Alexander the Great Read online

  Next, at a distance of one stade [a unit of measurement equal to some 185 feet], came Sisygambis, the mother of Darius, drawn in a carriage, and in another came his wife. A troop of women attended the queens on horseback. Then came the fifteen so-called armamaxae [covered wagons] in which rode the king’s children, their nurses and a herd of eunuchs (who are not at all held in contempt by these peoples). Next came the carriages of the 360 royal concubines, these also dressed in royal finery, and behind them 600 mules and 300 camels carried the king’s money, with a guard of archers in attendance. After this column rode the wives of the king’s relatives and friends, and hordes of camp-followers and servants. At the end, to close up the rear, were the light-armed troops with their respective leaders.4

  The Achaemenid Empire was highly centralized in that the king of kings did whatever he wanted. The Persian ruler also had a special fondness for adding fair-skinned Greek women to his boundless harem. And was also famous for parks that contained rare trees and wild animals he could hunt and slaughter—“Versailles with Panthers,” as historian James Davidson has called it. Aside from a lavish lifestyle his wants consisted only of tribute money and adding to his vast domains, which included Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and some lands farther east. Far from enforcing Iranization in the then-thriving cities of Asia Minor, the Persian emperor allowed the beginnings of Hellenization to occur there.

  The Persian Empire was largely governed by satraps, or imperial governors, who were usually Persians, and the constituent peoples were left alone to pursue their own cultures, languages, and religions. The Persian Empire falls into the category of hydraulic despotisms of antiquity. Eighty percent of the population lived on the land, drawing sustenance from rivers and irrigation systems. The empire also comprised large urban centers numbering up to a million people each. The general populace was poor and lived in mud or sun-dried brick huts. There were temples dedicated to the gods, inhabited by a priestly caste. And above all there were three huge palaces and government centers at Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis.

  The Persian Empire was a “soft” empire, resembling the British Empire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The imposition of a common English culture was far beyond the capacity or even the ambition of the British Empire’s modest-size official personnel. Rulership in the British Empire varied radically. In Africa and parts of India, the British were content with “indirect rule”—leaving government largely in the hands of native chieftains and princes. Hedonism, eroticism, and self-indulgence on the part of the elite were common characteristics of such soft empires.

  The Roman Empire, in contrast, was hard-core. Only two languages—Greek in the East and Latin in the West—were recognized. Every effort was made to impose Greco-Roman culture and religion on the peoples of the Roman Empire. In spite of the failures of the communication network of the time, the Roman Empire was controlled centrally from Rome, through governors who behaved in a demanding and often rapacious manner. The imposition of the Roman lifestyle on its conquered people is why the Roman Empire has had such a far-reaching influence on the Western world until the present day.

  Alexander’s empire, modeled on that of his Persian predecessor, was of the soft variety, although had he been given a few more years, it might have hardened over time.

  Before Alexander invaded Persia, his route of conquest took him from Tyre in Lebanon—which he captured and leveled after a long siege—to Gaza and Egypt. Along the way he encountered Jerusalem, then a city of perhaps 15,000 people. Cyrus’s release of the Jews of Iraq to return to their homeland had been only partially successful; a third of them went home. The rest were comfortable as craftsmen and small merchants, and they remained in Iraq, where their descendants lived until about 1950.

  Jerusalem surrendered peacefully to Alexander. The high priests came out of their city and brought him gifts. There is no indication that Alexander tried to visit the sanctuary of the Holy of Holies in the Second Temple, which was still in the course of being built with a subsidy offered by Cyrus I.

  Jews were, however, slated to play a significant role in Alexandria. This was the great port, today partly under water, that Alexander founded, the only really successful Alexandria among the seven cities by that name that he established. By the first century AD the Egyptian Alexandria had a population of 750,000, of whom at least a third were Jews. Jewish merchants and scholars enlivened the city. They were a Greek-speaking minority; few of them could read Hebrew. Around 200 BC the Hebrew Bible was translated into a Greek version called the Septuagint, after the seventy sages who supposedly worked on it. This was the biblical text used by the Greek Jews of Alexandria.

  The greatest scholar among these Jews of Alexandria was Rabbi Philo, whom the Romans called Philo Judaeus. Philo, who lived in the middle decades of the first century AD, attempted a synthesis of Judaism and Platonic philosophy. He was what we today would call a Reform Jew, preaching and writing in Hellenistic Greek. (It is not known whether he even read Hebrew.)

  The Jewish community of Alexandria was originally drawn from all over the eastern Mediterranean, and in many instances those Jews were Greek-speaking when they arrived in Alexandria. Alexander would have loved the Alexandrian Jews.

  Alexandria remained the great center of Reform Judaism until around AD 300, when the Jewish community there was reduced and impoverished by Christian pogroms. After that only Orthodox Talmudic Judaism prevailed in the Jewish world. Reform Judaism did not reappear in Germany and the United States until the mid-nineteenth century.

  If Alexander aimed at Hellenization—and he had that vaguely in mind—it was the Jews of Alexandria who best exemplified the process. They spoke Greek as their daily language; they translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek; their leading scholar, Rabbi Philo, sought a synthesis between Judaism and Platonism.

  Rabbi Philo envisaged a monotheistic God whose light shone upon mankind, God’s spirit a fountain immersing the world in light. Here is the origin of what became Jewish mysticism, the kabbalah, in Western Europe in the thirteenth century. Because of Philo’s affinity with Christian mysticism, the early church fathers preserved a dozen volumes of his works. While the writings of Saint Paul (Rabbi Saul of Tarsus), Philo’s contemporary, are known to us from only half a dozen meager letters to Christian communities, Philo’s elaborate writings are readily available today.

  No similar cultural blending occurred in Persia, in spite of such far-fetched stratagems as Alexander’s marrying his generals to Persian noblewomen. When Alexander died, nearly all of them promptly abandoned their Persian wives. It was the Jews of Alexandria who flourished by engaging in long-distance trade to Asia Minor, Arabia, and as far away as India. These Jews had thoroughly absorbed Hellenistic culture. They too had their gymnasia, where they bathed, modestly clothed, in preparation for Philo’s Sabbath sermons.

  More than anyone else, the Alexandrian Jews achieved a union of Greek language and culture and Judaism, but by AD 400 it had all vanished under Christian persecution. (The Alexandrian Jewish community partly revived in the twelfth century under Muslim rule, this time under the leadership of an Orthodox rabbi, Maimonides.)

  Writing in the Roman Empire in the early second century AD, the Greek historian and biographer Plutarch, in his very popular book Parallel Lives, tried to compare Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, who lived three hundred years later. In the beginning of his book, Plutarch says of Alexander:

  It being my purpose to write the lives of Alexander the king, and of Caesar, by whom Pompey was destroyed, the multitude of their great actions affords so large a field that I were to blame if I should not by way of apology forewarn my reader that I have chosen rather to epitomise the most celebrated parts of their story, than to insist at large on every particular circumstance of it. It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment,
an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavour by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.5

  The trajectory of their lives was completely different, however. Caesar was a politician who incidentally acquired renown by fighting as a very effective general in Gaul (France) and then used his military fame to intervene in and dominate Roman politics. Alexander inherited a throne and a superb army and did not need to meddle in politics as Caesar did; he aimed instead at pure military glory. He was the unique hero of the ancient world. There was no one else in antiquity whose life followed quite the same path as Alexander’s.

  Caesar was essentially a very clever and ambitious politician who pursued a military career, and became a military hero only because it suited his political aspirations. To Alexander, on the other hand, warfare was a primal life force, and he spent nearly all his adult life on the battlefield. Not only did he exult in war, but he also carried out innovations in battlefield tactics and sought and gained the devotion of his military companions. Caesar was more detached and conscious of a separation between his political and military careers. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he knew the political consequences were going to be much more significant than the military ones. Alexander experienced no such conflict between politics and his wars.

  Alexander emulated Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War, whom he considered an ancestor on his mother’s side. Symbolically, his first stop toward conquest was in Troy. Historian Peter Green describes the landing:

  The king’s first act on landing was to set up another altar, to Athena, Heracles, and Zeus …and to pray that “these territories might accept him as king of their own free will, without constraint.” Then he set off on his pilgrimage to Ilium. …Hewas welcomed by a committee of local Greeks…. They presented him with ceremonial gold wreaths. Alexander then offered sacrifice at the tombs of Ajax and Achilles…. He made lavish sacrifice to Athena, and dedicated his own armour at the goddess’s altar. In exchange he received a shield and panoply of guaranteed Trojan vintage, with which he armed himself for his first major engagement on Asiatic soil, at the Granicus River. However, they got rather badly knocked about during the fighting, and thereafter Alexander merely had them carried into battle before him by a squire.6

  He proclaimed that he was the product of both Greece and Troy, and the worthy heir of both Achilles and Priam, implying that this conquest was his by right. Alexander was a man dedicated to war.

  TWO

  Who Was Alexander?

  ALEXANDER THE Great, believed by many to be the mightiest general of antiquity, was born in July, 356 BC, of the marriage between Philip II of Macedon and his third wife, the Albanian princess Olympias. It is unclear exactly how they met or when they married, but it is known that the marriage was a stormy one. Philip was at the peak of his political powers when they married and when Alexander was conceived. The day Alexander was born, his father had just taken the town of Potidaea. Philip received three messages simultaneously—one of his generals had just overthrown the Illyrians, his racehorse had won at the Olympic games, and his wife had given birth to a son. The soothsayers assured him that a child born on the same day as two other such successful events would be invincible.

  On her father’s side, Olympias traced her ancestry back to Achilles, and on her mother’s she traced her family to Helen of Troy. She belonged to a strange cult of snake worshippers, and she probably kept and sometimes slept with pet snakes. This snake cult was related to the orgiastic worship of Dionysus and encouraged its devotees to engage in frenzied rituals. The queen would pull large snakes out of ivy or baskets and encourage the other women to coil them around their bodies. The worship of Dionysus had long been wild and uninhibited, involving animal sacrifices and drinking of the blood. In ancient times even human sacrifices took place. Philip seemed to be repelled by the fanatic zeal with which Olympias led other women in this worship, but whatever his reluctance to sanction such a religion, the couple managed to cohabit long enough to produce a son.

  Philip had other wives, but for a long time Olympias was his principal one. Wild and unprincipled in many respects, she still managed to take an interest in her child’s education. She brought two tutors, Lysimachus and Leonidas, from her own family to Macedonia to teach and train the young prince. The tie with Lysimachus continued into Alexander’s adulthood; Leonidas, on the other hand, was very austere, forcing Alexander to satisfy himself with nothing luxurious or excessive. His education, which emphasized doing without luxuries, even necessities, stood Alexander well in his later years of deprivation, when he was traveling through the deserts in the East.

  In the last three years of Philip’s reign, when Alexander was in his teens, Olympias’s sole ambition was to ensure the throne for her son. Alexander always remained fiercely loyal to his mother, faithfully sending her long letters after his ascension to power, reporting on his journeys and wars. These letters—except for a handful of fragments, possibly forged—have not been found and none of Olympias’s letters back to Alexander have been discovered either, even though Alexander maintained a good secretary who kept a daily royal journal of his activities.

  It is curious that in the last year of his life, after he ceased his Asian campaign and reestablished himself in Persia, Alexander did not send for his mother. Indeed, after he crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor—begining a decade-long separation—mother and son never met face-to-face again. All indications are that Alexander loved his mother deeply but did not want to be in her powerful, demanding presence. Sending letters to Olympias would suffice. Alexander asserted his own identity.

  Alexander’s relations with his formidable and successful father were also tense. Philip conquered much of the Greek peninsula but left it to his son to organize. Philip was cautious in dealing with the noisy and resourceful cities of southern Greece. He did not try to conquer them, except for Thebes, which lay halfway down the Greek peninsula and rebelled actively against him.

  Justin, a Roman writer of the late second or early third century AD and author of a life of Philip, drew a sharp distinction between Philip and Alexander:

  Philip was succeeded by his son Alexander who surpassed his father both in good qualities and bad. Each had his own method of gaining victory, Alexander making war openly and Philip using trickery; the latter took pleasure in duping the enemy, the former in putting them to flight in the open. Philip was the more prudent strategist, Alexander had the greater vision. The father could hide, and sometimes even suppress, his anger; when Alexander’s had flared up, his retaliation could be neither delayed nor kept in check. Both were excessively fond of drink, but intoxication brought out different shortcomings. It was the father’s habit to rush straight at the enemy from the dinner-party, engage him in combat and recklessly expose himself to danger; Alexander’s violence was directed not against the enemy but against his own comrades. As a result Philip was often brought back from his battles wounded while the other often left a dinner with his friends’ blood on his hands. Philip was unwilling to rule along with his friends; Alexander exercised his rule over his. The father preferred to be loved, the son to be feared. They had a comparable interest in literature. The father had greater shrewdness, the son was truer to his word. Philip was more restrained in his language and discourse, Alexander in his actions. When it came to showing mercy to the defeated, the son was temperamentally more amenable and more magnanimous. The father was more disposed to thrift, the son to extravagance. With such qualities did the father lay the basis for a worldwide empire and the son bring to completion the glorious enterprise.1<
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  Philip was satisfied not to try to conquer Athens, Sparta, and Corinth. He formed them into a league with himself as hegemon (similar to today’s chairman of the board or CEO). In Athens the orator Demosthenes so raged against Philip and forecast the threat he posed to the Greek city-states if he was not stopped (like Churchill on Hitler in the 1930s) that his speeches are a synecdoche for opposition to a tyrant. These orations are called philippics, the same term used later for the orations by Cicero against Mark Antony. (The term is still a synonym for speeches of rage and condemnation.) Alexander eventually succeeded in getting Demosthenes exiled from Athens; Mark Antony had Cicero killed.

  Though Alexander was carefully trained and educated in the humanities and sciences, from the age of five he was meant to be a highly skilled soldier. He had an affinity for diplomacy, and by the time he was fifteen, he was engaging Greek ambassadors in discussions. He had a special inclination to be a horseman and is said to have personally broken in his horse Bucephelus, in whose saddle he rode into battle for the next twenty years until the animal died.

  The story goes that in the Balkans King Philip had acquired a very handsome horse of a special, elegant breed, but Philip and his grooms could not break the horse. It stood taller than the common run of runty Macedonian horses, and it boasted a proud mane and shimmering brown coat.

  Philip and his grooms were about to give up on the Balkan horse as incapable of ever being broken in when Alexander, who was there, remarked that they were losing a wonderful horse simply because they were too inexperienced and too spineless to handle him. Initially Philip remained silent, but after Alexander repeated his comment and became visibly upset, Philip asked Alexander if his criticism of his elders was due to his knowing more than his elders, to which Alexander replied that he could at least handle this horse better than they. His father then asked his son what the consequence of his impulsiveness would be, were he to not succeed in handling the horse. His answer, which was the promise to pay the price of the horse, resulted in much laughter. After the financial terms between father and son were settled, Alexander quickly ran toward the horse. He did not immediately mount the horse. Earlier, he had noticed that the horse was greatly bothered by the sight of its own shadow, and so after he took the reins, he turned the horse toward the sun. For a short while, he ran beside it, and patted it in order to calm its panting. Then, after gently setting aside his cloak, he quickly and firmly mounted the horse, using the reins to put pressure on the bit without hurting its mouth. Once Alexander felt comfortable that the horse had dropped its menacing demeanor and was eager to gallop, he gave it some rein and urged it on, using a firmer voice and kick of his foot.