Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  In his letter, Darius had blamed the outbreak of war on the Macedonians and dismissed his defeat as an act of god; in answer, Alexander invoked the sacrileges of the Persian kings in Greece and their hostility to Philip, including Darius's plans for his murder, and explained his own invasion as a campaign of vengeance. Darius, he wrote, had seized the Persian throne by crime and bribed the Greeks to rebel; as for the gods, they were with his own army and in future, Darius should approach him as King of Asia. Only as suppliant before a King would he be granted his family. 'If you dispute your right to the kingdom, stand your ground and fight for it; do not run away, for I will come after you, wherever you go.' This was a blunt manifesto, and Greek revenge was already beginning to fade against the wider perspective of Asia's kingship. But the aspiring king of Asia might yet be confined to the western coast of the continent; that depended on his strategy in the sea-ports, and he knew it.

  For the moment, all was working out splendidly. At Byblos he welcomed another absent king's son; at Sidon, a crucial port, past history helped him to a decisive coup. The Persians had suppressed Sidon's bid for independence some twelve years earlier and after the usual savagery had left the city to a tame king. Memories of those heady days when Sidon's citizenry had hacked down the trees in the Persian governor's park had not yet died, and when Alexander could promise the deposition of Persia and her agent, the city was his to treat as he pleased. Some fifty ships manned by Sidon were sailing in the Persians' fleet, and the surrender of their home city would surely persuade them to defect or return peacefully; the choice of a new king is said to have been left to Hephaistion, who picked on a man hitherto employed in a garden. Who better to rule than a gardener, even if the story may reflect an ancient myth in Semitic kingship? Promoted from the flowerbed, King Abdalonymus was as popular a choice with the mass of Sidonians as Alexander intended, and in return, he entertained the Companions to a lion-hunt in his nearby royal game park; scenes from the hunt were carved on his sarcophagus when he died, a Companion himself.

  However, friendship with Sidon meant likely trouble at the ancient harbour city of Tyre, for while Sidon had recently suffered from Persia, her rival Tyre had flourished and so lay powerful and forbidding on Alexander's coast route southwards. When Alexander approached, he was met by the city's elders and the son of their absent king with gifts and a golden crown, promising to do whatever Alexander might command. Alexander replied that he wished to pay sacrifice to Melkarth, a Tyrian god whom he identified with his ancestor Heracles: this had been advised by an oracle. He had once watched his father use the same pretext for an unavoidable war and it was shrewdly calculated, for it exposed the Tyrians' offer and revealed that at heart, they wanted to remain neutral. If Alexander wished to sacrifice, there was an adequate temple to Heracles at Old Tyre on the mainland; he was not to enter their new island city. This retort made Alexander angry and within days he had begun to demolish Old Tyre in order to use its stone and timber for an assault on New Tyre's offshore position.

  Anger was not his principal motive. Tyre, like Sidon, was one of the home ports for the crews in the Persian fleet and as Alexander had already decided to head south into Egypt, he could not leave it unsubdued on his main route of communication, especially as many of Tyre's warships had remained in the city. On a wider front, the Tyrians had been holding a grand festival in honour of Melkarth, to which representatives had come from Carthage, a city once founded by Tyre; these Carthaginians promised help in the event of a siege. Alexander may not have known of their promises but he would be aware of Carthage's link with Tyre and the possibility of naval help once his back was turned. It might be important to scare off this new threat from the west.

  The process was bound to be laborious. New Tyre stood on a walled island two and three-quarter miles in circumference, cut off from the coast by half a mile of sea, shallow at first but soon dropping to a depth of some 600 feet. The city was fitted with two harbours, one on the north and another on the south-east outside the walls, and the wall itself rose as much as 150 feet, at least in the opinion of the besiegers. Though a king of Cyprus had once taken Tyre by force forty years before - a remarkable success about which regrettably little is known - he would have been supported by his strong fleet; in early January, a month of rough seas, Alexander was proposing to assault an island city and its remaining fleet when he had no ships of his own. In the early sixth century, Tyre had withstood siege by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, for thirteen consecutivc years, and against a land-bound Alexander it must have reckoned that its chances of survival were equally high. Evidently the Macedonian soldiery had their reservations; Alexander was forced to tell them that he had seen Heracles in a dream, extending his right hand and inviting him inside the city, while his favourite prophet Aristander announced cheering interpretations of such omens as blood-dripping rations of bread. In the background there were more solid reasons for confidence, though the historians never explained them.

  In antiquity the assault of a walled city already required the combination of men and machines. It is naive to exalt the inventions above men's moods and opinions; Greeks in Alexandria would later discover steam-power but only use it to propel toy engines, and Buddhists were content if their newfound water power would peacefully revolve their prayer-wheels. But on the battlefield, inventions are more readily applied and there they can help to conquer the most soldierly courage. Like men, the inventions have fought a to-and-fro battle of their own. That primitive weapon for smashing, the mace, was first defeated by the helmet; to the helmet, the axe made cutting reply, only to be kept at bay by the newfound bow and arrow. Arrows brought on body armour, body armour diminished the earlier man-sized shield, smaller shields left a hand free for the thrusting-spear, and the discovery of the long-range composite bow in Mesopotamia in the seventeenth century B.C., backed by the mobile platform of the chariot, had been an innovation on the scale of powder and musket. So too with the race between siege technique and city walls. Axes, poles and ladders had menaced third millennium walls of brick and mud, but in the second millennium, walls had improved and regained the upper hand. Battering rams and siege-towers reached their peak in seventh-century Assyria, whereupon walls, shocked and overtopped, grew sloping banks at their base, bastions and recesses in their outlines and often changed their water-soluble bricks to massive thicknesses of stone. Since the heyday of Assyria, siege technique in the east had been exported to the Mediterranean, but until recently, it had not been advanced; city walls had had things more their own way, and there was no uniformity of stone materials or defences among the Greek cities. In 332 Alexander, like King Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria and his lightly built battering ram, was one step ahead in the battle of weapons; he was patron of a stone-throwing catapult, fitted with washers and powered by springs of twisted sinew.

  It is ironic that the walls of Tyre were to be the first fortification to feel the force of boulders from Greek engines. Compared with the kingdoms of the east, the Greeks had been slow to develop advanced siege equipment, drawing their knowledge of siege-towers and rams in the course of the fifth century from their contact with the Orient; probably the techniques had passed from Assyria to Tyre, from Tyre to Carthage, from Carthage to the battlefields of Sicily, where the resident Greeks could have learnt from their Carthaginian enemies. Tyre, then, had been a vital link in the roundabout passage of siegecraft to the Greeks. But the route had also worked in reverse. At the turn of the century. Dionysius I, ruler of Syracuse, had first sponsored an elementary form of arrow-shooting artillery which he then turned against the startled Carthaginians: Carthage no doubt had reported her new wounds to Tyre and hence in 332 the Tyrian engineers had copied Dionysius's idea, and evolved arrow-catapults of their own. But they had not bargained with Philip and the intervening rise of Macedonia. By 340 Greek engineers under Philip's patronage had disovered the powers of a torsion spring; at first they fitted it to the old Sicilian brand of catapult, but soon pupils of Philip's head en
gineer, Polyeidus the Thessalian, had gone on to experiment with torsion-powered stone-throwers for Alexander's benefit. The old Syracusan catapult, presumably still used at Tyre, was repeat-firing without a torsion spring; whereas its range was some two hundred yards and its weapon a metal-tipped bolt, Alexander's new stone-throwers, improved since their first appearance at Halicarnassus, could rip through the ranks of defenders at 400 yards, and at 150 yards they could damage a city wall. To judge from several stories, the accuracy of ancient artillery was most impressive; when the Spartan king Archidamus was shown an arrow-shooting catapult for the first time, 'By Heracles', he remarked, 'man's courage is now a thing of the past.'

  Alexander's technicians had not stopped at stone-throwers; stronger and taller siege-towers than ever before were waiting to be assembled, leaving space for archers and battering rams on as many as twenty different levels, up to a height of 180 feet; they were an extraordinary feat of carpentry, for their axles were made of oak, their planking of fir and their wooden towers were coated with lime and hung with sheepskins to keep off enemy missiles. There were improved grappling irons, though Alexander's head engineer disputed their merits; there was also a borer on wheels whose long iron-tipped pole was poked into mud-brick walling by a newly improved method. Wide drawbridges fell from each storey of the towers, down which more troops could pour than on usual designs; rams were mounted on a superior form of 'tortoise' 48 feet square, beneath which they were worked by ropes and a roller, while animal skins and a three-storey tower protected them, its top level carrying catapults, the bottom two holding buckets of water to put out any flames. But without exceptional leadership no number of new machines would bring Tyre down. Men as well as mules would have to heave these gigantic towers into position, and encouragement rested with Alexander, cut off by half a mile of water from the point at which conventional siegecraft could begin. 'Genius,' Napoleon once remarked, 'is the inexplicable measure of a great commander.' Before Tyre, Alexander's generalship had been good rather than great; with a characteristic leap forward to meet a challenge, he was now to show for the first time that genius which singles him out in military history. Before settling down to besiege, he sent heralds to offer Tyre peace in return for surrender. The Tyrians seized and killed them, hurling their bodies off the city walls in full view of the enemy. 'A truce must not be broken or a herald killed; a man who has surrendered to a superior must not be abused': the Tyrians had flouted an unwritten law of Greek warfare.

  In reply, Alexander's first plan was bold. If he could not sail to Tyre, he would build a mole across the waves and walk there. For the mole, he had a successful precedent. In 398 Dionysius I had taken the city of Motya in north-west Sicily after rebuilding its sunken causeway across a whole mile of sea. Tyre was only half that distance away and though no previous earthwork survived as a foundation, most of the sea cliannel was so shallow that its mud could be used to bind the stonework together. It would be interesting to know how, if at all, Alexander had estimated the depth of the sea, as a hundred yards or so short of the island the water deepens suddenly. But even at that distance, Alexander's causeway would have served its purpose; his siege-towers would still overtop the wall, allowing his archers to shoot down on to the defenders, while his new stone throwers could batter the fortifications. Fortunately the forests of the Lebanon were a nearby source of timber, whereas Old Tyre, fast being demolished, provided the necessary stone; any further transport of building materials would have been impossibly slow, especially in the absence of the fleet. Ancient Greece knew no efficient carthorse collar and had never even devised a wheelbarrow.

  Through the shallows the work proceeded apace, watched by Alexander who, said his officers, 'explained each step in person, encouraging some with a kind word, lightening the labours of others who had worked conspicuously well with a gift of money'. The people of Tyre were sceptical, harassing the builders from their warships and jeering at Alexander for daring to rival the God of the Sea. But the mole drew nearer, Poseidon notwithstanding, and the Tyrians soon took to pelting it with arrows from their arrow-catapults: in reply, Alexander hung up leather hides to protect his men and ordered two tall siege-towers to be erected to that he could shoot back. The Tynans, themselves engineers with a respectable history, replied with a show of technical cunning.

  In the secrecy of the city harbour they built up a transport ship to hold as much dry timber, shavings and torchwood as possible, adding pitch, sulphur and other inflammable material. The idea of a fireship was not new, but to each of its two masts near the prow they lashed two beams and hung up cauldrons filled with fuel; when the beams burnt, the cauldrons would tip and fan the fire, like the famous firepots which Rhodes would popularize over a century later. After ballasting the stern so that the prow was well clear of the water the crews waited for a favourable wind and then arranged for triremes to tow them towards the mole. Within range, they set light to the cargo, dived for safety and left the ship to blow straight into Alexander's siege-towers. The triremes bombarded any Macedonian defenders, and skiffs put in to the mole elsewhere and destroyed all available catapults. Victim of a most intelligent manoeuvre, Alexander ordered new machinery to be built and the mole to be widened to some 200 feet in order to hold more siege-towers. Personally, he departed to Sidon on the happy news that the Phoenician fleet was at last returning home from Persian service; they might well be compelled to join him now that they had heard how their bases had surrendered, and as his hewers of wood in the Lebanon cedar forests were being harassed by natives, the Shield Bearers and Agrianians came too, prepared for a short sharp exercise.

  On reaching Sidon, Alexander was more than compensated for the slow and disastrous progress of his mole. The kings of Byblos and Arad had returned to put in his power the ships with which they had deserted from the Persian admirals. Sidon did likewise, pleased by her change of king, and Rhodes sent nine warships, a precious gesture from an island whose entrepreneurial skills were becoming indispensable to the trade of the south-east Mediterranean. A hundred warships in all had joined him, enough to cripple the Persians' fleet at the start of their sailing season and to vindicate his long-term policy of taking the sea-ports one by one. It did not seem too disturbing when a fifty-oared pinnace arrived from Antipater with an urgent message in its captain's keeping; across enemy seas and against a March wind, the journey must have been dramatic and it would not have been undertaken for a triviality. As the captain had been the hero of the surprise of the ten Persian triremes in the Cyclades the previous autumn, his message probably concerned the evident attempts of the Spartan king Agis to rebel with Persian naval and monetary support. Alexander was already aware of Spartan discontent and none too worried that the Greek allies would abet it; the Persian ships were now a dying threat, so he left Sidon for ten days and menaced the tribesmen of the Lebanon cedar forests in order to safeguard his timber-cutters, sparing himself nothing in the process, as is plain from a delightful incident.

  Lysimachus, Alexander's favourite boyhood tutor, had insisted on joining the march to the woods but as darkness fell, cold and unfamiliar in the mountains, he was lagging far behind the professional soldiers. Rather than abandon him to the enemy, Alexander fell back by his side and together, pupil and tutor soon found themselves cut off from all but a few of their troops. The night was growing chilly and they had no supplies to light a fire; in the distance, Alexander saw the enemy camp fires and 'trusting in his own agility - for, as always, he consoled his Macedonians by sharing their hardships in person', he set off to fetch his men a light. Reaching the camp fire, he surprised and stabbed two enemy guards with his dagger, snatched a torch from the embers and brought it back to warm his followers. Having scared off enemy reprisals, tutor, pupil and friends spent the night by their own blazing fire. In the search for Alexander's personality, this story must not be discounted; Chares its teller was Alexander's Master of Ceremonies, who would hear it told at dinners by his king, and any exaggerations may come not from
his own imagination but from fellow-guests at table. Serious concern for his soldiers, a personal daring which in a lesser man would be a foolish waste of life: it was only proper that the new Achilles should have risked himself in the manner of his hero for the tutor who had first given him his Homeric nickname.

  On returning to Sidon, he must have thought that his good news would never end. A hundred and twenty Cypriot ships and three prominent kings of Cypriot cities had left the Persians to pledge him their services; he now had a fleet nearly three times as large as Tyre's and he could call on that most modern invention in sea power, the quinquireme. Cypriots and Phoenicians used this expertly, for it meant manning their normal three-banked warship with two men to each oar on the two bottom layers, one to each oar on the top layer; this doubled manpower on the lower levels had increased the speed and ramming-power over the usual trireme. The Cypriot kings kept this prestige ship as their privilege; in the age after Alexander the quinquireme would touch off an arms race of the usual royal pomposity, one king competing with another until the definitive futility of a thirty-banker had laboured on to the Aegean. No king more merited a quinquireme than the elderly Pnytagoras of Salamis, a man whose past may have decided the fate of the Cypriot fleet; his grandfather had been bold Euagoras, who had fought for independence from Persia's empire. Twelve years earlier, this grandson Pnytagoras had been raised to Salamis's throne to throw off Persian control at a time of revolt in Egypt and Phoenicia. Eventually he had secured himself by changing sides for a bargain with Persia, but his independence was a recent memory and when he looked to Alexander, he was not altogether disappointed. Alone of the Cypriot kings, Pnytagoras ruled a city with no minerals, so Alexander granted him a nearby copper-mine on Cyprus. Like the kings of the Phoenician cities, the Cypriot kings were restored and acknowledged as allies, and although they were to strike coins with Alexander's name and type, strict uniformity was not enforced, and money in their own name continued to appear in small quantities.