The case of Attalus is important. It offered Alexander a precedent, which would become crucial at a later crisis in his career.
Certainly at this moment he could afford no legal quibbles, nor can the decision have detained him long. He had not the time. At the news that the great Philip’s imperium had passed to a youth of twenty, all his conquered lands rose up in instant revolt. Alexander was surrounded with more dangers than his father had faced at the death of Perdiccas III.
The most immediate was the defection of Thessaly, whose feudal lords had no notion of making the archonship hereditary to Macedon. They manned the impregnable pass between the massifs of Olympus and Ossa, the narrow river gorge of Tempe. Alexander saw at once that if they got away with it the whole south would rise, and he would face another Chaeronea. He marched swiftly down, surveyed the terrain, saw with his lightning strategic instinct where the pass could be turned by cutting steps on the Ossa flank; and appeared in the Thessalians’ rear while his advance was still awaited. Stunned, they did homage without a fight, and offered him all Philip’s former rights and tribute. (From the latter he exempted Phthia, because it had been the birthplace of Achilles.) At Thermopylae he summoned a conference of the Sacred League, which recognized him without a dissenting vote.
The panic at Athens was equal to that after Chaeronea. The vote of thanks to Philip’s assassin was remembered with alarm; an embassy was dispatched to Alexander, to plead for pardon. He received it with courtesy, accusing no one. His march did not cross the Attic border. He did not, and never would, revisit the immortal museum of Western civilization. He called a conference at Corinth, as Philip had done before him, and was invested with Philip’s commission as war leader against the Persians.
The passes and strongpoints commanding the south were manned. The magnificent Macedonian walls which crown the Acrocorinth had yet to rise, but its acropolis was garrisoned. Thebes, as in Philip’s time, had its Cadmea (a man-made citadel of no great height) held by Macedonians. South Greece was secured, and none too soon considering the threat from the north. No expedition to Asia was possible before Thrace was controlled. Parmenion’s expeditionary force was already in danger of having its communications cut.
In Macedon, Olympias had made good use of his absence. It is not credible that, as Justin says, she came galloping from Epirus to crown with gold the body of Pausanias, displayed on a traitor’s cross. But she had enjoyed a far greater satisfaction; she had forced her young rival Eurydice to hang herself, presumably by threats of torture, after first watching the death of her newborn second infant. When Alexander came back he was angry, Plutarch says. He had spared Arridaeus, and this girl too had been a pawn of state.
Winter had come. Over its short span Alexander had to ready his newly inherited army for the urgent work of safeguarding the force already committed to Asia. In early spring, when Thracian war bands ceased to hibernate, he marched northeast with his usual cool-headed speed; his mind not only on immediate but future dangers. The military road to the Hellespont once secured, his objective was the hinterland of the still unsubdued Triballians. These were the tribesmen who had fallen on Philip during his return march from Byzantium, and given him his crippling wound. Their habitat was the riverland of the Ister (Danube) beyond the wild mountain range of Haemon, the Stara Planina of today’s Bulgaria. When at sixteen he was left as Regent, his campaign against the Maedi had led him up that way; he would have pressed on then, had his father not recalled him “lest he should undertake too much.” His strategic sense had been sound. He would now square the account, and protect the lifeline to Asia.
He had held no command since the battle of Chaeronea, the climax of a campaign directed by Philip throughout; he had not independently led an army since his repulse of the Illyrians when he was seventeen. He had been in exile, followed by disgrace; his status in Philip’s planned expedition had been uncertain. Yet he had only to appear before the troops and lead them—and this into very difficult country, where Philip himself had been defeated—to be followed with élan and unquestioning trust. This fact, eclipsed in history by his later exploits, is perhaps as remarkable as any.
Beside his own Macedonians, he had a contingent of Agriani, a Thracian tribe whose young chieftain, Lambarus, he had already made a friend of, perhaps in his earlier wars, or because Lambarus had been sent to Pella, like some other noble Thracians, as hostage for his father’s fealty. In any event he was devoted to Alexander. The warlike Thracians, who tattooed themselves blue and collected enemy heads as trophies, were considered rather backward even by the standards of rural Macedon. But Alexander throughout his life was concerned with the individual.
He showed from the outset of the campaign his characteristic swift adjustment to the unexpected. The defenders of the Haemon pass had walled themselves behind a line of carts, which they started to bowl down on his men with the lethal force of gravity. Throwing the phalanx into open order, he told those who could not avoid a cart to crouch under a roof of shields (thus anticipating the Roman “tortoise”). The carts bounced over; not a man was lost, the pass was carried. He advanced into the river plain of the Triballians, a large force of whom shortly cut off his rear. He turned round at once to meet them; they withdrew into an impregnable gorge. He never wasted his men’s lives in stacking such positions; he sent archers and slingers to harass from a distance; when the enemy took the bait and came out in chase, he fell on them with all his forces. Panicking, they were cut down with the usual dire contrast of casualties between pursuer and pursued. To soldiers of the ancient world there was a force unknown today in what Alexander would say to his men a decade later: “While I have led you, not one of you has been killed in flight.”
After this battle he marched north to the Ister. Not only did he want to control the land it bounded; he had a longing, says Arrian, to cross to the other side.
This is the first time of many in his life story where we hear of such a craving—the Greek word is pothos. His many-sided nature had a powerful strain of the explorer. The Ister was the northern edge of the known Greek world; all beyond was hearsay. But his dreams had always their practical side; he did not aim to pass over the great river only “because it was there.” The tribes beyond were known for fierce warriors and raiders; and he wanted before he left for Asia to make a lasting impression. If he crossed to their side, they might later feel discouraged from crossing to his.
The Danube in its lower course was such a stream as neither he nor his men had ever before set eyes on. He had had some war galleys sent up from Byzantium (now subdued) but they were only a squadron, with their rowers taking up room, and he had to embark an army. Here Xenophon came to his constant reader’s aid; he has a passage about the inflated hide rafts used to cross the Euphrates. Hide was used also to make army tents (it must have made the baggage trains immensely cumbrous), and these Alexander had cobbled into rafts, stuffed with hay for buoyancy. He also commandeered the local dugout canoes. On this makeshift flotilla he crossed the Ister by night, with 4,000 foot and, astonishingly, 1,500 cavalry. The horses must have swum.
This whole campaign is described with the close detail of an eyewitness; presumably Ptolemy. He had not yet been promoted to high command; not till after Philip’s death had Alexander been able to recall his banished friends. His present chief of staff was another friend of those days, Parmenion’s son Philotas. Never having lost the royal favour, he had entered the new reign with higher rank.