At length wrath and intoxication together drove him into uncontrollable fury. He started from his couch, and felt for his dagger to spring at Clitus; but the dagger had been put out of reach by one of his attendants. In a loud voice and with the Macedonian word of command, he summoned the bodyguards and ordered the trumpeter to sound an alarm. But no one obeyed so grave an order, given in his condition of drunkenness. His principal officers, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, and others, clung round him, held his arms and body, and besought him to abstain from violence; others at the same time tried to silence Clitus and hurry him out of the hall, which had now become a scene of tumult and consternation. But Clitus was not in a humour to confess himself in the wrong by retiring; while Alexander, furious at the opposition now, for the first time, offered to his will, exclaimed that his officers held him in chains as Bessus had held Darius, and left him nothing but the name of a king. Though anxious to restrain his movements, they doubtless did not dare to employ much physical force; so that his great personal strength, and continued efforts, presently set him free. He then snatched a pike from one of the soldiers, rushed upon Clitus, and thrust him through on the spot, exclaiming, “Go now to Philip and Parmenion.”
REMORSE OF ALEXANDER
No sooner was the deed perpetrated than the feelings of Alexander underwent an entire revolution. The spectacle of Clitus, a bleeding corpse on the floor—the marks of stupefaction and horror evident in all the spectators, and the reaction from a furious impulse instantaneously satiated—plunged him at once into the opposite extreme of remorse and self-condemnation. Hastening out of the hall, and retiring to bed, he passed three days in an agony of distress, without food or drink. He burst into tears and multiplied exclamations on his own mad act; he dwelt upon the names of Clitus and Lanice with the debt of gratitude which he owed to each, and denounced himself as unworthy to live after having requited such services with a foul murder. His friends at length prevailed on him to take food, and return to activity. All joined in trying to restore his self-satisfaction. The Macedonian army passed a public vote that Clitus had been justly slain, and that his body should remain unburied; which afforded opportunity to Alexander to reverse the vote, and to direct that it should be buried by his own order. The prophets comforted him by the assurance that his murderous impulse had arisen, not from his own natural mind, but from a maddening perversion intentionally brought on by the god Dionysus, to avenge the omission of a sacrifice due to him on the day of the banquet, but withheld. Lastly, the Greek sophist or philosopher, Anaxarchus of Abdera, revived Alexander’s spirits by well-timed flattery, treating his sensibility as nothing better than generous weakness; reminding him that in his exalted position of conqueror and Great King, he was entitled to prescribe what was right and just, instead of submitting himself to laws dictated from without. Callisthenes the philosopher was also summoned, along with Anaxarchus, to the king’s presence, for the same purpose of offering consolatory reflections. But he is said to have adopted a tone of discourse altogether different, and to have given offence rather than satisfaction to Alexander.
To such remedial influences, and probably still more to the absolute necessity for action, Alexander’s remorse at length yielded. Like the other emotions of his fiery soul, it was violent and overpowering while it lasted. But it cannot be shown to have left any durable trace on his character, nor any effects justifying the unbounded admiration of Arrian; who has little but blame to bestow on the murdered Clitus, while he expresses the strongest sympathy for the mental suffering of the murderer.
After ten days, Alexander again put his army in motion, to complete the subjugation of Sogdiana. He found no enemy capable of meeting him in pitched battle; yet Spitamenes, with the Sogdians and some Scythian allies, raised much hostility of detail, which it cost another year to put down. Alexander underwent the greatest fatigue and hardships in his marches through the mountainous parts of this wide, rugged, and poorly supplied country, with rocky positions, strong by nature, which his enemies sought to defend. One of these fastnesses, held by a native chief named Sisymithres, seemed almost unattackable, and was indeed taken rather by intimidation than by actual force. The Scythians, after a partial success over a small Macedonian detachment, were at length so thoroughly beaten and overawed, that they slew Spitamenes, and sent his head to the conqueror as a propitiatory offering.
Greek Urn
After a short rest at Nautaca during the extreme winter, Alexander resumed operations, by attacking a strong post called the Sogdian Rock, whither a large number of fugitives had assembled, with an ample supply of provision. It was a precipice supposed to be inexpugnable; and would seemingly have proved so, in spite of the energy and abilities of Alexander, had not the occupants altogether neglected their guard, and yielded at the mere sight of a handful of Macedonians who had scrambled up the precipice. Among the captives taken by Alexander on this rock, were the wife and family of the Bactrian chief Oxyartes; one of whose daughters, named Roxane, so captivated Alexander by her beauty that he resolved to make her his wife. He then passed out of Sogdiana into the neighbouring territory Parætacene, where there was another inexpugnable site called the Rock of Chorienes, which he was also fortunate enough to reduce.
From hence Alexander went to Bactra. Sending Craterus with a division to put the last hand to the reduction of Parætacene, he himself remained at Bactra, preparing for his expedition across the Hindu Kush to the conquest of India. As a security for tranquillity of Bactria and Sogdiana during his absence, he levied thirty thousand young soldiers from those countries to accompany him.
It was at Bactra that Alexander celebrated his marriage with the captive Roxane, in the spring of 327 B.C. Amidst the repose and festivities connected with that event, the oriental temper which he was acquiring displayed itself more forcibly than ever. He could no longer be satisfied without obtaining prostration, or worship, from Greeks and Macedonians as well as from Persians; a public and unanimous recognition of his divine origin and superhuman dignity. Some Greeks and Macedonians had already rendered to him this homage. Nevertheless to the greater number, in spite of their extreme deference and admiration for him, it was repugnant and degrading. Even the imperious Alexander shrank from issuing public and formal orders on such a subject; but a manœuvre was concerted, with his privity, by the Persians and certain compliant Greek sophists or philosophers, for the purpose of carrying the point by surprise.