Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Because it excluded nobody, Greek culture could spread universally; to do so, it also had to seem impressive. Nowadays, the meek surrender of the East to western culture is a surrender to technology and industrial growth, helped by the by-ways of tourism, pop-songs and the drip-dry world of the businessman. In Alexander's empire, land transport was painfully slow and only the patient and hardy could travel; economically, the Greeks promised no miracle and although Cleomenes and the Ptolemies primed the royal economy of Egypt for the coins with which to hire their troops and sailors, it was the government who gained by this skilful change, not the vast mass of Egyptians. The founding of Egyptian Alexandria and the reopening of the sea route from India to the west were proof that Alexander had his father's awareness of the merits of trade, but the trade he inspired did not work deeply into the agricultural world of most of Asia. Alexandria's trade only flourished through the Greek middlemen of nearby Rhodes and through customer cities with the harbour or river to receive it, while the trade from India was the hazardous life of a minority, bringing luxuries west to the courts of the rich, not the villages of tribes and peasants. By opening a string of new mints from Sardis to Babylon, Alexander had encouraged a wide coinage on the same Athenian standard which had already prevailed in the satraps' mints on the Asian coast; more coins then circulated on a standard and a royal design which was generally used in Greece, and for the trading minority and the hired soldiery this was no doubt a useful convenience. But in this agricultural world where most men lived by a natural economy, the scattered finds of small everyday coins cannot support the sweeping theories of coinage which collectors of valuable gold and silver pieces have written into the classical past; Alexander has even been blamed for promoting inflation in the Aegean by coining too rapidly from Darius's vast treasures, as if the farming society of Greece would ever have been troubled by the fluctuations of his silver tetradrachms or this alleged glut of precious coin, sound proof of which has still to be discovered. As for Asia's nomads and country villagers, they had no need for a coinage which tended to circulate, if at all, in towns. The most notable find of Alexander's small-change coins in Iran are the bronze obols in the mouths of nomads' skeletons beyond the Oxus, presumably placed for the customary Greek offering to Charon the ferryman, who shipped the dead across the river of the Greek underworld.

  If the Greeks promised no wide prosperity, like their western heirs they impressed the East with their technical skill. In places it was as if they were working on an underdeveloped 'third world': 'When the Indians saw sponges in use among the Macedonians,' wrote Nearchus, 'they imitated them by sewing hairs and string into a sort of wool; then they pressed the wool to make it like felt, carded it and dyed it different colours. Many of them, too, were quick to learn to make the "rubbers" which we used for massage and the flasks in which we carried our oil'. Technically the Indians could train elephants and cure the bite of their poisonous snakes, but it was probably a Greek engineer who first devised the howdah for the elephant's back, and Greek doctors were always used for the surgery of serious flesh wounds. 'The Indians here have huge resources of salt, but they are very naive about what they own ...' Alexander's Greek prospector reported critically on the minerals of each Asian province and though mining was an ancient art in Asia, the Greeks may have introduced the skill of splitting rocks by fire to tribesmen who formerly picked precious stones from the beds of their fast-flowing rivers. Greek surveyors paced out the first accurate distances through lands which had otherwise been measured by the variable stages of an hour's journey; irrigation had long been the basic skill of Iranian farmers, but two new Alexandrias show signs of an improved water system, probably due to their Greek inhabitants. The tools and calendar of agriculture are likely to have changed little, for local lore is always authoritative and its fertile results had impressed Greek observers. However, the spreading of Asia's precious trees and plants though the open frontiers of Greek Asia can be traced in the vigorous efforts of the Ptolemies to import new crops and spices into Egypt; minor kings in Greek Asia continued their botanical example. In their buildings Greek architects could manage a wider unsupported roof-span than the builders of Persepolis, while the simple rectangle of their city-planning was adopted in oases along the Oxus and continued by the nomads who finally burst on their cities; their towered walls and ditches were a necessary defence to their own new principles of siege-craft, powered by the torsion-spring which had so surprised the Oxus nomads. In Syria, the Greeks even dug new harbours from bays which had been left 'natural' by their able Phoenician predecessors.

  This power of invention was all the more impressive for being a break with the Persian past. The Persians had borrowed their skills from their subjects, but the Greeks brought their own with them and then created more. The golden age of experimental Greek science under the patronage of the Ptolemies in Egyptian Alexandria is the purest tribute to the Greeks' gifted intellect, for no Persian ever calibrated a catapult, studied human anatomy, applied steam power to toys or divided the world into zones of climate. If Greek science was for too long the follower of Aristotle's dogmatism, always more theoretical than applied, it was nonetheless the symptom of a new mental liveliness. The financial exploitation of Egypt was a matter for Greeks, as the Pharaohs had already realized; under the Ptolemies in Alexandria, taxation, agriculture, improved canals, a coinage and commercial law helped to open a new economy to the Greek world. Visiting Greek doctors took the study of human anatomy far beyond Egyptian magic; the royal library encouraged the birth of classical philology and the deadening rise of textual scholarship. Whereas Babylon had been Asia's intellectual centre, the Greeks took the Babylonian records of astronomy and deduced the precession of the equinoxes which no compiler had ever detected; while a Babylonian wrote a book on the magical properties of stones, a Greek in the Successor's new Babylonian capital was arguing that the earth went round the sun and that the tides must be affected by the phases of the moon. Babylonians treated the particular, but the Greeks saw the general, and it was only to be expected that the liveliest political culture in the world should influence local government, the form of a Babylonian decree and the phrasing of a Jewish manifesto. The Greeks had an elegant mathematical theory and the power of abstract reasoning; a simple cell for electroplating silver on to copper has been found in Parthian Babylonia, and it is natural to credit its invention to a Greek.

  To the tribes and villages of Iran, these skills must have appeared in the light of rifles and telescopes to their first Indian observers. The Greeks had more fundamental weapons, their art and their language, the two skills which still impress the classical past on an industrial world. To carve and to think in Greek was to work in a finer and more sensitive idiom, for it was well said by a Roman in the age of disputed theologies that if he started to discuss the Trinity in Latin, he could not avoid any one of three grave heresies. These new tools opened up a new world; there is no written history of the hellenization of the upper satrapies, but there are their arts and a few inscriptions and these are perhaps more revealing than mere events.

  In Iran, Alexander had left Greek as the one written language. No Iranian dialect was literate and so the Persians' lame Aramaic was continued for native administration. With the annoying persistence of a pidgin jargon its script flourished far and long as a result, passing into Khwarezm beyond the Oxus where it served as the first native alphabet five hundred years after Alexander, and then as far as China where it was inscribed centuries later on the Heavenly Temple in Peking. It was no competitor for serious thought. Although the long tradition of the Iranian minstrel continued to flower in the professional gosans who sang at the Parthians' court, In Iran Greek was the only language for written poems and for the education of soldiers in each Alexandria; so the Greek classics appealed to the East with an impact which has only since been equalled by popular songs of the modern West. At the palace of Nisa, court of the Parthian kings on the lower Oxus, Greek plays were performed before an audie
nce of former nomads, while among the palace documents directions have been found for the making of a mask for a tragic actor. In neighbouring Armenia, verses of Euripides were inscribed, perhaps as a school text, at a time when the province was ruled by an independent Iranian king; in Roman times, the tale of Castor and Pollux was known in the Swat highlands above the Indus; in the Punjab, five hundred years after Alexander, Indian Buddhists still carved the tale of the Trojan Horse alongside the life of their Buddha, a theme which is now known to have passed to them directly from Alexander's heirs in the neighbouring Greek kingdom of Bactria. Homer was always said to have been translated into an Indian language, and the extraordinary find of inscriptions in Ceylon which appear to discuss him together with Plato, Aristotle and Alexander in their Indian names more than five hundred years after Greek rule in Iran had ended should remove any doubts that the fate of Greek poetry in the East was brief or insignificant. When the Greek kingdoms fell, the Persian Gulf traders could still carry their legacy east by ship. The Persian kings had first settled Ionian Greeks as sailors in the ports near Susa, and their persistent Greek culture is the background to the Greek after-glow in western India.

  The same is true of art. The coins and the silver trappings of the Greeks in Bactria are of the highest craftsmanship, and at the Parthians' palace of Nisa, their profound effect on Iranian neighbours can now be appreciated. Iranian drinking-cups were carved with the legend of Dionysus; Aphrodite, Heracles and Hera were sculpted in marble; the palace included a gymnasium and columns with acanthus leaves, a style which left its trace in the Punjab's art for another four hundred years. These kings were the sons of Iranian nomads, and yet they took to Greek art like Czarist Russians playing with French civilities; their taste had an astonishingly long history both among the nobles and the alternative culture of the nomads. Greek influence can be traced in the pattern of the oriental carpets found in central Asia of the same broad date as Nisa, again in the sculpture and architecture of an Iranian palace and temple at Surkh Kotal in Afghanistan a century after nomads had seized Greek Bactria, in the coins placed for Charon in the mouths of the dead beyond Alexander's north-east frontier and in the clay figures made in Samarkand some seven hundred years after the last Greek Bactrian king. Through Alexander's planned sea route from Egyptian Alexandria along the Persian Gulf to the river Indus the Greek art of Alexandria reached to the Punjab and outer Iran for at least five hundred yean; its designs may have helped the long life of Greek art in the area, and they certainly influenced the first carved Buddhist reliefs of north-west India. They had also come by the route which Alexander had determined to reopen.

  And yet the hellenization of Iran was not deep or wide enough for permanent results. It was competing with an alternative, the Iranian nobility to whom a town was more the sum of its great families than a self-governing citizenry in an expanse of royal land. To these Iranians the family was life's one continuity, marked out by genealogies and rigid rule of precedence; a culture which spread through cities and administrators could not work down through their looser forms of rural government. Already at Nisa, the Parthians' documents were written in Aramaic, not Greek, and the courtiers' names were all Iranian, while the old words of rural Iranian government continued unchanged, the food-levy for the king's table, the land tax and the village commissioner, the satrapies and the baronial castles. 'Whosoever shall compel you to go with him a mile, go with him twain'; the word which Christ used for this requisitioning in hellenized Judaea was the Persians' old word for forced service on the stations of their Royal Road. In the country, Alexander had not come to change. His empire of vast spaces and wooded mountains could not be travelled swiftly or cheaply by centralized officials, so he chose to balance the old Persian forms. The new Greek cities were his chosen points of loyalty among tribesmen and desert-chieftains and once those cities fell to nomads or to the stronger pull of family allegiance, Iran had only the memories of Persian rule on which to feed; it was not by chance that the design of the throne of Achaemenid Persia lived on under Greek rule in the royal art of upper Iran. Persia, moreover, was still prepared to step back into her past, for Alexander's Successors had left the Persians' mountainous home province to Persian client-kings, and naturally, they had made no parade of hellenism. Five hundred years after Alexander, it was from this 'deep south' of Iranian feeling that the great Persian revival began, with a new line of kings, who at once brought back the titles of Darius's Empire. But this new Persia's triumphs were also inscribed on rock in an official Greek translation. Trapped between nomads and tribal barons, the heirs to Alexander's Greek cities had at last given way to a Persian court of country squires, but the embers of hellenism were still seen to glow in the brighter fire of Sassanid Persia.

  During the centuries of their slow decline, the Greeks' own education by the East is a far more delicate subject. Although to western geographers, Alexander's conquests seemed to have opened a wider and more accurate knowledge of a far East where men spoke Greek, their own views of the East were not noticeably more correct. The one advancement may have been spiritual rather than scientific. Like western intellectuals who idealized Stalinist Russia, distant academics fathered Utopian ideals on far eastern peoples whom they had not seen; this attitude was possible because they felt that the philosophy of the East had a claim to their respect. Though debates between Oriental wise men and Greek philosophers had already featured in Greek literature, under Greek rule the theme persisted that the East possessed the older and more venerable wisdom. So far from suppressing Oriental gods the Greeks identified them with their own and a certain attitude of deference shows through the art of the gods they combined. In portraits of Greco-Oriental deities, especially the many Eastern mother-goddesses, the oriental element tends to be dominant; it is easy to imagine how the diverse religion of the Olympians gave ground before the moral and spiritual faiths of Zoroaster and Buddha and the tenderer goddesses that characterized the obedient societies of the East, not the self-willed cities of free Greece. There are hints of this, even in the very limited evidence; there were Macedonians, probably in the colonics of Asia Minor, who followed the Magi and took to the Iranians' fire-worship, while in the Greek cities of western Asia, the influence of the Iranian families who held the city's priesthoods of the goddess Artemis, their own Anahita, cannot have been insignificant. When the kings of Greek Bactria put pagan Indian gods on their coinage, they may have intended more than a tactful appeal to the Indians in their kingdoms, while among the Greeks abandoned to Chandragupta and his Indian successors, a conversion to Buddhism is very likely, not least through their native marriages. An official in the restored Greek kingdoms of north-west India made a dedication to Buddha in Greek, while another, perhaps a Macedonian, did likewise two hundred years after the ending of Greek rule; these wisps of evidence suggest Greek Buddhists were not uncommon. To those who see the wide appeal of eastern religion among the youth of the industrially dominant West there is nothing surprising about the Greeks' conversion.

  If the Greeks were aware of a certain wisdom in the Orient, they still interpreted it in their own western terms. Unlike the British, who encouraged the study of native Indian culture, the Greeks took little interest in eastern tradition except where they could bend it to concepts of their own; they saw the East through eyes trained by Plato and Herodotus and their own culture determined the points which they chose to notice. Each eastern tribe and community was fitted into the Greeks' prehistory of myth and heroes without respect for their independent origins; Buddha became a descendant of a fellow-soldier of Dionysus's Indian invasion, just as Thessalians in Alexander's army had already explained the Armenians as sons of their hero Jason, because they wore clothes of Thessalian style. No Greek writer is known to have spoken an Iranian dialect, and Orientals who wrote Greek books on their kingdoms' history tailored their narrative to concepts common to a Greek; a hellenized author could not distance himself from the Greek attitudes he chose to share. For Greeks, Zoroaster the
prophet was described more as a magician than a religious reformer; it is only a worthless legend that Alexander arranged a Greek translation of the many Zoroastrian scriptures which he found at Persepolis.

  When the history of the hellenized Orient is known more fully, it will still seem a story of missed opportunities, of new frontiers thrown away by the quarrels of Alexander's Successors. Alexander's own intentions will never be certain, but as he passed through the villages and tribal wastes beyond Hamadan, it must have been easy (except to our post-colonial fashion) to feel that a Greek upbringing and Greek aspirations were a power from a superior world. The wide and absolute break with the past that came over the East after Alexander's conquest had so far seemed more obvious to historians of eastern art than to students of the written and scattered evidence. But art is a measure of society and the more that is known of it, the more Alexander deserves to be seen as decisive.