Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Once, according to a pretty story, Alexander and his elderly historian Aristobulus were sailing in the same boat down the Indian river Jhelum, and to ease the journey, Aristobulus was reading aloud from his history, elaborating the truth, as he thought that he would most please his king by adding fictitious heroics to the story. But Alexander seized the book and flung it into the river, saying: 'And the same, Aristobulus, is what you deserve, fighting these duels on my behalf and spearing all these elephants with a single javelin.' If Alexander had ever been so honest about the months which follow the siege of Gaza, his historians might well be in danger of a similar ducking. In November 332 Alexander crossed the desert into Egypt; by the following April, his myth had taken a new and strange direction. Legend and flattery soon set to work on this shift of tone, but behind them lie the deepest questions about Alexander's personality: whether Alexander was in any sense a mystic, how seriously he regarded the divine honours which were paid him in his lifetime, whether he came to disown his father Philip and if so, what this could have meant to him. This is a far cry from the sarissas and siege machinery of the year before and stands in the sharpest contrast to the carnage at Tyre and Gaza; if part of Alexander's spell has been his youth and part his impetuous curiosity, the most extraordinary part has based itself on the events of the next five months.

  The road from Gaza to Egypt was particularly hazardous, as it led first through three days' desert, then through the famous Barathra or Serbonian bog which had brought a Persian army to grief only twelve years earlier. It is not known how Alexander supplied himself with water, perhaps from his fleet, or how he avoided these coastal marshes, but by November he found himself on the easterly arm of the Nile Delta, the prize of Egypt before him and a winter of plentiful food in store for his army. In November the Nile was no longer prohibitively flooded, and winter was the season of leisure for the Egyptian farmer. At Issus, the former satrap of Egypt had died leading his troops, and after the battle Amyntas the renegade Macedonian had led some 4000 fugitives from the Great King's mercenaries by boat to Cyprus, then south to the Nile where they had disembarked to an eager welcome from the natives. Later, when Amyntas's Greeks began to loot Egyptian farms they lost popularity; Amyntas and his troops were killed, possibly on Persian instigation. But his example remained as a spur to the next adventurer; Egypt was waiting, her natives responsive to tact, her army, as always, no serious obstacle.

  As a civilization, Egypt was as old as the world and proud of it. Greek philosophy, so her priesthood claimed, had been discovered by an Egyptian, son of the Nile, 48,863 years before Alexander's arrival. It was nearly two hundred years since the Persians had first conquered her Pharaoh and seized a kingdom so rich in men and grain; the Persian king had been recognized as the new Pharaoh and a satrap had ruled as his deputy, supported by military colonists from all areas of the empire, whether ews or nomads from Khwarezm, who lived in garrison enclaves as far south as the Nile's first cataract, border of Egypt and independent Nubia Despite legends of Persian atrocity, remembered among the priesthood, Persian rule had not weighed as heavily as it might have done. Persian noblemen enjoyed Egyptian estates which they farmed with native slaves through Egyptian agents; the yearly tribute, at its height, was a mere 700 talents of silver and the payments in kind had not been severe. The move to a state monopoly and a tax on all production would later yield the Ptolemies more than twenty times as much in value, but under Persian rule it was at most partial and in several vital trades and harvests it had not begun at all. Aristocrats of the Delta towns had survived the Persian conquest in the same high office as before; a temple could still own twelve square miles of farmland, and yet their educated classes had never accepted the Persians for long. Rebellion had been persistent and for all but five of the seventy years before Alexander's arrival, Egypt had maintained her independence under various Pharaohs, some of them, probably southerners from Ethiopia, who had set up new dynasties in the Delta. The Persian attempts at reconquest had been repeated and often spectacular. Four times they had invaded and they did not regain the country until the winter of 343. Even then success was brief; within five years of the Delta Pharaohs' fall, Khabash the pretender had again stirred the country to revolt and it was only three years since he had been put down.

  Heir to recent and repeated rebellion. Alexander was welcomed enthusiastically by the natives. The Persian satrap met him at the fort of Pelusium and offered him 800 talents and all his furniture in return for a safe pass; Macedonians were sent by boat down the Nile to the capital city of Memphis and Alexander marched to meet them by land. Within a week he had entered the monumental palace of Upper Egypt, home of the Pharaohs for more than a thousand years.

  The Egyptian society which greeted him was as rigidly shaped as one of its pyramids; at the base stood the millions of native peasants, the fellahin whom invaders and aristocrats had taxed and dominated because they could not escape; near the top were the family dynasties of the Delta regions, men like Semtutefhakhte or Patesi who made their peace with Alexander and continued without disturbance in the priesthoods and local governorships which their families had held for more than two hundred years; at the peak stood the Persian King (represented in art and ceremony as the Pharoah), and around him the priesthood, whose education and ceremony made them the most articulate class in Egyptian history. 'In Egypt', Plato had written, expressing the priests' own view, 'it is not possible for a king to rule without the art of the priests; if he has forced his way to power from another class, then he must be enlisted into the priestly class before he can rule.' The priests were placed to control a coronation and they judged each wearer of the crown by the terms of their own law, the Ma'at or code of social order which abounded in ritual and complexities; even the brave native Pharaohs of the recent rebellions were denounced as 'sinners' by the priesthood because they had offended their arcane commands for a righteous life. A stern verdict was passed on the two hundred years of Persian 'misrule and neglect' by priests who exaggerated Persian sacrilege beyond all recognition; Artaxerxes III, who had reconquered Egypt eleven years earlier, was known to the priests as the Sword and was accused of killing the sacred bull of the god Apis, eating it roast and substituting that accursed animal the donkey in its place. Under Persian rule the temples may have had their presents and privileges reduced, but these legends of atrocity went far beyond the truth. However, they suited the purpose of Alexander, the acclaimed avenger of Persian impiety.

  Inside Memphis, he was not slow to delight his likeliest critics. 'He sacrificed to other gods and especially to Apis.' By this one sacrifice, he reversed all memories of Persian unrighteousness and paid honour to the Egyptian god Apis in the form of his sacred bull, most famous of Egypt's many religious animals, who represented the god at Memphis until an age of some twenty years when he made way for a younger bullock, died and was interred with pomp in a polished sarcophagus. In return, Alexander is said to have been crowned as Pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt, an honour only mentioned in the fictitious Romance of Alexander; this crowning cannot be dated to any one month, but is supported by the Pharaonic titles which were applied to him in the inscriptions of the country's temples. As Pharaoh, he was the recognized representative of god on earth, worshipped as a living and accessible god by his Egyptian subjects: he was hailed as Horus, divine son of the sun god Ra whose worship had prevailed in Lower Egypt, and as beloved son of Amun, the creator god of the universe, whose worship had flourished in the temples of Upper Egypt and grown to incorporate the worship of the more southerly Ra. This divine sonship fitted him into the dynastic past of the native Pharaohs, for he could be said to share their common father Amun-Ra, who visited the Pharaoh's mother to father each future king; courtiers would have explained the doctrine and addressed him by its titles, but before many months had gone, it would prove to be rich in possibilities.

  'Pharaoh, Pharaoh,' an Egyptian priest had written of the Persians' reconquest, 'come
do the work which awaits you'; as crowned king of the two lands, 'lord of sedge and bee', Alexander was indeed to fulfil the hopes of the temples and bear out the daily routine of the priestly Ma'at. His crowning had come at a time of confusion. The last Pharaoh, Nectanebo II, had fled south, probably to Ethiopia, to avoid the Persians' reconquest but he was believed by Egyptians to be ready to return and resume his rule: Alexander had replaced him, and it was perhaps more than a rumour that he considered a march into Ethiopia, border home of Nectanebo's possible supporters. Instead, his historian Callisthenes is said to have gone south up the Nile to investigate the causes of the river's summer flooding, a story which may well be correct. The floods had long exercised the ingenuity of Greek authors, some of whom had guessed the answer, but it was left to Aristotle to write that the matter was no longer a problem, now that Greek visitors had seen the truth of Ethiopia's summer rains for themselves. Probably these witnesses were his kinsman Callisthenes and other soldiers in the Macedonian army.

  As for Alexander, he took ship from Memphis early in the year of 331 and sailed northwards down the Nile to make his most lasting contribution to civilization. At the river's mouth, he visited the Pharaohs' frontier fort at Rhacotis and explored the other outlets of the Delta. He was much struck by the possibilities of the site at its western edge:

  It seemed to him that the place was most beautiful for founding a city and that the city would be greatly favoured; he was seized by enthusiasm for the work and marked out the plan in person, showing where the gathering-place should be built and which gods should have temples where, Greek gods being chosen along with the Egyptian Isis; he arranged where the perimeter wall should be built.

  So Alexandria was born, a new centre of gravity in all succeeding Mediterranean history which 'was to stand, like a navel, at the middle of the civilized world'.

  Like every other Alexandria it grew round the site of a fortress used by the Persians. Rhacotis became a quarter in the new city and absorbed the herdsmen who had long lived round it in villages: its site had been admirably chosen and its natural harbour may already have been exploited by Egyptians. To Alexander it promised a particularly benign climate, shelter from the island of Pharos and a raised position on the shoreline which would catch the north-west breeze in summer. A site further east on the Delta would soon have been ruined by the silt which the natural current at the river mouth washes down shore from the west.

  Apart from fame and the wish for the city to prosper, the motives for founding Alexandria can only be guessed. Its site was not well defended and its position on the fringe of Egypt's administration suggests that access to the Aegean was its prime attraction, perhaps for economic reasons. Greeks had long maintained a trading-post at Naucratis in the Delta and their trade with Egypt is not known to have dwindled before Alexander's arrival, though Persian invasions cannot have helped it. How far commercial relations with Greece and their possible growth weighed in Alexander's decision is most uncertain. The Aegean, when he founded the city, was infested with pirates and too hostile to deserve development; even in its maturity more trade was thought to pass into Alexandria from inland Egypt than from the entire Mediterranean. The inland granaries of Egypt could ship corn quickly into the city by river and canal to feed its large population; this ready supply of food was more important to its founder than the casual trading of its surplus or the harbour taxes taken from trade in the port. In Alexandria, as in other Greek cities, traders were seldom citizens and their organization into official groups was a very slow development. Trade therefore was not a natural force in a city's politics and during the next century Alexandria's commerce spread more through the entrepreneurs of Rhodes than her own citizens; when the city was founded Rhodes was an uncertain friend to Alexander.

  The citizen body was exclusive rather than commercial. Macedonian veterans, Greeks and prisoners, perhaps too a contingent of Jews, were detailed as the new citizens, and native Egyptians were mostly added as men of lesser status. The laws and charter of the city are very far from certain; it perhaps had an assembly and council from the start but their qualifications for membership are nowhere mentioned. The architect was a Greek from Rhodes and the building was entrusted to Cleomenes, a Greek from Naucratis with a shrewd head for finance. As the barley-meal was sprinkled to mark out the city in the shape of a Macedonian military cloak, Aristander the prophet is said to have predicted that 'Alexandria would be prosperous in other respects, but especially in the fruits of the earth'; home-grown food was the city's first concern, not balanced trade or the c port of Egypt's sail-ropes, drugs and spices and the import of Greece's wine and painted pottery.

  As the building work began, Alexander was rewarded by a pleasant surprise. From the Aegean, so early in the season, one of his admirals sailed in to deliver prisoners and report on his campaign; now that the Cypriot, Rhodian and Phoenician fleets had changed sides, the news could only be welcome. The Persian admirals were left with dwindling money, a mere 3,000 Greek mercenaries and only as many boats as they could enlist from Aegean pirates. Their tyrants and oligarchs had been expelled from the cities of Tenedos, Lesbos, Chios and Cos, usually to the delight of the mass of their citizens: pirates and one of the two Persian admirals had been ambushed in Chios's harbour. However, the Persian admiral had since escaped and his fellow was somewhere in hiding; Chares the Athenian, who had seized one of Lesbos's cities, was also ranging free, and by no means the last had been heard of them. For the moment it was more alarming that Aegean shipping was still at the mercy of pirate long-boats. Less serious were reports that Agis King of Sparta, whose negotiations with the Persian admirals had come to nothing, had since transferred 8,000 Greek fugitives from Issus to Crete and won over Crete's towns and fortresses with Persian help. Persian desperadoes would flock there now that the Aegean war was over, but if Agis shipped his bandits back to Greece, they were unlikely to cause uncontrollable revolt. Against Antipater and the allies, their numbers were negligible and their pay would soon start an argument, especially as Sparta used no coinage and had no ready means to finance a hired army. Among the spoils of Issus Alexander had captured Spartan ambassadors to Darius; two more had been sent since then but they were unlikely to meet with any more help from a king whose strategy now centred on Asia.

  As leader of the Greek allies. Alexander arranged the punishment of all his Aegean prisoners. The pirates were executed and most of the tyrants were sent back for trial in home cities whose democracies had been restored; there was no comfort in legality, for in one freed town the two pro-Persian terrorists were condemned to death by 883 votes to 7, resounding proof of the hatred with which a democratic court regarded them. The ringleaders from Chios had been so dangerous that Alexander dealt with them personally, sending them in chains to serve in an old Persian garrison on the Nile's first cataract; other Chian offenders were to be tried locally or refused asylum if they fled. Alexander did not await reports of their sentence; in early spring, while the building began in his Alexandria, he marched westwards along the coast of the Mediterranean, leaving his army to speculate about his intentions. With their speculation, the problems of his personality begin.

  In the next month, Alexander was to travel westwards with a small group of attendants and then turn south for three hundred miles through an eerie stretch of desert in order to put certain questions to the oracle of Ammon, a ram-headed god who was worshipped in the oasis of Siwah on the remote western border of Egypt and Libya. In his lifetime, Alexander was to reveal neither the questions nor the answers, but clues to their content have been drawn from his own behaviour and from the way his historians have described it. Only once before in Asia had Alexander diverged from the route required by strategy, and then only for his pilgrimage to Troy; this suggests that whatever drove him to Ammon's oasis, it was nothing easily satisfied. In the fullest surviving account of his motives, given by Arrian five hundred years later on the basis of wide and varied reading, he is said to have been seized by a burning desir
e to go 'because he was already referring part of his parentage to Ammon ... and he meant either to discover about himself or at least to say that he had done so'.

  This challenging remark is an introduction to the strangest strand in Alexander's life and legend. As a result of his visit to the oasis, at several points in his various histories he will be said to have disowned his father Philip and come to claim Ammon as his father. On coins, especially those issued by his Successors, he is shown round-eyed and mystical, adorned with a curling ram's horn, symbol of the god Ammon. In the Alexander romance, he writes letters addressed from Ammon's son; in the Bible's Book of Daniel, he appears in the guise of the ram-horned conqueror. In his legend, from early Moslem Syria to Modern Afghanistan, he is remembered as Iskander Dhulkamien, Alexander the Two-horned, who is identified with the two-homed prophet in the Koran, who searches for the Springs of Immortality, defies the barbarians beyond Iran and still guards the north-east frontier against Russian invasion. Because of this one adventure in the desert, Alexander has exchanged fathers and sprouted horns, but it is a separate question how far these developments are true to his character.