Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  At Mallus the generals met. Since Parmenio and 14,000 men now held the pass, they decided to advance at a saunter from town to town and spring to spring. Some food was seized, some bought from Aramaic-speaking merchants. The granaries were full, the orchards ripe. Then the coast narrowed, and the road began zigzagging through mountains and cliffs. To the east rose the mountain that the people called Haman, after the local god. To the west valleys opened on the Mediterranean. The scouts rode ahead, with Syrian or Phoenician interpreters. Next came Philotas and the lead troops of companions. Alexander and the rest of the troops followed, with Parmenio still watching the rear. The young and fleet in the lead, the old and slow at the rear: the army of 40,000 moved with the feral logic of a pack of wolves.5

  Inscriptions stared down from some outcroppings. One, a ways ahead of them, at the Dog River pass, commemorated the king who had built the road—Nebuchadnezzar, who had besieged Tyre and overthrown Jerusalem 250 years before. The inscription, which is still there, says:

  I did what no former king had done: I cut through the high mountains, I crushed the rocks. … I prepared a passage for the cedars for Marduk—tall and thick, splendid … and supreme. … I bundled them like reeds and planted them in Babylon like so many Euphrates poplars. I let the people of Lebanon lie in safe pastures … and I wrote an inscription in the mountain passes and on it established my royal image forever.6

  Marduk was Nebuchadnezzar’s Zeus. This god had assigned the people of Lebanon to Nebuchadnezzar as a farmer assigns sheep to a shepherd. The Macedonians would not have understood this image of a human flock. Sheep were offerings, not human beings.

  Some days later the army came to the town of Issus, and there they paused to build a hospital. They also left behind a few men who had taken ill in Cilicia. Parmenio recently had quit the pass and joined the march south. Now the Macedonians would be blind to enemy movements, as they sometimes had been in Anatolia.

  The next day they crossed the Pinarus, one of many small rivers, and the day after that they reached a narrow 600-yard stretch of shoreline lined with high rocks and empty towers and walls. They did not know the Hebrew story that the great whale had disgorged Jonah at this spot, but they might have guessed it, for the unmanned defenses seemed to swallow them, as they spent nearly an entire day marching through.

  The following day, the Macedonians headed toward the next defile, twenty miles south. Xenophon and his mercenaries, who had used the same road, had turned east there. The Macedonians turned south and reached the coastal town of Myriandrus. Their scouts had no word of Darius and the Persians. Was the enemy to the south of them, as the generals feared? Then one of the medical personnel left behind at Issus rode into camp and reported that the Persian army had entered Issus the same day the Macedonians left and had mutilated the patients recuperating there.7

  The two armies had dropped into a funnel. First came the Macedonians, then the Persians. Neither could escape. The Mediterranean blocked them in one direction, and the Arabian plate, throwing up mountains to oppose the sea, blocked them in the other direction. The funnel had narrowed, and they were both stuck. More than 100,000 men would now collide.

  like the macedonian generals, Darius thought in military terms. When word reached him of the defeat at the Granicus, he responded calmly and confidently. Although he began to gather an army at Babylon, he declined to send more men to Anatolia or go there himself. He did not see the need. The northern third of Anatolia remained in friendly hands, Cappadocia had acknowledged Alexander under duress, and the Greeks might change sides. Alexander’s campaign to control seaports had only partly succeeded.

  Then came word that Alexander had slipped through the Gates. This piece of luck alarmed Darius, as though a burglar had found the one unlocked door in the house. In the early fall of 333 he summoned his advisers, especially Mazdai, who knew the region because he was satrap of Syria as well as former satrap of Cilicia. He had governed Greeks and fought against them.8

  Darius’s Greek mercenary commanders warned the king of the superiority of the enemy infantry. A pitched battle against these forces would be a mistake, no matter how big an army the king raised. Forces like Alexander’s had beaten the Persians at the Granicus, had beaten them decades before, when Xenophon’s mercenaries invaded, and had beaten them in Greece during the Greco-Persian wars 150 years earlier. The king must fight battles of another kind, harassing the Macedonians with mounted archers or surrounding them in open country in either Cilicia or Syria. This advice resembled Memnon’s to the satraps a year earlier.9

  Mazdai, who knew the Macedonians from scouting reports, surprised the king with his news about Alexander’s army. The invaders had not continued to advance, as Xenophon’s men had, and they had not secured their supply line through the Gates to the rest of Anatolia, or rebuilt their navy. Alexander was an armed tourist, going where he liked—a young man, slight and ungainly, and not long arisen from his sickbed.10

  Weighing this portrait of Alexander against the mercenaries’ warnings, Darius decided to lead his troops out of Babylon and head west, seeking a battle. He may not have consulted Babylonian astrologers or priests about obtaining Marduk’s blessing. He was not king of Babylon, a long-abolished title. He did consult his own Persian priests, the Magi, who served Ahura Mazda, Anahita, and other Persian gods.11

  After several weeks, the Persian army arrived at the main ford on the upper Euphrates and crossed the half-mile-wide river, an exertion that took several days. Then they headed west over flat, sandy country toward the Mediterranean. The Iranian cavalry led the way, followed by the king and his sacred fire, to be kept burning until the hour of his death, and select water from Susa in Elam. Boiled and then cooled, it was stored in silver vessels.12

  To make better time, Darius left behind the women, the baggage, and the heavy troops, sending some to the rear and others to Damascus. The lead elements reached the pass Parmenio had been guarding a few hours after he left. They might have caught the Macedonians just south of Issus, but they stopped there to capture the patients in the hospital. After that the Persians proceeded south, reaching the Pinarus River.13

  The Macedonians were just a dozen miles away, at Myriandrus. The story of the mutilated prisoners stiffened their resolve to fight. The war council debated whether the Pinarus should be the place. They could go farther and choose another spot. Fight at the Pinarus, Parmenio urged, and all agreed.14

  That night Alexander and a few of his priests climbed the mountain beside the coastal road to make offerings. This rite would be harder to perform than it had been the night before the Granicus battle. The gods here were Phoenician, and so Zeus and others Alexander might want to worship would have new names. Zeus turned out to be Baal Haman, the master of the mountains, shown on Persian coins minted in Cilicia. The Phoenician Athena was Baal’s virgin sister, Anat—an odd thing, since Athena was not Zeus’s sister. Anat appeared on Cilician coins, too. Alexander wanted to worship his ancestor, Heracles, and could find something like this hero in the person of Nergal, a warrior whose familiar was a lion.15

  To identify these gods, Alexander did not need to be a religious expert. He did not need to know, for example, whether the local people thought of the mountain Haman as a god in its own right, or whether they sometimes called the mountain by the name El, another god. He needed Zeus’s authority, Athena’s skill, and Heracles’s strength. By the same token, he did not need to give up his own gods in favor of Phoenician ones. If Zeus could be Amon, as was true at home, he could be Baal.16

  The particulars of worship differed somewhat from a Greek or Macedonian ceremony. The Semites sacrificed cattle, sheep, and goats, but unlike the Europeans, they did not use pigs. Some goddesses had a taste for birds; the chief god had a taste for beef. That was the same, and so were offerings of grain in addition to animals. Incense was more popular among the Semites than among the Europeans, who regarded it as a luxury import. For Alexander, and for the Greeks, the acme of the offering was not the
ceremony but the request. Worship, like supplication, centered on benefactions.17

  The next morning Alexander performed the usual offerings at the start of the day. The ceremony went well, and so he could regard the mountaintop encounter with the local gods as propitious. He ordered the army to turn north, back through the narrows and toward the Pinarus. They reached the southern side of the river late in the afternoon. The Persians were waiting on the opposite side, several hundred yards away.18

  The land alongside the Pinarus ran about a mile and a half from the sea to a hillock that marked the beginning of the mountains. Unlike the Granicus, the river was fordable throughout, but in some places the far bank was steep enough to slow down infantry. For the Macedonians, the terrain posed two dangers. To attack the Persians, they must cross the river. That would expose the infantry to attack from above. Troops along the seashore, where the river broadened and became shallow, could be outflanked.

  The Macedonian order of battle alleviated the coastal danger. Parmenio, stationed by the sea, assigned the Greek cavalry to cover the beach. Next to them came the six regiments of the phalanx. Alexander’s strike force included the shield bearers, lining up next to the phalanx, and then the companion cavalry plus the Thessalians. Archers and Balkan mountaineers faced the heights. Alexander rode with the cavalry, beside Clitus and Parmenio’s son Philotas. He was somewhat to the right of center, as he had been at the Granicus, and as Philip had been against Bardylis. The Greeks guarded the baggage train, and also a pass that the Macedonians feared that the Persians might use if they attacked from the south.19

  Darius drew up his order of battle after consulting veterans of the Granicus defeat. Opposite each of the main Macedonian forces, he stationed a force well suited to fight it. All the Persian cavalry faced Parmenio’s cavalry. Darius put his brother, Huxshathra, in command of them. Opposite Parmenio’s infantry he put his Greek mercenaries, including a Macedonian exile, Amyntas. To one side, he stationed an ethnically mixed force of infantry with shields. Some of these faced Parmenio, some the shield bearers. Since the Persians reached the battlefield first, Darius got the chance to post infantry on the hills on the Macedonian side of the river. They looked down on Alexander’s flank. Less valuable troops waited along the coastal road, to the rear. In the very center of the line stood the best infantry, 10,000 “Immortals,” so called because the unit was always at full strength, and his personal guard. A mere forty guardsmen had fought at the Granicus. Now the full complement of 2,000 protected Darius.20

  Darius reckoned that his cavalry could outride their opponents in any melee, and that the archers among his infantry could make any Macedonian assault costly. Sooner or later the Persian cavalry would break through and surround the Macedonians. If, in spite of everything, the Macedonian phalanx advanced, the Greek mercenaries would meet them as they climbed up the banks of the Pinarus. To impede the phalanx, Darius built a palisade along part of the river. If Alexander advanced, the Immortals and the guards would give up their lives to stop him. If put in danger, Darius would leave his chariot and mount a gray mare held by a servant. Until then he would control his officers by issuing written orders.21

  A mile or so away, Alexander took alarm at some of the Persian dispositions. To ward off the Persians in the hills, he put his archers and javelin men opposite them. They would do best at firing or charging uphill. To ward off the Persian cavalry facing Parmenio, he sent the Thessalians to that side of the field.

  By now the sun hung low over the Mediterranean. In the nearest towns, Issus and Myriandrus, a few Persian or Greek soldiers stood guard. The people prayed to Baal in their homes and shrines. Alexander’s men spread the password, the name of a god or hero. Darius’s men did not all speak the same language, nor worship alike, and could not share a password.

  On one end of the field, by the mountains, the javelin men and the archers drove the Persians from the hillock. The enemy retreated to the heights stretching away from the battlefield to the east. On the other end of the battlefield, by the sea, the Persian cavalry began to advance against the Thessalians and the other cavalry under Parmenio. In between, Alexander readied the troops nearest him, the companion cavalry under Philotas and Clitus, and then trotted toward the enemy. He led the first wedge, and this wedge led the others. The shield bearers and phalanx advanced, too, but could not keep pace, and so they and Alexander’s men moved in echelon, as at the Granicus.

  Alexander and the companion cavalry crossed the stream and flung back the Persian infantry and archers. Alexander could now see a way to Darius’s chariot, and he directed the troops toward it. Alexander hoped to reach the king and kill, capture, or humiliate him. If Darius fled on his gray mare, the enemy might still retreat or surrender. Alexander did not need to fight a duel with Darius. He needed to turn the contest between them into a ritualistic encounter that would make one of them legitimate and the other illegitimate.22

  As the enemy drew near, the king and his entourage must have recognized Alexander by the two plumes atop his burnished iron helmet. The swift advance surprised those who had never fought Macedonians, but no one withdrew. Darius continued to give orders, and his Immortals continued to fight. For Alexander and his cavalry, the battle slowed down. Each yard gained took longer. Yet they drew nearer to Darius. First they were hundreds of yards away, then dozens. Although wounded in the thigh, Alexander drove on. Darius stood firm. The number of Persians between the two kings diminished. Bucephalas and the mare could almost see each other.23

  several hundred yards to the left and rear of Alexander, the shield bearers strove to keep up with him. Then came the phalanx, toting their fifteen-foot spears across the stream and up the steep bank full of brambles. The lead regiments moved so fast that a gap opened up between them and the back three. Darius’s palisade made the gap hard to close.

  Some of the Greek mercenaries stationed near Darius spied the gap and marched into it. Once they reached this point, which lay just to the Persian side of the riverbank, they wheeled and attacked the three trailing regiments in the side. The nearest regiment was Ptolemy’s. He was not the same man as Alexander’s childhood friend, who eventually became pharaoh. This Ptolemy would not travel so far as Egypt.24

  A young man, he had started the war as one of the royal bodyguards, and then took part in the siege of Halicarnassus. Just afterward he and Coenus led newlywed Macedonian soldiers home for the winter. The next spring, Ptolemy and Coenus led these men back to Asia to rendezvous with the army at Gordium.

  Ptolemy now stood some dozens of yards away from the Greeks. He marched to the right of his men, hurrying them along, conspicuous in his purple cloak. The Greeks smashed into them. Their short spears caught the Macedonians in the side. As the Macedonian officers stepped forward to rally their companies, they made themselves targets, and were stabbed. Ptolemy fell dead. So did one officer after another. When junior officers stepped forward to reform the companies, the Greeks speared them, too. Square by square, the companies disintegrated. Most of Ptolemy’s hundred or so officers were now slain, fatally wounded, or trampled to death.25

  Surviving officers sounded trumpets calling men to regroup and other units to help. Alexander’s nearby strike force heard the call better than Parmenio’s wing. Alexander halted his advance on Darius and turned to observe the fighting some hundreds of yards behind him. Coenus, commander of the front half of the phalanx, turned and watched also. He was closer to the beleaguered regiment. In the Persian army, a man in Coenus’s position would have waited for orders from the king. Not in this army. As Alexander watched, Coenus gave the order for his regiment, and those beside it, to turn around and head toward the fighting. Once Coenus arrived on the scene, he positioned his men so that they could hit the Greeks on the side. What the Greeks had done to Ptolemy, Coenus now did to them.26

  The Greek mercenaries needed help, but that would have to come from Darius. The Persian king could see the fighting, or some of it, and so he saw the need. If he ordered reinfor
cements for the mercenaries, the order did not get through. None of Darius’s officers took it upon themselves to march to the aid of the mercenaries.27

  Left to their own devices, the mercenaries looked for some escape from their predicament. Coenus was attacking from one side, and Ptolemy’s remnants were attacking from the other. The gap in the Macedonian line remained. They realized the Macedonian baggage train might be that way. Seeking plunder as well as escape, they headed toward it, and marched themselves out of the battle.

  Parmenio, farther away, did not respond to the regiment’s call for help. The Iranian cavalry, far outnumbering his own riders, were attacking in swarms. The Iranians dodged Parmenio’s infantry; their horses typically avoided lowered spears. Instead the Iranians charged up the beach and attacked the Thessalian cavalry. Most rode past the diamonds and attacked from behind, but the Thessalians could change front and counterattack. Horse-to-horse fighting was ill suited to the bows and arrows of the Iranians but well suited to the javelins of the Thessalians. The Iranians rallied to their standards and attacked repeatedly, but suffered more casualties than they inflicted. Eventually they withdrew to the other side of the river.28

  Only now, after Parmenio had prevailed and Coenus had saved Ptolemy’s remnants, did Alexander resume his attack. He was too late. Darius knew that the cavalry had withdrawn and that some of the mercenaries had disappeared. The time had come for the indispensable man to leave the field on his gray mare, like a modern leader forced from his limousine. He left his robe and his shield behind him in the chariot.29

  Alexander did not pursue him into the gathering dusk. Instead he and the other Macedonians turned on some of the troops Darius had kept in reserve. These troops had no horses and no officers of any account. The battle ended with the cries of fallen men in the dark. Friendly torches moved toward the voices that called out in Macedonian or Greek, only to find that some of the wounded were not friends.