Alexander the Great Read online

  Previously Europeans had satisfied themselves with artistic models from late Hellenistic and Roman times, but now it was the Victorian British and the imperial Germans of the Second Reich who revived an appreciation of the glories of Greek literature, sculpture, and architecture of the Heroic and Classical Eras.

  It was the privilege and honor of two British archaeologists and one amateur German with an avid interest in anything Trojan to make the mute stones of Greece speak in a highly dramatic fashion. What they—Thomas Bruce, the seventh earl of Elgin; Sir Arthur Evans; and Heinrich Schliemann—dug up revealed in all its glory the material remains of Greek culture and society that had provided the context for Alexander’s life.

  The discovery of ancient Greek art and architecture began with Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the sultan of Turkey, in the early years of the nineteenth century. Convinced that the Greeks could not protect their art—and with Turkish attempts looming to suppress the Greek war of independence—Elgin took it upon himself to pack up the Parthenon frieze and other statuary from the Athenian Acropolis, for which these sculptures had been designed and where they were best displayed, and cart them off to London. Elgin’s idea—to get the British Museum to buy the sculptures from him—was a private, nongovernmental venture in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Though he eventually succeeded—these works are known today as the Elgin Marbles—he was very disappointed in the offered price. The friezes and sculptures from the Parthenon remain at the British Museum to this day, despite ongoing efforts to have them returned to Greece.

  In the 1870s a German millionaire and amateur archaeologist, who had grown up hearing about, studying, and eventually becoming obsessed by the stories of Homer, went to Greece with the intention of obtaining permission from the government of Turkey to dig for Troy. He acquired a very fine house and a Greek wife in Athens, and then set about excavating Homer’s Troy, across the Hellespont in Asia Minor (Turkey). This was Heinrich Schliemann. After ten years of sloppy excavation, Schliemann discovered that there were at least seven layers to the city of Troy, which had been deserted or burned more than once and then rebuilt on the same site. He fastened on what he called Level IV as the city of Homer’s Iliad because it was there that he discovered the alleged treasures of King Priam of Troy—mostly a set of splendid gold dishes and some elaborate jewelry. He smuggled most of his finds out of both Turkey and Greece, thus alienating the governments of both countries, which demanded their return. He eventually donated the so-called Priam’s treasure to the National Museum in Berlin and was suitably honored for doing so by the German emperor Wilhelm II. In 1945 the Red Army carted Priam’s hoard off to Saint Petersburg, where it remains to this day in a Russian museum. (Archaeologists since Schliemann have demonstrated that “Priam’s gold” could not possibly be attributed to the actual Priam.)

  The third great discovery, this time by a British professor, Sir Arthur Evans, was made on the island of Crete just before the outbreak of World War I. Since the turn of the century Evans had been excavating the site of the huge palace of Knossos, which was destroyed in an earthquake perhaps around 1300 BC. Because the labyrinthine structure of the palace called to mind the myth of King Minos, Evans called the period of his discoveries the Minoan Age of Crete, and argued that the civilization of mainland Greece in the Heroic Age, known as the Mycenaean, corresponded roughly to that of Minoan Crete. Subsequently, after World War II, scholars revealed an identity between archaic Mycenaean and Minoan script, called Linear B, which lent credence to Evans’s hypothesis.

  Alexander the Great could not have known about the wonders of Minoan Crete, buried a thousand years before his time. Neither does he ever appear to have visited Athens, where the buildings and sculptures on the Acropolis had been created only a century before his lifetime. But he knew about the glories of the Mycenaean Heroic Age: Alexander slept, we are told, with a copy of Homer’s Iliad close at hand.

  Alexander should have equally esteemed the other Homeric hero, Odysseus (Ulysses to the Romans), whose ten-year travels in the Mediterranean, described in Homer’s Odyssey, had, in spirit, some similarities to Alexander’s own wanderlust. But Alexander’s mind did not run that way, being fastened instead mainly on strength, war, a shared military culture, and Achilles. He saw himself as a reincarnation of Achilles, just as Gen. George S. Patton believed that in one previous life he had been a Viking and in others had fought with Caesar—and with Alexander himself.

  The fanatical nineteenth-century admirers of the Greeks, such as Elgin and Schliemann, played down the obvious existence of slavery in Greek society. Similarly, they ignored the fact that Greeks of the upper classes were often pedophiles and serial child abusers. Most Greek adult males would have regarded the body of a twelve-year-old pubescent boy as the most beautiful body image. There was plenty of physical contact between adult males and their young acolytes, who were raised and educated in their households. When the Oxford don and classicist Benjamin Jowett in the 1870s came to translate Plato’s Symposium, which is partly about the homosexual love of boys, he bowdlerized his translation, omitting the homoerotic and pedophile qualities because they did not fit with how he wanted his audience to view the Greeks.

  The Greeks, with their great accomplishments in literature, art, and philosophy, were nonetheless hard men who satisfied their desires recklessly. Slaves did their physical labor and boys gratified their sexual appetites. Alexander the Great grew up in such a society, and to a certain extent his harshness and cruelty were imposed on him by his social environment.

  There were some signs that Alexander appreciated the ambience of the classical Greek cities. He was familiar with some of the Greek tragedies, which were performed in amphitheaters all over his empire. Wherever he went in Egypt and Asia, he created new Alexandrian cities, laid out in rectangles, defended by walls, and with an acropolis (temples and other public buildings) and an agora (a marketplace) in the classical mode. A few of these Alexandrian urban foundations still exist in Central Asia in skeletal form. Everywhere Alexander went, sculptures and monuments in the classical style were also his legacy, and the workshops of his empire were kept busy turning out these memorials of antiquity.

  To the cities of Greece (Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes were the major ones) and to colonial Greek cities in Asia Minor, Alexander offered self-government and restored town councils where they had been replaced by oligarchs. But this was something of a facade brought on by the pragmatic exigencies of wartime. When Thebes refused to join Alexander’s league of cities with himself as hegemon (leader), he burned it to the ground and sold its citizens into slavery.

  In assessing the Victorian idealization of Greek culture, we cannot say that the tragic, restraining sensibility or the drive to make rationality primary in human relationships captured the essence of the Greek way of life. The Greeks’ greed, violence, sexual promiscuity, slavery, child abuse, and drunkenness stand in sharp contrast to the civilizing doctrines of the tragic dramatists and the philosophers.

  It is probably true to say that all cultures bear the stamp of inner conflict and contradiction. But Greek culture was among those that suffered the deepest split in mind-set. To go from the masculine chauvinism of the Greek Heroic Age to the civilized morality and vaunting rationality inculcated by the playwrights and philosophers of the Classical Age is to pass from one cultural and intellectual era to another. The ascendancy of Macedonia under the rule of Alexander’s father, Philip II, and the conquest of the rest of Greece, forced the combination of the Heroic Age with the civilizing influence of the philosophers and tragedians. Alexander stands out as an excellent example of this dichotomy, as he was the child of both sides of the culture—a product of violent, passionate parents and a student of that paragon of reason, Aristotle.

  Alexander, who would eventually be called “the Great,” was born in the kingdom of Macedonia, which comprised most of northern Greece. Culturally and intellectually Macedonia was far removed from the city-states of
southern Greece, especially Athens. Structurally it was much closer to the military autocracy that prevailed in Sparta. By the time Philip came to power in 359 BC, the city-states of Thebes, Sparta, Argos, and Athens had already achieved their eras of greatness and were ripe to be conquered by a strongman such as Philip. By the late 340s BC, with the annexation of Thrace and Thessaly, Philip had made Macedonia a superpower, with no real challenge to its domination of the entire peninsula. He had even been urged by an outstanding Athenian orator, Isocrates, to unite Greece and attack Persia. Any opposition was met with strong military might. In August 338, Philip’s army faced a coalition of Thebans and Athenians, who had little or no support from any other city-state. On the plain of Chaeronea, Philip’s phalanx defeated the combined armies, with the Athenians alone losing one thousand dead and two thousand prisoners.1 Philip was now supreme in Greece.

  With its abundant natural resources, including gold and silver deposits and fertile plains suitable for agriculture, Macedonia was a very wealthy country. Moreover, dues to the crown and tax levies augmented the royal treasury, permitting Philip to bribe people into submission when he wanted to avoid the use of force. The king used his considerable wealth to cement alliances and ensure the loyalty of small cities in his territories.

  Macedonia was also rich in people. The Macedonian infantry under arms in 334 BC numbered 27,000, with ample reserves that could be mustered in subsequent years. At the Battle of Chaeronea, for example, Philip’s army was estimated at 30,000 foot soldiers and 2,000 cavalry. In addition, numerous allies under arms could be called on at all times.2

  Philip, who traced his ancestry to Hercules, ruled as an autocrat, subject to few political restraints. He probably consulted a small group of intimates, but they were strictly advisory, rather than holding any real power. There were no regular assemblies, and the king was not bound by public opinion. Procedures were fluid and continually changing at Philip’s decision and whim. Though there was some notion of legal precedent and tradition, there was no code of Macedonian law.

  Macedonia was a wild country, socially closer to the Balkans than to Athens. The official method of public execution was stoning, but Philip used crucifixion or impalement on several occasions. The penalty for treason was death not only for the perpetrator but for all his blood relatives as well. Because of the extent of intermarriages among the upper class, this provision of the law was rarely applied, however, or the entire ruling class might have been wiped out.

  Homosexuality was widespread, as was polygamy—Philip himself had seven or eight wives. Marriage was predominantly a political matter, and women had no power whatsoever. This social, geographical, and cultural interconnectedness between one era and another, and one location and another, probably goes a long way toward explaining the enigmatic behavior of Alexander the Great.

  The consortium of allies brought about by Philip met at Corinth in 337 BC to declare war on Persia. For many years the Persian Empire had been in decline, and Philip believed that the time was propitious for an attack. Rebellions in Egypt and Babylon had left the Persian emperor, who had relied on Greek mercenaries to supplement his own army, amid disorder and disarray. Philip’s alliances had made recruitment by the Persians difficult if not impossible, but he kept his ultimate intentions secret, obviously waiting until there was no more resistance in Greece before he advanced into Persia. In the spring of 336 BC, a group of Macedonians crossed the Hellespont and began the subjugation of Asia Minor. It was at this critical juncture in his life that Philip was cut down by an assassin.

  This was the world that Alexander inherited.

  The Achaemenid Persian Empire, which became Alexander’s chief antagonist and his first conquest, had been established in 539 BC by Cyrus I—the same “king of kings” (a term used for all Persian kings) who sent the Jews, after a fifty-year exile, back to Jerusalem. During the last years of Philip’s reign the Persian Empire, ruled by King Ochus, had its problems. Diodorus Siculus, a Roman writer of the second half of the first century BC, described the bloody ascension of Darius to power.

  While Philip was still on the throne [of Macedonia], Ochus was king of Persia, and his rule over his subjects was brutally harsh. Ochus was detested for his callousness, and his chiliarch [commander of a thousand men] Bagoas—he was, physically, a eunuch but had a villainous and aggressive nature—did away with him by poison, through the agency of a certain doctor. Bagoas then put the youngest of Ochus’ sons, Arses, on the throne. He also did away with the new king’s brothers, who were still at a very early age, so that the young man’s isolation would make him more compliant to him. The young man, however, was outraged by Bagoas’ lawless conduct and made it clear that he was going to punish the perpetrator of these crimes, whereupon Bagoas struck before he could implement his plans, murdering Arses, along with his children, when he had been king for two years.

  The royal house was now without an heir and there was no descendant to succeed to power, and so Bagoas picked out one of the courtiers, Darius by name, and helped him gain the throne…. There was a curious incident involving Bagoas that is worth recording. With his usual bloodthirstiness he attempted to murder Darius with poison. Information concerning the plot reached the king, who issued an invitation to Bagoas on some pretext of sociability. He then gave him the cup and obliged him to drink the poison.

  Darius was considered fit to rule because of his reputation for surpassing all Persians in courage. Once when King Artaxerxes [a former king and related by blood to Darius] was at war with the Cadusians, one of the Cadusians, who was noted for strength and courage, issued a challenge to single combat to any of the Persians willing to accept. Nobody dared take up the challenge apart from Darius, who alone faced the danger and killed the challenger, for which he was honoured by the king with sumptuous gifts and gained amongst the Persians unrivalled prominence for his courage. It was on account of this brave showing that he was considered worthy of the throne, and he took power about the time that Alexander succeeded to his kingdom on the death of Philip.3

  He was called the “king of kings.”

  The last king of the Persian Empire was Alexander the Great. Alexander regarded himself not as an interloper but as a successor of the Achaemenids, replacing Darius III. Alexander was remorseless and persistent in pursuing Darius through two fierce battles and scouring the countryside intending to capture him. Though it is just possible that Alexander would have treated Darius benignly, it is more likely that he would simply have killed and supplanted the king of kings.

  The Persian Empire—an area stretching from Turkey to Tajikistan—comprised numerous highly autonomous peoples of whom it demanded only tribute, a complex system of taxes and gifts. Thus the Achaemenid rulers were very wealthy, and by capturing their treasuries, Alexander made himself the richest man in the world. Though Persian wealth had been among the reasons for Alexander’s invasion of the Persian Empire, he had no idea when he started exactly how rich the king of kings might be. A description of the wealth of Darius III is given by Quintus Curtius Rufus, a Roman writer of the first century AD, who wrote the first full-length account in Latin of Alexander:

  It is a tradition among the Persians not to begin a march until after sunrise, and the day was already well advanced when the signal was given by trumpet from the king’s tent. Above the tent, so that it would be visible to all, a representation of the sun gleamed in a crystal case. The order of the line of march was as follows: in front, on silver altars, was carried the fire which the Persians called sacred and eternal. Next came the Magi, singing the traditional hymn, and they were followed by 365 young men in scarlet cloaks, their number equalling the days of the year [for in fact the Persians divide the year into as many days as we do]. Then came the chariot consecrated to Jupiter, drawn by white horses, followed by a horse of extraordinary size, which the Persians called “the Sun’s horse.” Those driving the horses were equipped with golden whips and white robes. Not far behind were ten carts amply decorated with
relief carvings in gold and silver, and these were followed by the cavalry of twelve nations of different cultures, variously armed. Next in line were the soldiers whom the Persians called the “Immortals,” some 10,000 in number. No other group were as splendidly bedecked in barbarian opulence: golden necklaces, clothes interwoven with gold, long-sleeved tunics actually studded with jewels. After a short interval came the 15,000 men known as “the king’s kinsmen.” This troop was dressed almost alike, its extravagance rather than its fine arms catching the eye. The column next to these comprised the so-called Doryphoroe, the men who usually looked after the king’s wardrobe, and these preceded the royal chariot on which rode the king himself, towering above all others.

  Both sides of the chariot were embossed with gold and silver representations of the gods; the yoke was studded with flashing gems and from it arose two golden images [each a cubit high] of Ninus and Belus respectively. Between these was a consecrated eagle made of gold and represented with wings outstretched.

  The sumptuous attire of the king was especially remarkable. His tunic was purple, interwoven with white at the center, and his gold-embroidered cloak bore a gilded motif of hawks attacking each other with their beaks. From his gilded belt, which he wore in the style of a woman, he had slung his scimitar, its scabbard made of precious stone. His royal diadem, called a cidaris by the Persians, was encircled by a blue ribbon flecked with white. [Ten thousand] spearmen carrying lances chased with silver and tipped with gold followed the king’s chariot, and to the right and left he was attended by some 200 of his most noble relatives. At the end of the column came 30,000 foot-soldiers followed by 400 of the king’s horses.