In Cilicia Alexander learned that the Persian king Darius III was approaching through Syria with a large army, the Persian royal army, intending to engage the Macedonian forces and drive them back out of Asia. Darius brought with him his entire household, including his principal wife, children, and concubines, and a great treasure, all of which he stationed at Damascus. From there he marched north to confront Alexander and succeeded in slipping past Alexander and his army, cutting him off from his lines of communication back to Asia Minor. Forced to turn about and face north, Alexander confronted Darius’ significantly larger army near the small town of Issus, at the River Pinarus (most likely the modern Payas, near Iskenderun in southern Turkey). Like the Persian commanders at the Granicus, Darius drew up his forces on the bank of the stream, challenging Alexander and his army to attack across and through the stream bed. Alexander, again, accepted the challenge. As the pike phalanx fought its way up the opposing bank of the stream against stiff opposition, especially from Darius’ Greek mercenaries, Alexander himself—stationed as ever on the right at the head of the Macedonian heavy cavalry—charged into the enemy line and turned inward, driving towards the Persian center where Darius himself was stationed. Darius had acquired a reputation as a bold and valiant warrior during campaigns he had fought in Bactria, when he was just a distant cousin of the ruling king; he now put that reputation to shame by fleeing precipitately at the sight of Alexander’s charge towards him. The scene is likely depicted in the famous Alexander Mosaic (ill. 13). Though the battle in general was not going so badly for the Persians, the king’s flight changed everything: the Persian center collapsed and followed their fleeing king, and the battle was lost.
13. The Alexander Mosaic in the Archaeological Museum, Naples
(Wikimedia Commons photo by Magrippa at the English language Wikipedia)
The aftermath of the battle was striking in two ways. In pursuing Darius, Alexander and his cavalry prevented the king from returning to Damascus and instead reached that city themselves, there finding and becoming masters of the Persian royal treasury and harem. The capture of Darius’ family, including his mother, principal wife, and children, was a striking coup for Alexander. We hear of a remarkable scene in which Alexander, apprised of the presence of the royal family, went to visit Darius’ ladies accompanied by his longtime friend and lover Hephaestion. Since Alexander at this time still dressed and comported himself in the casual, everyday style of a Macedonian ruler, it was not immediately clear to Darius’ mother Sisygambis which of the two Macedonian officers she saw before her was Alexander. Making an understandable mistake, the old lady bowed to the taller and more striking Hephaestion, rather than to the short and boyish Alexander. He took this error in good part, reassuring the mortified queen that the trusted and beloved Hephaestion was “Alexander too.”
More significantly, since the two armies had, before the battle, bypassed each other and fought facing towards their own territories, when the bulk of the Persian army turned to flight after the collapse of their center, they fled backward into Asia Minor, the region just conquered by Alexander, rather than into the heart of the Persian Empire. Gathering in large numbers in Cappadocia, which Alexander had not entered let alone conquered, these Persian forces decided to stage a counter-attack into central and western Asia Minor, to re-conquer the region and, perhaps, link up with the Persian fleet on the Aegean coast, which was staging its own counter-attacking operations in the Aegean. That created a very dangerous and difficult situation for Alexander’s governor on the spot, Antigonus the One-Eyed, who had to find a way to cope with this counter-attack by greatly superior forces. Despite his inadequate forces, Antigonus succeeded—in a campaign of swift movement and maneuver—in taking on and defeating the enemy piecemeal, in three separate victorious battles. It seems the Persians helped him out by dividing their force into three, invading along three routes to overwhelm the enemy, but giving Antigonus the chance to beat them in detail. Alexander’s trust in him was vindicated.
The Persian fleet in the Aegean remained a problem, as sea-borne communications with Macedonia became more necessary the further Alexander advanced south. Though Alexander had no fleet to engage the Persian fleet, there was a solution open to him, and he took it. The bulk of the Persian fleet came from the ancient maritime cities of Phoenicia, on the coast of modern Lebanon. Alexander reasoned that by capturing these cities, the home bases of the Persian fleet, he would oblige the fleet to become his, and that is in fact what happened. Of the great Phoenician cities, only Tyre offered serious resistance: the city was located on an offshore island, and its inhabitants evidently supposed that without ships Alexander could not harm them. Over the course of seven months in late 333 to early 332, Alexander had a causeway built connecting Tyre to the mainland. Once it was complete, his army attacked Tyre like any other city, and captured it. With Phoenicia his, the Persian fleet become Alexander’s too. He seems to have decommissioned most of it for the time being. His own much smaller Macedonian fleet, along with southern Greek allied contingents, was more reliable and quite sufficient for his purposes in overseeing the Aegean and the shipping lanes back to Macedonia. Meanwhile, Alexander had other business: he marched on south, capturing Gaza after a siege, and entering Egypt to add it to his empire. As noted above, the great unpopularity of the Persians in Egypt meant that Alexander had no difficulty in taking over there, being welcomed as something of a savior and readily acknowledged as pharaoh. He left behind a local Greek, Cleomenes from the old Greek port city of Naucratis on the Canopic mouth of the Nile, to oversee Egypt and the gathering of the tribute monies from that wealthy country.
With his army, Alexander returned to Syria, where he received an embassy from Darius. The Persian king was much struck by the two defeats his armies had undergone, and concerned about the fate of his family and harem. He reputedly offered Alexander peace terms: if Alexander would return to Darius the royal harem unharmed, Darius would acknowledge Alexander as ruler of all lands west of the Euphrates—that is, he would accept the loss of the lands Alexander had already conquered and make peace on the basis of the status quo. We are told that Parmenio, Philip’s old marshal and Alexander’s second-in-command, strongly advised him to accept these terms, saying that he would do so if he were Alexander. The point here is that Asia Minor, Syria/Palestine, and Egypt together constituted very large, populous, and wealthy lands that needed to be carefully organized and administered to form an empire under Macedonian control. Opened up to Greek colonization, they could become home to dozens if not hundreds of new Greek cities, relieving population stress in the southern Balkan region and being fully integrated economically, culturally, and militarily into an empire of the eastern Mediterranean region that made sound strategic, logistical, and fiscal sense. Parmenio’s advice may well represent the plan of empire that animated Philip’s projected conquering mission in western Asia, as has often been noted. But Alexander’s reply was to the effect that if he were Parmenio he would accept too (this was meant disparagingly), but as Alexander nothing less than the entire Persian Empire was sufficient to his conquering spirit. Darius’ terms were rejected, and Alexander prepared his army for the invasion of Mesopotamia and Iran.
Darius had not counted on his peace offer being accepted, and was himself preparing the largest army his resources could muster. The two armies came together near the city of Arbela (Arbil) in northern Mesopotamia, on the east bank of the River Tigris. By the village of Gaugamela there lay a vast flat plain, dusty and salty, where Darius decided to make his stand, not far from the modern city of Mosul. He would no longer rely on stream beds or other natural obstacles as defenses against Alexander’s attack: he proposed to overwhelm Alexander’s army by sheer numbers in a place that offered no chance of tactical tricks or stratagems. He had gathered the forces of the eastern half of the Persian Empire—the Iranian and Bactrian lands—to create a great army whose main strength was in cavalry. Numbers given by our sources are so exaggerated that any mode
rn estimate is hypothetical; but it is clear from the course of the battle that his army outnumbered Alexander’s very considerably, perhaps by fifty percent or more. As was the Persian custom, Darius himself was stationed in the center of his army with the royal guard around him, bolstered by his remaining Greek mercenaries. To either side were vast contingents of cavalry: on his right Syrian and Mesopotamian troops along with Medians and Parthians; on his left his best cavalry, drawn from Bactria and Sogdia, along with Sacas, Massagetae, and others. In front of his line Darius stationed two hundred scythed chariots: his hope was that charges by these chariots could create gaps in Alexander’s formation which his cavalry could charge at and exploit for victory.
When Alexander arrived at Gaugamela and surveyed Darius’ army, he realized that in the battle to come his army was bound to be out-flanked: the enemy numbers were so great that he could only have matched the length of their front by thinning out his own formations dangerously. Instead of doing this, he drew up his best troops, the phalanx of Macedonian pikemen and hypaspistai, the Macedonian heavy cavalry, and the Thessalian cavalry, in the usual formation: the phalanx in the center with the Macedonian cavalry on the right and the Thessalians on the left. To counteract the effect of possible out-flanking and resultant attack from the rear, he drew up a second phalanx behind his Macedonian phalanx: the southern Greek hoplites, allied and mercenary, with instructions to be prepared to about-face and make a front to the rear if necessary. Specialized light infantry forces were stationed in echelon between the two phalanxes, covering the gap between them, and light cavalry forces screened the flanks of the heavy cavalry on either side. When drawn up, Alexander’s right wing was initially out-flanked by the Bactrian and other cavalry on the Persian left, with the Macedonian cavalry facing Darius’ center head on. This was not Alexander’s plan, however: he wanted to confront the Persian left, create a gap between it and the Persian center, and exploit that gap. He preferred that his army should be out-flanked on the left, where the Thessalian cavalry under Philip son of Menelaus and phalanx battalions led by Craterus and Simmias were stationed under the overall command of Parmenio. As he marched his army forward, therefore, Alexander moved it diagonally to the right, until Bactrian and Saca cavalry moved forward to prevent him out-flanking them. Parmenio and his forces on the Macedonian left confronted a massive out-flanking Persian force: they were to hold their ground as long as they could, while Alexander won the battle.
The battle began with the charge of Darius’ scythed chariots, which utterly failed to achieve anything: a screen of Agrianian javelineers drawn up in advance of Alexander’s line succeeded in killing most of the horses and immobilizing the chariots. Light cavalry units charged on the right, engaging the cavalry on the far left of the Persian line. Alexander gradually fed more light cavalry into this fight, which caused more and more of the Bactrian cavalry to move left to join in the fight too. As a result, a gap opened between the Persian left and center, into which Alexander charged with his heavy cavalry, turning in towards the Persian center and fighting his way towards Darius. As at Issus, when Darius saw the Macedonian heavy cavalry under Alexander moving inexorably towards where he was stationed in his royal chariot, his nerve broke and he turned to flight, causing the collapse of the Persian center. Alexander was eager to engage Darius in person, to kill or capture him, and pursued enthusiastically, considering victory his. But meanwhile his own left wing under Parmenio was under extreme pressure. Drastically out-flanked by vastly superior forces, Parmenio had drawn the Thessalian cavalry and supporting phalanx battalions into a defensive mass and worked to hold them steady. The Persian commander on the right, Mazaeus, sent forces around Parmenio’s troops to attack Alexander’s camp, and to attack Alexander’s phalanx from behind. They were thwarted there by Alexander’s reserve phalanx of Greek hoplites, but the situation on the left grew desperate. After holding out as long as he could, Parmenio observed the collapse of the Persian center and sent a messenger to Alexander, to remind him of the need to relieve his left wing. That message turned Alexander back from his pursuit of Darius, to attack the Persian right wing from behind and force them into flight, cementing his victory.
Our sources insist on Alexander’s desire to catch up with Darius, his frustration at Parmenio’s message calling him back, and suggest that Parmenio was over-cautious and irresolute in not handling the fight on the left on his own. That is clearly a libel on the old marshal. The truth is that Parmenio and his men had performed marvelously, tasked with the most difficult and dangerous part of the battle by far. Had they failed to hold out, Alexander’s victory in the center would have been negated by Persian victory on his left, and the undefeated Bactrian cavalry on the Persian left might even have tipped the scale of battle Persia’s way. As it was, Parmenio did hold out long enough, and his message to Alexander reminded the king just in time that victory depended on driving off the Persian right and saving his own left wing, not on confronting Darius in person. Darius thus escaped, pausing at his base at Arbela only long enough to change into traveling gear and obtain a fast horse. The Bactrian cavalry on the Persian left retreated from the battle under Darius’ cousin Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, undefeated so far as their own fight was concerned, and furious at Darius for causing the Persian defeat. They caught up with the king in his flight and placed him under arrest, Bessus assuming the kingship in his place. Many of the troops on the Persian right also escaped unscathed under their commander Mazaeus. He led them around Alexander’s army and south to the relative safety of Babylon. Alexander and his army remained victorious on the field of battle, a victory for which Parmenio, it must be said, deserves as much credit as Alexander himself.
After the battle Alexander and his army marched south. Mazaeus and his forces at Babylon represented the most proximate threat, and taking over southern Mesopotamia would strengthen his position. Mazaeus surrendered without a fight, offering his services to Alexander as the new king. This was to set a trend: the elites of the empire, including the Persian elite, could see the writing on the wall. Alexander and his Macedonian army now ruled western Asia, and the only prospect for any sort of comfortable future was to make terms with that new reality. Mazaeus’ offer of service was accepted: when Alexander left Babylon in the fall of 331, Mazaeus remained as satrap of Babylonia, though with Macedonian military commanders to support and supervise him. Alexander proceeded onward to the great capital of the Persian Empire at Susa, with its immense treasuries that must be secured: an officer named Philoxenus had been sent on ahead and had already secured the co-operation of the Persian governor there. On his way to Susa Alexander received a mass of fresh recruits from Macedonia to replace his losses in the campaigning so far, and he then moved on into Persia itself, to the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis.
While Alexander was thus engaged, trouble had arisen back in Europe: the governor of Thrace, Memnon, rebelled against the regent Antipater; and in southern Greece the Spartan ruler Agis III organized a rebellion against the Macedonians by many of the Peloponnesian states. Antipater had little difficulty bringing Memnon to heel; the southern Greek rebellion was a more serious matter, especially since Antipater had recently despatched around fifteen thousand soldiers as reinforcements to Alexander. Nevertheless Antipater managed to raise an army of some forty thousand men, and in 330 he entered the Peloponnese and brought the much smaller army of Agis—a little over twenty thousand it seems—to battle at Megalopolis. Though the Spartans fought heroically, the outcome was not in doubt: Antipater’s army won a complete victory, and the numerous Spartan dead represented a crushing blow to Sparta from which it was not to recover for a century. Alexander had sent some three thousand talents from the Persian treasury to help Antipater, which was no doubt welcome though it arrived only after the fighting was over: money was always welcome to assist in the post-war resettlement of Greece. When told of Antipater’s victory, Alexander snidely dismissed it as “a battle of mice.” The ever touchy king could not stand
to have any comparison to his own victories. The reference was no doubt to Homer: whereas Alexander’s own victories were truly epic and reminiscent of the Iliad, Antipater’s resembled the mock-epic Batrachomyomachia (battle of the frogs and mice) also attributed to Homer.
Alexander’s forces seem to have entered Persis at the high pass known as the Tang-i Mohammed Reza, where a large force of Persians awaited him: the Persians were not going to surrender their homeland without a fight. Local prisoners, however, apprised Alexander of an alternative route by which he was able to lead forces on a flanking maneuver and attack the Persians from two sides. His victory was overwhelming, and the Persians put up no further fight, Persepolis opening its gates to him peacefully. The reality was that, though the Persians were splendid fighters, their equipment and system of warfare made them no match for the Macedonian pike phalanx and heavy cavalry designed by Philip. The army stayed in Persis for the winter, waiting for the spring thawing of the mountain passes. At some point during the winter, after getting thoroughly drunk at a feast, Alexander led a party of revelers in the burning and looting of the royal palaces at Persepolis, an action he reputedly regretted in the sober light of dawn. The vast royal treasure at Persepolis was collected on wagons and sent off to be stored and/or distributed elsewhere, for a variety of purposes.
Before and After Alexander Page 18
