Macedonian Warrior

It is by now a well-established belief that what makes a man fight is the bond that he feels with his comrades-in-arms: the men who are his family on the campaign, his emotional support, his ‘confessors,’ and his protectors in the line of battle. He fights with them and for them, and as much as he fears to let them down, he dreads even more the prospect and the stigma of dishonor. But what makes a man wage war is a more complex matter, the result of cultural conditioning and propaganda, of beliefs handed down from generation to generation and revelations of ‘truths’ (many of them fabricated to serve the occasion) that stir even the most indolent to follow the path of the war-god.

For the Macedonian phalangites, whose service under Alexander would take them to the ends of the known world and separate them from homeland and relatives for a decade or more, if not forever, the motives were manifold, ranging from simple greed and economics to the most lofty idealism. This warrior fought first and foremost because he was expected to, and it never occurred to him to challenge the demands of king and country, or even to question the basic premise that war is an inescapable fact of life. Indeed, he welcomed it as an opportunity to enter the arena of heroes, to test his mettle against the adversary, and to acquire the honor that ennobles all men, no matter how humble their origins. He was, in all likelihood, not highly educated, but he knew by heart the sagas of old, and the remarkable achievements of the Ten Thousand – the mercenaries who accompanied the Persian prince Cyrus to Cunaxa (near Babylon) and fought their way back along the valley of the Tigris, through the mountains of Armenia, and eventually to the Greek cities on the Black Sea. But he fought also for economic reasons, in the expectation of plunder, particularly in a campaign against the opulent barbarian. He fought out of reverence for his king, the defining characteristic of his people, and in this case for a king whose name was the byword for victory and daring.