by F S Naiden
As the army pressed on, one of the satraps in the region, Shatibrzana, rode up from Herat and surrendered. Shatibrzana offered to furnish supplies, and Alexander confirmed him as satrap. He sent him back to Herat escorted by forty mounted infantry under the command of the companion Anaxippus. The king thought these forty would suffice to remind the satrap of Macedonian power.
Within weeks, however, came news that Shatibrzana had killed Anaxippus along with his men and was mounting a rebellion. For the first time, a satrap had betrayed Alexander’s trust, and Persians had annihilated a Macedonian unit.
Alexander moved fast, with his usual mix of cavalry and a few infantry, and reached Herat after a forced march of seventy-five miles in two days. Shatibrzana had already escaped eastward into the foothills of Hindu Kush, so Alexander had to content himself with enslaving some would-be suppliants.38
At the rear, Craterus, leading the main body, encountered a mass of rebels who had taken refuge on a butte. The western side, where Craterus camped, rose 2,000 feet above the plain, far beyond the reach of any tower or drawbridge. Atop the massif, a spring and a grassy meadow four miles in circumference provided the defenders the essentials for a long siege. Some 13,000 men defended the perimeter.39
Craterus’s troops attempted to scale the 2,000-foot cliffs, but high winds blew men off the precipices. Next the engineers built a ramp of felled trees, but it did not reach the tableland and collapsed when they tried to extend it.
Alexander had to turn around and help Craterus. After he arrived at the butte, he and his men accomplished nothing against the rocks, the foe, and the vertiginous winds.
Only an accident rescued the Macedonians. The ramp caught fire, and the wind carried the flames onto the tableland. Nearly all the rebels burned to death. The first siege east of the Zagros Range ended not with a victorious assault but with a natural disaster. Zeus the sky god was as fickle as ever.
The army regrouped and marched to their original destination, Herat. At the sight of the Macedonian siege engines, especially a drill invented by Diades, the defenders supplicated.40 Once in possession of the city, Alexander convened the most important strategy meeting since the discussion of Darius’s peace offers. Alexander presented two choices to the council.
First, they might resume their march on the man Alexander still called Bessus, but who was now King Artaxshasa. If they used the main road eastward, they would be well supplied, but Artaxshasa would know they were coming. He might attack their flanks, using the cavalry of Scythian allies.
Second, they might turn away from Artaxshasa and campaign in the swath of Persian territory to the south. They would find what water and food they could, and kill or run off all who would not surrender. The landscape was traversable, the people vulnerable. A large part of this region, the watershed of the Helmand River, was broad and fertile, thanks to irrigation; the crops were in. After living off the Helmand, they would turn around, go northeast, and approach Artaxshasa that way, rather than use the main road. That would surprise him. If he fought, he would likely lose. If he did not fight, they could force him into the wastelands to the north. They would control most of the Persian Empire, and he would control only the men who followed him.41
Alexander and the council preferred the second choice, which meant a detour of many months. They did not realize that the route from the Helmand country to Bactria lay through the Hindu Kush, some of the highest mountains in the world. For an ancient army, which thought of mountains as the abodes of gods or titans, this line of march would be a religious as well as topographic challenge.
in the fall of 330, the Macedonians entered the Helmand valley. The Helmand did not turn out to be a river as they understood it. Partly dry, the riverbed was not firm enough to march in, and it was too wide for engineers to bridge. Wells along the unpaved road were far apart, and the water in the irrigation canals proved undrinkable. Even now, in October, the hot sun could fry an egg on a rock. On three sides, a wavy surface of brushwood spread across a sea of reddish sand. On the fourth side, foothills faded into the northeast.
The army reached the Persian citadel of Zarin just as food was running low. The satrap there had sided with Artaxshasa and fled to India. The mud-brick buildings suggested a very provincial Babylon, and some of the bricks even bore cuneiform stamps. Yet if a Babylonian king ever came this way, it was hard to see why. The shrine of the Persian gods Ahura Mazda, Anahita, and the sun god Mithra was a trifling affair, three stone altars seven feet high in a small roofless court without a sanctuary, and Alexander ignored it. Bored, he ordered books from Harpalus.42
South of Zarin, the river gave way to a network of lakes that watered orchards and fields. The harvest was in, but one lake gave the men fever, and the army had to rely on water skins carried on donkey or camelback. Only the hunting was good: fish, wild fowl, and wild asses by the hundreds galloping into the undrinkable water to cool off. The natives, besides not knowing how to read, write, or build houses, did not know how to eat and drink: no bread or wine, or even Near Eastern beer. Though the days were sometimes still warm, the nights turned gelid. The soldiers called the one friendly tribe the Euergetae, or “Doers of Good Deeds.” They had reportedly helped Cyrus the Great, too. Alexander granted them autonomy at a price in food and animals.43
The surveyors could not tell Macedonians much about where they were. To the south, reddish cliffs made of sand and silt guarded a thousand miles of desert. Out of it rode raiders on dromedaries from the neighboring province of Gedrosia. Gedrosia, the surveyors said, faced the ocean that encircled the world. India, where the satrap went, faced the ocean, too, and lay at the world’s edge. Rumors about the size of the mountains to the north, the Hindu Kush, now reached the troops. Artaxshasa—the man they called Bessus—was on the far side. How would they reach him?
The Persians who were now part of Alexander’s entourage also worried the troops. The Macedonians especially disliked Alexander’s new favorite, the eunuch Bagoas. The king even took Persian advice about clothes. He did not put on trousers or give up his Macedonian hat, but he wore a Persian tunic, belt, and diadem. The companions thought the belt effeminate and wondered why Alexander would not let them wear diadems, the headbands favored by Persian notables. The final insult was Alexander’s decision to put Darius’s brother, the cavalry commander Huxshathra, in charge of a new force of 1,000 Persian cavalry. Alexander also made Huxshathra a companion. That was worse than an insult.44
When Macedonians voiced these complaints, Alexander answered that he was not the Persians’ king. Although he had captured Darius’s regalia at Issus, and again at Arbela, he did not use it. He never wore the upright tiara, or Persian crown, and did not ask to be called a Persian king. He did not speak Persian or worship their gods, and so he needed Persian intermediaries. He judged Persians according to their merits. Mazdai received good treatment, and the commander at Gaza received the worst treatment Alexander could inflict. Darius was hunted down, but he was duly buried, the minimum due to an honorable enemy. As for Persian cavalry, he needed them to replace the much-missed Thessalians.45
Soon afterward discontent among the soldiers intersected with court gossip and with Alexander’s resentment of Parmenio and Philotas. The army was camping at Farah, another scraggly Helmand valley stronghold. Philotas had long since rejoined them. Now that Parmenio had gone, Philotas was the leading companion, seeing Alexander twice a day. Men such as Craterus had more seniority but less access. Philotas did not know that Alexander was spying on him through the concubine Antigone.
As one of his lesser duties, Philotas kept watch over the dozens of royal pages. In previous reigns, pages were privy to most plots against Macedonian kings. When talk of a plot began in late 330, Philotas inevitably learned of it. After a meeting of the council, Philotas was the last to leave, and a page who was waiting at the entrance to the council chamber spoke to him. He repeated a rumor of a plot against Alexander. He had heard the rumor, he said, from his brother, another pa
ge. The ringleaders were rumored to be a bodyguard plus a few commanders, none highly placed.46
The rumors were especially doubtful because no one knew who was supposed to replace Alexander. There were only two possibilities. One was Alexander’s incompetent half-brother, but no officer would participate in a plot to replace Alexander with this nonentity. The other was Antipater’s son-in-law, the prince of Lyncestes, who was also named Alexander.
The Lyncestian had lost his command back in Asia Minor. The councilors thought he was in touch with Darius at the time, put him on trial, and wanted to execute him. The voluble Aristander agreed., for not long after the council meeting a swallow had landed on Alexander’s head while he was napping, and that was a sign that they should kill the Lyncestian.47 Alexander had preferred to put Antipater’s son-in-law under house arrest, and he had remained under arrest for the next four years. He had no recent military record, and his years under arrest had made him timid and simpleminded.48 A plot against Alexander was unfeasible, and Philotas, for one, knew it. He chose not to report the page’s accusations.
Frustrated, the page went to the king through other parties. Alexander investigated, and learned that Philotas had kept the information from him.
Alexander now confronted three possibly guilty parties: the conspirators, the pages who knew about them, and Philotas. Had he feared the conspirators, he would have dealt with them first. He ignored them, and he did not punish the pages, who begged for mercy. Instead he concentrated on Philotas. The man who ridiculed his investiture as pharaoh had failed to protect him. It did not matter to Alexander that Philotas was innocent of any involvement in the conspiracy. Philotas was guilty of lèse-majesté, a very contagious offense.
In an army with any kind of military law, Alexander would have had to make some charge against Philotas and bring it before a tribunal. In a court like that of Darius, the monarch would decide. Alexander could not do either. Instead he had to engineer a consensus against Philotas among the council of officers. To convince them, Alexander would employ Craterus, who hated Philotas and perhaps envied Parmenio. If Philotas was sentenced to death, an assembly of soldiers must agree to carry out the sentence. To influence the assembly, Alexander would employ trusted officers.
Alexander interviewed Philotas privately, and Philotas confirmed the details: two royal pages, braggadocio, no feasible plans. Philotas begged for mercy, and the king gave a pledge of future favor. Next, Alexander convened a council of just six, including Craterus but not Philotas. The king suppressed the supplication and the pledge, and Craterus warned that a pardon for Philotas would not assuage Parmenio. Although Parmenio was 500 miles away, many soldiers remained loyal to him. The unity of the army, Craterus implied, required that Philotas and Parmenio both die. That same day, the king invited Philotas to dinner and told him nothing.49
Next he convened an assembly of the Macedonian soldiers. Six thousand attended, mostly from regiments Alexander thought reliable. Keeping Philotas out of sight, he recounted the plot, accused Philotas of leading it, and added that Parmenio had masterminded it. Next he paraded witnesses before the assembly. Several admitted their own guilt, but no one accused Philotas, let alone Parmenio. Alexander produced a letter from Parmenio to Philotas, but it was not incriminating. In his peroration, he added an accusation of impiety. Philotas, he said, ridiculed his claim to be the son of Zeus-Amon.
Alexander now presented Philotas, hands tied behind his back and head covered. Generals rose at the front of the assembly to denounce him, especially Craterus and Coenus, who had married Philotas’s sister. The king ordered Philotas’s head uncovered, and asked him to speak in Macedonian, even though he and the generals had spoken in Greek. After this appeal to the prejudices of the troops, Alexander left the rostrum. He wanted the officers to carry on the attack without him. They did, but Craterus, Coenus, and the others were less effective than another, lower-ranking infantry officer, Bolon. This senior veteran of Philip’s wars spoke against Philotas and Parmenio, too. Either Alexander or Craterus had coached him.50
At last allowed to speak, Philotas rebutted the attacks, conceding only that he had failed to report some idle talk. The troops pitied him and refused to execute him. After begging Alexander for mercy and being betrayed, Philotas was successfully begging the troops for help. The Zeus of suppliants seemed to support Philotas.
Switching tactics, Alexander remanded Philotas to the council of generals and left the initiative to them. Craterus persuaded them to torture Philotas, yet Philotas failed to confess to any crime worse than indiscretion. Now the king had failed twice. Yet he was gaining. Each time the army drew nearer to a consensus against the accused.51
Alexander brought Philotas before a second assembly and asked them to stone Philotas. This manner of punishment would show that the Macedonians regarded Philotas as hateful to the gods rather than merely guilty of a crime. At last, the cascade of lying and bullying succeeded. As the leading officers watched, a few angry soldiers began to stone Philotas. Others joined them, and stoned him to death.52
Alexander knew that news of the execution of Philotas would reach Parmenio in several weeks. Within six weeks or so, it would reach Harpalus, Antigonus, Cleomenes, and Antipater. At the very least, these men could stop the flow of money and troops to Alexander. More likely they would make war on Alexander. Whatever they did, Parmenio would have to organize and lead them. He would know first, he commanded the most men, and he had the strongest motive.
Grasping this, Alexander summoned Polydamas, a senior officer Parmenio would trust since he had carried the message from Parmenio to Alexander at Arbela. The king gave him a letter to hand-deliver to Parmenio and another letter to read to Parmenio’s men, and put him and two nomads on camels, with orders to ride day and night to Ecbatana. Not quite two weeks later, Polydamas reached the city and brought the letter to Parmenio. It brought good news about the army’s progress and the exploits of Philotas. As Parmenio read parts of the letter aloud, so that his subordinates could hear the news, too, Polydamas and the nomads stabbed Parmenio to death. Polydamas unrolled the other letter Alexander had given him and read it aloud. It proclaimed that Parmenio and Philotas had conspired against the king, and that the council of war approved their deaths.53
After some hubbub, Parmenio’s subordinates accepted this explanation. The letters were evidently genuine. They did not know that the letters were untruthful.
To prevent a coup that had never been planned, Alexander had carried out a countercoup. Then he was perspicacious enough to stop. He made no attempt to purge Parmenio’s associates such as Coenus and Polyperchon. Some leaders have purged their corps of officers—Stalin did—but Alexander avoided handicapping an army in the middle of a hostile continent. Alexander allowed some of Philotas’s alleged co-conspirators to be acquitted. He did arrange for the soldiers to put Prince Alexander of Lyncestis to death.54
Although sparing his fellow officers, Alexander damaged another of his assets, the cult of companionship. Parmenio symbolized this cult, which Philip had formalized about thirty years before. Philotas led the second generation of companions. Philip would not have killed these men. Alexander killed them partly because Philotas had denigrated the new, unwelcome cult of Alexander as the son of Zeus-Amon.55
Until this point, Alexander’s religious policy in the Near East had never conflicted with his role as priest of the cult that helped make the Macedonian army strong. Now a conflict had arisen, and Alexander had chosen the cult proclaimed at Siwah over the cult organized by his own father. Cyrus the Great may have astutely combined cults, but Alexander could not.
The last word belonged to Antipater. When he learned of Parmenio’s death, he asked, “If Parmenio plotted against Alexander, who can be trusted? If he did not, what should we do?” The answers to these questions would not come immediately. Instead they would emerge years later, in even more remote parts of Asia.56
alexander dispersed the powers wielded by Philotas and Parmenio. He ga
ve half the companion cavalry to the administrator Hephaestion and the other half to Clitus, the cavalry veteran who had saved him at the Granicus. He promoted those in Ecbatana who had assented to the assassination, he immediately segregated Macedonians of doubtful loyalty in a brigade assigned to hazardous or humiliating duty, and he gradually dispersed the Balkan troops who served under Parmenio in all the great battles.57
No sooner did the army leave the Helmand country to turn north, toward the Hindu Kush, than the Iranians struck again. Shatibrzana rebelled a second time, threatening the line of communication to Ecbatana and the rest of the empire. Alexander dispatched companion cavalry under Erigyius, the column commander in the Caucasus. Erigyius acted much as Alexander might have. Instead of using the army’s route along the Helmand, which was a half circle, he cut across the middle, along the granite outcroppings of the Hindu Kush. Winter storms descending from the mountains tore up trees by the roots and brought blocks of rock down the hillsides. The temperature dropped forty degrees in minutes. Sometimes the men could take shelter in a cave, but seldom in a tent and never a house. Fresh water was rare, and foodstuffs rarer. Erigyius should have lost many of his men. He had Alexander’s good luck, and so he lost only a few.58
After weeks in the saddle, Erigyius and his detachment fell upon the larger force of Shatibrzana. In the ensuing melee, Erigyius speared Shatibrzana in the face, killing him, and the enemy fled. The Macedonians had beaten the Iranians at their own kind of fighting, but the credit went to Erigyius and his bravos, not Alexander or the main body. In another, smaller battle against the rebels, Parthians fought on the Macedonian side. For the first time, Alexander employed Asiatics in land warfare.
As these troops fought, the army had marched upriver toward the next Persian satrapal capital, at modern Kandahar. The Helmand stretched 250 yards across, with snow wreaths melting on the banks. Cliffs guarded the southern side. The satrap fled toward the Bolan Pass and India, and Alexander did not bother to appoint another. The army ate well, for it was now late spring, and the wheat and barley in the upper Helmand valley were milk-ripe, but as they went farther upriver, the air became colder and the snow did not melt. The riverbanks turned into massive rocks, and the stream ran so fast it was hard to scoop up, or even put a foot in. Then the stream gave out, and so did all the trees, save for solitary junipers, and the road ended. Pinnacles of rock guarded the steeply rising path. The army marched for weeks, yet they were too late. The mountain passes visible in the distance had filled with snow.