Invention: The Master-key to Progress. Fiske Bradley Allen
to try it: placing himself in a defensive position in either case. But Alexander draws his sword and cuts the knot in two, thereby accomplishing whatever the untying of the knot would have accomplished, but in an unexpected way. Alexander's victories and escapes from perilous positions were largely accomplished by unexpected measures.
But Alexander showed his inventive ability before he invaded Persia; in his very first campaign undertaken to subdue a revolt in Thessaly immediately after he ascended to the throne. The Thessalians opposed him in a narrow defile. An ordinary man would have thought, as the Thessalians did, that he was checkmated. But Alexander conceived and executed the ingenious scheme of cutting a new road up the steep side of the mountain, leading his army along that road, and suddenly threatening the Thessalians in their helpless rear. Shortly afterward in Thrace he reached a defile in the mountains which it was necessary for him to pass, but which he found defended by a force that had stationed a number of war-chariots at the top, to be rolled down on the Macedonians. Alexander immediately ordered his infantry to advance up the path and to open their ranks whenever possible to let the chariots rush through; but when that could not be done to fall on their knees and hold their shields together as a sort of roof on which the chariots would slide, and from which they would roll off. This amazing story is supposed to be true; and it is said to have succeeded perfectly.
Not long afterward Alexander had to cross the Danube with his army and all their equipments and attack a force of barbarians on the farther bank. This he saw he could not do by the use of any means available of an ordinary kind. Nothing daunted, he conceived and executed the scheme of floating his equipments across at night in floats made of tent skins, filled with hay.
The next clear example that we find of Alexander's inventiveness was when he undertook the siege of Tyre. Tyre stood on an island of Phœnicia in the extreme eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. It was surrounded with a wall, very thick and very high, and was separated from the shore by half a mile of deep water. To capture such a place was no small undertaking for a man who had no ships. But Alexander conceived and executed a scheme that worked successfully. In accordance with that scheme, he built a causeway that extended from the shore out toward the island on which Tyre stood. Naturally, the Tyrians obstructed his efforts by sending fireships against him and firing projectiles; and these tactics became more and more effective as the causeway approached the city. Then Alexander visited some of the jealous neighbors of Tyre that had submitted to him, and secured a fleet of some eighty ships; and these he led, as the admiral commanding, against the Tyrian harbor.
By this time, the causeway was well protected with catapults and war-engines of various kinds, and had been carried close up to the island. Yet little actual damage could be done to Tyre, because of the height and thickness of the walls, and because Alexander's galleys that he had equipped with war-engines could not get close enough, by reason of large boulders under water. Alexander then equipped certain galleys with windlasses to root up the boulders, the galleys being fitted with chain cables to prevent divers from cutting them. Tyre was soon afterwards reduced to a purely passive defense and consequent surrender.
The story of the siege of Tyre, if read in the light of the conditions of the comparative barbarism of the world in those days, is a record of inventiveness, on the part of Alexander, so convincing and complete, as to entitle Alexander to a place in the first rank among the inventors of our race.
Shortly afterward Alexander reached the town of Gaza, the great stronghold of the Philistines. It stood on high ground, and was more than two miles from the sea. Alexander's engineers reported to him that, as the fleet could not assist them, and as the walls were themselves very high and stood on a high hill, the walls could never be stormed. Things looked serious. They were serious; and failure would then have come to any man, except a man like Alexander. He cut the Gordian knot by ordering that ramparts be thrown up as high as the top of the walls, and war engines placed on the ramparts. This was done, and the city was taken.
Alexander's campaigns in Egypt, and afterward in western Asia, were characterized by the same quickness and daring, both in conception and in execution, that had marked his opening campaigns in Greece. Later, when advancing toward Persia, he encountered a tribe of hillsmen in the Uxian Pass, who, like the Thessalians and the Thracians, thought they had blocked his passage by opposing him in so narrow a defile. Alexander literally "circumvented" them by making a night march over a difficult mountain pass, and astonishing them by an attack on their rear the following morning. Shortly afterward a like situation presented itself, when an army opposed him in a narrow defile called the Persian Gates, that was fortified with a wall. Alexander soon realized that the position of his enemy was impregnable. He learned, however, that there was a path that led around the pass, though it was exceedingly dangerous, particularly to men in armor and to horses, and especially at that time, when snow and ice were on the ground. He again utilized his former invention (circumvention) and with his former success; though the conditions under which it was accomplished were much more difficult.
The four examples just given of literally circumventing an uninventive enemy illustrate in the simplest form the influence of invention on military history.
After it became clear to Alexander that his invasion of Asia would be successful from a military point of view, his active imagination presented to his mind a picture of a grand and noble empire, embracing the whole world, but dominated and inspired by the spirit of the civilization of Greece. To develop this conception into an actual reality, became at once the object of his efforts. To develop it, he decided to adopt in some measure the characteristics and dress of the people in whatever province he might be, and to take such steps in organizing provinces, founding cities and establishing systems, as to weld all into one empire, under himself, as ruler. One can hardly credit the authoritative account he reads of Alexander's bewildering success. He seems not only to have won battles, and built cities, and organized provinces, but actually to have super-posed Greek civilization on Persian civilization!
In one of his most important later battles, Alexander again utilized his inventiveness. If he had not done so, he would assuredly have lost the battle. It was against King Porus in northwestern India. Alexander found the forces of Porus encamped on the opposite side of the Hydaspes River, with the evident intention of preventing him from crossing. As the army of Porus in men alone was evidently equal to his own, and as it was reinforced with a multitude of elephants, Alexander was apparently confronted with a problem impossible of solution. It would have been impossible to anyone but a man like Alexander. He, however, by means of various feints and ingenious stratagems, managed to get across at night about sixteen miles up the river, using boats that he had constructed, and floats of skin stuffed with straw. Porus took up a position on the opposite shore and made ready to receive attack, his front preceded by war chariots and elephants. Alexander had neither; but he did have brains and originality. So he simply held the enemy with his infantry, and then made a determined attack with cavalry and archers on the enemy's left flank, and especially on the elephants. The elephants soon got beyond control; and the rest of the battle was a fight between a highly trained Macedonian phalanx, assisted by cavalry, and an Oriental mob.
Alexander died in Babylon when not quite thirty-three years old. In actual and immediate achievement he surpassed perhaps every other man who has ever lived. He founded an empire which he himself had conceived and developed, which covered nearly all the then known world, and which, though it was composed mainly of barbarous and semi-barbarous people, was dominated by Greek thought. It is true that the empire fell apart almost immediately after Alexander died. But it did not fall into anarchy, or revert to its previous state: it was divided into four parts, each of which was distinct, self-governing and well organized. The two larger parts, the kingdom of the Seleucidæ, which occupied approximately the territory of Persia, and the kingdom of the Ptolomies, or Egypt, continued as torch-bearers to civilization for many centuries thereafter.
Of the two, the former was the larger and was probably the better, from an administrative point of view; but Egypt represented the finer civilization; for Alexandria, with its library and its wonderful museum, became the seat of learning and the resort of the scholars of the world, and the centre of the Hellenistic civilization that followed that of Greece.
This Hellenistic civilization, it may here be pointed out, was in some respects as fine as that of Greece, and in some respects was finer, because it was more mature. But (perhaps for the reason