Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Rumour later exaggerated their numbers farcically, but there is no doubt that at the Granicus, the Persians' army was markedly smaller than Alexander's, perhaps some 35,000 to his 50,000. Except for Memnon, their commanders were Iranian aristocrats, most of them satraps or governors of the tribes of western Asia, some of them relations real or honorific of the Persian king. However, no unit from Persia, ruling province of the Empire, was present, and the cavalry, their customary strength, was either drawn from the royal military colonists who had long been settled in return for service on the rich plains near the Asian coast away from their homes by the Caspian Sea or the Oxus, or else from the mountain tribes of Cappadocia and Paphlagonia, whose horses were famous but whose governors had raised rebellion against the Persians' loosely held empire less than thirty years before. Some of these were heavily armoured

  with the metal protections which Xenophon had noticed and which Persian sculptures confirm; the flanks of the horses and the legs of some riders were guarded with large metal sheets, while metal leg-guards projected like flaps from others' saddles to guard them against blows from a sword. The head pieces and breastplates of the horses were also of metal, while rich riders wore metal-plated armour and an encasing metal helmet, ancestors of the chain-mailed cataphracts of Sassanid Persia whom the Roman army nicknamed 'boiler-boys' because of the heat and metal of their armour. Such horsemen are far from mobile, but on the edge of a river bank where a jostle was more likely than a joust, heavy body-armour was more useful than mobility; it was a point, however, in Alexander's favour that their fellow-cavalrymen were armed with throwing-javelins, while his Companions carried tougher thrusting-lances of cornel-wood. But this was only favourable if he could give himself space to charge, and a riverbed did not seem to allow this.

  On foot, the Persians had summoned no archers but had hired nearly 20,000 Greeks from the usual sources of recruitment. At the moment they were positioned behind the line, but Memnon was a skilled commander of mercenaries, and if battle was joined immediately they would no doubt be advanced; the Companions would find it hard to break their solid formation unless they could take them in the flank, and not until they were broken could the Foot Companions charge with their sarissas. It promised to be a heavy fight.

  One element ruled out hopes of a fair trial of strength: the river which ran between the two armies. Lining its far bank, the Persian troops held a splendid defensive position; for part of its course the river Granicus flows fast and low between sheer banks of the muddy clay which Alexander's histories expressly mention as a hazard; its width is some sixty feet, and its sheer-banked section beneath the foothills of Mount Ida allows little freedom of movement for troops climbing down, through or up it. The Macedonian army had marched perhaps as much as ten miles in the day, and they needed time to spread out into battle order, especially as their commands were mostly passed down the line by word of mouth. The afternoon would be far advanced by the time they were ready for Alexander's strategy. As he rode along the river bank on his second horse, for Bucephalas was either lame or too precious to be risked, he cut a prominent figure in his helmet with the two white plumes. But it is very disputable which kind of strategy he was about to choose.

  According to one of his officers, writing after Alexander's death, there was no doubt about it. The elderly Parmenion came forward to give his 120 advice: it would be wisest, he was reported as saying, to camp for the night on the river bank, for the enemy were outnumbered in infantry and would not dare to bivouac nearby. At dawn, the Macedonians could cross the river before the Persians had formed into line, but for the moment a battle should not be risked as it would be impossible to lead troops through such deep water and up such steep and clifflike banks. 'To fail with the first attack would be dangerous for the battle in hand and harmful for the outcome of the whole campaign.'

  Alexander rejected the advice: he retorted, wrote his officer, that 'he knew this to be the case, but was ashamed if, after crossing the Hellespont with ease, the petty stream of the Granicus should deter him from crossing there and then. He did not consider that delay was worthy of his Macedonians' glory or his sharpness in the face of dangers. Besides, it would encourage the Persians to think they were a fair match for his men if they did not suffer the immediate attack which they feared.' Parmenion was sent to command the left wing, while he himself moved down to the right; there was a long pause, and then to prove his point he launched the Mounted Scouts, followed by the Companions, against enemy cavalry who lined the far bank; by a display of personal heroics against the Persian generals which lost him his lance and nearly cost him his life, he cleared a crossing for the Foot Companions and a path to an afternoon victory.

  This conversation with Parmenion is probably fiction, for Parmenion appears suspiciously often as Alexander's 'adviser', not only in his officers' histories but also in legend, whether Greek or Jewish, where he is usually refuted and so serves to set off his master's daring and intelligence. It is more relevant that within four years of the battle, Parmenion was killed, on Alexander's orders, for his son's conspiracy. From the few surviving scraps of Callisthenes's official history, Parmenion's part in the great pitched battle of Gaugamela can be seen to have been criticized strongly and probably unfairly, and a story which was used at Gaugamela could easly have been applied at the Granicus too, perhaps again by Callisthenes, or by one or both of the later historians, Alexander's friend Ptolemy and his elderly apologist Aristobulus. If Callisthenes began it, then this 'refutation' of Parmenion must have been to Alexander's liking, perhaps because it was written after Parmenion had been killed and his memory was thought fit to be blackened. But it was not only a device to set off Alexander's boldness; it was also dishonest, for others described a battle fought exactly as Parmenion suggested, and for various reasons they were probably correct.

  Alexander, wrote a historian who owed him nothing, did encamp for the night on the Granicus banks. There was no dialogue with Parmenion, but at dawn Alexander crossed the river unopposed, probably because the Persians had indeed bivouacked on a hill a mile or two back; it was not a Persian practice to begin a march before sunrise, and their universal habit of camping casually at a distance and even hobbling their horses in front of camp had already been emphasized by Xenophon as a fine chance for attackers. Having stolen a march by stealth at dawn, Alexander fanned out his battle line and clashed with a headlong charge of the Persian cavalry, who had leapt astride on news of the surprise crossing and galloped ahead of the infantry. Against them, Alexander showed a heroism worthy of any Achilles, unhorsing several satraps and receiving a mass of weapons on his Trojan shield, but on the left, Parmenion and the Thessalian cavalry ran his gallantry a close second, a fact which the officers had failed to mention. After a prolonged jostle and much use of the scimitar, the Persian cavalry fled, having lost several satraps and generals; as dawn broke, Alexander's battle line poured into the enemy camp, surrounding the Persians' hired Greek infantry, who tried to make a stand. Outnumbered, they did manage to wound Alexander's horse, but most of them were killed and a mere 2,000 were taken prisoner. Alexander could not afford to hire them himself, so he decided to make an example of them to all other Greek rebels; by his officer's figures, this meant a massacre of more than 15,000 men.

  The battle was fought and won in exactly the style which Parmenion, according to Alexander's officers, had wrongly advised. Cunning at dawn, perhaps, seemed less dashing in retrospect and so less worthy of a hero; dius they invented an afternoon charge to replace it, and blamed the real battle on Parmenion's excessive caution. In the search for Alexander the various myths and memoirs of his friends must be tested against the narrative of a literary artist, written within fifteen years of Alexander's death from what he had heard and read from participants, and the Granicus battle is the first warning that the artist, though romantic and given to exaggeration, has kept truths which the officers distorted to set off the bold planning and invincibility of their king. Personal bias in
matters of military glory should not surprise connoisseurs of history, but the weaving of a myth round a famous leader and his murdered general makes the lesson of the search no less immediate for being grounded in the distant past.

  Of the sequel to the victory there is no room for doubt and little for complaint. As a leader of men, Alexander cast a spell which was firmly based on effort, and events on the Granicus showed its notable beginnings. Memnon and several satraps escaped, but Alexander buried the Persian 122 leaders, a Greek gesture of piety which would have distressed its recipients, as many Persians did not believe in burial for religious reasons. In happier style, he 'showed much concern for the wounded, visiting each of them in turn, looking at their wounds and asking how they got them', and, human to the last, 'he gave them a chance to tell and boast of what they had done in the battle'. Twenty-five of the Companion cavalry had been killed in the charge he led, so on the morrow, he ordered them to be buried gloriously, and decreed that their parents and children should be exempt from taxes, duties of service and capital levies; bronze statues of each of them were commissioned from his official sculptor Lysippus to be set up in Macedonia's border town of Dion. As for the hired Greeks in Persian service, thousands of the dead were to be buried, but the prisoners were bound in fetters and sent to hard labour in Macedonia, 'because they had fought as Greeks against Greeks, on behalf of barbarians, contrary to the common decrees of the Greek allies'. Under cover of his father's myth, Macedonia gained a work force, and on a legal pretext an example was made to deter any future Greek recruits from joining the enemy's cause.

  The spoils were treated with similar glamour and astuteness. Their surplus was sent to Olympias as queen of Macedonia, but three hundred suits of Persian armour were singled out for dedication at Athens to the city's goddess Athena, and the following inscription was ordered to be attached to them: 'Alexander son of Philip and the Greeks, except the Spartans, from the barbarians who live in Asia.' With this simple wording Alexander must be given credit for one of the most brilliantly diplomatic slogans in ancient history; Alexander, he called himself, not King Alexander nor leader nor general, but merely the son of Philip, in impeccably humble style; from the Greeks, he wrote, not the Macedonians not the Agrianians nor the tribes of Europe who had won a battle in which Greeks had only featured prominently on the enemy side; from barbarians, whose outrages he was avenging, but whose leaders he had none the less buried; from a victory, above all, of the Greeks 'except the Spartans', three words which summoned up emotions from all Greek history of the past two hundred years. On the one hand, no Spartans present, none of Greece's best-trained soldiers, none of the Spartans who had turned back Xerxes long ago at Thermopylae, caring nothing for arrows which darkened the sun, because 'Sparta did not consider it to be her fathers' practice to follow, but to lead'; but also none of the Spartans whom the smaller cities of southern Greece still feared and detested, whose unpopularity had been shrewdly exploited by Philip, whose shadow had darkened the history of democracies not only at Athens but also throughout the Greek world, Spartans who had come to free the Greeks of Asia seventy years before and cynically signed them away to the Persian king; it was a message of clear meaning, and it tells much that it went to Athens, the city whose culture Alexander and his father had respected, but whose misconduct they had fought and feared for two decades.

  A thousand years, said the historians, divided the victory at the Granicus from the fall of Troy, which Callisthenes had calculated to occur in the same month as Alexander's invasion; a thousand years, therefore, between one Achilles and the coming of his rival to the plains of Nemesis, goddess of revenge, as Callisthenes described the site of the battlefield. It was indeed the start of a new age, though none of those who turned away from the site could ever have realized how; not in a new philosophy or science, but in the geographical width of conquest and the incidental spread of a people's way of life.

  We can very easily imagine

  how utterly indifferent they were in Sparta

  to this inscription, 'except the Lacedaemonians.'*

  But it was natural. The Spartans were not

  of those who would let themselves be led and ordered about

  like highly paid servants. Besides,

  a panhellenic campaign without

  a Spartan king as commander in chief

  would not have appeared very important.

  O' most assuredly, 'except the Lacedaemonians.'

  That too is a stand. It is understood.

  So, except the Lacedaemonians, at Granicus;

  and then at Issus; and in the decisive battle

  where the formidable army that the Persians

  had amassed at Arbela was swept away,

  that had set out from Arbela for victory and was swept away.

  And out of the remarkable panhellenic campaign,

  victorious, brilliant in every way,

  celebrated far and wide, glorious

  as no other had ever been glorified,

  the incomparable: we were born;

  a vast new Greek world, a great new Greek world.

  We, the Alexandrians, the Antiocheans,

  the Seleucians, the innumerable

  rest of the Greeks of Egypt and of Syria,

  and of Media, and Persia, and the many others.

  With our extensive empire,

  with the varied action of our thoughtful adaptations, and our common Greek, our Spoken Language, we carried it into the heart of Bactria, to the Indians.

  Are we going to talk of Lacedaemonians now**

  * Lacedaemonians is the usual Greek word for Spartans,

  **C. P. Cavafy, 'In the year 200 B.C.'

  CHAPTER NINE

  'My sharpness in the face of dangers', in the weeks which followed his victory at the Granicus, Alexander deserved the motto which historians later put into his mouth. Tactically, his problem was plain. He had to follow up his advantage before the Persians could regain their balance and defy him at any of the strong strategic centres down the coast. Distance never inhibited him, and the western coast of Asia had never been heavily occupied by the king's garrisons and feudal colonists, but he was moving into a world of complicated interests, each of which would have to be consulted in order to hasten his progress.

  In the administrative jargon of the Persian empire, the coast of Asia Minor was divided into the country and the cities; the agreed owner of the country was the king, who received its fixed taxes and distributed farms as he pleased to colonists, administrators or Persian and Greek nobles with a claim to royal favour. The interposing buttresses of hills and the more remote parts of the interior were left to wild native tribes who were as independent as they could make themselves; the coastline, however, was thickly settled with Greek cities, and their status had long been argued between mainland Greek powers, who wanted to dominate them, and the Persian king, who wanted to tax them. For the past fifty years, these cities had been agreed by a treaty of peace to belong to the king; by his father's slogan, Alexander was now committed to the familiar ideal of freeing them.

  In finance and religion, the Persians had been neither meddlesome nor extortionate masters; their scale of tribute was fixed, most cities were rich from their land, especially those with an active temple bank, and just as some of the numerous magi in Asia Minor had found a home in Ephesus, so the Persian king respected the rights of the nearby precincts of the Greek gods Apollo and Artemis, whom he identified with gods of his own. But politically, like the Romans or the British, the Persians had found it most convenient to strike a bargain with the cliques of the rich and powerful. Local tyrannies flourished in the smaller and less accessible Greek cities, knowing that their narrow power had the support of the Persian administration. In the larger cities, Persian hyparchs, generals, judges and garrison commanders lived on contented terms with the local grandees, establishing friendships which in several cases bridged the differences of east and west with commendable warmth. As the cities were surrou
nded by the country, richer citizens were men with a double allegiance, for as country landowners they owed taxes to the Persian king but as citizens, they retained their eligibility for office within the city walls. Inevitably, the two allegiances tended to merge into one and usually it was the freedom of fellow-citizens which suffered, for the rich and powerful would follow their Persian sympathies and set up a political tyranny. Where rule by the rich was in the nature of Persian control and was often promoted by Persian intervention, city feelings clashed bitterly, and men lived in one of the most revolutionary situations in the ancient world. Rich were divided against poor, class, therefore, against class, and democrat loathed oligarch with an intensity which even the odious divisions of Greece could not equal, free from the provocation of a foreign empire. 'The cities', wrote Lucian, an Asian Greek sophist, when the Romans were playing the part of the Persians, 'are like beehives: each man has his sting and uses k to sting his neighbour.' His metaphor fitted Alexander's age even more aptly for then, stings were as virulent and cities, like true hives, were actively divided on class lines.