Alexander’s mirror
1. Crossing to Troy to punish the Persians
Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, and student of Plato tutored the prince until sixteen. Following the assassination of his father Philip II in 336 BC, he took up the throne of the Macedon monarchy at the age of twenty.
After securing his Kingdom, Alexander III planned to cross into Anatolia to invade the Achaemenid and punish the Persians for invading Greece some 156 years earlier!
As I knew him, that was an irrational reason. His vision was to reach the ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea. None of his key captains willingly realized such imagination or could relate history to mythology like him.
The youthful King organized his army for the campaign not far from Amphipolis’s grand temple that he built. The army consisted chiefly of Macedonians, but with other allied Greeks. Nearchus and two other admirals supervised the fleet’s assembly on the Strymon River near the Aegean Sea.
I was the King’s Mesopotamian multilinguist when the expedition departed Amphipolis in April 334 BC. I joined his civilian elite of the campaign that included Anaxarchus (the philosopher who called to worship the King), his doctors Kritodemos and Glaucias, the architect Aristobulus, and Callisthenes, the historian nephew of Aristotle.
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Within a month, we were near the northwest coast of Anatolia. Alexander engaged in the first battle with the Achaemenid army at the Granicus River, where he defeated them. Thanks to the Macedonian phalanx, armed with the sarissa, a spear 6 meters long. Alexander freed Troy and exempted it from taxes.
After capturing Troy, Miletus, Halicarnassus, and Gordion, King Alexander led the army to south-central Anatolia, passing through Tarsus by the River Cydnus. He almost drowned there but was saved by his soldiers.
While he was in Tarsus, the Achaemenid King massed his army in Babylon and advanced into Syria.
Darius led the army by himself, setting the battle near the Pinarus River’s mouth and Issus’s town in southern Anatolia. In contrast, Alexander was at the head of his battalions.
The Persian King Darius III proposed peacetime and a truce. Still, Alexander refused and marched from Issus south into Phoenicia to isolate the Achaemenid fleet from its bases and destroy it as a significant fighting force. He captured the Phoenician cities with little or no resistance, including Damas, Byblos, Sidon, but not Tyre (Sur).
The naval blockade set by Admiral Nearchus for the Achaemenid fleet threatening the Aegean Sea successfully aided Alexander’s conquest of Phoenicia and Egypt soon after.
Alexander advanced south and reached Gaza that was conquered by the Philistines in the 13th century BC. The city defenders resisted him for two months, refusing to surrender and inflicting a severe shoulder wound in one of the raids. Alexander put many of the male population to death for that.
When he advanced to Egypt, Egyptians welcomed him as their savior, and the Achaemenid satrap surrendered peacefully. At Memphis, he sacrificed to the sacred Egyptian bull and assured the safety of the priests. They inaugurate him as King with the traditional double crown of the Pharaohs. He employed Egyptian governors but kept the army under the Macedonian command.
King Alexander was in total control of Egypt in 332 BC. He founded the port city Alexandria and made a journey into the western desert to the Siwa Oasis, where Egypt’s priests proclaimed him the son of their deity.
In spring 331 BC, Alexander returned to Tyre and prepared to advance into northern Mesopotamia along the upper Euphrates. He wanted to conquest Babylon, which was one of the Achaemenid main capitals at that time.
Mazaeus commanded a small cavalry army near Thapsacus town on the Syrian Euphrates’ western bank that obstructed Alexander’s way to Babylon and made the invader take the road through the north Mesopotamia. Such action forced Alexander to go to Assyria, where King Darius III was ready with a large army. The decisive battle took place at Gaugamela on a plain between Ninevah and Arbela, north of Mesopotamia, on October 331 BC.
Alexander’s army had the upper hand. Again, Darius III took flight, and panic spread through his entire army, which began a retreat. The Macedonians pursued them till Arbela town, whereas Darius escaped to Bactria in the Medes land.
King Alexander entered the city on a chariot and went into the palace to receive Darius’ assets on October 22, 331 BC. Some Babylonians greeted the invading King, including Bagophanes, who was in charge of the citadel and royal treasury.
The new Conqueror sacrificed to the city deity Marduk and promised to preserve its Esagila temple. He was impressed by the great walls, gates, temples, and the Hanging Gardens, built by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II three centuries earlier. It was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. With its beauty and antiquity, the city itself commanded the King and all the Macedonians’ attention.
To be continued
Submitted: December 13, 2020
© Copyright 2020 Ali Al-Zaak. All rights reserved.
Originally published at https://www.booksie.com.
