Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power
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The Macedonian phalangites turned their full attention to thrusting their dreadful spears, without the cumbersome weight of the old hoplite panoply—or the need to protect with an enormous shield their immediate comrades on the right. Offensive movement, leveled pikes, and constant motion forward meant everything; defense, large shields, and worry over covering neighbors were of little consequence. Once a phalanx achieved momentum, and its pikes were rambling forward, nothing could withstand the terrifying force of oncoming Greek iron. Imagine the Persian unfortunates shredded by repeated stabbing: the chief problem for their victorious Macedonian executioners was to keep spearheads free of ruined enemy equipment and the weight of mutilated corpses. From literary sources we receive the impression that in this horrendous world of phalanx-killing, it was not sleek youth or elegant muscle that the infantry commander sought out, but stout, grubby old veterans, with the nerve and experience not to flinch in the task at hand and thus stay in rank during the charge and collision to follow.
Used with greater precision and power, the new Macedonian phalanx delivered a knockout blow once the target had been sighted and left vulnerable by the work of cavalry and ancillary contingents. Hammerlike, the Macedonian cavalry charges concentrated on a set spot on the enemy line, broke through, and eventually battered the enemy back onto the clumsy anvil of the spear-bristling phalanx. This coordination between infantry and horsemen was an entirely new development in the history of Western warfare, and was designed to make numbers superfluous. Philip’s battles were not to be huge shoving matches between phalanxes, but sudden Napoleonic blasts to particular spots, which when exploited would collapse and thereby ruin the morale of the others. Unlike the prior evenly matched battles inside Greece, the Macedonian army in Asia had to assume it would be outnumbered by three to one.
Alexander’s Successors in the decades after his death were often criticized for abandoning his mastery of mounted and infantry coordination in favor of sheer bulk: lengthening pikes to twenty feet and more and bringing in elephants and torsion artillery in place of skilled, seasoned cavalry. In their defense, captains like Antigonus, Seleucus, Eumenes, and Ptolemy were not, like Alexander, fighting Persians but other Macedonian and Greek armies against which mounted charges had little effect. To break apart a phalanx of pikemen in a decisive battle required elephants or another phalanx. Consequently, Alexander’s fluidity and mastery of cavalry battle were not so much forgotten by his successors as deemed irrelevant in the new wars that saw armies of Greek and Macedonian pikemen, led by tough European veterans who would have frightened Alexander’s horsemen.
Philip brought to Western warfare an enhanced notion of decisive war. True, the Macedonians’ face-to-face, stand-up fighting was reminiscent of the shock assaults of the Greek phalanxes of the past. The running collisions of massed infantry, the spear tip to the face of the enemy, were still the preferred Hellenic creed of any Macedonian phalangite. But no longer were Macedonians killing merely over territorial borders. Battle was designed predominantly as an instrument of ambitious state policy. Philip’s destructive mechanism for conquest and annexation was a radical source of social unrest and cultural upheaval, not a conservative Greek institution to preserve the existing agrarian community. Decisive face-to-face battle, once embedded in Greek cultural protocol—notification of intent, limited pursuit, exchange of prisoners, agreement to accept the victory of the battlefield scrum—had become the centerpiece of a new total war of brutal annihilation which the world had not yet seen. Small Greek armies of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. had met on small plains to collide together, push, stab, and force their adversaries off the battlefield, an hour or so of battle often deciding an entire war. The Macedonians saw no reason to stop fighting at the collapse of their enemy on the battlefield when he could be demolished in toto, and his house and land looted, destroyed, or annexed.
Philip’s men, too, were a completely different breed from the Greek hoplites of the city-state. In his lost comedy Philip, the playwright Mnesimachus (ca. 350 B.C.) makes his characteristic Macedonian phalangites brag:
Do you know against what type of men you’ll have to fight?
We who dine on sharpened swords, and drink down blazing torches as our wine.
Then for dessert they bring us broken Cretan darts and splintered pike shafts. Our pillows are shields and breastplates, and beside our feet lie bows and slings.
We crown ourselves with catapult wreaths.
(Mnesimachus frg. 7 [cf. Athenaeus 10.421b])
In the conservative fourth-century-B.C. oratory of the Greek polis, Philip himself appeared as a limping, one-eyed monster, a terrible man who would fight at any time, in any manner. Demosthenes warned the Athenians:
You hear of Philip marching unchecked, not because he leads a phalanx of hoplites, but rather because he is accompanied by skirmishers, cavalry, archers, mercenaries, and similar troops. When relying on these forces, he attacks a people that is at odds with itself, and when through distrust no one goes forth to fight for his country, he next brings up his artillery and lays siege. I need hardly tell you that Philip makes no difference between summer and winter, and has no season set apart for inaction. (Demosthenes 9, Third Philippic 49–51)
After the assassination of Philip (336 B.C.), and Alexander’s subsequent subjugation of the Greek states following the destruction of Thebes, the twenty-year-old king inaugurated his deceased father’s planned Persian invasion with a victory at the Granicus River near the Hellespont (334). In his first savage onslaught at the Granicus, Alexander established a pattern of battle in which we can distinguish a rough sequence of events that appears at all three of his subsequent major triumphs at Issus (333), Gaugamela (331), and the Hydaspes River (326): brilliant adaptation to often unfavorable terrain (all his battles were on plains chosen by his adversaries); generalship by frightful example of personal —and always near fatal—courage at the head of the Companion Cavalry; stunning cavalry blows focused on a concentrated spot in the enemy line, horsemen from the rear turning the dazed enemy onto the spears of the advancing phalanx; subsequent pursuit of enemy forces in the field, reflecting Alexander’s impulse to eliminate, not merely to defeat, hostile armies. In all such cases, the overriding agenda was to find the enemy, charge him, and annihilate him in open battle—victory going not to the larger force, but to the one who could maintain rank and break the enemy as a cohesive whole.
Alexander never led an army larger than 50,000 men—by necessity more than by intent: he was forced to leave at least 40,000 Macedonians back in Greece to keep the peace. In his first battles (e.g., Granicus and Issus) there were more Greeks fighting against him than for him. Given the fact that garrisoning and constabulary forces were also needed to secure his conquest, it is a wonder—given the limited manpower reserves of Macedonia—that he had any army left at all. Such practical manpower considerations are critical in any assessment of his later “humanitarian” efforts at including Persians and other Asians in his army. Remember also that for the first four years of his invasion (334–331), there were thousands of Greeks who made their way to Persia to fight Alexander the “liberator”—and almost no Persians who fought for him.
To Alexander, as was true of Napoleon, the size of the opponent mattered little, since he would concentrate on only a small segment of the enemy line, while his father’s old marshals would hold the enemy fast elsewhere. Reserves would help to ensure that the enemy did not reach his own rear. Alexander himself would wait, seek his opening, and send his wedge of horsemen and heavy pikemen to blast apart the enemy, his charge sending ripples of fear through thousands of less disciplined imperial subjects. Who of the enemy—themselves of differing speech and custom—would be the first to stay and die against the crazed Macedonian so that others in the Great King’s army could follow their sacrifice and swarm Alexander?
KILLING SPREE
Was Alexander Greek? Linguistically not in the pure sense, for few in the central and southern Greek wo
rld could understand much Macedonian, a distant Hellenic dialect less akin to proper Dorian or Ionic Greek than an Arkansas twang is to Oxford English. To the Greeks, the problem with Macedon was not its harsh and mostly incomprehensible language, much less matters of race, but its culture. Specifically, there were no true city-states north of the Greek border with Thessaly, just hamlets and villages of the poor, juxtaposed to the few vast estates of the horse-breeding rich—all overseen by a conglomeration of warring and often petty monarchs whose palaces and tombs today constitute most of the archaeological record of ancient Macedonia. Philip had united these lords into a real kingdom, and he had brought Hellenic artists, philosophers, and men of science to Macedon, subsidizing the Greek influx of talent with booty and stolen gold.
Thousands of hired Greek scientists and craftsmen eventually accompanied Alexander and his Macedonians eastward to ensure technological and organizational superiority over the Achaemenid armies: Diades, the Thessalian siege engineer who “took Tyre,” with his colleague Charias, and the other designers, Phillipus and Poseidonius; Gorgias, the hydraulic engineer, and Deinocrates, the town planner who laid out Alexandria; Baeton, Diongnetos, and Philonides, who systematically organized camps and surveyed routes; the naval experts Nearchus and Onesicritus; Eumenes, the head of the secretarial service; the natural philosopher and historian Callisthenes and his assistants; and Aristobolus, architect and engineer. The Macedonians had also hired thousands of southern Greeks in their army, from mercenaries to scientists, all seeking a steady wage and the patronage of the royal house. Whereas the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.), fought for principle and leadership of Greece, had nearly wrecked the old Greek city-states, Alexander’s nakedly predatory rampage in the East had the opposite effect of creating, not consuming, capital for the Western world.
Where Philip and Alexander drew the line on the imported Hellenic tradition was, like the later Japanese, politics—ta politika (“matters of the polis”). From Greece—Philip had been a young hostage at Thebes (369–368 B.C.) during the heyday of the brilliant Theban general Epaminondas—the king welcomed the phalanx, and with it the tradition of large infantry musters, decisive head-on assault, disciplined ranks, and the beginning of real tactical maneuver. From Greece Philip embraced the rationalist tradition and the disinterested pursuit of science and natural inquiry apart from religion and government—only that way might he build elaborate siege engines and torsion catapults. From Greece he adopted the traditions of individual initiative, coupled with iron-clad military discipline that put more emphasis on group solidarity than the number of enemy killed by heroic warriors. In that manner, he might recruit and train spirited phalangites who would charge into a wall of spear tips on his orders.
Before the battle at Gaugamela Alexander reminded his hired mercenaries that they were nonetheless “free” men—in contrast to the Persians, who were felt to be mere slaves. While not a single man had voted for Alexander as their king, there was nevertheless some truth to what he said. The legacy of Hellenic freedom was not to be defined entirely in political terms, but, as Aristotle noted, as “doing as one pleased.” Alexander’s phalangites, like the hired Ten Thousand earlier, enjoyed a liberality of association, as they held spirited and boisterous assemblies, voted on proposals when it was convenient to Alexander, and at royal banquets and sports enjoyed a familiarity with their betters unknown at the Persian court. It would turn out that even hired killers who were not citizens eventually became disgusted with the growing orientalism of Alexander—and the revolting custom of proskynēsis, or a free man’s kowtowing to another as if he were a living god.
Philip, however, had no interest in civic militarism, civilian control over his military, or abstract political freedom for his soldiers—the entire baggage of the weak and squabbling city-states. That distrust he taught Alexander—and he added one brilliant piece of propaganda as well: the Great Idea of a Panhellenic crusade into Persia, a final Götterdämmerung that would pay back the Achaemenids for the burning of the Athenian acropolis, revenge their enslavement of Hellenic Ionia and a century of meddling in Greek affairs, empty the Persian treasuries to enrich the Balkans beyond imagination, and provide a final unification of all Greek-speaking peoples, a real nationhood of men-in-arms at last. Only this way, Philip knew, could he leave a secure Greece to his rear as he headed eastward. True, there would always be patriots and firebrands like Demosthenes and Hyperides who would intrigue and revolt, always Greek hoplites eager to fight him in Asia for the Great King’s pay. Under his phony “League of Corinth,” Philip could say he was killing “for Greece,” not himself. In this first European “Crusade” Philip offered to a squabbling Greece the unification necessary to ransack a unified and despotic East.
Consequently, Alexander’s entire relationship with Hellenism, with Western culture itself, is paradoxical. No single man did more to spread the art, literature, philosophy, science, architecture, and military practice of Hellenic culture eastward beyond the borders of mainland Greece than Alexander the Great—and no foreigner did more to destroy three hundred years of liberty and freedom of the Greeks inside Greece than did Philip and his son. Alexander the Great mustered more Greek-speaking soldiers to kill more non-Greeks than any other Greek in history—and himself engineered the death of more Greeks at Chaeronea, at Thebes, at the Granicus, and at Issus than any Greek general in history. Alexander’s original intention was to rob and loot an aging Achaemenid kleptocracy. In the process he unleashed the stored tribute of centuries, whose newly coined money fueled a cultural renaissance unimagined under Persian rule, as thousands of Greek profiteers, engineers, and itinerant craftsmen followed him into Persia. Alexander went eastward, he said, to spread Hellenism. Yet no philosopher, king, or holy man did more to Orientalize Greeks than Alexander, who weakened secular Greek city-states in order to embrace Asian theocracy, leaving as his legacy the three-century-old Hellenistic practice of a plutocratic god-king, ensconced and isolated from his subjects in an imperial capital.
Alexander’s expropriation of the Hellenic military tradition, without the bridle of parochial local government and the logistical constraints of amateur hoplites, meant that the Greeks for the first time in their history might find the natural limits of their military power at the distant Indus River. By the same token, Alexander’s rejection of constitutional government, of civic militarism, and of municipal autonomy ensured that his conquests would never result in a stable Hellenic civilization in Asia, or even liberty in Greece—but simply the Successors’ kingdoms (323–31 B.C.) of his like-minded marshals who followed. For three centuries theocrats—Macedonians, Epiriots, Seleucids, Ptolemies, Attalids—would rule, fight, plunder, and live in splendor amid a Hellenic veneer of court elites and professionals in Asia and Africa until at last they were subdued by the legions of republican Rome. The latter, unlike the Hellenistic Greeks, really would combine the ideas of Hellenic politics, civic militarism, and decisive battle, to forge vast and deadly forces of voting citizens, whose government created the army, rather than the army the government.
What were the political and cultural results of decisive battle in the hands of Alexander the Great? Ancient historians of the Roman age, their sources traceable in a convoluted trail back to contemporaries of Alexander himself, present both a “good” and a “bad” Alexander—either Homer’s Achilles come alive whose youthful exuberance and piety brought Hellenism to its proper florescence, or a megalomaniac, drunken, and self-indulgent thug, who butchered most in his path before turning on his father’s friends and compatriots, the men whose loyalty and genius created him in the first place. That debate continues today. The majority of contemporary Greeks despised Alexander for robbing them of their freedom and butchering them from Thebes to the Granicus. If we put aside later romance about Alexander—his supposed efforts to achieve the “brotherhood of mankind” or to bring “civilization” to the barbarians— we can agree that his real genius is mostly military and political, not humanitari
an or philosophical: a brilliant innovation of Hellenic warfare, with the savvy needed to use such power to liquidate and bribe rivals who wished to do the same to him.
Alexander brilliantly employed decisive battle in terrifying ways that its long-conquered Hellenic inventors had never imagined—and in a stroke of real genius he proclaimed that he had killed for the idea of brotherly love. Cortés, a similar military prodigy, would likewise slice through the ranks of the Mexicas, slaughtering them in decisive battle that was largely outside their cultural experience, claiming that he did it for the Spanish crown, the glory of Christ, and the march of Western civilization. To Alexander the strategy of war meant not the defeat of the enemy, the return of the dead, the construction of a trophy, and the settlement of existing disputes, but, as his father had taught him, the annihilation of all combatants and the destruction of the culture itself that had dared to field such opposition to his imperial rule. Thus, Alexander’s revolutionary practice of total pursuit and destruction of the defeated enemy ensured battle casualties unimaginable just a few decades earlier.
At the Granicus River (May 334 B.C.) Alexander destroyed outright the Persian army, surrounded the trapped Greek mercenaries, and massacred nearly all of them—except 2,000 whom he sent back as slaves to Macedon. Our sources disagree over the precise casualty figures; Alexander may have exterminated between 15,000 and 18,000 Greeks after the battle was essentially won. He killed more Hellenes in a single day than the entire number that had fallen to the Medes at the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea combined! As many as 20,000 Persians fell as well at Granicus—far more than in any single hoplite battle in two centuries of warfare on the mainland. Granicus proved two points: Alexander would have to kill like no other Westerner before him to achieve his political ends, and he would be forced to eliminate thousands of Greeks, who for either greed or principle were willing to fight him in service of the Persian king.