The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics) (37 page)

… Eumenes was ready for a reconciliation, and this argument was enough to induce Hephaestion, though against his will, to make up the quarrel.
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It was in the course of this journey
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that Alexander is said to have seen the plain called the plain of Nesaea where the royal mares were pastured. Herodotus tells us that the mares were always known as Nesaean. There were once about 150,000 of them, but when Alexander saw them there were not more than 50,000, as most of them had been stolen.
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There is a story that while Alexander was there, Atropates, the governor of Media, sent him a hundred women, who he declared were Amazons. They were equipped like cavalrymen, but carried axes instead of spears and light targes instead of the ordinary cavalry shield. According to some writers, their right breasts were smaller than their left, and were bared in battle. Alexander sent the women away to avoid trouble; for they might well have met with unseemly treatment from the troops, Macedonian or foreign. However, he told them to inform their Queen that he would visit her one day and get her with child.
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This story is not to be found in Aristobulus or Ptolemy,
or, indeed, in any other reliable writer; personally I doubt if the Amazons still existed at that date – indeed Xenophon, writing before Alexander’s time, never mentions them, though he has references to Phasians and Colchians and other barbarian peoples which the Greeks encountered on either side of Trapezus, where they would have certainly found Amazons had there still been any.
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I cannot, however, bring myself to believe that this race of women, whose praises have been sung so often by the most reputable writers, never existed at all:
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there is the tradition, for instance, that Heracles was sent to them and brought back to Greece a girdle belonging to their Queen Hippolyte; and that Theseus and his Athenians were the first to defeat them in battle and prevent their invasion of Europe.
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There is a picture, too, by Cimon of the battle between the Amazons and the Athenians, just as there is of the battle between the Athenians and Persians.
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Herodotus, moreover, has frequently referred to these women,
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and all Athenians who have pronounced eulogies on those who fell in war have made particular mention of the fight with the Amazons.
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If Atropates really did present some female cavalry troopers to Alexander, I should imagine
they must have been women, of some nationality or other, who had been taught to ride and equipped in the traditional Amazon style.

At Ecbatana, Alexander offered sacrifice, as it was his custom to do to celebrate a happy occasion. He also held a festival with literary and athletic contests, and drank deep with his closest friends. About this time Hephaestion fell sick. On the seventh day of his illness it so happened that there was a big crowd at the stadium to watch the boys’ races, which were then taking place. During the races a message was brought to Alexander that Hephaestion’s condition was serious; he hurried away, but his friend was dead before he could reach him.
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The accounts of Alexander’s grief at this loss are many and various. All writers have agreed that it was great, but personal prejudice, for or against both Hephaestion and Alexander himself, has coloured the accounts of how he expressed it. Many writers have told us of things which were beyond all bounds of propriety; those friendly to him apparently wishing us to believe that whatever he said or did in his grief for this friend, whom he loved better than all the world, could but enhance his glory; his critics, on the other hand, indicating that such excesses were discreditable, and unfitting not only for a great potentate like Alexander, but for any King. We are told, for instance, that he flung himself on the body of his friend and lay there nearly all day long in tears, and refused to be parted from him until he was dragged away by force by his Companions; and again, that he lay stretched upon the corpse all day and the whole night too. Some have said that he had Glaucias, the doctor, hanged for giving the wrong medicine; others, because he had seen Hephaestion drinking too much and had made no attempt
to stop him.
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I do not, however, think it unlikely that Alexander cut his hair short in mourning for his friend, for he might well have done so, if only in emulation of Achilles, whose rival he had always felt himself to be, ever since he was a boy.
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Then there is the story – to me quite incredible – that he personally drove for a short distance the funeral carriage with Hephaestion’s body in it; and, again, that he ordered the shrine of Asclepius in Ecbatana to be razed to the ground – a thing one might have expected from an Oriental despot, but utterly uncharacteristic of Alexander. Indeed, it reminds one of the absurd story of Xerxes, who, with his reckless disregard of what men hold sacred, ‘punished’ the Hellespont by pretending to bind it with chains.
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Another story, to me a not wholly improbable one, is that on the road to Babylon Alexander was met by a number of deputations from Greece, with some representatives from Epidaurus among them.
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Alexander granted the Epidaurians’ requests, and gave them something to take home and dedicate as an offering to Asclepius in his shrine. ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘Asclepius has not treated me kindly; for he did not save the friend I valued as my own life.’

Most authorities have said that he ordered sacrifice to be always offered to Hephaestion as a demi-god, and some declare that he sent to inquire of Ammon if he would permit sacrifice to be offered to him as a god; but Ammon refused.
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All the accounts, however, agree in telling us that for two whole days after Hephaestion’s death Alexander tasted no food and paid no attention in any way to his bodily needs, but lay on his bed now crying lamentably, now in the silence of grief. He had a funeral pyre prepared in Babylon at a cost of 10,000 talents – or more, if we can believe some accounts
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– and ordained a period of mourning throughout the East.
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Many of the Companions, out of respect for Alexander, dedicated themselves and their arms to the dead man, a gesture initiated by Eumenes, who, as I mentioned just now, had quarrelled with him.
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His object, no doubt, was to prevent Alexander from thinking that he was glad to have him gone. Alexander made no fresh appointment to the command of the Companion cavalry; he wished Hephaestion’s name to be preserved always in connexion with it, so Hephaestion’s Regiment it continued to be called, and Hephaestion’s image continued to be carried before it. Alexander held Funeral Games in his honour, with contests in literature and athletics; the festival was far more splendid than ever before both in the number of competitors and in the money spent upon it. In all 3,000 men competed in the various events – and these same men took part soon afterwards in the Games at Alexander’s own funeral.

Alexander’s distress was long drawn out; but at last he began to get over it, and the proffered consolation of his friends to have more effect. Once he was himself again, he undertook an expedition against the Cossaeans. These
people, neighbours of the Uxians, were a warlike tribe of mountaineers, living in village strongholds high in the hills; on the approach of an enemy, their practice was to abandon their positions, either all together or in small parties as occasion offered, and slip away, thus frustrating any attempt by an organized force to get at them; then, when the enemy was gone, they would return to their normal life of brigandage. Alexander, however, destroyed them. It was winter when he made his raid, but Alexander was never held up by either bad weather or bad country – and the same may be said of Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who was in command of part of the army on this expedition. Alexander, indeed, once he was embarked upon any of his enterprises, never found anything to stop him from carrying it through.
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On the way back to Babylon he was met by representatives from Libya, who with congratulatory speeches offered him a crown in recognition of his sovereignty over Asia; Bruttian, Lucanian, and Etruscan envoys also arrived on the same mission from Italy. It is said that Carthage, too, sent a delegation at that time, and that others came from the Ethiopians and European Scythians – not to mention Celts and Iberians – all to ask for Alexander’s friendship.
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It was the first time that Greeks and Macedonians had ever heard the names of these peoples or set eyes upon their unfamiliar dress and equipment. We are told that they even appealed to Alexander to arbitrate in their domestic quarrels, with the result that then,
if ever, both he and his friends felt that he was indeed master of the world. Two of the writers on Alexander’s career, Aristus and Asclepiades,
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declare that Rome sent him a delegation, and that when he met the delegates and observed the proud freedom of their bearing, their obvious devotion to duty and order, and had learned the nature of their political principles, he prophesied something, at least, of the future greatness of their country. I record the story, which may or may not be true; but the fact remains that no Roman has ever made any reference to this delegation, any more than the two writers on Alexander who are my principal authorities, Aristobulus and Ptolemy, son of Lagus. Moreover, it would have been out of character for the republican Romans, who enjoyed at that date entirely free institutions, to send a delegation to a foreign King, especially at such a distance from their own country, when they had nothing either to fear or to gain from him, and were of all people in the world the most violently averse to Kings, the very word being anathema to them.

After these events Alexander sent Heracleides, son of Argaeus, with a party of shipwrights to Hyrcania with orders to fell timber in the hills and build warships, some decked, some undecked, on the Greek model. The reason for this order was the fancy which had taken him to extend his geographical knowledge by the exploration of the Caspian (or Hyrcanian) Sea; he wished to determine what other sea it was connected with – whether it joined the Black Sea, or whether it was merely a gulf of the great Indian Ocean to the eastward. The Persian – or Red Sea,
as it is sometimes called – he had proved to be a gulf of the ocean, and it might, he thought, turn out to be the same with the Caspian.
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The limits – or origins – of the Caspian had never yet been discovered, in spite of the fact that its shores are inhabited by a considerable number of peoples and navigable rivers flow into it: from Bactria, for instance, the Oxus, the greatest river of Asia outside India, runs into it, and also the Jaxartes after following its course through Scythia, and, as is generally supposed, the Araxes after passing through Armenia.
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Apart from these three great rivers, there are also many tributaries which join them, and thus discharge their waters, too, into the Caspian; some of these were discovered by Alexander’s armies, others, of course, are far to the north in the wholly unknown country of the Nomad Scythians.

On his march to Babylon, Alexander, after crossing the Tigris, was met by some Wise Men of the Chaldaeans,
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who drew him aside and begged him to go no further, because their god Bel had foretold that if he entered the city at that time it would prove fatal to him. Alexander replied by quoting to them the line of Euripides:

‘Prophets are best who make the truest guess.’
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‘My lord,’ said the Chaldaeans, ‘look not to the West; do not march westward with your army; but turn about and go eastward.’ But this was not easy for Alexander to do, as the country to the east was impracticable for troops.
The truth was that fate was leading him to the spot where it was already written that he should die.

Who knows? Perhaps it was better for him to make his end while his fame was unimpaired and the world most grieved for his loss, and before he was overtaken by the ill fortune which, at one time or another, is the lot of all men. That, doubtless, was why Solon advised Croesus to ‘look to the end’ of a life, however long, and never to say that a man is happy till that end had come.
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Even in Alexander’s case, Hephaestion’s death had been no small calamity, and I believe he would rather have been the first to go than live to suffer that pain, like Achilles, who surely would rather have died before Patroclus than have lived to avenge his death.

Alexander had some suspicion that the Chaldaeans’ attempt to prevent him from marching to Babylon on that occasion was not, in fact, based upon a prophecy of impending disaster at all; on the contrary, its object, he felt, might well be to secure their own advantage. In Babylon stood the great temple of Bel, a huge edifice of baked bricks, set in bitumen. Like the other shrines in the city, it had been destroyed by Xerxes on his return from Greece and Alexander had proposed to restore it.
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According to some accounts, he intended to rebuild upon the original foundations, and for that reason the Babylonians had had instructions to clear the site. Others say he intended a still larger building than the old one. The workmen, however, once he was out of the way, dawdled over their job, so he
proposed to set all his own troops to work upon it. Now a great deal of land and considerable treasure had been devoted by the Assyrian kings to the god Bel, and from this the temple, in the old days, used to be maintained and the sacrifices offered to the god. But at the time of which I am speaking the Chaldaeans themselves had the disposal of the god’s property, as there was nothing upon which the income could be spent. For these reasons it had occurred to Alexander that they might not want him to enter the city, lest the rebuilding of the temple might be rapidly completed and they, in consequence, lose the benefit of the money. Nevertheless, Aristobulus tells us that Alexander, so far as changing his direction was concerned, was ready to yield to their wishes; on the first day he halted his men on the Euphrates, and on the next advanced, keeping the river on his right hand, with the intention of first passing the western section of the city and then wheeling to the eastward. But it turned out that by this route the going was too bad for the army to get through, as anyone approaching the west side of the city and then turning east is bound to get bogged down in swampy land. The result was that Alexander disobeyed the divine command – half deliberately, and half because he could not help it.