Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  In Greece, the pattern was hardly brighter. Leosthenes of Athens died in battle and his rebellion collapsed; Demosthenes, in exile, took poison; Aristotle was driven from Athens because of his Macedonian past and ended his life in his mother's house on the island of Euboea, saying that he grew fonder of the myths in his loneliness; when Antipater died of senility, Olympias promptly clashed with his son Cassander. With the help of her Thracians she killed king Arrhidaeus and a hundred of Cassander's friends and family; to Eurydice, great niece of Philip, she sent hemlock, a noose and a sword and told her to choose; Eurydice hanged herself by her girdle, whereupon Cassander retorted. He besieged Olympias in the coast town of Pydna and reduced her to feeding her elephants on sawdust; she ate those that died, along with the corpses of her maids. After nine months she surrendered and went to a proud death; Cassander killed off her family and turned against Roxane who was visiting Greece with her son; they were murdered by his henchmen twelve months after their imprisonment. Most ruthless of Antipater's children, Cassander disgraced a brother and sister who had nothing to do with him; his brother founded a drop-out community on Mount Athos and his sister alone stood out in these savage times, defending the innocent and helping penniless couples to get married at her own expense.

  While the world was ripped apart by feuding and ambition, Alexander was not allowed to rest in peace. At Babylon, Egyptians embalmed him for posterity and while his officers wondered who would befriend them, they put it about that his dying wish had been to be buried at Siwah, conveniently distant from all their rivals. Meanwhile, his last plans were

  produced from his official papers and put to the troops: Hephaistion's pyre was to be completed regardless of cost; a thousand warships, larger than triremes, were to be built in the Levant for a campaign against Carthage, along north Africa, up to the Straits of Gibraltar, back down the coast of Spain and so to Sicily; roads and docks were to be distributed along the north African coast; six temples were detailed for Greek and Macedonian religious centres at huge expense; the largest possible temple was to be set at Troy and Philip should have a tomb equal to the biggest Egyptian pyramid; last, but not least, 'cities should be merged and slaves and manpower should be exchanged between Asia and Europe, Europe and Asia in order to bring the greatest two continents to common concord and family friendship by mixed marriages and the ties of kith and kin.'

  None of these plans is unlikely in spirit or outline. A harbour for a thousand ships had already been ordered at Babylon and after Arabia, the conquest of Carthage and the West was surely a reasonable plan, modest even, for a young man with time and money on his side and a record of victory which stretched as far as the Punjab. The opposition was not strong, and such was Carthage's low ebb that she had been raided and occupied by Sicilian adventurers within twelve years of his death. As for the buildings, if Alexander could afford anything he wanted, then six big temples and a gigantic one at Troy were intelligible ambitions, besides bringing welcome business to the workmen and citizenry of his chosen sites; a pyramid to Philip was not an inept idea for a son who may have been booed by his veterans for preferring his 'father' Zeus Ammon ever since his visit to the land of the Pharaohs. The merging of Europe and Asia is the plan which catches the attention; 'common concord' was a political catchphrase of the time, and therefore empty, but the plan of mixed marriage and forcible transfer of peoples befitted the man who had ordered the Levant to be drained of settlers for his new towns on the Persian Gulf, who had approved the oriental wives of his soldiers and who had forced Iranian brides on his Companions. It was a memorable plan, but an alarming one; its announcement, however, was not above suspicion.

  When the last plans were read to the soldiery, the officers had reason for wanting their cancellation. In the west, Antipater's intentions were not certain, and Craterus had already reached the Asian coast with Alexander's orders and the 10,000 veterans he was leading home; there was no reason yet to mistrust his ambitions, but he did hold the balance between Asia and Macedon if their very different courts could not cooperate. Meanwhile, it was a time of consolidation, until Roxane's baby arrived and the guardianship could be seen to work; rivals, however, might claim that Alexander had wished it otherwise. Craterus or Antipater were the danger, for they might publicize papers which Alexander had left them; it suited their fellow officers that all such documents should be aired first in Babylon and agreed to be impractical before anyone tried to invoke their authority. The plans were read by Perdiccas, friend and patron of Eumenes the royal secretary; what Eumenes may have done to the Diaries of Alexander's last days he may also have done to the plans, inflating their scale to ensure that the troops would reject their excesses. The 240-foot high pyre for Hephaistion, the cost of the temples and the size of Philip's pyramid are not unthinkable extravagances, nor are they proof that Alexander had lost all sense of the possible, for Pharaohs had built pyramids before him and colossal architecture was nothing new for kings who lived in Babylon or Susa. But in their political context, they perhaps owe more to Perdiccas's invention than to Alexander's wishes; the man who read them out did not intend to hear them approved, and 'mass transfers and marriages between Asia and Europe' were a powerful threat to troops who had just refused a son of Roxane as their sole Iranian heir. Possibly, Perdiccas made up the suggestion: 'They realized, despite their deep past respect for Alexander that these plans were excessive, and so they decided that none should be carried out.' But the plans had had to seem plausible to their announcers and audience; western conquest, honour for the Greek gods, a tribute to Philip that was perhaps too insistent to be sincere, and above all, the dreaded union and city-settlement of Asia and Europe on a huger scale than ever before, these were what friends and soldiers believed to have preoccupied their king at the end of his life. There is no surer evidence of how Alexander was eventually seen by his men than the spirit, if not the detail, of these final plans.

  Men who turned his plans to their purpose could also make play with his remains. Possession of Alexander's corpse was a unique symbol of status, and until the west and Antipater seemed certain, no officer at Babylon was likely to let it go from Asia; there was talk of a Siwah burial to keep the soldiery quiet, and for two years, workmen were busied with elaborate plans for the funeral chariot. Meanwhile the situation in Macedonia was tested and found to be friendly, so much so that the corpse could at last be sent home. It was to lie among spices in a golden coffin with a golden lid, covered with purple embroidery on which rested Alexander's armour and famous Trojan shield; above it, a pillared canopy rose 36 feet high to a broad vault of gold and jewels, from which hung a curtain with rings and tassels and bells of warning; the cornice was carved with goats and stags and at each corner of the vault there were golden figures of Victory, the theme which Alexander had stressed from Athens across Asia and into the Punjab. Paintings were attached to mesh-netting down either side of the vault, Alexander with his sceptre and his Asian and Macedonian bodyguards, Alexander and his elephants, his cavalry, his warships; gold lions guarded the coffin and a purple banner embroidered with an olive wreath was spread above the canopy's roof There were precedents for such a chariot, not least in Asia where it recalled the ritual chariot of the god Mithras, a divine nuance which was perhaps intended for Alexander's Persian admirers; the chariot was built in Persian style and its decoration of griffins, lions and a canopy recalled the throne ornament of the Persian kings. Sixty-four selected mules drew four separate yokes in Persian fashion; the ornate wheels and axles had been sprung against potholes, while engineers and roadmenders were to escort them on their way. When the whole was ready, Perdiccas its guardian was fighting the natives of Cappadocia, the one gap in Alexander's western empire; his back was turned, and Egypt's new satrap Ptolemy befriended the cortege's officer-in-command. Macedonia was not consulted; the chariot set out in secret for Egypt, where Ptolemy came to meet the spoils which would justify his independence. He had stolen a march on rivals who had talked too blandly of Siwah,
and instead of sending the coffin into the desert, he displayed it first in Memphis, then finally in Alexandria, where it was still on show to the young Augustus when he visited Egypt three hundred years later. It will never be seen again. Despite fitful rumours, modem Alexandria has not revealed the site of its founder's remains; probably his corpse was last visited by Caracalla and was destroyed in the city riots of the late third century a.d.

  Servant in death of Ptolemy's independence, Alexander had fought through ten years of his life for broader ends. Unlike Ptolemy, he had believed it possible for one power to rule from the Mediterranean to the far edge of India, by basing an empire on Macedonia and on the inexhaustible abundance of Babylon and her surrounding farmland. To this end and to ease the importing of Indian and Eastern luxuries, he had planned to reopen the old sea routes which had formerly met in the Persian Gulf. Once this was done, he had believed that the conquered Iranian nobility should share in their victors' court and government and that the army and the future of the empire depended on westernized native recruits and the children of soldiers' mixed marriages brought up in Macedonian style. Above all, he had believed that culture and government meant cities as all Greeks knew them, a belief to which the infinitely older and more adaptable style of the nomads was no exception. It has often been said that these three beliefs were sure to founder on the prejudice of his successors or the realities of any age that followed. Alexander was not such a shallow or unworldly judge.

  Politically, his belief in one possible empire from the west Mediterranean to India was not refuted by the way that it failed within thirty years of his death. Those years were chaotic, but not once are the natives known to have risen seriously against Macedonian rule, except in the cities of mainland Greece which had never been firmly held anyway; there the uprising collapsed within a year. Egypt, a part of Iran and the Punjab were indeed lost to the court at Babylon, but Egypt was detached because its new satrap Ptolemy pursued his ambition of being an independent Pharaoh; some twenty years after Alexander's death, India, the Hindu Kush and probably the Helmand valley as far as Kandahar were abandoned for a price of 500 elephants to the new and ruthless empire of Chandragupta, admirer of Alexander and heir to the eastern kingdom of Magadha whose last ruler he had overthrown; if Alexander's men had not mutinied on the Beas, Magadha would have fallen to the west and Chandragupta's army would never have pressed so soon on the eastern frontier. Within eighty years of Alexander's death, Parthian tribesmen from the lower course of the Oxus had overrun new grazing-lands south and southwest of the river and cut off the one remaining land route to the rich upper satrapy of Balkh and Sogdia; there the Greek and Macedonian generals took the title of king, perhaps as much from helplessness as from sinister ambition. These Parthians, who later grew to rule Asia, were nomads and outsiders, men who would only have been forced into Alexander's satrapies by the uncontrollable pressures of weather and pasturage; as for the kings of Bactria, they were Greeks and Macedonians who wore the diadem like Alexander and went east to reclaim his Indian conquests in campaigns as surprising as they are obscure. Neither kings nor Parthians were native subjects; Alexander's empire was never challenged from beneath or within.

  Secure from inside, his one kingdom could have been realized if only his high commanders could ever have agreed among themselves, for Ptolemy, Chandragupta and the Parthians only broke off their separate pieces at moments when the Asian Successors were absorbed elsewhere with struggles between themselves, their brothers and their wives. Reprisals came, but in each case too late and from kings who were pressed by rivals in western Asia; India and eastern Iran were not given up lightly as the huge price of 500 elephants was asked for them; it was proof of the kings' priorities that those elephants were promptly moved to the west, where they won the decisive battle that nude Seleucus the king of Asia. Caught between west and cast, the Successors put the west and its family struggles first; had Alexander lived, his personality would have towered over the Empire and held them together for the repulse of any nomads or Chandragupta. In another twenty years he could have schooled his sons to succeed him. As for the far west, the victories of Pyrrhus the Epirote and Agathocles the Sicilian in the next fifty years showed that the western plans which Alexander had begun through his brother-in-law and implied at the end of his life were not an impossibility. Both Pyrrhus and Agathocles linked themselves to Alexander's Mediterranean Successors; what was left to these two minor allies of his inheritance could surely have been achieved by Alexander himself and then entrusted to client kings. The 'frog-pond' of the Greeks would have extended from Sicily to the river Beas.

  It was not, then, a grave lack of manpower or an outburst of native hatred which told against Alexander's aims; it was the older enemies of time and distance, combined against officers who fought amongst themselves through the accident of his early death. Because the Successors lost the east, they are often thought to have disdained it. This, however, is to pass improbable judgement on what is unknown. Alexander's belief that the court and army should include Iranians and a wide class of hellenized orientals has often been claimed as a victim of his officers' prejudices; again, the point is too complicated to go unqualified. By the third century the high court officials of the Successors' kingdoms were almost exclusively Greeks, attracted from the Aegean to a personal rank in royal service where neither class nor home were counted against them; even the Macedonians were relatively rare in administrative jobs outside the army. This open society did not extend beyond talented Greek immigrants. In the Ptolemies' Egypt, hellenized natives were very seldom admitted to high court rank; the name of Persian was confined to a privileged class of mixed senders. There is hardly an Iranian satrap or servant known at the western court of the Seleucids; they are only known to have used Iranians in their army where they were too valuable to ignore. So much, it might seem, for Alexander's 'concord and partnership in the empire'. The heirs to his colonists resorted to tortuous inter-marriage to avoid taking native wives into their family property; there are very few Greeks in eastern cities who are known to have married wives with native names. It was the prejudice of the ruling class which finally won.

  Their victory may not have been total or immediate. In Egypt Ptolemy began by employing certain natives in high posts and perhaps only hardened his policy later under the influence of philosophers from Aristotle's school.

  In Asia, ninety-two Iranians had been married to Companions and only five are known in their new capacity. Three were deserted for western political wives, but of the other two one was Seleucus's wife, daughter of the rebel Spitamenes. When Seleucus rose to be king of Asia he did not divorce her; their son, Antiochus I, was sent to be regent of Iran among barons who remembered his grandfather's war of resistance. This was hardly the choice of a man lacking sympathy with the east or with the promotion of Iranians. In the upper satrapies Iranians and Greeks had reason to present a common front against the nomads, a tendency which Antiochus's origins must have encouraged. The Seleucids' method of rule there is still unknown, but the barons are likely to have rallied round this semi-Iranian king. The rejection of Alexander's 'concord' may only have set in gradually as his own generation died, taking its memory with them. In upper Iran it may never have died at all.

  In Asia, therefore, the Successors lived in Alexander's shadow. They abandoned his plans for Arabia, but they may not have overturned his court policies at once and just as they rallied to a half-Iranian king, so they followed him in founding and renaming a host of Asian Greek cities. It had been Alexander's belief that the Greek city was worth planting all across Asia on the sites of old Persian citadels, and this one belief was his most lasting contribution to history. He had spent his youth in a palace-society, but he had watched his father Philip found cities as far east as the Black Sea; he had also learnt from his tutor, for Aristotle wrote his political theory round the web of the Greek cities which would last far longer than the empty succession of Asia's kings, flourishing on Asia's western coast f
or a thousand years, until the rise of the Arabs and Islam reduced their offspring to embattled forts. The thin crust of classical culture only formed in its cities, linked by rough roads and surrounded by alien country-tribes; though Alexander's conquests opened a vast new frontier to the east and south, this new sense of space meant as little as the Greeks' daily business as the manning of the moon has meant to the strident nationalism of the planet Earth. The age of kings did not kill the spirit of the city-states in Greece, for they fought and protested as much as in any Periclean age; politically, it was an age of new beginnings, of broader federations and closer unions, which were mostly handled by their Macedonian masters with a restrained disinterest. In Asia, the age of the Successor kings was not markedly harsher to Greek city freedom and self-government than the empires of Athens, Sparta and Darius which had gone before: there was still room for manoeuvre. The real turning point comes with the Roman Conquests, stabilized into an Empire by Augustus from 31 B.C. onwards.

  Romans were not sympathetic to the Greeks' democratic freedom and so they encouraged a renewed spread of oligarchy.

  East of the Euphrates and into the Punjab, some eighteen Alexandrias had been sited in the first shock of Alexander's conquests; seventy years ago their qualities could only be guessed, and the guesses were mostly pessimistic. Peopled with natives and Alexander's war wounded, their way of life had few intuitive admirers, until inscriptions and archaeology from Susa to the Oxus began to reveal its human face. The further a man is left from his home, the more fiercely tenacious he becomes of all it once meant to him. In Afghanistan, where the river Kokcha rushes down from the mountains and the blue mines of Badakshan to join the upper Oxus in sight of Russia and the corridor-road through the Pamirs to China, the huge Greek city of Ai Khanum has begun to be uncovered, probable site of the most north-easterly Alexandria, Alexandria-in-Sogdia, founded on a Persian frontier-fort in the months after the ending of Spitamenes's revolt. Three thousand miles from the Aegean, Greek, Macedonian and Thracian citizens enjoyed their temples, gymnasium and wrestling ring exactly as in a city of mainland Greece; the broad timbered roof of their enormous mud brick palace was guarded by a porch of delicate Corinthian columns and supported on capitals of carved Greek acanthus-leaves. Just as the radar-warning outposts of modem America try to create the home life of California on the northern coast of the Eskimos' Arctic under the blessing of the Pope, so this frontier town among Sogdian barons and buff-coloured desert had set up a perfect copy of the moral teaching of the Seven Sages as recorded at Delphi, holy centre of their home Greek world. 'In childhood, seemliness; in youth, self-control; in middle age, justice; in old age, wise counsel; in death, no pain'; the wording and lettering, like the marble sculptures found in the city, are as purely Greek as a fragment of distant Athens.