Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

At Samarkand, a few evenings later, Alexander was banqueting with his Greek friends and army officers. It must be remembered how trying a moment it was in his career. For a whole year, Spitamenes had kept him from entering India, and as yet there was little prospect that he would be rapidly caught. The Macedonians' one brush with him had ended in disaster; ever since they had been wearily reconquering Sogdian villages in the midsummer sun, and the process was not yet completed. At dinner the local wine flowed very freely, more a sign of frayed nerves than of the new barbarism which historians later liked to detect in Alexander, for like Philip he had always enjoyed a drinking party and now, if ever, he had some excuse in his circumstances. Heavy drinking is the corollary of survival for a traveller in a Sogdian summer and the few lasting water-springs are naturally brackish and tainted with saltpetre. Wine is the one alternative to thirst, and it was taken in quantities which would appal a European: like the natives, the Macedonians drank it neat, a practice considered too strong for Greeks, who economized by mixing their wines with a third part of water. The surroundings may explain the drinking, but they cannot excuse the sequel. As Alexander drank and dined, an incident developed, so disgraceful that Ptolemy's memoirs seem to have suppressed it, while the eighty-year-old Aristobulus was reduced once more to special pleading.

When two contemporaries were secretive it is hard to be sure of what happened. Certainly, a quarrel blew up from the heavy drinking, when wine persuaded some men to boast and flatter, others to rebut what they did not like to hear. The most argumentative guest was Cleitus, Hipparch of the Companion Cavalry and probably in his late middle-age; his sister had nursed Alexander as a little boy. He and the king began to shout and provoke each other, made petulant by all that they had drunk and there is no saying which of them did more to fire the quarrel. Alexander's temper was the first to break and once it had broken, he lost all control. Nearby guests tried to hold him down, or so they later persuaded the historians, but Cleitus's taunts continued and Alexander struggled for whatever weapon lay to hand. He is said to have pelted Cleitus with an apple from the table; then, set on murder, he reached for his sword.

But a bodyguard, it is claimed, had prudently whisked it away. So Alexander bawled for his own Shield Bearers in Macedonian dialect, 'a source of especial alarm': he ordered his trumpeter to sound a note of warning and when the man refused, he punched him in the face. Cleitus's fate, meanwhile, was arguable. According to some, he was hustled out of the room by his friends and deposited beyond a ditch and a mud-wall. But he defied all restraint and found his own way back into the dining-room, staggering through the door just as Alexander, furious, was calling 'Cleitus'. 'Here's Cleitus, Alexander,' he replied, whereupon Alexander ran him through with a sarissa. Others, more plausibly, denied that Cleitus had ever left the room: Alexander merely seized a spear from a bodyguard and killed him on the spot. The tale of Cleitus's re-entry, which even claimed that only Cleitus was to blame, is a warning of the lengths to which courtly excuses would go.

Murder is said to have caused the king revulsion beyond telling. In horror, said the apologists, he leant the offending sarissa against the wall and planned to throw himself on to its point: at the last moment, his nerve failed and he took to his bed, as most are agreed, where he lay distraught for three whole days, repeating the words 'the murderer of my friends' in incoherent snatches between sobs and self-mortification. Three days passed before he would take food or drink, or care for his body, and only then was he brought to help himself by the long persuasions of his friends. The burden of shame was intolerable, the murderer's worst punisher was himself. Callisthenes and other wise courtiers cast round for an explanation which a deeply wounded sense of honour could use as a prop before the world. They were never slow to find one. The Macedonians had long held a yearly festival to Dionysus, Greek god of wine and life-giving forces: Alexander had not paid due sacrifice to the god of the season, but had made an offering to Castor and Pollux, sons of Zeus, instead. Dionysus, then, had been offended and had punished his neglecter through wine, his earthly agent. Historians, at least, enjoyed his lame defence; the army, who preferred their King to Clcitus, begged Alexander to forget his accident. Cleitus, they said, had deserved to be killed.

When such a quarrel breaks, it can light up the past like a flash of lightning and release thunder which has been long brooding in the air. But with Cleitus and Alexander there are several forks to the lightning, and the thunder has often been misunderstood. Far from the dining-room at Samarkand, Greeks were free to guess the quarrel's causes: they had no love for Alexander, and where historians had only seen a personal brawl, touched off by insults to the soldiers' reputations, they idealized the conflict and cast Alexander as a tyrant. Cleitus as the champion of freedom who persistently opposed all Oriental customs; he protested because he hated flattery and its fulsome parallels with Ammon, gods and heroes. 'The two friends who quarrelled were not really the two men; rather they were two different views of the world which exploded with elemental violence.' If this were correct, it would indicate a deep source of conflict in the court life of the past two years. But the evidence is fiction, the quarrelers were heavily drunk, and instead of high principles there were facts, ignored, in their background.

Days before the drinking-party, Cleitus had been given a new commission. He was to govern Bactria, a satrapy behind the lines. For a former Hipparch of the Companions, this was a poor reward: though Bactria would be staffed with some 15,000 Greek troops, an important responsibility, a soldier's life in its outbacks was notoriously grim, not helped by the knowledge that Alexander never appointed his closest friends to any satrapy away from court. Cleitus, therefore, was being downgraded: a fellow-officer, also commissioned for Bactria, had preferred to refuse and be executed rather than leave the centre of affairs. While his fellow Companions earned glory in India, Cleitus would live and grow old by the Oxus, where a man's one hope of distinction was the occasional repulse of unknown nomads. Retired against his will, he took to drinking, and heavy in his cups, he at last burst out into abuse.

His fall must have had a cause. After Philotas's plot he had been promoted to command the Companions with Hephaistion for reasons, perhaps, not all in Alexander's control. Clcitus was the most experienced cavalry leader. He also commanded the 6,000 Macedonians, then temporarily in Hamadan. They were crucial for Parmenion's removal, and they arrived to find a new Persian monarchy and the general's family purged. Their loyalty needed recognition, and perhaps Alexander trod carefully. Hephaistion sympathized with Persian customs; many Macedonians did not. The second Hipparch should be a staunch Macedonian, Philip's man. Cleitus was both, so he took the job. Even so, he had preferred his king to Parmenion and Alexander had not behaved more orientally since Seistan. Perhaps Cleitus would not have cared if he had: he would never have been retired to Bactria, the Iranian baronry's stronghold, if he seriously believed Iranians to be contemptible. Other staunch Macedonians continued to serve loyally. Clcitus's problems were more personal. He was ageing and had been ill; in the past year he had not held the highest field commands and when the reinforcements reached Balkh, six or more Hipparchs had probably been raided to replace him. Perhaps he had been wounded; perhaps he had been rude to Hephaistion,

whom others too detested. His demotion may well have been personal: it certainly did not spring from a hatred of diadems and Persian ushers or a sudden passion for freedom, as philosophic Greeks implied. A temporary choice to steady Seistan's crisis, he had already been retired.

'Wine', said the Greeks, proverbially, 'is the mirror of the mind', and in a very drunken quarrel, its reflections should be especially clear; we only regret what we say in a moment of passion because we expose so much more of ourselves than of our victims. The gist of the taunts which caused Cleitus's murder can still be recovered, but their details remain obscure: they enflamed, like all chance remarks, because they caught on long latent obsessions, and reputation, not politics, was surely at the root of them. Alexander, some said, was listening to an after-dinner ballad which mocked the generals whom Spitamenes had destroyed a year before: such satire of delicate mishaps is known elsewhere in Alexander's circle, and it would be welcome light relief in a case where Alexander could secretly blame himself for the disaster. Others, less plausibly, said that Alexander was decrying his father Philip or approving flatterers who did the same. Certainly the past was mentioned, though Philip may not have been so bluntly insulted; soon Cleitus stood up to challenge the facts; he was a veteran and he had saved Alexander's life at the Granicus; he did not like to hear past glories belittled, so he championed the feats of the older men. Alexander's glory, he insisted, was Macedonian glory; the king took credit for what he had not done. After a year's hot and tiresome struggle against rebels, this old man's criticism was all the more enraging for being well-aimed; the rivalries with heroes, the flatteries of Callisthenes, are proof of Alexander's concern for his personal reputation, and at Samarkand in a year of little progress, it was easy to suggest that his pride in his generalship might yet be misplaced. A deep sensitivity had been affronted: young men and old began to shout, until they went wild with the threats to their own self-importance. No matter that their final jibes are unknown, for they were drunk and they had begun on each other's achievements. Sexual incompetence, Alexander's small stature, Cleitus's ageing courage, the failure to catch Spitamenes: they had plenty to bandy at each other, try though the older guests might to stop them. Cleitus, no doubt, made fun of father Ammon, and then suddenly he found himself speared with a sarissa, unable to take it all back.

Alexander's outburst was unforgivably horrific; as Aristotle would have taught him, 'the man who sins when drunk should be punished twice over, once for sinning, once for being drunk'. Yet it can be understood. Alexander's ideals were those of Homer's Achilles, devoted to glory and defended by personal achievement, however violent; in Homer's Iliad , even Patroclus, Achilles's lover, had first left his father's home for a murder committed in youth. To call Cleitus's murder Homeric is not to condone it, but it is to set the pattern for what followed. Alexander took to his bed, like Homer's Achilles on the death of Patroclus,

And shed warm tears remembering the past,

lying now on his side, now, again, on his back,

Now on his face;

then, he would stand upright

And pace to and fro distraught,

by the shore of the boundless sea ...

Worse than Achilles, he had not sent a Companion to his death in battle: he had murdered him before his guests at dinner. Apologists, perhaps, exaggerated his instant wish to die, but it is foreign to the few known threads of Alexander's character to belittle his three days' self-punishment or dismiss them as calculated play. He did not pretend to torture himself, as if to scare his soldiers and officers with the fear that he would never revive; the common foot-soldiers, understandably, had shown not the slightest distress at the accidental death of an ageing cavalryman, and if the officers had been likely to conspire, nothing could have been more foolish than to retire to bed for three whole days and leave them alone with their plans. It was not as if Cleitus had been spokesman of a principled opposition; no officer is known to have lost his job for a friendship with him, and as if to appease Alexander's conscience, Cleitus's own nephew continued in high favour among the king's friends for the rest of the reign. The murder was so painful precisely because it was a personal and accidental disgrace; Alexander suffered, as he lived, on the grandest scale, and a personal crisis drove him not to oriental tyranny, but to his Homeric attitude to life.

But that night of terror also revealed what every young man knows to be true: there is a deeper rift between old and young than between class and class, or creed and creed, and no successful son can be harangued on how much more his father's generation has achieved. It was not that veterans found Alexander changed for the worse: they continued to serve him and even to rise to high commands, but henceforward they would surely hesitate before overpraising their past with Philip to a man who felt, rightly, that he owed as much to his own initiative and to the guidance of Zeus Ammon as to any earthly father. Alexander did not disown Philip, any more than he had betrayed his father's ambitions; he merely excelled him. There is no reason to suppose that Philip too would not have been happy to overrun all Asia, wear the Persian diadem and stress his relationship with Zeus, but there is room for doubt that he ever had the necessary dash to do so. Whatever Cleitus said, Alexander had proved he could do it, and his astonishing success made an old man's comparisons all the more wounding for being untrue. There is no gainsaying the qualities of Philip's men, but they had achieved far more in five years with Alexander than they had in Philip's twenty: the months after Cleitus's murder show most pointedly why Alexander's sense of style still fascinated the classical world long after his father's energies had been forgotten.

With Cleitus dead, Alexander's misfortune began to wane. Remaining Sogdians were subdued and fortified in a matter of weeks, and their surrender at once cut Spitamenes off from his most promising source of support. As his 8,000 nomad horsemen were heavily outnumbered, he was reduced to raiding Balkh behind the lines, where he ambushed its few troops and invalids and killed most of them, including Aristonicus, harpist both to Philip and Alexander, who died 'fighting not as a musician might, but as a brave man'. The raid was a well-judged surprise, but it did little to advance his cause; as he tried to vanish westwards back into the desert, he was intercepted by Craterus, returning from the Merv oasis, who fiercely harried his Scyths in a cavalry charge. By now, Sogdians and Bactrians were serving in Alexander's army and Spitamenes seemed more of a bandit than a rebel-leader. He had little hope but to repeat his surprise raids behind the lines; at the first attempt he ran into Alexander's rear division and was routed completely despite his enlistment of 3,000 vagrant Scythians. Even these surviving desperadoes lost heart, and for the third time in two years Alexander's enemy was betrayed by associates. They cynically murdered their Persian leader and as autumn ended, Spitamenes's head was sent as proof to the Macedonian army.

Typically, Alexander was not yet satisfied. Three of Spitamenes's henchmen, all former minions of Bessus, were still at large in the area, while the eastern half of Sogdia had never submitted in the first place. Rebels had retreated there for safety, and so after a mere two months in their winter camp the army was set on an eastward trail, still discomforted by hunger as local supplies were long since dwindling. As they marched the snow lay thickly on the hillsides, and within three days a massive thunderstorm had driven them back under cover as thunderbolts flashed and hailstones bombarded their armour. Alexander took the lead and directed them to native huts where a fire could be kindled from the surrounding forest: he even gave up his royal chair by the fireside to a common soldier whom he saw shivering and exhausted. But 2,000 camp followers had been lost, and 'it was said that victims could be seen still frozen on to the tree trunks against which they had been leaning’.