In military history there are often cases of armies that, harassed during their retreats, end up being decimated or even exterminated completely. The cases of the British who left Kabul or the Grand Armée returning from Russia are famous. But there is one little-known one that is somewhat surprising because it was suffered by a general of Alexander the Great, in what could be considered the only disaster of the otherwise almost invincible Macedonian army. His name was Zopirion.
Except that he lived and died in the fourth century BC, not much is known about him; neither place nor date of birth nor subsequent evolution until he enters history when appointed by Alexander as governor of a territory around the Black Sea.
Which? Quintus Curtius Rufus, a Roman historian of the 1st century AD, calls it Thraciae praepositus (Thrace was equivalent to what would today be northeastern Greece, southern Bulgaria, and the European part of Turkey), but another Roman chronicler, Justin, refers to him as prefect of Pontus (an ancient Persian satrapy of northeastern Cappadocia later converted into in reign by Mithridates I).
In any case, from the available sources it is deduced that being in that position he wanted to make merits, so he planned the invasion of Scythia. In fact, it is not known whether this plan was due to an order from Alejandro or was of your own accord . The aforementioned Rufo says verbatim that he started it "thinking that if he didn't try, he would be stigmatized as indolent" . Therefore, he seems to lean towards personal initiative.
Not much more is known about him, since the work in which Rufo recounts his adventure, Historiae Alexandri Magni Macedoni (Stories of Alexander the Great of Macedonia), logically focuses on the figure of the famous conqueror and is also incomplete, since two of the ten volumes that made it up have been lost and the rest are empty. Luckily, the story begins in 333 BC, when Philip's son is already in Asia Minor, taking Celenas and entering Gordion (where the famous legend of the Gordian knot is set). Something similar happens with other sources; the leading role was for Alexander.
In the year 331 B.C., after the bulk of the Macedonian army had defeated the Persian army of Darius III at Gaugamela, entering Babylon and thus completely opening the gates of the Persian Empire, whose ancient capital, Susa, was devastated, Zopirion did not want to remain. inactive. The successes of his companions made him set his sights on the lands of the neighboring Scythians. They were a group of nomadic peoples, of Iranian origin, that Herodotus cites for the first time in his Nine books of history , including among them the aucatas, catíaros, traspis and pariálatas, although no other author names them.
They inhabited a vast region of the western Eurasian steppe stretching from the Danube to the lower Don basin. It was what the Greeks knew as Great Scythia to distinguish it from Scythia Minor, present-day Romania and Bulgaria. Darius I tried to subdue them in 514 BC. but he failed because he was met with an unexpected and disconcerting tactic:the enemy merely allowed the Persians to roam their lands, aimlessly as there were no cities, but attacked sporadically. Since the Scythians were all fighting on horseback, unleashing massive volleys of arrows and then retreating as quickly as they had come, Darius's army reached the Volga without achieving anything practical.
At the beginning of the 4th century BC, the Scythians were at their peak, both politically and culturally and economically, to the point that many had become sedentary, dedicating themselves to agriculture. They were the ones who formed a kingdom north of the Sea of Azov with its capital in the place known to the Greeks as Panticapea, on what is now the Crimean peninsula, where there was also a Hellenic colony. According to Strabo, it was King Ateas who unified the tribes and expanded his domains to Thrace, which caused him to clash with Philip II (Alexander's father), who fought them in 339 BC, managing to kill Ateas.
This dissolved the incipient Scythian empire and moved them away from the Balkans, in parallel with the pressure they were beginning to suffer from the west by the Sarmatians. The adverse stage they were going through was, without a doubt, a spur to the ambition of Zopirión, who gathered thirty thousand men for his campaign. With them he skirted the Pontus Euxine (Greek name for the Black Sea) and near the Crimea laid siege to Olbia, which was a colony of Miletus and lived in its heyday, with about forty thousand inhabitants. The problem was that the metropolis had fallen into Macedonian hands in 334 BC, so no help could be expected from it. Therefore, Olbia had to adopt drastic measures.
According to the Roman Macrobius in his work Saturnal is, the authorities “freed their slaves, granted citizenship rights to foreigners, issued bills of exchange, and thus managed to survive the siege «. These were things that the Greek polis used to do in extreme circumstances like these but, in fact, they did something else:sign an alliance with the Scythians. They did not choose them because yes; most of the inhabitants of the city and its surroundings came precisely from that town.
Zopirión awaited the arrival of reinforcements by sea but, according to Rufo, a strong storm arose that sank the fleet, so, deprived of troops and resources to continue the siege of Olbia and the campaign itself, he had to give up his plan, undertaking the return. It was during that long road that his army had to be harassed again and again by Scythian attacks, which would follow their characteristic tactic, already successfully tested against the Persians as we have seen:avoid direct shock in favor of quick blows, taking advantage of the fact that the enemy he was not in combat formation but marching.
In this way, the Macedonian column would have been seeing its ranks diminished little by little, without ever being able to organize a defense. In reality, the development is conditional because it is mere speculation; There is no account of those combats. It is only known that the survivors reached the Danube, leaving the Scythians behind but to find that new enemies awaited them:the Getae and the Triballians.
The first constituted a Thracian tribe (see the first map) that had been conquered by Alexander, who, according to the Anábasis of Arriano, after overwhelmingly defeating them in battle, razed his capital. The latter, who were also Thracians, had demanded from Philip the payment of a right of passage through his lands when he was returning from his campaign against the Scythians in 339, which led to war; Filipo almost lost his life but managed to prevail and five years later, when he died and Tribalia took the opportunity to rebel, Alexander repressed them extremely harshly.
The Thracians therefore had every reason to want revenge on the Macedonians, and they found the perfect opportunity when Zopirion appeared with the remnants of his battered army. It was the winter of 331 BC. and the general perished with all his men in some unspecified place on the steppes of Bessarabia. Antipater sent three letters to Alexander; in one he gave her the good news of the victory over Sparta at Megalopolis, including the death of King Agis III; in another it informed him of the death of his uncle (Olimpia's younger brother), Alexander the Molossian , king of Epirus, during an expedition to Magna Graecia (Italy) in aid of the Greek colony of Taranto. The third letter recounted the tragic fate of Zopirión. According to Rufo:
However, in his Epítome de Pompeyo Trogo's "Philippic Histories" , the Roman historian Justin (six centuries later) tells that Alexander seemed to give more importance to the previous news:
However, he ordered three days of mourning for the death of his relative. Two years later, Alexander reached the Jaxartes River (present-day Sir Darya, which runs through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan, flowing into the Aral Sea), where the Scythians awaited him, eager to avenge Ateas's death. They positioned themselves on the north bank, trying to surprise him as he crossed the river. But the Macedonian provoked them with his cavalry and when he had them entertained and fixed, he sent the phalanxes to bar their way. Caught in a trap, they were massacred by Cretan archers, and more than a thousand died while the Macedonians plundered eighteen hundred horses.
That battle was a morale booster because until then only Philip had managed to defeat a nomadic army. In truth, Alexander had no interest in Scythia, so he released the prisoners without ransom and continued his campaign southward, thus securing his rear and putting what had been Macedon's only major defeat to date into semi-forgetfulness. moment.