Aeschines speaks of the crossing of the Paropamisus as a feat of logistics and a tribute to his leadership, which I suppose it was. But consider this question: how many people had to starve for each mile Alexander’s army was provisioned in that country? In these matters I saw more than anyone in the Macedonian general staff did, including Alexander. The task of separating the native people from their food was left in the hands of low-level officers. When the Macedonians came to a place with a significant concentration of families, soldiers went out to demand all their stores be deposited in a central place by a certain day. Crimes of opportunity were not uncommon during these visits, including murders of recalcitrant men and abductions of young women.
Alexander frowned on these practices. He even punished an inveterate rapist, a certain Hero, son of Alcaemon, with a run through the gauntlet. But as his comrades took turns punching Hero, the ‘punishment’ took on the quality of a mass congratulation of the man. Nor was he removed from the duty that seemed to trouble him with so much temptation.
Some of the villages held back supplies and were destroyed. The rest submitted, though the “donation” of their winter stores would inevitably reduce them to starvation in the months to come. Like living reproofs of these outrages, women with stick-thin babes and shriveled breasts hung around the army’s camp for the whole time Macedonians campaigned in Bactria. The soldiers were not immune to pity-on several occasions I saw them toss a morsel or two out to these victims. The women fought over them like ravening dogs.
This was how Alexander’s triumph in the mountains was supplied. I don’t say that he was unique in this regard, or that the Persians didn’t do the same in their marches through territories of the Greeks. In lands of wealthier people the Macedonians were content to buy their supplies, though such people were, ironically, far better able to survive outright theft than the mountaineers. What I am saying is that you should not believe that the burden of cold, hunger, or disease fell only on Alexander’s gallant soldiers, as the current stories lead you to believe. For every hungry soldier who didn’t get enough to eat there were three villagers who got nothing; for every cold soldier there was a family robbed of its bedclothes.
In this way, he crossed the mountains with a loss of only a twentieth of his army. Before the winter ended he descended from the highlands and, after setting beacon-fires to guide the rest of his men down from the mountains, raced to take the towns of Drapsaca and Bactra with whatever forces he had with him. Bessus, hoping to find reinforcements in the lands of the Scythians, retreated north across the Oxus River. To forestall pursuit, he burned anything within a thousand stades that would float. The Macedonians followed by resurrecting a trick Alexander had used to cross the Danube years before, rafting across the river on tents stuffed and sewn shut with grass, leaves and wood chips.
With his failure to stop Alexander at the Oxus, the Persians had seen enough of their new king. Riders delivered the message that Bessus was arrested and waiting for Alexander a short distance ahead of his army. Thus ended, as dishonorably as it had begun, the short reign of ‘Artaxerxes V.’
Alexander had definite plans for disposing of the traitor. Ptolemy was sent ahead to secure the prisoner, strip him naked, and place him at the side of the road where the Greeks marched. As the troops went by, they saw him humiliated there, a dog collar around his neck. Riding in his chariot, Alexander turned to the prisoner with a sneer, as if confronted with a pile of dung.
“Why did you betray and murder your king?” asked Alexander.
Bessus responded with equal arrogance, asking “Alexander, why did you betray and murder your father, Philip?”
“I ask you again to account for yourself.”
“What I did, I did for all the Persians, unlike the king of the Macedonians, who works only for his own glory.”
Alexander put the question a third time, and Bessus, knowing that his death was foregone, showed his contempt by indulging the part of a collared dog, growling and barking. This ended their interview, for surely any man who would bark at his conqueror was a fool. Bessus was seized and packed off to Bactra, where his treachery was dealt with in traditional Persian fashion, which I will not describe beyond saying that it involved disarticulation. That Alexander allowed such practices is perhaps not surprising, insofar that the Persians could not be expected to take up civilized ways right away. But the episode did shock a good many of the Macedonians, who would just as soon put a sword through the neck of a traitor and have done with him. To allow such a deliberately sadistic death was unseemly.
With Darius gone, and his betrayer most definitely dead, the rationale for continuing the war dwindled. Yet cities and kingdoms far ahead were sending emissaries to Alexander, capitulating in advance, promising their alliance and support against those who resisted him. With such ripe fruits demanding to be plucked, it would have been difficult for anyone to stop.
The campaign became ever more squalid and loathsome. Alexander’s awareness that much of his success was due to Arridaeus increased his hunger to show he was more than a conqueror in name. From that point, he refused to call on his brother’s help in certain minor campaigns where he believed his personal valor alone would carry him through. These wars were usually against primitive tribes short of everything but pride. Tapurians, Mardians, Ariaspians, Drangae, Gedrosians, Arachotians, Abian Scythians, Assacenians, Orietae, Memaceni-no group was too poor in means or meager in numbers to conquer. The tribes submitted under the crushing weight of Macedonian power, but only while he was in the area. Time and again, once Alexander was gone the garrisons he left behind were massacred. And on each occasion, the rest of the army was never told of these losses, but left to believe in their invincibility.
With each reduction of an independent people emerged an uncomfortable truth: the Persian Empire was not what we were told it was. For years, pamphleteers like Isocrates had described a domain that was united in lucrative subjugation to the Persian throne. Throughout Asia, men were supposed to bow to the Great King, lavishing upon him tribute that could have gone to Greeks, if we only would agree to take it. Like a monolith hewn from rotten stone, it was only a matter of giving the empire a small push to topple it into a thousand pieces. Or so the argument went.
But the empire was no monolith. As we learned marching with Alexander, only a small part of the territory said to be under the Great King’s control was actually ruled by him. These were composed of the farmlands, the habitable coastlines, and the roads that connected them. All the rest-the mountains, the deserts, the lands fit only for herding and thievery-were controlled by a myriad of petty chieftains. In many cases Darius did not even receive tribute from these chiefs, but had to pay tolls to transport his army across their territory! Alexander, as I have said, refused to do so, preferring to force them into submission. But as I have also said, the time always came with armies must move on; not even Alexander could be everywhere at once.
Please understand, I do not tell you that the empire of the Great King was poor and disunited to belittle Alexander’s achievement. All told, the resources at the command of Darius were still far greater than those of all the Greeks put together. I only tell you these things for you to know the truth, to know something of what the men who marched with Alexander were thinking. Only a fool conquers the world without learning something he doesn’t know.
Having humbled a continent, Alexander conceived a need to humble those who did all the work. Much has been said about the introduction of prostration among the Macedonians; my opponent even claims that I was truckling in my zeal to please the King. It seems there is no winning against Aeschines: either I defy Alexander, and I am called an obstruction, or I obey him, and I am accused of toadyism! The truth is that I understood the need to establish a conventional etiquette around the royal person. Since Macedonians and Persians would have to share responsibility, and the practices in their respective courts were very different, whatever custom the King demanded would necessarily offend someone. Rather than contribute to what I regarded as peevish resistance on the part of some Macedonians and Greeks, I showed a dutiful example. And that, gentlemen of the jury, is the extent of my sinister design in this matter!
In Greece monarchy is preserved only in the cities with the most ancient constitutions, such as in Sparta, or as an honorific only, such as our “king-archon” in Athens. Even in these cases the “king” is better understood as belonging to a class of administrator, occupying only one place in a larger arrangement by which free people govern themselves. The Persian, however, is not free, and his empire is not a city, but an agglomeration of towns, tribes, and smaller kingdoms aligned by force. To rule such a vast territory, filled with peoples who hardly agree on the principles of mortal governance, requires an authority that is more than a man.
It therefore comes as little surprise that the Persian takes his Great King as the very representative of divinity on earth. Only silk and precious metal ever touches the royal person. Suppliants at his court must dress in garments
