Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Alexander’s officers reported some 1,200 Macedonian deaths, mostly in the infantry. Persian deaths numbered many thousands. Darius retreated toward the Euphrates, 300 miles east, and from there to Babylon. Some troops escaped to the north and sailed to Egypt, and others marched to Anatolia, where they plagued the Macedonian commander Antigonus.30

  After the battle, Alexander’s doctors treated his wound, and the king in turn visited the other wounded, and ordered the dead be cremated and given a shrine. With plunder from Darius’s baggage, which he captured after the fighting, he paid donatives to the relatives of the dead and conducted funeral games in the traditional Greek and Macedonian manner. Naked sprinters competed in one race, and men in armor in another. Horses and chariots competed, the most prestigious event; wagons and mules competed, too, a concession to the realities of army life. Most events were military, like the javelin. That gave honor to the dead soldiers.31

  Yet funeral games were not merely for the dead. Greeks and Macedonians liked to compete, no matter what the occasion. The Macedonians in particular could think of war itself as a game played by companions according to rules partly invented by Philip II. As for Philip or any other king, he would regard staging games partly as a way of manipulating his men. In this case, Alexander wished to distract attention from how the Macedonians had nearly lost the battle. The reason for the near defeat was Alexander’s headlong pursuit of Darius, undertaken to delegitimize rather than defeat the enemy. A political and religious goal had come into conflict with military requirements.

  To gain more plunder, Parmenio went to Damascus to seize the baggage that Darius had sent there. Lacking a map, he forced peasants to guide him. The governor of the city surrendered and gave the Macedonians 2,600 talents in coin, the largest haul so far. He also helped Parmenio capture a fleeing caravan of Persian servants and concubines who had quit Damascus so hastily they left clothes, furniture, and royal treasures strewn along the road. Parmenio wrote Alexander a letter enumerating “concubines who play music, to the number of 329, and 277 caterers and 70 wine-clarifiers,” but only “14 perfume-makers.” The letter showed how far the Macedonians had come since seizing Dascylium and Sardis. If Alexander did not sell this multitude of servants into slavery, they would slow down his army.32

  Alexander eventually returned to the place where he had worshipped before the battle and erected altars to the gods he knew as Zeus, Athena, and Heracles. These altars would survive for centuries. When Cicero arrived in the vicinity, almost 200 years later, he chose this spot to be acclaimed by Roman troops and give them a donative. He knew the place under the local name Hieron, Greek for “sacrosanct.” Alexander’s three altars had become a place of pilgrimage. It was Alexander’s Midas touch—every place he consecrated turned into an occasion for largesse. In contrast, he never finished the shrine that he planned to build in honor of the sacrifice made by the dead.33

  Alexander handled battle captives assiduously. He acknowledged the accomplishments of the Persian cavalry commander Huxshathra, and admitted the Persian into the entourage. He interviewed the queen mother, Sisygambis, who waited for him in the captured royal chamber. She decided to take the initiative and supplicate him. She probably knew enough about Greek customs to take the person she approached by the knees, and perhaps the hand; perhaps she had rehearsed the scene. She may also have kept a translator handy, since the ranking companions who knew Persian were not nearby.

  When Alexander entered the chamber accompanied by the bodyguard Leonnatus, she took Leonnatus for the king, and supplicated the wrong man. Alexander smiled and said she had made no mistake: the other man was Alexander, too. He called her “mother,” as he had Ada. He could pay no higher compliment to a female (or offer any plainer criticism of Olympias). Sisygambis was not deceived. She replied that she was a slave, as were the other captured women, including her daughters and her daughter-in-law, Darius’s wife. What, she asked, was Alexander going to do with them?34

  This was no motherly question, he must have thought, but the first words in an exchange among Sisygambis, himself, and Darius, who would want the captives returned to him. If Alexander did return them, even at a price, that would legitimize Darius. Rather than answer Sisygambis, he embraced Darius’s little son, another captive, and left Sisygambis to his subordinates. (They had been dealing with female Persian suppliants of their own. No doubt some of these suppliants became concubines.)35

  When Parmenio returned from Damascus, he brought two noteworthy captives. He gave the less prepossessing one, a young Macedonian woman named Antigone, to his son Philotas, who was already acquiring a string of concubines. A Macedonian captured at sea by the Persians in 333, she had somehow made her way to the court of the Great King, where she may have been the most prominent Macedonian. She was both a survivor and a social climber. Philotas soon made the mistake of remarking to her that Alexander was one companion among many. Philotas’s mistake lay not in what he said but in telling Antigone, who began to search for someone to whom she could profitably confide more damaging indiscretions.36

  Parmenio’s other noteworthy captive was Barsine, the widow of Memnon of Rhodes. Her elderly father ranked high in the Persian court, even though he had once been an exile in Macedon. His ancestors had been satraps in western Anatolia—Macedon’s neighbors—for nearly a century. He had named one of his sons Ilioneus, after the city of Troy.37

  You might have died on the battlefield without an heir, Parmenio told Alexander; take up with Barsine. Alexander agreed. Within several years she gave him a son, Heracles. This boy could become Alexander’s heir. If Alexander preferred, he would not. Barsine was no more important to Alexander than most of Philip’s seven wives had been to Philip.38

  Why had Alexander changed his mind about children? Perhaps because he had now accomplished something his father had not done, which was to defeat a Persian king, and so he felt ready to take this step. Or perhaps his reason may have had to do with Barsine, not his father. Barsine was a Greco-Persian. Marrying her—or, if that is too strong a word, using her as a concubine who might have legitimate children—showed that Alexander was flexible. He would welcome enemies into his entourage. They would not become companions, and Barsine would not become a queen, but they could prosper as subordinates, and she could prosper as a mate. And perhaps he chose her for a reason that had to do with himself. He and Barsine had known each other as children. In that sense, if not in any other, she was a companion.39

  Alexander did not like much of the rest of the booty he had received. Shown some of Darius’s furniture, he was embarrassed, and said, “Knowledgeable people seem to think that this means being a king.” He melted down much of it, keeping the regalia he found in the Persian baggage train, yet found he could not dispense with all of Darius’s tents. He needed several of them to house Darius’s women.40

  Soon after the battle, he rejected wealth of another kind, conveyed by an offer from Darius. From east of the Euphrates the king wrote and asked Alexander to return the captured women. Alexander could keep one of them, Darius’s daughter, and marry her. And in return for evacuating Syria and most of Anatolia, Alexander would receive ample silver.

  Alexander suppressed news of this letter. He may not have feared that the companions would accept this bargain, but the offer of money might tempt them, and they might pressure him to negotiate with Darius. He replied as follows:

  I made war after you began the quarrel. I have already prevailed over your generals and satraps in battle, and now, since the gods have given everything to me, I control you and your country. As for those who served under you and did not die in battle, I have taken care of them and they do not stay with me unwillingly, but instead willingly fight alongside me.

  No longer write to me as an equal. If you ask for anything, think of me as the master of everything you have. You will have whatever you can persuade me of.41

  Alexander had invited Darius to supplicate. To provoke him further, Alexander avoided mentioning the
women.

  Darius did not deign to answer. By angering him, Alexander had induced him to raise another army, a matter of months or even years. Meanwhile, Alexander could pursue his next two goals, seizing Phoenicia and then Egypt. After that, Darius would have another chance to beg for his life.

  in the mild weather of early winter, the army entered Phoenicia, a coastal strip of cities that abounded in resources of every kind. These cities resembled Greece, but also Asian kingdoms. In Arwad, Sidon, and Tyre, priest-kings ruled, but they differed from Greek or Macedonian kings with religious duties. They served as admirals, not generals, and so they were often overseas. Although of royal birth, they sometimes did not take office until acclaimed by a citizen assembly. As Alexander had learned, they worshipped in a familiar way, but did not always worship familiar gods. Inland, in neighboring Syria, some Semites were henotheistic, worshipping one god in preference to all others. Identifying this god with Zeus or Baal Haman would be an error.42

  Since Phoenicia consisted of independent cities, Alexander could not rule it as a whole. Nor could he appoint satraps and garrison commanders and leave administration to them. He would have to make use of the position of priest-king. Would he appoint himself to this post, or leave it to the incumbents?

  For a third time, the army marched through the 600-yard coastal narrows where the Hebrews said Jonah had come ashore. As they walked south for a week, to Arwad, a few warships accompanied them. Alexander’s scouts confirmed the surveyors’ warning: Arwad was an island. Part of the city was there, two miles offshore, and part on the mainland. The city’s fleet was absent, serving under the Persians, and so was the king.

  Alexander’s engineers advised that besieging the mainland settlement would be easy, but besieging the island would be difficult without more ships. To knock down the thirty-five-foot-high walls, they would have to put catapults on the ships, turning them into artillery platforms. So far as they knew, no navy had ever done this.43

  The citizen assembly in Arwad preempted any siege. At their behest, the crown prince sailed to the mainland and offered the throne of Arwad to Alexander. Alexander accepted, and the new king received a gold crown surpassing anything kings of the Macedonians wore. In return, Arwad received two considerations more valuable than the crown: Alexander would leave the prince in charge, and Arwad’s citizens would pay no more tribute than they had to the Persians.44

  Alexander wanted no more crowns on these terms. At the next city, Sidon, a week down the road, he declined to become king. He delegated negotiations to a trusted companion, Hephaestion, but Hephaestion, a novice, made a kind of religious mistake.45

  In Sidon, the king and the citizen assembly were at odds with each other. When the king, a Persian loyalist, refused to negotiate, the assembly sent delegates who surrendered to Hephaestion. They proposed that he name a new king. Hephaestion suggested one of the delegates, but they proposed a puppet—a royal relative who was a gardener. The gardener, they said, would know the royal family’s ceremonies. For the sake of the ceremonies, it seems, Hephaestion agreed.46

  Instead of being king, Alexander ended up with a vassal controlled by an assembly. That would make it harder to raise taxes, get ships, and unify Phoenicia. The winner in the negotiations, the assembly, got a priest-king who would not be a king. Rather than object, Alexander gave the new government most of the Persian wealth kept in the city. He took the rest and moved on to Tyre, a few days down the road. Here, in the biggest of the cities, Alexander got neither a crown nor a puppet. Instead he got a fight.

  At Tyre, stone and mortar walls 150 feet high encircled a community of about 100,000 crammed into a square mile. Tyre was the ancient world’s Manhattan, with outer boroughs of the city lining the shore half a mile away. The Macedonians arrived and overwhelmed these settlements with money, demands, and news that all the other Phoenician ports had fallen, and had also lent their navies to the invaders.

  The great powers of the past had seized the mainland towns, but no one had ever captured the island. Nebuchadnezzar, who had cut through the mountains and cut down the forests, besieged Tyre for thirteen years and then gave up. The Persian authorities, who maintained a garrison in Sidon to prevent revolts, never set foot in Tyre. In that era before catapults, the walls were impregnable. To be captured, a strongly walled city would have to be betrayed from within. That often happened in Greece, but not in Tyre.47

  The balanced, stable government of Tyre made betrayal less likely. An assembly of the people joined a council of elders and a priest-king in running the city. Over centuries, power had shifted from one to another, or to judges who umpired conflicts, but in Alexander’s time the people were strongest, and they were chauvinist. At most, the priest-king might sway the sailors in the fleet, which he commanded as admiral.

  The chief god, Melkart, was the priest-king’s partner. The god’s name meant “king of the city,” and the priest-king alone could lead worship at Melkart’s shrine, the most opulent in Tyre, built with gold and sapphire columns. Each spring this god, who also ruled the underworld, rose from the dead at the king’s request and came to Tyre. An image of Melkart was set afire, put aboard a boat, and sent out to sea, blazing, to warn the world that Tyre, like Venice, had renewed its marriage to the waters. When the Macedonians arrived, this festival was some weeks away. Ambassadors from Carthage, Tyre’s most important colony, would shortly arrive for the celebrations. Between them, Tyre and Carthage had enough first-class warships to challenge all Greeks together. Melkart was an avatar of naval, royal, and intercontinental power—a Titan, the columns of whose shrine, the highest spot in the city, shone in the distance at night.48

  Alexander thought Melkart was Heracles. (Heracles, after all, had come back from the underworld, even if he was not king there.) As a descendant of Heracles and Melkart, too, Alexander could claim the position of Tyrian king. For this purpose, he did not need a vote of the assembly or the elders. He needed access to the temple of Melkart. If he could make an offering there at festival time, he would be king as a result. The present king, he knew, was absent with the Persian fleet. When this king returned, he would protest, but Alexander, Melkart’s descendant, would outrank him. Heracles-Melkart had appeared to him in a dream and laid out the plan for Alexander. The binational god conveniently spoke to him in Greek.49

  The assembly of Tyre did not endorse Alexander’s scheme. They invited him to sacrifice in a lesser temple, on the mainland. Alexander declined. The assembly persisted. Only a Phoenician, they reasoned, could be a scion of Melkart. To gain access to Melkart, Alexander concluded, he would have to capture the city, doing what the Persians, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, and the pharaohs never had.50

  Summoning his councilors, Alexander proposed a siege. They thought it unnecessary. The Macedonians needed to keep watch over Tyre, not capture it. The Persians now had few ships, and Alexander would soon receive ships contributed by Arwad, Sidon, and Phoenician ports on Cyprus. This fleet could isolate Tyre, and a small force of Macedonians could do the same on land. The rest of the army should leave Tyre behind, just as they had left Halicarnassus behind.51

  Polyidus and the engineers offered another objection to a siege. Deep, treacherous waters protected the city. How could the Macedonians build a mole a half mile long across the strait and reach the walls? Even if they could, it would take months, and they would run out of food. Alexander answered that somehow or other they would turn the island into a peninsula and bring their siege engines close enough to knock down the walls. Food would come from the hinterland, as it had for the Tyrians.52

  Alexander also placated the councilors with a last attempt to negotiate. He officiously sent a herald to Tyre under Hermes’ protection. When the man did not return, Alexander claimed that the Tyrians had put him to death. That was sacrilege. The story was surely untrue: heralds enjoyed divine protection in Phoenicia as well as in Greece and Macedon. Yet the army believed the story. Alexander now had a moral advantage in the council debate, and he prevail
ed.53

  Perhaps Alexander also had to convince himself. For that he turned to the soothsayer Aristander. Alexander told Aristander he had dreamed that Heracles was leading him into Tyre, and Aristander replied that Tyre would fall, but only after labors to compare with those of Heracles. Alexander’s troops had reservations, too. When red specks appeared in some of the army’s bread, they panicked because of the bad omen. Aristander calmed this constituency by saying that the blood the soldiers saw was that of the Tyrians. When the men saw a whale in the harbor, that was bad news for the Tyrians. Then Aristander killed a sheep and inspected the liver: it looked propitious.54

  From the commander in chief to the common soldiers, the Macedonians had been in disarray. This double dose of religion provided a tonic. It did not provide a guarantee. Aristander’s predictions would flow back and forth with the tides of war.

  Operations began in midwinter with Macedonian work on the mole. The engineers battered down buildings in the seaside towns and hauled the earth and rubble to the shoreline. As boats carried the debris out to sea and dropped it, the Tyrians ridiculed Alexander for warring upon the god of the sea, then attacked the Macedonians with catapults from their own vessels. The Macedonians protected themselves with dozens of skins and sails; the Tyrians landed marines and butchered the longshoremen loading rubble onto Macedonian boats. Still, the mole rose to sea level, and the engineers commenced building towers and battering rams to roll up to the city walls. Modular towers devised by the engineer Diades would let catapults and archers fire down on the citadel.55

  Then the Tyrians called upon their allies living on Mount Lebanon, east of the city. Alexander’s foresters, who were stripping the mountain of timber for towers and rams, found themselves ambushed. Angered, Alexander left the siege of Tyre to Perdiccas and others and took a strike force into Mount Lebanon and beyond, killing any who resisted. One night when he and a companion had no fire, he ventured alone among some enemy sentries, killed them, and brought back a firebrand.56 When food ran low, he demanded help from peoples to the south, including the worshippers of Yahweh around Samaria and Jerusalem. Some refused, but some gave, impressed by the slaughter on Mount Lebanon.