Nine or ten months later, at the time of Sisines's murder, the Lyncestian was said to have been arrested for a very different reason. Shortly before the battle of Issus, letters arrived from Olympias with warnings against the Lyncestian, and Alexander, it was said, put him into chains. Possibly, Olympias had had private evidence, for it was a time of mystery and upheaval in Greece, but sheer jealousy against the Lynccstian might also have been a motive; he was married to Antipater's daughter, and the fierce quarrels between Antipater the general and Olympias the queen regent were soon to become a serious difficulty. By a strange chance, the story can be shown to have been rimed so plausibly that it has greater claims to be believed. A few weeks after receiving Sisines and leaving Phaselis, Alexander entered battle, having put the entire left wing of his army under the command of a man who was probably the offending Lyncesrian's nephew; such trust would have been an impossible folly if the Lyncestian had just been caught in a conspiracy. However, the battle was the nephew's final appearance in history, and ten months later he had been deposed for ever from the high command. He was a young man and there had been no fighting meanwhile to cost him his life; his fall, surely, had been due to his uncle's arrest, not through Sisines's visit, which he survived unharmed, but through letters from Olympias which cost him his job in the following autumn.

In the search for Alexander, this intrigue is illuminating. It is of some

interest that shortly before his battle of Issus, Alexander deposed the last of his Lyncestian commanders, even though he had been indebted to them at the time of his accession; it is far more telling that his friend Ptolemy and his officer Aristobulus could pass off the arrests by an intricate trail of deception. Possibly they had no clear memory of the high commanders in the invasion's early days; possibly, but it is far more plausible that they were concealing the brute truth of the Lyncestian's execution in the Seistan purge which they underplayed. They never mentioned it again, for Aristobulus pleaded that the man had been killed by a Theban woman five years earlier, Ptolemy that he had been a proven traitor; for Ptolemy, perhaps, there were grounds for the false suggestion. Sisincs and the Lyncestian were killed and arrested in one and the same month, each for different reasons; in Seistan, one fact about the Lyncestian's death caused comment, that when denounced, he faltered and found nothing to say in his defence. Perhaps the name of Sisines was used against him, an obscure Oriental who had died at the time of the Lyncestian's earlier arrest on a charge of treason, but of whom he knew nothing at all. Ptolemy may have heard the charge and connected it, falsely, with Sisines's only other exploit on the expedition. As at Thebes or Halicarnassus, the Granicus no less than the dismissal of the fleet, Alexander's story cannot be written exclusively from histories based on his friends and officers; their literary rival, like every other historian of the expedition, was no less admiring of Alexander and his achievements, but he also retained a disarming honesty, and when officers fell, or were denounced on spurious charges, such honesty, it seems, was very easy to lose.

Leaving Phaselis, with the Lyncestians still in honour, Alexander continued briefly and briskly on his coastal campaign, only doubling back to scare his dissident subject city Aspendos. Near Mount Climax, he rode down to the shore to take a short cut across the bay and save himself a six-hour ride through the hills behind. As he rounded the promontory the southerly wind stopped blowing and opened a way through the waves for his horsemen, a lucky chance which he described as 'not without the help of heaven', and which Callisthenes developed into a formal bowing of the sea before its new master. At Termessus and Sagalassus, he repulsed the tribesmen and cleared his road to the north without capturing their fortresses. There were no more harbour-towns nearby, so in early spring he at last turned northwards to join Parmenion, having done what he could to close the Lycian ports. His efforts would not, however, stop the Persian fleet from sailing between Syria and the Aegean islands the following summer. He had half-closed a coastline, but he had not cut off a sea route 148 of any importance, and longer marches were needed before his dry-land policy could begin to work.

It was a beginning, at least, but after a rigorous winter's exploits, he would be pleased to find the landscape of the Phrygian satrapy stretching northwards before him, bare of cover for an enemy, its pebbled plough-land broken only by the occasional belt of poplars. Its flatness was heartening to an army wearied of winter highlands, so much so that within five days they had reached the centre of Phrygia and encamped before the satrap's citadel at Celaenae. As soon as its foreign garrison realized that no Persian forces would rescue them in later winter, perhaps because Parmenion had moved to cut them off, they surrendered their sumptuous palaces and parks to their new masters; elderly Antigonus, one-eyed and prominent among Philip's veteran officers, received a satrapy so important for keeping the roads of communication clear of enemy attack. After sending another officer westwards to raise more troops from southern Greece, Alexander rode on northwards over richer lands to Gordium, his agreed point of meeting. There, behind the city's Persian battlements, he awaited Parmenion's arrival.

Gordium lay on the Royal Road, and as reinforcements were expected from Macedonia, it had been chosen as the convenient meeting-point with Parmenion's army and their fresh draft of troops from the Balkans. Parmenion soon appeared, but the reinforcements were slow to arrive. They could not sail the sea, as there was no fleet to protect them, and they had to march the five hundred miles from Pella to Gordium by road. Spring broke, and they still had not set out; May was already well begun and as disturbing news came of a Persian sea-offensive, the reinforcements had still not arrived, perhaps because they were detained at the Dardanelles. Gordium, an ancient capital city, had few excitements to offer; the troops fretted and idled, and Alexander needed a diversion to keep up morale.

Word reached him of a local curiosity, a chariot in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia which was linked by legend to King Midas's accession at Gordium four hundred years before. It had been dedicated to a Phrygian god whom the officers identified with Zeus the King, Alexander's royal ancestor and guardian, and it was bound to its yoke by a knot of cornel-bark which no man had ever been able to undo; that in itself was a challenge, and the story had a topical appeal. King Midas was connected through legend with Macedonia where the lowlands' Gardens of Midas still bore his name, and Phrygian tribes were rightly believed to have once lived in Macedonia, in memory of the early migration during which they had ruled the country and mined their wealth, according to Callisthenes, from the Bermion mountains. Alexander's prophet Aristander, a man whose 'prophecies he always liked to support', also had an interest in the chariot, for Midas's father was said to have consulted Aristander's own people about it, the Telmissians of Lycia, who were famed for their powers of divination. Several themes converged on the chariot, and Alexander reserved it for the largest possible audience.

It was late May before the reinforcements arrived, some 3,000 Macedonians and 1,000 or so Greeks and allies, together with the host of Macedonian bridegrooms who had returned to winter with their wives. With them, came ambassadors from Athens to beg the release of Athenian prisoners taken at the Granicus, but Alexander refused them 'for he did not think it was right, while the Persian war was in progress, to relax any terror for Greeks who did not refuse to fight against Greece on behalf of the barbarians. They should approach him again later.' It went unsaid that at Sardis, letters had been found to prove that Persian generals had sent money to Demosthenes the Athenian to stir up rebellion in the first year of his reign; sheltering behind his father's myth of a Greek expedition, Alexander kept up his hold on the one Greek city where it was most needed.