CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

To anxious watchers in Asia, the Makran disaster was less of a shock than the simple fact that Alexander had returned. Few of his satraps and fewer still of those in Greece and Europe had expected to sec him again: in eastern Iran, unrest had been fostered by news of his wound. Incredibly, he had reappeared and the history of the next six months of his career turns on a problem which he had brushed aside by marching east: how to retain a vast and varied empire in the face of foreign language, heat and slow communications.

The problem has not gone short of answerers. 'The best course,' the Aristotle of Persian legend advised him once again, 'is to divide the realm of Iran among its princes and to bestow the throne on whomsoever you appoint to a province; give none ascendancy or authority over another, that each may be absolute on the throne of his own domain. ... Then will appear among them so much variance and disunity, so much presumption and haughtiness, rivalry about power, bragging about wealth, contention over degree and so much arguing over retainers that they will not seek vengeance or recall their past. When you are at the farthest bounds of the earth, each would menace his fellow with your dread, invoking your power and support.' This clear statement of a Persian gentleman's attitude would not have pleased Machiavelli. Rightly impressed by Asia's long obedience to Alexander's successors, he explained it as the surrender of a kingdom of servants, not of barons. Unlike barons, servants cannot be played against their masters, but once they fall, they fall for ever, finding no love among the people. Darius had ruled among servants and their defeat handed Alexander a kingdom with no resources for revolt.

Of the two philosophers, this Aristotle showed more grasp of Alexander's predicament, but he too had missed the Iranians' will to rebel. While Alexander sailed on the Indus, observers in Asia would only have agreed on one probability: his empire was likely to fall apart.

As he rested briefly in Kirman, fourteen of the twenty-three provinces of the empire were showing the marks of disturbance and revolt. The problem was not a new one, as it had troubled Alexander ever since the year of Gaugamela, and only one of his many governors, Antigonus the one-eyed, was to retain the same satrapy throughout his reign. The local causes varied. In Bactria, where the natives had been suppressed in two years' warfare, it was the hired Greek settlers who had rebelled. They had believed Alexander to be dead, they had elected an experienced Athenian as king and had seized Balkh in autumn 325. Then they had quarrelled, and by the time Alexander was returning, they had not escaped from the Alexandrias they detested. Mercenaries were also to blame in India. As soon as Alexander had turned for home, they had risen up and murdered Philip the satrap. The news only reached Alexander in Kirman, and at once he ordered the province to be shared between a Thracian and the rajah Ambhi. Bodyguards had already punished the ringleaders.

In the Hindu Kush it was different again. In spring 325 word had come through Roxane's father that the Iranian governor of its heartland was showing himself to be turbulent. It was not the fust time that problems of independence had broken out among these mountain tribesmen; the man was deposed and Roxane's father took control of a province so important for the roads to Balkh and India. Meanwhile south of these roads, in the Helmand valley, chance had spurred on rebellion: the Macedonian satrap had died of sickness and before the request for a replacement could reach Alexander, Iranian chieftains had tried to seize power. But Alexander had the measure of them. When he had detached his veterans and elephants from the march into Makran, he had sent them by the Helmand valley to settle the trouble on their easy way home. This they did, and the Iranian culprits were brought to Kirman, chained and ready for execution.

Odiers soon arrived to join them. A pretender had set himself up among the Medes, 'wearing his tiara upright and giving himself out to be King of the Medes and Persians', but the local satrap, though Iranian, had reason to be loyal, so he had put him in chains together with his Iranian associates. The governor of neighbouring mountain tribes, also an Iranian, had repeatedly refused to answer orders and had fled from a final summons three years before: only now was he caught and sent to his king, to be ordered to an overdue death. In Kirman itself, home of the headhunting tribesmen, the ruler was plausibly charged with insubordination, for Alexander had never conquered the country and its aggressive habits lent support to the suspicion. As Nearchus returned from the palace to the fleet, the new governor, he found, had still not pacified the tribesmen, who had seized the local strongholds and were continuing to prove as troublesome as their reputation suggested.

Westwards the outlook was similar. The Persians' own homeland had been seized by an aristocratic pretender; the province of Susa and its neighbouring tribes were held by two suspect Iranians who had formerly been servants of Darius and who were likely to find Alexander's absence tempting. To the north-west, in the highlands of Armenia and Cappadocia, Alexander's governors had never become established and power had passed back to Iranians and their refugees; in Phrygia by the sea, adjoining tribesmen had been unruly, probably killing the satrap, while in Europe Thracian tribes had overthrown much that Philip and Alexander had striven to retain by colonies and tribute for the past twenty years. They had been encouraged by an ambitious failure in Alexander's name; during the past year one of his generals had crossed with a large army from Europe against the nomads around the Black Sea, whom Alexander had mentioned to the king of Khwarezm as a possible target. Weather and native resistance had wiped out his army, a disaster which had encouraged a Thracian uprising and which many observers believed Alexander might now return to avenge. In the nine more peaceful provinces, such familiar figures as Ada the queen mother and Mazaeus had died, while the experiment with native governors in Egypt had not lasted long. The fight for the empire could not be said to have ended with Gaugamela.

The proof of an empire's strength lies in its powers of survival. On paper, Alexander's seems dangerously fragile, only held by some 40,000 provincial troops, two dozen or so Alexandrias and a high command which had included nine of Darius's former satraps. And yet none of the pretenders or turbulent satraps had managed to organize a popular revolt, except among pockets of hill tribesmen. It is a mistake to describe their rebellions as nationalist, as if Asia were nineteenth-century Europe. The Iranian peasant did not feel part of a nation whose boundaries were worth defining: he only knew that the greater part of his produce went to his distant masters, as three-quarters of it still does, and the identity of these masters was more or less a matter of indifference. The struggle, as Alexander returned unexpectedly, was not between nations or classes, but within the high command, where it centred on prominent Iranians. Six years had passed since Gaugamela and Darius's noblemen had not been as supine as Machiavelli suggested.

Such a crisis of loyalty can be viewed from two directions, from the provinces, where it originated, or from Alexander, where it was suppressed. It is true that Alexander had just left Makran and was living with the memory of conspicuous disaster; his nerves on first emerging had been delicate, and so he had arrested the first messenger of Nearchus's return because the man seemed to have brought him unjustified news of success. But the messenger had been released when proved right, and weeks of celebration had done much to improve the army's morale; to a new Achilles, by a twist of a hero's logic, the escape from Makran could begin to seem like a personal triumph, a survival where Semiramis had failed and a victory in the struggle against the grimmest forces of geography. 'I am more delighted at the news of your return than at the conquest of all Asia,' Nearchus remembered Alexander saying, and Asia had thus been narrowed to include no more than the army's march. Nowadays such self-defence seems thin and distasteful; nonetheless, it goes flatly against the partem of all the evidence to blame the arrests which followed only on Alexander's presumed sense of insecurity or on a new and capricious mood of suspicion. Arrests were no new departure for the survivor of Parmenion, the pages or Philip's murder, let alone for any other Macedonian king, but not a single one of the courtiers, attendant Companions or staff-advisers is known to have lost his job or life during the coming year. If Makran had needed to be blamed on a scapegoat, it was among these assistants that a purge should first have been conducted. The arrests did not affect the court; they followed the fringes of the provincial high command, and it is from the provinces that their sequence must be interpreted. In each case, accusations were laid against the victims, and although such charges need not be truthful, there is often an independent background to make them entirely credible. Iranian revolt and satrapal turbulence were countered by gestures to the provincials' own sympathies, for against a pattern of Iranian rebellion, a union of satraps and subjects was a risk which Alexander could not afford.