by Andrew Marr
He also ordered that the names of another ten thousand Macedonians who had married Asiatic women should be registered. It was an astonishing experiment in cultural mixing – as if Queen Victoria had ordered her English, Irish and Scottish troops to take Hindu and Muslim brides, or as if General Custer instead of fighting at Big Horn had tried to mate the US Cavalry with Sioux squaws. Sadly, it seems, few of the marriages lasted very long, though Alexander’s successors after the break-up of his empire did put down roots across parts of Asia, allowing a new form of Greekness to spread far beyond the Mediterranean.
Further battles had preceded this, as Alexander led his armies into what is now Pakistan and India, where they fought their first war elephants. His horse Bucephalus was killed east of the Indus, and his lover Hephaestion died soon afterwards; grief, wounds and the effects of heavy drinking began to wear Alexander down. His troops, on the far side of the known world, had had enough, and they eventually mutinied at the prospect of further advances against Indian rulers. They demanded to return home. Even Alexander could not resist. He pulled back, returning eventually to Babylon, where he raised a funeral pyre to Hephaestion. Now in charge of a vast spread of the world’s surface, stretching from the Himalayas to the Balkans, he planned new campaigns, into Arabia, then along the African coast and into Italy. Had he lived, he might even have snuffed out an obscure but stroppy and ambitious city called Rome. Some say he was poisoned. More likely he caught a bug, perhaps typhoid fever; but in June 323, aged thirty-three, Alexander died in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace.
His astonishing life makes the case for war, and the case against it. Inspired by Greek culture and greedily curious about the world of the Persians and Indians, he acted as a kind of giant bloody cultural whisk. The Greek world would now have huge influence in Asia Minor, Egypt, and deep into Mesopotamia. A rash of new Greek-style cities were founded, even though Alexander’s empire had lasted for a hummingbird’s wingbeat. His generals divided most of the classical world between them, and a new period of Greek, or Hellenistic, culture flowered. Philosophers opened new schools, sculptors and painters found work in new places, and something like a common language began to spread.
Yet the slaughters, the mass deportations and burnings that Alexander was also responsible for did not produce a stable or attractive political system. He had spread the look of classical Greece, but not its essence. He could never have done so, because its essence was independent-minded and civic. It was bottom-up, not top-down. Democracy cannot be imposed with spears (or guns). Alexander’s was an imperial vision spanning many cultures, but his huge military success merely pushed the Mediterranean back to a world of kings and emperors, local tyrants and neighbourhood dynasties. It is possible that the reader may think of later parallels. Alexander smoothed the ground for the Roman invaders – at least, the Roman emperors thought so. Inspired by Homer’s heroes, and irresistibly heroic himself, he showed the limits of what heroes can do. Alexander was the gravedigger of the great Greek experiment, never its champion.
Part Three
THE SWORD AND THE WORD
From 300 BC to around AD 600: Classical Empires in China, India and Europe and Their Confrontation with New Religions
By the time of Jesus’s birth, around half the human beings alive on the planet lived under one of two great empires. Even if many of them were barely aware of the fact – for the peasants and farmers far from great cities heard about the outside world rarely and only in garbled form – this was a new thing in world history. It would never happen again. Rome and Han China emerged at roughly the same time and ruled over roughly the same number of people – 45 million in the case of Rome at its imperial peak, 57.6 million according to a Han tax census. Both covered roughly the same amount of territory, some four million square kilometres, though one was based on the edges of an inland sea, and the other on vast plains intersected by rivers. Their armies, marching in disciplined formations with uniform armour and weapons, chariots and cavalry, looked similar too.
Romans revered their household gods and their ancestors; so did the Chinese. But they were both practical, down-to-earth cultures. Each regarded themselves as more serious, disciplined and civilized than any possible rival. The Roman emperors claimed to rule orbis terrarum, ‘the whole world’. Their Chinese rivals ruled the empire of ‘all under heaven’. Roman emperors claimed divinity, posing as gods answerable only to Jupiter. Chinese emperors claimed a similar semi-divine status. The Romans built awe-inspiring walls to keep out the barbarians, and so did the Chinese. The Romans had their arrow-straight roads, the Chinese their long straight canals. Their empires were even divided into around the same number of administrative units. Their troops were urged on with very practical benefits – the Chinese won money and extra status for every severed enemy head they presented after battle, while valorous Romans could win land at home.
The Roman Empire had been made possible by one rising power on the edge of the Mediterranean world defeating its squabbling rivals; Han ascendancy was based on the final resolution of war between seven states, imposed by one from the margins. They knew little of each other, these Romans and Chinese. They were some 4,500 miles apart, separated by baking deserts and mountain ranges; the sea route was two thousand miles longer than that.1 Yet their empires almost touched fingers. There seems to have been a confused Chinese notion of an alternative, possibly mythical, other China somewhere in the far west, while the Roman word Seres may refer to the Chinese.
In AD 97 a Chinese general, Ban Chao, tried to send an envoy to Rome to suggest a joint pincer movement against the Parthians, who with their brilliant cavalry were causing equal pain to both empires. The envoy never made it through to the emperor Trajan. It was just too far. He gave up and turned back. Thus, one of the great ‘what ifs’ was lost at some dusty way-station east of Egypt.2 The envoy, Gan Ying, did, however, pick up rumours about the Romans, reporting back that they had more than four hundred walled towns and a capital city near the mouth of a river; that they were ‘tall and honest’ and that they selected kings from the worthiest men who, if calamity came, would accept demotion without getting angry.3 Gan Ying said the Roman ‘king’ had thirty-six leaders with whom he discussed events of the day, and that he took petitions from the common people. This was true; there is some vague impression of the Senate conveyed here, and it is clear that the notion of politics, involving losers and winners, was unfamiliar and interesting to the Chinese.
And that was not the only fascinating thing about the Romans. Gan Ying was particularly excited to report that they were amazing conjurors who could produce fire from their mouths and juggle twelve balls at a time.
Seventy years later, according to Chinese records, a Roman delegation arrived by sea in Vietnam, then part of the Chinese empire, possibly sent by the great philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. They were sent away; the only links remained distant trading ones. Around the time of Christ, Roman women were wearing scandalously semitransparent silk dresses, which caused much head-shaking amongst Roman moralists. This silk came from China, via long sea voyages from Vietnam to what is now Sri Lanka and then on to Egypt. Roman glassware and coins have been found in China. There is even a faint possibility that Roman legionaries and Han soldiers fought one another in Kyrgyzstan, the Romans in ‘fish-scale formation’, after being captured by Parthians in 54 BC.
The empires lasted a similar length of time. The Romans, who had started as unimportant town-dwellers in central Italy, grew partly by attracting migrants and partly thanks to their astonishingly successful and very violent military campaigns. Their rise to hegemony began with the fall of the Greek kingdoms established after Alexander’s career, and with the destruction of their North African rival, Carthage, in 149–6 BC. Some seventy years earlier, China’s first emperor had united the former warring states there. The Roman world would fall apart into two empires: the Western, which dissolved after AD400, and the Eastern (or Byzantine), which lasted until the fall of Constantinople in
1453 to the Ottoman Turks. The Han empire was gone by AD 220, though united China only really disintegrated in 317. (Even then, the southern half, less damaged by invasion and culturally more conservative, bears comparison with the long survival of the Eastern Roman Empire.)
So each of these great empires lasted for around half a millennium, not such a long time compared with the earlier civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, but impressive by modern democratic standards. A question that is being increasingly asked by historians, as today’s China rises, is whether our world, with a single united China but a fragmented Europe, derives in any way from the Roman and Han foundational experiences. After all, China remained broadly politically united for around half the time after the rise of its first emperor, while the Mediterranean and European west was never again united after the fall of Rome. Why?
Geography, say some. China is divided by river valleys and mountains but is also surrounded and cut off from the rest of the world by deserts and seas. Achieving political unity was no easy job. It has been calculated that between 656 and 221 BC there were no fewer than 256 separate wars in China. But once that phase had passed there was a strong topographical logic to this single area, with its long belly-shaped coast. As soon as roads, canals and walls had drawn the lines of communication and defence, they tended to stay put. Invasions from outside would keep challenging the country, but they failed to wipe away the cultural map of the One China.
The Mediterranean and European world is very different. True, the ‘middle sea’ made it easier to move around the classical Roman Empire, but there were fewer natural barriers to halt invaders, while Europe was divided by innumerable rivers, flowing in all directions, and by mountain ranges. Geographically it was an awkward, rumpled, riven peninsula, and therefore always less likely to hold together politically.
While instantly satisfying, this explanation seems a little too slick. For centuries China was divided. Her people in the north and south pursued very different lives, spoke different languages and at times were ruled by different empires. China very nearly pushed out into the world with great ocean-going fleets. That she did not was a political decision. Meanwhile in the West, for a time it seemed as if the Eastern Roman Empire might eventually reunite the Mediterranean. Much later, rulers such as the Habsburg Charles V and the Corsican adventurer Napoleon Bonaparte came close to uniting Europe, despite those rivers and mountain ranges.
What other forces are relevant? The role played by outsiders was certainly important. The nomadic and herding people of central Asia, armed and militant, produced waves of forced migration that washed across Europe. Many settled, before being pushed to move again by another wave. In China, the steppe peoples were kept out more effectively until, with the Mongols, they utterly overwhelmed the empire. But they did so so swiftly and comprehensively that they could replace it with their own imperial rule, and therefore could maintain its unity.
Though both the Chinese and European worlds would be shaken by the arrival of challenging religions, the effect of monotheism – both Christianity and Islam – was more dramatic in the West than was the impact of Buddhism on China, where emperors were able to repress it. This meant there was an edge, a desperation, to Europe’s wars of religion which China did not experience. Monotheism would divide Western mankind into believers and outsiders, again and again, though following different patterns. Nothing quite like this happened in China where, as we shall see, law and conservative social thinking had more impact than religion. Then there are cultural differences, such as the greater difficulty of learning written Chinese, which kept a bureaucratic elite self-contained and powerful in ways not experienced in the West. These are all issues we will come back to.
The story in both China and the Roman world is, however, similarly bloody and brutal, replete with tales of cynical rulers, state terror and the persecution of dissenters. Attractively humane thinkers emerge in both worlds, and some gloriously beautiful buildings (though Han China was built mostly in wood and pounded earth, materials which, as mentioned earlier, do not survive). Yet these were also power structures erected by force and fear, able to express their beauty and philosophy only on the sweating backs of the vast majority, who were farmworkers. The Roman imperial achievement relied on the incorporation of local elites and the reputation of the legions; the Chinese more on pure force. But whether the educated elites studied the sayings of Confucius or of Christ, whether they kowtowed to an emperor or read the proclamations of a senate, armies marching under central control slaughtered rebel peoples and proclaimed their authority by means of public and deliberately repellent punishments. If might was right, centrally organized and mobilized might was righter still.
Ashoka
Before either Rome or Han China rose to its zenith, there existed another great empire, with a very different story. The third empire, which embraced perhaps a quarter of the world’s people, was that of Mauryan India. It covered almost all of modern India, excepting the far south, plus what is now Pakistan and much of Afghanistan too. Its population in the second century BC is guessed at fifty million and it began in 322 AD, when the Romans were still struggling to get to grips with central Italy and the Chinese were enduring a vicious and seemingly endless war between rival states. Yet this third empire had collapsed again by 185BC, despite the brilliance of its greatest ruler, Ashoka. After the Mauryas, who took on the classical world and defeated it, India was never able to reach out and dominate anywhere else. Much of the political and religious shape of the modern world was first settled two thousand years ago, by historical figures whose names we know.
The Mauryan rulers are on the edge of visible history, however. Ashoka was only properly identified, as a historical rather than a mythical figure, by an eighteenth-century amateur philologist called James Prinsep whose day job was running the British mint at Calcutta. Ashoka’s empire is less known and less documented than those of the Romans and Chinese, and always will be. There are three main sources. One was a Greek historian, Megasthenes, who worked for Seleucus Nicator, Alexander the Great’s general who carved his own mini-empire, centred on Persia and what is now Pakistan. Megas-thenes probably visited the great Mauryan capital city Pataliputra, which is now buried somewhere under modern Patna, undoubtedly one of the most chaotic and polluted metropolises in the world. Unfortunately, his own book has long disappeared and is known only from what later historians lifted from it. The second source is an Indian manual on how to rule, which may have been written, at least in part, by one of the advisers to the Mauryan court. And the third source is Ashoka’s own words, carved in stone and on pillars across much of India.
Ashoka’s grandfather, Chandragupta, is now believed to be the same Indian ruler identified by Megasthenes as ‘Sandrokottos’, who had met Alexander the Great. Chandragupta rose up against the previous dynasty of north India, the Nanda. With the help of an apparently wily and ruthless adviser he defeated them, and founded his own dynasty in 321 BC. His strategy had been to wear the enemy down from the outlying areas before moving towards the centre, in a long war of attrition as the former empire gradually shrank. The legend has it that he did this after hearing a woman tell her child not to eat from the middle of a dish because the centre was bound to be hotter than the edges.
Chandragupta now turned on the Greeks, so recently unbeatable, and about 303 BC defeated Seleucus. It clearly was no wipe-out, because in return for the new territories he won, Chandragupta gave Seleucus five hundred of the many thousands of war elephants he owned.4 Alexander’s had been the first Western army to face the awesome sight of Indian war elephants, and he had brought some back to Baghdad as his personal guard. For the Greeks, such a gift to Seleucus was like being given several regiments of Tiger tanks or attack-helicopters. The elephants were traded, borrowed and gifted by Greek kings: the Egyptian kings, for instance, used Indian war elephants against the Jews during their revolt, and later on they would be used against the rising power of Rome.
If the ancie
nt texts concerning government are to be believed, Chandragupta’s empire was not only warlike but highly interventionist, bureaucratic and paranoid, as he spread it across most of the Indian subcontinent. Yet we know very little about the ruler described as an Indian Julius Caesar; and less about his son, who took over after Chandragupta abdicated in 297 BC and reputedly starved himself to death as an act of pious self-denial. It is, rather, his grandson Ashoka who concerns us. He ruled from around 268 BC to 233, and was known from Buddhist writings well before a breakthrough translation of the mysterious written rock and pillar ‘edicts’ scattered across India gave him a voice in the modern world. Quite who he really was, was less clear. But these edicts, decoded in 1837 by the British mint supervisor, revealed a surprising story.
Ashoka, whose name can be translated as ‘without remorse’, began by living up to it. First there was the bloody succession battle. He may not have actually killed ninety-nine rival brothers, as the scriptures say, but the gap between his father’s death and his enthronement as king suggests a hard tussle. He then turned on one of the few parts of India not under his direct control, Kalinga, and after a terrible battle reconquered it. According to his own inscriptions, 100,000 soldiers were killed in the fight and many more people died, either from wounds or from the aftermath of the slaughter; a further 150,000 were deported.
A Caesar would have boasted of the death-toll; so would a Chinese warlord or indeed Chandragupta. Ashoka, however, seems to have had a dramatic change of heart, including a conversion to full Buddhism, perhaps at the instigation of his wife. In one of his inscriptions Ashoka said he felt remorse for this war, ‘for when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death and deportation of the people [are] extremely grievous . . . Today, if a hundredth or a thousandth part of those people who were killed or died or deported . . . were to suffer similarly, it would weigh heavily on the mind of the Beloved of the Gods [meaning himself].’ Ashoka went on, in this thirteenth rock edict, to warn his own descendants against new conquests, and called on them to impose only ‘light punishments’.