Текст книги "Alexander the Great"
Автор книги: Robin Fox
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Nearer to Kandahar, the desert landscape breaks into comparative lushness round the middle course of the Helmand river. The province, called Arachosia, was known to the Persians as the well-watered land, a name which Alexander's staff transcribed into Greek: besides its fertility it also commands the narrow corridor between the peaks which stretch north-cast to inner Afghanistan. Persian history had long shown the importance of its satrap, and for the first time since Gaugamela Alexander removed a province entirely from Oriental hands, appointing an experienced Macedonian, perhaps to sole command; perhaps, too, the change reflected protests in the recent conspiracy. Troops were left to keep the communications open and the satrap was ordered to settle in modern Kandahar, now to be expanded with 4,000 troops and renamed Alexandria. In late November Alexander left the warmth of this low-lying land and began the severer route up country: he would cross the mountains of the Hindu Kush and search the surrounds of Balkli for Bessus. The march was tactical but nonetheless remarkable. The Hindu-Kush runs north and south like a dragon's backbone between India and Iran; it first earned its modern name, meaning Hindu-killer, from the heavy death-rate of the Indian slave-women who were herded into Iran through its passes by mediaeval entrepreneurs. Among ancient mountaineers, it is Hannibal who nowadays holds pride of place for his crossing of the Alps. But Alexander's army was larger than the Carthaginian's and his road was no less spectacular. Unlike Hannibal, he had the sense to leave elephants out of an uncongenial adventure; any present in his army could have been loosed in the elephant parks to the west of Kandahar, known to the Persians and still patronized by the Ghasnavid kings some 1500 years later. There they could wallow in swamps of warm mud, happy in the winter comforts which they needed.
The men and their pack-animals were less fortunate. News arrived, unpleasantly, that Satibarzanes had indeed returned to the tribesmen round Herat and begun to raise another revolt among the Iranians of Parthia and Aria. Alexander must have regretted his initial trust in him, as he was now threatened in his rear by a valuable source of support for Bessus, who had given the rebel help and horsemen from his base at Balkh. Short of troops, he could only detach a mere 6,000 troops to protect Herat's garrison; the main army of at most 32,000 were ordered to continue their long hard course up the Helmand valley, menaced by winter, famine and rebellions ahead and behind them. Their numbers had hardly sunk so low before. They are unlikely to have followed the line of the modern road from Kandahar to Kabul, the 320-mile stretch which was to be made so famous to Victorian Englishmen of the 1880s by the relief march of General Roberts; native guides and the old Persian road kept them on the rougher and more mountainous ground to the east and must have brought them up by the long-used road through Gardez, later a Greek city, and so briefly on to the shoulders which descend on their eastern slope to the valleys of the Punjab. It was here that they met with a tribe which the Persians knew as Indians, a loose description of an outlying people from the plains of West Pakistan, but as food was very scarce there was no time to waste on these first indications of a world beyond. The winter skies hung morosely over thick-lying snow and the more the soldiers climbed the more they were distressed by the thinness of the atmosphere. Stragglers were soon lost in the murky light and left to frostbite and a certain death; others blundered into snowdrifts which were indistinguishable from the level whiteness of the ridges. Shelter was sought wherever possible, but it needed sharp eyes to pick out the native huts of mudbrick whose roofs, as nowadays, were rounded into a dome above the deepening snows. Once found, the natives were amenable and brought as many supplies as they could spare: 'Food,' wrote the officers, 'was found in plenty, except', nostalgically, 'for olive oil'. But there is no means of huddling 32,000 men away from the winter in the gorges which led towards Begram and Kabul; the army's one hope of relief was to keep on moving, while Alexander did what he could to keep up morale: he helped along those who were stumbling and he lifted up any who had fallen. Self-denial had long been a principle of his leadership.
But the march was not a wanton struggle against nature. By moving in winter, Alexander had surprised the mountain tribes and as British armies were to discover, snow and ice were far preferable to ambush by natives who knew and cared for the surrounding hills. There was also the likelihood of catching Bessus unawares. Safe beyond the Hindu Kush, he might expect to be left alone or at least not invaded until late summer; meanwhile, when the snow had melted, he could ride due west to Herat through the passes he had closed and join Satibarzanes in the revolt which had even spread to Parthia, a grave threat. Then if Alexander came down into Bactria his communications with the west could be cut and he could be isolated in the hot nomadic satrapies along the river Oxus. Foolishly, but understandably, Bessus made no attempt to block the Hindu Kush's northern passes so early in the year. He did not believe that his enemy would brave them, but with Alexander, nothing was safely incredible: his anticipation was not confined to members of Parmenion's family, and so as soon as possible he attempted the mountain-barrier.
East of modern Kabul, the army returned to the valleys along the modern main road into India and relaxed in smoother ground. They were still ringed round by mountains, but with the worst of the journey before them, they were allowed a three-month winter camp at the Persians' satrapal capital of Kapisa. Again, Alexander was moved to refound a Persian fort, settling it as a Greek city with 7,000 natives and with veterans and such hired troops as he could spare from his dwindling army. The result, known as Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus, has never been found on the ground, though brief French excavations at Borj-i-Abdulla south of modern Begram have uncovered traces of Greek towers and the wall of a city which succeeded Alexandria 150 years later. On the gentle slopes of these foothills, the most abundant basin in the area, the city was surely intended to guard the ancient routes through the Hindu Kush, for in the valleys of Bcgram and Kabul no less than three main roads converge, while the citadel overlooked the confluence of two main rivers, the Persian's favourite site for such a fort. For the past two hundred years since Cyrus, the Persians had maintained a garrison town on the same strategic site; Alexander, as so often in the far east, had taken the cue for an Alexandria from his Persian predecessors. The new town's style of life, if not its site, was entirely different: there had never been a theatre in a Persian outpost, but 150 years after Alexander, Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus still contained carvings of Greek comic actors, dressed for the stage which had flourished inside its walls. Even by a road-post for veterans the banner of Greek culture was defiantly raised in an Afghan valley.
Not until May, a seven-month delay, would Alexander have 'sacrificed to the usual gods', the most easterly sacrifice that had yet been wafted to the Olympians, and exhorted his army to the climax of their march. Like Tamurlane after him, he was to climb the northern buttress of the Hindu Kush by the Khaiwak pass, which rises to a height of 11,000 feet before dropping down to the plains of Bactria and further Asia beyond. The south and nearer face, which rears to the sky beyond Begram, was not attempted until the snows began to melt. Hunger, not cold, was the problem. The march to the summit took a week, and supplies throughout were desperately scarce except for the plants of terebinth and asa foetida, savoury but insubstantial herbs. Though the histories hurry over the experience a background of landscape can still be restored. There is an intensity of sunrise and sunset in these Afghan mountains which even the hill-farmers of upper Macedonia cannot have watched unmoved. The light throws patches of blue and violet on to the melting snow, striking the pink mountain rock and the grey clumps of prickly thrift, a plant as sharp as a hedgehog which carpets the slopes and discomforts the unwary traveller. 'A thin purple veil', a German explorer has written, travelling, like Alexander, through the Hindu Kush in the early season, 'very subdued and as misty as a breeze was daily drawn across the eastern sky. As I gazed, the clouds turned to flame and blood-red; the snowy peaks were glowing while a deep and inexpressible yearning filled me through and through.' That same sense of yearning was seen in Alexander by his fairest Roman historian, perhaps correctly; it was an emotion which drove him in search of myth or places of mystery; it was proper to a king living out the Homeric past. In the Hindu Kush myth and landscape combined as if to bring it into play.
'In the middle of the mountains, there was a rock half a mile high in which the cave of Prometheus was pointed out by the natives, along with the nest of the mythical eagle and the marks of his chains.' In Greek legend, the hero Prometheus was punished for his inventive intelligence and imprisoned by Zeus on an eastern rock where an eagle would gnaw at his liver; here in the Hindu Kush, the site of his punishment seemed at last to have been discovered. But this greatest of all myths had always been placed in the Caucasus, miles away to the north-west; in order to reconcile myth and geography, Alexander's staff maintained that the Hindu Kush was attached to the Caucasus as an easterly continuation. Ever since, scholars ancient and modern have treated their mistake unkindly, dismissing it as a flattery which deliberately brought Alexander into contact with the distant Caucasus mountains, an area which he never reached. But that is to misunderstand a very human error. The Greek name for the Hindu Kush, the Paropamisus, was derived from the Persian word 'uparisena', meaning 'peak over which the eagle cannot fly'. The eagle was part of local knowledge, and as with Prometheus it was a symbol with a history of its own; in local Iranian myth, the eagle Sena had saved the hero Dastan, son of Sam, from cruel imprisonment. Alexander's staff were evidently told the story by the natives and at once equated the details with their own Prometheus; if these mountains confined the mythical eagle, they must be the Caucasus whatever the geography, for that was where Prometheus and his eagle were known to lie. The marks of the chains were easily detected in the jaggedness of a Hindu Kush rockface: to Alexander's officers, geography was only accurate if first it fitted myth, and although the Hindu Kush is grander than Greek mountains and as weathered a brown as its natives' bread, it is a landscape with a definite feel of Greece.
While the foothills of the south face offered myth, the summit of the so-called Caucasus promised even greater rewards. Aristotle, who knew nothing of China and Far Asia, had believed that the eastern edge of the world could be seen from the top of the Hindu Kush, and perhaps his former pupil remembered this, if anything, from any school hours spent in geography; the belief may have been common too among ordinary Greeks, and for a man aged twenty-six there could be no more momentous ambition. A short march eastwards, and he could survey the boundary of the world and see how the border lands of India merged with the eddying ocean. To an explorer such an ambition needs no further justification, while to an Achilles any fighting to attain it was so much more service in the cause of glory. From the top of the Khaiwak pass, Aristotle's geography would already seem suspect to anyone in the army who remembered it. Ridge upon ridge of mountains rose eastwards, but for the moment Bessus mattered more than the problem of the world's end, and the army was coaxed northwards in search of him down the far face of the Hindu Kush.
The descent lasted at most ten days; it was intolerable throughout. The snow, facing northwards, still lay heavily and masked the line of the pass; only a parallel can show what this might mean. In April 1398 Tamurlane crossed the same face of the Khaiwak, forcing himself and his Mongols to crawl its glaciers on hands and knees, drag their pack-animals by wooden sledge and swing across its open ravines on rope bridges lassoed round prominent rocks; more men were lost in the crossing than in the whole of the campaign year. Alexander's horses would have been fitted with the leather snowboots, which Greek generals found useful against deep or slippery drifts; nonetheless, they suffered severely, as their needs took second place to their riders'. The natives had stored their supplies in underground pits which were hard to find and harder to break open: famine, therefore, spread through the army, as the few available jars of wine and honey were sold at absurdly high prices. On the lower slopes, where herbs and the famous brown trout of the rivers filled out the soldiers' diet, the animals found no fodder and orders were soon given to slaughter them and use them as meat. The scrub bushes of prickly thrift, which served the natives as firewood, were still buried under the snow; in the absence of any other fuel, horse and pack-ass were seasoned with the juice of silphium and eaten raw.
The troops were saved by Bessus's incompetence and a coincidental victory near Herat. While Alexander struggled down from the Hindu Kush, a brisk cavalry charge could have disarrayed him, especially as Bessus had begun to bum the crops in the plains. Instead of following up this devastation, Bessus took fright, probably at bad news from Satibarzanes and the west, and galloped some two hundred miles northwards across the Oxus, only halting to bum his boats for good measure. It was very poor generalship and his 8,000 local Bactrian cavalry deserted in disgust, seeing little alternative but to join in the rapid surrender of their rich home province. Descending from the foothills in early June, Alexander made his untroubled way through Kunduz to the local capital of Balkh, mother of cities, and allowed his troops to refresh themselves in its relatively generous oasis. He also needed to wait for the rest of his baggage and siege equipment to catch up his advance.
Set on a stream of water, Balkh was far older than the Persians' empire and must have served as the centre for Bactria's earliest traders at least a thousand years before it fell to the Great King; 'flag-bearing', the Persians'
sacred poems had called it, and besides the Persian flag its palace had been adorned with the image of Anahita, water goddess of the Oxus and very suitable for Balkh's oasis, where she was worshipped in her crown of stars and cloak of holy otter-hides.
To a man coming down from the Khaiwak pass, the province of Balkh, 'land of a thousand cities', lies stretched out like a fading carpet. It wears its place in history clearly on its surface: its plains alternate between gravel desert and pockets of fertility, the one a home for nomads, the other for settled villages, and the two landscapes have lived in continual mistrust. For those who controlled them, the province had rich resources: river-gold, superlative horses, mines of silver and rubies, and in the north-eastern hills of Badakshan, the Persian empire's only known source of lapis lazuli, whose blue fragments had been traded with Scistan and the south as a pleasure and a currency for the past 2,000 years. The villages conformed to the tensions of their landscape: they were built for self-defence behind the square of a mudbrick wall on whose inner face the village houses abutted, leaving room in the centre of the village for flocks to be stabled in case of invasion. Fortified turrets held each comer of the wall, while a watch-tower surveyed entry by the central gate: the pattern, like a toy fort, remains in the qal'ehvillages of outer Iran, invented and maintained for refuge against nomads. Nomads, therefore, both within the province and to the north and north-west of its Oxus boundary, were the hazard which Alexander could deduce from the villages he saw around him.
In this strange and distant world the Persians had ruled through the local baronry, who lived secure in castles and rockbound fortresses, attended by troupes of retainers. Their satrap was often a blood-relation of the king, but he married into the Bactrian nobility and relied on his local in-laws to support him; Alexander, who recognized the easy virtues of Persian administration, did not wish to disturb the past, preferring to find an Iranian fit to continue it. Most opportunely the elderly Persian Artabazus arrived in Balkh in early June. As an experienced satrap in the west and a very old friend of the Macedonian royal family, he was also the nearest Alexander could come to a blood relation among the Iranians, for Artabazus was father of Barsine, the mistress whom Alexander had taken after Issus. It was good to see him again, especially as he had come with cheerful military news. He had been leading the cavalry against Satibarzanes' rebellion around Herat, and now reported that he and his three fellow-generals had routed Bessus's rebel associates in a fierce and distinguished cavalry charge and had lanced Satibarzanes himself to death. Presumably, it was this news which had caused Bessus to retreat with such ill-advised rapidity. Alexander's mistaken trust in a rebel bad at last been atoned for; he was now safe from the rear, and he could appoint the trusted Artabazus, father of his mistress, to govern his fellow-Iranians in Bactria. Local tradition was thus respected, and as the late June sun warmed up, the army left Balkh on Bessus's dwindling trail, a prospect tougher than they knew. They numbered scarcely 30,000, but they followed uncomplainingly, not the behaviour of men discontented with their leader's recent purge, his ambitions or his sparse adoption of a few Persian customs. He was still the Alexander they loved, for whose sake they had marched from Persepolis, looped through 3,000 miles of desert, starved, and crossed the snowbound barrier between two worlds in the course of a single year.
From Balkh, Bessus's trail stretched north to the Oxus through fifty miles of pebbled desert. The same troops and horses who had been freezing a month before now suffered dreadfully from the midsummer heat, unable to swallow the little water which their guides had advised them to carry. It was impossible to travel by day, when the heat-haze shimmered deceptively over the sand and even the lizards retired beneath the gravel; night was hardly kinder, though the more pious histories omitted all mention of the men's losses. Throughout, Alexander showed why he could ask so much of his army: when water was brought to him in a helmet, scooped from a small desert spring, he refused to accept the privilege, and tipped it away, sharing his soldiers' hardships. When the river Oxus was finally reached, the army was so scattered that fires had to be lit on a nearby hill to direct them into camp. Alexander 'stood by their route and refused to take food or drink or refresh himself in any way, until the entire army had passed him by'. The men took heart from his example, and late that night Alexander and his army slept in camp near Kilif, where the yellowing waters of the Oxus narrow and their current, slowed by reeds, floats by.
Before crossing on the morrow, the oldest Macedonians, the unfit and the few Thessalian horsemen who had volunteered at Hamadan were paid generously and sent back home with orders to father children, the soldiers of the future: they would rather have been spared their last fifty miles. The river Oxus is broad and lazy, and five days after their fellows' departure, the rest of the army were already on its far bank, helped by a well-known Oriental method of transport. Bessus had burnt the native boats and there was no local timber to build a bridge, so the troops stitched up their leather tentskins, as at the Danube, and stuffed them with hay to make floating rafts, to this day the time-honoured means of crossing a river in the east. Once beyond the Oxus, the army at once set foot in Sogdia,
the north-eastern province of the Persian empire, from which one of the long-used routes branches off through the desert to China, the lifeline down which merchants of Sogdia would always travel, bringing anything from peaches and lotus to dances and radical religions into the homes of their Chinese clientele. To Alexander's army China was unknown and Sogdia no more than a sandy wasteland of stone and scrubby tamarisk, a site which only promised sickness, skirmishes with tribesmen, or more Alexandrias miles from the olive trees they knew at home. Only Bessus had ever lured them into it.
For the moment, pursuit continued to reward them. Bessus had been incompetent, and like Darius, he suffered from independent courtiers as a result; as the enemy crossed the Oxus, these henchmen seized him and agreed to hand him over. Ptolemy was sent to collect the traitor from a remote village and bring him naked, bound in a wooden collar. When he had been set on the right hand side of Alexander's road, Alexander passed by, stopped his chariot and asked why Bessus had murdered Darius, his lawful king and benefactor. Bessus blamed his helpers, but the excuse was not thought satisfactory: he was ordered to be scourged and proclaimed as an assassin before being taken to Balkh for further punishment. The incident says more for Alexander's shrewdness than his severity. Only a year before, Satibarzanes, another of Darius's murderers had surrendered and received a conspicuous pardon, but like Satibarzanes, Bessus had followed up treachery with rebellion, and rebels, in Alexander's ethic, could only expect the grimmest treatment. Bessus's crime was less that he had helped to kill Darius than that he had claimed to be the new king of Asia. And yet it was as a murderer that he was condemned: in summer 329, Alexander had Orientals serving in his army and he wished to convince them of his new position. He still fought to exact revenge, but not Greek revenge for Persian sacrilege so much as Persian revenge for Darius's murder. Bessus the royal pretender was stripped of his glamour under cover of Alexander's latest myth.
With Bessus safely in chains, the march northwards might have ended, had it not been natural to ride on to the nearby river Jaxartes and claim the north-east frontier of the Persian empire. Near Karshi, Alexander recruited the fine-blooded local horses to replace the many who had died in the desert; near Kungurtao, the one hill in the sandy monotony of the landscape, his men were harassed by natives while looking, perhaps too desperately, for food. Reprisals are said to have killed some 20,000 natives, though they did manage to hit Alexander hard in the leg with an arrow and break his splint-bone, a danger in a desert climate which invited gangrene. The wound caused a quarrel, not a delay, for Alexander was determined 300 to be carried on a stretcher to keep the expedition moving, and the choice of suitable bearers divided the army. Cavalry and infantry quarrelled for the privilege, a rift which would reopen six years later after Alexander's death. But in Sogdia Alexander was there to settle it and arrange that cavalry and infantry should take the job in turn. Loyalties were satisfied and within four days of desert marching, the army reached Samarkand, as yet a mere mud-walled summer palace of the ruling Iranians, watered by a river which the troops named Polytimetus, the Greek for 'very precious', no doubt a reference to the gold which was washed down its bed and is still remembered in its modern name Zarafshan or 'Scatterer of gold'. From here it was only 180 miles to the frontier river. Native villages were looted for food, burnt where resistant. Alexander, presumably, was still unable to walk.
The frontier was reached in July when humidity sinks as low as five per cent and the shade temperature rises to 43 0C. At modern Kurkath, a few miles south of its main ford, the river was guarded by a Persian outpost which Cyrus had settled two hundred years before, and as in the Hindu Kush, Alexander ordered a new Alexandria to replace it: 'He thought that the city would be well sited and suitable for increase, especially as a guard against the tribesmen beyond, and he expected that it would become great both from the numbers of settlers merged into it and from the splendour of its name.' On the last point, he was mistaken; Alexandria-the-furthest was soon harassed by nomads and refounded by his successor as an Antioch, it then became known as modem Khojend, then, as other names seemed splendid, Stalinabad, then Leninabad.
The city's purpose was unmistakable: improved defence of a frontier which had loomed large in the Persians' past. By viewing Persia through the eyes of a western Greek, this anxiety has often been underestimated. To Persians of the future, it was not the defeats by the Greeks at Marathon which lived on as an uneasy memory so much as the fact that their great king Cyrus and their prophet Zoroaster had both died fighting against nomads of the northern steppes. The province of Sogdia was to Asia what Macedonia was to Greece: a buffer between a brittle civilization and the restless barbarians beyond, whether the Scyths of Alexander's day and later or the White Huns, Turks and Mongols who eventually poured south to wreck the thin veneer of Iranian society. In this barrier province, Alexander naturally followed his father's example and strengthened Sogdia, like Philip's Macedonia, with improved towns and military colonies to keep the Scyths where they belonged. Already envoys had crossed the Jaxartes river to talk to the Scythian king and spy out his peoples, the most expert horsemen known to cast Iran. They were mobile and dangerous and the glorious art of their bridles, cups, carpets and tents is a reminder that the palace world of Asia and the city life of its Greeks were only brief punctuations in an older world of nomads, as light as dust but no less permanent, and never a society to be undervalued. It was an omen of the times that in a Persian love story, translated into Greek by Alexander's court usher, the villain of the piece had been changed since the mid-sixth century from a Bactrian aristocrat to a Scythian chieftain.
Before Alexandria-the-furthest could be begun, news arrived of rebellion, not among the Scyths, but in the rear. Since landing in Asia, Alexander had asked his men to march dreadfully hard, often without food, but he had never entangled them in a slow and self-sustaining struggle with guerrillas. Now for the first time his speed was to be halted. This Sogdian rebellion would exhaust his army's patience for eighteen unsatisfactory months, make new demands on his generalship and induce a mood of doubt among his entourage. The causes were simple; four of Bessus's henchmen still ranged free, led by Spitamenes the Persian whose name has a link with the Zoroastrian religion. All four now began to work on the native mistrust of the Macedonians. There was ample reason for it. Anxiously searching for food in the Sogdian desert, Alexander's army had plundered ricefields, looted flocks and requisitioned horses, punishing all resistance severely. His thirty thousand soldiers could not be fed from any other source, but it was a dangerous way to behave. Meanwhile, the natives saw garrisons installed in their main villages; Cyrus's old town was being changed into an Alexandria, and already, as in Bactria, Alexander had banned the exposure of dead corpses to vultures, because it repelled his Greek sensitivities. Like the British prohibition of suttee in India, his moral scruples cost him popularity, for Sogdians had not seen Persia overthrown only to suffer worse interference from her conquerors. It was time to be free of any empire, especially when a conference had been ordered at Balkh which the local baronry were expected to attend. If they went they might be held hostage. Bactrians, therefore, joined the resistance, the same Bactrians no doubt, whom Bessus had timorously abandoned, and from Balkh to the Jaxartes Alexander found his presence challenged.
Ignoring the nomad skirmishers who had gathered to rouse the south along the Oxus, Alexander turned against the nearest rebellious villagers. Here his garrisons had been murdered, so he repaid the compliment to the seven responsible settlements in a matter of three weeks. The mudbrick fortifications of the qal'ehs were treated contemptuously. Though siege towers had not yet been transported over the Hindu Kush, collapsible stone-throwers were ready to be assembled if necessary; they were not needed at the first three villages, which succumbed in two days to the old-fashioned tactics of scaling parties backed up by missiles; the next two were abandoned by natives who ran into a waiting cordon of cavalry, and in all five villages the fighting men were slaughtered, the survivors enslaved. The sixth, Cyrus's border garrison at Kurkath, was far the strongest, because of its high mound. Here, the mud walls were a fit target for the stone-throwers, but their performance was unimpressive, perhaps because there was a shortage of ammunition; stone is very scarce in the Turkestan desert and it cannot have been possible to transport many rounds of boulders across the Hindu Kush. However, Alexander noticed that the watercourse which still runs under Kurkath's walls had dried up in the heat and offered a surprise passage to troops on hands and knees. The usual covering fire was ordered and the king is said to have wormed his way with his troops along the river-bed, proof that his broken leg had mended remarkably quickly. The ruse was familiar in Greece, and once inside, the gates were flung open to the besiegers, though the natives continued to resist, and even concussed Alexander by stoning him on the neck. Eight thousand were killed and another 7,000 surrendered: Alexander's respect for his newfound ancestor Cyrus did not extend to rebellious villagers who wounded him, so Kurkath, town of Cyrus, was destroyed. The seventh and final village gave less trouble and its inhabitants were merely deported.
