The death of Darius did not delay the activity of Alexander; he was all the more stirred to pursue Bessus when it was announced that the satrap of Bactria was claiming to be the successor of Darius and had assumed the insignia of royalty. But the regions close at hand had to be pacified, so Parmenio was sent to occupy the country near the southwest coast of the Caspian Sea. Alexander himself had to retrace his steps to deal with a rebellious satrap who had previously sent in his submission.
On the march southward, the province of Drangiana was taken without resistance, but the conqueror’s stay at the capital, Prophthasia, was marked by a mysterious tragedy. It was reported to Alexander that Philotas, the son of Parmenio, was plotting against him. An assembly of the Macedonian army was summoned, and the charges laid formally before them. Philotas admitted that he had known of a plot to assassinate Alexander, but had kept it secret. This reserve was treated as treason, and Philotas was put to death by the soldiers. This semi-judicial act was followed by the murder at Alexander’s command of his faithful lieutenant, Parmenio, for which there was no excuse, as he had never been charged with complicity in the guilty knowledge of his son. But Alexander probably judged that the execution of Philotas would inaugurate a blood feud familiar to Macedonian life, and he resolved to take no chances.
The road to Bactria selected by Alexander led him through modern Afghanistan and across the Hindu Kush mountains. But first he turned to the south in order to secure Seistan and the northwestern portion of Baluchistan, known at that time as Gedrosia. The winter of 330-29 he spent in the south of Seistan among a friendly people, the Ariaspæ, to whom, on account of their hospitable reception, he granted autonomy. Among the Gedrosians, their neighbors, he set up a satrapy, with a capital at Pasa.
In the spring, the Greek army pushed on to Arachosia, almost directly south of Bactria, where the king founded another Alexandria, probably on the site of the modern Candahar. At the foot of the high range of the Hindu Kush, a complex mass of mountains which divides southern from central, eastern from western Asia, called Paropanisus, the army passed the winter, and yet another city, named after their leader, was founded somewhere to the north of Cabul, Alexandria of the Caucasus. In the early spring the difficult mountain ranges which protected Bactria were crossed, the troops suffering much from the cold and from the lack of food. They were obliged to subsist on raw meat and on herbs instead of bread. After resting the army, Alexander led them on through an arid plain to Bactria, the chief city of the satrapy. (329-28 B.C.)
Bessus, the pretender, had tried to hinder the progress of the Greeks by laying waste the country in front of them, but as soon as they drew near, his horsemen deserted him and he fled across the Oxus. Alexander lost no time in following him up. The pursuit carried him through Sogdiana, where he crossed the Oxus on the rafts, made of inflated skins, such as are still in use to-day. The river was passed at a point where it was not a mile wide, at Kilif, and from thence the road was taken to Maracanda, a town whose old name is now thinly disguised as Samarcand. Bessus was deserted by his supporters, who thought that they would be glad to secure peace by his surrender. They abandoned him, and he was found by a division of the Greek army in a walled village, and was finally sent in chains to Bactria, after Alexander had charged him with the murder of Darius, his kinsman and benefactor.
The ardor for annexing the Far Eastern division of the Persian Empire to his rule spurred Alexander on, now that the rebellion of Bessus had so unexpectedly failed. He purposed to make, not the Oxus, but the Tanais his frontier on the northeast. The resistance seemed easily overcome; the seven strongholds of the Sogdians were occupied, and on the banks of the Jaxartes, or Tanais, at a point which is the gate of communication between southwestern Asia and China, the pass over the Tian-shan mountains, Alexander set the boundary of his conquests in this direction, by founding a new city called Alexandria the Ultimate, in later days Khodjend. While he was planning his new town, the country rose in revolt, for the chieftains of Sogdiana had no mind to lose their freedom. The small Macedonian garrisons left in the strongholds a short time before were overpowered, and the city of Maracanda was being besieged. The news of the revolt had spread far and wide, and the various Scythian tribes were hurrying to join in driving out the invaders. Alexander quickly recovered the strongholds, burning five of them, but at Cyropolis there was stout resistance, and he received a wound. The inhabitants of all were removed and forcibly transplanted as citizens of the new Alexandria. (328 B.C.)
It was not possible to go to the rescue of Maracanda because of the threatening attitude of the Scythian tribes, who were preparing to descend upon Alexandria, which was only separated from them by the river Tanais. The danger of being rushed by these barbarous hordes was imminent. The new city, therefore, was made capable of resistance; in the short period of twenty days it was surrounded with walls of unburnt clay. But Alexander determined also to strike terror by aggressive action. He brought up to the banks of the river engines which threw stones and darts among the enemy and forced them to retreat from the stream. Then the Greek army crossed, and the Scythians were soon routed. The king, with his cavalry, pursued them some distance in their own territory. The heat was intense and Alexander was made dangerously ill by drinking the water along the line of march.
On his recovery he had to deal with a difficult revolt in Sogdiana, again led by Spitamenes, who had figured in the previous uprising and who this time had succeeded in cutting off a detachment of Macedonian troops sent in pursuit of him. It is recounted that the fear of a disaster made such a serious impression on the conqueror that he covered the distance to Samarcand, over 150 miles, in three days. Spitamenes did not wait to try conclusions with the Greeks, but abandoned the siege, drawing off hurriedly in a westward direction, closely pursued by Alexander.
The Persian leader and his Scythian supporters were driven into the wastes across the river Sogda, and Alexander, after ravaging the province of Sogdiana, crossed into western Bactria and passed the winter at Zariaspa, one of the chief cities of that region.
While residing here, the trial of the pretender Bessus was begun. He was condemned to mutilation and to die on the cross at Ecbatana. This type of punishment was alien to Greek feeling and tradition, but it is not necessary to say that Alexander’s apologists have argued the necessity of conforming to the habits of Oriental races when they are to be ruled successfully by outsiders. Alexander himself, as he had never assimilated the best traditions of Greece, seemed ready enough to adopt Oriental customs either to heighten his own dignity in Persia or to impress the Persians that he was the legitimate successor of Darius.
The colloquial axiom, “the longest way round is the shortest way home,” can be applied to the science of government and politics, and it is more than probable that the Hellenization of Asia would have had less of the pinchbeck quality if Alexander had been trained in Sparta rather than in Macedon. In any case, we know that his abandonment of the homely traits characteristic of the relations between a Greek commander and his soldiers made him unpopular, and that, especially, the favor shown by him to the Persians who sided with him was distasteful to the Macedonians. His execution of Parmenio savored of oriental despotism, and during this winter there were open signs of discontent in the camp. (328-27 B.C.)
The winter quarters were changed to Maracanda on account of the restlessness among the natives, and in the relaxation from the strict discipline the soldiers and their leaders spent much of their time in carousing. On one occasion when Alexander and his companions were excited with wine, the king was made indignant at some slighting reference to his military exploits made by his foster-brother Clitus, who appealed to some verses of Euripides which signify that the army does the work and the general reaps the glory. Alexander in his drunken passion hurled a spear at the offender, and Clitus fell dead. The fatal issue of this drunken quarrel was followed by three days’ passionate remorse, and Alexander lay in his tent sleepless and refused food. The fact that he had murdered his intimate friend could not be glossed over even if the army were willing to exculpate their leader, by giving Clitus a post-mortem trial, or by their ascribing the act to the Dioscuri, whose festival was being celebrated at the time.
The excitable temperament of Alexander, unfortunately, cannot always be ascribed to intemperance in drink. He began to be intoxicated with the idea that he was a semi-divine being, and he undertook to act the rôle of an avenging deity, in executing a ruthless sentence of destruction on a small Greek colony in Sogdiana, where dwelt the descendants of the people of Branchidæ, who generations before had betrayed to the Persians the treasures of a temple of Apollo not far from Miletus. The act had never been forgotten, and now Alexander caused all the inhabitants of the place to be massacred, and every vestige of it to be destroyed. An action like this was alien to the spirit of free Greece, and it marks the king’s progress in Oriental despotism. It is all the more a witness to his personal degradation that the Milesian men in his own army, to whom Alexander wished to leave the decision, could not themselves agree on the fate of the Branchidæ, and hence the initiative in the massacre was due to the savage sentiments of their leader.
The pacification of Sogdiana took some time, owing to the rugged nature of the regions in the southern part of the province, but the campaign is chiefly noteworthy because it resulted in the marriage of Alexander with Roxane, the daughter of a native chieftain who had gallantly defended against the Macedonians a mountain fastness called the Sogdian Rock. It had never been noted in the career of the youthful conqueror that he was susceptible to the influence of women. Hence this sudden attachment was as unexpected as it was unpopular in the army. They disliked to have their king ally himself with an alien, and their lack of sympathy was accentuated because Alexander chose to marry his bride after the fashion of her country.
The influence of the Oriental environment was seen also in the introduction of Persian court ceremonial. The king desired to make the custom of obeisance to royalty used by the Persians applicable also to the Greeks. Callisthenes, a nephew of Aristotle, who was attached to the army as official historiographer of the campaign, earned Alexander’s resentment because he sturdily refused to adopt the Persian ceremonial in the king’s presence. He was soon afterwards charged with being involved in a plot to murder Alexander, which originated because of the resentment held against the king by the royal pages, when one of their number, Hermolaus, was flogged and reduced from his position for a breach of etiquette in a boar hunt at which Alexander was present. Callisthenes, apparently because he was an intimate friend of Hermolaus and therefore assumed to be an accomplice in the plot, was hanged.
Three years had now passed since the death of Darius; Alexander had done in the interior of Asia a work which no western conqueror has accomplished since on so large a scale. Even to-day the effective occupation by Russia of the lands once included in the Persian Empire falls short of Alexander’s achievement, because Afghanistan, included in his conquests, is still an autonomous state. It will have been already noticed that much attention had to be given while the Macedonian army was in these Far Eastern provinces, to their protection against the nomad tribes on their frontiers. These operations in Bactria and Sogdiana were a necessary part of the conquests of Persia, since these remote provinces acted as a barrier against the savage tribes of the central Asiatic steppes, who might at any time by joint action overrun the civilization of the regions south of them. The special care shown by Alexander in the construction of settlements in this region is an evidence of his desire to make them centers of civilizing influence by which the restless herdsmen might be trained to orderly methods of life. The experiment failed, but it was a brilliant vision—a vision which might have become a reality if the conqueror had lived the normal span of years.
The beating down of all opposition in the enormously extensive empire which the defeat of Darius had laid at his feet had now been accomplished. If Alexander had been a statesman and nothing else, he would have stayed his hand, because the consolidation of the territory he had overrun was a work demanding the time and the talents of the greatest genius. But Alexander had not the temper of a Roman proconsul, capable and zealous to solve large political problems. He was young enough to be influenced by the spirit of adventure, and unlike Cæsar and Napoleon, had sometimes no deeply laid scheme in his military exploits.
There was no political or military necessity summoning Alexander to the conquest of India, but there was the irresistible charm of novelty exerted by the unknown, the ambition to penetrate into regions untrodden before by any Greek, and with this feeling of the conqueror the modern world is able to sympathize. He was lured also by the legendary stories of the visits to India of the god Dionysus and the hero Herakles. The mystical, superstitious traits in Alexander’s character could easily be stimulated, as we have already seen, to emulation with the divinities of his people, and he was also glad to afford proof that he could effect a conquest attempted without success by Cyrus and Semiramis.
The actual military difficulties of the undertaking were not great, for though the Indians were brave and warlike, and though they had a well-populated land to draw from, they were not a national unity. As the Indian states were constantly at war with one another, there would be an opportunity of securing allies in the peninsula. There was no difficulty in securing recruits for the expedition, although it is true a large detachment of the army had well-understood motives for desiring to be left in Bactria; but some of the best Asiatic warriors from these regions were enrolled, 30,000 in number, and the levies with which Alexander now prepared to descend on India were certainly twice as great as those with which he had left Macedon seven years before. His army was now a great cosmopolitan community, an organism resembling the mercenary armies of the Middle Ages, in the times of the Condottieri. It was self-supporting and self-sufficient in more senses than one, for it included artisans, engineers, physicians, diviners, literary men, athletes, secretaries, clerks, musicians, as well as a host of women and slaves.
Most of the states in northern India at this time were inhabited by what is often called an Aryan stock, the descendants of a succession of waves of emigration through the northwestern hills from central Asia. They had given up their nomadic life and reached the agricultural stage. The Brahman caste system, with its asceticism, and with its power of directive guidance in the state, according to the dictates of a religious sect, already dominated the life of India, and the country as a whole was made up of small principalities and village communities with no common bond of union.
Alexander effected his entrance into this new world by marching from Nicæa (probably to be identified with Cabul) along the Cabul river and then proceeded through the now well-known Khyber Pass. For the purpose of securing his communications much time had to be spent in warfare with the brave inhabitants of the Himalaya Mountains. Many fortresses were taken, the most remarkable of these exploits being the capture of the rock of Aormas, which probably lies on the right bank of the Indus, some sixty miles above the junction of that river with the Cabul. The two tribes whose resistance gave the most trouble were the Aspasians and the Assacenes, dwelling in localities which can now be identified as being parts of Chitral in the Pangkan and Swat valleys.
This hard preliminary campaign lasted all the winter; in the spring the Indus was crossed and a three days’ march was made eastward to Taxila, a rich country, whose prince, along with lesser princes, gave a friendly welcome to the conqueror. But this friendly attitude was not taken by Porus, the ruler of the region farther south, who sent a formal defiance to Alexander, and prepared to resist the invaders by collecting an army of from thirty to forty thousand men. With this he encamped on the river Hydaspes and prepared to contest its passage. Alexander transported the boats, which he had constructed for crossing the Indus, to the Hydaspes, and took up a position on the right bank of the stream, near Jalalpur, in view of the army of Porus, who had collected a large number of elephants, a formidable obstacle to the effective use of the Greek cavalry. (326 B.C.)
In the face of an enemy so placed the transit of the river was impossible, for the edge of the stream was slimy, making an insecure footing for the soldiers, and the horses, terrified by the presence of the elephants, could not be kept in control and would certainly be lost. Besides, Porus kept a sharp eye on all the fords near his camping ground. Alexander kept the enemy busy by making various feints as if he were about to attempt to pass the stream. It was the rainy season, and the Indian soldiers and elephants were kept in battle array at the threatened points, exposed for hours to the force of the wind and rain. Porus began to think that the Greeks were afraid to force the passage, and these manœuvers were continued until he was off his guard.
Some sixteen miles below the Greek encampment, where the river made a bend, there was a wooded island which hid the right shore from observation. Taking advantage of this, and also of the fact that on his side of the river there was a thick forest, Alexander managed to bring his boats, which were made of skins, to a place opposite the island, and at the same time he marched some of his troops down the stream, leading them by a detour some distance from the bank, in order to prevent the enemy from detecting his operations. The rest of the Greeks were left at the original camping ground or were posted along the river at different points, with directions to cross and aid him at the proper moment.
The actual crossing of the division under his command was done under his own eyes. Regiments of heavy-armed men were left on the right bank in anticipation of a possible rear attack by Abisares, prince of Cashmir, who, it was known, had promised to assist Porus in resisting the invading army. The passage was facilitated by the stormy weather which prevailed during the night. The Indian outposts heard nothing, and Alexander led the way safely past the island to the opposite shore, where, though some difficulty was caused by mistaking an islet for the mainland, the cavalry were disembarked and put in battle array. The whole number of troops under Alexander’s command were 6000 hypaspists, 4000 light-armed foot, 5000 cavalry, including 1000 Scythian archers. In the meantime the Indian outposts had ridden away to announce to Porus what had happened and to prepare him for the news of the Greek advance. Alexander went swiftly forward, taking with him all the cavalry, and he soon met and defeated a detachment of 1000 Indian horsemen and 160 chariots under the command of the son of Porus.
The Indian king himself was advancing with the bulk of his army, and he drew up his line of battle as soon as he found a piece of sandy ground suitable for displaying the cavalry and elephants. In front he placed 200 elephants at intervals of 100 feet, and behind them his infantry to the number of 20,000. In the wings his cavalry were drawn up, about 4000 in all. Alexander placed the pick of his army, the hypaspists, immediately in front of the elephants. The use of these animals in battle was still a strange sight to the Greeks, and the Indian fighting line seemed to them like a city wall with towers. Porus did not think that his foes would venture to advance through the spaces left between the elephants. He argued that the horses would be terror-stricken and the foot would be met by the Indian foot soldiers if they tried to attack the elephants from the side, and that they would hesitate to move directly against them for fear of being trodden down by their onslaught.
Exactly how the Indian infantry were armed is left uncertain. They probably had not the solidity of the Greek phalanx and were depended upon only to cover the work of the elephants. Alexander kept his infantry in reserve until he was able to confuse the line of the enemy by a cavalry attack. His cavalry he directed to spread out and attack not only in front but on the flanks as well. This manœuver was executed with practised precision, and neither the Indian chariots nor their horse could withstand the furious onslaught of the Greek squadrons, and soon retired behind the elephants with the Macedonians in close pursuit. As the elephants wheeled round, passing through the infantry in order to meet the Macedonians, the quick advance was blocked; the horses could not be induced to charge. They were obliged to retire; then Porus, on his side, vigorously attacked both the Macedonian cavalry and the phalanx.
The fight was now a general one. The Greek authorities paint this stage of the battle in superlative diction, describing how the elephants pressed through the thickly packed masses in front of them, rending and trampling the soldiers and horses as they went, while the engines on their backs scattered destruction far and wide. But the Macedonians finally won by striking down the elephants’ drivers and destroying the turrets they were in, and so wounded the beasts themselves that they ceased to attack. With the elephants rendered useless, the chance of victory for the Indians was gone. Their infantry was not sufficiently disciplined to make any use of the confusion caused in the Greek ranks by the work of the elephants. Besides, the Macedonian cavalry had in the first stage of the engagement got so far into the Indian lines, that they remained not only on the field of battle, but actually were, as the engagement advanced, behind both the enemy’s infantry and the elephants as well. When the Indian cavalry tried to take a hand in the fight and leave the part of the field where the elephants were in action, the Greek horse, having a superiority in numbers, forced them back.
The Greek infantry phalanx had been ordered by Alexander to keep its ground, but when the cavalry fight made it impossible for the Indians to move forward, the Greek foot soldiers drew away from their first position, where they were liable to a frontal attack by the elephants, and driving the elephants back, exposed the enemy to an attack by the Macedonian horse. Unprotected as the Indians were on both sides, they could not escape defeat, and at this point of the battle they suffered severely; most of the elephants and King Porus himself were taken prisoners.
The Greek historian, Arrian, says that the Macedonian loss was only 310 dead, mostly horsemen; but as other authorities add 700 foot soldiers, it seems likely that the battle was a stubborn one, for there were only 11,000 men engaged in Alexander’s army. The fact, too, that the use of elephants became customary in the wars fought by Alexander’s successors, some of whom were present at the battle of Hydaspes, proves that the fight with Porus must have made an impression on his opponents, and this places it in a different category from the easier victories over the Persians. Alexander treated his defeated antagonist with magnanimity and erected his kingdom into a vassal state; but as safeguards of his loyalty, directed that two garrison cities, Bucephala and Nicæa, should be established in his domains, one on either side of the Hydaspes near the site of the battle. A lieutenant, Crateros, was left to carry out these building plans, while Alexander turned to the conquest of the neighboring tribes. The only notable difficulty was the taking of the town of Sangala, the chief citadel of the free and warlike Cathæans, which had been strongly fortified and which had to be taken by storm.
The general result was that the Punjab was annexed to Alexander’s empire and placed in the hands of vassal princes. From this region the Greek army advanced to the river Hyphasis, reaching it at a point higher up than its junction with the Sutlej. This was the extreme limit of Alexander’s march. He would have gladly gone farther, for the whole of India might well have become a subject state; but the army had suffered from the discomforts of the rainy season, and they were weary of campaigning. The horses were worn out, the armor and accoutrements in bad condition. The temper of the troops, devoted though they were to their commander, left no doubt that they would mutiny if Alexander refused to turn back. He told the officers he would go on himself, and that they could return to Macedonia and let the Macedonians know that they had abandoned their king in a hostile land.
But appeals and threats alike failed to convince the army that their view of the situation was unreasonable. The sacrifices were found to be unfavorable, and persuaded by this intimation of the disfavor of the gods, the king consented to return. On the bank of the Hyphasis twelve altars were erected of large size, as lofty as the walls of a city, to mark the limits of Macedonian conquests, and as a thank-offering to the gods for their protection through the hazards of long-continued warfare in strange lands. The army then retired to the Hydaspes.
Alexander was an explorer as well as a conqueror, and his disappointment at this enforced withdrawal from the prosecution of his march must have been that of a man who was within reach of the goal and just failed to attain it. According to the geographical notions of his day, he was near the certain limit of the world; he knew nothing of the great Indian peninsula, and of course nothing of the vast extent of Siberia or the Chinese Empire. He supposed that the Ganges flowed into an eastern sea which was continuous with the Caspian and which washed the shores of Scythia and the base of the high mountains he had lately passed through. On the river Hydaspes, a fleet had already been under construction; as soon as it was ready he embarked on it a part of his best troops, while the mass of the army, in two divisions, moved down the stream. The route followed was along the Hydaspes to its confluence with the Akesines, then down this stream to the Indus and the Indus itself to the Delta.
From the military point of view, this concluding stage of the Indian expedition offers little of special interest. The inhabitants of the country either submitted to or fled from the Greek army, and various strongholds were taken by storm. In an assault on one of them, held by the Malians, who dwelt in the southern Punjab, the king, who had pressed forward in the midst of the enemy, found himself separated from the main body of his followers and was dangerously wounded. In the region the army traversed several colonies were founded; another Alexandria rose at the point where the Akesines flows into the Indus, and at Pattala a harbor and navy yard were built. The conquered portion of India was organized in three satrapies, one of which was under Porus, who had a free position as a vassal prince, for in his territory there were no Macedonian garrisons.
But the real subjugation of the country had not been effected by the spectacular march through it; as soon as the Greeks turned their backs, an uprising took place. Before the whole army reached Pattala, a part had been detached with directions to march west to Arachosia, and to wait in Caramania till it was joined there by the main division. The fleet was placed under the command of Nearchus, a Cretan, who was to take it along the coast of the Indian Ocean and finally into the Persian Gulf. Alexander, at the head of the rest of the army, took the road through Gedrosia.
The difficulties of the return were considerable. The men under Alexander suffered terribly in passing a desert country before they reached, after sixty days’ slow progress, the capital of Gedrosia, Pura. In the farther stretch to Caramania there was also exhausting work, but these trials marked the end of the expedition, for Crateros, who had led the rest of the troops by Arachosia, soon arrived, and news came of the landing of the fleet after a skilfully managed cruise of seventy-five days through unknown waters on the coasts of Caramania. A year had now passed (325 B.C.) since the beginning of the return home from India. During the course of the winter the army returned to Susa, thus concluding this remarkable adventure of Far Eastern conquest.