hundred elephants at intervals of one hundred feet, and behind them he placed his infantry, which stretched well beyond the Macedonian phalanx. Diodorus remarks: “His whole array looked very much like a city, for the elephants resembled towers, and the soldiers between them curtain walls.” His cavalry, now numbering after the recent skirmish only 3,600 riders in total, was divided between the wings, screened by 180 chariots and special infantry units.

Alexander took care to keep his forces out of sight for the time being while discreetly observing Porus’s dispositions. The Macedonian troops eventually caught up with the cavalry and were allowed to rest and recover a little from the exertions of the night.

Meanwhile the king devised his tactics. Once more he brought deception into play. He arranged his army in a conventional lineup, with his phalanx and hypaspists in the center, flanked on both sides by Companion cavalry. He led two squadrons on the right and Coenus commanded two on the left. But Alexander introduced a twist. His squadrons and the center moved forward toward the enemy and came into view. However, Coenus at the far end of the field was instructed to hold back and stay out of sight behind trees or in dead ground.

The king sent mounted archers against the Indian cavalry and the chariots on Porus’s left wing. In Arrian’s words, their task was “to create havoc among the troops stationed there with their dense volleys of arrows and quick charges in and out.” The enemy horse was soon in disarray and the chariots were more or less annihilated. Alexander then led a charge against them.

He was playing a mind game with the Indian king. He guessed that Porus would suppose that the Macedonians were fielding only two cavalry squadrons. He would know nothing of Coenus and his horsemen and would assume that the cavalry on his right wing had nobody to fight and nothing to do. He would be tempted to order it across the battlefield behind his lines and reinforce his cavalry on the left, which was now under fierce attack.

In this way, Porus would substantially outnumber Alexander’s squadrons and would be able to prevent his left from breaking. With any luck, he might even drive off the Macedonians and win the battle. Coenus had been instructed in advance to keep an eye on the Indian right, and if the cavalry there left its station to follow on behind it.

Porus acted just as Alexander’s psychological insight had predicted he would. With Coenus’s arrival, the combined Indian horse unexpectedly found itself assailed in the rear as well as the front. They began to break up and fell back onto the elephants nearby.

The mahouts drove their animals against the Macedonian cavalry. The phalanx took this as a signal to encircle the elephants. They speared them, hacked off their feet, and chopped at their trunks. Some of the crazed beasts charged into the Macedonian infantry lines, which prompted the Indian cavalry to launch an unsuccessful counterattack.

The fighting now became general. The Macedonians soon gained the upper hand, with Alexander and his Companions charging again and again into the trapped enemy horse. The elephants went berserk. Arrian takes up the gory narrative:

Crowded now into a narrow space, the elephants caused as much damage to their own side as to the enemy, turning round and round, barging, and trampling. The Indian cavalry, tightly corralled among the elephants, suffered massive carnage. Most of the mahouts had been shot down: wounded, exhausted, and with no one to control them, the elephants could no longer play their specific role in the battle but, maddened by pain, they began attacking friends and enemies alike, crushing, trampling, and killing indiscriminately.

The phalanx recovered its élan and pressed its bristling sarissas against the wavering line of enemy foot-soldiers. The Macedonian horse began to set a cordon around them and were perhaps joined by the Greek mercenaries who had been waiting at the riverside. The tiring and lengthy business of butchery began. Craterus moved his troops across the ford and joined in the mopping up.

By the end of the day it is said that twenty thousand Indian infantry and three thousand cavalry lay dead on the rain-soaked earth. The chariots were all wrecked. The Macedonians lost about eighty foot soldiers at most, ten mounted archers, and 220 cavalry.

One particular casualty of the battle or its aftermath struck Alexander to the heart. About this time, his horse Bucephalas died. He was thirty years old and probably succumbed not to a wound but to heat exhaustion. Alexander, who loved him as a comrade-in-arms, was grief-stricken. Of the two garrison towns he founded on the battle site and at the base camp, the first was named Nicaea, “City of Victory,” and the other Bucephala in honor of a much-missed friend.

A gigantic figure towering over the field on his enormous elephant, Porus surveyed the ruin of his army and his hopes. He ran through with a javelin a valued ally for recommending surrender. Unlike Darius he did not quit the struggle early and precipitate a rout. Bleeding profusely from a wound in his shoulder, he eventually accepted defeat when it was absolutely clear that the day was lost. He asked to be taken to Alexander.

Typically, the Macedonian king admired his adversary’s bravery. He asked Porus to say how he wished to be treated.

“Like a king,” came the perfect answer.

“As far as I am concerned, Porus, I shall do as you ask. Tell me now what you would like for yourself.”

“Everything is contained in my one request.”

The two men shared the same heroic code and understood each other. Alexander confirmed Porus’s kingship and added some territory to the Indian’s realm. As for Porus, from this moment he remained unfailingly loyal to his conqueror.

As was his custom, the victor honored the fallen. In thanksgiving, he sacrificed to the gods. Among them on this occasion was Helios, god of the sun (was he praying for more blue skies and less rain?). The king staged athletic and equestrian competitions on the bank of the Hydaspes at the very point where he had first crossed with his army. He left Craterus there with a detachment to build and fortify the cities he was founding, while he himself moved on against the Indians bordering the area ruled by Porus.

Two celebratory medallions were struck. One was a tetradrachm, or four-drachma coin, which showed an Indian archer with his bow on the obverse and an elephant on the reverse. The other was a decadrachm (ten drachmas); this shows a horseman, doubtless Alexander, attacking an elephant with two riders, doubtless representing Porus attended by a mahout. On the reverse Nike, goddess of victory, crowns a standing figure, presumably Alexander. He is clasping a thunderbolt, perhaps a reference to the thunderstorm that preceded the battle and, one supposes, an indication of his Zeus-born divinity.

—

THE PIECES OF ALEXANDER’S strategic jigsaw were falling into place. One by one the kingdoms and states of the Indus Valley joined a buffer zone that marked the Persian empire’s eastern frontier. The Macedonian conqueror was to be their overlord, but otherwise he would leave them to govern themselves.

Porus, now a close and trusted ally, was instructed to bring his best surviving troops and some elephants. The army was divided again into separate contingents, which roamed the Indus Valley requesting surrenders from the various states in the region. Most did as they were told, but some resisted. Taxiles was reconciled, a little reluctantly, with Porus. Abisares, who had been expected to join the Indian king at the Hydaspes but had failed to show up, sent an embassy, headed by his brother, to make peace. He was appointed satrap of his own kingdom. A force was dispatched to quash a revolt among the Assacenians.

Another king called Porus (the first one’s cousin) offered his submission. However, he was alarmed by Alexander’s favoritism toward his namesake, a long-standing enemy of his, and fled eastward with as many of his fighting men as he could persuade to join him. Hephaestion was sent off to annex his kingdom and pass it on to the first Porus; after he had done this, he founded a couple of fortified settlements.

A people called the Cathaeans rose up in arms and made a stand at the strongly fortified city of Sangala. They encircled a hill just outside the gates with three lines of wagons. Alexander captured these improvised defenses and the enemy retreated behind Sangala’s brick wall. After an attempted breakout, the Macedonians built a double stockade which ringed the city except for a shallow lake. The king guessed correctly that the defenders would attempt another breakout across the water; his Macedonians, reinforced by Porus, slaughtered them as they emerged.

Siege engines were moved up, ladders were installed around the circuit, and Sangala was taken by storm. Seventeen thousand Indians were reportedly killed and seventy thousand captured. The city was razed.

The chivalry which Alexander had shown to his royal adversary had given way once more to ferocity and inhumanity. Indian public opinion was disgusted by the destruction of Sangala. Polyaenus, a strategy expert during the reign of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, observes: “This act greatly damaged his reputation in the eyes of the Indians, who considered him a bloodthirsty savage.”

Alexander’s campaigning had been crowned with military success, but the morale of the troops was plummeting. The Battle of the Hydaspes had taken place in May, but in the following weeks the spring thunderstorms that announced the monsoon gave way to continuous heavy rain. As the Macedonians crossed one tributary of the Indus after another, the waters rose higher and flowed faster. The cities of Nicaea and Bucephala were washed away and had to be rebuilt.

Nothing is more injurious to a sense of well-being than being permanently wet. Alexander’s men may have adored him, but there were limits to what they would put up with.

—

INDIA WAS TURNING OUT to be a much larger place than had originally been anticipated. Alexander and the Greek scientific experts he had recruited had assumed that it was no larger than today’s Punjab and that a short march would bring them to the edge of the Ocean. Now that they were actually in the subcontinent, reports could not be ignored which showed that land, states, and populations stretched indefinitely eastward.

A local king spoke of a desert that would take twelve days to cross. The traveler would then arrive at a vast river, the Ganges. The ruler there had at his disposal two hundred thousand infantry, two thousand chariots, and four thousand elephants equipped for war. Alexander was impressed and consulted Porus, who happily confirmed the accuracy of the report (despite the fact that no such desert existed and the Indian army numbers were hyperinflated). Other accounts spoke of fertile lands with many elephants.

We are now confronted by an enigma. By now the Macedonians were approaching the last of the Indus tributaries, the Hyphasis (today’s Beas). It was six fathoms deep and with a violent current, and would be difficult to cross. The king could not care less about obstacles; he had a pothos to journey to the ends of the earth, and that was that. According to Arrian, he “advanced with his army to the river…intent on subduing the Indians yet further to the east. In his mind there could be no end to the war as long as there was any enemy left.”

The army disagreed. It had had a surfeit of water and refused to follow him. So far as they were concerned, the war was over.

Alexander had detected incipient discontent: after the victory over Porus, he had distributed large bonuses both to his generals and to other ranks. Soldiers’ wives were granted monthly rations, and their children received an allowance calculated according to their fathers’ military record. He gave generous rewards for bravery. None of this improved the mood. Men gathered in small groups and muttered. Some simply complained; others swore they would not take another step, even with Alexander as their leader. But no one spoke out openly.

The king saw that he had to intervene. He summoned his senior officers and gave them a pep talk. He had shared the work, the danger, and, notably, the recompense, with every member of the army, he said, and deserved their continuing loyalty. He told them: “All this land is yours, and you are its satraps.”

The men said nothing and hung their heads. “I must have hurt you in some way without knowing it,” added Alexander bitterly. “You don’t even want to look at me. I seem to be completely alone—nobody answers me, nobody even says no to me.”

A long silence followed. This was a political crisis of the first order. The future of the entire expedition depended on the trust that flowed back and forth between the king and his men, and that appeared to have drained away. At last one of the generals, the able and trusted Coenus, took his career in his hands and spoke for the army. He chose his words carefully and respectfully, but he did not mince them. The men wanted to see their homeland again and their loved ones. He referred pointedly to the poor condition of their equipment, their clothes, their armor, and their weapons. Arrian has him say, to loud applause:

You should not now lead forward a reluctant army. You won’t find them as ready as they once were to meet danger, when they have lost their will for battle. But, if you agree, go home with them to Macedonia, see your mother, settle what needs to be settled in Greece, bring back all these great victories to adorn your father’s house. Then, if you so choose, begin again from scratch—and launch another campaign.

Alexander was unaccustomed to rebuffs, and he took this one very badly. Much of his fury was directed at Coenus. He abruptly suspended the meeting and recalled it in a foul temper on the following day. He announced that he himself was going on and anyone who wished to join him was welcome to do so. Everybody else was free to go home. They could tell their friends that they had abandoned their king surrounded by enemies.

With these words he jumped down from the dais and withdrew like Achilles to brood in his tent. For three days he refused to allow anyone in, even his closest associates and Companions. Learning from his behavior after the murder of Cleitus, he hoped this might compel the army to change its mind. In fact, it remained obstinate. The men were sorry that Alexander was upset, but they were not going to change their minds.

The only question now was how the king would give way without loss of face. As was his practice on important occasions, he conducted a sacrifice before crossing the Hyphasis. He found that the omens were inauspicious. Is it too much to suppose that a quiet word was dropped into Aristander’s ear? In any event, Alexander called off the offensive, but made it clear that he was yielding to the gods, not to his men. The soldiers responded to the announcement with an earsplitting roar of joy.

To translate his renunciation into something that looked like a victory, the king arranged for twelve massive altars as high as his highest siege towers to be erected. He sacrificed on them to the gods in thanksgiving for his unbroken line of victories. As usual he staged athletic and equestrian competitions. This pause gave time for the army to recuperate after its exertions and ready themselves for the long return.

Within a few days of these events, Coenus took ill of some unspecified disease and died. Modern scholars have suspected foul play, but nobody did at the time. Alexander was saddened and the general was given a fine funeral.

—

THIS IS A CURIOUS TALE.

For all his pothos, Alexander was a practical man and did not give way to a random yen before assessing the risks and the benefits. Throughout his campaigning in Thrace and Asia, he had sought to secure his borders and resisted the temptation to annex new territory. If we judge the king by his deeds rather than by the rhetoric of war without end, his aims in the Indus Valley were rational and attainable. As we have seen, these were to protect the ramshackle, largely ungoverned eastern end of the Persian empire by establishing a reliable set of allied states that would stand between it and whatever and whoever lay beyond.

So the fact is that he never had any intention of marching to Ocean. He had displayed his standards along his empire’s final frontier and now the Indian adventure was over.

In that case, what lay behind the quarrel with his men? His passion for travel and discovery, for global dominion, was a feature of his public image. Perhaps when planning his departure from India, he needed someone else to blame for not fighting his way across the subcontinent to the world’s end. Otherwise he could be accused of losing his nerve. The obvious candidate was his army; he knew that if he broadcast his intention to carry on campaigning permanently, he would set off something approaching a mutiny. So that was what he did.

More mundanely, it can be argued that, while he had no serious plan to vanquish all India, he did fancy a brief foray, rather as when he crossed the Danube, to frighten the local people. It would also enable his experts to pursue their scientific inquiries and gain a more accurate notion of the geography of India. In the imagination of his men—and of ancient historians—this was inflated into a more all-embracing project.

We will never know the truth of the matter, but once the Indus Valley had been secured, Alexander’s next step was predictable. The only imperial frontier he had not yet visited lay to the south—down the Indus, along the coastline of the Arabian Sea, and up the Persian Gulf.

—

THEN, WITH THE CONCLUSION of his circuit of empire, rest and relaxation awaited him in Babylon, city of wonders.