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Each of them, like the noble bridegrooms, now received a royal dowry in return for enrolling their names and having their Asian mistresses officially recognized as wives.
There were several consequences to such an order. The women would benefit most, for once they were full wives, their children would have to be recognized and their husbands could not so easily desert them or replace them with a woman of higher status. But Alexander did not spend an enormous sum in dowries simply to make his soldiers' children legitimate; it would have suited him more, as he soon showed, if the next generation were bastard children, with nobody to look to except their king. What mattered was that these were Asian women, just as his Companions' brides were Iranians: the weddings were an attempt to include his subjects in an empire whose satrapal offices had mostly been taken from them. Asians had been taken on as mistresses because there were no alternatives, but he was raising them to a status which Greek populations abroad had always resisted strenuously. In Greek cities in a foreign land, the children of barbarian mothers had not, in the only known cases, been recognized as citizens: after Alexander, in the military colonics where families held land from the king in return for service, Greeks and Macedonians can be shown to have married their sisters and granddaughters rather than share their property with a native wife. Only in the Asian countryside, where there was no alternative and less at stake, were mixed marriages common in the next generations of Alexander's successors. The point at issue was more one of status than racial prejudice, but it was none the less a strong one; Alexander knew he had to offer the bribe of the dowry in order to legitimize mixed marriages on a scale that was never attempted again. Among the officers, all were pleased at the honour, though a few were resentful that their brides were to be oriental. None of them dared to refuse.
It was a splendid moment of chivalry, but behind it lurked an awkwardness that might still break out to spoil it all. Ever since the previous summer, Alexander had decided to send his Macedonian veterans home and he had segregated them for that very purpose; they had returned from India by the Helmand valley and because they had avoided Makran, all 10,000 had survived to outnumber the Macedonian survivors by almost two to one. Age and fitness still advised they should be sent away, but at a moment when Alexander was marrying Iranians to Companions and approving the troops' mixed marriages, the dismissal of veterans would take on a new and painful air. But they must be coaxed to go home, for the years ahead no longer lay with sixty-year-old men who often resented the oriental policies of their king; there is nothing more dangerous than
the frankness of old friends, especially when status is at issue. Only the next few weeks would show whether frankness would lead to conflicts, and whether Alexander's veteran troopers would succeed, where satraps, exiles and mercenaries had already failed to bring him down.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Fearing his veterans, Alexander once more prepared his way with generosity. It was his oldest tactic, and one which had nearly saved him on the river Beas. The Susa weddings had been the most prodigal display of his career and none of the guests could have failed to enjoy it, but the common soldiers still needed more reward than the dowries for their mistresses. As a balance to his officers' festivities Alexander a
The result of his promise was an enormous write-off of some 10,000 talents, or two-thirds of the a
From the Alexandrias and tribal villages of Iran, 30,000 young Iranians appeared at Susa, dressed in Macedonian clothes and trained in the Macedonian style of warfare. It was more than three years since Alexander, near Balkh, had ordered them to be selected and trained, and they could not have arrived at a more explosive moment. When they began to show off their military drill outside the city, word quickly spread that Alexander had named them his Successors, and there were facts to support camp gossip. The Companion Cavalry had marched through Makran in near entirety and had suffered the loss of almost half its horsemen. No new Macedonians were yet available, so Alexander had filled up the ranks with picked Iranians who had hitherto been serving in separate units. After the disaster the Companions' newly mixed squadrons numbered four, and a fifth was now added, conspicuously oriental in its membership. Not even the king's own Battalion was exempted. The most esteemed Asiatics, men like Roxane's brother or Mazaeus's and Artabazus's sons, were enlisted into its exclusive ranks and equipped with Macedonian spears instead of their native javelins. Militarily, Iranian cavalry were more than equal to their king's demands, but it was not their competence which was at stake. They had been given a place in the most Macedonian clique of all; it was as if a British general had opened the ranks of the Grenadier Guards to Indian sepoys, and like most high-minded changes, it was unpopular from the start.
The ordinary soldier hated what he saw. He had lived with hints of it for a long while: Alexander's Persian dress, however moderate; his ushers; his Persian Companions and his proskynesis , at least from orientals, but as long as his own rank was assured, he did not mind these mild i
For the moment, Alexander could escape a confrontation by moving westwards; his road, like the veterans', still led in the general direction of home, and reports from the last stage of Nearchus's voyage up the Persian Gulf, had aroused his interest in the river routes from Susa. He learnt he could sail down the river Pasitigris, venture on to the sea or a linking canal, and return up the mouth of the Tigris until he rejoined the Royal Road; the idea appealed to him, so he detailed his new brother-in-law Hephaistion to bring the troops in attendance by land, and he embarked on the fleet to carry it out. The Pasitigris was pleasantly navigable and allowed him to inspect the irrigation methods of the area, but the Tigris had been blocked by weirs 'because the Persians, themselves poor sailors, had built them at regular intervals to prevent any ships sailing upstream and seizing their country'. Alexander 'said that such devices did not befit a victorious army and he proved them to be worthless by easily cutting through what the Persians had been so keen to preserve'.