The Nature of Alexander

by Mary Renault

  At the next halt, on the Caspian side of the Elburz Mountains, Artabazus begged the King to seek safety among Patron’s Greeks. This counsel of despair Darius rejected with dignity, veiling his face as the old man was led out in tears. When the Persians went off to forage for provisions, all the Bactrians stayed. At nightfall the bodyguard round the tent, drawn from the renowned Immortals, slipped silently away. Darius, abandoning hope, lay down upon the ground.

  “Hence there was a great solitude in the tent, except for a few eunuchs who stood about the King, because they had nowhere to withdraw to.” This intimate touch pins down, effectively, our first-hand witness.

  Presently Darius called Bubaces to him, and ordered the eunuchs to save themselves. At his wail of distress, the others ran up and added their lamentations. Bessus and Nabarzanes, thinking the King had killed himself, came running in. On hearing from the eunuchs that he was alive they held back no longer, but seized and bound him, and carried him off in a common transport cart.

  The loyal troops were too much outnumbered to attempt resistance. Darius had not won the kind of loyalty by which forlorn hopes are inspired. Two Persian lords rode back over the pass to guide Alexander and throw their master on his mercy. It was the best choice for the unhappy man, but made too late. Alexander with his best-mounted cavalry made a breakneck dash to the rescue, fell on the rear of the straggling Bactrians whose discipline had already gone to pieces, and began hewing their way towards the prisoner. The conspirators untied him and told him to mount a horse. He replied that he would rather deal with Alexander. At this Bessus and a certain Barsaentes, with or without Nabarzanes, stabbed him with their javelins, crippled the draught mules of the cart, and took to flight. Nabarzanes, who may have opposed their action, went off separately with six hundred riders of his own.

  The dying King was found by a Macedonian soldier, who heard him groaning for water. Here Curtius ends, the manuscript being damaged. Plutarch says that Darius was given a drink, expressed his thanks, commended Alexander’s chivalry and wished him luck as his successor; propaganda or romance perhaps, though he would certainly have preferred him to Bessus. But the two kings, the fortunate and the luckless, were not to meet in life. Alexander had had a long fruitless search among the covered carts; when he reached the right one, Darius had breathed his last. Alexander laid his own cloak over him—the last gesture left to make—and ordered his body sent to Sisygambis for a royal burial at Persepolis.

  On the Hyrcanian Plain bordering the Caspian Sea, he took the surrender of Nabarzanes. Having rejected Bessus for reasons nowhere explained, he sent to ask for safe conduct, which he would never have got had Alexander not thought he deserved a hearing. His war record, and whatever he had to say at his audience, must have made a good impression; though he never got any office or command, his share in regicide was pardoned. He left behind him the customary gifts of honour, and one unusual one—the young dancer, Bagoas. “He had been loved by Darius, and was soon to be loved by Alexander.” Seeing that this attachment seems to have been lifelong, the source of the Curtius narrative is not far to seek.

  Plutarch states circumstantially that Alexander had twice refused, and taken as an insult, proffered gifts of Greek slave-boy beauties. So, although Curtius typically infers that the young Persian was presented as a mere gift or bribe, probability suggests a more substantial motive: namely that he had been an eyewitness of Darius’ murder, and could testify that Nabarzanes had opposed it.

  Nabarzanes had been a brave, and till near the end a loyal soldier. Though ready in desperation to get rid of a hopelessly bad commander by putting him into the hands of a chivalrous enemy, he may yet have drawn the line at regicide—an appalling crime in Zoroastrian belief, as Alexander well knew later, when he had Bessos tried by a Persian court.

  As for Bagoas, he must have known ever since the arrival of the Queen’s eunuch to announce her death that the captive ladies had been allowed to keep their own attendants. Besides any loyalty he felt to his master—whose memory he seems to have handled kindly—he had little to lose by following him, and no future among the rebels. The murder was a panic action, unforeseen by everyone, including the killers themselves.

  A whole train of circumstance falls into place with this assumption: the departure from the other conspirators of Nabarzanes and his men immediately after the murder; Bagoas’ flight in his company; and the statement of Curtius himself that “it was mostly through the boy’s pleadings that he [Alexander] was moved to pardon Nabarzanes.” The testimony of the dead King’s own favourite was solid evidence; a far more likely influence upon Alexander than the mere wheedlings of an attractive youth. Clearly, though, it was without any reluctance that he kept Bagoas at court to give the chroniclers his valuable account. Supposing that his Persian-learned Greek was unequal to so sustained a narrative, we may amuse ourselves by conjecturing that Alexander dictated the final form himself.*

  In any case, Bagoas stayed on. We hear of him from Curtius, Plutarch and Athenaeus, more doubtfully from Arrian; Ptolemy is far more likely to have blue-pencilled Alexander’s Persian boy than his own Athenian mistress, not because he was a boy, a matter of indifference in the Greek world, but because he was a “barbarian” eunuch. Alexander’s view that “all men are God’s children” was shared by few of his countrymen.

  To race-conscious Macedonians, Bagoas was a little eccentricity of Alexander’s about which the less said the better. But the story of Darius’ end—and who else can have supplied it?—tells us much of him, and indirectly of Alexander. Besides the vivid detail, the talent for evoking a scene, there are the loyalty and perceptive good taste which do not attempt crude flattery of a royal lover at the expense of the dead; the pathos of Darius’ last night, the insistence that “he nothing common did or mean”; his graceful tributes to his victor which, whether or not he ever uttered them, could not hurt his memory and would give such pleasure now. Sensitivity, self-respect, charm without sycophancy, and beauty for good measure; no wonder that Alexander’s fastidious sexual standards were met for once.

  Besides the scenes which only the eunuchs witnessed, part of the story must have been related by Artabazus, who came in soon after Nabarzanes and was received with the warmest pleasure by Alexander, being at once reinstated in his rank. After years in Macedon his Greek must have been fluent. Last arrived the Greek mercenaries, from their hideout in the hills.

  They had sent to ask for terms; but Alexander, with his usual animus against Greeks fighting for Persia, demanded unconditional surrender. Some straggled off; one man, an Athenian with a virulent anti-Macedonian record, killed himself; about 1,500 came in. By then Alexander would have heard of their fidelity from Artabazus and Bagoas. No one was punished; those who had been hired before he declared war he let go free; the rest he reprimanded, and conscripted into his army at their usual rate of pay. The account of Patron’s attempt to warn Darius against his murderers may come from Patron himself.

  On his record, Alexander would have treated Darius’ body with respect in any case; but the royal funeral now accorded him was also a manifesto; it was the duty of a Great King to his predecessor. There was a pretender in the field. Bessus in the east had put on the kyrbasia with upstanding peak (the prerogative of royalty; satraps had to wear theirs flattened) and called himself Artaxerxes.

  Whether patriotism or ambition moved him is uncertain. It was already becoming evident that he had two disabilities never known to Alexander: he could not discipline his men, nor attach their loyalty. In any case, Alexander now claimed the right to proceed against him for rebellion, regicide, and treason against two kings running. To enhance this claim, an important act of allegiance now took place. Oxathres, Darius’ fighting brother, arrived voluntarily to accept Alexander as King. Again the blood feud was paramount; the enemy of his brother’s killer was a natural ally. Alexander, who seems to have formed a high opinion of him, recruited him at once into the Companions. His adherence was of the highest propaganda value;
its only price was revenge on Bessus.

  Alexander had now to break the news to his men that even Darius’ death had not ended the war. He assembled the Macedonians and convinced them with “effective arguments” which must have come down to sheer personality, there being no question of force. Even the Greek auxiliaries, offered free choice and their expenses home, did not all depart. Those who signed on again got three talents each; gifts to the Macedonians were on the same dazzling scale. Such occasions were among the major pleasures of Alexander’s life.

  He was now to march into the unknown wilds of central Asia with the vast accretions of his court and army, which the Persian Romance remembers. “A moving world was his camp … the market that followed him was like a capital city’s; anything could be bought there, were it as rare as bird’s milk.” There were the secretariat, the engineers, craftsmen, stewards and doctors and grooms and slaves and architects and armourers in his actual employ; a horde of independent speculators who lived off the well-paid troops; the womenfolk of soldiers and civilians who with their children were almost a second army. His lines of communication would be indefinitely extended; there was no knowing what supplies the country would provide. The holding force he must leave behind would be vital to them all as a diver’s airpipe. This command he gave to Parmenion. He was now about seventy; rough campaigning lay ahead; the appointment, honourable and suited to his years, also probably solved for Alexander a longstanding problem. The old general was given his own army, partly of mercenaries (including perhaps the new Greek conscripts) and access to the Ecbatana treasure for his own needs, and those of Alexander’s commissariat.

  When still in Hyrcania, Alexander had mounted a small operation against the Mardians of the mountain forests, notable only for Bucephalas’ penultimate appearance in history. While being led through the woods by the royal squires, whose charge the King’s horses were, he and the rest of the string were carried off by local raiders. He was now twenty-five, and his likely fate all too obvious. The old horse had probably saved the life of his master, boy and man, half a dozen times; the thought of his ending his days as a broken-down beast of burden so appalled Alexander that he sent out heralds to threaten general devastation if he were not returned. The effect was prompt; the friends were reunited; in his relief, Alexander even gave the robbers a reward.

  The royal squires, among whose services to the King was that of bringing him his spare horses in battle, were the teen-aged sons of Macedonian aristocrats. In earlier troubled reigns they had been hostages for their fathers; now their duties were something between those of page and esquire in a medieval castle, except that there was no special body-squire for the King. There were enough of them—perhaps something near fifty—to take their watches in rota, and they guarded the royal room or tent at night. When fresh troops came out from Macedon to Hyrcania, new squires probably came too, for the batch Alexander had brought out with him would be grown men. The cherished Bucephalas’ ordeal may have started some of the newcomers off with a bad mark, and begun momentous events.

  Unlike medieval princes, who trained their esquires only in war and manners, Alexander had his educated, even when on campaign. Their schooling was the charge of Callisthenes, a figure of some importance in Alexander’s history. He was a great-nephew of Aristotle, who had recommended him for the post of royal archivist. (Hence the use of his name by the Pseudo-Callisthenes author.) He was a literary dilettante, who had written a history of Greece up to the time of Philip’s accession, and is quoted by later writers for antiquarian notes, especially on the Homeric sites. Alexander, like his contemporaries, treated the Iliad as history; he probably delighted in visiting the reputed scenes of the heroes’ birth or exploits in Greek Asia. Many ancient writers accuse Callisthenes of flattery without defining it, and no direct quotation from his work survives. Probably he stressed Alexander’s descent from the paladins of both sides in the Trojan War, and likened his deeds to theirs. If the flattery consisted in a florid presentation of substantially real achievements, it did him a disservice which he may have perceived as his mind matured.

  Meantime, Callisthenes had remained in close touch with the Lyceum, though henceforth correspondence would take much longer on the road. It does not appear that his sycophancy was rebuked by Aristotle, who had many ties with Macedon, especially a close friendship with Antipater which as yet involved him in no conflict of loyalties. He is quoted as having said of Callisthenes that he had a good intelligence but not wisdom; and on another, probably later, occasion that he was not likely to live long; a deduction, perhaps, from indiscretions in his private letters. Certainly he believed, like Aristotle and his school, that Persians were destructive, corrupt barbarians, and that Alexander’s proper mission should be of conquest and revenge. Uneasiness must have crept in when old Artabazus was received as a guest of honour; when a Persian prince appeared in the Companion Cavalry; when satraps were reappointed after surrender; when Darius’ favourite castrato, a being regarded by conventional Greeks as less than human, found his way into the royal bed. The demeanour of a Greek conqueror ought to have been an ostentatious display of Greek superiority, a proper sense of contrast.

  Instead of this a further shock awaited him. Alexander began to experiment with Persian dress.

  What he wore is rather vague, as is also what he adapted it from. His own version was more “modest” than the Persian, more “stately” than the Median. The dignitaries in the Persepolis reliefs date from more than a century earlier, and the fashion cannot have been quite static. The Medes wear coats and trousers, the Persians long robes (court dress no doubt) and fluted top hats. Nobody wears the “Persian sash” adopted by Alexander. Persians, like Medes, wore trousers in daily life, but Plutarch assures us that Alexander refrained from the barbarism of encasing either his upper or his lower limbs. He wore some kind of long robe, with a sash, and probably a cape over the arms, in the royal colours later used by the Roman Caesars, purple and white. He also wore the mitra, which strictly speaking was a headband in these colours. But since the fillet by itself was such common headwear among Greeks that it cannot have been controversial, he must on state occasions have worn it tied around the kyrbasia, like other Persian kings. The upright point of this helmet-shaped bonnet was an important symbol of royalty.

  Herodotus remarks of Persian dress that the shoes allow for something to be slipped inside them, to make the wearer look taller. This may have had influence too.

  Alexander used this outfit at first for audiences with Persians; then for private parties; then he started to go out in it; riding, Plutarch says; presumably in a chariot. The Macedonians did not like it much, but thought it a pardonable fad, like Bagoas, for which he had earned indulgence. No one complained aloud.

  Towards Persians it was good policy; but policy was never the whole story with Alexander, who was complex, emotional, and much affected by human contacts. If Persians had repelled him on acquaintance, he was incapable of sycophancy to them, and would soon have resumed with emphasis the conquering Greek. Clearly they had attracted him. Their sense of style, their dignity and good looks, the courage so cruelly wasted by their king, the integrity of old Artabazus, Bagoas’ delicate tact, had made their mark. He wanted to come before them as an aristocrat in their own terms; and guidance was easily had. Oxathres and Artabazus knew all the ceremonial; and trifles they could not be asked about without some loss of dignity could be learned in relaxed intimacy from Bagoas, versed in every detail of the royal day and night. Bagoas’ influence is one of history’s imponderables. It did not grow less as he passed out of adolescence; but this, like the talent of Hephaestion, is a thing Ptolemy can be relied upon to ignore.

  From this time begin the tensions between the concepts of king and conqueror. In the latter the Macedonians had invested their racial pride; and, as important, the prospect of going home, leaving behind a colony to supply tribute and slaves. On the Persian side feelings were divided. The legitimate Ochus and his heir had both been mu
rdered; the makeshift Darius had been an unmitigated disaster; Bessus was for some a hero, for others a regicide beside whom this foreign conqueror was no great change for the worse since he seemed willing to grow civilized. Though they had never known democracy they valued justice, and thought him just.

  Bactria, still loyal to its satrap, would give him some hard fighting. The days of pitched battles were over till he got to India. For the next two years he would be campaigning in rough country, against tribesmen familiar with it, and often established in precipitous strongholds. Sometimes a satrap who had sworn him fealty and been his guest would revolt when his back was turned; the chivalric code of honour he had brought from home was to suffer rude disillusions. If he began to trust his experiences before his hopes, it was not illogical. He was dealing with one of the most serious of these rebellions when an act of greater treachery, much nearer home, produced a major crisis of his life.

  While quartered in the royal stronghold of Drangiana, he learned that a plot to murder him had been connived at, if no worse, by his boyhood friend Philotas.

  Alexander had taken no steps about the earlier warnings. He assessed the loyalty of his friends by his own to them. (One cause of this optimism had no doubt been the bedrock constancy of Hephaestion, a certainty since boyhood.) Philotas, losing no position of trust, had assumed a good deal of pomp and luxury, with a nouveau-riche flamboyance that had made him enemies. He was now the only survivor of Parmenion’s three sons, the second having lately died of sickness. Parmenion’s posting in the rear, considering his age, was no just cause for resentment; but it did diminish the family power at court.