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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Napoleon said that in war ‘the moral is to the physical as three to one’. Alexander would have agreed. He was not only a great strategist and tactician; he was a personal leader of heroic mould, heading every major assault, probably more often wounded than any other man in his army. First up the ladder when the troops hung back at the city of the Malloi in India, leader of the last five in the search for water, when his desert column nearly foundered in Gedrosia, pouring out for a libation, David-like, the water brought to him in a helmet, earlier in that same march, he kept the love of his soldiers even through times of exasperation. Thus, from the very first, he built up in his army a tremendous feeling of moral superiority, a certainty that under his leadership no one could stand against them and no obstacle was impossible, in the strength of which his thirty to forty thousand marched from the Dardanelles to the Nile, the Oxus, and the Indus, with never a check, save at Tyre for a time, when he was present. Any special defiance, or any reputedly impossible problem, he took as a personal challenge, and fell upon it with especial ardour. The Gordian Knot yielded when he slid the yoke sideways out of it—and revealed many rope-ends, not only two. The defenders of the ferocious defile of the Cilician Gates fled at the mere terror of his approach; no doubt he would have scaled the Taurus to outflank them, but they could have gained time. Of Gaza on its high tell he said ‘the more “impossible” it is, the more it must be taken’, because of the moral effect: ‘for the achievement would amaze and dismay the enemy, and failure would be a disgrace when told to the Greeks and to Darius’. It was at Gaza that he is said to have disgraced himself by the atrocious killing of the captured Batis (Berve, ii. 104 f., no. 209—an atrocity unmentioned by Arrian, and disbelieved by Tarn—but Tarn had convinced himself that Alexander was a saint). More often, anyone who gave Alexander a stern fight gained his respect. Porus the Indian was among those who survived to enjoy it. Batis, a eunuch, perhaps aroused Alexander's disgust.
page 141 note 1 So Berve, ii. 313Google Scholar. Tarn, , CAH vi. 462Google Scholar, states it as fact; but there is no further evidence.
page 141 note 2 The best account of it is in Plutarch, , Life of Pelopidas, 23Google Scholar. Philip learned of it as a hostage at Thebes in the house of the general Pammenes, (ibid. 26) in Epaminondas' lifetime.
page 144 note 1 Because of this I find it hard to believe (with Tarn ii. 153 and n. 2) that they were as heavily armed as the phalanx. I prefer the older view, which would compare them to the peltasts of Philip V, the corps d'élite of his army (Polyb. iv. 64, 67, etc.).Google Scholar
page 144 note 2 After his defeat of the Spartans (Megalopolis, 331) Antipater sent Alexander another 6,000 Macedonian foot and 500 horse (D. xvii. 65; C. V. I). This and other drafts, and the fact that Antipater in turn could not leave Macedonia wholly denuded, sufficiently account for the fact, which troubles Tarn (ii. 155), that Antipater had only 600 horse in 322. His 12,000 infantry may well have included half the phalanx (9,000); and he must have had some javelin-men and archers.
page 146 note 1 I am not convinced by Tarn's account of the ‘final reorganization’ (A. ii. 164). Look up his references, A. vi. 21 and vii. 3. And on all this see further Brunt, P. A., ‘Alexander's Macedonian Cavalry’Google Scholar and Griffith, G. T., ‘A Note on the Hipparchies of Alexander’, both in JHS lxxxiii (1963).Google Scholar
page 149 note 1 As our sources say. But that Darius, ' army was ‘small (Curtius), iii. 3. 28Google Scholar, equal to Alexander, 's, iii. 7. 9Google Scholar, or smaller, iii. 10. 2’ (Tarn, , i. 26, n. IGoogle Scholar; ii. 106) is not what Curtius says. (See further my review of Tarn in JHS lxvii (which, owing to post-war difficulties, came out so late that a review of a book published in 1948 was able to ‘catch’ the volume nominally for 1947).)
page 151 note 1 Tarn, (i. 49Google Scholar; ii. 185 ff.) says they did break into the main line, since ‘the Macedonians’ drove them out (A. iii. 13. 4), and the flank-guard troops were not Macedonians. But Arrian uses ‘Macedonians’ of any of Alexander's troops; e.g. (iii. 14, end) of the camp-guards, who were Thracians (ibid. 12, end).
page 151 note 2 Numbers: C. viii. 13. 6, though not prone to understatement, gives Porus 85 elephants initially, and a few had been left with other troops to oppose Craterus, opposite A.'s base-camp (A. v. 15). Horse and foot, p. 62. Arrian (loc. cit.) gives Porus 30,000 foot, 4,000 horse, and 200 elephants in the battle; but 200 elephants at intervals of ‘not less than a plethron’ (100 feet), would make the whole line of infantry, extending beyond the elephants at each end, as he says, about four miles long; far too long for even 30,000 infantry in ancient warfare. I take Arrian's figures for horse and foot to be campaign totals. Some had been left facing Craterus, and many cavalry lost in the rout of Porus' advanced guard. The 200 elephants I take to be a simple exaggeration.
