Alexander the Great

Ulrich Wilcken, G. C. Richards

• Éditeur: Hauraki Publishing
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781787202580
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Egyptian Ancient History

"ALEXANDER THE GREAT opened a new era in the history of the world, and by his life's work determined its development for many centuries. He is conspicuous among the great men of history, because this work was accomplished in so short a span; when he died, he had not yet reached his thirty-third year. It was as a great conqueror that he impressed the popular imagination of every race. He subdued the East and penetrated into India, that land of wonders. The legend about him, equally current in East and West, took him to the limits of the earth and even to the gates of Paradise. The permanent result of his life, however, was not the empire which he won by hard fighting, but the development of Greek civilisation into a civilisation which was worldwide. It is in this way that his influence has affected the history of mankind even down to our own time. He had first to create his empire; the decision of the battlefield had, as usual, to produce the external conditions for the new civilisation."Originally published in 1932, Ulrich Wilcken's distinguished biography of Alexander the Great is widely regarded as a classic, perfectly capturing Alexander's true achievements and influence.Translated from German by G. C. Richards, Professor of Greek and Classical Literature at Oriel College, Oxford University.

PART I—PROLOGUE

Alexander represents the whole course of Greek life, for he has as much of Achilles as of Epaminondas; he has even something of the spirit of Pericles, political insight and love of beauty and truth. In him even more than in Alcibiades nature showed her power, and he did not waste her gifts like Alcibiades; fortified by a good education, which Alcibiades did not enjoy, he was able to devote these gifts to great tasks, and in his short life he did little harm, and much good.—A. HOLM

History and poetry seem to have taken Alexander as the type of an ambitious warrior. The phrase ‘Macedonia’s madman’, and the circumstance of his weeping for worlds to conquer, hardly convey a correct idea of one whose views of glory were so intimately connected with the effects his conquests were to produce. From Alexandria to Kandahar the unlettered do him more justice.—G. FINLAY

INTRODUCTION

ALEXANDER THE GREAT opened a new era in the history of the world, and by his life’s work determined its development for many centuries. He is conspicuous among the great men of history, because this work was accomplished in so short a span; when he died, he had not yet reached his thirty-third year. It was as a great conqueror that he impressed the popular imagination of every race. He subdued the East and penetrated into India, that land of wonders. The legend about him, equally current in East and West, took him to the limits of the earth and even to the gates of Paradise. The permanent result of his life, however, was not the empire which he won by hard fighting, but the development of Greek civilisation into a civilisation which was worldwide. It is in this way that his influence has affected the history of mankind even down to our own time. He had first to create his empire; the decision of the battlefield had, as usual, to produce the external conditions for the new civilisation.{1}

In the disputed question, what are the forces which make and mould history, Alexander is the strongest instance in favour of the view which maintains the decisive importance of personality. One cannot comprehend a genius like Alexander from the surroundings in which he lived, or as a product of his age and country. He was of course like any other man affected by his period and birthplace, but his spirit took a course of its own, to which the natural development of his age and surroundings would never have led by itself. Like every great leader of men he threw himself into the currents of his epoch; but he did not allow himself to be merely lifted and carried forward on their waves—where they were in opposition to his own ideas, he vigorously struggled against them. No doubt we can trace before him in the fourth century phenomena and tendencies, which we may regard as forerunners of Hellenism—the name we apply to the later transformation of the classical Hellenic world that he inaugurated—and yet they are only forerunners, to which he first gave full effect; they show that in many respects he only fulfilled the aims of his own time. The preliminary work of his great father Philip was most important. From him he inherited not only the instrument of victory, the incomparable Macedonian army, but also the solution of the Greek question in the Corinthian League, and the idea of a Panhellenic campaign of revanche against Persia.

Doubtless, in pursuance of his own ideas, Alexander gradually modified this inheritance and diverged from his father’s path; but without Philip, who is equally one of the great personalities of the world’s history, Alexander cannot be understood. We shall therefore have first to present to ourselves the political, intellectual and economic tendencies in the Greek world of the fourth century, so far as they contribute to an estimate of the rise of Macedonia under Philip and to our appreciation of Alexander.

CHAPTER I—THE GREEK WORLD IN THE FOURTH CENTURY DOWN TO PHILIP

AFTER the collapse of Athens and the Athenian Empire in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta was left victor and proceeded with brutal violence to establish her supremacy over the Greeks and to introduce oligarchic institutions in place of the democracies previously favoured by Athens. The victory, however, had not been won by her own strength, but only through the scandalous alliance with Persia, which was purchased by the sacrifice to the Great King of their brethren of Asia Minor, the descendants of the old Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian colonists.

Irritated by the senseless attitude of the radical democrats of Athens, who, in spite of the renewal of the Peace of Callias by Darius II, had interfered with the internal affairs of the Persian Empire, the Great King had since 412 supported the Spartans with his inexhaustible purse. In return for this they were prepared, without any nationalistic qualms, to surrender to him the Greeks of Asia Minor, for whose liberation the Delian League organised by Athens had fought under Athenian leadership down to 448, when we may date the Peace of Callias. It was Persian gold that built the fleets with which the Spartans overcame the resistance of Athens and finally (404) starved it into surrender, and thus at one stroke the Persian Empire, in spite of internal weakness, had become the determining factor in Greek history. It is true that Sparta, who soon fell out with her ally, and had already compromised herself at Susa by her secret support of prince Cyrus in his march with the famous Ten Thousand against his brother Artaxerxes Mnemon, drew the sword against Persia, according to the official account, in order to protect the Asiatic Greeks, who were about to be punished for their participation in that expedition. But patriotic motives can hardly have been the deciding factor with the Spartans, who had previously in cold blood awarded those cities to the Persians; it was, rather, the desire to retain the powerful position which they had won in Asia Minor, chiefly through the great Lysander, and perhaps also the wish, as lords of Greece, to purge themselves of the stain of the Persian alliance.

But while Sparta’s armies, first under other commanders and finally under Agesilaus, were fighting the Persians overseas, at home the hatred evoked by the brutal reign of force the Spartans had exercised there brought together Thebes, Athens, Corinth and Argos in a coalition, which compelled Agesilaus to break off the war with Persia and to fight in Hellas against the allies. Then again Persian gold played its part, this time on the side of the allies. More decisive in its effects than the victory of Agesilaus at Coroneia was the victory of the Persian fleet at Cnidus under the command of the Athenian Conon (394); this meant the collapse of Spartan power at sea, and Conon was able to have the walls of his native city rebuilt, though by Persian money. This melancholy civil war, however, which shockingly exhibits the miserable and incurable divisions of the Greek nation, continued with varying success for many years.

After the rise of Athens had emboldened the Athenians to support the revolt from Persia of the Cypriot prince Euagoras and the rebellion of Egypt, and had by a new grouping of powers brought Sparta into connexion with Persia, the so-called King’s Peace was concluded in 386, which was also called after the clever Spartan who negotiated it the Peace of Antalcidas. As early as 392 this Antalcidas, together with the satrap Tiribazus, had debated terms of peace with the representatives of the allies at Sardis. Then the Athenians were still strong enough to be the only allied state which refused the Persian demand for the cession of the coast of Asia Minor, on the patriotic ground that they could not admit that the Greeks who lived in Asia belonged to the Great King. For this and other reasons the negotiations broke down. But now Antalcidas, who was also a skilful admiral, succeeded, with the additional support of ships from Dionysius I of Syracuse, in closing the Dardanelles to the Athenians, and bringing to bear on them the same compulsion as in 405. Resistance was no longer possible. The Greeks had obediently to receive the peace, which the Great King sent down to them from Susa to Sardis in the most humiliating form by the hand of Antalcidas, with whom he had settled its terms. The King’s edict comprised two clauses and a sanction. The first clause laid down that all the Greek cities in Asia as well as the islands of Clazomenae and Cyprus should belong to the Great King, the second that all other Greek cities, great and small, should be free and independent, the only exceptions being the cleruchies of Lemnos, Imbros and Scyros which were left to Athens. The sanction stated that the King in conjunction with the states that were of the same mind would wage war by sea and land against anyone who did not accept the peace. On the basis of this edict the peace was confirmed at Sparta by the oaths of all present at the congress. Thus the Hellenic brethren on the other side of the sea were finally awarded to the Great King. The clause about autonomy corresponded not only to the interests of the Persian monarch, to whom it implied the permanent subdivision of Greece into countless sovereign communities, Poleis, but in particular to the interests of Sparta, inasmuch as all leagues of states which did not guarantee autonomy were thereby excluded. Accordingly the Theban League was immediately dissolved, while the Peloponnesian League, the members of which were nominally autonomous, remained in existence under the leadership of Sparta. In this respect the King’s Peace was a triumph for Sparta, who had now to superintend the strict execution of its terms in the sorry role of Persian agent. No doubt many short-sighted particularists, who were incapable of learning by experience, were well content that the old ideal of freedom and independence was guaranteed to each individual Polis. But the better elements felt it to be a disgrace, that this peace, which, as Isocrates put it, was not a treaty but a dictation, had been forced on them by the Persian King, and that he now as official guarantor exercised a supreme control over Greek policy. The disgrace was all the more crying, as the military superiority of the Greeks was unquestionable after the expedition of the Ten Thousand, and might have made a conquest of Persia possible, if in place of their disunion a unification of Greek forces could have been carried out. It is of prime importance for the understanding of the fourth century to realise that this shameful peace of 386 was a fundamental law in Hellas for fully half a century, and a burden which was now more, now less galling. Philip first cut the ground from under it by uniting the nation in his Corinthian League, and Alexander completely abolished it by the destruction of the Persian Empire.

The conclusion of the King’s Peace was followed by years of difficulty for Greece, during which Sparta used her new hegemony to extend her power still further. As a protection against Spartan encroachments, Athens succeeded in 377 in founding a new Attic naval league, in which according to the terms of the King’s Peace it guaranteed freedom and autonomy to each member of the league. By care in avoiding the faults which had produced the dissolution of the first naval league in the fifth century, a new organisation was created, the chief point being that the members each sent a representative to a federal council (Synhedrion) sitting at Athens, which had to keep in touch with the assembly of the Athenian people.

While this league in the next following years was extended in Northern and Central Greece and in the islands of the East and West by the successful operations of the Attic generals Chabrias and Timotheus, Thebes had in the meantime rapidly risen to power in the struggle with Sparta under the leadership of Epaminondas, on the recovery of the citadel, the Cadmeia, which the Spartans had seized in time of peace by a brutal violation of international law. Epaminondas’ immediate aim was the formation of a united Boeotian state, and when at the peace congress at Sparta in 371 objection was raised to this on the ground of the King’s Peace, he defied the congress and at Leuctra inflicted so severe a defeat on the Spartan king Cleombrotus that Sparta’s military predominance was at an end forever. This battle of Leuctra was also of the greatest significance for the development of the Macedonian military system; the so-called ‘oblique battle-array’, which Epaminondas, its inventor, and one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, first applied here, was later adopted and expanded by King Philip, and with it Alexander won the day in his three great pitched battles, as did Frederick the Great at Leuthen.

Sparta was prostrate and could not interfere in the following years, when Epaminondas by repeated expeditions into the Peloponnese rendered it completely impotent, by robbing it of Messenia, on whose harvests and supply of labour its economic and political position largely rested, and by the organisation of a federal Arcadian state with a newly created capital, Megalopolis.

But the aims of Epaminondas flew higher: he was working for the hegemony of all Greece. If, as was once erroneously assumed, his intention had been a Panhellenic national policy, he would, as the political situation then was, have been bound to attempt the unification of Hellas under the leadership of Thebes for a war against Persia and the destruction of the supremacy of the Great King. Instead of that he fell a victim to the curse of his age. In order to win domination over the other Greeks, he made overtures to the Persian King, to whom the rise of Attic sea-power was as much an eyesore as it was an obstacle in his own path, and caused his ambassadors, Pelopidas among them, to dance attendance at Susa, and humbly beg for the co-operation of the Great King. But in 362 when Epaminondas fell at Mantineia in a battle which he again had arranged with genius, the policy of Thebes as a great power collapsed, since it did not correspond to the actual strength of the state, and had only been maintained by his personality.

This episode of Theban hegemony was of no permanent value to the Greeks; it merely caused an aching void in the military strength of the nation by the annihilation of Sparta. Nor was the second Attic naval league destined to flourish long. In spite of the promises of 377, Athens began to slip back again into the policy of the first league in its dealings with the members, and in 357 Chios, Rhodes and Cos, incited by the intrigues of Maussollus of Caria, revolted and seceded. Nothing can throw a more lurid light on the impotent condition of Greece than the fact that after unsuccessful fighting Athens in 355 was forced, by the threat of a declaration of war by the Persian king, to let the seceders go: this was the new and vigorous king Artaxerxes III Ochus. Thus Athens too resigned the position of the sovereign great power, and the result was universal chaos in Greece. Opposed to the Greeks stood the Persian monarchy. Certainly at times it seemed to be approaching dissolution through the revolt of satraps and provinces, but by the help of Greek mercenaries it constantly maintained its existence; the unity of the empire was first and foremost, whereas in Greece there was a permanent division, out of which there seemed no way leading to unification of forces.

If this conflict of the Greek states with one another was discomforting, no less so were the internal conditions of the various Poleis. Whether democrats or oligarchs held sway, the oppositions of the hostile parties became everywhere embittered, and the domination of the victorious became ever more destructive to the defeated. The radical tendencies of democracies, such as Athens, which had begun in the fifth century grew ever more extreme. The rule of the proletariat under the leadership of its demagogues developed more and more into a class-domination, and the popular tribunals, which, since the raising of the payment of members, were overwhelmingly composed of the poorer citizens, dealt out a class justice, which was directed not merely against political opponents but specially against property-owners as such, with an eye to the confiscation of their property; it was at bottom a struggle of the poor against the rich, and in this process the most radical demands were raised, such as for a new division of land, the abolition of debts and so forth. In oligarchic states the war of classes was carried on with the same passion from the opposite point of view. Thus the exiles and bankrupts formed an ever-increasing proletariat without means or occupation, such as Isocrates describes in 380 and with greater emphasis in 346.

This became a danger to the whole of Hellas. There were then no great industrial concerns to supply work for these masses. Many turned to brigandage on the country roads, or as pirates rendered the sea unsafe, but most of them were driven by want to enlist as mercenaries in the service of the potentate who offered the highest pay. This mercenary system was a deep-seated evil which affected the whole nation. The gold of the Persian king was the chief attraction. After the shock of the expedition of the Ten Thousand he endeavoured more and more to prop up his power by armies of Greek mercenaries. But his efforts were partly defeated, because rebel satraps and countries like Egypt also enlisted Greek mercenaries to fight against him. Nor did Greece supply only soldiers: it also produced officers. Many of the most prominent generals of the day, if they were unemployed or disgusted by political conditions at home, entered foreign service, and often turned the scale in fighting for or against the Great King. What a waste of national vigour this was for the benefit of foreigners!

The ease with which mercenaries could be found had another mischievous consequence; in Greece too many civic communities began to enlist mercenaries, in order to escape more or less from the duty of bearing arms themselves. Even when the Athenian Iphicrates was organising a new body of light-armed peltasts, it appeared that citizens thought themselves too good to undergo the severe drill required by this new formation, and preferred to recruit mercenaries instead. The worst result was the decay of the old idea of the state which had once inspired citizens with the proud consciousness that it was their highest and noblest duty to defend their state with their property and their blood. The state came to be regarded more and more as an institution of maintenance, whose chief task was to assure the citizen of as easy and comfortable a life as possible and to organise for him many magnificent festivals. Thus at Athens, after the above-mentioned inglorious end of the Social War in the fifties, the inevitable result was a pacifism, which abandoned the policy of imperial power, provided that material interests were promoted.

But not only had the idea of the Polis been lowered in the hard struggle of actual life, it had also been shaken by the theories of the leading intellectuals. The individualism, preache...

Table des matières

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PART I-PROLOGUE
• PART II-ALEXANDER
• PART III-APPENDIX
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER