lying now on his side, now, again, on his back,

Now on his face;

then, he would stand upright

And pace to and fro distraught,

by the shore of the boundless sea ...

Worse than Achilles, he had not sent a Companion to his death in battle: he had murdered him before his guests at dinner. Apologists, perhaps, exaggerated his instant wish to die, but it is foreign to the few known threads of Alexander's character to belittle his three days' self-punishment or dismiss them as calculated play. He did not pretend to torture himself, as if to scare his soldiers and officers with the fear that he would never revive; the common foot-soldiers, understandably, had shown not the slightest distress at the accidental death of an ageing cavalryman, and if the officers had been likely to conspire, nothing could have been more foolish than to retire to bed for three whole days and leave them alone with their plans. It was not as if Cleitus had been spokesman of a principled opposition; no officer is known to have lost his job for a friendship with him, and as if to appease Alexander's conscience, Cleitus's own nephew continued in high favour among the king's friends for the rest of the reign. The murder was so painful precisely because it was a personal and accidental disgrace; Alexander suffered, as he lived, on the grandest scale, and a personal crisis drove him not to oriental tyranny, but to his Homeric attitude to life.

But that night of terror also revealed what every young man knows to be true: there is a deeper rift between old and young than between class and class, or creed and creed, and no successful son can be harangued on how much more his father's generation has achieved. It was not that veterans found Alexander changed for the worse: they continued to serve him and even to rise to high commands, but henceforward they would surely hesitate before overpraising their past with Philip to a man who felt, rightly, that he owed as much to his own initiative and to the guidance of Zeus Ammon as to any earthly father. Alexander did not disown Philip, any more than he had betrayed his father's ambitions; he merely excelled him. There is no reason to suppose that Philip too would not have been happy to overrun all Asia, wear the Persian diadem and stress his relationship with Zeus, but there is room for doubt that he ever had the necessary dash to do so. Whatever Cleitus said, Alexander had proved he could do it, and his astonishing success made an old man's comparisons all the more wounding for being untrue. There is no gainsaying the qualities of Philip's men, but they had achieved far more in five years with Alexander than they had in Philip's twenty: the months after Cleitus's murder show most pointedly why Alexander's sense of style still fascinated the classical world long after his father's energies had been forgotten.

With Cleitus dead, Alexander's misfortune began to wane. Remaining Sogdians were subdued and fortified in a matter of weeks, and their surrender at once cut Spitamenes off from his most promising source of support. As his 8,000 nomad horsemen were heavily outnumbered, he was reduced to raiding Balkh behind the lines, where he ambushed its few troops and invalids and killed most of them, including Aristonicus, harpist both to Philip and Alexander, who died 'fighting not as a musician might, but as a brave man'. The raid was a well-judged surprise, but it did little to advance his cause; as he tried to vanish westwards back into the desert, he was intercepted by Craterus, returning from the Merv oasis, who fiercely harried his Scyths in a cavalry charge. By now, Sogdians and Bactrians were serving in Alexander's army and Spitamenes seemed more of a bandit than a rebel-leader. He had little hope but to repeat his surprise raids behind the lines; at the first attempt he ran into Alexander's rear division and was routed completely despite his enlistment of 3,000 vagrant Scythians. Even these surviving desperadoes lost heart, and for the third time in two years Alexander's enemy was betrayed by associates. They cynically murdered their Persian leader and as autumn ended, Spitamenes's head was sent as proof to the Macedonian army.

Typically, Alexander was not yet satisfied. Three of Spitamenes's henchmen, all former minions of Bessus, were still at large in the area, while the eastern half of Sogdia had never submitted in the first place. Rebels had retreated there for safety, and so after a mere two months in their winter camp the army was set on an eastward trail, still discomforted by hunger as local supplies were long since dwindling. As they marched the snow lay thickly on the hillsides, and within three days a massive thunderstorm had driven them back under cover as thunderbolts flashed and hailstones bombarded their armour. Alexander took the lead and directed them to native huts where a fire could be kindled from the surrounding forest: he even gave up his royal chair by the fireside to a common soldier whom he saw shivering and exhausted. But 2,000 camp followers had been lost, and 'it was said that victims could be seen still frozen on to the tree trunks against which they had been leaning’.

Near modern Hissar, on the Koh-i-nor mountains, a final cluster of Sogdian rebels were reported to have found refuge with the local baronry. Their natural fortress seemed impregnable to watchers who guessed that 'its height was more than three miles, its circumference at least fifteen', and when Alexander asked the leaders to a parley and offered them, through one of Artabazus's sons, a safe pass in return for surrender, they only laughed and told him to go and find troops with wings. Alexander hated to be mocked, let alone to be told what he could not do. If his men could not fly, they could at least climb; when the envoys had left, heralds invited mountaineers to stand forward from the ranks.

Their rewards were in keeping with the danger. The first to scale the rock would receive twelve talents, twelve times the bonus paid to the allied troops for four years' Asian service; the rest would be paid according to their position in the race to the summit. The three hundred experienced climbers who volunteered were told to equip themselves with flaxen ropes and iron tent-pegs, and that same winter's night, by the pale light of the stars, they moved round to a rock-face far too forbidding to be guarded.

They climbed with the patience of hardened alpinists. Every yard or so, they hammered tent-pegs into the crevices and frozen snow-drifts, lassoed them and hauled themselves up on the end of their ropes. On the way to the top, thirty of them slipped to their death and buried themselves beyond recovery in the snow beneath, but as the first streaks of dawn showed through the sky, the remaining 270 attained the summit. It was no time for celebration: smoke curling up from the funnels of rock beneath them showed that the Sogdians were already stirring. They had to be quick if they were not to be outnumbered; they had arranged to signal with linen flags to Alexander, who had been keeping watch all night at the foot of the rock-face. Bluffing, he sent heralds to invite the native pickets to look up and see his flying soldiers; they turned round and seeing the climbers high above them they surrendered, believing them to be an army. Baronial families who left their fortress were spared for the future, but search though the troops might, there were no large caches of food to be found.

A second rock was hardly less spectacular. Some fifty miles south-east of Leninabad, where the road to Boldzhuan crosses the Vachshi river stands the crag called Koh-i-nor, a common name in the area which says nothing for its extreme height and inaccessibility: 'about two miles high and six miles round', it was protected by a deep ravine whose only bridge had been destroyed. It always took the challenge of a siege to bring the best out of Alexander's boldness. The troops were ordered to work in relays night and day until they had felled enough pine trees to span the abyss with a makeshift causeway. First, they climbed down the cliffs on ladders and drove stakes into the rock-faces at the ravine's narrowest point; then hurdles of willow-wood were laid on the network and surfaced with a thick layer of earth as a level road for the army and their weaponry. 'At first, the barbarians kept ridiculing the attempt as utterly hopeless', but like the people of Tyre, they soon began to see what a son of Zeus could do to the landscape. The bridge across the ravine was finished and arrows, perhaps from catapults, began to shoot into their lairs; their own shots in reply bounced idly off the Macedonian sheds and screens. Engineering had scared them, although their lair was still as inaccessible to troops, and it was only left to Oxyartes the baron, a prisoner from the first rock, to shout to their leader to surrender and save his skin: there was nothing, he called, which could not be captured by Alexander's army, something of a bluff as the rock was still impregnable although open now to shots from catapults. Sisimithres the leader agreed, and when Alexander brought 500 guards to inspect his fortress, he duly gave himself up. To please his captors, he also made mention of his larder, which was stored with corn, wine and dried meats, quite apart from the herds of livestock he stabled: there was enough, he boasted, to feed all Alexander's army for at least two years. He could have said nothing more opportune. After two hungry years the recurrent worry of stores for the camp had at last been resolved. There was no need to starve again, and Sisimithres, a baron who had married his own mother, perhaps because he was a Zoroastrian, was gratefully restored to his rock by a king who had reason enough for his mildness.