Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 5 FIRST BLOOD

As his ships approached the coast of Asia Minor, the new Achilles—as Alexander saw himself—relived the experience of making landfall where legend had it that King Agamemnon and his Greek fleet had arrived many centuries before. Now as then, their destination was holy Ilium or, as we call it today, Troy. Here the Greeks had besieged the city, and after ten long years the city had fallen.

For the young Macedonian this was not just a story, but true history. He found only a mound of ruins, but, for all that the windy plain of Troy, as the ancient poets liked to call it, was holy ground. The war marked the first round in a catalogue of clashes between the west and east. By invading Persia he was following an ancient tradition.

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SOMETIME IN MAY 334, the king left his general Parmenion to ferry the Macedonian army across the Hellespont (today’s Dardanelles). Meanwhile he set out with a flotilla of sixty warships on a brief but deeply felt pilgrimage to the site of Ilium. He was determined to be first to disembark, and before setting sail from the European shore he sacrificed at the grave of Protesilaus. A daring Thessalian, he had been the first to jump onto the beach, but had been cut down by a Trojan “while leaping foremost of the Achaeans upon the soil of Troy.”

Halfway across the narrows, Alexander propitiated the god of the sea, Poseidon, friend of Troy, who had obstructed the Greek invaders. To avoid a repetition, he sacrificed a bull in honor of the god, his wife Amphitrite, sea nymph and queen of the sea, and the Nereids, their fishy female companions. He poured a drink offering into the sea from a golden bowl.

Then, when his ship ran up the beach, Alexander sprang ashore in full armor and hurled his spear into the ground, in this way laying a claim to the ownership of Asia. He cried: “From the gods I accept Asia, won by the spear.” This took some nerve. The young pretender had not won even a single battle.

He then went up to the city four miles or so inland. It was now a somewhat dilapidated tourist destination and little more than a village. Passing through the ancient walls on top of a tumulus, he dedicated a complete set of armor to the goddess Athena, protector of the Greeks, and in return took from her “small and cheap” shrine some of the consecrated arms that were said (implausibly, but he believed it) to date from the Trojan War. He also sacrificed to Troy’s old king Priam; he wanted to turn away Priam’s anger at having been put to the sword by Achilles’ son Neoptolemus, from whom Alexander was descended. Usually he enjoyed boasting about his pedigree.

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ONCE THE FORMALITIES WERE over, the king wandered among the ruins. Someone came up to him and asked if he would like to see a lyre that had once belonged to Paris.

“I don’t care a jot for that lyre,” came the dismissive reply. “Where is the one Achilles played when singing of glorious deeds?”

Alexander and Hephaestion stripped off and oiled their bodies, as if they were athletes, and ran a race with their comrades. Alexander placed a wreath on a column that was supposed to be Achilles’ tomb, remarking that he wished he had as great a poet as Homer to celebrate his deeds, and Hephaestion placed another on the grave of Achilles’ erastes, Patroclus.

To the modern eye these are exotic goings-on, but they made sense to Alexander. He was sincere, but he also had a keen eye for publicity. He was seeking to express in dramatic terms the legitimacy of his expedition in the eyes of the Greeks. Everyone could remember the two Persian invasions and believed in the justice of revenge. But Alexander wanted to go beyond a mere branding exercise, and to create a religious justification. He asserted his supernatural ancestry and saw his place in history as reflecting a divine circularity. He was truly an echo of a heroic past and that was how he meant to be understood.

Finally, it is clear that these rituals at Troy meant something personal to him together with Hephaestion. He had listened to his tutor Aristotle, for whom philia was a great good. Whatever his reservations were about sex, he seemed determined to live his life as one of a loving and inseparable male couple.

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ALEXANDER ENJOYED A PARTY. Back in November or December of 335, at the outset of his campaign and a few months before his arrival at Troy, he held a splendid one, which marked the culmination of months of military preparation.

As a matter of policy, he looked after his soldiers well; he made sure that they regularly enjoyed periods of rest and he mounted festivals for their pleasure. He assembled his expeditionary force at Dium, one of the kingdom’s holiest sanctuaries. Here, beneath Mount Olympus, home of the gods, he conducted the traditional sacrifice to Zeus, tutelary deity of the Macedonians.

Then in the theater at Aegae he presented a nine-day drama competition in honor of the nine Muses, which his Hellenophile ancestor King Archelaus had founded seventy years previously. For his guests he commissioned a vast marquee capable of accommodating a hundred diners, with a couch for each one to recline on. The layout probably entailed a central lobby flanked by eleven-couch dining spaces—in descending order of grandeur to match each guest to his perceived importance. The king arranged for a similar marquee to be the royal headquarters when he was on campaign. He did not forget the common soldiers, to whom he distributed sacrificial animals and “everything else suitable for a festive occasion, and put them into a fine humor.”

This was the first time that Alexander had attended a public event at the scene of his father’s assassination in June of the previous year. Among those he invited to the celebrations were ambassadors from the Greek cities who had also been there as shocked witnesses. The pomp and circumstance were designed to allay the memory and to assert his mastery.

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ALEXANDER HAD UNDER ARMS a large number of men. Many Macedonians among them had served a long time with Philip and, if some were a little long in the tooth, they were tough and experienced. The army consisted of some 32,000 infantry and 5,100 cavalry (mostly Macedonian Companions and Thessalian horsemen). These totals included the 12,000-strong Macedonian phalanx and the same number of Greek allied and mercenary infantry (supplied under the terms of the League of Corinth or simply attracted by the money); in principle the latter were good fighters, but their loyalty might be suspect when they faced the Greek mercenary regiments whom the Great King hired. Also, Alexander recruited nearly eight thousand Thracian foot soldiers and horsemen, one thousand archers and Agrianian javelin-throwers—a small but invaluable elite team.

When added to Parmenion’s advance force of ten thousand infantry and one thousand cavalry, the grant total under Alexander’s command may have been about fifty thousand. (There may have been a further eight thousand infantry, mainly Greeks, who were responsible for guarding land already won.)

Of an armada of 182 triremes, or war galleys, 160 were provided by the Greek allies and mostly by Athens. Triremes were very labor-intensive. Each one required 200 oarsmen, or a total complement of 36,400 men.

This was not all, for many technical and military experts were needed for a variety of different purposes—a siege train, a baggage train, engineers (to build roads and tunnels), surveyors (to collect information on routes, camping grounds, and possible battlefields), secretaries and administrators, surgeons and physicians, grooms and muleteers. In a remarkable innovation, Alexander was the first commander in antiquity (so far as we know) to establish a public relations department.

A former student of Aristotle called Callisthenes was invited to join the expedition as its official historian—or, more accurately, propaganda chief.

The entire invasion force, both by land and sea, amounted to about 90,000 men, of whom more than half were Greek. This was of the same order of magnitude as the expeditionary force that the Great King Darius had sent across from Asia to punish the city of Athens, whose sailors had burned the great city of Sardis.

Alexander gave his men strict instructions not to plunder the territory they were to pass through. He told them: “You should spare your own property, and not destroy what you are going to own.”

The king left behind a substantial garrison in Europe, including a twelve-thousand-strong phalanx, under the command of the experienced and trustworthy Antipater, whom Alexander appointed regent in his absence. For all his remarkable recent victories, there remained a risk that the Greeks or the Illyrians might stir up trouble if they felt they could get away with it. What was more, the Persian fleet, which greatly outnumbered his own, might intervene in Greece and set up a second front.

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THE PHILOSOPHER AND SCIENTIST Aristotle expected his students to help him assemble and publish all kinds of data, for only through observation and experiment could human knowledge be advanced. Alexander was not just interested in conquest. He was determined to outdo all his old tutor’s other pupils and collect a vast store of information about botany, biology, geography, and zoology.

Alexander appointed a team of experts including architects, geographers, botanists, astronomers, mathematicians, ethnographers, and zoologists. We are told that they sent back to Aristotle regular accounts of their discoveries together with samples of fauna and flora. These probably contributed to his celebrated Enquiries into Animals and the many accurate eyewitness reports it contains.

The king took a special interest in animals, especially those he could watch and make use of (horses, for example, and hunting dogs). Bucephalas was an inseparable companion and he owned a dog called Peritas whom he brought up from a puppy. When he saw peacocks for the first time in his life, he was so impressed that he wanted to prevent by law any attack on them.

According to the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder,

he gave orders to some thousands of persons throughout the whole Asia and Greece, all those who made their living by hunting, fowling, and fishing and those who were in charge of warrens, herds, apiaries, fishponds and aviaries, to obey his instructions, so that he might not fail to be informed about any creature born in any region.

In the long run, this ambitious and well-funded research program had a profound influence on the development of the sciences and ultimately opened up awareness of the Indian subcontinent to the west. At a personal level, his thoughtfulness toward animals casts an attractive light on Alexander’s nature.

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WHAT WAS IT LIKE to be a soldier marching in Alexander’s army and, more particularly, what was the experience of battle?

Most of a soldier’s time was spent marching, often across rough ground, and he could in an emergency cover more than twenty miles a day. Alexander demonstrated this with his rapid descent on Greece and did so again when he followed Xerxes’ invasion route along the Thracian coast to the Hellespont.

Formations varied according to the terrain, but out in front were scouts, after whom might come the cavalry, then the baggage, and finally the infantry. When advancing through a defile the army would as a rule divide into two columns with the baggage between them. Curiously, nightly camps were not dug in and fortified.

A number of factors slowed the army down, chief of which was the baggage train; this included heavy equipment such as siege catapults; camp followers of all sorts; carts and pack animals carrying every kind of goods including loot accumulated on campaign; and traders selling wares. Both Philip and Alexander did their best to exert control. The former banned the use of wagons and refused to allow wives and prostitutes to accompany the army. He fixed the number of civilian servants to one for every ten men. Soldiers carried their armor and weapons together with utensils and some food.

Another factor holding up a soldier was his need to eat. On a lengthy expedition he could not carry enough staples such as grain or wine for more than a few days. Water was required in huge quantities, for the animals as well as the men. Horses and pack animals required regular rest periods and time to graze.

A large army was a curse to the lands it passed through, for few places had enough surplus to satisfy it. Most days it needed to spend time foraging, either buying or stealing everything edible in fields and farmhouses. Hungry soldiers could strip a countryside bare. An army could not remain stationary for extended periods when distant from sea or river transport, because it would rapidly consume the food and forage surpluses of the surrounding territory. It was obliged to move on and pillage somewhere else if it was to survive.

Cavalry played a crucial part in Alexander’s battle plans, but horse riding was a much trickier business than it became in modern times. Horseshoes were unknown and care had to be taken, if horses were ridden for long distances on rough ground, not to wear down their hooves. They needed periods of respite and could not safely canter or gallop for very long. Moreover, the stirrup had not been invented and only a basic saddle was used (perhaps a folded cloth or pad held in place by a strap around the horse). This reduced not only the rider’s stability but also his leverage when thrusting or throwing his javelin. Horses were small, not much larger than a sturdy pony nowadays, and riders mounted by vaulting. In sum, the main challenge facing a rider was not to fall off—especially in the mêlée of a battle.

Large-scale battles were rare but terrifying. They could take place only on a large, flat or flattish area of ground. They usually took place in the summer. Men would fight in a fog of blinding dust raised by feet and hooves (or less frequently in a storm of rain and mud, which was almost as bad). The noise was earsplitting.

A soldier in a phalanx, eight or sixteen rows deep, was part of a fixed formation and had no freedom of maneuver. He could not easily hear commands by trumpet or see flags raised and lowered once an engagement had started. Even orders from a junior officer nearby were hard to interpret, and in fact once the fighting had begun there was little a Philip or an Alexander could do, except by prearrangement, to react to events in the field. Both commander and other-rankers must have felt very alone and vulnerable.

When the phalanx, bristling with sarissas, charged, it raised a deafening paean, or war song. Only men in the front two or perhaps three rows of infantry were likely to have direct contact with the enemy, and then only at spear’s length. A phalanx’s chief task was not to fight hand-to-hand but to keep in tight formation and shove forward. Only if they broke up were they lost.

Troopers faced many more dangers than foot soldiers. When the battle had reached its crisis, their function was to charge on Alexander’s orders at a weak point in the enemy’s front line. This was the only time as commander that he was able to influence the course of the fighting. It was why he personally led his cavalry into the jaws of death. They could see him and followed wherever he chose to ride.

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THE AFTERMATH OF BATTLE was as pain-rich as the fighting itself. Hellenic armies as far back as those in Homer employed physicians to tend the wounded. At Troy the Greeks enjoyed the services of two sons of the god of healing, Asclepius. One of these was called Machaon. When a king was struck down by an iron-tipped arrow, Machaon extracted it

though the pointed barbs broke off as the head was pulled out….When he found the place where the sharp point had pierced the flesh, he sucked out the blood and skillfully applied a soothing ointment with which the friendly centaur Cheiron had equipped his father.

As a word-perfect lover of Homer and a daring fighter in the field, Alexander will have understood the need for an efficient medical service in his own army. He also learned about medicine from Aristotle, son as he was of Philip’s personal physician, whose groundbreaking treatises on human anatomy (sadly lost) helped develop the healing art. We may guess that the Macedonian expeditionary force was well supplied with the most up-to-date medical expertise.

Most injuries were inflicted during a rout and those on the losing side were usually slaughtered by victorious cavalry. Military doctors worked on many kinds of wounds. Through practice they became skillful bone surgeons, and amputations were common. A skeleton dating from about 300 B.C. has been found in Campania with an artificial leg, realistically modeled in bronze sheeting over a wooden core.

The main problem with surgical operations was the lack of anesthetics, which meant that they had to be brief. The agony could only be dulled with alcohol or concentrated liquors from the opium poppy and henbane. A draft of white mandrake (Mandragora officinarum, a highly poisonous hallucinogen and soporific) was recommended before procedures. It could induce unconsciousness and, if patient and surgeon were unlucky, death.

While serious internal injuries were usually fatal, men often recovered from flesh wounds, whether caused by cutting weapons or projectiles. A special forceps was devised to extract arrowheads. In the absence of modern antiseptics, septicemia was common and lethal. The disinfectant properties of honey, salt, and (in Egypt) saltpeter seem to have been well known. Some doctors understood the value of pitch, especially useful for coating amputees’ stumps, and of turpentine. Sulfides of arsenic seem to have been used to clean wounds.

According to one modern estimate, as little as 20 percent of prescribed medication was of any value, so it is remarkable that Philip and his son recovered from the many serious wounds they sustained in battle.

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RELATIONS BETWEEN OLYMPIAS AND Alexander did not suffer permanent damage because of her cruel treatment of Philip’s last wife, Cleopatra, and her daughter.

Mother and son remained close. According to a story told by Plutarch, Olympias “confided to him, and to him alone, the secret of his conception.” The obvious implication was that he was the son of a divine father, probably Zeus, adulterous ruler of the Olympian gods and husband of touchy Hera. The idea attracted Alexander’s passionate interest and evidently he talked about it. Embarrassed, she is said to have repudiated the claim with a witty remark. “Will Alexander never stop slandering me to Hera?”

People around the young king were worried for the future if he left Macedonia without marrying. Both Antipater at home and Parmenion with the advance force in Asia were keen that he first find a wife and procreate. The fact they had nubile daughters may have played a part in their thinking, but they were making a more serious point. They knew that the young king was a reckless risk-taker on the battlefield and the chances were high that he would not survive the forthcoming campaign. There was no obvious heir and the kingdom would face a period of upheaval, and as in past centuries very probably sink back to its old status as a second-rate power.

The anxiety was understandable. Everyone could remember that Philip had married at the first opportunity—years before he became king—and then frequently thereafter. This was how a bachelor leader on whose life many people’s fate depended was expected to behave.

Alexander was having none of it. He was eager for action and spoke vigorously against his generals. “It would be a disgrace,” he pointed out, “for one who has been appointed by Greece to command the war, and who had inherited his father’s unconquerable army, to sit around at home enjoying a marriage and waiting for children to be born.”

Mothers had no formal or legal role in the marriage of their sons, but we have seen that Olympias did not hesitate to interfere in Alexander’s sex life and she must have had a view on the generals’ advice. She was the chief woman in his life, and a wife would have been an obstacle between her and Alexander. To judge by what is known about Olympias’s character, their close one-to-one relationship would be damaged if a third person were allowed to join it. If she was asked for her opinion, we can safely guess that she told Antipater, whom she loathed, and Parmenion to mind their own business.

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MEMNON AND HIS BROTHER Mentor were crafty Greeks from the island of Rhodes. They made a good living as mercenaries and were excellent military tacticians. They were also skilled at changing sides while remaining masters of their fate. Their employers got the best out of them by not being too unsuspicious.

The brothers were close to a high-ranking Persian, Artabazus, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia in northwestern Anatolia. He fathered a very large number of children (eleven boys and twelve girls, startlingly by the same woman). One of his daughters, a beauty, was called Barsine; Mentor married her. He died and Memnon stepped into his shoes.

Artabazus turned his coat and joined a satraps’ revolt against the Great King. He found himself on the losing side and in 352 he and the brothers took refuge at the Macedonian court. It was here that Alexander, still a small boy, first met Barsine, who was some years older—probably in her late teens. (Their paths were to cross again in future years.) However, the exiles made their peace with the Great King and returned to the fold. Artabazus became one of Darius III’s most loyal supporters, and Memnon was sent with five thousand mercenaries to deal with Parmenion and his advance force.

Originally dispatched by Philip with ten thousand men, the old Macedonian general had enjoyed mixed fortunes. In 336 he had pushed down the coast and many Greek cities along the seaboard rose against their Persian master. Altars were erected to Philip and in Ephesus a statue of the king was placed inside the temple of Artemis. But then the offensive had faltered. In the following year, while Alexander was scoring victories in Greece and Thrace, Memnon campaigned with great effectiveness and drove Parmenion back into the Troad (now the Biga Peninsula, in northwestern Anatolia) and the Hellespont.

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MEANWHILE DARIUS WAS READY to deal with the Macedonian king once and for all. Since seizing the throne in 336, he had put down native revolts in Egypt and probably in Babylonia. He emerged as a tough and competent ruler. By the summer of 334 he had mobilized a fleet of some four hundred war galleys and ordered the gradual mobilization of the western satrapies. He sent some cavalry reinforcements, but otherwise saw no reason to involve himself personally in the campaign. Alexander was a menace, but a local one. In total, the Persians mustered an estimated force of fifteen thousand cavalry and five thousand or six thousand Greek mercenaries.

The Persian command debated whether it would be sensible to station their forces along an east–west mountain range. This would have the advantage of restricting the Macedonian intruders to the northwestern corner of Asia Minor, but the greater disadvantage of risking an attack in the rear by insurgent Greek cities at the same time as they attempted to destroy Alexander or at least to push him back into Europe. To avoid being sandwiched, it was decided to move eastward and establish a headquarters at Zelea, a town near Cyzicus on the Black Sea.

On hearing that the Macedonian army had crossed into Asia, a war council debated what to do next. Present were four commanders and two satraps, Spithridates of Lydia and Arsites of Hellespontine Phrygia. Memnon was also in attendance. He strongly advised the Persians not to risk taking on the Macedonians. They outnumbered the Persian infantry, were far superior in fighting quality, and had Alexander with them in person, whereas the Great King, hundreds of miles away in Susa, was a conspicuous absentee.

According to Arrian, Memnon spelled out the action they should take: “Instead, they should march on, destroy fodder by getting the cavalry to trample it down, burn the crops in the ground, and not even spare the towns in their path. Alexander will not stay in the country if he is denied provisions.” This was good counsel, for a large army could not survive without a continuous supply of food for its soldiers and hay or grass for its animals. However, Arsites, whose province would have to bear the brunt of this scorched-earth policy, vehemently disagreed.

He said he would not permit the burning of even a single house belonging to the people in his charge. Others at the meeting feared that Memnon, being a wily and untrustworthy Hellene, was deliberately delaying hostilities to persuade Darius to keep him in employment. Their suspicions seemed to be justified when the enemy left Memnon’s Phrygian estate unharmed (in fact, Alexander did not mean to show friendship, but to feed misgivings). Memnon’s track record as a former rebel against the Great King made it hard for him to defend himself, although on this occasion his advice was correct.

Eventually, it was decided that the Persians should seek battle on ground of their choosing.

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ALEXANDER WAS BROKE, as he admitted ruefully in a speech Arrian has him give to his troops years later:

My inheritance from my father consisted of a few gold and silver drinking cups and less than sixty talents in the treasury [a silver talent was worth about 6,000 drachmas]. There was also about 500 talents’ worth of debt contracted by Philip. I myself borrowed another 800 in addition to this.

Philip had consistently overspent, despite an estimated income of a thousand talents a year from his Thracian mines. To all the stated reasons for the Persian expedition, we must add a financial one.

Alexander admitted that neither he nor Philip could afford not to mount an invasion. (Even if they had decided to stay at home, they would still have been driving on fumes.) We do not know whether the Greeks paid for their military and naval contributions, but, even if they did, the daily payroll for the expeditionary force was punishingly large. On the reasonable assumption that an infantryman’s daily wage was one drachma a day and a cavalryman’s two drachmas, it probably added up to some seven talents.

Alexander probably paid for his Balkan campaign by looting and slave-market sales. When he left Pella for Phrygia in west central Anatolia in the spring of 334, he had enough money to maintain his army for no more than a month. Financial pressure argued for a decisive battle as soon as possible, as Memnon very well knew or guessed. Only then would Alexander be able to amass booty after a victory, levy taxes from the liberated Ionian cities, and raid provincial Persian exchequers.

He was open with his officers about his impending bankruptcy. Plutarch reports that Alexander would not board ship at the Hellespont until he had inquired into all his Companions’ financial circumstances. He gave an estate to one, a village to another, and the revenues of some port or community to a third.

When he had shared out or given away all the royal property, Perdiccas asked him, “But, king, what are you leaving for yourself?” “My hopes!” replied Alexander. “In that case, then,” said Perdiccas, “those who serve with you will have a share of them too.” With this, he declined to accept the property that had been allotted to him, and several of Alexander’s other friends did the same.

If one reads between the lines of this famous anecdote, it is evident what was really happening: the king was borrowing from his entourage and putting up the collateral. If he was not immediately victorious, his ambitious plan would dwindle into a humiliating demobilization.

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HIS OMNIPRESENT SCOUTS WARNED Alexander that they had located the enemy on the far side of the river Granicus, a mountain stream originating at Mount Ida. He at once marched in battle order toward it. He formed his heavy infantry into two phalanxes and posted the cavalry on either side. He ordered the baggage train to follow behind. These dispositions meant that he could defend himself if harried by cavalry (the rear phalanx could about-turn and face the rear if necessary). More to the point, he would be able to spread out speedily into his actual line of battle with cavalry on the wings and infantry in the center.

It was the afternoon of an early spring day in 334 and, if possible, the king wanted to wrong-foot the Persians by moving at once to an engagement. A short sharp attack before evening fell would cause astonishment and so enhance his chances of winning.

When the Granicus came into view, Alexander gave it a hard stare. It was a shallow, fordable stream, about thirty or so meters wide, which ran across a flat alluvial plain. The water did not fill the bed but meandered to and fro over a clay floor covered with rounded stones. At most it would reach a man’s knees. On either side there were steep banks up to three meters high. These would have been a serious obstacle except for the fact that here and there were gentle gravel slopes leading up from the riverbed to the plain.

On the far side of the Granicus, set back a little from the riverbank, stood some 20,000 enemy cavalry about sixteen troopers deep and extending for some two and a half kilometers. On a ridge farther behind them, twenty thousand infantry kept watch; perhaps some eight deep, they were mainly Greek mercenaries.

If the Persians were expecting to fight that day, they had no plans for the infantry to enter the action. This is very odd and can perhaps be put down to incompetence (but let us not forget that the capable Memnon was still with the army). More plausibly, the Persians were bivouacking in the order in which they had arrived on their march from Zelea. They thought the Macedonians would not attack so late in the day. Just in case the attack came, though, they guarded the river and would only form up for battle the next day; they probably intended to withdraw the cavalry to the wings and bring the infantry down from the ridge into the vacated center.

But there was not to be a next day.

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PARMENION WAS EFFECTIVELY ALEXANDER’S military deputy and usually commanded the left wing in battle. He had been his father’s foremost general from the beginning of the reign. Now in his mid-sixties, Parmenion had three sons, two of whom held senior appointments in the army. The eldest, Philotas, commanded the Companion cavalry, a crucial posting which he filled efficiently and loyally. However, if we recall Alexander’s dressing-down during the Pixodarus marriage scandal, Philotas was in the room at the time and may have informed on the prince or perhaps was held up as a paradigm of good behavior. Either way, he did not endear himself to Alexander. Nicanor commanded the hypaspists (elite infantry who acted as a flexible link between the phalanx and the Companion cavalry). The third son, Hector, seems to have been too young as yet for a major command.

Alexander was much indebted to the old general for conniving in the execution of his fellow commander and son-in-law, the influential and popular Attalus. It is sometimes said that Alexander resented this obligation, but was in too weak a position to dismiss the well-established and well-respected Parmenion and his sons. However, there is no evidence that he wanted to do so. The three men served him well. Parmenion’s alleged unpopularity at court is justified by claims that the king had a habit of rejecting his advice; however, there were other occasions when it was accepted. The worst that can be said is that the one was elderly and cautious and the other young and audacious.

While the Macedonian high command was deliberating its next move, Parmenion spoke. “It seems to me, sir, that our plan is for the time being to make camp on the riverbank just as we are.” In his opinion the riverbank was a dangerous obstacle and the army should attempt an unopposed crossing early next morning. He warned that “a failure at the very beginning…would threaten the outcome of the entire campaign.” Alexander abruptly dismissed the recommendation. He ordered Parmenion to take up his position on the left while he made his way to the right (the traditional post of honor for a commanding general).

For a while the two armies took no action, standing behind each riverbank. There was a deep silence.

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LIKE A BOXER, THE KING intended to deliver a left jab followed by a right punch. He drew up his army along the front for the same length as the Persian line. He placed the Thessalian, Greek, and Thracian horse under Parmenion. The center was occupied by the infantry: the phalanx and then the hypaspists. Next to them was a special assault force comprising the scouts and Paeonian light cavalry from Thrace together with a squadron of Companion heavy cavalry that was to lead the way.

The right wing was dominated by the Companion cavalry under Philotas; finally, the line was completed by the small but deadly contingents of Agrianian javelin throwers and Cretan archers.

We can deduce Alexander’s plan from what happened. It was to weaken the cavalry “wall” along the Persians’ left wing so that when the king led the Companions to crash against the wall it would crumble.

First, the Agrianians and Cretans moved to their right, seeking to outflank the Persians. The effect was to draw the enemy along upstream, eventually thinning its line. Then the assault force advanced across the river up a gravelly slope. This was an almost suicidal act of bravery, but its highly trained members were expendable. They were, in effect, a loss leader or (to use the imagery of chess) a pawn sacrifice. Their task, no doubt understated in the pre-battle briefing, was to soak up the Persian defense at whatever cost. The Persian cavalry were tempted to the bank of the Granicus and showered their javelins down on the attackers, who responded as best they could with thrusting spears. A few defenders, led by Memnon and his sons, rode down onto the riverbed.

Macedonian lives were being lost. It must have been hard holding back, but the king waited. At last, when the mauled survivors of the assault force were retreating, he judged the right moment to have come. To the sound of trumpets he led the Companions in a wedge-shaped formation, supported by some hypaspists, and delivered the coup de grâce. He had little difficulty in pushing his way up another of the gravelly slopes, for the Persians had already delivered most of their missiles and now, being at the river’s edge, they were in no position to build the necessary momentum for a charge. Alexander and some Companions reached the top of the bank, but in disorder.

From the beginning, the Persian high command had been able to see Alexander because of the attention shown him by his awed entourage and because of the magnificence of his armor. He wore tall white feathers on either side of the crest of his helmet and was carrying the antique shield he had obtained at Troy. The Persians gathered opposite him, for their simple battle aim was to kill the king. Apparently, they pulled back from the river until they had a clear sight of him on level ground and then rode pell-mell in his direction.

From the Macedonian viewpoint, this was the most dangerous moment of the battle. Alexander, at the heart of the mélée, received two blows on his breastplate and three on his shield. Arrian describes the scene:

A fierce fight developed around him, and in this time brigade after brigade of the Macedonians made the crossing with little difficulty now. The fighting was from horseback, but in some respects it was more like an infantry battle, a tangled mass of horse against horse and man against man.

This was a struggle worthy of the Iliad.

The Macedonians were beginning to make headway when Alexander’s lance broke. He asked a groom for his, but that too had snapped. Luckily old Demaratus of Corinth, who had bought the horse Bucephalas for Alexander when he was a child, was among the crowd of Companions and volunteered his lance.

The king saw Darius’s son-in-law Mithridates riding out far in front of the others and bringing a body of cavalry with him. He charged ahead and knocked Mithridates off his horse with a thrust in his face. A Persian nobleman brought down his ax with all his strength upon Alexander’s head. He sheared off part of Alexander’s helmet and one of its plumes, but failed to wound him. Alexander knocked him off his horse and drove his lance into his chest. Meanwhile, another of Darius’s sons-in-law had raised his scimitar against Alexander from behind. Cleitus, the grizzled commander of the Royal Squadron (and brother of the king’s long-ago wet nurse), sliced off the Persian’s arm with a single swipe of his sword. Alexander only avoided death by one man’s fast reaction.

A turning point had been reached. All the Companions were now fully engaged. Under their pressure, the Persian center collapsed, and the left was disintegrating as the archers and javelin throwers, mingling with the cavalry, outflanked it and rolled it up. It was now late afternoon, and low sunlight half-blinded the Persians, while it shone from behind the Macedonians.

At some stage, Parmenion ordered the Thessalian horse and the Macedonian phalanx to destroy the disheartened—albeit till now disengaged—enemy in front of them.

Whatever they did and whenever they did it, the Thessalians performed well: according to Diodorus, next to the king they “won a great reputation for valor because of the skillful handling of their squadrons and their unmatched fighting quality.”

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TWO HOURS OR LESS had passed since the fighting started. The Greek mercenaries on the ridge watched stunned by the pace of events. What should they do now? Because Alexander was leading a Panhellenic crusade, they would inevitably be regarded as traitors. They faced a bleak future, if they had a future at all.

They asked the king for quarter, but after the dangers of the battle he was in no mood to grant it. In a rage he charged at them and lost his horse (not Bucephalas on this occasion), which was pierced through the ribs by a sword thrust.

This did not improve Alexander’s temper. He sent the phalanx against the Greeks and ordered the cavalry to surround them. Perhaps they would have been wiser to follow Xenophon’s example after the Battle of Cunaxa and march away at once. It took some time to massacre them. Few escaped, among them those who shammed death among the corpses. Two thousand were taken prisoner and sent in chains to Macedonia and forced labor.

Although they had no hope, the mercenaries gave a good account of themselves, Plutarch writes: “It was here that most of the Macedonians who were killed or wounded, fought or fell, since they were battling at close quarters with men who were expert soldiers and had been rendered desperate.”

It is said that the Persians lost twenty thousand infantry, most of them presumably Greek mercenaries, and twenty-five hundred cavalry; these are plausible numbers, if a little on the high side. From Darius’s point of view the loss of eight senior commanders, mainly in the confused fighting around Alexander, was a more serious blow. Luckily for his cause, that great survivor Memnon lived to fight another day. The local satrap, Arsites, fled the field to Phrygia. It was his advice that had led to the debacle, and from shame he committed suicide.

As for Macedonian casualties, twenty-five Companions died in the first attack. Alexander had sacrificed them to clear the path for him, and he may have felt a little guilty on their account. He commissioned his favorite sculptor, Lysippus, to make bronze statues of them, which were erected in the sanctuary to Zeus at Dium, Macedonia’s “sacred space.”

Of the rest of the cavalry, more than sixty died; so did about thirty foot soldiers. Alexander gave them magnificent funerals on the next day, with their arms and other equipment. He exempted their parents and children from land taxes and all other forms of personal state service and property levies. (He also buried the Persian commanders and, now that the blood mist had cleared, the slaughtered Greeks, in an astute gesture of goodwill and of respect for heroism.)

Arrian writes that, with typical attention to his men and their morale, Alexander “showed great care for the wounded, personally visiting every one of them, inspecting their wounds, asking how they came by them and giving them the opportunity to boast about their exploits.” Later in the year, recently married officers and men were given leave to spend the winter in Macedonia with their wives. This hugely popular gesture was not accompanied by any softening of discipline: pillaging was still forbidden, camps were set up in the countryside, and men were not billeted in towns. The king’s generosity had a practical aspect, for the soldiers were told to bring back fresh Macedonian recruits.

Spoils from the enemy headquarters—drinking vessels, purple hangings, and other such luxury goods—were customarily awarded to an army’s commander; Alexander sent most of them to Olympias.

The king also paid attention to public opinion in Hellas. He wanted to reemphasize the war’s official purpose—revenge for the invasions of Darius I and Xerxes. He sent to Athens three hundred Persian panoplies to be dedicated to the goddess Athena in her temple on the Acropolis with the inscription: “Alexander the son of Philip and the Greeks except the Spartans dedicated these spoils from the barbarians living in Asia.”

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WHAT DO WE LEARN of Alexander’s feelings and intentions at this juncture? Did he have a firm idea of what he was doing?

He looked around the detritus of struggle as night fell on his victorious army, and his first emotion must have been one of unalloyed joy. He had fought gloriously; Achilles in the Elysian Fields was proud of him, he knew for sure. If there had ever been any doubt about his claim to be Greek and about his descent from gods and demigods, Granicus had dispelled it. He had inherited the leadership of the Hellenes; now he had earned it. At last Philip’s army was truly his.

But courage was not the only quality that decided the day. The Macedonians were more disciplined than their opponents and the quality of their weaponry superior. Their cornel-wood spears gave them a decided advantage over the Persians’ flimsy javelins.

Granicus was the moment Alexander took wing. He had displayed his talent as a field commander. With his eye for detail and his swift determination of tactics, first demonstrated in the Balkans, he had won the confidence both of his commanders and of the rank and file. He won battles. His men trusted him for his lunatic courage; he would himself do anything he asked of them, and more. Thanks to his devotion to their interests, the bond between them grew strong and stronger. They would follow wherever he led. In fact, it is hardly an exaggeration to speak of a collective love affair.

But if Alexander’s performance in the field impressed his men, it aroused anxiety among his generals and courtiers. His performance at the Granicus was that of an immature and rash youth. He would have won the admiration of the warrior heroes of the Iliad, and he surely had this in mind. But the fact is that he had nearly died in the blood-soaked scrum on the riverside. A childless bachelor, he had refused to take the advice of Antipater and Parmenion and find a wife. The battle confirmed their worst fears that one sword thrust, one flying arrow, would put an end to the expedition. Had it not been for Cleitus, Alexander’s reign would already have been over. Being the new Achilles was a perilous and irresponsible enterprise.

Maybe there was something of the sociopath in the king’s nature, excessively self-absorbed as he was and seemingly unable to enter into, or at least imagine, the feelings of others. We can only guess at this, though; we will never know it.

As for his aims, some of Alexander’s remarks indicate that he expected to stay and govern, rather than score victories and go home. But how much territory did he expect to conquer? And how was conquest to be consistent with liberation, so far as the Ionian city-states were concerned?

We must not forget his fathomless capacity for pothos. He harbored the dream of empire, but had to keep quiet about it. For his expeditionary force, freeing the Ionian cities and maybe acting as their guarantor and overlord was sufficient. The men would have strongly objected to an outsize project that kept them from home and family for many years.

More likely, Alexander did not know what his precise intentions were. He was following his star. As the adage has it, no one rises so high as he who knows not where he is going.

He awaited his moment.