Issus 333 BC: Outflanked Alexander Gives Up the Chase to Save His Army

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In 333 BC a 23-year-old Alexander was marching down the coast of Asia Minor, taking ports like Miletus and Halicarnassus to strip the superior Persian navy of its harbors. Waiting near Myriandus for Darius III to come through the Belen Pass, he was blindsided: Darius took the northern Amanic Gate, slipped behind the mountains, seized Issus, cut Alexander's supply lines, and mutilated the sick and wounded Macedonians left there. Alexander turned north to fight on ground he had not chosen, a coastal plain by the Pinarus River only about 2.6 kilometers wide between the Gulf of Issus and the mountains.

Modern estimates put Darius at about 100,000 men against Alexander's 40,000, but the narrow frontage cancelled most of that edge. Crossing the river and climbing staked banks, the phalanx lost cohesion, Darius's Greek mercenaries cut into the gaps, and 120 Macedonian officers fell. Alexander broke the Persian left with his hypaspists and then drove a Companion cavalry wedge at Darius, who fled in his chariot. With Parmenion's wing near collapse, Alexander turned back and struck the mercenaries from behind, and the Persian army routed. Darius left behind his mother Sisygambis, his wife Stateira and two daughters, whom Alexander treated with royal respect.

• Ptolemy, who rode in the pursuit, recorded that the victors crossed a ravine filled with the bodies of the dead.
• Ancient writers credited Darius with up to 600,000 men, a figure modern historians reject as impossible to supply.
• Curtius points to a theory that Alexander, advised by Parmenion, deliberately baited Darius into the coastal bottleneck.
• Darius fortified the Pinarus banks with stakes and earthworks and set his line in the shape of the Greek letter gamma.
• Alexander, educated by Aristotle, later married one of Darius's captured daughters.