The Asiatic conquests of Alexander do not belong directly and literally to the province of an historian of Greece. They were achieved by armies of which the general, the principal officers, and most part of the soldiers, were Macedonian. The Greeks who served with him were only auxiliaries, along with the Thracians and Pæonians. Though more numerous than all the other auxiliaries, they did not constitute, like the Ten Thousand Greeks in the army of the younger Cyrus, the force on which he mainly relied for victory. His chief-secretary, Eumenes of Kardia, was a Greek, and probably most of the civil and intellectual functions connected with the service were also performed by Greeks. Many Greeks also served in the army of Persia against him, and composed indeed a larger proportion of the real force (disregarding mere numbers) in the army of Darius than in that of Alexander. Hence the expedition becomes indirectly incorporated with the stream of Grecian history by the powerful auxiliary agency of Greeks on both sides—and still more, by its connection with previous projects, dreams, and legends, long antecedent to the aggrandizement of Macedon—as well as by the character which Alexander thought fit to assume. To take revenge on Persia for the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and to liberate the Asiatic Greeks, had been the scheme of the Spartan Agesilaus, and of the Pheræan Jason; with hopes grounded on the memorable expedition and safe return of the Ten Thousand. It had been recommended by the rhetor Isokrates, first to the combined force of Greece, while yet Grecian cities were free, under the joint headship of Athens and Sparta—next, to Philip of Macedon as the chief of united Greece, when his victorious arms had extorted a recognition of headship, setting aside both Athens and Sparta. The enterprising ambition of Philip was well pleased to be nominated chief of Greece for the execution of this project. From him it passed to his yet more ambitious son.
Though really a scheme of Macedonian appetite and for Macedonian aggrandizement, the expedition against Asia thus becomes thrust into the series of Grecian events, under the Pan-hellenic pretence of retaliation for the long past insults of Xerxes. I call it a pretence, because it had ceased to be a real Hellenic feeling, and served now two different purposes; first, to ennoble the undertaking in the eyes of Alexander himself, whose mind was very accessible to religious and legendary sentiment, and who willingly identified himself with Agamemnon or Achilles, immortalized as executors of the collective vengeance of Greece for Asiatic insult—next, to assist in keeping the Greeks quiet during his absence. He was himself aware that the real sympathies of the Greeks were rather adverse than favorable to his success.
Apart from this body of extinct sentiment, ostentatiously rekindled for Alexander’s purposes, the position of the Greeks in reference to his Asiatic conquests was very much the same as that of the German contingents, especially those of the Confederation of the Rhine, who served in the grand army with which the Emperor Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. They had no public interest in the victory of the invader, which could end only by reducing them to still greater prostration. They were likely to adhere to their leader as long as his power continued unimpaired, but no longer. Yet Napoleon thought himself entitled to reckon upon them as if they had been Frenchmen, and to denounce the Germans in the service of Russia as traitors who had forfeited the allegiance which they owed to him. We find him drawing the same pointed distinction between the Russian and the German prisoners taken, as Alexander made between Asiatic and Grecian prisoners. These Grecian prisoners the Macedonian prince reproached as guilty of treason against the proclaimed statute of collective Hellas, whereby he had been declared general, and the Persian king a public enemy.[113]
Hellas, as a political aggregate, has now ceased to exist, except in so far as Alexander employs the name for his own purposes. Its component members are annexed as appendages, doubtless of considerable value, to the Macedonian kingdom. Fourteen years before Alexander’s accession, Demosthenes, while instigating the Athenians to uphold Olynthus against Philip, had told them[114]—“The Macedonian power, considered as an appendage, is of no mean value; but by itself, it is weak and full of embarrassments.” Inverting the position of the parties, these words represent exactly what Greece herself had become, in reference to Macedonia and Persia, at the time of Alexander’s accession. Had the Persians played their game with tolerable prudence and vigor, his success would have been measured by the degree to which he could appropriate Grecian force to himself, and withhold it from his enemy.
Alexander’s memorable and illustrious manifestations, on which we are now entering, are those, not of the ruler or politician, but of the general and the soldier. In this character his appearance forms a sort of historical epoch. It is not merely in soldier-like qualities—in the most forward and even adventurous bravery—in indefatigable personal activity, and in endurance as to hardship and fatigue,—that he stands pre-eminent; though these qualities alone, when found in a king, act so powerfully on those under his command, that they suffice to produce great achievements, even when combined with generalship not surpassing the average of his age. But in generalship, Alexander was yet more above the level of his contemporaries. His strategic combinations, his employment of different descriptions of force conspiring towards one end, his long-sighted plans for the prosecution of campaigns, his constant foresight and resource against new difficulties, together with rapidity of movement even in the worst country—all on a scale of prodigious magnitude—are without parallel in ancient history. They carry the art of systematic and scientific welfare to a degree of efficiency, such as even successors trained in his school were unable to keep up unimpaired.
We must recollect however that Alexander found the Macedonian military system built up by Philip, and had only to apply and enlarge it. As transmitted to him, it embodied the accumulated result and matured fruit of a series of successive improvements, applied by Grecian tacticians to the primitive Hellenic arrangements. During the sixty years before the accession of Alexander, the art of war had been conspicuously progressive—to the sad detriment of Grecian political freedom. “Everything around us (says Demosthenes addressing the people of Athens in 342 B. C.), has been in advance for some years past—nothing is like what it was formerly—but nowhere is the alteration and enlargement more conspicuous than in the affairs of war. Formerly, the Lacedæmonians as well as other Greeks did nothing more than invade each other’s territory, during the four or five summer months, with their native force of citizen hoplites: in winter they stayed at home. But now we see Philip in constant action, winter as well as summer, attacking all around him, not merely with Macedonian hoplites, but with cavalry, light infantry, bowmen, foreigners of all descriptions, and siege-batteries.”[115]
I have in my last two volumes dwelt upon this progressive change in the character of Grecian soldiership. At Athens, and in most other parts of Greece, the burghers had become averse to hard and active military service. The use of arms had passed mainly to professional soldiers, who, without any feeling of citizenship, served wherever good pay was offered, and became immensely multiplied, to the detriment and danger of Grecian society.[116] Many of these mercenaries were lightly armed—peltasts served in combination with the hoplites.[117] Iphikrates greatly improved and partly re-armed the peltasts; whom he employed conjointly with hoplites so effectively as to astonish his contemporaries.[118] His innovation was farther developed by the great military genius of Epaminondas; who not only made infantry and cavalry, light-armed and heavy-armed, conspire to one scheme of operations, but also completely altered the received principles of battle-manœuvring, by concentrating an irresistible force of attack on one point of the enemy’s line, and keeping the rest of his own line more on the defensive. Besides these important improvements, realized by generals in actual practice, intelligent officers like Xenophon embodied the results of their military experience in valuable published criticisms.[119] Such were the lessons which the Macedonian Philip learnt and applied to the enslavement of those Greeks, especially of the Thebans, from whom they were derived. In his youth, as a hostage at Thebes, he had probably conversed with Epaminondas, and must certainly have become familiar with the Theban military arrangements. He had every motive, not merely from ambition, of conquest, but even from the necessities of defence, to turn them to account: and he brought to the task military genius and aptitude of the highest order. In arms, in evolutions, in engines, in regimenting, in war-office arrangements, he introduced important novelties; bequeathing to his successors the Macedonian military system, which, with improvements by his son, lasted until the conquest of the country by Rome, near two centuries afterwards.
The military force of Macedonia, in the times anterior to Philip, appears to have consisted, like that of Thessaly, in a well-armed and well-mounted cavalry, formed from the substantial proprietors of the country—and in a numerous assemblage of peltasts or light infantry (somewhat analogous to the Thessalian Penestæ): these latter were the rural population, shepherds or cultivators, who tended sheep and cattle, or tilled the earth, among the spacious mountains and valleys of Upper Macedonia. The Grecian towns near the coast, and the few Macedonian towns in the interior, had citizen-hoplites better armed; but foot-service was not in honor among the natives, and the Macedonian infantry in their general character were hardly more than a rabble. At the period of Philip’s accession, they were armed with nothing better than rusty swords and wicker shields, noway sufficient to make head against the inroads of their Thracian and Illyrian neighbors; before whom they were constantly compelled to flee for refuge up into the mountains.[120] Their condition was that of a poor herdsman, half-naked or covered only with hides, and eating from wooden platters: not much different from that of the population of Upper Macedonia three centuries before, when first visited by Perdikkas the ancestor of the Macedonian kings, and when the wife of the native prince baked bread with her own hands.[121] On the other hand, though the Macedonian infantry was thus indifferent, the cavalry of the country was excellent, both in the Peloponnesian war, and in the war carried on by Sparta against Olynthus more than twenty years afterwards.[122] These horsemen, like the Thessalians, charged in compact order, carrying as their principal weapon of offence, not javelins to be hurled, but the short thrusting-pike for close combat.
Thus defective was the military organization which Philip found. Under his auspices it was cast altogether anew. The poor and hardy Landwehr of Macedonia, constantly on the defensive against predatory neighbors, formed an excellent material for soldiers, and proved not intractable to the innovations of a warlike prince. They were placed under constant training in the regular rank and file of heavy infantry: they were moreover brought to adopt a new description of arm, not only in itself very difficult to manage, but also comparatively useless to the soldier when fighting single-handed, and only available by a body of men in close order, trained to move or stand together. The new weapon, of which we first hear the name in the army of Philip, was the sarissa—the Macedonian pike or lance. The sarissa was used both by the infantry of his phalanx, and by particular regiments of his cavalry; in both cases it was long, though that of the phalanx was much the longer of the two. The regiments of cavalry called Sarissophori or Lancers were a sort of light-horse, carrying a long lance, and distinguished from the heavier cavalry intended for the shock of hand combat, who carried the xyston or short pike. The sarissa of this cavalry may have been fourteen feet in length, as long as the Cossack pike now is; that of the infantry in phalanx was not less than twenty-one feet long. This dimension is so prodigious and so unwieldy, that we should hardly believe it, if it did not come attested by the distinct assertion of an historian like Polybius.
The extraordinary reach of the sarissa or pike constituted the prominent attribute and force of the Macedonian phalanx. The phalangites were drawn up in files generally sixteen deep, each called a Lochus; with an interval of three feet between each two soldiers from front to rear. In front stood the lochage, a man of superior strength, and of tried military experience. The second and third men in the file, as well as the rearmost man who brought up the whole, were also picked soldiers, receiving larger pay than the rest. Now the sarissa, when in horizontal position, was held with both hands (distinguished in this respect from the pike of the Grecian hoplite, which occupied only one hand, the other being required for the shield), and so held that it projected fifteen feet before the body of the pikeman; while the hinder portion of six feet so weighted as to make the pressure convenient in such division. Hence, the sarissa of the man standing second in the file, projected twelve feet beyond the front rank; that of the third man, nine feet; these of the fourth and fifth ranks, respectively six feet and three feet. There was thus presented a quintuple series of pikes by each file, to meet an advancing enemy. Of these five, the three first would be decidedly of greater projection, and even the fourth of not less projection, than the pikes of Grecian hoplites coming up as enemies to the charge. The ranks behind the fifth, while serving to sustain and press onward the front, did not carry the sarissa in a horizontal position, but slanted it over the shoulders of those before them, so as to break the force of any darts or arrows which might be shot over head from the rear ranks of the enemy.[123]