Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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Respect for captive royalty had a long history in the ancient East, and Alexander was not the man to betray it; the Persian Queen Mother, especially, came to recognize his kindness.

As at the Granicus, his army were shown this quality in his own inimitable way.

Despite his wound, he went round all the other wounded and talked to them; he collected the dead and buried them magnificently with all his army arrayed in their full battle-finery; he had a word of congratulation for all whom he himself had seen distinguishing themselves particularly bravely or whose valour he heard from agreed reports: with extra presents of money, he honoured them all according to their deserts.

That is the way to lead one's men.

The royal tent and the royal family were not the sum of Alexander's reward. Parmenion was sent to Damascus with orders to capture the treasures; the guards surrendered him 2,600 talents of coin and 500 pounds of silver, unminted as was the Great King's practice. The coin alone equalled one year's revenue from Philip's Macedonia, and sufficed for all debts of army pay and six months' wages; 7,000 valuable pack-animals heaved it back to the main camp. Parmenion further reported that '329 female musicians, 306 different cooks, 13 pastry chefs, 70 wine waiters and 40 scent makers' had been captured. With them came two more personal prizes, the first being the precious casket in which Alexander, after much debate, decided to store his copy of the Iliad,the second the Persian lady Barsine, some thirty years old, with an attractive family history. She had been married first to Memnon's brother, then to Memnon himself, and was thus brought up to a Greek way of life. She was the daughter of the respected Persian satrap Artabazus, who was of royal blood on his mother's side, and she had taken refuge at Philip's Pella some twenty years earlier when her father was exiled from Asia Minor. Barsine met Alexander when he was a boy. 'On Parmenion's advice', wrote Aristobulus, 'Alexander attached himself to this well-mannered and beautiful noblewoman.' It was a fitting climax to what may have been a childhood friendship, and Alexander retained his first bilingual mistress for the next five years.

This favour for Barsine was understandable, but she was only one among several women of status and varied upbringing. At Damascus, Parmenion had captured the wife and three daughters of the previous Persian king, the wife and son of Artabazus, Memnon's two other nieces, who were half Greek by birth, and Memnon's son. These bilingual families would one day stand at the centre of Alexander's plans for marriage

among his commanders, but they mattered for the moment as a pull on their husband's loyalties, not least on Memnon's nephew and Artabazus's son, brother of Barsine, who were sharing the command of Persia's Aegean fleet.

This collection of Persian wives and interrelated children was the first faint sign of where Alexander's future might one day lie. 'In Cilicia,' a polite Greek correspondent later wrote to him, 'men died for the sake of your kingship and for the freedom of the Greeks.' It is as well to be reminded that flatterers could still refer to Greek freedom, but the kingship was beginning to loom the larger of the two. On the banks of the Payas river, Alexander dedicated altars to Zeus, Athena and Heracles; he also ordered the first of his many commemorative cities, Alexandria-by-Issus, on the coastal site of the modem Alexandretta. The example of new cities had already been set by his father Philip, and these cities of Cilicia were to be organized as royal mints and ordered to strike Alexander's own silver coins. Their weight was to conform to the standard spread by Athens and already favoured in the area. Philip had used it too, so Macedon, the Aegean and Asia were linked for trade and army payments. Gradually, the king was moving towards a permanent empire, and an Emperor could not be content with a Greek campaign of revenge.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

On land the victory at Issus was inconclusive, not least because of Darius's escape, but at sea its effects were far more definite. The king's Greek fugitives had commandeered or burnt the hundred or so ships which had been beached for them at Tripolis, and neither ships nor Greeks would be seen in Persia's service again: the fall of western Asia and the capture of the baggage at Damascus made further shipments of coined money to the Persian admirals impossible, as only western Asia paid tribute to the king in coin and there was no route left open for Darius to despatch coined reserves to the Aegean. Above all, Alexander's Greek allies were less hesitant in providing another fleet now that he had proved himself in a battle they had expected him to lose. The Persian admirals could only look to a difficult spring ahead of them, in which they must improvise men, ships and money: their overtures to Agis, King of Sparta were poor reassurance, and his plan to recruit the fugitives from Issus had a decided air of desperation.

For Alexander victory had opened the way to the coastal cities of Phoenicia, where his policy of defeating the fleet by land could at last show results. These cities and nearby Cyprus provided the crews for the Persian fleet, but they were not a world on which he had no grip, for they had already shown a spontaneous favour for Greek culture and language among their kings and merchants, while Cypriots spoke Greek and mostly strove to be Greeks themselves; better still, it was only twelve years since both Cyprus and the leading naval city of Sidon had rebelled vigorously against their Persian masters. This memory, like several of its participants, was still alive, and without it Alexander's strategy might well have failed him. The local kings and their sailors were away in the Aegean, but Alexander could bargain with their sons and elders and once again use local hatreds in the name of liberation.

He began with Arad, a stronghold on its own island with thirty-foot walls of stone, a small land empire and an ingenious water system in case of siege. Its king was at sea, and his son offered Alexander a golden crown of submission, the first move in a long history of favour from Macedonians. Thereupon, couriers arrived with a diplomatic letter from Darius. He was

pained by the loss of his family and wrote as one king to another, to ask for friendship, alliance and their return. Darius was not yet in a mood for concessions, but a strange story survives that Alexander forged one of his letters and set a more arrogant version before his Companions to be sure that they would refuse it. Darius's letters to Alexander was disputed and muddled in the histories, and there is no means of verifying this unlikely story. In this first letter, said Alexander's officers, Darius promised neither reward nor ransom; others said that he offered 10,000 talents, and if Alexander suppressed anything, perhaps he may have suppressed this mention of ransom and a guarantee of land in his rear. His reported answer is agreed in its main points and must be near to its original form.

In his letter, Darius had blamed the outbreak of war on the Macedonians and dismissed his defeat as an act of god; in answer, Alexander invoked the sacrileges of the Persian kings in Greece and their hostility to Philip, including Darius's plans for his murder, and explained his own invasion as a campaign of vengeance. Darius, he wrote, had seized the Persian throne by crime and bribed the Greeks to rebel; as for the gods, they were with his own army and in future, Darius should approach him as King of Asia. Only as suppliant before a King would he be granted his family. 'If you dispute your right to the kingdom, stand your ground and fight for it; do not run away, for I will come after you, wherever you go.' This was a blunt manifesto, and Greek revenge was already beginning to fade against the wider perspective of Asia's kingship. But the aspiring king of Asia might yet be confined to the western coast of the continent; that depended on his strategy in the sea-ports, and he knew it.

For the moment, all was working out splendidly. At Byblos he welcomed another absent king's son; at Sidon, a crucial port, past history helped him to a decisive coup. The Persians had suppressed Sidon's bid for independence some twelve years earlier and after the usual savagery had left the city to a tame king. Memories of those heady days when Sidon's citizenry had hacked down the trees in the Persian governor's park had not yet died, and when Alexander could promise the deposition of Persia and her agent, the city was his to treat as he pleased. Some fifty ships manned by Sidon were sailing in the Persians' fleet, and the surrender of their home city would surely persuade them to defect or return peacefully; the choice of a new king is said to have been left to Hephaistion, who picked on a man hitherto employed in a garden. Who better to rule than a gardener, even if the story may reflect an ancient myth in Semitic kingship? Promoted from the flowerbed, King Abdalonymus was as popular a choice with the mass of Sidonians as Alexander intended, and in return, he entertained the Companions to a lion-hunt in his nearby royal game park; scenes from the hunt were carved on his sarcophagus when he died, a Companion himself.

However, friendship with Sidon meant likely trouble at the ancient harbour city of Tyre, for while Sidon had recently suffered from Persia, her rival Tyre had flourished and so lay powerful and forbidding on Alexander's coast route southwards. When Alexander approached, he was met by the city's elders and the son of their absent king with gifts and a golden crown, promising to do whatever Alexander might command. Alexander replied that he wished to pay sacrifice to Melkarth, a Tyrian god whom he identified with his ancestor Heracles: this had been advised by an oracle. He had once watched his father use the same pretext for an unavoidable war and it was shrewdly calculated, for it exposed the Tyrians' offer and revealed that at heart, they wanted to remain neutral. If Alexander wished to sacrifice, there was an adequate temple to Heracles at Old Tyre on the mainland; he was not to enter their new island city. This retort made Alexander angry and within days he had begun to demolish Old Tyre in order to use its stone and timber for an assault on New Tyre's offshore position.

Anger was not his principal motive. Tyre, like Sidon, was one of the home ports for the crews in the Persian fleet and as Alexander had already decided to head south into Egypt, he could not leave it unsubdued on his main route of communication, especially as many of Tyre's warships had remained in the city. On a wider front, the Tyrians had been holding a grand festival in honour of Melkarth, to which representatives had come from Carthage, a city once founded by Tyre; these Carthaginians promised help in the event of a siege. Alexander may not have known of their promises but he would be aware of Carthage's link with Tyre and the possibility of naval help once his back was turned. It might be important to scare off this new threat from the west.

The process was bound to be laborious. New Tyre stood on a walled island two and three-quarter miles in circumference, cut off from the coast by half a mile of sea, shallow at first but soon dropping to a depth of some 600 feet. The city was fitted with two harbours, one on the north and another on the south-east outside the walls, and the wall itself rose as much as 150 feet, at least in the opinion of the besiegers. Though a king of Cyprus had once taken Tyre by force forty years before – a remarkable success about which regrettably little is known – he would have been supported by his strong fleet; in early January, a month of rough seas, Alexander was proposing to assault an island city and its remaining fleet when he had no ships of his own. In the early sixth century, Tyre had withstood siege by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, for thirteen consecutivc years, and against a land-bound Alexander it must have reckoned that its chances of survival were equally high. Evidently the Macedonian soldiery had their reservations; Alexander was forced to tell them that he had seen Heracles in a dream, extending his right hand and inviting him inside the city, while his favourite prophet Aristander announced cheering interpretations of such omens as blood-dripping rations of bread. In the background there were more solid reasons for confidence, though the historians never explained them.

In antiquity the assault of a walled city already required the combination of men and machines. It is naive to exalt the inventions above men's moods and opinions; Greeks in Alexandria would later discover steam-power but only use it to propel toy engines, and Buddhists were content if their newfound water power would peacefully revolve their prayer-wheels. But on the battlefield, inventions are more readily applied and there they can help to conquer the most soldierly courage. Like men, the inventions have fought a to-and-fro battle of their own. That primitive weapon for smashing, the mace, was first defeated by the helmet; to the helmet, the axe made cutting reply, only to be kept at bay by the newfound bow and arrow. Arrows brought on body armour, body armour diminished the earlier man-sized shield, smaller shields left a hand free for the thrusting-spear, and the discovery of the long-range composite bow in Mesopotamia in the seventeenth century B.C., backed by the mobile platform of the chariot, had been an innovation on the scale of powder and musket. So too with the race between siege technique and city walls. Axes, poles and ladders had menaced third millennium walls of brick and mud, but in the second millennium, walls had improved and regained the upper hand. Battering rams and siege-towers reached their peak in seventh-century Assyria, whereupon walls, shocked and overtopped, grew sloping banks at their base, bastions and recesses in their outlines and often changed their water-soluble bricks to massive thicknesses of stone. Since the heyday of Assyria, siege technique in the east had been exported to the Mediterranean, but until recently, it had not been advanced; city walls had had things more their own way, and there was no uniformity of stone materials or defences among the Greek cities. In 332 Alexander, like King Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria and his lightly built battering ram, was one step ahead in the battle of weapons; he was patron of a stone-throwing catapult, fitted with washers and powered by springs of twisted sinew.

It is ironic that the walls of Tyre were to be the first fortification to feel the force of boulders from Greek engines. Compared with the kingdoms of the east, the Greeks had been slow to develop advanced siege equipment, drawing their knowledge of siege-towers and rams in the course of the fifth century from their contact with the Orient; probably the techniques had passed from Assyria to Tyre, from Tyre to Carthage, from Carthage to the battlefields of Sicily, where the resident Greeks could have learnt from their Carthaginian enemies. Tyre, then, had been a vital link in the roundabout passage of siegecraft to the Greeks. But the route had also worked in reverse. At the turn of the century. Dionysius I, ruler of Syracuse, had first sponsored an elementary form of arrow-shooting artillery which he then turned against the startled Carthaginians: Carthage no doubt had reported her new wounds to Tyre and hence in 332 the Tyrian engineers had copied Dionysius's idea, and evolved arrow-catapults of their own. But they had not bargained with Philip and the intervening rise of Macedonia. By 340 Greek engineers under Philip's patronage had disovered the powers of a torsion spring; at first they fitted it to the old Sicilian brand of catapult, but soon pupils of Philip's head engineer, Polyeidus the Thessalian, had gone on to experiment with torsion-powered stone-throwers for Alexander's benefit. The old Syracusan catapult, presumably still used at Tyre, was repeat-firing without a torsion spring; whereas its range was some two hundred yards and its weapon a metal-tipped bolt, Alexander's new stone-throwers, improved since their first appearance at Halicarnassus, could rip through the ranks of defenders at 400 yards, and at 150 yards they could damage a city wall. To judge from several stories, the accuracy of ancient artillery was most impressive; when the Spartan king Archidamus was shown an arrow-shooting catapult for the first time, 'By Heracles', he remarked, 'man's courage is now a thing of the past.'

Alexander's technicians had not stopped at stone-throwers; stronger and taller siege-towers than ever before were waiting to be assembled, leaving space for archers and battering rams on as many as twenty different levels, up to a height of 180 feet; they were an extraordinary feat of carpentry, for their axles were made of oak, their planking of fir and their wooden towers were coated with lime and hung with sheepskins to keep off enemy missiles. There were improved grappling irons, though Alexander's head engineer disputed their merits; there was also a borer on wheels whose long iron-tipped pole was poked into mud-brick walling by a newly improved method. Wide drawbridges fell from each storey of the towers, down which more troops could pour than on usual designs; rams were mounted on a superior form of 'tortoise' 48 feet square, beneath which they were worked by ropes and a roller, while animal skins and a three-storey tower protected them, its top level carrying catapults, the bottom two holding buckets of water to put out any flames. But without exceptional leadership no number of new machines would bring Tyre down. Men as well as mules would have to heave these gigantic towers into position, and encouragement rested with Alexander, cut off by half a mile of water from the point at which conventional siegecraft could begin. 'Genius,' Napoleon once remarked, 'is the inexplicable measure of a great commander.' Before Tyre, Alexander's generalship had been good rather than great; with a characteristic leap forward to meet a challenge, he was now to show for the first time that genius which singles him out in military history. Before settling down to besiege, he sent heralds to offer Tyre peace in return for surrender. The Tyrians seized and killed them, hurling their bodies off the city walls in full view of the enemy. 'A truce must not be broken or a herald killed; a man who has surrendered to a superior must not be abused': the Tyrians had flouted an unwritten law of Greek warfare.

In reply, Alexander's first plan was bold. If he could not sail to Tyre, he would build a mole across the waves and walk there. For the mole, he had a successful precedent. In 398 Dionysius I had taken the city of Motya in north-west Sicily after rebuilding its sunken causeway across a whole mile of sea. Tyre was only half that distance away and though no previous earthwork survived as a foundation, most of the sea cliannel was so shallow that its mud could be used to bind the stonework together. It would be interesting to know how, if at all, Alexander had estimated the depth of the sea, as a hundred yards or so short of the island the water deepens suddenly. But even at that distance, Alexander's causeway would have served its purpose; his siege-towers would still overtop the wall, allowing his archers to shoot down on to the defenders, while his new stone throwers could batter the fortifications. Fortunately the forests of the Lebanon were a nearby source of timber, whereas Old Tyre, fast being demolished, provided the necessary stone; any further transport of building materials would have been impossibly slow, especially in the absence of the fleet. Ancient Greece knew no efficient carthorse collar and had never even devised a wheelbarrow.

Through the shallows the work proceeded apace, watched by Alexander who, said his officers, 'explained each step in person, encouraging some with a kind word, lightening the labours of others who had worked conspicuously well with a gift of money'. The people of Tyre were sceptical, harassing the builders from their warships and jeering at Alexander for daring to rival the God of the Sea. But the mole drew nearer, Poseidon notwithstanding, and the Tyrians soon took to pelting it with arrows from their arrow-catapults: in reply, Alexander hung up leather hides to protect his men and ordered two tall siege-towers to be erected to that he could shoot back. The Tynans, themselves engineers with a respectable history, replied with a show of technical cunning.

In the secrecy of the city harbour they built up a transport ship to hold as much dry timber, shavings and torchwood as possible, adding pitch, sulphur and other inflammable material. The idea of a fireship was not new, but to each of its two masts near the prow they lashed two beams and hung up cauldrons filled with fuel; when the beams burnt, the cauldrons would tip and fan the fire, like the famous firepots which Rhodes would popularize over a century later. After ballasting the stern so that the prow was well clear of the water the crews waited for a favourable wind and then arranged for triremes to tow them towards the mole. Within range, they set light to the cargo, dived for safety and left the ship to blow straight into Alexander's siege-towers. The triremes bombarded any Macedonian defenders, and skiffs put in to the mole elsewhere and destroyed all available catapults. Victim of a most intelligent manoeuvre, Alexander ordered new machinery to be built and the mole to be widened to some 200 feet in order to hold more siege-towers. Personally, he departed to Sidon on the happy news that the Phoenician fleet was at last returning home from Persian service; they might well be compelled to join him now that they had heard how their bases had surrendered, and as his hewers of wood in the Lebanon cedar forests were being harassed by natives, the Shield Bearers and Agrianians came too, prepared for a short sharp exercise.

On reaching Sidon, Alexander was more than compensated for the slow and disastrous progress of his mole. The kings of Byblos and Arad had returned to put in his power the ships with which they had deserted from the Persian admirals. Sidon did likewise, pleased by her change of king, and Rhodes sent nine warships, a precious gesture from an island whose entrepreneurial skills were becoming indispensable to the trade of the south-east Mediterranean. A hundred warships in all had joined him, enough to cripple the Persians' fleet at the start of their sailing season and to vindicate his long-term policy of taking the sea-ports one by one. It did not seem too disturbing when a fifty-oared pinnace arrived from Antipater with an urgent message in its captain's keeping; across enemy seas and against a March wind, the journey must have been dramatic and it would not have been undertaken for a triviality. As the captain had been the hero of the surprise of the ten Persian triremes in the Cyclades the previous autumn, his message probably concerned the evident attempts of the Spartan king Agis to rebel with Persian naval and monetary support. Alexander was already aware of Spartan discontent and none too worried that the Greek allies would abet it; the Persian ships were now a dying threat, so he left Sidon for ten days and menaced the tribesmen of the Lebanon cedar forests in order to safeguard his timber-cutters, sparing himself nothing in the process, as is plain from a delightful incident.

Lysimachus, Alexander's favourite boyhood tutor, had insisted on joining the march to the woods but as darkness fell, cold and unfamiliar in the mountains, he was lagging far behind the professional soldiers. Rather than abandon him to the enemy, Alexander fell back by his side and together, pupil and tutor soon found themselves cut off from all but a few of their troops. The night was growing chilly and they had no supplies to light a fire; in the distance, Alexander saw the enemy camp fires and 'trusting in his own agility – for, as always, he consoled his Macedonians by sharing their hardships in person', he set off to fetch his men a light. Reaching the camp fire, he surprised and stabbed two enemy guards with his dagger, snatched a torch from the embers and brought it back to warm his followers. Having scared off enemy reprisals, tutor, pupil and friends spent the night by their own blazing fire. In the search for Alexander's personality, this story must not be discounted; Chares its teller was Alexander's Master of Ceremonies, who would hear it told at dinners by his king, and any exaggerations may come not from his own imagination but from fellow-guests at table. Serious concern for his soldiers, a personal daring which in a lesser man would be a foolish waste of life: it was only proper that the new Achilles should have risked himself in the manner of his hero for the tutor who had first given him his Homeric nickname.

On returning to Sidon, he must have thought that his good news would never end. A hundred and twenty Cypriot ships and three prominent kings of Cypriot cities had left the Persians to pledge him their services; he now had a fleet nearly three times as large as Tyre's and he could call on that most modern invention in sea power, the quinquireme. Cypriots and Phoenicians used this expertly, for it meant manning their normal three-banked warship with two men to each oar on the two bottom layers, one to each oar on the top layer; this doubled manpower on the lower levels had increased the speed and ramming-power over the usual trireme. The Cypriot kings kept this prestige ship as their privilege; in the age after Alexander the quinquireme would touch off an arms race of the usual royal pomposity, one king competing with another until the definitive futility of a thirty-banker had laboured on to the Aegean. No king more merited a quinquireme than the elderly Pnytagoras of Salamis, a man whose past may have decided the fate of the Cypriot fleet; his grandfather had been bold Euagoras, who had fought for independence from Persia's empire. Twelve years earlier, this grandson Pnytagoras had been raised to Salamis's throne to throw off Persian control at a time of revolt in Egypt and Phoenicia. Eventually he had secured himself by changing sides for a bargain with Persia, but his independence was a recent memory and when he looked to Alexander, he was not altogether disappointed. Alone of the Cypriot kings, Pnytagoras ruled a city with no minerals, so Alexander granted him a nearby copper-mine on Cyprus. Like the kings of the Phoenician cities, the Cypriot kings were restored and acknowledged as allies, and although they were to strike coins with Alexander's name and type, strict uniformity was not enforced, and money in their own name continued to appear in small quantities.

Besides the Cypriots, one final blessing arrived in Sidon: 4,000 hired Greek reinforcements who had been summoned the previous spring from southern Greece. If they had marched by land they may have brought news more welcome than their numbers, for during the winter, Alexander had been unaware of a desperate danger to Asia Minor and the Royal Road behind him. Persian troops had fled northwards from Issus into the desolate wilds of Cappadocia which he had scarcely troubled to subdue that very autumn, and in the winter months they had streamed west with the help of the native tribes and cavalry in an effort to break out to the coast and link up with the Persian admirals. Three pitched battles of much moment had been fought, and Philip's veteran officer, the one-eyed Antigonus, had covered himself in glory from his neighbouring satrapy in Phrygia. Each time the Persian fugitives had been routed, perhaps with the fresh help of these reinforcements, again, in Darius's absence, the enemy's plan was notable for its vigorous sense of the possible, but it had been frustrated even before Alexander had heard of it. Antigonus had won the day, and Iranians only survived in Anatolian hideouts where their numbers had been too reduced to be a disturbance. It had been a winter of extreme danger and ferocity and the victories which saved it deserve as much credit as most of the pitched battles in the front line.

Returning to Tyre, Alexander found that the mole had been severely damaged by a spring gale in his absence. However, his new sea power made up for the loss and his next step was to challenge the outnumbered Tyrian warships with his own. But the Tyrians had blocked their harbour and they could safely refuse battle, restricting their losses to three rammed ships; short of a decisive new strategy, Tyre seemed certain to stand, at least until a thorough blockade, no easy business, could starve her to surrender. But behind the lines brains were being brought to bear in one of the many international meetings of Alexander's career. As well as sailors, engineers had joined Alexander from Cyprus and Phoenicia and then were now enjoying an exchange of ideas with their Greek equivalents.

Their first suggestion was valuable enough to be imitated by several subsequent kings: two large ships were to be lashed prow to prow and a battering ram was to be suspended above their decks so that their crews could row it up to the island's walls. They would anchor directly beneath doubtless protected by roofs of hide, and thus work the rams against the stonework as if they were still on dry land.

Though these battering-ships lessened the need for a full-length mole, Alexander was much too efficient a besieger to limit his assault to one area; the combination of varied troops and weaponry was his military stock-in-trade, and the mole, therefore, was rebuilt at an angle to the prevailing wind, the tallest siege-towers ever known were commissioned for its tip, complete with drawbridges, and all the while, stone-throwing catapults were to keep up a barrage against the wall from both ship and mole. The Tyrians were every bit as energetic; they repaired their breaches and put into practice the schemes of their own engineers.