Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT, the man who would make all the difference, was born in July of 356 B.C., son of Philip II, king of the Greek outpost of Macedon, and a mother who was determined that her child would grow up to be greater than his father. During Alexander’s childhood, Philip’s ambition made Macedon feared; and he gradually extended its power south into the Greek peninsulas and east through the Balkans, creating a sort of “greater Greece,” a unity of politics, language, and culture, where Philip was overlord, the Greek gods were given uniform worship, and Greek culture heroes from Socrates to Herodotus were held in high esteem.

  His father’s aggressions frightened the child Alexander, but for one reason only: “There will be nothing left for me to conquer,” pouted the prince, when news of his progenitor’s sensational victories was brought to him. While still a teenager, Alexander successfully acted as regent in his father’s absence and at eighteen was given command of the left wing of the Macedonian cavalry at the battle of Chaeronea, which, thanks largely to Alexander’s brilliant performance, smashed the combined might of the Greek city-states of Athens, principal city of mainland Greece, and Thebes, chief city of Boeotia and Oedipus’s legendary capital. If Chaeronea was decisive for world history, it was also decisive for Alexander’s destiny: ever after he was seen as unstoppable. This beautiful boy of the “melting eye,” who modestly inclined his head to one side, had overcome the strength of the Athenian federation, even to the extent of crushing the mystical might of the Sacred Band of Thebes, a supposedly invincible posse of superheroes.

  It helps to have a mother who believes in you, one who whispers constantly in your perfectly formed little ear that you are the beloved of the gods and your father is just a temporary obstacle. Scarcely a year after the glorious victory at Chaeronea, Philip, full of himself, humiliated Alexander’s mother, the meddlesome Olympias, by taking another, much younger wife. It is not surprising that the names of Olympias and Alexander were ever after linked to the conspiracy that all assumed lay behind the savage assassination of the king during the first year of his new marriage.

  Alexander found himself at twenty king of Macedon, hegemon (or “leader”) of the Corinthian League of Greek city-states that his father had formed in the aftermath of Chaeronea, and commander in chief of an army of forty thousand troops and 160 warships that Philip had assembled to challenge the hegemony of the fabulous and detested Persian empire, which lay to the east. Before setting out for Persia, Alexander took the time to put down an annoying little rebellion among the Thebans, unhappy with their reduced status. The young king acted swiftly and with appalling decisiveness: he massacred the Thebans, destroyed their city, and enslaved the survivors. This unrestrained cruelty, carried out with cool calculation and obviously intended as a universal lesson, resounded through the Greek world, and no other city-state dared give trouble during the long absence of the king throughout his coming years of war.

  It took Alexander several years to break the power of Persia. In November of 333 at the battle of Issus in the Syrian mountains, Darius III, king of the Persians, himself led his army and was forced to flee the field. In responding dismissively to Darius’s subsequent suit for peace, Alexander signed himself “Lord of Asia,” giving the first hint that what he had in mind was a prize greater than even greater Persia, in its day the most extensive empire the world had known. During the grueling course of Alexander’s seven-month siege of Tyre, the Phoenician port city on the Levantine coast that had supplied the backbone of Darius’s fleet, Darius made the desperate offer of half his kingdom. “Heaven cannot support two suns, nor earth two masters,” replied the Lord of Asia, who went on to destroy the entire Persian fleet and to make of Tyre the same sort of terrifying example he had made of Thebes. What the Greeks had learned the Asians now knew: do not cross Alexander.

  He traveled south, captured Gaza, and invaded Egypt, where the charred catastrophes of Thebes and Tyre were not forgotten and where there was now not even a whisper of opposition. There in that archaic land, mysterious even to the ancients, the bulbous crown of Egypt was placed on his golden locks, and he was declared Pharaoh and “Son of God.” To Egyptians the god in question was Amon-Ra, the sun; to Alexander’s Greek battalions, it was Zeus, the god of gods. And in Egypt, Alexander built at the mouth of the Nile what would become the greatest city of the ancient world for the next two hundred years—Alexandria, the first of dozens by that name throughout the growing empire of the Son of God.

  But Alexander had more work before him. Darius had escaped his clutches and was gathering a new army in the heart of Persia. Alexander pursued him, winning the decisive battle of Gaugamela on the Tigris, after which Darius contrived his penultimate escape. Alexander let him go and set his face toward capturing Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis, Darius’s capital, where he burned the royal palace to the ground. In June of 330, the Macedonian changed course and set out in full pursuit of the Persian king, who escaped him one last time only because he was stabbed to death by his disaffected deputies. The unfortunate Darius’s dying request was for Alexander to avenge him. Kings, even if they are enemies, always have something in common; and Alexander happily hunted down the regicides. After all, the King of Kings, as he began to style himself, cannot allow the murder of his revered predecessor to go unpunished. Alexander, who could now portray himself as Darius’s avenger and legitimate successor, also began to assume the elaborate dress, paint, and bodily ornamentation of the Persian royal court—Oriental affectations that did not sit well with his homespun Macedonian guard, the same Macedonians who had been so rigorously trained by his late father. What decorations he did not keep for himself he sent home, along with massive quantities of precious plate and purple, to Mother.

  The King of Kings still had plenty of opposition on his hands, obdurate resistance especially in Bactria and Sogdiana, satrapies to the north and east (that correspond roughly to today’s Afghanistan and Uzbekistan). His pacification of these difficult areas was aided mightily by his taking in late 328 a Sogdian princess for wife. Her name was Roxane. She was young, she was beautiful, and she seems to have been the unwitting victim of an ancient public relations scheme to give the unpopular new king a better image with truculent ethnics in the far northeast of his domains. The word went out that Alexander and Roxane were madly in love. Of course, the royal marriage, though it produced an heir, didn’t mean that the King of Kings had to give up his favorite catamite, who continued to keep his accustomed place in the royal bed. This marriage to a foreign prisoner of war was no more popular with the Macedonians than was Alexander’s new wardrobe.

  The King of Kings began to establish settlements in the outlying territories, garrisons commanded by his faithful Macedonians. They were labeled new Greek “cities,” and the motive ascribed to Alexander in creating them was that he wished to spread the benefits of Greek culture. In reality, these fortifications kept the population quiescent and awarded to fed-up Macedonian warriors the customary spoils of victory—a free hand in the oppression of the local populations and the rape of their economies.

  In every age, professional soldiers, especially those engaged for years in combat, have been heavy drinkers, and Alexander and his men were no exception. But Alexander, it was noticed, had begun to drink more heavily than most and to grow unreasonable and violent on such occasions. One night, in his cups, Alexander killed Black Clitus, a trusty old lieutenant of Philip’s who had once saved Alexander’s life, for deriding the increasing “Orientalism” of the Alexandrine court. Alexander had even begun to insist that his subjects approach him by falling forward on the ground in complete prostrations, as Darius’s had done, for in the East the king was taken for a god. When the royal pages were discovered plotting Alexander’s murder, they were of course summarily executed, but not before giving as the justification for their attempt the king’s exceedingly un-Greek behavior. Alexander, increasingly isolated, trusted ever fewer counselors and could no longer treat anyone, even the most belaureled veteran of his f
ather’s campaigns, as an intimate. The exception was young Hephestion, his favorite boon companion, who never lost the king’s confidence.

  THE EMPIRE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  At the time of his death in 323 B.C., the territories under Alexander’s sway stretched from the Greek mainland in the west to the east banks of the rivers Indus and Hyphasis in central Asia and as far south as southern Egypt. (The Persian Empire, which Alexander conquered, had also been extensive: beginning in the area of Persepolis, it had stretched far north into the Caucasus on both sides of the Caspian Sea; but it never reached as far as Europe, Africa, or Asia east of the Indus.) The broken line along the Persian Gulf shows the route of the Greek fleet as it returned home from Alexander’s last campaign.

  Alexander, now in command of forces that numbered in the hundred thousands (goodly numbers in a time when the population of the globe was less than two hundred million), continued to look east. Though once Persia was conquered he sent home the troops of the Corinthian League, whom he had never trusted, he did not mean to stop even at the farthest frontiers of the old empire. Ahead lay India and then, so it was thought, the Great Sea—the very end of the earth. What was to prevent him from ruling the world?

  The Greek forces entered the mountains of the Hindu Kush in 327 and, with increasing savagery, carved a path for themselves as far east as the River Hyphasis (Beas in modern Pakistan), at which point the unthinkable happened: the army refused to go farther. Alexander had to concede; but he did choose the route home—not the way they’d come but a journey down the Indus, then a forced march west into Persia. It was an insane project, not only because much of the terrain was unknown, but because Alexander’s favored route contained highly fortified cities guarded by Indian warriors as adept at warfare as any Macedonian and led by Brahmins, whose fierce ancestors had come from the same stock of marauding Indo-European horsemen as the Greek nobles. Even for Alexander’s hardened troops the bloodshed was unparalleled; and then, once they reached the delta of the Indus, Alexander insisted that they make their way across the Gedrosian desert, which was known to have defeated every army that had ever attempted to traverse it. Where all others had failed, even the legendary Semiramis and Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian empire, Alexander would succeed. If he could not have the whole world, he would at least leave an indelible reputation as the only invincible man.

  The Greek army made it through the desert—about a quarter of them, that is. The others, as many as ninety thousand men, were left to die on the desert floor, their bodies sucked dry by a pitiless sun. Along the Persian coast, the soldiers who remained on their feet at last caught sight of the fleet, which managed to sail (the first ships ever to do so) along the coast and up the Gulf all the way from the Indus to the Euphrates. Thence did the creaking vessels bear home not an army of conquering heroes but a motley cargo of bitter and broken men.

  This was early in the year 324, and Alexander had but one more year to live. His last days were troubled, not only by the intrigues and corruption of the deputies he’d left behind, but by the refusal of some Greeks to worship him as a living god, an honor he had come to expect in the East. This ruler of the world, who could have anything he wanted by snapping his fingers, seems to have been able to squeeze less and less joy out of life. He took a second wife. His court was crowded with three thousand actors and artists and as many as thirty thousand dancing boys. He was surrounded by soothsayers and priests, sacrificing, purifying, telling the future. Their oracles did not lift the king’s spirits. Hephestion’s death in late 324 took much of the remaining life out of him. He had the attending physician crucified; then, his grief still unassuaged, he fell upon the pitiable Cosseans, putting their entire nation to the sword—which remedy seems to have improved his humor, for we find him in the spring of 323 in Babylon, restless as ever, gathering a gargantuan force in preparation for invading the Arabian Peninsula. But in Babylon he fell ill, and in early June he died, weeks short of his thirty-third birthday.

  The accomplishments of Alexander, fueled by his incomparable daring, inspired ancient writers. Where modern historians count the casualties and detect cruelty and inhumanity, the ancients saw only glory. Public action—that is, by war and conquest—was the most dangerous and, in consequence, the most noble of all human endeavors. Alexander was, therefore, “the Great,” the greatest man who had ever lived. If Plato was the measure of all subsequent philosophy and Phidias of all attempts to carve a man in marble, Alexander was the measure of man himself. We may think such a value system outmoded or remote, but it was not so long ago that Napolean enchanted Europe in his quest to be the modern Alexander, nor were such values unknown to the generals and kommandants of the twentieth century, and God knows they continue to infect the brains of all those who take up weapons of destruction in what they believe to be a noble cause. Indeed, down the whole course of history, the invincible warrior with raised sword has been the archetypal hero of the human race.

  Wherever one may stand on these matters, in one thing Alexander’s accomplishment is unassailable. The man loved Greek, both as a language and as a literature. His love of reading was undoubtedly an inspiration to his successors, who vied with one another not only politically and militarily but culturally, each dynasty meaning to outdo the others in its commitment to learning and literature. In the Great King’s eponymous city of Egyptian Alexandria, for instance, there rose ancient civilization’s most massive library, containing (or so it was thought) “all the books in the world,” a library whose destruction by fire in 47 B.C. is lamented to this day. And though it would be Eurocentrically embarrassing and a little absurd to assert, as was still asserted well into this century, that Alexander succeeded in raising the whole world to the highest standards of civilization (Greek civilization, that is), he did unite the known world by giving it a universal language. Since the racist Greeks believed all languages but theirs defective, they refused to learn the tongues of their conquered neighbors, thus forcing everyone else to learn at least a little Greek. This language as it evolved in popular parlance lacked many of the elegant refinements of Plato, but it was a Greek everyone could learn—a koine (or common) tongue, as it was called—and it was serviceable and strong.

  Languages bring values with them, and one cannot learn a language without making one’s own the things the civilization that developed the language considers important. The warrior as the greatest of all human figures—this was not something confined to the Greeks but enshrined in every ancient language (which is why it still lies hidden in the languages of our day). But the Greeks had their own powerful words and phrases which, once learned, gave the speaker a specifically Greek outlook. One could not learn Greek without reading Homer, and one could not read Homer without encountering the Greek heroes and the Greek gods. Alexander, who slept with his dagger and a copy of the Iliad under his pillow, believed himself descended from Achilles, the greatest of all Greek warriors, as well as from Hercules, the god of invincible strength, and from Asiatic Dionysos, the dark, impetuous, havoc-provoking god of wine. In learning to read Homer and the Greek playwrights, one ingested a whole mythology, indeed a whole psychology. In reading Plato and the Stoics, one absorbed a whole philosophy of life. By making use of the rhetorical models of Demosthenes,1 the student of Greek learned how to write a letter and to shape a speech—how to argue a point and present his arguments to best advantage.

  We needn’t imagine that every Iranian garrison commander had studied Demosthenes or that every Levantine merchant could quote Homer to understand that whatever Greek they knew affected their outlook. Similarly, common English words and phrases adopted nowadays throughout the world give even simple people, living in cultures bound by non-Western myths, access to such values as progress, democracy, technology, and capitalism (even if one should see these values through the eyes of inflexible traditionalists: as contempt for traditions of authority and discipline and love of chaos and of self at the expense of the common good).

>   And just as anyone in our world may turn on a television and see well-stocked refrigerators and family cars as desirable components of the American Way of Life, anyone in the ancient world that Alexander had united could raise his eyes to the horizon and see there the reasonable Greek temple, decorated with the stories of gods and heroes, place of prayers and offerings to the forces of fate. Nearby was the gymnasion (from which we derive our word gymnasium and the Germans their word for high school), where young male athletes trained in the nude and, after their vigorous workouts, sat at the feet of a philosopher, as Alexander had once sat at the feet of Aristotle, Plato’s most famous pupil, whom his father had employed as royal tutor.2 (This was not a simple act of paternal affection on Philip’s part. The Greeks thought of the Macedonians as shabby cousins at best, and it was essential for the Macedonian royal family to assert convincingly its Greek bona fides.) Within the compass of Alexander’s far-flung empire, then, Greek was the lingua franca, disseminated first by soldiers and administrators, then by the businessmen, traders, priests, oracles, trainers, and tutors who followed in their wake; and everywhere one was confronted with Greek assumptions, Greek images, the Greek Way of Life.