When Cyrus the Great took Babylon over two hundred years ago, he did it by diverting the Euphrates, which flows through the city, and attacking at night along the dry channel.
We have it easier. Before Gaugamela, scouts of our Paeonian Light Horse capture a number of Persians, including an extremely keen young captain named Boas, who speaks Greek and serves as an aide-de-camp to Mazaeus, commander of the Persian right and provincial governor of Babylonia. This excellent young officer has permitted himself to be taken, I am certain, on instructions of his superior. I order him released, to bear this message to Mazaeus: that, although I cannot as a gentleman urge him to betray his king in the coming fight, yet, should the affair turn out in my favor, I shall harbor no ill will to brave foes, but will look with kindness upon him who will accept my friendship. Mazaeus and his young captain fight with exemplary valor at Gaugamela, yet once Darius has fled, all allegiances are off. I send again to Mazaeus, extending my offer of accord. “You will find your answer,” the governor replies, “on the wind.”
When Babylon celebrates, she flies kites. In summer a hot dry wind beats across the plain, in currents that ascend powerfully at known places, such that the walls and irrigation stations fly great rafts of banners, the noble houses are made gay by snapping standards, and each dwelling, however humble, has its wind-borne jack and bunting. The kite masters of Babylon craft their creations of pressed flax dyed to brilliant colors, in every shape conceivable—swallows and butterflies, crickets and ravens, carp and perch—and soar them to unimaginable heights. The loftier a man’s station, the grander his kites.
Kites sail in thousands as the army approaches Babylon. Our fellows whoop and cheer; children pave their path with petals and candies. Our host Mazaeus awaits us with his wives and children on a barge in the Royal Canal. A great entertainment has been prepared. For five miles above the town Mazaeus has had the road strewn with palm fronds and, within a mile, with wreaths and garlands. Ecstatic multitudes line the thoroughfares; silver altars burn frankincense in mounds big as handbarrows. Everything is ours. Herds of horses and cattle, cartloads of fragrances and spice; nothing is missing, down to talking crows and tigers in cages.
I have drawn up the army in battle order, to show the populace its new masters. Thessalian horse first, led by the Pharsalian squadron in burnished armor; Agrianes and Macedonian archers next; Balacrus’s Thracian darters; then half the allied Greek and mercenary cavalry, Aretes’ men, and Menidas’s and Ariston’s, the Lancers and Mounted Scouts. Those wounded, or who cannot walk or ride, remain in hospital camp north of the city, though I will bring them in as expeditiously as appearances permit. After the Lancers come Hephaestion’s Royal Guard, Nicanor’s Guards brigades, both in crimson cloaks with regimental sashes; then Cretan archers; allied Greek and mercenary infantry, led by Cleander’s vet mercs. Behind these come the siege train and combat engineers, Diades’ divisions, flanked by Andromachus’s mercenary cavalry, and the other half of the allied Greek horse. The field baggage passes, to show the foe how little we need, and then, in the carriages in which we have captured them, the queen and queen mother of the empire and their retinue; Darius’s young son Ochus I have mounted upon my own parade horse, Corona; he rides at my side. The ladies I have screened from sight within their carriages, which bear their royal serpents, fluttering on the air. Behind the baggage train advance in armor, sarissas at the upright, the six regiments of the phalanx, in order as they triumphed at Gaugamela—Coenus’s, Perdiccas’s, Meleager’s, Polyperchon’s, Amyntas’s (under his brother Simmias), and Craterus’s. Last, Sitalces’ Thracians; Andromachus’s mercenaries; the Greek cavalry under Erigyius; allied cavalry under Coeranus; Odrysians under Agathon; and the Achaean and Peloponnesian infantry under their home commanders.
On the second day I enter the city and sacrifice to Baal, chief deity of Babylonia, with Mazaeus and the Chaldean priests in attendance according to the holy law. Those rites of the ancient religion, which Darius has proscribed, I restore. I command that the Great Temple of Esagila, razed by Xerxes, be rebuilt. I do not permit the ladies of Darius’s court to return to their apartments in the city but have them encamped, with the army on the plain of Ashai, east of the city, while I send detachments to occupy the citadels and disarm the royal guard.
On the third morning I enter Babylon to stay. The region that we know today as the province of Mesopotamia of the empire of Persia has been, centuries past, the empires of Chaldea, Assyria, and Babylonia, and the kingdoms of Ur, Sumer, and Akkad. Over these realms have ruled Semiramis, Sargon, Sennacherib, Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, Ashurbanipal. Scyths and Kassites have invaded, and Hittites and Medes and Lydians and Elamites. Cyrus the Great brought these lands under Persian rule two centuries ago, as now we of Macedon and Greece subdue his heirs and make his kingdoms subject to our might.
Where is Darius?
I call a council in the great Banquet Hall. Hephaestion commands our forward intelligence. He presides with his arm cinched in a sling, wounded from a spear thrust at Gaugamela. “Spies and deserters place the king in flight east toward Persepolis, capital of the empire, or north, on the track to Ecbatana in Media.”
The floor of the hall is a vast map of the empire. Hephaestion paces off the march from the site indicating Babylon, in the center, to Susa, east, then on to the other cities, while our generals observe with victors’ satisfaction from their places at a great ebony table. We feast on the foe’s meat and wine; business is interrupted again and again by toasts and cheers, which I cannot quell and do not wish to. “Both Persepolis and Ecbatana are a month and more of hard trek from here, and both are fronted by rugged, defensible mountains. Reports say Darius has thirty thousand men still with him. We will not overhaul him till midwinter, even if we start today, and this cannot be asked, if you want my opinion, of infantry who have just borne the sternest casualties of the campaign, or of cavalry whose men and horses have suffered even more severely.”
“Besides,” cries Ptolemy, “we have won!”
Perdiccas: “The men need gold—and time to spend it.”
“By Heracles,” adds Cleitus, “so do I!”
A chorus acclaims this.
“Indeed,” I agree, “diversion is the men’s due. They have earned it.”
We will winter in Babylon. I need the time, in any event, to refit the army. In addition to severe casualties in men, we have suffered even graver losses in horses—over a thousand highly trained primary mounts and twice that in remounts. It will take months to acquire proper replacement stock and bring them to even minimal serviceability.
Our forces themselves need reconfiguring. The next push will be into the eastern empire. We’ll be fighting not on open plains but in deserts, badlands, and mountains. We’ll need lighter and faster units and, perhaps, a whole new manner of war.
“Will you hunt Darius this winter?” Parmenio inquires.
There is a difference, I suggest, between pursuit and hot pursuit. The king may flee, but he will not get away. And I indicate, on the mosaic floor, the site of Babylon. “For now, gentlemen, let us set this stable in order.”
We begin.
Our conquests have schooled us in the art of taking over a country. My commanders have learned from Egypt, Palestine, Gaza, and Syria. And the process seems to go smoothly here as well, save one incident, which at the time appears trivial but in retrospect takes on the odor of an ill omen. It has to do with Philotas.
After Gaugamela, I have assigned him to bring to Babylon the spoils of Darius’s battlefield suite. This he does, including the horses, chariots, and apparatus used in the celebrated rite called the Procession of the Sun. This practice of the Persian monarchy requires a train of celebrants half a mile long—company upon company of priests and magi, crown-bearers and praise-singers, as well as the entire division of ten thousand Apple Bearers in full armor, with the king at the fore in his Chariot of the Sun.
Philotas gets it into his head to convene a mock procession and march
it down the central thoroughfare of Babylon, both to gratify our conquerors’ conceit and to show up, for the sport of it, the excess and extravagance of the empire we have overthrown. Philotas does this without informing me, so that I learn of the parade while at work in the palace, only by hearing from the street the barrages of scorn being heaped by our countrymen, and by the rabble of locals lining the Processional Way, upon the captives compelled by their participation in this spectacle to put on a show for their amusement. I stand out onto the gallery with Parmenio, Hephaestion, Craterus, and others, just as Philotas draws the pageant up beneath this stand. “Look here, Alexander!” he crows from horseback. “What do you think of this?”
Among the captives stand the remnants of Darius’s royal guard, the Apple Bearers. The deficit of this noble corps, decimated by casualties from Gaugamela and stripped further by those loyal spearmen who have remained with Darius in his flight, has been made up, I note, by thugs and ruffians off the streets. The fabled Chariot of the Sun has had its gold sheathing stripped to the bare frame, while of the emperor’s one thousand white stallions, so few remain that the deficiency has been restored by plugs and jades, and even asses. My eye lights upon one captain of the Apple Bearer Guard, a man of about fifty years, with a noble bearing and numerous wounds of battle. The binding of his boot, with splints laced tight to midcalf, is that which a physician applies for a broken lower leg.
“What do I think, Philotas? I think that these are good and worthy men whom you have shamed. And I command you to disband this spectacle at once and present yourself within doors before me.”
This is not, to put it mildly, the response Philotas has expected. I see him flush with outrage; he spurs toward the gallery on which I stand.
“And what do you accomplish by such reprobation, Alexander,” he calls up, loudly enough for all to hear, “save to humiliate other good men, myself not least among them, by whose blood and toil you have reaped these treasures?” A stir of the throng fuels his courage. “Whose side are you on?” he demands of me, leaving off all address of courtesy and respect.
I take one stride toward the platform’s edge. “Plead pardon of your king!” Parmenio commands his son, moving instantly to my shoulder. Hephaestion and Craterus hold poised at my side. One glance from me and they will cut Philotas down where he stands.
“Give thanks to heaven,” I tell him, “that you have bled on the field of battle so few days past, or, for such insolence, you would bleed here now.”
Afterward in private, Craterus takes stern issue with me. “What can you have been thinking, Alexander? To humble your commander of Companion Cavalry in public, before the defeated foe? We don’t need these Persians’ love, but their fear!”
He is right of course. I am chastened.
But in my heart something has changed. I can no longer see the knights of Persia as enemies, nor their commons as chattel to be maltreated and misused.
With Hephaestion I tour the barley fields along the Royal Canal. It is lunchtime and two of Mazaeus’s soldiers have snatched up a live goose. A farmer is beating at them with his rake and they are laughing. Our arrival breaks up the fracas. The soldiers point me out to the planter, expecting this to shut him up. But the old man displays no awe for his conqueror. “It’s all the same to me,” he declares, “which of you villains seizes my crops and steals my goods. I remain poor either way.”
I am taken by the fellow’s boldness and stop to talk. I tell him I intend to maintain order and let him farm in peace. “Yes,” he replies, “but you will take away this land I farm from the Persian prince who owns it now and absentee-farms it, and you will award it to one of your captains or colonels, who will farm it as an absentee in the same way. How has my lot altered? I remain enslaved to the same crop agent in town beneath whose heel I have labored all my life, who will now run the farm for a different faraway prince.” I ask exactly how destitute he is. He ticks it off on his fingers. “For every ten bushels, I furnish four to the king, two to the agent for his own use—otherwise, he will put me off the land—and keep four for myself, of which I donate one to the gods, one to the priests, one to my wife’s family, and the last one I bake into bread, if I’m lucky.”
I ask the farmer what he would manage differently if he could. “Give me this land,” he replies, “and let me keep what I grow. And send the agent from town to work for me. I will make that fat bastard sweat!”
I offer to appoint the farmer my commissioner of agriculture or, if he will not accept this, to draw for him from the treasury such wealth that he need never work again.
“Please, no!” the old man protests with genuine terror. “Leave me nothing, sire, for, by heaven, my neighbors will crack my skull if they smell so much as half a copper, and what they miss, my wife and her kin will beat out of me till nothing remains but brittle bones.”
“Then what shall I leave you, my friend?”
“My misery.” And he laughs.
With Hephaestion I begin to study the system in earnest. “This type of country,” my companion observes, “cannot support small farms and free yeoman, as in Macedon. Everything depends on irrigation, but to dredge the canals and keep them clear—for they silt up so fast and the reeds grow back so quickly—takes mass labor. Forced labor. The land is as fertile for tyranny,” Hephaestion concludes, “as for wheat and barley.”
I set up in the palace and begin to hear petitions. It becomes clear at once that power lies not with the king but with those who control access to him. An industry of corruption flourishes, not only at my threshold but along all roads and highways leading to it. Mazaeus becomes my mentor, along with Boas, the bright young captain, and two eunuchs, Pharnaces and Adramates.
The eunuch chancellors, one soon grasps, are the richest men in the kingdom and the most powerful. They direct not only the daylight affairs of the realm (their legitimate commission) but constitute as well a shadow syndicate, with its own captains and consuls, and a code of secrecy as stern as that of any other enterprise in organized crime. Adramates is the crown chancellor beneath Darius in Babylon; under him, I learn, are four subministers, who oversee a network of several thousand others—tax collectors, magistrates, administrators, and scribes. They are all in league with one another, I am informed, and all as crooked as the highway to hell. The primary functionaries of this underworld are bagomes, “soldiers”—that is, the managers appointed by the absentee grandees to oversee their holdings. These syndicate agents are the real power in the country. They serve the king and run circles behind his back. The eunuchs’ wealth is not in money (for they are forbidden to own anything beyond their personal effects) but in arcamas, “influence.” This, of course, is the same as money. Great generals genuflect before them and mighty captains bow at their feet. The eunuchs can turn any man off his land, seize his wife and children, deprive him of wealth, liberty, life. It is in their power to ruin even the sons and brothers of the king. “How did Darius control them?” I ask Pharnaces.
“No one can rule them, sire, not even you, save by wholesale purge—and this you dare not do, or the empire will fall apart in a day.”
I ask Pharnaces about civil crime—theft, homicide, felonies of the street. It does not exist, he tells me. “For a man who steals a pear forfeits his right hand, and who speaks ill of his master loses his tongue.”
The third night in the city, I instruct the crown chancellor to show me the Mint. Twenty thousand talents lie in store here, a stupefying sum, all in bullion, gold and silver, except four or five thousand in darics and staters. It is not locked up. The only sentinels, beyond the watch Parmenio has set over the precinct, are two scribes, both boys, and a registrar of such antiquity he could not have secured the place against an incursion of gnats. This, one sees, is the East. On the one hand, the produce of the empire is looted routinely by those ministers appointed to watch over it, while on the other, one could park the whole of the king’s exchequer in the middle of Procession Street and not a man would help himself t
o a jot.
When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylonia two hundred years ago, I am instructed, he divided the land into seventeen thousand plots, which he allotted to his victorious officers and soldiers. These tracts were registered either as Bow Land, Horse Land, or Chariot Land. The holder was required to pay taxes in kind each year and turn out for the king’s forces one infantryman with shield, armor, and servant from Bow Land; one cavalryman with mount, equipment, and groom from Horse Land; and one charioteer with car, team, and henchman from Chariot Land. Because many of these grant holders were commanded by Cyrus to attend at court, or elected on their own to exploit their holdings either as absentees or nonworking grandees, the day-to-day operations of the land came to be given over to local agents or managers, who contracted to pay the taxes and to remit all profits to the grant holders. These tax farmers formed a kanesis, a “syndicate” or “family,” and conspired with one another to subvert the power of the Persian nobility while aggrandizing their own. The eunuchs who served the king were privy to these intrigues and acted in concert with them, as it served their interests to enlarge their own power at the expense of the nobles. The result was you had the official tax collectors, those who served the king, operating in collusion with the gangster tax collectors, who conspired against the king, to extract from the conquering nobility the wealth that they and the king had won—and all on the backs of the peasantry.
Now here I am. I too will divide Babylon into royal grants and cede them to my countrymen as rewards for service. What else can I do? Campaign calls me on. I would seek measures to secure justice and promote the well-being of the people. But how can this be managed? In the end I have no choice but to leave affairs exactly as they are, run by exactly the same officials. I will do as every conqueror has done before me: