Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

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The natives were numerous, though their weapons were old-fashioned: on the border of the Chenab alone Alexander forced thirty-seven cities and at least as many villages to surrender and added their half million citizens to Porus's kingdom. It was nothing new to the Macedonians to be outnumbered, but there were hazards which needed a stronger nerve. 'In India,' wrote Theophrastus the botanist, who had heard the survivor's reports and is too astute to be disbelieved, *the/Macedonians ate a type of wheat which was so powerful that many actually burst apart.' Such insights into their hardships are all too few; the only convincing figures for casualties are on an occasion when Alexander was not present. But this one at least has the merit of being unforgettable. Others ate from a tree 'which was not particularly large but had pods like a bean, ten inches long and as sweet as honey'; this, the Greeks' first meeting with a banana or perhaps a mango, gave them such upset stomachs that Alexander forbade them to touch it, 'and you were unlikely to survive', wrote Aristobulus, 'if you ate one' against his orders. Other trees were safer, if no less alarming: by the river Chenab the troopers marvelled at the banyan, the wonder of Indian dendrologists. 'The shoots of a single tree spread out into a huge shaded arbour, like a tent with many pillars,' so wide that 'fifty horsemen could shelter from the midday sun beneath it.' Close inspection showed that each separate 'trunk' was a giant shoot from one and the same root system, while the fruits were small but deliciously juicy. Farther east, there were to be reports of a banyan which cast a shadow for half a mile, by no means an impossibility: the prize banyan of the Calcutta Botanic Garden resembles a huge wood, four acres big and a quarter of a mile in circumference.

Even a banyan was at the mercy of the weather. As the Chenab came in view, midsummer made way for the monsoon proper to begin, and at last the army understood why the local villages had been built on banks and mounds. As the rain teemed down, the river rose from its bed and came to life as if roused from a long and reluctant sleep. The nullahs began to flood and the ditches could no longer take their overflow. Camp had to be hastily moved as the current rose, ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet, until it burst its banks in disdain for the invaders. The men retired to the villages and watched the water race across the plains, in places even deeper than the elephants, and as they watched, they became aware of a threat which could not be so easily avoided: the floods had caused their houses to be plagued with snakes.

'Their numbers and their ferocity,' wrote Nearchus, 'were very surprising: at the time of the rains, they retreat to the higher villages and the natives therefore build their beds well above the ground, though even then, they are often forced to abandon their homes by this overwhelming invasion.' Species of python as long as twenty-four feet came in search of a dry comer: others were too tiny to be noticed, but it was these smaller snakes, scorpions and cobras who brought the most discomfort. 'They hid in the tents, the cooking-pots, the hedges and the walls: those whom they bit bled from every pore and suffered agony, dying very rapidly unless help was found in the drugs and roots of the Indian snake-charmers,' whose skill, however, was remarkably effective. Medical supplies were summoned urgently from all quarters, while wherever possible the men hung hammocks between the trees and spent an anxious night above the ground. Only by crossing the Chenab could they hope for better things.

But the Chenab was foaming and roaring in its mile-and-a-half-wide channel. Though Alexander chose the broadest and smoothest stretch for the crossing, even Ptolemy admitted that many of those who crossed by boat, rather than by rafts of stuffed leather, were dashed against the rocks so that 'not a few were lost in the water'. Once on the far bank Hephaistion was sent to deal with Indians to the north, while Porus returned to recruit as many elephants as possible, a sign that Alexander was expecting heavy fighting. Supplies were to be convoyed eastwards as soon as the river allowed, and in the meantime, he would live off the land.

Marching eastwards he waded across the river Ravi with his lightest troops and received the surrender of its nearest tribesmen. They told him of a tribe called the Cathaioi in the plains near Lahore who were bellicose by nature; they were said to have planned resistance and inflamed the tribesmen south on the Indus. Alexander hurried down to their territory in three days' rapid marching, with only one day for rest, and arrived at Sangala, their largest fortress. The Cathaioi had drawn up a triple line of carts off which they could defend themselves; cavalry failed to provoke them down from their hill, so the infantry line pushed in amongst them and drove them back behind Sangala's solid brick wall. Alexander had no siege machinery and could only encircle the fort while tunnels were dug to undermine it; a night escape was anticipated and cost the Indians five hundred lives. Just when the tunnels were being completed, Porus arrived with 5,000 Indian volunteers and the siege engines, a credit to the transport section who had hauled them across the mud of a summer monsoon. The engines were not needed, as the sapper's job had already sufficed; the wall subsided into the tunnel, ladders were slung across the breaches and brave resistance did not save 17,000 Indians from being slaughtered, according to Ptolemy, and another 70,000 being captured. 'Less than a hundred of Alexander's troops died in the siege' but more than 1,200 were wounded, an unusually high proportion for Ptolemy to admit and one which included many officers. The wounded were another bad burden on morale, and all the while the thunder rumbled and the rain poured down on weary men.

Neighbouring tribesmen were pursued to the death if they ran away, pardoned if they surrendered; Alexander 'would not be harsh to them if they stayed and received him as a friend, any more than he had been harsh to other self-governing Indians who surrendered willingly'. The continued stress on their 'ancient self-government' was a thin, but revealing, cloak for the campaign; momentarily, matters improved when the army reached Sopeithes's kingdom near Lahore and the river Beas.

When their engines of war drew near its capital city, out marched the native king, a tall figure dressed in gold and purple embroidery, golden sandals and bracelets and necklaces of pearl. He handed over his sceptre, studded with precious beryl, whereupon historians repaid his compliment:

Among these people, the strangest feature is their respect for beauty: they choose their most handsome man as king. When a baby is born, two months after its birth the royal council decides whether it is beautiful enough to deserve to live . ..: as for the adults, to improve their looks they dye their beards all sorts of bright colours. Oddly enough, their brides and bridegrooms even choose each other.

There were reasons for these friendly reminiscences: the ancient name of the country round Lahore meant 'prosperity' and for several days the army feasted in comfort, while the officers, at least, were housed away from the rain. The king entertained them with his famous breed of dogs, whose pedigree included the blood of tigers: four of them harassed a lion in public and refused to let go of his haunches even when the keepers were ordered to hack off one of their hind legs. The show appealed to Alexander's love of hunting and one of the dogs was given to him as a present; there were also reports of local veins of gold and silver, verified in the meantime by his Greek prospector-in-chief. The land of prosperity owned an enormous mound of salt: 'the Indians, however, have no experience of mining or casting metals', and 'are rather naive about what they own.'

East of Amritsar, only one more river of the Punjab remained to be crossed and there was no doubt now that Alexander meant to go beyond it. His staff needed little imagination to guess what he intended on the far side: for the past few weeks, they had been assembling as many elephants as they could find and they were now expecting the arrival of a batch of reinforcements from Greece and Asia far larger than any they had ever received before. Indians were joining in the march as well as any of the multitude of prisoners who had not been sold: the total strength of the army when reinforced was said to be 120,000, double its previous size and large enough for an expedition to the eastern ocean or for a view of the edge of the inhabited world. True, timber had been cut for a fleet on the Jhelum, but it would take time to season and even when ships had been built there was no need to use them immediately.

But Alexander was to pass from prosperity to disillusionment. The officers had heard stories of India and even knew the name and existence of Ceylon, but it was hard to connect these scraps of information with the brown and endless plain through which they were dragging their carts and sodden equipment, in mud which sucked the elephants down to a slow crawl. Alexander had talked of a four-month journey from Taxila and they had been prepared to believe him, but on the borders of the Beas the next king after Prosperity's lands gave the first clear warnings of what lay beyond. His knowledge may have been rough and ready, but its gist was unmistakable; beyond the Beas was a well-tilled land of peace and fertility, governed by aristocrats and well supplied with elephants. Beyond the Indus, if Alexander returned and marched down it, there came a twelve days' journey through deserted land; then the Ganges, some 'four miles wide', and deepest of all the Indian rivers, along whose lower course stretched the lands of Ksandrames the king, whose infantry was said to number 200,000, his horsemen as many again or more, while 2,000 chariots and 4,000 elephants would support them to the death. It was a dramatic piece of news. Like the Conquistador who first saw a boat from the unknown kingdom of the Incas, Alexander had been warned of a civilization which the western world had never known to exist. For the first time, he heard the name of Dhana Nanda, last of the nine great kings of Magadha, whose dynasty had ruled for the past two hundred years from their splendid palace at Palimbothra, where the Ganges runs down to the eastern sea.

It was hard to believe such a revelation. Alexander is said to have asked Porus to confirm it, which he duly did, adding that Ksandrames was a very common sort of man, who was only the son of a barber, raised to the throne by a family intrigue. That promised well for the invasion, while detailed inquiry gave a clear enough picture of the landscape, even down to such details as the turtles which swam in the Ganges. But wild surmise had quickly spread among the men and its dangers were obvious. Personally, Alexander relished the thought of a struggle with another Empire which was labouring, like Darius's, in its extreme old age. He would have to time his announcement carefully: unusual favours would help to prepare the audience, especially as the rains were showing signs of abating.

The troops, therefore, were given leave to plunder the nearby country, no mean privilege in a land where precious stones were theirs for the taking; in a river like the Chenab, jewels were washed to the surface, until no keen eye could miss the Indian beryls and diamonds, the onyxes, topaz and jasper and the clearest amethysts in the classical world. While the men were seeking their fortune, their women and children were called into camp and promised regular payments of com and money. Such bribery was of no avail: when the soldiery returned from their plundering, they gathered in groups and sullenly discussed the rumours of their future. Their mood had not improved when Alexander summoned their commanders and at last explained his plans for what lay beyond.

His speech was better constructed than received. The officers heard him in silence and for a long while they were too embarrassed to take up his invitation to reply. At last, the veteran Coenus dared to put their feelings into words: the men would never agree to a march against such an enemy, and if Alexander still wished to go eastwards to the Ganges, he must go without his Macedonians. It was not so much a mutiny as the expression of a deep despair. The men had marched 11,250 miles in the past eight years, regardless of season or landscape; official figures were to claim that they had killed at least three-quarters of a million Asiatics. Twice they had starved, and their clothing was so tattered that most were dressed in Indian garments: the horses were footsore and the wagons were unusable in plains that had turned to a swamp. It was the weather which had finally broken their spirit. For the past three months, the rains had soused them through and through. Their buckles and belts were corroded and their rations were rotting as mildew ruined the grain: boots leaked, and no sooner had their weapons been polished than the damp turned them green with mould. And all the while the river Beas rolled on before them, defying them to cross it in search of a battle with elephants, not in their tens or hundreds but in thousand upon thousand. They had been told, rightly, that the elephants east of the Ganges were larger and fiercer, and there was even word of the heavier breed which lived on the island of Ceylon.

Their case could not have been put from a more respectable quarter. Coenus had served in the army for twenty years, latterly as a Hipparch in the Companion Cavalry, and Alexander would always choose him for the toughest missions. Lesser generals, therefore, felt free to approve his words: 'Many even shed tears as a further proof of their unwillingness to face the dangers ahead.' Alexander grew angry and blamed them for hanging back. When anger had made no impression, he sent them away and began to sulk. There is nothing harder for a man than when all he has planned is challenged, when he knows he can do it if only the others will think on his own bold terms.

The next morning, he called the officers back and told them that 'he would go on himself but he would not force a single one of his Macedonians to come with him; he would find the men to follow him willingly. As for those who wished to go home, they could go now and they could tell their friends that they had deserted their King in the middle of their enemy.'

But the officers had taken a stand and they were not to be shamed into surrender. They refused, and it was time for the King's last threat: Alexander retired in anger to his tent and refused to see his Companions for the whole of the next two days in the hope that his brooding would make them think again.

A profound silence fell on the camp. The men were annoyed with their king's loss of temper but they were not to be shifted from their ground. The hours passed, until they could even feel brave enough to despise him and boo if he kept up his anger any longer. Such stubbornness proved decisive, for Alexander realized that he was a beaten man. Like his hero Achilles, he could not stand the shame of a public humiliation: he sent for the priests and seers and told them he meant to offer sacrifice to see if he should cross the Beas or not. Animals were brought, 'but when he sacrificed, the offerings did not go in his favour'. Now that he could plead the gods' disapproval, he set aside his shame, and summoned his closest friends and elderly Companions to tell them that all seemed to point to a retreat. It was only three years since he had flouted the omens and crossed the Oxus in defiance of gods and prophets.

When the news was announced, a roar of relief went up from the ranks and many burst into tears that their wishes had come true. Amid such jubilation, respect for the gods was the one remaining solace for Alexander's sense of pride. The army was divided into twelve sections, each of which was ordered to build an altar for the twelve Greek gods of Olympus 'as thanks to those who had brought them victoriously so far and as a memorial of all they had been through together'. The altars were to be enormous, 'as high as the tallest towers and broader even than towers would be': Alexander did not wish to be remembered as the king whom the river Beas had humbled. Others said that he traced out a camp three times larger than the one he had used and surrounded it with a ditch fifty feet wide and forty feet deep. Inside, huts were to be built with beds nearly eight feet long and mangers twice the normal size; huge suits of armour and impossibly large bits and bridles were scattered on the ground 'to leave the native evidence that his men were big men, showing excessive physical strength'. Romance later claimed that the altars were inscribed to father Amnion, brother Apollo, the Sun and the Kabeiroi, wild gods who were favoured by his mother Olympias.

Only archaeology will ever settle how far these rumours are true and though several have searched, nobody has been lucky enough to find what could be one of the strangest memorials of the classical past. There is no doubting the altars, but until it is proved on the ground the megalomania 370 of the camp need only be posthumous gossip. What is certain is that Alexander had known his first defeat and that when he reached the Jhelum by the way he had come, he would find little joy in the sudden relaxation of the early autumn rain. Across to Amritsar, back to the river Ravi, and so to the river Chenab, less swollen than before: there, the retreat was briefly halted by a sudden loss in the high command. Coenus the Hipparch 'died of sickness and Alexander buried him as magnificently as circumstances allowed'. It was only a few weeks since his bold complaint had turned the army homewards.

'How often before, the Führer had removed an inconvenient associate not by dismissal, but by an allegation of illness, merely to preserve the German people's faith in the internal unity of the top leadership; even now, when all was almost over, he remained true to this habit of observing public decorum.' Parallels between Hitler and Alexander have been fashionable, but there is nothing to prove that they are valid. If Coenus had been a sick man, then his plea to return was all the more intelligible; it could have been dysentery, it might have been snakebite, but the man who had publicly thwarted a son of Zeus never lived to enjoy the results of his counsel.

The retreat he inspired has always seemed sympathetic. Alexander's eastern plans have not been well received by historians: many have argued that they never existed and some have maintained that all mentions of the Ganges, are best discarded as legend. Apart from the facts, these arguments assume that no sane man could have wished to go on; there are two sides to such a judgement, and only one finds its evidence in Greek accounts of the campaign. The kingdom of Magadha was powerful, certainly, but reports of its strength were no less fantastic than those of the legendary armies of Indian epic heroes, and however plentiful its elephants, it was passing through a painful old age. In native Jain tradition, Dhana Nanda, last of its kings, was long remembered as son of a common woman, born, therefore, outside the ruling caste and detested by many of his courtiers. In the epic book of Ceylon, he is said to have extorted heaps of gold from his subjects and hidden them, meanly, in the waters of the Ganges. Alexander, most remarkably, knew this perfectly well from his informants: Ksandrames, said Porus, was 'merely the son of a barber', and not only is a barber's son a common Indian idiom for a feeble and low-born king, but it is exactly echoed in later Indian histories as a judgement on Dhana Nanda himself. The last of the Nanda dynasty had no firm hold on himself or on Magadha's loyalties; like Cortes, Alexander had stood on the brink of an old civilization, rich but torn by internal discontent. The journey from the Beas to the Eastern Ocean would have lasted another three months down a royal road, and his officers knew it as clearly as he did. And yet they turned it down.

Only the future can prove what they missed. Within three years of Alexander's death, a pretender arose in northern India, Chandragupta the Mauryan, who marshalled an army and made Magadha his own. Dhana Nanda was deposed, and ten years later Chandragupta was even pressing on the Punjab frontier, perhaps drawing help from its seditious highland tribesmen. In return for five hundred elephants, Alexander's Asian successor Seleucus was forced to concede him the Indian provinces; Chandragupta returned to Palimbothra, where he heeded his minister Kautilya and ruled in state for another twenty years. Behind the wooden palisading of the palace he kept open court to Greek envoys, who would come by the royal road from Amritsar, admire his harem and stroll in gardens which seemed to have been his for a hundred years. When asked how he had done it, said the Greeks, Chandragupta would reply: 'I watched Alexander when I was still a young man; Alexander,' he explained, 'had been within an ace of seizing India, because its king was so hated and despised, both for his character and his low birth.'

If an Indian imitator could do it, so too could his master ten years before: Dhana Nanda's kingdom could have been set against itself and Alexander might yet have walked among Palimbothra's peacocks, improved its fencing and enjoyed the fish-ponds on which the Indian princes had always learnt to sail. But not far from its gates the Ganges spreads into an estuary and glides beneath palm-trees through the banks of the silt-brown fields: it asks to be followed, and Alexander need only have done so for another six hundred miles, until he saw the sea-shore opening before him and would have concluded, wrongly but poignandy, that at last he was near the edge of his world. The Eastern ocean was three months away, and the soldiers had refused it. The conquerer's dream of the past few years was gone, when he knew too well that it could have come true.

FOUR

Pyrrho of Elis began as an unknown and impecunious painter; he then joined Alexander and followed him everywhere. He met the magi and talked with Indian gurus and as a result his outlook changed. He founded scepticism, the most noble sort of philosophy, insisting that judgement should be suspended and that nothing could be said to be known. There is no one thing, he would say, which is fine or shocking, just or unjust; nothing really exists except for man's habits and conventions and diese govern the way he behaves.

He lived out his life by these principles. He would avoid nothing and take no precautions against danger, whether from roads, cliffs or dogs; he ignored them all because he never trusted the evidence of his senses. He survived, but, men say, this was only due to his friends who walked and watched, always beside him.

diogenes laertius, Liv es of the Philosophers,9.61

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The retreat from the Beas was a disappointment, not a danger. The men were not so much embittered as exhausted; as for the officers, none of them plotted to take advantage of their king's defeat. For defeat it was, and the disgrace would far outweigh the negligible fears in Alexander's mind. He would not easily live with such a rebuff to his sense of glory, the heart of his Homeric values. He reached the Jhelum, only to find that Bucephala had been washed away by the rains; worse, news came from the ladies' quarters that Roxane's first baby had miscarried.

Only Porus benefited from the new despair. The 'seven nations and two thousand towns' between the Jhelum and the Beas were added to his kingdom; they had lost their interest now that the march to the east had been cancelled. There was only one direction left which promised Alexander his required adventure. It would be ignominious to retrace his steps through the Hindu Kush; now, therefore, was the moment to put the ship timber to use and explore southwards down the Jhelum to the river Indus. It was not the safest route home, but as a link between the conquests in east and west, this waterway might prove invaluable. Though Alexander had at last discovered from the natives that the Indus would not bring him round into the Nile and Upper Egypt he may well have preferred to keep up this hope among his weary troopers.

Back on the Jhelum more than 35,000 fresh soldiers from the west were waiting, raising the army's strength to 120,000, a massive force by classical standards; they had also brought medical supplies and smart new suits of gold– and silver-plated armour. More important, they would raise morale. Eight hundred ships of various shapes and sizes were needed for the voyage down the Indus, but such was the energy of the newly equipped army that two months later the fleet was ready to be manned by the expert crews of Cypriots, Egyptians, Ionian Greeks and Phoenicians who had been following Alexander, as before they had followed the fortunes of the Persian kings. The journey downstream to the outer ocean could begin.

It is a commonplace of sermons and histories that powerful men are corrupted and pay for their licence by loneliness and growing insecurity. But in life, the wicked have a way of flourishing and not every despot ends

more miserably than he began: power may turn a man's head, but only the virtuous or the uninvolved insist that it must always cost him his soul. Inevitably, with Alexander this moral problem begins to be raised: thwarted, did he lose his judgement and turn on the methods of a textbook tyrant in his isolation? Failure will often show in a general's style of leadership: he may no longer delegate his work, while refusing to take the blame for its consequences: he may be too exhausted to take a firm decision, too unsure to resist the meanest suspicions. It is only a legend that when Alexander heard from his philosopher Anaxarchus of the infinite number of possible worlds, he wept, reflected that he had not even conquered the one he knew. The need to justify a lost ambition can cause a man to over-reach; moralists, at least, might expect that Alexander's first rebuff from his army would mark the loosening of his grip on reality.

History does not confirm that this was so. As no officer describes the mood of the king in council, it is impossible, as always, to divide the credit for the army's actions between Alexander and his staff. Events, however, do not suggest autocracy or nervous indecision. Within two months, the entire fleet had been built from the felled timber, a tribute to the energy of officers and carpenters, and Alexander declared the enterprise open in characteristic style. After athletic games and musical competitions, he ordered animals for sacrifice to be given free to each platoon, and then going on board, he stood at the bows and poured a libation into the river from a golden bowl, calling upon Poseidon and the sea-nymphs, the Chenab, the Jhelum and the Indus, and the Ocean into which they ran. Then, he poured a libation to his ancestor Heracles and to Ammon and to the other gods to whom he usually paid honour, Poseidon, Amphitrite and the sea-nymphs, and he ordered the trumpeter to sound the advance.

The sailors responded, cheered by the taste of free sacrificial meat and by the pomp and variety of their expedition. There were flat-bottomed boats for the horses, thirty-oared craft for the officers, three-banked triremes, circular tubs, and eighty huge grain-lighters for supplies. These, the famous zohruks still used on the river Indus, were now built for the first time to serve Greeks; each able to hold more than two hundred tons of grain, they were one of Alexander's most valuable borrowings from the East, and their shallow draught and huge single sail would soon prove themselves in strong currents against the usual Greek trireme.

hi the hot sun, the men rowed naked. No ornament had been spared for their boats; for the first time, a Greek fleet's sails had been dyed deep purple, each officer competing with his rivals until even the banks looked on in amazement as the wind filled out their multi-coloured emblems'. Amid this luxury, their lines had been meticulously ordered: baggage-vessels, horse transports and warships were all to keep apart at the prescribed intervals and no ship was to break the line.

The splash of the oars was unprecedented, as was the shout of the coxes who gave orders for the rowers to take each stroke: the banks of the river were higher than the ships and enclosed the noise in a narrow space, so that it was magnified and re-echoed from one side to the other ... deserted clumps of trees on each bank helped to increase the effect.

There were also the celebrated songs of Sinde whose rhythms no traveller then or now can leave behind him. The shipment of the horses so surprised the native onlookers, that many of them ran after the fleet, while others were attracted by the echoes and careered along the bank, singing wild songs of their own. The Indians are as fond of singing and dancing as any people on earth.

Alexander had been at pains to involve his officers in the enterprise. With a typical respect for the methods of Athenian government, he appointed thirty-two trierarchs, nineteen being Macedonians, ten Greeks, two Cypriots, and one being Bagoas his Persian favourite, who would take charge of individual warships, finance them and doubtless compete for efficiency of maintenance. Most of the baggage train would follow under escort by land. Its size can only be guessed by comparisons. By now, Alexander was said to be employing some 15,000 cavalry; in the same area in the nineteenth century, British armies would have allowed 400 camels to carry a single day's grain supply for his horses alone. Nearchus the sea captain gave the size of the expedition as 120,000 men and it is not very likely that this is wild exaggeration or flattery. When their families, concubines and traders are added for a probable nine months' journey, the scale of the quartermasters' duties begins to come to life. 'We need,' wrote a British colonel, at a time when only gunpowder, heavy boots and stirrups had increased a soldier's requirements,