Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Alexander rode with the companion cavalry, next to Philotas and Clitus, and Parmenio commanded his flank from a post between Craterus and the Thessalians. The two men were more than a mile apart, farther than in past battles, and so they planned to communicate by messenger.

  A tired Persian army awaited them. Darius had expected a night attack, just as Parmenio proposed, and so he had kept his men up all night. Like Alexander, he had prayed, but not to Panic. Instead he invoked one or more Persian gods, notably Mithra, the god of duty and fidelity. He now deployed his troops in traditional fashion. His chariots and elephants occupied the cleared ground at the foot of a hill resembling a camel’s hump. To the left of them he put Bessus, the Bactrian and Central Asian cavalry, and the cavalry from Elam; in the center, behind the chariots, he put Indian cavalry ahead of the Babylonians and their neighbors; on the right, he put Mazdai and the troops from the Caucasus and nearby Parthia and Media. He stationed his men ethnically, whereas the Macedonians stationed theirs functionally. To Darius, troops were subjects. To Alexander and Parmenio, they were instruments. A continent was fighting an army.26

  Darius stood in a chariot in the center, protected by his remaining Greek mercenaries as well as the Immortals and the guard. The gray mare he rode in emergencies waited beside him.27

  Darius started the battle, sending Bessus’s men to the flank. He wished to confine Alexander’s troops to the area the Persians had cleared for chariots. Alexander ordered his light troops to counter the move. Then came the chariots. The Macedonians stepped aside, and the horse-drawn machines raced through the lines and off the field. Alexander now spied a chance to slip into the gap Bessus had left behind him. Avoiding the booby traps, Alexander and the companion cavalry trotted forward, and the shield bearers followed. An eagle soared over Alexander’s head, and Aristander, marching nearby, encouraged the men to regard this as a good omen. Alexander led the advancing wedge in search of Darius. He was pursuing his objective of capturing or killing one man, not defeating an army.28

  Alexander’s pursuit of his goal led to the same mishap as at Issus. The Macedonian army split, the lead element under Alexander, the rest under Parmenio. Ordered by Darius to rescue the Persian prisoners, Mazdai saw a chance to accomplish this mission by passing between the two parts of the Macedonian army. He plunged through, leading his cavalry toward the baggage train.29

  The generals had warned the Macedonian reserve about such an attack. As Mazdai reached the baggage train, the reserve struck back, spears lowered, and drove away Mazdai and his cavalry. Darius had squandered some of his best men on a futile attempt to free some of his noblest women.30

  Other Persian cavalry swung wide and outflanked Parmenio and his Thessalians. Parmenio was again in trouble, but Alexander had no occasion to stop and see how Parmenio was faring. The swirling dust blinded him. Parmenio sent a messenger saying that Mazdai had broken through but that the reserve had blunted this attack. Enemy cavalry were harassing him, and the phalanx had split in two. Two regiments were with him, and the other four were trying to follow Alexander. The time had come for Alexander to face about and attack Mazdai.31

  Afterward, the companions did not agree whether Alexander got the message. In any event, he trotted onward and his four regiments followed. They advanced in squares of several hundred men apiece, each led by a mounted officer conspicuous because of his breastplate and his horse. In the van rode the commander, even more conspicuous because of a purple cape. Coenus led the first regiment, Perdiccas the second. They could not make themselves less vulnerable by charging, stopping, or turning aside. They must go at the pace of infantry toting fifteen-foot spears.32

  The Persian archers spotted them, and concentrated their fire on the purple capes visible above the rising dust. They wounded Coenus and Perdiccas, who fell out of line. The mass of Alexander’s cavalry offered them another easy target, and they brought down a hundred of them. Hephaestion, leading some of the shield bearers, took a spear in the shoulder. All for naught: they missed Alexander and Bucephalas, too. Subordinates replaced the wounded commanders, and the decimated companions regrouped and trotted on. Where Alexander led, the shield bearers followed, and so did Coenus’s and Perdiccas’s regiments. They struck the Persian line, and under the impact the enemy wavered and began to break. The Indian troops were among the last to go. After a time, only the Immortals were defending Darius.33

  As at Issus, the Persian king faced the choice of fighting or retreating. He had little news to go on. Dust from the battle prevented him from seeing whether Mazdai had liberated his relatives or whether other cavalry had defeated Parmenio. Perhaps Mazdai or other commanders sent reports that did not get through. After waiting until the last possible moment, Darius left his chariot, got on his gray mare, and rode off the battlefield, heading for Arbela. The Immortals blocked any close pursuit. The rest of the Persians had already quit the field. Parmenio had defeated some of them and the reserves had defeated the rest.34

  When Darius reached Arbela, he called a meeting of his advisers. He wished to know whether to turn east, to Iran, or continue south, to Babylon. If he went east and Alexander followed him, he would draw the Macedonians away from Babylon. That would spare the city, and it would not endanger Darius, who could outrun his pursuers. Darius could reach Ecbatana, a Persian capital in northwest Iran, and regroup. If he went south, to Babylon, Alexander would follow him and besiege the city. Darius knew of the Macedonians’ success at Tyre, and he may have assumed Babylon would eventually fall. Then Alexander would capture him and the city both.35

  To deny Alexander this victory, he and the advisers decided that he should head east, into the mountains. Darius quit Mesopotamia, but purposefully, the way he had quit the battlefield.

  After Darius decided to withdraw to Iran, his top subordinates split. Mazdai went south to Babylon, and Bessus followed Darius. The remains of the Persian army, including troops that had not yet done any fighting, clogged the road to Arbela. The one bridge Darius had built over a river just down the road helped a few to safety, but blocked more. Many turned away from the road to find something to drink. The water in the irrigation canals made them sick, and easier for the pursuing Macedonians to dispatch. For the first time in two years, Alexander’s army killed many thousands. Their own casualties numbered less than 1,000. The Phoenician sutlers prospered. They bought many tens of thousands of Persian captives from Alexander, and sent them up the Tigris, to be sold into slavery.36

  Because of the stench of the Persian corpses on the battlefield, Alexander could not bury his hundreds of dead there. He brought the bodies to the vicinity of Arbela and buried them at a victory memorial on a hill. Then he paraded to the citadel of the city, the location of Egasankalamma, the gold-and-silver-plated temple of Ishtar. He gave a victor’s customary thanks for success in battle and also for the discovery of a trove of gold and silver abandoned by Darius. He knew that Ishtar could not crown him king of Mesopotamia. The priests of Babylonian Marduk kept that privilege for themselves. He must go on to Babylon, and never mind pursuing Darius. Although Darius was a prize, Babylon and Marduk were bigger ones.37

  Alexander perhaps took note of the municipal water supply piped from three rivers. He did not know it, but Sennacherib, whose monument had bewildered the companions in Cilicia, two years before, had built the tunnels. Besides being the world’s best astronomers, the Mesopotamians were the world’s best engineers, as shown by ziggurats and walls as well as irrigation canals and water mains. They had learned to use naphtha to make asphalt, and just south of Arbela Alexander and his courtiers encountered naphtha for the first time, as it bubbled up from the ground. Curious about the substance, Alexander cast about for some way to learn more about it, and had one of his slaves doused with it. The man accidentally caught fire and nearly died of his burns.38

  Like naphtha, Mesopotamia would need careful handling. Egypt had its mysteries, but Mesopotamia packed more surprises and disappointments. No one here would suppose Ale
xander had a special life force, a ka.

  while at arbela, Alexander changed his policy toward his subjects. To win friends, he announced the overthrow of tyrants throughout the empire. That had helped him at Ephesus, and it might help again. He also wanted to find some new, more plausible title for himself. He might call himself king of Asia, a term the Greeks would understand, but there was no kingdom of Asia. The people of Asia did not think of themselves as Asians, and would not recognize him as their king. He hit upon another phrase, “master of Asia,” as though Asia were his household or his estate. Soon after the battle he tried out this phrase in a personal rather than official way. He sent some spoils to an important shrine of Athena located in Lindos on the island of Rhodes. The Lindians received a donation inscribed: “King Alexander, having bested Darius in battle and become Master of Asia, Made offerings to Athena of Lindos.” Not far away in this shrine stood a statue dedicated to Athena by a pharaoh of two hundred years before.39

  The Lindians thanked Alexander. He was welcome to be master of Asia, but not master of any Greeks. They assumed that he would not tax their property, occupy their city, or usurp their ceremonies. Other Greeks adopted this attitude. Alexander now wielded more power than before, but not over them.

  Despite the victory, Alexander and the army found themselves somewhat at odds with each other. During the battle at Arbela, the army fought in three parts that did not communicate effectively. The officers felt isolated, if not slighted. The companions had won without acting like companions.

  Philotas voiced this feeling when he remarked that he felt sorry for the defeated Persians, since they were fighting a demigod, and sorry for the cavalry, since they had to ride hard to keep up with one. This witticism and others came to Alexander’s ears from Craterus, who had heard it from Philotas’s concubine. For the first time, he had passed along some of her gossip to Alexander.

  Soldiers who shared Philotas’s skepticism expressed themselves to Philotas and not to Alexander. A cavalry officer named Hegelochus came to Philotas and said that the troops felt insulted to serve under a so-called Egyptian god. He offered to kill Alexander. Alexander, after all, had done away with Philip, his true father, and so he was a virtual parricide. He deserved to die at the hands of a regicide.

  Philotas rebuffed Hegelochus, but told Alexander nothing. Hegelochus and his mounted scouts had been the first men to reach the Granicus River the day before the big battle. After Philotas told Antigone about Hegelochus, this tale reached Alexander, too. It did not matter that Hegelochus would soon die in battle. The tale told by Antigone would outlive him.40

  Craterus and many others realized that the main danger to morale came from another quarter. Many men who had no thoughts of murder—and no political thoughts at all—wanted to serve in less trying circumstances closer to home. News of military successes in Anatolia and Greece heightened this feeling.

  Antigonus, Alexander’s top commander in Anatolia, had cleaned up the spots missed during the Macedonians’ S-curve march through the peninsula. Antigonus had defeated several Persian armies, and he and Parmenio’s younger brother had eliminated the main Persian garrisons. The Macedonians serving under Antigonus mostly commanded native troops. They ran fewer risks than Alexander’s forces, and administered the territories they conquered. Antigonus not only made himself look good but made service under Alexander look worse.41

  The news from Macedon and Greece made the same impression on the troops. Antipater, Alexander’s viceroy, suppressed a rebellion led by Sparta. The Spartan leaders knew that Alexander had left the Mediterranean region, but they did not know of the victory at Arbela, and so the moment to overthrow the Macedonians seemed to have arrived. The Spartan king Agis assembled 20,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry, an army comparable to Philip’s, and more than equal to what Alexander had left to Antipater. Agis threw back the Macedonian forces in southern Greece.

  Antipater responded by raising troops and attacking Agis in Arcadia, in central Peloponnesus. In many hours of hard fighting, Antipater’s men inflicted 5,000 casualties on the Spartan core of the enemy force, and killed Agis. The Spartan defeat, the worst they ever suffered, finished them as a Greek military power.

  To companions of Philip’s generation, this, and not the battle of Arbela, was the best achievement of Alexander’s reign. Although Alexander had sent Antipater 3,000 talents, the money may have arrived too late to do any good, and so Antipater may have won by himself. Alexander belittled his viceroy’s victory, calling it a “battle of mice.” He told the companions that his own military reputation, now greater than ever, would overawe future enemies. Babylon would put any such claim to the test. The city and its leaders expected to negotiate with Alexander before surrendering.42

  greeks regarded babylon as the largest, richest city in the world.43 Many workmen were paid in silver, and quit if not paid on time. Thousands worked in just one industry, baking bricks. In the Persian period, wages rose, and private houses got bigger. Great trading houses sued each other, and the courts stayed busy.44 To judge from the surviving records, Babylon led Tyre, Athens, and everywhere else in kinds and numbers of commercial documents—contracts, leases, bills of sale, mortgages, loans, promissory notes. Whereas Athens and Phoenicia fought incessant wars and Athens prosecuted intellectuals, Babylon did neither.

  Astronomers and other clergy ran Babylon, giving the Persian satrap and garrison their cut. The palace of Nebuchadnezzar, where the satrap lived, might be the city’s biggest residence, but the temple of Marduk was the biggest building, and the attached ziggurat, where the astronomers worked, was the tallest building on earth, save for the pyramids. The astronomers formed a college like All Souls or the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. They and other leading priests belonged to a local assembly that was the most important center of power other than the Persian garrison.45 The assemblymen wished to keep their posts, income, and perquisites. Mazdai, who had taken charge of the Persian garrison, wished to be spared, and to have his men spared. Neither group could be sure of Alexander’s aims. Did the invader want plunder, power, or a general massacre?

  As Alexander marched south, Mazdai’s troops kept watch along the wall of Nebuchadnezzar some twenty-five miles north of the city. Then Mazdai sent emissaries to his foe. Would Alexander spare him and his troops? Perhaps, Alexander replied. Would Alexander spare the city? Perhaps. Did Alexander wish to become king? When Alexander answered yes, Mazdai put him in touch with the administrator of the shrine of Marduk, called the shatammu. He was not a royal impersonator, like an Egyptian priest, or a civil servant, like a Greek one. He served as a chief executive.

  The shatammu gave Alexander a Babylonian history lesson translated into Greek by Mazdai’s staff and Alexander’s Phoenicians. The Babylonians had been without a king since the Persians abolished the position a century and a half ago. Before that, Cyrus the Great and Cyrus’s son Cambyses had served as king and respected temple privileges. At Cambyses’s death, the usurper Darius I became the ruler of Persia, and Babylon rebelled against him, making a descendant of Nabonidus, the last native prince, the new king of the city. Darius suppressed the rebellion, and to punish Babylon he abolished the position of king.46

  That was an error. The Babylonians waited until Xerxes succeeded Darius, and rebelled again. Xerxes suppressed this brief outbreak, removed temple officials, and seized some temple and business archives. That provoked the Babylonians to rebel a third time. This affray lasted the better part of a year, and culminated in a siege. Now that Alexander had arrived, the Babylonians hoped for a king who, unlike the Persians, would perform the two complementary tasks of keeping chaos at bay and protecting the temple.47

  Alexander, alas, was a foreigner, but the shatammu would instruct him. Then Alexander would swear an oath to Marduk. Other gods, like Ishtar, would witness the oath. The shatammu did not explain how the gods would manifest themselves—a professional secret.

  If Alexander did not swear the oath, neither the assembly nor M
arduk would cooperate with him.

  However little Alexander knew about Marduk and chaos, he did not need a lesson in the history of sieges of Babylon. Aside from Xerxes’s troubles, the Assyrians had once needed two years to capture the city, and even Cyrus needed months. Cyrus had to divert the waters of the Euphrates River. This feat reminded Alexander and the engineers of their labors at Tyre.48

  At the last moment, when the Macedonians reached the wall, at Sippar, the three sides struck a bargain. Mazdai and his men would be unharmed. So would Babylon. Mazdai would administer the city, but not in the manner of a satrap. Alexander would swear an oath to Marduk and become king of Babylon—king of the four corners and king of the world. Then he could do in Babylon what he had done in Tyre and Egypt: make prestigious sacrifices. Once he did, he would rule legitimately.49

  The shatammu brought word of the agreement to the assembly, which met in the usual place, the juniper garden beside the temple of Marduk. They agreed to offer the throne to Alexander as of 336, six years earlier. That way Darius would never have ruled Babylon. Back among the Macedonians, Alexander announced his newest crown to the companions, along with the news there would be no more fighting around Babylon or elsewhere in Mesopotamia. Mazdai and some of his men escorted the army toward the city. Mazdai, who knew his Greeks, arranged for town notables to approach the army and supplicate. The suppliants called the invaders “Ionians,” or “Hanaeans,” the name of a long-vanished tribe from northwestern Mesopotamia. They used a gesture Greeks avoided, prostrating themselves. By supplicating this way they did obeisance to the invaders.50

  As the army trudged toward the city, led by Persians and accompanied by Babylonians, they passed one irrigation canal after another. The invaders noticed the large, regular, and impressively carved milestones, but they saw few people and fewer settlements. Then they spied a ridge—but no, the ridge was a seventy-five-foot wall of burnt brick hundreds of yards long. Scouts who swung away and approached the city sideways saw the next section of the wall, also interminably long.51