Bessus, now in Bactria and ruling as Artaxerxes V with the usurped title of Great King, attempts to continue guerilla resistance against Alexander by raising a national revolt in the eastern satrapies.

Outflanked by Alexander, Bessus flees beyond the Oxus (modern Amu Darya).

Alexander, marching west to Bactra-Zariaspa (modern Balkh [Wazirabad] in Afghanistan), appoints loyal satraps in Bactria and Aria.

Crossing the Oxus, he sends Ptolemy in pursuit of Bessus, who has meanwhile been overthrown by the Sogdian Spitamenes.

Bessus is captured, flogged, and sent to Bactra, where he is later mutilated after the Persian manner (losing his nose and ears); in due course, he is publicly executed, by crucifixion, at Ecbatana.

Meanwhile, Alexander threatens to severely punish the Daylamites (an Iranian people of northern Iran) for kidnapping his beloved war-horse Bucephalus, which they promptly return to him.

Alexander attempts at Bactra to impose the Persian court ceremonial, involving prostration (proskynesis), on the Greeks and Macedonians too; but to them this custom, habitual for Persians entering the king's presence, implies an act of worship and is intolerable before a man.

Even Callisthenes, whose ostentatious flattery has perhaps encouraged Alexander to see himself in the role of a god, refuses to abase himself.

(It is known that Callisthenes alluded to the story of Alexander's divine birth and may have been the first to do so.)

Macedonian laughter causes the experiment to founder, and Alexander abandons it.

Late in 328, Alexander attacks Oxyartes and the remaining barons who hold out in the hills of Paraetacene (modern Tadzhikistan); volunteers seize the crag on which Oxyartes has his stronghold, and among the captives is his daughter, Roxana.

In reconciliation, Alexander marries her, and the rest of his opponents are either won over or crushed.

Callisthenes, held shortly afterward to be privy to a conspiracy against Alexander among the royal pages, is thrown into prison, where he dies in 327; resentment of this action alienates sympathy from Alexander within the Peripatetic school of philosophers, with which Callisthenes, as the nephew of Aristotle, has close connections.

His death is commemorated by his friend Theophrastus in Callisthenes, or a Treatise on Grief.

Alexander leaves Bactria in early summer with a reinforced army under a reorganized command.

If Plutarch's figure of one hundred and twenty thousand men has any reality, however, it must include all kinds of auxiliary services, together with muleteers, camel drivers, medical corps, peddlers, entertainers, women, and children; the fighting strength perhaps stands at about thirty-five thousand.

The governors of Alexander’s empire crush an uprising by Greek mercenaries who have settled in Bactria but now want to return to Greece.