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The texts in this collection are drawn from three ancient biographies of Alexander of Macedon -'Alexander the Great’ - who died in Babylon in 323 BCE at the age of just thirty-two having conquering half of the known world. His is one of those stories in history that has the power to captivate every generation. In the popular view, Alexander achieved undying fame as history's golden boy, the ultimate hero endowed with youth, intellect and beauty, who pursued an extraordinary destiny only to burn out too soon. His image - hair like a lion’s mane, head tilted to one side, melting eyes fixed on far horizons - has compounded this myth ever since his own day, even though we now know it was the creation of carefully controlled ‘spin’ like the airbrushing of a modern tyrant’s photo. The real Alexander as far as we can tell, was short and stocky, with a big nose, a large chin and small eyes. But the idea of his godlike beauty has been as hard to remove as the mythical dimensions of his heroic tale, a tale created originally by the companions who went with him in their now lost accounts. The eternal fascination with Alexander is not due only to the amazing events he set in motion, but also to the inextricable tangle of history and myth that surrounds him. As the Greeks said, ‘Those whom the Gods love die young’.
The Macedonians were a rugged people from the mountainous region of northern Greece. Alexander’s father Philip had created the Kingdom of Macedonia with a powerful army that crushed all opposition within Greece. At that time, just across the Aegean Sea, lay the western provinces of the Persian empire, the greatest power that had yet existed in the world. The Persian king, Darius, claimed a loose overlordship extending from Upper Egypt to the Indus, and as far north as the Syr Darya river, on what is now Tajik-Uzbek border, running into the Aral Sea from the Pamirs. Fabulously wealthy, when Alexander came to power the Persians exacted annual tribute from over thirty different nations. A hundred and fifty years earlier they had attempted to conquer Greece, only to be decisively defeated in battles at Salamis and Plataea. To the Greeks the Persian war represented a latterday heroic age; they had never forgotten the desecration of their temples and there had long been talk of mounting a war of revenge.
Alexander became ruler of Macedon at the age of nineteen, after his father’s assassination. Two years later, in May 334, he set out on the great war of retribution against the Persians. Crossing the Hellespont into Asia, he paid his respects to the ghosts of the Greek heroes of Troy, who had died in what the Greeks saw as the first clash between East and West. Then Alexander’s nine-year campaign began with an attack on Anatolia, to secure the Greek speaking cities of what is now western Turkey. However not all in the region regarded him as a liberator and in places there was stiff resistance. In Greece too, especially in Athens, were hoping that the young 'mad hatter' would come unstuck. It is now clear how far he originally intended to go but in late 333 he fought a great battle against Darius near Issus on the main trunk route into Syria. The next year he was occupied with lengthy and costly sieges at Tyre and Gaza on the Levant coast before heading into Egypt. There the native aristocracy seem to have accepted the Greeks with relief after their experience of Persian intolerance towards their own religion. It was at this point that Alexander made his famous journey to the oracle at Siwa in the Western Desert where the priesthood greeted him as the son of Ammon, paving the way for him to be accepted as a legitimate pharaoh. The later Greek Alexander Romance, composed in Egypt in the first century BC, says he was crowned with traditional Egyptian ritual at Memphis. The march on Persia itself began in 332, and Alexander won a decisive battle at Tel Gomel (Guagamela) near Irbil in Kurdistan on 1 October, after which Babylon and other great cities of Iraq, the centre of ancient world, surrendered. Now he could call himself, as Darius had done, 'Lord of the World' - except that Darius himself was still at large.
Early in the following year, with his pan-Hellenic army now a massive 70,000 strong, Alexander fought his way with elite forces through the Zagros mountains in a desperate battle at a pass known to the Greeks as the Persian Gates. The Persian royal city of Parsa, Persepolis was then taken intact with the royal treasures. From that moment the capture of Persian king was only a matter of time. That summer Alexander made a lightning advance past Isfahan (Gabae) and then eastwards by the city of Rhagae (near today’s Tehran), finally circling the Ahuran massif through the desert at night only to find Darius murdered by his own officers by a small pool on the Khorasan road just short of the city of Quse (Hecatompylos). From then on, even though opposition continued, Alexander was effectively ruler of the Persian Empire and came to act increasingly like a Persian king. The texts tell us that he demanded prostration and adoration, which may well have been expected in some of the conquered lands, but did not go down well with the old fashioned veterans of the Macedonian officer corps. Inevitably, though, Iran was becoming the centre of Alexander’s world: he would never see Greece again.
The next phase of the campaign took the Greeks to the Caspian Sea, into Afghanistan and over the Hindu Kush into Central Asia. Outlying forces seem to have penetrated as far as Bukhara and Merv (the future Alexandria-in-Margiana); the main army journeyed past Samarkand to the Syr Darya river and the Mogul Tau Mountains. There, after two years of sapping warfare against local guerrillas, he negotiated a peace and marked the northern limit of his empire, believing himself to be close to the great ocean which Greek geographers thought circled the land mass of Europe, Asia and Africa.
In 327 BCE, having taken Bactrian princess Roxanne as his wife, he returned to the Kabul plain and prepared to invade India. The battle-hardened Greek army crossed the Khyber Pass and, after heavy fighting in the north-western frontier and the valley of the Swat, bridged the Indus and occupied the Indian city of Taxila. Moving further into the subcontinent, Alexander defeated the Raja of the Punjab, Porus, in a savage battle close to the modern town of Jalalpur on the river Jhelum. At this point, the heat, monsoon rains, disease and local resistance all began to erode morale. Alexander’s march continued eastwards as far as the Beas River in the present-day Indian Punjab, in sight of the Himalayan foothills. There, after eight years campaigning, the army showed its disinclination to go further and the king grudgingly turned back (though it should not be forgotten that his successors penetrated down the Ganges as far as Patna). Alexander's return down the Indus valley involved more heavy fighting, the wholesale destruction of Indian cities, and a final nightmare journey through the Makran desert into southern Iran. From then on, certainly with hindsight, his dream begins to unravel. We hear reports of drunkenness and get the impression of a lack of direction. The death of his favourite and lover - Hephaestion - after a massive binge seems to have led to fits of murderous fury and bouts of depression. Wounds and sickness had also taken their toll, and in 323 Alexander died in Babylon, probably from medical complications exacerbated by alcoholism, although there were persistent rumours that he had been poisoned by disenchanted members of his court.
What Alexander would have done had he lived is one of the great what-ifs of history. It seems likely that he had intended to return to India, and according to the historian Diodorus of Sicily, his death prevented planned moves west into the Mediterranean and North Africa as far as the Atlantic. The expedition of a Massiliot navigator, Pytheas, who in 325 circumnavigated Britain, penetrated the Baltic and reached the ice floes around Iceland, gives some idea of the rapidly expanding knowledge of the world that was available to Alexander before he died. It has been conjectured that Pytheas’ voyage was in some sense a Macedonian reconnaissance, and in Pytheas’ account On the Ocean was in Alexander’s hands in Babylon in 323, it would give some tantalizing substance to the idea recorded in Arrian that Alexander 'had he lived … would not have rested until he had subdued the world as far as the Britannic islands’.
Those are the bare bones of the story. It was by common consent one of the great episodes in the history of the world, an extraordinary tale of bravery and cruelty, endurance and excess, chivalry and greed; a journey of ten years and the best part of 20,000 miles all told. The empire broke up rapidly after his death, though Hellenistic kingdoms survived in places for centuries afterwards: the Seleucids in Babylonia, the Ptolemies in Egypt, of whom the Greek-speaking Cleopatra was the last, 300 years after Alexander. Out in the wilds of Afghanistan, Bactria and the Punjab, Indo-Greek kingdoms lasted a similar length of time, minting their coins in Greek on one side and in Indian script on the other, harking back with nostalgia to the days of ‘Great Alexander’. (Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King is a last reverberation of that tale from the days of the British empire, when oral traditions of those fabled kingdoms survived among the pagans of the Hindu Kush.)
Alexander's empire left strange and glittering debris in its wake: lost cities, blue-eyed Indians, exotic treasures, ancient manuscripts, and a great harvest of stories, songs, poems, myths, and legends. His legend spread to every corner of the Old World: Alexander appears in the apocalyptic visions of the biblical Book of Daniel as the ‘Third Beast’ who unleashes a bloody tide on humankind. In the Muslim Koran he is the mysterious ‘Two-Horned One’ who builds a magical wall to keep out Gog and Magog, the evil ones who will ravage the earth with Satan in the last days. There are over two hundred different Alexander epics and poems in medieval European languages alone, surviving in literally thousands of manuscripts: in Russian, Polish, Old French, Czech and Serbian, among others. In Jewish tradition Alexander is a folk hero: though he was a Gentile, his name may be given to orthodox Jewish boys. There is a medieval German Alexander epic, an Icelandic Alexander Saga, and an Ethiopian Alexander Romance. The modern Greek chapbook ‘Alexander’, which circulated under Turkish occupation, has been reprinted dozens of times in the last three centuries.
You will find Alexander depicted as one of the four kings on the standard French pack of playing cards; you’ll still find the map of his empire in every Greek school, and, until recently, on every traditional taverna wall. He is on Sicilian carnival carts, Ethiopian bridal cloths, Byzantine church murals, and in paintings from Moghul India. His tale has been re-interpreted by every generation since his day. The Jews told how he punished the ten lost tribes of Israel and found the Wonderstone in the earthly paradise; Muslim poets told how he found the tree of everlasting life, plumbed the deepest sea in a diving bell, and rose to heaven on a magic chariot pulled by griffons. In Europe in the middle ages he was the ‘perfect knight’ and the philosopher king, and the legend of his ascent to heaven, carved on cathedral stalls from Wells in Somerset to Otranto in southern Italy, became an anticipation of glory in the hereafter. Indian legend said he had found the Speaking Tree, which had foretold his destiny: ‘To die young but win eternal glory.’
In recent years the fascination shows no sign of dying out; indeed there has been an unparalleled outpouring of books, monographs, novels and films on the king. At the start of the twenty-first century Hollywood has no less than three movie versions of Alexander’s life in production. Throughout history, of course, people have always sought and found things in Alexander’s life to mirror their own fantasies and desires. In Hitler’s Germany the greatest Alexander scholar portrayed him as ‘intellect and power’, the Superman as real life hero and model, the embodiment of manifest destiny. Conversely in the latter days of the British Empire, imperial historians like Sir William Tarn saw him as a visionary idealist, a benevolent empire builder in their own mould, pursuing the dream of uniting humankind under one rule, irrespective of race, creed or colour.
Now, at the troubled start of a new century, another Alexander is being disentangled from the sources, and one who no doubt will be reflected in the new Hollywood versions just as Tarn’s was in the Richard Burton film of 1956. Indeed Alexander has perhaps never been the subject of such close scrutiny. The dark deeds of his reign are being investigated in the way that war crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Bosnia were. The Macedonian conquests, hitherto seen through Greek sources exclusively, are now being illuminated for the first time by native sources, newly discovered diaries, oracles and prophecies on papyrus or clay tablets. The Greek adventure in Asia is being reconsidered in terms of modern ideas on colonialism, orientalism, and racism. So, too, the king’s power politics - his purges and massacres; his reliance on intelligence, spies and secret police; his control of information, manipulation of images, and production of state propaganda; his use of torture against opponents, and terror against civilian populations - are now being seen in the light of modern authoritarian states. All these facts which are attested in our sources have take on new meaning in our own time which has lived through the great communist utopian tyrannies and their offshoots.
On the other hand, our view of the material culture of his court, and that of his father Philip, has been dramatically widened by the sensational archaeological discoveries at the royal tombs at Vergina. There, for example, one eye catching detail, the great collection of wine mixing bowls, strainers and decanters - recalls the drinking culture of they royal circle so frequently described in our sources. The nature of the Macedonian religious cult in the king’s lifetime has also recently been thrillingly illuminated by the remarkable recovery and reconstruction of the Derveni papyrus. On the king’s sexuality there are new insights too, as more becomes known about Greek male attitudes to women, and to homosexuality, and specifically about the importance of male love affairs in the internal politics and sometimes deadly jealousies and feuds of the Macedonian court. Others have attempted to look into the king’s mind, in particular at the psychology of leadership and the pitfalls of absolute power. A new study has suggested alcoholism – days-long Dionysiac drinking bouts as the increasingly isolated and paranoid king followed ever more devotedly in his god’s footsteps – was the root of his downfall. The most recent survey has found suggestive parallels with Cortes and the conquistadors, emphasizing the king’s dark side, ‘murderous and melancholy mad’ as one hostile contemporary portrayed him. Its all a far cry from the golden boy we have heard about for so long; it may perhaps be nearer to his truth – but there is no doubt that it is nearer to ours.
Links
Alexander by Plutarch, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Arrian
Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox
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