Alexander The Great

Alexander the Great, a patient and often devious man; had never struck without careful planning. The youthful, headstrong Alexander liked to settle problems by immediate action. Making decisions with great speed, he took extraordinary risks; his success was achieved by the amount of sheer force and drive to overcome these risks. Alexander was educated as a student by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. The philosopher imbued Alexander with a love of Greek art and poetry, and instilled in him a lasting interest in Philosophy and science.

Within a year of his accession, Alexander extended his dominions northward toward the Danube River and westward towards the Adriatic Sea. He then turned his attention to Greece where Thebes and Athens were threatening to bolt the league with weapons purchased with Persian gold. Also, Athens and Thebes were to unite in war against Macedon. In 335 B.C. Alexander decided to punish the city for what he regarded as treachery; .The city was destroyed and its people sold into slavery or killed. All of the city_s buildings were destroyed except for temples and the house of Pindar the poet. Pindar was long dead, but Alexander wanted to prove that even a Macedonian conqueror could be a Hellene. The savage lesson of Thebes brought results, the Athenian assembly quickly congratulated Alexander, and the Greek states, with Sparta as the continuing exception, remained Macedonian allies.

Alexander now took on a project that Philip had planned but never carried out: an invasion of Persia. He decision to do this was purely a political one. For a century Persia had interfered increasingly in Greek affairs and had constantly oppressed the Greek cities in Asia Minor. Alexander had personal reasons too. Avid for glory and for identification with Greece, Alexander knew no better way to win both than by attacking Greece_s ancient foe. In some ways the invasion, the longest military campaign ever undertaken, was a reckless undertaking. It required a large army to move an enormous distance from its supply bases, through and unfamiliar country, against a power incalculably rich in money and men. Furthermore, Persia was governed by a patriotic and devoted military caste that was egar to show its strength in war. However the enemy had a weakness. The current king, Darius III, had come to the throne through the murder of his predecessor and was highly incompetent._Darius was no leader-in fact, he was not even a brave man. The best of his generals and satraps might have been able to compensate for his shortcomings, but the rigidly structured hierarchy of the Empire did not give them a chance._ Besides the fact that Persia was poorly ruled, Alexander was counting on another shortcoming of the Persian Empire to aide in his conquest. The Persian Empire_s subject were unloyal to and had very little affection towards their ruler(s) and would be unlikely to resist and invading army.

In 334 B.C. Alexander crossed the Hellespont. Something that his father had planned but not fully achieved. He defeated the Persian forces that were gathered on the Asian side of the River Granicus. After this victory Alexander sent three hundred suits of Persian armor back to Athens. The message that went with them read, _Alexander, the son of Philip, and the Greeks, except the Spartans, have won this spoil from the barbarians of Asia,_ thus expressing in one brief and self-assured sentence his contempt for the Persians, his even greater contempt for the Spartans, and his conviction that he was furthering a Greek cause. _Of all the generals of the ancient world Alexander was surely the greatest. He possessed an almost clairvoyant insight into strategy and was a consummately resourceful tactician.

Alexander could be compared to Napoleon in swiftness and in movement, but Alexander could be patient as well. As he showed in his siege of the fortress of Tyre, which lasted for about seven months. The old port of Tyre had been abandoned for some time, and the Tyrians were now securely enclosed behind massive walls on an island that was half a mile from the shore. Alexander made attempts to negotiate an entrance into the city but they were halted by a display of force against his envoy by the Tyrians. _Alexander was determined to run every risk and make every effort to save the Macedonian army from being held in contempt by a single undistinguished city._ This commitment turned out to be far more exacting then Alexander could have ever imagined. Nevertheless, his determination and aversion to failure drove him to conjure up a more imaginative approach. He built a solid causeway over the water, half a mile long and two hundred feet wide. Then he constructed siege towers of 150 feet in height. Unfortunately the Tyrians responded to each and every effort with innovations of their own. At one point during the siege, his advisors gave him reason to abandon the assault. However, Alexander was not about to admit that he had labored in vain, nor was he willing to leave Tyre behind as a monument of his fallibility. Reinforced by ships from the Persian fleet that had defected to him, Alexander launched a varied assault on the city. Eight thousand Tyrians were said to have perished during the sack. Alexander personally led the attack on a breached section of the city_s wall. The siege was a moderate success in his eyes considering the resources lost. _Alexander was a man incapable of shrugging his shoulders and walking away from an unsuccessful effort. If as a result of several futile attempts, frustrated and angry, he would have decided that a quick and sudden attack would rescue him from embarrassment. Victory on the battlefield promised to be more complex. During the intervening two years since the battle of Issus, Darius had assembled some 25,000 horseman from his eastern satrapies, an untold number of infantry, 200 scythed chariots, and even 15 elephants. He was now encamped on a wide plain near Gaugamela. Alexander could only field 7,000 horsemen and 40,000 footmen. His men were superior in discipline and experience in the field, but he was short in numbers and well aware of it. Alexander delayed the attack until he had seen the battle field with his own eyes. Scanning the terrain for advantageous positions to make up for the lacking number of Macedonian forces. The day of the battle came and went with a stunning victory for Alexander. His plan was to create a rift in the center of the Persian troops. For that was where Darius was and where the commands for the Persian army were coming from. Alexander simply charged towards Darius_s chariot. Like Issus this tactic again proved to be successful. Darius fled Gaugamela like he fled at Issus.

Alexander was extremely skillful at dealing with unfamiliar tactics of warfare, such as the use of chariots armed with scythes, elephants deployed in battle, and evasive, encircling