In the meanwhile, he sent Parmenion forward with about a third of the army, to occupy the nearest of the maritime passes leading out of Cilicia into Syria. He himself, when sufficiently recovered, proceeded westward with the rest of his forces to Anchialus, where he beheld the statue of its reputed founder Sardanapalus, the voluptuous king, who judged so differently from himself—as the Assyrian inscription on his monument and the figure itself attested—of the value and use of life. At Soli, where he arrived next, he found a strong leaning to the Persian interest, which induced him to place a garrison there, and afforded him a fair ground for demanding a contribution of two hundred talents. Yet it seems to have been only an oligarchical party that had favoured the Persians, and perhaps the penalty was levied on them alone; for he established a democratical government, and the garrison may have been needed for its security. Before he returned to Tarsus, he made an inroad with a division of his forces into the mountains of the rugged Cilicia, and in the course of seven days reduced their wild inhabitants by force or terror to submission. On his return to Soli, he received the agreeable intelligence that Orontobates had been defeated in a hard-fought battle by Ptolemy and Asander, and that the citadel of Halicarnassus, and the other places which he had retained on the coast of Caria, had fallen.
Darius had previously suffered a much greater loss in the death of Memnon, who was carried off by a sudden illness while engaged in the siege of Mytilene, which, after having made himself master of Chios through treachery, and of the rest of Lesbos, he had invested closely by sea and land. Alexander, before he left Soli, celebrated the victory of his generals and at the same time testified his gratitude for his own convalescence by a solemn sacrifice to Æsculapius, with a military procession, a torch race, and musical and gymnastic contests.
He then marched back to Tarsus, and, sending Philotas forward with the bulk of cavalry across the Aleian plain, himself took a more circuitous route along the coast through Magarsus to Mallus, a town which claimed the Argive hero Amphilochus, as its founder. On this ground, as himself descended from the Heraclids of Argos, he both healed its intestine disorders, and exempted it from the tribute which it had paid to the Persian government. At Mallus for the first time he heard of the approach of the great Persian army commanded by Darius in person.[b]
DARIUS MUSTERS A NEW HOST
If Alexander was a gainer in respect to his own operations by the death of the eminent Rhodian [Memnon], he was yet more a gainer by the change of policy which that event induced Darius to adopt. The Persian king resolved to renounce the defensive schemes of Memnon, and to take the offensive against the Macedonians on land. His troops, already summoned from the various parts of the empire, had partially arrived, and were still coming in. Their numbers became greater and greater, amounting at length to a vast and multitudinous host, the total of which is given by some as six hundred thousand men; by others as four hundred thousand infantry and one hundred thousand cavalry.
Phrygian Weapons and Helmet
The spectacle of this showy and imposing mass, in every variety of arms, costume, and language, filled the mind of Darius with confidence; especially as there were among them between twenty thousand and thirty thousand Grecian mercenaries. The Persian courtiers, themselves elate and sanguine, stimulated and exaggerated the same feeling in the king himself, who became confirmed in his persuasion that his enemies could never resist him.
From Sogdiana, Bactria, and India, the contingents had not yet had time to arrive; but most of those between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea had come in—Persians, Medes, Armenians, Derbices, Barcanians, Hyrcanians, Cardaces, etc.; all of whom, mustered in the plains of Mesopotamia, are said to have been counted, like the troops of Xerxes in the plain of Doriscus, by paling off a space capable of containing exactly ten thousand men, and passing all the soldiers through it in succession. Neither Darius himself, nor any of those around him, had ever before seen so overwhelming a manifestation of the Persian imperial force. To an oriental eye, incapable of appreciating the real conditions of military preponderance—accustomed only to the gross and visible computation of numbers and physical strength—the king who marched forth at the head of such an army appeared like a god on earth, certain to trample down all before him just as most Greeks had conceived respecting Xerxes, and by stronger reason Xerxes respecting himself, a century and a half before. Because all this turned out a ruinous mistake the description of the feeling, given in Curtius and Diodorus, is often mistrusted as baseless rhetoric. Yet it is in reality the self-suggested illusion of untaught men, as opposed to trained and scientific judgment.