Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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'We are not living normal, human lives,' an Athenian politician wrote during Alexander's conquests, 'but we have been born to be a lesson in paradox to future ages. For the Persian king, who dared to write that he was master of all men from the rising to the setting sun, is struggling now, not for lordship over others but for his own life.' To the ordinary man in Greece, Alexander's crusade coincided with a starker fact. For seven consecutive years, the crops would fail in a series of summer droughts in the Mediterranean world, and pirate-ridden seas, politics and new centres of demand did not incline other corn-producing areas to help the desperate search for food. For most Greeks of the time Alexander was only a name amid hunger and grim survival, the constant struggle which conditioned any glory which fell to Greece. But the 'age of paradox' was true, and felt to be true, among Persians whose past made it all the more painful.

When a Persian stood in his great fire-temple, watching the flame dart up from a platform of logs arranged like the Great King's throne, he felt that the eternal fravashior spirit of the king was present in the fire's every movement, quivering and never dying away. As he watched, he felt safe in an empire destined to last for ever; in a normal season the price of food for his royal labourers never wavered from levels known in Iran right through to the Middle Ages and the coinage of his local governors never fell from the value the kings first fixed. It was as stable a world as the weather and baronry allowed, and away in Babylon a Persian might even lease out one of his country houses for as long as sixty years. To his ancestors, Macedonians were only known as yona takabara,the 'Greeks who wear shields on their heads', an allusion to their broad-brimmed hats; they had first met them some 170 years ago, when the Macedonian king had promised Darius I the tokens of submission, the earth and water, or tin m in,as they were known in the empire's bureaucratic language. On the tomb of Darius I these Macedonians were carved beneath the seat of the Great King's throne, helping to hold it in a posture of submission; on the tomb of King Artaxerxes III who died nearly two centuries later in the year of Philip's victory over the Greeks, the ancient carvings were repeated indiscriminately, among them the yon a takabarawho had long been lost to the empire. 'If you now shall ask', ran the inscription beneath their carvings, 'how many are the lands which Darius the King has seized, then look at those who bear this throne; then you shall know, then shall it be known to you: the spear of the Persians has gone forth far.' Within four years the spear of the yona takabarawould have gone far further into the heart of Persia's empire. It was to be the last, but not the least, of Persia's boasts.

TWO

She looked over his shoulder

For ritual pieties,

White flower-garlanded heifers,

Libation and sacrifice.

But there on the shining metal

Where the altar should have been,

She saw by his flickering forge-light

Quite another scene.

W. H. Auden, 'The Shield of Achilles'

CHAPTER SEVEN

In early May 334 Alexander set out for Asia. A brisk land march eastwards along the coastal roads to Thrace brought him safely across its four great rivers and so, within twenty days, to the Dardanelles, where the remnants of his father's advance army were encamped and alerted. He had been encouraged on his way by Olympias who had 'revealed to him the secret of his birth', as she believed it, and 'bidden him to think and act worthily of his parentage'; on this note of personal mystery, mother and son had parted, never to see each other again.

At Sestos, on the straits between Europe and Asia, Alexander was met by the 160 warships of his Greek allied fleet. Before him lay three miles of sea, known for their lively spring current; his horses and siege machinery would have to be shipped in flat-bottomed craft, and if Persia's far stronger fleet were to threaten in mid-ocean, the crossing might well have been vulnerable. Alexander appeared to give the danger no thought. While Parmenion saw to the transport he turned away on an adventure of his own, and only rejoined his main army on the farther shore; the crossing, so it happened, would go unchallenged, and luck, not Alexander, has often been given the credit. But there is a background which goes deeper and helps to explain that more than mere fortune was involved.

In war there are always two sides to the story, and in Asia one must be drawn from Alexander's enemy, the Persian empire, whose inner workings were mostly ignored by the historians on his staff. The Persians are elusive witnesses, for they never wrote their history, and mostly, like their Great King, they were unable to read or write at all; except for their art, their royal inscriptions and such business documents as were written on clay, papyrus or leather, it is seldom possible to see behind the enemy lines. But at the Dardanelles, the darkness can be penetrated and the enemy can be seen to have had problems of their own: Egypt had detained them, the running sore of their empire, and Egypt is a province whose history can begin to be recovered from papyrus.

'The south', wrote a native chronicler, 'was not in order; the north was in revolt.' Two years before, Khabash the rebel, possibly an Ethiopian, had stormed the capital city of Memphis and ousted its Persian governor; his slingstones have been found among the ruined palace's foundations.

Fearing reprisals, he had then inspected the Nile delta and the local marshlands, but after a year's grace the Persian navy had sailed to put him down, entering the river in autumn when it was no longer impassably flooded. By January 335 the rebel king of Upper and Lower Egypt, ever-living, likeness of the god Tenen, chosen of Ptah, son of Ra, had come to grief. The Persian ships would remain to restore the peace until the weather at sea improved, but in early May of the following year, Alexander had already reached the Dardanelles and the empire's forces, as often, could not be diverted against this second danger. This crossing was neither rash nor fortunate; at least one official from Egypt had been living at Pella and Alexander would certainly have heard that the native revolt had given him an opportunity.

Safe from the sea he was nonetheless to behave remarkably. From Sestos he began with a visit to a well-known landmark, the tomb of Protesilaus, first of the Greek heroes to set foot on Asian soil in the distant days of the Trojan war; this prowess, as prophesied, had cost the hero his life, so Alexander paid him sacrifice in the hope that his own first landing would turn out more auspiciously. Already, therefore, like Protesilaus Alexander had decided to be the first man ashore in Asia; he was matching, too, his own invasion with the grandest episode of the Greek epic past, when Greek allies like his own had last marched into Asia to besiege Troy. Already the careful ritual, the essence of Greek epic, was setting the mood for the sequel. While Parmenion and the main army planned their passage from Sestos, Alexander put out to sea from Protesilaus's tomb; for the first and only time in his life, he had turned in the opposite direction to that which tactics required, but his destination was much too compelling to be missed.

Sixty warships were with him on the open waters of the Dardanelles, but Alexander insisted on taking the helm of the royal trireme himself! In mid-journey, as the trees round the tomb disappeared from view, he paused to placate the ocean, slaughtering a bull in honour of the sea-god Poseidon and pouring libations from a golden cup to the Nereids, nymphs of the sea. The cup he chose was linked with the cult of heroes. Then, as the long low coast of Asia drew near, he dressed in his full suit of armour and moved to the bows; when the boat grounded, he hurled his spear into the soil of the Persian empire to claim it thenceforward as his own, received from the gods and won by right of conquest. Again his gesture had come down from the heroic past. Like Protesilaus, he leapt on to Asian soil, the first of the Macedonians to touch the beach still known as the harbour of the Achaeans.

The landscape around him could hardly have been more evocative. At the harbour of the Achaeans, he could see the beach where the ships of the Greek heroes' fleet were believed to have lain when they came, the sons of the Achaeans, to recover fair-haired Helen and sack the citadel of Troy: beyond the beach stretched the dunes and hillocks where Homer's heroes were thought to have been buried and inland lay Troy itself, still set in its windswept plain. Alexander had aimed his landing at the country of his favourite Iliad;with his chosen companions, the new Achilles could go in search of the Homeric world and begin his crusade with nothing less than a pilgrimage.

By the time of his visit, Troy had long decayed to the status of a village, best known for its temple and priests of Athena. Homer's 'holy city of Ilion', Troy VIIA when Schliemann found it, lay buried under the debris of some eight hundred years, and if Troy still mattered to the Greeks whom Alexander led, it was more as the centre of a murderous game of hide-and-seek than as a memorial of the heroic past. The story was a strange one. Because the Thessalian hero Ajax had murdered the prophetess Cassandra at the end of the Trojan war, oracles had ordered the nobles of the Hundred Families of Locri in Thessaly to send two virgins yearly to the Dardanelles and leave them to make their own way through to Troy. By tradition, the natives would come out to catch and kill them, armed with axes and stones, and only if the virgins escaped would they enter Athena's temple by a secret passage and live there in safety, dressed in a slave's robe and shorn of their hair until a replacement managed to relieve them. The rite was to last for a thousand years, but at some point in Alexander's life, it is known to have been interrupted. As ruler of the Thessalians, it was perhaps Alexander who first dispensed his subjects from their duties.

Virgins apart, at every point on his road Alexander attended respectfully to ceremony. Among the Greeks it was commonly believed that if one member of an enterprise were to offend or neglect the appropriate gods, his fellows were all liable for the consequences; as king, allied leader and general Alexander always observed religious custom carefully and suited his sacrifice to his situation. So on his way up to Troy he continued his link with the first Greek invasion in the Homeric past; he paid heroic sacrifice at the graves of Ajax and Achilles and honoured them as worthy predecessors, for on first invading Asia it was the favour of the divine Greek heroes of the Trojan war which he thought most relevant to his campaign.

At Troy itself the citizens were uncertain how to receive him. A king called Alexander, they heard, was approaching, and no doubt, they guessed, he would wish to see the relics of his namesake, Homer's Alexander, better known as Paris of Troy. But when they offered to show him Paris's lyre, 'for that lyre', he is said to have answered, 'I care little, but I have come for the lyre of Achilles with which, as Homer says, he would sing of the prowess and glories of brave men.' Homer's Alexander, keener on women than war, was not to the taste of his Macedonian namesake; Achilles was the hero with whom this Alexander was identified, but unlike Achilles, he had no Homer to immortalize his name. All the more need, therefore, to make his own view of himself explicit, and down to the smallest detail, the visit to Troy was to leave no doubt of his personal preference.

On entering the village, Alexander was crowned with a golden crown by his helmsman, as a tribute, presumably, to his control of the steering in mid-sea. However, the helmsman's name meant more than his crown: he was called Menoitios, and after Troy he never appeared in history again, but from Homer's Iliad,Menoitios was well known as the father of Patroclus, Achilles's closest friend; the man had been chosen, once, for the sake of a name which suited the moment, and after more crowns of gold had been offered by local Greek dignitaries to pledge their submission, Alexander began to show them how deeply he felt for such Homeric niceties.

Anointing himself with oil, he ran naked among his companions to the tombstone of Achilles and honoured it with a garland, while Hephaistion did likewise for the tomb of Patroclus. It was a remarkable tribute, uniquely paid, and it is also Hephaistion's first mention in Alexander's career. Already the two were intimate, Patroclus and Achilles even to those around them; the comparison would remain to the end of their days and is proof of their life as lovers, for by Alexander's time, Achilles and Patroclus were agreed to have enjoyed the relationship which Homer himself had never directly mentioned. Then, at an altar of Zeus, the theme of the new Achilles was stressed again. Alexander sacrificed and prayed to Priam, legendary king of Troy, begging him to stay his anger from this new descendant of his murderer, for Achilles's son had killed old Priam at just such an altar of Zeus.

It remained to honour Athena's temple, and again Alexander's pious rivalry did not desert him. He sacrificed and dedicated his own suit of armour to the goddess; in return, he took from the priests the finest relics of heroic times, a shield and a set of weapons which were thought to date from the days of the Trojan war. No gesture could speak more clearly of his personal ideals. Homer's Achilles, too, had received divine armour of his own before going out to battle, none more famous than his shield 'well worked on every side, edged with a triple rim of gleaming metal and held by a strap of silver; five layers in all, their face worked with many wonders'. Alexander had now equalled his hero, and such was his favour for the Trojan shield and armour that they would accompany him to war as far as India and back, carried before him by his bodyguard-at-arms. The shield's design must have been extremely impressive, and posterity would spend much ingenuity in guessing its probable emblems: dressed in his hallowed armour, Alexander would live out the splendour of another age.

With the receipt of the sacred shield and armour, the Trojan visit came to an end. In all Alexander's career, there is no behaviour more memorable, none more eloquent of his personal ideals. Only in the fictitious Romanceof his exploits is he made to voice disappointment in what he saw: the river Scamander, he was made to say, was so small that he could jump across it, and Ajax's 'sevenfold ox-skin shield' was scarcely more remarkable. Contemporaries had no reservations about their king's keen interest, Troy, in return, was granted handsome privileges, not least a new democracy, and later a pupil of Aristotle, a man, 'with a most inquiring mind', would write a pamphlet entitled The Sacrifice at Iliott.Unfortunately it has not survived, for the tide implies he had realized the visit's importance.

Throughout, Alexander's purpose was written large in his detailed behaviour. It is true that the Persian king Xerxes, for whose wrongs Alexander was taking revenge, had visited Troy 150 years earlier and also paid sacrifice before launching out on the Dardanelles, but Xerxes's offerings had been differently planned and arranged and nothing shows that Alexander had had his enemy's precedent in mind: no Persian king had steered his ship in person or run naked round his hero's tomb. Alexander's visit was Greek and spontaneous; it turned on a link with the Trojan war and, above all, in its every tribute it had evoked the hero Achilles, his fellow seeker for fame and glory. Publicly Achilles had his relevance, not least for the Thessalian troops. Thessalian horsemen, it was later said, had ridden in mock battle round Achilles's tomb and invoked his chariot's horses by their names, calling them to their side for the coming war. But to Alexander, lover of Homer and rival of Achilles, the visit surely appealed more to his personality than his politics. The new Achilles, facing his sternest test, had come first to honour the old, not for motives of power or idle glamour, but because Homer's hero had fired his imagination, and as a Macedonian king he lived by ideals which came close to the old Homeric world. The visit to Troy befitted a true romantic, and the romance was a part of how Alexander wished himself to be seen. The lesson, moreover, would not be forgotten.

Nearly 550 years later the Roman emperor Caracalla would choose Alexander as the hero for an emulation of his own. Marching through Thrace, he dressed and armed himself like Alexander and recruited elephants and a Macedonian phalanx of 16,000 men. He crossed the Hellespont, less deftly than his hero as his ship capsized, went up to Troy, sacrificed to Achilles and ran, not naked but fully armed, around Achilles's tomb. The visit had a sequel whose story is even more irresistible. Seven years later, Alexander rode again, as a stranger arose from the Danube and frolicked his way through Thrace, attended by four hundred Bacchic revellers who waved their wands in a gay procession, as if triumphant behind Alexander himself. Every day, the impostor announced his route in advance and enjoyed both food and housing at the public expense, as no official dared to challenge his credentials. But on reaching Byzantium, he crossed into Asia, built his last laugh, a hollow 'Trojan horse' of wood, and disappeared. Obviously he had passed himself off as Caracalla, back for a second journey in Alexander's style, and thus danced his way on the strength of his emperor's own pretentions. There could be no more extraoardinary tribute to Alexander's memory; Alexander, it was said, had envied Achilles for having a Homer to spread his fame, but even without such a poet, his trip to Troy remained a lasting inspiration.

It was long perspective, then, that Alexander left behind him as he returned eastwards from Troy to rejoin Parmenion. There was no escaping the heroic past, for the road he travelled was as old as Homer, being expressly mentioned in his favourite poem. His personal myth was with him; ahead, his army was waiting. Gods and heroes had been summoned to his side, but the time for romance and ceremony was over.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The main army had crossed the Dardanelles by a more conventional route, and when Alexander joined their commander Parmenion, all hopes were for a rapid meeting with the enemy. Thirty days' food, it was said, had been brought with the army, a quota for which the Macedonians had been trained by Philip; half had already been eaten, so they must cither conquer or arrange for the usual market supplies with enough Greek cities to sustain them. The Persians' most probable base was their satrap's castle some eighty miles to the east; before setting out in its general direction, Alexander reviewed and counted his united troops.

With him he had brought some 32,000 infantry, 9,000 of whom were the six brigades ot the Macedonian Foot Companions, 3,000 the Shield Bearers, 1,000 the foreign skirmishers and a mere 7,000 his allied Greeks. Seven thousand barbarian infantry from Thrace and Illyria, probably armed lightly, lent a note of valuable savagery; the Thracians, in particular, were troops to whom common decency meant little, and 'interesting parallels are to be found in the use of Red Indians by the British, French and Americans in the late eighteenth century'.* The victories of the previous summer had persuaded their chieftains to join the expedition, Triballians included; their numbers increased with reinforcements, and until they were abandoned as garrisons in India, they are a reminder that every atrocity should not be blamed on Alexander and his Macedonians.

Apart from a few allied Greeks, lightly armoured Thracians and the trained horsemen of Paeonia from Macedonia's northern border, the power of the cavalry lay with the 1,800 Companions and 1,800 heavily equipped Thessalians, less than half the horse-power of the one Greek state with the nobility and plainland to match Macedonia's riders. Together with the advance force, which had contained most of the Macedonian Mounted Scouts, the cavalry totalled about 6,000; the advance infantry had contained Macedonians and many hired Greeks, and so raised the total foot force to some 43,000. There were 5,000 hired Greeks in Alexander's main wave too, probably armed for light work rather than the front-line

* A. Andrewes and K.J. Dover, Hi storical Commentary on Thucydide s(1070), p. 41a 116

service against Persians in open plains, for which they were unsuited. Pay as well as food would soon become pressing unless there were a quick victory.

When the two armies joined, all but a few small towns on the empire's north-western coastline had been lost again to Persia; only one loyal ally was still significant, and she mattered most from a Persian viewpoint. Away to the west the island city of Cyzicus continued to favour the new invasion: the Persians had tried to capture it, even disguising their troops in broad Macedonian hats, but Cyzicus had held out, and this resistance cost the Persians dearly. Most remarkably, the Persian satraps of the Hellespont province were the only governors in western Asia never to have minted coins of their own; the province's tribute had to be sent to the king each year in money, and to meet this need they can only have used a local substitute, none more probable than the abundant coinage of Cyzicus, one of the most widely known currencies in the Greek world. But the city did not belong to the Persian king, as it was not a part of mainland Asia; it was free to close its gates, and by closing them in favour of Macedonia it inconvenienced the Persians' army most of whom were hired for the moment and looked to regular payments of money for food and wages. Their commander had made a name for paying maintenance money promptly, but without Cyzicus this might not continue so easily.

Elsewhere, Alexander could only trust to his father's policy of freeing the Asian Greek cities. But liberation is always a dubious promise and his advance force had already been seen to betray it; Alexander did not go far before meeting with native distrust of what freedom might mean this time, for the first three days of his march took him north-eastwards along the Asian coast, where his goal was evidently Lampsacus, a prosperous Greek city beside the sea. But Lampsacus was most reluctant to admit him. Persian satraps had been minting coins in the city and their generals had drawn on her funds, perhaps because Cyzicus was closed: assistants of Persia would make no move for Alexander, and so the first Greek city he had come to free merely turned him away unwanted. Later, when victory had given his promise of freedom more meaning, envoys pleaded for Lampsacus to be pardoned, but until Alexander had shown his strength he could neither subvert nor assure the leaders of Greek cities, who had heard and suffered too often the offer of 'freedom' from invaders.

So he delayed his liberation and turned south-east towards the local satrap's castle, hoping for battle along the road. Villages of no importance were received in surrender wherever friendly, but hard though his horsemen scouted the hills, the enemy was nowhere to be found. The ground opened out into a generous plain, and scouts again went forwards towards the nearby sea; there was nothing there to report, except for a welcome from one more village. And yet all the while to the south, only twenty miles distant, the Persian troops had been massing, still unseen.

On receiving news of the invasion, the Persian high command had left their lakeside fortress of Dascylium and moved through its thickly treed parks and forests to a steeper hill range in the west. Here in the small Greek town of Zeleia the local tyrant had made them at home, and they were discussing their possible tactics. There were two alternatives: either confront Alexander directly or else burn the crops in his path and hope to repel him through lack of food. The second plan was Memnon's, a Greek from the island of Rhodes who had followed his brother into Persian service, survived the changes of fifteen years and shone as a general against the Macedonian advance force. With the help of hired Greek infantry, he had driven the enemy back from their early gains; proof of his generalship can perhaps be seen in a unique series of Persian coins, on whose backs are stamped what appear to be maps of the countryside round Ephesus, scene of Memnon's campaign; when he paid his hired troops it seems that he gave them handy reminders of local geography on the back of their wages. Deviser of the first field maps to be used in Greek warfare, he was not a general to be despised; some ten years before, he had also lived as an exile in Macedonia and he had seen the style of Philip's army for himself.

His plan was sensible, and when adopted a year later it nearly proved successful. But although Memnon had married a Persian wife he was a Greek advising Persians how to fight Greeks, and there were deep objections to his policy. He was asking the satraps to burn a land which was highly productive; besides, they and their fellow Iranians had taken the best for their own estates. Around Zelcia, for example, where they were arguing, stretched the woods and parks of the former Lydian kings which the Persians now kept for their favourite sport of hunting; on marble reliefs from the site of their satrap's castle, they can still be seen enjoying the chase on horseback, while the castle looked out over lakes and game parks whose trees and animals were a revelation to Greek eyes, and the region is still renowned for its rare birds. The Persians farmed as well as hunted. Down by the coast, Persian nobles lived at the centre of farms which were worked by many hundreds of local serfs; their tall private castles served as spacious granaries, so much so that a local official could have supplied a sizeable army with corn for almost a year. When estates were on such a scale, it was all very well for Memnon to propose a devastation, but he was a foreigner talking of others' home coverts. He owned a large estate himself, but it was a recent present; others had seen their old homes burnt before, and the memory was most unpleasant. It was doubtful, too, whether their subjects would help by burning their own crops.

Bravely but wrongly the Persian command overruled him and ordered the all-out attack which Alexander had wanted. Down from Zelcia, the town, Homer had said, 'which lies at the foot of mount Ida, where men are rich and drink of the dark waters of the Aisopus', the Persian army descended westwards into the plain, while some thirty miles away in the mid-May morning, Alexander was still marching unawares, his infantry in double order, his cavalry on either wing and the baggage train tucked in behind for safety. A day passed before his Mounted Scouts came galloping back through the scrub of the open fields: the Persian army, they told him at last, was waiting for battle on the far bank of the Granicus river.

After the nervous searching of his past six days, Alexander must have greeted the news with relief. But some of his officers were not so confident; they would not reach the river until afternoon, and the month, they pointed out, was the Macedonian month of Daisios in which their kings had never made a practice of going to war. Their scruples, however, were irrelevant, for the ban had probably arisen from the need to gather the harvest in that month, and Macedonia now had slaves and workers enough to do the job without the army's help. Alexander refuted them, characteristically, by ordering the calendar to be altered and a second month of Artemisius to be inserted in Daisios's place. He would go ahead regardless, and by early afternoon he had reached the river Granicus, where he could inspect the enemy, a sight which justified his evasion of the date.

Rumour later exaggerated their numbers farcically, but there is no doubt that at the Granicus, the Persians' army was markedly smaller than Alexander's, perhaps some 35,000 to his 50,000. Except for Memnon, their commanders were Iranian aristocrats, most of them satraps or governors of the tribes of western Asia, some of them relations real or honorific of the Persian king. However, no unit from Persia, ruling province of the Empire, was present, and the cavalry, their customary strength, was either drawn from the royal military colonists who had long been settled in return for service on the rich plains near the Asian coast away from their homes by the Caspian Sea or the Oxus, or else from the mountain tribes of Cappadocia and Paphlagonia, whose horses were famous but whose governors had raised rebellion against the Persians' loosely held empire less than thirty years before. Some of these were heavily armoured

with the metal protections which Xenophon had noticed and which Persian sculptures confirm; the flanks of the horses and the legs of some riders were guarded with large metal sheets, while metal leg-guards projected like flaps from others' saddles to guard them against blows from a sword. The head pieces and breastplates of the horses were also of metal, while rich riders wore metal-plated armour and an encasing metal helmet, ancestors of the chain-mailed cataphracts of Sassanid Persia whom the Roman army nicknamed 'boiler-boys' because of the heat and metal of their armour. Such horsemen are far from mobile, but on the edge of a river bank where a jostle was more likely than a joust, heavy body-armour was more useful than mobility; it was a point, however, in Alexander's favour that their fellow-cavalrymen were armed with throwing-javelins, while his Companions carried tougher thrusting-lances of cornel-wood. But this was only favourable if he could give himself space to charge, and a riverbed did not seem to allow this.