The Nature of Alexander (18 page)

The house of the king-making eunuch vizier, Bagoas, forfeit at his death to Darius, was found to contain a thousand talents’ worth of rich robes alone. Plutarch says that the house and all its contents were presented to Parmenion. Among the palace treasures, a specially precious casket was taken by Alexander to house his copy of the
Iliad,
edited for him by Aristotle when he was a boy. It still lived in the bed box under his pillow. The dagger
must have been kept in quicker reach. There would be more times than one when he would be close to needing it.

The gold and silver was mostly in solid ingots, which had been issued for coining a few at a time. Alexander had larger ideas. The metals poured into his mints, the hand-punched money poured out of them, wearing out the moulds whose many variants can still be seen. Olympian Zeus soon has around him on the obverse the symbols of the lion, and the royal
kyrbasia
or peaked cap, circled with the
mitra,
the purple ribbon. It would be a fair guess that in the privacy of his bedroom, Alexander had already tried it on.

He kept giving money away, delighted to be asked for it, which he took as a sign of friendship. Told that some modest sum would be quite enough, he said, “For you to ask, but not for me to give.” But magnificence did not make him pompous. An independent young man among the friends he used to play ball with had obstinately refused to cadge, and heard rumours that Alexander was not pleased with him. At the next game, whenever he got the ball he shied it past the King, who finally called, “What about me?” “You didn’t ask,” he called back; on which, says Plutarch, Alexander laughed and gave him many presents.

Given or spent, the wealth of Susa began to influence history. For centuries it had lain sterile as if still unmined; now it would flow in the track of Alexander and his spendthrift armies. The busy trade routes it created began to Hellenize his empire before he set his hand to the work.

It was at Susa that, mounting the throne of the six-foot-odd Darius, he found his feet would not touch the ground. Someone shoved a low table under them. An old palace eunuch wept; it had been his master’s wine table. Touched
by such loyal grief, Alexander began to pick his feet up; but Philotas pointed out the good omen, and he changed his mind.

Among his loot was the ancient spoil of Xerxes carried back from Athens; including the archaic bronze statue group of Harmodius and Aristogiton, the tyrannicide lovers, from the Acropolis. This precious monument he later returned to Athens, where it still stood in Arrian’s day. He held victory sacrifices and a torch relay race. Fresh troops joined him from Macedon.

The Persian satrap was reinstated again, with a garrison under Macedonian command. Here, at Susa, he installed Sisygambis and her grandchildren in the harem from which Darius had carried them out to war. The great scene would never now be played; and he had a rough road ahead, up the mountain passes into Persis.

Here he met his first resistance since Gaugamela. The Uxian hill people sent to say the kings always paid them road toll to use their passes. Confident banditry now ceased to pay. Susian guides showed him a back stair to their fastness, and he trapped them in. He considered expelling the whole tribe from its strategic habitat; but the chief, a kinsman of Sisygambis, smuggled a messenger through to Susa, begging her to intercede. After some hesitation she wrote to Alexander. It was the first favour she had ever asked of him; he at once issued a general pardon, and, for good measure, tax exemption as well.

Between him and Persepolis, the impregnable pass of the Persian Gates was defended by the satrap of Persis, who had closed its gorge with a wall. From the cliffs above, his men flung boulders; it was a death trap and Alexander soon withdrew his troops. By one of history’s revenges the story of Thermopylae was now acted in reverse. A local shepherd among the prisoners offered to show a route round the pass. Alexander promised a rich
reward, and followed. The track, far longer and more dangerous than that over which Ephialtes led Xerxes’ men, was under deep snow as well; but he and his small force scrambled briskly along it. When he surprised the advance guard of the Persians, they behaved just like the Phocians of Leonidas; escaped as best they could into the hills, without warning their commander, who was taken quite unawares. The main Macedonian army then forced the pass without trouble. Persepolis lay open.

Here no one was in a position to offer formal surrender. Instead Alexander got a panic message from its treasurer that the city was in anarchy, and that unless they made haste, the treasure (for which he evidently feared to be held responsible) would be looted.

The fate of Persepolis, thus tilting in the scales, was probably decided by an encounter on the road. In the confusion thousands of Greek slaves (presumably from Greek Asia Minor) escaped and came to meet Alexander’s army. Some were elderly men, who must have been in slavery since Ochus’ wars. It was a macabre and hideous embassy. Diodorus says,

All had been mutilated. Some lacked hands, some feet, some ears and noses. They were men who had learned skills and crafts and done well in training; after which their other extremities had been cut off and they were left only with those on which their work depended.

Curtius says they had been branded too. Both sources agree that Alexander wept for them.

He offered to give them transport home and provide for their remaining lives. Conferring, they decided that to return to their cities as repulsive freaks would be unendurable. By now they would be forgotten there. (Ancient Greece was not notable for compassion; Alexander’s was felt as rather eccentric.) Some had slave wives who had
borne them children. They asked for a grant of land where they could live together. He allowed that they were right; gave them money, seed grain and livestock, good clothes for themselves and for their women; and appointed them their sad village.

Next day he marched upon Persepolis. His soldiers got what they had been straining at the leash for ever since Gaugemela—a wealthy city to sack.

It was the ceremonial capital of the empire; the opulent counterpart of little Aegae in Macedon. The King and his chief nobles had seats there; a rich merchant class must have supplied them. Curtius says that many citizens were casually killed because the loot-sated troops could not be bothered with ransoms. It is difficult today, yet some attempt should be made, to imagine the orgiastic pleasure of a sack to men of the ancient world who after hardship and danger felt it to be their due; where power, aggression, greed, lust, rivalry, the instincts of the hunter and the gambler, could be roused and fed in one vertiginous stream of action. No one, perhaps, but Alexander could have held them back at Babylon and Susa. Now he gave them a day at it. Even so he issued orders that the women should not be stripped of the jewels they wore.

The treasurer was promoted to governor. He had saved the palace strongrooms intact. Their contents amounted to three times as much as had been taken at Susa.

Darius wintered at Ecbatana, watched by Alexander’s intelligence for signs of life. There being none, Alexander wintered in Persepolis. It must have been at this time that he made his long-awaited pilgrimage to the tomb of Cyrus the Great at neighbouring Pasargadae, his ancient capital in what had once been Elam; a small Persian Macedon from which he too had conquered an empire. Here, as the sequel shows, Alexander paid him honour. If he had
earned it, so had Xenophon; but the rewards of history are capricious. Between them, Persian and Athenian, they had impressed on an eager mind, when no one else was doing it, that all men are God’s children, and that anywhere among them may be found the excellent ones whom, said Alexander, he makes more his own than the rest.

He returned to the palace of Persepolis, with its tall lotus-topped columns and endless reliefs of tribute bearers bringing offerings to its builder, Darius the Great. We hear of no such regal ceremonies as had marked his stay at Babylon or Susa; perhaps only because winter had made access difficult. When spring came, and it was time to march, he burned the palace down.

This action is known today by people who know virtually nothing else about him (and who remain more impressed by this outrage to an empty building than by the living holocausts of Coventry and Dresden); fit retribution, if he deserved it, for a man who cared intensely about his good name. The sources are not unanimous (though nor are they irreconcilable) as to why he did it, and historians debate the matter still.

Arrian, whose source, Ptolemy, must certainly have been present, simply says he did it against the advice of Parmenion, who pointed out that it would be looked on as the act of a conqueror rather than a king. Diodorus, Curtius and Plutarch all agree that Alexander gave a drinking party to which were invited a number of flute girls and hetairas; among them Thais, the Athenian courtesan, mistress of Ptolemy the future king; that at the height of the revelry she recalled Xerxes’ ravaging of the Acropolis, and urged Alexander to let an Athenian girl pay it back in kind; that thereon he proclaimed a Dionysiac comus, which he led with wreath on head and torch
in hand; that he threw the first torch himself and let her throw the next one. Plutarch says he had second thoughts after a while, and ordered the fire put out. If so he was too late; the layer of ash was found by archaeologists to cover everything.

No one was hurt; when it got too hot inside, they came out to watch the spectacle. There is no doubt that a really first-class fire, when no fear for human life intrudes, is one of the great atavistic joys still known to man. Today it is very shocking to think of archaeological treasures burning; to Macedonians and still more to Greeks, the significance of Persepolis was rather different.

Tarn has preferred to reject the party entirely, and have the palace burned “as a manifesto.” True, there is no party in Arrian. It does, however, seem likely that Ptolemy, a venerable King and grandfather when he wrote, may have thought fit to suppress such details of his riotous youth as the exuberant Thais. Parmenion’s objections are no doubt historically true. He may even have been reminding Alexander of intentions which he himself had expressed at soberer moments. He did wish to be a king rather than a conqueror; and the burning of the kings’ ceremonial seat must certainly have been held against him by the Persians. On the whole, it is hard not to conclude that, like so many happenings at very successful parties, it seemed a good idea at the time.

As to the archaeological treasures, they were left so wholly to the lion, the lizard and the shifting sands that Persepolis is today the best preserved of all monuments of the Achaemenian era.

The troops outside, seeing the bonfire and knowing that the cream of Persian wealth had been skimmed, took it as a sign their labours were over and that they could now march home with their loot. They were soon
undeceived; Alexander had merely paused before a final reckoning with Darius. They were now to be led into hard unknown country, with a strictly military objective. Yet without protest they followed their commander.

Too little has been made, too much taken for granted, of the extraordinary magnetism which this implies. The army of Macedon was steeped in an archaic, feudal democracy. Its forebears had made and unmade and murdered kings. He had grown up among these men; he accepted their traditional freedom of speech, unparalleled in the annals of emperors. Save for foreign auxiliaries, he was all alone with them in hostile country; if they mutinied he was wholly at their mercy. He kept no secret police to intimidate or spy on them; two later plots against his life were both revealed to him at the last moment by ordinary people. He had created a relationship of unique intimacy and trust, and inspired a possessiveness which was to create unforeseen complications. Their dependence on him grew almost superstitious, as their reaction to his wounds and sickness shows. When spring had melted the mountain snows, they followed him north towards Ecbatana.

When he reached it, Darius had gone. He took possession of the summer palace. In its strongrooms he deposited the enormous reserves of treasure which were left when he had filled his war chest. As treasurer and governor he left his old friend Harpalus.

Darius had left, as usual, the initiative to the enemy. At the news of Alexander’s advance he moved northward, sending the women ahead for safety. He himself paused
en route
to meet promised reinforcements. But they had smelled disaster, and did not keep the rendezvous. Alexander came on, taking time to secure his
communications. In Media he was met by a certain Bistanes; a surviving son of King Ochus, eager to tell which way Darius had fled.

This incident underlines a factor of great importance in Alexander’s story, the power of blood feud in the ancient world. By standards of modern nationalism Bistanes was a traitor; by those of his day, he fulfilled a religious duty in avenging his poisoned father and brother, to whose murder he believed (rightly or wrongly) that Darius had been a party. Had he been a Greek, this obligation would similarly have cancelled other loyalties.

Darius was making north towards the pass of the Caspian Gates, hoping to reach Bactria. For the rest of his story, Curtius has a detailed narrative, unique to himself. It is entirely without propaganda value; almost free from rhetoric; and returns us, this time at some length, to the account suggestive of an eloquent eyewitness, soon to appear upon the scene.

Darius had gathered up from the ruins of Gaugamela about 30,000 infantry and 4,000 skirmishers. Among the former were some 3,000 Greek mercenaries, the faithful core of Memnon’s 50,000. Even if some were exiles who dared not go home, most of them could have deserted to the Macedonians. Their courage and loyalty were exemplary.

The 3,000 cavalry and many foot soldiers were Bactrians, under the command of their satrap, Bessus. Other commands were held by the capable cavalry general, Nabarzanes; and by the ancient Artabazus, the friend of Alexander’s childhood, now in his nineties but still alert and spry.