The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics) (4 page)

The main weaknesses in Arrian’s portrait of Alexander seem to me two-fold – a tendency, which he derives from his sources, to gloss over the less attractive side of the king’s character, and a failure to appreciate Alexander’s intentions, especially with regard to the Persians.

The first of these is apparent before the expedition gets under way. The slaughter of the Thebans, perhaps rightly, and the destruction of the city and the enslavement of the survivors is blamed on the Greek allies of Alexander. Nothing is said of his responsibility for permitting them, as in fact he did, to pass this sentence. Yet even Plutarch, whom no one could accuse of hostility to Alexander,
implicitly holds him responsible; as he saw, Alexander’s intention was to terrify the other Greek states into submission. At the battle of the Granicus Arrian relates without comment the massacre of the Greek mercenaries, nearly 18,000 according to his own account; he does not remark on the cruelty or the inadvisability of the massacre. In the same way at Massaga in India the massacre of 7,000 Indians passes without comment. Nor should we guess from Arrian that some writers had doubts about the involvement of Philotas in a plot against the king. He is content to accept Ptolemy’s statement, although the ‘manifest proofs’ of his guilt adduced by him do not amount to much. Again, the burning of the palace at Persepolis is very briefly referred to with no mention of the alternative tradition that it was set on fire during a drunken revel. On the other hand, Arrian gives a much more balanced account of the murder of Cleitus than Aristobulus seems to have done, and he is obviously reluctant to accept the statements of Ptolemy and Aristobulus that Callisthenes was involved in the conspiracy of the Pages.

What the modern reader misses in Arrian’s book is an appreciation of the larger issues. Alexander emerges as a great leader, a great conqueror possessed of boundless ambition, a man who reached the height of human prosperity and who, if he committed great crimes, had the magnanimity to repent of them. Certainly the conquest of the Persian Empire was his most lasting achievement, but what we want to know is whether he was more than the supreme conqueror. What plans did he have for his empire? What part did he intend the conquered peoples to play in it? Amid a great deal that is obscure about Alexander, one thing is certain, that he was very much in earnest about what modern writers have called his ‘policy
of fusion’. The clearest expression of this policy is his prayer at Opis – a prayer that Arrian records without comment – that Macedonians and Persians might live in harmony and jointly rule the empire. This was a revolutionary idea, not shared by his Macedonians, nor, we can be sure, by many Greeks either. For the most distinguished of Alexander’s many teachers, the eminent philosopher Aristotle, who inspired him with a love of Greek literature and particularly of Homer, is said by Plutarch to have written to Alexander advising the young king to behave towards the Greeks as a leader but towards the ‘barbarians’ as a master. This contemptuous attitude towards ‘barbarians’ was no doubt widespread. But Alexander, who may have felt doubts about it even before the expedition – Artabazus and other leading Persians lived as exiles at Philip’s court when Alexander was a boy – soon came to reject it. After Gaugamela we find him appointing Persians as governors, certainly not through a lack of suitable Macedonians.

Arrian clearly shared Aristotle’s prejudice against ‘barbarians’ and had no conception of Alexander’s vision of a partnership between the two peoples. In the characterisation of Alexander at the end of his book he sees Alexander’s adoption of Persian dress and his introduction of Persian troops into the Macedonian army as a mere ‘device’, designed to render him less alien to his Persian subjects. Indeed, Arrian has earlier (4.7) condemned his adoption of oriental dress as a ‘barbaric’ act not so different from his ‘barbaric’ punishment of the pretender Bessus. Both acts, in Arrian’s view, indicate a deterioration of Alexander’s character. Even in the case of Bessus Arrian does not see that the punishment was a Persian punishment inflicted on him by Alexander in his position as ‘Great King’. Elsewhere, he refers to Alexander
‘going some way towards “barbarian” extravagance’, and his comment on the king’s marriage to Roxane, the Bactrian princess, is illuminating. ‘I approve’, he writes, ‘rather than blame’. This ‘policy of fusion’ with the adoption of Persian dress and Persian court ceremonial was bitterly resented by the Macedonians, as Arrian is well aware. Drink led Cleitus to give utterance to grievances which were deeply felt and widely shared, while the extent of the Pages’ conspiracy leads one to think that their motives were not so much personal as political. Yet Arrian does not ask himself whether Alexander would have persisted in a policy so universally detested if it were nothing more than a ‘device’ to win Persian favour.

Plutarch, perhaps exaggerating, puts the number of cities founded by Alexander at seventy. In his
Campaigns
Arrian mentions fewer than a dozen foundations; not a cause for complaint, for he was not compiling a catalogue. But we are not told what Alexander’s motives were, military or economic or, as some scholars believe, part of his mission to spread Greek culture throughout Asia. It is from the
Indica
that we learn that cities were established among the conquered Cossaeans to encourage them to forsake their nomadic habits and become a settled people.

Alexander took his religious duties very seriously indeed, as the account of his last days makes plain. Arrian frequently records that the king offered sacrifice or made drink-offerings, and the prophecies made by his seers, notably Aristander, are faithfully reported. Only once, before the siege of Tyre, is he provoked to sarcasm; ‘The plain fact’, he writes, ‘is that anyone could see that the siege of Tyre would be a great undertaking’. But Arrian’s hostile or sceptical attitude to the ruler cult of his day – an attitude he shares with Plutarch and the historian Appian – prevents him from doing justice to Alexander’s
divine aspirations. That Alexander believed himself to be the son of Ammon-Zeus, as his ancestor Hercules was son of Zeus, is very probable, although admittedly not susceptible of proof. Arrian will have none of this. Alexander set out for Siwah ‘hoping to learn about himself more accurately, or at least
to say that he had so learnt
’. For him Alexander’s claim was merely another ‘device’, to impress his subjects. He displays the same sceptical attitude towards Alexander’s divinity. In 324 the Greek states, probably in response to a ‘request’ from the king himself, sent
theoroi
(envoys sent on sacred missions) to crown him with a golden crown at Babylon. That the envoys were
theoroi
admits of no doubt; the fact that they themselves wore crowns proves it. If Arrian writes that ‘they came as
theoroi
forsooth’, using a Greek particle implying disbelief or sarcasm, he is suggesting that Alexander, as a mortal, could never be a god. Gods were immortal, men were not, and ‘after all’, as Arrian drily comments, ‘Alexander’s death was near’.

Arrian set out to produce the best and most reliable account of Alexander’s expedition, avoiding the exaggerations of his predecessors and correcting their errors. That he succeeded few will dispute. The histories of Diodorus and Curtius and, particularly, the biography of Plutarch throw light (and sometimes darkness) on the character of Alexander and occasionally even on his military exploits, but Arrian’s book is the basis of our knowledge. It impresses one as the work of an honest man who has made a serious and painstaking attempt to discover the truth about Alexander – a task perhaps impossible by his time – and who has judged with humanity the weaknesses of a man exposed to the temptations of those who exercise supreme power. We need not deny the limitations of the work, but it is proper to remember that Alexander’s
idea of an empire in whose rule conquering Macedonians and conquered Persians were to share perished with him. To spare the conquered was one thing, to associate them with one in government was another, an idea that was not to reach fulfilment until long after Alexander’s death.

In the spring of 334 Alexander set out from Macedonia, leaving Antipater with 12,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry to defend the homeland and to keep watch on the Greek states. The size of the army with which he crossed the Hellespont has been variously reported, totals ranging from 30,000 to 43,000 for infantry and 4,000 to 5,500 for cavalry. But the detailed figures given by Diodorus (17. 17), 32,000 infantry and 5,100 cavalry, agree essentially with the totals in Arrian (Ptolemy), and may be taken as substantially correct. The size and composition of the force holding the bridgehead at Abydos – there surely must have been some troops there in 334 – is not known, but the likelihood is that it was small and consisted mainly of mercenary infantry.

The backbone of the infantry was the Macedonian heavy infantry, the ‘Foot Companions’, organized on a territorial basis in six battalions (
taxeis
) of about 1,500 men each. In place of the nine-foot spear carried by the Greek hoplite, the Macedonian infantryman was armed with a pike or
sarissa
about 13 or 14 feet long, which required both hands to wield it. The light circular shield
was slung on the left shoulder, and was smaller than that carried by the Greek hoplite which demanded the use of the left arm. Both Greek and Macedonian infantry wore greaves and a helmet, but it is possible that the Macedonians did not wear a breastplate.
¹³
The
phalanx
(a convenient term for the sum total of the Macedonian heavy infantry), like all the Macedonian troops, had been brought by Philip to a remarkable standard of training and discipline. Unlike the phalanx which the Romans encountered over a century later, Alexander’s phalanx was capable of rapid movement and was highly manoeuvrable, as one can see from a reading of the first half-dozen chapters of Arrian’s book.

In battle the right flank of the phalanx was guarded by the
Hypaspists
or ‘Guards’. These were an élite corps, consisting of a Royal battalion (
agema
) and two other battalions, each of approximately 1,000 men. Alexander used them frequently on rapid marches and other mobile operations, often in conjunction with cavalry and lightarmed troops. This suggests, although it does not prove, that they were more lightly armed than the heavy infantry; but if they were less heavily armed, we do not know where the difference lay.

The member states of the Corinthian League contributed 7,000 heavy infantry, while 5,000 Greeks served as mercenaries. The remainder of Alexander’s infantry consisted of 7,000 Thracian and Illyrian light troops armed with javelins and two bodies of archers from Crete and Macedonia respectively. The outstanding unit among the light troops was the Agrianians, 1,000 strong, who have been well compared in their relation to Macedon and in their quality to the Gurkhas of the Indian army. Alone of
the allies they served throughout the campaign and Arrian mentions them almost fifty times. With the archers and the Guards they took part in all the reconnaisances and skirmishes as well as fighting superbly in the set pieces.

Pride of place among the cavalry was held by the Macedonian ‘Royal Companions’, originally 1,800 troopers divided into 8 squadrons or
Ilai
, all under the command of Parmenio’s son, Philotas. Among them the Royal Squadron, consisting of perhaps 300 men, was Alexander’s own bodyguard, which spearheaded the devastating cavalry charge in the major battles. Their position was on the immediate right of the Guards, who had the task of maintaining contact between the Companions and the phalanx. The counterpart of the Companions on the left of the phalanx was the Thessalian cavalry, also 1,800 strong at the start of the expedition. Under the general command of Parmenio, they had the difficult task at Issus and Gaugamela of holding much superior forces of Persian cavalry while Alexander delivered the decisive blow on the right. The Greek allies furnished 600 horsemen, and the remaining 900 were made up of Thracians, Paeonians, and ‘Scouts’ (
Prodromoi
) who were also called ‘Lancers’ (
Sarissophoroi
) since they were armed with the
sarissa
, presumably shorter than those carried by the infantry which required the use of both hands. Whether these light cavalry were Macedonians or Thracians is not clear; certainly they were distinct from ‘the Thracians’. Finally, although Diodorus does not mention mercenary cavalry in his list of forces, Alexander may have had some from the beginning. By Gaugamela at least he had perhaps 1,000 of these.
¹⁴

Despite the need for garrisons in Asia Minor and Egypt, Alexander’s army at Gaugamela numbered 40,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry. The only substantial reinforcements of Macedonian and allied troops recorded by Arrian reached Gordium early in 333, and there is no good reason to suppose that Alexander received any worthwhile number of Macedonians or allies apart from these before Gaugamela. For Quintus Curtius, who after 331 records the arrival of many reinforcements not mentioned by Arrian, mentions reinforcements only of mercenaries in this period. Indeed, it is clear that the increase in the number of Alexander’s troops was due principally to the recruitment of mercenaries from Greece and to the enlistment of mercenaries who had fought for Persia. Alexander had begun by treating the latter as traitors, but finding that this merely encouraged desperate resistance decided within a few months to change this unsuccessful policy. Many of the garrisons doubtless consisted in large part of mercenaries.

Soon after Gaugamela Alexander received strong reinforcements of Macedonian troops, no fewer than 6,000 infantry and 500 cavalry. This enabled him to create a seventh battalion of infantry, which was certainly operating early in 330.
¹⁵
The other battalions must have remained over strength for some time. This is the last draft of Macedonians he is known to have received until he returned to the west after his Indian campaign, and there is no compelling reason to think that he received any others. In 330 the allied troops from the Greek states and from Thessaly were discharged at Ecbatana. Many, we are told, chose to re-enlist as mercenaries. Increasing use was made of Greek mercenaries, and the garrisons of the many cities
founded by Alexander in the eastern satrapies consisted of them together with the native inhabitants and some unfit Macedonians. Presumably few of the 10,000 infantry and 3,500 cavalry left behind to protect Bactria in 327 were Macedonians.