He had held no command since the battle of Chaeronea, the climax of a campaign directed by Philip throughout; he had not independently led an army since his repulse of the Illyrians when he was seventeen. He had been in exile, followed by disgrace; his status in Philip’s planned expedition had been uncertain. Yet he had only to appear before the troops and lead them—and this into very difficult country, where Philip himself had been defeated—to be followed with élan and unquestioning trust. This fact, eclipsed in history by his later exploits, is perhaps as remarkable as any.
Beside his own Macedonians, he had a contingent of Agriani, a Thracian tribe whose young chieftain, Lambarus, he had already made a friend of, perhaps in his earlier wars, or because Lambarus had been sent to Pella, like some other noble Thracians, as hostage for his father’s fealty. In any event he was devoted to Alexander. The warlike Thracians, who tattooed themselves blue and collected enemy heads as trophies, were considered rather backward even by the standards of rural Macedon. But Alexander throughout his life was concerned with the individual.
He showed from the outset of the campaign his characteristic swift adjustment to the unexpected. The defenders of the Haemon pass had walled themselves behind a line of carts, which they started to bowl down on his men with the lethal force of gravity. Throwing the phalanx into open order, he told those who could not avoid a cart to crouch under a roof of shields (thus anticipating the Roman “tortoise”). The carts bounced over; not a man was lost, the pass was carried. He advanced into the river plain of the Triballians, a large force of whom shortly cut off his rear. He turned round at once to meet them; they withdrew into an impregnable gorge. He never wasted his men’s lives in stacking such positions; he sent archers and slingers to harass from a distance; when the enemy took the bait and came out in chase, he fell on them with all his forces. Panicking, they were cut down with the usual dire contrast of casualties between pursuer and pursued. To soldiers of the ancient world there was a force unknown today in what Alexander would say to his men a decade later: “While I have led you, not one of you has been killed in flight.”
After this battle he marched north to the Ister. Not only did he want to control the land it bounded; he had a longing, says Arrian, to cross to the other side.
This is the first time of many in his life story where we hear of such a craving—the Greek word is pothos. His many-sided nature had a powerful strain of the explorer. The Ister was the northern edge of the known Greek world; all beyond was hearsay. But his dreams had always their practical side; he did not aim to pass over the great river only “because it was there.” The tribes beyond were known for fierce warriors and raiders; and he wanted before he left for Asia to make a lasting impression. If he crossed to their side, they might later feel discouraged from crossing to his.
The Danube in its lower course was such a stream as neither he nor his men had ever before set eyes on. He had had some war galleys sent up from Byzantium (now subdued) but they were only a squadron, with their rowers taking up room, and he had to embark an army. Here Xenophon came to his constant reader’s aid; he has a passage about the inflated hide rafts used to cross the Euphrates. Hide was used also to make army tents (it must have made the baggage trains immensely cumbrous), and these Alexander had cobbled into rafts, stuffed with hay for buoyancy. He also commandeered the local dugout canoes. On this makeshift flotilla he crossed the Ister by night, with 4,000 foot and, astonishingly, 1,500 cavalry. The horses must have swum.
This whole campaign is described with the close detail of an eyewitness; presumably Ptolemy. He had not yet been promoted to high command; not till after Philip’s death had Alexander been able to recall his banished friends. His present chief of staff was another friend of those days, Parmenion’s son Philotas. Never having lost the royal favour, he had entered the new reign with higher rank.
However experienced the officers, this was a manœuvre quite new to the Macedonian army; its broad strategy and comprehensive grasp of detail must belong to Alexander. On the far bank the infantry advanced through high standing corn, flattening it by holding their sarissas sideways (they must have been extremely well drilled) to make a path for the cavalry. On open ground beyond, Alexander deployed his forces. But the local Getae were so shocked by this uncanny arrival in the dawn that they fled before the cavalry, first from their town, then on into the wilderness with such women and children as they could take on their horses’ cruppers. The Macedonians took the town and “as much plunder as the Getae had left behind”; which, in fourth-century terms, would include any remaining women and children. For such victims, massacre or slavery were the universal alternatives. These were enslaved.
On the Ister shore, Alexander sacrificed to Zeus the Preserver, to Heracles, and to the spirit of the river for graciously granting them passage. Having got everyone back across without a single drowning, he sat down to await results. Soon respectful embassies arrived from the tribes along the river. Their reception must have gone on for some time; for the last arrivals were Celts, from some distant settlement near the Adriatic. Men whom even the Macedonians thought very tall, they towered over the rumoured conqueror they had come to placate. Either from vanity or curiosity, he asked them what thing on earth they dreaded most. They feared nothing, they said, unless that the sky should fall on them. Amused by this gasconading brag (one he never made for himself) he sent them home with a pact of friendship.
Still in the north, he got news that the formidable Illyrians had risen; and that an intermediate tribe, the Antariates, planned to fall on him as he marched to meet the danger. At this the young Lambarus, still at hand with the pick of his Thracian warriors, told him to forget the Antariates at any rate; they were worth nothing as fighters, he would invade them himself and keep them occupied. Moved as always by a spontaneous act of friendship, Alexander loaded him with gifts of honour, and promised to join them in kinship with the hand of Cynna, one of his bastard sisters. They never met again; Lambarus, after a devastating performance of his mission, went home, fell ill and died. Whether or not Cynna shared her brother’s grief, the Agriani remained the most loyal of his auxiliaries.
Making haste over now familiar ground he reached the Illyrian frontier ranges. Cleitus, the Illyrians’ chief war lord, held the hill town of Pelium and the heights commanding it. The troops outside fled at sight of the Macedonians, leaving behind the freshly killed bodies of nine victims just sacrificed for victory—three black rams, three boys and three girls. (No wonder Alexander did not care to dwell on his Illyrian exile.) He invested the town; just avoided being encircled by a large relieving force; led out a troop to rescue Philotas, who was commanding a guard over the draught animals; but after doing so was himself dangerously trapped in a narrow pass between hills and river. This situation he met with sheer bravura. He had guessed from the Illyrians’ earlier flight that his name had run before him—in those parts he had been known for years—and he threw what troops he had into a polished display of aggressive drill. Their expertise and unknown intentions so dismayed the tribesmen that they started falling back. He ordered his men to yell and beat on their shields. The enemy abandoned their vantage points and bolted for the fort.
Still in difficult country, and harassed as he crossed a river, he got his archers firing from midstream, and set up his light catapults—a very smart operation, since they were taken apart for mule transport. His men were extricated in a fighting withdrawal, never once presenting their defenceless backs. Shortly after, taking advantage of the Illyrians’ indiscipline, which he must have known well, he put on a night attack and routed them out of the town. The west was settled; but he was to have no respite. A still more serious danger now threatened from the south.
Word of the risings had spread. The new King of Macedon, after a brief appearance at Corinth, had vanished into the wilds whence no news came. After no long delay, Demosthenes emerged and, contacting Darius and his leading satraps, offered, if they would finance him, to keep Alexander t
ied down in Greece. The Greek cities of Asia were tacitly written off to bondage; Demosthenes’ democratic principles were strictly parochial. So eagerly did Darius respond that his account rolls, when captured later in Sardis, showed disbursements to his ally of 300 talents.
Presently it was learned that the Thebans had admitted some anti-Macedonians whose lives Philip had spared after Chaeronea on condition of their exile, murdered two Macedonian commanders who in peacetime laxity had gone outside the citadel, and proceeded to invest the garrison within it. Elated by this news, and well supplied with funds, Demosthenes sent Thebes a large consignment of arms. Continuing to assure the Athenians that Alexander was a strutting boy, he urged them to join the war. They voted to do so, and started to prepare. Still no word came from the hinterland. Then rumour announced that Alexander was dead.
No sickness or wound had caused a genuine error. Demosthenes produced a man who swore to having seen him fall. On the strength of this, the Thebans openly proclaimed alliance with Persia against Macedon. When, within a week, they heard that an army led by Alexander was coming down through Thessaly, they refused at first to credit it. At all events, it could not conceivably be that Alexander. It would be Alexandros of Lyncestis. (They must have supposed him the new king.)
They were swiftly disillusioned. Alexander had brought his forces down from Pelium, through a series of mountain passes, a distance even by air of a hundred miles, in a six-day march. Scarcely pausing to pick up his allied troops from central Greece, in another six he was already in Boeotia. He appeared before Thebes next day.
Had he in fact been dead, it would have cancelled the Thebans’ treaty. His early forbearance may have come from knowledge of the rumour. For reasons which may have been emotional or religious, he encamped by the precinct of the hero Iolaus, Heracles’ charioteer and beloved companion, at whose shrine the couples of the Sacred Band used to take their vows. He sent an envoy to the city, offering to accept their surrender on terms if they would give up the anti-Macedonians who were there illegally. The Thebans refused, with a mocking counter-demand for Philotas and Antipater. They made a sortie against Alexander’s pickets, some of whom they killed. He now moved to a strategic position, near the gate that faced towards Attica and gave him the nearest approach to the beleaguered Macedonian garrison.
It was also the approach route from Athens, of whose intentions he would by now have heard. But in that respect his vigilance was needless. No troops from the south appeared. The alarming speed of his march had brought painful second thoughts. Without protest from Demosthenes the Athenians closed their gates, leaving the Thebans to weather the storm alone.
It did not yet break. Alexander still awaited a parley. He had collected on his southward march contingents of troops from Macedonian satellites, chiefly Phocians and Plataeans. The latter, it will be remembered, were the descendants of the Marathon heroes, inheritors of their perpetual Athenian citizenship, whom Demosthenes had traded to the Thebans on the eve of Chaeronea.
Alexander kept close to the Theban siege lines, at their nearest point of approach to the Macedonian garrison, trapped inside the Cadmea. This, as can still be seen, was no acropolis perched on natural rock; it relied for defence on its massive walls. For the next sequence of events, which Arrian gives in vivid detail, he expressly says that his source is Ptolemy, who must have taken part. He claimed that Perdiccas, still at that time holding only a small command, was posted next the siege works. For some reason, without awaiting orders, he rushed his men to the palisade and started to tear it down.
For justice towards Perdiccas we shall look in vain to Ptolemy, who had been his mortal enemy many years before he wrote his History, and has probably suppressed a good reason for this apparent breach of discipline, such as a signal from the garrison of some weakness in the enemy dispositions which needed quick action. Perdiccas was the man for it, as he had shown at Philip’s death. He broke through and got in. A fellow officer, seeing this, led up his men in support. Alexander, not far off, perceived they were all in danger of being cut off inside; he sent reinforcements, still reserving his main army. Assaulting the inner palisade, Perdiccas fell badly wounded. The rest pressed on; then the Thebans, rallying, got them on the run. This was decisive for Alexander; he charged at once, thrusting back the Thebans with such force that the city gates, which had been opened to let them in again, were jammed and let in their pursuers too.
It was the end. As the Macedonians flooded in, “with Alexander appearing everywhere,” the Theban cavalry pelted off across the plain, the infantry fled as they could; and the ancient city was given up to sack. The Phocians and the Plataeans, Arrian says, were the chief agents of a massacre that spared neither age nor sex, nor even suppliants hauled out of the temples. It has been said that Alexander could have stopped it if he had liked. This would possibly have been true in Thrace or in Illyria; it would certainly have been true after he crossed to Asia, when his authority was absolute over all his forces. His position at Thebes was unique. The allied troops were men to most of whom, till they joined his forced march a week before, he had been unknown except by name, simply the awe-inspiring Philip’s twenty-one-year-old son; while the Thebans were familiar enemies, against whom generations of hatred had been stored. Before Philip’s intervention, the Phocian War had been marked with hideous savageries. The atrocities of the lately betrayed Plataeans, if anyone’s fault but their own, may most fairly be blamed upon Demosthenes.
Arrian says the “best” of the Theban citizens (a term often, but not always, meaning the upper classes) had wanted to ask for terms, but had been prevented by the extremists. Alexander’s genius for command included an unerring instinct for rare moments when commands will be disregarded with consequent loss of face; but for the rest of his life, he seldom refused the petition of a Theban; if he found one serving as a Persian mercenary, he pardoned him because he had no home. Even during the shambles, he saved where he could find them—it must have been hit or miss—priests, old guest-friends of Macedonians (probably the hosts of his father’s youth), and the descendants of Pindar, along with the poet’s house. By general vote of the allies, most of the city was razed.
After the sack, the Thracian troops dragged before Alexander a woman whom they charged with killing one of their officers. She admitted it freely. He had broken into her house, raped her, and demanded to know where her valuables were hidden. In the well, she had told him, leading him up the garden to it and, when he craned over, pushing him in. When his men arrived she had finished him off with stones. She added, defiantly, that she was the sister of Theagenes, who had fallen at Chaeronea, leading the Sacred Band. He pardoned her at once and freed her with her children. This well-known Plutarch anecdote upholds Ptolemy’s apportionment of the blame for the massacre. Its most significant fact is that the woman was brought before Alexander. These Thracians were not newly joined allies but his regular troops. If they had been let loose to sack the city, he could not have given a judgment which implied that their officer had got what he deserved; and in any case, they would have taken their own revenge.
Meantime the Athenians were celebrating the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most solemn rite of the Attic year, when the first Theban fugitives galloped up with the news. For the third time panic reigned in Athens. The Mysteries were abandoned. Villagers with their household goods crowded within the walls. A peace embassy was chosen to sue for mercy: some pro-Macedonians, and trustfully, the city’s eloquent champion, Demosthenes. He rode with the rest as far as the Attic frontier; where his reflections grew so disturbing that he excused himself and retired.
The miserable remnant brought the victor abject congratulations on his safe return from the north and recent victory. Civilly he accepted Athens’ submission, and agreed to spare her if the most virulent anti-Macedonians were given up. Even this he was talked out of by the tactful Demades, the same man Philip had used as his envoy after Chaeronea. Antipater in Macedon, getting the news that Demosthenes had been spared
, must have thought the young King had taken leave of his senses. He was quick to correct the error after Alexander was dead. To Alexander himself, his own standards being what they were, it must have seemed unthinkable that Demosthenes could lift his head again. Here he failed to get the measure of fourth-century Athens. None the less, in withholding from that head a martyr’s crown, he proved wiser than old Antipater.
His work in the south was over. Greece was secured. He returned to Macedon, to prepare for the enterprise which was to fill the remaining third of his life.
In Macedon, Alexander performed the traditional sacrifices at the feast of Olympian Zeus, and held, besides the usual Games, contests for artists “in honour of the Muses.” During this time he got news that a famous statue of Orpheus, enshrined in south Macedon, had started to sweat profusely. The seers, pondering the omen, decided that the new King’s exploits would give the poets work.
He never had, as he must have hoped to have, his epic. Both he and posterity have been better served by the memoirs of a soldier, a sailor and an engineer. His best poetic epigraph was coined a good deal later by the Cavalier Montrose, thrown away in the middle of a love lyric.
I will like Alexander reign,
And I will reign alone;
My spirit ever did disdain
A rival near my throne.
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who will not put it to the touch
To win or lose it all.
It is briefer than he would have wished; but it distils his essence.
Meantime Darius, whose troops had been waging local defensive war against Parmenion’s bridgehead, disturbed by the news from Greece, had hired, also from Greece, some 50,000 mercenaries. Their general was Memnon, a veteran of Ochus’ reign. He had been involved in the satraps’ revolt and spent his exile in Macedon, where he had studied his hosts’ tactics before being recalled. Alexander, who never thought the worse of old Artabazus for taking the field against him in the service of a Persian king, felt no such tolerance towards Greeks who did so. The army raised by Memnon had but few hard-up soldiers hiring their swords for bread; mostly it was of southerners continuing the war against Macedon after their cities had signed peace treaties. These Alexander resented as he did not the Persians who were only doing their duty.