The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  In this second item of fake news about Alexander, that same writer – Ephippus – seems to have twisted a truth so as to present him as an upper-class Greek playboy whose behaviour at parties included cross-dressing and disrespecting the Greek gods. The story was credible to some Greeks because, on occasion, their upper classes really did behave in this way. As for the writer, there is an explanation for his malice. He was a refugee from the fall of Olynthus and therefore had good reason to hate the Macedonian royals.

  Alexander might have had a personal liking for the customs of the Persian ruling class. In the Aegean world he was not alone if he felt some cultural sympathy for Persian ways. Ancient Greek writers liked to stereotype an opposition between ‘good’ Greeks and ‘bad’ Persians. Real-life Greek behaviour reveals a more cross-cultural reality. Rather surprisingly, Athenian vases show that fifth-century BC Athenians, the great victors of the Persian Wars, liked to wear items of Persian-style clothing, and to drink from vessels inspired by Persian designs. This bi-cultural approach by Alexander to ruling his empire lifts his imperialism somewhat above the run of ancient conquistadors.

  The classical writers present Alexander as breaking new ground in another way – demanding worship as a god. Among political leaders of more recent times this kind of behaviour has a tin-pot aspect. One thinks of Turkmenistan’s former president Saparmurat Niyazov, with his gold statue in the capital that revolved so that it always faced the sun, and who in 1999 renamed the months of the year after members of his family. Classicists who have accepted the ancient traditions about Alexander’s quest for divinity have usually seen it as something shocking, a black mark against the historical figure and, more broadly, as a symptom of failings in Greek paganism which only the rise of a true faith, in the form of Christianity, could solve.

  The actual facts where Alexander is concerned hinge on a handful of passages of Ancient Greek ceaselessly debated by the experts. Beyond these, there is the larger interpretation of a religious phenomenon. Did young Alexander personally believe in his divinity? Did he manipulate religious attitudes to enhance his political authority? Or did the initiative lie mainly with those doing the worshipping? Here the evidence is perhaps clearest. Asiatics were not involved. Instead, some Greek cities, including Athens, took formal decisions to venerate Alexander in his lifetime with the usual paraphernalia of Greek cult – the altar, the sacrifice, the prayers and so on.

  Since readers might like to know why it is so tricky to establish the actual facts, here is an example. In winter quarters at Balkh in northern Afghanistan, in 327 BC Alexander experimented anew with the protocol of how he was to be approached when holding court. He tried to introduce into his Macedonian court Persian-style obeisance before the ruler. Some members of the entourage obliged; others balked; one laughed out loud watching others perform the gesture; Aristotle’s kinsman refused the gesture altogether when his turn came. It was said that Alexander at the time tactfully chose not to notice.

  The classical literati to whom we owe our portrait of Alexander were fascinated by this episode. In the Greek world, this act of obeisance, on your knees, head to the ground, was a gesture of mortal humility before a divine image. So it is clear that, at Balkh, resistance among the European entourage could have been on religious grounds.

  The portrayal by ancient Greek writers, as we have it today, went further. It presented the episode as a significant step in a morality tale of Alexander’s corruption by power and success. His head was now so turned that he sought worship as a god. This version was the one which, thousands of miles away in the Aegean, many Greeks chose to believe. Greek cities, including Athens, were now primed to offer Alexander what they had come to believe that he wanted.

  They might have been right about what Alexander desired. An alternative is that this interpretation of the Balkh episode was circulated by Greek ill-wishers as, once more, a fake news story. Modern historians have long pointed out that the historical Alexander’s motives could have been entirely secular. He sought further to conciliate the high Persian aristocracy by assuaging their sense of honour. He sought to do this by creating a semblance of greater equality between them and his European officer class (mostly Macedonians). When in the royal presence, Alexander wanted a level playing field. Elites of both groups were to perform the Persian-style obeisance – which was not an act of divine worship for Persians.

  All this might seem remote from today’s world. But there is an aspect to the debate about Alexander that is of more general human interest. In Alexander’s day the religious outlook of the ancient Greeks blurred the line between humans and gods. An Athenian intellectual could tell King Philip that, if he conquered the Persians, ‘there is nothing left for the king than to become a god’. Was this just flattery? Or did the Greek concept of what it was to be a ‘god’ have an elastic quality foreign to world religions today?

  There again, some experts have wondered if there are modern-day behaviours which, if not exact analogies, might at least be suggestive. As well as the petty tyrannies of central Asia, the modern world has seen mass cults of living leaders, such as Chairman Mao.

  Closer in time, at Donald Trump’s election in 2016, commentators noted the quasi-religious character of the cult of personality around him. I myself saw TV interviews in which his American supporters made clear that for them the leader could do no wrong. Nor was the leader a remote and invisible force. Mr Trump was a tangible presence who might answer, if not your prayer, then your tweet.

  Fuelling the suspension of disbelief among these Trump-enthusiasts was the conviction that the leader would deliver salvation from economic woes. In ancient times it was precisely the ability of powerful kings to offer practical protection – from human enemies, from forces of nature such as bad harvests and consequent famine – that allowed Greek communities to place them on the same level as gods. Greeks in the new world that Alexander ushered in bestowed on some of the Graeco-Macedonian rulers who followed him the same byname that they conferred on some Greek gods: ‘Saviour’.

  How much Alexander actively encouraged Greeks to worship him and how much he had this worship thrust upon him by Greeks themselves will continue to be debated by his modern historians. As for his legacy, since his reign was cut short, Alexander’s version of an imperial state was at best a work in progress. It is slightly unfair to claim, as some scholars try to do, that his bold experiment with ‘Persianizing’ was a failure.

  What is true, as the next chapter tries to show, is that his real legacy lay elsewhere.

  CHAPTER 12

  GAME OF THRONES, OR THE WORLD

  AFTER ALEXANDER

  A small-screen event of the early twenty-first century was an award-winning adaptation of a series of fantasy novels called Game of Thrones. Set in an imaginary land curiously similar to mainland Britain in the map adorning the opening titles of the TV series, the plot hinges on the violent competition for an overarching kingship among an interrelated group of noble lords and ladies ruling regional strongholds at varying removes from the royal capital.

  Many historians, and indeed members of the public, will relate easily to this world. A basic principle of its organization is the lineage of hereditary rulers – ‘House Stark’, ‘House Lannister’ and so on. These lineages embody common stereotypes or aberrations of family life – the scheming mother-in-law, the dysfunctional teenager, incestuous siblings.

  If the social and political context of the series looks superficially familiar, this is not only because dynasties are in some sense family life writ large, but also because much of the world has been organized into states ruled by hereditary families for much of history. So in the TV series many of us feel a certain conversancy with the world of palaces and thrones, the finery and ceremonial that display the hierarchy of social ranking in the so-called Seven Kingdoms.

  With the swords but minus the sorcery, the upheavals in the ancient world following Alexander’s death would not seem alien to fans of Game of Thrones. For a q
uarter-century or more different warlords, mainly the late king’s Macedonian officers, fight each other all over the map of the ancient Near East. At stake for the most ambitious is the supreme kingship of Alexander’s whole empire, for others the lesser project of carving off a slice of territory fit for a king for themselves.

  4. Central Asia.

  The warlords form alliances and intermarry. Naturally they also kill each other, on and off the battlefield. Little mercy is shown the weak. Alexander’s failure to secure the hereditary succession lay at the heart of this drama. His vulnerable widow and posthumous son, as well as the half-brother with a mental disorder who briefly succeeded him, are all slaughtered.

  Out of this bewildering succession of marching armies and encampments, battles on land and sea, sieges of cities and so on, a post-Alexander political map started to emerge in the first decades of the 200s BC – well over a generation after the ‘brilliant flash of lightning’ had vanished.

  This new world – conventionally called ‘Hellenistic’ – was inherently unstable. If there was constancy, it did not reside in unchanging rule over a given territory. The need for prestige and for booty meant that royal armies never really stopped fighting over this land or that. For the next two centuries, in what is now Turkey, the Levant and the Middle East, regions repeatedly changed rulers.

  Permanence, such as it was, came from the new ruling families. Instead of a supreme king, the Hellenistic world got used to several kings. The male progeny of three of Alexander’s officers turned out to be particularly good at transmitting this regal power from one generation to the next. From Ptolemy, Alexander’s childhood friend, descended nine generations of rulers. Descendants of another officer, Seleucus, held on to power for ten generations. A third, Antigonus, founded only five generations of kings. Their rulership was the first of the three to be snuffed out by the Romans.

  These military lineages each managed to retain a territorial core, a splinter of Alexander’s imperial state won by a dynastic ancestor in the so-called Successor wars triggered by Alexander’s death. For the Ptolemies this core was Egypt; it was Syria and, at first, Mesopotamia as well, for the Seleucids; and Macedon for the Antigonids.

  The families held on to power with the help of other groups of stakeholders. Before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, French archaeologists were busy uncovering an ancient fortified city on the country’s northern frontier. One immediately striking feature of the published plans and photographs is the emphasis on protection from attack. On two sides flowed important rivers at their confluence. As well as water, all round the settlement ran a massive fortification of thick walls and towers of baked mud brick. Inside, finally, there was higher ground and a citadel as well as a lower town.

  Some of the inhabitants of this place – known as Ai-Khanoum from today’s nearby village – were clearly Greek. I mentioned in the prologue a travelling exhibition of ‘treasures’ from Ai-Khanoum doing the global rounds in the early twenty-first century. At the time of writing it is in Tokyo; I saw it in Amsterdam. Two finds stood out for me.

  One was that waterspout shaped like a Greek theatrical mask, which I talked about earlier. The other remarkable find was an inscription, in proper Ancient Greek, carved in letters of the early third century BC on a block of local stone. On Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan that is remarkable enough. No less striking is the content: a copy for these faraway Greek settlers of a list, inscribed back home on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, of famous advice from Greek sages: ‘When a child show yourself well-behaved; when a young man, self-controlled; in middle age, just; as an old man, a good counsellor; at the end of your life, free from sorrow.’ This ancient life coaching has aged well. Did fathers, or teachers, once stand before this stone to improve the Greek-speaking youngsters in their charge? On the site itself, another building which you have to pinch yourself to remember has been found in Afghanistan, not in Greece, is a Greek-style gymnasium of the typical plan, as seen in the last chapter: a large square courtyard for physical exercise, framed by buildings.

  By the 200s BC, the gymnasium in a Greek city had become a standard institution of secondary education for the sons of better-off citizens who could pay the fees. Wherever it existed, as here, it is fairly safe to assume a social crème de la crème within the local community of families, families Greek in language and culture, although, in a place like ancient Ai-Khanoum, not necessarily in ethnic heritage.

  The ancient name of this place is uncertain. Whoever the European settlers were who arrived here perhaps a generation after Alexander’s death, around 300 BC, they did so on the coat-tails of his greatest imperial legacy, Macedonian military supremacy. Seleucus obtained this portion of Alexander’s empire; one of his captains may have been the mysterious founder whose Greek name we know from that same inscription, ‘Cineas’. The French found dwelling houses that were not Greek but oriental in plan. They found temples which do not look Greek either. So there can be no doubt that the Greek settlers and their descendants lived here alongside Asian people.

  Many of the ten thousand or so Macedonians discharged by Alexander in Mesopotamia in 324 BC had taken up with Asian women on campaign and had children by them. So it can safely be assumed that mixed marriage with local people, following the example of Alexander himself, was common from the start of this new wave of ancient Greek migration.

  The pioneers from the Aegean world who settled in these new cities under the protection of Alexander or his Macedonian successors were tempted with plots of farmland in return for an expectation or requirement of military service. Fourth-century BC thinkers like Aristotle were probably not the only Greeks who imagined the perfect Greek-style state as a place where the hard work on the citizen farm, as in Sparta, was done by foreign serfs:

  Those who till the soil should best of all, if the ideal is to be stated, be slaves, not of the same ethnic group or spirited in character (for thus they would be both serviceable for their work and safe to abstain from revolt), but as second best they should be barbarian dependents of a similar nature.

  Lack of evidence makes it hard to say whether conditions were this Helot-like in practice on the Greek settler farms of Asia and the Nile valley. But often, perhaps routinely, the farmhands must indeed have been local peasants, like their modern counterparts, the Qualang Pashtuns who tend the arable valleys of modern Afghanistan, or Egypt’s fellahin.

  So the settlers were, in one sense, economic migrants. They included army veterans, among them thousands of Greeks who fought for pay as mercenaries. Many were exiles from their home cities, where they had been on the losing side in Greek civil strife. For all these people, Alexander’s conquests opened up new opportunities overseas, where the king could offer new farms to replace the confiscated homesteads of their old lives.

  Founding a city and naming it after yourself was a regal tradition which went back to Philip. His ‘City of Philip’ (Philippopolis) survives as modern Plovdiv in Bulgaria.

  Seleucus and his successors in particular were active as city-founders. The names of these new towns were memorials to the royal lineage long after their founders were dead. Antakya in south-easternmost Turkey still hints at its original name ‘Antiocheia’, Antioch, after Antiochus, the son and heir of the first Seleucus.

  Apart from the self-advertisement derived from giving the royal name to a new city, there was the military aspect, as seen with Alexander. The male citizens were liable to call-up. The kings were also interested in maximizing the tax which they could cream off their lands. They seem to have viewed their kingdoms essentially as a profit-generating estate, to be run as efficiently as possible by an overall manager in the mould of a factor for a great estate in more recent times.

  One can imagine tough characters entrusted with great responsibility in return for huge personal rewards. Finds of Egyptian papyri have revealed the figure of Apollonius, who served the grandson of the first Ptolemy as his dioiketes, a title derived from the Ancient Greek verb ‘to manage
a house’. In effect he was Ptolemy III’s ‘finance minister’. His writ extended well beyond Egypt to what in the third century BC was a very significant Ptolemaic empire overseas, including Cyprus and possessions in what is now southern Turkey and as far away as the north coast of the Aegean Sea.

  Under this Apollonius in Egypt proper there were regional managers whose orders required them to take whatever practical steps were needed to ensure that all the arable land in the Nile valley was fully cultivated, such as delivering sufficient water for irrigation, listening to farmers’ complaints and so on. In return King Ptolemy gave Apollonius, who presumably came from a Greek migrant background, a huge estate of over 10 square miles in the rich agricultural basin of the modern Fayum, south-west of Cairo.

  Seleucus and his successors may have applied the same way of thinking – a kind of household economics of which Mrs Thatcher might have approved – to the business of founding cities. As well as in the frontier lands of Afghanistan, they seem to have planted these Greek-style new towns in rich but under-urbanized regions such as Syria and Mesopotamia, where barter rather than payment by coin had been the norm in Persian times.

  The new urban markets were meant to promote a cash economy by introducing silver coins from the royal mint in exchanges with surrounding peasants. The cities recycled the coin to pay royal taxes. The Seleucid kings then had silver to pay for their outgoings in the more monetized Mediterranean – above all the wages of their troops. They regularly used armies, among other military operations, to contest with their Ptolemy cousins down in Egypt the disputed border region of what is now the Beqaa valley, modern Lebanon’s chief agricultural district, famed in some circles today for Château Musar, Lebanon’s top wine estate.