In 336, Alexander was much more impatient. One of his qualities was intelligent rapidity. He reacted instantly to events and combined this with a taste for subterfuge and surprise. He always sent scouts out ahead of his army so that he was well informed about the enemy and unlikely to become a victim of ambush. The speed with which he managed his campaigns constantly caught enemies on the back foot. Confronted with emergencies in mainland Greece and in northern Macedonia and Thrace, he made war precede, not follow, diplomacy. He took on everybody at once, marching his exhausted men at a hectic pace from hotspot to hotspot, and invariably arrived on the scene sooner than expected. To his opponents the effect was almost magical. It gave an impression of focused energy and invincible force. Resistance often collapsed without a fight.
Once the enemy had conceded, Alexander was inclined to clemency. The defeated chieftains Cleitus and Glaucias were left alone and, as we have seen, a treaty with Thebes and Athens was soon agreed. If obliged to run for a second time around the course, he could be violent and cruel. As at Pelium he refused to accept defeat, but insisted on returning to the fray until he obtained his bloodbath.
Alexander watched the enemy with close attention. He had an uncanny talent for noticing small changes or movements and correctly interpreting them. So he guessed the secret purpose of the stockade of carts. Once he had identified a problem he would instantly improvise a solution, however eccentric; to win an encounter by a consummate display of drill was a remarkable example of his imagination at work.
He knew the importance of small casualty lists to the morale of his soldiers. He learned a bitter lesson at Pelium when his logistics failed and the army ran out of food. It was a failure that he never allowed to occur again.
* * *
—
IN THE AUTUMN OF 335, news arrived in Athens that the young king was no more. Demosthenes produced a man before the ecclesia, or citizens’ assembly, who had been wounded in a battle with the Triballi a long way away in darkest Thrace. He had witnessed the destruction of the Macedonian army and seen the king fall. The account was plausible and was widely accepted. The outcome of this report was, as Justin observed, that “the feelings of all the cities were changed and the garrisons of the Macedonians besieged.”
Some exiles slipped into Thebes from Athens one night to stir up the people. They spoke at the assembly, “making play with the fine old words ‘liberty’ and ‘free speech,’ ” and persuaded the Thebans to shake off the Macedonian yoke. Two officers of a Macedonian force occupying the Cadmea, the city’s citadel, were assassinated. The Thebans were playing with fire, for they were signed-up members of the League of Corinth and the common peace. To abrogate unilaterally an international treaty was to break an oath sworn before the gods. This was sacrilege and could be punished by the destruction of one’s city, the killing of all adult males, and the selling of all women and children into slavery.
But the Thebans felt safe to launch their rebellion because, they argued, Alexander’s death freed them of their allegiance. They took comfort from a growing mood of resistance throughout Greece. The Athenian ecclesia voted for an immediate alliance with Thebes and planned to send troops in support. Armed contingents were on their way from the Peloponnese. Demosthenes, well funded by the Great King, scattered gold throughout Greece to win over uncertain consciences.
Alexander, undead, was informed of these developments and saw that he could not ignore them. He immediately abandoned any plans he had for mopping up in Thrace and ordered his expeditionary force to proceed south with all speed (presumably the baggage train followed at its own slower pace). The first stage of the journey was through an inhospitable and mountainous landscape with few inhabitants. He must have sent ahead for supplies of food and, after covering a distance of 120 miles as the crow flies, arrived on the seventh day in Thessaly. We may assume a brief pause for eating, drinking, and resting. Then the march resumed. After another 120 miles the Macedonians rushed through the unguarded Hot Gates, or Thermopylae, and six days after leaving Thessaly arrived in Boeotia.
This was a remarkable achievement. The Greeks had no idea that Alexander had passed through Thermopylae until he was in Boeotia with his army at the town of Onchestus, only a day’s march from Thebes. He showed that the gibes of Demosthenes had got under his skin. He remarked: “Demosthenes called me a boy while I was in Illyria and among the Triballi, and a youth when I was marching through Thessaly. I will show him I am a man by the time I reach the walls of Athens.”
The shocked Theban leaders made the best of a bad job by insisting on Alexander’s death and arguing that it had to be another Alexander who commanded the Macedonian force. Few were convinced and the heart went out of the rebellion. The Peloponnesians halted at Corinth and then went home. Athens had second thoughts about sending military assistance.
The trusted eyewitness packed away his bandages and vial of pig’s blood.
* * *
—
IT MAY HAVE BEEN at about this time that the king sent top-secret messages to the regent Antipater and possibly to his mother, Olympias. The last thing he needed was for a palace conspiracy to erupt, adding domestic to foreign troubles. It was too dangerous to allow Amyntas, son of Perdiccas, to continue as a potential pretender to the throne and a rallying point for his opponents, however innocent he was of intention. So he was put to death.
Olympias had killed Philip’s last queen, Cleopatra, and her little girl, Europa. As usual she overdid things. The exotic cruelty of their deaths (the mother forced to hang herself after watching her child incinerated) attracted adverse comment.
We do not know for certain that Olympias was acting under her son’s orders, but she may have been. As we have seen, though, he was reported to have been furious with her for acting so barbarically. One way or another, the historical record suggests that no holds were barred when it came to a dispute inside the Macedonian royal family. Cruelty to kith and kin was a popular tradition.
Children were regarded as an extension of their father and mother, and their murder when politics destroyed their parents was almost automatic. It occurred in drama as well as during real-life dynastic struggles and is a central theme of Euripides’ masterpiece, The Trojan Women. The plot echoes the horrors of the Macedonian court: Troy has fallen and a Trojan princess’s daughter has been sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. Her little son has to die too, because the Greek leaders are afraid that the boy will grow up to avenge his father, the great warrior Hector. Realpolitik trumps decency and mercy.
The queen mother’s intervention was perfectly understandable, contemporary observers will have felt. Maybe she had acted a little roughly, but within the conventions of the age.
* * *
—
THE DAY AFTER HIS ARRIVAL at Onchestus, Alexander made his way to Thebes and encamped in front of the walls.
On the way he halted at the shrine of Iolaus, a guardian demigod of Thebes and nephew of Heracles. He was the great man’s charioteer and companion of his Labors (some said his eromenos). The shrine was a place where male lovers worshipped and exchanged vows. We may assume that Alexander paid his respects (doubtless accompanied by Hephaestion).
Having rushed to the seat of the revolt, the king now waited patiently. It would be much more convenient if the Thebans submitted without a fight, just as they had done the previous year. However, during this interval, Alexander did not waste his time. He contacted city-states hostile to Thebes, all of them league members, and persuaded them to join him. They would give him useful cover if he captured the city and decided to punish it.
Over the preceding centuries Thebes had made itself unpopular with its neighbors. It had never succeeded in winning permanent control of the smaller city-states inside Boeotia, the territory it claimed as its own. The Thebans had infuriated the entire Greek community by siding with the Persians when King Xerxes invaded mainland Hellas in 480, and
had made a name for themselves as traitors or Medisers (from the Medes, who were an ancient Iranian people; their name was used as a synonym for Persians). In the fourth century they became the greatest military power in Hellas, but only for an arrogant but brief decade, during which time they won no friends.
Alexander hoped for reconciliation, but enemy skirmishers made life difficult for his men and he decided to move camp to a better position. He settled outside the Electra Gate, near the Cadmea where the Macedonian garrison was holed up. He straddled the road from Athens up which a relief force might be expected to come.
The citadel was close to the city wall; to improve the wall’s defensive strength, the Thebans built two wooden palisades in front of it. Alexander agreed to a plan of attack with Perdiccas, the commander of two Macedonian battalions (which as the camp guard were in a forward position). He was among the king’s most loyal friends, and had been one of those who had pursued and killed Philip’s assassin. The men were growing impatient and were worried about their friends on the Cadmea. Perdiccas launched an assault before receiving orders to do so.
They broke through the first palisade and charged the defending troops. Their success forced the king’s hand. To avoid the battalions being cut off, he was obliged to send in the archers and Agrianians to occupy the space between the palisades. Perdiccas now forced his way through the second palisade, but was severely wounded and had to be evacuated (he survived).
The desperate Thebans turned on their pursuers and pushed them back. Alexander had foreseen this eventuality and had assembled his infantry in full battle array on open ground. As at Pelium, the Thebans lost formation as they chased the Macedonians away from the city’s defenses. They suddenly found themselves confronted by a phalanx bristling with long pikes. Routed, they ran into the city, so panic-stricken that they failed to shut the gates.
The Macedonians poured in behind them and the garrison in the Cadmea joined their victorious comrades. Bitter street fighting ensued. Alexander was to be seen here, there, and everywhere. Organized resistance lasted for only a short time and the Macedonians advanced to the city center. The Theban cavalry broke out and rode off in flight across the plain.
It was at this point that the embittered neighbors of Thebes took their long-awaited revenge. Arrian notes:
There followed a furious slaughter. It was not so much the Macedonians as the Phocians, Plataeans, and other Boeotians who began the indiscriminate killing of the now defenseless Thebans. They broke into houses and killed the occupants; they killed any who attempted to fight back; they killed even the suppliants at the altars; they spared neither women nor children.
Corpses were piled high in the streets. The number of the Theban dead was estimated at six thousand, and thirty thousand prisoners were counted. Five hundred Macedonians lost their lives, by Alexander’s standards quite a high number.
* * *
—
WHAT WAS TO BE done with Thebes, that ancient city of legend and history? This was where Oedipus had ruled, killed his father, married his mother, and blinded himself in expiation. Here too the man-woman seer, Tiresias, had prophesied. Alexander was in two minds, or possibly three. At heart, he favored a severe penalty. This would deter the Greeks from rising again during his absence in Persia and so support the overriding strategic aim which he had also pursued in Thrace. However, he preferred not to take the blame, so he handed the decision to the council of the League of Corinth. They should judge. He was well aware that there were scores to settle and that he could depend on council members to be harsh. Finally, he made a mental note to be magnanimous to individual Thebans, as occasion arose.
The council, convened in special session, behaved as he guessed it would. Among other witnesses, a Plataean reminded his audience that in 373 Thebes had attacked his tiny town on the edge of Boeotia and driven out all the inhabitants. That universal moralist, Isocrates, had denounced the crime and its perpetrator. Memories were long. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
There were precedents for the execution of all adult males and the enslavement of the women and children. It was the convention when a city resisted a siege, and some argued for this ancient prototype of genocide. However, the council finally recommended that the king and hegemon take no more lives, but sell the entire population on the slave market and raze the city. Alexander will have recalled that it was the same penalty his father had imposed on the thriving city of Olynthus in 348. He accepted the judgment and put it into effect. It would be as if Thebes had never existed.
The final profit from the sale was the considerable sum of 440 silver talents (a talent was a measurement of weight and amounted to about 26 kilograms, or 57 pounds). It will have been some time before the cash became available and presumably it was added to the king’s war chest.
The king took steps that would, he must have hoped, sweeten his now blood-soaked reputation. The morning after the city’s capture, he restored order and called off his men. A decree forbidding any further butchery was proclaimed, and a large number of Thebans—guest-friends, pro-Macedonian politicians, priests, and any who could show that they had opposed the uprising—were set free together with their families. Of the thirty thousand prisoners it appears that only twenty thousand were sold. The Macedonian soldiery turned their energies to pulling down the city’s buildings, except for its temples and sacred places. These were spared to avoid offending the gods. It is said that Alexander compelled the Theban musician Ismenias to play his pipes while the city was being demolished.
One of the greatest poets of Hellas was Pindar. He flourished in the fifth century and most of his poems are celebrations of young athletes, victorious at the four-yearly Panhellenic games of Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea. He has a deep sense not only of the tragedy of life, but also of the glory, however fleeting, of human achievement. This famous coda from one of his victory odes evokes the character of his work.
Creatures for a day! What is a man?
What is he not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendor given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days.
Pindar was a Theban and Alexander took good care to ensure that amid all the mayhem his house was left untouched and all his descendants were spared.
A troop of Thracians broke into the home of a noblewoman called Timocleia. While they were plundering everything they could find, their commander took the opportunity to rape her. When he had finished, he asked Timocleia whether she had any gold or silver hidden. She was a person of great presence of mind, and replied that indeed she had. If he came into the garden she would show him where it was. She led the man to a well and told him that when the city had been stormed she had dropped in it all her most valuable possessions. He leaned over and peered down the shaft, whereupon she gave him a firm push so that he fell in. She threw stone after stone onto him until he was dead.
The Thracians grabbed Timocleia, tied her hands, and brought her before the king for him to judge her fate. He was impressed by her calm demeanor and asked her to identify herself. She replied: “I am the sister of Theagenes who commanded our army against your father, Philip, and fell at Chaeronea fighting for the liberty of Greece.”
Alexander thoroughly approved of what she had just done and set her and her children free. The world should know that this was royal justice.
* * *
—
SOME WOLVES WERE TRYING to surprise a flock of sheep. Unable to reach the peaceable animals because of the dogs that were guarding them, they decided to use a trick to get what they wanted.
They sent some delegates to ask the sheep to give up their dogs. It was the dogs, they said, who created the bad blood between them. If only the sheep would get rid of them, peace would reign between sheep and wolves. Th
e sheep did not foresee what was going to happen and gave up the dogs. The wolves could now follow their instincts: they made supper of the unguarded sheep.
Demosthenes told this fable to the Athenian ecclesia. Alexander had indicated that he was willing to overlook its support of Thebes provided that it hand over to him eight anti-Macedonian politicians, including the great orator himself. They were the guard dogs and Alexander was a lone wolf, worse than those who run together. According to Aristotle, “Wolves tend to be man-eaters when they hunt singly rather than in a pack.” Demosthenes strongly advised his fellow citizens not to surrender him and his colleagues if they did not want to be eaten up.
The statesman Demades had been on good terms with King Philip and had criticized his boorish behavior after the Battle of Chaeronea; he was also friendly with Alexander. For a handsome consideration, he volunteered to plead with the king on their behalf. Plutarch comments sardonically that the Athenian “may have trusted in his personal relationship with Alexander, or he may have counted on finding him sated with blood, like a lion that has been glutted with slaughter.”
At any rate, Demades persuaded the king to pardon all but one of the eight men, including Demosthenes, and arranged terms of peace for the city.
* * *
—
BUT ALEXANDER’S ATTEMPTS AT magnanimity failed to win over public opinion. The Greeks were horrified by the destruction of Thebes and were not deceived by his delegation of judgment to the League of Corinth. It was his will that had prevailed. Nor were they persuaded by the clemency he showed to individuals. Over time, he also came to regret what he had done, being too clearheaded to believe his own propaganda, and acted kindly toward Thebans who crossed his path in the years to come.
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