Alexander the Great

by Anthony Everitt

  The plan very nearly worked. At an agreed time the first column burst out of the city and set fire to new siege engines. There was a tremendous conflagration. Missiles rained down on the Macedonians from the top of the replacement wall and from a mobile tower that had been specially built for the occasion. The king went forward and took personal command. Then Ephialtes emerged from the gate at the head of a second column, a deep, close-knit phalanx, and charged. He happened to crash into young and inexperienced troops, who flinched. Memnon then arrived on the scene in force.

  The Macedonians were facing defeat, and Diodorus claims that “Alexander did not really know what to do.” There was in fact nothing that he could do; the day was only saved by some battle-hardened warriors—Philip’s old soldiers—who launched a counterattack against the enemy phalanx.

  Fortune had beckoned to Memnon—and then changed her mind. Ephialtes was killed in the fray and his mercenaries were driven back inside Halicarnassus. They pushed toward the open gate, but a bridge that led to it over the ditch broke under their weight. Some were trampled to death or shot down from above. In the panic of the moment, the gates were closed too soon and many were left outside. They were slaughtered at the foot of the city wall.

  It was now evening and Alexander called back his troops. Some argue that if he had persevered, Halicarnassus would have fallen there and then. But battles in the dark can have unpredictable outcomes and his men were exhausted. It is probable that he was in touch with leading citizens and did not wish to initiate a sack.

  Memnon was a realist. He conferred urgently that night with his commanders and the Carian satrap, Ada’s usurping son-in-law, Orontobates. They decided that they could not hold out for much longer, for many of their best soldiers had lost their lives or been wounded, and the city’s fortifications were being battered down by the Macedonian artillery. They may also have feared a popular uprising. They acted at once while it was still dark, firing the city and burning their wooden tower and the arsenal where they kept their artillery. They withdrew their best troops into two of Halicarnassus’s three more or less impregnable fortress citadels and left the city itself to the Macedonians. All remaining personnel—Memnon and Orontobates among them—stores, and equipment were evacuated by the Persian navy to the island of Cos.

  Alexander was informed of exactly what was happening by some turncoats and immediately marched his army into Halicarnassus. He ordered all fire-raisers to be put to death. Civilians were to be treated with respect.

  Dawn was now breaking and it was possible to see the destruction wrought during the night. The king surveyed the occupied fortresses and decided it was not worth the time and energy to besiege them. With the city in his hands, there would have been little point. Ada was proclaimed queen and a garrison was installed of three thousand mercenary infantry and some two hundred horse, under the command of Ptolemy.

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  HALICARNASSUS SHOWED THE DECISION to disband the Macedonian fleet to have been a mistake.

  As a Greek, Memnon had never been fully trusted by the Persian court. Now he sent his wife and children to Darius as hostages for his good behavior and, as he had hoped, he was appointed commander-in-chief of operations in Asia Minor. He allocated money to pay for the fleet and a sizable body of mercenaries. His plan was to force Alexander to abandon his Asian campaign by taking the war to mainland Greece. In the absence of opposition, Memnon and the Persian fleet captured island after island. Soon the entire Aegean Sea would belong to the Great King. Diodorus writes:

  News of the general’s activity spread like wildfire and most of the Cyclades sent missions to him. As word came to Greece that Memnon was about to sail to Euboea with his fleet, the cities of that island became alarmed, while those Greeks who were friendly to Persia, notably Sparta, began to have high hopes of a change in the political situation.

  Having no warships, Alexander was powerless to intervene. Unless there was a material change for the better in the military outlook, he would be obliged to go back to Europe. Then his luck turned. In early spring 333, while campaigning on the island of Lesbos, Memnon suddenly died; no diagnosis has come down to us, but perhaps the cause was a heart attack. His nephew Pharnabazus inherited his command and acted energetically, but he was no Memnon. The grand plan expired with its deviser.

  (The Fates had a dry sense of humor, for Pharnabazus was the brother of the beautiful Barsine, soon to become Alexander’s mistress.)

  Alexander recognized his error and commissioned a new fleet. This was a hugely expensive project and took some time to implement. Pharnabazus remained free to career around the Aegean, but only for some months. Two admirals were appointed and were given five hundred talents for their costs; for his part, Antipater received six hundred talents, presumably to assist with recruitment. The League of Corinth was instructed under its treaty obligations to send a naval contribution.

  Alexander needed to assure himself that Asia Minor was fully pacified. He set out eastward along the southern littoral. Meanwhile Parmenion was instructed to retrace his steps northward to Sardis, after which he would strike inland, assert Macedonian power, and challenge the Persian satrap of Phrygia. They would meet again at Gordium in the center of Anatolia.

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  AT ABOUT THIS TIME an unnerving incident took place. A Persian nobleman called Sisines, who was a member of Darius’s intimate circle, was arrested by Parmenion’s men. His cover story, which ultimately he did not use, was that the Great King had sent him to visit the satrap of Phrygia, but in fact his real mission was to corrupt Alexander of Lyncestis, who commanded an elite cavalry squadron in Parmenion’s service.

  This namesake of the king was one of the various noblemen who had been caught up, innocently or otherwise, in the assassination of Philip II. As we have seen, his two brothers had been executed for their alleged complicity in the crime, but he had been spared because he was the first to hail the new king in the theater at Aegae. More to the point, perhaps, Antipater, Alexander’s leading backer, who had stage-managed his accession, was the other Alexander’s father-in-law and may have protected him. Ostensibly loyal, the Lyncestian had served in the army as an able commander of the Thessalian cavalry.

  Having been caged, Sisines sang. Sometime previously, a Macedonian defector had brought a (presumably) treasonous letter from this Alexander to the Great King. In response, Sisines was to give the Lyncestian a confidential message that, if he were to kill Alexander the king, he, Darius, would install the Lyncestian on the Macedonian throne and present him with a thousand gold talents.

  Sisines was sent under guard to Alexander, to whom he repeated the story. What was to be made of it? It was possible that this was an example of ancient psyops, a trick to confuse the enemy, discredit a valued officer, and damage morale. Alternatively, Sisines was telling the truth and the Lyncestian had been a traitor all along. The evidence was circumstantial and rested on a single, uncorroborated, and probably untrustworthy source.

  Alexander asked his Companions for advice. Their opinion was that it had been a mistake to give the best of the cavalry to a man of dubious loyalty. He should rid himself of the traitor before he could suborn the Thessalians “to some revolutionary purpose.”

  They reminded the king of a recent omen, which was obviously a refence to Sisines’ revelation. During the siege, he had been taking a midday nap when a swallow flew about over his head chirping noisily. The sound bothered him in his sleep and he brushed the bird away with his hand. Instead of flying off, the swallow perched on his head and stayed there till he was fully awake.

  Alexander took the incident seriously and consulted his seer, Aristander, who said that it signified a plot against his life. However, seeing that the swallow was a friendly, talkative bird, he predicted that the plot would come to light.

  The king was uncertain of the Lyncestian’s guilt, and di
d not have him charged and brought to trial. He ordered Parmenion to arrest him and keep him under guard. And so Alexander the Lyncestian remained for the next three years.

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  ALEXANDER NOW HAD TO decide whether to await the arrival of Darius and his host and do battle with him in Asia Minor, or to confront the Great King in his own heartland. Of course, he chose the latter, more aggressive option. Time was short, for the mustering of the vast Persian army was proceeding apace. He needed to conclude his business in Asia Minor as soon as possible.

  His choice came at a high price. The farther he and his invasion force moved away from Asia Minor the more likely it was that Pharnabazus would exploit his naval monopoly and recover some of his gains. It would not be long before Miletus and Halicarnassus went back under Persian rule. Alexander will have told himself that this would not matter greatly. His new fleet would soon be ready, he expected. Assuming that he won his showdown with the Great King, and he did assume it, the Ionian cities would drop into his hands again.

  The Macedonian army moved fast through Lycia (on the southern coast of Turkey) and its largest city, Telmissus, Aristander’s hometown of fellow prophets, capitulated without fuss. Envoys from the important port of Phaselis, with its two harbors, offered their surrender and awarded him a golden crown. As a friendly gesture, the king helped the inhabitants demolish a fort built by hostile Pisidians. He then continued to the fertile lands of Pamphylia, leaving his main army briefly to make its own way while he rode along a coastal path. This path was submerged when a southerly blew, but luckily a north wind got up and the way opened to Alexander and his troop.

  The citizens of Aspendus surrendered, promising to hand over the horses they bred as tribute to the Great King and to make a fifty-talent contribution to his army’s costs. They changed their minds and then, seeing Alexander arrive in person outside their walls, nervously changed their minds again. The king was not amused and raised the payment to one hundred talents. He was lucky, for if Aspendus with its high, sheer acropolis overlooking the river Eurymedon had decided to resist, a siege could have lasted for months.

  The king continued north. One town looked too difficult to capture quickly, so he simply bypassed it and went on to mop up various others. He then passed into Phrygia and reached Celaenae, a green oasis in the barren landscape of Anatolia and, more significantly, a city of strategic importance. It stood at the headwaters of two rivers, the Maeander and the Marsyas, and was a junction of major highways.

  The citadel perched on high cliffs and was garrisoned by Carian and Greek mercenaries. When the king sent a herald up to them demanding their immediate capitulation, they simply showed the man around the substantial fortifications before sending him on his way. For once Alexander opted for discretion rather than valor. Instead of a direct assault, he blockaded the citadel with his army and waited. After ten days, supplies were running short and the defenders’ resolve was wavering.

  They put a remarkable proposition to the king. If they were not relieved within sixty days, they promised to hand over the citadel. Even more remarkably, Alexander agreed to the terms, left a modest force to police the deal, and hurried on.

  After accepting fistfuls of surrenders, Alexander and Parmenion met, as arranged, at Gordium. Having done their philoprogenitive duty, the newly married husbands arrived from Macedon together with three thousand newly levied foot soldiers and three hundred horse.

  The slicing of the knot and the thundering approval of the king of the gods marked a symbolic turning point. The new lord of Asia was ready to march east to fulfill the prophecy and claim his inheritance.

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  WHAT CAN WE SAY of Alexander’s post-Granicus performance, especially so far as the sieges are concerned? Long-term investment in his engineers, up-to-date siege equipment, and long-range artillery had paid off handsomely. Even the most solid fortifications collapsed under the bombardment of his torsion catapults. This was to his credit.

  However, the incident of Perdiccas’s drunk soldiers suggests a problem with control of his men under the mental and physical strain of a siege. Worse than that, to have had to parley for a truce was a profound humiliation for a man whose stock-in-trade was invincibility. And he had been outmaneuvered by Ephialtes in front of the walls of Halicarnassus. For once, this most quick-thinking of commanders could not think how to turn the tables on his enemy. His career could have come to an abrupt end had it not been for Philip’s grizzled warriors—and the luck for which he was justly famous.

  Gratitude was not Alexander’s strong suit (he preferred people being grateful to him) and years later an old soldier reminded him of this episode, the memory of which the king did his best to suppress. We are told that he said: “You have no time for Philip’s men, but you are forgetting that if old Atarrhias here had not called back the younger fellows when they shrank from fighting, we would still be hanging out at Halicarnassus.”

  Nevertheless, mischance and mistakes apart, the king had more or less achieved his goal of conquering Asia Minor. As we have seen, his father would probably have halted at this point and followed the advice of Isocrates, who had died in 338, the year of Chaeronea, fatal to liberty. As already reported, he had argued that a chain of newly founded Greek city-states running south from Sinope on the Black Sea coast to Cilicia on the Mediterranean would create a barrier between a much enlarged Macedonian empire and the diminished but still extensive lands of the Great King.

  Intellectuals are often impractical; the notion that an aggrieved Persian empire, thirsting for revenge, would be deterred by a line of puny statelets was absurd. Alexander knew he would only be secure once he had put an end to the rule of the Achaemenids. When did he reject Isocrates’ “halfway house”? He seems not to have broadcast his inward thoughts, and little evidence about them has come down to us. He may have dreamed of total conquest as a teenaged boy, as crown prince and then king, or only during his campaign in Asia Minor. But his long-term intentions can be deduced from his actions. He may not have told anybody, but he fully intended to take over as Great King from Darius.

  His tactics were as clear-cut as his strategy. Everything he did was aimed at forcing Darius to stake his empire and his life on one great battle, which he and his Macedonians expected to win outright. With Asia Minor lost, the Great King’s honor required him to take the field himself.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

  Alexander was dying. It looked very much as if his campaign was drawing to a premature close. Officers and men held their breath.

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  BY THE TIME HE and Parmenion met at Gordium in early summer of 333, the whole territory of Asia Minor was more or less under their control, although the Persian fleet was still making mischief in the Aegean. Now it was time to pursue the Great King and confront the numberless horde he was assembling. After a quick expedition against tribes in Cappadocia, Alexander marched south. His plan was to reach Cilicia: this fertile coastal province was entirely enclosed on its landward side by inhospitable mountains. Once the Macedonians had reached the sea they would then turn eastward and march toward the river Euphrates and Mesopotamia.

  The first obstacle they encountered was the Cilician Gates, a pass through the Taurus range, which separated the Anatolian plateau from the coastal plain of Cilicia. It was long, cliff-bound, at its narrowest point had room only for four soldiers marching abreast, and was heavily guarded. Alexander assembled a crack assault force of his foot guards, the hypaspists. Under cover of darkness they made their way to the defile. Unfortunately, they were detected, but it was evidence of Alexander’s growing reputation as a bogeyman, which he sedulously cultivated, that when the defenders learned he was leading the operation in person they abandoned their posts and ran away. When dawn broke, the king led his army through the pass without incident.

 
His destination was Tarsus, no mean city. It was said to have been founded by traders from Argos in the Peloponnese. Another legend offers a foolish etymology: the mythical hero Bellerophon, a great slayer of monsters, liked to travel on his winged horse, Pegasus. One day he fell off it and hurt his foot—whence the name Tarsus, from tar sos, the sole of the foot.

  In fact, the city’s true history can be traced back six thousand years. It stood at the mouth of the river Cydnus and was a junction of important sea and land trade routes. Where the river empties into the sea were swamps and lagoons, both at Tarsus and along the Cilician coastline. Mosquitoes flourished. August scorched, and it was then that an annual malaria epidemic started.

  It was during this dangerous month that Alexander arrived at Tarsus, sweaty, dusty, and nearly overcome by the sweltering weather. Seeking coolness, he swiftly undressed in front of his troops, ran down to the river, and dived in for a swim. According to Arrian, the king suffered an “attack of cramp, violent fever and persistent inability to sleep.” Barely conscious, he was carried to his tent.

  What was the matter with him? It is too late for a doctor to examine him now, but the likeliest diagnosis is that he was bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito. His recorded symptoms are consistent with a pernicious infection caused by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, the most dangerous form of the disease. His first spasm or convulsion was followed by a violent fever and insomnia. After news arrived that Darius had left Babylon with his army and was bound for Cilicia, he suffered a bout of depression. He became unable to speak, had difficulty breathing, and lost sensation and then consciousness. This is very much how falciparum malaria develops, after which the sufferer either recovers or, without modern medication, more usually dies.