Alexander the Great 10
Appetite for Destruction : Picking His Battles
by CTCWeb Editors
"It's So Easy" - Guns n'Roses
Alexander’s massive army, like the blood that ran through his veins, was not purely Macedonian. In his army, Macedonians soldiered alongside Greeks from various parts of the ancient world. Greek soldiers willingly fought for the Macedonian king because Alexander justified his quest for empire on his determination to liberate the people of Greece from their foreign conquerors, the Persians.
From the outset of his campaign of liberation, Alexander demonstrated his prowess as a military strategist and commander. He proceeded methodically choosing his battlegrounds carefully. His first order of business was to re-conquer Thrace. He marched his army into the Thracian territory and chased out the Persians. The Thracians allied themselves with Alexander who, with his Thracian mission completed, moved towards the Hellespont, the thin stretch of water that separates Europe from Asia Minor.
HistoryofMacedonia.org website (http://www.HistoryofMacedonia.org)
In 334 BCE, Alexander crossed the Hellespont. He brought with him an army of approximately thirty thousand soldiers. This enormous mass of soldiers and their attendants halted briefly on the far shore at the site of Troy. The army made sacrifices to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, while Alexander and Hephaistion visited the tombs of the Iliadic heroes, Achilles and Patroclus. The Roman orator and statesman, Cicero, claimed that Alexander cried out to the tomb of Achilles, “O fortunate youth, to have found Homer as the herald of your glory!” Though innumerable authors have chronicled the martial achievements of Alexander the Great, none have gone so far as to raise Alexander to the mythical stature of the Homeric warrior, Achilles.
As Alexander and his army marched through Asia Minor, their first genuine clash with the Persian army took place at the river Granicus (modern Biga Çay). They won this battle against a field of Persians and Greek mercenaries. From the battlefield at Granicus, Alexander sent three hundred sets of Persian armor to the temple of Athena in Athens. The ancient Greek biographer Plutarch tells us that Alexander included with these spoils of victory a caption that read: “Alexander son of Philip and the Hellens, except for the Lacedaemonians, won these from the barbarians who inhabit Asia.” In the caption Alexander referred to himself as a son of the Hellens, another name for the Greeks, but excluded from this group the Lacedaemonian, the Spartans. Despite referring to the Persians as barbarians in the caption, after the engagement Alexander began the practice of honoring Persian soldiers and commanders who fell in battle against him and treating Persian captives with due respect.
