After some spectacular campaigning in Persis proper, Alexander occupied the palace of Persepolis, where the strong defensive position known as the “Persian Gates” was taken only after an unsuccessful and costly initial assault. The palace of Persepolis was looted and burned (spring 330). The less-creditable tradition of the vulgate maintains that the fire started when a drunken Athenian courtesan called Thais led a revel that got out of hand, and this may well be right. The event, however, could be exploited afterward as a signal to dissident Greeks at home that the “war of revenge” was complete.
To establish securely the propaganda value of the burning of Persepolis would require a more-precise chronology for the phases of that Greek dissidence than is ever likely to be achieved. The last fling of 4th-century Sparta was a revolt led by its king Agis III. It was probably still going on in 330 when it culminated in a narrow victory by the Macedonian general Antipater over the Spartans at Megalopolis. If this is right, the burning of Persepolis at about this time makes good propaganda sense. Athens had not participated in the revolt. The quiescence of Athens in the early years of Alexander’s campaigning is to be explained partly by the policy of civic retrenchment associated with the name of Lycurgus (a phase of Athenian history that included a remarkable building program, the first since the 5th century) and partly by a well-attested grain shortage in Greece, which may have sapped the will to fight. The conquest of Bactria and the Indus valley
By the middle of 330 Darius had been killed—not by Alexander but by his own entourage. Alexander now adopted symbolic features of Persian royal dress, but one of Darius’s noble followers (and murderers)—Bessus, the satrap of Bactria—also proclaimed himself king. The reckoning with Bessus, however, had to be postponed until the middle of 329. Alexander, who had initially followed Darius north, now moved steadily east, through Hyrcania and Areia, where Satibarzanes was confirmed as satrap; Alexander planned an invasion of Bactria and the elimination of Bessus. Satibarzanes, however, revolted almost instantly, and Alexander turned south again to deal with that rebellion. Having done so (though without taking the satrap himself), he maintained direction southward, toward Arachosia and Drangiana, home satrapies of Barsaentes, another of Darius’s murderers. Barsaentes, however, fled to India.
At Phrada, capital of Drangiana, occurred the most-famous conspiracy of Alexander’s expedition: that of Philotas, the son of Parmenio and a commander of the Companion cavalry. There was little solid evidence for the prosecution to go on, but it is clear that Alexander’s Orientalizing tendencies and the ever-more-personal style of Alexander’s kingship had begun to irk his Macedonian nobility, accustomed as they were to express themselves freely, as in the outspoken court of Philip’s day. Philotas had no doubt spoken very incautiously on some sensitive subjects, such as Alexander’s visit to Amon. The execution of Philotas entailed the execution of his father Parmenio as well, not because there was any serious suggestion that he too had been plotting but as a matter of practical politics; the family group of Parmenio, which can be elucidated by means of prosopography (the investigation of family ties with the help of proper names), had considerable power.
The year 329 saw the final elimination of Satibarzanes and the capture of Bessus in Sogdiana, north of the Oxus River from Bactria. In Sogdiana Alexander founded the city of Alexandreschate (“Alexandria the Farthest”), not far from the site of Cyropolis, a city of Cyrus II the Great, whom Alexander highly admired. This is a reminder that Persian urbanization in Central Asia had not been negligible. (At the interesting Bactrian site of Ai Khanum, which cannot definitely be identified as an Alexandria, there is evidence of Achaemenid irrigation.) Alexandreschate was a prestige foundation, designed, as explicitly stated by Arrian, for both military and commercial success. Alexander had already planted a number of new Alexandrias in central Iran, including Alexandria in Areia (Herat), Alexandria in Arachosia, and almost certainly Qandahār, on the exciting evidence of a metrical inscription found there by a British excavation team in 1978. There was another major foundation called Alexandria in the Caucasus at an important junction of communications in the Hindu Kush.
How far Alexander intended these places to be permanent pockets of Hellenism is not clear. That Hellenism could survive in these regions is shown by the case of Ai Khanum, which had many of the features of a Greek polis, including gymnasia and an agora with an oikist (city-founder) cult; there are even inscribed Delphic religious precepts. Nonetheless, many of Alexander’s Greek colonists in Bactria tried to return home to the mainland immediately after his death out of pothos, or yearning for their Greek way of life. It must be accepted that the ancient literary tradition exaggerated the extent of, and the Hellenizing intentions behind, Alexander’s city foundations. A brilliant recent reconstruction of that literary tradition suggests convincingly that the exaggerations were in the main the work of tendentious scholars and writers in Ptolemaic Alexandria whose aim was to disparage the urbanizing efforts of the Ptolemies’ great rivals the Seleucids by reassigning to Alexander himself many foundations that were actually Seleucid.
Alexander's empire at its greatest extent.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Bessus and Satibarzanes were not the last satraps of eastern Iran to offer resistance. It took fully two years (until spring 327) to suppress Spitamenes of Sogdia and other tribal leaders. The period was full of strain, culminating in the disastrous quarrel between Alexander and Cleitus, one of his senior commanders and the newly appointed satrap of Bactria at the end of 328. The quarrel ended in Alexander’s actually killing Cleitus with his own hands in drunken fury. The issue was a personal one, which, however, merged with a matter of principle: Cleitus had criticized Alexander’s leadership (there had admittedly been at least one military reverse due perhaps to inadequate planning), comparing him unfavourably with his father Philip. Before the army moved in the direction of India, there were two more incidents that widened the gap between Alexander’s conduct and traditional Macedonian attitudes.
First, Alexander attempted to introduce the Persian court ceremonial involving proskynesis, or obeisance. Just what this entailed is disputed; perhaps it amounted to different things in different contexts, ranging from an exchange of kisses to total prostration before the ruler in the way a Muslim says his prayers. What is not in doubt is that for Greeks that behaviour meant adoration of a living human being, something they considered impious as well as ridiculous. It was the court historian Callisthenes who voiced the feeling of the Greeks. The proskynesis experiment was not repeated: Alexander did not in the end insist on it. It is difficult, however, not to connect Callisthenes’ role in this affair with his downfall not long after, allegedly for encouraging the treason of a group of royal pages. This was the second of the two alarming incidents of the period.