The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (3 page)

Alexander was born in late July of 356 BC into the royal family of an ascendant Macedonian state. Under his father, King Philip II, the nation of Macedon, to the north of classical Greece, had extended its influence south and east across the Mediterranean, becoming a key player in Greek international politics. Greek culture mattered to Philip, and he ensured that his son received the very best Greek education available; indeed, Alexander’s personal tutor was Aristotle, one of the most influential philosophers in all of Western thought. The tales of Alexander’s promising childhood are legion, from his taming of the supposedly uncontrollable horse Bucephalus to his father’s exhortation that he should conquer a land suitable for his ambition, as Macedon was too small for him. Most of these legends grew up after the events, of course, to help explain the extraordinary rise of the young Macedonian. After the assassination of Philip by his bodyguard Pausanias at a wedding banquet (possibly at the instigation of the new king of Persia, Darius III), Alexander was quickly proclaimed king by the Macedonian army. He was clearly already held in high regard. And so, at just twenty years of age, began the most remarkable military career in history.

If Alexander’s father had been assassinated on Persian orders, Darius III would come to regret the decision. With an army of over forty thousand men Alexander first marched south to consolidate his hold over the city-states of mainland Greece and then crossed over the Hellespont into Asia to confront Darius in person. After defeating a Persian force at the battle of Granicus he stormed down the Ionian seaboard like an avenging angel, “liberating” the wealthy Greek trading ports that lined the coast on the way. He besieged Halicarnassus, then turned inland to the ancient Phrygian capital of Gordium, where, so legend has it, he chose to tackle the problem of “the Gordian Knot.”

The legend goes that at a time when Phrygia found itself without a king, an ancient oracle prophesied that the first man to enter the capital in an oxcart should be their next king. That man was the peasant Gordias, who, in return for his sudden change in fortune, dedicated his cart to the gods, tying its shafts to a post in an elaborate knot. The oracle then further prophesied that whoever could undo the knot would be king of all Asia. It had been a problem that had bothered would-be rulers of the world from that moment on. The knot was allegedly fiendishly complicated, without protruding ends and hence impossible to unpick. But Alexander found a simple solution. He drew his sword and sliced the knot in half, and as the oracle predicted, he did indeed go on to become master of all Asia. That at least is how Alexander’s friends and propagandists told it.

From Gordium he then passed through the Cilician gates—the high pass in the Tarsus Mountains of modern-day Turkey—and into central Anatolia to face the Persian Empire head on. At the battle of Issus in 333 BC, Darius III was defeated and fled the field, leaving his mother, wife, and children to be captured by Alexander. Also among the spoils was the golden casket, belonging to the Persian king, in which he placed his beloved copy of Homer.

Alexander chose not to pursue the fleeing Persian across the Euphrates, but instead continued south, besieging coastal cities as he went. Where he was heading became clear in 332 BC, when he was welcomed into Egypt as the nation’s liberator. Possibly with the connivance of the Persian governor of Egypt and certainly with the active support of the native Egyptian bureaucracy, the country was ceded to him without so much as a skirmish, and Alexander was king of Egypt at the age of twenty-three.

By the time Alexander first set foot on Egyptian soil, that civilization was already some three thousand years old. But this was not the Egypt of Khufu and Rameses. The pyramids of the Old Kingdom were already over two thousand years old, while the magnificence of the New Kingdom courts of Amenhotep III and Tutankhamen had faded and passed a millennium before.

Egypt’s recent history had been crueler. Since 525 BC it had been a subject nation of the Persian Empire and its nominal pharaoh (the Twenty-seventh Dynasty) was in fact the Achaemenid shah, currently Darius III. The proud and ancient nation of Egypt had not taken kindly to Persian rule, and throughout the period links between native Egyptians and Greek merchants had been growing, fostered by their mutual antipathy toward the occupying superpower. Some Egyptian cults had even taken root back in Greece. In 333 BC the Athenians had allowed Egyptian merchants to buy land for a temple to their goddess Isis, wife of the god of the underworld, Osiris. There were also Greek merchants living in Egypt and adopting elements of its religion, particularly the worship of Isis, which in the following centuries would spread across the Mediterranean and, under Roman rule, reach as far as Britain. There were even Greeks in the civil administration, and so, though Alexander was a foreigner, the Egyptians welcomed him with open arms, as a Greek and their nation’s liberator.

That Alexander wanted Egypt as part of his expanding empire was obvious. Despite the fact that so many of her glories were centuries if not millennia in the past, Egypt still retained a highly complex, literate culture with a wealth of esoteric knowledge, especially in astronomy, mathematics, and alchemy—knowledge which Greeks such as Pythagoras and Herodotus had sought out in the recent past. But more important for Alexander, Egypt was still a very wealthy nation with access to gold, slaves and exotic African imports from the south, and rich in grain. The irrigated fields around the Nile were a huge source of food that not only kept Egypt itself fed but also provided a surplus that could be exported for profit or used in military adventures. Then there was Egypt’s position, directly across the Mediterranean from Greece, with a major river navigable far into the south. A pharaonic canal cut between that river and the Red Sea would provide access to the Indian Ocean for a ruler with the ambition to attempt a conquest of India—a ruler with the ambition of an Alexander.

And so it was with these thoughts in mind that Alexander first came to the tiny village of Rhakotis. In the heyday of the Egyptian pharaohs, life had been concentrated on the Nile Valley, and while some New Kingdom rulers had ventured beyond her borders to carve out empires, Egypt was traditionally insular and inward looking. It focused on the Nile Valley, not the Mediterranean, and thus little effort had been spent on developing the northern coast outside the delta. But for Alexander things were different. The Mediterranean, not the Nile, bound his world together, and a port on this coast would provide the quickest way of supplying his army and controlling his empire.

Here then he found a unique location on a dangerous coast. To the south of the site lay Mareotis, a 100-square-mile lake; to the east was the mouth of the Canopic branch of the Nile and the rest of the delta, offering access to Egypt’s wealth and connections on to the Red Sea. To the north, just offshore, stood the island known as Pharos. Aside from the two harbors created by a causeway from Pharos to the mainland, canals could connect the Canopic Nile to the lake and the lake to the sea. In terms of trade it was simply a perfect location. The geographer Strabo, who visited the city some three hundred years after its foundation, also noted another great benefit:

 
This might seem like little more than a pleasant conceit, but finding a healthy location away from the slow-moving and polluted waters of the delta, where disease was rife in the summer, was a masterstroke. The site was cool, clean, and accessible from abroad, and that in Egypt was rare. It must have seemed to be the perfect location for a provincial capital, and so, with the decision made, Alexander moved off again.

 
 
There was one further place the Macedonian king had to visit while in Egypt, and this visit would have profound implications both for Alexander and for the dynasty of Greek pharaohs that would soon be established in his city of Alexandria. As he rode through the Western desert toward the shrine of Ammon at Siwa, he could hardly have imagined that he would never return alive to the city he had just founded. He had left behind a capital of sand and flour—just a preliminary sketch—before dashing off once more in his endless, restless pursuit of yet greater achievements.

But what he did next would help secure the future of that sketch and ensure that this city would be his home in death if not in life.

Even today the oasis of Siwa is an extraordinary site. Standing lost between the Qattara Depression and the Great Sand Sea, it lies in one of the most remote and inhospitable parts of the country. Legend has it that when King Cambyses II of Persia first conquered Egypt his entire army of fifty thousand men vanished somewhere in the emptiness of the surrounding desert as they marched in search of the oasis. Under Roman rule its very remoteness made it famous as a place of banishment.

It is only after mile upon mile of dunes and dry rock that the oasis suddenly appears, a great swath of green, filled with a forest of palm trees, over which towers the old fortress of Shali. Here also, in the now nearly abandoned village of Aghurmi, stand the remains of what brought Alexander and perhaps Cambyses to this place—the temple of Ammon.

In the temple was an oracle popular among the Egyptians (although no pharaoh had ever visited the site) and widely respected in the Greek world. The deity worshipped here was clearly Egyptian, as Diodorus Siculus’s description makes clear:

 
But if the god was worshipped here in a particularly Egyptian form, the spread of the cult across the Mediterranean to Greece, where it was known as the cult of the Libyan Ammon, made this a perfect bridge between Alexander’s Greek roots and an Egypt he needed to rule in a manner Egyptians would accept.

The oracle, we are told, had news for Alexander about his lineage—news that not only would cause ructions in the Greek world but would begin the process of turning Greek conquerors into Egyptian pharaohs. We are told that as Alexander approached the temple the priest welcomed him, calling him “Child of the God.” He then invited him into the adytum—the interior of the temple usually reserved exclusively for the priests. The rest of the king’s entourage had to wait in the courtyard. Just what Alexander asked the oracle in the darkened silence of the temple of Ammon is disputed. According to Plutarch, citing an anonymous source, the king asked two questions:

 
But even Plutarch is suspicious of this story, though he is happy to repeat it. He and many other ancient authors felt that what passed between Alexander and the oracle was almost certainly kept secret. But what mattered to the Greeks in the king’s party and what would matter to later generations of Egyptians is that from this meeting grew the idea that Alexander was not the son of Philip of Macedon but the son of the god Ammon himself.

The idea that Alexander was a living god was treated with great skepticism by the ancient Greeks, who generally thought only the dead were worthy of deification. Indeed, by the time of Plutarch there was even a story current that the whole idea of Alexander’s immortal ancestry came about through a misunderstanding at Siwa. Plutarch tells us that some believed that the priest who emerged from the temple to greet Alexander mispronounced the Greek
“O paidion”
(Oh, my child!), and instead called out
“O paidios,”
which could to a Greek ear sound like
“O pai Dios”
(Oh, child of the god!).

By the second century AD the author Lucian found the idea of the divine Alexander humorous enough to make fun of him in one of his
Dialogues of the Dead
(13), in which Alexander discovers in the underworld, somewhat to his surprise, that he is not a god: