August 19, 2025 • 19 mins
Discover how the Kingdom of Macedonia, under the visionary leadership of Philip II (382-336 BC), rose to dominate ancient Greece through a mix of shrewd diplomacy and military prowess. Philip revolutionized the classical Greek phalanx by integrating soldiers armed with the formidable 6-meter spear known as the sarissa, creating an infantry that remained unmatched until the rise of the Roman legions. After Philips tragic assassination, his son, Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), ascended to the throne and embarked on an extraordinary journey, establishing an empire that stretched from Greece to the far reaches of northwestern India. The Hellenistic culture he spread not only influenced his empire but also laid the groundwork for modern western civilization. (Summary by Pamela Nagami, M.D.)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section nineteen of Rise of the Macedonian Empire by Arthur M. Curtis.
This librovox recording is in the public domain. Read by
Pamela Nagami, Chapter fourteen, The Campaigns in Bactria and Sogdiana,
Part one. In the autumn of three thirty Alexander set
(00:22):
out from Prophthasia on his long march of more than
six hundred miles to Ortospana Cabul, which he did not
reach until early in three twenty nine. The weather was severe,
for snow had fallen and was lying on all the highlands.
The country was difficult, especially the latter part of it,
(00:42):
where the route was intersected by lofty ridges, deep ravines,
and narrow passes. He met with no combined resistance from
the tribes through which he marched, although he was obliged
to detach a division to return to Aria, which the
Indefatigabules Sadie Barneys had entered once more with two thousand
(01:03):
horse and was rousing to rebellion. This was soon crushed
and two more military colonies were planted at Alexandria, Condahar
and Ordospana to secure the peace of the province. But
though his march was checked by no serious resistance. The
soldiers suffered terribly from the intense cold and want of food,
(01:26):
the snow, it would seem, being exceptionally deep. Yet in
spite of hardships, Alexander pressed on, being anxious to cross
the Central Range before the melting of the snow. There
were four passes over the Parapeneses from the country of
the Gandarians to Bactria, and it is probable that the
(01:47):
army took the so called Kushan Pass, eight thousand to
five hundred feet above the sea, a march of extreme
difficulty which consumed sixteen days and cost the lives of many,
both of the soldiers and the camp followers. At the
southern end of the pass, and twenty five miles northeast
(02:07):
of Ordospana, a new city, Alexandria ad Coccasum, was founded
in a commanding position at or near the site of
the modern Bogrum, where vast numbers of Greek coins are
still to be found. Thence the army struggled on its
weary march, half blinded by the dazzling brightness of the snow,
(02:28):
half buried in the drifts, and all the more bitter
was their disappointment, when, on emerging from the mountains at
adropsa Anderab, they found the whole country lying between them
and the Oxus laid waste by order of Bessus, and
the men who had been battling with cold and fatigue
had now to battle with hunger. Also, it was not
(02:51):
indeed a difficult country to ravage, for much of it
is barren and hilly, where the spurs of the Parapenesis
run northwards to the desert, and it is only the
valleys of the tributaries of the Oxus that are fertile.
In spite of difficulties, however, Alexander pressed onwards, taking at
the first onset the two most important towns of Bactria.
(03:14):
But Bessis himself he did not find for shrinking. At
the last moment from the collision he had provoked, he
had fled with seven thousand of his native troops and
a few of his fellow conspirators, and had placed the
Oxes between himself and his pitiless pursuer, burning the boats
in which he had crossed. This union, however, was already
(03:38):
at work in the ranks of his adherents. For the
Bactrian cavalry rather than accompany him, broke up and dispersed
in all directions. Alexander left garrisons at Aornas, a great
hillfort whose name, like that of another Aornas in the
Indus Valley, imports inaccessibility even to the birds of the air,
(04:00):
and in Bactra or Zariaspa, the modern bulk where ruins
that cover five leagues of country remained to prove the
former greatness of what Orientals call the mother of cities
in the Middle Ages, the rival of Bokhara and Samarkand,
and the capital of Mohammedan civilization. Then he set out
(04:23):
across the desert in pursuit of bessis the foresight of Alexander,
in timing his march, now received another confirmation. The Oxus
was before him, and he had no boats. Even then.
It was a deep and rapid river, not far short
of a mile in breadth. There was no wood near
(04:43):
enough to use, and the bottom was formed of shifting,
loose sand. So great, indeed is the quantity of sand
which its yellow waves hold in solution that although the
water is proverbially sweet and delicious to drink it, grits
under the teeth if taken straight from the river and
requires time for the sand to settle. Had Alexander reached
(05:05):
it in flood time, when the snows are melted in
the mountains, and when its breath is so great that
both banks cannot be seen at the same time, the
passage would have been hardly practicable. Nor would he have
had an easy task had Bessus chosen to dispute the passage.
As it was, Bessus was far away in Otaka of
(05:26):
the Sobians, and the army got across the river safely
in five days on tent skins stuffed with straw. Had
he been able to seek safety in the boundless steps
of Scythia, Bessis, even if bereft of his shadow of
a crown, would have kept life and liberty. But it
was not so to be. Very soon after the king
(05:49):
had crossed the Great River, he received a message from
Spidamins and another of the companions of Bessis, offering to
seize and give him up if a small all force
were sent to support them. He was already their prisoner,
they said, though not in chains. Alexander's resolution was at
once taken. Slackening his own pace, he ordered Ptolemy son
(06:13):
of Lagos, to take a division consisting chiefly of cavalry
and light armed troops, and to come up with Spidamines
by forced marches and with as little delay as possible.
In four days, Ptolemy was so close upon the fugitives
that he reached the camp where they had bivouacked the
night before. There he heard that the conspirators were hesitating.
(06:37):
He instantly started with the cavalry, leaving the infantry to follow,
and shortly reached a village where Bessis was resting with
a few soldiers. Spidamines and his friends were ashamed it
would seem at the eleventh hour to play the trader,
and having retired to a distance, Ptolemy posted his troops
all round the village, which had walls and gates, and
(06:59):
then summoned the inhabitants to give up the stranger, under
a promise of immunity from attack. If they did so.
They opened their gates to him, and Ptolemy, with his
own hand, arrested Bessies and set out again to rejoin
the king. He sent, however, an officer before him to
ask in what guise Alexander would have besses brought into
(07:21):
his presence for a man who had murdered his sovereign
and usurped his place, there was no room for mercy.
The answer was that Bessis was to be bound, naked
in chains, with a collar round his neck, and placed
at the side of the road by which the army
would march. Then, as Alexander drew near to the place,
(07:43):
stopping his chariot, he sternly asked how it was that
he had dared to seize and bind and slay his
master in benefactor, Darius. Bessis answered that he had not
acted alone, and that the deed was done to propitiate Alexander.
The king's only reply was to order the traitor to
be scourged and sent back a close prisoner to Bactra,
(08:07):
shortly to die. The onward march to Maracanda, Samarkand and
the Jaxartes undertaken, perhaps in emulation of the first Cyrus,
was broken by a curious episode. At a certain village,
the army came unexpectedly upon an isolated Greek population said
(08:28):
to be descendants of that priestly family of the Broncodie
of Melitus, who, being guardians and treasurers of the Great
Temple of Apollo near that city had surrendered its treasures
to King Xerxes one hundred and fifty years before, covered
with odium for this treachery, and obliged to abandon their
old home. They had been settled by Xerxes in Sogdiana,
(08:52):
and their descendants had continued to occupy the same place.
Now they came out to meet their victorious brothers from Greece,
doubtless with mingled feelings of pride and apprehension. They were
not long left in doubt as to their treatment. Alexander
had a special tenderness for the oracle, which had broken
(09:13):
silence for the first time since the days of Xerxes,
to pronounce that he was the son of Zeus, and
the sacrilege of the Broncodie against the God had involved
treason against the fatherland, far baser than that of any
Greek mercenaries who had fought for Persia since the Synod
of Corinth. That the sins of the fathers were to
(09:34):
be visited on their posterity was a common Greek belief,
and it is hard to assign any probable motive for
the infliction of so awful a retribution as the destruction
of the village and of all its inhabitants, men, women
and children, unless it were this belief coupled with the
(09:56):
desire to avenge the treason and sacrilege of which the
Broncodis had had been guilty against Tellus and the Hellenic God.
If Alexander was not a conscious agent in what he
conceived to be a work of righteous retribution, he was
a merciless savage. Alexander was now in the fertile district
(10:17):
midway between the Oxus and Jasartes, watered by the river
Polytimytas or Zerafshan, the scatterer of gold, which pours its
waters into the Axia Palace, or during the dry months,
is lost in the sands. Having repaired the loss and
horses which the army had sustained, and the march across
(10:37):
the mountains in the desert, he advanced to Maakanda, Samarkand.
In Alexander's day it seems to have had little of
the importance which it gained in the fifteenth century as
the capital and burial place of Timor, and which is
recalled by the Persian proverb that styles at the focus
of the whole globe. It is more true, he said
(11:00):
that it resembles paradise, for no lapse of time or
change of circumstance can efface the contrast between the terrible
desert and its beautiful sight, fine air and water, and
luxuriant vegetation, which even in those days marked it out
as the capital of Sogdiana. Here Alexander left a garrison,
(11:22):
and it would appear from subsequent events that Spidamines also
retained at least a part of the power which he
had held under Bessis. But the king himself still set
his face steadily northwards until he reached the left bank
of the Jizardes. Here too he found in another city
or military colony, Alexandria Kojend, the position being suitable for
(11:47):
making it at once a frontier fortress and a base
of operations against the Scythians of the right bank. It
was not long, indeed, before the place became of vital
importance in each character. For in this remote corner of
the empire, Alexander was unexpectedly assailed by enemies in front
and flank and rear, not acting in combination, though actuated
(12:12):
by a common hostility. On the march from Aracanda, he
had reduced without difficulty a chain of seven forts, standing
near to one another on the skirt of the hills
and the desert, and intended probably as outposts against Scythian inroads.
The largest and most important bore the ambitious name of Syropolis.
(12:34):
He now received tidings that the mountain tribes in his
rear had taken all these forts and put their Macedonian
garrisons to the sword, and not only so, they had
been reinforced and assisted by Sogdian and Bactrian allies, only
too certainly excited by the intrigues of Spidamenes, who, as
(12:56):
he learned later, was even threatening Maracanda. While presently the
right bank of the river became lined with a host
of Scythian horsemen, either roused to action by the same intriguer,
or fearing for an independence that might seem threatened by
the erection of the new fortress. It was a serious
(13:16):
crisis exactly suited to try the king's judgment and to
call out his determined energy. The first and most important
thing was to recover the seven forts. Accordingly, he despatched
craters to blockade the strongest Syropoulis, which lay furthest but
one to the east and was held by fifteen thousand men,
(13:41):
while he himself hastened to attack the westernmost gaza. It
was carried by storm and burnt, and the garrison was
put to the sword. On the same day he stormed
a second On the next day, three more were carried,
and the garrisons, in their attempt to flee to the mountains,
fell onto the hands of the Macedonian cavalry. The resistance
(14:04):
at Syropolis was more desperate, but the dry bed of
a torrent gave admittance to a forlorn hope headed by
the king in person, while the attention of the besieged
was engrossed by a fierce attack on the other side.
Even so, however, with the gates open and the enemy
actually within the walls, the garrison fought bravely. Alexander himself
(14:27):
was wounded by a blow in the neck from a stone,
and it was not till eight thousand had fallen and
the residues shut up in the citadel were fainting for
want of water that they thought of submission. The seventh
and last forts surrendered at discretion. By this time, the
new colony of Alexandria was sufficiently advanced in building to
(14:48):
sustain an attack, and after leaving a garrison there of
combined Greeks and natives, and sending a force of fifteen
hundred foot and eight hundred horse to the relief of Marakande,
he crossed the river under cover of showers of arrows
from the engines on the bank, and at once attacked
the Scythian horsemen who had defied him to come over,
(15:11):
and boasted of the different sort of enemy he would
find in them. It was a new style of fighting,
in which the enemy, so to say, eluded the grasp,
but hovered on the flanks of the army and trusted
to their missiles. Alexander's genius, however, was shown not least
in coping with strange emergencies, and few generals, if any,
(15:34):
have rivaled his rapidity of movement. The Scythians were compelled
to fight in this way and not their own way,
and were finally driven off the field with a loss
of one thousand killed and one hundred and fifty prisoners.
A reverse so unexpected speedily led to apologies, submission, and peace.
(15:56):
Alexander at once recrossed the river, and, spurred by the
entire elligence of disasters in his rear, actually made the
whole distance from Jissardes to Maracanda by a forced march
in less than four days. His presence was indeed needed.
It appears that on the approach of the relieving force
already mentioned, Smidamenes, who was pressing the garrison of Maracanda
(16:20):
hard at once retired westward down the valley of the
Polytimyitas in the direction of the modern Bokhara, and passed
it to the very edge of the desert lying between
Bokhara and Kiva. Here he was joined by six hundred
Scythian cavalry. Then, turning fiercely on the Macedonians who had
been pursuing him, and using cunningly those very tactics which
(16:45):
had almost baffled Alexander himself, he harassed their advance with
perpetual faints and unceasing showers of missiles, until they were
driven to a retreat at the river. The retreat became
a rout and simple mass occur so that less than
four hundred escaped to tell the tale. Then Spidamanes marched
(17:06):
a second time to Maracanda to renew the siege. It
was the first reverse of the Macedonian arms the possible
signal for a general rising against the intruders in accordance
with the usual habits of barbarous tribes. Indeed, it is
in this light, and this light only, that a word
(17:27):
of extenuation can be said for the pitiless vengeance which
fell upon the inhabitants of this fertile valley. For if
it was not an act of military self defense, it
was an act of atrocious cruelty. Spitamenes, on hearing of
Alexander's approach a second time, bowed before the storm and
(17:48):
retreated hastily in the same direction as before, this time
into the very desert itself. Alexander followed as far as
he dared, but to enter the desert would have been
sheer matters. Bulked of his prey, he turned back up
the valley, ravaging far and near as he went, reducing
(18:08):
every fort and putting all alike to death. After this
he returned victorious into winter quarters at Bactra three twenty
nine through eight, where he received reinforcements from Greece and
Syria during the winter. Moreover, the unfortunate Bessis was brought
before the assembled Macedonians to receive his final sentence. If
(18:31):
Aarian is correct in saying that Alexander ordered him to
be mutilated in nose and ears, and then sent him
to Agbatana for execution, the strictures are just, which he
passes on the king for this conformity to a hideous
Eastern custom. On the other hand, Deudorus avers that Bessis
(18:52):
was given over to the tender mercies of the brother,
another kinsman of Darius, as a public concession, and that
they in soul melted and tortured and finally put him
to death, with ingenious refinements of cruelty only possible to Orientals.
End of Section nineteen
Section nineteen of Rise of the Macedonian Empire by Arthur M. Curtis.
This librovox recording is in the public domain. Read by
Pamela Nagami, Chapter fourteen, The Campaigns in Bactria and Sogdiana,
Part one. In the autumn of three thirty Alexander set
(00:22):
out from Prophthasia on his long march of more than
six hundred miles to Ortospana Cabul, which he did not
reach until early in three twenty nine. The weather was severe,
for snow had fallen and was lying on all the highlands.
The country was difficult, especially the latter part of it,
(00:42):
where the route was intersected by lofty ridges, deep ravines,
and narrow passes. He met with no combined resistance from
the tribes through which he marched, although he was obliged
to detach a division to return to Aria, which the
Indefatigabules Sadie Barneys had entered once more with two thousand
(01:03):
horse and was rousing to rebellion. This was soon crushed
and two more military colonies were planted at Alexandria, Condahar
and Ordospana to secure the peace of the province. But
though his march was checked by no serious resistance. The
soldiers suffered terribly from the intense cold and want of food,
(01:26):
the snow, it would seem, being exceptionally deep. Yet in
spite of hardships, Alexander pressed on, being anxious to cross
the Central Range before the melting of the snow. There
were four passes over the Parapeneses from the country of
the Gandarians to Bactria, and it is probable that the
(01:47):
army took the so called Kushan Pass, eight thousand to
five hundred feet above the sea, a march of extreme
difficulty which consumed sixteen days and cost the lives of many,
both of the soldiers and the camp followers. At the
southern end of the pass, and twenty five miles northeast
(02:07):
of Ordospana, a new city, Alexandria ad Coccasum, was founded
in a commanding position at or near the site of
the modern Bogrum, where vast numbers of Greek coins are
still to be found. Thence the army struggled on its
weary march, half blinded by the dazzling brightness of the snow,
(02:28):
half buried in the drifts, and all the more bitter
was their disappointment, when, on emerging from the mountains at
adropsa Anderab, they found the whole country lying between them
and the Oxus laid waste by order of Bessus, and
the men who had been battling with cold and fatigue
had now to battle with hunger. Also, it was not
(02:51):
indeed a difficult country to ravage, for much of it
is barren and hilly, where the spurs of the Parapenesis
run northwards to the desert, and it is only the
valleys of the tributaries of the Oxus that are fertile.
In spite of difficulties, however, Alexander pressed onwards, taking at
the first onset the two most important towns of Bactria.
(03:14):
But Bessis himself he did not find for shrinking. At
the last moment from the collision he had provoked, he
had fled with seven thousand of his native troops and
a few of his fellow conspirators, and had placed the
Oxes between himself and his pitiless pursuer, burning the boats
in which he had crossed. This union, however, was already
(03:38):
at work in the ranks of his adherents. For the
Bactrian cavalry rather than accompany him, broke up and dispersed
in all directions. Alexander left garrisons at Aornas, a great
hillfort whose name, like that of another Aornas in the
Indus Valley, imports inaccessibility even to the birds of the air,
(04:00):
and in Bactra or Zariaspa, the modern bulk where ruins
that cover five leagues of country remained to prove the
former greatness of what Orientals call the mother of cities
in the Middle Ages, the rival of Bokhara and Samarkand,
and the capital of Mohammedan civilization. Then he set out
(04:23):
across the desert in pursuit of bessis the foresight of Alexander,
in timing his march, now received another confirmation. The Oxus
was before him, and he had no boats. Even then.
It was a deep and rapid river, not far short
of a mile in breadth. There was no wood near
(04:43):
enough to use, and the bottom was formed of shifting,
loose sand. So great, indeed is the quantity of sand
which its yellow waves hold in solution that although the
water is proverbially sweet and delicious to drink it, grits
under the teeth if taken straight from the river and
requires time for the sand to settle. Had Alexander reached
(05:05):
it in flood time, when the snows are melted in
the mountains, and when its breath is so great that
both banks cannot be seen at the same time, the
passage would have been hardly practicable. Nor would he have
had an easy task had Bessus chosen to dispute the passage.
As it was, Bessus was far away in Otaka of
(05:26):
the Sobians, and the army got across the river safely
in five days on tent skins stuffed with straw. Had
he been able to seek safety in the boundless steps
of Scythia, Bessis, even if bereft of his shadow of
a crown, would have kept life and liberty. But it
was not so to be. Very soon after the king
(05:49):
had crossed the Great River, he received a message from
Spidamins and another of the companions of Bessis, offering to
seize and give him up if a small all force
were sent to support them. He was already their prisoner,
they said, though not in chains. Alexander's resolution was at
once taken. Slackening his own pace, he ordered Ptolemy son
(06:13):
of Lagos, to take a division consisting chiefly of cavalry
and light armed troops, and to come up with Spidamines
by forced marches and with as little delay as possible.
In four days, Ptolemy was so close upon the fugitives
that he reached the camp where they had bivouacked the
night before. There he heard that the conspirators were hesitating.
(06:37):
He instantly started with the cavalry, leaving the infantry to follow,
and shortly reached a village where Bessis was resting with
a few soldiers. Spidamines and his friends were ashamed it
would seem at the eleventh hour to play the trader,
and having retired to a distance, Ptolemy posted his troops
all round the village, which had walls and gates, and
(06:59):
then summoned the inhabitants to give up the stranger, under
a promise of immunity from attack. If they did so.
They opened their gates to him, and Ptolemy, with his
own hand, arrested Bessies and set out again to rejoin
the king. He sent, however, an officer before him to
ask in what guise Alexander would have besses brought into
(07:21):
his presence for a man who had murdered his sovereign
and usurped his place, there was no room for mercy.
The answer was that Bessis was to be bound, naked
in chains, with a collar round his neck, and placed
at the side of the road by which the army
would march. Then, as Alexander drew near to the place,
(07:43):
stopping his chariot, he sternly asked how it was that
he had dared to seize and bind and slay his
master in benefactor, Darius. Bessis answered that he had not
acted alone, and that the deed was done to propitiate Alexander.
The king's only reply was to order the traitor to
be scourged and sent back a close prisoner to Bactra,
(08:07):
shortly to die. The onward march to Maracanda, Samarkand and
the Jaxartes undertaken, perhaps in emulation of the first Cyrus,
was broken by a curious episode. At a certain village,
the army came unexpectedly upon an isolated Greek population said
(08:28):
to be descendants of that priestly family of the Broncodie
of Melitus, who, being guardians and treasurers of the Great
Temple of Apollo near that city had surrendered its treasures
to King Xerxes one hundred and fifty years before, covered
with odium for this treachery, and obliged to abandon their
old home. They had been settled by Xerxes in Sogdiana,
(08:52):
and their descendants had continued to occupy the same place.
Now they came out to meet their victorious brothers from Greece,
doubtless with mingled feelings of pride and apprehension. They were
not long left in doubt as to their treatment. Alexander
had a special tenderness for the oracle, which had broken
(09:13):
silence for the first time since the days of Xerxes,
to pronounce that he was the son of Zeus, and
the sacrilege of the Broncodie against the God had involved
treason against the fatherland, far baser than that of any
Greek mercenaries who had fought for Persia since the Synod
of Corinth. That the sins of the fathers were to
(09:34):
be visited on their posterity was a common Greek belief,
and it is hard to assign any probable motive for
the infliction of so awful a retribution as the destruction
of the village and of all its inhabitants, men, women
and children, unless it were this belief coupled with the
(09:56):
desire to avenge the treason and sacrilege of which the
Broncodis had had been guilty against Tellus and the Hellenic God.
If Alexander was not a conscious agent in what he
conceived to be a work of righteous retribution, he was
a merciless savage. Alexander was now in the fertile district
(10:17):
midway between the Oxus and Jasartes, watered by the river
Polytimytas or Zerafshan, the scatterer of gold, which pours its
waters into the Axia Palace, or during the dry months,
is lost in the sands. Having repaired the loss and
horses which the army had sustained, and the march across
(10:37):
the mountains in the desert, he advanced to Maakanda, Samarkand.
In Alexander's day it seems to have had little of
the importance which it gained in the fifteenth century as
the capital and burial place of Timor, and which is
recalled by the Persian proverb that styles at the focus
of the whole globe. It is more true, he said
(11:00):
that it resembles paradise, for no lapse of time or
change of circumstance can efface the contrast between the terrible
desert and its beautiful sight, fine air and water, and
luxuriant vegetation, which even in those days marked it out
as the capital of Sogdiana. Here Alexander left a garrison,
(11:22):
and it would appear from subsequent events that Spidamines also
retained at least a part of the power which he
had held under Bessis. But the king himself still set
his face steadily northwards until he reached the left bank
of the Jizardes. Here too he found in another city
or military colony, Alexandria Kojend, the position being suitable for
(11:47):
making it at once a frontier fortress and a base
of operations against the Scythians of the right bank. It
was not long, indeed, before the place became of vital
importance in each character. For in this remote corner of
the empire, Alexander was unexpectedly assailed by enemies in front
and flank and rear, not acting in combination, though actuated
(12:12):
by a common hostility. On the march from Aracanda, he
had reduced without difficulty a chain of seven forts, standing
near to one another on the skirt of the hills
and the desert, and intended probably as outposts against Scythian inroads.
The largest and most important bore the ambitious name of Syropolis.
(12:34):
He now received tidings that the mountain tribes in his
rear had taken all these forts and put their Macedonian
garrisons to the sword, and not only so, they had
been reinforced and assisted by Sogdian and Bactrian allies, only
too certainly excited by the intrigues of Spidamenes, who, as
(12:56):
he learned later, was even threatening Maracanda. While presently the
right bank of the river became lined with a host
of Scythian horsemen, either roused to action by the same intriguer,
or fearing for an independence that might seem threatened by
the erection of the new fortress. It was a serious
(13:16):
crisis exactly suited to try the king's judgment and to
call out his determined energy. The first and most important
thing was to recover the seven forts. Accordingly, he despatched
craters to blockade the strongest Syropoulis, which lay furthest but
one to the east and was held by fifteen thousand men,
(13:41):
while he himself hastened to attack the westernmost gaza. It
was carried by storm and burnt, and the garrison was
put to the sword. On the same day he stormed
a second On the next day, three more were carried,
and the garrisons, in their attempt to flee to the mountains,
fell onto the hands of the Macedonian cavalry. The resistance
(14:04):
at Syropolis was more desperate, but the dry bed of
a torrent gave admittance to a forlorn hope headed by
the king in person, while the attention of the besieged
was engrossed by a fierce attack on the other side.
Even so, however, with the gates open and the enemy
actually within the walls, the garrison fought bravely. Alexander himself
(14:27):
was wounded by a blow in the neck from a stone,
and it was not till eight thousand had fallen and
the residues shut up in the citadel were fainting for
want of water that they thought of submission. The seventh
and last forts surrendered at discretion. By this time, the
new colony of Alexandria was sufficiently advanced in building to
(14:48):
sustain an attack, and after leaving a garrison there of
combined Greeks and natives, and sending a force of fifteen
hundred foot and eight hundred horse to the relief of Marakande,
he crossed the river under cover of showers of arrows
from the engines on the bank, and at once attacked
the Scythian horsemen who had defied him to come over,
(15:11):
and boasted of the different sort of enemy he would
find in them. It was a new style of fighting,
in which the enemy, so to say, eluded the grasp,
but hovered on the flanks of the army and trusted
to their missiles. Alexander's genius, however, was shown not least
in coping with strange emergencies, and few generals, if any,
(15:34):
have rivaled his rapidity of movement. The Scythians were compelled
to fight in this way and not their own way,
and were finally driven off the field with a loss
of one thousand killed and one hundred and fifty prisoners.
A reverse so unexpected speedily led to apologies, submission, and peace.
(15:56):
Alexander at once recrossed the river, and, spurred by the
entire elligence of disasters in his rear, actually made the
whole distance from Jissardes to Maracanda by a forced march
in less than four days. His presence was indeed needed.
It appears that on the approach of the relieving force
already mentioned, Smidamenes, who was pressing the garrison of Maracanda
(16:20):
hard at once retired westward down the valley of the
Polytimyitas in the direction of the modern Bokhara, and passed
it to the very edge of the desert lying between
Bokhara and Kiva. Here he was joined by six hundred
Scythian cavalry. Then, turning fiercely on the Macedonians who had
been pursuing him, and using cunningly those very tactics which
(16:45):
had almost baffled Alexander himself, he harassed their advance with
perpetual faints and unceasing showers of missiles, until they were
driven to a retreat at the river. The retreat became
a rout and simple mass occur so that less than
four hundred escaped to tell the tale. Then Spidamanes marched
(17:06):
a second time to Maracanda to renew the siege. It
was the first reverse of the Macedonian arms the possible
signal for a general rising against the intruders in accordance
with the usual habits of barbarous tribes. Indeed, it is
in this light, and this light only, that a word
(17:27):
of extenuation can be said for the pitiless vengeance which
fell upon the inhabitants of this fertile valley. For if
it was not an act of military self defense, it
was an act of atrocious cruelty. Spitamenes, on hearing of
Alexander's approach a second time, bowed before the storm and
(17:48):
retreated hastily in the same direction as before, this time
into the very desert itself. Alexander followed as far as
he dared, but to enter the desert would have been
sheer matters. Bulked of his prey, he turned back up
the valley, ravaging far and near as he went, reducing
(18:08):
every fort and putting all alike to death. After this
he returned victorious into winter quarters at Bactra three twenty
nine through eight, where he received reinforcements from Greece and
Syria during the winter. Moreover, the unfortunate Bessis was brought
before the assembled Macedonians to receive his final sentence. If
(18:31):
Aarian is correct in saying that Alexander ordered him to
be mutilated in nose and ears, and then sent him
to Agbatana for execution, the strictures are just, which he
passes on the king for this conformity to a hideous
Eastern custom. On the other hand, Deudorus avers that Bessis
(18:52):
was given over to the tender mercies of the brother,
another kinsman of Darius, as a public concession, and that
they in soul melted and tortured and finally put him
to death, with ingenious refinements of cruelty only possible to Orientals.
End of Section nineteen
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