Alexander improved his position, however, when he promised to rebuild the ziggurat called Temple-of-the-High-Head, and all the other temples of Bel that had been desecrated by the Persians. These measures earned him the support of the priestly classes, who bear an influence in eastern lands we can hardly imagine. In gratitude, the priests shared a vast bounty of knowledge with the newcomers-their secrets of chemistry, metalworking, agriculture, their 30,000 years of astrological records. From the engineers of the ziggurat of E-sagila our engineers gleaned much that would help them in the construction of the proposed lighthouse at Alexandria. The Babylonians revealed the secrets of the terraced forest known as the Hanging Garden, which, though it had seen better days, still exceeded in ingenuity and splendor anything made in the Greek world. The only question upon which they could not enlighten the Macedonians was the fate of Darius’s money: the royal treasury, they suggested, must have been removed to Susa.
Perceiving that their rustic liberators were easily dazzled by cheap tricks, the Babylonian magi organized magic shows for their delight. This was harmless enough, until the Macedonians took it upon themselves to experiment with naphtha on their own. So it was that a young boy, a worker in the baggage train, cheerfully submitted to being doused and lit. It seems that neither the boy nor the rest of the Macedonians understood that this substance produced heat when burned. So great was his surprise that he had an astonished look on his face as he died-he gave a kind of shrug, and the spectators around him did the same, until there was nothing left of the boy but a blackened, shrugging husk.
As a tourist, Alexander seemed to delight in the place. Its architectural wonders, and its geographical centrality in his future empire, recommended it as his capital. But as he learned firsthand of the burdens of administering such a stupendous city, with a walled area of more than 180 square miles, a population as great as all of Macedon, and hordes of priest-bureaucrats practiced at ankle-biting and boot-licking, his dominion lost its luster.
He stayed there a month for no other reason than he had little idea what to do next. On this question, Arridaeus could be of no help. Hephaestion then seized his opportunity to restore his position at Alexander’s side, urging him to go on to conquer all of Asia. The King agreed to this for no more profound reason than that he wished neither to go back nor stay where he was. The farther he went from the throne at Pella, the more the memory of the place seemed redolent of Philip, whose fatherly command he grew to resent. Friendly god Ammon, after all, had never flogged him, nor banished his friends from the palace, nor begrudged him his overlordship of the universe. Nor did the prospect of a reunion with Olympias have much appeal.
And so, with Hephaestion, he drew up plans for a new war, and reorganized the army. Which is to say, he gave Hephaestion free rein to take revenge on those who had disrespected him, dissolving units whose officers had joked at his expense, or spread unflattering rumors, or who had looked at him in some way that displeased him. At this same time, he welcomed more Persians into his service, for the simple reason that they knew how to administer what the Macedonians had conquered. In many cases Alexander simply took the oath of whatever satrap or native king he found in the lands he passed through. There is much talk of Alexander’s “wisdom” in this regard, in his supposed respect for local custom and native ways. Yet in this he had innovated nothing, but only emulated the policies of the Great Kings, who, if nothing else, were masters of skimming off the cream and delegating away the rest.
And what cream it was! There was no precedent for the fortune in loot turned up on this march: 10,000 talents at Sardis, 50,000 at Susa, 120,000 in the royal treasury at Persepolis. These are magnitudes by the light of which the very preciousness of silver and gold becomes absurd. Although Alexander recognized its utility, unlike many of his fellow Macedonians he took no direct pleasure in the spectacle, smell, and touch of money. Its only use for him lay in giving it away, preferably by the talent. And so we hear of the king giving out rewards of one round talent for increasingly trivial attainments: a talent for each man in a nicely turned-out infantry rank; a talent for a skillful air on the cithara at dinner; a talent for a well-polished cuirass or for policing up the camel dung around camp. So aggressive was Alexander at this gift-giving that his men fell victim to outsized expectations. Ordinary soldiers came to expect a talent for their mere proximity to the King; if overlooked, an otherwise good man who once would have exulted in a word of royal praise went away muttering ‘what, no talent?’
Someone should have told the King that gifting, like any pleasure, could become something of a vice if overindulged. It should come as no surprise that, as they went around with their hands out, none of his friends got around to telling him this.
XI.
Of the renowned ‘victory’ at the Susian Gates, I say no more than that it was a colossal waste of lives. Any commander with a shred of respect for his enemy would have anticipated that the Persians would block that pass. I warned Alexander of ambush myself. But the young King was in the grip of his own legend by then, and would not agree to the simple precaution of taking the coast route into Persia. That he managed to force the Gates I credit to Arridaeus’s instincts and the stamina of the Macedonians. No one else deserves praise for surviving this stupidity.
The army passed out of Mesopotamia and into the enemy homeland. The Achaemenid royal seat at Persepolis beckoned, but first Alexander had to force a sheer pass through the Zagros mountains to the plateau of Persis. For this he took with him only his most mobile forces, elements of his hypaspists, the Agrianian allies, his best scouts; the heavy troops were placed under the command of Parmenion and ordered to march the long way around by the coast.
We met no resistance all the way to the Gates, and then most of the way through it until he reached the narrowest part. At that point the march was stopped by a wall of rude blocks that the enemy had thrown up. The Macedonians were puzzled over how to attack this wall when an avalanche of rocks, arrows and javelins fell on them from the heights: the Persians had sprung a trap on them. Alexander had his men take cover, still imagining he would force his way through, until the enemy rolled boulders down on his men, so that their upturned shields were no longer any defense. Alexander’s position was hopeless; the enemy was dug into positions on the hillsides where the Macedonians could not see them, much less mount a counterattack. Alexander ordered a general retreat. The great cheer went up from the Persians as they saw the young king’s back for the first time.
With the Persian cheers echoing in his ears, Alexander led his men on the bitterest maneuver of the campaign. This was not only a matter of pride: the conquest of so large an empire would take decades if the Persians were emboldened to contest him in every place they could. To discourage this, Alexander could not accept anything less than instant, total annihilation of all resistance. But the Macedonians had already lost more men that day than during the fight at the Granicus, while the Persians had suffered not a single casualty.
Craterus and Ptolemy suggested that they avoid the obstacle by proceeding around by the coast route into Persia. But as the Macedonians had left unburied dead in the gorge, Alexander could not compound defeat with desecration. Moreover, he refused to give the Persians the glory of turning the tables on Thermopylae, where the Lacedaemonians had delayed Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. He called for all the Persians captured in the area to be brought forward, and asked them if they knew of some hidden route by which the enemy might be outflanked. Under threat of torture, all these men swore that there was no way around the wall-with one exception. This fellow, a shepherd, suggested one possibility, but then seemed to withdraw it.