In October 332BC, a city on the rim of the Mediterranean was under siege. This city, Gaza, was the final stronghold standing between the army of Alexander the Great and entry into Egypt.
During that siege, Gaza fell. Alexander captured the Gazan leader, Batis, forced a rope through a gash in his ankles and dragged the body behind his chariot beneath the city walls until Batis died — in imitation of Achilles’s mutilation of Hector’s corpse outside Troy in Homer’s Iliad.
Two millennia on, a different siege is under way. Inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, encompassing the city of Gaza and smaller towns to the south, are no strangers to violence and sorrow. But this month’s retaliatory bombing raids, after Hamas’s terrorist attacks
