was to begin the acculturation of his Macedonian staff to the world of ruling the Persian Empire.
I sat in my chair, and Thais came, veiled in silk gauze, and after the Priestess of Aphrodite had said all the words, I rose, threw back her veil and kissed her lips, and her blue eyes stayed on mine for a long time.
I think that would be a good place to end. Thais and I, on thrones, and Polystratus and his Persian bride Artacama, Laertes and Theodore with their brides, Barsulas with his bride, a magnificent girl and a rich heiress named Artonis, and all of our friends who we could gather – all the survivors of my group of pages. Philip the Red was there, and he wed another beauty, Amastrine, who seemed shocked to be offered a cup of wine by a man not her husband. You see – we carried through the weddings in the Persian manner, because the king had commanded it, and he was paying.
But the feasts that followed were pure Greek. I’d say Macedonian, except that among the thousand men and women dining on the portico of the Temple of Astarte at Susa, no boy was raped and no man’s gullet slit – so it can’t have been a Macedonian feast.
Thais played the kithara, and everyone was silent – the highest compliment that a crowd can pay a musician. We had performers – jugglers, and an old rhapsode, and then we danced – women with women and men with men, and Cyrus, my friend from Sogdiana, danced the Plataean Pyricche with Strakos and Amyntas and Polystratus and me. We were pretty drunk, but we did it well. And when the aulos pipes stopped and we were merely human again, we saw that the king had joined us.
Thais led the women out – Persian as well as Macedonian, more than twenty women with whom, we saw immediately, she had practised in secret – and they danced one of the dances of Artemis that all Greek women know. Olympias danced next to Thais, and the Persian women danced – and Cyrus smiled. We all smiled. Wine flowed, and people were happy.
It would be a good place to end this story.
But I will not end here.
A few weeks after the wedding, the king paid off the army’s debts. The men saw it as a favourable sign.
They were wrong.
He had himself declared a god. He assumed he had bought the army’s acceptance.
He was wrong.
He began to move the army – Aegema, Tagma and Antitagma all together – back to Babylon, and he paraded them at Opis.
It was a clear, dry day. The army bore no resemblance to the ragged horde that had stumbled out of the Gedrosian Desert. We had the new phalanx, magnificent in bronze armour, crisp, white chitons and the new helmets with Persian-style tiaras atop them. The old Macedonian infantry – fewer than ten thousand men, even with a recent infusion of recruits from home and a thousand Greek mercenaries – stood looking second-best. The hypaspitoi had absorbed more men out of the pezhetaeroi – yet they, too, had received drafts of the very best of the new Persians. They gleamed with gold. And they stood separate, more like a tyrant’s bodyguard than the elite of the army. Seleucus commanded them, but he had multiple lieutenants who were clearly there to watch him – new men, fresh out of Greece, and one from Lydia.
The Hetaeroi were more Persian than Greek. We had new horses and new armour and thousands of new men.
Alexander came out and sat on a throne, surrounded by advisers and functionaries, under an awning. Then he stood, and in a loud, clear voice, informed them of his plans.
‘It is my wish that the men who conquered the world,’ he said with an easy smile, ‘should have the retirement they deserve – that men who should long ago have gone home to Pella to plant their farms should go, richly rewarded, and live lives of ease and splendour.’
If he imagined that they would be pleased, he was wrong.
The ranks began to move – the Tagma writhed as if it had to face elephants. The pikes wavered.
The very air became still.
Alexander still had that smile fixed on his face.
Amyntas son of Philip stepped forward – he was the right file leader of the rightmost taxeis – the senior phalangites of the army. Every man knew him – every man knew he had declined to become the king’s shield- bearer, or the senior phylarch of the hypaspitoi. He stepped forward at parade-ground pace, until he was three paces in front of the taxeis.
‘Do you think you can just send us away?’ he roared. ‘We shat blood for you!’
Alexander watched him, the way a man looks at a snake that has suddenly appeared near his foot.
The phalanx began to shout abuse – at the king.
Alexander’s face grew red.
Amyntas raised his arm and pointed his spear at the Antitagma. ‘You plan to conquer the rest of the world with your
The Tagma took up the cry – War Dancers! War Dancers!
Men began to laugh.
Now spears in the Antitagma began to shake – with rage.
Alexander’s face was as red as the sun had turned it in the Gedrosian Desert. He raised his hand to speak.
But the Tagma was not cowed.
‘With your pretty boys and your father Amon!’ called another front-ranker, and men laughed.
They all laughed.
Every Macedonian in the army began to laugh at the king.
‘God Alexander!’ men laughed. ‘Father Amon! War dancers!’
Alexander walked rapidly up to Amyntas. He motioned to the hypaspitoi, and his personal guard detached themselves and ran to him. Not Bubores or Alectus, or Astibus – all dead. Men we didn’t know.
Amyntas saluted. He said something. I was too far away to hear it.
Alexander’s face became ugly – white and red, his mouth thin and set.
A hypaspist drove his spear into Amyntas, under the arm with which he was saluting the king.
He killed about fifty of them – veterans, every one. Later, in a fit of remorse, he held funerals, and a dinner to celebrate the friendship of Macedon and Persia.
And then he ordered all the veterans home. Oh, they were well paid. But he sent them under Craterus, with orders to displace – and murder – old Antipater.
And then Hephaestion died.
Alexander was almost human for a month after Hephaestion died. He died of a hard life under brutal conditions – of a love of excess and hard drinking. I suppose it is possible that he was poisoned. I don’t think so.
But his death revealed something to the king. Alexander looked around him like a man awakened from a dream – I think because Hephaestion, for all his failings, had helped to protect the king from the hardest truths, and without him, Alexander was like a man wearing armour without padding.
But Hephaestion had also been our last conduit to the king – our last way of protesting, of demanding that he remain a Macedonian. And after a funeral that alternated between high drama and darkest comedy, heavy drinking and flights of royal fancy that made me want to vomit – he was lost.
By the time we moved to Babylon, I had had enough. I sent Thais away, with the children, and all my men but Polystratus. They were discharged veterans now, anyway.
I sent them west, to Aegypt. Thais had her orders, and Laertes had his.
FORTY
After Hephaestion’s death, all I could think of was Philip – Philip, the King of Macedon. The only excuse for his murder was hubris and tyranny. He had made himself a god, and begun to act like a selfish tyrant.
And Amyntas son of Philip – a ranker, a phalangite, a man who loved his king and marched to his wars, and died, spitted on a spear on the tyrant’s orders.
Oh, yes.
