IX.
The King called a war council to hear the advice of his generals. The city, he was told, stood on an island half-mile off a windswept coast. She was protected by massive fortifications 150 feet high on the landward side, only somewhat lower to seaward. As Alexander had sent away his only ships, taking the city from the water would be impossible. “Then it must be from the land,” he concluded. Constructing a mole across the strait was be likewise impractical, said his admiral Nearchus, as the channel was deep there. “How deep?” Alexander demanded. No one knew.
At this point Nearchus argued that the Persian fleet was not out of action and might appear at any moment to support the Tyrians (which was true), and that the city might be safely bypassed anyway (which was not). But his objections only confirmed Alexander in his course: he would take the impregnable island city from the land.
The Macedonians seized the mainland coast across the Tyrian strait. Battalions of Foot Companions and mercenaries were ordered to take off their armor and don workshirts. Whole forests were cut down for pilings, and all moveable boulders in the vicinity roped, dragged, and dropped into the channel to support the construction of the greatest artificial causeway ever conceived.
While these preparations were underway, the Macedonian camp was shaken by an ominous sign: as the army’s bakers removed their bread from the ovens, they found drops of human blood in the loaves. Panic spread among the Greeks in a way it had not before the battles at the Granicus or Issus. The campaign was saved by Alexander’s personal seer, the Telmissian Aristander. Instead of disaster, Aristander interpreted the bloody bread as a promising sign: since the blood flowed on the inside of the bread, it must mean that the force within the city was doomed, not the attackers. As this seemed reasonable to most of the Macedonians, work resumed in earnest.
Alexander searched his army for strong swimmers who might survey the underwater course of his mole. As this was dangerous work, he promised each survivor a talent for his trouble. So confident were the Tyrians that the siege would fail, however, that they declined to shoot at these scouts as they appeared under their walls. Instead they laughed, asking them whether their King thought himself Poseidon’s master.
The causeway was supposed to be wide enough for an eight-man front of Foot Companions to march across, and high enough for the top of it to be above the winter swells. Working in day and night shifts, the Macedonians quickly finished the section over the shallows. As his men worked, the enemy sent out boats with crack archers in them. Thinking perhaps that Alexander was bluffing, at first they resorted only to insults, jeering at the workmen, telling them they were a race of mules, not warriors. When this failed to stop the work, the archers brandished their bows. Finally, they commenced shooting at the workers, forcing them off the mole. Alexander brought up Cretan bowmen equipped with flaming arrows, driving the boats away. To protect his men, he altered the design of the mole, equipping it with a pair of wheeled towers, topped with rock-throwers, that could be rolled forth as the work proceeded.
Unable to approach the causeway from the water, the Tyrians sent boats filled with cutthroats down the coast to attack the work-crews inland. Alexander detailed his Illyrian auxiliaries to protect the workers. The enemy turned to diplomacy, paying the Arab tribes of Mt. Lebanon to harry the Illyrians. In response, Alexander launched a land campaign, bringing the Arabs to heel in just ten days.
The work proceeded into greater depths. The magnitude of the task seemed to grow more and more absurd, like burying the ocean, as we watched tons of stones and trees disappear into the water. The head of the mole, meanwhile, was now in range of archers on the city walls, which they used with telling effect. Alexander countered the Tyrian bowmen by erecting sheets of canvas around the head of the mole to conceal his men as they worked their way closer. Poseidon made his allegiance known by sending strong winds through the channel to rip away the canvas, leaving the workers exposed to enemy fire. Alexander replaced the canvas with heavy skins, weighted down at the bottom with shorn logs, which had the additional dividend of breaking the high waves. Poseidon grumbled and bided his time.
Alexander was often out on the mole himself, exposing himself to danger, always ready with words of encouragement for his men. At last his faith seemed to bear results, as the Macedonians looked down to see the mole’s foundation inch toward the surface. Morale surged; it seemed as if the task was possible after all.
Understanding that this was a key moment, the Tyrians launched their counterstroke: a sulphur-caked merchant vessel, stripped of everything that would not burn, filled to the gunwales with fuel and choice accelerants. To insure that the fire ship would ground herself on the mole, they shifted its ballast aft, so that its prow was pitched free of the water. The next windy day their best oarsmen towed it into the channel and, with spirited war- cries, propelled it toward the enemy.
The ship struck home and exploded in an enormous conflagration. With particular ingenuity, the Tyrians suspended cauldrons of boiling pitch between the ship’s masts, so that when these collapsed additional fuel poured onto the blaze. Mounds of unused timber, cordage, canvas and idle catapults went up. The fire spread so quickly that the guards in Alexander’s towers were forced to dive into the sea. Enemy triremes swarmed around the helpless Macedonians, beating them senseless with clubs before taking them all as hostages. The Tyrian archers, meanwhile, drove back anyone coming out to fight the fire. The entire mole burned to the waterline.
That was when Poseidon seized his chance. Sending forth a storm, he punished the very foundation of the mole until it gave way, collapsing in a heap on the seafloor. So completely was the structure destroyed that when Alexander came out to view the damage from this attack, all signs of his months of work, wet or dry, were erased. I was there during the episode Aeschines described, when the Tyrians gathered on their wall to jeer at Alexander as he stood among the debris.
These developments provoked fresh carpings from Nearchus, who complained that the city would never be taken if the Tyrians were left in command of the sea. This was no doubt intended to dissuade Alexander, since the enemy had a strong fleet and the Macedonians had none. Alexander nevertheless ordered the mole rebuilt at twice the width and with double the number of towers. His men, weary and discouraged, stripped an even greater area around the country for materials. Alexander, meanwhile, rode north with his personal guard. He was away for seven days.
The gods alone must know what the Tyrians thought of Alexander’s disappearance. We may suppose, though, that they believed he had given up and that the siege was finished; Poseidon himself must have assumed as much, since the winter storms ceased and the sea settled down. It was on one of these calm days that their lookouts sighted a fleet approaching from the north. They cheered again, for they thought it surely must be the Persians coming to drive the besiegers away for good, or perhaps a relieving force from Tyre’s daughter city of Carthage, riding to the rescue of their ancestral temples.
These illusions were shattered as the devices painted on the fleet’s sails came into view. The fleet, 200 ships strong, was a mixed force from Sidon and Cyprus; at the prow of the very first ship stood Alexander.
Now it was the Macedonians’ turn to cheer and their adversaries to groan. With such an overwhelming force against them, the Tyrians recalled their dispersed fleet, and took the additional defensive action of blocking their north and south harbor mouths with merchantmen. Alexander’s Sidonese allies showed their value immediately by launching fire ships against the obstructing vessels; several were burned, but the enemy replaced them. Alexander ordered a blockade on the city.
With the enemy fleet out of action, work on the second mole proceeded faster than on the first. The Tyrians responded by erecting wooden towers atop their walls to increase the range of their heavy artillery. With these engines they threw heavy boulders into the sea, hoping to impede the movement of Alexander’s ships. This strategy pleased Alexander, since the enemy was providing good material for his work crews. He sent out triremes to haul up the rocks and dump them at the head of the mole.
Perceiving their mistake, the Tyrians produced up a squadron of ram ships to attack the triremes. The ram ships were great armored vessels, with even their oar-shafts clad in bronze. Though they were slow and would easily have capsized in rougher seas, they caught the Macedonians by surprise, sinking several of their vessels and, in the process, further littering the landward channel with obstructions.
The Tyrians, having regained control of the waters under their city walls, came up to threaten the mole again. Fighting resumed along the causeway, as Alexander’s men took refuge in their towers. Bolts from the Macedonian artillery clanked harmlessly off the metal skins of the ram ships. Alexander, furious, ordered the immediate construction of his own armored fleet. This was completed within days, and launched with selected
