STORMING OF CYROPOLIS.—REVOLT OF THE SCYTHIANS.
Having thus captured the five cities and reduced them to slavery in two
days,[516] he went to Cyropolis, the largest city in the country. It
was fortified with a wall higher than those of the others, as it had
been founded by Cyrus. The majority of the barbarians of this district,
and at the same time the most warlike of them, had fled for refuge
thither, and consequently it was not possible for the Macedonians
to capture it so easily at the first assault. Wherefore Alexander
brought his military engines up to the wall with the determination
of battering it down in this way, and of making assaults wherever
breaches might be made in it. When he observed that the channel of the
river, which flows through the city when it is swollen by the winter
rains, was at that time nearly dry and did not reach up to the wall,
and would thus afford his soldiers a passage by which to penetrate
into the city, he took the body-guards, the shield-bearing guards,
the archers, and Agrianians, and made his way secretly into the city
along the channel, at first with a few men, while the barbarians had
turned their attention towards the military engines and those who were
assailing them in that quarter. Having from within broken open the
gates which were opposite this position, he gave an easy admittance to
the rest of his soldiers. Then the barbarians, though they perceived
that their city was already in the hands of the enemy, nevertheless
turned against Alexander and his men and made a desperate assault upon
them, in which Alexander himself received a violent blow on the head
and neck with a stone, and Craterus was wounded with an arrow, as were
also many other officers. Notwithstanding this, however, they drove
the barbarians out of the market-place. Meantime, those who had made
the assault upon the wall, took it, as it was now void of defenders.
In the first capture of the city about 8,000 of the enemy were killed.
The rest fled for refuge into the citadel; for 15,000 warriors in all
had gathered together in the city. Alexander encamped around these
and besieged them for one day,[517] and then they surrendered through
lack of water. The seventh city he took at the first assault. Ptolemy
says that the men in it surrendered; but Aristobulus asserts that this
city was also taken by storm, and that he slew all who were captured
therein. Ptolemy also says that he distributed the men among the army
and ordered that they should be kept guarded in chains until he should
depart from the country, so that none of those who had effected the
revolt should be left behind. Meantime an army of the Asiatic Scythians
arrived at the bank of the river Tanais, because most of them had heard
that some of the barbarians on the opposite side of the river had
revolted from Alexander. They intended to attack the Macedonians, if
any revolutionary movement worthy of consideration were effected. News
was also brought that Spitamenes was besieging the men who had been
left in the citadel at Maracanda. Against him Alexander then despatched
Andromachus, Menedemus, and Caranus with sixty of the Companion
cavalry, 800 of the mercenary cavalry under the command of Caranus,
and 1,500 mercenary infantry. Over them he placed Pharnuches the
interpreter, who, though by birth a Lycian, was skilled in the language
of the barbarians of this country, and in other respects appeared
clever in dealing with them.