At this all the men, including myself, leapt to console her, to deny her degradation was permanent. We were lying, of course, well aware of the only real use to which she had availed herself. All of us, that is, with the possible exception of Ptolemy, whose depth of foresight we can only imagine. Did he see her as his queen even then?
“No, it cannot be denied. My future has been sealed by my past—it is too late for me. But I did come here with a thought in my mind, O King, that would go some way toward healing what has been broken. I dare not utter it…”
“Go on, speak,” said Alexander, who could not help but adopt the humility in her tone.
“I look around me,” she said, “and think of the majesty of those who built this place, and of their arrogance, believing that free Greeks would ever bend knee before them. I look, and I think, what an irony it would be, if one of the children they dispossessed took ultimate revenge on their works! A girl of Athens, for instance, with just a torch, could erase the mighty Xerxes from the memories of men. Is that not a thought?”
In an instant, her eyes were back to promising all sorts of diversions, and we men, whipped between desire and pity, were ready to grant her anything. Ptolemy rose from his couch and declared that the time had come to avenge the violation of the temples in Athens and Delphi. Why should it not be a woman who ignites the flames, added Craterus, igniting a guttural belch to punctuate his question. And I must confess, as I looked at Thais sitting there, chewing her lip with girlish anticipation, her eyes softening as they peered through the smoky lamplight, that yes, her suggestion was a thought indeed.
But the only opinion that counted was Alexander’s, and he said nothing. Seeing this, Thais sought to please him with a feat of entertainment even we experienced symposiasts had never seen before. For instead of delivering the usual show—frigging herself, for instance, or blowing a slave—she commenced her tour de force by approaching Bagoas.
The eunuch had been quiet so far. At her display of skill he seemed only to be taking mental notes; at her approach he looked bemused, as if she was wasting her time. That was my assumption, after all! But as she descended to put her lips on his, the act was done with such a tender deliberateness it was like the kiss given in the spring of new love. And it went on, her tongue drawing forth the tongue of Bagoas, her hands leading him to her breast, now miraculously exposed. As their clinch tightened, Bagoas responded as if he were a real man, pulling her chiton off her shoulders, clutching and clasping her. And when she felt the moment had arisen, Thais pulled herself off his lap, and pulling his tunic aside, showed the engorged fruit of her genius.
The rest of us cheered, exclaiming that yes, the divine Thais had indeed aroused a eunuch! And Bagoas, who seemed to see or hear nothing but her, seemed to be speaking to no one when he said, “The Palace of Darius must burn.”
Alexander, awed, drunk, nodded.
Our labor began in the Hall of One Hundred Columns. Torches appeared, and the party stood before the throne and gold-spun tapestries enclosing it. Alexander gave a brand to Thais, invited her to throw it on the cushions. Wisely, she declined.
“To the conqueror goes the honor,” she declared.
The King, who was barely able to keep his feet, threw the first torch. It missed the throne, clattering on the marble floor. With that, Thais rushed forward, retrieved it, and set the tapestries alight. We all cheered again, raising our cups to the conflagration as it climbed the fabric, consumed the canopy, and bit into the painted cedar rafters.
The party had to move when the room filled with smoke. In the courtyard, we saw the Macedonian soldiers running up from their camp with bags of sand, thinking the place had caught fire by accident. But when they saw us standing there, laughing and toasting our handiwork, they rushed off to contribute more fuel. Soon the inferno reached an intensity that the entire terrace was uninhabitable. Darius’s palace went up so fast that Alexander didn’t have time to retrieve his own belongings from the room where he had been sleeping. This was among the many things Alexander regretted about that night, for he lost all his copies of Euripides’ plays in the fire. The ancient armor of Achilles was, alas, saved. But ironically, this was not thanks to any Macedonian or Greek, but to the quick thinking of a Persian slave boy.
This, then, was how the most important city in Asia was destroyed.
XII.
We saw two kinds of settlements as we marched on through Persia. Near the rivers we found villages built out of reeds, ringed with fields of grain, rice, and indigo. These places were often recently abandoned, though whether this was due to the army’s approach or the seasonal travels of the people was difficult to say. In the arid places there were settlements of baked brick that appeared, from a distance, much the same ashen color as the land around them. On closer inspection, however, these villages were full of gardens, cooled by date palm and pipal, their walls shimmering with reflected light from half-shaded pools of sweet water.
Alexander’s army had grown to such a size it filled canyons and passes from end to end. It consumed the miles ahead of it and sloughed back feces, smoke, and Greek-speaking satraps. Anyone could see it coming days ahead, a plume of trail dust hanging over it, and watch it recede for days after, thousands of marching feet laying down long scourges in the earth.
With each parasang beyond Persepolis, beyond Media and the high Zagros, the army had reached territories few Greeks or Macedonians—traveler, soldier or slave—had ever seen. Aristotle’s geographies proved worthless. Ignorant and frightened, the Macedonians glimpsed surpassing weirdness in everything around them. They saw the natives bathing in cow urine and believing themselves clean. They saw men worshipping flame as they wore cloths before their faces, honoring the dead by feeding dogs, holding marriages by firelight that ended with eggs being tossed on roofs.
The Macedonians, understanding nothing, looked to Alexander for his example. In return he gave them a simple task: find Darius. Everything else, he seemed to say, was just details.
Ever since Darius had escaped from the battlefield, Alexander maintained a network of spies to inform him of his enemy’s movements. It was known that the latter still had the loyalty of some of his satraps, notably those from Bactria and Arachosia. He had reconstituted an army around him, small by Persian standards but approaching the numbers Alexander himself had possessed when he first landed in Asia. If, by some perversity of the gods, Darius learned to use his forces in a clever manner, he could still cause much trouble among the small garrisons and unsteady governors Alexander had left strung out behind him. Securing the long-term loyalty of Alexander’s Persian subjects would be impossible as long as they believed the Great King would return. For this reason it was essential that Darius be retired, one way or another.
Alexander set about this task with characteristic vigor. Leaving his slower units behind (including myself, being no horseman!) he pushed north, skirting the eastern slopes of the Zagros on the way toward Darius’s summer palace at Ecbatana. There he learned that Darius had retreated further, into the Elburz Mountains in Parthia. Lingering only a moment over the riches of the palace, Alexander struck northeast with his speediest cavalry, pausing for nothing but essential supplies. Many of the Thessalian horses died beneath their riders as they were pushed beyond their limits. These were replaced, and replaced again, as Alexander drove them on, across the plateau and toward the Caspian Gates.
On the way he encountered the overnight camps that Darius and his men had occupied first a week, then a few days, then mere few hours before. He used these remains to spur his men, igniting the campfires with the still-burning embers, showing them there was only a short distance to go. Soon they came upon further evidence of their quarry’s desperation: the path was littered with armor and dead horses, as well as rich furniture, chests, plates and gold utensils spirited from Persepolis, Susa, and Ecbatana. these were left where they lay in the dust.
Passing through the Caspian Gates, he heard disturbing news: the closeness of t
he pursuit had moved Darius’s allies to panic. The Great King had been betrayed by his Bactrian satrap, a man called Bessus, and was very possibly already dead. This intelligence sent Alexander into a fit of indignation—after sitting on Darius’s throne, taking his wife and mother into his house, and sleeping in his bed, he had come to imagine a kind of brotherhood between them. Coming so close upon his old adversary on the chase, seeing his campfires and the kind of tracks his horses left in the dirt, he imagined he was achieving some deep understanding of the man. Obsessed now with rescuing Darius from his captors, he stripped his force to a minimum—just 150 mounted men—and rode all night toward the enemy’s last known position, somewhere in the desert northwest of the Gates.
The local people were forced to show the Macedonians a short-cut that might end the pursuit. There was a steep and narrow defile through the hills that was unknown to the Persians; Alexander hurtled through first, and was off ahead of his escort as he sighted a mass of riders and carts in the remote distance ahead. We may well imagine what his quarry must have thought of his tiny galloping figure at it rushed toward them, virtually alone! Specialists in horsemanship, they would have recognized the King’s mount as Macedonian before they perceived the rider to be Alexander himself. In any case, there was a tumult in the Persian retinue—a sword flashed in the sun, and the riders abandoned the carts as they put the crops to their horses’s flanks. With the gleam of that sword, the second-darkest nightmare of any king, the murder of another king, was realized.
Alexander’s men found him staring down into one of the carts. Some in his party rushed to pursue the murderers; Alexander forbade them, gathering them all around him as he settled into a deliberate reverie. Though this was the last time he lay eyes on Darius, it was the only occasion in which they were engaged in something like a common cause. Even in death, Darius was an impressive figure, taller than Hephaestion, with a vigor that belied his fifty years. He had been stabbed in the heart, and though unconscious he was not yet dead. Even then, bleeding and abandoned in a donkey cart, Darius cut the kind of noble figure that was ever beyond the tiny Alexander or his one-eyed, coarse-grained father. The Persians did not need to beg oracles to have their king taken as a god, but easily and unanimously saw him as the mortal axis of Ahuramazda’s worldly empire. For his life to end at the hands of a fool like Bessus invited the question of what low character would, in time, get his blade into Alexander.
The Macedonians watched Darius expire, imbibing from both kings the gravity of the moment, and perhaps a new appreciation for what their army had accomplished in Asia, for this was the Great King prone before them. They bore his corpse back to Persepolis in a cortege that steadily grew as Alexander gathered his scattered forces. The necropolis of the Persian kings had been expressly spared the sack; a grand funeral was staged there, with all the proper customs observed. I saw Sisygambus make her final appearance in public to grieve for her son, showing perhaps less sentimentality at his passing than Alexander did. We may imagine that even she understood Darius was a flawed man, possibly adequate for less momentous times, but entirely run down by history. Her gaze was fixed on his shroud, never glancing at the company of Persian nobles who had come to mourn the old king and ingratiate themselves with the new. Her contempt for Bagoas, who liked to tell stories of what he had seen in Darius’s court that flattered Macedonian prejudices, was obvious. She was destined to outlive her son for only a short time.
Gathered near the still-smoking ruins of Persepolis, Alexander’s court swelled into an ungainly mass of Macedonians, Persians, and allied nobles, riven by mutual contempt and suspicion. With the death of Darius, Alexander was the acknowledged successor in form as well as substance, charged with the task of governing the whole without alienating the parts. He met this ascension with the public adoption of certain practices he had indulged before only in private audiences or drinking parties, such as wearing the Persian diadem, sleeved robes and high-heeled shoes (which he took to quite readily, given his modest height). There were also a number of court rituals unknown to the Macedonians, such as taking state dinners behind a crepe curtain and flanking himself with servants bearing fly whisks and sunshades. The latter seemed particularly absurd to the Macedonians, who were quite used to seeing Alexander broiled red with sunburn as he shared his troops’ discomfort on campaign. They were also disturbed by a custom among the Persians of keeping their hands hidden in the King’s presence—a practice that would have been outright worrisome in the blade-strewn dining halls of Macedon.
The men were at least encouraged by the expectation that after more than four years in Asia they would all soon be going home. In due course Alexander called an assembly to make an announcement. He took care to revert to Greek dress for the occasion, for he did not expect his news to be welcome.
Alexander began by praising his troops’ historic achievement, telling them that no army, not even the storied Ten Thousand, had marched farther or overcome greater odds. When they did turn back for Greece, it would be as living legends, and as rich men, for Alexander would discharge every man with enough wealth to make him a figure of substance in his city.
“But the job is not finished!” he said. “I have received word from Bactria that Bessus, the betrayer of Darius, has taken the headdress of Persian kings and now styles himself ‘Artaxerxes V, king of Asia.’ Can any of us doubt that he will soon gather an army around him, and if we do not seek him he will come west, to take away what we have so dearly earned? The Bactrians are tough soldiers, and cannot be trusted behind our backs. Can it be long, do you think, before Bessus spreads tales that the Greeks are afraid to confront a competent enemy, instead of the hapless Darius? For this reason, we march tomorrow, so that we may show ‘Artaxerxes’ the true depth of his folly.”
Against a campaign to preserve Macedonian honor, there could be no argument. The army struck east across the eastern satrapies of Parthia and Aria. On the way Alexander either accepted or exacted the submission of all the tribes. In cases of voluntary allegiance he showed great lenience, often confirming the suppliant in his current domains or enlarging them at the expense of those who refused him. Word of this policy of course spread ahead of him, so that actual resistance became more and more exceptional.
Bessus had probably expected that Alexander would proceed carefully, consolidating his hold over the lowlands and assuring his lines of supply before forcing the passes into Bactria. In anticipating how his enemy would fight, Bessus proved as unsuccessful as old Darius, for the Macedonians came on as inexorably as winter itself.
The crossing of the Paropamisus mountains came at great cost, with Alexander’s troops unprepared for the great cold and the fainting sickness often seen in high places; Bessus had furthermore torched all the villages and farms in the region, hoping that hunger would force the Macedonians to retreat. They froze but most did not starve, having brought with them prized luxuries, such as honey, from the palaces of Darius. With the end of these, Alexander ordered the men to stalk as many of the wild, spiral-horned goats of the region as they could find, and after they were gone, to root underground for the native herbs, just as the goats did.
When grubbing in the dirt proved less than sustaining, he diverted the troops by showing them a great landmark of the area: the famous crag of Prometheus, high above the clouds, on a ridge at the crest of the Paropamisus. This was the very place where the Titan was bound in punishment for bringing fire to men, condemned for all eternity to have his guts devoured by an eagle. Alexander paused long enough to allow those who were interested in the crag to go up to it in small parties, where they marveled at the very spot where the victim suffered, his rusty shackles still in place. They were further cheered by the implication that Alexander’s army would surely have freed Prometheus, had the King’s ancestor, that underachiever Heracles, not been lucky enough to get there first.
It was in these mountains that I suffered my only wound of the campaign. As you see here, I am marked by the experience i
n a way that trifling, but permanent…
Machon held up his right hand, revealing that the index and middle fingers ended above the last knuckle.
The fault is entirely mine that I didn’t notice my fingers turning black. The handiest treatment—if I might put it that way!—would have been to warm my fingers in the snow, which was as warm as a blanket compared to that cutting wind. But I was lucky compared to others, who lost whole fingers, feet, or the ends of their noses.
Aeschines speaks of the crossing of the Paropamisus as a feat of logistics and a tribute to his leadership, which I suppose it was. But consider this question: how many people had to starve for each mile Alexander’s army was provisioned in that country? In these matters I saw more than anyone in the Macedonian general staff did, including Alexander. The task of separating the native people from their food was left in the hands of low-level officers. When the Macedonians came to a place with a significant concentration of families, soldiers went out to demand all their stores be deposited in a central place by a certain day. Crimes of opportunity were not uncommon during these visits, including murders of recalcitrant men and abductions of young women.
Alexander frowned on these practices. He even punished an inveterate rapist, a certain Hero, son of Alcaemon, with a run through the gauntlet. But as his comrades took turns punching Hero, the ‘punishment’ took on the quality of a mass congratulation of the man. Nor was he removed from the duty that seemed to trouble him with so much temptation.
Some of the villages held back supplies and were destroyed. The rest submitted, though the “donation” of their winter stores would inevitably reduce them to starvation in the months to come. Like living reproofs of these outrages, women with stick-thin babes and shriveled breasts hung around the army’s camp for the whole time Macedonians campaigned in Bactria. The soldiers were not immune to pity—on several occasions I saw them toss a morsel or two out to these victims. The women fought over them like ravening dogs.
Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great Page 17