Obscure Battles

Alexander's Conquest of Persia

Late May, 334 BCE

Macedonians under Alexander III of Macedon, approx. 18,100 (5,100 cavalry, 13,000 infantry)
Persians under Arsites, Satrap of Phrygia, approx. 30,000 (16,000 cavalry, 14,000 infantry)

First Light: 05:30 Sunrise: 05:56 Sunset: 20:19 End of Twilight: 20:42
(approximate times calculated from U.S. Naval Observatory based on location. However as the calculator does not figure for dates prior to 1700, this was based mid May for this year. It may have been a few minutes off.

Location: 40° 13’ N 27° 14’ E Just northwest of the Turkish town of Gümüşçay on what is now called the Çan Çayı.

This semi-famous battle, the first of Alexander's victories in his conquest of the Persian Empire, has interested me because there is controversy about what really happened. And, as any of you who have followed my blog have by now realized, I love the iconoclastic. History is full of "accepted truths". And the more old the history, the more fuzzy those truths become. Like so many accepted truths of the military genius of Frederick the Great or Napoleon or Stonewall Jackson, most accepted truths are the fossilized remains of self-serving propaganda. So, I believe, is the accepted truth of this battle.

Classical historians as well as modern ones disagree about what really happened at this first battle in the new king's conquest of the Persian empire. Some modern historians simply take the predominant narrative of the Greco-Roman historians, Arrian (86-160 AD) and Plutarch (46-120 AD), as fact, based as they were on Alexander's contemporary chronicler, Ptolemy, or his official scribe, Callisthenes, whose own writings have been conveniently lost (eaten by Arrian's dog apparently). Others have drawn on Diodorus Siculus's history ((90-30 BCE), which differs from the others in key details. But others (notably Peter Green in his book Alexander of Macedon) suspect a lot of these ancient accounts were left-over, Hellenistic propaganda, and that the truth lies somewhere in between.

So, as with my other posts on semi-obscure battles (and, I know, I know, to you classical scholars and hobbyists,The Granicus is not obscure at all), the obscurity will be in my idiomatic take on this ancient battle. I approach the subject with logic, i.e. what makes sense, and not a partisan adherence to one point of view or another. In so doing, I have found myself seeing the sense of Peter Green's synthetic conclusions about what probably, actually happened.

The young king wants to avenge past wrongs.

We've seen this political phenomenon in our own time; the political need to avenge past insults. It's a sad, human trait. There was Hitler's animus to avenge the humiliation of Germany after WWI. Or Saddam Hussein's urge to avenge the insults from his neighbor Kuwait in 1990. This urge to avenge was still a human trait twenty-four centuries ago.

Alexander, shortly after he had succeeded his assassinated father, Philip II, as the most powerful monarch in Greece, declared that he wanted to avenge the past insults and invasions from Persia. Though the perpetrators of those insults, Darius I and Xerxes, had died respectively 153 and 131 years before, 20-year-old Alexander sought to use the racial resentment of the Persians to unite Greeks in a race war, a war to unify Greece. he needed them to rally behind his true ambition, the conquest of the Achaemenid empire. Within two years of his accession, Alexander had made all of mainland Greece and the southern Balkans his--well, everybody except the Spartans. But he saw himself as destined to rule not just Greece, but the whole known world. So it was a political as well as a vainglorious motive to invade Darius III's realm.

Darius III, for his part, was not particularly worried about a threat from the West. He and his predecessors had long regarded the Greeks as an irritating, "third world" joke, more concerned with fighting each other than defying the world's first superpower. After Xerxes' failed invasion almost a century-and-a-half before, the Persian monarchs had long settled on a policy of merely meddling in Greek elections, bribing their politicians, cultivating allies, and keeping the Greeks at each others' throats. In other words, Balkanizing them. It had been far cheaper than conquest. And Greece, moreover, had been an important trading partner with the empire. The Achaemenids, too, had been the principle employers of Greek mercenary armies, contributing greatly to the economic prosperity of the Aegean littoral. Several Greek city states along the Ionian coast (modern western Turkey) were integral parts of the Empire. The Acheamenids had been light-handed rulers since Cyrus the Great, tolerant of local customs and and religion, and had encouraged their local economies. They had learned that this was far more profitable than oppressive subjugation. Let people worship their own gods, elect their own governments, do their own business, as long as they paid their taxes to Persepolis and supported the Great King in his wars. The Greek city states of the Achaemenid kingdom, for the most part, didn't think of themselves as in need of liberation. They had felt pretty free for generations. For the most part they weighed their interests in economic stability rather than racial antagonism.

In fact, Darius was facing far more serious political threats from the rebellious eastern satrapies of his empire (read Afghanistan) and from Egypt than from Greece. To him, some kid had just inherited a tiny throne from some backwater part of the Balkans (not even Greek); it was not anything that should concern the Great King. When he got word of Alexander's invasion in northwest Phrygia, he, at first regarded it as a nuisance and delegated the local satraps and his trusted Greek mercenary general, Memnon of Rhodes, to deal with it. They could muster an overwhelming army from resources in that region alone to squash the kid.

Alexander starts his amazing adventure.

In early 334. after having subdued the recalcitrant city states in mainland Greece and put down a rebellion up in the Balkans, Alexander mobilized an army of some of some 36,500 in Thrace and set off to cross the Hellespont (the modern Dardanelles Straights separating Europe from Asia Minor). This had been the traditional route of invasion in reverse, when Darius's ancestors had invaded Greece in the previous century. After a three week march across Thrace, his army had arrived at the crossing point at Sestos, on the European side of the straights. Leaving his senior and most veteran general, Parmenion, to manage the crossing of the army to Abydos, on the Asian side, Alexander decided to take his boyfriend, Hephaestos, and some of his Companions down the coast on a little sight-seeing trip down to the ruins of Troy.

He laid the foundations of two temples to Poseidon and Athena at the port towns of Elaius and Sigeion on either side of the mouth of the straight, and made some pious sacrifices to those gods and to heroes of Homeric legend. As his trireme crossed the two miles from Elaius to Sigieon, Diodorus describes him as hurling his spear into the sand at Sigeion and jumping down into the surf, thereby symbolically laying claim to all of Asia. This anecdote, like so many recounted, was probably made up either by Callithenes or by Arrian or Diodorus centuries later to give epic drama to their narratives. Of course, this strategic port at mouth of the Hellespont, had, for months already been safely in the hands of a Macedonian garrison, so Alexander probably just climbed down unceremoniously off the boat to be welcomed by the garrison commander, Calas.

Mouth of the Hellespont looking from Alexander's personal crossing point toward the Asia side.

After everyone got ashore, Alexander went inland a couple of miles to the reputed ruins of Troy to visit the reputed tomb of Achilles, his idol--that Marvel Universe Superhero of the ancient world--and one whom the adolescent Alexander had most wanted to emulate. Apparently, he also appropriated Achilles's armor from his tomb to make it his own (according to Diodorus and Arrian but not Plutarch). Since it would have been almost nine-hundred years old at this point, it is doubtful if it was actually Achilles's original armor (if the superhero had actually existed outside of Homer's fantasy), or if it was still functional. But apparently Alexander felt having it around his torso bestowed some kind of magical charm. I wonder if he didn't just buy it at the local gift shop, since this Troy was even then a popular tourist destination. And did the curators just go ahead and replace it again with some other old armor from storage when the king left?

It was on this trip, too, that Alexander's sycophantic fortune teller, Aristander, supposedly predicted that Alexander would soon personally defeat a powerful enemy in mounted combat. This anecdote also came from Arrian, writing five centuries after the event. Arrian's hindsight is uncanny in his back-to-the-future prediction, because (spoiler alert) that is just what was about to happen at the Granicus. Also, Aristander had acquired a talent for coming up with favorable, but vague, predictions that Alexander loved to hear, or bend to his own self-narrative. So the clairvoyant made himself a nice living following the king to tell him things he liked to hear.

Meanwhile, back up at the main crossing point, Parmenion had succeeded in ferrying the entire force across the water to Abydos (the site from which Xerxes had launched his own invasion in the other direction 146 years before), He then moved it up to camp at the town of Arisbe to wait for Alexander's return from his field trip. Once the king rejoined the army, he was informed of a large concentration of Persian forces to the northeast, around the city of Zelea (modern Sarikoy, Turkey). His original plan had been to march southward along the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, liberating Greek cities on the way. But this new information caused him to change his plans and engage the Persians directly. So leaving a third of his army at Arisbe to guard his bridgehead, he proceeded to march/sail eastward along the coast some 60 miles (100 km) to the port of Priapus* (modern Karabiga) on the Propontis (modern Sea of Marmara).

*And yes, the town was named for what you think it was. It was a sailor town, after all.

Along the route the Greek cities, like Lamapscus and Kolonai, declined Alexander's offers of liberation and, instead, offered him bribes to spare them a siege. This suited Alexander in two ways; 1) he was short of cash to pay and provision his troops and couldn't afford series of long sieges, and 2) since Memnon, the defacto military representative of Darius in the northwest, owned quite a lot of property in these cities, it might have seemed as though the Greek mercenary general was somehow colluding with the invaders. He wasn't. But that's what Alexander wanted Darius to suspect. So he spared Memnon's property.

View across the Hellespont at approximate location of the main crossing of Alexander's army, a relatively short ferry ride in a trireme.

Persians Respond

Meanwhile, Arsites, satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, had called a mobilization of fellow satraps from Phrygia, Lydia, Paphlagonia, Bythnia, Ionia, and other northwestern provinces, to convene with their forces at the town of Zelea in northern Phrygia. Memnon joined them. Though didn't outrank them (he was a foreign mercenary, after all), he had the most direct military experience with the Macedonians. He also had the Great King's trust and sat on Artises's council as Darius' representative.

Memnon's advice to the assembled Persian nobles was blunt and sobering. He didn't bother with diplomatic niceties. He noted that the forces they had gathered, (about 15,500 cavalry, 5,000 heavy infantry, and an unknown swarm of local levies) would be no match for the veteran and disciplined Macedonian army. Instead of confronting Alexander, he advised avoiding battle altogether and advocated a scorched earth policy, burning the crops, stores, and even towns in front of the Macedonian line of march and threatening its lines of communication to force it back to Greece. Memnon's intelligence also informed him of Alexander's logistical and financial straights. So he knew that it wouldn't take much to drive him back over the Hellespont, even without a battle. at least until the following year. This would give time for the Great King to quell the rebellions in Egypt and in the east, and bring up overwhelming force to counter-invade Macedonia, exterminate the young troublemaker, and install his own puppet. There were any number of available Macedonian ex-pats who had fled to Darius's court after Alexander started executing people. So, with all of this inside intelligence, Memnon made his case.

The Persian nobles, who had regarded themselves as members of the preeminent military power in the known world since Cyrus the Great, scoffed at the threat the Macedonians posed. Their own intelligence indicated that Alexander had only 18,000 infantry and less than half their cavalry, and that if the Persians chose their defensive position wisely, he would have to face them with inferior forces on disadvantageous ground. Though they had long respected (and employed as mercenaries) Greek phalanx methods of warfare, they had not kept up with the advances in tactics and weaponry (like the long pike, the sarissa) of Philip's military innovations. They imagined they'd just be fighting a relatively small band of ordinary Greeks. And, besides, they had 7,500 of their own Greek mercenaries to supplement their overwhelming Persian cavalry.

Moreover, the idea that these proud nobles should burn their own property and that of their subjects seemed just too drastic--and even cowardly. Under the three-hundred-year-old Achaemenid administrative tradition of paternalism established by Cyrus and honored by his successors, that was anathema. By the tenets of their state religion, Zoroastrianism, the primary duty of a satrap and of a soldier, was to protect their subjects under their charge. It presages the same kind of chivalry we would later see bring the French nobility to a bad end at Crecy, 1,680 years later. The Persians' religion, their traditions, and their pride would not tolerate the idea of "burning down the village to save it."

They also had their own xenophobic distrust of Memnon, a Greek himself, who they suspected had duplicitous motives of his own. (What about those rumors, for instance, of his property being spared by the Macedonians as they marched down the coast?) So they overruled the Greek and ordered an advance to the Granicus River (see strategic map), a natural moat any invader would have to cross.

Strategically, had the satraps' confidence in their army's prowess been justified, this was a smart move. Alexander could not leave a powerful enemy force on his flank and rear to threaten his communications with Greece, so they knew he had to confront them sooner rather than later, especially given his supply and payroll troubles. And the Granicus River, though not large, at this time of year was in flood, had a swift current, was uneven in depth, and had steep, slippery banks. It would be a nightmare for any army to try and attack across. It was probably the best defensive line the satraps could have taken.

They also clung to the hope that, knowing Alexander's youthful impetuosity and his reputed urge to throw himself into the thick of the fighting, he could fall in battle and the invasion by a unified Greece would be snuffed out with him. This was something that happened so often in ancient warfare (see the untimely death of Cyrus the Younger in Xenophon's Anabasis) that it had become a preferred strategy; cut the head off the snake.

So, though historians have enjoyed citing how idiotic the Persians were in confronting Alexander, given their success for three centuries, and the circumstances at this stage of the invasion, their strategic reasoning was understandable. Conservative and overconfident, but understandable. They didn't know what the seer Aristander knew. Or Arrian knew five centuries later.

The Battle: Arrian's Version

(See first battle map at the top of the article: Arrian's Version)

Resting his army by the sea in Priapus, Alexander got word of the arrival of the Persian army on the Granicus River. He hurried his army the short eight miles south to meet them. Why he chose to march down the western side of the river and didn't cross it up at the coast, Arrian doesn't say. It would have put him on the same side as the Persians.

Arriving in the late afternoon, Alexander sees that the enemy has occupied the berm above the steep, slippery slope of the eastern bank of the river. According to Arrian and Plutarch, the Persians had massed all of their cavalry forward on the lip of the slope, with their infantry somewhere behind (and out of sight of the Macedonians). To the south of the Persian left wing, held by Memnon and the mercenary Greek cavalry, the ground on the western side of the river was all mushy and impassable. The logical crossing point was here, blocked by thousands of heavily armored cavalry.

Alexander's second in command, Parmenion, observed all of this and cautioned that an assault directly across the river and up the steep slope would be suicidal. He suggested that, given the latenesss of the day, they make camp, wait until dark, and then stealthily find an undefended crossing point further downstream (north) and attack the enemy on open ground at first light. A classic Napoleonic or Frederickan maneuveur sur les derrieres.

View across the Granicus today.
It would probably not have been as brushy then.
And, in May, the water would have been
deeper and faster as meltwater coming down
from the mountains to the south.

Picture credit: Jona Lendering, 2014

The king would have none of this sensible advice from this old friend of his father's. No, they'd attack at once, straight at the enemy. So, leading his Companions and the lance-armed Prodrmoi cavalry in their wedge formations (interspersed with the lightly armed peltasts and archers), he charged right across and up the slope as if it wasn't there, smashing into the stationary Persians (and Greeks). In the center, Parmenion led the Hypaspists (Shield Bearers) and the six battalions of the Phalanx with their sixteen-foot sarissa, straight across and up the slope. There was some difficulty. It couldn't have been easy staying on the backs of their horses (remember, no saddles or stirrups) while hanging onto to their twelve foot lances with both hands. And it couldn't have been easy for the phalanxes to keep their tight formations while also holding their own sixteen foot sarissa with both hands. But Alexander and his heroes managed get unhindered to the top of the bank. The king personally slew two Persian noblemen himself (Mithradates and Rhosaches, both relatives of Darius) and narrowly avoided being killed himself by a third (Spithradates) when a bodyguard, Cleitus the Black, hacked off the Persian's arm as he raised his axe to split Alexander's head.

The Persians, after fighting ferociously on the top of the bank for a time, soon broke and fled, taking all the Persian infantry, who had evidently just been playing cards in the rear, with them. Their Greek mercenaries, however, kept their discipline and marched in phalanx formation back to a nearby hill. From there they sent a delegation asking for terms, even offering to join Alexander's crusade.

But, for some reason, Alexander was in no mood for mercy. Apparently he was infuriated by what he perceived as treason by the Greeks fighting on the side of barbarians against fellow Greeks, even though Greek mercenaries had fought for Persians--and yes, against Greeks--for over a century. It had been a normal thing. The whole concept of Greek nationalism had only just been invented--by Alexander himself as a political McGuffin. And he himself had fought with his father against Greeks.

But he gave no quarter to Memnon's Greeks, ordering his phalanxes and cavalry to butcher them where they stood. In the end, after a heroic last stand, over four thousand were said to have been killed. The remaining two thousand were marched in chains back to Macedon to slave in the mines until they died. Memnon himself, and a few Greeks, managed to escape to fight Alexander another day.

Many historians had thought this massacre was a senesless and unwise move on the part of Alexander. They saw that he was passing up an opportunity to recruit thousands of highly trained compatriots. And he was, so he piously claimed, there in Asia to liberate the Greeks. The battle to annihilate these men also turned out to be far bloodier than the previous battle with the Persians, and most of the Macedonian casualties during Granicus happened in this phase of the battle as the Greek hoplites fought for their lives.

As it would turn out, this no-quarter, homicidal nature of Alexander's was more the rule than the exception. He had ordered the genocide and razing of Thebes the year before when that city had resisted his offer to "unify" Greece. And he seemed to think that the best way to govern was through terror--a notion that every tyrant in history has discovered never ends well--for the tyrant. He would also ruthlessly execute, or just murder in a drunken rage, old friends he came to suspect--or got peeved with, including Parmenion, his sons, and even Cleitus the Black who had that day saved his life. Alexander was, at heart, a paranoid, sociopathic killer.

But that's an aside. This narrative of Arrian's and Plutarch's, of the superhero Alexander ignoring the advice of Parmenion and charging straight at the enemy in an impregnable position has been the story accepted by most historians. Most have rationalized that it was the stupidity and arrogance of the Persians putting their cavalry instead of their infantry in the front line, on top of a bank, that caused their downfall, and that Alexander, military genius that he was, could see the mistake at once. Or that the Persians were just no match for the superior Europeans.

But there is another version.

A Revisionist Narrative

There was another Greek historian who lived closer to the event than either Arrian or Plutarch, by a couple of centuries. Diodorus of Sicily's account told a different story, one favored by David Green in his book Alexander of Macedon. It makes much more sense.

Diodorus describes a north-south battle, over open ground, that commenced in the morning after Alexander had crossed the Granicus. He doesn't mention the aborted attack the evening before. Otherwise he describes the combat in the same way, including Alexander's brush with death and his personal combat with all the Persian nobles.

Peter Green hypothesizes that both Arrian's and Diodorus's each are partially true; that the battle hyphenated, fought both on the evening and the next morning, but that Arrian's makes Alexander look more heroic, more Achilles-like. Arrian may have relied on accounts (now lost) that had been edited for propaganda purposes: press releases.

A story getting out that the New Achilles had bungled his first action and had to take the advice from his father's best friend (Parmenion) would not go well with his need to cow all of the Greek cities in Asia Minor. Months before, when he had gone to Delphi to secure the prediction of the Oracle and the Oracle had said she was closed for the season, he nevertheless dragged her out to the temple and demanded his fortune be told. Peeved, she told him he was "invincible". This bit of sarcasm zooming right over Alexander's head, he took it as Delphic validation. But this first battle challenged that pronouncement. He had been beaten back easily on that first charge, even though he ultimately won the battle. So that story had to be altered to suppress the embarrassing opening.

Green suggests a synthesis of the conflicting narratives.

Under Green's hypothesis, Alexander at first does reject Parmenion's prudent advice not to attack at once in the late afternoon, but cross that night further downstream and attack from the north in the morning. As in Arrian's version, in Green's theory, Alexander impulsively led an attack right away with his Companions and Prodromoi, charging obliquely across the stream and up the bank into the Persian left. This was supported by Parmenion , doing his duty even as he disagreed, leading the Macedonian phalanx in the center, wading across the river and struggling up the slippery bank against the Persian center. In Green's version the Persian center would have been held in the traditional deployment, by the phalanx of Greek mercenary hoplites and peltasts, and not by cavalry. Both attacks stalled as horses and men slipped and fell trying to climb the muddy slope and taking casualties from Persian arrows and javelins from above.

Soon seeing that this attack was fruitless and costing lives, Alexander grudgingly called it off. Parmenion, though he loyally supported the cavalry with the Macedonian foot, had been right. I'm assuming, he was diplomatic enough not to say "I told you so." At least Alexander at this point was flexible and mature enough to listen to the advice. He may have resented being proven wrong, though, which could have been, at least partially, the animus he felt toward Parmenion later when jealous rivals were dripping rumors of his disloyalty in Alexander's drunk ears.

After having marched all day and fought for an hour or so, the Macedonians needed rest. So they made camp in the hills above the stream. They weren't worried that the Persians might cross the stream in the night; the satraps had wisely picked their ground and had no incentive to give it up themselves.

Sometime in the night, Parmenion's Thessalian cavalry scouts had found a narrow ford about two-and-a-half miles downstream (to the north, see map below). In the wee hours, the Macedonians quietly crept out of their campsite, leaving a few men tending the fires to fool the Persians. By dawn all had filed across the ford and drawn up on the plain in their original battle order, but facing in a ninety degree direction, their front across open, flat ground, threatening the Persian flank. This move was what Frederick the Great himself had emulated when he stole a march on the Austrians at Leuthen, or Napoleon at Arcola.

This sudden appearance of the enemy battle line on their flank on their side of the river must have greatly shaken the satraps, congratulating themselves on having easily repulsed Alexander the previous evening. When scouts frantically came in with reports that the Macedonian army had got across the river and was bearing down on their unprotected right flank, they panicked. Leaving their infantry to follow when they could, they hurried their cavalry north to change their front and face the Macedonians. They still had twice as many horse as Alexander, and their front would have extended past his left (held by the Thessalians), but they no longer had an impassable stream to their front. There were a couple of shallow gullies, but the ground was otherwise perfect for cavalry and the unhindered advance of the Macedonian phalanx.

The Main Battle

From here the battle unfolded pretty much as Arrian had described it in his own narrative (minus the climbing up the slippery slope). Alexander ordered his forlorn hope, an ila (squadron) of Companion cavalry under one Socrates (not that Socrates) to charge obliquely into the Persian left alone. This broke the line there and Persian cavalry started swarming to the spot to mend the hole, like bees swarming to attack an invader.

This local disruption achieved, Alexander followed through leading all of his right flank cavalry (his 1,550 Companions and 750 Paonians and Prodromoi) first at the Persian left flank opposite where Socrates ila had disrupted the line (held by Memnon and Arsites), and then abruptly swinging a hard left across the front to plunge right toward the Persian center. The Persian right had begun to try and outflank the Macedonian left, held by the Thessalian cavalry. This opened a hole in the Persian center as their cavalry sought to move farther to the east. This hole was right where Alexander was galloping.

Flat countryside on the east bank of the Granicus.Picture credit: Jona Lendering, 2014

It was the primary tactic of battles during this period to slay the commander, thus hoping to cause the entire enemy army to lose heart and flee. The Persians themselves had this exact idea when they saw Alexander coming at them in his bright cloak, "Achilles's" gold cuirass, and helmet decked out with a crest and white feathered wings at the apex of his cavalry wedge. Though he must have looked like he was a Mardi Gras queeen, this flamboyant gear was also supposed to inspire his own army. People needed to see him at the front, leading.

The first to get to him was Mithradates, a son-in-law of Darius, leading the Iranian cavalry in the center. The prince of Persia hurled his javelin at Alexander, which stuck in the "Achilles" breastplate but didn't hurt him. Alexander drove his lance into Mithradates's own breastplate, where it snapped off without hurting him (armor really did work back then, unlike what you see in movies). As Mithradates drew his sword to engage Alexander more closely, the king just rammed the splintery end of his broken lance shaft with full force into Mithradates face, killing him instantly (or maybe just knocking him off his horse--at any event it must have hurt like hell).

Then other Persian noblemen quickly rode up to attack Alexander from all sides; he had ridden way out in front of his Companions and was, for a critical minute or two, completely alone. One, Rhosaces, managed to get behind Alexander and whack him on the head with his sword (or axe, Persian cavalry often carried battle axes) so hard that it split the king's fancy helmet and left him with a shallow crack on the skull. This stunned Alexander, but he managed (according to Diodorus and Arrian in each of their accounts) to cut Rhosaces down with his own sword.

At this point, Alexander was getting pretty dizzy from the repeated blows and his head wound and starting to reel on his horse (not Bucephalus). Another Persian, Spithradates, the satrap of Ionia and Rhosaces brother, rode up and was raising his axe to cut down Alexander when, just then, one of the king's companions, Cleitus "the Black", came up in the nick of time and sliced the nobleman's arm clean off with his sword. Spithradates fell off his horse and probably died quickly (we hope) from massive blood loss.

Dazed, Alexander, too, fell off his horse and lay unconscious on the ground while his Companions rallied around his body, fighting off the Persian aristocracy. About this time, as well, the Agranian peltasts (light infantry armed with sharp knives and javelins) had caught up with the Macedonian cavalry to dart in and out of the heavily armored Persian cavalry, hamstringing and disemboweling their horses and collectively pulling the riders down, where they slit their throats or rammed their spears into the cracks of their armor. This joint arms tactic (cavalry and light infantry working together) had long been common to Greek warfare. And, as we would see in medieval battles (see my article on Crecy 1346), English longbowmen had performed the same homicidal service during the Age of Chivalry. It wasn't considered chivalrous, either in 4th century BCE Persia or 14th century Europe, but it was devastatingly effective.

As all of this mayhem was going on, the 9,000 sarissa-armed men of the Macedonian phalanx under Parmenion (the six regiments, or taxeis, of the infantry) and the 3,000 Hypaspists (shield bearers, armed with traditional Greek shield, or hoplon, and spear) had been steadily pressing forward against the center of the Persian cavalry line. The Greek mercenaries and the Persian infantry had not yet come up to counter the Macedonian foot.

One would think that heavy Persian cavalry would have had an advantage over open ground against foot. However, as Xenophon had counseled his own men in his Anabasis, well-formed infantry wielding a thicket of spears, or even longer sarissa, need have no fear of cavalry:

"But if any of you is out of heart to think that we have no cavalry, while the enemy have many squadrons to command, lay to heart this doctrine, that ten thousand horse only equal ten thousand men upon their backs, neither less nor more. Did any one ever die in battle from the bite or kick of a horse? It is the men, the real swordsmen, who do whatever is done in battles. In fact we, on our stout shanks, are better mounted than those cavalry fellows; there they hang on to their horses' necks in mortal dread, not only of us, but of falling off; while we, well planted upon earth, can deal far heavier blows to our assailants, and aim more steadily at who we will. There is one point, I admit, in which their cavalry have the whip-hand of us; it is safer for them than it is for us to run away." --Xenophon, Anabasis, Book III

Moreover, it was long known among professional infantry that no horse would willingly impale himself on a thicket of pointy things. And horses were wary of stepping on dead bodies (men or other horses). This was a principle long recognized in ancient and even early modern warfare. Though movies would have us think that cavalry would just crash into solid infantry formations, even Napoleon's cavalry knew this was folly to attempt. The more likely thing to happen was that if a horse were forced to gallop at a line of men holding pikes or bayonets, they would either swerve to the side or stop cold and topple the rider over their heads. So as long as the phalanx kept its ranks, kept its thousands of sarissa pointed forward, and its flanks protected by cavalry, it was safe from the Persian cavalry.

The Persian right, had swung right to try and outflank the Macedonian line, but the Thessalian horse, as well as Alexander's own Greek cavalry, had nimbly maneurvered to counter them. So the Persian cavalry, unable to get behind the Macedonian foot, and facing this moving solid wall bristling with sixteen foot pointy things, had nothing to do but run away. Just as Xenophon had predicted a generation before.

Before long a trickle became a torrent as the Persian cavalry started to give up and flee to the rear. As they did so, they took the Persian infantry levies with them (8,000 to 600,000 of them, depending on which ancient source you believe). And soon, all who were left to face Alexander were the 5,000 Greek mercenary hoplites, who marched slowly back to a hill where they made their stand. We've already related their sad fate before.

The Aftermath

Alexander had won his first battle in his eight-year campaign to conquer Asia. Until his last battle, at the Hydaspes River (modern Jhelum River in Pakistan) in 326, this was his closest run thing. His impetuosity had very nearly killed him. Had the gallant Cleitus been a half-second later, the entire history of the world would have been different.

The young king went on that year consolidating his power, "liberating" cities along the Ionian coast, building up his army, and winning over Persian allies within the empire. He had also solved his financial difficulties with all the tax revenue diverted from western Persian satrapies now paying the taxes to him instead of Darius. Within three years he had defeated Darius's vast main army twice (at Issus and Gaugamela) and essentially captured the seat of the empire, taking the remaining five years to conquer the eastern part up to the Indian frontier.

The two principle commanders on the Persian side, Memnon and Arsites, both escaped. The former mounted an aggressive counter-offensive against the Macedonians by using Darius' large navy (mostly Phoenician) to ravage the Greek fleet in the Aegean. He also invaded Macedon and conspired with Demosthenes to start an anti-Macedonian revolt. His campaign to bring the war to mainland Greece was successful until the following year when he caught some bug and died during a siege. Memnon was probably Alexander's most formidable enemy general in his career. Had he not caught that virus, the history of the world my have also been different.

Poor Arsites, on the other hand, was so heartbroken that he had lost the battle and let this scorpion loose in the Empire, that he went home and committed suicide in his palace at Dascylium, seat of Hellespontine Phrygia.

We need to talk.

An Unreliable Narrator

The divergent descriptions of this historic event underscore a truth about reading history; it isn't always true. As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, it often just propaganda that has survived out of its contemporary context. The immediate political issues fade, and this propaganda, while possibly seen for what it was when it was circulated, evolves into accepted fact. As U.S. Attorney General William Barr cynically said just this weekend, "History is written by the winners."

With the variance of Arrian's, Plutarch's, and Diodorus's accounts of the Granicus, none of which were first sources by a long shot, we can see this effect. Their own sources came from people like Ptolemy and others of Alexander's retinue, who had clear political objectives of what they put out, sometimes self-serving (as with Ptolemy) and sometimes just sycophantic as with his official chronicler and PR hack, Callisthenes (who was, ironically, later tortured to death on the orders of an increasingly paranoid Alexander when a rival accused him of being in on a conspiracy to assassinate the king). So you just can't trust the narrator.

The contemporary chroniclers of Alexander's campaign were trying to make their fearless leader look more than heroic. They were trying to make him look godlike. And gods don't make mistakes. They don't make foolish, doomed-to-fail charges. Gods may face mortal danger. They may even suffer wounds and temporary setbacks. But these just make their triumphs all the more heroic. The focus on Alexander's hand-to-hand combat with enemy heroes, themselves larger than life, makes it seem like nobody else on the battlefield was fighting for their lives. It was just Alexander and the handful of Persian princes. Like Achilles and the Trojans.

Would you trust an official report of a contemporary leader facing a crisis that just talked about how he personally met it and he personally defeated it? Only him. No. We'd recognize that as propaganda.

This is where it is often useful to apply logic to try to understand what really happened, as Peter Green has done in his analysis of the battle. Ultimately, there is little doubt that Alexander was the commander of the army that won the Granicus. But there is doubt about how that happened.

The Persian "Mistakes"

There is the matter of the Persian cavalry's deployment. Were the Persians just being arrogant and stupid in putting their cavalry in the front line? This is what the Greek historians apparently wanted us to believe. Were they acting like the French knights at Crecy? In Arrian's and Plutarch's versions, they had the cavalry defending the river bank, with the Greek and Persian infantry to the rear, something that just didn't make any tactical sense in a fourth century battle. Xenophon's advice to his men about infantry being better than cavalry at holding a line (see quote above) was not news, it was accepted doctrine.

But in Diodorus's version, the Persian cavalry only took the front of the line when they hurried north to confront the Macedonian crossing there. The left their infantry behind not because of any tactical decision, but because they just couldn't keep up. And this was an emergency deployment. There wasn't time to array conventionally.

Peter Green postulates that in the original position on the evening before, the Persians had put their heavy infantry (the Greek hoplites) in the center at the top of the river bank, with the cavalry on the flanks, as conventional tactics dictated. It was only when they were surprised the next morning by Alexander's mouvement sur les derrieres that the cavalry all hurried north, leaving their foot behind.

I would also propose that with the Macedonians trying to climb up the muddy slope, whether on horseback (remember, no stirrups or saddles to hold on to) or on foot with their heavy, sixteen foot sarissa (which took two hands to hold), they would have become highly disordered, breaking their tight formations. This would have left them mortally vulnerable to a cavalry charge. So this may have been the logic behind the Persian dispositions of putting so much of their cavalry forward.

If the Persians made a glaring mistake, I would contend it was in battlefield security. Were they so fooled by the campfires across the river that they didn't feel the need to post pickets up and down the river to watch for enemy crossings? Surely, if the Macedonians had so easily found another ford, the Persians would have known about them too. This was their country, after all.

The Granicus is another example, though, of how a previously unconquerable force meets its match when confronted with a new idea, or when it is so confident in itself that it fails to be careful. We've seen that in so many of the examples I've covered this site, Gettysburg, Crecy, Isandlwana, Gqokli Hill, Friedland, Kolin, Blenheim, Lexington-Concord. The Vietnam War also comes to mind.

For three hundred years the Persians had expanded and held on to the mightiest empire the world had ever known. Their military and naval preeminence was unchallenged. They were the only superpower. While they had long known of Greek methods of warfare, and even suffered checks from those methods (at Marathon, at Salamis, at Plataea) they readily adopted those methods themselves and even employed Greeks to fight for them. Greece wasn't a threat. It was a resource to their own power.

When Alexander crossed the Hellespont, he was considered just another annoying Greek. Ignoring the intelligence brought to them by Greeks like Memnon, who had been closely watching the new war machine created by Philip of Macedon and inherited by his son, they responded by meeting them in the old way. They were confident that they could just brush him aside.

At the subsequent battles of Issus and Gaugamela, Darius himself took command and marshalled the might of the whole empire on the battlefield. he assumed the Granicus, fought by local levies and satrapal cavalry, had been an embarrassing fluke. Darius was going to show them what overwhelming military might could do. Unfortunately, even though he had a much larger force at those battles (and terrifying weapons like scythed chariots), he failed to appreciate the almost foolproof tactics that Alexander and this new type of army employed. Alexander did not even change his battle plan for these battles; feinting to the right to draw the Persian cavalry away, then hooking back to go for the exposed jugular at the center. The Persians fell for this same sucker punch every time. And by Gaugamela, Alexander could read his enemy like a book. The remarkable thing is that the overconfident Persians never caught on.

Alexander has long been praised as one of the great military geniuses of history. Julius Caesar, Frederick the Great, Marshal de Saxe, Napoleon, all studied him. But his martial skill paled beside his genius for political manipulation. He could not only win battles, he knew how to turn the perception of those military victories into even more powerful political ones, winning over allies as he went forward. He could even turn fiascos (like the siege ofHalicarnasus) into a political victory by framing them through propaganda and personal charm. Many considered his last battle, at the river Hydaspes against the Indian king Porus to be a Pyrrhic victory, if that. Though he ultimately drove back the elephants of Porus's army, his own army was so mauled that he could not go on. Instead, he used his charisma to befriend Porus and recruit him as a loyal satrap.

Thus we see how the near-run-thing that was this first battle at the Granicus was turned into this myth of the unstoppable god-king destined to conquer the world. So many people believed he was invincible. The Delphic Oracle's pronouncement of him as "invincible" may have been sarcastic, but like General Bee's sarcastic remark about General Thomas Jackson refusing to help him and acting like a "stone wall" at Bull Run, the non-sarcastic moniker was the one that stuck.

Macedonian Formations

While there is ample illustration and explanation of the various formations used by the Macedonian cavalry and infantry in other sources (some cited below), I thought I'd be helpful and illustrate those here. The cavalry wedge formation had evolved from the Thessalian rhomboid. Experience had shown that each of these allowed charging cavalry to change direction quickly, making them much more maneuverable and allowing Alexander to feint and fool the Persians as to the aim of his attack. The leader of each squadron, at the apex of the formation, could also more easily direct it than from a corner or the side.

The standard array for a syntagma was 16 side by 16 deep. However it was flexible enough to quickly widen to 32 by 8, or to narrow itself by files to negotiate a defile. Six syntagma formed a taxis, equivalent to a brigade.

Order of Battle

The following OOB is derived mostly from Diodorus' account of the battle. Numbers are approximate, obviously, since there are no surviving parade state reports from the era. Diodorus did passingly mention that there were 100,000 local levies of Lydian infantry, but we can probably discount that. Other sources I relied on were Hackett's Warfare in the Ancient World, Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon, Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander, and Warry's Warfare in the Classical World.

A note on organization: Under "Subunits" I have used contemporary names of what we might today call companies and squadrons. For the Macedonians, these would have been syntagma (256 men) for infantry and ilae (sing. ila, 120-200 troopers) for cavalry. For Persians the company subunit was in satabam (6-10 files of 10 ranks, or 60-100 men). I have listed Greek mercenary subunits in the classical lochoi (singular lochos, about 100 men in eight ranks).

As usual, this graphic is copyrighted by Jeffery.P.Berry Trust, and protected by a Digimarc digital watermark.

Arrian, James Romm (ed) The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, 2012, Anchor Books, ISBN 978-1-4000-7967-4

Connolly, Peter, Greece and Rome at War, 1998, Greenhill Books, ISBN 1-85367-303-X

Fuller, J.F.C, The Generalship of Alexander the Great, 1960, Da Capo Press, ISBN 0-306-81330-0

Green, Peter, Alexander of Macedon 356-323 BC, 2013, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-27586-7

Obscure Battles

Pages

Monday, May 11, 2020

The Granicus