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Updated: May 7, 2025
Is it a Prelate, or a Prince? A King, even an Emperor? It may be all these; yet these, as we must all daily feel, are not necessarily great men. A great man is one who affects the mind of his generation: whether he be a monk in his cloister agitating Christendom, or a monarch crossing the Granicus, and giving a new character to the Pagan World.
Now, do you suppose that with these eighteen or twenty talents alone he fed his army, won the battle of Granicus, subdued Asia Minor, conquered Tyre, Gaza, Syria and Egypt, built Alexandria, penetrated to Lybia, had himself declared Son of Jupiter by the oracle of Ammon, penetrated as far as the Hyphases, and, when his soldiers refused to follow him further, returned to Babylon, where he surpassed in luxury, debauchery and self-indulgence the most debauched and voluptuous of the kings of Asia?
That fear has certainly routed a hundred thousand times more men than the real encounter. This was always more or less avoided by the horse, and no one was knocked down. I find but little real fighting on horseback in all antiquity like that of Alexander the Great at the passage of the Granicus. Was even that fighting?
Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the spectator can be once persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Cæsar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature.
After a victory his chief thoughts were for the wounded. Like Napoleon, he also possessed that personal equation of absolute popularity with his soldiers. Their devotion to him was simply complete. After Thebes came the invasion of Asia. The invincible Macedonian had fought and won the battle of the Granicus.
The month of Thargelion evidently brings misfortune to the barbarians, for Alexander defeated the Persian king's generals on the Granicus in Thargelion, and the Carthaginians were defeated by Timoleon in Sicily on the twenty-seventh of Thargelion, at which same time Troy is believed to have been taken, according to Ephorus, Kallisthenes, Damastes and Phylarchus.
Alexander himself joined in the fighting, and would certainly have been killed had not his friend Clytus, the son of his old nurse, rushed to his rescue and saved his life. In spite of the size of the Persian army, which was much larger than his own, Alexander won a complete victory at the Granicus. Then, marching southward, he took the cities of Sardis and Ephesus without striking another blow.
Alexander then marched northwards along the coast of the Propontis. The satraps of Lydia and Ionia, together with other Persian generals, were encamped on the river Granicus, with a force of 20,000 Greek mercenaries, and about an equal number of native cavalry, with which they prepared to dispute the passage of the river. A Rhodian, named Memnon, had the chief command.
The previous defeats of his troops, however severe they had been, were not looked on as irreparable, The Granicus had been fought by his generals rashly and without mutual concert.
He had with him only seventy talents in money. He marched directly on the Persian army, which, vastly exceeding him in strength, was holding the line of the Granicus. He forced the passage of the river, routed the enemy, and the possession of all Asia Minor, with its treasures, was the fruit of the victory.
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