Alexander’s army had grown to such a size it filled canyons and passes from end to end. It consumed the miles ahead of it and sloughed back feces, smoke, and Greek-speaking satraps. Anyone could see it coming days ahead, a plume of trail dust hanging over it, and watch it recede for days after, thousands of marching feet laying down long scourges in the earth.
With each parasang beyond Persepolis, beyond Media and the high Zagros, the army had reached territories few Greeks or Macedonians-traveler, soldier or slave-had ever seen. Aristotle’s geographies proved worthless. Ignorant and frightened, the Macedonians glimpsed surpassing weirdness in everything around them. They saw the natives bathing in cow urine and believing themselves clean. They saw men worshipping flame as they wore cloths before their faces, honoring the dead by feeding dogs, holding marriages by firelight that ended with eggs being tossed on roofs.
The Macedonians, understanding nothing, looked to Alexander for his example. In return he gave them a simple task: find Darius. Everything else, he seemed to say, was just details.
Ever since Darius had escaped from the battlefield, Alexander maintained a network of spies to inform him of his enemy’s movements. It was known that the latter still had the loyalty of some of his satraps, notably those from Bactria and Arachosia. He had reconstituted an army around him, small by Persian standards but approaching the numbers Alexander himself had possessed when he first landed in Asia. If, by some perversity of the gods, Darius learned to use his forces in a clever manner, he could still cause much trouble among the small garrisons and unsteady governors Alexander had left strung out behind him. Securing the long-term loyalty of Alexander’s Persian subjects would be impossible as long as they believed the Great King would return. For this reason it was essential that Darius be retired, one way or another.
Alexander set about this task with characteristic vigor. Leaving his slower units behind (including myself, being no horseman!) he pushed north, skirting the eastern slopes of the Zagros on the way toward Darius’s summer palace at Ecbatana. There he learned that Darius had retreated further, into the Elburz Mountains in Parthia. Lingering only a moment over the riches of the palace, Alexander struck northeast with his speediest cavalry, pausing for nothing but essential supplies. Many of the Thessalian horses died beneath their riders as they were pushed beyond their limits. These were replaced, and replaced again, as Alexander drove them on, across the plateau and toward the Caspian Gates.
On the way he encountered the overnight camps that Darius and his men had occupied first a week, then a few days, then mere few hours before. He used these remains to spur his men, igniting the campfires with the still-burning embers, showing them there was only a short distance to go. Soon they came upon further evidence of their quarry’s desperation: the path was littered with armor and dead horses, as well as rich furniture, chests, plates and gold utensils spirited from Persepolis, Susa, and Ecbatana. these were left where they lay in the dust.
Passing through the Caspian Gates, he heard disturbing news: the closeness of the pursuit had moved Darius’s allies to panic. The Great King had been betrayed by his Bactrian satrap, a man called Bessus, and was very possibly already dead. This intelligence sent Alexander into a fit of indignation-after sitting on Darius’s throne, taking his wife and mother into his house, and sleeping in his bed, he had come to imagine a kind of brotherhood between them. Coming so close upon his old adversary on the chase, seeing his campfires and the kind of tracks his horses left in the dirt, he imagined he was achieving some deep understanding of the man. Obsessed now with rescuing Darius from his captors, he stripped his force to a minimum-just 150 mounted men-and rode all night toward the enemy’s last known position, somewhere in the desert northwest of the Gates.
The local people were forced to show the Macedonians a short-cut that might end the pursuit. There was a steep and narrow defile through the hills that was unknown to the Persians; Alexander hurtled through first, and was off ahead of his escort as he sighted a mass of riders and carts in the remote distance ahead. We may well imagine what his quarry must have thought of his tiny galloping figure at it rushed toward them, virtually alone! Specialists in horsemanship, they would have recognized the King’s mount as Macedonian before they perceived the rider to be Alexander himself. In any case, there was a tumult in the Persian retinue-a sword flashed in the sun, and the riders abandoned the carts as they put the crops to their horses’s flanks. With the gleam of that sword, the second-darkest nightmare of any king, the murder of another king, was realized.
Alexander’s men found him staring down into one of the carts. Some in his party rushed to pursue the murderers; Alexander forbade them, gathering them all around him as he settled into a deliberate reverie. Though this was the last time he lay eyes on Darius, it was the only occasion in which they were engaged in something like a common cause. Even in death, Darius was an impressive figure, taller than Hephaestion, with a vigor that belied his fifty years. He had been stabbed in the heart, and though unconscious he was not yet dead. Even then, bleeding and abandoned in a donkey cart, Darius cut the kind of noble figure that was ever beyond the tiny Alexander or his one-eyed, coarse-grained father. The Persians did not need to beg oracles to have their king taken as a god, but easily and unanimously saw him as the mortal axis of Ahuramazda’s worldly empire. For his life to end at the hands of a fool like Bessus invited the question of what low character would, in time, get his blade into Alexander.
The Macedonians watched Darius expire, imbibing from both kings the gravity of the moment, and perhaps a new appreciation for what their army had accomplished in Asia, for this was the Great King prone before them. They bore his corpse back to Persepolis in a cortege that steadily grew as Alexander gathered his scattered forces. The necropolis of the Persian kings had been expressly spared the sack; a grand funeral was staged there, with all the proper customs observed. I saw Sisygambus make her final appearance in public to grieve for her son, showing perhaps less sentimentality at his passing than Alexander did. We may imagine that even she understood Darius was a flawed man, possibly adequate for less momentous times, but entirely run down by history. Her gaze was fixed on his shroud, never glancing at the company of Persian nobles who had come to mourn the old king and ingratiate themselves with the new. Her contempt for Bagoas, who liked to tell stories of what he had seen in Darius’s court that flattered Macedonian prejudices, was obvious. She was destined to outlive her son for only a short time.
Gathered near the still-smoking ruins of Persepolis, Alexander’s court swelled into an ungainly mass of Macedonians, Persians, and allied nobles, riven by mutual contempt and suspicion. With the death of Darius, Alexander was the acknowledged successor in form as well as substance, charged with the task of governing the whole without alienating the parts. He met this ascension with the public adoption of certain practices he had indulged before only in private audiences or drinking parties, such as wearing the Persian diadem, sleeved robes and high-heeled shoes (which he took to quite readily, given his modest height). There were also a number of court rituals unknown to the Macedonians, such as taking state dinners behind a crepe curtain and flanking himself with servants bearing fly whisks and sunshades. The latter seemed particularly absurd to the Macedonians, who were quite used to seeing Alexander broiled red with sunburn as he shared his troops’ discomfort on campaign. They were also disturbed by a custom among the Persians of keeping their hands hidden in the King’s presence-a practice that would have been outright worrisome in the blade-strewn dining halls of Macedon.