Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 6 UNDOING THE KNOT

Once upon a time in Phrygia, a region of central Anatolia, there lived a poor old man called Gordius, who scraped a simple living from a smallholding. He owned an inexpensive cart and two pairs of oxen, one for the plow and the other to pull the cart.

One day an extraordinary thing happened. As he was plowing his field, an eagle flew down and perched on the yoke of his cart and stayed there all day. Awestruck, Gordius decided to ask for an explanation from the seers or clairvoyants of Telmessus, a town in Caria where lived a number of families with prophetic gifts. Whether men, women, or children they were skilled in the interpretation of omens. One of these foretellers was the famous Aristander, Alexander’s personal divination expert.

The old man approached a village in the Telmessian area and met a young woman drawing water from a well. They fell into conversation and he told his story. It turned out that she had the gift, and she advised him to return to the site of the omen and sacrifice to Zeus.

She agreed to come back with him and manage the ceremony. They married and a son was born, Midas. When he had grown into a handsome young man, Phrygia was involved in a bitter civil war, and an oracle asserted that a cart would bring peace. A people’s assembly was discussing the matter when Midas drove up with his parents. They immediately decided he was their designated king.

Midas was the king who famously asked a god that anything he touched should turn into gold. But once the gift had been granted, he found that he could no longer eat or drink. Bread and wine became metal in his hand or on his lips. As the old proverb says, he should have been careful what he wished for, lest it came true.

One of Midas’s first regnal acts was to dedicate his father’s old cart on the city’s acropolis as a thanks offering to the king of the gods for sending him the eagle.

—

AT THIS POINT LEGEND shifts gear into history.

The cart existed. A yoke was attached to it by a complicated knot of cornel bark. It was prophesied that whoever could undo it was destined to rule Asia. This was too much of a challenge for Alexander to resist. In the spring of 333 he led his army to Gordium, the impressive capital of Phrygia, with massive fortifications and grand palace buildings. He insisted on climbing up to the acropolis, where the cart was on display in the temple of Zeus, and trying his luck with the knot.

The bark was so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how it was fastened. The king could find no way of undoing it. He was surrounded by a crowd of Phrygians and Macedonians and would lose face if he admitted defeat. He could not allow that to happen. So he drew his sword and with a single blow cut through the knot. “It’s undone now,” he growled.

Some might call this cheating, but so far as Alexander and his entourage were concerned the prophecy had been fulfilled. That night a storm blew up, with thunder and lightning, confirmation of Zeus’s approval.

The incident had great publicity value. It will have encouraged the Macedonians to believe that the gods were on their side, but more importantly it helped to justify their presence in Asia and may have shaken the loyalty of Darius’s subjects.

—

BY THE TIME OF his visit to Gordium in 333, Alexander was already well on his way to conquering Asia Minor (that is, Anatolia, or our modern Turkey). The prophecy was approaching fulfillment.

After the victory at the Granicus in May the previous year, the king’s first task had been to secure the Mediterranean coastline and deny it to the powerful Persian fleet, which dominated the Aegean Sea. After sending Parmenion off to secure the capital of Hellespontine Phrygia, the king marched his army south to the great Lydian city of Sardis. Many of the Ionian city-states were fearful of being liberated, in case the Persians were to return, and kept their heads down for the time being, but the commander of Sardis’s acropolis, a Persian nobleman called Mithrenes, came out some miles to meet the king. He surrendered the city and, even more helpfully, its treasure, for Alexander was running out of cash.

Greeks and Macedonians had no time for barbarians and most of the army will have expected him to be treated harshly. However, Alexander was no racist and was willing to make use of men from any ethnic background provided they were able and experienced. He kept Mithrenes with him “in a position of honor” and two years later appointed him to be satrap of Armenia.

Reluctant ever to give an individual too much power, the king appointed a Macedonian to the satrapy of Lydia, and another one to command the Sardis garrison. A Greek treasurer handled the financial affairs of this wealthy province and reported directly to the king.

Alexander, a tireless tourist, spent time looking around Sardis. He was particularly impressed by the strength of the citadel—very precipitous and fortified with a triple wall. Somewhere on the summit he decided to build a temple to Olympian Zeus and an altar for sacrifices. He was looking around for a suitable site when the god signified his choice by letting off peals of thunder and soaking the royal palace (and only the royal palace) in a downpour of rain.

—

THE KING MOVED ON to the prosperous city of Ephesus on the Ionian coast (in today’s Turkey). Before he arrived, the garrison of Greek mercenaries requisitioned two triremes and vanished: no doubt they had heard of the fate meted out to Memnon’s Greek regiment at the Granicus and were disinclined to share it. The citizens welcomed Alexander’s arrival. Two years previously, as reported, Parmenion’s advance force had briefly taken Ephesus, where they had erected a statue of Philip in the celebrated temple of the mother-goddess Artemis and established a semi-divine cult in his honor. But the Macedonians had faced serious opposition from the Persians under Memnon and were forced to withdraw. In their absence the statue was pulled down.

Now they were back, and led by a new young king. Most of the Ionian cities were governed by pro-Persian upper-class elites, or oligarchies, and Ephesus was no exception. Alexander, having cast himself as liberator of the Greeks, favored democracies, and the city’s rulers were thrown out of office. The leading oligarch, his son, and his nephew sought sanctuary in the temple, but were dragged out and stoned to death.

Alexander immediately put a stop to this settling of scores, typical of the quarrelsome Hellenic city-states. Arrian writes that he “prevented any further inquisitions and vengeance, knowing that, if given license to do so, along with the guilty the people would kill innocent men out of personal enmity or designs on their property. No other action won Alexander as much credit as his handling of Ephesus at this time.”

The temple of Artemis had been badly damaged by fire on the day of Alexander’s birth and had never been restored. The geographer and historian Strabo, writing three centuries later, recounts that the king offered to pay for the rebuilding on condition that the gift was recorded on a marble inscription. The proud Ephesians felt that this would be too high a price and declined the offer on the ground that it was “inappropriate for a god to dedicate offerings to gods.” Any possible offense was cleverly masked by sycophancy.

While at Ephesus the king met the famous artist Apelles, who had painted his father many times. Apelles had an international reputation and his pictures “sold for the price of a whole town.” His work was remarkable for its elegance, he could catch a likeness, and, unlike many of his fellows, he knew when he had put enough work into a painting, when to put down his brush. He restricted his palette to white, yellow, red-brown, and black.

Alexander commissioned a full-length portrait of himself as Zeus wielding a thunderbolt. This was touching on the sacrilegious and suggests that Alexander, proud of his descent from the hero Heracles, was following his father’s self-presentation as godlike, isotheos.

Apelles found his sitter to be a know-it-all, who liked to pontificate about art, although he had no specialist knowledge. He had a word in Alexander’s ear: “Sir, please keep quiet, for the lads who grind the colors are laughing at you.”

Alexander took the reprimand in good part. He was so impressed by the artist’s work that he awarded him a generous fee of twenty talents and exclusive rights to his painted image.

After sending out two military detachments, one of them led by Parmenion, to receive the surrenders of towns in the region, the king set off for his next destination, the great port of Miletus. This time resistance was expected and the Macedonians prepared for a siege.

—

ONE FINE MORNING A thousand years earlier, the Trojans woke up to find that their Greek enemy had left. The shore where they had beached their fleet was deserted. The siege, which had lasted ten years, was finally over. It was time to celebrate.

There was nothing to be seen except for a giant wooden horse. What could its purpose be? A man claiming to be a Greek deserter explained to a wondering crowd that the colossus was intended as a religious offering that would assure the enemy of a safe passage home. It was too large to be taken into the city, so the happy Trojans widened a gate by demolishing part of the city wall and dragged it inside. They then settled down to an evening’s serious drinking.

It was a trick, of course, invented by the wily Odysseus. Inside the horse’s belly, warriors awaited their moment. The Greek ships had not set sail across the Aegean Sea, but were moored out of sight behind the nearby island of Tenedos. Once the city was asleep (stupefied, in many cases), the armed men slipped out of the horse and were joined by the main army after the fleet had returned to the beaches.

The city was fired and sacked.

For the Greeks, the Trojan War was a momentous event and is evidence of the trouble they had always had with sieges. Their main method for capturing cities was deceit and bribery. It was only to be expected that Troy should fall, not to attack, but to subterfuge.

Centuries later, the Greeks lagged far behind Persia, which mined tunnels, built mounds to the height of defensive walls, and used battering rams. Philip, Alexander’s father, recognized that a well-defended city was a challenge to his forces and he had no objection to duplicity. A wooden horse was fit only for myth, and anyway he had another more likely animal in mind. He confessed: “There is no citadel to which one cannot send up a little donkey laden with gold.”

However, both Philip and Alexander were determined to improve the art of siegecraft. They borrowed many of their techniques from the Carthaginians and the Syracusans, who regularly clashed in Sicily where both held substantial territories.

The main problem was that city walls, which used to consist of masonry rubble or even mud, were getting stronger. During the fifth century B.C., wealthy states began building them from accurately cut rectangular or polygonal stone blocks, surmounted by mud-brick battlements. Narrow sallyports allowed defenders to launch sorties. Athens was a maritime power and boasted the most powerful fleet in the Mediterranean. She made herself impregnable from land assault by building massive stone walls around her port, Piraeus, and linking it to the city by means of a “corridor” of two high stone walls punctuated at regular intervals by two-story towers. In effect, Athens became an island.

So the question facing the Macedonians was how to counter stone. Philip and Alexander invested heavily in imaginative engineers. One of these was a Thessalian called Diades. He claimed to have invented, but probably only improved, wheeled towers constructed from wood and hides. These would have up to ten floors with windows on each side, protected from arrows by leather curtains. They could bring the besiegers level with the top of a fortification and enabled them to fight guards on the battlements on equal terms. An assault bridge allowed soldiers to cross over onto a wall, a fortification, or a building. The tallest tower Diades ever built was more than fifty meters high.

The other solution to the problem of lofty stone walls was artillery. Sicilian engineers invented the arrow-shooting catapult. To begin with this was no more than an outsize crossbow, but in Philip’s day the more deadly torsion catapult was invented, powered by twisted sinew or hair. It was soon adapted for stone-throwing, and a large one could hurl heavy rocks as far as 100 meters.

Battering rams developed rapidly at this time. The most important innovation was to house them in a covered vehicle called a tortoise. This could be sixteen feet long; a small tower stood on its pitched roof, which held pots of water for extinguishing fires. The ram itself could be pulled back and forth by ropes, like a pendulum; these gave way to rams on rollers, which had a constant momentum and greater penetration. A specialist form of ram was the drill, twenty feet long with a sharp metal point that could pierce walls.

Defenders, no longer able to sit comfortably behind their stone walls, countered the new siege devices with developments of their own. Above all, they needed to be active with countermeasures. Towers were built that accommodated heavy artillery, for the higher a catapult was from the ground, the greater its range. Ditches were dug in front of walls to make it difficult for mobile siege towers to approach. Crenellated battlements were replaced by screen walls with shuttered openings and loopholes.

Thanks to the technological advances of men like Diades, the balance of advantage now lay with the besieger, provided that he was determined, not pressed for time, and able to endure high casualties. A victorious general was liable to lose more men in a siege than on the battlefield. However, the besieged could win the day if they had strong defenses, plentiful food supplies and running water, and could boast loyal citizens and brave soldiers.

—

MILETUS WAS ONE OF the wealthiest Greek city-states on the coastline of Asia Minor. Founded by Athens, it was perched on a headland at the foot of the rocky, jagged Mount Latmos and looked across a bay at the mouth of the river Maeander. It became a center for philosophical and scientific studies. Its greatest citizen was the sixth-century-B.C. thinker and political consultant Thales, who devoted much of his time to the cause of Milesian independence. It was an era of political upheaval, dominated by Cyrus the Great and culminating in the creation of the Persian empire.

Thales rejected the use of mythology to explain the nature of the universe in favor of hypotheses that could be tested—in other words, he pioneered the scientific method. Philosophers of his era often supposed that all material things were modifications of one eternal substance. According to Thales, this substance was water.

Thales is credited with inventing geometry by generalizing from Egyptian land measurement. He was also an astronomer and is reputed to have predicted a solar eclipse. Aristotle regarded him as the first philosopher in the Hellenic tradition.

As we have seen, for a few brief years at the close of the fifth century, Miletus joined other Greek city-states in the Ionian revolt against Persian rule. Their navy lost a decisive battle off the small island of Lade near the harbor entrance. The city itself was besieged and captured. The Great King was back in control.

Now, in the autumn of 334, more than a century and a half later, the empire was again being challenged. Miletus was a rich prize, as the Persians well knew. They sent their fleet of 400 warships to reach the city before the Macedonians. However, Alexander’s one hundred and sixty ships arrived there first and anchored at Lade. From this position they could intercept any Persian ships that tried to enter the port, and the enemy was forced to moor some distance away, under Mount Mycale.

Parmenion advised the king to fight at sea, arguing that although the Macedonian fleet was half the size of the enemy’s, a naval battle was worth the risk—and a defeat would not have serious consequences. Alexander strongly disagreed. It made no sense, he said, to pit their own inexperienced sailors against the better-trained Cypriots and Phoenicians who made up the Persian fleet. A defeat would be a blow to his reputation for invincibility and would encourage revolt in Greece.

So the king let the fleets look after themselves and prepared for a siege. He dismissed some envoys from Miletus, who offered equal access to the walls and harbor for both sides. “Go back at once inside the city,” he told them, “and warn your compatriots to be ready for battle tomorrow.”

Alexander’s engineers got down to work, under his supervision, and proved their worth. Siege engines (presumably battering rams and catapults) were brought up and soon demolished a section of wall. The soldiers worked in relays. A longer stretch of wall was weakened; once it had been broken down, the army prepared to launch a major assault. The Persians at Mycale were powerless and could only watch over the fate of their friends and allies.

The admiral of the Macedonian fleet at Lade observed this early success and feared that the desperate Persians might risk running the gauntlet into the port and smuggling in aid. So he rowed along the coast to the harbor mouth, where he lined up his triremes and packed them close together like sardines with their prows facing outward. Miletus was now completely blockaded by sea.

The garrison of Greek mercenaries lost hope. Some of them jumped into the sea and paddled on their upturned shields to an uninhabited islet. Others tried to slip away in small boats, but were caught by the triremes at the harbor mouth. Most of the defenders were killed in the city itself. The Rhodian general Memnon and other high officials had made their escape from the battlefield at the Granicus and taken refuge in Miletus; they went on their travels again.

The Milesians made it clear that the Persian garrison had been responsible for the resistance to the siege. Leading citizens carrying suppliant olive boughs prostrated themselves before the king and placed their city in his hands. Alexander was a little skeptical. He noticed many statues of athletes who had won victories in the Olympic and the Pythian Games and asked, “Where were the men with bodies like these when the barbarians took over your city?” However, he took the Milesians at their word and treated them with kindness. All other adult males were sold into slavery.

With the siege now over, Alexander sailed some triremes to the islet. They were equipped with ladders on their prows for scaling the sheer cliffs. However, when he realized that the mercenaries were prepared to fight to the death, the king was moved by their courage. He pardoned them on condition that they sign up in his army. The story is very probably true, for he had a soft spot for brave enemies. He may also have wanted to make a show of reconciliation with Greek mercenaries. The massacre at the Granicus had been counterproductive. Thousands of embittered Greeks were in the Great King’s pay; believing they could expect no mercy from Alexander, they remained his most obdurate enemies. It was in his interest to win them over to his side.

It was now time to deal with the Persian fleet marooned at Mount Mycale. Alexander sent Philotas with a small mixed force of cavalry and infantry to prevent the sailors from leaving their ships. Finding supplies in this barren spot was already difficult; Philotas made it impossible. After a perfunctory attempt to entice the Macedonian fleet out of the harbor, the Persians, half starved and thirsty, sailed away.

The siege showed that the Macedonians could defeat the Persian navy from dry land, or at least render it harmless. What was the point, Alexander mused, of maintaining a fleet of his own, especially when it was too small, too inadequate, and too expensive to be of practical use. He decided to disband it altogether, except for a few transports for carrying the siege equipment. His army was well on its way to capturing Asia Minor. He would make do without ships.

At the time it seemed like an excellent idea.

—

MILESIANS MIGHT DISAGREE, but Halicarnassus was the greatest of the Ionian city-ports.

The capital of Caria, it stood on a barren peninsula that extended into the Aegean Sea and commanded a fine harbor. Its most famous son was Herodotus, who wrote a prose epic about the Persian invasions of Greece in the fifth century B.C.

The city had been governed for many years by members of the same family: Hecatomnus, who founded the regime, and his three sons and two daughters. Although they were officially only satraps, the Great King was content to let them settle into dynasties and, in effect, become monarchs themselves. There were pros and cons to this arrangement. It conferred stability, continuity, and in-depth local knowledge; on the other hand, overmighty subjects might be tempted to bid for complete independence.

The most successful Hecatomnid was Mausolus, the eldest of three brothers, who reigned between 377 and 353 and expanded his sphere of influence to include Rhodes and other islands. He moved his capital to Halicarnassus and invested in an ambitious program of public works. He was a Hellenophile, and the best Greek architects, artists, and engineers were hired. The harbor was deepened and a fine city wall was built, with watchtowers, three fortified citadels, and deep protective ditches. Streets and squares were paved, statues erected and temples dedicated. Halicarnassus became one of the most spectacular cities in the ancient world.

Its inhabitants acquired a reputation for decadent living. Some fantasists blamed a city fountain for making “effeminate” all who drank from it. Strabo disagreed: “It seems that the effeminacy of man is laid to the charge of the air or of the water; yet it is not these, but rather riches and wanton living, that are the cause of effeminacy.”

Like the pharaohs in Egypt, male Hecatomnids married their female siblings, perhaps to keep the ruling family to a manageable size and limit the number of potential claimants to the throne. Mausolus married his sister Artemisia, who acted as his co-ruler. The union was, or became, a love match. On her brother’s death, the grief-stricken queen supposedly swallowed his ashes, mixed in a drink. She commissioned an elaborate tomb, the Mausoleum (whence our “mausoleum”), on a hill overlooking the city. Within three years she, too, was dead.

The Hecatomnid clan held on to power. Artemisia was followed by a brother, who died and left his sister-wife, Ada, as queen regnant. She was displaced by the youngest of the brothers, Pixodarus (the man whose plan to marry his daughter to Alexander’s half-brother Arridhaeus had caused so much grief). He in turn was succeeded by his son-in-law, a prominent Persian called Orontobates.

Halicarnassus was the next siege on Alexander’s list, after which he would have realized his immediate strategic aim, the conquest of Asia Minor. He marched south and received surrenders from towns en route. He made a detour to the fortified town of Alinda, where the deposed widow Ada lived in exile. She petitioned the king to reinstate her as queen of Caria, which he immediately promised to do.

He had a taste for ladies of a certain age, and he fell if not in love then in warm friendship with her. He allowed her to adopt him and gave her the official title of Mother. Every day she used to send him cakes and sweets from her kitchen. Finally, Ada offered to send him her finest bakers and cooks. These little tokens of her affection began to be embarrassing and, according to Plutarch, he politely reprimanded her:

I do not need your chefs, because my tutor Leonidas provided me with better ones—a night march for breakfast and a light breakfast to give me an appetite for supper. This same Leonidas would often come and open my chests of bedding and clothes, to see if my mother hadn’t hidden some titbits inside.

One can only wonder what Olympias made of all this. Alexander frequently corresponded with her, but perhaps he took care not to draw this new relationship to her attention.

—

HALICARNASSUS PROMISED TO BE a challenge. Memnon and many Persians, together with several thousand Greek mercenaries, had concentrated their forces there after leaving Miletus. The Great King’s navy, still smarting from its failure there, rode at anchor inside the harbor. Now that the Macedonian fleet had been disbanded, nothing could be done to prevent supplies from being brought into the city.

Alexander pitched camp on the eastern side of Halicarnassus; siege engines and provisions arrived by sea. The king reconnoitered the walls. A body of defenders suddenly stormed out of a nearby gate to the accompaniment of long-range artillery fire. The Macedonians had little difficulty driving them back inside, but after a few days the king decided to assess the western fortifications near a gate that led to the town of Myndus twelve miles away.

He was briefly distracted by some traitors inside Myndus who promised to hand it over to him. One day he went in person up to the town wall around midnight, but the agreed signal was not given and the Macedonians returned empty-handed.

The siege now began in earnest. It was decided to demolish a section of wall in the north of the city. Sappers began by filling in a part of the ditch so that the wheeled towers and battering rams could be pushed close to the wall. Penthouses were placed against it to protect diggers who were undermining its foundations. A surprise nighttime sally was repulsed: about 170 defenders lost their lives against sixteen of Alexander’s troops (although 300 were injured because they had not had enough time to put on their armor).

One piece of good news was that the Halicarnassian fatalities included Neoptolemus. He was the son of Arrabhaeus, the Macedonian nobleman who had been executed for his (alleged) involvement in Philip’s assassination. This provoked his desertion to the Persians. By contrast, his brother Amyntas was an officer of high standing and ability and remained loyal and trusted. Neoptolemus was not long dead when the king confirmed his confidence in Amyntas by appointing him to an important command.

A few days later, two towers and connecting walls were destroyed and a third tower badly shaken. That evening two men from Perdiccas’s infantry battalion, who were tent-mates, drank too much wine and quarreled about their exploits. To prove their virility they ran up to the piles of collapsed masonry. Soldiers from the city came out to confront them and a fight started. More men from both sides joined the mêlée and soon a fierce battle was underway. This was the second time that Perdiccas and his men had endangered Alexander’s career by their foolhardiness (the first time had been at the siege of Thebes).

He and his staff appeared in person; the Macedonians drove back the enemy and, writes Arrian, Halicarnassus “came near to being captured.” That may be so, but it looks as though the struggle was more even than the historian suggests. According to Diodorus, the king asked the enemy through a herald for a truce to recover the bodies of his men who had fallen during the engagement. Evidently, he did not control the area where they lay. The clear implication is that the Macedonians had had the worst of it.

Ephialtes and Thrasybulus, Athenians fighting on the Persian side, advised Memnon not to give up the dead bodies for burial, but chivalrously he granted the request.

The defenders rapidly plugged the gap in their defenses by constructing a crescent-shaped brick wall behind the debris. On the next day, the king brought up his siege engines against it, but one of his towers and some wickerwork shelters for the sappers were destroyed when enemy soldiers with torches set light to them. They were chased back inside, but the damage had been done.

—

A DAY OR TWO’S pause ensued. Memnon and his staff met in council to discuss the situation. Despite their successes, they realized that unless the besieged took some sort of aggressive action their future was bleak. Ephialtes devised a clever plan. One thousand mercenaries were to emerge with torches and once again set light to the siege engines. The Macedonians would react by sending in troops. Once they were fully engaged, a second troop of mercenaries, led by Ephialtes, would issue from a nearby city gate and take the Macedonians in the flank. If this tactic showed any sign of succeeding, Memnon and his full army would arrive to deliver the coup de grâce.

The plan very nearly worked. At an agreed time the first column burst out of the city and set fire to new siege engines. There was a tremendous conflagration. Missiles rained down on the Macedonians from the top of the replacement wall and from a mobile tower that had been specially built for the occasion. The king went forward and took personal command. Then Ephialtes emerged from the gate at the head of a second column, a deep, close-knit phalanx, and charged. He happened to crash into young and inexperienced troops, who flinched. Memnon then arrived on the scene in force.

The Macedonians were facing defeat, and Diodorus claims that “Alexander did not really know what to do.” There was in fact nothing that he could do; the day was only saved by some battle-hardened warriors—Philip’s old soldiers—who launched a counterattack against the enemy phalanx.

Fortune had beckoned to Memnon—and then changed her mind. Ephialtes was killed in the fray and his mercenaries were driven back inside Halicarnassus. They pushed toward the open gate, but a bridge that led to it over the ditch broke under their weight. Some were trampled to death or shot down from above. In the panic of the moment, the gates were closed too soon and many were left outside. They were slaughtered at the foot of the city wall.

It was now evening and Alexander called back his troops. Some argue that if he had persevered, Halicarnassus would have fallen there and then. But battles in the dark can have unpredictable outcomes and his men were exhausted. It is probable that he was in touch with leading citizens and did not wish to initiate a sack.

Memnon was a realist. He conferred urgently that night with his commanders and the Carian satrap, Ada’s usurping son-in-law, Orontobates. They decided that they could not hold out for much longer, for many of their best soldiers had lost their lives or been wounded, and the city’s fortifications were being battered down by the Macedonian artillery. They may also have feared a popular uprising. They acted at once while it was still dark, firing the city and burning their wooden tower and the arsenal where they kept their artillery. They withdrew their best troops into two of Halicarnassus’s three more or less impregnable fortress citadels and left the city itself to the Macedonians. All remaining personnel—Memnon and Orontobates among them—stores, and equipment were evacuated by the Persian navy to the island of Cos.

Alexander was informed of exactly what was happening by some turncoats and immediately marched his army into Halicarnassus. He ordered all fire-raisers to be put to death. Civilians were to be treated with respect.

Dawn was now breaking and it was possible to see the destruction wrought during the night. The king surveyed the occupied fortresses and decided it was not worth the time and energy to besiege them. With the city in his hands, there would have been little point. Ada was proclaimed queen and a garrison was installed of three thousand mercenary infantry and some two hundred horse, under the command of Ptolemy.

—

HALICARNASSUS SHOWED THE DECISION to disband the Macedonian fleet to have been a mistake.

As a Greek, Memnon had never been fully trusted by the Persian court. Now he sent his wife and children to Darius as hostages for his good behavior and, as he had hoped, he was appointed commander-in-chief of operations in Asia Minor. He allocated money to pay for the fleet and a sizable body of mercenaries. His plan was to force Alexander to abandon his Asian campaign by taking the war to mainland Greece. In the absence of opposition, Memnon and the Persian fleet captured island after island. Soon the entire Aegean Sea would belong to the Great King. Diodorus writes:

News of the general’s activity spread like wildfire and most of the Cyclades sent missions to him. As word came to Greece that Memnon was about to sail to Euboea with his fleet, the cities of that island became alarmed, while those Greeks who were friendly to Persia, notably Sparta, began to have high hopes of a change in the political situation.

Having no warships, Alexander was powerless to intervene. Unless there was a material change for the better in the military outlook, he would be obliged to go back to Europe. Then his luck turned. In early spring 333, while campaigning on the island of Lesbos, Memnon suddenly died; no diagnosis has come down to us, but perhaps the cause was a heart attack. His nephew Pharnabazus inherited his command and acted energetically, but he was no Memnon. The grand plan expired with its deviser.

(The Fates had a dry sense of humor, for Pharnabazus was the brother of the beautiful Barsine, soon to become Alexander’s mistress.)

Alexander recognized his error and commissioned a new fleet. This was a hugely expensive project and took some time to implement. Pharnabazus remained free to career around the Aegean, but only for some months. Two admirals were appointed and were given five hundred talents for their costs; for his part, Antipater received six hundred talents, presumably to assist with recruitment. The League of Corinth was instructed under its treaty obligations to send a naval contribution.

Alexander needed to assure himself that Asia Minor was fully pacified. He set out eastward along the southern littoral. Meanwhile Parmenion was instructed to retrace his steps northward to Sardis, after which he would strike inland, assert Macedonian power, and challenge the Persian satrap of Phrygia. They would meet again at Gordium in the center of Anatolia.

—

AT ABOUT THIS TIME an unnerving incident took place. A Persian nobleman called Sisines, who was a member of Darius’s intimate circle, was arrested by Parmenion’s men. His cover story, which ultimately he did not use, was that the Great King had sent him to visit the satrap of Phrygia, but in fact his real mission was to corrupt Alexander of Lyncestis, who commanded an elite cavalry squadron in Parmenion’s service.

This namesake of the king was one of the various noblemen who had been caught up, innocently or otherwise, in the assassination of Philip II. As we have seen, his two brothers had been executed for their alleged complicity in the crime, but he had been spared because he was the first to hail the new king in the theater at Aegae. More to the point, perhaps, Antipater, Alexander’s leading backer, who had stage-managed his accession, was the other Alexander’s father-in-law and may have protected him. Ostensibly loyal, the Lyncestian had served in the army as an able commander of the Thessalian cavalry.

Having been caged, Sisines sang. Sometime previously, a Macedonian defector had brought a (presumably) treasonous letter from this Alexander to the Great King. In response, Sisines was to give the Lyncestian a confidential message that, if he were to kill Alexander the king, he, Darius, would install the Lyncestian on the Macedonian throne and present him with a thousand gold talents.

Sisines was sent under guard to Alexander, to whom he repeated the story. What was to be made of it? It was possible that this was an example of ancient psyops, a trick to confuse the enemy, discredit a valued officer, and damage morale. Alternatively, Sisines was telling the truth and the Lyncestian had been a traitor all along. The evidence was circumstantial and rested on a single, uncorroborated, and probably untrustworthy source.

Alexander asked his Companions for advice. Their opinion was that it had been a mistake to give the best of the cavalry to a man of dubious loyalty. He should rid himself of the traitor before he could suborn the Thessalians “to some revolutionary purpose.”

They reminded the king of a recent omen, which was obviously a refence to Sisines’ revelation. During the siege, he had been taking a midday nap when a swallow flew about over his head chirping noisily. The sound bothered him in his sleep and he brushed the bird away with his hand. Instead of flying off, the swallow perched on his head and stayed there till he was fully awake.

Alexander took the incident seriously and consulted his seer, Aristander, who said that it signified a plot against his life. However, seeing that the swallow was a friendly, talkative bird, he predicted that the plot would come to light.

The king was uncertain of the Lyncestian’s guilt, and did not have him charged and brought to trial. He ordered Parmenion to arrest him and keep him under guard. And so Alexander the Lyncestian remained for the next three years.

—

ALEXANDER NOW HAD TO decide whether to await the arrival of Darius and his host and do battle with him in Asia Minor, or to confront the Great King in his own heartland. Of course, he chose the latter, more aggressive option. Time was short, for the mustering of the vast Persian army was proceeding apace. He needed to conclude his business in Asia Minor as soon as possible.

His choice came at a high price. The farther he and his invasion force moved away from Asia Minor the more likely it was that Pharnabazus would exploit his naval monopoly and recover some of his gains. It would not be long before Miletus and Halicarnassus went back under Persian rule. Alexander will have told himself that this would not matter greatly. His new fleet would soon be ready, he expected. Assuming that he won his showdown with the Great King, and he did assume it, the Ionian cities would drop into his hands again.

The Macedonian army moved fast through Lycia (on the southern coast of Turkey) and its largest city, Telmissus, Aristander’s hometown of fellow prophets, capitulated without fuss. Envoys from the important port of Phaselis, with its two harbors, offered their surrender and awarded him a golden crown. As a friendly gesture, the king helped the inhabitants demolish a fort built by hostile Pisidians. He then continued to the fertile lands of Pamphylia, leaving his main army briefly to make its own way while he rode along a coastal path. This path was submerged when a southerly blew, but luckily a north wind got up and the way opened to Alexander and his troop.

The citizens of Aspendus surrendered, promising to hand over the horses they bred as tribute to the Great King and to make a fifty-talent contribution to his army’s costs. They changed their minds and then, seeing Alexander arrive in person outside their walls, nervously changed their minds again. The king was not amused and raised the payment to one hundred talents. He was lucky, for if Aspendus with its high, sheer acropolis overlooking the river Eurymedon had decided to resist, a siege could have lasted for months.

The king continued north. One town looked too difficult to capture quickly, so he simply bypassed it and went on to mop up various others. He then passed into Phrygia and reached Celaenae, a green oasis in the barren landscape of Anatolia and, more significantly, a city of strategic importance. It stood at the headwaters of two rivers, the Maeander and the Marsyas, and was a junction of major highways.

The citadel perched on high cliffs and was garrisoned by Carian and Greek mercenaries. When the king sent a herald up to them demanding their immediate capitulation, they simply showed the man around the substantial fortifications before sending him on his way. For once Alexander opted for discretion rather than valor. Instead of a direct assault, he blockaded the citadel with his army and waited. After ten days, supplies were running short and the defenders’ resolve was wavering.

They put a remarkable proposition to the king. If they were not relieved within sixty days, they promised to hand over the citadel. Even more remarkably, Alexander agreed to the terms, left a modest force to police the deal, and hurried on.

After accepting fistfuls of surrenders, Alexander and Parmenion met, as arranged, at Gordium. Having done their philoprogenitive duty, the newly married husbands arrived from Macedon together with three thousand newly levied foot soldiers and three hundred horse.

The slicing of the knot and the thundering approval of the king of the gods marked a symbolic turning point. The new lord of Asia was ready to march east to fulfill the prophecy and claim his inheritance.

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WHAT CAN WE SAY of Alexander’s post-Granicus performance, especially so far as the sieges are concerned? Long-term investment in his engineers, up-to-date siege equipment, and long-range artillery had paid off handsomely. Even the most solid fortifications collapsed under the bombardment of his torsion catapults. This was to his credit.

However, the incident of Perdiccas’s drunk soldiers suggests a problem with control of his men under the mental and physical strain of a siege. Worse than that, to have had to parley for a truce was a profound humiliation for a man whose stock-in-trade was invincibility. And he had been outmaneuvered by Ephialtes in front of the walls of Halicarnassus. For once, this most quick-thinking of commanders could not think how to turn the tables on his enemy. His career could have come to an abrupt end had it not been for Philip’s grizzled warriors—and the luck for which he was justly famous.

Gratitude was not Alexander’s strong suit (he preferred people being grateful to him) and years later an old soldier reminded him of this episode, the memory of which the king did his best to suppress. We are told that he said: “You have no time for Philip’s men, but you are forgetting that if old Atarrhias here had not called back the younger fellows when they shrank from fighting, we would still be hanging out at Halicarnassus.”

Nevertheless, mischance and mistakes apart, the king had more or less achieved his goal of conquering Asia Minor. As we have seen, his father would probably have halted at this point and followed the advice of Isocrates, who had died in 338, the year of Chaeronea, fatal to liberty. As already reported, he had argued that a chain of newly founded Greek city-states running south from Sinope on the Black Sea coast to Cilicia on the Mediterranean would create a barrier between a much enlarged Macedonian empire and the diminished but still extensive lands of the Great King.

Intellectuals are often impractical; the notion that an aggrieved Persian empire, thirsting for revenge, would be deterred by a line of puny statelets was absurd. Alexander knew he would only be secure once he had put an end to the rule of the Achaemenids. When did he reject Isocrates’ “halfway house”? He seems not to have broadcast his inward thoughts, and little evidence about them has come down to us. He may have dreamed of total conquest as a teenaged boy, as crown prince and then king, or only during his campaign in Asia Minor. But his long-term intentions can be deduced from his actions. He may not have told anybody, but he fully intended to take over as Great King from Darius.

His tactics were as clear-cut as his strategy. Everything he did was aimed at forcing Darius to stake his empire and his life on one great battle, which he and his Macedonians expected to win outright. With Asia Minor lost, the Great King’s honor required him to take the field himself.