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 critical expanse. Preemptive measures seemed in order.
Beyond the Jaxartes stretched the open steppes of central Asia, where various independent Scythian tribes lived out a nomadic existence.3 These hardy peoples, renowned for their fighting spirit and horsemanship, sometimes joined forces with their sedentary neighbors to the south. Bessus had staked his last hopes on such an alliance, and that gave Alexander very good reason to bar the door. Like the present borderlands nominally separating Afghanistan from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, and other nations, the Jaxartes frontier offered rebels a place to hide, smuggle, and recruit. Alexander intended to fortify this frontier and prevent any such collusion in the future by setting up a permanent military barrier between Sogdiana and the Scythians. The king had done this sort of thing before; in fact, he began his reign in 336 B.C.E. with a Balkan campaign north to the Danube River, where he bullied some Scythian tribes that threatened interference in his realm.4 It had worked wonders back home, but he was not in the Balkans any more.
At his leisure, Alexander moved his army northward through Sogdiana. He may have been following the old caravan route that threaded the Iron Gates and emerged in the territory of Nautaca south of Maracanda (modern Samarkand). The long pursuit of Bessus, though anticlimactic, had taken its toll on the cavalry horses. Therefore, in the fine horse-rearing country around Karshi (site of a critical air base used by the Soviets and, later, by U.S. Task Force Dagger), Alexander requisitioned fresh mounts for his men.5 This may, in retrospect, have touched a nerve among a local population always sensitive to any loss of livestock. More unwelcome intrusions soon followed.
Alexander’s army paused briefly in Maracanda, the largest city in Sogdiana. Inside its impressive circuit of walls and strong citadel, the king left a thousand men as a garrison.6 About 180 miles farther to the northeast lay the Jaxartes frontier. Alexander’s plans for this area were no doubt already taking shape, and the king’s preparations could not have been overlooked by the indigenous population. Near the river there existed only one substantial city, an old Persian foundation named Cyropolis (perhaps modern Ura-Tyube), plus six walled towns. Though impressive, Cyropolis stood twenty-five miles south of the crucial river, too far to effect the kind of control that the king now envisaged. Given the surplus population available from these settlements, Alexander decided to construct a new, powerful military post right on the Jaxartes (probably at modern Khodzhent). Surrounded by almost seven miles of defensive walls and named Alexandria Eschate (“the farthermost Alexandria”), it would henceforth guard the edge of his empire.7
This was apparently more meddling than the locals were willing to bear. Plans for the new city signaled a permanent Greek presence on the Sogdian-Scythian border. This would diminish the commercial and administrative standing of Cyropolis and probably meant that area croplands and pasturage would be attached to Alexandria Eschate as dependencies. In other ways, militarily closing the frontier would disrupt traditional patterns of life in an environment where rivers naturally attracted disparate peoples together rather than divided them. Scythians and Sogdians-Bactrians enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, especially