Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome
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verted to their old ways and paid him only lip service.
Diodorus tel s us another way that Alexander intended to manage his
empire. In his account of Alexander’s so-cal ed last plans, he says that
Alexander planned to found cities and to transplant people from Asia to
Europe and vice versa, to bring “the biggest continents into a common
unity and to friendship by intermarriages and family ties.”17 Alexander
did not embark on any transpopulation policy, but he did found a large
number of settlements, apparently as many as seventy. However, the
majority of these were not actual poleis with developed constitutions,
gymnasia, theaters, and al the attributes of a city but instead were more
garrison posts, often inhabited by veteran soldiers and local peoples to
keep a particular area in check.18 Alexander probably founded only a
dozen actual cities, the most famous being Alexandria in Egypt.19
Founding cities for strategic reasons was not novel. Philip II had
done the same thing along his northwest frontier with the troublesome
Illyrian tribes in 345, and Alexander’s borrowing this leaf out of his fa-
ther’s book shows us he realized that using native satraps would not be
enough to placate his subject peoples. Philip had conquered the various
Illyrian tribes, unified Macedon as a result, and then incorporated them
into the new Macedonian army. Even so, he was forced to monitor
them continuously throughout his reign.20 So Alexander also could not
afford to assume his satrapal arrangements would be enough. Hence
he took care to pepper the garrison settlements throughout the areas
Alexander the Great and Empire 127
of his empire where he expected the most resistance—unsurprisingly,
the greatest concentration was in the eastern half of the empire. Even
so, these would not prove to be enough in Bactria and Sogdiana.21
The new settlements also facilitated trade and communications, al-
though they rose to economic prominence only after Alexander. Thus,
Alexandria (in Egypt) became the cultural center and an economic
power in the Hellenistic period after Ptolemy I made it the capital.22
The real advantage of using cities to help maintain rule over huge
empires is shown by the later Seleucid rulers of Syria. It is no coinci-
dence that Seleucus, the first of these rulers, and the first to make city
foundations deliberate policy, was one of Alexander’s generals. He had
learned well by example.
Diodorus also talks about a “common unity” between the western
and eastern halves of Alexander’s empire and intermarriages. This sort
of line, compounded by Plutarch’s presentation of Alexander as a phi-
losopher and idealist in his rhetorical treatise On the Fortune or the Virtue
of Alexander, has led to a belief that Alexander wanted to create a broth-
erhood of mankind as a means of ruling his empire. There is, of course,
merit to a policy that tries to make foreign rule acceptable not by enforc-
ing it but by promoting equality and commonality among everyone,
and some of Alexander’s actions throughout his reign seem to support
the belief that he was striving to achieve such an equality. Prominent
among his actions here were the integration of foreigners into his army
and administration, his marriage in spring 327 to the Bactrian princess
Roxane, his attempt to enforce proskynesis at his court, the mass wed-
ding at Susa in 324, at which he and ninety members of his senior staff
married Persian noblewomen, and final y a reconciliation banquet at
Opis in 324, at which he prayed for harmony between everyone.
Yet there was no such thing as a unity-of-mankind “policy” on Alex-
ander’s part.23 None of the above actions was ideological in purpose,
but, like Alexander himself, all were pragmatic and no different from,
say, founding cities to maintain Macedonian control. For example, for-
eigners in his army, such as specialist troops from Iran or the Bactrian
cavalry, were kept apart in their own ethnic units until 324, when Al-
exander incorporated them into the army for tactical reasons before
the Arabian expedition.24 Native satraps, as already noted, were merely
128 Worthington
figureheads, the powerful families being given some semblance of their
former station to secure their support.
For Alexander, Roxane may well have been “the only woman he
ever loved,” but the marriage was political.25 Her father Oxyartes had
been one of Alexander’s toughest opponents; the marriage, Alexan-
der would have hoped, was to secure his support, and hence Bactria’s
passivity, and in return Alexander made him satrap of Parapamisadae.
Hence, Alexander’s marriage was no different from his father’s first six
marriages, undertaken to help consolidate Macedon’s borders—and
provide an heir. Roxane had a child who died in 326 at the Hydaspes,26
thus giving us a motive for Alexander’s marriages in 324 to two Persian
princesses: to solidify his rule and to produce heirs on the eve of his
Arabian campaign (Roxanne became pregnant soon after).
Proskynesis set Persians apart from Greeks, who thought the act was
akin to worship. Alexander’s attempt to enforce it on his own men looks
like he was trying to fashion some common social protocol between
the races, to get West to meet East. Yet he was brought up to believe in
the traditional gods and still performed the traditional sacrifices as king
in the last days of his life, so he must have known his men saw the act as
sacrilegious. Even the posture was unacceptable, as Greeks commonly
prayed standing up with their arms upraised, whereas slaves lay on the
ground. More likely, then, is that Alexander now thought of himself as
divine, and proskynesis reflected that.
The symbolism of the interracial mass marriage at Susa seems obvi-
ous, but it is important to note that no Greek women were brought
out from the mainland to marry Asian noblemen, which we would ex-
pect if Alexander was sincere about fusing the races by intermarriage.
What Alexander was doing was polluting the bloodline to ensure that
children from these marriages would never have a claim to the Persian
throne. Moreover, his men were against the marriages, and after Alex-
ander’s death, they all, apart from Seleucus, divorced their wives.
Finally, the prayer to harmony after the Opis mutiny: Alexander
ended the mutiny by playing on his men’s hatred of the Persians. At
a reconciliation banquet the same evening the seating order sought to
emphasize the superiority of the invaders: Macedonians sat next to
Alexander, then came the Greeks, and then all others. Moreover, the
Alexander the Great and Empire 129
prayer to concord was about unity in the army, not unity of mankind,
because Alexander planned to invade Arabia, and so dissension in the
ranks was the last thing he needed.
Aristotle, his personal tutor from the age of fourteen to sixteen, had
advised Alexander “to treat the Greeks as if he were their leader and
other people as if he were their master; to have regard for the Greeks
as for friends and family, but to conduct himself towards other peoples
as though they were plants or animals.”27 Aristotle may well have in-
fluenced Alexander’s scientific curiosity to find out about the natural
resources of the areas through which he traveled,28 but Alexander did
not follow Aristotle’s advice about his Asian subjects. At the same time,
Alexander knew he had to regard the conquered populations with sus-
picion; hence everything he did was for a political reason.
Another area that might throw light on Alexander’s relationship
with the conquered people, and hence the maintenance of his empire,
is the spread of Greek culture. Hellenization became something of
a staple in Alexander’s nation building. To a large extent, the spread
of Greek civilization was inevitable simply as an effect of Alexander’s
army marching through new areas and exposing the people there to
things Greek. Alexander was an avid reader of Homer (especially the
Iliad) and of Greek tragedy (Euripides was his favorite), and his men
would have shared his tastes. Thus, when the army returned to Tyre
from Egypt in the summer of 331, Alexander held a celebratory festival
to Heracles, complete with games and dramatic performances. Among
the performers were the celebrated actors Thessalus (a personal friend
of Alexander) and Athenodorus, who reneged on a contract to perform
at the culturally important festival of the city Dionysia in Athens to be
at Tyre. For this he was fined, but Alexander paid the fine for him.
These sorts of cultural events would have been lost on his men if
they did not appreciate them, and they must have had an effect on local
peoples. Indeed, his fostering of Greek culture led later authors such
as Plutarch to speak of him as the bringer of civilization to foreign
peoples.29 However, one might argue that the spread of Greek culture
was not simply an offshoot of his campaigns but that he saw the politi-
cal benefits to be gained from cultural change. The problem was, he
made little attempt to tolerate local customs and religious practices,
130 Worthington
and he would end customs that Greeks condemned or that he person-
ally disliked.
For example, Greeks were appalled that in Persia, brothers would
marry sisters and sons married their mothers.30 On the other hand,
these practices might be overlooked because the Macedonians had
marital customs that other Greeks condemned, specifically polygamy
(later in Ptolemaic Egypt the practice of ruling brothers marrying
sisters began with Ptolemy II Philadelphus and his sister, Arsinoë).
However, the Scythians’ practices of sacrificing their elderly parents,
drinking the blood of their first human kill, and using as much of a
corpse as possible in their everyday lives were another thing.31 So too
was the Bactrians’ custom in regard to their elderly: “those who be-
came infirm because of old age or sickness are thrown out alive as prey
to dogs, which they keep specifically for this purpose, and in their na-
tive tongue they are called ‘undertakers’. While the land outside the
walls of the city of the Bactrians looks clean, most of the land inside
the walls is full of human bones.”32
We, like the Greeks back then, find this custom shocking, but never-
theless it was a traditional local custom. However, that did not stop
Alexander ending it, and he had no business to do so. It was this type of
disruption to established social practices that could only fuel discontent
in the affected areas and encourage locals to resist the Macedonians,
and it gave rise to an anti-Greek sentiment. This is very much in evi-
dence with the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt, for example, who segregated
the native Egyptians in society and precluded them from taking part in
state administration. The feelings of exploitation had grown to explo-
sive levels by the reign of Ptolemy IV (221–203), and Egypt was split by
civil war that tested Ptolemaic rule to its utmost.
On the other hand, Alexander was more tolerant of religious beliefs,
but then the equivalents of Greek gods were everywhere. For example,
Alexander identified the local god Melqart at Tyre with Heracles; at
Siwah there was an oracle of Zeus-Ammon, and at Nysa in India the
local god Indra or Shiva was deemed the equivalent of Dionysus. Re-
ligion is a powerful tool for bringing about unity, and the king used
it as and when he saw fit, though not always properly understanding
what religion meant to different people. Thus, in Egypt he took care
Alexander the Great and Empire 131
to sacrifice to Apis at Memphis and in Babylon he gave orders to re-
build the temple to Bel, which Xerxes had destroyed. He spared the
lives of the people of Nysa in 326 (a deviation from what had by then
become his modus operandi of wholesale slaughter of native tribes)
because they claimed descent from those who had traveled with Dio-
nysus through the region, Nysa was the name of Dionysus’s nurse, and
Alexander was convinced a local plant was ivy, Dionysus’s symbol.
However, Alexander could be far more myopic. In 332, after the peo-
ple of Tyre had surrendered to him, Alexander expressed his wish to
worship in their temple. The temple was to Melqart, the local equiva-
lent of Heracles, who was one of Alexander’s ancestors. The temple,
then, was not to Heracles but to Melqart, and for Alexander to worship
there was sacrilegious to the Tyrians, who refused, asking him to wor-
ship on the mainland opposite (in antiquity, Tyre was an island). Rather
than recognizing the political advantage he had just gained from the
Tyrians’ surrendering to him (it was essential for him to control Tyre
to prevent the Phoenician navy using it as a base) and accepting the
compromise because of its religious nature, Alexander took the rebuff
as a personal affront. Furious, he gave orders for Tyre to be besieged.
When it fell to him after a difficult and lengthy siege, he put many of its
citizens to death and sold the rest into slavery. As an example to other
places that might defy him, he ordered the crucified bodies of 2,000
Tyrians to be set up along the coastline. This act merely stiffened resis-
tance to him, for the next town he approached, Gaza, refused to open
its gates to him. After a short siege Gaza fell, and Alexander punished
the people harshly, including dragging the garrison commander Batis
behind a chariot around the walls of Gaza until he died.
u
As a king and at times even as a general, Alexander had flaws, but
he was impossible to beat. He was, then, “his own greatest achieve-
ment.”33 However, it is common to transfer his failings as a king and a
man to his plans for the building of a single empire. He did not have a
conscious economic policy, if such a term is not too modern, for the
empire as a whole, although he recognized the economic potential of
132 Worthington
the areas through which he traveled and which he next targeted—one
of the reasons for invading Arabia had to have been its lucrative
spice
trade. His continual marching east until his men forced him back leads
one to conclude he knew nothing else but fighting.34 Yet Alexander did
give thought to how he could deal with the problems that faced him
and manage his empire so as to maintain Macedonian rule over it. He
introduced administrative measures to this end, such as streamlining
the satrapal system and creating the office of imperial treasurer. He
involved the powerful Persian aristocratic families, whose support he
needed, in his administration, and he started wearing Persian dress and
the upright tiara (in 330 after Darius III was killed) to endear himself
to the Persians and to offset the threat from Bessus and Artaxerxes V.35
These factors help us to see how Alexander’s exploits more than
two mil ennia ago highlight the dilemma of modern nation building.
It is easy for us to think of ways he could have endeared himself to his
subject peoples more. For example, he could have worked to under-
stand different customs, religious beliefs, and even cultures and main-
tain them on an equal basis with his own. While it was perfectly fine
to expose the Asians to Greek culture, their own culture should not
have been ignored, condemned, or reduced because the Greeks thought
theirs was better (whatever that means). Then again, perhaps to achieve
this “equality” was impossible in the real world. What Alexander did (or
did not do) shows us that the dilemma of Western nation building was
as alive in antiquity as it is now—or conversely, that Alexander’s inherent
problems in nation building set a trend for the centuries that fol owed
and into the modern era that has not yet been reversed.
Thus, to persuade his men to keep marching, to keep conquering,
and thus to keep expanding his empire, Alexander was forced to argue
the benefits that hel enization would bring to the peoples of the former
Persian Empire, as wel as the advantages (economic and otherwise)
that the conquest and maintenance of Asia would bring to Macedon.
These benefits were worth fighting for—and dying for—although the
material benefits of booty would not have been lost on the army. At
the same time, he had to reconcile his rule with the native peoples and
so rule his empire with minimum opposition. These peoples, however,