Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Go to the end of the world, he summed up: no cowardice, no delay. Plunder and satrapies for the taking, and pensions for all who wish them, once the army had gone as far as possible. Remember the examples set by Heracles and Dionysus. The members of the expedition will become famous, if not divine.

  For a time, no one replied. Then Coenus removed his helmet, as custom required, and addressed the council. “In the light of the reputation that I have, thanks to you, and that I have in the eyes of the troops,” he began, and went on to say, “My age gives me the right not to hide what seems best.”

  Coenus was raising the dead against Alexander. Everyone in the meeting knew that Parmenio and Clitus, the two officers Alexander had murdered, would have favored calling a halt. Parmenio had wanted to call a halt before they invaded Mesopotamia. Clitus was killed after he challenged Alexander’s decision to leave him in Central Asia.

  Coenus now made Alexander a somewhat insulting offer. If Alexander would go home to visit his mother, and dismiss his troops, Coenus and the other officers would help him raise a new force and attack peoples closer than the Indians, such as the Carthaginians. Coenus concluded with a commonplace that Alexander may have taken as another insult, or even a threat: “Divine power can do unpredictable things. Human beings cannot be protected against them.”

  Infuriated, Alexander dismissed the councilors.

  A day later, Alexander reconvened the council. If they wished, he said, they could go home with donatives. He would persevere, helped by whoever would stay. With this new gambit, he hoped to split the opposition. Friends such as Hephaestion would speak up, he thought, and refuse to abandon their king. Once Coenus and the rest saw that the officers were split, they would yield to Alexander for unity’s sake. Then the officers would help Alexander convince the men.42

  The king waited for some response but got none, not even from Hephaestion. Ptolemy was among those who said nothing.

  Alexander dismissed them a second time.

  After these two days of deadlock, some companions approached him privately and tried to talk him into going back to Macedon. No doubt Hephaestion was among them. Perhaps Ptolemy was. They all chose to keep their fruitless conversation with Alexander secret. They did not suggest he call another meeting. That would show the army that Alexander had lost the confidence of his war council, and perhaps lead to disorder.

  A third day went by, and then another, and then another. Alexander refused to speak to any of the commanders, or even to come out of his tent. A mutiny had broken out, a royal mutiny of one: the son of the god of companions versus the companions, the priest versus his congregation.

  One hundred miles away, the Ganges princes were surely mobilizing. In Macedon, Antipater perhaps was editing his own correspondence. The people there were suffering from famine, and so were many Greeks. To appease the gods who had sent the famine, thousands of acts of sacrifice were occurring every day. Yet no one sacrificed on behalf of this army, a community the size of Athens or Memphis. Only Alexander could perform these rites, and he refused.43

  Then one morning the king stepped out of his tent. For what may have been the 10,000th time, he slew a sheep and inspected the entrails. They proved unfavorable. Perhaps he performed this ritual three times, the maximum custom allowed. The bad omens persisted. Although he had ignored or manipulated omens before, Alexander did not challenge them this time.

  He convened a third meeting, summoning the closest and oldest of his companions. He announced bad omens for crossing the river. The army would turn back. Where they would go, he did not say.44

  When the news spread, the troops rejoiced. Rushing to his tent, they called down the gods’ blessings on him, thinking he had at last let himself be defeated, by his companions.45

  In reply, Alexander announced that before withdrawing, the army must erect twelve brick altars as tall as siege towers. Ten thousand men would work on each one. For weeks men and animals labored in the rain to build the complex. Then the sky cleared, and Alexander sacrificed to a different Olympian god atop each altar, and decreed games for the men. After days of celebration, they turned back the way they had come, toward the Jhelum River.46

  The twelve altars counted as prominent oddities on Alexander’s Indian itinerary, along with crocodiles, pearls, and monsoons. One later writer, Plutarch, believed that Indian kings worshipped at them, but eventually these piles of brick faded into the landscape and vanished.47

  One person in the expedition might have preserved them: Sandracottus. He left at about this time, for he no longer had any prospect of enlisting Alexander’s help once the army turned back. His future seemed unpromising. In the next twenty years he nonetheless raised an army and conquered most of northern India. Besides overthrowing the Magadha kingdom, he conquered all of Alexander’s territories in the subcontinent. He would have found it easy to preserve the riverside altars, the building of which may have been the last act of Alexander’s that he witnessed. Perhaps they did not suit his religious taste. He was a syncretist, combining traditional Indian cult with Buddhist ideas. Alexander’s altars looked like ziggurats, not stupas.48

  Anonymous color drawing of the western bank of the Beas River, 1848.

  Illustrated London News.

  in early fall, the army marched back to the place on the Jhelum where they had fought Puru some months before. Two thousand teakwood boats were waiting there. So were new leather corselets and cherrywood pikes brought from Europe via the Khyber Pass. The men burned their old corselets and prepared the flotilla while Alexander made travel plans with his councilors and gave Puru charge of the Indian frontier. He had founded a city at the site earlier, but now he named it after Bucephalas, who had lately died, a victim of one wound too many. Coenus died of illness, and received the most elaborate funeral since Erigyius. Even Alexander’s favorite dog had recently died—and got a city named after him, too. The sick and wounded were numerous enough to form garrisons for these cities.49

  The king and council were embarking on a risky plan—descending the Indus to the Gulf of Arabia. They knew this downriver voyage would take months, but they could not know how many. Bad weather might delay them indefinitely. The trickle of mail and supplies through the Khyber Pass would no longer reach them, and Alexander’s orders to his subordinates would no longer get through. Men such as Antipater, Antigonus, and Harpalus, used to hearing from him after several weeks or months, might not hear from him again for up to a year. The descent of the Indus would test not only the army but the strained ties of companionship.

  To save time and lives, they might have gone back the way they came. The council knew that Alexander would reject this plan with all his native vehemence, exacerbated by resentment at having to turn back. No one even proposed it. Instead the councilors let Alexander approach them individually and borrow money to build the ships.50

  That October, amidst further rains, Alexander propitiated the river in the name of Amon and Heracles and the army set sail. Craterus took infantry and cavalry down the western bank, and Hephaestion took more troops plus baggage and 200 elephants down the eastern bank. The fleet of 1,800 vessels, led by Alexander, traveled just behind. Crowds of curious villagers gathered along the banks or poured down from neighboring hills, and Craterus and Hephaestion had to police them. Alexander waved from on deck, and river dolphins bobbed beside the royal barge.51

  The voyage soon turned rough. At the confluence of the Jhelum and the Chenab, in central Punjab, a whirlpool destroyed two ships. Lookouts called warnings to helmsmen, drums beat the pace for the rowers, sawyers broke up against the hulls of the ships, and rescue teams on shore hollered back and forth as boats went aground. Tributaries flowed into the river and threw up waves and spume.52

  Every day they put in for rest, food, and forage. Whenever they failed to secure cooperation from the locals, Alexander ordered his troops to seize villages and supplies.

  The troops complained. They had thought fighting would come to an end once they turned b
ack at the Beas River. Alexander and the officers had to convince them to keep at it.53

  When the Malava federation of southern Punjab refused to cooperate, Alexander regarded this as resistance by a mere tribe. Rather than negotiate, Alexander marched his strike force day and night through a fifty-mile stretch of desert and launched a surprise attack on a Malava city. For lack of a palisade, he stationed a ring of thousands of cavalry around the place. When civilians tried to flee, he killed them before they could supplicate. He had treated Central Asian rebels in much the same way, but the Malavas were not rebels, and their cities surpassed anything in Central Asia. Their warriors had fought in the chief battle described in the Indian epic, the Mahabharata.54

  Perdiccas, sent against another city, found it deserted. Pressing onward, the two commanders killed fugitives on the roads or fleeing into marshes. Advancing on a third city, the Macedonians encountered a garrison of crack troops who were Brahmin priests under arms. More impulsive than ever, Alexander led the way in mounting the wall, and the Macedonians followed him to victory, but this time the Indians burned the city rather than desert it, and died fighting amidst the flames.

  To the south, the Indians marshaled another, bigger army of 50,000. When Alexander outmaneuvered them, they took refuge in a fourth Malava city, and the biggest siege since Tyre ensued. Alexander and Perdiccas attacked, driving the Indians from the outer wall to a citadel. Rather than wait for the siege train, Alexander ordered an assault with scaling ladders. Not even a diviner who wished to warn him to wait could delay him. He told the diviner he had already found good omens by killing an ox himself, and ordered his men to mount the walls with ladders.

  When he thought they were shirking their duty, he went up a ladder himself, mounting the wall and cutting down the enemies in his way. Arrows rained down from the citadel towers, and Indians standing near him on the parapet flung javelins. Alexander had only his sword and his shield. Aghast that their king was in danger, the shield bearers scrambled up the ladders to join him. Then the ladders broke. Only the bodyguard Leonnatus and two others had reached Alexander.55

  Rather than retreat, or offer an easy target atop the parapet, Alexander jumped down into the city, landing beside a fig tree. He continued fighting with his back against the wall of the citadel. The Indians hemmed him in, flinging spears and rocks. They would have overwhelmed him had not Leonnatus and the other two Macedonians leapt down after him. An arrow in the face killed one Macedonian. Another arrow pierced Alexander’s armor and struck him in the lung. As blood flooded his breastplate, he fainted and dropped to the ground. The two Macedonians left standing were wounded, too. The king was minutes away from death.

  Frantic because they had lost sight of Alexander, the shield bearers climbed the wall of the citadel by standing on one another’s shoulders. Leaping down into the city, they repelled the Indians and carried Alexander out through the gate to his tent. Seeing that the arrow was barbed, the surgeons made a large incision, so they could extract all of it, and more blood gushed. The king opened his eyes, only to faint a second time. The anxious surgeons dressed his wound, and the body of a very fit thirty-year-old began, breath by breath, to recover. The surgeons had saved him. The enraged Macedonians took the life of every Indian in the city. Stunned by this onslaught, the Malava federation surrendered unconditionally, as did the cities of the neighboring Ksudrakas.56

  Meanwhile, some troops heard a rumor that the king was dead. They panicked, and pandemonium broke out. To calm them, Alexander ordered that he be brought from his tent and put on a barge. After he came alongside the place where the men were camped, he showed himself by removing a screen that sheltered him from the sun. The men shouted in amazement and held up their hands as though praying. When slaves brought his litter, he ordered them to bring his horse instead. He mounted and came ashore to resounding cheers. Weeping men came forward and touched him or threw flowers. He had never come so close to receiving the divine honors Amon proclaimed were his due.

  Later, the companions gathered unsummoned at his bedside and criticized him for recklessness. Craterus, the leader of the delegation, reminded him he was a king, not a soldier. If he continued to suffer grave injuries, more rumors of his death would spread and encourage rebellion. Philip took risks, too, Craterus reminded Alexander, and they cost him an eye, but he did not repeatedly put himself in the lead. Craterus and the other officers thought that Alexander no longer needed to take grave risks. Earlier he did it to capture Darius. Now he did it only to capture a small city.57

  Alexander neither protested nor changed his conduct. He preferred the individualism of Homer’s Achilles to the collective thinking of Craterus, Parmenio, and Philip. Yet sometimes he knew better than to imitate this selfish hero. His favorite verse in Homer praised Agamemnon, the beleaguered Achaean leader, not Achilles.58

  Alexander was torn. As leader of his companions, he had to take risks. As commander in chief and king, he had to order his companions to take the risks. If he tried to strike a balance between these duties, a companion such as Craterus would complain Alexander was too much a soldier, and a companion such as Clitus would complain that Alexander was merely a general. This problem of balance is a perennial one, affecting leaders today when they decide whether to command from the front line or from the rear. Alexander’s religious bent compounded the problem. He took risks because he wanted his men to revere him.

  He also understood their religious needs as opposed to his own. An army in its right mind will not stand and fight; it will run away. Alexander strove to give his men the outlook—the supernal, self-sacrificing zeal—they would need to persevere. He tried to motivate them by invoking omens, propitiating gods, and sending dead comrades on a safe trip to the underworld.

  Over the next few weeks Alexander recovered from his wound, and the men from their distress. The king gave thanks to the gods, called another meeting, and appointed a Macedonian satrap to govern the Malavas. (Only one new province had gone to a Macedonian since Clitus received Bactria.) From the Malavas, Alexander demanded 1,000 hostages. Once he received them, he felt the Indians had proved their loyalty, and he returned the hostages. Kindness toward captives, not suppliants, was his new token of mercy.59

  The army now reached the Indus and built more ships before resuming the voyage downstream. As they left Punjab for the flats of the lower Indus valley, the river became smooth, falling only half a foot per mile. The flotilla meandered around sandbanks and sawyers, passing rafts made of stuffed skins and bundles of reeds. From a distance, the men could see the peaks of Hindu Kush. Yet marshes and oxbow lakes obscured the configuration of the land along the Indus, and often they could not tell where to put in for the night. Thankfully, resistance ceased. The Macedonians’ reputation preceded them, and when they reached the Ambashthas, the people hailed them as an army of gods—the Macedonians did not know which ones—and surrendered.60

  For the first time, a community would do what Amon said, and worship Alexander. Alas, this community had never heard of Amon, or Zeus-Amon, and so whatever they did was incomprehensible to the god whom they worshipped. If they gave Alexander a ticket to the heavens, as the Brahmins could have done, apparently no companion recorded it.

  After several more weeks’ voyage, the Macedonians encountered the ruler of a large kingdom in the central Indus Valley. They called him Mushika, confusing his name with that of his people. The outcome of the encounter was also confused. He refused to cooperate, then changed his mind, and then changed it again and rebelled, the first Indian leader to do so. The next king they encountered, in the desert and mountains to the west of Mushika, was another royal question mark. The companions called him Samba, confusing him with a legendary son of Krishna. Samba refused to cooperate, like the Mushika and the Malavas, but some cities in his kingdom submitted and then rebelled.61

  Brahmin priests and soldiers led the rebellion. Rather than take any prisoners, Alexander executed them. He apparently did not know that this policy vio
lated the norms of Indian warfare. Later some of them begged for mercy, waving palm fronds, and a surprised Alexander spared them. At a city farther south, Hamartelia, Brahmins defied the Macedonians, and Alexander besieged them, but in time they begged for mercy, too, waving fronds, and Alexander spared them also. They had gotten the knack of this Greek ritual: resist, then beg. Yet these supplications did Alexander little good. For the most part, Indians did not submit to him. The king could no longer manage the business of surrender with aplomb. Farther south, deep in the lower Indus valley, Alexander’s troops massacred a tribe that identified itself with Dionysus.62

  Casualties in the southern Indus Valley were high—as many as 80,000 in the kingdom of Samba, and tens of thousands in other places. One-third of all casualties reported during the entire expedition were Indian. About half of those enslaved were Indian. This policy of mass enslavement may have angered the Indians more than the casualties, for the Vedic religion did not allow for the enslavement of worshippers of the gods of India. In contrast, the religion of the Macedonians and Greeks allowed for the enslavement of anyone, except priests in important shrines. Even more than vegetarianism, this Indian norm divided the locals from the invaders.63

  At some point, Alexander asked the Indians in the entourage about the tenacious resistance to an obviously superior invader. Calanus, the ascetic who had joined the expedition in Taxila, answered without words. He spread a dried cowhide and stepped on the edge of it. Another part of the hide rose. He stepped on that part, and somewhere else rose. Then he stood in the center and the hide stayed flat. What did Calanus mean? Was he suggesting that Alexander could control India only by reaching the center? Where was that?64