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LOST VICTORY

When someone is an absolute ruler, his personal flaws can create an absolute disaster.

Before Alexander became Alexander the Great, conqueror of the known world, he had to defeat the most powerful and largest empire that had been formed up to his time. One whose scope would not again be matched for four hundred years. The Persian Empire was one of a kind. It was much bigger, much wealthier, and more powerful than any of its neighbors or predecessors. No other empire waited on its borders to compete with it. At seemingly no risk to itself, Persia meddled constantly and overtly with Greece, using the empire’s wealth and power to play one city state against another. The ferocity and length of the ruinous Peloponnesian War can be partially attributed to Persian support shifting to whichever alliance of Greek cities was losing.

There was a great deal of difference between the two cultures. The Greek and neighboring peoples valued individualism, courage, and accomplishment. It was in the city state of Athens in Greece that democracy first arose. The key values of the Persian Empire were obedience to central authority, accepting your place in society, and generally being a good part of a very large machine.

In 336 BCE, the Emperor Darius III was installed as king of the Achaemenid Dynasty of Persia. He did not sit easily on the throne. Darius was, at best, a shirttail relative of the past emperors Artaxerxes III and Arses. Known as Codomannus before becoming emperor, Darius III was a proven general, but initially nothing but a pawn placed on the throne. He was put in power by a eunuch named Bagoas. This court officer virtually controlled the empire and had poisoned both previous emperors when they proved difficult to control. After becoming emperor, Darius III, too, had too much of a mind of his own for Bagoas to tolerate. But he proved better than his predecessors at court politics. When Bagoas turned up with a goblet of poison, the new emperor forced the eunuch to drink it himself.

So Darius III was an emperor with little, if any, royal blood who had to kill the man who had placed him on the throne. In the next few years, he handled himself well, quickly putting down a few revolts. But when he got word that the Greeks had invaded one of the distant satrapies (similar to states) in his empire, he ordered that it be handled locally. Unfortunately for him, this was not just an ordinary raid by Greeks (as he’d expected) but the beginning of an invasion by Alexander of Macedon.

The local governor and his Greek mercenaries were easily crushed by Alexander. In response, Darius began gathering an army from all the western satrapies and moved to meet the Macedonian army. When they converged, he had managed to maneuver his men into position behind Alexander and cut off all retreat. With an army twice the size of the Macedonians’, this meant that any defeat would have resulted in the complete destruction of the Macedonian forces. Battling across the River Issus, Alexander managed to flank and defeat the larger force. Darius, when he saw that the battle was lost, rode back to his distant capital and began forming a much larger army by summoning troops from all parts of the empire.

Alexander then defeated the powerful Persian Mediterranean fleet—without a battle—by simply conquering all the ports they could be based in. This included taking all of the coastline down to Egypt, where he was hailed as a god. Alexander next moved toward Babylon and its capital. At this point, Darius III did everything correctly and by the book . . . er, tablet. But the massive Persian army always stayed near its supplies, was trained to be more effective and work together, and had added special units, such as elephants and scythed chariots. To ensure that his much more numerous mounted forces would be most effective, Darius III had the battlefield smoothed and cleared of even small obstructions.

On the last day of September 331 BCE, Alexander and his army arrived at the well-prepared battlefield. Across it was a Persian force that outnumbered them at least five to one. Alexander, knowing he had the initiative, ordered his army to rest. Darius, fearing a night attack, kept his standing at arms all night. The next morning the refreshed Macedonians marched to face the larger Persian army.

After both the chariots and the elephants struck early and proved less than decisive, the battle began in earnest. Soon the Macedonian left was attacked by a significantly larger force of Persian cavalry and infantry that, from the first contact, pushed the Greeks very slowly back. Alexander refused to react and instead began riding along with his best cavalry units in front of his right wing and across from the bulk of the Persians. This opened a hole in the Macedonian center. A portion of the Persian cavalry broke through and raided Alexander’s baggage camp, but Alexander again refused to react. The Macedonian king continued to ride across the Persian front until, while trying to adjust to his movements, the Persian line had thinned at the center. Alexander turned and charged into this weak spot in the line of infantry. Riding at the tip of a triangle of horsemen, with thousands of pike-armed infantry following, he thundered directly toward the wagon containing Darius III, sitting on an ornate throne.

A look at the general situation when Alexander led this charge does not bode well for the Macedonians. On the left side, his best infantry is being pushed back and is in danger of being flanked and broken by a massive number of Persian horsemen. The Macedonian center has been split and Persian light horsemen are pillaging his baggage camp. The right side of his army is not engaged, but would soon be even more badly outnumbered than the left was. From Darius III’s perspective, things were going as planned—before Alexander charged at him. His superior numbers were making a difference on the only flank currently engaged, the thinner Macedonian line had already been breached once, and most of his quarter of a million men were unengaged and ready to fight. His opponent was parading away from the only part of the field where there was any fighting, but had no real chance of flanking or riding around the much larger Persian army.

A few minutes later, everything had changed. It did not matter what was happening elsewhere in the battle. Alexander, at the head of that wedge formed with his heavy horsemen, was cutting his way through the infantry directly in front of the Persian emperor. The emperor’s bodyguards, the Immortals, were hard-pressed. There was no question that he, personally, was the target of the thundering attack of thousands of Macedonian soldiers, led by a commander some thought to be the son of a god. And here is when Darius made the mistake. At this point, the Persians still greatly outnumbered Alexander’s army, Darius had additional forces yet to commit, and his army was beginning to win on the one engaged flank. With Alexander bearing down on him, the imperiled Persian emperor chose not to move to one side, not to shift to where more units could protect him, not to order a general attack by all his forces. What he did was run. Darius III jumped off his throne, hopped into a chariot, and fled, abandoning his gigantic army and leaving it leaderless. He made the mistake of putting greater value on his immediate personal safety than on victory. By doing this, Darius lost everything, eventually even his life.

Darius III’s army was still winning when he and his top commanders fled the battlefield. The young Macedonian wanted to follow Darius, but he was made aware that his left was near collapse. It shows just how close-run things still were that Alexander swung all of his troops to the left and hit the back of the tens of thousands of Persians who had been pressing his phalanxes back. That broke their attack, and as word spread that Darius III had fled, the rest of the massive Persian army collapsed.

All of the world’s history could have been changed if this one man had shown some personal courage. Because Darius made the mistake of fleeing from the threat that Alexander might cut through to him, he lost his empire. The most powerful man in the ancient world became a footnote and Alexander of Macedon became Alexander the Great. Because the Persian emperor made this cowardly mistake, the dominance and almost inevitable expansion into Europe of Persian culture was stopped and Greek values instead spread across Alexander’s empire. Greece and Europe were now safe to develop based upon their unique cultures. If Darius had not fled, there is a good chance he would have defeated Alexander or the two armies would have destroyed each other. We might all today be calling him Darius the Great, whose descendants continued the expansion of Persia across Europe. Rather than success or achievement, we might now all consider that obedience to authority and groupthink are the only way to go. There probably would be no democracy, no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta. Science and original thought would likely have been equally stifled. Then again, there might well have been the kind of peace only found for a number of decades a few centuries later under the next great Western empire, Rome. But the Greek culture of individualism was saved. So the Greek culture, not the authoritarian Persian model, became the basis of the European and American ways of life and how we live today, because Darius III fled.