The Classical World (35 page)

Aristotle, Alexander’s tutor, had believed that the edge of the world lay just beyond the Hindu Kush mountains. In the pouring rains of a monsoon, Alexander’s troops refused to press far into India and investigate, not least because they were hearing reports of a massive
unknown Indian kingdom which lay beyond them on the river Ganges. Alexander had to return, although he was now leading an army of more than 120,000 men, the biggest such force in Western history, the majority of whom were Indians, Iranians and barbarians, recently his enemies. At the mouth of the river Indus, in what is now Pakistan, he did manage to sacrifice to Outer Ocean as if at the southern edge of the world. It was a second-best, and he marched back towards Babylon, where he died less than two years later, aged thirty-two years and ten months. He was not poisoned, but perhaps he had caught malaria in the previous weeks. Inevitably, his officers blamed one another, or even the pupils of Aristotle, for having poisoned him, starting these rumours against one another in their struggle for his succession.

Like Alexander, the Emperor Hadrian also made a dedication to Outer Ocean, but his was made in the north of the world, at the mouth of the river Tyne in Britain, which Alexander never knew. Hadrian visited Alexander’s great city, Alexandria in Egypt, and our best surviving narrative of Alexander’s campaigns was written by one of Hadrian’s provincial governors, Arrian, a keen hunting man, like his hero. If he wished, Hadrian could certainly have found out much more about Alexander than we can, as many more histories were surviving in his day than in ours.

As a general, Alexander remained globally famous, but his conquests were essentially won with the army which Philip had created. His favourite battle-tactic was already Philip’s: an angled charge with the cavalry from one wing, drawing the enemy sideways to cover it, then a turn inwards in pointed formation towards the enemy’s centre, which this manoeuvre had unbalanced. It was followed up by the infantry in the centre, armed with the long pike, or
sarissa
, which was swished up and down like the quills, observers said, of a terrifying porcupine. Alexander’s crack troops were Philip’s Shield-bearers, hardened infantry who savaged the Indian armies and their elephants, even when many of them, Philip’s recruits, were already over sixty years old. They survived Alexander, and remained the world’s most lethal troopers, a refutation of our modern ideas of ‘old age’. Even the plan to invade Asia was Philip’s own, as were the Greek experts in artillery who added torsion-power to the stone-throwing catapults

and designed ever bigger machinery and siege towers for the assaults on city-walls.

Unlike Philip, Alexander interpreted ‘Asia’ to mean the world to its (supposed) eastern edge, not simply all or part of the Persian Empire. On the way east, unlike Philip, he was a supremely successful besieger. He never lost a battle and his minor campaigns were masterpieces of audacity and hardly credible stamina. He was lethal up an Indian mountain-peak or alone in a Lebanese forest. He led his men from the front, although this inspiring habit nearly killed him in 325
BC
when he jumped down off a city-wall in India single-handedly into a terrified crowd of Indian archers. He took the island city of Tyre by building a mole across the sea; he flattened the rebellious city of Thebes, Philip’s uneasy ally, and sold the inhabitants into slavery (as Philip had done to many Greek cities in the north). In one spectacular evening, encouraged by wine, women and song, he and his men burned the Persians’ ceremonial capital, Persepolis, to the ground. Yet he was also extraordinarily canny. He could trick opponents by a series of stratagems; he was a master of what military theorists now teach as ‘dynamic manoeuvres’; he could split his forces and co-ordinate them in a planned campaign. He was cool enough to take huge risks, but intelligent enough to adapt them to the weak points of his ever-changing enemies. He also helped his progress by an appropriate political ‘spin’. Philip had given his Asian invasion an artful presentation as a campaign of revenge; Alexander publicized a ‘dossier’ of letters exchanged with the Persian king Darius in which he ‘justified’ his aggression in terms of previous Persian aggression and interference. After three years as the avenger of Persian outrages, he then recycled himself as the respectful heir of Cyrus, the first great Persian king. Behind the spin, he had been determined to rule and retain his conquests in Asia from the very start.

Alexander’s bold, impulsive nature owed much to his extreme youth. It was enhanced, however, by two singular supports. His father Philip had given him a good Greek education, shared with the young sons of Macedonian nobles, Philip’s newly formed corps of Royal Pages, who became Alexander’s supporting officers. The pupil of Aristotle, Alexander read Greek texts, staged Greek dramas to entertain his army across Asia and shared his men’s fascination with the
new world around them which seemed at times to recall the old myths of the Greeks. But he also modelled himself on the supreme hero of Homer’s epics, Achilles. He ran naked to the supposed site of Achilles’ tomb at Troy, while his male lover, Hephaestion, crowned the tomb of Achilles’s beloved Patroclus. He placed his copy of Homer’s
Iliad
, annotated by Aristotle, in the most precious casket captured from the Persian king. When the Athenians sent him an ambassador called Achilles, he granted them their request. In Alexander, Homer found his most avid over-interpreter.

In Macedonian society, this personal rivalry with a Homeric hero was not entirely misplaced. The king ruled by prowess among his Companions and, as Philip had shown, he had to bestow gifts and strive for personal esteem; the heroic world of Homer’s epics was not so remote from Macedonian values. Like a very special hero, Alexander also came to believe that he was the begotten child of a god. Again, there were Greek precedents, in the Spartan royal family, in the ruling family at Syracuse and even, admirers said, in Plato the philosopher, the ‘begotten son of Apollo’.
¹
Alexander publicized this personal claim after his visit to an oracle in the Siwah oasis on the borders of Libya and Egypt. Its god, Ammon, had often been consulted by Greeks before him and was understood to be Zeus; its priest greeted Alexander, Egypt’s new ruler, as ‘son of Zeus’. It was said that his mother Olympias had already hinted that Alexander’s father was more than human, a view which her eventual quarrels with Philip may have reinforced in her. Certainly, Alexander prized his divine sonship. He also honoured the god when he reached, as second-best, the ‘Outer’ Indian Ocean: his sacrifices here were announced as being ‘in accordance with Ammon’s oracular words’.
²
It seems, then, that at Siwah in 332/1, he had already asked the god which gods to honour when he reached the Ocean, the edge of the world. When he asked the question, aged twenty-four, he had not yet defeated the Persians’ grand army. The question says much for his priorities and for the self-confidence which helped to realize them.

The role-model of a hero and the parentage of a god supported Alexander’s innate energy and boundless ambition. No doubt his edgy relationship with his own father, Philip, also accentuated his own endless wish to excel. The result was a conquest which changed the
horizons of the Greek world. As a result, the army and military style of the Persian kings were replaced by Macedonian training and troops, as first mapped out by Philip. The festivals and ideals of Persian kingship were replaced by the Macedonians’ personal royal style. At least sixteen new cities were founded by Alexander at promising points across Asia, while tradition credited him, questionably, with many more. These cities were not just military outposts, a type of settlement which he also founded. They were meant to be famous, to their founder’s glory, and to that end they were placed, where possible, near accessible routes for trade and exchange. One city commemorated Alexander’s noble horse, Bucephalas, who carried him for more than seventeen years; typically, another commemorated his dog. The cities, with Greek settlers, were centres of Greek language and Greek entertainments, including athletic games and the inevitable theatre. But local non-Greeks were also settled in some of them. Once, in Sogdia, rebel prisoners were given to the residents of a new Alexandria as slaves, but elsewhere local non-Greeks were included as volunteers. Alexander’s close friend, his admiral Nearchus, explained that Alexander founded townships in Iran so that the nomads should become ‘cultivators of the fields and as they would have something for which they would be anxious, they would not do one another harm’.
³
The plan may have failed, but it is certainly not anachronistic to ascribe a ‘civilizing’ vision to some of Alexander’s foundations. Previous Macedonian kings had had similar aims with their cultural patronage and new towns back in rough uncivilized Macedon itself.

Alexander had also inherited from Philip the aim of freeing the Greeks of Asia. Within a year, he had largely done so, and was encouraging democracies as the alternative to Persian-backed oligarchies. Tribute from the Greek cities was abolished, a unique favour in these cities’ history of relations with greater powers. Freedom, in consequence, became equated with democracy in the Greek city-states. Elsewhere, in non-Greek Asia, in Babylon or Egypt or Cyprus or Sidon, Alexander could capitalize on recent grievances against Persian rule and offer ‘freedom’, in the sense of self-government (‘autonomy’) as an alternative. But he also inherited here the Persian king’s system of taxation and claims to ultimate control. Outside the territories of Greek cities, the ‘land’, as one of his early rulings proclaimed, ‘I
recognize as mine’.
⁴
His governors oversaw it, while troops were kept strictly in the hands of Greek and Macedonian governors. Tribute continued to be paid as before, but in return, his troops and governors kept the peace (or so he hoped) and in India stopped the existing local wars.

In Asia, therefore, there was a real increase of freedom for most of the Greek cities, but for other people there was peace after slaughter and a subtle change of master: in Arabia or in India, no less than in Greek Asia, Alexander did persuade himself, at least, that he was granting ‘autonomy’, even to non-Greeks. In Greece, meanwhile, Philip’s well-armoured peace between the Greek allies remained in force. Those Greeks who sought justice under its terms could turn, as always, to local arbitrators or to the courts of their home city-states: in theory there was no limit to the penalties, except exile, which these local courts could impose. To settle disputes between Greek cities, the League in Greece might also appoint arbitrators. ‘Justice’, therefore, had a new framework in Greece, although the freedom of local ‘leagues’ and city-states was restricted by it. In Asia, meanwhile, Greek cities continued to operate their own courts, but there was always the possibility of sending an embassy to the king himself for a higher ruling. Alexander had not put the eastern Greek cities into his father’s Hellenic Alliance. He personally had freed them, and after constitutional upheavals in such cities he himself might prescribe a new political settlement by letter. In summer 334, he implied to the restored democracy on the island of Chios that he personally would read through their proposed new law-code so as to check that nothing in it was contrary to their democratic future. In these cities, the question of exiles and their peaceful restoration remained the object of his personal intervention; he even specified, by letter, that their cases should be judged by jurors using a ‘secret ballot’. Inevitably, within the local framework of a ‘free’ city’s laws, Alexander’s own edicts by letter did acquire an irresistible power.

Outside the Greek cities, aggrieved parties throughout Asia could appeal to a local governor or to one of Alexander’s underlings in the hope of an enforceable ruling. They might even gain access to the king himself and aspire to a judgement in their favour (they would need an interpreter to present the case). In Asia, therefore, justice remained
at the dispensation of a king’s local officials, as before. There were no judicial reforms or new constitutions for his non-Greek subjects, but here and there (where a tradition of local laws existed) Alexander did publicize a return to pre-Persian rulings.

His conquests also multiplied the scope for gain and luxury beyond any Greek’s wildest dreams. Whereas Philip’s income had hardly sufficed to mount an invasion of Asia, Alexander’s allowed him the most lavish displays in Greek history. Ten thousand talents, about ten times the yearly income of Pericles’ Athens, were expended on a single celebration, a royal wedding or banquet. His Companions dined on couches with silver feet; individual officers were said to own fine hunting-nets a mile or more in length; even the staid elderly officer, Polyperchon, one of Philip’s men, was said to dance in a saffron cloak and slippers.
⁵
Drink had always flowed freely at the Macedonian court, and it came to flow very freely in Alexander’s later years. There were nights when Alexander sat up drinking until dawn. At the funeral celebrations of an Indian wise man at his court, the winner in a drinking contest drained several gallons, while the runners-up included several Indians, who died in the aftermath. When Alexander married two more brides from the Persian royal houses near the end of his life, the occasion was celebrated with lavish gifts and his audience-tent was enlarged into the most magnificent marquee. Even the big curtain-poles were made of gold.