Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Stupidity, however, is easier to detect when the sequel is known. At the time, Darius's apparent folly was a measure of his mood, that imponderable element which history has tended to forget. To a King of Kings, chosen by Ahura Mazda and supported by an army which the victors later assessed at a million strong, Alexander's 47,000 troops were asking to be crushed. At Issus, the ground and the gods had been unfavourable but at the chosen site of Gaugamela, seventy-six miles south cast of the Tigris crossing, the battlefield was being smoothed for the Empire's traditional weapons, the cavalry and the scythed chariots which its feudal army system existed to maintain. Hyrcanians from the Caspian, Indians from the Punjab, Mcdes from the empire's centre and allied Scythians from beyond the Oxus; such tribal cavalry from the Upper Satrapies' villages made up for the diminution of the hired Greek infantry, by losses and desertion, to a mere 4,000 loyalists. When these and many others were waiting, at least five times as numerous as the enemy, what need of devastation or unsettling division of the troops? They might only deter Alexander from advancing into a foe far larger than he knew. But if Alexander had underestimated the numbers of the Persians, Darius had underestimated his opponent's military genius.

  On the evening of 21 September, the day after the eclipse, Alexander broke camp and marched beyond the Tigris through country which his guides called Aturia, transcribing its Aramaic name into Greek. His route

  was the well-defined line of the Royal Road; on his right, flowed the river; on his left rose the Kurdish mountains which bordered the lands of the Medes; before him galloped his mounted scouts searching hard for the enemy. For three whole days they ranged south-east while sixty miles passed without any sign, but at dawn on 25 September they were back in a flurry, reporting that Darius's army had at last been seen on the march. Again, this was a failure in advance intelligence, as on a closer look the 'army' turned out to be a thousand horsemen who had been detailed to burn any local barns of grain. They had arrived too late to hold the Tigris, and before their firebrands caused much damage, they were routed by Alexander and his mounted lancers in a typically brisk charge. Prisoners were taken and these put the reconnaissance to rights, warning Alexander that 'Darius was not far away with a large force'. On the evening of the 25th Alexander ordered a halt to take stock of the situation. A ditch was to be dug, a palisade set around it and a base camp made for his baggage-train and followers.

  In this camp, at least seven miles from the enemy, Alexander remained for the next four days, in no way distressed by lack of supplies. It was a time, no doubt, for checking horses' fitness and polishing sarissa wood and blades, but as the night of 29 September came on, he at last arrayed his army in battle order and led them off shortly before midnight, evidently meaning to surprise Darius at daybreak. He had already been observed from the hills ahead, perhaps by Mazacus and a small advance force, but he was unaware of this. Four miles from Darius's lines, Alexander surmounted the ridge which overlooks the plains to the north of the Jebel Maqlub; he looked down to the village of Gaugamela in the foreground and the Tell Gomel or 'camel's hump' beside it, from which it took its name. Here he halted his line of battle and summoned all his commanders to a sudden council of war; nothing is said to explain this, but at the very last moment the plans for attack had obviously worried him. Most of those present at the council advised him to march straight ahead, but Parmenion urged encampment and the inspection of the enemy's units and the terrain, in case of hidden obstacles such as stakes and ditches. For once, Parmenion's advice is said to have prevailed, perhaps because it was true to life; the men were ordered to encamp, keeping their order of battle.

  It is not difficult to find reasons for Alexander's hesitance; it does not follow that those reasons are true. He had hoped, no doubt, to surprise his enemy at daybreak, only to see from his hill-top that they were already forewarned and lined up for battle; possibly he had never realized what overwhelming numbers Darius could put into the field. Without surprise, there was little point now in hurrying, especially as Parmenion's advice of reconnaissance was sound; there was much to occupy another day and by waiting, he could pay back Darius for his forethought by keeping his subjects waiting another day and night under arms. The battle would open with a trial of nerves, and he would have dictated its terms.

  For all these reasons a halt was advisable, but nerves were perhaps a double edged weapon, a threat not only among the waiting Persians but also where the historians were later loth to admit them, inside the Macedonian army itself. The men had marched in the dark towards an enemy many times larger than any they had ever seen before, knowing that their king was risking all on the coming encounter. At one point, they are said to have been struck by such panic that Alexander had to order a halt during which they could lay down their weapons until they had recovered; the occasion was probably the night of 29 September, when Alexander did down arms, and the troops, seeing 100,000 camp fires beyond them, had every reason for terror. On the following evening, Alexander was to offer certain secret sacrifices attended by his prophet Aristander, and for the first and only known time in his life, he killed a victim in honour of Fear. This mysterious gesture may have been his propitiation of a power too much in evidence on the night before.

  With a day of valuable reconnaissance, morale had reason to revive. On 30 September Alexander took a group of Companions and galloped in a circle round the battlefield; snares and stakes, they saw, had been driven into the ground to hold up a cavalry charge, while the pitch had elsewhere been levelled for the two hundred scythed chariots. Darius's broad plan of battle could be detected, and for once this was advance intelligence which Alexander could put to use. He returned to camp, and as darkness fell he went with Aristander the prophet to offer the necessary sacrifices. When the offerings were complete, Parmenion and the older Companion nobles came out to join him in the royal tent. To a man, they urged Alexander to attack under cover of night, Parmenion helping to put the case, but the King made memorable reply: 'Alexander,' he answered, 'does not steal his victories.' Whether a true remark or only flattery invented to please the king, this was an answer as outrageous as the moment deserved. A night attack would be a confused risk, better foregone. Alexander, like a true Hellene, had never been above tricks in the interest of his army: had he not set out the night before in order to attack, if not in darkness, at least at the break of dawn? He answered boldly for others to hear or at least to record in his public myth; he then turned about, having ordered a march for the following morning, entered his tent and settled down to a night of plans, sifting all that he had seen and working into the small hours of the morning, while the camp fires burnt low among the enemy host whom he had long sought.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Deep in thought, Alexander sat by torchlight, pondering his tactics for the morrow. Outside the royal tent midnight had come and gone, but not until the small hours of the morning was he ready for bed, where he soon fell asleep. Dawn broke on I October but still Alexander slept on. The morning sun grew full; the officers, it is said, began to worry, until Parmenion gave the troops their orders and gathered a group of generals to rouse Alexander from his bed. They found him relaxed and calm, ready with an answer to their rebukes: 'How can you sleep,' they are said to have asked, 'as if you had won the battle already?' 'What?' he replied with a smile, 'do you not think that this battle is already won, now that we have been spared from pursuing a Darius who bums his land and fights by retreating?'

  This story may be fanciful, but Alexander would indeed have been relieved that as long planned, the mastery of Asia was to depend on a pitched battle. The battle itself was daunting. The enemy's numbers were reported to be immense, at least some quarter of a million men, though they could never have been reckoned accurately. In the open plain, where no natural barriers protected his flanks, Alexander was bound to be encircled by the Great King's cavalry who were drawn in thousands not only from the horse-breeding areas of the empire, from Media, Armenia and even from Cappadocia behin
d his lines, but also from the tribes of the upper satrapies, Indians, Afghans and others, some of them mounted archers, all of them born to ride, none more so than the allied Scythian nomads from the steppes beyond the Oxus. Against their total, perhaps, of 30,000, Alexander's own cavalry totalled a mere 7,000, and not even weaponry was in his favour. Many enemy riders were heavily armoured, a doubtful advantage if the fighting became open and mobile, but since Issus, Darius had revised their weapons of attack, giving them larger shields, swords and thrusting-spears, not javelins, to bring them into line with Alexander's Companions. As for the mounted sarissa-bearers, even they had met their match: some of the Scythian horsemen could perhaps fight with a lance requiring both hands and it was probably for this reason that Darius had placed them opposite Alexander's right, where he had seen their Macedonian equivalents in action two years before. Only his

  infantry were conspicuously weak, for though plentiful, they had none of the drill of Alexander's Foot Companions. But Darius did not expect that the engagement would be won on foot.

  Within this broad problem of encirclement, specific details were reported by scouts and needed close attention. In the centre of the Persian line, where by tradition a Persian king would take up his own position, Darius had stationed some fifteen Indian elephants whose trumpeting and tusking would scare off any frontal charge by Macedonian horses and riders who had never seen or smelt their like before. Some distance from the Persian front stakes and snags had been hammered into the ground as a further precaution against Alexander's cavalry, while closer to the line the plain had been levelled for a counter charge by the two hundred Persian scythed chariots. Their antique form of attack had been evaded by Greeks vith success before, but in the circumstances they posed an added danger. Their target was the phalanx as well as the cavalry, and to avoid them Alexander had best head for bumpy ground away from their level pitch. This bumpy ground, let alone a swing towards it, was likely to upset the massed sarissas of his own phalanx; like chariots diese were also most effective on smooth going.

  There are few finer tributes to Alexander's intelligence than his plan to anticipate these dangers. The fundamentals of his battle line were those which he and his father had long exploited: the Foot-Companions, some 10,000 strong, held sarissas at the ready in the centre, while their unshielded right flank was protected by the 3,000 Shield Bearers, who in turn linked up with the aggressive right cavalry-wing of Companions, led by Alexander himself and preceded by some 2,000 archers, slingcrs and Agrianian javelin men for long-range skirmishing. On the left wing, the shielded flank of the Foot Companions joined directly with Parmenion and the Greek horse, who would fight their usual defensive battle as the anchor of the slanted line. The threat of outflanking and encirclement had called for special precautions. At the tip of each wing, Alexander had added mixed units of heavy cavalry and light infantry, concealing the foot soldiers among the horses and inclining the whole at an oblique angle to his already slanting front line, so that they extended backwards like flaps, behind his own forward cavalry and went some way towards guarding the flanks and rear if these forward units began to be encircled. If the encirclement continued, they were under orders to swing back to an even sharper incline, until they stood at right angles to the front line and joined, at their far end, with Alexander's second protection. This lay some distance behind the rear of the Foot Companions' rectangle and consisted of some 20,000 Greek and barbarian infantry arranged in a reserve formation, which would face about if the enemy cavalry escaped the flank guards and appeared at the gallop in the rear. This about-turn by reserves would change Alexander's army into a hollow oblong, bristling with spears to the front, rear and sides, and although there were obvious dangers if the rear units were forced back into their front-guards and robbed of any retreat, the use of reserves and a hollow formation were sophistications unusual, if not unprecedented, in Greek warfare. Designed for an outnumbered defence, it was to set an example which would not be forgotten ; specific plans against the elephants, snags and chariots would become clear in the course of the action.

  After a sound but not excessive sleep Alexander gave the word for his units to take up these new positions and returned to don his armour in a manner worthy of any Homeric hero:

  His shirt had been woven in Sicily, his breastplate was a double thickness of linen, taken as spoil at Issus. His iron helmet gleamed like pure silver, a work of Theophilus, while his neck-piece fitted him closely, likewise of iron, studded with precious stones. His sword was amazingly light and well-tempered, a present from a Cypriot king: he also sported a cloak, more elaborately worked than the rest of his armour. It had been dyed by Helicon, the famous weaver of Cyprus, and given to him by the city of Rhodes.

  In this cosmoplitan dress he mounted one of his reserve horses and rode out to review his troops; only when the preliminaries were over would the ageing Bucephalas be led forwards.

  Riding up and down the line Alexander exhorted each unit as he thought fit. To the Thessalian horsemen and the other Greeks on the far left under Parmenion's command, he had much to say, 'and when they urged him on, shouting to him to lead them against the barbarians, he shifted his lance from right hand to left and began to call on the gods, praying, so Callisthenes said, that if he were truly sprung from Zeus, they would defend and help to strengthen the Greeks'. This prayer says much for how Alexander wished himself to be seen. So far from being blasphemous or implausible, a reference to his own special descent from Zeus was the fitting climax to his harangue of Greek troops at a moment of high excitement; similarly, on the eve of battle, Julius Caesar would remind his men of his descent from the goddess Venus, whom he claimed as his family protector. Taken loosely, Alexander's words need mean no more than that Zeus was his ancestor, as for all Macedonian kings, and the same phrase could be applied, in this unexceptionable sense, to the kings of Greek Sicily or half-barbarian Cyprus. But this ancestry was undisputed, and neither Alexander nor his court historian would ever have hedged it about

  with the words 'if it were truly so ..This cautious reference implies a deeper meaning, and to an audience who had lived with the rumours and flattery that had gathered since Siwah, the words would surely have been taken as hinting at direct sonship of the god. Even then they were an encouragement, not an impossibility; their guarded phrasing is not a proof that Alexander was sceptical of stories of his own divine origin. Unlike others, he realized that such delicate matters can never be considered certain. Support was given by Aristander, his tame prophet, who accompanied him along the lines, dressed in a white cloak with a crown of gold on his head: he 'pointed out an eagle', symbol of Zeus and of Alexander's own royal coinage, 'which soared above Alexander's head and directed its flight straight against the enemy'. Preparing to fight for their lives, no troops would wish to dispute that the bird in the sky was anything less momentous.

  Orders and exhortations take time to be delivered, and it cannot have been long before midday that Alexander finally marched his 47,000 men down into the plain against a foe some six times their numbers, whom they had kept waiting under arms, fretful and sleepless, for the past two days. Much ingenuity has been devoted to what follows, but there were facts in the advance which only serve to discredit such attempts; no general, least of all a rival of Achilles, had remained on a vantage point to describe the overall engagement, and no historian, least of all Callisthenes, was in a position to survey the scene with the naked eye. Such a broad view would clearly be impossible: the enemy were relying on horsemen, who always charge and career in frantic competition, and the plain beneath Tell Gomel is dry and dusty. Every account agreed that the battle would end in a billowing dust-cloud. When orders could only be passed by trumpet or word of mouth to distant commanders whose line-up left them to choose between several alternative positions, this dust is a disruptive fact of the first importance: 'Anyone who has witnesscd a cavalry charge in dry weather over an Indian maidan will be able to picture what the dust at Gaugamela was like.
On one such occasion, the writer remembers that visibility was reduced to four or five yards.'* In every account of the battle, ancient and modem, the dust is only allowed to intervene when the fighting is almost finished. But if the retreat was obscured by a dust-cloud, so too was the advance over exactly similar ground; like philosophers, historians of Gaugamela would do better first to raise the dust and then complain that they, like Alexander, are unable to see from the start.

  The more the historian is removed from the facts, the more he imposes a pattern on their disorder: contemporaries would soon describe a battle

  * Major General J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great (1958) p. 178. 236 rich in about-turns and flanking manoeuvres,

  and within twenty years their details had been muddled and elaborated by a literary historian. By a Roman, four hundred years later, these various narratives were clumsily intertwined and now, two thousand years afterwards, men draw maps to reconcile differences which ought to be left to conflict. To participants, a battle is neither tidy nor explicable; the earliest accounts of Gaugamela tell more of the mood of Alexander's court after victory than of events on the field itself. Romance and flattery singled out what suited them; though one coherent document, the Persians' order of battle, was captured among the spoils, even this cannot be believed unreservedly. It may only have been one copy among many, never enacted in practice.