In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  No doubt as a part of his education syllabus in the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza, Aristotle had credited the tight formation of the hoplite phalanx with the forging of a cooperative ethos that made a Greek polis, and so demokratia, possible, and yet his Athenian Constitution detailed its bureaucratic drag: Athens attempted to employ 7,000 jurymen, 1,600 archers, 1,200 knights, 500 council members, 500 arsenal guards, 700 other resident officials with 700 more overseas, 12,500 hoplites (in time of war) and twenty coastal vessels with 2,000 crew; all on an annual income of not much over 1,000 talents once the silver production from the silver mines at Laurium tapered off. Few of the potential new revenue streams suggested in Xenophon’s Poroi (or Peri Prosodon, broadly ‘ways and means’, or ‘revenues’) had ever been introduced. It was in this environment that leiturgia (the root of ‘liturgies’) evolved, requiring the wealthier citizens to assume the funding of onerously expensive public activities in return for an honorific; almost one hundred liturgical appointments existed for festivals alone and these increased under the Diadokhoi. What the constitution failed to mention was the additional cost of a slave ratio of perhaps three to one serving the citizens in Athens.155

  Conceivably, with the dichotomies of Aristotle’s Politics fighting in his head, Alexander adopted an erratic policy that turned the cities in his path into an eclectic mix of ‘loyal’ democracies, oligarchies, tyrannies and indefinable in-betweens.156 Philip’s advanced expeditionary force under Parmenio, Attalus and Amyntas had done much the same through 336/335 BCE and some of the alliances they formed were inherited by Alexander, though townsfolk had been sold into slavery by his predecessors too.157 Although Philip’s foray into Asia Minor had found receptive ears in a few Greek cities, others living symbiotically with the Great King’s satraps under the King’s Peace of 387/6 BCE (otherwise known as the Peace of Antalcidas, which had once maintained Spartan supremacy in Greece) just saw trouble ahead.

  ISOCRATES’ IDEOLOGICAL INVASION, ALEXANDER’S ARGEAD ADVENTURE

  Unlike Xenophon who had his Theban friend, Proxenus, to act as a proxenos and broker relations with Cyrus the Younger, Alexander had received no formal invite to Asia.158 He did, nevertheless, have Isocrates’ famous ‘persuasion through words’. How influential was his early plea for koinonia, a commonality of purpose, remains conjecture, for it had failed to unite Greece against the Macedonian threat. As well as reaching out to Philip II, the Athenian rhetor had courted the fourteen-year-old Macedonian prince through correspondence; Isocrates’ letter praised Alexander’s philanthropos, his philosophos and his philathenaios, the love of Athens.159 The Rhetoric to Alexander, possibly written around 340 BCE by Anaximenes, suggests the prince was indeed a political target in his malleable teens.160 Isocrates had challenged Philip to Heraclean efforts, but his rousing words, more sycophantic than practical on the Pellan-strained budget, might have resonated deeper with the young self-assured Alexander:

  Be assured that a glory unsurpassable and worthy of the deeds you have done in the past will be yours when you shall compel the barbarians – all but those who have fought on your side – to be serfs of the Greeks, and when you shall force the king who is now called Great to do whatever you command. For then will naught be left for you except to become a god.161

  Xenophon and his working colleague, King Agesilaus of Sparta, had shared Isocrates’ view, though the deep-rooted resentment of Sparta’s supremacy in the wake of the Peloponnesian War made her leadership of any Panhellenic force impossible. Moreover, Sparta had been aided by Cyrus the Younger in the last years of the conflict, a state of affairs that earned the pro-Spartan Xenophon his exile from Athens.162 Since then, military supremacy had passed to Thebes under the remarkable generals Epaminondas, Pelopidas and Pammenes (died 364, 362, 356 BCE respectively), whose military reforms had led victory at Leuctra in 371 BCE over Sparta which was either deliberately excluded by Philip from the League of Corinth, or was standing aloof in a display of xenalasia.163 When Thebes was destroyed by Alexander in 335 BCE, Isocrates’ decades-old call for the invasion of Persia fell upon the new Macedonian hegemon.

  When Alexander picked up the challenge, to obtain the funding for the expedition that would extend his rule beyond the bounds the gods and heroes approved of – so Themistocles had warned – he had been forced to borrow some 800 talents and at a loan rate that probably reflected the risk to the capital from (we assume) the Macedonian aristocracy.164 He exempted Macedonians from tax to consolidate his position after Philip’s death and was now dishing out crown lands to secure further funds, though Perdiccas, the future Somatophylax, is famously said to have declined any such security, joining Alexander with a simpler trust in his ‘hopes for the future’.165 Curtius and Arrian claimed the king still carried a debt of 500 talents from his father; this may have been derived from a court source who had wished to reinforce the non-pecuniary notion of loyalty of the state soldiers crossing to Asia, if it was not an allusion to the similar plight of the younger Cyrus in Xenophon’s Anabasis.166

  The alleged 60 or 70 talents remaining in the royal coffers at Philip’s death would have covered the wages of the 30,000 or so mixed infantry Alexander crossed to Asia with for only a few meagre weeks without additional plunder coming their way, discounting the far higher remuneration the cavalry would have expected; Duris of Samos (date of birth uncertain, possibly as late the 330s BCE), calculated Alexander had funds sufficient for thirty days and Onesicritus claimed he owed 200 talents besides.167 The 800 newly borrowed talents would have maintained the expedition for no more than a further several months, and, as a result, Alexander was forced to disband his 160-ship navy (costing perhaps 250 talents a month) after the siege of Miletus due to financial constraints; his continued mistrust of his Greek naval officers in the face of 400 Phoenician ships still in Persian employ possibly played a part.168 Although the treasury at Sardis would yield to him and Tarsus would be captured intact (giving him his first mint), and no doubt his adoptive mother, Queen Ada of Caria, made available funds from her stronghold of Alinda, the pressure was on for a confrontation that would prise the Persian treasury open.169

  As Alexander pressed on down the coast of Asia Minor, cities and synoecisms that refused immediate obeisance were ransomed, garrisoned, destroyed and pillaged, or occasionally pardoned on the promise of good behaviour. For apart from a few Greek cities on the Aegean seaboard, these were not members of the League of Corinth, and thus they were fair game, despite any ancient Ionian League affiliations.170 Non-Greek communities (those in Lycia, for example) could expect no terms at all; essentially their fate lay in the manner in which they treated the Macedonian advance.

  Some cities failed to comply from the outset; others did, and then revolted. More than twenty cities came under siege, and Alexander (if not Philip II before him), and not Demetrius the son of Antigonus, should have earned the epithet Poliorketes, the Beseiger.171 When they did finally fall, Greek, Macedonian or local resident governors were installed (or reinstalled) with nomographoi to draft new laws and ‘correct’ those that had been already been drafted or imposed by the koine sympoliteia, the federal state body that oversaw their interests.172 In Miletus, Alexander was even nominally elected (or self-appointed) as stephanephoros, chief magistrate, for the year 334/333 BCE. There was no Thucydidean Melian Dialogue to weigh up arguments of alignment or neutrality; as Solon (ca. 638-558 BCE) had once been warned: ‘Written laws, are just like spiders’ webs; they hold the weak and delicate in their meshes, but get torn to pieces by the rich and powerful.’173 In fact Solon had himself departed Greece for ten years to avoid being called to task for the decrees that backfired in the wake of his own reforms.174

  In the view of Tarn, Alexander’s behaviour was justifiable; he pointed out that the state of affairs in Asia Minor, specifically relating to these years, required extraordinary measures because the outcome of the war with the Great King was still far from certain.175 We have an equally conspicuous apologia by Arrian: Alexander’s �
�… instructions were to overthrow the oligarchies and install democracies throughout, to restore their own local legislation in each city, and to remit the tribute they had been paying to the barbarians.’ This appears to overlook the key objective of the arrangement: the tribute (phoros) was now redirected to the Macedonian regime.176

  In truth, all political ideologies suited Alexander’s direction and in isolation each of them worked, for a while. A number of inscriptions preserve the essence of Macedonian machtpolitik and none better than Alexander’s Letter to the Chians, thought to have been written sometime between 334 and 332 BCE. The decree provided for the return of exiles to the island (including the historian Theopompus) with a ‘democratic’ constitution to be reinstated, and yet it demanded that all judicial disputes be referred directly to Alexander. Though Tarn argued this was the ‘decent thing’ to stop the civil strife, Chios, a member of the Corinthian League (as was Lesbos), was forced to donate twenty fully-crewed and funded triremes to the war effort, and the island was summarily garrisoned at its own expense – though the occupiers were termed a ‘defence force’.

  To accomplish what he did, and to hold it together with limited military resources, required the threatening charisma and his exploitative genius Alexander had inherited from his father. But it was not a sustainable policy; loyalty was fickle, garrisons were vulnerable to being overrun and so were his regional governors. But it was a salutary lesson on Macedonian-style freedom; the Common Peace was, as Badian noted, an ‘aggressive peace’… ‘governed by the will of one man’.177 And so in Alexander’s Homeric adventure the ‘liberation’ from Persia was to become a very mixed blessing.178

  The cynical Diogenes, watching from occupied Corinth, is said to have summed up the campaigning king, his regent then in Athens, and his messenger (named Athlios) who had just arrived in the city, with, ‘athlios par’ athliou di’ athliou pros athlion’. This broadly (and here with poetic licence) translates as ‘wretched son of wretched sire to wretched wight by wretched squire’.179 The mixed signals broadcast by this new order in the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard had to be weighed up against the certainty of annihilation if Alexander’s ambition was stifled.

  The confrontation that would finally access significant funds from the Persian treasury came with the second major pitched battle with the Great King’s army beside the Pinarus River at Issus in Cilicia in November 333 BCE, near the strategic border ‘gates’ that separate Cilicia from Upper Syria. Demosthenes was hoping that Alexander, the meirakion (stripling) that held Greece under his thumb, would be ‘trampled under Persian hooves’.180 The result was quite different: Darius fled in the face of Alexander’s penetrating charge in his direction despite the spirited defence of his nobles, forcing him to eventually abandon his chariot, shield and bow, along with his family and his harem of 329 concubines. Further hauls at nearby Damascus included hostile Spartan and Athenian envoys and some 2,600 talents of coined money, 500 pounds of wrought silver and 7,000 loaded pack animals.181

  Some 100,000 infantry and 10,000 of Darius’ cavalry were reportedly slain, though Justin clarified that 40,000 were actually taken prisoner. Only 300 Macedonian infantry and 150 cavalry fell, claimed Diodorus who incongruously added, ‘… the cavalry on both sides was engaged and many were killed as the battle raged indecisively because of the evenly matched fighting qualities…’ The Persians had additionally ‘… launched at Alexander such a shower of missiles that they collided with one another in the air’; the source behind the figures (Arrian’s text suggests it might be Ptolemy) was obviously expecting readers to conclude that few arrows had found their mark. Curtius more plausibly added that that 4,500 of Alexander’s men were additionally wounded.182

  The battle at Issus may have been the first instance in which the Macedonian infantrymen were provided reason to question Alexander’s motives as well as their own position in the scheme of things. In a pre-battle address to his troops, Alexander encouraged the Illyrians and Thracians to loot and pillage but there is no mention that any wealth filtered down to his Macedonian regulars. All this was, however, buried beneath the grander themes of post-battle chivalry that saw the captured Persian women embraced as Alexander’s own.183

  Keeping royal hostages alive on the pretext of bargaining for a larger prize was supportable. But Alexander assured Darius’ captive daughters that he would provide dowries for their marriages and find them suitable husbands – himself and Hephaestion as it turned out – for he married Stateira and Hephaestion married Drypetis at Susa in 324 BCE. Alexander further promised to bring up Darius’ young son as his own and to show him royal honour.184 Had Alexander’s regular soldiers known of the outcome, it is doubtful they would have put their lives on the line at Issus, despite Diodorus’ claim that Alexander ‘…won universal recognition throughout his own army for his exceeding propriety of conduct’, behaviour that Diodorus hoped would echo through the future ages.185

  Some 8,000 Greek mercenaries had made good their escape in the cover of darkness.186 Up to this point, more Greek mercenaries had fought for Darius III than in the invasion force; it was a state of affairs captured by an earlier Theban proclamation: ‘Anyone who wished to join the Great King and Thebes in freeing the Greeks and destroying the tyrant of Greece [Alexander] should come over to them.’187 Those behind the Theban revolt were attempting to revive a Boeotian confederacy, one supposedly disbanded in 386 BCE (and again in 336 BCE).188 Some 50,000 mercenaries might have eventually found their way into the Great King’s ranks, and if captured the punishment for their ‘treachery’ was bound to be harsh; many were exiles of their city-states care of Philip’s earlier campaigns.189

  The next major campaign episode, the drawn-out siege of Tyre in 332 BCE and the slaughter that followed, warned of the consequences of continued opposition to Alexander’s war machine; after the Macedonian envoys had been cast from the walls which were finally breached some seven months later, 8,000 civilians were massacred in Tyre itself and 2,000 were reportedly crucified along the beach. Alexander had now destroyed both cities of the Phoenician Cadmus.190 The Greeks had always viewed the aquiline-featured Phoinikes (Phoenicians, though they still termed themselves Canaanites) with suspicion. They were shrewd and cunning traders who had settled at Aradus, Byblos, Berytus, Sidon and Tyre some 2,000 years before, and who furtively slipped in and out of Mediterranean ports after offloading their cargoes; no doubt their merchandising contacts were secretly coveted by the Greeks, and Herodotus all but blamed them for starting the Trojan War.191

  Habitually settling on coastal islands into a loose Phoenician federation, here at Tyre, some 600 yards of maritime arrogance separated them from the shore; Alexander set about building a mole 200-feet wide so that ‘… they too would understand they belonged to the mainland.’192 He had already proven it could be done; Clazomenae had been joined to the coast with a permanent causeway a year or so before. The siege at Tyre requiring an estimated 28,000-plus tons of grain to feed the attackers, probably accounting for many of the support ships from Rhodes and the other ‘allies’ who watched on as a seaborne competitor was being battered into submission.193 It is the silted-over remains of Alexander’s mole that joins the city to the mainland today.

  Accounts of the military ingenuity employed against the Phoenician mother-city spanned many colourful pages. The artillery knowledge Philip’s engineers had gained from the innovations of Dionysius I of Syracuse, and which had been employed in the sieges Philip II brought to bear on Olynthus, Perinthus and Byzantium, was passed down to Alexander who had already used it well at Miletus and Halicarnassus (Bodrum in Turkey).194 The taking of the city became a challenge that inspired the Thessalian, Diades (‘the man who took Tyre’, successor to Polyidus, a siege engineer for Philip) to invent and further develop movable towers (phoretoi pyrgoi), wheeled rams (arietes), drills (trypana), cranes (korakes), possibly ‘belly shooters’ (grastraphetes) and the new rock-hurling torsion catapults, the katapeltai Makedonikoi.

 
Arrian provided a description of the catapult-carrying warships, mechanophorai nees, which bombarded the walls. This in turn required the defenders to employ fire-throwers of bitumen, sulphur and other combustibles, as well as spoked spinning wheels to deflect the incoming projectiles, while red-hot sand was poured down into the armour of Alexander’s men.195 The siege technology would pass down the generations through the lost writing of Diades himself and into the descriptions of Agesistratus and Athenaeus’ Mechanicus, through Ctesibius’ Construction of Artillery, Biton’s Construction of War-machines and Artillery, into the new catapult technology in Polyidus’ On Machines, Heron’s treatises Belopoeika and Cheiroballistra, and to the extant treatise of Aeneas Tacticus’ Defence of Fortified Positions (written soon after ca. 357 BCE) which survived along with Vitruvius’ three chapters on artillery for the Roman army to exploit.196

  This was a far cry from the honour code of the ‘spear-famed lords of Euboea’ who apparently banned missiles in the early Archaic ‘mythistorical’ Lelantine War ca. 700 BCE, and it renders the opening lines of Heron’s Belopoeika (On Arrow-Making) somewhat paradoxical: ‘Artillery-construction has surpassed argumentative training… and taught mankind how to live a tranquil life.’197 The Tyrian siege was a tense, bitter, drawn-out and expensive delay in Alexander’s progress. Yet the city’s eventual fall and the tribute to the dead is afforded a single line by Plutarch and Justin, less than a quarter-page by Arrian, and a meagre half-page by Curtius who provided the most detailed account (some thirty Loeb edition pages) of the siege.198 Despite the Phoenician priests roping down and nailing Tyrian Apollo to his pedestal, with proposals to reinstate the Carthaginian tradition of sacrificing a freeborn son to Canaanite El (Cronus to the Greeks, Saturn to the Romans), the gods joined Alexander, and the Phoenician city that had survived a thirteen-year siege by Nebuchadnezzar II two and a half centuries before (585 through 572 BCE), was finally taken.199