Putting his dry-land tactics into action, he thus turned his back for ever on the Asian Greek cities whom he had come to free. Their freedom, of course, depended on him and only extended as far as he wanted; that, often, might be far enough, while he also showed them the favour of plans for new buildings, here a causeway, there a new street-plan, and at the Ionian city of Priene, centre of the Pan-Ionian festival, he dedicated the city's new temple to Athena, probably contributing to its funds. Just as he had honoured Zeus at Sardis or Artemis at Ephesus he favoured the local gods of the Greek cities down to the smallest details of cult and decoration. Like his plans to rebuild Troy, several of his building schemes were delayed or only carried out by local decision, but nonetheless in Greek Asia, if anywhere, the Greek crusade became a holy war of revenge and restoration. Its fervour must not be played down.

Other schemes had a longer and more calculated future. An ingenious policy seems to have begun with Alexander, whereby royal favourities who were rewarded with country estates were now forced to attach them to the 'free' territory of a Greek-city and become its honorary citizens. The result was a system of local patronage. Under the Persians, such land grants had been made without restrictions and created a provincial baronry free from the king, or a class of absentee landlords, free from their locality. Alexander and his Successors arranged that their favourites should be local citizens, able to report and maintain their king's interests in city affairs, while the Greek cities gained a rich local benefactor and an added acreage of land. By tying country estates to city life, a balance of interest was struck, and it lasted. Typically, it was city life which Alexander put first in his empire.

Country life, as always, saw less change. The colonial villages of the Persian kings' provincial soldiery remained on their old sites. The same baronial towers, perhaps now in Macedonian hands, surveyed the landscape from Pisidia to the Cyzicene plain and their name still survives in the common Turkish place-name Burgaz; their land was still farmed by serfs whom nobody freed, although many of them lived in some comfort in their own houses. But through this continuity, a new current had begun to flow. In the Caicus valley, for example, the colonists from distant Hyrcania, who had fought with their satrap at the Granicus, lived on in the land called the Hyrcanian Plain, where Cyrus had settled them two centuries earlier but over the years their villages would be merged into a town and mixed with Macedonians. Their traditional fire-worship continued, but when they appear in Roman history, it is as citizens dressed and armed in the style of Macedonian westerners.

After Alexander the force of Greek culture came to be guaranteed in western Asia; the cities' recognition of a new age was more than a detail of their calendars, for many felt that Alexander was what he said: a saviour of the Greeks from Persian slavery and an avenger of Persian sacrilege in the name of Greek freedom. It was thus among Iranians of the former empire that this mood of Alexander's passing made itself most felt. Repeatedly in the next hundred years, Iranians who lived on in Asia Minor are known to have joined the councils and magistracies of the Greek cities whose future Alexander had underwritten, a life of civic duty which contrasted with the baronial isolation of their past. Only their religion remained as a solid landmark in a changed world. The worship of the water goddess Anahita was continued by the magi who met to read their sacred texts among assemblies of the Iranian faithful in the hinterland of Greek Asia. An Iranian could no longer be sure of his country tower, but he could still find a place in his goddess's worship; an Iranian eunuch was left to run the temple affairs of Artemis at Ephesus, and in a small Carian town in Alexander's lifetime two Iranians became honorary citizens in order to serve as priests of Anahita, whom the Greeks saw as Artemis, a job for which their background suited them and which they passed from father to son for another three generations. These priesthoods were to prove their one safe haven in a world of civic duty, the rest of which bore little likeness to their past. But as Alexander turned south to Lycia, leaving his Greek cities to an unchallenged Persian fleet, it was still far from certain that an Iranian's days of satrapal politics had been more than momentarily interrupted.

CHAPTER TEN

While Parmenion arranged haulage for the siege equipment and led most of the cavalry and the wheeled supply wagons back to Sardis, Alexander advanced to Lycia and Pamphylia further south. The daily range of a warship was about thirty miles from its base, and Alexander meant to cut off the bases which the Persian fleet had used when sailing from the Aegean to Syria and the Levant. In the tough winter campaign which followed, little known beyond the disputed details of its route, he gave the first hint of his most precious quality of leadership: his refusal to be bound by any awkwardness of season and landscape. Even nowadays, the southern crook of the modern Turkish coast, the most glorious stretch of country which can still boast Greek ruins, is a challenge to the traveller. The highlands north of Xanthus, the twisting coast roads of Lycia, the citadels of the longlived Lycian league or the Pamphylian river plains, all these sites can still be visited, unspoilt and imposing in early summer but extremely daunting in the winter months. Though there are tracks and passes which remain open throughout the snows, they are enough to deceive the resident shepherds, whereas Alexander had no maps, no supply train, no fleet to support his coastal advance; his treasure was too heavy to accompany his travels and hence he relied for army pay and presents on whatever moneys he could exact from the towns on his way. Throughout he must have been very short of food.

Travelling light, he had to be selective, never risking a long siege and only stopping for willing allies or the more important harbours. Usually, the ground was too rough for horses, and citadels which were too strongly sited were left alone; at Termessus he bluffed his way through the natural defences of the defile but left the towering town alone, while at Aspendus, where moderate terms had been agreed only to be rejected as soon as his back was turned, he scared the inhabitants into severer submission by reappearing and showing off his strength. At the mercy of local knowledge, he seldom strayed far from the path of friends and native allies; his prophet Aristander and perhaps, too, his Cretan friend Nearchus had connections in several cities, but Lycia, like Ionia, was a tangle of hostile factions with no love lost between one city and its neighbour, one wild tribe and its marauding rival. If Alexander's army wanted local knowledge of the ground, they had to pay by being directed to the route which suited the locals' own disputes. Hence, no doubt, the hesitant loops and retreats in the Macedonian army's advance.

Iranian colonists had lived in Lycia, but the tribes and mountains had never been properly tamed or given their own satrap, and Alexander made swift progress, demanding help against the Persian fleet and showing favours to coastal cities with a slender claim to be considered Greek. However, his thoughts were with Parmenion, now in the north and only accessible by roads which the enemy could cut, and on reaching the city of Xanthus, where Lycia's coastline bent southwards, he hesitated and wondered whether to turn back. But, said his officers, 'a local spring was seen to upheave itself and cast up a bronze tablet from its depths, imprinted with archaic letters which proved that the Persian Empire would be destroyed by the Greeks'. The omen, a sign that Alexander was in two minds, justified the king's decision to press on eastwards down the curving coast. Wherever possible he saved his men's energies, only loosing them on a brief campaign in the frozen Lycian highlands which was probably meant to clear a path to the main road and the plains of the interior. On no account could he risk being cut off from Parmenion and the units wintering up in Phrygia, and this concern for his lines of the north was soon to cause an intrigue within his high command. The story was peculiar.