Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Country life, as always, saw less change. The colonial villages of the Persian kings' provincial soldiery remained on their old sites. The same baronial towers, perhaps now in Macedonian hands, surveyed the landscape from Pisidia to the Cyzicene plain and their name still survives in the common Turkish place-name Burgaz; their land was still farmed by serfs whom nobody freed, although many of them lived in some comfort in their own houses. But through this continuity, a new current had begun to flow. In the Caicus valley, for example, the colonists from distant Hyrcania, who had fought with their satrap at the Granicus, lived on in the land called the Hyrcanian Plain, where Cyrus had settled them two centuries earlier but over the years their villages would be merged into a town and mixed with Macedonians. Their traditional fire-worship continued, but when they appear in Roman history, it is as citizens dressed and armed in the style of Macedonian westerners.

  After Alexander the force of Greek culture came to be guaranteed in western Asia; the cities' recognition of a new age was more than a detail of their calendars, for many felt that Alexander was what he said: a saviour of the Greeks from Persian slavery and an avenger of Persian sacrilege in the name of Greek freedom. It was thus among Iranians of the former empire that this mood of Alexander's passing made itself most felt. Repeatedly in the next hundred years, Iranians who lived on in Asia Minor are known to have joined the councils and magistracies of the Greek cities whose future Alexander had underwritten, a life of civic duty which contrasted with the baronial isolation of their past. Only their religion remained as a solid landmark in a changed world. The worship of the water goddess Anahita was continued by the magi who met to read their sacred texts among assemblies of the Iranian faithful in the hinterland of Greek Asia. An Iranian could no longer be sure of his country tower, but he could still find a place in his goddess's worship; an Iranian eunuch was left to run the temple affairs of Artemis at Ephesus, and in a small Carian town in Alexander's lifetime two Iranians became honorary citizens in order to serve as priests of Anahita, whom the Greeks saw as Artemis, a job for which their background suited them and which they passed from father to son for another three generations. These priesthoods were to prove their one safe haven in a world of civic duty, the rest of which bore little likeness to their past. But as Alexander turned south to Lycia, leaving his Greek cities to an unchallenged Persian fleet, it was still far from certain that an Iranian's days of satrapal politics had been more than momentarily interrupted.

  CHAPTER TEN

  While Parmenion arranged haulage for the siege equipment and led most of the cavalry and the wheeled supply wagons back to Sardis, Alexander advanced to Lycia and Pamphylia further south. The daily range of a warship was about thirty miles from its base, and Alexander meant to cut off the bases which the Persian fleet had used when sailing from the Aegean to Syria and the Levant. In the tough winter campaign which followed, little known beyond the disputed details of its route, he gave the first hint of his most precious quality of leadership: his refusal to be bound by any awkwardness of season and landscape. Even nowadays, the southern crook of the modern Turkish coast, the most glorious stretch of country which can still boast Greek ruins, is a challenge to the traveller. The highlands north of Xanthus, the twisting coast roads of Lycia, the citadels of the longlived Lycian league or the Pamphylian river plains, all these sites can still be visited, unspoilt and imposing in early summer but extremely daunting in the winter months. Though there are tracks and passes which remain open throughout the snows, they are enough to deceive the resident shepherds, whereas Alexander had no maps, no supply train, no fleet to support his coastal advance; his treasure was too heavy to accompany his travels and hence he relied for army pay and presents on whatever moneys he could exact from the towns on his way. Throughout he must have been very short of food.

  Travelling light, he had to be selective, never risking a long siege and only stopping for willing allies or the more important harbours. Usually, the ground was too rough for horses, and citadels which were too strongly sited were left alone; at Termessus he bluffed his way through the natural defences of the defile but left the towering town alone, while at Aspendus, where moderate terms had been agreed only to be rejected as soon as his back was turned, he scared the inhabitants into severer submission by reappearing and showing off his strength. At the mercy of local knowledge, he seldom strayed far from the path of friends and native allies; his prophet Aristander and perhaps, too, his Cretan friend Nearchus had connections in several cities, but Lycia, like Ionia, was a tangle of hostile factions with no love lost between one city and its neighbour, one wild tribe and its marauding rival. If Alexander's army wanted local knowledge of the ground, they had to pay by being directed to the route which suited the locals' own disputes. Hence, no doubt, the hesitant loops and retreats in the Macedonian army's advance.

  Iranian colonists had lived in Lycia, but the tribes and mountains had never been properly tamed or given their own satrap, and Alexander made swift progress, demanding help against the Persian fleet and showing favours to coastal cities with a slender claim to be considered Greek. However, his thoughts were with Parmenion, now in the north and only accessible by roads which the enemy could cut, and on reaching the city of Xanthus, where Lycia's coastline bent southwards, he hesitated and wondered whether to turn back. But, said his officers, 'a local spring was seen to upheave itself and cast up a bronze tablet from its depths, imprinted with archaic letters which proved that the Persian Empire would be destroyed by the Greeks'. The omen, a sign that Alexander was in two minds, justified the king's decision to press on eastwards down the curving coast. Wherever possible he saved his men's energies, only loosing them on a brief campaign in the frozen Lycian highlands which was probably meant to clear a path to the main road and the plains of the interior. On no account could he risk being cut off from Parmenion and the units wintering up in Phrygia, and this concern for his lines of the north was soon to cause an intrigue within his high command. The story was peculiar.

  Alexander came to rest at Phaselis, a coastal city which was later renowned for the possession of Achilles's original spear. The citizens were friendly, golden crowns of submission were offered and native guides were promised to lead the army eastwards along the seaboard. In such genial company, Alexander relaxed, finding time for an after-dinner revel in the course of which he threw garlands on to a statue of Theodectas, a citizen who had been well known in his lifetime as an orator in Greece and whose writings were familiar to at least one officer on Alexander's staff. Flushed with wine, the king joked and remarked that he owed Theodectas a gesture of honour 'as they both had associated with Aristotle and philosophy in their time'. More serious business, however, was soon forthcoming. From Parmenion's base in Phrygia, there arrived an Oriental called Sisines, bearing information of extreme urgency. The king took council with his Companion nobles; as a result, a trusted Orestid officer was disguised in native dress and despatched northwards with a verbal message for Parmenion's benefit. Local guides were to see him through the mountains: 'it was not thought fit to commit anything to writing in such a matter.' It is a separate question just what this matter was.

  According to Alexander's friend Ptolemy, Sisines the Oriental had been sent by Darius to make contact with Alexander of Lyncestis, brother of the two highland princes who had been involved in the- killing of King Philip. Hitherto, this other Alexander, had prospered in the Macedonian army, holding one high command after another until he had been appointed general of the Thessalian cavalry, an esteemed position. Sisines had set out 'on a pretence of visiting the satrap of Phrygia', whereas 'in fact', he was under orders to meet the Lyncestian in Parmenion's camp, offer him 1,000 talents of gold and the kingship of Macedonia, and persuade him to murder his namesake the king. Letters, it was believed, had already passed from Lyncestian Alexander to a Lyncestian relation who had deserted to the Persian side. Sisines had fallen into Parmenion's hands and revealed the true purpose of his mission, and Parmen
ion had hurried him southwards through enemy territory so that the king could hear the truth for himself. Alexander, supported by his Companions, sent back orders that the suspect Lyncestian should be arrested; only a few weeks before, at Halicarnassus, a swallow had been seen twittering above the king's head, and the prophets had taken it as a warning against treachery by a close friend. Through the Lyncestian the omen had come true.

  That was only Ptolemy's opinion, and it bristles with unlikelihood for anyone who is prepared to doubt the word of Alexander's friend; Ptolemy liked to include good omens in his history, but the sign of the swallow is perhaps too subtle not to rouse suspicion. Why had Parmenion risked sending such a valuable captive as Sisines through miles of enemy territory? Alexander's own precautions in reply, the native guides, the disguise, the verbal message, show the journey could not be undertaken lightly even without a prisoner and his guard in tow. Why was the official arrest of the Lyncestian so important that it could not be entrusted to writing for fear of enemy interception? Even if the enemy captured such written news, how could they exploit it? Parmenion had heard Sisines's story and was surely shrewd enough to keep a serious suspect under arrest until his king, some 200 miles and a frozen mountain barrier distant, could come to a decision. Why did Sisines ever reveal the 'true cause' of his mission rather than the 'pretext' that he was visiting his satrap in Phrygia, a plausible story which Parmenion could hardly have disbelieved? It is all most implausible, and it deserves to be suspected, for Alexander the Lyncestian was an officer of considerable mystery and embarrassment.

  It was not just that his brothers had been killed on a charge of murdering Philip; in Seistan, four years later, he was to be brought out of close arrest and accused before the soldiery at a time of purge and crisis in the high command. Denounced as guilty, he was promptly speared to death, an awkward fact which Alexander's officers omitted from their histories. Ptolemy, it seems, never mentioned the Lyncestian again, content with his story of the arrest for treachery; Aristobulus, who wrote in his eighties and elaborately defended Alexander, seems to have taken an even more extreme stand. Most probably, he implied that the Lyncestian had been killed by an enemy before he ever reached Asia. During the siege of Thebes, he wrote, a Macedonian called Alexander who was leading a squadron of Thracians broke into a noble lady's house and demanded her money. He was a 'stupid and insolent man, of the same name as the King but in no way like him', and, proud daughter of a Greek general, she showed him to a well in the garden and pushed him down it, dropping boulders in afterwards to make sure that she killed him. For this act of defiance, Alexander spared her from slavery, a pardon which illustrated his chivalry. However, Alexander the Lyncestian was the commanding general of Thrace at the time and known to be present with an army of Thracians at Thebes; it is most unlikely that there were two Macedonians called Alexander in command of Thracians at the same time, and indeed the tone of Aristobulus's story suggests that he was disposing of the Lyncestian, whose true fate he omitted, as an unprincipled plunderer who went to a deserving death. As a contemporary and an eye-witness, Aristobulus has been used as an authority for Alexander's history, but on the subject of an officer, well known as a cavalry commander in Asia and as a victim of Seistan's purge, he could construct a monstrously apologetic falsehood. His history does not seem to be notable for accurate detail or for lists of high officers, except those reported already by Callisthenes who would anyway omit the Lyncestian's arrest from his panegyric. It is as if Aristobulus felt bound to conceal the truth, and he does not deserve to be trusted elsewhere.

  Against Alexander's friends, there is once again a rival story, written up from soldiers' reminiscences, but its view of Sisines and the Lyncestian is very different. Sisines, it alleged, was an Oriental who had fled from Egypt to Philip's court and followed Alexander in a position of trust; during the winter in Lycia, he cannot, therefore, have been arrested as a spy from the Persian army. Not until the following autumn is anything said of his fate, for shortly before the battle of Issus, when Persians were threatening everywhere, he was suspected of receiving a letter from the Persian Vizier asking him to kill Alexander, but was himself killed by the Cretan archers 'doubtless on Alexander's orders'. The suspicion may have been true, his murder may only have been a security precaution but the fact that he was one of Alexander's own courtiers puts Ptolemy's story of the Lycian affair in a very different light. If Sisines was a friend and a courtier, at once the implausibilities disappear. Some two hundred miles north of Phaselis, Parmenion must have been anxious about communications with his king; anxious, moreover, with good reason as Alexander himself had skirmished in the Lycian highlands to clear the one main road to his absent generals. Perhaps Parmenion wanted to check the plans and timing: perhaps news of a Persian threat had suddenly been intercepted. One, and only one, officer could be sure of passing unnoticed down a road flanked by the enemy and through a satrapy still in the Persians' hands: Sisines, the loyal Oriental, inconspicuous master of the necessary languages. Sisines, then, slipped southwards with a secret message; Alexander sent back one of his friends in native disguise, as a sign that the trusted messenger had fulfilled his mission and the accompanying orders were genuine. It was a dramatic piece of intelligence work, but it concerned strategy; it had nothing to do with the Lyncestian, let alone with his treachery, and here too an alternative story survived.

  Nine or ten months later, at the time of Sisines's murder, the Lyncestian was said to have been arrested for a very different reason. Shortly before the battle of Issus, letters arrived from Olympias with warnings against the Lyncestian, and Alexander, it was said, put him into chains. Possibly, Olympias had had private evidence, for it was a time of mystery and upheaval in Greece, but sheer jealousy against the Lynccstian might also have been a motive; he was married to Antipater's daughter, and the fierce quarrels between Antipater the general and Olympias the queen regent were soon to become a serious difficulty. By a strange chance, the story can be shown to have been rimed so plausibly that it has greater claims to be believed. A few weeks after receiving Sisines and leaving Phaselis, Alexander entered battle, having put the entire left wing of his army under the command of a man who was probably the offending Lyncesrian's nephew; such trust would have been an impossible folly if the Lyncestian had just been caught in a conspiracy. However, the battle was the nephew's final appearance in history, and ten months later he had been deposed for ever from the high command. He was a young man and there had been no fighting meanwhile to cost him his life; his fall, surely, had been due to his uncle's arrest, not through Sisines's visit, which he survived unharmed, but through letters from Olympias which cost him his job in the following autumn.

  In the search for Alexander, this intrigue is illuminating. It is of some

  interest that shortly before his battle of Issus, Alexander deposed the last of his Lyncestian commanders, even though he had been indebted to them at the time of his accession; it is far more telling that his friend Ptolemy and his officer Aristobulus could pass off the arrests by an intricate trail of deception. Possibly they had no clear memory of the high commanders in the invasion's early days; possibly, but it is far more plausible that they were concealing the brute truth of the Lyncestian's execution in the Seistan purge which they underplayed. They never mentioned it again, for Aristobulus pleaded that the man had been killed by a Theban woman five years earlier, Ptolemy that he had been a proven traitor; for Ptolemy, perhaps, there were grounds for the false suggestion. Sisincs and the Lyncestian were killed and arrested in one and the same month, each for different reasons; in Seistan, one fact about the Lyncestian's death caused comment, that when denounced, he faltered and found nothing to say in his defence. Perhaps the name of Sisines was used against him, an obscure Oriental who had died at the time of the Lyncestian's earlier arrest on a charge of treason, but of whom he knew nothing at all. Ptolemy may have heard the charge and connected it, falsely, with Sisines's only other exploit on the expedition. As at Th
ebes or Halicarnassus, the Granicus no less than the dismissal of the fleet, Alexander's story cannot be written exclusively from histories based on his friends and officers; their literary rival, like every other historian of the expedition, was no less admiring of Alexander and his achievements, but he also retained a disarming honesty, and when officers fell, or were denounced on spurious charges, such honesty, it seems, was very easy to lose.

  Leaving Phaselis, with the Lyncestians still in honour, Alexander continued briefly and briskly on his coastal campaign, only doubling back to scare his dissident subject city Aspendos. Near Mount Climax, he rode down to the shore to take a short cut across the bay and save himself a six-hour ride through the hills behind. As he rounded the promontory the southerly wind stopped blowing and opened a way through the waves for his horsemen, a lucky chance which he described as 'not without the help of heaven', and which Callisthenes developed into a formal bowing of the sea before its new master. At Termessus and Sagalassus, he repulsed the tribesmen and cleared his road to the north without capturing their fortresses. There were no more harbour-towns nearby, so in early spring he at last turned northwards to join Parmenion, having done what he could to close the Lycian ports. His efforts would not, however, stop the Persian fleet from sailing between Syria and the Aegean islands the following summer. He had half-closed a coastline, but he had not cut off a sea route 148 of any importance, and longer marches were needed before his dry-land policy could begin to work.