The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics) (15 page)

The Tyrians, now in serious trouble, decided to attack the Cyprian contingent which was blockading the northern harbour. Some time previously they had rigged sails across the harbour entrance to act as a screen behind which they could man their vessels unobserved; and now, about midday, when the crews of the Greek ships were dispersed upon whatever job they happened to have in hand, and Alexander usually left the fleet on the other side of the town to withdraw to his quarters, they completed their preparations. Having manned three quinquiremes, three quadriremes, and seven triremes with picked crews – their smartest men, their best-armed marines, specially selected for their courage in naval warfare – they slipped quietly out of harbour in single file. No one called the
time to the men at the oars; they rowed in silence until just before they turned to come within sight of the Cyprians, when with a hearty shout and cheers of mutual encouragement they laid to their oars and bore down upon the enemy at their best speed.

It so happened that though Alexander had retired to his quarters that day, he had not taken his customary rest, but had almost immediately returned to the fleet. The Tyrian surprise proved successful: some of the blockading squadron they found without a single man aboard; others were being manned under difficulties with whoever was available at the last moment, with the enemies’ battle-shout in their ears and the attack imminent; and the result was that Pnytagoras’ quinquireme was rammed and sunk at the first encounter. The ships commanded by Androcles of Amathus and Pasicrates of Curium
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suffered the same fate. The rest of the squadron was driven ashore and broken up.

As soon as it was reported to Alexander that the Tyrian triremes had been out, he ordered most of the ships on the south side of the town, the instant that each could be got ready for action, to lay-to off the south harbour entrance, in order to prevent another sortie; then with his quinquiremes and the five or six triremes which had been smartest in getting their crews aboard, he sailed round to the north side of the town in search of the Tyrian squadron which had made the attack. When the Tyrians on the battlements saw what was happening and that Alexander in person was with the enemy squadron, they shouted a warning to the men in their own ships to get back into harbour, and, when the din and clatter of action made their shouts inaudible, tried signals of various sorts to indicate the necessity of withdrawing to shelter. The Tyrian crews
saw Alexander’s ships coming; they put about and made for the harbour – but too late: a few managed to get in in time, but most of them were rammed; some were put out of action and one quinquireme and one quadrireme were captured right at the harbour entrance. Loss of life was not severe; the men on board, once they knew their ships were done for, swam off into the harbour and escaped without difficulty.

All hope of protection by the fleet was now gone, and this was the moment when the Macedonians began to bring their artillery into action. From the mole the siege engines could make little impression because in that sector the city wall was too strong. Another attempt was made on the north side, where a number of ships with artillery aboard were brought into action; but their success was no greater. Alexander, accordingly, turned his attention to the southern sector of the defences, feeling methodically for a weak spot, and it was here that he had his first success. A considerable length of the wall began to give under the assault, and an actual breach was made, though not a large one. Alexander then made a tentative attack – a probing movement, not much more, in point of fact, than the throwing of a bridge across the breach. The movement was easily repulsed.

Three days later, when Alexander had the weather he wanted, he addressed some words of encouragement to his officers and ordered the ship-borne artillery into action. Great damage was done to the defences, and as soon as he thought that a breach of sufficient breadth had been made, he withdrew the artillery carriers and ordered up two other vessels equipped with gangways which he proposed to throw across the breach. One of these vessels, commanded by Admetus, was taken over by a battalion of the Guards, and the other by Coenus’ battalion of heavy
infantry. Alexander himself was with the Guards ready to mount the breach wherever it was practicable. Some of his triremes he ordered round to the two harbours, on the chance that they might succeed in forcing an entrance while the enemy’s attention was engaged in trying to repel the assault elsewhere; other vessels which had archers on board or carried ammunition for the artillery were instructed to cruise round the island and, wherever they could, close in with the wall, lying off but within range if it so happened that to get close in was impossible, so that the defenders might be threatened from every point and caught, as it were, in a ring of fire.

No sooner were Alexander’s ships in under the city wall and the gangways lowered, than the men of the Guards sprang upon them and pressed powerfully forward into the breach. In the ensuing action Admetus played a soldier’s part, and Alexander himself was in the thick of it, fighting like the rest, and ever on the watch for any act of conspicuous courage in the face of danger among his men. The section of the defences where Alexander had chosen to take personal command was, in fact, the first to fall; the attacking force were no longer faced by a sheer and precipitous ascent but had, for the first time, firm ground under their feet, and succeeded, in consequence, in driving the defenders from their position without difficulty. Admetus, leading the assault and calling to his men to follow, was killed by a spear-thrust while still upon the shattered wall, but Alexander, hot on his heels, seized the breach and, having established control of some of the towers together with the sections of wall connecting them, passed on through the battlements towards the royal quarters, this way appearing to offer the most practicable descent into the town.

Meanwhile the operations of the fleet had been no less
successful: the Phoenicians who were lying off the southern harbour smashed a way in through the defensive booms and made short work of the shipping inside, ramming some vessels where they lay afloat and driving others ashore; and the northern harbour, which was not even protected by booms, presented no difficulty to the Cyprians. They sailed straight in and quickly gained control of that portion of the town. The main body of the Tyrian defenders abandoned the wall once they saw it was in the enemy’s hands, and withdrew to the shrine of Agenor,
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where they turned to face the Macedonians. Alexander and the Guards were soon upon them; some fell fighting, others fled, with Alexander in pursuit. The troops from the harbour were masters of the town; Coenus’ battalion was already in; the slaughter was terrible – for the Macedonians, sick as they were of the length of the siege, went to work with savage ferocity.
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There was another reason, too, which roused them to rage; the Tyrians had taken some prisoners on their way from Sidon; these men they had subsequently dragged up on to the battlements, cut their throats in full view of the Macedonian army, and flung the bodies into the sea.

The Tyrian losses were about 8,000; the Macedonians, in the actual assault, lost Admetus, who was the first to mount the breach, and died as a soldier should, and twenty men of the Guards who were with him. In the siege as a whole they lost about 400.

Azemilcus, the King of Tyre, together with the dignitaries of the town and certain visitors from Carthage who had come to the mother city to pay honour to Heracles
according to an ancient custom,
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had fled for refuge to Heracles’ temple: to all of these Alexander granted a free pardon; everyone else was sold into slavery. In all, including native Tyrians and foreigners taken in the town, some 30,000 were sold.
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After the victory Alexander offered sacrifice to Heracles and held a ceremonial parade of his troops in full battle equipment; the fleet also took part in the review in the god’s honour, and there were athletic contests in the Temple enclosure and a torch-race. The piece of siege-artillery which had made the breach was dedicated in the Temple, and the Tyrian ship sacred to Heracles, which had been captured in the naval action, was also solemnly presented to the god. There was an inscription on the vessel, composed either by Alexander himself or someone else. In any case it is not worth remembering, so I have not thought fit to record it here. In this way, then, Tyre was taken; the year was that of the archonship at Athens of Anicetus, and the month August.

While Alexander was still occupied with the siege, he was visited by envoys from Darius, who in the King’s name offered a sum of 10,000 talents in exchange for his mother, wife, and children; they further proposed that all the territory west of the Euphrates right to the Aegean Sea should belong to Alexander, who should seal his bond
of friendship and alliance with Persia by marrying Darius’ daughter.
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These proposals were made known at a meeting of Alexander’s personal advisers, and Parmenio, according to all reports, declared that were he Alexander he would be happy to end the war on such terms and be done with any further adventures. ‘That,’ replied Alexander, ‘is what I should do were I Parmenio; but since I am Alexander, I shall send Darius a different answer.’ And send it he did. He had no need, he wrote, of Darius’ money, nor was there any call upon him to accept a part of the continent in place of the whole. All Asia, including its treasure, was already his property, and if he wished to marry Darius’ daughter he would do so, whether Darius liked it or not. If, moreover, Darius wanted kindliness and consideration at his hands, he must come to ask for it in person. Upon receiving this reply, Darius abandoned all thought of coming to terms and began once more to prepare for war.

Alexander’s next objective was Egypt. All of what is known as Syrian Palestine except the town of Gaza had already accepted Alexander’s control. The master of this stronghold, however, a eunuch of the name of Batis, refused to join him. He had raised a force of mercenary Arab troops, and for some time past had been laying in stores sufficient for a protracted siege, and that, added to his confident belief that the town was too strongly defended ever to be taken by assault, induced him to refuse Alexander admission.

Gaza is about two and a half miles from the sea; the approach to it from the coast is over deep sand, and the
sea off-shore is all encumbered with shoals. It was a large town, standing high on an eminence, and encircled by a strongly-built wall – the last town, on the edge of the desert, as one travels south from Phoenicia to Egypt.

Once within striking distance, Alexander took up a position opposite that section of the defences which seemed most open to assault, and ordered the assembly of his siege engines. His engineers expressed the opinion that the mound, or artificial eminence, on which the town stood was so high that it would not be possible to carry it by assault; Alexander, however, was firm in his belief that the greater the difficulty, the more necessary it was to take it; for a success so far beyond reason and probability would be a serious blow to the morale of the enemy, while failure, once Darius and the Greeks got to know of it, would be an equally serious blow to his own prestige.

The plan of campaign was to enable the siege engines to be brought to bear upon the defences by ringing the town with a raised earthwork up to the level of their base, and mounting the engines upon it; the work was concentrated chiefly upon the southern sector, where the wall appeared more vulnerable than elsewhere, and when a sufficient height had been reached the engines were mounted and prepared for action. At this moment Alexander, the ceremonial wreath upon his head, was on the point of offering, according to precedent, the first victim of the sacrifice, when a bird of prey flew over the altar and dropped upon his head a stone which it was carrying in its talons, and when Alexander asked Aristander what the omen might mean, ‘Sire,’ the seer replied, ‘you will capture the town, but today you must-take care for your own safety.’
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Alexander, accordingly, kept out of range for a while, close to where his artillery was posted; before long, however, the defenders of the town made a sortie in strength; the Arab troops endeavoured to set fire to the siege engines, and heavy attacks with missile weapons delivered from their commanding position almost succeeded in thrusting the Macedonians back down the earthwork they had raised. At the sight of this reverse, Alexander forgot the seer’s prophetic warning. Maybe he deliberately ignored it – perhaps the excitement of action put it out of his mind: in any case, at the head of his Guards he hurried to the support of the Macedonians at the very point where they were hardest pressed. For them, at any rate, his help was just in time: he saved them from being driven ignominiously from their position on the earthwork; but in the action a missile from a catapult pierced his shield and corselet and penetrated his shoulder. Aristander, then, had been right – he had foreseen the wound. Alexander was delighted, for he believed that the other prophecy would also be fulfilled, and that the town would fall. Meanwhile the wound was serious and did not easily yield to treatment.
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The artillery which had been instrumental in the capture of Tyre had already been sent for, and now arrived by sea. Alexander gave orders for the raised earthwork, two furlongs broad and fifty-five feet high,
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to be carried right round the town. The artillery was assembled, mounted on the earthwork, and brought into action. Long stretches
of the wall suffered heavy damage; saps were dug at various points, the earth being removed unobserved by the enemy, until in many places the wall, having nothing to support it, collapsed and fell. Pouring in volleys of missile weapons, the Macedonians were soon in control of a wide sector, thrusting the defenders back from the towers. Three assaults the men of Gaza bravely resisted, in spite of heavy casualties in dead and wounded; but at the fourth Alexander brought into action the main body of his heavy infantry on all sides of the town, the wall, already undermined, was battered down or widely breached where the artillery had already done its work, so that it was now an easy matter to get ladders on to the shattered defences, and thus force an entry. Once the ladders were in position, every Macedonian soldier who had any claim to courage vied with his fellows to be the first man up. The honour fell to Neoptolemus, one of the Companions and an Aeacid by blood; hot on his heels came battalion after battalion, led by their officers, and no sooner had the leading sections penetrated the defences than they smashed down all the gates they could find and cleared an entrance for the whole army.