to some ancient custom. These Carthaginians had promised the Tyrians help at the beginning of the
siege but could not deliver on their promise because of their own war against Syracuse. The
Carthaginians were sent packing, bearing a formal declaration of war.
After the victory Alexander offered sacrifice to Herakles and also dedicated the piece of siege
artillery that had breached the wall to the temple. In a revealing act of piety, Alexander also removed
the gold chains from Apollo and gave orders that the god was henceforth to be called Apollo
Philalexandros, or Apollo, friend of Alexander.
The siege unquestionably was brutal and its outcome horrific. But the Tyrians conducted their
resistance in a way that probably guaranteed that no mercy would be shown to them. At one point
during the siege the Tyrians had captured some Macedonians who had been sailing from Sidon. The
Tyrians dragged them up onto the battlements, cut their throats in full view of the Macedonian army,
and flung their bodies into the sea. Modern historians who have condemned Alexander and the
Macedonians for the slaughter and enslavement of the Tyrians have failed to mention this Tyrian
atrocity, which, Arrian says, particularly aroused the rage of the Macedonians—along with the
protracted nature of the siege.
To explain, of course, is not to justify, and anyone who reads Arrian’s description of the Tyrians’
last stand in front of the shrine of Agenor can only feel pity for them, as the historian intended.
Diodorus put it well when he commented that Tyre had endured “the siege bravely rather than wisely,
and had come into such misfortunes, after a resistance of seven months.”
From Alexander, the Tyrian resistance had elicited perhaps the best example during the entire
campaign of his absolute determination to achieve total victory no matter what the practical
challenges were. At Tyre Alexander showed the world that, once he had committed himself, he just
would not be denied. Very soon he would have an opportunity to make that point again.
THE SIEGE OF GAZA
After Tyre’s capture, Alexander proceeded down the coast to the ancient Philistine city of Gaza, the
only real pocket of potential resistance before the Macedonians would reach Egypt. Its ruler, a eunuch
named Batis, had collected together a force of mercenary Arabs and laid in supplies for a protracted
siege. Believing that the town was too well defended to be taken by assault, Batis denied Alexander
entry. The predictable siege of this turreted city, which was situated some twenty stades from the sea
according to Arrian’s reckoning, then ensued, eventually lasting from September to November 332.
The siege was notable for several reasons, including the Macedonians’ use of shored mines to
undermine the fortification wall of the city, an attempted assassination of Alexander by an Arab
mercenary soldier who had thrown himself at Alexander’s feet, claiming to be a deserter, only to
jump up and strike at Alexander with a sword—Alexander dodged the stroke—and then a serious
shoulder wound that Alexander received from a catapult bolt he could not dodge.
Batis in fact believed that Alexander had been killed and began to celebrate his victory; like the
Thebans, Batis would learn that his celebration was premature. Alexander was hurt but alive and,
ominously, angry.
Once the siege artillery had arrived from Tyre, the Macedonians brought it into action and
breached the walls. The Gazans resisted three assaults, but not the fourth. Every Gazan defender fell
and all the women and children were sold into slavery.
It was from the spoils of Gaza that Alexander was able to send his old tutor Leonidas sixteen tons
of frankincense and myrrh, so that he would not deal parsimoniously with the gods.
Batis himself was captured alive. Perhaps in retaliation for the assassination attempt, Alexander
allegedly had him dragged around the walls of Gaza by his ankles at the rear of a chariot, as Achilles
had dragged Hektor’s corpse around the walls of Troy. A week later, Alexander and the Macedonians
arrived at Pelusium in the delta of the Nile River in Egypt, which had been the ultimate object of his
march to the south.
CHAPTER 9
The Gift of the River
METAMORPHOSIS
Alexander and the Macedonians came to the “Two Lands” of Upper and Lower Egypt in 332–31 for
strategic reasons. But Alexander’s visit to the country Herodotus felicitously called the “gift of the
river” nonetheless would mark a turning point in his personal evolution.
As the leader of the pan-Hellenic crusade, Alexander already had led the Macedonians and the
Greeks to unprecedented military victories over the Persians. By the winter of 332 Alexander was, in
effect, the ruler of the largest empire in Greek or Macedonian history. Alexander had turned history
upside down. For hundreds of years Persians had ruled Greeks. Now Macedonians and Greeks were
about to rule Persians, Egyptians, Arabs, Jews, Scythians, Bactrians, Indians, and all the other subject
peoples of the Persian empire.
Before that happened, though, at a remote oasis in the desert between Egypt and Libya, Alexander
was transformed by a visit to the oracular shrine of Zeus Ammon. His consultation of the oracle there
apparently confirmed his sense that he was descended from the greatest of the Olympian gods and that
he had a divinely sanctioned destiny to fulfill. As we shall see, even after Darius had been killed and
all of his possible native successors had been tracked down and executed, Alexander’s sense of his
unique destiny would lead him ever deeper into Asia—and eventually into conflict with the very men
who had made him king of Asia.
It was also in Egypt that Alexander founded Alexandria, the first and greatest of his city
foundations. Alexander probably did not found seventy cities, as Plutarch claimed, and many of his
real foundations were in essence military garrisons. But the dozens of cities he established from
Egypt to the Indus nevertheless became outposts of Hellenism where none had existed before.
In Egypt also, during a brief exchange with a local philosopher, Alexander set out his belief that
while Zeus was the father of all mankind, the ruler of Mount Olympus nevertheless had a special
preference for the “best” among human beings. It is hard to overestimate the importance of that belief
for understanding how Alexander intended to organize his world empire.
Alexander was probably never officially installed as the pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt. But
somehow, like Lawrence of Arabia at Wejh in April 1917, amid the date palms of an oasis in the
middle of a trackless sea of sand, the young Macedonian king began a metamorphosis, from leader of
the Greeks into king of all Asia, and finally a god, who intended to extend his belief in his father’s
love of the best over the entire face of the earth.
FROM PELUSIUM TO MEMPHIS
Egyptian scholars of the Hellenistic period traced a history of thirty dynasties of Egyptian kings who
had ruled Egypt from c. 3100 B.C.E. until shortly before Alexander’s arrival. In reality, however, the
Two Lands of Egypt had been absorbed into the Persian empire in 526–25 after a bloody war of
conquest directed by the Persian king Cambyses II. Except for a break from about 401 to 343 Egypt
essentially had been a Persian prov
ince ruled by Persian governors for almost 200 years by the time
Alexander arrived.
Mazaces, the Persian governor in 332, commanded no native troops. He had heard the reports of
Alexander’s victory over Darius at Issos, and of Darius’ flight. The unfortunate governor also had
learned that Phoenicia, Syria, and the greater part of Arabia already were in Macedonian hands: the
terrible fates of Tyre and Gaza could not have escaped his notice, either. So Mazaces received
Alexander in Pelusium, at the easternmost mouth of the Nile, with a show of friendship, and offered
no obstacle to his entry into Egypt. Unlike Napoleon in 1798, after nearly two centuries of intermittent
Persian rule, Alexander was welcomed as a liberator.
After establishing a garrison at Pelusium, Alexander then marched about sixty miles through the
desert up to Heliopolis while the accompanying fleet sailed up the Nile. Heliopolis—“City of the
Sun,” in Greek—lay to the west of the Nile, although it was connected to it by a canal. From
Heliopolis Alexander crossed the Nile to Memphis.
Memphis, located about fourteen miles south of modern Cairo, had been the administrative center
of Egypt from the Old Kingdom period (c. 3000 B.C.E.) and from the second millennium B.C.E. had
been a very cosmopolitan city, attracting traders and artisans from around the Mediterranean world.
Here Alexander celebrated games with both athletic and literary contests, attended by the most
famous performers in Greece.
He also offered a special sacrifice to Apis, the bull of Memphis, sacred to the Egyptian god Ptah.
According to Egyptian propaganda, as recorded in the hostile account of Herodotus, the Persian king
Cambyses II actually had stabbed the Apis bull. Thus, Alexander’s public sacrifice was an expression
of piety and respect for Egyptian religious traditions, meant to be seen in contrast to (alleged) Persian
sacrilege.
Although in the “Alexander Romance” (the later, essentially medieval compilation of stories about
Alexander’s fantastic adventures), there is a story of Alexander’s official enthronement as pharaoh in
Memphis, no reliable contemporary evidence of such an official ceremony exists. In contemporary
Egyptian inscriptions, Alexander did receive the nomenclature of the pharaohs, and on the relief of the
temple of Amun in Luxor he is depicted offering a libation to the god. But such titles and
representations do not necessarily imply an induction ceremony. The Persian kings themselves
received such titles from their Egyptian subjects without official induction. Alexander probably did
so as well. It was enough for him to be king.
In any case, his stay in Memphis was brief. For, after sailing upstream, Alexander was seized by a
passionate desire to visit the oracular shrine of Zeus Ammon in Libya and to consult the god there.
THE VISIT TO THE ORACLE OF ZEUS AT SIWAH
Greeks had known about the oracle in Siwah for hundreds of years and identified Ammon, the
Egyptian-Libyan god of the shrine, with their own Zeus. Indeed, Greeks living in the city of Cyrene,
on the Libyan coast to the west of the shrine in Siwah, had spread the good news about Zeus Ammon
and his infallible oracles to their relations back in mainland Greece, where shrines of Zeus Ammon
subsequently appeared in the harbor city of Sparta and in Olympia. The Theban poet Pindar, whose
house Alexander had left standing when he razed Thebes, also had celebrated Zeus Ammon 130 years
before Alexander’s visit, and the family of the great Spartan general Lysander had connections with
the shrine and its god. Moreover, only thirty years before Alexander’s visit to Egypt, a temple of Zeus
Ammon had been built within the Piraeus, Athens’ port. Even before he set out on his pilgrimage,
then, Alexander would have had some in-depth knowledge of the famous mother shrine and its god, to
whom he felt a lineal connection.
We are told that Alexander sought to visit the oracle because of its reputation for infallibility and
because Perseus and Herakles had consulted Zeus Ammon—Perseus en route to slay the Gorgon, and
Herakles while in Libya and Egypt searching for Antaeus and Busiris. Alexander wanted to equal the
fame of these heroes, whose blood flowed in his veins; and, just as myths traced their descent from
Zeus, Alexander believed that he too was descended from Ammon. Thus he undertook the expedition
to Siwah to obtain more precise information on the subject—or, at any rate, to say that he had.
Some modern scholars have attempted to explain Alexander’s visit to the oracle in more political
or pragmatic terms. But the journey to Siwah entailed a long, difficult, and dangerous expedition that
Alexander never would have undertaken without genuine, passionate interest. Alexander’s piety and
sense of descent or connection to the immortals, especially to Zeus, were powerful motives for him.
To begin the journey, Alexander sailed down the Nile from Memphis to Lake Mareotis with a force
of light infantry and the Royal Squadron. There, ambassadors from the Greek city of Cyrene on the
Libyan coast came to him with gifts, requesting peace and asking that he visit Libya. These envoys
may have been sent to help solidify the position of the government they represented, which was facing
civil unrest. Unintentionally, they also may have planted in Alexander’s mind ideas about further
conquests to the west.
At the time, however, Alexander marched westward along the coast through country uninhabited,
but not waterless, to the city of Paraetonium (modern Mersa Matruh), now about 200 miles from
Alexandria. Proceeding to the village of Apis, Alexander and his entourage turned southward in the
direction of the oasis of Siwah, which lay somewhat less than 200 miles from the coast.
This was the truly dangerous and difficult portion of the journey, and several of Alexander’s
contemporaries, including Aristobulus, Ptolemy, and Callisthenes, wrote accounts of it. Callisthenes’
account has been criticized for its blatant flattery of Alexander. But many of the phenomena
Callisthenes and the others describe seem to be embellishments of features of the desert, rather than
outright inventions.
During the first and second days of the journey south, the difficulties of the march seemed bearable,
but then the party reached plains covered by deep sand just as they ran out of water. The land lay
parched beneath the sun and the men’s throats were dry and burned. Then clouds shrouded the sky and
hid the sun, and soon high winds showered down generous quantities of rain. According to Arrian,
Alexander attributed this cloudburst to Zeus Ammon himself.
But Alexander’s party then lost its way. It was saved, according to Ptolemy, when two snakes
suddenly appeared and led the army, hissing as they went. Alexander instructed his party to follow the
snakes and trust the divinity, and the snakes led the way to the oracle and back again from it.
Aristobulus, supported by Callisthenes’ account, says that Alexander’s guides were not snakes, but
two crows, who flew before the men, acting as guides.
Although we may be skeptical about such miraculous rescues, sudden rainbursts, snakes, and crows
are not unknown in the Libyan desert. Ptolemy’s focus on the snakes also may be explained in terms of
his own political agenda. Ptolemy’s account of the visit to the oracle was committed to papyrus after
generally were considered sacred. For example, a cobra, the uraeus, visualized as the eye of the sun
god Re, was depicted rearing up on the crown of the pharaohs, ready to protect the king. Snakes may
have led Alexander, Ptolemy, and the rest of the Macedonians safely to the oracle and back. But for
Ptolemy, writing decades later, their providential appearance was an early and convenient sign of
local, divine favor. The snake story helped legitimize the rule of a pharaoh who in fact was a
foreigner.
As for Aristobulus’ and Callisthenes’ story about the crows, if helpful crows appeared in
Callisthenes’ account, the story ultimately must have been agreeable to Alexander, who had hired
Callisthenes to be the official historian of the campaign. Alexander perhaps was not displeased to
have it be thought that the gods had sent along some crows to help him reach the oracle and return
safely from it.
Whatever were the difficulties of the journey, Alexander finally reached the oasis of Siwah in eight
days. The oasis was supposedly more than six miles wide, and many fine springs watered its copious
trees. In the center of the oasis was a garden of olive and palm trees.
There also was a unique spring within the oasis, the Spring of the Sun, a natural phenomenon of
great interest to classical historians. At midday the waters of the spring were cold, but as the sun set
the waters became warmer, reaching their peak at midnight. After midnight the waters cooled again,
until by dawn the waters of the spring were cold again, becoming coldest at noon.
Having reached this well-watered garden with its miraculous spring, Alexander set out to consult
the oracle in the central sanctuary on the hill now called Aghurmi. When he was conducted into the
temple and had gazed upon the god for a while, the priest who held the position of the god’s prophet
came out to meet him and said to Alexander, “Greetings, O son; take this form of address as from the
god also.”
To which Alexander supposedly replied, “I accept, O father; for the future I shall be called your
Alexander Page 13
