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By Root 672 0

had long before made Eumenes royal secretary, a new post created to handle the complex paperwork of a growing empire. According to one report, Philip had simply liked the look of the boy when he spotted him winning a pancration, a no-holds-barred wrestling match, and hired him on the spot. During the Asian campaign, other Companions smirked that Eumenes followed Alexander with pen and writing tablet rather than with sword and shield, and sometimes forcefully put him into what they saw as his place. In India, Eumenes received a painful slight when Hephaestion, Alexander’s favorite, took away his designated quarters and reassigned them to a common flute player. Eumenes complained bitterly to Alexander, who at first took his scribe’s part and scolded Hephaestion but later changed sides and railed at Eumenes for demanding royal protection. No one knew quite where to rank a Greek foreigner, and a noncombatant, in a Macedonian hierarchy based on military valor.

Ultimately, Alexander decided that Eumenes, too, might possess that valor, or might be allowed to earn it. In India Alexander entrusted his scribe with a minor cavalry command, assigning him to lead a troop of horsemen to two rebel towns and demand their submission. As it turned out, the townspeople had fled before Eumenes arrived, but the mission nonetheless allowed Eumenes to lead men in hostile territory and demonstrated that Macedonian cavalry, if ordered by Alexander, would accept a Greek as their captain. Then, in the last year of his life, Alexander made a much more dramatic move, appointing Eumenes commander of an elite cavalry unit formerly headed by lofty Perdiccas. No Greek had held such a distinguished post in Alexander’s army before. Little Eumenes had risen high, indeed—and was destined to rise still higher.

Most of the men in the room with Alexander had waded through rivers of blood in the course of winning their commands. The Indian campaign had been particularly harsh: Alexander had slaughtered civilians, even prisoners of war, hoping that this distant province could be terrorized into subjection. His generals followed such orders because they believed a greater good justified them. With the Persians subdued and tribes beyond the Caspian Sea and the Hindu Kush cowed into nonaggression, Alexander felt he was close to melding the whole known world into a single state. Religious and cultural freedom, economic development, and even (where possible) local autonomy would make the empire’s peoples willing sharers rather than grudging subjects. Alexander himself, his image carefully crafted to project tolerance, harmony, and progress, would be the banner under which the nations would unite.

All that was needed to bring this brave new world into being was the obliteration of those who threatened it, either by attack from without or by rebellion from within. The generals who helped conduct Alexander’s massacres were not butchers but loyal supporters of his driving vision. They had agreed to pursue his multiethnic world-state, certain they would one day share in rule over it. Indeed, Alexander had made clear how large a role they would have. In the royal pavilion he set up in Persis in his final year, a magnificent tent surrounded by thousands of elite troops in concentric rings, he stationed the Bodyguards on silver-footed couches directly around his own golden throne—the innermost orbit of the cosmos of which he formed the center.

Now these trusted generals were preparing to move against the Arabs, a people that had not directly threatened their empire. But after the army’s return to Babylon, when many unconquered peoples sent embassies to Alexander offering submission, the Arabs sent none. Their silence was worrisome because of their geographic position, astride the waterways connecting the empire’s Asian heartland to Africa and Europe. As foes, they could rob Alexander’s cities of trade revenue or limit the range of his warships. Under Macedonian control, conversely, their coasts offered harbors and anchorages for the ships that would sail, in Alexander’s