Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

XI

Of the renowned ‘victory’ at the Susian Gates, I say no more than that it was a colossal waste of lives. Any commander with a shred of respect for his enemy would have anticipated that the Persians would block that pass. I warned Alexander of ambush myself. But the young King was in the grip of his own legend by then, and would not agree to the simple precaution of taking the coast route into Persia. That he managed to force the Gates I credit to Arridaeus’s instincts and the stamina of the Macedonians. No one else deserves praise for surviving this stupidity.

The army passed out of Mesopotamia and into the enemy homeland. The Achaemenid royal seat at Persepolis beckoned, but first Alexander had to force a sheer pass through the Zagros mountains to the plateau of Persis. For this he took with him only his most mobile forces, elements of his hypaspists, the Agrianian allies, his best scouts; the heavy troops were placed under the command of Parmenion and ordered to march the long way around by the coast.

We met no resistance all the way to the Gates, and then most of the way through it until he reached the narrowest part. At that point the march was stopped by a wall of rude blocks that the enemy had thrown up. The Macedonians were puzzled over how to attack this wall when an avalanche of rocks, arrows and javelins fell on them from the heights: the Persians had sprung a trap on them. Alexander had his men take cover, still imagining he would force his way through, until the enemy rolled boulders down on his men, so that their upturned shields were no longer any defense. Alexander’s position was hopeless; the enemy was dug into positions on the hillsides where the Macedonians could not see them, much less mount a counterattack. Alexander ordered a general retreat. The great cheer went up from the Persians as they saw the young king’s back for the first time.

With the Persian cheers echoing in his ears, Alexander led his men on the bitterest maneuver of the campaign. This was not only a matter of pride: the conquest of so large an empire would take decades if the Persians were emboldened to contest him in every place they could. To discourage this, Alexander could not accept anything less than instant, total annihilation of all resistance. But the Macedonians had already lost more men that day than during the fight at the Granicus, while the Persians had suffered not a single casualty.

Craterus and Ptolemy suggested that they avoid the obstacle by proceeding around by the coast route into Persia. But as the Macedonians had left unburied dead in the gorge, Alexander could not compound defeat with desecration. Moreover, he refused to give the Persians the glory of turning the tables on Thermopylae, where the Lacedaemonians had delayed Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. He called for all the Persians captured in the area to be brought forward, and asked them if they knew of some hidden route by which the enemy might be outflanked. Under threat of torture, all these men swore that there was no way around the wall-with one exception. This fellow, a shepherd, suggested one possibility, but then seemed to withdraw it.

“The path is no more than a sheep-track,” he told Alexander. “Your men will not manage it.”

“Are you saying we cannot go where your sheep can?”

“You will be making the attempt in the dark, and there is snow,” came the reply.

Faced with such a challenge, Alexander could accept no other course. “Prepare to lead us up,” he told the prisoner, “and never doubt that we will follow, whatever the difficulty!”

Craterus was placed in command of the camp, and given a thousand men with which to make a diversionary attack on the wall. Then, after night fell, the Macedonians followed the shepherd up along a narrow ledge, onto the ridge above the gorge.

The prisoner had not exaggerated the meagerness of the path. No more than a few feet wide in places, it often disappeared under snow, just as he had warned. As we could not use torches, and the walls of the gorge prevented starlight from reaching them, we groped along in complete darkness, all the while trusting that our guide was not leading us into another trap, or over a cliff. For safety, the Macedonians used pikes to probe ahead of them, or to keep in touch with their companions grasping the ends; several men were thus saved from falling by their comrades, who used their sarissas to pull them back from the chasm. When one man did slip and fall over the side, the mishap was more felt than heard-as he plunged to his death, he bravely protected the army’s position by keeping his silence. Nevertheless, despair laid hold of us as the path wound higher and higher, and the men were forced to abandon baggage on the way, and the shepherd turned back to Alexander, whispering ‘See, I told you it was impossible!’

In time the path leveled, and then began to descend. Just as the first fingers of light touched the eastern sky, we were able to look down and see the smoke from the Persian camp below. A gasp went up among the Macedonians as they realized they had succeeded. Alexander bade them all to keep quiet, and issued his commands for the final assault: Ptolemy, with the hypaspists, would fall on the enemy by the path the prisoner had showed them. Alexander and the Agrianians, meanwhile, would go to the far side of the pass and charge the enemy from that quarter. He trusted Craterus would hear the attack as it was underway, and make a frontal assault at the critical moment.

The battle unfolded exactly as he planned. Alexander charged into the Persian camp, taking them completely by surprise, as Ptolemy swooped on them from above. The troops by the wall were further pinned down by Craterus’s attack, so that the Persians were beset from every direction. Thousands were killed before the sun mounted the hills and revealed the full extent of the rout. The day was not destined to rise on a Persian Thermopylae.

The way was open to Persepolis. This was a city synonymous with the power of the Great King, where Greeks from the Ionian cities had been forced for generations to appear on bended knee, and where the accumulated loot of a continent waited for the victor of Gaugamela. With the fall of the Susian Gates, the capital of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes lay at the pleasure of the twenty-five year old king of a people despised by the Persian overlords as a servile race. As the Thracian porter asked Hippias in Aristophanes’s The Crows, was not the bended knee now on the other foot?

Rejoining Parmenion’s forces, Alexander marched in no great hurry toward the city. He was met on the way by two parties: first, emissaries from the royal chamberlain Tiridates, begging the Greeks to advance on the capital with all speed, as a mob was swarming to loot the treasury. Anxious that his property be protected, Alexander quickened the march-until a second party arrived which stopped him in his tracks.

To the Macedonians, it seemed that an army of corpses was coming forth to meet them. But the supplicants were Greeks, four thousand of them, who had been freed from their imprisonment by the Persian nobles as they fled; moreover, they were not corpses but, like Alexander’s soldiers, living men.

That was where the resemblance ended, for no more pathetic husks of humanity were ever loosed to haunt the living. It was said that most of them suffered mutilation, removal of eyeballs and noses and ears and limbs. What was most apparent from the pattern of these outrages was the depraved humor behind many of them, such as the amputation of every finger except the small one on the left hand, or removal of the entire lower jaw. Still others bore the scars of repeated burnings, brandings, and scourgings, or of tattoos proclaiming that they were “dogs” attached to the houses of their Persian masters. Several of these wretches-the ones still capable of speech, that is-were brought before Alexander to tell their stories, which invariably involved years of deliberate torture, of casual brutality that so ached the heart the King wept openly, crying out that he could take no more.

The prisoners were given shelter and food, and promised that those who wished would be free to return to their homes, along with enough money that they would suffer no discomfort for the rest of their lives. Those who had no families to go to, or who could not face the repugnance of their countrymen at their injuries, were pledged land and slaves with which to settle in Alexander’s empire.

Aeschines is right: if the Persians had applied half the ingenuity they showed in tormenting these poor men to perfecting their tactics in battle, Alexander would never had made it beyond the Granicus. What he did not say, however, is that a good number of these ex-slaves came from places that were destroyed by Alexander or his father. Many were from Thebes or Amphissa or Olynthus, and had been away for so long they did not know the fate of their cities. So when the poor wretches hobbled, crawled, or were carried into Alexander’s presence, and thanked him for liberating them so they could again glimpse their beloved Cadmeia, the King could only turn away in his guilt, having himself been responsible for pulling down the Cadmeia stone-by-stone. Instead of the truth, the Thebans were given a travel allowance and an escort back to Greece.

We may only guess what they thought of their liberator when they saw the empty field where their city once stood. Did these homesick men rejoice when they saw that the Macedonians had spared the house of Pindar? Did they savor the irony, worthy of some tragedian’s imagination, of preserving the house of a poet while leaving nothing of all the poet held dear? Or did they only weep?

We were the last generation of mankind to see in its glory the great citadel of Persepolis, or Parsa as the barbarians called it. There was no sight elsewhere that I would compare it with, but can only say it resembled a mass of towering majesties arrayed on a great game board. I say ‘game board’ because it stood on its artificial terrace with nothing around it but flat country, and because there was something of the architect’s model about the place. Even when I had my eyes on it, it seemed like some grand but unlikely abstraction. When I saw it again, on the way home nearly ten years later, reality had imposed itself on the dream: dust was blowing into the great audience halls, the ornamental arbors were dead, and the local farmers were carrying away the scorched stones. Curious of what he might say, I asked one of the farmers what had happened there.

“The Greeks came,” he said.

As you might imagine, this answer made me angry, for only a single Greek had had a hand in that barbarity, and that one Greek was a courtesan. Yet not even she had thrown the fatal torch. The following was what really happened.

First, some clarification: when Aeschines recounted the sack of Persepolis to you, he really meant the sack of the town adjacent to the citadel. This was a settlement built largely of mud brick, and contained the houses of the servants who ran the palace, and the artisans who continued to work on it up until the day it was destroyed. Parsa was, in fact, never a completed work, and was never truly lived in. Let it be a testament to its opulence that the greed of the Macedonian soldiers could be satisfied in this way. It was the richest sack many of them had seen in a lifetime of looting Greek cities, and they had seen only the servant’s quarters!

No-the real treasures were stolen by a quieter, more discriminating bunch. As the glow of the fires below the citadel began to rise, and screams of the raped and murdered Persians filtered through the tiled walls, Alexander and his friends embarked on a torchlight tour of Darius’s palace with the Great King’s chamberlain. It took all night to get through the maze of pylons and palaces, armories and stables. The gardens alone had no parallel in Greece or Macedon, with great reflecting pools flanked with pomegranate trees, jujube, willows and tamarisk, and stocked with enormous carp that practically nuzzled one’s hand to be fed. Peafowl and ibises strode the paths, and hidden among the topiaries, our guide said, there remained a single survivor from the Great King’s collection of tame Indian tigers.

The greatest excitement was reserved, of course, for the treasuries. It was the big room, the vault of the great Darius, that contained the fortune in bullion I have mentioned-some 120,000 talents’ worth.

The chamber was too dark for the party’s taste, so a brazier was lit with whatever fuel was at hand. By its light, they marveled at a spectacle of gleaming metal that inspired some, such as Ptolemy, to drop to their knees in a fit of pecuniary ecstasy. More braziers were ordered, and more fuel to light up the treasure, until their Persian guide lost his voice, his face having gone white.

“What is it?” asked Hephaestion, smiling.

“We have burned the original manuscript of the Avesta-12,000 leaves in letters of gold, dictated by Zarathushtra himself. It is a thousand years old.”

“How old is this?” asked Alexander, holding up a gilded drinking cup.

The King’s taste, you see, was different: gold interested him more when it plated or gilded fancy things, such as the flatware made for his table, or the fine cedar beams that held up the tapestries that would soon cool his crowned head.

The impression that I got of the place from a distance, that it was a kind of royal dollhouse, was only strengthened when I got inside. The carved gateways and palmetted columns seemed to bear no distinctive style. Or shall I say they had a kind of corporate style that was at the same time Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian, and therefore amounted to neither. Though we understood construction of the citadel to have begun by the elder Darius well before the first invasion of Greece, the floors seemed unscraped by groveling retainers, the striding stone bulls unappreciated by human eyes. Not even the royal dinnerware seemed ever to have known use.

We were not prepared to find temples or sanctuaries of any kind in Persepolis, for Herodotus had written that the Persians abjured such things. We were fools to place any stock in Herodotus: there was a splendid fire temple there, reserved for the use of the Great King and his family. In design it was a windowless, orthogonal room, unadorned with any of the faux-Egyptian or Babylonian frillery we saw elsewhere. The walls were caked in a fine, black, aromatic ash that both charmed the nose and devoured all light except the glow of the sacred flame. The atmosphere was both tomb-like and intimate, like the private boudoir of Kore.

Unlike in our temples, there was no statue of their god, and the altar was inside the temple. The latter was a bed of glowing embers on an upraised platform. It is said that this fire, the Atas Bahram, had first been kindled in the days of Zarathushtra himself, centuries before, and had been carried to Pars from the east in an earthenware pot during the reign of Cyrus the Great. At first I dismissed this as a mere story. In all the years since that time, after all the invasions and upheavals, did not this Atas Bahram go out at least once?

I began to believe the legend when Parmenion announced that his scouts had captured two Persian priests travelling away from the capital in different directions. Each of these priests bore an earthenware pot with burning embers from the sacred fire. As the Zoroastrians considered the number three to be sacred, I imagine a third messenger escaped Parmenion’s screen. The embers he carried might already have kindled another Atas Bahram, safely hidden from the Macedonians, as it was from the invading Assyrians, Medes, Cimmerians, Scythians and Babylonians in their time.

As it was, Alexander had no interest in extinguishing the altar. On the contrary, he declared that it looked unhealthily weak! On his orders, wooden chairs and tables were fetched from elsewhere in the palace, broken up, and tossed on the altar so that it flared up like a proper campfire. The priests dared show neither approval nor disapproval at this, but stood off to the side smiling tightly, their shadows dancing on the bare walls behind them.

The climax of the tour was the royal throne room. It was known as the Hall of One Hundred Columns, which testified to the literal truth. Yet here again the combination of enormous expense and practical uselessness was striking, for at no place in the Hall was a view of the throne unobstructed by a column. This could only have been the work of a deliberate but perversely alien mind.

As Alexander faced the throne of the Great King, he saw that someone had toppled a large statue of Darius’s ancestor, Xerxes. Then, as he was wont to do at dramatic moments, he mused conspicuously.

“Shall I set you back on your feet, Xerxes, because the heart of a lion beat in your chest? Or shall you lie there as a villain, because of your crimes against the Greeks?”

It seemed a good question, but not one Alexander cared to answer, for he was already distracted by the carved device of the winged disk over the throne. He pointed at the inscription underneath.

“What does that say?” he asked the chamberlain.

“It says that the Great King of Kings has built a palace befitting Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithra, and that the gods approve of what he has done in the name of asha, or righteousness. It says that as Ahuramazda honors the King as his earthly counterpart in the great struggle against the daevas, his home will never suffer its degradation.”

“The daevas?”

The chamberlain, looking uncomfortable, took a long time before answering.

“They are minions of the Hostile Spirit, Angra Mainyu. They are bringers of chaos and destruction.”

At this Alexander gave only a nod, and passed the throne by without sitting in it. It may have been the warning by Ahuramazda that dissuaded him, but more likely he did not want to risk a repetition of his misadventure on the throne at Susa, where his legs were too short to reach the floor.

Alexander lingered at Persepolis for almost five months. As the exhilaration of this conquest wore off, the King’s determination to keep going wavered. His mandate from the Greek cities, after all, had provided only for the freeing of the Ionians. His rant at the Persian envoy notwithstanding, he came to worry that everything else he had done, from the destruction of the Persian army three times over to the occupation of Babylon to the seizure of the royal seat, smacked of hubris. To change his mind, Hephaestion, Ptolemy, and the rest came at him from every side, arguing that to break off the offensive then would invite a counter-attack. If Darius did not return this year, or next, he would in ten years, or twenty. And besides, of what concern to a god such as Alexander are the bleats of urban gossips back home? Even to a mortal king like Philip, those people counted for little.

The jury shuffled and muttered. Though Swallow was used to forensic hyperbole, even he was beginning to resent the constant belittling of Greeks by the Macedonians. On this point alone, if only half of what Machon claimed was true, Aeschines’ prosecution was in deep trouble.

While these arguments raged behind closed doors, the Macedonians diverted themselves with contests. Actors, athletes, raconteurs and musicians from home came in a procession down the Royal Road from Sardis. Among them was Thettalus the actor, who has appeared to great acclaim in the plays of Sophocles here and in the palace at Pella, where he first became familiar with Alexander. In the years before his ascension the Prince often used Thettalus as his unofficial envoy. With his military success he did not forget his friend. At Alexander’s eager expense, Thettalus was given a free hand to produce Euripides’ Bacchae anywhere he wished at Persepolis.

Thettalus chose a great processional staircase of Darius’s palace as a backdrop. This represented the reception hall of Pentheus, King of Thebes. As you know, at the climax of the play Pentheus attempts to spy on the rites of Dionysus by dressing as a woman, but is unmasked by the crazed celebrants. In an inspired bit of stagecraft, Thettalus has Pentheus escape not into a fir tree, but atop one of the great carved statues of Darius. The audience roared with delight as the maenads toppled the statue to get at Pentheus, who was played with great skill by Thettalus himself. They sat in wonder as the actor playing Pentheus’s mother, in ecstatic thrall to the god, foaming at the mouth, ignored her son’s pathetic pleas and ripped his arm from its socket. Here again, Thettalus was an innovator, for the act is performed onstage as the Messenger describes it. Cleverly, Thettalus fashioned a costume with a sham arm, having subtly withdrawn his own arm under his cloak. This production bore the kind of spectacle we never see in the Theatre of Dionysus, but judging by the response of Macedonians and Persians alike, it may represent the future. Now there is a true master of the stage, unlike the mediocre arts of our friend Aeschines!

Other kinds of performers also made their way to Alexander. I am thinking in particular of a courtesan named Thais. She was quite well-known here in years past-I see by the reactions of some gentlemen in the jury that they remember her. In her time she had beauty, but please understand, she was the kind of woman who was beautiful no matter what she looked like.

Today you will find her preparing to join Ptolemy on the throne of Egypt. That she came into alliance with that character I take as no surprise-Ptolemy deserves her. For those who never purchased her services, you know the type: to strangers, impeccable, unapproachable, unimpeachable. Show her a few drachmas, and she is your best friend, bursting with a thousand ideas of how to spend your money so you don’t appear a fool. Show her a few more, and she is brazen, gutter-mouthed, leaving you panting but with her legs firmly closed. The cost of unsticking those gams was never quite clear! But when you hammered at her gates, they say she earned her nickname, which was ‘the Handshake.’

So it came to be that Thais talked her way through the palace doors and onto a couch in Alexander’s drinking parlor. She was quiet at first, just sitting and showing off her white arms through her chiton, contenting herself just to keep up with all of us, all the hardened soldiers, cup for cup and crater for crater. The conversation touched on diverse topics, including politics, food, and the follies of certain mathematical cults. Thais was prepared to hold forth on all of them, taking Callisthenes’ side in a debate with the King and myself over the existence of the so-called “irrational” numbers.

“It cannot be denied,” proclaimed the historian, “that if we imagine a square with a side length of one unit, the diagonal of that square will be the square root of two. Try as we might, we cannot find a fixed unit of any length that will evenly divide both into the side length or the diagonal. They are, as the Pythagoreans call it, incommensurable.”

“Short of trying every possible common unit, I cannot understand how you can know that,” I told him.

“Your opinion is shared by others,” Thais said. “The man who first proved the existence of irrational numbers was expelled from the order of the Pythagoreans. His colleagues gave him a funeral and a tomb, as if his suggestion amounted to intellectual suicide.”

“And yet Hippasus was correct,” added Callisthenes.

Alexander shook his head. “I take the soldier’s part, and agree with Machon. No one can claim to know no common factor exists unless he tries them all.”

“Then why don’t we try here, now?” asked Thais. With that, she untied her girdle and knelt on the floor. The mosaic in the center of the room had a pattern that seemed close to perfectly square. Folding the girdle into a length equivalent to the side of the figure, she first showed that the diagonal of the square was almost half again as long as the side. As she demonstrated this fact the men were not watching the girdle at all, but the casual exposure of a breast as firm and unshriveled as a virgin girl’s.

No matter how many times she folded the girdle, from one-half to one-quarter to one-eighth the length of the side, no number of whole units fit into the diagonal. There was always some material left over. (A dark aureole likewise insisted on presenting itself, standing free of her folds.)

“So you see, they are incommensurable.”

“A most revealing demonstration!” applauded Callisthenes.

“Revealing, yes, but no demonstration,” said the King. “I can imagine units much smaller than we can make with a piece of cloth. How do we know none of these may factor evenly into both lines?”

“We know, because it is a matter of mathematical proof.”

The argument went on for some time with neither side convincing the other. But as competent as Thais was on matters geometrical, she took over the room as the wine flowed and the men grew tongue-tied. She picked up the cithara and played a romantic air, then played it again with racy lyrics she made up on the spot. Verses from Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar tripped lightly from her tongue, but especially lines from Euripides, for she had done her homework. And she danced, creating music in the men’s minds by the swaying of her hips, hiking up her gown to show her upper thighs.

By the climax of the evening all of us were gazing at her with our aspirations plain, including the King, who blushed like a lovesick boy with his pleasure of her. But before any propositions flew, she suddenly turned the conversation to matters of politics, and of history.

“Mine was a wealthy family,” she said, “before the Persians came to Attica. We had farms near Dekeleia, and a townhouse. My ancestors drew liturgies-they ran at the battle of Marathon, commanded ships at Salamis. There was a tripod dedicated to a first-place finish at the Festival of Dionysus. It was destroyed when Mardonius burned the city on his second occupation…”

As she said this, all hint of titillation went out of her manner. She was intimate, confessional, showing far more than just arms and thighs. Who was she speaking to? We all thought it was to ourselves alone, her deference to Alexander notwithstanding. As she spoke of the fires of Mardonius, the flames of the braziers shone in her eyes. A stray lock of hair, so fetching as it came loose in her dance, was threaded back behind her ear, like that of a windblown child standing at the foot of the burning Acropolis.

“My family never recovered from the Great King’s predations. To survive, my mother was forced to board her children to different houses around the city. What ‘boarding’ meant was not hard to understand: for a fee, we were placed in the power of unscrupulous men with little regard for our age. I was sent into the service of a man named Bitto, who owned a house not far from the Whispering Hermes. On pain of beating, I was forced to cooperate with his criminal enterprise: having been blessed-or cursed-with a pretty face, I was obliged to show myself to the male passersby in the street. When the inevitable insults came, I was to let them into the house, and let them have their way with me. This would go on until Bitto contrived to ‘surprise’ us in the act. Pretending to fly into a rage over the insult of his only daughter, he would lock the men in the house and declare that he would return with others of his family, so that they could together seek the justice they had coming. Naturally, the dupes promised any sort of payment to avoid their fate.

“With this blackmail, and by my ruin, Bitto attained quite a high style of living. That none of the victims suspected that I was no longer innocent I put down to my age-just ten years old-and the foolishness of most men regarding the anatomy of women. With experience, I was able to fool most of them by offering my anus instead, or even a chance to rub themselves between my thighs, so ignorant were they! Yet as the months passed I fell more into despair, for there seemed no way for me to escape the power of this Bitto. And so with my hopelessness I lost my fear, and swore before the gods that I would live to turn the tables on him.

“My opportunity came when I took into my bed an older man named Evaces. This fellow was very pleasing to me, for he was courteous, and wore nice clothes, and seemed to have few vices except for a weakness for young girls. When Bitto sprung his trap, I therefore told Evaces not to concern himself with his rantings, but to trust me instead. When Bitto threatened to get his brothers, I instructed Evaces to call his bluff. Enraged, Bitto tore open the door and pointed a knife at Evaces. At that point, in front of many witnesses on the street, I proclaimed ‘I am Evaces’ daughter, not Bitto’s.’ Bitto sputtered and fumed, but could say nothing when the men in the crowd demanded he prove his relation to me; he barred the way for us to escape, but backed down when Evaces threatened to summon a deputy of the Eleven.

“And so I came into the house of Evaces, in which I lived as a concubine until my sixteenth year. When Evaces died of sickness, he made certain to leave three minas to his brother toward the cost of my maintenance. He honored his dying wish for several months, but reneged on his responsibility by claiming that as a freeborn woman I was the responsibility of my family, none of whom I had seen in many years. So instead of returning to the relatives who had sold me into disrepute in the first place, I took what I could from Evaces’ house and went to Corinth. There I learned the finer arts of the only profession left to me.

“Sitting here with you, I know what you must think of me. Yet you should know that I would have had a different fate, had the gods been willing! I think of the girls of Athens today, safe in the strength of your protection, dear King. They will have no need for the arts of women like me. They will never know these depths…”

At this all the men, including myself, leapt to console her, to deny her degradation was permanent. We were lying, of course, well aware of the only real use to which she had availed herself. All of us, that is, with the possible exception of Ptolemy, whose depth of foresight we can only imagine. Did he see her as his queen even then?

“No, it cannot be denied. My future has been sealed by my past-it is too late for me. But I did come here with a thought in my mind, O King, that would go some way toward healing what has been broken. I dare not utter it…”

“Go on, speak,” said Alexander, who could not help but adopt the humility in her tone.

“I look around me,” she said, “and think of the majesty of those who built this place, and of their arrogance, believing that free Greeks would ever bend knee before them. I look, and I think, what an irony it would be, if one of the children they dispossessed took ultimate revenge on their works! A girl of Athens, for instance, with just a torch, could erase the mighty Xerxes from the memories of men. Is that not a thought?”

In an instant, her eyes were back to promising all sorts of diversions, and we men, whipped between desire and pity, were ready to grant her anything. Ptolemy rose from his couch and declared that the time had come to avenge the violation of the temples in Athens and Delphi. Why should it not be a woman who ignites the flames, added Craterus, igniting a guttural belch to punctuate his question. And I must confess, as I looked at Thais sitting there, chewing her lip with girlish anticipation, her eyes softening as they peered through the smoky lamplight, that yes, her suggestion was a thought indeed.

But the only opinion that counted was Alexander’s, and he said nothing. Seeing this, Thais sought to please him with a feat of entertainment even we experienced symposiasts had never seen before. For instead of delivering the usual show-frigging herself, for instance, or blowing a slave-she commenced her tour de force by approaching Bagoas.

The eunuch had been quiet so far. At her display of skill he seemed only to be taking mental notes; at her approach he looked bemused, as if she was wasting her time. That was my assumption, after all! But as she descended to put her lips on his, the act was done with such a tender deliberateness it was like the kiss given in the spring of new love. And it went on, her tongue drawing forth the tongue of Bagoas, her hands leading him to her breast, now miraculously exposed. As their clinch tightened, Bagoas responded as if he were a real man, pulling her chiton off her shoulders, clutching and clasping her. And when she felt the moment had arisen, Thais pulled herself off his lap, and pulling his tunic aside, showed the engorged fruit of her genius.

The rest of us cheered, exclaiming that yes, the divine Thais had indeed aroused a eunuch! And Bagoas, who seemed to see or hear nothing but her, seemed to be speaking to no one when he said, “The Palace of Darius must burn.”

Alexander, awed, drunk, nodded.

Our labor began in the Hall of One Hundred Columns. Torches appeared, and the party stood before the throne and gold-spun tapestries enclosing it. Alexander gave a brand to Thais, invited her to throw it on the cushions. Wisely, she declined.

“To the conqueror goes the honor,” she declared.

The King, who was barely able to keep his feet, threw the first torch. It missed the throne, clattering on the marble floor. With that, Thais rushed forward, retrieved it, and set the tapestries alight. We all cheered again, raising our cups to the conflagration as it climbed the fabric, consumed the canopy, and bit into the painted cedar rafters.

The party had to move when the room filled with smoke. In the courtyard, we saw the Macedonian soldiers running up from their camp with bags of sand, thinking the place had caught fire by accident. But when they saw us standing there, laughing and toasting our handiwork, they rushed off to contribute more fuel. Soon the inferno reached an intensity that the entire terrace was uninhabitable. Darius’s palace went up so fast that Alexander didn’t have time to retrieve his own belongings from the room where he had been sleeping. This was among the many things Alexander regretted about that night, for he lost all his copies of Euripides’ plays in the fire. The ancient armor of Achilles was, alas, saved. But ironically, this was not thanks to any Macedonian or Greek, but to the quick thinking of a Persian slave boy.

This, then, was how the most important city in Asia was destroyed.