Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great (13 page)

“Very well, then,” Polycleitus relented. “As it is customary to be liberal in these cases, you have the same amount of time the prosecution had…but not one second more!”

“For your fairness, I thank you,” said Machon with a tight smile. His eyes rested on Swallow, who took his meaning and waved his hand, is if to decline any credit.

VII.

As the Macedonian army formed up and began the march upcountry, I was puzzled by the lack of organized resistance to the invasion. The Persian navy, after all, was made up of very capable Phoenician and Sidonese levies, at twice the numbers Alexander could gather. It should have been a straightforward matter for this force to bottle up the Hellespont, intercept the Macedonian troop carriers, or execute whatever plan the enemy would have conceived. Or at least that’s how it seemed to an Athenian used to thinking in terms of sea power.

No satrap was waiting on the shore for us with his hooded troops and mailed cavalry. Nor were the farms and towns of this rich country burned in our path, to prevent stores from falling into our hands; the granaries, instead, were bursting with last year’s harvest. To the young Macedonian grunts, the invasion went as easily as their childish dreams made it. But to anybody who knew anything, the stillness suggested there was something very deeply wrong.

It was only much later, upon speaking with Persian courtiers who had been at Susa at that time, that I learned the truth: though the Persian Empire was vast, it was riddled with problems. The Great King, Artashata, otherwise known as Daryavaush III, or ‘Darius,’ was a weakling who had alienated most of the nobility by poisoning his competitors for the throne. Egypt was in the midst of a revolt that had only just been put down by the Persian fleet when Alexander tossed his spear on the beach at Ilion. We might therefore say that Alexander had been lucky to arrive when he did, or cunning, in that he landed with most of Persia looking the other way. We cannot say, however, that his mere arrival represented much of a victory.

I might as well take the opportunity now, as I have Alexander on his way toward the Granicus, to correct an impression you might have gotten from our friend Aeschines. Judging from his account, only Alexander, along with a few other minor players and a faceless army, were present at his battles. But it takes more than one extraordinary man to make an army. Some of the others who went with Alexander had a lot to do with his victories.

I’m thinking of Parmenion, the old stalwart who served Philip too. True, he was not the kind of flashy performer who plays to the gallery by taking foolish risks. He was, in fact, too fat to mount a horse. But he knew how to hold a line against superior foe, which is something Alexander never had to accomplish. I’ve already mentioned Ptolemy, and Cleitus. These are unsavory characters, thugs really, but they were loyal and ruthless, and such men can accomplish a lot. I would count in their company Peithon son of Crateuas, though to look at him you would say he seemed more scholar than warrior. His area of knowledge, I came to learn, was the infliction of lethal force on those too weak to defend themselves. I will describe some of his notable works as the occasion arises.

To my recollection Aeschines mentions Perdiccas son of Orestes only once, which is strange because he now sits on Alexander’s throne in Babylon!
 
In most ways he was cut from the same cloth as Alexander: face full of curl-lipped arrogance, born to make war, hunt frequently, and drink his wine neat. He even took care to cut his hair just like Alexander. To his credit, he was a decent phalanx commander in the early years, and scaled the ladder of influence with hardly a misstep. Perdiccas never seemed ambitious, but events always seemed to go his way. For all his resemblance to the King, however, he lacked one important element: Alexander’s impulse to understand the world he was destroying.

There were many others who had their moments on the stage over the next twelve years—Peucestas, Coenus, Nearchus, Craterus, Aristander the soothsayer…and Philotas, whom Aeschines mentions only in relation to the ridiculous charges that led to his death! If you and I were sharing a drink, I would tell you about them all—from their best moments to their worst, and how they shaped the success that has come to compose the legend of Alexander. But we have time today to speak only of Machon—a minor figure indeed! If I say to you, though, that Alexander was more a corporation than a man, and his myth a work of many authors, it is because I was there. Let only those who marched with me dispute my words!

Hephaestion is another bit player in Aeschines’s story. Alexander would never have countenanced this. They were friends since boyhood, and lovers for almost as long. Alexander was the ‘bottom,’ and Hephaestion, who was bigger and stronger, the ‘top.’

Olympias begged her son to produce an heir before he left for Asia, but he was too much in love with Hephaestion even to function as a man. Of the pair, Hephaestion was the more ambitious. It was he who encouraged Alexander to march on after Issus, to take on the entire Persian Empire, and it was he who argued the strongest for an invasion of India, though no one else would agree with him. So great was his influence with the King, he almost succeeded in cajoling him onto the Gangetic plain.

But foremost among the forgotten characters is Arridaeus, Alexander’s half-brother. I see your faces—you don’t believe it! Bear with me, then, and you will see.

You have been given a rousing account of the battle at the Granicus. I congratulate my opponent on his powers of description. Listening to him evoke the scene, it was as if I was there—until I realized I had been there, and it was nothing like he described!

Imagine this: the Macedonians on one side of a river swollen with spring melt, the mounted Persians high on the other, backed up by a Greek army. Alexander, after a spirited invocation of Homer, single-handedly charges the entire Persian line—and lives! The Macedonians follow, and striking ‘like Hephaestus’s hammer,’ they smash the enemy. Thousands of Persians die, and the Greek mercenaries, astounded by this wonder, stand around and wait for the Macedonians to cross the river in force, organize themselves, and surround them. Thousands of the mercenaries are slaughtered too. And the toll for Alexander’s army? Just twenty-five dead, writes Callisthenes.

Most of us are veterans of war here…do we not smell a rat? Do single riders charge entire armies and survive? How could it be that the Macedonians could cross a torrent, proceed uphill against their enemy, slash their way through the Persian lines, and lose only twenty-five men? Having seen cavalry cross muddy, miserable spring rivers, I would expect more than twenty-five to die just falling off their horses! To doubt this is not to engage in what Aeschines calls ‘sophistication.’ It is to use common sense.

What really happened was this: our scouts reported that the Persians were gathered at the Granicus River, and Alexander proceeded with his officers to inspect their position. They observed that the enemy was blocking the only fording place, and that the manner of their deployment, on a bluff above the far bank, would result in horrific casualties among the Macedonians. Parmenion therefore recommended a subtler strategy. The Persians, the old general explained, were anxious to secure their horses against theft at night, and so made a practice of tethering them by both bridle and the feet. As these precautions made it hard for them to saddle and mount in an emergency, they were obligated to make their camps far away from their enemies. In this case the Persians would bivouac overnight well out of touch with their scouts on the river. Why not wait until before dawn the next morning, asked Parmenion, cross the river in secret, and take them all by surprise?

Alexander carped, complaining that he hadn’t crossed the mighty Hellespont just to be stopped at a mere trickle. Hephaestion declared that strategizing was for weaklings, and that the barbarians would scatter at the first flash of steel. But there was no denying that the river flowed fast and deep, the Persian armor was blindingly numerous, and that the Macedonian infantrymen were spooked. Even if they managed to break through the horses, at least twenty thousand Greek mercenary pikemen waited behind them, each one no doubt desperate to redeem the reputation of Greek arms against Macedon. Perhaps most important, a defeat or a costly victory there, at the very outset of the invasion, would doom the entire enterprise.

The King took Parmenion’s advice. Overnight, swimmers were sent across to silence the Persian watchmen. And as the first blush of dawn appeared in the sky behind the enemy camp, Alexander got his Cavalry Companions across the river, and most of the pikemen, before they were observed by the Persians. A confused melee ensued in the twilight; Alexander led his horsemen forward to meet the enemy, who had been roused before their time and wore only half their armor. Marching with the hypaspists, I reached the enemy camp in time to see Alexander sitting on the ground, ministered by a doctor after he was struck in the helmet with an axe. Cleitus, who had saved Alexander at the last second, crouched with his hands on his knees, looking down at the King.

That was when I noticed something curious. Alexander was out of the action, barely conscious, but someone very much like him, with the same build, same stature, and virtually the same voice, was still directing the attack on the Persian camp. With unerring perception of the flow of forces around the battlefield, he directed cavalry and footmen into flying columns that cut the disorganized enemy to pieces. As the sun broke over the horizon, we could see scattered remnants of the Persian cavalry fleeing, and much of Darius’ Greek hirelings still in their camp clothes, surrounded.

Who was the commander who accomplished all this? Sighting him again, I followed some distance behind. His resemblance to Alexander in both movement and voice was striking, yet he wore far more armor than the King, including a muscle cuirass and greaves. Coming closer, I could see that he wore a lot of metal, but nothing else—no cloak, no tunic, no groin-flaps. His ass was bare for the world to see!

This spectacle intrigued me, to say the least, for this half-naked apparition was directing the relentless slaughter of virtually all the Greek mercenaries. By midday more than fifteen thousand bodies formed an enormous mountain of fly-strewn flesh. But in the time it took me to glance at the dead and then look back, the mysterious commander was gone. In his place was Alexander, discussing with his officers the enormity of incinerating such a mass.

To be sure, I made many inquiries into what I had seen. The Macedonians were aggressively reluctant to discuss it; Callisthenes acknowledged that he had seen the figure I described, but would not elaborate. In the months to come, using every method I could think of, including bribery, I was finally able to learn the truth.

We know of him now as Philip Arridaeus. He was Alexander’s half-brother—a bastard produced by the union of Philip and a Thessalian concubine. The official historians are loathe to speak of him, because from a young age he was an idiot, barely able to speak or take care of himself. He had other odd problems, such as an inability to tolerate the touch of other people, and a deep aversion to the wearing of clothes. Instead, he preferred the feel of metal against his skin. For this reason he wore either armor or nothing for his entire life.

Yet he did have certain talents. His memory, for instance, was prodigious. By the age of three he could recognize and name all the different units of Philip’s army. By eight he memorized the entire text of the
Iliad
. He knew thousands of men by name, and the names of their fathers, and could recount their deeds in battle with precise detail. Alexander, on the other hand, was a charmer, but had no head for the common man. When he was forced to interact with them, he never knew their names. Arridaeus remembered everything.

The man was in every way fascinated by war. From a young age he liked nothing better than to pore over maps, planning for his fanciful campaigns. As I will recount, he was also invincible on the battlefield, and his talents as a general turned out to be more than imaginary. But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that you will never read of Arridaeus in any official history, because the combination of martial virtue and complete idiocy was incomprehensible to the Macedonians. They were, and are, deeply embarrassed by what they owe to him.

The origins of his illness are obscure. Some say he was born that way, others that Olympias, fearing competition for Alexander’s future throne, had the infant Arridaeus fed poison with his breast milk. Her intent was not to kill him, which would have been too obvious a crime, but to destroy his mind. I am told that there are preparations of mercury or arsenic that might have such effects if used in small quantities. But bear in mind that I have no proof that he was poisoned. I know only that, wherever he came from, and however he did it, he became the secret weapon of the Macedonians.