Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The next year at Issus (333 B.C.), against the grand army of Darius III himself, the fatalities reached new magnitudes never before seen in battle involving either a Greek or a Macedonian army. Another 20,000 Greek mercenaries fell, and anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 Persian recruits were dead by the end of the day—a formidable challenge of time and space to butcher more than 300 men every minute for eight hours. This was extermination taken to new heights, evidence of what the Western way of war might evolve into when shock battle was used to annihilate the enemy rather than settle parochial border disputes. The Macedonian phalanx did not push men off the battlefield as much as slaughter them from the rear for hours on end after the battle was already decided.

  After Gaugamela, at his fourth and last victory over the Indian prince Porus at the Hydaspes River (326), Alexander killed around 20,000 of the enemy. Very conservative figures suggest that in the space of just eight years Alexander the Great had slain well over 200,000 men through decisive battle alone—at the cost of a few hundred of his own Macedonians. Only the Greek mercenary hoplites at Granicus and Issus had caused him real problems, and finally they were outnumbered, surrounded, and almost annihilated—nearly 40,000 at the two battles, enough to ensure that there were scarcely any available at Gaugamela. Only Caesar in Gaul and Cortés in Mexico would rival Alexander’s record of battlefield dead and subsequent civilian losses during years of pacification. Clearly, the Western approach to war—shock and frontal collision by walls of highly trained and disciplined professional foot soldiers—had created a one-sidedness in casualties heretofore unforeseen in Asia.

  In between these formal battles, Alexander also stormed a host of Greek and Persian cities, displaying the truth that the Western way of war was no longer a technique of infantry battle, but an ideology of brutal frontal assault against any obstacle in its way. Alexander systematically captured and enslaved nearly all cities in his path, beginning in Asia Minor, proceeding to the Syrian coast, then into the eastern satrapies of Persia and ending with the carnage of Indian communities in the Punjab. We hear little from any sources about the precise number of those killed in Alexander’s capture of Miletus (334), Halicarnassus (334), Sagalassus (333), Pisidia (333), Celanae (333), Soli (333), the massacre of the Branchideae (329), the various fortresses of Syr-Darya (329), the stronghold of Ariamazes (328), the Indian cities of Massaga (327), Aornus (327), and Sangala (326). Most of these strongholds were larger than Thebes, his inaugural siege, which saw 6,000 Greeks butchered in the streets. Arrian suggested 80,000 were cut down in the storming of the southern Punjabi cities around Sindimana, and 17,000 Indians killed and 70,000 captured at Sangala. A conservative estimate would assume a quarter million urban residents were killed outright between 334 and 324 B.C., most of them civilian defenders who lived in the path of Alexander’s trek east.

  The most well documented carnage was in Phoenicia at Tyre and Gaza. After months of heroic defense, Tyre fell on July 29, 332. We have no exact record of how many were lost in the city’s defense, but on the city’s final day of existence 7,000 to 8,000 residents were slain in the chaos. Two thousand surviving males were crucified as a lesson in the futility of resistance. Anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 women and children were enslaved. Tyre, like Thebes before, ceased to exist as a community. Gaza, farther south on the Syrian coast, was next. After a two-month siege Alexander let his troops murder the city’s inhabitants at will. All Syrian males were exterminated. Nearly 10,000 Persians and Arabs died. All captured women and children, numbering in the untold thousands, were sold into slavery. Alexander bound Batis, the governor of Gaza, pierced his ankles with thongs, and dragged him around the city, Achilles-style, until the tortured victim expired.

  For most of his decade in Asia, Alexander was unable to draw his enemies out to pitched battle, and so brought battle to them, marching in obscurity to the East, systematically burning villages, murdering local elites, and razing strongholds in dirty wars of retaliation, in which nomadic Eastern traditions of skirmishing, ambushes, and hit-and-run attacks wreaked havoc on his army. The list of decimated peoples in what is now Afghanistan, Iran, and the Punjab is nearly endless, but a small sampling can give some idea of the sheer number of tribes that were either pacified or exterminated through Alexander’s Western propensity to advance ruthlessly against the main loci of enemy settlement. To the south of Susa, the mountain villages of the Uxiis of the Zagros Mountains were systematically sacked. Most of the inhabitants were killed or displaced. At the Susian Gates, in western Iran, during his approach to Persepolis, Alexander wiped out the forces of the satrap Ariobarzanes; only a handful of survivors escaped down the mountain. It took Alexander only five days to hunt down and conquer the Mardis of eastern Iran, who were incorporated in Alexander’s empire and forced to provide men, horses, and hostages (331).

  In Bactria Alexander began to cleanse in earnest when faced with local revolts and secessions. An expatriate community of Greeks, the so-called Branchideae, were said to have been wiped out to the man. The Sacans of Sogdiana—fierce veterans of Gaugamela—were extinguished and their territory ravaged. Convinced that the rich villages of the Zervashan valley to the south had aided the rebellions in Sogdiana, Alexander stormed their fortresses too. He executed all the defenders whom he found alive; 8,000 alone were killed in the capture of Cyrupolis. The revolts in Bactria and Sogdiana (329–328) were little more than two years of uninterrupted fighting, looting, and executing. Alexander followed the same pattern of total war in India (327–326). He massacred all the defenders along the Choes River in Bajaur. After promising the surrounded Assacenis their lives upon capitulation, he executed all their hired soldiers who surrendered. Their other strongholds at Ora and Aornus were likewise stormed. The garrisons were probably slaughtered. Most of the villages of the Mallis of the lower Punjab were razed. The civilian refugees were butchered in the flight into the desert. Most agree that tens of thousands were killed.

  The East had never experienced anything like Alexander’s army, which offered the enemy the choice of submission or death, and had the will and power to accomplish both. None of these tribes had a prayer against the Macedonians in pitched battle. Their only chance was to wage desultory wars in the mountains, in hopes of slowing down and frustrating Alexander’s progress, rather than defeating him outright. On his passage through the Gedrosian desert in 325 B.C., when his own men were not dying, Alexander attacked the Oreitae. Alexander’s lieutenant Leonnatus killed 6,000 of them in one engagement. Between famine and military conquest the Oreitae had their territory depopulated. Any figure for the human costs for the subjugation of Bactria, Iran, and India is impossible, but many villages and provincial strongholds were the homes of thousands. After the arrival of Alexander, their communities were destroyed and their male defenders killed, enslaved, or recruited.

  For what purpose was all the killing? Alexander’s desires are not known, although pacification of a new empire from the bones of Achaemenid rule are the most likely explanations for his continuous rampage through Asia. Sometimes the Macedonians killed in transit or in general quarters; so lethal had Alexander’s war machine become that it was a danger even to itself. After the Persian capital of Persepolis was handed over in submission, Alexander had allowed his Macedonians an entire day of plunder and gratuitous butchery. The frenzied Macedonians pillaged the houses even of the common people, carried off the women, and sold into slavery any who survived the day of random killing. Plutarch remarks that there was also much slaughter of the prisoners. Curtius adds that many residents preferred to jump from the walls with their wives and children or torch their own households and families rather than be gutted in the streets. Mass suicide is rare among European populations, but more common among the victims of Western arms: non-Western peoples when confronted with the hopelessness of resisting Western arms, from Xenophon’s Ten Thousand to Roman legions in the Holy Land to Americans on Okinawa, have often preferred voluntary group death.

  After a respi
te of a few months, all the imperial treasury was carted off—few precious metals were ever found in Persepolis by modern excavators—and the royal palace torched amid a mass orgy of drunken debauchery. Fires probably spread beyond the palace and for a time left the capital uninhabitable. Documentary sources chronicle the immense loot gathered—120,000 talents by most accounts, the material bounty requiring 10,000 pairs of mules and 5,000 camels to carry away—but do not calculate the human cost. If Persepolis was capital of an empire of millions, and its population was in the hundreds of thousands, thousands died during the initial killing, subsequent enslavement, and final deportations and dispersals.

  In an empire of 70 million there was no native constabulary force that could prevent 30,000 veterans from the West from doing whatever they pleased. The result was that hundreds of thousands died literally from being in Alexander’s way. Macedonians and indigenous tribes were killed on Alexander’s ill-fated crossing of the Gedrosian desert in late summer 325 along the northern coast of the Indian Ocean, from the Indus River delta to the Persian Gulf. Ancient sources give lurid accounts of the suffering and death on the march of some 460 miles over sixty days. Alexander embarked with an army of at least 30,000 combatants, followed by a lengthy train of thousands more women and children. Arrian, Diodorus, Plutarch, and Strabo speak of unending losses to thirst, exhaustion, and sickness, and mention tens of thousands left dead. In three months Alexander was responsible for more deaths among his own troops than in a decade of losses to Persian soldiers. The real threat to Macedonian phalangites was not a Persian or Indian renegade, but their own murderous general.

  Unlike the prior practice of the Greek city-states, there were no shared commands by a board of generals in the Macedonian army—no civilian audits, no ostracism through voting or court trials to oversee the high leadership of the Macedonian army and its king. Alexander as absolute ruler reacted to suspicions of disloyalty with instant sentences of death. An entire generation of Macedonian noblemen was executed by the king they served. The murders increased with the paranoia and dementia of his last years—and with the realization that their services in pitched battle were no longer needed after the collapse of the Achaemenid royal army and the extermination and enslavement of the dangerous Greek mercenaries.

  The mock trial and subsequent torture and stoning of his general Philotas (330) are well known. Far from being a conspirator, Philotas, who had shared command of the Macedonian cavalry and fought heroically in all of Alexander’s major campaigns—he led the charge of the Companions through the Persian line at Gaugamela—was guilty of little more than arrogance and failure to pass on gossip about possible dissension against the king. With Philotas’s gruesome death, his father, Parmenio (no charges were ever brought against him) was murdered as well. Various other Macedonian nobles disappeared or were killed outright as the army moved farther east from Babylon. The so-called Black Cleitus, who had saved Alexander at the Granicus, was speared to death at a drunken banquet by the intoxicated king himself. After a number of young Macedonian pages were stoned to death for suspicion of sedition (327 B.C.), Alexander executed the philosopher Callisthenes, nephew of Aristotle, who had objected to the king’s practice of proskynēsis.

  After emerging from the Gedrosian desert, Alexander went on a seven-day binge of drink and revelry, culminating in a series of further execution decrees. The generals Cleander and Sitacles, and later Agathon and Heracon, and six hundred of their troops were killed without warning or legal trial. Purportedly, they were guilty of either malfeasance or insubordination. More likely, they were cut down because of their past involvement in carrying out Alexander’s order to execute the popular Parmenio—a blunder that had not gone down well with the rank-and-file veterans and required some ceremonial show of expiation.

  Alexander literally decimated an entire corps of 6,000 men—the first clear evidence in Western warfare of that practice of lining up and executing one out of every ten soldiers. Alexander had introduced to the West from the East and South the twin ideas of decimation and crucifixion. In turn, his own original contribution to Western warfare was the carnage of decisive battle when completely divorced from moral restraint and civic audit. Alexander unleashed the idea of shock battle as the annihilation of the enemy. The Greek world had never seen anything quite like him.

  Alexander the Great was not a well-meaning emissary of Hellenism. He was an energetic, savvy adolescent and an authentic military genius, who was naturally curious and saw propaganda value in being surrounded by men of letters. He inherited from his father a frighteningly murderous army and was wise enough to secure the loyalty of a cadre of shrewd and experienced battle administrators—at least until the Persian army was defeated. Alexander understood how to modify the Hellenic tradition of decisive battle for murderous new ends, baffling his opponents in the East, who believed that ambush, ruse, negotiation, raiding, and plundering were all preferable to a head-on collision of shock troops.

  The Hellenistic age (323–31 B.C.) began with Alexander’s final destruction of Greek freedom and political autonomy. His introduction of Greek military culture beyond the Aegean and the economic stimulus of flooding the Greek world with the stored and previously untapped gold and silver of the imperial Persian treasuries fueled political oppression and economic disparity—even as it drew writers and artists to the new courts of the age. He left exploiting monarchies in place of Greek autonomous polities—which nevertheless drew on the Western traditions of rationalism and disinterested learning to create cities, great art, and sophisticated agriculture and commerce. There was no room in Alexander’s world for patriots and politicians, but far more opportunity and money for artists and academics than in the past.

  For all his professed devotion to Greek culture, Alexander died a man closer at heart to Xerxes than to Themistocles. Under the subsequent Hellenistic dynasts, militiamen gave way to paid mercenaries, and war consumed budgets and manpower at astronomical rates. Free markets, military research, and sophisticated logistics combined to form deadly Western armies unimaginable a few decades earlier. The Eastern notion of a divinity enthroned became the norm in the Hellenistic Successor states—with all the accustomed megalomania, gratuitous slaughter, and oppression that we associate with theocracies. Scholars sometimes compare Alexander to Caesar, Hannibal, or Napoleon, who likewise by sheer will and innate military genius sought empire far beyond what their own native resources might otherwise allow. There are affinities with each; but an even better match would be Adolf Hitler—a sickening comparison that will no doubt shock and disturb most classicists and philhellenes.

  Hitler similarly engineered a brilliant but brutal march eastward during the summer and fall of 1941. Both he and Alexander were singular military geniuses of the West, who realized that their highly mobile corps of shock troops were like none the world had seen. Both were self-acclaimed mystics, intent on loot and plunder under the guise of emissaries bringing Western “culture” to the East and “freeing” oppressed peoples from a corrupt, centralized Asian empire. Both were kind to animals, showed deference to (but were not really interested in) women, talked of their own destiny and divinity, and could be especially courteous to subordinates even as they planned the destruction of hundreds of thousands, and ultimately murdered many of their closest associates and greatest field marshals. Both were half-educated pop philosophers who sprinkled their orders of mass destruction with allusions to literature and poetry. For every promise of a “brotherhood of man,” there was a “thousand-year Reich”; for every house of Pindar saved among the rubble of Thebes, there were visions of a new Rome in Berlin; for every gutted Parmenio, there was a murdered Rommel; for every desolate Tyre, Gaza, or Sogdiana, there was a ransacked Warsaw or Kiev; and for every Gedrosian desert, a suicidal Stalingrad.

  Just as Alexander understood that European individualism and the know-how of Hellenism could forge highly spirited troops and thereby serve for a time autocracy, so Hitler drew on the rich legacy of Germa
ny and its once-free citizenry to create an equally dynamic and frightening blitzkrieg. History calls Alexander an emissary of world government and a visionary, while it rightly sees Hitler as a deranged and deadly monster. Had Alexander died at the Granicus on his entry into Asia (his head was almost cleaved in two by an enemy cavalryman) and had Hitler’s Panzers not stalled a few miles outside Moscow in December 1941, a few historians might consider the Macedonian merely an unbalanced megalomaniac whose insane ambitions ended in a muddy stream near the Hellespont, and the latter a savage but omnipotent conqueror who through brilliant decisive battles vanquished Stalin’s brutal communist empire.

  The failure of these ancient and modern autocrats—Alexander’s empire disintegrated into squabbling fiefdoms before being annexed by Rome, while Hitler’s thousand-year Reich lasted thirteen years—reminds us that decisive battle, superior technology, capitalism, and unmatched discipline give Western armies only ephemeral victories if they lack the corresponding foundation of Western freedom, individualism, civic audit, and constitutional government. Given the complexity and origins of Western military practice, it is more effective when confined within the parameters of its birth. The ancient world produced no man more personally courageous, militarily brilliant, and abjectly murderous than Alexander the anti-Hellene, truly the first European conquistador in a long train to follow.