Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (3 page)

It helps to have a mother who believes in you, one who whispers constantly in your perfectly formed little ear that you are the beloved of the gods and your father is just a temporary obstacle. Scarcely a year after the glorious victory at Chaeronea, Philip, full of himself, humiliated Alexander’s mother, the meddlesome Olympias, by taking another, much younger wife. It is not surprising that the names of Olympias and Alexander were ever after linked to the conspiracy that all assumed lay behind the savage assassination of the king during the first year of his new marriage.

Alexander found himself at twenty king of
Macedon,
hegemon
(or “leader”) of the
Corinthian League of Greek city-states that his father had formed in the aftermath of Chaeronea, and commander in chief of an army of forty thousand troops and 160 warships that Philip had assembled to challenge the hegemony of the fabulous and detested
Persian empire, which lay to the east. Before setting out for Persia, Alexander took the time to put down an annoying little rebellion among the Thebans, unhappy with their reduced status. The young king acted swiftly and with appalling decisiveness: he massacred the Thebans, destroyed their city, and enslaved the survivors. This unrestrained cruelty, carried out with cool calculation and obviously intended as a universal lesson, resounded through the Greek world, and no other city-state dared give trouble during the long absence of the king throughout his coming years of war.

It took Alexander several years to break the power of Persia. In November of 333 at the
battle of Issus in the Syrian
mountains, Darius III, king of the
Persians, himself led his army and was forced to flee the field. In responding dismissively to Darius’s subsequent suit for peace, Alexander signed himself “Lord of Asia,” giving the first hint that what he had in mind was a prize greater than even greater Persia, in its day the most extensive empire the world had known. During the grueling course of Alexander’s seven-month siege of
Tyre, the Phoenician port city on the Levantine coast that had supplied the backbone of Darius’s fleet, Darius made the desperate offer of half his kingdom. “Heaven cannot support two suns, nor earth two masters,” replied the Lord of Asia, who went on to destroy the entire Persian fleet and to make of Tyre the same sort of terrifying example he had made of Thebes. What the Greeks had learned the Asians now knew: do not cross Alexander.

He traveled south, captured
Gaza, and invaded
Egypt, where the charred catastrophes of Thebes and Tyre were not forgotten and where there was now not even a whisper of opposition. There in that archaic land, mysterious even to the ancients, the bulbous crown of Egypt was placed on his golden locks, and he was declared Pharaoh and “Son of God.” To Egyptians the god in question was Amon-Ra, the sun; to Alexander’s Greek battalions, it was Zeus, the god of gods. And in Egypt, Alexander built at the mouth of the Nile what would become the greatest city of the ancient world for the next two hundred years—
Alexandria, the first of dozens by that name throughout the growing empire of the Son of God.

But Alexander had more work before him. Darius had escaped his clutches and was gathering a new army in the heart of Persia. Alexander pursued him, winning the decisive
battle of Gaugamela on the Tigris, after which Darius contrived his
penultimate escape. Alexander let him go and set his face toward capturing
Babylon,
Susa, and Persepolis, Darius’s capital, where he burned the royal palace to the ground. In June of 330, the Macedonian changed course and set out in full pursuit of the Persian king, who escaped him one last time only because he was stabbed to death by his disaffected deputies. The unfortunate Darius’s dying request was for Alexander to avenge him. Kings, even if they are enemies, always have something in common; and Alexander happily hunted down the regicides. After all, the King of Kings, as he began to style himself, cannot allow the murder of his revered predecessor to go unpunished. Alexander, who could now portray himself as Darius’s avenger and legitimate successor, also began to assume the elaborate dress, paint, and bodily ornamentation of the Persian royal court—Oriental affectations that did not sit well with his homespun Macedonian guard, the same Macedonians who had been so rigorously trained by his late father. What decorations he did not keep for himself he sent home, along with massive quantities of precious plate and purple, to Mother.

The King of Kings still had plenty of opposition on his hands, obdurate resistance especially in Bactria and Sogdiana, satrapies to the north and east (that correspond roughly to today’s Afghanistan and Uzbekistan). His pacification of these difficult areas was aided mightily by his taking in late 328 a Sogdian princess for wife. Her name was
Roxane. She was young, she was beautiful, and she seems to have been the unwitting victim of an ancient public relations scheme to give the unpopular new king a better image with truculent ethnics in the far northeast of his domains. The word went out that Alexander and Roxane were madly in love. Of course, the
royal marriage, though it produced an heir, didn’t mean that the King of Kings had to give up his favorite catamite, who continued to keep his accustomed place in the royal bed. This marriage to a foreign prisoner of war was no more popular with the Macedonians than was Alexander’s new wardrobe.

The King of Kings began to establish settlements in the outlying territories, garrisons commanded by his faithful Macedonians. They were labeled new Greek “cities,” and the motive ascribed to Alexander in creating them was that he wished to spread the benefits of Greek culture. In reality, these fortifications kept the population quiescent and awarded to fed-up Macedonian warriors the customary spoils of victory—a free hand in the oppression of the local populations and the rape of their economies.

In every age, professional soldiers, especially those engaged for years in combat, have been heavy drinkers, and Alexander and his men were no exception. But Alexander, it was noticed, had begun to drink more heavily than most and to grow unreasonable and violent on such occasions. One night, in his cups, Alexander killed Black Clitus, a trusty old lieutenant of Philip’s who had once saved Alexander’s life, for deriding the increasing “Orientalism” of the Alexandrine court. Alexander had even begun to insist that his subjects approach him by falling forward on the ground in complete prostrations, as Darius’s had done, for in the East the king was taken for a god. When the royal pages were discovered plotting Alexander’s murder, they were of course summarily executed, but not before giving as the justification for their attempt the king’s exceedingly un-Greek behavior. Alexander, increasingly isolated, trusted ever fewer counselors and could no longer treat anyone, even the most belaureled veteran of his father’s campaigns, as an intimate. The exception was young Hephestion, his favorite boon companion, who never lost the king’s confidence.

T
HE
E
MPIRE
OF
A
LEXANDER
THE
G
REAT

At the time of his death in 323
B.C.
, the territories under Alexander’s sway stretched from the Greek mainland in the west to the east banks of the rivers Indus and Hyphasis in central Asia and as far south as southern Egypt. (The Persian Empire, which Alexander conquered, had also been extensive: beginning in the area of Persepolis, it had stretched far north into the Caucasus on both sides of the Caspian Sea; but it never reached as far as Europe, Africa, or Asia east of the Indus.) The broken line along the Persian Gulf shows the route of the Greek fleet as it returned home from Alexander’s last campaign.

Alexander, now in command of forces that numbered in the hundred thousands (goodly numbers in a time when the population of the globe was less than two hundred million), continued to look east. Though once Persia was conquered he sent home the troops of the
Corinthian League, whom he had never trusted, he did not mean to stop even at the farthest frontiers of the old empire. Ahead lay India and then, so it was thought, the Great Sea—the very end of the earth. What was to prevent him from ruling the world?

The Greek forces entered the mountains of the Hindu Kush in 327 and, with increasing savagery, carved a path for themselves as far east as the River Hyphasis (Beas in modern Pakistan), at which point the unthinkable happened: the army refused to go farther. Alexander had to concede; but he did choose the route home—not the way they’d come but a journey down the Indus, then a forced march west into Persia. It was an insane project, not only because much of the terrain was unknown, but because Alexander’s favored route contained highly fortified cities guarded by Indian warriors as
adept at warfare as any Macedonian and led by Brahmins, whose fierce ancestors had come from the same stock of marauding Indo-European horsemen as the Greek nobles. Even for Alexander’s hardened troops the bloodshed was unparalleled; and then, once they reached the delta of the Indus, Alexander insisted that they make their way across the Gedrosian desert, which was known to have defeated every army that had ever attempted to traverse it. Where all others had failed, even the legendary Semiramis and Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian empire, Alexander would succeed. If he could not have the whole world, he would at least leave an indelible reputation as the only invincible man.

The Greek army made it through the desert—about a quarter of them, that is. The others, as many as ninety thousand men, were left to die on the desert floor, their bodies sucked dry by a pitiless sun. Along the Persian coast, the soldiers who remained on their feet at last caught sight of the fleet, which managed to sail (the first ships ever to do so) along the coast and up the Gulf all the way from the Indus to the Euphrates. Thence did the creaking vessels bear home not an army of conquering heroes but a motley cargo of bitter and broken men.

This was early in the year 324, and Alexander had but one more year to live. His last days were troubled, not only by the intrigues and corruption of the deputies he’d left behind, but by the refusal of some Greeks to worship him as a living god, an honor he had come to expect in the East. This ruler of the world, who could have anything he wanted by snapping his fingers, seems to have been able to squeeze less and less joy out of life. He took a second wife. His court was crowded with three thousand actors and artists and as many as thirty thousand dancing boys. He was surrounded by soothsayers and
priests, sacrificing, purifying, telling the future. Their oracles did not lift the king’s spirits.
Hephestion’s death in late 324 took much of the remaining life out of him. He had the attending physician crucified; then, his grief still unassuaged, he fell upon the pitiable Cosseans, putting their entire nation to the sword—which remedy seems to have improved his humor, for we find him in the spring of 323 in
Babylon, restless as ever, gathering a gargantuan force in preparation for invading the Arabian Peninsula. But in Babylon he fell ill, and in early June he died, weeks short of his thirty-third birthday.

The accomplishments of Alexander, fueled by his incomparable daring, inspired ancient writers. Where modern historians count the casualties and detect cruelty and inhumanity, the ancients saw only glory. Public action—that is, by war and conquest—was the most dangerous and, in consequence, the most noble of all human endeavors. Alexander was, therefore, “the Great,” the greatest man who had ever lived. If
Plato was the measure of all subsequent philosophy and Phidias of all attempts to carve a man in marble, Alexander was the measure of man himself. We may think such a value system outmoded or remote, but it was not so long ago that Napolean enchanted Europe in his quest to be the modern Alexander, nor were such values unknown to the generals and kommandants of the twentieth century, and God knows they continue to infect the brains of all those who take up weapons of destruction in what they believe to be a noble cause. Indeed, down the whole course of history, the invincible warrior with raised sword has been the archetypal hero of the human race.

Wherever one may stand on these matters, in one thing Alexander’s accomplishment is unassailable. The man loved Greek, both as a language and as a literature. His love of reading
was undoubtedly an inspiration to his successors, who vied with one another not only politically and militarily but culturally, each dynasty meaning to outdo the others in its commitment to learning and literature. In the Great King’s eponymous city of Egyptian
Alexandria, for instance, there rose ancient civilization’s most massive library, containing (or so it was thought) “all the books in the world,” a library whose destruction by fire in 47
B.C.
is lamented to this day. And though it would be Eurocentrically embarrassing and a little absurd to assert, as was still asserted well into this century, that Alexander succeeded in raising the whole world to the highest standards of civilization (Greek civilization, that is), he did unite the known world by giving it a universal language. Since the racist Greeks believed all
languages but theirs defective, they refused to learn the tongues of their conquered neighbors, thus forcing everyone else to learn at least a little Greek. This language as it evolved in popular parlance lacked many of the elegant refinements of
Plato, but it was a Greek everyone could learn—a
koine
(or common) tongue, as it was called—and it was serviceable and strong.