EIGHT ALEXANDER OF MACEDON AND THE HELLENISTIC INTERLUDE

The world of the ancient Greeks was surrounded by non-Greek peoples who nevertheless over time came to be highly influenced by Greek civilization. Important among such peoples were the Macedonians, who lived on the northern fringes of the Greek world. They looked southwards to Greece and in time absorbed a great deal of what the great classical civilization had to offer. By the fourth century BC the sons of the Macedonian aristocracy, and especially of the royal house, were sent to Athens or other Greek cities to complete their education. Athenian philosophers would also be hired to be tutors in either Macedonia or in Greece itself.

The young king Alexander, who ascended the Macedonian throne in 336 BC following the assassination of his father Philip II, was steeped in all aspects of Greek culture. He considered Macedonia to be very much part of the Hellenic world and as such his principal objective as king was to maintain the security and well-being of this world. To the young Macedonian monarch this could be accomplished only by the fulfilment of two principal objectives: the unification of the Hellenic cities into a single powerful state, and the removal, forever, of the Persian danger. Although the age of warfare between the Greeks and the Persians had by that time come to an end, at least for the time being, the great eastern empire still appeared to be a menacing and dangerous neighbour on the other side of the Aegean. It was too close for comfort and, despite considerable contraction over the previous century, it still held a dominating position over most of – if no longer almost all – the ancient world. The Achaemenids were certainly weaker than they had been in the past and this made the possibility of confronting them appear more realistic.

Almost as soon as he became king, Alexander determined to bring the situation to a head and to attack the Persians. The most he could probably have expected was to weaken their empire to such an extent that it would no longer be able to retain the dominant position it had enjoyed during the previous two centuries. In 334 BC Alexander crossed the Hellespont at the head of a large army. He was confronted at Granicus in northern Anatolia by an equally powerful Persian army commanded by the Shahanshah Darius III himself. In this battle the Macedonians were triumphant. Their heavily armed cavalry had little problem dispersing the Persian light horse and there were heavy Persian losses, including many of their leaders. This defeat shook the Persians to the core and it revealed a weakness at the heart of the empire that may have been suspected but had not been fully accepted. In military terms, it opened up the whole of the west of Anatolia to the Macedonians.

The next confrontation with Darius was in 333 BC at Issus, close to the Gulf of Alexandretta on the southern edge of Anatolia. According to Greek observers of the battle a mere 35,000 Macedonians faced ‘a vast horde’ of Asiatics. While the Greek historians, especially Herodotus, almost always exaggerated the numbers of their opponents, and contrasted this with the relatively small numbers of Greeks, Alexander’s army would certainly have been considerably smaller than at Granicus, as large numbers had been left to garrison the territory already occupied. Nevertheless, Alexander was once more victorious in this second battle, and the Persians were forced to retreat after again sustaining heavy losses.

It was after this battle that Alexander moved southwards around the shores of the Mediterranean and entered Egypt. This was no longer within the Persian Empire but the invasion by Alexander substantially increased the size of the Greek presence in the Mediterranean. On the northern coast of Egypt, on the edge of the Nile Delta, he founded the first of what were to be many new cities. This was Alexandria, and it was to prove to be one of his greatest legacies. From then on he came to see the new cities he founded as beacons of Hellenic civilization built in the midst of the barbarous Asiatic world.

In 331 BC Alexander moved back eastwards into northern Mesopotamia, where the third and final great battle with the Persians took place. This was on the plain of Gaugamela near the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh. The Persian army was without doubt far larger than that of the Macedonians, but the latter were more disciplined and organized, while the former included a considerable number of subject peoples, who proved difficult to control.1 Once more Alexander was victorious and after that battle the Persian army disintegrated. The Greek phalanx, perfected by the Macedonians, played a major part in ensuring the defence of the Macedonian forces against the huge numbers mustered by the Persians.² Darius managed to escape eastwards but by this time he had few followers left; the last Achaemenid king was finally assassinated by Bessus, the satrap of Bactria. A little more than two centuries after Cyrus’s great victory over the Medes at Pasargadae had inaugurated the rise of the Achaemenids, the empire came to an ignominious end in the bleak mountains of the east.

It has been said that the empire of the Medes did not actually come to an end but merely acquired new management. In some ways the same could be said of the Macedonian conquest. Following the death of Darius, Alexander was proclaimed Shahanshah. Clearly, the conqueror intended that the empire that had dominated the Middle East for so long should continue to exist, but now it would be the Macedonians, a people from the edge of Europe, who would be in charge. He then moved to complete his triumph by advancing on Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the empire. After occupying the city, and when the great victory celebrations were over, he ordered it to be destroyed. It is not known why Alexander engaged in this act of wanton destruction. Some have suggested that he did it in an act of drunken madness; others propose that it was revenge for the Persian destruction during the invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxes. Whatever the reason, it signified very clearly the end of the Achaemenid Empire and the beginning of Alexander’s brief attempt to resurrect it as a Hellenistic one.

The Macedonians, and through them the Greeks, now dominated the ancient world. Yet Alexander’s appetite for conquest was not satisfied. He still wanted to probe to the edges of that world and to discover what was there and what dangers to his new empire might still be lurking. His actions resembled those of Cyrus, and the ultimate result had many similarities with them. Leaving garrisons wherever he went, he took his army northwards into Central Asia. He occupied a large part of the basin of the Oxus and Jaxartes, that Central Asia in Mesopotamia into which the Achaemenids had long before penetrated a little too far, and where Cyrus the Great had met his end. From there he took his army southwards through the mountains of Bactria using the Khyber Pass to invade India. In this way he added most of the basin of the Indus to his conquests. From there he turned back westwards and returned by sea through the Persian Gulf to Mesopotamia. He eventually arrived in Babylon, where he had decided the capital of his new empire was to be built.

The empire that Alexander planned was to be modelled on that of the Persians. Although a sworn enemy of the Persians, the Greeks showed the greatest respect for their foe and this respect continued even after the calamitous Persian defeat. Herodotus summarized the education of a Persian boy: ‘They train them from the age of five to the age of twenty to do three things, and three things only: to ride and to shoot and to speak the truth.’3 Arnold Toynbee considered that the most impressive of all Greek testimonies to Persian virtues was Alexander himself. As a demonstration of his intentions, Alexander married Roxane, the daughter of Oxyartes, a Sogdian chieftain, and encouraged his generals to marry into the conquered people.⁴ Despite encountering resistance from the Macedonians, he also began the enlistment of Persian soldiers into his army. In some ways Alexander can be regarded as being less the founder of a new empire than as the last of the Achaemenids. His aim was to bring about a kind of fusion of Greeks and Persians into a new and unified world order. His ideal was not so much to destroy the Persian Empire as to resurrect it as a Hellenistic one. The two ‘greats’ – Cyrus and Alexander – certainly had much in common. However, while Cyrus created the first world empire, Alexander’s ideal was not to become a reality. The king died in Babylon in 323 BC at the young age of 33.5 The creation of the new Hellenistic empire was still on the drawing board and Alexander’s great plans were to remain unfulfilled.

There is an interesting, if understandable, ambiguity in later sources on Alexander, or Iskander, as he is known in eastern sources. Western accounts generally portray him in heroic terms as a figure who triumphantly brought Hellenistic culture to the East. Indeed, in many sources he is transformed from a historic figure into a semi-mythical or legendary hero of romance, becoming an icon of heroic kingship and courtly idealism similar to King Arthur in the European tradition.

Persian sources are more ambiguous. Alexander is described in them as a great statesman and heroic leader, but he is also remembered as the destroyer of Persian cities such as Susa and, particularly, Persepolis. Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh describes how Alexander smashed the taqdis, the mythical throne of the Iranian kings, but nonetheless Ferdowsi attempts to give him some legitimacy as heir to the Persian throne by presenting him as the half-brother of Darius, the last Achaemenid king. Later, when writing of the Sasanid period, he reverts to describing Alexander as evil and destructive and an enemy of the Persian people.

The Zoroastrian tradition has no such ambiguity, presenting Alexander definitively as the killer of many Magi and as having extinguished the sacred flame and destroyed many fire temples. In later Zoroastrian writings, Alexander shares with Angra Mainyu the title of Guzastag – the Accursed.

Following their king’s death, the Macedonians were left triumphant but leaderless. They were the rulers of a vast empire, but what they fundamentally lacked was an emperor able to take it forward. Most significantly, they failed to replicate the unity that had been created by the Persian Empire. It is said that when those around his deathbed asked Alexander who he wished to nominate as his successor, he replied ‘the best’.⁶ Who ‘the best’ may have been remains a mystery and, with no accepted successor, those who had been closest to Alexander – his generals – began to dispute the succession among themselves. These were the Diadochi – the Successors – and eventually it was resolved that the only solution was for the empire to be divided among them.

It was Seleucus who became the ruler of that part of the empire centring on Mesopotamia and the historic Persian lands. The heart of his empire was Mesopotamia and in it he built his capital Seleucia, just to the north of Babylon. It thus largely accorded with the geopolitical structure of the empire as envisaged by Alexander, who would have made Babylon his capital, but there was little sign of the fusion of Greeks and Persians he had envisaged as being fundamental to his new world order. The great project of Hellenization remained and the Seleucid Empire was central to this Hellenistic period in Persian history. Alexander had intended this empire to be based on the establishment of Hellenic cities throughout the Persian Empire, as centres for the spread of Greek civilization, and during his short reign he began this process with considerable vigour. The city-state, the polis, was the basic unit of government in Greece itself and this was a model Alexander intended to extend throughout his empire. It was to have been an empire of city-states, thus achieving on a massive scale what the Macedonians had originally desired to bring about in the Aegean world itself. The first and most famous of these city-states founded by Alexander had been Alexandria in Egypt, and this was soon followed by the establishment of more Alexandrias as far north as Central Asia and as far east as India. They were seen as being the bedrock of the Hellenization of the world and as firm outposts of his new city-state empire.

While the legacy of Alexander was split up among the Diadochi, what did come into existence was a massive free-trade area covering the whole of the Hellenistic world and extending from the Mediterranean to the Indus. Greek became the lingua franca and Greek merchants and administrators were placed in positions of power. Despite the political divisions, the Hellenization of the world was well under way.

The intention of the new Greek world order was that empire and polis, for so long set apart as confrontational opposites, would be fused into one. This remained an ideal, and the only place in which it was partly realized was the kingdom of Seleucus. The two principal elements of an alternative geopolitical world structure remained for the most part unfulfilled fundamentals.7 It was Seleucia that came nearest to the fulfilment of the Hellenistic ideal, but it was not to remain so for long. In the end it would be imperialism that triumphed, and when it did so the polis would become not its partner but its victim.⁸ Within a few centuries there would be many forgotten Alexandrias dotted throughout the lands of the old Persian Empire.⁹

The Seleucid dynasty retained its hold for little more than a century. Around 150 BC another group of nomadic people moved southwards from Central Asia. These were the Parthians, and they gradually displaced the Seleucids. They took over much of the east of what had been the Persian Empire and soon came into contact with Rome, the power that was moving into a dominant position in the Mediterranean and which was extending its sphere of influence eastwards. In 53 BC the Romans were roundly defeated by the warlike Parthians at Carrhae in Mesopotamia, and that called a halt for some time to their eastern ambitions.

In the second century AD, at the height of its power, Rome again moved eastwards into Mesopotamia, thus once more coming into conflict with the Parthians. By that time the latter had become a diminished force and presented far less of a threat than they had before. The Romans had little difficulty in occupying the region and added it to what by that time had become an enormous empire. However, Rome was soon to be confronted with a far more formidable and permanent opponent in the East, and this was brought about by the rise of a new Persian Empire, which threw off the Parthians. This new empire then sought to model itself on the Achaemenids and to emulate their achievements. After their fall centuries earlier, the Achaemenids had left a strong political and cultural legacy in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. This was now to be used by their successors to resurrect the ancient empire and to give it a role in the fast-changing Middle Eastern world.