While Nearchus brought the fleet to the far end of the Persian Gulf, Alexander arranged supplies for him and left Persepolis to march on westwards and meet him at Susa. Arriving in late March, he again fell foul of Iranian satraps. He was greeted by the local governor and his son, both of whom had served Darius at Gaugamela and had bought their reinstatement from Alexander afterwards. The son he put to death, some said by spearing him with his own sarissa, and the father he imprisoned, complaining that he had brought bribes of money, not supplies for the army, an oversight which was serious at any time, but never more so than after Makran when orders had been issued that all supply posts on the main roads should be filled by the governors for the army's passing. This and a suspicion of insubordination led to the man's execution, and at the same time the last of the four generals from Media was found guilty, perhaps fairly, of robbing Susa's sacred treasures. He was sent to a belated death.

With the Susa executions, the brief purge came to an end; there was nothing new about it. More officers had been sent to their death for suspected plotting in the three years before the invasion of India than were executed in the years after Makran. Since emerging from the desert, Alexander had removed four Iranian governors and four Iranian pretenders, together with their associates; he had caught up at last with a

long-summoned Iranian offender, and disposed of four noted miscreants from Hamadan. The pattern had been important. Even before invading India, Alexander had been moving away from the use of Darius's Iranian satraps whom he had at first been pleased to receive and reinstate. But by summer 326, six had already been tried and found wanting, while another two had never established their rule in their satrapies; after his renewed executions, only four, excluding the Indian rajahs, continued to hold high provincial office. Of these, one was Roxane's father-in-law; another was Artabazus, father of Barsine, who was an old man, and confined to the command of one Sogdian fort; the third ruled the northern wilds of Media like an independent duchy and proved so memorable that his name, Atropates, passed into the province's new title of Azerbaijan; the fourth, Phrataphernes, was the conspicuous exception, the one satrap who had served Darius, yet still retained his satrapy of Parthia near the Caspian Sea, loyal enough to send cooked food and his two sons by camel to Carmania in answer to Alexander's pleas from Makran. Elsewhere, Europeans had taken the place of suspect Iranians, whose past with Darius could not be trusted when Alexander was absent. A Thracian ruled Indians; a Cypriot, most successfully, ruled the hardened tribesmen of the Arians' home province; Peucestas the Macedonian pleased the Persians by adopting their dress, their customs and language. During this time, Alexander is said to have become quicker to believe accusations and to punish even the lesser offenders heavily, because he felt that in the same state of mind, they would go on to commit more serious crimes'. In the circumstances, that was prudent and may well be true, though in the four years which followed Gaugamela, courtiers in plenty had already been put to death on mere suspicions. Twelve swift arrests sufficed to return the empire to a calm which lasted not only throughout Alexander's brief remaining lifetime but also throughout the forty selfish years of western struggle among his Macedonian Successors. The barons had had their day, and the empire thereafter behaved as if wrested from servants. In the eastern half of Asia the new appointments mostly remained in power for the next eight years and were praised as men who had governed well. The eastern purge, in short, had proved a signal success; it would be seventy years or more before Macedonian rule in Asia was shaken in so many provinces again, and then too the pattern and the provinces concerned were remarkably similar.

But in spring 324 the fate of the west was still in the balance. From Kirman, news of the king's return had sped dramatically towards the coast and at Babylon it can still be detected in its rapid passage: the city's garrison commander had come to meet Alexander near Susa, but 'seeing 410 that he was punishing his satraps severely, sent back a letter to his brother in Babylon, who happened to be a prophet. He was frightened for his own safety and especially feared the king and Hephaistion.' The prophet, after asking for details, returned to his business and made ready a momentous answer. In the meantime, the news had passed beyond him and by early summer it had reached to the fastnesses of Cilicia and the fringe of the Aegean sea. Harpalus, a treasurer of the empire, heard it with dismay and retired to consider his own position in the private rooms of the castle at Tarsus. He had a guilty record, and he knew, as an officer in Hamadan when Parmenion was murdered, how a suspicion was treated in times of crisis.

Among Alexander's Macedonian officers, famed for their wrestling, their drinking and their silver-studded boots, none is more congenial than Harpalus the treasurer. Alexander had always liked him; they had grown up together, but as Harpalus was lame, he could not be used on active service. Nonetheless he had followed the army and shortly before Issus, he had travelled from Asia to Greece on a mysterious mission, probably as a royal spy. After Issus, he had rejoined the troops and at a time when Alexander was striking his first coins in Asia, he had become one of the army's treasurers. His responsibilities had increased with the booty, so much so that three years later he could be left in Hamadan to centralize the bullion of the Persian Empire. While Alexander had battled into India, Harpalus had gone about his leisurely life behind the lines. He would send books east for his king's light reading; he organized the hired reinforcements and supervised the despatch of smart new suits of armour to the Punjab. Much of his time was spent in the heat of Babylon, where he improved the Persians' palace by adding a gaily-plastered Greek portico to its inner courtyard. In a strange land, he had also found solace in gardening. At Alexander's request, Greek plants were to be naturalized in the terraces of Babylon's Hanging Gardens; Harpalus saw them into place, though the hot sandy soil was not to the liking of the ivies which refused to settle down.

A rich man, but lonely in his garden, he had felt the need for a female companion, and like Ptolemy, his tastes had inclined to the courtesans of Athens. Through friends in the city, he heard of the practised Pythionice; he sent her an invitation and, like Thais, she left the Piraeus to seek her fortune in the east. Harpalus spared nothing to impress her, he even shipped rare fish to Babylon from the distant Red Sea; and for two or three years they lived, Treasurer and slave-girl, in the Hanging Gardens until, despite his affairs with native women, Harpalus found he had fallen in love. Pythionice bore him a daughter, but at a time when Alexander was reported to be sailing on the Indus, she had died and left her lover to do justice to her memory. Harpalus was not the man to let her down, and in the process, he had involved himself in scandal.

It was inevitable that Alexander should have friends in the Greek cities of the empire and that these friends, often restored home by his favour, should prove articulate. On the Aegean island of Chios lived Theopompus the pamphleteer, a rich man who had travelled Greece in the name of history, only to write provocative slander about most of the facts he had seen or heard. Twenty years before, he had spent some time at Philip's court and had spared no abuse in describing the king and his courtiers; times soon changed, and Philip had become master of Greece, Alexander master of Asia and the Aegean; Theopompus found himself indebted to men who had been themes for his vituperation. So he wrote a panegyric on each of them and when Alexander returned from India, he sent him a stylized letter which respectfully discussed certain topics in the west. Among them was Harpalus's behaviour: Pythionice ‘was a slave and a harlot three times over, but now that she has died, he has built two monuments for her at a cost of more than 200 talents. One stands in Babylon, the other in Athens', at the side of the Sacred Way from the city to Elcusis, framed by a distant prospect of the Acropolis: it was so much larger than any other, men said, that an innocent stranger would assume it honoured Pericles or a similar hero of the past. Her coffin had been escorted to the grave by a huge choir of famous musicians and lest she should be forgotten, 'this man, who pretended to be your friend, has dedicated a temple and a sacred enclosure to Pythionice Aphrodite, goddess of love, not only despising the vengeance of the gods but also making a mockery of the similar honours bestowed on you'. Harpalus, no less, had immortalized his mistress as a goddess at a time when others were already paying divine honours to his king. He had also set a fashion, as royal mistresses of the future would frequently be named Aphrodite and worshipped insimilar style.