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

It was all true. He had a hundred witnesses, and he liked nothing better than to make Philotas, for instance, tell how he, the king, had rescued Philotas when his horse went down and he took a wound. He insisted that I tell how and why I had sent for help, so that he could explain how he had come into the rear of the enemy Greeks like a god from a machine in a play.

It was his first victory that was all his own, against the Persians. He had triumphed – with his own feats of arms, his own battle plan, an army that followed him. Parmenio played a very small part in the battle, and that Alexander couldn’t let anyone forget.

We were weeks travelling south along the coast, through the mountains and back to the coast of Phoenicia, and every night I heard the story of Issus again.

One afternoon, when I was with the king, we rode off the road in answer to a summons from Ariston, who was commanding the advance guard. We went north from the road a stade or two, and there was a statue. It was magnificent and barbarous all at once, in black basalt.

It depicted an ancient king in a high crown, with his fingers raised on his right hand. I had to look at them from several angles before I realised that he was in the act of snapping his fingers.

I laughed.

The king shrugged at Ariston.

Ariston had the look of a man who had tried to play the courtier and please his king, and failed. He shrugged. ‘The peasants said he was the greatest king in the history of the world,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d want to see him.’

Alexander made a face.

‘Who is he?’ he asked.

Ariston spoke briefly to a Syrian, who cowered in the dirt. The man raised his face, like a dog expecting a bone. His Greek was halting.

‘He is the Great King Ashurbanipal,’ Ariston said.

‘What does the inscription say?’ Alexander asked. ‘I know who Ashurbanipal was. He ruled the world – or enough of it that it didn’t matter.’

Ariston spoke to the cowering Syrian.

He laughed, slapped his thigh and turned to the king. ‘According to this peasant, the inscription says, “Eat! Drink! Fuck! And the rest is not worth this!”’

‘What rest? Is not worth what? Foolish old man. Worthless!’ Alexander shook his head. ‘There’s no greatness here. A village bull might say the same.’ He looked at me, because I was sobbing with laughter. ‘What’s up with you, Ptolemy?’

I couldn’t decide what was funnier – that Ashurbanipal had raised a statue to proclaim this message (and the rest is not worth the snap of my fingers) or that Alexander didn’t get it.

Later, I thought that if only he’d mentioned war, the king would have found him worthy.

There was another change. Until we marched into Cilicia, we were liberators. It was in the official letters, and in the Military Journal, too. We had come at the behest of the League of Corinth to avenge the burning of Athens and to liberate the Greeks of Ionia and Aetolia.

That was now done. It was shown to be rather hollow by the fact that less than a month after Issus, Halicarnassus and Miletus were back in Persian hands and their fleet continued to dominate the seas.

The truth is, all we won at Issus was time. Darius had a new army within hours, and we actually lost ground after the battle.

And we only truly owned the ground under our feet. More and more, the king had to send detachments – like the one I had led, like Antigonus, like Seleucus – to hold key cities or to put down the endless rebellions in our rear. I use the term ‘rebellions’ advisedly – I didn’t work for the Military Journal any more, and I disdained their jargon and still do. We were the foreign usurpers. Why should we have expected loyalty of the satraps? They would make submission to us, but as soon as Darius showed his teeth, they all flocked to his banner. Including a great many Greeks.

On our side of the struggle, once we marched south into Phoenicia, we were conquerors, not liberators, and that had an effect on the army that I didn’t like to see. The younger men revelled in it – especially relatively new recruits fresh from the farm. Their peasant myths of their own superiority were played out. They had licence to slaughter – aye, and rape and steal – because we were Macedonians!

But the older men saw it differently. I never heard one put it just this way, but my feeling was that until we liberated the last Greek states in Asia, the old veterans could pretend to themselves that this was Philip’s son completing Philip’s crusade, and then we’d all go home.

After Issus, Alexander bragged openly that he intended to make himself Master of Asia. King of Kings. And all the veterans knew what that meant.

It meant thousands of stades of marching and a lot more fighting, that’s what it meant.

Morale plummeted, and between atrocities committed on the civilian population and suicides among the older veterans, the signs were obvious.

Phoenicia should have been easy. I can still grow angry just telling this part of the story.

As we marched south, the cities surrendered one by one, and the Persian fleet lost base after base. Granted, in the north, they had retaken about a third of Ionia, and most of the islands, which, if you consider it, suggests that Alexander’s strategy was utterly hollow. The only thing that kept the Persians from counter-invading Greece and Macedon was lack of a strategos and Athens’ continued prevarication. Men like Kineas’s father did more to help Alexander than he did to help himself. That whole autumn and winter, had Athens come over to Persia, we’d have been cut off from our homes.

Sparta did, in fact, join the Persian cause, but in their own special Spartan way, they left it too late and bungled it. That happened later, of course.

We marched up to Sidon, the second-greatest city in Phoenicia, and they made submission gracefully enough, and Alexander was munificent in rewarding them for their choice. Then we marched down the coast to Tyre with four thousand Sidonese marines in our ranks.

Again, it should have been easy.

Alexander’s demands were very easy – the usual tokens of submission and a payment to the treasury to cover the cost of their submission – the costs of conquering them, so to speak. And taxes, of course. But Alexander was far too wise to impose a foreign government over them – he usually left a military governor with a few thousand troops to watch a whole region.

With Tyre, which was a city associated with Melkart, the Syrian version of our Herakles, Alexander had an additional desire – a pothos, a heroic craving. At Tyre, Alexander wanted permission to worship and sacrifice (lavishly) in person at the Tyrian Temple of Melkart. Tyre was an island fortress, a set of rocks of two stades or more forming a promontory, and the temples were magnificent – but no man might enter without the leave of the city fathers.

Alexander wanted to sacrifice there.

I was present for the negotiations, and I watched the next year of my life vanish in poor judgement.

Azemiticus was explaining that he had no interest in fighting, and Alexander was smiling away, already marching on, in his head, to our next prey, when the Tyrian shrugged.

‘As to making sacrifice at our temples,’ he said with that mock ruefulness you so easily detect as a falsehood that you know you are being mocked – then paused. He meant to offend. ‘That is the privilege of the Great King and no other.’

Alexander’s head turned as rapidly as if he had been struck. ‘There is no longer a “Great King”. I am your king, and I will worship there.’ He smiled, his lips tight – those who knew him understood what this meant. ‘All the better that it is a privilege reserved for kings alone.’