When and where was the Battle of Issus?
On 5 November 333 BC Alexander the Great met the Persian king Darius III near Issus, on a narrow coastal plain in what is now southern Turkey. Darius had maneuvered a much larger army behind Alexander, but the cramped ground robbed him of his numbers. Alexander led his cavalry in a charge straight at the king, and when Darius turned and fled, his whole army broke. His mother, wife and children were captured, and the road to Phoenicia and Egypt lay open.2
For the first time, Alexander faced the Persian king in person, and on ground the king had chosen. Darius had slipped behind the Macedonians and cut them off, and by every count of numbers he should have won. What happened instead made Alexander the unquestioned master of his army and set him on the road to an empire.3
Who won the Battle of Issus and why?
Alexander the Great won. Darius III had the larger army, but he gave battle on a narrow coastal plain where his numbers could not tell. Alexander led his Companion cavalry across the Pinarus River against the Persian left, broke it, and turned on the center; when Darius fled, the whole Persian army collapsed.4
Alexander marches east
In 334 BC Alexander the Great of Macedon crossed into Asia to bring down the Persian Empire, the superpower of the age. After his first victory at the Granicus he swept through Anatolia, and in late 333 the Persian king Darius III came in person at the head of a huge royal army to crush the invader.5
Alexander's real target was the Persian fleet. Manned largely from the Phoenician cities and able to stir up revolt in the Aegean behind his back, it was the one Persian force that could still hurt him, and the Macedonians decided to beat it from the land by taking its home ports. In the autumn of 333 they came down into Cilicia through the pass known as the Cilician Gates.6
Darius meanwhile gathered his army at Babylon and marched west with his court; his mother, his wife and his children traveled with him. He waited for the invader on the open plain of Sochi, east of the Amanus Mountains, ground that suited his cavalry and his numbers.7
Alexander was slow to come. He fell seriously ill at Tarsus and then campaigned against the hill tribes of Cilicia, while Parmenion, his second in command, went ahead to hold the passes into Syria.8
The trap that failed
The delay misled Darius. His courtiers told him that Alexander was afraid to come on. A Macedonian exile in his service, Amyntas son of Antiochus, begged him to stay on the open plain and insisted that Alexander would come to him wherever he was, but Darius would not listen.9
He took his army north and crossed the Amanus range by the pass called the Amanian Gates, coming down unnoticed behind the Macedonians at Issus, where Alexander had left his sick. The Persians killed them. By then Alexander, joined by Parmenion, was marching south on the far side of the mountains: the two armies had passed each other.10
Darius now stood across Alexander's line of supply. But the battlefield he ended up on, a narrow plain between the mountains and the sea along the Pinarus River, was too cramped for his great numbers to tell. The vast Persian host was packed into ground where only its front ranks could fight.11
Alexander at first refused to believe the report and sent a ship back up the coast to check it. Once it was confirmed, he called his officers together, reminded them that Darius had left the open plain for a narrow place where his numbers would be useless, and that night marched his army back north. At dawn he came down onto the plain, opening his column into line as the ground widened.12
Two armies on the Pinarus
Darius drew up behind the Pinarus, a small river with steep banks in many places, and built a stockade where the banks were easiest to climb. His best infantry, Greek mercenaries, stood in the center facing the Macedonian phalanx, with Persian infantry called kardakes on either side and the king himself in the middle of the line, as Persian custom required. Most of his cavalry he massed on his right, by the sea, where the ground was open.13
Alexander put the Macedonian phalanx in the center, with Parmenion commanding the left and ordered not to lose touch with the sea, so that the Persians could not get around him there. He kept the Companion cavalry with himself on the right, by the foothills. When he saw the Persian horse massing against his left, he sent the Thessalian cavalry over to Parmenion, riding behind the phalanx so that the enemy would not see them move.14
Then Darius waited on the river bank instead of attacking. To Alexander's men, Arrian writes, that was a sign that the king had lost heart.15
The charge at the king
Alexander held his line steady, then led the elite Companion cavalry in a hammer-blow charge on the right, smashing through the Persian left and wheeling in toward Darius himself. As the fighting reached his chariot, the king's nerve broke and he fled the field. The sight of the great king in flight undid the whole Persian army, and it dissolved into rout.16
Elsewhere it was a close-run thing. In the center the phalanx lost its order crossing the river and climbing the steep far bank, and Darius's Greek mercenaries drove into the gaps; Ptolemy son of Seleucus and about 120 Macedonians of note were killed there. On the seaward wing the Persian cavalry crossed the river and fell on the Thessalians in a fierce fight. What saved the Macedonians was their right wing: having routed the Persian left, it wheeled inward and took the mercenaries in the flank.17
The accounts of Darius's flight differ. Arrian says he fled in his chariot as soon as his left wing broke, then abandoned it in rough ground, with his shield, bow and royal mantle, and escaped on horseback. Diodorus describes a desperate fight around the royal chariot, where Darius's brother Oxathres and his best horsemen fought in front of the king until the wounded, panicking horses forced Darius to flee. Either way, once the Persian cavalry by the sea saw that the king had gone, it too broke and fled.18
How many soldiers fought at Issus, and how many died?
Nobody knows exactly. Arrian says Darius had about 600,000 fighting men, and Diodorus gives over 400,000 infantry and 100,000 cavalry, figures modern historians treat as impossible. Alexander's side is better known: Livius.org puts his united army at about 41,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry. Ancient casualty claims are just as lopsided.19
The big numbers come from writers who worked centuries after the battle, from earlier accounts now lost. Arrian's figure of about 600,000 and Diodorus' over 400,000 foot and at least 100,000 horse describe armies that could never have deployed on a plain this narrow. Jona Lendering of Livius.org, reconstructing the march, writes of a Persian army of around 100,000 men, and counts about 41,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry for Alexander once Parmenion's force had rejoined him. Even on that reading the Persians had more men. They simply could not use them.20
The death tolls show the same problem. Arrian puts the Persian dead at about 100,000, more than 10,000 of them cavalry, and repeats Ptolemy's claim that the pursuers crossed a ravine on the bodies of the fallen. Diodorus gives the same order of figures, and Plutarch more than 110,000; on the Macedonian side Diodorus counts only 300 infantry and 150 cavalry killed.21
Arrian gives no total for the Macedonian dead. Alexander himself took a sword wound in the thigh. Plutarch, quoting Alexander's own letter to Antipater, says it did him no serious harm, while the court historian Chares claimed that Darius himself had dealt it. The next day, still wounded, Alexander visited the injured and buried the dead with the whole army drawn up in battle order. The Persian losses were clearly very heavy, but the exact figures deserve the same doubt as the army sizes.22
The spoils of Issus
Darius escaped only because night fell. Alexander pursued while the light lasted, then turned back with the abandoned royal chariot and the king's shield, mantle and bow. The Persian camp had fallen at the first assault, and with it Darius's mother, his wife, his young son and his two daughters.23
That night Alexander heard the women of the royal family mourning in a nearby tent: they had seen the chariot and bow and believed Darius dead. He sent his companion Leonnatus to tell them that the king was alive and that they would keep their royal state. A famous story, which Arrian repeats while doubting it, has Darius's mother bowing the next day to Alexander's friend Hephaestion, taking the taller man for the king; Alexander told her she had made no mistake, for Hephaestion too was Alexander.24
The victory broke Persian power in the west and opened Phoenicia and Egypt, which fell to Alexander over the next two years. Darius offered an alliance and a large ransom for his family; Alexander refused, and the two would meet once more, two years later, at Gaugamela.25
Why was the Battle of Issus important?
Issus was the first time Alexander beat the Persian king in person, and it changed the war. Darius fled and lost his family, his camp and his war chest at Damascus. Alexander could now take the Phoenician ports that sheltered Persia's fleet, and he began to call himself lord of all Asia.26
The war chest mattered more than the camp. Arrian says the Persians had sent most of the royal treasure and baggage ahead to Damascus, so only about 3,000 talents were taken on the battlefield, but Parmenion was sent to Damascus and seized the rest soon after. Strategy mattered too. As Livius.org explains, the one Persian force still able to hurt Alexander was the navy, crewed from Phoenician cities, and the Macedonians had decided to beat it by taking its home ports from the land. After Issus no Persian field army stood between them and that coast.27
Most telling of all is the exchange of letters. While Alexander was at Marathus, envoys from Darius asked for the return of his mother, wife and children and offered friendship and alliance, writing as one king to another. Alexander's reply, as Arrian gives it, refused that equality outright: he called himself lord of all Asia, told Darius to come to him in person to ask for his family, and warned that any future letter must address him as king of Asia.28
From that moment the war could only end with one king. It did, two years later, at Gaugamela. To see where Issus sits among the other clashes of the age, read the greatest battles of ancient Greece or the life of Alexander the Great.
Could you find the Pinarus on a map? Try Where Was It Fought?, then take the Greek battles quiz.
