The Spear at Maracanda

In 328 BCE, at a drinking party in what is now Samarkand, Alexander killed Cleitus the Black — then made the army call the dead man a traitor.

By Jonah Hale

The battles get the marble. Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela, Hydaspes. What happened at Maracanda, the old Sogdian city the Greeks called by that name and we call Samarkand, gets a quieter line in the histories — and it may tell you more about the king than any river crossing.

In 328 BCE Alexander was still mopping up the eastern Iranian lands. Cleitus, called the Black, was not a court ornament. After the destruction of Parmenio’s house, Alexander had split the Companion cavalry. One half went to Hephaestion. The other went to Cleitus, an older Macedonian of the old guard. Britannica records him among Alexander’s most-trusted commanders. Ancient writers also place him at the Granicus years earlier, in the melee that nearly killed the young king.

That summer, at Maracanda, the trust ended in a cup.

The sources — principally Arrian and Plutarch — agree on the shape if not every insult. There was a banquet, heavy with wine. Praise of Alexander slid into slight of Philip. Persian manners sat badly with men who still thought in Macedonian ranks. Cleitus spoke for the veterans. Tempers rose. Friends held Alexander back; Cleitus was pushed from the room. He came back. Alexander got free, took a spear, and killed him.

Then the remorse — so loud, the army’s remedy was stranger than the crime. Britannica notes Alexander’s “excessive display of remorse,” after which the army passed a decree convicting Cleitus posthumously of treason. The dead man was made the guilty party so the living king could go on being king.

It was not a battlefield decision. It was absolutism practiced with a spear and cleaned up with a vote. Shortly afterward Alexander pressed Persian royal dress and, at Bactra, the court ritual of prostration. The Macedonians laughed that experiment down. Callisthenes, who would not bow, did not long outlive the fashion.

The empire still had India ahead of it, and a mutiny at the Hyphasis, and a fever in Babylon. But Maracanda is where the breach between Alexander and many of his own shows in a single night: the man who shared the Companion command dead on the floor, the army rewriting the story so the king could sleep.