Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Morale also suffered for another reason. The soldiers knew, just as the officers knew, that there was one good road out of Anatolia, and that it passed through the Cilician Gates, where the Persians ought to be waiting. The alternative to passing through the Gates lay through the Antitaurus, a route of 215 miles at heights of up to 5,000 feet. Xenophon’s mercenaries had traveled through the Antitaurus at the end of their service in Asia. To avoid starvation, they had given up their slaves and animals. They could not avoid frostbite, and some died of exposure. The Macedonians numbered six times this group of 10,000. That would spell greater confusion, and much greater losses.39

  Then a religious problem arose, and solving it raised morale. The shrine of Zeus at Gordium had a Macedonian touch, or so the locals said. A Macedonian exile, Midas, had come to Gordium, become king, and built a shrine to Zeus. Yes, this was the Midas best known for turning objects into gold. Here in the local shrine was the wagon he had traveled in. He had dedicated it to the god, and tied it in place with a knot. Zeus would part with this piece of memorabilia only if the knot was untied. Would Alexander care to try? Perhaps the priests would discreetly assist him. Perhaps he would endow their shrine, which was only a house and a lot.40

  Undoing the knot, the priests went on, would be significant. After the era of Midas and his descendants, Cyrus the Great seized the country. To undo the knot was to undo Cyrus’s empire. The priests even said that the man who untied the knot would rule Asia. Of course, they had made the knot difficult to untie.

  What truth was there in this palaver? Rather than the name of a king, Midas was a dynastic title of the Phrygians, who made an early attempt to unify Anatolia. Far from being rich in gold, they used cloth for money. One ambitious ruler married a Greek. To resist this particular Midas, the Assyrians entered Anatolia. Midas responded by preventing them from passing through the Cilician Gates. He had divided Anatolia from the East—in effect, had linked Anatolia to Greece. Now the priests had invited Alexander to do the opposite and unite Macedon to Asia.

  Although ignorant of this history, Alexander accepted the offer to untie the knot. Then he panicked, or became infuriated. (Perhaps the first of these feelings inspired the second.) Rather than untie the knot, he drew his sword and cut it open. No priest could claim to have helped him. That night, Alexander’s soothsayers greeted thunder and lightning as good omens. Zeus (who had got power by rude strokes of his own) approved of Alexander. The king reciprocated with offerings by which he gave thanks to the god and shared his apparent good fortune with his men. He told the engineers (or let them believe) that he loosed the knot by pulling a pin, not by cutting.41

  Then true good fortune came. Memnon, Alexander learned, had fallen ill and died. The siege of Mytilene ended, and the danger passed. For lack of an adequate replacement for the dead commander, the Persian fleet dispersed.

  Had Alexander ever prayed for this stroke of luck? Not in public. Greek and Macedonian leaders did not pray for such a thing publicly, any more than Achilles prayed for Hector to die in bed of an illness. Perhaps, after hearing of Memnon’s death, Alexander prayed on behalf of Memnon’s widow, Barsine. She had lived in Macedon as a child, for her family were Persian exiles who took refuge with Philip, and so Alexander knew her. Born around 360, she was only a few years older than he. Now she was a widow with three children. If Alexander did pray, his prayers came true, for she reached Damascus, where he would eventually encounter her again.42

  Once the army left Gordium and went east, on the Persian road, the plain became barren. To avoid hunger and drought at that time of year, the late summer and early fall, the expedition hoped to draw on royal storehouses along the road. The storehouses were available, but to feed an army the size of Alexander’s, all must be filled, and so the king sought logistical help from a new source. After reaching Ancyra, he appointed a native, Sabictas, as satrap of the next region, Cappadocia. Alexander feared there would be too little grain otherwise. Towns would not provide them a market, and there was little to plunder.43

  He had never appointed a native before. He had let Ada take the throne but not appointed her. In Celaenae he picked a top officer, Antigonus. For the port towns on the coast he picked one of his sea captains, in Sardis a brother of Parmenio. These men would stand guard against Memnon’s forts on the peninsula, the Persian navy, and restive locals. Sabictas might not. He lacked any religious or cultural ties to the Macedonians. He was not a companion—not a Homeric henchman and not an Argonaut.44

  Of the several wells named after Midas, the one in Ankara was the last from which the army would drink.45 They marched on through country so empty that later writers could not tell what road they used. Homer told them nothing about the country around them, and neither did Xenophon or Herodotus. Local informants may have told them that Cyrus the Great had founded the local town of Zela after defeating nomadic invaders from Central Asia, a region the Macedonians knew almost nothing about. Cyrus had built a shrine there to the Persian goddess Anahita—an odd shrine in the eyes of a Greek, for it consisted only of an ashen mound surrounded by a circular earthen wall. The ashes were the remains of fires tended by Magi who killed their sacrificial victims not by slitting their throats, as Greeks did, but by bashing them with a log. If the generals heard of Zela, they did not bother to turn aside and stop. The Macedonians cared much less about Persian religion than about Persian troops, roads, and gold.46

  As the Macedonians continued east and then south, heading for the Cilician Gates, the Antitaurus range rose on their left. The local people said one peak was so high that in good weather both the Black Sea and the Mediterranean were visible. If the Persians stopped the Macedonians, they would either have to find a way through these mountains or go back the way they had come.47

  The men knew that even if some favored going back, Alexander would not, and Alexander would likely prevail. He would declare the omens for a retreat unfavorable, and those who disagreed would need to produce more persuasive omens. Earlier, when Parmenio produced an omen in favor of fighting the Persians at sea, Alexander reinterpreted the omen.48 The omen came from Zeus, the king said, and so it was the king’s business to read it. He did not let Aristander or any other diviner interfere.

  How many Persians were guarding the Gates? They would not know until they arrived. They did know that the narrow road through the Gates stretched for some miles. At the tightest spot, the road was two yards wide and cliffs rose more than a hundred yards overhead. A rockslide could stop them. Several hundred Greek mercenaries could, just as several hundred Spartans stopped the Persians at the pass at Thermopylae. Barriers could block the way, and archers and perhaps catapults could decimate them as they removed the barriers. Flash floods could stop them. Skirmishers could slow them down, mile after mile.49

  At the Granicus they had been trapped on three sides. The river ran beside them; marshes blocked them on one side and the rough ground on another. At the Ladder, in the coastal mountains, they had been trapped. The beach disappeared behind them, the mountains rose on one side, and the tide came in on the other. Now they had gates in front of them—battlements of well-guarded rock. The fairy-tale march had stopped at the door of the ogre’s castle.

  A force of Persians—small, but more than enough to hold the pass for days—knew the Macedonians were approaching. They did not expect them to arrive as soon as they did, and the defenses remained minimal. Their commander had withdrawn to Cilicia. He thought he could defeat or delay the Macedonians in a pitched battle there.

  When the Persians saw Alexander’s Thracians clambering up the pass, they panicked. In the distance, they saw the long Macedonian line. Behind them they saw open road. They took to the road.50

  Hour by hour, for nearly a day, Alexander’s army passed through the Gates. Not a weapon or a rock swooped down on them.

  Once the army passed the Gates and descended into the lowlands of Cilicia, Alexander collapsed with a fever. As he lay sick, it occurred to him that his doctor might have b
een paid to kill him. Darius was trying to bribe Alexander’s courtiers to assassinate him, and Parmenio suspected the doctor, a Greek named Philip. Ignoring Parmenio and the other councilors, Alexander decided to trust his father’s namesake. He recovered from the illness and would not be seriously ill for another eight years. Two common camp diseases, typhus and typhoid, would bypass him. In spite of his many wounds, gangrene, tetanus, and blood poisoning would spare him, too. His mother had good reason to dedicate a statue to the goddess Health in that most prominent of places, the Athenian Acropolis.51

  The army’s path through Anatolia described an enormous, sideways S. The first part made some sense: the religious stop at Troy, then the battle, then the sweep of the treasure houses and the attempt to neutralize the Persian fleet. That, though, was only the first turn in the S. The army split and drove north, in the opposite direction, and circled back south toward the Gates. That second turn followed the Persian royal road, but the first had not. The S-curves kept the Persians guessing.52

  Religion accounted for some of the risks the expedition had taken, and for some of the success. The side trip to Troy, taken for the sake of the hero Achilles, was a religiously motivated risk, and the failure to get greater control of places such as Ephesus was a religious compromise. The morale-saving bravado displayed by Alexander at Gordium was a piece of good religious luck, and passing through the Gates, even more than escaping trouble at the Ladder, was a piece of luck that a Macedonian or a Greek might think due to a god.

  Religion was also an occasional liability. Alexander wanted pitched battles, no matter the odds, because he wanted proof Zeus favored him. He trusted his companions, men he worshipped with, but when they could not help him, as happened in Cappadocia, he had to turn to strangers. Yet religion also supplied an invincible motive to carry on. Every favorable sacrifice and every supplication said that the gods had chosen Alexander’s side. That seemed to explain the invaders’ spectacular success. Big and forbidding as it was, Anatolia had given way to them, river by river and peak by peak.

  The Anatolian campaign had closed the gap between the military experience of Alexander and that of his senior companions. Now a new gap opened between them. When Alexander led the companions in a rite of thanksgiving at Solli, the first important Cilician city, they thought of him as priest of the Macedonians, but this twenty-two-year-old had begun to think of himself as more than a priest. After he left western Anatolia, several cities had changed their calendars, so that his arrival there marked the start of a new era.53 More such honors would follow. Alexander was becoming a man apart. In the apprehensive minds of some Greeks, he was becoming godlike.

  the jews and Armenians told stories of Alexander that made him an Egyptian. The Persians told another story, put in writing in the Middle Ages by the poet Firdausi.54 Alexander was the son of Darab, the king of Persia. He was called Sikander because the first syllable of his name, “Al,” was the definite article in Arabic, the most widely spoken language. He became “the Sikander,” or simply “Sikander.” His father was Failakus, who ruled Rum, or Rome. In this story, the march through Anatolia is merely part of a journey Alexander makes to Persia.

  The king of Persia, Darab, had ruled well, defeating his Arab enemies, and then attacked Failakus, king of Rum, whom he defeated with great loss. Failakus begged for peace, and Darab agreed, if Failakus would send one of his daughters to marry Darab. Failakus sent his daughter Nahid with many presents to the king of Persia, who married her.

  Nahid had bad breath, and so, although she became pregnant, she was so disagreeable to the king that he let her return for a time to her father in Rum, where she gave birth to a son. Failakus had no sons, and decided to keep the baby, spreading the word that it was a son of his own. He called the child Sikander.

  Darab married another wife, by whom he had another son, named Dara, who succeeded his father. Dara governed as his father had, claiming tribute from inferior rulers like Failakus. Sikander, who became king of Rum after Failakus’s death, refused to pay tribute. Through an ambassador, he told Dara, “The time is past when Rum acknowledged the superiority of Persia. It is now your turn to pay tribute to Rum. If you refuse my demand, I will invade your dominions. Do not think not that I shall be satisfied with the conquest of Persia alone. The whole world shall be mine.”

  Anonymous Persian illustration of Nahid and Darab in the Dārābnāmah of Abu Tahir Tarsusi, late sixteenth century.

  British Library, London, or. 4615, fol. 129r.

  Dara had no choice but to assemble his army, for Sikander was already marching against him. As Sikander drew near to the border of Persia, he disguised himself as an envoy, traveled to the camp of his half-brother, Dara, and told the king, “Your majesty, Sikander has not invaded your empire for the sake of fighting, but to know its history, its laws, and customs. He wishes to travel through the whole world. Why should he make war on you? Give him free passage through your kingdom, and nothing more is required.”

  Dara was astonished at the airs put on by this envoy, and asked, “What is your name, and who are your parents? Are you Sikander?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” answered the envoy.

  Dara entertained the envoy, and ordered his cup-bearer to bring him wine. After Sikander drank, he refused to return the cup, and instead put it in his sack, explaining that it was the custom in Rum for an ambassador to keep any cup from which he drank. Amused, Dara gave him more wine, and let him keep four cups, with which the ambassador returned to his own camp.

  “They have been generous,” Sikander said, displaying the jeweled cups. “I have eaten at their table, and learned everything about them, including their numbers. Prepare to attack.”

  The Alexander of this story, a deceitful player of parts, was not one that the companions would have recognized in late 333, when the army passed through the Gates and reached Cilicia. Yet the events in Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia during the next few years would lead some of them to change their minds and have the same opinion as Firdausi. They would watch Alexander play the part of a priest-king in several foreign cultures, and each time they would object, as Dara did in the story, but Alexander would prevail against them. Like Barrymore or Olivier, he could play all royal roles.

  The Route of the Expedition Through Syria and Palestine, 333–332 BC.

  Ancient World Mapping Center.

  4

  The Throne of Tyre

  once alexander survived the worst of his illness, he and the companions thanked both Asclepius and his doctor, Philip, for saving his life. They did not expect either the hero or the doctor to do away with the need for a period of rest and recovery for the patient and his companions. They lingered in Cilicia, enjoying a return to the shore of the Mediterranean. As a defensive measure, Parmenio went west with ample forces to guard the chief pass between Cilicia and Mesopotamia. The rest of the army remained with the king.

  The generals were glad for the pause. Parmenio needed time to secure the pass, and the council of war needed time to learn Persian intentions. When would they attack, and where? The pass offered one route, but the generals also feared an attack from another direction, the south. If the enemy chose the south, another important provincial capital, Damascus, could serve as the Persian headquarters. They could attack the Macedonians and shield Phoenicia and Egypt. The generals were not sure that the Persians wanted to defeat them more than they wanted to protect these territories.

  Alexander wanted to pause in the hope that Darius would seek out the Macedonians and lead his Persians into battle against them, just as the satraps had done. The Macedonians should wait for the enemy in the narrow country along the coast, which resembled the terrain in Greece and Macedon. Alexander hoped not so much to defeat the Persians as to kill or capture Darius. At best, he would make Darius beg for mercy.1

  There was another reason Alexander wished to wait. He had never before been in a mostly Semitic country, and he wanted to learn about the gods, people, and landscape. At the f
irst town he visited, Anchialus, he saw ruins far larger than at Troy. The colossal alabaster stele of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, found in the center of the city, confounded Callisthenes and the others, who could not read the inscription. They relied on a mistranslation that turned a boast about the king’s sybaritic opulence into a cynical rejection of pleasure and riches. No one realized that Sennacherib had erected the stele around 698 BC as part of the Assyrian struggle against Midas and the Phrygians. No one knew that Sennacherib’s god, Ashur, was another version of Zeus.2

  After the sojourn in Anchialus, Alexander and the army marched on to Solli, a Greek city, which surrendered and let Alexander make a thank offering. Seeing the city had a mint, Alexander exacted a levy of 200 talents in order to produce coins to pay troops and debts. He then compensated the city by letting it establish a democracy. Mallus, the next stop on his tour of Cilicia, worshipped the hero Amphilochus, and that made for an agreeable pause: Amphilochus was a supposed ancestor of Alexander as well as the citizens. Instead of a levy, Mallus got a tax break, and Alexander brokered a settlement between competing political factions in the city. Mallus also had a mint that had produced coins for the Persians, and would keep producing them.3

  Alexander did not object to other kinds of money, even coins bearing the name of Mazdai, the former Persian satrap. Mazdai’s money would remain legal tender, and so would Persian darics, gold coins bearing a stereotypical image of the king kneeling and shooting an arrow. So would local money from a dozen mints, including coins issued in his name with Semitic legends. Alexander was all for money, the more the better. He needed streams of it, and whenever he got bullion, he minted new issues. Eventually he started twenty-four mints in Egypt and Asia. From Philip he had inherited just two, both Macedonian.4