IT SEEMS THAT THERE WAS NO NATION, NO CITY
IN THOSE DAYS, NO PERSON IN ANY LAND THAT
THE NAME OF ALEXANDER HAD NOT REACHED.
—ARRIAN
Even before the body of Alexander had grown cold, rumors began to circulate that the king had been murdered. Stories grew that Antipater had ordered the poisoning through the agency of his son Cassander, who was still in Babylon recovering from the beating he had received from Alexander. As Antipater was highly motivated to save his own life and as he had access to the king’s wine through his younger son, the royal cupbearer Iolaus, it was a plausible accusation to many. Some sources say the poison, perhaps strychnine, was smuggled into the palace in the hollowed hoof of a pack mule. The fact that the lover of Iolus was none other than Medius—who had invited Alexander to the fateful party in which he cried out in pain after drinking—made the charges more credible. Whether or not Aristotle, a friend of Antipater, was involved at a distance in the assassination of his former pupil continued to be debated in ancient times.
As attractive as conspiracy theories are in any age, it is just as likely that Alexander died of natural causes. He may have suffered from malaria for years, at least since his collapse in the Cydnus River at Tarsus just before the battle of Issus. He had cheated death a dozen times since with wounds and illnesses that would have killed most men. The endless bouts with dysentery and especially the punctured lung he suffered in India at the city of the Malli would have weakened his resistance to disease. Add to this the sheer exhaustion of twelve long years of marching through swamps and over mountains along with the heavy drinking expected of any Macedonian king and it’s a wonder Alexander lived as long as he did. If malaria, a lung infection, or liver failure didn’t kill him, typhoid fever is another possibility, given the symptoms of abdominal pain and high fever during his final days.
There is a sad and charming story that when Alexander realized he was dying, he secretly dragged himself from his sickbed out of the palace to throw himself into the Euphrates so that he might vanish from the world without a trace. He hoped it would strengthen his claim to be the son of a god if he disappeared mysteriously rather than died like any other man. But the story has it that his wife Roxane saw him at the last moment struggling toward the water and stopped him, prompting Alexander to complain that she was denying him the eternal fame he so desired. In any case, whether by poison or the infirmities of disease that claim most mortals, the king was dead and the living remained to mourn him.
Macedonians and natives alike wept at the news of Alexander’s death, running through the streets in panic. Persian subjects shaved their heads, as was the custom on the Great King’s passing, while the mother of Darius reportedly starved herself to death as if she had lost her own son. The Macedonian soldiers quickly fell to fighting among themselves about whose faction they would support—Perdiccas, the ambitious ring bearer; Meleager, the infantry commander and conservative stalwart; or perhaps general Ptolemy, the childhood friend of the king. After much blood was spilled, the different leaders agreed to meet in peace to decide how to rule the empire. The soldiers then marked the death of the king with an ancient Macedonian custom of marching between the two halves of a disemboweled dog on the plain outside Babylon. At the subsequent meeting, it was agreed that Alexander’s mentally handicapped half brother Arrhidaeus, who was resident in Babylon, would ascend to the throne as King Philip III until such time as Roxane’s expected child, should it be a boy, would come of age and take his father’s place. No one took Arrhidaeus seriously as a ruler, viewing him only as a temporary and expendable symbol of the Macedonian royal dynasty. What the major players needed was time to consolidate their own positions in the part of the empire each desired for himself. Neither did the generals expect Roxane’s child to be anything more than a political pawn. Alexander’s illegitimate young son Hercules by his Persian mistress Barsine was not even worth considering as a possible heir.
One outcome of the meeting was a division of the empire. Ptolemy received Egypt, while Seleucus, a friend of Perdiccas, would hold the bulk of Asia for the time being. Antipater and his son Cassander would retain Macedonia and Greece, and the king’s former bodyguard Lysimachus would take over Thrace. Alexander’s body would be embalmed and returned to Macedonia for a royal burial, though this plan was thwarted when Ptolemy hijacked the funeral procession and took the king’s remains to Egypt. There his tomb in Alexandria remained a favorite destination for Greek and Roman tourists, among them the emperor Augustus, until the early Christian era.
Civil wars soon began in earnest when Perdiccas had Meleager murdered in the sanctuary of a temple where he had sought refuge. Many of Meleager’s followers were cast before the army’s elephants to be trampled. It was an inauspicious beginning to years of fighting in which each side sought only to strengthen itself, with little care for the fate of the millions under their rule. Of those who had known and served Alexander, few died peacefully in their beds. Roxane quickly poisoned Stateira, the daughter of Darius whom Alexander had married in Susa, along with her sister and threw the bodies of both women down a well, all with the approval of Perdiccas. The Bactrian queen’s own child turned out to be a boy and was named Alexander IV. Perdiccas championed both mother and child to further his own ends until he himself was killed in Egypt fighting Ptolemy. Roxane and the young prince fled to Macedonia and were welcomed by Olympias. But soon Cassander, who had taken over Macedonia after the death of his father, Antipater, had them murdered, thus ending the line of Alexander. Olympias continued to plot throughout the struggles of succession, killing many of the nobility of Macedonia and earning their undying hatred. When finally she was captured by Cassander, who had promised to spare her life, the soldiers he sent to slay her admired her dignity in her last moments and watched while she arranged her hair and clothes even as she bled to death from the wounds they had given her.
The fate of most of the remaining friends and family of Alexander was equally violent. The king’s half bother Arrhidaeus was slain by a Thracian guard after he returned to Macedonia, reportedly under orders from Olympias. Barsine and Alexander’s surviving son Hercules were apparently poisoned at Pergamum in Asia Minor, where they had retired in a futile attempt to live a quiet and deliberately apolitical life. Aristotle was forced to flee from Athens in the wake of anti-Macedonian uprisings following the death of Alexander. Referring to Socrates, he claimed he didn’t want to give the Athenians a second chance to sin against philosophy. Instead he died in exile of a digestive disease. The orator Demosthenes, Alexander’s most vociferous foe in Greece, also escaped Athens after he was accused of bribery in the Harpalus affair and committed suicide on a small Aegean island, assassins sent by Antipater hot on his trail. Craterus, Alexander’s loyal lieutenant who had fought with such vigor during the eastern campaign, died in battle early in the wars when he was thrown from his horse. King Porus of India held on to his satrapy after the death of Alexander, only to be treacherously killed several years later by one of Alexander’s generals. One-eyed Antigonus, left behind in Asia Minor early in the campaign to deal with rebellious natives, turned his province into a private kingdom until he grew so fat he could no longer lead troops in battle. Seleucus, having rid himself of his friend Perdiccas, extended his personal rule over much of Alexander’s former empire, from the Aegean to the steppes of central Asia. The dynasty he established would continue for many years to come, until engulfed by the Parthians in the east and Rome in the west. Ptolemy likewise consolidated his control of Egypt and lived to write his memoirs of the great campaign with Alexander from the Danube to the Indus. His family passed on the throne of the pharaohs for generations until the death of his descendant Cleopatra, who killed herself with the bite of an asp and surrendered Egypt to Rome.
The legacy of Alexander and the powerful influence of Greek culture that he initiated with his short-lived empire spread quickly over Asia, Africa, and Europe in the following centuries. It seems safe to say that without the Macedonian king and his conquests, the philosophy, art, and literature of ancient Greece that have so influenced our lives for more than two thousand years would instead have been only one of many voices in a chorus of ancient civilizations. Alexander’s plan to spread Greek culture across three continents was never anything more than a practical and limited means of military control over a diverse population. Like the Persians before him and the Romans after, he didn’t particularly care which language the natives spoke or which gods they worshiped as long as they followed his rules. The Hellenic customs he introduced into cities across his realm were largely for the benefit of his Macedonian and Greek colonists, who became the ruling citizens of their regions. He wanted his followers to feel at home whether they served him in Bactria or Babylon. Even the thousands of native youths he trained in the Greek language as part of his new officer corps were never meant to be cultural ambassadors to their people. But the successors of Alexander, especially the heirs of Seleucus, turned the spread of Greek civilization into a tool of sometimes ruthless political dominance, aided greatly by the members of the local nobility who saw that adopting Greek ways was the key to power, wealth, and prestige in the new Hellenistic age.
In India, the influence of Greek culture spread even as direct political control by the Macedonians waned. The kingdoms of the Ganges valley fell under the sway of a powerful ruler named Chandragupta, who founded the Mauryan empire and extended his rule to the Indus River. Twenty years after Alexander had fought so hard to gain control over the area, Seleucus met Chandragupta and ceded sovereignty of his Indian possessions up to the Hindu Kush in exchange for five hundred war elephants to use against his enemies in the west. Seleucus sent an ambassador named Megasthenes to the Indian court who, like Herodotus before him, mixed firsthand observations with dubious local stories to produce the most extensive and influential account of India available to the ancient Mediterranean world.
But even with the withdrawal of Seleucid power from the Indus valley, Greek culture and influence survived in the distant East for centuries. The great Buddhist king and grandson of Chandragupta, Ashoka, expanded the Mauryan empire over much of the subcontinent and set up inscriptions in Greek proclaiming his power. Under the influence of Hellenic artists, images of the Buddha appeared for the first time, dressed like the god Apollo in Greek clothing. The descendants of Macedonian and Greek soldiers continued to dwell in the many Alexandrias the king had established in the East. The largely male population of settlers married local women and created a vibrant hybrid culture. Archaeological excavations at Ai Khanum on the Oxus River have revealed a magnificent city with a Greek theater, a gymnasium, and a mint producing Greek-inscribed coins. In time the Mauryan empire lost control of the upper Indus valley to a series of Greco-Bactrian states ruled by Greek-speaking descendants of Alexander’s colonists. Rulers such as Demetrius I maintained contact with the Aegean world, but were much more at home among their mixed Greek and native courts in Bactria and Sogdiana. Even after the rise of the Parthians in Persia severed relations between the Greco-Bactrians and the Mediterranean, the heirs of the original veterans and merchants flourished. The greatest of the Greek rulers of the East was Menander, born near Kabul, who conquered the Punjab and invaded the Ganges valley. He became a Buddhist in spite of his success at war and sponsored a fusion of Greek and Indian art and culture that would long survive the collapse of the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms two hundred years after the death of Alexander.
In Persia, Alexander has long been remembered as both a hero and villain. In the medieval Shahnameh, Alexander—or Iskandar, as he came to be known in the Middle East—is a noble Iranian prince of the royal line, but is also vilified as the destroyer of Persian power. The slightly later Iskandarnameh portrays the king as an ideal ruler of Greek origin, a philosopher and scientist as well as a warrior, who marries Roxane, daughter of the Great King Darius, and takes the throne, then travels to China and journeys to Mecca. But to the Zoroastrians who still practice the old religion of the Persian kings, he is Alexander the accursed, who destroyed their holy books and soaked the earth in blood. The burning of Persepolis is not forgotten as they tend the sacred fire of Ahuramazda yet today. Even among Muslims in modern-day Iran, Alexander appears as a character in village parades along with the wicked scoundrels of history including Uncle Sam, while mothers threaten naughty children that Iskandar will get them if they misbehave.
Throughout the Middle East, the legacy of Alexander endures. He appears in the Koran as Dhul-Qarnayn, literally “the two-horned one,” in reference to his image on ancient coins wearing the horns of his divine father Zeus-Ammon. In the words recorded by Mohammed, he was a philosopher-king “whom God made mighty in the land and gave the means to achieve all things.” The Greek learning Alexander introduced into the region survived well into Muslim times and exercised a particular influence on the intellectual history of Shiite Islam.
Jewish culture was also ambivalent about Alexander and the value of Greek civilization. The Jews had prospered under Persian rule and many did not look kindly on the invader from the north. In the biblical book of Daniel, the Macedonian king appears as the last in a line of foreign rulers:
There shall be a fourth kingdom on earth,
that shall be different from all other kingdoms;
it shall devour the whole earth,
and trample it down, and break it to pieces.
As in the Koran, the biblical Alexander has horns, though they are ten in number, representing the evil rulers of the Seleucid line who contended for control of Palestine after his death. Most notable among these was Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who sought to spread Greek culture actively among the Jews. This vision was endorsed by many influential Jewish leaders, who gladly accepted a Greek gymnasium and educational institutions even in Jerusalem. Young Jewish men competed naked in athletic contests alongside Greeks in the shadow of the Temple. Some, ashamed at the circumcision that set them apart from their Greek friends, even underwent a painful operation to restore their foreskins. For the small but dedicated group of Jewish pietists, all this was blasphemy. They launched a war against the Seleucid king, but were beaten down by his troops and a garrison of his soldiers was established on a citadel north of the Temple. Antiochus outlawed Jewish worship and defiled the Holy of Holies, prompting even the most accommodating Jews to rise up against him. They were led by the Hasmonean family, who with their band of guerrilla warriors known as the Maccabees, drove the hated Seleucids and their Greek ways from Jerusalem and reinstated Temple worship—an event still celebrated by the feast of Hanukkah.
But not all Jews were opposed to the influences introduced by Alexander. In Egypt, Jews flocked to the newly established city of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast and helped transform it into the greatest metropolis of the age. Only a century after the death of the king in Babylon, the Jews of Alexandria were translating their sacred scriptures from Hebrew into Greek as they became more comfortable with the language of Socrates than their native tongue. The result was the Septuagint, a rendering of the Hebrew Bible that became the standard edition for Greek-speaking Jews (and Christians) after them. But the Septuagint was just one of many notable products of the magnificent Hellenistic culture that grew up in Alexandria with the support of the Ptolemaic kings. The city became the center for Greek scholarship in the ancient world, outshining even Athens. Citizens were recruited from all over the Greek world who, along with the Jewish residents and the decidedly second-class native Egyptians, formed a cosmopolitan center unparalleled in history. The city’s famous museum and library became the home of the greatest scientists and scholars of the Hellenistic age. Aristarchus of Samos, who first theorized that the sun was the center of the solar system and the earth revolved on its own axis, was resident in the city, as was the geographer and polymath Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who calculated the circumference of the earth with great accuracy.
But of all the lands that benefited from Alexander’s legacy, the one that most embraced Greek culture was a country Alexander never conquered—Rome. The legions seized Macedonia and Greece for their empire two centuries after Alexander, but the captured land in turn exerted a powerful influence on its captors. Any Roman who dared to call himself educated became fluent in Greek and immersed himself in Hellenic philosophy and literature. Not that Romans weren’t suspicious of foreign ways and mistrustful of any Greeks bearing cultural gifts inside their walls, but the allure of Greek civilization was too pervasive and powerful to resist. Hellenistic culture spread throughout the Roman world from Syria to Britain. Julius Caesar studied Homer and Herodotus as carefully as any Greek scholar and wept when he saw a statue of Alexander on display at a temple in Spain on the shores of the Atlantic. The Roman general explained his tears by saying he had accomplished so little by the age at which Alexander had died. Augustus also admired Alexander, but more for his unmatched military skill than his ability to govern an empire effectively. Many succeeding emperors modeled themselves on Alexander and tried to match his conquests in the East, though none was able to extend Roman rule beyond Mesopotamia.
The spread of Alexander’s Hellenistic culture throughout the Roman world and beyond became a prime factor in the eventual success of Christianity. The New Testament and most other popular early Christian literature were written in the Greek language, not the native Aramaic of Jesus of Nazareth. The almost universal knowledge of Greek allowed the Gospels to be read with equal ease in Jerusalem, Egypt, and Rome. When the Apostle Paul wrote his New Testament letters to the native people of Asia Minor, Greece, or to the Romans themselves, they were composed in the tongue of Alexander. Indeed, one could make a persuasive case that without the conquests of the Macedonian king, the Christian religion would have remained a local phenomenon.
The Greek language was also the initial means for the dispersion of the most famous version of the story of Alexander himself, The Alexander Romance. Only a century after the king’s death, a collection of entertaining and highly imaginative tales of his life had been published, probably in Egypt. These stories became incredibly popular and were translated over the following centuries into Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, Sanskrit, Persian, and many other languages, including Icelandic and the Middle English of Chaucer’s age. The stories go far beyond anything recorded in Arrian and the other ancient historians. The Alexander of the Romance ascends into the air in a basket carried by eagles, explores the ocean depths in a diving bell, and searches for the fabled Water of Life. Through this collection of stories the classical and medieval world came to know Alexander as the greatest of ancient kings. The legend of Alexander spread even to medieval West Africa, where the famous prince Sundiata listened eagerly to tales of the Macedonian ruler.
There was scarcely a country in the world that did not have its own stories of the great king Alexander. But, as in Persia, not everyone in history has viewed him in a positive light. The Italian poet Dante placed him in the seventh circle of Hell, boiling forever in the very blood of others he so freely shed. Many others since have readily agreed that Alexander was nothing more than a murderous tyrant with a gift for generalship. Views of Alexander have swung back and forth like a pendulum over the centuries, depending on the flow of history and the predisposition of those who have written his story. For the British Victorians, he was a mirror of themselves as enlightened purveyors of civilization through a superior culture backed by a powerful military. This rosy view of Alexander collapsed with the devastating wars of the twentieth century, when the horrific reality of absolute power swept away any romantic notions of benevolent tyranny. Today many modern scholars prefer to see Alexander as little more than a “drunken juvenile thug,” as one prominent historian has recently characterized him.
This view of Alexander is much too simplistic. He was a man of his own violent times, no better or worse in his actions than Caesar or Hannibal. He killed tens of thousands of civilians in his campaigns and spread terror in his wake, but so did every other general in the ancient world. If he were alive today, he would undoubtedly be condemned as a war criminal—but he did not live in our age. Like the heroes of Thomas Love Peacock’s marvelous satirical poem “The War Song of Dinas Vawr,” Alexander conquered much of the ancient world simply because he could:
The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.
Alexander himself would not have disputed such reasoning nor would those who fell beneath his sword. If the Great King Darius could have crossed the Hellespont and slaughtered every Macedonian in his path to add their land to his empire, he would have done so without remorse.
Whether we approve of Alexander’s often brutal tactics, every reasonable student of history must agree that he was one of the greatest military minds of all time. No one but a true genius in battle could have taken on the entire Persian Empire at long odds and fought his way across Asia all the way to India. As for his motives, we err greatly when we try to make Alexander anything more than a man of supreme military ability who wanted passionately to rule the world. Views of the Macedonian king as Prometheus bringing the light of Greek civilization to the poor masses of Asia are both unsound and insulting to the advanced cultures of the ancient east. To truly understand Alexander we must realize that—perhaps more than any man in history—he hated to lose. Alexander was and is the absolute embodiment of pure human ambition with all its good and evil consequences. We can condemn the death and destruction he left in his wake as he strode across the world like a colossus, but in the end we can’t help but admire a man who dared such great deeds.