Cyprus will either yield to us without delay or it will be captured with ease at the mere arrival of a naval force – which then prosecutes the war with the ships from Macedonia in conjunction with those of the Phoenicians.’ He looked around.
Alexander seldom made long speeches, and when he did, with his face shining, his whole attention on his audience, he was virtually impossible to resist. Even Parmenio was nodding along.
‘Once Cyprus is in our hands, we shall have the absolute sovereignty of the sea, and at the same time an expedition into Egypt will become easier for us. After we have brought Aegypt into subjection, no anxiety about Greece and our own land will any longer remain, and we shall be able to undertake the expedition to Babylon in safety with regard to affairs at home and at the same time with greater reputation in consequence of having cut off from the Persian empire all the maritime provinces and all the land this side of the Euphrates. And at Tyre, we shall have shown the world that we are worthy sons of Herakles!’
Sons of Herakles. As Diades intended, the very challenge fired him, and he, in turn, shot it at us. Because the men of Macedon see themselves as the heirs of Herakles.
The siege was on.
Diades rode around the countryside for ten days while the Tyrians jeered at our lack of effort. When he returned, he sat with Alexander for most of a day.
I sat with Thais, who was deeply depressed because she was pregnant, and because the Tyrians had executed one of her agents in their horrible way and dumped his body in the sea. I tried to console her that they’d executed three other men who were not her agents. ‘If they kill three of theirs for every one of ours, we will win the siege in a month,’ I joked.
She raised her eyes. ‘Leave me,’ she said. And she meant it. Never make a jest about defeat or death.
I wandered among my troops, watched a dice game, watched two men beat a slave, watched two more men butchering a lamb. The pezhetaeroi were sullen and didn’t want me in their camp. I went to sit and drink wine with Marsyas and Cleomenes, but they were screaming at each other like prostitutes fighting over a customer in the streets of Athens – and on the same subject.
‘She was
‘She’s not a slave. You cannot own a woman.’ Marsyas spoke in the sneering way that poets have when being superior, always the very best way to incite a riot.
Two of my officers, standing in the street, fighting over a woman. With half a thousand of their own men watching.
Cleomenes reached for the dagger he always wore. Really, we all wore them. I grabbed his hand from behind and then had to kick Marsyas in the crotch as he had drawn his and in his rage seemed to think I was pinning Cleomenes’ arms for him.
Macedon. I tell you.
As Marsyas the Poet fell forward, I slammed his forehead into Cleomenes’ forehead and the two fell together to the ground.
I didn’t feel any better, but I’m sure that I helped to preserve discipline, which was going to Hades already, and we were on the day
‘We had a murder this morning,’ he said sullenly.
As I left Cleomenes’ tent, I couldn’t help but note that the men going on guard were drunk.
However, the finest anodyne to soldiers’ behaviour is work. And suddenly, the God of Work, with his high priest Diades, descended from the heavens. And none too soon.
He had divided the areas around the landward end of his proposed mole into districts, and he’d assigned one each to all of the pezhetaeroi commanders. We were to employ our men as labour, and gather stone and wood.
Craterus held a meeting and suggested that we refuse.
‘You have to be kidding,’ I said. I remember laughing at him. ‘It’s better than my lads deserve. I intend to work them like slaves. Until I trowel off the fat and the bad attitude.’
Perdiccas nodded. Perdiccas and I had always been rivals – but having reached high command, we were, somehow, allies. He rubbed his chin and drank wine and then nodded. ‘If I enforced the king’s law about harming civilians,’ he said, ‘I’d have no phalangites. Last night, some of my men were sending children into the hills so they could
Craterus breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank Ares,’ he said. ‘I expected you all to be angry, and I was ready to back you. But in truth, there’s been too much loot and not enough discipline.’
‘Every man in camp has his girl,’ Perdiccas said. He looked at me. ‘I don’t mean you – yours does a job of work.’
‘Even Philotas has a beauty.’ Amyntas laughed. ‘And he affects to despise women.’
‘He despises all of her,’ Perdiccas laughed, ‘except when he’s on top of her.’
The next day, we began working. I mustered my full strength – we’d had some levies, so I had a little more than fourteen hundred men. With Perdiccas, my men were assigned the old city of Tyre, which we were to dismantle, stone by stone, and move to the seaside.
I stood on the bed of a four-wheel wagon and gave my orders, district by district. Isokles and I had already put out coloured tape – Tyrian red linen tape, used for marking, worth a fortune at home – to mark what streets were to be demolished and by what company.
Marsyas and Cleomenes stood well apart from each other. They both looked a little green.
I marched the taxeis over to the old city, had them strip and put them to work. One man in fifteen went into an army-wide pool to weave baskets. Every man who could handle a donkey went to the baggage train. Every man who could do fine carpentry or forge metal went to work directly for Diades.
The siege of Tyre ran on manpower. We had four hundred oxen and a little over a thousand donkeys and perhaps two hundred mules at the height of the siege, but most of the digging and most of the rubble fill was ‘mined’ by men and carried by men in baskets woven by men who needed a new basket every couple of days.
We had about twelve thousand pezhetaeroi and twice that again in slaves. Thirty-six thousand men, each needing a basket the size of a market basket every two days. To give you a notion of the scale of the siege of Tyre, let’s imagine the requirement for brush to weave baskets, at eighteen thousand baskets per day. Just for the sake of easy calculation, let us call that eighteen thousand mina of brush a day. Three thousand talents of brushwood, every day. Roughly the weight of a completed trireme with all its oars and all of its sails and equipment and fully laden with men –
Of course, I exaggerate. Of course not every man wore out his basket – nor did the basket-makers ever keep pace. Men were lost from the work to repair their own baskets – indeed, at one point, I had almost a hundred of my own men making baskets to keep the rest at work, and Diades came and took the whole draft – slaves and soldiers as well.
Brush came from close by – for the first few days. After that, the local brush was gone, and the foragers had to go farther and farther afield, slowing the whole process. By the end of the siege, our brush was being brought from Kana and Sinde, east in the hills and down the coast in Galilee.
And then there was food, water, forage for animals, heavy beams of wood, whole trees and stone. Wine, oil, water and food for fifty thousand men. Every day.
And every man thus served could carry perhaps two hundred baskets of fill a day, if he was fast and devoted and fit. Care to guess how many men fell into that category? And men had to be detailed to destroy as well as to carry – to pull down the old houses and get at the stone in their foundation courses, or the base of the walls, the pillars of old temples. On and on.
After just six days, it seemed normal. After ten days, I joined in, because that’s how you lead troops, and stripped naked and carried a basket on my head all day. I never made two hundred, either. And two days later, my whole body hurt, but I kept at it.
We rested for major feasts, so on the nineteenth day of Mounikhion, by the Athenian festival calendar that dominated in my taxeis, we celebrated the feast of Olympian Zeus. I ordered five oxen to be sacrificed, and we feasted on them amid the rubble of Old Tyre. I gave games for my men, and pitted company against company. I couldn’t help but notice how well muscled everyone was.
In Greece, women are forbidden the games, but in the field, all the camp followers watched, and Thais was
