Arrian of Nicomedia, a Greek of the Roman Empire writing two centuries later, told Alexander’s march from the memoirs of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, generals who had been there. This is Book 2 of his Anabasis of Alexander. Book 1 left a twenty-two-year-old king across the Dardanelles, winner at the Granicus in Asia Minor, with the Persian empire still waiting for its own king to appear.

Darius III, the Great King of Persia, now comes in person. They meet at Issus, a narrow coastal plain in Cilicia (southern Turkey) that wastes Persian numbers. Darius flees; his mother, wife, and children fall to Alexander, who treats them as royalty. Offers of the land west of the Euphrates are refused. The coast must be cleared. Tyre, an island city, holds seven months while a mole grows toward its walls and a navy is built from cities already yielded. Gaza’s Batis will not kneel; that fight is shorter and crueler. Egypt is next, city by walled city, toward the Nile.