Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (28 page)

Alexander was convinced a local plant was ivy, Dionysus’s symbol.

However, Alexander could be far more myopic. In 332, after the peo-

ple of Tyre had surrendered to him, Alexander expressed his wish to

worship in their temple. The temple was to Melqart, the local equiva-

lent of Heracles, who was one of Alexander’s ancestors. The temple,

then, was not to Heracles but to Melqart, and for Alexander to worship

there was sacrilegious to the Tyrians, who refused, asking him to wor-

ship on the mainland opposite (in antiquity, Tyre was an island). Rather

than recognizing the political advantage he had just gained from the

Tyrians’ surrendering to him (it was essential for him to control Tyre

to prevent the Phoenician navy using it as a base) and accepting the

compromise because of its religious nature, Alexander took the rebuff

as a personal affront. Furious, he gave orders for Tyre to be besieged.

When it fell to him after a difficult and lengthy siege, he put many of its

citizens to death and sold the rest into slavery. As an example to other

places that might defy him, he ordered the crucified bodies of 2,000

Tyrians to be set up along the coastline. This act merely stiffened resis-

tance to him, for the next town he approached, Gaza, refused to open

its gates to him. After a short siege Gaza fell, and Alexander punished

the people harshly, including dragging the garrison commander Batis

behind a chariot around the walls of Gaza until he died.

u

As a king and at times even as a general, Alexander had flaws, but

he was impossible to beat. He was, then, “his own greatest achieve-

ment.”33 However, it is common to transfer his failings as a king and a

man to his plans for the building of a single empire. He did not have a

conscious economic policy, if such a term is not too modern, for the

empire as a whole, although he recognized the economic potential of

132 Worthington

the areas through which he traveled and which he next targeted—one

of the reasons for invading Arabia had to have been its lucrative spice

trade. His continual marching east until his men forced him back leads

one to conclude he knew nothing else but fighting.34 Yet Alexander did

give thought to how he could deal with the problems that faced him

and manage his empire so as to maintain Macedonian rule over it. He

introduced administrative measures to this end, such as streamlining

the satrapal system and creating the office of imperial treasurer. He

involved the powerful Persian aristocratic families, whose support he

needed, in his administration, and he started wearing Persian dress and

the upright tiara (in 330 after Darius III was killed) to endear himself

to the Persians and to offset the threat from Bessus and Artaxerxes V.35

These factors help us to see how Alexander’s exploits more than

two mil ennia ago highlight the dilemma of modern nation building.

It is easy for us to think of ways he could have endeared himself to his

subject peoples more. For example, he could have worked to under-

stand different customs, religious beliefs, and even cultures and main-

tain them on an equal basis with his own. While it was perfectly fine

to expose the Asians to Greek culture, their own culture should not

have been ignored, condemned, or reduced because the Greeks thought

theirs was better (whatever that means). Then again, perhaps to achieve

this “equality” was impossible in the real world. What Alexander did (or

did not do) shows us that the dilemma of Western nation building was

as alive in antiquity as it is now—or conversely, that Alexander’s inherent

problems in nation building set a trend for the centuries that fol owed

and into the modern era that has not yet been reversed.

Thus, to persuade his men to keep marching, to keep conquering,

and thus to keep expanding his empire, Alexander was forced to argue

the benefits that hel enization would bring to the peoples of the former

Persian Empire, as wel as the advantages (economic and otherwise)

that the conquest and maintenance of Asia would bring to Macedon.

These benefits were worth fighting for—and dying for—although the

material benefits of booty would not have been lost on the army. At

the same time, he had to reconcile his rule with the native peoples and

so rule his empire with minimum opposition. These peoples, however,

might be attracted to aspects of his brand of Hel enism, but not at the

Alexander the Great and Empire 133

expense of their own culture and, even more important, their freedom.

Using powerful families in his administration, al owing natives to be sa-

traps, involving natives in his army, and adopting Asian dress were some

of the ways in which Alexander might have appealed to his subjects.

His methods, however, alienated his own men and were transparent

to the locals: no native satrap could have thought for a moment that

nothing had changed from the days of the Great King. The fact that

Macedonians were in charge of the army and treasury in his satrapy

was a daily reminder that a new regime existed. Thanks to the Mace-

donian army’s continued victories, Alexander’s position as Lord of Asia

was as secure as it ever could be. However, the problems increased as he

marched farther eastward, intent on expanding his empire. The intense

fighting in Bactria and Sogdiana was a turning point in Alexander’s re-

lations with his own men, who up to that point had loyally followed

their king. The fighting in these regions and then in India, together

with Alexander’s orientalism, proved too much, as seen in the mutiny

at the Hyphasis. This event marked a decline in Alexander’s control of

Asia as a whole. That military success was the basis of his power, and

not hellenization or empire building, is proved by the revolts of India,

Bactria, and Sogdiana as he left, and by the activities in the west of the

satraps, generals, and imperial treasurer in his absence. And it is signifi-

cant that before the burning of Persepolis, the story goes, Parmenion

warned Alexander about the possible native backlash from the palace’s

destruction. None came, a testimony not so much to the acceptance of

Alexander’s rule as to the military might of the conquering army.

No one wants to be conquered, and in the end, only military power,

not idealism, can maintain a conqueror’s power. Alexander’s empire did

not survive him, but that was probably its fate anyway. He established an

empire that was for a time without paral el, but its very size and cultural

diversity made it impossible for one man or one regime to govern it

effectively. These factors alone led to the failure of his attempts to main-

tain it. At the same time, without Alexander, there would not have been

the great Hel enistic kingdoms and the cultural capitals at Alexandria,

Antioch, and Pergamum. These great centers arose from the spread of

Greek civilization that began with Alexander and continued with the

Hel enistic kings, as shown by the ease with which the Ptolemaic kings

134 Worthington

in Egypt and the Seleucid kings in Syria, whose dynasties were founded

by Alexander’s generals in the disintegration of his empire, were able to

attract Greeks from the west to live and work in their empires.

Further Reading

Dozens of accounts of Alexander’s reign were written during and shortly after his life-

time (the so-called primary sources), but only fragments of these survive. The extant

narrative histories of Alexander’s reign that we have (the secondary sources) were writ-

ten centuries after his death, beginning with Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC,

Quintus Curtius Rufus sometime in the mid- to later first century AD, Arrian in the

second century AD, and Justin’s epitome of an earlier work by Pompeius Trogus (now

lost), which he copied in either the second or the third century AD. Of these, Arrian

is commonly accepted as the most reliable source, principally because of his critical

and balanced approach to the primary sources and his reliance on the eyewitness ac-

count of Ptolemy. To these later sources may be added the biography of Alexander by

Plutarch (second century AD) and his treatise
On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander
,

though this is a rhetorical, not historical, work. Ian Worthington,
Alexander the Great:

A Reader
(London: Routledge, 2003), includes a wide selection of translated primary

sources, and Waldemar Heckel and J. Yardley,
Alexander the Great: Historical Sources in

Translation
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), contains a selection of mostly secondary

sources in translation.

There is an abundance of modern books about Alexander, from scholarly biogra-

phies to glossy coffee-table ones. Michael Wood’s
In the Footsteps of Alexander
(Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) is recommended as a general

introduction to Alexander and especially for its photographs of the areas through

which he marched since Wood himself followed his route. More recent biographies

that can be singled out include Peter Green,
Alexander of Macedon 356–323 b.c.: A Histori-

cal Biography
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974); Robin Lane Fox,
Alexander the Great

(London: Penguin, 1973); A. B. Bosworth’s
Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander

the Great
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), the best scholarly biography,

together with his
Alexander and the East
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Major

General J.F.C. Fuller,
The Generalship of Alexander the Great
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rut-

gers University Press, 1960); N.G.L. Hammond,
Alexander the Great
:
King, Commander

and Statesman
(Bristol: Bristol Press, 1989), to be preferred over his later
The Genius of

Alexander the Great
(London: Duckworth, 1997); Paul Cartledge,
Alexander the Great:

The Hunt for a New Past
(London: Routledge, 2003); and Ian Worthington,
Alexander

the Great: Man and God
, rev. ed. (London: Pearson, 2004). Some collections of scholarly

articles that deal with different aspects of Alexander’s reign are A. B. Bosworth and E. J.

Baynham, eds.,
Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2000); Guy T. Griffith, ed.,
Alexander the Great: The Main Problems
(Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1966); Joseph Roisman, ed.,
Brill’s Companion to Alexander the

Great
(Leiden: Brill, 2003); Waldemar Heckel and Lawrence A. Tritle, eds.,
Crossroads of

History: The Age of Alexander
(Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2003); and Worthington,

Alexander the Great and Empire 135

Alexander the Great: A Reader
. For the Persian Empire, the best book is still Pierre Briant,

From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire
, trans. Peter D. Daniels (Winona

Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002).

notes

1 Diodorus 17.17.2; Justin 11.5.10.

2 On Philip’s army reforms, see Ian Worthington,
Philip II of Macedonia
(New Ha-

ven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 26–32; on Alexander’s army, see A .B. Bosworth,

Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1988), 266–77.

3 Aristobulus,
FGrH
139 F7 (Arrian 2.3.7); Plutarch
Alexander
18.4.

4 Cf. Plutarch
Alexander
27.3–6.

5 Diodorus 17.70.

6 Plutarch
Alexander
38.6–7.

7 Q. Curtius Rufus 6.2.15–16.

8 Note Arrian 3.3.2 implies that Alexander made the long and arduous trek to Siwah

in Egypt to emulate his ancestors Perseus and Heracles.

9 Diodorus 17.77.7; Q. Curtius Rufus 6.6.9–12.

10 For a reappraisal of Darius, see Ernst Badian, “Darius III,”
HSCP
100 (2000): 241–68.

11 See Ernst Badian, “The Administration of the Empire,”
G&R
2 12 (1965): 166–82,

and W. E. Higgins, “Aspects of Alexander’s Imperial Administration: Some Modern

Methods and Views Reviewed,”
Athenaeum
58 (1980): 29–52.

12 On Alexander’s satrapal appointments and arrangements, see in more detail

Bosworth,
Conquest and Empire
, 229–41, and Badian, “Administration of the Empire,”

166–82. On the Indian arrangements, see A. B. Bosworth, “The Indian Satrapies under

Alexander the Great,”
Antichthon
17 (1983): 37–46.

13 Arrian 1.23.6.

14 Arrian 6.30.2–3.

15 On Alexander’s financial administration, see in more detail Bosworth,
Conquest

and Empire
, 241–45.

16 Arrian 4.22.3.

17 Diodorus 18.4.4.

18 Cf. Diodorus 17.111.6.

19 On Alexander’s cities, see P. M. Fraser,
Cities of Alexander the Great
(Oxford: Ox-

ford University Press, 1996), who argues that excluding Alexandria in Egypt, Alexander