THE intellectual career of Aristotle, after he left his royal pupil, paralleled the military career of Alexander; both lives were expressions of conquest and synthesis. Perhaps it was the philosopher who instilled into the mind of the youth that ardor for unity which gave some grandeur to Alexander’s victories; more probably that resolve descended to him from his father’s ambitions, and was fused into a passion by his maternal blood. If we would understand Alexander we must always remember that he bore in his veins the drunken vigor of Philip and the barbaric intensity of Olympias. Furthermore, Olympias claimed descent from Achilles. Therefore the Iliad had a special fascination for Alexander; when he crossed the Hellespont he was, in his interpretation, retracing the steps of Achilles; when he conquered Hither Asia he was completing the work that his ancestor had begun at Troy. Through all his campaigns he carried with him a copy of the Iliad annotated by Aristotle; often he placed it under his pillow at night beside his dagger, as if to symbolize the instrument and the goal.
Leonidas, an austere Molossian, trained the boy’s body, Lysimachus taught him letters, Aristotle tried to form his mind. Philip was anxious that Alexander should study philosophy, “so that,” he said, “you may not do a great many things of the sort that I am sorry to have done.”1 To some extent Aristotle made a Hellene of him; through all his life Alexander admired Greek literature, and envied Greek civilization. To two Greeks sitting with him at the wild banquet at which he slew Cleitus he said, “Do you not feel like demigods among savages when you are sitting in company with these Macedonians?”2
Physically, Alexander was an ideal youth. He was good in every sport: a swift runner, a dashing horseman, a brilliant fencer, a practiced bowman, a fearless hunter. His friends wished him to enter the foot races at Olympia; he answered that he would be willing, if his opponents were kings. When all others had failed to tame the giant horse Bucephalus, Alexander succeeded; seeing which, says Plutarch, Philip acclaimed him with prophetic words: “My son, Macedonia is too small for you; seek out a larger empire, worthier of you.”3 Even on the march his wild energy found vent in shooting arrows at passing objects, or in alighting from, and remounting, his chariot at full speed. When a campaign lagged he would go hunting and, unaided and on foot, face any animal in combat; once, after an encounter with a lion, he was pleased to hear it said that he had fought as though it had been a duel to decide which of the two should be king.4 He liked hard work and dangerous enterprises, and could not bear to rest. He laughed at some of his generals, who had so many servants that they themselves could find nothing to do. “I wonder,” he told them, “that you with your experience do not know that those who work sleep more soundly than those for whom other people work. Have you yet to learn that the greatest need after our victories is to avoid the vices and the weaknesses of those whom we have conquered?”5 He grudged the time given to sleep, and said that “sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was mortal.”6 He was abstemious in eating, and, until his last years, in drinking, though he loved to linger with his friends over a goblet of wine. He despised rich foods, and refused the famous chefs who were offered him, saying that a night march gave him a good appetite for breakfast, and a light breakfast gave him an appetite for dinner.7 Perhaps in consequence of these habits his complexion was remarkably clear, and his body and breath, says Plutarch, “were so fragrant as to perfume the clothes that he wore.”8 Discounting the flattery of those who painted or carved or engraved his likeness, we know from his contemporaries that he was handsome beyond all precedents for a king, with expressive features, soft blue eyes, and luxuriant auburn hair. He helped to introduce into Europe the custom of shaving the beard, on the ground that whiskers offered too ready a handle for an enemy to grasp.8a In this little item, perhaps, lay his greatest influence upon history.
Mentally he was an ardent student, who was too soon consumed with responsibilities to reach maturity of mind. Like so many men of action, he mourned that he could not be also a thinker. “He had,” says Plutarch, “a violent thirst and passion for learning, which increased as time went on. . . . He was a lover of all kinds of reading and knowledge,” and it was his delight, after a day of marching or fighting, to sit up half the night conversing with scholars and scientists. “For my part,” he wrote to Aristotle, “I had rather surpass others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion.”9 Possibly at Aristotle’s suggestion he sent a commission to explore the sources of the Nile, and he gave funds generously for a variety of scientific inquiries. Whether a longer life would have brought him to Caesar’s clear intelligence, or the subtle understanding of Napoleon, is to be doubted. Royalty found him at twenty, after which warfare and administration absorbed him; in consequence he remained uneducated to the end. He could talk brilliantly, but fell into a hundred errors when he wandered from politics and war. With all his campaigns he seems never to have gained such acquaintance with geography as the science of his time could have given him. He rose at times above the narrowness of dogma, but remained to the last a slave to superstition. He put great confidence in the soothsayers and astrologers that crowded his court; before the battle of Arbela he spent the night performing magic ceremonies with the magician Aristander, and offered sacrifices to the god Fear; he who faced all men and beasts with a very ecstasy of courage was “easily alarmed by portents and prodigies,” even to changing important plans.10 He could lead many thousands of men, could conquer and rule millions, but he could not control his own temper. He never learned to recognize his own faults or limitations, but allowed his judgment to be soaked and drowned in praise. He lived in a frenzy of excitement and glory, and so loved war that his mind never knew an hour of peace.
His moral character hovered between similar contradictions. He was at bottom sentimental and emotional, and had, we are told, “melting eyes”; he was moved sometimes beside himself by poetry and music; he played the harp with great feeling in his early youth. Teased about this by Philip, he abandoned the instrument, and thereafter, as if to overcome himself, refused to listen to any but martial airs.11 Sexually he was almost virtuous, not so much on principle as by preoccupation. His incessant activity, his long marches and frequent battles, his complex plans and administrative burdens, used up his resources, and left him little appetite for love. He took many wives, but as a sacrifice to statesmanship; he was gallant to ladies, but preferred the company of his generals. When his aides brought a beautiful woman to his tent late at night he asked her, “Why at this time?” “I had to wait,” she replied, “to get my husband to bed.” Alexander dismissed her, and rebuked his servants, saying that because of them he had narrowly escaped becoming an adulterer.12 He had many of the qualities of a homosexual, and loved Hephaestion to madness; but when Theodorus of Taras offered to sell him two boys of great beauty he sent the Tarentine packing, and begged his friends to tell him what baseness of soul he had shown that anyone should make such a proposal to him.13 He gave to friendship the tenderness and solicitude that most men give to love. No statesman known to us, much less any general, ever surpassed him in simple trustfulness and warmheartedness, in open sincerity of affection and purpose, or in generosity even to acquaintances and enemies.14 Plutarch remarks “upon what slight occasions he would write letters to serve friends.” He endeared himself to his soldiers by his kindliness; he risked their lives, but not heedlessly; and he seemed to feel all their wounds. As Caesai for gave Brutus and Cicero, and Napoleon Fouche and Talleyrand, so Alexander forgave Harpalus, the treasurer who had absconded with his funds and had returned to beg forgiveness; the young conqueror reappointed him treasurer to all men’s astonishment, and apparently with good results.15 At Tarsus, in 333, Alexander being ill, his physician Philip offered him a purgative drink. At that moment a letter was brought to the King from Parmenio, warning him that Philip had been bribed by Darius to poison him. Alexander handed the letter to Philip, and as the latter read it, Alexander drank the draught—with no ill effect. His reputation for generosity helped him in his wars; many of the enemy allowed themselves to be taken prisoner, and cities, not fearing to be sacked, opened their gates at his coming.—Nevertheless, the Molossian tigress was in him, and it was his bitter fate to be ruined by his occasional paroxysms of cruelty. Having taken Gaza by siege and assault, and infuriated by its long resistance, Alexander caused the feet of Batis, its heroic commandant, to be bored, and brazen rings passed through them; then, intoxicated with memories of Achilles, he dragged the now dead Persian, tied by cords to the royal chariot, at full speed around the city.16 His increasing resort to drink as a means of quieting his nerves led him more and more frequently, in his last years, to outbreaks of blind ferocity, followed by brooding fits of violent remorse.
One quality in him dominated all the rest—ambition. As a youth he had fretted over Philip’s victories: “Father,” he complained to his friends, “will get everything done before we are ready, and will leave me and you no chance of doing anything great and important.”17 In his passion for achievement he assumed every task, and faced every risk. At Chaeronea he was the first man to charge the Theban Sacred Band; at the Granicus he indulged to the full what he called his “eagerness for encountering danger.”18 This, too, became an uncontrollable passion; the sound and sight of battle intoxicated him; he forgot then his duties as a general, and plunged ahead into the thickest of the fight; time and again his soldiers, fearful of losing him, had to plead with him to go to the rear. He was not a great general; he was a brave soldier whose obstinate perseverance marched on, with boyish heedlessness of impossibilities, to unprecedented victories. He supplied the inspiration; probably his generals, who were able men, contributed organization, training, tactics, and strategy. He led his troops by the brilliance of his imagination, the fire of his unstudied oratory, the readiness and sincerity with which he shared their hardships and griefs. Without question he was a good administrator: he ruled with kindness and firmness the wide domain which his arms had won; he was loyal to the agreements which he signed with commanders and cities; and he tolerated no oppression of his subjects by his appointees. Amid all the excitement and chaos of his campaigns he kept clearly at the center of his thoughts the great purpose that even his death would not defeat: the unification of all the eastern Mediterranean world into one cultural whole, dominated and elevated by the expanding civilization of Greece.
On his accession Alexander found himself at the head of a tottering empire. The northern tribes in Thrace and Illyria revolted; Aetolia, Acarnania, Phocis, Elis, Argolis renounced their allegiance; the Ambraciotes expelled the Macedonian garrison; Artaxerxes III boasted that he had instigated the killing of Philip, and that Persia now had nothing to fear from the immature stripling of twenty who had succeeded to the throne. When the glad tidings of Philip’s death reached Athens, Demosthenes donned festal garb, placed a garland of flowers upon his head, and moved in the Assembly that a crown of honor should be voted to the assassin Pausanias.19 Within Macedonia a dozen factions conspired against the young King’s life.
Alexander rose to the situation with a decisive energy that ended all internal opposition, and set the tempo of his career. Having arrested and decapitated the chief plotters at home, he marched south into Greece (336), and within a few days reached Thebes. The Greek states hastened to renew their allegiance; Athens sent him a profuse apology, voted him two crowns, and conferred upon him divine honors. Alexander, appeased, declared all dictatorships abolished in Greece, and decreed that each city should live in freedom according to its own laws. The Amphictyonic Council confirmed him in all the rights and honors that it had given to Philip; and a congress of all Greek states except Sparta, meeting at Corinth, proclaimed him captain general of the Greeks, and promised to contribute men and supplies for the Asiatic campaign. Alexander returned to Pella, put the capital in order, and then marched north to suppress the rebellion of the barbarian tribes (335). With Napoleonic swiftness he led his troops as far as the modern Bucharest, and planted his standards upon the northern bank of the Danube. Then, hearing that the Illyrians were advancing upon Macedonia, he marched two hundred miles through Serbia, surprised the invaders in the rear, defeated them, and drove the remnant back to their mountains.
But in the meantime a rumor had stirred Athens that Alexander had been killed in fighting on the Danube. Demosthenes called for a war of independence, and felt justified in accepting large sums from Persia to further his plans. At his instigation Thebes revolted, killed the Macedonian officials left there by Alexander, and besieged the Macedonian garrison in the Cadmeia. Athens sent help to Thebes, and invited Greece and Persia to join in an alliance against Macedon. Alexander, furious over what seemed to him not a passion for freedom but the crudest ingratitude and treachery, marched his weary troops down again into Greece. Reaching Thebes after thirteen days, he defeated the army sent out against him. He left the fate of the defenseless city to her ancient enemies—Plataea, Orchomenos, Thespiae, and Phocis; they voted that Thebes should be burned to the ground, and her inhabitants sold as slaves. Hoping to give other rebels a lesson, Alexander signed the order, but stipulated that the victorious troops should spare the home of Pindar, and the lives of priests and priestesses, and of all Thebans who could prove that they had opposed the revolt. Later he looked back with shame upon this violent revenge, and “was sure to grant without the least difficulty whatsoever any Theban asked of him.”20 He atoned in part by his leniency with Athens; he forgave her violation of the pledges made to him a year before, and did not press his demand for the surrender of Demosthenes and the other anti-Macedonian leaders. To the end of his life he maintained an attitude of respect and affection for Athens: he dedicated on the Acropolis various spoils from his Asiatic victories, sent back to Athens the Tyrannicide statues that Xerxes had taken away, and remarked, after an arduous campaign, “O ye Athenians, will you believe what dangers I incur to merit your praise?”21
Having received again the allegiance of all the Greek states except Sparta, Alexander returned to Macedonia, and prepared for the invasion of Asia. He found his state treasury almost empty, with a deficit of five hundred talents ($3,000,000) as a legacy from Philip’s reign.22 He borrowed eight hundred talents, and set out to conquer not the world but his debts. He had hoped to fight Persia as the champion of all Hellas, but he knew that half of Greece was praying that he would soon be killed. It was reported that the Persians could muster a million men; Alexander’s expeditionary force did not exceed thirty thousand infantry and five thousand cavalry. Nevertheless the new Achilles, leaving twelve thousand soldiers under Antipater to guard Macedonia and watch Greece, set out in 334 upon the most daring and romantic enterprise in the history of kings. He would live eleven years more, but would never see home or Europe again. While his army crossed the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos, he himself chose to land at Cape Sigeum, and retrace what he believed to have been Agamemnon’s path to Troy. At every step he quoted to his comrades passages from the Iliad, which he knew almost by heart. He anointed the reputed tomb of Achilles, crowned it with garlands, and ran naked around it according to the custom of antiquity. “Happy Achilles!” he exclaimed, “to have had in life so faithful a friend, and, after his death, so famous a poet to celebrate him.”23 He vowed now to carry through to a successful end that long struggle, between Europe and Asia, which had begun at Troy.
It is not necessary to our purpose to tell again the story of his victories. He met the first Persian contingent at the river Granicus, and overwhelmed it. There Cleitus saved his life by severing the arm of the Persian who was about to strike Alexander from behind; a whimsical student might build upon such events an accidental interpretation of history. After giving his men a rest he marched down into Ionia, offering the Greek cities democratic self-government under his protectorate. Most of them opened their gates without resistance. At Issus he met the main force of the Persians, 600,000 men, under Darius III. Once more he won by using his cavalry for attack, his infantry for defense. Darius fled, leaving his purse and his family behind him, to be treated the one with gratitude, the other with chivalry. After peaceably taking Damascus and Sidon Alexander laid siege to Tyre, which was harboring a large Phoenician squadron in the pay of Persia. The ancient city resisted so long that when at last he captured it Alexander lost his head and allowed his men to massacre eight thousand Tyrians, and to sell thirty thousand as slaves. Jerusalem surrendered quietly, and was well treated; Gaza fought till every man in the city was dead and every woman raped.
The triumphant march of the Macedonians was resumed through the Sinai desert into Egypt, where, when he showed a tactful respect for the country’s gods, Alexander was welcomed as a divinely sent liberator from Persian rule. Knowing that religion is stronger than politics, he crossed another desert to the oasis of Siwa, and paid his respects to the god Ammon—his very father if Olympias could be believed. The pliant priests crowned him Pharaoh with the ancient rites, and so eased the way for the Ptolemaic dynasty. Returning to the Delta, Alexander conceived or approved the idea of building a new capital at one of the Nile’s many mouths; perhaps the Greek merchants at near-by Naucratis suggested it as providing a more convenient depot for the enlarged Greek trade that might now be expected between Egypt and Greece. He marked out the orbit of the walls of Alexandria, the outline of the principal streets, and the sites for temples to the Egyptian and Grecian gods; further details he left to his architect, Dinocrates.I
Marching back into Asia, he met the vast polyglot army of Darius at Gaugamela, near Arbela, and was dismayed by their multitude; he knew that one defeat would cancel all his victories. His soldiers comforted him: “Be of good cheer, Sire; do not fear the great number of the enemy, for they will not be able to stand the very smell of goat that clings to us.”25 He spent the night in reconnoitering the ground on which he was to give battle, and in offering sacrifices to the gods. His victory was decisive. The disorderly hosts of Darius could make no headway against the phalanxes, and knew not how to defend themselves against the swift and incalculable dashes of the Macedonian cavalry; they broke and fled, and Darius was not the last to go. While Darius’ generals assassinated him as a coward, Alexander received the submission of Babylon, partook of its wealth, distributed some of it to his soldiers, but charmed the city by making obeisance to its gods, and decreeing the restoration of its sacred shrines. By the end of the year (331) he had reached Susa, whose population, still remembering the ancient glory of Elam, welcomed him as a deliverer. He protected the city from pillage, but comforted his troops by dividing among them some of the fifty thousand talents ($300,000,000) that he found in Darius’ vaults. To the people of Plataea he sent a substantial sum because they had so bravely resisted the Persians in 480; and to the Greek cities of Asia he appears to have remitted the “donations” that he had elicited from them at the outset of his campaign.26 And he announced proudly to the Greeks of the world that they were now completely free from Persian rule.
Hardly stopping to rest at Susa, he marched over mountains in the depth of winter to seize Persepolis; and so rapidly did he move that he was in Darius’ palace before the Persians could conceal the royal treasury. Here again his good judgment left him, and he burned the magnificent city to the ground. His soldiers looted the houses, ravaged the women, and killed the men. Perhaps they had been infuriated by seeing, on their approach to the town, eight hundred Greeks who, for various reasons, had suffered mutilation at the hands of Persians by the cutting off of legs, arms, or ears, or the gouging out of the eyes. Alexander, moved to tears by the sight, gave them lands, and assigned dependents to work for them.
Still insatiate, he attempted now what Cyrus the Great had failed to accomplish—the subjugation of the tribes that hovered on the eastern borders of Persia. Perhaps in his simple geography he hoped to find, beyond that mystic East, the ocean that would serve as a natural frontier for his conquered realm. Entering Sogdiana, he came upon a village inhabited by the descendants of those Branchidae who, in 480, had surrendered to Xerxes the treasures of their temple near Miletus. Fevered with the thought that he was revenging the pillaged god, he ordered all the inhabitants slain, including the women and children—visiting the sins of the fathers upon the fifth generation. His campaign in Sogdiana, Ariana, and Bactriana was bloody and bootless; he achieved some victories, found some gold, and left enemies everywhere behind him. Near Bokhara his men captured Bessus, who had slain Darius. Alexander, suddenly making himself the avenger of the Great King, had Bessus whipped almost to death, had his nose and ears cut off, and then sent him to Ecbatana, where he was executed by having his arms tied to one, and his legs to the other, of two trees that had been drawn together by ropes, so that when the ropes were cut the trees pulled the body to pieces.27 At every new remove from Greece Alexander was becoming less and less a Greek, more and more a barbarian king.
The year 327 found him passing over the Himalayas into India. Vanity conspired with curiosity to lead him into such distant territory; his generals advised against it, his army obeyed him unwillingly. Crossing the Indus, he defeated King Porus, and announced that he would continue to the Ganges. But his soldiers refused to go farther. He pled with them, and for three days, like a scion of Achilles, pouted in his tent; but they had had enough. Sadly he turned back, loath to face west again, and forced his way through hostile tribes with such personal bravery that his soldiers wept at their inability to realize all his dreams. He was the first to scale the walls of the Mallians; after he and two others had leaped into the city the ladders broke, and they found themselves alone amidst the enemy. Alexander fought till he sank exhausted by his wounds. Meanwhile his troops had made their way into the town, and soldier after soldier sacrificed his life to protect the fallen King. When the battle was over Alexander was carried to his tent, and his veterans kissed his garments as he passed. After three months of convalescence he renewed his march along the Indus, and at last reached the Indian Ocean. There he sent on part of his forces by water under Nearchus, who skillfully accomplished the long voyage in unfamiliar seas. Alexander himself led the rest of his army northwest along the coast of India and through the desert of Gedrosia (Baluchistan), where the sufferings of his men rivaled those of Napoleon’s army on the return from Moscow. Heat killed thousands, thirst killed more. A little water was found, and was brought to Alexander, but he deliberately poured it out upon the ground.28 When the remnants of his force reached Susa some ten thousand had died, and Alexander was half insane.
He had now spent nine years in Asia, and he had changed the continent by his victories less than it had transformed him by its ways. He had been told by Aristotle to treat Greeks as freemen, “barbarians” as slaves. But he had been surprised to find among the Persian aristocrats a degree of refinement and good manners not often seen in the turbulent democracies of Greece; he admired the manner in which the Great Kings had organized their empire, and wondered how his rough Macedonians could replace such governors. He concluded that he could give some permanence to his conquests only by reconciling the Persian nobles to his leadership, and using them in administrative posts. More and more charmed by his new subjects, he abandoned the idea of ruling over them as a Macedonian, and conceived himself as a Greco-Persian emperor governing a realm in which Persians and Greeks would be on an equal footing, and would peaceably mingle their culture and their blood. The long quarrel of Europe and Asia would end in a wedding feast.
Already thousands of his soldiers had married native women, or were living with them; should he not do likewise, marry the daughter of Darius, and reconcile the nations by begetting a king who would unite both dynasties in his veins? He had already married Roxana, a Bactrian princess; but this was a negligible impediment. He broached the plan to his officers, and suggested that they, too, should take Persian wives. They smiled at his hopes of uniting the two nations, but they had been a long time away from home, and the Persian ladies were beautiful. So in one great nuptial at Susa (324) Alexander married Statira, daughter of Darius III, and Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes III, attaching himself in this way to both branches of Persian royalty, while eighty of his officers took Persian brides. Thousands of similar marriages were soon afterward celebrated among the soldiers. Alexander gave each officer a substantial dowry, and paid the debts of the marrying soldiers—which amounted (if we may believe Arrian) to twenty thousand talents ($120,000,000).29 To further this union of peoples he opened lands in Mesopotamia and Persia to Greek colonists, thereby reducing the pressure of population in some of the Greek states, and mitigating the class war; now began those Hellenized Asiatic cities which were to be a vital part of the Seleucid Empire. At the same time he drafted thirty thousand Persian youths, had them educated on Greek lines, and taught them the Greek manual of war.
Possibly his wives had something to do with his rapid adoption of Oriental ways; possibly it was a failure of modesty, or a part of his plan. “In Persia,” says Plutarch, “he first put on the barbaric” (i.e., foreign) “dress, perhaps with the view of making the work of civilizing the Persians easier, as nothing gains more upon men than a conformity to their customs. . . . However, he followed not the Median fashion . . . but taking a middle way between the Persian mode and the Macedonian, so contrived his habit that it was not so flaunting as the one, and yet more pompous and magnificent than the other.”30 His soldiers saw in this change the conquest of Alexander by the Orient; they felt that they had lost him, and they mournfully missed the signs of solicitude and affection which he had once showered upon them. The Persians made every obeisance to him, and flattered him to his heart’s content; the Macedonians, themselves softened by Oriental luxury, grumbled at the tasks that he laid upon them, forgot his beneficence, murmured of desertion, and even plotted against his life. He began to prefer the society of the Persian grandees.
His culminating apostasy, or diplomacy, was his announcement of his own divinity. In 324 he sent word to all the Greek states except Macedonia (where the insult to Philip might have aroused resentment) that he wished hereafter to be publicly recognized as the son of Zeus-Ammon. Most of the states complied, feeling it to be merely a form; even the obstinate Spartans agreed, saying, “Let Alexander be a god if he wants to.” It was not so much for a man to be a god in the Greek sense of the term; the chasm between humanity and deity was not as wide then as it was to become in modern theology; several Greeks had overleaped it, like Hippodameia, Oedipus, Achilles, Iphigenia, and Helen. The Egyptians had always thought of their Pharaohs as gods; if Alexander had neglected to rank himself similarly the Egyptians might have been disturbed by so bold a violation of precedent. The priests at Siwa, Didyma, and Babylon, who were believed to have special sources of information in this field, had all assured him of his divine origin. That (as Grote thought31) Alexander actually believed himself to be a god in a more than metaphorical sense is quite unlikely. It is true that after his self-deification he became increasingly irritable and arrogant; that he sat on a golden throne, wore sacred vestments, and sometimes adorned his head with the horns of Ammon.32 But when he was not playing his divinity for world stakes he smiled at his own honors. Being injured by an arrow, he remarked to some friends, “This, you see, is blood, and not such ichor as flows from the wounds of the Immortals.”33 That he had not taken too seriously his mother’s tale of the thunderbolt appears from his flaming anger at Attalus’ imputations on his birth, and his remark about the need of sleep as distinguishing man from the gods. Even Olympias laughed when she heard that Alexander had made her legend official. “When,” she asked, “will Alexander stop slandering me to Hera?”34 Despite his godhead Alexander continued to offer sacrifice to the gods—an unheard-of thing for a divinity. Plutarch and Arrian, able to judge the matter as Greeks, took it for granted that Alexander deified himself as a means to easier rule over a superstitious and heterogeneous population.35 Doubtless he felt that the task of unifying two hostile worlds would be facilitated by the reverence which the common people would give him if his claims to divinity were accepted by the upper classes. Perhaps, indeed, he thought to overcome the disruptive diversity of faiths in his empire by providing, in his own person, the beginning of a sacred myth and a common unifying faith.II
The Macedonian officers could not fathom Alexander’s policy. The Greek spirit had touched them to the point of mental emancipation, but not to the point of philosophical toleration; they found it humiliating to prostrate themselves, as he now demanded, in approaching the King. One of his bravest officers, Philotas, son of his ablest and most favored general, Parmenio, entered into a conspiracy to kill the new god. Alexander got wind of it, had Philotas arrested, and wrung from him by torture a confession implicating his own father. Philotas was forced to repeat the confession before the soldiers, who, in accord with their custom in such cases, at once stoned him to death; Parmenio was executed by messenger as probably guilty, and in any case a presumptive enemy. From that moment to the end, the relations between Alexander and his army became increasingly strained—the troops ever more discontent, the King ever more suspicious, severe, and lonely.
His solitary exaltation and the growing multitude of his cares inclined him to seek forgetfulness in heavy draughts of wine. At a banquet in Samarkand Cleitus, who had saved his life at the Granicus, drank himself into such candor as to tell Alexander that his victories had been won by his soldiers rather than by him, and that Philip’s achievement had been much greater. Alexander, equally drunk, rose to strike him, but Ptolemy Lagus (soon to be ruler of Egypt) hurried Cleitus away. Cleitus, however, had more to say; he escaped from Ptolemy, and went back to finish his tirade. Alexander hurled a lance at him and killed him. Overcome with remorse, the King secluded himself for three days, refused to eat, fell into hysteria, and tried to end his own life. Soon afterward Hermolaus, a page whom Alexander had unjustly punished, formed another conspiracy against him. The boy was apprehended, and under torture made a confession incriminating Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes. The latter, who was accompanying the expedition as official historian, had already offended the King by refusing to prostrate himself before him, openly criticizing him for his Oriental ways, and boasting that Alexander would be known to posterity only through Callisthenes the historian. Alexander had him put in prison, where, seven months later, he died.III This incident put an end to the friendship between Alexander and Aristotle, who had for years been risking his life to defend Alexander’s cause in Athens.
In the end the discontent in the army verged on open mutiny. When the King announced that he would send back to Macedon the oldest of the soldiers, each richly paid for his services,IV he was shocked to hear many muttering that they wished he would dismiss them all, since, being a god, he had no need of men to realize his purposes. He ordered the leaders of the sedition executed, and then addressed to his troops an affecting (but probably apocryphal) speech39 in which he reminded them of all that they had done for him, and he for them, and asked which of them could show more scars than he, whose body bore the marks of every weapon used in war. Finally he gave them all permission to go home: “Go back and report that you deserted your king and left him to the protection of conquered foreigners.” Then he retired to his rooms, and refused to see anyone. His soldiers, stricken with remorse, came and lay down before the palace, saying that they would not leave till he had forgiven them and reaccepted them into his army. When at last he appeared they broke into tears and insisted on kissing him; and after being reconciled with him they went back to their camp shouting a song of thanksgiving.
Deceived by this show of affection, Alexander dreamed now of further campaigns and victories; he planned the subjugation of hidden Arabia, sent a mission to explore the Caspian regions, and thought of conquering Europe to the Pillars of Hercules. But his strong frame had been weakened by exposure and drink, and his spirit by the conspiracies of his officers and the mutinies of his men. While the army was in Ecbatana his dearest companion, Hephaestion, fell sick and died. Alexander had loved him so much that when Darius’ queen, entering the conqueror’s tent, bowed first to Hephaestion, thinking him Alexander, the young King said, graciously, “Hephaestion is also Alexander”40—as if to say that he and Hephaestion were one. The two often shared one tent, and drank from one cup; in battle they fought side by side. Now the King, feeling that half of him had been torn away, broke down in uncontrolled grief. He lay for hours upon the corpse, weeping; he cut off his hair in mourning, and for days refused to take food. He sentenced to death the physician who had left the sick youth’s side to attend the public games. He ordered a gigantic funeral pile to be erected in Hephaestion’s memory, at a cost, we are told, of ten thousand talents ($60,000,000), and sent to inquire of the oracle of Ammon whether it was permitted to worship Hephaestion as a god. In his next campaign a whole tribe was slain, at his orders, as a sacrifice to Hephaestion’s ghost. The thought that Achilles had not long survived Patroclus haunted him like a sentence of death.
Back in Babylon, he abandoned himself more and more to drink. One night, reveling with his officers, he proposed a drinking match. Promachus quaffed twelve quarts of wine, and won the prize, a talent; three days later he died. Shortly afterward, at another banquet, Alexander drained a goblet containing six quarts of wine. On the next night he drank heavily again; and cold weather suddenly setting in, he caught a fever, and took to his bed. The fever raged for ten days, during which Alexander continued to give orders to his army and his fleet. On the eleventh day he died, being in the thirty-third year of his age (323). When his generals asked him to whom he left his empire he answered, “To the strongest.”41
Like most great men he had been unable to find a successor worthy of him, and his work fell unfinished from his hands. Even so his achievement was not only immense, but far more permanent than has usually been supposed. Acting as the agent of historical necessity, he put an end to the era of city-states, and, by sacrificing a substantial measure of local freedom, created a larger system of stability and order than Europe had yet known. His conception of government as absolutism using religion to impose peace upon diverse nations dominated Europe until the rise of nationalism and democracy in modern times. He broke down the barriers between Greek and “barbarian,” and prepared for the cosmopolitanism of the Hellenistic age; he opened Hither Asia to Greek colonization, and established Greek settlements as far east as Bactria; he united the eastern Mediterranean world into one great web of commerce, liberating and stimulating trade. He brought Greek literature, philosophy, and art to Asia, and died before he could realize that he had also made a pathway for the religious victory of the East over the West. His adoption of Oriental dress and ways was the beginning of Asia’s revenge.
It was just as well that he died at his zenith; added years would almost surely have brought him disillusionment. Perhaps if he had lived he might have been deepened by defeat and suffering, and might have learned—as he was beginning—to love statesmanship more than war. But he had undertaken too much; the strain of holding his swollen realm together, and watching all its parts, was probably disordering his brilliant mind. Energy is only half of genius; the other half is harness; and Alexander was all energy. We miss in him—though we have no right to expect—the calm maturity of Caesar, or the subtle wisdom of Augustus. We admire him as we admire Napoleon, because he stood alone against half the world, and because he encourages us with the thought of the incredible power that lies potential in the individual soul. And we feel a natural sympathy for him, despite his superstitions and his cruelties, because we know that he was at least a generous and affectionate youth, as well as incomparably able and brave; that he fought against a maddening heritage of barbarism in his blood; and that through all battles and all bloodshed he kept before his eyes the dream of bringing the light of Athens to a larger world.
When the news of his death reached Greece, revolts against the Macedonian authority broke out everywhere. Theban exiles in Athens organized a force of patriots, and besieged the Macedonian garrison in the Cadmeia. In Athens itself, where many had prayed for an end to Alexander, the antiMacedonian party, feeling that its prayers had been heard, crowned themselves with garlands and feasted over the death of him whom they had courted as a god—singing, says Plutarch, “triumphant songs of victory, as if by their own valor they had vanquished him.”42
For a moment Demosthenes was in his glory. He had not fared well during Alexander’s campaigns: he had been convicted of accepting a heavy bribe from Harpalus, and had been flung into jail; he had been allowed to escape, and had lived nine months of fretting exile in Troezen. Now he was recalled, and was sent as envoy to the Peloponnesus to raise allies for Athens in a war of liberation. A united force marched north, met Antipater at Crannon, and was destroyed. The old soldier, who lacked Alexander’s sensitivity to Athenian culture, laid the most arduous terms upon the city, requiring it to pay the cost of the war, to receive a Macedonian garrison, to abandon its democratic constitution and courts, to disfranchise and deport to colonial settlements all citizens (12,000 out of 21,000) possessing less than two thousand drachmas’ worth of property, and to surrender Demosthenes, Hypereides, and two other anti-Macedonian orators. Demosthenes fled to Calauria and took refuge in a temple sanctuary. Surrounded by Macedonian pursuers, he drank a phial of poison, and died before he could drag himself out of the sacred court.
The same tragic year saw the end of Aristotle. He had long been unpopular in Athens: the Academy and the school of Isocrates disliked him as a critic and a rival, while the patriots looked upon him as a leader of the pro-Macedonian party. Advantage was taken of Alexander’s death to bring an accusation of impiety against Aristotle; heretical passages from his books were brought in as evidence; he was charged with having offered divine honors to the dictator Hermeias, who, being a slave, could not have been a god. Aristotle quietly left the city, saying that he would not give Athens a chance to sin a second time against philosophy.43 He withdrew to the home of his mother’s family in Chalcis, leaving the Lyceum in the care of Theophrastus. The Athenians passed sentence of death upon him, but had neither opportunity nor need to execute it. For either through a stomach illness aggravated by his flight, or, as some say,44 by taking poison, Aristotle died a few months after leaving Athens, in the sixty-third year of his age. His will was a model of kindly consideration for his second wife, his family, and his slaves.
The death of Greek democracy was both a violent and a natural death, in which the fatal agents were the organic disorders of the system; the sword of Macedon merely added the final blow. The city-state had proved incapable of solving the problems of government: it had failed to preserve order within, and defense without; despite the appeals of Gorgias, Isocrates, and Plato for some Dorian discipline to tame Ionian freedom, it had discovered no way of reconciling local autonomy with national stability and power; and its love of liberty had seldom interfered with its passion for empire. The class war had become bitter beyond control, and had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting. The Assembly, a noble body in its better days, had degenerated into a mob hating all superiority, rejecting all restraint, ruthless before weakness but cringing before power, voting itself every favor, and taxing property to the point of crushing initiative, industry, and thrift. Philip, Alexander, and Antipater did not destroy Greek freedom; it had destroyed itself; and the order that they forged preserved for centuries longer, and disseminated through Egypt and the East, a civilization that might otherwise have died of its own tyrannous anarchy.
And yet, had oligarchy or monarchy done any better? The Thirty had committed more atrocities against life and property in the few months of their power than the democracy in the preceding hundred years.45 And while democracy was producing chaos in Athens, monarchy was producing chaos in Macedonia—a dozen wars of succession, a hundred assassinations, and a thousand interferences with freedom—with no redeeming glory of literature, science, philosophy, or art. The weakness and smallness of the state in Greece had been a boon to the individual, if not in body, certainly in soul; that freedom, costly though it was, had generated the achievements of the Greek mind. Individualism in the end destroys the group, but in the interim it stimulates personality, mental exploration, and artistic creation. Greek democracy was corrupt and incompetent, and had to die. But when it was dead men realized how beautiful its heyday had been; and all later generations of antiquity looked back to the centuries of Pericles and Plato as the zenith of Greece, and of all history.
I Dinocrates had pleased Alexander by proposing to carve Mt. Athos—six thousand feet high—into a figure of Alexander standing waist deep in the sea, holding a city in one hand and a harbor in the other.24 The project was never carried out.
II Lucian gives the ancient view in one of his Dialogues of the Dead: “Philip. You cannot deny that you are my son, Alexander; if you had been Ammon’s son you would not have died. Alex. I knew all the time that you were my father. I only accepted the statement of the oracle because I thought it was good policy. . . . When the barbarians thought they had a god to deal with, they gave up the struggle; which made their conquest an easy matter.”36
III There are conflicting stories about his guilt and his death.37 He left three main works: Hellenic a, a history of Greece from 387 to 337; a History of the Sacred War, and a History of Alexander.
IV Each of them, Arrian assures us, received a talent in addition to his pay—which continued till he reached his home.38