[10]

How Many Miles to Babylon?

ALEXANDER'S return march to the Jhelum began in autumn 326. While the army lay at the Chenab, a fresh embassy arrived from Abisares, with thirty elephants and other rare gifts. Once again the rajah of Kashmir failed to present himself in person: this time he pleaded illness as an excuse. (The illness may have been more than diplomatic, since a year later Abisares was dead.) Alexander, however, proved surprisingly lenient. He not only accepted the rajah's apologies, but confirmed him as governor of his own ‘province’. In point of fact there was little else he could do. To whip Abisares into line would call for another campaign, and the Macedonians were unlikely to relish the prospect of chasing elusive tribesmen up the Himalayas. Alexander's sudden loss of interest in northern India was largely due to circumstances beyond his control. To save time and trouble, all conquered territory as far as the Beas was simply made part of Porus' kingdom.¹ Thus the Paurava monarch now found himself — paradoxically enough — more powerful than he had been before his defeat at the Jhelum.

During the eastward advance Hephaestion, like Craterus, had been on detachment — not, fortunately, to the same place, since the two men detested each other, as only personal rivals for power can do. Hephaestion had ‘pacified’ a large area, rejoiningAlexander just before the mutiny. One of his tasks had been to build a fortified garrison-town at the Chenab crossing. This ‘town’ (probably little more than a mudbrick compound and a market) was now ready. Alexander settled it with the usual mixed population: unfit or time-expired mercenaries reinforced by local native volunteers — an abrasive formula, which seldom made for either peace or permanence. Craterus, with remarkable efficiency, had Alexander's naval flotilla ready and waiting by the time the Macedoniansreturned to the Jhelum.² There were eighty triakonters (thirty-oar vessels), 200 undecked galleys, 800 service ships — horse-transports, grain-barges, lighters — and a multitude of rafts and smaller river-craft. Crews had been drafted from Phoenician, Cypriot,Carian and Egyptian volunteer units accompanying the expedition. The larger vessels were built on the spot, from timber cut in the Himalayas; the rest had been commandeered.

Massive reinforcements — 30,000 infantry and about 6,000 cavalry — had also arrived from Thrace, Greece, and Babylon. The Babylonian contingent dispatched by Harpalus brought, in addition, badly needed medical supplies, and 25,000 suits of new armour, all beautifully inlaid with silver and gold. These Alexander issued to his men, ordering the old equipment to be burnt — an eloquent comment on its condition. Presumably the king had sent Harpalus an urgent request for replacements.³ Whether he also requisitioned a transfer of bullion or coined money we do not know. Certainly none would seem to have been sent. This (like so many things connected with Harpalus) is both puzzling and suspicious.

Despite the legendary wealth of the Indians (mostly in jewels and gold-dust, it was believed), Alexander did not acquire much loot during his eastern campaigns. His expenses, on the other hand (not least in bribes, bonuses and donations), were very heavy, and sometimes — as in the case of his thousand-talent gift to Ambhi — caused active ill-feeling. His daily mess-bill alone came to 10,000 drachmas, and he never had less than sixty or seventy officers at dinner with him. Obviously he could well afford this scale of living: Darius' treasures had made him the wealthiest potentate in the known world. Yet by the end of his Indian campaign there are definite signs that he was hard-pressed for ready cash. The cost of his river-flotilla he partly defrayed by appointing thirty ‘trierarchs’ on the Athenian model (that is, wealthy men who were made responsible for outfitting vessels and paying their crews). By the time his flotilla entered the Indian Ocean, Alexander was once more, as in Macedonia at the outset of his career (see above, p. 155), reduced to raising loans among his friends.⁴

Wherever the Persian treasure might be, it was not coming through to India. Yet if Harpalus' 7,000 men brought 25,000 suits of armour with them, they could just as easily have convoyed gold bullion. The inference, especially in the light of subsequent events, seems clear enough: Harpalus had other, more personal, plans for its use. This ties in very well with the alarming rumours which now began to reach Alexander about his imperial treasurer's general conduct.

At first, it seems, Harpalus had done nothing more adventurous than make experiments in exotic gardening. (He imported a number of Greek plants and shrubs for the royal park, all of which flourished except ivy.) But after a while this lame quinquagenarian discovered that money, in unlimited quantities, could buy a good deal more than hardy annuals. He brought over a glamorous Athenian courtesan, on whom he proceeded to throw away Alexander's gold with lavish generosity. When she died he built her two monuments, one in Babylon, the other in Athens: between them these cost him over 200 talents. Harpalus seems to have been an affectionate, not to say uxorious, patron: he never had more than one mistress at a time, and invariably became devoted to her. His next acquisition, Glycera, was likewise an Athenian. What she felt about her predecessor being worshipped as a local variant of Aphrodite one can only surmise; but as she herself was set up en princesse in the palace at Tarsus she had little cause for complaint. The besotted Harpalus gave her a gold crown, and made visitors prostrate themselves when they greeted her. Jokes began to circulate about the ‘Queen of Babylon’.

All this might, just conceivably, have been the product of infatuation and nothing more. But the introduction of proskynesis (whether in jest or earnest) carried ominous political overtones. Furthermore, in 327/6 the Tarsus mint began striking a series of Persian-type silver coins without reference to Alexander. Independent issues also appeared about the same time in Phoenicia and Cyprus. True or not, it was widely thought that Harpalus, given half a chance, meant to revolt against the king. In this connection his links with Athens — which went rather beyond the acquisition of courtesans — are highly significant. During the great grain-famine which hit Greece between 330 and 326, perhaps in part as the result of Alexander's military requisitions (see above, p. 351 n.), Harpalus, on his own initiative, had sent Athens a large consignment of wheat, for which he was rewarded with honorary Athenian citizenship.

Though we know little of the details, it seems pretty clear that Harpalus, like many other men in authority, was hedging his bets on the king's political future. If Alexander never came back from the Far East — which to observers in Europe or Asia Minor must have seemed more likely than not — then Harpalus, with his immense financial reserves, could easily emerge as the most powerful man in the empire. Given Greek support, he could go on to dispose of Antipater. But if Alexander did come back, crowned with victory, then his embezzling (and possibly seditious) imperial treasurer would undoubtedly need all the friends he could raise. On either count, Athenian citizenship would not come amiss.⁵

When these rumours first reached Alexander he threw the messengers in jail. But a detailed report from the Chian historian Theopompus seems to have convinced him that some, at least, of the charges were true. During the flotilla's voyage down-river, at the time of the Rural Dionysia (December 326), a satirical sketch was performed, lampooning Harpalus, Glycera, the Athenians, and the Persian Magi — a revealing series of targets. This sketch, the Agen, fragments of which survive, must have had the king's endorsement; indeed, according to one tradition he wrote it himself.⁶ But there was little more he could do about Harpalus' activities till he got back to Babylon. In any case he does not appear to have taken them over-seriously. His exploration of the Persian Gulfwent through as planned. He probably saw Harpalus as comic rather than dangerous: a hobbling, elderly, Hephaestus-like pasha, a spendthrift victim of the male menopause.

Before the departure downriver, Coenus sickened and died. Those who crossed Alexander's will seldom — whether by design or accident — outlived his displeasure for long. ‘So far as circumstances permitted,’ Arrian observes drily, ‘Alexander gave him a splendid funeral.’ Curtius adds that though the king was grieved by his death, he ‘could not forbear to remark that Coenus for the sake of a few days had begun a long harangue, as if he alone were destined to see Macedonia again’. Porus, on the other hand, Alexander's late opponent, was now proclaimed king of all subjugated Indian territories except for Taxila: the contrast must have suggested, forcibly, to Coenus' surviving friends that defeat at Alexander's hands brought greater and more immediate rewards than long years of hardship in his service. Moreover, whereas the pliable Ambhi had to put up with a Macedonian ‘resident’ to keep a watchful eye on his activities, Porus (like the dynasts of Caria) ranked as an independent vassal-prince, responsible directly to Alexander.⁷ This distinction indicates, with some clarity, the relative degree of trust which the king placed in each of them.

The flotilla set out from Jalalpur early in November 326. Nearchus of Crete had been appointed admiral-in-chief, with a grand total of 1,800 vessels under his command. At dawn on the day of departure some 8,000 troops — no more than a small fraction of the total expeditionary force, but including the Guards Brigade and the Companion Cavalry — began to file aboard. The remainder were divided into three separate columns, under Craterus, Hephaestion and Philip, the newly-appointed ‘resident’ (or satrap) of Taxila. When all was ready Alexander made sacrifice, and standing in the bow of his flagship poured libations from a golden chalice to various appropriate deities: Ocean, Poseidon, the Nereids; the rivers which the fleet would traverse — Jhelum, Chenab, Indus; his ancestor Heracles, his divine father Zeus Ammon. Then a trumpet sounded, hawsers were cast off, and in perfect formation Alexander's armada began to glide downstream, bright with gaily coloured flags and bunting, each vessel's oars rising and dipping as its coxswain called the stroke.

The Jhelum, here and as far as its confluence with the Chenab, was at least two and a half miles wide — space enough for over forty oared galleys to travel abreast. It must have been a highly impressive spectacle. The natives had never seen anything like it, and followed the flotilla's progress for miles (they were particularly astonished by the horse-transports). At various points, says Arrian, ‘other friendly tribesmen who were near enough to hear the cries of the rowers and the dash and the clatter of the oars came running to the river-banks and joined in the procession, singing their barbaric songs’. The fleet advanced at a very leisurely pace, no more than five miles a day, with frequent disembarkations.

Craterus and Hephaestion went on ahead, Craterus marching along the right bank, and Hephaestion (with the main body and 200 elephants) along the left: a sensible arrangement, considering the feud between them. Philip at first followed on with the baggage-train, but was afterwards sent east to march along the line of the Chenab, thus covering Hephaestion's left flank.⁸ While the flotilla cruised down-river, Aristobulus entertained the king by reading out his freshly composed account of the battle at the Jhelum— a sensational piece of fiction, which made Alexander fight out an epic duel against Porus, and kill the rajah's elephant with one javelin-thrust. Alexander (still proof, it would seem, against the grosser sorts of flattery, especially those with a built-in credibility-gap) pitched this effusion overboard, remarking that Aristobulus himself deserved to follow it for writing such rubbish.⁹

Rapids and whirlpools at the confluence of the Jhelum and the Chenab gave the king a very rough passage. His light galleys in particular were tossed about like corks, quite out of control, oars snapping off as they swung broadside-on to the turbulent current. At one point the royal flagship nearly foundered, and Alexander (who could not swim) only just managed to struggle to safety with the help of his friends. However, the fleet got through in the end. Alexander now could — and did — boast that, like his heroAchilles, he had done battle with a river. Once safely through to the broad waters of the Chenab, the fleet put ashore at a pre-arranged rendezvous, and the whole expeditionary force was once more united.

So far Alexander had met very little serious resistance; but now reports came in that two powerful tribes, the Malli (Mālavas) and the Oxydracae (perhaps the Kshatriyas or Kshudrakas, a Hindu warrior caste) were mobilizing in force to block his advance. They were said to have about 100,000 men under arms — not to mention 900 chariots. Alexander, on receipt of this intelligence, sent Nearchus and the fleet on ahead to the meeting-point of the Chenab and Ravi, divided his forces into three major assault-groups, and got ready to make a clean sweep of the Malli before they could link up with their allies.

At this point Alexander's veterans, realizing that they were about to be pitched into yet another tough campaign (when all they had bargained for was an uneventful voyage), once again threatened to mutiny. They complained, with some justification, that they ‘were exposed to unconquered nations in order that at the cost of their blood they might open up a way for him to the Ocean’. Not — as their spokesman hastened to point out — that Ocean itself (‘a deep teeming with schools of savage sea-monsters’) was all that attractive a goal in any case, even if they did eventually fight their way through to it. They were sick of glory and honour. They had endured more in eight years than most men are called upon to face in a lifetime. Now all they wanted was a quick, safe journey home. By a charismatic mixture of blarney, romantic rhetoric, and the most outrageous lies (Ocean lay so close they could almost smell the sea-breeze; the tribes facing them were ‘unwarlike’) Alexander somehow talked them into going on. But though they cheered him, their morale was still perilously low — a fact which became all too clear during the tough campaign which followed.

The king himself had lost none of his tactical flair and panache (once again he scored a notable victory by marching fifty miles through waterless desert before dawn), but his men were at the end of their tether. Like frightened and desperate troops the world over, they began to fight with savage, almost hysterical cruelty. Rapine and wholesale massacre became commonplaces: even Tarn, for whom Alexander can do little wrong, claims (with some exaggeration) that ‘among Alexander's campaigns this is unique in its dreadful record of mere slaughter’.¹⁰ Resistance, stimulated by the Brahmin priestly caste, became correspondingly more stubborn, and this in turn revealed the demoralization of Alexander's hitherto invincible phalanx.

Twice they refused to mount the scaling-ladders during a siege, until the king himself led the way, and shamed them into following him. On the second occasion a soothsayer (doubtless sensing the troops' reluctance) warned Alexander against pressing this attack: the omens indicated danger to his life. Alexander looked at him sharply. ‘If anyone interrupted you while you were about your professional business,’ he snapped, ‘I have no doubt you would find it both tactless and annoying, correct?’ The seer agreed. ‘Well,’ said the king, ‘my business — vital business — is the capture of this citadel; and I don't intend to let any superstitious crackpot stand in my way.’ With that he shouted for the scaling-ladders to be brought up. The men hung back, hesitating. Furious,Alexander snatched a ladder himself — there would seem to have been no more than two or three available — leaned it against the parapet, and went straight up, holding a light shield over his head as protection.

When he reached the top, he quickly cut down the defenders barring his way, and stood alone for a moment on the battlements — a perfect target for any archer. His friends shouted to him to come back. Instead, with splendid but foolhardy bravado, he jumped down inside the citadel. His back against the wall, and protected on one side by a large tree (which suggests that the struggle took place at ground-level) he proceeded to take on all comers single-handed. After a moment he was joined by three other Macedonians: Leonnatus, Peucestas his shieldbearer, and a highly decorated Guards officer named Abreas. These should have been the first of many — his gesture had had its desired effect — but such a crowd of soldiers now came swarming up the ladders that they collapsed into matchwood, leaving Alexander temporarily cut off.

While frantic Macedonian sappers battered their way through a postern-gate, with mattocks and axes, the king and his three faithful aides held off a multitude. Stones, bolts, every kind of missile clattered on their shields and helmets as they laid about them. Abreas fell, shot in the face. Then a long Indian arrow drove clean through Alexander's corslet and breast, just above the lung. He dropped on one knee, half-fainting, but still had the strength to run his sword through another assailant before he collapsed altogether. Peucestas stood over the king as he lay there, covering him with the sacred shield of Ilium, hemmed in by eager attackers. But by now rescue was on the way. One assault-group scaled the wall on a series of improvised pitons. The postern-gate yielded, and a crowd of furious Macedonians charged through into the citadel, killing every man woman and child they found there. Meanwhile Alexander was borne away on his shield to the royal pavilion; word went round that he was either dead or dying.¹¹

To extract the arrowhead proved a perilous operation. It was leaf-shaped and barbed, about three inches long by two wide, and lodged deep in the breastbone beside the heart. When it had been finally cut out — one account says that Perdiccas did the job with his sword, because no surgeon could be found, or was willing to take the risk — a major haemorrhage followed, and Alexander lost consciousness. His attendants barely succeeded in staunching the flow of blood; for a week the king hung between life and death.¹² No one believed he could survive, and a premature but circumstantial report of his death spread rapidly through the area. The Indians at once recovered confidence, while in Alexander's base camp (now established at the junction of the Chenab and theRavi) the news caused sheer consternation.

His men could not imagine themselves under any other leader. No one else seemed qualified to replace him. Now he was dead they would never get home again. At the Beas they had had a comparatively safe line of retreat. Here they were surrounded on all sides by hostile and war-like tribes, who would fight all the more fiercely without Alexander's name to sap their courage. Even the rivers suddenly looked wider. ‘Every difficulty seemed hopelessly insoluble without Alexander to get them through’ (Arrian 6.12.2). Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the personal and charismatic quality of the king's leadership — or its fundamental limitations.

All he had built up depended on the awe and inspiration caused by his physical presence; the moment he was gone, his empire split into anarchic warring fragments, without any central principle or authority to hold it together, or halt the centrifugal explosion which followed so soon upon his death. When this false rumour reached Bactria, some three thousand Greek mercenary-settlers at once revolted, and set out westward for home — an ominous foretaste of things to come. At the same time his prestige and personal authority were so overwhelming that men who afterwards founded royal dynasties and became great generals in their own right — a Seleucus, a Ptolemy, a Perdiccas — were wholly eclipsed by him. He had perhaps the most extraordinary and talented team of subordinates in all history; yet till the day of his death subordinates they remained, competent staff-officers and nothing more. Only Alexander could control them — yet so masterfully did he do the job that his troops saw none of them as his natural or pre-destined successor.

Almost the moment he recovered consciousness, the king wrote a public letter to the troops at headquarters, squashing the rumour of his death, and promising he would be with them as soon as he was fit to travel. But by now the men were in such a state that they flatly refused to credit what they heard. The letter, they said, was a forgery, something concocted by Alexander's officers as a device for boosting morale. When this news reached the king's ears, he knew that only his personal appearance could forestall a serious breakdown of discipline. His wound was still uncicatrized; but, fit or not, he must move to base camp at once. He was carried on a litter to the Ravi; two vessels were lashed together, and his daybed set on a high platform between them, where he could easily be seen from the river-bank. Let the Indians learn that Alexander still lived, and lose their false hopes.

But he was still dreadfully weak: so weak, indeed, that his boat travelled some distance ahead of the others, ‘in order that the quiet which he still needed … might not be interfered with by the beat of the oars’ (QC 9.6.2). As they approached base camp, he ordered the stern awning to be removed, so that he was plainly visible in the sunlight. Even now the troops remained dubious. This motionless figure was Alexander's corpse, they muttered, not a living man, not their commander. Then the king raised his hand, weakly, in greeting, and a great cheer went up. But something more was needed, some proof that Alexander not only lived, but was indeed aniketos, invincible.

When the boat put in to shore, a litter was waiting for him. He told his attendants to take it away and to bring him his horse. With what iron exercise of will one can scarcely imagine, he got up, mounted, and slowly rode into camp in full sight of his troops. A sudden spontaneous storm of applause broke out, ‘so loud that the river-banks and neighbouring glens re-echoed with the noise’ (Arrian 6.13.3). As he drew near his pavilion he dismounted, and walked the rest of the way. His veterans crowded around him, touching his arms and clothes with superstitious awe, as though to make sure he was not a ghost. Wreaths and flowers were showered on him. Then he passed out of sight into his tent — where, after this supreme effort, he probably at once lost consciousness. Even Alexander's extraordinary physique had its limitations, and there are signs that he never fully recovered from the effects of this appalling wound.

The king's friends took him seriously to task afterwards. He had no business, they said, to risk his life — and hazard the outcome of the entire expedition — by so gratuitous a display of heroics. It was company officers, not the commander-in-chief, who should be first up a scaling-ladder. To this Alexander doubtless replied that if his company commanders had not all shown themselves arrant cowards, he would have been under no compulsion to set them an example. The old Boeotian who told him ‘Action is a man's job, my lord’ was not altogether wrong. Alexander might well have pointed out, in addition, that his personal feat of valour had (apart from anything else) considerably shortened the campaign. The Malli were so shattered by the loss of their chief stronghold, and — equally important — the circumstances in which it had fallen, that they felt further resistance against this godlike figure was useless, and surrendered. At the same time numerous ambassadors arrived from the Oxydracae, who were so impressed by Alexander's campaign against the Malli that they made their own submission without striking a blow.¹³

If the king had deliberately set out to demonstrate just how indispensable he was, he could not have succeeded in a more striking fashion. From now on he was able to get away with almost anything, and showed an increasing inclination to do so. Perhaps his survival, against all reasonable odds, convinced him that he really did possess super-human powers. When Craterus and Ptolemy, back off detachment, came to pay him their respects during his convalescence, the subject uppermost in his mind was the posthumous deification of Olympias.¹⁴ Once again Alexander had become preoccupied with divine aspirations; and this time the idea was not put aside, but grew into a major obsession.

A great banquet was held to celebrate the king's full recovery. This occasion gave rise to an unpleasant but all too characteristic incident. One of Alexander's most distinguished Macedonian veterans, Corragus, challenged the famous Athenian boxerDioxippus to single combat. Dioxippus fought naked, armed only with a club, while Corragus was in full armour, and carried both sword and spear. Dioxippus, defter than any Roman net-fighter, finished off his opponent in a matter of seconds. Alexander (who had backed Corragus) was so furious he left the feast: this had been a matter of national prestige. From now on his sycophants made endless trouble for Dioxippus, even going so far as to plant a gold cup on him at a dinner-party, and then accuse him of stealing it. In the end the wretched athlete committed suicide rather than endure further persecution.¹⁵ When Alexander learnt the truth of the matter he was, as so often, filled with remorse. But by then it was too late.

The southward advance now continued, interspersed with a number of minor campaigns. About February 325 Alexander's much-enlarged flotilla emerged from the Chenab into the Indus. The confluence of these two great rivers marked the southern limit ofPhilip's satrapy. A frontier garrison-city, with dockyards, was built here, and new thirty-oared galleys laid down for the fleet. At the same time, to strengthen his communications with eastern Iran, Alexander replaced the unreliable Persian satrap of Paropamisus (Hindu Kush) by his own father-in-law, Oxyartes.

It took the king another five months to reach the head of the Indus delta. During that period he fought a whole series of bloody battles against various independent rajahs who blocked his advance, or rose in revolt once he had passed on. Again, the record of sheer slaughter is appalling. Diodorus (17.102.5) does not exaggerate when he says that Alexander ‘spread the terror of his name throughout the entire region’, with fire, destruction, and wholesale enslavement. The ultra-fierce resistance he encountered was due in large part to holy-war propaganda spread by the Brahmin priests. As before, Alexander's only answer to ideological opposition was sheer terrorism. Many Brahmins who fell into his hands were hanged as a deterrent. One, on being asked why he had instigated a certain leader to revolt, replied: ‘Because I wished him to live with honour or die with honour.’ Here the king badly misjudged his opponents. Resistance, far from being crushed by his strong-arm methods, took on a new lease of life: before 300 B.C. everyMacedonian garrison in the Land of the Five Rivers had been wiped out.¹⁶

Perhaps near modern Shikarpore (details are uncertain: the Indus has changed its course a number of times over the centuries) Alexander divided his forces. Craterus, with Polyperchon as his second-in-command, was to take three battalions of the phalanx, the elephants, and all time-expired Macedonian veterans, and march overland into the province of Carmania. Here the fleet and the rest of the army would rendezvous with him, either at the mouth of the Euphrates, or at some nearer point along the Persian Gulf. The route Craterus was to follow ran through the Mulla pass to Quetta and Kandahar, thus traversing the ancient satrapy of Arachosia. From here he was to march south-west, by Lake Seistan, the Kerman Desert, and the Jebal-Barez. Once again Alexander had been at some pains to keep him well away from Hephaestion — who, we may note, took over his post as deputy supreme commander the moment he was gone.

The most interesting aspect of this move, however, is the detailed geographical knowledge it reveals on Alexander's part. Desert conditions and shortage of available supplies in the regions which lay ahead made a division of forces essential: so much is obvious. What comes as a surprise is the degree and extent of the king's advance information: clearly he had the whole voyage of exploration already planned, complete with rendezvous-points. It is easy to forget the immensely valuable work which his intelligencesection and surveyors and scientists were always doing in the background throughout his campaigns: mapping, measuring, collecting specimens, studying natural resources, sifting information of every type.^a Without their constant assistance, their reports on everything from salt-mines to desert routes, the expedition would have gone a great deal less smoothly: might, indeed, have met with irreparable disaster.¹⁷

Alexander reached Pattala, at the head of the Indus delta, in July 325. The governor of the city had previously come to him with an offer of surrender, but was so alarmed by the king's punitive methods that he now evacuated both Pattala itself and the surrounding countryside. Since Alexander planned extensive harbour and dockyard works here (for which he would need coolie labour), he sent word to the refugees that they were welcome to come back and till their fields as before. Most of them did so. With the appointment of Peithon as governor of lower India to the sea, Alexander's campaign of subjugation was complete.

Greek writers, bedazzled by the glamour of this exotic and unknown region, vastly exaggerated the importance of what was, in fact, little more than a large-scale raid. Alexander penetrated no farther than West Pakistan, nor does his name once figure in the later Indian literary tradition. For a very brief period his representatives ruled — in theory if not always in fact — over a region extending from Kashmir to Karachi. But their hold on the country remained precarious, and to the Indians themselves they were never anything but mere barbarian aggressors. Indeed, no sooner had Alexander moved on than the destruction of his work began. Philip the satrap was killed by a group of mercenaries. Resistance gathered in the Punjab, under the leadership of a young Kshatriyacommoner, Chandragupta. After Alexander's death Chandragupta was joined (ironically enough) by a Punjabi king named Parvataka, who is almost certainly Porus. Between them these two conquered the empire which Alexander had dreamed of, but never won.¹⁸The Mauryan dynasty founded by Chandragupta held sway eastward to Bengal and the Ganges, southward as far as Mysore.

Nor did Alexander ever appreciate how fundamentally alien the Indian temperament was to anything he had hitherto encountered. When he first reached Taxila he was struck — like every visitor from the West — by the naked Jain ascetics and teachers, who became known in Greek asgymnosophistae, or ‘naked philosophers’. Numerous stories, most (but not all) apocryphal, are told about this confrontation of cultures. Alexander and his advisers, having the characteristic Greek taste for syncretic interpretations, seem to have convinced themselves that the gymnosophistaepreached a local variant of Diogenes' Cynicism. There was just enough truth in this notion to prevent any serious examination of what they did think; and zealous Cynics had no scruples about filling in the gaps. (Only Pyrrho, who afterwards founded the Sceptic school, seems to have grasped something of their philosophy: his doctrines of inaction and contempt for external phenomena bore a considerable resemblance to Jain teaching.) Like so many aspects of Alexander'scareer, his encounters with the gymnosophistae soon became a topic for romance or myth.

Yet certain anecdotes still have an unmistakable ring of truth about them. Alexander persuaded one holy man to abandon his life of ascetic contemplation and accompany the expedition — presumably as a tame travelling sage, an exotic addition to Alexander's Greek seers and Chaldaean astrologers. This person was written off by more high-principled ascetics as ‘a slave to fleshly lusts’ for choosing to serve any lesser master than God; he later burnt himself alive, a remorseful act of self-immolation. On another occasion, Alexander with his retinue passed a meadow where thegymnosophistae gathered for philosophical discussion. At the approach of the troops ‘these venerable men stamped with their feet and gave no other sign of interest’. When Alexander, through an interpreter, inquired the reason for their curious behaviour, this was the reply he got: ‘King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth's surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others. Ah well! You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.’¹⁹ Alexander is said to have applauded such sentiments; he had reacted in much the same way after his encounter with Diogenes (see above, p. 123). However, as Arrian reminds us, ‘his conduct was always the exact opposite of what he then professed to admire’.

At Pattala the Indus split into two main channels before reaching the sea. Alexander now left Hephaestion to fortify the citadel and supervise the construction of docks and harbours, while he himself set out on a reconnaissance voyage down the right-hand or western arm. The south-west monsoon was blowing, and the fleet suffered considerable damage from storms. At one point, very near the sea, they had to run for shelter up a side-channel, only to find themselves left high and dry by the tide — a phenomenon which, as Mediterranean sailors, they regarded at first with considerable alarm. They wandered helplessly about the mudflats, avoiding giant crabs and other unpleasant creatures, imagining they were stranded there for ever. Though this illusion lasted only a few hours, the fast tidal bore that lifted them off was just as frightening and caused further damage to the boats. Alexander carried out what running repairs he could, and sailed on. The fleet found good anchorage off an island in the mouth of the estuary. They had reached Oceanat last.

During his visit to Siwah, one question Alexander must have put to the Oracle was whether he would conquer all of Asia. Ammon, it seems, not only gave the hoped-for response, but also laid down what sacrifices Alexander must make to which gods when the prophecy should be fulfilled. That moment had now come, and the king duly honoured — with open acknowledgement — such deities as Ammon had prescribed. His campaign of eastern conquest could clearly go no farther. Nevertheless, he had to display his authority over Ocean, however, perfunctory or symbolic the gesture. He therefore sailed out to a second island, some twenty-five miles offshore, where — again on instructions — he set up altars to Ocean and Tethys. After a brief exploratory cruise along the coast, he returned to his anchorage in the estuary. Here he sacrificed bulls to Poseidon for a safe voyage home, and set off back up-river. Though the eastern arm of the Indus would give his fleet an extra 200 miles to sail, it might, he hoped, prove somewhat less hazardous.

In the event it gave him just what he was looking for. It was sheltered from monsoon winds. Its waters discharged into the Rann of Kutch, which at this period extended far further inland, as a vast landlocked salt-water lake. Having reconnoitred the passage through to the sea, Alexander took his cavalry a three days' journey westward along the coast. Parties were left at various points to dig fresh-water wells. A harbour and dock were built by the salt lake, and provided with a garrison.²⁰ This done, the king returned to base and began organizing his projected expedition in detail.

If the fleet was to make a voyage from the Indian Ocean into the Persian Gulf, it would need wells and supply-depots prepared for it at regular intervals. All reports agreed that the coast, for several hundred miles, was barren desert, a wind-scoured, dusty, red-rock wilderness known today as the Makran. Alexander planned to march by this route, hugging the coast as far as possible, with the main body of the army and all non-combatants. As they went they would dig wells and lay down supply-dumps. Provisions for four months were secured (Arrian 6.20.5: presumably grain and salted fish). From a close study of our evidence (see n. 22 below) it becomes clear what Alexander's strategy was. Fleet and army would advance according to a coordinated plan. The fleet would carry bulk supplies; the army would be responsible for finding water.^b This was the highly successful amphibious strategy adopted by Xerxes in 480 for his invasion of Greece; but Alexander (who had doubtless borrowed it after studying Herodotus) should have noted that any lengthy separation of fleet and army was liable to have unfortunate consequences. In the event it directly occasioned the most catastrophic episode of his entire career.

Alexander's motives for undertaking this hazardous venture were somewhat mixed. He probably regarded the plan he had worked out as the best and safest method of getting both fleet and army through a peculiarly barren stretch of territory. He was genuinely concerned about the revictualling of the fleet: otherwise he might well have sent the entire expeditionary force by sea. Further, it would be dangerous to leave any unsubdued territory in the Iran—Baluchistan area: this meant reducing Gedrosia, the primitive satrapy bordered by the Makran. He also may well have been curious, as Arrian (8.32.11) suggests, to find out whether a viable trade-route could be opened up between India and the Euphrates.

Such considerations seem reasonable enough. But Nearchus (who was in a better position than most to know the truth) recorded that Alexander, although aware of the difficulties, nevertheless conceived a burning desire, a pothos, to march by this route (Arrian 8.20.1–2). According to tradition, both Queen Semiramis and Cyrus the Great had attempted the feat: the queen got through with twenty survivors, Cyrus with no more than seven. Once again Alexander was seized by the spirit of emulation: ever to strive to be best. Would it not stand as a glorious achievement if he were to succeed where they had failed, and bring his entire army safely through the Makran? So far Nearchus: it may also have occurred to Alexander, after studying the intelligence reports of what lay ahead of them, that his by now unwieldy host could do with a little trimming and pruning, especially among the non-combatants. This march, in fact, would be a survival of the fittest.

The king's most immediate problem was purchasing supplies. For whatever reason (see above, p. 414) the military chest had little left in it, and once again Alexander was reduced to making a whip-round among his friends. He asked Eumenes, his chief secretary, for 300 talents. Eumenes somewhat grudgingly protested that he could only spare a third of the sum required. Alexander, in a flash of fury, set fire to Eumenes' tent, and waited for him to rescue his hidden valuables. In this way he obtained over a thousand talents in gold and silver. At the same time many of the expedition's documents and records were destroyed (Plut. Eum. 2.2–3). Some, perhaps, Alexander was not sorry to see lost, even though he afterwards wrote round to his various satraps and generals asking for duplicates. Since the treasures of the Persian campaigns were still intact, and the mints of Asia Minor in active production, it seems clear that (whether by accident or design) at least one consignment of bullion, and probably more, had failed to arrive.

After some hesitation on Alexander's part, Nearchus was appointed admiral of the fleet. The king at first showed reluctance (says Nearchus) to hazard one of his closest friends on so perilous a mission; but persistence was finally rewarded, and Nearchus got the command. Troop morale was still low; Nearchus' presence would reassure the crews that they had a fair chance of survival. However, the fleet could not leave until the end of the monsoon, when the prevailing winds were due to veer round from the southwest and give them a following breeze — that is, in late September at the earliest. Alexander and the army, however, set out well ahead of Nearchus, towards the end of August. Thus, since no one could exactly foresee when the monsoon would terminate, a random time-element entered the relations between land and sea forces ab initio.

To begin with, however, all went as planned. Alexander and his men were marching through comparatively fertile territory. They dug wells along the shore, and a brisk punitive expedition brought the tribes immediately west of modern Karachi to heel. A city, Rhambacia, was founded here, some way from the sea. Apollophanes became satrap of the region, and Leonnatus also stayed behind, as military governor, with a considerable force at his disposal. Their instructions were to keep the natives docile and make preparations for the fleet's arrival.²¹ At this point Alexander clearly had no shortage of supplies, since he collected, and left behind for Nearchus and the fleet, no less than ten days' rations of grain (Arrian 8.23.7–8).^c

Now Alexander moved on into Gedrosia, keeping as close to the shore as possible. His first encounter was with a grisly Stone Age tribe whom the Greeks nicknamed Ichthyophagi, or Fish-Eaters. They were hairy all over, with long matted locks and uncut nails like wild beasts' claws. Diodorus (17.105.3–4) calls them ‘unfriendly and utterly brutish’. They wore animal pelts or shark-skins, and built their houses from the skeletons of stranded whales. Even their cattle lived off fish-meal, and had a fishy taste when eaten. To obtain provisions from them was virtually impossible. Nothing grew here except thorn and tamarisk and the occasional palm-tree.

As they pressed on into the Makran, the land became still more inhospitable. For a while Alexander kept advance-parties digging wells; but presently he reached the mountains of the Talar-i-Bund, the Makran coast range, which stretched all the way down to the sea. Because of this he was forced to make a long detour inland, away from any chance of rendezvous with the fleet, even supposing the fleet overtook him. It was now, predictably, that the real suffering began. They ran desperately short of water, and often had to march anything from 25 to 75 miles between one brackish well and the next, for the most part at night. When they got there, the men were so maddened with thirst that they often plunged straight into the pool, armour and all. Many died from the effects of over-drinking after dehydration. Many more succumbed to heatstroke. In the end Alexander was forced to bivouack at least three or four miles from a water-point.

Nevertheless, he contrived to preserve his prestige and popularity by sharing the men's worst hardships. Once, when a helmetful of muddy water had been found for him in some nearby gully — but no more was to be had — he laughed, thanked the donor, and then tipped the water out into the sand. ‘So extraordinary was the effect of this action that the water wasted by Alexander was as good as a drink for every man in the army’ (Arrian 6.26.3). It was ironic that during this terrible march the army should have passed through a region rich in myrrh and spikenard: the Phoenician merchants accompanying the expedition loaded up their pack-mules with these precious herbs, while soldiers hung branches of myrrh from their tents, and the spikenard roots they trampled as they advanced gave off a delectable aroma.

Under a brazen sky the long column struggled forward, up and down the sides of soft, shifting sand-dunes, endlessly repeated like waves of the sea, where wagons sank to the axles, and boots filled with burning grit. Poisonous snakes lurked in the herbage, poisonous plants were all around — prickly cucumbers that squirted a blinding juice, laurel-like shrubs which made pack-animals die foaming at the mouth. Date-palms, with their succulent ‘cabbages’, provided some relief, but too many unripe dates frequently choked the eater to death. Soon Alexander's troops were surreptitiously killing pack-animals and breaking open sealed stores. Alexander — wisely — affected not to notice: the problem now was sheer survival. Men fell out hourly, dying in the sun from exhaustion, or left behind when they were no longer fit to march.

Too much water could be as dangerous as too little. One night the baggage-train and non-combatants were encamped in a dry wadi — something any Macedonian officer should have known better than to permit — when a sudden flash-storm broke in the hills. Down roared a great torrent of water through the darkness, carrying away tents, baggage (including the royal pavilion), almost all the women and children, and large numbers of the remaining transport animals. Many soldiers had narrow escapes from drowning, and survived with nothing but their weapons and what they stood up in. Alexander at once sent off emergency requests to all the surrounding satrapies for food-stuffs and other essential suppies. These were to be dispatched (as presumably the messages had been sent) by racing camel, and await the army's arrival in Carmania. Whether it would be humanly possible for the satraps to carry out such orders in time seems more than doubtful. Perhaps Alexander's main object, even at this point, was to find some handy scapegoats for the disasters that had overtaken him.

The final catastrophe was a violent sandstorm, which obliterated all landmarks, so that even the guides lost their bearings and took a path which led farther and farther away from the coast. Alexander, realizing what had happened, set off south with a small cavalry detachment, and eventually reached the sea. Here he and his men dug wells in the gravel — and to their incredulous delight struck pure fresh water. For a week the whole army marched along this coastal strip, always finding water when they dug for it. Then Alexander's guides picked up the road that led inland to Pura, the Gedrosian capital. Sixty days after first entering the Makran, that ragged column of gaunt, sun-blackened weary men reached safety.²² Their losses were appalling. Alexander had begun the march with perhaps 85,000 persons in all, a majority of them non-combatants: of these not more than 25,000 now survived. His Companion Cavalry was reduced from 1,700 to 1,000.²³ Horses, pack-mules, stores, equipment — all were lost. This disastrous march through the desert has been compared, and with good reason, to Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812.

If Alexander had set out with the idea of surpassing Cyrus and Semiramis, his hubristic ambition had received something more than a sharp rebuke. If — as seems only too likely — he had by now come to regard himself as superior to all natural hazards, his pride and self-confidence must have been badly shaken. On both counts he had to find a scapegoat, and perhaps more than a scapegoat. Since he normally took intelligent and practical precautions to ensure that superiority, we may well ask ourselves whether he did not, in fact, have legitimate cause for complaint against certain key subordinates who (for whatever reason) had failed to carry out the orders assigned them. As we have seen (above, p. 426), his advance intelligence concerning Gedrosia and the adjacent regions was thorough, his planning (as always) meticulous. It is inconceivable that he did not know of the Talar-i-Bund's existence, or realize that it would necessitate a long detour inland.

From this there emerges the inescapable conclusion that Alexander (as we might assume in any case) had arranged at least one rendezvous with Nearchus before leaving the coast, to draw iron rations for his march through the desert. When the fleet did not appear on schedule, Alexander had no option but to press on without further delay. Every day he waited ate into his minimal reserves. Neither Nearchus nor the governors of Gedrosia, Susiana, Paraetecene and Carmania had sent him the supplies he so desperately needed. Nearchus could, and did, make convincing excuses for his failure — excuses into which Alexander, through sheer relief at seeing the fleet back at all, probably did not inquire over-closely. The satraps, who presented a correspondingly greater potential threat, were not so lucky.²⁴

Alexander's subsequent behaviour makes it clear enough that he, at least, thought something worse than mere negligence was involved. Nor is it hard to see why. Harpalus had failed to send him consignments of bullion when he needed them, was giving himself royal airs and graces (see above, p. 414), and was widely held to be contemplating defection.²⁵ At least two, and probably several more, of his provincial governors had let him down badly during a crucially dangerous march. The fleet had vanished when he most needed it. A far less naturally paranoiac mind than Alexander's might well have deduced from these circumstances that Harpalus, Nearchus and the rest of them were all in a widespread conspiracy against him, the object of which was to encompass his death in the burning wastes of the Gedrosian desert. The question is, were his suspicions justified? At this distance in time, and with the limited evidence at our disposal, we cannot return a firm verdict; but the evidence for satrapal disaffection after Alexander vanished into India should not be minimized,²⁶ and Nearchus certainly had ample leisure to polish his own version of the fleet's vicissitudes for Alexander and posterity.²⁷

The king's first, and most obvious, victim was the wretched Apollophanes (see above, p. 432), in whose satrapy the disaster had taken place. Alexander now sent a letter formally deposing him. This crossed with a dispatch from Leonnatus, who reported that local tribal levies had attacked his division, inflicted severe losses, and then withdrawn. Among those killed was Apollophanes. Alexander, baulked of his prey, did what he could by converting this defeat into a propaganda victory, with Leonnatus destroying 6,000 natives for the loss of fifteen horsemen and a few footsoldiers. Troop morale was not yet up to digesting another defeat.²⁸

A more cheerful dispatch arrived from Craterus, who had defeated two Persian nobles attempting a revolt, and was bringing them on to Alexander in chains. But the general news was far from encouraging. Rumours of treachery, inefficiency, and large-scale embezzlement came in from every side. Nothing, as yet, had been heard of the fleet. Many officials, confident that Alexander would never return from his Indian venture, had set up as independent oriental despots, and equipped themselves with powerful private armies. Every kind of luxurious excess and administrative corruption was reported. Here was a dangerous situation — and one which made Harpalus look far less like a figure of fun (not that by now Alexander can have had many illusions left on that score). Nor could it have arisen at a worse time. After the fearful casualties sustained in Gedrosia, Alexander's own prestige had lost much of its charismatic lustre; the epithet aniketos (invincible) now bore a large interrogation mark after it. Unless the king acted with speed and decision, he might find himself up against something far worse than mere dereliction of duty. Frightened, guilty men make natural conspirators.

After a short rest period at Pura, Alexander set out again: clearly there was no time to be lost. His immediate destination was Salmous (Tepe Yaḥyā: cf. Iran 7, 1969, p. 185) in Carmania, some way inland from the Strait of Hormuz. Wisely, he relaxed discipline during this march. There is a persistent tradition that for seven days he and his army reeled through the rich countryside in a splendid Dionysiac rout. Alexander, like Philip, was much addicted to such quasi-religious revelry, and the story is by no means incredible.

Such junketings, however, did not distract him from more important business. When the army entered Carmania it was welcomed by Astaspes, the Iranian satrap. Alexander already had a dossier on this man, who (quite apart from failing to get supplies through) had allegedly been plotting treason during the expedition's absence in India. For the moment nothing was said. Alexander greeted Astaspes warmly, took everything he had to offer, and confirmed him in his position. By the time he reached Tepe Yaḥyā, however, the king had collected more evidence. He had also felt the mood of sullen hostility in the province as a whole. Astaspes was abruptly put under arrest and then executed. Alexander's satrapal purge had begun. In fact it might be said to have begun earlier; the satrap of Paropamisus (Hindu Kush), whom he replaced by his father-in-law Oxyartes, was likewise afterwards executed for treason.

Alexander's recent summons to the various satraps to meet him in Carmania with provisions and transport animals plainly had more than one purpose. As soon as the Ecbatana contingent arrived, their leaders (Cleander, Sitalces, and two deputy commanders) were arrested and clapped in irons. As Parmenio's murderers (see above, p. 346) they were by no means popular with the troops, so that Alexander found no shortage of witnesses, both Persian and Macedonian, to testify against them, ‘alleging that they had plundered temples, disturbed ancient tombs, and committed other crimes of a violent and tyrannical nature against the people of the province’ (Arrian 6.27.4; cf. QC 10.1.1–5). Cleander and Sitalces were condemned to death; we hear nothing more of their subordinates, who presumably suffered the same fate. Cleander, of course, was Coenus' brother. All of them had been potentially involved with the elusive Harpalus (Cleander, indeed, belonged to the same family as the imperial treasurer, the royal out-kingdom House of Elimiotis).

The independent control exercised by this group over the great central satrapies was dangerous enough in itself, without proof positive of treason. But if a junta did in fact exist, Alexander lost no time in eliminating it. Harpalus himself, however, escaped capture: he knew better than to go anywhere near Alexander from now on. When the summons came, he fled to the coast, with a body of 6,000 mercenaries and some 5,000 talents in silver. (Why did he not take more — scoop the pool, in fact? Is it possible thatAlexander had in fact pre-empted such a move by dividing his treasure up among more independent custodians than our sources would suggest?) From here he sailed for Athens, hoping to cash in on his benefactions and honorary citizenship.

Harpalus' sudden panic-stricken flight, coming so soon after the execution of Cleander and Sitalces, removed any real fear of an organized coup. Alexander was playing an extremely shaky hand with his usual cool flair and psychological insight. Perhaps, too, he remembered the technique adopted by Artaxerxes Ochus in 358, when faced with a very similar situation. One of the first things which that bloodthirsty monarch did (having killed off his relatives and put down a provincial revolt) was order his satraps inAsia Minor to disband their mercenaries. In Artaxerxes' case this decree provoked a rebellion. Alexander, however, had prepared the ground somewhat better, and when he ‘wrote to all his generals and satraps in Asia, ordering them, as soon as they had read his letter, to disband their mercenaries instantly’ (Diod. 17.106.3) the order was obeyed without question.

On the other hand, only dire political necessity could have dictated it. There were quite enough unemployed mercenaries loose in Asia as it was, without adding to their number (see above, p. 421). The social consequences of this policy were only too predictable. If they lacked a paymaster, they would turn to freelance marauding for a livelihood. Soon all Asia was full of such wandering bands, and the moment the resistance movement began to develop again in Greece, they naturally made their way across theAegean and joined it. Again, when heads began to roll, it was not simple corruption that invariably brought Nemesis in its wake: there had to be a political angle as well. Cleomenes, the Greek who had made himself de facto satrap of Egypt (see above, pp. 278–9), had about the most scandalous record for graft and general financial huckstering of all Alexander's administrators. But he was loyal, efficient, and — best of all — not Macedonian. The king confirmed him in his command. Philoxenus in Cilicia also got away with a great deal — though he nearly ruined his chances by offering Alexander a pretty boy-prostitute as a present. The implications were hardly flattering, and Alexander was not the man to let anyone choose his lovers for him.²⁹

It was now December (325). Craterus arrived safely, with his troops and elephants; shortly afterwards came a report that Nearchus had been seen in the vicinity. At first Alexander could not credit this news, and actually arrested the provincial governor for spreading false rumours. Even when Nearchus appeared — in ragged garments, hair long and matted with brine — the king's first thought was that he and his five companions were the only survivors. Bitter distress at the presumed loss of the fleet eclipsed any pleasure he might have felt at his admiral's escape. But as soon as Nearchus revealed that the fleet had come through intact, and now lay at Hormuz undergoing a refit, while the crews were well and fit, Alexander's delight knew no bounds.

Those who made the sea-voyage had their own adventures to tell. Nearchus, with breathtaking effrontery, had (he said) been forced to weigh anchor earlier than he originally intended, because of attacks by the natives: on Alexander's departure the natives had lost their terror and begun to behave like free men. Later, of course, the monsoon, and storms, and various accidents had combined to delay him for up to a fortnight beyond Alexander's marching time of sixty days, but there was, clearly, to be no suggestion of deliberate loitering. Nor did Nearchus intend to admit that he and his men had had a comparatively easy time of it. The coast, he claimed, had proved barren and inhospitable. He even went so far as to assert that supplies had begun to run out (not much more than two of those four months' rations were accounted for: what had become of the rest?). In their hunger, so the story ran, they had been compelled to raid a friendly town and strip it of provisions. When on the very verge of starvation they killed and ate seven camels. Nor were the perils of the deep forgotten in this recital. The sudden appearance of a school of whales caused great alarm, but Nearchus — rising nobly to the occasion — had all the trumpets of the fleet blown simultaneously, and charged them, on which they dived out of sight.

Alexander now made sacrifice to the gods, and held a great athletic and musical festival, in thanksgiving for the safe return of his fleet, and (according to Aristobulus) ‘for his conquest of India and the escape of his army from Gedrosia’ (Arrian 6.28.3). What the survivors made of this stunning if pious lie one can only surmise. Nearchus was the hero of the hour: he headed the ceremonial procession, while the troops showered him with ribbons and flowers. The prize for singing and dancing went to Alexander's favourite, the eunuch Bagoas (see above, p. 333). Everyone in the audience told the king he should kiss the winner. Alexander duly obliged.

It would be interesting to know how Bagoas got on with Hephaestion: perhaps their spheres of ambition and influence were so different that they could not regard one another as genuine rivals. Hephaestion's bickering with Craterus, on the other hand, broke out the moment they were in contact again. The two men actually drew swords on each other. Alexander, who separated them, rebuked Hephaestion publicly, ‘calling him a fool and a madman for not knowing that without Alexander's favour he was nothing’. (Plut.Alex. 47.6). Craterus received his dressing-down in private.³⁰ An official reconciliation now took place; but the sooner these two touchy individuals could be separated again, clearly, the better. Before Alexander set out for Persepolis, in January 324, he placed Hephaestion in charge of the baggage-train, the elephants, and the bulk of the army, and dispatched them by the long, easy coast road, where they would find plentiful supplies. He himself, with the Companion Cavalry and the light infantry, travelled overland. We may be tolerably certain that Craterus went with him. Nearchus, at his own request, had stayed with the fleet: their next rendezvous was to be at Susa.³¹

The satrap of Persis had died, and his place was now filled by a wealthy Iranian nobleman named Orsines, who claimed descent from Cyrus. As Alexander approached Pasargadae, Orsines came out and met him with rich gifts of every kind, including many for his friends and commanders. To Bagoas, however, he gave nothing. When told, discreetly, that the eunuch was Alexander's favourite, he replied with aristocratic contempt that ‘he was honouring the friends of the king, not his harlots’ (QC 10.1.26). This remark soon got back to Bagoas, who at once began a vicious smear-campaign, systematically poisoning Alexander's mind against Orsines. When it was found that the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae had been looted by vandals, and all its rich gold and silver treasures stolen, Bagoas saw his chance. It was not hard to convince the all too suspicious king that Orsines had been, as it were, robbing dead Peter to pay live Paul. The satrap was arrested, convicted, and hanged — with a last scornful word for the minion who had brought about his downfall.

After the Gedrosian disaster, a change for the worse seems to have taken place in Alexander. He became increasingly paranoiac and suspicious, ready to believe any calumny against his officials, however unlikely its source. He would now punish even minor offences with sternness, on the grounds that an official guilty of minor irregularities might easily progress to more serious crimes. This line may have been dictated in part by the purge he was carrying out; but it hints at something rather more fundamental. There is a tendency nowadays to pooh-pooh the belief (universally held in antiquity) that Alexander's character had by this time undergone very considerable degeneration. This does not imply a fundamental change in his nature: the man who burnt Persepolis was also the boy who had destroyed Thebes. From the very beginning his ambition had been insatiable, and murderous when thwarted. But in any consideration of his later years, the combined effects of unbroken victories, unparalleled wealth, power absolute and unchallenged, continual heavy physical stress, and incipient alcoholism cannot be lightly set aside. Abstemious as a boy, he now regularly drank to excess. Nor was it political pressure alone which now dictated the king's actions, but his own increasingly dominant and uncontrollable megalomania.³²

From Pasargadae Alexander moved on to Persepolis, where Orsines was executed. To succeed him as satrap the king appointed his shieldbearer, Peucestas, who had recently been made a supernumerary Gentleman of the Bodyguard. Peucestas was utterly loyal and of undistinguished origins: two first-class qualifications in Alexander's eyes. He had, moreover, dutifully adopted the king's orientalizing habits, and spoke fluent Persian. At the same time Harpalus' vacant post as imperial treasurer went to a competent nonentity, a Rhodian accountant named Antimenes. Sensitive administrative appointments, Alexander seems to have decided, were safer (and indeed more efficiently discharged) in the hands of anonymous Greek bureaucrats or sedulously loyal underlings.

Towards the end of February 324 Alexander reached Susa, where he made a lengthy halt, and his satrapal purge finally ran its course. The governor of Susiana and his son were both put to death on the usual charges: maladministration, extortion, and, most important, failure to deliver supplies to the army in Gedrosia. The satrap, Abulites, offered Alexander 3,000 talents in cash as a substitute. The king had the money thrown to his horses. ‘What kind of provisions do you call these?’ he asked, when they refused to touch it. He is said to have dispatched Abulites' son in person, transfixing the wretched youth with a spear. The ghost of Cleitus, it seems had ceased to trouble him. At the same time he was already full of plans for further campaigns of conquest, this time in the western Mediterranean. Carthage, Spain and Italy were all mentioned as possible targets. There was even a rumour that he meant to circumnavigate Africa. Nearchus arrived safely with the fleet, and the two men discussed this new project. The king sent orders for the construction of no less than 700 large new galleys at Thapsacus on the Euphrates. The kings of Cyprus were commanded to provide this flotilla with copper, hemp and sailcloth.³³

All organized opposition in Asia was now effectively crushed, and Alexander felt free to proceed with his systematic policy of orientalization. Despite some ingenious special pleading by modern scholars,³⁴ it is safe to say that this did not imply any ideological belief in racial fusion or the brotherhood of man. The arguments used to promote such a view have been adequately disposed of elsewhere,³⁵ and need no more than a brief mention in this context. Plutarch (Alex. 27.6) has a story about Alexander'sconversation with the priest of Zeus-Ammon at the Siwah Oasis — where, we recall, he had just been proclaimed the son of god. The priest observed, platitudinously but undeniably, that God was the common father of mankind; to which Alexander replied ‘that though God was indeed the common father of all mankind, still he made peculiarly his own the noblest and best of them’. From this statement Tarn somehow contrived to extract an endorsement by Alexander of the brotherhood of man. In fact, of course, it points in another direction altogether, and suggests a far more sinister slogan, given wide currency by George Orwell's Animal Farm: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’

Apart from this curious assertion, Tarn's case rests largely on two passages: the sixth chapter of Plutarch's first rhetorical treatise De Alexandri Magni Fortuna aut Virtute (Moral. 329A–D), and Arrian's account of the supposed ‘international love-feast’ which followed Alexander's reconciliation with his men after the mutiny at Opis (Arrian 7.11.8–9). The latter episode will be scrutinized in its proper context (see below, pp. 453 ff.); of the former disquisition one need only say that Plutarch wrote it when very young, as an exercise devoted to proving the highly dubious proposition that Alexander, by his deeds, showed himself a true philosopher of action. By the time he came to compose the Life, Plutarch had discreetly abandoned this unprofitable paradox; Tarn, of course, interprets the change of attitude as middle-aged loss of idealism — ‘the fire had burnt low and was half swamped by his much reading.’³⁶ Any reader who has followed Alexander's career with attention this far should be able to assess the nature, and extent, of the king's idealism for himself.

That Alexander (or his propaganda section) used various philosophical notions concerning the unity of mankind to put an acceptable gloss on what otherwise has been construed, with justice, as mere political or militaristic opportunism is by no means impossible. Such ideas had been circulating at least since the fifth century,³⁷ and could obviously be utilized to justify an expansionist policy of conquest. One promising propaganda line still in use today can be extrapolated from Plutarch (Moral. 328E), who argued that those defeated by Alexander were luckier than those who escaped him, since the former received the blessings of Greek culture and philosophy, whereas the latter were left in their backward and uncouth primitivism. A publicist such as Anaxarchus may well have used these arguments on Alexander's behalf, thus starting a tradition which Plutarch in due course picked up; but for a modern historian to take them au pied de la lettre, to mistake propaganda for honestly held beliefs, shows political naivety of a very high order.

Any steps which Alexander took towards racial integration were strictly limited, and with immediate, purely practical ends in view. His policy, far from being dictated by the impulses of philanthropic idealism, was restricted to the higher echelons of government service and the army (the officer corps in particular); its two main objectives were to assimilate Persian generals and colonels into the existing command structure, and to create a joint Perso-Macedonian administrative class. Indeed, it could plausibly be argued that Alexander's ultimate aim was to discard his Macedonian cadres altogether. After the heavy losses sustained in India and the Makran, he reduced the number of Companion Cavalry divisions from eight to four, and then added a fifth, based on the RoyalSquadron. For the first time, Iranians were not only brigaded with these units at squadron level, but fully integrated. Some privileged Persians were actually admitted to the Royal Squadron, and issued with Macedonian arms.

To make matters worse, the 30,000 Iranian youths whom Alexander had sent to be given a Macedonian military training (see above, pp. 371–2) now reappeared at Susa, having completed their long and arduous course. They were superbly equipped, bursting with energy and enthusiasm, never weary of displaying their expertise at weapons-drill, their marvellous fitness and discipline. Alexander was loud in their praises. He not only called them his ‘Successors’, which was bad enough, but made it clear that if necessary they could be used as a ‘counterbalance [antitagma] to the Macedonian phalanx’ (Diod. 17.108.3). It is hardly surprising, then, that their presence caused deep alarm and resentment among Alexander's veterans, who with a mixture of scorn and envy nicknamed them ‘the young war-dancers’. On top of Alexander's autocratic behaviour and Persian dress, the unapproachable pomp and protocol of his court life, all this became ‘a cause of deep resentment to the Macedonians, who could not but feel that Alexander's whole outlook was becoming tainted with orientalism, and that he no longer cared a rap for his own people or his own native ways’ (Arrian 7.6.5).

To a large extent this fear was well-grounded. Babylon had long since replaced Pella as the centre of Alexander's universe; he cared little more about what happened in Greece, now, than he would about any other province on the periphery of his vast empire. It was reported about this time, for instance, that Olympias and Cleopatra had raised a faction against Antipater, with Cleopatra taking Macedonia for her province, while Olympias kept Epirus. Alexander's only comment on this was that his mother had made the more sensible choice, since Macedonians would never agree to be ruled by a woman.³⁸

The king's high-handed, not to say dictatorial, efforts to enforce top-level integration reached a climax with the famous Susa mass-marriages. At a ceremony of extraordinary splendour, between eighty and one hundred high Macedonian officers took Persian or Median brides, from the noblest families in Iran. The weddings were all solemnized in Persian style. The bridegrooms sat on chairs, in order of precedence; then, after a toast, their brides came in, took them by the hand, and kissed them. Every guest who sat down to the banquet which followed had a gold cup before him. The celebrations went on for no less than five days. Alexander himself took two wives at this ceremony, the daughters respectively of Darius and of Artaxerxes Ochus. If he was going to strengthen his claim on the Achaemenid throne he might as well make a thorough job of it — even if this meant being saddled with no less than three regnant queens. Hephaestion he also married to a daughter of Darius — ostensibly because he wanted their children as his own nephews and nieces.

Hephaestion's rivals, however, would not be slow to see another, more ominous, explanation for this royal favour. Already the office of Chiliarch, or grand vizier, had been revived for him. He had recently taken over as sole commandant of the CompanionCavalry, despite Alexander's earlier resolution never again to entrust this post to one man (see above, p. 348). Whatever Alexander may have said to him in a moment of anger (see above, p. 442), he was now, beyond any doubt, the second man in the empire and the king's most likely successor. None of this increased his popularity. Nor did the marriages themselves have the effect which Alexander hoped to achieve. They had been made willy-nilly, at the king's express command, and almost all of them were repudiated soon after his death. To the Macedonians they symbolized Alexander's oriental despotism at its very worst. His idea of creating ‘a new ruling class of mixed blood, which would be free of all national allegiance or tradition’ proved an utter failure.³⁹

His troops now thoroughly distrusted him, and he was reduced to pacifying them by means of wholesale bribery. Sometimes this worked; sometimes it proved unexpectedly disastrous. The men had no objection to his compiling a register of those who had married Asiatic wives, since his purpose in doing so was to give them all belated wedding-presents (the total number involved was over 10,000). But his next step, though clearly meant as a douceur, was not nearly so well received. Most of the men were heavily in debt to the traders, merchants, horse-copers and brothel-keepers who accompanied the expedition (the situation would doubtless have been worse had not a number of outstanding debts been written off in the burning sands of the Gedrosian desert). Now that Alexander once more had access to ample funds — Harpalus, as we have seen, embezzled a small fraction only of the 180,000 talents realized after Persia fell — he decided it was high time these accounts were settled, and to win favour he announced that he would settle them himself. He therefore called for a detailed schedule, with names, so that payment could be made at once.

The response was minimal: hardly anyone put his name down. All ranks assumed, instantly, that this was a trick of Alexander's, to find out which of them had overspent their army pay. Furious, Alexander informed them that a king always, in duty bound, spoke the truth to his subjects, and that they had no right to presume otherwise. After this somewhat breathtaking assertion, he had banking-tables set up in camp, and instructed the pay-clerks to settle all outstanding claims on the production of a bond or IOU. No names were to be taken. Convinced at last, and with grudging gratitude, the men now came forward. This piece of open-handed munificence cost Alexander 20,000 talents.⁴⁰

A far more urgent problem, and one largely created by Alexander's own policies, was that of the countless unemployed Greek mercenaries still at large. From a merely social menace (which was bad enough) they looked like becoming a serious political and military threat. Many of them were exiles, victims of those puppet oligarchies which Antipater, on the king's orders, maintained in Greece. Their sole means of livelihood had been to take service under Darius. By so doing they virtually outlawed themselves, since their allegiance to Persia was regarded as treason against the Hellenic League. Alexander had very soon learnt that a tough line against mercenaries did not pay off; but this made little difference to the Greek cities of the league, which were in no mood now or ever, to reabsorb their old political enemies. There was thus created a large body of homeless and drifting men who could only be kept out of mischief so long as they had regular military employment.

The king had already taken steps to ease this problem. He enrolled all the mercenaries he could find room for in his own army, and, as we have seen, planted numerous garrison-colonies throughout the Far East. This by no means accounted for them all, however; and some, in any case, loathed Alexander and all he stood for so much that they refused to serve under him whatever the inducement. What brought the crisis to a head, of course, was the king's emergency decree ordering the satraps to dissolve their private armies (see above, pp. 439–40). This at once threw a vast body of well-trained, ruthless toughs out of work, and made them available on the international market. Moreover, when Alexander began his purge of imperial administrators, quite a few Persian satraps and commanders seized what funds they could and fled to Taenarum, in southern Laconia, now being organized as an anti-Macedonian recruiting-centre.

This conjunction was too good an opportunity to ignore, and an Athenian general, Leosthenes — probably with the connivance of his government — started running an underground ferry-service for mercenaries, from Asia Minor to the Peloponnese. Here was a potentially explosive situation indeed. The mercenaries had found a centre, an organization, and leaders who could pay them — Harpalus among others, who now reached Taenarum with his 5,000 talents still intact. The 3,000 rebel settlers from Bactria (see above, p. 421) also made their way back to Greece about this time. Unless Alexander took firm action, fast, he looked like having a major crisis on his hands.

But what action could he take? Professor Badian (MP, p. 220) puts the problem in a nutshell: ‘He could not disband the concentrations of desperadoes; he knew that he could not, on the whole, re-enlist them; he had found that he could not resettle them. The only solution was to send them home.’ Most of these men were his implacable enemies; but even they might well feel better disposed towards him if he was responsible for terminating their exile. On the other hand, the puppet governments backed by Antipaterwould sing a very different tune when compelled to take back all their radical opponents: that could not be helped.

Alexander now drafted a proclamation, addressed directly to the exiles themselves. It read as follows: ‘King Alexander to the exiles from the Greek cities. We have not been the cause of your exile, but, save for those of you who are under a curse [i.e. for sacrilege or murder: Alexander also made an exception in the case of the Thebans], we shall be the cause of your return to your own native cities. We have written to Antipater about this to the end that if any cities are not willing to restore you, he may constrain them’ (Diod. 18.8.4). In other words, the king was preparing, with great finesse, to ditch his Greek quislings (who were expendable); to shift the blame for the exiles' plight, by implication, on to Antipater (who was not expendable yet, but soon would be); and to collect some easy popular credit by reversing the previous Macedonian party line and supporting democrats for a change. The decree was bound to produce a whole spate of litigation and administrative tangles; detailed instructions were therefore drawn up for those who would be required to implement it.⁴¹

In March the final draft was read out to Alexander's assembled troops. The king wanted an official announcement made at the Olympic Games that summer, and his special envoy Nicanor — Aristotle's adopted son — left on this mission soon afterwards. With him he took a second, unrelated decree, which has aroused considerable controversy among scholars, but seems to have been regarded by the Greeks themselves as a joke — and one in somewhat questionable taste, at that. Alexander now required that the cities of the league should publicly acknowledge him as a god. That this was a mere political device⁴² is unlikely in the extreme: in fact the practical advantages that Alexander could derive from his own deification were virtually nil. It would inevitably antagonize the Macedonians (a prospect however, which by now he must have regarded with some equanimity), and Persian opinion was bound to consider it sheer blasphemy. Sophisticated Greeks would ridicule the king's pretensions with mocking epigrams. Perhaps the best (certainly the most ironic) comment came from Damis the Spartan. When the question of divine honours was under debate, he said: ‘Since Alexander desires to be a god, let him be a god.’⁴³

Whatever his divination meant to anyone else, it is plain that Alexander himself took it very seriously indeed. All his life, in a sense, he had been moving towards this final apotheosis. Divine blood ran in his veins; heroes and demigods were numbered among his ancestors; his mother's dark hints concerning his begetting had been given fresh dimensions by the Pharaonic coronation ceremony in Memphis, and Ammon's revelations during his pilgrimage to the Siwah Oasis. If superhuman achievements conferred godhead (as Anaxarchus had suggested in Bactria) then Alexander had unquestionably earned himself a place in any pantheon: his deeds by now far outshone those of Achilles or Heracles. Aristotle had taught him that the true king was a god among men. The dyingIsocrates had argued that nothing would remain for the conqueror of Asia but deification.

Year by year, with that growing isolation from one's fellow-men (and hence from reality) that is the penalty of an unbroken ascent to absolute power, Alexander's control over his own latent megalomania had grown progressively weaker. What finally broke it were the psychological shocks inflicted by the mutiny at the Beas and the nightmare of the Gedrosian desert. ‘He took refuge from the insecurity of power in the greater exercise of power: like a god intervening in the affairs of mortals, he would order the fate of princes and of nations.’⁴⁴ He became a god when he ceased wholly to trust his powers as a man, taking the divine shield of invincibility to combat his inner fear of failure, the divine gift of eternal youth as a talisman against the spectres of old age, sickness, death: the perils of the flesh that reminded him of his own mortality. Alcoholism bred paranoia: his dreams became grandiose lunacies. He was formidable still; but he had come very near the end of the road.⁴⁵

In spring 324 Alexander left Susa. Hephaestion, with the bulk of the infantry, was dispatched west to the Tigris, by the overland route. The king himself sailed down the River Eulaeus, cruised along the coast until he reached the Tigris estuary, and then made his way upstream to Hephaestion's camp. From here he continued as far as Opis, the highest navigable point on the river, some 200 miles north of Babylon. The Persians had built a series of weirs to prevent enemy squadrons raiding upstream; Alexander's engineerssystematically cleared these dams as he advanced, and built others off the main stream to ensure efficient irrigation of the delta.⁴⁶ It was probably during this journey, somewhere between the Eulaeus and the Tigris estuary, that the king founded Alexandria-in-Susianis (Charax), a port which subsequently became the main entrepôt for Babylon. The removal of the weirs similarly suggests, among other things, a wish to encourage trade and commerce.

At Opis, Alexander assembled his Macedonian troops, and announced the imminent demobilization ‘of all men unfit through age or disablement for further service’ (Arrian 7.8.1). He promised them lavish bonuses and severance pay, enough to make them the envy of their fellow-countrymen when they returned home (not to mention a walking advertisement for future recruits). ‘Doubtless,’ Arrian observes, ‘he meant to gratify them by what he said.’ Doubtless. But he knew their cumulative grievances, the rebellious state they were in. If they mutinied again, he was going to make sure they did so when the odds were all in his favour.⁴⁷ In any case, his words produced a near-riot.⁴⁸ Those he proposed to release shouted that it was an insult to wear men out with long service and then throw them on the scrap-heap. The younger time-expired veterans demanded their own discharge. They had served as long, fought as hard; why discriminate between them? All the pent-up resentment against the king's orientalizing policy burst out in ugly heckling and barracking.⁴⁹ Underneath it all they were scared: scared that he no longer needed them, that they would become a tiny isolated minority in a virtually all-Persian army, that he had the whip-hand at last, and knew it.

Their worst fear (and with good reason) was that ‘he would establish the permanent seat of his kingdom in Asia’, that they would not see home again for years, perhaps never. In the end they threatened to walk out on him en masse. ‘Go on and conquer the world with your young war-dancers!’ one veteran shouted — a bitter allusion to the Persian ‘Successors’. ‘With his father Ammon, you mean,’ retorted another.⁵⁰ The cry was taken up generally, amid jeers and laughter. It certainly had its effect. In a blinding fury⁵¹Alexander sprang down from the dais, accompanied by his officers of the guard, and strode through the ranks pointing out the chief troublemakers. Thirteen men were arrested, and dragged off to summary execution.⁵²

A horrified silence fell. Then the king, with that psychological flair which never deserted him in a crisis, went straight back to the platform, where he began a cuttingly contemptuous speech by listing all the benefits and favours the Macedonian army had received from his father Philip.⁵³ Philip, he said, had found them a ‘tribe of impoverished vagabonds’ dressed in sheepskins, unable to defend their own frontiers. When he died, they were masters of the greatest state in the Aegean. ‘Yet,’ Alexander went on, ‘these services are small compared with my own’ — which he then proceeded to enumerate in full. He reproached his men bitterly for their disloyalty and cowardice. Then came the final thrust. ‘You all wish to leave me,’ he cried. ‘Go, then! Out of my sight!’ With that he swept off to his private quarters, leaving the assembled troops silent and dumbfounded: for some while they stood there like sheep, at an utter loss what to do next.⁵⁴

As usual on such occasions, Alexander shut himself up incommunicado, and waited. Like his hero and exemplar Achilles, he could think of no worse punishment to inflict on his fellow-warriors than to deprive them of his incomparable and indispensable presence. Crowds of veterans stood about hopelessly outside his pavilion. He refused to see them. His psychological shock-tactics had never been more skilfully employed.⁵⁵ On the third day he let it be known that he was using the ‘Successors’ to form new Persianunits on the lines of the old Macedonian corps d'élite — a Persian Royal Squadron and Companion Cavalry, a Persian Guards Brigade. At the same time he summoned the cream of the Iranian fighting nobility, and appointed them to all brigade commandspreviously held by Macedonians.⁵⁶ These high dignitaries were also, in Achaemenid fashion, termed the king's ‘kinsmen’, and entitled to exchange the kiss of friendship with him.⁵⁷

When the troops learnt what was happening their resistance broke down altogether: this kind of brutal emotional blackmail got clean past their guard. They all rushed to Alexander's pavilion, weeping and shouting and begging to be let in, condemning themselves as worthless ingrates, asking for any punishment rather than this barbarian usurpation. They offered to surrender both the instigators of the mutiny and ‘those who had led the cry against the king’. They refused to disperse until Alexander dealt with them: it was a sitdown strike in reverse.⁵⁸ Having thus manoeuvred them into a suitably contrite mood, Alexander emerged from seclusion prepared to be magnanimous. At the sight of all those battle-scarred old toughs crying their eyes out he shed tears himself — probably from sheer relief.

One elderly, grizzled cavalry officer, who acted as spokesman, said their main grievance was Alexander's having made Persians his kinsmen, privileged to exchange the kiss of friendship, when no Macedonian had ever received such an honour. Here was one occasion that cost nothing. ‘But I regard you all as my kinsmen,’ the king exclaimed. At this many of those present, led by the old cavalry officer, came forward and kissed him: as a symbol of public reconciliation the gesture left little to be desired.⁵⁹ Afterwards they all picked up their arms (thrown down at the doors in token of supplication) and marched back to camp, bawling the victory paean at the tops of their voices; though one might have thought that if anyone had a right to sing that particular song just then it was Alexander himself.

Nevertheless, the Macedonians were still by far his best troops, and he had no hesitation in flattering them with a grandiose public gesture once he had gained his point. Another vast banquet now took place,⁶⁰ to celebrate a double reconciliation: between Alexander and his veterans, between Persians and Macedonians. By addressing the mutineers as ‘kinsmen’ the king had raised them, socially speaking, to the level of any Persian noble: this privileged status was emphasized at the banquet itself, where they had the seats of honour beside him and drank from the royal mixing-bowl. There is no hint here of that international love-feast, that celebration of the Brotherhood of Man which at least one scholar⁶¹ has professed to find in the banquet at Opis. Persians were placed firmlybelow Macedonians in order of precedence, and other races, again, below them. When Alexander made his famous prayer at the feast for ‘harmony [homonoia] and fellowship [koinonia] of rule between Macedonians and Persians’ he meant precisely what he said, and no more — nor is there much doubt which race he meant to be senior partner.^d

As soon as the celebrations were over, Alexander went ahead with his demobilization scheme — but on a far more massive scale than he had originally planned.⁶² No less than 11,000 veterans were discharged, a total which suggests that most of the younger time-expired men went with them. Alexander's intention had been to retain a Macedonian nucleus of 13,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry in Asia for garrison duties. After such an exodus he may well have had to supplement even this basic figure from Persian sources. The terms of discharge, moreover, were extremely generous. Active-service pay was to be continued throughout the period spent travelling home — an eloquent hint as to the probable conditions to be encountered en route. Over and above this, each man received a severance bonus of one talent. Alexander sent instructions to Antipater that special seats must be reserved for them in the theatre and at all public contests. Orphaned children of men who had died on campaign were to receive their father's pay.

At the same time, the king insisted that all native wives or concubines, together with their offspring, should be left behind — to avoid friction (he said) between them and the men's original families in Macedonia. He promised that the sons of these unions would receive, gratis, a good Macedonian-style education — ‘with particular attention to their military training’.⁶³ When they were grown up, he added, somewhat vaguely, he would bring them back to Macedonia. In fact, from these boys — there were about 10,000 of them — he meant to create ‘a royal army of mixed blood and no fixed domicile — children of the camp, who knew no loyalty but to him’.⁶⁴ He clearly did not plan any end to his campaigns in the foreseeable future. Aristobulus commented on his insatiable thirst for conquest, and his plans for western conquest as far as the Atlantic were well known.⁶⁵

As commander of the discharged veterans on their long homeward march Alexander chose Craterus, with Polyperchon as his second-in-command. But this apparently routine appointment was merely a prelude to the most coveted post in the empire. When Craterus reached Macedonia, he was ‘to assume control of Macedonia, Thrace and Thessaly, and assure the freedom of Greece’ (Arrian 7.12.4). In other words, he would supersede Antipater as regent — or rather, now, as viceroy. Antipater himself received orders to hand over his command, raise fresh drafts of Macedonians as replacements for those lately discharged, and bring them out to Babylon.

Antipater had known for a long time that the next blow might well be aimed at him. He had had a decade now in which to consolidate his position. His defeat of King Agis had left him supreme in Greece, without fear of opposition: it was after this victory that Alexander began to denounce him for ‘affecting royal pretensions’. He seems to have won his battle of wills with Olympias about the same time; the queen mother now retired to Epirus, whence she kept up a non-stop smear-campaign against Antipater in correspondence with her son. It is plausibly suggested (though by late and untrustworthy sources) that it was these letters from Olympias which finally drove the king to take action against his deputy in Europe.⁶⁶ Were there any more substantial grounds for suspicion?

Antipater had been deeply and genuinely shocked by Alexander's request for deification, and would have nothing to do with it: indeed, he opposed the entire orientalizing policy, root and branch. The king was jealous of his achievements: that remark about the victory at Megalopolis having been ‘a battle of mice’ must have warned the viceroy what was in store if he showed himself too successful a leader. Furthermore, he enjoyed the close friendship of Aristotle, who took equal exception to Alexander's divine pretensions. The king had lately (see above, p. 379) been dropping uncomfortable hints and threats to both of them in his correspondence. He seems to have convinced himself (or to have been bent on convincing others for his own ends) that Antipater, the one really powerful old guard noble left, was plotting to seize his throne. When someone praised the viceroy's frugal way of life, Alexander snapped: ‘Outside Antipater is plain white, but within he is all purple.’⁶⁷

Remarks of this nature would not take long to get back to Macedonia. Nor would the ambiguous text of the Exiles' Decree, or — if it came to that — the news of Craterus' sudden promotion to the office of viceroy, which almost certainly reached Antipater's ears before the official dispatch. It must have very soon become apparent to him that, on top of everything else, he was to be made the scapegoat for Alexander's repressive government in Greece, though he had done no more than carry out the king's own orders. His replacement by Craterus would be publicized as the dawn of a new democratic era, an argument to which the return of perhaps 40,000 democratic exiles would lend a certain superficial plausibility.

On the other hand, if Antipater obeyed the royal summons to Babylon he was a dead man, and knew it. Even at seventy-odd he had no great desire to be lopped off by another of Alexander's rigged treason trials. The executions of Callisthenes, Philotas,Parmenio, and his own son-in-law, Alexander of Lyncestis, had shown only too clearly which way the wind was blowing. The king's increasingly unpredictable temper, the disturbing signs of paranoia and megalomania which now characterized his actions, the ruthless purges he had so lately carried out — such things made it abundantly clear that Antipater must, at all costs, stay out of his clutches. Since the viceroy enjoyed considerable popularity in Macedonia (not least, we may surmise, through handling Olympias with such exemplary firmness), and, more important, had the whole Home Army behind him, he could afford to temporize. He may even have used these advantages to take some private counter-measures of his own.⁶⁸

Calculating that Alexander, for the moment at any rate, had no more desire for an open trial of strength than he did, Antipater ignored the king's summons, and instead sent out his eldest son Cassander to negotiate on his behalf (see below, pp. 472–3). Cassander's brief was a tricky one. Almost certainly he had instructions to make an on-the-spot assessment not only of the king's intentions but also of his mental state. He may, in addition, have had the delicate task of sounding out some likely senior officers, such as Perdiccas, regarding the possibility of a take-over. It is very probable that at some point on his journey he met Craterus and did a private deal with him, since when Alexander died, a year later, the veterans were still no nearer home than Cilicia. Antipater, we may take it, was not the only farsighted man who hedged his bets during those last few crucial months.

Nor is it hard to see why a persistent, widespread tradition in antiquity should claim that he and Aristotle now began plotting to remove the king by means of a fatal dose of poison.⁶⁹ One modern scholar, indeed, has advanced the very plausible theory that Alexander was eliminated by a junta of his senior commanders, including Perdiccas and Antipater (working, for the moment at least, in close cooperation), with Cassander as their liaison officer, and a share-out of the empire carefully agreed on in advance.⁷⁰ Even without such powerful support, Antipater's chances in the event of a straight showdown were by no means negligible. He was well-known (and well-liked) in Macedonia, whereas Alexander had been an absentee ruler for ten years. His troops were efficient, loyal, and fresh; Alexander's were worn out after endless campaigns, had been largely replaced by orientals (whom they detested), and had underlined their attitude by staging two full-scale mutinies. Antipater had every reason to feel confident.

Meanwhile he began, very discreetly, to look round for potential supporters among the Greek states. There were two powers, Athens and Aetolia, which strongly opposed the Exiles' Decree, because its enforcement would involve them in territorial losses (they were determined to prevent exiles being returned to Samos and to Oeniadae respectively). Alexander had plans to crush both of them for their stubbornness, and this made them potentially susceptible to a secret approach by the viceroy. Antipater negotiated a private alliance with the Aetolians, and may well have approached Athens as well: with her vast fleet and impregnable naval arsenals, the violet-crowned city would be indispensable to any general organizing the defence of Greece.⁷¹ But here Antipater had to tread warily. Until he learnt the result of Cassander's negotiations, he could not afford to commit himself too far.

It was now, early in July 324, that Harpalus appeared on the scene again, a political hot potato with a genius for mistiming his intrigues. If he offered his cash and troops to Antipater (as he must surely have done when he heard of the viceroy's dismissal) they were doubtless refused with more haste than politeness. As a revolutionary Harpalus showed himself peculiarly inept. No one else could have gone round peddling open revolt to men who were pinning their hopes on secret diplomacy. With bland cheerfulness, he next descended on Piraeus, followed by his entire private army, apparently in the naïve expectation of receiving a hero's welcome. Instead, he found the harbour closed against him. Many Athenians were only too anxious to do a deal with Alexander's defaulting treasurer — but not at the price of having their activities made quite so glaringly public.

By the middle of the month, however, Harpalus was back again. This time, more tactfully, he presented himself as a suppliant, with only three ships — plus 700 talents in cash. Since he still enjoyed honorary Athenian citizenship, such a formula more or less guaranteed his admission. Once inside the city he made contact with various leading politicians, and very soon collected massive support for his projected revolt. At this point envoys arrived, in rapid succession, from Antipater, Alexander, and Olympias, each firmly demanding Harpalus' extradition. (When the king's ambassador, Philoxenus, appeared in the assembly, Demosthenes said: ‘What will they do on seeing the sun who are dazzled by a lamp?’) Harpalus appealed for help to his old friend Phocion, even offering to deposit all his money in trust with him. Phocion prudently declined.

Argument raged as to whether Harpalus should or should not be surrendered — and if so, to whom. In the end Demosthenes devised a formula to stall everybody and leave the situation open. Harpalus himself was taken into what amounted to protective custody, and held under guard. His funds were turned over to a special commission (which included Demosthenes) and stored for safekeeping on the Acropolis. This move drew bitter recriminations from the war-party. Hypereides even complained that by arresting Harpalus they had thrown away the chance of a satrapal revolt. Though that chance had in fact been lost much earlier, and through no action of Athens', at least Harpalus was still alive and safe from Alexander's hands.

Demosthenes now left for Olympia, where the Exiles' and Deification Decrees were proclaimed about the beginning of August. As an official Athenian delegate, he was empowered to negotiate with Nicanor, Alexander's representative, on any matters arising from the decrees which affected Athens. Apart from territorial problems (in particular the status of Samos, where Athens had settlers) the future of Harpalus must surely have come up during these talks. Whatever agreements the two men made were, for obvious reasons, kept secret. But Alexander — somewhat grudgingly, it is true — did leave the Athenians in possession of Samos, so there was probably a quid pro quo involved, and the most obvious would be the surrender of Harpalus. If Demosthenes in fact struck such a bargain, he clearly did not intend to honour his side of it. No sooner was he back in Athens than Harpalus — with the connivance of persons officially unknown — contrived to escape.

This, of course, triggered off a major political scandal, which hardly diminished when it became known that of the original 700 talents only half had found their way to the strongroom on the Acropolis. Demosthenes was widely thought to have pocketed no less than fifty talents himself. Charges and counter-charges, involving most of the best-known public figures in Athens, were hurled to and fro with angry abandon. At first Demosthenes admitted receiving money from Harpalus, but said he had spent it on public business which he was not at liberty to divulge (perhaps as pay for Leosthenes' Peloponnesian mercenaries). Then he changed his mind and denied the whole thing. Finally, at Demosthenes' own suggestion, that venerable body the Areopagus — with which he had close and friendly ties — appointed a commission to investigate the affair: then as now a reliable stalling technique. Six months later its members still had not published their findings. Like everyone else, they were waiting on events.⁷²

Except in Athens and Aetolia, where it met with united hostility, the Exiles' Decree seems to have had a mixed reception (depending in each case on the political colour of the ruling party). Everywhere it brought a vast amount of administrative and legal problems in its wake.⁷³ Alexander's request for deification was quite another matter. Since it had little practical impact on their lives, most Greeks seem to have regarded it with tolerant indifference, a subject for witty aphorisms. Positive reactions varied from angry contempt to amused disdain. Only a few elderly conservatives, like Antipater, were genuinely shocked.

As we might expect, the debate at Athens — on the motion that Alexander should be recognized as a thirteenth god in the Olympian pantheon, like Philip — was a particularly lively affair. The most outspoken comment was that by the Athenian statesmanLycurgus. ‘What sort of god can this be,’ he asked, ‘when the first thing you'd have to do after leaving his temple would be to purify yourself?’ One opponent of the motion retorted, on being rebuked for youthful presumption, that at least he was older than the prospective deity. Demades, however, proposing — an act which cost him a ten-talent fine when Alexander was safely dead — uttered one shrewd word of warning to the opposition. While they were concentrating on heavenly matters, he told them, they might well lose the earth — meaning Samos. The hint went home. Even Demosthenes, a convinced opponent of deification on principle, now gave Demades his grudging support, ‘All right,’ he said, ‘make him the son of Zeus — and of Poseidon too, if that's what he wants.’⁷⁴The motion was carried.

To escape the torrid heat of the plains, Alexander moved on east from Opis to Ecbatana, the Great King's traditional summer retreat. During this journey a ridiculous quarrel broke out between the touchy Hephaestion — clearly not at all sweetened by Craterus' removal — and Eumenes, the chief secretary. Eumenes' staff had requisitioned a house for their master. Hephaestion threw them out and gave the billet to a Greek flute-player. Once again Alexander was forced into the role of peacemaker over a shrill and petty private quarrel.

At Ecbatana, as soon as all urgent business had been settled, the king staged a lavish and protracted festival in honour of Dionysus, with athletics, music, and 3,000 Greek performers specially brought over to provide entertainment. Every evening there would be an epic drinking-party. After one of these Hephaestion (whose capacity for alcohol seems to have at least equalled Alexander's) collapsed and was put to bed with a high fever. His physician prescribed a strict plain diet, and for a week Hephaestion followed it obediently. Then he began to feel better. Early one morning, as soon as the doctor's back was turned, he got up, wolfed a whole boiled chicken, drank about half a gallon of chilled wine, and — not surprisingly — became very ill indeed. Alexander, warned that he had taken a turn for the worse, came hurrying back from the stadium, where he was watching the boys' athletics. By the time he reached his friend's bedside, Hephaestion was already dead.

The king's alter ego has not gone down to posterity as a very sympathetic figure. Tall, handsome, spoilt, spiteful, overbearing and fundamentally stupid, he was a competent enough regimental officer, but quite incapable of supporting great authority. His most redeeming quality was his constant personal devotion to Alexander. To someone who asserted that Craterus showed him equal loyalty, the king replied: ‘Craterus loves the king; Hephaestion loves me for myself.’ Olympias, as one might expect, was violently jealous of her son's inseparable companion. When she was through with denigrating Antipater in a letter, she would often throw off a barbed or threatening paragraph directed against Hephaestion. In the end, with overweening self-assurance, Hephaestion sent her a personal rebuke, couched in the royal plural. Its final words were: ‘Stop quarrelling with us and do not be angry or menacing. If you persist, we shall not be much disturbed. You know that Alexander means more to us than anything.’

If Alexander meant more than anything to Hephaestion, so did Hephaestion to Alexander. The violence and extravagance of the king's grief went beyond all normal bounds. For a day and a night he lay on the body, weeping: no one could comfort him. General mourning was ordered throughout the East. All flutes and other musical instruments were banned in camp. Alexander cut his hair in token of mourning, as Achilles did for Patroclus, and even had the manes and tails of his horses docked. Hephaestion's wretched physician was crucified, and the temple of Asclepius in Ecbatana razed to the ground — a brisk gesture of retribution by one god against another. In heaven as on earth, Alexander gave incompetence very short shrift indeed.

The body was embalmed, and sent on ahead to Babylon, with a royal escort commanded by Perdiccas. A funeral of the magnificence which Alexander had in mind would take some time to prepare. It was finally celebrated in the early spring of 323, and every province of the empire contributed to its cost. The pyre was five storeys high and a furlong square at the base, a vast Wagnerian monstrosity decorated with gilded eagles and ships' prows, lions, bulls and centaurs. ‘On top of all stood sirens, hollowed out and able to conceal within them persons who sang a lament in mourning for the dead’ (Diod. 17.115.4).

After Hephaestion's death, no official appointment was ever made to the vacant command of the Companion Cavalry: it was still known as ‘Hephaestion's Division’. Many of the Companions — led by Eumenes — tactfully dedicated themselves and their arms to the dead man. Alexander had sent envoys to Siwah asking if it would be lawful to worship Hephaestion as a god. This was a little too much even for Ammon. No, the oracle replied; but it was permissible to establish a hero-cult in his honour. Alexander at once wrote off to the rascally Cleomenes, now his governor of Egypt (see above, p. 440), promising him a blanket pardon for all his many misdeeds provided he built appropriate shrines to Hephaestion in Egypt, and ensured that the name ‘Hephaestion’ appeared on all merchants' contracts. It now became fashionable to swear oaths ‘by Hephaestion’, while stories of visitations, cures and prophecies began to multiply. Finally, in disregard of Siwah's instructions, Hephaestion was actually worshipped as ‘God Coadjutor and Saviour’.

All this orgy of grief came remarkably expensive. The funeral pyre alone set Alexander back by 10,000 talents, and the elaborate tomb which he subsequently commissioned cost rather more than that: the millionaire's resources went to realize the megalomaniac's dreams. Just what sort of future the king had in mind for his lost favourite we can only surmise; but one fact is worth noting. During the month after Hephaestion's death, Roxane became pregnant, and the son she subsequently bore was Alexander'ssole legitimate heir.⁷⁵

After his providential escape from Athens, Harpalus returned to the Peloponnese, collected his squadron, and sailed for Crete — that home of all lost causes — where he was promptly assassinated. The murderer appears to have been a Macedonian agent, acting in collusion with Harpalus' second-in-command, and very probably at Alexander's direct instigation. The king would have been less than human had he let his defaulting and treacherous imperial treasurer go scot-free. Harpalus' steward, however, got away toRhodes, where the ever-watchful Philoxenus, now governor of Cilicia, soon had him picked up and interrogated. In this way Philoxenus acquired a full dossier on all Harpalus' private contacts. He thereupon — clearly with Alexander's approval, if not on his express orders — sent an official dispatch to Athens, listing every Athenian citizen whom Harpalus had bribed, together with the sums involved.

There is some doubt as to whether Demosthenes' name originally figured on this list, but it was undoubtedly there by the time (February 323) that the Areopagus finally published its findings on the Harpalus affair. With the death of Hephaestion Demosthenes had lost his friend and contact at court; the murder of Harpalus now removed any excuse for hushing matters up on security grounds. In March 323 an Athenian jury found Demosthenes guilty of accepting bribes, and fined him fifty talents. The sum was more than he could raise, and he suffered imprisonment instead. Later, however, he escaped — like Harpalus, with the connivance of his guards — and got away to Aegina, where he remained until Alexander's death.⁷⁶

The best panacea for grief is work; and there was only one kind of work which Alexander knew. In the winter of 324/3, by which time his misery had subsided into moody aggressiveness, he launched a whirlwind campaign — his last, as it turned out — against the Cossaeans. These were mountain tribesmen dwelling south-west of Ecbatana. The Achaemenid kings had paid them an annual sum for undisturbed passage through their territory, a practice which Alexander regarded with contempt (see above, p. 311). It took him about five weeks to exterminate them; this he called ‘an offering to the shade of Hephaestion’ (Plut. Alex. 72.3).⁷⁷ His mind was already full of plans for new conquests and adventures. Before leaving Ecbatana he sent a reconnaissance expedition off to theCaspian Sea, complete with carpenters and shipwrights. They were to cut timber in the great Hyrcanian forest, and build a fleet of Greek-style warships — ostensibly for a voyage of exploration, but in fact, no doubt, as a preliminary to that long-deferred campaign against the Scythians (see above, p. 359). Other projects, including one for the subjugation of the whole vast Arabian peninsula, were in active preparation.

By the time Alexander had finished with the Cossaeans, spring was approaching. The whole army now set out for Babylon, marching in easy stages, with frequent rest-periods. Embassies from Libya and South Italy — the first of many such — met them on the road, with honorific gold crowns and flattering speeches. A less cheerful note was struck by the Chaldaean seers, who warned the king that a great disaster would befall him if he entered Babylon. However, they added, he would escape this danger if he undertook to restore Bel-Marduk's ziggurat and temple. In any case he should avoid making his entrance into the city from the eastern side, i.e. facing the setting sun.

Here was a splendid piece of effrontery. Alexander had, in fact, ordered work to begin on this vast undertaking at the time of his first visit, seven years before (see above, pp. 303–4). Expenses were to be met from temple funds — the usual procedure in such cases. However, clearing the mound alone was estimated as two months' work for 10,000 men; and what funds there were had been going straight into the priests' pockets for a century and more. Once the project got started, this profitable source of income would dry up overnight. As a result, of course, almost nothing had been done. Now the priests were belatedly attempting to scare Alexander into footing the bill himself. The remarkable thing — and a significant general pointer to the climate of fourth-century religious belief — is how seriously he still took them. Though he must have known quite well, in his heart of hearts, what they were up to, nevertheless after some hesitation he decided to play safe.

While the bulk of the army marched on into Babylon, Alexander himself, together with his immediate entourage, pitched camp a safe distance outside. Philosophical sceptics like Anaxarchus, astonished by this display of superstitious nerves on the king's part, very soon talked him into a more rational frame of mind, and he made up his mind to ignore the Chaldaeans' warnings. Yet even now he still tried (though finally without success) to find a way into Babylon through the swamps and marshes lying west of the river. His entry was, it seems, followed by several appalling omens, and Alexander's opinion of Greek philosophers dropped to zero.⁷⁸

However, he had other distractions to take his mind off the machinations of Fate. Ambassadors arrived daily, from every corner of the Mediterranean world — and in particular (as we might expect when Alexander's plans for future conquest became known) from Sicily, Italy, Spain, North Africa, and Carthage. Some were in search of profitable alliances, some came to defend their governments against various accusations or claims, all bore hopeful official tributes and the statutory gold crowns or wreaths. In the end Alexander was so swamped by them that he laid down a strict — and revealing — order of priorities for granting audiences. Religious matters were dealt with first, gifts second. Next it was the turn of those with disputes for arbitration, or — less important — internal domestic problems. Right at the bottom of the list (a popular category, one suspects) were ‘those who wished to present arguments against receiving back their exiles’ (Diod. 17.113.3).

One country which, curiously, sent no delegation to Babylon was Arabia: ample excuse for a punitive expedition, Alexander claimed. Even Arrian finds this a little hard to swallow, and is prompted to comment that the real motive was simply ‘Alexander'sinsatiable thirst for extending his possessions’ (Arrian 7.19.6). Ships sent out to reconnoitre the Arabian coastline now came back with glowing reports of the country's size and prosperity, the heady scent of spice-trees blowing out to sea, well-placed islands and anchorages. Phoenician galleys were dismantled, carried across country on pack-animals, and reassembled on the Euphrates. A vast new harbour-basin was dug at Babylon, large enough, allegedly, to accommodate a thousand vessels. The Arabs, Alexander was told, worshipped two gods only, Uranus and Dionysus. On learning this, he pronounced that he himself was entitled to make a third in their somewhat limited pantheon, since ‘his achievements surpassed those of Dionysus’ (Arrian 7.20.1).^{79 e}

While his naval preparations went forward, Alexander busied himself with the celebration of Hephaestion's funeral. This pious task once discharged, he lost no time in getting outside the city-limits once more. Boarding a flotilla of small boats, he and his friends sailed down to inspect the marshy lower reaches of the Euphrates, with its canals and dykes and floodgates. Irrigation was a problem that had always interested him: before leaving Greece he had found time to organize the partial drainage of Lake Copaïs. He also wanted to examine the navigational facilities for his Arabian fleet, which included two vast Phoenician quinqueremes.

By entering Babylon and then quickly leaving again before any disaster could befall him, the king felt he had finally disproved the Chaldaeans' prophecy. But as the boats pushed their way through those stinking, overgrown, malaria-haunted swamps, an incident took place which caused both him and the soothsayers considerable uneasiness. As he sat at the tiller of his boat, a stray gust of wind blew off the sun-hat he was wearing, with its royal blue-and-white ribbon. The ribbon fluttered away, and caught in the reeds by an ancient royal tomb: all the old kings of Assyria were said to be buried here among the marshes. This was a grim enough portent for anyone. But the sailor who swam across and rescued the sun-hat unwittingly made matters worse by putting it on his own head to avoid getting it wet. Alexander gave him a talent as reward for his kindness, and then a sound flogging for lèse-majesté. Some accounts claim that he actually had the wretched man beheaded, ‘in obedience to the prophecy which warned him not to leave untouched the head which had worn the diadem’.⁸⁰

When the king returned to Babylon he found Peucestas there, with a force of 20,000 Iranians from Persia. Philoxenus had also arrived, at the head of a Carian contingent; so had Menander, from Lydia. The Arabian invasion force was beginning to take shape. Alexander now carried his integration policy one step farther. He re-brigaded the infantry battalions of the phalanx, using four Macedonians — as section-corporal and file-leaders — to twelve Persians. Macedonians were still to be armed with the sarissa, Persians with the bow or javelin. Perhaps it was fortunate that this extraordinary mixed force was never tried in action: it would surely have taken the most rigorous training and discipline (let alone the linguistic problem of communication) to make it even remotely effective. On the other hand, it did undoubtedly provide an effective safeguard against mutiny.

On the day that Alexander was organizing the reallocation of men to their new units, he left his parade-ground dais for a moment, with his aides, to get a drink. During his absence an escaped Babylonian prisoner mounted the dais, put on the king's royal cloak and diadem, and seated himself on the throne. When interrogated under torture as to his motives, he would only say that the god had put the idea into his head. Alexander suspected some kind of nationalist plot; and the incident is so oddly reminiscent of the Rite of the Mock King in the Babylonian Akitu (New Year) Festival, due at this time, that he may even have been right.⁸¹ Our sources, at any rate, are unanimous in reporting a number of such ominous portents shortly before Alexander's death. These are worth more consideration than they normally get. It is most often taken for granted that they were ex post factopropaganda, manufactured after the event. But in this case they are at least as likely to have been manufactured before the event, by those most interested in getting Alexander out of the way. They would certainly suggest that the king's death was due to divine or natural causes, rather than to human agency. The best prophet (to adapt Euripides) is he who knows what will happen in advance.

More embassies now arrived, this time from Greece, and their delegates behaved in Alexander's presence ‘as if their coming were a ritual in honour of a god’ (Arrian 7.23.2): from the king's viewpoint, of course, it was, and Greeks — in Alexander's day as in Juvenal's — would not be slow to fall in with the monarch's whims. In caelum iusseris, ibit. ‘And yet,’ Arrian adds, with ironic hindsight, ‘his end was not far off.’ With these envoys came Cassander, to negotiate with the king on his father's behalf, and very probably (if Alexander proved impervious to reason, or showed alarming signs of mental instability) to arrange, in concert with Perdiccas and other senior officers, for his discreet removal (cf. above, p. 460).⁸²

Antipater's son got off to the worst possible start in Babylon by bursting into nervous laughter when he saw a Persian prostrate himself before the royal throne. At this Alexander sprang up in a paroxysm of rage, seized Cassander by the hair with both hands, and beat his head against the wall. Later, when Cassander tried to rebut various charges that were now being brought against his father, the king accused him of philosophical hair-splitting, and threatened both of them with dire retribution if the accusations were well-founded. By so doing he may well have signed his own death-warrant; he certainly scared the young negotiator almost witless. Years afterwards, when he was himself King of Macedonia, Cassander still trembled and shuddered uncontrollably at the mere sight of Alexander's portrait, and the hatred engendered during that visit to Babylon lasted until his dying day.⁸³

The fleet's training programme was now in full swing, with competitive races up and down the river between triremes and quinqueremes, and golden wreaths for the winning crews. But Alexander, despite the prospect of a new campaign, was sunk deep inaccidie, and drinking so heavily as to cause his Greek doctor serious concern. He was, he admitted on one occasion, ‘at an utter loss to know what he should do during the rest of his life’ (Plut. Moral. 207D 8). On this the Roman emperor Augustus (himself no mean empire-builder) made a comment that many historians have since echoed. He felt astonishment, he said, ‘that Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire which he had won than to win it’. But for Alexander conquest and areté were all. The dull but essential routine of administration held no charms for him. The chaos he had left behind him in the East, even the threat of civil war at home, could not distract him from the lure of Arabia.⁸⁴

But the dream, this time, was to remain unfulfilled. On the evening of 29 May⁸⁵ Alexander held a banquet for his admiral Nearchus. The usual deep drinking took place. After dinner the king wanted to go to bed: an uncharacteristic preference, and one which, combined with his accidie, suggests that (for whatever reason) he had during the past week or two been feeling some kind of malaise. However, his Thessalian friend Medius⁸⁶ was giving a late party, and persuaded him to attend it: those sources which relate the poisoning theory (see below, p. 476) make Medius one of the conspirators.⁸⁷ After further carousing — in commemoration of Heracles' death — the king was given a large cup of unmixed wine, which he drained straight down, and instantly ‘shrieked aloud as if smitten by a violent blow’.⁸⁸ On this he was carried back to his quarters and put to bed.

Next day he had a high fever. Despite this he got up, bathed, had a siesta, and once more wined and dined with Medius. That night his fever was so intense that he slept in the bathing-house for the sake of coolness. The following morning (31 May) he went back to his bedroom, and spent the day playing dice. By the night of 1 June he was in the bathing-house again, and here, on the morning of the 2nd, he discussed the projected Arabian voyage with Nearchus and other senior officers. He was now in constant and increasing fever. By the evening of 3 June it became clear that he was critically ill. Nevertheless he had himself carried out next morning to perform the daily sacrifice, and to hold a briefing for his officers. On 5 June he himself was forced to recognize the gravity of his illness, and ordered all high officials to remain within call of his bedside.

By the evening of 6 June he was almost past speech, and gave his ring to Perdiccas, as senior marshal, so that routine administration would continue to function smoothly. At this, not altogether surprisingly, a rumour spread through the camp that he was in fact dead. His Macedonian troops crowded round the palace, threatening to break down the doors if they were not let in to see him. Finally a second entrance was knocked through his bedroom wall, and an endless file of veterans passed slowly through to take their leave of him. Sometimes he would painfully raise his head a little; more often he could do no more than move his eyes in token of greeting and recognition.

During the night of 9–10 June a group of his officers kept vigil on his behalf in the nearby temple of ‘Sarapis’ (probably in fact that of Bel-Marduk). But when they asked the god if it would help Alexander to be moved into the shrine, the oracular response came that it would be better for him if he stayed where he was. At this the king's friends, gathered round his bedside, asked him — it was, after all, a vital question — to whom he bequeathed his kingdom. Weakly Alexander whispered: ‘To the strongest.’ His last, all too prophetic words were: ‘I foresee a great funeral contest over me.’ Early in the morning of 10 June 323 B.C., his eyes closed for ever.

There is an extremely circumstantial story told about one of the king's companions, Apollodorus of Amphipolis, who served in Babylon and Ecbatana while Alexander was away in the East. On the king's return from India, Apollodorus was scared (as well he might be) by the ruthless purge of high officials which followed. He therefore consulted his brother, Peithagoras, a distinguished soothsayer, as to his own future, saying that those he particularly feared were Alexander and Hephaestion. Peithagoras wrote back telling him not to worry: both men would soon be removed from his path. Common sense suggests that whatever this seer may have said (by way of justifying his prescience) about lobeless sacrificial livers, the truth was that he had inside information of some sort; perhaps he had also been encouraged to create some suitable prophecies before the event (see above, p. 472). Hephaestion in fact died no more than a day or two after Apollodorus got Peithagoras' tip-off, and the manner of his death — heavy drinking followed by an inexplicable high fever — exactly duplicates Alexander's own end.

Now our ancient sources all record a tradition that Alexander was in fact poisoned: that Aristotle prepared the drug, that Antipater's son Cassander brought it to Babylon, and that it was administered to the king, in unmixed wine, by his cupbearer Iolaus — another of Antipater's sons.⁸⁹ Till recently this tradition was dismissed out of hand as preposterous propaganda. Obviously, it is not susceptible of proof. Equally obviously, when marshals like Craterus, Antipater and Perdiccas later fell out, they would not hesitate to use smear-techniques against each other: it has lately been argued, with some cogency, that our tradition represents an attempt by Perdiccas to incriminate Antipater.⁹⁰ But it is not a justifiable inference from this that no murder was committed: we may well be dealing with a smoothly executed coup d'état involving numerous conspirators.

The poisoning charge, as Badian rightly says, ‘if true … was bound to be denied or ignored, and if false, bound to be asserted’.⁹¹ But we must at least regard it as a strong possibility; and though the attempt to make Antipater and his clique exclusively responsible sounds like ex post factopropaganda, it nevertheless remains plausible enough per se, on the cui bono principle if for no other reason. Antipater had, after all, been superseded and summoned to Babylon. Aristotle's nephew had been executed, and he himself may well have been in danger. Both men were appalled by the king's orientalizing extravagances (as they saw them), and even more by his assumption of godhead. For them he had become an arbitrary, unpredictable tyrant; and as Aristotle himself wrote (Pol. 1295a), ‘no free man willingly endures such rule.’

A recent biographer, R. D. Milns, has also pointed out⁹² that the symptoms of Alexander's last illness, especially his lassitude and high body temperature, are compatible with slow strychnine poisoning. Strychnine is easily extracted, and can be kept effective for a long period — in a mule's hoof or any other less exotic container (the former being alleged by some of our ancient sources). Aristotle's friend Theophrastus describes its uses and dosage,⁹³ remarking inter alia that the best way to disguise its bitter taste is by administering it in unmixed wine. There is, then, much circumstantial evidence (and some direct testimony) which suggests that neither Alexander nor Hephaestion died from natural causes. If they did not, the odds are that both were eliminated by a junta of senior commanders (with Craterus, Perdiccas and Antipater prominent among those involved), in a ‘successful coup d'état, cleanly and ruthlessly executed’.⁹⁴

If the king was not poisoned, the chances are that he succumbed either to raging pleurisy, or else, more probably, to malaria (the latter picked up during his boat-trip through the marshes). In either case, advanced alcoholism, combined with the terriblewound he sustained in India, had finally lowered even his iron resistance to a point where he could no longer hope to survive. Whatever the truth concerning his last days, it is clear enough that at the time (a point not stressed as much as it should be) there were few men, and a fortiori fewer women, who lamented Alexander's passing. In Greece and Asia alike, during his lifetime and for several centuries after his death, he was regarded as a tyrannous aggressor, a foreign autocrat who had imposed his will by violence alone. When the news of his death in Babylon reached Athens, it was the orator Demades who crystallized public reaction. ‘Alexander dead?’ he exclaimed. ‘Impossible; the whole earth would stink of his corpse.’⁹⁵

The reaction was an all too predictable one. For 25,000 miles Alexander had carried his trail of rapine, slaughter, and subjugation. What he achieved of lasting value was largely unintentional: in political terms his trail-blazing activities through the Near East had a curiously ephemeral quality about them. The moment he moved on, rebellion tended to flare up behind him; and when he died — just as he himself predicted — the empire he had carved out at once split apart into anarchic chaos, while the next forty years saw an indescribably savage and bloody struggle between his surviving marshals. At a fairly early stage in these ‘funeral games’ (310) Cassander liquidated Roxane and her thirteen-year-old son, Alexander IV, so that the king's direct line became extinct.

Alexander may have demanded deification in his own lifetime, but by a kind of ironic rough justice he got mythification after he was dead. While his physical remains, smoothly hijacked by Ptolemy to Alexandria, lay on view in a glass coffin, a tribute to the local embalmers' art, his legend took root and flourished. When Aristobulus (see above, p. 417) could concoct pure fiction about recent and known events, to be recited in the presence of their actual protagonist, what would later romancers not achieve, once freed from the fear lest Alexander himself should pitch their effusions into the nearest river, and threaten to deal with them in similar fashion?⁹⁶ Immediately after his death, the king's character, reputation, and career were taken in hand by endless propagandists, would-be monarchs, historians, and a whole series of interested parties with some axe or other to grind.

He was not popular in Hellenistic times (though in art his portraiture, especially that by Lysippus, started a widespread iconographic trend, and rulers were fond of using his head on their coinage as a species of political endorsement), which may partially account for the fact that none of our main surviving accounts of him was written less than three hundred years after his death. By the time world-conquest came into fashion again, with Augustus, Alexander was already well on the way to becoming a giant, a demigod, the superhuman figure of romance who figured during the Middle Ages as Iskander the Two-Horned (a description which started from coin-portraits showing him wearing the ram's horns of Zeus Ammon).

Nothing did more to accelerate this process than the so-called ‘Alexander-romance’. Perhaps in the second century A.D., perhaps much earlier — some details suggest propaganda of a date not long after the king's death⁹⁷ — an anonymous writer who borrowed the name of Callisthenes wrote a sensationalized, semi-mythicizing version of Alexander's career which at once ousted all the more sober versions, and spread like wildfire not only through the Greek and Roman world, but far into the East. In this work, for example, Alexander was alleged to have been sired on Olympias by the Egyptian Pharaoh Nectanebus, himself changed into a magician for the occasion. By the fifth century A.D. Syriac and Armenian versions of this weird farrago were in circulation. Arabic and Persian poets drew on it, with the result that cities like Secunderabad in the Deccan preserve Alexander's name although he never came anywhere near them.

Yet the uncomfortable fact remains that the Alexander-romance provides us, on occasion, with apparently genuine material found nowhere else, while our better-authenticated sources, per contra, are all too often riddled with bias, propaganda, rhetorical special pleading, or patent falsification and suppression of the evidence. Arrian drew for the most part on Ptolemy and Aristobulus, who both (as we have seen) had powerful motives for preserving a parti pris version of the events in which they had taken part. No one has yet worked out a satisfactory analysis of the eclectic tradition on which Plutarch and Diodorus drew.⁹⁸ Curtius, for all his tedious rhetorical hyperbole, contains valuable material not found elsewhere, and not all of it can be written off as hostile material invented by Cleitarchus or the ‘Peripatetic tradition’, as Tarn would have us believe.⁹⁹

The truth of the matter is that there has never been a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ source-tradition concerning Alexander, simply testimonia contaminated to a greater or lesser degree, which invariably need evaluating, wherever possible, by external criteria of probability. This applies to all the early fragmentary evidence quoted in extant accounts as well as, a fortiori, to the authors of those accounts themselves. A. E. Housman's strictures, in the field of textual criticism, against ‘the reigning fashion of the hour, the fashion of leaning on one manuscript like Hope on her anchor and trusting to heaven that no harm will come of it’ could equally well be applied, mutatis mutandis, in the field of Alexander studies, where until recently Arrian received similar treatment. This was due, as Borza acutely noted,¹⁰⁰ to a process whereby scholars formed a rigid estimate of Alexander's character, and then ‘began to reject or accept evidence depending upon whether that evidence was consistent with their characterization’.

Such a circular process of argument will also leave judgement very much at the mercy of contemporary fashions and preoccupations, a fate to which Alexander (who has always tended to involve his interpreters' emotions at least as much as their reasoning faculties) is, to judge by the record, peculiarly prone. Everyone uses him as a projection of their own private truth, their own dreams and aspirations, fears and power-fantasies. Each country, each generation, sees him in a different light. Every individual biographer, myself included, inevitably puts as much of himself, his own background and convictions, into that Protean figure as he does of whatever historical truth he can extract from the evidence. The power and fascination of Alexander's character are undeniable, and operate as strongly on modern scholars as they did on his Macedonian veterans. The king's personality is so strong, so idiosyncratic, that it comes through despite all the propaganda, pro or con: the smears, the eulogies, the star-struck mythologizing.

Something can be done, by careful analysis, to sort out truth from propaganda and legend.^f But this is where the real difficulties begin, since each student inevitably selects, constitutes criteria, according to his own unconscious assumptions, social, ethical or political. Moral conditioning, in the widest sense, plays a far greater part in the matter than most people — especially the historians themselves — ever realize. So, indeed, does contemporary fashion. To the Romans of Augustus' day Alexander was the prototype of fashionable world-conquerors; they could call him ‘the Great’ without any sense of creeping inferiority, since their own Princeps had so signally eclipsed his achievements, both in scope and durability. Juvenal, writing slightly later, at a time when imperialpretensions had become something of a cliché, saw Alexander rather as a supreme instance of the vanity of human wishes.¹⁰¹

The medieval world, which enjoyed Juvenal's savage sniping at wealth and ambition, developed much the same theme. ‘And where is Alisaundir that conqueryd al?’ asked Lydgate; many other poets echoed his rhetorical question. With the Renaissance came a reversion to the Augustan picture. Great Captains — as the popularity of Plutarch's Lives demonstrates — were once more in the ascendant: the prevailing mood was summed up for all time by that marvellously evocative line of Marlowe's:

Is it not passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through
Persepolis?

Such an attitude survived largely unchallenged until the early nineteenth century. One event which then heralded a change in Alexander's reputation was undoubtedly the Greek War of Independence, following close on the French Revolution and the American War of Independence. The climate of educated liberal opinion had swung sharply round against the concept of imperialism; the fashion now was to endorse all subject races struggling for liberty, an ideological programme into which it would be hard to fit Alexander's career without some fairly thorough-going (not to say casuistic) reappraisal of the evidence.

This trend reached its logical climax in the famous — and still eminently readable — History of Greece by George Grote, a professional banker and passionate liberal, two things less mutually exclusive then than they have, it would seem, since become. Grote's hero in the fourth century is Demosthenes, whom he sees as embodying the true spirit of independence in the face of brazen and calculated imperialist aggression. He writes off both Philip and Alexander as brutalized adventurers simply out for power, wealth, and territorial expansion, both of them inflamed by the pure lust for conquest. Earlier historians, of course, had said much the same thing, but without Grote's note of moral censure.

Committed liberalism, however, was not a universal feature of nineteenth-century scholarship. European history moved in various channels, some more authoritarian than others: as usual, Alexander's reputation varied according to context. One milestone in Alexander studies was the publication of Johann Gustav Droysen's still immensely influential biography, Alexander der Grosse (1833). It has often been said, with justice, that this is the first work of modern historical scholarship on Alexander: Droysen was, undoubtedly, the first student to employ serious critical methods in evaluating our sources, and the result was a fundamental study. Once again, however, Droysen's own position largely dictated the view he took of his subject.¹⁰² Far from being a liberal, he was an ardent advocate of the reunification of Germany under strong Prussian leadership and after 1848 served for a while as a member of the Prussian parliament.

Thus we have a biographer of Alexander imbued with a belief in monarchy and a passionate devotion to Prussian nationalism: how the one aspect of his career influenced the other is, unfortunately, all too predictable. For the aspirations of independent small Greek states (as for their German counterparts) he had little but impatient contempt. In his view it is Philip of Macedon who emerges as the true leader of Greece, the man destined to unify the country and set it upon its historical mission; while Alexander carried the process one step farther by spreading the blessings of Greek culture throughout the known (and large tracts of the unknown) world. Plutarch's early essay on Alexander had made much the same point, contrasting the untutored savage who had not benefited from the king's civilizing attentions with those happy lesser breeds who had, the result of their encounter being that blend of Greek and oriental culture which Droysen, perhaps rather misleadingly, christened Hellenism.

As one contemporary scholar says,¹⁰³ ‘Droysen's conceptions were propounded so forcefully that they have conditioned virtually all subsequent scholarship on the subject.’ Whatever their views on the nature of his achievement, most subsequent biographers tended to see Alexander as, in some guise or other, the great world-mover. This view held up surprisingly well until after the Second World War. The late nineteenth century, after all, saw the apogee of the British Empire, and scholars who got misty-eyed overKipling in their spare time were not liable to argue with Droysen's view of Alexander. But this was also the heyday of the English gentleman, and much of that fascinating if often legendary figure's characteristics also now began to figure in their portraits —Alexander's becoming lack of interest in sex, his chivalrous conduct to women, his supposed ideals and aspirations towards the wider and mistier glories of imperialism.

The climax of this trend was, of course, the famous and enormously influential biography by the late Sir William Tarn, first published in the Cambridge Ancient History (1926) and then again in 1948, the narrative more or less unchanged, but this time supported by an immense volume of specialist research on various key topics. Tarn's basic picture resembled that of Droysen, but he added something new: a social philosophy, a belief on Alexander's part in the Brotherhood of Man. Why he took this line is clear enough. Tarn had an ethical dilemma to solve when he set about his task. By the time he came to write, imperial expansionism was no longer a tolerable programme in the minds of progressive intellectuals unless it had some sort of idealist or missionary creed to underwrite it. Tarn could not possibly, therefore, treat Alexander as a conqueror pure and simple and still regard him with unqualified approval. He had to find some ulterior goal for this imperial adventurer to pursue, and duly did so.

His solution, as it happened, lay conveniently ready to hand. The early 1920s were the heyday of the League of Nations, and as a gentlemanly late-Victorian liberal Tarn — along with Sir Alfred Zimmern, Gilbert Murray, and many others — was instantly swept away on a wave of international idealism. As in the case of Droysen (though with rather different results) Tarn's personal political convictions strongly affected his subsequent treatment of his hero. The League of Nations was proclaiming the Brotherhood of Man. Tarn brooded over the feast at Opis, laced it with some hit-and-miss proto-Stoicism, added a pinch of dubious early rhetoric from Plutarch (see above, p. 445), and duly evolved what I have always thought of as the League of Nations Alexander.

We can, if we so wish, criticize Tarn on the grounds of political naïvety, and this is, of course, the most significant and damaging weakness in a magnum opus which, by any standards, remains a major scholarly achievement. But in this connection there are two important points we should remember. The first, and perhaps the most important, is that his version proved immensely popular. True or not, it was what a vast majority of people actively wanted to believe, and they therefore believed it, despite the critical small-arms fire with which various hardheaded historians, both at the time and later, riddled Tarn's central thesis. The second consideration to bear in mind is this. Tarn passed his formative years at the close of a century of peace and affluence, which enjoyed a stability — financial, social, political — such as the world had seldom seen since the days of the Roman Empire under the Antonines. This epoch, which those who lived through it regarded as the climax of a rational process with its roots in the eighteenth century, we now know for the unique phenomenon it was. This awareness, it goes without saying, has profoundly modified our attitude to the problems of history.

Tarn and those like him held that the devils of emotion and irrationalism had been chained and tamed for ever. They believed in the supremacy of human reason, the essential goodness of human nature. The grim events of the past sixty years have taught us that man's life, alas, remains much the same as Thucydides or Thomas Hobbes saw it: nasty, brutish and short. The optimistic idealism characteristic of so much Victorian thinking bears little relationship to the overall sweep of human history. Towards the end of his life Tarn, in a groping way, began to realize this. The final paragraph of his original study in the Cambridge Ancient History was an impassioned plea for the ultimate indestructibility of the Brotherhood of Man as a perennial concept. In his 1948 edition, however, he appended a footnote which read: ‘I have left the latter part of this paragraph substantially as written in 1926. Since then we have seen new and monstrous births, and are still moving in a world not realized; and I do not know how to rewrite it.’

There we have the humanist's cri de coeur, the last despairing utterance of an idealist mind at the end of its tether. Behind the clumsy abstractions there stalk ghosts not laid but merely sleeping: horrors like the gas-chambers and the hydrogen bomb, the world of double-think and ruthless power-politics and Orwell's 1984, things which Thucydides and Alexander and Augustus understood very well in their own terms, but which Western Europe or America in the early years of this century simply could not conceive. Tarn further suffered from a sternly simpliste attitude to the psychological facets of morality: in his eyes murder was wrong, promiscuity was wrong, homosexuality was especially wrong, pure aggression without justification was wrong. Alexander, as a great man and a great hero, had to be cleared of such imputations as far as possible. It was only a short step from this axiom to the corollary that those traditions which presented Alexander in a morally good light were sound, while hostile testimony could be with confidence dismissed as false propaganda.

In short, the rise of psychology as a scientific discipline, combined with the return of totalitarianism as an instrument of politics, left Tarn's approach almost totally bankrupt in principle, if still a most impressive achievement over matters of detail (e.g.Alexander's eastern foundations) where ethical considerations did not apply. It is impossible to have lived through the middle decades of this century and not apply its lessons to the career of Alexander, which in so many ways shows remarkable parallels with those of other would-be world-conquerors who used propaganda as a deliberate tool and believed that truth was a commodity to be manipulated for their own ends.

Our picture of Augustus, as those who have read Sir Ronald Syme's classic work The Roman Revolution will be well aware, has been altered out of all recognition by this traumatic modern experience. It was hardly to be expected that the old rose-tinted view of Alexander would remain unaltered either. For post-war historians the king has once more become a world-conqueror tout court, the act of conquest being regarded not as a means to an end but an end in itself, carried out by a visionary megalomaniac serving the implacable needs of his own all-consuming ego.^g At the same time, perhaps inevitably, a Freudian element has crept into the study of Alexander's personality during recent years. Critics now point out that his distaste for sex, the rumours of his homosexual liaisons — in particular his lifelong friendship with that rather lumpish character Hephaestion and the sinister but beautiful young eunuch Bagoas — coupled with his partiality for middle-aged or elderly ladies and the systematic domination of his early years by that formidable matriarch Olympias, all suggest the presence in his nature of something approaching an Oedipus complex.

It hardly needs saying that this generation is no more free from the influence of its own overriding assumptions than any previous one; that perhaps once again we are reading into that chameleon personality what we ourselves fear or desire or find of obsessional concern in our own lives and society. As I suggested earlier (see above, p. 56), the Freudian interpretation of Alexander's motives can easily be overdone: an Adlerian power-complex would seem to fit the facts better. The real virtue of the new approach, it seems to me, is its basic pragmatism: it at least begins by looking at the historical facts without trying to fit them to a preconceived moral theory based on some arbitrary assessment of character. The picture which emerges in the course of such an investigation is hardly one to please idealists; but it makes a great deal of political and historical sense. To strip away the accretions of myth, to discover — insofar as the evidence will permit it — the historical Alexander of flesh and blood: this must be the task of any contemporary historian, and to the best of my ability I have attempted it.

For me, in the last resort, Alexander's true genius was as a field-commander: perhaps, taken all in all, the most incomparable general the world has ever seen.¹⁰⁴ His gift for speed, improvisation, variety of strategy; his cool-headedness in a crisis, his ability to extract himself from the most impossible situations; his mastery of terrain, his psychological ability to penetrate the enemy's intentions — all these qualities place him at the very head of the Great Captains of history. The myth of the Great Captains is wearing rather thin these days, and admiration for their achievements has waned: this is where we too become the victims of our own age and our own morality. Viewed in political rather than military terms, Alexander's career strikes a grimly familiar note. We have no right to soften it on that account.

Philip's son was bred as a king and a warrior. His business, his all-absorbing obsession through a short but crowded life, was war and conquest. It is idle to palliate this central truth, to pretend that he dreamed, in some mysterious fashion, of wading through rivers of blood and violence to achieve the Brotherhood of Man by raping an entire continent. He spent his life, with legendary success, in the pursuit of personal glory, Achillean kleos; and until very recent times this was regarded as a wholly laudable aim. The empire he built collapsed the moment he was gone; he came as a conqueror and the work he wrought was destruction. Yet his legend still lives; the proof of his immortality is the belief he inspired in others. That is why he remained greater than the measurable sum of his works; that is why, in the last resort, he will continue an insoluble enigma, to this and all future generations. His greatness defies a final judgement. He personifies an archetypal element, restless and perennial, in human nature: the myth of the eternal quest for the world's end, memorably summed up by Tennyson in the last line of Ulysses: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’