u/Last_Adhesiveness530

By the winter of 330 BCE, Alexander had already shattered the main Achaemenid field army at Gaugamela and taken Susa. Darius III was still alive and still trying to save his empire: he had withdrawn east, hoping to raise another army in the eastern satrapies. That made the task before Ariobarzanes, satrap of Persis, brutally clear: delay Alexander for as long as possible and protect the Persian heartland while the king was gathering forces.

Alexander chose the shorter and harder route into Persis, through the Persian Gate, a mountain defile in the Zagros. The pass is generally identified with a narrow gorge flanked by steep parallel ridges, reached only after marching through a broader valley. It was only a couple of meters wide at one point, one reconstruction notes an icy brook, slippery ground, and steep slopes from which defenders could strike from above.

Seeing no resistance at the earlier approaches, Alexander seems to have assumed that no serious enemy force remained ahead of him. According to Livius’ reconstruction of the ancient tradition, he failed to send scouts into the pass and marched straight into Ariobarzanes’ trap. The Macedonians even saw people on the heights and assumed they were refugees.

The size of Ariobarzanes’ force is one of the battle’s major uncertainties. Ancient writers give him anything from 25,000 to 40,000 infantry and several hundred cavalry, but modern scholarship is much more skeptical. They argue that these numbers are inflated and that his true force may have been far smaller, perhaps only around 700 to a few thousand men.

Ariobarzanes blocked the pass with a barrier, prepared forward positions, and let Alexander march deep enough into the narrowing gorge before striking. Then the Persians turned the pass into a killing zone. From the steep slopes above, they hurled javelins and rocks onto the Macedonians, who could neither deploy properly nor answer effectively. Alexander’s first assault failed, and he had to retreat with heavy losses.

Ariobarzanes held the pass for a month, but Alexander succeeded in encircling the Persians in a pincer attack with Ptolemy and Perdiccas and broke through the Persian defenses. Alexander and his elite contingent then attacked Ariobarzanes from above in a surprise attack until the Persians could no longer block the pass. Accounts of how he did so vary widely. Curtius and Arrian both report that prisoners of war led Alexander through the mountains to the rear of the Persian position, while a token force remained in the Macedonian camp under the command of Craterus. Although precise figures are unavailable, some historians say that this engagement cost Alexander his greatest losses in the Persian campaign.

"[The Persians]...Fought a memorable fight... Unarmed as they were, they seized the armed men in their embrace, and dragging them down to the ground... Stabbed most of them with their own weapons."

The last stand is told in different ways. According to some accounts, Ariobarzanes and his surviving companions were trapped, but rather than surrender, they charged straight into the Macedonian lines. One account states that Ariobarzanes was killed in the last charge, while Arrian's version reports that Ariobarzanes escaped to the north, where he finally surrendered to Alexander with his companions.

Modern historian J. Prevas maintains that Ariobarzanes and his forces retreated to Persepolis, where they found the city gates closed by Tiridates, a Persian noble and guardian of the royal treasury under Darius III, who had been in secret contact with Alexander the Great. Tiridates considered resisting Alexander's forces to be futile, and so allowed Alexander to massacre Ariobarzanes and his troops right outside the city walls rather than fight.

This is in agreement with Curtius' account which states that the Persian force, after both inflicting and suffering heavy casualties in the ensuing battle, broke through the Macedonian forces and retreated to Persepolis, but were denied entrance into the capital, at which point they returned to fight Alexander's army to the death.

Upon his arrival at the city of Persepolis Alexander seized the treasury of Persepolis, which at the time held the largest concentration of wealth in the world, and guaranteed himself financial independence from the Greek states. Four months later, Alexander allowed the troops to loot Persepolis, kill all its men and enslave all its women. This destruction of the city can be viewed as unusual, as its inhabitants had surrendered without a fight and Alexander had earlier left Persian cities he conquered, such as Susa, relatively untouched.

Similarities between the battle fought at Thermopylae and the Persian Gates have been recognized by ancient and modern authors. The Persian Gates played the role "of a Persian Thermopylae and like Thermopylae it fell." The Battle of the Persian Gates served as a kind of reversal of the Battle of Thermopylae, fought in Greece in 480 BC in an attempt to hold off the invading Persian forces. Here, on Alexander's campaign to avenge the Persian invasion of Greece, he faced the same situation from the Persians. There are also accounts that an Iranian shepherd led Alexander's forces around the Persian defenses, just as a local Greek showed the Persian forces a secret path around the pass at Thermopylae.

During World War II, the USSR’s formal head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, had so little real power that he was not even a member of the State Defense Committee, the emergency body that concentrated full state authority in its hands and actually ran the Soviet war effort. His wife, Yekaterina Kalinina, spent most of the war in the Gulag. According to later Soviet reporting, Kalinin repeatedly pleaded with Stalin to release her, but she was freed only in December 1945, after the war.

The irony is that Kalinin, a largely ceremonial Soviet head of state, ended up giving his name to one of Russia’s most strategically important territories: Königsberg, the former German city on the Baltic, was renamed Kaliningrad on 4 July 1946, shortly after his death. Tver, the major city in his home region, had already been renamed Kalinin in 1931, but got its old name back in 1990.