Alexander the Great

by Anthony Everitt

  A turning point had been reached. All the Companions were now fully engaged. Under their pressure, the Persian center collapsed, and the left was disintegrating as the archers and javelin throwers, mingling with the cavalry, outflanked it and rolled it up. It was now late afternoon, and low sunlight half-blinded the Persians, while it shone from behind the Macedonians.

  At some stage, Parmenion ordered the Thessalian horse and the Macedonian phalanx to destroy the disheartened—albeit till now disengaged—enemy in front of them.

  Whatever they did and whenever they did it, the Thessalians performed well: according to Diodorus, next to the king they “won a great reputation for valor because of the skillful handling of their squadrons and their unmatched fighting quality.”

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  TWO HOURS OR LESS had passed since the fighting started. The Greek mercenaries on the ridge watched stunned by the pace of events. What should they do now? Because Alexander was leading a Panhellenic crusade, they would inevitably be regarded as traitors. They faced a bleak future, if they had a future at all.

  They asked the king for quarter, but after the dangers of the battle he was in no mood to grant it. In a rage he charged at them and lost his horse (not Bucephalas on this occasion), which was pierced through the ribs by a sword thrust.

  This did not improve Alexander’s temper. He sent the phalanx against the Greeks and ordered the cavalry to surround them. Perhaps they would have been wiser to follow Xenophon’s example after the Battle of Cunaxa and march away at once. It took some time to massacre them. Few escaped, among them those who shammed death among the corpses. Two thousand were taken prisoner and sent in chains to Macedonia and forced labor.

  Although they had no hope, the mercenaries gave a good account of themselves, Plutarch writes: “It was here that most of the Macedonians who were killed or wounded, fought or fell, since they were battling at close quarters with men who were expert soldiers and had been rendered desperate.”

  It is said that the Persians lost twenty thousand infantry, most of them presumably Greek mercenaries, and twenty-five hundred cavalry; these are plausible numbers, if a little on the high side. From Darius’s point of view the loss of eight senior commanders, mainly in the confused fighting around Alexander, was a more serious blow. Luckily for his cause, that great survivor Memnon lived to fight another day. The local satrap, Arsites, fled the field to Phrygia. It was his advice that had led to the debacle, and from shame he committed suicide.

  As for Macedonian casualties, twenty-five Companions died in the first attack. Alexander had sacrificed them to clear the path for him, and he may have felt a little guilty on their account. He commissioned his favorite sculptor, Lysippus, to make bronze statues of them, which were erected in the sanctuary to Zeus at Dium, Macedonia’s “sacred space.”

  Of the rest of the cavalry, more than sixty died; so did about thirty foot soldiers. Alexander gave them magnificent funerals on the next day, with their arms and other equipment. He exempted their parents and children from land taxes and all other forms of personal state service and property levies. (He also buried the Persian commanders and, now that the blood mist had cleared, the slaughtered Greeks, in an astute gesture of goodwill and of respect for heroism.)

  Arrian writes that, with typical attention to his men and their morale, Alexander “showed great care for the wounded, personally visiting every one of them, inspecting their wounds, asking how they came by them and giving them the opportunity to boast about their exploits.” Later in the year, recently married officers and men were given leave to spend the winter in Macedonia with their wives. This hugely popular gesture was not accompanied by any softening of discipline: pillaging was still forbidden, camps were set up in the countryside, and men were not billeted in towns. The king’s generosity had a practical aspect, for the soldiers were told to bring back fresh Macedonian recruits.

  Spoils from the enemy headquarters—drinking vessels, purple hangings, and other such luxury goods—were customarily awarded to an army’s commander; Alexander sent most of them to Olympias.

  The king also paid attention to public opinion in Hellas. He wanted to reemphasize the war’s official purpose—revenge for the invasions of Darius I and Xerxes. He sent to Athens three hundred Persian panoplies to be dedicated to the goddess Athena in her temple on the Acropolis with the inscription: “Alexander the son of Philip and the Greeks except the Spartans dedicated these spoils from the barbarians living in Asia.”

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  WHAT DO WE LEARN of Alexander’s feelings and intentions at this juncture? Did he have a firm idea of what he was doing?

  He looked around the detritus of struggle as night fell on his victorious army, and his first emotion must have been one of unalloyed joy. He had fought gloriously; Achilles in the Elysian Fields was proud of him, he knew for sure. If there had ever been any doubt about his claim to be Greek and about his descent from gods and demigods, Granicus had dispelled it. He had inherited the leadership of the Hellenes; now he had earned it. At last Philip’s army was truly his.

  But courage was not the only quality that decided the day. The Macedonians were more disciplined than their opponents and the quality of their weaponry superior. Their cornel-wood spears gave them a decided advantage over the Persians’ flimsy javelins.

  Granicus was the moment Alexander took wing. He had displayed his talent as a field commander. With his eye for detail and his swift determination of tactics, first demonstrated in the Balkans, he had won the confidence both of his commanders and of the rank and file. He won battles. His men trusted him for his lunatic courage; he would himself do anything he asked of them, and more. Thanks to his devotion to their interests, the bond between them grew strong and stronger. They would follow wherever he led. In fact, it is hardly an exaggeration to speak of a collective love affair.

  But if Alexander’s performance in the field impressed his men, it aroused anxiety among his generals and courtiers. His performance at the Granicus was that of an immature and rash youth. He would have won the admiration of the warrior heroes of the Iliad, and he surely had this in mind. But the fact is that he had nearly died in the blood-soaked scrum on the riverside. A childless bachelor, he had refused to take the advice of Antipater and Parmenion and find a wife. The battle confirmed their worst fears that one sword thrust, one flying arrow, would put an end to the expedition. Had it not been for Cleitus, Alexander’s reign would already have been over. Being the new Achilles was a perilous and irresponsible enterprise.

  Maybe there was something of the sociopath in the king’s nature, excessively self-absorbed as he was and seemingly unable to enter into, or at least imagine, the feelings of others. We can only guess at this, though; we will never know it.

  As for his aims, some of Alexander’s remarks indicate that he expected to stay and govern, rather than score victories and go home. But how much territory did he expect to conquer? And how was conquest to be consistent with liberation, so far as the Ionian city-states were concerned?

  We must not forget his fathomless capacity for pothos. He harbored the dream of empire, but had to keep quiet about it. For his expeditionary force, freeing the Ionian cities and maybe acting as their guarantor and overlord was sufficient. The men would have strongly objected to an outsize project that kept them from home and family for many years.

  More likely, Alexander did not know what his precise intentions were. He was following his star. As the adage has it, no one rises so high as he who knows not where he is going.

  He awaited his moment.

  CHAPTER 6

  UNDOING THE KNOT

  Once upon a time in Phrygia, a region of central Anatolia, there lived a poor old man called Gordius, who scraped a simple living from a smallholding. He owned an inexpensive cart and two pairs of oxen, one for the plow and the other to pull the cart.r />
  One day an extraordinary thing happened. As he was plowing his field, an eagle flew down and perched on the yoke of his cart and stayed there all day. Awestruck, Gordius decided to ask for an explanation from the seers or clairvoyants of Telmessus, a town in Caria where lived a number of families with prophetic gifts. Whether men, women, or children they were skilled in the interpretation of omens. One of these foretellers was the famous Aristander, Alexander’s personal divination expert.

  The old man approached a village in the Telmessian area and met a young woman drawing water from a well. They fell into conversation and he told his story. It turned out that she had the gift, and she advised him to return to the site of the omen and sacrifice to Zeus.

  She agreed to come back with him and manage the ceremony. They married and a son was born, Midas. When he had grown into a handsome young man, Phrygia was involved in a bitter civil war, and an oracle asserted that a cart would bring peace. A people’s assembly was discussing the matter when Midas drove up with his parents. They immediately decided he was their designated king.

  Midas was the king who famously asked a god that anything he touched should turn into gold. But once the gift had been granted, he found that he could no longer eat or drink. Bread and wine became metal in his hand or on his lips. As the old proverb says, he should have been careful what he wished for, lest it came true.

  One of Midas’s first regnal acts was to dedicate his father’s old cart on the city’s acropolis as a thanks offering to the king of the gods for sending him the eagle.

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  AT THIS POINT LEGEND shifts gear into history.

  The cart existed. A yoke was attached to it by a complicated knot of cornel bark. It was prophesied that whoever could undo it was destined to rule Asia. This was too much of a challenge for Alexander to resist. In the spring of 333 he led his army to Gordium, the impressive capital of Phrygia, with massive fortifications and grand palace buildings. He insisted on climbing up to the acropolis, where the cart was on display in the temple of Zeus, and trying his luck with the knot.

  The bark was so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how it was fastened. The king could find no way of undoing it. He was surrounded by a crowd of Phrygians and Macedonians and would lose face if he admitted defeat. He could not allow that to happen. So he drew his sword and with a single blow cut through the knot. “It’s undone now,” he growled.

  Some might call this cheating, but so far as Alexander and his entourage were concerned the prophecy had been fulfilled. That night a storm blew up, with thunder and lightning, confirmation of Zeus’s approval.

  The incident had great publicity value. It will have encouraged the Macedonians to believe that the gods were on their side, but more importantly it helped to justify their presence in Asia and may have shaken the loyalty of Darius’s subjects.

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  BY THE TIME OF his visit to Gordium in 333, Alexander was already well on his way to conquering Asia Minor (that is, Anatolia, or our modern Turkey). The prophecy was approaching fulfillment.

  After the victory at the Granicus in May the previous year, the king’s first task had been to secure the Mediterranean coastline and deny it to the powerful Persian fleet, which dominated the Aegean Sea. After sending Parmenion off to secure the capital of Hellespontine Phrygia, the king marched his army south to the great Lydian city of Sardis. Many of the Ionian city-states were fearful of being liberated, in case the Persians were to return, and kept their heads down for the time being, but the commander of Sardis’s acropolis, a Persian nobleman called Mithrenes, came out some miles to meet the king. He surrendered the city and, even more helpfully, its treasure, for Alexander was running out of cash.

  Greeks and Macedonians had no time for barbarians and most of the army will have expected him to be treated harshly. However, Alexander was no racist and was willing to make use of men from any ethnic background provided they were able and experienced. He kept Mithrenes with him “in a position of honor” and two years later appointed him to be satrap of Armenia.

  Reluctant ever to give an individual too much power, the king appointed a Macedonian to the satrapy of Lydia, and another one to command the Sardis garrison. A Greek treasurer handled the financial affairs of this wealthy province and reported directly to the king.

  Alexander, a tireless tourist, spent time looking around Sardis. He was particularly impressed by the strength of the citadel—very precipitous and fortified with a triple wall. Somewhere on the summit he decided to build a temple to Olympian Zeus and an altar for sacrifices. He was looking around for a suitable site when the god signified his choice by letting off peals of thunder and soaking the royal palace (and only the royal palace) in a downpour of rain.

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  THE KING MOVED ON to the prosperous city of Ephesus on the Ionian coast (in today’s Turkey). Before he arrived, the garrison of Greek mercenaries requisitioned two triremes and vanished: no doubt they had heard of the fate meted out to Memnon’s Greek regiment at the Granicus and were disinclined to share it. The citizens welcomed Alexander’s arrival. Two years previously, as reported, Parmenion’s advance force had briefly taken Ephesus, where they had erected a statue of Philip in the celebrated temple of the mother-goddess Artemis and established a semi-divine cult in his honor. But the Macedonians had faced serious opposition from the Persians under Memnon and were forced to withdraw. In their absence the statue was pulled down.

  Now they were back, and led by a new young king. Most of the Ionian cities were governed by pro-Persian upper-class elites, or oligarchies, and Ephesus was no exception. Alexander, having cast himself as liberator of the Greeks, favored democracies, and the city’s rulers were thrown out of office. The leading oligarch, his son, and his nephew sought sanctuary in the temple, but were dragged out and stoned to death.

  Alexander immediately put a stop to this settling of scores, typical of the quarrelsome Hellenic city-states. Arrian writes that he “prevented any further inquisitions and vengeance, knowing that, if given license to do so, along with the guilty the people would kill innocent men out of personal enmity or designs on their property. No other action won Alexander as much credit as his handling of Ephesus at this time.”

  The temple of Artemis had been badly damaged by fire on the day of Alexander’s birth and had never been restored. The geographer and historian Strabo, writing three centuries later, recounts that the king offered to pay for the rebuilding on condition that the gift was recorded on a marble inscription. The proud Ephesians felt that this would be too high a price and declined the offer on the ground that it was “inappropriate for a god to dedicate offerings to gods.” Any possible offense was cleverly masked by sycophancy.

  While at Ephesus the king met the famous artist Apelles, who had painted his father many times. Apelles had an international reputation and his pictures “sold for the price of a whole town.” His work was remarkable for its elegance, he could catch a likeness, and, unlike many of his fellows, he knew when he had put enough work into a painting, when to put down his brush. He restricted his palette to white, yellow, red-brown, and black.

  Alexander commissioned a full-length portrait of himself as Zeus wielding a thunderbolt. This was touching on the sacrilegious and suggests that Alexander, proud of his descent from the hero Heracles, was following his father’s self-presentation as godlike, isotheos.

  Apelles found his sitter to be a know-it-all, who liked to pontificate about art, although he had no specialist knowledge. He had a word in Alexander’s ear: “Sir, please keep quiet, for the lads who grind the colors are laughing at you.”

  Alexander took the reprimand in good part. He was so impressed by the artist’s work that he awarded him a generous fee of twenty talents and exclusive rights to his painted image.

  After sending out two mili
tary detachments, one of them led by Parmenion, to receive the surrenders of towns in the region, the king set off for his next destination, the great port of Miletus. This time resistance was expected and the Macedonians prepared for a siege.

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  ONE FINE MORNING A thousand years earlier, the Trojans woke up to find that their Greek enemy had left. The shore where they had beached their fleet was deserted. The siege, which had lasted ten years, was finally over. It was time to celebrate.

  There was nothing to be seen except for a giant wooden horse. What could its purpose be? A man claiming to be a Greek deserter explained to a wondering crowd that the colossus was intended as a religious offering that would assure the enemy of a safe passage home. It was too large to be taken into the city, so the happy Trojans widened a gate by demolishing part of the city wall and dragged it inside. They then settled down to an evening’s serious drinking.

  It was a trick, of course, invented by the wily Odysseus. Inside the horse’s belly, warriors awaited their moment. The Greek ships had not set sail across the Aegean Sea, but were moored out of sight behind the nearby island of Tenedos. Once the city was asleep (stupefied, in many cases), the armed men slipped out of the horse and were joined by the main army after the fleet had returned to the beaches.