‘According to the Magi of the East’, wrote Aristotle, who had not spent his early life in Asia Minor for nothing, ‘there are two first principles in the world, a good spirit and an evil spirit; the name of the one is Zeus or Ahura Mazda, of the other Hades or Ahriman.’ As King Darius sat listening to the news of Alexander’s past twelve months, there could be little doubt on which side of this heavenly division he would have placed his opponent. Lion-like, dressed in the lionskin cap of his ancestor Heracles, Alexander was the very symbol of lion-embodied Ahriman. ‘For three thousand years, say the Magi, one spirit will rule the other: for another three thousand, they will fight and do battle until one overcomes the other and finally Ahriman passes away.’ In the meantime, some of the king’s fellow-Persians would sacrifice to Ahriman and privately acknowledge his regrettable abilities. For Darius III, chosen by the great god Ahura Mazda, there could be no such dalliance with the powers of darkness. In the name of the Good Spirit, who ‘created earth, who created man, who created peace for men’, he must repulse the advancing force of Lies, Unrighteousness and Evil, and from Susa, strike a blow for the development of the world of time.
Hope, however, was still lively, and it turned on the trusted Memnon, whom the Great King now raised to the supreme command. From his base on the island of Cos, he could sweep the Aegean with 300 warships of the empire’s fleet, manned with Levantine crews and as many Greek mercenaries as remained to be hired after the mass surrender on the Granicus and the loss of recruiting grounds in Greek Asia; it was an expensive form of war, but the fleet could sail wherever it could set up supply bases, and Alexander had no ships with which to retort. Communications across the Dardanelles could be cut and Alexander’s reinforcements from the Balkans could be prevented; merchant shipping could be sunk or commandeered, and interference with the autumn sailing of the corn fleet from the Black Sea kingdoms could put extreme pressure on Athens to join a rebellion even though Alexander was holding twenty of her citizen crews as hostages. Bribes and secret negotiations with Sparta and other open allies might well lead to an uprising against Antipater in Greece and to a mutiny among Macedonians in Asia who saw their home country threatened. Alexander would be forced to return to the Balkans, and to this end Darius had no need to summon a grand army and challenge him first inside the empire; better to lure him far on into Asia and burn the crops in his path, while cutting his lines behind him. Alexander had been reinforced and did not depend on supplies from his rear, as he lived off the land: it was conceivable that he himself might dare to continue inland, even if the Aegean and the Balkans were lost to him, but his soldiers would certainly refuse.
In spring 333 Memnon set out on his new commission. He began with Chios and the main cities of Lesbos, all sworn members of Alexander’s Greek alliance, where he overthrew such democratic governments as dated from the end of Philip’s reign and replaced them with tyrants and garrisons, those omnious signs for the common islander that Persian repression, like their exiled men of property, was due to return. Except for Mitylene on Lesbos, which had received troops from Alexander, the cities of both islands gave up their democracies and obeyed with reluctance.
Waiting at Gordium for his reinforcements, Alexander had heard the news which he ought to have expected. Perturbed, he sent 500 talents home to Antipater and gave another 600 to the leader of the Mounted Scouts and Amphoterus brother of Craterus the Orestid, ordering them to raise a new allied Greek fleet ‘according to the terms of his alliance’; the new year’s tribute and the treasures captured at Sardis allowed the fleet’s dismissal to be revoked so soon, but even 600 talents would only finance a fleet as large as Memnon’s for a mere two months at sea. The two chosen officers are not known to have had experience of naval work, and their return to Greece with the burden of money would be hazardous by sea, slow by land. Memnon had several clear months ahead of him, and Alexander could only reflect on his prospects. Memnon, after all, had not set himself an easy ambition. Antipater had an army and garrisons; Athenians were being held hostage; many Greeks mistrusted Sparta and the promises of Persians whose past brutality could not be forgotten, all these would help to stop any general Greek uprising, and anything less would be troublesome rather than dangerous. If Alexander had not believed that he could trust some of his Greek allies to fight Persia, he would never have asked them for a second fleet; there was also an enemy problem of money. Memnon had funds from the king, but Asia Minor’s tribute had been lost and as no other area paid in coined currency, its loss might restrict the Persians’ plan for a mercenaries’ war at sea. Memnon had already resorted to plundering and piracy, and neither would endear him to Greeks with an interest in sea trade. He might succeed locally, but Greece needed sterner tactics; there was nothing more to be done in defence except wait helplessly for the second fleet, so in June Alexander left Gordium and prepared to follow the Royal Road east, then south to the coastal towns of Cilicia to continue to capture Persian harbours.
Memnon’s chances were to remain untested, for in June, while blockading the city of Mitylene, ‘he fell ill and died, and this, if anything, harmed the King’s affairs at that time’. It was a marvellous stroke of luck for Alexander, as there was no other Greek general with a knowledge of Macedonia, a long career in Persian service and a way with the hired Greeks under his command. Persia was soon to recognize it. The news of Memnon’s death took some time to travel to Susa; the ponderous machinery of the Persian Empire was not to be lightly turned in a new direction, but such was the Great King’s dismay at the loss of this one commander that as soon as he heard it in late June or July, he planned to alter the entire strategy of the war. Memnon could wish for no more telling epitaph than this change, but while the new plans were put into effect, events were to drift until late July giving Alexander scope for good fortune and Persia less chance of a quick recovery of face.
It is not certain when Alexander learnt of Memnon’s death, but it could only have confirmed him in his business inland. Swinging eastwards along the Royal Road, he welcomed the token surrender of stray mountain tribes north of Ancyra whom the Persians had never troubled and whom Callisthenes could have identified by pleasing quotations and his comments on Homeric verse. Paphlagonia made its peace and was added to a western satrapy; then, the 50,000 troops followed their king along the edge of the salt desert, across the river Halys and on down the Royal Road, the smoothest surface for their supply wagons. Cappadocia is a desolate area, as grey and parched as some dead elephant’s hide, and so Alexander put it under the control of an Oriental, probably a native; the North had been divided off by the Persians as an untamed kingdom, and although the centre and south fringed the Royal Road, Alexander did not waste time on securing it. The mountains remained more or less independent, a refuge for fugitive Persians, and thereafter an untamed pocket in the wars of Alexander’s successors. Though populous, they were not particularly important.
Two weeks or so after crossing the river Halys, Alexander reached the south-east border of Phrygia, where he would have hit upon the camp site used by Xenophon’s soldiers in 401 B.C. From his readings of Xenophon’s works, he could reason that he would shortly be faced by the defile of the Cilician Gates, ‘impassable if obstructed by the enemy’. There are ways over the surrounding shoulders of the Golek-Boghaz hills which do avoid the extreme narrows of the pass, but Alexander decided to force it. Either he had made no reconnaissance, in the absence of native guides, or he reckoned that like Xenophon, he could scare the defenders into withdrawal. In this he was justified; the lightly armed units of archers, Shield Bearers and Agrianians were ordered to muster after dark, Alexander led them in person and by a night attack he so unnerved the local pass-guards that their satrap retreated, burning the crops behind him as he headed southwards to his capital at Tarsus. Relieved, Alexander marched the rest of his army through in safety.
On the far side of the pass, Alexander ‘examined the position and is said to have marvelled at his own good fortune: he admitted that he could have been overwhelmed by boulders if there had been any defenders to roll them down on to his men. The road was barely wide enough for four abreast.’ Happy in his entry into Cilicia, probably in late June, he descended into the ‘large and well-watered plain beyond, full of various trees and vines’ as Xenophon had found it, ‘and abounding with sesame, millet, wheat and barley’. Enough would survive to satisfy the hungry troops as king and army hurried over the sixty odd miles to Tarsus, Callisthenes pointing out the sites of old Homeric cities in the neighbourhood which, no doubt to Alexander’s excitement, had once been sacked by the spear of swift-footed Achilles.
Whatever Alexander himself may have said, the forcing of the Cilician Gates was not entirely due to his good fortune. Part of the reason lay, for once, where he could not see it: at the enemy court of the Persian king. In the royal palace at Susa there had been nothing smooth or Homeric about the progress of the months of June and July. They had begun with hopes that Memnon’s good news would continue, that Alexander would be lured far into Asia and a confrontation would be avoided, while the land would be ravaged along his path, as Memnon had first suggested at the Granicus. This is exactly what the satrap at the Cilician gates had continued to do. In late June Alexander had entered Cilicia while Memnon’s strategy was still in force, but by a cruel stroke, as his army passed unopposed through the defile, Memnon’s death had become known at Susa and with it, the Great King had decided on more positive plans. By then, the narrows of the Cilician Gates had been wasted; Alexander had been invited through them for the sake of a policy which was now to be abandoned.
In late June or July, on hearing of Memnon’s death, King Darius anxiously summoned a council of noble advisers. As Alexander bore down on distant Tarsus, word went round the court that tactics were under review. Honoured Friends and Royal Relatives, some honorific, others indeed descended from the imperial harem, satraps and staff-bearers, Table Companions, Vitaxas, Benefactors of the King, Wearers of the Royal Purple, Chiliarchs of the Immortals, Orosangs and all the lesser Hazarapats foregathered in anxiety, knowing that at Susa their future was to be settled. In the council chamber, the assembled company paid obeisance to the superior presence of their king; opinions were expressed, points of strategy were mooted, but Darius’s conviction that without Memnon he could no longer rely on war being shipped to the Balkans was generally agreed to be correct. A new move must be made against Alexander himself. The question for discussion was where a move would be most effective. The Athenian general Charidemus had joined the Persians after being exiled by Alexander and here he is said to have proposed that he himself should take 100,000 men, including 30,000 Greek mercenaries, and oppose Alexander alone. But Darius was unwilling to divide his army and was annoyed at the insolent remarks which Charidemus had added; he therefore ‘seized him by the girdle according to the Persian custom and handed him over to his attendants for execution’. The story may have been dramatized by a patriotic Greek, but the central fact of their disagreement is probably true. Darius’s reaction was to insist on summoning the fullest force and going to war in person. No renegade Athenian would dissuade him from his opinions; stewards, therefore, passed the word, scribes translated the details into Aramaic, couriers rode forth with their sealed letters; hyparchs and eparchs read, resigned themselves to the worst and left their district headquarters. Eyes and Ears of the king prowled round in search of stragglers, while the royal wives and imperial concubines dressed themselves for their customary attendance on a moving army and awaited their chariots and camels.
In the oppressive heat of July, Darius moved westwards to Babylon, a sweltering city with a low-lying palace which his ancestors had always tried to avoid in the height of summer. Sun and sand burnt alike but the Great King knew he had to hurry uncomfortably; already news would have arrived that Alexander had entered Cilicia, and within six weeks, he could be menacing Babylon’s massive walls. There was too little time to call out the troops of the upper satrapies east and north-east of Hamadan to meet the emergency, but there was power enough within range. The two main horse-breeding grounds of the empire were still accessible, the Nisaean fields of the Medes with their famous acreage of lucerne, and the equally productive pastures of Armenia, reputed to send 20,000 horses each year as tribute. Armed riders could be summoned from the king’s colonists and local nobility; the problem was their supporting infantry, for the only trained natives, apart from slingers and archers, were the famous palace guard of the 10,000 Immortals. They needed heavier allies, and there was no alternative but to weaken the sea-campaign in the Aegean by summoning most of the hired Greeks from the fleet.
On his deathbed, Memnon had appointed his Persian nephew and his deputy as temporary admirals and the pair of them had been fighting on boldly. By August, they had finally forced Mytilene to surrender, ‘urging the Mytilenaeans to become allies of Darius according to the peace of Antalcidas made with Darius’, an extraordinarily crooked settlement, as this peace of Antalcidas, which had been sworn fifty-three years before to King Artaxerxes II, had left the Aegean islands free and in no way obliged to Persia. The treaty had perhaps been infringed often enough to be forgotten by a new generation of islanders; if so, Mytilene was rewarded for its poor sense of history with a garrison, a foreign commander, the return of rich exiles to half their property, a tyrant, and a punitive fine. The capture of Lesbos opened the fleet’s path to the Dardanelles, but before the two admirals could pursue this, orders arrived for the delivery of most of their hired Greek troops. So, perhaps in mid-August, nearly two hundred ships were diverted east along their open supply points at Cos and Halicarnassus to Tripolis on the coast of Syria where they could hand over their mercenaries to another nephew of Memnon. The ships were to be beached there, and the mercenaries were to march inland to Darius, ‘30,000 Greeks’ according to Alexander’s staff, a number which should be reduced or even halved.
The Persian admirals rejoined forces in the Aegean to continue their war with a mere 3,000 mercenaries and a hundred warships. Their prospects were much reduced, but Darius had not disturbed them unnecessarily, for he needed all possible infantry on land. From court, he had sent for the raw trainees of the Persians’ youth-corps, boys who were conscripted in plenty for tree-cutting, hunting and wrestling as a preparation for army service. In the crisis, they were pitched into grown-up life, regardless of age or inexperience. Every ablebodied man within range was summoned, and from the land round the royal headquarters at Babylon the effects of such urgency can still be detected. By lifting the curtain on the Persians’ empire, it is possible to lay bare the local problems of a call-up and see straight to the heart of an imperial soldier’s life.
When the Persians had first conquered Babylon two hundred years before, they had divided its gloriously fertile land to suit their own interests. Much of it had been allotted to their servants and soldiers as a means of maintenance; the Persians faced the need for expensive and complex weaponry and as only land grants could finance this in a rural society without cash or coinage, they had introduced a feudal system which, like much that was sophisticated in the language and methods of Persian government, can be shown to trace back to their imperial predecessors, the Medes. As in the plains of Lydia, so in the plains of Mesopotamia families of foreign troopers from far afield had been settled on land grants, some seventy acres in the few cases where their extent is known, and arranged according to cantons of class or nationality, whether Arabs, Jews, Egyptians, Syrians or Indians, each supervised by district officers who were responsible for collecting the annual taxes due from the grant-holders to their king. Unlike the foreign colonists in Lydia and elsewhere, those in Babylonia recorded their business dealings on clay tablets in the dead Akkadian language and as baked clay can survive the ages, a hoard of their tablets has been found intact near the city of Nippur. Their information relates to the activities of a sharp firm of native entrepreneurs called the Murasu, which means, appropriately, a ‘wild cat’, and from their detailed evidence an important pattern can be extracted.
Three main types of land grant had been issued, horse land, bow land and chariot land; the very names are an insight into the Persian army, for the owners served as feudal archers, heavy cavalry and charioteers, complete with chariot and horse. All were liable for annual taxes, ‘flour for the king’, ‘a soldier for the king’ and ‘taxes for the royal household’, which were paid in weights of unminted silver. No family could sell any part of its land grant, and as many preferred to idle rather than to farm, increasingly they would strike a bargain with natives like the Murasu bank who were prepared to take a lease of their land grant, meet the yearly taxes from the proceeds and farm it for their own business profit. Unlike the colonists, the bankers were helped by a massive backing of men, silver, oxen, seeds, water rights and chain pumps. But though the taxes and the land could be leased to a wild cat entrepreneur, colonists in some, if not all, of the cantons were also liable for military service. The duty of military service was personal and had to be met from the owner’s family; it could not be leased out with the land, and as the Murasu records show so neatly, ninety years before Alexander, complications were already at work within the system. They are unlikely to have changed by the time that Alexander invaded, for the system was still surviving under his Successors.
In one remarkable document, the problems are set out in detail. In 422 King Artaxerxes had summoned his colonists to attack the city of Uruk, but the summons had caught the Jewish owner of a land grant off his guard. Probably because of financial embarrassment, the Jew’s father had been forced to adopt a member of the Murasu bank as his son, so that the banker could inherit a share in the family allotment, and as the land grant could only be owned by a member of the family, adoption was the one means of evading the king’s law and endowing an outsider. When the father died, the adopted banker held one part of the farm, the true male heirs the rest. In 422 they were presented with the king’s demand for silver, weaponry and the personal service of one family member as a fully equipped cavalryman, complete with horse. Fortunate in his banking ‘brother’, the Jew had struck an advantageous bargain; the wild cat bankers would not fancy fighting and so their adopted agent would finance the armour, silver tax, horse and, very probably, the groom, while the Jew would ride out at the risk of his life.
In the joy of his heart, Gadal-Iama the Jew has spoken thus to the son of the Murasu: the planted and ploughed fields, the horse land of my father, you now hold because my father once adopted your father. So give me a horse with a groom and harness, a caparison of iron, a helmet, a leather breastplate, a buckler, 120 arrows of two sorts, an iron attachment for my buckler, two iron spears and a mina of silver for provisions and I will fulfil the service-duties which weigh on our lands.
As the horseman owned no bow, the arrows were presumably to be handed in to the cashier and then distributed to owners of bow and chariot land.
But in summer 333, not every colonist would be sharing his land with a rich wild cat banker who could pay for his army outfit; the adoption of the banker is itself a sign, like the increasing number of leases and mortgages in the Murasu documents, that the colonists had found life more strenuous or awkward as the years went by. The annual tax was fixed, making no allowance for a bad harvest, and worse, the allotments remained the same size, though they had to pass to all male members of the family; even by 420, colonists were living on thirds, quarters, eighths or even fifteenths of their original grant. Their obligations remained the same, one fully turned-out soldier from the whole farm, even when the number of family mouths to be fed from the land had risen. Private Indians or Syrians could not meet the increase by intensive farming on the scale of the Murasu entrepreneurs, so the colonists’ yearly surplus grew smaller as their home demand grew larger. They might fall into debt or adopt a banker as son; either way, they were no longer so capable of arming themselves to their king’s expensive requirements. Horses and chariots need maintenance and an allotment split into fifteen parts is hardly a home for either; too much must not be built on the documents of one small area, especially as Babylonia was more urbanized than other satrapies, but it does seem that one reason why the Great King had relied on hired Greek troops in the fourth century was the declining abilities of his own overcrowded colonists.
Thus, as Darius awaited his feudal archers and horsemen he might be excused for the dreams which Greek historians attributed to him, the visions of the Macedonian camp aglow and of Alexander dressed in the Persian royal robe and vanishing into a Babylonian temple. Distressed feudal horsemen and a royal youth corps were hardly the ideal match for the Macedonian infantry and the Companion cavalry, but in the plains near the city, the Great King took refuge in numbers and consoled himself with counting his summoned troops. A circular enclosure was fenced off, able to hold some 10,000 men at a time. This was filled and emptied until the army had all passed through and the tens of thousands had been counted. Medes, Armenians, Hyrcanians, North Africans and Persians themselves: ‘from dawn till dusk’, in the exaggerated view of historians, 400,000 of these peoples filed through the stockade. Their true numbers cannot be estimated, nor do they matter for the sequel; but early one morning in late August or September, they decamped in their thousands and lumbered their way westwards among the canals of the well supplied Assyrian land.
To the sound of the trumpet, the Sacred Fire was hoisted forwards on its silver altars: priestly Magi followed chanting their traditional hymn; 365 young Wearers of the Purple strode behind them, ‘equal to the number of days in the Persian year’. White horses from the Median fields tossed and stamped before the Chariot of Ahura-Mazda, their drivers dressed in white with matching whips of gold; the largest horse of all prepared to draw the Holy Chariot of the Sun. Immortal Guards, so called by the Greeks because their numbers never fell below 10,000, marched close behind in solemn order, as Royal Relations and Spear Bearers cleared the way for the chariot of the King. Gold beyond telling gleamed on its coachwork, the yoke was aflame with varied gems; on either side rose pictures of the gods, among whom an eagle of gold, symbol of Ahura-Mazda, benevolently stretched its painted wings. Inside stood the bearded King Darius, thin-faced and dressed in a purple-edged tunic of white: from his shoulders streamed an embroidered cloak ‘on which golden hawks were fighting with their curved beaks’; from his golden belt, hung a scimitar whose scabbard was made of a single gem; round his head, ran the fluted crown of the King of Kings, bound with a ribbon of blue and white cloth. Cavalry and footmen paraded in attendance, protecting the chariots of the Queen and the Queen Mother who followed behind them; farther back fifteen mule-drawn wagons bore the eunuchs, the governesses and the royal children in their charge; 365 King’s Concubines kept their distance, dressed for the occasion, while 600 mules and 300 camels edged them forwards, laden with a selection of the imperial treasures.
Back in the Macedonian camp, in the two months while Darius’s army mustered, events had taken an unfortunate turn. After forcing the Cilician Gates in July, Alexander had hurried to seize Tarsus, rescuing it from burning by the Persians. He had marched fast in the heat, descending some 3,000 feet into an airless plain, and when he arrived in the city, he was understandably tired and dusty. Through Tarsus, run the yellowish waters of the Cydnus, a broad river which was said to be cool; Alexander, said Aristobulus, was already feverish. Others said that he swam, as yet in good health. But the local waters have a bad record; in 1189, the Calycadnus chilled Frederick Barbarossa, also rash enough to swim in the course of a Crusade. Within hours, Alexander developed a chill, hastened on by the cold water. His attendants laid him sleepless and shivering in his royal tent, but as he grew increasingly cramped, the doctors despaired of their treatment, until Philip the Greek stood forward, a man Very much trusted in medical matters and not inconspicuous in the army’. He had attended Alexander as a boy and knowing his temperament, he proposed a purge with a strong medicine. Alexander was desperate to recover and gave his agreement.
While Philip assembled the necessary drugs, a letter was said to have been handed to Alexander from Parmenion; some say, implausibly, that it had arrived two days before and that Alexander had concealed it under his pillow. According to Parmenion, Philip the doctor had been bribed by Darius to kill his royal patient, but when Philip reappeared, Alexander disregarded any such warning. Handing Philip the letter, he took his glass of medicine and drank it down at the same time as Philip read the message. At once, Philip ‘made it quite clear that nothing was wrong with his medicine: he was not in the least disturbed by the letter but simply ordered Alexander to obey any other instructions he might give him. If he did so, he would recover.’ The purge eventually worked and Alexander’s fever eased: ‘Alexander then gave proof to Philip that he trusted him, convincing his other attendants that he was loyal to his friends in defiance of suspicion and that he was brave when faced by death.’ Aristobulus may have agreed, though denying the swim.
The story of this letter has been disbelieved largely because it seems too dramatic. But history is not only true when dull and though interventions by Parmenion are not to be trusted lightly, there is no outside evidence with which to challenge this telling scene. In legend, certainly, Parmenion is later made into a personal enemy of the doctor, or even into a cunning poisoner, hoping to kill Alexander and clear himself of guilt by his letter of warning beforehand. But these legendary embellishments do not prove that the story first arose to discredit him. Trust and daring are virtues to be expected in any great general and even if Alexander was not so indiscriminate in his loyalties as flattery implied, he was sharp to distinguish between true friends and false, prizing the former and purging the latter. It is much in favour of the story of doctor and letter that it brings this feature to the fore.
Alexander’s sickness at Tarsus was a more serious delay than any of his historians made plain. Through the long weeks of July and August and on into mid-September, the king lay abed, apparently unaware that Darius’s army had been summoned, let alone numbered and led out westwards from Babylon. Tactics, for Alexander, still centred on the coastline, and as he slowly recovered, there was enough to worry about at sea. Even without their Greek mercenaries, Memnon’s successors were making themselves felt; they had sailed north to Tenedos, an island base for merchant shipping just off the Dardanelles, and they had taken it, again with a false reference to a peace of the past. Ten ships had been detached to the islands of the Cyclades off southern Greece, where they were to await overtures from Spartans and other disgruntled Greeks; Antipater was alarmed for the safety of Greece’s coastline and had called out what warships he could, placing them under a Macedonian, probably the nephew of Alexander’s nurse. A raid captured eight of the Persians’ advance fleet and scared off the rest, but it could not be long before all hundred of the enemy ships came south. The two recruiting officers of Alexander’s allied fleet were finding their business slow and difficult, perhaps because most Greeks preferred to stay neutral. Alexander could only press on with capture of Asian land bases, that desultory process which was bringing him nearer the ports of Syria and Phoenicia, although island harbours and the port at Halicarnassus were still open to the enemy behind him.
From now on, he was without detailed maps or local contacts, and for knowledge of what lay ahead he would surely consult the narrative of Xenophon’s march, neatly detailed into marching-hours and distances. From it, he could deduce that the next enemy stronghold on the coast was the pass of the Pillar of Jonah from Cilicia into Syria some seventy miles distant, and on the basis of his reading he sent Parmenion at a leisurely pace round the coast to take it in advance, hoping that its complex of double turret walls and intervening river would not be too heavily guarded. Personally, he would march westwards in the opposite direction as soon as he felt fit.
How ironically these careful plans now read. All the while, Darius was approaching the plains of Syria, where he would encamp and wait to attack as soon as Alexander came out through the Amanus mountains into the plains. Meantime Alexander marched and countermarched, surely ignorant of the Great King’s whereabouts, let alone of his change of plans; otherwise, he would not have dared to divide his troops. To the Macedonians this routine work was to seem like one more stage in the laborious capture of the coast; they delayed till their king felt better, they watched Parmenion disappear eastwards with the cavalry, and in late September, when Alexander had finally recovered, they retraced their path towards the decaying city of Anchialus, unaware of the risk they would soon have to run. In the centre of that high-walled city stood the tomb of its founder Assurbanipal, King of Assyria in the mid-seventh century B.C., with a carving of the king clapping his hands above his head and an inscription beneath him in cuneiform script. Intrigued, Alexander made the local settlers translate it for his benefit: ‘Sardanapalus son of Anakyndaraxes’, it was said to run ‘built Anchialus and Tarsus in a single day; stranger, eat, drink and make love, as other human things are not worth this’, ‘this’ being a clap of the king’s hands. The historian Aristobulus, writing his book in his eighties, took such exception to this blunt reference to sex that he rephrased the advice as ‘eat, drink and be merry’. The inscription had anyway become unintelligible and what the locals said was only gossip. Nonetheless Callisthenes’s history noted the exact impropriety for Alexander’s pleasure, who then marched forwards, a living denial of any such drop-out philosophy.
The next ten days were proof of the king’s return to health. Wild tribesmen were routed in a seven-day campaign, a pro-Persian city was fined and the very welcome news arrived that the remaining strongholds of Halicarnassus and its coast, including Cos, had fallen at last to the Macedonians. Alexander was keen to celebrate this first success in the naval campaign, so he offered sacrifice to the Greek god of Healing as thanks for his own recovery, and held a torch race, athletic games and literary competitions. The success, had he known, was shortlived, as Cos and Halicarnassus were soon to be threatened and lost again. Nonetheless, Alexander moved south-east to Mallus, where he stopped its civil strife and abolished its payment of tribute, pleased by its alleged link with his legendary Greek ancestors; generous and moving freely in the world of myth, the king was plainly back into his stride. October was now far advanced, when all of a sudden a message arrived from the distant Parmenion on the borders of Syria and Cilicia: Darius had been seen encamped with a large army only two marching days from the Syrian Gates and the Pillar of Jonah.
It must have been hard to keep calm on receipt of this information. For the past month, Alexander had been lingering along the southern coast of Turkey with his forces widely divided and winter all but upon him; his thoughts had been on the Persian fleet and their dangerously free manœuvres towards Greece, and he must have hoped for rough autumn weather to close the sailing season early. There were troubles too both within and beyond his high command.
Recently he had received letters from Olympias warning him finally against Alexander the Lyncestian, and it was now, not a year earlier, that he took the step of arresting him in his cavalry command. At the same time, his close friend Harpalus, lame and unsoldierly, had left for Greece across a thoroughly hostile sea to make contacts in the southern Greek harbour town of Megara, presumably to ward off the approaching Persian fleet. Another envoy had gone with him on a still more daring sea journey, across from Greece to south Italy to talk to Olympias’s brother King Alexander of Epirus, again no doubt about possible help for Greece by sea. It was a worrying time on all fronts, and now it had been joined by the threat of a Persian grand army.
Never happier than when challenged, Alexander ‘assembled his Companion nobles and told them the news; they ordered him to lead them straight ahead exactly as they were. Praising them he broke up the meeting, and on the next day he led them east against Darius and the Persians.’ By comparing notes with Xenophon’s history, Alexander could calculate that at a reasonable pace, the army would reach the borders of Syria in three days or some twenty-five regular hours on the road. It was not, however, a time for being reasonable and the army was thinned by Parmenion’s absence; let the men march at the double and cover the seventy-odd miles within forty-eight hours. The coast road east was level and inviting, and fertile farms lay on either side; where the shore of the Mediterranean bends sharply southwards to Syria, the road hooked round and continued to follow it, with the sea still on Alexander’s right and the shadowing Amanid mountains on his left. At the very edge of Cilicia lay the town of Issus, pointing the way to the satrapy of Syria and the south; there Alexander abandoned all stragglers and invalids for whom the march was proving too fast. Meanwhile, Parmenion had come back from reconnaissance to meet him, and together king and general hurried on to the fortified Gates of Syria, the modern Pillar of Jonah, which the advance force had already captured. A few miles south of this frontier-post they called a halt at Myriandrus, knowing that at last they were within range of the Beilan pass. From here they could cross the edge of the Amanid range and hurry east into Assyria and so, they hoped, into King Darius’s encampment before he knew of their approach. By now the evening of the second day was drawing on and the march had stretched the infantry to their utmost; it was a mercy when during the night ‘a heavy storm broke and rain fell from heaven in a violent wind. This kept Alexander in his camp.’ The implication is that otherwise he would have been back on the road before dawn.
He could not know what a heaven-sent blessing this late autumn gale was to prove. At least four days had passed since Parmenion’s spies had last observed Darius to the east in the plains near Sochoi, and the Great King’s tactics deserve a closer consideration than any of the Macedonians had given them. He had reached Sochoi, perhaps, in late September and as advised by his officers, he had waited in its open spaces to deploy his full force against Alexander emerging from the coastal hills over the Beilan pass. But he had become impatient. He had detached his baggage-train south-west to Damascus, a curiously distant choice of site but perhaps intended to ease the burden on the food supplies of the Sochoi plain and to put the camp-followers nearer the mercenaries’ transport ships which were beached at the nearby harbour of Tripolis; perhaps too, the choice would be more understandable if the ancient city of Sochoi could be located with any accuracy. Having shed his baggage, Darius had begun to move northwards to look for Alexander himself, against the strong advice of the Macedonian deserter Amyntas.
His advance intelligence can only be guessed. Probably he had heard a rumour of Alexander’s illness; possibly, scouts or fugitives had already warned of Parmenion’s approach down the coast to the Pillar of Jonah. If so, it seemed that Alexander was detained far away in Cilicia and had split his forces most unwisely. The moment seemed ripe to march northwards, on the inland side of the Amanid mountains, and penetrate the Hasenbeyli pass at a height of some 4,000 feet, and then to bring the army southwards and back on to the main road, down the Kalekoy pass into Issus. If Darius already knew of Parmenion’s advance, he may also have known that these passes had been left undefended; if he did not, luck was to see him safely through them.
He must have begun this northward march very shortly after Parmenion’s scouts had retired with news of his whereabouts. In some four or five days, he would have reached the Hasenbeyli pass, still expecting to swing round on to the main road and occupy Issus. He would either wait there to fight Alexander as he came east down the road over the Kara Kapu pass from Tarsus, or else he would move westwards to Tarsus and hope to catch him on his sick bed. He cannot have known that as he marched north on the inland side of the Amanid range, Alexander was marching south down its coastal side, still less that Alexander was marching at a pace that has seemed incredible to those who have never tried a forced march. During one night, Alexander careered down one side of the coast road, while Darius was either encamped or marching on the other; there are few stranger tributes to the lack of proper reconnaissance in the history of ancient warfare. On the same night that Darius came through the Kalekoy pass into Issus, expecting to meet Alexander marching east, Alexander crossed the Pillar of Jonah, expecting to meet Darius encamped to the east at Sochoi. Neither knew the other’s whereabouts.
When Darius descended into Issus, he found the Macedonian invalids whom Alexander had already abandoned. He was now some fifteen miles north of Alexander, facing into his rear, and yet it was only the exceptional speed of Alexander’s advance which had given him this enviable position. At most Darius may have hoped to separate Alexander from Parmenion; he can take no credit for arriving in the rear of them both. As if to celebrate, he cut off the hands of the Macedonian sick whom he found at Issus, a pointless atrocity which was to cost him dear, for others escaped by boat and warned Alexander that the King of Kings was actually encamped in his rear. At Myriandrus on the sea, Alexander was unable to credit what they told him. But he sent several Companions in a thirty-oared skiff up the coastline to test the facts for themselves, and on rowing into the Gulf of Alexandretta, they sighted the campfires of the Persian army and realized that the worst had happened. At last Alexander’s legendary luck appeared to have deserted him.
Footsore from his forced march and soaked by the past day’s rain, Alexander was given little chance by natives who were freely assisting Darius’s army. There was one hope of escape from the trap into which his headlong advance had thrown him. Darius, presumably, would march south down the coastal narrows, and expect to fall on Alexander’s rear once he had emerged into the open beyond the Beilan pass. What if Alexander faced about and met the king in the Cilician narrows first?
With a wet and weary army that is a difficult order to give, but, as Amyntas the Macedonian deserter had told Darius, advising him never to leave the plains; ‘Alexander was sure to come wherever he heard Darius to be.’ Within hours, sarissas had been shouldered, horses had been wheeled about, and a fight was to be made on Alexander’s terms; Alexander was indeed coming, coming to where he had heard of Darius. Darius, however, had not yet heard of Alexander’s return, and for the battle on the morrow surprise would not be the least of the Great King’s disadvantages.