Having told his plan to his closest friends, apparently without opposition, he confided it to leading Persians; they had put up with enough and were due for some compensation. A number of them were invited to a banquet, along with Macedonians of rank. Arrian, who may here be using either Ptolemy or the chamberlain Chares, gives the most reasonable account of this event. The sophist Anaxarchus made a speech in praise of the King. (He came from the Thracian city of Abdera. The Athenian tradition called him a flatterer of Alexander. He ended up being pounded to death with iron clubs by a Cypriot king about whom he had been rude, a fate he met with defiant courage. If he did flatter Alexander it must have been because he liked him, a possibility which can never be excluded.) He listed his unexampled achievements, correctly predicted that he would be offered divine honours as soon as he was dead, and asked why he should not receive them in his lifetime. On cue, the friends jumped up with assenting cries, ready to make their reverence. At the critical moment, Callisthenes intervened.
In a longish speech, he urged the impiety of offering gods’ rights to men. Most of the Macedonians had been taken unprepared by the proposal; at this support for their indecisive reluctance, they broke into applause. Alexander, faced with the prospect of an unpleasant scene, sent round word that he would not insist. Everyone sat down. Then the Persian guests, who knew the real intention and were determined to acknowledge it, got up and performed the proskynesis of their own accord. As one of them took his turn less gracefully than the rest, a Macedonian guffawed with laughter. It was the last straw for Alexander; he strode down the hall and threw the man off his banquet couch on to the floor—certainly, for the Persians, an innovation in court etiquette.
This volte-face of Callisthenes’ may, or may not, have been simply maturing within him. All sources agree on the effusiveness of his official chronicle. But he was a product of the Lyceum, keeping in touch with Aristotle, who must have heard with mounting disgust of honours and offices conferred on Persians, the assumption of “barbarian” royal dress, and the scandalous Bagoas. After the long delays involved in getting private mail from Attica to the Oxus, Callisthenes may have been urged to make a stand.
Alexander remained tenacious of his purpose. His next move cannot be called arrogant; it showed both sensitivity and tact. He arranged a small party, for distinguished Macedonians and Greeks alone. Hephaestion lobbied each beforehand, making sure they knew what to expect and would not object. One was Callisthenes.
A brief ceremony was planned around the loving cup. Each guest would stand and drink, then make the proskynesis before Alexander, rise, and come forward to receive a kiss. Thus, in return for a single prostration formally acknowledging his right to it, Alexander would accept them all into the Royal Kin. His return of the kiss—in Persian terms the salutation of equals—was a personal gesture from friend to friends. Offering what was perhaps the most signal proof of his long devotion, Hephaestion bowed down the first of all.
All went smoothly till it came to Callisthenes, when Alexander “happened” to be talking to Hephaestion, and “did not notice” that he came up for the kiss without first making his bow. That the obvious joker in the pack had really been overlooked is of course incredible. A neat little piece of face saving had been arranged, allowing Callisthenes to keep his philosophic pride without official cognizance. Any odium it incurred among the others was his own affair.
Like many intelligent men, Alexander had not left margin enough for others’ dullness. As Callisthenes came for his kiss, someone called out that it had not been earned. Diplomacy thus frustrated, the King turned his face away. Callisthenes completed the social disaster by saying rudely, “So I go off short of a kiss.” Thus Chares the chamberlain, who must have been an eyewitness.
Hephaestion, who had certainly done his best, had no alternative but to assure the other guests afterwards that Callisthenes had agreed to bow. He may indeed simply have changed his mind, a contingency provided for in vain. There was no further attempt to introduce proskynesis among the Macedonians.
Alexander had now not only been twice snubbed publicly by Callisthenes; he had been baulked of an important political aim. Had he become the Oriental tyrant of Athenian propaganda, this offensive and obstructive person would speedily have suffered a fatal colic, so easily passed off as the virulent local dysentery. No clearer evidence is needed of Alexander’s aversion to secret murder than Callisthenes’ continued life. None of his privileges were withdrawn. He even kept his office of tutor to the royal squires. Alexander could still be trusting to the point of naïvety.
He did test the sophist’s popularity by asking him one evening to give in sophistic style first a panegyric exhibition speech on the Macedonians, then a speech in their detraction. The second, which the company considered the more vigorous, was much resented. Alexander, striking while the iron was hot, remarked that it had simply shown ill will.
The proskynesis issue was one handful of fuel on an already smouldering fire. It had not yet touched the rank and file, with whom Alexander’s stock had never been higher; but the staff was divided sharply. Young officers, like the frontier subalterns of Kipling’s India, could fraternize when East met West, and enjoy it among the other adventures with which Alexander had enriched their lives. Philip’s old guard clung bitterly to their victor’s status, and saw it daily eroded.
It is fairer to see Alexander as a great original than to despise them for reaction. If prejudice is prejudgment, they could claim to judge by results. They had won against odds; had fought better, were better led, and thought they had better traditions. Macedonian restraints on the royal power, though crude, were valuable. The image of the Oriental was linked in their minds, not without the truth evident in Herodotus, to the cruel caprices of despotic power slavishly endured, of which the prostration was a symbol. Alexander’s friends would have bowed, as they wore his presents of Persian dress, because they knew, loved, and partly understood him. To Philip’s men it was all anathema; and their condemnation made the King’s party sharply defensive. Though his personality kept it in check, friction bred faction, and still did when he moved his headquarters from the Oxus plains, where he had wintered, to the delightful climate of Samarkand. Ironically, when stress reached breaking point in tragedy, it was not because Alexander had distanced himself from his countrymen with a Great King’s hauteur, but precisely because he had not.
Artabazus had lately asked leave to retire from the satrapy of Bactria, which he began to find fatiguing. This exalted and wealthy office had been conferred on Hephaestion’s co-commander and Alexander’s kinsman, Cleitus.
If it seemed to discharge a debt of honour to him and to his sister, it also removed a vocal and stubborn conservative from the high command. Unlike Parmenion’s posting at Ecbatana—a staff job, officially temporary—it had high prestige, but was also permanent. Cleitus had rank already, military and social; he may not have found the golden handshake flattering. However, he accepted it, and would soon have gone his way. The anger of Dionysus determined otherwise.
On the god’s Macedonian feast day Alexander gave a banquet, especially to share with his friends a consignment of prime Hyrcanian apples. For reasons unknown, he dedicated the feast to the divine warrior twins, Castor and Pollux. Cleitus, invited, had begun a sacrifice of his own, perhaps to the more orthodox divinity, when he heard the dinner trumpet and put it off. The two sheep he had ready to butcher, sheeplike, came trotting after him. Alexander thought this escort of sacrificial beasts a disturbing omen, and ordered the priests to pray for Cleitus’ safety.