Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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Thrace's wooded landscape was more of an obstacle than its unarmoured tribesmen, so much so that Philip had once used a pack of hounds to flush his enemy from the thickets. Alexander balanced his weapons nicely. His father's slingers and archers provoked the barbarians out of the woods, then his infantry pitched into them, uphill if necessary, and his cavalry either jostled or punched in from the flanks wherever there were clearings. Before long he had routed the Triballians so thoroughly that their king retreated with a few loyalists to an island in the Danube itself, where he was watched from the far bank by its nomadic tribesmen.

* I do not, of course, imply that Ptolemy's entire history or precise words have ever survived; sec the General Note on Sources at the end of this book for this point and for the identity of our main historians.

Alexander despatched his booty back to Macedonia, for he remembered his father's unhappy losses, and advanced to Europe's great river to round off his first foreign campaign.

His ships met him as requested, but they were too few and feeble to storm the Triballian island, so Alexander abandoned the sea power which, like Napoleon, he never mastered, and decided to float his troops across the Danube for a show of terror on the far bank. Fishing canoes were commandeered, and orders were given for the troops to fill their leather tent-skins with chaff and sew them together to make rafts; on these makeshift transports they crossed the river under cover of night, their horses swimming beside them. They landed cunningly near the cover of a tall cornfield, and were led through the crops by the Foot Companions who smoothed a way with the flat blades of their sarissas. On open ground, they loosed a classic charge, punching forwards with the Companions on the right wing, backing up with sarissas in square formation in the centre. The tribesmen fled first to a fort, then retreated on horseback into the steppes. Alexander knew better than to follow a retreating enemy into barren steppeland, and so returned to count the plunder and sacrifice to 'Zeus the Saviour, Heracles and the river Danube for allowing him to cross it'.

The manner of his crossing was not just a matter of the river's goodwill. Nomad relations of the Danube tribesmen were known to stuff their horses' skins with chaff when they died, but there is no evidence that Alexander's straw-stuffed rafts were a native custom; they belonged, rather, to the East, to the Euphrates and the Oxus, and the rivers of the Punjab where stuffed skins able to carry some two hundred pounds still serve as kilikrafts for the natives. No Macedonian had ever seen so far into Asia, and only one Greek general had described it; Xenophon the Athenian, who led the Ten Thousand Greeks through Mesopotamia at the turn of the century, and recorded his march in his memoirs. Faced with the Euphrates he had been shown how to cross it on rafts of stuffed skins; at the Danube, Alexander evidently turned to a trick he had read in a military history.

After the bold example of the first Balkan troops ever to cross the Danube, tribes along the river sent presents of friendship, and the Triballians surrendered on their island; later, more than 2,000 joined Alexander in Asia. Even the so-called Celts of western Europe who lived far up river near the Adriatic coast, sent envoys to plead for alliance. Alexander asked them, wrote his friend Ptolemy, 'what they feared most in the world, hoping they would say himself, but they replied that they were most afraid that the sky would fall on to their heads', an old Celtic belief which had already been described by Herodotus; not for the last time, a Macedonian described an unknown tribe through Herodotean eyes. But the Celts' presence was more pleasing than their stubbornness, for Macedonia was serving history in a way that her Greek subjects could not recognize at the time; bestriding the Balkans, she acted as a barrier against the pressure of Europe's restless tribesmen, and a strong Macedonia guaranteed the safety of the Greeks' city life in the south. Not for another fifty years would hordes of Gauls pour into Greece from Europe and threaten her civilization, and then only at a time of feeble confusion in the Macedonian royal family. The European conquests of Philip and Alexander belonged to a wider perspective, essential to the safety, if not the freedom, of Greece. But there was another corridor to Europe, and no sooner had Alexander received the Celts than he heard that it too was giving trouble.

West and north-west of Macedonia's highlands lived the tribes of Illyrians whose villages controlled the main road of invaders from Europe into Greece and whose kings were dangerous in their own right. When Philip took the kingdom, they had overrun much of Macedonia, killing the king and claiming heavy tribute. Philip fought them back, and pierced far up the Adriatic Coast at all seasons to harass them; he had peopled his north-west frontier with new garrison towns, uprooting his subjects 'like a shepherd who moves his flocks from winter to summer pastures', but he had never ensured their security and the Illyrians had been one of the failures of his reign. The king he had learnt to respect was Bardylis, who had twice exacted tribute from Macedonia and was known as an extraordinarily rich man; he had recently died aged ninety, and it was his son who threatened Alexander with frontier war.

Within weeks, the Danube had been forgotten and Alexander was deep in Illyrian marshes and borderlands. Penning Bardylis's son into a stronghold in late summer he had settled down to besiege him in a narrow glen, only to find that a neighbouring king appeared in force along the passes that blocked his escape. This was a very unpleasant situation. He was short of food and his foraging-parties had to be rescued from harassment; he could not retreat unchallenged, for Bardylis's son would sortie from his fort and launch into his rear with troops who had already shown proof of their taste for human sacrifices. The escape route was a narrow wooded valley between the foot of a sheer mountain and a river beneath, and it was only broad enough for four men abreast. Trapped, Alexander resorted to an impudent bluff.

On his patch of open ground, he narrowed his infantry into a line 120 ranks deep and placed a few cavalry on either wing. Sarissas were to be held erect and on command, the first five ranks were to lower them for the charge and swish them in perfect time from left to right; all troops would advance, swinging from one wing to the other to match the front sarissa bearers, and they would form into a wedge on the left and charge towards the enemy. Shields were to be clashed and the war-cry of Alalalalaiwas to be echoed down the glen. On the first rapid strides forward, the main enemy fled in panic from the hill-tops, scared by the disciplined drill and the sound of the war-cry.

The next task was to secure the lower slopes of the mountain from the few remaining guards. A troop of Companions galloped up to dismount and do battle, but the guards fled again at their onset and the hill passed to Alexander and his skirmishing force of Agrianians, archers and Shield Bearers. While they held the slopes against the enemy higher up the mountain, the rest of the army forded the river on one side of the narrows, continuing the war-cry and forming swiftly up on the far bank to deter attackers; Alexander held their rear with his trusted skirmishers and only joined them when it seemed safe. More shouting and firm drill from, the infantry scared off the worst of the danger, and when Alexander was finally forced to ford the river himself, he arranged for arrow-shooting catapults on the far bank to give him cover across the water. Holding off with his skirmishers, covering with his artillery, and menacing with his heavier troops, he escaped disaster by an intelligently balanced withdrawal. Three days later he slipped back by night across the river and launched two brigades of Foot Companions and his invaluable archers and Agrianians into an enemy who were casually encamped and not expecting to see him again. Many were slaughtered, more captured and the Illyrian kings fled northwards, discredited.

But unwelcome news prevented any further pursuit. It was already mid-September and by circling round his northern frontiers, Alexander had presumed on the obedience of the Greeks and the continuing safety of Philip's advance force in Asia. On both points he was mistaken. In Asia, Attalus had been murdered, and it was perhaps on news of this that Olympias had taken vengeance into her own hands in Macedonia and murdered Eurydice, niece of Attalus and the girl who had supplanted her in Philip's affections; for completeness, she had murdered her baby daughter Europe too. But in Asia, perhaps because of Attalus's removal, the advance force had faltered and been driven back by the vigour of the Persian king's generals; as part of a coherent strategy, 300 talents were said to have been sent to Demosthenes, most hostile of Athenian politicians, and there were hopes that the Greeks would rebel against their leaders. Rebellion had indeed come, but it owed nothing to Persia or to Athenian politicians.

Three years before Philip had punished the city of Thebes in central Greece harshly for her opposition on the battlefield; she had been his ally, then changed sides as her hopes were disappointed; after the Greeks' defeat, she had seen her prisoners sold as slaves and her dead buried only after she had paid for the privilege. In the city prominent Thebans were killed or exiled and their property was confiscated; a Macedonian garrison invested Thebes's fortress and a council of three hundred Thebans, many of whom had already been exiled by their fellow citizens, were set in authority over men who loathed them for their debt to Macedonia. Worst of all, in the name of independence Philip had promised to restore the smaller cities in surrounding Boeotia; these cities Thebes had persistently tried to tyrannize for the sake of more land and power, and nearly two hundred years of Theban history could be written round her domination of small and reluctant neighbours. Now they were to be independent, by order of a Macedonian.

It was not, then, Alexander who was to blame for Thebes's latest upheaval. Philip's severity was working itself out in Alexander's name, and the cause was the secret return of Thebans whom Philip had banished three years before. They talked of freedom and they alleged that Alexander had been killed in battle near the Danube. This sounded too convincing to resist, and when they described the misbehaviour of the Macedonian garrison, whom the Thebans had been too slow to eject the previous autumn, two of its leaders were seized and assassinated. It was open rebellion, now, but their talk of freedom was hardly disinterested: among the returned exiles, there were former officials of the league through which Thebes had dominated her neighbours, and if they were protesting against Macedonia's tyranny, they were also indignant that their own sweet days of local empire had ended.

Alexander treated the news with the speed and gravity which it deserved. He did not waste time in returning to Macedonia, but in a tremendous forced march he stormed down Macedonia's western border, across the brown plains near Trikkala, and was over all hills and mountain passes and up before Thebes within fourteen days. Thebes had been hoping for Athenian troops and for citizen armies from southern Greek cities, but only the Arcadians were stirring to join her, and other states seemed dangerously likely to stay neutral or even to help the Macedonian leader to whom they were sworn allies. When a Macedonian army, more than 30,000 strong, was reported from the city walls, the Thebans could not bring themselves to believe it: 'Alexander', they assumed, must be Antipater, or perhaps Alexander of Lyncestis who had been set in command of Thrace. But to their cost, Alexander it was, and within a week he had begun the 'swiftest and greatest disaster', it could be said, which had ever befallen a Greek city.

Alexander's movements were decisive and much deplored, and the dispute, as often, left its mark in the delicacies of his various histories. Ptolemy, his friend and officer, stressed his reluctance to attack the city, his repeated delay in the hope that Thebes would send ambassadors, the division, no doubt true, between Thebans who wished to talk and between instigators who would have none of it; others agreed on the fact of Alexander's delay, but when Alexander asked for the surrender of the rebel leaders, the Thebans, they said, answered him by shouting from a high tower for help in freeing the Greeks from their tyrant, and Alexander thereupon launched irrevocably into plans for attack. Three days later he opened battle with the Theban army outside the walls and was very hard pressed indeed, for the Thebans had been training in their city gymnasium; not until Antipater led his reserve line into action did his Macedonians begin to recover ground. As they rallied Alexander noticed a postern-gate in the city wall which the Thebans had left unguarded, and this turned the battle. He hurried Perdiccas and his regiment to take it, and once the city had been entered behind the Thebans' backs, their defence was vain; the looting was helped by the Macedonian garrison who had hitherto been blockaded inside their fortress, and it knew no bounds.

Ptolemy put it more cunningly: so far from attacking intentionally, Alexander had continued to delay, and it was only when Perdiccas acted without orders and took it into his head to attack the Thebans' stockade that battle was joined at all. For Perdiccas tried an unofficial raid and was 'wounded badly', and 'almost stranded'; only when the Thebans drove his men back into Alexander's camp did Alexander feel obliged to charge to the rescue. As if by accident, some of the Macedonians followed up so fast that they were trapped inside the city itself; they were almost unopposed, and with the garrison's help, the city fell to them, more by accident than savage design. This sly apology is very interesting. Writing after Alexander's death Ptolemy had strong reason to slander his rival and enemy Perdiccas, and so he explained away Thebes's capture as due to his insubordination and the chance reprisals of his master Alexander. He also posed as a protector of Greek freedom and had reason to conceal Greek opposition to the Macedonians.

And yet one fact was agreed, and of great significance. In the brutal sack of the city, Alexander's Greek allies from Thebes's neighbouring cities distinguished themselves by looting worthy of any Thracian, and given their past history, their enthusiasm was wholly forgivable. In Greece Philip had repeatedly supported the smaller cities against their bigger neighbours; now, when Alexander dismantled the power of Thebes, it was these small cities who joined him wholeheartedly as allies. The sack of Thebes cannot be dismissed as one more outrage to the freedom of the Greeks, for Thebes herself had infringed that freedom by her local empire, and fellow Greeks had avidly repaid in Alexander's name all that they had suffered from Thebes in the past. Alexander shrewdly entrusted the fate of the city to the decision of these allied Greek assistants, probably at a meeting on the spot rather than at a full council of his 'allies' in all Greece. They voted for Thebes's utter destruction, as he knew they would. So the city was destroyed, all private ground was given to the allies to farm as a reward, and 30,000 Thebans are said to have been enslaved, women and children included; they were sold at a reasonable price for such a sudden glut on the local market. Priests were exempted, as were the known opponents of the rebellion and all friends and representatives of the Macedonians' interests, down to the descendants of the poet Pindar, who had written poems to the Macedonian king a hundred and fifty years before. His house, conspicuously, was bidden to be spared.

In the name of his Greek allies, Alexander thus destroyed one of the three great powers in Greece that had threatened him. Men remembered, it was said, how Thebes had once abetted Persia in the distant days of the Persian invasion, and the memory was a cunning one to revive at a moment when Alexander was about to invade the Persian empire as if to avenge their ancient insults against the Greeks. If his allied council did not vote at once for Thebes's ruin, they would naturally have decreed their approval of an act which they were too frightened to condemn; only the Arcadians had moved to help Thebes, but they promptly sentenced their own leaders to death, relieved that their troops had not crossed the isthmus. Others did likewise, but there remained the power centre of Athens, and here Alexander intervened.

Despite rumours, witnesses even, of Alexander's 'death' on the Danube, Athens had not sent troops to the Thebans' cause. Alexander still controlled the ports of the Dardanelles through his fleet and his advance force, and possibly his ships were already detaining the corn fleet from the Black Sea, on which Athens depended for her food supply. Open assistance to Thebes would have been repaid by more rigorous blocking of this lifeline, so she had stayed neutral, even if Demosthenes had sent money and weapons from the presents given him by the Persian king. Besides, Athenians had hated Thebes for almost two hundred years and their rapprochement was only a thing of the past four years, whereas Thebes herself had voted to destroy a helpless Athens only seventy years before, a memory which had not died easily. At the time of the sack the city was celebrating a religious festival and no Greek army would disrupt honours to the gods for the sake of a march to war. Fresh from his Theban terrorism, Alexander was nonetheless keen to teach Athens a lesson. He could not easily risk a siege of her long walls and he was unwilling to outrage a city whose fleet and reputation he needed to use against Persia, so he merely ordered the surrender of the generals and politicians most patently opposed to him. The list of his victims was disputed, but a pleading embassy from Athens persuaded him to moderate his terms and he was content that Charidemus alone should leave Athens. This revision was perhaps true to legal propriety, for alone of his enemies Charidemus had not been born an Athenian and may not have been made a full honorary citizen, so he could be forced into exile without infringing the city's laws. In practice it was a bad mistake, for Athens's most seasoned general thus fled into service with the Persian king, and two other of Alexander's suspects, both of them citizens, followed of their own accord. He should have seized them, citizens or not, while he could; a year later, they were rousing Asian resistance, and their escape, more than any ruin of Thebes, must have seemed regrettable to the Macedonian camp.

On this high note of terror, Alexander returned to Macedonia in late October, secure on all four frontiers and able to plan for a full-scale invasion of Asia. Like his father, he prefaced his march with pomp. The annual festival of Zeus and the Muses was due to be celebrated in the border town of Dion, and this year he invited friends, officers and even ambassadors from his allied Greek cities to share it. An enormous tent was put up to hold a hundred sofas, and for nine days the court caroused and enjoyed the arts, properly careless of a treasury whose monetary debt had almost been paid off by booty from Thebes and the Danube. The entire army were given presents and animals for sacrifice, which they ate after they had offered a part to the gods. The officers received presents according to their influence and more estates as a bribe for their loyalties.

It was also a time for marriages between the noble families of highland and lowland. Both Parmenion and Antipater had eligible daughters, and they suggested to Alexander that he too should marry and father a son and heir before invading Asia; Alexander refused, perhaps because he was wary of his father's matrimonial muddle, perhaps because he did not wish to risk an heir through whom his elderly generals might try and rule. Antipater's daughter he gave to one of his Bodyguards, Parmenion's to an Elimiot baron whose brothers mattered in his army commands. A host of other marriages followed, some to heal old wounds, others to produce the

officer-class of the future, but Parmenion and Antipater did not go unrewarded.

Antipater, nearing sixty, was to stay as general over the Balkans and Europe; Parmenion, already sixty-five years old, was to be deputy-commander of the army with authority over the whole left wing in the line of battle. One of his sons, Philotas, was to command the Companion Cavalry, another son the Shield Bearers; a nephew, or cousin, led half of the Mounted Scouts, and the leader of the Elimiot foot-brigade was now his son-in-law. Three other infantry officers and a prominent cavalry colonel may already have been his close friends, and yet there is nothing to prove that Alexander had been compelled to promote Parmenion's friends and family against his own wishes. The high command reflected Parmenion's influence, but it was hardly in his grip, and nothing suggests that king and deputy were already at odds with each other.

If anything, the opposite was true. There were many among the Companion nobles who opposed an Asian invasion, but Parmenion alone urged Alexander on, perhaps because he had already seen the country for himself. There was, however, an alternative, far away in the west; Alexander answered it by making plans for war on two fronts at once. While his main army crossed the Dardanelles into Asia, a transport fleet and twelve warships were to sail with cavalry and infantry to southern Italy under the command of his brother-in-law King Alexander of Epirus, brother of Olympias, who thus left his wife with a baby daughter and a son after only two years of marriage. Through Greek Companions, Alexander knew the political balance of the Greek west; the Greek colony of Tar-entum had invited his help against the neighbouring tribesmen and he had ordered his brodier-in-law to intervene in the interests of Greek settlements in Italy. The problems of piracy in the Adriatic had already attracted his attention, and he had corresponded with Rome on the clearing of the seas; within three years, Rome, which Aristotle's pupils described as a Greek city, would have sworn an alliance with his brother-in-law's invasion and the Macedonian cause in Italy seemed to be established.

It was a brave moment, the spreading of Macedonia's armies through the Greek cities and against barbarians at either edge of the Mediterranean world, and of course there were courtiers who mistrusted it. As Alexander completed his gifts of land and money to friends, his faithful Perdiccas, leader of one of the two Orestid brigades, felt bound to question him: 'And for yourself, my lord,' he is said to have asked, 'what are you leaving?' 'My hopes,' replied Alexander. It is worth considering how those hopes deserved to be rated.

CHAPTER SIX

As an idea, a Greek campaign against Persia was nothing new. For more than sixty years it had featured as a theme for professional orators and pamphleteers and it had been repeatedly urged on Philip and other outsiders by the eloquent letters of the ageing Athenian Isocrates, who on his own admission wrote for display and was not taken seriously. These paper expeditions ignored the balance of power in a divided Greece, and they did not reconcile the claims and rewards of an outside leader with the hopes of Greek allies who were bound to be fighting as subordinates; their advice was academic, and as Catherine the Great once told Diderot, the advice of academics 'existe seulement sur le papier qui souffre tout'. Reality would prove very different; the Greeks would have recognized it only too clearly as Alexander prepared to set out.

Ten years before Philip's reign, it had been boasted that Asia was easier to conquer than Greece, that depended on where Asia was thought to end, but the subjection of Greece was indeed the first and most awkward essential for any invader who crossed the Aegean. As heir to his father's Greek council, Alexander was dictator to Greece in all but name. There are three recognized aids to a dictatorship: police, a myth and an army, and on leaving for Asia, he arranged Greek politics with the help of all three.

His mother Olympias was to act as Macedonia's queen, her daughter Cleopatra as queen of Epirus; Antipater was appointed general over Greece and Europe with 12,000 Macedonian infantry and 1800 cavalry and the power to recruit more in times of crisis both from Macedonia and from her Greek allies. Personally, Antipater and Olympias would never settle down, but in Greece there were Philip's methods of policing to simplify their task; at least three strategic cities were being garrisoned, and elsewhere there were the favourable governments which had been frozen into power by Philip's treaties. A common peace' had been agreed among the Greek cities, whose presiding council forbade domestic revolution and the return of exiled undesirables in any member state. 'Supervisors of the common stability' had been set up to see that none of the three traditional means of social upheaval, redistribution of land, freeing of slaves and abolition of debt, took place inside an allied city's constitution. Externally, the political balance was suitably feeble; Thebes was now broken, Sparta was detested by neighbours who feared her for her past history, and only Athens remained of the major Greek powers. Alexander's brush with her had been indecisive, but as long as he held the Dardanelles and their cities, 'the corn-table of the Piraeus', he controlled the grain route from the Black Sea on which she depended for food and so was her ultimate master. It was an uneasy relationship. Although the allied Greek council had guaranteed stability for Greek cities, the Athenians were so afraid that Philip and Alexander might interfere with their city's laws that they had already approved a commission to recommend protections for their democracy. But Philip and Alexander still saw this strongly walled city as central to their plans, and their moves on her behalf were very revealing, for it was with Athens in mind that they had turned to the use of myth.

Already, on his gold coinage, Alexander was displaying on one side the goddess Athena, on the other the figure of Victory holding a naval symbol and shown in the style of the statue of Victory on the Acropolis in Athens. Very possibly, in the first autumn of his reign, he had helped to restore two such bronze statues on the Acropolis, and this conscious publicity fitted with his theme of Victory and Invincibility and with his hopes for Athens in the Asian invasion. Victory, his coins implied, would be forthcoming, won by a fleet with Athenian connections; Macedonia owned the finest ship-timber in the Balkans, but only through her Greek harbour towns did she have any ships of her own, whereas Athens's dockyards housed more than 350 warships, too expensive for the city to man in force but still more powerful than any fleet docked in the Aegean and a dreadful danger if they fell into Persia's rich hands. The myth of naval victory was meant to woo them, and although events refuted it, the Athenian fleet did at least remain neutral to overtures from Spartan kings and Persian admirals during the next four years. 'Athens, would you ever believe what dangers I endure to win your commendation?' so Alexander's vice-admiral recorded him as saying, and the myth of Victory was part of this calculated policy. It was supported, moreover, by the slogan of the whole invasion.

War, Philip had announced, 'was being declared against the Persians on behalf of the Greeks, to punish the barbarians for their lawless treatment of the old Greek temples': he was fighting as the Greeks' crusader, and had chosen his slogan for its many subtle overtones. Historically, it referred back to the dark days of 480, when the Persian King Xerxes had invaded Greece and left a trail of sacrilege which only ended with his sensational defeats at Salamis and Plataea: it was not, however, an idle echo of the past, for a Greek crusade brilliantly disguised a Macedonian 92 venture led by Macedonians, and it flattered, above all, the interests of Athens. In 480, it was the temples on the Athenian Acropolis which Xerxes had burnt, and for more than thirty years they had been left unrestored as a war reminder to her allies; these allies she had led in a protective league which had fast degenerated into her empire, but its slogan, too, had been a crusade of revenge against Persian sacrilege, By reviving this old political theme, Philip appealed directly to Athens's lively memories of her imperial past, and the tone of contemporary speeches and decrees confirms that her past glory and her 'Dunkirk spirit' in 480 were still worth invoking; since her defeat by Philip, Athens's horizons had been narrowing in space and turning back in time, and her political mood combined sentiment with bitter bursts of incrimination. A Greek crusade against Persia's 'barbarians' implied justice and religion and promised plenty of the plunder on which Greek warfare depended; it coloured the way in which Greek allies saw their Macedonians' task, and this colouring worked into the bones of the expedition. The small Greek town of Thespiae had delightedly helped in the ruin of her dominant neighbour, Thebes, and so she sent a squadron of cavalry to join Alexander's army; when those cavalrymen returned rich and victorious from Hamadan, they made a dedication from their spoils, not as Greeks who had served Alexander's Macedonian interests, but as avengers of their ancestors' virtue against the insults of Asian barbarians. The Greek crusade was a myth, for the Macedonians fought it with the barbarian help of Thracians and Illyrians and the Greeks featured mostly as Alexander's hostages and Persia's allies; only seven hundred Athenians accompanied the land army, a mere seventh of which was drawn from Greeks. But the myth was not outdated or without a real effect.