[9]

The Quest for Ocean

IT was winter by the time Alexander resumed his march. If he had simply wanted to pursue Bessus, with no other considerations in mind, he could have back-tracked north to the point where he left the Murghab (or the Kushk) River, and then have continued his advance on Zariaspa. Instead, he swung north-east through Arachosia, which meant that he would now be forced to cross the Hindu Kush. His main reason for picking this long, difficult route seems to have been the still-unpacified state of the southern satrapies, including Arachosia itself. Dissension, indeed, was widespread. No sooner had he set out than reports reached him of a fresh rising in his rear, once again under Satibarzanes' leadership. An expeditionary force was at once sent back to Areia to deal with the rebels, and its commander, Erigyius of Mytilene, won great distinction by killing Satibarzanes in single combat.

The revolt collapsed, but Areia continued to give trouble. Its Persian governor had subsequently to be replaced by a reliable Macedonian. Alexander appointed another Macedonian, Menon, as satrap of Arachosia: Menon's authority was further reinforced by a new military settlement, probably near the site of modern Kandahar. The whole region, it is clear, was very far from subdued, much less reliable.

Alexander reached Kandahar in February 329, and began his crossing of the Hindu Kush about the beginning of April. During their winter march through the highlands of eastern Afghanistan his troops had suffered severely from frostbite, snow blindness, and chronic fatigue — the latter probably due to oxygen shortage at high altitudes.¹ Somewhere near Kabul the king gave them a short and well-earned rest. Then, after establishing a third garrison town (which received the name Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus) he took his army over the Khawak pass (11,600 ft), and struck north along the line of the Surkhab River towards Drapsaca (Kunduz). The crossing is said to have been accomplished in seventeen days — a remarkable feat, and one which must have required the most careful planning and accumulation of supplies at Alexander's base-camp. North of the Hindu Kush Bessus had adopted a scorched-earth policy; all supplies had been either destroyed or else concealed in pits by the local inhabitants. This caused the Macedonians considerable hardship, but failed to hold up their advance.^a

Bessus himself, together with 7,000 Bactrians and some strong Soghdian levies — the latter under two great feudal barons, Spitamenes and Oxyartes — was confidently awaiting Alexander at Aornus (Tashkurgan). There are no less than seven passes fromKabul to the Oxus valley: Bessus assumed, very reasonably, that the Macedonians would choose the lowest one. But Alexander, unpredictable as always, did nothing of the sort. The Khawak pass is not only the easternmost of the seven (which was why he chose it) but also the highest and the most heavily snowbound. His army negotiated it with fantastic speed, and Bessus, eighty miles away to the west, found himself outflanked. He therefore decided to abandon Bactria altogether, retreat across the Oxus, and base his defence on Soghdiana.²

When this plan was announced, most of his Bactrian cavalrymen promptly deserted, peeling off home to their own villages. Yet Bessus' strategy — as subsequent events proved — was neither cowardly nor unintelligent. Bactria, being for the most part a seamed and rugged mass of pathless mountains, offered almost impossible fighting terrain. Beyond the Oxus, however, conditions were very different. Soghdiana (Bokhara and Turkestan) consisted largely of plain and desert. Its inhabitants were fierce, independent tribesmen who could ride almost before they could walk. This offered the perfect combination for a hit-and-run campaign of attrition (cf. Fuller, p. 117), carried out by mounted guerrillas who could swoop down on a marching column, and vanish into the steppe when pursued.

After a short rest at Drapsaca, Alexander went on to occupy both Tashkurgan and Zariaspa, the capital of Bactria — and Zoroaster's birthplace — without encountering any real opposition. Then, leaving old Artabazus as satrap of the newly conquered province, he passed on towards the Oxus. It was now June, the dry season, and his route lay across a burning waterless desert, where the frostbitten suddenly found themselves suffering from heatstroke. Marching by night made conditions less unbearable, since the temperature then dropped considerably (from 100° + to 70° or even 60°F). Even so, the bulk of the army trailed behind badly during this gruelling marathon — so much so that when Alexander finally reached the Oxus, about sunset, he had to light beacon-fires for them: otherwise they might have missed his camp in the darkness.

After this experience the Thessalian volunteers (already restive enough as a result of Parmenio's murder) mutinied en masse, and many of Philip's older veterans followed their example. They were four thousand miles from home: they had had enough. The king had no alternative but to release them all, with severance pay and bonuses. This unexpected demobilization left him dangerously short of first-class troops. To make matters worse, a great number — more than he had lost in any battle — now died as a result ofdehydration followed by frenetic over-drinking. He therefore took a gamble and, for the first time, recruited local ‘barbarian’ auxiliaries on a large scale. The gamble paid off handsomely — though how Alexander's remaining Macedonians reacted to it is quite another matter.

The Oxus (Amu Darya) presented a formidable obstacle. Rising in the high Pamirs, it carries down a vast quantity of snow-water from the mountains of central Asia. At Kelif, where Alexander made his crossing, it was three-quarters of a mile wide, and deep in proportion, with a sandy bottom and a swift-flowing current. The king's engineers tried to sink piles for a bridge, but these were quickly carried away. In any case the countryside was barren and treeless: to collect enough timber would have taken far too long. Finally Alexander fell back on the expedient he had adopted at the Danube (see above, pp. 128–9) — except that this time he had no fleet to help him. All the leather tent-covers were stuffed with dry chaff and then stitched up carefully to make floats.

By this makeshift method the king got his forces across the river. But it took him five days: if Bessus had chosen to attack during this period he would have had Alexander at a very serious disadvantage. He might also, as things turned out, have saved his own life.³ Instead, he assumed that Alexander would be held up at the Oxus until he could collect a transport fleet — just as he had earlier deduced, with erroneous confidence, which pass the Macedonians would follow from Kabul. His military reputation, already shaky after the evacuation of Bactria, sank to zero when Alexander's latest exploit became known. Spitamenes and the Soghdian barons decided, at this point, that a change of leadership was advisable. They therefore placed Bessus under arrest, and sent messengers to tell Alexander that if a Macedonian officer and escort came to a certain rendezvous, the regicide would be handed over to them. This was an extremely clever move. It not only rid the new junta of Bessus himself, but convinced Alexander of their willingness to collaborate.

Nevertheless he reacted cautiously: the message might prove to be some sort of trap. Ptolemy, son of Lagus (who had been made a Bodyguard after the liquidation of Demetrius), was entrusted with this delicate mission. As an insurance against possible trouble, he had a very strong force with him — about 1,600 cavalry and 4,000 infantry.⁴ Spitamenes and his colleagues, who no more trusted Alexander than he did them, carefully avoided any personal contact with his party. Ptolemy was directed to a remote village, where he found Bessus under armed guard. He thereupon sent a dispatch back to Alexander, asking how Bessus should be brought into his presence.

The king's instructions were very specific. Bessus was to be placed by the roadside where Alexander and his troops would pass, naked, bound to a post, and with a slave's wooden collar round his neck. This was duly done. When Alexander (whose treatment of Bessus seems to have been mainly dictated by a desire to impress the recalcitrant Iranian nobility) came abreast of his prisoner, he stepped down from his royal chariot, and asked why Bessus had first enchained and then slain Darius ‘his king, kinsman and benefactor’. Bessus replied that it had been a joint decision, ‘to win Alexander's favour and so save their lives’. But such favours (as everyone knew) would only be welcomed as such by a foreign usurper — the one title Alexander was anxious to avoid. As proof of the abhorrence with which he regarded Bessus' act of betrayal, Alexander first had him scourged, and then sent back to Zariaspa, where in 328 he stood trial as a regicide. His nose and ears were cut off — a Persian practice, which Darius I had previously used against a pretender to the throne, but here done on Alexander's express orders — and he finally suffered public execution in Ecbatana,⁵ before a full assembly of the Medes and Persians. How far Alexander's display of Achaemenid justice impressed them is a debatable point.

Both the crossing of the Hindu Kush and the desert march which followed it had taken heavy toll of the Macedonians' cavalry mounts. Alexander now re-equipped his squadrons with local Turkestan horses, bigger and stronger than any breed they had encountered hitherto. Then, under the happy but mistaken impression that Spitamenes was now his subject-ally, and all south-west Soghdiana peacefully subdued, he struck north for Maracanda (Samarkand) and the Jaxartes (Syr-Darya). This river marked the furthermost north-eastern boundary of the Persian Empire. Beyond it lay limitless ‘Scythian’ steppe and mountain, inhabited by wild nomadic tribesmen — Dahae, Sacae, Massagetae. Here Alexander found an outpost and a chain of forts, seven in number, supposedly built by Cyrus. These he garrisoned with mercenaries. He also planned to construct a new military settlement of his own, ‘both as an excellent base for a possible future invasion of Scythia and as a defensive position against raiding tribes from across the river’. Its name was Alexandria-the-Furthest (Leninabad or Khodjend).

Various ‘Scythian’ tribes had sent delegations to him, seeking alliance. Alexander received them graciously. A number of Macedonian officers accompanied these envoys home, with instructions to ratify treaties of friendship — while at the same time picking up all the information they could get about local topography, military equipment, and troop-numbers. The practice of using diplomats as intelligence agents is by no means an exclusively modern phenomenon.

It was now that the real trouble began. Alexander summoned Spitamenes and his colleagues to a meeting in Zariaspa. Spitamenes, probably afraid that the king meant to take hostages for their future good behaviour, refused. The whole province now rose in revolt under him. Local commandos recaptured Cyrus' outpost and its string of forts, massacring Alexander's garrisons. Spitamenes himself laid siege to Maracanda. On receipt of this news the king acted promptly enough, but he does not seem, as yet, to have fully appreciated what he was up against. The relief force he sent to Maracanda was hopelessly inadequate for its task. Indeed, its titular commander, Pharnuches, a Lydian interpreter, had probably been chosen with an eye to diplomatic negotiations rather than fighting. He knew the local language, ‘and had often shown a skilful hand in dealing with the natives’. All he had with him were sixty Companion Cavalry, and 2,000 mercenaries, 800 of them mounted, under three Macedonian officers.

Alexander dealt with the river-forts himself. He had been shot through the leg-bone by a stray arrow on the march to Maracanda: this is unlikely to have improved his temper. Five of the seven forts he retook in three days, butchering their defenders by way of reprisal. The main outpost, Cyropolis, fell after a raiding-party squeezed in along a dry river-course that ran under the wall. Eight thousand men died in a last desperate stand. Seven thousand survivors, together with the garrisons of the two remaining forts, were (says Aristobulus) afterwards executed en masse. During the hand-to-hand fighting Alexander was struck on the face and neck by a large stone. For a while both his vision and his vocal chords were impaired, and there was a fear that he might actually go blind.

What he needed more than anything was the chance to rest and recuperate. Bone-splinters kept working out of his wounded leg, and he must have suffered the most excruciating migraines. Yet though he could barely stand, he spent the next three weeks supervising the construction of Alexandria-the-Furthest's new city-walls. Towards the end of this period, irritated by the taunts and threats of the tribesmen across the river, he carried out a tactically brilliant raid into their territory. The encircling nomad horsemen were outmanoeuvred and encircled in their turn, and a thousand of them cut down by Alexander's heavy cavalry. During the retreat which followed, the king drank some infected water. When he recrossed the Jaxartes he had gastro-enteritis to contend with on top of his other troubles.

But the worst news was yet to come. When Pharnuches and his relief column approached, Spitamenes had withdrawn from Maracanda, skilfully luring his pursuers on towards Bokhara, across the Zarafshen River, into the wild territory of the Massagetae. Here they were ambushed, surrounded, and shot down almost to a man (accounts differ as to the exact circumstances). Only 300 infantry and about forty mounted troopers escaped. Spitamenes at once took his troops back to Maracanda, and resumed the siege. When Alexander heard this grim story from the survivors, he threatened them with the death penalty if they breathed a word about what had happened. Knowing his Herodotus, he probably also had in mind Cyrus' equally ill-fated expedition among the Massagetae, which ended with a similar massacre — in which the king lost his life. One thing stood out clearly: Spitamenes was the most dangerous opponent Alexander had been called upon to face since Memnon of Rhodes.

Once again the king moved with quite extraordinary speed. Taking a column of cavalry and light-armed troops, he force-marched along the Jaxartes, across the Golod'naya Steppe, and into the valley of the Zarafshen, reaching Maracanda at dawn on the fourth day — a distance of about 160 miles. Spitamenes and his horsemen promptly raised their siege and faded away into the desert. Alexander pursued them for a while, but in the end gave up the chase as hopeless. On his way back he systematically ravaged the land bordering on the river: without fodder and provisions hostile raiders would find it difficult to attack Maracanda during the winter. He also made a detour to the spot where Pharnuches had been ambushed, and buried the dead soldiers still lying there.⁶

This done, he recrossed the Oxus and went into winter quarters at Zariaspa (329/8). Here final sentence was pronounced on Bessus (see above, p. 355); and here Alexander also dealt with the rebel satrap of Areia, who was brought back in chains by his collaborating fellow-nobles. Welcome reinforcements, mostly mercenaries, arrived from the coast. With them came such men as Parmenio's brother Asander (who, perhaps fortuitously, is never heard of again), and Nearchus, Alexander's boyhood friend, till recently satrap of Lycia (see above, p. 201), and now appointed a battalion commander in the Guards Brigade. The winter months were also enlivened by various embassies, including a personal visit from Pharasmenes, King of the Chorasmians, a large tribe dwelling along the Oxus towards the Aral Sea.

Though it was probably from Pharasmenes that Alexander first learnt of the Aral's existence, faulty notions of geography and over-imaginative interpreting seem to have got the two men quite splendidly at cross-purposes. Pharasmenes was eager to enlist so great a conqueror's support against his western neighbours on the Caspian; but somehow Colchis and the Amazons were brought into the picture, and Alexander became convinced that what Pharasmenes had in mind was an expedition to the Black Sea. What is most interesting about this malentendu is the king's reaction to it. He told Pharasmenes that his first concern was to round off the conquest of Asia by subduing India. When he returned to Greece, however, he planned, he said, to make a full-scale naval and military expedition into the Black Sea; and for this Pharasmenes' offer would be most useful.⁷ Here is the first hint in our sources of Alexander's plans for ultimate world-conquest, of the further expeditions that would follow when the East had been fully subdued.

Meanwhile, before he could think of moving on to India, there was the elusive Spitamenes to be dealt with. Early in the spring of 328 Alexander, leaving Craterus and four battalions of the phalanx to police Bactria, recrossed the Oxus and set about this singularly frustrating task.^{8 b} He split up his forces into five mobile columns, under Hephaestion, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Coenus and himself. These columns ranged through the countryside, mopping up pockets of local resistance and establishing a linked network ofmilitary outposts. Either now or shortly afterwards a similar system was set up in Margiane (western Bactria). Existing hill-forts were taken over and fresh ones built, all within easy reach of each other. Justin lists no less than thirteen such posts in Soghdiana alone.⁹

Spitamenes, meanwhile, had kept well beyond Alexander's reach, among the Massagetae nomads, where he was reputed to be raising a large cavalry force. When the five Macedonian columns made their pre-arranged rendezvous in Maracanda, about midsummer, the king sent off Coenus and old Artabazus to keep an eye on his activities. Spitamenes dodged their scouts with insolent ease, swept south into Bactria, captured a border fortress, ravaged the land round Zariaspa, and carved up a scratch force of Macedonian veterans who ventured out against him. When this news reached Craterus (who had been up-country with his four phalanx-battalions) he hurried after Spitamenes, overtaking him just on the edge of the desert. There was a fierce engagement, during which about 150 Massagetae horsemen lost their lives. But the remainder, Spitamenes included, did their usual vanishing-trick into the steppe, where Craterus found it impracticable to pursue them.¹⁰

The atmosphere in headquarters that summer was strained and irritable. What should have been a quick minor campaign continued to drag on inconclusively. Two unprecedented defeats did not improve matters. The hatred and jealousy between Philip's old guard and the king's Graeco-Oriental courtiers reached a fresh peak of intensity. Maracanda sweltered dustily under a burning sun. Everyone, Alexander included, had begun to drink rather more than was good for them. Under such conditions it needed very little to bring overstrained tempers to flash-point. The heavy carousing which followed a Macedonian banquet soon set resentful tongues wagging freely. In vino veritas — and the truth came out with more violence for being so long suppressed, as it had done during Philip's last and fatal marriage-feast. Sooner or later there was bound to be an explosion; and when it came, it assumed a particularly ugly form.¹¹

The evening began, like so many others, with a lavish banquet — perhaps in honour of Black Cleitus, who was setting out next day to take up his new appointment as governor of Bactria, a hazardous and responsible post.¹² Presently the banquet degenerated into the usual uproarious drinking-party. Alexander, more than half-tipsy, and egged on by the sycophants who crowded round him, began to boast immoderately of his own achievements. Flatterers compared the king's exploits — favourably — with those of Heracles. This vainglorious attitude might have been calculated to provoke the old guard. If so, it achieved its object.¹³ Cleitus (who found Alexander's orientalism and the gross adulation of his courtiers equally repellent) now remarked, sourly, that such talk was blasphemous. In any case, he went on, they were exaggerating. Most of Alexander's successes were due to the Macedonian army as a whole (a theme to which Cleitus returned later, with fatal consequences).¹⁴ When he heard this the king was ‘deeply hurt’. One can imagine the scene all too clearly.

Alexander's clique, by no means averse to fanning the flames, now launched into a wholesale denunciation of Philip, suggesting that what he had done ‘was, after all, quite ordinary and commonplace’. The king himself needed little encouragement to develop this theme. Philip had grudged him credit for the victory at Chaeronea, even though he, Alexander, personally saved his father's life during the battle. Other long-cherished grudges came tumbling out.¹⁵ Cleitus, by now angry-drunk himself, vigorously upheld Philip's achievements (and with good reason), ‘rating them all higher than the present victories’. He even spoke out in defence of Parmenio, accusing Alexander of winning easy victories for which he depended on Philip's veterans.

‘From this,’ says Curtius, ‘there arose a dispute between the younger and the older soldiers.’¹⁶ But the division was not merely one of youth and age; it was fundamental, irreconcilable — nationalism against the orientalizing policy, simplicity against sophistication, blunt free speech against sedulous conformism. It is by no means impossible that Alexander (who had become ultra-sensitive of late, perhaps with reason, about plots against him) deliberately provoked this kind of outburst to learn what old guard officers such as Cleitus were really thinking and feeling. At all events, he poured fuel on the flames by giving the floor to a Greek singer,¹⁷ who proceeded to entertain the company with a malicious skit aimed at certain (unnamed) Macedonian commanders who had recently been defeated in battle against Spitamenes (see above, pp. 357–60 and n. 10). This provoked an outcry among the older Macedonians present, but Alexander and his courtiers, hugely delighted, told the singer to go on.

Cleitus, stung beyond endurance, cried out that it was a shameful thing, in the hearing of enemies and barbarians (by which he meant the king's Persian guests) ‘to insult Macedonians who were far better men than those who laughed at them, even though they had met with misfortune’. We see now why Alexander timed this after-dinner jeu d'esprit when he did. Cleitus, clearly, had been one of the commanders involved — and was now rising to the bait. Silkily, the king murmured that to call cowardice ‘misfortune’ sounded like special pleading. ‘It was my cowardice, as you call it, that saved your life at the Granicus,’ Cleitus shouted. ‘It is by the blood of the Macedonians, and these wounds of ours, that you have risen so high — disowning Philip, claiming Ammon as your father …’ He also, significantly, reproached Alexander with the murder, not of Parmenio, but ofAttalus, which suggests where his own sympathies may have lain during the struggle for power.¹⁸

Alexander's reply, too, is highly revealing. ‘That's how you talk about me the whole time, isn't it? That's what causes all this bad blood between the Macedonians. You needn't think you're going to get away with it …’ ‘Look, Alexander,’ Cleitus said, carefully addressing the king by his bare name, according to Philip's practice, ‘we don't get away with it, even now. What rewards have we for our labours? Those who died are the luckiest — they never lived to see Macedonians thrashed with Median rods, or kow-towing to Persians before they could have an audience of their own king.’ This speech caused a tremendous uproar, during which Alexander, perhaps not quite so drunk as he made out, turned to two Greek courtiers, sitting beside him and observed, scathingly: ‘Don't you feel that Greeks go about among Macedonians like demi-gods among wild beasts?’ — a remark which might have been calculated to make any old-guard Macedonian lose his last vestige of self-control.

There was so much noise that Cleitus missed the king's exact words — which may in fact have been a deliberate aside, designed to provoke him further. The old warrior bellowed at Alexander that he should either say what he meant openly, or else not invite to supper ‘men who were free and spoke their minds’, but rather consort with slaves and barbarians, creatures who would prostrate themselves before his white robe and Persian sash. Alexander, half out of his mind with rage, picked up the first thing that came to hand, an apple,¹⁹ hurled it at Cleitus, and began looking round for his sword. One of the Gentlemen of the Bodyguard had prudently removed it. The king's closest friends — Perdiccas, Lysimachus, Leonnatus — scenting trouble, crowded round and forcibly held him down. A violent struggle developed, with Alexander screaming that this was a plot, that he had been betrayed like Darius.

Meanwhile other guests, led by Ptolemy son of Lagus, managed to drag Cleitus out of the banqueting-hall by main force. The king finally broke loose, and began shouting in broad Macedonian, ‘Turn out the Guard! Turn out the Guard!’ He ordered his trumpeter to sound a general alarm: with great courage and presence of mind the man refused — an act which afterwards won him great praise, since he arguably avoided a riot — and was knocked flat for his pains.²⁰ At this point Cleitus, who had broken loose once more, lurched back in by another door, shouting a line from Euripides' Andromache: ‘Alas what evil government in Hellas!’ Euripides was a popular playwright in Macedonia, and schoolboys learnt long stretches of his work by heart. Alexander would have had no trouble in continuing Cleitus' all-too-apt quotation:

When the public sets a war memorial up
Do those who really sweated get the credit?
Oh, no! Some general wangles the prestige! —
Who, brandishing his one spear among thousands,
Did one man's work, but gets a world of praise.
These self-important fathers of their country
Think they're above the people. Why, they're nothing!

Alexander, flicked on the raw by this indictment, and in no mood now (if ever) for Stoic theories about the Brotherhood of Man if they in any way diminished his ego, sprang up, seized a spear from one of his guards, and ran Cleitus through, killing him instantly.²¹

Struck by sudden overwhelming remorse, the king plucked the spear from his old comrade's dead body and tried (not very energetically, it would seem) to impale himself on it. His friends, however, once more closed in and forcibly restrained him.²² He now shut himself up in his private quarters, where he continued to lament all night, recalling, inter alia, the omission of a sacrifice to Dionysus, which sounds like an attempt to divest himself of responsibility for his murder by laying it at the door of an angry god.²³ At dawn he had Cleitus' body brought to him, and mourned over it for a while, though it was later removed again.²⁴ For a considerable period — estimates range between Plutarch's thirty-six hours (the most likely) and Justin's four days (a characteristic exaggeration), with Curtius and Arrian settling for a quasi-canonical three-day retirement²⁵ — he remained in seclusion, without food or drink.

The point at which genuine grief began to merge into calculated play-acting is very hard to determine: perhaps the two elements co-existed up to a point throughout. We can only judge by results, and the results were of great interest and significance. Once it sank into the minds of Alexander's followers that he might really starve himself to death, leaving them leaderless in this remote and barbarous country, they did everything they could to make him change his mind. What the king sought, in effect, was a combined absolution and vote of confidence: he got both. Callisthenes tried tactful philosophical comfort. This was not a success.²⁶ Anaxarchus, however, a political realist, saw at once that Alexander needed not intellectual placebos but philosophical justification. He therefore marched into the king's bedroom and told him, with cheerful brutality, to get up and quit snivelling: the king stood above mere human laws.

This, of course, was precisely what Alexander hoped to be told: from now on Anaxarchus enjoyed increasing favour at Callisthenes' expense. The Macedonians, taking their cue from the king's reaction, now ‘decreed that Cleitus had been justly put to death’, presumably for treason. Soothsayers complicated the issue by ascribing his end to the anger of Dionysus: various premonitory omens were ‘remembered’ (i.e. manufactured) confirming such a view, and implicitly transferring the burden of responsibility from Alexander to ‘Fate's decrees’ (Aristander played a useful role here). His crime thus retrospectively legitimized — and conscious that henceforth he could, at a pinch, get the army's endorsement for almost anything — Alexander consented to sit up and take nourishment.²⁷ Nevertheless, every man present at that fatal banquet knew the truth. Cleitus had been killed for daring to express open criticism of the king, and for no other reason. What was worse, Alexander's act of murder had not been forgiven so much as publicly justified. From now on there would be no holding him. The death of Cleitus, coming so soon after that of Parmenio, did indeed, as Curtius says, mark the end of freedom.²⁸

Alexander had now spent two campaigning seasons in Bactria and Soghdiana, with very little to show for them. Spitamenes remained as elusive as ever. The king was grimly determined to finish him off before spring came: he had no intention of holding up his projected invasion of India a moment longer. There had been far too much delay as it was. Alexander himself took over Cleitus' vacant command in the Companion Cavalry. While the bulk of the army moved into winter quarters at Nautaca, Coenus, with two battalions of the phalanx and a strong mixed cavalry force, was sent to cover the north-west frontier.

The network of Macedonian hill-forts now began to prove its worth. Spitamenes was finding ever greater difficulties in obtaining provisions and horses, let alone a secure base. Finally, in desperation, he enlisted the support of three thousand Massagetaehorsemen and attempted a mass breakthrough — just as Alexander had foreseen when making his dispositions. Coenus cut this large but ill-disciplined horde to pieces with professional zest, killing 800 enemy horsemen at almost no loss to himself. Those few Soghdians who had followed Spitamenes now came over to the Macedonians — in whose ranks many of their fellow-countrymen were already serving. Spitamenes himself fled into the desert with the nomads, his prestige much lowered by this ignominious defeat. Indeed, when the Massagetae learnt that Alexander himself was coming after them, they lost no time in executing Spitamenes, whose head they then dispatched to the king by way of a peace-offering.^c Their desert neighbours, the Dahae, hearing what had happened, promptly turned in Spitamenes' second-in-command, thus winning themselves a free pardon.²⁹

With Spitamenes' death all organized resistance on the northern frontier collapsed. Though the Soghdian leader's military qualities have been overrated, he was undoubtedly an excellent guerrilla general who saw, just as Memnon had done, that the best way to deal with Alexander was by commando raids and maquis tactics. He tied down a large and hitherto invincible army in Turkestan for over two years; and if he had had more reliable supporters than desert nomads in search of easy loot, he might have done even better.

It was now midwinter, and Alexander had still to deal with the wild mountainous district of the south-east (Paraetecene, between modern Tadzhik and Badakhshan) where at least four great barons continued to defy him from their remote rock-fortresses. After only two months at Nautaca the Macedonian army set off once more. It was early January, and weather conditions proved appalling; torrential rain, electric storms, and violent hail, turning to hard ice overnight as the temperature dropped below zero. During this march some 2,000 men froze to death or died of pneumonia. Alexander, as always, showed his best qualities in a crisis. Somehow he rallied the demoralized Macedonians: trees were cut down, fires lit, icy limbs thawed out. One soldier, lost in the forest, at last reached camp, barely able to stand, let alone hold his weapons. The king sat him down on his own chair by a blazing fire. When the man had recovered, and saw whose seat he was occupying, he sprang up at once, with the reflex instinct of a well-trained guardsman.

Alexander's reaction was characteristic — and revealing. He looked kindly at the soldier and said: ‘Now do you see how much better a time you have of it under a king than the Persians do? With them, to have sat in the king's seat would have been a capital offence — but in your case it proved a life-saver.’ Even on a freezing mountainside the king was still preoccupied (even allowing for Curtius' Roman rhetoric) with the insoluble problem of how, politically speaking, to be all things to all men. His mother's hints, hisPharaonic enthronement in Egypt, even the flattering predictions of Isocrates — who after Chaeronea told Philip that, once he had subdued the Great King, nothing would remain for him but to become a god — pointed towards one increasingly attractive answer.³⁰After all, had he not already eclipsed the achievements of Heracles?

The first mountain stronghold to face Alexander's assault was that known as the ‘Soghdian Rock’. Oxyartes, the local baron, had garrisoned it strongly (with 30,000 troops, we are told, but this sounds a suspiciously high figure), and had sent his own wife and children there to ensure their safety. Provisions were stored up against a two-years' siege. Deep snow not only hampered the Macedonians' advance, but also ensured abundant drinking-water for the defenders. The rock itself was sheer-faced and, or so its occupants believed, absolutely impregnable. Their optimism became apparent when Alexander, at a preliminary parley, offered them safe conduct to their homes if they would surrender the fortresses. They laughed rudely and asked whether his men could fly, adding that they would only surrender to winged soldiers, ‘as no other sort of person could cause them the least anxiety’. The king's reputation should have made them think twice before issuing such a challenge: far from discouraging him, it simply put him on his mettle.

He at once combed through the entire army for experienced cragsmen and mountaineers, of whom he found some 300. Reconnaissance had shown that the defenders only guarded the direct approach to the fortress. Alexander now called for volunteers to scale the sheer rock-face on the far side, offering vast rewards to the first twelve men up. They were to take swords, spears and provisions for two days. When they reached the summit, above the fortress itself, they were to wave white flags as a signal.

Every man of them volunteered for this perilous operation. The details recorded by Arrian and Curtius suggest that Alpine climbing techniques have changed comparatively little in over two millennia. The raiders roped themselves together and scaled the most difficult overhangs with the aid of iron wedges and pitons driven into cracks in the rock-face. They made the ascent by night, an extra hazard. About thirty of them plummeted down into the snowdrifts below, and their bodies were never recovered. But at dawn a flutter of white flags broke out from the very summit of the rock, and Alexander sent a herald to tell the defenders that if they looked up, they would see he had found his winged men. Oxyartes' troops were so taken aback by this coup de théâtre that they capitulated on the spot, even though they outnumbered the mountaineers by something like a hundred to one, and Alexander's main forces still had no clear road to the summit. Once again psychological insight had paid off handsomely.³¹

But better still was to come. After the surrender of the Soghdian Rock Alexander let it be known that he took a personal interest in Oxyartes' daughter Roxane, whom all the Macedonians regarded as ‘the loveliest woman they had seen in Asia, with the one exception of Darius' wife’. Whether Alexander was genuinely in love with her is a debatable point, though several sources allege it; she only became pregnant in the last year of his life, after Hephaestion's death.^d In any case, the political advantages of such an alliance were very considerable indeed, for all parties concerned. So Alexander and Roxane were duly married: bride and bridegroom shared a ritual loaf, which Alexander sliced in two with his sword. This custom may have been Macedonian; it was certainly symbolic.

Romance has cast a distorting haze over the details of what was undoubtedly, as one French scholar says, ‘un habile acte de propagande’.³² Immediately afterwards, Alexander renewed his winter offensive — accompanied, now, by an influential father-in-law who, as the most powerful of his late enemies, could be relied upon to talk over-stubborn resistance leaders into submission. Oxyartes' presence proved a godsend at another even more inaccessible fortress, perched on a rock some 4,000 feet high, and no less than seven miles in circumference. After making vast efforts to bridge the ravine which led to this stronghold, the king sent Oxyartes to convince its commander that further resistance was useless, and that if he surrendered he would receive honourable treatment. The trick worked, and the bargain was duly kept. Alexander allowed this baron, Chorienes, to remain in command of the fortress; Chorienes, as a quid pro quo, provided Alexander with two months' rations for his entire army. (He could not resist pointing out that this was no more than one-tenth of the rock's reserves, the implication being that he had surrendered from choice rather than necessity.) Soghdiana's reduction was now almost complete.³³ The king detached a force under Craterus to deal with any remaining opposition, and took the main army back to Zariaspa, in preparation for his long-delayed invasion of India.

Alexander was under no illusions as to the nature of his hard-won victory. He had, at last, subdued the two great north-eastern satrapies; but unless he took very special precautions there would be serious trouble the moment he recrossed the Hindu Kush. By marrying Roxane — a gambit that would surely have won his father's approval — he had purchased himself a certain measure of local support, albeit (once again) at the risk of alienating the Macedonian old guard. What else could he do to strengthen his position? One answer was provided by the network of military garrisons he had built up. Some of these could be turned into permanent cities. At least six major foundations, all named Alexandria, are known from this area, including those of Margiane (Merv), Tarmita(Termez) on the Oxus, and Alexandria-the-Furthest, or Alexandria Eschate (Leninabad, or Khodjend). Their primary function was that of frontier defence; but several became important trading-centres, and they also served as a convenient dumping-ground for numerous^e Greek mercenaries, time-expired or of suspect loyalty.³⁴

In addition, ample drafts of reinforcements (16,000 infantry alone during 328) made it possible to allow for an extra-strong garrison. Amyntas, who had replaced Black Cleitus as the new satrap of Bactriana, was eventually given 10,000 foot and 3,500 horse, a vast figure by previous standards. But the most significant step which Alexander took at this time (and the one which most clearly reveals Philip's influence) was the recruitment of 30,000 native youths, to be taught the Greek language and given a thoroughMacedonian-style military training. All the boys were carefully selected for their strength, fitness and intelligence, and chosen from the best families in every province.

This scheme had two primary aims, one immediate, the other long-term. Eventually, these trainees would furnish replacements for Alexander's officer corps, now much depleted by casualties, sickness, and garrison or administrative appointments along the line of march. The king later referred to them as his ‘Successors’, by which, bien entendu, he meant successors to the Macedonian old guard. For the moment, however, while he marched on to India and the shores of Ocean, they would serve as admirable hostages.³⁵

It was, clearly, impossible to keep this innovation a secret, even had Alexander wished to do so. Doubtless he emphasized the role of the ‘Successors’ as hostages when discussing the matter with his staff officers; but the whole idea, from their viewpoint, was too uncomfortably reminiscent of the Royal Corps of Pages — and on a far larger scale. Yet another section of the king's original Macedonian command-structure, the ‘training-school for generals and governors’,³⁶ saw itself threatened by direct competition from barbarian upstarts. Indeed, it must have looked as though Alexander planned (for obvious reasons) to purge his royal apparat of all Macedonian influence whatsoever. The leaders of the old guard, the only group which continued; with xenophobic stubbornness, to oppose and ridicule the king's imperial pretensions, had one by one been eliminated. Persian nobles were now coming to occupy more and more important posts in Alexander's administration, and Persian court protocol had rendered him increasingly inaccessible to his titular peers.

Nevertheless, one major snag still remained. It was all very well to brigade Iranian and Bactrian troops with Macedonians or with Greek mercenaries; but where, except among the ranks of the Companions, the Guards Brigade, and the phalanx, were first-class battalion or divisional commanders to be found? Like it or not, Alexander had to put up with his officer corps; and it was these same officers whose blunt Macedonian irreverence kept pricking the bubble of his oriental self-aggrandizement.

Nothing better exemplified this fundamental division in court circles than the matter of proskynesis or obeisance. To Persians this was normal prescriptive etiquette, though the manner of greeting varied considerably according to the relative social rank of the parties involved. Equals received a kiss on the mouth, near-equal superiors on the cheek, whereas, in Herodotus' words, ‘a man of greatly inferior rank prostrates himself in profound reverence’. As we might expect, the one person entitled to proskynesis in its most extreme form, from all his subjects, whatever their rank, was the Great King. To the Greeks, however, proskynesis, if practised at all, was a gesture reserved exclusively for the adoration of a god. In any merely social context it struck them as comic, humiliating, and blasphemous — ‘the typical indication of oriental servility’.³⁷ Callias, after the battle of Marathon, was astonished to see a Persian prisoner greeting him in this way. Ambassadors to Persia found the act a source of constant embarrassment. One ingenious diplomat dropped his seal-ring at the crucial moment, and told himself he had merely gone down on hands and knees to pick it up. At Persepolis, the relief of a Mede doing obeisance to the Great King was deliberately defaced by Alexander's troops, a clear pointer to what they thought of the practice.

To make matters worse, since the Greeks viewed proskynesis as an act of religious adoration, they came to the erroneous conclusion that Persians, by thus prostrating themselves before the Great King, must be acknowledging his divinity. It is easy to picture the confusion and resentment which these conflicting beliefs must have aroused in Alexander's court. His Persian grandees prostrated themselves before him as a matter of course — just as they in turn expected proskynesis from their own inferiors. Alexander could not abolish the custom without having his own bona fides as Great King called in question. On the other hand, there were far too many incidents of Macedonian officers roaring with laughter or otherwise showing unmannerly contempt when the act of obeisance was performed. Polyperchon, in what sounds like a parody of some well-known Macedonian drill-sergeant, called out to one prostrate Persian: ‘Come on, don't just touch the floor with your chin! Bang it, man! Bang it!’³⁸

Obviously this kind of situation could not be allowed to continue. To have half the court performing proskynesis while the other half treated the whole thing as a huge joke was intolerable. But what was to be done? Alexander could hardly imprison or execute all his best officers. (He did gaol Polyperchon for a while, but soon released him again; Leonnatus, another offender, seems to have got off scot-free.) The only hope was, by slow degrees and careful stage-managing, to make the Macedonians accept this gesture as a mere polite formality. A great deal of quiet discussion went on behind the scenes, mostly between Alexander himself, his Greek propaganda section (including both Callisthenes and Anaxarchus), and various high-ranking Macedonians.

Echoes of these discussions have been preserved for us in the stylized debates set out by Arrian and Curtius.³⁹ Anaxarchus, backed by a group of sedulous propagandists,⁴⁰ and well aware that the main Macedonian objection to proskynesis was its implication of divinity, put forward a bold but eminently logical proposal (which doubtless had the king's own less-than-modest blessing). Why not, he asked, recognize the obvious fait accompli and treat Alexander as a god? He was bound to receive divine honours posthumously. ‘Would it not, therefore, be in every way better to offer him this tribute now, while he was alive, and not wait till he was dead and could get no good of it?’ His exploits had already outstripped those of Heracles and Dionysus, with whom his links were loose enough anyway. Would it not be preferable — a sop to nationalist vanity, this — to think of him as a purely Macedonian god?

But Anaxarchus' attempt to woo the Macedonians proved a failure: they obstinately refused the bait he offered them. What was more, they got support from a most unexpected source. Callisthenes, the court historian, came out with a flat rejection of Anaxarchus' proposals, on traditional religious grounds. Why? He had shown no qualms whatsoever about glorifying his employer as the son of Zeus or Ammon. He had spent the past six or seven years publicizing Alexander's exploits, not always in the most scrupulous or veracious fashion. He disliked the old guard, and had been quite ready to help run a smear-campaign against Parmenio (see above, pp. 175, 294). His whole previous career, despite modern apologias,⁴¹ reveals him as a pliant and conceited intellectual time-server.

What brought about his abrupt change of heart? He may, as he himself implied, have found the idea of deifying Alexander genuinely repugnant to his religious sensibilities, though for him (as for most Greek sophists) physical reality and hyperbolic literary rhetoric had, at best, a tenuous connection. It seems far more likely that he was reacting to a change in the balance of power at court. Hitherto, it seems clear, he had anticipated a Greek take-over once the old guard had been finally cleared out; he only embraced the cause of Macedonian conservatism, we may surmise, when it became clear that any future take-over would be not Greek, but Persian.

Whatever his personal motives, Callisthenes had judged the immediate situation with some percipience. In the last resort Alexander depended on his Macedonian commanders; and they were strongly against proskynesis if it involved treating the king as a god. Callisthenes had backed the winning side, and Alexander's project was, for the moment, abandoned. What the Greek historian failed to understand, however, was that by this untimely opposition he had dug his own grave. For Alexander, Hellenism was now virtually a dead letter; and Callisthenes' ideological faux pas after Cleitus' death (see above, p. 365) had hardly endeared him to the king, who expected his yes-men to say ‘yes’ not only loud and clear, but also in the appropriate form of words. Anaxarchus managed this side of things far better, and his stock now rose accordingly. The model for success in this field was, of course, Aristander, and we need not doubt that Anaxarchus had watched and carefully imitated his methods.

Since the deification scheme, thanks to Callisthenes' intransigence, had fallen through, Alexander — together with Hephaestion and one or two other close friends — now devised an alternative plan for introducing proskynesis on a more or less secular basis. It was arranged that at one particular banquet, when the loving-cup passed round, those who were privy to the scheme should drink, rise, prostrate themselves before the king, and receive in return — to take the sting out of any humiliation this act might imply — the royal kiss of equality. Then, it was hoped, other guests would feel constrained, if only out of politeness, to follow suit.

History has known worse diplomatic compromises; and in fact everything went off without a hitch until — once again — it came to Callisthenes' turn. After spending his whole life playing with words, Aristotle's nephew failed to realize that he was now playing with fire. He seems to have convinced himself that the pen was, literally, mightier than the sword; that Alexander, exploits and all, could be made or broken by his, Callisthenes', version of events — a common, but in this case fatal, delusion. He therefore drank, but did not prostrate himself. Alexander, deep in conversation with Hephaestion, failed to notice; but a nearby courtier quickly pointed out the omission. Alexander refused Callisthenes his salutation, whereupon the Greek said, loudly, as he turned away: ‘Well then, I'll leave the poorer by a kiss.’⁴² Once again he had killed Alexander'sproskynesis scheme stone dead. Hephaestion, to protect himself, was forced to claim that Callisthenes had accepted the idea, but afterwards went back on his word.

This little exhibition sealed Callisthenes' fate, though the philosopher himself seems to have been blissfully unaware of the fact. He realized, in a vague way, that he had alienated Alexander; but his overnight popularity with the Macedonians seems to have gone straight to his head. He began to see himself, head still in the philosophical clouds, as the defender of freedom against tyranny, upholding traditional Hellenism against decadent barbarian innovations.

Alexander did not relish having his carefully laid plans blown sky-high by this posturing literary ass. Already the propaganda section had begun a whispering campaign against Callisthenes, attacking his prim abstemiousness, and reporting a number of so-called ‘subversive’ remarks he had made (mostly anti-tyrannical clichés straight out of the rhetorical stockpot). He had also been heard to mutter, on leaving the king's presence: ‘Patroclus also is dead, who was better by far than you are.’ The king's main task, however, was to undermine Callisthenes' newly-won popularity with the old guard. In the event this proved absurdly easy. By playing on the innate conceit of the one and the ingrained prejudice of the other he achieved his end in a single evening.

After dinner Callisthenes was invited to display his oratorical skill by making an impromptu speech in praise of the Macedonians. This he did so successfully that he got a standing ovation, and was showered with garlands. Alexander now had Callisthenes where he wanted him, in a position from which sheer conceit would not let him back down. Quoting a provocative tag from the Bacchae (‘Give a wise man an honest brief to plead / and his eloquence is no remarkable achievement’),^f the king challenged Callisthenes to show his skill in eristics (see above, p. 61), by taking the other side of the argument and making an equally persuasive denunciation of the Macedonians, ‘that they may become even better by learning their faults’.

The philosopher, a born preacher and teacher, rose to this lure without further encouragement, and launched into a swingeing indictment of Macedonian mores and Greek factionalism, culminating with the proverbial line ‘But in a time of sedition the base man too is honoured’ — a clear gibe (or so his hearers assumed) at Philip. The old-guard barons, who could not distinguish between an exercise in eristics and a speech from the heart, were mortally offended, while Alexander (who could) made matters worse by saying that what Callisthenes had demonstrated was not eloquence so much as personal malice.⁴³

After that, it was simply a matter of finding some convenient plot in which the historian could be implicated: what had been good enough for Philotas was certainly good enough for a mere Greek civilian. An opportunity arose soon enough. One of the royal pages, with a personal grudge against Alexander, laid a plot to assassinate him. Four other pages joined this conspiracy. The attempt misfired, one of the pages talked, and all five were put under arrest. None of them, when interrogated, made any attempt to deny their guilt. In fact, with the courage of despair, their ringleader Hermolaus took this opportunity to deliver a scathing broadside against Alexander's arrogance, alcoholism, and dictatorially criminal behaviour. But none of them, equally, even under pressure, would implicate Callisthenes, whom the king had arraigned as an accessory the moment he heard of the plot.

Callisthenes, like any Greek philosopher, had inveighed against tyranny in general terms, but that was all. His indictment rested on the flimsiest circumstantial evidence. It was alleged against him that when Hermolaus complained about a flogging he had received from Alexander, Callisthenes told him to remember he was a man now. The prosecution interpreted this as incitement to murder; it sounds far more like a piece of Spartan stiff-upper-lip morality. Callisthenes was nevertheless found guilty. As Alexander himself remarked at the time, ‘often even what has been falsely believed has gained the place of truth’.⁴⁴ The five pages suffered immediate execution by stoning. Callisthenes — accounts vary — was either hanged, somewhat later, or else dragged around with the army in a prison-cage until he died of disease.

In a letter to Antipater, the king related the execution of the pages, but said that he himself would take personal responsibility for punishing ‘the sophist’ — as he contemptuously described Callisthenes — ‘together with those who sent him to me and those who now harbour in their cities men who conspire against my life’: words⁴⁵ which must have given both Aristotle and Antipater himself considerable pause for thought (see below pp. 459–60).

Alexander's ideas concerning India were, at this point, still sketchy in the extreme. To the Greeks of his day the land across the Indus was a shallow peninsula, bounded on the north by the Hindu Kush, and on the east by the great world-stream of Ocean, which ran (or so they believed) at no great distance beyond the Sind Desert. Of the main Indian sub-continent, let alone the vast Far Eastern land-mass from China to Malaysia, they knew nothing whatsoever. Aristotle, indeed, believed that Ocean was actually visible from the summit of the Hindu Kush. That fallacy, at least, Alexander had now disproved by personal observation; but in general his ignorance of Indian geography remained profound, and his whole eastern strategy rested on a false assumption. When enlightenment came, it was too late. The great Ganges plain, by its mere existence, shattered his dream more effectively than any army could have done.

Two centuries earlier, Cyrus the Great had created an ‘Indian province’ between Peshawar and the northern Punjab, which was subsequently alleged to pay the fantastic annual tribute of 360 talents — in gold-dust. About 517 Darius I commissioned a Greek,Scylax of Caryanda, to explore the Indian trade-routes. Scylax sailed down the Indus and reached home by way of the Persian Gulf, afterwards writing a book on his voyage. Herodotus and Ctesias (a Greek doctor at the Persian court during the latter part of the fifth century) both wrote in some detail about India. All three works would be easily available to Alexander and his staff; it is unlikely in the extreme that they did not familiarize themselves with such obviously relevant material. Not that they would have been much the wiser for doing so: by the fourth century Persia had abandoned her Indian satrapies, and even while ‘Hindush’ was part of the empire, it remained largely terra incognita, a region of myth and fable, like medieval Cathay. Herodotus believed that the Indians' gold was dug up by gigantic ants, larger than foxes; and with Ctesias we are in a fairy-tale world akin to that portrayed by Hieronymus Bosch.^{46 g}

Alexander had several cogent motives for invading this mysterious wonderland. As self-proclaimed Great King, he meant to recover Cyrus' lost satrapies. The existence of the Khyber pass meant that he had to protect Turkestan from possible eastern attack. His main impulse, however, seems to have been sheer curiosity, a pothos for the unknown, coupled with his determination to achieve world-dominion in the fullest sense. When he stood by the furthest shore of Ocean, that ambition would be fulfilled. As he had toldPharasmenes (see above, p. 359), India once conquered, ‘he would have Asia entirely in his hands’. Ever to strive to be best: no previous mortal ruler, not the great Cyrus, not even that semi-legendary figure Queen Semiramis, had ever invaded India with complete success. Hitherto such a triumph had fallen to gods alone. Dionysus had passed through the country with his Bacchic rout, carrying out a programme of conquest and civilization (he was supposed, inter alia, to have brought India the vine). Fifteen generations later, according to tradition, came Alexander's ancestor Heracles, who through his daughter sired a long line of Indian kings. Alexander was determined to outshine them both; perhaps even to win acceptance — here if anywhere — as a god himself.⁴⁷

Before setting forth, the king greatly enlarged and modified the structure of his original cavalry arm. Each of the eight Companion squadrons was now brigaded, separately, with Iranian cavalry units from the central satrapies to form a whole new independent division, known as a ‘hipparchy’. This policy of integration made for greater military efficiency; but it also struck one more blow at the old guard. If every Macedonian cavalry commander was operating with an international unit, his chances of forming any sort of junta were considerably reduced.

The final size of the army which recrossed the Hindu Kush in spring 327 is almost impossible to estimate with any degree of accuracy. Alexander had with him not more than 15,000 Macedonians, of whom 2,000 were cavalrymen. Total cavalry estimates, however, range between 6,500 and 15,000. The infantry figures are equally uncertain, varying from 20,000 to 120,000. Tarn's guess of 27–30,000 operational troops is almost certainly too conservative. On the other hand it has been suggested, with some plausibility, that 120,000 represents an overall total, including camp-followers, traders, servants, grooms, wives, mistresses, children, scientists, schoolmasters, clerks, cooks, muleteers, and all the other members of what had by now become ‘a mobile state and the administrative centre of the empire’.⁴⁸

This vast horde, we are asked to believe, streamed over the (?)Salang pass (12,000 ft) to Alexandria-of-the-Caucasus in a mere ten days: more probably the advance guard took this time to establish a forward base camp, leaving the rest to follow as and when they could. While he was still in Bactriana, Alexander had been joined by an Indian rajah, Sasigupta (Sisicottus), a deserter from Bessus who presumably had briefed him on the political situation beyond the Khyber. At all events, the king now sent envoys ahead toAmbhi (Omphis), the rajah of Taxila (Takshaçila) and ‘the Indians west of the Indus’, asking them to meet him, at their convenience, in the Kabul valley. Ambhi and several other minor princes duly arrived, with gifts, flattering speeches of welcome, and twenty-fiveelephants. It was the elephants which caught Alexander's eye, and eventually — under a certain amount of pressure, one suspects — the Indians agreed to make him a present of them. However, Ambhi had good reasons for keeping in with Alexander: he wanted theMacedonian army's support against his great rival Porus, a powerful monarch whose domains lay beyond the Jhelum (Hydaspes) River.

Alexander now divided his army. Hephaestion and Perdiccas, with rather more than half the cavalry, three battalions of the phalanx, and the baggage-train, were to proceed down the Khyber pass to the Indus. ‘Their instructions’, Arrian reports, ‘were to take over either by force or agreement all places on their march, and on reaching the Indus to make suitable preparation for crossing’ — probably a pontoon bridge of portable boats, such as (till very recent years) could still be seen in this area. Ambhi and his fellow-Indians would accompany them as guides. Meanwhile Alexander himself, with Craterus as his second-in-command, planned to take a mobile column up the Choaspes (Kunar) River and to march through the hill-country of Bajaur and Swat, reducing enemy strongholds en route, and giving cover to the main army's left flank. The two forces would finally rendezvous at the Indus.⁴⁹

Hephaestion's part in this operation, except for one month-long siege, proved straightforward and uneventful. Alexander, on the other hand, had a very rough passage indeed. The mountain terrain he passed through was difficult to negotiate, and most of the tribesmen he came up against showed themselves first-class fighters. During one engagement he got an arrow through his shoulder; and by the end of the campaign (which lasted from November 327 till about February 326) his condition can perhaps best be described as jittery. Most of the walled towns he attacked, far from obligingly opening their gates at the first onset, put up a violent resistance.^h By way of retaliation, when they finally fell he took to butchering the inhabitants wholesale: crossing his will, as always, brought violent retribution. At Massaga he treacherously massacred 7,000 Indian mercenaries together with their wives and children — and after guaranteeing them safe conduct — because they refused to join him against their fellow-countrymen. Plutarch said that this act ‘adhered like a stain to his military career’; modern Indian historians, understandably, echo Plutarch's verdict.⁵⁰

It is now, too, that we first find signs of the propaganda section promoting Alexander's divinity rather than his divine sonship. During the siege of Massaga the king received a slight wound in the ankle, and an Athenian bystander, Dioxippus, quoted Homer's line: ‘Ichor, such as floweth from the blessed gods’. Alexander at once snubbed his flatterer with the testy remark: ‘That's not ichor, that's blood.’ Enough, clearly, was enough.⁵¹ For a Greek to make such a comment had been a faux pas; the interesting thing from our point of view is that he thought of making it at all, or supposed it would prove welcome. The idea of Alexander's godhead must at least have been under serious discussion, if only as a device to impress the Indians. It is also significant that the two best-known episodes from this campaign (which probably means those given most official publicity) both had divine associations, one with Heracles, the other with Dionysus.

After dealing with the Aspasians (Açvakas) along the Kunar and Bajaur valleys, Alexander moved on north, into the rich forest-clad mountain region below Chitral. One night the column pitched camp in a wood. It was so bitterly cold that they gathered fuel and built a number of campfires. The flames spread, and engulfed what turned out to be cedar-wood coffins hanging among the trees. These went up like tinder. There was a great barking of dogs from beyond the wood, which revealed that the Macedonians were near a town — had, indeed, accidentally stumbled on its somewhat exotic cemetery.

This town surrendered after a short siege. It was called Nysa, a name intimately associated with Dionysus, and the god who founded it had (to judge from what the local inhabitants told Alexander) decidedly Dionysiac characteristics. Dionysus' presence was further confirmed for the Macedonians by a great mountain outside the town, where there grew not only vines but also ivy — a plant they had found nowhere else in the Far East. Alexander and his men climbed this mountain, crowned themselves with ivy-wreaths, and went (or so our sources allege) on a ten-day Bacchic spree, feasting and drinking and revelling in splendid style. ‘Hence,’ says Curtius, ‘the mountain heights and valleys rang with the shouts of so many thousands, as they invoked the god who resided over that grove.’

It used to be thought that this whole episode was pure fantasy, put out as propaganda either by Alexander himself, or else (in the view of more puritanical scholars) by his enemies. Yet the mountains south of Chitral — abounding in wild game, lush with vines and ivy, walnut and plane, mulberry and apricot — exactly match the description given by our ancient sources. Furthermore, they are still inhabited by a unique and isolated people known as the Kalash Kafirs, who make wine (a skill known to no other tribe in the area), sacrifice goats for religious purposes — and expose their dead in wooden coffins hung among the trees.⁵² As so often, it is the most improbable anecdote which turns out to rest on a bedrock of sober fact.

The second episode was Alexander's remarkable capture of the fortress which Arrian calls Aornus: perhaps a Greek attempt at Sanskrit avarana, ‘a place of refuge’.⁵³ This fortress stood on the great massif known as Pir-Sar, in a bend of the Indus about seventy-five miles north of Attock, and over 5,000 feet above the river. Arrian gives its circumference as roughly twenty-five miles. It was well provided with water, and had only one ascent, which was steep and difficult. Local legend told how a god (whom the Macedonians identified with Heracles) had tried, unsuccessfully, to capture this inaccessible stronghold. Arrian's comment — perceptive if cynical — is that ‘people like to make difficulties look much more difficult than they really are, and to this end start a legend about Heracles' failure to overcome them’. Alexander, of course, at once conceived a violent desire (pothos) to capture Aornus himself; as we might predict, ‘the story about Heracles was not the least of his incentives’.

After making contact with Hephaestion (their rendezvous-point was to be at Ohind, some sixteen miles upstream from Attock) he at once set off to tackle this officially ultra-Herculean labour. He brought to his task what Sir Aurel Stein adjudged ‘such combined energy, skill and boldness as would be sought rather in a divine hero of legend than in a mortal leader of men’.⁵⁴ If people were willing to deify Alexander, this stemmed in large part from his desire, and ability, to perform more than godlike feats — which he meant, moreover, as a deliberate challenge to divine precedent. At Aornus, in order to bring his catapults and artillery within range (hauling them up the 8,721 feet of the Una-Sar massif was a remarkable enough achievement in itself) he found himself obliged to run a great wooden crib-work causeway across the ravine between Una-Sar and a small hill dominating Pir-Sar. This extraordinary structure must have somewhat resembled an early American railroad trestle bridge. When the causeway was built, and Alexander'sartillery in place, the defenders fled. With some difficulty a group of Macedonians reached the summit, and thus ‘Alexander was left in possession of the rock which had baffled Heracles himself’.⁵⁵ If the king's propagandists gave him good publicity, at least they had something out of the ordinary to publicize.

Leaving Sasigupta as garrison commander of Aornus, Alexander carried out a quick reconnaissance of the surrounding countryside. His patrols were ordered to interrogate the natives and, ‘in particular, to get what information they could about elephants, as this interested him more than anything’. Most of the Indians had fled across the river. Alexander, whose retinue already included a group of hunters and mahouts, rounded up thirteen abandoned elephants (two others fell over a cliff) and attached them to his own column. He then built rafts and shipped the entire force, elephants included, downstream to Ohind. His engineers had completed the bridge⁵⁶ some while before — a notable feat, since even in the dry season the Indus was seldom less than a mile across, and generally much wider — while Hephaestion had also collected a number of boats, including two thirty-oar galleys.

Various rich presents, ranging from bar silver to sacrificial sheep, had arrived from Ambhi, escorted by a crack native cavalry regiment seven hundred strong. The rajah also promised to surrender his capital, Taxila, the greatest city between the Indus and theJhelum, and a former Persian satrapal seat. This was a rare prize indeed. Taxila's reputation in antiquity as a wealthy centre of trade and the arts has been confirmed by modern excavation: its ruins extend over some twelve square miles, and the countryside round it, between Attock and Rawalpindi, has just that spaciousness and fertility which Strabo claimed for it.

It was now March (326). Alexander gave his troops a month's rest, ending with athletic contests and a cavalry tattoo. Then, after lavish sacrifices — and correspondingly favourable omens — the entire army crossed the Indus, and set out towards Taxila. Ambhi came out to welcome them, at the head of his own forces, in full battle-array and parading an impressive number of gaily caparisoned war-elephants. As they advanced across the plain they must have presented a most striking spectacle. Alexander, however, still tense and nervous after his gruelling Swat campaign, at once assumed that this was a dangerous trap. All Ambhi's gifts and diplomacy, he thought, had been aimed at lulling the Macedonians into a sense of false security. Now this perfidious Indian meant to massacre them while they were off their guard. Trumpets blared out, orders were barked down the line, and the Macedonians hurriedly moved into battle-order.

That the king could have entertained this nonsensical idea for one moment tells us a lot about his state of mind at the time. The rajah's army was five miles distant, and coming on in full view; it is hard to see how he could have hoped to surprise anyone. In fact, the moment Ambhi saw ‘the excited activity of the Macedonians’ and guessed its cause he galloped ahead, alone except for a small cavalry escort, and formally submitted his person and army to Alexander.⁵⁷ The king, much relieved, thereupon reinstated him, with full sovereign rights, as rajah of Taxila. For the next three days Ambhi entertained the Macedonians royally, adding further lavish gifts to those he had already sent.

But Alexander, as usual, had the last word. No one must outshine him, whether in warfare or munificence. He returned all Ambhi's presents, adding on his own account thirty horses, a collection of rich Persian robes, some gold and silver vessels, and no less than 1,000 talents in cash from the military chest.⁵⁸ Over dinner the following night Meleager, one of his battalion commanders,⁵⁹ congratulated the king, with sour irony, on having at last found a man worth that amount, even if it had meant coming all the way to India. Meleager was a trusted Companion, and drunk; Alexander — very much on his guard after the Cleitus affair — merely remarked, with unwonted restraint, that jealous men were their own worst enemies. The comment, nevertheless, carried a sting in its tail: Meleager never got another promotion while Alexander lived.

The king's generosity to Ambhi had one obvious and highly practical motive. By now his intelligence service must have provided a preliminary report on the size and strength of enemy forces beyond the Jhelum. It was all too clear that Porus, the warrior-king whose territories extended from Gujrat to the Punjab, and Abisares, the dissident rajah of Kashmir, could between them provide a formidable opposition to Alexander's further advance. Ambhi of Taxila might be their traditional enemy; but in the circumstances they were more than likely to hold out a tempting olive-branch in his direction. Alexander had to ensure that if this happened, Ambhi would stand firm. A combination of all three local kings against the Macedonians could well prove, if not fatal, at the very least a most serious hazard.

Hence, of course, the king's dazzling generosity (a point which should have been obvious to any quickwitted staff officer: if Meleager never reached field rank this was, in a sense, just retribution for plain stupidity). Nor did Alexander's munificence imply uncritical trust. Despite all the superficial honours and rewards heaped on Ambhi — including the right to assume the royal diadem — Alexander nevertheless appointed a Macedonian as military governor of Taxila, with a strong garrison at his disposal. There was no point in taking needless chances. On the other hand Alexander himself delayed at Taxila for between two and three months, which in one respect at least was a near-fatal mistake: it meant that by the time he embarked on the next stage of his expedition, in early June, the monsoon rains would already have begun. Even so, if he could reach some diplomatic accommodation with Abisares and Porus, thus avoiding another major campaign, it would have been time well spent.

Early in April came ambassadors from Abisares, with gifts and promises of submission. These Alexander accepted: their sincerity was highly questionable, but at least they made good propaganda. The rajah's real object, in all likelihood, was to insure himself against an immediate attack while he mobilized his army. Nevertheless, the arrival of Abisares' mission prompted Alexander to send his own envoys to Porus, on whom the timing of such a gesture would not be lost. The Paurava monarch was requested to meet Alexander at the Jhelum (which formed his frontier) and to pay tribute in token of vassalage.

The reply to this proposal was exactly what Alexander had feared and expected. Porus would indeed, he said, meet Alexander at the Jhelum — but in full military strength, and ready to do battle for his kingdom. Intelligence reports put his muster at 3–4,000 cavalry and up to 50,000 infantry. together with some 200 elephants and 300 war-chariots.⁶⁰ Reinforcements were expected from Abisares, and Indian troops had already begun to move up along the eastern bank of the river. Alexander, it was clear, could not afford to waste time. His first urgent need was for a transport flotilla. Taxila lay miles from the nearest navigable river, and in any case building ships from scratch would take too long. Coenus was therefore sent back to the Indus, with orders to dismantle Alexander'spontoon-bridge, cut up the boats into sections, and load them on to ox-carts. They would then be carried overland for reassembly by the Jhelum.⁶¹

While Coenus was thus occupied, Alexander made his final military and administrative arrangements. Five thousand Indian troops were now drafted into the infantry, and the king received thirty more elephants, captured with the rebel satrap of Arachosia. About the beginning of June the monsoon broke; and a few days later Alexander led his army southward to meet Porus, through steaming, torrential rains that continued almost without a break for over two months. His route lay across the Salt Range, by way ofChakwal and Ara; when he was through the Nandana pass, he turned south-west, and reached the Jhelum near Haranpur, having marched about 110 miles since leaving Taxila, in an estimated two days.⁶² Even if this time applied only to his advance guard, its achievement under monsoon conditions was a quite extraordinary feat.

Alexander knew, from intelligence reports on the terrain ahead, that Haranpur was one of the few points at which he could hope to ford the Jhelum under monsoon conditions. (This is confirmed by its choice as the site of a modern railway-bridge.) Porus, clearly, had been thinking along very similar lines. When Alexander reached the Haranpur ford, he found the opposite bank held in strength by a large force that included archers and chariots. Most alarming of all — especially to the horses — were Porus' elephants. A squadron of these great beasts, eighty-five strong, kept guard over the approaches, stamping and trumpeting as they moved ponderously to and fro. The river itself, swollen by monsoon rains, came roaring past in muddy spate, a good half-mile wide. There was no sign of the promised crossing-point.⁶³

Even if it were physically possible, to negotiate the river against such mass opposition would be suicidal: Alexander's cavalry horses would go mad with fright if brought anywhere near the elephants.⁶⁴ Further reconnaissance revealed that Porus had put strong guard-detachments at every other nearby point where a crossing could be made. It looked very much like stalemate, and Alexander deliberately encouraged this impression by having endless wagonloads of grain and other supplies brought to his camp, in full sight of the enemy. This would, with luck, convince Porus that his opponent meant — as he publicly declared — to sweat it out on the Jhelum until the rains were over and the river became fordable once more.

At the same time Macedonian troop activities continued to suggest the possibility of an immediate attack. Cavalry detachments rode from one outpost to another. Battalions of the phalanx marched and counter-marched along the river-bank, squelching dismally through thick red mud. Boats and assault-craft sailed up and down, occasionally landing raiders on one of the many small islands near Haranpur which might serve Alexander as a bridgehead.⁶⁵ But after a while, when no attack materialized, Porus began to pay less attention to all these distracting manoeuvres — which was, of course, just what Alexander had intended. Meanwhile Macedonian cavalry patrols were discreetly exploring the higher reaches of the Jhelum, as far east as Jalalpur. It was here, over seventeen miles upstream from their base-camp, that they found what Alexander wanted: a large, wooded island (Admana), with only a narrow channel flowing past either side of it, and a deep nullah on the near bank where troops and assault craft could be conveniently hidden.⁶⁶

Since the king had decided to force the Jhelum under cover of darkness, he spent much time and ingenuity confusing Porus as to his real intentions. Every night fires would be lit over a wide area, with plenty of noise and bustle. Every night Ptolemy would take a large cavalry force ‘up and down the bank of the river, making as much noise as possible — shots, war-cries, and every sort of clatter and shindy which might be supposed to precede an attempted crossing’.⁶⁷ At first Porus took these demonstrations very seriously. He followed every sound and movement on the opposite bank, bringing up his elephants at the first alarm, while his cavalry patrolled the river wherever a landing seemed imminent. After a while, however, when he found that nothing came of all the noise and clatter, he relaxed his vigilance. This was not merely a case of familiarity breeding contempt. Endless false alarms in the middle of the night, followed by chaotic sorties carried out under lashing monsoon rain, must have wrought havoc with the Indian troops' morale. Porus probably decided that this was Alexander's real aim. At all events, he stopped all nocturnal troop-movements, relying solely on his chain of look-out posts up and down the river.

Alexander now learnt that Abisares, the rajah of Kashmir, was on his way south at last — was, indeed, no more than fifty miles off — with ‘an army little smaller than that of Porus’.⁶⁸ To let them join forces was out of the question. Porus, then, must be dealt with in the next forty-eight hours. Alexander's flotilla had already been transported piecemeal to Jalalpur and reassembled in the Kandar Kas nullah. The king now held an emergency staff conference and outlined his plan for the assault. The element of secrecy would only work up to a point. Alexander might deceive Porus as to where and when he intended crossing the river; but once the actual crossing had begun, Porus' scouts would very soon observe and report it.^{69 i} Any assault-plan, then, must discount the chance of a surprise attack. The only way to keep Porus guessing was by a division of forces which left him uncertain, until the very last moment, where the main blow would fall.

Alexander made his dispositions accordingly. The larger part of the army, together with the baggage-train and the non-combatants, was to remain at base-camp by the Haranpur ford, under Craterus' command. Preparations for crossing the river were to be carried out quite openly. The king's pavilion was to be pitched in a conspicuous position near the bank, and a certain Macedonian officer, a near-double of Alexander's, was to appear wearing his royal cloak, ‘in order to give the impression the king himself was encamped on that part of the bank’.⁷⁰ In actual fact the king, together with the main assault group (or ‘turning force’, as Fuller calls it), would already be on his way to Jalalpur. This force, numbering 5,000 horse and at least 10,000 foot, would cross the river before dawn, and advance down the southern bank on Porus' position. A second group — three battalions of the phalanx plus the mercenary cavalry and infantry — was to take up a position between Haranpur and Admana Island, opposite the main fords, and only cross when battle had been joined.⁷¹ Craterus' holding force, meanwhile, was not to attempt a crossing ‘until Porus had moved from his position to attack Alexander’ — and only then provided no elephants were left behind to defend the ford, ‘or until he was sure that Porus was in retreat and the Greeks victorious’.⁷²

This was a brilliant plan, and the dilemma in which it placed Porus has become something of a classic for military historians.⁷³ Whichever way he moved, he left himself open to attack from the rear, either by Alexander or by Craterus. His one possible defence move was to detach a strong but limited force that could destroy Alexander's assault-group before it established a bridgehead, thus still leaving Porus himself in full control at Haranpur. To counter such a gambit Alexander built up his ‘turning force’ from the crack divisions of the Macedonian army: the Royal Squadron of the Companions, three hipparchies, or cavalry brigades, under Hephaestion, Perdiccas and Demetrius; the Guards Brigade, two phalanx battalions (commanded by 393">Coenus and Cleitus the White), the archers and Agrianians, cavalry units from Bactriana and Turkestan, and a special force of Scythian horse-archers.

This whole body, some 15–16,000 strong, he brought to the crossing-point, and embarked on boats and rafts, by about 3 a.m. on the morning of the assault. Scholars sometimes take such operations for granted — a great mistake. One of the crucial factors behind Alexander's continuous and unbroken success was the unparalleled efficiency of his supply and transport commands. When we reflect that in 1415 it took Henry V three days to disembark 8–10,000 men at Harfleur, and that to ferry 2,000 horse and 3,000 foot across the English Channel William of Normandy needed some 350 boats, we can the better appreciate Alexander's achievement at the Jhelum.⁷⁴ He had to get this large force out of camp in broad daylight, without their departure being noticed by Porus' scouts; march them over seventeen miles (which in monsoon conditions can hardly have taken less than six hours); reassemble and launch enough vessels to convey them across the river; and embark the entire assault-group, horses included, well before dawn.

To complicate matters further, the crucial part of the operation was carried out not only in darkness, but during a particularly violent electric storm. In one way this storm came as a godsend. The steady roar of torrential rain, interspersed with deafening thunder-claps (Alexander lost several men struck by lightning) completely masked the noise of the embarkation.⁷⁵ When dawn broke, and the wind and rain had become less violent, the flotilla was already sailing down the northern channel, still hidden from Porus' scouts by the wooded mass of Admana Island. But the moment they passed beyond its western tip, the alarm was given, and messengers rode off at full speed to warn Porus.⁷⁶

It was now that Alexander made a miscalculation which could have cost him the battle. When he was clear of Admana Island he put in to shore and disembarked all his forces, cavalry leading. But, as he presently found, what he had taken for the river-bank was in fact another long, narrow island. Either his intelligence was badly at fault, or else the storm during the night had created a fresh channel. There was no time to re-embark; their only hope lay in finding a ford. At first the task seemed hopeless. It was not a wide channel, but the Jhelum was roaring down in spate, over a muddy, shifting bed that gave no sure foothold. Finally they managed to struggle ashore, the infantry — weighed down by their armour — fighting against a breast-high torrent, the horses with little more than their heads visible. Sodden and exhausted, the assault group was at last ready for its advance — cavalry massed on the right, infantry on the left, with a fringe of light-armed troops to cover their flank, and a screen of horse-archers thrown out in front.⁷⁷

To get such a force ashore must have taken several hours, at the very least, by which time Porus would have known all about it. Was Alexander's move a feint, or the prelude to a major attack? At this point no one could tell. Craterus' camp was a mass of activity: whichever way Porus moved, he would inevitably find himself in trouble. The Indian rajah, however, was no mean strategist himself. Without hesitation he detached a force of 2,000 cavalry and 120 chariots, under his own son, to ride east with all speed and, if possible, destroy Alexander's assault-group before it was clear of the river. In the circumstances this was his only feasible move; unfortunately he had made it too late.⁷⁸ His son, moreover, was heavily outnumbered, and in the event proved no match for the best cavalry units in the whole Macedonian army.⁷⁹ After a brief skirmish — during which Bucephalas received the wound from which he subsequently died — the Indians fled, leaving four hundred dead behind, including young Porus himself.⁸⁰ The chariots bogged down in thick mud and had to be abandoned. It was at this point, in all likelihood, that the reserve battalions, under Meleager, Attalus and Gorgias, crossed by the main fords and joined Alexander's advance. The king was pressing on ahead with the cavalry, leaving the infantry to follow at their own speed. By now there was a gap of over two miles between them.

When the news of his son's defeat reached Porus,⁸¹ the rajah had a brief moment of indecision. Either as a feint, or because they took the minor engagement across the river for a full-scale victory, Craterus' men were making vigorous preparations to force the Haranpur crossing. Finally, however, Porus decided correctly that his showdown must be with Alexander. He left a holding force, with elephants, to keep Craterus in play,⁸² and marched the rest of his army upstream, ready for battle. At this point — allowing for detachments and losses — he probably had at his disposal 20,000 infantry, 2,000 horse, 130 elephants and 180 war-chariots. He picked his ground carefully: a level sandy plain, free from mud, where elephants and cavalry would have ample room to manoeuvre.^j

Porus drew up his infantry battalions on a wide central front, stationing an elephant every hundred feet or so to strengthen them. (Our ancient sources say that this produced the appearance of a castle, with the elephants as towers and the infantry as curtain-walls.) On either wing he placed, first, a flanking body of infantry, and then his cavalry, with a squadron of chariots masking them.⁸³ The overall Indian battle-line must have been nearer four miles than three in length, of which the infantry accounted for at least two-thirds. This formation, as Burn correctly points out,⁸⁴ lacked flexibility, a weakness Alexander was never slow to exploit. While he was waiting for the infantry to catch up with him, he carried out a detailed reconnaissance of Porus' dispositions, carefully keeping his own forces out of sight behind trees and broken ground. A frontal attack was impossible: Alexander could not risk having the horses panic when brought up against elephants. But if the phalanx was to deal with Porus' centre, his Indian cavalry had to be knocked out first; otherwise the Macedonians could be outflanked and ridden down while pressing home their attack.⁸⁵

To defeat Porus' cavalry, Alexander adopted a highly ingenious stratagem. If he launched a cavalry attack of his own against the Indian left wing, with numbers just sufficiently less than Porus' own total mounted force to convince the rajah that an all-out retaliation would annihilate them, then Porus might well, as they say, take a swinger — which in this case would mean shifting his right-wing cavalry across to the left in the hope of achieving total victory. The success of such a scheme depended on Alexander keeping two full cavalry divisions hidden from the enemy until Porus had committed his own forces irrevocably to a left-flank engagement. The commander of these divisions, Coenus, received very specific instructions.⁸⁶ He was to circle Porus' right wing, still out of sight, and wait until battle was joined on the opposing flank. If Porus transferred his right-wing cavalry to feed this engagement, Coenus was to charge across behind the enemy lines,⁸⁷ and take them in the rear. Otherwise he would engage them normally. Thephalanx battalions and the Guards Brigade, in similar fashion, had orders ‘not to engage until it was evident that the Indians, both horse and foot, had been thrown into confusion by the Macedonian cavalry’.⁸⁸

His dispositions thus made, Alexander attacked at once. The mounted archers, a thousand strong, were launched against the Indian left, and knocked out almost all Porus' chariots — a very useful softening-up process.⁸⁹ Then the king charged, at the head of his massed cavalry divisions.⁹⁰ Porus did just what Alexander had hoped he would. From the howdah on top of his great war-elephant (an excellent command-post) the rajah made a lightning assessment of Macedonian cavalry strength, and brought across his own right-wing squadrons to deliver the coup de grâce. Coenus, with his two fresh divisions, at once broke cover and rode in pursuit. The Indians engaged against Alexander suddenly found themselves forced to fight a rearguard action against Coenus as well.⁹¹ ‘This, of course,’ says Arrian, ‘was disastrous not only to the effectiveness of the Indians' dispositions, but to their whole plan of battle.’

Macedonians   1 Horse-Archers Companion Cavalry   2 Hephaestion   3 Perdiccas   4 Coenus   5 Demetrius   6 Hypaspists-Seleucus Phalanx   7 Antigenes   8 Cleitus   9 Meleager 10 Attalus 11 Gorgias 12 Agrianians, Archers, and Javelin-men

Indians a Elephants b Infantry c Flanking Infantry d Left-wing Cavalry e Right-wing Cavalry f Qiariots

Alexander pressed home his charge just as they were facing about, and the Indians fell back on the protection of the elephants. By now, all danger removed from their flanks, the Macedonian heavy infantry, strongly reinforced with archers and javelin-men, were advancing on Porus' centre. They had one stroke of luck. The Indian archers used a long heavy bow: the leaf-headed clothyard shaft it discharged was capable — as Alexander later found to his cost — of great penetration at medium range. But they usually rested the foot of this bow on the ground when drawing it, and the earth had become so slippery that their effective fire-power was seriously reduced.⁹² The real nightmare facing the phalanx, though — one which haunted them for the rest of their days — was that line of maddened, trumpeting, ferocious elephants. Alexander had worked out a technique for dealing with these beasts: encircle them, let the archers pick off their mahouts, and then discharge volleys of spears and javelins into the most vulnerable parts of their anatomy, while infantrymen slashed through their trunks with Persian scimitars, or chopped at their feet with axes.

The elephants had several very effective tricks of their own. Some Macedonian soldiers they stamped underfoot, crushing them to a bloody pulp, armour and all. Others they caught up with their trunks and dashed to the ground. Others, again, found themselves impaled on the great beasts' tusks. Quite apart from the elephants, they were also engaged in a desperate struggle with the Indian infantry (though here the long Macedonian sarissa once more proved its worth). To preserve any sort of military discipline in that hell of mud and blood and driving rain, with such terrible carnage going on all around, was in itself a most remarkable achievement — and one which made victory possible. An Indian cavalry counter-attack failed. As Porus' squadrons were pressed back, the elephants, hemmed in a narrowing space, began to trample their own side: the cavalry suffered particularly heavy losses because of them.⁹³

Porus led one last elephant-charge in person. It was not a success. By now the Macedonians were learning how to deal with these lumbering creatures at least risk to themselves, dodging them like so many huge bulls, relentlessly slashing and shooting at them and their riders. Presently the elephants decided they had had enough. They ‘began to back away, slowly, like ships going astern, and with nothing worse than trumpetings’.⁹⁴ At this Alexander drew his cavalry ring tighter round Porus' battered divisions, and signalled the Guards Brigade and the phalanx ‘to lock shields and move up in a solid mass’.⁹⁵ This final stage of the battle was pure butchery, but the Macedonians, after so traumatic an experience, were in no mood to give quarter. Indian casualties are variously estimated at 12,000 or more and 23,000 (of which 3,000 were mounted troops). Some managed to break through Alexander's cavalry — only to be mopped up by Craterus, who had crossed the river and now continued the pursuit with his fresh units.⁹⁶ Losses among Porus' commanders and officer corps were particularly heavy: both his sons were killed.

Porus himself fought to the bitter end. Then, when he saw further resistance was hopeless, he slowly rode off the field on his great elephant, weak from loss of blood (a javelin had pierced him through the right shoulder). Alexander, ‘anxious to save the life of this great and gallant soldier’, sent Ambhi after him with an immediate offer of terms. This was an appalling diplomatic blunder. Porus regarded Ambhi as a traitor and turncoat; when he approached, the wounded rajah made a valiant attempt to pig-stick him with his lance. Eventually, however, a more suitable messenger reached Porus, who now dismounted from his elephant, weak and thirsty, and was brought to Alexander.

No one could better Arrian's description⁹⁷ of that momentous meeting (certainly not our other sources,⁹⁸ which bury it under the usual dreary rhetorical floss): ‘When they met, Alexander reined in his horse, and looked at his adversary with admiration. He was a magnificent figure of a man, over seven feet high and of great personal beauty; his bearing had lost none of its pride; his air was of one brave man meeting another, of a king in the presence of a king, with whom he had fought honourably for his kingdom.’ When Alexander asked him how he wished to be treated, the dignified Paurava warrior said: ‘Like a king.’ Alexander pressed him further. Was there nothing else he wanted for himself? He had only to ask. ‘Everything,’ Porus told his captor, ‘is contained in that one request.’

The anecdote — surely true in substance — forms a fitting epilogue to Alexander's last major battle, and one which many students regard as his greatest. Gaugamela was fought against heavier odds, and far more hung on its outcome. But at the Jhelum Alexander displayed a flexible resourcefulness of strategy which he never equalled on any other occasion, from his brilliant initial dispositions to the final ruse by which he outmanoeuvred Porus' cavalry. In addition, he had to cope with appalling weather, and — worst of all — with the Indian war-elephants. In the circumstances we need not wonder that he played down his undoubtedly heavy losses. The highest casualty-figures recorded are 280 cavalry and something over 700 infantry; but close scrutiny of the evidence suggests that an overall figure of 4,000 might well come nearer the truth,⁹⁹ with especially heavy losses among the battalions of the phalanx.

This frightful struggle left its mark on Alexander's men. Their nerve, if not broken, had been severely shaken, and nothing Alexander said or did would ever reconcile them to facing elephants in battle again.¹⁰⁰ They had come very near the end of their endurance, and perhaps it was the monsoon almost as much as the elephants which finally undid them. Only those with personal experience of the rainy season in India or Burma can fully appreciate its effects on equipment, terrain, and morale. When every piece of metal (be it sword or gun) rusts in five or six hours after polishing; when canvas, leather and fabric become patched with damp green mould, and rot in a matter of weeks; when every soldier in uniform suffers agonies from foot-rot and prickly heat (not to mention the likelihood of contracting malaria or amoebic dysentery); when the ground is a steaming morass, and the air whines like a band-saw with mosquitoes — then, in Alexander's day or Wingate's, there is mutinous talk in camp, and a damp collective cafard descends on old sweats yearning for the long voyage home.¹⁰¹

After the battle, says Diodorus, ‘the Macedonian army rested for thirty days in the midst of a vast plenty of provisions’. Even so, some of them got less rest than others. During this month the king found time to make a quick razzia through the territories of any neighbouring Indian tribes who had not yet submitted. These new conquests were turned over to Porus, who had been reinstated in his own kingdom with every mark of honour.¹⁰² Indeed, Alexander's chivalrous treatment of Porus led the Indians to regard him as a Dharmavijayi, or ‘conqueror through righteousness’¹⁰³ — a concept which still casts its spell over some modern historians. While the king undoubtedly felt strong and genuine admiration for his defeated opponent, he also saw him as a most useful ally, a source of first-class recruits, and the ideal counterweight to Ambhi of Taxila. Though Alexander staged a public reconciliation between the two rajahs, he meant each of them to keep a watchful eye on the other.

Bucephalas had died at last, of old age and wounds: Alexander gave his faithful charger a state funeral, leading the procession himself. One of the two new cities he founded, on the actual site of the battle, was named Bucephala, as a memorial tribute (Alexander called another settlement Perita, after his favourite dog). The second, Nicaea (‘Victoria’) — probably modern Jalalpur — went up at the point where he had made his night-crossing. (Both were mud-brick settlements, quickly completed: coolie labour,Alexander found, was dirt-cheap and inexhaustible.) Thus while Porus was spared the indignity of a resident Macedonian satrap, it would nevertheless be possible, through these military garrison-towns, to keep some kind of check on the rajah's activities.

Such fears proved groundless. Porus, an honourable man, repaid Alexander's confidence with unswerving loyalty during the king's lifetime — which was more than could be said for most of the conquered Indian tribes, especially in Bajaur and Swat, whereAlexander now had to put down a serious rising.¹⁰⁴ His great victory at the Jhelum, however, had considerable effect on such potentates as Abisares — who, wisely, arrived too late for the battle. The rajah of Kashmir now sent his brother on an embassy to Alexander, with treasure and elephants (the king's favourite gifts), offering anything short of personal submission — ‘for he would not live without royal power, nor reign as a captive.’ The king replied, briefly, that if Abisares did not come to him, then he would come to Abisares, and with an army behind him.¹⁰⁵

A four-horse chariot statue-group of Alexander was erected to mark the battlefield, and the king made lavish donations, in gold, to his officers and men in recognition of their valour at the Jhelum. But this, for him, was no more than the prelude to yet another chapter of conquest and exploration. ‘He intended,’ says Diodorus, ‘to reach the borders of India and to subdue all of its inhabitants, and then to sail downstream to the Ocean.’ Arrian presents a substantially similar view.¹⁰⁶ Here, I submit, we have an accurate summing-up of his aims immediately after the victory over Porus. What is more, this urge to mop up the remaining regions of India makes strategical sense only if Alexander was, at the time, still convinced that there was no great distance between his advancing forces and the shores of Ocean. In other words, the existence of the Ganges was still unknown to him while he was planning his overall eastern campaign,¹⁰⁷ and the fleet being made ready by Craterus had been ordered with a view to finding Ocean shortly after crossing the River Hyphasis (Beas).

Alexander and his staff, as we have seen, took their fundamental notions on the geography of India from Aristotle. First-hand observation (above, p. 379 with n. 46) had already disproved some of Aristotle's basic facts. However, from a study of theMeteorologica Alexander might well still infer that the Eastern Ocean lay only a short way beyond the Punjab.¹⁰⁸ When, exactly, was this erroneous notion dispelled? By now Alexander must have been well aware, through long discussions with Ambhi, Porus, and other Indian dignitaries, that Greek beliefs concerning the eastern stream of Ocean (see above, p. 379) were at complete variance with local information on the subject. This does not necessarily mean that he rejected Aristotle's guidance at once: axioms are often cherished long after reason would counsel their abandonment. Yet though Alexander's notions of world geography might be vague, he never failed to amass accurate intelligence about the regions through which he planned to pass, and undoubtedly did so on this occasion. It has been argued that he ‘continued eastward from the Hydaspes [Jhelum] waiting for his accumulating geographical intelligence to clarify the matter’,¹⁰⁹ and up to a point this may be true; but the suggestion of our ancient sources, that his first intuition of the truth only came when his troops were on the verge of mutiny before reaching the Beas (see below, p. 407), is flatly incredible.

Such lack of immediate intelligence would have implied inefficiency of a sort that Alexander never tolerated for one moment. What seems far more likely is that by now he knew the truth very well — had, indeed, suspected it for some time — but kept it a close secret for fear of the effect it might have on his troops' already low morale. Alexander was not a man to be deterred by mere geographical considerations. If he could lure the army forward one river at a time, with Ocean a glittering goal always just over the next hill, he might yet attain his end. Such a confidence-trick depended entirely on his knowing more than the army about local conditions, and this he usually did.^k But at the Beas there were no more hills to deceive his men, only a vast expanse of plain stretching away eastward, and beyond that — visible on a fine day from Gurdaspur, where Alexander probably reached the river — the great rampart of the Western Himalayas.¹¹⁰ No more potent incitement to mutiny could well be imagined. A diplomatic lie had been nailed, once and for all, by the brute facts of geography.

This, however, remained an unforeseeable hazard during Alexander's immediate advance from the Jhelum. He meant to rely, for as long as he could, on the substantial gap between his own intelligence and the hearsay information which filtered through to the troops. With this in mind, he had the propaganda section minimize the scope and extent of his coming campaign. He also put out a rumour (which he himself could not have believed for one moment) that the Jhelum and the Chenab in some mysterious way formed the headwaters of the Nile, because crocodiles had been seen in them, and ‘Egyptian’ beans grew along their banks.¹¹¹

Why did he do this? The answer seems clear enough. Alexander knew his Herodotus; he may even have possessed a copy of Scylax's Periplus. His next project after reducing India was to explore the coasts of Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Ample supplies of fir, pine, cedar and other shipbuilding timber were available in the nearby mountains: Craterus had already been set to work on the construction of a vast fleet.¹¹² So much was public knowledge. But to spell out for his troops just how long and hazardous a voyage they would be undertaking obviously struck Alexander (and with good reason) as most inadvisable. The propaganda line that was used on this occasion is recorded by Strabo: Alexander ‘thought of preparing a fleet for an expedition to Egypt, thinking that he could sail as far as there by this river’. But unfortunately the truth soon leaked out. Numerous Greek, or Greek-speaking, traders and settlers were in touch with Alexander's commissariat; the king, after a while, grudgingly admitted that a voyage down the Jhelum would, indeed, lead in the first instance to the Indian Ocean.¹¹³ It was just such a leakage of unwelcome topographical information which finally precipitated Alexander's showdown with his troops.

The king resumed his march eastward in early July, before the end of the monsoon — a great psychological blunder, but by now he would seem to have been more than a little frayed himself. He crossed the Chenab and Ravi rivers, defeating some tribes and terrifying others into submission. One city, Sangala, was razed to the ground. Rain fell heavily from a grey sky; the air was steaming and humid.¹¹⁴ The Macedonians trudged on, sodden, desperate, marching and fighting like automata, plagued by snakes, and sleeping in tree-slung hammocks to avoid being bitten. As they advanced, they too began to pick up more precise information about what lay ahead — not the shores of Ocean, but an interminable plain, peopled by fierce warrior-tribes.

While the king himself and his intimates were entertained by pliable local princelings, who pressed everything on them from women to Indian hunting dogs, morale in camp dropped daily — and with good reason. Alexander's veterans were no longer the same eager youths who had set out from Pella eight years before. They had marched over 17,000 miles and fought in every kind of battle and siege. Few can have come through this ordeal unscathed. Their arms and armour were worn out, fit only for the scrapheap. Their Macedonian clothes had long since been thrown away. By now they were perilously near breaking-point. Obedience, discipline, loyalty had brought them so far. But there is a limit to what men will stand without a clear end in view, and Alexander'sMacedonians had reached it.¹¹⁵ The siege of Sangala had been a hard and bloody affair: even Ptolemy (who minimizes Macedonian losses with monotonous regularity) admitted that 1,200 men were seriously wounded during the fighting.

Now, as Alexander and his troops approached the rain-swollen Hyphasis (Beas), wild rumours began to circulate about the territory and people which lay ahead. Twelve days' march after the Beas they would come to a far greater river (presumably theSutlej), and beyond this dwelt a fierce, warlike nation, with vast armies, chariots, and — worst of all — not less than four thousand fighting elephants.¹¹⁶ Furthermore, the Beas appears to have formed the eastern frontier of Darius I's empire, a fact which (despite some modern claims to the contrary) would not be lost on any Macedonian.¹¹⁷ Up to this point Alexander could at least claim to be acting as Darius' successor, and recovering lost provinces that were his by right of conquest and inheritance. The end, however remote, had always been in view. But once he crossed the Beas, there was no predictable limit to his ambitions, only a constantly receding horizon ad infinitum. What he intended now was (in the most literal sense) a march to the world's end: small wonder that his veterans baulked at such a prospect.

Hitherto Alexander's innate contempt for the common run of mankind had not led him into serious trouble: his extraordinary personal charisma saw to that. Soldiers, in particular, he seems to have dealt with on the assumption that they were motivated exclusively by fear, greed, and ambition; on most occasions this hypothesis worked well enough. Between the stick of tough discipline and the carrot of rich plunder he had kept his army efficient and loyal for a decade. Why should the formula not work once again? The men were tired, he understood that: they had had a gruelling two months. Mutinous talk was nothing new. All they needed was some sort of special bonus: that would soon shift them.

But the geographical horizons revealed when Alexander finally halted his advance at the Beas made any such solution quite hopeless. To reach even the westernmost tributary of the Ganges, the Jumna, meant crossing some two hundred miles of the northernIndian desert. The subsequent march from the Jumna to the Ganges, and from the Ganges to Ocean, would add well over a thousand miles more. Yet Alexander still seems to have believed, with a kind of insane optimism, that a little indulgence would induce his veterans to march on through this limitless terra incognita. He therefore gave the army a holiday, with carte blanche to ravish and plunder the surrounding countryside. He could not offer them another Persepolis, but this was the next best thing. The local rajah had entertained Alexander for two days, and was now officially his ally — a consideration which bothered the king not at all. When his veterans' loyalty hung in the balance, to lose local goodwill was a cheap sacrifice.¹¹⁸

While the Macedonians were off on this legalized looting spree, Alexander, like any political demagogue, wooed their wives with a promise of free monthly rations and child-allowances.¹¹⁹ Nothing could better demonstrate his failure to appreciate what he was up against. This time it was different: this time the usual bribes, threats and blandishments would no longer work. After the troops got back from their expedition, laden with plunder, he thought they would have changed their minds about going on. They had not. A speech exhorting them to further glorious exploits fell very flat indeed. They did nothing loudly or aggressively mutinous, merely stood in sullen silence and refused to budge.¹²⁰

Having failed with the men, Alexander called a private meeting of his senior officers. He was now on very dangerous ground, since at this stage he needed his Macedonians more than they needed him — a fact which they doubtless realized. Without their unrivalled training and experience, his entire command-structure would be in danger of collapsing overnight. There was — as yet — no comparable Iranian officer-corps to replace them. If they struck, he could not possibly go on. His address to this key group shows, and all too clearly, what the main points of grievance were.¹²¹ The unknown, he assured his sceptical audience, always sounded worse than in fact it was. They should beware of exaggeration. The rivers were not so wide as rumour made out, the Indian warriors neither so numerous nor so valiant. As for elephants, they had beaten them once and could beat them again. In any case, their journey was almost over. Soon, very soon, they would reach Ganges and the Eastern Ocean. Why turn back now, when their goal lay so near? And if they did turn back, they risked losing all they had won.

After Alexander had finished speaking, there was a long embarrassed silence; and small wonder. To challenge this farrago of nonsense and special pleading without provoking the king's formidable wrath seemed out of the question. In any case he had made his own attitude all too clear: ‘For a man who is a man,’ he declared, ‘work, in my belief, if it is directed to noble ends, has no object beyond itself.’ There was no arguing with Alexander; in the last resort one could only agree to differ, and even that had its dangers. Nevertheless, after he had several times invited comment, Coenus — old now, and perhaps already in the grip of his last illness — made a valiant effort to get the truth through to him.¹²² The veterans, Coenus reiterated, were worn out, done for, pushed beyond the last limits of human endurance. Many had died of sickness or in battle. What survived was ‘a small remnant broken in health, their old vigour and determination gone’. They wanted one thing only: to get home before it was too late. Alexander could mount other expeditions from Greece, with younger men. ‘Sir,’ Coenus said, ‘if there is one thing above all others a successful man should know, it is when to stop.’

This speech was greeted with thunderous applause. Furious, Alexander dismissed the conference. Next day he summoned his officers once more, and tried another gambit. He was going on, he told them, whether they did or not — and so would many others. They were not necessary to his plans. If they wanted to return home, they could do so. ‘And you may tell your people there,’ he added, ‘that you deserted your king in the midst of his enemies.’ With that he retired to his tent, as he had done after the Cleitus affair, refusing to see anyone for the next two days.¹²³ It was pure bluff; and this time the bluff was called. Alexander's Macedonian officers, far from undergoing a change of heart, as the king confidently expected, kept up their angry, obstinate silence. If Alexander meant to starve himself to death, they at least had no intention of stopping him. They could, they now realized, quite well get the army back home without his assistance. Professional soldiers to a man, they were indispensable and knew it.

By the third day Alexander saw that there was going to be no tearful reconciliation, no offer to follow him wherever he might lead. For once his infallible charisma had failed him. Indeed, unless he walked very warily, he might well find himself in danger of being deposed by a military junta. Coenus was, after all, the last surviving member of Parmenio's old guard. He had changed sides once, and could do so again. The king therefore emerged from his self-imposed retreat, announced that he still meant to go on, and proceeded to offer sacrifice ‘in the hope of favourable omens for the crossing’. The omens, of course, were all against him: a convenient face-saving device behind which, yet again, one senses Aristander's tireless prophetic diplomacy. To climb down under pressure was unthinkable, but to bow before the will of heaven indicated both prudence and piety.^{124 l}

Twelve great commemorative altars, in honour of the twelve Olympian gods, were erected by the river. Their hyperbolic dimensions, together with those of various special outsize fortifications, pieces of military equipment, and even dining-couches, whichAlexander now had made and left behind, were designed to provide the natives with evidence that their enemies had been ‘men of huge stature, displaying the strength of giants’.¹²⁵ One late and erratic source, Philostratus,¹²⁶ further asserts that the altars bore the inscription ‘To Father Ammon and Brother Heracles and Athena Pronoia and Olympian Zeus and the Cabeiroi of Samothrace and Indus and Helios and Apollo of Delphi’ — so odd a collection of dedicatees that I am sorely tempted to believe Philostratus, for once, an honest reporter, and the inscription genuine. He also records the existence of a brass obelisk, put up, he suggests, by the Indians, and bearing the legend ‘Alexander stopped here.’

When the king's decision to retreat was first made known, a laughing, tearful mob, hysterical with relief, thronged round his tent, calling down blessings on him for so generous a surrender. If he ever felt like murdering the entire Macedonian officer corps with his own bare hands it was, surely, at this moment. He never got over his humiliation by the Beas, nor did he forgive those responsible for it. ‘In Alexander's reaction to the thwarting of his desires by his unhappy soldiers one may see most clearly the despot's spite, egotism and ingratitude … they had crossed him, and that was all that counted.’¹²⁷ He was determined, by whatever means, to make the long homeward trek a hell on earth for them all; and in this aim he unquestionably succeeded.¹²⁸