Moving west to rule in foreign Babylonia, the Persian nobility had freely intermarried with their subjects. Within two generations, the native business documents are rich in mixed Persian and Babylonian names, while even among the nobility, a Persian might marry a Jewess, an Armenian or an Egyptian and have his marriage legally witnessed by Babylonians, Arabs or Hebrews. Under Persian rule Babylonia had become a land of half-castes, while even the Persian king had been known to maintain a Babylonian mistress. In the capitals of the Empire, in Memphis no less than Babylon, there were foreign quarters named after the nationality of their inhabitants, exactly as in the cities of Alexander and the Greek kings which succeeded them, but these segregated areas had not isolated one people from another and Persian Babylon, especially, was an integrated world. This integration did not stop at marriage: at the Persian court it can still be detected in the carvings of Persepolis, an accurate record of the Persian empire's officials. The Royal Guards of the private palace quarters are all of them Persians, distinguished by their gold spear-butts and commanded by Persian Staff Bearers. But immediately outside, in the public halls and along the grand staircases, the staff-bearers are often Medes, while Median spearmen are mixed with subjects from Susa, scat of the old Elamite empire, in the nine other 'thousands' of the Immortal Guards, who serve as the elite troops of the king. With the court police, the pattern is even more impressive. The king employed Whip-bearers who controlled the crowds when he processed in public; besides their whips of office, they carry carpets and the royal chair, proof that they also supervised the king's comfort. And yet, at Persepolis, every one of these high officials is shown by his cape and spherical headdress to be a Mede; just as Medes supervise the king's footstool, so Median grooms arrange for his horses, while Elamites from Susa attend to his chariots. Half the envoys from the empire are ushered in to the king by Persian ushers, half by Medes; before the King, the Steward of the Household makes his report, bowing slightly in audience, and yet he, the highest court official, is a Medc. The Persians had not excluded the peoples whose empires they supplanted: from the natives of Susa, they had recruited scribes and foot-guards, as well as borrowing the style of their pleated robes and mantles, their daggers, bow cases and buttoned shoes. From the Medes, well known for their use of cosmetics, their gaily coloured trousers, earrings and high-heeled boots, they had attracted officials to make their court comfortable and to maintain their king in properly secluded style.

Without this Persian background Alexander's own plans for government have been made to seem unnecessarily radical. Already in summer 330 there were signs that the wisdom of such integration was no more lost on him than on his Persian predecessors: he was reappointing Orientals to the satrapies east of Babylon, where they knew the language and the tribesmen, and even the most conservative Greek pamphleteer had advised such a policy to Philip, fighting the Greeks' crusade; he had maintained Persians as Honoured Friends around him; he now respected the dead Darius, just as Darius's ancestors had once respected the kings they replaced, whether live or dead. To administer his conquests he needed the same expertise as the Persians before him, both locally in Babylonia, where taxes passed through a complex sequence of collectors and canton officials, and also at the seats of government, Susa or Hamadan, where the silent majority of supply officers, treasurers, foremen, land agents and accountants had long served the Persian nobility, entirely ignored by Greek historians. Local documents prove that under Persian rule as many as 1,350 labourers from the treasury could be despatched on a single consignment from Persepolis, while a backlog of work could keep scribes up to six years behind with receipts and registrations. Like the Persians, Alexander would surely reappoint this foreign bureaucracy and workforce of serfs, if only for the sake of his taxes and supplies: what he did for the chancellery, he should now do, logically, for his court, and as the Persians had once treated the Medes, so now he should go on to treat the Persians.

But the sequence was not so smooth as it sounded. On his own side stood the veterans of thirty years' fighting, brought up under Philip and often resentful of Greeks, let alone of Orientals. They had not spent their youth with friends who could speak Persian or with tutors who wrote on the Magi. They wanted power for themselves, treasure and perhaps an end to their marching. They had not expected to share their monarchy, any more than the Greeks had expected their crusader to become the Persian King. Educated Greeks had shown no more fondness for the idea of the barbarian than for that of the lower classes: there were Macedonian officers who might feel likewise, especially if Alexander threatened their status with Orientals.

Their agreement would only be hastened by the features of Persian kingship, for if the Persian court was a mixed society, the king himself was set above it in venerable seclusion. Access to him was controlled by Staff Bearers and Chamberlains, and during an audience the visitor's hands were to be kept strictly inside his cape. It was believed by Greeks that no man could be admitted unless he had first washed and dressed in white raiment; certainly, it was death for a subject to sit on the King's golden throne or walk down the royal carpet. Once admitted, he brought his hands to his lips in a respectful gesture which Greeks reserved for their gods, while suppliants or the very humblest classes also went down on their knees. During the court's official dinners, the king dined behind a veil in the company of his wife, mother and royal brothers: he drank specially boiled water, ate a cake of barley and only took wine from an egg-shaped cup of gold. Members of the court might even set aside food from their table as an offering to his revered spirit. Throughout the king's lifetime, a royal fire was kept alight in his honour and only dowsed when he died: at his funeral, his surviving staff-bearers were killed beside his pyre. Though not worshipped as a living god, he was the chosen and protected favourite of Ahura-Mazda and he dressed to suit his majesty. He rode in an ornate chariot, pulled by white horses; his tunic was striped with white and purple and worn beneath the robe of gold embroidery reputed to be worth 12,000 talents; his necklace and bracelets were gold; he was shaded by a parasol and accompanied by a fly-whisk, while his headdress was smooth and rounded, like a tall but brimless top-hat; his shoes were padded and dyed pale saffron, without buckles or buttons and his girdle was woven of pure gold thread. He moved like a god among men, distant but lonely and often insecure.

However respectful of the dead Darius, Alexander could never compete with this religious aura. His officers would not understand it, and already after Gaugamela, his publicity was flouting it deliberately: his coinage from mints in western Asia showed a lion-griffin, Persian symbol of chaos and evil, but so far from being stabbed, as at Persepolis, by the Persian king, the griffin was itself shown slaying Persians, a direct reversal of their royal myth. When a Persian king took the throne, he attended Pasargadae, site of King Cyrus's tomb, and dressed in a rough leather uniform to eat a ritual meal of figs, sour milk and leaves of terebinth. This ancient ceremony recalled old legends of Cyrus's youth in the once nomadic society of Persia; after his meal, the new king even assumed King Cyrus's cloak. Alexander knew from Greek authors and Persian friends how Cyrus's memory was revered by Persians, and soon he would show a concern for Cyrus in his own publicity. But only in his Romanceis he said to have issued a proclamation to all Persians as the new King of Asia that he would