In Persian legend, Alexander was said to have soon sent Roxane away to Seistan, where he gave her its citadel as a wedding present to keep her safe when the men withdrew to the Punjab; this, however, is dubious, as Roxane did come to India and the walls of Seistan’s capital probably belong to a later date. Presumably, she stayed in camp, where she would have assisted at one of the most misrepresented episodes in her husband’s life. This cannot be understood without its Persian background, proof of the change in Alexander’s plans. Once understood, it is a small but revealing glimpse of his mood: it turns on the matter of a courtly kiss.
Unlike the Chinese, who had no word for kissing, the kingdoms of the ancient east had long included a term for kissing gesture in their court vocabularies. This gesture was practised in Assyrian royal society, whence it was adopted first by the Medes, then by the Persians; its equivalent was known in Greece, probably as a borrowing from the East, and the Greeks described both their own and the Orientals’ practice by one and the same word, proskynesis. The only descriptions of it were written under the Roman empire, but they fit well enough with early Greek and Persian sculpture: the payer of proskynesis would bring a hand, usually his right one, to his lips and kiss the tips of his fingers, perhaps blowing the kiss towards his king or god, though the blowing of kisses is only known for certain in Roman society. In the carvings at Persepolis, the nobles mounting the palace staircase or the attendants on King Artaxerxes’s tomb can be seen in the middle of the gesture, while the Steward of the Royal household kisses his hand before the Great King, bending slightly forwards as he does so. These Persian pictures and the Greeks’ own choice of words show that in Alexander’s day, proskynesis could be conducted with the body upright, bowed or prostrate. The Romans believed that when Alexander asked for proskynesis from his closest friends, he expected them to grovel before him. But in Persia, as in Greece, it was only the suppliant or abject inferior who would go down on his hands and knees. Only if courtiers and aristocrats fell into disgrace or begged a favour would they prostrate themselves before the king. Proskynesis itself did not require it.
In Persia and Greece its social uses varied. In Greece it was a gesture reserved for the gods alone, but in Persia it was also paid to men: ‘When the Persians meet one another in the street,’ wrote Herodotus, with one of those deep insights into foreign customs which make him far the most congenial of Greek historians, ‘in the following way, a man can tell whether they meet as social equals. If they are equal, they kiss each other on the mouth, instead of speaking a word of greeting; if one is slightly inferior to the other, he only kisses him on the cheek; if he is far less noble, he falls down and pays proskynesis to his superior.’ There was another category, not to be seen in the street: a meeting with the Great King himself. Because the king was superhuman in his majesty, he receivedproskynesis from everybody; however, courtiers and royal Relations were noble enough to be spared the accompanying curtsey or prostration, and so they merely bowed. The Greeks noted this custom, and because they themselves paid proskynesisonly to the gods, by a little sophistry some could suggest that the Persian king was considered to be a god himself. Intelligent Greeks knew this to be mistaken: in Persia proskynesis was also paid by the lower classes to the upper class, and not even in Persia was the entire upper class divine. It was a social gesture, but nonetheless a deeply traditional one.
At Balkh, Alexander decided to try out proskynesis among his Macedonian friends. The decision was a bold one: proskynesis had caused trouble in the past when Greek met Persian, and it was open to misinterpretation, for whatever the Persians thought, it was not the way that a free Greek liked to greet a mortal. It had been left to the most radical of the Athenian dramatists, Euripides, to show proskynesis being paid on the stage to a man and even then he produced it as a foreign extravagance. At Persepolis, in the Treasury, the hands of officials paying proskynesis are the worst-damaged feature in sculptures which are otherwise well preserved: Alexander’s army may have mutilated them on purpose, thinking this one gesture absurd. Greek ambassadors to the Persian court had been known on occasions to take an equally defiant stand: one had sent a letter in to the king, rather than pay proskynesis before him, and another was said to have dropped his signet ring, so that he could bow down to pick it up and seem respectful by his movement, though the true kissing gesture was missed in the course of bending forwards. Such stubborn refusals were less a matter of religion than of pride; if Greeks also came to Persia as prisoners or suppliants, at least in the eyes of the king, they were expected to go down on hands and knees as well as paying proskynesis, and the double disgrace had been known to prove too much for them. Aristotle had been told of an elephant trained to pay proskynesis to a king, no doubt by blowing the kiss with its trunk as Aristotle did not believe that elephants could bend both their front legs at once. But free Greeks were not brutes, and what befitted an elephant did not become a Hellene.
Nevertheless, Greeks like Themistocles and Alcibiades had been sensible enough to do as the Persians when in Persia, and it was in this spirit that Alexander broached the subject of proskynesis to his Companions. As Darius’s heir, he would have been receiving such homage from his Iranians for the past three years: it came naturally to them, just as it did to Darius’s queen when taken prisoner at Issus. Alexander had continued to attract more and more Iranians as hostages or helpers. Iranian brigades had been recruited to fight in India and at court the seven sons of elderly Artabazus had now been joined by Roxane’s brothers and sisters, Spita-menes’s daughter, many local barons and a grandson of the last King Artaxerxes; Alexander even had his own two Magi and a fugitive rajah from the Punjab. If these Orientals saw the Macedonians greeting him without first paying their respects, they might begin to wonder whether he was a proper king; this belief ‘would have started among the servants and quickly spread everywhere’, and at the end of a long and bloody native revolt, that was not a risk worth taking. New reinforcements and the recruiting of Greeks and Orientals meant that the Macedonians were now heavily outnumbered in the army; before invading India, the Macedonian courtiers should give way to their new supporters and take up their customs for the sake of social uniformity. But as in the case of Cleitus, later writers saw the tension differently; by ordering proskynesis, they insisted, Alexander was not considering court etiquette: he was intending to be worshipped as a god.
It is true that in Greece proskynesis was only paid to the gods, and that Alexander was doubtless aware of this. But in outer Iran, it was not Greek practice which was at issue. He was King of Asia, and his courtiers ought to tolerate an Asian social custom; in much the same way, he had been wearing the diadem, which among Greeks was a claim to represent Zeus, among Persians a claim to be king, but he had treated it entirely from a Persian point of view as heir of Darius, not rival of the gods. It was to be the same with proskynesis: his own Master of Ceremonies described the first attempt to introduce it and as the incident took place at a dinner party, he would have been present in the dining-room and able to see the result for himself. It was a far cry from Alexander the tyrant, seeking to become divine.
Alexander, said his servant, had ordered a banquet and was presiding over the after-dinner drinking: the guests had been carefully chosen and warned what was expected of them. A golden cup, filled with wine, was passed down from his seat and each guest stood up and drank from it, facing the hearth which perhaps stood behind the royal table; they either drank a toast or poured a libation, but so far all had happened in the manner of a normal Greek drinking-party. Then they went Oriental: they paid proskynesis to Alexander, kissing their hand and perhaps bowing slightly like the sculptured Persian officials. After this gesture, they walked up to the royal table and exchanged kisses with Alexander, perhaps on the mouth, more probably on the cheek. This unassuming little ceremony went the round of all the guests, each drinking, kissing his hand and being kissed in return by the king, until it came to Callisthenes, cousin of Aristotle. He drank from the cup, ignored the proskynesis and walked straight up to Alexander, hoping to receive a proper kiss. Alexander happened to be talking to Hephaistion and did not notice that his court historian had deceived him. But a Bodyguard leant across to point out the error and as Callisthenes had not complied, Alexander refused to kiss him. ‘Very well,’ said Callisthenes, ‘I go away the poorer by a kiss.’
This after-dinner episode explains Alexander’s intention beyond all doubt. Before enforcing proskynesis, he wished to experiment in private with a few selected friends: first, they were to pay him homage, just as the average Iranian had always paid it to his king, and then, because they were his Macedonians with whom he had shared so much, they were to be rewarded by a kiss which, among Persians, was only exchanged between social equals or between the king and his royal Relations. The kiss restored them to their former dignity and refuted any possible suggestions that Alexander sought proskynesis because he wished to seem divine: no god has ever destroyed his own illusion by giving his worshippers a privileged kiss. The plan could hardly have been tried more reasonably and despite the indignation of Romans, philosophers and others since who have missed its Persian background, Alexander came out of it all remarkably well. It was a social experiment, and for once a witness had described exactly what he was doing.
There remained the uncooperative Callisthenes. As a ‘flatterer who had tried to make a god out of Alexander’, he would have been the very last person at court to have spoken out against divine honours for a living man, but as a Greek who had worked with Aristotle, he saw this social custom as a different matter. To pay proskynesis to a man had long seemed slavish, at least to the Greeks, and whatever else, Callisthenes had been brought up to believe in the values of Greek culture; he knew and analysed the details of Greek myths; he agreed with the view that certain Egyptians were really descended from an Athenian: he even claimed that the name Phoenicia was derived from the Greek word for a palm tree (phoinix). Like his kinsman and associate, Aristotle, he saw the barbarian world as the Greeks’ inferior and so in an earlier part of his history, he seems to have described the waves of the Lycian sea as bowing to the king, as if doing proskynesis before him. That was fair enough for barbarian waves, but for a Greek, steeped in the Greek past, it was a gesture which smacked of slavishness. Educated Greeks should have no truck with oriental decadence: kissing the hand be damned, he would refuse, and trust to the consequences.
It is not easy to plot his recent relationship with Alexander, not least because Alexander’s officers never referred to it in their histories. Six months before, said others, Callisthenes’s comforts had counted for much as Alexander despaired of life after murdering Cleitus; fellow-Greeks and philosophers later disagreed, unwilling to believe that Aristotle’s kinsman would ever have consoled a man whom they reviled as a tyrant. There was another Greek philosopher at court, Anaxarchus, who had come from a Thracian town and was known because of his opinions as the ‘contented’: it was he, said admirers of Aristotle, who had revived Alexander after the murder by teaching him the classic doctrine of an oriental tyrant, that whatever a king did was just and fair. ‘Anaxarchus’, wrote a later follower of Aristotle, ‘only rose to a position of influence through the ignorance of his patrons: his wine would be poured out by a naked girl, chosen for her beauty, though all she in fact revealed was the lust of those whom she served.’ Callisthenes, by contrast, was extolled for his austerity and self-sufficiency, as befitted Aristotle’s kinsman; his fame as a wanton flatterer was conveniently overlooked. Not for the last time academic rivalries impinged on the writing of history, abusing Anaxarchus and idealizing his rival Callisthenes. But Anaxarchus would one day die a hero’s death, owing nothing to Aristotle’s schoolmen, while Callisthenes would be best remembered for hailing his patron as the new son of Zeus.
Since the comfortings which followed Cleitus’s murder, there are signs, undated, that king and historian had been at variance elsewhere. Once at dinner, wrote Alexander’s Master of Ceremonies, a cup of unmixed wine had come round to Callisthenes, who was nudged by a neighbour and asked why he would not drink. ‘I do not wish,’ he replied, ‘to drink from Alexander and then need the god of medicine.’ Like proskynesis, the drinking of undiluted wine was not a Greek practice and once again Callisthenes had refused to betray his Greek ideals. Philosophers told a second story, which Callisthenes was said to have confided to the slave who read aloud to him: during the after-dinner drinking, Callisthenes was once asked to speak in praise of the Macedonians, which he did so fulsomely that all the guests applauded and showered him with flowers. Alexander then asked him to denounce them no less fluently, and Callisthenes pitched into the subject and distressed his audience by his evident taste for it. If true, this unlikely story says much for Callisthenes’s sophistry, and Aristotle was said to have remarked on hearing it that his cousin was a capable speaker but sadly lacking in common sense. If this incident followed the affair of the proskynesis, Alexander may also have played on his historian’s defect in order to discredit him in public.
For it was the proskynesis affair, surely, which had first marked the parting of the ways between the two men. Hitherto, Callisthenes would hardly have earned much affection among the Macedonians, whose fun he spoilt at parties and whose individual heroics he described incorrectly though he never took to the battlefield himself. But now there were others who did not think very far: one of the older Macedonians had mocked a Persian for his proskynesis and told him to hit the ground harder with his chin, as he went down on hands and knees to pay the exaggerated respects of an abject inferior. The story was retold of several officers, and on each occasion Alexander was said to have lost his temper with the Macedonian concerned. That was fair enough. If Macedonians started to poke fun at oriental life, then the harmony at court to which Alexander was pledged would never come about: it was the older men, by and large, who found it hardest to adapt to oriental customs, though that did not stop several thousand veterans from continuing to serve contentedly or an officer like Craterus, fiercely tenacious of his Macedonian habits, from rising rapidly despite his principles. The issue was not an absolute division, and only if it had been mishandled could it have become very awkward. Grumble though the old men might, when it came to the choice a few weeks later, it was Callisthenes they saw unaided to his death, and though legend maintained that Callisthenes’s one refusal deflated all plans for proskynesis, it is far from certain that the custom was ever dropped. Neither Ptolemy nor Aristobulus mentioned the attempt to introduce it, perhaps because they thought it insignificant. But their silence is more likely to have been deliberate, one more proof of the feelings which the affair could arouse in certain quarters. To a Greek public, a frank description would have put the sequel in a sinister light and neither historian wished to expose Alexander to the criticism of those who had not served with him.
Some time after the party and its related misadventures, perhaps days, perhaps months, the main army were quartered near a small Bactrian village. While four divisions fanned out to arrest the last of Spitamenes’s accomplices on the edge of the Red Sand desert, a serious plot was uncovered in camp against the king’s life: it could hardly have been more remote from the old and unadaptable. It broke among the Macedonian royal pages, boys of fifteen or so, who had been sent out to join the army three years before. According to the story, perhaps mere guesswork, one of them, son of a prominent cavalry commander, had blotted his record out hunting: a wild boar had been flushed out in Alexander’s direction and before the king could take a shot at it the page had speared it to death. Alexander was annoyed that someone for once had been quicker than himself. He ordered the page to be whipped, while the other young boys looked on. He even took away his horse.
Here too, Persian customs may be relevant. On a Persian hunt it had always been agreed that the king should be allowed the first shot at game, whereas those who broke the rule had been known to be flogged: in Macedonia, there may have been a similar rule, but the killing of a wild boar had a special significance, the act by which a young man won the right to recline at dinner. Whether victim of a Persian outrage or not, the page felt he had a grievance, so he enrolled seven associates in a plot to murder the king. Now, the royal pages were very well placed to effect this. They served on night duty outside Alexander’s tent and were in close daily access to his person, but as they numbered about fifty, the night guard would fall to one of the eight conspirators during the next fortnight. The night of Antipater, son of Asclepiodorus, was soon due and as only one page is likely to have stood guard at a time, he could easily admit his associates.
Eventually, Antipater’s night came round. The plan was a simple one, to enter the royal bedroom and stab Alexander in his sleep. No mention is made of Roxane, probably because she was already sleeping in quarters of her own, perhaps away from the army altogether; but more worrying than a wife was Alexander’s habit of not returning to bed before dawn, for at dawn the guard was changed. However, the risk was worth taking and when Alexander left in the early evening for the usual dinner with his friends the pages’ hopes were high. But dinner proved very attractive and the king stayed drinking and watching entertainments: the conduct which led to the burning of Persepolis and the murder of Cleitus was, third time lucky, to save his life. Dawn found him still carousing with Companions a fact which so shocked the eighty-year-old Aristobulus that in his history he invented an excuse. Alexander, he wrote, did leave the table at a reasonable hour, but on his way to bed he met a Syrian prophetess. She had long been following the army and would wail words of warning, a habit which at first Alexander and his friends had thought amusing, but when all her warnings came true Alexander had taken her seriously and even allowed her to watch beside his bed while he slept. This time she implored him to go back to his drinking; he obeyed, not because he liked wine but because he trusted the woman, and so he grew more and more drunk against his will until dawn. This apology for his late-night habits is very remarkable: Alexander, Aristobulus maintained, would only sit over his wine for the sake of conversation, like a portly academic: facts were against him, but even after Alexander’s death such apologies were felt to be needed by those who had known the man in person.
Drunk, not meekly superstitious, Alexander returned to his tent in daylight. A new page had replaced Antipater, and Alexander could go inside to bed, safer than he knew. Once again, his enemies could not keep a secret. In a matter of hours, one of the pages had told the plot to his current boyfriend, or so rumour believed: the boyfriend told the page’s brother; the brother told two Bodyguards, one of them Ptolemy. At once the news was brought to Alexander who arrested all those named and put them to the torture. The informants were acquitted; the rest, said some, were tried before the soldiery and stoned to death. If true this punishment implies that the audience believed wholeheartedly in their crime. But a private execution is as likely.
The pages, though guilty beyond doubt, were in need of a motive; once again, posterity’s guesses centred on politics, casting Alexander as the type of an eastern tyrant. In self-defence, their leader is said to have declaimed against tyranny, the wearing of Persian dress, the continuing practice of proskynesis, heavy drinking and the murders of Cleitus, Par-menion and all the rest: he and his friends were striking a blow for freedom and futhermore, said their Roman speechwriter, they would not stand for all the talk of Ammon any longer. But these speeches have no authority whatsoever, and there are details which may also bear on the pages’ discontent. Their leader had been flogged degradingly, but he also had a father who had held a high command in the Companion cavalry ever since Alexander had come to the throne. A month or so before the plot, his father had been sent back to Macedonia, stripped of his position, ‘in order to fetch reinforcements’; he never reappeared in camp. Another conspirator was son of the former satrap of Syria: he had recently left his province and joined Alexander with the last reinforcements, but he had not been returned to his governorship or given another command. In the two cases where anything is known of the pages’ fathers, both can be shown to have changed their jobs in the past three months; a third was son of a Thracian, not a man to fuss about the betrayal of the Macedonians’ traditions. But the informer is the important exception. As his brother was not in the plot, their family honour was not at stake. Hence, perhaps, hisindiscretion. As with the deaths of Parmenion and Cleitus, the pages’ plot probably turned in the end on the same old problem: the downgrading of officers who thought they deserved a longer or better service. Parmenion had been old, Cleitus, whatever the personal reason, had been falling out of favour; the pages’ fathers were victims of unknown changes in the high command. Young boys of fifteen care more for themselves and their fathers’ status than for the principles of Greek political thought: beyond that, their motives cannot be traced.
The plot itself was carried further. The mystery remained its background, for how could five young men have decided on murder and planned it carefully without considering the consequences? Perhaps they had only followed their emotions, rallying to an insulted friend and striking a blow for their fathers’ reputations; perhaps, but it was also plausible to look for an elder statesman, and this time, the choice did not fall on a Macedonian: it was Callisthenes who was arrested, tortured and put to death. ‘The pages admitted’, wrote Aristobulus, ‘that Callisthenes had urged them on to their act of daring’, and Ptolemy wrote much the same. But others were more sceptical.
There is indeed a case to be made for the historian’s arrest. He was condemned as an instigator, not a participant, and the leading page was said to have been his pupil, so that Greeks later maintained that it was his studies in liberal philosophy which had roused him to kill Alexander the tyrant. Their relationship is probably true, as Callisthenes would have finished his Deeds of Alexander down to the ending of the Greek allies’ service, the natural place for the panegyric to stop, and as the pages had arrived in camp only shortly before the material for his book had ended, he would have been free to take charge of the young nobility’s education. Disgusted by proskynesis, the drinking of unmixed wine and Alexander’s oriental policy, he could have worked on the feelings of six young pupils who had reasons of their own for disaffection. But except for the word of Alexander’s serving officers, there is nothing to prove his guilt, and as their word is not by itself enough, the truth remains uncertain.
It is conceivable that Alexander resented Callisthenes’s opposition, that his retort ‘the poorer by a kiss’ had been too accurate to be forgotten and that the first opportunity was seized to rid the court of an enemy’s presence; conceivable, maybe, but still unproven. Callisthenes’s importance was easily exaggerated, and it is very doubtful whether his solitary show of stubbornness mattered enough to cause his unfounded murder. But the pages had conspired, and their plot made all the more sense if encouraged by their disgruntled tutor. Four hundred years later a letter could be quoted as if from Alexander, which, if genuine, would strongly Support the historian’s innocence. It was addressed to three Commanders of the foot-phalanx, almost certainly out of camp at the moment of the plot: ‘Under torture’, it said, ‘the pages have confessed that they alone had plotted and that nobody else knew of their plans.’ It is, however, extremely improbable that private correspondence between Alexander and his officers survived for the use of historians, let alone a note whose contents were so dangerously frank. Forgeries abounded, and on the disputed death of Aristotle’s kinsman, Greeks had every cause to invent a proof of his innocence. Alexander had no need to write to three generals a mere week or so away from base and implicitly accuse himself of murder. If there was a genuine letter of the moment, it was perhaps the one said to have been written to Antipater, who is known to have edited his own correspondence: in it, Alexander is made to accuse Callisthenes of plotting and affirm that he meant to punish ‘those who had sent the sophist out in the first place’, presumably a threat against Aristotle. The execution of Aristotle’s kinsman cannot have helped relations between Alexander and his former tutor and as a first annoyed reaction, Alexander might indeed have vowed revenge. But Aristotle’s son-in-law remained in high favour at court, and these threats never came to anything: on such a favourite topic of legend the menacing letter too may only be a later invention.
The last and only certain word went, fittingly, to Anaxarchus the contented. ‘Much learning’, he wrote, ‘either helps a man greatly or harms him greatly: it helps the shrewd but harms the easy talker, who says whatever he pleases wherever he is. One must know the proper and appropriate measure of all things: that is the definition of wisdom.’ The distrust of the academic had long been a feature of Greek thought and it is tempting to see it here as a topical allusion. Callisthenes, his rival, had been the clever man who could argue about earthquakes, derive place names from known Greek words and work out a date for the Fall of Troy; he died in the end for his indiscretion, opposing a policy which he thought to be barbaric, because he was stopped, like other Aristotelians, by a narrowly Greek outlook from seeing what was appropriate. His tale is a strange one: the flatterer who wrote up a crusade of Greek revenge in the most glowing terms, hailed its leader as the son of a god, slandered the Parmenion whom his patron had killed, and finally changed his mind when the Crusader became a king. It is for their early years that he and Alexander should be remembered, as king and Aristotelian scholar had made their way through Asia Minor, the king in rivalry with his beloved Achilles, the scholar improving his text of Homer and pointing out sites linked with Homer’s poems. But patronage, as often, soured. ‘Alexander and Alexander’s actions’, Callisthenes is said to have remarked, ‘depend on me and my history: I have come not to win esteem from Alexander but to make him glorious in the sight of men.’ When the historian died, not even those who knew the truth agreed on the manner of his death.
According to Ptolemy, Callisthenes was tortured and hanged, as a guilty conspirator deserved; according to Aristobulus, who involved Alexander less directly, Callisthenes was bound in fetters and taken round with the army until he eventually died, not on Alexander’s orders but from disease. Chares the court Chamberlain disagreed: Callisthenes was ‘kept in fetters for seven months so that he could be tried by the allied council in Greece in the presence of Aristotle’, a careful retort, no doubt, to associates of Aristotle who were already complaining that Callisthenes had been murdered without a fair trial. Theophrastus, pupil of Aristotle, even wrote a pamphlet called Callisthenes, or On Mourning, in which he complained that Alexander was a ‘man of the highest power and fortune, but did not know how to use his assets’. Not a bit of it, Chares the Chamberlain maintained: Callisthenes became ‘excessively fat and ridden with lice’, being flabby and lousy anyway, and died more than a year after his disgrace, before he could be tried in public. Apologetic tales of a lingering sickness were soon reversed: Callisthenes, said some, was mauled limb by limb: his ears, nose and lips were cut off: he was shut in a pit, or a cage, with a dog, or a lion, and only rescued by the high-minded Lysimachus, a future king in Europe, who slipped him a dose of poison.
When witnesses could make up such elaborate stories, the impact among Greek schoolmen of Callisthenes’s death was neither shortlived nor insignificant; hence neither Ptolemy nor Aristobulus recorded his refusals of proskynesis in order to deny him the glamour of a hero. He had flourished in flattery, died in controversy, and there are few plainer insights into the hazards of a search for Alexander than that his own historian was said by informed contemporaries to have died in five different ways.