Alexander the Great

Man and God

Ian Worthington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317866442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Alexander the Great conquered territories on a superhuman scale and established an empire that stretched from Greece to India. He spread Greek culture and education throughout his empire, and was worshipped as a living god by many of his subjects. But how great is a leader responsible for the deaths on tens of thousands of people? A ruler who prefers constant warring to administering the peace? A man who believed he was a god, who murdered his friends, and recklessly put his soldiers lives at risk?

Ian Worthington delves into Alexander's successes and failures, his paranoia, the murders he engineered, his megalomania, and his constant drinking. It presents a king corrupted by power and who, for his own personal ends, sacrificed the empire his father had fought to establish.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: UNCOVERING THE LEGEND

‘“How can a man become a god?” was a question that Alexander once put to several Indian philosophers. They answered, “By doing something a man cannot do.”’¹

Alexander III of Macedonia became king in 336 at the age of 20. What he did for posterity to call him ‘Great’ seems clear enough. By the time he died in 323 in his 33rd year, he had expanded the Macedonian empire from Greece in the west to India in the east. He conquered native peoples on an astonishing scale and in great battles and sieges. He brought down the Persian empire and subdued Egypt, promoted Greek education and culture in his new empire, and was even worshipped as a god by some of his subjects. He took scientists with him who recorded all sorts of information about the areas through which he marched, from flora and fauna to climate. He opened up a world that was much larger than Greece or even the entire Mediterranean. In the process, he introduced to the Greeks a sense of belonging to that larger world, and during the Hellenistic period that followed his death they took to that legacy eagerly. Moreover, he died young, at the height of his power, but he had not planned to return home after his conquests in Asia. When he died his next venture, the invasion of Arabia, was already in motion. His plan to conquer the western Mediterranean after Arabia was already hatched. Only death stopped him.

Alexander is arguably the most famous and most controversial figure from antiquity. Although other kings and generals won many battles and forged many empires, Alexander produced an empire that was, albeit briefly, without parallel. He was a legend in his own lifetime, and he remains one today. Appearance, though, is not always reality. Therein lies the problem: trying to separate the real or historical Alexander from the legendary.

Was he really the great general, whose genius lay on the battlefield? Was he the philosophical idealist, who integrated foreigners into his administration and army, seemingly as a way of uniting mankind? Was he really the bringer of Greek civilisation to so-called barbarian lands? Was he really a dashing, heroic king who ruled a great empire that led to the physical and cultural formation of the Hellenistic kingdoms? Or was he a paranoid, alcoholic megalomaniac who thought he was a god, was guilty of murder and genocide, who today would be tried for crimes against humanity, and who destroyed the Macedonian empire? Should he still be called Alexander the Great or, as the modern Persians call him, Alexander the Accursed?

Much of the Alexander that we admire, that we think is great, is the product of later writers and societies that attributed deeds, motives and feelings to him that were unhistorical. Here we reach the core problem with Alexander: the nature of our source material. All of Alexander’s most infamous actions added together are less controversial than the problems associated with the sources for him.

I deal with the following in more detail in the Bibliographic Essay at the end of this book.

It would be natural to suppose that with a figure like Alexander we would have a vast array of source material from his reign, and so have no problem in putting together a picture of it. Not so. It is not until centuries after his death that we start to get a connected narrative of the reign. The most important of these later sources are Diodorus Siculus (first century BC), Quintus Curtius Rufus (first century AD), Arrian (second century AD), Justin, who epitomised an earlier work (third century AD) and Plutarch’s biography of Alexander (second century AD). These are the ‘big five’.

We also have information on aspects of Alexander’s reign, though not in any connected narrative, in other sources. The most important are Strabo (first century BC) and Athenaeus (second/early third century AD). Athenaeus’s work was set at a banquet at which guests discussed various intellectual and artistic matters. Accordingly he is less interested in facts and more in anecdotes about people and places.

In a collection called the Moralia, which encompasses a vast expanse of topics, by Plutarch, we have numerous references to Alexander. In particular there is a treatise called On The Fortune or The Virtue of Alexander. It has had an undue influence on the historical Alexander (see below).

Accounts of the reign were written in Alexander’s time and in the generation or so after him, but they have not survived in their entirety. We know of around two dozen authors, including Callisthenes of Olynthus (the court historian), Alexander’s general Ptolemy, and Nearchus of Crete, who sailed the Indian Ocean. To these we can add other contemporary sources, such as the Ephemerides, the Royal Diaries, supposedly a daily journal of the king’s activities. This probably did not cover the entire length of the reign but just the last few days since it recorded mostly Alexander’s drinking habits and how he died. However, what remains of all these early works (the ‘fragments’) is quoted only in the much later narrative histories.

Since we do not have the contemporary works in full, the problem starts to be obvious. Did each one deal with the reign in full or concentrate on only aspects of it, and how accurate are they? For example, the authenticity of the Ephemerides is suspect. It was probably written by the royal secretary, Eumenes of Cardia, after Alexander died. How much importance can we therefore attach to it? Another example: How can we be sure that Ptolemy, who was an eyewitness to Alexander’s actions, does not get something wrong or (even more likely) slant his account in his own favour? He probably wrote his account shortly after he seized Egypt in 323, and elevating himself and his achievements during Alexander’s campaigns would have given him more of an edge in the wars of the successors that broke out on Alexander’s death. Another source, Aristobulus, tended to overlook the downsides of Alexander’s reign and focus on portraying the king in as flattering a light as possible. These earlier sources’ shortcomings are vividly summed up in the Preface to Arrian’s narrative: ‘Different authors have given different accounts of Alexander’s actions, and there is no one about whom more have written, or more at variance with each other.’

Then we encounter the problem of the later narrative sources (the ‘big five’), which must have been affected by the differences among the contemporary writers. We know, for example, that Nearchus’s account of his voyage along the Makran Coast was used extensively by Arrian. Two other major sources that Arrian used were Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and mention of their shortcomings has already been made.

Cleitarchus was the principal source for Diodorus, Curtius and Plutarch, and often what is detailed in Curtius (such as matters of geography and topography) can be found in shorter form in Diodorus. Plutarch was not a historian but a biographer. He was more interested in Alexander as a person and in his system of values and beliefs than in historical accuracy, and although he refers to 24 earlier writers in his biography of Alexander, many have shortcomings. Hence, we may ask similar questions of all these later sources: How accurately did they reconcile conflicting earlier information? How and why did they decide that one account was to be preferred over another? To what extent did they impose their own moral judgements and backgrounds on their subject matter? These questions we cannot always answer.

The later legends and stories about Alexander affect the historical king. His larger than life persona lent itself to manipulation and embellishment in his own time and throughout the ages. In the third century, the Alexander Romance was begun. This is a stirring account of Alexander’s reign that is mostly fictitious. It was rewritten and added to many times over the centuries, and had a massive influence on many cultures. For example, in Hebrew literature, Alexander was a preacher and prophet, and in Persian literature he is Sikandar, sent to punish the impure peoples. Since the Alexander Romance was expanded over the years, deeds were attributed to Alexander that are unhistorical. The stories attached to Alexander became fodder for the illuminated manuscripts of the mediaeval period. For example, there is Alexander’s voyage to the bottom of the sea in a glass bathysphere along with a cock, a cat and a dog, in a version copied in Flanders in 1340 (see Plate 1).

In the dark depths of the ocean, the cock’s crowing would tell Alexander when it was morning, the pure breath of the cat would provide clean air, and if he got into difficulties he could kill the dog and float to the surface. These sorts of stories and images, like Alexander’s encounter with the tribe of headless men, we can dismiss, but what about all of them?

In the second century AD, we have a treatise supposedly by Plutarch called On The Fortune or The Virtue of Alexander. Influenced by his own intellectual and political background, Alexander is depicted in this work as an action man and a philosopher-king, whose mission was to impose Greek civilisation on the ‘barbarian’ Persians. The work is rhetorical, but that aspect of it came to be disregarded as time continued. Late antiquity and the mediaeval era welcomed the warrior-king who combined military success with wisdom and unification. In the Middle Ages’ world of chivalry, warriors and great battles, the historical Alexander faded faster into the invincible general. Artists over the centuries kept his military side, but at the same time he became a symbol for piety, for virtue, for excellence, for unity. It is no accident that his bust is on the modern Greek 100 drachma coin.

The ancient sources portray a variety of Alexanders for a number of reasons. So also do modern scholars, who are equally affected by the source problem, and especially by their own political and cultural backgrounds.

For example, Alexander was a unifier of the world with divine sanction (Droysen, in 1877), an immoral imperialist out to found a new World Order akin to the Nazis (Schachermeyr, in 1949), a ruthless imperialist who found out that absolute power was lonely (Badian, in 1958), a philosophical idealist, who strove to establish a brotherhood of man (Tarn, in 1948), a Homeric hero type (Lane Fox, in 1973), a successful king for the most part, but who had many downsides (Bosworth, in 1988) and, simply, a genius (Hammond, in 1997).

The problem of separating the legendary Alexander from the historical affects our evaluation and appreciation of him. In this book I present my Alexander. He was a genius when it came to strategy and tactics. He was a fierce and unrelenting fighter, an inspiration so often to his men, a conqueror of enormous territories and an intellectual. However, he was not just a general. He was a king, a statesman, a political leader. Everything was concentrated into his hands, and so he needs to be treated as this ‘package’. He was also a man who had his demons. He had many influences playing on him, from his ethnic background, to his mother’s complaints about his father, to his father himself. His motives for what he did in his reign show its downside, and his downside as a person.

The bulk of my book is a factual, narrative account of Alexander’s reign and his exploits, in which I have followed the accounts of ancient authors that today are accepted as generally reliable. Where there is room to expand or discuss a particular problem or controversy within the narrative in a new light I have done so. Two thematic chapters follow. I believe that worsening relations between Alexander and his father, Philip II, made him desperate to outstrip Philip. Deification afforded him the means to do this.

However, as his reign progressed, he came to believe that he was a god on earth. How his belief affected him and his reign is examined in Chapter 14. I consider Alexander the ‘package’, his positives and negatives, in Chapter 15. As reason gave way to delusion, his paranoia, murders and belief that he was a god on earth would prove disastrous for himself, his throne, his empire and everything that Philip II had worked to build. Given this downside, should we still call him Great? The final chapter (16) is a general conclusion.

As I said in my Preface, not everyone will agree with my approach and what I say. My aim is to be provocative, to challenge some of the traditional approaches to Alexander, and in so doing to present a less ‘heroic’ (in the modern sense) Alexander than is the norm.

Note

In the following chapters, I have decided to quote from the surviving fragments of the otherwise lost, contemporary sources rather than the later, narrative ones. I realise that my approach has its limitations, given the fragmentary nature of the evidence. However, I want to show what ancient writers in and around the time of Alexander actually said, for it is truly from them that Alexander comes alive. For a full narrative of the reign it is essential to read the ‘big five’.

All of the contemporary sources (over 400 of them) are collected together in a volume of a multi-volume work by F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der grieschischen Historiker (The Fragments of the Greek Historians), commonly abbreviated as FGrH. This has a Greek text of the fragments with a commentary in German on them. The fragments of the Alexander historians are in Volume IIB, nos 117–53 (Berlin, 1927) and the German commentary on them is in IID (Berlin, 1927), pp. 403–542. A few extra of dubious worth are in Volume IIIB, nos 742–3 (Berlin, 1930). The Alexander historians are translated in C.A. Robinson, The History of Alexander the Great 1 (Providence RI, 1953), and about a third are reprinted in my Alexander the Great: A Reader (London and New York, 2003; repr. 2004).

In Jacoby, each ancient author has his own number (thus, Onesicritus is Number 134), and each fragment of that author is numbered from one. My notes give the references to the sources as in Jacoby followed by the later writer who quotes them for readers who wish to follow them up. Thus, for example, a reference in a note to ‘Onesicritus, FGrH 134 F 38 = Plutarch, Alexander 8.2’ would be to the Onesicritus, whose number in Jacoby’s FGrH is 134, and to Fragment Number 38 of Onesicritus’s works. What Onesicritus says there is quoted by Plutarch in his biography of Alexander at Chapter 8, Section 2.

See the Bibliographic Essay for details of the other ancient sources who are cited in the notes.

CHAPTER TWO

ALEXANDER’S INHERITANCE

Alexander’s homeland, and especially his father as a man and his exploits as a king, influenced him to a far greater degree than is often seen.¹ These need to be set in context at the outset in any attempt to understand Alexander as king and why he did what he did with his father’s brilliant legacy.

Macedonia, Alexander’s home state, was situated north of Mount Olympus (see Plate 2), the home of the gods, which served as the frontier in antiquity between it and the Greeks to the south.

As well as a geographical line of division between those who lived south of Mount Olympus and those who lived to its north, there was an apparent racial one. The Greeks to the south called the Macedonians ‘barbarians’, a word that was used as late as the last quarter of the fourth century. This does not mean that the Macedonians were uncivilised in our definition of the word, but that the Greeks did not see them as Greek. The word ‘barbarian’ comes from bar-bar, the noise of a sheep. That was how anyone who did not speak Greek sounded to the Greeks, hence such people were not Greek.

But were the Macedonians really not Greek, and if so, what were they? The ethnicity issue has been much discussed.² There is still no consensus, and there probably never will be. The Greeks south of Mount Olympus did not think the Macedonians were Greek, but then they were their enemies so perhaps their attitude does not mean much. What are perhaps the most telling indicators are things like the proper name for the Macedonians, which was ‘Makedones’ or ‘highlanders’. The name is Greek. Moreover, the gods whom the Makedones worshipped, the names of their months, the names of the people and the names of their towns were all Greek. Royal (and perhaps wealthy noble) Macedonians participated in the Olympic Games. For that, a competitor had to be Greek.

It would seem that the case is closed. However, this last argument (participation at the Olympic Games) is tenuous. It is anchored on the tradition that at some time a new dynasty of the Macedonian royal house came from Argos in Greece, the Temenids. The first king was Perdiccas, and because of this link Alexander I competed at Olympia some time b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• Preface to Paperback edition
• Preface to Hardback edition
• Acknowledgements
• Alexander’s Reign: The Main Events
• Map of Macedonia and Greece
• Map of Alexander’s Empire
• 1 Introduction: Uncovering the Legend
• 2 Alexander’s Inheritance
• 3 Alexander’s Boyhood
• 4 King at Last
• 5 The Very Gates of Asia
• 6 A Bridge of Corpses
• 7 Son of Ra, Son of Zeus
• 8 Lord of Asia
• 9 Conquest and Conspiracy
• 10 Bactria and Sogdiana
• 11 India
• 12 ‘We’ll say Goodbye in Babylon’
• 13 Death and Disorder
• 14 Man and God
• 15 Alexander: The Great
• 16 Philip’s Ghost
• Notes
• Bibliographic Essay
• Index