Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Leaving the Eternal Fires, Alexander sent a courier eastwards to Susa, the next palace on his obvious path, and himself turned off the Royal Road and took the other great highway of history to lead him south to Babylon. Near Tuz-Kharmatu, he noted the local source of bitumen and learnt that it had been used for the building of Babylon's walls; at Opis, he recrossed the Tigris and marched down the canals of its west bank, through farmland so thickly stocked with millet and barley that his army could eat as they pleased. Everywhere, they were greeted by date palms, the glory of Babylon's economy and a source of wood, beer, food and bedding; the Persians had made up a popular song about its uses, all 360 of them, so they said, one for each day of the Babylonian year.

  The country he travelled had long served Persia with crops, new estates and a tribute which none of the rest of her empire could rival. It was two hundred years since Babylon had first fallen to the Persian king, and ever since her land had been bled of its marvellous fertility: Iranian tribesmen had left a life in desert and mountain to rob her of acres of farmland, waterways and city housing; only the native business documents can set such a social change in perspective. It was not that Iranians had found Babylonia more congenial than their homes, for the heat was appalling, and five hundred years later a Chinese visitor would still find their successors living in underground houses cooled by ice, a valid comment on what their forebears had suffered. Most had come because they had to; some were more fortunate, living away in the relative cool of the Persian court and running their western estates through native slaves and agents as a tax-free gift from their king, the others were government servants, judges, overseers, collectors of annual taxes, and they had to make homes wherever they worked. Nor were they always Iranians. Among them lived groups of the foreign soldiers whom the king settled on communes of land in return for taxes or military service; Indians, Arabians, Jews and former nomads, they had changed the face of whole areas of Babylon's countryside, until it was through the farms of foreigners and Persian favourites that Alexander was mostly marching on his way to the greatest city in the east.

  From the Babylonian plains around him the court and empire had long drawn the surplus on which their proper working depended. East in the heartlands of Iran, farmland is scarce and water has always been revered, but in Babylonia 1,000 talents of silver, 500 eunuchs and a third of the food for the Persians' court had been levied yearly from natives and military colonists: the Great King's ceremonial among his Royal Relations depended on the surplus drained from the mud fiats of Babylonia. The local satrap had once been believed to stable 16,800 horses of his own, excluding those for war, and to maintain a pack of hounds from the revenues of four villages allotted for the purpose. Private dignitaries had benefited no less conspicuously from a land with a long tradition of large royal estates; Parysatis, queen of Darius II, had owned Babylonian villages whose taxes paid for her wardrobe, some financing her shoes, others her girdles, while her vast farms near Babylon were worked by gangs of slaves and administered by her own sword-bearers and judges. Outside the city, a Persian eunuch or a Paphlagonian favourite might rise to a well-treed park and a planting of rare date palms, while his neighbours were fellow expatriates who had given their own Iranian names, like country squires, to their new home farms; a Persian prince could lease through his agents 2,380 sheep and goats in a single day in Babylon and own farmland in no less than six separate districts from Egypt to Persia, all administered by local foresters and bailiffs. It was an aristocratic style of life which few Macedonians, and fewer Greeks, had ever been able to savour.

  'In Babylonia,' wrote Theophrastus the botanist from the reports of Alexander's soldiers, 'badly tilled ground yields a fifty-fold crop, well-tilled ground a hundred fold. Tilling means letting the water lie on the soil for as long as possible in order to form silt; there is very little rain, but the dews feed the crops instead. On principle, they cut the growing crops down twice,' a practice that would amaze most farmers on Greek soil, 'and they let their flocks in to graze it a third time; in Babylon, unlike Egypt, there are very few weeds and coarse grass.' In Babylon, therefore, the prizes were high, not least for Alexander himself, as the long shadow of the Persian king loomed over so much of the countryside's richest assets. Not only had he endowed his favourites, but like the kings of Assyria before him, he had taken the fine royal farms for himself; in private sales, a buyer would even ask for a guarantee that none of the land in question belonged to the Persian king. To the king, it was nothing to rent out a single farm for 9,000 bushels of grain, an ox and ten rams a year; he owned and leased granaries, chicken farms complete with a keeper of the king's poultry, town houses, stabling and even the right to fish. Often his broad estates lay on the banks of canals where they flourished from the nearby irrigation, a privilege which might cost a native farmer a quarter of his annual date crop. As for the canals, those arteries of Babylonian life, he owned many of these too and leased them to native firms of free enterprise, who charged a toll for transport and watering, sold off the fishing and covered their costs from the profits. The canals, meanwhile, grew silted, stifling the farming on which Babylonian life depended, and nobody had the will or the equipment to put them to rights.

  Alexander was heir to the king and Babylon marked the first and most important step in his progress to becoming the richest man in the world; Babylon and its farmland could feed the prodigalities of a King of Asia's court. Besides the country estates, so often in Persian hands, there was the city itself and its treasure, a reward of unimagined value; his meeting with Babylon would be crucial, his first encounter with an Asian city since victory had made him master of Persia's western empire. He could hardly have begun more auspiciously. Several miles north of the city's turreted walls, Mazaeus rode out to greet him, bringing his sons as a pledge of his loyalty, and the man who had led the Persian right wing only seven days earlier now offered to surrender Babylon, perhaps as prearranged.

  Alexander was by no means as certain of the sequel as his historians implied. When Babylon's massive brick walls were in sight, he drew up his army as if for battle and ordered a prudent advance, hoping to seem a liberator, not another marauding king. He was bluffing, and he also feared a trap, but he was not to be disappointed in his hopes. As he came close, the gates of Babylon were thrown open and out streamed the city's officials down a road strewn with flowers and garlands and lined with incense-laden altars of silver. The Persian commander of the fortress brought herds of horses and cattle, leopards in cages and tame lions: behind him danced Babylon's priests and prophets, chanting their hymns to the sound of lutes and sackbuts. Less mistrustful, Alexander retained an armed guard and mounted the royal chariot; the natives followed him through the main city gate, and so to the Persians' palace where the ovation continued throughout the night.

  Alexander's welcome in Babylon had been overwhelming, as striking a moment in his career as any pitched victory over Darius. Fear and the wish to appease a conqueror explain the Persian governors' meek surrender, but the citizens had forced their hand, and their motives were very much older. It is a mistake to invoke economics and point to the Persians' long dominance of Babylon's land and resources; under Persian rule, the rates of barter or bankers' interest in both Babylon and Egypt can be shown to have quadrupled or more within a hundred years, but in a society which used no coinage and where the vast mass of the population lived off what they could grow or be given by their masters, too much must not be made of a rise in the cost of luxuries or a drop in the value of a silver shekel. Under Persian rule deeds for the sale of slaves also increased noticeably in scale, and one class of serfs belongs only on farms of the Persian king; contracts provide ever more stringently against their attempts at escape. But many may have been foreign prisoners of war and slavery on the estates of an alien king was nothing new to Babylonians. Alexander was not heir to the rising of a long-oppressed proletariat; in a society where religion was strong, discontent would take less crude a form, inspired by the evi
dent flourishing of the unjust or ungodly, rather than by visions of perpetual class war. There was none of the dogma to inspire such a protest. The genius of Babylon had been to compile where the Greeks would go on to compose; facts were collected, not framed by an abstract theory, and hence there was never a doctrine of class revolution to work on a slavery which Babylonians took for granted. For nearly two thousand years Babylon had observed, not explained; a Babylonian had already visited Plato's Academy in Athens, and Callisthenes is said to have copied and sent back to his relation, Aristotle, the records of Babylon's many astronomers, which stretched, according to rumour, for 34,000 years. Only in Greece would these records be used for a general theory of the heavens; there are prompt signs of their effects, for Callippus the astronomer soon calculated a more accurate length for the Greek year from a cycle which he began in July 330. He is said to have used Babylonian records and his dating implies these were Alexander's.

  Babylon's surrender is also explicable from the gestures which Alexander made in return, probably by prior arrangement. Inside the city he gave the priesthood an audience and ordered the restoration of the temples which Xerxes had damaged, especially the famous E-sagila, which 'had been made to shine like the sun with gold and jewels', so its founder Nebuchadnezzar had written, 'while its ceilings were made of gilded Lebanon cedar and the floor of the Holy of Holies inlaid with red gold'. At the priests' suggestion, he paid sacrifice to the city's god Bel-Marduk, presumably clasping the hand of his statue to show that he received his power like the old Babylonian kings, from a personal encounter with the god. Once again, he had turned Xerxes's past misdeeds to his own advantage: as in Lydia or Caria or Egypt, he had also learnt through friends and interpreters where tact would be most appreciated.

  In Babylon this respect for the temple communities had long been a precept of wise and kingly government, even under the brutal Assyrian empire of the eighth century B.C., but the example of history had been betrayed by Persian governors. Round the staff and properties of the temple were grouped the city assemblies, run by a council of priests but drawn from a wider class whose links with the temple were often weak or ancestral. These native assemblies had been forced to pay taxes to the Persian king, providing wine, beer, farm produce and gangs of labourers for the royal herds, buildings and gardens. No Persian king is known to have paid the customary tithe to the temples; as never before, temple slaves had been ordered to cut the king's reeds, bake his bricks and shear his sheep, while royal officials saw that the workers and taxes were sent as he commanded. Within sixy years of her conquest, Babylon had revolted four times against such interference, and in 482 Xerxes had sent his brother-in-law to punish Babylon for ever by breaching her walls, denying her the status of a satrapal capital and dropping her title of honour from his royal protocol. Temple lands had been confiscated, however briefly; the holy buildings of E-sagila and the tall sacred ziggurat of Etemenanki were damaged and the solid gold statue of the god Bel-Marduk was hauled away to be melted down. In the procession to welcome Alexander the priesthood and city officials danced behind the Persian commander, and in view of the past the attitude of these educated men was not surprising. In return, they won favours and as so often, what Alexander granted became a precedent for his successors. The Macedonian kings continued to give money for rebuilding the temples; they would call themselves King of the Lands, an ancient title of honour which referred specifically to Babylonia but had been dropped by the Persian kings since Xerxes; they respected the temple citizenry, allowing them to draw up their documents in their arcane scribal language and to be exempt from certain sales taxes, imposed on all other Greek-speaking citizens by a royal Overseer of Contracts. As privileged communities in a vast expanse of king's land, the Babylonian temple assemblies resembled the free Greek cities of Asia and certain royal favours were common to them both. As in Greek Asia, so in Babylon lands endowed on a royal courtier now had to be registered as part of a nearby temple dry's land, a contrast to the random gifts of a Persian king; presumably this privilege too first arose with Alexander.

  Yet there were reservations. Alexander had ordered the rebuilding of the city's largest temple of Esagila, formerly more than 200 feet high, but he had not guaranteed its expenses; the money, it seemed, would be demanded from temple land, but the priesthood had long been enjoying these extra finances, because no temple buildings remained to absorb them. Moreover Xerxes's punisher still meant to rule, and his plans combined tact with firmness. Babylon was restored to its long-lost status as a satrapal capital, but tribute was still to be levied and garrisons kept in the city's fortress: these troops were divided between two officers, both with estates in Philip's Macedonia, one of them brother to a soothsayer who would have much in common with Babylon's many astrologers. The choice of satrap was more debatable: Mazaeus, Darius's renegade viceroy of Syria, was appointed to rule the province he had helped to surrender. This hardened Persian official was to be watched by two generals and a royal tax officer, but publicly he seemed to have lost very little of his dignity; he was once more a satrap, and probably silver coins continued to be minted and marked with his name, a Persian privilege which Alexander later tended to replace with standard designs of his own. This reinstatement was remarkable and perhaps rewarded an agreed betrayal of the

  city: like King Cyrus, the Persian conqueror of Babylon, Alexander may also have chosen his first governor as a man with native connections, for both of Mazaeus's sons had been named after Bel, the primary god of Babylon. Perhaps he had married a Babylonian.

  In similar mood Alexander gave the satrapy of Armenia to Mithrines, the Iranian who had surrendered Sardis three years earlier, and reinstated the Persian fortress commander in Babylon; he thus marked out a future theme in his empire, for Persian satraps who surrendered could now expect to be returned to provinces where they had ruled for Darius, but, as in Egypt or Caria, a Macedonian general would be set beside them to keep the local troops in loyal hands. This bargain would encourage surrender and save unnecessary problems of language and organization; the same Persian servants would be re-employed where possible and in the face of an empire, so much for the slogan of punishment and Greek revenge.

  Having made known his arrangements, Alexander relaxed inside Babylon for nearly five weeks. There was much to see in a city whose size had long been exaggerated by the Greeks: the huge double walls of brick and bitumen, twelve miles in circumference, the turreted Ishtar Gate with its enamelled plaques of animals, the sacred Ziggurat, built in seven storeys to a height of 270 feet, these were extraordinary sights and all would figure in the various later lists of the Wonders of the World. Between tall gaunt houses, built without windows for the sake of coolness, the city's main highways ran in near-straight lines, their ground plan broken only by the curving course of the river Euphrates, bridged by a famous viaduct of stone. To a Greek, the city was built on an unimagined scale and its government quarters which rambled between the Ishtar Gate and the river Euphrates were no less astonishing: Alexander took up residence in the more southerly of the two palaces, a maze of some six hundred rooms whose four main reception chambers met in a throne-room and main court, built by Nebuchadnezzar to proportions which would not disgrace a Mantuan duke or Venetian doge. From the palace, he visited the northern fortress where Nebuchadnezzar had once kept his treasures and laid out his works of art as if in a museum, 'for the inspection of all people'; these, perhaps, Alexander saw as Persian property, 'while he admired the treasures and furniture of King Darius'. A vast mass of bullion completed his reward, enough to end all problems of finance in his career; never before had coins been used in Babylon, but a new mint was to help to convert the solid ingots to a form which the troops could use.

  Riches were not the only concern. Around the palace buildings lay the Hanging Gardens, whose artificial terraces were so thickly planted with trees that they seemed to the Greeks, themselves mediocre gardeners, to be a forest suspended in the air; their cedars and spruces, it was said,
had been transplanted by Nebuchadnezzar to comfort his Syrian queen for her homesickness in a bare and foreign land. Alexander took an interest in the terraced park and suggested that Greek plants should be introduced among the many Oriental trees; the wish was admirable, if none too fortunate, as only the ivies settled down in their new climate. The army's pleasures, meanwhile, were coarser: while Alexander surveyed his gardens, they made up for three years' dearth of women with the strip-tease artistes of the city brothels. Extremely generous pay from the city treasures encouraged them, a reward which may have been overdue.

  Among the pleasures of Babylon it was tempting to forget that Alexander was still engaged in an unfinished war. Darius was still alive and no doubt preparing to rally in the mountains near Hamadan, but nothing was to be gained by pursuing him in winter through such rough and unfamiliar country, and the longer he was left, the more he might expose himself to another open encounter. The empire's palaces lay due east, full of treasure and ready for the taking; their capture would cut Darius off from his many surviving Persian supporters and leave him no choice except to retreat into ever more easterly deserts where his royalty might not go unchallenged. Tactically and financially, it made sound sense to continue to follow the Royal Road, and so in late November, Alexander set out towards it through country well stocked with the supplies which could not be amassed from central Iran in winter. His destination was Susa, administrative centre of the empire, and as he had sent a letter by courier to its satrap he was hoping for another surrender.