maneuvers in the fields around Pella. Legend held that this was the very vehicle that had carried Midas’s father from his farmhouse in Macedonia to the throne of Phrygia. The Knot, a great ball of stripped bark, fastened the heavy double-yoke to the shaft. The man who untied it was destined to seize the throne of the Great King.
Standing in the back, I watched as Alexander circled the cart, quite possibly realizing the magnitude of the trouble he had taken upon himself. Generations of adventurers had tried and failed to untie the Knot. The entire population of Gordion seemed to be waiting outside the temple; the Macedonian officers were there too, their childish faith in their King yet unspoiled.
The Knot was so long untouched that spider webs hung from it. Alexander began to pick at it, as if trying to find some loose end to work free. But public challenges go unmet for centuries for a reason: in this case, the Knot was as tight as a drumhead, and seemed held together by some kind of glue. He tried to get a fingertip under one of the leather strands but slipped, ripping off part of a nail. He cursed. The priests sucked in their breaths at this blasphemy in their sanctuary. Alexander ignored them, taking out his sword. Working the tip between two strands, he struggled to widen the opening, but the Knot moved too much, and he could not grip the blade tightly enough. The King became frustrated, stabbing at the wobbly thing until he went red in the face and everyone became embarrassed for him. The nervous whispers of the onlookers became louder, and Hephaestion looked as if he was ready to intercede. That was when Alexander raised his sword and commenced hacking at the Knot as if he were chopping wood.
It was a big sword, and though he was short, Alexander had a strong arm. Yet it still took more than twenty blows to cut through the leather mass, and by the end the King was wide-eyed and sweaty and oblivious to the expressions of horror on the faces of the natives. With a look of accomplishment on his face that was as absurd as it was childish, he held up the two severed halves of the Knot. At that, the senior members of his staff clapped their hands, and with their glances made sure the junior officers followed, until all the Macedonians were applauding him.
It was an anxious moment, in fact, because the attitudes of the natives and foreigners to this sad spectacle were so different. But in the end the ones with the weapons prevailed, and the King basked in an ovation that seemed to go on forever. The celebration paused as a peal of thunder was heard above the temple. All at once the nervousness returned, and some even proceeded suddenly to jeer the King, believing that the gods had expressed their disapproval of what he had done. But Perdiccas leapt on a plinth and settled the issue.
“Zeus has thrown his thunderbolt! The new King of Asia is crowned!”
All at once the pendulum swung from uncertainty back to servility. The soldiers ripped the ancient cart from its moorings, lifted Alexander inside, and rolled him around the sanctuary in triumph. As the temple emptied, I stayed behind to watch the head priest. The man knelt before the discarded halves of the Knot, threw the folds of his cloak over his head, and wept.
Despite Alexander’s “triumph,” there seemed an urgency to clear out of Gordion as soon as possible. The army prepared to move on to Ancyra, about twenty parasangs to the east. As we decamped, I noticed a tiny figure atop the great mound of King Midas. Coming closer, I saw it was Alexander, sitting up there with a wine jug and his sword stuck in the mound beside him. He hailed me as I came up to join him.
“Machon! Have you nothing better to do than climb hills?”
“It is a remarkable hill that we both have climbed.”
And it was. The mound, which they say is heaped atop a fabulous hoard of undiscovered treasure, commanded the plateau for miles around. Around the city stretched a patchwork of farms, split by the winding ribbon of the river Sangarius. The Macedonian camp was a constellation of torches by the river. From that distance, and as the twilight came on, no figures could be seen in the town or the camp below. We seemed to be alone-the monarch and his memoirist, or in Alexander’s mind, the hero and History herself.
“I wonder if anyone would have done it.”
“It?”
“Loosened the Knot for real. And don’t look so shocked, my friend! The storyteller need not believe his own stories.”
He held out his cup. I sat down next to him, and together we finished the jug as the sun sank into the plain. I turned east, in the direction of Ancyra; the sky there was the darkest-a soiled indigo with the dying light and the smoke of hearth-fires. Alexander climbed to his feet.
“Tomorrow, we go there. Let’s see what it brings us!”
As we entered the town we learned that Ptolemy and Craterus were desperate to learn where the King had gone. Soldiers filled the streets, breaking down the doors of every wine shop in the city. With a wink, the King hid his head under his cloak and disappeared into an alley. He was not seen again until late the following morning, when he was found sleeping in his bed.
With the fall of Persian resistance throughout the western half of Asia Minor, Alexander’s promise to liberate the Ionians was accomplished. While it is true that ease of their victory tempted the Macedonians to take all of the Persian lands, it was equally true that the invasion had gathered its own momentum, and that other forces were then at work to keep it in motion. Cities in Alexander’s path insisted on surrendering before he had even arrived, forcing him to march east to preserve them from anarchy. The pattern repeated many times, until it seemed that the Macedonians were being sucked inevitably eastward, farther from their homes, their families, and in some sense, from themselves.
So we reached Issus. Aren’t we all tired of descriptions of battles? The hero is always fearless, the enemy is always in hordes. While the Greeks do exceed all other people in the arts of war, the bravery of the Persians, as men, should never be doubted. The fact was that our enemies were indifferently led. The Great King could more easily find 100,000 foot-soldiers than one decent company commander. Darius, who showed up at last to defend his kingdom, was competent only at setting up troops for battle. The more essential skill, of leading them through the adjustments that are inevitable in any fight, was completely beyond him.
Darius disposed his forces in a defile along the banks of the river Pinarus, from the foothills of Mt. Amanus on his left to the sea. His center was again held by his Greek hirelings, who must have burned to avenge the humiliation of the Granicus. The banks of this river were even more steep at the Persian center than at the last battle; Darius increased his odds of success by using gangs of slaves to mound up more earth there, so that his mercenaries would look down on us from a great height. On his right Darius massed a multitude of armored cavalry. Arrayed behind this narrow front was a horde of crack archers, slingers, and native infantry.
Aeschines was most expansive on this matter so I won’t expend my time on the details. The fact is that Alexander was late showing up on the morning of the battle because he was hung over. The more he drank the previous evening, the more he became assured that he was fated to die, either at the hands of the Persians or of his own men. His drinking companions, Hephaestion, Parmenion, and Cleitus, indulged this fantasy by asking him how he would dispose of his new kingdom. He replied that he cared only of disposing of himself, for his preferences would not matter the slightest bit after he was gone.
Of course, he didn’t die at Issus. But his words proved prophetic, as the present circumstances around the royal succession show.
That Darius would offer battle in such a narrow valley was unexpected. The Macedonians, who had been prepared to face a large cavalry force on open ground, were confounded that the Great King would negate his own best advantage. They suspected some hidden strategy was at work.
The armies stood staring at each other for some time until Arridaeus could be brought to the field. In a glance the fool discerned the weakness in the Persian battle-order: a body of lightly-armored infantry on the enemy left that he somehow felt to be wavering. There terror should go, he said, and with it the battle.
So Alexander went where he was told. And just as Arridaeus had foreseen, the Persian left broke. The King exceeded his mandate, however, by wheeling to his left and charging the enemy center, where Darius’s retinue could be seen under the royal standard of the winged solar disk. From their respective places around the battlefield the Macedonian generals watched helplessly as Alexander risked turning victory into defeat.
I try to imagine what the Great King must have seen as he stood in his garlanded chariot. Set in the center, he would have had a view of his forces breaking the advance of the vaunted phalanxes, while the very mass of his cavalry on the right promised to break Parmenion’s line. In the confusion, in the dust churned by hundreds of thousands of feet, he would scarcely have noticed a disturbance far to the north. Over the din of crashing shields before him, he might have heard a thin chorus of screams. Perhaps one of his retainers would have told him his left wing had broken; perhaps he even expected it, having planted weak troops there in order to bait Alexander away
