maintain their traditions as before. He is not known to have learnt to speak Persian fluently and although he soon employed eastern Magi, he never ordered this traditional royal ceremony for himself. He was a foreigner who had burnt Persepolis and he could not understand such old nomadic rituals. But the rituals were to survive long after his achievements had been forgotten.

However, he was also approaching outer Iran where a due measure of tradition would be expected of any claimant to the Persian kingship. In the process Alexander might offend his elderly generals, but it ought to be possible to compromise between Macedonian scruples and Oriental expectations. Had he been feeble or unimaginative, he would never have tried. He was neither, and within weeks his court was alive with gossip and conjecture.

First he made sure of his circumstances. Leaving the site of Darius's murder, he returned to the main body of his troops and after a short rest led them up from the edges of the desert to the passes of the Elburz mountains, heading north for the Caspian Sea through forests of oak and chestnut, hill ravines and the lairs of wolves and tigers. Darius's courtiers and the Greek troops who had served him to the end were known to have fled to these thickets for refuge. Within a week, the former Vizier, one of Darius's murderers, had promised surrender in return for a pardon which was later attributed to the charms of his accompanying eunuch. The pardon belonged to a less self-indulgent policy, whereby those who surrendered should be spared, for Alexander began by caring less for the punishment of Darius's murderers than for the luring of Persian nobles out from the forests on to his staff, where they could help with the problems of language and government. The eunuch was indeed a figure to be respected, for of all the finds in the months near the Caspian, none was to prove more precious or remarkable; with Bagoas the Persian, Alexander began an affair which lasted for life.

The name Bagoas was rich in recent and unpleasant memories; some ten years earlier, a Bagoas, also a eunuch, had made his name as a Persian general in Egypt and then served in western Asia where he had sent Hermeias, Aristotle's first patron to his death. He had then poisoned Darius's predecessor and made Darius king, only to be poisoned himself, some said, by way of thanks; his famous tree park at Babylon had now been bestowed upon Parmenion. But Alexander's Bagoas is said to have been young and extremely handsome - a list of Alexander's officers honours 'Baguas, son of a certain Phamuches', who perhaps had connections with the hellenized coast of Asia. If so, he might have been bilingual and was probably no more than a young court eunuch beloved for his airs and graces. What Hephaistion thought of him can only be imagined, for the high importance of Bagoas was left in decent silence by Alexander's friends. So the most startling of all Alexander's intimates is also the least known, but his role must not be played down; a willing source of Persian information, he was also the bluntest proof that Alexander found Orientals' company congenial, and within weeks, Bagoas could be seen as the earliest sign of new times.

Continuing to lure supporters from the wilds, Alexander offered terms of new employment to the 1,500 Greek mercenaries who had stayed devotedly beside Darius. First, they argued; then they took up the suggested bargain, which still recognized Alexander as allied Leader. Those who had joined Persia before Philip had declared war were to be left free, while those who had fought against the decrees of the Greek allies were to enlist in Alexander's army at the same rate of pay. Rich and unchallenged, Alexander had moved far from the massacre of Greek 'rebels' at the Granicus; he then left briefly to hunt out the surrounding hill tribes; for one glorious moment, they managed to ambush Bucephalas, but a furious threat of devastation from Alexander caused them to surrender and give the horse back. This brusque treatment of the mountain tribesmen could only have impressed his new Persian friends, for their kings' authority had long foundered against such inaccessible peoples.

Reunited, Alexander and his troops marched down the mountain slopes to Zadracarta, Gurgan's capital, close to the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. He had entered the lush jungle of a tropical landscape, abounding in supplies and freshened by the luxury of summer rains: no Greek had seen it before, and his officers were suitably impressed: they noted its silver firs, its sappy oak-trees, and the precipices by the seashore, over which the 'rivers poured, leaving room for the natives to feast and sacrifice in the caves below, basking in the sun-light and looking up at the water passing harmlessly above, while before them, stretched the sea and a shore so damp that it was grassy and alive with flowers'. The sea itself was no less intriguing. By command of the first King Darius, it had been explored two hundred years before by Scylax, a sailor from Caria, whose small boat had reached its northern shores and proved that another land-mass lay beyond. The facts were not well known in Greece, though Aristotle could have told them to his former pupil, and as many believed that the Outer Ocean of the world flowed round the northern coast of Asia, Alexander now wondered whether the Caspian was perhaps a gulf of Ocean. For the first time, he had the sensation of standing at a possible edge of the world, and whether or not such excitements mattered to him, at the end of his life he would return to a plan to discover its truth. His followers, meanwhile, had tasted the Caspian's water and noted its extreme sweetness, still manifest today; they were also amused by the number of its small water-snakes. But they left its extent uncertain, and for fifteen days they relaxed at Zadracarta while Alexander sacrificed to his customary gods and held the first athletic games the people of Gurgan had ever witnessed. During that fortnight two events are reported, the one as romantic as the other was momentous.

To the shore of the Caspian, it was said, came the Queen of the Amazons, accompanied by 300 women whom she prudently left outside the Macedonian camp. Single-breasted and trained in war, she told Alexander she wished to bear his child. Bagoas notwithstanding, 'the passion of the woman, being keener than the King's, made him spend thirteen days in satisfying her desires'. But none of Alexander's staff historians was prepared to support this disputed story, not even his chief court usher who might have admitted the queen to his presence, and it must therefore be dismissed as a legend. The Greeks had long located the Amazons near the Black Sea, not without reason as the tribes there were matriarchal and ruled by women. But the Black Sea was hundreds of miles away from the Caspian, and the visit of the Amazon queen was invented by two historians who had first confused this geography. Perhaps a nearby queen did call on the camp; certainly, the Amazons were too famous for romantics to admit that Alexander had not received them.

Though spared an affair with an Amazon, Alexander had not been sitting idle. At Zadracarta, Persian noblemen continued to join him from their refuges in the Elburz foothills: some of them were former satraps; one, Artabazus, was a former guest-friend of Philip's court. Father of Barsine, Alexander's Persian mistress taken at Issus, he brought no less than seven sons, the interpreters and minor officials of the future. The policy of free pardons and the affair with Barsine had usefully added to Alexander's growing stock of Orientals. This same pool of Persian collaborators remained central to his plans for his Empire throughout his life. It was prudent and polite to make this new nobility feel at home, and in conversation, they would have discussed what they had always known in the days of a Persian king. Alexander hesitated no longer; as Darius's heir and Bagoas's admirer, he began to wear certain parts of the Persian royal costume.