A History of the World (19 page)

For whatever reason, Philip was hostile to Olympias, and in order to isolate her he decided to marry his daughter (by another wife) to Olympias’ older brother, the King of Lydia. Dynastically, this would cut Alexander out of the succession. But it is rarely a good idea to infuriate a Greek wife, or ex-wife. As he was preparing for his daughter’s wedding, Philip was murdered by one of his own bodyguard. Many thought Olympias was behind it, avenging herself on her
husband and helping ensure her son’s succession.
³²
After a bloodthirsty family struggle Alexander did succeed, inheriting a superb army and a feud with a Persian empire, already racked by its own dynastic troubles.

He was only twenty years old when he came to the throne, long-haired, clean-shaven and with a mesmeric gaze, but apparently rather short. He had been helping his father rule, and fighting in battles, since he was sixteen. Aged thirteen, he had been given his famous black horse Bucephalus, after mastering the seemingly untamable stallion. As a teenager he fell in love with his male lover Hephaestion, who like Bucephalus would remain with him for most of his short life. His father’s entourage was usefully mixed. With Greece at Philip’s feet, the Macedonian court attracted great writers and artists, including the playwright Euripides and the painter Apelles, as well as musicians and philosophers. But Alexander also grew up with the sons of the rougher Macedonian nobility, who were living at his father’s court as pages and hostages.

His obsession with the East started then, among exiled Persians and travel stories. Herodotus taught him, amongst other things, about the interesting habits of the Medes, Persians and Egyptians. Homer taught him the cult of single combat and glory-searching and shared with him his belief that the Trojans, those wily old Asians, were admirable in their way. As already noted, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle himself, who was well paid to educate the prince in natural philosophy, politics and government. All this adds up to the most impressive education of any prince we know of in the ancient world – laid out before him were the martial inspiration of Homer, the tough world of Macedon, the best of Greek thought and curiosity and a ready openness to Asia. It made of Alexander a man ready to reach from one world deep into another, taking those territories in his hands in a mighty effort to bring them all together.

His father’s army lived off the land, eschewed luxury, could cover thirty miles in a day, and was supported by siege engines, archers and javelin-throwers. These were the men who would power across Asia and into India, some of them, tough as old buzzards, fighting well into their sixties. Alexander’s conquests offer us one of the ancient world’s most jaw-dropping epics. After putting down local rebellions in Greece – once-mighty Athens did not even try to fight, but immediately sued
for peace – he took his forces to war against the last of the Persian empire’s Kings of Kings, Darius III, who initially ignored this impudent boy’s invasion.

Winning his first victories in what is now Turkey, near Troy, Alexander found many cities coming over to him; and copying the old Persian habit, he left them effectively to run themselves, so long as tribute was paid. At Issus in 333
BC
he defeated a Persian army led by Darius in person, who fled leaving both his crown and his wife on the battlefield. Sieges of the great trading cities Tyre and Acre followed, before Alexander was welcomed as a liberator by the Egyptians, who made him pharaoh and named him an incarnation of their gods Ra and Osiris. He swept on into Mesopotamia for his greatest victory, at the battle of Gaugamela, where he shattered the much larger army of Darius, after which he pursued the Persian emperor, who in the end was assassinated by his own soldiers.

Alexander declared himself King of Kings and ruler of Persia. He went on to seize Babylon and, after a rare reverse in a Persian ambush, took the great city of Persepolis, which was badly burned in the process.

Cleitus, a general who had saved Alexander’s life in an earlier battle, hacking off the arm of a Persian about to kill the king, in 328 became embroiled in a drunken argument with him during a conference of generals at Samarkand. (The Macedonians drank their wine undiluted, everyone present at the conference was intoxicated, and probably frustrated by a slow campaign.) Cleitus told Alexander to his face that his father Philip had been the greater king, and in the ensuing scuffle an enraged Alexander killed him with a spear. Alexander is said to have been distraught. Later writers portrayed Cleitus as a man speaking truth to power, an honest old fighter who realized his king’s head had become impossibly swollen. Certainly, by now there were clear signs that Alexander, never modest, had become drunk not only on his unwatered wine but on his astonishing succession of victories. Declared master of the world by the Egyptians, he took to claiming that his real father had been a godlike mix of the Greek Zeus and the Egyptian Ammon.

But he had a problem. He had been
too
successful. His Macedonians were a small minority of the combined forces he now commanded, and a tiny minority of the people he had conquered. He
needed the respect of his new Asian subjects, even if it meant offending Greek sensibilities. So he adopted Persian dress, and allowed the custom of being greeted with a kiss of obeisance, which was considered respectful by Persians and Medes but hopelessly decadent by Greeks. Alexander was now claiming to be a god, they murmured. He chose a wife, Roxana, from among the Sogdian people, east Iranians in what is now part of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, marrying her at a grand ceremony. This may have been shrewd politics, or lust, or even love. Alexander certainly began to try to meld the Macedonian Greeks and Asians together, in the manner of a true world emperor. He ordered thirty thousand Asian boys to be trained as Greek-style fighters, and gave his lover Hephaestion a Persian title and position.

According to the Greek-Roman historian Arrian, who wrote the most complete surviving life of Alexander, he also organized a remarkable mass wedding between Greeks and Persians at the old capital of Susa. He himself now also married the eldest daughter of Darius and gave her sister to Hephaestion, so their children would be cousins; to another eighty of his crack Macedonian ‘companions’ he gave wives from the Persian and Median nobility in a group ceremony that sounds like a multiple wedding of the kind later favoured by the Moonie Unification Church. Arrian says:

He also ordered that the names of another ten thousand Macedonians who had married Asiatic women should be registered. It was an astonishing experiment in cultural mixing – as if Queen Victoria had ordered her English, Irish and Scottish troops to take Hindu and Muslim brides, or as if General Custer instead of fighting at Big Horn had tried to mate the US Cavalry with Sioux squaws. Sadly, it seems, few of the marriages lasted very long, though Alexander’s successors after the break-up of his empire did put down roots across parts of
Asia, allowing a new form of Greekness to spread far beyond the Mediterranean.

Further battles had preceded this, as Alexander led his armies into what is now Pakistan and India, where they fought their first war elephants. His horse Bucephalus was killed east of the Indus, and his lover Hephaestion died soon afterwards; grief, wounds and the effects of heavy drinking began to wear Alexander down. His troops, on the far side of the known world, had had enough, and they eventually mutinied at the prospect of further advances against Indian rulers. They demanded to return home. Even Alexander could not resist. He pulled back, returning eventually to Babylon, where he raised a funeral pyre to Hephaestion. Now in charge of a vast spread of the world’s surface, stretching from the Himalayas to the Balkans, he planned new campaigns, into Arabia, then along the African coast and into Italy. Had he lived, he might even have snuffed out an obscure but stroppy and ambitious city called Rome. Some say he was poisoned. More likely he caught a bug, perhaps typhoid fever; but in June 323, aged thirty-three, Alexander died in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace.

His astonishing life makes the case for war, and the case against it. Inspired by Greek culture and greedily curious about the world of the Persians and Indians, he acted as a kind of giant bloody cultural whisk. The Greek world would now have huge influence in Asia Minor, Egypt, and deep into Mesopotamia. A rash of new Greek-style cities were founded, even though Alexander’s empire had lasted for a hummingbird’s wingbeat. His generals divided most of the classical world between them, and a new period of Greek, or Hellenistic, culture flowered. Philosophers opened new schools, sculptors and painters found work in new places, and something like a common language began to spread.

Yet the slaughters, the mass deportations and burnings that Alexander was also responsible for did not produce a stable or attractive political system. He had spread the look of classical Greece, but not its essence. He could never have done so, because its essence was independent-minded and civic. It was bottom-up, not top-down. Democracy cannot be imposed with spears (or guns). Alexander’s was an imperial vision spanning many cultures, but his huge military success merely pushed the Mediterranean back to a world of kings and emperors, local tyrants and neighbourhood dynasties. It is possible
that the reader may think of later parallels. Alexander smoothed the ground for the Roman invaders – at least, the Roman emperors thought so. Inspired by Homer’s heroes, and irresistibly heroic himself, he showed the limits of what heroes can do. Alexander was the gravedigger of the great Greek experiment, never its champion.

From 300
BC
to around
AD
600: Classical Empires in China, India and Europe and Their Confrontation with New Religions

By the time of Jesus’s birth, around half the human beings alive on the planet lived under one of two great empires. Even if many of them were barely aware of the fact – for the peasants and farmers far from great cities heard about the outside world rarely and only in garbled form – this was a new thing in world history. It would never happen again. Rome and Han China emerged at roughly the same time and ruled over roughly the same number of people – 45 million in the case of Rome at its imperial peak, 57.6 million according to a Han tax census. Both covered roughly the same amount of territory, some four million square kilometres, though one was based on the edges of an inland sea, and the other on vast plains intersected by rivers. Their armies, marching in disciplined formations with uniform armour and weapons, chariots and cavalry, looked similar too.

Romans revered their household gods and their ancestors; so did the Chinese. But they were both practical, down-to-earth cultures. Each regarded themselves as more serious, disciplined and civilized than any possible rival. The Roman emperors claimed to rule
orbis terrarum
, ‘the whole world’. Their Chinese rivals ruled the empire of ‘all under heaven’. Roman emperors claimed divinity, posing as gods answerable only to Jupiter. Chinese emperors claimed a similar semi-divine status. The Romans built awe-inspiring walls to keep out the barbarians, and so did the Chinese. The Romans had their arrow-straight roads, the Chinese their long straight canals. Their empires were even divided into around the same number of administrative units. Their troops were urged on with very practical benefits – the Chinese won money and extra status for every severed enemy head they presented after battle, while valorous Romans could win land at home.

The Roman Empire had been made possible by one rising power on the edge of the Mediterranean world defeating its squabbling
rivals; Han ascendancy was based on the final resolution of war between seven states, imposed by one from the margins. They knew little of each other, these Romans and Chinese. They were some 4,500 miles apart, separated by baking deserts and mountain ranges; the sea route was two thousand miles longer than that.
¹
Yet their empires almost touched fingers. There seems to have been a confused Chinese notion of an alternative, possibly mythical, other China somewhere in the far west, while the Roman word
Seres
may refer to the Chinese.

In
AD
97 a Chinese general, Ban Chao, tried to send an envoy to Rome to suggest a joint pincer movement against the Parthians, who with their brilliant cavalry were causing equal pain to both empires. The envoy never made it through to the emperor Trajan. It was just too far. He gave up and turned back. Thus, one of the great ‘what ifs’ was lost at some dusty way-station east of Egypt.
²
The envoy, Gan Ying, did, however, pick up rumours about the Romans, reporting back that they had more than four hundred walled towns and a capital city near the mouth of a river; that they were ‘tall and honest’ and that they selected kings from the worthiest men who, if calamity came, would accept demotion without getting angry.
³
Gan Ying said the Roman ‘king’ had thirty-six leaders with whom he discussed events of the day, and that he took petitions from the common people. This was true; there is some vague impression of the Senate conveyed here, and it is clear that the notion of politics, involving losers and winners, was unfamiliar and interesting to the Chinese.

And that was not the only fascinating thing about the Romans. Gan Ying was particularly excited to report that they were amazing conjurors who could produce fire from their mouths and juggle twelve balls at a time.