The Nature of Alexander

Persia

FROM THIS TIME ON, Alexander’s chroniclers record outstanding events, between which weeks will have passed, occupied in the mere conveyance of a huge court, administration and army from place to place, or planning and populating a new city, or resting his men after a hard campaign. Over the vast and varied landscapes of Asia, amid the excitements of exploration and war, he evolved a kind of daily life which he pursued when nothing interfered with it. Plutarch has most to say of it, probably drawing on the vanished memoirs of Chares, the court chamberlain.

Alexander’s day began with public prayers. His priesthood, unlike his privilege of divinity, was a function of his human kingship. His personal celebrations were for great events; but regularly as a matter of course he recommended his people to the gods. Almost to the day of his death, when so ill he had to be carried in a litter to the shrine, he made the morning libation.

After this he “took breakfast sitting” (in a chair, not on a dining couch); then spent the day in “hunting, administering justice, managing army business, or reading.” He was a keen hunter, intrigued by changes of country and its game; while the army lumbered along at foot pace he would pass his time at the chase. He lived close to the long ages of man in which wild animals were vital sources of food, and dangerous enemies; as Xenophon recognized when he called the sport “the image of war.”

“Administering justice” was already an enormous task. First there were the affairs of Macedon. Antipater was firm and capable, but Olympias detested him; her complaints, accusations and intrigues followed Alexander everywhere. She was jealous of his friends; furiously jealous of Hephaestion. Alexander, who wrote to her faithfully and sent her a stream of lavish gifts, occasionally came to the end of his patience, and is quoted as once remarking that she charged pretty high rent for the nine months’ lodging she had given him. He even allowed himself to be seen in public sharing one of her letters with Hephaestion; which, considering how it would have enraged her, betrays some exasperation.

There was also mainland Greece with its restless “subject-allies.” Sparta was in revolt till crushed by Antipater in 331. The danger from the south necessitated a standing army in Macedon, and garrisons in all those strongpoints whose magnificent ashlar walls can be seen today. Had Alexander not been able to attract foreign troops, continue paying them, and keep their loyalty, his forces would have stretched to breaking point. Antipater would deal with home emergencies; but all important policy decisions came to the King.

Far outweighing all this was the complex administration of the conquered lands. In the liberated city-states he had restored Greek forms of government; where Persian satrapies were indigenous he had appointed satraps, native ones if possible; to old kingdoms he had given kings. He was Pharaoh of Egypt, and founder of Alexandria, an enormous project employing swarms of experts. During the growing pains of all these communities, a constant traffic of problems and arbitrations followed his march.

“Managing army business” meant, to him, much more than making staff appointments and directing grand strategy. He never thought himself above the concerns of a regimental officer. Without doubt the love of the army was the breath of life to him; but never in his life did he try to get it cheap. It was not just a matter of being first into danger and last to take comforts when conditions were rough. Before a battle he could greet men by name instead of making speeches. To have one’s exploits remembered by him was in itself an award, though his material rewards were generous. He was constantly interested in the common soldier’s predicaments, however remote from his own. When a man with a good record was found malingering to stay near his mistress, Alexander, having gone into the matter, said that being a free courtesan she could not be compelled, but perhaps could be persuaded to follow her man. If he was hard up, Alexander probably furnished the persuasion. Whether in the field or routine fatigues, he watched out for merit. A soldier in the treasure train, who shouldered a heavy pack when the mule in his charge gave out, was told just to get it as far as his own tent, and keep the contents. Like Xenophon’s Cyrus, Alexander aroused an eager wish to please him. He never needed, for troops under his command, the brutal punishments of the Roman army. No regiment of his was ever “decimated”—numbered off in tens and every tenth man killed. Yet his discipline was meticulous. Once when his troops were drawn up in battle formation, he noticed a single soldier fixing belatedly the throwing strap of his javelin and, walking up to him, pushed him out of the phalanx, saying he had no use for slovens. From him, as the survival of the story shows, this must have been as traumatic as a flogging from Julius Caesar.”

He could take the surrender of wealthy cities, and hold back his troops from sacking them. One of his rare impositions of the death sentence was on two of his Macedonians who had raped the wives of two foreign auxiliaries; his men were his men wherever they came from. This close attention to their affairs must often have taken up nearly as much time as the administration of his empire.

Never described in detail, but evident from results, are innumerable personal conversations with the men he regarded, and treated, as his friends: Macedonian generals, actors, musicians; in due course Persian lords and at least one Persian eunuch; an Indian sage; old Sisygambis; all people he individually knew. From time to time he must have looked in on his poor imbecile half-brother Arridaeus, who disappears from history till Alexander’s death, when he is discovered close at hand in the royal palace.

Seeing that routine business was constantly falling into arrears during periods of violent action, it is astonishing that he found time to read; not only history and civics, but classical tragedy and modern poetry. At the supper parties which closed his day and relaxed its tensions, “no prince’s conversation was ever so agreeable”; so says Plutarch, adding that this applied as long as he was sober.

About Alexander’s drinking habits much nonsense has been written which can be corrected by the most elementary medical knowledge combined with the evidence of his life. Aristobulus, cited by Plutarch, says he liked to sit up late over the wine, not drinking heavily but for the sake of the talk. It seems incredible that this should arouse scepticism when any night of the year in London, Paris, New York, Athens or Rome, hundreds of people whose constitution it suits will be found doing precisely this. In Alexander’s case, the mere record of his dynamic energy (he took exercise on the march by jumping off and on a moving chariot) and his astonishing powers of recuperation makes the idea of habitual drunkenness absurd. On the other hand, male Macedonian social life embraced, traditionally, the deliberate heavy drinking bout in honour of this or that; and in these he certainly did not hold back, getting disastrously drunk on two occasions at least. There is no doubt that he and his generals made up a pretty hard-drinking mess; but it is abundantly clear from the overall picture that he usually behaved as Aristobulus says he did, though sometimes he made a night of it.

In vino Veritas, and he was no exception. When he took too much, the insecurities of his boyhood surfaced in an insatiable craving for reassurance. He loved being told of his achievements, and if he did not get enough he asked for more. No doubt hostile propagandists made the most of it; but it would be foolish to reject Plutarch’s statement which, though citing no good source, has so much psychological consistency. Probably he could irritate his dearest friends, even though, we are told, he only claimed what was true. But the kind of affection he inspired throughout his lifetime supports Aristobulus’ words about his more habitual charm.

In July 331, about the time of his twenty-fifth birthday, Alexander marched east to Mesopotamia, where beyond the Tigris Darius was awaiting him.

A great mobilization had been held of the forces from the still unconquered eastern empire. The valuable stiffening of Greek mercenaries had been lost, all but about 4,000. But beside the elite troops of Persia, there were the less disciplined but fierce and tough levies of Bactria and Sogdiana under Bessus, the powerful satrap of Bactria and cousin of the King; also auxiliaries of many tributary races from the Caucasus to the Indian frontier. All were now based on Babylon, where the Persian commanders had worked hard on improving weaponry. After the lesson of Issus, javelins had been replaced with spears; and there was a squadron of the fearsome scythed chariots, with their spearheaded yoke poles and multi-bladed wheels. Nothing, unfortunately, could be done about the continuing liability of Darius as commander-in-chief.

The cavalry under Nabarzanes was of high calibre; born horsemen, and far better mounted than the Greeks. Beside the tall Nisaeans, probably as big as modern chargers, Bucephalas must have looked like a thickset pony. For such troops to wear down the Greeks with harrying tactics promised better results than a pitched battle, even without Darius’ known record. But either he was resolved to redeem the honour lost at Issus, or had been made to feel he ought. He marched his huge host towards the ancient town of Arbela, between the Tigris and the hills.

A cavalry detachment was sent west to the Euphrates, to locate and oppose Alexander’s crossing. But his advance engineers ran out their double bridge on piles from their own side till Alexander came up; the Persians, commanded by Mazaeus, satrap of Babylon, made off without opposing him. Babylon, the heart of ancient conquered Assyria, was not the most loyal part of the Persian empire.

The Tigris, whose name means Arrow, was too swift to bridge and had to be forded. Alexander got his infantry across between two columns of cavalry, one to break the current for them, the other to catch any men swept away. He headed the infantry himself, and then stood on the bank pointing out the shallower places. Not a man was lost.

No other commander of unmechanized forces could ever move as fast as Alexander. He also knew when to take his time. Instead of striking across the hot river plain, where the retreating Mazaeus had burned the crops, he skirted it by the northern uplands, cooler and well watered. Too late to catch him as he struggled across the Tigris, Darius improved the time by sending an army of slaves to level the intervening plain of Gaugamela. He had been told that Issus had been lost because he had not had room to deploy his forces; and the chariots would need smooth ground.

As Alexander marched south towards him east of the Tigris, there was an eclipse of the moon, one of the most alarming phenomena of the ancient world. Thanks to Aristotle, Alexander understood its cause; not for him the fatal delay of the superstitious Nicias which, in the previous century, had lost the whole Athenian force in Sicily and with it the Peloponnesian War. Alexander did not, however, bother his anxious soldiers with astronomy, but summoned the seers to cheer them up by identifying the darkened moon with Persia. He sacrificed punctiliously to the powers involved, the Sun, Moon and Earth; his knowing what they were doing did not affect his belief that they were gods.

A Persian moon had indeed been eclipsed for ever. Stateira, wife of Darius, the most beautiful woman of mortal birth in Asia, had fallen sick and died. Plutarch says, without hint of scandal, that she died in childbirth, in which case it must have been much earlier. In any event, Alexander had held up his march for a day to perform her funeral rites, assuming the duties of a kinsman, including a day-long fast.

He may well have reproached himself, if he had sacrificed her to his sense of theatre. The splendid set piece from Xenophon would never be enacted now. Even in cushioned wagons, journeys over earth roads on hard wheels must have been a tiring business, with exposure to local infections. He must have wished he had been content with a less spectacular piece of generosity, which—since he had never attempted to use the women as hostages—he could have afforded. He had now to witness the grief of the children and Sisygambis; and though her continuing affection shows that she never blamed him, there need be no doubt that his mourning was sincere.

Curtius has a story here, with important later implications. Alexander sent one of the Queen’s attendant eunuchs, who is actually named, to inform Darius of her death and assure him that she had had the customary Persian funeral honours. The scene moves to Darius’ tent, where Darius cries out that such honours must be the tribute to a mistress. The eunuch reassures him, and he then expresses respect for his enemy’s conduct. This episode is the prologue to much inside information from Darius’ headquarters. In Curtius, it has every indication of having been first supplied by an eyewitness; a vivid and lively raconteur with a courtier’s sense of tact. More will be heard before long of such a person.

Darius now sent out scouts to report on the approach of Alexander. He caught a few, and learned where the Persians were. He then gave his men a four-day rest, trusting Darius not to move from his swept and garnished battleground. He also had his own base camp fortified, no doubt remembering the Issus massacre; and left in it all noncombatants, including Queen Sisygambis. He then led his troops towards the plain of Gaugamela. From the low hills that fringed it he saw the vast Persian host, of which the most conservative estimate is 200,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry. His own numbers were 40,000 infantry and 7,000 horse.

He convened a war council in the style of Macedon, whose kings conferred with their chiefs as primi inter pares. Several commanders were for bringing the rested troops straight into action; which, in view of Persian numbers, says a good deal for their confidence in Alexander. The experienced Parmenion pointed out that this was a field prepared for them by Darius, who might have hidden pit traps and caltrops in their way. Alexander agreed, made camp and rode out to reconnoitre, probably glad of the excuse to pause and calculate, without seeming overimpressed by Persian strength. He took a good look, in full view of their outposts. After noting their immense superiority in cavalry, the arm on which his own tactics most relied, he rode back to think.

Parmenion, who had evidently gone with him, advised him to try a night attack. He answered that he would not “steal a victory”—referring to Xenophon, original coiner of the phrase “to steal a march.” To flourish bravura over shrewdness was part of the Alexander touch. Night operations had endless possibilities of confusion and error; a night pursuit would give routed enemies the chance to re-form and retrieve morale. Darius had been allowed a year in which to collect his remaining assets and put them on the table. Now Alexander meant to beat him at his own game on his chosen pitch, and pick up the stake entire, with unarguable finality. It was the crux of his own destiny, and of much more, and this he knew. He ordered his men a good dinner and told them to get some sleep; they were to set out before dawn. He himself sat up late, thinking and planning.

Darius had been thinking too. As Alexander had hoped, he had been thinking like Parmenion. The Greeks were hopelessly outnumbered; what would they do but try to snatch advantage from a night surprise? Orders went out, not just to the outposts but to the whole huge host, to stand by all night, the men in arms and the horses bridled. To hear was to obey. Night passed, the men grew tired. In Alexander’s tent the lamp went out. Decisions taken, the outcome laid on the gods, he fell into deep sleep. When it was time for the men to be roused and fed, his officers found him sleeping like a child. They gave the necessary orders and came back. Finally Parmenion had to shake him. When asked how he could be so calm, he said he had had far more to worry about when the Persians were burning the crops ahead of him. Now, he had been given his heart’s desire.

It was a bad day for history when Quintus Curtius enrolled at a Roman school of rhetoric. With access to priceless sources now destroyed by fire or sack, of which he gives us tempting glimpses, he makes every major speech in his History a showpiece of his own, which seekers of fact can safely discard unread. In this spirit of academic exercise he furnishes Darius and Alexander with long pre-battle orations, which need not detain us. More interestingly, since it comes from a first-hand source, Arrian describes Alexander’s briefing of his officers. He told them they did not need speeches to inspire them; their own courage and pride in it would do that; just let each encourage the men under his command. They were not fighting now for Asia Minor, or for Egypt, but for the sovereignty of all Asia. Let each keep strict discipline in time of danger; observe complete silence when ordered to advance silently; raise a terrifying battle yell when the right moment came; be alert for orders, and swiftly pass them on. He was thinking ahead to the blinding dust which would prevent all visual signals. He needed to keep his plan flexible, and wanted swift response to any change of tactics.

The instruction to make the war yell terrifying may not be unrelated to the fact that, according to Plutarch, before the battle he sacrificed to Fear. Greeks readily personified any natural force; but there is no other record of his ever honouring this deity. It would seem that since Issus he thought of Fear as Darius’ familiar spirit. All these preparations attended to, he marched his men from the low hills down to the plain, as dawn light revealed the hosts to one another.

The Persian front, with plenty of room to manoeuvre, and outnumbering the Macedonians by about five to one, was so much longer that if things went amiss they stood to be not only outflanked but encircled. Alexander deepened his flanks with reverses which in case of an enveloping movement could turn outward to form a square. Parmenion as usual led the left wing, where he was opposed by the brave and able Mazaeus, whose withdrawal at the Euphrates had certainly not been caused by cowardice. Darius took the royal station in the centre; but had in front of him his Greek mercenaries and other strong contingents; also fifteen elephants and fifty scythed chariots. Alexander led the Macedonian right. Confronting him was the massive army of Bactria, led by its satrap, Bessus. So far did its line overlap his own, that he started the battle nearly opposite Darius.

He began, however, edging out to his right, as if to escape the Persian overlap. Darius ordered a corresponding movement to keep his overlap extended; he still committed no troops to action, trying to divine what Alexander meant to do. He kept moving right, till he was approaching the edge of Darius’ carefully flattened arena. On the rougher ground beyond, scythed chariots would not run and cavalry would be hampered. It was a trial of nerve. Darius, falling to the bluff, ordered Bessus’ men to oppose further rightward movement. Persian troops were now engaged. Alexander, by a series of precisely timed manoeuvres, caused more and more of them to be involved. He himself, at the head of the Companion Cavalry, meticulously bided his time.

He had been located, and Darius ordered the scythed chariots to charge him. But he had been permitted a leisurely reconnaissance beforehand and his arrangements for them were made. They were attacked with missiles by the Agriani; some of the daring tribesmen leaped head on at the horses, dragging them to a halt and pulling down the charioteers. Those that got through met wide lanes in the well-drilled infantry, shot harmlessly past and were disposed of at leisure in the rear.

Meantime, Darius’ left wing was becoming increasingly committed, while Parmenion’s forces still pinned down his right. The centre was thinning. Despite Alexander’s fewer numbers, he had ingeniously contrived that his apex of strength should meet an area of Persian weakness just where he wanted it to be.

It was time to change horses. A squire had been holding ready the veteran Bucephalas, now twenty-four, keeping him fresh for this moment, the climax of his active service. Alexander rode to the head of the royal squadron. Forming it into column, with a tapering point of which he was the apex, he raised the war yell, and hurtled towards Darius, now in the front line. The cavalry had not forgotten their orders to make a terrifying noise; they thundered after, offering their tributes to Fear.

Fear was their friend. As, unimpeded by the fifteen elephants, they rolled up the Persian front and approached the royal chariot, Darius wheeled it round, snatching the reins dropped by its wounded driver, and was the first to fly. The fall of the charioteer had been seen by neighbouring Persians; the chariot’s flight convinced them that it was the King who had fallen and died. The centre disintegrated; a signal for general rout. Alexander and his cavalry crashed on, hewing their way in pursuit, and intent on catching Darius.

A message then arrived from Parmenion that his sector was still heavily engaged. Alexander was no Rupert of the Rhine; once the messenger had located him in the dust and confusion, he abandoned the tempting chase to support his men and consolidate his victory. While reaching the threatened point he fought a fierce engagement in which sixty Companions died and Hephaestion was wounded. Much dispute has raged over this message, and on whether it was later stressed by Alexander’s chroniclers to discredit Parmenion. Its propaganda value seems very doubtful, considering that Parmenion’s was a holding operation, competently fulfilled, and the message saved Alexander from the grave danger of leaving a doubtful field. He was no doubt anxious to tell the world why he had let Darius slip through his fingers, and to receive proper credit for rescuing his left wing (whose danger was over by the time he got there); but this is a long way from finding scapegoats, and Parmenion emerges from the account without discredit.

As it was, Alexander’s forward dash had left a small gap in the line, not of strategic size, but big enough for a small task force detailed by Darius to attempt the rescue of his family. This troop of Royal Guards and Indians got through, and penetrated as far as the base camp, where they wasted valuable time in looting, and in killing non-combatants, before they reached their objective. Diodorus relates that many Persian captives joined forces with their countrymen and prepared for an escape; but that the Queen Mother Sisygambis, when the women called to her to hurry, sat silent and immobile in her chair. Soon afterwards the Persian troop was beaten off.

Meantime the satrap Mazaeus had learned of Darius’ flight. Like Nabarzanes at Issus, who had also held down the redoubtable Parmenion and been similarly left in the lurch, he decided his obligations were at an end. He extricated as many of his men as he could, and went racing back to Babylon. Though he and Nabarzanes had reached the same conclusion, they were different men; each would act as his nature prompted him.

Alexander, finding Parmenion’s force already out of trouble, dashed off with the Companions, still hoping to catch Darius on his way to his base at Arbela. So furious was the race that a thousand horses foundered. (Not Bucephalas. Alexander had taken time to have him cared for. The old horse, never used again in battle, was to be cherished for six more years.) At Arbela it was proved that the horses had died in vain; once more the Great King’s chariot was found abandoned, along with whatever could not be carried away in the headlong Persian flight; this must have included a good many women. Alexander paused, to rest his men and consider his objective. Hitherto, he had accorded Darius much the same military importance as himself. At Arbela he decided that the capture was, after all, a very low priority. So completely did he discard the pursuit in favour of other aims, so open was his contempt for Darius as an enemy, that it would have been inconsistent to put much importance on Parmenion’s responsibility, if any, for letting him slip away.

The military historian E. W. Marsden, concluding his analysis of the battle, puts down the victory partly to the Macedonians’ superior morale and closer ties with their commander, partly to Alexander’s remarkably detailed understanding of the art of war. He sums up,

It is difficult to re-create the chaos characteristic of full-scale engagements at certain stages, the confusion caused by noise, movement and dust, the atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty, the horrible carnage… It must be extraordinarily difficult for modern generals to remain calm and detached when controlling operations in a command-post some miles from the scene of the fighting. How much harder it would be for Alexander and Darius who were stationed in the line of battle itself! Darius appears not to have possessed that rare ability to sift conflicting reports, to make correct observations, and, remaining cool and unflurried, to issue swift and well-considered orders in such circumstances. Alexander had this ability in a pronounced degree. That was the third decisive factor at Gaugamela.

Darius and a ragged remnant struggled southeast over the mountain passes towards Ecbatana (Hamadan), the summer resort of the Persian kings. The Royal Road south, to Babylon, Susa and Persepolis, the rich heart of the empire, was left open to Alexander. The choice of objective did not take him long. By now he must have talked through his interpreters with captive Persians, and formed his own estimate of Darius’ value to morale.

Curtius, drawing again it seems on the Persian informant to whom some earlier chronicler had access, says that Darius abandoned the great cities to keep Alexander from following his trail. Certainly if his objective was to rally Persia to arms, his remaining months of life give little sign of it. Though his son was a captive, he had an effective heir in his warrior brother Oxathres. Had he succeeded a Great King fallen inspiringly in battle against the invader, the course of the war might have been much altered.

As it was, its next phase was mere swanning for Alexander. He may not yet have guessed it while nearing the huge brick-and-bitumen walls of Babylon. Herodotus, who went there a century before, says they enclosed 60 square miles, in which food crops could be grown during a siege. Even the old fortifications of Nebuchadnezzar, now an inner ring, were vast. The outer ones were 180 feet thick and 400 high, a monument to the Assyrian builders with their hordes of expendable slaves. Cyrus had taken it without a fight; but Alexander must have known Xenophon’s livelier version. Its mass was visible for miles across the plain, promising a siege at least as colossal as that of Tyre. But there was no need even to reconnoitre it. Alexander was met on the road by Mazaeus its satrap, fresh from his tussle with Parmenion. Now, bringing his children as hostages, he invited Alexander in.

It was not much more than a century since Babylon had last tried to revolt from Persia, and been crushed by Xerxes with severity. Its luxury-loving people were disaffected or indifferent; its garrison was disillusioned; its commander had no sentiment for a beaten fugitive king. It remained only to placate the victor. Alexander, naturally wary of a trap when this astonishing gift was offered him, still advanced in battle order, leading the van. But the walls were undefended, the hundred gates wide open, the drawbridges down. He entered as King of Babylon, in a state chariot plated with gold, among splendours never to be surpassed in the triumphs of the Caesars. The city treasurer, eager to outdo Mazaeus, had had the route strewn with flowers and censed with perfume. Rare and exotic gifts, choice horses, cars bearing caged lions and leopards, were led in the procession; magi and priests attended, royal praise singers chanted, Mazaeus’ cavalry paraded. As always with Alexander, one Roman adornment was lacking: the spectacle of captives humiliated in chains.

After viewing the ancient splendours of the palace, he visited its treasury. Of this vast hoard no assessment remains. He paid out lavish bounties to all his men; his mercenaries got two months’ extra pay. These included many Greeks who, given leave to go home when the Greek cities had all been fired, had chosen to stay on. All could now afford the luxuries of a city they had not been let loose to sack. Here in Babylon was the real beginning of his extravagant generosities which henceforth would flow out to all around him. This first donative was good policy and fair dealing. But to give pleasure, to be surrounded with gratitude and liking, met a deep need in his nature. In his childhood, his tutor Leonidas had made him live poor in the midst of plenty; he loved profusion as only those can who have been pinched. He loved display; it went with his sense of theatre. All these cravings were fed in Babylon; as the money came in, he would develop his personal style.

From the throne he granted Babylon the status it had had before Xerxes crushed it and threw down the ziggurat of Bel. The priests of the god were now given much gold to rebuild his sanctuary. (It would have fateful consequences later.) Mazaeus was at once confirmed in his rank of satrap. The gift of this great office to a Persian, gratifying to Iranians, can hardly have been as popular with Macedonians; to emphasize his good performance at Gaugamela would be natural, and Parmenion’s reputation could not be damaged by tributes to the strength of his opponent. The posts of garrison commander and treasurer of course went to Macedonians. Alexander was a month in Babylon, giving his men a holiday. He was busy himself, though it is not likely that the pomps of the court were irksome. When ready to march, he put his now impressive treasure train in the charge of Harpalus; the loyal friend of boyhood was to know himself thoroughly forgiven.

The soldiers were broken intently after the demoralizing joys of the city; marched into pleasant country where games were held. There was an important novelty: prizes were offered for valour on campaign. Typically of the extraordinary rapport between this army and its leader, all ranks were invited to offer the judges their views by acclamation. There were eight awards. They consisted not of the usual gold wreath or money but of command appointments, each over a thousand men. Up till now Alexander had kept his staff within the tribal hierarchies of the home land; now, with sound dramatic flair and canny assurance that choices would be popular, he introduced real promotion on merit.

Susa lay ahead, but required no haste. It had capitulated directly after the battle to the envoys he had sent ahead. News of Darius’ flight would have outstripped them, for the Royal Road had the world’s fastest post relay, with fresh horses and men stationed all along it. Darius himself may have ordered surrender in the hope of saving the city from sack. It was spared; with the ironic result that it survives today only as a mound. (The impressive fortress which crowns it was built not by Alexander, but by nineteenth-century archaeologists as a necessary refuge from the local tribesmen.) However, it was then the administrative capital of the empire and chief royal seat, built in an out-thrust of the Mesopotamian plain on the threshold of the Iranian plateau. Fragments from the palace suggest bright glowing surfaces of glazed ceramics, mostly blue and yellow moulded in relief. In its treasury, Alexander found the enormous sum—not counting jewels, which were never even approximately valued—of 40,000 talents in silver, and 9,000 darics in gold. Reckoned by Wilcken in 1931 as somewhere near £14,000,000, it could only be thought of today in terms of Fort Knox.

The house of the king-making eunuch vizier, Bagoas, forfeit at his death to Darius, was found to contain a thousand talents’ worth of rich robes alone. Plutarch says that the house and all its contents were presented to Parmenion. Among the palace treasures, a specially precious casket was taken by Alexander to house his copy of the Iliad, edited for him by Aristotle when he was a boy. It still lived in the bed box under his pillow. The dagger must have been kept in quicker reach. There would be more times than one when he would be close to needing it.

The gold and silver was mostly in solid ingots, which had been issued for coining a few at a time. Alexander had larger ideas. The metals poured into his mints, the hand-punched money poured out of them, wearing out the moulds whose many variants can still be seen. Olympian Zeus soon has around him on the obverse the symbols of the lion, and the royal kyrbasia or peaked cap, circled with the mitra, the purple ribbon. It would be a fair guess that in the privacy of his bedroom, Alexander had already tried it on.

He kept giving money away, delighted to be asked for it, which he took as a sign of friendship. Told that some modest sum would be quite enough, he said, “For you to ask, but not for me to give.” But magnificence did not make him pompous. An independent young man among the friends he used to play ball with had obstinately refused to cadge, and heard rumours that Alexander was not pleased with him. At the next game, whenever he got the ball he shied it past the King, who finally called, “What about me?” “You didn’t ask,” he called back; on which, says Plutarch, Alexander laughed and gave him many presents.

Given or spent, the wealth of Susa began to influence history. For centuries it had lain sterile as if still unmined; now it would flow in the track of Alexander and his spendthrift armies. The busy trade routes it created began to Hellenize his empire before he set his hand to the work.

It was at Susa that, mounting the throne of the six-foot-odd Darius, he found his feet would not touch the ground. Someone shoved a low table under them. An old palace eunuch wept; it had been his master’s wine table. Touched by such loyal grief, Alexander began to pick his feet up; but Philotas pointed out the good omen, and he changed his mind.

Among his loot was the ancient spoil of Xerxes carried back from Athens; including the archaic bronze statue group of Harmodius and Aristogiton, the tyrannicide lovers, from the Acropolis. This precious monument he later returned to Athens, where it still stood in Arrian’s day. He held victory sacrifices and a torch relay race. Fresh troops joined him from Macedon.

The Persian satrap was reinstated again, with a garrison under Macedonian command. Here, at Susa, he installed Sisygambis and her grandchildren in the harem from which Darius had carried them out to war. The great scene would never now be played; and he had a rough road ahead, up the mountain passes into Persis.

Here he met his first resistance since Gaugamela. The Uxian hill people sent to say the kings always paid them road toll to use their passes. Confident banditry now ceased to pay. Susian guides showed him a back stair to their fastness, and he trapped them in. He considered expelling the whole tribe from its strategic habitat; but the chief, a kinsman of Sisygambis, smuggled a messenger through to Susa, begging her to intercede. After some hesitation she wrote to Alexander. It was the first favour she had ever asked of him; he at once issued a general pardon, and, for good measure, tax exemption as well.

Between him and Persepolis, the impregnable pass of the Persian Gates was defended by the satrap of Persis, who had closed its gorge with a wall. From the cliffs above, his men flung boulders; it was a death trap and Alexander soon withdrew his troops. By one of history’s revenges the story of Thermopylae was now acted in reverse. A local shepherd among the prisoners offered to show a route round the pass. Alexander promised a rich reward, and followed. The track, far longer and more dangerous than that over which Ephialtes led Xerxes’ men, was under deep snow as well; but he and his small force scrambled briskly along it. When he surprised the advance guard of the Persians, they behaved just like the Phocians of Leonidas; escaped as best they could into the hills, without warning their commander, who was taken quite unawares. The main Macedonian army then forced the pass without trouble. Persepolis lay open.

Here no one was in a position to offer formal surrender. Instead Alexander got a panic message from its treasurer that the city was in anarchy, and that unless they made haste, the treasure (for which he evidently feared to be held responsible) would be looted.

The fate of Persepolis, thus tilting in the scales, was probably decided by an encounter on the road. In the confusion thousands of Greek slaves (presumably from Greek Asia Minor) escaped and came to meet Alexander’s army. Some were elderly men, who must have been in slavery since Ochus’ wars. It was a macabre and hideous embassy. Diodorus says,

All had been mutilated. Some lacked hands, some feet, some ears and noses. They were men who had learned skills and crafts and done well in training; after which their other extremities had been cut off and they were left only with those on which their work depended.

Curtius says they had been branded too. Both sources agree that Alexander wept for them.

He offered to give them transport home and provide for their remaining lives. Conferring, they decided that to return to their cities as repulsive freaks would be unendurable. By now they would be forgotten there. (Ancient Greece was not notable for compassion; Alexander’s was felt as rather eccentric.) Some had slave wives who had borne them children. They asked for a grant of land where they could live together. He allowed that they were right; gave them money, seed grain and livestock, good clothes for themselves and for their women; and appointed them their sad village.

Next day he marched upon Persepolis. His soldiers got what they had been straining at the leash for ever since Gaugemela—a wealthy city to sack.

It was the ceremonial capital of the empire; the opulent counterpart of little Aegae in Macedon. The King and his chief nobles had seats there; a rich merchant class must have supplied them. Curtius says that many citizens were casually killed because the loot-sated troops could not be bothered with ransoms. It is difficult today, yet some attempt should be made, to imagine the orgiastic pleasure of a sack to men of the ancient world who after hardship and danger felt it to be their due; where power, aggression, greed, lust, rivalry, the instincts of the hunter and the gambler, could be roused and fed in one vertiginous stream of action. No one, perhaps, but Alexander could have held them back at Babylon and Susa. Now he gave them a day at it. Even so he issued orders that the women should not be stripped of the jewels they wore.

The treasurer was promoted to governor. He had saved the palace strongrooms intact. Their contents amounted to three times as much as had been taken at Susa.

Darius wintered at Ecbatana, watched by Alexander’s intelligence for signs of life. There being none, Alexander wintered in Persepolis. It must have been at this time that he made his long-awaited pilgrimage to the tomb of Cyrus the Great at neighbouring Pasargadae, his ancient capital in what had once been Elam; a small Persian Macedon from which he too had conquered an empire. Here, as the sequel shows, Alexander paid him honour. If he had earned it, so had Xenophon; but the rewards of history are capricious. Between them, Persian and Athenian, they had impressed on an eager mind, when no one else was doing it, that all men are God’s children, and that anywhere among them may be found the excellent ones whom, said Alexander, he makes more his own than the rest.

He returned to the palace of Persepolis, with its tall lotus-topped columns and endless reliefs of tribute bearers bringing offerings to its builder, Darius the Great. We hear of no such regal ceremonies as had marked his stay at Babylon or Susa; perhaps only because winter had made access difficult. When spring came, and it was time to march, he burned the palace down.

This action is known today by people who know virtually nothing else about him (and who remain more impressed by this outrage to an empty building than by the living holocausts of Coventry and Dresden); fit retribution, if he deserved it, for a man who cared intensely about his good name. The sources are not unanimous (though nor are they irreconcilable) as to why he did it, and historians debate the matter still.

Arrian, whose source, Ptolemy, must certainly have been present, simply says he did it against the advice of Parmenion, who pointed out that it would be looked on as the act of a conqueror rather than a king. Diodorus, Curtius and Plutarch all agree that Alexander gave a drinking party to which were invited a number of flute girls and hetairas; among them Thais, the Athenian courtesan, mistress of Ptolemy the future king; that at the height of the revelry she recalled Xerxes’ ravaging of the Acropolis, and urged Alexander to let an Athenian girl pay it back in kind; that thereon he proclaimed a Dionysiac comus, which he led with wreath on head and torch in hand; that he threw the first torch himself and let her throw the next one. Plutarch says he had second thoughts after a while, and ordered the fire put out. If so he was too late; the layer of ash was found by archaeologists to cover everything.

No one was hurt; when it got too hot inside, they came out to watch the spectacle. There is no doubt that a really first-class fire, when no fear for human life intrudes, is one of the great atavistic joys still known to man. Today it is very shocking to think of archaeological treasures burning; to Macedonians and still more to Greeks, the significance of Persepolis was rather different.

Tarn has preferred to reject the party entirely, and have the palace burned “as a manifesto.” True, there is no party in Arrian. It does, however, seem likely that Ptolemy, a venerable King and grandfather when he wrote, may have thought fit to suppress such details of his riotous youth as the exuberant Thais. Parmenion’s objections are no doubt historically true. He may even have been reminding Alexander of intentions which he himself had expressed at soberer moments. He did wish to be a king rather than a conqueror; and the burning of the kings’ ceremonial seat must certainly have been held against him by the Persians. On the whole, it is hard not to conclude that, like so many happenings at very successful parties, it seemed a good idea at the time.

As to the archaeological treasures, they were left so wholly to the lion, the lizard and the shifting sands that Persepolis is today the best preserved of all monuments of the Achaemenian era.

The troops outside, seeing the bonfire and knowing that the cream of Persian wealth had been skimmed, took it as a sign their labours were over and that they could now march home with their loot. They were soon undeceived; Alexander had merely paused before a final reckoning with Darius. They were now to be led into hard unknown country, with a strictly military objective. Yet without protest they followed their commander.

Too little has been made, too much taken for granted, of the extraordinary magnetism which this implies. The army of Macedon was steeped in an archaic, feudal democracy. Its forebears had made and unmade and murdered kings. He had grown up among these men; he accepted their traditional freedom of speech, unparalleled in the annals of emperors. Save for foreign auxiliaries, he was all alone with them in hostile country; if they mutinied he was wholly at their mercy. He kept no secret police to intimidate or spy on them; two later plots against his life were both revealed to him at the last moment by ordinary people. He had created a relationship of unique intimacy and trust, and inspired a possessiveness which was to create unforeseen complications. Their dependence on him grew almost superstitious, as their reaction to his wounds and sickness shows. When spring had melted the mountain snows, they followed him north towards Ecbatana.

When he reached it, Darius had gone. He took possession of the summer palace. In its strongrooms he deposited the enormous reserves of treasure which were left when he had filled his war chest. As treasurer and governor he left his old friend Harpalus.

Darius had left, as usual, the initiative to the enemy. At the news of Alexander’s advance he moved northward, sending the women ahead for safety. He himself paused en route to meet promised reinforcements. But they had smelled disaster, and did not keep the rendezvous. Alexander came on, taking time to secure his communications. In Media he was met by a certain Bistanes; a surviving son of King Ochus, eager to tell which way Darius had fled.

This incident underlines a factor of great importance in Alexander’s story, the power of blood feud in the ancient world. By standards of modern nationalism Bistanes was a traitor; by those of his day, he fulfilled a religious duty in avenging his poisoned father and brother, to whose murder he believed (rightly or wrongly) that Darius had been a party. Had he been a Greek, this obligation would similarly have cancelled other loyalties.

Darius was making north towards the pass of the Caspian Gates, hoping to reach Bactria. For the rest of his story, Curtius has a detailed narrative, unique to himself. It is entirely without propaganda value; almost free from rhetoric; and returns us, this time at some length, to the account suggestive of an eloquent eyewitness, soon to appear upon the scene.

Darius had gathered up from the ruins of Gaugamela about 30,000 infantry and 4,000 skirmishers. Among the former were some 3,000 Greek mercenaries, the faithful core of Memnon’s 50,000. Even if some were exiles who dared not go home, most of them could have deserted to the Macedonians. Their courage and loyalty were exemplary.

The 3,000 cavalry and many foot soldiers were Bactrians, under the command of their satrap, Bessus. Other commands were held by the capable cavalry general, Nabarzanes; and by the ancient Artabazus, the friend of Alexander’s childhood, now in his nineties but still alert and spry.

The Great King’s household was pathetically depleted. His coffers held only 7,000 talents; his concubines had gone; his personal attendants were down to a handful of court eunuchs; the senior an Egyptian, Bubaces, the youngest a boy called Bagoas, an accomplished singer and dancer. A favourite of the King, he had been castrated to preserve his exceptional beauty.

When the reinforcements failed to appear, Darius made camp and held a war council. Curtius has written him an oration; his own may have been little better. The rest of the speeches sound much more authentic. Old Artabazus reaffirmed his loyalty and that of his Persian troops. Nabarzanes then came forward. Pointing out that bad luck seemed to be dogging them, he inferred that the gods had at present forsaken Darius, and proposed that Bessus, his cousin, should for a time assume the throne, retiring when the enemy was vanquished.

It sounds as if the formal meaning was that Bessus should stand in for the King as royal scapegoat, to shoulder his bad luck. But Darius had no doubt of the real intent. He drew his sword, and made for Nabarzanes. He was politely restrained with gestures of pleading for mercy, and the two leaders got away. A vivid account follows of their efforts to subvert the loyal Persians during the night, opposed by the indomitable Artabazus. He had withstood the dangerous tyrant Ochus, but now kept faith with a weak king who had not wronged him, though sure of a free pardon from Alexander.

Nabarzanes’ priorities were different. Since the flight at Issus, he had seen that the only hope of effective Persian resistance was to get rid of Darius. His plan had been to hand him over to Alexander, make peace to get a breathing space, proclaim Bessus King in Bactria, and from there renew the war. But the Greeks and Persians would not come in. In the morning, therefore, the two professed repentance and loyalty, and rejoined the march.

Darius trustingly believed them; not so the Greeks, who knew of the night’s activities. Their commander, Patron, made his way during that day’s march to the royal chariot, beckoned to Bubaces the chief eunuch, and asked to speak with the King, who had some knowledge of Greek, without interpreter; a needed precaution, since Bessus was riding near by. Darius listened to his warning, and dismissed him with a kindly word. If Patron was right, his own position was hopeless; and it is to his credit that he did not clutch at straws at the cost of faithful lives.

At the next halt, on the Caspian side of the Elburz Mountains, Artabazus begged the King to seek safety among Patron’s Greeks. This counsel of despair Darius rejected with dignity, veiling his face as the old man was led out in tears. When the Persians went off to forage for provisions, all the Bactrians stayed. At nightfall the bodyguard round the tent, drawn from the renowned Immortals, slipped silently away. Darius, abandoning hope, lay down upon the ground.

“Hence there was a great solitude in the tent, except for a few eunuchs who stood about the King, because they had nowhere to withdraw to.” This intimate touch pins down, effectively, our first-hand witness.

Presently Darius called Bubaces to him, and ordered the eunuchs to save themselves. At his wail of distress, the others ran up and added their lamentations. Bessus and Nabarzanes, thinking the King had killed himself, came running in. On hearing from the eunuchs that he was alive they held back no longer, but seized and bound him, and carried him off in a common transport cart.

The loyal troops were too much outnumbered to attempt resistance. Darius had not won the kind of loyalty by which forlorn hopes are inspired. Two Persian lords rode back over the pass to guide Alexander and throw their master on his mercy. It was the best choice for the unhappy man, but made too late. Alexander with his best-mounted cavalry made a breakneck dash to the rescue, fell on the rear of the straggling Bactrians whose discipline had already gone to pieces, and began hewing their way towards the prisoner. The conspirators untied him and told him to mount a horse. He replied that he would rather deal with Alexander. At this Bessus and a certain Barsaentes, with or without Nabarzanes, stabbed him with their javelins, crippled the draught mules of the cart, and took to flight. Nabarzanes, who may have opposed their action, went off separately with six hundred riders of his own.

The dying King was found by a Macedonian soldier, who heard him groaning for water. Here Curtius ends, the manuscript being damaged. Plutarch says that Darius was given a drink, expressed his thanks, commended Alexander’s chivalry and wished him luck as his successor; propaganda or romance perhaps, though he would certainly have preferred him to Bessus. But the two kings, the fortunate and the luckless, were not to meet in life. Alexander had had a long fruitless search among the covered carts; when he reached the right one, Darius had breathed his last. Alexander laid his own cloak over him—the last gesture left to make—and ordered his body sent to Sisygambis for a royal burial at Persepolis.

On the Hyrcanian Plain bordering the Caspian Sea, he took the surrender of Nabarzanes. Having rejected Bessus for reasons nowhere explained, he sent to ask for safe conduct, which he would never have got had Alexander not thought he deserved a hearing. His war record, and whatever he had to say at his audience, must have made a good impression; though he never got any office or command, his share in regicide was pardoned. He left behind him the customary gifts of honour, and one unusual one—the young dancer, Bagoas. “He had been loved by Darius, and was soon to be loved by Alexander.” Seeing that this attachment seems to have been lifelong, the source of the Curtius narrative is not far to seek.

Plutarch states circumstantially that Alexander had twice refused, and taken as an insult, proffered gifts of Greek slave-boy beauties. So, although Curtius typically infers that the young Persian was presented as a mere gift or bribe, probability suggests a more substantial motive: namely that he had been an eyewitness of Darius’ murder, and could testify that Nabarzanes had opposed it.

Nabarzanes had been a brave, and till near the end a loyal soldier. Though ready in desperation to get rid of a hopelessly bad commander by putting him into the hands of a chivalrous enemy, he may yet have drawn the line at regicide—an appalling crime in Zoroastrian belief, as Alexander well knew later, when he had Bessos tried by a Persian court.

As for Bagoas, he must have known ever since the arrival of the Queen’s eunuch to announce her death that the captive ladies had been allowed to keep their own attendants. Besides any loyalty he felt to his master—whose memory he seems to have handled kindly—he had little to lose by following him, and no future among the rebels. The murder was a panic action, unforeseen by everyone, including the killers themselves.

A whole train of circumstance falls into place with this assumption: the departure from the other conspirators of Nabarzanes and his men immediately after the murder; Bagoas’ flight in his company; and the statement of Curtius himself that “it was mostly through the boy’s pleadings that he [Alexander] was moved to pardon Nabarzanes.” The testimony of the dead King’s own favourite was solid evidence; a far more likely influence upon Alexander than the mere wheedlings of an attractive youth. Clearly, though, it was without any reluctance that he kept Bagoas at court to give the chroniclers his valuable account. Supposing that his Persian-learned Greek was unequal to so sustained a narrative, we may amuse ourselves by conjecturing that Alexander dictated the final form himself.*

In any case, Bagoas stayed on. We hear of him from Curtius, Plutarch and Athenaeus, more doubtfully from Arrian; Ptolemy is far more likely to have blue-pencilled Alexander’s Persian boy than his own Athenian mistress, not because he was a boy, a matter of indifference in the Greek world, but because he was a “barbarian” eunuch. Alexander’s view that “all men are God’s children” was shared by few of his countrymen.

To race-conscious Macedonians, Bagoas was a little eccentricity of Alexander’s about which the less said the better. But the story of Darius’ end—and who else can have supplied it?—tells us much of him, and indirectly of Alexander. Besides the vivid detail, the talent for evoking a scene, there are the loyalty and perceptive good taste which do not attempt crude flattery of a royal lover at the expense of the dead; the pathos of Darius’ last night, the insistence that “he nothing common did or mean”; his graceful tributes to his victor which, whether or not he ever uttered them, could not hurt his memory and would give such pleasure now. Sensitivity, self-respect, charm without sycophancy, and beauty for good measure; no wonder that Alexander’s fastidious sexual standards were met for once.

Besides the scenes which only the eunuchs witnessed, part of the story must have been related by Artabazus, who came in soon after Nabarzanes and was received with the warmest pleasure by Alexander, being at once reinstated in his rank. After years in Macedon his Greek must have been fluent. Last arrived the Greek mercenaries, from their hideout in the hills.

They had sent to ask for terms; but Alexander, with his usual animus against Greeks fighting for Persia, demanded unconditional surrender. Some straggled off; one man, an Athenian with a virulent anti-Macedonian record, killed himself; about 1,500 came in. By then Alexander would have heard of their fidelity from Artabazus and Bagoas. No one was punished; those who had been hired before he declared war he let go free; the rest he reprimanded, and conscripted into his army at their usual rate of pay. The account of Patron’s attempt to warn Darius against his murderers may come from Patron himself.

On his record, Alexander would have treated Darius’ body with respect in any case; but the royal funeral now accorded him was also a manifesto; it was the duty of a Great King to his predecessor. There was a pretender in the field. Bessus in the east had put on the kyrbasia with upstanding peak (the prerogative of royalty; satraps had to wear theirs flattened) and called himself Artaxerxes.

Whether patriotism or ambition moved him is uncertain. It was already becoming evident that he had two disabilities never known to Alexander: he could not discipline his men, nor attach their loyalty. In any case, Alexander now claimed the right to proceed against him for rebellion, regicide, and treason against two kings running. To enhance this claim, an important act of allegiance now took place. Oxathres, Darius’ fighting brother, arrived voluntarily to accept Alexander as King. Again the blood feud was paramount; the enemy of his brother’s killer was a natural ally. Alexander, who seems to have formed a high opinion of him, recruited him at once into the Companions. His adherence was of the highest propaganda value; its only price was revenge on Bessus.

Alexander had now to break the news to his men that even Darius’ death had not ended the war. He assembled the Macedonians and convinced them with “effective arguments” which must have come down to sheer personality, there being no question of force. Even the Greek auxiliaries, offered free choice and their expenses home, did not all depart. Those who signed on again got three talents each; gifts to the Macedonians were on the same dazzling scale. Such occasions were among the major pleasures of Alexander’s life.

He was now to march into the unknown wilds of central Asia with the vast accretions of his court and army, which the Persian Romance remembers. “A moving world was his camp … the market that followed him was like a capital city’s; anything could be bought there, were it as rare as bird’s milk.” There were the secretariat, the engineers, craftsmen, stewards and doctors and grooms and slaves and architects and armourers in his actual employ; a horde of independent speculators who lived off the well-paid troops; the womenfolk of soldiers and civilians who with their children were almost a second army. His lines of communication would be indefinitely extended; there was no knowing what supplies the country would provide. The holding force he must leave behind would be vital to them all as a diver’s airpipe. This command he gave to Parmenion. He was now about seventy; rough campaigning lay ahead; the appointment, honourable and suited to his years, also probably solved for Alexander a longstanding problem. The old general was given his own army, partly of mercenaries (including perhaps the new Greek conscripts) and access to the Ecbatana treasure for his own needs, and those of Alexander’s commissariat.

When still in Hyrcania, Alexander had mounted a small operation against the Mardians of the mountain forests, notable only for Bucephalas’ penultimate appearance in history. While being led through the woods by the royal squires, whose charge the King’s horses were, he and the rest of the string were carried off by local raiders. He was now twenty-five, and his likely fate all too obvious. The old horse had probably saved the life of his master, boy and man, half a dozen times; the thought of his ending his days as a broken-down beast of burden so appalled Alexander that he sent out heralds to threaten general devastation if he were not returned. The effect was prompt; the friends were reunited; in his relief, Alexander even gave the robbers a reward.

The royal squires, among whose services to the King was that of bringing him his spare horses in battle, were the teen-aged sons of Macedonian aristocrats. In earlier troubled reigns they had been hostages for their fathers; now their duties were something between those of page and esquire in a medieval castle, except that there was no special body-squire for the King. There were enough of them—perhaps something near fifty—to take their watches in rota, and they guarded the royal room or tent at night. When fresh troops came out from Macedon to Hyrcania, new squires probably came too, for the batch Alexander had brought out with him would be grown men. The cherished Bucephalas’ ordeal may have started some of the newcomers off with a bad mark, and begun momentous events.

Unlike medieval princes, who trained their esquires only in war and manners, Alexander had his educated, even when on campaign. Their schooling was the charge of Callisthenes, a figure of some importance in Alexander’s history. He was a great-nephew of Aristotle, who had recommended him for the post of royal archivist. (Hence the use of his name by the Pseudo-Callisthenes author.) He was a literary dilettante, who had written a history of Greece up to the time of Philip’s accession, and is quoted by later writers for antiquarian notes, especially on the Homeric sites. Alexander, like his contemporaries, treated the Iliad as history; he probably delighted in visiting the reputed scenes of the heroes’ birth or exploits in Greek Asia. Many ancient writers accuse Callisthenes of flattery without defining it, and no direct quotation from his work survives. Probably he stressed Alexander’s descent from the paladins of both sides in the Trojan War, and likened his deeds to theirs. If the flattery consisted in a florid presentation of substantially real achievements, it did him a disservice which he may have perceived as his mind matured.

Meantime, Callisthenes had remained in close touch with the Lyceum, though henceforth correspondence would take much longer on the road. It does not appear that his sycophancy was rebuked by Aristotle, who had many ties with Macedon, especially a close friendship with Antipater which as yet involved him in no conflict of loyalties. He is quoted as having said of Callisthenes that he had a good intelligence but not wisdom; and on another, probably later, occasion that he was not likely to live long; a deduction, perhaps, from indiscretions in his private letters. Certainly he believed, like Aristotle and his school, that Persians were destructive, corrupt barbarians, and that Alexander’s proper mission should be of conquest and revenge. Uneasiness must have crept in when old Artabazus was received as a guest of honour; when a Persian prince appeared in the Companion Cavalry; when satraps were reappointed after surrender; when Darius’ favourite castrato, a being regarded by conventional Greeks as less than human, found his way into the royal bed. The demeanour of a Greek conqueror ought to have been an ostentatious display of Greek superiority, a proper sense of contrast.

Instead of this a further shock awaited him. Alexander began to experiment with Persian dress.

What he wore is rather vague, as is also what he adapted it from. His own version was more “modest” than the Persian, more “stately” than the Median. The dignitaries in the Persepolis reliefs date from more than a century earlier, and the fashion cannot have been quite static. The Medes wear coats and trousers, the Persians long robes (court dress no doubt) and fluted top hats. Nobody wears the “Persian sash” adopted by Alexander. Persians, like Medes, wore trousers in daily life, but Plutarch assures us that Alexander refrained from the barbarism of encasing either his upper or his lower limbs. He wore some kind of long robe, with a sash, and probably a cape over the arms, in the royal colours later used by the Roman Caesars, purple and white. He also wore the mitra, which strictly speaking was a headband in these colours. But since the fillet by itself was such common headwear among Greeks that it cannot have been controversial, he must on state occasions have worn it tied around the kyrbasia, like other Persian kings. The upright point of this helmet-shaped bonnet was an important symbol of royalty.

Herodotus remarks of Persian dress that the shoes allow for something to be slipped inside them, to make the wearer look taller. This may have had influence too.

Alexander used this outfit at first for audiences with Persians; then for private parties; then he started to go out in it; riding, Plutarch says; presumably in a chariot. The Macedonians did not like it much, but thought it a pardonable fad, like Bagoas, for which he had earned indulgence. No one complained aloud.

Towards Persians it was good policy; but policy was never the whole story with Alexander, who was complex, emotional, and much affected by human contacts. If Persians had repelled him on acquaintance, he was incapable of sycophancy to them, and would soon have resumed with emphasis the conquering Greek. Clearly they had attracted him. Their sense of style, their dignity and good looks, the courage so cruelly wasted by their king, the integrity of old Artabazus, Bagoas’ delicate tact, had made their mark. He wanted to come before them as an aristocrat in their own terms; and guidance was easily had. Oxathres and Artabazus knew all the ceremonial; and trifles they could not be asked about without some loss of dignity could be learned in relaxed intimacy from Bagoas, versed in every detail of the royal day and night. Bagoas’ influence is one of history’s imponderables. It did not grow less as he passed out of adolescence; but this, like the talent of Hephaestion, is a thing Ptolemy can be relied upon to ignore.

From this time begin the tensions between the concepts of king and conqueror. In the latter the Macedonians had invested their racial pride; and, as important, the prospect of going home, leaving behind a colony to supply tribute and slaves. On the Persian side feelings were divided. The legitimate Ochus and his heir had both been murdered; the makeshift Darius had been an unmitigated disaster; Bessus was for some a hero, for others a regicide beside whom this foreign conqueror was no great change for the worse since he seemed willing to grow civilized. Though they had never known democracy they valued justice, and thought him just.

Bactria, still loyal to its satrap, would give him some hard fighting. The days of pitched battles were over till he got to India. For the next two years he would be campaigning in rough country, against tribesmen familiar with it, and often established in precipitous strongholds. Sometimes a satrap who had sworn him fealty and been his guest would revolt when his back was turned; the chivalric code of honour he had brought from home was to suffer rude disillusions. If he began to trust his experiences before his hopes, it was not illogical. He was dealing with one of the most serious of these rebellions when an act of greater treachery, much nearer home, produced a major crisis of his life.

While quartered in the royal stronghold of Drangiana, he learned that a plot to murder him had been connived at, if no worse, by his boyhood friend Philotas.

Alexander had taken no steps about the earlier warnings. He assessed the loyalty of his friends by his own to them. (One cause of this optimism had no doubt been the bedrock constancy of Hephaestion, a certainty since boyhood.) Philotas, losing no position of trust, had assumed a good deal of pomp and luxury, with a nouveau-riche flamboyance that had made him enemies. He was now the only survivor of Parmenion’s three sons, the second having lately died of sickness. Parmenion’s posting in the rear, considering his age, was no just cause for resentment; but it did diminish the family power at court.

Little is known of the plot to kill Alexander, nothing of the means designed. Its known instigator was an obscure Dymnus, elsewhere unmentioned, apparently on the fringe of Alexander’s personal circle, who complained of some unspecified slight. He tried to recruit a youth called Nicomachus, whose lover he was but who, horrified at what he heard, at once told his elder brother. The two, impatient to discharge their perilous knowledge and clear themselves, went to Philotas as someone close to the King. All sources agree he did not report it. Diodorus, Plutarch and Curtius say he promised to do so two days running, and excused himself on the ground that Alexander had been too busy, though in fact he had talked with him freely. The brothers were growing desperate, and suspicious. The elder now went direct to the royal rooms, and informed the squire in charge of Alexander’s weapons. He, unlike Philotas, burst straight in upon Alexander during his bath. He questioned the brother, learned there had been delay, and was told the reason.

Reacting with customary speed, before doing anything else he had the whole camp cordoned round to keep news from leaving it. Then he sent a squad to arrest Dymnus, who certified his guilt by killing himself before he could be seized. He had apparently disclosed to Nicomachus the names of some other conspirators, one of them in the Royal Bodyguard; which certainly would suggest something more than the personal anger of a private man. Philotas’ known conduct had been clearly treasonable. All sources agree that he admitted having been told of the plot; his defence was that he had not believed in it. (Some historians, in periods more peaceful than ours, have even accepted this; it can now be agreed that honest men, warned of a bomb upon a plane, do not take chances.) Though Nicomachus would not have approached him had he known him to be involved, Dymnus may only have told as much as he dared.

Till the camp had been enclosed, Alexander was forced to keep up a normal manner with Philotas, much against his nature. He then had all the accused arrested. Arrian, citing both his sources, says Philotas had a public trial before the Macedonian Assembly, Alexander himself speaking for the prosecution—he was a material witness, as having been available when Philotas said he was not. Philotas spoke in his own defence (Curtius’ florid artifice makes his version useless). The Assembly judged him worthy of death. Arrian says nothing of his interrogation by torture, to which Diodorus, Plutarch and Curtius all refer.

Before deciding that Ptolemy was whitewashing, we must ask as always whether he would have seen a need for it. Almost certainly not, in an ordinary treason trial, as he shows elsewhere. Torture in such cases was general throughout Greece, with one exception. The democratic Athenians, exempting their own citizens, let them offer their slaves instead: if torture produced no evidence, it was taken that they had witnessed nothing amiss; accused citizens who did not make use of this facility were highly suspect. In Philotas’ case, his high rank and his war record may have caused Ptolemy to keep quiet, and the question remains open.

There were several more trials, some ending in acquittals. Among those condemned, “lacking words to defend himself,” was the long-suspect Alexandros of Lyncestis. Of royal descent, he had probably been chosen, whether or not he knew it, as a suitable puppet king. The Macedonians traditionally executed in public those they had condemned; in this case it was done with javelins. There was no arbitrary purge. But Alexander was now faced with a dreadful choice.

Whether plotter or callous opportunist, Philotas had been a traitor. No army in hostile country could afford to let him live. Still less could it now afford to carry, on its lifeline of communications, a father on whom had devolved the archaic duties of the blood feud.

Prince Oxathres had joined a foreign invader to avenge his brother; Prince Bistanes to avenge his father. There could be no surety that Parmenion, whether or not his son’s accomplice, would not change sides when his death was known. This had been Alexander’s first thought when he threw his ring round the camp. The ancient laws of Macedon provided that the close male relatives of any traitor should share his death. It was not mere frightfulness; it did not presume their collusion; it simply recognized the blood feud, which would make all who survived into enemies of the King.

It would be strange if at this moment Alexander did not remember Attalus. A proven traitor, he had been secure from arrest among his own tribal levies. The practical problem here was just the same. Two factors only were altered: on the one hand, Parmenion’s guilt was not established; on the other, he was infinitely more dangerous.

Till now the young conqueror had known only the rewards of power; glory, homage, splendour, limitless wealth and the pleasures of generosity; admiration, love. They had cost him only the hardships and dangers which were his pride. For the first time he learned power’s terrible necessities. He knew them when he saw them; yet it is possible he kept a last option open.

Three agents on racing dromedaries were sent out on the guarded road. They carried such a royal warrant as had protected the slayer of Attalus. This they gave to Parmenion’s senior officers at Ecbatana. In the private park of the palace where he had his residence, one envoy whom he knew offered him first a letter from the King, then one forged in Philotas’ name. He was reading the second “joyfully, as could be seen from his countenance,” when they struck him down.

This letter, mentioned by Curtius without comment, explanation or drama, deserves very serious attention. Why bother with either letter, when Parmenion was already defenceless among his killers? Etiquette demanded that the royal dispatch be read before anything else; it had to be there to authenticate the one that mattered, the Philotas forgery. It was when Parmenion showed evident pleasure at its contents, and not before, that he was killed. If he had shown puzzlement, irritation, vague disapproval, anger, fear, would the daggers have been drawn? Curtius in one of his unreliable purple passages states that Philotas incriminated his father. One of the conspirators may have done so, truly or falsely. It would seem that Alexander, rather than accept such testimony unsupported, took a last chance by working into the forged letter some sign, extracted during the interrogations, which would convey only to a man with guilty knowledge that the plot was going well. It would be hit and miss, open to tragic misunderstandings, but the only feasible test remaining.

Arrian says of Alexander that, unlike other kings, he repented when he knew he had done wrong. We read of such regrets; even of bitter shame; but never of his repenting Parmenion’s death. It had been done not in passion but in considered decision; and by his decision he stood.

The appalling risk it had involved of causing Parmenion’s troops to mutiny—a contingency he had no power whatever to prevent—could only have been run in the firm belief that a still worse danger threatened. (Only the other day, modern Europe has seen the mere dismissal of a popular general followed at once by an army revolt.) Alexander had had to stake everything on the loyalty of troops hundreds of miles away from him, whom he could neither persuade nor coerce when they were forced to choose between him and their own commander. The implications of this have been too little considered.

There was no mutiny. His own army took it quietly; men of Macedon, their folk memory stored with grim tales of its dynastic struggles, and fully satisfied of Philotas’ guilt, they were unlikely to acquit his powerful father. A temporary, ad hoc censors’ board examined home letters for signs of disaffection. Resentful men were segregated into a special corps—receiving, apparently, no punishment but the slur of unreliability—and challenged to redeem themselves by good performance in action. This they did, even with keenness, probably after an address from Alexander himself.

He now knew that a man who wished him dead had held command of his finest striking force, the Companion Cavalry. Hephaestion had proved himself in command, and it would probably have been Alexander’s choice to put the whole corps under a man in whom he had perfect trust. But he was identified with the new controversial policies, a tactful and well-liked diplomat among the Persians, whose customs, and probably speech, he had taken the trouble to learn. To avoid an open snub to the conservatives at this touchy time, Alexander divided the Companions between him and Cleitus “the Black,” his nurse’s brother who had saved his life in the scrimmage at the Granicus. The family was related to the royal house, and had had no need to treat little princes with deference. Probably Alexander had known Cleitus since his infancy and through much of his stormy childhood, with subconscious associations of which he himself was unaware.

Bessus was still in control of Bactria. The two-year resistance of this province has been described as a national rising, but this is true in no modern sense. Its bonds of unity were tribal and familial, and its ancient feuds were never laid aside.

Alexander wintered among a peaceful tribe whom Cyrus, provisioned by them at a time of crisis, had named “The Benefactors,” and whom Alexander took to his heart. With the spring he moved on into the wilds. Through this whole phase of campaigning, rugged country meant well-defined routes however rough; and at strategic points along these ancient trails—some reaching to India, some as far as China whose existence he never guessed—he would mark his passage by founding another city. Modern archaeology is only now beginning to learn how real and solid were his efforts to implant centres of civilization in the wilderness. The garrison was there for protection as well as for control; the streets were properly laid out, there would be a public square, the focus of all Greek cities; a temple for the tutelary deity, a council chamber, sometimes even a theatre; one had a monument to Peritas, a favourite dog he had hand-reared, after whom he had named the town. Most were called Alexandria. The settlers came from the multitude that followed him: veterans who had picked up a woman on the march and bred a family; merchants and craftsmen, attracted by the trade route or the lack of rivals; disabled men ready to settle down with their bounty, their loot and their bit of land rather than face the long drag home; some travel-weary whores to serve the garrison. In later days, if discontent broke out it was in the garrisons; they had no real stake in the place, and a monotonous job while their comrades were with Alexander, getting adventure and wealth.

The campaign against Bessus had been much hampered by the fierce and treacherous Satibarzanes, satrap of Ariana, who, after Gaugamela, had pursued Bessus’ and Nabarzanes’ original plan of first making peace and then rebelling. In the spring of 329 he was in flight, soon to be killed in hand-to-hand combat by Erigyius, one of the boyhood friends exiled by Philip for their devotion. Alexander, resolved to settle with Bessus for good, and get north into Bactriana before he was expected, early in the year led his army over the still icy heights of the Hindu Kush.

Historians have agreed that as a feat of leadership and endurance it far surpasses Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. Its hardships were to a great extent foreseeable; he must have felt an unshaken confidence in his men’s devotion, which events confirmed. He may not have allowed enough for altitude. Provisions ran short; wheeled transport was impossible and the ground grew only alpine herbs; dead mules were eaten raw for lack of cooking fuel; the glare caused snow blindness, and at 11,000-odd feet there must have been some mountain sickness. But Alexander was always to be seen as cold and hungry as anyone, Stopping for a joke, or to haul some numbed man out of a drift. Xenophon too had shaken listless soldiers from the drowsy hypothermia that turns to death; one had complained because his hard-tried commander hit him. No one complained of Alexander.

He had by now taken Bessus’ measure; he could not have risked struggling down head-on into a fresh and determined enemy. He cast his spell on foes as well as friends. Lean and weary, he was forerun by a name of dread. Irresolutely, Bessus stripped the countryside into which he came; leaner, but resolute, he still came on. Bessus’ nerve broke; he fled across the Oxus, burning his boats behind him. Local resistance collapsed; Alexander rested and fed his men. As satrap of Bactria, he appointed the indestructible Artabazus.

It was a breathing spell between a cold hell and a hot one. Alexander detached old veterans and the unfit for discharge home, before marching into the grilling desert round the Oxus. They marched by night, the day being unbearable. The men overspent their water ration in the arid air. The distress of the camp followers must have been extreme. Curtius tells how some of the carriers, who had found a little waterhole and filled a skin for their children, passed Alexander sweltering, and dutifully offered him a cupful. Having asked where they were taking it, he told them to give it to their sons; he would not drink till there was enough for everyone. This recalls a still more famous incident; both are typical, and, human nature being repetitive, no doubt both are true.

At last they reached the river, Alexander standing unrested and unfed, after his last lap, to see everyone safe in camp. The river was wide, the ferry boats had been burned; but Xenophon had taught him on the Danube the lore of the Euphrates, and it served for the Oxus too. The tentmakers set to work stuffing the tent hides into rafts, and the crossing took five days.

Fate treated Bessus just as he had treated Darius. His levies had been melting by desertion. Two of his chiefs decided he was hindering the war. Leaving him in a village fort, held by two servants, they sent Alexander word that he was there for the picking up.

Not to dignify the event by his own presence, Alexander sent Ptolemy, with orders to treat Bessus like a common criminal. The point was to be made that this was not, and never had been, a Persian king. Bessus’ fatal mistake was not to have surrendered along with the realistic Nabarzanes, who had secured his amnesty before Oxathres arrived. Now the brother of Darius waited, expectant, for the vengeance that was his price of fealty. Bessus was stripped, a Persian’s greatest disgrace, and stood by the road, his hands tied to a wooden yoke. Halting his chariot, Alexander asked why he had betrayed and murdered his benefactor, his kinsman and his king. With less dignity than Darius’ when all was lost, he answered that the whole suite had agreed on it, to get safe conduct from Alexander. It was the wrong approach to a man who had pardoned, and taken into his army, a batch of rebels he saw marching to execution with conspicuous courage. He ordered Bessus a flogging, which no doubt Oxathres witnessed, and his custody in chains till a Persian court could try him.

No other pretender appeared. Alexander marched northeast to the immemorial boundary of the Jaxartes River, where civilization ended and the steppes began. Here stood a line of ancient forts, built to keep off the Scythians, fierce nomads whom even Darius the Great could not subdue. Alexander was quick to decide that the frontier had been rightly drawn. He had the rare vision to perceive that, if prejudice were broken down, two great civilizations could cross-fertilize; but he knew barbarism when he saw it, and his concern was to keep it out. It was evident to him that at the first sign of weakness, the Scythians would be across.

Having replaced the horses that heat or cold had killed, he marched back west towards Samarkand. In a clash with tribesmen an arrow split his leg bone. Unable to ride, he saved delay by getting into a litter. First carried by the infantry, it roused the jealousy of the cavalry, who demanded to dismount and share the privilege. He let them take it in turns.

The Jaxartes campaign cannot here be followed in detail. Samarkand, the royal city, was occupied, the river forts were reduced and manned. The country seemed quiet, and Alexander summoned the chiefs of Sogdiana to a council. At once suspecting a treachery which to them seemed a matter of course, they rose in revolt instead, overran his new towns and laid siege to Samarkand. His relieving force was cut up, its commanders proving inadequate, and he had to raise the siege himself. During these operations, leading from the front as usual, he was knocked about. His larynx was bruised by a stone—a dangerous injury—and for a time he lost his voice. A head blow gave him a spell of clouded vision. From this may derive a curious quirk of the Alexander legends, that he had one grey eye and one black. One dilated pupil is a common feature of concussion; some local report of him, in a state when most people would have been in bed, may have lodged in folk memory.

On the further shore of the Jaxartes a horde of defiant Scythians appeared. He got a mixed force over, put them to rout, and chased them far across the plains. Like Darius the Great, he found them slip through his fingers. A worse mishap, because more lasting in its results, was that in the heat he drank whatever water he found, and got a crippling bout of enteritis. So no doubt did other soldiers, not without some fatalities, for Alexander was seriously ill. The army soon learned in the thirsty lowlands that the only safe drink was wine.

Oxathres returned to Ecbatana, to preside over Bessus’ trial by a court of Persian nobles. His nose and eartips had been cut off, the Persian mark of the criminal. The execution too was traditionally barbaric, by impalement or the cross. Oxathres had the body cut in pieces and strewn for wild beasts to eat. His brother at last avenged, his loyalty rewarded, he certified by his presence the legitimacy of the new Great King, to whose court he then returned.

The mass of administration now surrounding Alexander was as much Persian as Macedonian or Greek. Inevitably, people had to wait for audience; inevitably, Macedonians had to take their turn with Persians. Bagoas, a decorative addition to the royal household, was one not universally approved. Persian officers, satraps and envoys were increasingly in evidence, performing those deep obeisances so offensive to Greek tradition, before a King who did not discourage it.

Alexander had had by now the experienced advice of Artabazus, survivor of four reigns, and of Bagoas, familiar with court procedure from very close to the throne. The deference accorded a foreign king would be measured by his own sense of his dignity; there could be no question of ceasing to exact from Persians so essential a token of respect as the “prostration.” But Alexander was thin-skinned; even if no one had told him, he would hardly have missed the fact that the scornful glances of unbowing Macedonians were not being lost on his newer subjects.

Consulting with Hephaestion—whose unshakeable devotion the advent of Bagoas had not flawed—he considered how the matter could be regularized. It would be difficult, and would have to be done with tact.

Herodotus, writing a century earlier, said of Persian customs:

When they meet each other in the streets, you may know if the persons meeting are of equal rank by the following sign: if they are, instead of speaking they kiss each other on the lips. Where one is a little the other’s inferior, the kiss is given on the cheek; when the difference of rank is great, the inferior prostrates himself on the ground.

All Persians were inferior to the King, most of them greatly inferior; there is an area of debate about the depth of obeisance required of persons about the court. We read of Persians high enough placed to be Alexander’s dinner guests making full prostration before him; but he also took over the important institution of the Royal Kindred. The Persian kings had admitted to this privileged caste large numbers of noblemen to whom they were not related, thus making them “a little” his inferiors, with the right to kiss his cheek. Alexander must certainly have conferred this at once upon, for instance, the venerable Artabazus, and royal princes like Oxathres and Bistanes; probably on many more. But he kept it in his gift, not to be taken for granted.

In the time of Darius the Great two Spartan envoys, men of the highest birth, had risked death sooner than make proskynesis before him (they were magnanimously spared). If any rite of bending was intermediate between prostration on the ground and the kinsman’s kiss, it was deep enough to give Macedonians the same sense of servility. About this Alexander had no illusions, as his proceedings show.

Persians were willing to bow down before a king, Macedonians not. Neither race must be humiliated. The faces of Macedonians could be saved by upgrading the status of the person to whom they bowed. From a king, there was only one step up. Let them bow before a son of Ammon who partook of the god’s divinity.

In an issue like this, the complex mind of Alexander, baffling to men who shared his culture, is inaccessible to ours. Except in Egypt, where it had millennial sanction, he had never made use of his divine prerogative. His use of it now was practical, statesmanlike, and in a sense highly civilized. On the other hand, it was not a form; he believed in it. It is worth remembering that millions of men, in three continents, would agree with him before many years were out.

Having told his plan to his closest friends, apparently without opposition, he confided it to leading Persians; they had put up with enough and were due for some compensation. A number of them were invited to a banquet, along with Macedonians of rank. Arrian, who may here be using either Ptolemy or the chamberlain Chares, gives the most reasonable account of this event. The sophist Anaxarchus made a speech in praise of the King. (He came from the Thracian city of Abdera. The Athenian tradition called him a flatterer of Alexander. He ended up being pounded to death with iron clubs by a Cypriot king about whom he had been rude, a fate he met with defiant courage. If he did flatter Alexander it must have been because he liked him, a possibility which can never be excluded.) He listed his unexampled achievements, correctly predicted that he would be offered divine honours as soon as he was dead, and asked why he should not receive them in his lifetime. On cue, the friends jumped up with assenting cries, ready to make their reverence. At the critical moment, Callisthenes intervened.

In a longish speech, he urged the impiety of offering gods’ rights to men. Most of the Macedonians had been taken unprepared by the proposal; at this support for their indecisive reluctance, they broke into applause. Alexander, faced with the prospect of an unpleasant scene, sent round word that he would not insist. Everyone sat down. Then the Persian guests, who knew the real intention and were determined to acknowledge it, got up and performed the proskynesis of their own accord. As one of them took his turn less gracefully than the rest, a Macedonian guffawed with laughter. It was the last straw for Alexander; he strode down the hall and threw the man off his banquet couch on to the floor—certainly, for the Persians, an innovation in court etiquette.

This volte-face of Callisthenes’ may, or may not, have been simply maturing within him. All sources agree on the effusiveness of his official chronicle. But he was a product of the Lyceum, keeping in touch with Aristotle, who must have heard with mounting disgust of honours and offices conferred on Persians, the assumption of “barbarian” royal dress, and the scandalous Bagoas. After the long delays involved in getting private mail from Attica to the Oxus, Callisthenes may have been urged to make a stand.

Alexander remained tenacious of his purpose. His next move cannot be called arrogant; it showed both sensitivity and tact. He arranged a small party, for distinguished Macedonians and Greeks alone. Hephaestion lobbied each beforehand, making sure they knew what to expect and would not object. One was Callisthenes.

A brief ceremony was planned around the loving cup. Each guest would stand and drink, then make the proskynesis before Alexander, rise, and come forward to receive a kiss. Thus, in return for a single prostration formally acknowledging his right to it, Alexander would accept them all into the Royal Kin. His return of the kiss—in Persian terms the salutation of equals—was a personal gesture from friend to friends. Offering what was perhaps the most signal proof of his long devotion, Hephaestion bowed down the first of all.

All went smoothly till it came to Callisthenes, when Alexander “happened” to be talking to Hephaestion, and “did not notice” that he came up for the kiss without first making his bow. That the obvious joker in the pack had really been overlooked is of course incredible. A neat little piece of face saving had been arranged, allowing Callisthenes to keep his philosophic pride without official cognizance. Any odium it incurred among the others was his own affair.

Like many intelligent men, Alexander had not left margin enough for others’ dullness. As Callisthenes came for his kiss, someone called out that it had not been earned. Diplomacy thus frustrated, the King turned his face away. Callisthenes completed the social disaster by saying rudely, “So I go off short of a kiss.” Thus Chares the chamberlain, who must have been an eyewitness.

Hephaestion, who had certainly done his best, had no alternative but to assure the other guests afterwards that Callisthenes had agreed to bow. He may indeed simply have changed his mind, a contingency provided for in vain. There was no further attempt to introduce proskynesis among the Macedonians.

Alexander had now not only been twice snubbed publicly by Callisthenes; he had been baulked of an important political aim. Had he become the Oriental tyrant of Athenian propaganda, this offensive and obstructive person would speedily have suffered a fatal colic, so easily passed off as the virulent local dysentery. No clearer evidence is needed of Alexander’s aversion to secret murder than Callisthenes’ continued life. None of his privileges were withdrawn. He even kept his office of tutor to the royal squires. Alexander could still be trusting to the point of naïvety.

He did test the sophist’s popularity by asking him one evening to give in sophistic style first a panegyric exhibition speech on the Macedonians, then a speech in their detraction. The second, which the company considered the more vigorous, was much resented. Alexander, striking while the iron was hot, remarked that it had simply shown ill will.

The proskynesis issue was one handful of fuel on an already smouldering fire. It had not yet touched the rank and file, with whom Alexander’s stock had never been higher; but the staff was divided sharply. Young officers, like the frontier subalterns of Kipling’s India, could fraternize when East met West, and enjoy it among the other adventures with which Alexander had enriched their lives. Philip’s old guard clung bitterly to their victor’s status, and saw it daily eroded.

It is fairer to see Alexander as a great original than to despise them for reaction. If prejudice is prejudgment, they could claim to judge by results. They had won against odds; had fought better, were better led, and thought they had better traditions. Macedonian restraints on the royal power, though crude, were valuable. The image of the Oriental was linked in their minds, not without the truth evident in Herodotus, to the cruel caprices of despotic power slavishly endured, of which the prostration was a symbol. Alexander’s friends would have bowed, as they wore his presents of Persian dress, because they knew, loved, and partly understood him. To Philip’s men it was all anathema; and their condemnation made the King’s party sharply defensive. Though his personality kept it in check, friction bred faction, and still did when he moved his headquarters from the Oxus plains, where he had wintered, to the delightful climate of Samarkand. Ironically, when stress reached breaking point in tragedy, it was not because Alexander had distanced himself from his countrymen with a Great King’s hauteur, but precisely because he had not.

Artabazus had lately asked leave to retire from the satrapy of Bactria, which he began to find fatiguing. This exalted and wealthy office had been conferred on Hephaestion’s co-commander and Alexander’s kinsman, Cleitus.

If it seemed to discharge a debt of honour to him and to his sister, it also removed a vocal and stubborn conservative from the high command. Unlike Parmenion’s posting at Ecbatana—a staff job, officially temporary—it had high prestige, but was also permanent. Cleitus had rank already, military and social; he may not have found the golden handshake flattering. However, he accepted it, and would soon have gone his way. The anger of Dionysus determined otherwise.

On the god’s Macedonian feast day Alexander gave a banquet, especially to share with his friends a consignment of prime Hyrcanian apples. For reasons unknown, he dedicated the feast to the divine warrior twins, Castor and Pollux. Cleitus, invited, had begun a sacrifice of his own, perhaps to the more orthodox divinity, when he heard the dinner trumpet and put it off. The two sheep he had ready to butcher, sheeplike, came trotting after him. Alexander thought this escort of sacrificial beasts a disturbing omen, and ordered the priests to pray for Cleitus’ safety.

Accustomed by now to the axiom that “you can’t drink the water,” men must already have slaked their thirsts with wine before they arrived; and Macedonian feast days always meant heavy drinking. Someone sang a lampoon on the commanders who had failed to relieve the city; a tasteless black joke, seeing they had been killed, but countenanced by Alexander who had succeeded where they had failed. Feelings built up; his friends began to exalt his exploits over those of Castor and Pollux, perhaps with the proskynesis still in mind. With everyone drunk, the debate grew quarrelsome and aggressive; the friends, abandoning the Twins, turned to the still more explosive theme of how Alexander had surpassed his father.

Cleitus noisily disagreed. Having lived close to the royal family through Alexander’s lifetime, he must have been dense not to know, even when in liquor, that he was playing with fire. He would have been safe with Alexander the King of Persia, whom he so resented. Fatally, he had aroused instead the furious youth who had hurled a goblet at his father’s wedding.

Alexander’s response was wholly Macedonian. When Cleitus shouted and argued, he argued and shouted back. Cleitus mocked his Persian dress and his cult of Ammon; complained that “barbarians” must be petitioned for leave to see him; taunted him with having saved his life at the Granicus. Alexander shied an apple at his head, then, the insults continuing, looked about for a weapon. His friends, like true Macedonians, held him back by force while he cursed and struggled; resourceful Ptolemy eased the protesting drunk outside. This common barroom brawl ended as so many have done among lesser men. Cleitus came bursting in again with a new insult he had just thought of; Alexander, blind with rage, snatched a spear from the nearest guard and ran him through the heart. At the sound of his death cry, the noise in the hall was succeeded by a deep silence.

Such was the act of homicide invariably called by historians “the murder of Cleitus.” Today, with equivalent evidence of drink and provocation, it would receive a sentence of two or three years, with remission for good conduct.

No judgment on it has been harsher than Alexander’s own. He had killed Parmenion as a king, responsibly. This time he had killed as a man, who could not hold his drink or keep his temper. As a king, he had illegally killed a Macedonian asserting his right of free speech. As a Greek, he had killed a benefactor and a guest; aspects whose enormity we can scarcely now assess. His shame was proportioned to his pride; for a time he found himself intolerable. Plutarch may be right in saying that in the first shock he had to be restrained from running himself on the spear he had pulled out of Cleitus. For three days he would not eat or drink, till there were fears for his life, perhaps also for his sanity. People came to his room without his leave, as if he were helpless with some dangerous illness. The philosophers offered rational or soothing words. The Macedonian soldiers, alarmed by his desperation over what must have seemed to them a very common mishap, called an Assembly of their own accord, condemned Cleitus for treason, and sent to let Alexander know that his act had now been legalized. Consoling as their forgiveness must have been, he did not yet forgive himself, and met comfort with cries of self-reproach.

More effective first aid was brought by the priest of Dionysus. Each of the Olympians had his own weapon of retribution: Zeus wielded thunderbolts, Poseidon waves and earthquakes, Aphrodite disastrous passions. Dionysus’ weapon was madness. Neglected on his feast day in favour of other deities, he had come like some uninvited fairy in those folk tales which are the detritus of old religions, and cast his malign enchantment. Alexander had done the deed when, literally, he was not himself.

From this he took some salve to his self-respect, and gradually came back to life again. The theory had something in it, even though the spell had been cast on the god’s behalf by his votary Olympias, twenty-odd years before.

Any fairly short account of Alexander’s crowded life must often seem to leap from drama to drama. Yet these events were brief in time; long weeks and months were spent in varied action, much of it now lost to us; in campaigning over wild and difficult country where, once off the caravan trails, men of his race had never stepped before. After operations of the most physically exacting kind, while his men were resting, he merely changed his tasks; seeing the usual envoys and petitioners and couriers, administering not only the old army but its constant inflow of foreign auxiliaries about whose methods and capacities he had to know; seeing that their native officers got along with his own commanders. He had to see surveyors’ reports, and those of the scouts on whose intelligence he would advance into uncharted lands. Everything of importance fell on him. He could not delegate to an establishment he was in process of constructing as he went.

He was founding more cities, deeply concerned with them both as viable communities, and as his own memorials. Kandahar still echoes his name. On choice of site hung the settlers’ welfare, even their lives. That Hephaestion was often given a free hand to establish towns when Alexander was busy is striking evidence of his real abilities.

Alexander had plenty to do. The character and terrain of these wars can best be reconstructed from the memoirs of nineteenth-century soldiers who found men and mores largely unchanged, and, coming from a society more sensitive to shock, took less for granted. We learn in passing that Alexander put down a local custom of leaving out the sick and senile for the hyenas. He could not wait to see whether survival offered them a better fate.

His legend was already forming in his tracks. Two thousand years later, Afghan chiefs would be claiming descent from him, and even that of their horses from Bucephalas, rather elderly now to be at stud. Forces which had held out against his officers would melt into the hills at the mere rumour that he himself was on the march towards them. Spitamenes, one of Bessus’ betrayers, a tough and resourceful guerrilla leader, died of such news. His officers heard that Alexander was coming, and in panic sent him their chieftain’s head. Curtius says that his wife removed it while he slept; adding that she was also his mother.

The country was full of precipitous cliffs and summits, fortified from remote antiquity in the perennial cycles of blood feud and tribal war. From time to time some especially sensational and ingenious siege gets detailed description. It was impossible for Alexander to hear that a strongpoint was impregnable without regarding it as a personal challenge. This showed a perceptive grasp of war psychology in Sogdiana, where courage, strength and success were essentials of status and of survival.

The most notorious of such pinnacles was the Sogdian Rock; high, sheer, and riddled at the top with caves well stocked with food and water. Its chieftain, Oxyartes, was away raising the countryside, leaving his family and garrison in the charge of his son. The single path to the top was entirely commanded from above. The area was under snow.

Alexander offered a parley. Two envoys climbed down, laughed in his face, and told him not to waste his time unless his men had wings. That settled the matter. He called for volunteers who were expert climbers, and got 300. At night, helped by the snow which would have etched out all the ledges, they were to ascend the steepest, unguarded face, a “very severe.” The first man up would get 12 talents, a sum on which to be comfortable for life; the next 11; and so through the first twelve. Iron tent pegs for pitons, mallets, and ropes got them up, in spite of snow-numbed fingers, with a loss of one in ten. In Sogdiana, to have conceded failure might have cost lives by the thousand.

Stunned at dawn by the sight of an unknown force above him, the chief’s son surrendered, and everyone was spared. A feast was offered, at which the ladies of the family performed a dance for the conqueror. Among them was the chief’s daughter, Roxane. Alexander fell in love with her at first sight. Quixotically renouncing the right of capture which neither friend nor foe would have questioned, he asked for her hand in marriage.

Political expediency has been suggested, but does not convince. No doubt had she been disastrously unsuitable—married for instance—he would have mastered his feelings; but everything points to an authentic coup de foudre. The obvious state marriage would have been with Darius’ daughter, as he knew, for he later made it. Any daughter of Artabazus would have been more eligible than this chieftain’s child. It would seem that falling in love with a woman was a new and exhilarating experience, and, ever the explorer, he was eager to pursue it without delay.

It is unlikely she had any female predecessor. Recent archaeology has revealed the proud, aristocratic refinement of the ideal type admired by the Persian rulers of these regions; and she was an acknowledged beauty. Perhaps she reminded him of his mother, with whom she had traits in common, whether or not he had time to find it out. After such a childhood, it is a wonder his heterosexual instincts were not destroyed instead of merely retarded. The epicene graces of Bagoas may have been tilting, imperceptibly, his sexual bias.

Roxane’s father was summoned, made alliance and gave consent. The Macedonians, after the initial shock, would have remembered Philip’s succession of campaign wives, and presumed that his son would choose in due course a proper consort. The Persians, their royal house passed by, must have raised their eyebrows. (The highborn family of Artabazus remained tranquil, suggesting that the seduction and humiliation of his daughter Barsine was still unborn in the mind of its propagandist author; in real life they could not have swallowed the insult.) The Sogdians were delighted. At the marriage feast the young girl was handed her ritual piece of the bridal loaf by the strange fair-haired chieftain who had sliced it with his sword—ancient and still-surviving symbol of his power to protect and maintain her. Tasting the bread, she pledged herself to a man with five years to live, during most of which he would be on campaign in conditions where only his fighting force could follow him. Her married life must have been measured in months.

Within weeks, he was off to another siege of sensational difficulty. His new father-in-law having mediated a peace treaty, he returned to his bride. The story of the marriage is much neglected by the sources, in itself significant. Only an accident of history has disclosed that in a month or two he was already sleeping alone.

That it took him four years to give her a child admits of various explanations. She is said to have had a stillbirth in India, begotten therefore early in their marriage; we hear of no others. He may have been attentive, but infertile; her attraction may have been fitful; or it may have long ceased, and only some premonition of his early death made him bestir himself to beget an heir. The certainty is that he never became uxorious. With Hephaestion he remained in love, at a depth where the physical relationship becomes almost irrelevant; and years later Bagoas was still his recognized eromenos. He had been disinhibited, not reversed, and had now achieved the normal Greek bisexuality.

Among those most scandalized by the match must have been Callisthenes. Like his teacher Aristotle, he saw Alexander’s mission as that of Hellenic war leader, and thought he had long since betrayed it; Macedonian tolerance of royal polygamy was not shared by southern Greeks, and the thought of Greek lands being some day ruled by a scion of barbarian stock must have been monstrous. Callisthenes adopted an ostentatious austerity of life; a protest admired by the disaffected. Alexander himself paid it little heed. With the spring he had moved from Sogdiana south into Bactria to consolidate his conquests, India in the forefront of his mind. Between this and his new wife, he had enough to think of without the tedious scholar, who was left undisturbed to his instruction of the squires.

His most receptive student, a youth called Hermolaus, was one day attending Alexander at a boar hunt, when for reasons never made clear he speared a boar which the King had marked as his own quarry. For this he got an exemplary sentence: a beating before his fellows, and forfeiture of his right to ride. Since officers who over-punish in fits of petulance are not regarded by their men as Alexander was, it would seem obvious that Hermolaus had been accumulating a bad record. Not enough is known of the royal hunting etiquette to show whether Alexander was now being hard on him for something which might otherwise have been overlooked, or if his offence was flagrant. He was bitterly resentful, and, according to the depositions later, complained to Callisthenes, who spoke in praise of tyrannicides. At all events, Hermolaus formed a plot with five other squires, one of whom was his lover, to kill Alexander as he slept. Six squires made up a night watch; they had therefore to get themselves into the same watch, unobtrusively, one by one.

The ease with which they did so would have staggered any one of the Greek tyrants, of whose precautions such fascinating accounts exist. The squires’ arrangements took them about a month. Night duty was only served for one night at a time, which meant that they must act on their night assigned, or wait the best part of a fortnight for their next turn. Yet their plans took no account whatever of Roxane or her anteroom attendants. She had been consigned to the harem, where the assassins had no apparent fears of her husband sleeping.

The lack of evidence about their relations leaves an important gap in our knowledge of Alexander. It is clear, however, that close and affectionate communication had been integral to his other loves. To Hephaestion he confided everything; Bagoas had been encouraged to reminisce about his former life. Roxane cannot have had a word of Greek; the sources are silent about Alexander’s Persian. Beyond a few endearments picked up from Bagoas, it was probably elementary. Beauty, however dazzling its first impact, may have turned out to be not enough.

On the night arranged for his murder, Alexander was at a party. The squires awaited him, hoping he would be drunk. Fairly late he got up to leave, but was waylaid going to bed by a slightly crazy Syrian woman, a clairvoyant he had taken up because she had given him some true predictions. He let her hang about his quarters, the third of his mother-figures. Ptolemy, much inclined to ignore Alexander’s more disreputable connections, does not admit, as does Aristobulus, that she told him it would be bad luck to turn in before the morning. A born night bird in any case, he got the party going again, and came to bed at dawn. The relief guard arrived, but the anguished conspirators on some pretext still stood by, hoping against hope for their chance. He was sober enough to thank them charmingly for their courtesy in waiting up for him, and give each a tip, before he fell into bed. Hermolaus was ready to wait till their turn came round again; but one of the others now felt unhappy enough to confide in a lover of his, from whom he had kept the secret. The youth was at once sent off to make a clean breast of everything; which he did, in great distress, to Ptolemy whom he found in the royal tent. Alexander, when with some difficulty he had been shaken awake, pardoned the youth, and ordered all the others arrested. Curtius includes Callisthenes; in Arrian, he is only accused after the interrogation of the squires, and Ptolemy does not hesitate here to speak of torture.

They, as Macedonians, were tried before the Assembly. Hermolaus’ defence is said to have been a denunciation of Alexander; just possible in a fanatic with nothing left to lose and no concern for his fellows. They were all condemned by general assent to stoning, which the Assembly carried out. Callisthenes, a non-Macedonian, had no title to a trial and got none. According to Ptolemy he was first tortured—probably to learn if the plot had its roots in Athens—and then hanged. Whether or not he had helped to plan the murder, he had created its moral climate. Alexander’s logic made no distinction between the theorist killer and the man with the knife.

If he had spent longer in Athens, he might have known what this act would cost him, and thought twice. He had embittered the most influential body of opinion formers in his world. Anti-Macedonian and anti-monarchist already, the men of the Academy and the Lyceum now sank their rivalries to execrate in concert the martyrdom of free-minded philosophy. His barbarian marriage was derided; wild rumours of sexual debauch were swallowed whole; military operations were converted to atrocities. Blatantly forged letters of his abounded. One of them purported to say that the squires had not implicated Callisthenes; even the absurdity of his exonerating a man he had just condemned was not questioned by the logicians, it would have been ideological heresy. The Athenian Alexander, passed on to Rome, has bedevilled history ever since.

His death had been devised with treachery and cowardice, things he abhorred and could not understand. But killing Callisthenes was the one great strategic blunder of his career. He did not live to know the worst of it.

* In a fictional account of this incident (The Persian Boy) a different explanation of Bagoas’ arrival was given. Later reflection, however, has persuaded me that the one above is more consistent with the evidence. M.R.