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Notes on Alexander's Campaigns, 332–330

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

A. R. Burn
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Extract

The following five notes deal with some neglected or controversial points concerning Alexander's operations in the two decisive years January, 332, to January, 330. Though independent of each other, they have a certain external unity, since all concern the crucial ‘third act’ of Alexander's career. Early in 332, the Persians, in spite of Issos, still hoped to recover Asia Minor, raise trouble in Greece, and transfer the seat of war back to the Aegean. Two years later, after Alexander's dash to Persepolis, Darius was no longer King of Persia; he was left indeed with virtually no forces except his Greek mercenaries and the troops of the Bactrian barons, who had ideas of their own.

I have found myself at certain points in disagreement with the views of Sir William Tarn. Tarn has indeed left little to be said about Alexander, except where one disagrees; and I would not wish to end this prefatory note without an expression of admiration for his great work.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 72 , November 1952 , pp. 81 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1952

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References

1 Probably a blunder of a copyist, or of Curtius himself, for Autophradates, whose name never occurs in Curtius; cf. Arrian, II. 1, 2 and 13.

2 Deinde here is xa mistake of Curtius'; or Ph. was already at Siphnos when the news of Issos arrived (Arr. II. 13). Ph's operations here described are therefore simultaneous with the land operations described previously. Curtius has confused, probably, what came next in his source with what came next in time.

3 I.e. from Issos, cf. Arr. II. 13, D.S. XVII. 48. 1 ff.

4 Mention of the Mercenaries' Source, so admirably described by Tarn, prompts the question why so good and unsensational a source was not used by Arrian, and is not named, at least in a manner enabling us to identify the writer, among the numerous authors mentioned by Plutarch. It might be because the writer had little to say about Alexander personally; but surely the soldier Arrian would have been interested in what the Mercenary had to say about the campaigns. (Compare his detailed account of Pharnouches' and Andromachos' disaster, where Alexander was not concerned, IV. 5, 6.) I would suggest therefore that the Mercenaries' Source as represented by Curtius and Diodoros derives not from the published Anabasis of some pro-Persian Xenophon, but from the oral reminiscences of one or more Greek mercenaries, used as a source by a good Greek historian. If this material thus first appeared in a general history along with less good material, marked by that prejudice against Alexander, against which Arrian revolted, that would account for Arrian's rejection of it together with the rest of the professional historians' books, in favour of the ‘original sources’, the eye-witnesses who wrote themselves.

5 Cf. Gomme, ‘A Forgotten Factor in Greek Naval Strategy’, in his Essays in Creek History and Literature.

6 SirTarn, W. has argued (Alexander, I. 49; II. 184–5)Google Scholar that the Bactrians and the Saka cataphracts did break into the ranks of the Companions, who expelled them only after suffering considerable losses. His grounds are that Arrian here speaks (13.4) of ‘the Macedonians’—and the Companions were the only Macedonians in this part of the field—and that if ‘the Macedonians’ after suffering considerable losses (more than their antagonists) ‘drove the Sakas out of their array’, then they must previously have got in. I do not think this argument is cogent. ‘The Macedonians’ here simply means ‘Alexander's troops’; in the next chapter Arrian uses the word of the camp guard, who were Thracians, as Arrian himself has told us; and surely means ‘drove them out of line’—out of the formation which they were trying to take up for a concerted charge. It is inconceivable that Ptolemy anand most unlikely that Arrian should have omitted to mention that the cataphracts broke in, if they did;and it is also inconceivable that Alexander should have let them get at the Companions, whom he was reserving for the decisive charge against the Persian King, without using Aretes' Lancers to check them. The Lancers were, in fact, probably between the Sakas and the Companions, and even so, they were not engaged till a little later.