God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I knew what I had to do. This is what the pages train you for. This moment. But it hurts, and all that pain – boy, do you know that pain gets worse as you get older? The fear of pain – the expectation of pain?

  At any rate, I stepped out of the file and ran back along the ranks to the very back of the hypaspistoi. I didn’t know the men by name or even by sight yet, but I guessed there were at least a dozen men already gone from the ranks. I also noticed that the pezhetaeroi behind us were marching in their chitons, with slaves carrying their helmets, small shields, pikes and armour.

  I felt like an idiot. Cavalrymen generally wear their kit, and I was a cavalryman. Of course foot soldiers marched with slaves carrying their kit.

  On the other hand . . .

  There was Polystratus, riding and leading my Poseidon. He looked amused. I hated him.

  ‘Get your sorry arse back along the column and find my stragglers,’ I barked.

  ‘Yes, O master,’ he intoned. ‘You could ride and do it yourself.’

  I made a rude sign at him, sighed and ran back up the column. ‘You tired? Anyone want to run with me?’ I bellowed, and men looked up from their misery.

  ‘I’m going to run the next five stades. And then I’m going to rest. You can walk the next five stades and then keep walking, or you can run with me.’ I repeated this over and over as I ran from the back of the column to the front.

  At the front, I took my place in the lead file – a much more comfortable place to march, let me tell you, than the middle files, where the dust clogs your scarf and turns to a kind of mud with your breath.

  In my head I started playing with tunes. I could play the lyre, badly, but I could sing well enough to be welcome at an Athenian symposium, and I knew a few songs. Nothing worked for me just then, so I grunted at my file leaders.

  ‘Ready to run?’ I asked.

  Sullen stares of hate.

  Command. So much fun.

  ‘On me,’ I said, and off I went at a fast trot.

  Let’s be brief. We ran five stades. We caught up to the Hetaeroi cavalry in front. By then, we were strung out along three stades of dirt road, because a lot of my hypaspitoi were breaking down under the weight of the shields – ungainly brutes.

  But we made it, and I led the files off the road into a broad field – a fallow farm field. I dropped the aspis off my shoulder and, without meaning to, fell to the ground. Then I got to my feet, by which time most of the hypaspitoi who were still with me were lying on their backs, staring at the sun in the sky.

  ‘Hypaspitoi!’ I shouted.

  Groans. Silence.

  ‘The men of Athens and Plataea ran from Marathon to Athens at night after fighting all day,’ I shouted.

  Legends often start in small ways. And no one remembers, later, the moments of failure.

  My hypaspitoi straggled into camp, and almost a third of my men – mostly, but not all, Agrianians – were among the last men into camp. I had to get my grooms together and use them as military police to collect up the slowest men. Forty men had to be dismissed – home to Agriania or back to the pezhetaeroi.

  But none of my friends – or enemies – in the Hetaeroi really noticed that. What Hephaestion knew was that the hypaspitoi had caught up with the cavalry and he claimed we’d hooted at the horsemen and demanded to be allowed to run past. Horseshit. All I wanted to do was lie down and die, at that point. But that’s how a good legend starts.

  I wanted to go and eat with my Hetaeroi, but I knew that wouldn’t work, so instead I put myself in a mess with Alectus and Philip Longsword, and we cooked our own food. Well – to be fair, all the phylarchs had slaves or servants, and we didn’t do a lot of cooking. But the work got done, and I do have some vague recollection of helping to collect firewood with two exhausted Macedonian peasants who were scared spitless to find their commander breaking downed branches with them. I had to teach the useless fucks how to break branches in the crotch of a living tree with a natural fork close to the ground. Apparently only lazy men know how to do this.

  The next morning, I ordered the armour and aspides packed, and ordered the men to march in their chitons. And I collected the file closers . . .

  You have never served in a phalanx. So let’s digress. A Macedonian phalanx is raised from a territory. In their prime, we had between six and nine taxeis, and each was raised in one of the provinces – three for the lower kingdoms, three for the upper kingdoms and three for the outer provinces, or close enough. Every taxeis had a parchment strength of two thousand, but in fact they usually numbered between eleven hundred and seventeen hundred sarissas. Every man was armed the same way – a long sarissa, a short sword or knife, a helmet. The front ranks were supposed to be well armoured, and sometimes they were – never in new levies, always in old veteran corps.

  Veterans were supposed to rotate home after a set number of years or campaigns, and new drafts were supposed to come out to the army every spring when the taxeis reformed. All the phalangites – the men of the phalanx – were supposed to go home every autumn. Only the royal companions – the Hetaeroi – and the hypaspitoi stayed in service all year round.

  Each taxeis was composed of files – eight men under Philip, and ten men under Alexander. At times we’d be as deep as sixteen or twenty, but that was generally for a specific purpose. Let’s stay with files of ten. A taxeis of two thousand men formed ten deep has two hundred files. Every file, at the normal order, has six feet of space in the battle line – six feet wide and as deep as required. That means that the frontage of a taxeis at normal order is twelve hundred feet. A little more than a stade.

  But of course we almost never fight in ‘normal’ order, but contract to the synaspis, the shield-touching shield formation with ten pikes stacked over the front rank’s locked round shields. So that’s about three feet per man, two hundred files, six hundred feet width, or about half a stade. Still with me?

  Every file has three officers – the file leader, who runs the group and leads it – literally – in combat and on the march. The file closer – the ‘last’ man; he’s the second-in-command, because if the phalanx faces to the rear he’s the front-rank man, and because he alone can prevent men from deserting or running away. And the mid-ranker. In many manoeuvres – especially Macedonian manoeuvres – men march by half-files, and suddenly the half-file leader is the leader of a short file. The half-file leader is the third-in-command. Finally, the most promising new man is the half-file closer – the fifth man back, who, if the file is split in two, will be the ‘last’ man in a file only five deep. See? It was never a real rank, but to be put in the fifth position was to be seen as the next to be promoted in the file.

  But the hypaspitoi were more complicated. We were a little over a thousand men and only eight deep. Our eight-man files were clumsy, because no one had worked together. And the file isn’t just a tactical unit – a file of infantry builds shelters together, cooks together, eats together, goes to find whores together, kills innocent civilians together, steals cattle together, digs latrines together, uses them together, swims together. You get the picture.

  My files had no cohesion. We’d forced a bunch of men together, and they were supposed to be elite, but mostly they were angry and unfed, because dysfunctional files meant no firewood, no shelter and no food.

  Their other problem is that Alexander’s mixture of magnanimity and paranoia had resulted in his releasing all the old hypaspitoi. If it had been me, I’d have released a third each campaign. My beloved king left me with precisely one veteran – Philip Longsword. If I had even a hundred – just one veteran per file – I’d have had someone to teach all the Agrianians how to live as soldiers.

  I see your question, young man – how could all these picked men not know how to function as soldiers? Why weren’t those woodsy mountaineers clever enough to get firewood and cook?

  I’m sure that alone in the mountains, they’d have had their shelters rigged in no time. But when you march with ten thousand s
oldiers and as many slaves and grooms – twenty thousand men and some prostitutes and hangers-on – foraging is a skill. Getting firewood is a skill. Cooking – quickly and well, with minimal wood use and very few pots or utensils – is a skill. Men going into the mountains take a pot – wealthy men have a copper or bronze pot. Soldiers need time and expertise to collect such things – they need to pool money and resources to get a slave, to buy a pot for that slave to carry, to find, buy or steal food to put into that pot . . .

  We hadn’t given my boys time to do any of that. There were twenty messes without a cauldron of any kind. I know – I walked around and looked.

  But I saw something that suggested that there was hope. I saw one file cook and then hand its cauldron over to another file. They ate late, but they ate.

  The army was fed by markets – our own army agora. When we were on home ground, scouts – the Prodromoi – would ride out and warn the farmers for stades around the projected evening camp, and they would bring their wares to the camp before the soldiers even arrived. They’d be set up when the soldiers marched in, and one or two men from every mess would go to the market and buy food – a little meat, some grain for bread, some oil, a little wine.

  A lucky or skilful mess had a slave or two. That would ease the process greatly, because the slave didn’t have to be with the column. In friendly country, a really good slave – a trusted slave – would go out on his own, buy food in the countryside (where the prices were lower) and maybe even have the fire going when the men marched in. A slave who has reason to believe that expert service will bring freedom – which is a Thracian concept of slavery and something Macedonians practise well – will do all this every day for a year or two. But in the end, the file has to free him, of course, and then they need to pool their cash and buy another.

  Or just take one in battle.

  And let’s just add to this. A victorious Macedonian army accreted slaves – bed-warmers, foragers, cooks, baggage-humpers. And the duty of the footslogger gets easier and easier. He’s got a slave to carry his gear, a donkey, two cook pots per mess to make the food more interesting, more cash to buy better food, wine every night and a girl. Or a boy. Or both.

  One defeat, and all that is gone. If you lose a fight with the Thracians, they take your camp and all your slaves, all your baggage animals, all your bed-warmers. Gone. And you are back to humping your own gear.

  That’s the life of an infantryman. I’ve embarked on this long discourse so that you understand that, despite their status as ‘household’ troops, my hypaspitoi were pretty much at the bottom of the barrel as we marched out of Pella. We had very few slaves, insufficient cook gear, no tents, no baggage animals at all.

  So when my men marched in their chitons, they still had to hump all their gear on their own shoulders, and that was painful. I was not happy to carry my own kit, and my decision to do it allowed Polystratus a long laugh at my expense.

  ‘I dreamed of this, when I was your slave,’ he said.

  I grunted.

  Day two was worse than day one. Luckily, I really don’t remember any of it.

  But towards afternoon, I took my new palfrey – a nice little Thracian mare with no good blood but lots of heart – and rode up the column, saluted the king and then went north with the Prodromoi. We were in my land, and we’d be camping on my farms. I rode into Ichnai with Polystratus, embraced Heron and sent out my orders.

  When the hypaspitoi marched into camp – and they weren’t any better off than they had been the day before – they found their fires already lit and their food in bronze cauldrons by their lit fires, ready to cook. Every mess had a fire. A fire, two donkeys and a slave.

  It’s good to be rich.

  After they’d eaten, I collected the whole regiment in a mob outside my tent. I had a tent and I was not going to go without it. There are limits.

  ‘Good evening, hypaspitoi!’ I shouted, and that night I got some response besides grunts. ‘How was the lamb?’

  Shouts of approval. ‘More like mutton than lanb!’ said somebody. There’s always one.

  ‘Tomorrow, you can find your own!’ I shouted. ‘Those slaves are yours – to keep.’

  One hundred and twenty prime male slaves. Even I felt that as an expense. And I’d just stripped four of my farms of workers.

  But the grumble from my men had another tone entirely.

  ‘And the donkeys,’ I said. ‘And the cook pots.’

  Cheers.

  ‘On the other hand,’ I shouted, and they laughed. ‘On the other hand, tomorrow we march in armour, with our shields on our shoulders.’ Silence.

  I was standing on a big wicker basket stood on end. I raised my arms. ‘We’re going to be the elite of this army,’ I shouted. ‘We will march under arms every day, and we will run every day, and we will fight when called upon and still march and run, every day. Use the donkeys to carry your loot, my friends, because they will not be carrying your aspides. Tomorrow we will be the first taxeis on parade. Your slaves will waken you with hot wine when it is time. If you quarrel with them, you are quarrelling with me. Understand?’

  We were back to grunts. And scowls.

  So be it, I thought.

  The fourth day out of Pella. My lads had their shelters built and their food cooked before darkness fell for the first time. I gathered them all under an old oak tree and shouted at them. I asked every mess to send me their best singer.

  The phylarchs – a hundred and twenty of them – stayed behind when I dismissed my men to their blankets. Most of them had another man with them – the best singers of their files. Almost all Agrianians.

  ‘How many of you can read Greek?’ I asked, and the result was to cut my meeting from three hundred to about thirty in one go. I told the rest of them to go to bed.

  I gave the thirty men left a speech from Mnesimachus. ‘Put it to music,’ I said. ‘We’ll make a song of it.’

  That got a lot of nods.

  ‘Tomorrow, we’ll throw javelins after dinner,’ I said to the phylarchs. They groaned.

  Have you any idea

  What we’re like to fight against?

  Our sort make their dinner

  Off sharp swords

  We swallow blazing torches

  For a savoury snack!

  Then, by way of dessert,

  They bring us, not nuts, but broken arrows, and splintered spear shafts.

  For pillows we have our shields and breastplates,

  Arrows and slings lie under our feet, and for wreaths we wear catapults

  As it turned out, Marsyas, one of the former pages, turned his hand to writing my song. Marsyas was always bookish – he was the one royal page besides Alexander himself who would happily debate Aristotle, and his lyre-playing was nearly professional in its polish and he played better than the king, who played better than anyone else in Macedon. Nor was he a poor soldier – in fact, his particular skills were raid and subterfuge, and he thought nothing of lying all night in an ambush, because he was a Macedonian, not some lily-handed minstrel. We were two years apart, so we’d never been close, but he was a good friend to my young scapegraces Cleomenes and Pyrrhus. Indeed, the three were inseparable.

  And since I didn’t go to eat with my former mess, they came to eat with me. The next morning I had all three of them to breakfast when a hesitant Agrianian sang his version. It was rich and dramatic, but hopeless as a marching song, and sounded as if it had been sung through his nose. Still, it was a good effort, and I gave him a silver four-drachma piece.

  Marsyas listened, picked up a lyre and began to tune it. Lyres take a lot of tuning, I always find, but Marsyas could tune them as fast as I could kill a deer – I’ve known him take an instrument down from the wall of some strange hold and tune it while talking and go straight to playing. I suspect that being that fast to tune an instrument is a significant skill – if I’d ever learned to tune a lyre, I’d be a far sight better at playing one, I’ll wager.

  At any rate
, he tuned the lyre – and started to play. He played a song, shook his head, played another, made a face, played a line or a snatch of a line.

  He nodded to Philip Longsword, who was watching with rapt admiration. Everyone loves music, and it’s rare in a marching camp. It was still dark, and the slaves were packing, and here’s this Macedonian nobleman playing the lyre on the next stool – of course Philip was attentive.

  ‘Show me your marching pace,’ Marsyas said.

  So Philip walked up and down a few times.

  Marsyas nodded and tried other things. The only one I knew was the beat of the rhapsodes singing the Iliad. Who knew you could march to the Iliad?

  Marsyas did.

  Now you do, too.

  That day, we were on parade with all the other taxeis, all our gear packed. There was some sarcastic applause from the veterans. And we were in all our kit, with spears and shields.

  Twice that day, we ran a stade. Just one stade – it was enough. And then we marched, with those who knew the Iliad shouting the verses until our voices were shot. We concentrated on the first fifty lines. For some of the Agrianians, it was the first Greek they had ever learned.

  That night, we made camp, lit fires, ate and threw javelins.

  It was a pretty sad exhibition. The Agrianians made the Macedonians look really bad. No, that’s not fair. The Macedonians were really bad, and the Agrianians were better. The trouble was that in recruiting the biggest men, we’d taken more of the city boys who were rich and got meat every day, and fewer of the Pellan farm boys who could bring down a rabbit with a stone.

  And the next day, we ran three times, a stade each time, and that night we threw javelins, and this time I offered a big silver four-drachma piece to each of the twenty best javelin men. We threw at marks.

  I was the best javelin man. That made me happy. Still does. A thousand men, and I could throw farther, harder and more accurately.

  The next day, we sang the first fifty lines of the Iliad again, as often as I had the wind to sing it, and we ran three times, a stade each time. And that night, the winners of the javelin throw each took twenty students and ran a javelin class. Alectus and Philip Longsword walked around preventing chaos and bad feeling. I taught a bunch of city boys.