Aristobulus, more than a biographer

Aristobulus of Cassandreia has been listed among the many biographers of Alexander the Great (see: Eyewitness accounts of Alexander’s life), but he was far more than that. He did not hold any military function in Alexander’s army. Consequently, not being involved allowed him to approach the events as an onlooker. 

He must have been a tough guy since he survived the hardships of Alexander’s campaigns, including the march through the Gedrosian Desert. He seems to have lived to be over ninety years old. 

When he was 83, he began writing his book about the exploits of Alexander from the early days of his kinship to his death. He was blessed with an excellent memory, being able to recall so many events, novelties, and details! Apparently, his book was finished at about the same time as Ptolemy and Cleitarchus published theirs, 285-283 BC. Unfortunately, most of his work is lost. We only have a few scraps together with his observations recorded and used later by Arrian and Strabo. 

We may assume that Aristobulus’ accounts were exact and reliable. He had a wide field of interest and investigated the land, the animals, the many peoples he encountered, the public buildings, and other construction works. Alexander’s military campaign was not his priority. 

He is best known as the engineer/ architect in charge of restoring Cyrus’ Tomb in Pasargadae, a serious responsibility that clearly shows how much Alexander trusted his capabilities. 

Aristobulus, however, was mainly a geographer. He spent much time analyzing and describing the fauna and flora he encountered, the rainfall and the Indian monsoon (whose arrival he recorded in Taxila), the rivers, and the different climates. He drew an in-depth comparison between India and Egypt, including their environment. He analyzed the river courses, placing them in a broader context as trade routes throughout Central Asia and Punjab. 

The Oxus (see: Crossing the Oxus River), for instance, was the longest river, he said, that was navigable and used to transport goods from India to the Caspian Sea. Another river that caught his attention was the Polytimetus (see: Alexander's march to Maracanda) in Sogdiana, which did not flow into another river or a sea, but petered out in the desert. 

On the other hand, fragments of Aristobulus’ text on plants have been preserved. He tells us how rice was cultivated in beds in the backwaters and that the plants were 1.75 meters tall. He said that since each plant had several ears, the harvests were plentiful, adding that the grains had to be hulled. 

The geographer also spent ink on the importance of Alexander’s visit to Siwah. Unlike fellow biographers of the king, Aristobulus detailed Alexander’s route. Ptolemy stated that Alexander headed directly for Memphis. Aristobulus, instead, wrote that the king left from Paraetonium and followed the Mediterranean for about 290 kilometers before turning south to Siwah. On the way back, Alexander founded the city of Alexandria. This implies that he returned over the same route as the one used on his outward journey. Again, this is the version of events as copied by Arrian.

We know very little about Aristobulus’ fascinating personality, but he is one of the rare authors who draws an overwhelmingly positive picture of Alexander. He depicts him as a righteous king, concerned about justice and not making hasty decisions. Another of his remarkable declarations is that Alexander was not a heavy drinker but liked to spend time with his companions, toying with his drink. That is a far cry from the many statements or hearsay statements depicting Alexander as a heavy drinker and even that the wine led to his premature death in Babylon! 

Aristobulus rightfully declares that Alexander was under the protection of the gods. Nowadays, we would say that he was born under a lucky star. Why not?

We leave no man behind

The phrase and what it stands for hit me the other day when I followed the story of an elite group of British military trying to make it out alive across the Iraqi border into Syria. These men belonged to the Special Forces of the S.A.S. (Special Air Forces) on a rescue operation.

The concept of nemo resideo translated as “leave no one behind” seems to disappear in the dawn of time. However, it may have been revived during recent conflicts like the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No matter when or how it originated, the very core of these words led me to Alexander. It was something he could have initiated if it not already existed.

As I was pondering the matter, I remembered Alexander’s march across the Karakum Desert towards the Oxus River. Over a distance of roughly sixty kilometers, the troops trudged over endless treeless hills dotted with rare green vegetation. In this “pebble desert”, they fell short on water, and some men broke into the wine and oil provisions making their situation far worse. They all struggled to keep moving, and some were maddened by thirst and lost their sense of orientation. When Alexander finally reached the river banks, he ordered to light huge fires to bring those who lost their bearings back on track. Comrades ran back and forth to carry water to the stragglers. With his usual determination, Alexander encouraged his troops to keep going. He wasn’t going to leave anyone behind if he could help it.

But after all, this may not be entirely Alexander’s doing. The bulk of his troops had campaigned with his father, who created the first professional army ever. Most men had been fighting together for ten or twenty years already by the time Alexander took over the general command. They had shared the sores of long marches under all weather conditions. They had shared their food, their sorrows and miseries, as well as their dreams and their secrets. They had cared for each other’s wounds and got drunk together. Most importantly, they had learned to rely on each other. They knew the others as they knew themselves. They were a real band of brothers.

Campaigning with Alexander had tightened that brotherhood as he added ever more years of service to those which his seasoned soldiers had already computed. Marching on with their king, the men always had to be alert of the almost daily dangers. These dangers could take many forms. The men had to face hostile tribes, rivers in spate, scorching deserts, dilluvian rains, thunderstorms, ice and freezing cold, earthquakes, wild animals. The list is endless, so it seems. If the soldiers could not rely on each other, they could not survive. It was as simple as that. They would never leave any of their buddies behind if they could help it. Staying together and caring for their comrades was a matter of pure necessity.

Another event that came to my mind is the ambush set up by Spitamenes in Bactria where Alexander’s troops were caught in a guerrilla war. The confrontation ended in a pure massacre as only some 350 men out of the 2,300 sent on the mission survived. There was nothing Alexander, who was still recovering from his wounds and dysentery in Alexandria Eschate, could have done to rescue them. The king never sent his men on a suicide mission. Loosing so many good men hit him hard but all he could do was to avenge their death. In his anger, he ordered to sweep up the entire valley of the Polytimetus River. His instructions were clear, every house and every village should be taken down, all the crops burnt. The enraged Macedonians didn’t hesitate to execute their orders. Taking revenge was something they understood all too well.

In modern warfare, the US Army personnel are expected to live by what’s called the Soldiers’ Creed. Its last version from 2003 reads as follows:

I am an American Soldier.

I am a Warrior and a member of a team.

I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values.

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.

I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.

I am an expert and I am a professional.

I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America, in close combat.

I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

I am an American Soldier.

Times have really changed for if the concept would certainly have appealed to Alexander and his Macedonians, I’m sure they didn’t feel the need to express it in so many words or to spell it out in writing. They simply knew their duty and what was expected from them and they certainly would give their all under any circumstance.

Alexander caring for the wounded and the dead

Battlefields always revolve around numbers and tactical moves. The human aspect is generally left out, simply because it is an inevitable by-product of war. Modern warfare is far more clinical, and statistics of the number of dead and wounded are kept pretty accurately.

In antiquity, the situation was entirely different. A person’s life was of little value. Men died in battle, women died in childbirth, and if they managed to escape that fate, they could fall victim to raids from a neighboring town and finally die as slaves. Not the happiest prospect for any being, unless you belonged to the upper class of society. But still.

The Greeks considered that dying on the battlefield was an honorable death, but they were not ready to sacrifice their lives for that sole purpose.

When I watched Oliver Stone’s picture of the aftermath of the Battle of Gaugamela with hundreds and thousands of corpses spread over the battlefield, I remembered a similar shot of Atlanta in the movie Gone with the Wind. In both scenarios, I wondered about the smell of the decaying bodies of men and beasts, the puddles of blood and excrement, the buzzing of the flies, and the vultures uttering their guttural screams. There is nothing glorious left on a battlefield after the victory is claimed by one party.

Following Alexander on his major confrontations at the Granicus, at Issus, at Gaugamela, and on the Hydaspes, our sources from antiquity wind up producing the strangest figures when it comes to counting the dead. Numbers on either side have been distorted. They were either to make the losses on the enemy’s side much higher than they were or to reduce the casualties on Alexander’s side to a questionable minimum. It is impossible to verify any of the information that has reached us through Arrian, Plutarch, Diodorus, Curtius, or Justin, more so because it was penned down centuries after the facts.

As to the wounded, it seems they were not accounted for, or only in exceptional cases. Counting the dead on a battlefield did not equate to the ultimate number of casualties. Many of the wounded were bound to die afterward. 

Hygiene was a foreign word in antiquity, and if there was any basic knowledge, it was a far cry from our modern concept. We should remember, however, that Alexander had a great interest in medicine and learned from Aristotle everything he could. Healing illnesses with plants and specific concoctions was one aspect, but stitching the soldiers’ cuts back together and cleaning their wounds was another.

If we consider the many cases of trepanation that were successfully carried out since the Neolithic, we must admit that the knowledge available in antiquity is far beyond what we might think. Philip, Alexander’s father, lost an eye and survived the operation quite well. So did Antigonus Monophthalmus. Speaking of eyes, it is known that cataract surgeries were performed as early as 4,000 BC by the Egyptians. The list of medical wonders is probably endless, but the point I am trying to make is that the physicians in Alexander’s army were far more knowledgeable than we may believe. Cleanliness certainly was one of the main requirements. 

Early last century, for instance, it was essential to wash a bleeding wound with water and soap. This has been done for centuries and may well have been applied by the caretakers in antiquity. In my own youth, when a wound was infected, it was to be soaked repeatedly in hot water and soda crystals. The ancients may well have used something similar. The technique of cauterization was known long before the early trappers in the American West, and that knowledge was inherited from earlier generations. A hot knife, dagger, or even a sword would seal the wound and kill the bacteria at the same time.

It has been reported that Alexander visited the wounded after the battle. Going from one soldier to the next, he listened to their report, how they had been injured, acknowledged their courage, and showed them respect. I am sure that the king checked their wounds and how they were treated. The caretakers and physicians were watched closely by Alexander because he, himself, had considerable knowledge of healthcare and medicine. In the end, he gave his soldiers and the caretakers a huge boost in morale. There cannot have been a better medicine than that. In the end, this may well be the secret to justify the low rates of mortality among the Macedonian troops.

What about the wounded enemies, one might wonder? Well, I don’t think that the Macedonians were inclined to show much pity, if any, to their adversaries. They were not in for half measures, just as Alexander wasn’t. For them, the enemy had to be eliminated. I would doubt if any of the wounded were left behind with some breath in their lungs. 

When the enemy, however, asked to retrieve their dead to give them a proper burial, Alexander did not refuse. We’ll remember how he even sent the body of Darius III back to his mother to accomplish the funeral according to Persian customs. On an earlier occasion, at Issus, the king had also given the Queen Mother permission to bury the Persians from the battlefield. The recovery of wounded enemy soldiers is never mentioned.

The soldiers who died in Alexander’s service always received an appropriate burial with full honors. After the Battle of the Granicus, Alexander instructed Lysippos to create a bronze memorial for the 25 cavalrymen who had fallen on the battlefield. For several centuries, it stood in Dion, the sanctuary of Macedonia.

The list of lavish and expensive burials is a long one. I relied on Frank Holt’s account, as mentioned in his book “The Treasures of Alexander the Great”. For the soldiers as a group, there was a burial at Issus in 333 BC, Ecbatana in 330 BC, on the Polytimetus River in 329 BC, and Sangala in 326 BC. Personal and more elaborate funerals took place in honor of his generals/companions, Hector in Egypt in 331 BC, Nicanor in Alexandria Ariana in 330 BC, Philip and Erigyius in Sogdiana in 327 BC, Demaratus in 327 BC, and Coenus on the Hydaspes River in 326 BC. Also to be mentioned is the gymnosophist and sophist Calanus from Taxila, who immolated himself in Susa in 324 BC. Last but certainly not least was the expensive funeral pyre that Alexander had built for his dearest Hephaistion, who died in Ecbatana in 324 BC.

Clearly, nothing was too good for the dead.

[The picture of the battlefield is from Oliver Stone's movie Alexander]

Alexander's March to Maracanda (Central Asia 8)

[7 - In early autumn of 329 BC, Alexander marched to Maracanda in three days and nights to see Spitamenes vanish in thin air. He re-crossed the Oxus to winter in Bactra. Arrival of reinforcements from Macedonia.]

In early autumn 329 BC, as soon as he could manage health-wise, Alexander marched to Maracanda to find Spitamenes and avenge the recent cruel ambush of his envoys. Alexander was never in for half measures, and he proved it once again, covering a good 180 miles from Alexandria-Eschate to Maracanda in three days and nights, the fastest march of his life (an average of some 45 miles a day!). He must have had an iron constitution to travel at such high speed after suffering the discomforts of dysentery and his recent wounds. The loss of the 2,000 good men in Maracanda must have hit him hard.

Spitamenes meanwhile had attacked Maracanda a second time, but as soon as he was informed of Alexander’s approach, he quickly withdrew. Alexander set in pursuit, but his enemy’s lead was too great. In this process, Alexander passed the ghostly battlefield where his troops had lost their lives a few months earlier and arranged for a decent burial. In his anger, he ordered to sweep the entire valley of the Polytimetus River, modern Zeravshan still running past Samarkand. His instructions were clear, every house and every village should be taken down, all the crops burnt, and any person sympathizing with Spitamenes should be killed. I wonder how many questions the enraged Macedonians bothered to ask before killing…

These measures only put more oil on the fire with the Bactrians and the Sogdians. Most of their towns were now in ruins, the population wiped out, they had nothing to lose, and their only hopes lay with Spitamenes. Personally, I think it is about this time that the new Great King realized that warfare in this part of his empire was entirely different from his well-planned, well-drilled, and well-executed battlefields.

With the fast-approaching winter at his doorstep, Alexander left 3,000 men on guard in Bactria and retired to Bactra, where enough provisions had been stored to sustain the severe winter months. The good news must have been that the highly needed and long-expected reinforcements finally arrived from Macedonia, 22,000 fresh Greek mercenaries sent out by Antipater. A welcome boost to manpower and morale, no doubt.

I just can’t believe I have arrived in Samarkand myself, the Maracanda of the Greeks and the Afrasiab of antiquity! The very name rings like Baghdad, Babylon, or Persepolis, an unknown world as far as I’m concerned somewhere in the Orient. No wonder for Samarkand is one of the oldest cities in the world, although opinions differ widely when it comes to dating its origins. However, we are sure that the Persian Achaemenids ruled the local tribes from the 6th to the 4th century BC. With the arrival of Alexander the Great in 329 BC, Maracanda occupied a key position and became an important business center thanks to its impregnable citadel surrounded by a more than ten kilometers long city wall, which in later centuries even kept the Arabs out. But the arrival of Islam and the hordes of Genghis Khan could not be stopped. Golden times blessed the city when Tamerlane declared Samarkand the capital of his empire that reached from the Bosporus to the Indus. Today’s treasures of Samarkand are to be found in the mosques, madrassa’s and mausoleums Tamerlane left us, unique beauties that are luckily added to the World Heritage List of UNESCO. Samarkand is also closely linked to the Silk Road, situated on the crossroad of two main routes, one running from Persia in the west to China in the east, the other running south towards India. As I said before, Alexander must have followed these same roads since they ran, in fact, on top of the Royal Roads built by the Great Kings over the centuries to connect their many palaces and to quickly move their armies through this vast empire.

No trace of Alexander is to be found in today’s Samarkand. I’ll have to go to neighboring Afrasiab, constantly inhabited until the Mongols arrived here in 1220 and leveled the proud city upon explicit orders of Genghis Khan. Those who survived these terrors fled the premises and chose to settle at the edge of the foothill, and this is where today’s Samarkand is still shining. I’ll be visiting Afrasiab, of course. [See: Part 10, Afrasiab, ancient Samarkand]

I’m walking along the Zeravshan River, the old Polytimetus River, during my visit to a Natural Reserve in that area. I am told that this is a safe haven for foxes and lynxes, a certain number of birds, but all I see are some apparently unique deer, fenced-in like our deer parks. Not exactly what one would expect under the label of a Natural Reserve, but we are probably very spoiled with our western safari parks and the kind. The local guide is willing to take us to the banks of the Zeravshan River; nobody is really interested but me. Yes, of course, Alexander has been here rampaging through the thickets on his reprisal expedition after Spitamenes’ brutal murder of the Greek mercenaries around here. The path is wild and overgrown with lots of spiny plants and branches that scratch you wherever they can; not very inviting, I must say. How Alexander’s men cut their way through these dense thickets and low thorny branches makes you bow in respect because their bodies, arms, and legs must have been covered with scars. I guess these seasoned troopers were used to it or worse. I can’t take in enough of these wild-grown shrubs and grasses, as if Alexander could dash out of this wilderness anytime before me!

A year later, Alexander is back for another sweep-up along the Polytimetus and its tributaries to demonstrate his power and that of his army. Strangely enough, and in spite of his harsh actions, legends about Alexander still flourish in this part of the country where an Alexander River (Iskander Darya) flows out of an Alexander Lake (Iskander Kül). It is believed that he built a golden dam to create the lake and that gold particles can still be panned further downstream. Another story tells how Alexander and his trusted horse Bucephalus rise from the lake with every full moon to cross the sky (Michael Wood and Frank Holt).

My path stops abruptly at the bank of the Zeravshan, at least five feet above the riverbed. All I see is a charcoal-black muddy surface plowed by deer and cattle that waded through on their way to the water near the opposite side – a shimmering rivulet, nothing more. But then, this time of the year (fall), the rivers around here are at their lowest; they swell in spring after the snow from the surrounding mountains starts melting. The Zeravshan rises at the fringes of the Pamir Mountains I crossed on my way from Shahr-i-Sabz and may have emptied into the Oxus in antiquity, although today, it simply peters out in the desert before reaching that far. Alexander must have seen this river also fully swollen as he repeatedly traveled between Maracanda and Bactra (having to cross the Oxus River each time again also). We have no idea of the hardships or distances out here; Samarkand-Balkh, for instance, is roughly 200 miles, almost as far as Los Angeles - Las Vegas or London - Land’s End).

Click here to read Episode 9 of Central Asia.