Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

IX

The King called a war council to hear the advice of his generals. The city, he was told, stood on an island half-mile off a windswept coast. She was protected by massive fortifications 150 feet high on the landward side, only somewhat lower to seaward. As Alexander had sent away his only ships, taking the city from the water would be impossible. “Then it must be from the land,” he concluded. Constructing a mole across the strait was be likewise impractical, said his admiral Nearchus, as the channel was deep there. “How deep?” Alexander demanded. No one knew.

At this point Nearchus argued that the Persian fleet was not out of action and might appear at any moment to support the Tyrians (which was true), and that the city might be safely bypassed anyway (which was not). But his objections only confirmed Alexander in his course: he would take the impregnable island city from the land.

The Macedonians seized the mainland coast across the Tyrian strait. Battalions of Foot Companions and mercenaries were ordered to take off their armor and don workshirts. Whole forests were cut down for pilings, and all moveable boulders in the vicinity roped, dragged, and dropped into the channel to support the construction of the greatest artificial causeway ever conceived.

While these preparations were underway, the Macedonian camp was shaken by an ominous sign: as the army’s bakers removed their bread from the ovens, they found drops of human blood in the loaves. Panic spread among the Greeks in a way it had not before the battles at the Granicus or Issus. The campaign was saved by Alexander’s personal seer, the Telmissian Aristander. Instead of disaster, Aristander interpreted the bloody bread as a promising sign: since the blood flowed on the inside of the bread, it must mean that the force within the city was doomed, not the attackers. As this seemed reasonable to most of the Macedonians, work resumed in earnest.

Alexander searched his army for strong swimmers who might survey the underwater course of his mole. As this was dangerous work, he promised each survivor a talent for his trouble. So confident were the Tyrians that the siege would fail, however, that they declined to shoot at these scouts as they appeared under their walls. Instead they laughed, asking them whether their King thought himself Poseidon’s master.

The causeway was supposed to be wide enough for an eight-man front of Foot Companions to march across, and high enough for the top of it to be above the winter swells. Working in day and night shifts, the Macedonians quickly finished the section over the shallows. As his men worked, the enemy sent out boats with crack archers in them. Thinking perhaps that Alexander was bluffing, at first they resorted only to insults, jeering at the workmen, telling them they were a race of mules, not warriors. When this failed to stop the work, the archers brandished their bows. Finally, they commenced shooting at the workers, forcing them off the mole. Alexander brought up Cretan bowmen equipped with flaming arrows, driving the boats away. To protect his men, he altered the design of the mole, equipping it with a pair of wheeled towers, topped with rock-throwers, that could be rolled forth as the work proceeded.

Unable to approach the causeway from the water, the Tyrians sent boats filled with cutthroats down the coast to attack the work-crews inland. Alexander detailed his Illyrian auxiliaries to protect the workers. The enemy turned to diplomacy, paying the Arab tribes of Mt. Lebanon to harry the Illyrians. In response, Alexander launched a land campaign, bringing the Arabs to heel in just ten days.

The work proceeded into greater depths. The magnitude of the task seemed to grow more and more absurd, like burying the ocean, as we watched tons of stones and trees disappear into the water. The head of the mole, meanwhile, was now in range of archers on the city walls, which they used with telling effect. Alexander countered the Tyrian bowmen by erecting sheets of canvas around the head of the mole to conceal his men as they worked their way closer. Poseidon made his allegiance known by sending strong winds through the channel to rip away the canvas, leaving the workers exposed to enemy fire. Alexander replaced the canvas with heavy skins, weighted down at the bottom with shorn logs, which had the additional dividend of breaking the high waves. Poseidon grumbled and bided his time.

Alexander was often out on the mole himself, exposing himself to danger, always ready with words of encouragement for his men. At last his faith seemed to bear results, as the Macedonians looked down to see the mole’s foundation inch toward the surface. Morale surged; it seemed as if the task was possible after all.

Understanding that this was a key moment, the Tyrians launched their counterstroke: a sulphur-caked merchant vessel, stripped of everything that would not burn, filled to the gunwales with fuel and choice accelerants. To insure that the fire ship would ground herself on the mole, they shifted its ballast aft, so that its prow was pitched free of the water. The next windy day their best oarsmen towed it into the channel and, with spirited war-cries, propelled it toward the enemy.

The ship struck home and exploded in an enormous conflagration. With particular ingenuity, the Tyrians suspended cauldrons of boiling pitch between the ship’s masts, so that when these collapsed additional fuel poured onto the blaze. Mounds of unused timber, cordage, canvas and idle catapults went up. The fire spread so quickly that the guards in Alexander’s towers were forced to dive into the sea. Enemy triremes swarmed around the helpless Macedonians, beating them senseless with clubs before taking them all as hostages. The Tyrian archers, meanwhile, drove back anyone coming out to fight the fire. The entire mole burned to the waterline.

That was when Poseidon seized his chance. Sending forth a storm, he punished the very foundation of the mole until it gave way, collapsing in a heap on the seafloor. So completely was the structure destroyed that when Alexander came out to view the damage from this attack, all signs of his months of work, wet or dry, were erased. I was there during the episode Aeschines described, when the Tyrians gathered on their wall to jeer at Alexander as he stood among the debris.

These developments provoked fresh carpings from Nearchus, who complained that the city would never be taken if the Tyrians were left in command of the sea. This was no doubt intended to dissuade Alexander, since the enemy had a strong fleet and the Macedonians had none. Alexander nevertheless ordered the mole rebuilt at twice the width and with double the number of towers. His men, weary and discouraged, stripped an even greater area around the country for materials. Alexander, meanwhile, rode north with his personal guard. He was away for seven days.

The gods alone must know what the Tyrians thought of Alexander’s disappearance. We may suppose, though, that they believed he had given up and that the siege was finished; Poseidon himself must have assumed as much, since the winter storms ceased and the sea settled down. It was on one of these calm days that their lookouts sighted a fleet approaching from the north. They cheered again, for they thought it surely must be the Persians coming to drive the besiegers away for good, or perhaps a relieving force from Tyre’s daughter city of Carthage, riding to the rescue of their ancestral temples.

These illusions were shattered as the devices painted on the fleet’s sails came into view. The fleet, 200 ships strong, was a mixed force from Sidon and Cyprus; at the prow of the very first ship stood Alexander.

Now it was the Macedonians’ turn to cheer and their adversaries to groan. With such an overwhelming force against them, the Tyrians recalled their dispersed fleet, and took the additional defensive action of blocking their north and south harbor mouths with merchantmen. Alexander’s Sidonese allies showed their value immediately by launching fire ships against the obstructing vessels; several were burned, but the enemy replaced them. Alexander ordered a blockade on the city.

With the enemy fleet out of action, work on the second mole proceeded faster than on the first. The Tyrians responded by erecting wooden towers atop their walls to increase the range of their heavy artillery. With these engines they threw heavy boulders into the sea, hoping to impede the movement of Alexander’s ships. This strategy pleased Alexander, since the enemy was providing good material for his work crews. He sent out triremes to haul up the rocks and dump them at the head of the mole.

Perceiving their mistake, the Tyrians produced up a squadron of ram ships to attack the triremes. The ram ships were great armored vessels, with even their oar-shafts clad in bronze. Though they were slow and would easily have capsized in rougher seas, they caught the Macedonians by surprise, sinking several of their vessels and, in the process, further littering the landward channel with obstructions.

The Tyrians, having regained control of the waters under their city walls, came up to threaten the mole again. Fighting resumed along the causeway, as Alexander’s men took refuge in their towers. Bolts from the Macedonian artillery clanked harmlessly off the metal skins of the ram ships. Alexander, furious, ordered the immediate construction of his own armored fleet. This was completed within days, and launched with selected crews from among his Sidonese and Cypriot allies. Outnumbered, the enemy withdrew.

The allied triremes resumed pulling up the stones. To frustrate them, the enemy sent out waves of divers to cut their cables from underwater. The Tyrian swimmers, who seemed able to hold their breaths for superhuman lengths of time, also assaulted the mole from below, using metal hooks to work the cobbles loose from the tree branches the Macedonians had sunk there. These attacks did real damage to Alexander’s plan. Having no divers of like skill, he ordered the anchor ropes of his triremes replaced with iron chains, and boats with archers to patrol the channel and kill the Tyrians before they could submerge. The latter tactic met with scant success, but in any case the divers could do nothing against the chains, and gave up.

With the noose tightening around the town, the Tyrians tried to break the blockade by sallying out against the enemy ships at the north end of the island. A crack force of the city’s best fighters gathered behind a canvas screen erected at the harbor mouth. Coming out in mid-afternoon, when the Macedonians were rotating their crews, thirteen Tyrian ships rowed out in complete silence and again caught their enemy by surprise. All the blockading ships were taken and either burned or cast adrift in the swift current, to founder on the rocks downstream.

Learning of this attack, Alexander rushed to the fleet blocking the southern harbor and ordered it to pull for the other side. So quickly was this order obeyed that the Macedonians caught the Tyrians still at their destructive work. Upon seeing the reinforcements, and Alexander conspicuous at their head, the Tyrians made frantic signals for their scattered force to retire. The Macedonians fell on most of these before they could find shelter in the north harbor; only a handful of the enemy escaped, making the overall losses even for both sides. It was a draw Alexander could afford more than the Tyrians, however.

A strange inactivity then came over the defenders; their artillery fell silent, and the archers just sat on the walls, watching the Macedonians come ever closer. To the workers on the causeway, this stillness was most ominous.

In fact, the defenders were preparing a new weapon. The slings of their torsion catapults were replaced with bronze shields, the missiles abandoned for something far more noxious. Just as the mole came up under the walls, the Macedonian workers were seen to cry out, tear off their clothing, and cast themselves into the sea. Mystified, Alexander came out to investigate.

He soon learned that the Tyrians were using artillery to project loads of red-hot sand against his men. The effect of this weapon was to send down a spreading, molten cloud that destroyed anything it touched. Siege works were scorched, lungs seared, and skin burned as the sand worked into the seams of the men’s armor.

There was no counter-measure against this horror. Work on the mole was abandoned. Alexander, in despair, punished the Tyrians by using his biggest rock throwers against the landward walls. Two full days of constant pounding worked only a few cracks in the fortifications, which the Tyrians quickly filled in from behind. The bombardment was called off.

There seemed nothing more we could do. The winter and spring had been consumed by the siege, and summer had begun; no doubt somewhere Darius was using the time to strengthen his position. Alexander’s spies in Greece reported that the Lacedaemonians were trying to enlist the Athenians in an alliance against Macedon; accounts reached him that the Persian fleet was forcing open the port of Miletus. It seemed as if Nearchus’ advice was correct after all-Tyre must be bypassed.

Then a most unusual sign appeared. The waters in the channel began to churn. Onlookers gathered on both sides and watched in wonder as the great, dark back of an enormous sea-monster parted the waves. Given their reverses, there was great nervousness at this apparition in the Macedonian ranks, and the beginnings of outright panic among some of the more ignorant Thracian and Illyrian allies.

Alexander came to the shore to view the creature in the manner of a master inspecting a fine horse. Dismissing all talk of omens, he refused to consult Aristander on the matter, instead recounting what he had learned about such creatures from his tutor, Aristotle of Stageira.

“I was told he examined one of the monsters that had washed up alive on the shores of the Thermaic Gulf,” recalled the King. “They are blooded animals, and toothless. As he undertook a vivisection, a baby sea-monster beached itself on the shore next to the other. The bigger monster then laid a fin over its calf. At this, Aristotle broke off his investigations, leaving the harmless things to die in peace.”

This account seemed to quiet his men. The Tyrians, by contrast, were in an uproar. As the monster circled the channel, they sought the favor of Poseidon, whom they called Yamm, by cutting the throats of their prisoners and casting them into the sea. They implored the monster to smash the enemy warships. Instead, it swam under the walls and paused at a place just off the south end of the island, on the seaward side. With its nose just out of the water, it seemed to be pointing to a place on the fortifications. Then it pulled itself back into the water and disappeared.

Alexander leapt on his chariot and, to everyone’s surprise, proclaimed “It is a sign! That is where we attack!”

Of the truth of this episode I have nothing to tell you. I was not there to see it, but away in the interior, attempting to learn something more about Arridaeus. I suspect it was he, and not some sea monster, who deserves the credit for identifying the weakest section of the Tyrian walls. Yet behind this tale hides an element of the truth, for it is exactly as a monster that the Macedonians saw Arridaeus-as a presence that was unexpected, inexplicable, and that filled them with dread. Curious about this, I plied Callisthenes with questions, but his indifference to this mystery was as fervent as my curiosity. There was nothing to learn from him.

To penetrate the conspiracy around the King’s half-brother was dangerous. Yet there could be no pretending that I was an historian if I preferred childish fables to the complexities of real human affairs. I therefore decided to risk learning more, even if accusers like Aeschines would eventually crawl forth to impugn me, and to tell me that I had failed in my oath to the Assembly. To my knowledge, my oath never bound me to transmit lies to my fellow citizens, both live or yet to be born. I make no apologies for this decision.

With a few silver decadrachms placed in the right hands it was not hard to find where Arridaeus was kept. He was installed some distance inland from the Levantine coast, and safely remote from the main encampment of the army, in a back room of the Temple of Herakles Palaeotyros. The place was well-guarded by Alexander’s most trusted troops, which happened to be the first division of the King’s Hypaspists. As my title in the Macedonian army was that of an officer in the second division, it was a straightforward matter to pull rank and get inside before the guards could scurry back to the main camp for instructions. Their resistance mounted the deeper I got into the temple, however, so that I became nervous that I would not reach my goal before someone of superior rank arrived to stop me.

It was only with a threat of flogging that I convinced the last sentry to step aside. My heart pounding, I pushed the door open, and then peeled aside a black curtain stretched behind it. Though it was midday outside, the room was obscured by a thick, sulphurous darkness. Peering within, I saw a corner of the room was heated with braziers, and lit by a single oil lamp. A stench like a latrine hit me full in the face.

The king’s brother was sitting on the floor. He was surrounded by miniature tin figures of soldiers, cavalry, siege engines, which he had arranged in opposing phalanxes. His armor-the only kind of clothing he would allow to touch his skin-was stacked against the wall behind him. He was naked as he sat there, rocking with a slow rhythm as he hummed to himself, absently handling the head of his penis.

Just then something moved behind him, and I realized he wasn’t alone: an old woman was there, sitting on a cushion with a bucket and mop. She was staring in my direction as the feeble light from the rest of the temple penetrated the sanctuary. When she spoke, the enclosed space made her voice seem as if she was speaking from beside me.

“He’s not hungry. Leave it.”

Arridaeus never looked up, never showed me his face, but continued to hum and rock, and would evidently continue until he soiled himself in whatever way and the old woman would clean him. And though I have no evidence that this was the totality of his life, apart from his brief appearances on the battlefield, it was not hard to believe it was so. If there were any other exits from his tomb, they were not obvious; if there were any other concessions to human companionship granted to him, I didn’t see them.

There was a commotion behind me, and the sound of booted feet on marble. Not wishing to be arrested with my head inside the forbidden chamber, I withdrew.

Craterus met me at the foot of Heracles’s statue. He had a bemused look on his face, as if he had bested me in some game. He had two guards with him, but instead of arresting me they straightened, saluted, and let me pass. As I walked away Craterus must have observed my attitude, obliging him to make a single justification to my back:

“Arridaeus is not unhappy, Machon. He thinks he is a god!”

There were no serious consequences to what I had done. Arridaeus was not moved for the rest of the time of the siege, and aside from a single long look at me from his couch that evening, Alexander never showed any awareness of the incident. Of this I can only speculate that the King, for reasons known only to him, decided to hold me immune from any penalties for this adventure.

There was a single consequence only: for the rest of my time on the campaign, almost eleven years, either Craterus or one of his junior officers kept a constant watch on me. I never learned whether Alexander had assigned him as my ‘minder,’ or whether he had taken that responsibility upon himself. Considering that I could have been killed, imprisoned, or sent home for what I’d done, I thought it best not to ask.

On the coast, Alexander took a ship to the south end of the island to survey the weak point the “monster” had indicated. He noted that the topography of the shore made that portion of the Tyrian walls the lowest of all. When he returned, he put his carpenters to work constructing retractable gangways for his ships.

The next day dawned fair and calm. The catapults on the mole were reloaded. On the water, Alexander pressed every available man into service on every vessel in his fleet; his ships came out and anchored just out of range from the Tyrian rock-throwers. Fireships were loaded with fuel and positioned off the mouths of both harbors. In response, the enemy warmed up their sand weapon. There was a sense on both sides that the issue would be fully and finally decided that day.

Alexander appeared on his flagship in Achilles’ battle armor. Moving so that all could see, he took his position at the head of the gangway and took his lance. The cheers of his men drowned out the sound of the sea. Just as the uproar was at its loudest, he gave a nod, and the signal went up to attack.

The Macedonians made a furious assault on the city from every direction. Ships stood off the weaker, seaward side, using artillery to crack open the masonry there, forcing the Tyrians to expend manpower on repairs. Where there was room between the waterline and the wall, his men landed and began sapping operations against the foundations. The defenders dumped everything they could-rocks, sand, boiling water, anvils-down on the engineers. The Phoenician allies launched their fire ships, setting the obstructions in the harbors ablaze, putting the Tyrians in a panic as they tried to save their fleet.

Just as the enemy was most overextended, the rock throwers assailed the spot in the wall where the sea-monster had pointed. It collapsed in short order. The first Macedonian vessel to drop its gangway was commanded by a man named Admetus, who led a column of Shield Bearers through the breach. They didn’t get far as the Tyrians massed their defense there, cutting all the invaders down. But Alexander was not far behind, and when the enemy saw him coming, singing the paean as he leapt over the rubble, their nerve broke.

Soon the Macedonians broke through at several points. I went in from the city’s north end, and saw more than I care to relate. The city was overwhelmed so rapidly that the Tyrians did not have time to organize a final defense; after its highly coordinated beginning, the day gave way to an afternoon of chaos as the Macedonians, stymied for months, having lost more men at Tyre than at the Granicus and Issus combined, worked their frustration against the people. The bodies piled up as the Tyrians continued their resistance from their doorways and rooftops and the Macedonians, equally determined, hacked their way into homes, shops, and temples. By sundown, I saw that the pipes bearing sewage from the streets to the sea were gushing red. The waters ran so thick that the seabirds, smeared with human blood, could not fly.

Having given his men their moment of revenge, Alexander commanded that all survivors be spared. The entire royal family was captured alive in the Temple of Heracles, along with a party of Carthaginian emissaries. The Tyrian king, Azemilcus, was released with his retinue, while the Carthaginians were packed off for home, with a message from Alexander that he now considered that city his enemy.

The entire remaining population of Tyre, rich and poor, some thirty thousand souls, were given in chains to their rivals. It was said that the markets of Sidon were so glutted with product that a slave could be purchased for the equivalent of a few dozen drachmas. Even minor farmers could afford to buy themselves a former aristocrat or fashionable lady for whatever purpose they desired. Thus are the wages of resistance to the “Captain of the Greeks.”

Machon allowed this grim imagery to sink into the minds of the jurors. Swallow glanced at the Macedonians in the spectator’s box: there was such a transparency of pride on their hairless faces that he wanted to spit on them.

Before he left the empty streets, Alexander made a victory trophy of a Tyrian ship, mounting it in the sanctuary with the inscription he had written himself. It read “Dedicated to the god by Alexander, son of Philip, from inside the city.” He then did as he first requested seven long months before-he made sacrifice to Heracles at his temple within the walls.

If nothing else, Alexander hoped the siege and its aftermath would lessen future loss of life, as fewer cities would refuse to open their gates to him. Unaccountably, it seemed to have the opposite effect in the next big town he encountered on the way to Egypt. The satrap of the city of Gaza, an Arab named Batis, had watched the reduction of Tyre and took the opposite lesson: that Alexander could be defeated if he was denied the use of his artillery.

Gaza stood on a great hill, ringed by well-built walls, that was surrounded by loose sand too unstable to erect towers or heavy equipment upon. Siege trains bogged down to their axles. The city was situated in such a lofty spot that catapults could not hit the walls at an effective angle from anywhere around it. The defenders were well-supplied, and a besieging force would need to subsist in dry, difficult country. Batis made it more difficult still by burning all the fields in the surrounding area before Alexander arrived. As Gaza was not a port town, and therefore could not supply the Persian fleet, Batis may also have believed his enemy would content himself with a mere show of force.

Suffice it to say he was mistaken. As his campaign advanced, Alexander was even less willing to brook resistance. Nor was he inclined, he informed us, to expend another half a year reducing another recalcitrant city. His staff must find a way into the place in a matter of weeks, not months.

After much discussion, it was agreed that tunneling was the one tactic the soft soil around the city did afford. Accordingly, excavation began from a place out of sight of the Gazans, so Batis would not know what was coming. To further distract the enemy from making an effective defense, Alexander had a ring of siege towers built from large trees dragged all the way from Lebanon. The trunks of these had to be sunk many yards into the ground to give support to his engines. The Gazans took the bait: they commenced raising the tops of their walls to match the works of the enemy. Alexander ordered his men to build higher-Batis also built higher, racing the Macedonians skyward until the extremities of both structures were so tall they could be seen from miles out at sea. It was all a splendid ruse, however, as the real attack was completely out of sight, under everyone’s feet.

So it happened that one day Alexander was out among his engineers, helmetless in the great heat, when fate intervened again. A crow, flying out of the west, passed over him and dropped a heavy object on his head. The King was briefly stunned, and the bird, strangely, did not escape but landed on a siege tower. The object that hit Alexander was an abalone, which was closed when it fell from the bird’s grasp but opened up after it hit the ground. Aristander the soothsayer was summoned to explain this event; making a quick examination of the evidence, he was concerned, saying that the fact that the abalone had opened meant the town would fall, but that Alexander could be killed in the assault if he was careless.

This omen caused some consternation in the Macedonian camp, as the life of Alexander was far more valuable than the submission of Gaza. Alexander would not be deterred, of course, promising only that he would stay away from the front lines.

Fate is not so easily changed. As Alexander was sitting far to the rear, watching unhappily from a distance, a Gazan soldier was presented to him as a deserter. This man was allowed to keep his shield for his interview with the King. Casting himself at Alexander’s feet, he begged permission to join the Macedonian army; the King bid him to stand and be accepted into his service. At that instant the deserter, who was really an agent of Darius, pulled a dagger hidden in his shield and fell on Alexander. The attacker was cut down before he could harm the King, wounding him only lightly in the neck. Without a thought for the danger he had just barely escaped, Alexander directly called for Aristander: as the assassin’s cut must qualify as the wound he had prophesied, could he now return to the front ranks? But Aristander shook his head, for the injury was too minor. Disappointed that the cut was not serious enough, Alexander sank, dejected, back on his throne.

Having seen their tormenter go down earlier that day, the Gazans saw an opportunity. Sallying forth that night, they took the Macedonian sentries by surprise and nearly reached the siege works with their torches. None were surprised when the King forgot his pledge and threw himself into the fight. Suffering great losses, the Gazans retreated, but not before Alexander was wounded in the shoulder by an arrow. Instead of worrying him, this injury filled him with delight: Aristander’s prediction had at last come true, so the town must fall.

With redoubled energy, pushing his men to their limits, Alexander caused the siege works to rise and the mines sink deep into the earth. At last, near the end of the month of Maimakterion, all was ready: at their leader’s signal, the miners removed the supports they had installed in the tunnels, and a wide section of the wall collapsed in a heap. The Macedonians stormed into the breach just as the last stone came down. The rest of the day saw bitter fighting, as the Gazans knew the fate of Tyre, and expected no better. Every one of the ten thousand men in the town was killed in the fight; the women and children went to the Sidon markets, where they sold even more cheaply than the Tyrians.

A single exception was made for Batis himself. Orders went around that the satrap was to be taken alive, and this was accomplished, though he did his best to achieve a soldier’s death. When he was led before Alexander, he looked his conqueror straight in the eye, refusing to bend knee before him. Alexander threw up his hands, saying “What shall I do with this man? With just a word he could save himself, but he stands there mocking me on the field I have duly taken from him.”

Instead of begging for his life, the Arab merely smiled and made a cutting gesture across his own throat. Impatient, exhausted in body and spirit, Alexander exploded at this insolence. “You count on death, but by the gods your pride has earned you worse!”

With that, he summoned a chariot. Batis’s ankles were pierced between the bone and the tendon (which broke his silence), and looped through with a rawhide strap. The ends of the strap were then attached to the back of the car. Alexander stood over Batis as the man writhed on the ground, quoting Homer to him:

Hector’s body lashed to the car, dragging the head

Mounted Achilles lofted his shining arms

Lashed the strong horses to flight, so they sped

Through the dust of Illium he raised

By Hector’s black hair spread upon the ground-

Unlike Achilles, Alexander did not mount the car, but just slapped the lead horse to start him on his way. All watched, curious, as the chariot raced off toward the sea, Batis’s head carving a bloody furrow in the shell-strewn dust. Some time later riders went out to retrieve the chariot. The man’s remains were not buried, but left for the crabs to devour.

The end of Batis may seem cruel to us. Alexander, too, was often given to merciful treatment of worthy enemies, as I will later relate. The one thing he could not abide, however, was the presumption of arrogance by beaten men. If nothing else, he would teach humility to all the Persians. Some critics, Demosthenes among them, have made much of Alexander’s supposed descent into oriental despotism, pointing to Batis’s death as a notable example. But there is nothing about this execution that smacks of the barbarians. Indeed, I say the opposite: it was Homeric, which we may agree is as Greek as it gets!

It is one of the imponderables of this campaign that it was the fall of Gaza, not Tyre, that made Alexander’s name throughout the world. That such a well-protected city was reduced so fast, in less than two months, at last established that mere walls were no defense against him. There were sieges to come, to be sure, but in the years to come all the large cities just opened their gates to him. His name alone made walls moot.

Egypt agreed with the young king. Having millennia of experience in investing weak characters in the trappings of godhood, the Egyptians had become most accomplished in their sycophancy. Not that Alexander was the least worthy of their flattery-on the contrary, he was every inch the gallant conqueror, as young and winning as the old Persian satrap had been cowardly and rapacious. For the reasons I described earlier, when he left the oracle at Siwah he was as convinced of his divinity as I had ever seen him. Cash and favors poured from him like wet from the Nile. Emissaries from all over the world came to pay him homage, or to beg his indulgence in settling their petty disputes. In short, from the time he rejoined his army for the march to Damascus, until he took possession of Babylon, he was much the hero that Aeschines described. This was a period of less than a year.

At the ancient capital of Memphis he held court, feasting the local nobles and regaling them with the finest poets and musicians from Athens. He sponsored a program of athletic contests on the plain of Giza. At the end of the day, he climbed up the highest Pyramid, that of Cheops, and surveyed the sweep of his new province. To a mind determined to confront all obstacles, the linearity of Egypt, thrusting so grandly into the heart of Africa, was a tonic.

Sailing up to Egyptian Thebes, he was welcomed at Karnak like its long-lost master. Dressed in flawless white linen, he strode down the aisle of the great Hypostyle Hall between throngs of plaited, intoning priests. He entered the sanctum alone, to gaze at the very image of the god Ammon recumbent in His golden pavilion. The next day he took the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt on his head, and was called Horus, Horus-of-Gold, He-of-the-Sedge-and-the-Bee and the Son of Ra. By the end of the ceremony the Egyptians unveiled a likeness of their new pharaoh: a colossus in black basalt, enthroned with the crook and the flail. This impressed Alexander, as the carving of this statue must have begun well before he entered the country. It is in the nature of the Egyptians to think of everything.

Here I must turn aside from my story to dispute how Aeschines has portrayed my conduct in Egypt. He makes special reference to a report I sent to the archon Nicetes, and proceeds completely to misunderstand the substance of it. By the orders of the Assembly I was duty-bound to report what I saw in Alexander’s company, whether it flattered him or not. Therefore, if I observe that the King’s troops laughed at him behind his back when he put on Egyptian garb, it is because that is what I saw! Would Aeschines prefer that I mislead the Assembly? Likewise, I did write that Alexander’s enthusiasm for barbarian finery was a weakness in his character, and that this weakness might someday lead him into trouble. Given subsequent events, was this anything less than the unvarnished truth?

Recall at this time that King Agis of Sparta approached this city with an offer of alliance against Macedon. The Athenians refused, which was fortunate for us, as Agis’s revolt was defeated by Antipater on the plains of Megalopolis. To those who longed for an end to Macedonian hegemony, my reports of Alexander’s defects gave the virtue of patience: if the young king would ultimately destroy himself, why risk the very existence of our state on Agis’s hopeless cause? In this way, what I learned was of direct benefit to you all. Note that this doesn’t mean I sought to destroy Alexander myself! If that was my object, I could have stuck a dagger in his heart on any one of a thousand occasions. So I ask you again, how have I served my city wrongly?

Returning to the Delta, the new pharaoh turned west, toward the great oasis of Siwah. He announced that it was his intention to consult the god Ammon at his sanctuary, as his ancestors Heracles and Perseus had before him. Taking a small force of two hundred hypaspists, Hephaestion, Aristander and myself included, he started along the coast, skirting Lake Mareotis. On the way he paused at a site he perceived to be an ideal spot for a new city, situated on sloping ground between the lake and the sea. Perhaps inspired by his experience at Tyre, he foresaw how a mole running out to the Pharos island would afford deep, calm anchorage. Anyone with a particle of ambition would already have exploited the site, declared Alexander, except that the Pharaohs of old had never thought any other land worth conquering, and so never built a true seaport from which to rule.

He was so impatient to see his perfect foundation realized that he immediately began surveying the site. Marching ahead of his secretaries, he dictated the future locations of the temples, the marketplace, and the palace; to compensate for the lack of high landmarks in the area, he left instructions that a lighthouse exactly one stade tall be constructed on the island to guide ships into the port. To be sure, nothing of the kind had ever been built before, but none doubted that Alexander would see it done.

His clerks fretted that they had no surveying equipment with them, so they could not record the King’s wisdom. Alexander commanded his men to use the flour in their packs to mark the boundaries. The Egyptians warned against this, as the flour would be necessary for the difficult journey across the desert to Siwah. Alexander ignored them, using every bit of grain to lay out the capital’s walls and streets. When he was done, he looked with satisfaction at his design, until a great flock of seagulls arrived and began to eat his city. He deployed his troops to drive away the birds, but it was too late: the lines of flour were trampled by thousands of little feet.

‘What can this mean?’ Alexander turned to Aristander.

The soothsayer had a ready answer: “Fear not, O King! The splendor of your capital will attract men from abroad like gulls from the sea, and make it the Queen of Cities.”

“The gods were so anxious to see the place built,” added Hephaestion, “that they want you to mark the boundaries with something more permanent, like stones.”

Both answers pleased Alexander.

The trip to Siwah took us into a waste so trackless that our guides had difficulty keeping their bearings. Such desolation is unknown anywhere in Greece; rain was so rare there, in fact, that the natives of Siwah long ago stopped building roofs on their houses. Short of water, and with no flour for food, it seemed that the Macedonians were in trouble-until the gods intervened again. Zeus sent a great rainstorm. Then Hermes manifested out of the ground in the form of an asp, and led us directly to the oasis. The Egyptians were amazed at these events, as if they were used to only nominal divinity, not true miracles, from their god-kings.

Alexander’s party was met in the outer courtyard of the temple by the high priest. The man’s Greek was so poor that instead of referring to Alexander in the vocative case, as ‘O my son,’ he used the nominative, as in ‘the son’, or ‘the son of Zeus.’ It was a trifling difference in the sounds of the words, a common mistake for barbarians, but it intrigued Alexander. The priest, in his turn, observed the expression on the King’s face.

Alexander went alone into the Holy of Holies. He was there for some time, as if in long conversation with the god. While nothing is known of what Alexander asked of the oracle, or the nature of the replies, what he learned there must have confirmed his new, and growing, sense of his unique destiny.

Returning to Memphis, Alexander installed his governors. In his wisdom, he understood that Egypt is too rich a land to trust to one man alone. He therefore divided its administration among two governors and three garrison commanders. Each was sworn not only to serve their King, but to respect the local governments and religious customs of the natives. He then led his army back to Phoenicia.