Before and After Alexander

by Richard A. Billows

  Inevitably, given his youth, rumors swirled alleging poisoning or other nefarious action causing his death. The most elaborate version has Aristotle, seeking revenge for the death of his son-in-law Callisthenes, going to the River Styx, boundary between this world and the underworld, and collecting its highly poisonous and corrosive water in a hollowed out ass’s hoof, the only vessel that could contain this water. The noxious liquid was given to Antipater, who had his son Cassander convey it to Babylon, where another son named Iolaus—being the king’s cup-bearer—slipped it into Alexander’s drink. This arrant nonsense is indicative of the basic reality that there is no good evidence for any murderous plot against Alexander. The young king had recklessly abused his body by physical exertion, courting danger, and heavy drinking throughout his adult life. He had followed the near fatal wound at the Mallian town by the near fatal desert march through the Makran. Instead of taking care of his body, he had indulged in reckless binge drinking, not even deterred when that lifestyle caused Hephaestion’s death. The fatal illness that took Alexander has long been debated. The most plausible candidate is malaria, which was an endemic disease in much of the ancient world. His body weakened by wounds, overexertion, and excessive drinking, Alexander was simply unable to fight off a particularly virulent attack of the disease. He died, that is to say, as he had lived: in the midst of extravagance, and giving little thought for the future.

  3. ALEXANDER’S PERSONALITY AND IDEAS

  One thing that is clear about Alexander is that he had a dominant personality and large ego. Short in stature and boyish in appearance, he made up for what he lacked in physical impressiveness by his force of will and charisma. He more than held his own among a group of high Macedonian officers many of whom were not only talented and dominant persons themselves, but also physically big and powerful: the likes of Seleucus, Lysimachus, and Hephaestion, for instance. Here Philip’s grooming of Alexander for power no doubt stood him in good stead, as well as his own natural abilities. Like everything else about him, Alexander’s personality has attracted attention, and been judged in very different ways. William Tarn saw him as a collection of virtues, explaining away all evidence that suggested a darker side; Ernst Badian by contrast emphasized the evidence of a darker, more selfish, and cruel Alexander. On the whole, recent historians have tended more towards the Badian view, and with good reason.

  That Alexander was a generous man, giving freely from the vast wealth his conquests won him to friends and associates, is not in dispute. Nor is it disputed that he was capable of, even fond of chivalric and at times almost quixotic gestures. He treated the family of Darius with great generosity and respect, seeing to their safety and comfort with such concern that Darius’ mother Sisygambis reputedly came to consider Alexander almost as another son. Though Darius’ principal wife was reputed to be of extraordinary beauty, Alexander declined so much as to look at her as being his rival king’s wife. When a drinking companion named Proteas somehow angered Alexander, he was soon persuaded by friends to give up his anger and instantly made Proteas the princely gift of five talents to show he bore no ill will. Famously, at the sack of Thebes a lady named Timocleia was brought to him for judgement, having killed one of his soldiers. When she told him the soldier in question had raped her, he released her and her children, as having rightly fought for her honor. These kinds of gestures certainly look good, and are often quoted as signs of Alexander’s good nature and high personal code of honor. But more than ten thousand Theban women were captured at that city’s sack. Are we to suppose none of them were raped, either during the sack itself or afterwards, when they were sold into slavery and were no longer considered to have any right of refusal? Alexander cared nothing about the rape of captive women: he merely enjoyed making a quixotic gesture on behalf of a lady who personally impressed him. In contrast to Proteas, who won Alexander’s forgiveness, we might place Callisthenes, who angered the king by refusing to bow down before him, and suffered a lingering and cruel death by Alexander’s orders. And if the story of his sexual liaison with the Persian lady Barsine is true—he reputedly had a son by her named Heracles—then his careful observation of the sanctity of marriage is undermined, as she was married to Memnon of Rhodes.

  That Alexander was a heavy, often indeed excessive drinker should not be in doubt, though Plutarch offered the excuse that Alexander liked to linger over his wine for the sake of conversation, rather than heavy drinking (Plutarch Alexander 23). But the stories of his deep drinking are too many to shrug off; in the last years of his reign it is reported that he quite frequently drank all night and spent the following day in bed recuperating. When drunk he could become very violent, as at the feast at Samarkand in 327 when he murdered his officer Cleitus the Black in a drunken rage. But worse than his violence when drunk is the excessive distrust and cruelty he often showed when sober. The most egregious example of this is his treatment of Parmenio and his son Philotas. There is little doubt that Philotas was unwise: he apparently had a habit of boasting that his father and he were as responsible for Macedonian successes as was Alexander himself, if not more so. One can understand Alexander being annoyed when he heard this, not least because it was essentially true. When an insignificant character named Dimnus supposedly tried to start a plot against Alexander, and this was reported to Philotas by a certain Cebalinus, he twice ignored the information. Obviously he would have done better to pass it along, but Alexander was never remotely in danger. On this basis Philotas was arrested and tortured, even though torture was not normally used against free men, certainly not free men of Philotas’ standing. Under torture, Philotas reportedly made some damaging statements which later, placed on trial in front of the Macedonian soldiers, he retracted. Nevertheless Alexander had him executed, and immediately sent assassins to murder Parmenio for the crime of being Philotas’ father.

  It is of course well known that most people, when tortured, will say whatever they think their questioners want to hear in order to make the torture stop: this is why torture is not used in most societies, not because people are too squeamish but because it is a highly unreliable way of getting at the truth. And even if there was some excuse for executing Philotas (it was at best an exceedingly flimsy one), the murder of Parmenio was carried out for purely prudential reasons: after killing Parmenio’s son, Alexander was afraid of what the old man might do. There was not the slightest suggestion that Parmenio was guilty of any disloyalty or crime. The deaths of these two highly placed Macedonian aristocrats, among the most important three or four leaders of the Macedonian expedition after Alexander himself, had a chilling effect on the Macedonian leadership. If Parmenio and Philotas and Cleitus could be murdered, tortured, and/or executed like this, who could consider himself safe from Alexander? Plenty of others suffered from what Badian, exaggerating slightly perhaps, judged to be Alexander’s paranoia. Among them were the court historian Callisthenes, a group of the royal paides led by Hermolaus, and the officers Cleander and Sitalces who had facilitated the murder of Parmenio on Alexander’s behalf: indeed in the last years of his reign Badian speaks of a virtual “reign of terror” as Alexander’s anger and suspicion grew. It is true that there was discontent in the army. After the deaths of the Persian rulers Darius and Bessus, Alexander had taken to adopting elements of Persian royal dress and court ceremony, most infamously the practice of proskynesis. This was an act of physical prostration, bowing down to the ground, in obeisance to the king’s majesty, and it was considered deeply humiliating by most Macedonians and other Greeks, who bowed down only to the gods. The anger at Alexander’s perceived tendency towards despotism, and the profound resistance to the act of proskynesis, only increased Alexander’s suspicion that men around him were disloyal: it became a vicious circle.

  Another controversial topic regarding Alexander’s person is his sexuality. Many modern commentators on Alexander—most notoriously again William Tarn—insist that Alexander was strictly heterosexual. This proceeds essentially from mere preju
dice against homosexuality, and involves a profound misinterpretation of ancient Greek sexuality. Not only was there no prejudice in classical Greek society against homoerotic relationships, in upper-class circles, at least, they were considered natural and even desirable. One of the features of Alexander’s personality that is so universally attested that we cannot properly doubt it, is that he had relatively little interest in sex. His passions were fighting, hunting, and drinking, not sex. But from boyhood he had an exceedingly close and intimate relationship with his dearest friend and companion Hephaestion; and though no source happens to say explicitly that their relationship was sexual, this is more likely because in the culture of fourth-century Greece it hardly needed saying, than because it was not so. Alexander and Hephaestion, that is to say, were indubitably lovers: Hephaestion’s position as Alexander’s virtual alter ego, attested in numerous anecdotes, and Alexander’s crazed grief when Hephaestion died in 324, make that clear. In addition, we are told that Alexander had a passionate sexual attachment to a beautiful Persian youth, a eunuch, named Bagoas. Limited as Alexander’s interest in sex was, it seems that his preference was for homoerotic sex. But like most ancient Greeks, that preference was not exclusive. He had a familial duty to marry and produce children, and though he neglected that duty for years, he did eventually marry the Bactrian princess Roxane in 327. Though presented by our sources as a love match, it was rather a prudential arrangement like his father Philip’s marriages: Roxane’s father was a great Bactrian noble named Oxyartes, and Alexander needed to cultivate the goodwill of the Bactrian nobility in order to cement his hard-won dominance over Bactria. In 324 Alexander married again: two Persian princesses, daughters respectively of Artaxerxes III and Darius III, became his wives. But there was no love here: it was a matter of tying the remnants of the Achaemenid royal family to himself. The only sign of any purely sexual interest in women by Alexander is the reputed affair with Barsine, if there is any truth to that.

  The marriage to the two Persian princesses raises another aspect of Alexander that has been much discussed: his supposed idea of promoting cultural/ethnic fusion, or even an ideal of the “unity and brotherhood of mankind.” The evidence for these notions consists of Alexander’s employment of Persian nobles in his court and administration after 331; his selection of (reputedly) thirty thousand Asian boys to be educated and trained as Macedonian warriors to supplement his army; and the great marriage ceremony at Susa in 324 at which he married his two Persian princesses, and at the same time more than eighty of his officers also married ladies of the Persian aristocracy. Taking the last first, it is very hard to see in this marriage ceremony any sort of ethnic fusion between the Macedonian and Persian aristocracies: for that to be the case, there would have needed to be a similar number of Macedonian ladies brought over to Susa to marry Persian aristocrats. One of the ways in which conquerors throughout history have habitually expressed their dominance is by the sexual appropriation of the womenfolk of the conquered. That was often accomplished by rape, but it could take the form of forced marriage. The Persian elite will hardly have missed the symbolism in being obliged to hand over their daughters for marriage to Macedonian officers. This is not an expression of cultural or ethnic fusion, it is an expression of Macedonian dominance.

  The same can essentially be said of turning Persian or other Asian boys into Macedonians: where were the Macedonian boys being trained in Persian customs? How happy can we imagine the fathers of these boys were to be obliged to hand over their sons to strangers, so that they could be trained to learn the strangers’ language, customs, way of life? In other words, to see their sons turned into strangers to them? Again, this is not an expression of cultural or ethnic fusion, it is a pure expression of Macedonian supremacy. Alexander needed large numbers of soldiers for his future plans of conquest. In his estimation, soldiers of the type developed by his father—Macedonian pikemen and heavy cavalry—were the best. Taking Persian and other Asian boys and turning them into Macedonians was not the pursuit of some ideal of cultural melding; it was merely the prudential increasing of his pool of Macedonian soldiers. In the armies of Alexander’s Successors we meet with large units of pantodapoi (men of varied ethnic backgrounds) who were armed and trained in the Macedonian fashion and fought as Macedonian pikemen and cavalry: there were eight thousand pantodapoi phalangites and five hundred such cavalry in Antigonus’ army at the battle of Paraetacene, while Eumenes’ army in the same battle had five thousand pantodapoi in his pike phalanx (Diodorus 19.28–29). It is very conceivable that these 13,500 pantodapoi altogether originated in the mass of boys Alexander arranged to have taught the Macedonian equipment and system of warfare. As to the employment of Persians as governors and administrators in his empire, they had an expertise, thanks to two hundred years of Persian dominance in and rule over Asia, which Alexander chose to exploit. Again, there is no sign here of cultural melding.

  As with most elements of the adulatory version of Alexander’s career, the most extreme account of an ideal of ethnic fusion on Alexander’s part comes from William Tarn, in his notion of Alexander as a proponent of the “brotherhood and unity” of mankind. It is perhaps already clear from the above that this is an exceptionally unlikely notion: Alexander was not that kind of idealist at all. Stoic philosophers of the generations immediately after Alexander did indeed come up with the idea that all men are “brothers,” but only in an idealized way: they did not draw any practical political or social consequences from this. Later writers, building up the legend of Alexander, took this notion and attributed to Alexander the idea of creating a “world state,” of transplanting and mixing populations in this “world state,” and thereby creating a practical and effective “unity of mankind” under his own rule. Badian already long ago deconstructed the evidence for this and showed how absurd was Tarn’s elaboration of it into a fixed ideology pursued by Alexander. At the very best, if Alexander entertained any idea of some sort of “world state,” we should see that as an expression of his megalomania, not of some idealistic striving for the brotherhood of all men.

  4. WAS ALEXANDER REALLY GREAT?

  Alexander has been universally known as “the Great” for over two thousand years now, and there is no likelihood of this changing. But the automatic nature of adding the honorific qualifier to his name tends to forestall any serious discussion of whether he deserves it, and if he does, what it is that made him great. What is the standard of greatness that is being applied? There are quite a number of rulers in western history who are standardly referred to as “the Great”: the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, the Saxon king Alfred the Great, the Franco-German emperor Charles the Great (or Charlemagne as he is often called, the term “the Great” becoming part of his actual name), the Russian rulers Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great, to name a few. On the other hand, some rulers who were undeniably among the great, even the greatest, are not so called: Caesar, Augustus, and Trajan among Roman emperors; Elizabeth I of England, Louis XIV of France, and Napoleon among modern(ish) European rulers. Arguably the greatest of the Ottoman rulers, too, is known as Suleiman “the Magnificent” rather than “the Great.” Perhaps for some, greatness is so evident that it requires no emphasis: to be called “the Great,” would that add to or diminish the standing of a Caesar, an Augustus, a Napoleon? Most of the rulers referred to as “the Great” were in part at least men of great military renown and achievement. Though that is not so much true of Peter and Catherine, and though the likes of Constantine, Alfred and Charles certainly had other claims to achievement beyond the military sphere, it does seem that great military success is often a factor in the granting of the epithet “the Great.” In Alexander’s case, it can be argued that it was the only factor.

  What, in effect, did Alexander do? He won battles and conquered. There is little else to be said for him, despite the attempts of some writers to see in him a deep thinker with ideas of human brotherhood far in advance
of his time. As we have seen, such notions are as fanciful as they are wrong-headed. More plausibly, Alexander might be viewed as an empire-builder, with administrative and/or organizational talents along with his military talent. The reality is, however, that there is very little evidence to support this. As Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, he moved on through it, not lingering to organize or administer. Early on, his procedure was simply to depose and/or kill or chase away the regional Persian governor and appoint a member of his officer corps as a replacement, leaving the man so appointed to govern his province as best he could. Alexander’s main concern seems to have been that tribute moneys be collected and forwarded. After Gaugamela, as the Persian elite surrendered to Alexander and offered him its services, he began to leave suitably subservient Persian governors in place, to continue governing their provinces on Alexander’s own behalf. He evidently recognized the value of the accumulated experience and expertise of the Persian elite, which had been governing the empire for two hundred years, and decided to take advantage of it. The corollary is that he had no particular organizing or administrative ideas of his own, but was content to let things go on in the way the Persians had set in place. One change he did make was to separate military command from civil/administrative command: continued Persian governors would typically be stripped of military powers, which would be granted instead to a Macedonian or other Greek strategos (general) established as the Persian satrap’s second-in-command and (in effect) watchdog. Alexander, that is to say, did not fully trust most Persians; he simply made use of their administrative expertise.