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Philip II of Macedonia, Alexander's father
Alexander, the oldest surviving image. From the British Museum.
Darius the Third, at the center in the top picture.
Macedonians are believed to have as ancestors Dorian Greeks, who had overrun other people in the area. Macedonian kings admired Greek civilization and encouraged Hellenization in their realm, including the learning of Hellenistic technical skills. Macedonians worshiped Greek gods and spoke a dialect of Greek. But it was a dialect that was difficult for the Greeks south of them to understand. Greeks to the south of the Macedonians saw the Macedonians as uncouth barbarians. They made jokes about them. Greeks to the south of the Macedonians looked upon the murderous dynastic intrigues that had marked Macedon's (Macedonia's) recent history as tribal antics. Dynastic disputes in Macedonia had provided Athens or Thebes an excuse to intervene there. But the attitude of the Greeks to the south of Macedonia would be in need of adjustment. Rather than Greeks from south of Macedonia dominating Macedonia, Macedonia was to dominate them.
In 359 BCE, the Macedonian king, Perdiccas III, was killed fighting an invasion by the Illyrians. His infant son succeeded him, and Perdiccas' twenty-two year-old brother, Philip, was made the infant's regent. Thebes and Athens backed pretenders to Macedonia's throne and Paeonian tribesmen continued to raid Macedonia from the north. Philip pushed aside his infant nephew. Perhaps he had the child murdered. Then he made himself king, taking the title Philip II.
Ruling from the city of Pella, Philip needed a few months to strengthen his army. He bought time by bribing the Illyrians and the Paeonians. And he bought time by appeasing Athens, ceding to Athens the city of Amphipolis. In 358, with his strengthened army, he invaded Paeonia. Then he led his army against the Illyrians, killing seven thousand in one battle and reversing the defeat of the year before. That year he transferred Macedonians to his kingdom's northern plain, splitting hostile groups and defining the frontier against the Illyrians. The following year he helped stabilize his western frontier by marrying Olympias, the daughter of king Neoptolemus of Epirus.
Philip claimed to be descended from Greeks of the Peloponnesian city of Argos, where Homer's king Agamemnon was said to have ruled - a city from which, it was also said, some Greek aristocrats in the 600s had emigrated to Macedonia. Philip championed Greek ways. He saw Athens as the center of Greek civilization. In his home he spoke the dialect of Greek common among the Greeks. Soon he was to have his son, Alexander, taught to play the lyre, to recite and to debate, and he was to provide Alexander with no less a tutor than the great Aristotle. Ambassadors from Athens would tell Philip that he was "thoroughly Greek." They would praise him as a drinker and praise him for his memory and ability as a speaker.
Philip was determined to strengthen his realm and to unite it into a nation. He saw that Macedonia could become a great power, and he saw opportunity in the divisions and quarrels among the Greek city-states. He knew that Macedonia had much in natural and human resources. Macedonia was developing agriculturally. Unlike many Greek states to the south, Macedonia was economically self-sufficient. It had timber. It had great mines on its northwestern and eastern frontiers. Its plains were abundant with fruit, sheep and cattle. It had grass pastures for horses. Philip encouraged trade, which provided him with more revenues. Macedonians were hard working, hard fighting and unaccustomed to the soft living and luxuries that many Greeks to the south enjoyed. And Macedonia had a great abundance of unquestioning, obedient men who lived for war.
The nobility in Macedonia had been a source of division, and Philip mitigated this by making nobles of men who supported him. Philip added to the loyalty of his subjects by creating a service for teenagers as Royal Pages, which helped foster the spirit of national identity among them and their parents. But Philip's greatest instrument of unity was his army. It was a national army, professional and highly disciplined. He trained it constantly and kept it permanently mobilized, rewarding talent with promotions and bonuses. It was an army with an elite cavalry, with men superior in horsemanship to those in Greece. It had siege weapons, and it had a new formation called the phalanx - rows of soldiers packed closely together, unweighted by body armor and carrying pikes fifteen feet in length, which was longer than those carried by the Greeks to the south.
Feeling sufficiently strong vis-à-vis Athens, in 357 Philip took back Amphipolis, a gateway to Thrace. Athens, with its powerful navy, failed to win back Amphipolis or to prevent further expansion by Philip. And, in 356, Philip took the Thracian city of Crenides and renamed it Philippi, a city from which he began controlling neighboring gold mines.
Greek cities invited Philip to join them as an ally in their quarrels with other Greek cities. And, skilled at diplomacy as well as at war, Philip made alliances. He deceived those he planned to swallow, and he fought when he had to. In 353, Philip took the city of Methone on the coast just south of Pella. He advanced south of Mount Olympus. In 352 he began dominating cities in Thessaly. In 350, he absorbed the city of Stagira, just south of Amphipolis, and within two years he had all of Chalcidice.
These successes gave Philip more land with which to support horses, more men for his armies and more revenues. He had more land to give to nobles as rewards for their loyalty, and the nobles, impressed by Philip's military successes, were now firmer in their recognition of his authority. Philip's military successes made common Macedonians feel more secure. It lifted their optimism and morale and brought him more enthusiastic support.
In 342, Philip installed his brother on the throne of Epirus. He left his sixteen year-old son, Alexander, in charge of Macedonia and led his army eastward into Thrace, reaching the city of Perinthus in 340. Philip's army laid siege to Perinthus and Byzantium, and Alexander led a force that defeated a rebellion by the Maedi people of Thrace. Then Philip backed away from his sieges against Perinthus and Byzantium. He had decided that he did not want to provoke Athens by threatening its trade route into and out of the Black Sea.
Sparta was a weakened city, and other Greek cities remained weakened by their divisions and wars. By now, Philip's kingdom was the dominant power in his league with other Greek cities. Athens and Thebes were at war against each other over control of the sacred site at Delphi, and late in the year 339 Philip took advantage of this by moving his army into central Greece. Thebes and Athens were alarmed and put aside their warring to join forces against Philip and his Greek allies. The following year, Philip defeated them, Philip gaining domination over all mainland cities except Sparta. Alexander, now eighteen, had contributed to these victories by having commanded the left-wing of Philip's army, and he had proved himself a courageous and resourceful commander. Philip garrisoned Macedonian soldiers in Thebes and stripped the city of its power in Boeotia. And he offered Athens an alliance with favorable terms that Athens was glad to accept.
Having failed at unity among themselves, the cities south of Macedonia had become united by Macedonia. Philip held autocratic authority over his league of Greek cities. He created a federal constitution and a council of representatives for his league, and he made the city of Corinth the meeting place where these representatives would settle issues that arose among them. He held all the member states responsible for contributing to order within the league: for defense against brigandage, against piracy and against trouble from those seeking a redistribution of wealth or abolition of debts. The league's politics were to be conservative, bringing an end to the trend toward reform and democracy that had begun with Solon more than two hundred years before.
Since the death of Persia's king Artaxerxes I in 425, Persia had been suffering from incompetent monarchs. Jealousies within the Persian royal family, corruption, palace and harem intrigues and regicide had occurred. Darius II, who had ruled to 404, had been unpopular and had spent much time quelling revolts. Under Artaxerxes II, the subject peoples of the Persian Empire had become restless. Artaxerxes III, had massacred his brother's family and gained the throne in 358 BCE, and he ruled by terror until he had been poisoned in 338 by one of his eunuch ministers.
Meanwhile, money that poured into Persia's royal treasury from tributes and taxes had been hoarded rather than spent, which resulted in economic stagnation. Also, Persia's aristocracy - the backbone of its military - had been growing soft. Their moderation in eating and drinking had given way to eating as a preoccupation, with meals lasting from noon to night. And they had grown accustomed to being waited on by numerous slaves.
Philip was aware of Persia's weakness. He saw opportunity to punish the Persians for their ruinous attacks on Hellenic sanctuaries the century before. Also he wished to free Greek cities in Asia Minor from Persian domination, to extend his league's naval power (which was mainly Athenian), to extend his league's commerce, and to settle people deep in Asia Minor as a buffer against Persia. Philip's league declared war and commissioned Philip to lead their armies against Persia. In the spring of 336, Philip sent an advance party of several thousand into Asia Minor, which overthrew various dictators favored by Persia, and a few Greek cities in Asia Minor joined Philip's league. But before Philip's great invasion of Asia Minor, personal problems intervened.
Philip had divorced Alexander's mother, Olympias, and had married a younger woman. Olympias and Philip attended the marriage celebration of their daughter, and there one of Philip's former close companions, who now had a bitter grudge against him, leaped upon him and murdered him. When the assassin ran to a horse to escape, Philip's bodyguards killed him, and it was never to be known for certain whether the assassination was the work of this lone individual or a conspiracy.
Philip's generals supported Alexander as Philip's successor, and Alexander restored his mother as queen of Macedonia. Soon Olympias was to execute the young woman Philip had recently married, Cleopatra, and the daughter Cleopatra had had by Philip. Alexander held an inquiry into who might have conspired with the assassin, which concluded with the announcement that the assassination was the work of Persian agents.
Philip's passing created hope for freedom among some Greeks. And, in 335, Thebans heard and believed a rumor that Alexander had also died. They revolted and trapped a Macedonian garrison in their city's citadel. Alexander led an army to Thebes, and in street fighting he overpowered the Thebans. He scattered the Thebans and sold many into slavery. All other Greek resistance to Macedonian domination suddenly ceased, and Alexander returned to pursuing his father's plan to liberate the Greeks in Asia Minor.
In 334, Alexander started his army eastward toward Asia Minor. It was an army of nearly forty thousand, including secretaries, scientists and philosophers. Security on the home front was supplied by Greece's navy, an army of 12,000 infantry, 1,500 cavalry in Macedonia and reserves elsewhere within the alliance who could be called up in an emergency - all under the command of Alexander's most trusted general: the aging Antipater.
Alexander had inherited an efficient military machine, and he had learned lessons in good military strategy and diplomacy. Moreover, among kings he was exceptional: he could plan like a master chess player, and in battle he was bold and quick in seeing sudden shifts in advantages and disadvantages. He was perhaps foolhardy about his own safety but not toward the safety of his troops, and because of his care and tactics his casualties would be lighter than those of his enemies.
Alexander's opponent was the forty-six year-old Darius III, a refined and intelligent man but without much energy or foresight and a poor military commander. Darius underestimated Alexander's strength, but he sent against him a force three times as large, a force that included able horsemen and 20,000 or so Greek mercenary infantrymen, largely men who had run from Greece with Philip's defeat of their cities.
In sixty boats, Alexander's army crossed the strait called Hellespont into Asia Minor, at Abydos, and met Darius' army on the opposite side of the Granicus River. On horseback Alexander led a charge across the river and was met by Darius' top ranking officers and combatants. He emerged from this hand to hand combat alive, with most of Darius' leading generals dead. The disorderly ranks of the Persian infantry became easy targets for the long spears and solid ranks of the Macedonians, and the Macedonians cut them to pieces. Darius' Greek mercenaries remained in formation and refused to surrender. Alexander's forces charged, and only around two thousand of the mercenaries survived, to be sent as slaves to work Macedonia's mines.
Alexander was bright enough to avoid hating those thought to be his enemies, and after his first victory over the Persians he honored the dead Persian troops as well as his own, and he paid a special honor to the Persian commander who had come close to killing him. But the historian who accompanied Alexander, Callisthenes (Aristotle's nephew), described Alexander's victory over the Persians as the work of the Greek goddess of revenge, Nemesis - revenge for Persia's misdeeds against the Greeks more than a century before.
News of Alexander's victory spread fast through the Mediterranean region and West Asia. Greek cities in Asia Minor began setting up democracies and opening their gates to Alexander. Awed by Alexander's success, various cities proclaimed Alexander a divinity. But Miletus and a couple of other cities resisted, and Alexander overpowered them. Alexander was always ready to punish rebellion, as he had against Thebes, but he also wished to win hearts and minds. In the fighting at Miletus he offered a pardon to Greek mercenaries and citizens holding the inner city, and, respecting the courage of the Greek mercenaries there, he offered them service in his own army. In Asia Minor his forces limited their taking of spoils mainly to armor and weapons. They took no more captives to sell as slaves, and Alexander forbade reprisals against civilians.
It had been spring when Alexander invaded Asia Minor, and, by the end of the year, most of the Greek cities on the western coast of Asia Minor were declared free. Cities that had been ruled by Persian satraps were now garrisoned by Macedonians and their Greek allies. These cities were allowed to run their own local affairs, with Alexander unopposed to any inclinations they had toward democracy. Where local people were accustomed to a Persian system of administration, Alexander accepted the Persian system, and he improved it by dividing what had been the powers of the local Persian governor into three different offices: civil, military and financial.
Aristotle had advised Alexander to turn those non-Greeks he defeated into slaves, but Alexander had begun a policy of winning their respect and cooperation. He brought a Persian commander into his own entourage. And he happily let himself become the adopted son of a princess - soon to be queen - of the non-Greek royal house of Caria, in Asia Minor's southwest.
Alexander and his army marched into the middle of Asia Minor in pursuit of Darius, leaving behind the pacification needed for expanded conquest. They passed the winter of 334-33 at Gordium, and into the spring they waited for reinforcements and for local crops to ripen. Meanwhile, Persia's fleet of three hundred warships and some sixty thousand men sailed for the Aegean Sea from their ports along the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. By the end of April the fleet had established bases for itself at various islands in the Aegean, and the fleet threatened Alexander's line of communications to Macedonia and the Greek mainland.
Alexander sent money to his home front commander, Antipater, to strengthen defenses in Greece. Then in June, he left Gordium with an enlarged army. He veered away from the Persian empire's old Royal Road, turning toward Syria, along the way leaving those who surrendered to him in charge of their cities. His march was delayed for two months as he lay sick, perhaps from malaria.
In November, at Issus, on the Mediterranean coast just north of Syria, he met and defeated Darius' army again. Darius fled eastward through Mesopotamia, leaving behind his family, his harem and his treasury. Alexander treated Darius' family and harem with tact and courtesy. And, with this victory, Alexander now considered himself king of Asia.
From Issus, Alexander moved southward through Syria, taking one Mediterranean seaport after another. In January 332, he and his army came upon the Phoenician city of Tyre, a naval base and home for many crewmen in Persia's navy, a city of fanatical fighters and a city that was a bitter enemy of surrounding city-states. Alexander began a seven-month siege of Tyre, and against Tyre he used catapults, rams and finally swords. Then he resorted to tradition: the many who did not surrender were put to death, and the women and children of Tyre were sold into slavery.
The loss of Tyre broke Persia as a naval power. Syrian and Cypriot contingents of Persia's navy deserted. Alexander's Greek navy regained control over the Aegean Sea, and one by one Darius' military forces were compelled to withdraw from the Aegean islands.
Alexander set his next goal as Egypt. He bypassed Jerusalem, his entourage believing that Judah was an unimportant priest-state run by ineffectual star gazers. He and his navy confronted the well fortified Phoenician city of Gaza, which, for Alexander was the gateway to Egypt. At Gaza, as at Tyre, the fighting was bitter. It lasted two months. Gaza's defenders fought to the last man. Alexander sold its women and children into slavery, and he repopulated the city by allowing the settlement there of people from the surrounding area.
While supplied by his navy, Alexander and his army marched across the Sinai desert into Egypt, and Alexander's reputation preceded him. Happy to see the end of Persian rule, Egyptians welcomed him as a liberator. They had little choice, for they no longer had the cohesion nor an army that could resist him. Egypt's priesthood hailed Alexander as pharaoh - as a king of kings. Like the pharaohs, he was hailed as a god. He became the guest of Egypt's king, staying at the king's palace in Memphis. And in Memphis, Alexander made sacrifices to Egypt's gods, including the bull god Apis.
Early in the year 331, Alexander sailed down the Nile, and he found a place he thought perfect for a city. There he founded Alexandria, soon to be Egypt's new capital - a city that would be populated by people from neighboring villages and towns and by Macedonian, Greek and Balkan veterans from Alexander's army. Like a Macedonian city, Alexandria's inhabitants were to be subject to royal edicts but otherwise self-governing, with an assembly and a city council.
Concerned about his glory and his relationship with the gods, Alexander and a small party with camels crossed the Egyptian desert to an oasis and holy place called Siwah. There a sun god called Amon-Ra, the father of the pharaohs, was believed to dwell. It was common among Greeks to see their own gods in foreign deities, and for some time Greeks and Macedonians had visualized Amon-Ra as another manifestation of Zeus. Alexander and his party traveled in the coolness of twilight and night, and their journey became biblical in its telling. They endured a sandstorm. They crossed an area infested with snakes and became lost, and their water supply was just about finished. Alexander's historian, Callisthenes, was to claim that they were rescued by gods: two crows that flew in front of them to show them the way. According to another account they were led by gods in the form of two talking snakes.
At Siwah, Alexander was welcomed by the local high priest as a great conqueror and as the son of Amon-Ra. Alexander welcomed this proclamation of his divinity. It was Macedonian and Greek tradition that a hero might be the son of a god and yet human,. Many in the world believed that the success and power of a conqueror was derived from his divinity. And when news of Alexander at Siwah reached Alexander's mother, Olympias, it reinforced her view that Alexander's birth had been divine.
In early 331, Alexander returned to his pursuit of Darius. He marched with his army toward Babylon, where Darius had been organizing a force for a showdown against him, a force that included Indian elephants and chariots armed with scythes. Along the way, during the early summer, Alexander conducted a campaign against a rebellion in Samaria. There a group of Jews had captured and burned alive their governor. Samarians surrendered those responsible for the killing, and Alexander had the murderers executed on the spot. Then, as a further lesson against such rebellions, he expelled Samaria's inhabitants, and in their place he invited Macedonians to populate the city.
Moving eastward across Mesopotamia, Alexander came again to the Royal Road, and he turned south toward Susa. On October 1, Darius and his army of a million men arrived on a wide plain along the Royal Road, by a town called Gaugamela, and the two armies clashed. Commanding his army from his chariot, Darius was slow in correcting weaknesses that developed in troop positions, and he was slow in taking advantages of weaknesses that had developed in the position of Alexander's army. Darius had failed to delegate enough command to subordinates. When he thought he saw Alexander's army over-powering his army, he fled with his retinue - the second time that he deserted men who were dying for him. And Darius' poorly led army was massacred.
Leaving behind his chariot, bow and a substantial hoard of coins as a prize for Alexander, Darius fled to Arbela, without destroying river bridges behind him. There he was joined by Bactrian cavalrymen, 2,000 loyal Greek mercenaries and a few of his surviving Royal Guards. From Arbela they pushed east through the Zagros Mountains and then south, dropping down to Ecbatana. Darius' nerve had been broken by his last defeat, but he hoped to gather and re-organize his army. He expressed hope that Alexander and his army would weaken themselves in luxury, idleness and the women they would find in Babylon, and he wrote nervously to his governors in Bactria and elsewhere in the east, urging them to remain loyal.
Alexander marched southward unimpeded, leaving the Royal Road and traveling along the Tigris River, past great fertile fields of barley and millet, past rows of date palms, man made canals and huge estates, to Babylon. The Persian governor of Babylon surrendered the city to him, and with his army Alexander entered the city in triumph.
The local priesthood made a show of welcoming Alexander, and Alexander in turn displayed his respects. He consulted the local priesthood on the correct worship of the Babylonian god, Marduk, and he made animal sacrifices to Marduk. He pleased the priesthood by ordering the restoration of Marduk's statue and the temples that the Persians had long before destroyed as punishment for a revolt. Men of wealth in the area, wishing to make peace with Alexander, gave him great sums of money. For Alexander's soldiers it was time for another rest, and they spent their pay on Babylon's women.
Sparta still resented Macedonia's occupation of the Peloponnese peninsula, and Sparta's king, Agis II, was encouraged by a large force leaving Macedonia to join Alexander, and Agis II was encouraged by an uprising against Macedonian rule in Thrace. Agis believed that Alexander had marched too far east to counteract him. With gold from Persia he hired soldiers from other Greek cities. He brought the Peloponnesian city of Elis and much of the Peloponnesian districts of Arcadia and Achaea into an open alliance with him, and he launched a war against Macedonian rule in Greece.
Alexander's general in charge of defending the home front, Antipater, sent an army against the uprising. Alexander sent his navy to give support to the many Greek cities that preferred Macedonian power to a revival of Spartan power, and Alexander also sent a large sum of money home to help finance the war against Sparta. In the year 331, Antipater's army crushed the armies of Sparta and its allies - indicating again that Sparta's days as a great military power had ended.
Alexander pushed farther east - leaving the former governor of Babylon in charge of Babylon's civil affairs and a military force in Babylon under Macedonian charge. In twenty days he and his army traveled two hundred miles and arrived at Susa, the administrative center of the Persian empire. Susa surrendered to Alexander before he entered the city. With this Alexander acquired the city's great treasury, which allowed him to reward his troops generously - his troops not having been allowed the usual form of payment to soldiers: pillage and loot.
In Susa, Alexander sacrificed to the gods in accordance with Macedonian custom. Then he held a festival that included athletic events. Not expecting to meet another great army like the one he fought at Gaugamela, he reorganized his army for guerrilla and siege warfare in mountainous country, dividing it into smaller units of seventy-five to a hundred men. And he included in his cavalry some recruits from among the East's good horsemen.
In December, 331, Alexander left the Persian governor in charge in Susa, a Macedonian in charge of local troops, and with a refreshed army of about sixty-thousand, he fought his way southeastward through mountainous terrain. Then he swept through an open plain of woods, canals and estates, toward Persia's capital city, Persepolis. Alexander and his army of sixty thousand entered Persepolis and took control of its palace. They saw themselves in the heart of Persia. Alexander seized a wondrous amount of money from the Persian treasury. Then he resorted to the tradition of vengeance. Those in Persepolis were to pay for the misdeeds he believed the Persians had committed some hundred and fifty years before, when Xerxes had invaded Greece. Alexander turned the city over to his troops, who stormed through its streets, slaughtered men, plundered their property and stripped women of their jewelry.
Alexander and his troops spent the remainder of the winter at Persepolis, and there Alexander began thinking that he could not be both the avenger of the wrongs wrought by the Persians in Greece and at the same times be the Persian's exalted ruler. But in early spring he allowed vengeance one last fling, a vengeance perhaps for Xerxes having burned the Athenian Acropolis and the towns and temples of Attica in the year 480. After a night of drinking, Alexander and his army burned Persepolis' great palace of Xerxes.
Alexander and his troops then pushed north along a mountainous course toward the Caspian Sea, to Darius' summer palace, where, according to reports, Darius and Persian troops were encamped. Hearing a report of Alexander's approach, Darius' military, including Greek mercenaries, began escaping in a hard ride eastward. Alexander and five hundred of his toughest men went ahead of the rest of his army. They rode across forty-four miles of desert, and at dawn, near the town of Damghan, they came upon Darius' troops. Alexander had hoped to leave Darius as a subordinate king - similar to the pharaoh he had left in Egypt - with himself as King of Kings. But before Alexander and his men could reach Darius, the leader of Darius' Bactrian cavalry, Bessus, and some accomplices, killed Darius. And moved by the sight of Darius' corpse, Alexander covered it with his cloak.
Bessus moved eastward with his troops and proclaimed himself Darius' successor. In pursuit, Alexander pushed eastward into Bactria. With reinforcements that arrived from Greece and Macedonia, Alexander fought local rulers and independent tribes whom the Persians had only barely managed to dominate. Alexander inflicted heavy casualties on them, gaining control of the route farther east and forcing local peoples to accept his rule. Hoping to end the marauding ways of the local tribes and to create peace in the area he encouraged tribal people to adopt a settled way of life and to move into new towns that he founded.
Alexander marched into the Hindu Kush mountains, from whose summit Aristotle believed one would be able to see the end of the world. And, in these mountains, local people showed Alexander the rock where the mythical Prometheus was said to have been chained after he gave the gift of fire to humanity.
Bessus scorched the earth behind him as he fled. Alexander, together with local rulers, managed to capture Bessus, who was brought naked in bonds and a wooden collar to stand before Alexander at the town of Bactra. Alexander asked Bessus why he had killed his king and kinsman. While Bessus tried to justify himself, a herald announced his errors, and Bessus was flogged - a punishment of Macedonian tradition. And in keeping with Persian tradition, Bessus' nose and ears were cut off. Then he was sent to be tried by a Persian court, which had him executed.
In the vast area of Bactria, Alexander founded more towns, and he married a local chieftain's daughter, Roxana, apparently more for good relations with a local ruler than for love. Alexander was still ignoring Aristotle's advice, for he was treating non-Greeks as kinsmen, which encouraged local peoples to treat him as a liberator and to join forces with him.
Alexander was concerned about his image among Persians, and, to match his court to the expectations of his new subjects and courtiers in the East, he began to discard the Macedonian custom of openness with which he could be addressed. As king of the East he began borrowing from the pomp of the Persian throne, and those who came to see him had to prostrate themselves before him in recognition of his divinity. This was easily accepted by the Persians and other easterners, but Alexander's troops found it embarrassing and considered it a part of the slavishness and inferiority of Eastern people.
Alexander took more Persians into his ranks, including Darius' brother as one of his companion soldiers. One of Alexander's most trusted commanders, Cleitus, who had saved his life at Granicus, was offended by Macedonians having to petition Persians for an audience with their own king, and he objected to positions of command passing to Persians. While Alexander and his companions were having one of their wine parties, Alexander and Cleitus argued. Alexander tried to strike Cleitus but was held back by others. Alexander called on his trumpeter to sound the call for help, but the trumpeter refused. A bodyguard named Ptolemy pulled Cleitus out of the room. Cleitus returned and Alexander, thinking that Cleitus was attacking, ran him through with a pike and killed him. Then Alexander noticed that Cleitus had not been armed, and he realized that Cleitus had not returned to kill him. For days Alexander lay on his bed filled with remorse and taking no food. Then he recovered and made a sacrifice to appease the god of wine, Dionysus.
After two years in Bactria, the king of an area by the Indus River - which had been a part of the Persian Empire - declared himself an ally of Alexander and requested Alexander's help against a rival kingdom. In the summer of 327, Alexander and his army started a 400-mile journey to India, arriving there in the spring of 326. By the Hydaspes River, Alexander's army of 16,000 confronted the force of the rival king - an army of 34,200 men, with elephants, chariots and cavalry and archers. Typical of his other battles, Alexander avoided a center confrontation by taking the initiative. He attacked the enemy's flank, compelling the enemy to rearrange his forces, and he took advantage of the enemy's confusion and imbalance. Alexander lost 990 men. The other side lost 2,180 and the battle.
Alexander hoped to advance to the Ganges River and make it his eastern border, but after a march of a hundred miles his troops refused to go farther east. With his Macedonians troops Alexander was still a leader by persuasion, as warrior-kings were traditionally. Unable to persuade them to continue, and seeing what he thought were unfavorable omens, he and his men returned to the Hydaspes River and began their return to Susa. They journeyed south along the Hydaspes to the Indus River and down the Indus to the Arabian Sea. Some of Alexander's entourage boarded ships, and Alexander and the others began a murderous march of fifteen hundred miles through mountainous and dry terrain to Persepolis, then another three hundred miles to Susa - a journey that began in September, 325, and ended in the spring of 324.
During Alexander's absence some of his local governors had lusted after more power, had recruited private armies and had abused local peoples. When Alexander returned he listened to charges against the errant governors, and he had most of them executed. Then he continued his policy of integrating his forces with local people. He encouraged his officers to take local women as wives. He set an example by taking two more wives for himself. And one of them, Stateira, was a daughter of Darius, which added legitimacy to Alexander's claim of kingship over the Persians.
Some ten thousand of Alexander's soldiers are said to have married local women. These soldiers received generous dowries, were demobilized and sent home. Their wives and children stayed in the East, where the children were to be maintained and educated in Greek ways, at state expense, and to be handed over to their fathers when they reached adulthood.
Alexander replaced the demobilized soldiers with Persian troops, which outraged some of his remaining veterans. But Alexander was undeterred. With new troops that arrived from Macedonia, Alexander created an integrated force, with Macedonians in the front rank, carrying pikes, and Persians in rows behind them with swords and javelins. It was a force with greater mobility than before - and a creation that was to be adopted by the Roman Republic.
In 323, Alexander returned to Babylon, which he planned to make the capital of his great new empire. He saw himself as creating the kind of government Aristotle thought best - rule by a benevolent, philosopher-king. He hoped to create a new loyalty across the lands he had conquered and a new feeling among his subjects that they belonged to a world outside their home town. He prayed for new cooperation and brotherhood, and he looked for his empire to be strengthened by a common culture, Hellenism, including the Greek language. His Persian cadets were to have instruction in Greek literature, and his other subjects in the East were to be encouraged to become like the Greeks and Macedonians.
Alexander hoped that commerce would help tie his empire together. He decided to exploit new commercial possibilities and to make Babylon the center of an enhanced world commerce. Already his warring had created a new demand for iron. His conquest of Persian treasury had put more money into circulation, and his conquests had broken down trade barriers. Already he had stimulated economic activity by building new ports and by founding new cities and seventy military colonies in the conquered territories. Now Alexander began planning for the building of docks along the Euphrates at Babylon and for the clearing and dredging of the Euphrates River to the Persian Gulf. He planned to colonize the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf. And he planned to have Arabia circumnavigated and explored.
Alexander was laying plans to extend his conquests to Sicily and Italy - to unite more of the world under his rule. But a fortuity intervened. In 323 BCE, at the age of thirty-two, Alexander died - possibly from malaria.
By his conquests, Alexander had changed the world. But what had not changed was the inclination to create myth. Even while Alexander lived, his court historian, Callisthenes, had written of an incident in which the sea had retreated from before Alexander's path. Now myth-makers colored their image of Alexander as they pleased. Some of them added to the myth of Alexander having had godly powers. But Zoroastrian priests demonized Alexander. They were jealous of foreign creeds and, reeling from the damage that Alexander had done to the prestige of their religion, they began a legend that described him as one of the worst sinners in history, as having slain many Persian teachers and lawyers and as having quenched many sacred fires. Some others in Persia described Alexander as a member of Persia's royal family - the Achaemenids. In Egypt, Alexander would become known as the son of the last pharaoh, Nectanebus. Arabs would come to know him as Iskander and would tell fanciful stories about him. And in Ethiopia, Christians would describe his father, Philip, as a Christian martyr, and they would describe Alexander as an ascetic saint.
Recommended Books
Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox, 1994
The Genius of Alexander the Great by N.G.L. Hammond, 1997
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