Philip’s second policy was to create an officer class based on talent. From this pool the king could not only command in battles but also had a supply of educated ‘gentlemen’ to serve as diplomats and proconsuls, once there were conquered territories to govern. The interesting thing about Philip is that he happily recruited non-Macedonians, including qualified Greeks, for this new meritocracy.
What was in it for such people? History is littered with royal servants hoping for self-advancement from a ruler offering gifts. An ancient inscription in handsome Greek letters found on the three-pronged peninsula east of modern Thessaloniki shows what rewards Philip distributed.
It gives details of Philip’s allocation of landed estates in this area to a member of his officer class. ‘Sine’ was the name of one; ‘Trapezus’ another. The inscription dates from half a century later, when this man’s grandson needed a later Macedonian king to reconfirm his title. This was required because the monarchy withheld complete security of tenure. Ultimately the land remained crown property. For each descendant of the original grantee to inherit, a new royal assent was needed. The system was a clever way of putting pressure on this class to serve well, not just now but also in the future.
As to how Philip came by these lands in the first place, the case of a Greek city called Olynthus is instructive. This city was an eastern neighbour of the Macedonians, sited on that same peninsula. When I visited the archaeological site, I was struck by the richness of the rolling farmland surrounding it. Americans dug here between the world wars. They uncovered the remains of neatly laid-out streets lined with terraced houses in which Greek citizen families lived lives of relative comfort – there was drainage; there were bathrooms.
They also found arrowheads. These were – once more – Macedonian state issue. In this case letters in Ancient Greek read ‘Belonging to Philip’. In 348 BC Philip captured Olynthus and wiped it out. By right of conquest its farmland was now his, to be divided up into lots as gifts for his officers.
If some Greek bystanders aspired to join these robber barons, others were appalled: ‘[c]areless of what they had, they itched for what they had not, though they owned a whole section of Europe,’ as one wrote sourly. So there was now, in Philip’s reformed Macedon, a ‘systemic’ propensity for warmongering. Troopers needing pay, officers hungry for land, a kingship nurtured by military success: they all had a stake in identifying a new campaign.
After his victory at Chaeronea (338 BC), Philip was effectively master of a Balkan empire extending east to the Dardanelles and southwards to include most of mainland Greece. Some of this territory he ruled directly or through a viceroy, some of it, including the Greek states, through friendly regimes or at any rate (as at Athens) prudently cooperative politicians. In his appetite for further aggression, he now looked east.
In the fourth century BC the Persian Empire endured. There were no great new conquests, but the empire survived a revolt by provincial governors and recovered a long-insurgent province, Egypt. The ruling family kept its tight grip on the throne, and kings still displayed fortitude in war. Artaxerxes II must have been a successful ruler, managing to keep his throne for some forty-five years (from 405/4 to 359/8 BC). Once, returning home from campaigning in northern Iran,
he dispensed with his horse and, with his quiver strapped to his back and shield in hand, personally led the column on foot as it marched through mountainous and precipitous country. This had such an effect on the rest of the army that they felt as if they had grown wings and had their burdens lifted, seeing as they did his determination and strength.
This kind of inspiring leadership of men was just what ancient writers repeatedly attributed to Alexander of Macedon. Still, Greek observers saw an underlying military decadence in Persia. Their view has to be accorded some credence, given what was to happen next.
When he was stabbed to death in 336 BC, Philip had already sent an advance force across the Dardanelles into Persian imperial territory in what is now north-western Turkey. He had also persuaded the cowed Greek states to supply troops for the army that was to follow, led by himself. A politician as well as a general, he had told them that now was the time to avenge Greece’s gods for the destruction of their shrines by the impious Persians back in 480 and 479 BC.
After the Persians withdrew from Greece, the Athenians had built shattered blocks from the Persian burning of the Acropolis into its defensive wall – they are still visible today – as a memorial to the ‘barbarian’ sacrilege. Despite the passage of time, it would be wrong to think that the prospect of revenge had no traction among fourth-century Greeks.
The assassin’s dagger brought an already-seasoned Alexander to the throne at the age of twenty. Within two years he had shown himself to be his father’s son by a ferocious act of destruction. The Thebans to the north of Athens, misjudging the neophyte, decided to revolt. Alexander and his well-drilled men marched south like the wind: over 300 miles in twelve days. Theban stubbornness left him no choice, some said, but to lay siege to the city. It was ‘stormed, plundered and razed to the ground’. The usual modern view of this ruthlessness was that Alexander needed a submissive Greece behind him if he were to pursue his father’s Persian project.
The twenty-two-year-old Alexander’s expedition against Persia joins the Trojan and Peloponnesian Wars as a creation, in the only form in which we can follow it today, of ancient men of letters. Of all the paraphernalia of ancient warfare – the archaeological evidence of arms and armour, encampments, victory monuments and so on, original documents such as troop dispositions or battlefield orders – little or nothing survives. The short-lived reign of Alexander – thirteen years – was, as one Roman historian wrote much later, ‘a brilliant flash of lightning’.
It was in Roman times that the only ancient writers whose accounts of Alexander survive were writing. If they did not exactly stand on the shoulders of giants, they certainly sat in libraries surrounded by the works of predecessors. These in turn built on their predecessors, in a chain of armchair historians that reached back to the first writings of people alive in Alexander’s day.
These first writers did include participants or, if not, writers who at least spoke to survivors, which is important, obviously. They wrote in Ancient Greek, whether because they were ethnic Greeks or Greek-educated Macedonians. Alexander’s new subjects in Asia and Egypt left no accounts in their own languages of their experience of invasion and conquest.
On the other hand, since Macedonian power divided the Greek world bitterly, these first Greek writings – now lost – offered wildly varied versions of Alexander. We enter here, long before an American political commentator coined the expression, a smoky world of ‘alternative facts’. Wherever Alexander comes out either too well or too badly in the surviving ancient writers, modern historians are not wrong to suspect the distant echoes of either the king’s partisans or his enemies.
Scholars expend all the considerable ingenuity of their profession to get at the historical truth about Alexander. Even so, much depends, now as in ancient times, on where you stand in the first place. Already in the eighteenth century, learned Europeans wrestled with whether Alexander’s prodigious career of conquest was a good or a bad thing – whether it was mainly about glory and plunder; whether in exchange for the undeniable violence he gave concrete benefits to the conquered; whether his treatment of Asiatics had anything to teach the Europeans in Mughal India, and so on.
The basic facts are agreed. Aged twenty-two, Alexander crossed the Dardanelles with an army of Macedonians and some Greek allies. At once resisted by a large Persian army, he achieved a decisive victory near Troy. Fighting his way through the interior, he reached south-east Turkey in November of the following year (333 BC). Here, near the ancient town of Issus, he was confronted for the first time by the Persian king himself, Darius III, at the head of an army larger than his own. As usual in his battles, Alexander led the cavalry charge; this broke the enemy line. Darius had his chariot turned and fled
.
A cool-headed Alexander resisted the temptation to pursue Darius. To secure his territorial gains and protect his rear, he sought to neutralize Persian sea-power, based in the ports of the Phoenicians in what is now Lebanon. After successfully fighting his way down this coast, he then invaded Egypt, where Persian rule was unpopular.
Having made clear his empire-building intentions by leaving governors, tax collectors and garrisons among his new subjects in Asia, from Egypt Alexander retraced his steps through modern Syria and then turned east, into what is now northern Iraq. Here, in October 331 BC, on the dusty Mesopotamian plain, he met Darius with a new Persian army near Mosul, at ancient Gaugamela. For a third time Alexander won decisively, and for a second time Darius abandoned his chariot and fled.
Some specialists argue that by tradition the Persian king was perhaps more a bystander at his own battles, and that the uniqueness of his person required his withdrawal if the battle went ill. Inevitably, the Macedonians trumpeted this regal behaviour as cowardice. Whatever the case, Darius was the commander-in-chief of his army: to many on his own side, abandoning the field to save himself looked like poor generalship then – as it still does. His predecessor Artaxerxes II, the leader of men encountered just now, might have behaved differently.
With Darius on the run, Alexander was now in the heartlands of the Persian Empire. Glittering prizes were within reach – the rich royal cities of Babylon, Susa, Persepolis and Ecbatana. Alexander occupied them one by one, stripping the royal treasuries and eventually centralizing his vast haul of bullion in a Smaug-like trove at Ecbatana, in what is now north-west Iran.
After setting fire to the palace of Xerxes at Persepolis so as to back up his public claim that Greece had now been avenged, in 330 BC Alexander sent his Greek troops home. He himself was far from ready to admit ‘mission accomplished’. The refugee Darius having been killed in a coup by his entourage, Alexander now set off to pursue the Persian royal kinsman who had claimed the Persian throne.
The next four years saw tough campaigning in Iran, Afghanistan and up into what is now Tajikistan, where he finally captured the Persian claimant. Afghanistan – the Greeks called it Bactria – was hard to pacify, then as now. To help matters, Alexander made a diplomatic marriage to Roxane, daughter of a local baron. He also founded a handful of Greek-style fortified cities in the region, settled with European veterans and indigenes. The point of these seems to have been above all strategic: a combination of bridgehead and bastion.
All these lands had belonged to Darius or his ancestors. In 326 BC Alexander invaded Pakistan, ‘India’ to the ancient Greeks, long lost to the Persian Empire. Based on the errors of Greek geographers, Alexander hoped to reach the ocean encircling, as he and they believed, the world.
Instead his men mutinied. They found a spokesperson in a Macedonian officer – the then holder, as it happens, of those estates of Sine and Trapezus. A furious Alexander was unable to budge his long-suffering men and had to turn back. He opted to sail down the River Indus and march back across southern Iran, with dreadful privations suffered by his troops in the deserts of that region.
In 324 BC a relentless Alexander was back in the old imperial heartlands. Discharging disgruntled Macedonian veterans and enlisting troops levied from his new Asian subjects, he had a new plan – an invasion of the Arabian peninsula.
Oil was not the attraction in those days, and the modern reader might wonder what had caught Alexander’s eye – or rather, those of his scouts. The best ancient account, not untypically, gives both irrational and rational motives. The former was his ‘insatiable thirst for extending his possessions’. The latter gives a glimpse for once of the calculated economic thinking behind Macedonian imperialism:
The wealth of their [i.e. the Arabs’] country was an additional incitement – the cassia in the oases, the trees which bore frankincense and myrrh, the shrubs which yielded cinnamon, the meadows where nard grew wild . . . there were harbours everywhere fit for his fleet to ride in and to provide sites for new settlements to grow to great wealth and prosperity.
It was this lucrative luxury trade in spices and aromatics that Alexander and his entourage now eyed covetously. However, with plans well under way, shortly before his thirty-third birthday, in 323 BC, Alexander fell sick. Despite an ox-like constitution, this time he did not recover. Naturally, this being the court of a spectacularly successful ruler with many enemies, rumours of poison circulated.
I remember years ago being invited to listen to a fascinating presentation by trainee medics in a USA armed services hospital in Baltimore. By way of light entertainment they had an occasional lunchtime seminar for which they would be given in advance all the details (except the identity) of a famous person’s death, and be asked to come up with a diagnosis.
This time it was Alexander, whose symptoms the ancient writers recorded in detail. Among the trainees there was no unanimity. One wondered about poison. Others leaned more towards a waterborne illness. Since he died at ancient Babylon, sandwiched between the sluggish waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, this does indeed seem quite a plausible cause of death, especially if the heavy drinking that ancient writers record had lowered his immune system.
When Alexander expired, his vast conquest-state stretched from today’s northern Greece to today’s Pakistan and Kashmir. Classicists can still be found who think that he had a long-term aim to advance Greek civilization in these lands. He would have used Graeco-Macedonian settlers to take the Greek way of urban living to the plains of Mesopotamia, the valleys of Afghanistan and so on.
In truth these new civic settlements seem to have been far fewer than ancient figures suggest – as few as nine, according to a recent study. As seen, in Alexander’s lifetime these fortified outposts were tellingly concentrated among the belligerent peoples of the eastern frontier.
It is true that Alexander had had a Greek education. Philip had hired Aristotle, no less, to tutor his son. Alexander had a cultural outlook that in many ways was Greek. He loved the Greek theatre – actors followed his campaign. He staged Greek athletic contests for the army. He had Greek philosophers in tow. He kept a copy of Homer under his pillow supposedly – some scholars question this anecdote, which does indeed sound almost too good to be true. His official historian was a Greek, a kinsman and protégé of Aristotle, to whom the historian is said to have sent back ‘observations from Babylon’ for Aristotle’s astronomical research – evidence for the continuing absorption by Greek culture of the older wisdom of the East, in this instance with the direct sanction of Alexander himself.
The young Alexander also acquired what seems to have been a personal fondness for the trappings and pastimes of the Persian royal court. To be sure, in part he was playing at what today would be called identity politics. This revealed itself in his sustained attempt to ‘Persianize’ his royal image. He used Persian culture to reach out to his Asian subjects and, among these, to one key group in particular – the high Persian aristocracy at the core of the fallen empire’s governing elite. The support of these people could do much to build a new political consensus around the Macedonian conqueror.
Before his premature death, Alexander does not seem to have tried to learn Persian, but he took to wearing items of Persian regal dress, and started to hold court and give audiences in the Asiatic style of the vanquished Darius. Eventually he took two additional wives, both Persian royal princesses, and required eighty or so members of his officer class likewise to marry high-born Persians.
The classical writers detailed with horrified relish this apparent slide into Persian ‘decadence’. It is hard to think of a historical parallel – perhaps as if the Spanish conquistador Pizarro, after having the pagan Inca emperor garrotted in 1533, had adopted his tasselled crown and expected people to approach him as well with gestures as if he were the divine Sun. According to one Greek contemporary of Alexander, ‘myrrh was burnt before him, and other kinds of incense; and all the bystanders kept silent, or spo
ke only words of good omen, out of fear. For he was a very violent man, with no regard for human life.’
In fact, the burning of aromatics before the enthroned Persian king and a respectful silence seem to have been part of the normal procedure of Persian royal audiences. Here the ill-meant comment that follows suggests that this passage has something in common with modern ‘fake news’.
How personally committed Alexander was to the Persian royal lifestyle is suggested by another cryptic passage from the same Greek writer, whose name was Ephippus. He claims that at his dinner parties Alexander was in the habit of dressing up as the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis. Like Artemis in Greek art, he would appear on a chariot as a feminine bow-hunter.
The Macedonian court went in for festive junkets, and Greeks dressing up as their gods was not unheard of at this time, both on and off the theatre stage. This ancient writer gives himself away, however, by adding the detail that Alexander on these occasions was dressed in his version of Persian regal costume. This involved flowing robes, of the kind that on men Greek writers derided as womanly.
Another Greek writer gives a clue to what lay behind this malicious tease. He tells of Alexander taking up chariotry and archery while in Asia – neither of them a traditional pursuit of Macedonian royalty. So the reality behind this alleged impersonation of Artemis may have been that Alexander, a keen huntsman himself, had decided to take his ‘Persianizing’ to a new level by learning to hunt in the traditional style of Persian kings, dressed, not as Artemis, but, even so, in the Persian regal dress that Greeks found effeminate.
The Persian kings were bow-hunters. They hunted in game parks from a moving chariot, which they would need to be able to get on and off during the chase, since they seem to have gone in for the kill on foot. The most prestigious prey was the king’s opposite number in the animal kingdom, the Asian lion, now extinct in the wild, but which European travellers still saw prowling the outskirts of Baghdad in the seventeenth century.
The Story of Greece and Rome Page 21
