Nearly 550 years later the Roman emperor Caracalla would choose Alexander as the hero for an emulation of his own. Marching through Thrace, he dressed and armed himself like Alexander and recruited elephants and a Macedonian phalanx of 16,000 men. He crossed the Hellespont, less deftly than his hero as his ship capsized, went up to Troy, sacrificed to Achilles and ran, not naked but fully armed, around Achilles's tomb. The visit had a sequel whose story is even more irresistible. Seven years later, Alexander rode again, as a stranger arose from the Danube and frolicked his way through Thrace, attended by four hundred Bacchic revellers who waved their wands in a gay procession, as if triumphant behind Alexander himself. Every day, the impostor announced his route in advance and enjoyed both food and housing at the public expense, as no official dared to challenge his credentials. But on reaching Byzantium, he crossed into Asia, built his last laugh, a hollow 'Trojan horse' of wood, and disappeared. Obviously he had passed himself off as Caracalla, back for a second journey in Alexander's style, and thus danced his way on the strength of his emperor's own pretentions. There could be no more extraoardinary tribute to Alexander's memory; Alexander, it was said, had envied Achilles for having a Homer to spread his fame, but even without such a poet, his trip to Troy remained a lasting inspiration.

It was long perspective, then, that Alexander left behind him as he returned eastwards from Troy to rejoin Parmenion. There was no escaping the heroic past, for the road he travelled was as old as Homer, being expressly mentioned in his favourite poem. His personal myth was with him; ahead, his army was waiting. Gods and heroes had been summoned to his side, but the time for romance and ceremony was over.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The main army had crossed the Dardanelles by a more conventional route, and when Alexander joined their commander Parmenion, all hopes were for a rapid meeting with the enemy. Thirty days' food, it was said, had been brought with the army, a quota for which the Macedonians had been trained by Philip; half had already been eaten, so they must cither conquer or arrange for the usual market supplies with enough Greek cities to sustain them. The Persians' most probable base was their satrap's castle some eighty miles to the east; before setting out in its general direction, Alexander reviewed and counted his united troops.

With him he had brought some 32,000 infantry, 9,000 of whom were the six brigades ot the Macedonian Foot Companions, 3,000 the Shield Bearers, 1,000 the foreign skirmishers and a mere 7,000 his allied Greeks. Seven thousand barbarian infantry from Thrace and Illyria, probably armed lightly, lent a note of valuable savagery; the Thracians, in particular, were troops to whom common decency meant little, and 'interesting parallels are to be found in the use of Red Indians by the British, French and Americans in the late eighteenth century'.* The victories of the previous summer had persuaded their chieftains to join the expedition, Triballians included; their numbers increased with reinforcements, and until they were abandoned as garrisons in India, they are a reminder that every atrocity should not be blamed on Alexander and his Macedonians.

Apart from a few allied Greeks, lightly armoured Thracians and the trained horsemen of Paeonia from Macedonia's northern border, the power of the cavalry lay with the 1,800 Companions and 1,800 heavily equipped Thessalians, less than half the horse-power of the one Greek state with the nobility and plainland to match Macedonia's riders. Together with the advance force, which had contained most of the Macedonian Mounted Scouts, the cavalry totalled about 6,000; the advance infantry had contained Macedonians and many hired Greeks, and so raised the total foot force to some 43,000. There were 5,000 hired Greeks in Alexander's main wave too, probably armed for light work rather than the front-line

* A. Andrewes and K.J. Dover, Hi storical Commentary on Thucydide s(1070), p. 41a 116

service against Persians in open plains, for which they were unsuited. Pay as well as food would soon become pressing unless there were a quick victory.

When the two armies joined, all but a few small towns on the empire's north-western coastline had been lost again to Persia; only one loyal ally was still significant, and she mattered most from a Persian viewpoint. Away to the west the island city of Cyzicus continued to favour the new invasion: the Persians had tried to capture it, even disguising their troops in broad Macedonian hats, but Cyzicus had held out, and this resistance cost the Persians dearly. Most remarkably, the Persian satraps of the Hellespont province were the only governors in western Asia never to have minted coins of their own; the province's tribute had to be sent to the king each year in money, and to meet this need they can only have used a local substitute, none more probable than the abundant coinage of Cyzicus, one of the most widely known currencies in the Greek world. But the city did not belong to the Persian king, as it was not a part of mainland Asia; it was free to close its gates, and by closing them in favour of Macedonia it inconvenienced the Persians' army most of whom were hired for the moment and looked to regular payments of money for food and wages. Their commander had made a name for paying maintenance money promptly, but without Cyzicus this might not continue so easily.

Elsewhere, Alexander could only trust to his father's policy of freeing the Asian Greek cities. But liberation is always a dubious promise and his advance force had already been seen to betray it; Alexander did not go far before meeting with native distrust of what freedom might mean this time, for the first three days of his march took him north-eastwards along the Asian coast, where his goal was evidently Lampsacus, a prosperous Greek city beside the sea. But Lampsacus was most reluctant to admit him. Persian satraps had been minting coins in the city and their generals had drawn on her funds, perhaps because Cyzicus was closed: assistants of Persia would make no move for Alexander, and so the first Greek city he had come to free merely turned him away unwanted. Later, when victory had given his promise of freedom more meaning, envoys pleaded for Lampsacus to be pardoned, but until Alexander had shown his strength he could neither subvert nor assure the leaders of Greek cities, who had heard and suffered too often the offer of 'freedom' from invaders.

So he delayed his liberation and turned south-east towards the local satrap's castle, hoping for battle along the road. Villages of no importance were received in surrender wherever friendly, but hard though his horsemen scouted the hills, the enemy was nowhere to be found. The ground opened out into a generous plain, and scouts again went forwards towards the nearby sea; there was nothing there to report, except for a welcome from one more village. And yet all the while to the south, only twenty miles distant, the Persian troops had been massing, still unseen.

On receiving news of the invasion, the Persian high command had left their lakeside fortress of Dascylium and moved through its thickly treed parks and forests to a steeper hill range in the west. Here in the small Greek town of Zeleia the local tyrant had made them at home, and they were discussing their possible tactics. There were two alternatives: either confront Alexander directly or else burn the crops in his path and hope to repel him through lack of food. The second plan was Memnon's, a Greek from the island of Rhodes who had followed his brother into Persian service, survived the changes of fifteen years and shone as a general against the Macedonian advance force. With the help of hired Greek infantry, he had driven the enemy back from their early gains; proof of his generalship can perhaps be seen in a unique series of Persian coins, on whose backs are stamped what appear to be maps of the countryside round Ephesus, scene of Memnon's campaign; when he paid his hired troops it seems that he gave them handy reminders of local geography on the back of their wages. Deviser of the first field maps to be used in Greek warfare, he was not a general to be despised; some ten years before, he had also lived as an exile in Macedonia and he had seen the style of Philip's army for himself.