The Sieges of Alexander the Great

  THE SIEGES OF

  ALEXANDER

  THE GREAT

  THE SIEGES OF

  ALEXANDER

  THE GREAT

  STEPHEN ENGLISH

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Pen & Sword Military

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Stephen English

  ISBN 978 1 84884 060 7

  The right of Stephen English to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  List of Plates

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  Chapter 1 Siege Technology

  Chapter 2 Pellium and Thebes: 335

  Chapter 3 Miletus and Halicarnassus: 334

  Chapter 4 Tyre: 332

  Chapter 5 Gaza: 332

  Chapter 6 The Northeast Frontier: 330–327

  Chapter 7 India and the Journey to Babylon: 327–323

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Plates

  1.

  The Capture of Miletus, by Andre Castaigne, 1898 (© Andrew Michael Chugg, www.alexanderstomb.com)

  2.

  The Myndus Gate, Halicarnassus (courtesy of www.Livius.org)

  3.

  Artist’s reconstruction of a torsion catapult (after Jeff Burn, © J. Sidnell)

  4 &

  5. Fourth-century BC fortifications at Assos (© www.HolyLandPhotos.org)

  6.

  Alexander’s mole is attacked by ships. The Siege of Tyre drawn by Didier, engraved by W. Roberts, c. 1848 (© Andrew Michael Chugg, www.alexanderstomb.com)

  7.

  A Macedonian assault during the siege of Tyre, by Antonio Tempesta, 1608 (© Andrew Michael Chugg, www.alexanderstomb.com)

  8.

  Engraved view of Tyre before modern development, by Petit, 1889 (© Andrew Michael Chugg, www.alexanderstomb.com)

  9.

  A naval action during the siege of Tyre, by Andre Castaigne, 1898–9 (© Andrew Michael Chugg, www.alexanderstomb.com)

  10.

  Lade, NW of Miletus (courtesy of www.Livius.org)

  11.

  The Persian Gates (courtesy of www.Livius.org)

  12.

  Aornus (Pir Sar) from the southeast (courtesy of www.Livius.org)

  13.

  Aornus (Pir Sar) from the northwest (courtesy of www.Livius.org)

  14.

  The Broken Ladder by Andre Castaigne, 1899 (© Andrew Michael Chugg, www.alexanderstomb.com)

  15.

  Alexander’s lone defence against the Mallians, anonymous, 1696 (© Andrew Michael Chugg, www.alexanderstomb.com)

  Preface

  This book is the second of three dealing with the career of Alexander the Great. The first book, The Army of Alexander the Great, dealt with most issues pertaining to the army. Such issues will generally not be repeated in this volume or the next. The third volume is entitled The Field Campaigns of Alexander the Great and details every set-piece battle and minor campaign of Alexander’s brief reign. These three volumes are each intended to stand alone, but are also complementary; when taken as a continuum, they detail every aspect of Alexander’s military career.

  The books arose out of my doctoral thesis and have, therefore, been six years in the preparation. I undertook the doctorate, and ultimately these books, with the intention of reconstructing Alexander’s battles and sieges with a view to determining what tactics he used in gaining the largest empire the world had yet seen. This study, then, has a definite aim: to reconstruct Alexander’s great battles and sieges and to assess tactics and their development throughout Alexander’s career. This approach may be considered narrow and old-fashioned by some, but I believe much work remains to be done in the area, and that it is still a legitimate field of academic study.

  I decided to undertake the thesis after having read Fuller a number of years ago; it constantly struck me that no real attempt has been made by academics to produce a more up-to-date assessment (Fuller was first published in 1958) based upon a considerable body of modern scholarship. Many articles have been written on individual battles and campaigns, but no full-length academic studies. I believe this full-scale approach has more validity, as an individual study will always, by necessity, miss the bigger picture and fail to grasp any developments in Alexander’s tactical thinking. Small studies will also fail to properly demonstrate what Alexander’s main tactics were, and if he used the same ideas repeatedly or constantly innovated to suit every circumstance.

  The study of military history in recent years has become extremely unfashionable, and has been replaced by trendier subject areas like social history and the study of women in the ancient world (both very worthy fields of study in themselves, but not what interests me). This is extremely unfortunate, but I am sure that the pendulum will swing back in our direction at some point in the future. I have always been deeply fascinated by military history, and particularly the ancient world, for everything else depends upon warfare; upon victory and the freedoms it gave, or upon defeat and the travails it brought. As Sun Tzu said:

  The art of war is of vital importance to the state; it is a matter of life and death, a road to either victory or defeat. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.1

  I could not agree more.

  One final note, all dates used within this work are BC, unless otherwise stated.

  Acknowledgements

  It is a great personal pleasure for me to now be able, with the help of my publisher and editor, to put some of my thoughts on paper, and hopefully pass on some of my interest to others who are of like mind. With this in mind, there are a number of people who deserve my thanks: firstly, Elizabeth for her continued love and support, my friends Martin and Sue Foulkes, and to my family. My greatest thanks, as always, are to Peter Rhodes for his boundless help and friendship. I would finally like to thank Phil Sidnell and the rest of the team at Pen and Sword for making this book possible.

  Finally, I would say that this work owes a great debt to the many scholars who have come before me, and to the body of work that they have produced. I hope that in some small way I can add to that work. Despite the various people who have seen, read, and helped with the production of this book, any remaining errors are entirely my own.

  Sources

  The surviving source materia
l for the career of Alexander the Great is usually divided into two general groups, the first of which is frequently referred to as the ‘vulgate tradition’ (or derivatives thereof). The term does far more harm to these sources than is probably justified: they present a popular tradition and are represented by Diodorus, Curtius, Pompeius Trogus (in the epitome of Justin) and Plutarch. It is not true to say that these sources are anti-Alexander, but they are certainly not as pro-Alexander as the other tradition, that represented by Arrian.

  Diodorus

  Of the five narratives that survive, Diodorus is the earliest. Diodorus Siculus was a Greek from Sicily, active in the first century BC, and author of a forty-book history that he called the Library of History. Of this great work, book seventeen deals with the career of Alexander. Diodorus is justly criticised by modern authorities for being an uncritical compiler of information. He also has a tendency to play with dates, to move events from one year to another in order to fill a time gap, and to even out events. Diodorus had a tendency to use a single primary source for each book, and in book seventeen this was Cleitarchus. He did, however, take information from other writers where appropriate, such as Ephorus, Apollodorus, Agatharchides and Timaeus. Some of his passages are almost identical to the corresponding passages in Curtius, taking into account differences in the Greek and Latin. The size of his work means that frequently he preserves some material that goes unrecorded in the other surviving sources and this is his primary value.

  Diodorus’ narratives are similar to the rest of the vulgate tradition, in that it

  is rhetorical in nature and contains, in the case of the Battle of the Hydaspes, for example, little of tactical interest. As in Plutarch, terminology, when used, is vague and lacking in full detail. For example, Porus divided his cavalry by posting a body on each flank and that he divided his elephants equally along the length of the front line.2 The motif of the castle wall, with the elephants representing towers, is repeated throughout the vulgate tradition. Diodorus’ descriptions of Alexander’s dispositions are even less tactically useful, for example: ‘he viewed those of the enemy and arranged his own forces accordingly.’3 Diodorus also fails to recognize that there were several phases of the battle involving some intricate manoeuvres from Alexander.

  Arrian

  Lucius Flavius Arrianus (Arrian) was a Greek from Nicomedia in Bithynia (Asia Minor, modern Turkey). The specific date of his birth is nowhere attested, but since he was consul in 130 AD, he was most likely born some time around 85 AD. Although Arrian gained Roman citizenship, he was first and foremost a Greek, writing in Greek and primarily for a Greek audience. In his early life he was a pupil of the great Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, but his Anabasis (his history of Alexander) shows little or no bias in that direction. In his adult life, Arrian was a significant figure in the Roman Empire, along with the consulship he was also made governor of Cappadocia by Hadrian and commanded two Roman legions there. In terms of content, Arrian was no Thucydides, but he did choose good sources, even if his reason for the choice was dubious at best.4

  Arrian’s history has generally and rightly been regarded as the finest of the surviving narratives of the career of Alexander the Great. His text is unique in the ancient world in that he specifically gives us information about his use of sources: in his preface, he identifies both his sources and his reasons for using them as his primary sources. Arrian’s reasons for selecting his sources are often considered naïve, and I believe this is a perfectly correct judgement, but we must examine his reasoning in more depth.

  Arrian opens his history by telling us that:5

  Wherever Ptolemy and Aristobulus in their histories of Alexander, the son of Philip, have given the same account, I have followed it on the assumption of its accuracy; where their facts differ I have chosen what I feel to be the more probable and interesting.

  This statement may seem to imply that Ptolemy and Aristobulus were considered to be of equal weight by Arrian; this is demonstrably not the case, however. At 6.2.4 Arrian calls Ptolemy ‘my principle source’; and for Arrian, therefore, there was evidently a clear hierarchy of quality with regard to his sources: Ptolemy, Aristobulus, and then the rest. Ptolemy is clearly Arrian’s main narrative source, and some passages are probably verbatim extracts, such as the narrative of the Danubian campaign. Whilst we can clearly see Ptolemy in the text of Arrian, Aristobulus’ contribution is more difficult to assess. The surviving fragments of Aristobulus, coupled with the relative lack of direct citations in Arrian, means that there is insufficient primary material to make any substantive judgements.

  Bias is always present in any written material, and in history particularly so. The surviving sources for the career of Alexander are especially prone to this, given that what we have was written so long after his death, and the now-lost contemporary sources were written by individuals who can certainly be accused of having ulterior motives. Ptolemy, for example, has been accused of deliberately altering events to make Perdiccas responsible for the destruction of Thebes.6 Perdiccas and Ptolemy were rivals in the period immediately after Alexander’s death; Perdiccas having invaded Ptolemy’s Egypt in 320. If Ptolemy wrote his history around this time, then there was an obvious and strong political motivation for wishing to re-write history in his favour and against Perdiccas. None of the dates for Ptolemy’s history are anywhere near this early, however, so we must look more deeply for Ptolemy’s motives. It is almost certainly incorrect to assume simple political bias, however. Ptolemy explicitly tells us that Perdiccas was wounded in the initial stages of combat, and was removed from the field, taking no further part in the battle. Any bias in Ptolemy’s account is not anti-Perdiccas but is in fact pro-Alexander. Ptolemy has Alexander giving the Thebans every chance to surrender and essentially blames them for their fate. I see no reason, therefore, to dismiss Arrian’s account on the grounds of bias against one of his later protagonists.

  The Perdiccas bias, or lack thereof, is further complicated by a very similar incident during the siege of Halicarnassus. Arrian tells us that two drunken solders from Perdiccas’ taxis (division of heavy infantry) made some kind of approach to the city, and were killed by missile fire from the defenders, some of whom began shooting at the rest of the encamped Macedonians. Perdiccas ordered more troops to join the fray, as did Memnon, and considerable confusion ensued. Arrian tells us that Alexander could have broken into the city at this point but sounded the withdrawal. The Diodorus version of events is considerably briefer, and whilst Arrian represents it as an almost total success, with the city coming close to falling, Diodorus has it as an unqualified defeat.7 Again, this incident does not show a bias against Perdiccas because, although he clearly acted without orders, the city could have fallen because of his actions and was only prevented from doing so by Alexander. If Ptolemy was genuinely anti-Perdiccas, then we can only assume that he would have taken the same line as Diodorus and presented the incident as a disaster.

  The sources are also far from comprehensive in terms of what was written; with regard to the siege of Tyre, it is certain that the texts of Arrian and Curtius omit much of the detail of the siege. There is certainly not enough narrative to fill the eight months that we know it took Alexander to capture the island fortress. One obvious and significant omission is the construction of the mole; it seems to disappear from Arrian and Curtius for quite some time. One minute it is being destroyed by the fire ship, the next it has been doubled in size and is at the very walls of Tyre itself.8 Diodorus provides a little vital tactical information, that after early mistakes Alexander was protecting the construction workers with a heavy screen of naval vessels. The main reason could be that Ptolemy may have only included the most interesting elements of the siege, which is entirely plausible; but it is also possible that Ptolemy may not have been present for parts of the siege.9 Junior officers would likely have been sent, from time to time, on scouting or foraging missions. The lack of Ptolemy’s name in the histories at this point makes it impossible
to know. Arrians’ choice of a junior officer (Ptolemy) in the army for the first few years of the campaign, a man who may have been excluded from councils of war during that time, adds yet another layer of complexity to the interpretation of his text.

  Curtius

  Quintus Curtius Rufus wrote in the second quarter of the first century AD. He was a Roman, writing in Latin, and was himself an active politician, having held public offices under both Tiberius and Claudius. Curtius wrote his history of Alexander in ten books, of which the first two are now lost, and what remains contains lacunae in places (the end of book five and the beginning of book six, and large parts of book ten, for example). Curtius’ primary source seems to have been Cleitarchus, but he sensibly added many details from Ptolemy and others.

  Although Arrian is correctly regarded as the most reliable of the surviving sources, there is much in Curtius and others that is not in Arrian; either because the latter did not believe it important, or perhaps because he did not have access to the material. At Issus, for example, Curtius presents us with a picture of events at the Persian court that is not in Arrian. He describes a debate, not with Amyntas as in Arrian, but with Thymondas, son of Mentor.10 The subject of the debate, according to Curtius, was whether or not to divide the army, a theme that appears in neither Arrian nor Plutarch. Curtius and Diodorus both describe an earlier debate in Babylon, in which the Athenian mercenary, Charidemus, advocated such a division of forces, and was executed for his overzealousness. This should not necessarily be taken to imply that Curtius had access to a Persian source that Arrian did not, perhaps only that Curtius was occasionally interested in issues outside of Arrian’s scope.11