Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Archers and slingers for long-range provocation; arrow-shooting catapults for cover and the clearing of city walls; Companions for piercing charges; Foot Companions for routing broken infantry; Shield Bearers for tough missions and for locking the sarissas and cavalry into a solid and well-flanked battle front; Philip had trained the first balanced standing army in the Balkans, and he could add to it his foreign subjects, whether the heavy Thessalian cavalry in their diamond-shaped formations, the light-armed horsemen and javelin-throwers of the Thracian tribes, or the hired Greek infantry who served against their fellow-Greeks without any show of reluctance. But balance was pointless without the freedom to campaign on demand, and here was the last, though not the least, of Philip's innovations.

  In the Greek states armies were mostly conscripted from citizens as and when they were needed, and because the citizens were also farmers the army could not go to war in the months of the harvest. Only in Sparta, where a thousand aristocrats had ended by tyrannizing a massive body of Greek serfs, was there enough farm labour to back a standing army; by conquest and plunder, Philip had raised Macedonia to the situation of a Sparta. Too much has been made of the apparent leap in Macedonia's birth rate between Philip's accession and Alexander's death. The figures are misleading and are also influenced by the kingdom's widening boundaries and the recruitment, perhaps, of new tribes and classes; the raw imports of prisoners are far more relevant, as all prisoners who were not sold were enslaved as usual and in an agricultural and unmechanized world where leisure was otherwise impossible Greece's talent for literature, direct democracy and citizen-warfare had always depended on the exploitation of slave labour. Philip had dragged home slaves by the 10,000 to work his mines and farm his feudal nobility's estates. Some, as Athenian visitors to Pella noticed, were given away in droves as presents; others, fellow-Athenians even, were despatched to Philip's own vineyards. Their general effect had been to free Macedonian soldiery from the bonds of the farmers' and foresters' calendar.

  'He does not distinguish,' complained one of Philip's enemies, 'between summer and winter; he sets no time of the year aside for inactivity.' Philip's army was not only balanced, it was also backed by enough slaves to make it mobile. In late autumn, Alexander had hurried it through Greece; the following spring, in the month of the harvest, he would direct it up to the Danube, across to Illyria, south again for vengeance in Greece on a march as brisk and varied as any of his father's. The army had only lacked one element, a leader of natural genius; at the age of twenty-one, Alexander would show that his invincibility might, after all, be a theme of substance.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  If Greece seemed submissive, there were still old scores to be settled in Philip's legacy among the barbarian kingdoms of the European north. Philip had played one Thracian king against another beyond Macedonia's north-east borders and settled an impressive network of new towns through modem Bulgaria as far north as the river Danube and the Black Sea. He had controlled most of the huge rough hinterland of his road to Asia and enjoyed the rich rewards of its royal tithes. It had been the most brilliant of his conquests, but it was not complete: three autumns before his death, Philip had been returning from a conquest on the banks of the Danube with a rich plunder of cattle, girls, small boys and brood mares when the free-spirited tribe of Triballians in Thrace raided his lines, removed all the spoils and wounded him badly in the thigh. The losses were especially annoying as Philip's finances were under strain and his troops were wanting pay; Alexander had served on the march, and he now set out in spring 335 to avenge his father and protect the flanks of the road between Macedonia and the Asian invasion. He knew how lines of communication mattered. Any recovered plunder would be welcomed by the treasury.

  For the first time he was very much on his own. Antipater was left in Macedonia and Parmenion was probably in Asia with other proven generals. Alexander had twice had experience of Thracian tribes and landscape; he would now overcome them by an expert use of varied weaponry, the main principle of his military success. All Philip's units were brought into use, except for the Mounted Scouts with their two-handed lances, for they were already in Asia, where the open plains suited them. Only one unit was added as Alexander's own, and though small, it was very significant. During Philip's lifetime, he had privately befriended the King of the Agrianians, a mountain tribe on the upper Strymon river near Macedonia's northern border; a thousand or so of their javelin-throwers now came with their king to join Alexander's skirmishing-troops, and as a foil to Philip's Shield Bearers, they would show most admirable ferocity. The Ghurkhas of Alexander's army, they are the one point at which he already excelled his father's balanced armoury

  The march was planned on the model of Philip's expedition four years earlier, and its aims were the Danube and the Triballians, Philip's enemies. Orders were sent for the small fleet of long warships to row from Byzantium, where they were guarding the Dardanelles. They were to hug the shore of the Black Sea northwards to the mouth of the Danube, and then come up river to meet the land army. Only Philip, among Greece's generals, had ever reached the Danube, but Alexander had watched him do it; in emulation of his father, he was already thinking ambitiously, and while attending to the sacrifices which were the business of every general, he chanced on support for his thoughts. While he offered meat to Dionysus in the famous sanctuary of Crestonia in eastern Macedonia beside his road, the flame flared up unusually high, a peculiarity of the shrine, and his prophets were quick to recognize the traditional omen of a victorious king. It was not long before the omen of flame was confirmed on the battlefield.

  In appallingly rugged country his road ran through a narrow defile, perhaps the modern Shipka pass, whose tribesmen had bivouacked behind a defending line of carts. First, as in Thessaly, Alexander looked for a way round them; he failed, so he assessed the chances of forcing them directly. The carts seemed a defence, but he quickly realized they could also be rolled downhill into his packed ranks; his men were told to advance, and those with room to manoeuvre were ordered to spread out if the carts began rolling, those with proper shields were to lie flat on the ground and use them as cover. Down came the carts, and some ranks opened, others dropped down as ordered, and the carts either rumbled through the gaps or else bounced over the wall of shields, 'and not one of the Macedonians was killed', implied Alexander's friend Ptolemy* in his history of the incident. When Alexander faced Persian chariots four years later, he defeated them as he defeated these Thracian carts; great generals remember ruses which have worked before, and soon he would show that he memorized as much from reading as from experience.

  Thrace's wooded landscape was more of an obstacle than its unarmoured tribesmen, so much so that Philip had once used a pack of hounds to flush his enemy from the thickets. Alexander balanced his weapons nicely. His father's slingers and archers provoked the barbarians out of the woods, then his infantry pitched into them, uphill if necessary, and his cavalry either jostled or punched in from the flanks wherever there were clearings. Before long he had routed the Triballians so thoroughly that their king retreated with a few loyalists to an island in the Danube itself, where he was watched from the far bank by its nomadic tribesmen.

  * I do not, of course, imply that Ptolemy's entire history or precise words have ever survived; sec the General Note on Sources at the end of this book for this point and for the identity of our main historians.

  Alexander despatched his booty back to Macedonia, for he remembered his father's unhappy losses, and advanced to Europe's great river to round off his first foreign campaign.

  His ships met him as requested, but they were too few and feeble to storm the Triballian island, so Alexander abandoned the sea power which, like Napoleon, he never mastered, and decided to float his troops across the Danube for a show of terror on the far bank. Fishing canoes were commandeered, and orders were given for the troops to fill their leather tent-skins with chaff and sew them together to make rafts; on these makeshift transports they cros
sed the river under cover of night, their horses swimming beside them. They landed cunningly near the cover of a tall cornfield, and were led through the crops by the Foot Companions who smoothed a way with the flat blades of their sarissas. On open ground, they loosed a classic charge, punching forwards with the Companions on the right wing, backing up with sarissas in square formation in the centre. The tribesmen fled first to a fort, then retreated on horseback into the steppes. Alexander knew better than to follow a retreating enemy into barren steppeland, and so returned to count the plunder and sacrifice to 'Zeus the Saviour, Heracles and the river Danube for allowing him to cross it'.

  The manner of his crossing was not just a matter of the river's goodwill. Nomad relations of the Danube tribesmen were known to stuff their horses' skins with chaff when they died, but there is no evidence that Alexander's straw-stuffed rafts were a native custom; they belonged, rather, to the East, to the Euphrates and the Oxus, and the rivers of the Punjab where stuffed skins able to carry some two hundred pounds still serve as kilik rafts for the natives. No Macedonian had ever seen so far into Asia, and only one Greek general had described it; Xenophon the Athenian, who led the Ten Thousand Greeks through Mesopotamia at the turn of the century, and recorded his march in his memoirs. Faced with the Euphrates he had been shown how to cross it on rafts of stuffed skins; at the Danube, Alexander evidently turned to a trick he had read in a military history.

  After the bold example of the first Balkan troops ever to cross the Danube, tribes along the river sent presents of friendship, and the Triballians surrendered on their island; later, more than 2,000 joined Alexander in Asia. Even the so-called Celts of western Europe who lived far up river near the Adriatic coast, sent envoys to plead for alliance. Alexander asked them, wrote his friend Ptolemy, 'what they feared most in the world, hoping they would say himself, but they replied that they were most afraid that the sky would fall on to their heads', an old Celtic belief which had already been described by Herodotus; not for the last time, a Macedonian described an unknown tribe through Herodotean eyes. But the Celts' presence was more pleasing than their stubbornness, for Macedonia was serving history in a way that her Greek subjects could not recognize at the time; bestriding the Balkans, she acted as a barrier against the pressure of Europe's restless tribesmen, and a strong Macedonia guaranteed the safety of the Greeks' city life in the south. Not for another fifty years would hordes of Gauls pour into Greece from Europe and threaten her civilization, and then only at a time of feeble confusion in the Macedonian royal family. The European conquests of Philip and Alexander belonged to a wider perspective, essential to the safety, if not the freedom, of Greece. But there was another corridor to Europe, and no sooner had Alexander received the Celts than he heard that it too was giving trouble.

  West and north-west of Macedonia's highlands lived the tribes of Illyrians whose villages controlled the main road of invaders from Europe into Greece and whose kings were dangerous in their own right. When Philip took the kingdom, they had overrun much of Macedonia, killing the king and claiming heavy tribute. Philip fought them back, and pierced far up the Adriatic Coast at all seasons to harass them; he had peopled his north-west frontier with new garrison towns, uprooting his subjects 'like a shepherd who moves his flocks from winter to summer pastures', but he had never ensured their security and the Illyrians had been one of the failures of his reign. The king he had learnt to respect was Bardylis, who had twice exacted tribute from Macedonia and was known as an extraordinarily rich man; he had recently died aged ninety, and it was his son who threatened Alexander with frontier war.

  Within weeks, the Danube had been forgotten and Alexander was deep in Illyrian marshes and borderlands. Penning Bardylis's son into a stronghold in late summer he had settled down to besiege him in a narrow glen, only to find that a neighbouring king appeared in force along the passes that blocked his escape. This was a very unpleasant situation. He was short of food and his foraging-parties had to be rescued from harassment; he could not retreat unchallenged, for Bardylis's son would sortie from his fort and launch into his rear with troops who had already shown proof of their taste for human sacrifices. The escape route was a narrow wooded valley between the foot of a sheer mountain and a river beneath, and it was only broad enough for four men abreast. Trapped, Alexander resorted to an impudent bluff.

  On his patch of open ground, he narrowed his infantry into a line 120 ranks deep and placed a few cavalry on either wing. Sarissas were to be held erect and on command, the first five ranks were to lower them for the charge and swish them in perfect time from left to right; all troops would advance, swinging from one wing to the other to match the front sarissa bearers, and they would form into a wedge on the left and charge towards the enemy. Shields were to be clashed and the war-cry of Alalalalai was to be echoed down the glen. On the first rapid strides forward, the main enemy fled in panic from the hill-tops, scared by the disciplined drill and the sound of the war-cry.

  The next task was to secure the lower slopes of the mountain from the few remaining guards. A troop of Companions galloped up to dismount and do battle, but the guards fled again at their onset and the hill passed to Alexander and his skirmishing force of Agrianians, archers and Shield Bearers. While they held the slopes against the enemy higher up the mountain, the rest of the army forded the river on one side of the narrows, continuing the war-cry and forming swiftly up on the far bank to deter attackers; Alexander held their rear with his trusted skirmishers and only joined them when it seemed safe. More shouting and firm drill from, the infantry scared off the worst of the danger, and when Alexander was finally forced to ford the river himself, he arranged for arrow-shooting catapults on the far bank to give him cover across the water. Holding off with his skirmishers, covering with his artillery, and menacing with his heavier troops, he escaped disaster by an intelligently balanced withdrawal. Three days later he slipped back by night across the river and launched two brigades of Foot Companions and his invaluable archers and Agrianians into an enemy who were casually encamped and not expecting to see him again. Many were slaughtered, more captured and the Illyrian kings fled northwards, discredited.

  But unwelcome news prevented any further pursuit. It was already mid-September and by circling round his northern frontiers, Alexander had presumed on the obedience of the Greeks and the continuing safety of Philip's advance force in Asia. On both points he was mistaken. In Asia, Attalus had been murdered, and it was perhaps on news of this that Olympias had taken vengeance into her own hands in Macedonia and murdered Eurydice, niece of Attalus and the girl who had supplanted her in Philip's affections; for completeness, she had murdered her baby daughter Europe too. But in Asia, perhaps because of Attalus's removal, the advance force had faltered and been driven back by the vigour of the Persian king's generals; as part of a coherent strategy, 300 talents were said to have been sent to Demosthenes, most hostile of Athenian politicians, and there were hopes that the Greeks would rebel against their leaders. Rebellion had indeed come, but it owed nothing to Persia or to Athenian politicians.

  Three years before Philip had punished the city of Thebes in central Greece harshly for her opposition on the battlefield; she had been his ally, then changed sides as her hopes were disappointed; after the Greeks' defeat, she had seen her prisoners sold as slaves and her dead buried only after she had paid for the privilege. In the city prominent Thebans were killed or exiled and their property was confiscated; a Macedonian garrison invested Thebes's fortress and a council of three hundred Thebans, many of whom had already been exiled by their fellow citizens, were set in authority over men who loathed them for their debt to Macedonia. Worst of all, in the name of independence Philip had promised to restore the smaller cities in surrounding Boeotia; these cities Thebes had persistently tried to tyrannize for the sake of more land and power, and nearly two hundred years of Theban history could be written round her domination of small and reluctant neighbours. Now they were to be independent, by order of a M
acedonian.

  It was not, then, Alexander who was to blame for Thebes's latest upheaval. Philip's severity was working itself out in Alexander's name, and the cause was the secret return of Thebans whom Philip had banished three years before. They talked of freedom and they alleged that Alexander had been killed in battle near the Danube. This sounded too convincing to resist, and when they described the misbehaviour of the Macedonian garrison, whom the Thebans had been too slow to eject the previous autumn, two of its leaders were seized and assassinated. It was open rebellion, now, but their talk of freedom was hardly disinterested: among the returned exiles, there were former officials of the league through which Thebes had dominated her neighbours, and if they were protesting against Macedonia's tyranny, they were also indignant that their own sweet days of local empire had ended.