Alexander's Path Read online

  Copyright

  First published in 1988 by

  The Overlook Press

  Lewis Hollow Road

  Woodstock, New York 12498

  Copyright © 1988 by Freya Stark

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-59020-918-9

  To B.B.,

  whose kind thoughts travelled with me,

  this book is dedicated.

  My grateful thanks are due to Lord David Cecil, to Sir Harry Luke, to Dr. Guy Griffith, to Mr. John Sparrow, to Mr. George Bean; to the Editor of The Journal of Hellenic Studies for permission to reprint the article which appears as Appendix I, and to my patient publisher for kind advice and help.

  ‘He lived thirty-two years and eight months … In body he was very handsome, a great lover of hardships; of much shrewdness, most courageous, most zealous for honour and danger, and most careful of religion; most temperate in bodily pleasure, but as for pleasures of the mind, insatiable of glory alone; most brilliant to seize on the right course of action, even where all was obscure; and where all was clear, most happy in his conjectures of likelihood; most masterly in marshalling an army, arming and equipping it; and in uplifting his soldiers’ spirits and filling them with good hopes, and brushing away anything fearful in dangers by his own want of fear—in all this most noble. And all that had to be done in uncertainty he did with the utmost daring; he was most skilled in swift anticipation and gripping of his enemy before anyone had time to fear the event; he was most reliable in keeping promises or agreement; most guarded in not being trapped by the fraudulent; very sparing of money for his own pleasure, but most generous in benefits of others.

  ‘If Alexander committed any error through haste or in anger, or if he went some distance in the direction of Eastern arrogance, this I do not regard as important; if readers will consider in a spirit of charity Alexander’s youth, his unbroken success, and those courtiers who associate with kings … But I do know that to Alexander alone of the kings of old did repentance for his faults come, by reason of his noble nature….

  ‘Whosoever speaks evil of Alexander … let such a one, I say, consider of whom he speaks evil; himself being more puny, and busied about puny things, and not even bringing these to success.’

  ARRIAN VII, 28–30.

  CONTENTS

  *

  COPYRIGHT

  FOREWORD

  PART I

  CILICIA

  1. ISSUS AND CASTABALA

  2. MERSIN, SOLI AND OLBA

  3. CILICIAN DIGRESSION. Seleuceia to Anamur

  4. CILICIAN DIGRESSION. Anamur to Antalya

  PART II

  PAMPHYLIA

  5. THE PAMPHYLIAN PLAIN

  6. MOUNT CLIMAX

  7. THE PAMPHYLIAN DEFILES

  8. SELGE

  PART III

  LYCIA

  9. THE CHELIDONIAN CROSSING

  10. THE VALLEY OF THE ALAGIR CHAY

  11. THE EASTERN WALL OF XANTHUS

  12. THE COAST ROAD OF LYCIA

  13. THE ROAD TO FINIKE FROM MYRA

  14. THE HIGHLANDS OF XANTHUS

  15. OENOANDA AND THE PASSES OF XANTHUS

  16. THE WALL OF XANTHUS

  APPENDIX I (with maps):

  ALEXANDER’S MARCH FROM MILETUS TO PHRYGIA

  APPENDIX II:

  APPROXIMATE MILEAGES

  REFERENCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  FOREWORD

  All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill’.

  DUKE OF WELLINGTON: Croker Papers, 1885, Vol. III, p. 276.

  NO PART OF THE WORLD CAN BE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN the western and southern coasts of Turkey. Their remote valleys break from the treeless plateau, whose oozing snows feed them with harvests wherever the land is flat enough to grow wheat or barley; and to travel in and out of them is like the circumventing of an immense natural fortress, whose walls are precipices with a glacis of fertile stretches before them and whose bastions are toilsome capes that dip, one after another, to the sea.

  I have made three journeys into these regions, and have written two books about them—the first dealing with the more northerly and gender coasts of Ionia, and early blossoming of Greece on the easy peninsulas loved by the Mycenean oarsmen; and the second travelling by sea, under the high, forest-clad fortresses of Lycia. When I left these, I longed to return, and after a two-year interval did so, and my account now extends the scope of the former journeys, describing things that already have altered much since I saw them, round the coasts and along the southern shore from Alexandretta to Pamphylia, into the valleys of Chelidonia and the uplands of Cibyritis behind them. The method of travel, by horse or jeep along ways not much frequented, brought me into closer contact than before with the country people of Turkey, whose kindness, hospitality, and goodness I am delighted to have discovered for myself, as many earlier travellers have done before me.

  This, then, was a simple travel book to plan. Beginning at the beginning it was to move, like the voyage itself, by easy human stages to its end; and so it would have done, if Alexander, and the geography of his marches, had not pressed in to complicate the pattern.

  Alexander followed this coast and crossed the Chelidonian headland, and although that early and successful adventure is dismissed in few words by all historians ancient or modern, the mere outline of the great conqueror’s footstep is enough to oust all other history from one’s path. He impressed himself upon me not all at once, but gradually, as the descriptions of Arrian and the scenes of the landscape combined; and I have kept this accidental order, and brought him by slow degrees into my story—stepping into the foreground at Issus and vanishing altogether through Cilicia, along the pirate coast. It was only when I first reached Pamphylia in 1954, that a question—like that small discrepancy which starts the train in detective stories—awakened a number of surmises. I was driving along the plain, dark under the sunset, with pointed ranges round it thin like cut paper against the clear pale sky. Looking, as Alexander must have looked, at the easy spaces on my right that seemed to lead to open valleys, and at the opposite heavy high outlines of Termessus threatening in the west: “why,” I asked myself, “should he have wished to turn west at all and attack such a difficult position, when his aim was all towards Gordium in the north?”

  This question altered what was left of my journey. Instead of adding the Macedonian march down the coast to my Lycian book, as I had intended, I held my hand and decided to investigate the passes and to see whether Arrian had not left out things that it might still be possible to discover. The whole route between Xanthus and Phaselis, and the campaign against the hillmen which it included, is a blank, to which roads and passes are, I felt sure, the key. I began to ask myself other questions. Why, if they had no importance, should Arrian mention those mountain raids from Xanthus and Phaselis? And why, if one comes to that, should Alexander stop here and there for unessential reasons while his greatest adversary was gathering in strength before him? It seemed as improbable as did the unnecessary turning to the west. Only one other mountain raid is mentioned before Issus, and that too dealt with passes—near Soli in Cilicia—evidently intended to secure the road to the coast from Labranda (Karaman). I decided to spend two months with a horse or a jeep among these mountains, and reconstruct what I could.

  * * * *

  It is one of the caprices of history that while the farther regions of Alexander’s marches have been illuminated by the most brilliant modern scholars and enquirers, the nearer geography of Anatolia, which saw the first and most formative year and a half, or perhaps a little more, of his adventure, have been comparatively little attended to. The ancient historians dismiss it in a few pages, and the moderns are not left with much to work on; and this is perhaps due to the fact that Asia Minor, now full of elusive distance, was a part of the everyday world in Alexander’s time. The crossing of the Hellespont was a military risk and an imposing function, but no leap to the unknown. Alexander must have been familiar with it through Aristotle, who had spent three years and married at the philosophic court of the tyrant of Adramyttium, and had then lived in Mitylene. His host, the uncle of his wife, met ruin and death through the Persians’ governor, Memnon the Greek—which adds a private enmity to the first campaigns in Asia. Among the most intimate of Alexander’s friends and companions were the Lycian Aristander and the Cretan Nearchus, who knew the coastlands well; and there had been messages and intercourse with Caria, and friendship in Philip’s court with Persian refugees.

  There was no need to go into great detail of routes in a country so well known; and the king who landed here was not yet solitary in his Arimazian mists, but a companion whose projects were shared by all his peers. It is this little band of brothers, so very young, that swings across the Granicus, and looks out from the acropolis of Sardis, and takes Miletus and Halicarnassus by siege and storm and marches down the coast. Nor is there any mystery about their plans: they were those of a small army in a land where even Greeks were potentially hostile; the enmity o
f Athens was simmering, and no fleet but hers could stand up to the Persian navies at sea. The march through Caria, Lycia and Pamphylia was a measure directed not against the land forces of Darius, but against his ships. Alexander’s objectives were the harbours with their populations of sailors and the immense forests behind them of cedar and cypress and pine, which continued through Hellenistic, Roman, Crusading ages to be valued and fought over by the timberless dynasties of Asia. When he reached Pamphylia, Alexander had in his possession all the harbours except the outlying fortresses in Caria which the Persians could hold from the sea; and when the battle of Issus was fought and won, he swung south and completed this naval policy along the Phoenician coast. Only then, with Tyre destroyed and Egypt conquered, was he able with no threat behind him to turn against the homelands of Darius.

  When this policy was determined we do not know, but it was given a voice and an effect at Miletus, both during the siege and when Alexander disbanded the small navy he had.1 From here he marched across Caria and besieged Halicarnassus and—leaving three thousand men to complete its capture behind him—continued down the coast. He knew all he had to expect in the rough hills of Lycia and travelled light, without siege train, heavy baggage, and possibly with little or no cavalry to speak of (which explains his anxiety about the horses of Aspendus when he reached riding country again). He foresaw no major opposition, for much of the infantry was left behind as well. He cannot have taken more than, or even as many as, fifteen thousand men.

  Historians seem to me to have by-passed a certain human interest in this march, connected with Caria and Ada the Queen. The tangle of her affairs, complicated by incest and family quarrels, had ousted her from her throne and reduced her to the one fortress of Alinda. From here, Arrian tells us, she went to meet Alexander, surrendered her stronghold, and adopted him as her son. ‘Alexander gave Alinda back to her in charge, and did not reject the adoptive title, and on the capture of Halicarnassus and the rest of Caria, put her in command of the whole.’ Arrian does not even say that he stayed in her fortress—a fact proved by Plutarch, who mentions sweetmeats that she sent him every day, and how she offered to provide cooks—a picture of eastern hospitality and the difficulty of circumventing it which every oriental traveller will recognize across the ages.

  Alexander therefore stayed in Alinda on his way, and became Queen Ada’s adopted son; and all this began three years before, when he was still the nineteen-year-old prince in Macedonia, and had decided to marry Ada’s niece. He had consulted the friends who were now among his officers, and had sent a messenger from Corinth to Asia. Philip, furious with him and with the companions who encouraged so inferior an alliance, had exiled a number of his friends. And now Philip was dead and the Carian family affairs had changed: Ada’s brother, the father of the young fiancée, had ejected the widowed queen and become ruler; and he too had died, and Orontobates, a Persian brother-in-law, had seized and held his power. Ada, with all her difficulties, had become a centre for the anti-Persians in Caria. She would remember Alexander with kindness, and welcome someone who had almost become a member of her (however unsatisfactory) family: and that, it seems to me, is the background for the adoptive relationship of mother and son.

  Nor is this matter historically negligible, though one would not wish to press it too far. Professor Tarn3 has shown how important in the world’s history were the thoughts of Alexander when they bridged the gap between Greek and Barbarian—the gap that Isocrates and Aristotle and every mainland Greek before him had failed to cross. Alexander crossed it. His messages from the Granicus speak of ‘the spoils of the barbarians of Asia’; but tolerance grew as he came to know the lands and their peoples, step by step till it reached the climax of his life, and an unsurpassed conclusion; for at the feast in Opis, he prays for the brotherhood of mankind. And I do not think it too far-fetched to see in the planned half-Carian, half-Persian marriage in Asia—the boy’s dream that prepared the reception of Alinda—an early step in line with the stronger steps that followed—the kindness for Sisygambis, mother of Darius, the marriage with Roxana, the Persian fusion, the gradual vision of a united world.

  Any evidence of the links that unite this ancient dream, across a gap of twenty-two centuries, with our thoughts today, must interest us deeply, and give as it were a topical complexion to such events in Alexander’s life.

  The immediate effect, however, was that he passed through and out of Caria with influential friends. He came, too, as a champion of the democratic nationalists who were popular among the seafaring populations of the coast. Arrian, without lingering over names or details, brings him to Xanthus, mentions an expedition there among the tribesmen, brings him across the high peninsula to Phaselis and to Pamphylia, and finally takes him, after a fight in the defile of Termessus, north to Gordium where his base and his reinforcements and his general, Parmenion, were waiting. From there he marched by the regular and usual route with all his army, across the Cilician gates to Issus and his destiny beyond.

  To find out what he did between Xanthus and Sagalassus became my object; and the gathering of the evidence and gradual unwinding of the clues got involved in my daily gossip of travel. I soon discovered that my book was no longer so easy to plan. Alexander and I happened to be travelling in opposite directions; he was coming from the north while I was approaching Chelidonia from the south. I could not very well treat myself like a movie roll and drive backwards along the southern coasts; nor could I reverse one of the most inspired marches in history. The only answer was separation. Alexander’s progress is written by itself in the appendix to this book, with such evidence as to his route and motives as I have been able, to the best of my ability and very tentatively, to gather; and my own journey is related in the casual way which I enjoy. The Macedonians were never far from my thoughts: the places I visited were nearly always the places where they, too, had halted: the questions I asked myself were those that dealt with their geography, silent for so many centuries: but the order of my journeying remains haphazard as it occurred and the landscape is the landscape of today, though the past appears through it, like the warp in the world’s threadbare weaving.

  Yet it is, in spite of all this, a geographic essay, of which Alexander himself might have approved. For he was, more than most men, geographically minded. As I travelled, I remembered the story familiar in the East, as I heard it many years ago from the Mirza who taught me Persian in a garden in Hamadan. It tells how they spoke in the King’s hall of the wells of life in the Lands of Darkness, and the King asked where they lay; and none could tell him until Elias, a stripling at the court, stood up and spoke of the waters, white as milk and sweet as honey, that rise through six hundred and sixty springs out of the darknesses of the west. Whoever washes there and drinks will never die.

  Alexander, who wished to live for ever because his kingdom was so great, prepared for the journey. He asked what he should ride and Khizr Elias bade him mount a virgin mare, for their eyes are made of light—“and in truth,” said the Mirza, “I have noticed that a mare which has never foaled sees better than any other—and each took in his hand a salted fish, to test the waters when they reached them.

  “Now when they came to the western darkness, Elias wore a jewel, and by its glitter saw on every side white wells of water, and threw his salt fish, and it swam away; and Elias washed and drank and lives for ever. But Alexander of the Two Horns missed the path and wandered, until he came out by another road, and died in his day like other mortal men. Unto God we return.”

  The tale, in the way legends have, holds its essential truth and gives in right proportion the great conqueror’s passion for exploration. I can even imagine, though there is nothing to prove it, that the secret promise of Ammon was no military matter, but the sailing of unvisited and unreported seas, for which on the shore of the Indian Ocean, ‘he sacrified other sacrifices, to other gods, with different ceremonial … in accordance with the oracle given’,2 and reached perhaps the nearest limit of his dreams.

  None can know. But to the geographical bent of Alexander’s mind there is abundant witness, and the surveying section of his armies, checked and controlled by himself, long provided all the geography of Asia that there was. When his troops forced him to turn back he wept, not for the unfinished conquest—for he gave away the provinces of India as he acquired them—but for the unsolved problem with which his mind was busy when he died.3