At last they reached the river, Alexander standing unrested and unfed, after his last lap, to see everyone safe in camp. The river was wide, the ferry boats had been burned; but Xenophon had taught him on the Danube the lore of the Euphrates, and it served for the Oxus too. The tentmakers set to work stuffing the tent hides into rafts, and the crossing took five days.
Fate treated Bessus just as he had treated Darius. His levies had been melting by desertion. Two of his chiefs decided he was hindering the war. Leaving him in a village fort, held by two servants, they sent Alexander word that he was there for the picking up.
Not to dignify the event by his own presence, Alexander sent Ptolemy, with orders to treat Bessus like a common criminal. The point was to be made that this was not, and never had been, a Persian king. Bessus’ fatal mistake was not to have surrendered along with the realistic Nabarzanes, who had secured his amnesty before Oxathres arrived. Now the brother of Darius waited, expectant, for the vengeance that was his price of fealty. Bessus was stripped, a Persian’s greatest disgrace, and stood by the road, his hands tied to a wooden yoke. Halting his chariot, Alexander asked why he had betrayed and murdered his benefactor, his kinsman and his king. With less dignity than Darius’ when all was lost, he answered that the whole suite had agreed on it, to get safe conduct from Alexander. It was the wrong approach to a man who had pardoned, and taken into his army, a batch of rebels he saw marching to execution with conspicuous courage. He ordered Bessus a flogging, which no doubt Oxathres witnessed, and his custody in chains till a Persian court could try him.
No other pretender appeared. Alexander marched northeast to the immemorial boundary of the Jaxartes River, where civilization ended and the steppes began. Here stood a line of ancient forts, built to keep off the Scythians, fierce nomads whom even Darius the Great could not subdue. Alexander was quick to decide that the frontier had been rightly drawn. He had the rare vision to perceive that, if prejudice were broken down, two great civilizations could cross-fertilize; but he knew barbarism when he saw it, and his concern was to keep it out. It was evident to him that at the first sign of weakness, the Scythians would be across.
Having replaced the horses that heat or cold had killed, he marched back west towards Samarkand. In a clash with tribesmen an arrow split his leg bone. Unable to ride, he saved delay by getting into a litter. First carried by the infantry, it roused the jealousy of the cavalry, who demanded to dismount and share the privilege. He let them take it in turns.
The Jaxartes campaign cannot here be followed in detail. Samarkand, the royal city, was occupied, the river forts were reduced and manned. The country seemed quiet, and Alexander summoned the chiefs of Sogdiana to a council. At once suspecting a treachery which to them seemed a matter of course, they rose in revolt instead, overran his new towns and laid siege to Samarkand. His relieving force was cut up, its commanders proving inadequate, and he had to raise the siege himself. During these operations, leading from the front as usual, he was knocked about. His larynx was bruised by a stone—a dangerous injury—and for a time he lost his voice. A head blow gave him a spell of clouded vision. From this may derive a curious quirk of the Alexander legends, that he had one grey eye and one black. One dilated pupil is a common feature of concussion; some local report of him, in a state when most people would have been in bed, may have lodged in folk memory.
On the further shore of the Jaxartes a horde of defiant Scythians appeared. He got a mixed force over, put them to rout, and chased them far across the plains. Like Darius the Great, he found them slip through his fingers. A worse mishap, because more lasting in its results, was that in the heat he drank whatever water he found, and got a crippling bout of enteritis. So no doubt did other soldiers, not without some fatalities, for Alexander was seriously ill. The army soon learned in the thirsty lowlands that the only safe drink was wine.
Oxathres returned to Ecbatana, to preside over Bessus’ trial by a court of Persian nobles. His nose and eartips had been cut off, the Persian mark of the criminal. The execution too was traditionally barbaric, by impalement or the cross. Oxathres had the body cut in pieces and strewn for wild beasts to eat. His brother at last avenged, his loyalty rewarded, he certified by his presence the legitimacy of the new Great King, to whose court he then returned.
The mass of administration now surrounding Alexander was as much Persian as Macedonian or Greek. Inevitably, people had to wait for audience; inevitably, Macedonians had to take their turn with Persians. Bagoas, a decorative addition to the royal household, was one not universally approved. Persian officers, satraps and envoys were increasingly in evidence, performing those deep obeisances so offensive to Greek tradition, before a King who did not discourage it.
Alexander had had by now the experienced advice of Artabazus, survivor of four reigns, and of Bagoas, familiar with court procedure from very close to the throne. The deference accorded a foreign king would be measured by his own sense of his dignity; there could be no question of ceasing to exact from Persians so essential a token of respect as the “prostration.” But Alexander was thin-skinned; even if no one had told him, he would hardly have missed the fact that the scornful glances of unbowing Macedonians were not being lost on his newer subjects.
Consulting with Hephaestion—whose unshakeable devotion the advent of Bagoas had not flawed—he considered how the matter could be regularized. It would be difficult, and would have to be done with tact.
Herodotus, writing a century earlier, said of Persian customs:
When they meet each other in the streets, you may know if the persons meeting are of equal rank by the following sign: if they are, instead of speaking they kiss each other on the lips. Where one is a little the other’s inferior, the kiss is given on the cheek; when the difference of rank is great, the inferior prostrates himself on the ground.
All Persians were inferior to the King, most of them greatly inferior; there is an area of debate about the depth of obeisance required of persons about the court. We read of Persians high enough placed to be Alexander’s dinner guests making full prostration before him; but he also took over the important institution of the Royal Kindred. The Persian kings had admitted to this privileged caste large numbers of noblemen to whom they were not related, thus making them “a little” his inferiors, with the right to kiss his cheek. Alexander must certainly have conferred this at once upon, for instance, the venerable Artabazus, and royal princes like Oxathres and Bistanes; probably on many more. But he kept it in his gift, not to be taken for granted.
In the time of Darius the Great two Spartan envoys, men of the highest birth, had risked death sooner than make proskynesis before him (they were magnanimously spared). If any rite of bending was intermediate between prostration on the ground and the kinsman’s kiss, it was deep enough to give Macedonians the same sense of servility. About this Alexander had no illusions, as his proceedings show.
Persians were willing to bow down before a king, Macedonians not. Neither race must be humiliated. The faces of Macedonians could be saved by upgrading the status of the person to whom they bowed. From a king, there was only one step up. Let them bow before a son of Ammon who partook of the god’s divinity.
In an issue like this, the complex mind of Alexander, baffling to men who shared his culture, is inaccessible to ours. Except in Egypt, where it had millennial sanction, he had never made use of his divine prerogative. His use of it now was practical, statesmanlike, and in a sense highly civilized. On the other hand, it was not a form; he believed in it. It is worth remembering that millions of men, in three continents, would agree with him before many years were out.