Alexander the Great

On his deathbed, Memnon had appointed his Persian nephew and his deputy as temporary admirals and the pair of them had been fighting on boldly. By August, they had finally forced Mytilcne to surrender, 'urging the Mytilenaeans to become allies of Darius according to the peace of Antalcidas made with Darius', an extraordinarily crooked settlement, as this peace of Antalcidas, which had been sworn fifty-three years before to King Artaxerxes II, had left the Aegean islands free and in no way obliged to Persia. The treaty had perhaps been infringed often enough to be forgotten by a new generation of islanders; if so, Mytilene was rewarded for its poor sense of history with a garrison, a foreign commander, the return of rich exiles to half their property, a tyrant, and a punitive fine. The capture of Lesbos opened the fleet's path to the Dardanelles, but before the two admirals could pursue this, orders arrived for the delivery of most of their hired Greek troops. So, perhaps in mid-August, nearly two hundred ships were diverted cast along their open supply points at Cos and Halicarnassus to Tripolis on the coast of Syria where they could hand over their mercenaries to another nephew of Mcm-non. The ships were to be beached there, and the mercenaries were to march inland to Darius, '30,000 Greeks' according to Alexander's staff, a number which should be reduced or even halved.

The Persian admirals rejoined forces in the Aegean to continue their war with a mere 3,000 mercenaries and a hundred warships. Their prospects were much reduced, but Darius had not disturbed them u

When the Persians had first conquered Babylon two hundred years before, they had divided its gloriously fertile land to suit their own interests. Much of it had been allotted to their servants and soldiers as a means of maintenance; the Persians faced the need for expensive and complex weaponry and as only land grants could finance this in a rural society without cash or coinage, they had introduced a feudal system which, like much that was sophisticated in the language and methods of Persian government, can be shown to trace back to their imperial predecessors, the Medes. As in the plains of Lydia, so in the plains of Mesopotamia families of foreign troopers from far afield had been settled on land grants, some seventy acres in the few cases where their extent is known, and arranged according to cantons of class or nationality, whether Arabs, Jews, Egyptians, Syrians or Indians, each supervised by district officers who were responsible for collecting the a

Three main types of land grant had been issued, horse land, bow land and chariot land; the very names are an insight into the Persian army, for the owners served as feudal archers, heavy cavalry and charioteers, complete with chariot and horse. All were liable for a

In one remarkable document, the problems are set out in detail. In 422 King Artaxerxes had summoned his colonists to attack the city of Uruk, but the summons had caught the Jewish owner of a land grant off his guard. Probably because of financial embarrassment, the Jew's father had been forced to adopt a member of the Murasu bank as his son, so that the banker could inherit a share in the family allotment, and as the land grant could only be owned by a member of the family, adoption was the one means of evading the king's law and endowing an outsider. When the father died, the adopted banker held one part of the farm, the true male heirs the rest. In 422 they were presented with the king's demand for silver, weaponry and the personal service of one family member as a fully equipped cavalryman, complete with horse. Fortunate in his banking 'brother', the Jew had struck an advantageous bargain; the wild cat bankers would not fancy fighting and so their adopted agent would finance the armour, silver tax, horse and, very probably, the groom, while the Jew would ride out at the risk of his life.

In the joy of his heart, Gadal-Iama the Jew has spoken thus to the son of the Murasu: the planted and ploughed fields, the horse land of my father, you now hold because my father once adopted your father. So give me a horse with a groom and harness, a caparison of iron, a helmet, a leather breastplate, a buckler, 120 arrows of two sorts, an iron attachment for my buckler, two iron spears and a mina of silver for provisions and I will fulfil the service-duties which weigh on our lands.

As the horseman owned no bow, the arrows were presumably to be handed in to the cashier and then distributed to owners of bow and chariot land.

But in summer 333, not every colonist would be sharing his land with a rich wild cat banker who could pay for his army outfit; the adoption of the banker is itself a sign, like the increasing number of leases and mortgages in the Murasu documents, that the colonists had found life more strenuous or awkward as the years went by. The a