Parmenion

Philip II's most senior general, born c. 400 BC, veteran of the campaigns of unification and the Chaeronea command. Commanded the left wing at Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela — the conservative counterweight to Alexander's Companion-cavalry right, the anvil on which Alexander's hammer closed. Aged sixty-four at Gaugamela; his caution increasingly out of step with Alexander's ambition after 331. Left behind at Ecbatana to guard the treasury when Alexander pushed into the eastern satrapies in 330. In autumn 330 his son Philotas, commander of the Companion cavalry, was executed on a conspiracy charge; Alexander then sent riders to Ecbatana with orders that Parmenion — innocent of his son's plot but dangerous as the father of the condemned — be killed, and he was assassinated by the soldiers of his own guard (Arr. *Anab.* 3.26 + Plut. *Alex.* 49). The 'Parmenion dilemma' — the old general's repeated recommendation of prudence that Alexander repeatedly overruled — was already a moralising topos in the Hellenistic biographical tradition.

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