Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 8 IMMORTAL LONGINGS

Unfamiliar gusts of snow blew across the inland plateau on which the Syrian capital of Damascus stood. An unusually hard winter threatened. Faint dustings whitened the farmland and irrigation channels outside the walls.

Through this landscape a long trail of noble Persians and camp followers was abandoning the city. The governor had claimed it could not be defended against the triumphant Macedonians and ordered an evacuation. A crowd of porters, guarded by an armed escort, were carrying the treasures and cash that Darius had sent to Damascus for safekeeping. These included fabulously expensive robes, stiff with purple and gold embroidery. The temperature was so low that the porters put on these costumes in an attempt to warm themselves.

The governor was playing a double game, for he wanted to hand over the entire contents of the baggage train to Alexander, but not be seen to do so. He sent a message to Parmenion, who was on his way to take it over, that he was willing to bring the Great King’s store of gold and silver out of the city into open country where it would be easy to confiscate without opposition.

When the Macedonian general at the head of his troops arrived on the scene and saw a crowd of refugees, the exotically dressed porters, and the armed escort, his suspicions were aroused. This looked like a trap. He ordered his Thessalian cavalry to charge.

The porters dropped their goods and took to their heels, while the guards, no braver, also threw down their weapons and made for familiar side roads. Seven thousand pack animals were now on the loose. The royal treasure was scattered across the snowy fields in vast quantities: more than 2,500 talents of coined money—an enormous sum—golden vessels, golden bridles, elaborately decorated tents, and wagons laden with uncounted wealth. Our sources speak of more than two tons’ worth of gold goblets and cups inlaid with precious stones.

This was many Macedonians’ introduction to the luxury of the barbarian way of life and, as Plutarch says neatly, “From now onwards, like dogs that have picked up a scent, they pressed on to track down the wealth of the Persians.”

Everything was safely gathered up and a report sent to Alexander. This was accompanied by a beautifully made casket, which was regarded by the keepers of Darius’s treasure as the finest item of all. Alexander asked his friends what he should keep in it as his most precious possession. Many different suggestions were aired, but in the end Alexander announced that he had decided to keep his copy of the Iliad there.

Alexander instructed Parmenion to return Darius’s baggage train to Damascus and told him to guard it carefully. He also charged him with the military oversight of lowland Syria, the province in which Damascus was situated, and gave him authority to mint coins.

So far as human valuables were concerned, Parmenion took into custody the Great King’s household. This included 277 caterers, seventeen bartenders, and, evidence of Darius at leisure, more than three hundred concubines. Of greater political value were a number of senior Persians, including women of the imperial family: three unmarried daughters of Darius’s predecessor Artaxerxes Ochus; Ochus’s widow; and the daughter of Darius’s brave brother Oxyathres. Among other prisoners of war were the wife and daughter of Pharnabazus, Memnon’s successor as commander-in-chief of Asia Minor’s coastal area and of the navy. All these people would raise a great deal of money if ransomed. But Alexander was now, without exaggeration, rich beyond the dreams of avarice and may have kept his captives at court along with Sisygambis and Stateira. He never again suffered from financial difficulties.

Some envoys from Thebes (or the memory of it), Athens, and Sparta had the bad luck to be visiting the Great King at the time of the Issus catastrophe. Their city-states wanted to break up the League of Corinth, of which they were reluctant members, and were seeking an entente with the Great King. Ordinarily this would have been a serious offense in Alexander’s eyes, but he was minded to be lenient. As he had laid waste their city, the Thebans’ enmity was understandable, even praiseworthy. So he released them. The Athenian ambassador was the son of a famous military commander, Iphicrates, whom he admired, and he retained him as an honored guest; when the ambassador died later (of natural causes), Alexander arranged for his bones to be sent to his family in Athens.

—

AMONG THE PERSIAN WOMEN at Damascus was a great beauty. She was Barsine, one of the copious offspring of Artabazus, nephew of Artaxerxes III. As we have seen, Barsine spent time in Pella as an exile with her father when Alexander was a child. Her date of birth is unknown, but she was probably now in her early to midthirties.

She had led a life crowded with incident. Her mother came from the Greek island of Rhodes and was sister of the two wily military commanders in Darius’s service, Mentor and Memnon. Consanguinity was no bar: Barsine married the first of her uncles, perhaps not long after reaching puberty. By him she had three children, all daughters. But by 336 or earlier Mentor was dead, and Barsine wedded Memnon, by whom she had a son. As reported, her new husband sent her to Darius as a pledge of his good faith when he signed up for service as the Great King’s admiral and military commander in the Aegean and Asia. This was why she found herself in Damascus as a member of the royal court. By now she had been widowed for a second time and was without a male protector.

Alexander’s sexuality seems to have been enlarging its scope, for he is reported to have fallen in love with Barsine. Apparently she was the first woman he had sex with. She was well equipped to please; being some ten years older, she could bring the expertise of a mature woman to bear on a callow (at least so far as straight sex was concerned) male. As well as good looks, she had received a Greek education and was, Plutarch observes, “of a gentle disposition.” It was helpful, too, that Achaemenid blood ran in her veins.

Parmenion had been pressing Alexander hard for years to do what was necessary with a socially distinguished woman and produce children. On this occasion he seems to have played the part of matchmaker. The lovers settled into a couple and Barsine gave birth to a son. They named him Heracles after the demigod and hero who was Alexander’s ancestor. But however fond they were, they never married. (The whereabouts of Barsine’s father, Artabazus, at this time is unknown, but unlike his daughter, if she had a choice in the matter, he remained loyal to Darius.)

Despite his new love interest, the old asexual Alexander had by no means disappeared. When he met his female captives, he said jokingly: “These Persian women are an irritation of the eyes.” The remark picked up on a phrase in Herodotus; some ambassadors from the Great King once complained that royal Macedonian women “irritated their eyes,” and then scandalously touched their breasts and tried to kiss them. In self-conscious contrast, Alexander made a show of his chastity, or so writes Plutarch, by paying the members of Darius’s harem as little attention as if they were stone statues.

The king strongly objected to the sexual trafficking of slaves or prisoners. Philoxenus, the commander of his forces on the seacoast, who had satrapal powers, wrote to him to say that he had with him a slave merchant from Tarentum in Italy who was offering two exceptionally good-looking boys for sale. Would Alexander be interested in buying them? The king was furious. He asked his friends what evidence of depravity Philoxenus could ever have seen in him that he should waste his time on such a monstrous proposal.

A rich and influential courtier called Hagnon, who was one of Alexander’s Companions, made a similarly ill-judged proposition. He sent the king a letter saying that he wanted to buy him a young slave boy whose beauty was the talk of Corinth. Hagnon received a sharp rebuke for his temerity. (These stories, we may note in passing, do confirm a general perception among his contemporaries that Alexander had sex with males.)

When the king heard that two Macedonian soldiers serving under Parmenion had seduced the wives of some Greek mercenaries, he allegedly wrote to the general that if convicted they should be put down like wild animals.

It would seem that he repeatedly discussed sexual topics with Parmenion. He commented in the same letter: “So far as I myself am concerned, it will be found that not only have I never seen nor wished to see Darius’s wife, but I have never even allowed her beauty to be discussed in my presence.” If Alexander seems to be protesting too much, it is worth noting that no ancient commentator accused him of sleeping with the queen.

When he was a child, Alexander lived in Philip’s boisterous court where sex with people of every gender was rough, ready, and routine. Pretty slaves will have been welcomed with enthusiasm. Our less than trustworthy sources assert no linkage, but it is not a wild surmise that Alexander’s childhood experiences fed into adult distaste. He expected his own behavior and that of those around him to promote, if not virtue, then at least restraint.

—

DARIUS SENT A LETTER to the king of Macedonia. He wrote as “monarch to monarch,” quite a concession for a ruler who admitted no equals, and asked for the release of his close relatives—his mother, wife, and children—in return for a large ransom. The fantastic sum of ten thousand talents was mentioned. He also proposed a treaty of friendship and, according to Diodorus, agreed to cede the territory and cities of Asia west of the Halys River. In other words, the war aim of annexing what is now Turkey and marching no farther east, as set out by that international intellectual Isocrates and probably endorsed privately by Philip, would be fully achieved.

Darius thought it a very good offer. So did Parmenion when the king brought the letter to his advisory council. He said, perhaps recalling military planning conversations with his previous master: “I would accept those terms if I were Alexander.” “So would I, by Zeus, if I were Parmenion,” came the crushing rejoinder.

In fact, the offer was suspect and the king was right to reject it. The treaty of friendship was not based on a true meeting of interests and was, rather, a long-term booby trap. The Macedonians would have had to defend an immensely long frontier; instability and war would have been permanent.

Alexander’s reply opened with a rhetorical reminder that his campaign was a response to the two invasions of Greece more than a century before. He was not the aggressor, but was acting in self-defense (not the most convincing of claims). Darius had suborned Philip’s assassins (almost certainly untrue, but plausible) and bribed Greek statesmen to rise against him (true, but in reaction to threats and invasion). Darius himself was a usurper (arguably so; a eunuch had placed him on the throne). Alexander went on:

It is for you, then, to come to me as lord over all Asia. If you are afraid I will harm you when you come, send some of your people to bring you back my guarantees. And when you have come you can ask me for your mother and wife and children and anything else you wish, and you shall have them. Whatever you persuade me to give shall be yours. And in future address any communications to me as the king of Asia, and do not write as an equal, but tell me as the master of all your possessions what it is that you need. Failing this, I intend to treat you as a criminal. But if you wish to dispute the kingship, stand your ground and fight for it. Do not run away, as I shall come after you wherever you are.

When Darius received this forbidding missive, he abandoned hope of negotiation and began to recruit another army, this time from his eastern provinces. It was exactly the response Alexander had hoped to provoke.

—

THE MAN, DRESSED IN RAGS, worked as a gardener and water carrier in the suburbs of the Phoenician seaport of Sidon in Syria. Called Abdalonymus, he struggled to get by on a tiny income. Preoccupied with his labors, he had not noticed the political and military activities of the day.

The Battle of Issus passed him by, as did the arrival outside Sidon of the Macedonian army. Alexander accepted the surrender of the northern cities of Syria. The king of Sidon handed over his mini-state, although this did him no favors with the popular party, who believed that he was at heart pro-Persian. He was unceremoniously deposed and Alexander instructed Hephaestion to find a new king for Sidon.

Abdalonymus knew nothing of these high events.

Hephaestion was billeted with two wealthy young Sidonians and asked them for advice on suitable candidates. He was impressed by his hosts and inquired if they might be interested in the job. They declined, saying that Sidonians would only accept as king a member of the royal family. As a matter of fact, they claimed, they knew the very man for the job. He was distantly related to the ruling family and was an honest man.

Abdalonymus was drawing water from a well or doing some weeding when the two young men, in armor, came unannounced into the garden where he was working, carrying the royal robe and insignia. They hailed him as king. He was sure he must be dreaming and asked the visitors not to mock him. They eventually persuaded him of their good faith, got him washed, threw away his rags, and dressed him in purple and gold.

The city’s upper class strongly objected to the appointment on the grounds of Abdalonymus’s poverty and obscurity, so Alexander called him in for an interview. He asked him: “How well were you able to endure poverty?” to which Abdalonymus replied: “I only hope I will be able to put up with power as contentedly. I had nothing, and I lacked nothing.” Alexander was impressed by the man’s sangfroid and confirmed the nomination.

His reign seems to have been successful, if only in the sense that it lasted long enough for a son to follow him on the throne. But nothing is known of his activities during Alexander’s lifetime, saving a gift of perfume made from henna, a specialty of Sidon, and some lilies that he sent to Alexander.

—

THE CAPITULATION OF SIDON was a necessary precursor of the main event, the siege of the great mercantile seaport of Tyre farther down the Phoenician coast (in today’s Lebanon).

The city stood proud and unconquerable (its inhabitants were certain of this) half a mile from shore. It was built on a rocky island with a circumference of two and three quarter miles and was surrounded by a towering wall, 150 feet high on its landward side. Space within these fortifications was limited, and multistory houses were crowded together to provide homes for some forty thousand souls.

Tyre was the richest and most powerful of the many Phoenician settlements along the Syrian littoral. It had two fine harbors, the Sidonian in the north and the Egyptian in the south. Across the water on the mainland, Old Tyre was the city’s original site although now a suburb of the island. Herodotus paid a visit in the mid-fifth century B.C. and was told Tyre had been founded more than two millennia previously.

The historian was much impressed by the temple of Melqart, the city’s tutelary god, whom the Greeks equated with Heracles. He reported: “I visited the temple and found that the offerings which adorned it were numerous and valuable, not the least remarkable being two pillars, one of pure gold, the other of emerald which gleamed in the dark with a strange luminosity.”

For centuries Tyre had made its living, and a very prosperous one, from trade, and its ships did business across the Mediterranean. As long ago as the seventh century B.C., the Jewish prophet Ezekiel had Jehovah pronounce:

You say, Tyre, “I am perfect in beauty.”

Your domain was on the high seas;

your builders brought your beauty to perfection.

They made all your timbers of juniper from Senir;

they took a cedar from Lebanon to make a mast for you.

Of oaks from Bashan they made your oars;

of cypress wood from the coasts of Cyprus

they made your deck, adorned with ivory.

Fine embroidered linen from Egypt was your sail

and served as your banner;

your awnings were of blue and purple

from the coasts of Elishah.

Tyrians’ income in kind included copper, lead, and other metals, ivory tusks and ebony, perfumes, oil, and precious stones. They were famous for the production of a purple or dark red dye, especially prized for the fastness of its color. The dye was extracted from sea snails of the family Muricidae. It was difficult to manufacture, in great demand and very expensive. Phoenicia, the semitic region of which Tyre was a leading member, was so named after the Greek word for dark red, phoinos.

A shadow fell across Tyre’s uninterrupted prosperity. According to Ezekiel, Jehovah would not forgive the city for its hostility to his chosen people and predicted its destruction:

Your end will be sudden and terrible,

and you will cease to exist for all time.

But ages passed without catastrophe and the city’s future remained as bright as ever.

The verdict of Issus and the surrender of Phoenician cities such as Sidon captured the attention of the Tyrians, but they did not expect serious trouble even when in January 332 the Macedonian army marched down from Sidon twenty miles away and encamped on the mainland opposite the island city.

At heart the Tyrian authorities, including the crown prince (in the absence of their king, Azemilcus, in service with the Persian fleet), were loyal to the Persian empire and, faced by the force majeure of a victorious Macedonian army, preferred alliance to capitulation. They did not want to let foreign troops into their city. Already on cordial terms with Alexander, they had supplied provisions to the Macedonian army, but they knew they had to tread carefully. They sent envoys across the channel and presented the king with a golden crown, offering to obey any orders he might give.

The king thanked them warmly, but seems to have sensed that something was being withheld. He asked the envoys to tell their government that he intended to “pay his dues to Heracles,” or in plain terms sacrifice to Melqart, at his sanctuary on the island. In other words, he was going to enter the city. This was closer to surrender than entente.

When the embassy returned, the message had slightly changed. The Tyrians would obey any orders Alexander might give, except to allow either Persians or Macedonians to enter their city. In an attempt to sweeten the pill, they added that there was a temple of Melqart in Old Tyre, where he would be more than welcome to sacrifice.

Unlike Sidon, Tyre had opted for apparent neutrality. Alexander lost his temper and dismissed the embassy with the bleak promise: “I will either enter your city, or storm it.” The envoys were shaken by Alexander’s performance and once back home they advised their fellow citizens that it might be wise to let him in after all. However, the Tyrians were certain that, thanks to its fortifications, their island fastness was impregnable. Besides, the Persian navy ruled the waves. Their colony, the powerful north African merchant city of Carthage, promised practical aid. Alexander’s threats were empty.

According to Diodorus, they cheerfully agreed to undergo a siege:

Because they were doing Darius a good turn, they were confirming their loyalty to him. They thought they would get great rewards from the king for this favor, which involved drawing Alexander into a protracted and difficult siege. In that way they would give Darius a breathing space for his preparations.

But Alexander determined to destroy Tyre and nothing would hold him back. His first step was that of a typical Macedonian monarch; he took counsel of his army. He summoned his Companions and army leaders and explained his case for capturing Tyre. He was aware this would not be a popular decision, for sieges tended to be bloody affairs.

He said that it would be unsafe to proceed to Egypt, their next stop, with a hostile or at least ambivalent Tyre in the rear. The Persians still held Cyprus and with their fleet, mostly consisting of Phoenician galleys, they could very well win back the Mediterranean seaboard and stir up an already restless Greece, as Memnon had once planned. On the other hand, with Tyre taken most of Phoenicia would fall under Macedonian control. There was then every likelihood that their navies would defect and join Alexander’s fleet. The Great King would lose Cyprus and his supremacy at sea would be at an end.

Alexander concluded:

When we have conquered Egypt, we shall have no further worries for Greece or our own country, and we can then make our move on Babylon with security ensured at home, our reputation enhanced, and the Persians cut off from the entire sea and all the land this side of the Euphrates.

To make assurance doubly sure, the king announced that in a dream Heracles had ushered him into Tyre. The ever reliable Aristander was on hand to offer the correct interpretation, namely that Tyre would fall (not too difficult a deduction). The gathering applauded and work began at once on the siege.

—

THE CHALLENGE FACING THE Macedonians appeared insurmountable and Alexander knew he would have to deploy every resource at his disposal. The engineer Diades, together with his fellow Thessalian Charias, headed his siege team. More artillery specialists were recruited from Phoenicia and beyond.

Their task was simply expressed. Using a battering ram and catapults, they had to break down a section of wall through which troops could then launch an assault. Tall wheeled towers would be pushed up against the wall. Once inside Tyre, the besiegers would face fierce opposition, but the defenders would almost certainly be disorganized and panic-stricken, and resistance would soon be over. Alternatively, if Alexander was not in a hurry, he could set up a blockade and starve the defenders to death. That could take months and was a less desirable option.

But how would it be possible to accomplish any of these things when the city in question was inaccessible, heavily fortified, and encircled by the sea? Furthermore, it had its own warships and could call on the Persian navy for assistance. The newly recommissioned Macedonian fleet was not yet battle ready, except for twenty Athenian triremes.

For the king, this was simply another Gordian knot through which to slice. Dash and determination would find a way. The siege was opened in January 332. The first hugely ambitious step was to build a mole or causeway, reportedly two hundred feet wide at its maximum, from shore to island. The army was put to work, aided by local people. In the beginning the going was easy, for the first part of the channel consisted mainly of shallow pools and mudflats. Nearer the island, though, the water deepened to three fathoms.

Old Tyre was demolished to provide the large quantities of stones and wood needed. Stakes were driven into the mud to hold the rubble in place, and planks were laid on top. Little by little the causeway lengthened. Then the Tyrians disrupted proceedings. Their ships sailed up to the mole and shot missiles at the unarmored workers. They jeered at these “famous fighters loaded down like donkeys.” Construction came to a halt until two towers, covered in animal hides to resist burning arrows, were pushed to the end of the mole.

The Tyrians now began to take the siege seriously. To reduce the number of mouths to feed, the women, children, and men too old to fight were evacuated to Carthage and the Tyrians requested military reinforcement from their colony. They were daring and imaginative in their response to the inexorably lengthening causeway. They converted a broad-beamed horse transport into a fireship. They stuffed it full of dry branches, wood shavings, pitch, and sulfur. They rigged a double yardarm from which they suspended buckets of some flammable substance (probably naphtha), and then set them alight. Triremes pulled the boat toward the mole and at just the right moment the crews lit the yardarms. These burned through and the buckets fell onto the fuel-packed fireship. The triremes then released the fireship and flames shot high into the air just when it plowed into the towers. To prevent firefighters from approaching, the men in the triremes maintained a barrage of arrows at the towers, which soon blazed out of control.

This was a major setback for Alexander. He gave orders for the mole to be widened and for new towers to be built, but he realized that he would never take the city without command of the sea. Taking with him the hypaspists and the Agrianians, he marched to Sidon to pick up some warships there and bring them back. He then had a marvelous stroke of luck—or, rather, his policy of marching through Phoenicia collecting capitulations paid off almost immediately.

Phoenician contingents made up the better part of the Persian fleet. As their various cities surrendered to Alexander, these felt obliged to sail home and abandon the Great King’s cause. Unexpectedly, eighty Phoenician ships put in at Sidon and agreed to sail under the Macedonian flag. Then ten triremes arrived from Rhodes, three from Cilicia, ten from Lycia, and, as a small bonus, a penteconter (a fifty-oarsman galley) from Macedonia. Not long afterward, 120 ships came in from Cyprus, whose kings had collectively decided that it was time to join the winning side.

All of a sudden, Alexander controlled the eastern Mediterranean.

—

WHILE PREPARATIONS WENT AHEAD to sail his warships in battle array southward to Tyre, the king amused himself by leading a small force on a ten-day campaign against Arab tribes in the Lebanese mountains. His aim was probably to protect his supply lines. This was essential if he was to continue feeding his army in front of Tyre as days became weeks and months, and the city still stood. Water was abundant, but most provisions were either requisitioned locally or had to be ferried in by sea.

Here was an opportunity for Alexander to behave with the utmost irresponsibility. His onetime tutor Lysimachus insisted on accompanying him on the march, but he was old and fell behind the main body. Alexander and a few others loyally stayed with him. The sun was setting and it became bitterly cold. With nightfall, the king saw in the distance some scattered watch fires. According to Plutarch,

trusting to his speed and agility, he dashed to the nearest campfire, dispatched with his dagger the two barbarians who were sitting by it and, snatching a firebrand, ran back to his own party. They quickly built up a huge fire which scared some of the enemy into flight, while those who dared to attack were quickly driven off and the Macedonians spent the rest of the night in safety.

Circumstances had allowed the king to act out something very like an episode in the Iliad. This was the occasion when the brave warrior Diomedes and the wily Odysseus crept by night into the Trojan encampment, slaughtered sleeping soldiers, and made their way back to safety. Diomedes, Homer recounts,

laid about him with his sword and killed them right and left.

Hideous groans came up from the dying men

and the earth ran red with blood.

This otherwise pointless incident in the Lebanese mountains was a reminder that Alexander lived in the age of heroes as much as he did in the present. It hardly occurred to him that he had been reckless. In the flickering darkness, he was Diomedes reborn.

—

THE KING RETURNED TO SIDON, where his grand fleet was now prepared for action. With himself in command, it set out in battle formation on the short journey south to the island city. The Tyrians had intended to offer battle, but knew nothing of the recent reinforcements and were astounded when they saw the number of warships approaching. They went about and retreated to their two harbors. To prevent the Macedonians from finding anchorage in them, they blocked the entrances, using warships lashed together sideways. The following morning Alexander ordered the Phoenicians to set up a permanent blockade of the Egyptian harbor, and the Cypriots to blockade the Sidonian. This meant that at last the enemy navy was out of action.

During the king’s absence a large number of siege engines had been built. Some of them were mounted on ships and others pushed to the end of the mole, which was creeping nearer and nearer to the high walls of Tyre. Floating battering rams were a remarkable technical innovation. They probably rested on platforms supported by two vessels and, provided that they were anchored firmly, could do a great deal of damage.

For their part, the ever ingenious Tyrians came up with trick after trick. Among the torments they devised were metal containers filled with red-hot sand, which they poured onto agonized attackers below. They built towers on the battlement facing the mole, which overshadowed Alexander’s, and hastily put up an inner wall in case the main one was breached. They also placed catapults on the battlement, which released showers of fire arrows at the floating rams. To blunt the force of flying stones, they hung over the wall hides stitched together and stuffed with dried seaweed. They dropped large rocks into the water at the foot of the wall to deter ships from coming near. The Macedonians then had the awkward task of moving the rocks into deeper water with ropes and cranes.

The siege reached a hyperactive stalemate. Both sides could see that something radical had to be done to break it. But what? The defenders’ answer was to send in some vessels, armored against missiles, to cut the anchor hawsers of the Macedonian ram ships. When these were driven off, they were replaced by divers with knives. The problem was solved only when the hawsers were replaced with chains. At last, despite the temporary inconvenience of a violent storm, it proved possible to get alongside the wall.

The Tyrians recognized the threat posed by the maritime blockade and attempted a desperate remedy. They noticed that the ships’ crews went ashore every day for lunch and that Alexander usually took a nap at the same time. They decided that this would be the ideal moment for a surprise sortie. Sails were erected across the entrance to the Sidonian harbor to hide the preparations and then, at about noon one day, ten of the Tyrians’ most powerful ships, with picked crews and their best armed marines, sailed out and fell on the temporarily empty Cypriot ships.

Luckily Alexander had forgone his siesta and was visiting the Phoenician fleet in the Egyptian harbor when he received news of the breakout. He immediately assembled a squadron of the quickest galleys to be crewed and rowed at full speed around the island. The Tyrians on the battlements saw what was afoot and shouted warnings to the men on their own ships. These were inaudible because of the din of the engagement, but eventually the men got the message and turned tail. A few of them reached their harbor in time, but most were caught and put out of action, sunk or captured. It was the Tyrian navy’s last gasp; from now on, the Macedonian fleet could sail wherever it wanted without hindrance.

About this time, the mole reached the city wall, but despite the blood and toil that had gone into its making, it did not bring the end of the siege any closer. The Tyrians put all their energy into defending the fraction of the wall where it met the mole. Alexander belatedly realized this and, now that the enemy was excluded from the sea, sailed round the island looking for any weakness in the fortifications. He brought his battering-ram platforms to the battlement near the Sidonian harbor, but without success.

He then settled on a stretch of weak-looking wall immediately south of the Egyptian harbor. His battering rams soon shook it loose and partly broke it down. A drawbridge or ramp was laid across the breach and a tentative assault launched. This failed, but the king knew he had found a weak spot.

A couple of days later Alexander ordered a major attack by detachments of hypaspists, led by an officer called Admetus, and of infantry Companions. The breach had been widened and two ramps were laid down. Alexander joined the hypaspists and was in the middle of the mêlée (how could it have been otherwise?). Admetus was first to clamber through the ruined fortification, but a spear hit him and he died where he stood.

Meanwhile the fleet encircled the island, equipped with archers and missile-throwers. Squadrons attacked the two harbors and broke through into them. Arrian writes: “Under fire from all directions the Tyrians were confronted with danger wherever they turned.”

Alexander and the infantry captured several towers and the curtain wall between them. They moved on along the battlements toward the royal palace, an area that offered an easy route to the city center. The main body of the defenders abandoned the wall and regrouped for a last stand at the Shrine of Agenor, a legendary king of Tyre who was credited with introducing the Phoenician alphabet. They saw that the city and its harbors were lost and sold their lives as dearly as they could. According to Arrian,

the Macedonians stopped at nothing in their fury. They were enraged by the wearisome length of the siege, and by the behavior of the Tyrians when they had captured some of their men sailing in from Sidon. They had paraded them on the wall in full view of the camp, then cut their throats and thrown them into the sea.

The slaughter was terrible, although from compassion for their fellow Phoenicians, Sidonian sailors saved many defenders and hid them away in their ships. Some eight thousand Tyrians died, whereas over the whole siege Macedonian losses were about four hundred.

A number of dignitaries sought refuge in the temple of Melqart, including the Tyrian king, Azemilcus, and other government officials together with a delegation from Carthage, which in the event had done nothing at all to help its founder. They were all pardoned, but other survivors were not so lucky. Two thousand men of military age were crucified. A total of about thirty thousand Tyrians and other foreigners found in the city were sold into slavery.

At last Alexander was able to make the sacrifice to the god for which he had sought permission seven months earlier. As was his custom at the end of a campaign, the king held a celebration. He staged a parade of his entire army in honor of Melqart and also a naval review. Athletic competitions were held and a torch race in the temple precincts.

As in the case of Thebes, the complete destruction of a renowned city whose merchants were a familiar sight across the Mediterranean made an indelible impression on public opinion. The world learned that it was wisest to cooperate with the young Macedonian conqueror.

What Ezekiel foretold had now come to pass in all its terrible finality.

Nobody could be bothered to dismantle the mole; as the centuries passed, it silted up and slowly became a permanent isthmus. Tyre was repopulated and, whatever Hebrew prophets may say, thrives again today. But beneath the impedimenta of the modern city, its streets and buildings, lies the stone causeway, an unforgotten but unseen reminder of the wrath of Alexander.

—

A COUPLE OF MONTHS after the fall of Tyre, the king’s life hung in the balance again. He was hit by a catapult bolt, which went straight through his shield and breastplate into his shoulder. This characteristic incident took place during the siege of Gaza, the last of the Phoenician cities before the wide desert that separated Egypt from Asia like a cordon sanitaire.

The royal physician, Philip, extracted the missile. Apparently, Alexander’s cuirass had prevented those around him from seeing how deep the wound was, and when blood began to gush out, they became seriously alarmed.

Alexander himself did not even lose color. He had the bleeding stanched and the wound bandaged. According to Curtius,

for a long time he remained on his feet before the standards, either concealing or mastering his pain, until the blood which had shortly before been suppressed by the application of a dressing began to flow more copiously and the wound, painless while still warm, swelled up as the blood cooled. He began to faint, his knees buckled, and the men next to him caught him and took him back to camp.

Gaza’s commander, Batis, a corpulent black eunuch, was loyal to the Great King and, despite the grim news from Tyre, was determined to resist the triumphant Macedonians.

Gaza was a wealthy and well-fortified stronghold, an entrepôt for the spice trade, which occupied a high plateau, or tell, two miles inland. It had only a small garrison, but to the besieger, it presented two insuperable difficulties and one excellent opportunity. The tell was 250 feet high and siege engines could not reach the walls themselves. The ground was relatively sandy and soft and it was almost impossible to move wheeled traffic over it. But on the credit side, sappers would easily be able to tunnel under the town’s defenses and take away the subsoil; the wall above would then fall in.

It was going to be the most testing of sieges, even harder perhaps than Tyre, but this only made Alexander the more determined. Hephaestion arrived with the fleet and transport vessels carrying the siege engines used at Tyre; he was also in charge of the commissariat and was responsible for procuring and supplying the large quantities of water and grain needed by the Macedonians outside Gaza (and later for the journey to Egypt).

The king ordered tunnels to be dug out of view into the tell and, as a diversion, arranged for some mobile towers to be moved toward a section of wall (presumably near a city gate where there was a road or ramp leading up to it).

The towers got stuck in the sand, and the Arabs inside Gaza sallied out to set them alight. The king led the hypaspists to the rescue; it was at this point that he received his wound. While he presided at a sacrifice earlier in the day, a carrion bird dropped a clod of earth, which fell on his head and broke up, or so the sources say. According to the seer Aristander, this omen meant that the city would fall, but also that the king risked serious harm. He was warned not to fight that day, and despite his annoyance he did stay in the rear for a while. But the temptation to lead the counterattack was too strong.

The wound did not heal easily, but Alexander continued to manage operations. He had the town surrounded with an earth mound or ramp. The siege engines were moved up the ramp and started battering the wall. A section of the wall crumbled, and the sappers’ tunnels caused a more general collapse.

Ladders were laid over the rubble and three attacks were launched, without success. In the fourth assault the king surrounded Gaza with his heavy-armed infantry. The Macedonians pressed forward and opened every gate they found.

Alexander’s shoulder was still very painful, for a scab had not yet formed on the wound. However, he insisted on joining the fighting. He was struck on the leg by a rock and had to support himself with his spear, but he stayed in the front line.

Gaza fell. The defenders, some ten thousand of them, fought to the bitter end. The city’s women and children were sold into slavery. Batis struggled on bravely and was taken alive. Alexander, presumably unhinged by pain, restaged another incident in the Iliad. This was when the furious Achilles kills Hector, the great Trojan warrior; he ties the corpse to his chariot and drags it back to the Greek camp. Batis suffered a similar fate, with the significant difference that he was still alive. His ankles were slit and attached by thongs to a chariot, which drove around the ruined walls of Gaza until the eunuch was dead.

Many spices were found in Gaza’s warehouses, including five hundred talents of frankincense and one hundred of myrrh. This was the occasion when the king dumped a huge consignment of spices on his old tutor Leonidas with a tart covering note that he no longer needed to be stingy with them.

—

OCTOBER WAS A BAD month to cross the 130 miles of desert from Gaza to Pelusium, a border fortress and the gateway to Egypt. The annual rains did not start until November and the water from wells, which were few and far between, was often too brackish to drink and anyway at this time of year were probably dry. Nevertheless, Alexander was too impatient to wait and he set off with his entire army for Egypt.

His “entire army” was not what it once was, for he was acquiring so much new territory, which everywhere required garrisons, that its numbers were falling. He sent off Amyntas, son of Andromenes and a trusted friend of Parmenion’s son Philotas, with ten ships to Macedonia, with orders to enlist young men who were fit for military service.

Alexander and his men marched from Gaza to Pelusium along the seacoast, which was covered entirely with sand dunes. They had to keep to the wet shoreline, for otherwise the horses and wagons would have sunk into the sand. Food depots had been set up along the coast, and the fleet sailed alongside the army and ferried water to the thirsty troops. All went well and the Macedonians reached the border fortress without incident. In order to save on supplies, they had covered 137 miles in one week, or nearly twenty miles a day, a speedy rate.

Alexander was received with delight and open arms. Huge crowds were waiting at Pelusium to welcome him to the land of the pharaohs. In fact, everyone knew that he was set to become the next pharaoh.

The Egyptians had smarted for centuries under the Great King’s yoke. Every so often they drove the Persians out, sometimes for years, but the insurrections were always suppressed. The eldest son of the last rebel pharaoh, Nakhthorheb (known to the Greeks as Nectanebo), fought on Darius’s side at the Battle of Issus. His fate is unknown, but another Egyptian collaborator unpronounceably called Sematawytefnakht fled the battlefield. Shocked by the debacle, he abandoned the Persian cause and made his way home as quickly as he was able.

It may seem odd that Alexander was not regarded as just another foreign invader greedy for the country’s wealth, but anyone who showed signs of destroying the Persian empire, as he did, was bound to be popular. Perhaps the Egyptians were persuaded by Alexander’s self-promotion as a true liberator.

The king took ship to the great political and religious center of Memphis, at the base of the Nile Delta, where he met the governing elite, priests who were also administrators. The city’s mud-brick walls were painted white, and to the approaching visitor it must have appeared as a blinding mirage, a shining city. Persian officials had not awaited the king’s arrival and had made themselves scarce, except for the acting governor (the satrap himself had fallen at Issus). He stayed at his post and handed over all the gold he had, more than eight hundred talents, and, curiously, all the royal furniture. He was rewarded with a job in the new administration.

—

EGYPT HAD MANY GODS, but Ptah was among the greatest. He was the divine craftsman, the demiurge who preceded everything in the universe. In fact, it was he who brought the universe and its deities into being by the sheer exercise of thought. He took many forms; sometimes he was shown as a naked and deformed dwarf (the Greeks equated him with Hephaestus, the divine but lame blacksmith), but usually he appeared as a man with green skin, wearing a tight-fitting shroud.

At Memphis Ptah was embodied in a sacred bull, the Apis. The bull lived in state in a temple and was allotted a harem of cows. He was worshipped as an aspect of Ptah and when he died he was immortalized collectively as the Osiris Apis. A bull calf was chosen to succeed him, which had various precisely defined markings. His mother was impregnated by a flash of lightning from the heavens. She too lived a life of luxury. A lucky cow.

Alexander took care to sacrifice to the Apis, knowing better than to tamper with other people’s beliefs. He may also have paid his respects at the funerary temple at Saqqara, where the dead, mummified bulls were laid to rest. The comparison with Artaxerxes Ochus, who on his invasion of Egypt a decade earlier had slaughtered the divine bull of the day, as had the Great King Cambyses in the sixth century B.C., was seen as doing him great credit.

While in Memphis, Alexander was officially recognized as pharaoh, the priest-king whose spiritual duties matched his political authority. However, he did not have time to stay in the country for the year-long round of ceremonies that the new ruler traditionally observed.

A pharaoh was recognized, in a symbolic sense, as son of Amun, chief deity in the Egyptian theogony. He had five official names or titles. Those of Alexander in hieroglyphic inscriptions reflected his military success against the Persians and announced his duty as guardian of Egypt. His throne name was Setep en Ra, mery Amun (“Chosen by Ra and beloved of Amun”). His title in his capacity as the incarnation of the falcon-headed god Horus, Egypt’s tutelary deity, was “The Brave Ruler Who Has Attacked Foreign Lands.” Other titles were “The Lion, Great of Might, Who Takes Possession of Mountains, Lands, and Deserts” and “The Bull Who Protects Egypt, The Ruler of the Sea and of What the Sun Encircles.” His birth name was given as Aleksindres.

Splendid religious rituals marked the accession to power; once they were completed, Alexander decided it was time for Hellenic culture to receive its due share of attention. The new pharaoh staged games for his troops both in athletics and in the arts of drama, music, and dance. These celebrations must have been planned well in advance, for leading practitioners in the Greek world, the stars of the day, traveled to Egypt to take part.

Perhaps we have here an early hint of the principle that underlay Alexander’s politics—namely, equal respect for different cultures. He disagreed with Aristotle, who advised him, according to Plutarch,

to treat the Greeks as if he were their leader, and other peoples as if he were their master; to have regard for the Greeks as for friends and relatives, but to conduct himself toward other peoples as though they were plants or animals; for to do so [i.e., to do as Aristotle advised] would have been to cumber his leadership with numerous battles and banishments and festering seditions.

There was a practical consideration in the king’s thinking; if he was to govern Asia he would need the services and the consent of the local inhabitants. There were not enough Macedonians to go round. However, he seems to have rejected from conviction the racism ingrained in most Greeks, and indeed his Macedonian subjects, and made sensitive appointments on grounds of merit rather than ethnicity.

This was one of the key assumptions that underlay his administrative arrangements for Egypt; the other two being “divide and rule” and noninterference in the lives of ordinary citizens. He appointed two Egyptians, presumably on advice from the priestly bureaucracy, to share the country between them according to an immemorial division, one for the governance of the Upper and the other of the Lower Kingdom.

Military matters were separated from the civilian government. Two Macedonian Companions were to be garrison commanders, and the leadership of a regiment of Greek mercenaries was shared between a Greek general and a Macedonian Companion. The eastern and western frontier districts were to be overseen by a couple of Greeks, one of whom was to be responsible for the finances of the entire province. This was the extremely able but extremely corrupt Cleomenes, from the port of Naucratis on the Nile Delta. We are not told, but he and the military commanders presumably reported directly to their Macedonian pharaoh.

For the individual Egyptian, nothing changed. District officials collected taxes as usual, but delivered the proceeds to Cleomenes rather than to a Persian satrap, and went on managing local affairs.

These dispositions were primarily designed to ensure that nobody had enough power to threaten his, Alexander’s, control over this vastly wealthy province. At the outset they worked well enough, but, as we shall observe, in time the king’s best-laid plans were subverted and he had to step in and retrieve the situation.

At about this time, good news arrived by ship about the naval situation in the Aegean. After Issus, Pharnabazus, whom Darius had appointed as admiral after Memnon’s unexpected death, had failed to prevent the Greek islands of Tenedos, Chios, and Cos from breaking with Persia and had been captured. He managed to escape, but the days of the Great King’s dominance of the seas were over for good.

Formal business being completed, Alexander sailed downriver, taking the western or Canopic tributary. He was accompanied by a small infantry detachment and the Royal Squadron of cavalry. At this time he was saddened by a personal tragedy. Parmenion had three sons, two of whom, Philotas and Nicanor, were senior commanders in the army. The youngest, Hector, was in his late teens and was particularly close to the king. Curtius writes that, during the voyage, he

wanted to catch up with [Alexander], and boarded a small vessel along with a complement of men exceeding the boat’s capacity. The boat sank, leaving all those aboard in the water. Hector fought against the current for a long time. Although his sodden clothes and tight-fitting shoes made swimming difficult, he still managed to reach the bank in a half-dead condition.

However, there was no one there to help him, for his companions had swum to the other bank, and he died. He was given a splendid funeral.

The army reached Naucratis, through which Egyptian grain, linen, and papyrus were exported and silver, timber, olive oil, and wine were imported. The fall of Tyre and Gaza had given the city a once-in-a-lifetime commercial opportunity. However, Alexander was not greatly impressed by the place and, as luck had it, when sailing around the huge and shallow saltwater lake Mareotis he stumbled on the perfect harbor.

This was a long limestone ridge or spur of land. To the south behind it was the lagoon, and on the Mediterranean side lay the island of Pharos. Ridge and island were separated by a stretch of deep water, where ships could moor in safety. The place had a temperate climate with mild winds, fresh water, limestone quarries, and easy access to the Nile. There was no unbearable heat, no malarial marshes.

Here Alexander chose to build a new city in his name: Alexandria. He was reassured in his decision by the endorsement of Homer. In the Odyssey, the bard has Menelaus, the cuckolded king of Sparta, whose wife Helen’s elopement caused so much misery, sail home from Troy. He was blown off course to Egypt and found himself at “an island in the rolling seas off Egypt and men call it Pharos….It has a harbor with good anchorage, where men can draw fresh water and launch their ships on an even keel into the deep sea.” A good anchorage was just what Alexander had been looking for, but at the moment he had another more personal project in mind.

—

WHILE IN EGYPT, ALEXANDER suffered a mental crisis. We do not know enough of his psychological interior to know exactly what it was, but its external impact was visible.

As we have seen, he was a religious man and a punctilious observer of sacrifices and ceremonies. He paid attention to oracles, and Aristander was always on hand to advise on the will of the gods. His spiritual life was egocentric; his chief concern was with his place in the spiritual cosmos. As we have seen, he believed that the Argeads, Macedonia’s royal family, could be traced back to Heracles, hero and demigod, a son of Zeus. Heracles was the only human being to have been granted immortality. Perseus, too, slayer of the Gorgon Medusa whose gaze turned onlookers to stone, was among Alexander’s forebears. And Olympias belonged to the Molossian ruling dynasty, which claimed descent from Neoptolemus, son of Achilles.

Surely, he mused, his achievements were as awe-inspiring as those of his glorious ancestors. They merited recognition on Olympus, and reward. As pharaoh he was named the son of Amun, or in its Greek spelling, Ammon. Chief of the gods, Amun was the local incarnation of Zeus. Could Alexander conclude that he was literally the son of Zeus? If so, what about Philip? Did he really have nothing to do with his son’s birth?

These questions were difficult to answer. We have seen that Alexander’s relations with Philip had been stormy and with his mother very close and loving. A late literary source reports that Philip publicly doubted Alexander’s paternity and that Olympias claimed that “she had conceived Alexander, not by him, but by a serpent of extraordinary size.” We do not need to believe these stories to sense domestic unhappiness. They were probably later inventions, but if they did originate in gossip from the early years of Philip and Olympias’s marriage, they pointed to adultery. One can imagine the queen dropping dark hints to her little boy. At least one might infer that he sensed discord, sided with his mother, and saw Philip as a hostile stranger.

It is uncertain whether or not Alexander, with or without Olympias, had plotted Philip’s assassination. If he had, parricide was the most terrible of crimes, on which the gods could be depended to visit their wrath; Alexander would have thought of Oedipus, the legendary king of Thebes, who murdered his father (as well as marrying his mother) and ended up as a blind outcast.

Had Alexander by some chance learned of a conspiracy against Philip he had taken no part in, but failed to report? If so, he might have to shoulder a share of blame and seek purification, or perhaps the gods would not require that of him. It would be worth eliciting a divine ruling on the guiltiness of guilty knowledge.

Another worrying possibility was that his mother played a part in her husband’s death without informing her son.

The king felt “an overwhelming desire” (pothos, again) to consult one of the most famous oracles of the ancient world, the temple of Zeus-Ammon. This would entail a risky journey from the Libyan coast across 160 miles of desert to the oasis of Siwah, where the oracle was situated. The place had a special significance for him because, according to legend, two of his ancestors, Heracles and Perseus, had paid it a visit.

He intended to raise the fundamental issues that were exercising his mind.

—

ALEXANDER AND HIS MILITARY escort left Lake Mareotis on a day in March 331. He went west along the coast, and near the little port of Paraetonium he turned south into the unknown. Camels were hired to carry supplies (the first time the Macedonians are reported to have used them). After two days progress was slowed by deep sand dunes. A severe windstorm blew up, common in Egypt at this time of year and caused by the differential heating of the Libyan desert and the rest of the Middle East during spring. The wind gusted to gale force, the temperature rose sharply, and the humidity fell. Worst of all, a sandstorm blasted its way across the desert and obliterated landmarks. After four days, the water ran out and the guides lost their way. If something did not turn up, the little expedition’s survival was at stake.

The Fates were generous. A sudden downpour allayed the men’s thirst, and two crows were seen flying ahead of the party. On the assumption, correct as it proved, that they were making for the oasis, Alexander followed their lead, and Siwah came thankfully into sight. Even today, it is reported, the flight of two crows is regarded by residents of the oasis as a good omen.

Six miles long by four to five miles wide, Siwah lies below sea level. It has about 200 springs, including a hot water fountain the temperature of which varies. Date palms and olives abound. Rock salt deposits were farmed (they still are) and exported to Egypt. On a rise stood the temple of Zeus-Ammon.

Ammon was usually represented as a male figure with ram’s horns, but at Siwah the cult image was a navel- or omphalos-shaped stone studded with emeralds and other precious stones. When the oracle was consulted, eighty priests carried it in a gilded boat with silver cups hanging from it. It seemed to move involuntarily where it willed. Women followed behind and chanted hymns. A priest interpreted the boat’s movements in answer to questions put to the oracle.

After his arrival, Alexander walked up a path to the shrine and entered the first of two halls. He was welcomed by an elderly priest and seer, who said: “Rejoice, my son.” Pharaohs were used to being called the Son of Amun and the priest must simply have been addressing him with formulaic politeness. He said as much, noting that “Ammon [that is, Zeus] is by nature the father of us all.” However, the king took the greeting as a direct message from the god, which confirmed his suspicion that he was indeed the son of Zeus. He was then led through the second hall and into a small sanctuary.

The priest listened to the king’s questions (or read them if they had been submitted in advance in writing). Presumably he left the sanctuary to watch the divine boat sway about for a while and returned with his interpretations. The matter of paternity now being settled, Alexander asked whether he was fated to rule the world. The flattering priest answered that the god agreed to his request.

The second question was a thunderbolt. “Have all my father’s murderers been punished?” The priest corrected him: if Ammon was his father, he was a god and obviously could not be murdered or die. However, he confirmed that all Philip’s murderers had paid for their crime.

It was a most surprising issue to raise: perhaps Alexander worried that there had been a wider conspiracy which remained to be uncovered. But surely this was old business, long since dealt with. It would cast a painful light, though, on his conscience if he had been implicated in some peripheral way in the murder or, indeed, if Olympias had been secretly involved.

What was said was said in private. Arrian is one of those who kept the king’s confidence and offered no comment. He writes with unexpected brevity: “Once there [in Siwah], Alexander toured the site with keen interest, and put his questions to the god. Having heard all the answers he had hoped for, he set out back to Egypt.” Other ancient sources publish the contents of the conversation. Are we to believe that these accounts were invented? Maybe. The oddity of the king’s question about Philip, though, lends them credibility. The king could have spoken indiscreetly in later years, or the people at Siwah allowed themselves to gossip.

Whether or not the contents of Alexander’s private conversation with the priest at Siwah were widely known, many senior Macedonians, whose careers were nourished and flourished in Philip’s day, were upset by his son’s apparent rejection of his earthly paternity when he accepted Ammon as his divine father. It is reported that Parmenion’s son Philotas wrote to the king, advising him that it would be more dignified to keep quiet about the matter than to publicize it. One leading Macedonian lamented: “We have lost Alexander, we have lost our king!”

These first signs of discontent led nowhere at the time, for the thrill of successive victories reinforced loyalty and enthusiasm.

—

ALEXANDER STOOD ON THE long ridge and surveyed the scene. Having marched back without incident from Siwah the way he came, he found himself again at Lake Mareotis. He was surrounded by officials, among them the celebrated town planner Deinocrates and Alexander’s Egyptian treasurer, Cleomenes of Naucratis, who was to be in overall charge of the development. On one side lay the lagoon and on the other, separated by a stretch of sea, the island of Pharos.

The king’s mind was focused on the design of his new city. He wanted a Hellenic look with a grid pattern of streets. According to Arrian,

he was seized with a passion for this project, and took personal charge of mapping his city on the ground—where its central square was to be built, how many temples there should be and to which gods (some Greek, but also the Egyptian Isis), where the surrounding wall should run. He made sacrifice in hope of sanction for these plans, and the omens proved favorable.

He also made provision for a large and splendid palace, from which it may be inferred that Alexandria was to be Egypt’s administrative capital.

Alexander must have proposed a causeway connecting the ridge to the island of Pharos (it was not constructed till the following century). This would create two harbors, one for commercial shipping and the other for the fleet. When tracing the course of the circuit wall, Alexander followed Macedonian tradition by using ground pearl barley. When flocks of birds flew down to eat it up, Aristander and other seers prophesied (uncontroversially, for Egypt was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean) that the city would prosper “especially from produce of the earth.”

The area within the walls was very large, for Alexander had in mind a megalopolis; indeed, for a century or two Alexandria became the largest city in the world, until Rome overshot it. People from neighboring towns and villages were drafted in, and incomers, mostly Greeks, were recruited from around the eastern Mediterranean world. A democratic constitution was planned, with an assembly, a council, and a board of elected officials, which would be responsible for local administration.

The king officially founded his new, as yet only imagined city on April 7, 331 B.C., and then immediately left what turned out to be his most lasting monument. He did not visit Egypt again and never saw his Alexandria complete. Much of the building work was done after his death, including its most famous edifice, the massive lighthouse of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

—

ABOUT A YEAR HAD passed since the fall of Tyre. Despite two bitterly fought sieges, Alexander’s strategy had succeeded. He now controlled the entire coastline of Asia Minor and North Africa from the Hellespont to Libya. As expected, Persian seapower had collapsed. Following a short return visit to Memphis, the king rejoined his army, cheerful after wintering in the Nile Valley. It was now time to march eastward into the Persian homeland and do battle with the new host that Darius had been assembling since Issus.

But what Alexander appreciated as much as his thrilling victories by sea and land was his encounter with Zeus-Ammon. He could now legitimately claim to be a hero and a demigod on a level with the great warriors of old. In following the course of his life, a cumulative impression emerges that his hyperactivity had both an external and internal dimension. To his contemporaries and those who served him, he could hardly have seemed more real, more energetically, more dangerously, even unpleasantly present, whereas he himself appears to have seen the world as no more than a means of reenacting a dreamed past.

He dipped in and out of his own parallel universe, at will.