Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  It was a beginning, at least, but after a rigorous winter's exploits, he would be pleased to find the landscape of the Phrygian satrapy stretching northwards before him, bare of cover for an enemy, its pebbled plough-land broken only by the occasional belt of poplars. Its flatness was heartening to an army wearied of winter highlands, so much so that within five days they had reached the centre of Phrygia and encamped before the satrap's citadel at Celaenae. As soon as its foreign garrison realized that no Persian forces would rescue them in later winter, perhaps because Parmenion had moved to cut them off, they surrendered their sumptuous palaces and parks to their new masters; elderly Antigonus, one-eyed and prominent among Philip's veteran officers, received a satrapy so important for keeping the roads of communication clear of enemy attack. After sending another officer westwards to raise more troops from southern Greece, Alexander rode on northwards over richer lands to Gordium, his agreed point of meeting. There, behind the city's Persian battlements, he awaited Parmenion's arrival.

  Gordium lay on the Royal Road, and as reinforcements were expected from Macedonia, it had been chosen as the convenient meeting-point with Parmenion's army and their fresh draft of troops from the Balkans. Parmenion soon appeared, but the reinforcements were slow to arrive. They could not sail the sea, as there was no fleet to protect them, and they had to march the five hundred miles from Pella to Gordium by road. Spring broke, and they still had not set out; May was already well begun and as disturbing news came of a Persian sea-offensive, the reinforcements had still not arrived, perhaps because they were detained at the Dardanelles. Gordium, an ancient capital city, had few excitements to offer; the troops fretted and idled, and Alexander needed a diversion to keep up morale.

  Word reached him of a local curiosity, a chariot in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia which was linked by legend to King Midas's accession at Gordium four hundred years before. It had been dedicated to a Phrygian god whom the officers identified with Zeus the King, Alexander's royal ancestor and guardian, and it was bound to its yoke by a knot of cornel-bark which no man had ever been able to undo; that in itself was a challenge, and the story had a topical appeal. King Midas was connected through legend with Macedonia where the lowlands' Gardens of Midas still bore his name, and Phrygian tribes were rightly believed to have once lived in Macedonia, in memory of the early migration during which they had ruled the country and mined their wealth, according to Callisthenes, from the Bermion mountains. Alexander's prophet Aristander, a man whose 'prophecies he always liked to support', also had an interest in the chariot, for Midas's father was said to have consulted Aristander's own people about it, the Telmissians of Lycia, who were famed for their powers of divination. Several themes converged on the chariot, and Alexander reserved it for the largest possible audience.

  It was late May before the reinforcements arrived, some 3,000 Macedonians and 1,000 or so Greeks and allies, together with the host of Macedonian bridegrooms who had returned to winter with their wives. With them, came ambassadors from Athens to beg the release of Athenian prisoners taken at the Granicus, but Alexander refused them 'for he did not think it was right, while the Persian war was in progress, to relax any terror for Greeks who did not refuse to fight against Greece on behalf of the barbarians. They should approach him again later.' It went unsaid that at Sardis, letters had been found to prove that Persian generals had sent money to Demosthenes the Athenian to stir up rebellion in the first year of his reign; sheltering behind his father's myth of a Greek expedition, Alexander kept up his hold on the one Greek city where it was most needed.

  It was also time to encourage his myth in a new direction. On the day before leaving Gordium he went up to the acropolis meaning to try the chariot which he had saved for his farewell; friends gathered round to watch him, but hard though he pulled, the knot round the yoke remained stubbornly tight. When no end could be found, Alexander began to lose patience, for failure would not go down well with his men. Drawing his sword, he slashed the knot in half, producing the necessary end and correctly claiming that the knot was loosed, if not untied. The aged Aristobulus, perhaps reluctant to believe in his king's petulance, later claimed that Alexander had pulled a pin out of the chariot-link and drawn the yoke out sideways through the knot, but the sword-cut has the weight of authority behind it and is preferable to an eighty-year-old historian's apology; either way, Alexander outmanoeuvred, rather than unravelled, his problem. He also managed to arouse an interest in what he had done. 'There were thunderclaps and flashes of lightning that very night', conveniently signifying that Zeus approved, so Alexander offered sacrifice to the 'gods who had sent the signs and ratified his loosing of the knot'. As a king under Zeus's protection, he then encouraged gossip and flattery to elaborate on his efforts.

  As usual, they spread apace. Perhaps, according to local legend, the loosing of the knot had been connected with a claim to rule the Phrygian natives; certainly, in every account of the matter that survives, it now became proof that Alexander was destined to rule Asia, and the theme must have begun with his own historian Callisthenes. The inevitability of victory keeps recurring in the histories of the campaign, and on the next day as the army took their leave of Gordium, troubled by news that the Persians' fleet was mounting a serious counterattack at sea, there were many worse rumours for Callisthenes to encourage throughout the camp. 'Rule over Asia' was spiriting talk but it was also purposefully vague. For where did the rule of Asia end? In Asia Minor, perhaps; perhaps even over the river Tigris and down in the palaces of the Persian King; when Asia had been conquered, Alexander had recendy announced, he would return all the Greeks to their homes. But as the reinforcements mustered and the bridegrooms resumed their places, nobody, least of all Alexander, would have dared to claim that within eight years, Asia would mean the Oxus, the crossing of the Hindu-Kush and a fight with the elephants of a north-west Indian rajah.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  'According to the Magi of the East', wrote Aristotle, who had not spent his early life in Asia Minor for nothing, 'there are two first principles in the world, a good spirit and an evil spirit; the name of the one is Zeus or Ahura Mazda, of the other Hades or Ahriman.' As King Darius sat listening to the news of Alexander's past twelve months, there could be little doubt on which side of this heavenly division he would have placed his opponent. Lion-like, dressed in the lionskin cap of his ancestor Heracles, Alexander was the very symbol of lion-embodied Ahriman. 'For three thousand years, say the Magi, one spirit will rule the other: for another three thousand, they will fight and do battle until one overcomes the other and finally Ahriman passes away.' In the meantime, some of the king's fellow-Persians would sacrifice to Ahriman and privately acknowledge his regrettable abilities. For Darius III, chosen by the great god Ahura Mazda, there could be no such dalliance with the powers of darkness. In the name of the Good Spirit, who 'created earth, who created man, who created peace for men', he must repulse the advancing force of Lies, Unrighteousness and Evil, and from Susa, strike a blow for the development of the world of time.

  Hope, however, was still lively, and it turned on the trusted Memnon, whom the Great King now raised to the supreme command. From his base on the island of Cos, he could sweep the Aegean with 300 warships of the empire's fleet, manned with Levantine crews and as many Greek mercenaries as remained to be hired after the mass surrender on the Granicus and the loss of recruiting grounds in Greek Asia; it was an expensive form of war, but the fleet could sail wherever it could set up supply bases, and Alexander had no ships with which to retort. Communications across the Dardanelles could be cut and Alexander's reinforcements from the Balkans could be prevented; merchant shipping could be sunk or commandeered, and interference with the autumn sailing of the corn fleet from the Black Sea kingdoms could put extreme pressure on Athens to join a rebellion even though Alexander was holding twenty of her citizen crews as hostages. Bribes and secret negotiations with Sparta and other open allies might well lead to an uprising against Ant
ipater in Greece and to a mutiny among Macedonians in Asia who saw their home country threatened. Alexander would be forced to return to the Balkans, and to this end Darius had no need to summon a grand army and challenge him first inside the empire; better to lure him far on into Asia and burn the crops in his path, while cutting his lines behind him. Alexander had been reinforced and did not depend on supplies from his rear, as he lived off the land: it was conceivable that he himself might dare to continue inland, even if the Aegean and the Balkans were lost to him, but his soldiers would certainly refuse.

  In spring 333 Memnon set out on his new commission. He began with Chios and the main cities of Lesbos, all sworn members of Alexander's Greek alliance, where he overthrew such democratic governments as dated from the end of Philip's reign and replaced them with tyrants and garrisons, those ominous signs for the common islander that Persian repression, like their exiled men of property, was due to return. Except for Mitylene on Lesbos, which had received troops from Alexander, the cities of both islands gave up their democracies and obeyed with reluctance.

  Waiting at Gordium for his reinforcements, Alexander had heard the news which he ought to have expected. Perturbed, he sent 500 talents home to Antipater and gave another 600 to the leader of the Mounted Scouts and Amphoterus brother of Craterus the Orestid, ordering them to raise a new allied Greek fleet 'according to the terms of his alliance'; the new year's tribute and the treasures captured at Sardis allowed the fleet's dismissal to be revoked so soon, but even 600 talents would only finance a fleet as large as Memnon's for a mere two months at sea. The two chosen officers are not known to have had experience of naval work, and their return to Greece with the burden of money would be hazardous by sea, slow by land. Memnon had several clear months ahead of him, and Alexander could only reflect on his prospects. Memnon, after all, had not set himself an easy ambition. Antipater had an army and garrisons; Athenians were being held hostage; many Greeks mistrusted Sparta and the promises of Persians whose past brutality could not be forgotten, all these would help to stop any general Greek uprising, and anything less would be troublesome rather than dangerous. If Alexander had not believed that he could trust some of his Greek allies to fight Persia, he would never have asked them for a second fleet; there was also an enemy problem of money. Memnon had funds from the king, but Asia Minor's tribute had been lost and as no other area paid in coined currency, its loss might restrict the Persians' plan for a mercenaries' war at sea. Memnon had already resorted to plundering and piracy, and neither would endear him to Greeks with an interest in sea trade. He might succeed locally, but Greece needed sterner tactics; there was nothing more to be done in defence except wait helplessly for the second fleet, so in June Alexander left Gordium and prepared to follow the Royal Road east, then south to the coastal towns of Cilicia to continue to capture Persian harbours.

  Memnon's chances were to remain untested, for in June, while blockading the city of Mitylene, 'he fell ill and died, and this, if anything, harmed the King's affairs at that time'. It was a marvellous stroke of luck for Alexander, as there was no other Greek general with a knowledge of Macedonia, a long career in Persian service and a way with the hired Greeks under his command. Persia was soon to recognize it. The news of Memnon's death took some time to travel to Susa; the ponderous machinery of the Persian Empire was not to be lightly turned in a new direction, but such was the Great King's dismay at the loss of this one commander that as soon as he heard it in late June or July, he planned to alter the entire strategy of the war. Memnon could wish for no more telling epitaph than this change, but while the new plans were put into effect, events were to drift until late July giving Alexander scope for good fortune and Persia less chance of a quick recovery of face.

  It is not certain when Alexander learnt of Memnon's death, but it could only have confirmed him in his business inland. Swinging eastwards along the Royal Road, he welcomed the token surrender of stray mountain tribes north of Ancyra whom the Persians had never troubled and whom Callisthenes could have identified by pleasing quotations and his comments on Homeric verse. Paphlagonia made its peace and was added to a western satrapy; then, the 50,000 troops followed their king along the edge of the salt desert, across the river Halys and on down the Royal Road, the smoothest surface for their supply wagons. Cappadocia is a desolate area, as grey and parched as some dead elephant's hide, and so Alexander put it under the control of an Oriental, probably a native; the North had been divided off by the Persians as an untamed kingdom, and although the centre and south fringed the Royal Road, Alexander did not waste time on securing it. The mountains remained more or less independent, a refuge for fugitive Persians, and thereafter an untamed pocket in the wars of Alexander's successors. Though populous, they were not particularly important.

  Two weeks or so after crossing the river Halys, Alexander reached the south-cast border of Phrygia, where he would have hit upon the camp site used by Xenophon's soldiers in 401 B.C. From his readings of Xenophon's works, he could reason that he would shortly be faced by the defile of the Cilician Gates, 'impassable if obstructed by the enemy'. There are ways over the surrounding shoulders of the Golek-Boghaz hills which do avoid the extreme narrows of the pass, but Alexander decided to force it. Either he had made no reconnaissance, in the absence of native guides, or he reckoned that like Xenophon, he could scare the defenders into withdrawal. In this he was justified; the lightly armed units of archers, Shield Bearers and Agrianians were ordered to muster after dark, Alexander led them in person and by a night attack he so unnerved the local pass-guards that their satrap retreated, burning the crops behind him as he headed southwards to his capital at Tarsus. Relieved, Alexander marched the rest of his army through in safety.

  On the far side of the pass, Alexander 'examined the position and is said to have marvelled at his own good fortune: he admitted that he could have been overwhelmed by boulders if there had been any defenders to roll them down on to his men. The road was barely wide enough for four abreast.' Happy in his entry into Cilicia, probably in late June, he descended into the 'large and well-watered plain beyond, full of various trees and vines' as Xenophon had found it, 'and abounding with sesame, millet, wheat and barley'. Enough would survive to satisfy the hungry troops as king and army hurried over the sixty odd miles to Tarsus, Callisthenes pointing out the sites of old Homeric cities in the neighbourhood which, no doubt to Alexander's excitement, had once been sacked by the spear of swift-footed Achilles.

  Whatever Alexander himself may have said, the forcing of the Cilician Gates was not entirely due to his good fortune. Part of the reason lay, for once, where he could not see it: at the enemy court of the Persian king. In the royal palace at Susa there had been nothing smooth or Homeric about the progress of the months of June and July. They had begun with hopes that Memnon's good news would continue, that Alexander would be lured far into Asia and a confrontation would be avoided, while the land would be ravaged along his path, as Memnon had first suggested at the Granicus. This is exactly what the satrap at the Cilician gates had continued to do. In late June Alexander had entered Cilicia while Memnon's strategy was still in force, but by a cruel stroke, as his army passed unopposed through the defile, Memnon's death had become known at Susa and with it, the Great King had decided on more positive plans. By then, the narrows of the Cilician Gates had been wasted; Alexander had been invited through them for the sake of a policy which was now to be abandoned.

  In late June or July, on hearing of Memnon's death, King Darius anxiously summoned a council of noble advisers. As Alexander bore down on distant Tarsus, word went round the court that tactics were under review. Honoured Friends and Royal Relatives, some honorific, others indeed

  descended from the imperial harem, satraps and staff-bearers, Table Companions, Vitaxas, Benefactors of the King, Wearers of the Royal Purple, Chiliarchs of the Immortals, Orosangs and all the lesser Hazarapats foregathered in anxiety, knowing that at Susa their future was to be settled. In the council ch
amber, the assembled company paid obeisance to the superior presence of their king; opinions were expressed, points of strategy were mooted, but Darius's conviction that without Memnon he could no longer rely on war being shipped to the Balkans was generally agreed to be correct. A new move must be made against Alexander himself. The question for discussion was where a move would be most effective. The Athenian general Charidemus had joined the Persians after being exiled by Alexander and here he is said to have proposed that he himself should take 100,000 men, including 30,000 Greek mercenaries, and oppose Alexander alone. But Darius was unwilling to divide his army and was annoyed at the insolent remarks which Charidemus had added; he therefore 'seized him by the girdle according to the Persian custom and handed him over to his attendants for execution'. The story may have been dramatized by a patriotic Greek, but the central fact of their disagreement is probably true. Darius's reaction was to insist on summoning the fullest force and going to war in person. No renegade Athenian would dissuade him from his opinions; stewards, therefore, passed the word, scribes translated the details into Aramaic, couriers rode forth with their sealed letters; hyparchs and cparchs read, resigned themselves to the worst and left their district headquarters. Eyes and Ears of the king prowled round in search of stragglers, while the royal wives and imperial concubines dressed themselves for their customary attendance on a moving army and awaited their chariots and camels.