by Ben Thompson
On the battlefield at Cunaxa in 401 BCE, King Artaxerxes showed up with an army nearly four times the size of Cyrus’s. But Xenophon and his fellow Greek hardasses didn’t even blink. They calmly marched forward, presenting a single line of sharpened spear points and impenetrable shields to their lightly armed adversaries. The Persian regiment opposite them took one look at this massive bulldozer of pointy death and wisely turned tail and fled without a fight.
Unfortunately, that was the end of the good news. Cyrus launched an all-out assault on his brother, but the king stabbed the Prince of Persia in the brain with a scimitar. After seeing their leader slain in an astonishingly gruesome manner, Cyrus’s forces immediately laid down their arms and threw themselves at the mercy of their once and future king. The Greeks, who had chased their fleeing adversaries half a mile into the woods, returned to the field to find their commander dead, their supply train plundered, and their onetime allies now aligned against them.
The Persian general Tissaphernes approached the Greek mercenaries under a flag of truce, convinced them there were no hard feelings, and invited them to send a delegation to negotiate their safe passage home. All of the Greek generals and captains went to Tissaphernes’s camp to figure out what the goat cheese they were going to do, and were promptly double-crossed the hell out of. Those Greeks who were not slain on the spot were brought back to the capital and publicly tortured to death at a later date.
When the Greek soldiers heard what happened they realized that they were completely boned in more ways than an amateur porn actress. Our heroes were a thousand miles from home, deep in unfamiliar territory with no commanders, no food, no cavalry, no archers, and no medical supplies, and things were looking pretty bleak. It also didn’t help that they were completely surrounded by people actively seeking to kill them.
It was at this point that Xenophon polished off his pair of gigantic brass balls and put them to good use. He woke the Greeks up, slapped them around, and said something to the effect of, “All right, are you going to die like bitches or are you going to be soldiers? Seriously, screw those assholes; we’re going to fight our way home or die trying!” (He was obviously a little more eloquent than this, but you get the idea.) He appointed officers, recruited men from the ranks to serve as slingers, peltasts, and archers, and led his troops on a daring march toward freedom.
Xenophon’s troops charged forward, broke through the Persian lines, and followed the Tigris River north, never knowing what lay behind the next rise. They were harassed the entire time by relentless day-and-night attacks from Tissaphernes’s cavalry and archers, and in order to survive Xenophon had to resort to ruthless tactics—villages were plundered for food, natives were tortured for information, and dead bodies were mutilated to instill fear in the warriors that were following the Greek column. This was not a time for good manners. It was a time for survival.
Unable to find a good place to safely ford the Tigris, the Greeks continued north, leaving Persia and making their way into the mountains of Kurdistan. Here, they faced unrelenting attacks from the natives, who rolled gigantic Raiders of the Lost Ark–style boulders down on them and chucked arrows, spears, water balloons, and horrific insults down from the mountaintops. Xenophon maneuvered his troops through the treacherous enemy-controlled mountains, kicking ass at every turn and tenaciously fighting for every inch of desolate, inhospitable wasteland.
Next they passed into the highlands of Armenia, where a new enemy awaited them—winter. For those of you who have never been there, the Armenian winter is freezing-ass cold, especially when your uniform consists of a knee-length tunic, a pair of sandals, and a suit of metal armor, and the Greeks were getting their asses handed to them by hypothermia, snow blindness, frostbite, and starvation. They somehow managed to push through and gave that bitch Mother Nature the finger, Xenophon tirelessly pushing his men forward, until finally his warriors had arrived at the distant city of Trapezus, a Greek-controlled township on the coast of the Black Sea. From there, they restocked food and medical supplies before sailing off to Byzantium and, eventually, home.
All told, the March of the Ten Thousand covered four thousand miles in 215 days. This is the equivalent of walking from Miami, Florida, to Juneau, Alaska, in under a year. Six thousand men survived the perilous journey, an amazing number considering that they were constantly being wiped out by enemy soldiers, harsh climates, and unforgiving terrain. Xenophon returned home, jotted down his memoirs, composed a couple of books on tactics and philosophy, and penned the definitive history of the late fifth-century BCE. He died peacefully in his bed at age ninety, one of the greatest unsung heroes of the classical age.
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Peltasts might sound like a group of guys who got busted for selling candy to kids out of the back of their windowless conversion vans, but they were actually face-puncturing Greek javelin chuckers. These light infantrymen would run right up to the enemy lines, hurl their javelins in their enemies’ eyes, and retreat before the more heavily armed infantry could catch them.
Hoplite armor consisted of bronze greaves, a bronze helmet, a breastplate made from either metal or leather, and a three-foot-diameter circular shield known as a hoplon (this is where the word hoplite comes from—it has nothing to do with either hopping or being light). The whole getup weighed in at about sixty-five pounds.
Nowadays the phrase balls-out is just an expression, but back before the invention of Under Armour the ancient Greek Olympic Games were all contested by a bunch of big sweaty naked guys. The games featured naked boxing, naked footraces, and even naked wrestling. Things are different today, thankfully.
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4
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
(356–323 BCE)
There is nothing impossible to him who will try.
ALEXANDER III OF MACEDONIA WAS A HARDCORE BASTARD WHO ACCOMPLISHED MORE TOWERING DEEDS OF HEROIC AWESOMENESS IN THIRTY-THREE YEARS THAN MOST PEOPLE COULD EVER HOPE TO DREAM OF IN THEIR ENTIRE LIFETIMES, EVEN IF THEY USED 100 PERCENT OF THEIR BRAINS. He was undefeated in battle, conquered most of the known world, and is remembered to this day as one of the greatest and most successful generals in the history of warfare, thanks mostly to his impeccable ability to annihilate faces and make the greatest military leaders of his era look like rejects who couldn’t fight their way out of a convent.
Alexander was the son of King Philip II of Macedon, though he often claimed that his mother was actually sneaking around in cheap motel rooms with Zeus himself and that he was related to the classical heroes Hercules and Perseus. (After he conquered Egypt, Alexander also said that he was descended from the sun god Amun. That must have been one hell of a threesome.) I guess if your mom is going to screw around and have an affair, you could do a lot worse than the god of thunder.
As a young man Alexander was tutored by Aristotle, which is kind of like having Stephen Hawking as your algebra TA or getting batting tips from the ghost of Honus Wagner. Aristotle taught him the cryptic art of philosophizing, introduced him to all the joys of adventurous ass-whipping in Homer’s Iliad, and when the time came to put that knowledge into practical application at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, Alexander led King Philip’s cavalry against the legendary Sacred Band of Thebes and made them look like the Sacred Band of Pussies, kicking their asses across Greece and wiping the fabled cavalry regiment out of historical records forever.
Two years later King Philip was assassinated, leaving Alexander to take over as the sole ruler of Macedonia. As you can probably imagine, most of Alex’s neighbors thought they could screw with the new twenty-year-old king—barbarians from the north threatened Macedonia’s borders, while the city-states of Athens and Thebes took up arms and sent Alexander engraved invitations to bite their collective asses. At a time when most twenty-year-old aristocrats would have crapped their pants and run off to get wasted on malt liquor and sleep with drunk coeds, Alexander raised an army and set about restoring order by delivering Judge Dredd-style death-vengean
ce to anyone stupid enough to cross him. His military maneuvers were so decisive, effective, and rapid that he had already destroyed the barbarian armies and completely surrounded the city of Thebes before the bureaucracy there had even decided upon a plan of action. Alexander vanquished the Theban army, executed everyone in the government, burned the city to the ground, and sold any surviving citizens into slavery. The next day, he received word that Athens had surrendered peacefully and was willing to bend to his iron will. They didn’t want anything to do with that party.
Simply unifying the Greek city-states wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy Alexander’s giant Ramses-sized ego, however, as he had his sights set on something much more ginormous—namely, the Persian Empire. As we’ve seen, the Persians had been screwing with the Greeks for a while now, and Alexander finally decided it was time to stick it to the folks who had spent the better part of two centuries battering his countrymen to death with red-hot waffle irons. As any good ruler did in those days, he consulted the Oracle at Delphi before marching forty-two thousand men into Persia. Her response: “My son, you are invincible!” You can’t get a more emphatic answer than that.
Of course, the most powerful empire in the world wasn’t going to start dry-heaving into a garbage can just because some punk-ass twenty-year-old kid thought he was the baddest mofo of all time, so the armies of the Persian king Darius III came out and met Alexander near the Granicus River in 334. It was here that the Persians finally realized what they were up against—the young Macedonian king led his heavy cavalry on a balls-out charge over the river, up a steep hill, and directly into the center of the Persian formation. Alexander himself spearheaded the assault, hacking up everything in his line of sight, and the Greek troops carried the battle.
Darius tried to stick it to Alexander outside the city of Issus, but the Greeks put their dicks in the proverbial mashed potatoes once again. Despite having overwhelming numerical superiority, the Persian lines were smashed by the unstoppable Greek phalanxes and heavy cavalry formations. The ass-kicking was so complete, and Darius peeled out of there in such a rush that he forgot to take his family with him—Alexander captured them and took Darius’s daughter as his second wife.
The Greeks continued to move down the coast of Asia Minor, “liberating” the ethnically Greek villages they came across, and eventually entered Egypt, where Alexander founded the city of Alexandria—one of seventeen cities he would name after himself—and was received as a conquering hero delivering the Egyptians from the fetters of Persian tyranny. The only real resistance he faced en route to North Africa was from the heavily defended island fortress of Tyre, but something as insignificantly puny as impenetrable stone walls, unfavorable geography, and a complete lack of naval superiority wasn’t going to stop Alexander from popping his enemies in the esophagus with a pipe wrench. He simply built a massive wooden bridge from the coast out to the island, loaded it up with catapults, busted down the walls, killed every man inside, and sold the women and children into slavery. Awesomely enough, over time the causeway he built was covered over with sand and has now become a permanent geographic feature, proving that Alexander the Great was so badass that he was even capable of making the earth itself his bitch.
Not even life-threatening wounds could slow down this human torture rack, and no amount of physical pain or suffering could keep him from personally leading his men on balls-out cavalry charges all over the Middle East. During his adventures slicing dudes up across the entire continent of Asia, Alexander was shot with arrows in both thighs, the ankle, the shoulder, and the lung, stabbed in the head and thigh, clubbed in the neck, smashed in the skull with a battle-axe, bitten by a lion, and nailed with a rock that was launched out of a catapult. He also once dislocated his shoulder leaping off his horse onto one of his dismounted enemies. Hell, not even explosive diarrhea put a halt to his quest for ass-kicking; he once pursued a routed Scythian army for twelve miles while suffering from severe dysentery.
Once the coast was secure and all opposition was mercilessly crushed under his sandaled feet, Alexander set out to bust Darius in the mouth and end the war once and for all. Outside Gaugamela in 331 BCE, the two armies squared off in the ultimate battle for Persia. Darius picked the battlefield, fielded a force three times the size of Alexander’s, and launched a massive attack spearheaded by several thousand scythed war chariots, but he was completely outclassed. The Macedonians metaphorically de-pantsed him right there on the battlefield, destroying the Persian army, annihilating the infamous Immortals, and seizing control of their empire.
Alexander hung out in Persia for a while, chilling with his three wives (and countless mistresses), getting wasted, throwing gigantor parties, and accidentally burning the city of Persepolis into smoldering cinders in a drunken rage. Eventually he got bored of living a life of inebriated luxury and headed east to India, where he faced off against armies of crazy war elephants and skilled Punjabi swordsmen. He donkey-punched all opposition he encountered, and once he had carved out an empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, Alexander realized his work was done. So, just like that, the greatest conqueror in ancient history died randomly of a fever in 323 BCE at the age of thirty-three.
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One apocryphal story has the Amazonian queen Thalestris bringing three hundred hot sex-crazed warrior babes to Alexander’s camp in the hopes that he would impregnate them and create a new race of supermen. There’s no mention of whether or not this primitive eugenics program ever took hold, but that certainly seems like it would be a difficult proposition to pass up.
The fabled Gordian knot was a snarl of rope so absurdly convoluted that no human being could ever possibly hope to untangle it ever. There was a legend in that the man who unraveled the knot would be destined to be the greatest king to ever live, so of course Alexander decided to take a look at the accursed thing. He glanced at the unholy mass of cordage, drew his sword, and hacked the knot in half with one swing.
Alexander’s mother, Olympias, was a crazy nut job. She was a member of the cult of Dionysus, which was like an over-the-top old-school swingers’ club—their meetings usually consisted of getting high, drinking a ton of wine, worshiping snakes, and having extreme all-night orgies.
She ran the show in Macedon while Alexander was out campaigning, usually busying herself by boiling people alive and executing anyone she considered a rival to her power in the most brutal ways you could imagine.
Alexander rebuilt the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which was originally burned down in 356 BCE. It was torched once again by German barbarians in 409, and nobody has had the heart to build it a third time.
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THE MACEDONIAN PHALANX
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There wasn’t a whole lot out there more effective at delivering ultimate face-stabbings than the Macedonian phalanx—a massive, immovable wall of bronze shields and pointy death. The basic unit of the phalanx was a 256-man formation known as a syntagma, which was 16 men wide by 16 men deep. When it came time to skewer d-bags, the soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder, brandishing their massive sixteen-foot-long spears at their enemies and slowly pushing their way forward. Five ranks’ worth of spears protruded from the front of the formation, meaning that the poor bastards standing in front of this behemoth were looking at sixteen men and eighty spear tips. The spikes were sharpened on both ends to make it easier to stab wounded and dying men as troops walked over the top of them, and the spearmen also had a short sword they could bust out for close combat if the enemy somehow miraculously wasn’t impaled by the inexorable push of the relentless spike wall.
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5
CHANDRAGUPTA MAURYA
(340–289 BCE)
A man is great by deeds, not by birth.
—CHANKAYA, CHIEF ADVISOR TO CHANDRAGUPTA MAURYA
IT WASN’T JUST THAT CHANDRAGUPTA MAURYA WAS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL MEN IN THE WORLD. It wasn’t just that this orphan
ed commoner clawed his way up from nothing to carve out the most expansive empire in India’s history, rule more than fifty million people, and command an army of six hundred thousand infantrymen, thirty thousand cavalrymen, and nine thousand war elephants. It wasn’t just that he came from nothing to sit on a golden, jewel-encrusted throne, or that his capital city was eight miles wide, with five hundred guard towers and a nine-hundred-foot-wide moat. No, Chandragupta Maurya’s badassitude stems from the fact that he knew how to use his power in the most awesome way possible—by constantly surrounding himself with a highly trained, hyperelite, well-armed personal bodyguard of more than five hundred Greek and Indian warrior women. These superhot babes followed him around day and night, just looking for one good reason to jam their blades into someone’s cranial cavity, choke-slam them down a flight of stairs, or shred on their sitars.
We don’t know much about our hero before 325 BCE—he just sort of materialized out of thin air like a face-melting UFO or a vengeful, homicidal rainbow, but apparently he had some serious beef with the people in charge of India at that time—the Nanda Empire. Unfortunately, there aren’t many primary sources out there that give us any idea of who the Nanda were or what they did, but for our purposes it’s probably safe to assume that they were all total dickheads who needed to be killed as violently as possible.