The Punjab had already been visited by westerners, not only by the bravest man in early Greek history, Scylax the sailor from Caria, but also, as the troops were soon to believe, by the Greek gods Heracles and Dionysus in the very distant past. Six thousand and forty-two years, so the Indians claimed, divided Dionysus's invasion from Alexander's; there was stress on their self-government ever since, a theme which Alexander picked up, and there was no mention of the Persian empire. As for Heracles, he had come a little later, but the Macedonians were to see cattle in India branded with the sign of a club which their hero always carried. These parallels with the two divine ancestors of the Macedonian kings cannot be dismissed in the search for Alexander and within months of his invasion, they are to come into sharp perspective against a background of Indian myth-One son of Zeus was keen to rival another: it was in the spring before the invasion that Alexander's first Persian mistress Barsine gave birth to a son, believed, perhaps wrongly, to be Alexander's own. Aptly, the baby was named Heracles, after the royal hero of the moment, even if Alexander never recognized him with full honours after his marriage to Roxane.

Amid its myth and fable, India was a conqueror's chance for undying glory. The fighting would be tough, exactly what Alexander liked. The opponents were kings in their own right, his favourite class of enemy and as the Punjab was split between their independent tribes, many of whom had more of a link with Iran than India, they could as usual be set against each other. The Hindu religion had long centred in the plains, but it had not penetrated the wild mountain kingdoms; Buddhism was almost unknown, and there was no threat of a holy war. If Alexander succeeded his name would never be forgotten and even in their cups, men could no longer boast that Philip's achievements were superior: he would have conquered what had eluded all native kings, and he would have opened a whole new world to the West; Achilles's feats, by comparison, were very parochial.

As summer camp was broken in Bactria, the army he led eastwards showed the changes of the past two years. In size, it had grown but slightly. No new Macedonian troops had been received for the past four years. Fourteen thousand of the last year's Greek reinforcements had been left to supervise the two Oxus provinces; the Thracian and the Paeonian cavalry were absent, and most of the Thracian and other barbarian infantry were serving in the garrisons of Parthia and Hamadan. Some 50,000 men remained for India, scarcely more than at Guagamela, though a very sizeable force by the standards of classical warfare. But in style, they were different men, for only some 35,000 were westerners from Europe. The Foot Companions had abandoned the sarissa as too unwieldy for the mountainous ground and they never used it with Alexander again; the Mounted Lancers had done the same and been merged with the Companion Cavalry, whose numbers had now fallen to some 1,800 Macedonians in the absence of reinforcements from their homeland. Archers, in which India was strongest, numbered at least 3,000; on foot, strength was maintained by three brigades of the newer mercenaries, mainly Greeks from Europe and Asia, but now led by Macedonian noblemen. Iranian horsemen from Bactria and Sogdia swelled the cavalry, though kept in separate units from the Greeks and Macedonians: there were even a thousand horse-archers recruited from Spitamenes's nomads. As a whole, the army was lighter, more independent and better equipped with missiles. Iranians had given it balance, and the fluid tactics of their nomad horsemen along the Oxus had not been wasted on Alexander's officers.

But it was the pattern of command which wore the newest look. The Foot Companions had been rearmed and were still brigaded in seven battalions whose officers, where changed, were brothers of the previous barons; the commands of Alexander's highland infantry were very much a family affair. But through plots and depositions, the cavalry had lost all links with Philotas, Parmenion, Cleitus and the past. The diminished squadrons of the Companions had been spread for the last eighteen months into six or more Hipparchies, only one of whose known commanders had previously made his name as a leader of horsemen. The others were close friends, like Ptolemy or Hephaistion, or men like Perdiccas or Leonnatus, better known as royal Bodyguards; the Royal Squadron of Companions, once led by Cleitus, had been renamed and taken over by Alexander himself. Each had their friends and families, though their fickle currents of influence can no longer be usefully traced: an officer-class which had once been scattered with friends of Parmenion was now distinguished by future friends of Perdiccas, who would fight to keep the empire together after Alexander's death. Clearest was the case of the Royal Shield Bearers, now renamed the Silver Shields because of their smart new silver armour. Initially, this picked unit of veteran infantry had been responsible to a son of Parmenion, but shortly before his family's plot this son had died and now the Silver Shields looked to new officers, among them Seleucus, the future king of Asia, and Nearchus, Alexander's friend from childhood, soon to be admiral of the Indian fleet; their supreme commander was Neoptolemus, related to the Epirote royal family and so to Alexander's mother Olympias. By the summer of 327, a new group of marshals had emerged, not only in the royal Shield Bearers. These Hipparchs and trusted squadron-leaders now made it possible to divide the army more freely between different attacks at any one time, for long a principle of Alexander's siegecraft but not of his pitched warfare. Spitamenes had shown that second rate underlings were not equal to the task. Parmenion and Philotas had also shown that the cavalry, especially, could not be entrusted to any one man.

In the provinces, a similar pattern was emerging, less urgent for being remote. In June Alexander returned at a modest pace to the Hindu Kush and crossed it comfortably in ten days, presumably by the same road as he had used before, rather than by the treacherous road through modem Bamyan, future sanctuary of Buddha. The snows had melted and after the rich finds of food in the Sogdian fortresses there were no fears about a second starvation as the troops marched over the high grazing-grounds, among skylarks, buff hillsides and the pungent smells of wormwood and wild roses. Down near Begram, the new Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus was found to be giving trouble: its commander was deposed for insubordination, the eighth appointment to have proved a failure in the fourteen satrapies conquered since the year of Gaugamela, and although the replacement was another Oriental, he was the last Iranian, except for Roxane's father, to be given a governorship by Alexander. The experiment with the native satraps of the past four years had been convenient but risky, and by disappearing eastwards Alexander was inviting rebellion from those who still remained behind him; with only two exceptions, he was to reap a harvest of troubles on his return, 'I wish to go to India', Alexander was made to say in a fictitious letter, composed a thousand years later in Sassanid Persia, 'but I fear to leave alive my Persian nobles. It seems prudent to me to destroy them to a man, that I may carry out my purpose with untroubled mind.' To this, Aristotle was made to reply: 'If you destroy the people of Fars, you will have overthrown one of the greatest pillars of excellence in the world. When the noble among them are gone, you will of necessity promote the base to their rank and position; be assured that there is no wickedness or calamity, no unrest or plague in the world which corrupts so much as the ascending of the base to the station of the noble.' Nobody ever spoke more clearly for the views of a Persian gentleman than the Aristotle of Persian legend. But on returning from India the real Alexander would have more cause to question his advice.