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Alexander cast himself in the role of Darius III’s avenger. As he consolidated and expanded his conquests, it was necessary to put the Empire on a stable footing as he prepared for the future. Just as the Persians were “new” conquerors two centuries earlier under Cyrus, Alexander was likewise. But there were many differences, not least of which was familiarity. The Persians had lived in close proximity with the neighbors whom they conquered, in the core regions of Iran and Mesopotamia, for centuries previous. The Macedonians were an entirely foreign element to the region. And what Cyrus built almost from scratch Alexander conquered as a mature, unified entity. Cyrus’ task had been to build; Alexander’s was to prevent dissolution.
Alexander’s fusion policy – the joining of Iranian and Macedonian elites – is debated in its particulars. Alexander recruited Iranian troops from throughout the eastern satrapies, including a specialized troop of 30,000 young men who were to learn Greek and to train in Macedonian tactics (Arrian 7.6.1 and compare Quitus Curtius 8.5.1). In 327 BCE Alexander married Rhoxane, the daughter of Oxyartes, an Iranian nobleman who was appointed as a satrap. Whatever other reasons motivated Alexander, this act secured allegiances among the eastern Iranian nobles. After his return from the Indian campaign in 324, Alexander also married the Achaemenid princesses Stateira (daughter of Darius III) and Parysatis (daughter of Artaxerxes III). At the same time he staged a mass marriage ceremony at Susa between members of his Companions (his own elite Macedonian corps) and Iranian noble women. This act recalls Darius I’s marriage to Cyrus’ daughters, but Alexander took the symbolism to an entirely new level by including dozens of his own nobility in the same process. The mass marriage in particular reveals Alexander’s large-scale plan to integrate the Iranian and Macedonian elite, to form effectively a new ruling class.
Was Alexander simply being a pragmatist? Or was he intending some sublime synthesis of east and west, a new oikumene of which he would be the glorious founder? The first certainly applies, because of the obvious necessity of the continued involvement of the Persian governing class. The Macedonians had neither the experience nor the credibility, at least at first, to govern this sprawling empire. Answers to the second question, which is dramatically phrased, are more subjective. The image that Alexander chose to project took him beyond both Macedonian and Persian norms, and interpretations are as varied as they are fascinating. The subsequent development of the ruler cult, the deification of rulers during the Seleucid period, is not incidentally traced to Alexander’s program.
Alexander’s Persianization – regardless of its motivations – was bitterly resented by many of his Macedonian cohorts. It is an open question how well his fusion policy would have worked in the long run. But in the end Alexander had less than ten years, much of that time on campaign, to implement his plans. The splitting of the Achaemenid Empire among his successors into the Antigonid, Seleucid, and Ptolemaic monarchies (the so-called Hellenistic kingdoms) dominated the next three centuries of Near Eastern and Greek history, until the Roman conquests and the rise of the Parthians. Achaemenid imagery and traditions lived on not only in these eastern kingdoms – especially the Seleucid kingdom and some Hellenistic monarchies of Anatolia – but in the Persians’ successors in Iran itself: the Parthians and Sasanians. The histories of these kingdoms have often been perceived as secondary, overshadowed by the Hellenistic kingdoms and then Rome, though their import was no less. This has been understood for some time, even if often overlooked.
Especially it seemed to the writer that the picture of the world during the Roman period, commonly put before students in “Histories of Rome,” was defective, not to say false, in its omission to recognize the real position of Parthia during the three most interesting centuries of that period, as a counterpoise to the power of Rome, a second figure in the picture not much inferior to the first, a rival state dividing with Rome the attention of mankind and the sovereignty of the known earth.1
A recurring theme in this book has been the necessary reliance on Greek sources to write a narrative of Achaemenid Persian history, and all the problems that that entails. The poet Aeschylus’ embellished portrayal of Xerxes – in a literally dramatic context, a play performed in 472 BCE in Athens – is paradigmatic of the west’s portrayal of this monarch, seen for example in Xerxes’ bitter lamentation after his disastrous defeat of his expedition against the Greeks:
Alas! Unfortunate I am, beset by an unfathomable fate, how brutally some god has trodden upon the Persian race.
(Persae, lines 908–912)
As discussed, we have no Persian side of that story, but a Persian perspective – extrapolated from the ideology manifest in Xerxes’ inscriptions, for example – would have been significantly different. The unavoidable reliance on Greek sources is not entirely negative, thanks to its rich and varied material. And it is being balanced by increasingly accessible data from Near Eastern sources, textual and archaeological, though much remains to be done. Not until the Roman Empire at its height did a supra-regional state again have the organizational capacity and similar capability to project its power as did the Achaemenid Empire. The Achaemenid Persian Empire served as both model and foil for its successors. Its legacy persists.