[8]

The Lord of Asia

THE oracle at Gordium had foretold that Alexander would become ‘lord of Asia’ — that is, king of the Persian Empire and Darius' legitimate successor. It was thus, somewhat prematurely, that he had bidden Darius address him when they exchanged letters. AfterGaugamela the claim looked a good deal more plausible. As Plutarch says, ‘the empire of the Persians was thought to be thoroughly dissolved’. Alexander made his wishes known to the army, which thereupon acclaimed him ‘lord of Asia’ as part of the victory celebrations. Thus Gaugamela marked a turning-point for Alexander in more ways than one. The Greeks, who had never taken his democratic professions very seriously, found this new development absolutely in character. For them he had always been a type-cast example of the ambitious tyrant, and now he was proceeding to vindicate their judgement.

The effect on his Macedonian troops, however, was profound. From this time on, relations between Alexander and the army steadily deteriorated, culminating — as we shall see — in ugly episodes of mutiny and murder. The Macedonian old-guard barons, in particular, were shocked by their king's visible drift towards oriental despotism. For them Alexander's task in Asia was done, and the sooner he took them all home again the better. Parmenio told him, bluntly, that he ought rather to look back upon Macedonia than fix his gaze on the East. But Alexander's horizon of conquest was continually expanding; Macedonia, for him, had begun to seem very small and far away.

The king himself understood his dilemma all too well. He would not, could not, abandon the vision of glory and empire that drove him on; but he went out of his way to conciliate those who opposed him most vehemently. Before leaving Arbela he made lavish distributions of ‘wealth, estates, and provinces’ to his senior officers. At the same time, anxious to win favour among the Greeks — not surprisingly, with the Peloponnese in revolt — he wrote telling them that all their tyrannies were abolished, and they could henceforth live under their own laws. This sounded a fine and generous gesture; but the king's private instructions to Antipater seem to have been rather different. At all events, the tyrants of Sicyon, Pellene and Messenia continued in office; it would be simple enough, later, when all danger was past, to make Antipater himself the scapegoat for their retention (see below, pp. 458–9). Alexander's promise to rebuild Plataea, however, was eventually honoured, perhaps as a safeguard against any resurgence of ambition byThebes.¹

One of the trickiest problems the king had to face would only begin with his invasion of Persian soil. Hitherto he had been able to present himself as a liberator. In Asia Minor and Egypt the claim could be made to look convincing enough, despite those outbursts of pure terrorism down the Phoenician coast. Even for Babylonia, once proudly independent, the formula might just work. But once he set out on the road to Susa and Persepolis, he would have to think of a different formula. He could hardly claim to be liberating the Persians from themselves. Thus Alexander soon became, as the Marxists say, involved in a contradiction; which may well explain why his dispatches home now placed more emphasis on revenge than liberation as a motive for the crusade. Doubtless he took the same line with his Macedonian troops.

However, if he was to prevent trouble in his rear — let alone pose as Darius' successor — he would have to conciliate the Persian nobility in no uncertain fashion; and this, again, would not endear him to his own men. A good many Iranian grandees did not hesitate to collaborate with the invader. There nevertheless remained a hard core of opposition, led by Persia's priestly caste, the Magi, whose hostility to Alexander was primarily religious in origin, and who regarded him as a mere heathen aggressor. He did not worship Ahura Mazda; he was not a Persian aristocrat of Achaemenid stock, nor even from one of the ‘Seven Noble Families’. In the eyes of this powerful group, his claim to the throne rested on force, and force alone. Their propaganda presented him, naturally enough, as a common usurper, a ravening lion sent for Persia's destruction.

Alexander, who had studied the teachings of the Magi under Aristotle, seems to have been well aware of these objections. If he hoped to get himself accepted as Great King, he would need to make very large concessions to national religious and dynastic sentiment. His only chance of legitimizing himself as an Achaemenid was by removing Darius and marrying into the royal family: hence his careful cultivation of the queen mother.² Though any immediate plans he may have had for a dynastic alliance were disrupted by Stateira's untimely death, and Darius' second escape, the king's Achaemenid ambitions were bound to cause an eventual breach between him and his fellow-countrymen. He could hardly lay claim to the throne of Persia, for instance, without observingPersian court etiquette. The Great King was hedged about with endless taboos and religious ritual — in sharp contrast to the easy-going relationship which prevailed between a Macedonian monarch and his peers. To combine these roles was, ultimately, impossible; sooner or later he would have to choose between them.

Alexander stayed no more than a day or two in Arbela. He buried his own dead, but left the Persians where they lay: one excellent reason for a rapid departure. A force under Philoxenus was sent ahead to Susa, by the direct route, with orders to accept the city's surrender and safeguard its treasure. Meanwhile Alexander himself crossed the Tigris and marched for Babylon, some 300 miles away to the south. His route led through the most fertile region of Mesopotamia: the country was criss-crossed with irrigation canals, so that water and shade were both plentiful. At Mennis, near modern Kirkuk, Alexander was shown a great bitumen lake, and also a well of crude petroleum or naphtha. The local inhabitants, anxious to demonstrate the marvellous properties of this liquid, one evening sprinkled it all along the street leading to Alexander's quarters, and then set a torch to the ground, so that ‘with the speed of thought the flame darted to the other end, and the street was one continuous fire.’³

Meanwhile some hard private bargaining was going on between Alexander and Mazaeus, who after Gaugamela had returned to his duties as satrap of Babylon. Alexander wanted a bloodless surrender of the city; Mazaeus hoped to continue in office under the new regime. Some sort of provisional deal was worked out during the march south. Nevertheless, Alexander did not trust his late opponent, and therefore approached Babylon in battle-formation, ready for any kind of treachery or surprise attack. To those dusty soldiers trudging along beside the Euphrates, the city must have appeared like some shimmering mirage across the plain: a vista of high white terraces, luxuriant greenery, great crenellated walls and towers. Babylon formed a rough square (each side being about fifteen miles long) bisected by the river and the processional way. Its outer fortifications were of mud-brick bound with bitumen, and so broad on top that two four-horse chariots could pass abreast on them.

Hardly less impressive was the colourful procession which now came trailing out along the royal road — with much trumpet-blowing and clashing of cymbals — to greet Alexander and his men. At its head rode the renegade satrap Mazaeus, who formally made over city, citadel and treasure into the king's hands. Behind him crowded Babylon's chief citizens, with a motley collection of livestock as gift-offerings: not only horses and cattle, but also caged lions and leopards. There followed a solemnly chanting group of Babylonian priests, and lastly, as escort, several magnificently accoutred squadrons of the Great King's household cavalry. Alexander now mounted a chariot, formed his men into hollow columns (he still seems to have suspected some sort of trap) and made a superb triumphal entry. The whole route was strewn with flowers and garlands. Silver altars, heaped high with rich spices, burnt sweetly in honour of the conqueror. As Alexander rode under the high gold and lapis splendours of the Ishtar Gate, with its heraldic bulls and dragons, crowds on the parapet cheered and showered roses down on him.

Ironically enough, when Cyrus the Great had entered Babylon two centuries earlier (29 October 539) he too had been welcomed as a liberator by Marduk's priests. But in 482, after a nationalist rebellion Babylon had received terrible punishment. The fortifications built by Nebuchadnezzar were demolished; worst of all, the seven-storey ziggurat, 300 feet high, on which stood Esagila, Marduk's temple, the ‘House of the Foundation of Earth and Heaven’, was pulled down, never to be rebuilt. The god's solid gold statue, eighteen feet high and weighing nearly 800 lb., was carried off by Xerxes' troops and melted down for bullion. Babylon's walls had been rebuilt, but Esagila remained a lost memory. Alexander's enthusiastic welcome was due in part to his promise — which no doubt Mazaeus had passed on — that he would restore the ziggurat and shrine of the god. Once more, and for the last time, he could present himself as the deliverer from Persian injustice and oppression.

In any case the cheerful, luxury-loving citizens of Babylon, reflecting (with good reason) that it was better to collaborate than to suffer the fate of Tyre, went out of their way to give these Macedonian troops a month's leave they would never forget. Officers and men alike were billeted in luxurious private houses, where they never lacked for food, wine, or women. Babylon's professional courtesans were reinforced by countless enthusiastic amateurs, including the daughters and wives of many leading citizens. (After-dinner striptease seems to have been very popular.) Their guests were shown the usual tourist sights, including the fabulous Hanging Gardens — a stone-terraced forest of trees and shrubs, built by an Assyrian king whose wife pined for the forests and uplands of her native Iran.^{4 a}

While his troops enjoyed themselves, and Callisthenes supervised the transcription of the Babylonian priests' astronomical records (if they really went back for 31,000 years he must have had his time cut out) the king plunged into problems of administration. His first and undoubtedly most important step was to confirm Mazaeus as satrap of Babylon, with the traditional right of coining silver. What Parmenio and the Macedonian diehards thought about this re-instatement of an ex-enemy can all too easily be imagined; but it was a very practical step. If Alexander intended, from now on, to put himself forward as the legitimate Archaemenid successor, he had to get the support of the Persian aristocracy; and this implied more than suppressing potential opposition. Iran's noble families provided the empire's traditional administrators, and Alexander had no trained (much less bilingual) civil servants with which to replace them.

From this point of view Mazaeus' appointment can be seen as a particularly astute move: the satrap had a Babylonian wife, and strong local connections. Thus Alexander contrived to improve his image with the Persians, while at the same time posing as a liberator for the benefit of nationalists in Babylon. Not that he was foolish enough to give Mazaeus a completely free hand. The garrison commander in Babylon was a Macedonian; so was the officer left in charge of the satrapal levies, with responsibility for further recruiting. Mazaeus might have the right to issue coins, but not to collect taxes. This job went to a Macedonian finance officer, working under Harpalus. It was now, too, that Alexander first developed his keen interest in Babylonian religion and astrology (perhaps erroneously equating Egyptian Sarapis with Bel-Marduk, because the latter was sometimes referred to as Sarri-rabu, ‘the great king’). He may have ordered the restoration of Marduk's temple and ziggurat, in the first instance, for purely political reasons; but after a while he seems to have acquired a genuine respect for these Chaldaean priests. Whatever rituals they prescribed he carried out, and when the army moved on a number of them joined his retinue.⁵

Susa, the second of the Great King's palatial capitals, lay some 375 miles south-east from Babylon, close to the Persian Gulf. The plain in which it stood was immensely fertile, but ringed with mountains, so that for nine months of the year it formed a natural oven. Strabo wrote that ‘when the sun is hottest, at noon, the lizards and the snakes could not cross the streets in the city quickly enough to prevent their being burnt to death’. One reason why Alexander waited a month in Babylon was to let Susa cool down. By mid November, when he finally set out, the winds had veered round to south or south-east, and the first rains had fallen.^b The army was overtaken en route by massive reinforcements from Greece, under Amyntas (see above, pp. 267–8, n.): 1,500 cavalry and no less than 13,500 infantry, of whom nearly a third had been recruited in Macedonia itself. There were also fifty new royal pages: the king had certainly gone out of his way to insure himself against trouble at home, though the pages were later (see below, p. 378) to prove something of a trouble in their own right.

The arrival of this force prompted Alexander to halt his march for a day or two and carry out certain innovations in the command structure. Infantry reinforcements were still distributed territorially among the battalions of the phalanx, and a new additional seventh battalion was now formed. But with the cavalry Alexander went out of his way to break down all territorial groupings. The squadrons were now subdivided into two troops (lochoi), each under its own troop commander, and brought up to strength with replacements chosen on a random, non-regional basis. Promotion in future was to be by merit rather than seniority — which again gave the king far closer control over all military appointments. This kind of shake-up, taken in conjunction with the donations at Babylon, suggests that Alexander was already faced by considerable lack of enthusiasm — to put it no more strongly — among his officers and men. The reorganization had two objects: increased efficiency and increased loyalty. ‘He brought the whole force,’Diodorus says, ‘up to an outstanding devotion to its commander and obedience to his commands, and to a high degree of effectiveness.’ The order of priorities is revealing.

While Alexander was still on the road to Susa, a messenger reached him from Philoxenus with the news that the city had capitulated, and all its treasure was safely under guard. Once again the Macedonian army received a royal welcome. The satrap,Abuleites, sent out his son to escort Alexander's troops as far as the Choaspes River, where he was awaiting them in person. His gifts included camels, dromedaries, and a dozen elephants: by this time the Macedonian baggage-train must have begun to resemble a travelling menagerie. When Alexander entered Susa he was at once conducted into the royal palace, passing through the great hypostyle hall with its vivid glazed-brick reliefs — horned lions, winged griffins, long rows of gorgeously apparelled Persian archers — to the treasury. Here Abuleites formally made over to him 40–50,000 talents of gold and silver bullion, together with another 9,000 talents of minted gold darics. So fabulous a hoard was something beyond even Alexander's wildest dreams.

But this was only the beginning. The treasury also held more than a hundred tons of purple-dyed cloth from Hermione, nearly two centuries old, its colour still bright and unfaded. There was all the loot which Xerxes had amassed from Greece, including the famous ‘tyrannicide’ statue-group of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. There were jars of Nile and Danube water, sent in by vassal monarchs as tokens of fealty. There were the furnishings, gold plate and jewellery in the palace itself: when Alexander sat down to dine with his Companions, the scene must have resembled that recorded, for an earlier period, in the Book of Esther:

On every side, fastened by ivory rings to marble columns, hung canopies, some white, some flaxen, some violet, with cords of fine linen and purple thread; couches of gold and silver were set here and there on a floor of malachite and marble, wondrously patterned. From golden cups they drank, and the very trenchers on which the meat was served were ever of new design.

If Darius was, in fact, hoping to distract Alexander with dazzling riches while he himself once more prepared for battle, he could hardly have baited the trap more effectively.⁶

Alexander's personal ambitions, however, reached farther than mere loot, which never held any great attraction for him. After he had inspected the treasury, his first act — no doubt a calculated gesture — was to seat himself on Darius' throne, under its famous golden canopy. This, as he well knew, meant death for any other than the legitimate occupant. Old Demaratus of Corinth shed tears of joy at the sight, and died shortly thereafter: nunc dimittis. But despite its symbolic impact, this incident also had a streak of unintentional comedy about it. Darius was a tall man, and Alexander somewhat under average height; when Alexander sat down, his feet dangled in space above the royal footstool.

One of the pages, with considerable presence of mind, snatched away the footstool and substituted a table. At this a Persian eunuch standing by began to weep noisily. When Alexander asked him what the trouble was, he explained that this was the royal table from which his master Darius had formerly eaten. Alexander, anxious not to offend against any Achaemenid religious taboos, was on the point of having the table removed again; but Philotas, with shrewd perspicacity, pointed out that his act, being committed unknowingly, counted as an omen. Alexander had, in true biblical style, made his enemy's board his footstool. The table stayed where it was.

An even more ludicrous faux pas which Alexander committed about this time came as a timely reminder of the vast gap which still existed between upper-class Persian and Macedonian customs. Olympias had sent her son, as a present, a large quantity of purple cloth, together with the women who wove it. Alexander offered both to the Persian queen mother, Sisygambis. If she liked the material, he informed her, these women would teach her granddaughters how to make it for themselves. This kindly, if somewhat naive, offer was construed by Sisygambis as a calculated insult of the most deadly sort. The mere idea of any royal lady performing so menial a task almost gave the old Achaemenid matriarch apoplexy. The king, she thought, must be sneering at her servile status: it took a great deal of explanation and many elaborate apologies before good relations were restored between them. Alexander assured her that his own sisters had helped to weave the bale, but Sisygambis is unlikely to have regarded this claim as anything more than gallant fiction.⁷

Amyntas' report on the situation in Greece was anything but encouraging. King Agis of Sparta, he told Alexander, continued to gain ground. Tegea, Elis, Arcadia and other states had gone over to him. His total force was now estimated at nearly 30,000 men, of whom about one third were professional mercenaries. Meanwhile Alexander's governor in Thrace, Memnon, had also decided to revolt — the timing was not, in all likelihood, accidental, but correlated with Agis' movements — while Zopyrion (who held the same office for Pontus) had been defeated and killed while on a wholly unauthorized expedition into Scythia. Antipater was thus facing imminent trouble on two fronts simultaneously (and must have cursed the king for depriving him of so many badly-needed front-line troops). The situation on the home front was, clearly, critical.

Alexander, well aware of this, did what he could to help his hard-pressed regent. Menes, who was now appointed inspector-general for Syria, Phoenicia and Cilicia, took 3,000 talents back to the coast, with orders to pay Antipater as much as should prove necessary for the expenses of the Lacedaemonian war (Alexander clearly anticipated a long campaign). At the same time, the king was much concerned to keep Athens neutral: the fear of a Spartan—Athenian détente was never far from his mind. He had the sculpture-group of the tyrannicides carefully shipped back to Athens as Persian war-reparations (a gesture which cost him nothing and emphasized his role as captain-general of the league); at the same time large grants (or bribes) ranging from 50 to 100 talents were offered to various distinguished Athenian citizens, including Phocion and Xenocrates, both of whom refused them.

Ironically enough, Alexander could have spared himself all this worry and expense. Had he but known it, the crises in Thrace and the Peloponnese were already resolved. Antipater had marched out in full strength against Memnon, thus calling the rebel's bluff: to fight a full-scale battle was the last thing Memnon had in mind, and he cheerfully came to terms with the regent in return for confirmation as governor. (He must have been an astute diplomat, since he held this post until 327/6, when he was summoned out to India — still in good odour — with a draft of reinforcements.) King Agis of Sparta went down before Antipater's infantry outside Megalopolis — fighting heroically to the end, still without any help from Athens — at about the same time that Alexander himself defeated Darius at Gaugamela.

Before this final campaign got under way, however, Amyntas had left Greece. Alexander may not have learnt of Agis' defeat and death until he reached Persepolis — and his touchy military ego would not let him give Antipater the credit for any great achievement when he did: ‘It seems, men,’ he announced, ‘that while we have been conquering Darius here, over there in Arcadia there has been a battle of mice.’ It was the summer of 330 before Antipater's full dispatches on the campaigns in Greece (andAlexander of Epirus' death in Italy) finally caught up with him.⁸ Nothing more sharply distinguishes ancient from modern warfare than the degree of time-lag in passing on vital information.

By now it was January, and bitterly cold up in the passes. Any reasonable person (a category which included Darius) could have predicted what Alexander would do now. Between Susa and the two major provinces of Iran, Persis and Media, lay the great snowbound rampart of the Zagros Mountains, towering in places to 15,000 feet. The Macedonians, it was safe to assume, would go into winter quarters at Susa. With the coming of spring they would set out again: either north-east to Ecbatana, where Darius now lay, or south-east to Persepolis and Pasargadae. But Alexander, as so often, shattered all reasonable expectations. He made a speciality of winter campaigns, and he meant to exploit his victory at Gaugamela to the full: this did not include offering Darius a gentlemanly three months in which to get his wind back.

Alexander left Susa for Persepolis in mid January.^c The only Persian who seems to have divined his intentions in advance was the satrap Ariobarzanes. Since Gaugamela this determined and energetic officer had raised an infantry force of 25,000 men, together with 700 cavalry. The moment he learnt that the Macedonian army was on the move, Ariobarzanes occupied a deep mountain gorge known as the Susian Gates, and built a defensive wall across it. There were two possible routes to Persepolis, of which this was the more direct. If Alexander made a frontal assault up the gorge, he was bound to be repelled with heavy losses. On the other hand, if he chose the easier southern route (more or less identical with the modern highway through Kazerun and Shiraz) there would be ample time for the Persians to fall back on Persepolis. The city itself could be evacuated, and its gold-reserves removed to safety, long before Alexander got there. This admirable plan contained only two fallacies. Ariobarzanes believed his position at the Susian Gates to be impregnable; and he did not allow for the possibility that Alexander might divide his forces.

The king's initial route lay through a district inhabited by mountain tribesmen, the Uxians. Like several clans in the area, they habitually levied tolls from all travellers passing through, the Great King included, and saw no reason to make an exception for this foreign invader. They therefore informed Alexander that if he wanted to take his troops through to Persepolis, he must pay for the privilege. Alexander blandly told them to wait for him at the pass, ‘there to receive payment at his hands’. Craterus, with a strong detachment, was sent up into the heights above this defile. Before dawn Alexander, descending by a little-known hilltrack, made a brisk razzia through several still-sleeping Uxian villages. He then assaulted the pass. Its defenders lost their nerve and fled into the mountains, where Craterus' men annihilated them. Henceforth the Uxians paid tribute rather than exacting it — 100 horses, 500 pack-animals, and 30,000 sheep annually.

Alexander now sent off Parmenio, with the baggage-train, the Thessalians, and all the heavy-armed troops, by the main southern road, while he himself took a light mobile column of shock-troops over the mountains to deal with Ariobarzanes. After five days' hard marching this force reached the Susian Gates. An attempt to carry the wall by direct assault failed disastrously. Ariobarzanes had artillery mounted above the wall; his men rolled great boulders down on the Macedonians and poured a hail of arrows and javelins into their ranks from the steep spurs of the gorge. Alexander suffered heavy casualties, and was forced to retreat. He had, however, taken some prisoners during this foray, and one of them, a local herdsman, volunteered to guide him by an extremely difficult pass over the mountains, which would bring him out behind Ariobarzanes' position. The king left Craterus at the entrance to the gorge, with 500 cavalry and two battalions of the phalanx. In order to deceive the enemy, he was to burn the normal number of camp-fires. When he heard Alexander's trumpets, he was to assault the wall. Ariobarzanes would thus be caught between two attacking forces.

The mountain detour was only twelve miles round, but it took Alexander's commando force a gruelling day and two nights to negotiate it. They got there just before dawn on the third day. Two guard-pickets were silently massacred. Then the trumpets blared out, and Craterus' waiting troops at once launched a fierce frontal attack against the wall. At the same moment Alexander and his men came swarming down the crags from behind Ariobarzanes' camp. The Persians, finding themselves pressed hard from both front and rear, tried to escape by scrambling up the sides of the gorge. Alexander, anticipating this, had stationed a force 3,000 strong at the top. Most of these fugitives were cut down during the close-quarters fighting that followed: there seems to have been a fearful massacre. Only Ariobarzanes himself, with a mere handful of his 700 horsemen, managed to get away.

Even after Alexander's column had passed through the Gates, it made slow going for a while. Its route was seamed with lateral ravines and watercourses, and often obliterated by heavy snowdrifts. It was now that a messenger got through to the king fromTiridates, the garrison-commander of Persepolis. Tiridates promised to surrender the city, but warned Alexander that he and his Macedonians must get there without delay: otherwise the inhabitants might well plunder the royal treasury before they left. Alexander acted at once. Ordering the infantry to follow as best they could, he set off on an all-night, breakneck cavalry dash which reached the Araxes River at dawn. There was no bridge (or else it had been broken down). The king and his men built one in record time by the simple expedient of knocking down a nearby village, and using the timbers and dressed stone blocks from the houses they demolished. Then they rode on.

A little way beyond the river their first deputation met them. But these shabby creatures were very different from the elegant, time-serving collaborators with whom Alexander had hitherto dealt. Their cries of welcome, and the suppliant branches they bore, revealed them as Greeks: middle-aged or elderly for the most part, perhaps mercenaries who had fought on the wrong side against that ferocious monarch Artaxerxes Ochus (see above, pp. 51–2). What made them so ghastly and pitiable a sight was the fact that each one of them had been appallingly mutilated. Ears and noses had been lopped off wholesale, a typical Persian practice. Some lacked hands, others feet. All were disfigured by brand-marks on the forehead. ‘They were,’ says Diodorus, ‘persons who had acquired skills or crafts and had made good progress in their instruction; then their other extremities had been amputated and they were left only those which were vital to their profession.’

Alexander at first offered to repatriate them. After discussion, however, they told him they would rather stay where they were and form a separate community. Back in Greece they would be isolated objects of pity, social pariahs. Here they at least were among their own kind, companions if only in misfortune. The king applauded their choice, provided them with all they needed to set up as small farmers — oxen, seed-corn, sheep, cash subsidies — and made them tax-exempt in perpetuity. The local administration became directly responsible for their safety and well-being.⁹ We need not doubt the truth of this curious episode, which is recounted in circumstantial detail by all our main narrative sources except Arrian. At the same time Alexander must surely have seen, and duly emphasized, its value as propaganda when justifying his own subsequent conduct at Persepolis. The systematic looting and burning of Parsa's shrines would look better if presented, in part at least, as a quid pro quo for Persian atrocities committed against Greeks.

Alexander entered Persepolis on 31 January 330 B.C. This city was the traditional burial-place of the Achaemenid kings, the repository of their accumulated treasure, the religious capital of the empire (and thus outside normal satrapal jurisdiction). It was here, in April, that the solemn Akitu New Year festival took place, during which the Great King underwent a ritual ordeal — symbolized by reliefs representing his fight with a monstrous Death Demon — and emerged victorious, his office renewed, to be fêted asAhura Mazda's vice-regent on earth. Persepolis, in fact, was a Holy City, akin to Mecca or Jerusalem, and equally rich in solemn religious associations. If Alexander still cherished hopes of inheriting the Achaemenid crown according to legitimate precedent, backed by the Great King's nobles and the priestly caste of the Magi, he would treat this, of all cities, with extreme propriety and respect. Anything less would permanently antagonize those whom he most needed to conciliate.

There are signs, however, that by the time Alexander reached Persepolis he had become considerably less optimistic about persuading the Iranian elite to endorse his claims. What he had not reckoned on was the stubborn resistance generated by a purely religious or ideological opposition — something to which his own pragmatic nature tended to blind him. Many Iranian aristocrats were ready enough to collaborate: no country has ever lacked its political opportunists. But to recognize Alexander as the Chosen One of Ahura Mazda was quite another matter. We know something of the propaganda which the Magi organized against him,¹⁰ and which was echoed by Darius in his speech before Gaugamela. To them, Alexander and his unkempt Macedonians were ‘the Demons with Dishevelled Hair of the Day of Wrath’. There is an echo of this attitude in the Book of Daniel, where the Macedonian empire is symbolized as a beast, ‘terrible and dreadful and exceeding strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet’ (vii, 7).

There is one Sibylline Oracle which presents an even clearer picture of Alexander as the godless, violent, foreign usurper:

One day shall come to Asia's wealthy land an unbelieving man,
Wearing on his shoulders a purple cloak,
Wild, despotic, fiery. He shall raise before himself
Flashes like lightning, and all Asia shall have an evil
Yoke, and the drenched earth shall drink in great slaughter.

Ever since Issus Alexander had tried to change this image, but without success: episodes such as the sack of Tyre confirmed it all too well. Disaffection among his troops, Agis' revolt, and, worst of all, this stubborn, intangible atmosphere of moral hostility — all had combined to fray his all-too-edgy temper. Even his diplomatic overtures to 3Darius' womenfolk seem to have broken down in the end. This may explain why, despite Tiridates' formal surrender, he now gave his troops carte blanche to sack Persepolis — all but the palaces and the citadel, where Darius' treasures were stored. What he could not bend, he would break. If the Achaemenid crown was denied him, he would take it by main force, and show himself such a terrible Lion of Wrath as even the Magi had not dared to predict.

He now made an inflammatory speech to his officers, ranting on about Persian crimes against Greece — the incident of the mutilated mercenaries must have helped here — and describing Persepolis as ‘the most hateful of the cities of Asia’. The Macedonians needed no further encouragement. Their last real taste of wholesale rape and plunder had been at Gaza. Ever since then, at Babylon and Susa in particular, Alexander's policy of conciliation had placed them under heavy disciplinary restraint. Now, unleashed at last, they went completely berserk. The king authorized them to kill all adult males they encountered, ‘thinking that this would be to his advantage’. Presumably he now meant to secure Persian compliance through sheer terrorism. But he was also giving his hard-worked troops a holiday before leading them on the long, hard road through the eastern provinces.

For a whole day the Macedonian army gave itself up to an orgy of plunder and destruction. Every private house was full of gold and silver ornaments, rich tapestries, beautiful inlaid furniture. Priceless works of art were smashed up wholesale to give rivallooters a share of the precious metal and jewellery that adorned them. Frequent fights broke out, and those who amassed especially rich loads of booty were often killed by jealous rivals. No one bothered to take prisoners: they were not worth ransoming, and many committed suicide to save themselves from worse indignities.

Alexander, meanwhile, was busy inspecting the royal treasure-vaults, which contained an accumulated surplus of no less than 120,000 talents, dating back to the time of Cyrus the Great. From the Great King's bedchamber came 8,000 talents in gold, besides the jewelled golden vine — which, as Alexander surely knew, was also a symbolic Tree of Life, representing ‘the rightful, proper continuity of Achaemenid government under Ahura Mazda’. This fantastic fortune was now destined to finance Alexander's further adventures in the East. Some of it he kept with him, but the bulk was transferred to Susa and thence, ultimately, to Ecbatana. Its removal called for every pack-animal that could be commandeered from Susa and Babylon, together with no less than 3,000 Asiatic camels. Taking the pound sterling at its 1913 value, this bullion was worth something like £44,000,000 — which represents the national income of the Athenian empire, in its fifth-century heyday, for very nearly three hundred years.¹¹

Alexander's supremacy was now assured. With brilliant panache he had struck, through freezing winter snows, at the very heart and nerve-centre of Darius' crumbling empire. The Zagros mountains had been neatly by-passed; the fall of Persepolis opened the road to Ecbatana. Once again, any reasonable person, working on precedent, could have deduced what Alexander would do next — head straight north, capture Darius whatever the cost, and wind up this already overlong Persian campaign. But — once again — Alexander's behaviour proved totally unpredictable. He did not leave Persepolis until the late May or early June of 330. The climate was pleasant, and he spent much time out hunting. He visited the old capital of Pasargadae, fifty miles to the north (it had surrendered soon after his arrival, netting him a further 6,000 talents) and was shown the tomb of Cyrus the Great. He continued to hand out over-lavish gifts to his friends, a practice which brought him warnings not only from Olympias, but also from the Persians collaborating with him.¹²

The unmistakable impression one gets is that he was killing time. But why? Though Ecbatana was five hundred miles distant, his route thither would follow the course of the river-valleys, through a predominantly fertile region: he was unlikely to sit waiting patiently until the crops ripened. What possible reason could he have for so prolonged a delay? (Plutarch's four-month estimate seems, after all, to be about right.) It has recently been suggested¹³ that throughout the winter of 331/30 his communications with Europewere totally disrupted; that he dared not move before he learnt the outcome of the Greek revolt; that his reinforcements were not even certain whether he was in Ecbatana or Persepolis. This is hardly a compliment to any competent general, let alone to Alexander, who made a fetish of good communications and intelligence. Agis had died the previous September, and Persepolis did not fall until late January. Some delay is very likely; but even if his land-communications with Greece had been cut (which is by no means certain) Alexander now controlled the whole eastern Mediterranean. It is inconceivable that the news of Antipater's victory reached him later than February, and it may have done so much sooner — probably by mid December.

There was only one motive that could possibly have kept him in Persepolis until April and beyond: the Persian New Year festival. He had shown his Iranian subjects that he was not a man to be trifled with: the sacking of Persepolis proved that. But the vandalism of the Macedonian army had been most carefully controlled. The palaces and temples, the great apadana or audience-hall, the whole complex of buildings which formed the city's spiritual centre, on that vast, stage-like terrace backed by the Kuh-i-Rahmet mountains — none of these had been touched. In other words, the New Year Festival could still be held. Perhaps after such a lesson, Alexander argued, these proud nobles and priests might change their minds. Perhaps even now common sense would prevail, and he, Alexander, be acclaimed, with all due ceremonial, as Ahura Mazda's representative on earth. The psychological effect produced by such an act of recognition would be incalculable. Its impact would reach the remotest corners of the empire.

But more was at stake here than mere political propaganda. Alexander found himself up against a people who took their religion (including the divinity that hedged the Great King) very seriously indeed. If negotiations were ever opened on this tricky subject, they soon broke down. March passed into April, and soon it became clear that Persepolis would see no procession that year, no ritual renewal of kingship. About 20 April Alexander finally gave up hope. While deciding what his next step should be, he took an expeditionary force up into the mountains, and spent a month pacifying the province (one of his favourite relaxations when under strain: he reacted similarly after Hephaestion's death [see below, pp. 467–8]). His victims included a group of shockheaded troglodytes whose womenfolk were expert slingers. The spring rains had begun, and the Macedonians suffered badly from slush and sleet, especially at high altitudes.¹⁴

Alexander returned to Persepolis in late May, his mind finally made up. The city must be destroyed. It symbolized centuries of Achaemenid rule: once Alexander moved on eastward it would form an obvious rallying-point, both religious and political, for any nationalist resistance movement. Its great friezes and palaces and fire-altars embodied something to which the Macedonian conqueror had no effective answer: a purely spiritual and ideological opposition. He was to come up against the same problem again amongst the Brahmins of the Punjab (see below, p. 425).

Parmenio, on being told what he planned to do, replied bluntly that the king would be a fool if he destroyed his own property (a recommendation which, as the old marshal doubtless recalled, Alexander himself had made to his troops on first landing in AsiaMinor). Nor was he likely to impress the Iranians by mere conquest and destruction. Since Alexander had already failed to impress them in any other way, he could only reiterate that burning Persepolis would avenge Xerxes' similar destruction of the Greek temples. ‘My own view,’ says Arrian, stung into voicing a personal opinion for once, ‘is that this was bad policy.’ Scholars down the ages have echoed Arrian's verdict (generally throwing in a charge of gross vandalism as well), though they sometimes differ as to the king's motivation. What remains indisputable is that such an act finally destroyed any chance Alexander might have had of legitimizing himself as an Achaemenid by peaceful means. It also provoked a desperate last-ditch stand in the eastern provinces. Because of this, many have been tempted to see the burning of the palaces as an accident, suggested during a drunken orgy, and regretted immediately afterwards.

Such is the version of events which has passed into history (or legend), and no arguments now are likely to dislodge it. The mise-en-scène is justly famous. Alexander held a great feast, at which he got very drunk. Thaïs, Ptolemy's mistress, speaking as anAthenian, said what a wonderful gesture it would be to burn down Xerxes' palace — thus, of course, shifting the initial onus of responsibility away from Alexander himself. Torches were called for, and a wavering, garlanded procession set off, to the skirling of flutes and pipes. As the revellers approached the palace doors there was a moment's hesitation. This, cried some sedulous ape, was a deed worthy of Alexander alone. The king, with drunken enthusiasm — and perhaps glad to feel himself once more the champion of Hellas, a role he had been progressively abandoning — cast the first torch. Flames licked out, consuming rich tapestry-work, eating into the dry cedar cross-beams. Guards who came hurrying up with water-buckets stayed instead to watch the fun. Very soon the entire terrace was one roaring inferno.

Premeditated arson or drunken accident? The odds are heavily in favour of the former. As at Thebes, as at Tyre and Gaza, Alexander's royal will had been thwarted — something which tended both to cloud his judgement and produce the most drastic sort of retaliation. That he lived to regret his decision seems likely enough: it meant that his future hold over the Persian empire depended on Machtpolitik alone. But that he willed — and with his own hand initiated — the destruction of Persepolis seems a virtual certainty. It agrees too well with too many other aspects of his character and career.¹⁵

The palaces had already been systematically looted before their destruction — another tell-tale hint. Macedonian soldiers found and removed almost all the coins, gold-work and jewellery. They raided the armoury for swords and daggers, but left thousands of bronze and iron arrow-heads behind. Innumerable exquisite stone vases, which had no immediate market value, they carried out into the courtyard and deliberately smashed up. They decapitated statues and defaced reliefs. The Hellenic crusade against Asiatic barbarism was now approaching its final triumph. What remains today, solid and indisputable, is the evidence of the fire itself — and all that it preserved. ‘Burned beams of the roof still lay their print across stairways and against sculptures. Heaps of ashes are all that remain of the cedar panelling.’¹⁶ But that vast conflagration also hard-baked hundreds of clay tablets (which would otherwise long since have crumbled to dust), besides firing the marvellous glaze on Xerxes' processional reliefs. When Alexander left these smoking ruins behind him, he could hardly know that his act of incendiarism had immortalized Persepolis for all time.

At this point the king's immediate strategy was clear enough. He could no longer hope to legitimize himself as an Achaemenid by cultivating the queen mother (of whom from now on virtually nothing is heard). His best hope was to capture Darius alive: this would at least give him a good bargaining-counter. If the Great King abdicated in his favour, the hard-core nobility and the eastern satraps might yet be persuaded to endorse his claims rather than fight it out. So at the beginning of June Alexander struck north from Persepolis, leaving 3,000 Macedonians behind to garrison the city and province — an unusually strong force. On his way to Ecbatana (Hamadan) he was met by further reinforcements, who must have taken a short cut over the Kurdish mountains: 5,000 foot and 1,000 horse, under an Athenian commander. With them came Antipater's dispatches on the situation in Greece, Thrace, and South Italy.

Rumours began to come in that Darius, who had assembled 3,000 horse and 30,000 infantry, including his faithful 4,000 Greek mercenaries, was determined to offer battle once more. But three days' march from Ecbatana, after Alexander had already covered more than 400 miles, a renegade Persian nobleman appeared with the news that Darius was in retreat. His expected reinforcements had failed to arrive; he had therefore taken off eastward, five days before, with the Bactrian cavalry, 6,000 pickedinfantrymen, and 7,000 talents from the Ecbatana palace treasury. His immediate destination seemed to be the Caspian Gates,^d where his harem and baggage-train had been dispatched some time before. Alexander had to move fast. Darius' intention (his informant said) was to retreat by the shores of the Caspian as far as Bactria, ravaging the land as he went. This would leave the Macedonians with a serious supply-problem, since their route lay round the northern edge of the great salt desert. If they could be lured into the desolate wilderness of mountain and steppe beyond Hyrcania, a fresh satrapal army, familiar with local conditions, might very easily wear them down.¹⁷

When he reached Ecbatana, Alexander took rapid stock of the situation. He was now embarking on a new phase of his campaign. The burning of Persepolis had written finis to the Hellenic crusade as such, and he used this excuse to pay off all his league troops, Parmenio's Thessalians included. The crisis in Greece was over: he no longer needed these potential troublemakers as hostages. What he now envisaged was a streamlined professional army, loyal to him alone, and prepared to follow him wherever he might lead. The immense wealth he had gleaned from Persepolis also showed him how such an imperial force could be recruited and kept in order. When he dismissed the league troops, he paid each cavalryman, over and above his expedition pay, a bonus of one talent (6,000 drachmas). The bonus paid to the infantry, though smaller (1,000 drachmas) was still munificent. The first represented about eight years' accumulated pay, the second three.

A still more tempting bait was dangled before these demobilized troops. Any man who wished might re-enlist with Alexander as a soldier of fortune, and those who did so received a bounty of no less than three talents (18,000 drachmas) on enrolment. It would take a very high-minded veteran to resist such princely terms. The whole deal cost Alexander some 12–13,000 talents, but he probably regarded it as a valuable long-term investment. Almost as much again was embezzled by his light-fingered financial officers — an ominous symptom of things to come. Had he known about this at the time, Alexander might still have thought himself in credit. Money as such meant very little to him (and less than ever now); but by applying it so skilfully — the Macedonians likewise appear to have received fat donations — he had bought himself a mercenary army overnight. He had also fatally loosened Parmenio's hold on the military command structure. In future, he calculated, his troops' first allegiance would be to their royal paymaster.¹⁸

The demobilized league forces were given a cavalry escort back to the coast, and from there took ship home, remaining under safe-conduct as far as Euboea. Alexander probably reckoned that they would form a useful pro-Macedonian leaven in the variousGreek states, not to mention their value as free recruiting propaganda. Once they were out of the way, he lost no time in cutting Parmenio down to size. The old general remained behind at Ecbatana as area military commander: his career as chief of staff was over. Alexander dealt with him very tactfully. Parmenio was, after all, seventy years old, and — as the king doubtless assured him — had earned a rest from front-line campaigning.

This did not mean that he was off the active list: in fact his first task qua area commander would be to convoy the Great King's treasure to Ecbatana, after which he was to take an expeditionary force — Alexander had left him something like 6,000 mercenaries — and pacify the tribes round the south and south-west Caspian. During his absence the treasure would be guarded by four battalions of the phalanx, left behind on light duties. When he got back, these battalions would rejoin Alexander: their commander was to be Cleitus the Black, at present on sick-leave in Susa. It all sounded very sensible: on the face of it Parmenio's position had lost nothing in dignity or prestige. But the old man's effective power — as he himself well knew — had been drastically curtailed. Of his close relatives, only Philotas and Nicanor still held key operational commands. He had lost his Thessalian cavalry as a unit, and it was to Harpalus, as imperial quartermaster-general, that the mercenaries who had replaced them now looked for their pay. When the treasure-convoy reached Ecbatana it was Harpalus who would have charge of it and issue Alexander's coinage from the royal mint. Parmenio's own new second-in-command, Cleander, was the king's nominee.

Slowly, ruthlessly, Alexander was closing in on Parmenio; and from this point onwards he held all the trump cards. It has been said that Ecbatana marked the point at which Alexander's tragedy began, ‘the tragedy of an increasing loneliness, of a growing impatience with those who could not understand’.¹⁹ In point of fact his Macedonian officers, Parmenio included, understood all too well. Military success had increased Alexander's self-confidence, and sharpened his appetite for power. His coronation as Pharaoh, followed by that mysterious visit to Siwah, had made him acutely conscious of his supposedly divine antecedents. But in the last resort it was the capture of Darius' millions which removed all effective limitations from his authority, and left him free to indulge his fantasies as he chose.

All absolute autocrats end in spiritual isolation, creating their own world, their private version of the truth: to this depressing rule Alexander was no exception. From now on, those few friends who dared criticize him to his face most often paid a heavy price for their honesty. Such a state of affairs encouraged gross adulation among the king's more sycophantic courtiers; and this, in turn, reinforced Alexander's own latent delusions of grandeur. Thoughts of conspiracy were thereby engendered amongst the resentful, and the discovery of plots, or rumours of plots, brought out all Alexander's lurking paranoia. In 330 the process was barely begun. But during the years that followed — aided by the king's increasing addiction to drink — it developed with alarming speed and intensity.

Alexander wasted not a moment more than was necessary in Ecbatana. His arrangements made, he at once went on after Darius. With luck he might yet overtake the Persians before they were through the Caspian Gates. But it was now mid July, and his main problem was the appalling heat. He covered the 200 miles between Ecbatana and Rhagae (near Tehran) in eleven days. This was good going, but far from exceptional: Napoleon, marching through worse terrain, averaged twenty-eight miles a day. Even so, men fell out by the wayside, and their horses died under them. Arrian contrives to suggest that this was the result of the cracking pace Alexander set. In point of fact they must have been suffering from dehydration and heat-stroke.^e

At Rhagae, about fifty miles short of the Gates, Alexander learnt that Darius had already passed through them, and was now making for Hecatompylus (Damghan) — later to become the summer residence of the Parthian kings. To continue his forced march under that burning sun, without rest or adequate preparation, would be suicidal as well as pointless. Alexander bivouacked at Rhagae for five days, and then pressed on as far as the Gates. Beyond them, south of the Elburz Mountains, lay that desolate tract of salt-desert known today as the Dasht-i-Kavir. Before the column could proceed further, Alexander needed fresh provisions. Coenus was therefore given some cavalry and sent out on a foraging expedition.

During his absence two Babylonian noblemen — one of them Mazaeus' son — rode in with the dramatic news that Darius had been deposed, and was now a prisoner. The coup had been planned jointly by Bessus, satrap of Bactria, and the grand vizier,Nabarzanes. Alexander, it seemed, was not the only person to think of using this wretched royal fugitive as a political bargaining counter. What he heard spurred the king into immediate action. Without even waiting for Coenus to get back, he set off after the Persian column, taking his best cavalry and the Guards Brigade. They force-marched all night, when it was cooler, and all the next morning too. After a brief siesta they resumed the chase, and did not call a halt until dawn, when they reached the camp where Darius had been put under arrest.

Here they found his aged Greek interpreter, who gave Alexander further details. Nabarzanes had suggested, to begin with, that the Great King might — temporarily, of course — resign his title in favour of Bessus. This proposal made good practical sense. Bessus was well-known and respected in the eastern provinces; he had Achaemenid blood; and if there was to be a national resistance movement, he would make a far more effective leader for it than the twice-defeated and wholly demoralized Darius. But the Great King, weakly resentful, flew into a rage, drew his scimitar, and tried to kill Nabarzanes. The council-meeting broke up in some disorder. This left the retreating army split into two hostile camps. The Bactrians and other eastern contingents looked to Bessus as their natural leader, while the Persians, under Artabazus, and the Greek mercenaries stuck loyally to Darius.

An open trial of strength at this juncture was out of the question. The conspirators therefore swore formal oaths of fealty to Darius, and were officially reconciled. With old Artabazus haranguing them on the importance of a united front, no one dared question their sincerity. A night or two later, however, they abducted Darius to the Bactrian camp and placed him under close arrest. His Greek mercenary commander had warned him what was afoot, but he refused any offer of protection. The loyalists were left with only two alternatives, to pull out or to capitulate. At first they chose the former. Artabazus, the Persian contingents and the Greeks made off east towards Parthiene, ‘thinking anything safer than a retinue of traitors’. But two days later most of the Persians drifted back to Bessus, seduced by his lavish promises, and ‘because there was no one else to follow’.²⁰

Bessus now declared himself Great King, taking the title of Artaxerxes IV, and was enthusiastically acclaimed by his troops.²¹ His predecessor found himself chained up in an old covered waggon: as good a way as any of camouflaging his whereabouts on the march. Darius was also, of course, the rebels' insurance ticket: as Arrian says, they ‘had determined to hand him over if they heard that Alexander was after them, and thus get favourable terms for themselves’. On the receipt of this information, Alexander saw that there was not a moment to lose. Again, he marched all through the night and the morning which followed it. About noon the Macedonian party reached a village where Darius and his captors had rested the previous day. At this rate the pursuers were going to collapse from fatigue and heat-exhaustion before they overtook their quarry. At all costs Alexander had to head the Persians off. Was there, he inquired, any kind of short cut?

Yes, the villagers told him, a trail did exist, but it ran through uninhabited desert, and there were no waterholes. Alexander swept these objections aside, commandeered local guides, dismounted 500 of his cavalrymen, and gave their horses to his toughest, fittest foot-soldiers. Then he set off on a fantastic all-night dash across the desert, covering over fifty miles by dawn, and overtaking the Persians just as first light broke. They were trailing along unarmed, and put up no more than a token resistance. Clearly they had believed themselves to be at least two days' march ahead of him still, and his sudden appearance completely shattered them. Yet, according to Plutarch, only sixty horsemen had in fact kept up with the king. If Bessus' men had not panicked — numerically they were far superior — they might well have made history by bagging Alexander in addition to Darius.^f

Instead, their one thought was to get away, and as fast as possible. Darius' heavy waggon slowed them down considerably. Bessus and Nabarzanes urged their prisoner to mount a horse and escape with them. The Great King refused. If he could not hold hisempire, at least he would die with dignity. He would not, he said, accompany traitors. Divine vengeance lay at hand: he cast himself on Alexander's mercy. There was no time for prolonged argument. At any moment the retreating column might be surrounded. Bessus and Nabarzanes could do nothing now but ensure that Darius did not fall into Alexander's hands alive. So they and their fellow-conspirators ran him through with their javelins, and then fled, each by a different route — Nabarzanes to Hyrcania, Bessus to his own province of Bactria, while others made off southward, to Areia and Drangiana (Seistan).

This set Alexander a nice problem. If the Great King was still a prisoner, which of the various retreating columns had charge of him? It was impossible to tell. Weary Macedonian officers rode up and down the abandoned baggage-train, hoping against hope. Meanwhile the oxen pulling Darius' now driverless waggon had wandered about half a mile off the road, down into a valley where there was water. Here they came to a standstill, bleeding from numerous wounds, and weakened by the heat. A thirsty Macedonian soldier called Polystratus, directed by peasants to the spring in the valley, saw this waggon standing there, and thought it odd that the oxen should have been stabbed rather than rounded up as booty. Then he heard the groans of a dying man. Naturally curious, he went over and drew back the hide curtains.

There on the floor lay King Darius, still in chains, his royal mantle sodden with blood, the murderers' javelins protruding from his breast, alone except for one faithful dog crouching beside him. He asked, weakly, for water. Polystratus fetched some in his helmet. Clasping the Macedonian's hand, Darius gave thanks to heaven that he had not died utterly alone and abandoned. Soon after this his laboured breathing dwindled into silence, and all was over. Polystratus at once took his news to the king. When Alexander stood, at last, before the broken corpse of his adversary, and saw the sordid, agonizing circumstances in which he had died, his distress was obvious and genuine. Taking off his own royal cloak, he placed it over the body. At his express command, Darius was borne back in state to Persepolis, and given a kingly burial, beside his Achaemenid forebears.²²

However, this chivalrous gesture of Alexander's, though prompted in part by personal remorse, had other, more practical, motives as well. With Darius dead, and therefore unable to abdicate in his favour, Alexander's claim on the Achaemenid throne remained that of a foreign invader. Worse still, he was now up against a genuine and far more formidable Achaemenid competitor in the person of Bessus (or King Artaxerxes, as he now styled himself). This was a most dangerous development. If Bessus managed to rally the West behind him, Alexander could still be in serious trouble. As it was, he would have to fight for the eastern provinces instead of receiving their surrender under the terms of a general settlement. The war, in other words, was very far from over.

Alexander's only possible line was to behave, from the moment of Darius' death, as though he were in fact the Great King's chosen and legitimate successor. He must hunt down Bessus, not as a rival for the throne, but as a rebel and a regicide. Having pursued the Great King to his death, he must now rapidly switch roles and pose as his avenger. When he took possession of the Eastern empire it must be as Darius' heir.²³ But what he had originally anticipated was a public endorsement by Darius himself. Hence, perhaps, the dubious tradition, recorded by several sources,²⁴ that the Great King, in extremis, acknowledged Alexander as his successor, solemnly adjuring him to avenge his death on the traitors who had slain and abandoned him. It is even suggested that Alexander found Darius still breathing, and received this last vital message in person. The whole episode sounds far more like an improvised story put out by the propaganda department, suddenly faced with the fact of Darius' death, and forced to make the best of a bad job at short notice.

Alexander's own reaction to the loss of his bargaining-counter was prompt and characteristic: he took the cavalry straight on after Bessus. If this powerful rival for the throne could be caught and destroyed before he got away to his Bactrian province, all might yet be well. Bessus, unfortunately, had too long a start on them, and the chase was soon abandoned. Alexander thereupon took his troops back to the nearby city of Hecatompylus, and gave them a few days' rest. A rumour — very understandable in the circumstances — got around the camp that this was the end of the crusade, that they would all soon be back in Macedonia. The Great King was dead, the allied troops had already been dismissed. Wishful thinking crystallized into firm belief. Alexander woke one morning to hear the sound of waggons being loaded up for the homeward march.

Since he was already planning ahead in terms of a long Eastern campaign, this attitude caused him considerable alarm. He summoned his staff-commanders, ‘and, with tears in his eyes, complained that he was being recalled from the mid course of his glory’. They agreed to do what they could, but advised the king to be tactful and conciliatory when he made his general address to the troops. If he tried to get tough at this point, they said, he might well have a mutiny on his hands. In the event Alexander did something even more effective: he scared them silly. His whole speech emphasized the insecurity of the conquests they made, the unwillingness of the Persians to accept their overlordship. ‘It is by your arms that they are restrained, not by their dispositions, and those who fear us when we are present, in our absence will be enemies.’ Nor should they underestimate Bessus. Fine fools they would look if they went home now, and a few months later found this rebel satrap crossing the Hellespont to invade Greece! Until he was crushed, their task remained undone.

Now came the clinching peroration. ‘We stand on the very threshold of victory,’ Alexander told his men. Once Bessus was destroyed, Persian submission would be a foregone conclusion. Besides, the satrap's capital lay no more than four days' march away (a plain lie: the distance was 462 miles). What was that after all they had been through together? His troops cheered him to the echo: another crisis had been surmounted by a judicious application of charisma and rhetoric.

Despite the gloomy picture he drew of Persian national resistance, despite the burning of Persepolis, Alexander was still on the look-out for collaborators among the Iranian nobility. Before leaving Hecatompylus he carefully went through his prisoners, singled out those of high birth and rank (about a thousand in all) and henceforth treated them with special consideration, as potential administrators or governors under his new regime. Apart from anything else, he no longer had a surplus of trained Macedonians to spare for such posts; and the farther east he went, the more acute this problem would become.²⁵

Two days later the army struck camp and marched north into Hyrcania, a wild, mountainous, but fertile district bordering on the Caspian. They were suffering from a shortage of horses: many had died of heat during the chase after Darius, and more were now lost as a result of eating poisonous roots. During his march on Zadracarta (Sārī), the capital, Alexander received a letter from Nabarzanes. The grand vizier, after much specious self-exculpation for the part he had played in Darius' murder, offered to give himself up if he was granted a safe-conduct and reasonable terms. Alexander at once sent him the assurances he required. Every additional defection at this level would leave Bessus weaker and more isolated.

On his arrival in Zadracarta the king found a number of high-ranking Persians, Artabazus among them, waiting to offer him their submission. This was a most encouraging sign. There were also envoys from the Greek mercenaries. The Persians — especially old Artabazus, as a former guest-friend at Philip's court — were received with every honour. But Alexander flatly refused to do a deal with the mercenaries' representatives, saying that Greek soldiers who fought for Persia against their own flesh and blood ‘were little better than criminals and all proper Greek feeling was against them’. From these 1,500 he would accept nothing but unconditional surrender. His unexpected reversion to the post-Granicus line sounds like propaganda designed for public consumption, and he may well have shown himself more accommodating in private. At all events, the mercenaries accepted his terms without demur — and the whole 1,500 were afterwards incorporated in the Macedonian army en bloc, at standard rates of pay.

The king now conducted a rapid punitive expedition against the Mardians, ‘a people of rude habits of life and accustomed to brigandage’, who later supplied him with some first-class archers. His main object was probably to round up new cavalry mounts without paying for them: the Mardians were great horsemen. They retaliated, in kind, by stealing Bucephalas — a joke Alexander failed to appreciate. He let it be known that if the horse was not returned ‘they should see the country laid waste to its furthest limit and its inhabitants slaughtered to a man’. The Mardians, realizing that he was in deadly earnest, sent Bucephalas back at once. They also dispatched no less than fifty tribal elders, bearing rich gifts, to convey their profound apologies. Alexander accepted the presents — and coolly retained the leaders of this delegation as hostages for the tribe's future good conduct.²⁶

Soon after the king's return to Zadracarta, Nabarzanes arrived on the scene. The grand vizier had brought numerous costly offerings with him to sweeten his reception, including ‘a eunuch of remarkable beauty and in the very flower of boyhood, who had been loved by Darius and was afterwards to be loved by Alexander’.²⁷ The name of this sinister youth was Bagoas: as time went on he acquired great influence over the king. Alexander had in fact already promised Nabarzanes his life; but Bagoas' attentions are said to have tipped the scales still further in the grand vizier's favour. Again, it was a dangerous omen of things to come.

A far more immediate problem, in Macedonian eyes, was Alexander's ever-increasing orientalization: his adoption of Persian dress and protocol, the way he was beginning to confer on Iranian noblemen honours previously reserved for Macedonians, the progressive infiltration of ex-enemy troops into his own field army. As we have seen, his motives for such innovations were severely practical; this will not have increased their popularity. By now he was employing Asiatic court ushers, and had even admitted some Persians (including Darius' brother Oxathres) to the ranks of his Companions. He had taken to wearing the Persian blue and white royal diadem, though not the upright tiara which went with it — a typically uneasy compromise. He had, in like fashion, adopted a quasi-Persian style of dress, which drew the line at anything so barbaric as trousers, but retained the characteristic white robe and sash.

At first he only wore these exotic clothes in private, or with Persian friends; but very soon they became his regular attire, even on such occasions as a public audience, or when he was out riding. His court, in general, began to bear an ever-closer resemblance to that of the Great King. Macedonian horses were decked out in Persian harness; Alexander even took over the traditional retinue of 365 concubines (one for each night of the year) who had served Darius, and were hand-picked from the most beautiful women in all Asia. Alexander is unlikely to have made any of these innovations from active choice or preference. Concubines bored him; so (at least to begin with) did Persian court ceremonial. But he needed new administrators and officers; and if the Persians were ever toaccept his dynastic pretensions, he must play the part of Great King in an acceptable manner. By so doing, of course, he risked alienating his own Macedonians.

Fatally, he tried to compromise: this did him no good with anybody. If he adopted the diadem, he should have had the courage of his convictions and worn the high tiara as well. If he chose to surround himself with concubines, no one thought the better of him for not sleeping with them. The fact that he ‘employed these customs rather sparingly’ would cut no ice with the Macedonians, who objected to his employing them at all; while the Persians were unlikely to admire a monarch who followed their traditions in so gingerly a fashion (quite apart from having burnt and sacked their Holy City). Alexander's dilemma is well symbolized by the two seal-rings he used from now on. For European correspondence he employed his old Macedonian ring, while letters for delivery inside the Persian Empire he stamped with the royal signet of Darius. He made his Companions — much against their will in some cases — wear purple-bordered white Persian cloaks, and (when all else failed) tried to silent his more vociferous critics with increasingly lavish hand-outs and bonanzas.²⁸

However, any ruler who made so blatant an effort to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds could hardly avoid trouble in the long run. A few of Alexander's close friends, such as Hephaestion, together with the usual clique of court toadies, actively supported his new integrationist line. The professional career officers — Craterus is a good example — were indifferent so long as their own status and prospects did not suffer. But Philip's hard-lining veterans bitterly resented the whole experiment.²⁹ The sight of their young king parading in outlandish robes, and on intimate terms with the quacking, effeminate, barbarian nobles he had so lately defeated, filled them with genuine disgust. The idea of accepting their ex-enemies as comrades-in-arms was equally repugnant to them. So far as they were concerned, the war had ended with Darius' death, and Alexander's grandiose dreams of further eastern conquest left them cold. The sooner they got home, the better.

This widening rift between them and the king is underlined by the fact that Alexander now began to employ two separate aides on liaison duties: Hephaestion for all dealings with the Persians, and Craterus when Macedonians and Greeks were involved. If Parmenio still hankered after his old proconsular powers — to put it no more strongly — this situation gave him a most promising basis of support. There were many, many Macedonians (including almost all the most experienced officers) who violently disapproved of the turn events had taken. Any leader offering a reversal of Alexander's policy, coupled with speedy repatriation, could almost certainly count on their backing. The king had only just soft-talked his troops into going on as it was; there would be no shortage of barrack-room lawyers to emphasize the inconsistency between his alarmist speeches and his fraternizing tactics. The air was electric, ready to spark an explosion at any moment.

Alexander took several steps to lessen the tension. Like most personally austere leaders, he had an ill-disguised contempt for humanity in the mass, and seems to have felt he could manipulate his troops as he pleased simply by indulging their grosser appetites. It was now that vast luxurious feasts and drinking-parties first became a regular feature of camp life: the idea of bread-and-circuses was by no means a Roman invention. At the same time, the king actively encouraged his Macedonian rank and file to marry the concubines they had picked up on their travels, offering them what sounds like a primitive family welfare scheme by way of bait.³⁰

This was a shrewd and very farsighted move. Soldiers with their own domestic establishment in camp were less likely to clamour for immediate repatriation. They would put up with greater hardships, over a longer period. Eventually, indeed, they would come to regard their military existence as a permanent way of life: Alexander, it seems, looked to these liaisons for future recruits. Such a notion, if true, is highly revealing. It means that the king regarded conquest and exploration as an end in themselves, the natural condition of man; that he anticipated a state of affairs which would still be fundamentally unchanged in twenty years' time.

Immediate action, however, was the best antidote to any threat of mutiny.³¹ The army marched on eastward, from Zadracarta to Susia in Areia. Here the satrap, Satibarzanes, who had been one of Darius' murderers, came forward and made his submission (presumably after putting out diplomatic feelers to see whether he would be well received). The news he brought was that Bessus — who, unlike Alexander, did not hesitate to assume the upright tiara, and indeed had a far better claim to it — was now being widely acclaimed as lord of Asia. Recruits were joining him, not only in Bactria itself, but also from the wild nomadic tribes beyond the Oxus.

This was a threat that had to be dealt with as soon as possible, before it got completely out of hand. Alexander therefore confirmed Satibarzanes as satrap — a decision he soon had cause to regret — and pressed on at top speed towards Bactria. During this march Parmenio's son Nicanor, the commander of the Guards Brigade (hypaspistae), fell ill and died. Alexander was in too much of a hurry to bury him with full military honours; he continued the march eastward, leaving Philotas to arrange his brother's funeral, and overtake the main body afterwards as best he could — an absence which, as we shall see, conceivably cost him his life.

At the Margus (Murghab) River,^g Alexander heard that Satibarzanes had massacred his Macedonian garrison, and was raising Areia in revolt. The king at once halted his advance into Bactria. Leaving Craterus in command of the main army, he took a flying column southward towards Artacoana, the satrapal seat, where Satibarzanes was gathering his forces. In two days Alexander covered nearly a hundred miles. Satibarzanes, caught off-guard, fled to Bactria with 2,000 cavalry. His remaining troops dug themselves in on a nearby wooded mountain (Kālat-i-Nādiri). It was now August: Alexander simply set the forest alight and roasted the lot of them.

Another Persian, Arsaces, was appointed satrap of Areia in Satibarzanes' place. To help prevent further trouble, Alexander founded a settlement near Artacoana, which he called Alexandria-of-the-Areians (Herat) — the first of many such military garrisons planted at strategic points throughout the eastern provinces. The Macedonians were now advancing into regions where towns, as a Westerner would conceive them, were largely non-existent, and of which their geographical knowledge was hazy in the extreme. They thought, for example that the Jaxartes River (Syr-Darya) formed the upper reaches of the Don, and that the Hindu Kush range was somehow an extension of the Caucasus. From the moment they plunged into eastern Iran they were off the known map. It was now that the legends and tall stories began to proliferate — starting with the well-attested report that Alexander received a visit, during his stay at Zadracarta, from the queen of the Amazons, anxious to conceive a child by him.

There was, on the other hand, nothing romantic or mythical about the three years of mountain guerrilla fighting (330–27) which followed, from Afghanistan to Bokhara, from Lake Seistan to the Hindu Kush, against the fiercest, most indomitable opposition Alexander had yet been called upon to face. Bessus, and his successor Spitamenes, were fighting a nationalist war, with strong religious overtones: between them they gave Alexander more continuous trouble than all the embattled hosts of Darius.³²

The foundation of Herat had been made easier by a timely arrival of reinforcements — 3,000 Illyrians from Antipater, and almost the same number of Lydian mercenaries. Craterus now rejoined Alexander with the main army (including the four phalanxbattalions that Cleitus the Black had brought back from Ecbatana), and together they marched on south. For the moment Alexander's original plan of a direct assault on Zariaspa, otherwise known as Bactra (Balkh) was abandoned; yet another rebellious regicide had to be dealt with first. This was Barsaëntes, satrap of Drangiana and Arachosia, a vast area extending eastward from Seistan as far as the Indus.

After this thousand-mile diversion Alexander planned to march north-east through Arachosia, and reach Bessus' stronghold by way of the Hindu Kush. Barsaëntes, hearing that Alexander was at hand, fled towards the Indus, but the local inhabitants seized him and sent him back. The king ordered his immediate execution, on charges of treason and murder. Nationalist opposition in this remote area was thus crushed without much effort (for the time being, that is: Alexander was to have more trouble from Satibarzanesa few months later). The Macedonian army now rested for a while at the capital of Drangiana, on the eastern shore of Lake Seistan — a city afterwards occupied by the Parthians, who called it Phrada. It was here, during the autumn of 330 (in circumstances hardly less mysterious than those surrounding the Dreyfus Affair), that Alexander finally destroyed both Parmenio and his one surviving son, the arrogant, ambitious Philotas.³³

For a long while now, as we have seen, the king had been steadily undermining Parmenio's power and authority. Quite apart from the personal vendetta between them, Parmenio symbolized Macedonian conservatism in its most uncompromising form. Alexander's new pretensions deeply antagonized the whole old guard, his second-in-command perhaps more than anyone. This was not a crucial matter so long as the rank and file remained loyal; but there were disturbing signs, now, that their allegiance too had begun to wear dangerously thin. Victories, loot, and glory were not, in the end, enough for them. The war had gone on too long already, and peace continually receded over the eastern horizon. Worse still, the leader they had hero-worshipped was rapidly turning into an unapproachable oriental despot. ‘We have lost Alexander,’ one old soldier lamented. ‘We have lost our king.’

With the death of Darius, and its obvious implications regarding the succession, some kind of showdown became inevitable. Alexander, characteristically, made up his mind to strike first. Parmenio enjoyed great popularity with the troops, and any direct move against him might well provoke a riot, or worse. Alexander's obvious line was to get at the old marshal through his son, Philotas, a far less likeable character. Tactless, overbearing and ostentatious, Philotas caused deep resentment among officers and men alike by his caustic tongue and high-handed manners. Parmenio had warned him about his behaviour: Philotas took no notice. For some while now Alexander had been steadily advancing Craterus and Perdiccas at his expense.

He had also — on Craterus' suggestion — suborned Philotas' mistress Antigone to report any treasonable remarks her lover might make.³⁴ Presumably Alexander meant to build up a dossier of careless talk and then stage a show-trial. This approach, however, produced surprisingly little hard evidence. Philotas once vehemently asserted, while drunk, that he and his father between them were responsible for all Alexander's finest achievements — a remark which might perhaps smack of lèse-majesté but which could hardly be construed as conspiratorial or subversive. Philotas' worst fault, indeed, seems to have been his outspoken bluntness — something very different. If we can believe Curtius,³⁵ he wrote to Alexander after the Siwah episode, congratulating the king on his divine parentage, and commiserating (perhaps only half in jest) with all those who would in future be under such more than human authority.

This kind of shrewd deflation was hardly calculated to increase Alexander's liking for him. On the other hand, one quality Philotas possessed guaranteed him immunity — at least until after Gaugamela. He was a brilliant cavalry commander, who led theCompanions with superb panache and assurance. Now, however, as Alexander's destiny called him away from the plains into the mountains, and guerrilla fighting became the order of the day, Philotas had lost his usefulness — could, indeed, be regarded as expendable. What was more, the death of his last remaining brother, Nicanor, left him dangerously isolated; and Parmenio was far away in Ecbatana. All Alexander needed was a good excuse to act, and fate — or some discreet manipulation behind the scenes — obligingly produced it.

Philotas rejoined the army at Lake Seistan, after attending to Nicanor's funeral. A day or two later he was button-holed outside Alexander's headquarters by a young man called Cebalinus, who poured out some confused and unconvincing story about a plot against the king's life. Cebalinus' brother, it seemed, was in love with a man named Dymnus, who had invited him to join the plot, but of course (Cebalinus said) he had refused … We can imagine Philotas tapping his foot impatiently during this long-winded recital, and thinking: Another homosexual quarrel, with the usual bitchy accusations: obviously nothing in it. Cebalinus now proceeded to name several important persons, including Demetrius, a Gentleman of the Bodyguard. Worse and worse, Philotas must have thought. No witnesses, no proof: the boy had not even come in person, but had sent his brother. Now he was accusing friends of the king. Best not to get involved: this kind of gossip made for endless trouble.

Cebalinus was tiresomely importunate, and to get rid of him Philotas promised that he would pass on his information to Alexander without delay — probably calculating that the whole affair would die a natural death soon enough. Perhaps, too, at the back of his mind there stirred the unacknowledged thought that if by any remote chance the rumour was true, events should be allowed to follow their natural course:

Thou shalt not kill, yet need'st not strive,
Officiously, to keep alive.

At any rate, though he had several interviews with Alexander during the next two days, the subject of this alleged conspiracy was never brought up.³⁶ Each time Cebalinus saw Philotas, he asked him whether he had told Alexander yet; each time Philotas (who had no intention of feeding the king's all-too-inflammable paranoia with mere malicious tittle-tattle) made the usual polite excuses that one tends to reserve for ultra-persistent bores. In the end Cebalinus, understandably suspicious, carried his tale to one of the royal pages instead.³⁷

This time he got immediate action. The page hid Cebalinus in the armoury, and told Alexander his story while the king was bathing.³⁸ Alexander at once ordered Dymnus' arrest, and then proceeded to grill Cebalinus himself. Why, he asked, very reasonably, had there been forty-eight hours' delay before he was informed — especially since the coup had been planned for the third day after Cebalinus first learnt of it?³⁹ At this point Philotas' name was brought into the discussion for the first time. Cebalinus made no attempt to implicate him in the plot, and he had not figured in Dymnus' list of conspirators.⁴⁰ All that Cebalinus complained of — more to excuse himself than for any more sinister reason — was Philotas' dilatoriness in passing on his message.

But Alexander saw, instantly, that here was the opening he had been waiting for, the perfect instrument with which to encompass Philotas' downfall. By the time Dymnus was dragged in, barely alive (he had fallen on his sword when arrested) the king had a breathtaking punch-line ready: ‘What great wrong have I planned against you, Dymnus,’ he exclaimed, ‘that you should think Philotas more worthy to rule the Macedonians than I am myself?’ Dymnus, however, was by now past speech, and died leaving this extraordinary question unanswered.⁴¹ Next, Alexander summoned Philotas, who at first made light of the whole affair, ‘fearing besides,’ as Curtius says, ‘lest he should be laughed at by the rest if he reported a quarrel between a lover and his favourite’. The news of Dymnus' suicide took him aback. He admitted that perhaps he ought to have reported the matter, and apologized for not having done so. Alexander accepted his apology, the two men shook hands, and that, on the face of it, was that. Philotas walked out a free man.⁴²

In fact, of course, the king simply needed a little more time in which to perfect his plans. He called a private council meeting from which Philotas was conspicuously absent.⁴³ Amongst those present were Hephaestion, Craterus, Coenus — Parmenio's son-in-law, but ready enough to swim with the tide — Erigyius of Mytilene, and two Gentlemen of the Bodyguard, Perdiccas and Leonnatus. All were subsequently raised to high command; four became marshals of the empire. These, if anyone, constituted Alexander'sinner circle of faithful friends.

Cebalinus' brother Nicomachus was brought before them and made to repeat his story in detail.⁴⁴ Craterus then rose and made a virulent attack against both Philotas — his personal rival — and Parmenio, asserting that Alexander would never be safe so long as they were left alive. The other members of the council agreed. Philotas must surely be implicated in this plot: why else had he been so reluctant to report it? He should be tortured; perhaps he would then confess the names of other accomplices.

Having thus secured the support of his staff, Alexander struck at once. The actual arrest of Philotas would be the most dangerous step in the whole operation, since there was always an outside chance that the troops might stand by him. The king took all possible precautions. A route-march was announced for the following morning. Cavalry patrols were stationed at every gate of the camp, and on the road outside, to make sure no messenger got away to Parmenio during the night. Philotas himself, to disarm suspicion, received a dinner-invitation from Alexander. About midnight a picked detachment of troops set out from the king's tent to arrest both Philotas and the other conspirators whom Cebalinus' brother had named. Philotas' house was quietly surrounded while he lay asleep, and all the arrests were carried out with smooth efficiency.⁴⁵

Next morning Alexander summoned a general parade of his Macedonian troops. In cases of high treason, the king acted as prosecutor, but it was the army which passed final judgment. After a long silence, during which the atmosphere became progressively more strained, Alexander began his speech. Dymnus' body lay there before him; Philotas, for the moment, he kept out of sight. By now he was ready to declare, as proven fact, that Parmenio had been the master-mind behind the conspiracy, with Philotas and the rest as his agents. The best evidence he could produce for this assertion was an intercepted letter from the old man, containing the ambiguous injunction: ‘First, look out for yourselves, then for yours: for thus we shall accomplish what we have planned.’⁴⁶

Cebalinus, his brother, and the royal page who had broken the news to Alexander were all produced as witnesses: none of them incriminated Philotas. Alexander was reduced to raking up old gossip and tittle-tattle; not even the dossier supplied by Philotas' mistress gave him any really solid ammunition. The accused man was now, at last, brought in, hands tied behind him, wearing an old threadbare cloak. His appearance excited murmurs of pity from the troops. One officer, Amyntas, jumped up and attempted to counter this wave of sympathy by claiming that the prisoner had betrayed them all to the barbarians, that because of him none of them would see their wives or homes or children again.^h Amyntas was followed by Coenus, Philotas' own brother-in-law, who damned him as a traitor to king, country, and army, and was only with difficulty restrained from stoning him.

Philotas was, according to custom, allowed the privilege of speaking in his own defence, though Alexander — after a cheap gibe about his refusal to speak in Macedonian dialect — did not stay to listen. This was perhaps just as well, since Philotas, with contemptuous ease, tore the whole prosecution case to shreds. The hostile feeling of the assembly was only restored, with difficulty, by an ex-ranker general, who reminded them what an arrogant snob Philotas was, how he evicted troops from their billets to make room for his own stores. This produced an angry uproar, during which one of the guards was heard shouting that he would tear the traitor to pieces with his own hands.

Alexander, with his usual faultless sense of timing, now reappeared, and dismissed the assembly till the following day. At a second council meeting that evening it was agreed that Philotas and his fellow-prisoners should all suffer the traditional penalty — death by stoning. But there were two things Alexander wanted to get first: a written confession from Philotas himself, and some sort of statement implicating Parmenio. Craterus, Hephaestion and Coenus were therefore authorized to torture Philotas until he provided both. The king had a private briefing-session beforehand with Craterus (‘the subject of which has not been made public,’ says Curtius, and small wonder). Then he withdrew to his quarters and let them get on with it — or, according to Plutarch, observed the proceedings from behind a curtain.⁴⁷

Before morning the torturers had their written confession, and probably enough extra details, imagined or remembered, to implicate Parmenio as well (at one point Philotas asked Craterus, with weary cynicism, to explain just what it was he wanted said). When their victim was brought before the assembly to hear sentence pronounced, he had to be carried, since he could no longer walk. Our main source, Curtius, alleges that he suffered further torture even after his confession had been wrung out of him. As soon as he and the rest of those accused had been executed, Alexander (never averse — in the most literal sense on this occasion — from killing two birds with one stone) ordered his own namesake, the Lyncestian, to be brought in for final judgment.⁴⁸ But three years of close confinement seem to have addled this once-proud aristocrat's wits. When ordered to defend himself, he hesitated, stumbled, and finally dried up after a few meaningless words. The guards standing nearby grew impatient (or perhaps had their orders) and ran their spears through him without more ado.

Three of Andromenes' four sons were also arraigned now; mainly because they had been on close terms with Philotas, and Alexander had received warning letters about them from his mother. The fourth brother, Polemo, had fled on hearing of Philotas' arrest — enough, one might have thought, to damn them all out of hand. But Amyntas, the eldest (and the main target for Olympias' venom), put up a vigorous defence, pointing out, inter alia, that the queen mother's main grudge against him was due to his having conscripted several of her young palace favourites — at the king's express command — while recruiting in Macedonia.⁴⁹ Alexander, surprisingly, allowed them all to go free. (One brother, Attalus, was Perdiccas' brother-in-law, which perhaps had some bearing on the matter.) The king may well have felt that a scrupulous acquittal in one instance would suggest that all the trials had been fairly conducted.ⁱ When Demetrius the Bodyguard protested his innocence, Alexander let him go — and then quietly rearrested him a little later, after all the fuss had died down.⁵⁰

However, the king had no intention of carrying out a wholesale pogrom of dissident Macedonian officers. He had attained his immediate objective, and knew when to stop. Only one thing — perhaps the most important — still remained to be done.Polydamas, one of the Companions, was dispatched across the deserts of central Iran, in Arab costume and with two Arabs as guides, bearing Parmenio's death-warrant. To ensure that they reached Ecbatana before the old marshal could hear any rumour of his son's death, the party travelled on racing camels, covering the distance in eleven days rather than the usual thirty.

It was evening when Polydamas reached his destination. He changed back into Macedonian dress, and went straight to Cleander, Parmenio's second-in-command. One glance at Alexander's warrant was enough. Cleander alerted his staff-officers, and made arrangements for Polydamas to meet Parmenio early the following morning, in a grove of the Royal Park. Polydamas had brought two letters for Parmenio himself, so that this sudden visit should not arouse any untimely suspicions. One was from Alexander, while the other bore Philotas' seal, and may, indeed, even have been written by him at the same time as his ‘confession’. As the old general opened it, in evident delight, Cleander stabbed him twice, first through the ribs and then in the throat. His fellow-officers followed suit. Blows continued to rain down on him even after he was dead.

The guards outside the grove hurriedly roused their comrades in camp, and came back threatening lynch action. An ugly situation was only just averted by Cleander, who showed their leaders ‘the letters which contained an account of the plots of Parmenio against the king and Alexander's prayers that they should avenge him’. The soldiers, only partially mollified, demanded their old commander's body for burial. At first Cleander, afraid that such a concession might offend the king, refused point-blank. But when a near-riot ensued, he agreed to compromise. The head was hacked off and sent back to Alexander, while the decapitated trunk received a military funeral in Ecbatana.⁵¹

Parmenio's troops, with whom he had been extremely popular, never forgot or forgave his death. Years later, when those responsible were purged in their turn (see below, pp. 438–9), the occasion called forth general rejoicing. For Alexander it had been touch and go. He had got the army to act against Philotas, and had destroyed both Parmenio and Alexander of Lyncestis in the backwash of that carefully staged condemnation. The incubus that had lain on him for so long was now at long last removed. But the whole episode left an unpleasant aftermath of suspicion and hatred behind it. From now on Alexander never completely trusted his troops: the feeling was mutual.

To keep abreast of what the rank and file were thinking, he instituted the first known system of military postal censorship. Men and officers alike were encouraged to write letters home: they would, the king intimated, get the chance less and less often as they marched farther east. These mails were dispatched with his own couriers. After three postal stages they were recalled, and Alexander went through every letter at his leisure. All those who expressed criticism of him and his policies, or were (in his opinion) unduly distressed by Parmenio's death, or groused about their prolonged military service, he ‘assembled into one unit which he called the Disciplinary Company, so that the rest of the Macedonians might not be corrupted by their improper remarks and criticism’. The ultimate purpose of this group, Justin alleges, was to supply men for particularly dangerous missions, or to garrison remote military settlements on the eastern frontiers.⁵²

At the same time Alexander decided (though he later revoked the decision) never again to leave his all-important Companion Cavalry under one man's control. He therefore split Philotas' command between Black Cleitus — an appointment clearly designed to placate old guard conservatives — and his own closest personal friend, Hephaestion.⁵³ This was Hephaestion's first major post. From now on his rise to power was steady, progressive, and by no means based entirely on nepotism: he seems to have been a competent, if uninspired, cavalry commander.

When Antipater learnt of Parmenio's death, he said: ‘If Parmenio plotted against Alexander, who is to be trusted? And if he did not, what is to be done?’⁵⁴ It was an understandable reaction, and one with echoes for the future. The whole episode remains tantalizingly ambiguous. Plutarch assumed that the only plot was that against Philotas; most recent historical studies tend to agree.⁵⁵ Both Philotas and Parmenio, according to this view, were innocent victims of Alexander's personal vindictiveness and political absolutism. There may be an element of truth in this, but to present it as the whole truth is, surely, a dangerous over-simplification.

Unless we decide to jettison our sources altogether, it is evident that some sort of conspiracy against Alexander was in the air. Moreover, the way in which the king subsequently divided Philotas' vacant command between two officers suggests that — rightly or wrongly — he had convinced himself, if no one else, of the dead man's guilt. Whether he also regarded Parmenio as a traitor is more problematical. Disaffection was in the air, and Parmenio would be a natural focus for it. Furthermore, he controlled a key sector of Alexander's communications, and was admirably placed, in the event of a coup, to seize the accumulated treasures from Susa and Persepolis. Whatever his personal feelings, the king could not possibly afford to leave him in so powerful a position after the execution of his last surviving son.

If a plot existed at this juncture, it could have only one object: to overthrow Alexander, reverse his unpopular policies, and wind up the expedition as soon as possible. The natural instigators of such a programme were the Macedonian old guard: its natural leaders would be men like Parmenio and Philotas. So much Alexander could have deduced for himself; he might well have decided to get his own blow in first — especially since he had old scores to settle with both father and son. Yet certain details make one wonder. Philotas' obstinate refusal to report what he had been told remains — despite all his plausible explanations — undeniably odd. The extract from Parmenio's letter to his sons (if not a mere forgery) is, on the kindest interpretation, ambiguous. The sudden, apparently unmotivated decision to execute Alexander of Lyncestis would make more sense if there was any risk of his being used as a potential figurehead.

The truth, now, can in all likelihood never be recovered. Perhaps even at the time no one man — least of all Alexander himself — held all the clues. Our verdict over the ‘Philotas affair’, then, should be a cautious ‘Not Proven’ rather than a confident ‘Not Guilty’. At the same time we should not waste too much liberal sympathy on Parmenio, whose own record of judicial murder (see above, p. 120) will not bear over-close examination. Those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword; this tough and wily old Macedonian opportunist merely lasted longer than most.