"This semi-famous battle, the first of Alexander's victories in his conquest of the Persian Empire, has interested me because there is controversy about what really happened. And, as any of you who have followed my blog have by now realized, I love the iconoclastic. History is full of "accepted truths". And the more old the history, the more fuzzy those truths become. Like so many accepted truths of the military genius of Frederick the Great or Napoleon or Stonewall Jackson, most accepted truths are the fossilized remains of self-serving propaganda. So, I believe, is the accepted truth of this battle.
Classical historians as well as modern ones disagree about what really happened at this first battle in the new king's conquest of the Persian empire. Some modern historians simply take the predominant narrative of the Greco-Roman historians, Arrian (86-160 AD) and Plutarch (46-120 AD), as fact, based as they were on Alexander's contemporary chronicler, Ptolemy, or his official scribe, Callisthenes, whose own writings have been conveniently lost (eaten by Arrian's dog apparently). Others have drawn on Diodorus Siculus's history ((90-30 BCE), which differs from the others in key details. But others (notably Peter Green in his book Alexander of Macedon) suspect a lot of these ancient accounts were left-over, Hellenistic propaganda, and that the truth lies somewhere in between.
So, as with my other posts on semi-obscure battles (and, I know, I know, to you classical scholars and hobbyists,The Granicus is not obscure at all), the obscurity will be in my idiomatic take on this ancient battle. I approach the subject with logic, i.e. what makes sense, and not a partisan adherence to one point of view or another. In so doing, I have found myself seeing the sense of Peter Green's synthetic conclusions about what probably, actually happened…"
Much more here
obscurebattles.blogspot.com
Amicalement
Armand
paints a legend from the Trojan Wars.
