Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Alexandria-in-Sogdia is not alone in this. At Kandahar, Alexandria-in-Arachosia, Alexander had left veterans and 6,000 Greeks to settle with natives in a larger walled Alexandria round the old Persian fort; twenty years after his death, the city was given up to the Indian Chandragupta with an express provision that the Greek citizens could intermarry with Indians of any caste. But the Greeks' sons and grandsons had held so fast to their way of life that Chandragupta's grandson, Asoka the Buddhist king, could put up an edict of the Buddhist faith near Kandahar inscribed in clear Greek letters and phrased in impeccable philosophic Greek. He was writing for Alexander's heirs, for the Greek public of an Alexandria which was still described as a Greek city three hundred years later by a Greek geographer from the Persian Gulf 'Those who praise themselves and criticize their neighbours are merely self-seekers, wishing to excel but only harming themselves. ...' Buddhist precepts fell elegantly into an idiom that Plato might have written, and were rounded off with the usual greeting of a worshipper at a Greek oracle. Kandahar was not a mere military outpost. It was a city with Greek philosophers, interpreters, stone-masons and teachers, where a man could read the classics or put on a Greek stage play; there was more discussed in Alexander's fortress than the charge of the Companions at Gaugamela or the merits of the Thracian hunting-sword.

  In these Alexandrias, men from the Balkans were making a new start, and naturally they made it in the style of their past. Just as the English laid cricket pitches along the Yangtse river, so Alexander's settlers built gymnasiums without respect for heat or landscape; every Greek city in the east required one, under the patronage of Heracles and the god Hermes, while on the 'island of Icarus' which Nearchus had discovered in the Persian Gulf, the athletic festivals of the Greek calendar were observed in a summer temperature which ought to have made exertion impossible. The tenacity of the Greek and Macedonian settlers was astonishing. At Dura, a military colony on the Euphrates, families with pure Macedonian names can be traced four hundred years after their foundation, still in close control of land allotments which they preserved by tight intermarriage. When property was at stake, no native wife would be introduced lightly, for a colonist's farm was leased to him and his heirs; his reasons for keeping his family close were also reasons for clinging to his own Greek culture, irrespective of native outsiders. To that end, he would marry his sister, niece or granddaughter, rather than a foreigner.

  In these cities, athletics and the gymnasium were part of every prominent citizen's education for he was not a slave to the will of the distant court. He served among magistrates and a citizen-body to whom the king addressed his respectful requests; decrees were passed in the ponderous style of Attic Greek; officials were not allowed to hold office twice running and were subjected to legal scrutiny, as in Athens, on giving up their pub-he dunes; Greek law ruled their private and public dealings and what little we so far know of its details would not have seemed foreign to a judge from the Aegean. Nor would the cities' entertainments, for all across Asia, Alexander had held Greek festivals of drama and the arts, and their literature did not fade away behind him; Sophocles was read in Susa; scenes from Euripides inspired Greek artists in Bactria; comic mimes were performed in Alexandria-in-the-Caucasus; Babylon had a Greek theatre and the tale of the Trojan horse was a favourite in Ai Khanum where men must have read it in early Greek epic poets; Homer, deservedly, reached India and together with Plato and Aristotle, ended by being enjoyed in Ceylon. The settlers in Iran did not add to these classics, although a drab Greek hymn to Apollo was written by a settler at Susa; the company of expatriates does not encourage new writers unless they are novelists, and no Greek after Homer had shown a talent which could have produced the right kind of novel. The eastern cities had nothing to compare with the library and the posts for scholars in Egyptian Alexandria and so they never developed an academic school of poets from the literature they still enjoyed. When a man of letters was asked to stay in one of Mesopotamia's new Greek cities, a 'dish*, he replied, 'cannot contain a dolphin'; these 'dishes' beyond the Euphrates have no creative writer to their credit.

  But by their tenacity they had kept open the horizons of a wide and uniform Greek world, and this reached further than literary merit. 'The world my children ...', Asoka the Buddhist king proclaimed on the river-boundary of north-west India, and at a time when the struggles of the Successors in western Asia baffle the historians they now preoccupy, he wrote of his concern for each of the four Greek kings who ruled from Babylon as far west as Epirus and the Adriatic. This open horizon gave travellers a new freedom. Asoka's Buddhist monks set out on missionary journeys from India into Syria, where they may have encouraged the first monastic movements in the history of the Mediterranean; Greeks from Ionia helped to settle a city on the Persian Gulf and while the Successors warred, Greeks from Egypt travelled and settled south of the Caspian; Greek ambassadors passed from Kandahar by road to the Ganges and the Indian court at Palimbothra; the Delphic precepts of Alexandria-in-Sogdia were copied and brought to the city by the philosopher Clearchus, probably a pupil of Aristotle who walked the 3,000 miles from Delphi to the Oxus. He then wrote pamphlets which derived the wisdom of the Jews and the Brahmins from that of the Magi and described dialogues between Greek and Oriental philosophers to the marked advantage of the latter. In the generation after Alexander, this Aristotelian would have passed from one Alexandria to the next on his journey through Iran, visiting their new gymnasiums and talking with the men who shared his style of philosophic Greek; there was a comforting regularity about these new Greek cities, built over old Persian forts and citadels and set on a river-bank or wherever possible, on the meeting-point of two rivers; some were colonized from cities in western Asia, all used the same official dialect which Philip had first introduced to his court; they lived to a pattern, and their straight streets ran in the rectangular plan which signified the Greeks at home from the Punjab to southern Italy. Only the olive-trees were missing, but the Macedonians in Babylonia were at least planting vines in their native manner.

  This defiant network stands directly to Alexander's credit; it depended on him, and his death nearly undid it, for the Greek settlers in the upper satrapies rebelled at the news 'longing for their own Greek upbringing and way of life which they had only forfeited through fear of Alexander in his lifetime'. It took an army sent by Perdiccas at Babylon to rum them back and so save Greek Iran for history: several thousand were killed, but certainly not the majority. Some cities, those in the Merv oasis and Alexandria-the-furthest, were rapidly attacked by nomads and had to be rebuilt; those in India passed to Chandragupta; those in upper Iran were cut off after eighty years, and within two centuries every Greek city beyond the Euphrates had been overrun by Parthians and central Asian nomads. But politics are only one part of history and Greeks and Greek culture did not vanish with a change of masters; because years seem like minutes when they are so far distant, it is hard to remember that the Greek cities in Iran had lasted as long as the British empire in India. Just as British cooking still disgraces the kitchens of the Caribbean and Shakespeare is still taught in Indian schools, so the prints of the Greeks can be traced for another seven hundred years, whether in the city-planning of their first nomad masters or in the shapes of small clay figures which were traded from Samarkand to China, in alphabets and central Asian scripts or in the astonishing funerary art of nomads beyond the Oxus. The one detailed book on the towns and routes of central Asia to be written by a westerner in the Roman Empire derived its facts from a Macedonian entrepreneur, whose father had left his colonial home in Syria and moved to Bactria, where he mastered the silk trade which ran from the Oxus to China.

  Politically, this spreading of Greek culture had suited Alexander; in the process he forcibly rolled back the boundaries of the Mediterranean until the Greeks' own 'frog-pond' had threatened to reach to the outer ocean. This new horizon was extremely significant. Three centuries later, the frontier of his Roman successors came to rest on the river E
uphrates, and even then the frontier was never absolute. A traveller from Roman Syria to the Parthians' Fertile Crescent had not passed into a different world of barbarity, for the Semitic peoples were a vigorous unity which forts and frontiers could not divide. Likewise, in the upper satrapies beyond them, Alexander's Mediterranean legacy had not altogether died. The common blood of Hellenism still survived in skills and senders, while it also flowed from Egyptian Alexandria round Arabia and so to India by the great sea route which its founder had meant to realize. Beyond the Roman frontier men were not barbarians; to a historian in senatorial Italy they 'had the deplorable quality of not being barbarian enough*. Greek culture had not been confined to Greek colonists; it was dominant and it had invited its subjects to surrender to it.

  To an age which has seen the collapse of Iran to the ideals of western industry and the aping of America by a Japan which has lost its own nerve, this effect of Alexander's conquest is as fascinating as it is elusive. Every area responded differently, the broad divisions of Egypt, Asia Minor, the Semitic peoples and Iran, and within them every desert and valley, mountain and farmers' plainland; the thin veins of a road or the nearness of a royal estate and a westernized court could lift a tribe out of its past and link it with the skills and language of the Greeks, while neighbours inland continued their herding and grazing in the manner of their ancestors. The Syrians' Aramaic, the Iranian dialects and the country speech of Asia Minor's hinterland did not die before the new common Greek, but they certainly went underground. In Iran there was no native alphabet; in the west local dialects survived, but they seldom obtrude in the surviving evidence, apart from the names of native gods and the fact that a Phoenician under Greek rule wrote his people's prehistory in Aramaic prose.

  As these dialects retreated before their rulers' Greek, the results of their westernization were varied and seldom edifying. The flowering of science and scholarship in the Ptolemies' third-century Egypt was mostly the work of Greek immigrants from the old Aegean world; it stood as a tailpiece to the history of classical Greece, owing very little to westernized Egyptians. The special case of Egypt's Alexandria was mirrored in the fate of Babylon. The Successors favoured its temple communities in the manner of free Greek cities, and this tolerance limited foreign hellenism to a few-native governors and priests; Greek immigrants were scarcer and less of a distortion. Thus the Fertile Crescent did not lose its vigour; when the Parthians seized it two centuries after Alexander, it gave them a new and spiritual style of art and a flourishing architecture of vaults and arches. But these styles owed more to Semitic culture than to the upper layer of Greek taste which had never smothered the natives' unity.

  The shining exception was Syria, always contested by the Successors' armies. Circumstances forced Seleucus to found four cities on undeveloped sites, diverting the caravan trade from the Persian Gulf through a backward patch of country. Hellenism surged through these cities and their nearby military colonies: the one exception is athletic culture, for so far, athletic games are unattested here in early Hellenistic evidence. Syrian philosophers and a school of Syrian poets sprang up, who wrote witty Greek epigrams and referred to their homes as 'Assyria's Athens'. They left them soon enough, but it mattered more that Syria had joined the Greeks' common culture than that she could not contain her brightest children. This culture lasted and became the chain for the spread of Christianity. Without this common language of Greek, Christianity could never have spread beyond Judaea.

  East of the Euphrates and among Iranians Hellenism has received less attention, partly because it has long been less known: few hcllenized Persians are mentioned by name in surviving Greek literature, and the sense of an open frontier, where a man could speak Greek from Syria to the Oxus, can only be deduced from the horizons of Greek geographers and chance remarks in westerners' histories. Archaeology has recently added new evidence, a process which still has far to go: at a time of new beginnings the grandiose experiment of Alexander's eastern frontier deserves another thought.

  First, the generalities. After Alexander, Greek became the culture of every Asian native who wished to succeed, and so it swept through the circles of Asia's governing classes; 'Let us make a covenant with the Gentiles', wrote the Jewish author of the only historical work which describes the conflicts of hellenizing the East, 'for since we have been different from them we have found many bad things. ..." The urge to belong to the Greek world was the urge of successful men everywhere; it made no difference that much of Alexander's empire broke into local kingdoms within a hundred years. Just as the romanization of western Europe only took root through the efforts of local patron landowners four hundred years after Caesar's conquests, so the hellenization of the East was best served by these local kings, because they needed to work Greek culture down through their subjects and ensure secretaries, treasurers, generals and orators to plead their cause in the wide Greek world. Alexander had never controlled Cappadocia, mountainous refuge of many of Darius's followers, and under his Successors it became an independent kingdom with an Iranian aristocracy and line of kings. But two hundred years after Alexander, those kings patronized Greek actors and issued coins of pure Greek design; a Cappadocian man of letters was connected with Delphi, and an old Assyrian military colony in the Cappadocian plains had already turned itself into a Greek city which observed the law of Alexander's kingdom and passed decrees in perfectly balanced Greek. The neighbouring king of Armenia enjoyed Greek literature and wrote a play himself, though his kingdom had never acknowledged the Successors; the hellenizing families in Jerusalem were willing to buy from the Seleucid king the privilege of setting up a gymnasium to turn Jerusalem into a Greek city called Antioch, for they wished

  to belong to Alexander's legacy and their wish was all the stronger for being spontaneous.

  It is not too remote to invoke Alexander's name in this. Apart from the ceaseless fighting, his years in the 'upper satrapies' beyond Hamadan had brought Greek into the lives of Iranians by deliberate and calculated stages, his persistent games, sacrifices and festivals in Greek style, his recruitment of 30,000 natives for Greek training, his mixed marriages and plans for their children, his Greek teachers for the Persian queen and her daughters, his Greek-speaking court, his use of Greek army commands in his integrated army and above all, the settling of more than 20,000 Greeks and veterans in rebuilt Alexandrias where they were mixed with a native citizenry and so spread their language through their wives, families and fellow-inhabitants. Each Alexandria was a full-blooded city where men had to vote on Greek decrees and agree to Greek law; citizenship was a privilege which did not extend to all the natives housed in these cities, nor was a city granted to every group of soldiers whom Alexander settled. A city was a distinct and special foundation. Just as the Persian kings had granted land to feudal tenants in return for military service, so Alexander manned military colonies in his own name, inheriting the Great King's colonists and adding settlers of his own. More than a dozen such settlements were left to guard against the nomads where the province of Media met their desert steppes; they were not full Alexandrias, but their farming soldiery grew to adopt the law and language of their western landlords, and it is from these 'second class citizens' that there come the most impressive tributes to the force of Greek culture among Iranians. None has yet been excavated in the upper satrapies, but at Dura on the Euphrates, an early colony of the Successors, every legal contract known for the next four hundred years conforms to Greek law, although the majority of colonists were Oriental natives and the colony had long passed to Parthian rule; in the Lydian plains on Asia's west coast, the Hyrcanian colonists whom Cyrus had settled came to be called Macedonian Hyrcanians and even under the Roman empire they retained their Macedonian military dress. In the wild Kurdish mountains near Hamadan, where Alexander had barely trodden, settlers with Iranian names were still drawing up the deeds of sale for their vineyards in passable Greek and clear Greek law a century after Greek rule in Asia had ended, the most compelling ev
idence so far for the spread of the language through inaccessible comers of Iran. They were surely descendants of cavalry-colonists, planted there by Alexander's early successors.

  Through his court and his cities. Alexander had brought Greek speech and customs to some 100,000 Orientals from the upper satrapies alone; they would widen from one generation to the next, though the numbers of Alexander's first hellenizers are irrelevant, as Greek was the culture of the government and so it was bound to dominate. Within its limits, hellenization had to be complete. These limits were not demanding; an Oriental became a recognized Greek simply by speaking the language and sharing the games and customs of a Greek court or community. He did not have to change his religion and his colour was irrelevant; the one bar was nudity, for the Greeks exercised naked in gymnasiums, a habit which Orientals found repugnant and embarrassing; and not the least of the worries of hellenizing Jews in their new Jerusalem was that they should be seen by fellow athletes to be circumcised. The names 'Greek' and 'Macedonian' were freely applied to Jews, Syrians, Egyptians or Persians provided that they spoke Greek and adopted Greek customs, if not Greek gods; to the first Christians, the word Hellene applied to every pagan, regardless of race or religion.