The Nature of Alexander (21 page)

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.