Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [49]
Similar news had arrived two years earlier, when the king’s lung wound in India was rumored to be fatal. The false report had spurred a mass exodus of the Greeks in Bactria. Longing for home and thinking themselves free of a harsh master, many threw off the chains of garrison duty and organized a march to the West. Three thousand Greeks had crossed most of Macedonian-controlled Asia—a journey fraught with perils, from which no account has survived—and returned to their European homes. News of their escape must have made its way back to Bactria, inspiring new discontent and homesickness among their former comrades. Now these men had a miraculous second chance.
There were more than twenty thousand Greek soldiers scattered across Bactria and its northerly neighbor, Sogdiana (the “upper satrapies,” as the Persians called them). Most were infantrymen of the hoplite class, armed with large shields, eight-foot thrusting spears, and metal breastplates and helmets. Some were draftees, forced into service by standing treaties; others were mercenaries, soldiers of fortune hoping to get rich under an invincible leader. Still others had been fighting for the Persians when Alexander launched his invasion, but had been allowed to save their lives by switching sides. Few considered Alexander their king or believed in his cause. To the mercenaries he was merely an employer, if a very well-paying one; to the recruits, brought along largely as hostages ensuring the loyalty of their home cities, he represented the war machine that had robbed Greece of its freedom.
In combat these Greek troops had played only a minor role. The Macedonians, with their longer pikes and lighter, more mobile divisions, regarded them as second-raters, throwbacks to an outmoded style of warfare. All the same they were valuable to the army as cultural capital. Steeped in literature and learning that Macedonians lacked, revered for progressive political traditions, these Greeks offered Alexander a potent propaganda weapon. His rule over Asia would be not another Persian-style despotism but a Hellenic regime, with a king who exercised wise and just (though absolute) power. The presence of Greek contingents in his army, and a few Greek officers among his Companions, helped Alexander maintain his enlightened image.
In the upper satrapies Alexander’s Greek troops were especially important as cultural signposts. This was Asia’s wild frontier, a rugged, mountainous realm where tough nomads lived by the arrow and the sword. Raiding and counter-raiding had been rife for centuries, and boys learned to ride and shoot almost before they could speak. Attacks by Scythian warlords to the north kept the region unsettled and violent. If Hellenism could plant its flag even here, if the Greek polis could be imported from the Aegean to the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers, then Alexander’s campaign of conquest could be seen as a civilizational crusade.
Thus Greek squadrons were culled out of Alexander’s army and scattered through the Bactrian wilderness, like seeds from which city-states could grow. That at least is the metaphor invoked by Alexander’s admirers through the ages, from Plutarch in Roman times—who in a rapturous pair of speeches imagined plays of Sophocles being staged on the banks of the Oxus—to Sir William Tarn, the great British champion of Alexander in the mid-twentieth century. Alexander’s critics, whose views have become predominant in recent decades, have of course taken a different view. To them the new settlements were not beacons of enlightenment