The city of Sardis now belonged to Alexander, including, to his delight, a treasury full of Lydian gold. The money would not last forever, but it allowed the king to proceed with the war knowing he could finally pay his men. The rank and file soldiers were equally thrilled since after weeks of marching and fighting they at last had a few coins in their pockets. From his camp outside of town Alexander declared that all the Lydians were now free and would be allowed to follow their ancient customs. This was a pleasant but meaningless gesture since the Persians had always allowed the inhabitants of their empire to follow ancestral customs. As for freedom, it was true only in the sense that the Lydians were now liberated from the Persian into the Macedonian Empire. As long as the citizens of Sardis paid their taxes and did as they were told, they could consider themselves as free as they liked. Alexander then entered the city as a conqueror and climbed to the top of the citadel, where the view across the wide valley of the Hermus was magnificent. The king examined the defenses of the hill and thanked the gods yet again that he didn’t have to lay siege to such a towering fortress. Then a summer storm suddenly broke loose from the heavens with peals of thunder and sheets of rain. The king had been contemplating the construction of a temple to his ancestor Zeus at the top of the citadel, but now he was certain he should do so.
Alexander appointed a Macedonian named Pausanias as the new commander of the citadel and charged Nicias, a Greek, with the assessment and collection of taxes for the region. Asander, who may have been Parmenion’s brother, was chosen as satrap of Lydia and was left enough cavalry and light infantry to maintain order. The king sent most of the Greek troops who had followed him from Macedonia back to garrison the region around Troy while he stationed the Greeks from the allied town of Argos on the citadel of Sardis with Pausanias.
These seemingly minor dispositions open an important window into Alexander’s mind at this stage of the campaign. He had successfully won his first battle and had now taken a key city of the Persian Empire. He felt he could dispense with most of the Greek troops in his army and cast aside the facade that this was a campaign of Panhellenic liberation. From now on, it was a Macedonian war of conquest. The Greeks would still have their uses, of course, but Alexander no longer wanted to share his glory with them. He was also anxious to begin paring away as many kinsmen and supporters of Parmenion as possible from his command staff, beginning with Asander. He continued to need Parmenion’s support, but little by little he would begin to wear away the old man’s power as his own grew. Finally, the number of different officials Alexander left behind to govern his growing empire shows a keen recognition of the dangers of concentrated power. As the Persians had before him, the king knew that competition between officials was the surest check on unfettered ambition. Asander would be satrap, but Nicias would control the purse strings while Pausanias commanded the high ground. None of these men had reason to trust each other—which was exactly the point. Alexander could continue his march knowing that no one man would dominate the rich and powerful province of Lydia.
Alexander’s next stop was the coastal city of Ephesus, a four-day journey from Sardis. The town had been founded by Ionian Greeks centuries earlier, but had fallen under the rule of Croesus of Lydia and then to Persian control. The Ionians were the same branch of Greeks as the Athenians, though the Ephesians did not always support their kindred in war. To the Persians, who saw little difference between the various Hellenic tribes and dialects, all Greeks were lumped together as Ionians, or Yauna, in the Persian language. The city of Ephesus was best known for its famous temple of Artemis, the virgin goddess of hunting, which had reportedly burned down the night Alexander was born and was still being rebuilt. “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians,” later generations would chant, and the citizens of Alexander’s time could not have agreed more.
The backers of democracy at Ephesus had opened the gates to Parmenion two years earlier, even setting up a statue of Philip at the temple. But Memnon had retaken the city and restored the ruling aristocracy that supported Persia. Now the democrats returned from exile seeking vengeance. They launched a pogrom against the aristocrats and murdered anyone they could find who didn’t share their political convictions, including those who had torn down Philip’s statue. One oligarch named Syrphax was dragged from the temple along with his nephews and publicly stoned to death. Alexander had little sympathy with the aristocracy and allowed the bloodshed to continue for a few days, but eventually even he felt things were going too far. He knew that soon the violence would descend into general mayhem and personal grudges that had nothing to do with politics. He halted the vendetta and, to help distract the Ephesians from infighting, he offered to donate his own money to help rebuild the temple of Artemis and restore the lucrative tourist trade. Surprisingly, the citizens declined, though this refusal may have been orchestrated by Alexander to spare himself an enormous expense. Still, the king ordered that all city taxes previously paid to the Persians would henceforth be directed to rebuilding the great temple. To entertain and intimidate the restive citizens, Alexander then staged a grand parade and battle drill through the streets of the city with his troops in full battle dress.
Representatives from the nearby towns of Magnesia and Tralles soon arrived to surrender their cities to Alexander. The king graciously accepted and sent Parmenion with a large force of cavalry and infantry to make sure they meant it. He also dispatched troops to other Greek towns on the coast to drive out Persian garrisons, overthrow aristocratic rulers, and proclaim democracy and freedom for all. Now that they were free cities, they would not be subject to distasteful tax payments to the Great King in distant Persepolis. Instead, as liberated Greeks, they would be permitted to make hefty contributions to the Macedonian cause.
The famous painter Apelles was resident in Ephesus when Alexander arrived and the king could not resist commissioning a portrait of himself astride Bucephalas. The king had seen Apelles’ work before, including the painting of his own father, Philip, and had great expectations for a matchless work. However, when the painting was finished, Alexander was not impressed. Apelles then brought it over to show Bucephalas, who neighed in apparent approval. The bold artist then told Alexander that his horse had better taste than he did. But the king, who had studied artistic theory with Aristotle and fancied himself a connoisseur of fine paintings, demanded that Apelles try again. This time Apelles played to Alexander’s vanity and showed him as Zeus wielding a thunderbolt. He even used a secret varnish formula to give the portrait a striking tone. The king was pleased with this very un-Greek style of portraiture and gave Apelles a large bag of gold as payment.
While Parmenion was away, Alexander took the rest of the army and left Ephesus for the key city of Miletus thirty miles to the south. On the way he stopped at the small Ionian Greek town of Priene at the mouth of the Meander River. The river was notable for its wandering course (hence our modern term meander) and in time it would silt up the entire bay between Priene and Miletus. Alexander wanted to visit the newly completed temple to Athena in Priene, designed by Pythius himself, architect of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. At Priene, Alexander donated enough money so that, unlike at Ephesus, he was named patron of the new temple. The dedicatory inscription in Greek, which survives to this day, is one of the few pieces of contemporary evidence we possess naming the Macedonian king:
BAΣIΛEYΣ AΛEΞANΔPOΣ ANEυHKE TON
NAON AυHNAIHI ΠOΛIAΔI
King Alexander dedicated this temple to Athena,
Protector of the City
Alexander rarely missed a chance to combine his genuine devotion to the gods with useful propaganda.
Parmenion and his forces rejoined Alexander at Miletus. It was an ancient settlement dating back to the days of the Trojan War and had been a major naval center for centuries. It was now the city’s ability to shelter the Persian fleet that most concerned Alexander. The Great King had four hundred ships, primarily from Cyprus
and Egypt, operating in the eastern Mediterranean, as opposed to his own, untried fleet, less than half that size, drawn from various Greek cities of questionable loyalty. If the Persians were allowed to use Miletus as a naval base, they could hamper his advance and strike against him anywhere in the Aegean.
The commander of the garrison at Miletus had sent a message to Alexander offering surrender, but when he heard the Persian fleet was near at hand he reneged on his offer and barred the city gates to the Macedonians. Alexander then ordered his small fleet to race for Miletus to prevent the Persians from seizing the harbor and nearby islands. The Greek navy arrived in time to set up base on the island of Lade just offshore while the tardy Persians were forced to anchor in an unfavorable location ten miles to the north. Alexander ferried several thousand Thracians and other mercenaries to Lade to help hold the island against any Persian attack.
It was now Parmenion who urged boldness against the Persian fleet. He advised the king that a naval attack by the Greek ships could succeed, especially as he had seen an eagle, a favored bird of Zeus, perching on the stern of one of the ships. It would be a great victory if they could win, the general claimed, but only a minor defeat if they lost. Alexander, however, was uncharacteristically cautious. He had little experience with naval warfare and less trust in Greek sailors. He countered that it was foolish to engage a much larger fleet with his inexperienced navy. He would have to place Macedonian marines on each ship to fight the Persians at sea, a frightening prospect to men from the mountains of his homeland. Moreover, a defeat would indeed be serious and give the Greek cities courage to rise up against him. Finally, the eagle Parmenion saw was facing the land, not the sea, so that Zeus clearly wanted him to wage war on solid ground.
When Alexander’s engineering corps arrived at Miletus, the king put them to work knocking down the city walls. It was the first opportunity his engineers had during the campaign to prove they could work miracles. Soon there was a hole wide enough in the defenses to send the Macedonian army through into the city. Alexander’s men swarmed through the town, killing all the defenders they could find, and headed for the harbor. There the Greek fleet had moved in to blockade the Persians from landing reinforcements. The Persian soldiers in the city, made up largely of several hundred Greek mercenaries hired by Memnon, were pushed to the sea, where many climbed onto their concave shields and paddled to a small island in the harbor to make a final stand. They had heard of the fate of their comrades at the Granicus and were determined to sell their lives dearly. But Alexander sailed to the island himself and told the mercenaries that he admired their bravery and loyalty. He offered them mercy on the condition that they join his army. Given the circumstances, they had little choice but to accept. The citizens of the city who had survived the assault were likewise spared the horrors of enslavement and allowed to remain in the town, undoubtedly after paying a large indemnity for their resistance.
The Persian navy continued to harass the Macedonians even after the fall of Miletus. Each day they would sail from their base and draw up before the harbor, trying to tempt Alexander into a fight at sea. But fume as he might, the king remained firm in his plan to avoid a naval battle. Instead he sent Parmenion’s son Philotas to the coast near the Persian anchorage to prevent them from collecting fresh water. In frustration, they sailed to the nearby island of Samos for supplies and then struck at Miletus again. Five Persian ships managed to slip into the inner harbor, hoping to catch Alexander unprepared, but the king quickly gathered whatever troops were at hand and launched ten ships to strike back. The Persians had convinced themselves that the Macedonians were afraid to face them on the water, so they were surprised to see Alexander at the helm of a force twice their size sailing toward them in the harbor. They turned and rowed for their lives, but not before Alexander captured one of their ships.
In spite of his modest naval victory, Alexander now made a momentous decision that was to determine his course for the rest of the war—he ordered his fleet to disband. Ancient and modern historians have long argued about why he did this, but the reasons given by the historian Arrian seem plausible, namely that he did not have enough money to support a navy and even if he did, his fleet was no match for the Persians. One might add that he found the Greek sailors untrustworthy and far more trouble than they were worth. But decommissioning his navy meant that he had no choice but to defeat the Persian fleet by land. The only way he could do this was to deny them a safe harbor anywhere in the Mediterranean. In effect, Alexander was committing himself and the Macedonian army to seizing the entire coast from Troy to Egypt. Until he could accomplish this, he was leaving himself vulnerable to Persian naval strikes against Asia Minor, Greece, and even Macedonia. But to conquer the entire eastern Mediterranean was an astonishingly ambitious plan. Most of Alexander’s officers and soldiers had probably assumed they would limit their campaign to the shores of the Aegean Sea, but one suspects that the young king had planned from the beginning to drive his army all the way to the pyramids if not to the heart of Persia and beyond.
Word soon reached Alexander that the Great King had overruled the objections of his nobles and at last appointed Memnon as commander of the Persian army and fleet in the war against the Macedonians. The price of this appointment was that Memnon had to send his wife, Barsine, and his children to the court of Darius as hostages. The new commander then moved his forces to the coastal city of Halicarnassus, south of Miletus. It was an astute decision on Memnon’s part as this southernmost of the major Greek towns in Asia Minor had one of the finest harbors on the Aegean coast and was surrounded by formidable walls.
Halicarnassus was in the mountainous land of Caria, inhabited by a people of non-Greek origin related in language to the Lydians. The Dorian Greeks, relatives of the Spartans, had settled along the coast centuries earlier and founded outposts such as Halicarnassus. In later times, the Greek towns of Caria became Ionian in culture and produced such famous figures as the historian Herodotus, a native of Halicarnassus. Greeks and Carians lived amicably side by side, but the rulers were a native dynasty known as the Hecatomnids. As in Macedonia, the nobles embraced Greek culture while the vast majority of the people carried on the ways of their ancestors, even in the Hellenized cities. To the proud Carians, a father was ted and a mother en, not patēr and mētēr as among the Greeks. Ancient pastoralism was the foundation of the economy and it was practiced largely from isolated hilltop villages scattered throughout the land. But in spite of royal initiatives to promote Hellenic culture, the Carians remained loyal to their kings and queens even while they ignored their attempts to spread Greek ways.
Caria had fallen under Persian control in the late sixth century as had the rest of Asia Minor, but the royal family continued to rule in the name of the Great King. Most famous of these monarchs was Mausolus, who, following a custom Carian royalty shared with Egyptian pharaohs and Persian kings, had married his sister. He then moved the Carian capital from the inland town of Mylasa to Halicarnassus. He had briefly joined a revolt of the satraps of Asia Minor in the 360s, but was soon forgiven and spent the remainder of his reign increasing Carian power in the region while remaining loyal to Persia. His crowning achievement was the construction of the famous Mausoleum, named after himself, that was to serve as his tomb and a monument to his rule. It was indeed a wonder of the world, soaring almost 150 feet and topped by a pyramid. It was elaborately decorated with splendid Ionic columns and sculptures of lions, Amazons, and centaurs.
When Mausolus died and was buried as a cult hero in his magnificent tomb, royal power passed in time to Pixodarus, with whom the impulsive Alexander had tried to arrange a marriage alliance several years earlier. Pixodarus had seized power from his sister, Ada, and soon married his daughter to a Persian nobleman named Orontobates, who took over rule of Caria at the recent death of Pixodarus. The resourceful Ada, however, still held the mountain fortress of Alinda just fifty miles away. The Carians chafed under the rule of a foreign overlord and longed to see
Ada on the throne once again. It was a situation that Alexander could exploit to his own advantage.
On the march from Miletus to Halicarnassus, the Macedonians captured several smaller towns along the way, presumably including the sacred oracle of Apollo at Didyma. It seems unlikely that Alexander could have resisted the opportunity to visit this hilltop site overlooking the sea, as it had been one of the greatest prophetic centers in the Greek world before the Persian king Darius I destroyed it at the beginning of the fifth century. Darius deported the ruling priesthood, known as the Branchidae, to central Asia even though they had collaborated with the Persians, to protect them from retribution by their Greek neighbors. Alexander would have known of their fate and the rituals once conducted at the temple. As at Delphi, a consecrated prophetess conveyed the will of the god to mortals. At Didyma she first bathed, then entered the shrine to hear the questions put forth by petitioners. She sat on an axle suspended over a sacred spring, dipping her foot into the water before she answered. It must have saddened the king that the voice of Apollo had grown silent at this holy place, and he may have given orders to reestablish the oracle.
At the seaside town of Iasus, Alexander met a delegation of officials who welcomed him and anxiously petitioned him to restore the fishing rights they had lost under the Persians. Such prosaic matters may have seemed to some beneath the concern of the king, but Alexander knew that the support of local leaders was crucial to his enterprise and gladly granted their request. There he also met a young boy who had tamed a friendly dolphin. The king was so impressed by the lad and his talent with sea creatures that he afterward named him as chief priest of the god Poseidon at Babylon.
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