The Historians' History of the World 04

Alexander, on his arrival at Tarsus, while his blood was still violently heated by these extraordinary exertions, had been tempted to plunge into the clear and limpid waters of the Cydnus, which flowed through the city. This imprudence was generally supposed to have been the cause of a fever which seized him immediately after, and which soon became so threatening in its symptoms that most of his physicians despaired of his life. One however, an Acarnanian named Philippus, who stood high in his confidence, undertook to prepare a medicine which would relieve him. In the meanwhile, a letter was brought to the king from Parmenion, informing him of a report that Philippus had been bribed by Darius to poison him. Alexander, it is said, had the letter in his hand, when the physician came in with the draught, and, giving it to him, drank while he read—a theatrical scene, as Plutarch unsuspectingly observes, but one which would not have been invented but for such a character, and which Arrian was therefore induced, though doubtingly, to record. The remedy, or Alexander’s excellent constitution, prevailed over the disease; but it was long before he had regained sufficient strength to resume his march.

In the meanwhile, he sent Parmenion forward with about a third of the army, to occupy the nearest of the maritime passes leading out of Cilicia into Syria. He himself, when sufficiently recovered, proceeded westward with the rest of his forces to Anchialus, where he beheld the statue of its reputed founder Sardanapalus, the voluptuous king, who judged so differently from himself—as the Assyrian inscription on his monument and the figure itself attested—of the value and use of life. At Soli, where he arrived next, he found a strong leaning to the Persian interest, which induced him to place a garrison there, and afforded him a fair ground for demanding a contribution of two hundred talents. Yet it seems to have been only an oligarchical party that had favoured the Persians, and perhaps the penalty was levied on them alone; for he established a democratical government, and the garrison may have been needed for its security. Before he returned to Tarsus, he made an inroad with a division of his forces into the mountains of the rugged Cilicia, and in the course of seven days reduced their wild inhabitants by force or terror to submission. On his return to Soli, he received the agreeable intelligence that Orontobates had been defeated in a hard-fought battle by Ptolemy and Asander, and that the citadel of Halicarnassus, and the other places which he had retained on the coast of Caria, had fallen.

Darius had previously suffered a much greater loss in the death of Memnon, who was carried off by a sudden illness while engaged in the siege of Mytilene, which, after having made himself master of Chios through treachery, and of the rest of Lesbos, he had invested closely by sea and land. Alexander, before he left Soli, celebrated the victory of his generals and at the same time testified his gratitude for his own convalescence by a solemn sacrifice to Æsculapius, with a military procession, a torch race, and musical and gymnastic contests.

He then marched back to Tarsus, and, sending Philotas forward with the bulk of cavalry across the Aleian plain, himself took a more circuitous route along the coast through Magarsus to Mallus, a town which claimed the Argive hero Amphilochus, as its founder. On this ground, as himself descended from the Heraclids of Argos, he both healed its intestine disorders, and exempted it from the tribute which it had paid to the Persian government. At Mallus for the first time he heard of the approach of the great Persian army commanded by Darius in person.b

DARIUS MUSTERS A NEW HOST

If Alexander was a gainer in respect to his own operations by the death of the eminent Rhodian [Memnon], he was yet more a gainer by the change of policy which that event induced Darius to adopt. The Persian king resolved to renounce the defensive schemes of Memnon, and to take the offensive against the Macedonians on land. His troops, already summoned from the various parts of the empire, had partially arrived, and were still coming in. Their numbers became greater and greater, amounting at length to a vast and multitudinous host, the total of which is given by some as six hundred thousand men; by others as four hundred thousand infantry and one hundred thousand cavalry.

Phrygian Weapons and Helmet

The spectacle of this showy and imposing mass, in every variety of arms, costume, and language, filled the mind of Darius with confidence; especially as there were among them between twenty thousand and thirty thousand Grecian mercenaries. The Persian courtiers, themselves elate and sanguine, stimulated and exaggerated the same feeling in the king himself, who became confirmed in his persuasion that his enemies could never resist him.