Free Alexander the Great by Norman F. Cantor Page B

who fled back in wild confusion…to the safety of their fortress…. The tribesmen…realized that the Macedonians were on the point of breaking out of the trap so carefully laid for them. They rallied, and counterattacked. …Alexander, with the cavalry and his light-armed troops, held them off…long enough for his siege-catapults to be carried through the ford and set up on the further bank…. “This is the first recorded use of catapults as field artillery.”…Once again [Alexander] had concluded a complex and hazardous operation without losing a single man. 4
    Alexander ended this battle with a “Trojan horse” stratagem. He ordered his men to march away, leading the Illyrians to believe that they had left for good. He waited and sent back a reconnaissance party, which discovered that the barbarians had left their camp completely unguarded. He then marched back and, under cover of darkness, massacred the entire camp.
    These various defeats and slaughters should have warned the rest of the Greek peninsula of Alexander’s seriousness and that opposing him was futile. It didn’t happen that way, however. The first rebellion broke out in Thebes. Darius had been channeling money into Greece, spreading it around where it would do the most good, and Alexander had yet to establish total domination.
    Alexander heard that the rebellion was being backed by Demosthenes with arms and gold, and debated marching against Athens. Cooler heads in Athens did not want a direct clash with the Macedonian leader; and with Sparta refusing to join Alexander, the entire peninsula was ready to explode. Alexander realized that the time for diplomacy and kid gloves had passed, and he was going to have to make an object lesson of someone: It fell to the Thebans to be that example.
    The first thing Alexander did was send word to Pella, his capital, that he was returning. He sent a coded message for his mother, telling her to arrange the immediate deaths of his brother-in-law, Amyntas, and Cleopatra’s baby son. Olympias went one better and killed not only Caranus but also Philip’s daughter by Cleopatra. She then forced Cleopatra to hang herself. Amyntas fled to Asia Minor (and offered his services to Darius); he later was killed there.
    Alexander then moved toward Thebes. For some foolish reason, Demosthenes had told the Thebans that Alexander had been killed. They felt fairly secure with this news, and when they heard that a Macedonian army was approaching commanded by Alexander himself, they panicked. He really did not want to waste his time and efforts on pacifying Greeks, so if they had met him halfway, he probably would have let the entire rebellion go. However, the Thebans were stubborn to a fault: They had passed a unanimous resolution that they would fight to gain full political freedom from Macedonia.
    Alexander felt he was within his constitutional rights to coerce Thebes, since its rebellion was technically against the Hellenic League, whose captain-general he was. Alexander offered amnesty in exchange for their handing over the ringleaders of the revolt. Rather than accept his deal the Thebans defied the idea, and called Alexander a tyrant for good measure. Diodorus tells us that Alexander “decided to destroy the city utterly and by this act of terror take the heart out of anyone else who might venture to rise against him.” 5
    The siege engines were brought up, and the city walls were penetrated. The citizens lost heart and attempted to flee. Alexander’s veterans poured into Thebes, and savage street fighting quickly degenerated into wholesale slaughter. The houses were ransacked, the temples destroyed and plundered. By nightfall 6,000 Thebans had been killed and about 30,000 taken prisoner, later to be sold as slaves to augment the Macedonian treasury for the impending war against Darius. The city of legend and history where Oedipus had ruled was blotted from the face of the earth. 6 Alexander might have been better