XI.
Of the renowned ‘victory’ at the Susian Gates, I say no more than that it was a colossal waste of lives. Any commander with a shred of respect for his enemy would have anticipated that the Persians would block that pass. I warned Alexander of ambush myself. But the young King was in the grip of his own legend by then, and would not agree to the simple precaution of taking the coast route into Persia. That he managed to force the Gates I credit to Arridaeus’s instincts and the stamina of the Macedonians. No one else deserves praise for surviving this stupidity.
The army passed out of Mesopotamia and into the enemy homeland. The Achaemenid royal seat at Persepolis beckoned, but first Alexander had to force a sheer pass through the Zagros mountains to the plateau of Persis. For this he took with him only his most mobile forces, elements of his hypaspists, the Agrianian allies, his best scouts; the heavy troops were placed under the command of Parmenion and ordered to march the long way around by the coast.
We met no resistance all the way to the Gates, and then most of the way through it until he reached the narrowest part. At that point the march was stopped by a wall of rude blocks that the enemy had thrown up. The Macedonians were puzzled over how to attack this wall when an avalanche of rocks, arrows and javelins fell on them from the heights: the Persians had sprung a trap on them. Alexander had his men take cover, still imagining he would force his way through, until the enemy rolled boulders down on his men, so that their upturned shields were no longer any defense. Alexander’s position was hopeless; the enemy was dug into positions on the hillsides where the Macedonians could not see them, much less mount a counterattack. Alexander ordered a general retreat. The great cheer went up from the Persians as they saw the young king’s back for the first time.
With the Persian cheers echoing in his ears, Alexander led his men on the bitterest maneuver of the campaign. This was not only a matter of pride: the conquest of so large an empire would take decades if the Persians were emboldened to contest him in every place they could. To discourage this, Alexander could not accept anything less than instant, total annihilation of all resistance. But the Macedonians had already lost more men that day than during the fight at the Granicus, while the Persians had suffered not a single casualty.
Craterus and Ptolemy suggested that they avoid the obstacle by proceeding around by the coast route into Persia. But as the Macedonians had left unburied dead in the gorge, Alexander could not compound defeat with desecration. Moreover, he refused to give the Persians the glory of turning the tables on Thermopylae, where the Lacedaemonians had delayed Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. He called for all the Persians captured in the area to be brought forward, and asked them if they knew of some hidden route by which the enemy might be outflanked. Under threat of torture, all these men swore that there was no way around the wall-with one exception. This fellow, a shepherd, suggested one possibility, but then seemed to withdraw it.
“The path is no more than a sheep-track,” he told Alexander. “Your men will not manage it.”
“Are you saying we cannot go where your sheep can?”
“You will be making the attempt in the dark, and there is snow,” came the reply.
Faced with such a challenge, Alexander could accept no other course. “Prepare to lead us up,” he told the prisoner, “and never doubt that we will follow, whatever the difficulty!”
Craterus was placed in command of the camp, and given a thousand men with which to make a diversionary attack on the wall. Then, after night fell, the Macedonians followed the shepherd up along a narrow ledge, onto the ridge above the gorge.
The prisoner had not exaggerated the meagerness of the path. No more than a few feet wide in places, it often disappeared under snow, just as he had warned. As we could not use torches, and the walls of the gorge prevented starlight from reaching them, we groped along in complete darkness, all the while trusting that our guide was not leading us into another trap, or over a cliff. For safety, the Macedonians used pikes to probe ahead of them, or to keep in touch with their companions grasping the ends; several men were thus saved from falling by their comrades, who used their sarissas to pull them back from the chasm. When one man did slip and fall over the side, the mishap was more felt than heard-as he plunged to his death, he bravely protected the army’s position by keeping his silence. Nevertheless, despair laid hold of us as the path wound higher and higher, and the men were forced to abandon baggage on the way, and the shepherd turned back to Alexander, whispering ‘See, I told you it was impossible!’
In time the path leveled, and then began to descend. Just as the first fingers of light touched the eastern sky, we were able to look down and see the smoke from the Persian camp below. A gasp went up among the Macedonians as they realized they had succeeded. Alexander bade them all to keep quiet, and issued his commands for the final assault: Ptolemy, with the hypaspists, would fall on the enemy by the path the prisoner had showed them. Alexander and the Agrianians, meanwhile, would go to the far side of the pass and charge the enemy from that quarter. He trusted Craterus would hear the attack as it was underway, and make a frontal assault at the critical moment.
The battle unfolded exactly as he planned. Alexander charged into the Persian camp, taking them completely by surprise, as Ptolemy swooped on them from above. The troops by the wall were further pinned down by Craterus’s attack, so that the Persians were beset from every direction. Thousands were killed before the sun mounted the hills and revealed the full extent of the rout. The day was not destined to rise on a Persian Thermopylae.
The way was open to Persepolis. This was a city synonymous with the power of the Great King, where Greeks from the Ionian cities had been forced for generations to appear on bended knee, and where the accumulated loot of a continent waited for the victor of Gaugamela. With the fall of the Susian Gates, the capital of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes lay at the pleasure of the twenty-five year old king of a people despised by the Persian overlords as a servile race. As the Thracian porter asked Hippias in Aristophanes’s The Crows, was not the bended knee now on the other foot?
Rejoining Parmenion’s forces, Alexander marched in no great hurry toward the city. He was met on the way by two parties: first, emissaries from the royal chamberlain Tiridates, begging the Greeks to advance on the capital with all speed, as a mob was swarming to loot the treasury. Anxious that his property be protected, Alexander quickened the march-until a second party arrived which stopped him in his tracks.
To the Macedonians, it seemed that an army of corpses was coming forth to meet them. But the supplicants were Greeks, four thousand of them, who had been freed from their imprisonment by the Persian nobles as they fled; moreover, they were not corpses but, like Alexander’s soldiers, living men.
That was where the resemblance ended, for no more pathetic husks of humanity were ever loosed to haunt the living. It was said that most of them suffered mutilation, removal of eyeballs and noses and ears and limbs. What was most apparent from the pattern of these outrages was the depraved humor behind many of them, such as the amputation of every finger except the small one on the left hand, or removal of the entire lower jaw. Still others bore the scars of repeated burnings, brandings, and scourgings, or of tattoos proclaiming that they were “dogs” attached to the houses of their Persian masters. Several of these wretches-the ones still capable of speech, that is-were brought before Alexander to tell their stories, which invariably involved years of deliberate torture, of casual brutality that so ached the heart the King wept openly, crying out that he could take no more.
The prisoners were given shelter and food, and promised that those who wished would be free to return to their homes, along with enough money that they would suffer no discomfort for the rest of their lives. Those who had no families to go to, or who could not face the repugnance of their countrymen at their injuries, were pledged land and slaves with which to settle in Alexander’s empire.
Aeschines is right: if the Persians had applied half the ingenuity they showed in tormenting these poor men to perfecting their tactics in battle, Alexander would never had made it beyond the Granicus. What he did not say, however, is that a good number of these ex-slaves came from places that were destroyed by Alexander or his father. Many were from Thebes or Amphissa or Olynthus, and had been away for so long they did not know the fate of their cities. So when the poor wretches hobbled, crawled, or were carried into Alexander’s presence, and thanked him for liberating them so they could again glimpse their beloved Cadmeia, the King could only turn away in his guilt, having himself been responsible for pulling down the Cadmeia stone-by-stone. Instead of the truth, the Thebans were given a travel allowance and an escort back to Greece.
