All extant ancient sources emphasize that this final collision of horsemen was the most deadly moment of the entire battle. More than sixty Companions fell; hundreds of horses on both sides were slaughtered; and the Persian cavalry was nearly annihilated. Arrian adds that there was “no more javelin throwing or maneuvering of horses” (Anabasis 3.15.2), but rather a war of continual blows. More than sixty years earlier at the infantry battle of Coronea, the old Spartan king Agesilaus had likewise deliberately charged his victorious Spartan phalanx back into a retreating column of Theban hoplites and was nearly wiped out for his efforts. A battle like “none other of our time,” the eyewitness Xenophon wrote of that dreadful collision between heavy shock troops. In the Hellenic tradition an enemy on the horizon was not to be avoided, bypassed, or ignored, if there was even a slight chance that he could be struck head-on, face-to-face, and en masse.
Lord of Asia
Alexander would come to Gaugamela, Darius thought. He was sure of that much. So the king had prepared for the Macedonian’s arrival, seeking out a flat plain without obstacles for his scythed chariots, clear ground for his elephants, thousands of horsemen, and his much longer battle line— even Alexander could not overcome such advantages of terrain and numbers. At last, Darius thought, a cavalry battle in an open plain, precisely the type of mobile warfare his nomadic horsemen excelled at, and exactly the scenario dreaded by the phalangites of the West. Alexander, Darius also knew, would ride to battle at Gaugamela, just as he had charged across the river Granicus and up the high banks into the Persian mass, just as he had once ordered his men to advance through the stream, stockade, and embankment at Issus, just as he had insisted on storming the nearly impregnable Tyre and massive walls of Gaza, just as he had always come to destroy any obstacle, army, or citadel—flesh or stone—in his path. He would come to Gaugamela, river or no river, unfavorable ground or not, mused Darius. Alexander would come onto the chosen ground of King Darius III and thus once more be forced to battle according to His Majesty’s plans.
And why not? These “most foolish” Greeks had always done just that. At Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea they had forced decisive battles against Persians, despite being outnumbered. Seventy-seven years ago not too far from this spot, the trapped Greek hoplites of the Ten Thousand had refused the terms of Darius’s ancestor, Artaxerxes II, preferring to fight their way out of Persia. Even after their generals had been lured into a parley near Gaugamela itself, then tortured and executed, the leaderless Ten Thousand had still chosen to fight. They had battled the entire year, killing their way to the Black Sea and safety. Then in sight of Europe, many of them had stayed on, joined the Spartan army in Asia Minor, and fought Persians again. Yes, Darius thought, this crazed Macedonian youth would come up the Tigris River, hunt him down, and force a final battle for the empire of his forefathers.
This time Darius had picked his ground well. There were few hills. Alexander could use neither river nor sea to protect his flanks. Darius’s subjects had cleared the plain for the easy onslaught of his scythed chariots. Traps and spikes had been hidden where it was most likely Alexander would ride in. Had the Macedonians, the king thought, ever encountered elephants in battle?
The only worry? Long gone were most of his Greek mercenary hoplites, who had fought so well in the two prior pitched battles against Alexander. The original phalanx of hired Hellenic killers had been surrounded, and exterminated or captured at Granicus. Their replacements—more than 20,000 strong—were destroyed or scattered at Issus. Nowhere in Persia were there any such comparable infantrymen left who welcomed shock battle, men who could stand up to Alexander’s pikemen—surely neither the old Immortals of Persian legend nor the gaudy “Apple Bearers” with their famed sphere-butted spears. King Darius had only 2,000 Greek hoplites remaining, and thus no men in an empire of 70 million who were willing to charge the wall of Macedonian pikes. Alexander won at Gaugamela and elsewhere in Asia for the same reasons Greek infantry won overseas: theirs was a culture of face-to-face battle of rank-and-file columns, not a contest of mobility, numerical superiority, or ambush. It was no accident that Alexander’s veterans aimed their pikes and swords at the faces of the aristocratic mounted Persian elite, lords who had no experience with an enemy who sought to crash into them, push them down, and spear or slice them to pieces.
Could not Darius’s legendary scythed chariots—more than two hundred were assembled on the battlefield—mow down the clumsy phalanx if they could burst out unexpectedly from his line, race over the flat ground, and trap the phalangites before they were mobile? Could not elephants —he had obtained fifteen from India—also be useful if the Indians could bring them up safely through his lines and lead them head-on against Alexander’s Companions? Darius knew he had no real quality heavy infantry, but thousands of cavalrymen to surfeit, and so he determined that Gaugamela would be a vast war of horses, the greatest cavalry battle in Asia since the legendary battle of Kadesh between Egyptians and Hittites nearly a millennium earlier. Darius may have had nearly 50,000 mounted troops against fewer than 8,000 cavalry of Alexander. If the king could sweep the flanks of the Macedonian army, send his prized Bactrians and Scythian cataphracts around the enemy right, and simultaneously his trusted Mazaeus behind their left, then Alexander’s terrible phalanx would be not so terrible after all—surprised from the rear by mounted killers who could race around and cut the clumsy pikemen from behind. At Gaugamela, for the first time in the war for the Persian Empire, there were fearsome veterans from the steppes of the Eastern empire, men Alexander himself had never encountered before in the western satrapies, men of the caliber that could outflank and herd the Macedonians onto Darius’s massive advancing Persian center.
The Empire’s Last Battle
On October 1, 331, an aerial view of the battlefield of Gaugamela in the first few minutes would have revealed an enormous three-sided box of embattled Macedonians, as Alexander’s two wings bent backward, in their struggle to keep their encircling enemies to their sides rather than allowing them to their rear. Within the hour, however, Gaugamela was a radically different picture, more a race between desperate horsemen of both sides who had penetrated their respective enemies’ lines. Could Alexander and his Companions ride through the gap and shatter the Persians before the horsemen of Darius burst through a similar rip in his own lines? The answer was clearly yes. In singular fashion, Alexander wished to kill Darius, destroy his army, and annihilate every enemy soldier on the battlefield. He would pursue and slaughter his fleeing enemies unmercifully until they ceased to exist as a military force. For all that, he rode into the Persian mass: to stab the faces of the enemy with pikes, to throw them off their horses bare-handed, to crash their own mounts into the bigger horses of Darius. For all that and more, the dutiful Companions followed their king into the horde of enemy horsemen.
In contrast, the Persians and Indians who breached the Macedonian line headed directly for the cache of booty, more intent on the king’s adulation in freeing the Achaemenid royal prisoners than on the hard work of finishing off Parmenio. Alexander in a sea of Persians went about slaughtering an army, while amid Macedonians the Persians butchered camp followers. To Persian horsemen of the plains, loot, the rare chance to kill the unarmed, the frenzy of riding and raiding among tents and wagons, were the stuff of nomadic warfare: better to get your hands on plunder than lose it to some rival band of rapacious interlopers. To Macedonians and Greeks, however, charging, killing, and still more killing face-to-face were the essence of three centuries of the Western way of war.
Gaugamela (“the camel’s house”) was Alexander’s third, final, and greatest battle against the Achaemenid empire, more a slaughter than a real set piece per se, since a numerically superior force rapidly disintegrated through panic, fear, and the brilliant tactics of its adversaries. For hours until dusk Gaugamela was a story of thousands of imperial subjects—50,000 is a reasonable estimate—speared and ridden down from the rear as they sought safety
along the plains of the upper Tigris valley. Scholars are unsure how many fought on October 1 and find unanimity only in rejecting the fantastic claims of our ancient sources that more than a million Persians were assembled. Most likely, Darius III had collected well over 100,000 horse and infantry, pitted against 47,000 Macedonians, some 7,500 to 8,000 of them horsemen—the largest European army that Alexander had hitherto mustered. Alexander may have had more Greeks in his army at Gaugamela than during his prior two battles, as Hellenic mercenaries—Thracians, Thessalians, and stout infantrymen from the Peloponnese—increasingly discovered that service with Macedon meant life and booty, while work for the Achaemenid king more likely ended in a lonely death in a far land.
Mesopotamia was a good enough place to fight. Both armies had ample provisions and plenty of water. The weather was dry and mild in early fall; and there was enough flat ground to accommodate thousands of killers. Babylon, with its promise for the victors of rest, feast, loot, and women, was a relatively easy three-week march downstream.
After tearing off the western portions of the empire and Egypt, Alexander in late summer 331 B.C. drove on toward Babylon in hopes of capturing the ancient city and forcing a showdown with the final military reserves of the Persian Empire. After having witnessed his own Achaemenid armies routed at Granicus (334) and again at Issus (333), as well as losing the key strongholds at Tyre and Gaza, in addition to the rich provinces of Ionia, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Cilicia, Darius understood that he must finally stay put and fight for the survival of the remaining, eastern half of his empire. He chose a small plain, more than three hundred miles north of Babylon on a small branch of the Tigris River, the Bumelus, about seventy-five miles from the town of Arbela.
Because Alexander’s tactics were well known, Darius had a good idea what to expect. The king, always on the enemy right wing, would seek a gap or some flanking entry around his own left, pour through with 2,000 to 3,000 heavy horsemen, and head straight for the Persian high command, all in hopes of creating a breach through the mass, as his shield-bearing spearmen and dreaded pikemen followed. Meanwhile, Parmenio on the left would stay steadfast and pivot if need be, until the morale of the imperial army was shattered as the ruling Achaemenid clique fled for their lives. All that Darius knew, but was helpless to stop, and so the day’s slaughter followed the script Darius feared and Alexander planned.
The Macedonians parted on cue for the scythed chariots— Gaugamela seems to be the only time these much-feared but rather impractical weapons were actually used en masse in any battle—and stabbed the drivers as they sped past. Darius’s elephants apparently panicked or were let through the phalanx—or never even made it to the front. Both chariots and elephants were found largely unscathed after the battle and taken as trophies. The latter after their maiden appearance at Gaugamela became a mainstay of Hellenistic warfare; the former became little more than the rhetoric of Greek romances and the sketch-pad doodles of Western engineers until the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The Persian flanking columns never quite surrounded their enemies; and the decisive charge of Indians and Persians that slammed into the Macedonian left and center now went after plunder, not Parmenio.
The consequence was that when the dust cleared on the morning of October 2, the plain of Gaugamela was an ungodly mess—Diodorus says that “the complete area of the battlefield was full of corpses” (17.50.61). Fifty thousand Persians were dead or dying—we need not believe some ancient reports of 300,000 killed—among a general detritus of wandering camp followers, crippled horses, and booty scavengers. Thousands of wounded crawled to the tiny streams and mudholes of the surrounding alluvial plains. Alexander himself returned to the battlefield to bury his dead. He collected little more than a hundred men from under the carcasses of well over a thousand Macedonian horses. Five hundred Persians had fallen at Gaugamela for every Macedonian—such were the disparities when a polyglot, multicultural force of panicked men fled on level ground before heavily armed veteran killers with pikes and seasoned cavalry, whose one worry was not to turn fainthearted in front of lifelong companions -in-arms. The myriad corpses of his enemy were left to decompose in the autumn sun. Alexander, worried only about the rot and smell, quickly moved his army away from the stink and headed south to Babylon and the kingship of the Achaemenids. “The battle,” Plutarch remarks, “resulted in the utter termination of the Persian Empire” (Alexander 34.1).
THE MACEDONIAN MILITARY MACHINE
There was irony in the Macedonian conquest of Greece and Persia. After spending two decades creating the army that had pacified Greece, Alexander’s father, Philip II, was gutted by a young aristocrat and embittered hanger-on, Pausanias, perhaps as part of a broken homosexual affair, but more likely on orders of Alexander and his mother, Olympias, to ensure the young prince’s succession. If Philip was assassinated at the moment when his murderous twenty years of command had at last borne fruit to create the unified kingdom of Macedon and Greece, so Alexander, after reaching the Indus, would die in Babylon at thirty-three, without enjoying the empire for which he had also fought so long and killed so many.
The royal army of Macedon was Philip’s, not Alexander’s. It had been formed and led for more than twenty years by Philip, while Alexander was at its head for little more than half that period. It was King Philip who crafted a grand new army; Philip who supplied it, led it, and organized it differently from anything in past Greek practice—in order to kill other Greeks. As it turned out, Alexander found his inheritance even more useful for killing Persians.
The equipment and tactics of his Macedonian phalanx in theory did not differ all that radically from that of the traditional hoplite spearmen of the Greek city-states, though the phalangites were mercenary and handpicked as the “tallest and strongest” of Philip’s recruits. The thrusting spear was retained, but lengthened from eight to between sixteen and eighteen feet and fitted with a heavier iron point and stouter bronze butt spike. Thus, it became a true pike—weighing nearly fifteen pounds, more than six times heavier than the old hoplite spear—and required both hands for adequate control and handling. Such sarissai were held six feet from the butt, and so extended twelve feet in front of the phalangites, giving the Macedonian pikeman an advantage in reach of eight to ten feet more than the traditional hoplite spearmen. The old hoplite round shield of some three feet was discarded, and in its place a tiny disk was hung from the neck or shoulder; greaves, heavy bronze breastplates, and headgear were also replaced, with either leather or composite materials, or abandoned altogether. In the bargain, the first four or five rows, not three, were thrusting, giving 40 percent more spearheads in the killing zone. Such a hedgehoglike front also provided an unusual degree of offensive might as well as defensive protection for the lighter-clad initial ranks.
In ideological terms the traditional Greek hoplites’ large shields, heavy breastplates and helmets, and spears of moderate size had reflected the old civic and defensive values of the militiamen of a free city-state— precisely the opposite mentality of pike-wielding, lightly protected, and aggressive Macedonian phalangites. The latter were hired and rootless men without a polis, often with no farm of their own, who added numerous feet to the hoplite’s spear but reduced the shield’s area by two-thirds: killing and the advance, rather than personal protection and holding ground, were prized. To this phalanx of grim, professional “foot companions” (pezetairoi), Philip added the Companion Cavalry (hetairoi), an elite body of aristocratic horsemen, heavily armored on strong mounts. Horse raising had always been frowned upon to the south in Greek city-state culture; it was an inefficient use of scarce land, privileged an elite who often agitated for autocracy, and was of little value against a wall of yeoman spearmen. Not so in Macedon, a society of two, not three, classes, of masters and serfs, in a land as broad and wide as Thessaly. The Companion Cavalry, we should remember, was ultimately to end up fighting lighter-armed Eastern, not Western, spear-carrying infantry.
Another contingent of infantry, with mor
e armor and shorter spears, the “shield bearers” (hypaspists), also occupied the center of the Macedonian line, beside the phalanx. The hypaspists were the first infantry forces to follow behind the Companion Cavalry’s initial onslaught, thereby providing a crucial link between the mounted attack and the subsequent follow-up by the phalanx proper. Professional corps of light infantry, slingers, archers, and javelineers rounded out the composite army group, supplying both preliminary bombardment and crucial reserve support. The latter at Gaugamela—along with the tough Agrianians— held off the flanking movements of the Persian left, while Alexander and the hetairoi rode in, the hypaspists following, with the pezetairoi lumbering behind, clearing and widening the gap with their pikes.
The old Hellenic phalanx had been reinvented by Philip and had therein gained fresh importance. It was to evolve even further from the dependence on rural protocol and ritual that made Greek armies operate close to home, and without the ability to be supplied for extended marches. Philip’s intention was to craft a new national army that might outmaneuver a Greek phalanx, and yet still easily crash through the Persian Immortals. He wanted an army like the phalanx of the Ten Thousand that had cleared the field of Persian infantry at Cunaxa (401 B.C.), but one that also might outflank such heavily armed and far more deadly Greek hoplites.
The Greeks’ central idea of fighting en masse through shock battle remained predominant at Macedon. Integrated with, and protected by, such variegated forces, Philip’s phalanx of true pikemen was more lethal and more versatile than the traditional hoplite columns. “Nothing,” the historian Polybius concluded nearly two centuries later, “can stand up to the phalanx. The Roman by himself with his sword can neither slash down nor break through the ten spears that all at once press against him” (18.30.9–10). Surely, Polybius was correct: the idea that men could stand firm when three, four, five, and more iron spearheads plunged into their limbs, heads, necks, torsos, and legs is improbable. Since the first five ranks of the Macedonian phalanx would present a staggered wall of points—with the first row’s pikes extending ten feet into the killing zone—an enemy would have to fight his way through “a storm of spears,” which protruded at every angle, before he could even reach the initial rank of the phalanx.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 10
