Siwah oasis in the Libyan Desert to obtain confirmation that he was
the son of Zeus.4 His pretensions would, however, lead to his undoing
later (see below).
Alexander’s success at Gaugamela meant that the Persian Empire
was to all intents and purposes no more. It would not be long before
its more important and wealthier royal capitals were in Macedonian
hands. These included Babylon, Ecbatana, Susa, and finally Persepo-
lis, home of the palace of Darius and Xerxes, the “most hated city in
Asia.”5 Shortly before the Macedonian army left Persepolis in spring
330, the palace burned to the ground. Whether this was accidental or
deliberate is not known with certainty, but the symbolism of its burn-
ing, as with the Gordian knot, was exploited: the peoples of the Persian
Empire no longer would pay homage to the Great King but to Alexan-
der as Lord of Asia.
The burning of Persepolis meant, in effect, that the original aims of
the invasion of Asia—punishment of the Persians and freeing of the
120 Worthington
Greek cities of Asia Minor—had been achieved, and the men in the army
evidently thought they would now be going home.6 But Alexander did
not turn westward. He needed to hunt down Darius once and for al ,
and so set off after him. He caught up with him at Hecatompylus, only
to find him dead and that Bessus, satrap of Bactria, one of the men who
had deposed Darius and had had a hand in his murder, had proclaimed
himself Great King as Artaxerxes V. Again Alexander’s men expected
their king to give orders to start the long march home,7 and again they
were disappointed, as Alexander gave orders to pursue Bessus.
Although the army had wanted to return home at Persepolis and at
Hecatompylus, Alexander was right to see the need to depose Bessus in
order to maintain stability in his new Asian empire. Nevertheless, the
Macedonian invasion had entered a different phase, one of conquest for
the sake of conquest. Also different was how Alexander treated those
people who defied him as he marched eastward, with mass slaughter
and even genocide becoming something of a norm.
Bessus was quickly joined by Satibarzanes, satrap of Areia, and
Bactrian chieftains such as Oxyartes (the father of Roxane) and Spita-
manes, who commanded substantial numbers of men, and especially
first class cavalry. To counter this threat, Alexander invaded Bactria and
Sogdiana. The speed with which he moved caused these leaders to fall
back beyond the Oxus, and not long after Alexander crossed this river,
Oxyartes and Spitamanes betrayed Bessus to Alexander, who ordered
his execution. Again, the removal of one leader meant nothing, for
Spitamenes came to the fore, and the Macedonians were now faced
with fierce guerrilla warfare in this different and hostile part of Central
Asia. By 327, though, the resistance was over, Spitamenes was dead, and
Alexander added cavalry contingents from the two areas to his army.
During the Bactrian campaigns, two potentially major conspiracies
against Alexander were revealed. The first, the so-called Philotas affair,
was in 330 at Phrada, capital of Drangiana. Although Philotas, com-
mander of the companion cavalry and son of Parmenion, had nothing
to do with the affair, his criticisms of Alexander’s orientalism and pan-
dering to Persian nobility led to his undoing. He was accused of com-
plicity in the conspiracy and put to death. Alexander then gave orders
for the killing of the equally critical Parmenion, who was at Ecbatana
Alexander the Great and Empire 121
at the time and had no knowledge of any conspiracy. Then in 327 at
Bactria a conspiracy involving some of the royal pages was discovered.
Callisthenes, the court historian, who had defied Alexander’s attempt
to introduce proskynesis (the Asian custom of prostration before the
Great King), was implicated and put to death, yet no evidence existed
against him. If Alexander’s likely manipulation of these conspiracies to
rid himself of critics were not bad enough, Alexander also murdered
his general Cleitus at Maracanda (Samarkand) in 328 after the two men
got into a furious drunken row. There is no question that the Bactrian
campaign was a turning point in Alexander’s deterioration as a king
and as a man.
After pacifying Bactria (or so he thought), Alexander pushed east-
ward into India. Here he fought only one major battle, against the
Indian prince Porus at the Hydaspes River in 326. It was another Mace-
donian victory, but it was the high point militarily of Alexander’s cam-
paign in India. The men had expected to be returning home as early
as 330 following the burning of Persepolis, but Alexander was showing
no signs of that, and the campaign in India was the final straw. After
seventy days of marching through drenching monsoon rains toward
the Ganges, the army mutinied at the Hyphasis (Beas) River, forcing
Alexander to turn back. One of Alexander’s ambitions in India was to
sail down the Indus River and out into the Southern (Indian) Ocean.
He would achieve this (along the way almost losing his life at the siege
of Malli), and his voyage was one of the highlights of his time in India.
Leaving India, Alexander led a contingent of his troops westward
through the Gedrosian Desert. His reason was personal: Dionysus,
with whom Alexander was by then identifying himself, had traveled
through the desert, while Cyrus the Great of Persia had tried but failed.
Alexander’s ill-fated march saw about a third of the men with him die
because of the hostile natural conditions. This mattered less to the king
than the personal glory of marching through the desert.8
In the meantime, Bactria and Sogdiana revolted, and India followed
suit. Alexander had mistakenly believed that defeated in battle meant
conquered, but the Afghans were (and are) not conquered by anyone.
The Pashtun tribes of the present northwest frontier of Afghanistan
are constantly fighting each other, and there is a saying today that they
122 Worthington
are only united when they face a common enemy. That is exactly what
Alexander was in the 320s, just as the British in the nineteenth century
and the Russians in the twentieth were, and the same holds true today.
This time there was little that Alexander could do.
Two years later, in 324, at Opis, a second mutiny occurred over Al-
exander’s policy to discharge his veterans, although his plans to invade
Arabia did not help—nor did his adoption of a combination of Persian
and Macedonian clothing9 or his belief in his own divinity, as the men’s
mocking “you and your father Zeus can go to Arabia if you want” in-
dicates His powers of persuasion were unable to end this mutiny, and
after three days he was successful only when he shamed the men into
giving in by transferring Macedonian commands to Persians. In other
words, he played on the men’s racial hatred of the Persians to end the
mutiny. A year later, in Babylon, in June 323, on the eve of his Ara-
bian expedition, Alexande
r the Great died, a few months shy of his
thirty-third birthday. He left behind no heir (his wife Roxane, a Bactrian
princess, was pregnant when he died), and when asked to whom he
left his empire, he enigmatically replied, “to the best.” Thus began a
thirty-year round of bloody wars between his generals that saw the
carving up of the Macedonian Empire and the emergence of the great
kingdoms of the Hellenistic period.
u
It is important to remember that Alexander’s empire was never static
but continually shifting its frontiers and absorbing new peoples. There
was never an instance when Alexander fought that one final battle;
there was never a time when he ruled his empire peacefully, and he
was faced with opposition all the time he was in Asia, from the Per-
sian Great King to the chieftains of Central Asia and the princes of
India to the aristocratic families, all of whom naturally saw Alexander
as a threat to their power and prestige. After the Granicus River battle
in 334, a goodly number of the survivors fled to Miletus to defy Alex-
ander. When Miletus fell after a short siege, many from there fled to
Halicarnassus, forcing Alexander to wage yet another siege. And so the
years and resistance wore on. Against the background of the unabating
Alexander the Great and Empire 123
opposition, the undoing of the Gordian knot makes even more sense,
as Alexander strove to show everyone he was the new ruler of Asia, not
merely by conquest but according to prophecy.
We might expect the political exploitation of this religious sym-
bolism to be effective, and Alexander probably thought it would be,
given the religious nature of the people. However, he was a conqueror,
and despite attempts to endear himself to the aristocracy by involving
them in his administration (see below), no one likes to be conquered.
Even after the turning-point defeat of Darius at Issus, the Great King
was able to regroup and bring Alexander to battle at Gaugamela. Alex-
ander’s victories were hard-won, the enemy always outnumbered him,
and Darius, in addition to his enormous resources (far greater than
those of Alexander), was a skilled strategist and commander.10 And he
never said die: after Issus, he gathered together another army, and after
Gaugamela he was determined to fight Alexander again, this time with
an army principally made up of his easternmost subjects. His failures
in battle proved too much, though, and he was deposed and murdered.
Even then the resistance to Alexander did not fall apart but contin-
ued in the leadership of Bessus, forcing Alexander into Bactria and Sog-
diana. Bessus was quickly joined by Satibarzanes, whom Alexander had
appointed the satrap of Areia but who now sided with Bessus against
the invader. This type of disloyalty was something Alexander would
encounter time and again.
At first Alexander gained the upper hand in Bactria, as seen in the be-
trayal of Bessus to him, but Spitamenes, who succeeded Bessus, was far
more dangerous and tactically cunning. Using the barren, desolate, and
rocky topography that he and his people knew so well but the invading
army did not, he forced Alexander into more than two years of intense
guerrilla fighting and bloody siege warfare. Alexander was forced to
deal with all this and with growing opposition from his senior staff as
well as from the rank and file of his army, opposition that exploded
in 326 at the Hyphasis, forcing him to turn back. If the army had not
revolted, he would have reached the Ganges, and if he had not died in
Babylon, he would have invaded Arabia.
Thus at no time did Alexander rule a fixed geographic area, at no
time did he appear to want to rule an empire with fixed borders, as
124 Worthington
his continual campaigning shows, and at no time were all his subjects
passive and supportive of his presence among them. All these factors
made administering his empire in some longer-term uniform and ef-
ficient fashion and persuading his men to continue marching and fight-
ing doubly difficult.11
u
The Persian kings had realized the impossibility of one man trying to
rule the large and diverse kingdom they had created. That was why
Darius I (522–486) divided his empire into twenty satrapies (adminis-
trative regions), personally appointing a satrap (governor) over each
one. Apart from paying annual taxes to the Great King and furnishing
troops for the Persian army, the satraps wielded all the power in their
satrapies, although the Great King was at the top of the administrative
hierarchy, and he ruled absolutely.
The satrapal system remained in existence because of the rela-
tive autonomy of the satraps and their acceptance of the Great King.
While Alexander might call himself Lord of Asia, that was very differ-
ent from being the Great King, and many of the satraps had fought in
battle against him. Alexander as invader would have cause to question
their loyalty, but he recognized the value of the satrapal system, so he
kept it, with some changes.12 In the earliest stages of his Asian cam-
paign he placed his own men in charge of the western satrapies—for
example, Calas was made satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, Antigonus
of Phrygia, Asander of Lycia, and Balacrus was made satrap of Cili-
cia. However, as Alexander’s territories increased eastward, especially
after Gaugamela, Alexander began to involve the aristocratic Persian
families in his administration and appoint some as satraps. The first
of these was really Mazaeus, who was appointed satrap of Babylonia
in 331. Others included Abulites, satrap of Susa, Phrasaortes, satrap of
Persis, and Artabazus, satrap of Bactria and Sogdiana. Alexander’s ac-
tion would help smooth the path of a new, “transition” regime (so he
hoped) by nullifying opposition from these influential families whose
power he was eroding. Besides, he needed these people for their knowl-
edge of the language and customs of their people. The last point is
Alexander the Great and Empire 125
important, because by being part of the administrative hierarchy, they
would help to reconcile the mass of the people to his rule, the plan be-
ing to help him maintain a peaceful occupation.
The danger, of course, was that a conquered people could not be
left to its own devices. Alexander could not afford an insurrection, so
he made some important modifications to the satrapal system. Native
satraps continued to have some civil authority and to levy taxes in their
satrapies. However, they were little more than titular figureheads, for
Alexander appointed Macedonians to be in charge of the treasury and
the military forces of each satrapy. Thus, real power in the satrapies
now lay with his men. The change extended the precedent he had set,
for example, in Caria, where Ada continued as its satrap but Ptolemy
was in charge of military affairs,13 or in Egypt, where a Persian Doloas-
pis was governor of sorts but was dominated by Cleomenes, a Greek
from Naucratis, wh
o used his position as collector of taxes and over-
seer of the construction of Alexandria to seize the reins of power. The
new system continued throughout the reign, although in 325, when
Alexander returned from India, he punished many disloyal satraps
(and generals of mercenary armies) with death and appointed as their
successors both Persians and Macedonians; for example, Peucestas
was made satrap of Persis (he was the only Macedonian who learned
Persian and immersed himself in Persian customs, which pleased the
people greatly, according to Arrian).14
While Alexander allowed the satraps to continue collecting taxes, he
created the post of imperial treasurer at some point before (or in) 331.
His boyhood friend Harpalus oversaw all imperial finances (first from
Ecbatana and eventually from his headquarters in Babylon). Alexander
seems to have put the Greek cities of his empire in a special category,
for taxes from those in Asia Minor were to be collected by Philoxenus
and those in Phoenicia by Coeranus.15
Alexander’s men did not expect the enemy to retain any positions of
influence, and needless to say, the satraps would have resented losing
control of their armies and treasuries. The military might of the Mace-
donians held them in check, but it is no surprise that native satraps
were disloyal when Alexander was in India, and that in Central Asia the
satrapies of Bactria and Sogdiana revolted twice. Bactria proved to be
126 Worthington
such a problem area that when Artabazus resigned his post in 328, Al-
exander appointed Cleitus, co-commander of the Companion Cavalry,
as its satrap, although Alexander killed him before he could take up this
position. In his place he appointed another Macedonian, Amyntas, who
would head the largest contingent of troops in any one satrapy.16
Such disloyalty is also part and parcel of imperial power being held
by one man, and an invader at that. When Alexander was present with
his superior army, resistance was not an option, but when he left it was
a different matter. Bactria shows this, as does India. Here, Alexander
confirmed the power of many of the local princes who submitted to
him, for example Taxiles east of the Indus, and after the battle of the
Hydaspes, Porus was allowed to retain his power (although he became
a vassal of Alexander); however, once the king left India, the rulers re-
Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome Page 20