Christian Cameron - God of War - The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

The Theban cavalry rode into the other end of the field, as I had expected. After all, I was getting a new report on their movements every five minutes.

‘Don’t even twitch,’ I said to my men. ‘Let them do it, if they want.’

They rode away.

We rode up to Thebes and I picked a campsite – the same site we’d used the last time. I felt that sent the right message.

Alexander must have agreed, because he gripped my hand at the end of the day. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘They won’t fight now – but you left them no bodies to mourn. Well done.’

I loved his praise, when it was good praise.

I went to bed a happy man, and awoke to the sound of screams.

The Thebans had attacked our outposts in the dark – a huge attack, with twelve hundred hoplites. They came across the open ground in silence, and of course our army hadn’t fully entrenched, or anything like it. And Perdiccas hadn’t taken the precautions he should have. His outposts were surprised and overrun, and the Thebans killed at least two hundred pezhetaeroi and fifty hypaspists. And then they withdrew, untouched – we didn’t find a single body. Of course, they may have taken their dead with them – that’s certainly what I wrote in the Military Journal.

Either way, they hurt us and we did nothing in response, and that emboldened the war party. No matter that I’d shown them how toothless their cavalry was – never mind that we had every advantage. When men are determined on violence, it’s like a plague, and you cannot stop it.

Philip Longsword was among the dead. Alexander stood by his body in the new light of dawn, and he had white spots on either side of his nose and his lips looked pinched. His face was thinner than I’d ever seen it, and his ram’s horns were more pronounced. He looked like a satyr – a very angry satyr.

But despite that, he ordered our troops to dig in, and avoid combat contact.

So we did. The Hetaeroi, being aristocrats, didn’t dig – except in emergencies – but we were mounted in armour all day, moving from trouble spot to trouble spot.

The Assembly of Thebes voted for war to defend their liberties.

Our siege engines were three days’ march away. And our tents.

It rained. We were wet. Luckily, Greece is dry all summer, but autumn was coming.

The hypaspitoi marched out of camp and spread out, supported by the Agrianians, pillaging the countryside. This was an ancient tradition in Greek warfare. It was a public and somewhat formal statement – it showed the defenders that they could cower behind their walls, but they would lose everything outside them.

We understood from men inside the walls – because many Thebans were supporters of Alexander – that the Assembly was now divided. So, after some hesitation, Alexander had his heralds proclaim at the edge of the walls that any Theban who wished to come out of the city would be allowed to go free – or that if Thebes surrendered the two men who had murdered Macedonians, it could still avoid war. His herald reminded them that Alexander was the hegemon of the League and that Thebes was in violation of her sworn oaths.

The Thebans apparently read this as weakness.

The next day, their herald came out on the walls and called out in a voice of bronze, ‘Hellenes! Thebes stands with the King of Kings against the tyrant! Many times before, the King of Kings has aided Greece to throw off the yoke of tyranny and keep their cities free. Let us stand together, war down the tyrant, and be free together! But if the tyrant Alexander will give us Antipater and Philotas, as prisoners, men who are responsible for outrages against the Polis of Thebes, we will let him march away in peace.’

Philotas was Nicanor’s brother, and he was thousands of stades away, fighting the Persians in Asia.

I wasn’t anywhere near Alexander when the herald came out, but people tell me he went as white as parchment, and that when the man was done speaking, he spat.

No one likes to be called a tyrant. Least of all a tyrant. That was the same day we discovered that Olympias had killed Amyntas and Cleopatra’s children and that poor Cleopatra had hanged herself with one of her own dresses.

Macedon, eh? Olympias held the children face down in the coals of a brazier and literally burned their faces off. One at a time.

I didn’t need Thaïs to tell me what was in the letters from Alexander to Olympias.

But that didn’t make the cowardly Thebans right. Alexander had many failings. But we brought peace to the Greeks, and we made them ten times as rich and prosperous and lawful as ever before. We ended their petty squabbles, and how many women were raped, how many children burned in the endless cycle of wars? How many died when Athens and Sparta danced?

Thebes never had an empire. Thebes never thought beyond the narrow confines of the plain of Boeotia. Of the great cities, only Thebes allied with Persia – over and over. When Thebes defeated Sparta, they did nothing to pick up the reins of Sparta’s overseas commitments – and the cities of Ionia, liberated by Athens and supported by Sparta, went right back to Persia. Thebes raped Plataea – the first city of Greece ever destroyed by other Greeks. Thebes had a calendar of sins going back to ancient times, and Thebans were the most selfish, grasping and mercenary of all the Greeks.

I never shed any tears for Thebes. Don’t you, either.

After the herald’s answer, we opened siege lines. The Thebans were cocky, and to be fair, their hoplites were superb. Epaminondas wasn’t so long in his grave that their tradition of victory was dead. They raided our lines with panache, took prisoners, put three lines of palisades around the Cadmea to wall the Macedonian garrison off from any support – they were active, brave and professional.

Our siege train arrived, and we set it up. We had engineers – military mathematicians whose work consisted of evaluating defences and planning – scientifically – to reduce them. Calixthenes was the best man – he was young, dark-haired, weedy and small, and he looked like a child in a breastplate, but he was brilliant both at sighting his engines and at predicting enemy counter-measures.

The third day, they released a cavalry sortie, and I captured half of it. It was one of my best actions – one of those actions that make you feel like a god.

When I came on duty, just after sunrise, I set a pair of ambushes well back from the two gates where they might sortie. My ambushes were both subtle – bah, I’m bragging. But I put men in hayricks near one, and in a dry watercourse by the other, with orders to let anyone who emerged go right past them.

Both gates had a small cavalry force at hand, whose sole job was to fake an engagement and then get routed.

The main body of Theban horse galloped out of the Plataean gate a little after dawn and raced for our foragers in their distant fields. My ‘small force’ of cavalry pretended to attempt to engage them, and then fled before contact, and the Thebans gave chase, pursuing my handful of desperate victims across farm fields, across a dry watercourse . . .

Into the main body of the Hetaeroi. We charged them down a low hill and broke them in one charge, and then we hunted them all the way back to their gates, and the Agrianians who had been hiding in hayricks emerged and picked beaten men off tired horses as they fled.

More than fifty of their cavalry broke the other way – towards Athens.

Poseidon was fresh, and the power was on me. I gave chase with anyone who was following me.

One by one, we caught them and captured them, or killed them – ten, twenty, thirty.

Darkness fell, and we were still running them down. None of us had horses to change.

Horses started to die. You can ride a horse to death, if you go long enough and you are sufficiently stupid – or desperate.