Philip had already made friends of the princely house of Caria, and was now at pains to secure a footing in north-west Asia Minor. He threw, therefore, an advance column across the Dardanelles under his chief lieutenant, Parmenio, and proposed to follow it in the autumn of the year 336 with a Grand Army which he had been recruiting, training and equipping for a twelvemonth. The day of festival which should inaugurate his great venture arrived; but the venture was not to be his. As he issued from his tent to attend the games he fell by the hand of a private enemy; and his young son, Alexander, had at first enough to do to re-establish a throne which proved to have more foes than friends.
SECTION 5. ALEXANDER'S CONQUEST OF THE EAST
A year and a half later Alexander's friends and foes knew that a greater soldier and empire-maker than Philip ruled in his stead, and that the father's plan of Asiatic conquest would suffer nothing at the hands of the son. The neighbours of Macedonia as far as the Danube and all the states of the Greek peninsula had been cowed to submission again in one swift and decisive campaign. The States-General of Greece, re-convoked at Corinth, confirmed Philip's son in the Captain-Generalship of Hellas, and Parmenio, once more despatched to Asia, secured the farther shore of the Hellespont. With about forty thousand seasoned horse and foot, and with auxiliary services unusually efficient for the age, Alexander crossed to Persian soil in the spring of 334.
There was no other army in Asia Minor to offer him battle in form than a force about equal in numbers to his own, which had been collected locally by the western satraps. Except for its contingent of Greek mercenaries, this was much inferior to the Macedonian force in fighting value. Fended by Parmenio from the Hellespontine shore, it did the best it could by waiting on the farther bank of the Granicus, the nearest considerable stream which enters the Marmora, in order either to draw Alexander's attack, or to cut his communications, should he move on into the continent. It did not wait long. The heavy Macedonian cavalry dashed through the stream late on an afternoon, made short work of the Asiatic constituents, and having cleared a way for the phalanx helped it to cut up the Greek contingent almost to a man before night fell. Alexander was left with nothing but city defences and hill tribes to deal with till a fuller levy could be collected from other provinces of the Persian Empire and brought down to the west, a process which would take many months, and in fact did take a full year. But some of the Western cities offered no small impediment to his progress. If Aeolia, Lydia and Ionia made no resistance worth mentioning, the two chief cities of Caria, Miletus and Halicarnassus, which had been enjoying in virtual freedom a lion's share of Aegean trade for the past century, were not disposed to become appanages of a military empire. The pretension of Alexander to lead a crusade against the ancient oppressor of the Hellenic race weighed neither with them, nor, for that matter, with any of the Greeks in Asia or Europe, except a few enthusiasts. During the past seventy years, ever since celebrations of the deliverance of Hellas from the Persian had been replaced by aspirations towards counter invasion, the desire to wreak holy vengeance had gone for little or nothing, but desire to plunder Persia had gone for a great deal. Therefore, any definite venture into Asia aroused envy, not enthusiasm, among those who would be forestalled by its success. Neither with ships nor men had any leading Greek state come forward to help Alexander, and by the time he had taken Miletus he realized that he must play his game alone, with his own people for his own ends. Thenceforward, neglecting the Greeks, he postponed his march into the heart of the Persian Empire till he had secured every avenue leading thither from the sea, whether through Asia Minor or Syria or Egypt.
After reducing Halicarnassus and Caria, Alexander did no more in Asia Minor than parade the western part of it, the better to secure the footing he had gained in the continent. Here and there he had a brush with hill-men, who had long been unused to effective control, while with one or two of their towns he had to make terms; but on the approach of winter, Anatolia was at his feet, and he seated himself at Gordion, in the Sakaria valley, where he could at once guard his communications with the Hellespont and prepare for advance into farther Asia by an easy road. Eastern Asia Minor, that is Cappadocia, Pontus and Armenia, he left alone, and its contingents would still be arrayed on the Persian side in both the great battles to come. Certain northern districts also, which had long been practically independent of Persia, e.g. Bithynia and Paphlagonia, had not been touched yet. It was not worth his while at that moment to spend time in fighting for lands which would fall in any case if the Empire fell, and could easily be held in check from western Asia Minor in the meantime. His goal was far inland, his danger he well knew, on the sea--danger of possible co-operation between Greek fleets and the greater coastal cities of the Aegean and the Levant. Therefore, with the first of the spring he moved down into Cilicia to make the ports of Syria and Egypt his, before striking at the heart of the Empire.
The Great King, last and weakest of the Darius name, had realized the greatness of his peril and come down with the levy of all the Empire to try to crush the invader in the gate of the south lands. Letting his foe pass round the angle of the Levant coast, Darius, who had been waiting behind the screen of Amanus, slipped through the hills and cut off the Macedonian's retreat in the defile of Issus between mountain and sea. Against another general and less seasoned troops a compact and disciplined Oriental force would probably have ended the invasion there and then; but that of Darius was neither compact nor disciplined. The narrowness of the field compressed it into a mob; and Alexander and his men, facing about, saw the Persians delivered into their hand. The fight lasted little longer than at Granicus and the result was as decisive a butchery. Camp, baggage-train, the royal harem, letters from Greek states, and the persons of Greek envoys sent to devise the destruction of the Captain-General--all fell to Alexander.
Assured against meeting another levy of the Empire for at least a twelvemonth, he moved on into Syria. In this narrow land his chief business, as we have seen, was with the coast towns. He must have all the ports in his hand before going up into Asia. The lesser dared not gainsay the victorious phalanx; but the queen of them all, Tyre, mistress of the eastern trade, shut the gates of her island citadel and set the western intruder the hardest military task of his life. But the capture of the chief base of the hostile fleets which still ranged the Aegean was all essential to Alexander, and he bridged the sea to effect it. One other city, Gaza, commanding the road to Egypt, showed the same spirit with less resources, and the year was far spent before the Macedonians appeared on the Nile to receive the ready submission of a people which had never willingly served the Persian. Here again, Alexander's chief solicitude was for the coasts. Independent Cyrene, lying farthest west, was one remaining danger and the openness of the Nile mouths another. The first danger dissolved with the submission, which Cyrene sent to meet him as he moved into Marmarica to the attack; the second was conjured by the creation of the port of Alexandria, perhaps the most signal act of Alexander's life, seeing to what stature the city would grow, what part play in the development of Greek and Jew, and what vigour retain to this day. For the moment, however, the new foundation served primarily to rivet its founder's hold on the shores of the Greek and Persian waters. Within a few months the hostile fleets disappeared from the Levant and Alexander obtained at last that command of the sea without which invasion of inner Asia would have been more than perilous, and permanent retention of Egypt impossible.
Thus secure of his base, he could strike inland. He went up slowly in the early part of 331 by the traditional North Road through Philistia and Palestine and round the head of the Syrian Hamad to Thapsacus on Euphrates, paying, on the way, a visit of precaution to Tyre, which had cost him so much toil and time a year before. None opposed his crossing of the Great River; none stayed him in Mesopotamia; none disputed his passage of the Tigris, though the ferrying of his force took five days. The Great King himself, however, was lying a few marches south of the mounds of Nineveh, in the plain of Gaugamela, to which roads converging from south, east and north had brought the levies of all the empire which remained to him. To hordes drawn from fighting tribes living as far distant as frontiers of India, banks of the Oxus, and foothills of the Caucasus, was added a phalanx of hireling Greeks more than three times as numerous as that which had been cut up on the Granicus. Thus awaited by ten soldiers to each one of his own on open ground chosen by his enemy, Alexander went still more slowly forward and halted four and twenty hours to breathe his army in sight of the Persian out posts. Refusing to risk an attack on that immense host in the dark, he slept soundly within his entrenchments till sunrise of the first day of October, and then in the full light led out his men to decide the fate of Persia. It was decided by sundown, and half a million broken men were flying south and east into the gathering night. But the Battle of Arbela, as it is commonly called--the greatest contest of armies before the rise of Rome--had not been lightly won. The active resistance of the Greek mercenaries, and the passive resistance of the enormous mass of the Asiatic hordes, which stayed attack by mere weight of flesh and closed again behind every penetrating column, made the issue doubtful, till Darius himself, terrified at the oncoming of the heavy Macedonian cavalry, turned his chariot and lost the day. Alexander's men had to thank the steadiness which Philip's system had given them, but also, in the last resort, the cowardice of the opposing chief.
The Persian King survived to be hunted a year later, and caught, a dying man, on the road to Central Asia; but long before that and without another pitched battle the Persian throne had passed to Alexander. Within six months he had marched to and entered in turn, without other let or hindrance than resistance of mountain tribesmen in the passes, the capitals of the Empire--Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, Ecbatana; and since these cities all held by him during his subsequent absence of six years in farther Asia, the victory of the West over the Ancient East may be regarded as achieved on the day of Arbela.