by F S Naiden
When Alexander awoke and recalled the oracle which had been delivered to him, he recognized the Lord of all. He built a great altar and ordered that fit offerings be brought for the gods, and he had the architect Parmenio build the city’s holy places.62
The prophecy given by the “Lord of all” would prove true. Alexandria would venerate its founder for centuries, but not in a way Alexander would have understood, or even the Christian author of this passage would have. Alexander’s religious future lay with neither Christians nor pagans nor Jews.
In the spring of 331, when he left Egypt, this future was very distant. Meanwhile, the Macedonians, who knew him as a priest-king of one sort, did not accept him as a king of any other sort. The Tyrians had accepted him, but under duress. The Egyptians had accepted him, too, but on their own terms. That would also prove true of the next people Alexander would encounter, in Babylonia.
6
The Throne of Babylon
in the spring of 331 BC, the Macedonians left Egypt the way they had come in. The army gathered at Pelusium, at the eastern end of the delta, and marched up the coastal road. Uncooperative before, the Arabs were now officious. Once the army reached Palestine, Perdiccas took a detachment, headed inland, and made short work of the Samaritans. When the army reached Tyre, Alexander made sumptuous offerings to Melkart, the Semitic patron god, and added Greek games and a donative. In an expansive mood, he received ambassadors from Athens and granted a request of theirs that he had previously rejected. They wished to ransom Athenians who served the Persians as mercenaries and had then been captured. Alexander chose to regard the prisoners as suppliants, and he let them go for nothing. In the same mood, he let Harpalus, who had deserted him before Issus, return and resume his post as treasurer. Harpalus, one of his original companions, had sat next to him in classes taught by Aristotle.1
He also took on a new diviner, a Syrian woman who suffered prophetic fits and who was right often enough that Alexander came to trust her. She, not Barsine, slept beside him every night. She would tacitly compete with Aristander. So would others, including a specialist in the Babylonian art of reading sheep’s livers.2
From Babylon, Darius wrote Alexander a third time, asking for the return of the women captured at Issus. If Alexander would give up Darius’s mother, other members of the royal family, and their servants, Darius would allow him to keep one of the women, his own daughter, and marry her. Alexander would also receive 10,000 talents, or twenty times the previous offer, and obtain all land west of the Euphrates. Alexander probably could not keep this big an offer secret, and thanks to his recent successes did not think he had to. He summoned a council meeting, disclosed the offer to the generals, and asked for their advice.3
The older companions, Philip’s men, wanted to take the offer. Parmenio spoke politely on behalf of these veterans. He did not like the odds in a battle against Darius on the plains of Syria or Mesopotamia. The Persian cavalry would run rings around them. Perhaps Parmenio and the other generals did not like what little they knew of Babylon. It might be another Egypt, seducing their king into promoting natives as well as companions.
The Route of the Expedition Through Anatolia, 334–333 BC.
Ancient World Mapping Center.
Alexander replied impolitely to Parmenio. If he were Parmenio, he said, he would take the offer, but since he was Alexander, he would refuse it. Or so some companions remembered years later in their memoirs. Alexander never said anything so witty. He said many things that were this pointed, and made a pointed reply now. His marriages were his business, and he would not take a Persian for a wife. His Persian captives were his property, and he would not return them for a mere 10,000 talents. Alexander would return the captives only if Darius surrendered the Persian Empire. He dismissed the council, who returned to their tents more aware than ever of their commander’s indomitable zeal.
Insulted yet again, Darius made no reply.
For the first time, the Macedonians could foresee the course of the war. Alexander had demanded that Darius capitulate, and Darius had refused, and so Alexander must again try to capture or kill him. If that failed—as it had at Issus—the Macedonians must seize Mesopotamia, especially Babylon and Susa, both of which were capitals of the empire. Then Darius would become marginal. Alexander could carry the war into Persia and Central Asia, or, if the generals could persuade him, he could satisfy himself with Babylon and the Near East and leave Persia to the Persians. Perhaps Persian men would learn to do what the women had done and beg for mercy.
After just three years of fighting, Alexander may have thought he could unify the Near East as easily as his father unified Greece in the course of a lifetime. So far he had achieved seductive economies of scale. He had seized half the Near East at the cost of a few thousand of his own men. He had killed tens of thousands of the enemy once, at Issus, and he had killed thousands of civilians twice, at Tyre and Gaza. Some foes were now in his service. In Syria and Egypt he had got rich, and so had his companions. One of them, Antipater, ruled Greece; another, Antigonus, ruled much of Asia Minor, and piece by piece would acquire much of the rest. Only Zeus’s favor (and Amon’s) could explain such victories. Babylonian Marduk would welcome him. Alexander knew this god had welcomed the victorious Cyrus, if not other conquerors.4
the macedonians left Syria in July 331. Between them and the Persian army, now at Babylon, flowed the Euphrates River, easiest to cross at the Carcemish ford used by Xenophon and later Darius. If the Persians wished, they could block the ford, or catch the Macedonians in midstream. Alexander and the generals nonetheless took the risk of advancing straight to Carcemish. When they reached the Euphrates, they threw two pontoon bridges across the river, no matter the risk. A few Persian scouts under Mazdai were watching, but soon they withdrew over the horizon.5
For the next five days Alexander’s army marched over the bridge. Next they might go down the Euphrates, or travel a little farther and go down a tributary. Xenophon had. The generals rejected this route for lack of forage and fear of the heat. Instead they went east, heading toward the higher ground and lower temperatures in the valley of the Tigris. None of the Egyptians now in the entourage knew it, but by crossing the Euphrates Alexander had marched farther into Asia than any pharaoh.6
Alexander drove the army hard, marching the 300 miles to the Tigris in several weeks. The only road to Babylon lay on the far side, and to reach it the Macedonians again had to use a ford. They found one that was unguarded. Mazdai and his scouts had merely burned the granaries nearby. Around September 1 the army reached the road to Babylon, 360 miles to the south. This was Assyria, once the home of an empire, now a string of ex-capitals reduced to small towns or desert mounds, like Nineveh.7
Before the Macedonians lay a more complex objective than Egypt had been. Far to the south, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates was marshy, like the Nile Delta. Near Babylon, the land became firmer. Irrigation canals made any route other than the highway impracticable. Aside from patches of irrigated land, all was desert, and so the invaders must hop from one settlement to the next. That way they could feed on dates, and on beer and bread made from recently harvested grain. Village livestock would be in reach. Other flocks and herds belonged to camel-riding nomads and would not be worth the trouble to capture. Above Babylon, at the narrow point between the two rivers, stood the longest wall in the Near East. It ran from the Tigris to Sippar, on the Euphrates. Nebuchadnezzar had built it to block invaders.
The most important part of the environment lay overhead. The sky seemed larger than elsewhere, and brighter day and night. During their march south, on the thirteenth day of the Babylonian month of Elulu, a lunar eclipse occurred. The army had just pitched camp that evening. The eclipse lasted sixty-four minutes. A sandy west wind blew.8
The troops had seen eclipses before. One occurred in Egypt that spring, but they were not on campaign at the time, and so they ignored it. Three more occurred during the fighting in Anatolia but did not frig
hten them. Alexander and his seers, who could not predict eclipses, followed a formula for responding to them. The seers would declare the eclipse a good omen for the Macedonians and a bad one for the enemy. If the troops thought that the gods were favorable to them, this explanation would suffice. If the troops doubted the gods, they would need reassurance, and Alexander would resort to other devices.9
They needed reassurance now. They had been skirting a desert, and their route lacked shade trees and clear water. The gods of the locality were incomprehensible, and the troops had not seen any shrine betokening a Greek god for many weeks. They did not believe Alexander’s claim to be the son of Amon or Zeus-Amon, and so they got no reassurance that way. Beleaguered, they decided they would not march farther, and refused to stir from camp.
Alexander consulted the priests of Amon in his entourage. The Egyptians knew there had been several lunar eclipses since the expedition began, and that after each eclipse the Macedonians had continued to advance. They declared that the disappearance of the moon always boded ill for the Persians.10
Calling a meeting of seers and generals, Alexander announced this interpretation. Aristander agreed with it, and the generals welcomed it. The troops required something ceremonial, so the king ordered offerings to the sun, the moon, and the earth. These went well: the victims were slain, their entrails examined, their tails watched to see whether they would curl when put above the flames. Smoke trailed upward to divine nostrils. No eagle spoilt the affair, as happened at Gaza. Aristander predicted a battle by the end of the month. He knew—the officers told him—that the army would reach the enemy by then.11
After the sacrifice, the men ate, drank, and sang hymns. They did not object to beer instead of wine. Priest Alexander had calmed his troops.
The next morning Alexander rose early, as he commonly did, and made the daily offerings that assured him that the men should march on. When the offerings proved favorable, the army fell in and marched toward Arbela, the favorite residence of the goddess Ishtar. Like Athena, to whom he sacrificed before Issus, Ishtar was a warrior. If he prayed to a local goddess again, she would be his choice.
in the year and a half since the battle of Issus, Darius had replenished his forces and built up a new army in Babylon. His troops were mostly Central Asian cavalry, suited to a fight on the plains of Mesopotamia. A few had ridden ahead under Mazdai. Babylonians and their Iranian neighbors contributed infantry, and so did India. Mountain peoples—Armenians, Medes, and troops from the southern Caspian—formed another detachment. The western part of the empire contributed little, the Greeks even less. The Persians contributed mainly the Immortals and the king’s guard.
Some of Darius’s men were inexperienced, most far from home. All had heard of Alexander, now ruler of half the empire, but only the Immortals, the guard, and the cavalry had fought him. Mazdai and another general, Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, had fought at Issus, but not in Anatolia.
Once the Macedonians crossed the Tigris, Darius led the main body north from Babylon and occupied Arbela. A road to Iran passed through this Assyrian town, and he wished to control the junction. He had pitched camp north of the city and was preparing a battlefield when the eclipse occurred.12
Like Alexander’s men, Darius’s panicked. The Great King looked to priests to calm them. His Persian Magi used some formula that satisfied the king, his satraps, and his Persian troops. The army, though, was not mostly Persians, and these other subjects of Darius’s would look elsewhere for an explanation of the eclipse. The most likely place was an omen text. Babylon’s priests had produced a large literature of astronomical omens. Astronomy—which they did not separate from astrology—was their specialty. They predicted events such as eclipses, and they also interpreted them as divine signs.13
Babylonian astronomy had been developing for several hundred years. Continuous records of celestial observations dated from the eighth century BC, approximately the time of Homer. By the time of Nebuchadnezzar, astronomers had identified the twelve signs of the zodiac. By the time of the Persian wars with Greece, they had cast the first horoscopes.14
When this eclipse occurred, the priests had an omen text to explain it. The text said, “The enemy will inflict a defeat on the land. The enemy”—that was Alexander—“will take all royal possessions.” Darius probably did not hear of this prediction. If his Mesopotamian soldiers heard of it, it made their panic worse.15
This text also revealed a gap between Darius and the astronomers, who were the leading priests in Babylon. Rather than serve Darius, these priests were disinterested. If the eclipse was ominous for Darius, they would regard this piece of information as something for them to know and Darius to find out. They would not try to reverse the omen by means of a sacrifice. Since the omen came from the gods, it was irreversible except by special rituals that Darius did not ask them to perform.
Aristander and the other diviners on whom Alexander relied were traveling practitioners who had to please and persuade their royal client. The same went for Darius’s Magi. The Babylonian astronomers were experts attached to shrines, especially the shrine of Marduk in Babylon, rather than to kings and armies. Rather than guess, they calculated. Rather than disagree with a ruler, as Aristander sometimes did with Alexander, they kept their own counsel. Military morale was not their concern.16
worried about food and water, the Macedonians had kept moving, and eight days after the eclipse scouts riding at night sighted the constellation of Persian campfires lit mile after mile across the plain. They were stunned. They did not know the enemy was dispirited.17
Meeting the next morning, the leading companions fell into sharper disagreement than ever before. Many favored attacking later that same day, for they feared the enemy might encircle them if they waited. Parmenio preferred to pitch camp. He told his fellow councilors that the Macedonians should survey the terrain. It was, he noted, a battlefield chosen by Darius. Although Alexander presided over this meeting of the generals as he always did, he took no position. Parmenio prevailed.18
Taking the companion cavalry with him, Alexander rode the four miles of ground between the two sides. He discovered that the Persians had cleared one area for scythed chariots, cavalry, and creatures called elephants. A Greek mercenary deserter revealed that the Persians had booby-trapped another area. Returning to camp, Alexander called a meeting later the same day. He proposed to attack the next morning, but Parmenio proposed a surprise attack during the night, now that Macedonians knew the ground. A night attack might cause the enemy to panic, and negate the Persian advantage in numbers.19
Some agreed with Parmenio, but Alexander did not. In rebuking them, the king avoided challenging Parmenio and instead singled out a new regimental commander, Polyperchon, a veteran of Philip’s wars. Alexander told him the army should not strike at night, like a burglar, but attack in the light of day after the customary ceremonies. Other generals agreed with Alexander for a practical reason: they feared losing control of their men in the dark. This time Alexander prevailed. The meeting went on to discuss sidestepping the chariots and posting a reserve. Once the battle began, it would be too late to give orders for maneuvers like these. The council must give the orders now.20
After the meeting, the officers told their men to wait until morning. That night, the sight of the countless Persian fires demoralized them.
Alexander wanted help from the gods, but Callisthenes could not give him suggestions. The Greek intellectual did not know this country, and neither did Alexander’s Egyptian advisors. At a late hour, Alexander prayed alone to the local Athena, surely Ishtar, and to the local Zeus.21 Ishtar was an especially good choice, for she had been the dry nurse to the Assyrian conqueror Assurbanipal and a goddess much revered by Cyrus the Great. Instead of praying to Heracles, another god he typically invoked, Alexander addressed the Greek god Panic. Aristander attended as the king asked Panic to visit the other side, not his own, and cause a Persian rout. After returning to his tent exhausted, Alexander ov
erslept.22
At dawn, Parmenio and the top commanders met by the tent, and found they must wait. They ordered that the army take breakfast, but did not disturb Alexander. Then, after more time passed—too much time—Parmenio went in and awakened him. The old general asked him how he could relax before a battle, and the king replied that by marching unchallenged through the deserts of Mesopotamia the Macedonians had already won. Just before the Macedonians broke camp, the king summoned a larger circle of commanders to remind them of the battle plan, take questions, and boost morale. As the battle drew near, he became calmer.23
When the Macedonians marched out, the day was fair, but the wind was already brisk, a sign of a coming sandstorm. The officers led long columns of men to the fore, ordered them to wheel, and extended them left and right until the front stretched about two and a half miles across the sandy plain. Amid the rising dust, the 50,000 men moved almost silently, at the nod of their officers and the blare of trumpets. From half a mile away, the Persians watched the choral parade.24
The Thessalian and allied cavalry patrolled the left flank, under Parmenio, and that was standard, as was the phalanx in the center. Four of the six regimental commanders had served since the start of the expedition. Craterus led the regiment at one end, Coenus the regiment at the other. The right side of the line, Alexander’s, began with the shield bearers and the companion cavalry, both under sons of Parmenio. That was standard, too. Yet the battle of Issus had inspired some changes. On the far right, Alexander put archers and light Balkan troops, refusing to prevent encirclement by the Persians. The same change appeared on the left, where other cavalry and light troops from Thrace stood at an angle. In the rear, a reserve protected the baggage train with its prisoners and wounded.25