Accustomed by now to the axiom that “you can’t drink the water,” men must already have slaked their thirsts with wine before they arrived; and Macedonian feast days always meant heavy drinking. Someone sang a lampoon on the commanders who had failed to relieve the city; a tasteless black joke, seeing they had been killed, but countenanced by Alexander who had succeeded where they had failed. Feelings built up; his friends began to exalt his exploits over those of Castor and Pollux, perhaps with the proskynesis still in mind. With everyone drunk, the debate grew quarrelsome and aggressive; the friends, abandoning the Twins, turned to the still more explosive theme of how Alexander had surpassed his father.
Cleitus noisily disagreed. Having lived close to the royal family through Alexander’s lifetime, he must have been dense not to know, even when in liquor, that he was playing with fire. He would have been safe with Alexander the King of Persia, whom he so resented. Fatally, he had aroused instead the furious youth who had hurled a goblet at his father’s wedding.
Alexander’s response was wholly Macedonian. When Cleitus shouted and argued, he argued and shouted back. Cleitus mocked his Persian dress and his cult of Ammon; complained that “barbarians” must be petitioned for leave to see him; taunted him with having saved his life at the Granicus. Alexander shied an apple at his head, then, the insults continuing, looked about for a weapon. His friends, like true Macedonians, held him back by force while he cursed and struggled; resourceful Ptolemy eased the protesting drunk outside. This common barroom brawl ended as so many have done among lesser men. Cleitus came bursting in again with a new insult he had just thought of; Alexander, blind with rage, snatched a spear from the nearest guard and ran him through the heart. At the sound of his death cry, the noise in the hall was succeeded by a deep silence.
Such was the act of homicide invariably called by historians “the murder of Cleitus.” Today, with equivalent evidence of drink and provocation, it would receive a sentence of two or three years, with remission for good conduct.
No judgment on it has been harsher than Alexander’s own. He had killed Parmenion as a king, responsibly. This time he had killed as a man, who could not hold his drink or keep his temper. As a king, he had illegally killed a Macedonian asserting his right of free speech. As a Greek, he had killed a benefactor and a guest; aspects whose enormity we can scarcely now assess. His shame was proportioned to his pride; for a time he found himself intolerable. Plutarch may be right in saying that in the first shock he had to be restrained from running himself on the spear he had pulled out of Cleitus. For three days he would not eat or drink, till there were fears for his life, perhaps also for his sanity. People came to his room without his leave, as if he were helpless with some dangerous illness. The philosophers offered rational or soothing words. The Macedonian soldiers, alarmed by his desperation over what must have seemed to them a very common mishap, called an Assembly of their own accord, condemned Cleitus for treason, and sent to let Alexander know that his act had now been legalized. Consoling as their forgiveness must have been, he did not yet forgive himself, and met comfort with cries of self-reproach.
More effective first aid was brought by the priest of Dionysus. Each of the Olympians had his own weapon of retribution: Zeus wielded thunderbolts, Poseidon waves and earthquakes, Aphrodite disastrous passions. Dionysus’ weapon was madness. Neglected on his feast day in favour of other deities, he had come like some uninvited fairy in those folk tales which are the detritus of old religions, and cast his malign enchantment. Alexander had done the deed when, literally, he was not himself.
From this he took some salve to his self-respect, and gradually came back to life again. The theory had something in it, even though the spell had been cast on the god’s behalf by his votary Olympias, twenty-odd years before.
Any fairly short account of Alexander’s crowded life must often seem to leap from drama to drama. Yet these events were brief in time; long weeks and months were spent in varied action, much of it now lost to us; in campaigning over wild and difficult country where, once off the caravan trails, men of his race had never stepped before. After operations of the most physically exacting kind, while his men were resting, he merely changed his tasks; seeing the usual envoys and petitioners and couriers, administering not only the old army but its constant inflow of foreign auxiliaries about whose methods and capacities he had to know; seeing that their native officers got along with his own commanders. He had to see surveyors’ reports, and those of the scouts on whose intelligence he would advance into uncharted lands. Everything of importance fell on him. He could not delegate to an establishment he was in process of constructing as he went.
He was founding more cities, deeply concerned with them both as viable communities, and as his own memorials. Kandahar still echoes his name. On choice of site hung the settlers’ welfare, even their lives. That Hephaestion was often given a free hand to establish towns when Alexander was busy is striking evidence of his real abilities.
Alexander had plenty to do. The character and terrain of these wars can best be reconstructed from the memoirs of nineteenth-century soldiers who found men and mores largely unchanged, and, coming from a society more sensitive to shock, took less for granted. We learn in passing that Alexander put down a local custom of leaving out the sick and senile for the hyenas. He could not wait to see whether survival offered them a better fate.
His legend was already forming in his tracks. Two thousand years later, Afghan chiefs would be claiming descent from him, and even that of their horses from Bucephalas, rather elderly now to be at stud. Forces which had held out against his officers would melt into the hills at the mere rumour that he himself was on the march towards them. Spitamenes, one of Bessus’ betrayers, a tough and resourceful guerrilla leader, died of such news. His officers heard that Alexander was coming, and in panic sent him their chieftain’s head. Curtius says that his wife removed it while he slept; adding that she was also his mother.
The country was full of precipitous cliffs and summits, fortified from remote antiquity in the perennial cycles of blood feud and tribal war. From time to time some especially sensational and ingenious siege gets detailed description. It was impossible for Alexander to hear that a strongpoint was impregnable without regarding it as a personal challenge. This showed a perceptive grasp of war psychology in Sogdiana, where courage, strength and success were essentials of status and of survival.
The most notorious of such pinnacles was the Sogdian Rock; high, sheer, and riddled at the top with caves well stocked with food and water. Its chieftain, Oxyartes, was away raising the countryside, leaving his family and garrison in the charge of his son. The single path to the top was entirely commanded from above. The area was under snow.
Alexander offered a parley. Two envoys climbed down, laughed in his face, and told him not to waste his time unless his men had wings. That settled the matter. He called for volunteers who were expert climbers, and got 300. At night, helped by the snow which would have etched out all the ledges, they were to ascend the steepest, unguarded face, a “very severe.” The first man up would get 12 talents, a sum on which to be comfortable for life; the next 11; and so through the first twelve. Iron tent pegs for pitons, mallets, and ropes got them up, in spite of snow-numbed fingers, with a loss of one in ten. In Sogdiana, to have conceded failure might have cost lives by the thousand.
Stunned at dawn by the sight of an unknown force above him, the chief’s son surrendered, and everyone was spared. A feast was offered, at which the ladies of the family performed a dance for the conqueror. Among them was the chief’s daughter, Roxane. Alexander fell in love with her at first sight. Quixotically renouncing the right of capture which neither friend nor foe would have questioned, he asked for her hand in marriage.