Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Talk of Dionysus was spiriting to tired troopers and Alexander himself 'wanted the tales of the god's wandering to be true'. The cult of the god was old and fierce in his native Macedonia and no son of Olympias could underestimate it. He was keen as always to investigate, and the Companion Cavalry and Royal Squadron of Infantry were invited to join him in visiting the shady clumps of trees, the myrtle, box and laurel, symbols of the god and a blessing to eyes long wearied by rocky outcrop and dry salt desert. The place was a gardener's paradise, and the soldiers picked the common ivy and twined its acrid stems into wreaths. Crowned with ivy garlands, they sang hymns to the god on the hillside and addressed him by his many names, whereupon Alexander offered him a formal sacrifice: 'Many of the not unpromincnt officers around him garlanded themselves with ivy and - so several have written - were promptly possessed by the god and raised the call of Dionysus, running in his frantic rout.' The Bacchai, the Bacchai ... - the words of the most memorable chorus in Greek drama, probably written in Macedonia itself, may have sounded on a Pakistani hillside.

  This episode deserves to be believed, but its explanation is difficult. It is plausible to look first for an Indian background, and there are parallels which seem impressive. Alexander's officers named the hillside Meros, the Greek word for a thigh and a link with Dionysus who was believed to have been born from the thigh of Zeus. But the Indians may have led them to the name, for in early Hindu cosmology the world was believed to float like the four petals of a lotus around its central mountain Meru, which rose out of the surrounding waters to the peak of the easeful gods. Alexander might have heard the Indians in his camp talking of Meru and identified the word, as so often, with what he knew in Greek. As for the god himself, an Indian Dionysus was repeatedly mentioned by later Greek visitors to India and among the native pantheon none is more plausible than the Hindu god Shiva, who is worshipped by dancers and cymbalists, dressed like Greek Bacchants in the skins of wild animals. Ivy, Meru and Shiva might seem to have encouraged the Macedonians' fancy: scholars in Egyptian Alexandria later blamed the incident on Alexander's love of flattery, but they were men with dry minds. They had never seen the Swati highlands or shared the hazards of an Indian explorer.

  But there are difficulties in this Indian explanation, for the people of Dionysus conspire in a stranger story which tends to discredit it. Alexander was in the modern region of Chitral, which adjoins Nuristan on the eastern border of Afghanistan, home of the people long known as the Kafirs, whose kinsmen lived in Chitral and the Swat highlands where they share the Kafirs' language and many of their stylish folk tales. The Kafirs are one of the least accessible and most enchanting peoples in Asia. Their skin is sometimes fair, their hair is occasionally blond. They have aquiline noses and noble foreheads and they wear a woollen headdress which has seemed to the imaginative to be like the broad-brimmed Kausia of the Macedonians. Ivy abounds in their well-treed mountains and the people, like Dionysus, are conspicuously fond of wine; their music and singing are famous, their architecture of carved wood is distinctive and often ornate. It was inevitable that these Kafirs should have attracted the attention of the Victorian British; in the nineteenth century the Kafirs did not yet practise as Hindus or Muslims, so some said they were early Christians, uncorrupted by the Catholic Church, others that they were Jews, while

  others believed that they were Greek descendants of Alexander's garrisons, and hence had a European look, a story which was as old as Marco Polo and is still repeated; Kipling even paid these proto-Hellenes the honour of a story. But exploration proved that they neither spoke Greek nor cared for Jesus, and their origins soon lost popular appeal. But one strange fact had been noticed: alone of the tribes in the Hindu Kush the Kafirs expose their dead in wooden coffins, and so the Macedonians' search for firewood springs to mind: the troops had smashed up the coffins which lay to hand round their bivouacs and the custom is probably a link across thousands of years, so that the Kafirs of Nuristan are indeed descendants of the people whom Alexander met. This casts doubts on a link between Dionysus and Shiva, god of the Hindus.

  Research has discovered that the Kafirs speak a language whose roots derive from the earliest Indo-European dialects; Kafirs, then, are descendants of the first invaders to sweep west from India to Europe several thousand years before Alexander; hence their European looks, a feature which also owes something to their attraction for enterprising British ladies on the north-west frontier. Their religion, before they were forced to become Muslim, contained no Indian god to be compared with Dionysus; they worshipped a sky god, whom the Greeks would have called Zeus Ombrios, and a demon god in the shape of a stone, but they were not Hindus with a knowledge of Shiva. However, they did have a lively cult of the ibex or mountain goat, as befitted the people of one of its most prolific haunts, and as the Greek Dionysus's worship included the killing and eating of a goat the parallel is very impressive. Possibly Alexander saw or heard of this equally ecstatic cult among the Kafirs, whose link with his own Dionysus seemed to be confirmed by their natural gardens and the western appearance of their spokesmen.

  After Dionysus, it was time for Heracles. First, the rival son of Zeus made his laborious way across the waters of the Alishang and Kunar rivers, keeping far north and storming a strongly built citadel high on the Katgala pass: the ground was sheer, the walls protected by ditches and the defenders encouraged by 7,000 hired troops from farther east. In a preliminary skirmish Alexander was wounded in the ankle by an arrow from the city battlements and as his foot hung numb with pain, an Athenian all-in wrestler, who had long been applying his skills in the ranks, tried to atone for its bleeding by quoting the king a line of Homer: 'Ichor,' he remarked, 'such as flows from the veins of the immortal gods.' 'Nonsense,' Alexander retorted, 'it's not ichor: it's blood.' He had deserved divine honours by his prowess and he wished it to be known that he was specially favoured by his father Zeus. But he had no illusions about his own mortality and he would never have claimed that he had himself turned into a god.

  Wounded and repulsed, Alexander took thought for his machines. A mound was ordered, as at Gaza, from which the catapults and siege-towers could bring their barrage within range, but the natives had the pleasure of seeing their first drawbridge collapse beneath the weight of its Macedonians. The catapults were more formidable, and when one of the arrow-shooters killed the Indian chieftain, the tribesmen gave in to superior engineering. Their hired troops surrendered and were taken into Alexander's ranks, only to be massacred when they tried to escape on the following night. The rest were spared, including the chieftain's mother, who made up for the loss of her son to a catapult by sleeping with Alexander and conceiving a replacement.

  It was now midwinter, and the storming of two more highland citadels kept the army busy well into the new year; the righting continued to be strenuous and the weather chilly but food was no distress: only three months' earlier, a herd of 230,000 cattle had been captured, the finest of which had been chosen by Alexander who 'wished to send them back to Macedonia to work the land', a tribute to his keen eye for the agriculture on which all ancient economies depended: the rest sufficed to feed the army for several months on milk or meat, two rare luxuries in the diet of the classical world. Meanwhile the drift of the campaign was ever eastwards. Beyond the Swat hills, on the eastern side of the river Indus, lived a rajah whose people throughout history had always supported Alexander's present enemies on the near bank. Agitators and hired troops had already come to cause trouble and as Alexander sacked and resettled one city after another on the edge of the Indus, the survivors kept retreating towards this one source of help. By early March they had been penned up into the north-east highlands overlooking the Indus itself and had fled to a steep spur north of Attock which even the hero Heracles, men said in Alexander's army, had never been able to capture. At last, the scene was set for the climax to Alexander's career as the greatest besieger in history.

  In 1926 the site of this spur called Aornos was fixed by th
e explorations of Sir Aurel Stein, and his remarkable search has since been confirmed by archaeologists. Aornos is indeed as impressive as Ptolemy's history suggested. Where the river Indus crooks westwards above the Nandihar valley, a complex of spurs and ridges are enclosed inside its bend. Among them is Pir-Sar, the 'peak of the holy man', a long flat-topped cliff which stands over a height of 7,000 feet, guarded on the east by the broad river Indus to which it descends in a series of slippery gorges. Due north, the even higher spur of Bar Sar rises to a sharply conical point and meets Pir-Sar first by grass slopes, then by a particularly treacherous ravine, while to the west, sheer cliffs drop 2,000 feet to a strip of valley and thence rise straight to the highest peak of the whole range. To the south, Pir-Sar's terminal hillock breaks into three narrow branches, each more inaccessible than the next. As for Pir-Sar itself, its own flat summit commands a view dramatic enough to stir the most hardened Macedonian bodyguard, whether he looked away to the icebound caves of the Upper Swat headwaters or south beyond the Indus to the metallic green of the plains round Peshawar. It was a site for mountaineers, but emphatically not for warriors.

  From such a vantage point Alexander's looping march up the bank of the Indus was sure to be detected. On no side of the rock could his army hope for easy access, and they had to choose between a ridgeway or a ravine. As for starving out the enemy, that was impossible because Pir-Sar had its own water-springs and a summit wide enough to grow crops for its occupiers, as it still does for the local Gujars. The cliffs and gorges were far too sheer for the catapults to come within range: when the natives talked of their Hindu god Krishna, worshipped by men dressed in lion skins, it was only natural for the Macedonians to equate him with their own royal ancestor Heracles and spread the word that not even Heracles had been able to storm Pir-Sar. To Alexander, that was another reason for attempting it himself.

  From the pass, he briefly visited the Indus to check on Hephaistion's bridge-building; he then approached Pir-Sar up river from the south. At the nearest base the heaviest troops and most of the cavalry were left to prepare supplies against a long siege, while the Horse-archers and all the crack skirmishing troops continued for a day and a half up the western bank until they met with a decisive stroke of luck: nearby tribesmen surrendered, offering to lead the army to the easiest point of assault. As usual, they were believed for lack of any alternative. Ptolemy and Alexander's secretary Eumenes were sent on a reconnaissance, and striking due north from the river they seized the spur of Little Una, due west of Pir-Sar itself, helped by its covering of pine-trees and wild rhododendrons. After putting up a stockade on the hilltop, they lit a fire signal as prearranged. Alexander saw it, but so did the defenders, and it took two days' skirmishing and the despatch of a native Indian messenger before king, secretary and historian were safely united on their advance ridge.

  From Little Una, the outlook was very much more favourable. Pir-Sar, said the guides, was vulnerable on its hidden north face, so Alexander

  scrambled towards it along the Burimar plateau until he came to rest at the great natural fosse of the Burimar-Kandao ravine, some 800 feet deep. Here he was vulnerable from above and quite unable to fight back, as the ravine was too wide and too deep for his catapults' range. Undeterred, he once more ordered the landscape to be changed to suit him. Stakes were to be cut from the many nearby fir trees, some conveniently fallen, and a mound was to be built across a ravine as broad as a Punjab river until the catapults could find their mark. These amazing earthworks began at dawn, Alexander moving the first heap himself and then standing by 'to watch and praise those who worked eagerly but to punish those who gave up for a moment'. After one day, sixty yards were already finished, but as the sides of the ravine dropped away, the work slowed down and it was three more days before men were within fighting range of the nearest tip of Pir-Sar itself. Presumably the mound was more a platform than a complete filling; its crisscross pattern of stakes and brushwood was one more credit to the troops' skill in carpentry.

  A foothold on Pir-Sar was not to be easily won. Alexander chose thirty advance guards, and 'at the sound of the trumpet, he turned to them and ordered them to follow him, for he would be the first up the rock'. Nearing the top ledge, he changed his mind and sent the guards ahead, only to see them crushed by boulders rolled down from above: he was lucky to escape with his life, and so he withdrew for the next two days. Day and night the Indians beat drums to celebrate the repulse, but the third night brought silence, a blaze of torchlight and their attempt at a surprise retreat. Hauling himself up the rockface by a rope, Alexander this time led his Shield Bearers up to the attack, killing several fugitives and clearing the summit for the building of altars to Athena goddess of victory, possible traces of which were discovered by Aurel Stein. The rock was measured by the surveyors, whose geometry was remarkably accurate, and it was then time to climb down, the last threat to the lines from Balkh to the Indus having been forcibly dispersed. 'I could only wonder,' wrote Stein, with the evidence of the landscape before him, 'that the story of Aomos should have escaped being treated altogether as a mythos. ... I had no victory to give thanks for, and yet I too felt tempted to offer a libation to Pallas Athene for the fulfilment of a scholar's hope, long cherished and long delayed.'

  The last spring snows were melting along the Barandu valley as Alexander left Pir-Sar and marched to the natives' final city through forests of rhododendron, primula and alpine clematis. Animals, not plants, were now his anxiety, for once in the great plain of the Indus, he would be in elephant territory: two units of Shield Bearers were sent to spy out the land beyond, with special orders to interrogate captives about the numbers of elephants in the service of rajahs. Alexander encouraged the local mahouts to hunt out beasts for his own use, which they duly did, mounting them and bringing them into the ranks with the very briefest training, except for two rogue bulls who stampeded over a precipice. Mahouts and Macedonians then marched a hundred miles down the banks of the Indus towards its crossing point at Hund, which had long been bridged by the obedient Hephaistion.

  At Hund the Indus is in lazy and expansive mood. Resting between the Himalayan foothills and the gorges of Attock, it spills across the plains to a width of six miles, inviting the traveller to take it at his leisure. Ambhi, rajah of Taxila, had been feeding Hephaistion's advance army with grain, another happy chance for the supply corps. He now sent presents in advance to the far bank, including 3,000 bulls, 10,000 sheep, many talents of silver and thirty elephants. Alexander first sacrificed the bulls 'to his usual gods', Ammon presumably among them, 'and held athletic games and a horse-show'. The sacrifices proved favourable, so he entrusted himself to Hephaistion's boats and bridge and perhaps to stuffed leather skins as well, and crossed the Indus to sacrifice again on the far bank, thankful that the rafts had not collapsed. Ambhi greeted him on the far side, 'his elephants appearing like castles between his troops', and as soon as they had established friendship, they inarched into the plain north-west of Rawal-Pindi to a first true taste of Indian life.

  In the shadow of the Murree hills, beside the Tamra-Nala river, the mudbrick town of Taxila lay open to the most outlandish visitors it had seen. Unlike the forts of Upper Swat, it stood at the meeting-point of three main roads, and had prospered accordingly. It was a seat of Hindu teachers and doctors, though probably not already of Buddhists too, whose founder the Greeks called Bouddhas, explaining him as the son of a fellow-soldier of Dionysus. But Taxila had none of the outward refinements of a university town. Its wide main street twisted through old and unplanned houses whose flat roofs caught the heat, each a different height from its neighbour, and whose walls of mud and rough-cut stone encroached on the passers-by; the simple rooms behind were floored with earth and let on their street side by the narrow slit of a single window. Only one public building stood in the town centre, a long and curving hall supported by wooden rafters; to left and right ran the narrow alleys of an Indian slum, where dirt and darkness were little improved by the
presence of communal dustbins. While Alexander rode in to sacrifice, meet the local rajahs and hold a durbah in the city hall, his officers took closer note of their surroundings.

  Physically, the Indians are slim [wrote Alexander's admiral Nearchus]. They are tall and much lighter in weight than other men.... They wear earrings of ivory (at least, the rich do), they dye their beards, some of the very whitest of white, others dark blue, red or purple or even green. Their clothes are of linen, cither brighter than all other linen or made to seem so by the people's black skin: they dress in a tunic down to the mid-calf and throw an outer mantle round their shoulders: another is wound round their head.. .. They wear shoes of white leather, elaborately decorated, the soles of which are thickened to make them seem tall. And all except the very humblest carry parasols in summer.