For all practical purposes Alexander’s empire died with
Alexander. His only brother was feeble-minded, and his only heir was a baby.
Neither was in any position to assert authority. But practical considerations
aside, Alexander moved quickly to become a symbol of conquest. He gave a
semblance of legitimacy to anyone who might desire conquest, regardless of how
inherently wrong that conquest might be. He was a pioneer in bringing Europe and
Asia together into discourse and commerce.
It appears as though he did this empirically, administering
the Persian Empire peacefully while he moved beyond its borders into India.
Perhaps he would have undertaken some systematic reorganization of his
empire, stretching all the way from Macedonia to northern India, but he did not
have time to do this.
Alexander’s effort to create a world state and empire were
less successful. Within a decade of his death, his kingdom, loosely organized
as it was, split apart. His successors, who were his generals, carved out
territories for themselves. Cassander took Macedonia; Seleucid took most of
Asia Minor, Syria, Iraq, and Iran; Ptolemy took over Egypt. In Egypt
Ptolemy—who wrote an account of Alexander’s military campaigns— established a
dynasty that endured until 30 BC, ending only with the defeat of Mark Antony
and Cleopatra by Julius Caesar’s grandnephew Octavius (later Augustus Caesar)
at the Battle of Actium.
Experts on Alexander’s life are divided on some issues
concerning events, and how to separate fact from legend. A man such as
Alexander obviously is going to be the stuff of legends; it is inevitable. As
was the case with both the Greek and the Roman aristocrats, Alexander was, by
our standards, a cruel man. His army suffered 50 percent mortality. The mayhem
he inflicted on his enemies in battle reached catastrophic proportions. A safe
estimate is that half a million soldiers and sailors were wiped out among his
enemies. The losses in his own armed forces during a decade of battle were in
the neighborhood of 25,000. Eventually he could not rely on reinforcements from
Macedonia (it had been stripped clean) or even on southern Greek mercenaries.
At the time of his death at least 40 percent of his army consisted of Persian
soldiers.
In addition to this mayhem against military forces,
Alexander sold probably 500,000 people, at least half of them women and
children, into slavery. This was the common fate of defeated cities in Greek
and Roman times. It was the law of war. If a city fell, especially if it dared to
resist, the inhabitants were sold into slavery. It had been that way for
Alexander’s father, Philip, and it was the same for Alexander, but on a grander
scale.
Alexander was hard not only on his enemies. His treatment of
his own generals and other officials was draconian. His best general,
Parmenion, was executed or assassinated at Alexander’s behest because Alexander
became suspicious of Parmenion’s complicity in a plot involving the general’s
son. There exist stories regarding the removal and execution of courtiers and
officials for what seem to us fully pardonable offenses. The two Persian
officers who had killed their emperor were themselves hunted down and murdered
in turn—Alexander said he was the emperor’s successor and sought revenge on his
killers. Alexander murdered one of his best friends and drinking companions by
his own hand after the latter had taunted and annoyed him. At least in this
case, Alexander is said to have shown great remorse.
Like most men of his time, Alexander considered life cheap.
He made his way across Asia trailing blood. Charity and mercy were not
behavioral qualities of the gods of ancient Greece, nor was Alexander inclined
in that direction. Besides this lack of divine models, Alexander had a very
quick temper: Anyone who crossed him he sought to cut down immediately.
At the other side of the moral ledger, Alexander was a very
brave man. He personally led his troops and amazed even his enemies with his
almost superhuman feats. He suffered at least four major wounds, coming close
to death on two occasions. He shared rations with his soldiers, and at times of
water scarcity in the army he refused sustenance. We are told that Alexander
did not condone rape, but looting was intermittently allowed in addition to his
soldiers’ very high pay. One story is told that on the final march through the
Makran, one of his soldiers found some good water and brought it personally to
Alexander in his helmet. Alexander thanked him but then dumped it on the
ground, saying that if his men could not have water, neither would he.
He led his soldiers across deserts and over mountains, into
places no one else would dare go. Coming up against elephants for the first
time in northern India, he was in no way fearful, but plunged ahead as he had
always done.
Also, Alexander was lavish in rewarding his soldiers and
sailors, especially those who had accompanied him initially from Greece.
Alexander was very courageous and a charismatic leader of
men, but was he a great general? The resounding answer has been yes. In fact, a
recent book makes him out to have been a model corporate executive:
The life and
personality of Alexander were highly complex… . These distinct beads in the
necklace of Alexander’s life are posited around real issues
we confront today: How do we develop and train professionals? How do we
think about basic issues in strategy such as where, when, and how to compete?
How do we handle leadership transitions? How do leaders assert authority in
their “First Hundred Days”? Why do leaders single out myths? What are the many
styles of leadership a single person can possess in this] quiver and which to
choose where and when? How should we be thinking about convergence of cultures
and divergence of social mores as we seek to expand the footprint of our
influence? How does one think about what to carry and what not to carry on a
campaign? What role does strategic deception play in competitive situations?
Why is a leader’s legacy such a delicately balanced equation that often totters
on the verge of falling off a pedestal? These are the questions we focus on as
we study the life of Alexander.
As a matter of fact, Alexander would not have made a good
modern corporate executive. He was too headstrong, too impetuous, too
intuitive. He was a general, a military leader. He judiciously managed his
regiments, knowing when to engage in frontal assaults and when to use flanking
movements. Again he was similar to Napoleon, except that Alexander always
personally led his army from its front rank.
It was in the skillful use of infantry that Alexander’s
armies excelled. This was the key to Alexander’s success—the skill and
discipline of his infantry and the wielding otsarissas. It required a great
deal of training and much discipline to make these long pikes effective. The
Romans later would use their infantry in much the same way and conquer the
world.
One of the first accounts honoring Alexander after his death
comes from a Roman source of a supposed conversation between Scipio Africanus
(who destroyed Carthage) and Hannibal in Ephesus. Africanus asked who Hannibal
thought had been the greatest general, and Hannibal replied that it was King
Alexander of Macedon, because with a small force he had defeated armies of
immense proportions and penetrated to the ends of the earth, which human beings
had never expected to visit.
The Romans were the first to honor Alexander by imitation.
Bosworth tells us:
Pompey, whose very
name (Magnus) evoked the Macedonian conqueror, notoriously modelled himself
upon Alexander from his boyhood, adopted Alexander’s mannerisms and patently
saw himself recreating his conquests in the east. The same applied to Trajan,
who sacrificed to Alexander in Babylon, and in conscious imitation, sailed down
the Euphrates to the ocean, reporting in his dispatches that he had gone
further than the Macedonian king. With Caracalla imitation became a mania, to
the extent that he recreated a phalanx of Pompey’s opponent Julius Caesar
was often compared to Alexander, first by Plutarch, and later by others.
Although Caesar’s conquests were more political in nature, he used Alexander’s
mixture of infantry and cavalry to great advantage. A story is told that once
when Caesar was in Spain and at leisure, he was reading a history of Alexander.
He was lost in thought and then burst into tears. When his companions asked him
what was wrong, he answered, “Do you not think it is a matter for sorrow that
while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet
achieved no brilliant success?”
Mark Antony could not have avoided thinking of Alexander as
he married the last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs, Cleopatra. He named his son,
fathered on her, Alexander. Octavius (Augustus Caesar) visited Alexander’s
grave after he defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra and entered Alexandria as a
hero. Caligula supposedly removed Alexander’s armor from his tomb and wore it
for state occasions.
Truth to tell, however, Alexander was fortunate against his
enemy—the Persian emperor, Darius III, was a reluctant soldier. He fled from
the field of the two great battles that Alexander fought against him,
disheartening and dismaying his troops. Darius was slow to react when Alexander
conquered Asia Minor and Egypt, and encountered the great Alexandrian
threat only along the eastern frontier of Asia Minor. He could have put in the
field an army of at least 100,000 but never did so. Darius III eschewed a
scorched-earth policy that would have left Alexander’s troops very hungry. He
failed to protect his vast treasury in Babylon and Persepolis, allowing it to
fall into Alexander’s hands.
With a relatively small army, although highly disciplined
and for the time well armed, Alexander showed that he was a superb field
commander who could maximize his resources. Against the Romans the result possibly
would have been different. In fact, the famous Roman historian Livy, writing in
the late first century BC, was positive that Alexander could not have defeated
the Romans. He declared:
“{At] the outset I do
not deny that Alexander was an outstanding leader. His reputation, however, was
boosted by the fact that he was acting alone, and also that he died in his
youth as his career was taking flight and when he had experienced no reversal
of fortune.”
He goes on to say that the Roman Senate and its generals
would have been much harder to defeat than was the effete Darius. Italy would
have been a different proposition completely. Because success changed him, Livy
goes on to say, Alexander would have come to Italy more a Darius than an
Alexander, and brought an army that had forgotten Macedon and was already
lapsing into Persian ways. Alexander had a violent temper, killed many of his
friends while in the throes of drunkenness, and made ridiculous exaggerations
about his parentage. A young man would have had no success against a nation
already seasoned by 400 years of warfare. It is not difficult to see where
Livy’s sympathies lay.
It is one of the ironies of ancient history that a writer
who lived five hundred years after Alexander should be regarded as a trustworthy
and well-informed source, while a contemporary of Alexander should be regarded
as “better at oratory than history” (Cicero’s comment) and as an untrustworthy
romantic fantasist. The former writer was Arrian, who wrote in Asia Minor in
the mid—second century AD. The latter biographer is Cleitarchus, who wrote
around 310 BC and produced a work twelve volumes long, of which only fragments
survive. Cleitarchus wrote most of his work in Egypt. He never met Alexander or
accompanied him on military campaigns, but he was, after all, a contemporary.
So much for the distinction between “original sources” and “secondary sources.”
Arrian’s work is a pastiche of many fragmentary sources,
none of which have survived in undiluted or complete form, with the exception
of Plutarch. Arrian insists that he had all the accounts of Alexander laid out
before him and could pick and choose what was reliable. In case you wonder why
nearly all the biographies of Alexander are fragmentary, it is because of the
Roman school system. Certain ancient accounts were deemed classic, were
used in the schools, and were widely available. Others were buried under the
sands of time.
Arrian’s major interest and competence were in military
history. He made use of Callisthenes, who was Alexander’s private
historiographer and a nephew of Aristotle. Callisthenes’s long and very
detailed account, highly favorable to Alexander, ends abruptly in 327 BC, when
Callisthenes was executed for complicity in a plot against his employer.
Another writer who accompanied Alexander for the entire
duration of his campaigns was the Macedonian general Ptolemy, who composed a
multivolume work that was available to Arrian. Ptolemy, after Alexander’s
death, became the founder of a dynasty that held the throne of the pharaohs for
nearly three hundred years. He also hijacked much of the correspondence and
other documents of Alexander’s reign.
Among other writers consulted by Arrian were Astrolobus, an
officer who served in Alexander’s army; and Nearchus, an admiral who is
believed to have exaggerated his own importance. The geographer Strabo,
Curtius, and Diodorus tried to write substantial biographies, but only small
fragments of these are available to us. All these writers as funneled through
Arrian can be said to make up the “courtly tradition,” the sober canon of
Alexandrian studies.
The contemporary writer who founded the “vulgate,” or
popular tradition, was Cleitarchus. Much of his work survives, although he
tells us many dubious and romantic stories. He pays attention to Alexander’s
sex life, which is more than was done by the hard-bitten veteran soldiers
who wrote Alexander’s early biographies. Cleitarchus stands at the beginning of
a long line of romance writers on Alexander who reached their apogee in the thirteenth
century AD. By then we read fantasized tales such as the one about Alexander
exploring the sea in a glass submarine.
Leaning toward the classical equivalent of the courtly
tradition, but with an eye to the vulgate version, is Plutarch’s Parallel
Lives. Plutarch was a professional writer who wrote around AD ioo. Paralleling
Alexander and Julius Caesar, Plutarch takes pains to draw Alexander’s
character, and his is a finished, sophisticated work. The text of Plutarch’s
life of Alexander is (for once) fully extant.
Modern scholars are in sharp disagreement about the
authenticity of The Royal Journals, an official diary of the king’s reign, or
presumed to be such. For the most part the entries are sparse as well as
fragmentary, although statistics regarding the size of Alexander’s army have
been much mulled over. The Royal Journals, however, contain long, graphic
accounts of Alexander’s death.
The modern biographies are five in number: W W Tarn (1948);
Robin Lane Fox (1973); N. G. L. Hammond (1980); A. B. Bosworth (1977); and
Peter Green (1991). Tarn is notorious for claiming that Alexander was not a
homosexual and that the king clearly propounded the brotherhood of man, an
ideal derived from the Stoic philosophers. This was a cosmopolitan ideal in
which ethnic separatism would give way to the social and cultural bringing
together of Asia and Europe.
Every biographer since has claimed that this thesis is an
anachronism or at least much overdrawn.
Bosworth and Hammond are good on military and administrative
matters, although no modern biographer has seen fit to give the modern
equivalents for the place-names along Alexander’s route of conquest. It turns
out that half of Alexander’s fighting occurred in present-day Afghanistan,
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan.
This leaves Fox and Green, who have written the best—
although quite different—profiles of Alexander. Fox wrote a prose epic. In
Fox’s view Alexander could do no wrong until he began to deteriorate in his
last year. Fox’s biography of Alexander is immensely detailed. Green is much
more subdued and well balanced. All things considered, his is probably the best
modern biography. But you must not miss the fun of reading Fox’s Homeric epic,
showered with prizes when it was first published. The fascination and awe with
which Alexander was held are well communicated by Fox.
Curiously, two heavily illustrated books were published that
aim to trace the complete route of Alexander’s campaigns, one by Fox in 1980,
and another by Michael Wood in 1997. Two books on the subject are redundant.
One reads much about the authors’ enduring scorching deserts, freezing
mountains, cars breaking down, and sharing the humble food of tribesmen— who
are, of course, always kind, peaceful, and generous. Fox’s book covering this
painful trail was subsidized by a foundation grant. Wood is not an academic,
but that does not mean he is not a scholar. He was subsidized by the BBC,
which went along for the ride and filmed In the Footsteps of Alexander the
Great for a BBC production with Wood as anchor and producer.
It is unfortunate that Fox and Wood could not find each
other on the island of England and combine forces. Fox’s book is sharp on art;
Wood’s book is more anthropological in nature, but both trace substantially the
same fearsome journey. After reading Fox and Wood it is hard to avoid the
impression that Alexander was half mad to follow these obscure and perilous
routes.
If you take out a map of Central Asia and follow Alexander’s
route through Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, it is evident that
Alexander could have avoided some of the mountainous and desert routes he
traversed with his army. It seems that Alexander undertook this very arduous
journey through these lands because he wanted to test himself as a great
military leader who could journey to the end of the earth as well as establish
an empire. It was a trial for his soldiers, too— whether they would follow him
up cold mountains and through hot deserts. He saw the trip as more of an
expedition than a conquest.
The impact of Alexander on the Mediterranean world has
always been a subject for debate. A century after his death, Hellenistic Greek
(koine) had replaced Aramaic as the international language of merchants,
government officials, and intellectuals.
Even though under his successors the empire had split into
three parts, Alexander’s perpetual founding of cities named Alexandria in Egypt
and Central Asia played a role in this Greek impact.
The populations of these outposts were Greek and Macedonian
veterans buttressed by a polyglot merchant class. The only one of these seven
Alexandrias that became a large and thriving city was the one in Egypt, which
exceeded by far the old Egyptian capital of Memphis. In terms of both
linguistic and economic interchange, the other Alexandrias had but a modest
role to play.
Though Athens and Sparta remained independent, both
city-states were much enfeebled and fell easy prey to Rome’s rising power. Rome
also conquered Egypt and Asia Minor. Yet something lingered from Alexander’s
effort at political unification. Bringing various parts of the Mediterranean
world together set the policy and model for Rome. In a way the Rome of the
Caesars was a continuation of Alexander’s effort to create a world state.
To what extent the successor states to Alexander’s were
hellenized—that is, received the imprint of Greek culture—is a matter of
dispute. On a positive note, one can point to a mastery of koine by an elite of
higher government officials and merchants. As late as the Roman imperial era,
wealthy Romans constantly kept a Greek slave, their paedogogus, so that their
children were bilingual in both Greek and Latin. Greek nursemaids ensured that
the babies learned Greek even before Latin. One can point also to the spread of
Greek sculpture and painting to every corner of the states ruled by
Alexander’s successors.
The ubiquity of Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism, among
the aristocratic and intellectual classes indicates a cultural valorization
occurring among the elite. Stoicism prescribed the joining of the human mind
with the rational ordering of nature. In practice this meant not falling prey
to passion and violence but holding oneself in restraint and calmness so as to
be able to understand the rationality of the universe.
Yet according to Peter Green in From Alexander to Actium
(1990), Alexander’s effort to bridge Asia and Europe had only modest success.
Linguistically, only a very small part of the population in Egypt and Asia
learned Greek. These were bureaucrats and wealthy merchants. Cleopatra VII {the
Cleopatra) was the only ruler of Egypt after Alexander’s conquest who could
converse in demotic (colloquial) Egyptian. Green compares the British impact on
India and the post-Alexandrian Hellenic impact on Asia and Egypt and sees in
both a very narrow band of smug elitists.
This view probably does a disservice to both hellenization
and anglicization. After all, this narrow ribbon of uppermiddle-class society
was important in India, Asia, and Egypt, even though they comprised a very
small part of the population. Green deems these classes of bureaucrats and
merchants to be “boot-lickers” who greedily sought wealth and power, but this
does not seem a judicious assessment of their social value, whether in
Hellenistic society or postcolonial India.
Green has another point to make. It was the Romans, rather
than Alexander and his Hellenistic successors, who did more to integrate the
Mediterranean world. But it was Alexander, vague as his ideals and policies
were, who initially broke down the isolation of Egypt-Asia from the Greek
world. Even if the Greeks’ own appreciation for cultural colonialism was
modest, Alexander’s achievements were a major step in that development.
Many things changed, however, with the rise of Islam in the
seventh and eighth centuries AD. A process of linguistic dehellenization
occurred. Arabic, not Greek, then became the common language of the eastern
Mediterranean and has remained so to the present day.
Yet the advent of the Arab language in the eastern
Mediterranean did not signify the obliteration of Hellenistic Greek culture.
The impress of hellenization ran too deep for that. Greek philosophy, science,
and medicine were translated into Arabic, and Greek ideas continued to exercise
a strong influence for half a millennium of Islam.
It was only in the fourteenth century, with the rise of
militant forms of Islam in North Africa, that cultural dehellenization
profoundly altered the mind-set of the Arabic world. Deep into the Muslim and
Arabic centuries, the impact of Alexander’s empire continued to hold sway.
The Byzantine Greek emperor (the hasileus), after AD 312
until Byzantium’s demise in 1453, imitated the Alexandrian mode. He too wore a
diadem, sat on an elevated throne, and mandatedproskynesis from his subjects.
Hymns were sung by courtiers of the Byzantine emperor
associating the imperial majesty of the basileus with divine authority. A courtiers’
manual written down in tenth-century Byzantium carefully prescribed the duties
and privileges of each Byzantine government official within this framework of
the divine authority of the emperor.
The Russian Romanov dynasty down into the twentieth century
was structured along Byzantine lines. Constantinople was the “second Rome”;
Moscow the “third Rome.” So Alexander’s assumption of Persian traditions of
kingship echoed down the centuries. Though Alexander lived to embrace the
Persian traditions of kingship for only a decade, the consequences for the
Western world were far-reaching.
Byzantine culture influenced the pattern of kingship for all
kings in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages, except for an innovation
(probably drawn from the Spanish Visigothic kings) by the Franco-German
Carolingian emperors of AD 800 and subsequently. This involved the ceremony of
anointing by which monarchs at their coronation are blessed with holy oil, the
same way in which a bishop is anointed. This symbolizes that the king has been
elevated to a God-given status.
The coronation ceremony of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain in
1953 demonstrated that this age-old tradition still continued. She sat on an
elevated throne before which lesser mortals bowed and curtsied. Before she was
actually crowned, she was given an anointing of holy oil on the palms of her
hands, her breast, and her forehead.
Alexander’s legacy influenced later European royal
families regarding the rituals of kingship. But Alexander taught them more
than rituals; he taught the functioning and temperament of kingship. We have
become used to the politics and institutions of what are, in effect, democratic
republics. It is hard to think back to the advantages of kingship. But a strong
king like Alexander could make lightning decisions, and the elaborate levels of
bureaucracy, lobbyists, and political parties could be overborne by a king’s
early wise decision.
The temperament of kingship requires all focus to be placed
on the king and his family. All eyes look upward; all hopes and expectations
are concentrated on the king and the royal dynasty. No event is more important
than the birth of a male heir to the throne, since on the shoulders of this
infant will be cast the expectations of the next generation in society. Society
could always hope that the royal lottery of a dynastic childbirth could give
the people another heroic monarch, another world conqueror.
Since 1750 we have analyzed the defects and weaknesses of
monarchy. For long centuries the Alexandrian political system was regarded as
somewhat risky, but on the whole socially advantageous. Alexander added a
special veneer to kingship. He lost at least a third of his army, but he made
kingship glamorous by the force of his charisma and personal style.
This was not left to spontaneous chance. Alexander’s royal
propagandists worked long and skillfully to communicate the glory and
anticipations of the return of the “great king,” whether in orations or
histories. His sculptors, painters, and coin minters were adept at
creating an irrefutably thick culture of dynasty. Art was an important form of
state propaganda. The statues and friezes—and the coinage—of Alexander, widely
distributed throughout his empire, were consciously intended to have a
positive, comforting impact on society.
Alexander had his court artists develop a new style that we
call Hellenistic art. It was grandiose, disproportional, exaggerated, propagandistic,
even grotesque. It was not classicism, but it had a very strong influence on
Roman art and became the genre in which sculpture, architecture, and painting
were executed for half a millennium after Alexander.
Hellenistic style is meant to impress the conscious mind and
to evoke awe in the subconscious. The sparse, clean lines of the Classical Era
were superseded by the heaviness and ornamentation of an imperial style.
In these qualities Hellenistic art resembles another moment
in imperial history—the colonial style of the British Empire in the first two
decades of the twentieth century.
Examples of Hellenistic art were ornamental metal elephants,
gargantuan statues symbolizing winged victory, and lighthouses twenty stories
high at the entrance to harbors. There was a direct relationship between these
exemplars and Alexander’s military and political ambitions. So it was with
British imperial and colonial art in the early twentieth century. Hotels then
were designed as fortresses and office buildings had lavish rotundas, yet what
must not be forgotten was the tremendous skill of the Hellenistic and
British architects and sculptors. It was an art of excess, but its
craftsmanship was phenomenal and was endlessly reproduced.
The era of classical style in art endured for barely a
century from about 450 to 350 BC. The theme of classical art was adoration of
the human body and buildings that accommodated the body but in a restrained and
proportional way. Classical art sought to avoid hubris. This classical
restraint is what distinguishes the sculptures and friezes on the Athenian
Parthenon that Lord Elgin had moved to the British Museum.
The lore of Alexander achieved great renown in medieval
Europe, particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A literature of
romance and fantasy circulated among the courts and cathedrals of Western
Europe. But there is one point of social echo in this Alexandrian romantic
literature. The medieval writers intuited that Alexander made extensive use of
armored cavalry. Knights on horseback were for long years the key ingredient of
medieval armies.
The immensely popular Alexandrian romances in the thirteenth
century replaced the genre of the “matter of France” (Charlemagne and his
knights). By 1300 the Alexandrian genre had been largely supplanted by the
“matter of Britain” (King Arthur and his knights).
Aside from their recognition of the connection between
Alexander’s use of cavalry and medieval armored knights, there is another echo
from Alexander’s life that fascinated the writers of the Middle
Ages—Alexander’s involvement with India. By 1200 the spice trade with India via
Saudi Arabia added exotic necessary ingredients to the plain and simple
European diet. India was known as the source of the spices now demanded by
European cuisine and delicate palates. So Alexander’s invasion of India was an
additional fascinating dimension of his life that appealed to Europeans’
imaginations— and to their stomachs.
The Alexandrian romances of the Middle Ages reflect a whole
new type of literature that developed in the Hellenistic world. Critics now
believe that the the novel was ultimately a product of Hellenistic culture. The
romantic image of Alexander was itself a prime subject of these anticipations
of the novelistic form.
The key to the life and behavior of the historical Alexander
the Great lies in his belonging to a pre-Christian, thoroughly pagan world. He
remained culturally and psychologically committed to an archaic Homeric time of
heroic behavior.
Alexander belonged to an age of gods and heroes. It was a
harsh, pitiless world of unremediated severity and cruelty, in which the laws
of war, by which whole populations could be wiped out or sold into slavery,
prevailed. It was a superstitious ambience requiring that the gods be
propitiated, but these divinities were lacking in any ethical consciousness.
It was a world in which women were abused and prostitution
was commonly acceptable. It was a moment in time when pedophilic abuse
passed without comment. Falling-down drunkenness was similarly viewed as manly
and socially acceptable.
This culture produced Alexander, a man of incomparable
heroism, who gloried in his physical strength and his battle-ready glamour.
Overall the time was marked by a reckless, harsh ethos embedded in savage
cruelty. This was Alexander’s world, and he strutted on its stage as a
colossus.
People today, because of better nutrition in childhood, are
on average taller than at the time of Alexander the Great. But otherwise,
biologically and psychologically, humans today and in Alexander’s time are
identical. We are wired the same way. Oedipal rebellion against a mother or
father still affects growing up.
The difference between us and people of Alexander’s day,
particularly the Greeks, so often held up to us as role models, lies in the
vastly different value system, not in biology or psychology. Nurture is as
important as nature. The culture in which we grow up makes all the difference
in our adult attitudes toward the value and sanctity of life.
In this cultural screening process it was Christianity that
was most critical. Alexander was born into a pagan, pre-Christian world. His
behavior was conditioned along certain lines—heroism, courage, strength,
superstition, bisexuality intoxication, cruelty. He bestrode Europe and Asia
like a supernatural figure, and that is why his fame has not only endured but
also become magnified and embellished by fantasy.
But he belonged to an archaic world. Christianity has
screened us from that world and conditioned us to view life differently.
In 1974 a young Oxford don, Fox, tried to persuade us that
Alexander was a kind of contemporary of ours. Except for Alexander’s decline in
the last year of his life, Fox attempted to posit this Macedonian prince, this
idolizer of Achilles, as someone functioning within our own frame of values and
therefore a thoroughly admirable person with whom we can identify.
In 1986 Fox wrote another book, Pagans and Christians, in
which he dissected the differences in worldview of populations in the Roman
Empire. Something critical has happened here; a cultural and religious
line—Christianity—has been crossed.
How would Fox apply the lessons of Pagans and Christians to
his first, early book on Alexander the Great? He could not apply them, for his
epic, monumentally sympathetic account of the glorious Alexander could not have
been written if the significance of the huge cultural upheaval of Christianity
had been applied back to Alexander.
Fox’s work of 1974 on Alexander dates from a period when
Oxford was still basking in the postwar glow of Greek antiquity derived from
Victorian times. Pagans and Christians appears to demand judgment on Alexander,
which would be very unfair, because he is discovered to be a thoroughly pagan
and pre-Christian personality.
In AD 312, the new Roman emperor, Constantine I, professed
himself to be a Christian and set about supporting the church’s bishops. In 313
Constantine issued an Edict of Toleration for other religions. But in AD
395, Emperor Theodosius I canceled this act of toleration. The Roman Empire
would thenceforth be a Christian state, and the temples of the pagan gods were
closed.
These events, dictated by emperors, changed the world-view.
They separated the now Christian Roman Empire from the Greek world of pagan antiquity.
The birth of Christianity and its wide acceptance in the Western world brought
about a vast cultural and political revolution.
Alexander the Great was the supreme exemplar of that old
pagan world. He worshipped at the shrines of Zeus and other gods and even began
to believe that Zeus was his father. Alexander represented himself as the image
of the Homeric hero Achilles and brandished what he claimed was Achilles’
magical shield.
Alexander emphasized the attributes of courage and strength.
Under the laws of war he leveled cities and sold their inhabitants into
slavery. He was merciless, even to those he cared for. He risked the dismay of
his Companions, and when, in a drunken stupor, he killed one of his best
friends, his act ultimately led to an assassination attempt against him. He had
a lifelong gay lover; he consorted with whores; he was a drunkard.
The Athenian tragedians warned against arrogance, and Plato
and Aristotle sought the refinements of reason. But these qualifications to the
spirit of paganism did not seem to affect Alexander, although Aristotle had
been his tutor in his early years. He sought glory on the battlefield, stole
the Persian emperor’s treasury, and disported himself like a Homeric hero,
all without conscience. In his lifetime he caused the deaths of half a million
of his enemies’ soldiers and accepted with apparent equanimity the loss of at
least 25,000 of his own battle-hardened soldiers.
In time the church would educate heroic kings in an
alternative ethic, never completely but at least partially. Christian kings,
however, still yearned for the image of Alexander the Great. They sensed that
at the dawn of recorded history there was a superhero with pagan values. And
so, in spite of the application of another value system, Alexander remained,
for the Middle Ages, a model king.
Alexander was, however, transformed in the European
imagination. Stories about his life took on the gloss of Christian chivalry and
courtliness. Twelfth-century romances sought to combine antique heroism with an
up-to-date Christian sentimentality. The result was a species of magic realism
or fantasy which had no connection to the real Alexander. Thus is history
re-created from one era to another.
An image of a gruff and maniacal but brilliantly competent
and self-assured personality imprints itself over time. Poets come along and
re-create that image and gloss it over. The image takes on accoutrements of
romanticization and idealism that depart from the natural, original, prosaic
image and become intermixed in a new genre. Then some don—Le Fox— creates a new
image of unexcelled glory.
To paraphrase L. P. Hartley (in his novel of 1953, The
Go-Between), antiquity was another country; they did things differently
there. The Victorians were enamored of the Greeks and viewed them, especially
the Athenians, as idealistic and compassionate people. After a hundred years of
scholarship, we know better.
We would find the ancient Greeks a strange people indeed.
They were courageous and bold to a fault, but they were also heartless and
cruel. They slaughtered one another in trivial wars. They were superstitious
and fanatical. They knew they were vulnerable, but an inner demon drove them
into battle. With only swords, shields, and pikes to fight with, they inflicted
catastrophic and terrible cutting wounds on one another.
The Greeks had little in the way of machinery, except to
besiege cities. Yet they unflinchingly slaughtered one another in the name of
honor. The strong man prevailed. All others were left for dead on the
battlefield. The Greeks directed their strength and energy into making war.
Then they sat around their campfires and recited stories about the heroes of
old.
Because the Greeks had talented poets and artists, they were
able to create from their bellicose and unpitying society an imaginative
culture that impressed itself upon many later generations. The Romans were much
like the Greeks, but the Romans established a peaceful empire built on the
concept of law and order. They built aqueducts to bring water into their cities
and built roads to carry their civilization to the ends of their empire. The
Greeks had only heroes, who with a sense of honor laid waste to their cities
and engaged in perpetual conflict unto death.
Alexander will always remain in the minds of most
people as “great.” Even those who have not studied his life extensively
have heard of his exploits in battle, his skill in military organization, and
himself as a young man who accomplished great things before his untimely death.
Regardless of his flaws, and they were many, he is seen as great because of who
he was, not necessarily for what he did.
