IN SPRING 336, PHILIP WAS AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS POWER AND SUCCESS. Everything he had hoped and planned for at the start of his rule in the winter of 360/59 had been achieved, and more. Macedonia was strong, stable, prosperous, and greatly enlarged; cities were growing, the Macedonian people were thriving, and the economy had developed greatly under his rule. The Balkan peninsula and its peoples, south of the River Danube, were either directly subordinated to Macedonian rule, or effectively under Macedonian domination, thus posing no threat to Macedonian security. And the cities and peoples of northern, central, and southern Greece had either been brought under Macedonian rule (Chalcidians and Thessalians), or brought into a grand alliance system with Macedonia as the dominant partner and Philip as acknowledged Hegemon (leader). The Macedonian army, through which all of this had been achieved, was larger and stronger than ever: the largest army by far in all of the Balkan and Greek world, and the most effectively armed, trained, and led. Philip was ready to transition to a new and even grander set of goals, a new phase of his career as ruler: he was ready to take on the Persian Empire and seek to expand Macedonian power and the Greek culture and language into western Asia. At the beginning of the spring, an advance force of some ten thousand men, predominantly mercenaries and commanded by Parmenio, had crossed the Hellespont into north-western Asia Minor and begun the process of establishing a bridgehead there for the crossing of the main Macedonian army led by Philip himself, planned to take place early enough in the summer to give Philip a sufficient campaigning season in Asia Minor.
While Parmenio was campaigning, winning the allegiance of the Greek coastal cities in Asia Minor as far south as Ephesus, Philip marked the success of his endeavors and transition to a new field of operations with a grand festival at the old Macedonian capital of Aegae, centered around the marriage of his and Olympias’ daughter Cleopatra to the girl’s uncle Alexander of Molossia. Part of the ceremony was a grand procession of part of Philip’s army and statues of the gods to the theater of Aegae, where celebratory performances were to be staged. Philip marched at the end of the procession, flanked by his son Alexander and new son-in-law (and brother-in-law) Alexander. At the entrance to the theater, the two Alexanders preceded Philip inside, so the latter could make a splendid solo entrance as the leader and champion of the entire Greek world. Famously, as Philip finally moved forward alone, a disgruntled officer in his royal bodyguard named Pausanias, in pursuit of a personal grievance against Philip, dashed forward and stabbed him to death. So died Philip, the greatest ruler Macedonia had seen, at the very peak of his powers and at the relatively young age of about forty-seven (born around 383, died in early July 336). The assassin Pausanias was immediately pursued by others of Philip’s royal guard, caught, and killed, making it impossible to learn whether he had acted alone or had confederates in some sort of conspiracy.
Naturally, conspiracy theories swirled around this abrupt assassination, and have continued to swirl ever since. The apparently official account—retailed by the historian Diodorus and in a more abbreviated version by Aristotle—is of a rather sordid homoerotic intrigue between Philip and two young men in his entourage, both named Pausanias. The story is, perhaps, a little too detailed and sordid to convince. Not unsurprisingly, since Alexander benefited by becoming king, rumors arose suggesting that he and/or his mother Olympias were behind Pausanias. On the other hand, Alexander himself arrested and executed two scions of the dynastic house of Lyncus—Arrhabaeus and Heromenes—as conspirators; but he may simply have been using the charge of complicity in Philip’s death as an excuse to rid himself of two over-powerful aristocrats. The truth is, despite rivers of ink spilled discussing the issue, we shall never know more about Philip’s death than that Pausanias killed him. With that we must rest content.
1. THE SUCCESSION OF ALEXANDER
In the chaotic upset at the great ruler’s assassination, one man conspicuously kept his head: Philip’s senior officer and right-hand man Antipater. He immediately grasped that the succession to the throne was now the most important matter and, gathering up Philip’s bodyguards, he placed them protectively around Alexander and had him escorted to the safety of the nearby palace. There he summoned the chief Macedonian aristocrats who were present and presided over a meeting at which they proclaimed Alexander as the new ruler. Letters were despatched to Parmenio in Asia Minor, alerting him to the news, and Parmenio responded endorsing Alexander’s succession to the throne. Thus, at the age of twenty, Alexander became the ruler of the Macedonians in succession to his great father Philip. This can have come as no surprise to anyone: Philip had been visibly and publicly grooming Alexander for the succession for at least the past seven years. When Alexander was thirteen, Philip hired the great philosopher Aristotle to come to Macedonia and undertake the education of Alexander and a chosen group of companions of Alexander’s age; the princely sum Aristotle received for this three-year task enabled him to return to Athens and set up his famous school, the Lyceum (Lykeion) there. At sixteen, in 340, Alexander was appointed regent of Macedonia and placed in charge of the royal seal (that is, empowered to make official decisions) while Philip and his senior officers were absent campaigning at the Hellespont and Bosporus. In 338, when Alexander was eighteen, he was placed in command of the crucial Macedonian heavy cavalry at the battle of Chaeroneia, which cemented Philip’s leadership of Greece: it was the charge of the Macedonian heavy cavalry led by Alexander which secured victory in this battle, as argued in Chapter 4 above. And at the great ceremony in 336 at which Philip was assassinated, finally, it was Alexander who—along with Philip’s new son-in-law Alexander of Molossia—walked beside Philip in the grand procession, as we have just seen. All of this designated Alexander as Philip’s chosen heir beyond question.
There had, it is true, beeen tensions between Philip and Alexander in the years leading up to 336. Our sources love to play up these tensions, usually to Alexander’s credit and with a great deal of circumstantial detail that, if anything, undermines the credibility of the stories rather than enhancing it. These tensions first appeared, we are told, when Philip decided late in 338 to take a new young wife, his seventh. Unlike his previous six wives, all non-Macedonian ladies married to cement alliances of various sorts, this new wife—named either Cleopatra or Eurydice, in different sources—was a native Macedonian from the high aristocracy: her uncle and guardian was one of Philip’s senior officers named Attalus. Romantic stories insist that the marriage was a love match between the aging king (he was in fact only about forty-five) and a pretty young girl. At the wedding feast there was a great deal of drinking, as was usual at Macedonian feasts, and at some point Attalus offered a toast wishing that the new bride might bear Philip legitimate children. Alexander apparently took exception to this toast and attempted to assault Attalus, with others including Philip drunkenly intervening.
A great deal has been made by some scholars of this event. Supposedly the Macedonian aristocracy despised Alexander for his half-Epirote birth (through his Molossian mother Olympias) and regarded only an heir born of a Macedonian mother as well as father as legitimate. This notion, however, runs foul of the fact that Philip himself was only half Macedonian: his mother Eurydice had been of Illyrian birth. Exactly how did Attalus and his aristocratic friends explain to Philip that only a prince of Macedonian birth on both sides could be a legitimate heir? This is nonsense. Others have suggested that Attalus was literally impugning Alexander’s legitimacy: suggesting that Philip was not truly his father, Olympias having been unfaithful. But if that were so, why was Philip so visibly grooming Alexander for the succession? One must in fact recall what marriage in antiquity was about: not love and romance, but the begetting of children. As an anonymous Athenian orator famously put it (Ps. Demosthenes 59.122): “we keep courtesans (hetairai) for pleasure, concubines to take care of our daily physical needs, and wives to bear us legitimate children.” Expressing the wish that the bride would bear her husband legitimate children was a completely normal and standard part of ancient Greek weddings: it was the wife’s primary role. Philip had only two sons: Alexander himself and the mentally deficient Arrhidaeus. About to embark on a dangerous military campaign in which he himself and/or Alexander might easily die, Philip could certainly have used another son or two to help secure a legitimate line of succession.
The problem, that is to say, lay not with Attalus’ toast, but with Alexander’s reception of it. Exactly why Alexander flew into a violent rage at Attalus’ words can only be conjectured: no doubt excessive drinking was in part to blame. Alexander was well known, like his father and the Macedonian aristocracy generally, for heavy drinking at symposia. And Alexander was extremely touchy about his personal honor, and prone to fly into violent rages if he felt slighted. The most infamous example of this came at a feast held at Samarkand in 327: a senior officer named Cleitus the Black, who had saved Alexander’s life at the Battle of the Granicus, made some remarks to the effect that Philip was a greater ruler than Alexander, at which Alexander became so enraged that he snatched a spear from one of his bodyguards and murdered Cleitus with it on the spot. In the present case Alexander, doubtless very drunk, perceived some slight in Attalus’ perfectly standard toast and flew at him; Philip understandably intervened to protect Attalus; and at this Alexander became so furious that he took his mother Olympias and decamped with her from Macedonia altogether. After a few weeks, or perhaps months, calmer heads prevailed: Alexander and Olympias were invited back to Macedonia, and Alexander’s position as Philip’s heir apparent was not affected.
He remained touchy, however, and renewed tensions quickly arose over a proposed marriage alliance later in 337. Pixodarus, the local dynast of Caria, who was at the same time recognized as governor of Caria by the Persian king, knew of Philip’s plans to invade western Asia and made overtures to marry his daughter to a son of Philip, suggesting that he might be willing to switch sides and ally with Philip when the time came. Philip proposed that his son Arrhidaeus could marry Pixodarus’ daughter, and when Alexander learned of this he again felt slighted and became furious. Through intermediaries, he instead offered himself to Pixodarus as a better match for his daughter; but when Philip heard about this he put a stop to the proposed match. The angry king explained to Alexander that he had no plan to marry his heir presumptive to the daughter of a mere Carian dynast, and instructed him to think things through before acting. A few of Alexander’s friends, who had acted as intermediaries, were banished from Macedonia, and a chastened Alexander had to accept his father’s criticism for spoiling a potentially useful alliance: Pixodarus now chose to marry his daughter to a Persian grandee instead. The point of both of these upsets is that they were born of Alexander’s touchy and impetuous nature, and from the natural frictions between two very dominant personalities. Friction between fathers and teenage sons is in general a common phenomenon, even when the two men concerned do not have quite such outsize egos as Philip and Alexander. Far too much has in general been made of these upsets: at the end of the day Alexander was Philip’s publicly acknowledged and groomed heir apparent, and he succeeded to the throne of Macedonia at once when Philip died, thanks to the immediate support of Philip’s right-hand men Antipater and Parmenio, who knew quite well what Philip’s plans and intentions were.
It is appropriate here to point up the contrast between the situations faced by Philip and Alexander when they each became ruler at very young ages: twenty-three or twenty-four in Philip’s case, twenty in the case of Alexander. Philip took over in the aftermath of a terrible military disaster in which the Macedonian army had been largely wiped out; he had to deal with a Macedonia that had been chronically weak and disunited for decades at least, and which was at his succession under attack from all sides and seemingly on the verge of complete dissolution. Alexander, by contrast, inherited a strong and unified state, a loyal and obedient aristocracy and people, the best and largest army in the eastern Mediterranean region with an outstandingly trained officer corps, and a two-decade tradition of unbroken and unparalleled Macedonian success. In addition, Philip came to the throne unexpectedly, the youngest of three brothers with no particular preparation or training for a task of ruling he was never likely to have to take up; Alexander had the best training and grooming for the role of commanding and ruling that the ancient world could provide, at the hands of Aristotle, of Philip’s right-hand men Antipater and Parmenio, and most crucially from Philip himself.
This is not to say that Alexander faced no difficulties in taking up the rule of his father’s empire. Philip’s nephew Amyntas, the son of his older brother and predecessor as Macedonian ruler Perdiccas III, was still alive and aged around thirty. He had been carefully raised by Philip almost as another son: after all, for the first ten or twelve years of his reign, until Alexander began to grow up and show his abilities, Amyntas was Philip’s most natural successor should he die. At some point a few years before he died, Philip had married Amyntas to his oldest daughter Cynnane, from his Illyrian wife Audata; which meant that Amyntas’ children would not only be Philip’s great-nephews or nieces, but also his grandchildren. Amyntas, that is to say, was still very much part of the potential line of succession. As the son of a previous ruler and apparently impatient at his subordination, Amyntas decided not to wait. He challenged Alexander’s claim to the succession, but received virtually no backing from the Macedonian aristocracy, who understandably followed Philip’s intentions and Antipatros’ lead in accepting Alexander as the new ruler. Amyntas was quickly hunted down and executed.
More serious challenges to Alexander’s power came from outside, from non-Macedonian peoples. To the north of Macedonia the Balkan peoples had only been subordinated by long, arduous, and repeated campaigning under Philip. With Philip dead and Alexander a largely unknown quantity, it is no surprise that peoples like the Triballians and some of the Illyrians saw the chance to recover complete freedom. Alexander reacted swiftly. He led his army on an armed march through Thrace, cowing the Thracians, and into Triballian territory along the Danube. The Triballians were forced to submit, and Alexander crossed the Danube on ships that had sailed up the river from the Black Sea to join him, in order to stage a military demonstration among the Scythian tribes north of the great river. Re-crossing to the southern side, he swiftly marched west into Illyrian lands, where the demonstration of Macedonian military efficiency quoted in the previous chapter, along with some small-scale fighting, taught the Illyrians to accept the new ruler and keep quiet.
In southern Greece, meanwhile, embassies had flown to and fro debating the wisdom of a rebellion against Macedonian domination. The Thebans were all for it, but sensibly preferred not to act alone; they wanted other Greek city-states to join them, especially the Athenians. The lesson of Chaeroneia was too recent, however: the Athenians preferred to watch and wait, with even the anti-Macedonian Demosthenes counseling caution. In the event, the Thebans acted alone, spurred on by false rumors that the Macedonians had suffered a reverse in Illyria and Alexander was dead. In spring of 335, Alexander moved south through Thessaly at the head of a large army and invaded Boeotia. The Thebans preferred not to try battle against a greatly superior force; they pulled their population behind the defensive walls of the city of Thebes and prepared to withstand a siege. Unfortunately for the Thebans, the siege did not last long: an unwise sortie by Theban forces was repelled and, in the confusion, Macedonian infantry commanded by the phalanx officer Perdiccas forced their way through an open gate and into the city along with the fleeing Thebans. Thebes was captured, and Alexander decided to make an example of the city: he wanted no more trouble from southern Greece during his planned eastern campaigns. The men of Thebes were slaughtered, and the women and children were sold into slavery. The city was destroyed and its lands parceled out among the other cities of Boeotia. Thebes, one of the oldest and most famous cities of Greece, ceased to exist. Thoroughly cowed by this act of terror, the other southern Greek states, meeting at Corinth, accepted Alexander as their leader in succession to his father Philip, and renewed their commitment to join the Macedonians in war against the Persians. The story of Alexander’s war to conquer the Persian Empire has been written up in every way, from the sober to the fantastical, from the adulatory to the debunking, and everything in between. In view of the dozens of recent full-length accounts on offer, it can be treated relatively briefly here.
2. Alexander’s Conquests
Alexander is remembered, indeed world-famous, as one of history’s great conquerors. In his rather brief reign of thirteen years—from 336 until his early death in 323—he conquered all of western Asia from the Mediterranean Sea to the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River valley, and from the southern shores of the Black and Caspian seas to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, and also forayed into north Africa to add Egypt to his conquests. That sounds very impressive, but there is another way to put it which sounds a bit less so. In a grand ten-year campaign Alexander and his army took control of the Persian Empire away from the traditionally ruling Achaemenid royal family and Persian elite, and extended the empire a little in the region of modern-day Pakistan. This is, I suggest, the truer way of stating Alexander’s achievement. He could have done nothing without the magnificent army he inherited from his father, and it was that army as much as or more than Alexander which did the conquering. And if you want to conquer an empire, the easiest way to do so is to find an existing empire and take it over: the hard work of subjecting varied peoples by military force and making them accept their subordination and fiscal exploitation has already been done. All you need to do is defeat the army or armies of the governing power; the subject peoples of the empire will by and large accept the change of rulers, because it makes little difference to them who receives their taxes or gives the orders, so long as the taxes do not go up and the orders are not too onerous.
In the spring of 334, Alexander crossed over from the European to the Asian shore of the Hellespont (Dardanelles) at the head of a large invasion force, some forty thousand strong. About half of this army was Macedonian; the rest was a mix of southern Greek allies and mercenaries, and forces drawn from the Balkan peoples to the north and east of Macedonia. After Alexander himself, the most important leaders in the army were Parmenio, who was the second-in-command of the expedition; and Parmenio’s sons Philotas and Nicanor who commanded, respectively, the Macedonian heavy cavalry (eighteen hundred strong) and the elite infantry guard formerly named the pezetairoi, now renamed the hypaspistai (three thousand strong). At some time before crossing into Asia, Alexander had renamed his key Macedonian forces in a ploy intended to boost morale and loyalty to himself. The evidence is a passage preserved from the history of Anaximenes of Lampsacus, quoted in Chapter 4: whereas under Philip the term hetairoi (companions) referred to the closest associates of the king, about eight hundred in number, Alexander extended the term to refer to all of the Macedonian heavy cavalry; and whereas pezetairoi (foot companions) had been the name of the elite royal infantry guard unit, Alexander extended that name to all soldiers of the Macedonian pike phalanx (though we also later hear of some battalions using the mysterious name asthetairoi). The aim, specifically cited by Anaximenes, was that “sharing in the royal companionship (hetaireia), they should remain most devoted.”
The main part of the goal of winning control of the Persian Empire was accomplished in three great battles fought in a four-year span: the Battle of the Granicus, fought in north-western Asia Minor in the early summer of 334; the Battle of Issus, fought in north-west Syria in the late summer of 333; and the Battle of Gaugamela, fought in northern Mesopotamia (Iraq) in the summer of 331. In addition to these three great battles, Alexander also conducted a few sieges, particularly the siege of Halicarnassus in south-west Asia Minor in the summer of 334, and the epic seven-month siege of Tyre in Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) in late 333. He also invaded Egypt in 332 and received its surrender: the Egyptians hated the Persians, who had only reconquered Egypt in 343 after more than fifty years of Egyptian independence, and they welcomed Alexander as a savior. After 331, the bulk of the Persian Empire accepted Alexander as its ruler. It took a couple of years of campaigning in Bactria and Sogdia (modern Afghanistan) to bring the eastern part of the Persian Empire under his control. He then passed through the Khyber Pass in 327 and entered north-west India (modern Pakistan) where he defeated the armies of the local rulers, especially that of Porus. The battle of the Hydaspes against the army of Porus ranks as the fourth of Alexander’s great battles. In 325, under pressure from his army, Alexander reluctantly left India and turned back westwards, returning to Iran in 324, and Mesopotamia in 323, where he died at Babylon in mid-summer.
In order to bolster his position as the new ruler of Macedonia, Alexander spent lavishly on gifts for the Macedonian elite and soldiery, and we hear as a result that when he crossed into Asia Minor in 334 his treasury was nearly empty and he had with him only a month’s pay for his army. This meant that he urgently needed to win control of territory in Asia Minor from which he could obtain funds and supplies to keep his army going. Even if substantial funds and supplies had been available in Macedonia for his use, they could not easily have been forwarded to him: bulk transport in antiquity went overwhelmingly by sea, and a large Persian fleet controlled the sea and its shipping lanes. As a result, Alexander needed to fight and win a battle as soon as possible to give him control of territory. Initial opposition to Alexander’s invasion was in the hands of the local Persian governors of Asia Minor, who had concentrated their regional forces into a united army near the Hellespont, on the east bank of the small River Granicus. To aid in seeing off Alexander’s invasion, the Persian king Darius III had sent to join the satraps (governors) a substantial force of Greek mercenary hoplites (reputedly twenty thousand men, though the number seems exaggerated) under an excellent Greek general—Memnon of Rhodes—who was to act as military advisor to the Persian satraps.
Memnon understood the reality of Alexander’s situation—his need to fight a battle soon to win territory and booty—and advised the Persians to avoid battle at all costs, adopting instead a “scorched earth” strategy. The Persian force should leave the Granicus and march inland, into the interior of Asia Minor, drawing Alexander and his army after them. As they marched, the Persians should remove all supplies, burn farms and settlements, and poison wells and springs, leaving so far as possible nothing for Alexander’s army to eat and drink. Meanwhile light and highly mobile cavalry and infantry forces should harass Alexander’s column of march, and any foraging parties he sent out to seek supplies. After a month or so of this treatment, Memnon suggested, it might be time to engage Alexander’s exhausted and demoralized army in battle, on suitably advantageous ground. The response of the Persian grandees was to the effect that the Persians were not in the habit of fleeing from their enemies, of avoiding a fight, of destroying their own lands. As a proud conquering people, the Persians were determined to fight, and believed in their ability to win. Thus Alexander got exactly what he wanted and needed: as he approached the River Granicus from the west, he found the army of regional Persian forces there awaiting him. Victory over this one force, since it was made up of the collected security forces of the provinces of Asia Minor, would effectively open all of Asia Minor up to his occupation.
The battle was a rather straightforward affair. The Persians drew up their forces on the eastern bank of the river, challenging Alexander and his men to attack through and across the stream bed, a potentially tricky undertaking. But the Persians made a fundamental error in the disposition of their forces, which greatly eased Alexander’s task. Distrusting Memnon and his Greek mercenaries, they stationed them as a kind of reserve well to the rear of the line of battle; and in order to attack Alexander’s army as it struggled up, in considerable disarray as they hoped, from the stream bed, they stationed their best troops—their cavalry—right on the eastern bank of the river. But holding ground and fighting an enemy force from a standing position is what heavily armed infantry are good at; cavalry fight best in motion, charging at or around the enemy. The Persian disposition of forces was thus exactly the opposite of what it should have been: the Greek mercenary hoplites should have held the river bank and disputed the crossing, with cavalry stationed to the rear to charge at any enemy forces who broke through or got around the infantry. Commanding the Macedonian heavy cavalry on the right, Alexander instructed the battalion commanders of his phalanx to lead their troops across the stream as best they could, covered on the left flank by allied Thessalian cavalry under Parmenio. Meanwhile detachments of light cavalry, and of archers and slingers, made their way across the stream in front of Alexander to harass the enemy line. As Alexander surveyed the situation, he noticed a gravel slope that made a part of the river bank easy to mount, and concentrated his harassing forces there. Before long, they succeeded in disrupting the enemy line at that point enough to make a cavalry charge feasible, and Alexander led a charge across the river, up the gravel slope, and into the enemy line, where he turned in towards the enemy center and began to roll up their line of battle.
In this way a crushing victory was achieved by Alexander’s forces in short order. As the Persian line of battle fell into disorder under Alexander’s attack, the phalanx battalions and supporting Thessalian cavalry got across the stream, up the bank, and began to support Alexander and the Macedonian cavalry. The only moment of anxiety came when Alexander was hit on the head by a sword blow from a Persian cavalryman. Though his helmet saved his life, part of it was sheared off by the heavy blow and, as Alexander killed the cavalryman who had attacked him, another Persian darted forward to strike Alexander’s now unprotected head. Alexander was saved from near certain death by the swift action of the commander of his royal cavalry squadron, Cleitus the Black, who intervened in the nick of time, hacking at the arm of the Persian and sending his blow awry. The Persian cavalry, attacked from the side by Alexander’s cavalry and from in front by the pike phalanx, broke and fled; and the Greek mercenaries in the rear were surrounded and for the most part killed. Memnon got away with a few Persian leaders and some thousands of men, and fled south, eventually occupying the well fortified Greek city of Halicarnassus and making a stand there, hoping to hold out until Persian reinforcements could reach him. All of Asia Minor was open to Alexander. He pursued Memnon and his forces down the Aegean coast, sending detachments of troops out to receive the surrender of local cities and communities, Greek and non-Greek, until he reached Halicarnassus, which he besieged and captured after heavy fighting. Alexander then spent the autumn and winter months marching in a grand arcing campaign through southern and central Asia Minor, doing only minor fighting but receiving the surrender of the local communities and territories. In spring of 333 he reached Cilicia, the region of Asia Minor bordering Syria, having left behind the senior commander Antigonus the One-Eyed in charge of central Asia Minor (Phrygia) with orders to complete the pacification of the region.
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 modern 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.
Darius had wintered in the old Median capital of Ecbatana in northern Iran, along with Bessus and the forces from the eastern satrapies. When news arrived in spring 330 that Alexander was moving north to confront them, they fled eastwards towards Bactria. Learning on his march that Bessus and Darius had fled eastward with the royal treasure from Ecbatana, Alexander ignored the Median capital, sending Parmenio to occupy it, and set off in swift pursuit with his most mobile forces, including the hypaspistai and the Agrianians. Among the Persians there was dissension: the eastern satraps acknowledged Bessus as the new ruler; a few loyalists, most notably the western satrap Artabazus and some Greek mercenaries who had remained with the king, still clung to Darius. Many of the soldiers in the small force simply defected as they learned of Alexander’s inescapable pursuit. Darius was first placed in chains; then news of Alexander’s approach with a large force of cavalry led the eastern satraps to mortally stab the ex-king, and flee onward to Bactria with Bessus as their new king. Artabazus and the Greek mercenaries split away north-westward toward the Elburz region. Alexander caught up with Darius at last only shortly after the king had expired. The chase was over. Of the Persian Empire only the eastern satrapies, Bactria being by far the largest and most important, remained as yet unconquered. Parmenio’s position in Media was regularized: he was made its governor with oversight of the Iranian lands, and he never saw Alexander again. Freed of the perhaps somewhat oppressive presence of his father’s old marshal, Alexander promoted Craterus to be effectively his military second-in-command, and decided he could not rest until the entire Persian Empire was his. Despite the reluctance expressed by many of his soldiers in a near rebellion, Alexander insisted that the campaign must continue until at least Bactria was conquered. And so the army moved further east.
The conquest of Bactria and the surrounding satrapies proved no easy matter. It had taken Alexander four years to conquer the western and central portions of the empire; it took almost as long to conquer the lands that now make up Afghanistan: 330 to 327. Bessus and the other eastern leaders realized it would be folly to engage Alexander’s army in battle. Instead they turned to what today would be called guerrilla tactics. Alexander was obliged to divide and re-divide his forces to take the Bactrian lands valley by valley, often having to double back to re-take a previously conquered valley that rebelled as soon as his forces moved on. It was hard, dangerous, exhausting work, and the Macedonian losses were relatively heavy. But Alexander was relentless. It was during this Afghan campaign that two of Alexander’s most notorious crimes occurred, which illustrated his increasing tendency to cruelty and autocracy. A minor conspiracy of officers supposedly hoping to assassinate Alexander was brought to light, and it was alleged that Parmenio’s son Philotas—Craterus’ chief rival in the army now Parmenio himself had been left behind—had known about it but failed to report it. Details are obscured by the fact that our sources are all visibly tainted by anti-Philotas prejudice. At any rate, Craterus persuaded Alexander to arrest Philotas and torture him. After a show trial in front of a few thousand gathered Macedonian soldiers, the broken Philotas was stoned to death. Swift riders were sent to Media to order the execution (murder in effect) of the wholly innocent Parmenio too: he could not be allowed to live on after his son’s execution. As Antipater is said to have muttered when news of Parmenio’s death reached Macedonia: “If Parmenio was disloyal, then who can be trusted? If he was not, then what is to be done?” Every senior Macedonian leader had to wonder about his own safety now. To drive the point home, Alexander the survivor of the three Lyncestian brothers—it will be recalled that the elder two were executed by Alexander at the start of his reign—was now also summarily executed. Alexander had never trusted him.
The second great crime has already been mentioned: the murder of Cleitus the Black, commander of the royal squadron of the Companion Cavalry, who had saved Alexander’s life at the battle of the Granicus. Alexander was drunk again, during a great feast at Marakanda (Samarkand) in eastern Bactria, when this murder occurred, the occasion being Cleitus’ defiant defense of Philip as a greater ruler than Alexander. Some may see drunkenness as some sort of excuse; but though intoxication lowers the inhibitions, it surely only reveals what is in a man’s character when the normal civilized restraints are off. From this point on Alexander became increasingly intolerant and harsh. He adopted elements of Persian royal dress and ceremony, demanding that all who approached him must perform the ritual obeisance of proskynesis (bowing to the ground), which Macedonians and other Greeks found deeply humiliating. In the end, opposition led by Callisthenes forced Alexander to relent on this, but he never forgave Callisthenes, who was later arrested at the time of the “conspiracy of the paides” and caused to disappear. Stories of his fate vary, but most agree that he died a cruel and lingering death.
Eventually, of course, opposition to Alexander’s rule over Bactria was overcome. Bessus was captured and brutally executed, and Alexander was left as acknowledged ruler over the entire Persian Empire. To cement the good will of the now pacified Bactrian barons, Alexander married the daughter of one of the most powerful of them: Roxane, daughter of Oxyartes. By the spring of 327 Alexander was ready to move on, but he did not turn back westward, as the army hoped. Instead he passed south through the Khyber Pass to continue conquering in north India, even beyond the Persian Empire. It was apparently Alexander’s aim to conquer all of Asia to the great surrounding ocean: little did he know of the huge interior spaces of central Asia, and the vast Chinese lands beyond. In north India, in the valley of the River Indus, Alexander found a group of principalities at war with each other. The greatest of them, around the rivers Hydaspes and Hyphasis, was ruled by a king named Porus. Nearer to the Khyber Pass a group of smaller rulers had allied together under one Taxiles, who saw in Alexander’s army an opportunity to break the power of Porus. Taxiles surrendered to Alexander, agreed to become a governor under him, and provided him with crucial intelligence about Porus and his forces.
Alerted concerning Alexander’s approach, Porus had gathered his army on the south-east bank of the River Hydaspes, which was in full flood as it was the rainy season. Since the numbers in our sources are unreliable, we cannot say exactly how large Porus’ army was, but it was a considerable one, and he had eighty-five war elephants, the first such force Alexander had encountered. Alexander faced two problems: how to get his army across the river safely, and how to deal with the elephants. The Hydaspes was not, in its flood, a river that could be forded in the face of enemy opposition. If Alexander had been willing to wait a few months, until the dry season, the river would have become fordable; but waiting was not his style. Alexander split his forces, and for a week or two had units march by night to different spots along the river bank and stage noisy demonstrations, causing Porus to send forces to confront what seemed to be an attempt to cross. No attempt to cross was made, and inevitably Porus’ forces wearied of these pointless night marches. When Alexander judged that the enemy was sufficiently softened up, he split his army into three. The main force—hypaspists, several phalanx battalions, and the heavy cavalry—he led quietly to a spot where several islands in the stream covered his actions, and there embarked his forces on river boats and got them safely across. A large force of mercenaries staged a diversion elsewhere along the bank. Craterus, with a mixed force of pike battalions and cavalry, stayed at the camp with orders to cross if/when Porus’ army moved away and he heard a battle starting. This worked perfectly: Alexander got his main force across under cover of night and advanced to engage Porus’ army, and Craterus crossed to attack Porus’ army from behind once the battle had started.
14. Coin of Alexander showing the king on horseback attacking Porus on an elephant
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image from PHGCOM)
As to the elephants, Alexander had already learned about these beasts and their military weaknesses. Unlike a horse, which can be mounted and ridden by any competent rider, an elephant can only be controlled by a human it has bonded with, known in Hindi as its mahout. Kill or incapacitate the mahout, and the elephant becomes uncontrollable. Consequently, Alexander’s men had been prepared in advance not to be terrified of the elephants: they were to stab upwards with their pikes at the mahout on the elephant’s neck, and/or at the faces of the elephants. Javelineers and archers were to concentrate their fire on the same targets. Once the mahout was gone, the elephant—fearful of the noises and smells of battle, and with long pikes jabbing at its face and eyes—would turn to flight, trampling its own people in its urge to get away. In this way Porus’ elephant corps was rendered useless. Attacked from in front by Alexander’s pike phalanx and heavy cavalry wedges, the Indians proved no more of a match in equipment and fighting style for the army designed by Philip than the Persians had been. Craterus’ attack from the rear only confirmed and made more decisive the victory already won by Alexander’s main force. Porus was captured alive and treated well by Alexander, who left him in command of his realm as a subordinate king, under Macedonian oversight.
Alexander now learned of another great river, equal to the Indus, with a flourishing civilization and multiple kingdoms along its course: the Ganges, which he understood flowed down to the encircling ocean at last. His aim, consequently, was to advance into the Ganges valley and conquer it, thereby completing his conquest of the eastern part of the world as he saw it. At the bank of the River Hyphasis, however, the army mutinied and refused to cross. The soldiers found the heat and humidity of India in the monsoon season deeply dispiriting, and they had no appetite for further conquest. The Persian Empire was theirs, and even lands beyond it in the Indus valley. It was enough: they wished to turn west and begin the march back home. They had glory enough, they had booty to last a lifetime, they longed for the familiar climate and lifestyle of the Mediterranean and home. After ranting ineffectively at the soldiers for their disloyalty and sulking in his tent for days in the hope of making them change their mind, Alexander had to face the hard truth: the army would go no further, and therefore he had no choice but to turn back. Being Alexander, he could not just accept this gracefully and take the easy route: he insisted on making things hard for the army and for himself. First, the army, accompanied by a fleet of river boats, would march down the River Indus to the ocean, so that he could claim to have reached “the end of the earth” after all. From there, he would lead the army along the shore of the Persian Gulf back to Mesopotamia, while a large fleet of ships accompanied it with ample supplies. That sounded fairly simple in theory, but proved to be anything but that in practice.
In the first place, Alexander insisted on conquering all lands and peoples along the march down the Indus valley. Some of those peoples, naturally resenting being conquered, put up a stiff resistance; and the army had little appetite for conquering people who had, after all, little or nothing to offer that the army wanted. At the town of a people the Greeks called the Malli, things came to a head. Alexander insisted the town must be captured; the soldiers showed little inclination to risk life and limb on this quite unnecessary project. Irritated and headstrong, Alexander decided to show his men how it should be done: with a handful of companions he stormed up a siege ladder onto the enemy wall and called to his soldiers to follow him. It is not a general’s business, of course, to be the first up onto an enemy wall. Anxious for their leader’s safety, the Macedonian soldiery thronged the siege ladders, which broke under the strain, leaving Alexander himself isolated on the wall with only three companions. He promptly jumped down into the enemy town, followed by his three companions. In a desperate fight there, one of his companions was killed, and Alexander himself was struck in the chest by an arrow which pierced his lung. He collapsed, and his companion Leonnatus was also wounded, leaving only one remaining companion, Peucestas, to cover the wounded Alexander with his shield and somehow fight off the enemy soldiers. Amazingly, Peucestas succeeded. Somehow, when the frenzied Macedonians broke down the city gate and streamed in, they found Peucestas still standing over the body of Alexander, protecting the apparently dying king with his shield and fighting off a crowd of enemies. The Macedonians went wild: every living creature in the town was killed.
Alexander was placed on a shield and carried to his tent, where it was found that he was still alive but in a very bad way. The camp doctors, summoned to attend the king, concurred that the arrow would have to be extracted from Alexander’s chest, but none was willing to perform the operation: there was a very clear risk that, once the arrow was drawn from the wound, Alexander would suffer a fatal hemorrhage. No doctor wanted to be the man charged with having killed Alexander. It was the senior officer present, Perdiccas, who finally extracted the arrow. Alexander fainted away from the loss of blood that followed, but the doctors were able to stanch the flow and save Alexander’s life. After he had been patched up somewhat and revived, there was the condition of the army to be considered. The soldiery were in a panic, with the rumor spreading that Alexander was dead: they saw themselves cut off at the ends of the earth with no commander to control things and lead them home. Messages assuring them that Alexander yet lived did not still the panic and despondency, as they were not believed. Eventually Alexander had to have himself carried onto a river barge and placed as upright as possible on a large bed, and so rowed past the encampments of his soldiers, displaying himself to them and waving to assure them he was alive and on the mend. The men were appeased; but Alexander’s senior officers rightly upbraided him severely for running such unnecessary risks, putting the whole expedition in danger by behaving more like a common soldier than a general.
When Alexander and the army reached the mouth of the Indus, the expedition was divided for the return westwards. A substantial part of the army, including the heavy baggage and older veterans, was placed under the command of Craterus with orders to march west along a safe, well-populated route inland. A large fleet of warships and supply ships was placed under Nearchus’ command with orders to sail up the Persian Gulf, stopping at set intervals to rendezvous with a military expedition marching by land. This last expedition, commanded by Alexander himself, would march along the coast of the Gulf through the Makran desert (ancient Gedrosia), meeting with the ships to receive supplies. Supposedly no previous conqueror had managed to traverse the Makran, so Alexander would outdo them all. Things went wrong very quickly. Alexander’s army and the fleet lost touch with each other almost at once, and the planned meetings never occurred. The army suffered horrendously on its march through the Makran, and in the end Alexander was quite fortunate to reach ancient Carmania in fall of 325 with more than half his force still intact. As to the fleet, it finally arrived at the head of the Persian Gulf weeks late, having suffered from storms, navigational problems, and encounters with whales. Alexander, having feared it was lost for good, was just glad to see it arrive at all. Once again, in pursuit of his own yearning to achieve more than anyone before him (or as some would say, in pursuit of his megalomania), Alexander had exposed many thousands of his soldiers and sailors to danger and suffering for no good reason at all: just to show that he could do it. Not surprisingly, the men of the expedition were now growing more and more fed up with Alexander’s style of leadership: the more arrogant and demanding he became, the more they suffered.
After meeting up with Craterus’ force, which had made its march perfectly safely, Alexander proceeded through Persia to the great Persian capital of Susa. There he had the governor put to death for supposedly exceeding his power, and indeed conducted a veritable purge of his western governors, discussed further in section 3 of this chapter. Also while at Susa Alexander held a grand wedding ceremony, at which he himself married two Persian princesses and he obliged the Persian and Median aristocracies to produce some eighty of their young daughters to be married off to selected Macedonian officers: a neat symbolism of Macedonian supremacy in the new empire. Many of his soldiers had already, during the years of conquest, taken Asian wives for themselves and had children by them: Alexander now regularized these unions, gave the soldiers wedding gifts, paid off any debts they had, and promised to see to the proper education of the mixed ethnicity children of his soldiers’ Asian unions. All of this was doubtless to bolster a popularity among the men that he must have perceived he had damaged by his actions.
If that was his aim, he failed to achieve it. After Alexander had moved on in spring 324 from Susa to Opis, the army mutinied: the second great mutiny Alexander had to face. The Macedonians had long been angered by Alexander’s increasing affectation of Persian customs and dress, and his appointment of Persians to positions in the army and administration. The arrival of, reputedly, thirty thousand Asian youths who had been equipped and trained to fight in the Macedonian fashion, coinciding with Alexander’s decision to send thousands of Macedonians back home, made the soldiers feel that Alexander had no further use for them. The result was that all Macedonians demanded to return home, jeering that Alexander could continue his conquests without them. Alexander was furious, and had thirteen men he regarded as ringleaders of the mutiny immediately executed. The stand off between Alexander and his army lasted several days until the soldiers begged Alexander’s forgiveness, which he was pleased to give. Ten thousand veteran pikemen and fifteen hundred cavalry were deputed to return to Macedonia under Craterus’ leadership. They were to be replaced by an equal number of new Macedonian replacement soldiers, whom Antipater was to bring. It seems Alexander no longer trusted Antipater to be his regent in Macedonia. When news of this reached Antipater he, mindful of the fate meted out to Parmenio, declined to obey, sending his son Cassander instead to find out what Alexander’s intentions were.
Alexander moved on to Ecbatana, the old Median capital in northern Iran, where a series of parties and entertainments were held. During these, Alexander’s long-time lover Hephaestion fell ill and, neglecting his doctor’s advice to rest and abstain from alcohol, essentially drank himself to death. Alexander’s grief was as extravagant as everything he did. Sequestering himself for days without food and drink, when he emerged he ordered fantastically expensive funeral rites and gave instructions that Hephaestion was in future to be worshipped as a hero. The end was now nigh for Alexander himself. Once somewhat recovered from his grief, he resumed his round of parties and excessive drinking. The court and army moved down from Ecbatana to Babylon, where Alexander received embassies from all around the Mediterranean world and began plans for an expedition to conquer Arabia. He reputedly sent orders around his empire, and particularly to Greece, that he was now to be worshipped as a god. But, un-godlike, he fell ill after several all-night drinking parties and developed a high fever. After several days of fever and illness, he felt sufficiently better to attend another all-night drinking party given by his Thessalian friend Medeius. There, after particularly heavy drinking, he fell ill again and had to be carried to his bed. The illness and fever did not abate. When it was clear the king was dying, the senior officers present surrounded his bed and attempted to ask his instructions for the future. The soldiery insisted on seeing their king, and for hours Alexander was propped up in his bed as soldiers filed by, essentially saying farewell. After this exertion, Alexander was much weakened. His last act, reputedly, was to take off his royal seal ring and hand it to Perdiccas, the senior officer present. When Perdiccas asked to whom Alexander left his power, he is said to have murmured “to the strongest.” He then slipped into a coma from which he did not emerge. He breathed his last on 13 June 323 BCE, just short of his thirty-third birthday.
Inevitably, given his youth, rumors swirled alleging poisoning or other nefarious action causing his death. The most elaborate version has Aristotle, seeking revenge for the death of his son-in-law Callisthenes, going to the River Styx, boundary between this world and the underworld, and collecting its highly poisonous and corrosive water in a hollowed out ass’s hoof, the only vessel that could contain this water. The noxious liquid was given to Antipater, who had his son Cassander convey it to Babylon, where another son named Iolaus—being the king’s cup-bearer—slipped it into Alexander’s drink. This arrant nonsense is indicative of the basic reality that there is no good evidence for any murderous plot against Alexander. The young king had recklessly abused his body by physical exertion, courting danger, and heavy drinking throughout his adult life. He had followed the near fatal wound at the Mallian town by the near fatal desert march through the Makran. Instead of taking care of his body, he had indulged in reckless binge drinking, not even deterred when that lifestyle caused Hephaestion’s death. The fatal illness that took Alexander has long been debated. The most plausible candidate is malaria, which was an endemic disease in much of the ancient world. His body weakened by wounds, overexertion, and excessive drinking, Alexander was simply unable to fight off a particularly virulent attack of the disease. He died, that is to say, as he had lived: in the midst of extravagance, and giving little thought for the future.
3. ALEXANDER’S PERSONALITY AND IDEAS
One thing that is clear about Alexander is that he had a dominant personality and large ego. Short in stature and boyish in appearance, he made up for what he lacked in physical impressiveness by his force of will and charisma. He more than held his own among a group of high Macedonian officers many of whom were not only talented and dominant persons themselves, but also physically big and powerful: the likes of Seleucus, Lysimachus, and Hephaestion, for instance. Here Philip’s grooming of Alexander for power no doubt stood him in good stead, as well as his own natural abilities. Like everything else about him, Alexander’s personality has attracted attention, and been judged in very different ways. William Tarn saw him as a collection of virtues, explaining away all evidence that suggested a darker side; Ernst Badian by contrast emphasized the evidence of a darker, more selfish, and cruel Alexander. On the whole, recent historians have tended more towards the Badian view, and with good reason.
That Alexander was a generous man, giving freely from the vast wealth his conquests won him to friends and associates, is not in dispute. Nor is it disputed that he was capable of, even fond of chivalric and at times almost quixotic gestures. He treated the family of Darius with great generosity and respect, seeing to their safety and comfort with such concern that Darius’ mother Sisygambis reputedly came to consider Alexander almost as another son. Though Darius’ principal wife was reputed to be of extraordinary beauty, Alexander declined so much as to look at her as being his rival king’s wife. When a drinking companion named Proteas somehow angered Alexander, he was soon persuaded by friends to give up his anger and instantly made Proteas the princely gift of five talents to show he bore no ill will. Famously, at the sack of Thebes a lady named Timocleia was brought to him for judgement, having killed one of his soldiers. When she told him the soldier in question had raped her, he released her and her children, as having rightly fought for her honor. These kinds of gestures certainly look good, and are often quoted as signs of Alexander’s good nature and high personal code of honor. But more than ten thousand Theban women were captured at that city’s sack. Are we to suppose none of them were raped, either during the sack itself or afterwards, when they were sold into slavery and were no longer considered to have any right of refusal? Alexander cared nothing about the rape of captive women: he merely enjoyed making a quixotic gesture on behalf of a lady who personally impressed him. In contrast to Proteas, who won Alexander’s forgiveness, we might place Callisthenes, who angered the king by refusing to bow down before him, and suffered a lingering and cruel death by Alexander’s orders. And if the story of his sexual liaison with the Persian lady Barsine is true—he reputedly had a son by her named Heracles—then his careful observation of the sanctity of marriage is undermined, as she was married to Memnon of Rhodes.
That Alexander was a heavy, often indeed excessive drinker should not be in doubt, though Plutarch offered the excuse that Alexander liked to linger over his wine for the sake of conversation, rather than heavy drinking (Plutarch Alexander 23). But the stories of his deep drinking are too many to shrug off; in the last years of his reign it is reported that he quite frequently drank all night and spent the following day in bed recuperating. When drunk he could become very violent, as at the feast at Samarkand in 327 when he murdered his officer Cleitus the Black in a drunken rage. But worse than his violence when drunk is the excessive distrust and cruelty he often showed when sober. The most egregious example of this is his treatment of Parmenio and his son Philotas. There is little doubt that Philotas was unwise: he apparently had a habit of boasting that his father and he were as responsible for Macedonian successes as was Alexander himself, if not more so. One can understand Alexander being annoyed when he heard this, not least because it was essentially true. When an insignificant character named Dimnus supposedly tried to start a plot against Alexander, and this was reported to Philotas by a certain Cebalinus, he twice ignored the information. Obviously he would have done better to pass it along, but Alexander was never remotely in danger. On this basis Philotas was arrested and tortured, even though torture was not normally used against free men, certainly not free men of Philotas’ standing. Under torture, Philotas reportedly made some damaging statements which later, placed on trial in front of the Macedonian soldiers, he retracted. Nevertheless Alexander had him executed, and immediately sent assassins to murder Parmenio for the crime of being Philotas’ father.
It is of course well known that most people, when tortured, will say whatever they think their questioners want to hear in order to make the torture stop: this is why torture is not used in most societies, not because people are too squeamish but because it is a highly unreliable way of getting at the truth. And even if there was some excuse for executing Philotas (it was at best an exceedingly flimsy one), the murder of Parmenio was carried out for purely prudential reasons: after killing Parmenio’s son, Alexander was afraid of what the old man might do. There was not the slightest suggestion that Parmenio was guilty of any disloyalty or crime. The deaths of these two highly placed Macedonian aristocrats, among the most important three or four leaders of the Macedonian expedition after Alexander himself, had a chilling effect on the Macedonian leadership. If Parmenio and Philotas and Cleitus could be murdered, tortured, and/or executed like this, who could consider himself safe from Alexander? Plenty of others suffered from what Badian, exaggerating slightly perhaps, judged to be Alexander’s paranoia. Among them were the court historian Callisthenes, a group of the royal paides led by Hermolaus, and the officers Cleander and Sitalces who had facilitated the murder of Parmenio on Alexander’s behalf: indeed in the last years of his reign Badian speaks of a virtual “reign of terror” as Alexander’s anger and suspicion grew. It is true that there was discontent in the army. After the deaths of the Persian rulers Darius and Bessus, Alexander had taken to adopting elements of Persian royal dress and court ceremony, most infamously the practice of proskynesis. This was an act of physical prostration, bowing down to the ground, in obeisance to the king’s majesty, and it was considered deeply humiliating by most Macedonians and other Greeks, who bowed down only to the gods. The anger at Alexander’s perceived tendency towards despotism, and the profound resistance to the act of proskynesis, only increased Alexander’s suspicion that men around him were disloyal: it became a vicious circle.
Another controversial topic regarding Alexander’s person is his sexuality. Many modern commentators on Alexander—most notoriously again William Tarn—insist that Alexander was strictly heterosexual. This proceeds essentially from mere prejudice against homosexuality, and involves a profound misinterpretation of ancient Greek sexuality. Not only was there no prejudice in classical Greek society against homoerotic relationships, in upper-class circles, at least, they were considered natural and even desirable. One of the features of Alexander’s personality that is so universally attested that we cannot properly doubt it, is that he had relatively little interest in sex. His passions were fighting, hunting, and drinking, not sex. But from boyhood he had an exceedingly close and intimate relationship with his dearest friend and companion Hephaestion; and though no source happens to say explicitly that their relationship was sexual, this is more likely because in the culture of fourth-century Greece it hardly needed saying, than because it was not so. Alexander and Hephaestion, that is to say, were indubitably lovers: Hephaestion’s position as Alexander’s virtual alter ego, attested in numerous anecdotes, and Alexander’s crazed grief when Hephaestion died in 324, make that clear. In addition, we are told that Alexander had a passionate sexual attachment to a beautiful Persian youth, a eunuch, named Bagoas. Limited as Alexander’s interest in sex was, it seems that his preference was for homoerotic sex. But like most ancient Greeks, that preference was not exclusive. He had a familial duty to marry and produce children, and though he neglected that duty for years, he did eventually marry the Bactrian princess Roxane in 327. Though presented by our sources as a love match, it was rather a prudential arrangement like his father Philip’s marriages: Roxane’s father was a great Bactrian noble named Oxyartes, and Alexander needed to cultivate the goodwill of the Bactrian nobility in order to cement his hard-won dominance over Bactria. In 324 Alexander married again: two Persian princesses, daughters respectively of Artaxerxes III and Darius III, became his wives. But there was no love here: it was a matter of tying the remnants of the Achaemenid royal family to himself. The only sign of any purely sexual interest in women by Alexander is the reputed affair with Barsine, if there is any truth to that.
The marriage to the two Persian princesses raises another aspect of Alexander that has been much discussed: his supposed idea of promoting cultural/ethnic fusion, or even an ideal of the “unity and brotherhood of mankind.” The evidence for these notions consists of Alexander’s employment of Persian nobles in his court and administration after 331; his selection of (reputedly) thirty thousand Asian boys to be educated and trained as Macedonian warriors to supplement his army; and the great marriage ceremony at Susa in 324 at which he married his two Persian princesses, and at the same time more than eighty of his officers also married ladies of the Persian aristocracy. Taking the last first, it is very hard to see in this marriage ceremony any sort of ethnic fusion between the Macedonian and Persian aristocracies: for that to be the case, there would have needed to be a similar number of Macedonian ladies brought over to Susa to marry Persian aristocrats. One of the ways in which conquerors throughout history have habitually expressed their dominance is by the sexual appropriation of the womenfolk of the conquered. That was often accomplished by rape, but it could take the form of forced marriage. The Persian elite will hardly have missed the symbolism in being obliged to hand over their daughters for marriage to Macedonian officers. This is not an expression of cultural or ethnic fusion, it is an expression of Macedonian dominance.
The same can essentially be said of turning Persian or other Asian boys into Macedonians: where were the Macedonian boys being trained in Persian customs? How happy can we imagine the fathers of these boys were to be obliged to hand over their sons to strangers, so that they could be trained to learn the strangers’ language, customs, way of life? In other words, to see their sons turned into strangers to them? Again, this is not an expression of cultural or ethnic fusion, it is a pure expression of Macedonian supremacy. Alexander needed large numbers of soldiers for his future plans of conquest. In his estimation, soldiers of the type developed by his father—Macedonian pikemen and heavy cavalry—were the best. Taking Persian and other Asian boys and turning them into Macedonians was not the pursuit of some ideal of cultural melding; it was merely the prudential increasing of his pool of Macedonian soldiers. In the armies of Alexander’s Successors we meet with large units of pantodapoi (men of varied ethnic backgrounds) who were armed and trained in the Macedonian fashion and fought as Macedonian pikemen and cavalry: there were eight thousand pantodapoi phalangites and five hundred such cavalry in Antigonus’ army at the battle of Paraetacene, while Eumenes’ army in the same battle had five thousand pantodapoi in his pike phalanx (Diodorus 19.28–29). It is very conceivable that these 13,500 pantodapoi altogether originated in the mass of boys Alexander arranged to have taught the Macedonian equipment and system of warfare. As to the employment of Persians as governors and administrators in his empire, they had an expertise, thanks to two hundred years of Persian dominance in and rule over Asia, which Alexander chose to exploit. Again, there is no sign here of cultural melding.
As with most elements of the adulatory version of Alexander’s career, the most extreme account of an ideal of ethnic fusion on Alexander’s part comes from William Tarn, in his notion of Alexander as a proponent of the “brotherhood and unity” of mankind. It is perhaps already clear from the above that this is an exceptionally unlikely notion: Alexander was not that kind of idealist at all. Stoic philosophers of the generations immediately after Alexander did indeed come up with the idea that all men are “brothers,” but only in an idealized way: they did not draw any practical political or social consequences from this. Later writers, building up the legend of Alexander, took this notion and attributed to Alexander the idea of creating a “world state,” of transplanting and mixing populations in this “world state,” and thereby creating a practical and effective “unity of mankind” under his own rule. Badian already long ago deconstructed the evidence for this and showed how absurd was Tarn’s elaboration of it into a fixed ideology pursued by Alexander. At the very best, if Alexander entertained any idea of some sort of “world state,” we should see that as an expression of his megalomania, not of some idealistic striving for the brotherhood of all men.
4. WAS ALEXANDER REALLY GREAT?
Alexander has been universally known as “the Great” for over two thousand years now, and there is no likelihood of this changing. But the automatic nature of adding the honorific qualifier to his name tends to forestall any serious discussion of whether he deserves it, and if he does, what it is that made him great. What is the standard of greatness that is being applied? There are quite a number of rulers in western history who are standardly referred to as “the Great”: the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, the Saxon king Alfred the Great, the Franco-German emperor Charles the Great (or Charlemagne as he is often called, the term “the Great” becoming part of his actual name), the Russian rulers Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great, to name a few. On the other hand, some rulers who were undeniably among the great, even the greatest, are not so called: Caesar, Augustus, and Trajan among Roman emperors; Elizabeth I of England, Louis XIV of France, and Napoleon among modern(ish) European rulers. Arguably the greatest of the Ottoman rulers, too, is known as Suleiman “the Magnificent” rather than “the Great.” Perhaps for some, greatness is so evident that it requires no emphasis: to be called “the Great,” would that add to or diminish the standing of a Caesar, an Augustus, a Napoleon? Most of the rulers referred to as “the Great” were in part at least men of great military renown and achievement. Though that is not so much true of Peter and Catherine, and though the likes of Constantine, Alfred and Charles certainly had other claims to achievement beyond the military sphere, it does seem that great military success is often a factor in the granting of the epithet “the Great.” In Alexander’s case, it can be argued that it was the only factor.
What, in effect, did Alexander do? He won battles and conquered. There is little else to be said for him, despite the attempts of some writers to see in him a deep thinker with ideas of human brotherhood far in advance of his time. As we have seen, such notions are as fanciful as they are wrong-headed. More plausibly, Alexander might be viewed as an empire-builder, with administrative and/or organizational talents along with his military talent. The reality is, however, that there is very little evidence to support this. As Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, he moved on through it, not lingering to organize or administer. Early on, his procedure was simply to depose and/or kill or chase away the regional Persian governor and appoint a member of his officer corps as a replacement, leaving the man so appointed to govern his province as best he could. Alexander’s main concern seems to have been that tribute moneys be collected and forwarded. After Gaugamela, as the Persian elite surrendered to Alexander and offered him its services, he began to leave suitably subservient Persian governors in place, to continue governing their provinces on Alexander’s own behalf. He evidently recognized the value of the accumulated experience and expertise of the Persian elite, which had been governing the empire for two hundred years, and decided to take advantage of it. The corollary is that he had no particular organizing or administrative ideas of his own, but was content to let things go on in the way the Persians had set in place. One change he did make was to separate military command from civil/administrative command: continued Persian governors would typically be stripped of military powers, which would be granted instead to a Macedonian or other Greek strategos (general) established as the Persian satrap’s second-in-command and (in effect) watchdog. Alexander, that is to say, did not fully trust most Persians; he simply made use of their administrative expertise.
Alexander did create a new central fiscal structure for his empire, with the evident aim of ensuring that the tribute moneys would be properly accounted for and made available to fund future plans and operations. The system can hardly be considered a great success, however. To oversee his central fiscus, established at Babylon, Alexander appointed his boyhood friend Harpalus son of Machatas, from the old ruling family of Elimea. Harpalus used his position for his own enrichment, living a fantastically luxurious lifestyle and otherwise diverting the empire’s money to his own purposes. When Alexander’s return to Babylon approached, in 325, Harpalus—fearing punishment—fled taking with him the stupendous sum of five thousand talents of Alexander’s treasure. He took refuge at Athens, where he was arrested and his treasure confiscated. Eventually, the Athenians let Harpalus go, but kept the money for ostensible return to Alexander. They still had it in 323 when Alexander died, and the bulk of the sum ended up being used to fund the Athenian rebellion against Alexander’s Successors. Besides this unsuccessful central fiscal system, there is little or no evidence of Alexander creating any new administration: he was too busy continuing his conquering to give thought to such matters. And if the document purporting to contain his final plans has any truth in it, he intended to continue that way. When Alexander died, he was planning the conquest of Arabia. He supposedly then intended to march through Egypt to conquer the entire north African coast as far as the Atlantic Ocean, taking over the Carthaginian Empire; then he would cross to Europe and conquer Spain, southern France, and Italy on his way back to Macedonia. While the “last plans” document also envisaged some major and expensive building projects, including city foundations, it is clear that Alexander would not be personally overseeing any of this, any more than he oversaw the building of Alexandria in Egypt. He himself would be busy conquering, while others could see to the building projects for which he merely gave orders. Nor did Alexander indicate how anything was to be paid for, other than by coining the vast stored up treasure of the Persian Empire, which was bound to run out given the scale of Alexander’s purported projects.
Finally, there is Alexander’s reputation as a great founder of cities to be considered. Though our sources vary in the number of cities Alexander is supposed to have founded—up to seventy or more in some accounts—they do all agree that Alexander was a great city founder. The key example giving witness to this was the great city of Alexandria in Egypt (or by Egypt as the Greeks expressed it). By the late third century, a hundred years or so after its foundation, Alexandria was already one of the greatest cities in the ancient world; and at its height it may have attained a population of over a million inhabitants, fed by the huge annual grain surplus of the Nile valley. Undoubtedly Alexander selected an outstanding site for the city he wanted named after him: at the western edge of the Nile delta, with an excellent harbor that could fairly easily be artificially improved, on a substantial spit of land between the sea and a large fresh-water lake (Lake Mareotis), it was extremely well placed to be the chief harbor of Egypt and one of the great ports of the Mediterranean Sea. And its position between two great bodies of water made it defensively very strong and easy to protect from attack. But Alexander did not build Alexandria: he merely ordered that it should be built, and left. It was in fact Ptolemy I and his son Ptolemy II who built the great city of Alexandria that became the most important commercial and cultural hub of the Hellenistic world. This is not untypical of Alexander, ordering that something should be done and leaving it to others to sort out the organization and carry out the work.
Though various sources give Alexander credit for founding or refounding other cities in western Asia, in pretty much all cases the evidence is late and suspect: the rise of Alexander’s legend in the third century and later made cities eager to claim Alexander as founder if they could. The most reliable sources only have Alexander founding additional “cities” in inner Asia, east of the River Tigris, primarily in Bactria/Sogdia (Afghanistan) and north India (Pakistan). Closely examined, however, it is clear that the word “city” is a bit of a misnomer for most of these foundations: they were in fact just garrison colonies, settlements of veteran soldiers (especially Greek mercenaries) intended to secure Alexander’s hold on the eastern lands he had found it so hard to conquer. We hear reliably of about a dozen of these garrison colonies, each apparently having a population of around two thousand men. For shortly after Alexander’s death the men of these colonies abandoned them and gathered together into an army determined to march and fight their way back home to Greece: they had never had any desire to be settled in inner Asia. Altogether, we are told, about twenty-five thousand men gathered from these abandoned colonies, which gives us the number of about two thousand, just quoted, as the approximate average population of these dozen or so garrison settlements. On their attempted march home, they were met by a Macedonian army despatched to stop them, defeated, and forced to return to their settlements. Their descendants did flourish for nearly two hundred years as an Indo-Bactrian outpost of Hellenistic civilization. The nature of these cities, as some of them did eventually become, was revealed in the 1970s by French archaeologists excavating such a Greek city at Ai Khanoum in Afghanistan. So Alexander does perhaps deserve some credit for making possible the Greek cities of Bactria and north India and their civilization between 300 and 100 BCE. But that is a far more modest record as a city founder than he is often credited with, and in truth the process of founding Greek cities in western Asia was actually carried out by his successors Antigonus and Seleucus, and by Seleucus’ son Antiochus I.
Alexander’s sole credible claim to fame, then, is as a warrior, a general, a conqueror. That being so, it is relevant to note again that Alexander did not create the army he led, nor invent the military system he used: he inherited both from his father Philip, who was the inventive, creative one. Moreover, Alexander enjoyed the active co-operation of officers of the highest abilities: without Antigonus and his defeat of the Persian counter-attack in Asia Minor, Antipater and his defeat of the Spartan-led rebellion in southern Greece, Parmenio and his brilliant defensive leadership on the left wing at the Battle of Gaugamela, and the numerous and varied efforts of men such as Craterus, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, and others, how successful could Alexander have been? That Alexander was able to dominate and lead these men has been laid to his credit, and to some extent deservedly so: had Alexander shown weakness, indecisiveness, or lack of ability it does seem likely that one or more of these officers would have found a way to challenge and/or control him. But it should be borne in mind that Philip had instilled a near fanatical loyalty to himself, and by extension to his sons, in the Macedonian soldiery. That is why, after Alexander’s death, the soldiery insisted on Arrhidaeus as their king, and on re-naming him Philip after his father. Macedonian officers obeyed Alexander because he was able to command their respect, but also because they had little choice but to do so. The soldiery would not have backed anyone in a rebellion against Alexander, with the possible exception of Parmenio—which is why Alexander had him murdered.
As a general, Alexander’s reputation rests, or should rest, primarily on the battles of Gaugamela and the Hydaspes. The Granicus and Issus were very much his father’s battles, in the sense that Alexander won them using not just his father’s army and officers, but also his father’s tactics. At Gaugamela Alexander had to show considerable tactical ingenuity to achieve success, and at the Hydaspes he faced a new problem—how to confront war elephants—and found the successful solution. The withheld left wing and the reserve phalanx with orders to about-face to confront any out-flanking force attacking from behind: these were clever and effective solutions to the problem of fighting a numerically vastly superior army at Gaugamela. The extensive maneuvering Alexander employed in order to find a way to cross the River Hydaspes unopposed showed great strategic insight; and the way he had learned in advance to attack the mahouts controlling the elephants in order to render the elephants themselves uncontrollable showed effective use of military intelligence sources. In sum, there is no doubt that Alexander was an extremely daring, effective and (when needed) inventive battle general. He could adapt his battle strategy and tactics to the needs of the situation, while always operating within his father’s overall “sword and shield” strategy as described in Chapter 4.
On the other hand, Alexander was not without weaknesses as a general and leader. His grand strategical sense may legitimately be called into question. It simply made no logical, and especially no logistical sense to extend his conquests as far as Bactria and northern India (Afghanistan and Pakistan), given that his manpower base lay in Greece and the Balkan region. It is no accident that Alexander’s Successors gave up the Indian territories within twenty years of Alexander’s death, and showed, on the whole, very limited interest in Bactria after the first twenty years. These territories were just too far from the Mediterranean to be securely held by a Mediterranean power. Parmenio had been right in advising Alexander, in 333, to limit his ambitions (in effect, that is) to Syria/Palestine and Asia Minor (and perhaps Egypt): those were the rich and populous lands that could usefully be combined with the southern Balkan region into a viable empire. Moreover, as a battle general he was, as his officers complained, too apt to behave more like a common soldier than a general, needlessly putting himself at risk in battles and at sieges (most infamously the siege of the Mallian town in India), when the expedition could hardly afford to lose their leader. Clearly Alexander hugely enjoyed the thrill of the fight, and especially of the cavalry chase: as we have seen, he was only prevented in the nick of time from carrying his cavalry chase too far at Gaugamela, and thereby losing the battle. Having no one to succeed him if he died, he should have behaved more responsibly in battle, risking himself only if/when absolutely needed. And of course, his refusal until the last few years of his life to give attention to the crucial business of producing an heir is another justified criticism of Alexander’s rulership abilities.
On the whole, the term “the Great” seems an exaggerated assessment of Alexander’s real abilities and importance. He fulfilled his father’s plans, with his father’s army; but then went well beyond those plans in ways that, while immediately successful, made little strategic sense. He always found a way to overcome difficulties, but they were often difficulties he should have avoided in the first place. He showed no interest in organizing his conquests into a coherent, functioning empire, merely continuing the Persian system for the sake of convenience. Empire-building, as opposed to conquest, was left to his successors; and he left his successors with a massive problem of how to create a succession, and how to organize the Macedonian conquests. He was a general pure and simple, who seems to have lived for the thrill of the fight and of conquest for its own sake. Even the Prussian king Frederick the Great, the most purely military of later western rulers called “the Great,” had more to him than just military success. Why then the enormous admiration, not to say adulation of Alexander over the millennia that have passed since his death?
5. THE LEGEND OF ALEXANDER
Much of the passionate interest in and adulation of Alexander found in novels, films, other popular media, and even in some scholarly histories, can be explained by the romantic nature of Alexander’s exploits at such a young age (in his twenties) and his premature death at just short of thirty-three years old. It has also helped that he was capable, as we have seen, of occasional quixotic gestures that contributed to the aura of romance around him. This romantic element, within not much more than a century of his death, found its expression in a novelistic account of his life and exploits that turned him into a legendary figure, one might almost say western civilization’s first “super-hero”: I refer to the so-called Alexander Romance, attributed to Alexander’s court historian Callisthenes, and often cited as Pseudo-Callisthenes as a result. This work, originally composed in Greek, was translated/adapted into Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, old Slavonic, and various other languages, and had a wide impact, especially during the medieval period, on people’s image and estimation of Alexander. But the romanticized view of Alexander did not in fact have to wait for the creation of this outright novelistic account: many of the legendary, indeed almost mythical exploits attributed to Alexander in fact go back to stories told in supposedly sober contemporary historical accounts—contemporary to Alexander, that is.
The process began in the first historical account of Alexander’s deeds, that of his official court historian Callisthenes. This man, nephew of the philosopher and Alexander’s old tutor Aristotle, had made a reputation as a notable and reliable historian by writing a Hellenika (an account of general Greek history) covering the years 386 to 357. As Alexander’s court historian, specifically employed to record (and amplify?) Alexander’s deeds by putting them in the best possible light, Callisthenes changed his historical approach. He was to be Alexander’s “Homer” and his history Alexander’s Iliad. From the beginning, therefore, he did not so much write sober history as the story of a hero loved by the gods. For example, when Alexander and his army passed along the coast of Pamphylia, they reached a place where the road was extremely narrow between some cliffs and the sea. According to Callisthenes, the sea receded at Alexander’s approach, paying obeisance to the great king and giving him and his army an easy passage. When Alexander, during his visit to Egypt, decided to visit the Oracle of Ammon at Siwah, an oasis in the Libyan desert, he and his entourage reportedly became lost due to a dust-laden “simoom” wind that covered the road. According to Callisthenes, ravens appeared to guide Alexander to the oasis, taking such care that they even pursued stragglers who got separated from Alexander’s party and brought them back to the group. This is the stuff of legend, not history; but Callisthenes’ efforts to legendarize Alexander were modest compared to what happened in histories and memoirs written shortly after his death.
One of Alexander’s boyhood friends and trusted officers, Ptolemy son of Lagos, played a leading role in the “wars of the succession” and eventually founded the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt. Late in life he wrote a history of Alexander’s reign, taking care to emphasize his own achievements under Alexander; this history was used by our best surviving history of Alexander, written by the Roman era historian Arrian, who trusted Ptolemy because he was an eye-witness and later a king, who would surely not have lied. Ptolemy did indeed object to Callisthenes’ magical ravens leading Alexander to Siwah. It was in fact, he reported, speaking snakes that appeared in the desert and led Alexander to his destination. Ptolemy is usually considered one of the more sober and factual historians of Alexander. Are we really to believe in snakes that speak in human voices? The plain fact is that Ptolemy did lie in his history, making Alexander more than a man.
Things only got more legendary from here. A historian named Onesicritus, who served in Alexander’s army and commanded a ship (or at any rate served as its steersman) in his Indus river fleet, wrote an account of Alexander. He enjoyed the patronage of Alexander’s general and successor Lysimachus, and Plutarch tells of an occasion when, at Lysimachus’ court, Onesicritus read aloud to the king a passage from the fourth book of his history. The passage recounted the visit to Alexander’s camp in Hyrcania (south of the Caspian Sea) of the queen of the Amazons, with her entourage of Amazon warriors. Reputedly she wished to mate with Alexander: the two greatest warriors in the world, male and female, would surely produce marvelous offspring. Plutarch recounts Lysimachus’ humorous response: “I wonder where I was then?” (Plutarch Alexander 46). The Amazons, let us be clear, belong to Greek mythology, not to history. Yet the legend of Alexander’s tryst with the Amazon queen lived on and became a fixed part of the Alexander story.
One could go on, but the point is clear. From the very beginning, even during his lifetime, Alexander was magnified by those who wrote about him into a legendary, heroic figure: no tale was too tall if it was about Alexander. This was undoubtedly due in part to Alexander himself and his image cultivation. He was not satisfied to be the son of Philip and emulate his father’s achievements: he was the descendant of Heracles and Achilles, and his achievements were to be measured on that heroic scale. When crossing the Hellespont to start his Asian campaigns, we hear that Alexander first sacrificed, on the European side, at the tomb of Protesilaus who, in the Trojan War myth, was the first Greek warrior to land on Trojan (Asian) soil. He then stood up in the prow of his vessel, the leading vessel of course, as it approached the Asian side of the Hellespont, and heroically/symbolically cast a spear into Asia. Landed in Asia, he had locals point out to him the supposed tomb of Achilles, where he sacrificed to his reputed ancestor while his lover Hephaestion sacrificed at the reputed tomb of Achilles’ lover Patroclus. The point: Alexander was the new Achilles, the hero who would defeat the forces of the Asian world. Already at this early stage Alexander had gathered around himself a coterie of literary figures, such as the poets Choerilus, Agis of Argos, and Cleon the Sicilian, who made it their business (or whose business it was?) to compare Alexander to such humans become gods in Greek mythology as Heracles, Dionysus, and the Dioscuri Castor and Polydeuces. Towards the end of his reign, the question of whether Alexander himself was a god was very much in the air, as contemporary sources attest. Historians are divided on the question whether Alexander regarded himself as a god and demanded worship, or whether it was just flatterers who proposed divine honors for him. The former view does seem to fit with Alexander’s self-image as attested in many sources. That Alexander really did demand, near the end of his reign, to be worshipped as a god is perhaps supported by a typically laconic remark attributed to a Spartan named Damis: “Since Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god” (Plutarch Moralia 219E). The point being that if he was a god, he should show it by displaying divine powers, such as immortality.
15. Coin of Alexander depicting the king holding a thunderbolt
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image from PHGCOM)
In other words, the legend of Alexander as a superhuman hero was assiduously cultivated by Alexander himself from early on in his reign, and was spread by his court historian Callisthenes and by other eyewitness historians after Alexander’s death, as well as by poets employed to write about Alexander in a deliberately heroizing vein. One can add his cultivation of his physical image. Only one painter, Apelles, the greatest painter of Alexander’s time, was permitted to produce official portraits of Alexander. Apelles painted Alexander wielding Zeus’ thunderbolt, and Alexander authorized coins depicting himself with the thunderbolt (ill. 15). It is hard to think of another ruler who was as assiduous as Alexander at cultivating his own image and making that image superhuman: perhaps the Sun King Louis XIV of France comes closest. It is understandable, given the exaggerated respect shown in pre-modern sources for the act of military conquest, that Alexander’s self-aggrandizing propaganda should have had its effect and been copied and further exaggerated in subsequent writings, almost down to the present day. But there is no need for us, in the twenty-first century, to go along with it. Alexander was an impressive general and an influential conqueror, but no more than that. The legend of Alexander has had its day.