Respect for captive royalty had a long history in the ancient East, and Alexander was not the man to betray it; the Persian Queen Mother, especially, came to recognize his kindness.

As at the Granicus, his army were shown this quality in his own inimitable way.

Despite his wound, he went round all the other wounded and talked to them; he collected the dead and buried them magnificently with all his army arrayed in their full battle-finery; he had a word of congratulation for all whom he himself had seen distinguishing themselves particularly bravely or whose valour he heard from agreed reports: with extra presents of money, he honoured them all according to their deserts.

That is the way to lead one's men.

The royal tent and the royal family were not the sum of Alexander's reward. Parmenion was sent to Damascus with orders to capture the treasures; the guards surrendered him 2,600 talents of coin and 500 pounds of silver, unminted as was the Great King's practice. The coin alone equalled one year's revenue from Philip's Macedonia, and sufficed for all debts of army pay and six months' wages; 7,000 valuable pack-animals heaved it back to the main camp. Parmenion further reported that '329 female musicians, 306 different cooks, 13 pastry chefs, 70 wine waiters and 40 scent makers' had been captured. With them came two more personal prizes, the first being the precious casket in which Alexander, after much debate, decided to store his copy of the Iliad,the second the Persian lady Barsine, some thirty years old, with an attractive family history. She had been married first to Memnon's brother, then to Memnon himself, and was thus brought up to a Greek way of life. She was the daughter of the respected Persian satrap Artabazus, who was of royal blood on his mother's side, and she had taken refuge at Philip's Pella some twenty years earlier when her father was exiled from Asia Minor. Barsine met Alexander when he was a boy. 'On Parmenion's advice', wrote Aristobulus, 'Alexander attached himself to this well-mannered and beautiful noblewoman.' It was a fitting climax to what may have been a childhood friendship, and Alexander retained his first bilingual mistress for the next five years.

This favour for Barsine was understandable, but she was only one among several women of status and varied upbringing. At Damascus, Parmenion had captured the wife and three daughters of the previous Persian king, the wife and son of Artabazus, Memnon's two other nieces, who were half Greek by birth, and Memnon's son. These bilingual families would one day stand at the centre of Alexander's plans for marriage

among his commanders, but they mattered for the moment as a pull on their husband's loyalties, not least on Memnon's nephew and Artabazus's son, brother of Barsine, who were sharing the command of Persia's Aegean fleet.

This collection of Persian wives and interrelated children was the first faint sign of where Alexander's future might one day lie. 'In Cilicia,' a polite Greek correspondent later wrote to him, 'men died for the sake of your kingship and for the freedom of the Greeks.' It is as well to be reminded that flatterers could still refer to Greek freedom, but the kingship was beginning to loom the larger of the two. On the banks of the Payas river, Alexander dedicated altars to Zeus, Athena and Heracles; he also ordered the first of his many commemorative cities, Alexandria-by-Issus, on the coastal site of the modem Alexandretta. The example of new cities had already been set by his father Philip, and these cities of Cilicia were to be organized as royal mints and ordered to strike Alexander's own silver coins. Their weight was to conform to the standard spread by Athens and already favoured in the area. Philip had used it too, so Macedon, the Aegean and Asia were linked for trade and army payments. Gradually, the king was moving towards a permanent empire, and an Emperor could not be content with a Greek campaign of revenge.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

On land the victory at Issus was inconclusive, not least because of Darius's escape, but at sea its effects were far more definite. The king's Greek fugitives had commandeered or burnt the hundred or so ships which had been beached for them at Tripolis, and neither ships nor Greeks would be seen in Persia's service again: the fall of western Asia and the capture of the baggage at Damascus made further shipments of coined money to the Persian admirals impossible, as only western Asia paid tribute to the king in coin and there was no route left open for Darius to despatch coined reserves to the Aegean. Above all, Alexander's Greek allies were less hesitant in providing another fleet now that he had proved himself in a battle they had expected him to lose. The Persian admirals could only look to a difficult spring ahead of them, in which they must improvise men, ships and money: their overtures to Agis, King of Sparta were poor reassurance, and his plan to recruit the fugitives from Issus had a decided air of desperation.

For Alexander victory had opened the way to the coastal cities of Phoenicia, where his policy of defeating the fleet by land could at last show results. These cities and nearby Cyprus provided the crews for the Persian fleet, but they were not a world on which he had no grip, for they had already shown a spontaneous favour for Greek culture and language among their kings and merchants, while Cypriots spoke Greek and mostly strove to be Greeks themselves; better still, it was only twelve years since both Cyprus and the leading naval city of Sidon had rebelled vigorously against their Persian masters. This memory, like several of its participants, was still alive, and without it Alexander's strategy might well have failed him. The local kings and their sailors were away in the Aegean, but Alexander could bargain with their sons and elders and once again use local hatreds in the name of liberation.

He began with Arad, a stronghold on its own island with thirty-foot walls of stone, a small land empire and an ingenious water system in case of siege. Its king was at sea, and his son offered Alexander a golden crown of submission, the first move in a long history of favour from Macedonians. Thereupon, couriers arrived with a diplomatic letter from Darius. He was

pained by the loss of his family and wrote as one king to another, to ask for friendship, alliance and their return. Darius was not yet in a mood for concessions, but a strange story survives that Alexander forged one of his letters and set a more arrogant version before his Companions to be sure that they would refuse it. Darius's letters to Alexander was disputed and muddled in the histories, and there is no means of verifying this unlikely story. In this first letter, said Alexander's officers, Darius promised neither reward nor ransom; others said that he offered 10,000 talents, and if Alexander suppressed anything, perhaps he may have suppressed this mention of ransom and a guarantee of land in his rear. His reported answer is agreed in its main points and must be near to its original form.

In his letter, Darius had blamed the outbreak of war on the Macedonians and dismissed his defeat as an act of god; in answer, Alexander invoked the sacrileges of the Persian kings in Greece and their hostility to Philip, including Darius's plans for his murder, and explained his own invasion as a campaign of vengeance. Darius, he wrote, had seized the Persian throne by crime and bribed the Greeks to rebel; as for the gods, they were with his own army and in future, Darius should approach him as King of Asia. Only as suppliant before a King would he be granted his family. 'If you dispute your right to the kingdom, stand your ground and fight for it; do not run away, for I will come after you, wherever you go.' This was a blunt manifesto, and Greek revenge was already beginning to fade against the wider perspective of Asia's kingship. But the aspiring king of Asia might yet be confined to the western coast of the continent; that depended on his strategy in the sea-ports, and he knew it.