THREE
Gaugamela, October 1, 331 B.C.
The Greeks, as I have learned, are accustomed to wage wars in the most stupid fashion due to their silliness and folly. For once they have declared war against each other, they search out the finest and most level plain and there fight it out. The result is that even the victors come away with great losses; and of the defeated, I say only that they are utterly annihilated.
—HERODOTUS, The Histories (7.9.2)
ANGLES OF VISION
The Old Man
POOR PARMENIO! Once more he was to be left behind as the divine Alexander, far away to the right, charged headlong into the Persian horde. Almost the entire battle line of the Macedonian army followed their king. The Companion Cavalry with Parmenio’s own son Philotas in charge, the royal phalanx of pikemen, assorted mercenaries, and the veteran shield-bearing infantrymen, or hypaspists—everyone on foot and horse, it seemed, but Parmenio was heading to the right and to the kill. Once again the old man was to stay fast; there was to be no glory for Parmenio other than in anchoring the left wing. He was left only with a few hundred of his battle-hardened Macedonian horsemen, supported by companies of pikemen left behind under the commanders Craterus and Simmias, some Greek cavalry led by Erigyius, and the 2,000 redoubtable Thessalian horsemen under Philip.
Earlier at the Granicus River (334 B.C.) and Issus (333 B.C.), it had also been up to Parmenio to protect the left horn of the Macedonian army— his wing being “refused,” in tactical parlance—while the mobile Alexander broke through a hole between the Persian center and left, drove behind the enemy, and routed their king. Alexander’s way had always been to collapse the imperial army before Parmenio himself was buried by the mounted hordes of Persia. Parmenio holds; Alexander attacks—such was the traditional formula that made Alexander responsible for victory, and Parmenio alone for defeat.
At Gaugamela the Macedonian left under Parmenio almost did implode—it was “thrown back and in distress,” the ancient biographer Plutarch dryly notes in his life of Alexander (Alexander 23.9–11). In fact, Parmenio’s men were vastly outnumbered—perhaps by three to one— and for a brief moment, facing annihilation. Our ancient sources suggest that the numerical disparity at Gaugamela was greatest on the left wing, where the Macedonians were almost broken during the first onslaught. Parmenio’s Macedonian mounted lords faced excellent enemy cavalrymen: Armenian and Cappadocian horsemen, some fifty scythed chariots, along with a mixed force of Persian infantrymen and imperial horsemen under the satrap of Syria, Mazaeus himself. A wave of 15,000 mounted killers was breaking against Parmenio’s island of 5,000 foot and horse.
These cavalrymen were not to be underestimated. Persian horses were somewhat larger than Macedonian. Both rider and mount in great numbers at Gaugamela wore heavy frontal armor. From the Eastern provinces of the empire arose a rather different tradition of horsemanship that would come to resemble the later cataphracts, or heavy mailed cavalrymen on stout warhorses that could break fluid lines of light infantry and horsemen. While Persian cavalrymen were not so accomplished at brutal hand-to-hand fighting—their short javelins and swords were no match for the lance and broad slashing sword of Alexander’s Companions—the size of their mounts, plentiful armor, sheer numbers, and the momentum of attack resulted in a brutal crash against Parmenio’s stationary men.
Darius’s marshals had learned what Macedonian heavy cavalry could do against Eastern horsemen and infantry, and thus at Gaugamela they were determined for once to field better-protected and more numerous mounted forces than their Greek adversaries—as if war might yet be won through manpower and matériel rather than by tactics and spirit. The historian Curtius records that at first the Macedonians were shocked at the appearance of these novel Bactrian and Scythian nomadic warriors because of their “shaggy faces and uncut hair, in addition to the sheer enormous size of their bodies” (History of Alexander 4.13.6).
Parmenio was among the first Europeans in Alexander’s entourage to have invaded Asia, and later the rock of the king’s line at the battles of Granicus, Issus, and now at Gaugamela. Parmenio had already lost a son in Alexander’s cause, and his last surviving two were to die within the year. The seventy-year-old veteran had less than a year to live. His last son, Philotas, now charging with the Companions at the side of Alexander himself, would soon be tortured by his king and stoned to death before the assembled troops on the false charge of conspiracy. Poor Parmenio, one of the last of Philip’s original Companions who had built Alexander’s army before the king was even born. A marshal whom hundreds of Persian enemies could never kill in battle—the historian Curtius said he was “the most skilled of Alexander’s generals in the art of war” (History of Alexander 4.13.4)—Parmenio would be decapitated ignominiously in peacetime, on the orders of the king he had saved so many times.
After his first battle in Asia at the Granicus River, the king had dedicated statues to the fallen Companions, visited the wounded, and released the families of the dead from taxes back home. Now three years later, Alexander was evolving into a different sort of monarch—increasingly suspicious of his officers, soon to be enlisting Persians into the army, enamored with the pomp and arrogance of an Eastern theocrat, intent to accomplish something megalomaniac well beyond the thuggery of looting and destroying the western satrapies of the Persian Empire. The king’s paranoia would lead him to butcher the one man who had helped invent his army, who years earlier had cleared away the rival aristocratic opposition for Alexander’s own succession, who had taught the young king how to keep the unruly Macedonian lowland princes in check, off and on the battlefield—and who would one more time stay put and so save the army at Gaugamela. One of the great ironies of Alexander’s later military career was his systematic destruction of the very officer class which had guaranteed all his major victories—a calculated purge that would transpire only after these old marshals had ensured the destruction of the Achaemenid army.
Parmenio’s demise—unexpectedly stabbed by Alexander’s courtiers, his body further pierced after death, his head sliced off and sent to the king—was eleven months still in the future, in the far-off Persian provincial capital of Ecbatana. Now the loyal Parmenio had more immediate problems. He was surrounded. Blinded by the dust kicked up by thousands of horses on all sides, he was not yet defeated, despite what Diodorus called the “weight and sheer numbers” of Mazaeus’s contingent (17.60.6). Not yet at least, and so he rallied his old guard of Macedonian horse lords to get in close with the Persians and hack and stab at their horses and faces. Along with his reliable Thessalians—the best light cavalry in the ancient world—he would beat off the waves of assault, ensuring that the Macedonian army at large was protected on its left and rear. If just one more time Parmenio stopped the Persians’ predictable outflanking movement, protected the Macedonian rear, and drew off half the Persian army, Alexander—Alexandros Megas, king of Asia, divine son of Zeus-Ammon, conqueror of Darius III, and soon-to-be emperor of Persia and architect of the most brilliant victory in the history of East-West confrontation—might still ride on to triumph and finish the destruction of the Achaemenid dynasty itself.
Parmenio had two critical problems. By Darius’s careful intent, there were neither mountains nor sea at the battlefield of Gaugamela—not even a river or gully nearby to protect the Macedonians’ wings from the far longer enemy line. Soon the Persian horsemen to his left were piling up and outflanking Parmenio by hundreds of yards, forcing the thinning line of his own outnumbered troops to bend horseshoelike as they sloughed off the encircling Persians before they got to the rear. His Thessalians on the immediate right likewise beat back a wave of scythed chariots and even a few Greek mercenaries, holding firm so that the enemy would have to go around rather than through Parmenio. Farther to the right, about a quarter mile beyond the Thessalians, there was a growing gap in the Macedonian line that threatened to wipe out the whole middle of the army. Alexander’s own charge to the right would prove deadly to the enemy, but for the time being his dash had taken most of the right center of the Macedonian army along with him. All that remained of a tactical reserve were two companies of phalangites and a few irregulars to protect Parmenio’s right flank.
Hundreds of veteran Persian and Indian horsemen poured through this tear and were already charging to the rear of Alexander’s army, into the Macedonian camp itself, plundering supplies, killing the guards, and freeing the Persian prisoners. At any moment they might turn on Parmenio’s isolated left wing, meet up with Mezaeus’s flanking Persians, and attack from both sides, encircling and annihilating the septuagenarian and his beleaguered horsemen. Arrian relates that Parmenio at this point was “struck from both sides” (Anabasis 3.15.1). If the Macedonian left could now be cracked, the Persian horsemen could finish the slaughter by riding down Alexander himself from the rear, before the galloping Companions could crack the Persians at their own front. Parmenio could either protect the Macedonian left wing from being outflanked or maintain the integrity of the center, but he could not do both.
The enemy’s greed for plunder probably saved Parmenio, since the Persians and Indians in the gap first paused to slaughter the unarmed camp guards. Booty and easy killing apparently seemed preferable to charging into grim Macedonian horsemen. Realizing his danger, Parmenio immediately sent a messenger toward the rising dust cloud far across the battlefield—always a good indication of Alexander’s position— to find the rambunctious king and get help. In the meantime he ordered the reserve pikemen still on his wing to turn about and begin spearing the plundering Persians. Then Parmenio readied his own horsemen for a final thrust through the circle, hoping to break out and meet Alexander halfway in no-man’s-land, crushing the Persian right wing between two mounted pincers. Rumors that Darius III far across the battlefield was fleeing to the rear, and that even the successful Persian contingents in front were tottering, gave Parmenio some hope that the worst was over. He might yet get out alive. For the time being, the veteran general stayed where he was, as he broke the crest of the galloping Persian horsemen, readying himself for the final charge of his life to meet his king.
Alexander’s Pique
Parmenio be damned, Alexander must have thought. The panicked messenger had somehow found him in the cloud—resplendent in a shiny iron and gem-encrusted helmet, puffed up in magnificent war belt and breast-plate, bestride the venerable Bucephalas—just as he prepared to follow the fleeing King Darius himself. The latter’s imperial guard and the entire middle of the Persian army were collapsing and retreating to the north. Dust, screams, and bodies dulled the senses of sight, hearing, and touch as Alexander was lost in the confusion and scarcely able to make out the chariot of the panicked Darius. Arrian says his horsemen “were striking the faces of their enemies with spears,” as the phalanx “bristling with pikes” followed and slammed into the enemy, yelling the old Macedonian war cry “alala, alala” (Anabasis 3.14.2–3). If this new and sudden report from Parmenio was true—that more than a mile away to his left and rear his old marshal was about to be annihilated—then there could be no pursuit of the Achaemenid king, no further anything until his own army behind was secure.
It was bothersome for the triumphant Alexander to turn around 180 degrees and ride back into the swarm of interlocked horsemen to save his senior general. The historian Curtius says that Alexander “gnashed his teeth in rage” at the very thought of breaking off his pursuit (History ofAlexander 4.16.3). After waiting for his moment of advance, Alexander was to retreat—not through his own failure, but because of the success that his own lieutenants apparently could not match. While Alexander had lost absolute control of the battle once he plunged into the Persian lines, Parmenio and his generals should have known their king’s agenda: hold firm and pivot on the left. Alexander on the right would soon enough prevent the Persian outflanking movement while the Companions crashed through the inevitable enemy gap to come.
Well before his rescue, Alexander was growing more and more tired of the old man and his circle of reactionary barons from the Macedonian lowlands. “Sluggish and complacent,” Plutarch says, the aged captain had become at Gaugamela, “his age undermining his courage” ( Alexander 33.10–11). All the old horse lords were becoming a bothersome—and suspicious—lot: the farther the army marched eastward, the more these cavalry commanders grew nostalgic for home. The more Persians he defeated, the more Parmenio and his clique worried that they might still lose. The more he talked of empire and a world civilization to come under his own godhead, the more his parochial rustics talked of petty looting and a retirement of leisure and affluence back in Europe. Age and homesickness had gotten the best of them all.
Three years earlier at the Granicus River, Parmenio had warned Alexander that it was too late in the day to ford the river and start the attack. He had tried to beg off the onslaught since even the waters at the ford reached waist-high, prompting the king to scoff that he would feel ashamed of fearing an enemy across “a tiny stream” after he had just crossed the Hellespont (Arrian Anabasis 1.13.7)! Parmenio was overruled and the battle won directly. The next year at Issus, the sixty-eight-year-old Parmenio needlessly fretted that Alexander might be poisoned before the battle. During the next few months Parmenio had wished to commit to a sea battle in lieu of sacking the strongholds of Phoenicia! Here at Gaugamela before the battle even began, once more a jittery Parmenio and his old guard, numbed by the sight of Darius’s vast horde, had advised a night attack. At that Alexander had finally snapped, “I shall not steal my victory” (Plutarch Alexander 31.12), insisting on a head-on confrontation. Parmenio had even (wisely) convinced his king to reconnoiter the battlefield in the days before the showdown, to ensure there were no hidden traps on the plain that might derail Alexander’s planned mounted thrust to the right.
Alexander’s sycophantic entourage ridiculed the caution of the old man. The philosopher Callisthenes (soon to be executed himself) is the most likely source of these pejorative morality tales, which culminated in the story of Parmenio’s advice to cease entirely the advance eastward. Before the campaign of Gaugamela, he had purportedly urged acceptance of Darius’s eleventh-hour offer of a Western Persian Empire for Alexander under the aegis of a general truce. “I would accept if I were you,” he told his king. “And I too if I were Parmenio,” Alexander barked back (PlutarchAlexander 29.8–9).
In the heat of battle, with Darius almost in his grasp, Alexander scoffed that Parmenio fretted more about the loss of the Macedonian camp and its valuables than the course of the battle itself. Nevertheless, he sent back the rider with the promise that Alexander and his Companions would reverse their course, though not without the insulting admonition to Parmenio that the victorious add the baggage of their enemies to their own, while the defeated must not worry about money or their slaves, but only how to fight bravely and die with honor. Parmenio was not worried about his own baggage, nor even about getting his hands on the rich camp of the enemy, but was terrified about the very survival of his entire wing, and with it the fate of a Macedonian army thousands of miles from the Aegean. That same specter struck Napoleon centuries later, when he remarked that Gaugamela was a great victory but too risky, since defeat would have stranded Alexander “nine hundred leagues from Macedonia.” Parmenio knew that the gallant dash of his king, brilliantly timed to crack the weakened Persian left and middle, was nevertheless a tremendous gamble: a chasm opened in the Macedonian lines the moment the Companions took off. If Alexander was right that the Macedonians were a victory away from inheriting the entire Persian Empire, Parmenio was equally correct that they were also a defeat away from total annihilation— 50,000 Europeans 1,500 miles from home in a sea of millions of enemies.
Up until Parmenio’s messenger arrived, the battle had been a perfect day. Plutarch says that Alexander’s chief problem when he slammed into the Persian line was the sheer mass of enemy dead and wounded who obstructed the pursuit “by grabbing on and entwining themselves around both riders and horses” (Alexander 33.7). Arrian adds that horsemen were literally “shoving” the Persians before the phalanx came on with their bristling spears (Anabasis 3.14.2–3). Alexander’s tactical plan was simple but typically brilliant: as Parmenio pivoted on the left, tying down the Persian right and securing the safety of the army’s rear, he would have the entire Macedonian line drift slowly rightward, toward the rough ground where Darius’s scythed chariots would be useless. In response, the Persian king would be forced to send his left wing to surround Alexander’s right and block the Macedonian drift—and thereby deplete his own middle companies in an effort to herd Alexander back.
Alexander would continue to send rightward successive contingents—light-armed, horse, and infantry—to force the Persian flanking contingents into an ever-widening hook. Meanwhile, Alexander himself would sit tight with his veterans until he spotted a gap at the heart of the weakened enemy middle. For just such a moment, Alexander was holding back his grand punch—a wedge of his Companions, hypaspists, and the phalanx. With these veterans—the best fighting men the ancient world would produce—he would charge through the hole, into the heart of the Persian line and right at Darius himself. True, the Persian army was far larger and in theory might outflank both his wings. But as long as his horsemen and reserves channeled the flanking assaults outward, the base of the Persian attack at some point surely must thin and weaken. In every outflanking attack, troops must be transferred from somewhere; that somewhere Alexander was confident he could spot and exploit before it was too late.
The key for Alexander was organization, tactics, and timing. Novel mobile contingents of light skirmishers and horsemen must be placed independently on the wings—backed by a reserve line of 6,700 heavy infantrymen—while the best of the Macedonian cavalry and phalangites were to be kept out of the preliminary fighting, ready as a razor-sharp blade for the decisive blow against the Persian center. Alexander must strike before his two wings were overwhelmed—and yet not too soon lest he hit the massive wall of the Persian middle that had not yet become weakened. When the long-expected gap in the Persian line for a moment opened up, there rode Alexander into the imperial guard, directly after Darius and the prize of the empire itself.
With Alexander’s recall the Achaemenid king escaped—only to be murdered nine months later by one of his satraps, Bessus. A disgruntled Alexander reined in Bucephalas and turned back out of the dusty cloud of dying men and horses to ride in the opposite direction, into the retreating Persians who had almost killed Parmenio. But the old baron no longer seemed to be in danger; in fact, Alexander spotted Parmenio’s fleeing attackers and deliberately rode head-on into them. If he were not to slaughter Darius’s fleeing entourage, he might as well wipe out the best horsemen of Scythia and Bactria in this secondary engagement.
All extant ancient sources emphasize that this final collision of horsemen was the most deadly moment of the entire battle. More than sixty Companions fell; hundreds of horses on both sides were slaughtered; and the Persian cavalry was nearly annihilated. Arrian adds that there was “no more javelin throwing or maneuvering of horses” (Anabasis 3.15.2), but rather a war of continual blows. More than sixty years earlier at the infantry battle of Coronea, the old Spartan king Agesilaus had likewise deliberately charged his victorious Spartan phalanx back into a retreating column of Theban hoplites and was nearly wiped out for his efforts. A battle like “none other of our time,” the eyewitness Xenophon wrote of that dreadful collision between heavy shock troops. In the Hellenic tradition an enemy on the horizon was not to be avoided, bypassed, or ignored, if there was even a slight chance that he could be struck head-on, face-to-face, and en masse.
Lord of Asia
Alexander would come to Gaugamela, Darius thought. He was sure of that much. So the king had prepared for the Macedonian’s arrival, seeking out a flat plain without obstacles for his scythed chariots, clear ground for his elephants, thousands of horsemen, and his much longer battle line— even Alexander could not overcome such advantages of terrain and numbers. At last, Darius thought, a cavalry battle in an open plain, precisely the type of mobile warfare his nomadic horsemen excelled at, and exactly the scenario dreaded by the phalangites of the West. Alexander, Darius also knew, would ride to battle at Gaugamela, just as he had charged across the river Granicus and up the high banks into the Persian mass, just as he had once ordered his men to advance through the stream, stockade, and embankment at Issus, just as he had insisted on storming the nearly impregnable Tyre and massive walls of Gaza, just as he had always come to destroy any obstacle, army, or citadel—flesh or stone—in his path. He would come to Gaugamela, river or no river, unfavorable ground or not, mused Darius. Alexander would come onto the chosen ground of King Darius III and thus once more be forced to battle according to His Majesty’s plans.
And why not? These “most foolish” Greeks had always done just that. At Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea they had forced decisive battles against Persians, despite being outnumbered. Seventy-seven years ago not too far from this spot, the trapped Greek hoplites of the Ten Thousand had refused the terms of Darius’s ancestor, Artaxerxes II, preferring to fight their way out of Persia. Even after their generals had been lured into a parley near Gaugamela itself, then tortured and executed, the leaderless Ten Thousand had still chosen to fight. They had battled the entire year, killing their way to the Black Sea and safety. Then in sight of Europe, many of them had stayed on, joined the Spartan army in Asia Minor, and fought Persians again. Yes, Darius thought, this crazed Macedonian youth would come up the Tigris River, hunt him down, and force a final battle for the empire of his forefathers.
This time Darius had picked his ground well. There were few hills. Alexander could use neither river nor sea to protect his flanks. Darius’s subjects had cleared the plain for the easy onslaught of his scythed chariots. Traps and spikes had been hidden where it was most likely Alexander would ride in. Had the Macedonians, the king thought, ever encountered elephants in battle?
The only worry? Long gone were most of his Greek mercenary hoplites, who had fought so well in the two prior pitched battles against Alexander. The original phalanx of hired Hellenic killers had been surrounded, and exterminated or captured at Granicus. Their replacements—more than 20,000 strong—were destroyed or scattered at Issus. Nowhere in Persia were there any such comparable infantrymen left who welcomed shock battle, men who could stand up to Alexander’s pikemen—surely neither the old Immortals of Persian legend nor the gaudy “Apple Bearers” with their famed sphere-butted spears. King Darius had only 2,000 Greek hoplites remaining, and thus no men in an empire of 70 million who were willing to charge the wall of Macedonian pikes. Alexander won at Gaugamela and elsewhere in Asia for the same reasons Greek infantry won overseas: theirs was a culture of face-to-face battle of rank-and-file columns, not a contest of mobility, numerical superiority, or ambush. It was no accident that Alexander’s veterans aimed their pikes and swords at the faces of the aristocratic mounted Persian elite, lords who had no experience with an enemy who sought to crash into them, push them down, and spear or slice them to pieces.
Could not Darius’s legendary scythed chariots—more than two hundred were assembled on the battlefield—mow down the clumsy phalanx if they could burst out unexpectedly from his line, race over the flat ground, and trap the phalangites before they were mobile? Could not elephants —he had obtained fifteen from India—also be useful if the Indians could bring them up safely through his lines and lead them head-on against Alexander’s Companions? Darius knew he had no real quality heavy infantry, but thousands of cavalrymen to surfeit, and so he determined that Gaugamela would be a vast war of horses, the greatest cavalry battle in Asia since the legendary battle of Kadesh between Egyptians and Hittites nearly a millennium earlier. Darius may have had nearly 50,000 mounted troops against fewer than 8,000 cavalry of Alexander. If the king could sweep the flanks of the Macedonian army, send his prized Bactrians and Scythian cataphracts around the enemy right, and simultaneously his trusted Mazaeus behind their left, then Alexander’s terrible phalanx would be not so terrible after all—surprised from the rear by mounted killers who could race around and cut the clumsy pikemen from behind. At Gaugamela, for the first time in the war for the Persian Empire, there were fearsome veterans from the steppes of the Eastern empire, men Alexander himself had never encountered before in the western satrapies, men of the caliber that could outflank and herd the Macedonians onto Darius’s massive advancing Persian center.
The Empire’s Last Battle
On October 1, 331, an aerial view of the battlefield of Gaugamela in the first few minutes would have revealed an enormous three-sided box of embattled Macedonians, as Alexander’s two wings bent backward, in their struggle to keep their encircling enemies to their sides rather than allowing them to their rear. Within the hour, however, Gaugamela was a radically different picture, more a race between desperate horsemen of both sides who had penetrated their respective enemies’ lines. Could Alexander and his Companions ride through the gap and shatter the Persians before the horsemen of Darius burst through a similar rip in his own lines? The answer was clearly yes. In singular fashion, Alexander wished to kill Darius, destroy his army, and annihilate every enemy soldier on the battlefield. He would pursue and slaughter his fleeing enemies unmercifully until they ceased to exist as a military force. For all that, he rode into the Persian mass: to stab the faces of the enemy with pikes, to throw them off their horses bare-handed, to crash their own mounts into the bigger horses of Darius. For all that and more, the dutiful Companions followed their king into the horde of enemy horsemen.
In contrast, the Persians and Indians who breached the Macedonian line headed directly for the cache of booty, more intent on the king’s adulation in freeing the Achaemenid royal prisoners than on the hard work of finishing off Parmenio. Alexander in a sea of Persians went about slaughtering an army, while amid Macedonians the Persians butchered camp followers. To Persian horsemen of the plains, loot, the rare chance to kill the unarmed, the frenzy of riding and raiding among tents and wagons, were the stuff of nomadic warfare: better to get your hands on plunder than lose it to some rival band of rapacious interlopers. To Macedonians and Greeks, however, charging, killing, and still more killing face-to-face were the essence of three centuries of the Western way of war.
Gaugamela (“the camel’s house”) was Alexander’s third, final, and greatest battle against the Achaemenid empire, more a slaughter than a real set piece per se, since a numerically superior force rapidly disintegrated through panic, fear, and the brilliant tactics of its adversaries. For hours until dusk Gaugamela was a story of thousands of imperial subjects—50,000 is a reasonable estimate—speared and ridden down from the rear as they sought safety along the plains of the upper Tigris valley. Scholars are unsure how many fought on October 1 and find unanimity only in rejecting the fantastic claims of our ancient sources that more than a million Persians were assembled. Most likely, Darius III had collected well over 100,000 horse and infantry, pitted against 47,000 Macedonians, some 7,500 to 8,000 of them horsemen—the largest European army that Alexander had hitherto mustered. Alexander may have had more Greeks in his army at Gaugamela than during his prior two battles, as Hellenic mercenaries—Thracians, Thessalians, and stout infantrymen from the Peloponnese—increasingly discovered that service with Macedon meant life and booty, while work for the Achaemenid king more likely ended in a lonely death in a far land.
Mesopotamia was a good enough place to fight. Both armies had ample provisions and plenty of water. The weather was dry and mild in early fall; and there was enough flat ground to accommodate thousands of killers. Babylon, with its promise for the victors of rest, feast, loot, and women, was a relatively easy three-week march downstream.
After tearing off the western portions of the empire and Egypt, Alexander in late summer 331 B.C. drove on toward Babylon in hopes of capturing the ancient city and forcing a showdown with the final military reserves of the Persian Empire. After having witnessed his own Achaemenid armies routed at Granicus (334) and again at Issus (333), as well as losing the key strongholds at Tyre and Gaza, in addition to the rich provinces of Ionia, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Cilicia, Darius understood that he must finally stay put and fight for the survival of the remaining, eastern half of his empire. He chose a small plain, more than three hundred miles north of Babylon on a small branch of the Tigris River, the Bumelus, about seventy-five miles from the town of Arbela.
Because Alexander’s tactics were well known, Darius had a good idea what to expect. The king, always on the enemy right wing, would seek a gap or some flanking entry around his own left, pour through with 2,000 to 3,000 heavy horsemen, and head straight for the Persian high command, all in hopes of creating a breach through the mass, as his shield-bearing spearmen and dreaded pikemen followed. Meanwhile, Parmenio on the left would stay steadfast and pivot if need be, until the morale of the imperial army was shattered as the ruling Achaemenid clique fled for their lives. All that Darius knew, but was helpless to stop, and so the day’s slaughter followed the script Darius feared and Alexander planned.
The Macedonians parted on cue for the scythed chariots— Gaugamela seems to be the only time these much-feared but rather impractical weapons were actually used en masse in any battle—and stabbed the drivers as they sped past. Darius’s elephants apparently panicked or were let through the phalanx—or never even made it to the front. Both chariots and elephants were found largely unscathed after the battle and taken as trophies. The latter after their maiden appearance at Gaugamela became a mainstay of Hellenistic warfare; the former became little more than the rhetoric of Greek romances and the sketch-pad doodles of Western engineers until the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The Persian flanking columns never quite surrounded their enemies; and the decisive charge of Indians and Persians that slammed into the Macedonian left and center now went after plunder, not Parmenio.
The consequence was that when the dust cleared on the morning of October 2, the plain of Gaugamela was an ungodly mess—Diodorus says that “the complete area of the battlefield was full of corpses” (17.50.61). Fifty thousand Persians were dead or dying—we need not believe some ancient reports of 300,000 killed—among a general detritus of wandering camp followers, crippled horses, and booty scavengers. Thousands of wounded crawled to the tiny streams and mudholes of the surrounding alluvial plains. Alexander himself returned to the battlefield to bury his dead. He collected little more than a hundred men from under the carcasses of well over a thousand Macedonian horses. Five hundred Persians had fallen at Gaugamela for every Macedonian—such were the disparities when a polyglot, multicultural force of panicked men fled on level ground before heavily armed veteran killers with pikes and seasoned cavalry, whose one worry was not to turn fainthearted in front of lifelong companions -in-arms. The myriad corpses of his enemy were left to decompose in the autumn sun. Alexander, worried only about the rot and smell, quickly moved his army away from the stink and headed south to Babylon and the kingship of the Achaemenids. “The battle,” Plutarch remarks, “resulted in the utter termination of the Persian Empire” (Alexander 34.1).
THE MACEDONIAN MILITARY MACHINE
There was irony in the Macedonian conquest of Greece and Persia. After spending two decades creating the army that had pacified Greece, Alexander’s father, Philip II, was gutted by a young aristocrat and embittered hanger-on, Pausanias, perhaps as part of a broken homosexual affair, but more likely on orders of Alexander and his mother, Olympias, to ensure the young prince’s succession. If Philip was assassinated at the moment when his murderous twenty years of command had at last borne fruit to create the unified kingdom of Macedon and Greece, so Alexander, after reaching the Indus, would die in Babylon at thirty-three, without enjoying the empire for which he had also fought so long and killed so many.
The royal army of Macedon was Philip’s, not Alexander’s. It had been formed and led for more than twenty years by Philip, while Alexander was at its head for little more than half that period. It was King Philip who crafted a grand new army; Philip who supplied it, led it, and organized it differently from anything in past Greek practice—in order to kill other Greeks. As it turned out, Alexander found his inheritance even more useful for killing Persians.
The equipment and tactics of his Macedonian phalanx in theory did not differ all that radically from that of the traditional hoplite spearmen of the Greek city-states, though the phalangites were mercenary and handpicked as the “tallest and strongest” of Philip’s recruits. The thrusting spear was retained, but lengthened from eight to between sixteen and eighteen feet and fitted with a heavier iron point and stouter bronze butt spike. Thus, it became a true pike—weighing nearly fifteen pounds, more than six times heavier than the old hoplite spear—and required both hands for adequate control and handling. Such sarissai were held six feet from the butt, and so extended twelve feet in front of the phalangites, giving the Macedonian pikeman an advantage in reach of eight to ten feet more than the traditional hoplite spearmen. The old hoplite round shield of some three feet was discarded, and in its place a tiny disk was hung from the neck or shoulder; greaves, heavy bronze breastplates, and headgear were also replaced, with either leather or composite materials, or abandoned altogether. In the bargain, the first four or five rows, not three, were thrusting, giving 40 percent more spearheads in the killing zone. Such a hedgehoglike front also provided an unusual degree of offensive might as well as defensive protection for the lighter-clad initial ranks.
In ideological terms the traditional Greek hoplites’ large shields, heavy breastplates and helmets, and spears of moderate size had reflected the old civic and defensive values of the militiamen of a free city-state— precisely the opposite mentality of pike-wielding, lightly protected, and aggressive Macedonian phalangites. The latter were hired and rootless men without a polis, often with no farm of their own, who added numerous feet to the hoplite’s spear but reduced the shield’s area by two-thirds: killing and the advance, rather than personal protection and holding ground, were prized. To this phalanx of grim, professional “foot companions” (pezetairoi), Philip added the Companion Cavalry (hetairoi), an elite body of aristocratic horsemen, heavily armored on strong mounts. Horse raising had always been frowned upon to the south in Greek city-state culture; it was an inefficient use of scarce land, privileged an elite who often agitated for autocracy, and was of little value against a wall of yeoman spearmen. Not so in Macedon, a society of two, not three, classes, of masters and serfs, in a land as broad and wide as Thessaly. The Companion Cavalry, we should remember, was ultimately to end up fighting lighter-armed Eastern, not Western, spear-carrying infantry.
Another contingent of infantry, with more armor and shorter spears, the “shield bearers” (hypaspists), also occupied the center of the Macedonian line, beside the phalanx. The hypaspists were the first infantry forces to follow behind the Companion Cavalry’s initial onslaught, thereby providing a crucial link between the mounted attack and the subsequent follow-up by the phalanx proper. Professional corps of light infantry, slingers, archers, and javelineers rounded out the composite army group, supplying both preliminary bombardment and crucial reserve support. The latter at Gaugamela—along with the tough Agrianians— held off the flanking movements of the Persian left, while Alexander and the hetairoi rode in, the hypaspists following, with the pezetairoilumbering behind, clearing and widening the gap with their pikes.
The old Hellenic phalanx had been reinvented by Philip and had therein gained fresh importance. It was to evolve even further from the dependence on rural protocol and ritual that made Greek armies operate close to home, and without the ability to be supplied for extended marches. Philip’s intention was to craft a new national army that might outmaneuver a Greek phalanx, and yet still easily crash through the Persian Immortals. He wanted an army like the phalanx of the Ten Thousand that had cleared the field of Persian infantry at Cunaxa (401 B.C.), but one that also might outflank such heavily armed and far more deadly Greek hoplites.
The Greeks’ central idea of fighting en masse through shock battle remained predominant at Macedon. Integrated with, and protected by, such variegated forces, Philip’s phalanx of true pikemen was more lethal and more versatile than the traditional hoplite columns. “Nothing,” the historian Polybius concluded nearly two centuries later, “can stand up to the phalanx. The Roman by himself with his sword can neither slash down nor break through the ten spears that all at once press against him” (18.30.9–10). Surely, Polybius was correct: the idea that men could stand firm when three, four, five, and more iron spearheads plunged into their limbs, heads, necks, torsos, and legs is improbable. Since the first five ranks of the Macedonian phalanx would present a staggered wall of points—with the first row’s pikes extending ten feet into the killing zone—an enemy would have to fight his way through “a storm of spears,” which protruded at every angle, before he could even reach the initial rank of the phalanx.
The Macedonian phalangites turned their full attention to thrusting their dreadful spears, without the cumbersome weight of the old hoplite panoply—or the need to protect with an enormous shield their immediate comrades on the right. Offensive movement, leveled pikes, and constant motion forward meant everything; defense, large shields, and worry over covering neighbors were of little consequence. Once a phalanx achieved momentum, and its pikes were rambling forward, nothing could withstand the terrifying force of oncoming Greek iron. Imagine the Persian unfortunates shredded by repeated stabbing: the chief problem for their victorious Macedonian executioners was to keep spearheads free of ruined enemy equipment and the weight of mutilated corpses. From literary sources we receive the impression that in this horrendous world of phalanx-killing, it was not sleek youth or elegant muscle that the infantry commander sought out, but stout, grubby old veterans, with the nerve and experience not to flinch in the task at hand and thus stay in rank during the charge and collision to follow.
Used with greater precision and power, the new Macedonian phalanx delivered a knockout blow once the target had been sighted and left vulnerable by the work of cavalry and ancillary contingents. Hammerlike, the Macedonian cavalry charges concentrated on a set spot on the enemy line, broke through, and eventually battered the enemy back onto the clumsy anvil of the spear-bristling phalanx. This coordination between infantry and horsemen was an entirely new development in the history of Western warfare, and was designed to make numbers superfluous. Philip’s battles were not to be huge shoving matches between phalanxes, but sudden Napoleonic blasts to particular spots, which when exploited would collapse and thereby ruin the morale of the others. Unlike the prior evenly matched battles inside Greece, the Macedonian army in Asia had to assume it would be outnumbered by three to one.
Alexander’s Successors in the decades after his death were often criticized for abandoning his mastery of mounted and infantry coordination in favor of sheer bulk: lengthening pikes to twenty feet and more and bringing in elephants and torsion artillery in place of skilled, seasoned cavalry. In their defense, captains like Antigonus, Seleucus, Eumenes, and Ptolemy were not, like Alexander, fighting Persians but other Macedonian and Greek armies against which mounted charges had little effect. To break apart a phalanx of pikemen in a decisive battle required elephants or another phalanx. Consequently, Alexander’s fluidity and mastery of cavalry battle were not so much forgotten by his successors as deemed irrelevant in the new wars that saw armies of Greek and Macedonian pikemen, led by tough European veterans who would have frightened Alexander’s horsemen.
Philip brought to Western warfare an enhanced notion of decisive war. True, the Macedonians’ face-to-face, stand-up fighting was reminiscent of the shock assaults of the Greek phalanxes of the past. The running collisions of massed infantry, the spear tip to the face of the enemy, were still the preferred Hellenic creed of any Macedonian phalangite. But no longer were Macedonians killing merely over territorial borders. Battle was designed predominantly as an instrument of ambitious state policy. Philip’s destructive mechanism for conquest and annexation was a radical source of social unrest and cultural upheaval, not a conservative Greek institution to preserve the existing agrarian community. Decisive face-to-face battle, once embedded in Greek cultural protocol—notification of intent, limited pursuit, exchange of prisoners, agreement to accept the victory of the battlefield scrum—had become the centerpiece of a new total war of brutal annihilation which the world had not yet seen. Small Greek armies of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. had met on small plains to collide together, push, stab, and force their adversaries off the battlefield, an hour or so of battle often deciding an entire war. The Macedonians saw no reason to stop fighting at the collapse of their enemy on the battlefield when he could be demolished in toto, and his house and land looted, destroyed, or annexed.
Philip’s men, too, were a completely different breed from the Greek hoplites of the city-state. In his lost comedy Philip, the playwright Mnesimachus (ca. 350 B.C.) makes his characteristic Macedonian phalangites brag:
Do you know against what type of men you’ll have to fight?
We who dine on sharpened swords, and drink down blazing torches as our wine.
Then for dessert they bring us broken Cretan darts and splintered pike shafts. Our pillows are shields and breastplates, and beside our feet lie bows and slings.
We crown ourselves with catapult wreaths.
(Mnesimachus frg. 7 [cf. Athenaeus 10.421b])
In the conservative fourth-century-B.C. oratory of the Greek polis, Philip himself appeared as a limping, one-eyed monster, a terrible man who would fight at any time, in any manner. Demosthenes warned the Athenians:
You hear of Philip marching unchecked, not because he leads a phalanx of hoplites, but rather because he is accompanied by skirmishers, cavalry, archers, mercenaries, and similar troops. When relying on these forces, he attacks a people that is at odds with itself, and when through distrust no one goes forth to fight for his country, he next brings up his artillery and lays siege. I need hardly tell you that Philip makes no difference between summer and winter, and has no season set apart for inaction. (Demosthenes 9, Third Philippic 49–51)
After the assassination of Philip (336 B.C.), and Alexander’s subsequent subjugation of the Greek states following the destruction of Thebes, the twenty-year-old king inaugurated his deceased father’s planned Persian invasion with a victory at the Granicus River near the Hellespont (334). In his first savage onslaught at the Granicus, Alexander established a pattern of battle in which we can distinguish a rough sequence of events that appears at all three of his subsequent major triumphs at Issus (333), Gaugamela (331), and the Hydaspes River (326): brilliant adaptation to often unfavorable terrain (all his battles were on plains chosen by his adversaries); generalship by frightful example of personal —and always near fatal—courage at the head of the Companion Cavalry; stunning cavalry blows focused on a concentrated spot in the enemy line, horsemen from the rear turning the dazed enemy onto the spears of the advancing phalanx; subsequent pursuit of enemy forces in the field, reflecting Alexander’s impulse to eliminate, not merely to defeat, hostile armies. In all such cases, the overriding agenda was to find the enemy, charge him, and annihilate him in open battle—victory going not to the larger force, but to the one who could maintain rank and break the enemy as a cohesive whole.
Alexander never led an army larger than 50,000 men—by necessity more than by intent: he was forced to leave at least 40,000 Macedonians back in Greece to keep the peace. In his first battles (e.g., Granicus and Issus) there were more Greeks fighting against him than for him. Given the fact that garrisoning and constabulary forces were also needed to secure his conquest, it is a wonder—given the limited manpower reserves of Macedonia—that he had any army left at all. Such practical manpower considerations are critical in any assessment of his later “humanitarian” efforts at including Persians and other Asians in his army. Remember also that for the first four years of his invasion (334–331), there were thousands of Greeks who made their way to Persia to fight Alexander the “liberator”—and almost no Persians who fought for him.
To Alexander, as was true of Napoleon, the size of the opponent mattered little, since he would concentrate on only a small segment of the enemy line, while his father’s old marshals would hold the enemy fast elsewhere. Reserves would help to ensure that the enemy did not reach his own rear. Alexander himself would wait, seek his opening, and send his wedge of horsemen and heavy pikemen to blast apart the enemy, his charge sending ripples of fear through thousands of less disciplined imperial subjects. Who of the enemy—themselves of differing speech and custom—would be the first to stay and die against the crazed Macedonian so that others in the Great King’s army could follow their sacrifice and swarm Alexander?
KILLING SPREE
Was Alexander Greek? Linguistically not in the pure sense, for few in the central and southern Greek world could understand much Macedonian, a distant Hellenic dialect less akin to proper Dorian or Ionic Greek than an Arkansas twang is to Oxford English. To the Greeks, the problem with Macedon was not its harsh and mostly incomprehensible language, much less matters of race, but its culture. Specifically, there were no true city-states north of the Greek border with Thessaly, just hamlets and villages of the poor, juxtaposed to the few vast estates of the horse-breeding rich—all overseen by a conglomeration of warring and often petty monarchs whose palaces and tombs today constitute most of the archaeological record of ancient Macedonia. Philip had united these lords into a real kingdom, and he had brought Hellenic artists, philosophers, and men of science to Macedon, subsidizing the Greek influx of talent with booty and stolen gold.
Thousands of hired Greek scientists and craftsmen eventually accompanied Alexander and his Macedonians eastward to ensure technological and organizational superiority over the Achaemenid armies: Diades, the Thessalian siege engineer who “took Tyre,” with his colleague Charias, and the other designers, Phillipus and Poseidonius; Gorgias, the hydraulic engineer, and Deinocrates, the town planner who laid out Alexandria; Baeton, Diongnetos, and Philonides, who systematically organized camps and surveyed routes; the naval experts Nearchus and Onesicritus; Eumenes, the head of the secretarial service; the natural philosopher and historian Callisthenes and his assistants; and Aristobolus, architect and engineer. The Macedonians had also hired thousands of southern Greeks in their army, from mercenaries to scientists, all seeking a steady wage and the patronage of the royal house. Whereas the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.), fought for principle and leadership of Greece, had nearly wrecked the old Greek city-states, Alexander’s nakedly predatory rampage in the East had the opposite effect of creating, not consuming, capital for the Western world.
Where Philip and Alexander drew the line on the imported Hellenic tradition was, like the later Japanese, politics—ta politika (“matters of the polis”). From Greece—Philip had been a young hostage at Thebes (369–368 B.C.) during the heyday of the brilliant Theban general Epaminondas—the king welcomed the phalanx, and with it the tradition of large infantry musters, decisive head-on assault, disciplined ranks, and the beginning of real tactical maneuver. From Greece Philip embraced the rationalist tradition and the disinterested pursuit of science and natural inquiry apart from religion and government—only that way might he build elaborate siege engines and torsion catapults. From Greece he adopted the traditions of individual initiative, coupled with iron-clad military discipline that put more emphasis on group solidarity than the number of enemy killed by heroic warriors. In that manner, he might recruit and train spirited phalangites who would charge into a wall of spear tips on his orders.
Before the battle at Gaugamela Alexander reminded his hired mercenaries that they were nonetheless “free” men—in contrast to the Persians, who were felt to be mere slaves. While not a single man had voted for Alexander as their king, there was nevertheless some truth to what he said. The legacy of Hellenic freedom was not to be defined entirely in political terms, but, as Aristotle noted, as “doing as one pleased.” Alexander’s phalangites, like the hired Ten Thousand earlier, enjoyed a liberality of association, as they held spirited and boisterous assemblies, voted on proposals when it was convenient to Alexander, and at royal banquets and sports enjoyed a familiarity with their betters unknown at the Persian court. It would turn out that even hired killers who were not citizens eventually became disgusted with the growing orientalism of Alexander—and the revolting custom of proskynēsis, or a free man’s kowtowing to another as if he were a living god.
Philip, however, had no interest in civic militarism, civilian control over his military, or abstract political freedom for his soldiers—the entire baggage of the weak and squabbling city-states. That distrust he taught Alexander—and he added one brilliant piece of propaganda as well: the Great Idea of a Panhellenic crusade into Persia, a final Götterdämmerung that would pay back the Achaemenids for the burning of the Athenian acropolis, revenge their enslavement of Hellenic Ionia and a century of meddling in Greek affairs, empty the Persian treasuries to enrich the Balkans beyond imagination, and provide a final unification of all Greek-speaking peoples, a real nationhood of men-in-arms at last. Only this way, Philip knew, could he leave a secure Greece to his rear as he headed eastward. True, there would always be patriots and firebrands like Demosthenes and Hyperides who would intrigue and revolt, always Greek hoplites eager to fight him in Asia for the Great King’s pay. Under his phony “League of Corinth,” Philip could say he was killing “for Greece,” not himself. In this first European “Crusade” Philip offered to a squabbling Greece the unification necessary to ransack a unified and despotic East.
Consequently, Alexander’s entire relationship with Hellenism, with Western culture itself, is paradoxical. No single man did more to spread the art, literature, philosophy, science, architecture, and military practice of Hellenic culture eastward beyond the borders of mainland Greece than Alexander the Great—and no foreigner did more to destroy three hundred years of liberty and freedom of the Greeks inside Greece than did Philip and his son. Alexander the Great mustered more Greek-speaking soldiers to kill more non-Greeks than any other Greek in history—and himself engineered the death of more Greeks at Chaeronea, at Thebes, at the Granicus, and at Issus than any Greek general in history. Alexander’s original intention was to rob and loot an aging Achaemenid kleptocracy. In the process he unleashed the stored tribute of centuries, whose newly coined money fueled a cultural renaissance unimagined under Persian rule, as thousands of Greek profiteers, engineers, and itinerant craftsmen followed him into Persia. Alexander went eastward, he said, to spread Hellenism. Yet no philosopher, king, or holy man did more to Orientalize Greeks than Alexander, who weakened secular Greek city-states in order to embrace Asian theocracy, leaving as his legacy the three-century-old Hellenistic practice of a plutocratic god-king, ensconced and isolated from his subjects in an imperial capital.
Alexander’s expropriation of the Hellenic military tradition, without the bridle of parochial local government and the logistical constraints of amateur hoplites, meant that the Greeks for the first time in their history might find the natural limits of their military power at the distant Indus River. By the same token, Alexander’s rejection of constitutional government, of civic militarism, and of municipal autonomy ensured that his conquests would never result in a stable Hellenic civilization in Asia, or even liberty in Greece—but simply the Successors’ kingdoms (323–31 B.C.) of his like-minded marshals who followed. For three centuries theocrats—Macedonians, Epiriots, Seleucids, Ptolemies, Attalids—would rule, fight, plunder, and live in splendor amid a Hellenic veneer of court elites and professionals in Asia and Africa until at last they were subdued by the legions of republican Rome. The latter, unlike the Hellenistic Greeks, really would combine the ideas of Hellenic politics, civic militarism, and decisive battle, to forge vast and deadly forces of voting citizens, whose government created the army, rather than the army the government.
What were the political and cultural results of decisive battle in the hands of Alexander the Great? Ancient historians of the Roman age, their sources traceable in a convoluted trail back to contemporaries of Alexander himself, present both a “good” and a “bad” Alexander—either Homer’s Achilles come alive whose youthful exuberance and piety brought Hellenism to its proper florescence, or a megalomaniac, drunken, and self-indulgent thug, who butchered most in his path before turning on his father’s friends and compatriots, the men whose loyalty and genius created him in the first place. That debate continues today. The majority of contemporary Greeks despised Alexander for robbing them of their freedom and butchering them from Thebes to the Granicus. If we put aside later romance about Alexander—his supposed efforts to achieve the “brotherhood of mankind” or to bring “civilization” to the barbarians— we can agree that his real genius is mostly military and political, not humanitarian or philosophical: a brilliant innovation of Hellenic warfare, with the savvy needed to use such power to liquidate and bribe rivals who wished to do the same to him.
Alexander brilliantly employed decisive battle in terrifying ways that its long-conquered Hellenic inventors had never imagined—and in a stroke of real genius he proclaimed that he had killed for the idea of brotherly love. Cortés, a similar military prodigy, would likewise slice through the ranks of the Mexicas, slaughtering them in decisive battle that was largely outside their cultural experience, claiming that he did it for the Spanish crown, the glory of Christ, and the march of Western civilization. To Alexander the strategy of war meant not the defeat of the enemy, the return of the dead, the construction of a trophy, and the settlement of existing disputes, but, as his father had taught him, the annihilation of all combatants and the destruction of the culture itself that had dared to field such opposition to his imperial rule. Thus, Alexander’s revolutionary practice of total pursuit and destruction of the defeated enemy ensured battle casualties unimaginable just a few decades earlier.
At the Granicus River (May 334 B.C.) Alexander destroyed outright the Persian army, surrounded the trapped Greek mercenaries, and massacred nearly all of them—except 2,000 whom he sent back as slaves to Macedon. Our sources disagree over the precise casualty figures; Alexander may have exterminated between 15,000 and 18,000 Greeks after the battle was essentially won. He killed more Hellenes in a single day than the entire number that had fallen to the Medes at the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea combined! As many as 20,000 Persians fell as well at Granicus—far more than in any single hoplite battle in two centuries of warfare on the mainland. Granicus proved two points: Alexander would have to kill like no other Westerner before him to achieve his political ends, and he would be forced to eliminate thousands of Greeks, who for either greed or principle were willing to fight him in service of the Persian king.
The next year at Issus (333 B.C.), against the grand army of Darius III himself, the fatalities reached new magnitudes never before seen in battle involving either a Greek or a Macedonian army. Another 20,000 Greek mercenaries fell, and anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 Persian recruits were dead by the end of the day—a formidable challenge of time and space to butcher more than 300 men every minute for eight hours. This was extermination taken to new heights, evidence of what the Western way of war might evolve into when shock battle was used to annihilate the enemy rather than settle parochial border disputes. The Macedonian phalanx did not push men off the battlefield as much as slaughter them from the rear for hours on end after the battle was already decided.
After Gaugamela, at his fourth and last victory over the Indian prince Porus at the Hydaspes River (326), Alexander killed around 20,000 of the enemy. Very conservative figures suggest that in the space of just eight years Alexander the Great had slain well over 200,000 men through decisive battle alone—at the cost of a few hundred of his own Macedonians. Only the Greek mercenary hoplites at Granicus and Issus had caused him real problems, and finally they were outnumbered, surrounded, and almost annihilated—nearly 40,000 at the two battles, enough to ensure that there were scarcely any available at Gaugamela. Only Caesar in Gaul and Cortés in Mexico would rival Alexander’s record of battlefield dead and subsequent civilian losses during years of pacification. Clearly, the Western approach to war—shock and frontal collision by walls of highly trained and disciplined professional foot soldiers—had created a one-sidedness in casualties heretofore unforeseen in Asia.
In between these formal battles, Alexander also stormed a host of Greek and Persian cities, displaying the truth that the Western way of war was no longer a technique of infantry battle, but an ideology of brutal frontal assault against any obstacle in its way. Alexander systematically captured and enslaved nearly all cities in his path, beginning in Asia Minor, proceeding to the Syrian coast, then into the eastern satrapies of Persia and ending with the carnage of Indian communities in the Punjab. We hear little from any sources about the precise number of those killed in Alexander’s capture of Miletus (334), Halicarnassus (334), Sagalassus (333), Pisidia (333), Celanae (333), Soli (333), the massacre of the Branchideae (329), the various fortresses of Syr-Darya (329), the stronghold of Ariamazes (328), the Indian cities of Massaga (327), Aornus (327), and Sangala (326). Most of these strongholds were larger than Thebes, his inaugural siege, which saw 6,000 Greeks butchered in the streets. Arrian suggested 80,000 were cut down in the storming of the southern Punjabi cities around Sindimana, and 17,000 Indians killed and 70,000 captured at Sangala. A conservative estimate would assume a quarter million urban residents were killed outright between 334 and 324 B.C., most of them civilian defenders who lived in the path of Alexander’s trek east.
The most well documented carnage was in Phoenicia at Tyre and Gaza. After months of heroic defense, Tyre fell on July 29, 332. We have no exact record of how many were lost in the city’s defense, but on the city’s final day of existence 7,000 to 8,000 residents were slain in the chaos. Two thousand surviving males were crucified as a lesson in the futility of resistance. Anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 women and children were enslaved. Tyre, like Thebes before, ceased to exist as a community. Gaza, farther south on the Syrian coast, was next. After a two-month siege Alexander let his troops murder the city’s inhabitants at will. All Syrian males were exterminated. Nearly 10,000 Persians and Arabs died. All captured women and children, numbering in the untold thousands, were sold into slavery. Alexander bound Batis, the governor of Gaza, pierced his ankles with thongs, and dragged him around the city, Achilles-style, until the tortured victim expired.
For most of his decade in Asia, Alexander was unable to draw his enemies out to pitched battle, and so brought battle to them, marching in obscurity to the East, systematically burning villages, murdering local elites, and razing strongholds in dirty wars of retaliation, in which nomadic Eastern traditions of skirmishing, ambushes, and hit-and-run attacks wreaked havoc on his army. The list of decimated peoples in what is now Afghanistan, Iran, and the Punjab is nearly endless, but a small sampling can give some idea of the sheer number of tribes that were either pacified or exterminated through Alexander’s Western propensity to advance ruthlessly against the main loci of enemy settlement. To the south of Susa, the mountain villages of the Uxiis of the Zagros Mountains were systematically sacked. Most of the inhabitants were killed or displaced. At the Susian Gates, in western Iran, during his approach to Persepolis, Alexander wiped out the forces of the satrap Ariobarzanes; only a handful of survivors escaped down the mountain. It took Alexander only five days to hunt down and conquer the Mardis of eastern Iran, who were incorporated in Alexander’s empire and forced to provide men, horses, and hostages (331).
In Bactria Alexander began to cleanse in earnest when faced with local revolts and secessions. An expatriate community of Greeks, the so-called Branchideae, were said to have been wiped out to the man. The Sacans of Sogdiana—fierce veterans of Gaugamela—were extinguished and their territory ravaged. Convinced that the rich villages of the Zervashan valley to the south had aided the rebellions in Sogdiana, Alexander stormed their fortresses too. He executed all the defenders whom he found alive; 8,000 alone were killed in the capture of Cyrupolis. The revolts in Bactria and Sogdiana (329–328) were little more than two years of uninterrupted fighting, looting, and executing. Alexander followed the same pattern of total war in India (327–326). He massacred all the defenders along the Choes River in Bajaur. After promising the surrounded Assacenis their lives upon capitulation, he executed all their hired soldiers who surrendered. Their other strongholds at Ora and Aornus were likewise stormed. The garrisons were probably slaughtered. Most of the villages of the Mallis of the lower Punjab were razed. The civilian refugees were butchered in the flight into the desert. Most agree that tens of thousands were killed.
The East had never experienced anything like Alexander’s army, which offered the enemy the choice of submission or death, and had the will and power to accomplish both. None of these tribes had a prayer against the Macedonians in pitched battle. Their only chance was to wage desultory wars in the mountains, in hopes of slowing down and frustrating Alexander’s progress, rather than defeating him outright. On his passage through the Gedrosian desert in 325 B.C., when his own men were not dying, Alexander attacked the Oreitae. Alexander’s lieutenant Leonnatus killed 6,000 of them in one engagement. Between famine and military conquest the Oreitae had their territory depopulated. Any figure for the human costs for the subjugation of Bactria, Iran, and India is impossible, but many villages and provincial strongholds were the homes of thousands. After the arrival of Alexander, their communities were destroyed and their male defenders killed, enslaved, or recruited.
For what purpose was all the killing? Alexander’s desires are not known, although pacification of a new empire from the bones of Achaemenid rule are the most likely explanations for his continuous rampage through Asia. Sometimes the Macedonians killed in transit or in general quarters; so lethal had Alexander’s war machine become that it was a danger even to itself. After the Persian capital of Persepolis was handed over in submission, Alexander had allowed his Macedonians an entire day of plunder and gratuitous butchery. The frenzied Macedonians pillaged the houses even of the common people, carried off the women, and sold into slavery any who survived the day of random killing. Plutarch remarks that there was also much slaughter of the prisoners. Curtius adds that many residents preferred to jump from the walls with their wives and children or torch their own households and families rather than be gutted in the streets. Mass suicide is rare among European populations, but more common among the victims of Western arms: non-Western peoples when confronted with the hopelessness of resisting Western arms, from Xenophon’s Ten Thousand to Roman legions in the Holy Land to Americans on Okinawa, have often preferred voluntary group death.
After a respite of a few months, all the imperial treasury was carted off—few precious metals were ever found in Persepolis by modern excavators—and the royal palace torched amid a mass orgy of drunken debauchery. Fires probably spread beyond the palace and for a time left the capital uninhabitable. Documentary sources chronicle the immense loot gathered—120,000 talents by most accounts, the material bounty requiring 10,000 pairs of mules and 5,000 camels to carry away—but do not calculate the human cost. If Persepolis was capital of an empire of millions, and its population was in the hundreds of thousands, thousands died during the initial killing, subsequent enslavement, and final deportations and dispersals.
In an empire of 70 million there was no native constabulary force that could prevent 30,000 veterans from the West from doing whatever they pleased. The result was that hundreds of thousands died literally from being in Alexander’s way. Macedonians and indigenous tribes were killed on Alexander’s ill-fated crossing of the Gedrosian desert in late summer 325 along the northern coast of the Indian Ocean, from the Indus River delta to the Persian Gulf. Ancient sources give lurid accounts of the suffering and death on the march of some 460 miles over sixty days. Alexander embarked with an army of at least 30,000 combatants, followed by a lengthy train of thousands more women and children. Arrian, Diodorus, Plutarch, and Strabo speak of unending losses to thirst, exhaustion, and sickness, and mention tens of thousands left dead. In three months Alexander was responsible for more deaths among his own troops than in a decade of losses to Persian soldiers. The real threat to Macedonian phalangites was not a Persian or Indian renegade, but their own murderous general.
Unlike the prior practice of the Greek city-states, there were no shared commands by a board of generals in the Macedonian army—no civilian audits, no ostracism through voting or court trials to oversee the high leadership of the Macedonian army and its king. Alexander as absolute ruler reacted to suspicions of disloyalty with instant sentences of death. An entire generation of Macedonian noblemen was executed by the king they served. The murders increased with the paranoia and dementia of his last years—and with the realization that their services in pitched battle were no longer needed after the collapse of the Achaemenid royal army and the extermination and enslavement of the dangerous Greek mercenaries.
The mock trial and subsequent torture and stoning of his general Philotas (330) are well known. Far from being a conspirator, Philotas, who had shared command of the Macedonian cavalry and fought heroically in all of Alexander’s major campaigns—he led the charge of the Companions through the Persian line at Gaugamela—was guilty of little more than arrogance and failure to pass on gossip about possible dissension against the king. With Philotas’s gruesome death, his father, Parmenio (no charges were ever brought against him) was murdered as well. Various other Macedonian nobles disappeared or were killed outright as the army moved farther east from Babylon. The so-called Black Cleitus, who had saved Alexander at the Granicus, was speared to death at a drunken banquet by the intoxicated king himself. After a number of young Macedonian pages were stoned to death for suspicion of sedition (327 B.C.), Alexander executed the philosopher Callisthenes, nephew of Aristotle, who had objected to the king’s practice ofproskynēsis.
After emerging from the Gedrosian desert, Alexander went on a seven-day binge of drink and revelry, culminating in a series of further execution decrees. The generals Cleander and Sitacles, and later Agathon and Heracon, and six hundred of their troops were killed without warning or legal trial. Purportedly, they were guilty of either malfeasance or insubordination. More likely, they were cut down because of their past involvement in carrying out Alexander’s order to execute the popular Parmenio—a blunder that had not gone down well with the rank-and-file veterans and required some ceremonial show of expiation.
Alexander literally decimated an entire corps of 6,000 men—the first clear evidence in Western warfare of that practice of lining up and executing one out of every ten soldiers. Alexander had introduced to the West from the East and South the twin ideas of decimation and crucifixion. In turn, his own original contribution to Western warfare was the carnage of decisive battle when completely divorced from moral restraint and civic audit. Alexander unleashed the idea of shock battle as the annihilation of the enemy. The Greek world had never seen anything quite like him.
Alexander the Great was not a well-meaning emissary of Hellenism. He was an energetic, savvy adolescent and an authentic military genius, who was naturally curious and saw propaganda value in being surrounded by men of letters. He inherited from his father a frighteningly murderous army and was wise enough to secure the loyalty of a cadre of shrewd and experienced battle administrators—at least until the Persian army was defeated. Alexander understood how to modify the Hellenic tradition of decisive battle for murderous new ends, baffling his opponents in the East, who believed that ambush, ruse, negotiation, raiding, and plundering were all preferable to a head-on collision of shock troops.
The Hellenistic age (323–31 B.C.) began with Alexander’s final destruction of Greek freedom and political autonomy. His introduction of Greek military culture beyond the Aegean and the economic stimulus of flooding the Greek world with the stored and previously untapped gold and silver of the imperial Persian treasuries fueled political oppression and economic disparity—even as it drew writers and artists to the new courts of the age. He left exploiting monarchies in place of Greek autonomous polities—which nevertheless drew on the Western traditions of rationalism and disinterested learning to create cities, great art, and sophisticated agriculture and commerce. There was no room in Alexander’s world for patriots and politicians, but far more opportunity and money for artists and academics than in the past.
For all his professed devotion to Greek culture, Alexander died a man closer at heart to Xerxes than to Themistocles. Under the subsequent Hellenistic dynasts, militiamen gave way to paid mercenaries, and war consumed budgets and manpower at astronomical rates. Free markets, military research, and sophisticated logistics combined to form deadly Western armies unimaginable a few decades earlier. The Eastern notion of a divinity enthroned became the norm in the Hellenistic Successor states—with all the accustomed megalomania, gratuitous slaughter, and oppression that we associate with theocracies. Scholars sometimes compare Alexander to Caesar, Hannibal, or Napoleon, who likewise by sheer will and innate military genius sought empire far beyond what their own native resources might otherwise allow. There are affinities with each; but an even better match would be Adolf Hitler—a sickening comparison that will no doubt shock and disturb most classicists and philhellenes.
Hitler similarly engineered a brilliant but brutal march eastward during the summer and fall of 1941. Both he and Alexander were singular military geniuses of the West, who realized that their highly mobile corps of shock troops were like none the world had seen. Both were self-acclaimed mystics, intent on loot and plunder under the guise of emissaries bringing Western “culture” to the East and “freeing” oppressed peoples from a corrupt, centralized Asian empire. Both were kind to animals, showed deference to (but were not really interested in) women, talked of their own destiny and divinity, and could be especially courteous to subordinates even as they planned the destruction of hundreds of thousands, and ultimately murdered many of their closest associates and greatest field marshals. Both were half-educated pop philosophers who sprinkled their orders of mass destruction with allusions to literature and poetry. For every promise of a “brotherhood of man,” there was a “thousand-year Reich”; for every house of Pindar saved among the rubble of Thebes, there were visions of a new Rome in Berlin; for every gutted Parmenio, there was a murdered Rommel; for every desolate Tyre, Gaza, or Sogdiana, there was a ransacked Warsaw or Kiev; and for every Gedrosian desert, a suicidal Stalingrad.
Just as Alexander understood that European individualism and the know-how of Hellenism could forge highly spirited troops and thereby serve for a time autocracy, so Hitler drew on the rich legacy of Germany and its once-free citizenry to create an equally dynamic and frightening blitzkrieg. History calls Alexander an emissary of world government and a visionary, while it rightly sees Hitler as a deranged and deadly monster. Had Alexander died at the Granicus on his entry into Asia (his head was almost cleaved in two by an enemy cavalryman) and had Hitler’s Panzers not stalled a few miles outside Moscow in December 1941, a few historians might consider the Macedonian merely an unbalanced megalomaniac whose insane ambitions ended in a muddy stream near the Hellespont, and the latter a savage but omnipotent conqueror who through brilliant decisive battles vanquished Stalin’s brutal communist empire.
The failure of these ancient and modern autocrats—Alexander’s empire disintegrated into squabbling fiefdoms before being annexed by Rome, while Hitler’s thousand-year Reich lasted thirteen years—reminds us that decisive battle, superior technology, capitalism, and unmatched discipline give Western armies only ephemeral victories if they lack the corresponding foundation of Western freedom, individualism, civic audit, and constitutional government. Given the complexity and origins of Western military practice, it is more effective when confined within the parameters of its birth. The ancient world produced no man more personally courageous, militarily brilliant, and abjectly murderous than Alexander the anti-Hellene, truly the first European conquistador in a long train to follow.
DECISIVE BATTLE AND WESTERN WARFARE
Ultimately, wars are best decided by men who approach each other face-to-face, stab, strike, or shoot at close range, and physically drive the enemy from the battlefield. Missile weapons can aid infantry battle but in themselves—whether blow darts, slings, or howitzers—cannot send an enemy into defeat and decide a war:
Fire and fire only is hopeless if the enemy ever makes contact. Weapons of shock are the crushers and pincers which are held in the hands of the assailant. Shock weapons are the military instruments par excellence. They are not only employed by courageous fighters anxious to close with the enemy, deliver him a blow, and win a decision, but they are truly the deadly one. They win battles. (H. Turney-High, Primitive War: Its Practice and Concepts, 12)
At the Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela, the Persian army was stationary, waiting for Alexander’s arrival, intent on selecting superior terrain for a defense against the invaders. Stockades, riverbanks, caltrops, scythed chariots, and elephants were to stop what their men-at-arms could not. Alexander’s famous retort that he would fight Darius III openly by day rather than stealthily at night is one of the many anecdotes that illustrate the Hellenic desire for open, direct, and deadly confrontation. Curtius relates that Alexander also scoffed at the idea of a war of attrition, much less extended negotiations with Darius III: “To fight a war with captives and women is not my way; he must be armed for battle whom I hate” (History of Alexander 4.11.18).
Before Gaugamela, Curtius recorded that Alexander worried only that Darius might not fight. When Parmenio woke him from a sound sleep on the morning of the battle, he arose in confidence and said, “When Darius was torching the countryside, burning villages, and destroying the food supply, I was beside myself. But now, what do I have to worry about since he is preparing to fight it out in open battle? By God, he has satisfied my every wish” (4.13.23). Plutarch adds that Alexander also explained on the morning of Gaugamela, “What is the matter? Don’t you think that now we already appear to have won, since no longer do we have to wander about in a vast and denuded country in pursuit of a Darius who avoids pitched battle?” (Alexander 32.3–4). That same morning Alexander went on to goad his troops that their vast enemies—“on their side more men are standing, on ours more will fight”—were not shock troops like themselves, scarred and maimed from hand-to-hand collisions. Persians, he told his men, were but “a mixed mob of barbarians, in which some threw javelins, others stones, and only a few used real [iusta] weapons” (CurtiusHistory of Alexander 4.14.5). “Real weapons” in the Western mind meant pikes and swords that were to be used face-to-face at close quarters. During the battle itself the outnumbered Macedonians alone charged en masse to break the enemy line. When safely through the horde, they ignored the Persian camp and went directly for Darius’s chariot. Where the king fled, there Alexander’s men followed, nearly riding their horses to death as they sought to kill everyone on the battlefield and catch a fleeing king.
Whence did this peculiar Western notion of decisive battle derive? Where did the idea arise that men would seek their enemy face-to-face, in a daylight collision of armies, without ruse or ambush, with the clear intent to destroy utterly the army across the plain or die honorably in the process? Decisive battle evolved in early-eighth-century Greece and was not found earlier or elsewhere. The earlier great crashes of Egyptian and Near Eastern armies of the second millennium B.C. were not shock collisions of heavily armed foot soldiers, but vast battles of maneuver between horsemen, charioteers, and bowmen. The circumstances of the birth of decisive battle—wars of small property-owning citizens, who voted for and then fought their own battles—account for its terrifying lethality. Only freemen who voted and enjoyed liberty were willing to endure such terrific infantry collisions, since shock alone proved an economical method of battle that allowed conflicts to be brief, clear-cut—and occasionally deadly.
In the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. if a small Greek community was self-supporting and governed by its surrounding private landowners, then hoplite warfare, far better than fortification or garrisoning passes, made perfect sense: muster the largest, best-armed group of farmers to protect land in the quickest, cheapest, and most decisive way possible. It was far easier and more economical for farmers to defend farmland on farmland than to tax and hire landless others to guard passes—the sheer ubiquity of which in mountainous Greece ensured that they could be turned by enterprising invaders anyway. Raiding, ambush, and plundering were still common—such activities seem innate to the human species—but the choice of military response to win or protect territory was a civic matter, an issue to be voted on by free landowning infantrymen themselves. In that regard, other means of conflict resolution seemed unending, costly, and often indecisive.
Hoplite fighting through shock collision in the tiny valleys of early Greece marks the true beginning of Western warfare, a formal idea fraught with legal, ethical, and political implications. Almost all these wars of a day between impatient yeomen of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. were infantry encounters over land, usually disputed border strips signifying agrarian prestige more than prized fertility. Customarily, the army of one city-state, an Argos, Thebes, or Sparta, met its adversary in daylight in formal columnar formation—the word “phalanx” means rows or stacks of men—according to a recognized sequence of events, which allowed battle to be brutal, but not necessarily so deadly.
There arose an entire vocabulary for horrific moments of fighting that is ubiquitous in Greek literature, reflecting the centrality of shock battle to Greek culture in a way not true of other methods of fighting elsewhere. Hoplite engagements themselves were known as “drawn-ups” (parataxeis),“battles by agreement” (machai ex homologou), “battles in the plain” (machai en to pediō), or battles that were “just and open” (machai ek tou dikaiaou kai phanerou). Stations and areas of the battlefield—the front ranks (prōtostatai orpromachoi), no-man’s land (metaixmion), the close-in fighting (sustadon)—were carefully delineated. Clear stages—the initial run (dromō), the clash and breaking of the line (pararrēxis), spear thrusting (doratismos), hand-to-hand (en chersi), push (ōthismos),encirclement (kuklōsis), and rout (egklima or trophē)— were also formally recognized. Such nomenclature suggests that the mechanics of hoplite battle itself entered into the popular culture in a way unknown of mounted or light-infantry warfare.
The Greeks of the city-state acknowledged that decisive land warfare of their age was different from earlier practice. For example, the historian Thucydides begins his history with the recognition that the earlier Greeks did not fight as they did in his own time, and he presents a picture of the close tie between agrarian societies and land warfare. Capital, stationary agrarian populations on the mainland, and permanent crops, in Thucydides’ description, led to the predominance of decisive land warfare. Aristotle much more concretely mapped out the evolution of Greek warfare, and likewise put great emphasis on the later emergence of infantry battle in general and hoplite infantrymen in particular. Early Greek states that evolved after monarchies, he said, were primarily run by aristocratic horsemen. Thus, their war lay with cavalry, since hoplites were not yet effective troops, possessing neither “orderly formation” nor the “experience and knowledge of troop deployment.” Later, hoplites became stronger, which led to social transformation and the rise of constitutional governments (Politics 4.1297b16–24).
Aristotle implies that early Greek warfare was once primarily fought by mounted troops, but at the dawn of the city-state evolved into battles between heavily armed infantry. The rise of such soldiers, and presumably the manner in which they fought, gave the hoplites political preeminence in their poleis, leading to the spread of constitutional governments. Whereas mass collisions were a part of Mediterranean warfare at every age and locale, in Greece they became the exclusive domain of heavily armed infantrymen, who fought in file and rank, charged and crashed together in a truly shock fashion. Moreover, the militias of the polis Greeks were subject to a general set of protocols that had political and cultural implications beyond the battlefield: set battles might decide entire wars, even when the war-making potential of the loser was not exhausted by defeat.
As we have seen, Philip put a final end to hoplite battle as arbitrarily resolving conflict itself. In the process he took the Greek discovery of shock infantry battle and applied it to a new Western concept of total war. At the twilight of the free city-state and in the shadow of Philip II, the orator Demosthenes, in his Third Philippic (48–52), composed sometime around 341 B.C., lamented on how decisive battle had transmogrified into something terrifying: “whereas all the arts have made great advances, and nothing is the same as it was in the past, I believe that nothing has been more altered and improved than matters of war.” He goes on to remind his audience that in the past “the Lacedaemonians, like all the others, used to spend four or five months—the summer season—invading and ravaging the territory of their enemy with hoplites and civic armies and retire home again.” Finally, Demosthenes points out that hoplite armies were “so bound by tradition or rather such good citizens of the polis that they did not use money to seek advantage, but rather their war was by rules and out in the open.”
In contrast to this evolving Greco-Macedonian tradition, Darius drew on a distinguished but very different heritage, one that went back to Cyrus the Great and was enriched by fighting Scythian and Bactrian heavy horsemen, the chariot armies of Egypt, and tribal contingents to the east and mountainous north. The Persian army relied on mobility, speed, and ruse, and was thus especially strong in horsemen and archers—and weak in heavy infantrymen, as was befitting a nomadic people of the steppes, who had no agrarian city-state traditions and never a history of consensual government. The warrior ethos in Asia was not that of the yeoman farmer. No Mede, Scythian, or Bactrian trudged into the Assembly, voted to muster, pulled his armor off the wall, joined in his local regiment, and with his “general” at his side, marched off to challenge his opposing phalanx to a brutal collision—and then hurried back home to defend his own property and to conduct a public audit of the battle performance of the army and its generals.
Persians, Medes, Bactrians, Armenians, Cilicians, and Lydians, who either enjoyed tribal rule or were subject to imperial governments, relied on superior manpower, aerial bombardment by missile troops and archers, and vast encircling movements of hordes of horsemen and chariots. If a Western army—the later Romans at Carrhae (53 B.C.) are a good example—was foolish enough to fight in the sweeping plains of Asia without adequate mounted support, it might well be surrounded and overwhelmed by such forces. Usually, the superiority of Western infantry and its preference for shock battle meant that if the army was led properly—by a Pausanias at Plataea (479 B.C.), Caesar in Gaul (59–50 B.C.), or Alexander at Gaugamela—there were no forces in the world that could stand its onslaught.
The Hellenistic autocrats who followed Alexander the Great had found their phalanxes unconquerable against Asiatic troops, and were adequate enough against one another. They were eventually to learn that Rome brought to each battle a haughty new bellicosity and bureaucracy of war that were the material and spiritual dividends of a united and politically stable Italy and a revived idea of civic militarism that had helped the Greeks win at Salamis so long ago. Unlike Hellenistic battle practice, Roman decisive warfare was always presented as a legal necessity (ius ad bellum), a purportedly defensive undertaking that was forced by belligerents upon the rural folk of Italy. Whereas their generals may have killed for laus and gloria, the republican legionaries themselves felt confident that they fought to preserve the traditions of their ancestors (mos maiorum) and in accordance with the constitutional decrees of an elected government. Roman armies continued to win because they added their own novel contributions of regularization to decisive war. As we shall see with the unrivaled slaughter at Cannae, Roman militarism was based on mass confrontation in pitched battles, and on applying the entire engine of Hellenic-inspired science, economic practice, and political structure to exploit such battlefield aggressiveness in annihilating the enemy in a single day if possible—or being nearly consumed in the process.
The Greek way of war was not dead with the rise and passing of the Hellenistic kingdoms (323–31 B.C.) that followed the division of Alexander’s empire. Far from it. For the next two millennia in Europe, battle would be energized as never before by those who were not Greeks, but who inherited their peculiarly Western dilemma of being able to do what they knew they sometimes should not. Alexander the Great for a time created a deadly army by separating decisive battle from civic militarism; the Romans crafted an even deadlier military by returning the notion of shock battle to its original womb of constitutional government in ways far beyond even the Hellenic imagination.
This Western propensity for shock battle survived Rome as well, in the Byzantines’ century-long wars against nomadic and Islamic horsemen, and the deadly internecine struggles between the Franks and then against the Muslims. The Teutonic Knights of the Middle Ages adapted the idea of face-to-face fighting to mass heavy-cavalry charges, which had served their outnumbered forces well during the Crusades in the Middle East. Phalanxes—unique to Europe—were to reappear in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Renaissance abstract thinkers sought to apply ancient discussions of stratēgia (“generalship”) and taktika (the arrangement of troops) to improving the crash of contemporary pikemen. Pragmatists as diverse as Machiavelli, Lipsius, and Grotius also envisioned such armies in constitutional service to the state, realizing that heavy infantrymen, mustered from yeomen free citizens, were the most effective shock troops when engaged in mass collision. These small armies of central Europe followed in the classical tradition of shock land battles. By the sixteenth century the West was convulsed in an era of shock battles as professional armies sought to destroy one another’s ability to resist, in a manner not found in China, Africa, or the Americas. Between 1500 and 1900 thousands more infantry collisions took place inside Europe than in the rest of the world.
The Aztecs, who tried to pull Cortés and his men off their warhorses and bind his conquistadors as sacrificial offerings on the Great Pyramid, were of an entirely different heritage, one that did not see battle as the occasion to meet the enemy and settle the dispute instantaneously through the destruction of its ability to resist. In contrast, when Cortés at last took Mexico City, he advanced by destroying the city block by block, intent on annihilating all Aztec adversaries until they capitulated or were no more. The Zulus thought that after their sole victory at Isandhlwana, the British would retreat, having been defeated in open battle. They had no conception that the Western way of war meant a series of such battles until the will—or culture—of the adversary was crushed. The Ottoman Janissaries, who learned and mastered the European art of firearms, never embraced the corresponding Western idea of fighting as shock troops in disciplined columns, in which individual heroism was subjugated to the larger goal of achieving mass firepower and collision which alone might obliterate the enemy. The Marings on New Guinea, the Maoris of New Zealand, the mythical Homeric heroes of the pre-polis Greek past, and most other tribal peoples sought from war social recognition, religious salvation, or cultural status—anything other than the dismemberment of the enemy on the battlefield by the collective effort of shock encounter.
The idea of decisive battle continues in the West. The classical notion that pitched, shock confrontation is the only way to resolve wars in part explains why Americans consider it honorable and effective to bomb the Libyans when they have committed a terrorist act in Europe; or to rain down enormous battleship projectiles upon Palestinian villages openly and “fairly” from offshore when a few of their residents are alleged to have bombed in a “cowardly” fashion American marines asleep in their barracks. As long as Westerners engaged the enemy in an open contest of firepower, the ensuing carnage was seen as relatively immaterial: terrorists who shamelessly killed a few women and children, or states that surprised us on Sunday morning in a bombing attack on our fleet, usually found mechanized murderous armies of retaliation on their soil and daylight fleets of bombers over their skies.
Due to our Hellenic traditions, we in the West call the few casualties we suffer from terrorism and surprise “cowardly,” the frightful losses we inflict through open and direct assault “fair.” The real atrocity for the Westerner is not the number of corpses, but the manner in which soldiers died and the protocols under which they were killed. We can comprehend the insanity of a Verdun or Omaha Beach, but never accept the logic of far fewer killed through ambush, terrorism, or the execution of prisoners and noncombatants. Incinerating thousands of Japanese civilians on March 11, 1945, is seen by Westerners as not nearly so gruesome an act as beheading on capture parachuting B-29 fliers.
Will such a paradox always be true? Between the hoplite battlefields of classical antiquity and the present age lie the trenches of World War I, the carpet bombing and death camps of World War II, and the apocalyptic threat of World War III. Modern Western man finds himself in a military dilemma of sorts. His excellence at frontal assault and decisive battle—expanded to theaters above the earth’s atmosphere and below the sea— could end all that he holds dear despite the nobility of his cause and the moral nature of his war making. We in the West may have to fight as non-Westerners—in jungles, stealthily at night, and as counterterrorists—to combat enemies who dare not face us in shock battle. In consequence, we may not always fully draw on our great Hellenic traditions of superior technology and the discipline and ardor of our free citizen soldiers in shock battle—unless we are to face another Western power in a murderous collision of like armies. Alexander the Great, remember, fought mostly non-Greeks in short, decisive battles in which he suffered little. When he did meet other Westerners—whether in the pitched battle of Chaeronea or against the Greek mercenaries in Asia Minor—the result was frightful carnage.
I leave the reader with the dilemma of the modern age: the Western manner of fighting bequeathed to us from the Greeks and enhanced by Alexander is so destructive and so lethal that we have essentially reached an impasse. Few non-Westerners wish to meet our armies in battle. The only successful response to encountering a Western army seems to be to marshal another Western army. The state of technology and escalation is such that any intra-Western conflict would have the opposite result of its original Hellenic intent: abject slaughter on both sides would result, rather than quick resolution. Whereas the polis Greeks discovered shock battle as a glorious method of saving lives and confining conflict to an hour’s worth of heroics between armored infantry, Alexander the Great and the Europeans who followed sought to unleash the entire power of their culture to destroy their enemies in a horrendous moment of shock battle. That moment is now what haunts us.