He took a knife and cut the scroll at the death of Darius, and joined it to blank papyrus with a strip of linen. He did this himself. He looked at me, threw the scrap with fifteen days of retreat into the brazier, and walked out.
Read it yourself.
He’d never done it before. But he started to do it more and more.
Darius was dead, and the crusade in Asia was over. That was the tenor of the king’s message, and he gave a speech to the army that was not particularly moving and raised a great deal of resentment.
The long and short was that he was sending the allies home. Most of them were richly rewarded, and a great many of them were offered superb bonuses for staying on without their officers as our troops. Kineas, for example, was heartbroken. Alexander actually singled him out at a command meeting – a Macedonian-only meeting – when Parmenio, of all people, asked that he be kept on or even sent to the Prodromoi.
Alexander shook his head. ‘I need friends in Athens,’ he said. ‘And Kineas is not one of us.’
Further, he actively recruited the troopers – the rank and file men of the allied contingents.
He released the Thessalians. Parmenio’s household troops. Men who had served Philip and Parmenio and Attalus since the first light of Macedon’s dawn. Alexander gave them rich rewards, but he sent them home. Next to the Hetaeroi, they were our best cavalry.
I was at the staff meetings, and I knew the agenda – Alexander was clearing the army of rivals, and was preparing to function as the King of Kings. The Greeks – even Kineas – were the most intransigent about who they were, about being Hellenes. They had come to Asia to make war on Persia. To destroy the Persian Empire.
But Alexander was getting ready to become the Persian Empire.
He rid himself of dissent.
And he destroyed Parmenio’s power base. He paid off the veterans – with rich bonuses. He bought mercenaries. And he paid every pikeman who stayed with us a bonus – a two-talent bonus. Two talents of gold. Per man.
For old men like Philip, who asked where is my reward, this was the answer.
The army of Macedon – ably assisted by the Greek allies, backed by mercenaries – took Persia and conquered Asia.
The army that marched away from Ecbatana was Alexander’s army. It had no loyalties but those it owed to him. He was lord, god and paymaster.
I never saw Kineas go. He took his men and his gold and his horses and all the wreaths he’d won and packed and left. Polystratus saw him go – hugged Niceas, sent a letter home to his Macedonian wife. And Thaïs held the prostitute Artemis in her arms while the younger woman cried and cried. Because she wanted to follow the army to the ends of the earth. She didn’t want to go back to Athens and face . . . well, face an aristocrat’s family.
Thaïs sent letters home by Niceas, too. Letters asking that our child and our priestly ward be sent to us.
It’s worth noting that Athens stood firm – or at least stood hesitantly – and Sparta died alone, their gallant hoplites outnumbered by Antipater’s mercenaries. Their king died gloriously, but he died, and the revolt, if you can call it that, was over. And so was Sparta.
Alexander sent rewards to Athens, and treated her like the queen of Greece, which, in many ways, she was. But like Darius’s wife, she’d served her turn, and as we were all to discover, Alexander was done with her. And when he was done with things, he let them fall.
The last night in Ecbatana. We had a dinner – a magnificent dinner. Four hundred Hellenic officers and almost that many Persians – that is to say, Iranians, Cilicians, Carians and Phrygians. Medes. Aegyptians.
I had not received a command in the new army allotment. But I had received orders – to add Cyrus and two hundred Persian nobles to my troop of Hetaeroi, doubling it in size. In fact, we lost a great many Hetaeroi at Ecbatana, and on the pursuit of Darius. I’ll backtrack and say I tried to recruit Thessalian gentlemen from the disbanded regiments, and Athenian gentlemen from the Athenian contingent. I got a few.
Cyrus and his men were superb horsemen, well mounted, with fine armour and good discipline. But they were Iranians, and Philotas, for one, didn’t trust them at all.
As soon as I took Cyrus into my troop, I began to walk a knife’s edge, and because of it, I have more understanding of what the king faced than most men. The common story – Callisthenes’ story – is that the king was seduced by Persian tyranny and became a Persian tyrant.
Well – that’s not entirely untrue. Alexander was always impatient of limitations on his power, since he knew, with absolute certainty, that he was right about all decisions of rulership and the making of war. So Persian-style lordship appealed.
But by the time we rode out of Ecbatana the second time, I understood exactly why he did as he did.
Persian gentlemen were such excellent soldiers that you had to ask, after two weeks, how Darius had ever lost. Cyrus and his men were far more obedient than my Macedonians, who, being Macedonians, plotted, fought, lied, cheated, back-stabbed, sometimes literally and spent their spare time questioning every order I issued.
And they hated the mirror that the Persians held up to them, which quickly translated into hatred of the Persians.
I had a few Macedonians and a handful of Greek troopers who saw it differently – who made friendships across the line, or who found the time to listen. But I also found myself trying to be two different people – the fair and honourable commander of Cyrus and his men, and the quick-witted, argumentative king of the hill that the Macedonians expected.
I had four hundred cavalrymen.
Alexander had thirty-five thousand men.
There are things he did for which I cannot love him, but his attempt to rule Persia while remaining our king was a noble effort, and he did the very best with it that could be done. He made an effort to be all things to all men – an effort that he had made since he had been a boy, in many ways. Callisthenes and some of the other Hellenophiles argued, almost from the first, that Alexander was being corrupted.
I agree. He was being corrupted. But it wasn’t Persia that corrupted him. It was war, and the exercise of power.
The army rallied at Hecatompylos. Those were the next words in the Military Journal after the death of Darius, and they left out three weeks of supply-gathering and slow marching. And yet remained true. The contingents that Craterus, Philotas and I had left spread across southern Hyrkania were there still, and the hypaspitoi had remained well forward of the army, so that we might have been said to have ‘concentrated’ at Hecatompylos.
But despite the bribes and the bonuses, Hecatompylos was where the army discovered that we were marching east, to Bactria. Until then, most of the troops thought we were going to crush the mountain tribes. A fairly solid rumour said that we were going to restore Banugul to her little kingdom – as a lark – on the way to the Euxine and ships for home. And even Hephaestion, who usually read the king better than this, told me confidentially one night that we were going to march north into Hyrkania and then home via a campaign against the Scythians of the Euxine.
But at Hecatompylos, Alexander sent two full squadrons of the Hetaeroi and Ariston’s Prodromoi east, trying to re-establish contact with Bessus’s retreating columns.
It wasn’t mutiny, but by the gods, it was close. Our second morning in the clear air of Hyrkania, and I was awakened by Ochrid to be told that the pezhetaeroi were packing their baggage for the trip home. That they had voted in the night to march away and leave the king.