For justice towards Perdiccas we shall look in vain to Ptolemy, who had been his mortal enemy many years before he wrote his History, and has probably suppressed a good reason for this apparent breach of discipline, such as a signal from the garrison of some weakness in the enemy dispositions which needed quick action. Perdiccas was the man for it, as he had shown at Philip’s death. He broke through and got in. A fellow officer, seeing this, led up his men in support. Alexander, not far off, perceived they were all in danger of being cut off inside; he sent reinforcements, still reserving his main army. Assaulting the inner palisade, Perdiccas fell badly wounded. The rest pressed on; then the Thebans, rallying, got them on the run. This was decisive for Alexander; he charged at once, thrusting back the Thebans with such force that the city gates, which had been opened to let them in again, were jammed and let in their pursuers too.
It was the end. As the Macedonians flooded in, “with Alexander appearing everywhere,” the Theban cavalry pelted off across the plain, the infantry fled as they could; and the ancient city was given up to sack. The Phocians and the Plataeans, Arrian says, were the chief agents of a massacre that spared neither age nor sex, nor even suppliants hauled out of the temples. It has been said that Alexander could have stopped it if he had liked. This would possibly have been true in Thrace or in Illyria; it would certainly have been true after he crossed to Asia, when his authority was absolute over all his forces. His position at Thebes was unique. The allied troops were men to most of whom, till they joined his forced march a week before, he had been unknown except by name, simply the awe-inspiring Philip’s twenty-one-year-old son; while the Thebans were familiar enemies, against whom generations of hatred had been stored. Before Philip’s intervention, the Phocian War had been marked with hideous savageries. The atrocities of the lately betrayed Plataeans, if anyone’s fault but their own, may most fairly be blamed upon Demosthenes.
Arrian says the “best” of the Theban citizens (a term often, but not always, meaning the upper classes) had wanted to ask for terms, but had been prevented by the extremists. Alexander’s genius for command included an unerring instinct for rare moments when commands will be disregarded with consequent loss of face; but for the rest of his life, he seldom refused the petition of a Theban; if he found one serving as a Persian mercenary, he pardoned him because he had no home. Even during the shambles, he saved where he could find them—it must have been hit or miss—priests, old guest-friends of Macedonians (probably the hosts of his father’s youth), and the descendants of Pindar, along with the poet’s house. By general vote of the allies, most of the city was razed.
After the sack, the Thracian troops dragged before Alexander a woman whom they charged with killing one of their officers. She admitted it freely. He had broken into her house, raped her, and demanded to know where her valuables were hidden. In the well, she had told him, leading him up the garden to it and, when he craned over, pushing him in. When his men arrived she had finished him off with stones. She added, defiantly, that she was the sister of Theagenes, who had fallen at Chaeronea, leading the Sacred Band. He pardoned her at once and freed her with her children. This well-known Plutarch anecdote upholds Ptolemy’s apportionment of the blame for the massacre. Its most significant fact is that the woman was brought before Alexander. These Thracians were not newly joined allies but his regular troops. If they had been let loose to sack the city, he could not have given a judgment which implied that their officer had got what he deserved; and in any case, they would have taken their own revenge.
Meantime the Athenians were celebrating the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most solemn rite of the Attic year, when the first Theban fugitives galloped up with the news. For the third time panic reigned in Athens. The Mysteries were abandoned. Villagers with their household goods crowded within the walls. A peace embassy was chosen to sue for mercy: some pro-Macedonians, and trustfully, the city’s eloquent champion, Demosthenes. He rode with the rest as far as the Attic frontier; where his reflections grew so disturbing that he excused himself and retired.
The miserable remnant brought the victor abject congratulations on his safe return from the north and recent victory. Civilly he accepted Athens’ submission, and agreed to spare her if the most virulent anti-Macedonians were given up. Even this he was talked out of by the tactful Demades, the same man Philip had used as his envoy after Chaeronea. Antipater in Macedon, getting the news that Demosthenes had been spared, must have thought the young King had taken leave of his senses. He was quick to correct the error after Alexander was dead. To Alexander himself, his own standards being what they were, it must have seemed unthinkable that Demosthenes could lift his head again. Here he failed to get the measure of fourth-century Athens. None the less, in withholding from that head a martyr’s crown, he proved wiser than old Antipater.
His work in the south was over. Greece was secured. He returned to Macedon, to prepare for the enterprise which was to fill the remaining third of his life.
In Macedon, Alexander performed the traditional sacrifices at the feast of Olympian Zeus, and held, besides the usual Games, contests for artists “in honour of the Muses.” During this time he got news that a famous statue of Orpheus, enshrined in south Macedon, had started to sweat profusely. The seers, pondering the omen, decided that the new King’s exploits would give the poets work.
He never had, as he must have hoped to have, his epic. Both he and posterity have been better served by the memoirs of a soldier, a sailor and an engineer. His best poetic epigraph was coined a good deal later by the Cavalier Montrose, thrown away in the middle of a love lyric.
I will like Alexander reign,
And I will reign alone;
My spirit ever did disdain
A rival near my throne.
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who will not put it to the touch
To win or lose it all.
It is briefer than he would have wished; but it distils his essence.
Meantime Darius, whose troops had been waging local defensive war against Parmenion’s bridgehead, disturbed by the news from Greece, had hired, also from Greece, some 50,000 mercenaries. Their general was Memnon, a veteran of Ochus’ reign. He had been involved in the satraps’ revolt and spent his exile in Macedon, where he had studied his hosts’ tactics before being recalled. Alexander, who never thought the worse of old Artabazus for taking the field against him in the service of a Persian king, felt no such tolerance towards Greeks who did so. The army raised by Memnon had but few hard-up soldiers hiring their swords for bread; mostly it was of southerners continuing the war against Macedon after their cities had signed peace treaties. These Alexander resented as he did not the Persians who were only doing their duty.
He prepared to set out in spring. During the winter, he was urged by all those nearest him to marry and beget an heir before he left, lest he should be killed.
Antipater is said to have been insistent; loyal advice, for he was to be left as Regent, and if the King died childless would be well placed to seize the throne. But he had no more success than Philip and Olympias before him. Alexander impatiently replied that this was no time to sit at home “holding marriage feasts and awaiting the birth of children.” To have done the first need not have entailed the second. If offspring did not appear after his departure, he could have summoned his bride to Asia and tried again. Clearly he still found the whole idea repugnant. He may have reflected, too, that a child reared in Macedon in his absence would be wholly dominated by Olympias.