Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Long ago a man named Philip ruled over the land of Egypt. He was generous and kindly, he ruled righteously, and no ruler equaled him. All his people loved him. His wife was named Cleopatra.

   A certain Bildad, the son of Anson, lived in Egypt, an astrologer and a wizard unequalled in cleverness. Whatever he wished, he accomplished by means of witchcraft. He laid eyes upon Cleopatra and desired her, and pined away because of his lust for her. When he saw that the king had left Egypt, he went to a field where he had buried a certain herb, dug it up, and worked some witchcraft with it, and went to the Queen. He said, “Listen, my lady. I have brought a message from Digonia, our god. He wishes to visit you in order to lie with you and beget a son, who will also become a god.” When the Queen heard this, she said, “Give me a sign by which I may know that you tell the truth.” He answered, “Let this be the sign. When the god comes to you, the room will be full of light, and he will have a burning light on his forehead.” When the Queen heard this, she rejoiced, and bowed and prostrated herself.

  Anonymous Flemish illustration of Bildad, aka Nectanebo, and Olympias in the Alexander Romance, ca. 1475.

  Ghent Museum, ms. Ludwig XIII 5, v. 2, fol. 1V.

   That night Bildad came into the court of the Queen after he had put all the members of the Queen’s household asleep. He entered one chamber after another until he came before the Queen’s bed. He performed the sign that he had told her of, and she welcomed him, and so he went in to her, and she conceived. Then she asked him, “What shall be the name of the boy who is going to be born?” He replied, “Alexandron,” for “Alexandron” in the Egyptian language means “Lord over all.”

   When Philip returned from abroad, rejoicing because of his victories in battle, the Queen ran to meet him, embraced him and kissed him, and told him everything that had happened to her. When the king heard it, he became enraged, for he knew that Bildad the wizard had gone to her. He sent a messenger for Bildad, and Bildad was very much afraid, and fled Egypt, and lived in a cave all the rest of his life. The King sought him at all the frontiers of his kingdom, to slay him, but he had hidden himself, and could not be found. The King then said to the Queen, “You shall not be punished by being put to death, but stifle the report, so that no man shall know of this, lest we come to shame.”

   It came to pass that the Queen bore a son, and she said to the midwife, “Strangle this son of mine, and I will give you a shekel of gold.” But the midwife answered, “Far be it from me to stretch forth my hand against a prince in whom I see all the signs of royalty, and who will reign over the whole world, although he shall die in his youth in a strange land.” The Queen heard this, but refrained from replying, and so the child escaped.

   This was the form of him. From the soles of his feet up to his navel he was covered with hair. Between his shoulders he had the image of a lion, and upon his chest that of an eagle. One eye resembled that of a lion, and he looked with it toward the sky, and the other resembled that of a cat, and he looked with it toward the earth.

  This story does not explain how Philip went about creating a new army, but the image of Alexander as a monster does suggest the effect this army would have on a large part of the civilized world. The newborn monster also foreshadows Alexander’s career as an aberrant celestial being. (“Alexandron” means nothing in Egyptian.)

  2

  A Macedonian Priest-King

  in late 336 BC Alexander asserted himself as Philip’s successor in the roles of Thessalian general and leader of the Greeks. Then he turned north, asserting himself along the Danube. In this campaign, he handled the companions differently than Philip had. Philip took some risks, but Alexander took more, leading by example. Rumors spread that Danube tribesmen had wounded or even killed him.1

  Encouraged by these rumors, some Greeks revolted in the summer of 335. Patriots attacked the Macedonian garrison Philip had posted in Thebes and drove hundreds of men into the city’s acropolis. There, amidst the temples of the Theban gods, the beleaguered Macedonians waited for Alexander to come to the rescue.

  He and the army marched to Thebes at the rate that Philip had trained them to attain, and Greek allies joined them. They could have invested the city and deployed artillery. Unwilling to destroy it, they merely camped in front. The Thebans did not sally forth to fight, and a lull ensued. The Macedonians may have thought that the gods wanted the city and the shrines spared. Dionysus was especially fond of the city, where he had paid a tumultuous visit and established Bacchic ceremonies. Yet the gods did not send any signs that the Macedonians should withdraw.

  The lull ended when the guards atop the city walls began insulting the Macedonians. Infuriated, Alexander let one of his regimental commanders, Perdiccas, attack some of the Theban fortifications. The Thebans counterattacked, and Alexander committed more troops to the developing battle. Then the Thebans staged a mock retreat, as Philip had at Chaeronea. Turning around, they surprised the pursuing Macedonians and drove them back. Now it was the Thebans’ turn to be surprised. Advancing too fast, they fell into disarray, and Alexander pounced. The enemy panicked and fled through the city’s main gate. They forgot to close it, and the Macedonians pursued them into Thebes.2

  Chaos engulfed the city. The Greek allies of the Macedonians perhaps did the worst of the slaughter, but the Macedonians did most of it. Some Thebans supplicated in shrines, and the Macedonians killed them. Alexander spared a few who managed to reach him and appeal in person. At his most politic, the king spared a woman who killed an officer after he attacked her.3 This beau geste did not compensate for the offense done to the gods of the violated shrines.

  Alexander decided to sell the population into slavery. Zeus would not object: spoils belonged to the victor. Alexander spared Theban priests, a traditional religious exception to this rule. He also spared those who had shown hospitality to his father or to him. Doing that was a traditional social exception to the rule. To show respect toward Greek culture, Alexander spared descendants of the Theban poet Pindar. The exceptions added up to a fraction of the population. Some 30,000 were enslaved, the highest reported total for a single Greek city.4

  A trip to the tents of a field hospital revealed casualties rivaling those at the battle of Chaeronea. Perhaps Alexander paid more attention than he had after Chaeronea, or after any other previous battle. The casualties were now of his own making.

  The doctors plied their iron knives and rasps and their copper probes, and inserted tin and lead tubes for draining fluids. The occasional drill perforated a wounded skull to create drainage in cases where there was no fracture. For all the equipment—far more elaborate than anything other armies had—the doctors could do little but cut and thrust in ghastly imitation of the soldiers they were treating. Since there was no known soporific or anesthetic except mandrake root, slave nurses often restrained patients. Doctors ignored shock, including common symptoms such as pallor in the extremities, and they treated inflammation by opening veins and letting patients bleed. They passed over blows to the viscera, limiting themselves to superficial wounds. But they followed manuals, including Hippocratic writings they consulted as men screamed. Given the chance, they worked skillfully. Although Alexander’s father lost the sight in one eye to an arrow, a doctor prevented him from being disfigured.5

  Although he was the chaplain of every one of these wounded men, Alexander did not presume to offer them any pious hope or consolation. The lives of these men lay in the gift of Asclepius, the god of health, and not in the gift of Alexander, or even another god. The doctors were serving or abetting Asclepius. It was they who were the wonder-working priests, so to speak, on this occasion. King Alexander had the same duty as other men who had escaped unscathed, which was to give thanks.

  Some 500 Macedonians had died. For these men Alexander now conducted his first mass funeral. In a pious but shrewd touch, he let the Thebans do the same for their own dead.6

  The ceremonies conducted by the two sides were alike—prayers, libations o
f wine poured on the fire, and mementos such as coins, weapons, and strigils (for scraping away body oil) added to the flames. Yet the expectations for the dead were altogether different. The Macedonians had died in battle and would go to the Elysian Fields. Some of the Thebans were children who had died in shrines, along with unmarried young men and women. Tradition said they would become unhappy ghosts, haunting the place of burial.

  Perhaps to make amends for the blunder of killing the suppliants, Alexander offered to drain nearby Lake Copais. The lake had flooded fields and pastures in the region after an earthquake. The local cities refused to let Alexander’s engineer do the work. Alexander may not have realized the mistake he had made earlier, in Thrace. A commander who was also a king and a chief priest needed to stay alive, and his enemies had to know he was alive. Otherwise they would be more likely to resist.7

  The destruction of Thebes had two momentous results: Greek opposition to the Macedonians collapsed, and Greek resentment of the Macedonians increased. Alexander now had every reason to leave Greece behind him and take up his father’s plan to invade the Persian Empire. Invading Persia was a huge project, suitable for Alexander’s ambitions. It was also a complex religious project, attractive to a devout king who believed his god, Zeus, ruled Asia and Africa, even if Alexander did not grasp how.

  who were the Persians and who were their gods? Every educated Greek knew, and Alexander knew, that the Persian Empire included Egypt and Mesopotamia. In Egypt, Zeus was Amon, as he was in some places in Macedon, and in Babylon Zeus was Marduk, familiar to Alexander thanks to Herodotus and other Greek writers. The Persian Empire also included Phoenicia and Persia proper. The Phoenician god Alexander knew best was Heracles, his ancestor, who, he thought, was the chief god of Tyre, the biggest eastern Mediterranean city. Persia’s ruling dynasty came from the southwestern corner of modern Iran, called Persis, as did many of the best soldiers. The Greek writer and mercenary Xenophon had fought against these troops some sixty years before. Farther east, in Central Asia, the empire reached into the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, and western Pakistan as far as the Indus. Alexander knew good soldiers came from here, too, but he knew much less about the gods and people of these regions than he did about Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Phoenicia.

  The remaining lands—Palestine, the region south of the Caspian Sea, and the Anatolian peninsula—were mostly poor and lacking in soldiers. The Macedonians knew only Anatolia, which lay across the Hellespont. This province might serve as a stepping-stone for the invaders. From there they could reach Egypt and Mesopotamia, plus Phoenicia and Persia proper. Central Asia and Pakistan, “India” to the Greeks, would come last.

  Had the king of Persia ruled this empire as Philip or Alexander ruled Macedon, he would have been the chief priest of all these places. The Persian king did not play this multinational role. Instead he acted only as a Persian ruler. He took the throne in a Persian ceremony and did not become a king anywhere else but Egypt, where he acted as pharaoh in absentia. He left religion to local priests and delegated the administration of the empire to notables from leading families, especially the royal clan of the Achaemenids. These notables were the king’s bondmen, or servants, a position that the Greeks and Macedonians misunderstood as rendering them slaves and making the king a despot. They formed an ethnoclass drawn from a smaller ambit than Philip’s companions. The title given them, “satrap,” meant a defender of royal perquisites, not a subordinate. The king could remove them more easily than he could control them. Rather than be removed, some rebelled.8 Whether rebellious or loyal, satraps depended on local troops, plus a few Persians or other Iranians. The royal army served the king alone. The garrisons in leading cities throughout the empire also served the king. Persia had several military forces because it had two authorities, the king and the isolated satraps.9

  Below the level of the satrap, the empire formed congeries of dependencies. Local kings and tribal chieftains survived, each with their own gods, priests, and shrines, and the Persians relied on them to provide levies and collect tribute. Caria, the home of Pixodarus, Alexander’s would-be father-in-law, was one of these autonomous areas. The Great King lacked any administrative or religious instruments with which to replace men such as Pixodarus. Even where the empire was strong, in and around garrisons, it was not mainly Persian, any more than the British Raj in India was mainly British.

  The unity of the empire—one ruler, always an Achaemenid, and some two dozen satraps, all from the ethnoclass—was misleading. Babylon, Egypt, and other western provinces, such as Phoenicia, had been restive for generations. The typical rebellion featured a descendant (or a supposed descendant) of a native ruler such as an Egyptian pharaoh or a king of Babylon. The chief native god would back this descendant against the Persians, and then the god would fall silent once the Persians defeated the rebellion. Time would pass, and the cycle would recur.10

  The present Persian king, Daryamush, was a prince from a cadet line who got the throne after the murder of his predecessor in a palace intrigue. He began as a royal courier known as Artashata. (Greeks also knew him under a nickname, Codomannus, but they did not know what it meant. They did know Darius had some Mesopotamian ancestors.) Then Darius volunteered to defend Persian honor by challenging a rebel chieftain in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea. He killed the rebel and received the post of satrap of Armenia, an embattled frontier. At the beckoning of the vizier who murdered the previous king, he took the throne in 336, the same year as Alexander. Since then, he had suppressed a rebellion in Egypt and asserted himself elsewhere.11

  To legitimize himself, he adopted the name Darius, borne by several Achaemenid kings.12 For the same reason, he bore several titles—Great King, King of Kings, King of the Great Earth Far and Wide. These titles legitimized him by being grand and also by being Babylonian. In Asia, Babylonia was as ancient, successful, and prestigious as Egypt was in the Mediterranean.13

  Philip, who knew Darius’s record, respected the Persians. His lieutenants Parmenio and Attalus led only a small force, and they confined themselves to the northwestern corner of Anatolia, closest to Macedon. Philip and his generals realized the Macedonians had a far smaller army than the Persian king’s and a far, far smaller navy than Phoenicia could provide Darius. Philip had briefly been allied with Persia. After Philip’s death, everything about the military, naval, and diplomatic situation recommended caution—the successes of Darius, the cynical, unpredictable behavior of the Greeks encouraging the invasion, and Alexander’s own inexperience.14

  Yet Alexander saw no need for caution. He regarded Darius as illegitimate—a cadet who got the throne by murder. Although Darius had visited Egypt, he did not serve the Egyptian gods as a pharaoh would. Although he ruled Babylon and Tyre, he did not serve as a king or a priest there. Macedonians expected a ruler to do both, and so in Alexander’s eyes several great thrones in the Near East were effectively vacant. This ex-courier from Persia, a mediocre part of Asia, was an interloper, and he was not even a priest.15

  To replace Darius, Alexander would have to remove him. He must either kill him or capture him and compel him to supplicate, and he must do it in person at the head of a strike force of his best cavalry and infantry. He had to seize the Persian Empire the Macedonian way, by the spear, and rule it under the tutelage of Zeus and Zeus’s foreign counterparts, including Amon in Egypt and Marduk in Babylon.16

  Alexander’s plan was less preposterous than it seemed. Another conqueror, Cyrus the Great, had done much the same thing. Cyrus had created the empire in a way that resembled Alexander’s plan to seize it.

  Like Alexander, Cyrus was an outsider. Kurash, as Cyrus called himself, started as the king of Anshan, a small mountain state that lay to the northeast of Mesopotamia. The people of Anshan were an amalgam of Elamites, who lived in a plain next to lower Mesopotamia, and illiterate Iranian herdsmen, who lived in the mountains and valleys to the north. The Elamites worshipped gods like Mesopotamia’s, and the Iranians made some of the
se gods their own, but they added Ahura Mazda and Anahita, a water goddess. At some time or another the prophet Zoroaster had put his stamp on Iranian religion, giving it a dualistic character missing from the polytheism of the Mesopotamians or other peoples. The chief city of Anshan was Susa; some of the kings were called rulers of Anshan or of Susa and Anshan, titles that went back 1,500 years before Alexander. The ethnic term “Persian” came into use only at the end of this period.17

  Cyrus began his conquests in Iran and Asia Minor around 559. He had a knack for recruiting talented generals from among his enemies, and he employed some local notables as administrators. All this must have appealed to Alexander, who recruited companions in much the same way. Cyrus was Philip on a grand scale—an opportunist, a genius, and an arriviste.18

  To conquer Babylonia, Cyrus posed as the restorer of neglected cults. That helped him defeat the native ruler, who appeared impious. Taking the hoary title of King of Babylon, Cyrus was crowned accordingly, and made sure to sacrifice geese, ducks, and turtledoves in addition to the usual sacrificial pigeons. By quoting the inscriptions of earlier kings, he posed as something of an antiquarian. A long-established elite continued to manage the city’s religious life, but Cyrus arranged for temple revenues and other imposts to flow to his coffers. And he did small things to remind the Babylonians who was in command, such as wearing Elamite dress on the day he proclaimed his son his successor.19