was not taken by surprise.
The Greeks had built fires, and they took us forward to their village, which lined the Royal Road. They were despicable beggars, to the Persians, but they had prepared fires and food for us.
I warmed myself, and made myself accept the embraces and the thanks – the thanks! Of a hundred miserable wretches with no eyes, no lips, no noses, no ears, no hands or feet.
I watched them tend each other. They were like file mates – the man with no legs depended on his mate with two to fetch for him.
The king rode out of the snow.
He dismounted, threw his arms around Leonidas and walked through them, embracing these wrecks of men, and promising them that their troubles were over.
He did it well.
I thought it possible that these men would die of joy. I had never seen men to whom pleasure was so very painful.
And eventually, Alexander made his way to me.
‘You did well to send me word,’ Alexander said to me. He nodded. ‘This – it is for this that we march to destroy the rule of Persia.’
The falsity of his speech sickened me. I had never heard him sound so openly pompous.
Whatever passed over my face, he missed it, but Hephaestion didn’t. He looked at me with a special kind of pleading. The way a parent looks at another parent, begging that a child
So I let it go.
In the morning, we rode on, to Persepolis.
Tiridates surrendered it. When we marched through the passes to the city over the next day, we couldn’t believe he hadn’t made even a token effort to hold it, but of course Alexander had massacred almost every man who held the Susian Gates, and that may have broken Tiridates’ will to resist.
We rode into the city of the Persians, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had seen Aegypt and Babylon – I don’t use that phrase lightly.
The magnificence of the city rolled on and on, so that the eye couldn’t drink in all the splendour at once, and skipped from detail to detail. It wasn’t like Athens – which I love – or Memphis – which I dream of – or Babylon. All three cities have a magnificent central focus that draws the eye and holds it, and any man or woman watching the sun set on the Acropolis has to ask if mere men built the Parthenon, yes? And the same with the temple complex at Memphis, or the Temple of Bel in Babylon. And Athens was ancient when Hector died at Troy, and Aegypt was ancient when Herakles walked the earth, and Babylon – by the gods, Babylon is just ancient.
But at Persepolis, there’s more than you can see at a glance, and so you try to look everywhere. Or you did. It is no longer a problem.
And it was all new-built, like the house of a parvenu rich man. The oldest building was perhaps two hundred years old.
The lower town populace stayed in their houses. A hundred Persian cavalrymen met us outside the gates, led by the traitor in person. We had almost two thousand cavalry with us, and Alexander ordered Philotas to take the gates with his personal troop.
And then we rode in.
I remember that at some point, after most of the column had passed the ceremonial gate, I looked back to make a comment to Philip the Red. I can’t even remember what I meant to say. But behind him, one of my gentleman troopers – Brasidas, a highlander – fumbled his helmet and dropped it. It struck the stone street pavings with a hollow clang that sounded as loudly as a hundred temple bells.
That is how silent Persepolis was as we rode through the streets.
I still do not understand how it was that Darius chose to leave it intact. Or why he abandoned his treasury.
We rode to the palace. And Alexander threw the reins of his horse to the slaves and grooms as if he were the owner, and walked into the palace, led by Tiridates, who took him to the throne room.
I knew what Alexander intended. Apparently, Tiridates did not.
Alexander went to the throne – the great throne, with the winged lions supporting it. And sat. He had to get a table to climb into it. I helped carry the table, and two Persian servants standing by, shocked, burst into tears when the alien usurper sat on the king’s throne.
Alexander turned and looked at them.
‘Now I am your king,’ he said.
The silence inside the palace was thicker, if anything, than the silence in the streets.
‘Now take me to the treasury,’ Alexander said.
Our footsteps were loud. And the palace was immense.
It was utterly different from Memphis. At Memphis, enthusiastic priests led us from room to room of a living palace.
Despite the presence of the full staff at Persepolis, we were looking at the corpse of a palace, and I could feel the hate from every servant, every eunuch – even the slaves.
We crossed the complex to the double tower that acted as the royal treasury. A pair of eunuchs made trouble, and then subsided, and their keys were taken from them. And the doors were opened.
I walked in, one of perhaps eight or nine men behind Alexander. I looked at him. He had stopped, transfixed, in the midst of a marble floor inlaid with black basalt. He had a look – like the Greeks. Raw joy. Hunger.
I lifted my eyes from him, and saw it – I can testify to what it looked like.
It looked like all the gold in the world.
A talent of gold will feed a peasant for his entire life.
We launched the invasion of Asia with forty talents in our war chest.
A hundred thousand talents was, in a very real way, all of the gold in the world. Every treasure that the Persians had taken from every empire that they conquered – from the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Jews, from Thrace, from Euboea in Greece, from Athens; from India, from the Saka, from the desert tribes of the East, from the hill tribes – here it was, the product of two hundred years of ruthless war. Melted down, refined, stacked in bars that reached to shoulder height in front of us and vanished on either side into the murk of the vault, with chests of jewels, swords, armour, mirrors of silver, nets of pearls, the tribute of a hundred kings to the might of Persia.
Alexander made a sound like a moan – the sound of a woman in the joy of love. In that place, a hideous sound.
In that moment, Alexander ceased to care about Macedon. Macedon was an appendage of his treasure room.
Because the veins of Ares are not full of ichor, but molten gold. War requires gold as a horse requires hay and grass. War
We had all the gold in the world, and our king moaned with pleasure to see that he could make war
We were four months in Persepolis. The army moved up to us, and then the baggage moved up, little by little.
The soldiers began to grumble. They knew the scale of the treasure we’d just seized. They wanted some of it. The older veterans – especially Parmenio’s oldest men – made it obvious that they thought it was theirs.
I was adapting to my lack of place with the king. He scarcely seemed to recognise me when I attended him, and I was never summoned to council. He did say my name from time to time – but usually only to put me in my place.
I might have been bitter, but I had lost my heart for it. There was a busy crowd around him, fighting for supremacy and power. Viewed from the outside, it looked . . . obscene.
But the near mutiny of the old soldiers was being ignored at every level. Men like Craterus were obviously afraid to bring it up with the king. You’ll note there’s not a whisper about it in the Military Journal.
I sent a note to Hephaestion, requesting a cup of wine with him. He was, as far as I could see, the last of the old crowd still close to the king.
I dressed carefully. I had a feeling that this was very important. That appearances now mattered more than
