Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  While the foothills of the south face offered myth, the summit of the so-called Caucasus promised even greater rewards. Aristotle, who knew nothing of China and Far Asia, had believed that the eastern edge of the world could be seen from the top of the Hindu Kush, and perhaps his former pupil remembered this, if anything, from any school hours spent in geography; the belief may have been common too among ordinary Greeks, and for a man aged twenty-six there could be no more momentous ambition. A short march eastwards, and he could survey the boundary of the world and see how the border lands of India merged with the eddying ocean. To an explorer such an ambition needs no further justification, while to an Achilles any fighting to attain it was so much more service in the cause of glory. From the top of the Khaiwak pass, Aristotle's geography would already seem suspect to anyone in the army who remembered it. Ridge upon ridge of mountains rose eastwards, but for the moment Bessus mattered more than the problem of the world's end, and the army was coaxed northwards in search of him down the far face of the Hindu Kush.

  The descent lasted at most ten days; it was intolerable throughout. The snow, facing northwards, still lay heavily and masked the line of the pass; only a parallel can show what this might mean. In April 1398 Tamurlane crossed the same face of the Khaiwak, forcing himself and his Mongols to crawl its glaciers on hands and knees, drag their pack-animals by wooden sledge and swing across its open ravines on rope bridges lassoed round prominent rocks; more men were lost in the crossing than in the whole of the campaign year. Alexander's horses would have been fitted with the leather snowboots, which Greek generals found useful against deep or slippery drifts; nonetheless, they suffered severely, as their needs took second place to their riders'. The natives had stored their supplies in underground pits which were hard to find and harder to break open: famine, therefore, spread through the army, as the few available jars of wine and honey were sold at absurdly high prices. On the lower slopes, where herbs and the famous brown trout of the rivers filled out the soldiers' diet, the animals found no fodder and orders were soon given to slaughter them and use them as meat. The scrub bushes of prickly thrift, which served the natives as firewood, were still buried under the snow; in the absence of any other fuel, horse and pack-ass were seasoned with the juice of silphium and eaten raw.

  The troops were saved by Bessus's incompetence and a coincidental victory near Herat. While Alexander struggled down from the Hindu Kush, a brisk cavalry charge could have disarrayed him, especially as Bessus had begun to bum the crops in the plains. Instead of following up this devastation, Bessus took fright, probably at bad news from Satibarzanes and the west, and galloped some two hundred miles northwards across the Oxus, only halting to bum his boats for good measure. It was very poor generalship and his 8,000 local Bactrian cavalry deserted in disgust, seeing little alternative but to join in the rapid surrender of their rich home province. Descending from the foothills in early June, Alexander made his untroubled way through Kunduz to the local capital of Balkh, mother of cities, and allowed his troops to refresh themselves in its relatively generous oasis. He also needed to wait for the rest of his baggage and siege equipment to catch up his advance.

  Set on a stream of water, Balkh was far older than the Persians' empire and must have served as the centre for Bactria's earliest traders at least a thousand years before it fell to the Great King; 'flag-bearing', the Persians'

  sacred poems had called it, and besides the Persian flag its palace had been adorned with the image of Anahita, water goddess of the Oxus and very suitable for Balkh's oasis, where she was worshipped in her crown of stars and cloak of holy otter-hides.

  To a man coming down from the Khaiwak pass, the province of Balkh, 'land of a thousand cities', lies stretched out like a fading carpet. It wears its place in history clearly on its surface: its plains alternate between gravel desert and pockets of fertility, the one a home for nomads, the other for settled villages, and the two landscapes have lived in continual mistrust. For those who controlled them, the province had rich resources: river-gold, superlative horses, mines of silver and rubies, and in the north-eastern hills of Badakshan, the Persian empire's only known source of lapis lazuli, whose blue fragments had been traded with Scistan and the south as a pleasure and a currency for the past 2,000 years. The villages conformed to the tensions of their landscape: they were built for self-defence behind the square of a mudbrick wall on whose inner face the village houses abutted, leaving room in the centre of the village for flocks to be stabled in case of invasion. Fortified turrets held each comer of the wall, while a watch-tower surveyed entry by the central gate: the pattern, like a toy fort, remains in the qal'eh villages of outer Iran, invented and maintained for refuge against nomads. Nomads, therefore, both within the province and to the north and north-west of its Oxus boundary, were the hazard which Alexander could deduce from the villages he saw around him.

  In this strange and distant world the Persians had ruled through the local baronry, who lived secure in castles and rockbound fortresses, attended by troupes of retainers. Their satrap was often a blood-relation of the king, but he married into the Bactrian nobility and relied on his local in-laws to support him; Alexander, who recognized the easy virtues of Persian administration, did not wish to disturb the past, preferring to find an Iranian fit to continue it. Most opportunely the elderly Persian Artabazus arrived in Balkh in early June. As an experienced satrap in the west and a very old friend of the Macedonian royal family, he was also the nearest Alexander could come to a blood relation among the Iranians, for Artabazus was father of Barsine, the mistress whom Alexander had taken after Issus. It was good to see him again, especially as he had come with cheerful military news. He had been leading the cavalry against Satibarzanes' rebellion around Herat, and now reported that he and his three fellow-generals had routed Bessus's rebel associates in a fierce and distinguished cavalry charge and had lanced Satibarzanes himself to death. Presumably, it was this news which had caused Bessus to retreat with such ill-advised rapidity. Alexander's mistaken trust in a rebel bad at last been atoned for; he was now safe from the rear, and he could appoint the trusted Artabazus, father of his mistress, to govern his fellow-Iranians in Bactria. Local tradition was thus respected, and as the late June sun warmed up, the army left Balkh on Bessus's dwindling trail, a prospect tougher than they knew. They numbered scarcely 30,000, but they followed uncomplainingly, not the behaviour of men discontented with their leader's recent purge, his ambitions or his sparse adoption of a few Persian customs. He was still the Alexander they loved, for whose sake they had marched from Persepolis, looped through 3,000 miles of desert, starved, and crossed the snowbound barrier between two worlds in the course of a single year.

  From Balkh, Bessus's trail stretched north to the Oxus through fifty miles of pebbled desert. The same troops and horses who had been freezing a month before now suffered dreadfully from the midsummer heat, unable to swallow the little water which their guides had advised them to carry. It was impossible to travel by day, when the heat-haze shimmered deceptively over the sand and even the lizards retired beneath the gravel; night was hardly kinder, though the more pious histories omitted all mention of the men's losses. Throughout, Alexander showed why he could ask so much of his army: when water was brought to him in a helmet, scooped from a small desert spring, he refused to accept the privilege, and tipped it away, sharing his soldiers' hardships. When the river Oxus was finally reached, the army was so scattered that fires had to be lit on a nearby hill to direct them into camp. Alexander 'stood by their route and refused to take food or drink or refresh himself in any way, until the entire army had passed him by'. The men took heart from his example, and late that night Alexander and his army slept in camp near Kilif, where the yellowing waters of the Oxus narrow and their current, slowed by reeds, floats by.

  Before crossing on the morrow, the oldest Macedonians, the unfit and the few Thessalian horsemen who had volunteered at Hamadan were paid generously and sent back home with
orders to father children, the soldiers of the future: they would rather have been spared their last fifty miles. The river Oxus is broad and lazy, and five days after their fellows' departure, the rest of the army were already on its far bank, helped by a well-known Oriental method of transport. Bessus had burnt the native boats and there was no local timber to build a bridge, so the troops stitched up their leather tentskins, as at the Danube, and stuffed them with hay to make floating rafts, to this day the time-honoured means of crossing a river in the east. Once beyond the Oxus, the army at once set foot in Sogdia,

  the north-eastern province of the Persian empire, from which one of the long-used routes branches off through the desert to China, the lifeline down which merchants of Sogdia would always travel, bringing anything from peaches and lotus to dances and radical religions into the homes of their Chinese clientele. To Alexander's army China was unknown and Sogdia no more than a sandy wasteland of stone and scrubby tamarisk, a site which only promised sickness, skirmishes with tribesmen, or more Alexandrias miles from the olive trees they knew at home. Only Bessus had ever lured them into it.

  For the moment, pursuit continued to reward them. Bessus had been incompetent, and like Darius, he suffered from independent courtiers as a result; as the enemy crossed the Oxus, these henchmen seized him and agreed to hand him over. Ptolemy was sent to collect the traitor from a remote village and bring him naked, bound in a wooden collar. When he had been set on the right hand side of Alexander's road, Alexander passed by, stopped his chariot and asked why Bessus had murdered Darius, his lawful king and benefactor. Bessus blamed his helpers, but the excuse was not thought satisfactory: he was ordered to be scourged and proclaimed as an assassin before being taken to Balkh for further punishment. The incident says more for Alexander's shrewdness than his severity. Only a year before, Satibarzanes, another of Darius's murderers had surrendered and received a conspicuous pardon, but like Satibarzanes, Bessus had followed up treachery with rebellion, and rebels, in Alexander's ethic, could only expect the grimmest treatment. Bessus's crime was less that he had helped to kill Darius than that he had claimed to be the new king of Asia. And yet it was as a murderer that he was condemned: in summer 329, Alexander had Orientals serving in his army and he wished to convince them of his new position. He still fought to exact revenge, but not Greek revenge for Persian sacrilege so much as Persian revenge for Darius's murder. Bessus the royal pretender was stripped of his glamour under cover of Alexander's latest myth.

  With Bessus safely in chains, the march northwards might have ended, had it not been natural to ride on to the nearby river Jaxartes and claim the north-east frontier of the Persian empire. Near Karshi, Alexander recruited the fine-blooded local horses to replace the many who had died in the desert; near Kungurtao, the one hill in the sandy monotony of the landscape, his men were harassed by natives while looking, perhaps too desperately, for food. Reprisals are said to have killed some 20,000 natives, though they did manage to hit Alexander hard in the leg with an arrow and break his splint-bone, a danger in a desert climate which invited gangrene. The wound caused a quarrel, not a delay, for Alexander was determined 300 to be carried on a stretcher to keep the expedition moving, and the choice of suitable bearers divided the army. Cavalry and infantry quarrelled for the privilege, a rift which would reopen six years later after Alexander's death. But in Sogdia Alexander was there to settle it and arrange that cavalry and infantry should take the job in turn. Loyalties were satisfied and within four days of desert marching, the army reached Samarkand, as yet a mere mud-walled summer palace of the ruling Iranians, watered by a river which the troops named Polytimetus, the Greek for 'very precious', no doubt a reference to the gold which was washed down its bed and is still remembered in its modern name Zarafshan or 'Scatterer of gold'. From here it was only 180 miles to the frontier river. Native villages were looted for food, burnt where resistant. Alexander, presumably, was still unable to walk.

  The frontier was reached in July when humidity sinks as low as five per cent and the shade temperature rises to 430 C. At modern Kurkath, a few miles south of its main ford, the river was guarded by a Persian outpost which Cyrus had settled two hundred years before, and as in the Hindu Kush, Alexander ordered a new Alexandria to replace it: 'He thought that the city would be well sited and suitable for increase, especially as a guard against the tribesmen beyond, and he expected that it would become great both from the numbers of settlers merged into it and from the splendour of its name.' On the last point, he was mistaken; Alexandria-the-furthest was soon harassed by nomads and refounded by his successor as an Antioch, it then became known as modem Khojend, then, as other names seemed splendid, Stalinabad, then Leninabad.

  The city's purpose was unmistakable: improved defence of a frontier which had loomed large in the Persians' past. By viewing Persia through the eyes of a western Greek, this anxiety has often been underestimated. To Persians of the future, it was not the defeats by the Greeks at Marathon which lived on as an uneasy memory so much as the fact that their great king Cyrus and their prophet Zoroaster had both died fighting against nomads of the northern steppes. The province of Sogdia was to Asia what Macedonia was to Greece: a buffer between a brittle civilization and the restless barbarians beyond, whether the Scyths of Alexander's day and later or the White Huns, Turks and Mongols who eventually poured south to wreck the thin veneer of Iranian society. In this barrier province, Alexander naturally followed his father's example and strengthened Sogdia, like Philip's Macedonia, with improved towns and military colonies to keep the Scyths where they belonged. Already envoys had crossed the Jaxartes river to talk to the Scythian king and spy out his peoples, the most expert horsemen known to cast Iran. They were mobile and dangerous and the glorious art of their bridles, cups, carpets and tents is a reminder that the palace world of Asia and the city life of its Greeks were only brief punctuations in an older world of nomads, as light as dust but no less permanent, and never a society to be undervalued. It was an omen of the times that in a Persian love story, translated into Greek by Alexander's court usher, the villain of the piece had been changed since the mid-sixth century from a Bactrian aristocrat to a Scythian chieftain.

  Before Alexandria-the-furthest could be begun, news arrived of rebellion, not among the Scyths, but in the rear. Since landing in Asia, Alexander had asked his men to march dreadfully hard, often without food, but he had never entangled them in a slow and self-sustaining struggle with guerrillas. Now for the first time his speed was to be halted. This Sogdian rebellion would exhaust his army's patience for eighteen unsatisfactory months, make new demands on his generalship and induce a mood of doubt among his entourage. The causes were simple; four of Bessus's henchmen still ranged free, led by Spitamenes the Persian whose name has a link with the Zoroastrian religion. All four now began to work on the native mistrust of the Macedonians. There was ample reason for it. Anxiously searching for food in the Sogdian desert, Alexander's army had plundered ricefields, looted flocks and requisitioned horses, punishing all resistance severely. His thirty thousand soldiers could not be fed from any other source, but it was a dangerous way to behave. Meanwhile, the natives saw garrisons installed in their main villages; Cyrus's old town was being changed into an Alexandria, and already, as in Bactria, Alexander had banned the exposure of dead corpses to vultures, because it repelled his Greek sensitivities. Like the British prohibition of suttee in India, his moral scruples cost him popularity, for Sogdians had not seen Persia overthrown only to suffer worse interference from her conquerors. It was time to be free of any empire, especially when a conference had been ordered at Balkh which the local baronry were expected to attend. If they went they might be held hostage. Bactrians, therefore, joined the resistance, the same Bactrians no doubt, whom Bessus had timorously abandoned, and from Balkh to the Jaxartes Alexander found his presence challenged.

  Ignoring the nomad skirmishers who had gathered to rouse the south along the Oxus, Alexander turned against the nearest rebe
llious villagers. Here his garrisons had been murdered, so he repaid the compliment to the seven responsible settlements in a matter of three weeks. The mudbrick fortifications of the qal'ehs were treated contemptuously. Though siege towers had not yet been transported over the Hindu Kush, collapsible stone-throwers were ready to be assembled if necessary; they were not needed at the first three villages, which succumbed in two days to the old-fashioned tactics of scaling parties backed up by missiles; the next two were abandoned by natives who ran into a waiting cordon of cavalry, and in all five villages the fighting men were slaughtered, the survivors enslaved. The sixth, Cyrus's border garrison at Kurkath, was far the strongest, because of its high mound. Here, the mud walls were a fit target for the stone-throwers, but their performance was unimpressive, perhaps because there was a shortage of ammunition; stone is very scarce in the Turkestan desert and it cannot have been possible to transport many rounds of boulders across the Hindu Kush. However, Alexander noticed that the watercourse which still runs under Kurkath's walls had dried up in the heat and offered a surprise passage to troops on hands and knees. The usual covering fire was ordered and the king is said to have wormed his way with his troops along the river-bed, proof that his broken leg had mended remarkably quickly. The ruse was familiar in Greece, and once inside, the gates were flung open to the besiegers, though the natives continued to resist, and even concussed Alexander by stoning him on the neck. Eight thousand were killed and another 7,000 surrendered: Alexander's respect for his newfound ancestor Cyrus did not extend to rebellious villagers who wounded him, so Kurkath, town of Cyrus, was destroyed. The seventh and final village gave less trouble and its inhabitants were merely deported.