NotitiesAlexander
Steven Pressfield
In "Alexander: the Virtues of War," the text explores the intrinsic motivations of soldiers, emphasizing the importance of heart and will in battle. It discusses concepts such as self-control, the nature of empathy towards foes, and the psychological burdens of leadership. The narrative reflects on personal and moral struggles within the context of warfare, illustrating the complexities of honor, glory, and the human condition.
What drives the soldier is cardia, “heart,” and dynamis, “the will to fight.” Nothing else matters in war. Not weapons or tactics, philosophy or patriotism, not fear of the gods themselves. Only this love of glory, which is the seminal imperative of mortal blood, as ineradicable within man as in a wolf or a lion, and without which we are nothing. (Page 23)
Tags: Geel
A warrior must not advance to battle hopeless—that is, devoid of hope. Rather let him set aside all baggage of expectation—of riches, celebrity, even death—and spur beneath extinction’s scythe lightened of all, save surrender to that outcome known only to the gods. There is no mystery to this. All soldiers do it. They must, or they could not fight at all. (Page 43)
Tags: Geel
Another time when we were youths, Hephaestion and I asked Telamon if self-command had a place in the soldier’s kit. “Indeed,” he replied, continuing to stitch his overcloak, which chore our query had interrupted. “For the self-control of the warrior, which we observe and admire in his comportment, is but the outward manifestation of the inner perfection of the man. Such virtues as patience, courage, selflessness, which the soldier seems to have acquired for the purpose of defeating the foe, are in truth for use against enemies within himself—the eternal antagonists of inattention, greed, sloth, self-conceit, and so on. When each of us recognizes, as we must, that we too are engaged in this struggle, we find ourselves drawn to the warrior, as the acolyte to the seer. The true man-at-arms, in fact, can overcome his enemy without even striking a blow, simply by the example of his virtue. In fact he can not only defeat this foe but also make him his willing friend and ally, and even, if he wishes, his slave.” Our mentor turned to us with a smile. “As I have done with you.” (Page 43)
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Here, for your education, Itanes, I must address a question that causes all young officers consternation. I mean the experience of empathy for the foe. Never be ashamed to feel this. It is not unmanly. Indeed, I believe it the noblest demonstration of martial virtue. (Page 56)
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What I did not offer aloud was something other. In that moment, as my father made trial of me before his officers, I felt my daimon, my inhering genius. It entered as a ghost enters a room. The sensation was clarity and unshakable conviction. I perceived, as never I had before, that my gift exceeded my father’s by orders of magnitude. I seemed to look straight through him. He saw it. So did Parmenio at his shoulder, and Hephaestion and Craterus at mine. It was a moment between generations, one declining, the other in ascent. (Page 57)
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War is fear, let no man say otherwise. (Page 61)
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Philotas had worked up and was making a show of his grief. My rage at him had abated; I saw him clearly for what he was, a born fighter and cavalry commander, yes, but a vain and shallow fop, as well. And I understood the source of my fury at him. What crime had Philotas committed? He had doubted me. He had doubted my daimon and doubted my destiny. For this, I could never forgive him. Ten years later in India, the army encountered for the first time the gymnosophists, the so-called naked wise men. Hephaestion in particular was fascinated by these ascetics and sought to plumb their philosophy. The aim of their exertions, he reported, was to seat the center of their being not in the mortal part of their nature, as does the common run of men, but in the immortal—what they call the Atman, or Self. I know what they mean, though perhaps in a less felicitous way. My daimon was, and is, so strong that I am at times possessed by it. We have talked for hours, Hephaestion and I, and Telamon and Craterus as well, of this phenomenon. I have reported that my daimon, which was a stranger to me and which I did not understand and could not control, had seized me most powerfully in that hour succeeding my father’s assassination. “He is not me,” I have said, “but a creature to whom I am bound. It is as if this thing called ‘Alexander’ has been twinned with me at birth, fully formed, and that I only now discover it, aspect by aspect, as I grow. (Page 98)
Tags: Geel
Hephaestion and Craterus spur to me. I feel my daimon as I read. The sequence of experience is this: a flush of rage, succeeded immediately by a chill; then a state of pure, detached objectivity. Emotion has fled. My mind is pellucid. I am thinking the way an eagle thinks, or a lion. (Page 105)
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You can tell when men truly rage because they are silent. (Page 107)
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Later Hephaestion and I scrub up in the trickle of the summer Ismenus. The grime of massacre will not wash off so easily. My mate turns back toward the ruin that is Thebes. “I would not, yesterday, have thought you capable of this.” “I was not capable of it,” I reply. “Yesterday.” (Page 111)
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Men believe a boy’s concerns to be those of a child. Nothing could be further from the fact. At ten I apprehended the world as keenly as I do today, more so, as my instincts had not yet been dulled by schooling and the stultifying superimposition of conventional thought. (Page 114)
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Will it suffice to prove ourselves the greater brutes? Never! We must excel the foe, not only as warriors but as men and as knights. They must say of us that we deserve their empire, for we surpass them in virtue and in self-command!” (Page 116)
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The more I gave away, the lighter I felt. I wished to strip my baggage to the buckle, leaving nothing but my horse and my lance. (Page 118)
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There is a secret that all wounded men know, and the secret is this: When you know your wound won’t kill or permanently disable you, you enjoy it. You take pride in it. (Page 123)
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When the king of Macedon charges onto the foe at the head of his Companions, he is flanked by knights of such valor, mounted upon such superlative stock, drilled to such a pitch of prowess, and incented by such a drive for glory, as to make the force effectively irresistible. Nothing in warfare, ancient or modern, is comparable to the shock of this arm. (Page 123)
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A wounded man feels diminished and bereft, but most of all, he feels mortal. He has smelled hell’s breath and felt the earth yawn beneath him. (Page 146)
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To be wounded is a thing of terror, but to be honored and remembered fills a man with pride. (Page 146)
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For days afterward, I cannot take the air without hundreds trailing me about in extraordinary demonstrations of devotion. When I query a soldier directly as to why he and the others follow me so, he answers as if it were the most obvious thing in the world: “To be sure you are all right, sire. To make certain you lack nothing.” Telamon observes this phenomenon with interest. When I convey to him my uneasy sense that the army does not adhere to me as myself but as something other, he replies, “Indeed, your daimon.” It is my daimon the men see, not me. It is he who has brought them victory, he to whom their hopes have become attached, and he whom they fear to lose. I must embrace this, Telamon declares, as a consequence of triumph and celebrity. “You have ceased to be Alexander,” he says, “and become ‘Alexander.’” (Page 152)
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Soldiers are sad after victory. I don’t know why. A melancholy seems to descend in the aftercourse of success. (Page 152)
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My table of organization permits no staff officers at brigade level or lower. I want all my commanders to be fighting officers; I don’t want anyone the men don’t respect. The system makes each captain and colonel do double duty, handling administrative chores as well as training his unit and leading it in action. (Page 158)
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The engineer smiles at the council’s skeptical faces. “Because a thing has never been done, gentlemen, is no reason to say it cannot be. And, in my view, no reason not to try.” (Page 161)
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As for my own part, I say, here is what I will do. “I will strip and join in the labor. It inspires the men to see their king toiling at their shoulders. Who will not wish to boast, ‘I outshoveled Alexander!’ This will be better than medicine for me and the gods’ own tonic for the men. When one outfit surpasses another, I will shower the victors with bonuses and praise, and this will animate all other divisions to strive for excellence.” (Page 164)
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Do you know what faculty I claim in myself as preeminent beyond all rivals? Not warcraft or conquest. Certainly not politics. Imagination. (Page 165)
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I never let the men see me sleep. I rise before they wake and remain at work when they go to their slumber. When they drink, I drink with them; when they dance, I dance too. If I remain late at wine, I rise on steady legs and let my officers see it. When the sun blazes, I endure its heat without complaint; I sleep on the ground on campaign and on a plain cot in camp, and when we move across open country I train as we go, racing on foot and on horseback. (Page 169)
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Scale of arms is worthless beyond that number of men who can march from one camp to another and arrive in one day. That is our army. Forty-odd thousand, no more. (Page 170)
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The narrative of a battle is invariably recounted with a clarity, particularly a geographic clarity, which is seldom present in the event. (Page 178)
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Mark this, my young friend. Sear it into your soul with brands of iron: Never, never take anything for granted. Never believe you know, so that you cease to probe and query. (Page 179)
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When our sarissa phalanx with the brigades of the Royal Guard advances on line, for example, its twelve thousand men appear to constitute a solid wall. In fact, the front is composed of nine autonomous brigades—six of the phalanx and three of the Guardsmen—each capable of independent action, and each subpartitioned into battalions, likewise competent. So that this single front contains thirty-six plates and thirty-five seams, each plate capable of acting on its own, if opportunity or peril so demands, without breaking the seam that unites it to the whole. (Page 200)
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The commander-at-arms manipulates the ungovernable and the unpredictable. In battle, he directs the unknowable amid the unintelligible. This has always been clear to me. But it was not until the mutilation of our comrades at Issus, not until the flight of Darius and the riot of our army, not till then that I reckoned truly how little dominion even he wields, who calls himself victor and conqueror. (Page 215)
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What is more natural than to crave the good opinion of our fellows? We all wish to be loved. Perhaps the conqueror wants it more, even, than other men, for he seeks the adulation not only of his contemporaries but of posterity. (Page 233)
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In the end, Alexander, your character and works will be judged not by Athenians, however illustrious their city may once have been, or by any of your contemporaries, but by history, which is to say by impartial, objective truth.” Antipater was right. From that day, I vowed never to squander a moment’s care over the good opinion of others. May they rot in hell. You have heard of my abstemiousness in matters of food and sex. Here is why: I punished myself. If I caught my thoughts straying to another’s opinion of me, I sent myself to bed without supper. As for women, I likewise permitted myself none. I missed no few meals, and no small pleasure, before I brought this vice under control—or believed I had. (Page 233)
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You must incorporate the conventions and principles by which this army fights. Why? Because once battle is joined, I shall be where I can control nothing beyond the division immediately under my hand, and, in the inevitable chaos, will barely be able to direct even that. You must command on your own, my young lieutenant, but how you do so cannot be random or idiosyncratic; it must follow my thought and my will. That is why we talk here nightlong, my generals and I, and why you and the other Pages attend and listen. That is why we rehearse fundamentals over and over, until they become second nature to us all. (Page 235)
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On Philosophy of War TO PTOLEMY, AT EPHESUS: Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous. If I learn that an officer of mine has assumed a defensive posture in the field, that officer will never hold command under me again. TO PTOLEMY, IN EGYPT: When deliberating, think in campaigns and not battles; in wars and not campaigns; in ultimate conquest and not wars. TO PERDICCAS, FROM TYRE: Seek the decisive battle. What good does it do us to win ten scraps of no consequence if we lose the one that counts? I want to fight battles that decide the fate of empires. TO SELEUCUS, IN EGYPT: It is as important to win morally as to win militarily. By which I mean our victories must break the foe’s heart and tear from him all hope of contesting us again. I do not wish to fight war upon war, but by war to produce such a peace as will admit of no insurrection. (Page 236)
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Note: Fundamentals
The foe who has been a fugitive once will never be the same fighter again. (Page 237)
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On Tactics, Battles, and Soldiers No advantage in war is greater than speed. To appear suddenly in strength where the enemy least expects you overawes him and throws him into consternation. (Page 238)
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Be conservative until the crucial moment. Then strike with all the violence you possess. (Page 239)
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We concentrate our force and hurl it with utmost violence upon one point in the enemy line. (Page 239)
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An officer must lead from the front. How can we ask our soldiers to risk death if we ourselves shrink from hazard? (Page 240)
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The officer’s charge is to control the emotion of the men under his command, neither letting them yield to fear, which will render them cowards, nor allowing them to give themselves over to rage, which will make them brutes. (Page 240)
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Entering any territory, capture the wine stocks and breweries first. An army without spirits is prey to disgruntlement and insurrection. (Page 240)
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It is three years now since our army has crossed from Europe. The expeditionary force has appended to its conquests Phoenicia, both Hollow and Mesopotamian Syria, Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Samaria, Palestine, and Egypt. I have become Defender of Yahweh, Sword of Baal, Pharaoh of the Nile. The sun priests have anointed me Child of Ra, Boatman of Osiris, son of Ammon. I embrace all honors, but especially the religious ones. They are worth armies. (Page 243)
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The world we see is but a shadow, Itanes, an adumbration of the True World, the Invisible World, which resides beneath. What is this realm? Not What Is, but What Will Be. The future. Necessity is the name we give to that mechanism by which the Infinite produces its works. The manifest arising out of the unmanifest. God reigns in both worlds. But He permits only His favorites to glimpse the world to come. (Page 245)
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I don’t believe these councils accomplish much in the instant; we’ve heard it all before and will hear it a hundred times more in a hundred other caucuses. But I want my officers to see one another and hear one another speak. Particularly the mercenaries and allies, who understandably feel less central to the expedition than the Macedonians. (Page 248)
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Anabasis IS A MILITARY WORD. It means a “march to the Interior.” (Page 252)
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Here is something the instructors of war do not teach: the art of confronting the irrational, of disarming the groundless and the unknown. (Page 255)
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How is one to command? By consensus of his subordinates? Listen indeed. Weigh and evaluate. Then decide yourself. Are you stumped at the crossroads? Pick one way and don’t look back. Nothing is worse than indecision. Be wrong, but be wrong decisively. Can you please your constituents? Never let me hear that word! The men are never happy with anything. The march is always too long, the way always too rough. What works with them? Hardship. Give your men something that can’t be done, not something that can. Then place yourself at first hazard. The Spartan commander Lysander made the distinction between boldness and courage. We must have both. The audacity to conceive the strike and the belly to carry it out. All that being said, how does one make decisions? By rationality? My tutor Aristotle could classify the world, but couldn’t find his way to the village square. One must dive deeper than reason. The Thracians of Bithynia trust no decision unless they make it drunk. They know something we don’t. A lion never makes a bad decision. Is he guided by reason? Is an eagle “rational”? Rationality is superstition by another name. Go deep, my friend. Touch the daimon. Do I believe in signs and omens? I believe in the Unseen. I believe in the Unmanifest, the Yet To Be. (Page 260)
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WE MARCH EAST TOWARD THE TIGRIS. Sound military considerations dictate this, but in truth I have made the decision based on a dream. (Page 261)
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Nothing is harder in war than to stand fast. (Page 263)
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Nothing so steadies a company confronting great odds as a sober recitation of the facts. The more dread-inducing the reality, the more directly it must be faced. (Page 273)
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The material a commander manipulates is the human heart. His art lies in producing courage in his own men and terror in the foe. (Page 274)
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“This is an article of faith with me, brothers. I believe that a man, witnessing the selflessness of another, is compelled by his own nobler nature to emulate that virtue. (Page 276)
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“And I believe more, my friends. I believe that heaven itself is compelled by witness of intrepidity. The gods themselves cannot stand aloof from an act of true courage, but are impelled by their own higher nature to intercede in its behalf. (Page 276)
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I am the living soul of the army. As blood flows from the lion’s heart to its limbs, so courage flows from me to my countrymen. (Page 279)
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There is a type of exhaustion called by the Greeks apantlesis. It is that enervation produced not by physical fatigue alone but also by strain on the nerves. An officer or soldier in this state is prey to make bad decisions, to fail to take actions clearly called for, to misapprehend obvious situations, and in general to become deaf, blind, and stupid. Worse, this state comes upon one with the suddenness of night and the power of a punch in the teeth. One minute a man is able; the next he is an imbecile. (Page 309)
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Horses cannot comprehend delay, or conservation of effort. The moment is all that exists for them, and in that moment they know only the command that you and I communicate. Is it any wonder they become so “high”? Their nerves are excruciatingly attuned to ours; they take on our fear and our excitement, and the fear and excitement of the other horses. (Page 309)
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The eunuchs’ wealth is not in money (for they are forbidden to own anything beyond their personal effects) but in arcamas, “influence.” This, of course, is the same as money. (Page 333)
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And yet to call the workings of the state corrupt would be a mischaracterization. I pass a memorable night in converse with the queen mother, Sisygambis, who has become a sort of mentor to me. “You do not understand, my son. In the East there exists no objective standard of achievement, no impartial measure by which a man may establish or advance his station. He cannot ‘get ahead.’ He cannot ‘succeed.’ It is not like the egalitarianism of your army, Alexander, which provides an unbiased arena, within which a poor man may make his fortune and a rich man prove worthy of his fame. Here no man exists, save in subordination to another.” Sisygambis details for me the labyrinthine protocol of power by which one sphere of society imposes its will upon another and is in turn imprisoned by that imposition. “A network of interlocking tyrannies extends from top to bottom and side to side, and in it each man is caught like a fly in a web. Here all a man thinks of is to please his master. He has no concept of what he himself wishes. Ask him. He cannot tell you. The very concept is beyond his imagination.” (Page 335)
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“Dismiss this lunacy of interfusion, Alexander! These nobles of Persia, however nimbly they sit their horses, are incapable of self-rule. They are born to the courtier’s life; it is all they know, and all they ever will.” (Page 342)
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I abhor such unsoldierliness, but I have gone as slack myself. Since Damascus I have taken Memnon’s widow Barsine to my bed. This at Parmenio’s suggestion, to keep me from Darius’s harem. But his scheme has prospered too well. I have come to care for the woman and to depend upon her offices. Barsine protects me. If not for her, petitioners and grievance-pleaders would devour every minute of my day. She bars my door and lets me work. She will not permit me to drink to excess, as is my weakness, and she stands sentry over my table. (Page 352)
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Reunited with the army at Hecatompylus, I am seized with a melancholy beyond any I have known. The next challenge, clearly, will be reframing for the corps the object of the expedition. Darius dead, they’ll believe the chore over. They’ll want to go home. I can forestall unrest temporarily by pursuit of Bessus, who will doubtless back his pretense to the throne by raising another army farther east. But beyond that, what? How? Still, my despair is past this. I beg the company’s indulgence; I ask to be left alone, save Hephaestion, Craterus, and Telamon. In my quarters with them, I am too stricken to speak, even to drink. I read apprehension in my friends’ eyes. They fear for my state of mind. Each tries by turns to put words to my despondency, as if by defining and articulating it, they can free me from its grip. (Page 360)
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“We have lost our enemy,” Craterus assays. “The object of our exertions is gone—and we have nothing to set in his place.” A silence succeeds. “Success,” says Telamon, “is the weightiest burden of all. We are victors now. All our dreams have come true.” “That too is a death,” Hephaestion agrees. “Perhaps the sternest of all.” (Page 361)
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A YEAR PASSES. Our arms continue all-victorious. Half again as much territory has been brought into subjection since Gaugamela as in all the prior campaigns. But the glory has gone out of it. The glory and the legitimacy. (Page 363)
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The tribesmen of Afghanistan were the fiercest fighters I ever faced, and their general, the Grey Wolf, the only adversary I ever feared. The wolf warriors’ religion is fatalism. They worship freedom and death. The language they understand is terror. To prevail, one must be more terrible than they. This takes some going, as these clansmen, like all rude and insular races, perceive each person outside their blood sphere not as a human being but as a beast or devil. You cannot negotiate with such foes; they are proof against all blandishment or subornation and are animated by warrior pride alone. They would rather die than submit. They are vain, greedy, cunning, vicious, mean, cowardly, gallant, generous, stubborn, and corrupt. They are capable of endurance beyond all human measure and can bear such suffering, of both flesh and spirit, as would break a block of stone. Pursuit is the essence of wolf warfare, by which I mean pursuit until the last enemy is cornered and slain. One fights wild tribesmen best in winter. That’s when the snow drives them down out of the mountains. With our reconfigured forces, we sought to go this one better. We went up after them. To defeat wolf warriors, one denies them sanctuary. When you take a village, raze it. Overhauling the foe, kill him to the last man. Leave no one. Put to death or deport the entire population. It accomplishes nothing to drive the men off; they’ll just come back. Pacts or treaties? Forget them. The tribesman owns no compunction. What honor he knows is confined strictly to his own kind; to you, he cannot breathe without perjuring himself. Every oath is a sham, every promise a hoax. I have sat in tribal parleys a hundred times; if the truth was ever spoken, I never heard it. And yet, despite their treacherousness and duplicity, one could not help but admire these fellows. I came, myself, to love them. They reminded me of our wild highlanders back home. Their w...
...omen were proud and beautiful, their children bright and fearless; they knew how to laugh and how to be happy. In the end I could not tame them, so I married them. I wed your sister, the princess Roxanne, and paid your father Oxyartes more for the privilege than I hope you ever learn. It was the kind of stunt my own father would have approved of. And it has worked. (Page 375)
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The Afghan will fight for money, but he won’t work for it. To ask is an insult. Here is how we got round it. Say we wished to transport a hundred wine jars to Kabul. We learned to ask for ghinnouse, “a favor”—and to let the natives themselves turn it into work. One approaches the chief. “Would you please, as a favor to me, transport with your pack train this lamp when you trek to Kabul?” “Of course,” replies the fellow, “it would be my pleasure.” Then when he shows up, you have your wine jars waiting. “Hmm,” observes the chief, “would you like us to take these wine jars to Kabul with this lamp?” Since no one has offered pay and no one has accepted, no one is offended. One is free to “defray expenses” by a cash contribution. (Page 377)
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Worse, with administrative autonomy, the loyalty of individual soldiers has become attached to their division commanders, upon whom their advancement depends, and not to me—so that a fellow calls himself Coenus’s man or Perdiccas’s, and not Alexander’s. Each victory these companies bring home enlarges their unit pride, not their pride in the army as a whole. And each act of barbarity committed turns them more barbarous. (Page 380)
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In Afghanistan my daimon begins to talk to me. He comes forward in resonance with the wolf warriors against whom we fight. Like them, the daimon knows no pity. Like them he owns no fear of death. You have asked, Itanes, if the daimon is properly identified with the soul. He is not. The daimon and the self are subordinate to the soul, but the daimon, should he overcome the self, may abrogate the soul. At that point a man becomes a monster. (Page 381)
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Tragedy is the arrest of a man by his own nature. He is blind to it. He cannot transcend it. If he could, it would not be tragedy. And tragedy’s power derives from our own realization, commoner as well as king, that life truly is like that. (Page 397)
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When the laughter subsides, Telamon is compelled by his mates’ summons to step forward. “Indeed, gentlemen,” he acknowledges, “I have quizzed these yogis. I have learned that in their philosophy all of humanity is divided into three types: the man of ignorance, tamas; the man of action, rajas; and the man of wisdom, sattwa. We around this table are men of action. That is what we are. But though I have lived my own life as a man of this type, and all my previous lives—as Pythagoras would say, citing his doctrine of transmigration of the soul—I have always wished to become a man of wisdom. That is why I fight and why I have pursued the vocation of arms. Life is a battle, is it not? And how better to train for it than to be a soldier? (Page 399)
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feel anger start. Telamon sees it. He continues. “The yogi’s remark that he has ‘conquered the need to conquer the world’ could not have been more apt. What the sage means is that he has mastered his daimon. For what is the daimon but that will to supremacy which resides not only in all men but in beasts and even plants and is, at its heart, the essence of all aggressive life?” This hits me like a blow. (Page 401)
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In nature, the will to dominion is held within bounds by the limited capacity of the beast. Only in man is this instinct unrestrained and only in that man”—he addresses me with concern—“ like you, my friend, whose gifts and preeminence transcend all external governance. We have all known suicides,” Telamon finishes, “whose stem was this: A man must kill himself to slay his daimon.” (Page 401)
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Laughter greets this, to the relief of all. Telamon continues, sober. “Further, I declare that this quality is what makes you superior to your father. Not superior as a commander, notice I say, although you are. Or braver as a soldier, although you are. You excel your father not for these reasons, but for your moral object, because you do wish to become a man of wisdom, whereas Philip was content to fight and fuck. Your sufferings, too, are greater than his, because it pains you to fall short of that which you know yourself capable. (Page 402)
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Note: Fall short
It helps to hate the enemy, I have found, or at least to consider them butchers or barbarians. The ksatriyas of Porus are neither, nor have they committed any crimes against the Macedonians. (Page 405)
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I have set a date in my mind for the attack, revealing it to no one, but delays have forced me to put it back twice, and a third time after that. Inaction demoralizes any army; it is driving this one closer to revolt and insurrection. (Page 406)
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Note: InACTION
This army stopped being glorious a long time ago. Or shall we cite Achilles and say we emulate the ‘virtues of war’? Rubbish! Any virtue carried to its extreme becomes a vice. (Page 408)
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Note: Virtue - vice