Top 10 reasons Alexander The Great was a great commander

Alexander – even today, 23 centuries after his death, his name still has the power to inspire. His achievements have stood the test of time and remain amongst the most remarkable in the whole annals of military history. With an army of typically only around 40,000 men, he conquered the largest, richest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen; and all of this in less than a decade.

When Alexander became king, his military career began when he launched a campaign against Macedonia’s northern neighbours. This is a campaign that we know little about, but we can assume that it was remarkably successful given that Antipater, his regent, never had any difficulty from that region. From there, Alexander marched in central Greece, and sent a terrible message with the destruction of the ancient city of Thebes.

In 334, Alexander crossed the Hellespont and invaded Asia. He soundly defeated the Persians in large set-piece battles at the Granicus River, Issus and finally Gaugamela in 331. During this period he also captured the great fortresses of Halicarnassus, Tyre and Gaza. After the death of Darius, Alexander spent several years campaigning in Afghanistan and India; a brutal period culminating in the defeat of the Indian king Porus at the battle of the Hydaspes.

In India, the army had finally had enough and refused to march further into the unknown. They turned back and made a disastrous march through the Gedrosian Desert. After a final siege during which Alexander was struck by an arrow that punctured his lung, he returned to Babylon where he died in 323.

Alexander’s incredible string of successes was not accidental; listed here are the 10 main reasons for them (in no particular order). You can find out more about Alexander as a military commander in my books, The Army of Alexander The Great and The Sieges of Alexander The Great, both published by Pen & Sword.

1. Philip of Macedon

Philip, Alexander’s father, was one of the finest military minds of the ancient world; but he is completely overshadowed by his son. Philip took a broken kingdom that was about to be overrun by foreign enemies, and turned it into the most powerful state in Greece. Shortly before his death he sent an expeditionary force to Asia Minor to conduct an initial campaign against the Persians whilst he prepared for a larger invasion.

Had Philip lived – he is believed to have been buried at Aigai – he clearly would have expanded upon this expeditionary campaign with a full scale invasion. It is always interesting (but ultimately fruitless) to speculate how Philip would have fared compared to Alexander.

Alexander had a first rate military education watching the successes of his father, and evidently was worried that there would be nothing left for him to conquer if his father continued too long; the assassin’s blade ensured that this would not be the case.

Could Alexander have achieved what he did without his father’s foundation? This is a difficult question to answer, but I would suggest that Alexander had the ability, but his character would likely have let him down. Alexander clearly had the ability to reorganise the army and to develop innovative strategies and tactics as required, as well as his natural military genius. We must recognise, however, that it would certainly have taken rather longer because the army would have needed to be trained and turned into the machine that Philip had already created, and the question also remains as to whether Alexander would have had the patience to delay his ambition; patience is not a trait that Alexander ever demonstrated to any great degree.

2. The Army

Alexander’s greatest inheritance was the Macedonian army. At the time of the invasion of Asia Minor, the historian Diodorus tells us that it consisted of 5,100 cavalry and 32,000 infantry. This was a respectable size by Greek standards, but tiny in comparison with the number of troops Darius could put in the field. Of the 37,100 troops, the Macedonian contingent was relatively small: 1,800 Companion Cavalry and 12,000 infantry. These were by far the most important troops Alexander commanded, and the main weapon with which he gained an empire.

This army was a very complex organisation of interlocking and mutually supportive parts. Alexander created what was probably the first combined arms force in world history: he developed a series of units that excelled at specific tasks, but retained tremendous operational flexibility. Individual units were highly trained and some were highly specialised: the hypaspists, for example, were employed to maintain a cohesive link with the Companion Cavalry during the set-piece battles; if they failed then a gap would have opened in Alexander’s line that the Persians could have exploited.

Light infantry, specifically the Agrianians, were assigned specialised tasks, and even fought alongside the cavalry units at Gaugamela. Later the Dahae horse archers were deployed with devastating effect against the Indians at the Hydaspes. The heavy infantry could operate together, or as individual taxis (battalions). Each of the individual units of Alexander’s army were dangerous if engaged independently, but when combined formed an army that was one of the finest the world had yet seen; when this was coupled with the tactical genius of an Alexander, the results are there to see. Each element of the army was highly trained and supported every other element. This was a true combined arms force as described The Army of Alexander The Great.

3. Persistence

Another, perhaps more accurate word, would be stubbornness. Alexander was remarkably stubborn and never let any obstacle, be it natural or manmade, stand in his way. When faced with the city of Tyre, he refused to allow it to remain a “free city” offering safe harbour to both Greek and Persian fleets. He did not possess any significant navy at the time so he set about constructing a mole to join the island fortress to the land. Later in his career, we see a string of similar sieges on the north-east frontier and in India where he had to build a series of wooden bridges over deep ravines. He repeatedly captured seemingly impregnable fortresses, like Aornus, and never accepted any obstacle as being insurmountable.

4. Genius

This is a much over-used word in today’s society, but by whatever measure we employ, Alexander was without question a military genius, perhaps the greatest the world has ever seen. Alexander was the finest strategist and tactician the ancient world had yet seen. He repeatedly demonstrated an ability to successfully fight campaigns in every theatre of war the ancient world had to offer (although his naval experience was limited to the later stages of the siege of Tyre), and to continuously adapt his strategies and tactics to every emerging circumstance.
Alexander also demonstrated an ability to analyse the evolving circumstances that the Afghanistan region presented, and changed the organisation of the army to deal with the new threat of guerrilla warfare. Alexander’s sense of timing during his set-piece battles was also remarkable. The timing of his decisive cavalry charge was always immaculate, and the result devastating. He had a genius for analysing a situation and instantly making a judgement of what was needed. His set-piece battles are analysed in my forthcoming book The Field Campaigns of Alexander the Great.

Alexander Sarcophagus

The Alexander Sarcophagus is considered as the most important artifact in the İstanbul Archaeological Museums. It was found in the Royal Necropolis in Sidon in 1887.

Though it is called the Alexander Sarcophagus, in fact, it does not belong to Alexander the Great. It is thought to be the sarcophagus of Abdalonymus, the king of Sidon. .

On the front side of the sarcophagus, Alexander is shown on his horse. Since Alexander claimed descent from Heracles, he is depicted with the skin of the Nemean Lion on his head. Additionally, next to his ear, a ram horn, the symbol of the Egyptian god Amun is seen. Because of this depiction on the sarcophagus, it was named after Alexander. In fact, Alexander the Great died in Babylon and his body was transferred to Alexandria. It is known that his sarcophagus was an anthropoid one.

On one of the long sides of the sarcophagus, there is a scene of battle between Persians and Greeks. Greek and Persian soldiers can easily be distinguished thanks to their outfits. Greeks have short tunics or cloaks, whereas Persian soldiers, who had to cover all parts of their bodies excluding their faces and fingers, wear trousers, more than one long-sleeved shirts and tiaras covering their heads. The scene of battle is thought to represent the Battle of Issus, won by Alexander the Great in 333 BC and opened the doors of Phoenicia and Syria. As a result of this battle, the fate of Abdalonymus, who is thought to be the owner of the sarcophagus, changed and he became the king of Sidon after a while.

Two hunting scenes are depicted on the second long side of the sarcophagus. It is known that hunting with horses and carriages was usual for Near Eastern civilizations and that Alexander the Great participated in such events in Phoenicia.

It is accepted that Alexander’s aim was to establish a Greek-Persian empire through uniting Eastern and Hellenistic cultures after conquering Iran. Towards the end of his life, he married a Persian princess, started to wear Persian clothes and accepted Persian dynastic customs. The Persians and Greeks who friendly hunt on one side of the sarcophagus should be considered within this perspective. It is known that after defeating Darius III in Issus, Alexander the Great passed through the Amanus Mountains and entered Syria following the Mediterranean shores. The people of Sidon, who disliked the Persian administration, opened the doors of the rich cities to the Macedon army and asked Alexander the Great to choose a king for them. Alexander, who had no time to choose a king for Sidon, gave this job to Hephaestion. He found Abdalonymus, who was a distant relative of the royal dynasty of Sidon but who had a quiet life in the country until chosen as the king. The name of Abdalonymus means “servant of gods” in Persian and the Alexander the Great and Hephaestion depictions were therefore added to the sarcophagus ordered by him.

When the carvings are analyzed, it is understood that those who made this sarcophagus were masters of the Eastern art of decoration. The upper row of the acroter consists of eagles, partially with no remains other than pieces of wings, and women heads. In the Ancient Syria, it was believed that eagles were birds carrying the souls of dead people to heaven. Nine smaller women heads that line up at the bottoms of each of two sides bring the mother goddess worshipped since the prehistoric periods of Anatolia and Mesopotamia to mind. Upper acroters of the both pediments are decorated with Persian griffins and herbal figures. At each of the corners of the pediment, a lion is placed as sarcophagus protectors. Those lions with thin necks and small bodies, which resemble dogs, are elements belonging to the Ionian art.

Both the body and the cover of the sarcophagus is made of the same kind of marble. The carvings on the sarcophagus are so fine that it is thought that this artifact should have been made in Sidon since it would have been too dangerous to transfer such a work from Greece to Lebanon. There is no information about its sculptor. Painters of the sarcophagus should have been masters of their job as well. It seems that the eyes, eyelashes, lips and clothes were dyed in purple, yellow, blue, red and violet, and that the figures were slightly varnished.

www.istanbularkeoloji.gov.tr

Roxane (343-310 BC.), wife of Alexander The Great

Roxane -her name Roshanak means “little star”- was the daughter of a Sogdian nobleman named Oxyartes (Vaxšuvadarva), who defended a mountain fortress against the invading army of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great. When the fortress was captured, the sixteen year old woman was among the prisoners of  war.

At that stage of his campaign in the Achaemenid empire, it had become obvious that Alexander could not control his conquests without doing concessions to the native population. He had to show respect to their customs if he wanted their loyalty. In the years 330-327, we see Alexander appointing Persians in important functions, dress himself like an Iranian nobleman, introduce the oriental court ritual (proskynesis). Marrying a local princess was a logical step.

The obvious candidate was Barsine, who had been Alexander’s concubine since the battle of Issus in November 333. But this lady, who had already given birth to a son named Heracles, was ignored. It is not known why, but she may have been unacceptable to the Iranian population, because she had spend a great deal of her life in Europe. Barsine may have been too Greek; an extra argument for this hypothesis is that later, she settled herself in Greece. Another, more romantic, explanation may be that Alexander had simply fallen in love with Roxane.

The marriage was concluded according to the local customs, and Roxane followed her husband when he invaded India 326, where she gave birth to a child that died soon. She accompagnied Alexander to Babylon 325-324, where her husband died on 11 June 323. She was pregnant.

In the next years, the era of the Diadochi, Roxane had a very difficult position. One of the commanders, Perdiccas, was chosen as regent for Alexander’s mentally deficient brother Philip Arridaeus and his posthumous son, Alexander. Together, Perdiccas and Roxane saw to the execution of Alexander’s second wife, Statira, who might have become a rival.

However, Perdiccas died soon after, and the Macedonian commanders came together to discuss the future. During this meeting at Triparadisus, they decided to divide the empire. A new but weak regent, the old Antipater, was appointed. He ordered Roxane, Philip and the baby Alexander to go to Macedonia. For a woman who had grown up in Sogdia, had seen India, had lived in the palaces of Persia and Babylonia, it must have been a strange experience to live in a provincial town called Amphipolis in barbarous Europe.

For several years, she and her son were safe, but one of the rival commanders, Cassander, captured them in 316. Five years later, Cassander and the other Diadochi concluded a peace treaty in which they agreed that they would remain in charge of the empire until Roxane’s son would become king in 305. This was of course an incentive to execute the boy king and his mother, who were executed immediately 311/310.

Article by Jona Lendering

Hephaestion´s relationships

Hephaestion

Little is known of Hephaestion’s personal relationships, beyond his extraordinarily close friendship with Alexander The Great. Alexander was outgoing, charismatic man, who had many friends, but his dearest and closest friend and confidant was Hephaestion. Theirs was a friendship which had been forged in boyhood. It endured through adolescence, through Alexander’s becoming a king, through the hardships of campaigning and the flatteries of court life, and their marriages.

Their tutor, Aristotle, described such a friendship as “..one soul abiding in two bodies”. That they themselves considered their friendship to be of such a kind is shown by the stories of the morning ater  the battle of Issus. Diodorus, Arrian and Curtius all describe the scene, when Alexander and Hephaestion went together to visit the captured Persian royal family. Its senior member, the queen Sisygambis, knelt to Hephaestion to plead for their lives, mistaking him for Alexander, because he was taller, and both young men were wearing similar clothes. When she realised her mistake, she was acutely embarrassed, but Alexander reassured her with the words, “You were not mistaken, Mother; this man too is Alexander”. Their love for each other was no secret, as is borne out by their own words. Hephaestion, when replying to a letter to Alexander’s mother, Olympias, said “..you know that Alexander means more to us than anything”. Arrian says that Alexander, after Hephaestion’s death, described him as “..the friend i valued as my own life”. Paul Cartladge describes their closeness when he says: “Alexander seems actually to have referred to Hephaestion’s as his alter ego”. 

Alexander and Hephaestion enter the tent of the captive royal family of Darius. From a 1696 edition of Curtius.

Their friendship was also a working partnership; in all that Alexander undertook, Hephaestion was at his side. They worked well together; it is possible to discern a pattern, when studying Hephaestion’s career, of Alexander’s constant trust in, and increasing reliance on Hephaestion. By the time of the advance into India, after the deaths of senior generals from the older generation, there had been worrying instances among senior officers of their own generation, of treachery, a lack of sympathy with Alexander’s aims of further integration of Persians into the army, and of sheer incompetence. Time ater time, when Alexander needed to divide his forces, he entrusted half to Hephaestion, knowing that in him he had a man of unquestionable loyalty, who understood and sympathised with his aims, and above all, who got the job done.

The Battle of Alexander

The Battle of Alexander by Albrecht Altdorfer, 1529, Oil on panel, 158,4 x 120,3 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

This extraordinary painting is part of a history cycle completed by various artists at the behest of Duke William IV of Bavaria (1493-1556) and his wife, Jacobea. Alexander The Great (356-323 B.C.) is depicted conquering the Persian King Darius in the Battle of Issus in 333 B.C. He stands before an immense universal eastern Mediterranean landscape that includes the island of Cypress and, in the distance, the Egyptian coast. Mounted on his armored battle horse, Alexander pursues the defeated Persian King, who has fled in his battle wagon. The victorious Alexander is located precisely at the center of the composition, in the midst of an overwhelming mass of warriors and directly beneath the cord hanging down from the framed inscription. The movement of the clouds picks up the confusion of the battle, thus increasing the drama of the event. By dispensing with precise contours of the mountains and clouds, Altdorfer has created the impression of a natural event abstracted from reality.

Hephaestion’s career

Hephaestion

Sharing Alexander’s upbringing, Hephaestion would have learned to fight and to ride well from an early age. His first taste of military action was probably the campaign against the Thracians while Alexander was regent (followed by Philip II’s Danube campaign 342 BC) and the battle of Chaeronea 338 BC while he was still in his teens. His name is not mentioned in list of high ranking officers during the early battles of Alexander’s Danube campaign 335 BC, or the invasion of Persia, and nor are the names of Alexander’s other close friends and contemporaries, suggesting that their promotions, when they achieved them, were earned by merit.

Hephaestion’s career was never solely a military one. Right from the start, he was also engaged in special missions, sometimes diplomatic, sometimes technical. The first mention of his career in the sources is a diplomatic mission of some importance. After the battle of Issus 333 BC, when Alexander was proceeding south down the Phoenician coast and had received the capitulation of Sidon, Hephaestion was “… authorised to appoint to the throne the Sidonian he considered most deserving of that high office.” Hephaestion took local advice, and chose a man distantly related to the royal family, but whose honesty had reduced him to working as a gardener. The man, Abdalonymus, had a successful royal career, fully justifying Hephaestion’s choice.

After the siege of Tyre 332 BC, Alexander entrusted his fleet to Hephaestion, who had orders to skirt the coast and head for Gaza, their next objective, while Alexander himself led the army overland. Hephaestion’s task was not an easy one, for this was not the Athenian fleet with which Alexander had started, and had earlier disbanded, but a motley collection of semi-reluctant allies of many nationalities, who would need holding together with patience and strength. Furthermore, on arrival at Gaza, the cargo of siege engines had to be unloaded, transported across difficult terrain, and reassembled.

Plutarch, while writing about Alexander’s correspondence, reveals an occasion when Hephaestion was away on business, and Alexander wrote to him. The subject matter suggests that this took place while they were in Egypt. What business Hephaestion was attending to we do not know, but Andrew Chugg has suggested that it was concerned either with his command of the fleet or Athenian diplomacy. He quotes sources which suggest that Hephaestion had been approached by Aristion of Athens to effect a reconciliation between Alexander and Demosthenes, and certainly, Athens’ inaction during the revolt of the Spartan king, Agis, would seem to support the idea. As Chugg says, “If he did persuade Alexander to reach an accommodation with Demosthenes at this critical juncture, as would seem likely from the circumstances, then he was significantly responsible for saving the situation for Macedon in Greece by preventing the revolt of Agis spreading to Athens and her allies.”

It is likely, though not certain, that it was Hephaestion who led the advance army from Egypt to bridge the Euphrates river. Darius of Persia sent Mazaeus to hold the opposite bank while the bridging work was in progress. This Mazaeus was the commander who threw away what looked like certain victory on the Persian right at the battle of Gaugamela 331 BC, and later became Alexander’s governor of Babylon. Robin Lane Fox has an interesting suggestion that conversation with Hephaestion may have won Mazaeus over: “It is conceivable that the battle of Gaugamela was partly won on the banks of the Euphrates and that Mazaeus’ reinstatement was less a sign of magnanimity than of a prearranged reward.”

It is at Gaugamela that mention is first made of Hephaestion’s rank. He is called the “… commander of the bodyguards (somatophylakes).” This is not the Royal Squadron, whose duties also included guarding the king in battle, and which was at that time commanded by Cleitus—a man of the older generation—but a small group of close companions specifically designated to fight alongside the king. Hephaestion was certainly in the thick of things with Alexander, for Arrian tells us he was wounded, and Curtius specifically mentions that it was a spear wound in the arm.

After Gaugamela, there is the first indication that Alexander intended reconciliation with the Persians, and that Hephaestion supported him in this unpopular policy. One evening in Babylon, Alexander noticed a high-born woman obliged to dance as part of the entertainment. Curtius explains: “The following day, he (Alexander) instructed Hephaestion to have all the prisoners brought to the royal quarters and there he verified the lineage of each of them.”Alexander had realised that people from noble families were being treated with little dignity, and wanted to do something about it. That he chose Hephaestion to help him shows that he could rely on Hephaestion’s tact and sympathy. Yet Alexander could also rely on Hephaestion for firmness and resolve. When his policies had led to a plot against his life, the possible involvement of a senior officer, Philotas, caused much concern. It was Hephaestion, along with Craterus and Coenus, who insisted on, and actually carried out, the customary torture.