Alexander the Great

by Philip Freeman

  For three days Alexander lay on his bed weeping and lamenting Cleitus, refusing all food and drink. By now the army was becoming disturbed at the king’s behavior. They were far from home in a dangerous land and needed firm leadership. If word got out that Alexander had lost his mind, they would be vulnerable to attacks on all sides, especially from Spitamenes. The prophet Aristander at last entered the king’s quarters and assured him that the death of Cleitus had been foreordained long ago and that Alexander was merely acting as an agent of the gods’ will. The king had always been susceptible to whatever nonsense this soothsayer conveniently revealed to him and so brightened a bit at the news. After this, Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes, the expedition historian, arrived and gently began to argue that the Cleitus affair was not as bad as it seemed. But then the philosopher Anaxarchus barged into the tent and demanded that Alexander stop behaving like a sniveling slave. He reminded he king that he was ruler of most of the known world and better start acting like it. Being a prince among men, he could do whatever he wanted to his subjects even if it meant skewering them with a spear when angry. That’s the way things work, chided the philosopher, and if he wanted the respect of his army he had better pull himself together.

  This Machiavellian advice was just what Alexander needed to bring him out of his depression. The king still felt horribly guilty and ordered that Cleitus be given a fine funeral, but he finally left his quarters and took up leadership of the army once again. The officers and men were greatly relieved, but they were deeply troubled as well. In spite of the extenuating circumstances of anger and drunkenness, the fact remained that Cleitus—one of Alexander’s most loyal and faithful friends—had been murdered by the king because he dared to stand up to him and say what was on the mind of many of the Macedonian soldiers. Each of them must have wondered who would be next.

  In spite of the gloom at Alexander’s camp, events in the field were looking up for the Macedonians. Spitamenes was starting to feel hemmed in by Alexander’s garrisons scattered throughout the land, so he once again retreated to the borders of Scythia. There he recruited three thousand Scythian horsemen for a raid into Sogdiana. He expected it would be a quick and easy strike into his homeland since all the Macedonians were settled for the winter at their camps, but he did not reckon on the daring of Alexander’s lieutenant Coenus. Instead of fruitlessly chasing Spitamenes once he had already launched his raid, Coenus used his local intelligence network to get word of the strike before it happened and rode out to intercept the raiders. He surprised them on their own ground and killed more than eight hundred of them in battle. This defeat was enough to shift public opinion in the enemy camp. The Sogdians deserted Spitamenes, as did most of his Bactrian followers, who surrendered themselves to Coenus. The Scythians in his army remained loyal, but they plundered the baggage train and rode with the Sogdian lord into the steppes.

  When the end came for Spitamenes, it arrived from a most unexpected source. He was cunning and resourceful, but his weakness was, as the Roman historian Curtius puts it, an immodicus amor for his wife. This immoderate love took the form of dragging her through the steppes and over mountains with him on his raids, whereas most Sogdian commanders would have left their wives at home. The poor woman was at the end of her wits after two years of such affection and begged Spitamenes to surrender himself to Alexander and trust in the mercy of the Macedonian king. She had borne him three children, she implored him, now grown into men. End this conflict and let them go home rather than wearing away their lives in a pointless war of attrition against an unbeatable foe. But instead of giving in to her pleas, Spitamenes felt betrayed by his wife and pulled out his scimitar to kill her, only to be stopped by her brothers. He told his wife to get out of his sight, threatening her with death if he ever saw her again.

  For a few days Spitamenes slept only with his concubines, but at last his love for his wife overcame him and he admitted her back into his good graces. She in turn declared that her earlier outburst had been due to her feminine weakness and that from now on she would be a submissive and dutiful wife. The Sogdian lord celebrated their rapprochement with a banquet, from which he was carried back to his tent roaring drunk. As soon as he was asleep, his loving and attentive wife took his sword and cut off his head. Then, with the collusion of a trusted servant, she wrapped it in a cloth and rode off to the Macedonian camp. When they at last arrived, she went to Alexander’s tent and told the guard she must speak to the king personally. Alexander saw her enter with a blood-spattered robe and presumed it was yet another local noblewoman complaining of abuse at the hands of his troops. When the woman called in her servant with the bundle and unrolled the wrappings, the surprised king saw the head and asked whose it was, the object being an unrecognizable mess at this point. When the identity was confirmed, Alexander was torn between relief at the death of his greatest enemy and shock that his wife would do this to him. He was grateful, but he sent the woman away lest she be a poor example for the women in his entourage.

  At least that is the story according to Curtius. The version recorded by Arrian is a more plausible account of politics and betrayal. In this version the Scythians who had remained loyal to Spitamenes began to worry when they heard Alexander was coming for them. Their faithfulness was limited only by their devotion to saving their own skin, so they cut off their leader’s head and sent it as a present to the Macedonian camp. Whichever account is true, resistance along the northern borders of Sogdiana fell apart with the death of Spitamenes. The Scythians sued for peace, as did the Sogdians, turning over to Alexander any of the officers of Spitamenes remaining in their territory.

  The king wasted no time celebrating his victory as he wanted to settle affairs in the province quickly before he set out for India. He took his army into the mountains of eastern Sogdiana where some of the highland tribes still refused to accept his sovereignty. It was a strange winter among these peaks, with daytime thunderstorms turning to ice and snow at night. The hail was so heavy that the Macedonians used their shields to protect themselves. During one horrendous day, many of the soldiers became disoriented in the thick forest and almost two thousand died of exposure. The rest wandered aimlessly, hiding as best they could among trees to shelter themselves. Alexander went out like a shepherd, gathering those he could find and sending them to nearby mountain huts to thaw out. He found some frozen to trees, huddled together in death.

  When he had collected all the soldiers he could find, he went back to his camp and collapsed on his throne in exhaustion. It was then that a young Macedonian infantryman more dead than alive stumbled through the door of his tent, not knowing where he was or whose quarters he had entered. The king leapt from his seat and led the poor man over to his throne to warm up by the fire. For a long time the man was in a stupor, but Alexander plied him with hot drinks and covered him with blankets. At last the soldier recognized the king and saw where he was sitting. He was horrified that he had taken the royal throne and jumped up in terror. Alexander calmed him and ordered him to sit down again. He then told the young man that he was lucky he had not seated himself on the throne of the Great King of Persia, for it would be a crime worthy of death. But here, it was just the chair of a Macedonian king.

  Alexander gathered his men together to rest and warm their bones before he began the last push into eastern Sogdiana. There was a series of mountain fortresses in the region controlled by local lords who still held out against the king, hoping he would pass them by on his way to India. But Alexander hated to leave an enemy in a position of strength behind him, so he decided to take these citadels that winter no matter the cost. The first and most heavily fortified was a stronghold known as the Sogdian Rock on top of a mountain hundreds of feet high surrounded on all sides by precipitous cliffs. The tribesmen there had a secure source of water and enough food to survive a long siege. They were so confident of the impregnability of their fortress that they called down to Alexander saying he would never take the place unless his soldiers had
wings.

  This was just the sort of taunt that made the king more determined than ever to achieve his goal. He addressed the army and asked for volunteers to scale the mountain. Each man who made it to the top would receive a generous reward from the king. By now many of the soldiers were experienced in climbing difficult cliffs; three hundred stepped forward. They took with them only lengths of linen rope and their tent pegs to drive into the cliffs for handholds. They climbed through snow and ice at night on the unguarded, sheer face of the mountain. Thirty of them fell to their deaths during the ascent, their bodies lost in the crevices below, but by sunrise the rest were on top of a peak rising up just behind the fortress. Alexander then sent a message to the defenders saying they should turn around and look up, because he had found soldiers who could fly. The Macedonians above them grinned and waved linen flags. The tribesmen could not believe that anyone could have scaled their mountain and were so terrified that they surrendered without a fight. The other mountain fortresses of Sogdiana quickly gave up in turn when they heard the news. By spring, the whole province was in Alexander’s hands at last.

  Among the captives from the Sogdian Rock was the family of Oxyartes, a Bactrian nobleman who had fought against Alexander. One of his daughters was a maiden named Roxane, who seemed to the Macedonians to be the most beautiful woman they had ever seen. In spite of his tepid response to women in the past, the king was apparently smitten with the teenager and fell in love with her. He could have taken her as his prisoner to his bed whenever he wished, but he saw in Roxane something special and decided to make her his wife. Alexander had been turning down proposals of marriage for years, so one might wonder why he suddenly decided to marry a Bactrian woman at this point in his life. The answer is probably a mixture of politics and passion—two forces that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Alexander was now twenty-eight years old, a king of many lands without an heir. As everyone around him had been saying for years, it was high time for him to get married and bring sons into the world. And as his father, Philip, had shown, there was no reason why a Macedonian king had to wed a bride from his own country. Alexander’s own mother was a foreigner from Epirus. And again as with his father, there was also no reason Roxane could not be the first of many royal brides, including perhaps a proper Macedonian woman in time. There was also the matter of cementing alliances with an important Bactrian lord. Family ties were a sure way to bind Oxyartes and his family to Alexander, securing his hold on a restless land. It would also be a grand gesture to the natives of his empire that their new king did not think himself above marriage to one of his foreign subjects. It was important propaganda that could serve him well for years to come, even though the old guard among the Macedonians would grumble that the king was going native on them yet again. And there was love. Like many Greeks and Macedonians, Alexander preferred the company of men for his sexual affairs, but this did not mean he could not feel passion for women as well. The king, like most people in the ancient world, would have found modern distinctions of sexual orientation baffling.

  And so Alexander, king of Macedonia and ruler of all the lands from Egypt to the Hindu Kush, married Roxane, daughter of the Bactrian lord Oxyartes, beneath a soaring mountain in the distant land of Sogdiana. According to ancient Macedonian custom, attendants carried a fresh loaf of bread before the couple, which the king cut in two with his sword and shared with his new bride. Oxyartes was present and surely thrilled at the prospect of calling Alexander his son-in-law. Persians, Lydians, Syrians, and Babylonians, along with soldiers and courtiers from the whole empire, rejoiced at the sight of their young king marrying a wife from the heartland of Asia. Only the Macedonian officers disapproved of the union, but they feigned pleasure and offered the king their warmest congratulations. Since the murder of Cleitus, they had learned to hold their tongues.

  9

  INDIA

  OF ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE KNOWN WORLD,

  THE INDIANS OF ASIA LIVE FARTHEST TO THE EAST

  AND THE CLOSEST TO THE RISING SUN. BEYOND

  INDIA IS NOTHING BUT AN UNINHABITABLE

  DESERT OF SAND.

  —HERODOTUS

  Alexander’s wedding to Roxane in the seventh year of the campaign was only the first of several controversial steps the king took to unite the disparate factions of his empire as he prepared to move toward the borders of India. One of the most farsighted was his decision to train thirty thousand native youths from throughout the empire as Macedonian soldiers. This plan was motivated by necessity, since Alexander knew—even if most of his officers refused to accept the fact—that the small nation of Macedonia simply could not produce enough troops to control all the lands he had conquered and hoped to conquer yet. Like the Persians before him, the king realized that he needed to draw on the manpower of the many nations under his control to secure and expand his dominion. These selected youths would be taught the Greek language, equipped as Macedonian soldiers, and trained to fight as members of his army. They would not be foreign auxiliaries, as was common enough in the ancient world, but an integral part of the new Macedonian army, including leaders at the top levels. It was a boldly innovative plan beyond anything that had been attempted in military history. Alexander took pains to assure his current troops that this action would not lessen their importance, but they did not believe him for a minute. Anyone could see that the king was planning to turn the Macedonian army from a provincial into an international force. As the soldiers grew older and the new crop of native recruits came of age, the men who had fought with him for so long would be sent home to Macedonia with a bag of gold and a pat on the back. Their sons and grandsons would also serve under Alexander, of course, but as members of an imperial army of which Macedonians were just one part. Their future commanders would as likely be from Persia, Babylon, or India as Pella. It was a bitter blow to his loyal troops, officers and common soldiers alike, who did not share Alexander’s vision of a new world empire.

  But even more disturbing to many Macedonians was the immediate problem of homage before the king, a ritual known to the Greeks as proskynesis. Herodotus says that when two Persians met on the street, it was always possible to know their respective social status by watching how they greeted each other. Equals would kiss each other on the mouth, but a man of slightly lower rank would receive a kiss on the cheek from his superior. Persons of greatly inferior standing, however, would prostrate themselves on the ground before their betters. The same ritual applied to the Great King at court, though as he was superior to all others, it was expected that everyone would fall on the ground before him except a select few. Scenes from Persian art show high-ranking officials approaching the king on his throne and blowing him a kiss with their right hands, but most supplicants—and certainly all Greeks—were expected to fall on their faces before the awesome royal glory.

  To Greeks and Macedonians, such degrading behavior before any king was inconceivable. Free Greeks did not bow down before kings, but only before gods. To fall prostrate on the floor before a man was the posture of a slave before his master or a worshiper before a divinity. Even in prayer, the people of the Aegean normally stood in reverence before the image of a god with no more than a slightly bowed head. The Persians did not view proskynesis to the Great King as an act of worship, but as a profound mark of reverence and submission to royal authority. The Greeks knew this, but they could never in good conscience bring themselves to perform such obeisance when they appeared before the Persian throne. One clever Theban envoy to Persepolis had once approached the Persian king and let his ring drop to the floor, then stooped to pick it up, excusing himself in his own mind that he had simply fallen to the ground to retrieve his personal property. Some Spartan visitors to the court at Susa, however, had been more obstinate. When the royal bodyguards told them to prostrate themselves, they refused. When the guards tried to push them onto the floor, they fought back, saying it was not their custom to fall down before any mortal man. Greek resistance to this Persian ceremony
was deeply ingrained in the national psyche, so that many preferred to risk death rather than submit to such degradation.

  But to Persians and others at the royal court, proskynesis was a normal part of protocol. From the first time they had come before Alexander, the Persians had fallen to the ground as an act of respect, in spite of the fact that the Macedonians looked upon their performance with amusement and contempt. This created an untenable situation for Alexander. His Asian subjects regularly performed proskynesis before him and refused to change their ways, while the Greeks and Macedonians treated the ritual as an impious and degrading barbarian observance. By the time Alexander was preparing for the invasion of India, he knew he had to resolve the situation. His hope was to introduce proskynesis gradually to the Macedonians, perhaps in a modified form, so that they would come to accept it as a purely ceremonial rite with no religious connotations. Alexander had no desire to be worshiped as a god by his countrymen or even enjoy the same elaborate court rituals that traditionally surrounded the Great Kings of Persia, but it was ridiculous and divisive to have half his court performing ritual obeisance before him and the other half treating it as a bad joke.

  The king’s attempt to introduce proskynesis among the Greeks and Macedonians turned out to be a miserable failure, thanks largely to the court historian Callisthenes. Callisthenes hated to lose an argument and took pride in portraying himself as the defender of liberty in the face of Oriental despotism. Many among the old guard Macedonians admired his outspoken stance in favor of tradition because he spoke what was on their own minds, but the historian mistakenly believed he was untouchable. Even Aristotle had commented that his nephew was a marvelous orator, but had no common sense.