Читать книгу Into the Land of Bones - Frank L. Holt - Страница 12

CHAPTER TWO

Hunting the Enemy

CITY OF BONES

In the spring of 329 B.C.E., at the age of twenty-six, Alexander set up camp in a city rumored to be the oldest in the world. Zariaspa lay beside the Bactrus River and served as the administrative capital of Bactria, an old province of the Persian Empire; for these reasons, the city itself was generally referred to simply as Bactra (without an i). Today the site, called Balkh, is a sprawling ruin in northern Afghanistan with miles of crumbling walls enclosing a small village in a dusty tract.¹ In Islamic tradition, old Noah himself founded this city after floating through the Great Flood. Thousands of years later, Balkh was still “a splendid city of great size” (though already declining) when Marco Polo passed by in the thirteenth century C.E.² Gradually, its population shifted fourteen miles eastward to Mazar-i-Sharif, particularly after the establishment there of the popular shrine of Hazrat ‘Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad, in 1481.³ It was at Mazar-i-Sharif that the United States and its allies won their first victory in Afghanistan (with the cavalry charge mentioned in chapter 1), and at the tomb of ‘Ali that large crowds celebrated the event.⁴ Ironically, many Muslims revere an alternate burial place for this same ‘Ali, a rival shrine located at Najaf in Iraq—the scene of so much strife in an even more recent war.⁵

Neither Najaf nor Mazar-i-Sharif existed as cities in the fourth century B.C.E. When Alexander rode by on his way from Babylon to Bactra, Islam had not yet redrawn the maps of ancient empires. Zoroastrianism prevailed in much of the Persian realm conquered by Alexander, and Bactra was the holy city of its prophet.⁶ A famous golden shrine of Anahita, worshiped by Zoroastrians as a goddess of fertility and purifying waters, still stood astride the Bactrus River when the Greeks and Macedonians arrived.⁷ In later legends, Anahita would become the wife of Alexander and use her powers to help her husband win his wars.⁸ In reality, the only thing her cult could do for the king was to preside over the nourishing waters that refreshed his troops in this arid land. The Bactrus River, and the dozens of irrigation canals drawing from its stream, gave life to a land otherwise parched by encroaching sand dunes, dust storms, and daytime temperatures simmering above 110°F.

Inside the city, the sparkling oasis turned ugly. Decaying bodies and bleached human bones lay scattered in the streets. One of Alexander’s men reported seeing packs of dogs gnawing at the dead, while a few stalked and snapped at fresher meals still alive but helpless against the hounds.⁹ The outraged Greeks shuddered as they witnessed this alien spectacle. It was not, of course, the ordinary sight or smell of death that unsettled these veterans of Alexander’s wars. They had made careers of wading through blood pooled deep in captured cities and bodies piled high on battlefields. They had massacred entire populations when so ordered, or when the rush of victory carried them too far to stop. They had certainly witnessed on many occasions the glut of dogs and carrion birds on the dead and dying of war.

Bactra was different. Alexander’s army had not stormed its gates or scaled its walls. The dogs inside were not growling over the bones of battle casualties. The thing that so shocked the Greeks and Macedonians was that they had entered, unopposed, a city quite alive with normal trade and human traffic, its people going about their daily affairs with a wary eye on the newcomers but not the slightest regard for the carnage around them. As part of their religion, the Bactrians literally tossed their dead to the dogs and even hastened the process by letting these hounds execute their old, sick, and invalid citizens. No one intervened. In fact, the dogs were kept for just this purpose. In their own language, the locals called their hounds something like Devourers or Undertakers and let them do a dirty but sacred job that in Greece would be the work of a tomb or funeral pyre. Alexander and his troops denounced the use of Devourer dogs as a barbaric custom, whereas the Bactrians in turn could not believe that anyone would be so depraved as to set a dead person afire. Alexander had cremated his father back in Macedonia; no one in Bactria could imagine such a sacrilege. What were the two cultures to do, now that fate had thrown them together? How should the living henceforth treat their dead, now that one of the world’s youngest conquerors had arrived in one of the world’s oldest cities?

To Alexander’s credit, his policy was generally to respect local customs and religions. This had been true in Egypt, where the king paid homage to the bewildering beliefs of that exotic civilization. Indeed, Alexander would in time be mummified and buried there.¹⁰ When the Indian sage Calanus fell ill in Alexander’s camp, the king allowed—even assisted—the preparation of an elaborate funeral ritual culminating in the man’s astonishing self-immolation on a blazing pyre.¹¹ At Pasargadae in Persia, Alexander took special care to restore the aged tomb of Cyrus, and he later punished those who defiled that hallowed ground.¹² Alexander accommodated all sorts of local traditions on his long march from Greece to India, but at Bactra he bristled and would not budge: the Devourer dogs had to go. This decision gave the first hint of an epic struggle that would become as political and religious as it was military. Bactria would be treated unlike any other part of Alexander’s immense empire. The Greeks and Macedonians saw it as particularly alien and developed a singular distaste for its population. In the eyes of Alexander’s troops, nowhere needed civilizing more than this bleak landscape where warlords hid in the hills and a cruel religion brutalized the streets.

Of course, the tired and ill-tempered invaders were not entirely fair. As one Greek author complained when he later read of the Devourer dogs, Alexander’s compatriots “tell us nothing but the worst” about the native peoples they met in central Asia.¹³ Their biased accounts left out the extraordinary local achievements revealed to us today through the great efforts of archaeologists. The region was certainly urbanized, wealthy, and well irrigated. We must therefore be wary of the ancient propaganda that the conquering Greeks first brought civilization, high art, and economic prosperity to the backward Bactrians. In fact, the land was enjoying one of its periodic golden ages. Thus, Alexander’s army did not find the region in quite the ruined condition that exists today, although the invaders soon did their part to level its towns and cities, burn its croplands, and scatter its population. For a time, the Greeks and Macedonians themselves turned Bactria into a tempestuous wasteland that had to be rebuilt in order to regain something of its former (unacknowledged) glory. That cycle would continue down through the ages, with repeated invasions and periods of rehabilitation, as noted in chapter 1. Some of these eras were worse than others (the Umayyads and Mongols stand out for the long-term effect of their incursions), but it began with Alexander: the extent to which he actually brought high civilization to Afghanistan is the extent to which he destroyed what had been there since the Bronze Age.

Just a few weeks before Alexander arrived in Bactra, a warlord named Bessus held a raucous war council in the city. If we can trust a deserter’s account of that meeting, passed down through the centuries, this Bessus put on quite a show.¹⁴ Amid great feasting and drinking, Bessus tried to rally the martial spirit of his assembled friends and followers. He boasted of their power and belittled that of the invaders. He invoked the gods of the land to aid his cause and reminded his listeners of his own personal stake in their war against the Greeks.

Two years earlier, Bessus had fought against Alexander in the Battle of Gaugamela (October 1, 331 B.C.E.) near modern-day Irbil in Iraq.¹⁵ At that time, Bessus was the satrap of Bactria under Darius III, the “King of Kings” who ruled the Persian Empire. The Persian king and his satrap were kinsmen, and Darius desperately needed Bessus and the renowned cavalry from Bactria to help stop the relentless progress of the Greeks and Macedonians.¹⁶ Alexander’s troops had already captured the western third of the empire, and at Gaugamela the fate of everything else would be decided in a few desperate hours of dusty fighting. Darius’s plan, captured after the battle, clearly assigned Bessus and the Bactrian contingent the main task of meeting— and destroying—Alexander’s personal assault against the Persian left wing.¹⁷ During the battle, Bessus and his soldiers fought well, but found themselves pinned down while Alexander charged through a gap in the line and chased Darius from the field. With his own cavalry still intact, Bessus disengaged. According to one modern analysis of Bessus’s conduct that day, “no commander could be blamed for ordering a withdrawal in such circumstances. Later he [Bessus] could reasonably claim that others had let him down, that it would have been suicidal to remain where he was, and that he had not been defeated.”¹⁸

When Darius and Bessus met again, what remained of the Persian army and its officers must surely have struggled to explain how they had lost to an invading force five times smaller than their own. Whose cowardice had caused such a debacle? No doubt Bessus was still defending his actions when, at Bactra in 329 B.C.E., he argued along the lines quoted above and blamed everything on Darius: It was Darius’s incompetence, not his own poor judgment or Alexander’s generalship, that had gotten everyone in this mess.¹⁹ That is why Bessus had arranged the assassination of Darius in 330 B.C.E. The Persian King of Kings had first been deceived, arrested, and shackled and then shut into a locked wagon to be hauled along like a doomed animal.²⁰ The Bactrian cavalry saluted Bessus as Darius’s royal successor, calling him Artaxerxes V. In time, as Alexander drew near, the conspirators stabbed Darius and left him for dead. They hastened to the safety of Bactria’s hills, as warlords are still wont to do.

Alexander had not taken this news well. He had beaten Darius, torched the largest palace at Persepolis to settle old scores, and begun to see himself as the rightful new King of Kings in conquered Persia. The brutal murder of Darius deprived Alexander of his coup de grâce and destabilized the newly won empire. The war should have been over, but instead this criminal Bessus claimed Darius’s throne—Alexander’s throne—and defied the superpower to stop him. Alexander would have to invade Bactria to bring this madman to justice. To prepare the way, the king made a speech at Hecatompylus (cited in chapter 1), in which he denounced Bessus and his cabal as a threat to the civilized world. This operation would carry the leader of the Greek and Macedonian world well beyond the original mandate of the League of Corinth. Technically, the alliance had finished its job with the fall of Persia. If necessary, however, Alexander was prepared to go it alone against Bessus. He allowed the unwilling to turn back homeward and paid the rest handsomely to sign on as volunteers with his Macedonians. That is why Alexander needed to frame an essentially personal war in terms of a new, grander, more abstract cause. This was no longer to be a war of conquest and Hellenic retribution against a rival state, but rather an unavoidable struggle to keep the peace and protect all nations of law from organized criminals. Alexander meant to hunt down the outlaw Bessus and all who harbored him, not conduct a conventional war against a foe deserving the title of King Artaxerxes V.²¹

Alexander had to take some diplomatic gambles in order to strengthen his case against Bessus and his followers. In a precarious balancing act, he simultaneously acted the part of Macedonian king, leader (hegemon) of the Greeks, and ruler of all Persian territories. Rather than sweep away every vestige of Darius’s old regime, Alexander adopted some elements of Persian royal dress and protocol. He also chose a few Persians to hold high office. This put a less imperious face on the occupation of Persia and provided some leverage against the rhetoric of Bessus, but it angered many of the Greeks and Macedonians. Alexander nevertheless rushed into a policy of reconciliation toward men of dubious reliability. Even some of Darius’s murderers were pardoned and put into positions of authority, an expedience that Alexander very soon regretted.²²

Bessus, of course, was the key exception: he would have to pay an extraordinarily painful and public price for his royal pretensions. Rather than barge straight into Bactria, Alexander circled his prey. He fought a campaign in the area of modern Herat in western Afghanistan because the native governor there, named Satibarzanes, had, after surrendering, suddenly renounced his allegiance to Alexander and massacred the foreigners stationed in his province. Alexander’s policies were already backfiring. This man was clearly acting in conjunction with Bessus, so Alexander moved quickly to isolate the danger. The insurgents were soundly defeated, although Satibarzanes escaped.²³ Alexander’s generals would deal with him later. Meanwhile, Alexander appointed another Persian as governor. The army then swept south into the district of Drangiana. At Phrada (modern Farah), the recent attempts by Alexander to legitimize his power in Persia exposed a serious rift in his entourage. Traditionalist Macedonians resented some of Alexander’s new policies, such as his appointment of former enemies to prestigious posts and his wearing of Persian regalia. An assassination plot formed in response to the king’s apparent betrayal of his own people. The conspiracy failed and the traitors were executed. The most prominent victims were the great Macedonian generals Philotas and his father, Parmenio, who, in spite of their apparent innocence, were purged nonetheless in order to clear the king’s court of naysayers. A fresh coterie of loyalists closed ranks around Alexander; the Afghan wars would swiftly advance the careers of men like Craterus, Hephaestion, Coenus, Perdiccas, and Ptolemy.²⁴

After escaping this danger, Alexander renamed the place Prophthasia (Anticipation) to commemorate the failure of the plot. His march resumed south and then eastward along the high-duned fringe of the Dasht-i Margo (the Desert of Death). He had hoped to run down Barsaentes, another of Darius’s killers who had abused his pardon and sided with Bessus. The Persian, however, had too great a lead and vanished (like many of the Taliban) into what is now Pakistan.²⁵ The Greek and Macedonian army passed by Kandahar, a site built up by Alexander and still bearing his name (derived from Iskandariya, Alexandria in Arabic).²⁶ The center of so much strife during the invasions by Britain, the USSR, and now the United States, old Kandahar guarded strategic routes leading southeast to the Indus Valley, and northeast to the region of Kabul. Alexander took the same road later traveled by Lord Roberts in 1880; the Greeks and Macedonians thereby arrived at winter quarters in the vicinity of modern Begram, where the king fortified the camp as yet another Alexandria.²⁷

Since declaring his intention to punish the outlaw regime of Bessus, Alexander had marched fifteen hundred miles over eight months in a wide arc through what is now the southern half of Afghanistan. Parts of the journey had penetrated a miserable purgatory with “plagues of midges, mosquitoes, houseflies, and poisonous snakes and hurricane-force winds.”²⁸ Worse was soon to come in a region habitually short of food. No matter what the climate or circumstances might be, Alexander had to procure every day the equivalent of 255 tons of food and forage, plus 160,000 gallons of water, just to keep his army alive and moving forward.²⁹ On the other (northern) side of the Hindu Kush Mountains, Bessus and his followers were destroying everything that might feed the invaders. The rebels knew that the Greeks and Macedonians would consume all their provisions as they struggled over the high passes of the mountains, arriving in Bactria’s heartland exhausted and hungry. The scorched-earth plan, a good one under the circumstances, recognized that warfare in central Asia depends upon logistics, and that attrition can deal the hardest blows of all.³⁰

The fabled Hindu Kush Mountains, mistakenly called the Caucasus by Alexander’s men, soar as high as seventeen thousand feet (see Map 3). The lower slopes sustain modest vegetation, mostly scrub and grasses, but barren rock prevails above fourteen thousand feet. In winter, the snow line descends to six thousand feet and blocks the passes; blizzards are common, and snow falls even during summer at the higher elevations. The spring melt usually commences in March or April, gradually freeing the passes and sending torrents of icy water and boulders tumbling down every streambed. As early as possible—too early, in fact—Alexander threaded his army through these mountains. He had three possible routes: the western, through Bamian and the Shibar Pass; the central, via the Salang Pass; and the eastern, by way of the Panshir Valley and the Khawak Pass. The path through Bamian, where the giant Buddhas later towered near a pilgrim’s trail, until blown up by the Taliban, offered the easiest and most obvious choice, so Alexander probably refused it to surprise Bessus. The central course was shortest but by far the steepest, and it was never practical until the 1.6 mile Salang Tunnel, the highest in the world, was cut by the Soviets.³¹ The longer route over the Khawak Pass seems to have suited Alexander’s purpose in the spring of 329 B.C.E.³²

3. Ancient Bactria

The Greeks and Macedonians struggled for two weeks through deep snow before the passes fully cleared. The food ran out, and starving men naturally resorted to every extreme: they caught and ate raw fish, chewed on local plants, and finally ate their own baggage animals to survive. Like the British in the First Afghan War who ate sheepskins fried in blood, the invaders persevered. Because firewood could not be gathered, they devoured the carcasses uncooked and stumbled on toward Bactra. Either their king had miscalculated his army’s needs, or he had moved of necessity and entered the mountains while the weather was still dangerous.³³ Perhaps complicating Alexander’s operations was an extraordinary anomaly in the climate. Recent analyses of Fennoscandinavian tree-ring data demonstrate that some of the coolest summers of the past seventy-four thousand years (5407 B.C.E.—1997 C.E.) occurred in precisely the years 330–321 B.C.E.³⁴ What so dramatically cooled the north at this time is not certain, but the effects may have contributed to Alexander’s trouble by producing unexpectedly early and longer winters, with heavier snowfalls, in 329–327, as well as a contemporary famine in Greece caused by widespread grain shortages.³⁵ This data need not mean that the central Asian summers were comfortably cool, only that they may have been shorter and somewhat less horrendous while winters were correspondingly more severe.

Though in much distress, the Macedonian and Greek invaders made it across the mountains and found comfort in the Bactrian towns of Drapsaca (modern Qunduz?) and Aornus (modern Tashkurgan?).³⁶ Bessus and the Bactrian cavalry were nowhere to be seen when Alexander’s troops emerged tired and famished from the icy clutches of the Hindu Kush Mountains. Had the rebels used the guerilla tactics for which the Afghan warlords are now famous, the Greeks and Macedonians might have suffered a major setback. But Bessus employed only half a winning strategy: he cut off Alexander’s supplies, but also should have attacked at opportune moments. As it turned out, Bessus was not in position to strike the invading army; he seems to have denuded the likeliest invasion route while ignoring the others. Alexander’s risky move paid off. He and his troops refreshed themselves and regrouped while Bessus, a few miles west at Bactra, held his hasty council of war.

Whatever Bessus’s exact words in his arrogant speech to his warrior band, he and the Bactrians were extremely worried.³⁷ Blame Darius all he might for Gaugamela, brag of his own prospects as King Artaxerxes V, scoff at Alexander’s rashness, but as many as a hundred thousand foreigners had gotten into Bactria and were fast approaching, unopposed.³⁸ When Bessus laid out the next stage of his strategy, enough wine had been drunk to make it sound quite sensible: They would retreat north through the desert, cross the Oxus River, and make their stand in the region of Sogdiana. The Oxus (modern Amu Darya) would hold back the Greeks and Macedonians while Bessus recruited allies from the nomadic peoples of the vast northern steppes.

To this plan, one banqueter, named Gobares, dared object. In a speech probably embellished in the retelling over the ages, Gobares sprinkled his appeal with local proverbs still popular today, such as “still waters run deep” and “his bark is worse than his bite.”³⁹ This eloquence was meant to convince Bessus to give up and take his chances with Alexander, who could at times be incredibly merciful. Gobares questioned the legitimacy of Bessus’s authority, an indication that Alexander was already winning among some Persians the political battle for Darius’s throne. Bessus, of course, would abide none of this talk; when he drew his sword in anger, Gobares fled Bactra and reported the whole affair to Alexander. The Macedonian king hastened to the capital city, that bizarre oasis of Anahita littered with human bones, only to find Bessus already gone.

VICTORIES

At Bactra, the Greeks and Macedonians nonetheless got some very good news.⁴⁰ The generals who had remained behind near Herat to capture or kill Bessus’s ally Satibarzanes now rejoined the army and reported what had happened. There had been a significant battle during which Satibarzanes had paused, taken off his helmet, and challenged any opponent brave enough to fight him in single combat. Old white-haired Erigyius, who shared the Macedonian command with three others (including a Persian, Artabazus), stepped forward and accepted the offer. During the fight, Satibarzanes missed with his spear and Erigyius charged, driving his lance into the enemy’s throat and out the back of his neck. Thrown from his horse, Satibarzanes continued to fight though still impaled. Erigyius grabbed the lance and pulled it free, then thrust it forcefully into Satibarzanes’s face. The latter could do nothing but help drive it deeper to hurry his death and end his own suffering.

At Bactra, Alexander and his soldiers marveled at the mangled head of Satibarzanes, which Erigyius carried around as a trophy of war.⁴¹ The deed had won the battle and ended the insurrection around Herat, preventing those rebels from reinforcing Bessus as the warlord had planned. The same dramatic news may have been what compelled Bessus to withdraw into Sogdiana in search of other allies, and no doubt it demoralized the Bactrian cavalry, which had counted on Satibarzanes’s support.

When the Bactrians learned that Alexander had crossed the Hindu Kush, that Satibarzanes was dead, and that Bessus planned to retreat north across the Oxus and abandon Bactria to the invaders, most of the native horsemen simply slipped away to their homes.⁴² It could not have been a substantial band that followed Bessus to Sogdiana. At Bactra, Alexander considered these facts and decided to forge ahead as quickly as possible to finish Bessus before the assassin could redress his losses. Acting, of course, as the rightful King of Kings, Alexander appointed Artabazus—the Persian just back from the victory against Satibarzanes—to be the satrap of Bactria.⁴³ The message was clear: join Alexander’s cause, like Artabazus, and receive all the perquisites of the old Persian Empire; or live as outlaws, like Satibarzanes and Bessus, and endure the righteous punishments of the civilized world. No one could be neutral.

The march from Bactra to the Oxus River crossed a harsh stretch of desert that would again test the resilience of the Greek and Macedonian army.⁴⁴ The invaders had nearly frozen and starved just a few weeks earlier in the mountains, and now during high summer they had to hike through nearly fifty miles of searing wastes where Anahita’s water could not sustain them. Local informants advised Alexander to travel only at night, both to escape the worst temperatures and to navigate the desert by the stars. To keep the journey down to two nights, the king lightened the army’s load by leaving its baggage at Bactra in the care of Artabazus. Still, it was a disaster. The sand glowed with heat, mirages danced, and the dry air sucked every drop of moisture from the mouths of the suffering men. Water bags emptied too soon, and discipline failed. Soldiers gorged themselves on stores of oil and wine, only to vomit away what they had foolishly drunk. With growing numbers of men dehydrated or already dead, Alexander pressed forward to the Oxus River and lit signal fires to guide and encourage the troops. Relays of water bearers went back into the desert to assist the weakest stragglers. Unfortunately, many drank so excessively that they had “choking fits” and died. Alexander reportedly waited by the trail, without refreshing himself, to welcome each survivor as he staggered into camp. The political battle to win over the Bactrian people was going well, but the land itself was literally killing the Greeks and Macedonians.

The next obstacle was the Oxus River, the longest and largest in central Asia. As today it defines much of the northern border of Afghanistan, in antiquity it separated Bactria proper from Sogdiana. The region of Sogdiana stretched north to the Jaxartes River (modern Syr Darya); it was attached administratively to Bactria as an extension of the province (satrapy). At his crossing point, Alexander measured the river’s width at about three-quarters of a mile. Scholars have long disputed the exact location. In antiquity, the key crossings were located at Kerki, Kilif, Kampyr-Tepe, and Termez. Kerki was probably too far west for Alexander’s purposes. Of the remaining possibilities, the importance of Termez in later history (it became a key Islamic trading center) has swayed many to settle upon it. Legends do link Alexander to the founding of Termez, but such associations carry no decisive weight in that part of the world. Termez is certainly a reasonable guess, now with its Friendship Bridge (at times an Orwellian misnomer), but Kampyr-Tepe and Kilif cannot be ruled out as the spot where Alexander first encountered and crossed the Oxus. In fact, Kampyr-Tepe is the only crossing site where pottery has been found that is contemporary with Alexander’s reign. The challenge would have been the same at any locale.⁴⁵ Bessus had burned all the boats, and the powerful current made it impossible to set pilings in the deep riverbed. In any case, no wood could be found with which to construct a makeshift bridge. The only solution was the age-old practice of fashioning flotation devices by stuffing straw into leather tent covers and water skins. By stitching them tightly, these maintained enough buoyancy to float swimmers lying upon them across the river. The whole operation took five or six days.⁴⁶

During this time, Alexander received fresh intelligence about Bessus’s situation. The warlord had not fulfilled his promise to oppose the invaders at the “wall of the Oxus.” In fact, with each leg of Alexander’s relentless pursuit, Bessus found himself more alone. The man claiming to be Artaxerxes V experienced (ironically and perhaps justly) the same plight as Darius after Gaugamela: he fled, unable to mount a fight, and lost the last of his fretful lieutenants. Word of Alexander’s kindness to Gobares, the man who had defected after opposing Bessus’s speech at Bactra, encouraged other rebels to slip away to the oncoming army. It was easy, under the circumstances, to favor for the moment Alexander’s claim to the Persian realm over that of the retreating Bessus. Warlords tend to pledge allegiance as the occasion warrants, whatever the alleged religious and political crimes of the enemy. This remains Lesson One today: “There are no immutable loyalties or alliances in Afghanistan, whatever ethnic or religious umbrella they may be formed under and however fervent the oaths that seal them.”⁴⁷ Bessus betrayed Darius, and others revealed themselves willing to betray Bessus in turn.

Alexander could afford, therefore, to send part of his army back home. Some old and unfit Macedonians received their formal discharges on the banks of the Oxus. They would not have been dragged across the desert from Bactra if Alexander had not believed they might be needed to fight Bessus; clearly, the military situation had changed and the king could be charitable. An additional contingent of Greek mercenaries from Thessaly also went home, but they were apparently fired. They may have been held responsible for breaking discipline during the recent desert march and for grumbling about the hardships. Anticipating an arrest instead of a battle, Alexander resumed his march into Sogdiana with almost a thousand fewer men.⁴⁸

Then something strange occurred—if we may believe some of the ancient sources.⁴⁹ As the invading Greeks and Macedonians approached a town, its inhabitants surrendered in great celebration. They spoke a degenerated form of Greek and claimed to be the descendants of the Branchidae, a Greek clan that had been deported from Miletus (in western Asia Minor) by the Persian king Xerxes in 479 B.C.E. They happily welcomed Alexander within the walls of their town, expecting nothing like the so-called liberation they were about to receive. On this sesquicentennial of their exile, the Branchidae learned just how long their fellow Greeks could hold a grudge. Alexander’s army decided that the Branchidae were traitors living under the protective custody of the Persians, to whom they had once betrayed a famous temple in Miletus. The Branchidae remained, therefore, enemies rather than friends, criminals rather than compatriots. Alexander and his soldiers plundered the town and butchered every single person. No mercy was shown to the defenseless citizens, not even those begging as suppliants. The massacre was complete. Next, in a spasm of rage reminiscent of the Romans at Carthage, the invaders destroyed every vestige of the town and even leveled the surrounding woods and sacred groves. The stumps themselves were pulled up and their broken roots burned out of the ground. What roused such passions we cannot know. Perhaps Alexander’s army needed a bloody catharsis after its recent travails; perhaps the men were spoiling for a fight against anyone in their path; perhaps the king wished to play to the home crowd in Greece after acting so much lately as a legitimate king of Persia. Whatever the reason or reasons, the first atrocity had occurred in a campaign that would soon become a breeding ground for senseless brutality.

Having executed these traitors to the Greek cause, Alexander’s attention turned back to the treason of Bessus. A message arrived that three prominent rebels (Spitamenes, Dataphernes, and Catanes) had locked Bessus in chains somewhere in the neighborhood of modern Kitab in Uzbekistan. Having stripped their former leader of all his regalia, the warlords wished to surrender the captive to King Alexander for punishment. Two versions exist of the transfer to Alexander’s custody. In one, Spitamenes personally delivered the prisoner bound and naked, led around by a collar and chain. Spitamenes made a little speech on the occasion, professing his loyalty to the memory of Darius, for which Alexander praised him.⁵⁰ In the other version, the hero is Ptolemy. This account certainly derives from Ptolemy’s own memoirs, written when he became the king of Egypt at the outset of the Hellenistic age.⁵¹ Ptolemy could not resist the opportunity to elaborate at great length—indeed, exaggerate—his role in bringing Bessus to justice. When Alexander learned of Bessus’s arrest, the king assigned Ptolemy the mission of riding ahead with a picked force of five thousand men to secure the prisoner. This was Ptolemy’s first high-profile command, and he wished to make the most of it. Better to describe himself as the key figure, rather than give that honor to Spitamenes, whose daughter later married the general Seleucus, a political rival of Ptolemy.

Fearing the capricious nature of the so-called barbarians, Ptolemy dashed to the rendezvous lest Spitamenes and the others should change their minds and release their captive. Ptolemy’s troops covered the ten-day journey in only four. Sure enough, claimed Ptolemy, the conspirators were having second thoughts. As the invaders approached, Spitamenes and his followers allegedly rode off, leaving Bessus behind in a small village. Ptolemy surrounded the place and ordered its inhabitants to surrender Bessus, which the frightened villagers naturally did, after what had happened to the Branchidae. Informed of Ptolemy’s success, Alexander sent instructions on the treatment of the prisoner. Bessus was to be stood bound and naked by the right side of the road on which Alexander would pass. The captive should be wearing a wooden collar as a symbol of his disgrace.⁵² A few days later, the king stopped beside the would-be usurper and demanded an explanation of his crimes. All accounts agree that Bessus offered a lame defense: he had taken the title “King of Kings” intending only to pass it, in turn, to Alexander.⁵³ His long flight belied the excuse, and the penalty would be horrific. First, he was tortured while a herald announced his various evil deeds. Then he was placed in the custody of Darius’s brother, Oxathres, and sent to prison in Bactra. There in the coming winter, Bessus would be dragged before a sort of Loya Jirga and literally defaced.⁵⁴

According to Persian custom, the rightful King of Kings should be a handsome man; Darius, for example, had been “the best-looking and tallest of all men.”⁵⁵ Usurpers, therefore, were brutally disfigured before they were killed, in order to render them thoroughly unfit for the throne they had coveted. Later in Bactra, where Bessus had so recently held his war council under the name Artaxerxes V, the captive’s ears and nose were cut from his face. There could be no doubt then which man was king. Alexander appeared before the crowd young and ruggedly handsome. He was clean shaven, short, and muscular, with his head habitually cocked to the left. His hair and complexion were fair; his voice deep and harsh; his eyes clear and tending toward blue.⁵⁶ After the death of Darius, Alexander had begun to wear some of the regalia of the Persian kings, notably the diadem, striped robe, and belt.⁵⁷ Surely with startling effect, beside him stood Bessus chained and bleeding, a broken man. Lord Byron might have been looking at Bessus stripped of his royal robes and name (rather than thinking of Napoleon) when he penned these lines:

’Tis done—but yesterday a King!

And arm’d with Kings to strive—

And now thou art a nameless thing:

So abject—yet alive!⁵⁸

But not for long. In one account, Oxathres presided over the crucifixion of Bessus and the desecration of his corpse. In another, Bessus was strapped between two bent trees and ripped to pieces when the saplings sprang upright.⁵⁹ Even the greatest admirers of Alexander felt shock at this savagery.⁶⁰ One is reminded of the haunting photograph showing the Afghan president Muhammad Najibullah hung from a traffic kiosk in Kabul after the Taliban captured, castrated, and then killed him in 1996.⁶¹ Victory is the proud parent of vengeance in the wars of Afghanistan.