Alexander the Great

by Anthony Everitt

  Someone on the wall shot an arrow at Alexander and wounded him in the leg. He reacted with typical, careless fortitude. Curtius writes that he

  pulled out the barb, had his horse brought up and, without even bandaging the wound, rode around fulfilling his schedule no less energetically. But as his injured leg hung down and, after the blood dried, the wound stiffened, aggravating the pain, Alexander is reported to have said that, though he was reputed to be the son of Zeus, he could still feel the damage done by a wound.

  He should have lain on his bed, but (as at Gaza) he refused to stay still and wait for a scab to form. Instead, he insisted on inspecting some engineering work.

  The Assacenian king was killed by a stray catapult bolt and his mother, Cleophis, took charge. After a few days the defenders saw that their cause was hopeless. The terms of a surrender were negotiated and the queen dowager with her ladies-in-waiting presented herself to Alexander. She sought pardon and confirmation of her standing as ruler. The king gave her what she wanted. Apparently, she was good-looking and joined the lengthening list of women of a certain age who caught the king’s eye. A baby was born in due course, whom the queen named Alexander.

  The Assaceni had hired seven thousand or so Indian mercenaries, who offered strong resistance, but came to an agreement with Alexander that their lives would be spared if they enrolled as regular members of his army. They came out of Massaga with their weapons and encamped with their families on a hill opposite the Macedonians. In fact, they planned to slip away under cover of darkness, for they had no wish to fight against other Indians.

  The king got wind of this, ringed the hill with his forces, and slaughtered all the mercenaries. We can only suppose that the women and children were put up for sale. The incident shocked the civilized world and was another reminder of the destruction of Thebes. In extenuation, Alexander may have calculated that it was unwise to leave such a large body of hostile soldiers free to wreak havoc in his rear. The massacre was probably a case of cruel necessity rather than of gratuitous cruelty.

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  CRADLED IN A BEND of the Indus, a vertiginous massif rises to a height of five thousand feet above the river. It was called Aornos—Greek for “Birdless” because birds did not fly so high (it has been identified as today’s Pir-Sar, in Pakistan). The rock is crowned by a narrow plateau about one and a half miles long, containing good arable land and copious springs; it can be reached only by one difficult route. At the northern end, a much higher conical hill rises above the plateau and is separated by a deep ravine from another lofty crag, now called Uni-Sar.

  Many tribesmen had congregated on the plateau to escape the attentions of the Macedonian army. A local legend had it that a god, probably Krishna, had once besieged Aornos, but had given up because of an earthquake. Once Alexander was informed that Krishna was an incarnation of Heracles, he developed a pothos to succeed where his great ancestor had failed. He was determined to capture the rock, whatever the cost.

  But how to do it? Alexander marched to Aornos with a part of the army. A direct assault was out of the question. Advised by some locals, he sent Ptolemy with a lightly armed and agile advance guard to scale the neighboring Uni-Sar out of sight of the enemy. They scrambled up a rough and steep track, until they reached a spur facing Aornos. Here they could be seen and would have to defend themselves, so they made a camp with a surrounding stockade and ditch.

  A prearranged beacon alerted the king that the advance guard had established itself and he led his troops up Uni-Sar in Ptolemy’s footsteps. However, tribesmen crossed over from the plateau and blocked his way. Alexander was forced to pull back. The tribesmen then about-turned and assaulted Ptolemy. They tried to pull down the stockade, but at sunset they gave up and withdrew.

  During the night Alexander sent a trusted Indian deserter to carry a letter to Ptolemy, ordering him to go on the offensive the following day as soon as he saw the main force resume its advance. This would mean that the enemy would be sandwiched between two attacking forces. The tactic succeeded. The Macedonians drove off the enemy and reached a high top opposite the plateau.

  However, a deep ravine separated the two rocks, Uni-Sar and Pir-Sar or Aornos. Alexander was undeterred; he ordered his men to construct a bridge or causeway, probably a wooden cribwork construction covered with earth. It must have looked like an early American railroad trestle bridge, in a modern scholar’s happy simile. After a few days the causeway began to stretch across the void. Slingers and artillery engines were at last able to fire at the defenders (a light catapult could hurl a metal bolt about 450 yards). A band of enterprising Macedonians scaled a small hill on the far edge of the ravine and level with the plateau. The causeway was not far off and would soon reach the hill.

  The tribesmen were stunned by the Macedonians’ engineering skills and their giddying combination of determination and panache. They announced that they were ready to agree to terms of surrender; their intent was to waste the day in negotiation and then scatter to their homes during the night. The king was informed of this (we are not told how) and craftily removed troops guarding the exit route. After the tribesmen (literally) walked into his trap and began to leave the rock, he led seven hundred soldiers up the part of the plateau which they had vacated. At a signal, they attacked the retreating tribesmen and killed many of them.

  According to Arrian’s laconic comment, “Alexander was now master of the rock which had defeated Heracles.” The king was modest enough, or perhaps sensible enough, not to boast about this. Nevertheless, Aornos was the most remarkable of his sieges and confounded the Indians. His reputation as a military leader was now such that many thought twice before opposing him.

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  THE ARMY WAS ACTING very oddly indeed.

  Soldiers were roaming around lush mountain slopes in a drunken stupor and cavorting in clearings and shady thickets. Ivy (Dionysus’s signature plant) or something very like it was growing everywhere and the men made wreaths from it which they put round their heads.

  Some lay stoned on beds of leaves. Others sang songs to Dionysus and behaved as if they were Bacchants, drugged worshippers of the divine patron of wine and ecstasy. Although they are not mentioned in the sources, women from the baggage train must also have played a part in these ecstatic orgies (they certainly did on similar occasions elsewhere).

  It was as if the revelers were living out the god’s own behavior, as a hymn in his honor describes:

  He spent all his time wandering through woody coombes, thickly wreathed with ivy and laurel. And the nymphs followed in his train with him for their leader; and the boundless forest was filled with their screams.

  The explanation of these bizarre scenes can be traced back to an embassy to Alexander from the citizens of Nysa, a town near the Indus at the foot of a mountain rich in flora and fauna. The delegates asked him not to attack their city because it had been founded by Dionysus and was reputed to be his birthplace. The king, whose mother was, as we know, a follower of the god and had taken part in his rites, was mightily impressed and agreed that the Nysaeans should retain their independence.

  Arrian and Curtius had little time for the Dionysus connection. They thought the envoys had exaggerated a local legend to please Alexander. Perhaps they had even made up the story for the occasion. One way or another, though, the king allowed himself to be taken in, because, as Arrian suggests, he wanted Nysa to have been founded by Dionysus: if that was true, it would mean that he himself had already traveled as far as Dionysus and would yet go beyond him. Alexander calculated that the Macedonians would not be so reluctant to follow him on grueling campaigns in still more distant places if the ambition to surpass Dionysus’s achievements spurred them on.

  He announced a ten-day holiday and led his entire army up the mountain overlooking the town. There he sacrificed to Dionysus and held a lavish ban
quet. It must have been quite a party, for even senior Macedonians in his inner circle “became possessed by Dionysus, raised the cult cry of euoi, and fell into a Bacchic frenzy.”

  If only the Indians had known that the invincible invaders were stuck in the middle of a forest and helplessly out of their minds, the expedition could have come to a premature end. At last, though, the king and his men pulled themselves together and came down from the mountain.

  They marched onward to the Indus, where they found serviceable timber which was felled for shipbuilding. The resulting flotilla sailed down the river to the bridge Hephaestion had been ordered to construct (probably planking over tethered boats). Here the king sacrificed to all his usual gods (Dionysus and Heracles surely among them) and staged athletic and equestrian competitions beside the river. The omens were favorable and the Macedonians made their way across without incident. More sacrifices followed, in thanks this time rather than prayer.

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  THE SKIES WERE GRAY and lowered above the river Hydaspes, one of the five great tributaries of the Indus which pour south from the Himalayas. The air was thick with humidity. Anything made of metal— swords and armor—rusted without constant attention. Rain was falling, heavy, constant, everlasting rain. The date was July 326; the monsoon—unfamiliar to the Macedonians, and a nasty surprise—had started and would last till September.

  Alexander intended to march eastward, which meant crossing the Hydaspes, so he arranged for his flotilla on the Indus to be dismantled, transported overland to the river, and reassembled. He suspected that the Indian king Porus would cause trouble. As mentioned earlier, Porus ruled Pauravas, a territory between the Hydaspes and the Acesines (today’s Chenab). Unaware that the Macedonian never took no for an answer, Porus alone of his fellow rajahs had refused Alexander’s invitation to a meeting. He had made up his mind to fight the invader and was awaiting reinforcement from Abisares, who ruled an area of hill country (Kashmir) near the Hydaspes.

  The river was in full spate—swollen and muddy with a fast current—but Alexander hoped that he would be able to make use of a ford (near today’s railway station at Haranpur). When he arrived there, he found the entire Indian army lining the far, or eastern, bank. It was an alarming spectacle. And so, for that matter, was Porus himself. Curtius writes that he “rode an elephant which towered above the other beasts. His armor, with its gold and silver inlay, lent distinction to an unusually large physique. His physical strength was matched by his courage.”

  The sources vary, but a rational guess posits thirty thousand infantry and a modest four thousand horse, together with three hundred chariots. Porus also had about 130 elephants, trained for warfare. Alexander was skeptical of their value, for they could do as much damage to friends as to foes; however, they would frighten his horses, on whom he would be depending once again for victory.

  What was to be done? The king opted for deception. He split his army into smaller units, which he and his commanders led here and there in the countryside, laying waste to enemy territory and apparently searching for easier places to ford the river. Supplies of grain were brought in to give the impression that the Macedonians were digging in for a long stay, until the monsoon was over and the water level had dropped. As Arrian observes,

  With his boats plying up and down, leather rafts being stuffed with straw, the whole bank visibly crowded with troops, cavalry here, infantry there, Alexander kept Porus unsettled and prevented him from selecting a single vantage-point in which to concentrate his defensive capability.

  Then night after night the king had most of his cavalry ride up and down the bank shouting and making all sorts of noise that suggested an army getting ready to cross over. Porus reacted by following the commotion with his elephants and other troops. Eventually, he realized that these were false alarms and no longer paid them any mind.

  Once he was sure the Indian king had been lulled into inattention, Alexander put into effect an ingenious stratagem. There was no time to lose, for he learned Porus’s ally Abisares was on his way to join him with a substantial force and would arrive within a couple of days.

  The Macedonian scouts had discovered a pathless and uninhabited wooded island seventeen miles upstream (near today’s Jalalpur). It concealed a tree-covered inlet on the near bank. This was where the king intended to attempt a crossing. The plan was to divide the army in two. Through the night Alexander would lead some five thousand horse and at least six thousand foot soldiers to the island. These were modest numbers, but he must have calculated that they were enough for the task in hand, and at any rate they were the maximum he could transport within a single night.

  The king would take a roundabout route to avoid discovery. His men would bring with them the leather raft casings, which had been restuffed. The reassembled Macedonian boats would be waiting out of sight behind the island.

  The larger part of the army, under Craterus, was to remain where it was at the Haranpur ford. The men would behave as if they were about to launch an attack. The king’s pavilion would remain in place, and a double would wear the royal cloak and stand in for Alexander. Also, the Greek mercenaries were dispersed along the riverside. They too would cross the Hydaspes once it became clear that the forthcoming battle was on the point of being won.

  The departure of the assault force would be masked by empty tents and blazing fires. The king gave Craterus strict instructions to stay where he was unless Porus marched off to confront Alexander or was in retreat. In what appear to be his written orders, he continued:

  But if Porus takes part of his army against me and leaves part behind in the camp with elephants as well, you must still not make a move. If, though, he takes all his elephants with him against me, with some of the rest of his army left in the camp, then cross as fast as you can. It is only the elephants which make it impossible to land the horses—any other part of Porus’s army will pose no problem.

  One night Alexander put his plan into operation. He set out secretly and arrived at the island some hours later, where he found everything present and correct. Shortly before first light the cavalry were on their rafts and the infantry in their boats. The crossing was under way.

  As often happens with a careful plan, fate interposed an obstacle. A tremendous storm broke. Water flooded down from the sky, restricting vision and drenching the men. The general misery was at least alleviated by the knowledge that the claps of thunder and the drumming rain would camouflage the sounds of thousands of troops on the move.

  Worse was to come. The boats and rafts made for the bank and all the men and horses disembarked, only to discover that they were in fact on the shore of another smaller island. This was a serious setback. It would soon be broad daylight and the advantage of surprise would be lost. There was no time to reembark, so the king and his men struggled across the island and waded through a fast-flowing channel. This was hard going, for the water came over the chests of the foot soldiers and only the horses’ heads were above the surface.

  By now, the Macedonians had been observed by Porus’s scouts; it was essential that the entire assault force reach land as soon as possible and be ready to oppose the inevitable Indian attack. The whole process must have taken several hours. The king placed his cavalry in the front behind a screen of mounted archers. (From his guerrilla years in Bactriana and Sogdiana, he had learned the value of mounted archers skilled at dashing in, shooting arrows, and dashing out with impunity.) The infantry formed up behind the cavalry as they emerged sodden from the river.

  Porus now faced a painful dilemma. He saw that the Macedonians had divided into two. One part must have been a feint, a ruse, and the other the main force. Which was which? Or, to put the question another way, where was Alexander—at the Jalalpur island or at the Haranpur ford? He spent time pondering the problem, for he knew that his fate and the issue of the forthcoming battle hung on his choice. Meanwhile he quickly sent o
ne of his sons with two thousand cavalry and 120 chariots to see if he could drive the invaders back into the river.

  At first sight Alexander thought this force was the advance guard of Porus’s entire army, but when he learned their true strength he decided to wipe them out. He immediately charged at the head of his cavalry. Once the enemy recognized Alexander, they pulled back in alarm. The chariots turned out to be useless, for their wheels sank into the monsoon-muddy ground. Porus’s son was killed, as were four hundred of his horsemen.

  At last, Porus did the right thing, but he did it too late. His cavalry had been mauled. The Macedonians had extricated themselves from the Hydaspes and were preparing for battle. Alexander had been seen leading the charge in person against his son. The Indian king realized that the real threat came from the assault force and moved the bulk of his army against it. He left a small contingent and a few elephants to frighten Craterus’s cavalry away from the bank.

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  BOTH SIDES PREPARED THEMSELVES for a set-piece battle. Porus moved forward until he found a piece of well-drained ground where elephants and cavalry could maneuver safely. In his center he formed a line of between eighty-five and two hundred elephants at intervals of one hundred feet, and behind them he placed his infantry, which stretched well beyond the Macedonian phalanx. Diodorus remarks: “His whole array looked very much like a city, for the elephants resembled towers, and the soldiers between them curtain walls.” His cavalry, now numbering after the recent skirmish only 3,600 riders in total, was divided between the wings, screened by 180 chariots and special infantry units.