Defeat and death of Spitamenes.
Late winter:
Siege and capture of the Sogdian Rock and the Rock of Chorienes.
327 spring
Macedonian army reunites at Bactria.
Alexander marries Rhoxane.
30,000 Persian “Successors” recruited.
Pages’ conspiracy, fall of Callisthenes.
Early summer:
Alexander recrosses the Hindu Kush; invasion of India.
Hephaestion builds bridge and fleet on the river Indus.
327/26
Dionysus episode at Nysa.
Capture of the Aornus rock.
326 spring
Macedonian army reunites at the Indus.
Battle of the Hydaspes; death of Bucephalas.
“Mutiny” at the Hyphasis.
Reinforcements arrive from Greece.
November:
Macedonian fleet sets off downriver.
326/25
Campaign against the Malli; Alexander badly wounded.
325
Revolt in Bactria.
Harbor and dockyard built at Patala in the Indus Delta.
Craterus sets off for Carmania.
Late August:
Alexander marches through the Gedrosian desert.
October:
Nearchus sets sail for the Persian Gulf from the Indus.
Harpalus, Alexander’s treasurer, flees to Greece.
December:
Alexander meets Craterus in Carmania.
Purge of the satraps begins.
324
Nearchus joins Alexander in Carmania; fleet is sent on to Susa.
Tomb of Cyrus the Great King robbed.
Alexander returns to Persepolis.
February–March:
Alexander in Susa; mass marriages at Susa.
Spring:
30,000 Persian Successors arrive.
Summer:
Recall of the exiles, announced at the Olympic Games.
Mutiny at Opis.
Craterus appointed to replace Antipater as regent; restores order in Cilicia and leads veterans toward Macedonia.
Alexander moves from Susa to Ecbatana.
Hephaestion dies.
323
Harpalus assassinated in Crete.
Spring:
Campaign against the Cossaeans.
Alexander returns to Babylon.
Arrival at court of Antipater’s son, Cassander.
Final preparations for Arabian campaign.
May 29–30:
Alexander falls ill.
June 10–11:
Alexander dies.
321
Death of Cynnane, Alexander’s sister.
319
Death of Antipater.
317
Death of Philip III Arrhidaeus.
316
Death of Olympias.
310–309
Deaths of Alexander IV and Rhoxane.
309–308
Deaths of Heracles, Alexander’s natural son, and Barsine.
For Daphne and Jeremy
with much love
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am greatly indebted to Roddy Ashworth for his advice and assistance with research.
My literary agent, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, and his American colleague Tom Wallace have offered invaluable support; as has my editor, Molly Turpin. As in the past, the long-suffering Professor Robert Cape of Austin College, Texas, has read a draft and given me many valuable comments and suggestions. Any errors are mine alone.
BACKGROUND AND SOURCES
My line of business is narrative history. I am interested in people and in the bustling life of the past. I set myself two cardinal rules: I am blind to the future, and I describe the lives of my characters as though I did not know what was going to happen next.
Second, I avoid so far as possible the acrid debates among Alexander experts. Despite his fame, many of the memoirs of those who knew him and took part in his astounding career have been lost. The sources we have are less than adequate and were composed hundreds of years after the fact. Modern classicists have clever minds and have cleared up many conundrums, but sometimes they go too far and stretch speculation beyond the limits of the data. Their speculations recall the attributions made by the professional connoisseurs of Old Master paintings.
Thus, there is scarcely any evidence for the modern claim that Alexander plotted over many years the destruction of a family of loyal Macedonian generals. I shave with Occam’s razor. Of competing solutions to tricky questions, it is often simplest to accept what the ancient historians tell us if it is not obviously wrong.
I usually leave scholarly discussions to brief comments in the endnotes. Anyone who seeks further and better particulars will find the bibliography a starting point.
The inadequacy of the ancient historians brings with it another difficulty. We do not know enough to reconstruct Alexander’s psychology in detail. A picture does emerge, but in soft focus. We are told what he did, and from those actions it is possible to make an educated guess about the emotions that powered him. That is all.
The spelling and pronunciation of Greek proper nouns is problematic. The Romans transliterated them into Latin, and it was these versions which the English-speaking world inherited and which are still in common use today. So Achilleus became Achilles, and Alexandros answered to Alexander.
I have abandoned a search for rules other than the comfort of the reader and have chosen names on a case-by-case basis. I accept Persian names in their Greco-Latinate form—Darius, for example, rather than Dareios (Greek) or Dārayava(h)uš (Old Persian). Some lesser-known names I leave in Greek. A few, such as Athens or Tyre, have been anglicized. The Latinate Hephaestio just looks wrong. The Greek form is Hephaistion, but I opt for a commonly adopted hybrid version, Hephaestion.
The pronunciation of most names is obvious, but the letter “e” at the end is spoken as “ee.”
In an effort to be easily understood, I sometimes use contemporary appellations for places and territories—so, for example, the Punjab, the Hindu Kush, and the Middle East instead of Greek place-names that no one has heard of or for which no convenient Greek term exists.
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THE STUDY OF ANCIE
NT HISTORY is rather like the reporting of current affairs. In each case, there is too little evidence to be sure of exactly what has happened. Either too much source material has been lost or too little has yet been revealed. To fill the gaps we have to use our judgment. The basic rules of politics—the making and breaking of deals, the uses and abuses of power—do not appear to have changed greatly since the days of Alexander and in this biography are applied in much the same way as when we analyze the tergiversations at the White House or the inscrutabilities of the Forbidden City. I will be happy if my interpretations of a distant past are as plausible as the best of today’s political commentaries.
Most ancient historians, certainly the ones who have survived the literary cull of time, write incompetently about battles. Almost invariably they were not present and they make up for ignorance with invention, usually quantities of flyblown rhetoric. Sometimes they cite the reports of participants, but these can be unreliable witnesses too. A battlefield was a noisy and confusing place.
However, there is usually enough evidence to propose a broad outline of what happened. We can see that Alexander’s extraordinary skill was to judge the enemy’s intentions simply by looking at how he arranged his troops, scrutinizing the slightest of signs, and making last-minute dispositions (often a clever trap) while he could still communicate with his subordinates.
New technology has transformed warfare, but has not touched the imperatives of military strategy. Modern scholars have convincingly reconstructed Alexander’s victories, but their accounts sometimes fail to make the battle real. I want the reader to understand what was in Alexander’s mind, so far as we can tell, and how the day went.
Two giants bestride modern scholarship. They did their best to tell the truth about Alexander, but it is salutary to see how their accounts reflect the concerns of their own age as much as they do of his. In the first half of the twentieth century, Sir William Tarn was an admirer. His Alexander was the model of an English gentleman who played by the rules, believed in the “unity of mankind,” and, if he had been alive at the time, would have helped found the League of Nations.
After the Second World War, the Austrian-born Ernst Badian had little trouble dismantling the Tarn version. But Badian, too, was a man of his time. For him Alexander was a prototype of the totalitarian dictator, a classical Hitler or Stalin. It is a powerful analysis, but leaves a disagreeable impression of animus.
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ALEXANDER THE GREAT’S CAREER was so world-changing that some forty of his contemporaries or near contemporaries wrote books about his life and times, whether they knew him personally or not.
The king himself employed a secretariat and a Royal Journal was kept of his activities day by day. It was an essential feature of the royal administration. Other official records threw light on events—for example, the astronomical readings of the night sky (unearthed by modern archaeologists) which priests in Babylon translated into predictions of the future—on occasion with startling accuracy. Specialist members of the army that the king led into Asia must have written down useful information—for example, bematists’ measurements of distance and engineers’ designs of siege engines. Some of this material was published later.
Of necessity the king was a copious correspondent, and collections of his letters were published after his death. Unfortunately, many were spurious and it can be difficult to tell which is which when they are quoted in surviving sources.
Alexander took with him a relative of Aristotle called Callisthenes. His task was to record and interpret events as they took place, always making sure that they reflected the king’s wishes and showed off his achievements to their best advantage. He may have had access to the Royal Journal. In truth, he was less a historian than a public relations officer. In 327, Callisthenes fell from favor after the conspiracy of the Royal Pages and was either executed or died of natural causes as a prisoner. His history was probably carried down to 331 or even 329. The first in its field, it was published not many years later and, although filled with information, was generally felt to be too hagiographical.
Cleitarchus, a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt, wrote the most popular account of the king’s life, but although he was Alexander’s contemporary they never met. Cleitarchus appears to have looked down on Macedonians and disliked Alexander. He was less interested in facts than in sensation. Quintilian, a rhetorician of the first century A.D. and a good judge, found him “brilliantly ingenious but notoriously untrustworthy” and sided with Callisthenes. He was a tutor of Ptolemy and sometimes exaggerated his role in events. His history was a substantial text in twelve books and was published by the end of the fourth century.
Two authors knew Alexander well. Marsyas was raised in Pella and was a syntrophos, or fellow-student, of Alexander. He wrote the Makedonica, which primarily dealt with Philip’s reign and did not extend beyond the campaign in Asia Minor. The other writer who knew Alexander was Aristobulus, a Greek engineer, who accompanied Alexander from the beginning of the Asian campaign and remained with him until his death. He started writing his historical memoir only at the age of eighty-four and was more than ninety when he died. He enjoyed the king’s confidence and was an apologist both for him and for Ptolemy.
Others who served under Alexander recorded episodes in which they played a special part—the admiral Nearchus described the voyage from the Indus to the Persian Gulf, and Alexander’s helmsman Onesicritus wrote of the philosophy of the Brahmins and the utopian rule of an Indian rajah, Musicanus. Chares, royal chamberlain and usher, reported on etiquette and ceremonial at Alexander’s court as well as events such as the murder of Cleitus.
Ptolemy, one of the king’s leading associates and later pharaoh of Egypt, was the author of a substantial history of Alexander. He has been accused of writing up his role, but denied Cleitarchus’s report, or (rather) invention, that he saved the king’s life in India.
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OF ALL THIS MASS of material nothing has survived except for the Babylonian tablets and numerous fragments, mostly overwritten papyrus palimpsests dug up from long-forgotten Egyptian rubbish dumps. To this should be added a miscellany of innumerable quotations from the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. in the Deipnosophists (Learned Banqueters) of Athenaeus.
Time has reduced the literary wealth freely available in ancient times to a few more or less complete texts, first published hundreds of years after Alexander’s death. They are of variable value.
The earliest of these works is Book 17 of the Historical Library, a “universal history” written by Diodorus of Sicily in the first century B.C. Diodorus’s custom was to base each book’s text on a single, preferred source, in this case the unreliable Cleitarchus.
Not long afterward a Gallo-Roman historian called Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus wrote Philippic Histories and the Origin of the Whole World and the Places of the Earth in forty-four books. Its central theme was the Macedonian empire, but it was also a general history of all those parts of the world that came under Macedonian rule. Books 11 and 12 are devoted to Alexander. Trogus’s work survives in an epitome or abbreviation written by Marcus Junianus Justinus Frontinus (Justin) in the second century A.D. It contains useful material, but like all summaries should be used with caution.
Quintus Curtius Rufus wrote the only full-scale study of Alexander in Latin. His dates are uncertain, but he may have flourished in the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius. The first two books of his ten-book Histories of Alexander the Great are missing and there are large lacunae elsewhere. Cleitarchus and Ptolemy were among his sources. Curtius is tendentious and moralizing; his style is heavily rhetorical and he composed many elaborate speeches for his protagonists. He was surprisingly well-informed about the geography of the Middle East (see Engels, passim).
The only author to write about Alexander who can be read with undiluted pleasure is the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch, who flou
rished in the first and second centuries A.D. He is best known for his Parallel Lives, short biographies pairing and comparing distinguished Greeks and Romans. The longest was devoted to Alexander (who was coupled with Julius Caesar) and contains much interesting information. Other lives, such as those of Demosthenes and Phocion, also offer rewarding insights into Alexander and other leading personalities of the age, as do Plutarch’s essays On the Virtue and Fortune of Alexander I and II and Sayings of Kings and Commanders. However, although he understood the principles of historical inquiry, Plutarch was not a historian and did not claim to be one. His interest lay in the personalities of his subjects and the ethical conclusions that could be drawn from their behavior. On occasion, he repeated stories because they were telling rather than because they were likely to be true.
The Metz Epitome (so called because the only manuscript was found in Metz) is a summary written in late antiquity of various fragments dealing with the campaigns of Alexander the Great from Hyrcania to southern India. It is indebted to Cleitarchus. The manuscript includes the so-called Liber de Morte Alexandri Magni Testamentumque, a curious account of the king’s death and will.
Long passages in the above texts share a common source, probably Cleitarchus, and are sometimes corralled, not especially helpfully, as a group under the heading of the “Alexander Vulgate.” They are set against an apologetic tradition which features the Anabasis of Alexander and the Indica, by Lucius Flavius Arrianus Xenophon, and the anonymous Itinerary of Alexander.
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