The Nature of Alexander by Mary Renault

Author:Mary Renault [Renault, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480432949
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2013-08-15T01:16:00+00:00

Curtius says they had been branded too. Both sources agree that Alexander wept for them.

He offered to give them transport home and provide for their remaining lives. Conferring, they decided that to return to their cities as repulsive freaks would be unendurable. By now they would be forgotten there. (Ancient Greece was not notable for compassion; Alexander’s was felt as rather eccentric.) Some had slave wives who had borne them children. They asked for a grant of land where they could live together. He allowed that they were right; gave them money, seed grain and livestock, good clothes for themselves and for their women; and appointed them their sad village.

Next day he marched upon Persepolis. His soldiers got what they had been straining at the leash for ever since Gaugemela—a wealthy city to sack.

It was the ceremonial capital of the empire; the opulent counterpart of little Aegae in Macedon. The King and his chief nobles had seats there; a rich merchant class must have supplied them. Curtius says that many citizens were casually killed because the loot-sated troops could not be bothered with ransoms. It is difficult today, yet some attempt should be made, to imagine the orgiastic pleasure of a sack to men of the ancient world who after hardship and danger felt it to be their due; where power, aggression, greed, lust, rivalry, the instincts of the hunter and the gambler, could be roused and fed in one vertiginous stream of action. No one, perhaps, but Alexander could have held them back at Babylon and Susa. Now he gave them a day at it. Even so he issued orders that the women should not be stripped of the jewels they wore.

The treasurer was promoted to governor. He had saved the palace strongrooms intact. Their contents amounted to three times as much as had been taken at Susa.

Darius wintered at Ecbatana, watched by Alexander’s intelligence for signs of life. There being none, Alexander wintered in Persepolis. It must have been at this time that he made his long-awaited pilgrimage to the tomb of Cyrus the Great at neighbouring Pasargadae, his ancient capital in what had once been Elam; a small Persian Macedon from which he too had conquered an empire. Here, as the sequel shows, Alexander paid him honour. If he had earned it, so had Xenophon; but the rewards of history are capricious. Between them, Persian and Athenian, they had impressed on an eager mind, when no one else was doing it, that all men are God’s children, and that anywhere among them may be found the excellent ones whom, said Alexander, he makes more his own than the rest.

He returned to the palace of Persepolis, with its tall lotus-topped columns and endless reliefs of tribute bearers bringing offerings to its builder, Darius the Great. We hear of no such regal ceremonies as had marked his stay at Babylon or Susa; perhaps only because winter had made access difficult. When spring came, and it was time to march, he burned the palace down.

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