As the rebel Iranians arrived to be sentenced in Kirman, the unlikelihood of any such union became obvious. Among the governors who came bringing the requested food and baggage animals, there appeared the Thracian and Macedonian generals from Hamadan, who had not seen their king for the past six years. Their last known dealings had concerned Parmenion's murder, when they had disposed of the elderly general in obedience to Alexander's letter: four of them had remained in Media ever since, at the central point of the empire's communications to upper Iran, where they must have received regular orders for forwarding men and equipment. Six thousand soldiers accompanied them from their garrison, but complaints were swiftly raised about their conduct. Native accusers insisted that the generals had allowed the plunder of temple properties, a particularly emotive offence against local opinion; evidently they were guilty, for when a Greek invasion entered Hamadan over a hundred years later they noticed how silver roof tiles and precious stones had been stripped from the temple by Alexander's men, a sacrilege which 406 cannot belong with Alexander's own benign visits. His generals must have been responsible and they were also accused of the rape of respectable ladies, a crime which Alexander is always said in anecdotes to have detested. Their senior officer, brother of the same Coenus who had spoken up on the river Beas, 'had excelled them all in his mad passions, even to the point of assaulting an aristocratic virgin and giving her afterwards to his slave as a concubine'. These outbursts of violence were serious, but not surprising: two of the generals were commanders of Thracians, to whom such excesses had never been distasteful. When these blunt incriminations had been heard, 600 of the troops were put to death, a reprisal which could hardly have been conducted in the exempted presence of 5,000 of their fellows unless there had been grounds, and a distinction, to justify it. In a similar mood of inquiry and justice the four commanders were arrested and two of them executed on Alexander's orders. Complaints against a third did not seem convincing, and he was detained, although nobody had shown the slightest regret for the death of his fellow criminals. They had outraged the natives and they had given free rein to their ambitions at the pivot of the empire's roads. On both accounts, they were better out of the way, and the vast majority of their troops condoned their passing.

The misbehaviour of four generals and 600 soldiers would soon encourage a more audacious order: like the last successful king of Persia, he would 'order his satraps to disband their mercenary armies'. This briefly reported order is obscure and in need of qualification. Settlers in Alexandras would be exempted because they were citizens, not mercenaries, and they are known to have stayed their ground until Alexander's death. It is not clear whether the provinces' standing armies were still mercenaries or whether they now served Alexander as part of his central army. Nor is the order clearly dated to any one of the next six months. News of the mercenary rising in India, the Greek revolt in Bactria and the purge of criminals from Hamadan must already have formed the idea in Alexander's mind; economy and the need to replenish his own royal army were also motives for centralizing troops. The idea has been criticized as ill-conceived, but he must have known there was no point in issuing an order from a distance unless it could be expected to be obeyed; 10,000 mercenaries, at most, would roam wild as a result of it, many of them natives, not Greeks. They would loot for a living, but their effects were mostly felt in Asia Minor, where larger hordes of vagrants were all too familiar. It was more important that no satrap would refuse the order, once issued: it only needed one more disturbance for Alexander to take the chance and issue it. With mercenaries on his mind Alexander took leave of Kirman, sent Nearchus back to the fleet and set out westwards by the long used road into Fars for the great Persian palaces in the centre of his empire. It was nearly seven years since he had last passed through them, and he can only have wondered what he would find; he was entering the second, most delicate, stage of his return.

The march from Kirman to the province of Persia is not a hard one, and in early spring 324, Alexander found himself already at Pasargadae, barely fifty miles from Persepolis. For once his steps can be followed exactly, for at Pasargadae he was to stand on the threshold of Cyrus's tomb, a building which his officers had already visited six years earlier and which still survives on its stone platform very much as he then saw it. Inside the narrow doorway of its pedimented entrance, he found unmistakable signs of vandalism. On their first visit, officers had talked of a golden sarcophagus with a bed beside it and a covering, carpets and purple hangings. The king's cape, his trousers, his blue-dyed tunics, his necklaces and scimitars and his jewelled earrings had all been lying on the bed and its table; now they had disappeared. The sarcophagus had been chipped and Cyrus's skeleton had been scattered carelessly on the floor.

As Alexander had long proclaimed himself to be Cyrus's heir, he was deeply perturbed at this disrespect. He tortured the Magi, who traditionally guarded the tomb for the fee of a sheep and a horse as a monthly sacrifice, but they named no culprits and the inquest was dropped. The historian Aristobulus was ordered to see to the repairs, replace the royal clothing and block the door with clay and stone, sealing it with the king's seal, and in the course of his work, he described the building accurately enough for explorers to recognize it two thousand years later: he even paraphrased King Cyrus's epitaph in Greek. And he understood the likely causes of the robbery: 'It was plainly not the work of the satrap,' he wrote, but of bandits, as they left behind whatever they could not easily carry away. It was one more example of the rebellious disturbances during Alexander's absence in Bactria and India.' A Macedonian was eventually put to death for the offence, perhaps with justice.

But the satrap's hour was soon to come. Of the very noblest Iranian family, he had taken command of Persia when Alexander's own nominee had died; his action was arbitrary, so he came to meet the army with huge presents of gold, coin, horses, furniture and jewelled tableware in order to excuse his self-promotion. He was received as he hoped, and from the hills near Pasargadae, he marched with the king to Persepolis, where he might have survived, had the natives and the buildings not served as evidence against him. He was found to have 'plundered the shrines and the royal tombs', which overlook the terrace of Persepolis, and to have 'murdered many Persians unjustly'. He had also been a usurper in Asia's one dangerously nationalist province, and the charges were enough to sec him hanged, with Bagoas acting as interpreter and perhaps as accuser. He was replaced by Peucestas, the officer who had helped to save Alexander's life at Multan, and had since been made a personal Bodyguard in recognition. The choice was tactful in a province where the Persians' traditions ran strongest, for Peucestas followed up his appointment by wearing oriental dress and learning the Persian language, much to the natives' satisfaction. In a continuing mood of reconciliation, Alexander distributed the traditional presents of money to the women of Persia as he passed through their province, a custom which recalled King Cyrus's history, but had been neglected by recent Persian kings. He also expressed regret that the royal palace of Persepolis had ever been set alight; it was too late to undo the effects of a woman and a banquet, but as his respect for the memory of Cyrus suggested, his myth had moved far since those early days of the invasion. When satraps were suspect, it paid, as with the Hamadan generals, to flatter their subjects' sense of propriety. A reigning Persian king had seldom been seen in Persia for the past thirty years.