The retreat he inspired has always seemed sympathetic. Alexander’s eastern plans have not been well received by historians: many have argued that they never existed and some have maintained that all mentions of the Ganges, are best discarded as legend. Apart from the facts, these arguments assume that no sane man could have wished to go on; there are two sides to such a judgement, and only one finds its evidence in Greek accounts of the campaign. The kingdom of Magadha was powerful, certainly, but reports of its strength were no less fantastic than those of the legendary armies of Indian epic heroes, and however plentiful its elephants, it was passing through a painful old age. In native Jain tradition, Dhana Nanda, last of its kings, was long remembered as son of a common woman, born, therefore, outside the ruling caste and detested by many of his courtiers. In the epic book of Ceylon, he is said to have extorted heaps of gold from his subjects and hidden them, meanly, in the waters of the Ganges. Alexander, most remarkably, knew this perfectly well from his informants: Ksandrames, said Porus, was ‘merely the son of a barber’, and not only is a barber’s son a common Indian idiom for a feeble and low-born king, but it is exactly echoed in later Indian histories as a judgement on Dhana Nanda himself. The last of the Nanda dynasty had no firm hold on himself or on Magadha’s loyalties; like Cortes, Alexander had stood on the brink of an old civilization, rich but torn by internal discontent. The journey from the Beas to the Eastern Ocean would have lasted another three months down a royal road, and his officers knew it as clearly as he did. And yet they turned it down.
Only the future can prove what they missed. Within three years of Alexander’s death, a pretender arose in northern India, Chandragupta the Mauryan, who marshalled an army and made Magadha his own. Dhana Nanda was deposed, and ten years later Chandragupta was even pressing on the Punjab frontier, perhaps drawing help from its seditious highland tribesmen. In return for five hundred elephants, Alexander’s Asian successor Seleucus was forced to concede him the Indian provinces; Chandragupta returned to Palimbothra, where he heeded his minister Kautilya and ruled in state for another twenty years. Behind the wooden palisading of the palace he kept open court to Greek envoys, who would come by the royal road from Amritsar, admire his harem and stroll in gardens which seemed to have been his for a hundred years. When asked how he had done it, said the Greeks, Chandragupta would reply: ‘I watched Alexander when I was still a young man; Alexander,’ he explained, ‘had been within an ace of seizing India, because its king was so hated and despised, both for his character and his low birth.’
If an Indian imitator could do it, so too could his master ten years before: Dhana Nanda’s kingdom could have been set against itself and Alexander might yet have walked among Palimbothra’s peacocks, improved its fencing and enjoyed the fish-ponds on which the Indian princes had always learnt to sail. But not far from its gates the Ganges spreads into an estuary and glides beneath palm-trees through the banks of the silt-brown fields: it asks to be followed, and Alexander need only have done so for another six hundred miles, until he saw the sea-ehore opening before him and would have concluded, wrongly but poignantly, that at last he was near the edge of his world. The Eastern ocean was three months away, and the soldiers had refused it. The conquerer’s dream of the past few years was gone, when he knew too well that it could have come true.
...
The retreat from the Beas was a disappointment, not a danger. The men were not so much embittered as exhausted; as for the officers, none of them plotted to take advantage of their king’s defeat. For defeat it was, and the disgrace would far outweigh the negligible fears in Alexander’s mind. He would not easily live with such a rebuff to his sense of glory, the heart of his Homeric values. He reached the Jhelum, only to find that Bucephala had been washed away by the rains; worse, news came from the ladies’ quarters that Roxane’s first baby had miscarried.
Only Porus benefited from the new despair. The ‘seven nations and two thousand towns’ between the Jhelum and the Beas were added to his kingdom; they had lost their interest now that the march to the east had been cancelled. There was only one direction left which promised Alexander his required adventure. It would be ignominious to retrace his steps through the Hindu Kush; now, therefore, was the moment to put the ship timber to use and explore southwards down the Jhelum to the river Indus. It was not the safest route home, but as a link between the conquests in east and west, this waterway might prove invaluable. Though Alexander had at last discovered from the natives that the Indus would not bring him round into the Nile and Upper Egypt he may well have preferred to keep up this hope among his weary troopers.
Back on the Jhelum more than 35,000 fresh soldiers from the west were waiting, raising the army’s strength to 120,000, a massive force by classical standards; they had also brought medical supplies and smart new suits of gold- and silver-plated armour. More important, they would raise morale. Eight hundred ships of various shapes and sizes were needed for the voyage down the Indus, but such was the energy of the newly equipped army that two months later the fleet was ready to be manned by the expert crews of Cypriots, Egyptians, Ionian Greeks and Phoenicians who had been following Alexander, as before they had followed the fortunes of the Persian kings. The journey downstream to the outer ocean could begin.
It is a commonplace of sermons and histories that powerful men are corrupted and pay for their licence by loneliness and growing insecurity. But in life, the wicked have a way of flourishing and not every despot ends more miserably than he began: power may turn a man’s head, but only the virtuous or the uninvolved insist that it must always cost him his soul. Inevitably, with Alexander this moral problem begins to be raised: thwarted, did he lose his judgement and turn on the methods of a textbook tyrant in his i solation? Failure will often show in a general’s style of leadership: he may no longer delegate his work, while refusing to take the blame for its consequences: he may be too exhausted to take a firm decision, too unsure to resist the meanest suspicions. It is only a legend that when Alexander heard from his philosopher Anaxarchus of the infinite number of possible worlds, he wept, reflected that he had not even conquered the one he knew. The need to justify a lost ambition can cause a man to over-reach; moralists, at least, might expect that Alexander’s first rebuff from his army would mark the loosening of his grip on reality.
History does not confirm that this was so. As no officer describes the mood of the king in council, it is impossible, as always, to divide the credit for the army’s actions between Alexander and his staff. Events, however, do not suggest autocracy or nervous indecision. Within two months, the entire fleet had been built from the felled timber, a tribute to the energy of officers and carpenters, and Alexander declared the enterprise open in characteristic style. After athletic games and musical competitions, he ordered animals for sacrifice to be given free to each platoon, ...
~~Alexander The Great -by- Robin Lane Fox
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