After the dowry payments, Susa overflowed with money; and the traders who lived off the soldiers thought it opportune to foreclose on their ruinous debts. They had lived with the riches and recklessness of buccaneers. They were now in trouble; and Alexander with one of his huge gestures announced he would settle up for them all. But they took it with a new suspicion. At Susa he had acquired not only a Persian bride but, automatically, a Persian court; over and above which, he had introduced Persian soldiers into the most exclusive regiments. The Macedonians began to feel slighted. He was, and ought to remain, their Alexander, not the barbarians’ Great King. Word went round that his offer had been made in order to find out, for disciplinary reasons, which of them were overspending their pay. Names were slow to come in. When he learned why, it hurt both his feelings and his pride. He said with dignity that the King must never lie, nor should his subjects ever suppose it. The sentiment was so Persian that it might have come from Cyrus; but he backed it up with proof. Writing things were removed from the money tables; any man who produced a debtor’s bond was paid, in the certainty that no record had been made of it. It cost him 10,000 talents, some of it in false pretences; and for the time it won them over. But their amour-propre was soon to be shocked again.
Five years before, while still in Bactria, he had laid down a project which now matured: 30,000 Persian boys had been enrolled in their several provinces, trained in the use of Macedonian weapons (which had seemingly included teaching them Greek) and put into Macedonian dress. This seedling army was now ripe, and had been brought to Susa for his approval. Now about eighteen, they had been hand-picked for grace and physique. When in their handsome panoplies they manoeuvred before Alexander, he was so pleased with their dash and skill that in an unguarded moment he called them his Successors.
How many of these boys, half a century on, must have told their grandsons that once in their youth, in distant Susa, with their own eyes they had beheld Sikandar! Thus are legends born. But the veterans of India, weatherworn, gnarled and scarred, looked sourly at the polished parade. There were already far too many Persians in the army. A campaign wife had been all very well in Bactria; a Persian royal wedding was another thing. They hated seeing a good Macedonian soldier like Peucestas cheerfully setting up a satrap’s court with the King’s approval, talking Persian like a native, going about disgustingly in trousers. They had been furious when a mixed regiment with Macedonians in it had been put under Persian officers. Now came a whole corps of Hellenized Persians, presuming to wear their clothes and show off with their weapons. It was not Alexander’s successors they saw here, but then-own; he was “devising every means of doing without Macedonians”; he was “getting entirely barbarized.” Old grouses and new were angrily milled over, but discipline still held.
Alexander, as it happened, was occupied just then as a Greek with Greeks. He had sent to the cities of the League of Corinth—the states which had originally appointed him as war leader—requiring them to give him divine honours.
There are rooted misinterpretations of history with which the truth seems never to catch up. There will always be people who believe that Canute was serious when he ordered the tide to turn, though all his own contemporaries knew it was a moral object lesson; and people who will go on supposing that this request of Alexander’s marked the onset of megalomania. Not only had such honours voluntarily been offered him years before by several liberated cities of Asian Greece; they had often been conferred on men with poorer claims. The oligarchs of Samos, less than a century earlier, had granted them to the brutal Spartan general, Lysander, for maintaining their tyranny. In a moment of sentiment, Harpalus had even set up a posthumous cult of his first hetaira as Aphrodite; he had been laughed at, not stoned for blasphemy. Divine honours, however solemnly awarded, carried no specific rights or immunities. To the rationalist intellectuals of the day, they were an important distinction, like a Nobel Prize; to the many for whom religion still had meaning, they implied that the recipient had risen above the normal limitations of humanity, to a point where the gods must have had a hand in it. The birth legends which so swiftly adhered to Alexander after his death were not propaganda, but hagiography.
He himself, as so often, was thinking on two planes at once. Within, he felt in himself the divine spark hailed by Amnion. Objectively, he needed for purely political reasons the status its recognition would give. He did not ask it in Persia or Macedon, in neither of which, for different reasons, it would have been understood; in Egypt, he already had it; he wanted it in Greece where it could be used. And he got it without trouble, not because he had inspired any reverence there, but because Greek politicians were profoundly cynical. What they did respect was power. Even Demosthenes shrugged it off with “Let Alexander be the son of Zeus. And Poseidon’s too if he likes.” Ritual religious embassies, with the ritual tributes, were planned to set out next spring. Without awaiting them, Alexander moved at once to the real object of the exercise. Unconstitutionally, but imperiously, he ordered the cities to receive back their exiles.
No other man could have done it. Exiles were products of the blood feud. Party strife in the Greek city-states went back to before the time of the sixth-century tyrants, whom it had put in power. After every fifth-century coup, leaders of the ousted party were expelled, lest they get even with their enemies. So, often, were too-powerful rivals; some had retaliated by getting even with their country, like that baleful meteor Alcibiades. Others had welcomed foreign invaders in return for support. In the fourth century it had continued; Greek Asia was full of exiles. Darius’ 50,000 mercenaries had been partly made up of them; lest Alexander should have let the problem slip his mind, he had lately learned that Harpalus had been able to raise no less than 6,000 of such desperate men for his wildcat gamble. And there were still some 20,000 of them adrift, ready tools for any adventurer who could feed them. Alexander’s demand for their recall meant, of course, recall with immunity; common murderers and temple robbers were barred. When the herald gave out the news at the next Olympic Games, there was a furor of cheering.
Overall it worked, averting much misery. But in the cities there was some perturbation. In that individualistic society, it meant getting back one’s personal enemy, knowing just who had worked his downfall; biding his time, and his sons along with him. Sometimes it meant the unwelcome restitution of his land. Last, and most seriously, it undermined the policies of Antipater in the southern states. He had ensured their subservience to Macedon by supporting many harsh oligarch governments, and large numbers of the exiles had been expelled by them. Alexander was getting into touch with the West after a long and busy absence; firmly, though civilly, he was letting it be known that he did not approve of everything that had been done in his name.