Every major city-state on the Greek mainland except Sparta had joined Alexander’s coalition. Sparta stubbornly held out. Its great days were behind it, however, and it was now mainly a small and out-of-the way place with a glorious name. Even if its refusal smarted, Sparta was not worth the trouble to conquer.
Alexander also planned a political response to the threatened Persian naval offensive. As he drove the Persians out of the Greek cities of Anatolia, he advertised himself as a liberator for all Greeks. But he also showed himself to be a killer: in his first battle he executed most Greek mercenaries caught fighting for Persia, which was a brutal act, considering that captured mercenaries were usually easily encouraged to change sides. He wanted to make a political more than a military point in order to discourage other Greeks from fighting for Persia.
Hannibal: The Diplomat
When he marched against Rome in 218 B.C., Hannibal was already an accomplished commander. He had spent two years conquering hostile Spanish tribes and then turning to Rome’s Spanish ally, Saguntum. He laid siege to the city and took it after eight months. When Rome declared war, Hannibal was ready with a daring plan: an overland march across the Pyrenees and the hostile territory of southern France and the Alps—with elephants, no less.
Hannibal had crushed his Spanish enemies and earned the love of his men. He offered military prowess and leadership skill, to which he added public relations. He used religion deftly to appeal to the various Celtic peoples in his army. Unlike Alexander, Hannibal never claimed to be a god, but he avowed divine patronage. He branded himself as a new Hercules. Before leaving New Carthage, he made a special trip to Gades to pray at the shrine of Melqart, the Punic Hercules. In the Alps, there was talk of a god—plausibly, Hercules—leading Hannibal through the mountains. On the march through northern Spain, Hannibal reported a dream of a young man sent by the king of the gods to guide him to Italy and to ravage its land like a giant serpent.
In spite of that serpent, Hannibal was a diplomat who planned to win the support of potential allies in enemy territory. Rome had conquered the peoples of central and southern Italy one by one. Many of them chafed under its rule. But a bigger problem was Rome’s fragile control of the Celts, whose tribes comprised the majority of the population of the Po valley and most of today’s northern Italy (including Piedmont, Lombardy, the Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna). They had launched a great rebellion between 225 and 222 B.C. and were still simmering in discontent after defeat by Rome. Before setting out on his expedition, Hannibal sent ambassadors to the Celts and won promises of support from some tribes.
Meanwhile, in central and southern Italy, the population did not express anti-Roman sentiments as openly, but these regions too were rich in subterranean feelings of resentment. Hannibal planned to raise them up. He would tell Italians that he had come not as a conqueror but a liberator. After each of his victories he enslaved Romans but freed any Italians that his men had captured.
Hannibal’s comparison of himself to Hercules—Heracles to Greeks—played well in southern Italy. Pyrrhus too had likened himself to Heracles, and so had the greatest Greek conqueror of all, Alexander.
Hannibal had two other political audiences to think of, one in Spain and the other in North Africa. Some Spanish tribes still smarted under Carthaginian rule; should Hannibal falter in Italy, the news might spark their rebellion. When he marched to Italy, therefore, he left soldiers, ships, and elephants behind in Spain under the command of his brother Hasdrubal to keep the Spaniards in line.
Even more important for Hannibal was the politics of Carthage’s government. Hannibal protected Carthage by sending sixteen thousand soldiers from Spain to North Africa when he left for Italy. Carthage had supported Hannibal when Rome demanded his head, after the siege of Saguntum. The city had fought rather than hand over Hannibal, but they also wanted to keep Spain—and knew they had to protect Hannibal to do so. When it came to the Italian campaign, they might have felt differently.
As at Rome, so in Carthage a council of elders or senate played a leading role in the government. Its members had mixed feelings about Hannibal’s war. On the one hand, they hated Rome, but on the other hand, many of them distrusted Hannibal. The Barca family had won Carthage a lucrative province in Spain but had also won itself a power base. If Hannibal now added Italy to his sphere of influence, he would tower over Carthage. Political titans always make councils of elders nervous. “Safety in numbers” is usually their motto.
So the Carthaginian senate supported Hannibal but not in every particular. Many senators had their own agenda—winning back the lost colonies in Sicily and Sardinia. They saw the war in Italy as a means to that end. Should Hannibal stumble there, they were ready to open new fronts in the islands and to turn to new commanders—preferably ones with lesser political ambitions.
To win the war in Italy, therefore, Hannibal had to be far more than a great general. He had also to be a first-class diplomat, an able propagandist, and a cunning domestic politician.
Caesar: Shock and Awe Commander
What the Barca family had built in Spain, Caesar achieved in Gaul: conquest of a rich province that was all but his own property. Unlike Hannibal, however, who had left Carthage for good at the age of nine to follow his father to Spain, Caesar had built a career in Rome before going to Gaul: he was already a veteran politician when, in his forties, he became a conqueror. Caesar’s actions both before and after crossing the Rubicon demonstrate his mastery of the art of being a political general—of being, in short, Caesar.
Caesar used his victory in Gaul well. To advertise his success he wrote a literary classic, The Gallic War, in which he branded himself as a military giant. From its famous opening—“All Gaul is divided into three parts”—Caesar proclaimed to the Roman people his military and political skill; after all, “divide and conquer” was the oldest maxim of Roman warfare. The book drove home the power of Caesar’s military. It was quick, efficient, ruthless, and utterly ready to commit acts of terror: Caesar was said to have been responsible for a million deaths in the conquest of Gaul and a million more enslaved, many of them civilians.
While in Gaul, Caesar kept a finger on the pulse of politics in Rome. Gaul was a vast province, big enough to allow Caesar to spend his winters in Ravenna in northern Italy, just 200 miles from Rome. In 49 B.C., northern Italy was not considered Roman territory; it was a foreign province, under the rule of a Roman governor—Caesar. Northern Italy was called Cisalpine Gaul, “Gaul on this side [the south side] of the Alps,” and it was part of Caesar’s Gallic command. While wintering in Ravenna, Caesar commanded one legion. His other legions were north of the Alps, but three of them were poised to reach him quickly.
Having made his name as a populist before going to Gaul, Caesar continued the tradition by sending loot home to fund public works projects. He offered the Roman people a program of welfare benefits, which made him more popular than the grandees in the Roman senate, who jealously guarded their own property. But unlike many politicians, Caesar did not crow at his opponents’ mistakes.
Caesar faced two main groups of opponents at the time he crossed the Rubicon: conservatives in the Senate and Pompey and his supporters. The senators stood on principle: they could not abide the thought of one man dominating Roman politics as a dictator, as the dictator Sulla had (82–79 B.C.). They saw Caesar as what might now be called a “red dictator,” someone whose populist policies might yield absolute power. Pompey didn’t care about principle; he cared about Pompey. Before Caesar had conquered Gaul, Pompey had been the dominant military-political figure in Rome. Now, his star was waning and Caesar’s was a supernova. Pompey would not share power with Caesar; the senators could not bear submitting to a fellow aristocrat turned populist demagogue. Not that they relished cooperation with Pompey, himself a dominant figure, but the senators correctly saw him as less of a threat to them than was Caesar. So they ordered Caesar’s arrest, and he responded by crossing the Rubicon with his army, aimed at Rome.
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Many had doubted that Caesar would dare take this step, and for a good reason: he had only one legion in Italy, that is, five thousand men. Pompey had two legions (eight thousand to ten thousand men) and the authority to raise 130,000 new troops, to be led by himself and various prominent senators. Pompey also had seven legions in Spain and, although far off, they could be moved to Italy. Caesar had ten legions north of the Alps; as it turned out, three were ready to join him about a month later. Besides, he no doubt knew what a general would later say: “It is not the big armies that win battles; it is the good ones.”
If it seems surprising that neither side had a large army ready, remember, as Pompey and Caesar both did, that in a civil war, less is more. Both knew that the public wanted peace, so neither general wanted the blame for having provoked war. Each was willing to risk a lack of preparation in order to dodge responsibility for the war. The result was that once war broke out, the two sides each had to play catch-up. That favored Caesar.
Caesar had sole and supreme command of his forces, while Pompey had to share command with a committee of senators, each pulling in his own direction. Pompey and his allies in the Senate distrusted each other as much as Hitler and Stalin did after they agreed to carve up Poland together.
If Caesar coldly appraised Pompey before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he would have had to admit that he faced a great general. Among Pompey’s achievements were victories in North Africa, Spain, the eastern Mediterranean from Anatolia to Judea, and on the high seas against the pirates. He was shrewd, disciplined, and a superb organizer. Yet, while Caesar had stormed through Gaul, Pompey had gotten used to a life of civilian ease: it had been nearly fifteen years since he had commanded in the field. On top of that, Pompey’s military specialty was defense. Caesar, on the other hand, specialized in what is today called shock and awe.
A good general needs to figure out how his enemy thinks. Before crossing the Rubicon, Caesar probably guessed Pompey’s strategy: rather than risk fighting Caesar’s hardened veterans of Gaul, Pompey would raise new troops quickly in Italy and then evacuate them to Greece. There he could train them into a great army, return with them to Italy, and defeat Caesar.
Caesar knew that Pompey held two aces. Unlike Caesar, Pompey had a navy, which meant that, after fleeing Italy, he could return in force by way of the sea. The East, furthermore, was his base, just as Gaul was Caesar’s base. Pompey had conquered much of the eastern Mediterranean for Rome in the 60s B.C., leaving him a gigantic network of men who owed him favors.
But Pompey needed time. He needed time to persuade the senators that it really made sense to evacuate Italy. Many of them would refuse to concede to Caesar the psychological advantage of controlling Italy’s “sacred soil”—a point made by none other than Napoleon, who studied ancient history while living out his exile. Pompey also needed time to recruit new troops in Italy. Unfortunately for Pompey, Caesar was the thief of time. The war was a race, and in military terms, Caesar was a champion runner.
THREE EARLY VICTORIES—MORE TO COME
By the time they invaded enemy territory, Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar had each shown that he was dangerous. Each wielded the equivalent of a dagger: a loyal, veteran, and victorious army. Only two defenses were possible: to fight with equal force or to retreat. Retreat repels most soldiers but sometimes it is necessary for future victory, despite the accompanying shame. A retreat makes it possible to harass the enemy in skirmishes as they give chase, to deny him food by purposely destroying one’s own resources (a “scorched-earth” policy), and to regroup to fight again another day.
But still, retreat denies the men a fight, and few soldiers will tolerate that. Most armies choose to stand and fight, as the Persians did against Alexander and the Romans did against Hannibal.
Alexander: A Quick Early Victory
Things could hardly have gone better for Alexander as his army invaded Anatolia in spring 334. Getting from Europe to Asia required ferrying across the narrow waterway of the Hellespont (or Dardanelles as we know it). A strategic bottleneck, the Hellespont attracted antiquity’s naval battles the way a canvas ring attracts boxers, but Persia’s mighty fleet was nowhere to be seen. The Macedonians controlled both shores at the crossing point, and ancient navies did not like to fight without a friendly shore to retreat to. Alexander’s forces crossed unmolested and landed near Troy. They totaled about 50,000 men.
Their logistical base, however, was made of sand. Alexander had only a month’s worth of supplies. Worse still, he had no money. Macedon had spent its last drachma in putting together the invasion force. To feed his men, Alexander would have to persuade or force the cities of Anatolia to open their gates—and their granaries.
Darius did not take the Macedonian threat lightly. He saw to it that the five satraps of Anatolia’s great provinces met and pooled their military resources under the guidance of the leading mercenary general of the day. But that general did not have absolute command. In retrospect, Darius made a mistake by allowing a divided command when he should have enforced a single, united policy. Committees do not make good generals.
As Alexander’s army arrived on Asian soil, a council of Persian commanders met about seventy-five miles to the east, in the small city of Zeleia. Those present included satraps and members of the royal family as well as the greatest mercenary commander of the age, Memnon of Rhodes, a man “famous for his good judgment as a general.”
Memnon was Greek. It might seem surprising to find a Greek among Persia’s commanders, but it was a common sight. Persians made great cavalrymen but only mediocre infantrymen, while Greeks made excellent infantrymen. When it came to war, the Persian government was pragmatic and relatively open-minded, so it hired Greek soldiers and Greek generals.
Memnon came from the premier mercenary family of the age. He and his brother Mentor had spent twenty years in Persian service, where they rose to top positions. Yet they had married into Persia’s first family of rebellion, the family of Artabazus, satrap of Phrygia (an important area in northwestern Turkey). Mentor married Artabazus’s daughter Barsine; when Mentor died in 340, Barsine married Memnon. (Artabazus, by the way, married Mentor and Memnon’s sister.) In the 350s, Artabazus rebelled against the then Persian king Artaxerxes III. The tide of war ebbed and flowed until 352, when Artabazus and Memnon fled to Macedon and the court of Philip II. Mentor went to Egypt and eventually ended up back in the good graces of Artaxerxes III by helping to put down a rebellion there. In exchange, Artabazus and Memnon were pardoned and allowed to return to Persian territory in 343. They brought firsthand knowledge of Macedonian plans and power. When Darius III became king in 336, Memnon and Artabazus both served him loyally.
Memnon leveraged his knowledge of Macedon into a series of victories against Alexander’s advance forces in Anatolia from 336 to 335. In one battle, he even defeated the Macedonian commanding general, the great veteran Parmenio, and drove him back toward the Hellespont. But Memnon was shrewd, and he did not overestimate his success. He knew that it was one thing to defeat a small advance force and quite another to take on the main army led by its king.
Memnon knew just how seasoned and ruthless young Alexander was. Memnon concluded that a conventional battle against Macedon was too dangerous, because of the Persians’ inferiority in infantry. Instead, he “advocated a policy of . . . ravaging the land and through the shortage of supplies keeping the Macedonians from advancing further.” At the same time, he was pressing for a naval offensive.
Led by the local satrap, the men gathered at Zeleia rejected Memnon’s advice. They considered it their duty to defend their land, not to destroy it. They might also have disliked taking advice from a foreigner like Memnon. Some might even have questioned his loyalty, considering that the Macedonians had spared his estates near Troy from ravaging. (This was a bit of psychological warfare aimed at making the Persians distrust Memnon.)
The Persians at Zeleia decided to fight a pitched battle. They knew that Alexander outnumber
ed them in infantry but they probably also knew that most of Alexander’s 30,000 infantrymen were untested and untrustworthy allied troops. Persia had 6,000 veteran and reliable Greek mercenaries. Persia had the numerical edge in cavalry, 20,000 to 5,000. The Persians planned to make the Macedonians fight a cavalry battle. And they knew that they could fight on ground of their own choosing, because Alexander had to come to them.
As long as the Persians had an army near Zeleia, Alexander could not march south, because the enemy might then cut his communications with the Hellespont. So Alexander marched toward Zeleia, about three days away from Troy. As the enemy might have guessed, he left most of his 30,000 infantrymen behind; he took only 12,000 heavy infantrymen, all trusted Macedonians, as well as 1,000 light-armed troops from Thrace. He also brought his entire cavalry, 5,000 men.
The Persian army made its stand on the main east-west road, west of Zeleia. As Alexander’s army marched eastward, his scouts reported the location of the Persians at the far end of the Plain of Adrasteia, on the east bank of the Granicus River. The defenders had chosen good ground. Although the river was not deep (only about three feet in May), it was fast-flowing, slippery, and protected by steep and muddy banks. The Macedonians would have no easy time getting their men across and in good order. The Persians planned to take advantage of disarray in the enemy ranks to execute a strategy of decapitation. They would target Alexander and kill him.
It was already afternoon when the Macedonians located the Persians. Alexander’s advisors recommended delaying until the next day, in the hope that the enemy would withdraw from the damp river edge overnight, which would allow the Macedonians to cross in the morning. Alexander insisted on immediate battle. Usually a good psychologist, he knew that action would inspire his men and frighten the enemy.
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