Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  For twenty-three years Philip had welded his growing Macedonia for war. Toughness was obligatory, and reflected in numerous anecdotes: Philip stationing his horsemen behind the lines to cut down any deserters, Philip refusing to allow women into camp, Philip berating a Macedonian for washing in warm water because in Macedonia only a woman who had just given birth was allowed to bath in comfort. Discipline was backed by plunder, foreign tithes, new farmland and the old gold mines which were seized on Macedonia's eastern borders and transformed to yield a solid supply of gold coin; a standing army could thus be supported, a luxury which only Sparta among the Greeks had braced herself to afford, and at once Philip began to teach it how to march. Whereas the infantrymen of Greek citizen armies would take one servant each to war with them, Philip allowed only one attendant to every ten soldiers; he banned carriages for his officers and forced them to march for thirty miles at a time in high summer or to carry thirty days' supply of flour on their backs when going out to summer camp. They were to rely on as few ox-drawn carts and mules for transport as possible. Stone hand-mills were taken to grind the corn in camp, and a regulation diet of bread and olives was only supplemented by plundered livestock, although Macedonia was also rich in fish and fruit, especially figs, whose high sugar content was thought suitable for soldiers. The army learnt to live off the land whatever the season, even if they had to scratch a living from native store-pits in the grip of a Bulgarian winter. For the first time, distance had ceased to matter in Balkan warfare.

  This trained army was balanced by Philip's tactics, but great tactics are born less of originality than of a shrewd use of contemporary fashion, and Philip's army did not, like the goddess Athena, spring fully armed from its parent's brain. Greek society had seldom analysed its skills in technical pamphlets, but. warfare had been better served than arts as basic as mining or forestry, and the writings of such men as the general Xenophon were an accessible source of ideas both for oriental hazards and for the equipment of the horses which he so enjoyed. Infantry tactics were best learnt from example and discussion, and increasingly they had passed in the last sixty years from Greece's landed aristocrats to a new breed of common professionals, sons of a cobbler or a tradesman, who hired out their services abroad and spent most of their life in an army camp. Macedonia lay close to their operations, and in assessing Philip's army, the influences of Greek theory and professionals are central; Philip had inherited a siege train from his predecessor, but he hired his own Greek engineer, Polyeidus of Thessaly, and sponsored his inventions. 'A good deal of circumstantial evidence suggests that the principle of torsion was invented under the auspices of Philip II', who first applied spring of sinew or horsehair to the recently discovered arrow-catapult, doubling its range and power. Polyeidus also designed a system of toothed city walls and a siege tower 120 feet high, and he taught the pupils who devised ever stronger machinery for Alexander's siege-craft section. No Macedonian could have done it for himself.

  On the battlefield, cavalry and infantry were Philip's two staple units, and he balanced them into a coherent line. On the right wing, the cavalry delivered the hammer blow, and in the centre, the infantry followed up like a heavy press; this was his standard tactic and Alexander's too, and it was held together by links of differing armour. Already it gave them an advantage. Because Greek infantry drifted to their right, or shielded side, generals usually placed their strongest units on their respective lefts, with the result that they never met in combat. The Macedonian right and left were equally balanced to upset their enemy's formation and their infantry never drifted from the centre; Philip may have learnt his line from the Theban general Pammenes who had entertained him in his youth at Thebes. As the punch force, the cavalry had the distinction of deciding the pitched battle, usually at the gallop; this method is spectacular, but many have failed to control it, for cavalry units are an unruly group of young bloods and gentlemen who only respond to a dashing example. This dash Alexander provided even more than his father, and his leadership turned the Companions into the finest unit of cavalry in history, Genghis Khan's included. For this, they had needed a proper home.

  In southern Greece sparse summer grazing and a lack of men rich enough to own horses had mostly stopped cavalry from developing decisive style or numbers. But the feudal nobility of Macedonia were men born to ride and their European climate of glen and plain had given them watered pasturage. The highlands too had always grazed good horses, and by conquering the lush grass beyond his eastern borders in the first ten years of his reign Philip had won a broad acreage on which to settle nobles and a new class of landowners on new horse-pastures, until eight hundred Companion cavalrymen could be said to enjoy estates as vast as the total lands of the ten thousand richest men in Greece. Fertile estates meant more horses and revenues for a wider group of riders, and the number of Companion cavalrymen had risen from some six hundred or more at Philip's accession to some four thousand by the end of his reign. As for the horses, they were increased and varied by plundered mares from the barbarian north, a crossing which may have helped their speed. The horses of antiquity are coarse and heavy to an eye accustomed to Arab blood, and pictures on coins and paintings imply that Macedonian breeds had become heavier in the hundred years before Alexander. No stud books were kept of their lines, so improvement could not be planned; gelding was practised on most Greek warhorses and the technique of binding two wooden blocks to the testicles was as modem and effective as would be expected in a world well supplied with eunuchs.

  The Companion rider was modestly defended. In art, he is never shown carrying a shield, though his attendant groom might. He wore the usual breastplates of leather or metal in various designs, fitted with armpieces for close combat when he took to using his sword or curved hunting scimitar. He had no stirrups and he sat on a saddlecloth which was strapped round the horse's neck and sometimes padded to protect his knees. Over his belted tunic he sported a flowing Macedonian cloak and a fringed skirt of leather or metal to protect his private parts; his shoes were characteristically Macedonian and opened at the foot like sandals, with no defences. His helmet resembled a fluted sou'wester of metal and was sometimes worn with a metal neck guard; Xenophon had recommended these items in his books on cavalry, and the distinctive helmet, which he had singled out for wide vision, was invented in Greek Boeotia where Philip had spent early years as a hostage. But of Xenophon's suggested metal leg shields and horse armour, the Companions copied nothing.

  Techniques of skirmishing and wheeling had been developed by aristocrats and tribesmen, in the open plains of Sicily and the barbarian north, and these fluid manoeuvres were causing a favour in Greek tactics for lighter armour, javelins and a more distanced use of cavalry. Philip made no concessions to this. On the few occasions when the corseleted horsemen of Macedonia had been seen by Greek armies in the past hundred years, they had always astonished them by the plain shock of their charges, Philip did not discard this dramatic form of attack. Stirrups had not been invented, so a rider's legs could not be braced against impact and his lance could neither be stout nor supported under his arm. Nonetheless, the Companions surged into their enemy and lanced them. Their lances were fitted with a metal blade and cut from the cornel wood whose toughness Xenophon praised; they were so slender that they vibrated at the gallop and often broke on contact. Their use was mostly as a menace to scatter the line, whereupon men hacked and jostled against an enemy whom their bravado had unsettled. All Alexander's wounds from cavalry came from daggers and swords, not lances. However, the enemy too had no stirrups and experiment shows that a passing blow will topple a man without them, especially if he is heavily armoured.

  Riders were expected to steady themselves by holding on to the mane, but even this aid was no more essential than stirrups to an effective charge; Philip had recruited a force of Mounted Scouts who rode most usefully on reconnaissance and returned to charge in the front line with a lance so long that both hands were needed to hold it. They guided their
horses by the pressure of their knees, like any expert modern horseman and far from being an idle experiment, their two-handed technique survived not only among Russian cavalrymen in Africa but also among the Scythian nomads of the south Russian steppes. What writing has done to the memory, stirrups have done to riding; without them, men simply had to grip harder and ride better than they mostly do nowadays.

  There was, however, one technicality which helped the Companions to victory. Their basic unit was not a block but a wedge, shaped like a triangle, apex first. Cavalry have never been able to charge down a solid line of heavy infantry by a frontal attack, so the Companions first shattered or drew off the cavalry on the enemy's wing, then changed direction to cut diagonally into the flanks of the moving infantry in the centre. The wedge formation was pointed, and therefore more piercing, and it was adapted to diagonal changes of course 'because all the members fix their eyes on the squadron-leader at their point, like a flock of cranes which are flying in formation', and so took their cue from one conspicuous drill-master. Controlled turns were not easy even in a wedge. The Companions' reins and bridles were modern in appearance, but they could not be adjusted quickly to suit their circumstances, as the buckle did not exist; there were no curb-chains, so bits, especially the spiked 'hedgehog' variety, were very severe. The horses' mouths were hardened, therefore, and there were no martingales to keep their heads down when the bits were being pulled too hard. But Alexander still managed to lead with his Companions on the right wing, feint to the far right and pierce back into the centre in every pitched battle. The reason, surely, was the fluid wedge formation, which had been discovered by the brilliant horsemen of the barbarian Scyths and Thracians, and copied by Philip, who had repeatedly campaigned in the north against it,

  The Companions punched and pierced on the right; the Foot Companions, in the centre, were designed for a solid follow-up. Some 9,000 in number, they were packed shoulder to shoulder in six brigades, the centre files of which seem to have been known as the Citizen Companions, a tide whose purpose is obscure. They were armed, memorably, to cause mass terror. They carried the Macedonian pike, or sarissa, a most extraordinary weapon; its longest variety was eighteen feet long, tipped at the point by a foot-long blade of iron and at the butt by the usual metal butt-spike which helped to balance it and allowed it to be rammed into the ground for a rest or for a guard against an enemy's frontal charge. It had to be held with both hands and like the cavalry lance, it was made of cornel wood, cousin of the dogwoods from which spits and skewers have often been cut for their hard grain. The cornel tree grows abundantly in several forms, not only on Macedonia's hillsides but also in Greece and the western hills of Asia which Philip planned to conquer; its most common form, Cornus mas, has deceptively slender branches of a wide-spreading and is nowadays admired by knowing gardeners for its primrose-yellow spring flowers. Probably Macedonian foresters pruned it so that it threw up stocky stems. They made up each sarissa's full length by joining two selected branches into a central tube of bronze which helped to balance the centre of gravity.

  Because of the sarissa's length, the metal points of the first five ranks projected, perhaps in a graded series, beyond the Foot Companions' front line. It is uncertain whether the centre ranks also held sarissas or whether they were only included to give weight to the formation; they might be asked to fan out and broaden the front, so they probably did have sarissas too. If so, they could keep them vertical in deep formations and break the flight of enemy missiles, while the rear ranks could face about and drop their spears to the horizontal to make up a bristling rectangle. Drill had to be perfect, for the Foot Companions were a liability if they split, and the few known drill commands belie their years of complicated training. They could march in columns, rectangles or wedges, broaden their front by thinning their depth to a basic eight files or pack and narrow them to sixteen, thirty-two or even, in a crisis, a hundred and twenty. The file leaders were the most highly paid and seasoned troops in the unit. By marking time, they could wheel and advance at an angle, and by raising their sarissas vertically, countermarching or drilling round, then lowering them to the horizontal, they could face about. Against an enemy charge they would ram their sarissas into the earth and dress together to less than three feet between each man, so that the small shields strapped on their shoulders were contiguous. But they were never finer than when powering their way into infantry whom their cavalry had routed. Nobody who faced them ever forgot the sight; they kept time to their roaring of the Greeks' ancient war cry, Alalalalai; their scarlet cloaks billowed, and the measured swishing of their sarissas, up and down, left and right, seemed to frightened observers like the quills of a metal porcupine.

  The button-shaped shield of the Foot Companions became the national emblem of Macedonians, and yet their unit may not have been wholly a Macedonian creation. Foot Companions had fought in files of ten before Philip's reign, and although it was he who introduced their sarissas and packed their formation in multiples of eight, it is very relevant that he had spent his youth as a hostage at the Greek city of Thebes, where the two boldest generals of the age, Epaminondas and Pelopidas, were already experimenting with the deep lines and slanting battlefronts which Philip and Alexander later favoured. As for the long pikes, they were compared with those of Homer's infantry, but a truer parallel lies in Egypt where the natives had always fought with long spears and wickerwork shields. In the past forty years, professional Athenian captains had been advising the pharaohs on their army, and one of them had doubled the length of his Greeks' spears as a result; another, Iphicrates, had done likewise for the open plains of Asia, and he was a well-known friend of the Macedonian royal family, especially of Philip's mother, whom he had served, probably soon after the Foot Companions were first recruited. Another Athenian professional, Charidemus, had often campaigned on Macedonia's borders, and it was from him that Philip is said to have learnt the tight shield-to-shield formation which the Foot Companions used on the defensive. But the city of Thebes was to be destroyed by its former visitor's army and Charidemus was exiled to Asia on Alexander's orders, where he advised the Persians against the troops whom he had once helped to teach.

  Infantry armed with sarissas were every Greek state's ambition in the age that followed, and the Foot Companions became the most famous unit in Macedonia. But their formation was beset with difficulties, and those who saw them with Alexander knew it. In each of his big pitched battles, the Foot Companions either played little part or else split out of line on uneven ground, and before they invaded India, they gave up the sarissa altogether; they were a battle-winning force only if the cavalry shocked the enemy first, but they could not keep in step when the cavalry began to gallop, and once their wall of sarissas parted, through rough terrain or incompetence, the men inside were extremely vulnerable. Probably they had always worn metal greaves on their legs and breast-plates of leather or metal, an expensive but necessary defence against missiles, at least for the file-leaders; their helmets were made of metal too, and because both hands were busied with the sarissa their shields had to be small, some eighteen inches in diameter, and were slung by a strap across the left shoulder and upper arm. Often of bronze, they were convex in shape like a button, studded and painted with geometrical patterns; against heavy infantry they were a poor protection when the line had broken. Sarissas, of course, were almost useless in close combat, and the short daggers which Foot Companions wore on their hips were very much a last resort.

  Both Companions and Foot Companions were troops for open ground and weather. The Companions' horses, like all ancient cavalry, had no nailed horseshoes, and the leather boots which were slipped over their feet in icy conditions soon wore as thin as the hoof itself. But rough ground abounded in Greece, Thrace and Asia, and Philip was too varied a planner not to have taken lameness, broken ranks and the impossibility of charges into account; from three different units he developed a skirmishing force who could also fight in the front line. No troops worked
harder or more often. From an early date, he hired archers from Crete, the celebrated home of Greek archery; slingers from Rhodes were added to them, and their sling-stones have been found in the ruins of one of Philip's sacked cities inscribed with suitably rude messages. The crack troops were the 3,000 infantry whom Philip had developed as king's men and given the name of Royal Shield-bearers, formerly confined to the king's grooms and bodyguards. The finest foot force in antiquity, they deserve the credit which is given too often to the men with the sarissas.

  The Shield Bearers were troops with two functions. Because the Foot Companions wore their small shields on their left shoulders, their right flank would have been exposed if the Shield-bearer had not been stationed on it and ordered to guard it tightly with the broad circular shields from which they took their name. They served, then, as part of the Foot Companion's block, linking them to the wing of horsemen. From carvings, it seems that as front line troops they wore crested helmets, metal greaves and breastplates and fought with swords and, presumably, spears. But they also served as shock troops on night raids, hill climbs and forced marches of more than thirty miles a day, and the clear evidence of the histories confirms that they were lighter and faster than the Foot Companions; they had no sarissas, of course, and they probably left their heavy shields and body armour behind when detailed to do the work of commandos. As dual-purpose troops, their fitness was amazing. When many of them were over sixty years old, they could still cover thirty miles through desert in one summer's day; they were first up the ladders into besieged cities, or mountain forts in the Hindu Kush, first to savage the elephants and ruin the Persians' scythed chariots. After Alexander's death, they returned from the road to retirement and decided his Successors' grandest battles by showing improvised Foot Companions how their lines could be hacked apart by men old enough to be their grandfathers; they were drilled for war and nothing else, and they loved it.