The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Alexander's bold, impulsive nature owed much to his extreme youth. It was enhanced, however, by two singular supports. His father Philip had given him a good Greek education, shared with the young sons of Macedonian nobles, Philip's newly formed corps of Royal Pages, who became Alexander's supporting officers. The pupil of Aristotle, Alexander read Greek texts, staged Greek dramas to enter­tain his army across Asia and shared his men's fascination with the new world around them which seemed at times to recall the old myths of the Greeks. But he also modelled himself on the supreme hero of Homer's epics, Achilles. He ran naked to the supposed site of Achilles' tomb at Troy, while his male lover, Hephaestion, crowned the tomb of Achilles's beloved Patroclus. He placed his copy of Homer's Iliad, annotated by Aristotle, in the most precious casket captured from the Persian king. When the Athenians sent him an ambassador called Achilles, he granted them their request. In Alexander, Homer found his most avid over-interpreter.

  In Macedonian society, this personal rivalry with a Homeric hero was not entirely misplaced. The king ruled by prowess among his Companions and, as Philip had shown, he had to bestow gifts and strive for personal esteem; the heroic world of Homer's epics was not so remote from Macedonian values. Like a very special hero, Alex­ander also came to believe that he was the begotten child of a god. Again, there were Greek precedents, in the Spartan royal family, in the ruling family at Syracuse and even, admirers said, in Plato the philosopher, the 'begotten son of Apollo'.' Alexander publicized this personal claim after his visit to an oracle in the Siwah oasis on the borders of Libya and Egypt. Its god, Ammon, had often been consulted by Greeks before him and was understood to be Zeus; its priest greeted Alexander, Egypt's new ruler, as 'son of Zeus'. It was said that his mother Olympias had already hinted that Alexander's father was more than human, a view which her eventual quarrels with Philip may have reinforced in her. Certainly, Alexander prized his divine sonship. He also honoured the god when he reached, as second-best, the 'Outer' Indian Ocean: his sacrifices here were announced as being 'in accordance with Ammon's oracular words'.2 It seems, then, that at Siwah in 332/1, he had already asked the god which gods to honour when he reached the Ocean, the edge of the world. When he asked the question, aged twenty-four, he had not yet defeated the Persians' grand army. The question says much for his priorities and for the self-confidence which helped to realize them.

  The role-model of a hero and the parentage of a god supported Alexander's innate energy and boundless ambition. No doubt his edgy relationship with his own father, Philip, also accentuated his own endless wish to excel. The result was a conquest which changed the horizons of the Greek world. As a result, the army and military style of the Persian kings were replaced by Macedonian training and troops, as first mapped out by Philip. The festivals and ideals of Persian kingship were replaced by the Macedonians' personal royal style. At least sixteen new cities were founded by Alexander at promising points across Asia, while tradition credited him, questionably, with many more. These cities were not just military outposts, a type of settlement which he also founded. They were meant to be famous, to their founder's glory, and to that end they were placed, where possible, near accessible routes for trade and exchange. One city commemorated Alexander's noble horse, Bucephalas, who carried him for more than seventeen years; typically, another commemotated his dog. The cities, with Greek settlers, were centres of Greek language and Greek enter­tainments, including athletic games and the inevitable theatre. But local non-Greeks were also settled in some of them. Once, in Sogdia, rebel prisoners were given to the residents of a new Alexandria as slaves, but elsewhere local non-Greeks were included as volunteers. Alexander's close friend, his admiral Nearchus, explained that Alex­ander founded townships in Iran so that the nomads should become 'cultivators of the fields and as they would have something for which they would be anxious, they would not do one another harm'.3 The plan may have failed, but it is certainly not anachronistic to ascribe a 'civilizing' vision to some of Alexander's foundations. Previous Macedonian kings had had similar aims with their cultural patronage and new towns back in rough uncivilized Macedon itself.

  Alexander had also inherited from Philip the aim of freeing the Greeks of Asia. Within a year, he had largely done so, and was encouraging democracies as the alternative to Persian-backed oligar­chies. Tribute from the Greek cities was abolished, a unique favour in these cities' history of relations with greater powers. Freedom, in consequence, became equated with democracy in the Greek city-states. Elsewhere, in non-Greek Asia, in Babylon or Egypt or Cyprus or Sidon, Alexander could capitalize on recent grievances against Persian rule and offer 'freedom', in the sense of self-government ('autonomy') as an alternative. But he also inherited hete the Persian king's system of taxation and claims to ultimate control. Outside the territories of Greek cities, the 'land', as one of his early rulings proclaimed, 'I recognize as mine'.4 His governors oversaw it, while troops were kept strictly in the hands of Greek and Macedonian governors. Tribute continued to be paid as before, but in return, his troops and governors kept the peace (or so he hoped) and in India stopped the existing local wars.

  In Asia, therefore, there was a real increase of freedom for most of the Greek cities, but for other people there was peace after slaughter and a subtle change of master: in Arabia or in India, no less than in Greek Asia, Alexander did persuade himself, at least, that he was granting 'autonomy', even to non-Greeks. In Greece, meanwhile, Philip's well-armoured peace between the Greek allies remained in force. Those Greeks who sought justice under its terms could turn, as always, to local arbitrators or to the courts of their home city-states: in theory there was no limit to the penalties, except exile, which these local courts could impose. To settle disputes between Greek cities, the League in Greece might also appoint arbitrators. 'Justice', therefore, had a new framework in Greece, although the freedom of local 'leag­ues' and city-states was restricted by it. In Asia, meanwhile, Greek cities continued to operate their own courts, but there was always the possibility of sending an embassy to the king himself for a higher ruling. Alexander had not put the eastern Greek cities into his father's Hellenic Alliance. He personally had freed them, and after consti­tutional upheavals in such cities he himself might prescribe a new political settlement by letter. In summer 3 34, he implied to the restored democracy on the island of Chios that he personally would read through their proposed new law-code so as to check that nothing in it was contrary to their democratic future. In these cities, the question of exiles and their peaceful restoration remained the object of his personal intervention; he even specified, by letter, that their cases should be judged by jurors using a 'secret ballot'. Inevitably, within the local framework of a 'free' city's laws, Alexander's own edicts by letter did acquire an irresistible power.

  Outside the Greek cities, aggrieved parties throughout Asia could appeal to a local governor or to one of Alexander's underlings in the hope of an enforceable ruling. They might even gain access to the king himself and aspire to a judgement in their favour (they would need an interpreter to present the case). In Asia, therefore, justice remained at the dispensation of a king's local officials, as before. There were no judicial reforms or new constitutions for his non-Greek subjects, but here and there (where a tradition of local laws existed) Alexander did publicize a return to pre-Persian rulings.

  His conquests also multiplied the scope for gain and luxury beyond any Greek's wildest dreams. Whereas Philip's income had hardly sufficed to mount an invasion of Asia, Alexander's allowed him the most lavish displays in Greek history. Ten thousand talents, about ten times the yearly income of Pericles' Athens, were expended on a single celebration, a royal wedding or banquet. His Companions dined on couches with silver feet; individual officers were said to own fine hunting-nets a mile or more in length; even the staid elderly officer, Polyperchon, one of Philip's men, was said to dance in a saffron cloak and slippers.5 Drink had always flowed freely at the Macedonian court, and it came to flow very freely i
n Alexander's later years. There were nights when Alexander sat up drinking until dawn. At the funeral celebrations of an Indian wise man at his court, the winner in a drinking contest drained several gallons, while the runners-up in­cluded several Indians, who died in the aftermath. When Alexander married two more brides from the Persian royal houses near the end of his life, the occasion was celebrated with lavish gifts and his audience-tent was enlarged into the most magnificent marquee. Even the big curtain-poles were made of gold.

  At his death, Alexander was planning furthet conquests in Arabia (whose scale he perhaps underestimated) and then possibly a march into the West against Carthage and north Africa. His aims, of course, are disputed, but in my view he had decided early on to march to the eastern edge of the world; when he was denied it, he went down to what he thought was a southern edge (the Indian Ocean); at his death he was exploring a possible northern edge (the Caspian Sea) and surely, therefore, thinking of conquering to the western edge (the Atlantic Ocean). His 'geography' was only slightly less mistaken than Aristotle's, but it set his ambitions.

  What was his sexual nature? He was not a one-way homosexual. During eleven years on the march, he married the Bactrian Roxane and two Persian brides, taking three wives as opposed to Philip's seven. He also fathered a child on another Persian mistress, and perhaps one on an Indian chieftain, and was said in court gossip to have slept for twelve days with a visiting 'Queen of the Amazons' near the Caspian Sea. Since early boyhood he had also loved Hephaestion, whose death before his own drove him to extreme grief. Plainly, there was a homo-erotic sexual element to his love for his 'Patroclus', but their love was more than just sex. In Asia, Alexander also had sex with a Persian court-eunuch, Bagoas, who joined him in 330 and was made one of the ship-captains, the only foreigner, when Alexander's fleet turned for home down the river Indus in 326. The fairest modern label for his sex-life is 'bisexual': Philip was said to have behaved likewise, and homoerotic sex was part of the lifestyle of his Royal Pages. As in contemporary Athens, so in Macedon a sexual love for a boy was something which a man could profess openly, without discredit. We do not know what his accompanying Indians thought of it.

  As a passionate man, Alexander had his drunken moments and his outbursts of rage; they culminated in the dark evening in late 328 bc when he personally killed one of his father's veteran Companions, Cleitus, at a party. His life was emphatically not lived without moral blots and stains; his ambition also killed tens of thousands of Indians who refused to surrender and be his subjects rather than subjects of their existing kings, and his army plundered the goods and supplies of countless families in order to feed themselves as they crossed Asia. However, after the initial conquest, further looting and violence were not Alexander's idea of ruling his subjects. He had a magic which was personally exercised for the troops who loved him, and we must do justice to it too, and the accompanying extravagance of his youth. Such were his feats, his benefactions and his capacity for favours that some of the Greek cities spontaneously offered him 'honours equal to those for the gods'. Sometimes they were offered in admiration or gratitude, at other times as hopeful flattery. Benefaction, in the sense of material favours, was central to Greek ideas of a god; Alexander was as capable of it as almost any Olympian god, while his prowess, as far as India, rivalled most Olympians' known deeds. There had been divine cults previously for Greek men of power and achievement, but they only became an established practice among Greeks because of Alexander's exceptional prowess. But he himself knew very well that he was mortal, and he continued to honour the immortal gods and to obey their oracles. His own religious life remained traditional, rooted in Greek practice and precedent.

  Above all, Alexander had an emotional bond with his men, main­tained through storm and desert, wounds and hardship and the many moments when he and his commanders had no idea where they were on the map. They had marched on foot against vastly bigger armies and they had seen deserts, cities, mountains and elephants which none had ever imagined in his youth. Some of them had ridden without stirrups and without saddles, forming into pointed formations for the sudden shock of battle-charge, those moments of 'all or nothing' which are the moments for glory, to be won at the expense of enemies and sustained, for years, with ever-enlarging stories. When Alexander lay dying, 'his soldiers longed to see him, some of them so as to see him alive, others because . . . they thought his death was being con­cealed from them by his bodyguards. Most of them were driven to see Alexander by grief and longing for their king. As the army processed past him, he was unable to speak, but he gestured to each of them, lifting his head with difficulty and signalling to them with his eyes.'6 Like us, they were left unsure exactly what their king had in mind.

  22

  Alexander's Early Successors

  When Seleucus saw that his troops were terrified, he kept on encouraging them, telling them that it was not fitting for men who had campaigned with Alexander and been promoted by him for their courage to rely solely on power and money. They should use experience and clever understanding, the means by which Alexander, too, had accomplished his great and universally admired deeds . . . Alexander had stood beside him in a dream and clearly signified about the future leadership which he was destined to attain as time went by . . .

  Diodorus, 19.90, as Seleucus rides off to Babylon (312 bc)

  It was on 1o June 323 that Alexander died in Babylon. By a remarkable chance, we have the clay tablet on which a Babylonian scribe recorded the event in a day-by-day record of the heavens: 'The King died,' he noted. 'Clouds . . .''

  None of the surviving Greek or Roman sources mentions the clouds. Instead, they dwell on the bonfire of personal ambition which the unexpected death of the king ignited. Alexander left no designated heir, but his Bactrian wife, Roxane, was already six months pregnant. He had a half-brother, Philip Arrhidaeus, who was also in his thirties, but this son of King Philip and a Thessalian mother was half-witted. Already there were the makings of a stupendous struggle. The unborn baby would be half-barbarian and, like the defective Arrhidaeus, it would need guardians to exercise real power in its name.

  The first struggle, therefore, was for the 'guardianship' of the royal line. But which line? From 330 bc onwards, young Alexander had practised the 'inclusion' of Persians and other Iranians into positions of honour around him and eventually even into the inner, world-conquering units of his Macedonian army. He had married the Bactrian Roxane; he had loved the eunuch Bagoas; he had had 30,000 Iranian boys trained in Macedonian weaponry and entitled them his 'Successors'; in one spectacular ceremony, he had even married off ninety-two of his Macedonian officers to Iranian brides (arranging that any children of his and Hephaestion's brides should be cousins); at the same moment he had given presents to no less than 10,000 of his troops who had already 'married' Asian women too. This inclusion had gone way beyond a mere recruitment into supporting units so as to keep up his army's manpower. It put barbarians into the great Companion cavalry and made a few of them Companion nobles. Alexander did not need to do this. It was a principle of the king, the recruitment of 'Alexander's men', irrespective of origin, ethnicity and background, into an inclusive court and army of the future: 'Zeus', he was remembered as saying, 'is the father of all men,' as in Homer, 'but he makes the best particularly his own.'2 So, now, did Alexander, in an 'empire of the best'. Some of his Macedonians, the older ones especially, hated the policy. They had no wish to fraternize with people they had once tried to kill. As soon as he was dead, this hatred erupted.

  Others were more flexible, his younger and closer friends and his cavalrymen, who could accommodate any able fellow lover of horses: they were willing to wait for Roxane's unborn son. Meanwhile, the older Macedonians and the veteran infantry, united by their thick Macedonian Greek dialect, agitated for a Macedonian heir, a son of King Philip, even if he was mentally unsound. There were riots, fol­lowed by a compromise: Roxane's child would share the kingship with the half-wit, Philip Arrhidaeus. The most promin
ent advocate of the settlement was Alexander's trusted Perdiccas, a noble Macedonian of royal highland descent. After Hephaestion's death, Perdiccas was the man whom Alexander had appointed to be his next 'chiliarch', or second-in-command, with the charge of the most respected unit of cavalry. He was (later) said to have been given Alexander's ring by Alexander himself and even to have received the job of caring for Roxane. On such matters, propaganda proliferated.