“Darius even flattened the ground so that his scythe chariots could charge at the Macedonians,” says Wrightson. It was a wide, flat valley that, unlike Issus, would allow the Persians to take full advantage of their lopsided numbers, an estimated 250,000 Persian troops facing off against Alexander’s 50,000. When Alexander returned to Persia from his Egyptian conquests, Darius tried to delay the inevitable clash as long as possible, eventually deciding that if there was going to be a rematch, it would be on Daruis’ terms.ĭarius and his generals chose a battle site near the town of Gaugamela. In the interim, Darius regrouped and called in reinforcements from the East, while Alexander marched his army South into Egypt. The two armies wouldn’t meet again for another two years. A stunned Darius reportedly hopped on his horse and fled, with the rest of his army close behind. Just as he did with his father at Chaeronea, Alexander personally led the Macedonian cavalry charge at Issus, which cut right to the heart of the Persian defenses, just as planned. The Persian cavalry and archers were also legendary, as were the scythe chariots which cut down enemy infantry with their razor-sharp wheel hubs. When a man was killed, another rose to take his place. At the heart of the Persian army were the “Immortals,” an elite regiment of 10,000 infantrymen whose numbers never changed.
It’s estimated that King Darius III of Persia was in command of a total of 2.5 million soldiers spread across his vast empire. Whether motivated by Greek pride or the spoils of imperial conquest, Alexander picked up where his father left off and marched into Persia in 334 BC, where his army of 50,000 would be tested against the largest and best-trained fighting force in the known world. “He’s invading Persia to punish the Persians retroactively for daring to invade Greece in the first place.” “Alexander creates a propaganda campaign that the Macedonians are invading Persia on behalf of the Greeks, even though Macedon wasn’t part of Greece and didn’t fight on the side of Greece in the original Greco-Persian wars,” says Wrightson. That conflict featured the famous Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartan warriors made a heroic last stand against tens of thousands of Persian invaders. So as he turned his attention back to Persia, Alexander framed his campaign against the Achaemenid Empire as a patriotic retaliation for Persia’s failed invasion of the Greek mainland a century earlier. Always the savvy strategist, Alexander knew that he couldn’t rule the Greek mainland by fear and brute force alone.
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