CHAPTER 8
The Education of Alexander
Academia and Empires
When Alexander set out in 334 BCE to conquer the Persian Empire and touch the ends of the Earth, he brought with him a highly trained and inspired army of forty thousand troops and three of his most treasured personal possessions: his faithful horse and friend Bucephalus, and his two favorite books, gifted to him by his private tutor, the Greek polymath Aristotle.
The first was a copy of Homer’s Iliad annotated by Aristotle. The narrative epic recounts the heroic exploits of Achilles during the Trojan War, a much earlier Greek invasion of Persia. The archetypal warrior, Achilles was the golden child of the gods, and the masculine prototype Alexander sought to emulate during his own invasion almost a millennium later. He was obsessed with the heroic saga, and, as a boy, memorized lengthy passages and recited them to spellbound audiences. During his eleven years campaigning across twenty-two thousand miles of distant and exotic lands, Alexander kept his cherished copy under his bed—beside a dagger.
The second book, Anabasis, commonly called The Persian Expedition, was far more applicable. Written around 370 BCE by the Athenian military leader, philosopher, and historian Xenophon, it recounts the adventures of ten thousand Greek mercenaries, led by Xenophon, who were fighting for the Persians. The description includes minute details of Persian culture, governance, and military training, composition, and tactics.
Alexander’s acquisition of Bucephalus, as described by the Greek historian and biographer Plutarch in The Life of Alexander, illustrates his keen observation, intelligence, courage, and horsemanship skills at a young age. “The story is plausible in itself,” posits renowned historian and author Adrian Goldsworthy in Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors. “It is a story that could be true, and anyone of sentiment will feel it ought to be true.” Alexander and Bucephalus are arguably the most distinguished and venerated human-horse dyad in history.
When the prince was twelve years old, a frustrated trader abandoned a massive Thessalian horse to roam the streets of the Macedonian capital of Pella. The muscular, raven-black stallion marked by a menacing white star on its brow and one penetratingly piercing blue eye, refused to be mounted and chased off any attempt to be corralled. Surveying the spectacle, Alexander pleaded with his father, King Philip II, to purchase the horse. Originally interested in obtaining the magnificent creature, Philip quickly rescinded his offer after witnessing the ferocity of the wild animal.
The one-eyed king had no use for an unruly, insubordinate steed that quickly drew a swelling audience of curious onlookers. “What a horse they are losing,” protested Alexander, “and all because they do not know how to handle him, or dare not try!” Much to his son’s disappointment, Philip could not be swayed.
“Are you finding fault with your elders because you think you know more than they do or can manage a horse better?” the king snapped impatiently.
“At least I could manage this one better!” replied a defiant Alexander, as he shrugged off his cloak and crept toward the panic-stricken horse amid jeers from the raucous crowd.
Already renowned for his equestrian abilities, Alexander summoned the teachings of Xenophon to handle horses kindly by touching, caressing, and talking to them. “As the result of this treatment,” he concluded, “necessarily the young horse will acquire—not fondness merely, but an absolute craving for human beings.” Sensing that the horse was afraid of its own shadow, Alexander stunned the now-silent spectators. He clutched the dangling reins and turned the horse toward the sun to shroud its silhouette as he gently stroked its nose and whispered soothing words. He had tamed the savage beast.
As Alexander galloped away, a tearfully delighted Philip paid the thirteen-talent asking price, enough to sustain a Greek laborer for a century. “O my son,” Philip proclaimed, “look thee out a kingdom equal to and worthy of thyself, for Macedon is too little for thee.”
Eventually, the warhorse and loyal companion, which the prince named Bucephalus (ox-head), would carry his master across the known and unknown worlds as far as India, the eastern limit of his vast empire and one of the largest kingdoms in history. “The future was spread out before them like a giant canvas on which they could paint their own glorious deeds,” writes Alex Rowson in The Young Alexander: The Making of Alexander the Great. “Together they would see more of the world than any before them…. They took with them their language, traditions, beliefs, and ideas on art and architecture, a distinctive Greco-Macedonian mix that would prove to be one of history’s most enduring cultural exports.” With that tender moment between a headstrong boy and a stubborn horse on the streets of Pella, together Alexander and Bucephalus would profoundly change the world.
Plutarch also relates that after Alexander had tamed Bucephalus, Philip “would not wholly entrust the direction and training of the boy to the ordinary teachers of poetry and the formal studies, feeling that it was a matter of too great importance.” Alexander required an exceptional tutor to rival his exceptional horse. King Philip, who was busy transforming the Macedonian military with his own often overlooked genius, summoned Aristotle to instruct his child prodigy.
Alexander’s formal education was the product of a powerful academic pedigree. Aristotle studied for twenty years under his mentor, the philosopher Plato, who founded the Academy in Athens, the first true institution of higher learning. Plato and Xenophon were both students of the infamous “Athenian gadfly” Socrates. This torch of progress eventually found its way from Aristotle into the ambitious grip of a young prince in the northern wilds of Macedon.
Aristotle left his mark on every modern academic field. He wrote more than 150 treatises on everything from metaphysics, politics, and geology to psychology, the arts, and anatomy. He combined detailed investigation and the scientific method with biological reasoning and empiricism. In his work On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle examined the reproductive cycle, heredity, and breeding of horses with inquisitive accuracy. In his eight-volume Politics, Aristotle commented that cavalry was the preeminent and decisive military arm, a teaching point he no doubt passed on to his young apprentice.
Under Aristotle’s personal guidance, the adolescent Alexander was an avid reader and an astute student of history, and exhibited an early fascination with the Persian Empire. In addition to Anabasis, Alexander would have read Xenophon’s impressive catalog of books, including Cyropaedia (a half-truth biography of Cyrus the Great, another of Alexander’s childhood heroes), and his two treatises on horses.
On the Cavalry Commander specifies the duties and obligations of a cavalry officer, while the more renowned and studied On Horsemanship is an erudite discourse on the selection, training, equipment, riding, and maintenance of horses, including their military application. “The greatest generals of the ancient world such as Julius Caesar, Hannibal, and, above all, Alexander, would not have won their most famous victories without the proper appreciation of the battle-winning potential of cavalry,” stresses military historian Philip Sidnell in Warhorse: Cavalry in Ancient Warfare. The definitive guidelines and humane standards espoused by Xenophon were disseminated widely across Eurasia courtesy of Alexander’s exploits and endured well into the Middle Ages.
In addition to the permanent residence of Aristotle, Philip’s court at Pella was, to borrow a phrase from Xenophon, “a workshop of war.” Soldiers, politicians, academics, and adventurers visited from across the known world, forming a melting pot of concepts and conversation. Alexander once greeted the official Persian envoys by bombarding them with questions about their road system, cavalry horses, military training, and, of course, his hero Cyrus. The ambassadors were captivated by the young prince, and, according to Plutarch, “regarded the much-talked-of ability of Philip as nothing compared with his son’s eager disposition to do great things.” With this exceptionally syncretic and stimulating upbringing, Alexander was the culmination of all these brilliant minds.[*1]
Given that the premise of this book is the influence of the horse on human history, this chapter depicting the rise and supremacy of cavalry has been hitched squarely to Alexander and Bucephalus. “Even more important for our purposes,” writes Jeremiah McCall in his detailed investigation The Cavalry of the Roman Republic, “scholars have agreed that the Macedonian cavalry serving under Alexander the Great represented the pinnacle of ancient cavalry.” While the horse was a vital part of the armies of Hannibal (and his skilled Roman adversary Scipio) and Caesar, and was instrumental in the rise, and eventual fall, of the Roman Empire, it did not have the shock power and shattering impact it did under Alexander. On the heels of his father, Philip, he was the pioneering trailblazer. In the millennia that followed, their shock cavalry and combined arms warfare became the norm rather than the exception.
Alexander’s broader intellectual and historical base proffered by Aristotle and others would have picked up where our story left off, with the rise of cavalry and the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Assyrian Empire around 600 BCE. An appreciation of Alexander’s preeminent position in military history and his unrivaled use of cavalry must be contextualized within the eras of war that preceded him. “An unexamined life,” professed Plato, “is not worth living.”
To examine the life and legacy of Alexander, we must first take a brief step back into the affairs that created the atmosphere for his meteoric rise and enduring imprint on the modern world—specifically the Greco-Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. While there can be no denying that he possessed an uncanny innate intellect for the art of war, accompanied by reckless, charismatic courage, Alexander also learned from, and was the product of, the past.
At this time, our well-traversed greater Eurasian Steppe and its tributaries were divided into three theaters of war: Greece at the western gate, Persia occupying the central stage, and the warring states of China and their nomadic neighbors the Xiongnu trading barbs in the east. For all the major players of the period, the horse entered its age of ascendancy.
The Assyrians had shown the value of cavalry as a powerful tool in the construction of empire. The complete collapse of Assyria, however, set the stage for a new superpower of the ancient world. While the majority of the Middle East was rebuilding from the wreckage left by the Sea People and Assyrians, a new power quietly emerged from the shadows in the East.
Having secured the Persian throne in 559 BCE, Cyrus immediately set out consolidating his rule and conquering what would become his massive Achaemenid Empire. Initially, however, the small mountainous Persian enclave centered on the city of Pasargadae lacked suitable pasturelands for what was quickly becoming a life-or-death commodity: cavalry horses.
The early Persian annexation of the rich pasturelands and horses of the Nisaean Plain and Anatolia altered its equine fortunes. “Persian kings and their armies obtained horses from many sources,” reports Ann Hyland. “What is remarkable is how rapidly the Persians became thoroughly proficient horsemen without a tradition of early equestrianism.” When combined with their unique composite bow, incorporating both Assyrian and Scythian elements, and cast-bronze tree-leaf arrowheads, Persian cavalry was a potent tool in the Achaemenid military arsenal.
Cyrus the Great founded his empire through decisive military campaigns, skilled diplomacy, and, above all else, a visionary human rights policy the United Nations would applaud. His affirmation of cultural and religious tolerance and the repatriation of enslaved peoples to their homelands was immortalized by the egalitarian inscriptions on the small, clay Cyrus Cylinder. He is mentioned twenty-three times in the Bible and was anointed as messiah by the Judean Israelites, whom he freed from Babylonian captivity.
The empire he created embraced the coastal Greek Ionian city-states dotting western Anatolia, all the former imperial states of the Middle East, and stretched into the southern Caucasus and steppes of Central Asia. Approaching the Aral Sea in the autumn of 530 BCE, Cyrus encountered the matriarchal Massagetae branch of the Scythians (whom the Persians called Saka), led by the warrior-queen Tomyris. “Cyrus was eager to bring the Massagetae under his rule. They are said to be a large tribe, with a reputation of being warlike,” wrote Herodotus. “The Massagetae resemble the Scythians in both their clothing and their lifestyle. In battle they may or may not be on horseback, since they rely on both methods, and as well as using bows and spears.” Appreciating the disadvantages his army faced fighting the skilled armored cavalry of the Massagetae on their home turf, Cyrus wisely visited diplomacy first.
He sent Tomyris an offer of marriage, which she laughed off and flatly rejected. “King of Persia, abandon your zeal for this enterprise. You cannot know if in the end it will come out right for you. Stop and rule your own people, and put up with the sight of me ruling mine,” she chastised. “But no: you are hardly going to take this advice.” She then cordially invited him to battle. Cyrus should have heeded her suggestion. He was not, however, immediately willing to accept her entreaty to war. He preferred treachery.
Cyrus feigned retreat and left behind a tabled feast, stockpiles of wine, and a token party of expendable soldiers, who were quickly routed by a force led by Tomyris’s son, Spargapises. While feasting and drinking, the Massagetae were taken by surprise and slaughtered by hidden Persian troops. A disgraced Spargapises died by suicide. Tomyris immediately mustered the full might of her military. “You bloodthirsty man, Cyrus! What you have done should give you no cause for celebration,” she admonished the Persian emperor. “I swear by the sun who is the lord of the Massagetae that for all your insatiability I will quench your thirst for blood.”
Tomyris was true to her word. In what Herodotus considered “the fiercest battle between non-Greeks there has ever been,” the Persians suffered massive casualties, and Cyrus was killed. His body was brought before Tomyris, who hacked off his head as a trophy of war. As she plunged it into a cask filled with blood drained from the Persian dead, she screamed, “I warned you that I would quench your thirst for blood, and so I shall!” Based on Scythian ritual, Cyrus’s skull likely ended up as a great gilded drinking cup and one of Tomyris’s prized possessions. What was left of him made its way back to his beloved capital of Pasargadae and was interred beneath a modest limestone tomb, now suitably recognized as a United Nations World Heritage Site. Cyrus is regarded as one of the most influential and illustrious figures in history and is genuinely deserving of his “Great” suffix.
After a brief civil war, Darius, a distant cousin of Cyrus, eventually took the throne. Another (likely apocryphal) account has Darius and five other claimants deciding the fate of the Persian Empire through a contest of horse snorts. The man riding the steed who neighed initially at the sight of first light would become emperor. At the first shimmers of dawn, Darius’s servant Oebares placed his hands, which he had rubbed across the genitals of a mare, around the snout of his immediately aroused horse. Darius allegedly erected a statue of himself on his horse to commemorate his coronation in 522 BCE with the following inscription: “Darius, son of Hystaspes, obtained the sovereignty of Persia by the sagacity of his horse and the ingenious contrivance of Oebares, his groom.”
Darius inherited a vast and diverse empire. “This country Persia which I hold,” he proclaimed, “is possessed of good horses, of good men.” Both were vital cogs in the Persian military machine as he campaigned on the fringes of control from Egypt and Central Asia to the edges of India, including futile punitive expeditions against thorny Scythians. Although Darius boasted that “As a horseman I am a good warrior. As a bowman I am a good bowman, both afoot and on horseback. As a spearman I am a good spearman both afoot and on horseback,” in his offensive against the Scythian “Saka beyond the Sea,” he was outmatched and outmaneuvered.
Darius reigned over the empire at its territorial zenith. His cultural mosaic of subjects totaled an astounding fifty million people—almost half the global population—encompassing no fewer than forty-seven nations. Across the thriving and prosperous empire, both Cyrus and Darius promoted cultural, technological, and religious reciprocation and nurtured artistic, engineering, and scientific innovation. Darius introduced a universal coin currency through a state banking system to regulate international trade and taxation.
Like the Assyrian kings and Cyrus before him, Darius was also a brilliant mind and an impressive builder. To facilitate commerce and ensure the quick passage of troops and lines of communication across the empire, he constructed a novel network of infrastructure that included roads, bridges, irrigation systems, canals, way stations, post offices, and other travel services. The earth-packed roads, which served as the “eyes and ears of the king,” could accommodate sixteen oxen or horses lashed four abreast hauling siege towers weighing upwards of seven tons. The most renowned components of this sprawling transportation system were the thirty-five-mile-long technological marvel the Darius Canal (forerunner to the Suez Canal), connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, and the legendary Royal Road, which was fed by smaller intersecting routes.
The Royal Road, which had Assyrian antecedents, extended roughly 1,600 miles across the empire, from the city of Sardis in western Anatolia to Susa in the heart of the Persian homeland. More than a hundred rest stops, complete with caravanserais, stables, bed quarters, a post office, a military garrison, and other amenities, were erected one day’s ride apart, or roughly every fifteen miles.
What would have taken three to four months on foot, using a relay exchange of fresh horses, military personnel and mounted messengers of the Angarium postal institution could cover the entire distance in seven to fourteen days. “There is nothing mortal that is faster than the system the Persians have devised for sending messages,” praises Herodotus. “And neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dark of night keeps them from completing their appointed course as swiftly as possible.” This horse-shuttled Persian model served as the precedent for the informal US Postal Service creed, the short-lived Pony Express during the settlement of the American West, and the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways established in 1956 under President Dwight Eisenhower.
Persian economic reforms and landmark infrastructure projects created the first fully integrated society. Innovative horse transportation along the royal roads and secondary thoroughfares connecting the empire to vibrant Steppe Road trading centers allowed for the creation of multicultural “think tanks.” For example, when Darius was building his custom capital at Persepolis, he imported skilled tradesmen from across the far reaches of empire. As a result, science, engineering, spirituality, and the arts flourished under Persian rule, and its premier cities of Pasargadae, Persepolis, Susa, Ecbatana, and Babylon became thriving academic centers.
The expansion of Persian primacy, however, led to a legendary showdown with another young and aspiring power. Herodotus wrote that Cyrus brought together “every nation without exception.” The glaring exception, however, was Greece itself. The sparring Greek city-states were drawn into a life-or-death struggle against the Persians instigated by their Ionian brethren, who, with support from Athens, revolted against Persian rule in 499 BCE. After quickly subduing the rebellion, Darius vowed to punish Athens for its insolence. His full-scale invasion of Greece seven years later ignited the Greco-Persian Wars.
At this point, Greece, like China, was an assemblage of warring states. Sparta and Athens emerged as the dominant polities and sought allies to bolster their braided military and economic agendas. Also, as in China, these rival city-states were forced to put their mutual hostility on hold to withstand the onslaught of a far more lethal threat. For China, as we will see, it was plundering Xiongnu raiders from the steppe, while for the Greeks it was imperialistic Persians. At the onset of hostilities, however, the Greeks and the Chinese faced a decisive disadvantage: they both lacked any noteworthy cavalry tradition.
Taken as an ecological whole, the majority of Greece lacked suitable grasslands for the sustainment of any truly sizable horse populations. South of Macedon and Thrace, the Greek city-states, apart from Thessaly, were slow to adopt competent cavalry to complement heavy hoplite infantry. These troops fought shoulder to shoulder and shield to shield in deep ranks within the basic combat formation of the phalanx. Aside from inadequate pasture, there are additional reasons why the Greeks were discouraged, or dissuaded themselves, from establishing an earlier horse-based or cavalry culture.
Greece was dominated by a mountainous craggy landscape of cities and surrounding clusters of homestead farms inherently incompatible with raising horses. Within a semifeudal pastoral system, any arable land was intensively cultivated with crops and livestock, primarily goats and sheep, and their secondary products. The high population densities of Greece could not afford to waste viable, and valuable, land on pasture for luxury animals such as horses. Moreover, unlike the stretching royal roads of the Persian Empire or the Eurasian Steppe, the relatively short distances between the crowded urban centers of Greece did not necessitate horse-based commercial or conversational transport. Most people were simply not acquainted with horses.
They were also unreasonably expensive. At the onset of the Greco-Persian Wars, the average price for a Greek horse standing fourteen to fifteen hands was around 500 drachmas, with the most precious military mounts costing as much as 1,200 drachmas. By comparison, a goat or sheep commanded 10 to 15 drachmas, with a cow fetching around 50. Human slaves ranged from 140 drachmas for a donkey cart driver to 360 for a master goldsmith. The daily wage for a typical Greek laborer in the year 400 BCE was a single drachma, equivalent to one salted fish, a gallon of table wine, or five pounds of wheat.
Additionally, training both horse and rider demanded free time, something the average Greek workhand or farmer did not enjoy. The diminutive cavalry cadre remained a status symbol reserved for the aristocracy, who played at war by galloping on the fringes of battle. By default, heavy hoplite infantry dominated Greek military doctrine.[*2]
The Greek victories over the Persians at the battles of Marathon (490 BCE), Salamis (480 BCE), and Plataea (479 BCE) extinguished any future Persian designs toward Europe and propelled the balance of power west to Greece. The ensuing golden age of Greece would be the substance from which modern Western civilization was built. As military historian Paul Davis points out:
Many commentators point to Salamis and Plataea as the turning point in all of European history, the point at which Europe became a culture based on Greek civilization and not a vassal of Eastern emperors…. Thus, the basis of western political institutions, philosophies, and sciences comes from Greece; little is done today, or even conceived of, that the Greeks did not ponder upon more than two millennia past. Had the Persians prevailed, they might well have spread their empire deep into Europe…. No European population had the organization to mass against them; even the previously successful Scythians may have failed against a reinforced Persian military…. The world, indeed, could have been completely different.
As it was, the Greek triumph fostered the education of Alexander, fomenting his revolutionary employment of cavalry. He firmly entrenched the warhorse as an overriding, history-wielding combat arm that was here to stay. In the process, as both legendary conquerors and trailblazing explorers, Alexander and Bucephalus broadcast the Hellenic intellectual and cultural podium to the world.
Although the eastern invaders were repulsed, the Greco-Persian Wars proved to be a wake-up call for Greek military minds. Greece was saved as much by disease, luck, and Persian blundering as by Spartan bravery, home field advantage, and crafty Athenian strategy. Their decisive lack of cavalry could no longer be ignored. The inadequacies and shortcomings of their one-dimensional infantry system were wholly exposed, forcing Greeks, and Macedonians, to reevaluate their overall military configuration. After all, there was still the lingering question of hegemony within Greece itself. The mutual odium and common defense against Persia were the only bonds holding together the arranged marriage of Greek city-states.
Their bitter and spiteful divorce was finally settled by the reciprocal slaughter of the Peloponnesian War, derided by Aristophanes in Lysistrata and documented by Thucydides. Despite this warfare, raging intermittently from 460 to 404 BCE, or perhaps because of it, Greeks of the fifth century BCE (primarily Athenians) whose names hang in the hallways of immortality fashioned their most acclaimed academic innovations in architecture, science, medicine, philosophy, and the arts. Socrates, Plato, and Thucydides, for example, all fought for Athens during the Peloponnesian War.
These wars sounded the abrupt and grim denouement of the golden age of Greece. Fifty-six years of intermittent conflict had left both Athens and Sparta, and their subordinate allies, shattered and vulnerable. The weary, war-torn Greek world was in financial decay and political disarray. The Peloponnesian War prevented Athenian/Greek authority and influence from unfurling across the broader Mediterranean world toward the aspiring, rival states of Rome and Carthage. The expansive empire of Alexander and his pursuit of glory looked east, not west, to the ends of the Earth.
For those who were paying attention and reading up on their Thucydides and other accounts of the Greco-Persian and Peloponnesian Wars—among them Philip and Alexander—the untapped potential of cavalry came into sharp focus. In his authoritative book Cavalry Operations in the Ancient Greek World, historian Robert Gaebel emphasizes, “[F]or any bright young military leaders who were capable of profiting from past mistakes, there were some lessons to be learned about the use of cavalry…. This, together with a professionalism fostered by almost incessant warfare, set the stage for the remarkable military achievements of the fourth century [BCE] that reached their culmination in Alexander.”
By studying and coalescing the evolving martial principles and experimentation of the previous century, both Philip and Alexander were ready to challenge the military status quo from horseback. While the rise of the backwater kingdom of Macedon to superpower status was no accident, it was also by no means inevitable, and rested more on brains than brawn.
From the smoldering cinders of the Greco-Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, a new power arose, and a young horse-whispering prodigy would lead it beyond the summits of supremacy to gaze from his unimaginable heights toward the horizons at the ends of the Earth. Although he secured the prestigious titles of basileus of Macedon, hegemon of the Hellenic League, pharaoh of Egypt, shah of Persia, and lord of Asia during his meteoric rise to conquering celebrity, he is now known simply as Alexander the Great.
Rarely does one individual change the course of history and single-handedly carve his or her name indelibly on the pages of immortality. There are also only a handful of people who shaped not only their own contemporary world but also every future that followed. Alexander’s history-altering achievements and undefeated 20–0 battlecard, however, were made possible by the combination of the cavalry horse and his own heroic abilities. It is also worth remembering just how young Alexander was (twenty years old), and the relatively small size of his military forces (forty thousand soldiers), when he marched on Persia and challenged Darius III to a risky game of world domination.
Notwithstanding the ceaseless and futile intellectual squabbling over his character and motives, there can be no questioning the pure, raw genius that was Alexander. “If in reality he never wept because there were no more worlds to conquer or sheathed his sword for lack of argument,” contends Adrian Goldsworthy, “it does not diminish what he did in such a short time. Only in the modern mechanized era have a few armies managed to advance so fast for such a long period as Alexander’s men…. The sheer scale of what Philip and Alexander achieved is staggering…. It is easier to consider the impact these two men had on their world, although even here it is impossible to know what would have happened if they had not done what they did.”
In less than forty years, Philip and Alexander forged a backwoods vassal region into a mighty kingdom that conquered the battle-scarred Greek city-states and the entire Persian Empire, and even ventured into uncharted territory, claiming more than two million square miles (roughly 4 percent of the planet) in the process. By all comparisons, Alexander fielded one of the greatest armies the world has ever seen. Although he had proficient infantry, archers, and other specialized troops, it was his vaunted cavalry that delivered his string of victories and carried the complete Hellenistic cultural and academic package to Eurasia, and eventually, the world.
While the adolescent Alexander, whom Plutarch described as “ambitious and serious,” immersed himself in the teachings of Aristotle, his father, Philip, also a student of history, instigated a military revolution. “The internal workings of the new army were given birth to by Greek intellect, and one cannot help but think this represented the collective cerebral effort of many ruminating and scientifically inclined minds,” stresses David Karunanithy in The Macedonian War Machine, 359–281 BC. “The Macedonians under Philip and Alexander became adept at experimenting with, absorbing and improving upon the most progressive military thought of their antecedents, contemporaries, and enemies. Their activities acted as catalyst for a virtual explosion of intellectual activity on things military.”
When Philip assumed the throne of Macedon in 359 BCE at the age of twenty-two, he immediately set out to transform the Macedonian army through sweeping alterations to weaponry, tactics, and the combined arms deployment of infantry and cavalry. “Over the next twenty years,” notes Sidnell, “Philip campaigned almost continuously, all the while honing his military machine and its tactics on the whetstone of experience, so that it effectively became a permanent professional army.”
Philip also mandated an unprecedented regimen of intense training and discipline—a mindset drilled into his son. Alexander later joked to his soldiers that, as a child, he was served “night marches for his breakfast, and for his dinner his frugal breakfast.” Writing in the second century BCE, the Greek historian Polybius relates that “it is universally acknowledged that from his childhood he was well versed and trained in the art of war.”
The elite heavy Companion Cavalry commanded directly by Alexander in all his major battles was positioned on the right flank. Light cavalry, including the crack Thessalians, occupied the left flank. A special training school was set up by Philip for potential Companions. At age fourteen, the same age that Alexander began his studies under Aristotle, the leading sons of Macedon and other worthy applicants received a formal education at the king’s expense. Many of Alexander’s Companion cavalrymen were also his childhood friends and classmates at this exclusive military academy, adding to the esprit de corps of the elite unit.
The syllabus placed a high priority on horsemanship. Xenophon advised that a prospective cavalry mount be “tested in all particulars in which he is tested by war. These include springing across ditches, leaping over walls, rushing up banks, jumping down banks.” Unlike the Persians, the heavily armored Greek cavalry was based primarily on the sword and spear and not the bow. Macedonian cavalrymen were trained rigorously for close-quarter combat, prompting the ancient Greek historian Arrian to muse that Alexander’s mounted troops fought like hoplites on horseback.[*3]
Philip and Alexander understood fully the value and versatility of cavalry. “Given a strong cavalry force, there were three uses you could make of it,” summarizes historian Sir William Tarn. “You could merely fight with the enemy’s cavalry; or you could take his infantry in the flank or rear; or you could break through his line. Alexander used all three methods, but merely to defeat the enemy cavalry was clearly to him the least important.” Using impeccably timed, coordinated, and decisive cavalry actions to strike exposed enemy flanks or vulnerable spots in the main line became hallmarks of Alexander’s victories.
Given the pivotal role of cavalry within Macedonian military doctrine, procuring, breeding, and training quality mounts was a priority. Like the Mittani and Assyrians before them, the Macedonians developed a series of stud farms administered by the Office of the Secretary of Horses. Numerous Macedonian entries won at the Olympics. In 356 BCE, the same year Alexander was born, Philip’s racehorse won at the 106th Olympiad. His chariot teams were victorious at the following two Olympic Games.
Although the first recorded Olympic Games were held in 776 BCE, horse and chariot races were not introduced until 680 BCE. Fittingly, the first recorded winner in horse racing was Crauxidas, from Thessaly, in 648 BCE. By the third century BCE, shortly after Philip’s victories, the Olympic equestrian program contained six events. As a testament to the horse’s venerated status, to this day it is still the only nonhuman participant at the Olympic Games and is considered as much an athlete as its rider. Equestrian is the only individual sport in which men and women compete head-to-head on equal terms.
Through trade and conquest, both Philip and Alexander continuously augmented their herds. After the Battle of Issus, for example, seven thousand Persian mounts were added to the Macedonian count.[*4] The Nisaean Plain in Persia provided Alexander with fifty thousand of the highest quality horses, while his triumphant entry into Babylon in 331 BCE netted another sixteen thousand. As Karunanithy points out astutely, “[T]he very fact that Alexander regularly and often deliberately drove his cavalry horses so hard suggests that he had the reassurance of knowing that the army kept a fair-sized reserve of spare mounts as standby. The system of obtaining them was well organized, adaptable and effective enough for adequate numbers to be quickly gathered in when required.” Based on the available sources, it appears that Alexander had plenty of horses spread across various military formations, including service and supply units.
Sophisticated and highly organized baggage trains using horses, donkeys, mules, and camels were a staple of the Macedonian military. King Philip abandoned the use of wheeled vehicles (and oxen), which were clunky, slow, and awkward, especially in the difficult and heavy mountainous terrain of Greece. While these modifications may be the banal aspects of war, they reduced the baggage train by 65 percent, allowing for streamlined, rapid movement. Under this new equine pack-heavy logistical system, the entire Macedonian camp could cover thirteen miles a day, while independent cavalry could easily cover forty miles. The horse unlocked the shackles of supply.
No other professional military of antiquity possessing equivalent punching power could move so far so fast. The armies of Philip and Alexander were the most mobile, versatile, and low-maintenance to ever take to the field. By overthrowing the tyranny of logistics, Philip’s innovations set the precedent for Alexander and all future armies of Europe and the Middle East. The elevated performance of Alexander’s supply lines, which included seaborne coastal drops, is evident in the breakneck speed and vast distances of his campaigns, spanning a total of twenty-two thousand miles across diverse environments.[*5]
Fighting alongside his father, Alexander gained invaluable training, confidence, and momentum. He quickly earned respect and repute as a fierce, admirable leader who inspired loyalty, courage, and devotion by fighting at the front of his ranks. The most important takeaway for Alexander was that cavalry charges against infantry could be decisive if delivered at the opportune time and location. Wars can be lost with a moment’s hesitation. His personal bravery, or egotistical recklessness, certainly enhanced his genius as a cavalry commander, but it was also his innate prudence and precise instincts for when and where to strike that set him apart from his peers. This was his genius.
Alexander heeded Xenophon’s advice that “It is always necessary for the commander to hit on the right thing at the right moment, to think of the present situation and to carry out what is expedient in view of it.” His cavalry charges became the hallmark of his victories. “Alexander, in short,” declares Robert Drews, “exploited the full potential of shock cavalry.” The young prince possessed the appetite, intellect, and ability for war, and his sudden ascension to the throne of Macedon was close at hand.
Having united Greece under his rule—except for the recalcitrant but weak and largely irrelevant Spartans, whom Alexander ridiculed as “mice”—an anxious Philip smartly conjured up a common cause for all Greeks to rally behind by dredging up an old archenemy. It was time, he declared in 336 BCE, for a united Greece to march on Persia. Philip, however, would not steer the invasion. While presiding over his daughter’s wedding, the king was assassinated by a disgruntled bodyguard.
Alexander, unexpectedly assuming the throne at twenty years of age, prepared to carry out his father’s vision of conquest to unimagined heights. Having consolidated his domestic rule, in 334 BCE Alexander mustered his combined Macedonian and Greek force of no more than forty thousand soldiers, including five thousand cavalry, crossed the Hellespont, and marched on Persia. “With his small but excellently trained and organized army,” wrote Major General Carl von Clausewitz, the brilliant Prussian strategist in his immortal 1832 treatise On War, “Alexander shattered the brittle states of Asia. Ruthlessly, without pause, he advanced through the vast expanse of Asia until he reached India.”
From the ancient sources, historical reconstructions, and academic appraisals available, we can glean a relatively accurate representation of Alexander’s cavalry actions and combined arms tactics during his legendary string of victories, including the major battles of Granicus (334 BCE), Issus (333 BCE), and Gaugamela (331 BCE) against Darius III and the Persians; Jaxartes River (329 BCE), confronting the unconventional Scythians; and, lastly, against the valiant warrior King Porus and his elephants at Hydaspes River in India (326 BCE).
Part of Alexander’s genius rested with his innate ability to read the battlefield and react. He altered his approaches based on the formation, tactics, and movements of his adversary and the ebb and flow of battle. He did not apply the same successful methods that he had used against Darius in Persia against the Scythians in Central Asia or Porus in India. With crafty deployments and timely charges during all engagements, his warhorses always delivered the final blows of victory.
Outnumbered roughly two to one at both Granicus and Issus, Alexander positioned himself and his Companion Cavalry on the far right, as customary, with his elite infantry holding the end of the line. Alexander purposefully concentrated his best cavalry and infantry directly around him for protection, ease of command, and striking power. His loyal Thessalian cavalry and light infantry closed the left flank.
Alexander mosaic: Alexander the Great and Bucephalus (left) confront Persian emperor Darius III (center) at the Battle of Issus. Floor mosaic from the House of the Faun, Pompeii, Italy, circa 100 BCE. (Prisma Archivo/Alamy Stock Photo)
Alexander seized the initiative at Granicus by conducting a bold and timely advance against a vulnerable point of the Persian line, followed by coordinated and decisive cavalry assaults on both flanks. At Issus, his skilled use of cavalry to strike diagonally at the crucial spot at the critical moment was a stroke of genius.
Following his anointment as a god by the Egyptians, who viewed him as their liberator from Persian rule, Alexander drove his forces into the Persian heartland, instigating his overdue pursuit of Darius.[*6] In 331 BCE on an open plain at Gaugamela, slightly east of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh (Mosul), their armies collided for the final showdown. Again, Persia enjoyed numerical superiority. As the opposing lines converged, Alexander beckoned for Bucephalus. During the marshaling stage, he had been riding another mount, as Bucephalus “was now past his prime.” The old warhorse would carry his dear friend once more unto the breach.
Alexander immediately ordered his infantry to attack the center of the Persian position, while he and his Companion Cavalry occupied the far right of the line. He intended to draw the bulk of the Persian cavalry to his flanks, leaving the center of the Persian line fractured and exposed. It worked. Darius continued to commit resources to press the Macedonian flanks. Alexander had set the trap; now he waited patiently to engage the spring and strike. It was exactly as he had scripted, and he launched his main cavalry assault at the perfect place and time.
With Alexander riding Bucephalus at the sharp end, his reinforced cavalry formed a giant wedge and penetrated a gap forming in the center of the Persian line. “When the Macedonian cavalry, commanded by Alexander himself, pressed on vigorously, thrusting themselves against the Persians,” reports Arrian, “all things together appeared full of terror to Darius, who had already long been in a state of fear, so that he was the first to turn and flee.” With little motivation to continue fighting, disgruntled Persian soldiers simply drifted home. Others rebelled against Darius, who was assassinated shortly after his irreparable defeat.
At Gaugamela, Alexander’s genius and unrivaled use of cavalry was on full display. “Gaugamela also influenced other military leaders who adopted the Greek tactics that had defeated far more numerous foes,” notes military historian Michael Lanning. “These methods of military operation strongly influenced the leaders of the future Roman Empire and also provided inspiration and knowledge for the Napoleonic conquests more than two [millennia] later.” Napoléon acknowledged that he “read over and over again the campaigns of Alexander…. This is the only way to become a great general and master the secrets of the art of war.”
It had been just over three years since Alexander crossed the Hellespont into Asia. His battle record stood at a perfect 11–0. Stirred by his insatiable ego and Achilles complex, Alexander was hell-bent on conquering what Aristotle labeled “the ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea.”
Following his consolidation of the former Persian Empire, he drove his forces through Central Asia. During a brief campaign in 330 BCE against the Amardi, a branch of Scythians occupying the mountainous south shore of the Caspian Sea, a group of raiders stole a herd of grazing Macedonian horses—including Bucephalus. An enraged Alexander vowed to ravage the lands and slaughter or enslave the entire population if his horse was not returned unharmed immediately. Bucephalus was back with his friend and master just as fast as the Amardi delegation could get the stubborn old warhorse to move. With Bucephalus in tow, Alexander headed straight into the heart of Central Asia toward the Fergana valley and its prized horses, where he settled a Greek diaspora at Alexandria Eschate.
His progress was impeded in 329 BCE by a faction of headstrong Scythians along the shores of the Jaxartes River, which straddles the borders of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. “This episode is of particular military interest,” observes Robert Gaebel, “because it shows Alexander at his best, effectively employing various arms and technologies.” After crossing the river under a barrage of catapults, Alexander stunned and scattered the Scythian horsemen with a quick cavalry charge. They quickly reformed, and adopted the traditional Scythian method of riding rings around the trapped Macedonian cavalry. In doing so, they had taken Alexander’s bait.
Having analyzed Scythian tactics, including those used against his dad and Darius I, Alexander had anticipated this response. The Scythians were unaware that the bulk of the Macedonian army remained concealed behind the riverbank. Alexander immediately led a decisive cavalry charge, disrupting the Scythian encirclement at numerous spots. Again, his timing was impeccable. Surprised and overwhelmed, the Scythians fled in terror, melting into the steppe.
Using his accrued education and unrivaled military acumen, Alexander had bested the mighty Scythians he had read about as a boy in the works of Aristophanes, Herodotus, Xenophon, and Aristotle, not to mention listening to his father’s personal accounts. “People had believed the Scythians invincible,” declared the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus in his work from the first century CE, Histories of Alexander the Great. “But after this crushing defeat, they had to admit that no race was a match for Macedonian arms.” When news of Alexander’s march to India reverberated across the region, Scythian horsemen flocked to his banner, unable to resist the lure of riches and adventure. By this time, his forces had been fighting continuously without defeat (17–0) for nine years.
In the spring of 326 BCE, at the Hydaspes along the Indus River system, Alexander’s sickly and spent army faced King Porus and his fearsome war elephants in what turned out to be its final large-scale battle. Maintaining secrecy through a series of brilliant deceptions, false movements, and feints, Alexander kept Porus preoccupied and blind to his true intentions. With the main Macedonian line standing firm, Alexander and a cavalry-heavy strike force waded ashore on the Indian side of the river undetected.
He immediately launched a cavalry detachment in a wide wheel to threaten the Indian position from the rear. As Porus scrambled his troops to counter this flanking movement, Alexander, with his impeccable battlefield instinct, led his Companion Cavalry in a beautifully choreographed charge that sent the Indian cavalry fleeing into their own line of elephants, causing confusion and disarray. Having seized the initiative with his expert horsemen, Alexander ordered his heavy infantry to advance and pin down the exhausted Indian force, while the relatively unimpeded cavalry maneuvered around the flanks to strike the final blow from the rear—flawless execution of the “hammer and anvil” movement.
For Alexander, the masterpiece victory was bittersweet. Following the battle, his faithful warhorse, Bucephalus, died of old age, fatigue, or fatal wounds (depending on the source). Alexander honored his devoted horse by founding a city on the Hydaspes River: Alexandria Bucephalus.[*7] The beloved equine died at about age thirty, a little older, and perhaps wiser, than his master, who celebrated his own thirtieth birthday a few weeks later.
Although Alexander believed the ends of the world were within reach, it was not to be. The tomb of mighty Bucephalus, four thousand miles from home, roughly marks the eastern limit line of Alexander’s enormous empire. A fitting tribute of immortality for his beloved and trusted friend and one of the most time-honored and famous horses in history.
Shortly after the death of Bucephalus, Alexander sensibly turned his tired and ailing army around and headed west. His homesick troops simply “longed to again see their parents, their wives and children, their homeland.” Over the course of nine years, they had followed their leader across more than seventeen thousand blood- and sweat-soaked miles. The promised land at the ends of the Earth and the Great Outer Sea were still nowhere in sight, and they refused to aimlessly trudge any farther. Alexander was also aware that his supply lines were overstretched and fraying, his available pool of Macedonians and Greeks was evaporating, and his triumphs progressively tougher to attain.
His next target would have been the mighty Nanda Empire of northern India, which fielded a force of two hundred thousand infantry, twenty thousand cavalry, two thousand chariots, and three thousand war elephants (which spooked the Macedonian horses). Victory was not a foregone conclusion. Not even Alexander the Great, boasting a perfect 20–0 battle record, could circumvent these coalescing military complexities and impediments. In hindsight, given Alexander’s untenable position, the temporary abandonment of his India campaign proved to be a perceptively cautious decision.
While Alexander’s arrival in India did not stimulate war, which had long been serious business in the region, it did inspire notions of national unification and empire building. It also initiated an intense period of contact and creative interaction between Greek and Indian cultures. For example, it has been suggested that later portions of the Sanskrit masterpiece Ramayana, one of two principal Hindu epics, was heavily influenced by the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Four years after Alexander reversed course, Chandragupta Maurya founded an empire by conquering vast territories, including the Nanda and those satrapies (provinces) sustained by Alexander and his successors.[*8] He united the Indian subcontinent and created the largest imperial domain in Indian history. This vibrant and prosperous kingdom, which lasted 130 years, paved the way for the modern consolidated Indian state. The Maurya Empire also nurtured the dissemination of Buddhism.
This philosophical faith based on the teachings of Siddhārtha Gautama—the Buddha—had remained confined to eastern Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India, until it was embraced by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka around 260 BCE. He sponsored spiritual missions across India and Central Asia, where Buddhism became firmly entrenched by the first century BCE. These delegations, along with horse-riding Indo-Europeans, were instrumental in extending this spiritual belief through the Tarim Basin into China by the first century CE. In addition to the philosophical traditions of Buddhism, the subsequent Maurya Empire cultivated academia and the arts.
During his overthrow of the Nanda, Chandragupta was counseled by his mentor and chief advisor, Chanakya. A brilliant polymath, he was a pioneer in the fields of economics, industrial production, state welfare and governance, taxation, international relations, military strategy, and other matters of statecraft. He bundled all of these into his landmark treatise the Arthashastra, written in Indo-European Sanskrit on palm leaves, which would be rediscovered in 1905.
His writings served as a blueprint for Chandragupta’s confederation of India and the bureaucratic, commercial, and military administration of a centralized empire. Plutarch claims that Chandragupta “overran and subdued the whole of India with an army of 600,000 men,” including 30,000 skilled cavalrymen and lingering Greek mercenaries.
The horse, cavalry, and equestrian training, influenced heavily by Greek literature and vocabulary, features prominently in Chanakya’s writings. He states that the proximity of both the Persian and Macedonian Empires to India spurred the dissemination of horses and equestrian disciplines throughout the subcontinent long before the establishment of the Maurya Empire. It is evident that a string of outside influencers had successively shaped Indian horse culture: from the original mounted Indo-Europeans to the Scythians, Persians, and Greeks. “Kautilya [Chanakya] wrote just after Alexander the Great’s death,” explains Ann Hyland in The Horse in the Ancient World. “From the equestrian content, it must be taken as a distillation of what was current at, and for a considerable time prior to, Alexander’s era…. So detailed are these that every aspect of equestrianism can be extrapolated.”
Indian horses raised on royal stud farms stood fourteen to fifteen hands, with their temperament graded as “furious, mild, stupid, or slow.” The superintendent of horses, echoing the posts established by the Assyrians and Macedonians, registered and assigned all horses to suitable duties. I assume the “stupid or slow” were not conscripted into cavalry service.
In 303 BCE a Macedonian ambassador to the Mauryan court was struck by the sophistication of the training methods and professionalism of Indian horse masters, who possessed “a strong hand as well as a thorough understanding of horses.” The multifaceted roles of Indian cavalry follow the designs instituted by Alexander. Mirroring the earlier writings of Xenophon, the Arthashastra details the complex education of individual horses and the cutting-edge employment of cavalry. “Some manoeuvres that have been credited to the European Renaissance horse masters,” adds Hyland, “had already had an ancient history in India.”
Although Alexander turned his army west, he was by no means satisfied with his exploits, nor was he ready to burn out or fade away. Stopping in Babylon, he gave orders to prepare for an invasion of Arabia and North Africa, with his eye trained on Carthage and the western Mediterranean. Europe via the Rock of Gibraltar and Spain would have been in his sights. He simultaneously tasked reconnaissance missions to the shores of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe to secure a line of departure for the eventual rekindling of his Asian quest. “There is one thing I think I can assert myself,” claimed Arrian, “that none of Alexander’s plans were small and petty and that, no matter what he had already conquered, he would not have stopped there quietly.” Alexander, however, would never reach his paradise cities at the unknown ends of the world, at least not in this lifetime tour.
The larger-than-life Alexander the Great, who had survived no fewer than eight serious battle wounds, died in Babylon—likely of malaria—in 323 BCE at the age of thirty-two. His body, which was visited by venerating admirers and disciples, including Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Caesar Augustus, and Caligula, rested in his namesake city of Alexandria, Egypt, until the fourth century, when it disappeared from the historical record.[*9]
More than 2,300 years later, Alexander is one of those rare historical figures who still resonates today, and has captured the imagination, adoration, and respect of admirers across time. His “Great” epithet now rolls off the tongue as a proper surname, and with good reason: by revolutionizing and legitimizing cavalry, and conquering the almost ends of the earth, Alexander and Bucephalus transformed our world.
While Alexander’s territorial gains were quickly erased by infighting and the absence of centralized authority, the enlightening legacy of his Hellenistic empire endures to this day. Following his death, Greek sociocultural influence peaked across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and western Asia.
Through academia and action, he mastered the art of war by fusing professional cavalry with infantry and other combat trades to create the modern combined arms military doctrine. This guiding principle of war is as potent now as when he perfected it. Alexander also entrenched the value of cavalry on the battlefield for the next 2,200 years! As Louis DiMarco reminds us, “The similarities between Alexander’s lance-armed companion cavalry and the Indian lancers of Allenby’s cavalry divisions were far greater than the differences.” Alexander’s influence, however, stretches far beyond strictly military innovations.
His roaming wars and restless wanderings pollinated cross-cultural academia and innovation. He exposed his sprawling, eclectic empire to the attributes of Greek civilization and significantly broadened trade between East and West. Gold and silver coinage bearing the likenesses of Philip and Alexander, for example, have been found from France to Central Asia. “Macedon was not merely a military upstart created by ephemeral military genius,” stresses Robert Gaebel, “but rather a large, wealthy, well-managed state that was a major economic and political force.” His embryonic fusion of Eurasia would be reinforced 1,500 years later by horses ferrying European traders like Marco Polo across the Silk Roads transecting the immense Mongol Empire of Chinggis Khan and his unrivaled mounted archers. Alexander’s dream passed from one horse lover to another.
During his conquests and explorations, Alexander emulated his idol Cyrus the Great’s promotion of cultural, technological, and religious tolerance, reciprocation, and exchange, and, like Cyrus, he nurtured the arts, engineering, and scientific intrigue. Alexander took along writers to catalog new discoveries and ideas, sending vast collections and observations back to his aging master Aristotle, who died a year after his most famous apprentice.
Alexander also heeded the advice of his father: that it was better to “be called a good man for a long time than master for a short one.” In place of authoritarian rule, Alexander retained local administrative systems and constructed extensive infrastructure. He erected twenty-four major cities, including Alexandria, Iskenderun (Alexandretta), Kandahar, Herat, Bagram, Merv, and Khujand (many of which still exist today), while renovating more than fifty others in Greek tradition. The remains of a Greek site at Ai Khanoum in northern Afghanistan, for example, contains Hellenic fortifications, a gymnasium, a theater, a treasury, a palace for its Greek king, and a library containing the works of Greek and other literary masters.
Although his stays were brief and transitory as he drove his army east, Alexander instigated the spread of Hellenic ideas across his empire while establishing lasting Greek colonies to control it. “If we wish not just to pass through Asia but to hold it,” he instructed his inner circle, “we must show clemency to these people; it is their loyalty which will make our empire stable and permanent.” Hold it he did. The legacy of his achievements is permanently stitched into the fabric of our modern world.
Greek culture flourished across his empire long after his death. As Alex Rowson acknowledges in The Young Alexander:
Few historical figures have exerted such a persistent influence from beyond the grave…. His many self-named city foundations (Alexandrias) facilitated trade and exchange between East and West. Homer began to be read by Persian schoolboys, the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides were staged in new, exotic locations, [the Oracle of] Delphi’s words of wisdom were displayed in far-off Baktria (Afghanistan); the mixing of Greek and eastern cultures spawned a multitude of ideas and art forms. It was the dawn of a vibrant new age…set between the Classical era of Greek city-states and the establishment of the Roman Empire, a time of great innovation and productivity that rivals any in human history.
There are still thriving diasporas of Pontic Greeks in the Donetsk Province (including the city of Mariupol) of Ukraine, to the Pontus region of northern Turkey, to Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Alexander is still making headlines, all thanks to his taming Bucephalus, his creative military mind, and his mighty cavalry horses.
He assembled a stretching network of libraries and think tanks (which came to include the Great Library of Alexandria erected around 285 to 280 BCE), where he deposited copies of Greek texts in addition to reproductions of those he had gathered or translated into Greek from other cultures. This massive undertaking and academic enterprise ensured the broad dissemination of diverse ideas across his increasingly vast, multicultural empire. “Without him, it is unlikely that Greek culture and language would have spread so far or had the chance to take root on such a scale…. Syria, Asia Minor, and Egypt remained Hellenistic in language and culture for more than a thousand years, until at least the end of the Roman Empire,” reminds Adrian Goldsworthy. “It is worth recalling that as well as the Gospels being written in Greek, Jesus is the Greek form of the Aramaic, originally Hebrew, name Joshua.” Christians in the Middle East still speak Greek. The Ptolemaic (Macedonian Royal dynasty) rule of Egypt and its cultural influence, for example, lasted until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE. This synthesis of culture and academic advancement is perhaps Alexander’s greatest achievement.
Exploding from the heart of his former empire, Greek literature, architecture, science, mathematics, philosophy, and military strategy were disseminated across a wider berth and flourished in an age of intellectual prosperity and progress. In the great madrassas and libraries constructed across the blossoming Arab expanse during the Islamic Renaissance, scholars pondered the principles of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Archimedes, and Hypatia of Alexandria, whose works occupied the brimming shelves of archives that Alexander helped build.[*10] During the cross-cultural exchange of the Crusades, Islamic academics extended Europe a scholarly ladder by reintroducing Greek and Roman literature and culture, as well as their own refinements and academic advancements. This is the true legacy of Alexander and his vaunted cavalry horses.
Through his insatiable drive to reach the ends of the Earth, much of his adolescent reading list, compiled by Aristotle, has not only survived but thrived. It was composed of names that now echo in Indo-European and other languages across the classrooms and hallways of academic institutions all over the world. Successive generations of scholars, generals, and dreamers have used their concepts and discoveries as a springboard to see further into the limitless beyond. Even the great genius Sir Isaac Newton gravitated toward the notion that if we “have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” We all owe Alexander, Bucephalus, and his fellow warhorses a debt of gratitude. If greatness is the measure of influence and importance, then he is certainly one of the greatest of all time. The world still lives among the lingering equine shadows of Alexander’s empire.
The Romans, who viewed Alexander as the greatest of the greats, were eager beneficiaries of his Hellenic traditions. The Greco-Roman culture that followed dominated Europe, North Africa, and portions of the Middle East for the next seven hundred years, profoundly shaping the eras that followed. Many legal and political systems, for example, are an adaptation of Athenian or Roman law and democracy.
The Roman Empire also first martyred and subsequently facilitated the migration of Christianity across the unstable boundaries of Europe. “In his bold sweep east,” notes anthropologist Pita Kelekna in The Horse in Human History, “Alexander’s cavalry had bravely laid the ground for the emergence of the Rome-Byzantium era and the subsequent spread of Christianity.” This new remedial faith found its way across the sprawling Roman Empire on an unprecedented network of roads clattering with the thriving sounds and snorts of wagon wheels and horses.
Far outpacing the efforts of the Assyrians or the Persians, the Romans constructed an unrivaled network of military roads to shuttle a standing army of three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand soldiers across a maturing empire. A Roman legion could march upwards of thirty miles a day, while those on horseback could cover more than a hundred miles. At its territorial zenith in 117 CE, this transportation system snaked across 2 million square miles of holdings, home to roughly 75 million subjects (21 percent of the global population). The Romans constructed over 250,000 total miles of thoroughfare, including 53,625 miles of permanently paved, four-foot-thick trunk roads, most of which are still in service today. To put this feat into perspective, the current US Interstate Highway System totals 46,876 miles.
Based on the constraints of their massive, four-wheeled, oxen- or horse-drawn vehicles, where at all possible, Roman roads ran in perfectly straight lines. “Horses were essential for the many pack trains and, along with oxen, were hitched to wagons,” explains Bill Cooke, former director of the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky. “Without a fifth wheel, which allows the front axle to rotate, it is extremely difficult to turn a four-wheeled vehicle, possibly explaining why the Romans almost invariably laid out their roads in a straight line.” These roads not only allowed for the rapid movement of military forces, but also for extensive lines of communication and continuous trade of goods and services across the imperial realm and beyond.
Modeled on the Persian Angarium postal system, messengers and dispatch riders of the impressive Roman cursus publicus (“the public way”) crisscrossed the empire delivering mail, packages, and people. Relay stables holding as many as forty horses were sited every 8 to 12 miles, while full-service stations/garrisons were spotted in intervals of 20 to 30 miles. Government dispatches marked “Urgent” could travel upwards of 240 miles a day.
The cursus publicus also shuttled official personnel, baggage and freight, as well as military equipment and supplies. Public “stagecoach” transit could cover 60 miles a day. A Christian pilgrim who traversed the 3,000-mile overland route from Bordeaux, France, to Jerusalem in 333 and 334 CE noted in his diary that he encountered 305 posts along the way—roughly one every ten miles. The “Pilgrim of Bordeaux” carefully distinguishes between the small quick-change horse stables, the more comprehensive stopover stations, and those housing military garrisons.
The adoption of Alexander’s Hellenistic culture also stimulated Roman scholarship. Horses are vividly represented by some of the most celebrated academics and authors of the Roman era, including Varro, Virgil, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder. More specifically, On the Nature of Animals and Historical Miscellany, composed by the writer known as Aelian in the early third century CE, detail particulars on horse breeds, propagation, and management, while Vegetius’s late-fourth-century CE Digesta Artis Mulomedicinae provides a comprehensive guide to veterinary medicine. The Romans also left their permanent mark on horsemanship and cavalry through their introduction of horned, or pommeled, treed saddles and the first horseshoes, known as hipposandals in the adopted Greek (soleae ferreae, or “iron soles,” in Latin), worn much like slide-on slippers or flip-flops.
Across Roman manuscripts and records, more than fifty distinct horse breeds are mentioned by name, including the top-tier Thessalian, Thracian, Nisean, and Turkoman, all standing fifteen to sixteen hands. Commercial horses were generally categorized according to three grades: noble, breeding, and common stock. The bustling horse markets also peddled donkeys, mules, and camels, all important sources of traction for agriculture, trade, transportation, and war across the extensive, but easily accessible, empire.
Horses, however, did not dominate the Roman world as much as one might rightly assume. “The Romans were not great equestrians,” Juliet Clutton-Brock affirms bluntly. “Although they used horses for riding, warfare, and racing, the horse was not as much a part of Roman life as it appears to have been in classical Greece.” As a result, the handful of Roman commanders who employed effective cavalry, including Julius Caesar, were the exception. “If the Hellenistic-style cavalry tactics were characterized by maneuver and mobility,” points out military historian Jeremiah McCall, “Roman tactics certainly were not.” As we will see, these equestrian deficiencies would come back to haunt Rome when a merciless horde of Hun horsemen descended from the steppe.
The near annihilation of seven Roman legions under general and statesman Marcus Licinius Crassus at the hands of ten thousand Scythian-styled Parthian mounted archers at Carrhae on the Turkish-Syrian border in 53 BCE illustrates the manifest shortcomings of Roman cavalry. Crassus was killed, along with twenty thousand of his men. Another ten thousand legionaries were captured and trudged east into the flesh markets of Alexandria Margiana (Merv), one of Alexander’s refurbished cities and a major trading center in Turkmenistan along the Steppe Roads.
According to legend, grizzled veterans of this “Lost Roman Legion” supposedly drifted farther east and were later spotted fighting as mercenaries alongside Xiongnu horsemen in one of their many forays against the coalescing Chinese Han dynasty. While this apocryphal tale lacks all historical credibility, Rome and China did slowly piece together the puzzling fragmentary map of each other’s existence. “The central period of Classical Antiquity, from the third century BC to the third century AD, was marked most notably by the development of the Roman and Chinese Empires,” explains Christopher Beckwith. “They expanded to great size until they dominated the western and eastern extremes of the Eurasian continent. Both expanded deep into Central Asia.” Inevitably, their worlds collided through swelling commerce, including the prized commodity of silk, seeping across the Steppe, or newly christened Silk, Roads.
While Rome was extending its imperial tentacles across the increasingly interconnected steppe, the warring Chinese states were fighting for their existence in the face of a formidable, mounted adversary. Although seemingly strange bedfellows, the fates of Rome and China were fused, bound to the nomadic Xiongnu (Huns) and other horse-based societies of the steppe. The rise of China directly influenced the fall of Rome.
The appearance of a relaxed but robust Xiongnu federation on the eastern steppe, coupled with a changing climate, set off a domino effect of displacement rippling westward toward Europe. Waves of nomadic mounted migrants found their way into the heart of Europe and marched on the eternal city of Rome.
The capricious quick-striking raids of the Scythian-styled Xiongnu also threatened to overrun the war-weary Chinese states. Walls and chariots could not defeat this common enemy or stem the crisis unfolding on their northern border. The very survival of China rested with two saviors: confederation and the cavalry horse.
*1 According to later sources, Marsyas of Pella (brother of the acclaimed general Antigonus) wrote a work called The Education of Alexander. No copies survive.
*2 While environmental and cultural barriers limited Greek cavalry, during the Greco-Persian Wars, both Darius and his son Xerxes intentionally reduced their cavalry component for their futile invasions of Greece. They based their decision on logistical considerations: water, fodder, and suitable pasture would be in short supply.
*3 Although Arrian wrote in the mid-second century CE, he is considered the most reliable source on Alexander and his campaigns due to his reliance on, and specific reference to, eyewitness accounts and earlier secondary accounts, many of which have since disappeared from the literary record.
*4 The battle was fought on the Mediterranean coast near the Turkish city of Iskenderun, historically known as Alexandretta—founded by Alexander in 333 BCE after his victory over Darius III.
*5 By comparison, the equatorial circumference of the Earth is 24,902 miles.
*6 In preparation for traversing the unforgiving deserts, Alexander purposefully procured camels for his supply trains, having read about their benefits in books on military history and in the zoological writings of his tutor Aristotle.
*7 The city, also known as Alexandria Bucephalia, among other, similar names, is believed to be near the modern community of Jalalpur Sharif in Punjab, Pakistan.
*8 Chandragupta is said to have chatted cordially with Alexander not far from Bucephalia.
*9 The sadistic, perverse, and unhinged Roman emperor Caligula, who ruled between 37 and 41 CE, planned to appoint his favorite horse, Incitatus (“at full gallop”) to the Roman consulship. Cloaked in a purple silk blanket and a gem-studded collar, Incitatus was tasked with inviting dignitaries to join him at extravagant banquets hosted in his marble and ivory stable, where he dined on handpicked oats mixed with gold flakes. Anyone who dared to decline was tortured. Caligula also frequently pranced around in public dressed up as Alexander, even wearing the deceased’s golden breastplate—which he’d poached while visiting Alexander’s sarcophagus.
*10 Hypatia was the first recorded prominent female mathematician and philosopher. An earlier mathematician, Pandrosion of Alexandria, of whom little is known, may also have been female.