Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Yet there were reservations. Alexander had ordered the rebuilding of the city's largest temple of Esagila, formerly more than 200 feet high, but he had not guaranteed its expenses; the money, it seemed, would be demanded from temple land, but the priesthood had long been enjoying these extra finances, because no temple buildings remained to absorb them. Moreover Xerxes's punisher still meant to rule, and his plans combined tact with firmness. Babylon was restored to its long-lost status as a satrapal capital, but tribute was still to be levied and garrisons kept in the city's fortress: these troops were divided between two officers, both with estates in Philip's Macedonia, one of them brother to a soothsayer who would have much in common with Babylon's many astrologers. The choice of satrap was more debatable: Mazaeus, Darius's renegade viceroy of Syria, was appointed to rule the province he had helped to surrender. This hardened Persian official was to be watched by two generals and a royal tax officer, but publicly he seemed to have lost very little of his dignity; he was once more a satrap, and probably silver coins continued to be minted and marked with his name, a Persian privilege which Alexander later tended to replace with standard designs of his own. This reinstatement was remarkable and perhaps rewarded an agreed betrayal of the

city: like King Cyrus, the Persian conqueror of Babylon, Alexander may also have chosen his first governor as a man with native connections, for both of Mazaeus's sons had been named after Bel, the primary god of Babylon. Perhaps he had married a Babylonian.

In similar mood Alexander gave the satrapy of Armenia to Mithrines, the Iranian who had surrendered Sardis three years earlier, and reinstated the Persian fortress commander in Babylon; he thus marked out a future theme in his empire, for Persian satraps who surrendered could now expect to be returned to provinces where they had ruled for Darius, but, as in Egypt or Caria, a Macedonian general would be set beside them to keep the local troops in loyal hands. This bargain would encourage surrender and save unnecessary problems of language and organization; the same Persian servants would be re-employed where possible and in the face of an empire, so much for the slogan of punishment and Greek revenge.

Having made known his arrangements, Alexander relaxed inside Babylon for nearly five weeks. There was much to see in a city whose size had long been exaggerated by the Greeks: the huge double walls of brick and bitumen, twelve miles in circumference, the turreted Ishtar Gate with its enamelled plaques of animals, the sacred Ziggurat, built in seven storeys to a height of 270 feet, these were extraordinary sights and all would figure in the various later lists of the Wonders of the World. Between tall gaunt houses, built without windows for the sake of coolness, the city's main highways ran in near-straight lines, their ground plan broken only by the curving course of the river Euphrates, bridged by a famous viaduct of stone. To a Greek, the city was built on an unimagined scale and its government quarters which rambled between the Ishtar Gate and the river Euphrates were no less astonishing: Alexander took up residence in the more southerly of the two palaces, a maze of some six hundred rooms whose four main reception chambers met in a throne-room and main court, built by Nebuchadnezzar to proportions which would not disgrace a Mantuan duke or Venetian doge. From the palace, he visited the northern fortress where Nebuchadnezzar had once kept his treasures and laid out his works of art as if in a museum, 'for the inspection of all people'; these, perhaps, Alexander saw as Persian property, 'while he admired the treasures and furniture of King Darius'. A vast mass of bullion completed his reward, enough to end all problems of finance in his career; never before had coins been used in Babylon, but a new mint was to help to convert the solid ingots to a form which the troops could use.

Riches were not the only concern. Around the palace buildings lay the Hanging Gardens, whose artificial terraces were so thickly planted with trees that they seemed to the Greeks, themselves mediocre gardeners, to be a forest suspended in the air; their cedars and spruces, it was said, had been transplanted by Nebuchadnezzar to comfort his Syrian queen for her homesickness in a bare and foreign land. Alexander took an interest in the terraced park and suggested that Greek plants should be introduced among the many Oriental trees; the wish was admirable, if none too fortunate, as only the ivies settled down in their new climate. The army's pleasures, meanwhile, were coarser: while Alexander surveyed his gardens, they made up for three years' dearth of women with the strip-tease artistes of the city brothels. Extremely generous pay from the city treasures encouraged them, a reward which may have been overdue.

Among the pleasures of Babylon it was tempting to forget that Alexander was still engaged in an unfinished war. Darius was still alive and no doubt preparing to rally in the mountains near Hamadan, but nothing was to be gained by pursuing him in winter through such rough and unfamiliar country, and the longer he was left, the more he might expose himself to another open encounter. The empire's palaces lay due east, full of treasure and ready for the taking; their capture would cut Darius off from his many surviving Persian supporters and leave him no choice except to retreat into ever more easterly deserts where his royalty might not go unchallenged. Tactically and financially, it made sound sense to continue to follow the Royal Road, and so in late November, Alexander set out towards it through country well stocked with the supplies which could not be amassed from central Iran in winter. His destination was Susa, administrative centre of the empire, and as he had sent a letter by courier to its satrap he was hoping for another surrender.

He had not gone far from Babylon before he met with a reminder of all that he left behind him. On the Royal Road he was greeted at last by the reinforcements which had been summoned the previous autumn from Greece: Macedonians, Greeks and some 4,000 Thracians known for savagery, they totalled nearly 15,000 and increased his strength by almost a third. In a famously well-stocked countryside, he stopped to arrange them. The infantry were distributed according to nationality, and a seventh brigade of Macedonians was added to the Foot Companions; in the cavalry, the squadrons were subdivided into platoons, and the platoon-commanders were chosen not for their race or their birth but for personal merit. These small units were more mobile and their divided commands were more trustworthy. In the same efficient spirit competitions were held, and the army's method of signalling was changed from a bugle to the Persian

method of a bonfire whose smoke would not be lost in the hubbub of a crowd.

These reinforcements' fate had been a strange one; they had been caught between emergencies before and behind them they had missed the battles where they could have been most use. They were too late for Gaugamela, and they had left Greece too soon to help Antipater out of the Spartan revolt which had at last come to a head; in the autumn of Gaugamela, 40,000 Macedonians and allies had marched to the hills near Megalopolis in southern Greece and challenged the Spartans and their mercenaries to a pitched battle, outnumbering them two to one. In fierce fighting, Agis the Spartan king had been killed and his rebels routed, but the credit belonged more to Antipater's allies, Greeks themselves, than to the relatively few Macedonians left under arms; Agis's rebellion had been heroic, but in true Spartan style it had come too late, and more Greeks had helped to suppress it than to join in a fight for freedom which Sparta had so often betrayed. To allies who knew of Sparta's past record, the cause of a Spartan king had had even less to recommend it than Alexander's own.

The reinforcements as yet knew nothing of the rebellion's outcome. They could only tell of danger in southern Greece, and it was an anxious Alexander who reviewed his new troops and continued to wait for a letter or sign from his contacts in Susa. Within days the satrap's son arrived to set his anxieties to rest. He offered to act as guide to the river Kara Su, known to the Greeks as the source of the Persian king's drinking water; there, his father was waiting with twelve Indian elephants and a herd of camels as proof of his friendship. Twenty days after leaving Babylon Alexander thus entered the province and palace of Susa in early December, at the end of the Royal Road which had determined his route for the past three years.

'Susa', wrote one of his fellow-officers, 'is fertile but scorchingly hot. At midday, the snakes and lizards cannot cross the city streets for fear of being burnt alive; when the people want a bath, they stand their water outdoors to heat it: if they leave barley spread out in the sun, it jumps as if it "were in an oven.' In early December the worst of the weather was over, but its effects were visible in the city's appearance: 'because of the heat, the houses are roofed with three feet of earth and built large, narrow and long; beams of the right size are scarce, but they use the palm-tree, which has a peculiar property: it is rigid, but when it ages it does not sag. Instead, the weight of the roof curves upwards, so that it gives much better support.' Even Babylon seemed preferable to such a climate.

The palaces lacked no magnificence. 'The city', wrote a Thessalian companion, 'has no walls'; despite what many had believed, 'its circumference is twenty miles, and it lies at the far end of the Kara Su bridge'. It was thought by the Greeks to have been founded by Tithonus, hero of an endless old age, but in fact, it had been built by the first Darius nearly two hundred years before Alexander, and it lay in the land of the Elamites, once masters of an empire but long reduced by the Persians to service as scribes, palace guards and charioteers. Every province of the Great King had helped to build Susa. Sissoo-wood for the pillars had been shipped from India, craftsmen and goldsmiths had come from the cities of Greek Asia; among their carvings and goldwork, enamels, carpets and precious woods, Alexander found himself master of another gigantic treasure of bullion, this time a more personal legacy from the Persian kings. On the city's central platform, each king had built a treasury of his own; in the royal bedrooms, at the head and foot of the king's bed, stood two private treasure-chests, while the bed was guarded by the celebrated golden plane tree, so long a symbol of Persia's riches. No treasure was more impressive than the piles of purple embroidery, 190 years old but still as fresh as new from the honey and olive oil which had been mixed into their dyes. Heir to the most magnificient fortune in his world, Alexander had now entered a new scale of power altogether; it was only a beginning when 3,000 talents, six times the annual income of fourth-century Athens, were ordered to be sent to Antipater to help him with the Spartan revolt, still not known to have ended satisfactorily.

His entry to Susa was an emotional moment, for Greeks were celebrating the fall of a palace whose threats and money had determined so much of their affairs in the past eighty years. The occasion was not lost on Alexander: at Susa, he sacrificed to the Greek gods and held Greek gymnastic games, and on entering the inner palace, he was shown to the tall gold throne of the Persian kings where he took his seat beneath its golden canopy; Demaratus, giver of Bucephalas and most loyal of his Greek companions, 'burst into tears at the sight, as old men like to do, saying that a great pleasure had been missed by those Greeks who had died before they could see Alexander seated on Darius's throne'. But the height of the throne was an embarrassment, for whereas a Persian king would rest his feet on a stool, being too revered for his feet to touch the ground, Alexander needed not a footstool but a table, proof of his small size. A table was rolled to the throne, but the insult to Darius's furniture so upset an onlooking Persian eunuch that he burst into tears; Alexander hesitated, but at the suggestion of Philotas, Parmenion's elder son, he is said to have hardened his heart and left Darius's table under his feet. In that trivial moment of hesitation, his new problem had first been put to him, lightly though he passed it by. A Greek had wept for joy at what a Persian had lamented, and Alexander, the first man to rule both peoples, would soon have to compromise between them.

At Susa his attitude remained unashamedly Greek. As his new bargain required, the district was restored to the Persian satrap who had surrendered it, and a Macedonian general, treasurer, garrison and city commander were left beside him for safety and convenience. Other details were more telling. Inside the palace, statues were found of the two most famous Athenian popular heroes, revered as the slayers of Athens's last tyrant. Xerxes had taken them as loot from Athens in 480; Alexander ordered their return, a reply to those Athenians who called him a tyrant himself. He was not merely the avenger of Xerxes's wrongs. He was posing as a sympathizer with the most democratic cult in the Greek city whom he most feared. His publicity was as well informed as ever, perhaps on Callisthenes's advice. In return he left behind Darius's mother, daughters and the son whom he had captured at Issus, and appointed teachers to teach them the Greek language.

So far, in Susa and Babylon, his view of himself and his expedition had not been tested. At Babylon, he could continue to trade on the revenge for Xerxes which his father had once conceived for the Greeks; at Susa the Persians had first set up their palace 'because, most of all, the town had never achieved anything of importance but seemed to have always been subject to somebody else'. From Susa onwards he would no longer be passing through a long-subjected empire; he would not pursue Darius, rightly, until his flanks and rear were protected and the season allowed him to find supplies near Hamadan. His route now led him due east to the province of Persia, home of the empire's rulers. Here there was nobody to free or avenge; resistance was likely, and it would come from men who were fighting for their homes.

Leaving Susa in mid-December Alexander crossed the river Karun after four days, and received his first warning that the world beyond was different. In the hills above the road lived a large tribe of nomads who had always received dues from the Persian king in return for a safe passage through their grazing; this arrangement was new to Alexander and not to his liking, so in a dawn attack, whose two descriptions bear little resemblance to each other, he routed them and reduced them to pleading for their lands. They appealed to the Persian queen mother Sisygainbis, aunt of their leader; Alexander heeded her and granted the nomads continuing use of their lands at the cost of 100 horses, 300 baggage animals and 30,000 sheep, the only coin in which they could pay. The sheep were precious supplies, but in the unchanging balance of the East, where nomad and villager bargain and struggle for their rights against each other, it was no way to solve a problem which was as old as the landscape itself.

Three days' march beyond the nomads, danger took another turn. On the edge of the Persians' own homeland, it was natural to expect trouble, and Alexander recognized the task ahead by dividing his forces: where the road branched south-east Parmenion was to take the baggage and heavy-armed troops through modern Behbehan and Kazarun to Persepolis, ceremonial centre of the Persian empire, while the Companion Cavalry, the Foot Companions and the light-armed units were to follow their king eastwards into the province, up the rough but direct route through the mountains. Any pickets could thus be captured before they could fall back and warn against Parmenion. The sequel has been overshadowed by Gaugamela, but it was hardly the happiest memory of Alexander's career.

The road wound up through a narrow ravine to a height of 7,000 feet; it was flanked by thick oak forests, and a fall of snow had helped to conceal its pot-holes. On the fourth day the native guides pointed out the so-called Gates of Persia, a sheer mountain barrier which Arab geographers later praised as an earthly paradise; it was approached by a particularly narrow gorge and at the far end the rocks seemed to form a wall. Alexander entered it carefully, but no sooner was he committed than the wall was seen to be artificial; Persian catapults were mounted behind it and the heights on either side were swarming with Persians, 'at least 40,000 strong in the frightened opinion of Alexander's officers.

The pickets began an avalanche by rolling boulders down from the cliffs and the archers and catapults volleyed into an enemy 'trapped like bears in a pit'. Many Macedonians clawed for a hold to climb the rock walls but they only fell back in the attempt: there was nothing for it but to retreat, so Alexander led his survivors three and a half miles west to the clearing now known as Mullah Susan. Although an easier road was known to skirt the gorge in a wide north-easterly loop, he rightly refused to take it; he 'did not wish to leave his dead unburied', the concession of defeat in an ancient battle, and he could not risk a Persian retreat to Persepolis and an ambush of Parmenion and the approaching baggage-train. There seemed no way out until a captive shepherd told of a rough sheep track which led round behind the Persians' wall. Like so many guides and interpreters in history, he only half belonged to the society he now betrayed; he was half Lycian by birth and knew the mountains as an outsider. Such information was highly risky, but Alexander had to believe it.

As when besieging a city, he first divided his forces to vary his points of attack. Some 4,000 men were to keep the campfires burning and lull the Persians' suspicions; the rest were to bring supplies for three days and follow him up the shepherd's track to the top of the Bolsoru pass, 7,500 feet high. An east wind drove the snow into their faces through the December darkness, and buffeted them against the thick surrounding of oaks, but after about five miles up a route barely practicable for mules, they reached the summit, where Alexander divided his troops. Four brigades of Foot Companions, too cumbersome for the ambush were to descend into the far plain and prepare a bridge over the river to Persepolis; the rest were made to run uphill for another six miles of broken ground, until they had surprised and slaughtered the three outer groups of Persian pickets. In the early hours of the morning, they fell into the rear of the Persian wall. A blast on the trumpet alerted the army beyond in the base camp: from front and rear, the Persians were slaughtered mercilessly. Only a few escaped toward Persepolis, where the inhabitants knew they were doomed, and turned their help away. Of the rest, many flung themselves from the cliffs in despair; others ran into the units who had been stationed behind the ambush to deal with fugitives. After one of the few disasters of his march, Alexander was free in early January to enter Persia as he pleased.