Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Spitamanah soon reached Scythia, recruited 600 Scyths, and turned around and traveled south. He found Pharnuces at the oasis of Merv and sent his men in circles around the Macedonians. To escape the Scythian arrows, the Macedonians withdrew to a glen where the Scyths could not maneuver. Then Pharnuces lost control of his officers. One Macedonian commander tried to lead his men across a river to safety, and the Scyths annihilated them. Most of the Macedonians died in the fighting, and the Scyths captured the rest and put them to death. Alexander’s rescue column arrived too late to do much more than bury the dead. The Scyths had vanished into the desert.14

  Two thousand Macedonians died in this engagement, more than in any other since Alexander left Europe. Stunned, the companions could not agree about whom to blame. Some blamed Pharnuces, the foreigner. Others blamed Caranus, the officer who led his men across the river. Others had heard a rumor that Pharnuces tried to resign his command before the troops left Samarkand but that his subordinates shirked the responsibility of replacing him. Many blamed Alexander, who had appointed Pharnuces, put Macedonians under him, and arrived too late.15

  In another month, the weather turned cold, and the army returned to the comparative comfort of Bactra, where Alexander installed himself in the satrapal palace. That winter he made one of his best decisions. He had already refounded Persian settlements as Alexandrias, but these were few and far between. In Bactria and Sogdiana, he set out to establish more cities, closer together. Some would be refoundations, some new settlements. Both Phoenicians and Greeks would be welcome, and so would Macedonians too old for service with the army but suitable for garrisons or militias. Greek and Macedonian immigrants would run local governments, Greeks and Phoenicians would dominate local markets, Macedonians would provide military officers and infantry, and Iranians would provide cavalry. Captured Iranians would provide a source of slaves for the settlements. The first generation of women would almost all be captive natives.16

  The new cities, Alexander must have hoped, would regard him as a divine founder. Iranians would join others in this worship. A new society, partly Greek, partly Iranian, would emerge in Bactria and Sogdiana.

  The religious aspect of this plan fared badly. Alexander mistakenly assumed that Iranian and Greek gods and rituals were mutually compatible. He did not reckon with Anahita and the funeral rites at her shrine in Bactra.

  Like other Iranians, the Bactrians worshipped Anahita as a protector of irrigation. The ancient Iranian hymnal, the Avesta, described her as a wellspring that flowed from a mountain in the center of the world. Her original, esoteric name, Harahvati, meant “possessing all water.” The shrine in Bactra, luxurious by local standards, featured a statue of Anahita with a golden crown of eight rays and a hundred stars, gold shoes and jewelry, and a dress of thirty beaver skins. Participants in one of her festivals wore Scythian dress, giving her local appeal.17

  The worship of Anahita accounted for burial customs very different from those of the Macedonians and Greeks. Since Iranians regarded groundwater as sacred to the goddess, they kept corpses out of contact with watercourses and the soil. Sometimes they embalmed corpses in wax. More often, stone or ceramic caskets kept out water. Cyrus lay in such a casket at Pasargadae. If the Iranians did not insulate a corpse, they exposed it on a platform, to be devoured by dogs or birds kept in the shrine. Once the bones were picked clean, relatives put them in ossuaries. They never burned remains. Like water, fire was sacred.18

  The Macedonians and Greeks did the opposite: they buried or burned human remains. What they saw in Bactra offended them. When they objected, the worshippers and priests of Anahita explained that burial would contaminate the groundwater and harm the goddess, and that cremation would contaminate the fire and harm other gods. The companions disagreed: groundwater and fire were both profane, and important bodies of water were divine males, like Ocean Stream and Poseidon. No mountain stood in the center of the Greek world, and no goddess issued from it. They reported the exposed bodies to Alexander, and he ordered soldiers to kill the dogs and birds and bury or burn the corpses on the platforms.19

  After ignoring Anahita at Pasargadae, Alexander had now insulted her. This misstep evoked others: the harm he had done at Persepolis two years before, the enslavement of town after town, and the mutilation and execution of Artaxshasa. In the spring of 328, the guerilla war resumed, fiercer than ever.

  The campaign began with a misunderstood omen. After Alexander left winter quarters and pitched camp near the Amu Darya, the army ran short of water, and the engineers began digging wells. Instead of striking water, the engineers discovered petroleum burbling up out of the ground. They thought it was olive oil. Alexander ordered Aristander to interpret this oddity, and the diviner said that the Greek gods were on Alexander’s side. Yet some companion or other (was it Aristobulus?) remembered otherwise. The engineers eventually struck water, not olive oil. The Macedonians did not thank Anahita for giving them the water.20

  Another omen at this time showed how worried Alexander and his troops had become. One of the army’s herdsmen brought Alexander a lamb with a misshapen forehead that looked like a royal tiara. The lamb also had double testicles. Horrified, Alexander summoned his most learned experts, the Babylonian diviners. They purified him using their own chants and incense. Unsure at first whether the ritual had worked, he told his companions that he feared not only for his own life but for theirs as well.21

  Alexander’s main foe, Spitamanah, went among the Scythians, village to village and yurt to yurt, recruiting horsemen. Encouraged by his defeat of Pharnuces, he and his cavalry probed behind Macedonian lines. They rode as far as Bactra, where only a small garrison remained, plus a military hospital and some royal servants. The garrison chief, Peithon, commanded only a small mercenary force, so he summoned convalescents from the hospital and armed Alexander’s pages. He defeated the more numerous attacking force but lost control of his congeries of hirelings, walking wounded, and boys. Spitamanah counterattacked, killed most of the Macedonians, and captured Peithon, the first ranking Macedon to fall into the hands of the enemy.22

  Craterus, commanding a nearby detachment, marched on Bactra and attacked Spitamanah, who retreated to the north. Spitamanah recruited still more Scythians with promises of plunder and returned to Bactria. There he ran into Coenus, who defeated him. Most of the Sogdians and Bactrians fighting alongside Spitamanah lost hope and deserted him. Spitamanah’s Scyths stripped these deserters of their weapons and food.

  Now the Scyths heard a false report that Alexander was heading toward them. Tired of fighting, and wishing to appear hospitable yet formidable, they cut off Spitamanah’s head and sent it to Alexander.23

  Alexander now had the head of a warlord, but the Scythians had Peithon, and Alexander did not control Bactria and Sogdiana. In the fall of 328, after he returned to winter camp, he began to plan for a third year of war in Central Asia.

  when the Macedonians camped that winter, Alexander chose rude quarters in Samarkand. Some officers and men had to stay in Bactra, about 300 miles to the south, or in Nautaca, a post on the snowy road in between.

  Because of the weather as well as the long distances, Alexander met less with the companions than before, and mostly communicated with them by letter. He dropped the familiar Greek salutation xairein, reserving it for Antipater and a few intimates. He also began censoring the soldiers’ letters home. He didn’t want Antipater, or the soldiers’ families, to learn that casualties had risen and that the men were getting less loot and fewer captives than before. Inevitably, he stopped worshipping with the companions as a group.24

  Against the troops’ wishes, Alexander planned to station a garrison of 13,500 in Bactria, including 3,500 cavalry. He also contemplated a total of 23,000 troops for Bactria and Sogdiana. He could find this large number of men more easily than he could find someone eager to command them. He had to turn to the man who had always been closest to him in battle, Clitus the Black, who had saved his life at the Granicus, an
d whose sister had been his nurse. Since the death of Philotas, Clitus had held the prestigious position of top cavalry commander.25

  Clitus, Alexander announced, would give up his cavalry command and govern the provinces of Bactria and Sogdiana. He would command not only Macedonians and mercenaries but thousands of Persians and other Iranians—a first. Alexander did not predict when Clitus would get Macedonian or mercenary reinforcements, or when he might rejoin the army and have his share of any new conquests. A reluctant Clitus could not refuse the appointment.26

  Had Macedonians done less drinking, Clitus might have served in the post for years, but the Macedonians drank hard, especially that winter in Samarkand. On the night that Clitus and Alexander both drank too much, the witnesses were not sober enough to remember quite what happened.

  They did remember that Alexander and others had gone hunting during a warm spell. When the party returned, Alexander went to the palace and made an offering to Castor and Pollux, two brothers, one mortal and one immortal. These two were gods of safe homecoming, and also symbols of how Alexander saw himself, part man and part god. Clitus went to his quarters and was about to make an offering of three sheep when the invitation came to dine with Alexander. The sheep followed him as he went to the king’s, and Aristander, surprised, called this a bad omen. The king ordered Aristander and another diviner, the Spartan Cleomantis, to sacrifice for Clitus’s safety, and Clitus joined other leading companions at the party. Ptolemy and Perdiccas took couches on a large dais beside the king. Clitus and others found couches on a lower level. As bodyguards watched the entrances to the dining room, cupbearers poured wine, starting with the king.27

  After dinner the boasting turned from hunting to war. Unhappy with the situation in Bactria, some of the companions went so far as to disparage the expedition into Asia. They also knew the sharpest way to express themselves—to contrast Alexander with his genuine, human father, Philip. Clitus, the unhappiest of all, and one of the most senior, spoke most. Did he taunt Alexander? Or did he rise from his couch and challenge him? No one who remembered the party agreed about what he did, only about Alexander’s being to blame for what happened next. One companion wrote:

  Alexander began to belittle the deeds of Philip, and boasted that the well-known victory at Chaeronea had been his doing. A wicked and jealous father had deprived him of the glory of this deed. These things and others like them pleased the young, but displeased the older men. The older men had lived longer under Philip than under Alexander.

  Clitus turned to the people reclining below him and quoted a lyric of Euripides, so that the king could overhear the sound rather than the words. When the king suspected that the conversation was tending in a hostile direction, he began to ask those on the dais whether they had understood what Clitus said. They kept silent. His voice slowly rising, Clitus recalled Macedonian deeds in Greece. Then he said that the names of kings should not be inscribed on war trophies. The names of soldiers should. They did the killing and the dying. That was the truth, and if Alexander’s father Zeus would not tell him, an old soldier would. Parmenio and Attalus were not alive to tell him. The king had put them to death.

  Drunk, the king jumped up from his couch. In order to restrain him, his neighbors threw away their cups and rose. Alexander took a spear from a bodyguard and was going to strike Clitus, but Ptolemy and Perdiccas took him by the arms and stopped him. Leonnatus took away the spear. Alexander cried out and said that his close friends had seized him, something that never happened to Darius. He ordered that the trumpet be sounded to bring troops to the royal quarters.

  Ptolemy and Perdiccas released him and threw themselves at his knees, begging him to give up his headlong anger. The king ran into the vestibule, took a spear from a guard, and waited by the exit. One by one, the companions left, and the lights were put out. Clitus, who had stayed, stepped forward in the dark, and the king asked who he was. He said he was Clitus, and that he was leaving. Alexander struck him in the side, and as Clitus died, Alexander said, “Go and join Philip, Parmenio, and Attalus.”28

  This story implied that Alexander had caused the death of all four men, even his own father.

  Other companions remembered differently. The chamberlain, Chares, said Clitus quoted Euripides’s play Andromache, about a Trojan captive enslaved by Achilles’s son. Clitus did not have to remind the Achilles-obsessed Alexander that Andromache was an ancestor of the king’s. Impersonating her, Clitus said, “What bad government the Greeks have!” Alexander, Clitus implied, was a tyrant. According to Chares, Alexander immediately killed him with a spear. This version of events condemned Alexander by proving Clitus right.29

  In his memoirs, Ptolemy tried to exonerate Alexander. He wrote that after Clitus provoked Alexander, Ptolemy hauled Clitus away, but Clitus broke free, returned to the party, and challenged Alexander. Enraged by Clitus’s insults, Alexander killed him.30

  About the aftermath, the memoirists agreed. The grieving Alexander took to his bed and refused to eat, calling himself the murderer of his own friends. Cool after causing the death of Philotas, and indifferent to Parmenio’s death, he now became deranged. The ministrations of the doctors did no good, and neither did those of Callisthenes. The companions urged him to take food, and to make an offering to Dionysus. They knew that Alexander had skipped an offering to Dionysus and suspected that the god had let Alexander drink too much, or had driven him mad. They felt sure that Dionysus was accompanying the expedition. Callisthenes and the other intellectuals in the entourage pointed out that Dionysus had visited this region and subdued it, establishing his cult there. When the army discovered some Scythian burial stones, the intellectuals identified them as boundary markers erected by Dionysus.31

  When Alexander arose and went to look at the corpse of Clitus, he called out to Clitus’s absent sister, who had been his nurse. In the course of the war, she had lost two sons and now her brother. Three times Alexander had failed this woman, who was like a second mother.32 He wished to kill himself.

  Whatever the companions thought of Clitus’s death, they were not prepared to lose their military and religious leader. They convened a meeting of the army, and the soldiers, following the senior officers’ lead, declared the king could legitimately kill a subject who defied him. No one asked whether a king could legitimately kill a companion. Aristander reminded them that Clitus had ominously failed to complete a sacrifice just before his death. If that did not satisfy them, they could blame Dionysus.33

  This verdict let Alexander put an end to his grief. It could not supply him a grand strategy for the intractable war in Central Asia. He needed help, but who would give it? He had warred on the Scythians, caused the death of Spitamanah, and expelled Artaxshasa, so he could not expect help from the associates of these men. The Parthians who had helped him before, in suppressing Shatibrzana, were too far away. His sundry diviners had done little for him. The local gods were among his enemies.34

  the campaign of 327 began with a near disaster due to ignorance of local conditions. Alexander marched out too soon, and a hailstorm struck the army as they were heading up a forest road. The column scattered to take shelter in the woods. After the hail stopped, the temperature dropped suddenly. The king and the companions went from man to man, trying to keeping them from lying down and freezing to death, but some nevertheless died of cold. Later, the troops managed to set fires to warm themselves. Alexander saved one soldier by putting him on his throne in front of a fire. Then the flames from the fires spread. Although most men escaped to nearby meadows and a village, some burned to death. Altogether the storm cost Alexander’s army 2,000 lives. Rather than attempt to bury the dead, Alexander left them frozen in the woods.35

  Although he did not promise to bury them later, he did say he would replace all missing animals and equipment. He kept his word thanks to a friendly warlord whose scouts caught sight of the army. The troops received 2,000 camels among other new beasts of burden. On the Macedonians marched, and attacked the Scythi
an nomads Alexander had made his next target. Alexander captured 30,000 sheep and cattle from the nomads, and repaid the warlord.36

  Next the king directed his forces against an uncooperative warlord, Huxshiartas, who had served under Artaxshasa. Huxshiartas had gathered his family and troops atop a tableland the Macedonians called the “Rock of Sogdiana.” The wells and fields could support 1,000 households, and nine miles of mountains reaching as high as 9,000 feet ringed the place. Most of the year, heavy snow made the ascent arduous. Alexander and his officers debated whether to undertake a siege or withdraw and wait for the enemy to climb down. A taunt from one of the defenders settled the matter. He asked whether the Macedonians had wings to climb the highest mountain protecting the tableland. If they did not, they should give up.

  Alexander offered a reward of twelve talents to the first man to scale this mountain—twelve times the bonus he had paid to those who reenlisted at Ecbatana. He also offered prizes for runners-up, no matter how many. Three hundred men, most from the Balkans, volunteered. The engineers wove linen cords and adapted iron tent pegs for use in the frozen snow and rocks, and the volunteers dispensed with their weapons and armor.

  They waited until nightfall to climb the steepest, least guarded approach. Using the pegs and cords, they fashioned a rope ladder reaching many hundreds of feet to the top. Thirty men fell and died. Like the victims of the hailstorm, they lay unburied in the cold. By sunrise, 270 reached the peak, and sent Alexander a flag signal.37

  Alexander sent a herald to shout up to the defenders that they should surrender. The Macedonians had wings, he said, and had flown to the top of the mountain, above the defenders’ position. The king did not say that this unarmed force amounted to a company. Thinking the climbers armed and numerous, Huxshiartas and his troops surrendered.

  Huxshiartas expected to march down with his men and beg for mercy. Presumably Alexander would take them captive. The Macedonians would enslave some, especially the women, and sell the rest to the Phoenicians, who would send them in coffles to the slave markets of Persia and Mesopotamia. Instead Alexander asked to enter the citadel under a flag of truce. Huxshiartas sent guides to lead Alexander and a detachment up the mountain, and when they met, Alexander told Huxshiartas that the Macedonians would take no captives. He gave Huxshiartas to understand that the defenders should act as hosts. Alexander would be his guest.