The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics) (38 page)

In Aristobulus’ account we find the following story about Apollodorus of Amphipolis. Apollodorus, one of the Companions and closely associated with Alexander, was in command of the force which had been left with Mazaeus, the governor of Babylon.
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After Alexander’s return from India, he had not been long in his company before he observed the severity with which he was punishing the various provincial governors. He accordingly wrote a letter to his brother Peithagoras, a seer who pracz
tised divination by the entrails of animals offered for sacrifice, asking him to use his art to foretell whether or not any danger threatened himself. Peithagoras asked in reply who was the principal cause of the foreboding which made him desire the service of divination, and he wrote another letter in which he said that it was the King and Hephaestion. Peithagoras then proceeded to offer sacrifice, first to secure a prophecy in the case of Hephaestion; and, as no lobe could be found on the victim’s liver, he sent a sealed message to Apollodorus in Ecbatana, assuring him that Hephaestion would soon be out of their way and that there was, therefore, nothing to fear from him. Aristobulus declares that Apollodorus received this communication the day before Hephaestion’s death. Peithagoras then offered a second sacrifice, this time for information about Alexander; once again the victim’s liver had no lobe, and Peithagoras wrote another letter to his brother in similar terms to the first. Apollodorus made no attempt at concealment, but told Alexander what the letter contained, in the belief that he would be doing him a good turn if he warned him to be on his guard against impending danger. Alexander thanked him, and on his arrival at Babylon asked Peithagoras the nature of the warning sign which had induced him to write to his brother as he did.

‘The victim’s liver,’ was the answer, ‘had no lobe.’

‘What,’ Alexander asked, ‘does that sign portend?’

‘Something,’ Peithagoras replied, ‘of the utmost gravity.’
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Far from being angry with Peithagoras, Alexander treated him with all the more consideration for having told him the truth without concealment.

This story Aristobulus declares he heard from Peithagoras’ own lips. He adds, moreover, that Peithagoras, on
a later occasion, practised his art of divination to foretell the fates of Perdiccas and Antigonus; in each case the same warning sign appeared, and in each case the warning proved true; for Perdiccas was killed in his campaign against Ptolemy, and Antigonus was killed in the battle of Ipsus against Seleucus and Lysimachus.
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There is a similar story of Calanus, the Indian Wise Man.
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According to this, on the way to the pyre where he was to meet his death he made his farewells to Alexander’s personal friends, but refused to speak any word of the sort to Alexander himself, saying that he would give him his greetings when they met in Babylon. At the time nobody paid much attention to this incident; but when, later on, Alexander died in Babylon, all who had been present on the occasion remembered what Calanus had said, and realized that his words were inspired by some mysterious foreknowledge of Alexander’s death.

In Babylon, Alexander was visited by delegations from Greece, for purposes which have not been recorded; most of them, I fancy, were to offer him the victor’s crown and congratulate him on his many successes, especially his triumphant campaign in India, and to express their pleasure in his safe return.
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We are told that he received the envoys graciously and paid them all the honours due
to their position before dismissing them; he also entrusted to their care the statues, images, and other votive offerings which Xerxes had taken from Greece and brought either to Babylon or Pasargadae or Susa or any other Asian city, and this was the means by which the bronze statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton and the Celcaean Artemis were restored to Athens.
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Aristobulus writes that the fleet was in Babylon when Alexander arrived there. Nearchus’ squadron had sailed up the Euphrates from the Persian Gulf, the others – two Phoenician quinqueremes, three quadriremes, twelve triremes, and about thirty light galleys – had come over from the Phoenician coast; they had been taken to pieces and transported overland to Thapsacus on the Euphrates, where they were re-assembled and sailed down the river to Babylon. Apparently Alexander was having a new flotilla built as well, and for this purpose was felling the cypresses in Babylonia; cypress being the only sort of timber of which there is an abundance in Assyrian territory, which is otherwise badly off for ship-building material.
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Man-power and crews for the new vessels were supplied by shell-divers and others whose work was connected with the sea, from Phoenicia and the neighbouring seaboard. He also by dredging operations began the construction of a harbour at Babylon, large enough for 1,000 warships to lie in, and equipped with yards. Miccalus of Clazomenae was sent to Phoenicia and Syria with a sum of 500 talents to hire or purchase more men familiar with ships and the sea. The fact is, Alexander had ideas of settling the seaboard of the Persian Gulf and the off-shore islands; for he fancied it might become as prosperous a country as Phoenicia. The naval preparations
were directed against the Arabs of the coast,
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ostensibly because they were the only people in that part of the country who had sent no delegation to wait upon him, or shown their respect by any other normal act of courtesy; actually, however, the reason for the preparations was, in my opinion, Alexander’s insatiable thirst for extending his possessions.
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Report has it that Alexander had heard that the Arabs worshipped only two gods, Uranus and Dionysus, the former because he is seen to contain within himself not only the stars but the sun too, the greatest and clearest source of blessing to mankind in all their affairs, and the latter, Dionysus, because of the fame of his journey to India.
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Alexander accordingly felt it would not be beyond his merits to be regarded by the Arabs as a third god, in view of the fact that his achievements surpassed those of Dionysus; or at least he would deserve this honour if he conquered the Arabs and allowed them, as he had allowed the Indians, to retain their ancient institutions.
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Moreover, the wealth of their country was an additional incitement – the cassia in the oases, the trees which bore frankincense and myrrh, the shrubs which yielded cinnamon, the meadows where nard grew wild: of all this report had told him. Arabia, too, was a large country, its coast (it was said) no less in extent than the coast of India; many islands lay off it, and there were harbours everywhere fit
for his fleet to ride in and to provide sites for new settlements likely to grow to great wealth and prosperity.

He was further informed of the existence of two islands off the mouth of the Euphrates. One of them lay fairly close, at a distance of, perhaps, fifteen miles from that point on the shore where the river joins the sea. This, the smaller of the two, was densely wooded, and contained a temple of Artemis the regular service of which was performed by the islanders themselves. Deer and wild goats found pasture there, and as they were held sacred to the goddess it was unlawful to hunt them except for the purpose of sacrifice. For this reason only was the ban upon taking them removed. Aristobulus tells us that Alexander decreed that this island should be called Icarus after the Aegean island of that name,
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upon which the legendary Icarus, son of Daedalus, fell when the wax melted with which his wings were fastened – it melted, the story goes, because he disobeyed his father and, instead of flying low, soared aloft in his folly until the heat of the sun softened the wax, and falling to his death he bequeathed his name to the isle of Icarus and the Icarian Sea.

The second of the two islands, called Tylus,
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lay off the mouth of the Euphrates at about the distance a running ship can cover in a day and a night. It was of some size, most of it neither wild nor wooded, but fit to produce all sorts of cultivated crops in their proper seasons.

Some of this information Alexander got from Archias, who was sent out in a galley to reconnoitre the coast for the proposed expedition against the Arabs. Archias reached Tylus, but did not venture beyond; Androsthenes,
who went in command of another galley, got further, sailing round a part of the Arabian peninsula,
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and Hiero, the shipmaster from Soli, made greater progress than either. Alexander put him in charge of a third galley and gave him instructions to circumnavigate the whole peninsula as far as the Egyptian town of Heröopolis on the Red Sea. But even he found his courage fail him, though he had sailed round the greater part of the Arabian coast; he turned back, and stated in his report to Alexander that the peninsula was of immense size, nearly as big as India, and that a great headland ran far out into the ocean.
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This headland had, indeed, been sighted at no great distance by Nearchus’ men on their voyage from India, before they altered course for the Persian Gulf, and they were on the point of crossing over to it, as Onesicritus the pilot advised them to do; Nearchus, however, says in his account of the voyage
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that he refused his permission, as after completing his survey of the coast of the Persian Gulf he would have to report to Alexander on the object of the voyage, and that object was not to explore the ocean, but to examine the coast and collect information about the coastal peoples and how they lived, the fertility or otherwise of the various districts, and the places where anchorages and fresh water were to be found. And this, he adds, was what enabled Alexander’s navy to come through in safety; it would have been quite useless to take it across to the desert coast of Arabia, for that is said to have been the reason for Hiero’s turning back.

While the new warships were under construction and
the work of dredging the harbour proceeded, Alexander sailed from Babylon down the Euphrates to the river known as Pallacopas, about 100 miles down-stream from the city. The Pallacopas is not actually a river rising from an independent source, but a canal leading off from the Euphrates.
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Now the Euphrates, which rises in the mountains of Armenia, is in winter a shallowish river and runs well within its banks, but in spring, and especially round about the summer solstice, its volume is greatly increased by the melting of the snow in the Armenian mountains, so that the water, rising above the level of its banks, floods the neighbouring Assyrian plains. At least, this flooding would inevitably occur were it not for the cutting by which its waters are diverted along the Pallacopas into the marshes and lakes which continue from that point almost into Arabia, and passing thence over a vast area of swampy land, finally reach the sea by a number of ill-defined channels.

In autumn, after the snows have melted, the level of the Euphrates drops, yet even so much of its water continues to find its way along the canal into the lakes; thus, unless the canal were closed by a sluice, to block the entrance of the river-water and allow it to flow along its proper channel, it would, at this season of the year, empty the Euphrates completely, and so prevent the irrigation of the Assyrian plains. The construction of such a sluice was undertaken by the governor of Babylonia; it proved a tremendous task and the result was unsuccessful, as the soil at that point is mostly soft, wet clay which is easily penetrated by the water of the river. Consequently it was no easy matter to keep it from percolating into the canal, though for three months over 10,000 Assyrian workmen were kept on the job.

When these facts came to Alexander’s knowledge, he was anxious to do something to improve Assyria’s prospects. Accordingly, he proposed to construct a really efficient sluice at the junction of the canal and the river; however, at a spot some four miles lower down he observed that the soil was of a harder and stonier nature, and it occurred to him that if a new cutting were carried from that point into the Pallacopas canal, the problem might be better solved, for the water would be unable to penetrate the hard, impermeable ground, and could easily be shut off by the sluice at the proper times.

This, then, was the project which took Alexander to the Pallacopas, and down the canal to the lakes in the direction of Arabia.
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Happening to observe a good site, he built and fortified a new town and settled some of the Greek mercenaries in it, making up the numbers with volunteers and men who were either incapacitated or too old for active service.
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It now seemed that he had proved the Chaldaeans’ prophecy to be nonsense. They had foretold disaster in Babylon; none had occurred. He had marched safely out of the city before any mischance could catch him. Accordingly, with renewed confidence he sailed again for the lakes, proceeding to the southward. Some of his ships went astray among the narrow channels through the lakes and swamps, and he had to send them a pilot to get them back into the main stream.

The greater number of the tombs of the Assyrian kings were built in the lakes and marshland, and the story goes that Alexander, while his vessel with himself at the helm
was passing through, was wearing a sun hat, bound with the diadem or band, signifying royalty. Suddenly a strong gust of wind blew the hat off, which fell into the water, but the light band went flying away and caught on a reed in a reed-bed near one of the ancient royal tombs. This in itself was a presage, but there was more to come: one of the sailors
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swam off after the hat-band and, finding when he had taken it off the reed that he could not bring it back in his hands without wetting it as he swam, he bound it round his head. Most historians state that Alexander gave the man a talent by way of reward for his willing service, and then had him beheaded in obedience to the prophecy which warned him not to leave untouched the head which had worn the diadem. Aristobulus, however, though he confirms the gift of money, says that the punishment for putting on the band was only a flogging. He adds that the man concerned was one of the Phoenician sailors. Some writers say it was Seleucus, and declare that the incident portended Alexander’s death and Seleucus’ inheritance of his vast empire – and Seleucus was, in actual fact, the greatest king among Alexander’s successors. There can, I think, be no two opinions about this: he had the royal-lest mind of them all, and, after Alexander himself, ruled over the greatest extent of territory.
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