The Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  I am not angry. Fury has not seized me. Yet I perceive in this moment the gravest peril to the expedition since it marched forth from Europe. I glance to Hephaestion. He sees it too, and Craterus and Telamon at his shoulder.

  “Soldiers are you? On the trek to Gaugamela,” I remind my officers, “your men were so stricken with dread, and such prey to mindless panic, that they crowded about me like children in the dark. Yet now in possession of victory, they—and you—grow insolent.” I turn back to my accuser, who stands atop the mosaic site designating Babylon. “Have you conquered this city, Cleitus, or has it conquered you?”

  He shifts, shamefaced. He knows I know, as does all the army, of his liaison with a courtesan of the palace, and of the fortune he has torn through in days, bewitched by her.

  “I will tell you what I think, my impertinent friend. I think that license and fornication have robbed you of your wits. Yes, you. All of you! For you who call yourselves soldiers have forgotten the foundations of our calling. Obedience and respect! Am I your king? Will you obey me? Or have sudden riches—which have come to you by my hand—turned you brazen and insubordinate? Do you doubt my vision, brothers? Have I lost your trust?”

  The hall has gone stone-silent. My tread resounds as I stalk to the mosaic’s eastern end: Greece and Macedon.

  “When we set out from home, not four years past, how many of you dreamed that we would conquer even this far?”

  I cross the Hellespont, indicating Troy and the northern Aegean.

  “Yet we won here.” At the Granicus. “And here and here and here.” I stride down the coast, past Miletus and Halicarnassus to Issus. “Here, you would have turned back.” Tyre and Gaza. “Here you were satisfied to remain.” Egypt. “Here you counseled me to advance no farther.” Syria. “Do I say false? Speak up! Let him stand forward who dares refute me!”

  No one breathes. Not a man budges.

  I dislodge Cleitus from the mosaic site representing Babylon.

  “Now we stand here—beyond our most daring dreams—and lay designs to march even farther. To here . . .” Susa. “Here.” Persepolis. “And here.” Ecbatana. “Is that your aim, soldiers—if so you call yourselves? Then answer: Who will lead you?”

  I draw up.

  “Name him! Name your man and I shall step aside. Let this new general direct your affairs, since you find my counsel unworthy.”

  My glare scours the ring. Chastened countenances greet me. Not a man will meet my eye.

  “Will you heed me then? Dare I call myself your king? For you may as well know now—there can be no better time to tell you—that I have no intention of halting here, halfway across this floor.”

  I stride past Persia and Media. To Parthia, Bactria, Areia. The high plateau of Iran and the kingdoms of Afghanistan.

  “Will you conquer these lands with me, brothers? Or, sated with riches, will you bed down partway and give yourselves over to whoring and gluttony?”

  Murmurs of “No!” and “Never!”

  I pull back. One can scourge good men only so much.

  “My friends, I know I have pressed novelty too suddenly upon you. I have tried your patience. Let me beg you then, by all the good things that my counsel has brought you so far. Bear with me. Trust me, as you have always. For when we cross beyond Persia, into lands no Greek has known . . .”

  I step past the Afghan kingdoms, to the Hindu Kush and India.

  “. . . we will need all the good men we can get. And prepare your minds further, my friends. For from these lands we bring into subjection, I shall draw more foreign troops, and they will fight at my shoulder and at yours. It must be so. How can we work it otherwise?”

  For the first time I sense the men turning toward me. They understand, or begin to. And those who don’t, trust my vision and my call.

  “Do you imagine, friends, that we can overturn the order of the earth without altering, ourselves? The world is new, and we will make it newer. Who will follow me? Who believes? Let he who loves me clasp my hand now and pledge his allegiance. For such dreams as I hold cannot embrace the timorous or the faint of heart.”

  I step to India and beyond, crossing so far that I stand, at the end, in the shadows, where the lanterns of the hall barely cast their gleam: to the Shore of Ocean at the Ends of the Earth.

  “Declare yourselves now, brothers, and evermore stand by your vow. If you are with me, you are with me all the way.”

  As one man, the hall rises. “Alexander!” my officers cry. And again: “Alexander! Alexander!”

  Twenty- Eight

  MONSTERS OF THE DEEP

  TWENTY DAYS TAKE US TO SUSA. Here Darius’s hoard is fifty thousand talents, twelve hundred tons of gold and silver—so much that we cannot carry it with us. Another forty days of fighting and forced passages bear us within striking distance of Persepolis. We are in Persia proper now. The homeland. Darius has fled north to Ecbatana, though his satrap Ariobarzanes tries on his own to strip the capital. We beat him by covering eighty miles in two days and a night. At Persepolis the king’s treasury holds 120,000 talents of gold. Packing only part of this haul to Ecbatana takes five thousand camels and ten thousand pairs of asses. The train is seventeen miles long. It is wealth on such a scale that no one even thinks to steal it. Men sit round cook fires, perched on ingots of silver. They mount their horses, stepping off bags of gold.

  It is nine months since Gaugamela. The army is barely recognizable. Our reinforcements have at last caught up, fifteen thousand horse and foot; already half have been corrupted by the excess they behold on every hand. At Persepolis, it seems, half the world has come out to us. Actors and acrobats have arrived from Athens; we have chefs from Miletus and hairdressers from Halicarnassus; saddlers and tailors have flocked in from Syria and Egypt, along with dancers and jugglers, star-readers and omen-diviners; day girls and flute girls and evening girls. Our pimps, Ptolemy observes, are more numerous than our cavalry. Every day fresh caravans arrive. What had been an army has become an industry. Every veteran, it seems, packs a bride or mistress and half her kin. My father barred wagons in his army. In mine, sergeants and even corporals truck their goods. Philip permitted one servant for ten men; in my corps, the former outnumber the latter. We wear our wealth and ride it. Philotas’s string of ponies would mount a squadron in my father’s army; his stock of boots would shoe a division. In Persepolis he finds a man with hair exactly like his own; he hires the fellow on, just to grow fresh tresses (the men call him “the hair farm”), which Philotas has his hairdresser (yes, he packs one too) work into crowns to fill out his own thinning thatch.

  I abhor such unsoldierliness, but I have gone as slack myself. Since Damascus I have taken Memnon’s widow Barsine to my bed. This at Parmenio’s suggestion, to keep me from Darius’s harem. But his scheme has prospered too well. I have come to care for the woman and to depend upon her offices. Barsine protects me. If not for her, petitioners and grievance-pleaders would devour every minute of my day. She bars my door and lets me work. She will not permit me to drink to excess, as is my weakness, and she stands sentry over my table.

  For her birthday I throw a feast. An entertainment is staged. Acrobats armed with swords (real ones, whose edges they demonstrate by dicing juggled quinces) perform a pantomime of Persia’s conquest. The stunt is meant to flatter the Macedonians but, when it concludes, Tigranes, who has become a dear friend, rises, insulted. He blames Barsine for this shameless sycophancy. To the astonishment of all, Parmenio stands.

  “What is your complaint, Persian?” he demands of Tigranes. “You have won the war, not us!”

  I have never seen Parmenio so stinking or so animated by woe. The chamber, which is vast, falls silent. Parmenio addresses me.

  “Yes, we have lost!” he declares. “We broke these Persians in the field, but they have outsmarted us in the palace. See what we wear and eat, the retinues that attend us! You have not vanquished Darius, Alexander, but become him. And as for these mentors of yours, these spider women w
hom I have installed with my own hands, more fool I!”

  Voices seek to cry him down, fearful of my anger. “Now you will tell me,” I say, “that my father would never have conducted himself in this manner.”

  “As he would not.”

  “I am not my father!”

  “Yes,” replies Parmenio, “we see that plain.”

  Another time such insolence would have set my hand seeking a sword. But this night I feel only despair.

  Hephaestion defends me. “Indeed,” he testifies, “Alexander is not Philip. For Philip never faced challenges on such a scale, or even dreamt of their existence! If Philip led us, we would still be in Egypt, given over to intemperance and vice—”

  “And what are we now?” demands Parmenio.

  “—instead of seeking to remake the world into something bold and new!”

  Parmenio laughs in Hephaestion’s face. The old general is past seventy. He has already given one son, Hector, to the expedition and will lose another, Nicanor, before two months are out. His flesh bears twenty wounds of honor. He remembers me as an infant, and my father as the friend of his youth, with whom he dreamed—of what? Not this, that is certain.

  He addresses Hephaestion. “I cannot sleep in this bed”—meaning the bed of access to my person—“not with you in it.”

  My mate rises in fury. “What does that mean, you son of a whore?”

  Philotas leaps to his father’s defense. He’s so sock-eyed, he nearly pitches onto his teeth. The Guardians, foremost Love Locks, seize him and hold him up.

  “Gentlemen! Is this the synod of philosophers?”

  Laughter disarms the uproar. Pages dash, each to a man, bearing cool cloths and cut wine. When the tumult subsides, Hephaestion stands to his feet. Never have I been prouder of him than in this hour, to see him serve back patience for affront and return generosity for rancor.

  “Brothers,” he says, “when men strive together in hardship for a great prize, they willingly suppress individual vanity while the issue remains in suspense. But when the end has been achieved, each wants his share of the bounty. Now is the most dangerous time for us. Suddenly we are all lords and grandees. Each man judges his contributions greater than his fellows’ and sulks, beholding others reap that acclaim he believes belongs rightly to himself. What has happened to us, my friends? By Zeus, when we were bleeding and dying in the field, what would we not have given to find ourselves dining on pillows with the good things of the earth spread before us? Yet now we are safe and rich, we wrangle like barn cats!

  “Have we become severed from our virtue? Not yet, I think. But we live now on a scale beyond that which any man has known, save kings of Persia, and we have no choice but to rise to it. We are like the snake that swallowed the elephant. We have won this prize, so great we choke upon it. It overwhelms us, even as we claim it as our own.”

  Hephaestion calls upon the gods for aid and summons us, his lifelong mates, to common purpose.

  “My friends, let us here and now renew our commitment to one another and to our king, and pledge by our most holy bond to maintain ourselves, in the face of fortune as well as adversity, as the band of brothers we have been all our lives. Will you take this oath with me, comrades? For we here are like mariners adrift in a sea, the sea of success, and no act commands our performance more than to clasp hands, that we not glide apart from one another. For in this sea swim monsters who, beneath the surface, would chew us off at the knees.”

  Our mates rally to Hephaestion’s call; the crisis passes. We reach Ecbatana at midsummer. Darius has fled, just days before, into the eastern empire. His final guard is thirty thousand foot, including four thousand Greeks, Patron’s men who got away from Gaugamela, with five thousand archers and slingers and thirty-three hundred Bactrian horse under Bessus and Nabarzanes. A third of Asia still belongs to the king, with enough men and horses to field an army as great as any we have faced.

  This is not what I fear.

  Darius is finished. What strikes me with dread is that his own men will turn upon him before I can catch up and save his life.

  In Ecbatana a letter has been left for me by the king. His chamberlain, whom I maintain with my suite, authenticates it as dictated beneath its author’s own seal.

  Alexander from Darius, greetings,

  I write to you man-to-man, omitting all royal title and address. Know that you have my everlasting gratitude for your restraint toward, and care of, my queen and family. If your purpose has been, by your actions as a man, to show yourself worthy of your fame as a conqueror, you have done so. I salute you. And now, my friend, if I may presume so to address you (for I cannot but feel from our long history as antagonists as well as from the burdens we share of kingly station that we understand each other, perhaps, as no two others on earth), I beg you this favor. Do not take me captive. When we meet again on the field of battle, grant me death with honor. Do not consign me, either by your charity to spare my life or by your knightly munificence to restore me to my throne, to an existence shorn of honor. Raise my son as your own. To your care I entrust my dear ones. I know you will behave toward them as if they were your own.

  My heart is touched by Darius’s candor and nobility. Despite his professions, I wish more than ever to preserve his life, not only as a king but as a man. I mount a fast, strong force of Companions, Lancers, and mercenary horse, with the archers, Agrianes, and all of the phalanx not left behind to guard the treasury. The column presses east at a killing pace. We are in Hyrcania now, in the corridor between the Parthian desert and the Caspian Sea.

  Weather is wild and thick with portents. Eagles and ravens abound; Fate’s hand feels close above us. Thunderheads build up each day after noon. Great bolts cleave the heavens; downpours drench the column. The foe’s trail, prominent as a thoroughfare in the morning, is washed out to nothing by day’s close. We smell the end of empire.

  On the sixth dawn a messenger arrives from Patron, the Greek captain who remains, to his credit, loyal to Darius. The king’s generals make ready to betray him, Patron reports; he pleads with me to spare no exertion in pursuit, and offers his courier as guide and escort. He himself stays with Darius to protect him from his own men, he declares, but he cannot preserve the king forever without aid.

  We press on at top speed, reaching the town of Rhagae, a day’s march from the Caspian Gates, on the eleventh day. The main of the phalanx can’t keep up; even cavalry mounts are dropping from the pace. Deserters from Darius are coming over to us now by the hundreds; others make away on their own, the fugitives report, scattering to their homes and villages.

  I rest the corps five days, then resume the pursuit. The country is desert on the far side of the Caspian Gates. At a village called Ashana, we capture Darius’s interpreter, left behind because he was ill, and from him learn that the king has been disarmed and taken into custody by Bessus and Nabarzanes. Bessus, who commanded Darius’s left at Gaugamela, is governor of Bactria, the country toward which the fugitives now flee. All the king’s cavalry belong to him; he is master of the fleeing division in fact, if not in name.

  I strip our party to only the Companions, Lancers, and the youngest and strongest of the infantry, leaving Craterus in command of the troops left behind. We take our arms only and two days’ rations. A fast night march brings us, next noon, to a village called Tiri. Two of Patron’s men are there, left behind with wounds. The Greeks, they tell us, have bolted for the mountains, fearing their own massacre at Bessus’s and Nabarzanes’ hands. Darius is alone, without defenders.

  How far ahead?

  Sixty miles.

  It takes all day and a night to cross forty, by a waterless track, so rugged is the country and so close to collapse our stock. Regaining the main trace, our scouts discover, discarded, an eagle standard, bossed in gold, with wings outspread.

  Darius’s battle ensign.

  We rest till night’s cool in a village so poor it doesn’t have a name. Darius has overnighted here the evening before.
As we make a meal from whatever we can find, a party emerges from their hiding place in a mud hut. Mazaeus’s son, Antibelus, and Bagistanes, a Babylonian nobleman, in flight from the fugitive corps. From them we learn that Darius is still alive, twenty-five miles ahead, being carted in a closed wagon under arrest.

  I strip the party even further, mounting the youngest and lightest on the last horses still fit for speed. Midmorning we spy the renegades, five miles ahead. At sight of us, the column breaks apart and flees.

  Twenty- Nine

  THE END OF KINGS

  WE FIND DARIUS’S BODY IN A DITCH, three furlongs off the main road. His belly has been pierced, more than once, and in such a manner as would indicate his arms were held or bound. These wounds did not kill him in the instant. He suffered before he died. Telamon bends now to set in order the king’s cloak, which has been wrenched askew, and to turn his corpse into a posture less wanting in dignity.

  “Whoever slew him,” observes the Arcadian, “at least had the decency to do it from the front.”

  “Yes,” adds Hephaestion, “but they didn’t have the guts to finish the job.”

  I am sick with grief at this treachery and mad with fury at this waste. I remove my cloak and set it over the body. Kill the King is the game, I know, but I would have given anything to see it end other than like this. Darius’s royal tiara is missing, suggesting that his murderer has added the name of pretender to that of regicide. The wreck of the carriage that bore the king sprawls in a trench beside the track.

  “They had him chained.” Hephaestion indicates a shackle on the rail. “The axle must have split on the climb up this hill. Here at the summit, Bessus must have given him a horse to ride. They commanded the king to do something, and he refused.”