Alexander the Great

Alexander now turned his mind to the expedition to Egypt. Most of what is called Palestinian Syria had already come over to him, but there was resistance from a eunuch called Batis who governed the city of Gaza. He had brought in a force of Arab mercenaries and for some time had been stockpiling enough food to withstand a long siege.

Gaza stands a little over two miles from the sea. The approach to it is over deep sand, and the sea fronting it offers nothing but shallows. Gaza was a large city, built on a high mound with a strong surrounding wall, and it was the last centre of population at the edge of the desert on the route from Phoenicia to Egypt.

When Alexander came up to the city, he made camp that first day on the side where he judged the wall most vulnerable,  and ordered the construction of siege-engines. His engineers gave it as their opinion that the height of the base mound made a mechanical assault on the wall impracticable. Alexander took the view that this very impracticality made it all the more important to capture the place: success against the odds would have huge deterrent impact on his enemies, and his reputation would suffer if reports of failure reached the Greeks and Darius. So he decided to build a mound all round the city, piling it to a height which would enable the engines to be brought up level with the wall. Construction was concentrated at the south wall of the city, where there seemed the best prospect of a successful assault. When they judged that the mound had reached the appropriate height, the Macedonians positioned siege-engines on it and brought them to bear against the wall of Gaza.

As this began, Alexander made sacrifice. He had put on a garland and was just about to perform the ritual dedication of the first victim when a carrion bird flew over the altar holding a stone in its talons and dropped the stone on Alexander's head. He asked Aristander the seer what this omen signified. Aristander answered: 'Sir, you will take the city: but today you must look out for yourself.'

Thus warned, for a while Alexander kept back by the engines, out of range. But then there was a sally in force by the Arabs in the city, who were attempting to set light to the engines and, with constant fire from their superior position, while the Macedonians had to fight back from below, began driving them down the artificial mound. At this point Alexander either deliberately ignored the seer or forgot his warning in the heat of the emergency: at any rate he brought up the foot guards and went to the support of his men where they were under the greatest pressure. He did succeed in preventing the ignominy of a forced retreat down the mound, but was hit by a catapult-shot which went straight through his shield and breastplate into his shoulder. The realization that Aristander had been right about the wound encouraged him to think that, by the same token, he would go on to take the city. 

In fact Alexander's wound did not heal easily. But meanwhile the siege-engines used in the capture of Tyre arrived by sea (he had sent for them). He now ordered the construction of a ramp all the way round the city, four hundred yards deep and two hundred and fifty feet high. When the engines had been reassembled and brought up the ramp into action they demolished a large section of wall; at various other points tunnels were dug and the subsoil removed without detection, and this excavation caused subsidence and the collapse of the wall in several places; and the Macedonians kept up an overwhelming barrage of missiles over a wide front, driving back the defenders on the towers. Through all this, despite losing large numbers killed or wounded, the forces in the city held out against three successive attacks. But in the fourth assault Alexander brought up the Macedonian phalanx to ring the city on all sides, and broke down long stretches of the wall, some collapsed by undermining and others battered to pieces by his siege-engines: the result was to open a relatively easy route of attack by means of ladders placed over the rubble. So the ladders were brought up to the wall, and there was intense rivalry for first claim to its capture among the Macedonians who prided themselves on their courage. The first to scale the wall was Neoptolemus, one of the Companions and a member of the Aeacid family: following his lead brigade after brigade climbed up with their officers. Once some of the Macedonians had got inside the wall they split into groups and forced open every gate they came to, so giving access to the whole army. As for the Gazaeans, even though their city was now overrun by the enemy, they closed ranks and fought on: and they all died where they were, each man fighting at his post. Alexander sold their children and women into slavery, and repopulated the city from the surrounding area: it then served as a garrison town in his prosecution of the war.

(Arrian's Anabasis, II.25.4-27.7, translated by Martin Hammond.)

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For the cities that Alexander's armies visited, the choice was simple: they could submit or resist. Submission was rewarded; resistance was punished. 

Shakespeare's Henry V spelled it out for the citizens of Harfleur:

The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, 
And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand, shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants.
What is it then to me if impious war,
Arrayed in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do with his smirched complexion all fell feats
Enlinked to waste and desolation?
What is ’t to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon th’ enragèd soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the Leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command,
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil, and villainy.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Desire the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters,
Your fathers taken by the silver beards
And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? Will you yield and this avoid
Or, guilty in defense, be thus destroyed?

(Henry V, Act III Scene 3)

Henry V is much preoccupied with "Alexander the pig" (as Fluellen calls him). In 1599 Shakespeare was deep in his Plutarch, where the parallel life to Julius Caesar's was Alexander's, and most of the ethical horrors of Alexander's career are exposed and debated here in fifteenth-century Normandy. Shakespeare's Henry, ruthless and fresh-faced and clumsy and winning, has a way of shifting responsibility onto the shoulders of other people that, I suppose, every soldier needs. 

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Arrian's account of the siege of Gaza is the more terrible for its understatement. Unlike Curtius he doesn't tell us how many Gazans were massacred (10,000), and he doesn't even mention the story of the barbarous execution of Batis. 

Arrian´s admiration for Alexander was not blind, but his emphasis was on compiling a sober history, drawn from eyewitness accounts. This much happened at least, we can say. 

Gaza had been preceded by Tyre, and even before leaving Greece Alexander had razed Thebes to the ground. There were many other atrocities to come; so many, that in Sogdiana and the country of the Mallians the sacked cities don't always have names. If a city's defenders had the temerity to keep the Macedonians waiting, or to wound their leader, the retribution was (as Dryden puts it) "the last extremities of war".