Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  To its Macedonian leaders it had other attractions than glamour. Thorough crusades should begin their revenge at home, so the slogan licensed the use of Greek allies against troublesome pockets of Greek resistance, whether 'treacherous' Greeks in Persian service or rebellious Thebans whose help to Xerxes's Persians in 480 had not been forgotten; it went unsaid, of course, that the Macedonians and their Thessalian allies had also aided Persia when it mattered most. The myth was more than a flexible call to arms; it created a mood which its leaders could share, and one of the reasons why Philip had chosen Corinth as the centre for his Greek council was surely that Corinth had been the only Greek city to have recently repulsed barbarians from the Greek world. In Sicily, as Philip's friends had told him, Corinth had supported her own Timoleon in a triumphant liberation of the Greek cities from the threat of Carthage, a mirror in the west of Philip's declared aims in the east. So too, with Alexander's attitude; the interests of the Greek allies of course remained secondary to his own, but a mood of Greek revenge and religious retribution did influence his actions, and it was not inconsistent with Greek ideas of such an expedition that he soon took Persian nobles into his court in return for surrender and that he appointed 'barbarians' to commands where they knew the countryside and language. It was still possible to punish the Persians by ruling through them, and revenge for Greece's past did not exclude an ambition to be Asia's king of the future. Part of Alexander's fascination is to watch how this second aim would grow to be dominant, but it is wrong to dismiss the theme of the crusade as mere publicity, cynically adopted and always disbelieved. The stress on the role of Greek allies was a polite formality, but the call to revenge of past sacrilege was only upheld because it was taken seriously.

  Through Alexander, too, this mood was sponsored and written carefully into his history, for the leader of the Greeks' war of revenge needed his own historian, and with Aristotle's help, the man for this lucrative job had been forthcoming. Callisthenes, cousin of Aristotle, was already known among educated Greeks for his book on Greek Affairs from the King's Peace to the Sacred War. He had worked with Aristotle and learnt from him, and they were jointly engaged on the compilation of a list of the victors in the Pythian Games at Delphi, a labour of chronological love which contrasted with their flighty disregard for historical fact in other more familiar writings. Callisthenes was a man with an academic turn of mind; he was interested in the origins of place names and had theories on the date of the fall of Troy; like his mentor Aristotle, he used early Greek poems as evidence for history; he had a knowledge of botany and geography and perhaps of astronomy too; he argued for the influence of the sea on earthquakes, and he supported his argument not only by his own observations but by the fact that Homer had called the sea-god 'shaker of the earth'. He knew his Herodotus well, as befitted an author who had to describe a march through Asia and he was through and through a man of Greek culture; in the lively controversy over the origins of the Egyptian Pharaohs of the Nile Delta, he sided with those who argued, absurdly, that their ancestor was an Athenian. Academic interests went, as often, with a decided streak of silliness, mostly in keeping with attitudes shared by Aristotle and his pupils: he explained away the outbreak of the Crisaean war by the absurdly personal cause of an heiress's abduction; he admired the repressive constitution of Sparta, a common opinion among Greek intellectuals who did not have to live there; he agreed with Aristotle in the myth that the philosopher Socrates had kept two wives; worse, he maintained that Aeschylus, greatest of Greek dramatists, had written his plays when drunk. When he wanted he could be perverse, but it never perturbed his conscience that his home town of Olynthus on the eastern borders of Macedonia had been ruined by the Philip whose son he now flattered. Through Aristotle, presumably, he had first come to court, and Alexander commissioned him to write up his exploits in a suitably heroic manner; he had already shown, like Aristotle, that he knew how to compose a panegyric, and he made himself welcome by helping to prepare Alexander's treasured copy of the Iliad.

  'Alexander's fame,' Callisthenes is said, very plausibly, to have remarked, 'depends on me and my history,' This is true, and one of the difficulties in the search for Alexander is that this history only survives in some ten informative quotations by other authors. The literary models for such a work were more panegyric than historical and Callisthenes wrote in a rounded rhetorical style. The tone of his book was extremely favourable, for it was written to please Alexander, who was presented as the glorious equal of the gods, expressed in terms of the Greek culture which dominated Callisthenes's outlook. His starting point and end are unknown and he does not seem to have sent back his work in instalments to keep the Greeks informed. The theme of the Greek crusade was presumably stressed, although no surviving extract mentions it, and it was no doubt pleasing to Alexander that Callisthenes was thoroughly familiar with Homer's poems and well able to cap his feats of glory with quotations from the Iliad. 'A man who is trying to write properly,' Callisthenes remarked, 'must not miss the character he is describing, but must try to fit his words to the man and his actions'; through his efforts Alexander can still be seen as he wished to be seen, and the wish is the nearest route to his personality. Other historians, whether officers or literary artists, would read Callisthenes to add to their factual outline, but they were not dominated by him; from facts which are common to them all, his history appears to have been a detailed and flattering report of Alexander's route and prowess, and not only personalities but also such statistics as enemy numbers and losses were wildly distorted to set off the achievements of the new Homer crusader. Callisthenes, in short, was the sponsor of Alexander's personal myth, and the search for Alexander is also a search for Aristotle's academic cousin.

  For men faced with the invasion of Asia, these touches of heroic exaggeration were not altogether out of place. To Greeks who only knew the western coast of Asia Minor, the Lebanon and coastal Egypt, the conquest of Asia might indeed seem easier than that of Greece. In Persia's strictly graded society, even a minor nobleman could be called the 'slave' of his superiors, the king or the barons of the Seven Families. 'Mana

  bandaka, my slaves' so the Great King addressed his satraps, but his empire had never been the slavish kingdom of an all-powerful master. Centralized rule is the victim of time and distance and in an empire where a royal letter could take three months to go from Phrygia to the Persian Gulf power had had to be local to avoid dilution by mountains and slow roads. The Greeks had watched the satrapies of western Asia become the privileged duchies of recognized families or the subject kingdoms of native rulers who knew the language, the local villagers and tribal chieftains of the ever-present mountains. It suited the Great King to allow the empire to pass to these local governors, each of whom bore no love for his neighbouring equals; it also seemed to suit an invader, who could play one interest off against another and travel through the empire on its own incoordination. But for an invader who meant to control his conquests, it was not so easy. When no one foundation supports the whole edifice of empire, the defeat of the centre is never final and freedom still flourishes in unrelated fringes.

  To Persians the world seemed increasingly hostile the farther a man moved away from the circles of Parsa, his home province. As their court travelled ceaselessly from palace to palace in attendance on their itinerant king, they needed no reminder of the wearying presence of the empire's independent fringes. 'Taking a dry and hardened sheet of ox-hide he laid it on the ground and trod on one edge of it', men said of a Hindu philosopher who talked in India with Alexander's officers, 'and as it bunched together its other parts rose off" the ground. Then he walked round the rest of it, pressing hard on each comer to show how it had the same result, until he stood in the middle and the whole of the skin subsided. This was his way of proving that Alexander should press hardest on the centre of his empire and never stray far beyond it.' The Great King knew that the centre mattered most, but he was not prepared to give up his fringes without a fight. He had
never recognized Egypt as an independent kingdom, although she had only submitted to the empire for the past seventy years. The Suez canal, creation of the Pharaohs, had become unusable and the seafaring kings of Cyprus and Phoenicia had a respectable history of recent rebellion; twice in Philip's lifetime the satraps and local dynasts of western Asia had threatened to desert the empire and once, even, to march down the Euphrates and take Babylon. Against each of these western dangers royal generals had been despatched to raise armies of varying enormity: after repeated, and sometimes spectacular, attempts, they had trampled the empire's fringes back into place. If the memory of revolt remained to help Alexander, western Asia had at least returned to its allegiance to the king.

  The Persian concern for the west is not easily explained, except by the wish to retain an ancestral empire. As the middle kingdom between China and the Mediterranean, Iran does not have a natural interest in the Mediterranean sea; by Aegean observers, reared on memories of Persia's invasions of Greece, it was easily forgotten that the empire existed for its Iranians and they wanted three things of it. They wanted protection for their estates and country castles against the tribes of the mountains and forests and safety from the fearsome nomads of central Asia whom drought and the need for grazing might force across the Oxus or south from the Caspian Sea; they wanted a court with ceremonial which would mark out the unique majesty of their king and set him above his aristocratic circle of Honoured Equals. These ideals of security and ceremonial depended on food and precious metals, without which there could be no garrisons, no court honours; hence the high value of Babylon's Fertile Crescent from whose artificially watered farmlands a third of the court's yearly food and a mass of its raw silver were drained east to the Persians' palaces and to courtiers from the harsher world of the Iranian plateau. Even among the Greeks, who knew little of the Persians' eastern empire, there were those who thought the Euphrates or the rivers bounding Asia Minor to be the natural frontier of Persian rule. But the Persians had gone to great expense and trouble to disagree; the kings who had mounted huge expeditions against the west had allowed their former conquests in the Punjab to return to local rajahs, the lands beyond the Oxus to be governed by allied barons from forts of unassailable rock and all memories of Persian rule to fade on the lower course of the river Indus. But as long as Babylon's farmland was safe, Egypt, the fleets of the Levant and the cities of Greek Asia ought to have been irrelevant to the needs of an Iranian court.

  Geography may help to explain the Great King's priorities, for Iran and the 'upper satrapies' east of the river Tigris were a land of two main landscapes, neither of them suited to the passage of great armies. There was the boundless prospect of the desert steppes in the centre and the north of the empire where men strayed no faster than their flocks and the only rapid movement was the post haste of the courier and the king's work-parties down the stageposts of the rough Royal Road. Food was confined to a few oases of the water which Iranians always worshipped. If a man strayed into the desert he would not go far without the help of the Bactrian camel, hardy in mountain winters no less than in summer heat. 'When a desert wind is brewing, only the old camels have advance knowledge', wrote a Chinese traveller who had seen them, 'at once they stand in a group and snarl and bury their mouths in the sand. The men too cover their noses and mouths in felt and though the wind moves swiftly past, they would meet their deaths if they did not take this precaution.' The desert was not an enviable field for close administration, but it was at least more accessible than the mountains which ringed it round.

  To the west, the Zagros mountains, to the east the Hindu Kush, to the north the impenetrable forests of Gurgan and the Elburz range, to the south the fastnesses of Persia itself, a province which Artaxerxes III, contemporary of Philip, had never visited during his reign: these ranges were the lair of cave dwellers and mountain shepherds, forest tribes and nomads where an army had to cut a path if it was to progress at all and where snow and mud kept its season unusually short. On the outskirts of the Persian palaces a traveller would meet with nomads whom the king, left alone in return for a safe passage through their routes of migration older and more basic than any centralized empire. The hill tribes too were left free and now had less of a grievance against their rulers; the Persians' empire spread like a ground mist through the plains and valleys and when it came up against a mountain it could only halt and state its own powers all the more firmly at the mountain's foot. It was not the least of the powerful claims of Persepolis, ritual centre of the empire, that it stood in a plain ringed round with chains of mountains which the king could never have controlled.

  For this empire's survival, the kings relied on such bold and uncompromising statements of their power: they were far more easily made in the western empire. The Royal Road was smoother and faster; there was no Hindu Kush or unavoidable desert blocking authority's few routes. Politically, the difference was summed up in the different systems of water, the heart of Asian life. In upper Iran, the ingenious 'water-mines', or underground qanats fed local villages and rested in the local nobility's control. Power, like the water, was dispersed through these aristocracies, and the King's grasp was loose. But in the west, in Babylonia, water was centralized in the long royal canals. Officials held the centre, and multiplied: judges and inquisitors were attached to provincial garrisons and satraps' courts in order to enforce the King's Law in public disputes, taking priority over the law codes of their subjects. The King's bureaucracy worked in written languages which illiterate Iranians could not read; evidence of its detail is still being recovered and although its documents do not extend within seventy years of Alexander's march, it can no longer be underestimated. The precise taxing of the king's colonists, the hearing of appeals in the satrap's court, the uniform system of weights and measures, the elaborate documents for travellers on the Royal Road who deserved daily rations from its regular points of supply, these hints of an intricate government raise questions of interpreters, scribes and civil servants which only new clay tablets and Egyptian papyri will allow to be filled in. In the absence of detailed evidence it would be wrong to write off a bureaucracy which on a point of principle sent half as many rations to mothers of a new born daughter in their king's work-forces as to mothers of a new born son and which balanced the number of women in each local task force exactly to the number of men.

  Despite the scribes and law codes, power at the Persian court was personal, depending on access to the king. The politics of Persia were the politics of the palace gate and usher, the cup bearer, eunuch and brides of the royal harem: just as the king received his power by the grace of the good god Ahura Mazda, so the courtier received his rank from the hand of the king, being set apart by the honour of a purple cloak, a golden brooch or necklace or the right to kiss the king on the cheek or see him face to face. In Persia too, the old court titles had been widened to new faces; the Honoured Equals had become a whole squadron in the army and few Royal Relations still had a claim to kinship with the king; there were the same banquets as at Pella, whose expense was minutely observed and whose occasions brought the king and his advisers into daily contact. 'And the king made a feast unto all the people that were present in Shushan, the palace, both unto great and small, seven days in the court of the garden of the king's palace, where there were white, green and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble; the beds were of gold and silver upon a pavement of red and blue, and white and black marble.' There is no more vivid evocation of the workings of the Persian court than the historical fiction of the Bible's Book of Esther.

  At this court the king was a figure of superhuman majesty, of a sanctity which derived from his position and did not depend on the force of his achievements. Little is known of Alexander's opponent Darius III, but it is suggestive. His father and mother were brother and sister, and Darius too married his sister as a second wife. This incest may have become a necessary symbol for the Persian royal family, emphas
ising their superiority to an ordinary family's taboos. Its mental effects are still uncertain. Darius was handsome, at least, and was brave by repute, for he was said to have distinguished himself in single combat against the most seditious tribe in central Iran. Naturally, there were Greeks who slandered this inbred king as the son of a slave, or as a former courier on the Royal Road; in fact, his uncle was descended from a branch of the royal family and he had made his name as satrap of mountainous Armenia. Perhaps it was during this office that he married his first wife from neighbouring Cappadocia; it is

  noticeable how this wild tribal kingdom, so often rebellious, would fight for his cause repeatedly and become the refuge for noble Iranian refugees during Alexander's conquests and the age of the Successors. From this little regarded satrapy, Darius had progressed through poisonings to the throne. His friend the Vizier Bagoas had the influence and the severity to make or destroy a king, and it was with his help that Darius had removed his family rivals and taken the kingdom in default of other royal adults. The young son of the great Artaxerxes III was still alive, and there may have been Persians who would have preferred him to a Darius of such distant royal blood. No judgement can be passed on Darius's abilities, because there is no solid evidence; it is likely, however, that the manner of his accession had helped to scatter the court and weaken the loyalties of several provincial governors. It was not for nothing that Alexander proclaimed him publicly a mere usurper.

  Recent rebellion in western Asia and this royal intrigue at the Persian court could not detract from the massive power which the king should be able to mobilize. Alexander's fleet totalled a mere 160 ships, a negligible number for a Greek expedition when Athens alone controlled 400; from Cyprus and Phoenicia, the Persian king could man more than 300 warships with trained native crews and techniques more powerful than any known in Greece. Alexander's money expenses already equalled his father's money income, and a separate debt of 800 talents had accrued for the invasion; the Persian kings received more than 10,000 talents of precious metal as yearly tribute, probably after deduction of the provinces' expenses, and their palaces housed reserves of metal worth 235,000 talents, some in coin, most in the bar ingots which probably served as currency east of Babylon and north to the river Oxus. Alexander's army numbered some 50,000 troops about 6,000 of whom were cavalry; Asia's population numbered millions and only terrain and the problem of supplies limited the Great King's armies. Some 120,000 men or more could be deployed for a decisive battle, 30,000 of whom could be cavalry from tribal nomads and the king's feudal colonists; as for horses, there were ponies to pull chariots, famous studs in north-west Asia and Media, tribes of horsemen in Armenia, Cappadocia and outer Iran, while the lucerne pastures of the Nisaean fields near Hamadan alone pastured 200,000 of the heavy war-horses. In his youth every Persian nobleman had learnt to ride, tell the truth, and shoot a bow; Alexander had a mere thousand archers and slingers and a thousand javelin throwers, whereas the home province of Persia could provide 30,000 trained slingers and archers whose composite bow could kill at a range of 200 yards.