Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

XIII

Alexander was as sentimental a drunk as Cleitus was an angry one. Blaming himself for his quarrel with his old companion, he wept openly as they led him to his bed. Nor did his dejection lift when his head cleared: his army was unnerved to hear the bitter sobs of the King of Asia through the tent fabric for three whole days, bewailing the loss of his faithful right arm, begging the forgiveness of Cleitus’s sister Lanice, who was once Alexander’s wet nurse. “You lent me your sweet breast, and see how I’ve repaid you, with the death of your very own brother!” he cried. When gently reminded of the public duties of his kingship, he refused to appear before anyone, saying that a murderer of his friends deserved no crown.

He ate and drank nothing. Most worrying, the local tribes between the Oxus and the Jaxartes rivers were in open revolt, using raiding tactics to harass Macedonian garrisons. Informed of these attacks, which usually provoked him to immediate action, Alexander only sank into a deeper state of immobility.

Aeschines is correct to say that we all feared for his sanity. It is also true that Hephaestion was beside himself with worry, and that Bagoas attempted, but failed, to lift the king out of his funk. It was interesting to me that another person who might have helped, the divine Thais, did not make an appearance at this desperate hour. By that time she was already adorning the tent of Ptolemy, who came to me for the first time as a supplicant.

“We want you to go to him, because he has an affinity for scribblers.”

“Thais might do better.”

Ptolemy ignored this suggestion, but went on somewhat darkly:

“We still need him. Go now.”

Of the precise identity of ‘we’, and the nature of their need, I chose not to ask, but did what I was told.

For my part, I truly believed Alexander would harm himself. For the first time, then, I built up in his mind the idea that he was not only a god, but that he partook of the prerogatives of Zeus himself. Maybe this is what Aeschines is basing his story upon-he gets it so wrong it is hard to tell. For we did not speak throughout the day, but for less than an hour, and I did not meet with him before Sisygambus did, but after.

I began by alluding to Hesiod, who describes the goddess of justice-Dike-as the companion of Alexander’s divine father, Zeus. Where justice points out the crookedness in a man’s heart, the Father deals out retribution. But would it not be implausible, I suggested, if the king of heaven merely did what Dike told him to do, without expecting any service rendered to him in return? Clearly, Dike sits at Zeus’s right hand not only to dictate, but to watch and heed the acts of the god. Those acts are the very standards by which justice is measured. It can only be agreed, then, that a king’s acts must be just, simply because he has done them.

Alexander looked askance at me.

“Tell me plainly what you are saying, Machon. Do you think me entitled to murder my friends?”

“I suggest that is not the way to think of it.”

“The murder?”

“Your privileges have nothing to do with who you are, personally. Think of Darius…what sort of man was he? Yet to the Persians he was the pillar holding up the vault of the sky. Someone must set the limits who is not submerged by them. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise?”

“The men around you will drown.”

Alexander sat up on the cushions. Those eyes, so wide-set they seemed to be staring at me from around both sides of a corner, fixed on me with a peculiar sadness.

“I believe, my dear Machon, that you will come to regret making this argument to me.”

“By my oath to my countrymen, I can offer you only the truth,” I said.

“So be it, then.”

At the risk of seeming to magnify my influence, it did appear that from this point Alexander fought with a new ferocity. From his base at Marakanda, he waged a war of extermination against his enemies. The natives there had little taste for pitched battle, but instead bled the Macedonians white by attacking Alexander’s garrisons, supply caravans, and foundations. One chieftain in particular, Spitamenes, led a clever campaign of raids that tied down a Greek army ten times the size of his own. All but the largest concentrations of troops were targets: in a disaster that was never reported to the rest of the army, Spitamenes’ cavalry slaughtered 2000 Foot Companions and 300 cavalry at the Zeravshan River. But such losses could not be hidden for long. The Macedonians began to whisper of a war that would never end.

Alexander was comprehensively cruel in his reprisals. As a matter of policy, all the males of any town or village suspected of aiding Spitamenes were slaughtered. The Macedonians sent out small groups of mobile raiders who saw little success against Spitamenes, but were very good at terrifying the defenseless. Food stores were appropriated or destroyed, fields burned, families scattered. When Alexander at last marched for the Indus it was because he left little intact behind him. Spitamenes himself was finally betrayed and murdered, just as Darius and Bessus had been in their turn.

The chiefs of Sogdia were particularly contemptuous of any central authority, due in large part to their possession of several rock-cut fortresses that had never been taken by storm. The biggest of these was known simply as the Rock of Sogdia-a great stone pinnacle five stades high, with sheer walls and a snow-capped peak. The fortress of the chief, Oxyartes, was chiseled into the Rock, with no approach except along a narrow ledge. It had never been attacked by the Persians, much less taken. For this reason alone Alexander burned to make it his.

When the Macedonians arrived, Alexander was visited by emissaries of the Sogdian chief, cheekily demanding to know why the Greeks had violated his-that is, Oxyartes’s-territory. Alexander, through his interpreter, demanded the surrender of the Rock, on pain of death for all upon it. At this, the emissaries examined the backs of the Macedonians, as if assuring themselves of some fact.

“What are you doing?” the King asked them.

“You appear to have no wings,” they replied, “so your threats mean nothing to us!”

This remark reminded Alexander of the arrogance of the Tyrians, before he humbled their city. He told the emissaries to prepare their defenses for a siege. They laughed at him, asking what rock ever needed preparation to resist the wind? The fortress, they pointed out, was too high to be troubled by catapults or missile weapons of any kind. It was also blessed with abundant snowmelt and enough supplies to outlast a twenty-year assault. Alexander reminded them of similar boasts at Tyre and Gaza. The emissaries’ reply was a final insult, suggesting a place for the Macedonians to encamp that was sheltered from driven snow in the winter and received cool breezes in the summer-“for your pride will keep you here a very long time,” they assured him.

The army made camp-but not in the place the Sogdians suggested-and Alexander rode out with his officers to scout the best point to commence the assault. They had ridden around the Rock for quite some time before realizing they had already made a complete circuit without finding a single weakness. As they stood there, they felt a tingling sensation, as if a light rain was falling on them. The sky, however, was cloudless. Looking more closely, they saw the source of the ‘rain’-the Sogdians had lined up on the walls of their fortress. They had their robes lifted, and they were pissing on the Macedonians below.

Riding away some distance, Alexander wiped his face with a rag. “Find me a fast way onto that Rock,” he said. “Whatever it costs.”

The generals conferred through the night. They considered elevating their catapults on towers, or building an enormous ramp for their battering rams. But such massive constructions would mean bringing in soil and timber from great distances, as the ground in the area was barren. The Sogdians’s insults, moreover, had set Alexander in such a rage that his patience was spent.

There was time for only one solution. A call went out in the camp for those most practiced in rock climbing. To the three hundred men who responded, Alexander promised the princely sum of ten talents to each who reached the top of the Rock; once at the summit, they were to make as loud a racket as they could, so that the Macedonians and the Sogdians would know they were there. To speed their progress, Alexander made sacrifice to Hermes the Messenger, and to the mountain itself.

The attackers set out after dark, each equipped with sets of sharp iron stakes, hammers, rope, and two days’ rations. In theory, the stakes would be driven into whatever soil or ice the men would find; in practice, as climbers rose higher, they found themselves pounding rods into solid rock. Well may we imagine their terror as they clung to the sheer wall, equally afraid to go up or down, forced to witness their comrades slip and fall around them. As the sun set on the first day of the ascent, the survivors secured themselves by whatever method they could, some by tying ropes around themselves, others simply by wedging their arms or legs into tight places. The lucky ones were able to sleep; the unlucky, in their exhaustion and paralysis, slipped from their places and died. The cold tortured all of them, until many gave up and released their holds. The remains of some who fell were never found.

The survivors later reported that they had the same dream that desperate night: as they hugged the wall for their very lives, all were visited by a beautiful Oreid. The nymph, who was naked except for a sheen of the clearest ice on her body, seemed to float before them on a breeze blowing up from the base of the Rock. Using no words, she somehow communicated to each man that he should take hold of her shining hair, which fell to her waist and was garlanded with mountain flowers. Many of the climbers at first hesitated to do so, as she seemed so light as to flutter in the air before them, but were seized by such a temptation to embrace the lovely girl that they abandoned their toeholds and threw themselves upon her. Entangled in this slender form, they suddenly imagined they could sense the veins of water pounding deep in the rock, hear the tender mosses calling to them from the hillsides, and feel themselves carried to a place much higher on the wall, where they were planted with a kiss. And when they awoke, they found themselves clinging to the exact spot where they had dreamt the Oreid had lifted them.

By the dawn of the second day there was a great clamor at the summit of the Rock. Looking up from their camp, the Macedonians saw that most of the climbers were now on a ledge high above the fortress, waving their arms and rejoicing. The Sogdians, for their part, were greatly disturbed by this spectacle, for in their ignorance they believed that Alexander had indeed recruited soldiers with wings, and that the flying Macedonians were not thanking the gods for their mere survival, but preparing to attack. Though the climbers had no weapons, and were pitifully few in number, the Sogdians were defeated by their fears.

The abrupt surrender of the Rock came as a great relief to us. It was also a momentous example for the neighboring chiefdoms, who might have entertained thoughts that they might hold out against Alexander. The King, hoping to discourage such ambitions with a judicious show of kindness, restrained his impulse to punish Oxyartes for his arrogance. The chief was allowed to retain nominal sovereignty over his lands. Oxyartes, in turn, invited Alexander to provision himself from the stores he had laid up in his fortress, which were so prodigious that he could supply the entire Macedonian army several times over. At this, Alexander privately savored his good fortune, for the Sogdian emissaries had not exaggerated about withstanding a twenty-year siege.

When he surrendered his redoubt, the Sogdian chief Oxyartes did it with such gracious good-humor that the Macedonians were much charmed. He offered an inexhaustible supply of food, wine, and feminine companionship. Alexander, to whom gift-giving was as serious a matter as warfare itself, matched this largess with presents of gold and silver from the treasury at Persepolis. Oxyartes took the baubles, of course, but with the slightest air of disdain for such useless things, preferring in his turn to give weapons, horses, and provisions. Alexander pretended not to need these things either, and so the competition went on for some time, with the subordinates on each side benefitting far more than either of the two leaders.

In this part of Asia it was considered proper for fathers publicly to advertise the charms of their unmarried daughters. It was on such an occasion, performing a dance for the royal Companions in the reception hall of the chief, that Alexander first saw Rohjane. With her two sisters, she wore a finer version of the formal Sogdian men’s costume, with a knee-length, brocaded jacket of silk, tightly-cinched belt, and narrow trousers with the cuffs stuffed into leather boots. A cone-shaped headdress covered her head, with the tip deliberately bent forward. (The tip, it was said, had to be bent just so or the whole effect was ruined.) In their dance the girls held swords, which they swung and skipped over in unison. Rohjane’s mannish clothes notwithstanding, lines of plaited blonde hair swept down from the bottom of her cap, belying any possibility that she was anything but a woman. The playful Sogdians were amused at the spectacle of girls imitating warriors-a joke that was lost on the Macedonians, who had very proper ideas about this sort of thing. Alexander had eyes only for Rohjane.

In their lack of imagination, some rhapsodes have described Rohjane as ‘the second most beautiful woman in Asia’-that is, the most beautiful after Stateira. For the record, I don’t know if she was the second most beautiful woman in Asia, or perhaps in Sogdia alone, or just in the Macedonian camp. What ignorance to assume that mere beauty had any influence on Alexander, who had grown up immersed in the occupations and pleasures of men! Having been there at the time, I can attest that her appearance had less to do with it than her other charms. It could have been the way she tilted her head in the dance, for instance, or the play of slight creases around her mouth when she smiled, or the way she kissed the air as she disappeared behind the curtain.

Of what the heart wants, there is no accounting. Straightaway Alexander called to Oxyartes, asking for Rohjane to join him for a drink. Surprised, the chief asked if the King did not mean her elder sister. No, replied Alexander, he meant Rohjane. At this point the chief turned white-his reluctance was obvious, though everyone assumed it had to do with disposing of his daughters in the proper order, eldest first. In retrospect, I am not so sure this was the reason. For it was not paternal propriety that showed on the face of genial Oxyartes, but apprehension, perhaps even fear for his powerful but ignorant guest. But he was in no position to refuse.

The King spent an anxious few minutes waiting for the girl to return, suffering in silence the inanity of an argument between Craterus and Perdiccas. The former argued that man always gives away the fact that he is a prostitute by the timbre of his farts. Perdiccas, showing his prudence, denied that buggery had any such effect. They went back and forth on this question for some time, until the curtain to the women’s quarters rustled, and Alexander told them to shut up.

Rohjane came out in a different outfit this time. Her legs were covered by loose-fitting chintz trousers belted above her waist. Around her shoulders she had a short jacket of gold-embroidered green velvet left unfastened at the front, and a silk shawl. Her chest was entirely uncovered except for a plum-colored handkerchief that hung from her neck. This thin garment did little to conceal her shape as she moved, bewildering the otherwise delighted guests.

She strode toward Alexander on green leather shoes with built-up heels. Her every step was accompanied by the music of tinkling jewelry. When she bowed, her hair fell in curled disarray around her cheeks-a display that seemed to intrigue all the men, who rarely saw ungirt long hair among the respectable women of Macedon. There was a slight smile on her face, as if she were savoring some joke only she had heard.

Still, for all her undeniable attractions, she could not match the bounteous presences of Thais or Stateira. Her charm lay more with her quickness of mind. That, and her unaccountable confidence, for she was nothing more than a minor chief’s daughter, on display at the demand of the conqueror the Persian Empire, yet she showed no fear at all. In this she reminded me of someone whom I could not remember at that moment.

In trying to recall whom, I was distracted by the conversation that followed, and can only remember a few lines.

“King Alexander wishes to speak with you,” Oxyartes said.

“So I supposed. Well, King Alexander, speak!” she replied, in a heavily-accented Greek identical to her father’s.

“Rohjane!”

“I would speak,” said Alexander, “except that I am struck dumb.”

“What a pair we are, then. You are struck dumb, and I am commanded to be.”

Alexander looked at her with those eyes, which were not easy to withstand. Rohjane returned his stare, until he smiled, and she finally blushed, looking away. And with that, the bargain was sealed.

The next day they were married. According to Sogdian custom, Rohjane was not required to be present, but only her father. Alexander was presented with a loaf of bread, which he cut in half with a ritual sword passed down from the time of Oxyartes’s earliest forebears. Half the bread went to the father, and half to the husband, and when they ate the union was made.

The most remarkable thing about the wedding was not the ritual, but the differing expressions on the faces of the bride’s and groom’s parties. The Sogdians, of course, were unanimously delighted. The Macedonians, including Hephaestion, Craterus, Ptolemy, Perdiccas and Parmenion, could not have made their discomfort more obvious. To them, the marriage was nothing less than a disaster. Naturally, as her conqueror, Alexander had every right to take the girl into his bed in any fashion he wished. He was free to spawn a whole nest of bastards by her. But it was unthinkable that he would actually marry a girl of such minor status. No doubt they were also troubled by the possible implications of a ‘Queen Rohjane;’ the powers behind the throne were crowded enough without adding a new, unpredictable player to the game. These suspicions no doubt had something to do with her cool reception among the Macedonians, as Aeschines has described. Is it any wonder, then, that I sought to increase the Athenians’ influence over the court by befriending her? To my mind, I would have been negligent not to have taken the opportunity.

Of Alexander’s thinking on this matter I can say nothing for sure. He never discussed it with me, and met my eyes only once during the ceremony. There was a petulant defiance in them, as if his decision to marry was supposed to make a point. How god-like he was in his impetuosity, in his contempt for consequences, he seemed to be telling me. How much like Zeus, who never let the inferiority of his mortal conquests frustrate his pleasure.

It was then, just after the wedding, after Rohjane was led out in her semi-barbarous wedding gown of kidskin and fox fur, and presented her cheek for her husband to kiss, that I remembered the person of whom she most reminded me.

It was Olympias.

Speaking of his minor conquests, there is another I must mention though my time is short. I feel compelled to describe it because it will never appear in the public histories, or if it does, only as an unconfirmed story that the reader may believe or not according to his prejudices. I tell you now it did happen, in just the way I will describe it.

Just north of the Oxus River, the Macedonians came upon a small village. As the army approached, a deputation came out to greet it wearing Greek dress, and speaking in an Ionian Greek dialect. In Alexander’s presence they declared that they were Milesians of the clan Branchidae. At this Callisthenes struck his head in wonder. For these, he declared, had to be the very descendants of the priestly clan of the Branchidae who had once tended the sacred precincts of Apollo at Didyma. He was about to say more-but bid the King first to order the Milesians out of earshot.

When they were far enough away, he explained, “During the Ionian revolt against the Great King 150 years ago, the priests surrendered the sanctuary to the Persians. To spare them the fate they deserved from their countrymen, Darius the Great removed the Branchidae from Ionia and allowed them to resettle in Sogdia, far out of reach of retribution. Or so we all thought…”

Alexander, not wishing to alarm his guests, called them back and told them that he would camp near their town for the night. The next day, he said, he would return to them with an announcement.

As the betrayal of the Branchidae was foremost a crime against the people of the city of Miletus, Alexander decided to put the question of punishment to them. That evening, the King called a meeting of all the Milesians in his army. These numbered less than a hundred, but came from all divisions of his force, from cavalry officers to hypaspists to archers to quartermasters and engineers. In truth, it was quite a sight to see all these men, in their widely varying uniforms but common manner of speaking, wrestle with this dilemma. One man, a phalangite, argued for the punishment of the adult males.

“There is only one fate befitting traitors,” he declared, “whether they be father, son, or grandson. What good would any sacred oath, such as the one the Branchidae once took, if they could light out to foreign lands, and avoid all responsibility for their acts? It would be unfortunate for the women and children to lose their fathers, but their ancestors took this risk when they Medized. Any other course would invite Apollo’s displeasure.”

Some cheered this statement. Another man, an engineer, rose to disagree.

“One fate for traitors, of course! But these are not the traitors. They are not even the grandsons of the traitors. They are innocents one hundred and fifty years removed from the sins of another generation. The sons of many cities that Medized are with us today, including a fair number of Thebans! Shall we punish our own comrades too…?”

“What you make to seem absurd is but the work of Fate,” replied the phalangite. “These Branchidae will suffer no more than Croesus himself, when he paid the debt made five generations before by his ancestor, the bodyguard Gyges, when he overthrew the royal house of the Heraclidae for the sake of a faithless woman…”

And the debate went on like this for some time, with a vigor that would have done credit to deliberations in our own Assembly. When the King asked for a voice vote there was no clear majority for mercy or the sword. When the men were asked to raise their hands, the company was split down the middle.

“Damnable indecision!” cried Alexander. “You are all dismissed, then-your King will take the burden on himself.”

What he would do was not clear, as he had shown no bias toward either side in the debate. I did note a crease of agony on his face when the engineer alluded to the descendants of Persian collaborators in the army: Alexander’s predecessor a century and a half earlier-also named Alexander-had sent Xerxes tokens of water and earth, emblems of Macedon’s submission. Perhaps what followed had more to do with expiating this sin than any crime the Branchidae had committed.

The next morning the King went into the village with two guards. Upon arrival his small escort was surrounded by children bearing them garlands to wear. Decorated with blooms of anemone, asphodel, and gorse, the Macedonians were led by little hands to the village elder chosen by the rest of the Branchidae to represent them. When Alexander arrived the old man was on his knees weeding his flowerbeds. His host gave a little cry of surprise when he looked up to see the Lord of Asia at his garden gate.

“Welcome! You were expected, but I see the children found you first. So sorry I didn’t see you come…the hyacinths are such jealous mistresses! My name is Achilles.”

Alexander could not answer at first. He was noticeably rattled by the presence of the children, and the fact that his host had the same name as one of the ancestors he so publicly revered. When he opened his mouth and nothing came out, Achilles gestured back toward his garden.

“Many of these flowers came with us from our old home. The hyacinth is sacred to Apollo. We try to keep the old ways here, but as you must imagine it is difficult in such a strange land!”

“Yes, one would think,” the King answered.

The old man gave the king a short tour of his handiwork. The Macedonians were aloof, stone-faced, until the sweet perfume of the flowers began to work on them. The guards told me that the fragrance reminded them very much of the hills and meadows of their home near Lyncestis, northwest of Pella. Alexander, too, seemed affected by memories of home as he followed the houseproud Achilles. The weight seemed to lift from his shoulders; he began to ask gardening questions.

“You know, in my years I think I’ve done every kind of work there is to do in this village. But nothing gives me as much pleasure as this piece of ground,” said Achilles.

To which the King made an abrupt, bizarre declaration: “If I were not Alexander, I would tend a garden!”

Achilles nodded at this as if it made perfect sense.

“There is a story that the Temple at Didyma is surrounded by great hyacinths three feet tall, and in every color! I have never seen it, so don’t know whether to believe such stories.”

“You should…though the sanctuary is not what it once was…”

The talk of Didyma returned the subject to what Alexander had come to announce. His face hardened, and he turned away from Achilles’ pleasant beds. Yet he could not deliver an indictment with his neck draped with flowers and the naive eyes of the children looking up at him. Instead, he bid Achilles a sudden goodbye, turned on his heel, and rushed away. When he was out of sight of the village, he tore the garlands from his neck and threw them on the ground.

At camp, he disappeared into his tent and was not seen for the rest of the day. By the evening, Peithon was summoned, and left with an impassive expression on his face. I dogged him for information, but the frigid fellow would not divulge what Alexander had ordered him to do.

Before dawn the next morning, and in complete silence, 900 Foot Companions encircled the village of the Branchidae. For the occasion they had left their pikes stacked outside their tents and carried only their short swords.

The killing began that day with no warning-no rebuke, no recitation of the crimes of their father’s fathers. Most of the people were cut down as they fled their houses, and the ones that stayed inside were driven out by fire. How can I describe the screams to you? The cries of men in agony you have all heard, in battle. But have you heard how a mother sounds when her children are murdered before her eyes? It is an inhuman thing, something between a groan and a shriek. All the Macedonians in the village, and those lying idle in the camp a short distance away, heard it for all too long, as the Branchidae, of all ages, were pried, dug, or coaxed from their hiding places. I saw it with my own eyes as I came around to watch from the wooded side of the village. I saw fathers go down fighting against three and four assailants; I saw an entire family, parents and three children, stumble out of their burning house with the flesh melting from their bones. I saw soldiers with tears in their eyes cut soft throats of infants and lay them down in the street, as if to sleep.

You should not suppose this was easy for the men ordered to perform this labor. Hacking and stabbing many human bodies to death takes a steady hand; for a soldier with a family at home, murdering innocents is an implicit betrayal of every rationale used to excuse a life at war. After the deed was done, these Foot Companions, all hardened veterans of the third lochai of Peithon’s battalion, were useless for any further duty. Many of them seemed reduced to shades, with their eyes perpetually fixed on some distant place, as if they somehow might see behind the images that appeared unbidden in their minds. Their comrades avoided the pollution that adhered to them. Alexander took pity on these men, dismissing them from Marakanda with a talent each and a personal send-off from their King. Peithon himself, I should add, showed no ill effect from leading an action that ruined so many of his men.

The bodies-more than two hundred of them-were collected and dumped into a pit in the woods. When that was done, the heavy work began: an entire battalion under Coenus was commanded to come in and remove all evidence of human habitation. This meant more than just leveling the buildings. Everything, including the foundation stones, the fence posts, the street pavers, the roots of the trees in the orchards, was ripped from the ground. The remaining holes were filled in, and disguised with leaves and soil. Hundreds of men spent days smoothing over the plow furrows in the fields. Whether a scrap of lumber or a single olive or a child’s footprint on the ground, nothing was left that betrayed the existence of the Branchidae.

The work included the destruction of several small altars to Apollo and Zeus. This task drew the most resistance, and Perdiccas was forced to apply harsh discipline to see it done. Alexander, for his part, said that his father Zeus had vouchsafed his permission for the act. He said this several weeks later, at Marakanda, when he welcomed others to drink with him again. Still thinking of what I had seen, I sat with him all night, and managed to be the last to leave when the sun came up. But he raised his hand when I opened my mouth to speak.

“I know what you want to say, Machon. But before you say anything remember what you told me after Cleitus died: if the King does it, it is no sin. Remember that I warned you.”

It was true that he had warned me. But the principle of the consolation I offered was not to excuse any outrage at all, but only justice. To my discredit, I did not insist on this distinction, but remained silent as he rose from his cushions and dragged himself into the gloom of his apartment. Nor did I raise the issue again during any of the eventful months that followed. Perhaps it was fear that shut my mouth, perhaps ignorance of what he might do. That I kept this silence I accept as my greatest offense. If that was Aeschines’ charge against me here, I would not dispute it.

Let me say this: having watched the bitter work of that day, I have impeached myself in ways none of my enemies will ever know. The nights were most difficult when the camp had settled down for the night. That was when, in my dreams, the wind moaning over some nameless Asian peak became the dismal plaint of the Branchidae mothers. I awoke. Fretting, I threw aside the tentflap to lose myself in chatter with the guards. Once only I longed to put the question to some low-ranking son of an Orestan farmer: should a dangerous child like Alexander be allowed to grow up? Should we all run the risk of letting him look his nature in the face? Or are we all safer keeping him as pliant as a child-or just as well, as a god? I wonder what the guard would have said. Craterus’ description of Arridaeus in the temple of Heracles returned to me:

He is not unhappy. He thinks he is divine.

Unwilling ever to accept defeat, Alexander raised the blighted issue of prostration again. Low-ranking functionaries were simply ordered henceforward to grovel in Alexander’s presence. But prostration would never become the custom unless the superordinate Macedonians and Greeks-the generals and philosophers and diplomats from the mainland cities-also accepted it. Alexander, being anxious to avoid a confrontation like that with Black Cleitus, but also determined to display the kind of evenhandedness that would assure the loyalty of his Persian subjects, looked to his loyal Hephaestion for help with this problem. Together they hatched a plan that would introduce the practice is a more cunning fashion.

On the occasion of a dinner party, Alexander let it be known that those who performed prostration would earn the privilege of receiving a kiss from the King’s mouth. This offer, to receive a special favor for their abasement, was enough to convince the great majority of the Macedonians to succumb at last-Alexander was pleased to watch them all come before him one by one, touch their foreheads to the carpet, and come forward for their kisses, which the King gladly offered on the lips.

All of his Companions came-Leonnatus son of Anteas, Lysimachus son of Agathocles, Perdiccas son of Orontes, Ptolemy son of Lagus. Of the generals, the single exception was Parmenion, who had contrived to be off on some self-appointed business. The Persians who were present, including old Artabazus and Arsaces, the new satrap of Media, were pleased by this show of respect for the traditional custom. All was proceeding well-until it was Callisthenes’s turn to approach the dais.

Taking his opportunity when Alexander was busy talking with Hephaestion, Callisthenes sauntered up for his kiss without prostrating himself. Alexander would have smacked the nephew of Aristotle anyway, until Peithon piped up that Callisthenes had not gone down as everyone else had, and so had not earned a kiss. Alexander turned his head away from the puckered face of the sophist, who merely shrugged and launched into a dangerous peroration, the essence of which was the following:

“I suppose I am out of a kiss. But I think it wise to keep the distinction we Greeks make between men and gods. Have we all not seen the wages of dishonoring the true divinities, as the jealousy of Dionysus led to the death of our friend Cleitus? Might mortal men, even those of the bravest and most noble character, simply wait for the sanction of the Pythian oracle at Delphi for their divine honors, as Heracles did after he died? Indeed, it seems foolish to make a custom that the people will never follow, as we all know the Greeks back home will never bow to anyone.

“I, for one, think too much of this campaign to endanger it with barbarous formalities. I am too loyal to my king to render him into Darius Alexander.”

With that, Callisthenes went back to his couch and took up his cup. There was consternation on the faces of the Persian nobles, and purple-faced rage on Alexander’s. The mention of Cleitus galled him particularly, as did the name ‘Darius Alexander,’ which had the dangerous potential to stick. But Callithenes’s words were received with some sympathy by the Macedonians, including those who had already consented to prostration. Perceiving this, Alexander swallowed his anger, bidding the party to continue. But he did not forget Callisthenes’s insult.