Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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The wearing of divine clothes, too, was a familiar libel. Enemies, for example, later maintained that the young Augustus had dressed as Apollo and held a sacred banquet among twelve friends dressed as the gods. But in Greece, not Rome, it did have intelligible roots, and despite Ephippus's bias, Alexander may well have adorned himself as his works of art repeatedly suggest. There were eastern precedents, too, for these fancy headdresses, while Bucephalas had probably worn horns, and Philip's image had been carried, no doubt with much decoration, among the twelve Olympian Gods. In outline, therefore, Ephippus may have been telling the truth, a truth, moreover, about Alexander's divinity among his friends. Whether he was also 'unbearable, murderous and evidently melancholic' cannot be decided from Ephippus alone; melancholia, in antiquity, meant a volatile and hasty nature more than a mood of listless ennui. There are no signs that Alexander was any quicker-tempered than at his accession. So far from cowing his courtiers into silence, he still hunted, diced, played ball, joked and banqueted freely with his Companions. Once again, not one of them is known to have lost his life or job in the coming months. As he had said, blood, not ichor, flowed in his veins.

But the fact remains that Hephaistion's death had unnerved him and that for a year, the Makran disaster had remained the last adventure of the 'conqueror of all Asia'. No doubt, too, there had been heavy drinking since the tragedy of Hamadan, though the only hint that Alexander had collapsed into extreme indulgence occurs in the Royal Diaries, a suspect witness whose purpose will soon emerge. The vast expense at court, the full play of pomp could be afforded, the divinity understood, yet they too raised the question whether the old genius was gone. But that inner genius can only be judged from events, for lack of other evidence. Their message remains crisp.

Within six weeks of Hephaistion's death, he had left Hamadan by the Royal Road to the south and briefly invaded the nomads who flanked its passes in the hills of Luristan. Attacking them in winter, he surprised and routed them in under six weeks: 'The men here had been independent since the earliest times, and they live in caves, eating acorns and mushrooms and the smoked meat of wild animals.' The Persian kings had always agreed to bribe them in return for use of the Royal Road, but Alexander refused, and 'planned to settle these nomads into cities so that they might become settled tillers of the fields'. When Greek city culture first met nomads, it failed to understand them and tried, arrogantly, to fit them into its own scheme of life. The plan, as Reza Shah was to find in the 1930s, meant personal suffering to its victims and the destruction of a way of life which uniquely fitted the landscape: Alexander could not even promise better medicines or the spurious lure of richer employment. He wanted to settle these free and proud wanderers into cities, simply because they imperilled his highway. He failed, inevitably, and seven years later, the same nomads were blocking the Royal Road with a vengeance against his Successors.

Returning towards Babylon, winter residence of the Persian kings, he was met by embassies from all over the world. Libyans, Ethiopians and Carthaginians crowned him and pleaded friendship; Celts and Scyths paid their respects, as did Iberians from Spain, only known previously to the Greeks through the armies of Sicilian tyrants. From south Italy, came envoys of the tribes with whom his brother-in-law had been recently fighting; among them, some said, came ambassadors from Rome, a city as yet of some 150,000 inhabitants, who had mastered their neighbouring Latins in the year that Philip had mastered Greece, but were involved in war with the nearby Samnites. Alexander had already corresponded with Rome over the regulation of piracy in the Adriatic; his brother-in-law had made a temporary treaty with her, and it was understandable that even in a crisis, she should send envoys to guard her position abroad. The Romans who later preferred their own heroes to Alexander, did not take kindly to the suggestion of any such mission. Ptolemy did not even single them out as especially noteworthy, while to Aristotle's pupils Rome seemed nothing more than a Greek city.

These distant envoys at once raised the issue of what Alexander would do next, an indication of his state of mind. If Carthage, Libya and Spain promised friendship there was little to stop him marching west through Egypt, along to the Pillars of Hercules, nowadays the Straits of Gibraltar, and skirting up through Spain to Italy where his brother-in-law had lost his life on an expedition. Rumour spread that western conquest was his new ambition; some even suggested that he meant to sail completely round Africa and enter the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. This extraordinary journey had already been made by a Carthaginian captain, who took two years to complete it and suffered appalling hardship, well known at court from Herodotus's history. It is just possible that Alexander had considered it, for the rumour of the plan may perhaps go back to Nearchus, with whom he had discussed plans at Kirman in the previous spring. Knowledge and rumours of Africa were abroad in the camp, but as explorers were being sent to sail round Arabia and up into the Red Sea, it is more likely that if Alexander had plans for the west, he would attack more directly through the Suez Canal and west through the Mediterranean. Possibilities are one thing, intentions another, and it is idle to guess what a man might eventually do with his life; more immediately, his plans were beyond all doubt. A Macedonian was ordered to take shipwrights north to Gurgan and fell timber from the thickly branched forests he had visited seven years before. Longboats were to be built to explore the Caspian, and see 'whether it united with the Black Sea or with the outer ocean which flowed round the world and bordered India'. In Babylonia cypresses were being cut for a mass of new warships: quinquiremes and quadriremes were already being dismantled and carted overland from the Lebanon and Cyprus, all in aid of an expedition at the opposite side of the outer ocean to Gurgan. There were even to be septriremes, which Alexander sponsored for the first time. After 'mastering all Asia', as he put it, Alexander had fixed his ambitions on the Arabs; with these preparations the court at last realized where their next year would be spent. Hot, sandy and remote, the deserts of southern Arabia were to claim them.

In a famous picture painted by Apelles, Alexander was shown in a chariot, followed by a prisoner with his hands bound behind his back; Romans of the age of Caesar interpreted this prisoner as War and Alexander, therefore, as the king who triumphed over fighting, an allegory, which Virgil took up and applied through the picture's details to Augustus as a prophecy that under his empire war would be no more. This Roman fancy had left its original very far behind: if there was one activity which Alexander could never have abandoned, it was fighting, and even at the end of his life he showed none of the signs of triumphing over his bellicosity. The Arabs had been friendly allies of several Persian kings, especially when Egypt had needed attention: on the tomb of Artaxerxes III, recent reconqueror of Egypt, an Arab was shown as one of the only two foreign dignitaries to wear the gold necklace and bracelet of high honour, perhaps because his tribe had assisted the Egyptian invasion. Alexander had 'heard that these Arabs only worshipped the sky and Dionysus, and he supposed that he would not be unwordly to be worshipped as their third god if he conquered them and gave them, like the Indians, their former and customary right of self-government'. He was not fighting in order to demand his own worship: he was observing, rightly, that if he succeeded, he would have deserved divine honours, just as his similar 'liberation' had deserved them in Asian Greek cities. But only by a distorted view of Persian and Arab history, which had already coloured his Indian expedition, could his purpose be described as the restoration of his victims' ancient independence.

His pretext, said his officer Aristobulus, was that the Arabs had never sent him an embassy, 'but in fact, he was insatiable for conquest, wishing to be master of everybody'. His armies had spilled into Italy and India, along the Black Sea and north to the Danube, and it is a frequent mistake to rationalize men's motives for war, as if they fought more for profit than glory. However, there was another side to the Arab expedition as well as mere universal conquest: in the Hadramut valley, spices grew so prolifically that the Arabs used them instead of firewood, sending a steady surplus north by camel and caravan, whose scent was such that the 'drivers become drowsy and only overcome their drowsiness by sniffing asphalt or the skin of goats'. By raft, these spices travelled to the mouth of the Euphrates, then up-stream to Babylon by rivercraft, and so on foot to the city itself: there were myrrh and frankincense, oases of cassia, bushes of naturalized cinnamon and fields of self-sown spikenard. To a man whose palace floor was strewn with sweet scent, these luxuries were irresistible. Alexander was also excited by the reports of harbours along the Arabs' coastline. New Alexandras could be developed to guard the trade route round Arabia to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and grow rich and famous on its profits: a thousand talents annually of frankincense had once been paid by southern Arabia as tribute to the Persian kings, and although an old eastern proverb had said 'never show an Arab the sea or a Phoenician the desert', there was no reason why these spices could not be diverted from caravans to the fleet.

The plan had formed in his mind at least since his meeting with Nearchus in Kirman. There they had talked of the Persian Gulf's signs of a spice route, and four explorers had been sent one after another in thirty-oared craft to trace it back to its source. The first was one of Nearchus's fellow-captains who sailed south only as far as Bahrein; the second, son of an exiled Athenian general, was following him in the winter after Hephaistion's death and left a most observant account of Bahrein's natural history, down to the mangrove trees and orange groves which still distinguish it. He too went no farther. At the same time a third captain had set out on the reverse journey, from the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea and round Arabia into the Persian Gulf; heat and thirst defeated him and he turned back half way. The fourth explorer, a Cypriot, was bolder: he sailed as far as the Aden promontory, 'but despite orders to sail round to Egypt, he became afraid and returned, reporting that Arabia was even larger than India'. The route, however, had been sailed by local traders without fuss or fear for at least two thousand years.

Both the exploration of the Caspian and the conquest of Arabia were attainable ambitions and they speak for Alexander's continuing art of the possible. Neither was as original as it seemed to him: empires might rise and fall by sarissa and cataphract, but since the first dynasty of the Pharaohs, trade had been flowing from the Red Sea, Egypt and the kingdom of Punt, past Bahrein's island and up to the Persian Gulf. Scylax the sea-captain, everywhere a forerunner, had already found the secret of the Caspian's sources: he, too, had sailed round Arabia, beginning from the Red Sea and emerging into the Persian Gulf, ready to report on the need for repairing the Pharaoh's Suez Canal. Encouraged, his patron Darius I had cleared the canal and reopened the route from Persia, round Arabia, to the Mediterranean and this route had been used by ambassadors from the Aegean and traders from Phoenicia alike. At best, Alexander would regain the Persians' former knowledge of their empire's seas; at worst, he would have encouraged a trade route as old as history itself, for once more he came, unwittingly, to restore and to develop, not to change.

There were those in camp who had urged a more novel expedition: 'At a festival in Hamadan,' wrote Ephippus, 'Gorgo the royal munitions officer, a Greek from the island of Iasos, crowned Alexander son of Ammon with three thousand golden crowns and announced that when he besieged Athens, he would supply him with ten thousand suits of armour and as many catapults.' It was true that at Hamadan, an attack on Athens could well have been discussed by junior officers: Harpalus had fled there, and he had been received after a first refusal, while the city continued to elect as its yearly generals men who were known to be implacably opposed to the Macedonians, even choosing that same Thrasybulus who had caused Alexander such trouble at the siege of Halicarnassus ten years earlier. There was also the matter of Athens's tenancy of Samos which the decree to restore Greek exiles had suddenly endangered. Alexander had already announced in camp that he would 'give Samos to the Samians', but this may only have been a calculated threat on news of Harpalus's activities: however, the Athenian settlers on the island has served as a base to the Persian navy during the war in the Aegean, and the memory was not in their favour. Ephippus, as usual, knew how to rouse recent malice. Gorgo's name was loathsome to most Athenians, as he had had local contacts with the debate over Samos, and had vigorously pressed the Samian exiles' cause; thanks to men like Gorgo, the outlook for Athens's settlers was bad, and in autumn 324 the shrewder Athenians were already turning to flattery in order to save the island. Under the shadow of Samos they had been debating whether Athens should worship Alexander as a god: Demades had reminded his audience that 'they should not safeguard heaven, only to find they had lost the earth', while Demosthenes had commented that 'Alexander could be recognized as son of Zeus, for all he cared—and son of Poseidon too, if he really wanted', as long as this recognition seemed likely to save the Samian settlers. Alexander, as Athens agreed, was invincible, but he could at least be humoured with an offer of the worship which he was known to enjoy from Greeks elsewhere. Nobody objected to the principle of worshipping a living man, only to the fact that the man was their 'tyrant' Alexander. But diplomacy overcame disgust, and in the autumn of Hephaistion's death Athenian envoys set out with other Greeks to greet Alexander as a god, then put their case to him.

It is easily forgotten that the decision to restore the Samians had been received with delight by other Greek ambassadors. From Hamadan Alexander had no reason for besieging Athens into the bargain; Ephippus wrote gossip after his death and only put Gorgo's name to the proposal as a plausible touch of malice. As for his crowning as son of Ammon, the conceit seemed credible to contemporaries, and neither Ephippus nor hostile Athenians cared much for the truth; a letter was later invented, written as if to Athens about the ownership of Samos, in which Alexander was made to refer to Philip as merely his 'so-called father', and confirm, by implication, the Athenians' claim to the island. His true view of Ammon was less extreme, and in any case, it hardly befitted Athenians to mock the rumoured flatteries of Gorgo, when within twenty years, they themselves were hymning one of Alexander's Successors as a true 'child of the Sun and the goddess Aphrodite'.

Nonetheless, Alexander's threat had outraged Athens at a time when his position in Greece was not as secure as it often had been. Heavy new drafts of reinforcements were being summoned east from Macedonia to repair the gaps of Makran, and not only was the country's manpower strained by the demand, but Europe was also about to change its general. Antipater was aged over seventy and through letters and embassies, he had long been the subject of complaint, both from Olympias and Greek democrats; Alexander had maintained silence in the face of them, but he did once complain that his mother was punishing him hard for the mere nine months it had taken her to bear him. While Olympias was queen and Antipater mere general, there could never be peace between them. Now Craterus was approaching with orders to replace the general, perhaps temporarily while he visited Asia, perhaps for longer, as Alexander might wish to keep Antipater in Asia as second-in-command for all that gossip knew. It would be some months yet before Craterus returned, in poor health and with 10,000 veterans; his ageing troops were planning to winter in Asia, as Alexander had always allowed them, and for choice they would not leave the coast until summer, when sailing was easier; however, there were local disturbances in Cilicia which might delay them longer. They had only left for home after losing a mutiny, and they were not in any hurry; there was, however, a risk that Athens might abandon all reason and fight for the right to Samos before they returned. News of the recent rebellion in Thrace and the heavy Macedonian defeat on the Danube could only encourage their enterprise.

There was a man of the necessary recklessness. Leosthenes the Athenian had seen his father truckle to Macedonia, and in exile accept estates near Pella; himself, he did not agree, and so he had served as a mercenary captain and emerged in maturity as Macedonia's opponent. In July 324 he had been elected as one of Athens's ten generals for the year; when he took up office, Alexander had ordered his satraps to disband their mercenary armies, and in the autumn of 324 and the spring of 323 fugitive soldiers began to congregate along the Asian coast. The numbers were not large, no more than 8,000 or so, but Leosthenes saw them as an opportunity: Persian admirals and high officials, who had escaped Alexander's fleet nine years before, were still roaming free, prepared to accompany troops to Greece. Chares and Autophradates, both heroes of the war begun by Memnon in the Aegean, were waiting to take revenge, and Chares had used troops disbanded by satraps to good effect before. If he shipped them to the tip of southern Greece, a well-known mercenary base, Leosthenes could maintain them for Athens through his former professional contacts. Alexander was still in danger of the same piratical leaders as in the years when his invasion had begun.

The attempt was hazardous and not generally approved. Athens could call on a possible fleet of more than 300 ships, but she could never finance them, as Harpalus had already been turned from the city with his money and his troops before Leosthenes took up office: he was a lost hope, for news soon came that he had been murdered in Crete by a Spartan on his staff and that his troops were planning to raid North Africa rather than return. So Athens was left with little of the money she had long been needing, the prospect of some 8,000 mercenaries also needing pay, an unmanned fleet in dry dock, and a grievance in Samos which she dearly wished to settle. Leosdienes's plans to hire mercenaries had already been seen to fail the Spartan king Agis; even after Alexander's death they never added more than 5,000 troops to the city's resources. In Alexander's lifetime, the prospects were less enticing, for a huge Levantine fleet was at his disposal and all the while the Silver Shields and other Macedonian veterans were marching west from Opis, in slow stages, dangerously close to the coast and a fast boat home.

While Lcosthenes was left to scheme in the background, one more embassy set out in autumn to plead for Samos to be exempted from its exiles' return; wisely, Athens's assembly had realized that she must try every outlet before risking a forlorn revolt. As the ambassadors travelled, Alexander was riding south by chariot from Luristan's nomads, down towards Babylon, habitual winter residence of the Persian kings and scene seven years before of the most triumphant welcome of his career. Then, in the first flush of victory, he had ordered its holy temple of E-sagila to be restored, along with the steep-stepped ziggurat of Etemenanki. But the priests of Babylon had preferred their own finances, for as long as the temples were incomplete, they could spend the income from sacred land on more congenial goods than sacrifice and silver-polish, and they had delayed the building plans to suit themselves. If Alexander entered the city, he would angrily hurry them and so they came towards the Tigris to stop him.

Well versed in astrology, they deterred him with a prophecy. Their god, they said, advised him on no account to enter Babylon from the west; some said Alexander scorned them, but Aristobulus, who was placed to know better, insisted that he made a careful detour of the Euphrates, trying to avoid the western quarters of the city, until he was halted by the local marshes. The priests, no doubt, had known this, and by warning him against the western approaches, had hoped to exclude him from the city altogether. While Alexander respected the warnings of the gods, he would not submit to the trick of their anxious ministers; he marched in defiance through the western gate, and within days earth was being moved for the temple's new foundations. Tithes were to be collected once more from temple properties, a useful addition to the royal treasury.

Inside Babylon, as winter took hold, Alexander continued in his mood of bold decision. Nearchus and the explorers reported on their discoveries in the Persian Gulf, including the islands of Bahrein and Failaka which Alexander named after the Greek hero Icarus, and told of prospects for the voyage against Arabia. Despite the explorers' failure to round Arabia, a harbour was ordered to be dug at Babylon with boat-houses for a thousand ships, far the largest fleet that had ever been countenanced in Alexander's world and a force which lent plausibility to rumours that after Arabia, it would be Africa or the West. This fleet was not all. While cypresses were felled in the countryside to meet this remarkable demand, recruiting officers went east to Syria and Phoenicia 'to hire or buy men used to the sea, for Alexander intended to colonize the shore of the Persian Gulf, as he thought it would be no less prosperous than Phoenicia itself. Traders and messengers of the future would pass this new Phoenicia on their reopened route from India and put in for stores at these new harbour towns; the settlers too, would be sailors, able to follow the spring winds east to the Indus or strike out south for Arabia's spices and the newly conquered skeikdoms of the Hadramut. It was a far-sighted plan. Alexander's energy had all too plainly not deserted him, nor had the ruthlessness with which he and Philip had always transplanted settlements. But behind the order for the thousand ships lurked the officers' suspicion that Africa would follow Arabia and they would be made to sail round the south of the world.

When spring broke, he was quickly to work once more. Babylonian life had always depended on its intricate system of canals, and as Alexander sailed down the Euphrates to inspect the sites for his harbour and new settlements, he became aware that the irrigation was needlessly blocked, 'despite three months' work by ten thousand Assyrians to improve it'. Noticing a stretch of stony ground, he devised a simpler diversion for the river's overflow, and replaced the labours of 10,000 workmen by a single observation; then, sailing downstream, he explored the marshes at the mouth of the Euphrates and adorned, characteristically, the neglected tombs of its former kings and controllers. A site by the sea seemed to invite another Alexandria, so he ordered sufficient Greek mercenaries and disabled veterans to be selected as citizenry; but as he rowed back from his new creation, 'steering the boat in person', he suffered a slight misadventure: part of his fleet had lost the way, whereupon a sudden breeze blew off his royal hat, complete with diadem, and caught it in a clump of reeds. An unknown sailor swam away to retrieve it, and imprudently put the hat on his head as soon as he had disentangled it; his reward was a talent, but some said he was beheaded at the advice of the prophets before he could enjoy it, others, more plausibly, that he was scourged. All agreed he had sinned by assuming the diadem, already so powerful a symbol of royalty, and soon his rashness seemed itself to be an omen.

Back in Babylon, the flow of plans continued unabated and this time they touched on the army's final shape. Disbanded mercenaries from western Asia had arrived for service at the empire's centre, along with 20,ooo native Persians and a group of nomads. The Persians were brought by Peucestas their satrap; all of them were archers and javelin-throwers, light-armed recruits, therefore, from the province with most cause to prove hostile in all Asia, but Alexander enrolled them into his Macedonian brigades, where their files were headed front and rear by highly paid Macedonian veterans. It was the climax of his integration in the army: apart from his Iranian Successors, Companions and cavalry, his Foot Companions were now to be doubled in strength, and Persians outnumbered Macedonians by three to one. For four years already the Foot Companions had fought in more open order without their sarissas; possibly, at the last the Macedonians in front and rear were returned to their famous weapon, while light-armed Persians were to shoot arrows or javelins over their heads. First, a long-range volley from the Iranians' composite bows of horn and leather in the centre; then, an advance with three rows of eighteen-foot spears, backed by a core of light-armed troops for impetus. There was sense, as well as magnanimity, in a mixed Perso-Macedonian phalanx, for it put the middle ranks to more varied use.

As the troops were drafted, discipline and training were not allowed to slacken: the ships were built, and 'Alexander exercised them constantly, causing the three-banked warships to compete again and again with the four-bankers, for the sake of crowns of victory'. For amusement, he even staged a mock battle on the river, whereby crew pelted crew with apples from the decks of the royal fleet; morale must be high for the Arabs, and he spared no favour in order to sustain it. Meanwhile, the embassies arrived from the Greeks, Athens included, and were heard in revealing order of their business's importance; first religion, then presents; then foreign disputes, internal problems and, last of all, the pleas for returning exiles. Some envoys had come wearing crowns, as if to honour a god, so these religious embassies which took priority even over presents must largely have concerned Alexander's own worship. Among these worshippers the great Greek sanctuaries took precedence; first Olympian Zeus, then Ammon of Siwah, 'according to the importance of their respective sanctuaries': for Alexander, Libyan Amnion remained a subordinate equivalent of the Zeus he knew in Greece. To most of the embassies, a generous answer was given in return for golden crowns, even if they had not come to worship him and thus came low on his list. But it is a rare glimpse of Alexander's last months that he put worship of himself and the gods above all other Greek business.

In late spring, this glimpse becomes more public in the final design for Hephaistion's monument. As the architects drew up their plans, Alexander breached a mile and a quarter of Babylon's walls and ordered the baked bricks to be collected. Then he marked out a square, whose sides were 200 yards long, and divided it into thirty sections; in each, the tomb's stories were to be supported by the trunks of palm trees. The outside walls were decorated, first with the golden prows of 240 quinquiremes, each equipped with two kneeling archers, six feet high, and armed warriors, taller still, between whom were stretched drapes of scarlet felt. On the next storey, 22-foot torches were wound with wreaths of gold and topped, amid their flames, with eagles, wings outstretched; serpents coiled around their bases. The third storey showed a hunting-scene, the fourth a battle of gold centaurs, the fifth a row of golden bulls and lions. The sixth showed Macedonian and Persian weaponry, while the top was crowned with hollow sirens, inside which a choir could be concealed to sing a lament for the dead man.

The whole was said to be some 200 feet high; the word 'pyra' described it, but a 'pyra' could be a monument. It did not have to be burnt.

These measurements may be nothing more than rumour. No trace of this monument has been found, probably because its patron died before it was far off the ground; the desire to complete it was publicized among Alexander's Last Plans, which his officers probably exaggerated to ensure their rejection. Hence, perhaps, the huge dimensions, though they would not be implausible anyway. For a less powerful man this monument would have been an impossible madness, but the show was in keeping with a hero's concern to be seen to pay the dead the most glorious honours possible and for Hephaistion Alexander would not drop his Homeric ideals. He had the treasure to finance it and the architects to carry it out. Pharaohs had long built pyramids, just as dukes would one day build palaces and bishops still build larger cathedrals, and only a parochial mind can uphold this new Pharoah's extravagance as a definite 'proof of raving lunacy. The design was fantastic and obviously influenced by Babylonian architecture; aesthetically, it may have been hideous, but ugliness alone is not a proof that a man has lost his judgement, and there was always Harpalus's monument to his mistress in Babylon which asked to be excelled. Not every grand scheme was accepted. When Alexander's architect proposed to carve mount Athos's cliff face into his likeness. Alexander refused: megalomania strains for impossible grandeur, but in Babylon, heart of the centralized despotism which had passed to the Persian Kings with the system of royal canals, the vast royal work forces made vast royal buildings a tempting possibility.