Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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It must have been hard to keep calm on receipt of this information. For the past month, Alexander had been lingering along the southern coast of Turkey with his forces widely divided and winter all but upon him; his thoughts had been on the Persian fleet and their dangerously free manoeuvres towards Greece, and he must have hoped for rough autumn weather to close the sailing season early. There were troubles too both within and beyond his high command.

Recently he had received letters from Olympias warning him finally against Alexander the Lyncestian, and it was now, not a year earlier, that he took the step of arresting him in his cavalry command. At the same time, his close friend Harpalus, lame and unsoldierly, had left for Greece across a thoroughly hostile sea to make contacts in the southern Greek harbour town of Megara, presumably to ward off the approaching Persian fleet. Another envoy had gone with him on a still more daring sea journey, across from Greece to south Italy to talk to Olympias's brother King Alexander of Epirus, again no doubt about possible help for Greece by sea. It was a worrying time on all fronts, and now it had been joined by the threat of a Persian grand army.

Never happier than when challenged, Alexander 'assembled his Companion nobles and told them the news; they ordered him to lead them straight ahead exactly as they were. Praising them he broke up the meeting, and on the next day he led them east against Darius and the Persians.' By comparing notes with Xenophon's history, Alexander could calculate that at a reasonable pace, the army would reach the borders of Syria in three days or some twenty-five regular hours on the road. It was not, however, a time for being reasonable and the army was thinned by Parmenion's absence; let the men march at the double and cover the seventy-odd miles within forty-eight hours. The coast road east was level and inviting, and fertile farms lay on either side; where the shore of the Mediterranean bends sharply southwards to Syria, the road hooked round and continued to follow it, with the sea still on Alexander's right and the shadowing Amanid mountains on his left. At the very edge of Cilicia lay the town of Issus, pointing the way to the satrapy of Syria and the south; there Alexander abandoned all stragglers and invalids for whom the march was proving too fast. Meanwhile, Parmenion had come back from, reconnaissance to meet him, and together king and general hurried on to the fortified Gates of Syria, the modem Pillar of Jonah, which the advance force had already captured. A few miles south of this frontier-post they called a halt at Myriandrus, knowing that at last they were within range of the Beilan pass. From here they could cross the edge of the Amanid range and hurry east into Assyria and so, they hoped, into King Darius's encampment before he knew of their approach. By now the evening of the second day was drawing on and the march had stretched the infantry to their utmost; it was a mercy when during the night 'a heavy storm broke and rain fell from heaven in a violent wind. This kept Alexander in his camp.' The implication is that otherwise he would have been back on the road before dawn.

He could not know what a heaven-sent blessing this late autumn gale was to prove. At least four days had passed since Parmenion's spies had last observed Darius to the east in the plains near Sochoi, and the Great King's tactics deserve a closer consideration than any of the Macedonians had given them. He had reached Sochoi, perhaps, in late September and as advised by his officers, he had waited in its open spaces to deploy his full force against Alexander emerging from the coastal hills over the Beilan pass. But he had become impatient. He had detached his baggage-train south-west to Damascus, a curiously distant choice of site but perhaps intended to ease the burden on the food supplies of the Sochoi plain and to put the camp-followers nearer the mercenaries' transport ships which were beached at the nearby harbour of Tripolis; perhaps too, the choice would be more understandable if the ancient city of Sochoi could be located with any accuracy. Having shed his baggage, Darius had begun to move northwards to look for Alexander himself, against the strong advice of the Macedonian deserter Amyntas.

His advance intelligence can only be guessed. Probably he had heard a rumour of Alexander's illness; possibly, scouts or fugitives had already warned of Parmenion's approach down the coast to the Pillar of Jonah. If so, it seemed that Alexander was detained far away in Cilicia and had split his forces most unwisely. The moment seemed ripe to march northwards, on the inland side of the Amanid mountains, and penetrate the Hasenbeyli pass at a height of some 4,000 feet, and then to bring the army southwards and back on to the main road, down the Kalekoy pass into Issus. If Darius already knew of Parmenion's advance, he may also have known that these passes had been left undefended; if he did not, luck was to see him safely through them.

He must have begun this northward march very shortly after Parmenion's scouts had retired with news of his whereabouts. In some four or five days, he would have reached the Hasenbeyli pass, still expecting to swing round on to the main road and occupy Issus. He would either wait

there to fight Alexander as he came east down the road over the Kara Kapu pass from Tarsus, or else he would move westwards to Tarsus and hope to catch him on his sick bed. He cannot have known that as he marched north on the inland side of the Amanid range, Alexander was marching south down its coastal side, still less that Alexander was marching at a pace that has seemed incredible to those who have never tried a forced march. During one night, Alexander careered down one side of the coast road, while Darius was either encamped or marching on the other; there are few stranger tributes to the lack of proper reconnaissance in the history of ancient warfare. On the same night that Darius came through the Kalekoy pass into Issus, expecting to meet Alexander marching east, Alexander crossed the Pillar of Jonah, expecting to meet Darius encamped to the east at Sochoi. Neither knew the other's whereabouts.

When Darius descended into Issus, he found the Macedonian invalids whom Alexander had already abandoned. He was now some fifteen miles north of Alexander, facing into his rear, and yet it was only the exceptional speed of Alexander's advance which had given him this enviable position. At most Darius may have hoped to separate Alexander from Parmenion; he can take no credit for arriving in the rear of them both. As if to celebrate, he cut off the hands of the Macedonian sick whom he found at Issus, a pointless atrocity which was to cost him dear, for others escaped by boat and warned Alexander that the King of Kings was actually encamped in his rear. At Myriandrus on the sea, Alexander was unable to credit what they told him. But he sent several Companions in a thirty-oared skiff up the coastline to test the facts for themselves, and on rowing into the Gulf of Alexandretta, they sighted the campfires of the Persian army and realized that the worst had happened At last Alexander's legendary luck appeared to have deserted him.

Footsore from his forced march and soaked by the past day's rain, Alexander was given little chance by natives who were freely assisting Darius's army. There was one hope of escape from the trap into which his headlong advance had thrown him. Darius, presumably, would march south down the coastal narrows, and expect to fall on Alexander's rear once he had emerged into the open beyond the Beilan pass. What if Alexander faced about and met the king in the Cilician narrows first?

With a wet and weary army that is a difficult order to give, but, as Amyntas the Macedonian deserter had told Darius, advising him never to leave the plains; 'Alexander was sure to come wherever he heard Darius to be.' Within hours, sarissas had been shouldered, horses had been wheeled about, and a fight was to be made on Alexander's terms; Alexander was indeed coming, coming to where he had heard of Darius. Darius, however, had not yet heard of Alexander's return, and for the battle on the morrow surprise would not be the least of the Great King's disadvantages.

CHAPTER TWELVE

At Myriandrus, on turning back to face Darius, Alexander's first move was to harangue his troops. To each unit he is said to have made a different point, advising them that the gods were on their side. 'He also recalled their past successes as a team and mentioned any individual feats of daring which were especially brilliant or conspicuous, naming the man and his action in each case. In the most unexceptionable way, he described his own unsparing part in the battles.' He is also said to have added historical encouragement, reminding his men of Xenophon's long safe march through the Persian Empire seventy years before; in reply, said his Macedonian historians, possibly exaggerating the case, 'his men crowded round and clasped their King's hand, bidding him lead them forwards then and there'. First, Alexander ordered them to eat their dinner, while advance troops returned in the winter evening to hold the Syrian Gates through which they had passed the night before.

After dark the rest of the army turned about and headed for the Syrian-Cilician border which they duly reached at midnight. Pickets guarded the camp, with the Mediterranean seashore below them to their left, and the troops took a cold but well-earned rest on the hillside around the Gates. By the light of torches, Alexander is said to have conducted certain sacrifices and in one late narrative history, of which only a few short sentences survive on papyrus, these sacrifices are specified: 'In great anxiety. Alexander resorted to prayers, calling on Thetis, Nereus and the Nereids, nymphs of the sea and invoking Poseidon the sea-god, for whom he ordered a four-horsed chariot to be cast into the waves; he also sacrificed to Night.' This scrap of information cannot be checked, but it would have been most appropriate if the new Achilles did indeed offer prayers to his hero's mother, to Thetis of the silver feet in her cave beneath the waves, consoler of Homer's Achilles at similar moments of crisis.

As dawn broke at half past five in the morning, on or about 1 November 333, the trumpet announced the beginning of the all-important march. In columns, the troops strode down the road of the narrow rocky pass by the Pillar of Jonah, with the sea on their left and hills encroaching on their right. Some four miles from Darius's reported position, the ground opened slightly and the infantry found room to fan out into line formation, while the cavalry trotted behind in traditional order. Where the mountains receded from the seashore, curving inwards to leave a sinuous plain between their foot and the beach. Alexander spread his infantry still wider, arranging them in their classic battle-order, Shield Bearers on the right, protecting the vulnerable flank of the infantry, Foot Companions in the centre, and foreign mercenaries adjoining on the left. As the mountain buttresses gave way and the plain spread out still further, Alexander passed the word for his formations to broaden again, thinning their depth from sixteen to a mere eight men, unless this thinness has been exaggerated by his flatterers, while the cavalry moved up from the rear, allied brigades to the far left, Companions, Thessalians and Lancers to the far right. The line now stretched from foothills to seashore, Alexander commanding the right, Parmenion commanding the left, and battle was expected on an advantageously narrow front. By midday Darius's army would be in full view.

At this point, geography intervenes. As at the Granicus, the Persian army had taken up a defensive position behind a river south of the town of Issus but this time, the river has not been identified beyond doubt, though immense industry has been devoted to the problem, culminating in 690 unpublished pages by a French Commandant, based on a false premise. There are three main rivers and five intervening streams for consideration, and this range of choice is most awkward for those who claim to have found the solution. But before consulting the ground, a more important decision must be taken; parts of the battle narrative of Callisthenes have survived but can the details of Alexander's own historian be trusted?

Even in antiquity, Callisthenes's battle narrative was criticized, and although the criticism is illogical, it gives the only hint of what he wrote: three of his measurements are specified and he describes the riverbanks of the battle as 'sheer and difficult to cross'. The many experts who have placed the battle on the most northerly river available, the Deli Chai, have defied the indications which Callisthenes has given them. Their excuses are none too cogent. It is possible, as they point out, that Callisthenes exaggerated the roughness of the riverbanks in order to glorify his king's victory and that the two of his measurements which are given in round numbers are only estimates; that does not make them wholly untrue, and his third measurement, the most important for what follows, cannot be avoided so easily. The battle site, he claimed, was fourteen stades wide and though the exact length of his stade can be disputed to two places of decimals, this amounts to some one and a half miles. A

flatterer would surely have broadened rather than narrowed the battlefield, as the narrows were the one stroke of unforeseen luck in Alexander's favour; an observer would not have given such a confident figure as fourteen stades if he were only guessing it by eye from a hill behind the lines. As Alexander paid professional Greek surveyors to pace out accurate distances of any length in Asia, it is very possible that their fellow-courtier Callisthenes would have used their results in his history and thus arrived at the figure of fourteen. Even if not, it is bad method to reject the only precise evidence of an eyewitness in order to save the theories of German generals who have rationalized the battle and lost its haphazard excitement by placing it too far north.

Acceptance of Callisthenes means farewell to the broader banks of the Deli and support for the southerly Payas. Alexander and Darius must have fought on a very narrow front, even narrower than most of their critics believe, and as the Macedonians were probably only arranged eight deep, their effective numbers are likely to have been low, nearer 25,000 than 35,000. On the day of the engagement, their march from camp to battle would have been shorter but they would have faced a rougher and steeper river than the northerly Deli. As for Darius, his tactics too need a new stress, though Alexander's historians ignored them. Two evenings before the battle he had emerged from the mountains north-east of Issus into Alexander's rear, doubtless expecting in his ignorance to move on westwards through Cilicia and find his enemy still lingering or divided on the southern coast of modern Turkey, perhaps in the neighbourhood of Tarsus. As soon as the natives surprised him with news that Alexander had already passed south on the day before, heading for Syria, he must have blessed his luck and followed rapidly, the open plains of Assyria his target, a fully deployed attack from the rear his purpose. By the morning of the day of battle, his army would easily be as far south from Issus as the narrow Payas river, expecting to fall on Alexander in the open on the following day; he would not have bargained with his enemy's about turn, and so Alexander's sudden reappearance, marching boldly back on his tracks from Myriandrus, must have been much more of a shock to the Great King than is usually admitted. If Issus was the battle which on paper Alexander should have lost, it was also the battle which was fought earlier than Darius expected. When Darius heard the unexpected news of the Macedonian about turn, he preferred to stay put on the banks of the Payas rather than retreat northwards to a slightly wider point of the plain nearer the town of Issus. His army could fan out where they encamped, while an advance guard would hold the river until he was ready. Wisely, he ordered a palisade to be set at level points on the river banks in order to hinder an enemy charge. 'It was at this point', wrote a Macedonian historian, 'that those around Alexander realized quite clearly that Darius was slavish in his ways of thought.' Trapped in a Cilician pass where his numbers, larger than Alexander's but not nearly so large as his enemy pretended, were now of no avail, the Great King can be forgiven for his extra defence.

The distinguishing features of the battlefield, wherever its site, are undisputed. By marching northwards for some ten miles from his camp of the night before, Alexander had come down through hill country into what little plain the Mediterranean coast and the inland Amanid mountains leave between them. Persians and Macedonians were now divided by a river which ran straight across Alexander's path of advance, flowing from the foot of the mountains into the sea and forming a natural rampart which favoured Darius as its defender. The narrowness of the plain was greatly to Alexander's advantage, as a frontage of fourteen stades would stop Darius making any use of his superior numbers. But though cramped, the Great King at once planned competently. He had to use the two natural boundaries of the battlefield, on Alexander's right the curving foothills of the mountain chain, on Alexander's left the level beach of the Mediterranean. There he could distribute his weight of men as effectively as possible and hope to break through his enemy's flanks and encircle him. All the while, there was the intervening river to hamper the Macedonian infantry.

Before Alexander could think of the idea for himself, Darius had sent troops up into the mountains so that they could circle unseen behind Alexander's right and descend to attack him from behind. This tactic could have been decisive, had not Alexander ordered his Agrianians and archers to drop back and stop them. By pinning down Darius's troops in the foothills, they soon forced them to retire. If the ruse on the right failed, that on the left was more promising. Alexander had stationed surprisingly few cavalry on the far left wing where the river levelled out to run into the sea, though the seashore was the one obvious point for an enemy charge. Noticing the weakness, Darius massed his own horsemen to exploit it; again Alexander realized his mistake in time and transferred his Thessalian horsemen unseen behind the lines in order to stiffen the defences. As their removal weakened his right, where the longer frontage of the Persians outstretched Alexander's line, two units of Companion cavalry were shuffled rightwards, also in secrecy behind the lines, and the Agrianians and archers returned to join them now that their work in the foothills was finished. Most interestingly, these additions were enough to give Alexander a longer battle frontage than his enemy's, despite Darius's alleged large numbers. But both armies were hemmed in by sea and hills, and Darius, especially, had kept much infantry in reserve.

After these furtive moves in the game of military chess, Alexander had to assess his new position. He would be thankful that his swift return on the night before had trapped Darius in the narrows, but he had worries enough of his own. His left might still veer away from the beach, allowing the Persians to outflank them and gallop round his rear, and he could only trust to Parmenion to prevent this. More urgently, his centre and his right were confronted by a river with rough banks and waters swollen from the recent gale. This time, he was confined by the mountains and could not move upstream and repeat the turning manoeuvre which had worked for him at the Granicus. His cavalry might manage the slippery ground without losing impetus against the Persian archers and light infantry, but his Foot Companions were bound to find the going most troublesome. Their formation always tended to split apart on broken ground and, if the enemy could hack their way inside, short daggers and small shields would be no protection against their onslaught; the most sensible plan was to allow for this weakness and leave the main charge to Alexander's cavalry, who would ford the river ferociously, hoping to scatter the enemy on the wing opposite. If they succeeded, they would circle round and divert the hired Greek troopers in Darius's centre from harassing the floundering Foot Companions whom as, a symbol of Macedonian tyranny, they so detested. All depended, then, on the horsemen, and with horsemen morale and leadership are fundamental. They would look to their king for a lead: in a real sense, the battle of Issus was to turn on Alexander's personality.

Plans and rearrangements take more time than historians often allow, especially in an army where messages can only be passed from one wing to the other by word of mouth, and it must have been the middle of the November afternoon before Alexander could shout his final exhortation, reminding the men in each unit of their individual past glories and calling on the commanders by name and title. 'From all sides there came the answering cry: delay no longer but charge into the foe.' At first the troops stepped slowly forwards, their alalalalaireechoing down the mountain-fringed plain, then, at a sign from their king, the cavalry on the right kicked at their horses and dashed towards the river, Alexander at their head and the Persian archers in their mind's eye. On both flanks, however, Darius's cavalry had begun to move first into a charge; the two sides collided and the battle that followed is as obscure to posterity as it no doubt was to its participants, splashing manfully through mud and spray; detailed reconstructions of an ancient battle are always a matter of faith, but four vital facts cannot be gainsaid and for once it is unlikely that Alexander's role has been overstressed by his historians. He was to matter very much indeed.

On the right, at the foot of the mountains, Alexander's meeting with Darius's cavalry was bold, and entirely successful. The enemy archers, light infantry and heavy cavalry gave way at the first shock; there was much jostling, whereupon the Companions, pulling hard on their bits, managed to swing their horses round to the left and strike into the Persian centre where, according to royal custom, Darius had stationed his chariot. Their virtuosity was well-timed; back in the Macedonian centre, the phalanx was faltering on the brink of the river and beginning to come adrift as it tried to match the speed of the king and cavalry: ranks were breaking, the wall of sarissas was parting and Darius's hired Greeks had hurled themselves across the river into the gaps, 'challenging the phalanx's widespread reputation for invincibility'. Fighting was fierce and the Macedonian losses would have been severer had not Alexander's horsemen, wheeling into the Persian centre, cut off the hired Greeks from behind and forced them to look back to their encircled rear.

On the seashore to the left Parmenion's brigades had held firm in the face of oriental slingers and heavy cavalry. Far from piercing a gap beside the sea, Darius's horsemen found themselves thrown back to join their centre, while the Thessalians ripped past them down the left wing, meaning to circle round and join with Alexander in the pursuit. As the winter darkness came on and cavalry fought their way towards him on both sides, the Great King realized his danger and decided to turn his chariot and flee, leaving his brother Oxathres to fend heroically for himself among the advancing Macedonian horsemen. For one vivid moment, caught in an ancient mosaic of the battle, probably based on an original painting by a contemporary, king met the eye of king, Darius urging his tossing horses to swing about. Alexander pushing through the press, intent on spearing his rival to death. This contest, at least, Darius was to win; his brother Oxathres and other Persian nobles came to brave terms with the Macedonians, and behind the protection of his Royal Relations Darius was free to rattle over the hilly ground in his chariot until the streams and gullies impeded his advance and he was forced to take to his horse. His shield and his Persian robe he abandoned in his empty chariot for Alexander to find behind him; as he made the most of his start, night's onset stayed the Macedonians and Thessalians from more pressing pursuit.

In the battle 110,000 Persians were killed, said the historians, whereas the Macedonian dead totalled 302; their general agreement suggests that these farcical figures were derived from Callisthenes, writing up the triumph for his king's enjoyment. Ptolemy, who shared in the pursuit, even overstepped Callisthenes's limit and claimed that he had ridden across a ravine on the bodies of the Persian dead which filled it. Despite the official figures, the Macedonian infantry, split and unprotected, would surely have suffered heavily from the opposing Greeks and it is perhaps relevant that among these glamorous fibs a figure of 4,000 Macedonian wounded is also recorded, possibly nearer the painful truth. For the battle of Issus had exposed the recurrent limitations of the Foot Companions forced to march on rough terrain; victory, as never before in Greek warfare and seldom afterwards even in modern times, had been won wholly by the merits of the cavalry, outnumbered and seriously hampered by the lie of the land, yet still able to meet the Persians' right, swing left-handed and pierce the flanks of its centre. Such horsemanship would not be seen again until the Carthaginians' double charge at Cannae, when the ground was level and their Roman opponents were neither so skilled nor so heavily armoured as Darius's Orientals. Alexander's victory cannot be attributed to any notable superiority of weapons, although some if not all, of the Persian horses and riders were heavily armoured, so much so that their weight slowed their final retreat. They were beaten because they were bowled over by a charge, and then jostled off balance at close quarters; this bowling over was the result of that training, dash and high morale which make the Companions the finest cavalry in history, and for this, their commander Alexander must be held directly responsible.

From the battlefield the Persian forces scattered to all four points of the compass, many following Darius eastwards to the safe heart of the empire, many risking the northerly route through Cilicia into the fastnesses of the Taurus mountains, others heading westwards for the Asia Minor coast and others, some 4,000 soldiers of fortune, rallying to Amyntas the Macedonian deserter and circling southwards to try their hand in that richest of Asian prizes, the satrapy of Egypt. For some twenty miles those with Darius were dogged by Alexander and his Companions, hoping for the prey which would tum their victory into a triumph. But with half a mile's start through unfamiliar country, the Great King had time to escape eastwards through the Amanid mountains, and eventually Alexander gave up the chase, arriving back in his camp on the verge of midnight. His failure was a grave disappointment but back on the field of victory there were prizes enough to make up for the loss of Darius's person.

Even in his army camp, Darius had encumbered himself with riches and paraphernalia, though these were only a foretaste of what lay abandoned at his base in Damascus. The Macedonians had plundered all that was to hand, reserving the royal tent for the man who now deserved it, so that when Alexander returned at midnight, bloodstained and muddied, expressing a wish to wash off his sweat in Darius's bath, they could lead him forwards to his rightful prize, a Companion reminding him that Darius's bath was in future to be known as Alexander's. On the threshold of the royal tent, Alexander stood surprised, struck by a sight which no young man from Pella could ever have imagined to be true:

When he saw the bowls, pitchers, tubs and caskets, all of gold, most exquisitely worked and set in a chamber which breathed a marvellous scent of incense and spices, when he passed through into a tent whose size and height were no less remarkable, whose sofas and tables were even laid for his dinner, then he looked long and hard at his Companions and remarked: 'This, it would seem, is to be a King.'

But there is more to kingship than its treasures. Alexander was tired; he wanted his bath and dinner; he was limping from a dagger-wound in his thigh which court gossip attributed to a thrust from King Darius himself. And yet he was perturbed by the sound of ladies wailing close to where he stood, and on asking what ladies could possibly be responsible he was told that these were Darius's wife, mother and children, weeping for the king whom they believed to be dead. Promptly, Alexander sent a Companion, Leonnatus, to reassure them and to tell them, perhaps in Persian, that Darius lived, though his cloak and weapons had been captured in his chariot: Alexander would grant them royal state and the continuing rank of Queen, as it was Darius, not his family, upon whom he was making war.

The following morning, Alexander summoned Hephaistion and went to visit his royal captives. When they entered her tent, it was said, the Queen Mother did obeisance to Hephaistion, mistaking him for Alexander as be seemed so plainly the taller of the two. Hephaistion recoiled and an attendant corrected her; she stood back, flustered at her mistake. Alexander, as with his Carian mother Ada, had the tact to cope with a lady's embarrassment: 'No mistake,' he replied, 'for he too is an Alexander.' Then, he complimented Darius's wife on her six-year-old son and confirmed the ladies' privileges, presenting them with dresses and jewellery, and giving them leave to bury any of their Persian dead; they were to live unmolested in quarters of their own, honour being paid to their beauty. Once more, Alexander had shown himself able to respect feminine nobility; his captives could have been valuable hostages, but he never used them for political bargaining, and not for nine years did he marry Darius's daughter.