alexander

14 THE WISDOM OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
To understand what happened next, we must digress
and consider mahouts, sarissas, military police, mounted
archers, and javelin throwers.
As you know, elephants are enormous, intelligent, longlived
mammals. They can be trained, but the trainer has to
form a very special relationship with each animal. These
trainers, with their special bonds to certain elephants, are
called mahouts. At birth, a baby elephant is separated from
its mother. From then on, the mahout provides all the food
that baby elephant receives. He gives the elephant baths,
brushes it, changes the straw in its stable (taking it to the
horse stables), and very soon, certainly within days if not
hours of the animal’s birth, rides it by straddling its neck.
Because elephants lived much longer than people did in Alexander’s
day, mahouts were selected for this lifelong job at
a very young age—typically as young as five. (If the boy
should be killed in the elephant’s youth, the elephant was
usually destroyed because no one else would ever be able to
control the elephant. If the elephant died, the boy could not
be reassigned to a different elephant, unless the boy was still
very young.) At birth, elephants weigh about 250 pounds.
One can picture a five-year-old boy climbing up on the
baby elephant’s neck and riding it. He would steer it by
pulling on its ears. Even as the elephant grew to its 4,000-
to 6,000-pound maturity, the mahout was able to control it
because of their special bond. Each mahout was wedded to
one elephant. Hold this image.
The Greek phalanxes were each equipped with a long,
pike-like object called a sarissa. This pole could be of varying
lengths, such that men, staggered in ranks of eight,