Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Land bound, therefore, like his eagle, he prepared to leave Miletus and follow the coast south. As an Ionian city, Miletus was given a democracy, 'freedom' and exemption from tribute, but all foreign prisoners, as was the custom, were enslaved and sold. Out of gratitude, the restored democrats agreed that Alexander should be the city's honorary magistrate for the first year of their new epoch; he did not, however, delay, for the first hills of the satrapy of Caria rose beyond him and it was here that he could expect Memnon to rally Persians from the Granicus and their unscathed fleet. Since his victory, Persians had hardly been in evidence at all; it was probably during the past weeks that a fugitive son of Darius had tried to enlist Alexander's help, only to be assassinated on Darius's orders. Such treacheries in the royal family were very much to be hoped for, but in Caria a more solid rally seemed inevitable, while Memnon was alive to supervise it.

  As in Ionia, Greek cities still lined Caria's increasingly jagged coastline, but their citizens were secondary to the natives of the pine forests and patches of plain inland. In the past two decades, many of these natives had been introduced to the ways of hcllenized city life by their local dynasts who had also ruled as Persian satraps. This voluntary patronage of Greek culture had become a political issue, for it had encouraged Caria's ruling family to bid for independence when the Persian Empire seemed weak. Even in the remote interior, pillared temples had been built in honour of Greek gods, and in the four main cities, decrees were passed in keeping with Greek protocol. Greek names and Greek language had already gained control in the more accessible areas and Alexander was not yet confronted by serious barriers of language; the barriers, rather, were political. Many villages had been merged some twenty years ago into the rebuilt town of Halicarnassus, a hcllenized capital of Greek origins, and hellenism always fostered independence from Asia; however, Caria did not share Greek culture enough to be won over by another promise of democracy and the slogan of Greek revenge. There was no class hatred to exploit in Caria and Alexander needed a line of attack which would appeal to native politics without involving him in long-drawn effort. On crossing the border, he found precisely what he wanted: he was met by a noble lady in distress.

  Ada, former Queen of Caria, could look back on a life seldom independent, repeatedly sad. Born into a ruling family where women retained certain rights of succession, she had watched her remarkable brother Mausolus civilize and extend her home kingdom in the 350s until she had bowed to the pressures of family politics and married his only son, resigning herself to a husband some twenty years her junior who was unlikely to respond with passion to the advances of his elderly aunt. Though childless, the couple had remained true, until first Ada's brother, then her nephew-husband had died and Ada had found herself a widow, heiress to a kingdom which was not an alluring inheritance for a woman in her middle age. Meanwhile her youngest brother Pixodarus was alive and scheming. He had banished Ada into retirement, taken the title of satrap and plunged into foreign politics with the proper energy of a man.

  It was Pixodarus who had exchanged envoys with King Philip three years before to discuss a marriage between his daughter and one of King Philip's sons, the very plan which Alexander had frustrated by his over-anxiety. Instead, Pixodarus had married his daughter to an Iranian administrator; shortly afterwards, Pixodarus too had died and for the first time for fifty-seven years, the satrapy of Caria had been inherited by an Iranian, that son-in-law Orontobates who owed his marriage and position to a bungling act of Alexander's youth. Ageing in the confinement of a single fortress, Queen Ada had reason to reflect on the sorrows of her past.

  Now from the maze of her family history, hope had strangely reappeared. That same Alexander was approaching, no longer a nervous boy of nineteen. Ada left her citadel at Alinda and came to meet him at the border, keen to retain at least the little she still controlled. She knew the conventions of her family, knew also that she was royal and childless, that the years were slipping by. She came, therefore, with a tentative suggestion: she would surrender her fort in the hope of reinstatement, but she also requested that Alexander might become her adopted son.

  Alexander was quick to recognize a windfall, however unusual, and received her with respect. Through Ada, he could appear to the Carians as protector of their weaker local interests against Persia; support for a member of their hellenizing dynasty would fit with his liberation of the resident Greeks. His adoption was popular. Within days, nearby cities of Caria had sent him golden crowns; he 'entrusted Ada with her fortress of Alinda and did not disdain the name of son': his new mother hurried home delighted, and 'kept sending him meats and delicacies every day, finally offering him such cooks and bakers as were thought to be masters of their craft'. Alexander demurred politely: 'he said that he needed none of them; for his breakfast, his preparation was a night march; for his lunch, a sparing breakfast'; it was a tactful evasion of Asian hospitality, and his mother countered by renaming her Carian fortress as an Alexandria, in honour of her lately adopted son.

  Culinary matters were not Ada's only concern. She confirmed the ominous news that Memnon and Persian fugitives from the Granicus had rallied again at Halicarnassus, the coastal capital of Caria; Memnon had been promoted by order of royal letter to the 'leadership of lower Asia and the fleet' and as a pledge of his loyalty, he had sent his children inland to Darius's court. With ships, imperial soldiers and a strong hired garrison, he had blockaded Halicarnassus, trusting in the circling line of walls and the satrapal citadel which had been built by Ada's eldest brother; Alexander, therefore, should expect a serious siege. The necessary equipment was carried by ship to the nearest open harbour and the king and his army marched south to meet it by the inland road.

  The siege of Halicarnassus is a prelude to one of the major themes of Alexander's achievement as a general. Nowadays, he is remembered for his pitched battles and for the extreme length of his march, but on his contemporaries, perhaps, it was as a stormer of walled cities that he left his most vigorous impression. Both before him and after him, the art was never mastered with such success. Philip had been persistent in siegecraft without being victorious and it is the plainest statement of the different qualities of father and son that whereas Philip failed doggedly, Alexander's record as a besieger was unique in the ancient world. Though a siege involves men and machines, a complex interaction which soon comes to the fore in Alexander's methods, it is also the severest test of a general's personality. Alexander was imaginative, supremely undaunted and hence more likely to be lucky. At Halicarnassus, he did not rely on technical weaponry of any novelty and his stone-throwers, the one new feature, were used to repel enemy sallies rather than to breach the walls, probably because they had not yet been fitted with torsion springs of sinew. He was challenged by the strongest fortified city then known in Asia Minor, rising 'like a theatre' in semicircular tiers from its sheltered harbour, with an arsenal to provide its weapons and a jutting castle to shelter its governor. As the Persians held the seaward side with their fleet, Alexander was forced to attack from the north-east or the west where the outer walls, though solid stone, descended to a tolerably level stretch of ground. The challenge was unpromising, especially as the enemy were masters of the sea, and it is not easy to decide why he succeeded, even after doing justice to his personal flair.

  Two descriptions of the siege survive and they match each other most interestingly; the one, written by Alexander's officers, again minimizes his difficulties, confirmation of the way in which the myth of his invincibility was later developed by contemporaries; the other, probably based on soldiers' reminiscences and Callisthenes's published flatteries, rightly stresses the city's resistance and notes that the defenders were led by two Athenian generals with the stirringly democratic names of Thrasybulus and Ephialtes, whose surrender Alexander had demanded in the previous autumn; though spared, they had crossed to Asia to resist the man who was supposed to be avenging their city's past injustices. A third leader, it was agreed, was a Macedonian
deserter, probably the son of one of the Lyncestians who had been killed at the accession; they made a strong team, but neither of the histories makes it plain that their main defence was to last for two months, including the heat of August.

  At first, Alexander skirmished lightly, probably because his siege engines had not yet laboured their slow way by road from the harbour some six miles to the rear, the one port unoccupied by the Persians' fleet. He encamped on level ground half a mile from the north-east sector of the wall and busied his men first with an unsuccessful night attempt to capture a sea-port some twelve miles west of the city which had falsely offered surrender, then with the filling of the ditch, 45 feet wide and 22 feet deep, which had made the north-east wall of Halicarnassus inaccessible to his wheeled siege towers. Diggers and fillers were sheltered by makeshift sheds until their ditch was levelled out and the siege-towers, newly arrived by road, could roll across it into position; thereupon catapults cleared the defenders, rams were lowered from the siege towers on to the walls, and soon two buttresses and an appreciable length of fortifications had been flattened. Undaunted, the defence sallied forth by night, led by the renegade Lyncestian; torches were hurled into the wooden siege engines and the Macedonian guards were unpleasantly surprised in the darkness before they had time to put on their body-armour. Having made their point, the defenders retired to repair the hole in their outer wall and build a semi-circular blockade of brick on hilly ground. They also finished a sky-high tower of their own which bristled with arrow-catapults.

  The next incident is unanimously ascribed to the heartening effect of drink. One night, two or more soldiers in Perdiccas's battalion, flown with insolence and wine, urged on their fellows to a show of strength against the new semi-circular wall. The ground was unfavourable, the defenders alert and amid a flurry of catapults, Memnon led such a counterattack that Alexander himself was forced to the rescue of his disorderly regiment. But though the defenders retired, they did so as they pleased: Alexander had to admit defeat and ask for the return of the Macedonian dead, the accepted sign that a battle had been lost. In his history, King Ptolemy recorded the start of this drunken sortie, knowing that it discredited Perdiccas, the rival with whom he had fought after Alexander's death, but he suppressed the defeat which followed, unwilling to reveal a failure by his friend Alexander; it thus went unsaid that within the city, the Athenian exile Ephialtes had urged his fellow defenders not to return the enemy bodies, so fervent was his hatred of the Macedonians.

  Anxious at this setback, Alexander battered and catapulted as furiously as ever. Again the Persians sallied, and again, covered by their fellows from higher ground, they came off well. That was only a prelude. A few days later, they planned their most cunning sortie, dividing themselves into three separate waves at Ephialtes's bidding. The first wave was to hurl torches into Alexander's siege-towers in the north-east sector; the second was to race out from a more westerly gate and take the Macedonian guards in the flank, while the third was to wait in reserve with Memnon and overwhelm the battle when a suitable number of opponents had been lured forward. According to the officers, these sorties were repelled 'without difficulty' at the west and north-east gates; in fact, the first two waves did their job splendidly and Alexander himself was compelled to bear the brunt of their onslaught. The entry of the third wave into the battle startled even Alexander, and only a famous shield-to-shield rally by a battalion of Philip's most experienced veterans prevented the younger Macedonians from flinching and heading for camp. However, Ephialtes was killed, fighting gloriously at the head of his hired Greeks, and because the defenders shut their gates prematurely, many of his men were trapped outside at the mercy of the Macedonians. 'The city came near to capture,' wrote the officers, 'had not Alexander recalled his army, still wishing to save Halicarnassus if its citizens would show a gesture of friendliness.' Night had fallen and presumably Alexander's men were in some disorder; if he had thought he could attack successfully, citizens or no citizens, as at Miletus, he would have done so.

  That night the Persian leaders decided to abandon the outer city: the wall was broken, Ephialtes was dead, their losses were heavy and now that their garrison had dwindled, perhaps they feared betrayal by a party within the city. 'In the second watch of the night', about ten o'clock, they set fire to their siege-tower, their arsenals and all houses near to the walls, leaving the wind to do its worst. The satrap Orontobates decided to hold the two promontories at the entrance to the harbour, trusting in their walls and his mastery of the sea.

  When the news reached Alexander's camp, he hurried into the city, giving orders, said his officers, that any incendiaries should be killed, but that Halicarnassian citizens in their homes should be spared. When dawn showed him the extent of the damage, he 'razed the city to the ground', a detail recorded in both versions but evidently exaggerated as the city's famous monuments remained unscathed. Probably, Alexander only cleared a space from which to besiege Orontobates's two remaining strongholds, for some 3,000 troops were ordered to continue the siege and garrison the city. As Halicarnassus had been stubborn, there was no reason to give her a democracy or call her free. She was a Greek city, but she was not Ionian or Aeolian and had been promised nothing; her promontories were to hold out for another whole year and serve the Persian fleet as a base of supply. But Caria, at least, had fallen; mother Ada was named its satrap and given troops under a Macedonian commander to do any work

  that might prove too strenuous for an elderly woman. Thus, under a female eye, Alexander's principle of a province split between a native satrap and a Macedonian general was introduced for the first time.

  The siege of Halicarnassus leaves a mixed impression. Alexander had persevered, and personally he had fought with his usual courage, but his victory, and that only within its limits, was not due to bold ingenuity or mechanical subtlety so much as to outnumbering an enemy who had sallied repeatedly. None the less, an important point of supply for an Aegean fleet had been breached, if not wholly broken, and as autumn was far advanced, most generals could have been forgiven for relaxing. Typically, Alexander did nothing of the sort.

  Before advancing, he gave orders that all Macedonians who had married 'shortly before his Asian campaign' should be sent back home to Macedonia to spend the coming winter with their wives. 'Of all his actions, this earned Alexander popularity amongst his Macedonians', besides helping their homeland's birthrate and encouraging more reinforcements. Led by the husband of one of Parmenion's daughters, the bridegrooms bustled homewards, and Alexander thinned out his forces, detailing Parmenion to take the supply wagons, the Greek allies and two squadrons of cavalry back by road to Sardis and thence to await him further east on the Royal Road. The siege equipment was despatched to Tralles, and ever inexhaustible, Alexander announced that he would head south to the coast of Lycia and Pamphylia 'to hold the seaboard and render the enemy useless'.

  Putting his dry-land tactics into action, he thus turned his back for ever on the Asian Greek cities whom he had come to free. Their freedom, of course, depended on him and only extended as far as he wanted; that, often, might be far enough, while he also showed them the favour of plans for new buildings, here a causeway, there a new street-plan, and at the Ionian city of Priene, centre of the Pan-Ionian festival, he dedicated the city's new temple to Athena, probably contributing to its funds. Just as he had honoured Zeus at Sardis or Artemis at Ephesus he favoured the local gods of the Greek cities down to the smallest details of cult and decoration. Like his plans to rebuild Troy, several of his building schemes were delayed or only carried out by local decision, but nonetheless in Greek Asia, if anywhere, the Greek crusade became a holy war of revenge and restoration. Its fervour must not be played down.

  Other schemes had a longer and more calculated future. An ingenious policy seems to have begun with Alexander, whereby royal favourities who were rewarded with country estates were now forced to attach them to the 'free' territory of a Greek-city and become its honorary citiz
ens. The result was a system of local patronage. Under the Persians, such land grants had been made without restrictions and created a provincial baronry free from the king, or a class of absentee landlords, free from their locality. Alexander and his Successors arranged that their favourites should be local citizens, able to report and maintain their king's interests in city affairs, while the Greek cities gained a rich local benefactor and an added acreage of land. By tying country estates to city life, a balance of interest was struck, and it lasted. Typically, it was city life which Alexander put first in his empire.