‘Then clear off out of here, the lot of you!’
Everyone rushed to the door and disappeared down the stairs. At that moment the herald arrived and explained that he had not been able to find Philotas and that he had left messages for him. Eumenes nodded and was about to leave after the Companions when Alexander called him back.
‘Yes, Sire?’ he said as he entered Alexander’s rooms once again.
‘Philotas was not here,’ said the King immediately.
‘The orderly couldn’t find him. Do you want him to keep looking?’
‘No, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure he’ll hear tale of all this anyway. And you?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing with all the gold you’ve received?’
‘I’m living comfortably, but without overdoing it. I’m putting what’s left to one side for my old age.’
‘Well done,’ replied Alexander. ‘You can never tell. If one day I find myself in need of a loan, I’ll know who to turn to.’
‘May I go now?’
‘Yes, of course,’ and Eumenes headed for the door. ‘Just a moment.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The order, of course, applies to you as well.’
‘What order?’
‘The one about sleeping in the camp, under canvas.’
‘Of course,’ retorted Eumenes, and then he left.
*
Some days later Alexander summoned Eumenes to tell him that, when they eventually started marching northwards, he intended to transfer all the treasure of Persepolis to Ecbatana. Eumenes was amazed by this decision, which to him seemed completely useless, senseless even, but it was clear the King would not be moved in any way.
Such an operation would last more than two weeks, and require a caravan of five thousand pairs of mules and ten thousand camels, because the mountain paths of Media made transportation by carts virtually impossible.
Eumenes failed to comprehend the reasoning behind the decision – to him it seemed strange and even risky, but any time he tried to obtain an explanation from Alexander he received vague and evasive replies. In the end he gave up asking, but his heart remained heavy with some sort of dark presentiment, a sombre portent of some dramatic event.
25
FOR SOME TIME THE Companions respected the orders and lived in the camp, but then Hephaestion asked to be allowed to return to the palace because he wanted to be near Alexander, and the King did not know how to deny his friend this request. Having made this concession to Hephaestion, he could do nothing to stop the others, who with a variety of excuses obtained permission to move back into their residences in the city. They all swore most solemnly of course to live simple, frugal lives. Spring was almost over now and the more serious wounds of the devastated city were slowly beginning to heal, but it was clear Persepolis would never be as it once had been. In the meantime, from the still independent northern provinces of the empire, there came news that Darius was assembling another army and that he was ready to stand ground on the Caucasus Mountains, on the Caspian Sea, and Alexander decided that it was time to move. He organized a party and a banquet to bring their period of rest to an end, celebrations which indeed proved to be memorable events.
All the rooms of the immense palace were brightly illuminated by hundreds of lamps; the royal cooks set to work to prepare the finest dishes; the finest looking eunuchs and girls of the palace were chosen to serve at table in states of semi-undress, after the Greek fashion. At the centre of the dining hall great vases of solid gold taken from the imperial treasure were positioned and used as craters for wine and aromatic and spiced drinks made according to oriental recipes.
Cups of gold and silver from the royal collection were placed on the tables, while everywhere there were vases full of roses and lilies – cut from the palace gardens, the only gardens to have survived in the whole city.
The feast began immediately after sunset and Eumenes realized that Hephaestion had been nominated ‘leader of the symposium’ and that as such it was he who had decreed that the wine should be served in the Thracian manner – straight.
‘Are you not celebrating with us?’ Callisthenes asked as he suddenly appeared behind Eumenes.
‘I’m not hungry,’ replied Eumenes, ‘and it’s my job to oversee everything and to make sure it all goes well.’
‘Or is it that you’d rather stay sober just to make sure you enjoy the spectacle?’
‘What spectacle?’
‘Well . . . I don’t know, but something’s bound to happen. This feast makes no sense. It’s grotesque. I arrived from the Western Gate, and believe me the palace so full of light is a terrible and dramatic contrast with the devastation and the darkness of the city. We’ve been here for months and Alexander hasn’t ordered the reconstruction of even one single house.’
‘But he hasn’t stopped anyone from rebuilding.’
‘No, that’s true; but he hasn’t done anything to stop the nobility and the landowners leaving. Only the poorest people remain, and that means the city is effectively condemned to death. And with the city—’
Eumenes lifted his hand as though to chase away some nightmarish vision, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’
‘Where is Parmenion?’ Callisthenes asked, apparently changing the subject.
‘He’s not here.’
‘And that doesn’t mean anything to you, I imagine. And the Black?’
‘I haven’t seen him.’
‘Exactly. Anyway, I don’t believe he was ever on the guest list – but just look at who has turned up.’
Eumenes turned and saw Tais coming along a corridor towards them – the beautiful Athenian, barefoot and with a most daring gown on, similar to the one she had worn when she first danced before the King.
‘I think she’s been sleeping with Alexander,’ said Callisthenes, ‘and I don’t think there’s anything good about that.’
‘I think I agree with you,’ replied Eumenes, ‘but things don’t necessarily have to get any worse.’
Callisthenes made no comment and went off towards the door named after Xerxes that led out on to the rear portico. From there he could see the tombs cut into the side of the mountain that towered over the palace, lit by the votive lamps burning for the Achaemenid sovereigns. Among them was the as yet unfinished tomb of Darius III. From inside the palace came the ever louder shouting and laughing of the banqueters, increasingly boisterous as they celebrated.
Suddenly he heard some music, which for a moment dominated the din made by the revellers, rhythmic music accompanied by drums and apparently suited to some orgiastic dance. Callisthenes lifted his eyes to the skies and murmured to himself, ‘Where are you, Aristotle?’
Eumenes in the meantime had looked in on the great hall of the apadana and had realized that the banquet was beginning to degenerate. Tais was almost naked now and was dancing wildly, her movements accompanied by the sound of tiny metallic cymbals attached to her fingers. With each pirouette she made her short chiton revealed her statuesque legs in full, together with her marble-smooth buttocks and her sex, while the onlookers shouted all sorts of filth at her.
Suddenly the girl twisted violently and stopped, standing on the points of her toes, and then she crouched down slowly, with all the sensual movements of a cat, still accompanied by the music that somehow seemed to follow the development of her movements. When she got back to her feet she was holding a thyrsus, a staff just like the one held by the maenads, covered in ivy and bearing a pine cone at its tip; she held it aloft and shouted loudly, like a woman possessed, ‘Komos!’
She moved through the columns in the hall like a maenad through the trunks of a great forest and called everyone to take part in the orgiastic dance. Alexander was the first to reply, in his turn shouting, ‘Komos!’
Everyone joined in with him. With her other hand Tais grabbed a torch from a holder on the wall and started leading the frenetic dance through the audience chamber, the corridors, the bedchambers of the wonderful royal apartmen
ts, followed by the revellers – the men all with erections, the women half-undressed or even completely naked, doing their utmost to excite the men even more with their sensual movements.
‘Dionysius is with us!’ shouted Tais, her gaze burning bright in the light of the torch she held in her hand.
Everyone replied, ‘Euoè!’
‘Dionysius wants revenge on these barbarians!’
‘Euoè!’ all the men and women shouted again in their delirium of wine and desire.
‘We will avenge our soldiers, those who died in battle, and our destroyed temples, our burned cities!’ the girl shouted once more, and right before Alexander’s eyes she threw the torch against a purple drape that hung alongside a doorway.
‘Yes! Revenge!’ shouted Alexander and he threw another torch under a large piece of furniture in cedar wood. He was completely out of his mind. Eumenes watched on, witnessing events without being able to do anything about it, and with his eyes he searched for someone who might put an end to the madness, but there was no one in the midst of that cauldron of men and women in heat whose gaze showed any sign of reason.
The flames took hold and the room crackled as it was illuminated as bright as daylight with the vermilion light of the fire. As though possessed by demons, the revellers spread out through the chambers, shouting as they went, setting fire to everything.
The wonderful palace was soon enveloped in a whirlwind of flame. The hundreds of columns made from cedars of Lebanon burned like torches, the fire licked the ceilings and spread to the beams and the joists that groaned and split with the violence of the blaze.
The heat became unbearable and everyone ran outside towards the great entrance courtyard, continuing their dance down there, their songs and their mating. Eumenes came out of a side door, clearly in shock, and as he moved away down the external stairway he saw Tais lying completely naked on a carpet in the atrium, Alexander and Hephaestion both taking her as she writhed and turned in ecstasy.
The people who had remained among the ruins of Persepolis ran out of their slums to bear witness to the disaster – the palace of the Great King was exploding now, devoured by fire, collapsing in an inferno of sparks, in a vortex of black smoke that blotted out the stars and the moon. They looked on motionless, petrified, all of them in tears.
*
On the following morning, what had once been the finest palace in the entire world was simply a pile of smoking debris, in some places four or even five cubits deep, out of which protruded only columns with their capitals in the shape of winged bulls. The portals remained, together with the podium and the foundations and the stairways with the images of the great new year procession and the Immortals of the imperial guard for future millennia, mute witnesses to the disaster.
Towards morning Alexander reached his pavilion in the camp and dropped on to a bed there, falling into a deep, troubled sleep.
*
Parmenion came shortly after dawn and the pezhetairoi of the guard tried in vain to stop him by crossing their spears before the entrance. The old General roared like a lion: ‘Out of my way, by Zeus! Let me through, I must see the King!’
Leptine came towards him with her hands raised as though she too were trying to stop him, but he pushed her out of the way and silenced the growling Peritas with a fierce look and a simple, ‘Get to bed!’
Alexander jumped up, holding his bursting head and shouting, ‘Who dares . . .’
‘I do!’ shouted Parmenion, no less loudly.
Alexander calmed down, as though Philip himself had come into the tent. He moved over to the basin to put his head in the cold water. Then, completely naked, he moved towards his unexpected guest, ‘What’s wrong, General?’
‘Why did you do it? Why did you destroy that wonder? Is this what Aristotle taught you? This is moderation? This is respect for the beautiful and the noble? Before the world you have shown yourself to be an uncultivated and primitive savage, an arrogant and presumptuous man who believes he can behave like a god! I have dedicated my life to your family, I have sacrificed a son to this enterprise, I have led your army through all its battles. I have every right to expect a reply from you!’
‘If anyone else ever dared say and do these things, these things that you have said and done, General, they would be dead already, but I will answer you. I will tell you why I did this. I permitted the sack of Persepolis because in this way the Greeks know that I am the real avenger, I am the one they can identify with, the only one who has succeeded in bringing a centuries-old duel to an end. And I wanted it to be a young Athenian woman who torched the palace of Darius and Xerxes. Given that the city was already destroyed, what point would there have been in keeping the palace? I left it standing for just the time that was necessary to transfer the treasure and the archival documents to Ecbatana and Susa.’
‘But—’
‘We are about to set off, Parmenion, to follow Darius into the farthest provinces of his empire. That palace, if I had left it intact with its treasure, would have been too strong a temptation for anyone, even for one of my Macedonian governors – the atmosphere there, the luxury of those halls, those scenes sculpted everywhere with memories of Achaemenid greatness and then that throne . . . empty! The gold heaped up in unbelievable quantities under those vaults would have made any man the richest man on earth. No end of Persian nobles would have tried to take it at any cost. They would have been willing to spill any amount of blood to sit on that throne, to hold that sceptre in their hands, and all of this would have sparked off new wars – bloody, exhausting, endless. Is this what I should have allowed to happen?
‘I had no choice, General, I had no choice, don’t you understand? If you don’t want the stork to return then you have to destroy the nest.
‘It is true, I have destroyed one of the wonders of the world, but who is to prevent me, when the moment comes, from building an even grander and more wonderful building? In doing this I have destroyed the symbol of Persia and her kings, I have shown the Greeks and the barbarians of the whole world who exactly is the new master – I have shown that the past is dead, the past is ashes, and a new era is being born now. It was beautiful, General, too beautiful, and for this reason it was too dangerous to be left standing.’
Parmenion lowered his head – the orgy, the dancing, the shouting for the god Dionysius, the state of possession that Eumenes and Callisthenes had told him of just a short time before . . . it had all been planned, all been constructed. The production had certainly been a most realistic one, but it was still acting! Alexander was capable even of this, he was better and more consummate than Thessalus, his favourite actor. And the reasoning behind his defence of his actions was faultless, from the political, military and ideological point of view. That boy thought and acted now as though he were Lord of the entire world!
The King took a scroll from his library and handed it to Parmenion: ‘Read it, it arrived last night. Antipater tells me that the war against the Spartans has been won. King Agis fell in battle at Megalopolis and now there is no one in Greece who opposes my position as supreme leader of the pan-Hellenic league. As for me, I have done what had to be done – I have kept my promise of defeating the centuries-old enemy of the Greeks, and the destruction of the palace also represents this fact. Now all I have on my mind is to follow my destiny.’
Parmenion read through Antipater’s letter with some difficulty because his sight was not what it used to be, but he understood what his King was telling him.
Alexander put a hand on his shoulder and looked at him with a mixture of gruff affection and military severity: ‘Prepare yourself, General,’ he ordered. ‘Assemble the army, restore the strictest discipline. We are about to set off again.’
26
THE ARMY STARTED moving towards the end of spring and headed north, climbing up to the centre of the highlands with the desert on their right and the snow-covered Elam Mountains on their left. They travelled in four stages for a total of twenty parasangs and as even
ing fell they reached Pasargadae, the ancestral capital of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty. It was a small city, inhabited predominantly by shepherds and peasants but at its centre stood the first pairidaeza that had ever been built – the breathtaking grounds surrounding Cyrus’s old palace. A complex system of irrigation took water from a spring at the base of the hills and kept all the plants fresh and green – the grass, the roses, the cypresses and the tamarinds, the fragrant gorse, the yews and the junipers.
To one side, to the west, lay the tomb of the founder. It was extremely simple in form, like the quadrangular tent of skins with a double-sided sloping roof, typical of the nomads of the steppe, the four-centuries-old ancestors of the Persians. Initially these people had been vassals of the Medians and their King Astyages, then they themselves became conquerors of vast territories. This simple construction was placed on an impressive foundation of seven steps, like a Mesopotamian tower, and it was surrounded by a colonnade that enclosed a garden with yew trees that were well looked after and pruned.
The tomb itself was still cared for by a group of magi and by a priest who officiated every day at the ceremonies in honour of the great King. Alexander’s approach frightened them because they had heard of what he had done in Persepolis, but the King soon allayed their fears. ‘What has been done has been done,’ he said, ‘and it will not happen again. Show me this monument, I beg you. I simply wish to pay homage to the memory of Cyrus.’
The priest opened the door to the sacellum and let the young King through. He looked around in silence, a ray of sun coming in through the door to illuminate the rough-hewn sarcophagus on which there was but one inscription:
I AM CYRUS, KING OF THE PERSIANS DO NO HARM TO THIS MY TOMB
At the bottom, hanging on a hook, was the great conqueror’s armour – a breastplate of iron scales, a cone-shaped helmet, a round shield and a pure iron sword with an ivory hilt, the only precious material in the entire panoply.