The Historians' History of the World 04

The loss on the side of Alexander is said to have been very small. Twenty-five of the companion-cavalry, belonging to the division under Ptolemy and Amyntas, were slain in the first unsuccessful attempt to pass the river. Of the other cavalry, sixty in all were slain; of the infantry, thirty. This is given to us as the entire loss on the side of Alexander. It is only the number of killed; that of the wounded is not stated; but assuming it to be ten times the number of killed, the total of both together will be 1265. If this be correct, the resistance of the Persian cavalry, except near that point where Alexander himself and the Persian chiefs came into conflict, cannot have been either serious or long protracted. But when we add farther the contest with the infantry, the smallness of the total assigned for Macedonian killed and wounded will appear still more surprising. The total of the Persian infantry is stated at nearly twenty thousand, most part of them Greek mercenaries. Of these only two thousand were made prisoners; nearly all the rest (according to Arrian) were slain. Now the Greek mercenaries were well armed, and not likely to let themselves be slain with impunity; moreover Plutarch expressly affirms that they resisted with desperate valour, and that most of the Macedonian loss was incurred in the conflict against them. It is not easy therefore to comprehend how the total number of slain can be brought within the statement of Arrian.

After the victory, Alexander manifested the greatest solicitude for his wounded soldiers, whom he visited and consoled in person. Of the twenty-five companions slain, he caused brazen statues, by Lysippus, to be erected at Dium in Macedonia, where they were still standing in the time of Arrian. To the surviving relatives of all the slain he also granted immunity from taxation and from personal service. The dead bodies were honourably buried, those of the enemy as well as of his own soldiers. The two thousand Greeks in the Persian service who had become his prisoners, were put in chains, and transported to Macedonia there to work as slaves; to which treatment Alexander condemned them on the ground that they had taken arms on behalf of the foreigner against Greece, in contravention of the general vote passed by the synod at Corinth. At the same time, he sent to Athens three hundred panoplies selected from the spoil, to be dedicated to Athene in the Acropolis with this inscription, “Alexander, son of Philip, and the Greeks except the Lacedæmonians (present these offerings

), out of the spoils of the foreigners inhabiting Asia.” Though the vote to which Alexander appealed represented no existing Grecian aspiration, and granted only a sanction which could not be safely refused, yet he found satisfaction in clothing his own self-aggrandising impulse under the name of a supposed Panhellenic purpose: which was at the same time useful as strengthening his hold upon the Greeks, who were the only persons competent, either as officers or soldiers, to uphold the Persian empire against him. His conquests were the extinction of genuine Hellenism, though they diffused an exterior varnish of it, and especially the Greek language, over much of the oriental world. “True Grecian interests,” says Grote, “lay more on the side of Darius than of Alexander.”

EFFECTS OF ALEXANDER’S VICTORY

No victory could be more decisive or terror-striking than that of Alexander. There remained no force in the field to oppose him. The impression made by so great a public catastrophe was enhanced by two accompanying circumstances: first, by the number of Persian grandees who perished, realising almost the wailings of Atossa, Xerxes, and the Chorus, in the Persæ

of Æschylus, after the battle of Salamis; next, by the chivalrous and successful prowess of Alexander himself, who, emulating the Homeric Achilles, not only rushed foremost into the mêlée, but killed two of these grandees with his own hand. Such exploits, impressive even when we read of them now, must at the moment when they occurred have acted most powerfully upon the imagination of the contemporaries.f

Battle-field of Issus

CHAPTER LII. ISSUS AND TYRE