Preface
Teachers and writers of ancient Mediterranean history are drawn, if not willingly then by the interests of their students and readers, to the subject of Alexander III of Macedon. People have an ardent desire to know as much as possible about this man who altered the course of history in his brief lifetime. He has held a prominent place in courses of mine and I admit to two minor publications examining particular aspects of his career. However, I do not belong to the cadre of Alexander specialists nor was it my intent to write an account of his career and nature. That is, it was not even a latent plan until serendipity intervened.
A few years ago, I made the acquaintance of Al Bertrand, now senior commissioning editor at Blackwell Publishing, in the course of appraising several proposals for possible publications. Some dealt with Macedonian matters, which eventually provoked a question from Al to me. Might I think of an interesting new approach for a biography of Alexander for the Blackwell biography series? His question asked for suggestions not authors. A fascinating orientation would be the examination of Alexander’s career from the Persian perspective, but since sources for this approach were even more limited than Greek and Roman sources for Alexander, that avenue was not pursued.
Having exhausted more traditional possibilities, I mentioned a direction that I regularly follow in my own area of research, pre- and proto-historical Greece, where the nature of evidence makes an understanding of the larger context essential. Would an examination of the world into which Alexander was born and raised provide insight into the nature of the person himself? I had followed this path in my seminars titled “Alexander’s Conquests: Why?” in which students investigated a variety of “explanations” for Alexander’s success: his Macedonian identity, the nature of Macedonia itself, membership in the royal line, the parentage of Philip and Olympias, relations with neighboring peoples, the condition of the Persian Empire during his lifetime. Perhaps, I suggested to Al, someone might employ such an approach for a Blackwell biography.
About two weeks later, Al invited me to write a concise biography of Alexander for us around the theme of my course. While the invitation was flattering I demurred on the grounds that I am not an “Alexander-specialist.” Al’s rebuttal was that it might be an advantage to come to the subject without a fixed idea of Alexander’s motives, character, wishes, and dreams.
This study, therefore, comes with an apologia to all who are “Alexander-specialists,” whose research and publications are essential to any understanding of Alexander III of Macedon. It seeks to look deeply into the circumstances of his world in the belief that we cannot understand individuals apart from the cultures that condition their lives. It does not engage in source criticism nor is it an attempt to solve specific issues of fact or interpretation.
Conforming to other books in this series, there are no footnotes but all the works mentioned are given in the bibliography. Citations such as VII.56 from Herodotos refer to classical authors for whom no edition need be cited, since the citation provides information for readers to find the source of quotations in any edition. References to scholarly collections of evidence, such as IG II2, are cited in fuller form parenthetically in the text.
It has been an exciting adventure both to read the evidence with a different aim and to explore the land of Alexander’s birth from the Pindos mountain range in the west to the Thermaic Bay and beyond in the east. Travel under the expert guidance of Theo Antikas and Laura Wynn Antikas yielded essential new insights about how the land of Macedonia was at once a subject and a source for conquest. Their knowledge of the region and of scholars working to enhance evidence of Macedonia’s past opened many doors, intellectual as well as physical. The illustrations owe much to their friendships with present-day inhabitants of the land of Alexander, as the credits will reveal.
The assistance of many people has been essential. Theo Antikas read the manuscript three times, providing welcome suggestions and corrections. My husband and colleague, Richard Rigby Johnson, was the photographer of our Macedonian adventure. Lance Jenott, currently a doctoral student at Princeton University, created the maps. Ryan Boehler, a doctoral student in ancient history, made some changes to those maps and prepared many of the illustrations. My colleague and friend Daniel Waugh donated his considerable expertise and time to editing a majority of the illustrations. A grant from the Royalty Research Fund of the University of Washington provided a quarter of release from teaching in which to investigate the land of Macedonia and to devote time to research and writing. I am indebted again to my co-author of two books who has provided the index, an activity that he genuinely enjoys and does consummately. Al Bertrand and others at Blackwell Publishing have been helpful and tolerant throughout the entire process.
In the world of ancient Greece, two subjects have drawn exceptional attention from antiquity to the present - Homer and Alexander III of Macedon. It is valuable to recall their connection: Alexander claimed descent from Achilles and he was reported to have slept with a copy of the Iliad - as well as his sword, of course - within reach. The subjects are linked in another way, one that helps to explain their attraction through the ages: both present serious questions, many of which seem to be unanswerable given the nature of the surviving evidence. Learning the true identity of Homer or of Alexander may be impossible. It has been argued that Homer was a title, not the name of a real person: rather Homer is the imaginary first epic singer imaged for themselves of all singers of Greek epic. Thus there were many “Homers” whose tales were eventually collected into a single long poem. Many are not convinced by this argument, however, and so debate continues. Difficulty in discovering the true nature of Alexander is due to the nature of surviving evidence that endows him with multiple, different characters. Although the reality of an individual known as Alexander III of Macedon is not in doubt, we are confronted with many Alexanders. Consequently, scholarly debate regarding both Homer and Alexander has deep roots and has provoked heated discussion.
The subject of this study is Alexander, thus only marginally does Homer enter the story. So we are spared from plunging into the spider’s web known as “the Homeric Question.” “The Alexander Question” is formidable enough. Nor is it only a scholarly concern. So powerful is his image that it is explored for popular audiences in seemingly countless books, articles, comic strips, documentaries, and full-length films, the most recent - Alexander directed by Oliver Stone - costing hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. Surely other films will appear in the attempt to discover the true Alexander. As a result a great many different images of the Macedonian king exist already and continue to proliferate.
This situation is at first difficult to understand since we know the names of 20 contemporaries who published accounts about him. However, much of the problem stems from the fact the accounts themselves have not survived. A portion of only one contemporary work has been attached to a later account: the official report of the admiral of Alexander’s fleet that sailed back from India into the Persian Gulf survives in the fuller account of Alexander’s life written by Arrian in the late second century CE. The rest of the major surviving works date to the first century BCE and the first and second centuries CE, thus postdating Alexander’s death by three or more centuries. Materials from other, now lost, works also found their way into the later accounts. Alexander’s officer and friend Ptolemaios wrote an account of his commander before his own death in 283 which was regarded as one of two major, and reputedly reliable, sources for Arrian. Unfortunately, the apparent quality of many of the other original works was not equally high, explaining why they were not preserved. Of one of them, the Roman orator/statesman Cicero said “his subject matter was just as bad as his manner of speech.” For example, in clarifying why Artemis’ temple burned on the very day that Alexander was born, the writer of the account despised by Cicero reminded his readers that Artemis was away from her temple, aiding the birth of this special infant.
As Lionel Pearson revealed in his study of these “lost histories,” the surviving accounts mingle summaries of earlier accounts with later material. Consequently Pearson stresses the need to sort new additions from the older material as well as to attempt to determine which author is responsible for specific parts of the story. No unanimous verdict arises from the process of sorting and attribution. Thus one modern scholar, W. W. Tarn, may assign the “reliable” Ptolemaios as a source while another will disagree with that attribution, having determined that one of the “unreliable” accounts has supplied the information. Such discrepancy will influence the picture that emerges because the reasonableness of a reconstruction obviously depends on the reliability of the evidence.
It is not merely factual data about the main subject that is controversial; indeed, it is possible to assemble a generally uncontested chronology of the basic dates and events in Alexander’s short life. However, such was his accomplishment that we want to know about his motives, goals, feelings - in short, the inner being and personality which turned the lives of millions in new directions after ending the lives of millions of others. It is precisely in this respect that the sources fail us. Alexander has been viewed by a major modern scholar as a dreamer hoping to affect the brotherhood of mankind, and by Plutarch, who lived in the late first and early second centuries CE, as the greatest of philosophers. Strong cases have been made for just the opposite characterization: for some, Alexander excelled as the butcher of millions of people, and the picture of his generally acclaimed superlative generalship is tarnished by another view of him as an inebriate. He is thought to have seen himself as a Homeric hero or perhaps the son of Zeus, or he may have been impelled by his mother’s designs or his own narcissism. Friendship is seen as the key to his success by some, while others believe that he simply used and discarded people according to whim mixed with anger. Some have argued that Alexander knew the wisdom of adopting Persian customs once he had defeated the Persian forces, while counterarguments state that he truly saw himself as an Oriental monarch. He set out (1) to continue his father’s plans or (2) to avenge the Greeks on the Persians or (3) because he was driven by the longing of an explorer. These are just a handful of assessments but they demonstrate the correctness of C. Bradford Welles’ confession (in his review of F. Schachermeyr’s Alexander der Grosse, Ingenium und Macht, American Journal of Archaeology 55 (1951) 433-6): “It is honest to confess that, in the last instance, we make of Alexander what we want or think reasonable.”
It seems to me that there is room for another approach to this problematic young man who was described concisely and extremely well by Will Cuppy in his The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody: “Just what this distressing young man thought he was doing, and why, I really can’t say I doubt if he could have clarified the subject to any appreciable extent. He had a habit of knitting his brows. And no wonder” (p. 48).
Like Cuppy, but unlike some who have found a secret key to his inner being, I admit that I cannot say what Alexander thought he was doing. On the other hand, there are means for understanding the person that Alexander came to be and the manner in which he dealt with his circumstances. A good deal is known about his world; the fourth century BCE is well documented in written accounts and by surviving archaeological evidence. This is in part because the turbulent events of Alexander’s lifetime drew comments and in part because the Greek and Persian civilizations had become highly literate by comparison with earlier periods. Yet although available this kind of evidence is limited. Fortunately, there are other doors to the past. People are born into particular social and material environments and, as children, they are educated by their society and learn its values and traditions. With advancing maturity, individuals must begin to cope with their world and to learn strategies that are likely to succeed given the institutions of that group and its social and physical environments. To be sure, humans possess a biological, genetic inheritance that defines certain of their individual physical and mental attributes, or explains the lack of them. Consequently, there is opportunity for individual intentionality but even that intentionality is affected - although not necessarily absolutely determined - by forces that are external to the individual. Surviving material evidence can provide information about those environments. In the case of Macedonia the archaeological record and knowledge of the physical nature of the kingdom during Alexander’s lifetime is always growing and at no time more so than in the past thirty or so years.
In the belief that this view of the interplay between an individual and his world is correct, consideration of the role of the constituent forces at work in the centuries when Macedon developed into the kingdom that Alexander knew and ruled will bring us closer to Alexander himself. We may never gain entrance into the workings of his mind, but we will understand the factors that gave rise to his remarkable career. Following a brief synopsis of the basic chronology of his life, the chapters of this book will treat six major forces that shaped that life.
We will begin with Macedonia, where he was born and raised. The physical conditions of the region determined the nature of life possible within it. It was, according to the ancient view of territorial differences, a “hard” rather than a “soft” country. Thus its inhabitants were likely to be strong not weak. Consideration of natural resources can extend an understanding of the role of Macedonia vis-à-vis others. Were there resources that drew others to the region? If so, what relationships developed between Macedonians and others? Did those resources provide an internal advantage to would- be players in the larger Aegean and eastern Mediterranean spheres either in the role of trade partners or as conquerors?
The population of Macedonia is a second aspect of the significance of Macedonia in Alexander’s life. Who were the ancient Macedonians? What sort of neighbors did the Macedonians find on their borders? How did the various groups of people relate to one another; that is, did propinquity produce cultural borrowings, ongoing hostility, fusion of once-independent groups? It is known that Alexander’s father created a unified kingdom stretching from the Adriatic across the northern Aegean into the lands on the northern coast of the Black Sea and along the Danube. How these lands were drawn into this kingdom is yet another factor operating in the world into which Alexander was born and raised to manhood. The process of Philip’s unification reveals “tools” required by the would- be unifier that Alexander became on “inheriting” the kingship as well as the tensions that it produced. The nature of life in midfourth-century Macedonia, then, establishes two basic parameters in the story of any individual living in the kingdom of Macedon at the time, namely the physical environment and the people who forged a life suited to their location.
Next we will turn to his ancestry, which refocuses attention from Macedonia as a whole to individual Macedonians. Alexander’s father, Philip II, was remarkable in his own accomplishments. What inheritance - physical, temperamental, and in particular accomplishments - did he leave to his son? And what of his mother, Olympias, and her own ancestry and character? Did her role as a member of the royal family of the kingdom of Epiros and, later, a wife of the Macedonian king figure prominently in Alexander’s shaping? In addition to his parents, it will be valuable to take a wider view of his ancestry, for Alexander was a member of the royal line: he was an Argead. What was expected of a son of a reigning king and how was he trained as potential heir to the kingship? Did problems arise from belonging to the Argead line? If so, what and how serious were they?
The story of ancient Macedon is inextricably tied to that of Greece, initially through geographical proximity that led to cultural borrowings of many types. The nature of that tie is a third major factor in Alexander’s world. A description of the interaction from the period of the Persian Wars in the early fifth century grows fuller during the reign of Philip, who drew the Greek states under Macedonian hegemony both militarily and politically. Can his success be explained by factors in addition to Macedonian military might? After all, both Greeks and Macedonians had felt the effects of Persian attempts at expansion into the western Aegean in the late sixth and early fifth centuries. Perhaps a bond of having a common enemy was also instrumental, making “avenging” the Greeks on the Persians a joint effort of that official union. Culturally as well, the interaction between Greece and Macedon was significant. One specific aspect of this cultural influence on Alexander came through his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle of the Greek polis of Stageira in the northern Aegean. Does an understanding of Alexander’s contact with the Greek polymath lend insights into the nature of Alexander himself?
The necessity of military strength figures prominently in relations with others, but it also deserves consideration on its own in chapter 5 especially because the integrity of the kingdom demanded an effective, constantly vigilant military force. What are the underpinnings of the kingdom with respect to the social structure of Macedon, the organization of its army, and requisites for military success? How did the Macedonian king figure in the military structure of his kingdom?
Macedon and Greece both witnessed directly the power of the Persian Empire, whose king, as reported by Herodotos, was so mighty that one ordinary human exclaimed of Xerxes “Why, Zeus, did you take the form of a Persian man and the name of Xerxes in place of Zeus in order to destroy Greece, leading all these men? You could have done this without these efforts” (VII.56). Why would a king of Macedon have any expectation of defeating such a powerful ruler of the largest empire yet created in the history of the ancient Near East? An answer to this question must include knowledge of the territorial and administrative structure of that empire and the condition of that structure in the mid-fourth century. How well did the Macedonian kings know the nature of Persia? Did the two realms possess certain similarities that would facilitate an understanding of one another? Inasmuch as Alexander did succeed in defeating the Persians, the force of Persian tradition on Alexander became another factor in his world.
On the basis of an understanding of the conditions, forces, and institutions in the Aegean during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE it is possible to form a clearer picture of Alexander III of Macedon, known from antiquity as Alexander the Great. The final chapter will consist of a “portrait” of that person: how did Macedonia, his Argead ancestry, interaction with Greece, the military momentum of the original kingdom, and relations with the Persian Empire mold both the man and his career? Although it might be argued that deviating from those influences was precisely what made him “great,” it will become obvious that he could not purposefully or unconsciously abandon his inheritance. At the same time he was not a passive player in his world. He used his inherited position in circumstances that no previous Argead had experienced. Yet, without the tools and situation presented to the young man on his acclamation as successor to Philip II, he would not have won his epithet.