Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (27 page)

as its satrap, although Alexander killed him before he could take up this

position. In his place he appointed another Macedonian, Amyntas, who

would head the largest contingent of troops in any one satrapy.16

Such disloyalty is also part and parcel of imperial power being held

by one man, and an invader at that. When Alexander was present with

his superior army, resistance was not an option, but when he left it was

a different matter. Bactria shows this, as does India. Here, Alexander

confirmed the power of many of the local princes who submitted to

him, for example Taxiles east of the Indus, and after the battle of the

Hydaspes, Porus was allowed to retain his power (although he became

a vassal of Alexander); however, once the king left India, the rulers re-

verted to their old ways and paid him only lip service.

Diodorus tel s us another way that Alexander intended to manage his

empire. In his account of Alexander’s so-cal ed last plans, he says that

Alexander planned to found cities and to transplant people from Asia to

Europe and vice versa, to bring “the biggest continents into a common

unity and to friendship by intermarriages and family ties.”17 Alexander

did not embark on any transpopulation policy, but he did found a large

number of settlements, apparently as many as seventy. However, the

majority of these were not actual poleis with developed constitutions,

gymnasia, theaters, and al the attributes of a city but instead were more

garrison posts, often inhabited by veteran soldiers and local peoples to

keep a particular area in check.18 Alexander probably founded only a

dozen actual cities, the most famous being Alexandria in Egypt.19

Founding cities for strategic reasons was not novel. Philip II had

done the same thing along his northwest frontier with the troublesome

Illyrian tribes in 345, and Alexander’s borrowing this leaf out of his fa-

ther’s book shows us he realized that using native satraps would not be

enough to placate his subject peoples. Philip had conquered the various

Illyrian tribes, unified Macedon as a result, and then incorporated them

into the new Macedonian army. Even so, he was forced to monitor

them continuously throughout his reign.20 So Alexander also could not

afford to assume his satrapal arrangements would be enough. Hence

he took care to pepper the garrison settlements throughout the areas

Alexander the Great and Empire 127

of his empire where he expected the most resistance—unsurprisingly,

the greatest concentration was in the eastern half of the empire. Even

so, these would not prove to be enough in Bactria and Sogdiana.21

The new settlements also facilitated trade and communications, al-

though they rose to economic prominence only after Alexander. Thus,

Alexandria (in Egypt) became the cultural center and an economic

power in the Hellenistic period after Ptolemy I made it the capital.22

The real advantage of using cities to help maintain rule over huge

empires is shown by the later Seleucid rulers of Syria. It is no coinci-

dence that Seleucus, the first of these rulers, and the first to make city

foundations deliberate policy, was one of Alexander’s generals. He had

learned well by example.

Diodorus also talks about a “common unity” between the western

and eastern halves of Alexander’s empire and intermarriages. This sort

of line, compounded by Plutarch’s presentation of Alexander as a phi-

losopher and idealist in his rhetorical treatise
On the Fortune or the Virtue

of Alexander
, has led to a belief that Alexander wanted to create a broth-

erhood of mankind as a means of ruling his empire. There is, of course,

merit to a policy that tries to make foreign rule acceptable not by enforc-

ing it but by promoting equality and commonality among everyone,

and some of Alexander’s actions throughout his reign seem to support

the belief that he was striving to achieve such an equality. Prominent

among his actions here were the integration of foreigners into his army

and administration, his marriage in spring 327 to the Bactrian princess

Roxane, his attempt to enforce
proskynesis
at his court, the mass wed-

ding at Susa in 324, at which he and ninety members of his senior staff

married Persian noblewomen, and final y a reconciliation banquet at

Opis in 324, at which he prayed for harmony between everyone.

Yet there was no such thing as a unity-of-mankind “policy” on Alex-

ander’s part.23 None of the above actions was ideological in purpose,

but, like Alexander himself, all were pragmatic and no different from,

say, founding cities to maintain Macedonian control. For example, for-

eigners in his army, such as specialist troops from Iran or the Bactrian

cavalry, were kept apart in their own ethnic units until 324, when Al-

exander incorporated them into the army for tactical reasons before

the Arabian expedition.24 Native satraps, as already noted, were merely

128 Worthington

figureheads, the powerful families being given some semblance of their

former station to secure their support.

For Alexander, Roxane may well have been “the only woman he

ever loved,” but the marriage was political.25 Her father Oxyartes had

been one of Alexander’s toughest opponents; the marriage, Alexan-

der would have hoped, was to secure his support, and hence Bactria’s

passivity, and in return Alexander made him satrap of Parapamisadae.

Hence, Alexander’s marriage was no different from his father’s first six

marriages, undertaken to help consolidate Macedon’s borders—and

provide an heir. Roxane had a child who died in 326 at the Hydaspes,26

thus giving us a motive for Alexander’s marriages in 324 to two Persian

princesses: to solidify his rule and to produce heirs on the eve of his

Arabian campaign (Roxanne became pregnant soon after).

Proskynesis
set Persians apart from Greeks, who thought the act was

akin to worship. Alexander’s attempt to enforce it on his own men looks

like he was trying to fashion some common social protocol between

the races, to get West to meet East. Yet he was brought up to believe in

the traditional gods and still performed the traditional sacrifices as king

in the last days of his life, so he must have known his men saw the act as

sacrilegious. Even the posture was unacceptable, as Greeks commonly

prayed standing up with their arms upraised, whereas slaves lay on the

ground. More likely, then, is that Alexander now thought of himself as

divine, and
proskynesis
reflected that.

The symbolism of the interracial mass marriage at Susa seems obvi-

ous, but it is important to note that no Greek women were brought

out from the mainland to marry Asian noblemen, which we would ex-

pect if Alexander was sincere about fusing the races by intermarriage.

What Alexander was doing was polluting the bloodline to ensure that

children from these marriages would never have a claim to the Persian

throne. Moreover, his men were against the marriages, and after Alex-

ander’s death, they all, apart from Seleucus, divorced their wives.

Finally, the prayer to harmony after the Opis mutiny: Alexander

ended the mutiny by playing on his men’s hatred of the Persians. At

a reconciliation banquet the same evening the seating order sought to

emphasize the superiority of the invaders: Macedonians sat next to

Alexander, then came the Greeks, and then all others. Moreover, the

Alexander the Great and Empire 129

prayer to concord was about unity in the army, not unity of mankind,

because Alexander planned to invade Arabia, and so dissension in the

ranks was the last thing he needed.

Aristotle, his personal tutor from the age of fourteen to sixteen, had

advised Alexander “to treat the Greeks as if he were their leader and

other people as if he were their master; to have regard for the Greeks

as for friends and family, but to conduct himself towards other peoples

as though they were plants or animals.”27 Aristotle may well have in-

fluenced Alexander’s scientific curiosity to find out about the natural

resources of the areas through which he traveled,28 but Alexander did

not follow Aristotle’s advice about his Asian subjects. At the same time,

Alexander knew he had to regard the conquered populations with sus-

picion; hence everything he did was for a political reason.

Another area that might throw light on Alexander’s relationship

with the conquered people, and hence the maintenance of his empire,

is the spread of Greek culture. Hellenization became something of

a staple in Alexander’s nation building. To a large extent, the spread

of Greek civilization was inevitable simply as an effect of Alexander’s

army marching through new areas and exposing the people there to

things Greek. Alexander was an avid reader of Homer (especially the

Iliad
) and of Greek tragedy (Euripides was his favorite), and his men

would have shared his tastes. Thus, when the army returned to Tyre

from Egypt in the summer of 331, Alexander held a celebratory festival

to Heracles, complete with games and dramatic performances. Among

the performers were the celebrated actors Thessalus (a personal friend

of Alexander) and Athenodorus, who reneged on a contract to perform

at the culturally important festival of the city Dionysia in Athens to be

at Tyre. For this he was fined, but Alexander paid the fine for him.

These sorts of cultural events would have been lost on his men if

they did not appreciate them, and they must have had an effect on local

peoples. Indeed, his fostering of Greek culture led later authors such

as Plutarch to speak of him as the bringer of civilization to foreign

peoples.29 However, one might argue that the spread of Greek culture

was not simply an offshoot of his campaigns but that he saw the politi-

cal benefits to be gained from cultural change. The problem was, he

made little attempt to tolerate local customs and religious practices,

130 Worthington

and he would end customs that Greeks condemned or that he person-

ally disliked.

For example, Greeks were appalled that in Persia, brothers would

marry sisters and sons married their mothers.30 On the other hand,

these practices might be overlooked because the Macedonians had

marital customs that other Greeks condemned, specifically polygamy

(later in Ptolemaic Egypt the practice of ruling brothers marrying

sisters began with Ptolemy II Philadelphus and his sister, Arsinoë).

However, the Scythians’ practices of sacrificing their elderly parents,

drinking the blood of their first human kill, and using as much of a

corpse as possible in their everyday lives were another thing.31 So too

was the Bactrians’ custom in regard to their elderly: “those who be-

came infirm because of old age or sickness are thrown out alive as prey

to dogs, which they keep specifically for this purpose, and in their na-

tive tongue they are called ‘undertakers’. While the land outside the

walls of the city of the Bactrians looks clean, most of the land inside

the walls is full of human bones.”32

We, like the Greeks back then, find this custom shocking, but never-

theless it was a traditional local custom. However, that did not stop

Alexander ending it, and he had no business to do so. It was this type of

disruption to established social practices that could only fuel discontent

in the affected areas and encourage locals to resist the Macedonians,

and it gave rise to an anti-Greek sentiment. This is very much in evi-

dence with the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt, for example, who segregated

the native Egyptians in society and precluded them from taking part in

state administration. The feelings of exploitation had grown to explo-

sive levels by the reign of Ptolemy IV (221–203), and Egypt was split by

civil war that tested Ptolemaic rule to its utmost.

On the other hand, Alexander was more tolerant of religious beliefs,

but then the equivalents of Greek gods were everywhere. For example,

Alexander identified the local god Melqart at Tyre with Heracles; at

Siwah there was an oracle of Zeus-Ammon, and at Nysa in India the

local god Indra or Shiva was deemed the equivalent of Dionysus. Re-

ligion is a powerful tool for bringing about unity, and the king used

it as and when he saw fit, though not always properly understanding

what religion meant to different people. Thus, in Egypt he took care

Alexander the Great and Empire 131

to sacrifice to Apis at Memphis and in Babylon he gave orders to re-

build the temple to Bel, which Xerxes had destroyed. He spared the

lives of the people of Nysa in 326 (a deviation from what had by then

become his modus
operandi of wholesale slaughter of native tribes)

because they claimed descent from those who had traveled with Dio-

nysus through the region, Nysa was the name of Dionysus’s nurse, and