THREE
CLEITUS:
O let me rot in Macedonian rags
Rather than shine in fashions of the east.
Ay, for the adorations he requires,
Roast my old body in infernal flames
Or let him cage me, like Callisthenes.
Nathaniel Lee, Rival Queens (1677), Act 4.1.
Like many defiant gestures, the burning of Persepolis was soon to seem outdated. During the following summer, Alexander was to break with the past, a change so notable that it came to be explained by a corresponding change in his character; hence the history of the next three years was told both as Alexander’s victory against the tribes of Iran and as his defeat by his own growing pride and indiscipline. Of the two battles, that against himself is more intriguing, for though new strains and conflicts grew with the expedition, history would cast Alexander in the role which suited its preconceptions. The probable truth ran deeper, at times no less dark, at others certainly more subtle.
By the middle of May Alexander had left Persepolis and taken the main road northwards for the 450 miles to Hamadan, expecting to fight a pitched battle before he caught Darius. He was met on the way by 6,000 reinforcements which he had summoned the previous November, and which increased his army to more than 50,000, apart from the treasure-train and ever-increasing baggage. This was a cumbrous force if matters came to a pursuit of Darius rather than an open fight. Darius, however, could not make up his mind. Since Gaugamela he had fled by mountain road to Hamadan with some 10,000 loyal supporters, including his hired Greek troopers, and at first he had stayed his ground in the hope of discord in Alexander’s camp. But when his pursuers turned north to hunt him down he planned a flight towards Balkh in Afghanistan, distant home of many noble families of the empire; then, finding that Alexander was approaching too fast, he changed course again and decided to retreat from Hamadan and hold the nearby Caspian Gates with a draft of Scyths and Cadusians. A rumour of this reached Alexander, but neither the Scyths nor Cadusians would stir to the rescue; quarrels, therefore, broke out among Darius’s followers. Those with homes near Balkh were determined to retreat there, and so they arrested their king in the fertile plain of modern Khavar, meaning to escape east as fast as they could. Darius’s besetting fault had been his irresolution. This now was to cost him his life.
Meanwhile Alexander’s pursuits had varied with his information. As far as modern Isfahan he advanced steadily, taking the local tribesmen and a Persian palace in his stride; then, learning for the first time of Darius’s flight, he hastened to Hamadan, a long week’s march behind his prey and arrived there by mid-June, eager to gather supplies and continue northwards. Even in his haste he found time for two far-reaching changes: the proportion of the palace treasures which was being transported from Persia was to be centralized in Hamadan by a temporary guard of 6,000 Macedonians while all the allied Greek troops and Thessalian cavalry were to be released from military service. Able to replace his Greek allies with the recent reinforcements, Alexander thus took his leave of a myth which was becoming outdated; after its giddy climax at Persepolis, the slogan of a Greek revenge was not extended to the pursuit and capture of the Persian king, and in future the war was to be a personal adventure, not a public vendetta. On a private basis allies could enlist as adventurers and share in the excitement. Many did so, tempted by the promise of a bonus three times bigger than the splendid farewell paid to those who declined and received their agreed wages, a gigantic present in cash and an escort home to the sea coast, along with their spoils and souvenirs. Nine thousand talents and much finery were given away in a moment; lesser generals who found their units disbanded were given new commands, and Par-menion was to deposit the treasure with Alexander’s friend Harpalus in Hamadan and then march north-west with a large force against the Cadu-sians on whose help Darius had been depending. Expecting to meet in Gurgan, Alexander and his general took a brief farewell. They were never to see each other again.
By advancing northwards, Alexander was putting his quartermasters under severe strain. Persian documents prove that the main roads out to the Oxus were equipped with post-houses at every stage of the journey so that officials could enjoy regular meals if they had the right credentials. Alexander’s generals, then, could be sure of food whatever the landscape, but the men had their wagons and little else, for the traders who followed the army would not find it easy to offer them the customary market in a land of desert tribes and no cities. They were entering months of short rations where the army would survive best if divided, and there was also the problem of pay. The wonderfully lavish donations at Hamadan promised well for the future, but there is nothing to show how Alexander paid his men for the next six years. Some treasure, at least, seems to have accompanied him, and a travelling mint was used by later kings; the gold bullion for a year’s army pay would not have been impossibly bulky to transport from Hamadan to India, and a currency of silver ingots, valued by weight, appears to have been used across upper Iran under the Persian kings. The troops could be paid in this raw metal, for the total finds of Alexander’s coinage in upper Iran are not impressive, and the small units of everyday exchange are particularly rare. Plunder and payment in kind must have been extremely important, although we hear most about them only in later Roman narratives, and perhaps the men served for a promise of huge rewards on returning home. But the amounts and availability of money can never be calculated, and a crucial side to the king and his soldiers’ relationship is an insoluble mystery. At standard rates, which Alexander no doubt improved, the next six years were immensely expensive; the treasury could stand them, but even if the methods of their funding are unknown, and likely to remain so, its intricacies and accounting should not be forgotten.
For eleven days Alexander led a force picked for its mobility northwards at furious speed from Hamadan; as Arab caravans later allowed nine days for the journey, he must have turned off the main road, perhaps hoping to catch Darius down a sidetrack. Disappointed, he returned to the Royal Road and rode into Rhagae where he rested for five days; many soldiers had already dropped out exhausted and several horses had been galloped to death.
It was stragglers once more who revealed what had happened. Two Babylonians, one of them Mazaeus’s son, gave news of the arrest of Darius, and with a few picked horsemen Alexander at once raced eastwards to overtake the traitors. After two days’ reckless gallop, resting only in the afternoon heat, he had reached Darius’s last known camp on the edge of the Dasht-i-Kavir: Darius, he heard, had been stowed in a wagon and hustled as if for Shahroud by murderers who would abandon him in the last resort. Any time saved in the desert could prove decisive, so the fittest light infantry were mounted on horseback and ordered to follow a bold short cut across its fringes. Between dusk and dawn, forty miles of the salt-waste were covered, and at last as the morning heat began to take hold, a convoy of carts was to be seen in the green distance, shambling eastwards down the main road near modern Damghan. For the last time, the horses stumbled into a canter, enough at least to raise a dust and scare their unsuspecting prey. Only sixty men were at Alexander’s side as the convoy was halted and the carts stripped for inspection. But search though they might, Darius was nowhere to be found.
Wearily, a Macedonian officer strayed to look for water by the roadside; searching, he came upon a mud-daubed wagon, abandoned by its team. He looked inside, and there lay a corpse, bound in the golden chains which signified a Persian king: like Yazdagird III, last of the Sassanid dynasty, in flight from the Arab invaders a thousand years later, Darius III, last of the Achaemenid kings, had been stabbed and deserted by his own courtiers. Only in legend was he left enough breath to greet his discoverer and command Alexander’s nobility. Serving officers insisted, conveniently, that Darius had died before Alexander could see him. The assassins had fled too far to be caught.
Left with his enemy’s dead body, Alexander behaved remarkably. He stripped off his own cloak and wrapped it round the corpse. Darius was to be taken to Persepolis for a proper royal burial. The Persian prisoners were interviewed and the nobles were separated for release: the grand-daughter of Darius’s royal predecessor was restored to her husband, a local aristocrat, and within days, Darius’s own brother was enrolled as a Macedonian Companion. And yet, alive, Darius had been denounced as Alexander’s enemy, ‘who began their enmity in the first place’, who ‘would regain his family and his possessions only if he surrendered and pleaded on their behalf’: it was a complete change of tone, and the soldiery must have watched it with amazement. Hugely generous gifts from the treasure captured with the convoy were distributed to reassure them.
By the death and capture of Darius, Alexander saw himself made heir to the empire which he had formerly come to punish. But the kingship of Persia was not to be assumed lightly; its roots went deep into history, and like the empire’s government it had drawn freely on the background of its subject peoples. Alexander was about to succeed to traditions which he had already affronted. He would never come to terms with them, but it is important to realize what their example meant, and why he could not do them justice.
If Greeks had long denounced the Persian monarchy as slavish, and even explained it in terms of Asia’s enfeebling climate, it was nonetheless a commendably versatile government. ‘The Persians’, Herodotus had written, ‘admit foreign customs more readily than any other men’, and the more that is known of them the more he is proved right. Two hundred years before Alexander, they had overthrown the empire of the Medes and annexed the ancient civilization of Babylon, but in each case they had availed themselves of their subjects’ experience. From the Medes, they had acquired the arts of courtly comfort and secluded kingship, besides a legacy in language and architecture which is only now beginning to be recovered: from Babylon and Assyria, they had borrowed the ancient royal myths, whether the Tree of Life or the slaying of the Winged Lion of evil, which gave such sanctity to Persepolis, while at a humbler level, they had absorbed the law and bureaucracy for which their own illiterate pastoral life had not equipped them. As always, new needs had been met internationally: scribes from Babylon and Susa had kept the king’s accounts in a language he could not speak, Greeks had served as his doctors, sculptors, interpreters and dancers, Carians and Phoenicians had manned his navy; the Magi of the Medes had managed his prayers and sacrifices, at least initially, while garrison service in the satrapies had brought Indians to Babylon, men from the Oxus to Egypt, Greek sailors to the Persian Gulf and Bactrians from outer Iran to Asia Minor. But skills and government service were not the end of this exchange.
Moving west to rule in foreign Babylonia, the Persian nobility had freely intermarried with their subjects. Within two generations, the native business documents are rich in mixed Persian and Babylonian names, while even among the nobility, a Persian might marry a Jewess, an Armenian or an Egyptian and have his marriage legally witnessed by Babylonians, Arabs or Hebrews. Under Persian rule Babylonia had become a land of half-castes, while even the Persian king had been known to maintain a Babylonian mistress. In the capitals of the Empire, in Memphis no less than Babylon, there were foreign quarters named after the nationality of their inhabitants, exactly as in the cities of Alexander and the Greek kings which succeeded them, but these segregated areas had not isolated one people from another and Persian Babylon, especially, was an integrated world. This integration did not stop at marriage: at the Persian court it can still be detected in the carvings of Persepolis, an accurate record of the Persian empire’s officials. The Royal Guards of the private palace quarters are all of them Persians, distinguished by their gold spear-butts and commanded by Persian Staff Bearers. But immediately outside, in the public halls and along the grand staircases, the staff-bearers are often Medes, while Median spearmen are mixed with subjects from Susa, seat of the old Elamite empire, in the nine other ‘thousands’ of the Immortal Guards, who serve as the élite troops of the king. With the court police, the pattern is even more impressive. The king employed Whip-bearers who controlled the crowds when he processed in public; besides their whips of office, they carry carpets and the royal chair, proof that they also supervised the king’s comfort. And yet, at Persepolis, every one of these high officials is shown by his cape and spherical headdress to be a Mede; just as Medes supervise the king’s footstool, so Median grooms arrange for his horses, while Elamites from Susa attend to his chariots. Half the envoys from the empire are ushered in to the king by Persian ushers, half by Medes; before the King, the Steward of the Household makes his report, bowing slightly in audience, and yet he, the highest court official, is a Mede. The Persians had not excluded the peoples whose empires they supplanted: from the natives of Susa, they had recruited scribes and foot-guards, as well as borrowing the style of their pleated robes and mantles, their daggers, bow cases and buttoned shoes. From the Medes, well known for their use of cosmetics, their gaily coloured trousers, earrings and high-heeled boots, they had attracted officials to make their court comfortable and to maintain their king in properly secluded style.
Without this Persian background Alexander’s own plans for government have been made to seem unnecessarily radical. Already in summer 330 there were signs that the wisdom of such integration was no more lost on him than on his Persian predecessors: he was reappointing Orientals to the satrapies east of Babylon, where they knew the language and the tribesmen, and even the most conservative Greek pamphleteer had advised such a policy to Philip, fighting the Greeks’ crusade; he had maintained Persians as Honoured Friends around him; he now respected the dead Darius, just as Darius’s ancestors had once respected the kings they replaced, whether live or dead. To administer his conquests he needed the same expertise as the Persians before him, both locally in Babylonia, where taxes passed through a complex sequence of collectors and canton officials, and also at the seats of government, Susa or Hamadan, where the silent majority of supply officers, treasurers, foremen, land agents and accountants had long served the Persian nobility, entirely ignored by Greek historians. Local documents prove that under Persian rule as many as 1,350 labourers from the treasury could be despatched on a single consignment from Persepolis, while a backlog of work could keep scribes up to six years behind with receipts and registrations. Like the Persians, Alexander would surely reappoint this foreign bureaucracy and workforce of serfs, if only for the sake of his taxes and supplies: what he did for the chancellery, he should now do, logically, for his court, and as the Persians had once treated the Medes, so now he should go on to treat the Persians.
But the sequence was not so smooth as it sounded. On his own side stood the veterans of thirty years’ fighting, brought up under Philip and often resentful of Greeks, let alone of Orientals. They had not spent their youth with friends who could speak Persian or with tutors who wrote on the Magi. They wanted power for themselves, treasure and perhaps an end to their marching. They had not expected to share their monarchy, any more than the Greeks had expected their crusader to become the Persian King. Educated Greeks had shown no more fondness for the idea of the barbarian than for that of the lower classes: there were Macedonian officers who might feel likewise, especially if Alexander threatened their status with Orientals.
Their agreement would only be hastened by the features of Persian kingship, for if the Persian court was a mixed society, the king himself was set above it in venerable seclusion. Access to him was controlled by Staff Bearers and Chamberlains, and during an audience the visitor’s hands were to be kept strictly inside his cape. It was believed by Greeks that no man could be admitted unless he had first washed and dressed in white raiment; certainly, it was death for a subject to sit on the King’s golden throne or walk down the royal carpet. Once admitted, he brought his hands to his lips in a respectful gesture which Greeks reserved for their gods, while suppliants or the very humblest classes also went down on their knees. During the court’s official dinners, the king dined behind a veil in the company of his wife, mother and royal brothers: he drank specially boiled water, ate a cake of barley and only took wine from an egg-shaped cup of gold. Members of the court might even set aside food from their table as an offering to his revered spirit. Throughout the king’s lifetime, a royal fire was kept alight in his honour and only dowsed when he died: at his funeral, his surviving staff-bearers were killed beside his pyre. Though not worshipped as a living god, he was the chosen and protected favourite of Ahura-Mazda and he dressed to suit his majesty. He rode in an ornate chariot, pulled by white horses; his tunic was striped with white and purple and worn beneath the robe of gold embroidery reputed to be worth 12,000 talents; his necklace and bracelets were gold; he was shaded by a parasol and accompanied by a fly-whisk, while his headdress was smooth and rounded, like a tall but brimless top-hat; his shoes were padded and dyed pale saffron, without buckles or buttons and his girdle was woven of pure gold thread. He moved like a god among men, distant but lonely and often insecure.
However respectful of the dead Darius, Alexander could never compete with this religious aura. His officers would not understand it, and already after Gaugamela, his publicity was flouting it deliberately: his coinage from mints in western Asia showed a lion-griffin, Persian symbol of chaos and evil, but so far from being stabbed, as at Persepolis, by the Persian king, the griffin was itself shown slaying Persians, a direct reversal of their royal myth. When a Persian king took the throne, he attended Pasargadae, site of King Cyrus’s tomb, and dressed in a rough leather uniform to eat a ritual meal of figs, sour milk and leaves of terebinth. This ancient ceremony recalled old legends of Cyrus’s youth in the once nomadic society of Persia; after his meal, the new king even assumed King Cyrus’s cloak. Alexander knew from Greek authors and Persian friends how Cyrus’s memory was revered by Persians, and soon he would show a concern for Cyrus in his own publicity. But only in his Romance is he said to have issued a proclamation to all Persians as the new King of Asia that he would maintain their traditions as before. He is not known to have learnt to speak Persian fluently and although he soon employed eastern Magi, he never ordered this traditional royal ceremony for himself. He was a foreigner who had burnt Persepolis and he could not understand such old nomadic rituals. But the rituals were to survive long after his achievements had been forgotten.
However, he was also approaching outer Iran where a due measure of tradition would be expected of any claimant to the Persian kingship. In the process Alexander might offend his elderly generals, but it ought to be possible to compromise between Macedonian scruples and Oriental expectations. Had he been feeble or unimaginative, he would never have tried. He was neither, and within weeks his court was alive with gossip and conjecture.
First he made sure of his circumstances. Leaving the site of Darius’s murder, he returned to the main body of his troops and after a short rest led them up from the edges of the desert to the passes of the Elburz mountains, heading north for the Caspian Sea through forests of oak and chestnut, hill ravines and the lairs of wolves and tigers. Darius’s courtiers and the Greek troops who had served him to the end were known to have fled to these thickets for refuge. Within a week, the former Vizier, one of Darius’s murderers, had promised surrender in return for a pardon which was later attributed to the charms of his accompanying eunuch. The pardon belonged to a less self-indulgent policy, whereby those who surrendered should be spared, for Alexander began by caring less for the punishment of Darius’s murderers than for the luring of Persian nobles out from the forests on to his staff, where they could help with the problems of language and government. The eunuch was indeed a figure to be respected, for of all the finds in the months near the Caspian, none was to prove more precious or remarkable; with Bagoas the Persian, Alexander began an affair which lasted for life.
The name Bagoas was rich in recent and unpleasant memories; some ten years earlier, a Bagoas, also a eunuch, had made his name as a Persian general in Egypt and then served in western Asia where he had sent Hermeias, Artistode’s first patron to his death. He had then poisoned Darius’s predecessor and made Darius king, only to be poisoned himself, some said, by way of thanks; his famous tree park at Babylon had now been bestowed upon Parmenion. But Alexander’s Bagoas is said to have been young and extremely handsome – a list of Alexander’s officers honours ‘Baguas, son of a certain Phamuches’, who perhaps had connections with the hellenized coast of Asia. If so, he might have been bilingual and was probably no more than a young court eunuch beloved for his airs and graces. What Hephaistion thought of him can only be imagined, for the high importance of Bagoas was left in decent silence by Alexander’s friends. So the most startling of all Alexander’s intimates is also the least known, but his role must not be played down; a willing source of Persian information, he was also the bluntest proof that Alexander found Orientals’ company congenial, and within weeks, Bagoas could be seen as the earliest sign of new times.
Continuing to lure supporters from the wilds, Alexander offered terms of new employment to the 1,500 Greek mercenaries who had stayed devotedly beside Darius. First, they argued; then they took up the suggested bargain, which still recognized Alexander as allied Leader. Those who had joined Persia before Philip had declared war were to be left free, while those who had fought against the decrees of the Greek allies were to enlist in Alexander’s army at the same rate of pay. Rich and unchallenged, Alexander had moved far from the massacre of Greek ‘rebels’ at the Granicus; he then left briefly to hunt out the surrounding hill tribes; for one glorious moment, they managed to ambush Bucephalas, but a furious threat of devastation from Alexander caused them to surrender and give the horse back. This brusque treatment of the mountain tribesmen could only have impressed his new Persian friends, for their kings’ authority had long foundered against such inaccessible peoples.
Reunited, Alexander and his troops marched down the mountain slopes to Zadracarta, Gurgan’s capital, close to the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. He had entered the lush jungle of a tropical landscape, abounding in supplies and freshened by the luxury of summer rains: no Greek had seen it before, and his officers were suitably impressed: they noted its silver firs, its sappy oak-trees, and the precipices by the seashore, over which the ‘rivers poured, leaving room for the natives to feast and sacrifice in the caves below, basking in the sun-light and looking up at the water passing harmlessly above, while before them, stretched the sea and a shore so damp that it was grassy and alive with flowers’. The sea itself was no less intriguing. By command of the first King Darius, it had been explored two hundred years before by Scylax, a sailor from Caria, whose small boat had reached its northern shores and proved that another land-mass lay beyond. The facts were not well known in Greece, though Aristotle could have told them to his former pupil, and as many believed that the Outer Ocean of the world flowed round the northern coast of Asia, Alexander now wondered whether the Caspian was perhaps a gulf of Ocean. For the first time, he had the sensation of standing at a possible edge of the world, and whether or not such excitements mattered to him, at the end of his life he would return to a plan to discover its truth. His followers, meanwhile, had tasted the Caspian’s water and noted its extreme sweetness, still manifest today; they were also amused by the number of its small water-snakes. But they left its extent uncertain, and for fifteen days they relaxed at Zadracarta while Alexander sacrificed to his customary gods and held the first athletic games the people of Gurgan had ever witnessed. During that fortnight two events are reported, the one as romantic as the other was momentous.
To the shore of the Caspian, it was said, came the Queen of the Amazons, accompanied by 300 women whom she prudently left outside the Macedonian camp. Single-breasted and trained in war, she told Alexander she wished to bear his child. Bagoas notwithstanding, ‘the passion of the woman, being keener than the King’s, made him spend thirteen days in satisfying her desires’. But none of Alexander’s staff historians was prepared to support this disputed story, not even his chief court usher who might have admitted the queen to his presence, and it must therefore be dismissed as a legend. The Greeks had long located the Amazons near the Black Sea, not without reason as the tribes there were matriarchal and ruled by women. But the Black Sea was hundreds of miles away from the Caspian, and the visit of the Amazon queen was invented by two historians who had first confused this geography. Perhaps a nearby queen did call on the camp; certainly, the Amazons were too famous for romantics to admit that Alexander had not received them.
Though spared an affair with an Amazon, Alexander had not been sitting idle. At Zadracarta, Persian noblemen continued to join him from their refuges in the Elburz foothills: some of them were former satraps; one, Artabazus, was a former guest-friend of Philip’s court. Father of Barsine, Alexander’s Persian mistress taken at Issus, he brought no less than seven sons, the interpreters and minor officials of the future. The policy of free pardons and the affair with Barsine had usefully added to Alexander’s growing stock of Orientals. This same pool of Persian collaborators remained central to his plans for his Empire throughout his life. It was prudent and polite to make this new nobility feel at home, and in conversation, they would have discussed what they had always known in the days of a Persian king. Alexander hesitated no longer; as Darius’s heir and Bagoas’s admirer, he began to wear certain parts of the Persian royal costume.
It is important to realize exactly how he did it. He refused such Median excesses as the royal trousers or sleeved overcoat and he is never known to have worn the rounded tiara or royal headdress. He contented himself with the purple-and-white striped tunic, the girdle and the head-ribbon or diadem which had formerly been worn by the king and by his Royal Relations. Now, the diadem was confined to the king alone and either worn round his purple Macedonian hat or on occasions wound round his bare head. His Companions were given similar purple hats and cloaks bordered with purple, like the official Wearers of the Purple at the Persian court; they were invited to adorn their horses with ornate Persian harness and saddlery. Henceforward access to Alexander was controlled, as in Persia, by ushers and Staff Bearers, whose chief officer was the Greek Chares from Lesbos, presumably bilingual, who later wrote colourful memoirs. Darius’s concubines are also said to have been reinstated, ‘three hundred and sixty-five in all’, according to the Greeks, who liked to number Persian habits as equal to the days in the Babylonian year which they followed. The concubines are never mentioned again and they are unlikely to have been at hand in the wilds of the Caspian Sea. But sooner or later, no doubt, Alexander did recruit them.
Such a rearrangement was bound to cause comment. ‘It was now’, wrote his Roman historian, four hundred years later, ‘that Alexander gave public rein to his passions and turned his continence and self-control to haughtiness and dissipation.’ This well-worn theme entirely missed the point, for Alexander was not even the first Greek king to have worn the diadem or Persian dress. For the past sixty years, the tyrants of Syracuse in Sicily had successively taken it up, not because of any connection with Persia, but because they believed, wrongly, that the Persian king was thought to be a living god, and they too wished to be seen by their dress to represent the god Zeus on earth. These nuances of religion must not be discounted for the casual Greek observer who now saw Alexander in a diadem and knew already how he emphasized his relationship with Zeus. They were not a part of Alexander’s purpose: that was political, but nonetheless modest. He had refused the showiest Persian clothing because his officers would resent it, and he only intended to wear the remainder in the presence of Orientals. But by the diadem alone he set a lasting fashion: it would be worn by his Successors, when each laid claim to his Asian heritage, and 150 years after his death it was still being imitated by the distant Greek kings of Bactria, cut off from the West in outer Iran. He himself is said to have called it ‘the spoils of victory’, but it was also a concession to his new position: as a king, not the agent of Greek revenge, he was bound for the heartland of Iranian tribes and he had assumed for sparing use a part of the costume to which his subjects were accustomed. After three heavy victories, these few Persian customs may seem an irrelevant gesture. But more were to follow, and even these few mattered: when Julius Caesar planned to invade the Parthian empire in Alexander’s footsteps, there were those at Rome who wished him, as a fit precaution, to be attired in the diadem and Persian costume before he even entered Asia.
To Alexander’s staff these changes told of new ambitions. Alexander had already talked of conquering Asia, but as heirs of Darius, they now saw that Asia would mean the whole Persian empire and that they could not turn back until this much, at least, had been made their own. It would be a hard march, for Alexander had set his heart on two kingdoms, and a detail from his chancellery made this all too clear. Letters, as always, needed his daily attention, but no longer did he head them with the forms of polite greeting, except when writing to Antipater and to Phocion, a trusted Athenian politician; elsewhere, throughout, he used the royal ‘We’, the title of an absolute monarch. Letters which were bound for Europe he sealed with his former ring, but those which referred to Asia were stamped with the ancient seal of the Persian kings.
Such ambitions would not have developed unless Alexander had tested his ground. Three weeks before, he had been awaiting the rest of his army after Darius’s capture near Damghan; he was tired and he had just received news that his brother-in-law, Alexander, King of Epirus, had died in battle in southern Italy. He rested his men for mourning by the road which led to Khavar; for three days they encamped in a fortress which they renamed Hecatompylos, ‘city of a hundred gates’, because of its position on the local roads. A century later, the fortress had grown to become the earliest capital of the Parthian empire, and though many had searched for its famous site, it was not until 1966 that the disputed measurements of Alexander’s own surveyors helped in its rediscovery. Three miles south of the road to the Caspian Gates stand a group of tall mounds at Shah-i-Qumis, thrown into clifflike prominence by the flatness of their arid plain. To the north and west rise the distant peaks of the Elburz mountains, but on all other sides the landscape is bare to a treeless plateau and the salt waste desert of Dasht-i-Kavir. It was here that Alexander assembled his troops and asked them for silence beneath the July sun. In the Hundred-gated city he told his men of their many past victories, of the need to follow up a conquest, of the ease with which the East would be theirs. They had seen their crusade end, and already Darius’s death had started them talking of home. But Alexander made light of such common rumour. He carried his soldiery with him until their exhaustion left them and their ambitions seemed to stretch to the far horizon. Then, having roused their fervour, he paused. There was a hush, the reward of the greatest speeches: like the swell on the sea, came the answering shout of agreement: Lead us; lead us, wherever you will.