IN JUNE 323 BCE, IN A PALACE IN BABYLON, A YOUNG MAN LAY DYING. Around his bed were a host of attendants, doctors, and generals, concerned about the imminent death of the ruler of their world. The young man was Alexander the Great, and though he was just thirty-two years old, he had already conquered one of the largest empires in history and made himself forever famous as one of history’s greatest military leaders. For the generals gathered at his bedside, however, Alexander’s death presented a huge problem: he had no clear successor. There was a vast empire to be organized and ruled, and no one knew how it was to be done or by whom. In the end, it took forty years of rivalry and warfare among Alexander’s generals to sort out the succession to his power.
One hundred and fifty years later a new power, the young Roman state, began to expand into and take over the lands that Alexander had conquered and ruled so briefly, and they found in the eastern Mediterranean region a civilization based on the Greek language, Greek cities, and Greek culture, established there by the work of Alexander’s Successors. That Greek-based civilization is known today as the Hellenistic civilization, and though taken over by the Romans it endured as the civilization of the eastern Mediterranean world for another five hundred years or so, until the triumph of Christianity and, eventually, Islam brought about radical changes. As the conqueror who made this great era of Hellenistic civilization possible, Alexander the Great’s life, career, and achievements have been studied over and over by historians, giving rise to literally hundreds of books and probably thousands of detailed articles about the great conqueror. Much less studied, however, are the development of the Macedonian state and army under Alexander’s father Philip II, which made Alexander’s career possible, and the activities and policies of Alexander’s Successors, which created the organizational framework in which Hellenistic civilization developed and flourished.
The aim of this book is, first, to offer a detailed study of the career of Philip II (Chapters 1–4). The state of Macedonia before Philip’s succession to the throne was a disorganized and disunited backwater, peripheral to the local great powers of Athens, Sparta, and Persia. Philip II built up an entirely new type of army with a new style of warfare, and through this army united Macedonia, expanded its borders, and turned it into the greatest power in the ancient world by his death at the age of forty-seven, assassinated by a disgruntled officer in his own bodyguard. It was the state and army built by Philip that provided Alexander with the tools to undertake his career of conquest.
After a relatively brief review of Alexander’s conquests (Chapter 5), the book treats in some detail the forty years after Alexander’s death, showing how his greatest generals—men who, like Alexander, had been trained in the army and wars of Philip II—took control of Alexander’s conquests and built the three great Hellenistic empires in those lands: the Antigonid Empire in the Balkan region, the Seleucid Empire in western Asia, and the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt and Libya. By settling tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Greek colonists, for whom they built hundreds of new Greek cities in western Asia and Egypt, and by encouraging many natives to settle in these new cities too, adopting Greek names, the Greek language, and Greek culture as their own, these rulers helped to establish Hellenistic civilization as the culture of the eastern Mediterranean world for over half a millennium (Chapters 6–7).
This book thus covers a topic of enormous interest and importance to the history of western civilization, that of the establishment of Greek culture as a universal culture from the rivers of Iraq to the Adriatic Sea, and from the Black and Caspian Seas to the deserts of Arabia and the border of the Sudan. Everywhere within this vast and diverse territory, between 300 BCE and 300 CE (and later) there were to be found Greek cities with Greek citizens, speaking and reading the Greek language, and living their lives according to the social, cultural, and political patterns established in Classical Greece in the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE. This remarkable civilization left, as is well known, a rich cultural heritage that has deeply influenced western (and indeed Muslim) culture and civilization ever since. It is as the facilitators who made possible this spread of Greek culture, and its establishment throughout the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia as the dominant culture, that Philip II of Macedonia, his son Alexander, and Alexander’s Successors remain an important and fascinating topic of study.