Virtues of War (36 page)

E
PILOGUE

ITANES

T
HESE WERE THE LAST WORDS
Alexander spoke for this record. That evening, when I presented myself, he thanked me for my witness (which had now served its purpose, he declared) and commanded me to return full-time to my post with the corps. This I did.

After a rest of thirty days, the army continued its advance to the east. It crossed the river Acesines, another mighty torrent, and the Hydraotes, adding to Porus's dominions the kingdoms of his enemies. The southwest monsoons had begun. Seventy days the army labored on, beneath stupefying deluges, amid ungodly heat, across a quagmire of mud. Illness ravaged the column. Morale plunged. Worse, natives, when queried as to the proximity of the Eastern Ocean (which Alexander had declared “not far” when he established it as the ultimate object of the expedition), reported that thousands of miles yet remained, across territory obstructed by impassable rivers, uncrossable mountains and deserts, and defended by warriors in hosts innumerable—if in fact such Ocean existed at all. As measured by the expedition surveyors, the army had marched 11,250 miles over the past eight years. At last, on the river Hyphasis, a delegation of commanders and Companions presented themselves to the king, begging him to take pity on them. The Macedonians' endurance had reached its end. They would march east no farther.

Alexander rejected this and retired in fury to his tent. On all prior occasions this device had brought the army swiftly to heel. But the men this time had set their purpose. When Alexander realized that no word or act could turn them from their course, he made a show of taking the omens, which declared, so the diviners testified, that heaven itself accorded with the wishes of his countrymen. He would not compel them onward. The army would turn back.

He who had proved invincible to every force of man or nature yielded at last to the misery of his compatriots. When they learned of his acquiescence, they flocked about his tent in thousands, weeping for joy. They blessed and praised him, rejoicing that at last they might put a period to their trials and hope to see again dear wives and children, aged fathers and mothers, and their beloved homeland, from which they had been parted for so long.

Alexander continued his conquests on the return west, bringing into subjection numerous nations and peoples, of whom the greatest were the Oxydracae, the Mallians, Brachmanes, Agalasseis, Sydracae, the kingdoms of Musicanus, Porticanus, and Sambus, and, as well, charting heretofore-undiscovered passages to the Arabian Ocean and the Persian Sea.

At Susa he took Persian brides for the most high ranking of the Companions, ninety-two in all, in one magnificent ceremony. He himself wed Darius's eldest daughter, Stateira, selecting for Hephaestion her sister Drypetis, it being his wish that his children and Hephaestion's be cousins. He presented dowries to all the Companions and their brides, as well as a golden cup to every man of Macedon (some ten thousand, when they registered) who had taken a consort of the East.

At Ecbatana, two years after turning back, Hephaestion took fever and died. In seemed the earth itself could not contain Alexander's grief. To honor his friend, he commanded the construction of a monument two hundred feet high, at a cost of ten thousand talents. He ordered the manes of every horse and mule cropped in mourning and directed even that the battlements of the empire be broken down, every other one, so they appeared as if they wept.

I served the king then as a captain in the
agema
of the Companions, so that I stood in his presence between six and twelve hours a day. I may state, and you may believe, that, though he displayed without fail a cheerful and enterprising mien, yet, from the death of Hephaestion, he was never the same man.

For the first time, he began to speak of his own death and to project with apprehension the strife that must follow, predicting the succession struggles that would inevitably ensue. Roxanne was with child then. Alexander warned me to look to her safety and my own, for, when he was gone, ambitious men would discover means to discredit and disown us, if not murder us outright, to further their own ends.

Alexander returned to Babylon and turned his attention to future campaigns. He planned to bring Arabia next beneath his sway. In late spring of the eleventh year after his crossing out of Europe into Asia, he took sick. His state deteriorated rapidly over the succeeding days; no measure of the physicians availed.

The soldiers of the army, driven frantic by the rumor that their king had succumbed, and refusing to believe reassurances of their officers that he still lived, swarmed about the palace, demanding entry to him in person. This was granted. One by one, Alexander's comrades filed past his bed, dressed in their military tunics. The king could no longer speak, but he recognized each soldier and blessed him with his eyes. The following evening, his spirit departed from life among men. The date was 15 Thargelion of the Athenian calendar, 28 Daesius of the Macedonian, in the first year of the 114th Olympiad.

Alexander was thirty-two years, eight months old.

No portrayal of mine could represent the passion of lamentation that succeeded his decease, save to say that Persians and Macedonians vied in extravagance of woe, the former bewailing the loss of so mild and gracious a master, the latter the end of their brilliant and peerless king.

It is a measure of Alexander's superhuman personality and achievements that at his death the chronicle of his days did not remain as history even for an hour, but vaulted at once into the sphere of legend. Such fables of his exploits proliferated as no mortal could have accomplished. His passing left a hole at the center of the world. And yet at the same time, his presence remained so powerfully that when in succeeding seasons his generals contested one another bitterly over division of the empire, they could be made to convene civilly by one dispensation only: that they meet in Alexander's tent, before his vacant throne, upon which rested the king's crown and scepter. Men feared to offend even the shade of Alexander, lest they encounter him again beneath the earth, for surely in that world, too, none would surpass him.

And now, perhaps, it may not be out of place for this witness to speak from his own heart.

I leave to historians the reckoning of Alexander the king. Let me address only the man. Many have indicted him for the vice of self-inflation (as if these critics would have proved superior to it in his place), yet I found him the most kind and knightly of men. He treated me, a youth, as a comrade and as a soldier, never condescending, always opening his heart absent artifice.

No one was less impressed than he with the scale of his triumphs. He stated in this journal that he wished only to be a soldier. That he was. He was superior to heat and cold, hunger and fatigue, and, what is more, to greed and cupidity. Time and again, I watched him turn the choicest portions to his comrades. His bed was a camp cot; he dressed in moments, despising all adornment and superfluity. Winter and summer were the same to him; his idea of hell was absence of toil. He was more himself amid adversity and craved never ease, but hardship and danger. No man was more loved by his comrades or more feared by his enemies. He needed no speeches to fire the hearts of his fellows (though none excelled him as an orator), only to show himself before them. The sight of their king in arms rendered timid men brave and brave men prodigious. His years of campaign were not thirteen. Who has won what he has? Who shall ever again?

What Alexander said of his beloved Bucephalus may be applied to his own case: that he belonged to no one, not even himself, but only to heaven.

Why does Zeus send prodigies to earth? For the same reason He makes a comet streak across the sky. To show not what has been done, but what can be.

I would add of Alexander that he was human, if anything too human, for his glories and excesses alike were spawned of passion and noble aspiration, never bloodless calculation. The inner plane upon which he dwelt was peopled not by his contemporaries but by Achilles and Hector, Heracles and Homer. He was not a man of his time, though no one ever shaped an epoch so powerfully, but of an era of gallantry and heroic ideals, which perhaps never existed save in his imagination, spawned by the verses of the poet. Since his death, I have not heard one man who knew him speak a word against him. His faults and crimes are eclipsed in the brilliance of his apparition, which we perceive now with terrible clarity, made bereft by its absence.

I close this document with an anecdote of India. On the river Hyphasis, when the army refused to go on, Alexander erected twelve great altars to mark for the ages the farthest limit of his conquests. I attended among numerous officers at the dedication of these monuments. The day was bright and windy, as it often is in that country in intervals between torrential downpours. As the party turned back toward camp, Telamon, the Arcadian mercenary, presented himself before the king. Apparently he and Alexander had an understanding of many years—that of all the army, Telamon alone might claim his discharge at any time, any place. This he now did.

Alexander reacted first with surprise and regret, at the prospect of being deprived of his friend's much-loved company, yet he at once recovered, offering to load the man down with treasure. What did Telamon wish? Money, women, an escort-at-arms? With a smile, the Arcadian declared that he bore on his person all he required. This, one could see, was nothing but a staff, some utensils, and a modest pack. Alexander, struck by this, asked the mercenary where he intended to go.

Telamon indicated the high road east, upon which a number of Indian pilgrims then trekked. “These fellows interest me.” He wished, he said, to make himself their student.

“To learn what?” Alexander inquired.

“What comes after being a soldier.”

Alexander smiled and extended his right hand.

Telamon clasped it. “Come with me,” he said.

I stood directly to Alexander's left, as close to him as a man is to his own arm. It seemed to me that for a moment the king truly considered this. Then he laughed. Of course he could not go. Already aides and chancellors were calling him apart to other business. The grooms brought the party's horses. Something made me remain at Telamon's side. As Alexander prepared to mount, a sad, sweet piping caught his ear. He turned toward the sound. There, where the Royal Lancers had made their temporary camp, a brace of cavalry sarissas stood upright, at the ready. The wind passing across their serried shafts produced the melancholy chord.

“The sarissas are singing, Telamon,” said Alexander. “Tell me, will you miss their song?”

The king and the mercenary exchanged a valedictory glance; then one of Alexander's Pages boosted him onto Corona's back.

I half-recalled the tale of the sarissas' song, but could not bring back the full story. What was it? I asked the Arcadian. Telamon was about to answer, when Alexander, overhearing, turned back, in the saddle, and responded himself.

The sarissa's song is a sad song.
He pipes it soft and low.
I would ply a gentler trade, says he,
But war is all I know.

The wind rose in that moment, lifting the corner of Alexander's cloak. I saw his heel tap Corona's flank. He reined about and started for the camp, surrounded by his officers.

IN GRATITUDE

O
f course to the ancient writers, Arrian, Curtius, Diodorus, Justin, Plutarch, Polybius, and others, but thanks also to the many brilliant contemporary scholars whose concepts, insights, and reimaginings of Alexander's battles I have looted shamelessly: A. B. Bosworth, P. A. Brunt, Peter Connolly, A. M. Devine, Theodore Dodge, Donald Engels, Robin Lane Fox, J. F. C. Fuller, Peter Green, G. T. Griffith, George Grote, J. R. Hamilton, N. G. L. Hammond, Victor Davis Hanson, B. H. Liddell Hart, Waldemar Heckel, D. G. Hogarth, E. W. Marsden, R. D. Milns, Sir Aurel Stein, John Warry, Benjamin Wheeler, and Ulrich Wilcken. I am indebted also to the memoirs and maxims of Caesar, Vegetius, Napoleon, Marshal Saxe, Frederick the Great, and particularly Baron de Marbot, for his swashbuckling tales of cavalry warfare. I'd also like to thank the translators and editors of the Loeb Classical Library Series; their notes and indices, interweaving all works in the series, and particularly the appendices, are tremendously helpful to any researcher, and the texts are impeccable. To my outstanding editor, Bill Thomas, for the original idea, to my in-the-trenches editor, Katie Hall, whose contributions to this manuscript have been innumerable and invaluable. To my secret weapon, author-editor Printer Bowler, and to Gene Kraay, who first sent me an article on the battle of Gaugamela and said, “This might be of interest to you.” Big thanks to Erica Poseley for her expertise on equestrian matters, and to Dr. Linda Rydgig and Dr. Brad Dygert for their equine and veterinary wisdom. To Steffen White for his indefatigable creativity in supporting and promoting this project. And to Dr. Hip Kantzios, as always, for being my guru in all things Greek.

Epigraph reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from XENOPHON: CYROPAEDIA, VOLUMES V and VI, Loeb Classical Library ® Volumes 51 and 52, translated by Walter Miller, pp. 9, 19, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914. The Loeb Classical Library ® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.