Текст книги "Alexander the Great"
Автор книги: Robin Fox
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To cushion the arrows and boulders, they hung long leather skins stuffed with seaweed along their battlements and set up large wheels of marble which they revolved with an unspecified mechanism; their whirring spokes were enough to break the missiles' course. They dropped rocks into the sea against the battering ships, which were already foundering in rough water, and hoped to prevent the crews from anchoring within range; by a master stroke, Alexander's men replied by hauling up the rocks on rope lassoes, loading them into their stone-throwers and hurling them far out of harm's way. Undaunted, the Tyrians sent armoured ships to cut the Macedonians' anchor cables and when these were beaten off by guards, they resorted to underwater divers, a familiar force in Greek warfare, who cut through the ropes until the Macedonians changed their anchor cables to solid chain. Patience was running out and a blockade had not brought Tyre any nearer to surrender.
When the battering-ships did manage to anchor at the foot of the walls they fared little better. The Tyrians used slurp poles to slice through the ropes by which the rams were swung and followed this up with sheets of flame from their flame-throwers. Against the siege towers on the mole they fitted tridents to long ropes and harpooned the enemy on their various levels, dragging them like speared fishes into the sea. Those who ventured on to the tower's drawbridges were trapped in large fishing nets and flung down on to the rocks. Workers at the foot of the wall were showered with sand which had been heated in upturned shields. Red hot, it poured inside their body armour and drove them to a frenzy.
This gallant resistance to naval blockading and battering continued from April until early July and against it the stone-throwing catapults could make little headway. Now that the Phoenician fleets had surrendered there was more to be said for swearing a truce with Tyre and moving south to Egypt, but Alexander refused to leave an enemy city behind him as long as Persian admirals were at large in the Aegean and southern Greece was unsettled by Sparta. Only one of his Companions is said to have backed his opinion in council.
A tempting alternative was not hard to find. While Tyre still stood Darius sent a second communication, offering a large ransom, his daughter's hand in marriage, friendship and alliance and all the lands up to the river Euphrates, later to be the furthest eastern boundary of the Roman Empire. It came at a very opportune moment, and when Alexander put it to his friends, he may well have thought first of the judicious forgery which was mentioned in connection with one of Darius's letters. But its reception was agreed, presumably because it was recorded by Callisthenes, writing up the court's personalities to please his patron. 'If I were Alexander,' Parmenion is said to have commented, at least in the official myth of his king, 'I would accept the truce and end the war without further risk.' 'So would I,' answered Alexander, irrefutably, 'if I were Parmenion.'
On this defiant note, a refusal was sent to Darius who also heard, through a eunuch escaped from camp, that his wife had died in childbirth and that Alexander had given her a magnificent funeral, a tribute which he had no political need to pay. The news of her death and Alexander's refusal of the peace offer finally determined Darius to muster a truly grand army from the Punjab to the Persian Gulf, a task which would take a whole year; it was evident that the Aegean offensive would now fail, as the Levantine fleets had surrendered, although his admirals still put up a resourceful struggle with the help of that scourge of Greek sailors and sea trade, the pirate. The coast of western Asia had been thoroughly harassed by land and sea in the past nine months, despite the attempted closure of its ports. Cos had been retaken and fifty pirate long-boats had helped raid even the apparent stronghold of Miletus, restoring a Persian governor and exacting badly-needed money. Ephesus's new democracy may have been similarly disturbed, and as if by design, the wild mountain tribes of three satrapies in Asia Minor had drawn off Alexander's generals in punitive expeditions. These were their last signal successes, for Alexander's second Greek fleet had finally put to sea. It at once cleared the Hellespont, then freed its islands and pursued the Persians southwards. Their henchmen were rooted out with them, not least the Athenian soldier of fortune, Chares, who had set himself up in Mitylene less than three years after he had crowned Alexander at Troy: he throve on chaos and disorder, but not for the first time he had changed sides too late and was expelled by the Macedonian admirals.
Back at Tyre, the next incident selected by the historians was centred on Alexander himself One July morning, after careful preparation behind screens of hide, the Tyrians sailed out in their thirteen smartest warships, meaning to surprise Alexander's Cypriot fleet which had been beached in the north harbour while its crews had left as usual for lunch. Their adventure began auspiciously. They approached in hushed silence, then raised their cox's call, plashed their oars and rammed three royal Cypriot quinqueremes to pieces before the crews could return. Alexander was lunching in the southern harbour but had not returned to his royal tent as usual; he hurried to his quinquereme on hearing of the sortie, and sped round the city with ships to the rescue, urging his crews to ram and sink the Tyrian attackers. His own role was conspicuous, its results important, for his surprise retaliation deprived Tyre of her swiftest ships. Their sortie was said to have been prompted by a festive bout of drinking, but it was more likely to have been inspired by hunger, as Alexander had long been mounting a blockade on both harbours. Without their best warships the Tyrians were now more hemmed in than ever. Even Carthage had withdrawn her offers of help.
After two days' rest, the Macedonians were able to follow up their naval victory. In keeping with Alexander's methods, the final blow was to be delivered by varied weapons at various places. Battering-ships were to breach given points in the wall, machine-bearing ships would give cover and two more shiploads of infantry were to emerge down newly devised drawbridges and storm a way through any breaches. Meanwhile the fleet was to attack both harbours, north and south; archers and catapults were to be carried round the island in a flotilla of warships in order to create an unpleasant diversion. Such a mixture of concentrated and diversionary tactics is the mark of a great general, able to see his decisive chance and seize it. As planned, walls were rammed until they tottered, artillery rounded off the damage, warships and archers drew off the defenders, drawbridges dropped downwards and the Shield Bearers poured into the breach, led by their captain Admetus, with Alexander heading the second wave. Admetus, first to mount the wall, died a hero's death. Alexander was quickly astride the battlements to fill his place. Conspicuous both in armour and performance, he speared some, stabbed others and hurled Tyrians down into the sea. As the infantry followed his lead Tyre fast fell to Macedonian hands, no longer having the ships to keep its attackers at bay. A last-ditch stand by the shrine of the city founder was to no avail.
Enraged by Tyrian atrocities and the seven-month length of the siege, Alexander's army killed some 8,000 of the citizens and enslaved a further 30,000 of those who had not already been shipped in safety to Carthage and Sidon; on Alexander's orders, 2,000 more were crucified along the shore. The cruelty was not wholly wanton, for as the army burst upon the city, a truce had been announced for all who might take refuge in shrines or temples. Though most of the Tyrians were now too stubborn to comply, those who did so were spared, including Azemilk, King of Tyre, and the thirty envoys from Carthage whom it would have been unwise to violate. Azemilk was to be restored to his kingship and the city was to be resettled with loyal garrison troops and native survivors; as a sign of the times, it was given a Greek constitution.
On the following day, Alexander paid his overdue sacrifice to Heracles or Melkarth, dedicating the catapult which had first broken the city walls and consecrating the sacred ship of Tyre which he himself had been responsible for sinking. Never can the god have received such a bloodstained sacrifice: 'Tyre', said a Macedonian historian, possibly Callisthenes, 'had fallen in the month of July when Aniketos was official magistrate at Athens.' But the magistrate's name is known to have been Nikeratos; the word Aniketos means Invincible and in a forgivable burst of enthusiasm, even the name-date of the year was altered to suit Alexander's invincibility as a besieger.
Encouraging, explaining, 'sharing the hardships in person', whether on the mole or among the cedars of Lebanon, Alexander had deserved his touch of historical glamour. As usual, the histories centre their story round the king, but there is one chance reminder that the new Achilles could no longer sack cities in the manner of his Homeric forbear, 'laying them low by the might of his own spear'. In a work on technical engineering, Diades the Greek from Thessaly, pupil to King Philip's inventor, is later described as the 'man who besieged Tyre with Alexander'. The fall of the city perhaps owed more to the drawing-board than will ever be known.
Once Tyre had fallen, Alexander could continue south through the coastal plains to Egypt, sure of the surrender of lesser cities in Syria and Palestine. Dor, Ashdod and Straton's Tower made terms because they depended on Tyre and Sidon, but a mere hundred miles south he ran into more obstinacy. Gaza, that large and ancient Philistine city, bestrode his route two miles from the sea, and from the Lebanon's trade of frankincense and the Arab's trade in spices, it had long grown very rich. It was garrisoned by hired Arabs, and it was urged to resist by its oriental governor Batis, who went down in history as ugly, fat and a eunuch.
Gaza's most formidable defence was its own mound, for like many cities in biblical lands it was perched on a 'tell' or heap of its earlier layers of habitation, from which it surveyed the open desert. It was well provisioned, and as soon as Alexander ordered the machinery which had been shipped from Tyre to be reassembled his engineers protested that the city was 'too high to take by force’. Undeterred, Alexander 'thought that the more impossible it seemed, the more it must be captured; the feat would be so extraordinary that it would greatly unnerve his enemies, whereas failure would be a disgrace if ever the Greeks or Darius should hear of it*. Gaza, like Tyre, was too strong to be left on Alexander's one route of communication, and this must have weighed as heavily as any attractions of the impossible.
Alexander's solution was characteristic. The citizens of Gaza prided themselves in their steep fort; very well, if the city was too high, then the ground level must be raised to meet it. Orders were given that against the south wall of the city a mound was to be built up, 400 feet wide and 250 feet high according to Macedonian estimates, though these are surely an exaggeration, for the siege only lasted two months and it would have been impossible, even unnecessary, to pile up so much sand in the time available. The method of such a mound was extremely old; it had been used two centuries earlier by Persian generals. Now it was to serve a new purpose: catapults and siege-towers were to be hauled to its top, presumably, on wooden ramps, and the defenders were to be battered from a point which overtopped them. At the same time, sappers were to dig tunnels under the walls to cause them to subside, an effective method against cities set on a 'tell' of earth and one which was standard practice; in 83 B.C., when the Romans were besieging a town in Asia Minor, the defenders even stole out and released a bear and a swarm of wasps down the enemy siege tunnel in order to discomfort their diggers.
Battered by artillery and rammed from the siege-towers, the city walls of Gaza soon subsided into the sappers' tunnel. As the Macedonians poured in, the natives resisted heroically and Alexander himself sustained two wounds. One came from an Arab who knelt as if in surrender, only to stab with a dagger concealed in his left hand, the other, more serious, from an enemy arrow-catapult whose bolt cut through the king's shield and breastplate and embedded itself in his shoulder causing a wound which 'was treated' with difficulty. Nonetheless Alexander saw his purpose fulfilled: at the fourth attempt, the Macedonians managed to mount the 'tell' and scale its shattered walls on movable ladders. Once inside they opened the gates for the entire army, and by late October, despite a vigorous defence, Gaza had fallen.
If only more details were known, the capture of Gaza would surely rank among Alexander's most remarkable exploits. As at Tyre, he had forced through a constructional scheme of admirable daring with an almost outrageous sense of what was possible, for to have prevailed on an army, weary from the trials at Tyre, to heap up a huge sand mound in the heat of late summer is no small tribute to Alexander's inspiration: as for his generalship, once again he had shown that pugnacious sense of style and that readiness to attack by several means at once which single out the great besieger. No other general in ancient history can boast of two siege successes comparable with the fall of Tyre and Gaza in ten consecutive months.
About the treatment of Gaza more is known, and even in antiquity the information aroused warm comment. The male inhabitants were killed to a man, mostly during the capture of the city, whereas all the women and children were enslaved, in keeping both with the customs of the time and with Alexander's habitual treatment of 'rebels'. The city itself was re-populated with native neighbours and used as a fortress for the rest of the war, proof of how Alexander had valued its site. Batis's fate was more discussed: Alexander's officers are not known to have referred to it, but camp gossip said that thongs were passed round his feet and lashed to the back of Alexander's chariot, and the horses then dragged him round the city while Alexander compared his punishment to that of Homer's Hector at the savage bidding of his slayer Achilles. As time passed, the description of the incident grew more lurid, but that is no reason to doubt it; in Thessaly, for example, men still dragged a murderer's body behind their horses round the grave of his victim, and Alexander was accompanied by a large contingent of Thessalian cavalry. They could well have suggested a punishment which appealed to their ruler's Homeric pretensions; at Gaza, Alexander had been wounded twice, and his army always took especially fierce vengeance on cities that gave him a wound.
The fall of Gaza had opened the way through marsh and desert to Egypt, and so after nine months of bloodshed, Alexander could enter unchallenged the most powerful kingdom in Darius's empire. During the past nine months he had introduced Syria and Palestine to the Macedonian weaponry which would sweep to and fro across them for more than a century in wars for their forests, fleet and precious metals; Gaza had been repopulated and Tyre resettled with a Greek form of government, but there can have been few thanks among the families of the thousands who had died for the beginnings of the flood of Greek culture which would overwhelm them with such rich results in the course of the next hundred years.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Once, according to a pretty story, Alexander and his elderly historian Aristobulus were sailing in the same boat down the Indian river Jhelum, and to ease the journey, Aristobulus was reading aloud from his history, elaborating the truth, as he thought that he would most please his king by adding fictitious heroics to the story. But Alexander seized the book and flung it into the river, saying: 'And the same, Aristobulus, is what you deserve, fighting these duels on my behalf and spearing all these elephants with a single javelin.' If Alexander had ever been so honest about the months which follow the siege of Gaza, his historians might well be in danger of a similar ducking. In November 332 Alexander crossed the desert into Egypt; by the following April, his myth had taken a new and strange direction. Legend and flattery soon set to work on this shift of tone, but behind them lie the deepest questions about Alexander's personality: whether Alexander was in any sense a mystic, how seriously he regarded the divine honours which were paid him in his lifetime, whether he came to disown his father Philip and if so, what this could have meant to him. This is a far cry from the sarissas and siege machinery of the year before and stands in the sharpest contrast to the carnage at Tyre and Gaza; if part of Alexander's spell has been his youth and part his impetuous curiosity, the most extraordinary part has based itself on the events of the next five months.
The road from Gaza to Egypt was particularly hazardous, as it led first through three days' desert, then through the famous Barathra or Serbonian bog which had brought a Persian army to grief only twelve years earlier. It is not known how Alexander supplied himself with water, perhaps from his fleet, or how he avoided these coastal marshes, but by November he found himself on the easterly arm of the Nile Delta, the prize of Egypt before him and a winter of plentiful food in store for his army. In November the Nile was no longer prohibitively flooded, and winter was the season of leisure for the Egyptian farmer. At Issus, the former satrap of Egypt had died leading his troops, and after the battle Amyntas the renegade Macedonian had led some 4000 fugitives from the Great King's mercenaries by boat to Cyprus, then south to the Nile where they had disembarked to an eager welcome from the natives. Later, when Amyntas's Greeks began to loot Egyptian farms they lost popularity; Amyntas and his troops were killed, possibly on Persian instigation. But his example remained as a spur to the next adventurer; Egypt was waiting, her natives responsive to tact, her army, as always, no serious obstacle.
As a civilization, Egypt was as old as the world and proud of it. Greek philosophy, so her priesthood claimed, had been discovered by an Egyptian, son of the Nile, 48,863 years before Alexander's arrival. It was nearly two hundred years since the Persians had first conquered her Pharaoh and seized a kingdom so rich in men and grain; the Persian king had been recognized as the new Pharaoh and a satrap had ruled as his deputy, supported by military colonists from all areas of the empire, whether ews or nomads from Khwarezm, who lived in garrison enclaves as far south as the Nile's first cataract, border of Egypt and independent Nubia Despite legends of Persian atrocity, remembered among the priesthood, Persian rule had not weighed as heavily as it might have done. Persian noblemen enjoyed Egyptian estates which they farmed with native slaves through Egyptian agents; the yearly tribute, at its height, was a mere 700 talents of silver and the payments in kind had not been severe. The move to a state monopoly and a tax on all production would later yield the Ptolemies more than twenty times as much in value, but under Persian rule it was at most partial and in several vital trades and harvests it had not begun at all. Aristocrats of the Delta towns had survived the Persian conquest in the same high office as before; a temple could still own twelve square miles of farmland, and yet their educated classes had never accepted the Persians for long. Rebellion had been persistent and for all but five of the seventy years before Alexander's arrival, Egypt had maintained her independence under various Pharaohs, some of them, probably southerners from Ethiopia, who had set up new dynasties in the Delta. The Persian attempts at reconquest had been repeated and often spectacular. Four times they had invaded and they did not regain the country until the winter of 343. Even then success was brief; within five years of the Delta Pharaohs' fall, Khabash the pretender had again stirred the country to revolt and it was only three years since he had been put down.
Heir to recent and repeated rebellion. Alexander was welcomed enthusiastically by the natives. The Persian satrap met him at the fort of Pelusium and offered him 800 talents and all his furniture in return for a safe pass; Macedonians were sent by boat down the Nile to the capital city of Memphis and Alexander marched to meet them by land. Within a week he had entered the monumental palace of Upper Egypt, home of the Pharaohs for more than a thousand years.
The Egyptian society which greeted him was as rigidly shaped as one of its pyramids; at the base stood the millions of native peasants, the fellahin whom invaders and aristocrats had taxed and dominated because they could not escape; near the top were the family dynasties of the Delta regions, men like Semtutefhakhte or Patesi who made their peace with Alexander and continued without disturbance in the priesthoods and local governorships which their families had held for more than two hundred years; at the peak stood the Persian King (represented in art and ceremony as the Pharoah), and around him the priesthood, whose education and ceremony made them the most articulate class in Egyptian history. 'In Egypt', Plato had written, expressing the priests' own view, 'it is not possible for a king to rule without the art of the priests; if he has forced his way to power from another class, then he must be enlisted into the priestly class before he can rule.' The priests were placed to control a coronation and they judged each wearer of the crown by the terms of their own law, the Ma'at or code of social order which abounded in ritual and complexities; even the brave native Pharaohs of the recent rebellions were denounced as 'sinners' by the priesthood because they had offended their arcane commands for a righteous life. A stern verdict was passed on the two hundred years of Persian 'misrule and neglect' by priests who exaggerated Persian sacrilege beyond all recognition; Artaxerxes III, who had reconquered Egypt eleven years earlier, was known to the priests as the Sword and was accused of killing the sacred bull of the god Apis, eating it roast and substituting that accursed animal the donkey in its place. Under Persian rule the temples may have had their presents and privileges reduced, but these legends of atrocity went far beyond the truth. However, they suited the purpose of Alexander, the acclaimed avenger of Persian impiety.
Inside Memphis, he was not slow to delight his likeliest critics. 'He sacrificed to other gods and especially to Apis.' By this one sacrifice, he reversed all memories of Persian unrighteousness and paid honour to the Egyptian god Apis in the form of his sacred bull, most famous of Egypt's many religious animals, who represented the god at Memphis until an age of some twenty years when he made way for a younger bullock, died and was interred with pomp in a polished sarcophagus. In return, Alexander is said to have been crowned as Pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt, an honour only mentioned in the fictitious Romance of Alexander;this crowning cannot be dated to any one month, but is supported by the Pharaonic titles which were applied to him in the inscriptions of the country's temples. As Pharaoh, he was the recognized representative of god on earth, worshipped as a living and accessible god by his Egyptian subjects: he was hailed as Horus, divine son of the sun god Ra whose worship had prevailed in Lower Egypt, and as beloved son of Amun, the creator god of the universe, whose worship had flourished in the temples of Upper Egypt and grown to incorporate the worship of the more southerly Ra. This divine sonship fitted him into the dynastic past of the native Pharaohs, for he could be said to share their common father Amun-Ra, who visited the Pharaoh's mother to father each future king; courtiers would have explained the doctrine and addressed him by its titles, but before many months had gone, it would prove to be rich in possibilities.
'Pharaoh, Pharaoh,' an Egyptian priest had written of the Persians' reconquest, 'come do the work which awaits you'; as crowned king of the two lands, 'lord of sedge and bee', Alexander was indeed to fulfil the hopes of the temples and bear out the daily routine of the priestly Ma'at. His crowning had come at a time of confusion. The last Pharaoh, Nectanebo II, had fled south, probably to Ethiopia, to avoid the Persians' reconquest but he was believed by Egyptians to be ready to return and resume his rule: Alexander had replaced him, and it was perhaps more than a rumour that he considered a march into Ethiopia, border home of Nectanebo's possible supporters. Instead, his historian Callisthenes is said to have gone south up the Nile to investigate the causes of the river's summer flooding, a story which may well be correct. The floods had long exercised the ingenuity of Greek authors, some of whom had guessed the answer, but it was left to Aristotle to write that the matter was no longer a problem, now that Greek visitors had seen the truth of Ethiopia's summer rains for themselves. Probably these witnesses were his kinsman Callisthenes and other soldiers in the Macedonian army.
As for Alexander, he took ship from Memphis early in the year of 331 and sailed northwards down the Nile to make his most lasting contribution to civilization. At the river's mouth, he visited the Pharaohs' frontier fort at Rhacotis and explored the other outlets of the Delta. He was much struck by the possibilities of the site at its western edge:
It seemed to him that the place was most beautiful for founding a city and that the city would be greatly favoured; he was seized by enthusiasm for the work and marked out the plan in person, showing where the gathering-place should be built and which gods should have temples where, Greek gods being chosen along with the Egyptian Isis; he arranged where the perimeter wall should be built.
So Alexandria was born, a new centre of gravity in all succeeding Mediterranean history which 'was to stand, like a navel, at the middle of the civilized world'.
Like every other Alexandria it grew round the site of a fortress used by the Persians. Rhacotis became a quarter in the new city and absorbed the herdsmen who had long lived round it in villages: its site had been admirably chosen and its natural harbour may already have been exploited by Egyptians. To Alexander it promised a particularly benign climate, shelter from the island of Pharos and a raised position on the shoreline which would catch the north-west breeze in summer. A site further east on the Delta would soon have been ruined by the silt which the natural current at the river mouth washes down shore from the west.
Apart from fame and the wish for the city to prosper, the motives for founding Alexandria can only be guessed. Its site was not well defended and its position on the fringe of Egypt's administration suggests that access to the Aegean was its prime attraction, perhaps for economic reasons. Greeks had long maintained a trading-post at Naucratis in the Delta and their trade with Egypt is not known to have dwindled before Alexander's arrival, though Persian invasions cannot have helped it. How far commercial relations with Greece and their possible growth weighed in Alexander's decision is most uncertain. The Aegean, when he founded the city, was infested with pirates and too hostile to deserve development; even in its maturity more trade was thought to pass into Alexandria from inland Egypt than from the entire Mediterranean. The inland granaries of Egypt could ship corn quickly into the city by river and canal to feed its large population; this ready supply of food was more important to its founder than the casual trading of its surplus or the harbour taxes taken from trade in the port. In Alexandria, as in other Greek cities, traders were seldom citizens and their organization into official groups was a very slow development. Trade therefore was not a natural force in a city's politics and during the next century Alexandria's commerce spread more through the entrepreneurs of Rhodes than her own citizens; when the city was founded Rhodes was an uncertain friend to Alexander.
The citizen body was exclusive rather than commercial. Macedonian veterans, Greeks and prisoners, perhaps too a contingent of Jews, were detailed as the new citizens, and native Egyptians were mostly added as men of lesser status. The laws and charter of the city are very far from certain; it perhaps had an assembly and council from the start but their qualifications for membership are nowhere mentioned. The architect was a Greek from Rhodes and the building was entrusted to Cleomenes, a Greek from Naucratis with a shrewd head for finance. As the barley-meal was sprinkled to mark out the city in the shape of a Macedonian military cloak, Aristander the prophet is said to have predicted that 'Alexandria would be prosperous in other respects, but especially in the fruits of the earth'; home-grown food was the city's first concern, not balanced trade or the c port of Egypt's sail-ropes, drugs and spices and the import of Greece's wine and painted pottery.
As the building work began, Alexander was rewarded by a pleasant surprise. From the Aegean, so early in the season, one of his admirals sailed in to deliver prisoners and report on his campaign; now that the Cypriot, Rhodian and Phoenician fleets had changed sides, the news could only be welcome. The Persian admirals were left with dwindling money, a mere 3,000 Greek mercenaries and only as many boats as they could enlist from Aegean pirates. Their tyrants and oligarchs had been expelled from the cities of Tenedos, Lesbos, Chios and Cos, usually to the delight of the mass of their citizens: pirates and one of the two Persian admirals had been ambushed in Chios's harbour. However, the Persian admiral had since escaped and his fellow was somewhere in hiding; Chares the Athenian, who had seized one of Lesbos's cities, was also ranging free, and by no means the last had been heard of them. For the moment it was more alarming that Aegean shipping was still at the mercy of pirate long-boats. Less serious were reports that Agis King of Sparta, whose negotiations with the Persian admirals had come to nothing, had since transferred 8,000 Greek fugitives from Issus to Crete and won over Crete's towns and fortresses with Persian help. Persian desperadoes would flock there now that the Aegean war was over, but if Agis shipped his bandits back to Greece, they were unlikely to cause uncontrollable revolt. Against Antipater and the allies, their numbers were negligible and their pay would soon start an argument, especially as Sparta used no coinage and had no ready means to finance a hired army. Among the spoils of Issus Alexander had captured Spartan ambassadors to Darius; two more had been sent since then but they were unlikely to meet with any more help from a king whose strategy now centred on Asia.
