Into the Land of Bones. Frank L. Holt

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      CHAPTER THREE

      A Desperate Struggle

      EXPLOSION

      In the summer of 329 B.C.E., a strange calm settled over Bactria and Sogdiana. The threat of war had passed. A compliant Persian held the post of Bactrian satrap; the dangerous Bactrian cavalry had demobilized; farmers and herdsmen had returned to their ancient tasks. The last of the warlords had backed down and betrayed their leader. As a result, no rival contested Alexander’s right to rule the empire of Darius III. This first invasion of Bactria-Afghanistan by a punitive superpower could hardly have seemed easier.¹ Except for the horrid weather and challenging terrain, the operation involved fewer risks, surely, than anyone had predicted. Satibarzanes had put up a fight, but not Bessus. No Bactrian city, not even Bactra, had closed its gates and forced a siege. On the other side, the only destruction of croplands resulted from Bessus’s orders, not Alexander’s. The only locals killed by the Greeks were the descendants of other Greeks. No Bactrian except Bessus was tried and condemned to death. There seemed for just a moment an exquisite chance that the intervention might actually end well. The United States senses that possibility now, as once did the Soviets; the British felt it twice. It is, historically, a dangerous feeling.

      Since the political contest between Alexander and Bessus involved a throne in far-off Mesopotamia, it probably mattered little to the Bactrians which man eventually sat upon it, so long as nothing much changed in their own homeland. They wanted most to be left alone, returning to local matters of family, faith, farms, and flocks and petty feuds about them. Alexander, however, was not quite ready to leave them to their work. This adventurous king never missed a chance to examine another frontier. He liked to offer sacrifices at the extremities of his empire, especially along major rivers.² Just ahead of the army, the Jaxartes (modern Syr Darya) flowed along the border of the Sogdian extension of Bactria, thus defining the northeast frontier of the old Persian Empire. The king wanted to add his personal monuments to those of his predecessors and, at the same time, to reconnoiter a СКАЧАТЬ