Unless he defeated Darius definitively, his territorial gains would be precariously held. So the war had to continue. But if he overthrew the Great King, who would govern the empire? There could be only one candidate: Alexander himself.
A fly was caught in the amber. His Macedonians were enjoying their wonderful escapade, but they expected to return to their native land in the not-too-distant future. After all, the king had promised in his pre-battle pep talk that victory would “put an end to their labors and crown their glory.” They had not the slightest intention of spending the rest of their lives fighting their way mile by mile through the world’s largest empire and becoming an army of occupation.
There was no need to resolve the contradiction yet, but intelligent observers could see that there was trouble in store. They kept their mouths shut, though, and Alexander did not repeat a promise made in the heat of the moment.
CHAPTER 8
IMMORTAL LONGINGS
Unfamiliar gusts of snow blew across the inland plateau on which the Syrian capital of Damascus stood. An unusually hard winter threatened. Faint dustings whitened the farmland and irrigation channels outside the walls.
Through this landscape a long trail of noble Persians and camp followers was abandoning the city. The governor had claimed it could not be defended against the triumphant Macedonians and ordered an evacuation. A crowd of porters, guarded by an armed escort, were carrying the treasures and cash that Darius had sent to Damascus for safekeeping. These included fabulously expensive robes, stiff with purple and gold embroidery. The temperature was so low that the porters put on these costumes in an attempt to warm themselves.
The governor was playing a double game, for he wanted to hand over the entire contents of the baggage train to Alexander, but not be seen to do so. He sent a message to Parmenion, who was on his way to take it over, that he was willing to bring the Great King’s store of gold and silver out of the city into open country where it would be easy to confiscate without opposition.
When the Macedonian general at the head of his troops arrived on the scene and saw a crowd of refugees, the exotically dressed porters, and the armed escort, his suspicions were aroused. This looked like a trap. He ordered his Thessalian cavalry to charge.
The porters dropped their goods and took to their heels, while the guards, no braver, also threw down their weapons and made for familiar side roads. Seven thousand pack animals were now on the loose. The royal treasure was scattered across the snowy fields in vast quantities: more than 2,500 talents of coined money—an enormous sum—golden vessels, golden bridles, elaborately decorated tents, and wagons laden with uncounted wealth. Our sources speak of more than two tons’ worth of gold goblets and cups inlaid with precious stones.
This was many Macedonians’ introduction to the luxury of the barbarian way of life and, as Plutarch says neatly, “From now onwards, like dogs that have picked up a scent, they pressed on to track down the wealth of the Persians.”
Everything was safely gathered up and a report sent to Alexander. This was accompanied by a beautifully made casket, which was regarded by the keepers of Darius’s treasure as the finest item of all. Alexander asked his friends what he should keep in it as his most precious possession. Many different suggestions were aired, but in the end Alexander announced that he had decided to keep his copy of the Iliad there.
Alexander instructed Parmenion to return Darius’s baggage train to Damascus and told him to guard it carefully. He also charged him with the military oversight of lowland Syria, the province in which Damascus was situated, and gave him authority to mint coins.
So far as human valuables were concerned, Parmenion took into custody the Great King’s household. This included 277 caterers, seventeen bartenders, and, evidence of Darius at leisure, more than three hundred concubines. Of greater political value were a number of senior Persians, including women of the imperial family: three unmarried daughters of Darius’s predecessor Artaxerxes Ochus; Ochus’s widow; and the daughter of Darius’s brave brother Oxyathres. Among other prisoners of war were the wife and daughter of Pharnabazus, Memnon’s successor as commander-in-chief of Asia Minor’s coastal area and of the navy. All these people would raise a great deal of money if ransomed. But Alexander was now, without exaggeration, rich beyond the dreams of avarice and may have kept his captives at court along with Sisygambis and Stateira. He never again suffered from financial difficulties.
Some envoys from Thebes (or the memory of it), Athens, and Sparta had the bad luck to be visiting the Great King at the time of the Issus catastrophe. Their city-states wanted to break up the League of Corinth, of which they were reluctant members, and were seeking an entente with the Great King. Ordinarily this would have been a serious offense in Alexander’s eyes, but he was minded to be lenient. As he had laid waste their city, the Thebans’ enmity was understandable, even praiseworthy. So he released them. The Athenian ambassador was the son of a famous military commander, Iphicrates, whom he admired, and he retained him as an honored guest; when the ambassador died later (of natural causes), Alexander arranged for his bones to be sent to his family in Athens.
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AMONG THE PERSIAN WOMEN at Damascus was a great beauty. She was Barsine, one of the copious offspring of Artabazus, nephew of Artaxerxes III. As we have seen, Barsine spent time in Pella as an exile with her father when Alexander was a child. Her date of birth is unknown, but she was probably now in her early to midthirties.
She had led a life crowded with incident. Her mother came from the Greek island of Rhodes and was sister of the two wily military commanders in Darius’s service, Mentor and Memnon. Consanguinity was no bar: Barsine married the first of her uncles, perhaps not long after reaching puberty. By him she had three children, all daughters. But by 336 or earlier Mentor was dead, and Barsine wedded Memnon, by whom she had a son. As reported, her new husband sent her to Darius as a pledge of his good faith when he signed up for service as the Great King’s admiral and military commander in the Aegean and Asia. This was why she found herself in Damascus as a member of the royal court. By now she had been widowed for a second time and was without a male protector.
Alexander’s sexuality seems to have been enlarging its scope, for he is reported to have fallen in love with Barsine. Apparently she was the first woman he had sex with. She was well equipped to please; being some ten years older, she could bring the expertise of a mature woman to bear on a callow (at least so far as straight sex was concerned) male. As well as good looks, she had received a Greek education and was, Plutarch observes, “of a gentle disposition.” It was helpful, too, that Achaemenid blood ran in her veins.
Parmenion had been pressing Alexander hard for years to do what was necessary with a socially distinguished woman and produce children. On this occasion he seems to have played the part of matchmaker. The lovers settled into a couple and Barsine gave birth to a son. They named him Heracles after the demigod and hero who was Alexander’s ancestor. But however fond they were, they never married. (The whereabouts of Barsine’s father, Artabazus, at this time is unknown, but unlike his daughter, if she had a choice in the matter, he remained loyal to Darius.)
Despite his new love interest, the old asexual Alexander had by no means disappeared. When he met his female captives, he said jokingly: “These Persian women are an irritation of the eyes.” The remark picked up on a phrase in Herodotus; some ambassadors from the Great King once complained that royal Macedonian women “irritated their eyes,” and then scandalously touched their breasts and tried to kiss them. In self-conscious contrast, Alexander made a show of his chastity, or so writes Plutarch, by paying the members of Darius’s harem as little attention as if they were stone statues.
The king strongly objected to the sexual trafficking of slaves or prisoners. Philoxenus, the commander of his forces on the seacoast, who had satrapal powers, wrote to him to say that he ha
d with him a slave merchant from Tarentum in Italy who was offering two exceptionally good-looking boys for sale. Would Alexander be interested in buying them? The king was furious. He asked his friends what evidence of depravity Philoxenus could ever have seen in him that he should waste his time on such a monstrous proposal.
A rich and influential courtier called Hagnon, who was one of Alexander’s Companions, made a similarly ill-judged proposition. He sent the king a letter saying that he wanted to buy him a young slave boy whose beauty was the talk of Corinth. Hagnon received a sharp rebuke for his temerity. (These stories, we may note in passing, do confirm a general perception among his contemporaries that Alexander had sex with males.)
When the king heard that two Macedonian soldiers serving under Parmenion had seduced the wives of some Greek mercenaries, he allegedly wrote to the general that if convicted they should be put down like wild animals.
It would seem that he repeatedly discussed sexual topics with Parmenion. He commented in the same letter: “So far as I myself am concerned, it will be found that not only have I never seen nor wished to see Darius’s wife, but I have never even allowed her beauty to be discussed in my presence.” If Alexander seems to be protesting too much, it is worth noting that no ancient commentator accused him of sleeping with the queen.
When he was a child, Alexander lived in Philip’s boisterous court where sex with people of every gender was rough, ready, and routine. Pretty slaves will have been welcomed with enthusiasm. Our less than trustworthy sources assert no linkage, but it is not a wild surmise that Alexander’s childhood experiences fed into adult distaste. He expected his own behavior and that of those around him to promote, if not virtue, then at least restraint.
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DARIUS SENT A LETTER to the king of Macedonia. He wrote as “monarch to monarch,” quite a concession for a ruler who admitted no equals, and asked for the release of his close relatives—his mother, wife, and children—in return for a large ransom. The fantastic sum of ten thousand talents was mentioned. He also proposed a treaty of friendship and, according to Diodorus, agreed to cede the territory and cities of Asia west of the Halys River. In other words, the war aim of annexing what is now Turkey and marching no farther east, as set out by that international intellectual Isocrates and probably endorsed privately by Philip, would be fully achieved.
Darius thought it a very good offer. So did Parmenion when the king brought the letter to his advisory council. He said, perhaps recalling military planning conversations with his previous master: “I would accept those terms if I were Alexander.” “So would I, by Zeus, if I were Parmenion,” came the crushing rejoinder.
In fact, the offer was suspect and the king was right to reject it. The treaty of friendship was not based on a true meeting of interests and was, rather, a long-term booby trap. The Macedonians would have had to defend an immensely long frontier; instability and war would have been permanent.
Alexander’s reply opened with a rhetorical reminder that his campaign was a response to the two invasions of Greece more than a century before. He was not the aggressor, but was acting in self-defense (not the most convincing of claims). Darius had suborned Philip’s assassins (almost certainly untrue, but plausible) and bribed Greek statesmen to rise against him (true, but in reaction to threats and invasion). Darius himself was a usurper (arguably so; a eunuch had placed him on the throne). Alexander went on:
It is for you, then, to come to me as lord over all Asia. If you are afraid I will harm you when you come, send some of your people to bring you back my guarantees. And when you have come you can ask me for your mother and wife and children and anything else you wish, and you shall have them. Whatever you persuade me to give shall be yours. And in future address any communications to me as the king of Asia, and do not write as an equal, but tell me as the master of all your possessions what it is that you need. Failing this, I intend to treat you as a criminal. But if you wish to dispute the kingship, stand your ground and fight for it. Do not run away, as I shall come after you wherever you are.
When Darius received this forbidding missive, he abandoned hope of negotiation and began to recruit another army, this time from his eastern provinces. It was exactly the response Alexander had hoped to provoke.
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THE MAN, DRESSED IN RAGS, worked as a gardener and water carrier in the suburbs of the Phoenician seaport of Sidon in Syria. Called Abdalonymus, he struggled to get by on a tiny income. Preoccupied with his labors, he had not noticed the political and military activities of the day.
The Battle of Issus passed him by, as did the arrival outside Sidon of the Macedonian army. Alexander accepted the surrender of the northern cities of Syria. The king of Sidon handed over his mini-state, although this did him no favors with the popular party, who believed that he was at heart pro-Persian. He was unceremoniously deposed and Alexander instructed Hephaestion to find a new king for Sidon.
Abdalonymus knew nothing of these high events.
Hephaestion was billeted with two wealthy young Sidonians and asked them for advice on suitable candidates. He was impressed by his hosts and inquired if they might be interested in the job. They declined, saying that Sidonians would only accept as king a member of the royal family. As a matter of fact, they claimed, they knew the very man for the job. He was distantly related to the ruling family and was an honest man.
Abdalonymus was drawing water from a well or doing some weeding when the two young men, in armor, came unannounced into the garden where he was working, carrying the royal robe and insignia. They hailed him as king. He was sure he must be dreaming and asked the visitors not to mock him. They eventually persuaded him of their good faith, got him washed, threw away his rags, and dressed him in purple and gold.
The city’s upper class strongly objected to the appointment on the grounds of Abdalonymus’s poverty and obscurity, so Alexander called him in for an interview. He asked him: “How well were you able to endure poverty?” to which Abdalonymus replied: “I only hope I will be able to put up with power as contentedly. I had nothing, and I lacked nothing.” Alexander was impressed by the man’s sangfroid and confirmed the nomination.
His reign seems to have been successful, if only in the sense that it lasted long enough for a son to follow him on the throne. But nothing is known of his activities during Alexander’s lifetime, saving a gift of perfume made from henna, a specialty of Sidon, and some lilies that he sent to Alexander.
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THE CAPITULATION OF SIDON was a necessary precursor of the main event, the siege of the great mercantile seaport of Tyre farther down the Phoenician coast (in today’s Lebanon).
The city stood proud and unconquerable (its inhabitants were certain of this) half a mile from shore. It was built on a rocky island with a circumference of two and three quarter miles and was surrounded by a towering wall, 150 feet high on its landward side. Space within these fortifications was limited, and multistory houses were crowded together to provide homes for some forty thousand souls.
Tyre was the richest and most powerful of the many Phoenician settlements along the Syrian littoral. It had two fine harbors, the Sidonian in the north and the Egyptian in the south. Across the water on the mainland, Old Tyre was the city’s original site although now a suburb of the island. Herodotus paid a visit in the mid-fifth century B.C. and was told Tyre had been founded more than two millennia previously.
The historian was much impressed by the temple of Melqart, the city’s tutelary god, whom the Greeks equated with Heracles. He reported: “I visited the temple and found that the offerings which adorned it were numerous and valuable, not the least remarkable being two pillars, one of pure gold, the other of emerald which gleamed in the dark with a strange luminosity.”
For centuries Tyre had made its living, and a very prosperous one, fr
om trade, and its ships did business across the Mediterranean. As long ago as the seventh century B.C., the Jewish prophet Ezekiel had Jehovah pronounce:
You say, Tyre, “I am perfect in beauty.”
Your domain was on the high seas;
your builders brought your beauty to perfection.
They made all your timbers of juniper from Senir;
they took a cedar from Lebanon to make a mast for you.
Of oaks from Bashan they made your oars;
of cypress wood from the coasts of Cyprus
they made your deck, adorned with ivory.
Fine embroidered linen from Egypt was your sail
and served as your banner;
your awnings were of blue and purple
from the coasts of Elishah.
Tyrians’ income in kind included copper, lead, and other metals, ivory tusks and ebony, perfumes, oil, and precious stones. They were famous for the production of a purple or dark red dye, especially prized for the fastness of its color. The dye was extracted from sea snails of the family Muricidae. It was difficult to manufacture, in great demand and very expensive. Phoenicia, the semitic region of which Tyre was a leading member, was so named after the Greek word for dark red, phoinos.
A shadow fell across Tyre’s uninterrupted prosperity. According to Ezekiel, Jehovah would not forgive the city for its hostility to his chosen people and predicted its destruction:
Your end will be sudden and terrible,
and you will cease to exist for all time.
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