Alexander the Great

This conversation with Parmenion is probably fiction, for Parmenion appears suspiciously often as Alexander's 'adviser', not only in his officers' histories but also in legend, whether Greek or Jewish, where he is usually refuted and so serves to set off his master's daring and intelligence. It is more relevant that within four years of the battle, Parmenion was killed, on Alexander's orders, for his son's conspiracy. From the few surviving scraps of Callisthenes's official history, Parmenion's part in the great pitched battle of Gaugamela can be seen to have been criticized strongly and probably unfairly, and a story which was used at Gaugamela could easly have been applied at the Granicus too, perhaps again by Callisthenes, or by one or both of the later historians, Alexander's friend Ptolemy and his elderly apologist Aristobulus. If Callisthenes began it, then this 'refutation' of Parmenion must have been to Alexander's liking, perhaps because it was written after Parmenion had been killed and his memory was thought fit to be blackened. But it was not only a device to set off Alexander's boldness; it was also dishonest, for others described a battle fought exactly as Parmenion suggested, and for various reasons they were probably correct.

Alexander, wrote a historian who owed him nothing, did encamp for the night on the Granicus banks. There was no dialogue with Parmenion, but at dawn Alexander crossed the river unopposed, probably because the Persians had indeed bivouacked on a hill a mile or two back; it was not a Persian practice to begin a march before sunrise, and their universal habit of camping casually at a distance and even hobbling their horses in front of camp had already been emphasized by Xenophon as a fine chance for attackers. Having stolen a march by stealth at dawn, Alexander fa

The battle was fought and won in exactly the style which Parmenion, according to Alexander's officers, had wrongly advised. Cu

Of the sequel to the victory there is no room for doubt and little for complaint. As a leader of men, Alexander cast a spell which was firmly based on effort, and events on the Granicus showed its notable begi

The spoils were treated with similar glamour and astuteness. Their surplus was sent to Olympias as queen of Macedonia, but three hundred suits of Persian armour were singled out for dedication at Athens to the city's goddess Athena, and the following inscription was ordered to be attached to them: 'Alexander son of Philip and the Greeks, except the Spartans, from the barbarians who live in Asia.' With this simple wording Alexander must be given credit for one of the most brilliantly diplomatic slogans in ancient history; Alexander, he called himself, not King Alexander nor leader nor general, but merely the son of Philip, in impeccably humble style; from the Greeks, he wrote, not the Macedonians not the Agrianians nor the tribes of Europe who had won a battle in which Greeks had only featured prominently on the enemy side; from barbarians, whose outrages he was avenging, but whose leaders he had none the less buried; from a victory, above all, of the Greeks 'except the Spartans', three words which summoned up emotions from all Greek history of the past two hundred years. On the one hand, no Spartans present, none of Greece's best-trained soldiers, none of the Spartans who had turned back Xerxes long ago at Thermopylae, caring nothing for arrows which darkened the sun, because 'Sparta did not consider it to be her fathers' practice to follow, but to lead'; but also none of the Spartans whom the smaller cities of southern Greece still feared and detested, whose unpopularity had been shrewdly exploited by Philip, whose shadow had darkened the history of democracies not only at Athens but also throughout the Greek world, Spartans who had come to free the Greeks of Asia seventy years before and cynically signed them away to the Persian king; it was a message of clear meaning, and it tells much that it went to Athens, the city whose culture Alexander and his father had respected, but whose misconduct they had fought and feared for two decades.

A thousand years, said the historians, divided the victory at the Granicus from the fall of Troy, which Callisthenes had calculated to occur in the same month as Alexander's invasion; a thousand years, therefore, between one Achilles and the coming of his rival to the plains of Nemesis, goddess of revenge, as Callisthenes described the site of the battlefield. It was indeed the start of a new age, though none of those who turned away from the site could ever have realized how; not in a new philosophy or science, but in the geographical width of conquest and the incidental spread of a people's way of life.