Alexander the Great

His pretext, said his officer Aristobulus, was that the Arabs had never sent him an embassy, 'but in fact, he was insatiable for conquest, wishing to be master of everybody'. His armies had spilled into Italy and India, along the Black Sea and north to the Danube, and it is a frequent mistake to rationalize men's motives for war, as if they fought more for profit than glory. However, there was another side to the Arab expedition as well as mere universal conquest: in the Hadramut valley, spices grew so prolifically that the Arabs used them instead of firewood, sending a steady surplus north by camel and caravan, whose scent was such that the 'drivers become drowsy and only overcome their drowsiness by sniffing asphalt or the skin of goats'. By raft, these spices travelled to the mouth of the Euphrates, then up-stream to Babylon by rivercraft, and so on foot to the city itself: there were myrrh and frankincense, oases of cassia, bushes of naturalized ci

The plan had formed in his mind at least since his meeting with Nearchus in Kirman. There they had talked of the Persian Gulf's signs of a spice route, and four explorers had been sent one after another in thirty-oared craft to trace it back to its source. The first was one of Nearchus's fellow-captains who sailed south only as far as Bahrein; the second, son of an exiled Athenian general, was following him in the winter after Hephaistion's death and left a most observant account of Bahrein's natural history, down to the mangrove trees and orange groves which still distinguish it. He too went no farther. At the same time a third captain had set out on the reverse journey, from the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea and round Arabia into the Persian Gulf; heat and thirst defeated him and he turned back half way. The fourth explorer, a Cypriot, was bolder: he sailed as far as the Aden promontory, 'but despite orders to sail round to Egypt, he became afraid and returned, reporting that Arabia was even larger than India'. The route, however, had been sailed by local traders without fuss or fear for at least two thousand years.

Both the exploration of the Caspian and the conquest of Arabia were attainable ambitions and they speak for Alexander's continuing art of the possible. Neither was as original as it seemed to him: empires might rise and fall by sarissa and cataphract, but since the first dynasty of the Pharaohs, trade had been flowing from the Red Sea, Egypt and the kingdom of Punt, past Bahrein's island and up to the Persian Gulf. Scylax the sea-captain, everywhere a foreru

There were those in camp who had urged a more novel expedition: 'At a festival in Hamadan,' wrote Ephippus, 'Gorgo the royal munitions officer, a Greek from the island of Iasos, crowned Alexander son of Ammon with three thousand golden crowns and a

It is easily forgotten that the decision to restore the Samians had been received with delight by other Greek ambassadors. From Hamadan Alexander had no reason for besieging Athens into the bargain; Ephippus wrote gossip after his death and only put Gorgo's name to the proposal as a plausible touch of malice. As for his crowning as son of Ammon, the conceit seemed credible to contemporaries, and neither Ephippus nor hostile Athenians cared much for the truth; a letter was later invented, written as if to Athens about the ownership of Samos, in which Alexander was made to refer to Philip as merely his 'so-called father', and confirm, by implication, the Athenians' claim to the island. His true view of Ammon was less extreme, and in any case, it hardly befitted Athenians to mock the rumoured flatteries of Gorgo, when within twenty years, they themselves were hymning one of Alexander's Successors as a true 'child of the Sun and the goddess Aphrodite'.

Nonetheless, Alexander's threat had outraged Athens at a time when his position in Greece was not as secure as it often had been. Heavy new drafts of reinforcements were being summoned east from Macedonia to repair the gaps of Makran, and not only was the country's manpower strained by the demand, but Europe was also about to change its general. Antipater was aged over seventy and through letters and embassies, he had long been the subject of complaint, both from Olympias and Greek democrats; Alexander had maintained silence in the face of them, but he did once complain that his mother was punishing him hard for the mere nine months it had taken her to bear him. While Olympias was queen and Antipater mere general, there could never be peace between them. Now Craterus was approaching with orders to replace the general, perhaps temporarily while he visited Asia, perhaps for longer, as Alexander might wish to keep Antipater in Asia as second-in-command for all that gossip knew. It would be some months yet before Craterus returned, in poor health and with 10,000 veterans; his ageing troops were pla