“The path is no more than a sheep-track,” he told Alexander. “Your men will not manage it.”
“Are you saying we cannot go where your sheep can?”
“You will be making the attempt in the dark, and there is snow,” came the reply.
Faced with such a challenge, Alexander could accept no other course. “Prepare to lead us up,” he told the prisoner, “and never doubt that we will follow, whatever the difficulty!”
Craterus was placed in command of the camp, and given a thousand men with which to make a diversionary attack on the wall. Then, after night fell, the Macedonians followed the shepherd up along a narrow ledge, onto the ridge above the gorge.
The prisoner had not exaggerated the meagerness of the path. No more than a few feet wide in places, it often disappeared under snow, just as he had warned. As we could not use torches, and the walls of the gorge prevented starlight from reaching them, we groped along in complete darkness, all the while trusting that our guide was not leading us into another trap, or over a cliff. For safety, the Macedonians used pikes to probe ahead of them, or to keep in touch with their companions grasping the ends; several men were thus saved from falling by their comrades, who used their sarissas to pull them back from the chasm. When one man did slip and fall over the side, the mishap was more felt than heard-as he plunged to his death, he bravely protected the army’s position by keeping his silence. Nevertheless, despair laid hold of us as the path wound higher and higher, and the men were forced to abandon baggage on the way, and the shepherd turned back to Alexander, whispering ‘See, I told you it was impossible!’
In time the path leveled, and then began to descend. Just as the first fingers of light touched the eastern sky, we were able to look down and see the smoke from the Persian camp below. A gasp went up among the Macedonians as they realized they had succeeded. Alexander bade them all to keep quiet, and issued his commands for the final assault: Ptolemy, with the hypaspists, would fall on the enemy by the path the prisoner had showed them. Alexander and the Agrianians, meanwhile, would go to the far side of the pass and charge the enemy from that quarter. He trusted Craterus would hear the attack as it was underway, and make a frontal assault at the critical moment.
The battle unfolded exactly as he planned. Alexander charged into the Persian camp, taking them completely by surprise, as Ptolemy swooped on them from above. The troops by the wall were further pinned down by Craterus’s attack, so that the Persians were beset from every direction. Thousands were killed before the sun mounted the hills and revealed the full extent of the rout. The day was not destined to rise on a Persian Thermopylae.
The way was open to Persepolis. This was a city synonymous with the power of the Great King, where Greeks from the Ionian cities had been forced for generations to appear on bended knee, and where the accumulated loot of a continent waited for the victor of Gaugamela. With the fall of the Susian Gates, the capital of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes lay at the pleasure of the twenty-five year old king of a people despised by the Persian overlords as a servile race. As the Thracian porter asked Hippias in Aristophanes’s The Crows, was not the bended knee now on the other foot?
Rejoining Parmenion’s forces, Alexander marched in no great hurry toward the city. He was met on the way by two parties: first, emissaries from the royal chamberlain Tiridates, begging the Greeks to advance on the capital with all speed, as a mob was swarming to loot the treasury. Anxious that his property be protected, Alexander quickened the march-until a second party arrived which stopped him in his tracks.
To the Macedonians, it seemed that an army of corpses was coming forth to meet them. But the supplicants were Greeks, four thousand of them, who had been freed from their imprisonment by the Persian nobles as they fled; moreover, they were not corpses but, like Alexander’s soldiers, living men.
That was where the resemblance ended, for no more pathetic husks of humanity were ever loosed to haunt the living. It was said that most of them suffered mutilation, removal of eyeballs and noses and ears and limbs. What was most apparent from the pattern of these outrages was the depraved humor behind many of them, such as the amputation of every finger except the small one on the left hand, or removal of the entire lower jaw. Still others bore the scars of repeated burnings, brandings, and scourgings, or of tattoos proclaiming that they were “dogs” attached to the houses of their Persian masters. Several of these wretches-the ones still capable of speech, that is-were brought before Alexander to tell their stories, which invariably involved years of deliberate torture, of casual brutality that so ached the heart the King wept openly, crying out that he could take no more.
The prisoners were given shelter and food, and promised that those who wished would be free to return to their homes, along with enough money that they would suffer no discomfort for the rest of their lives. Those who had no families to go to, or who could not face the repugnance of their countrymen at their injuries, were pledged land and slaves with which to settle in Alexander’s empire.
Aeschines is right: if the Persians had applied half the ingenuity they showed in tormenting these poor men to perfecting their tactics in battle, Alexander would never had made it beyond the Granicus. What he did not say, however, is that a good number of these ex-slaves came from places that were destroyed by Alexander or his father. Many were from Thebes or Amphissa or Olynthus, and had been away for so long they did not know the fate of their cities. So when the poor wretches hobbled, crawled, or were carried into Alexander’s presence, and thanked him for liberating them so they could again glimpse their beloved Cadmeia, the King could only turn away in his guilt, having himself been responsible for pulling down the Cadmeia stone-by-stone. Instead of the truth, the Thebans were given a travel allowance and an escort back to Greece.
We may only guess what they thought of their liberator when they saw the empty field where their city once stood. Did these homesick men rejoice when they saw that the Macedonians had spared the house of Pindar? Did they savor the irony, worthy of some tragedian’s imagination, of preserving the house of a poet while leaving nothing of all the poet held dear? Or did they only weep?
We were the last generation of mankind to see in its glory the great citadel of Persepolis, or Parsa as the barbarians called it. There was no sight elsewhere that I would compare it with, but can only say it resembled a mass of towering majesties arrayed on a great game board. I say ‘game board’ because it stood on its artificial terrace with nothing around it but flat country, and because there was something of the architect’s model about the place. Even when I had my eyes on it, it seemed like some grand but unlikely abstraction. When I saw it again, on the way home nearly ten years later, reality had imposed itself on the dream: dust was blowing into the great audience halls, the ornamental arbors were dead, and the local farmers were carrying away the scorched stones. Curious of what he might say, I asked one of the farmers what had happened there.
“The Greeks came,” he said.
As you might imagine, this answer made me angry, for only a single Greek had had a hand in that barbarity, and that one Greek was a courtesan. Yet not even she had thrown the fatal torch. The following was what really happened.