The Nature of Alexander (20 page)

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.