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by Strauss, Barry

  In short, Alexander was well on his way to creating a new army. If it proved loyal to him, and if it was anywhere near as effective as his old army, it could have put down any revolt in Alexander’s empire—or at least in most of it, India being far away and full of hostile armies. The new army might even have carried out Alexander’s new conquests. But loyalty and effectiveness were both big ifs.

  New Worlds to Conquer

  Governing was boring. Alexander wanted to be a conqueror. As a contemporary wrote, “Alexander was always insatiable when it came to conquest, he aimed at being the lord and master of everyone.” He had hardly shaken the dust of India off his boots when he was ready for new wars. Audacity, as usual, was his hallmark. The first stage, but only the first stage, was Arabia.

  The Arabian peninsula had not been part of the Persian empire, but that didn’t stop Alexander from wanting to conquer at least part if not all of it. Arabia was famous for its myrrh and frankincense and the wealth in trade they generated, and it offered naval way stations for the voyage to India. Ancient seafarers avoided the open sea and looked for coastal harbors to break up a journey.

  Alexander planned to conquer and settle the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf. A prime goal was the fertile island of Bahrain and the mainland port opposite it, which was a terminal of the spice trade. But Alexander may have planned to go farther, into what is today Oman and Yemen, to control the areas where spice was produced and to gain ports on the south Arabian coast to use for the trade route to the Red Sea.

  As he looked ahead, Alexander gave a much bigger role to warships than in his previous campaigns. In affairs of war, he was gifted with a profound capacity for growth; he was a man of enormous versatility. The success of Nearchus and his fleet, sailing from India to Iran, seems to have inspired Alexander. Now he knew that sea power could project force with little support from land. Sea power multiplied that mobility which the king so prized. Not only the Persian Gulf but other seas could be highways for his armies.

  The invasion of Arabia was to be a seaborne expedition, and Alexander would personally sail with the fleet. In preparation for the war, Alexander had a new harbor built at Babylon with room for one thousand warships—a huge number by ancient standards. He sent recruiting agents to Syria and Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) to find sailors. Since timber was scarce near Babylon, he had the ships built in far-off regions, transported and reassembled on the Euphrates and sailed downstream to Babylon. By spring 323 the first ships were practicing drills on the river at Babylon.

  Few people thought Alexander’s war plans would end with Arabia. It was rumored that he wanted the fleet to continue past Arabia and to sail around Africa to the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar). If so, that would fit in with other reported plans to conquer Carthage and Italy. Ever since Carthage supported Tyre against Alexander in 332, he had had an ax to grind against it. Alexander’s uncle had already invaded Italy and achieved considerable success there before being killed by a traitor in 331 B.C. It was only natural for Alexander to pick up the torch.

  In spring 323, ambassadors from Carthage, Libya, and various Italian states came to see Alexander in Babylon. One of those states was Rome, which was a rising power in central Italy at the time. After Alexander’s death, his papers are supposed to have revealed plans to construct yet another one thousand warships in the eastern Mediterranean and to build a military road across North Africa.

  Finally, Alexander was planning another fleet to explore the Caspian Sea and to find what he hoped (in vain) would be a river route to Sogdiana (modern Uzbekistan and part of Tajikistan).

  Alexander had already conquered more empire than he was likely to be able to govern. But he wanted more.

  “The Great Horn Is Broken”

  The last eight months of Alexander’s life have the quality of a soap opera as told in a college frat house. The main themes were sex and violence, washed down with gigantic amounts of alcohol.

  Since his return from India, Alexander journeyed here and there in Iran and Mesopotamia, attending to one piece of business after another. He was full of energy but he did not travel light. A huge royal entourage accompanied Alexander. Every trip was expensive and complicated but rarely unpleasant for those at the top, since the locals fell over one another to wine and dine the king and his court.

  In autumn 324 the party stopped—Hephaestion died. He was Alexander’s closest friend and perhaps once his lover. Hephaestion died in Ecbatana (modern Hamadan) in western Iran. After a week of games and heavy drinking, he came down with a fever. On the seventh day, Hephaestion felt better and began eating and drinking again, against his doctor’s advice; he died later that day. Suspecting poison, Alexander had the doctor crucified. Then the king went wild with grief over his lost companion. He went through elaborate mourning rituals, commissioned an enormous monument in Babylon, and had Hephaestion proclaimed a “hero”—that is, a demigod—though the priests whom he consulted balked. Perhaps they figured it would cheapen Alexander’s own status as a god if they spread the honor around.

  Hephaestion had supported the king in everything. Recently, he had been the mainstay of Alexander’s pro-Persian policy. Alexander even had them both marry daughters of Darius III, which made them brothers-in-law; Alexander hoped their children would be cousins. Now, Alexander was on his own.

  In winter 324 to 323, Alexander was busy with a campaign against the tribes of the Zagros Mountains in western Iran. The Persians used to pay them protection money for safe passage through the region, but Alexander wanted to break them. He succeeded but only temporarily—a few years later the mountaineers were back to their old business.

  In early 323 Alexander and his court went to Babylon. With preparations for the Arabian campaign, embassies from the West, and plans to memorialize Hephaestion, there was plenty to keep him busy. Yet the parties didn’t stop. In late May, Alexander celebrated the priests’ decision to let Hephaestion be worshiped with a round of celebrations. At one of them, a banquet thrown by a Greek, Alexander came down with a fever. It was May 31, 323 B.C. He never recovered. Eleven days later, on June 10, Alexander died. He was about a month shy of his thirty-third birthday.

  “The great horn is broken,” says the Book of Daniel, in what is usually taken to be a reference to the death of Alexander. The phrase captures some of the shock the world felt at his sudden and unexpected demise. One minute, he was the all-victorious conqueror and then suddenly, he was gone.

  Some people at the time saw the hand of Providence at work. Others turned to rumor, guesswork, and conspiracy theories: Was Alexander poisoned? Did he drink himself to death? Was he lonely and depressed?

  The most credible version of what happened is that Alexander contracted a fever. He refused to take it seriously and continued working, even as the fever got worse. Finally, on the ninth day, the fever got so high that he took to his bed and lost the ability to speak. Two days later he fell into a coma and died.

  Alexander did not behave prudently when he got sick, but then, he thought he was a god. His body had to bear the brunt of an accumulation of war wounds, including three he had acquired in Bactria, Sogdiana, and India—all unnecessary campaigns. The Indian wounds had been life-threatening. If poison cannot be ruled out as a cause of death, it seems less likely a contributing factor than these wounds.

  “The music must always play,” says the poet. Alexander too probably felt that way. But suddenly, at the age of thirty-two, the music was over. All that was left was “the unmentionable odor of death.”

  Unmaking an Empire

  On his deathbed Alexander said that his empire should go “to the strongest.” He also said that his leading friends would hold “great funeral games” in his honor—those were his last words, in fact—or so men claimed afterward. The fight over the succession had begun.

  Alexander’s marshals were hard men. They were, nearly all of them, believers in Macedon first. They had no interest in bringing the Persian elite into a big tent—nea
rly all of them immediately abandoned the Asian wives whom Alexander had forced them to marry—nor did they want to go off and invade new lands, not when they already had such rich territories in their hands. Some of them wanted to hold Alexander’s empire together, but most of them were content to grab whatever piece of it they could get. They loved to fight and had no hesitation about going to war to take what they wanted. No one in Alexander’s family could stop them.

  When Alexander died, he left Heracles, an illegitimate son of his mistress Barsine, widow of Memnon of Rhodes. His wife Roxane was pregnant and eventually gave birth to a son, Alexander IV. Alexander’s half brother, Philip Arrhidaeus, was a full-grown man, but he was intellectually disabled.

  In principle, Philip Arrhidaeus—now Philip III—and soon the infant Alexander IV were elected co-kings of Macedon. Real power lay in the hands of Alexander the Great’s generals.

  Alexander did not choose to die young but he did choose not to produce an heir early. If he had followed those who advised him to marry before leaving Macedon in 334, Alexander might have left a ten-year-old legitimate son at the time of his death instead of an incapable brother and an unborn child.

  To be sure, producing an heir would not have been without risks. As he grew up, Alexander’s son could have become the focus for enemies and rivals of the king—just as young Alexander himself had once been to his father, King Philip. As long as King Alexander was the only adult male member of the Argead royal line, he had no rivals to worry about. Yet his leaving no legitimate heir forced his family to pay the price after Alexander’s untimely death. Philip III was murdered in 317 and Alexander IV in 311. Heracles was murdered by 309. It was the end of the glorious dynasty of Philip and Alexander. Macedon would have new kings but they would come from different families.

  Alexander’s empire did not survive either. Conquering an empire of two million square miles in eleven years was the work of a master. Dismembering it during the next fifty years was the work of a committee. What Alexander built up, his successors tore apart. Sixty years after Alexander invaded the Persian empire, Greeks and Macedonians still ruled most of what he had conquered, but they had ripped it into small pieces.

  In fairness, even if Alexander had lived to a ripe old age and left a full-grown heir behind, he would have had trouble maintaining his empire. The Persians had never been able to keep control of India, Thrace, Macedon, or Greece, although they had invaded all of them. They barely held on to the ever-rebellious provinces of Egypt and Anatolia. And they didn’t attempt to add Arabia, Carthage, and Italy to their possessions, as Alexander was planning.

  Within months of Alexander’s death in 323 B.C., Greece rose in revolt. A year later, in 322, Alexander’s generals began fighting one another. The conflict between them, known as the Wars of the Successors, lasted nearly fifty years, until 275 B.C.

  Fifty years after Alexander’s death, the map of Alexander’s empire now looked something like this: Macedon was an independent kingdom, as was Egypt—which also controlled Libya, Israel, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and the Mediterranean coast of Anatolia. Northwest Anatolia was the small but rich kingdom of Pergamum. The heart of the old Persian empire, from Anatolia to Bactria, was still a single kingdom, ruled from Babylon. But India and northeastern Iran had broken away. So had most of the Greek city-states.

  Descendants of Alexander’s generals ruled the three largest states. The family of Antigonus ruled Macedon, Ptolemy and his children ruled Egypt, and Seleucus and his descendants ruled from Anatolia to Bactria. Pergamum was founded by Alexander’s general Lysimachus, but control passed to another family.

  Alexander’s generals had created the kingdoms of the Hellenistic Era, as historians call the years between 323 and 30 B.C. Alexander had laid the foundation by conquering the Persian empire, but the result looked nothing like what he had planned.

  Ironically, the Hellenistic Era bore a certain resemblance to the Persian empire before Alexander. Back then, the Greek peninsula and the Balkans as well as India had maintained their independence, as they did in the Hellenistic period. Egypt and western Anatolia were semi-independent under the Persians and fully independent in the new era. Under the Persians, a great land empire in northwest Asia extended from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush, and so it did again under the Seleucid kings. The only difference, of course, was that Persians had ruled the old empire while Greeks and Macedonians ruled the new one.

  The saddest irony concerns Macedonia. Alexander’s military needs stripped the kingdom of manpower. Few of his soldiers ever came home. Relatively little of the new wealth that he created found its way to Macedon. In fact, Alexander left the Macedonian state weaker than he had found it. Macedonians ruled from vast new realms but the old country suffered.

  HANNIBAL

  The war in Italy was lost—and Spain and Sicily too. The question before Carthage now was what it could salvage of the situation. The same question confronted Hannibal. But his interests and those of his country were not the same. Now, more than ever, he faced political as well as military challenges.

  In a country that crucified failed generals, Hannibal had first of all to survive. Then he had to consider whether his military skills could still help Carthage. Finally, he had to see if he could transform his talents in the field into the skills of statesmanship that might buy Carthage the best peace it could get.

  Hannibal’s Rival: Scipio

  In autumn 203, Hannibal came home. After fifteen years of fighting up and down the Italian boot, he had been recalled to Carthage.

  When he landed in Africa in 203 B.C., his countrymen wanted Hannibal to save them. He would have to reach deep into his stock of magic to pull that off.

  A little more than a year before, a Roman army had arrived in Africa, led by Publius Cornelius Scipio. In that short period, the army brought Carthage to its knees. Scipio literally burned out one Carthaginian army and defeated another in battle; overthrew Carthage’s most important ally, King Syphax of Numidia, and replaced him with a pro-Roman king, Masinissa; and forced Carthage to sue for peace. Scipio imposed terms that deprived Carthage of all its overseas possessions and its navy, and that included a large indemnity.

  Harsh terms, but Scipio could have asked for more. If he didn’t, it was because time wasn’t on his side. Carthage had enormously strong defensive walls, which meant it could withstand a long siege. Scipio’s term of office was limited and his political enemies at Rome were sharpening their knives. So he made the best treaty he could and sent it to Rome, where after some grumbling, it was ratified. Unfortunately for Scipio, the Carthaginians had second thoughts. They believed in Hannibal.

  They were wrong. If time was unfriendly to Scipio, it was downright hostile to Carthage. The Carthaginians had kept Hannibal in Italy much too long, well past the time when he could win the war there, because they wanted to tie Rome’s hands. But it hadn’t worked and Rome had invaded Africa, even with Hannibal still in Italy.

  Scipio had done so much damage in Africa that by the time Hannibal arrived, he had very little chance of defeating Scipio. Carthage should have accepted its fate and made peace. Instead, hoping for one last hurrah, the city recalled Hannibal and his men from Italy. They believed that Hannibal and the army that returned with him—probably, fifteen thousand men—could form the nucleus of a force that would drive out the Romans. They didn’t know when to stop.

  Scipio was Rome’s greatest general. He came from a fighting family. As mentioned earlier, he had served at the battles of the Ticinus and Cannae, but he made his name in Spain. There, he inherited from his father and uncle a policy of making war on the Carthaginians. They failed but he succeeded.

  Scipio wasn’t just a great general: he was Hannibal’s best student. In fifteen years of fighting in Italy, Hannibal had taught Rome how to wage war. Ironically, he seems not to have had equally apt pupils in Carthage. But it was probably easier to imitate Hannibal from a distance. Great men tend to use up all the air in a room.

  Fr
om Hannibal, Scipio learned how to be a great and charismatic leader who emphasized mobility and surprise in battle. He trained his men to fight with a professionalism that Rome’s citizen militias lacked. Under his inspired leadership, they were the equal of Carthage’s armies.

  After capturing New Carthage (209 B.C.) and defeating Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal in the battle of Baecula (208 B.C.), Scipio went on to drive the Carthaginians out of Spain altogether. He won his final and greatest Spanish battlefield victory at Ilipa (206 B.C.). Near modern Seville, a large Roman army under Scipio met an even larger Carthaginian army under a general named Hasdrubal Gisgo (no relation to Hannibal or his brother Hasdrubal).

  Scipio had drilled his best troops—25,000 Romans and Italian allies—and turned them into an excellent fighting force. Hasdrubal Gisgo’s soldiers were not as good. To add to his advantage, Scipio tricked the enemy by putting his best infantrymen on the wings instead of in the center, where the Romans usually placed their best soldiers. He attacked and defeated the Carthaginian flanks, and once they collapsed, the Carthaginian center followed.

  Scipio won the battle and the war. Carthage lost its empire in Spain and with it, a major source of its money and manpower. But Scipio wasn’t done. He had huge ambition and an audacious vision to sustain it. He wanted to invade Africa. It was a mirror image of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, but Scipio intended to make his invasion work.

  Scipio knew that Hannibal’s strategy in Italy had failed less because of conceptual errors than because of adequate resources. Scipio intended not to repeat that error, but he faced powerful enemies in the Roman senate. Like Hannibal in Carthage, Scipio aroused the jealousy of other politicians in Rome. And he had a powerful enemy in Fabius.