was poured into the waters that the sea’s foam washed up red at the men’s feet.
Aristander reported the auspices to be favorable for the King’s next project: a voyage of exploration along the southern coast of Asia to the Persian Gulf, under the command of Nearchus. To prepare the way for this journey, Alexander sent parties of men into the eastern desert to stockpile supplies and dig wells for the sailors. When a number of these parties did not return, the King blamed the natives for their disappearance. Punitive action brought these people-principally the Arabitae and the Oreitae-into line; as penance, he ordered the tribes to bring all the stores they could gather to the coast. Though the people had little to spare, they obeyed, so that Alexander gave permission for Nearchus to proceed when his fleet was ready.
He ordered the bulk of the army, including all the Foot Companions, half the hypaspists, the elephants corps, and all the native auxiliaries, to follow Craterus to Carmania along the safe route west, through Arachosia. The rest of his men, amounting to about 6,000 infantry and 1,000 horse, plunged with him into the Gedosian desert. Alexander had heard that entire armies of Persians and Babylonians had been swallowed up there; in former crossings, an army of the Babylonians had been reduced to twenty men, while another of the Great King had lost all but seven. Naturally, it became Alexander’s intention to succeed where these others had failed, and become the first to lead a force through the desert intact.
I went with Craterus, so I did not witness the ordeal that was in store for Alexander and his men. The outlines are clear, though: for two months the expedition struggled through such infernal wastes as to make the trip to Siwa in Egypt seem easy. Though they were never far from the ocean, they found little fresh water except deep underground, and that only after expending more sweat and effort than the meager flows would replenish. They found no animals, and no plants except a kind of nettle that, for all the sustenance it provided, might have been made of bone. Though Alexander had intended to lay up supplies for Nearchus, he could spare none, and feared that the desolation of the coast would doom his fleet as well. Autumn came but the sun did not relent, forcing them to travel at night. This further confused his guides, who already contended with the disappearance of their landmarks under the shifting sands. Days and weeks were added to the march as the expedition drifted on and off the trail.
Alarmed, Alexander sent scouts to seek the help of the native people of the area. His riders returned with discouraging news: the barbarians of the coast were too backward to possess towns, weapons, or buildings of any kind. The natives, whom the Persians called the Fish-eaters, went about mostly naked, with hair and nails left uncut over their whole lives. They lived in holes dug in the sand, roofed over with fish-bones and seaweed. The only moisture to pass their lips was dew collected on seal-skins they left unfurled by night, or the blood of the creatures that swam in those waters. They had no word for “rain” in their language.
“Have the barbarians acknowledged our sovereignty over them as the Lord of Asia?” asked the King.
“My lord, the Fish-eaters lack knowledge even of chiefs, let alone of kings that might reign over them from afar. We did not think to demand their submission.”
“Ignorance is no excuse for their disrespect.”
Alexander sent a force of cavalry to demonstrate his authority. The troops returned without suffering any losses, and bearing the finest tribute the Fish-eaters had to offer: a handful of sea-shells. This gift Alexander accepted as gladly as any from the wealthiest of his subjects, for he was not unreasonable, and could only expect the things thought most precious in the lands he conquered. The King returned their gift with a dozen javelins, for use in fishing or any other purpose they wished.
The real dying began when the guides lost the trail again. With hopelessness spreading through the ranks, men straggled, fell behind the pace, and disappeared into the night. They went by twos and threes, until Alexander had lost more men than to any human enemy. There was a look of despair on his face, they say, that had never been seen there before; no doubt he took pity on the faithful Macedonians who had followed him, and received only death for their trouble. This expression worried his men as much as the desert, for if the indomitable Alexander lost heart they were certainly doomed.
That Alexander understood this is clear from a famous story most of you already know. Some of his men had dug a deep pit and managed to collect a helmet-full of fresh water from the bottom of it. When they brought the water to their King, he was tempted, but in the end refused to drink, pouring it on the ground. His men were comforted by this, knowing that Alexander expected no more of them than he was willing to suffer himself. Many of the survivors attest that this gesture gave them the will to go on. Alexander had therefore worked a kind of miracle: he had made a single helmet-full of water enough to satisfy an entire army.
At length Craterus, who was waiting for them on the borders of Carmania, saw a party of burnt skeletons emerge from the desert. When Alexander joined him, he had the appearance of a dust-covered reptile, but a smiling one: the Persians had lost all but seven men, and the Babylonian queen Semiramis all but twenty, but Alexander saved more than three thousand, or about half his force. Thus the King triumphed over his rivals in history, if not over the desert itself.
Thanks to Peithon’s example no one was willing to assume Alexander was dead until they laid eyes on his corpse. Craterus, instead of taking the diadem for himself when the King was overdue, just followed orders. Indeed, he led the army more sensibly than Alexander himself, for in his lack of imagination he simply led us from point A to point B, without turning aside every few miles to overawe every feathered native he saw.
Harpalus was unique in failing to share in this good sense. As Aeschines has said, he was a personal friend of the King’s, his treasurer at Ecbatana. In a fit of what may have been grief at Alexander’s death in the desert, but was probably just greed, Harpalus abandoned his post and fled to this city with a fortune of 6000 talents. My opponent misleads you, however, when he makes wild accusations based on some moneylender’s records of 1000 gold darics due for my collection. That money was not a bribe from Harpalus, but Alexander’s reward to me for saving his life in the Mallian raid.
Nor is there much significance to the fact that the payment was made in darics: a great deal of the Great King’s fortune, out of which Alexander issued all his rewards, was minted in that coin. This is not a secret. If Aeschines had bothered to check with any of the other Greeks who have come home with money from Alexander, he would have found many of them were paid in darics. Aeschines furthermore neglects to mention that Harpalus was expelled from the city on the order of the Assembly, and then murdered at the instigation of his own bodyguard, Thibron the Lacedaemonian. Yet wasn’t Harpalus supposed to be allied with…dare I say his name… Demosthenes? So much for the vaunted influence of Aeschines’ personal bugaboo!
XX.
When I saw the King again he posed a question to me that had preoccupied him during long night-marches in Gedrosia: what does it mean to be Persian? When he first asked this I thought it was a joke. But he was serious, and by asking it he meant more than simply the fact that a man was born in Persian territory.
“Are you asking about the customs of the Persians?”
“I’m asking about customs,” he replied, “and clothing, and the way they think, and everything in their history that makes them what they are.”
What reply to make? As Greeks, we have insults for the Persians like “carpet-munchers,” “runaways,” and “spear-droppers.” And we have words to describe the Persians that flatter us more than they describe them: words like arrogance, decadence, slavishness, obsequiousness, cowardliness. These are venerable notions, handed down to us from the men who fought at Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. But no one who saw the Persians take the field against the Macedonians, pitting their leather armor against the sarissa, could say they were cowardly. No one who has seen the splendor of their architecture, art, or gardens can doubt their ingenuity. And no one who has worked beside Persian administrators or fought beside their nobles, as we came to do, has any grounds to doubt their basic decency.
What is a Persian? It was easier to speak of individual Persians, and the qualities that blighted or recommended them. Pressed by the King, I suggested he look to the beliefs that most of the Persians had accepted-that is, the odd philosophy of Zoroaster, who taught that our sins each have cosmic consequences, that judgment awaits us all, and that all life is worthy of reverence. Yet how can a soldier believe such a thing, objected Alexander, if it is his duty to destroy life? They may believe it, I replied, but at the cost of fearing death, which as every Greek knows makes a man useless in the phalanx.
