Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (10 page)

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.