The autumn and winter were spent by Alexander in reducing Drangiana, Gedrosia, Arachosia, and the Paropamisadæ; the modern Seiestan, Afghanistan, and the Western part of Kabul, lying between Ghazna on the north, Kandahar or Kelat on the south, and Furrah in the west. He experienced no combined resistance, but his troops suffered severely from cold and privation.[478] Near the southern termination of one of the passes of the Hindoo-Koosh (apparently north-east of the town of Kabul) he founded a new city, called Alexandria ad Caucasum, where he planted 7000 old soldiers, Macedonians, and others as colonists.[479] Towards the close of Winter he crossed over the mighty range of the Hindoo-Koosh; a march of fifteen days through regions of snow, and fraught with hardship to his army. On reaching the north side of these mountains, he found himself in Baktria.
The Baktrian leader Bessus, who had assumed the title of king, could muster no more than a small force, with which he laid waste the country, and then retired across the river Oxus into Sogdiana, destroying all the boats. Alexander overran Baktria with scarce any resistance; the chief places, Baktra (Balkh) and Aornos surrendering to him on the first demonstration of attack. Having named Artabazus satrap of Baktria, and placed Archelaus with a garrison in Aornos,[480] he marched northward towards the river Oxus, the boundary between Baktria and Sogdiana. It was a march of extreme hardship; reaching for two or three days across a sandy desert destitute of water, and under very hot weather, The Oxus, six furlongs in breadth, deep, and rapid, was the most formidable river that the Macedonians had yet seen.[481] Alexander transported his army across it on the tent-skins inflated and stuffed with straw. It seems surprising that Bessus did not avail himself of this favorable opportunity for resisting a passage in itself so difficult; he had however been abandoned by his Baktrian cavalry at the moment when he quitted their territory. Some of his companions, Spitamenes and others, terrified at the news that Alexander had crossed the Oxus, were anxious to make their own peace by betraying their leader.[482] They sent a proposition to this effect; upon which Ptolemy with a light division was sent forward by Alexander, and was enabled, by extreme celerity of movements, to surprise and seize Bessus in a village. Alexander ordered that he should be held in chains, naked and with a collar round his neck, at the side of the road along which the army were marching. On reaching the spot, Alexander stopped his chariot, and sternly demanded from Bessus, on what pretence he had first arrested, and afterwards slain, his king and benefactor Darius. Bessus replied, that he had not done this single-handed; others were concerned in it along with him, to procure for themselves lenient treatment from Alexander. The king said no more, but ordered Bessus to be scourged, and then sent back as prisoner to Baktra[483]—where we shall again hear of him.
In his onward march, Alexander approached a small town, inhabited by the Branchidæ; descendants of those Branchidæ near Miletus on the coast of Ionia, who had administered the great temple and oracle of Apollo on Cape Poseidion, and who had yielded up the treasures of that temple to the Persian king Xerxes, 150 years before. This surrender had brought upon them so much odium, that when the dominion of Xerxes was overthrown on the coast, they retired with him into the interior of Asia. He assigned to them lands in the distant region of Sogdiana, where their descendants had ever since remained; bilingual and partially dis-hellenized, yet still attached to their traditions and origin. Delighted to find themselves once more in commerce with Greeks, they poured forth to meet and welcome the army, tendering all that they possessed. Alexander, when he heard who they were and what was their parentage, desired the Milesians in his army to determine how they should be treated. But as these Milesians were neither decided nor unanimous, Alexander announced that he would determine for himself. Having first occupied the city in person with a select detachment, he posted his army all round the walls, and then gave orders not only to plunder it, but to massacre the entire population—men, women, and children. They were slain without arms or attempt at resistance, resorting to nothing but prayers and suppliant manifestations. Alexander next commanded the walls to be levelled, and the sacred groves cut down, so that no habitable site might remain, nor any thing except solitude and sterility.[484] Such was the revenge taken upon these unhappy victims for the deeds of their ancestors in the fourth or fifth generation before. Alexander doubtless considered himself to be executing the wrath of Apollo against an accursed race who had robbed the temple of the god.[485] The Macedonian expedition had been proclaimed to be undertaken originally for the purpose of revenging upon the contemporary Persians the ancient wrongs done to Greece by Xerxes; so that Alexander would follow out the same sentiment in revenging upon the contemporary Branchidæ the acts of their ancestors—yet more guilty than Xerxes, in his belief. The massacre of this unfortunate population was in fact an example of human sacrifice on the largest scale, offered to the gods by the religious impulses of Alexander, and worthy to be compared to that of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, when he sacrificed 3000 Grecian prisoners on the field of Himera, where his grandfather Hamilkar had been slain seventy years before.[486]
Alexander then continued his onward progress, first to Marakanda (Samarcand), the chief town of Sogdiana—next, to the river Jaxartes, which he and his companions, in their imperfect geographical notions, believed to be the Tanais, the boundary between Asia, and Europe.[487] In his march, he left garrisons in various towns,[488] but experienced no resistance, though detached bodies of the natives hovered on his flanks. Some of these bodies, having cut off a few of his foragers, took refuge afterwards on a steep and rugged mountain, conceived to be unassailable. Thither however Alexander pursued them, at the head of his lightest and most active troops. Though at first repulsed, he succeeded in scaling and capturing the place. Of its defenders, thirty thousand in number, three fourths were either put to the sword, or perished in jumping down the precipices. Several of his soldiers were wounded with arrows, and he himself received a shot from one of them through his leg.[489] But here, as elsewhere, we perceive that nearly all the Orientals whom Alexander subdued were men little suited for close combat hand to hand,—fighting only with missiles.
Here, on the river Jaxartes, Alexander projected the foundation of a new city to bear his name; intended partly as a protection against incursions from the Scythian Nomads on the other side of the river, partly as a facility for himself to cross over and subdue them, which he intended to do as soon as he could find opportunity.[490] He was however called off for the time by the news of a wide-spread revolt among the newly-conquered inhabitants both of Sogdiana and Baktria. He suppressed the revolt with his habitual vigor and celerity, distributing his troops so as to capture five townships in two days, and Kyropolis or Kyra, the largest of the neighboring Sogdian towns (founded by the Persian Cyrus), immediately afterwards. He put all the defenders and inhabitants to the sword. Returning then to the Jaxartes, he completed in twenty days the fortifications of his new town of Alexandria (perhaps at or near Khodjend), with suitable sacrifices and festivities to the gods. He planted in it some Macedonian veterans and Grecian mercenaries, together with volunteer settlers from the natives around.[491] An army of Scythian Nomads, showing themselves on the other side of the river, piqued his vanity to cross over and attack them. Carrying over a division of his army on inflated skins, he defeated them with little difficulty, pursuing them briskly into the desert. But the weather was intensely hot, and the army suffered much from thirst; while the little water to be found was so bad, that it brought upon Alexander a diarrhœa which endangered his life.[492] This chase, of a few miles on the right bank of the Jaxartes (seemingly in the present Khanat of Kokand), marked the utmost limit of Alexander’s progress northward.
Shortly afterwards, a Macedonian detachment, unskilfully conducted, was destroyed in Sogdiana by Spitamenes and the Scythians: a rare misfortune, which Alexander avenged by overrunning the region[493] near the river Polytimêtus (the Kohik), and putting to the sword the inhabitants of all the towns which he took. He then recrossed the Oxus, to rest during the extreme season of winter at Zariaspa in Baktria, from whence his communications with the West and with Macedonia were more easy, and where he received various reinforcements of Greek troops.[494] Bessus, who had been here retained as a prisoner, was now brought forward amidst a public assembly; wherein Alexander, having first reproached him for his treason to Darius, caused his nose and ears to be cut off—and sent him in this condition to Ekbatana, to be finally slain by the Medes and Persians.[495] Mutilation was a practice altogether Oriental and non-Hellenic: even Arrian, admiring and indulgent as he is towards his hero, censures this savage order, as one among many proofs how much Alexander had taken on Oriental dispositions. We may remark that his extreme wrath on this occasion was founded partly on disappointment that Bessus had frustrated his toilsome efforts for taking Darius alive—partly on the fact that the satrap had committed treason against the king’s person, which it was the policy as well as the feeling of Alexander to surround with a circle of Deity.[496] For as to traitors against Persia, as a cause and country, Alexander had never discouraged, and had sometimes signally recompensed them. Mithrines, the governor of Sardis, who opened to him the gates of that almost impregnable fortress immediately after the battle of the Granikus—the traitor who perhaps, next to Darius himself, had done most harm to the Persian cause—obtained from him high favor and promotion.[497]
The rude but spirited tribes of Baktria and Sogdiana were as yet but imperfectly subdued, seconded as their resistance was by wide spaces of sandy desert, by the neighborhood of the Scythian Nomads, and by the presence of Spitamenes as a leader. Alexander, distributing his army into five divisions, traversed the country and put down all resistance, while he also took measures for establishing several military posts, or new towns in convenient places.[498] After some time the whole army was reunited at the chief place of Sogdiana—Marakanda—where some halt and repose was given.[499]
During this halt at Marakanda (Samarcand) the memorable banquet occurred wherein Alexander murdered Kleitus. It has been already related that Kleitus had saved his life at the battle of the Granikus, by cutting off the sword arm of the Persian Spithridates when already uplifted to strike him from behind. Since the death of Philotas, the important function of general of the Companion-cavalry had been divided between Hephæstion and Kleitus. Moreover, the family of Kleitus had been attached to Philip, by ties so ancient, that his sister, Lanikê, had been selected as the nurse of Alexander himself when a child. Two of her sons had already perished in the Asiatic battles. If, therefore, there were any man who stood high in the service, or was privileged to speak his mind freely to Alexander, it was Kleitus.
In this banquet at Marakanda, when wine, according to the Macedonian habit, had been abundantly drunk, and when Alexander, Kleitus, and most of the other guests were already nearly intoxicated, enthusiasts or flatterers heaped immoderate eulogies upon the king’s past achievements.[500] They exalted him above all the most venerated legendary heroes; they proclaimed that his superhuman deeds proved his divine paternity, and that he had earned an apotheosis like Herakles, which nothing but envy could withhold from him during his life. Alexander himself joined in these boasts, and even took credit for the later victories of the reign of his father, whose abilities and glory he depreciated. To the old Macedonian officers, such an insult cast on the memory of Philip was deeply offensive. But among them all, none had been more indignant than Kleitus, with the growing insolence of Alexander—his assumed filiation from Zeus Ammon, which put aside Philip as unworthy—his preference for Persian attendants, who granted or refused admittance to his person—his extending to Macedonian soldiers the contemptuous treatment habitually endured by Asiatics, and even allowing them to be scourged by Persian hands and Persian rods.[501] The pride of a Macedonian general in the stupendous successes of the last five years, was effaced by his mortification when he saw that they tended only to merge his countrymen amidst a crowd of servile Asiatics, and to inflame the prince with high-flown aspirations transmitted from Xerxes or Ochus. But whatever might be the internal thoughts of Macedonian officers, they held their peace before Alexander, whose formidable character and exorbitant self-estimation would tolerate no criticism.
At the banquet of Marakanda, this long suppressed repugnance found an issue, accidental indeed and unpremeditated, but for that very reason all the more violent and unmeasured. The wine, which made Alexander more boastful and his flatterers fulsome to excess, overpowered altogether the reserve of Kleitus. He rebuked the impiety of those who degraded the ancient heroes in order to make a pedestal for Alexander. He protested against the injustice of disparaging the exalted and legitimate fame of Philip; whose achievements he loudly extolled, pronouncing them to be equal, and even superior to those of his son. For the exploits of Alexander, splendid as they were, had been accomplished, not by himself alone, but by that unconquerable Macedonian force which he had found ready made to his hands;[502] whereas those of Philip had been his own—since he had found Macedonia prostrate and disorganized, and had had to create for himself both soldiers, and a military system. The great instruments of Alexander’s victories had been Philip’s old soldiers, whom he now despised—and among them Parmenio, whom he had put to death.