The Banquet at Maracanda.
CHAPTER XXVII
NEWS FROM THE EAST
The six years that followed were years of quiet, uneventful happiness for Charidemus and his wife. The governorship of Pergamos was not exactly a sinecure, but it was not laborious. The garrison duty was of the slightest. The place was practically safe from attack, even if there had been any enemies to attack it. The governor’s chief duty was the charge of a depôt, for which the town had been found a convenient situation. New troops were trained at it; troops who were invalided, or who had passed their time, were sent there to receive their formal discharge. These veterans had much to tell of what the army was doing. Of course plenty of fable was mixed with the fact, the more so as much of the news came at second or third hand and from very remote regions indeed. A more regular and reliable source of information were the letters which Charondas, who had been attached to headquarters, continued to send to his friend. The two had contrived a system of cypher, and so the Theban was able to express himself with a freedom which he would not otherwise have been able to use. Some extracts from these letters I shall give:—
“ ... So Bessus the murderer has met with his deserts. We crossed the Oxus, the most rapid and difficult river that we have yet come to. We got over on skins, and lost, I am afraid, a good many men and horses. I myself was carried down full half a mile before I could get to land, and thought more than once that it was all over with me. If Bessus had tried to stop us there must have been disaster; but we heard afterwards that he had been deserted by his men. Very soon after we had crossed the river he was taken. I have no pity for the villain; but I could wish that the king had not punished him as he did. He had his nostrils and ears cut off. You remember how Alexander was moved when he saw those poor mutilated wretches at Persepolis, what horror he expressed. And now he does the same things himself! But truly he grows more and more barbarian in his ways. Listen again to this. We came a few days since on our march to a little town that seemed somewhat differently built from the others in this country. The people came out to greet us. Their dress was partly Greek, partly foreign; their tongue Greek but mixed with barbarisms, yet not so much but that we readily understood them. Nothing could be more liberal than their offers; they were willing to give us all they had. The king inquired who they were. They were descended, he found—indeed they told the story themselves without any hesitation—from the families of the priests of Apollo at Branchidæ. These priests had told the secret of where their treasures were kept to King Xerxes after his return from Greece, and he to reward them, and also we may suppose, to save them from the vengeance of their countrymen, had planted them in this remote spot, where they had preserved their customs and language as well as they could. Now who could have imagined that the king should do what he did? He must avenge forsooth the honour of Apollo on these remote descendants of the men who caused his shrine to be robbed! He drove the poor creatures back into their town, drew a cordon of soldiers round it, and then sent in a company with orders to massacre every man, woman, and child in it. He gave me the command of these executioners. I refused it. ‘It is against my vows, my lord,’ I said. I thought that he would have struck me down where I stood. But he held his hand. He is always tender with me, for reasons that he has; and since he has been as friendly as ever. But what a monstrous deed! Again I say, the barbarian rather than the Greek.
“Another awful deed! O my friend, I often wish that I were with you in your peaceful retirement. In war the king is as magnificent as ever, but at home he becomes daily less and less master of himself. Truly he is then as formidable to his friends, as he is at other times to his enemies. What I write now I saw and heard with my own eyes. At Maracanda[75] there was a great banquet—I dread these banquets a hundred-fold more than I dread a battle—to which I was invited with some hundred other officers. It was in honour of Cleitus, who had been appointed that day to the government of Bactria. When the cup had gone round pretty often, some of those wretched creatures who make it their business to flatter the king—it pains me to see how he swallows the flatteries of the very grossest with greediness—began to magnify his achievements. He was greater than Dionysus, greater than Hercules; no mortal could have done such things; it was only to be hoped that the gods would not take him till his work was done. If I was sickened to hear such talk, what think you I felt when Alexander himself began to talk in the same strain. Nothing would satisfy him but that he must run down his own father Philip. ‘It was I,’ he said, ‘who really won the victory of Chæronea, though Philip would never own it. And, after all, what petty things that and all his victories are compared to what I have done!’ On this I heard Cleitus whisper to his neighbour some lines from Euripides:
“‘When armies build their trophies o’er the foe,