Like all ancient Greek or Macedonian meals, the banquet began with a prayer. Ritual called for filling a wine cup and pouring out a few drops in honor of the gods. Alexander gave the Macedonians the honor of ladling their wine from the same huge bowl from which he would drink. Greek and Persian priests began the ceremony, and then Alexander led the prayer. He prayed for “various blessings and especially for unity among Macedonians and Persians as partners in the government.”
Remarkable sentiments, but they were just words. The seating plan at the Opis banquet told the real story—Persians would play a role in Alexander’s regime but Macedonians (and Greeks) would monopolize the inner circle. But they would be his Macedonians and support his policy of working with the Persians. They would not be narrow-minded “Macedonia first” types who would challenge the king.
We’ll never know if Alexander would have succeeded in his plans, because he barely had a chance to put them into practice. By the next summer, the king was dead.
About 125 years later and about fifteen hundred miles to the west, an even more bittersweet victory party took place. It was summer 205 B.C. outside Croton, Italy. Croton was a small port on the toe of the Italian boot, with a harbor on the Ionian Sea, looking eastward toward Greece. A once great city, famous for its beautiful women and its wealth, Croton was a ghost town after centuries of war and ruin. Only two glories were left—the temple of Hera and Hannibal.
In 205, the area around Croton was all that remained of Hannibal’s once vast Italian holdings. It was a grim place, hardly worth keeping, but the Carthaginian government insisted that Hannibal stay. The rulers in Carthage thought he was distracting the Romans, but the Romans had him cornered. Hannibal had his hands full, what with the Roman army nearby, an epidemic, a food shortage, and the bandits who roamed the area. Still, he held his forces together for two more years until the government finally recalled them to Africa, in autumn 203.
Meanwhile, Hannibal made a magnificent gesture. Not far from Croton, on a rocky promontory on the coast, stood the sanctuary of Hera Lacinia. In spite of Croton’s decline, this famous and opulent shrine, which contained a solid gold column, had maintained its prestige.
It was here that Hannibal paid tribute to all that he had done. Hannibal placed in the temple a large history of his achievements since leaving Spain, thirteen years earlier, inscribed on a bronze tablet. The text was bilingual, written in Punic and in Greek.
It was a monument in the boondocks. It might have seemed like an empty gesture, but it made Hannibal immortal. It was still standing about fifty years later when the Greek historian Polybius saw it. Polybius took the backbone of his account of Hannibal’s war in Italy from the inscription, and Polybius’s book is the most trustworthy history of Hannibal that we have. In a real sense, our knowledge of Hannibal in Italy today goes back to the Lacinian inscription.
Hannibal lived for about another twenty-five years. If he ever regretted the long road that led from Cannae to Croton, he shouldn’t have. All his men and elephants did less to bring him fame than did one bronze tablet.
One hundred sixty years later and about four hundred miles to the northwest, in October 45 B.C. another victory party took place, this one loud and raucous. Caesar’s troops marched through the streets of Rome in triumph—for the fifth time. The previous summer 46, Caesar had stunned Rome by putting on four successive triumphs in just one month: one each for Gaul, Egypt, Pontus, and Africa. Now he celebrated victory in Spain.
Just like the earlier triumphs, the Spanish celebration was splendid. Each event had a theme, as it were—ivory for Africa and silver for Spain—which was used to decorate the floats in the parade. Silver symbolized both Spain’s famous mines and Caesar’s wealth.
In 46, Caesar tactfully avoided reference to the civil war, since a triumph was supposed to mark a victory over foreign armies, but in 45, he showed his true colors. He had fought and beaten fellow Romans in Spain, the sons of Pompey, and he made no bones about it. Caesar didn’t care, he had more important things in mind than Roman sensibilities. He was already gearing up for a new war in the East.
But many Romans did care. One of them was Gaius Pontius Aquila, one of the ten tribunes. As Caesar rode past the reviewing stand in his triumphal chariot, nine of the tribunes stood in salute, but Aquila remained seated. The dictator was furious. “Ask me for the Republic back, Tribune Aquila!” Caesar called out. Nor was that the end of it. For days, whenever Caesar promised something in public, he added bitingly, “That is, if Pontius Aquila will let me.”
Caesar capped his Spanish triumph with the usual public banquet for the people of Rome. Then, four days later, he feasted them again, which was unprecedented. His motive, he said, was to put on a lavish spread in order to make up for cutting corners in the first meal. Caesar was a politician, though, and perhaps the real reason was that he felt the public’s anger and he wanted to make amends.
Five months later, he was dead. Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times by a mob of senators. One of them was Pontius Aquila.
Things did not end well for any of our three commanders. Alexander and Caesar had military glory, at least—although neither one ended his last campaign on a high note. Hannibal did not even have that.
True, Hannibal helped Carthage recover after it had lost to Rome. His postwar statesmanship bought his country two generations of peace and prosperity. But he was paving the road to damnation for Carthage. After Hannibal, Rome would never trust Carthage again and eventually, it avenged Cannae in a way that made that battle’s carnage look like a pillow fight.
Neither Alexander nor Caesar bequeathed a legacy of peace. Caesar left Rome one generation of war, Alexander left his empire two generations of war.
Things could have gone differently. Alexander could have come back much sooner from the East and then devoted himself to governing his empire instead of building a new army for more fighting. Hannibal might have left Italy years earlier and protected Carthage and its empire instead of chasing an unreachable victory. Caesar might have negotiated a peace agreement with his Roman opponents years earlier. But that wasn’t in their character.
Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar were conquerors, not statesmen. Conquerors keep on going until they and their men drop from exhaustion or die. Statesmen know when to stop.
They remind us of the wisdom of Winston Churchill, who wrote: “Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace, and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.”
ALEXANDER
When Alexander returned from India, he had conquered an empire. The question now was, could he keep it? New empires do not govern themselves. They require enormous attention to the dynasty, the ruling elite, the army, and the administration. While Alexander was not blind to these matters, he was not overly interested in them either.
It was hard to listen to bureaucrats drone on when you still heard the trumpets.
Misgoverning an Empire
Alexander’s empire comprised two million square miles from Greece to India—three thousand miles as the crow flies, from end to end. It included dozens of different peoples and languages. How to hold them together?
The first and biggest issue was the new empire’s identity. Alexander claimed to be the king of Asia but he acted as if he expected a European elite to hold the upper hand. That was likely to offend everyone. It also conflicted with inconvenient facts of demography. Alexander had veteran Macedonian troops but he distrusted them. He ordered new recruits from Macedon, but Macedon was short of manpower and it needed soldiers to deal with new threats in Greece. The one place where Alexander got plenty of new troops, Iran, was full of people who resented his conquest. Alexander faced a dilemma.
Macedon and the Persian empire offered lessons for governing, both good and bad. Philip of Macedon had done an excellent job of integrating local elites into the ruling class by bringing their sons to his court. He did much the same with their followers by adding them to the Macedonian army. Ph
ilip was equally good at winning over foreign states by a combination of threats and bribes. He also founded new cities in territory that he conquered, and they could serve as bases for governing. Otherwise, though, he showed little interest in administration or state infrastructure. He created no bureaucracy and no ladder of offices to tie the middle class to the new regime.
The Persians ruled through a system of provincial governors, royal officials, military colonies, and constant deals and negotiations with local elites. Compared with other empires, the Persians governed with a light touch. There was little attempt to “Persianize” their subjects. While that made the Persians popular it also left them weak. Revolts were frequent and support for the empire was thin. When Alexander defeated the Persian army, very little held the civilian population together. Rome, with its close-knit society and alliance system, could pull together and bounce back after a defeat like Cannae. Persia could not rebound from Gaugamela.
Alexander showed leadership in some areas. After neglecting to supervise his provincial governors, he caught up. He recognized the severe shortage of Macedonian soldiers and began to build a new army. He took a stab at integrating a few Iranians into a new, Macedonian-dominated imperial elite.
But Alexander did not confront the even bigger problems of administering his new empire. Successful empires need large numbers of immigrants from the home country—soldiers, administrators, businessmen, propagandists, and settlers. They need schools to produce a steady stream of loyal public servants.
Empires need big garrisons and bases full of willing inhabitants, and not what Alexander had left behind: a string of vest-pocket-sized “Alexandrias” whose unhappy inhabitants had been uprooted and forced to live there. Plutarch claimed that Alexander founded seventy cities, but that was a wild exaggeration. The best modern scholarly estimate is that he founded only ten, of which all but two were on the eastern edge of his empire. It remained for Alexander’s successors to build the great new cities of the East, from Pergamum (in Anatolia) and Antioch (in Syria) to Ai Khanum (in Bactria). In short, Alexander did not establish the administrative structures his empire needed to survive.
This isn’t surprising. Alexander did not think in such terms. For him, government wasn’t about institutions, much less about citizens. It was about a great man, his friends, and the army.
Instead of building administrative structures, Alexander did what he liked doing best—he went back to war.
The provincial governors—satraps—and top officials needed to be guided by a strong hand from the center. But while Alexander was away in the East for five years starting in 330 B.C., he paid little or no attention to the rest of his empire. The result was maladministration, corruption, disloyalty, and rebellion. More than half of the twenty-three provinces of the empire experienced either rebellion or a pretender to the throne.
When Alexander came back to the West, he made an effort to improve things, but it was too little. Opposition was predictable and Alexander ran into plenty of it. If he had fought half as hard against administrative abuse as he fought against Darius, he might have consolidated his rule. Instead, he again turned his attention to the military, where he radically reformed recruitment and began yet another campaign of conquest.
As soon as he reached Iran in December 325, Alexander began cleaning house. In short order he had four provincial governors executed, along with several pretenders to the throne. They were all Iranians, and Alexander replaced them with Macedonians. Earlier, he had kept as many of Darius’s governors in place as he could, but now, only four Iranian governors were left. Alexander executed Macedonian officers and troops as well but not Macedonian governors, in spite of their misbehavior.
Alexander wanted cooperation in government between Macedonians (and Greeks) on the one hand, and Persians on the other. But he didn’t trust the Persians and the Macedonians didn’t see things Alexander’s way. They had even less interest than he in governing the former Persian empire. They wanted to loot it.
Alexander backed an ambitious strategy of sharing power with local elites. If he really was the king of Asia, this made perfect sense. He took modest steps forward but even those provoked cries of betrayal and sellout from the Macedonians. For example, they grimaced when, in early 324, Alexander made one hundred of his top officers marry Iranian wives and made ten thousand ordinary soldiers legalize their relationships with the Asian women they had met on campaign. Alexander himself married Stateira, daughter of Darius III, as well possibly as Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes III, one of Darius’s predecessors on the throne. A polygamist, Alexander had already married Roxane, daughter of a powerful Bactrian noble.
When it came to the degree of compromise needed to govern a state that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Adriatic Sea, few Macedonians “got it.” Some of Alexander’s old friends understood. Hephaestion, for example, served as grand vizier, the Persian officer in charge of court ceremonial—and Alexander introduced a great deal of Persian ceremonial. Peucestas, who served as satrap of Persis (modern Fars), the old Persian heartland, learned to speak Persian and wore Persian dress. Seleucus actually loved the Sogdian princess he married, Apama, the daughter of the rebel baron Spitamenes. Ptolemy made wise use of the principle of compromise with native culture when he later became king of Egypt. But these men were the exceptions among Macedonians, not the rule.
Or maybe the Macedonians were realists. When you came right down to it, most Macedonians agreed with Parmenio that Alexander wanted too big an empire. They couldn’t say so, of course, because they loved and feared their king. But actions speak louder than words. Many Macedonians behaved as if the empire was ungovernable and would inevitably break down into local units. In Bactria, Egypt, and Macedon itself, local rulers rebuffed Alexander or engaged in outright rebellion. Not that they cared, but they were following time-worn Persian precedent.
The default mode of the Persian empire had been devolution—that is, the transfer of power from the central government to local government. When the Great King chose to make an issue of it, devolution became rebellion and it was put down by force. More often, however, the authorities in Persepolis, Susa, and Babylon simply accepted the fact that the governors of Egypt, western Anatolia, Bactria, and Sogdiana—not to mention the more-or-less-lost province of India—would do as they pleased.
Local power was one problem for the Persians and for Alexander. Another was the law of unintended consequences, which reigned in full force in so big an empire. One case in point was the rise of a mercenary problem in Greece because of developments as far off as Afghanistan (Bactria).
Cape Taenarum, in southern Greece near Sparta, became the headquarters of an ancient “Murder Incorporated”—a pirate’s nest of mercenaries and brigands looking for trouble. Alexander’s conquests caused the problem. Some of the men at Cape Taenarum were political exiles from the regime change in hundreds of cities that Alexander had conquered. Others had been let loose by Alexander in 325, when he ordered all satraps to disband their mercenary armies, which he rightly considered a threat to him—in Bactria, for instance, the mercenaries had rebelled. Still other mercenaries—six thousand, in fact—came to Cape Taenarum along with Harpalus, Alexander’s boyhood friend and treasurer, who ran off to Greece in 325 with a small fortune and a private army.
From one point of view, the mercenaries of Cape Taenarum were a cynical gift to Alexander, because they kept the Greek city-states on edge and out of Macedon’s hair. From another point of view they threatened Macedon, because it was possible that the Greeks would buy off the mercenaries and use them in a revolt. The upshot was that Alexander had to keep troops in Macedon, which empowered the governor there, Antipater, and denied Alexander valuable military manpower in the Middle East.
The Greek city-states were a problem again by 324, as they had been before 330. Athens was the biggest headache. The Athenians refused entry to Harpalus’s mercenaries but they gave asylum to Harpalus himself and to his money. They pocketed the m
oney and shooed Harpalus out. (He was murdered soon afterward.) Meanwhile, Athens ignored an order from Alexander to every state in Greece. Alexander wanted the Greek states to accept political exiles back home, which would have reduced the number of mercenaries but sent many governments teetering. Athens stood to lose its control of the island of Samos, so it kept the exiles out. Once again, a problem of administration and authority loomed for Alexander.
But he much preferred to deal with military matters. Ever since the Macedonians had mutinied in India, he wanted to do something about their power in the army. He made his move in 324. As the story of the mutiny and banquet shows, Alexander succeeded in sending his infirm or older soldiers home to Macedon.
The numbers are telling. About ten thousand Macedonian infantrymen and one thousand five-hundred Macedonian horsemen went home. Alexander was left with thirteen thousand infantrymen and two thousand cavalrymen—a group consisting of both Macedonians and Greek mercenaries. He ordered new recruits from Macedon to replace the men he sent home, but they never arrived. Even if they had, they would have been outnumbered by the new troops from all over Iran who were now pouring into Alexander’s army.
Alexander needed a new military force after returning from India, and he got it. In 327 B.C., Alexander had ordered thirty thousand Easterners to be trained as Macedonian infantrymen, and by 324 they were ready. The next year, preparations were under way for a new war, and additional troops had arrived. Alexander’s boyhood friend Peucestas, governor of Persis, recruited twenty thousand soldiers from his province. The governors of two provinces in Anatolia sent mercenaries as well. A small number of Iranians had already been enrolled in the elite Companion Cavalry.
Looking ahead, another source of new troops would soon be available—the sons of Alexander’s veterans and Asian women. When he sent their fathers home, Alexander kept these boys for training as soldiers.
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