Alexander the Great

by Anthony Everitt

  The royal physician, Philip, extracted the missile. Apparently, Alexander’s cuirass had prevented those around him from seeing how deep the wound was, and when blood began to gush out, they became seriously alarmed.

  Alexander himself did not even lose color. He had the bleeding stanched and the wound bandaged. According to Curtius,

  for a long time he remained on his feet before the standards, either concealing or mastering his pain, until the blood which had shortly before been suppressed by the application of a dressing began to flow more copiously and the wound, painless while still warm, swelled up as the blood cooled. He began to faint, his knees buckled, and the men next to him caught him and took him back to camp.

  Gaza’s commander, Batis, a corpulent black eunuch, was loyal to the Great King and, despite the grim news from Tyre, was determined to resist the triumphant Macedonians.

  Gaza was a wealthy and well-fortified stronghold, an entrepôt for the spice trade, which occupied a high plateau, or tell, two miles inland. It had only a small garrison, but to the besieger, it presented two insuperable difficulties and one excellent opportunity. The tell was 250 feet high and siege engines could not reach the walls themselves. The ground was relatively sandy and soft and it was almost impossible to move wheeled traffic over it. But on the credit side, sappers would easily be able to tunnel under the town’s defenses and take away the subsoil; the wall above would then fall in.

  It was going to be the most testing of sieges, even harder perhaps than Tyre, but this only made Alexander the more determined. Hephaestion arrived with the fleet and transport vessels carrying the siege engines used at Tyre; he was also in charge of the commissariat and was responsible for procuring and supplying the large quantities of water and grain needed by the Macedonians outside Gaza (and later for the journey to Egypt).

  The king ordered tunnels to be dug out of view into the tell and, as a diversion, arranged for some mobile towers to be moved toward a section of wall (presumably near a city gate where there was a road or ramp leading up to it).

  The towers got stuck in the sand, and the Arabs inside Gaza sallied out to set them alight. The king led the hypaspists to the rescue; it was at this point that he received his wound. While he presided at a sacrifice earlier in the day, a carrion bird dropped a clod of earth, which fell on his head and broke up, or so the sources say. According to the seer Aristander, this omen meant that the city would fall, but also that the king risked serious harm. He was warned not to fight that day, and despite his annoyance he did stay in the rear for a while. But the temptation to lead the counterattack was too strong.

  The wound did not heal easily, but Alexander continued to manage operations. He had the town surrounded with an earth mound or ramp. The siege engines were moved up the ramp and started battering the wall. A section of the wall crumbled, and the sappers’ tunnels caused a more general collapse.

  Ladders were laid over the rubble and three attacks were launched, without success. In the fourth assault the king surrounded Gaza with his heavy-armed infantry. The Macedonians pressed forward and opened every gate they found.

  Alexander’s shoulder was still very painful, for a scab had not yet formed on the wound. However, he insisted on joining the fighting. He was struck on the leg by a rock and had to support himself with his spear, but he stayed in the front line.

  Gaza fell. The defenders, some ten thousand of them, fought to the bitter end. The city’s women and children were sold into slavery. Batis struggled on bravely and was taken alive. Alexander, presumably unhinged by pain, restaged another incident in the Iliad. This was when the furious Achilles kills Hector, the great Trojan warrior; he ties the corpse to his chariot and drags it back to the Greek camp. Batis suffered a similar fate, with the significant difference that he was still alive. His ankles were slit and attached by thongs to a chariot, which drove around the ruined walls of Gaza until the eunuch was dead.

  Many spices were found in Gaza’s warehouses, including five hundred talents of frankincense and one hundred of myrrh. This was the occasion when the king dumped a huge consignment of spices on his old tutor Leonidas with a tart covering note that he no longer needed to be stingy with them.

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  OCTOBER WAS A BAD month to cross the 130 miles of desert from Gaza to Pelusium, a border fortress and the gateway to Egypt. The annual rains did not start until November and the water from wells, which were few and far between, was often too brackish to drink and anyway at this time of year were probably dry. Nevertheless, Alexander was too impatient to wait and he set off with his entire army for Egypt.

  His “entire army” was not what it once was, for he was acquiring so much new territory, which everywhere required garrisons, that its numbers were falling. He sent off Amyntas, son of Andromenes and a trusted friend of Parmenion’s son Philotas, with ten ships to Macedonia, with orders to enlist young men who were fit for military service.

  Alexander and his men marched from Gaza to Pelusium along the seacoast, which was covered entirely with sand dunes. They had to keep to the wet shoreline, for otherwise the horses and wagons would have sunk into the sand. Food depots had been set up along the coast, and the fleet sailed alongside the army and ferried water to the thirsty troops. All went well and the Macedonians reached the border fortress without incident. In order to save on supplies, they had covered 137 miles in one week, or nearly twenty miles a day, a speedy rate.

  Alexander was received with delight and open arms. Huge crowds were waiting at Pelusium to welcome him to the land of the pharaohs. In fact, everyone knew that he was set to become the next pharaoh.

  The Egyptians had smarted for centuries under the Great King’s yoke. Every so often they drove the Persians out, sometimes for years, but the insurrections were always suppressed. The eldest son of the last rebel pharaoh, Nakhthorheb (known to the Greeks as Nectanebo), fought on Darius’s side at the Battle of Issus. His fate is unknown, but another Egyptian collaborator unpronounceably called Sematawytefnakht fled the battlefield. Shocked by the debacle, he abandoned the Persian cause and made his way home as quickly as he was able.

  It may seem odd that Alexander was not regarded as just another foreign invader greedy for the country’s wealth, but anyone who showed signs of destroying the Persian empire, as he did, was bound to be popular. Perhaps the Egyptians were persuaded by Alexander’s self-promotion as a true liberator.

  The king took ship to the great political and religious center of Memphis, at the base of the Nile Delta, where he met the governing elite, priests who were also administrators. The city’s mud-brick walls were painted white, and to the approaching visitor it must have appeared as a blinding mirage, a shining city. Persian officials had not awaited the king’s arrival and had made themselves scarce, except for the acting governor (the satrap himself had fallen at Issus). He stayed at his post and handed over all the gold he had, more than eight hundred talents, and, curiously, all the royal furniture. He was rewarded with a job in the new administration.

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  EGYPT HAD MANY GODS, but Ptah was among the greatest. He was the divine craftsman, the demiurge who preceded everything in the universe. In fact, it was he who brought the universe and its deities into being by the sheer exercise of thought. He took many forms; sometimes he was shown as a naked and deformed dwarf (the Greeks equated him with Hephaestus, the divine but lame blacksmith), but usually he appeared as a man with green skin, wearing a tight-fitting shroud.

  At Memphis Ptah was embodied in a sacred bull, the Apis. The bull lived in state in a temple and was allotted a harem of cows. He was worshipped as an aspect of Ptah and when he died he was immortalized collectively as the Osiris Apis. A bull calf was chosen to succeed him, which had various precisely defined markings. His mother was impregnated by a flash of lightning from the heavens. She too lived a life of luxury. A lucky c
ow.

  Alexander took care to sacrifice to the Apis, knowing better than to tamper with other people’s beliefs. He may also have paid his respects at the funerary temple at Saqqara, where the dead, mummified bulls were laid to rest. The comparison with Artaxerxes Ochus, who on his invasion of Egypt a decade earlier had slaughtered the divine bull of the day, as had the Great King Cambyses in the sixth century B.C., was seen as doing him great credit.

  While in Memphis, Alexander was officially recognized as pharaoh, the priest-king whose spiritual duties matched his political authority. However, he did not have time to stay in the country for the year-long round of ceremonies that the new ruler traditionally observed.

  A pharaoh was recognized, in a symbolic sense, as son of Amun, chief deity in the Egyptian theogony. He had five official names or titles. Those of Alexander in hieroglyphic inscriptions reflected his military success against the Persians and announced his duty as guardian of Egypt. His throne name was Setep en Ra, mery Amun (“Chosen by Ra and beloved of Amun”). His title in his capacity as the incarnation of the falcon-headed god Horus, Egypt’s tutelary deity, was “The Brave Ruler Who Has Attacked Foreign Lands.” Other titles were “The Lion, Great of Might, Who Takes Possession of Mountains, Lands, and Deserts” and “The Bull Who Protects Egypt, The Ruler of the Sea and of What the Sun Encircles.” His birth name was given as Aleksindres.

  Splendid religious rituals marked the accession to power; once they were completed, Alexander decided it was time for Hellenic culture to receive its due share of attention. The new pharaoh staged games for his troops both in athletics and in the arts of drama, music, and dance. These celebrations must have been planned well in advance, for leading practitioners in the Greek world, the stars of the day, traveled to Egypt to take part.

  Perhaps we have here an early hint of the principle that underlay Alexander’s politics—namely, equal respect for different cultures. He disagreed with Aristotle, who advised him, according to Plutarch,

  to treat the Greeks as if he were their leader, and other peoples as if he were their master; to have regard for the Greeks as for friends and relatives, but to conduct himself toward other peoples as though they were plants or animals; for to do so [i.e., to do as Aristotle advised] would have been to cumber his leadership with numerous battles and banishments and festering seditions.

  There was a practical consideration in the king’s thinking; if he was to govern Asia he would need the services and the consent of the local inhabitants. There were not enough Macedonians to go round. However, he seems to have rejected from conviction the racism ingrained in most Greeks, and indeed his Macedonian subjects, and made sensitive appointments on grounds of merit rather than ethnicity.

  This was one of the key assumptions that underlay his administrative arrangements for Egypt; the other two being “divide and rule” and noninterference in the lives of ordinary citizens. He appointed two Egyptians, presumably on advice from the priestly bureaucracy, to share the country between them according to an immemorial division, one for the governance of the Upper and the other of the Lower Kingdom.

  Military matters were separated from the civilian government. Two Macedonian Companions were to be garrison commanders, and the leadership of a regiment of Greek mercenaries was shared between a Greek general and a Macedonian Companion. The eastern and western frontier districts were to be overseen by a couple of Greeks, one of whom was to be responsible for the finances of the entire province. This was the extremely able but extremely corrupt Cleomenes, from the port of Naucratis on the Nile Delta. We are not told, but he and the military commanders presumably reported directly to their Macedonian pharaoh.

  For the individual Egyptian, nothing changed. District officials collected taxes as usual, but delivered the proceeds to Cleomenes rather than to a Persian satrap, and went on managing local affairs.

  These dispositions were primarily designed to ensure that nobody had enough power to threaten his, Alexander’s, control over this vastly wealthy province. At the outset they worked well enough, but, as we shall observe, in time the king’s best-laid plans were subverted and he had to step in and retrieve the situation.

  At about this time, good news arrived by ship about the naval situation in the Aegean. After Issus, Pharnabazus, whom Darius had appointed as admiral after Memnon’s unexpected death, had failed to prevent the Greek islands of Tenedos, Chios, and Cos from breaking with Persia and had been captured. He managed to escape, but the days of the Great King’s dominance of the seas were over for good.

  Formal business being completed, Alexander sailed downriver, taking the western or Canopic tributary. He was accompanied by a small infantry detachment and the Royal Squadron of cavalry. At this time he was saddened by a personal tragedy. Parmenion had three sons, two of whom, Philotas and Nicanor, were senior commanders in the army. The youngest, Hector, was in his late teens and was particularly close to the king. Curtius writes that, during the voyage, he

  wanted to catch up with [Alexander], and boarded a small vessel along with a complement of men exceeding the boat’s capacity. The boat sank, leaving all those aboard in the water. Hector fought against the current for a long time. Although his sodden clothes and tight-fitting shoes made swimming difficult, he still managed to reach the bank in a half-dead condition.

  However, there was no one there to help him, for his companions had swum to the other bank, and he died. He was given a splendid funeral.

  The army reached Naucratis, through which Egyptian grain, linen, and papyrus were exported and silver, timber, olive oil, and wine were imported. The fall of Tyre and Gaza had given the city a once-in-a-lifetime commercial opportunity. However, Alexander was not greatly impressed by the place and, as luck had it, when sailing around the huge and shallow saltwater lake Mareotis he stumbled on the perfect harbor.

  This was a long limestone ridge or spur of land. To the south behind it was the lagoon, and on the Mediterranean side lay the island of Pharos. Ridge and island were separated by a stretch of deep water, where ships could moor in safety. The place had a temperate climate with mild winds, fresh water, limestone quarries, and easy access to the Nile. There was no unbearable heat, no malarial marshes.

  Here Alexander chose to build a new city in his name: Alexandria. He was reassured in his decision by the endorsement of Homer. In the Odyssey, the bard has Menelaus, the cuckolded king of Sparta, whose wife Helen’s elopement caused so much misery, sail home from Troy. He was blown off course to Egypt and found himself at “an island in the rolling seas off Egypt and men call it Pharos….It has a harbor with good anchorage, where men can draw fresh water and launch their ships on an even keel into the deep sea.” A good anchorage was just what Alexander had been looking for, but at the moment he had another more personal project in mind.

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  WHILE IN EGYPT, ALEXANDER suffered a mental crisis. We do not know enough of his psychological interior to know exactly what it was, but its external impact was visible.

  As we have seen, he was a religious man and a punctilious observer of sacrifices and ceremonies. He paid attention to oracles, and Aristander was always on hand to advise on the will of the gods. His spiritual life was egocentric; his chief concern was with his place in the spiritual cosmos. As we have seen, he believed that the Argeads, Macedonia’s royal family, could be traced back to Heracles, hero and demigod, a son of Zeus. Heracles was the only human being to have been granted immortality. Perseus, too, slayer of the Gorgon Medusa whose gaze turned onlookers to stone, was among Alexander’s forebears. And Olympias belonged to the Molossian ruling dynasty, which claimed descent from Neoptolemus, son of Achilles.

  Surely, he mused, his achievements were as awe-inspiring as those of his glorious ancestors. They merited recognition on Olympus, and reward. As pharaoh he was named the son of Amun, or in its Greek spelling, Ammon. Chief of the gods, Amun was the lo
cal incarnation of Zeus. Could Alexander conclude that he was literally the son of Zeus? If so, what about Philip? Did he really have nothing to do with his son’s birth?

  These questions were difficult to answer. We have seen that Alexander’s relations with Philip had been stormy and with his mother very close and loving. A late literary source reports that Philip publicly doubted Alexander’s paternity and that Olympias claimed that “she had conceived Alexander, not by him, but by a serpent of extraordinary size.” We do not need to believe these stories to sense domestic unhappiness. They were probably later inventions, but if they did originate in gossip from the early years of Philip and Olympias’s marriage, they pointed to adultery. One can imagine the queen dropping dark hints to her little boy. At least one might infer that he sensed discord, sided with his mother, and saw Philip as a hostile stranger.

  It is uncertain whether or not Alexander, with or without Olympias, had plotted Philip’s assassination. If he had, parricide was the most terrible of crimes, on which the gods could be depended to visit their wrath; Alexander would have thought of Oedipus, the legendary king of Thebes, who murdered his father (as well as marrying his mother) and ended up as a blind outcast.

  Had Alexander by some chance learned of a conspiracy against Philip he had taken no part in, but failed to report? If so, he might have to shoulder a share of blame and seek purification, or perhaps the gods would not require that of him. It would be worth eliciting a divine ruling on the guiltiness of guilty knowledge.

  Another worrying possibility was that his mother played a part in her husband’s death without informing her son.

  The king felt “an overwhelming desire” (pothos, again) to consult one of the most famous oracles of the ancient world, the temple of Zeus-Ammon. This would entail a risky journey from the Libyan coast across 160 miles of desert to the oasis of Siwah, where the oracle was situated. The place had a special significance for him because, according to legend, two of his ancestors, Heracles and Perseus, had paid it a visit.