The main army had crossed the Dardanelles by a more conventional route, and when Alexander joined their commander Parmenion, all hopes were for a rapid meeting with the enemy. Thirty days’ food, it was said, had been brought with the army, a quota for which the Macedonians had been trained by Philip; half had already been eaten, so they must either conquer or arrange for the usual market supplies with enough Greek cities to sustain them. The Persians’ most probable base was their satrap’s castle some eighty miles to the east; before setting out in its general direction, Alexander reviewed and counted his united troops.
With him he had brought some 32,000 infantry, 9,000 of whom were the six brigades of the Macedonian Foot Companions, 3,000 the Shield Bearers, 1,000 the foreign skirmishers and a mere 7,000 his allied Greeks. Seven thousand barbarian infantry from Thrace and Illyria, probably armed lightly, lent a note of valuable savagery; the Thracians, in particular, were troops to whom common decency meant little, and ‘interesting parallels are to be found in the use of Red Indians by the British, French and Americans in the late eighteenth century’.* The victories of the previous summer had persuaded their chieftains to join the expedition, Triballians included; their numbers increased with reinforcements, and until they were abandoned as garrisons in India, they are a reminder that every atrocity should not be blamed on Alexander and his Macedonians.
Apart from a few allied Greeks, lightly armoured Thracians and the trained horsemen of Paeonia from Macedonia’s northern border, the power of the cavalry lay with the 1,800 Companions and 1,800 heavily equipped Thessalians, less than half the horse-power of the one Greek state with the nobility and plainland to match Macedonia’s riders. Together with the advance force, which had contained most of the Macedonian Mounted Scouts, the cavalry totalled about 6,000; the advance infantry had contained Macedonians and many hired Greeks, and so raised the total foot force to some 43,000. There were 5,000 hired Greeks in Alexander’s main wave too, probably armed for light work rather than the front-line service against Persians in open plains, for which they were unsuited. Pay as well as food would soon become pressing unless there were a quick victory.
When the two armies joined, all but a few small towns on the empire’s north-western coastline had been lost again to Persia; only one loyal ally was still significant, and she mattered most from a Persian viewpoint. Away to the west the island city of Cyzicus continued to favour the new invasion: the Persians had tried to capture it, even disguising their troops in broad Macedonian hats, but Cyzicus had held out, and this resistance cost the Persians dearly. Most remarkably, the Persian satraps of the Hellespont province were the only governors in western Asia never to have minted coins of their own; the province’s tribute had to be sent to the king each year in money, and to meet this need they can only have used a local substitute, none more probable than the abundant coinage of Cyzicus, one of the most widely known currencies in the Greek world. But the city did not belong to the Persian king, as it was not a part of mainland Asia; it was free to close its gates, and by closing them in favour of Macedonia it inconvenienced the Persians’ army most of whom were hired for the moment and looked to regular payments of money for food and wages. Their commander had made a name for paying maintenance money promptly, but without Cyzicus this might not continue so easily.
Elsewhere, Alexander could only trust to his father’s policy of freeing the Asian Greek cities. But liberation is always a dubious promise and his advance force had already been seen to betray it; Alexander did not go far before meeting with native distrust of what freedom might mean this time, for the first three days of his march took him north-eastwards along the Asian coast, where his goal was evidently Lampsacus, a prosperous Greek city beside the sea. But Lampsacus was most reluctant to admit him. Persian satraps had been minting coins in the city and their generals had drawn on her funds, perhaps because Cyzicus was closed: assistants of Persia would make no move for Alexander, and so the first Greek city he had come to free merely turned him away unwanted. Later, when victory had given his promise of freedom more meaning, envoys pleaded for Lampsacus to be pardoned, but until Alexander had shown his strength he could neither subvert nor assure the leaders of Greek cities, who had heard and suffered too often the offer of ‘freedom’ from invaders.
So he delayed his liberation and turned south-east towards the local satrap’s castle, hoping for battle along the road. Villages of no importance were received in surrender wherever friendly, but hard though his horsemen scouted the hills, the enemy was nowhere to be found. The ground opened out into a generous plain, and scouts again went forwards towards the nearby sea; there was nothing there to report, except for a welcome from one more village. And yet all the while to the south, only twenty miles distant, the Persian troops had been massing, still unseen.
On receiving news of the invasion, the Persian high command had left their lakeside fortress of Dascylium and moved through its thickly treed parks and forests to a steeper hill range in the west. Here in the small Greek town of Zeleia the local tyrant had made them at home, and they were discussing their possible tactics. There were two alternatives: either confront Alexander directly or else burn the crops in his path and hope to repel him through lack of food. The second plan was Memnon’s, a Greek from the island of Rhodes who had followed his brother into Persian service, survived the changes of fifteen years and shone as a general against the Macedonian advance force. With the help of hired Greek infantry, he had driven the enemy back from their early gains; proof of his generalship can perhaps be seen in a unique series of Persian coins, on whose backs are stamped what appear to be maps of the countryside round Ephesus, scene of Memnon’s campaign; when he paid his hired troops it seems that he gave them handy reminders of local geography on the back of their wages. Deviser of the first field maps to be used in Greek warfare, he was not a general to be despised; some ten years before, he had also lived as an exile in Macedonia and he had seen the style of Philip’s army for himself.
His plan was sensible, and when adopted a year later it nearly proved successful. But although Memnon had married a Persian wife he was a Greek advising Persians how to fight Greeks, and there were deep objections to his policy. He was asking the satraps to burn a land which was highly productive; besides, they and their fellow Iranians had taken the best for their own estates. Around Zeleia, for example, where they were arguing, stretched the woods and parks of the former Lydian kings which the Persians now kept for their favourite sport of hunting; on marble reliefs from the site of their satrap’s castle, they can still be seen enjoying the chase on horseback, while the castle looked out over lakes and game parks whose trees and animals were a revelation to Greek eyes, and the region is still renowned for its rare birds. The Persians farmed as well as hunted. Down by the coast, Persian nobles lived at the centre of farms which were worked by many hundreds of local serfs; their tall private castles served as spacious granaries, so much so that a local official could have supplied a sizeable army with corn for almost a year. When estates were on such a scale, it was all very well for Memnon to propose a devastation, but he was a foreigner talking of others’ home coverts. He owned a large estate himself, but it was a recent present; others had seen their old homes burnt before, and the memory was most unpleasant. It was doubtful, too, whether their subjects would help by burning their own crops.
Bravely but wrongly the Persian command overruled him and ordered the all-out attack which Alexander had wanted. Down from Zeleia, the town, Homer had said, ‘which lies at the foot of mount Ida, where men are rich and drink of the dark waters of the Aisopus’, the Persian army descended westwards into the plain, while some thirty miles away in the mid-May morning, Alexander was still marching unawares, his infantry in double order, his cavalry on either wing and the baggage train tucked in behind for safety. A day passed before his Mounted Scouts came galloping back through the scrub of the open fields: the Persian army, they told him at last, was waiting for battle on the far bank of the Granicus river.
After the nervous searching of his past six days, Alexander must have greeted the news with relief. But some of his officers were not so confident; they would not reach the river until afternoon, and the month, they pointed out, was the Macedonian month of Daisios in which their kings had never made a practice of going to war. Their scruples, however, were irrelevant, for the ban had probably arisen from the need to gather the harvest in that month, and Macedonia now had slaves and workers enough to do the job without the army’s help. Alexander refuted them, characteristically, by ordering the calendar to be altered and a second month of Artemisius to be inserted in Daisios’s place. He would go ahead regardless, and by early afternoon he had reached the river Granicus, where he could inspect the enemy, a sight which justified his evasion of the date.
Rumour later exaggerated their numbers farcically, but there is no doubt that at the Granicus, the Persians’ army was markedly smaller than Alexander’s, perhaps some 35,000 to his 50,000. Except for Memnon, their commanders were Iranian aristocrats, most of them satraps or governors of the tribes of western Asia, some of them relations real or honorific of the Persian king. However, no unit from Persia, ruling province of the Empire, was present, and the cavalry, their customary strength, was either drawn from the royal military colonists who had long been settled in return for service on the rich plains near the Asian coast away from their homes by the Caspian Sea or the Oxus, or else from the mountain tribes of Cappadocia and Paphlagonia, whose horses were famous but whose governors had raised rebellion against the Persians’ loosely held empire less than thirty years before. Some of these were heavily armoured with the metal protections which Xenophon had noticed and which Persian sculptures confirm; the flanks of the horses and the legs of some riders were guarded with large metal sheets, while metal leg-guards projected like flaps from others’ saddles to guard them against blows from a sword. The head pieces and breastplates of the horses were also of metal, while rich riders wore metal-plated armour and an encasing metal helmet, ancestors of the chain-mailed cataphracts of Sassanid Persia whom the Roman army nicknamed ‘boiler-boys’ because of the heat and metal of their armour. Such horsemen are far from mobile, but on the edge of a river bank where a jostle was more likely than a joust, heavy body-armour was more useful than mobility; it was a point, however, in Alexander’s favour that their fellow-cavalrymen were armed with throwing-javelins, while his Companions carried tougher thrusting-lances of cornel-wood. But this was only favourable if he could give himself space to charge, and a riverbed did not seem to allow this.
On foot, the Persians had summoned no archers but had hired nearly 20,000 Greeks from the usual sources of recruitment. At the moment they were positioned behind the line, but Memnon was a skilled commander of mercenaries, and if battle was joined immediately they would no doubt be advanced; the Companions would find it hard to break their solid formation unless they could take them in the flank, and not until they were broken could the Foot Companions charge with their sarissas. It promised to be a heavy fight.
One element ruled out hopes of a fair trial of strength: the river which ran between the two armies. Lining its far bank, the Persian troops held a splendid defensive position; for part of its course the river Granicus flows fast and low between sheer banks of the muddy clay which Alexander’s histories expressly mention as a hazard; its width is some sixty feet, and its sheer-banked section beneath the foothills of Mount Ida allows little freedom of movement for troops climbing down, through or up it. The Macedonian army had marched perhaps as much as ten miles in the day, and they needed time to spread out into battle order, especially as their commands were mostly passed down the line by word of mouth. The afternoon would be far advanced by the time they were ready for Alexander’s strategy. As he rode along the river bank on his second horse, for Bucephalas was either lame or too precious to be risked, he cut a prominent figure in his helmet with the two white plumes. But it is very disputable which kind of strategy he was about to choose.
According to one of his officers, writing after Alexander’s death, there was no doubt about it. The elderly Parmenion came forward to give his advice: it would be wisest, he was reported as saying, to camp for the night on the river bank, for the enemy were outnumbered in infantry and would not dare to bivouac nearby. At dawn, the Macedonians could cross the river before the Persians had formed into line, but for the moment a battle should not be risked as it would be impossible to lead troops through such deep water and up such steep and clifflike banks. ‘To fail with the first attack would be dangerous for the battle in hand and harmful for the outcome of the whole campaign.’
Alexander rejected the advice: he retorted, wrote his officer, that ‘he knew this to be the case, but was ashamed if, after crossing the Hellespont with ease, the petty stream of the Granicus should deter him from crossing there and then. He did not consider that delay was worthy of his Macedonians’ glory or his sharpness in the face of dangers. Besides, it would encourage the Persians to think they were a fair match for his men if they did not suffer the immediate attack which they feared.’ Parmenion was sent to command the left wing, while he himself moved down to the right; there was a long pause, and then to prove his point he launched the Mounted Scouts, followed by the Companions, against enemy cavalry who lined the far bank; by a display of personal heroics against the Persian generals which lost him his lance and nearly cost him his life, he cleared a crossing for the Foot Companions and a path to an afternoon victory.
This conversation with Parmenion is probably fiction, for Parmenion appears suspiciously often as Alexander’s ‘adviser’, not only in his officers’ histories but also in legend, whether Greek or Jewish, where he is usually refuted and so serves to set off his master’s daring and intelligence. It is more relevant that within four years of the battle, Parmenion was killed, on Alexander’s orders, for his son’s conspiracy. From the few surviving scraps of Callisthenes’s official history, Parmenion’s part in the great pitched battle of Gaugamela can be seen to have been criticized strongly and probably unfairly, and a story which was used at Gaugamela could easly have been applied at the Granicus too, perhaps again by Callisthenes, or by one or both of the later historians, Alexander’s friend Ptolemy and his elderly apologist Aristobulus. If Callisthenes began it, then this ‘refutation’ of Parmenion must have been to Alexander’s liking, perhaps because it was written after Parmenion had been killed and his memory was thought fit to be blackened. But it was not only a device to set off Alexander’s boldness; it was also dishonest, for others described a battle fought exactly as Parmenion suggested, and for various reasons they were probably correct.
Alexander, wrote a historian who owed him nothing, did encamp for the night on the Granicus banks. There was no dialogue with Parmenion, but at dawn Alexander crossed the river unopposed, probably because the Persians had indeed bivouacked on a hill a mile or two back; it was not a Persian practice to begin a march before sunrise, and their universal habit of camping casually at a distance and even hobbling their horses in front of camp had already been emphasized by Xenophon as a fine chance for attackers. Having stolen a march by stealth at dawn, Alexander fanned out his battle line and clashed with a headlong charge of the Persian cavalry, who had leapt astride on news of the surprise crossing and galloped ahead of the infanty. Against them, Alexander showed a heroism worthy of any Achilles, unhorsing several satraps and receiving a mass of weapons on his Trojan shield, but on the left, Parmenion and the Thessalian cavalry ran his gallantry a close second, a fact which the officers had failed to mention. After a prolonged jostle and much use of the scimitar, the Persian cavalry fled, having lost several satraps and generals; as dawn broke, Alexander’s battle line poured into the enemy camp, surrounding the Persians’ hired Greek infantry, who tried to make a stand. Outnumbered, they did manage to wound Alexander’s horse, but most of them were killed and a mere 2,000 were taken prisoner. Alexander could not afford to hire them himself, so he decided to make an example of them to all other Greek rebels; by his officer’s figures, this meant a massacre of more than 15,000 men.
The battle was fought and won in exactly the style which Parmenion, according to Alexander’s officers, had wrongly advised. Cunning at dawn, perhaps, seemed less dashing in retrospect and so less worthy of a hero; thus they invented an afternoon charge to replace it, and blamed the real battle on Parmenion’s excessive caution. In the search for Alexander the various myths and memoirs of his friends must be tested against the narrative of a literary artist, written within fifteen years of Alexander’s death from what he had heard and read from participants, and the Granicus battle is the first warning that the artist, though romantic and given to exaggeration, has kept truths which the officers distorted to set off the bold planning and invincibility of their king. Personal bias in matters of military glory should not surprise connoisseurs of history, but the weaving of a myth round a famous leader and his murdered general makes the lesson of the search no less immediate for being grounded in the distant past.
Of the sequel to the victory there is no room for doubt and little for complaint. As a leader of men, Alexander cast a spell which was firmly based on effort, and events on the Granicus showed its notable beginnings. Memnon and several satraps escaped, but Alexander buried the Persian leaders, a Greek gesture of piety which would have distressed its recipients, as many Persians did not believe in burial for religious reasons. In happier style, he ‘showed much concern for the wounded, visiting each of them in turn, looking at their wounds and asking how they got them’, and, human to the last, ‘he gave them a chance to tell and boast of what they had done in the battle’. Twenty-five of the Companion cavalry had been killed in the charge he led, so on the morrow, he ordered them to be buried gloriously, and decreed that their parents and children should be exempt from taxes, duties of service and capital levies; bronze statues of each of them were commissioned from his official sculptor Lysippus to be set up in Macedonia’s border town of Dion. As for the hired Greeks in Persian service, thousands of the dead were to be buried, but the prisoners were bound in fetters and sent to hard labour in Macedonia, ‘because they had fought as Greeks against Greeks, on behalf of barbarians, contrary to the common decrees of the Greek allies’. Under cover of his father’s myth, Macedonia gained a work force, and on a legal pretext an example was made to deter any future Greek recruits from joining the enemy’s cause.
The spoils were treated with similar glamour and astuteness. Their surplus was sent to Olympias as queen of Macedonia, but three hundred suits of Persian armour were singled out for dedication at Athens to the city’s goddess Athena, and the following inscription was ordered to be attached to them: ‘Alexander son of Philip and the Greeks, except the Spartans, from the barbarians who live in Asia.’ With this simple wording Alexander must be given credit for one of the most brilliantly diplomatic slogans in ancient history; Alexander, he called himself, not King Alexander nor leader nor general, but merely the son of Philip, in impeccably humble style; from the Greeks, he wrote, not the Macedonians not the Agrianians nor the tribes of Europe who had won a battle in which Greeks had only featured prominently on the enemy side; from barbarians, whose outrages he was avenging, but whose leaders he had none the less buried; from a victory, above all, of the Greeks ‘except the Spartans’, three words which summoned up emotions from all Greek history of the past two hundred years. On the one hand, no Spartans present, none of Greece’s best-trained soldiers, none of the Spartans who had turned back Xerxes long ago at Thermopylae, caring nothing for arrows which darkened the sun, because ‘Sparta did not consider it to be her fathers’ practice to follow, but to lead’; but also none of the Spartans whom the smaller cities of southern Greece still feared and detested, whose unpopularity had been shrewdly exploited by Philip, whose shadow had darkened the history of democracies not only at Athens but also throughout the Greek world, Spartans who had come to free the Greeks of Asia seventy years before and cynically signed them away to the Persian king; it was a message of clear meaning, and it tells much that it went to Athens, the city whose culture Alexander and his father had respected, but whose misconduct they had fought and feared for two decades.
A thousand years, said the historians, divided the victory at the Granicus from the fall of Troy, which Callisthenes had calculated to occur in the same month as Alexander’s invasion; a thousand years, therefore, between one Achilles and the coming of his rival to the plains of Nemesis, goddess of revenge, as Callisthenes described the site of the battlefield. It was indeed the start of a new age, though none of those who turned away from the site could ever have realized how; not in a new philosophy or science, but in the geographical width of conquest and the incidental spread of a people’s way of life.
We can very easily imagine
how utterly indifferent they were in Sparta
to this inscription, ‘except the Lacedaemonians.’*
But it was natural. The Spartans were not
of those who would let themselves be led and ordered about
like highly paid servants. Besides,
a panhellenic campaign without
a Spartan king as commander in chief
would not have appeared very important.
O’ most assuredly, ‘except the Lacedaemonians.’
That too is a stand. It is understood.
So, except the Lacedaemonians, at Granicus;
and then at Issus; and in the decisive battle
where the formidable army that the Persians
had amassed at Arbela was swept away,
that had set out from Arbela for victory and was swept away.
And out of the remarkable panhellenic campaign,
victorious, brilliant in every way,
celebrated far and wide, glorious
as no other had ever been glorified,
the incomparable: we were born;
a vast new Greek world, a great new Greek world.
We, the Alexandrians, the Antiocheans,
the Seleucians, the innumerable
rest of the Greeks of Egypt and of Syria,
and of Media, and Persia, and the many others.
With our extensive empire,
with the varied action of our thoughtful adaptations,
and our common Greek, our Spoken Language,
we carried it into the heart of Bactria, to the Indians.
Are we going to talk of Lacedaemonians now!†