MACEDON , 401—301 B.C.

 

CHAPTER XIII .

ALEXANDER: THE CONQUEST OF THE FAR EAST

I.

ALEXANDER, PHILOTAS, AND PARMENION

 

Alexander was now Great King by right  of conquest; in his dedication at Lindus this same year he calls himself Lord of Asia, while about 331 the lion-gryphon of Persia, and in 329 the title of King (which he never used on his coinage minted in Macedonia), begin to appear on some of his Asiatic issues. He consequently claimed, when he so desired, to treat all still in arms against him as rebels. He did not follow Bessus; for a group of Darius’ adherents had taken refuge in Tapuria, and he had first to secure his rear. He sent his baggage by road via Shahrud, and struck into the Elburz mountains with two mobile columns commanded by Craterus and himself, which united at Bandar Gaz on the Caspian and thence proceeded eastward to Zadracarta, the royal residence of Hyrcania. His operations produced their effect, and all those still in arms came in, some to Gaz and some to Zadracarta, and submitted: Autophradates satrap of Tapuria, Phrataphernes satrap of Parthia and Hyrcania, Nabarzanes, Artabazus, and delegates from the Greek mercenaries. Artabazus, once Philip’s friend, was received with honour, Nabarzanes pardoned, and the two satraps confirmed in their offices; Alexander desired to show that prompt submission to the new ruler would bring its reward. While waiting for the Greeks, he reduced the Mardi in their forest fastnesses in the hills south of the Caspian; he probably went as far as Arnol, and added the country to Tapuria. Then all the Greeks came in, bringing the ambassadors who had been with Darius. Though Great King in Asia, Alexander desired to emphasize the fact that to Greeks he was still President of the Hellenic alliance, and he settled matters by the touchstone of the League. The Greeks who had been in Darius’ service prior to the Covenant of the League, and the envoys from Sinope and Chalcedon, which were not members, went free; the other mercenaries were compelled to enter his service, and he imprisoned the envoys from the League towns, Athens and Sparta, as being traitors. Sparta was beaten, and the sea secure; he had no further need to give Athens special treatment.

Alexander had now reached a part of the world where towns were almost unknown. The true Iranian type of country knew only villages, fortresses, and ‘royal residences’, a royal residence being a palace with pleasure grounds, a citadel, and an ancillary village, serving as a satrap’s seat. The great non-Greek towns of the west of the Empire all belonged to older civilisations than the Persian; and if Bactra was really a town, tradition at least made it pre­Iranian. A royal residence might have a name of its own, like Zadracarta or Maracanda, or Persepolis, seemingly a corruption of Portipora; but it was often called by the name of the province, as ‘the Arachosian’.’If Alexander wanted cities in eastern Iran he must build them.

From Astrabad Alexander started to follow Bessus, who had gone to Bactria, while Satibarzanes and Barsaentes had returned to their satrapies to collect troops preparatory to joining him. Alexander went up the Gurgan river and by Bujnurd into the valley of the Kashaf-Rud. At Meshed he received and accepted the submission of Satibarzanes, who was not yet prepared for resistance, and confirmed him in his satrapy, sending Anaxippus to him as general but with an inadequate force. Doubtless he was trying a policy of trust; at the same time he had evidently no idea of the feeling in Aria. He also heard that Bessus, supported by the Bactrians, had assumed the upright tiara and called himself Great King. From Meshed he followed the regular road towards Balkh; he may have reached the Murghab river when he heard that Satibarzanes had risen and killed Anaxippus and his force, and was collecting troops; Arachosia was also in arms. He could not invade Bactria with Aria up behind him; he had to turn. Leaving Craterus to follow with the army, he hurried south with a small force, and in two days reached the royal residence, Artacoana; Satibarzanes was surprised, and barely escaped to Bessus. Alexander marched through Aria, and, as he thought, subdued it; near Artacoana he founded Alexandria of the Arians (Herat). He appointed another Persian, Arsames, as satrap; he did not yet understand that eastern Iran was fighting a national war. Then he entered Drangiana, which was part of Barsaentes’ satrapy. Barsaentes fled to the Indians in eastern Arachosia, and was handed over to Alexander, who put him to death; as Nabarzanes and Satibarzanes had been pardoned, it is clear that he was executed for rebellion and not for Darius’ murder.

Alexander halted at the royal residence, Phrada, possibly near Nad Ali, site of the later capital, Faranj, which preserved the alternative name, ‘the Zarangians’; and here occurred the execution of Parmenion’s son Philotas. In estimating what happened, Alexander’s position among his generals must be borne in mind. Olympias once rebuked him for making these men the equals of kings; and indeed they were little less. Some were princes of old lines; most were as proud and ambitious as himself, and intoxicated with victory and its material fruits. Many of them had high military ability; a few were to be great administrators. Of things like the sanctity of life they thought little; they lived hard and took their chances in a world full of wonderful chances. And scarcely one of them could understand Alexander. The ancient world had never seen such a group of men; and Alexander, who was twenty-two when he crossed the Dardanelles, had to drive them as a team. He did drive them with success till he died; but his success was not as yet a foregone conclusion.

There seems to have been a conservative element among the generals, men who did not care for Alexander’s position as Great King, or his Persian policy and satraps. Their ideal was a national king like Philip, first among his peers; they disliked the notion of a king without a peer. Philotas, an overbearing man, may have represented this element; but more probably the motive of his treason was personal, not political. For Parmenion’s family had held too much power; but now his son Nicanor was dead, and Parmenion himself had fallen out of favour. Since crossing the Dardanelles Alexander had uniformly disregarded his advice and had uniformly been successful; Parmenion too had failed at Gaugamela, and his enemies, including Callisthenes, were hinting that he had not particularly desired Alexander’s victory. Since then Alexander had left him on communications, and Craterus was fast taking his place as second in command. Is the explanation of Philotas’ action to be found in a belief that the star of his house was setting and his own position insecure?

Philotas’ loyalty had already once been called in question; but Alexander had simply passed the matter by, as he had done with Harpalus. But at Phrada a plot was discovered against Alexander’s life. The ringleader was an obscure person, but he claimed the support of Amyntas the phalanx-leader and Demetrius the Bodyguard. The plot came to Philotas’ ears; on his own admission, he knew of it for two days and did not tell Alexander. Then Alexander heard. If Philotas, general of the Companions, were a traitor, it was necessary to strike hard and quickly. It was Macedonian custom that in a trial for treason, where the king was virtually a party, the State was represented, as it was when the throne was vacant, by the Macedonian people under arms, the army; and Philotas was properly put on trial before the army. Nothing further is known beyond Ptolemy’s statement that the proofs of his treason were perfectly clear; the army condemned him to death, and carried out its sentence according to Macedonian custom. It was rough and ready justice; but the army gave a fair trial according to its lights. For, after Philotas, Amyntas and his brothers were tried; all were acquitted and continued in their commands. Demetrius was subsequently cashiered, and Ptolemy son of Lagos replaced him on the Staff. It is said that Alexander the Lyncestian was now put to death; it has been thought that the conspirators meant to make him king.

There remained Parmenion. There was no evidence against him, but he could not be left in charge of Alexander’s communications. But neither could he be removed. That a great general could be relieved of his command and retire quietly into private life would probably have seemed impossible to every Macedonian. There were only two known alternatives: he must rebel or die. Alexander decided that Parmenion must die. He sent Polydamas with swift dromedaries across the desert, bearing letters to Parmenion’s generals in Media, Cleander and Menidas of the mercenaries and Sitalces of the Thracians. Polydamas travelled faster than rumour; the generals carried out Alexander’s orders and killed Parmenion. Philotas’ execution had been perfectly judicial; Parmenion’s was plain murder, and leaves a deep stain on Alexander’s reputation. But he had shown his generals that he was master; he struck once, with terrible effect, and the lesson went home; he never had to strike again.

 

II.

THE CONQUEST OF TURKESTAN

 

It was clear that no subject must again hold Philotas’ power; and the Companions were re-organized as two hipparchies, each of eight half-squadrons (nominally 1000 men), under Hephaestion and Cleitus as hipparchs. Alexander founded a city at Phrada which was, perhaps later, named Prophthasia, ‘Anticipation,’— a curious allusion to the conspiracy. He apparently never took winter quarters at all in the winter of 330—29 BC; he was anxious to reach Bactria, and he had to ensure Bessus’ isolation from the south. He went on from Phrada to the Helmund, where he found a people (perhaps the almost extinct Reis tribes) called the Benefactors, because they had once aided Cyrus with supplies. They are represented as an innocent folk enjoying a golden age of righteousness, and he exempted them from satrapal rule and tribute for helping his predecessor Cyrus. The satraps of Carmania and Gedrosia now sent their submission; but Arachosia was masterless and unconquered. Alexander separated Drangiana from it and added it to Aria; then he followed up the Helmund and the Argandab into Arachosia, where at the royal residence he founded Alexandria of the Arachosians (Candahar); he left Menon to reduce the country, pushed on up the Tarnak, and founded another Alexandria, probably Ghazni. Thence he crossed the mountains into the Cabul valley (spring 329). The troops suffered from cold and snow blindness, and were glad to shelter at night in the beehive huts which the natives built with a hole in the roof to let out the smoke; but the natives had plenty of animals, and tradition may have exaggerated the sufferings of the march, though Alexander possibly crossed too early in the year. In the Kabul valley he founded another city, Alexandria of the Caucasus (Opian near Charikar), appointed a Persian satrap of the country (Paropamisadae), and prepared to cross the Paropamisus or ‘Caucasus’ (Hindu Kush) into Bactria.

Bessus was holding Aornos (Tashkurgan) with 7000 Bactrians and a force of Dahae from the desert; with him were the great barons Oxyartes of Bactria and Spitamenes of Sogdiana. The regular route across the Hindu Kush into Bactria probably ran by one of the lofty Kaoshan group of passes; but all roads joined at Anderab, and Bessus had wasted the country there right up to the mountains. Alexander on leaving Charikar bore northward, and crossed by the lower but far longer Panjshir-Khawak pass, 11,600 feet high. The army suffered from lack of food and firing, and lived on raw mule and silphium, but they got across with little loss; Persian armies must have crossed the Hindu Kush before them. Alexander however did not take the direct road from Anderab through the defile at Tashkurgan, as Bessus expected; he bore north again, reached Drapsaka, and turned Bessus’ position. Bessus fled across the Oxus; the Bactrians submitted, and Alexander occupied Tashkurgan and Zariaspa-Bactra without resistance, and made the veteran Artabazus satrap of Bactria. At last too Aria was settled. Satibarzanes, with Arsames’ privity, had returned and raised the country again while Alexander was in Arachosia, but had been defeated and killed by a force sent under Erigyius. Alexander now sent as satrap Stasanor, of the royal house of Soli in Cyprus, with orders to remove Arsames. The national war had forced upon Alexander a change in his Persian policy; but in Stasanor he had found the right man, and Aria had peace.

From Bactra Alexander marched to the Oxus opposite Kilif, the army suffering from thirst in the summer heat; Bessus had destroyed all the boats, but the troops crossed native fashion, lying flat on skins stuffed with rushes and paddling. (The famous story, which occurs here, of Alexander’s massacre of a harmless community of exiles from Branchidae for their ancestors’ supposed treachery toward Apollo, is a clumsy fabrication, invented to glorify Alexander). Word now came from Spitamenes that Bessus was his prisoner and that he was ready to surrender him. Ptolemy was sent to take the surrender; but after a forced march he learnt that Spitamenes had changed his mind and gone, leaving Bessus behind. He captured Bessus, who was put in the pillory and shown to the army, publicly flogged, and sent to Bactra to await judgment. Alexander then occupied Maracanda (Samarcand), the summer royal residence of Sogdiana, and pushed on by the usual route into Ferghana past the fortress of Cyropolis to the great southward loop of the Jaxartes, where Persian rule had ended; on the way he was wounded in the tibia and lost part of the bone. He left garrisons of mercenaries in Cyropolis and in the seven fortresses between Cyropolis and the Jaxartes which the Persians had built for protection against the nomads; and from there, at the end of the known world, he summoned all the Sogdian barons to a durbar in Bactra. He thought Sogdiana had submitted; but it was merely waiting for a lead, and the invitation to the durbar, which could mean nothing good, kindled the torch. The whole country flamed up behind him; his garrisons in Cyropolis and the seven fortresses were killed, and he had to reduce these places one after the other; at Cyropolis, which he razed, he was again woun­ded. He showed considerable severity; cut off from information, he thought he was dealing with a local revolt which severity might suppress.

At last he got news; Spitamenes had risen and was besieging the citadel of Maracanda. He could not spare many men to relieve the place, for a host of Turcomans was gathering on the Jaxartes; he sent 2300 mercenaries and 60 Companions, under the command of his interpreter Pharnuches, a Lycian; probably he scarcely realized that things were serious, and thought there might be negotiations. Meanwhile he decided to found a city on the Jaxartes as a defence against the nomads. In 20 days the mud walls were finished and the city settled; it was called ‘Alexandria the Farthest,’ today Chodjend. It was not founded to control the Silk Route from China across Chinese Turkestan, for Alexander knew nothing of the existence of Chinese Turkestan or of any Silk Route (if indeed the latter yet existed); beyond the Jaxartes was ‘Europe.’ All the time that the city was building the Turcomans patrolled the farther bank, challenging him to cross. They were beyond his marches; but he wished to prevent them helping Spitamenes, and he did not mean to be mocked by ‘Scythians’ as Darius I had been. He ranged his catapults on the bank and began shooting. The Turcomans were alarmed by the power of the strange weapons, which could kill them across the river, and retired out of shot. The army then crossed as it had crossed the Oxus, Alexander with the archers leading; once landed, he kept a clear space for the army to land behind him. Part of his heavy cavalry then attacked; the Turcomans tried desert tactics, riding round them and shooting; Alexander mixed the Agrianians and archers with the cavalry, and these succeeded in stopping the encircling tactics of the enemy. Once this was done, Alexander made his usual charge, and the Turcomans broke. He pursued them a long way, though very ill from drinking foul water; finally he had to be carried back to camp. The battle is notable, for it shows Alexander, who had never seen desert or ‘Parthian’ tactics before, meeting them with complete confidence and certainty; had he been an inferior general, he might have suffered the fate of Crassus at Carrhae.

What might have happened to Alexander did happen to the troops sent to relieve Maracanda. Spitamenes, beside his own Sogdian horse, had found allies in the nomads of the Kirghiz steppe west of the Polytimetus river; he retired down the river and drew the relieving force after him into the desert. There he attacked, using desert tactics. Pharnuches was not a soldier, and the mercenaries’ leaders would not take the responsibility. The men formed square and fought their way back to the river, but at the sight of safety discipline gave way; there was a rush to cross, and Spitamenes practically annihilated the force. When Alexander heard, he realized at last that he was face to face with a national war and a national leader. He had apparently quitted Chodjend, and (taking the bematists’ stade as about three quarters of the Greek) was some 135 miles from Maracanda. He took the Companions, Agrianians, archers, and some picked phalangites, and according to tradition reached Maracanda in a little over three days and three nights; if allowance be made for better climatic conditions than today, for it being late autumn, and for Alexander’s terrific driving power, it can hardly be pronounced impossible off hand, if the cavalry carried the spears and shields. Spitamenes was again besieging Maracanda; again he retreated to the desert. Alexander went as far as the battlefield and buried the dead, but he did not follow Spitamenes; he turned and retraced his steps up the Polytimetus, wasting its rich valley from end to end to prevent the enemy again attacking Maracanda. Thence he returned to Bactra, where he wintered; the victorious Spitamenes, with his headquarters in the winter royal residence of Sogdiana, Bokhara, was left undisturbed till spring. Alexander held little north of the Oxus but Chodjend and Maracanda; but the army had had no rest for two strenuous years, and winter quarters were an absolute necessity.

There was a great gathering at Bactra that winter (329—8). Phrataphernes and Stasanor came bringing in Arsames and other partisans of Bessus; large reinforcements arrived from Europe; the western satraps brought fresh drafts of mercenaries. Bessus was brought out and judged; his ears and nose were cut off and he was sent to Ecbatana for execution. He was condemned, not for the murder of Darius, but for having assumed the tiara; Alexander, in mutilating him, treated him as Darius I had treated Fravartish. On the best Greek standards the mutilation was probably indefensible; still, Greeks used torture, and the best of them could on occasion advocate worse things than mutilation. There also came Pharasmanes, ruler of Chorasmia (Khiva); he offered Alexander his alliance and was also understood to have offered to guide him by some northern route to the Black Sea, thus linking up Bactria with Thrace. The Caspian was at this time joined to the Aral by one or more salt-water connections; and Alexander thought that the sea which he had seen in Hyrcania (the Caspian) was Aristotle’s Hyrcanian lake, and that what it joined must really be the Maeotis (Sea of Azov), the Jaxartes, like Aristotle’s Araxes, being identified with the Tanais (Don), dividing Asia from Europe. Pharasmanes presumably was taken as confirming this view, for evidently the Black Sea was not far off. Possibly the subsequent expedition made by Zopyrion, Antipater’s general in Thrace, who crossed the Danube, perhaps reached Olbia, and was killed by the Scythians, was an attempt to link Thrace with Bactria. Had Alexander lived, he might have attended to the Black Sea and its problems; but for the present, while accepting Pharasmanes’ alliance, he told him that he must next go to India.

Sogdiana however had first to be reduced. In spring 328 Alexander left Bactra and again crossed the Oxus; by the river he found a spring of petroleum (he was the first European to discover it), and offered sacrifice to avert the evil consequences of the prodigy. The army he divided into five columns, which swept the plain country and reunited at Maracanda. Spitamenes could not face them; he crossed the Oxus southward, and went to the Massagetae of the desert. Alexander ordered Hephaestion to build fortified posts at various points, and continued to sweep the country. But Spitamenes was not yet beaten. He persuaded the Massagetae to help him, overwhelmed one of the border forts of Bactria, and a few days later appeared before Bactra itself, behind Alexander’s back. The king had left Craterus with a strong force to patrol Bactria and prevent a rising, but in Bactra there were only details and the sick. The commandant of the hospital led them out; Spitamenes ambushed and annihilated them. Craterus came up in haste, but Spitamenes escaped into the desert with little loss. It had taken Alexander much of the campaigning season of 328 to reduce about half of Sogdiana, and still Spitamenes was at large; but the country was now a network of fortified posts and garrisons. He left Coenus in charge of western Sogdiana with two battalions of the phalanx, some Companions, and the newly raised Bactrian and Sogdian horse, the first Asiatic troops in his army; he himself made his headquarters at Nautaka, possibly to rest the army for the wfinter campaign and attend to administration, but there is a lacuna here in the story. Spitamenes was sadly hampered by the fortified posts, but by the promise of plunder he roused the Massagetae to another effort; they gave him 3000 horse, and with these and his own Sogdians he attacked Coenus. But Coenus had mastered his tactics, and he too had light horse. Spitamenes was decisively defeated, and his Sogdians left him and surrendered; the Massagetae lost heart, cut off his head, and sent it to Alex­ander. He was the best opponent Alexander met. His blood was continued in the line of the Seleucid kings; for Alexander subsequently married his daughter Apama to Seleucus, and she became the mother of Antiochus I.

 

III.

CLEITUS, CALLISTHENES, AND ALEXANDER’S DIVINE DESCENT

 

This same summer saw the murder of Cleitus the hipparch at Maracanda. The dry climate of Turkestan, and the bad water, induced in the army much use of strong native wine. Alexander himself, as is quite clear, habitually drank no more than other Macedonians; he sat long at dinner, but chiefly for the sake of conversation; the stories of his excessive drinking were first put about after his death by Ephippus of Olynthus, a gossip-monger who was not with the army, and were afterwards spread by the New Comedy. However, at this particular banquet Alexander did get drunk, as did Cleitus; but the conversation in which the quarrel originated cannot be reconstructed with any certainty from the varying versions. It seems probable that some Greek recited a sarcastic poem about the mercenaries’ leaders defeated by Spitamenes, and that in some way Parmenion’s name was brought up, probably with a suggestion of failure; Cleitus, who had been Philotas’ principal lieutenant, thought Alexander approved, and began to defend Parmenion and Philip’s men generally, and went on to compare Philip with Alexander, whose Persian innovations he was known to dislike. Alexander became angry, possibly at being belittled, but possibly too at the indecency of such a comparison ; Cleitus, too drunk to understand, went on to assert that Alexander owed his victories to Philip’s Macedonians. What he seems to have been trying to express was, that Alexander was slighting the men whose bravery alone had raised him to a position in which he could slight them. Alexander made some effort at self­control; he turned to two Greeks beside him and said “Don’t you feel like demigods among beasts?”. But Cleitus could not be restrained; he thrust out his hand towards Alexander and said “This saved your life at the Granicus”, and continued to taunt him. Then Alexander’s temper gave way utterly; he sprang up and snatched a spear from a guard, but some held him down, while Ptolemy pushed Cleitus out of the hall. He broke away, however, and hearing Alexander shouting his name rushed back, crying “Here is Cleitus, Alexander”’ Alexander ran him through on the spot. When the king came to himself his remorse was bitter. He shut himself up for three days, taking no food, and calling on the names of Cleitus and his sister Lanice, who had been his nurse and to whom he had made such a fine return. The army became alarmed; they might be left leaderless at the end of the earth. At last his friends persuaded him to eat; the soothsayers gave out that Cleitus’ death was due to the anger of Dionysus for a neglected sacrifice, and the army passed a resolution that Cleitus had been justly executed. The philosopher Anaxarchus is said to have told Alexander roughly not to be a fool: kings could do no wrong. One hopes it is not true, though Aristotle had said much the same: when the supreme ruler did come, he would be above all laws. But he had meant human laws. Terrible as the incident seems to us, it probably affected the generals very little; life was cheap and you took your chances; Cleitus (as Aristobulus says) had only himself to thank. Arrian’s kindly verdict is, that many kings had done evil, but he had never heard of another who repented.

While at Nautaka Alexander removed Autophradates from Tapuria and added it to Phrataphernes’ satrapy, and restored Darius’ former satrap Atropates to Media; these two men were loyal to him throughout, as they had been to Darius. Artabazus was permitted to retire on account of his age, and a Macedonian, another Amyntas, was made satrap of Bactria and Sogdiana; it was obviously an impossible post for any Persian. But Alexander had not yet conquered all Sogdiana. He held the plain country; but four great barons, Oxyartes, Chorienes, Catanes, and Austanes, were still in arms in the hills of Paraetacene. In January 327 Alexander attacked Oxyartes’ stronghold, the ‘Sogdian rock,’ perhaps near Derbent; Oxyartes was not there, but his family were. The snow was so deep, and the rock so precipitous, that the garrison told Alexander he would never take it unless he found men who could fly. Alexander called for volunteers; 300 answered and went up with ropes and iron pegs; 30 fell and were killed, but the rest climbed the crag overlooking the fortress and hoisted the agreed signal. Alexander told the garrison to go and look at his flying men, whereon they surrendered. Among the captives was Oxyartes’ daughter Roxane, whom Alexander married. It was a marriage of policy, intended to reconcile the eastern barons and end the national war. Tradition naturally represents him as in love with her; but she had no child for four years, and it is doubtful if he ever cared for any woman except his terrible mother. On hearing the news Oxyartes came in, and accompanied Alexander to the siege of Chorienes’ stronghold, on the Vakhsh river south of Faisabad. The ‘rock’ was protected by a deep canon, at the bottom of which ran the torrent; the garrison thought it could never be crossed. But Alexander set the whole army to work day and night making ladders; with these they descended the ravine on a broad front, fixed pegs in the rock, and bridged the river with hurdles covered with earth. Chorienes took fright, and Oxyartes secured his surrender by enlarging on the clemency and good faith which Alexander had shown toward the defenders of his own stronghold. Alexander then left Craterus to reduce Catanes and Austanes and the land east of the Vakhsh, which he accomplished successfully, while he himself returned to Bactra to prepare for the expedition to India. During his stay in Bactria he refounded Bactra as an Alexandria, and caused to be founded another Alexandria at Merv, subsequently destroyed by nomads. He also arranged for the education and training in Macedonian fashion of 30,000 native youths.

At Bactra there came up the question of Alexander’s divine descent. The man who publicly brought it forward was the philosopher Callisthenes. He was anxious to please Alexander, as he hoped to secure from him the rebuilding of his native city Olynthus; he also had an exaggerated opinion of his own importance as the self-constituted historian of the expedition; he is reported to have said that Alexander’s fame depended not on what Alexander did but on what Callisthenes wrote. Some time after 330 he had sent to Greece for publication his history of Alexander, so far as it had gone; he must have read it to Alexander and others, and it was doubtless well known. It was written to advertise Alexander, with an eye to the Greek opposition; he has been called Alexander’s press agent. It contained some very extravagant inventions. He said that what the oracle of Ammon had told Alexander was, that he was not Philip’s son at all, but in actual fact (and not merely officially) the son of Zeus-Ammon himself; that the oracle of Apollo at Didyma, so long silent, had again spoken and declared that Alexander was son of Zeus; that a prophetess at Erythrae had confirmed his divine origin; and that in his passage along the Pamphylian coast at Mount Climax the very waves had prostrated themselves before the son of Zeus. Whether he thought this would please Alexander, or whether Alexander was deliberately using him to prepare his way in Greece, may never be known; his role in either case was equally inglorious. But as all knew that Philip was supposed to have doubted Alexander’s legitimacy, the seed he sowed fell on fertile ground. True, he apparently made Alexander son of a god only, and not a god; but it can be seen from Timaeus and others that many Greeks now made no distinction on that head. Whatever blame accrues to Callisthenes must however be shared by others; for Isocrates had said that, if Philip conquered Persia, nothing would be left him but to become a god, and Aristotle, not content with telling Alexander that he had no peer, had written, with Alexander in mind, that the supreme ruler when he came would be as a god among men.

Alexander, on his side, had, since Darius’ death, adopted on State occasions Persian dress and Persian court ceremonial, and had made Chares the historian chamberlain. He now resolved to introduce the Persian custom of prostration (proskynesis) for all those approaching the king. Here arose a difficulty. To Persians it was only a ceremony, the Achaemenid kings had not been gods, and prostration in Persian eyes did not imply worship. But to Greeks and Macedonians it did imply worship; man did not prostrate himself save to the gods. Alexander knew perfectly how Greeks must interpret prostration, and must therefore have had some strong reason for adopting it; i.e. the reason was not ceremonial but political. He had to settle how the autocrat of Asia, without playing the autocrat, was to exercise such authority over free Greek cities as might be necessary to unite Greeks and Persians in one empire, and safeguard that empire’s access to the Aegean; and we must suppose that he had already some idea of the solution of 324: officially, he must be the god of his Greek allies. This does not mean more than ‘officially.’ Alexander never thought that he was a god; he was ironical on the subject in private, and in public regularly alluded to his father Philip. The thing to him was simply a matter of policy, a pretence which might form a useful instrument of statecraft. What first put the idea into his head is uncertain. It may have simmered there ever since the greeting of the priest of Ammon; or it may really have been put there by Callisthenes, as some afterwards believed. With prostration he began to feel his way. He had the support of Hephaestion and other Macedonians, possibly including Lysimachus; and both he and Hephaestion believed that Callisthenes would aid them, as was natural after his story of the sea prostrating itself be­fore the king; some indeed asserted that Callisthenes had promised. But when prostration was actually introduced, events took an unexpected course. Some of the Macedonians did not even oppose; they laughed. But Callisthenes opposed in good earnest and asked Alexander to confine this Asiatic custom to Asiatics. Alexander did so perforce in future; but he was furious with Callisthenes. He had counted on his influence as an aid to his policy, and Callisthenes had failed him.

The reason for Callisthenes’ change of attitude is obscure. In the Peripatetic literature drawn on by Plutarch he figures as a lover of liberty opposing a tyrant; he was of course the same Callisthenes, the man who, Aristotle said, had no sense. Doubtless, as Aristotle’s pupil, he despised barbarians and objected to Persian ceremonial; but the time to think of that was before he wrote about Mount Climax. To say that he had Panhellenic ideas, and wished to make of Alexander a god for Greeks but not for Persians, is no explanation; for deified men were unknown in Persia, and there was no question of Alexander becoming a god for Per­sians. One must suppose that he had only meant to write up Alexander in extravagant terms, and suddenly found himself (as he thought) faced with the terrible consequences of what he had done; the god he had made meant to act as such; it was no longer rhetoric but sober earnest. He tried to draw back, too late.

Then came the Pages’ conspiracy. One of the royal pages, Hermolaus, had anticipated Alexander at a boar-hunt; he was deprived of his horse and whipped, apparently the usual Macedonian custom. He and some friends thereon conspired to kill Alexander; they were detected and put to death. This act of personal revenge had no political import, but it involved Callisthenes, who had been Hermolaus’ tutor. Whether he was formally a party to the conspiracy is uncertain; but he had indulged in some wild talk to the boys on the virtue of killing tyrants, and Ptolemy says the boys confessed that this talk lay at the bottom of the whole business. Alexander put Callisthenes to death, presumably for conspiracy; to relieve him of odium, Chares spread a story that Callisthenes died naturally in prison. The verdict of the historian Timaeus may be recorded: Callisthenes deserved his fate, for he had made of a man a god, and done all in his power to destroy Alexander’s soul. How far the verdict is true will probably never be known. But Callisthenes had his revenge; and Alexander paid. He incurred the hostility of Aristotle’s school; Theophrastus in a pamphlet lamented Callisthenes’ death and branded Alexander as a tyrant, and Demetrius of Phalerum presently carried the school over to Alexander’s enemy Cassander; and the two philosophers worked out a doctrine of Chance, which was applied to Alexander. Thus from the Peripatetic school, of which Callisthenes had been a member, arose that debased portrait of Alexander against which Plutarch so passionately protested, and from which history for long could not shake itself free—the portrait of a despot whose achievements were due to luck, and who was ruined at the end by the excess of his own fortune.

 

IV.

INDIA: FROM BACTRA TO THE JHELUM

 

Alexander received large reinforcements while in Bactria, and reorganized his army for the invasion of India. He separated the Royal Squadron from the Companions, and under the name of the agema made it his personal command, doubtless because he had incorporated in it sons of a few great Persian nobles. Of the Companions he made four hipparchies instead of two, each of 1000 men; the hipparchs were Hephaestion, Craterus, Perdiccas, and Demetrius, one of the original squadron leaders. The original 2000 Companions were much reduced in numbers, and Alexander was yet to form a fifth hipparchy in India; the hipparchies therefore now contained only one Macedonian squadron apiece, and were filled up with Bactrian, Sogdian, Sacaean, and Arachosian horse. What invaded India, therefore, was not Macedonia but the Empire; and the army had already become a school for the fusion of races. The phalanx was raised to 10 battalions; of the old leaders, Coenus, Polyperchon, and Meleager alone remained; among the new were Alcetas, Perdiccas’ brother, Attalus, afterwards Perdiccas’ general, and Cleitus the White, the future ad­miral. Seleucus now commanded the hypaspists, whose numbers were unchanged, while Nearchus led one of the battalions. The Bodyguards were now Hephaestion, Perdiccas, Leonnatus, Ptolemy, Lysimachus, Peithon and Aristonous. Alexander already had a corps of horse-javelin men, and he now formed a corps of 1000 horse-archers from the Dahae; but the lancers and Paeonians were left behind. He cannot have taken many mercenaries with him, for he had been leaving them in every satrapy and newly- founded city, and of necessity he left a large body, 10,000, with Amyntas in Bactria, besides 3000 horse. He may have invaded India with some 35,000 fighting men; his known formations render any much greater number impossible. But the Macedonians had their native wives and their children with them, and there were scientific men and experts, camp-followers and traders; with the auxiliary services, the seamen, and the contingents supplied later by Indian princes, there may well have been (as tradition suggests) 120,000 souls in camp on the Hydaspes. The army had become a moving state, a reflection of the Empire; and provision was made for training the soldiers’ children.

To understand Alexander’s invasion of India we must discard all ideas later than 327 and try to see ‘India’ as he then saw it. He never knew of the existence of northern or eastern Asia—of Siberia and Chinese Turkestan, China and further India; to the end of his life, ‘Asia’ meant to him, as to everyone, the empire of Darius I. He never knew of the Ganges or eastern Hindustan, which were unknown to Greeks prior to Megasthenes, or of the Indian peninsula, though later Nearchus and Onesicritus collected dim reports of ‘islands’ further south. There is no evidence that he even knew of the Rajputana desert, which Herodotus had known. ‘India’ to Alexander, when he invaded it, meant the country of the Indus, which, following Aristotle, he thought was a broad-based peninsula jutting eastward, into the sea from the land mass of Iran. Along the north side of it, like a backbone, ran a chain of mountains, Aristotle’s ‘Parnassus’ (i.e. Paropanisus); the rest was a plain, traversed by the Indus and its tributaries. Ocean, which was near the Jaxartes, washed the northern base of these mountains, and flowed round the eastern end of the peninsula. As to the south side, he began by sharing the perplexities of Aristotle, who at one time thought, like Aeschylus, that ‘ India’ had land connection with Ethiopia (making the Indian ocean a lake), and at another believed that the sea separated them.

‘India’ had once been fairly well-known. Darius I had ruled the Kabul valley and Gandhara, and had subsequently conquered Sind and probably further parts of the Punjab; his admiral Scylax was said to have sailed down the Indus and back to Egypt, and though the truth of this has been doubted, Darius had made some use of the Indian ocean. The Indian punch-marked silver coinage had been struck on the Persian standard and perhaps represented the Achaemenid coinage for Indi2; the official Aramaic writing of the Achaemenids had been introduced at Taxila (Takshacila), to become the parent of the Kharoshthi script. Taxila itself had an Iranian mercantile quarter, where Zoroastrian customs prevailed. But the fourth century had for­gotten these things. To Ephorus, Indians were as shadowy as Celts. Herodotus was no longer much read; even Callisthenes could neglect him, and there is no sign that Alexander knew him at all, not even his account of Scylax’ voyage. On the Persian side, the Achaemenids had lost the satrapies of India, Gandhara, and probably the Paropamisadae; Alexander meets no Persian officials east of the Hindu Kush. Ochus had even believed that India joined Ethiopia and that the Indus was the upper Nile; this theory influenced Aristotle and, through him, Alexander, who started by believing it, though he soon learnt the truth. ‘India’ had become dim to the West.

But ‘India’ had been part of the empire of Darius I; and Alexander’s invasion was only the necessary and inevitable completion of his conquest of that empire. It had nothing to do with any scheme of world-conquest; indeed it could not have, for in the far East the ‘world,’ like ‘Asia,’ only meant the Persian empire; nothing else was known. Possibly Alexander did not know, any more than we do, exactly how much of the Punjab Darius I had ruled; on the other hand, with his known interest in Cyrus, he possibly believed Xenophon’s mistaken statement that Cyrus had ruled all ‘India’ to the eastern ocean; in either case he naturally meant to reduce the entire province, like any other satrapy. He had already, while at Bactra, formed some political connections there; a chief from Gandhara, Sasigupta, who had helped Bessus, had come over to him, and he had been promised aid by the powerful rajah of Taxila, who was having difficulty in withstanding his neighbour Porus and turned naturally to the new King of Persia, whose forerunners had once been Taxila’s suzerains. Incidentally, Alexander greatly desired, as did Aristotle, to solve the problem of Ocean and the relationship of ‘India’ to Egypt. He meant therefore to explore the southern sea with a fleet; for this purpose he took with him to India rowers and shipwrights from Phoenicia, Cyprus, Caria, and Egypt, and had already decided that his friend Nearchus should be admiral. That is why Nearchus was recalled from his satrapy and given an interim command in the hypaspists, an apparent reduction in rank which must have puzzled those not in the secret.

In early summer 327 Alexander started from Bactra. He recrossed the Hindu Kush—local tradition says by the Kaoshan pass, 14,300 feet high—and reached Alexandria of the Caucasus, which was in disorder; he left Nicanor as governor to organize the city, and soon after made Oxyartes satrap of Paropamisadae. On his way to the Kabul river he was met by the local chiefs and the new ruler of Taxila, Ambhi (officially called Taxiles), the son of the old rajah, who was dead. They gave Alexander 25 elephants which they had with them (he did not, however, use elephants except for transport), and Taxiles put himself and his kingdom at his disposal. There Alexander divided his army, and sent Hephaestion and Perdiccas with Taxiles and the baggage through the Khyber pass to the Indus, with orders to build a bridge of boats; he himself with part of the Companions, seven battalions of the phalanx, the hypaspists, archers, Agrianians, horse-javelin men, and the siege-train, intended to march through the hills to the north of the Kabul river, to secure Hephaestion’s northern flank from attack, his southern flank being protected by the nature of the ground.

Breaking camp about November, Alexander followed the old route through Laghman, ascended the Kunar river, and crossed into Bajaur, whose warlike people the Greeks called Aspasii. He attempted to prevent their concentration by the speed of his movements; he had much hard local fighting, was again wounded, and took several towns, including the capital Arigaion (Bajaur), which he settled; but he could not prevent the tribes concentrating for battle. He attacked their army in three columns, led by Ptolemy, Leonnatus, and himself, and after a severe fight broke them, taking many prisoners and cattle; he was so struck by the beauty of the cattle that he sent the best to Macedonia. He then left Bajaur, crossed the Landai river below the junction of the Panjkora and Swat, and entered Swat, the country of the Assaceni, who had concentrated before their capital Massaga; with them were a body of mercenaries from beyond the Indus. They did not wait to be attacked, but attacked him themselves. Alexander, who led the phalanx, feigned flight to draw them from the walls; but though he defeated them they reached the city with little loss, and in trying to rush the place he was wounded in the ankle. He brought up his siege-train, but failed to breach the walls or to enter by a bridge, as at Tyre; and the garrison held out till their chief was killed, when they surrendered upon terms. The Indian mercenaries left the town and camped outside; in the night Alexander surrounded them and cut them to pieces. The official ex­planation was that they had agreed to enter his service and were meditating desertion and he found it out. The explanation is un­satisfactory, for it omits the real point: had they taken the oath to Alexander or not? If they had, and were really meditating deser­tion, he was within his rights, though the death of the ringleaders might have sufficed. If they had not, it was massacre. Probably they had not, or the official explanation must have said so; the thing may have been some horrible mistake due perhaps to defective interpreting and to Alexander’s growing impatience.

It was in Swat, in the district of the Kamdesh Kafirs, near Meros (the triple-peaked mountain Koh-i-Mor), that he found a town which the Greeks called Nysa, inhabited by people who, like their modern descendants, did not resemble the surrounding tribes; they worshipped some god (? Siva) who could be identified with Dionysus, especially as the ivy growing on the mountain made the Macedonians home-sick. Alexander welcomed the identification, for to suppose that Dionysus had been there and that he was going farther than the god encouraged the army; and he declared the Nysaeans, who probably really were immigrants from the west, independent of his satrap. Before leaving Swat he took and garrisoned two other towns, Ora and Bazira, and then came down through the Shahkot pass into the Yusufzai country, which Hephaestion had failed to reduce; he pacified it and received the sur­render of the capital Peucelaotis. Here he reconstituted the country between the satrapy of Paropamisadae and the Indus, part of the old satrapy of Gandhara, into a provisional satrapy, which he gave to Nicanor. He next halted at a place not far from a mountain called by the Greeks Aornos, on which many Indians had found refuge. Heracles (Krishna) was said to have failed to take it, and Alexander decided to do so.

Aornos should be between the Kabul and Buner rivers; but geographers have sought it in vain. It has possibly not been conclusively proved that it is not Mahaban; but the mountain will never be satisfactorily identified till geographers know what they are looking for. Its alleged height and circuit, and the amount of plough-land and water at the top, are given by Arrian merely as stories with which the natives entertained Alexander beforehand; Curtius’ ‘ravines’ were invented later in some school of rhetoric. None of these things appear in the simple narrative of Ptolemy, who was there. Aornos to him was a ridge, difficult of access, and broad enough to camp on; at one end of the ridge was the ‘rock’ (a fortress, partly artificial), and the slopes were wooded. Alex­ander took the hypaspists, Agrianians, archers, Coenus’ battalion of the phalanx, and a few horse for communications, and reconnoitred the path up to the rock; some natives offered to guide him to the ridge by another track. He sent Ptolemy up the track with the light-armed; they reached the ridge and palisaded themselves. Next day Alexander tried to force his way up the path and was beaten back; the Indians then attacked Ptolemy’s camp but were repulsed. Alexander sent a message up to Ptolemy by an Indian deserter that he would attempt the track next day, and Ptolemy must take any defenders in the rear; the plan worked, and Alex­ander fought his way up and joined Ptolemy; how he got his catapults up is not recorded. He decided that the rock itself could not be stormed; there was, however, between him and it a hillock, of equal height. He began building a sloping embankment from Ptolemy’s camp toward this hillock, dragging his catapults up the inclined plane as the work grew; some Macedonians seized the hillock, and Alexander completed the embankment up to it. Thereon the Indians, seeing that his catapults would now command the rock, gave up, and Alexander stormed the rock as they fled. He left Sasigupta to hold it.

From Aornos he pursued a chief still in arms through Swat to Dyrta; the locality is unknown, but it is unlikely that he entered Chitral. He then joined Hephaestion on the Indus. Hephaestion had bridged the river at Ohind, 16 miles above Attock, and had built in sections a number of boats, including some triakonters (light warships of I y oars a side); while Taxiles had sent 30 elephants. Alexander crossed the Indus in early spring 326, and at Taxila, now partly excavated, his army for the first time saw a great Indian city. It was both a commercial centre and a famous university town, a headquarters of the teaching of the Brahmans. Taxiles gave Alexander 56 more elephants and some information. He was at war with the Paurava king (Porus), whose country lay in the plains between the Hydaspes (Jhelum) and the Acesines (Chenab), and who had allied himself with Abisares, ruler of the hill states of Rajauri and Bimber, both now included in Kashmir. Porus, however, had himself an enemy beyond the Chenab, the ‘free nations’ or Aratta (kingless ones), who were too strong for him to conquer; these peoples, the Cathaei, Oxydracae, and Malli, were confederations of village communities under oligarchic rule. Alexander left a garrison in Taxila, appointed Harpalus’ brother Philippus as satrap, and advanced to the Hydaspes at Jhelum, which he probably reached early in June. He had now formed a fifth hipparchy under Coenus, and Antigenes took over Coenus’ battalion of the phalanx; it had apparently been the crack battalion, picked for the attacks at Tyre and Aornos, and it continued to bear Coenus’ name.

 

V. 

INDIA: FROM THE JHELUM TO THE BEAS

 

The river was not yet at its full size, but the rains would soon begin; and Porus with his army, including many elephants, held the farther bank. Alexander had the flotilla from the Indus brought across in sections, and made ostentatious preparations for crossing to hold Porus’ attention, though he knew that the cavalry could not cross in face of the elephants. Under cover of these preparations he reconnoitred the bank, and selected a place 18 miles above Jhelum, at the great bend of the river, where was a wooded island in midstream. The rains had begun, and there was need of haste. The boats were brought to the selected point and put to­gether; meanwhile Alexander made numerous feints at crossing elsewhere, keeping Porus perpetually on the move; the Indian finally grew weary of meeting threats that never materialized. Shortly after the summer solstice, Alexander joined his flotilla by a wide detour, leaving Craterus at Jhelum with his hipparchy and part of the army; his orders were not to cross unless Porus were defeated or the elephants withdrawn from the bank. The following night was exceptionally stormy.

Alexander had with him the agema of the Companions, the hipparchies of Hephaestion, Perdiccas, Coenus, and Demetrius, and the horse-archers, nominally 5250 horse. Of infantry he had the hypaspists, two battalions of the phalanx—Coenus’ (Antigenes’) and Cleitus’—the Agrianians, archers and javelin-men; even if all the corps but the hypaspists were much below strength, he had at least 8000 foot; more probably he had over 10,000. Ptolemy’s statement that he had under 6000 foot is, for once, demonstrably wrong; if taken from the Journal it was given there simply with the object of minimizing the effect of the enemy’s elephants. In the morning the force crossed to the island; but as soon as they left it they were seen by Porus’ scouts. They landed safely, only to find themselves on another island; with great difficulty they waded ashore, and Alexander at once advanced downstream towards Porus’ position, on the way defeating and killing Porus’ son, who had been sent forward with 2000 horse to reconnoitre. Porus himself, leaving a few elephants to prevent Craterus crossing, had followed, and drew up his army on the sandy Karri plain, to avoid the mud so far as possible. His centre was formed by 200 elephants; behind and between them the infantry were drawn up, with a body of infantry on each wing unprotected by elephants. His best infantry, the archers, carried huge bows capable of shooting a long arrow with great force; but one end of the bow had to be rested on the ground, and the slippery mud handicapped them badly. On either flank were his cavalry, some 3000—4000 altogether. Possibly his left rested on the quicksands of the Sookaytur, and he faced diagonally towards the Jhelum, with the purpose of driving Alexander into it.

Alexander had his heavy infantry in line, with the light-armed on either flank, Seleucus leading the hypaspists and Antigenes the phalanx; he himself with all the cavalry was on the extreme right. Out of bowshot he halted, to breathe the infantry; and Porus, seeing the massed cavalry, brought all his own cavalry round to his left. Alexander began by sending his horse-archers to attack the infantry of Porus’ left wing outside the elephants and keep them occupied; his own infantry had orders not to attack till he had defeated Porus’ cavalry. He desired to draw that cavalry away from the elephants; he therefore ordered Coenus to take two hipparchies and move off toward Porus’ right (Alexander’s left); then, when the Indian cavalry, seeing the force opposed to them, should charge, his orders were to take them in rear. If Alexander knew that the Indian cavalry, a weaker force than his own, would charge him, this could only be because he intended to make them do so; the inducement was the division of his force; they would imagine Coenus was going to support the horse-archers, and would see only two hipparchies with Alexander. The plan worked; the Indians attacked Alexander’s two hipparchies, and while Alexander met them Coenus swung round and took them in the rear; after a sharp fight they were driven to take refuge behind the elephants. Then the Macedonian line advanced and the elephants attacked them. There was a terrific struggle, but at last the Macedonians won; many elephants were killed, the wounded broke back, and the battle was over. The pursuit was taken up by Craterus, who had crossed the river. Porus, who had fought to the last and was wounded, rode leisurely off on his huge elephant; when finally he surrendered, and Alexander asked him how he would be treated, he replied ‘Like a king.’ Alexander’s losses were carefully con­cealed, but there is a conclusive proof of the desperate nature of the battle with the elephants—its effect on the minds of the generals (as seen later) and especially on that of Seleucus, who had actually fought with them; when king, he ceded whole provinces in order to obtain enough war-elephants, and they became the special arm and symbol of his dynasty.

As after Gaugamela, Alexander founded two towns after his victory, Bucephala, named from his horse which died there, and Nicaea on the battlefield; and later a coin was struck to commemorate the battle, showing Alexander pursuing Porus’ elephant. Porus became his ally, a protected native ruler; Alexander reconciled him to Taxiles, and greatly enlarged his kingdom. He had already enlarged Taxiles’ kingdom, which now stretched to the Jhelum, and relieved him of subjection to Philippus; he meant the two rajahs to balance each other. Abisares, who had not helped his ally, sent envoys and 40 elephants to Alexander, who threatened him with invasion unless he came in person. Alexander now decided that, after reaching the end of ‘India,’ he would return down the Jhelum and Indus, reducing Sind; he left Craterus with troops to build a fleet and finish the new cities, and himself advanced to the Chenab, keeping near the hills to avoid wide crossings. It was early July, with the rains at their full and the Chenab rising; it flooded him out of his camp, and he had some losses crossing. He left Coenus to bring the transport across, sent Porus home to recruit troops, and advanced to the Hydraotes (Ravi), leaving garrisons along his line of route and detaching Hephaestion southward to conquer the kingdom of Porus’ re­calcitrant nephew (between Chenab and Ravi), and place it under Porus’ rule. He then crossed the Ravi and entered the country of the Cathaeans.

The Aratta generally were regarded as the best fighters in the Punjab; and the Cathaeans had gathered for the defence of their capital Sangala (unidentified; not Sagala-Sialcot), and had formed a triple lager of wagons outside the town. Alexander attacked the lager, himself commanding on the right and Perdiccas on the left; cavalry being useless, he led the phalanx on foot. The lager was taken, but the defenders took refuge in the town; he had to build siege-machines, and ultimately stormed the place and razed it to the ground. The desperate nature of the fighting is shown by the unique admission that Alexander had 1200 wounded, for only the seriously wounded were ever counted. Porus was ordered to garrison the country, and Alexander pushed on to the Hyphasis (Beas), which he probably struck somewhere near Gurdaspur. It is not certain if it then joined the Sutlej at all; the Sutlej may have helped to form the Hakra, the great lost river of Sind. Possibly the Beas had been the boundary of Darius I; it would agree with what happened.

For at the Beas the army mutinied and refused to go farther. They were tired. The rains had told heavily on them, and they had been shaken by the severe fighting on the Jhelum and at Sangala. Report said that across the Beas was another Aratta people (possibly the Oxydracae are meant) with an unexampled number of very large and brave elephants; after their experience with Porus they had no desire to meet those elephants. But they were even more tired in mind than in body. They had understood the con­quest of Persia; but now they did not know what they were doing or where they were going; they wanted to go home.

It was a severe blow to Alexander. True, he could not have gone much farther in any case; half his army was on his communications with Taxila, and he was using Porus’ troops for garrisons. But he thought there was not much farther to go; his desire still to advance with his reduced force proves that clearly enough. The intention of conquering the Prasii, i.e. the great kingdom of Magadha on the Ganges, with which tradition has credited him, is a later legend; for he knew nothing of the Ganges or Magadha. Undoubtedly traders and students from the east came to Taxila; but the Achaemenids had not known of the Ganges, and any information Alexander obtained, filtered through two interpreters via Persian, would be no clearer to him than what he had got at Bactra from Pharasmanes, whose, information about the Aral merely confirmed Alexander’s Aristotelian geography. In fact, as the gazetteer of 324—3 conclusively shows, Alexander learnt clearly only of one more (unnamed) river, the Sutlej (or Sutlej- Hakra), and vaguely of one kingdom beyond it, the Gandaridae, which he probably thought lay near the river; and then came, he supposed, the end, i.e. Ocean. To turn back meant, not only failure to secure the entire province of ‘ ndia,’ but failure to solve the problem of Ocean, and above all to provide for the Greeks, in his continental empire, necessary access to a new sea to replace the home sea they would long for. Once the design of reaching the eastern ocean failed, we see Alexander giving little further thought . to the Punjab, and concentrating instead on a second-best plan, the colonization of the Persian Gulf. How much he cared is shown by this, that almost his last act when dying was to discuss Ocean with Nearchus. He would have failed of course even without the mutiny; it was centuries too early, and Ocean was not where he thought. But it was a great dream.

 

VI.

 INDIA: FROM THE BEAS TO PATALA

 

Like Achilles, Alexander retired to his tent, and waited for three days for the army to change its mind; but the army was as stubborn as he. Then he took the omens for crossing, which naturally were unfavourable; he yielded to the gods, set up by the Beas 12 altars, one for each Olympian, at which Chandragupta afterwards sacrificed, and turned back amid the acclamation of his troops. But the actual clash of wills ended in a draw. They had stopped him going forward, but they did not get their desire, an easy return home; he went back by the way he had intended to go all along, and gave them some of the hardest fighting and worst marching of their lives. But he left his arrangements in India an unfinished sketch, to be sponged off the canvas the moment he died. He merely handed over all the country up to the Beas to Porus; and when, in spite of his threats, Abisares still did not come to him, he accepted his excuses, confirmed him in his kingdom as a (nominally) tributary prince, and gave him authority over the neighbouring ruler of Hazara. Clearly Alexander no longer cared very much what happened east of the Jhelum.

On the Jhelum he completed his half-finished fleet—80 triakonters and some smaller warships, with horse-transports, supply vessels and numerous native boats carrying food; they were organized in divisions, and the flotilla reached the imposing total of 800. Nearchus commanded, and in the simple straightforward Cretan, most honest of chroniclers, Alexander had the right man; Onesicritus steered Alexander’s ship. The expenses of equipment were borne by 33 trierarchs—24 prominent Macedonians, 8 Greeks, and one Persian. Before the start Coenus died, a loss to the army. Alexander took on board his favourite troops, the hypaspists, Agrianians, Cretans, and the agema of the Companions; the rest marched in three armies, Craterus on the right bank, Hephaestion with the elephants on the left, and Philippus following; they were accompanied by the contingents of the Indian princes, and a great train of women and children, camp-followers and traders. The start was made early in November 326, with the north wind. Alexander, standing on the prow of his ship, poured libations from a golden cup to his ancestor Heracles and to Ammon; to the rivers, Jhelum, Chenab, and Indus; to the gods of the sea, Posei­don, Amphitrite, and the Nereids; lastly to Ocean himself. Then his trumpets sounded; the wooded banks rang to the shouts of the rowers and the beat of oars; and the vast procession started down the Jhelum towards the sea.

Below the confluence of the Jhelum and the Chenab the armies camped, and Alexander prepared for his last important campaign, that against the Aratta people called Malli (Mahlava), who lived on the lower Ravi. They were said to be in arms, and confederate with the Oxydracae (Ksudraka), who lived eastward along the Beas; but if so they were very ill prepared, and were not barring his road. It is, however, quite probable that their country had been within the Persian sphere. He planned a great drive; he was to cross the waterless Sandar-Bar to the Ravi and work south, driving them on to Hephaestion, who was sent forward; Ptolemy was to guard against a break-back westward. He took his favourite troops, crossed 50 miles of desert, and surprised the first town; the men outside had not their arms, and were simply slaughtered; the town was then taken and no quarter given; Perdiccas took another town and slaughtered the fugitives. But most of the Malli broke eastward across the Ravi; Alexander followed, slew many, and took a town of Brahmans, which resisted desperately; he had to mount the wall first, and practically all the garrison were killed. Their other cities he found empty; he sent out detachments to scour the woods, worked round the main body, drove them back across the Ravi, fought a battle at the ford, and shut up some of them in a town on the west of the river (not Multan). The town was easily taken, but the Indians retired to the citadel; the Mace­donians hung back, and Alexander snatched a storming-ladder and went up the wall himself, followed by his shield-bearer, Peucestas, and Leonnatus; Abreas, a corporal, mounted another ladder; then both ladders broke, leaving Alexander and the three on the wall. He leapt down into the citadel, and fought single-handed with his back to the wall till the three joined him; Abreas was killed, and Alexander was shot through corselet and breast by a long arrow. Peucestas covered him in front with the holy shield of Ilium and Leonnatus on one side; a tree prevented attack on the other; they kept the enemy off till the army broke in and slew every living creature there. Alexander was carried out fainting; Perdiccas cut the arrow out with his sword and he fainted again; the report went forth that he was dead. As soon as he could be moved he had himself carried on to a ship and shown to the army.

Among Alexander’s campaigns this is unique in its dreadful record of mere slaughter. The explanation probably is that the army hated it; they had no wish to fight, but as they had to, they gave no quarter; they did not mean to be turned back from their way home to quell a fresh rising. Twice Alexander had to mount the wall first to get the men to follow; it was indeed time to go home. Indirectly, this, the least creditable of his campaigns, was to cost him his life, for the wound left him weakened; while it seems to have been among the Brahmans of the Punjab that the reaction started which placed Chandragupta on the throne of a united Northern India, and blotted out nearly every trace of Alexander’s rule east of the Indus. For the time being both the Malli and Oxydracae formally submitted.

The progress of the flotilla down the Chenab and the Indus cannot be traced, or the places mentioned be identified, because all the rivers, more especially the Indus, have since altered their course many times. No one can say for certain where the Indus then ran; but most probably it joined the Hakra, and discharged into the Ran of Cutch. Alexander built a few more ships, and founded two Alexandrias on the Indus, one at the confluence of the Indus and the united stream of the four rivers, and another lower down; and he secured the submission of the tribes and rulers he passed, though, as among the Malli, the Brahmans were irreconcilable. At last, about the end of July 325, he reached Patala, where the Indus then bifurcated, and halted to prepare the last stage of the journey. Craterus with the baggage and siege­train, the elephants, the sick and wounded, and those troops not left with Alexander, had been already sent off homeward through the Mulla pass.

Alexander’s Indian satrapies may here be noticed. There were Indian peoples west of the Indus; the satrapy of Gandhara, and parts of those of Paropamisadae, Arachosia, and Gedrosia, were of Indian blood. Alexander made separate governments of this Indian belt. Nicanor was apparently dead, killed perhaps in suppressing a revolt in Swat, and his satrapy of Gandhara, with parts of Paropamisadae and of Arachosia, was made into one big satrapy for Philippus, with his seat at the northern Alexandria on the Indus; Eudamus with Thracian troops was left to support him. Philippus, who was related to the royal house, was also called satrap of the Malli and Oxydracae; generally speaking, he represented Alexander’s authority in the Punjab, being, as regards the protected native kings, a kind of Resident. South of his satrapy, another Peithon (not the Bodyguard) was satrap of the rest of the Arachosian belt, and of the Indus valley and Sind as far as the sea; his seat was probably the southern Alexandria. The Indian Oreitae of Gedrosia were presently made a separate satrapy. The Indian belt west of the Indus was thus divided among three satraps; its limits westward cannot be defined, but it was these three satrapies, which contained territory carved out of the old satrapies of Paropamisadae, Arachosia, and Gedrosia, which Seleucus later ceded to Chandragupta.

At Patala Alexander began to build a great harbour and docks, to secure sea connection with the west; he also explored the two arms of the Indus. The coast of the Delta then ran some 50 miles north of its present line, and the Ran of Cutch was an estuary. He first sailed down the western arm, where the fleet was caught by the bore, the dangerous tidal wave that runs up some Indian rivers. Naturally alarm was caused, and some ships were destroyed; but he mastered the nature of the phenomenon, sacrificed as Ammon had taught him, and sailed out into the Indian Ocean; there he sacrificed and poured a libation to Poseidon and flung his golden cup into the waves, praying that the sea might bring Nearchus and the fleet safely home. He then explored the eastern arm to lake Samarah, ascertained there was no bore, and began to build a harbour on the lake as a starting-point for Nearchus. Nearchus, for his voyage to the Persian Gulf, took the triakonters that remained and some smaller vessels, perhaps 100—150 ships. The crews would be some 3000—5000 men; he carried a few archers and mercenaries, and some catapults to cover a landing. He had no supply-ships; the fleet could carry food for ten days only, and water at a pinch for five, but practically he had to land daily for water. There was no question of the possibility of reaching .the Gulf, and his instructions were entirely practical, framed with a view to establishing regular communication by sea between Indus and Euphrates: he was to examine the beaches, harbours, islands, and water-supply along the coast, explore any gulfs, find out if there were any cities, and report what land was fertile and what barren. In September 325 he dropped down the eastern arm of the Indus to its mouth. He was timed to start with the N.E. monsoon (late October); but the local tribes were so threatening that late in September he put to sea, cutting through the sand-bar at the mouth. He met contrary winds, and was delayed 24 days at ‘Alexander’s harbour,’ near Kurachi, till he got the monsoon.

 

VII. 

GEDROSIA AND SUSA

 

In September Alexander started for his famous march through southern Gedrosia (the Mekran). He had with him the hypaspists, Agrianians, archers, and seven battalions of the phalanx; the agema of the Companions, the Macedonian squadron from each hipparchy, and the horse-archers, the other native cavalry being sent home. There was nothing foolhardy about it. His object was to support the fleet, which was not self-supporting, by digging wells and forming depots of provisions; he knew the difficulties, but counted on an increased water-supply after the summer rains. Crossing the Arabis, he received the submission of the Oreitae of Las Bela, founded an Alexandria at their principal village Rhambakia, and made Apollophanes satrap, with orders to collect and forward supplies; with him he left Leonnatus with a strong force, including the Agrianians. He himself returned to the coast and formed a depot at Cocala. As soon as he left, the Oreitae rose; Leonnatus defeated them, but Apollophanes was killed, and consequently no provisions were forwarded, which upset Alexander’s arrangements. He had with him 12,000— 15,000 fighting men, beside women, children and camp followers. At first he followed the coast; provisions were not plentiful, and, though he tried to form another depot, his troops broke his seals and ate the food. But the real trouble began at the river Tomeros. He did not know of the Taloi range; it compelled him to leave the coast and strike inland. The guides lost themselves, and 200 miles of suffering in that desolate country followed. They marched only by night, because of the heat; they ate the baggage-animals and burnt the carts for firewood; all who straggled died. Alex­ander displayed his greatest qualities as a leader; he sent back his horse and went on foot, and refused water when there was not enough for all. He lost his personal baggage; the hardships en­dured are illustrated by the disorganization of his surveying section. At last he reached the sea at Pasni, and found enough water, and from Gwadur got the regular route to the royal residence, Pura, where he was able to rest his men. He had extricated the army without great loss, but the mortality among the non-combatants was severe. From Pura he followed the Bampur and Halil Rud rivers to Gulashkird in Carmania, where Craterus re­joined. Craterus had probably come by the Mulla pass, Candahar, and the Seistan lake, and had crossed the Lut by the ordinary route via Nazretabad. How Leonnatus got back is unknown.

Meanwhile Nearchus had left Kurachi. At Cocala he met Leonnatus, obtained provisions from the depot, and put all shirkers ashore and got fresh men. Thenceforth the log of the fleet resolves itself into the daily search for food and water along the inhospitable coast. Often they only got fish-meal and wild dates; sometimes they ran clean out, and Nearchus could not let the men ashore for fear of desertion. But they had some adventures. They found an enchanted mermaiden’s island(Astola)  they were alarmed by a school of whales, whom they charged in battle-order to the sound of the trumpet, giving thanks when the frightened monsters dived; and they discovered the Fish-eaters, the first savages any Greek had seen—a hairy stone-age people with wooden spears, who caught fish in the shallows with palm-bark nets and ate them raw or dried them in the sun and ground them into meal, wore fish-skins, and if well-to-do lived in huts built of the bones of stranded whales. At last the fleet sighted Ras Mussendam in Arabia, passed up the straits of Ormuz, and after an 80 days voy­age anchored in the Amanis river; they had only lost four ships. Nearchus landed, and after various adventures found Alexander, who had been terribly anxious about the fleet, for he knew what his failure to establish depots might mean. The reunited army and fleet forgot their hardships in a round of feasting and athletic sports, a necessary holiday, which legend perverted into the story of Alexander, dressed as Dionysus, reeling through Carmania at the head of a drunken rout. An Alexandria was founded at Gulashkird; then both army and fleet proceeded to Susa, which was reached in spring 324.

It was time that Alexander returned; his empire could not function by itself, and he found it in great confusion. Some satraps had enrolled mercenaries and acted as independent rulers; some of the Persian satraps had ill-used and murdered their subjects. Pretenders had appeared in Media and Carmania. The tomb of Cyrus and several temples had been plundered, and two-thirds of the enormous royal stud of horses in Nisaea stolen; three of the generals in Media had joined in the campaign of wrong-doing. Cleomenes in Egypt had been guilty of many abuses; Harpalus had acted as though king, and had already fled to Greece. Alex­ander was determined not to permit oppression of subjects, and he struck very hard. He put to death the Persian satraps of Persis, Susiana, Carmania, and Media Paraetacene, and also the three generals in Media, including Cleandcr and Sitalces, who had killed Parmenion. Craterus had already captured the Carmanian pretender; Atropates now brought in the Median, who was executed. Aristobulus was commissioned to restore Cyrus’ tomb; and all satraps were ordered to disband mercenaries enlisted for their private service. The vacant satrapies were perforce given to Macedonians. Tlepolemus received Carmania, and Sibyrtius three satrapies, Arachosia, Gedrosia and the Oreitae; the Indian satrapy of Philippus, who had been murdered, was entrusted provisionally to Eudamus and Taxiles. The most important matter was to quiet the minds of the Persians; Peucestas was made a Bodyguard and appointed satrap of Persis and Susiana. Peucestas was ready to carry out Alexander’s ideas as he understood them; he adopted Persian dress, learnt Persian, and became extremely popular with his people. One trouble, a revolt of Greek mercenaries in Bactria, was not really overcome; Amyntas was replaced by another Philippus, but the discontent simmered till Alexander died.

At Susa a strange incident happened. Alexander was supposed, while in India, to have been interested in some ascetics, living in meditation in the forest, who told him that his conquests meant nothing at all, and that he owned precisely what they owned, as much ground as you could stand on. One of them, Calanus, accompanied the army, and is said to have taught Lysimachus; but, if his teaching was to master yourself and not others, Lysimachus did not profit by it. At Susa Calanus fell ill, and told Alexander that he desired to live no longer. Alexander demurred; but Calanus had his way, a pyre was built, and the Indian burnt himself alive in the presence of the army, while the trumpets sounded and the elephants gave the royal salute. He was said to have prophesied Alexander’s death; he took farewell of the generals but not of Alexander, only saying to him ‘We shall meet again at Babylon.’

At Susa too a great feast was held to celebrate the conquest of the Persian empire, at which Alexander and 80 of his officers married girls of the Iranian aristocracy, he and Hephaestion wedding Darius’ daughters Barsine and Drypetis. It was an attempt to promote the fusion of Europe and Asia by intermarriage. Little came of it, for many of the bridegrooms were soon to die, and many others repudiated their Asiatic wives after Alex­ander’s death; Seleucus was an honourable and politic exception. At the same time 10,000 of the troops married native women. Alexander undertook to pay the army’s debts, and invited all debtors to inscribe their names. It is significant of the growing tension between him and his men that they at once suspected that this was merely a trick to discover those who had exceeded their pay; he thereon paid all comers in cash without asking names. But the tension grew from another cause. The governors of the new cities came bringing for enrolment in the army the 30,000 native youths who had received Macedonian training; this inflamed the discontent already aroused among the Macedonians by several of Alexander’s acts, the enrolment of Asiatic cavalry in the hipparchies and of Persian nobles in the agema, and the Persian dress worn by himself and Peucestas. Alexander, they felt, was no longer their own king, but an Asiatic ruler.

 

VIII. 

ALEXANDER’S DEIFICATION AND DEATH

 

It was now that Alexander issued his decree for the return to their cities of all Greek exiles and their families, except the Thebans. His object was twofold. He wished to remove the danger to security involved in this floating mass of homeless men, ready to serve anyone as mercenaries; in this sense the decree was the logical outcome of his order to his satraps to disband their private troops. He also entertained the impossible idea of putting an end to Greek faction-fights, with their accompaniments of banishment and confiscation, and securing unity in the Greek world, even at his own expense; for, just as in the Greek cities of Asia he had for this purpose restrained his friends the democrats, so he now proposed to recall, among others, his enemies, the democrats exiled through Antipater’s measures. Antipater had been interfering with the form of government, and the Greek democracies hated him. The story that, after Gaugamela, Alexander had ordered him to abolish his tyrants may not be true; but certainly a necessary condition of unity in Greece was his supersession. The attempt, however, to show that there was bad feeling between Alexander and Antipater is only later propaganda; there was in fact complete mutual loyalty, though doubtless Antipater wearied Alexander with his complaints, however well-founded, about Olympias; Alexander said Antipater could never understand that one tear of Olympias’ would outweigh all his despatches. But a new policy required a new man; and Alexander arranged that Craterus and Antipater should change places.

The recall of the exiles was in itself a wise and statesmanlike measure. But it was also a breach of the Covenant of the League of Corinth, which forbade interference with the internal affairs of the constituent states. Of course Alexander’s mere existence was a continuing breach of the Covenant, for in some cities his name was keeping a minority in power; the dead pressure on the League due to its President being also the autocrat of Asia was severe. That he could not help. But for his active breach of covenant he contemplated the strange remedy already foreshadowed by his attempt at Bactra to introduce prostration. The Covenant bound Alexander of Macedon; it would not bind Alexander the god; the way therefore to exercise authority in the cities was to become a god. The cities adopted this view, deified Alexander, and thereby, in form, condoned his breach of covenant. Subsequent events, however, seem to show that their action was in many cases an unwilling one, due to fear. If we look at facts, therefore, and not forms, we must conclude that Alexander was not justified in what he did; it was simply the old trouble of the world, doing wrong for a good end. There is nothing to show that he had any intention of doing away with Greek freedom; Craterus’ instructions to supervise the freedom of the Hellenes show that the exiles decree was treated as an exceptional measure and that the League was to continue as before. But Alexander had taken the first step on the road of interference in the internal affairs of the cities; and he had sworn not to interfere. That the interference was badly needed does not mend the matter. What it might have led him to, had he lived, cannot be said; we shall see to what it led Antigonus.

It is somewhat uncertain whether Alexander requested the Greek cities to recognize him actually as a god, or only as a son of Zeus. But though the two things had certainly once not been identical, there are sufficient indications that many men no longer drew distinctions between them; and probably Alexander did not. The matter was probably brought before the League states by his partisans in the several cities, but certainly the initiative came from him and not from the Greeks; Hypereides’ evidence seems conclusive, and in any case Athens (for instance), irreconcilably opposed to the exiles decree, would not of her own motion have conferred on Alexander the means whereby he could carry that decree into effect without a formal breach of the Covenant. But the fact that the initiative came from Alexander has no real bearing on his character, for his deification had no religious import. To educated Greeks the old State religions were spiritually dead, and Alexander’s deification was a product, not of re­ligious feeling, but of disbelief; while to Alexander himself it was merely a political measure adopted for a limited political purpose, to give him a foothold in autonomous Greek cities. Greek cities had deified living men before; and no one now objected except his political opponents, or a few old-fashioned people like Antipater, who really thought it impious. The Macedonians themselves were not affected, one way or another; and they were ready enough, at Eumenes’ suggestion, to worship Alexander once he was dead.

It was soon afterwards, at Opis, that the discontent in the army came to a head. Alexander was not trying to oust the Macedonians from their ancestral partnership with him, but they thought he was; he only wished to take it up into something larger, but they distrusted the changes entailed by a new world, and especially his Persian policy. The occasion was his proposal to send home with Craterus any veterans past service. The whole army except some of the hypaspists broke into open mutiny; all demanded to go home. Alexander’s temper rose; after ordering the hypaspists to arrest the ringleaders, he passionately harangued the troops, and ended by dismissing the whole army from his service: if they wished to go, let them go, every one of them, and boast that they had deserted Alexander. Then, after shutting himself up for two days, he called the Persian leaders to him and began to form a Persian army. This broke down the Macedonians; they gathered before his quarters, crying that they would not go away till he had pity on them. He came out and stood before them, with tears running down his face; one began to say ‘You have made Persians your kinsmen,’ and he broke in ‘But I make you all my kinsmen.’ The army burst into wild cheers; those who would kissed him; the reconciliation was complete. He made a banquet for 9000 men of the army, at which the Macedonians sat above the Persians and next himself; and after the libations he prayed for a union of hearts and a joint commonwealth of the two peoples. Those veterans who desired (10,000) were then sent home with large presents under Craterus’ leadership.

That autumn at Ecbatana his friend Hephaestion died, a severe blow to the king. Hephaestion was hardly popular; he had feuds with Craterus, Eumenes, and Olympias; but Alexander clung to him as his second self, the one man who could understand. He had revived for him the Persian office of chiliarch (vizier), which to Asiatics made him the second man in the empire, and had probably, after returning from India, collected what remained of the original Companions into one hipparchy, and given him the command. He now ordered that a royal pyre should be built in Babylon and Hephaestion be honoured as a hero. Hephaestion’s command was not filled up; his hipparchy was to bear his name for ever. No new chiliarch was appointed, but probably Perdiccas did the duties of the office. Alexander relieved his sorrow by a successful winter campaign in the hills of Luristan against the Cossaeans, who perhaps had demanded their customary black­mail for passage through their land. In the spring of 323 he returned to Babylon, which was destined for his capital; there envoys came to him from the Libyans and from three peoples of Italy—the Bruttians and Lucanians, who feared vengeance for the death of Alexander of Epirus, his brother-in-law, and the Etruscans, who desired freedom of the seas for their piracies.

He now again attacked the secret of the ocean. He sent Heracleides to explore the Hyrcanian sea, and ascertain if it might not after all be a gulf of Ocean—an old theory, known to but discarded by Aristotle; the project was abandoned on his death. He himself turned his attention to the Persian Gulf. He took steps to ensure better communication between Babylonia and the sea by removing the Persian obstacles to free navigation of the Tigris and founding an Alexandria on the Gulf, which, refounded later as Charax-Mesene, became an important trade centre; and he began to build a vast harbour-basin for merchantmen at Babylon. He also planned to colonize the eastern coast of the Gulf, along which Nearchus had sailed, and sent 500 talents to Sidon to be coined for the hire or purchase of sailors and colonists. This would help to establish the already explored sea-route between India and Babylon; but he meant to complete the sea-route from India to Egypt by exploring the section between Babylon and Egypt and circumnavigating Arabia, possibly as a preliminary to Stillmore extensive maritime exploration in the future. He therefore planned an expedition along the Arabian coast, and for this purpose had a few larger warships, including quinqueremes, built in sections in Phoenicia, carried to Thapsacus, and floated down the Eu­phrates. It was to be primarily a naval expedition, though supported by troops, and the 'Journal shows that he himself was going with the fleet; it was reported that he did not mean to make Arabia a province under a satrap. He knew little of Arabia except the districts bordering on Babylonia and Syria, once subject (rather nominally) to Persia; Nearchus had sighted Ras Mussendam, but it might have been an island. Being ignorant of its size, he attempted a preliminary circumnavigation from both sides; he sent a ship south from the gulf of Suez which reached the incense­land of Yemen and heard of the Hadramaut, and three triakonters down the Persian Gulf. One discovered the island of Bahrein; Hieron of Soli, whose orders were to sail round to Suez, followed the Arabian coast down to Ras Mussendam, and wisely reported that Arabia must be nearly as big as India.

While the fleet was preparing, Alexander sailed down the Euphrates to study the Babylonian canal-system, and especially the Pallakopas cut, which carried off the flood water of the river; it was not working well, and he devised a better method for keeping the Euphrates at the proper level for irrigation; he also founded a city on the Chaldean side of the lower Euphrates as an outpost toward Arabia. The story was told that on the voyage his diadem blew off and lodged on a rush; a sailor swam out for it, and to keep it dry placed it on his head; later a legend grew up that the man who for a moment had worn Alexander’s diadem was Seleucus. On his return to Babylon Alexander is said to have remodelled the phalanx, incorporating Persian light-armed, a step in which some have detected a knowledge of the Roman legion; later tactical manuals mention its occasional employment. Antipater’s eldest son Cassander now came to him, to answer accusations against Antipater made by some Illyrians and Thracians. Also there came many envoys from Greece, with petitions on innumerable questions raised by the exiles decree; they came garlanded, as though they had been religious envoys sent to a god.

They set the stage for the final scene. For in the midst of his preparations for the Arabian expedition Alexander was struck down by a fever, which his constitution, weakened by over­exertion and wounds, could not throw off. The Journal relates that for some days he continued his preparations, offering the usual sacrifices and discussing the coming expedition with his generals and Ocean with Nearchus, till he became too ill to move; then he was carried into Nebuchadrezzar’s palace, already past speech. The army insisted on seeing him, and would take no denial; in silence the veterans filed through the room where the dying man lay, just able to raise his head in token of recognition and farewell. That night several of the generals inquired of some Babylonian god if Alexander should be brought into his temple; the oracle replied that it would be best for him where he was. Two days later, at sunset, he died; for that was best. He died on the 13th of June 323; he was not yet 33 years old, and had reigned twelve years and eight months.

 

IX. 

ALEXANDER’S CHARACTER AND POLICY

 

He was fortunate in his death. His fame could hardly have increased; but it might perhaps have been diminished. For he died with the real task yet before him. He had made war as few have made it; it remained to be seen if he could make peace. He had, like Columbus, opened up a new world; it remained to be seen what he could do with it. No man since has possessed so unquestionably the strongest power upon earth; had he desired, he could have conquered Carthage or Rome, just as (so Chandragupta said) he could have conquered northern India. But he could have done nothing with them had he conquered them; he could do nothing even with the Punjab. But there is no reason to suppose that he had formed any design of world-conquest; the belief that he had rests on a late and unauthentic compilation which passed as his ‘Memoirs,’ and attributed to him a scheme for the conquest of the countries round the Mediterranean, a scheme which the Romance afterwards made him carry into effect. In fact, he had not yet completed the conquest of the one-time Persian empire; a great block of territory stretching from Heraclea to the Caspian—Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Armenia, the Cadusii of Gilan—had become independent. His desire to reach the eastern Ocean had, as already noticed, nothing to do with world-conquest, i.e. with a desire to round off his empire on all sides with Ocean; had it had, he would not have turned at the Jaxartes, where (with Aristotle) he thought Ocean quite close, and he would have sent Heracleides to conquer, and not explore, the Caspian. He never even, like the Achaemenids, called himself King of Kings. That he aimed at world-dominion, as many believe, is a legend which derives ultimately from the Amon-ritual, in which Amon promised to many Pharaohs the dominion of the earth; it can only be supported, if at all, on the ground that, if Alexander desired to fuse the peoples under his rule in a common polity and culture, he must necessarily have desired so to fuse all peoples. As a theory this is open to belief, like any theory; but history has no right to attribute any such ideas to Alexander. What he would have aimed at, had he lived, we do not know; we can only try to see what he was and what he did. 

His personality was adequate to great tasks. Aristotle had presumably taught him that man’s highest good lay in right activity of the soul; he had modified this for himself into strenuous energy of soul and body both. He had crowded as much into his short life as he could; when he died, his body was half worn out. But his vitality of mind was unimpaired; and his mind could generally make his body do what it chose. For, as Plutarch says, he thought it more kingly to conquer himself than others; and he gives a strangely vivid impression of one whose body was his servant. This is the key to his attitude toward women; apart from his mother, he apparently never cared for any woman; he apparently never had a mistress, and his two marriages were mere affairs of policy. When he called his beautiful Persian captives ‘painful to the eyes,’ what he meant is, in Plutarch’s narrative, fairly obvious: women were merely incitements to the rebellion of the body. The phenomenon has since become well known; but it made Alexander, to his contemporaries, seem either more, or less, than a man. It meant a will of iron; but even his will was inadequate for one end, the control of his temper. The son of Olympias was bound to be shaken by devastating gusts of passion; but though this showed in impatience, in irritability, in decisions repented of later, only once, apparently, did he absolutely lose control; then his wrath swept to its goal in total disregard of every other consideration, human or divine. The murder of Cleitus gives a fearful glimpse of the wild beast in him that he had to keep chained; his anguish after the deed was perhaps not only for his friend but for himself. It gives too a glimpse of the power of will that could usually keep such a beast chained. But if his temperament led him sometimes to grievous acts of injustice, it led him also to acts of justice far in advance of his time, like his unheard-of step of ordering Parmenion to put two Macedonians on trial for rape and kill them like animals if convicted., What his force of character was like can be best seen, not in his driving power, great as it was, but in his relations with his generals. Here was an assembly of kings, with passions, ambitions, abilities, beyond those of most men; and, while he lived, all we see is that Perdiccas and Ptolemy were good brigade-leaders, Antigonus an obedient satrap, Lysimachus and Peithon little-noticed members of the Staff; even on the masterful Cassander he so imposed himself during their brief acquaintance that Cassander, when king himself, could not pass a statue of Alexander without shivering.

These are some of the things that seem to stand out most clearly in his picture. But there was another side, which cannot be overlooked; a romanticism which was kindled by the exploits of Achilles and Heracles, Semiramis and Cyrus, and burst into flame under the glamour of the East; something too of the mystic which set him apart from others as the man whom Ammon had counselled, and who possibly felt himself an instrument of the gods. From this side of him, obscurely as we see it, sprang what was probably the most important thing about him: he was a great dreamer. To be mystical and intensely practical, to dream greatly and to do greatly, is not given to many men; it is this combination which gives Alexander his place apart in history. There were of course terrible crimes in his record—the destruction of Thebes, the murder of Parmenion, the Massaga massacre—the sins of a young and imperious man who meant to rule because he could. None need palliate them; perhaps those only who have known the temptations of power can judge.

That he was a great general is certain; Napoleon’s verdict suffices. The few who have doubted have either believed the fantastic legend which makes the Persian armies huge, useless mobs, or have suggested that his success was due to Parmenion and the Staff. Alexander started of course with the advantage of Philip’s army; but Parmenion’s death made no apparent difference, while his Staff in Turkestan and India were men he had trained himself. Probably he was not tested to the full, unless at Tyre and on the Jhelum; but that he would have been equal to almost any test is shown by the manner in which he met every opponent with different but appropriate tactics; he handled the unknown foe—desert Turcomans, Indian hill-tribes, Porus’ elephants—with the same certainty as Greek hoplites or Persian cavalry. If he charged himself, so did every general before Hannibal; the use of reserves was practically unknown, and the moral effect all-important. In fact, he did use something like reserves at Gaugamela, and did not charge there till they were all in. He was a master in the combination of various arms; he taught the world the advantages of campaigning in winter, the value of pressing pursuit to the utmost, and the principle of “march divided, fight united”. He marched usually in two divisions, one conducting the impedimenta and his own travelling light; his speed of movement was extraordinary. It is said that he attributed his military success to ‘never putting anything off.’ He understood absolutely how’ to keep his men’s affection; and though their moral broke at the Beas, he had maintained it intact during eight strenuous years. He discovered the value of amusements in this respect, and held athletic and musical contests at every important halting-place. The enormous distances traversed in unknown country imply a very high degree of organizing ability; in ten years he had only two serious breakdowns, his intelligence before Issus and his commissariat in Gedrosia, the latter partly due to the bad luck of Apollophanes’ death. The truth is, that his success was too complete. Perfect success invariably looks easy; but had a lesser man attempted what he achieved, and failed, we should have heard enough of the hopeless military difficulties of the undertaking. Did Crassus or Antony find the invasion of Persia easy?

Whether he was a great statesman is a more difficult question. Our information is inadequate, and his work was only beginning when death cut it short; no formal answer is possible. Something was wanted to divert his energy whole-heartedly from war and exploration to administration. The chaos in his empire when he returned from India should have called out his powers in this direction; but he was preoccupied with the completion of the sea­route from India to Egypt, and he merely hanged some satraps and appointed others. Unless in the Punjab, he had nowhere gone beyond the boundaries of Darius I; and he naturally retained the Persian system of satraps. But it does not follow that that system would have been his last word. He abolished it in Egypt, and substituted an arrangement more enlightened than that which the Ptolemies subsequently adopted; he partially abolished it in the Punjab, where his satrap was only a Resident. Even in Iran it may have been largely provisional. For if, as is probable, the Alexandrias were meant to be satrapal seats, then there were too many of them, e.g. three in Bactria-Sogdiana and two in Arachosia. The separation of the Indian districts west of the Indus, and the formation of little satrapies like those of Media Paraetacene and the Oreitae, coupled with the number of Alexandrias, suggest that he may have meant ultimately to break up the great satrapies into smaller and more manageable units, a gain to centralization. In any event he greatly restricted the satraps’ powers; they lost the right to collect taxes and (except at Babylon) to strike coins, while the chief fortresses were held by governors directly responsible to himself. Any subject who was wronged could, as in Macedonia, appeal to Alexander direct. For any­thing but satrapal government in some form Asia was not ripe; whether it would ripen must depend on the measures adopted to that end, and time. It will be convenient to consider Alexander’s measures for his empire generally under four heads: finance, cities, fusion, and the general question of co-ordination. His dealings with the Greek cities have already been considered. To treat the Greeks as free allies was indeed a most statesmanlike policy, which offered the one chance of Greek unity, had the Greeks been willing to co-operate; but the policy was largely originated by Philip.

 

X. 

FINANCE AND THE NEW CITIES

 

Alexander’s financial superintendents were a new and important thing, and the system survived his death. Probably they and their district subordinates were meant to form a comprehensive Civil Service, with Harpalus at its head, which would link up king and peasant. Unfortunately we do not know in what relation they stood to the satraps, or how the latter obtained the necessary funds for administering their satrapies. Harpalus’ position however was superior to that of any satrap; he could give the satraps orders, and this explains how he tried to lord it as king during Alexander’s absence, an extraordinary phenomenon in a civilian without military powers. His successor Antimenes introduced the first known scheme of insurance. The system should have benefited the peasantry by preventing indiscriminate exactions; and we hear of no complaint that taxes were too high. But during Alexander’s absence it did not work well. Harpalus, himself corrupt, was not the man to repress exactions; the satraps, by ways familiar in Asia, got money enough to raise private armies; and a surviving document gives rather a lurid account of the sins of some of the financial officials. It may be liberally discounted, for it represents an attempt by some Peripatetic to belittle Alex­nder’s administration; but the doings of the worst offender, Cleomenes, are corroborated from better sources. True, his famous corner in grain did not hurt the Egyptian cultivator, to whom he paid the usual price, even if his prohibition of any export but his own half ruined the Egyptian middleman; and he probably thought it clever to make huge profits out of Greek cities for the benefit of Alexander’s treasury. That Alexander for other reasons condoned his proceedings is one of the most disappointing things about him.

Of great importance was the coinage. The problem was to reconcile the decimal coinage of Persia (1 gold daric= 20 silver sigloi) with the duodecimal of Philip II (1 gold stater, Attic standard= 24 silver drachmae, Phoenician standard). Alexander did it by reverting to a silver monometallism and adopting the Attic standard, thus making the stater = 20 silver drachmae, which, though lighter than sigloi, were accepted in Asia. He thus refrained from competing with Athens’ coinage, and practically made her a trade partner; but he demonetized the Persian gold, for as the hoarded treasures of Darius began to circulate gold fell below Philip’s basic ratio, and the daric became bullion. The uniform coinage powerfully promoted trade, but whether the credit for the adoption of the Attic standard as an auxiliary in conquering Asia belongs to Alexander may be doubted; for as he adopted the new standard the moment Philip died, it may be that Philip had already decided on the change. Only two countries disliked the new coinage—conservative India, and the Balkans, which Alexander had neglected. He continued to use nearly all the existing Persian mints, except Tyre and Gaza. But his principal mint was at Amphipolis, with Babylon second in importance; next came the Phoenician group (Sidon, Byblus, Ake, Damascus), the Cilician (Tarsus and Alexandria by Issus, with the independent Cyprian mints), and Alexandria in Egypt; there were many others, including Pella and Sicyon. His mints must have been controlled by royal officials, but to whom these were responsible is unknown; Tarsus however became the financial centre for Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, and Harpalus had his seat there as well as at Babylon. But Alexander showed his wisdom by not forcing the new coinage wholesale on the great trading centres, Phoenicia, Cilicia, and Babylon; there he still permitted the old coinage to be struck also, as a temporary measure.

These were two great financial reforms. But the treasury still remained identical with the king’s privy purse; and when Alexander’s natural generosity and his enormous expenditure are considered, one wonders whether, had he lived, he would have been able to balance his accounts. He gave 2000 talents to the Thessalians and allies, and a talent each to the 10,000 discharged Macedonian veterans; 20,000 talents were used to pay the army’s debts, and 15,000 for gold crowns for the generals; at the marriages at Susa he gave dowries to 80 noble Persian girls and 10,000 women of the people; he allocated 10,000 talents to Hephaestion’s pyre and (possibly) 10,000 to restore temples in Hellas; and there were presents for Indian princes, artistes, and learned men, including 800 talents for Aristotle’s researches. He had too an amazing programme of works in hand when he died; it included many unfinished cities; the new docks and harbours at Patala and Babylon; improved harbour-works at Clazomenae and Erythrae; the rebuilding of E-sagila, destroyed by Xerxes, where the arduous work of merely clearing the site of ruins was still going on in 310; the restoration and amelioration of the Babylonian canal system; the draining of Lake Copais. Except Hephaestion’s pyre, most of this expenditure was justifiable in itself. The army was entitled to share Darius’ gold; the dowries were part of a great policy; the Indian princes gave as much as they received; most of the works would have been remunerative, and E-sagila was provided for by special local taxation. But if we add the expenses of the war, and the money squandered and stolen by Harpalus, the tradition may be correct that, in spite of Alexander’s large (unknown) revenue, out of all the treasure he had secured only 50,000 talents remained at his death.

We come to the cities. Isocrates had advised Philip to build cities in Asia; and Alexander was the greatest city-builder of all time. He is said to have founded 70; some 25 are known for certain. The conditions of foundation varied greatly. There were absolutely new cities, like Alexandria in Egypt and Chodjend; royal residences or old sites turned into cities, like Candahar and Herat; existing towns enlarged and hellenized, like Alexandretta. Besides these, there were towns that failed and were refounded by others, like Merv; towns that he planned and others built, like Smyrna; towns that other builders attributed to him or that attributed themselves; lastly, towns given him by romance, like Samarcand and Sian-fu. In this respect his successors carried out his policy whole-heartedly; all caught his inspiration and became great builders. He initiated what became a vast scheme of colonization in Asia, differing from the older Greek colonization in that it was deliberately planned, that many cities were not on the sea, and that the settlers were not drawn from single cities but were mixed. The typical Alexandria was settled with Greek mercenaries, traders, natives, and a few Macedonians. But this was only to start with. For the Greek mercenaries had native wives, and were not the best medium for the spread of Greek culture; Alexander probably meant to send out further settlers, and above all European women; otherwise the towns would soon have become simply Asiatic, for nationality depends primarily on the mother. That Asia was not more hellenized than it was arose simply from there not being enough Greeks in the world. They had to be collected into comparatively few towns; they never spread over the country. It has been suggested that it would have been better for Greek civilization had Alexander confined his conquests to Asia Minor, which could have been governed from Europe, and attempted a more intensive hellenization. In this event, however, Greeks would not have secured a share in the great trade routes; they could not do both.

Simple hellenization, moreover, was not his object; and he did not, like Eumenes and possibly Antigonus, propose to oust any Iranian landowners. As his marriage to Roxane had guaranteed her class, and he meant the Iranian landowners and the new towns to coexist, it cannot be supposed that his ultimate aim was an empire divided up into city states; for, as the new towns were designed to promote the fusion of Europe and Asia on a basis of Greek culture, they were probably not autonomous Greek cities (or they must have possessed city-land), but a new mixed type. Except for Doura-Europos, founded by Antigonus I’s general Nicanor after Alexander’s model, much of what we know about Alexander’s towns relates to Alexandria in Egypt, and there it is impossible to distinguish what is original and what not; but the type was doubtless due to Alexander, for Ptolemy I’s foundation Ptolemais was an autonomous Greek city. A provisional sketch of one of the Alexandrias under Alexander may therefore be attempted. It was founded on King’s land, and the succession law of Doura-Europos shows that the land given it for settlers’ allotments remained King’s land, the king retaining the right of escheat; it had no city-land. The town itself would consist of a Greek corporation and probably other national corporations —Thracians, Persians, etc.—each possessing certain quasi-autonomous rights; probably also a few privileged Macedonians, and some local natives. The Greek corporation was much the most important; they were ‘the citizens,’ ‘the Alexandrians.’ The constitutive law of the city, given by Alexander, created officials of Greek type and prescribed their duties; these must have acted for the whole city, e.g. the astynomi would look after all the streets, whatever the nationality of the householders. It seems probable that there was neither Council nor Assembly; but there were autonomous Greek law-courts which, independently of the king, administered a body of private law formed by royal rescripts and the ‘city law,’ this last a code based on, or taken bodily from, that of some leading Greek city. This code may have been settled by a commission (nomographi) appointed at Alexander’s instance; but doubtless in the more remote foundations he merely ordered that some well-known code should be adopted. The important thing is that all the inhabitants were in practice subject, not only to the king’s rescripts, largely based on Greek legal conceptions, but probably also to the ‘city law,’which was in principle the personal law of the Greek ‘citizens’; at Doura the succession to all allotments was regulated by Greek law. Thus there might develop a territorial law embracing the whole city; and possibly Alexander deliberately meant to use Greek law, rather than political rights, as one means of unifying these mixed city populations. One recalls that his financial superintendents leased King’s land in Asia according to Greek law.

Politically these towns, unlike the Greek cities, were subject to governors appointed by Alexander, and possibly to his satraps. They thus approximated somewhat to the native subject towns; and it is related that the Greeks settled in the far East refused to regard this mixed system as Hellenic ‘life and training.’ Whether Alexander intended that these towns should, after a period of probation, acquire full autonomous Greek rights cannot be said; possibly some did later. The gift of King’s land to a number of towns would diminish the royal revenue; probably therefore the allottees paid an equivalent in taxes, whether directly or through the towns.

 

XI. 

THE EMPIRE: ALEXANDER’S PERSONALITY

 

Next, Alexander’s policy of the fusion of races. It was a great and courageous dream, which, as he planned it, failed. Greek blood had once been mixed with Asiatic (Carian) in Ionia with good results, and Alexander might fairly suppose that a Graeco­Persian blend would be successful; he could not guess that the intermarriage of Europe and further Asia would often result in the loss of the good qualities of both. But it is doubtful whether, even had he lived, he could have carried out his idea of a joint commonwealth; for his system of Iranian satraps had broken down before he died. Of eighteen appointed, two soon died, one retired, and two are not again heard of; but ten were either removed for incompetence or executed for murder of subjects or treason, and were replaced by Macedonians. The three who alone held office when Alexander died were doubtless good men; never­theless Atropates certainly, and Oxyartes possibly, ended by founding independent Iranian kingdoms, while from Phrata- phernes’ satrapy of Parthia-Hyrcania came later the main Iranian reaction. In fact, Alexander had come into conflict with the idea of nationality, which was exhibited, not merely in the national war fought by Sogdiana, but in the way in which, even during his lifetime, independent states like Cappadocia and Armenia under Iranian rulers arose along the undefined northern limits of his empire. But of course, owing to his death, his policy never had a fair trial. The Seleucid kings indeed, half Sogdian in blood, were a direct outcome of that policy, and they did carry out parts of it; they transferred Europeans to Asia, employed, though sparingly, Asiatics in high position, and produced a marvellous mixture of east and west. But it was not done on Alexander’s lines or in his spirit; the Macedonian meant to be, and was, the dominant race. What Alexander did achieve was again done through the cities, both his own and those which he inspired Seleucus to found, and it was a great enough achievement; the cities radiated Greek culture throughout Asia till ultimately the bulk of the upper classes over considerable districts became partially hellenized, and for the second time certain Hellenic elements crossed the Hindu Kush from Bactria into India. What he did succeed in ultimately giving to parts of western Asia was not political equality with Greece, but community of culture.

Lastly, we have to consider the question of the coordination of the empire. That empire was even more complicated than the British. In Egypt Alexander was an autocrat and a god. In Iran he was an autocrat, but not a god. In the Greek cities he was a god, but not an autocrat. In Macedonia he was neither autocrat nor god, but a quasi-constitutional king over against whom his people enjoyed certain customary rights. In Thessaly he was the elected head for life of the Thessalian League; in the Amphictyonic League a man who owned two votes. The greater number of the Greek cities of Asia and Europe (outside Italy and Sicily) were his free and independent allies, in respect of whom his rights and duties were formulated and limited by the Covenant of the League of Corinth; but many Greek cities both in Europe and Asia had no relations with him at all. The Phoenician kings were subject allies; the Cyprian kings were free allies, who coined gold, the token of independence. Persepolis possibly kept her native priest-kings, from whom was to spring the Sassanian dynasty; the High Priests still governed Judaea according to the Law; the temple states of Asia Minor retained their strange matriarchal and theocratic social system unchanged. To the Iranian land­owners he was feudal superior. In Lydia and Babylon he had voluntarily limited his autocracy by native custom; Caria retained her native league of Zeus Chrysaoreus; part of Seistan was autonomous. With the peoples of the Punjab he had no point of contact; their real organization was the village community, and Alexander was merely the suzerain of certain rajahs who happened to be ruling certain groups of villages. The co-ordination of this heterogeneous mass of rights was not going to be achieved by Alexander claiming (as some believe he claimed) to be the divine ruler of the inhabited world.

Fortunately there is no reason for attributing to him any such idea. He was deified in 324 by and for the Greek world only, as a limited political measure; Greece apart, his deification had no bearing on the co-ordination of his empire. He did not claim to be the only god, or even the supreme god. There is no trace of any common official cult of himself in his empire; his head does not (as it would then have done) appear on the Alexander-coinage; his successor in the empire, Philip III, was not even a god at all, except in Egypt. That Alexander, like every Pharaoh, was divine in Egypt has no bearing on the matter; the point is, that he was not divine in Iran. Zoroastrianism knew nothing of, and had no place for, deified men; and it is noteworthy that on the coins which Agathocles of Bactria struck to commemorate his predecessors, though the Greeks Diodotus and Euthydemus are gods, Alexander is not[LXVI]. We cannot read back into the tentative events of Alexander’s life considerations which, if they arise at all, arise from the more extended worship of him under his successors and from the phenomena of Roman Imperialism.

Whether indeed he ever meant to try to co-ordinate his empire, and if so how, we do not know. It is unlikely that he had any cut and dried theories on the subject; but he had initiated various measures which, in their degree, made for unity, and he would probably have gone on in the same way, step by step, taking things as they arose. Trade, the coinage, the new mixed cities, might do something; something more might be done by intermarriage, by training native youths in Graeco-Macedonian fashion, by giving Persians_a share in the government. Babylon was probably selected for capital as being neutral ground between Greek and Persian, though it is not certain that Alexandria in Egypt was not meant to be a joint capital. But the true unifying force was lacking; there was no common idea, or ideal. The United States has turned men of many countries into Americans by force of the American idea. Britain and the Dominions are held together by a common idea stronger than any formal bond. There was no equivalent in Alexander’s empire; there was no common term even between Greek and Persian. To two of the great contributions made by Greece to the world’s progress, freedom of action (so far as it went) and freedom of thought, Persia was a stranger; and to incorporate Persia in the empire at all Alexander had to diminish Greek freedom of action; his new cities were probably not autonomous Greek foundations, and with the Greek cities themselves he began to interfere. But if Persia could only be incorporated by lowering Greek political values, then politically the empire stood condemned from the start.

Security of course it could and would have given, had Alexander lived; and behind that shield it might have developed those possibilities of ethical and intellectual progress which constituted Alexander’s greatest gift to Asia, and might, given time enough, have achieved complete unity of culture and therefrom created a common idea. But all this was hypothetical, and dependent on a single life; and, as a fact, up to Alexander’s death, the empire was held together solely by himself and his (mixed) army; that is, it resembled the empire of the Hapsburgs. And a further source of weakness was that the ultimate care of everything—the army, administration, law,—fell upon himself personally, entailing a stupendous amount of work; probably only his habit of occasion­ally sleeping for 36 hours kept him going; certainly toward the end he was growing more impatient and irritable. His one attempt at comprehensive delegation turned out unhappily, owing to Harpalus’ unworthiness. Nevertheless, had he lived his full term, and trained a son, his empire, for all its defects politically, might well have achieved a cohesion beyond our Belief; it needed the supreme shock of all history to break up that of the Hapsburgs, and we have to reckon, as a moulding force, with Alexander’s astounding personality.

For when all is said, we come back at the end to his personality; not the soldier or the statesman, but the man. Whatever Asia did or did not get from him, she felt him as she has scarcely felt any other; she knew that one of the greatest of the earth had passed. Though his direct influence vanished from India within a generation, and her literature does not know him, he affected Indian history for centuries; for Chandragupta saw him and deduced the possibility of realizing in actual fact the conception, handed down from Vedic times, of a comprehensive monarchy in India; hence Alexander indirectly created Asoka’s empire and enabled the spread of Buddhism. Possibly his example even inspired the unification of China under the first Han dynasty. Both flanks of the Hindu Kush are still crowded with the imagined descendants of the man who left none to succeed him; in Chitral, Gilgit, Hunza, and elsewhere on the Indian side they cluster thick, in places intermarrying only with each other; the white Kafirs are his Macedonians; in the middle ages his line still ruled even at Minnagara in the Indus Delta. Northward his descendants are found in Wakhan, Darwas, Karategin, Badakshan, and Ferghana; in Margelan of Ferghana his red silk banner is shown, and his tomb honoured as a shrine; the Mirs of Badakshan used to cherish a debased Greek patera as an heirloom, and their very horses descended from Bucephalas. Along the Indian frontier innumer­able traditions attach to his name. But all the countries claimed him as theirs. In Persian story he became a son of Ochus by Philip’s daughter; in Egyptian, a son of the last native Pharaoh, the magician Nectanebo, who in the guise of Ammon had de­ceived Olympias. In Jewish legend he was the Two-horned, the precursor of the Messiah; and as Dhulcarnein, the Two-horned, he became one of the heroes of Islam. The Bedouin thought that Napoleon was Iskander come again; in France he ended as a knight of chivalry, in Abyssinia as a Christian saint.

Hardly was he dead when legend became busy with his ter­rible name, and strove to give him that world-kingdom which he never sought in life. Around him the whole dream-world of the East took shape and substance; of him every old story of a divine world-conqueror was told afresh. More than eighty versions of the Alexander-romance, in twenty-four languages, have been collected, some of them the wildest of fairy-tales; they range from Britain to Malaya; no other story in the world has spread like his. Long before Islam the Byzantines knew that he had traversed the Silk Route and founded Chubdan, the great Han capital of Sian-fu; while the Graeco-Egyptian Romance made him subdue both Rome and Carthage, and compensated him for his failure to reach the eastern Ocean by taking him through the gold and silver pillars of his ancestor Heracles to sail the western. In Jewish lore he becomes master of the Throne of Solomon, and the High Priest announces him as ruler of the fourth world-kingdom of Daniel’s prophecy; he shuts up Gog and Magog behind the Iron Gate of Derbend, and bears on his shoulders the hopes of the whole earth; one thing alone is forbidden him, to enter the cloud-girdled Earthly Paradise. The national legend of Iran, in which the man who in fact brought the first knowledge of the Avesta to Europe persecutes the fire-worshippers and burns the sacred book, withers away before the romance of the world-ruler; in Persian story he conquers India, crosses Thibet, and subdues the Faghfur of China with all his dependencies; then he turns and goes northward across Russia till he comes to the Land of Darkness. But Babylon, as was fitting, took him farthest; for the Babylon-inspired section of the Romance knows that he passed beyond the Darkness and reached the Well of Life at the world’s end, on the shores of the furthest ocean of them all.

The real impress that he left on the world was far different; for, whatever else he was, he was one of the supreme fertilizing forces of history. He lifted the civilized world out of one groove and set it in another; he started a new epoch; nothing could again be as it had been. He greatly enlarged the bounds of knowledge and of, human endeavour, and gave to Greek science and Greek civilization a scope and an opportunity such as they had never yet possessed. Particularism was replaced by the idea of the ‘inhabited world,’ the common possession of civilized men; trade and commerce were internationalized, and the ‘inhabited world’ bound together by a network both of new routes and cities, and of common interests. Greek culture, heretofore practically confined to Greeks, spread throughout that world; and for the use of its inhabitants, in place of the many dialects of Greece, there grew up the form of Greek known as the Koine, the ‘common speech.’ The Greece that taught Rome was the Hellenistic world which Alexander made; the old Greece counted for little till modern scholars recreated Periclean Athens. So far as the modern world derives its civilization from Greece, it largely owes it to Alexander that it had the opportunity. If he could not fuse races, he transcended the national state; and to transcend national states meant to transcend national cults; men came to feel after the unity which must lie beneath the various religions. Outwardly, this unity was ultimately satisfied in the official worship of the Roman Emperor, which derived from Alexander’s claim to divinity; but beside this external form there grew up in men’s hearts the longing for a true spiritual unity. And it was Alexander who created the medium in which the idea, when it came, was to spread. For it was due to him that Greek civilization penetrated western Asia; and even if much of the actual work was done by his successors, he broke the path; without him they would not have been. Consequently, when at last Christianity showed the way to that spiritual unity after which men were feeling, there was ready to hand a medium for the new religion to spread in, the common Hellenistic civilization of the ‘inhabited world’; without that, the conquests made by Christianity might have been as slow and difficult as they became when the bounds of that common civilization were overpassed.

But if the things he did were great, one thing he dreamt was greater. We may put it that he found the Ideal State of Aristotle, and substituted the Ideal State of Zeno. It was not merely that he overthrew the narrow restraints of the former, and, in place of limiting men by their opportunity, created opportunities adequate for men in a world where none need be a pauper and restrictions on population were meaningless. Aristotle’s State had still cared nothing for humanity outside its own borders; the stranger must still be a serf or an enemy. Alexander changed all that. When he prayed for a union of hearts and a joint commonwealth of Macedonians and Persians, he proclaimed for the first time, through a brotherhood of peoples, the brotherhood of man. True, it perhaps meant to him only a brotherhood of certain aristocracies, though he is reported to have said that all men were sons of one Father; but he, first of all men, was ready to transcend national differences, and to declare, as Paul was to declare, that there was neither Greek nor barbarian. And the impulse of this mighty revelation was continued by men to whom it did not mean a brotherhood of aristocracies; for Zeno, who treated his slave as himself, and Seneca, who called himself the fellow-slave of his slaves, would (though Alexander might not) have understood Paul when he added ‘there is neither bond nor free.’ Before Alexander, men’s dreams of the ideal state had still been based on class-rule and slavery; but after him comes Iambulus’ great Sun­state, founded on brotherhood and the dignity of free labour. Above all, Alexander inspired Zeno’s vision of a world in which all men should be members one of another, citizens of one State without distinction of race or institutions, subject only to and in harmony with the Common Law immanent in the Universe, and united in one social life not by compulsion but only by their own willing consent, or (as he put it) by Love. The splendour of this hopeless dream may remind us that not one but two of the great lines of social-political thought that have divided the world since go back to Alexander of Macedon. For if, as many believe, there is a line of descent from his divine kingship, through Roman Emperor and mediaeval Pope, to the great despotisms of yesterday, despotisms ‘by the grace of God,’ there is certainly a line of descent from his prayer at Opis, through the Stoics and one portion of the Christian ideal, to that brotherhood of all men which was proclaimed, though only proclaimed, in the French Revolution. The torch Alexander lit for long only smouldered; perhaps it still only smoulders today; but it never has been, and never can be, quite put out.

 

 

CHAPTER XIV

GREECE: 335 TO 321 BC