“In the battles of the classical age the duties of the general and the subaltern coincided, and in consequence the personal leadership of the general-in-chief was of paramount importance. When Alexander took the field, he was both the thinking and fighting head of the army. In battle he invariably set his men an example of supreme personal bravery; on the line of march there was no toil that he did not share with them; in his sieges he laboured with them, and it was his presence among them that fired their imagination and awoke in them the mystical faith that led them to accept without question that there was nothing he would not dare, and nothing he could not do -- to them, as to the priestess of Delphi, he was ΑΝΙΚΗΤΟΣ -- the Invincible ...
Whether on the battlefield or in camp, Alexander dominated his companions. Through his overmastering personality and his genius for war he won their trust and devotion, and many of them were outstanding personalities, among whom Cassander was not the least. When it is remembered that the Macedonians were a truculent and semi-barbaric people, not a few of whose kings had perished by the knight, it redounds to Alexander’s leadership that, in spite of his pro-Persian policy, which was so deeply resented by Philip’s old veterans, he was able to carry out his conquests with so few internal dissensions as those recorded.
To his men he was not only their king but their comrade in arms, and on the battlefield one of them. Their devotion to him and reliance on him are touchingly described by Arrian in the scene which followed his wounding in the assault on the Mallian citadel. His extreme heroism, coupled with the hesitation o this men to mount the wall, must have awakened in them a sense of guilt and rage, which is to be seen in their indiscriminate slaughter of the unfortunate Malli and Oxydracae ...
This devotion was roused, not only by his heroism, but also by his daily concern for their welfare and happiness, and because of his deep understanding of how to stir their hearts ...
What appealed to his men probably more than anything else, were his unexpected kindness toward them; such as when, after the capture of Halicarnassus, he sent his newly married men home to spend the winter with their families; the care with which he prepared the return journey of his Thessalians from Ecbatana; and when after the great reconciliation at Opis he not only rewarded his departing veternas in a princely way, but ‘also ordained that the orphan children of those who had lost their lives in his service should receive their father’s pay’.
He never asked his men to do what he would not do himself ...
... Incidents such as these bound his men to him with invisible and unbreakable moral ties. They endowed them with particles of his invincible will, and, under his leadership, they obliterated dangers, smoothed away adversities, and enabled him to lead them to what for them appeared to be the ends of the world.”
- J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great
