aking. It required a large army to move an enormous distance from its supply bases, through and unfamiliar country, against a power incalculably rich in money and men. Furthermore, Persia was governed by a patriotic and devoted military caste that was egar to show its strength in war. However the enemy had a weakness. The current king, Darius III, had come to the throne through the murder of his predecessor and was highly incompetent._Darius was no leader-in fact, he was not even a brave man. The best of his generals and satraps might have been able to compensate for his shortcomings, but the rigidly structured hierarchy of the Empire did not give them a chance._ Besides the fact that Persia was poorly ruled, Alexander was counting on another shortcoming of the Persian Empire to aide in his conquest. The Persian Empire_s subject were unloyal to and had very little affection towards their ruler(s) and would be unlikely to resist and invading army. In 334 B.C. Alexander crossed the Hellespont. Something that his father had planned but not fully achieved. He defeated the Persian forces that were gathered on the Asian side of the River Granicus. After this victory Alexander sent three hundred suits of Persian armor back to Athens. The message that went with them read, _Alexander, the son of Philip, and the Greeks, except the Spartans, have won this spoil from the barbarians of Asia,_ thus expressing in one brief and self-assured sentence his contempt for the Persians, his even greater contempt for the Spartans, and his conviction that he was furthering a Greek cause. _Of all the generals of the ancient world Alexander was surely the greatest. He possessed an almost clairvoyant insight into strategy and was a consummately resourceful tactician. Alexander could be compared to Napoleon in swiftness and in movement, but Alexander could be patient as well. As he showed in his siege of the fortress of Tyre, which lasted for about seven months. Th...
