At the next halt, on the Caspian side of the Elburz Mountains, Artabazus begged the King to seek safety among Patron’s Greeks. This counsel of despair Darius rejected with dignity, veiling his face as the old man was led out in tears. When the Persians went off to forage for provisions, all the Bactrians stayed. At nightfall the bodyguard round the tent, drawn from the renowned Immortals, slipped silently away. Darius, abandoning hope, lay down upon the ground.
“Hence there was a great solitude in the tent, except for a few eunuchs who stood about the King, because they had nowhere to withdraw to.” This intimate touch pins down, effectively, our first-hand witness.
Presently Darius called Bubaces to him, and ordered the eunuchs to save themselves. At his wail of distress, the others ran up and added their lamentations. Bessus and Nabarzanes, thinking the King had killed himself, came running in. On hearing from the eunuchs that he was alive they held back no longer, but seized and bound him, and carried him off in a common transport cart.
The loyal troops were too much outnumbered to attempt resistance. Darius had not won the kind of loyalty by which forlorn hopes are inspired. Two Persian lords rode back over the pass to guide Alexander and throw their master on his mercy. It was the best choice for the unhappy man, but made too late. Alexander with his best-mounted cavalry made a breakneck dash to the rescue, fell on the rear of the straggling Bactrians whose discipline had already gone to pieces, and began hewing their way towards the prisoner. The conspirators untied him and told him to mount a horse. He replied that he would rather deal with Alexander. At this Bessus and a certain Barsaentes, with or without Nabarzanes, stabbed him with their javelins, crippled the draught mules of the cart, and took to flight. Nabarzanes, who may have opposed their action, went off separately with six hundred riders of his own.
The dying King was found by a Macedonian soldier, who heard him groaning for water. Here Curtius ends, the manuscript being damaged. Plutarch says that Darius was given a drink, expressed his thanks, commended Alexander’s chivalry and wished him luck as his successor; propaganda or romance perhaps, though he would certainly have preferred him to Bessus. But the two kings, the fortunate and the luckless, were not to meet in life. Alexander had had a long fruitless search among the covered carts; when he reached the right one, Darius had breathed his last. Alexander laid his own cloak over him—the last gesture left to make—and ordered his body sent to Sisygambis for a royal burial at Persepolis.
On the Hyrcanian Plain bordering the Caspian Sea, he took the surrender of Nabarzanes. Having rejected Bessus for reasons nowhere explained, he sent to ask for safe conduct, which he would never have got had Alexander not thought he deserved a hearing. His war record, and whatever he had to say at his audience, must have made a good impression; though he never got any office or command, his share in regicide was pardoned. He left behind him the customary gifts of honour, and one unusual one—the young dancer, Bagoas. “He had been loved by Darius, and was soon to be loved by Alexander.” Seeing that this attachment seems to have been lifelong, the source of the Curtius narrative is not far to seek.
Plutarch states circumstantially that Alexander had twice refused, and taken as an insult, proffered gifts of Greek slave-boy beauties. So, although Curtius typically infers that the young Persian was presented as a mere gift or bribe, probability suggests a more substantial motive: namely that he had been an eyewitness of Darius’ murder, and could testify that Nabarzanes had opposed it.
Nabarzanes had been a brave, and till near the end a loyal soldier. Though ready in desperation to get rid of a hopelessly bad commander by putting him into the hands of a chivalrous enemy, he may yet have drawn the line at regicide—an appalling crime in Zoroastrian belief, as Alexander well knew later, when he had Bessos tried by a Persian court.
As for Bagoas, he must have known ever since the arrival of the Queen’s eunuch to announce her death that the captive ladies had been allowed to keep their own attendants. Besides any loyalty he felt to his master—whose memory he seems to have handled kindly—he had little to lose by following him, and no future among the rebels. The murder was a panic action, unforeseen by everyone, including the killers themselves.
A whole train of circumstance falls into place with this assumption: the departure from the other conspirators of Nabarzanes and his men immediately after the murder; Bagoas’ flight in his company; and the statement of Curtius himself that “it was mostly through the boy’s pleadings that he [Alexander] was moved to pardon Nabarzanes.” The testimony of the dead King’s own favourite was solid evidence; a far more likely influence upon Alexander than the mere wheedlings of an attractive youth. Clearly, though, it was without any reluctance that he kept Bagoas at court to give the chroniclers his valuable account. Supposing that his Persian-learned Greek was unequal to so sustained a narrative, we may amuse ourselves by conjecturing that Alexander dictated the final form himself.*
In any case, Bagoas stayed on. We hear of him from Curtius, Plutarch and Athenaeus, more doubtfully from Arrian; Ptolemy is far more likely to have blue-pencilled Alexander’s Persian boy than his own Athenian mistress, not because he was a boy, a matter of indifference in the Greek world, but because he was a “barbarian” eunuch. Alexander’s view that “all men are God’s children” was shared by few of his countrymen.
To race-conscious Macedonians, Bagoas was a little eccentricity of Alexander’s about which the less said the better. But the story of Darius’ end—and who else can have supplied it?—tells us much of him, and indirectly of Alexander. Besides the vivid detail, the talent for evoking a scene, there are the loyalty and perceptive good taste which do not attempt crude flattery of a royal lover at the expense of the dead; the pathos of Darius’ last night, the insistence that “he nothing common did or mean”; his graceful tributes to his victor which, whether or not he ever uttered them, could not hurt his memory and would give such pleasure now. Sensitivity, self-respect, charm without sycophancy, and beauty for good measure; no wonder that Alexander’s fastidious sexual standards were met for once.
Besides the scenes which only the eunuchs witnessed, part of the story must have been related by Artabazus, who came in soon after Nabarzanes and was received with the warmest pleasure by Alexander, being at once reinstated in his rank. After years in Macedon his Greek must have been fluent. Last arrived the Greek mercenaries, from their hideout in the hills.
They had sent to ask for terms; but Alexander, with his usual animus against Greeks fighting for Persia, demanded unconditional surrender. Some straggled off; one man, an Athenian with a virulent anti-Macedonian record, killed himself; about 1,500 came in. By then Alexander would have heard of their fidelity from Artabazus and Bagoas. No one was punished; those who had been hired before he declared war he let go free; the rest he reprimanded, and conscripted into his army at their usual rate of pay. The account of Patron’s attempt to warn Darius against his murderers may come from Patron himself.
On his record, Alexander would have treated Darius’ body with respect in any case; but the royal funeral now accorded him was also a manifesto; it was the duty of a Great King to his predecessor. There was a pretender in the field. Bessus in the east had put on the kyrbasia with upstanding peak (the prerogative of royalty; satraps had to wear theirs flattened) and called himself Artaxerxes.
Whether patriotism or ambition moved him is uncertain. It was already becoming evident that he had two disabilities never known to Alexander: he could not discipline his men, nor attach their loyalty. In any case, Alexander now claimed the right to proceed against him for rebellion, regicide, and treason against two kings running. To enhance this claim, an important act of allegiance now took place. Oxathres, Darius’ fighting brother, arrived voluntarily to accept Alexander as King. Again the blood feud was paramount; the enemy of his brother’s killer was a natural ally. Alexander, who seems to have formed a high opinion of him, recruited him at once into the Companions. His adherence was of the highest propaganda value; its only price was revenge on Bessus.