Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

by Nicholas Nicastro

  First, some clarification: when Aeschines recounted the sack of Persepolis to you, he really meant the sack of the town adjacent to the citadel. This was a settlement built largely of mud brick, and contained the houses of the servants who ran the palace, and the artisans who continued to work on it up until the day it was destroyed. Parsa was, in fact, never a completed work, and was never truly lived in. Let it be a testament to its opulence that the greed of the Macedonian soldiers could be satisfied in this way. It was the richest sack many of them had seen in a lifetime of looting Greek cities, and they had seen only the servant’s quarters!

  No—the real treasures were stolen by a quieter, more discriminating bunch. As the glow of the fires below the citadel began to rise, and screams of the raped and murdered Persians filtered through the tiled walls, Alexander and his friends embarked on a torchlight tour of Darius’s palace with the Great King’s chamberlain. It took all night to get through the maze of pylons and palaces, armories and stables. The gardens alone had no parallel in Greece or Macedon, with great reflecting pools flanked with pomegranate trees, jujube, willows and tamarisk, and stocked with enormous carp that practically nuzzled one’s hand to be fed. Peafowl and ibises strode the paths, and hidden among the topiaries, our guide said, there remained a single survivor from the Great King’s collection of tame Indian tigers.

  The greatest excitement was reserved, of course, for the treasuries. It was the big room, the vault of the great Darius, that contained the fortune in bullion I have mentioned—some 120,000 talents’ worth.

  The chamber was too dark for the party’s taste, so a brazier was lit with whatever fuel was at hand. By its light, they marveled at a spectacle of gleaming metal that inspired some, such as Ptolemy, to drop to their knees in a fit of pecuniary ecstasy. More braziers were ordered, and more fuel to light up the treasure, until their Persian guide lost his voice, his face having gone white.

  “What is it?” asked Hephaestion, smiling.

  “We have burned the original manuscript of the Avesta—12,000 leaves in letters of gold, dictated by Zarathushtra himself. It is a thousand years old.”

  “How old is this?” asked Alexander, holding up a gilded drinking cup.

  The King’s taste, you see, was different: gold interested him more when it plated or gilded fancy things, such as the flatware made for his table, or the fine cedar beams that held up the tapestries that would soon cool his crowned head.

  The impression that I got of the place from a distance, that it was a kind of royal dollhouse, was only strengthened when I got inside. The carved gateways and palmetted columns seemed to bear no distinctive style. Or shall I say they had a kind of corporate style that was at the same time Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian, and therefore amounted to neither. Though we understood construction of the citadel to have begun by the elder Darius well before the first invasion of Greece, the floors seemed unscraped by groveling retainers, the striding stone bulls unappreciated by human eyes. Not even the royal dinnerware seemed ever to have known use.

  We were not prepared to find temples or sanctuaries of any kind in Persepolis, for Herodotus had written that the Persians abjured such things. We were fools to place any stock in Herodotus: there was a splendid fire temple there, reserved for the use of the Great King and his family. In design it was a windowless, orthogonal room, unadorned with any of the faux-Egyptian or Babylonian frillery we saw elsewhere. The walls were caked in a fine, black, aromatic ash that both charmed the nose and devoured all light except the glow of the sacred flame. The atmosphere was both tomb-like and intimate, like the private boudoir of Kore.

  Unlike in our temples, there was no statue of their god, and the altar was inside the temple. The latter was a bed of glowing embers on an upraised platform. It is said that this fire, the Atas Bahram, had first been kindled in the days of Zarathushtra himself, centuries before, and had been carried to Pars from the east in an earthenware pot during the reign of Cyrus the Great. At first I dismissed this as a mere story. In all the years since that time, after all the invasions and upheavals, did not this Atas Bahram go out at least once?

  I began to believe the legend when Parmenion announced that his scouts had captured two Persian priests travelling away from the capital in different directions. Each of these priests bore an earthenware pot with burning embers from the sacred fire. As the Zoroastrians considered the number three to be sacred, I imagine a third messenger escaped Parmenion’s screen. The embers he carried might already have kindled another Atas Bahram, safely hidden from the Macedonians, as it was from the invading Assyrians, Medes, Cimmerians, Scythians and Babylonians in their time.

  As it was, Alexander had no interest in extinguishing the altar. On the contrary, he declared that it looked unhealthily weak! On his orders, wooden chairs and tables were fetched from elsewhere in the palace, broken up, and tossed on the altar so that it flared up like a proper campfire. The priests dared show neither approval nor disapproval at this, but stood off to the side smiling tightly, their shadows dancing on the bare walls behind them.

  The climax of the tour was the royal throne room. It was known as the Hall of One Hundred Columns, which testified to the literal truth. Yet here again the combination of enormous expense and practical uselessness was striking, for at no place in the Hall was a view of the throne unobstructed by a column. This could only have been the work of a deliberate but perversely alien mind.

  As Alexander faced the throne of the Great King, he saw that someone had toppled a large statue of Darius’s ancestor, Xerxes. Then, as he was wont to do at dramatic moments, he mused conspicuously.

  “Shall I set you back on your feet, Xerxes, because the heart of a lion beat in your chest? Or shall you lie there as a villain, because of your crimes against the Greeks?”

  It seemed a good question, but not one Alexander cared to answer, for he was already distracted by the carved device of the winged disk over the throne. He pointed at the inscription underneath.

  “What does that say?” he asked the chamberlain.

  “It says that the Great King of Kings has built a palace befitting Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithra, and that the gods approve of what he has done in the name of asha, or righteousness. It says that as Ahuramazda honors the King as his earthly counterpart in the great struggle against the daevas, his home will never suffer its degradation.”

  “The daevas?”

  The chamberlain, looking uncomfortable, took a long time before answering.

  “They are minions of the Hostile Spirit, Angra Mainyu. They are bringers of chaos and destruction.”

  At this Alexander gave only a nod, and passed the throne by without sitting in it. It may have been the warning by Ahuramazda that dissuaded him, but more likely he did not want to risk a repetition of his misadventure on the throne at Susa, where his legs were too short to reach the floor.

  Alexander lingered at Persepolis for almost five months. As the exhilaration of this conquest wore off, the King’s determination to keep going wavered. His mandate from the Greek cities, after all, had provided only for the freeing of the Ionians. His rant at the Persian envoy notwithstanding, he came to worry that everything else he had done, from the destruction of the Persian army three times over to the occupation of Babylon to the seizure of the royal seat, smacked of hubris. To change his mind, Hephaestion, Ptolemy, and the rest came at him from every side, arguing that to break off the offensive then would invite a counter-attack. If Darius did not return this year, or next, he would in ten years, or twenty. And besides, of what concern to a god such as Alexander are the bleats of urban gossips back home? Even to a mortal king like Philip, those people counted for little.

  The jury shuffled and muttered. Though Swallow was used to forensic hyperbole, even he was beginning to resent the constant belittling of Greeks by the Macedonians. On this point alone, if only half of what Machon claimed was true, Aeschines’ prosecution was in deep trouble.

  While these arguments raged behind clo
sed doors, the Macedonians diverted themselves with contests. Actors, athletes, raconteurs and musicians from home came in a procession down the Royal Road from Sardis. Among them was Thettalus the actor, who has appeared to great acclaim in the plays of Sophocles here and in the palace at Pella, where he first became familiar with Alexander. In the years before his ascension the Prince often used Thettalus as his unofficial envoy. With his military success he did not forget his friend. At Alexander’s eager expense, Thettalus was given a free hand to produce Euripides’ Bacchae anywhere he wished at Persepolis.

  Thettalus chose a great processional staircase of Darius’s palace as a backdrop. This represented the reception hall of Pentheus, King of Thebes. As you know, at the climax of the play Pentheus attempts to spy on the rites of Dionysus by dressing as a woman, but is unmasked by the crazed celebrants. In an inspired bit of stagecraft, Thettalus has Pentheus escape not into a fir tree, but atop one of the great carved statues of Darius. The audience roared with delight as the maenads toppled the statue to get at Pentheus, who was played with great skill by Thettalus himself. They sat in wonder as the actor playing Pentheus’s mother, in ecstatic thrall to the god, foaming at the mouth, ignored her son’s pathetic pleas and ripped his arm from its socket. Here again, Thettalus was an innovator, for the act is performed onstage as the Messenger describes it. Cleverly, Thettalus fashioned a costume with a sham arm, having subtly withdrawn his own arm under his cloak. This production bore the kind of spectacle we never see in the Theatre of Dionysus, but judging by the response of Macedonians and Persians alike, it may represent the future. Now there is a true master of the stage, unlike the mediocre arts of our friend Aeschines!

  Other kinds of performers also made their way to Alexander. I am thinking in particular of a courtesan named Thais. She was quite well-known here in years past—I see by the reactions of some gentlemen in the jury that they remember her. In her time she had beauty, but please understand, she was the kind of woman who was beautiful no matter what she looked like.

  Today you will find her preparing to join Ptolemy on the throne of Egypt. That she came into alliance with that character I take as no surprise—Ptolemy deserves her. For those who never purchased her services, you know the type: to strangers, impeccable, unapproachable, unimpeachable. Show her a few drachmas, and she is your best friend, bursting with a thousand ideas of how to spend your money so you don’t appear a fool. Show her a few more, and she is brazen, gutter-mouthed, leaving you panting but with her legs firmly closed. The cost of unsticking those gams was never quite clear! But when you hammered at her gates, they say she earned her nickname, which was ‘the Handshake.’

  So it came to be that Thais talked her way through the palace doors and onto a couch in Alexander’s drinking parlor. She was quiet at first, just sitting and showing off her white arms through her chiton, contenting herself just to keep up with all of us, all the hardened soldiers, cup for cup and crater for crater. The conversation touched on diverse topics, including politics, food, and the follies of certain mathematical cults. Thais was prepared to hold forth on all of them, taking Callisthenes’ side in a debate with the King and myself over the existence of the so-called “irrational” numbers.

  “It cannot be denied,” proclaimed the historian, “that if we imagine a square with a side length of one unit, the diagonal of that square will be the square root of two. Try as we might, we cannot find a fixed unit of any length that will evenly divide both into the side length or the diagonal. They are, as the Pythagoreans call it, incommensurable.”

  “Short of trying every possible common unit, I cannot understand how you can know that,” I told him.

  “Your opinion is shared by others,” Thais said. “The man who first proved the existence of irrational numbers was expelled from the order of the Pythagoreans. His colleagues gave him a funeral and a tomb, as if his suggestion amounted to intellectual suicide.”

  “And yet Hippasus was correct,” added Callisthenes.

  Alexander shook his head. “I take the soldier’s part, and agree with Machon. No one can claim to know no common factor exists unless he tries them all.”

  “Then why don’t we try here, now?” asked Thais. With that, she untied her girdle and knelt on the floor. The mosaic in the center of the room had a pattern that seemed close to perfectly square. Folding the girdle into a length equivalent to the side of the figure, she first showed that the diagonal of the square was almost half again as long as the side. As she demonstrated this fact the men were not watching the girdle at all, but the casual exposure of a breast as firm and unshriveled as a virgin girl’s.

  No matter how many times she folded the girdle, from one-half to one-quarter to one-eighth the length of the side, no number of whole units fit into the diagonal. There was always some material left over. (A dark aureole likewise insisted on presenting itself, standing free of her folds.)

  “So you see, they are incommensurable.”

  “A most revealing demonstration!” applauded Callisthenes.

  “Revealing, yes, but no demonstration,” said the King. “I can imagine units much smaller than we can make with a piece of cloth. How do we know none of these may factor evenly into both lines?”

  “We know, because it is a matter of mathematical proof.”

  The argument went on for some time with neither side convincing the other. But as competent as Thais was on matters geometrical, she took over the room as the wine flowed and the men grew tongue-tied. She picked up the cithara and played a romantic air, then played it again with racy lyrics she made up on the spot. Verses from Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar tripped lightly from her tongue, but especially lines from Euripides, for she had done her homework. And she danced, creating music in the men’s minds by the swaying of her hips, hiking up her gown to show her upper thighs.

  By the climax of the evening all of us were gazing at her with our aspirations plain, including the King, who blushed like a lovesick boy with his pleasure of her. But before any propositions flew, she suddenly turned the conversation to matters of politics, and of history.

  “Mine was a wealthy family,” she said, “before the Persians came to Attica. We had farms near Dekeleia, and a townhouse. My ancestors drew liturgies—they ran at the battle of Marathon, commanded ships at Salamis. There was a tripod dedicated to a first-place finish at the Festival of Dionysus. It was destroyed when Mardonius burned the city on his second occupation…”

  As she said this, all hint of titillation went out of her manner. She was intimate, confessional, showing far more than just arms and thighs. Who was she speaking to? We all thought it was to ourselves alone, her deference to Alexander notwithstanding. As she spoke of the fires of Mardonius, the flames of the braziers shone in her eyes. A stray lock of hair, so fetching as it came loose in her dance, was threaded back behind her ear, like that of a windblown child standing at the foot of the burning Acropolis.

  “My family never recovered from the Great King’s predations. To survive, my mother was forced to board her children to different houses around the city. What ‘boarding’ meant was not hard to understand: for a fee, we were placed in the power of unscrupulous men with little regard for our age. I was sent into the service of a man named Bitto, who owned a house not far from the Whispering Hermes. On pain of beating, I was forced to cooperate with his criminal enterprise: having been blessed—or cursed—with a pretty face, I was obliged to show myself to the male passersby in the street. When the inevitable insults came, I was to let them into the house, and let them have their way with me. This would go on until Bitto contrived to ‘surprise’ us in the act. Pretending to fly into a rage over the insult of his only daughter, he would lock the men in the house and declare that he would return with others of his family, so that they could together seek the justice they had coming. Naturally, the dupes promised any sort of payment to avoid their fate.

  “With this blackmail, and by my ruin, Bitto attained quite a high style of living. That none of
the victims suspected that I was no longer innocent I put down to my age—just ten years old—and the foolishness of most men regarding the anatomy of women. With experience, I was able to fool most of them by offering my anus instead, or even a chance to rub themselves between my thighs, so ignorant were they! Yet as the months passed I fell more into despair, for there seemed no way for me to escape the power of this Bitto. And so with my hopelessness I lost my fear, and swore before the gods that I would live to turn the tables on him.

  “My opportunity came when I took into my bed an older man named Evaces. This fellow was very pleasing to me, for he was courteous, and wore nice clothes, and seemed to have few vices except for a weakness for young girls. When Bitto sprung his trap, I therefore told Evaces not to concern himself with his rantings, but to trust me instead. When Bitto threatened to get his brothers, I instructed Evaces to call his bluff. Enraged, Bitto tore open the door and pointed a knife at Evaces. At that point, in front of many witnesses on the street, I proclaimed ‘I am Evaces’ daughter, not Bitto’s.’ Bitto sputtered and fumed, but could say nothing when the men in the crowd demanded he prove his relation to me; he barred the way for us to escape, but backed down when Evaces threatened to summon a deputy of the Eleven.

  “And so I came into the house of Evaces, in which I lived as a concubine until my sixteenth year. When Evaces died of sickness, he made certain to leave three minas to his brother toward the cost of my maintenance. He honored his dying wish for several months, but reneged on his responsibility by claiming that as a freeborn woman I was the responsibility of my family, none of whom I had seen in many years. So instead of returning to the relatives who had sold me into disrepute in the first place, I took what I could from Evaces’ house and went to Corinth. There I learned the finer arts of the only profession left to me.

  “Sitting here with you, I know what you must think of me. Yet you should know that I would have had a different fate, had the gods been willing! I think of the girls of Athens today, safe in the strength of your protection, dear King. They will have no need for the arts of women like me. They will never know these depths…”