Collections: On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon, the Great? Part I (2024)

This week, in part as a follow-on to our series on the contest between Hellenistic armies and Roman legions, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about Alexander III, who you almost certainly know as Alexander the Great. But I want to discuss his reign with that title, ‘the Great’ (magnus in Latin or μέγας in Greek) stripped off, as Alexander III rather than merely assuming his greatness. In particular, I want to open the question of if Alexander was great and more to the point, if he was, what does that imply about our definitions of greatness?

It is hardly new for Alexander III to be the subject of as much mythology as fact; Alexander’s life was the subject of mythological treatment within living memory. Plutarch (Alex 46.4) relates an episode where the Greek historian Onesicritus read aloud in the court of Lysimachus – then king of Thrace, but who had been one of Alexander’s somatophylakes (his personal bodyguards, of which there were just seven at at time) – his history of Alexander and in his fourth book reached the apocryphal story of how Alexander met the Queen of the Amazons, Thalestris, at which Lysimachus smiled and asked, “And where was I at the time?” It must have been strange to Lysimachus, who had known Alexander personally, to see his friend and companion become a myth before his eyes.

Then, of course, there are the modern layers of mythology. Alexander is such a well-known figures that it has been, for centuries, the ‘doing thing’ to attribute all manner of profound sounding quotes, sayings and actions to him, functionally none of which are to be found in the ancient sources and most of which, as we’ll see, run quite directly counter to his actual character as a person.

So, much as we set out to de-mystify Cleopatra last year, this year I want to set out – briefly – to de-mystify Alexander III of Macedon. Only once we’ve stripped away the mythology and found the man can we then ask that key question: was Alexander truly great and if so, what does that say not about Alexander, but about our own conceptions of greatness?

Because this post has turned out to run rather longer than I expected, I’m going to split into two parts. This week, we’re going to look at some of the history of how Alexander has been viewed – the sources for his life but also the trends in the scholarship from the 1800s to the present – along with assessing Alexander as a military commander. Then we’ll come back next week and look at Alexander as an administrator, leader and king.

But first, if you like what you are reading here and want to help out this project, you can help this project and join my valued pezhetairoi by sharing this post – I rely on word of mouth for all of my recruits readers. And if you want to join the companions of the blog, you can buy your way by supporting this project on Patreon; much like the companions themselves, Patrons have special access to the king (as I try to always respond to messages on Patreon). If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).

Sources

As always, we are at the mercy of our sources for understanding the reign of Alexander III. As noted above, within Alexander’s own lifetime, the scale of his achievements and impacts prompted the emergence of a mythological telling of his life, a collection of stories we refer to collectively now as the Alexander Romance, which is fascinating as an example of narrative and legend working across a wide range of cultures and languages, but is fundamentally useless as a source of information about Alexander’s life.

That said, we also know that several accounts of Alexander’s life and reign were written during his life and immediately afterwards by people who knew him and had witnessed the events. Alexander, for the first part of his campaign, had a court historian, Callisthenes, who wrote a biography of Alexander which survived his reign (Polybius is aware – and highly critical – of it, Polyb. 12. 17-22), though Callisthenes didn’t: he was implicated (perhaps falsely) in a plot against Alexander and imprisoned, where he died, in 327. Unfortunately, Callisthenes’ history doesn’t survive to the present (and Polybius sure thinks Callisthenes was incompetent in describing military matters in any event).

More promising are histories written by Alexander’s close companions – his hetairoi – who served as Alexander’s guards, elite cavalry striking force, officers and council of war during his campaigns. Three of these wrote significant accounts of Alexander’s campaigns: Aristobulus,1 Alexander’s architect and siege engineer, Nearchus, Alexander’s naval commander, and Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s bodyguards and infantry commanders, who will become Ptolemy I Soter, Pharaoh of Egypt. Of these, Aristobulus and Ptolemy’s works were apparently campaign histories covering the life of Alexander, whereas Nearchus wrote instead of his own voyages by sea down the Indus River, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf which he called the Indike.

And you are now doubtless thinking, “amazing, three contemporary accounts, that’s awesome!” So I hope you will contain your disappointment when I follow with the inevitable punchline: none of these three works survives. We also know a whole slew of other, less reliable sounding histories (Plutarch lists works by Cleitarchus, Polycleitus, Onesicritus, Antigenes, Ister, Chares, Anticleides, Philo, two different Philips, Hecataeus, and Duris) do not survive either.

So what do we have?

Fundamentally, our knowledge of Alexander the Great is premised on four primary later works who wrote when all of these other sources (particularly Ptolemy and Aristobulus) still survived. These four authors are (in order of date): Diodorus Siculus (writing in the first century BC), Quintus Curtius Rufus (mid-first cent. AD), Plutarch (early second century AD) and Arrian (Lucius Flavius Arrianus, writing in the early second century AD). Of these, Diodorus’ work, the Bibliotheca historica is a ‘universal history,’ which of course means it is a mile wide and only an inch deep, but Book 17, which covers Alexander’s life, is intact and complete. Curtius Rufus’ work survives only incompletely, with substantial gaps in the text, including all of the first two books.

Plutarch’s Life of Alexander survives intact and is the most substantial of his biographies, but it is, like all of his Parallel Lives, relatively brief and also prone to Plutarch’s instinct to bend a story to fit his moralizing aims in writing. Which leaves, somewhat ironically, the last of these main sources, Arrian. Arrian was a Roman citizen of Anatolian extraction who entered the Senate in the 120s and was consul suffectus under Hadrian, probably in 130. He was then a legatus (provincial governor/military commander in Cappadocia, where Dio reports (69.15.1) that he checked an invasion by the Alani (a Steppe people). Arrian’s history, the Anabasis Alexandrou (usually rendered ‘Campaigns of Alexander’)2 comes across as a fairly serious, no-nonsense effort to compile the best available sources, written by an experienced military man. Which is not to say Arrian is perfect, but his account is generally regarded (correctly, I’d argue) as the most reliable of the bunch, though any serious scholarship on Alexander relies on collating all four sources and comparing them together.

Despite that awkward source tradition, what we have generally leaves us fairly well informed about Alexander’s actions as king. While we’d certainly prefer to have Ptolemy or Aristobolus, the fact that we have four writers all working from a similar source-base is an advantage, as they take different perspectives. Moreover, a lot of the things Alexander did – founding cities, toppling the Achaemenid Empire, failing in any way to prepare for succession – leave big historical or archaeological traces that are easy enough to track.

Towards Assessing Alexander

Those, of course, are the ancient sources, but what about modern scholarship? The historiography on Alexander is one of those things basically every ancient history graduate student is required to study for comprehensive exams, so I may cover it in brief. One may broadly describe the scholarly symphony Alexander as proceeding in three general ‘movements,’ as it were.3

The first movement, Alexander the Hero, begins with Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) and his Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (“History of Alexander the Great,” 1833). Droysen is the foundational ‘Great Man’ historian and for him Alexander is the prototypical Great Man of history around whom major events turn, shaped by his vision and power. That vision of Alexander in turn makes it into English most notably through William Woodthorpe Tarn (1869-1957) in his Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind (1933). For both Droysen and Tarn, there could be little question that Alexander was Great – indeed both great and also good – a human force propelling humanity itself into a better future.

That vision is itself something of a product of Droysen’s and Tarn’s time and place and there are reasons both in the sources and in the men themselves for skepticism. Droysen was an ardent supporter of Prussia and a German nationalist through the decades of German unification and clearly saw something of Prussia’s House Hohenzollern in his Argeads (that’s the family of Alexander III and his father Philip II). Just as Prussia ought to unify German (by conquest, if necessary!) so Alexander unified the Hellenistic world (by conquest). Indeed, Droysen neatly elides the Macedonian nobility (too small minded and resistant to Alexander’s grand project) to the German nobility, resisting unification, by calling the former junker. Tarn, meanwhile, was a British gentleman (and a patriot of the empire – at 55 he volunteered for service in WWI) for whom Alexander appears as the prototype of the ideal British gentlemen heading out to civilize foreign peoples, by force if necessary. Thus Alexander’s violence was fundamentally good, motivated – as was the violence of any good British colonial officer – by a belief in (Tarn’s term) the “unity of mankind.” Also, Alexander was, for Tarn, very much clearly not gay, for the same reason, despite the weight of the evidence on the question going rather the other way. Indeed, Tarn in particular, makes an almost herculean effort to strip Alexander of anything he perceived as a foibles or failing, despite the sources being very, very clear that Alexander III was a deeply flawed person that did some quite bad things.

I mean, the man speared one of his best friends to death in a drunken rage – a man who had saved his life. There are some things you can’t walk back.

A correction was almost inevitable as the world wars, particularly the second, took the shine off of trying to ‘unify mankind’ through bloody conquest and also the colonial project of imposing one’s culture by force more generally.

Thus comes the second movement: Alexander the Villain. The first major marker here is Fritz Schachermeyr (1895-1987) and his Alexander, der Grosse. Ingenium und Macht (1949) but it is an awkward one. Schachermeyr’s Alexander is a military genius driven to destructive madness by the megalomania his success brought on; his generals do not rebel against his grand design for lack of vision, but rather his army collapses from exhaustion trying to follow his increasingly mad vision. And now it is probably worth noting that Schachermeyr was a committed Nazi and an open adherent to Nazi race ideology during the war who only disowned his Nazism and racism in 1945 (when it would have been deeply unpleasant not to). His Alexander is thus a particular vision of Hitler. Not the way we’d think of him – Hitler as the hateful villain all the way through – but as a Nazi trying to understand the collapse of the Third Reich might: Alexander-Hitler as the genius driven mad by his success, driving his armies beyond the limit of their endurance in his megalomania, leading to collapse and failure.

In English, the turn to ‘Alexander the Villain’ comes a little later but in, perhaps, a purer form with the early work of Ernst Badian (1925-2011), particularly a scathing series of articles beginning in 1958.4 Badian blasts Tarn, in particular, quipping at one point that “Tarn’s Alexander is Droysen’s, “translated into the King’s English.”5 It was not a complement. Instead, Badian’s Alexander is militarily capable, but an insecure, lonely tyrant who ends up alienating all of the friends he doesn’t murder and whose failures of leadership lead to the failure of his regime and the collapse of his empire after his death. He is not, perhaps, the raw evil of Hitler, but there is little left to admire, much less love, in Badian’s understanding of Alexander.

The final movement is more difficult to name, but perhaps Alexander the Uninteresting will do: the age of scholarship that finds the figure of Alexander the Great less interesting either than his victims or the Macedonian state he (and others) ruled. The transition point is fairly clearly the work of A.B. Bosworth in two major volumes, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988) and Alexander and the East: The Tragedy of Triumph (1996). Initially, Bosworth, in many ways an apprentice to Badian, presents a fully-formed Badian-vision of a ruthless, arrogant, tyrannical, insecure, autocratic and glory-hounding Alexander, the villain of his own story: Alexander as a Spanish conquistador, an exceptional killer with no other skills destroying a civilization he is too boorish to know how to replace. But in that portrait, Bosworth issued a call for scholarship to shift to focus not on Alexander, but on his victims and indeed in the decades that followed, the spotlight has mostly been off Alexander himself.

Pierre Briant comes to mind immediately as taking the direct call to focus on Alexander’s victims with his From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002) sparking a renewed interest in the study of the Achaemenids. Briant’s vision of Darius III, Alexander’s opponent, is hardly flattering, though I’d note it sure seems like there is an effort underway to rehabilitate Darius III and try to make a capable Great King out him.6 This side of the movement in the scholarship has, however, been slow because doing it well requires a lot of language expertise: not just Greek and Latin, but perhaps also Babylonian, Old Persian and Egyptian. Not a lot of scholars have that kind of language expertise, both because it’s hard to learn that many languages, but also because it is hard to learn those eastern languages at all because they’re simply not taught in many universities. Indeed, the number shrinks over time, as language programs are often under siege at universities.

In the other direction, we have a pull to focus not on Alexander, but on his father, Philip II, most notably in the work of Eugene Borza, In the Shadow of Olympus (1990). That focus has tended to see Philip as the more interesting figure than Alexander, as Philip is the fellow that built the unbeatable military system Alexander would employ; Alexander merely pulls the trigger on an invasion Philip had already designed, with an army he had already built, commanded by officers he had already trained, backed by a political structure in Greece he had already secured. Alternately, I think some of the scholarship that in previous decades might have been focused on Alexander has instead shifted later, to the Hellenistic Antigonid kingdom which came to rule Macedon – after some twists and turns – after Alexander’s death.7 Fundamentally, both turns in the scholarship understand the Macedonian stateas fundamentally more interesting than any of its individual rulers.

For what it is worth, my sense is that everyone feels that the next ‘turn’ in Alexander scholarship, the start of the next movement in this story, is overdue, but it hasn’t come yet.8 And, not to disappoint in advance, but it isn’t going to come here: my take on Alexander is hardly earthshaking.

Still, I suspect readers at this point may already be rather surprised by just how far from the popular glowing image of Alexander the scholarship has come and so even my rather pedestrian take on the reign of Alexander III may do something to help you all understand why the scholarship has come to the place it has and also why this is pretty clearly a better place than it was in the 1930s.

In an effort to give Alexander a fair shake here, I want to consider him in three aspects: Alexander the Warlord, Alexander the King and finally Alexander the Leader. That is to say, I want to consider first his performance as a purely military leader – was Alexander III the military genius he is reputed to be? Then, we’ll look at Alexander the civil leader – was he dedicated to the ‘unity of mankind’ or otherwise a particularly effective or gifted administrator? Finally, I want to examine Alexander as a leader, judging him by the promises – explicit and implicit – that he forged, kept and broke with his followers: was Alexander a good sort of man to follow to the figurative ends of the earth?

The Legacy of Philip II

A different Alexander, Alexander Burns, had a good description of the various stages that students (and enthusiasts) who are ‘into’ military history move through, with the first two stages being “Paradigm Invocation,” where the student ‘knows’ something they’ve been told, but not why it is or why it is significant (“Alexander was a military genius!”), and then “Paradigm Rejection, where the student, having learned that some paradigms are incomplete or even wrong, turns on them rather too completely (“Alexander was nothing special.”) The ‘paradigm invocation’ is simple: Alexander fought four major battles and about two-dozen minor battles and won all of them, and therefore was an undefeated ‘military genius.’ The ‘paradigm rejection’ is, as is its wont, every bit as simple: Alexander won all of those battles because he inherited an army, officers and a tactical system from the actual great military reformer, Philip II.

In both cases, maturity in thinking about history (and military history) requires moving beyond the paradigm to the evidence in greater detail and with greater care, adding necessary context.

Alexander III becomes king in the summer of 336, at the age of twenty. By that point, the army he inherits had been at war more or less continuously since the start of the Third Sacred War in 356 which, conveniently, was also the year of his birth. Now, unfortunately for us, the sources for the reign of Alexander’s father, Philip II (r. 359-336) are both sparse and scattered. Ancient writers were far more interested in Alexander than Philip. That makes reconstructing Philip’s reign and military reforms difficult, but we can generally say a few things. First, the army of the Macedonian kingdom before Philip II was hardly a top-tier force. It seems to have been large, but lacking in heavy infantry. The aristocratic cavalry was good, but few in number. And the kingdom itself was prone to succession disputes spiraling into civil war.

Philip II made radical changes. He reorganized the infantry, drawing on new military ideas that were already probably brewing in Greece proper, arming them with two-handed pikes (the sarisa) and keeping them under arms for longer periods, allowing for greater training and drill.9 He also encourages esprit de corps by reframing his infantry as Pezhetairoi, ‘foot companions,’ tying them directly to the king. There is some reason to suppose this was more than just empty language and that Philip’s soldiers, by virtue of being on campaign, had more accesses to him as well. Finally, he reformed the Macedonian cavalry, the hetairoi or ‘companions’ (of the King), greatly expanding their number, drawing in both essentially the whole Macedonian aristocracy, but also using the institution as a tool to recruit Greek experts. In addition, after 352 or so, he is also the leader of the Thessalian League, giving him access also to the best cavalry in Greece.

In 338, Philip II took his army south, as part of a long and complicated rivalry with Athens and other Greek poleis we needn’t get into here. He was met with a Greek alliance that aimed to prevent him, now the ruler of a large and powerful kingdom, from asserting hegemony over Greece: Athens and Thebes made up the core of the coalition. The resulting battle at Chaeronea is, I think, instructive to the degree that Alexander is effectively inheriting not only an army, but a tactical system. Our accounts of the battle are frustratingly vague (the only full account is a very brief one, Diod. Sic. 16.86), but we can hazard a basic vision: Philip II took command of the Macedonian right (where the Companion cavalry will have been), while Alexander, at age 18, was given command of the other wing of cavalry (alongside, we are told by Diodorus, some carefully selected officers). Philip II seems to have first engaged and then refused his right (Polyaenus Strat 4.2.2), which created a rupture in the Greek lines between the Athenians who pressured Philip II and the Thebans who were being pressued on the far side, at which point Alexander hammered with the cavalry through the gap, leading to the collapse of the Greek army and Philip II’s great victory.

Now remember how I described Alexander Battle? To recap, the basic formula for Alexander’s battles – modified slightly in each – is to position the phalanx in the center, with the Thessalian cavalry (and sometimes some light troops) covering the phalanx’s left wing, while Alexander sits on its right, with additional light troops covering his right and the medium-infantry hypaspists keeping his cavalry connected to the phalanx. The extreme right wing and the left wing stall (often being refused), while the right of the phalanx provides pressure that creates a rupture, which Alexander then hammers his cavalry through – with him at the front – in order to achieve decision. Alexander seems to form his army up to aim his cavalry hammer at where he imagines the ‘joints’ in an enemy army might be, to punch at a relatively weaker spot, not on a flank, but where the center joins the enemy left.

At Chaeronea, Philip II splits his cavalry between his wings, with the phalanx in the center, refusing his right flank, while the left flank of his infantry advanced, creating a rupture at the joint between the Thebans and the Athenians, which Alexander hammered the cavalry through, leading to victory. We don’t have detailed descriptions of Philip II’s battles – Chaeronea is the best we have – and it is really striking that the basic outlines of Alexander Battle are visible here as well. It might suggest that not only was Philip II the author of the army Alexander would take East, but also the tactical formula Alexander would seek to employ.

Note that Philip II’s legacy isn’t just the tactics and the army itself, it is also the companions. The key men that are going to enable Alexander’s early victories are Philip II’s men. Antipater, who Alexander can leave in Macedon to handle affairs in Greece (and who crushes a Spartan effort to oust Macedonian control)? One of Philip’s men, probably in his service for most of Alexander’s life. Parmenio, the infantry commander who successfully holds the flank in Alexander’s great battles? One of Philip’s men, around as old as Antipater. Krateros, who commanded the phalanx at Issus? One of Philip’s men – fifteen years or so Alexander’s senior. Kleitos the Black, who saved Alexander’s life at the Granicus and commanded the royal squadron of the Companion Cavalry at Gaugamela? Another of Philip’s men, twenty years older than Alexander. And Eumenes – a Greek – who was Alexander’s secretary and bookkeeper? One of Philip’s men.

Meanwhile, Alexander’s other crop of key officers were the syntrophoi, the men of his own age and generation with whom he had grown up. On the one hand, these are Alexander’s friends, but on the other hand they were at court because they were picked to be at court by Philip II. This, by the by, are men like Ptolemy, Hephaistion, Perdikkas, Nearchus. Almost no member of Alexander’s inner circle had not served under his father or been tutored in his father’s court, simply as a product of Alexander’s age.

So now, Philip II has built the army for Alexander, arrayed the necessary political structures in Greece (which, admittedly, Alexander will have to reinforce by burying Thebes), developed the tactical system which Alexander will use to win his battles and trained the officers who can conduct that tactical system. And then, just to top it off, Philip II was already planning the invasion of the Achaemenid Empire when he was assassinated. Indeed, Parmenio and several others were already in Anatolia with an army to prepare a beachhead for the main effort when Philip II was killed. So Alexander likely inherited a fully-formed invasion plan as well, though I suspect it only went as far as detaching western Asia Minor from the Achaemenids, not the whole empire.

So what does that leave Alexander? Quite a lot, actually.

Alexander the Warlord

We may begin with the tactical: there is a difference between noting that Philip II and Alexander III seem to have had the same basic vision of the battle they wanted to fight – we might say they shared a doctrine – and these battles all being carbon-copies of each other. I think it is fair to say that Alexander has an ideal pitched battle in his head (which he seems – remember how weak our evidence is – to share with his father) that he wants to play out on the field, but there’s an awful lot that goes into getting the actual battle to play out into that ideal formula for victory and each of Alexander’s major battles poses different problems for him to get to that distinctive Alexander Battle climax.

This isn’t the place to go through each of Alexander’s victories in detail: for one, that would be a long post series of its own and for another, you can just read the sources too. But for readers for whom these battles all kind of blend together, I want to note the unique challenges each engagement presented Alexander, where he had to figure out, with the resources he had, how to get to that Alexander Battle formula.

The first is the Battle of the Granicus (334) and the key problem here is, well, the Granicus river, which – as Arrian has Parmenio note – had high banks and deep spots sure to disrupt a formation moving across (Arr. Anab. 1.13.4-5). And while Alexander’s army was probably comparable in size and possibly larger, the Persian force had a lot of cavalry.10 Alexander seems to have recognized – we’ll come back to this – that operationally, he couldn’t afford to wait and has to force the crossing. So his problem here is how to get the army over the river in a shape to fight and win on the other side.

The battle is a little hard to unpack (Arrian is our best source and his account is a confusing read), but it’s clear that the Persian force formed up with its infantry on the high ground behind the river and the cavalry right on the river-bank to contest the crossing. Alexander lines his army up all along the river in fighting formation (Arr. Anab. 1.14.1-3) which threatens the entire Persian cavalry line, holding its center and right in place, while Alexander aims to break over the river on his right (the Persian left). The effort to push across is a complex maneuver: Alexander has some of his light infantry (the Paionians) support his lead squadron of cavalry making what seems to have been a direct crossing, while Alexander crosses at a diagonal with the bulk of the cavalry pushing towards the left, essentially crossing behind that lead squadron. While the lead squadron is repulsed, that maneuver allows Alexander to get over the river and into a shock engagement with the Persian cavalry, for which his horsem*n were better equipped (Arr. Anab. 1.15.4-1.16.2). That in turn allows the rest of Alexander’s cavalry following on (Arr. Anab. 1.15.8) to get over the river and finally for the phalanx itself in Alexander’s center to do so (Plut. Alex. 16.12).

As I read it then, Alexander first essentially sacrifices his lead cavalry squadron to pull the Persians out of position and hold their attention, to get the main body of his cavalry over the river and then begins levering the Persian cavalry off of their positions bit by bit to enable the rest of his army to cross. Once the Persian cavalry was pushed off the field, he then engages the infantry force – mostly Greek mercenaries, according to Arrian – in the front with the phalanx and then shatters it with cavalry. Note that Alexander lets the Persian cavalry go, focusing instead on securing his victory by annihilating the enemy infantry force. The outlines of the Alexander Battle are there, but so heavily distorted by the terrain as to be hard to see. Or, another way to put it is Alexander has successfully and adroitly modified the doctrine to get his ideal engagement.

As Issus (333) the problem is at least conceptually simple: Alexander is wildly outnumbered. His solution is, in part, to find a confined battlefield at Issus, which actually requires some adroit campaign maneuvering. Alexander is, after all, at Mallos when he hears that Darius III is moving into the region with his army, at which point Alexander books it into the Levant and down the coast to Myiandros in just a few days, getting his army out of the relatively wide spaces of Cilicia into the long narrow space between the Amanus Mountains and the Mediterranean coast. Darius follows, allowing Alexander to set the battle in a relatively narrow place, in this case along the Pinaros River at Issus.

Alexander then plays out a fairly classic Alexander Battle formula, refusing and holding on his left (under Parmenio, clearly an exceedingly capable commander himself) while hammering through on the center-right with his companions backed up by his elite hypaspists. Once again, he has to make adjustments, such as posting his best light infantry, the Agrianians, on the high ground to cover his own right flank as he hammers his way through. More critically, he has the presence of mind to identify the center of gravity in the Persian army as Darius III himself and targets the king. Alexander then lets Darius III escape, because he has to circle back to bail out his left wing, sealing his victory. Put a pin in that, we’ll come back to it.

Gaugamela (331) poses similar problems – Darius III’s army is very big – but the northern Tigris Basin (the area of operations, broadly construed) simply doesn’t provide the kind of narrow terrain Alexander used at Issus. So once again, he has to get clever: he now knows Darius is the weak-point in the Persian Army and that if he can run the Alexander Battle playbook against the center of Darius’ line – use the right edge of phalanx to create a disruption, then hammer through with the hypaspists and companion cavalry – he can win. So he positions Parmenio for the standard left-flank holding action, but also now puts his extreme right in an oblique as well, partially refusing it and sets a second Greek phalanx behind his first (the Macedonian one) to cover any gaps and provide more resilience, all to buy him the time to deliver that Alexander Battle hammer blow.

And it works, with Alexander shattering Darius’ center and sending the king into flight. But once again, Alexander becomes aware – this time by messenger – that his left under Parmenio was in severe trouble, as the Persians there were not aware that Darius had fled (Arr. Anab 3.14.4-15.4). And again, Alexander, with Darius fleeing before him turns and bails out Parmenio.

Of course that leaves the last major battle, the Battle of the Hydaspes (326), which is certainly complex, seeing Alexander fighting unfamiliar forces (elephants!) on unfamiliar ground, but the main tactical challenge and Alexander’s solution is fairly simple to explain, if difficult to execute. His problem, of course, is the river Hydaspes itself, which Alexander wouldn’t be able to cross directly into Porus’ army (it is a fairly substantial river and was swollen in the season, Arr. Anab. 5.9.4). So Alexander first declares to his troops that his plan is to wait for the river to go down in the dry season (Arr. Anab. 5.10.1), but then begins a long series of feints which eventually create the opening he needs to slip across the river (Arr. Anab. 5.10-13), which in turn sets conditions for the successful pitched battle to follow.

What I want to note here is the character of Alexander’s military leadership. On the one hand, Alexander invents no new tactics and employs only one clever ruse in this whole set of battles. And here we get into the nature of what we may term military ‘genius’ – a term long-time readers may note I avoid. This is not because I think the term is inappropriate – Clausewitz uses it (drink!), so it has pedigree – but because I think the way most popular readers understand it is unhelpful. The matter is either reduced to a sort of preternatural cleverness in employing ruses and deception or else the military genius is a chessmaster ‘controlling for every contingency.’ Actual military leadership is rarely like either of these things. Most battle plans are quite simple and ‘tricks’ in war (strategems) are also relatively simple. Indeed, no less than Clausewitz points this out, famously (drink!):

Everything [in war] looks simple; the knowledge required does not look remarkable, the strategic options are so obvious that by comparison the simplest problem of higher mathematics has an impressive scientific dignity. Once war has actually been seen, the difficulties become clear; but it is still extremely hard to describe the unseen, all-pervading element that brings about this change in perspective.
Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.11

Alexander’s genius is not in clever ruses or brilliant ideas. His solutions are simple and workmanlike, as we’ve seen. Nor does he ‘control every contingency’ – he is forced, like any general, to allow vast space for uncertainty and chance. But he has a fantastic, intuitive grasp of how fast his army can march, how long Parmenio can hold that flank, how easily (or not) his cavalry can break through. Clausewitz (drink!) goes on at length (Book I, Chapter 3) about the need for a general to have this intuitive sense, to be able to know things from a mix of experience and talent at the stroke of the eye (coup d’oeil). Instead, Alexander repeatedly come up with relatively simple solutions that he knows, from experience and intuition, his army can execute. His plans are never too baroque and complex but always address the problem in an effective way.

I focused here on the battles, because they’re the easiest to explain in this sort of space, but I think Alexander’s excellent intuitive grasp of his army’s capabilities actually comes out more clearly if one begins to look at the logistics of what he is doing. Alexander, after all, is taking an army of around 45,000 men and marching them through mostly hostile territory for eleven years. He has to obtain food as he goes, in terrain that he only has imperfect knowledge of. And apart from the brutal march through the Gedrosian Desert (which seems to have been intentional, as if to punish his army for its mutiny), he doesn’t make mistakes in this. Remember that an army like this on the move only has, at most, a few weeks of food on hand at any given time, so he is managing a tight-rope balancing act continually, gauging when he has time for a battle or a siege or when he has to keep marching. And he manages it so flawlessly, you could read all of the sources and barely notice. For those who want more on this, the detailed study is D.W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (1978). Doubtless, some of that is luck, but a general that just gets lucky every time is a good general.

And beyond the rational aspect of military planning, there is the emotional aspect as well (which Clausewitz, keep drinking, also discusses), which has to be quite carefully balanced. A good general cannot be rash or reckless, but also cannot be vacillating or indecisive. Most of all, a good general has to master themselves, overcoming their own emotions in extremely emotionally charged moments to reach sound decisions.

And here I want to come back to something Alexander did in those battles above, at moments of extreme heightened emotions, three times: having shattered the elite core of the Persian Army (the cavalry at Granicus and Darius’ guard at Issus and Gaugamela) and having them fleeing before them he does not pursue. This is the task, you will recall, Antiochus III – otherwise a clearly very capable commander – failed at repeatedly.

Consider what a sore test of generalship this is, taking Issus and Gaugamela in particular. There is Alexander, at the head of his cavalry, his enemy fleeing before him, the prize of his campaign – Darius III – there for the taking if he will just reach out and grasp it. And yet in this moment, Alexander has to do a lot of difficult things very quickly to win; simple things – but difficult. First, he has to master himself: he has just been personally in combat, leading his companions directly, with all of the mix of emotions and adrenaline that implies. But he is either observing, or getting a messenger telling him, that his left flank is in trouble. The first thing he has to do is think rationally and do so quickly. Then he has to make the right decision, keeping in mind all of the reasons of personal glory which might lead him to rationalize his way to saying that Parmenio can hold his own, or that Darius is the more important prize. Then he has to recover control of his cavalry, rapidly reform them and have them follow him away from the loot-filled enemy camp and the defenseless, fleeing enemy towards enemies that are still in good order, fighting and dangerous, charging back into death and peril. And he has to do that in the chaos of an ongoing engagement!

And he does it, without fail, every time.

Alexander’s campaigns are so long and complex that we could spend ages analyzing both the soundness of his decisions and then his ability to actually get his army to carry out his plans, but I think these examples serve to make the point. For reasons we will get to next week, I do not think, had Philip II not done it for him, Alexander III could have reformed the Macedonian army, trained the Companions, or developed his doctrine. As I am going to argue in part II, Alexander was simply not that kind of deep thinker or leader; when he tries reforms, they mostly fail and when he brings younger men into the Macedonian leadership, they are mostly not the equals of Philip II’s old war horses.

But as a general, a leader of armies in battle and on campaign, Alexander was extremely skilled, almost never setting a foot wrong in handling the simple-but-difficult elements of leadership. Fellow ancient historian Paul Johstono offered a quip a while back on Twitter that I think makes the point perfectly:

Alexander has a lot of failings, and we’re going to get to them. But he was unnaturally composed and at least when it came to doing violence (and getting others to do violence effectively) he was highly competent, almost absurdly so. Not because he had some sort of world-shaking flash of brilliant insight, of ‘genius’ in the popular sense, but because he had a composed, calm but determined mind with an intuitive grasp of what his army was capable of and what simple solutions would work and be required in the moment, genius in the Clausewitzian sense (drink!). The question that raises, of course, is a value judgement: is it enough to merely be good at killing and destroying in order to be great?

Next time, however, we’re going to take Alexander III off of the battlefield and see how he fares. Not as well, it turns out.

1. This is as good a place as any to make a note about transliteration. Almost every significant character in Alexander’s narrative has a traditional transliteration into English, typically based on how their name would be spelled in Latin. Thus Aristobulus, instead of the more faithful Aristoboulos (for Ἀριστόβουλος). The trend in Alexander scholarship today is, understandably, to prefer more faithful Greek transliterations, thus rendering Parmenion (rather than Parmenio) or Seleukos (rather than Seleucus). I think, in scholarship, this is a good trend, but since this is a public-facing work, I am going to largely stick to the traditional transliterations, because that’s generally how a reader would subsequently look up these figures.
2. An ἀνάβασις is a ‘journey up-country,’ but what Arrian is invoking here is Xenophon’s account of his own campaign with the 10,000, the original Anabasis; Arrian seems to have fashioned himself as a ‘second Xenophon’ in a number of ways.
3. This is going to be quite a general overview. For a much more detailed run-through, see D. Ogden, “Introduction” in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander the Great (2024), ed. D. Ogden.
4. Most notably “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind” Historia 7.4 (1958), “The Death of Parmenio” TAPA 91 (1960) and “Harpalus” JHS 81 (1961).
5. “Some recent interpretations of Alexander” Etretiens sur l’antiquite classique 22 (1976)
6. I don’t see it, to be honest.
7. I have in mind here Billows, Kings and Colonists (1995); Sekunda, The Antigonid Army (2013); and Hatzopoulos, Macedonian Institutions Under the Kings (1996) and L’organisation de L’armée Macédonienne sous les Antigonides (2001).
8. A more or less explicit effort to force the turn by trying to understand Alexander through his religious aspects with F. Naiden, Soldier, Priest and God (2018) was roughly received and has not prompted the intended turn, I think.
9. This was expensive – Philip II has a few windfalls in his reign, and yet we are told ends it deeply in debt, which in turn provides some of the impetus for Alexander to conduct his war.
10. Arrian, Anab. 1.14.4 gives a Persian force of a little under 40,000, evenly split between cavalry and infantry. He does not give the size of Alexander’s army, but has Parmenio suggest it is larger (Anab. 1.13.3). By contrast, Diodorus (17.19) gives the Persian army as massively larger, with some 100,000 infantry, which no modern scholar very much believes. Alexander’s whole army was around 35,000, a figure reportedly widely in our sources (Plut. Alex. 15.1, Arr. Anab. 1.11.3, Justin 11.6.2) and Parmenio’s comment given by Arrian suggests that Arrian at least thinks Alexander has the whole army up, but it is possible – as N.G.L. Hammond suggests in his article on the battle (“The Battle of the Granicus River” JHS 100 (1980): 73-88) that they weren’t all in the fight, so while Alexander’s overall army is larger, he has fewer men engaged, which I think is probably correct. The reason he can’t get his whole army in the fight is clear enough: the river and its obstruction.
11. Emphasis mine, trans. Howard and Paret.