Christian Cameron - God of War - The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

It was true.

The sheer number of people in the streets and the fields transformed my idea of conquest. It occurred to me – for the first time – that conquest has an element of social contract to it. It was obvious to anyone there that the Babylonians outnumbered us fifty to one. Our army vanished into the city.

Who was conquering whom?

The city itself was like a feverish dream – a riot of plants and bright colours. Every house had great urns of trees and roof gardens, streets had shade trees and every available surface was plastered and painted garishly, or fired and glazed. Expensive houses were built of fired brick with the glazes fired in, amazing patterns that baffled the eye, or towering figures of their gods that filled a wall in shiny perfection.

And then we entered the walls – by the main gates; they were twice the height of the walls of Athens, with great gates of cypress and bronze that shone in the omnipresent sun, and the waves of cheering pounded at my head – on and on.

Alexander met the priests outside the city, and insisted that they walk with him in procession.

The men were tall, well fed and prosperous, tending a little to fat, with broad shoulders and tawny skin. The women were shorter than Greek women, and showed a great deal more skin, and wore gold ornaments in sufficient profusion to pay for the army for many days, and there were tens of thousands of bejewelled women.

Alexander rode with the priests through the heart of the city to the ruins of the temple of Bel, where he mounted a rostrum that had been provided by the Angeloi. They were very much in evidence in Babylon. They had prepared the way.

Alexander mounted the steps of the platform.

He took off his helmet.

He threw his arms wide, a sudden, sweeping movement that made his armour glitter in the sun, and the crowd roared like a living thing – a great beast with a million heads.

The army kept marching. The Prodromoi, by this time, had their orders, and the army wasn’t going to be camped in the midst of the city. But the Aegema stayed by the king.

He waited until the cheering died away. That took a long time.

‘I have come,’ he said, in a beautifully controlled voice, ‘to free Babylon from the Medes. And to restore your gods.’

At his side, Strako stood with the high priest of Bel, who spoke – loud, clear and high – to the crowd in Sumerian. They didn’t even let him finish, but roared and roared – the roars became chants, and I was deafened. My horse became skittish, and all around me the Hetaeroi had a hard time keeping their mounts under control.

They began an odd, keening chant. I think it was the name of Bel, sung in a high, nasal voice by a million throats, and it sounded – terrifying.

But it affected Alexander like a drug, and he seemed to grow in stature. Again he lifted his arms, and again they roared their approval.

Naphtha and incense. And shit.

That was Babylon.

The next day – we stayed in the royal palace, which effortlessly accommodated a thousand hypaspists and as many Hetaeroi and grooms – Alexander met the hierophants of every temple in the city. He confirmed every ancient privilege and restored the rights of the temples that had been taken away by Persia.

Babylon was utterly ours. While I’d lingered in fever, I now understood, Eumenes the Cardian, Alexander’s military secretary, had outmanoeuvred Callisthenes for control of the Military Journal, and Thaïs supported him. Harpalus was involved somehow, as well, and Babylon was their shared triumph. They had the priests from the first – Eumenes won over the nobles, and Harpalus brought the commons. I still find it interesting that the treasurer, the secretary and the hetaera took a city of a million men without a fight. I thought about things that Aristotle had discussed with us, things I’d relearned on the couches of Athenian symposia. About the contracts between governed and governing. About what victory and defeat are, in war.

But those were my private thoughts.

The next day, Alexander went to visit the temples. They were incredible – as old as those at Memphis, or older, and if Aegypt sent chills down my spine, Babylon was just scary. That day, at the Temple of Bel, Alexander was shown the scribal entry for the Battle of Arabela. It pleased him immensely, because, as the priest noted, until that date, Darius had been called ‘King of all the Earth’. But in that entry, Alexander was called ‘King of all the Earth’. And henceforth would be known as such, in Babylon.

Marsyas stood with me and with Black Cleitus. We were all staggered, by everything, but Marsyas’s intense curiosity never flagged. He walked over to the priests. The youngest was actually writing with a bronze stylus in clay. The hierophant stood with the king.

‘How far back does this record go?’ Marsyas asked, pointing at the rows of tablets that literally ran off into the dark, shelf after shelf running off to the north in the foundations of the great temple.

‘Ah!’ the hierophant said, his pleasure at the question evident. He was a great man – spoke Greek and Persian, Median, Aegyptian and Hebrew. Later – as you’ll hear – when I was laid low by fever, he helped tend me, and asked Thaïs thousands of questions about Athens and Greece and Aegypt.

At any rate, he led us off into the cavernous rooms under the temple – room after room, and in every room he lifted his torch so that we could see the neat baskets of clay tablets that lined the walls. After ten rooms, the baskets were so old that the tablets had deformed them. In twenty rooms, we saw new baskets.

I forget how many rooms there were, but by torchlight, in that endless undercroft, itself oppressive and musty, like some man-built intellectual Tartarus for burying old truths – my fever was returning, and the place terrified me, and still haunts my nightmares – eventually, the high priest raised his torch.

‘The First Room,’ he said to Alexander. The king nodded. This sort of thing engrossed him.

The hierophant walked along the shelves, looking carefully into the baskets at the left end of the top shelf, until he found what he wanted, and pointed to the last basket.

‘First Basket,’ he said. His own awe was evident.

‘But how old is it?’ Marsyas persisted. This had all taken what seemed like hours.

Reverently, two junior priests took down the First Basket and extracted the tablets, which were laid carefully on a portable table that was painted with images of their gods.

To the best of my feverish ability, I stared at the three tablets. I was alive enough to note that the style of the squiggles was identical to those on the tablet the youngest priest was inscribing out in the main temple.

‘This is the First Tablet of Record,’ the hierophant said, and he kissed it. ‘It records the events of the year, as it should – the rainfall, and the maintenance of the irrigation channels.’

‘How old is it?’ Marsyas asked. ‘Is it five hundred years old?’

The hierophant leaned down. He traced some marks with his fingers.

‘This was written down three thousand, four hundred and nine years ago, by the priests of this temple.’

‘By Zeus, that is before Troy!’ Alexander said.

Marsyas drew a deep breath. ‘That is before Troy was founded .’

The hierophant shrugged. ‘It is not our oldest record. Merely our oldest record in writing that is part of the Yearly Almanac. We have records of weather and river floods at least a thousand years before that.’

Babylon had a way of making all of us feel small.

Except Alexander, I think. And I think that seeing his name as King of all the Earth in that temple did . . . something.