Microsoft Word - front-1-4438-1743-0.rtf Read online

  Alexander the Great

  Alexander the Great

  By

  Krzysztof Nawotka

  Alexander the Great, by Krzysztof Nawotka

  This book first published 2010

  Cambridge Scholars Publishing

  12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Copyright © 2010 by Krzysztof Nawotka

  All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

  otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  ISBN (10): 1-4438-1743-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1743-1

  CONTENTS

  Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Chapter I: Childhood, Family, Macedonia .................................................. 1

  1. Birth of Alexander

  2. Macedonia

  3. The Argead dynasty

  4. Philip II and the rebuilding of the Macedonian state

  5. Philip II and Alexander’s Macedonian army

  6. Alexander’s childhood and school years

  Chapter II: The Heir to the Throne ............................................................ 43

  1. At his father’s side

  2. Chaeronea

  3. The congress at Corinth and the beginning of the Persian war

  4. The Pixodarus affair

  5. Cleopatra’s wedding

  6. Death of Philip

  Chapter III: The New King........................................................................ 83

  1. The takeover. Philip’s funeral

  2. War in the north

  3. The destruction of Thebes

  Chapter IV: From Abydus to Alexandria ................................................ 109

  1. Granicus – the first victory

  2. Freedom for Greeks of Asia

  3. From Halicarnassus to Cilicia: the campaign in Asia Minor

  4. The battle of Issus

  5. Phoenicia. Syria and Palestine

  6. The son of Ammon

  vi

  Contents

  Chapter V: King of Asia.......................................................................... 213

  1. From Memphis to Mesopotamia

  2. The revolt of Agis III

  3. The battle of Gaugamela

  4. Babylon, Susa and Persepolis

  5. The death of Darius III

  6. Philotas affair and the fall of Parmenion

  7. The conquest of eastern Iran

  8. Time of intrigues and anxiety

  Chapter VI: Expedition to India .............................................................. 295

  1. From Sogdiana to the Indus

  2. Taxila and Porus

  3. Hyphasis – the end of the expedition

  4. Towards the Ocean

  Chapter VII: The Last Years ................................................................... 331

  1. In the footsteps of Cyrus and Semiramis

  2. Empire in crisis

  3. The weddings at Susa

  4. The mutiny at Opis

  5. Greece in 324: the exiles and a new god

  6. The death of Hephaestion

  7. Return to Babylon

  Chapter VIII: Death, Last Plans, Tomb ................................................... 371

  1. The king died

  2. Alexander’s legacy

  3. Alexander’s tomb

  Bibliography ............................................................................................ 387

  Index........................................................................................................ 419

  PREFACE

  Alexander III, King of Macedonia, son of Philip II and heir to Achaemenid

  kings of Persia, is one of the most fascinating and frequently discussed

  figures of world history. By contemporaries he was more commonly hated

  rather than admired or loved, but soon after his death his legend began and

  it is still alive today. A belletristic account of his life and deeds – the so-

  called Alexander Romance – was in ancient, the medieval and early

  modern times one of the most universally known books in Europe, Asia,

  and Africa having some 80 versions written in 24 different languages. The

  book’s protagonist was the first in Western Civilization to be hailed Great,

  in all probability a title already bestowed upon him when the generation

  remembering his deeds was still alive, at the court of his onetime brother

  in arms – Ptolemy I of Egypt. Alexander’s brief reign marks a borderline

  between two great epochs of ancient times: the Classical and the

  Hellenistic. And this is by no means merely a convention in historiography.

  Without any exaggeration one can say that after his death the world was

  no longer the same as when he had ascended the Macedonian throne,

  regardless of whether one believes that this was a direct consequence of

  Alexander’s actions or simply the effect of general historic processes that

  were underway in the second half of the 4th century BC. Someone who so

  much personifies this great turning point in the history of the Western

  civilization naturally attracts scholarly interest. On the other hand, the

  specific aura and charisma of this young ruler, the scale of his conquests

  and the exotic landscapes and peoples encountered during a tireless trek of

  over 35,000 km spanning three continents is what the broader public have

  always found particularly appealing.

  That is why for a long time now not even a year has passed without a

  new book on Alexander. Apart from detailed studies, a number of

  complete monographs now exist whose authors frequently stress that they

  are not biographies. Strictly speaking if we were to apply the same

  rigorous definition of what a biography is to antiquity as we do to later

  epochs, virtually no biography related to this period could be written. But

  since so many non-biographies of Alexander already exist, I believe that

  there is space for a new biography, if only somewhat relaxed genre

  defining criteria are applied. This necessitates presenting Alexander as a

  component of the historical processes in his epoch and considering his

  viii

  Preface

  influence on the developments in Greece, Macedonia, the Persian Empire

  and neighbouring countries. Another reason for focusing more on

  Alexander as a person is the growing awareness that ancient societies were

  far less institutionalised than was assumed in modern times and in fact

  they operated on a much more personal level. Today we know that

  concepts as obvious in modern states as automatic procedures or Weberian

  impersonal rational bureaucracies were quite unheard of not only in the

  feudal Persia of the Achemenids but also in 4th-century Greece and

  Macedonia. In a world where borders as we understand them today did not

  exist and relationships between people from various countries were

  frequently stronger than loya
lty to a particular state, the significance of

  such a powerful personality on the shaping of events cannot be overrated.

  Finally, although Alexander is considered to be the greatest military

  commander of ancient times and, indeed, much of this book deals with the

  wars fought during his reign, it was not this author’s intention to make a

  meaningful contribution to military history. Instead it is hoped that this

  book will interest the reader in Alexander as a man and politician of

  outstanding talents and unparalleled charisma, but also one who erred in

  judgment and more than once displayed grave character faults.

  Three reasons may be found to justify the writing of yet another book

  entitled Alexander the Great. First, of the many books on this subject the

  last comprehensive, serious and, indeed, in this author’s opinion, the most

  important monograph was published over twenty years ago (Bosworth

  1988) and since then our perception of various aspects of antiquity has

  changed. Of particular value has been the rapid progress in study of the

  Achaemenid Persia, which has been experiencing an extraordinary boom

  in its last three decades. Ancient Persia has in many ways now been

  rediscovered. This has come about thanks to: the Persepolis tablets (some

  of which have only recently been published), other oriental and

  archaeological sources, detailed analyses of references made by the

  classical authors and a general movement away from the purely western

  perspective that had prevailed for years. Especially since P. Briant’s

  monumental synthesis (1996), our understanding of how the Achaemenid

  state was run and therefore also the Macedonian conquests from the

  Persian perspective have had to change. Moreover, our general knowledge

  of eastern societies and their response the Macedonian invader has been

  broadened by a systematic uncovering of sources from these regions,

  particularly ones originating from Babylon. Finally, in recent years many

  important monographs have come out on: history and topography of

  territories covered by Alexander’s expedition (in general Wood, 1997);

  Macedonia (Hammond, 1989; Borza, 1990; Errington, 1990) Iran, India,

  Alexander the Great

  ix

  and other regions of the ancient world (e.g. Holt, 1988; Eggermont, 1993;

  Karttunen, 1997; Habicht, 1999; Debord, 1999; Sartre, 2001, 2003; Speck,

  2002); specific aspects of 4th-century history such as the attitude of

  mainland Greece towards Macedonia (Jehne, 1994; Blackwell, 1999); the

  way the elites functioned in Greece (Herman, 1987; Mitchell, 2002) and

  Macedonia (Heckel, 1992); the position of women in Macedonia (Carney,

  2000) and Persia (Brosius, 1996); Macedonian colonization (Fraser, 1996);

  finances and numismatics (Le Rider, 2003; Holt, 2003); history of art and

  ideology (Stewart, 1993; Cohen, 1997) as well as the first monographs on

  Darius III (Briant, 2003), Olympias (Carney, 2006), and new biographies

  of Philip II (Hammond, 2002; Corvisier, 2002; Worthington, 2008). To

  that there is a plethora of new books on military history, although without

  much real progress except for the critical assessment of study of

  Macedonian army logistics pioneered by Engels in 1978 (Roth, 1999). All

  this new knowledge and all these new interpretations clearly require the

  actions and personality of Alexander to be once again reviewed.

  Second, for a long time it has been a common knowledge that the

  most serious obstacle faced in Alexander research is the number and

  quality of historical sources available. A few authors were already writing

  about Alexander in his lifetime and over a dozen more wrote about him

  not long after his death when they still had access to eyewitness accounts.

  Unfortunately all these works have disappeared almost without a trace.

  The earliest extant historical work to mention Alexander at least in passing

  is that of Polybius, who wrote in the mid 2nd century BC, whereas the most

  important ancient accounts date from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The

  quality of these accounts depends not only on the considerable time that

  had elapsed between the time of writing and the epoch of Alexander, but

  also on the methods the authors used, frequently relying on a single

  source. Ancient Alexander historians are customarily classified into two

  groups depending on the sources they use. One is the works of Flavius

  Arrianus (Arrian) and the anonymous Itinerarium Alexandri, which are

  based on the writings of Alexander’s companions – the King of Egypt

  Ptolemy I and Aristobulos. Their accounts are of greater value for events

  prior to 327 BC, for they made use of the now missing books of the

  famous historian Callisthenes of Olynthus, who also accompanied

  Alexander. The second category, commonly called the Vulgate, includes

  Diodorus, Curtius Rufus and Justin, who above all based their writings on

  the Alexandrian historian Cleitarchus, Ptolemy’s contemporary. Plutarch

  cannot be included in either of these groups, for this outstandingly erudite

  scholar made use of the works of as many as 24 different authors, mainly

  Alexander’s contemporaries, in an extraordinarily modern way. To the

  x

  Preface

  modern reader Arrian’s rhetoric is more palpable than that of the Vulgate

  authors and for this reason he was for many years considered to be the

  most trustworthy source. However, his methodology in fact simply relied

  on rejecting information that might in any way cast Alexander in a

  negative light and thus his stance primarily reflects the Macedonian

  propaganda version of events. W.W. Tarn and N.G.L. Hammond both

  largely rely on Arrian and to give him greater credibility they maintain the

  theory regarding the existence of the Royal Journal ( ephemerides), which

  was allegedly kept at Alexander’s court throughout his reign and later

  taken to Alexandria in Egypt, where it served as a source for Ptolemy and

  thus also indirectly as a source for Arrian.

  Source research in recent decades has uncovered so much new

  information regarding Alexander’s history that writing a new biography

  has become both possible and necessary. Commentary on Arrian and

  other studies by A.B. Bosworth (1980, 1988a and 1995) have shed new

  light on Arrian’s methods, his reliance on earlier sources and generally

  allowed us to wonder whether the significance of this ancient author

  regarding the life and times of Alexander may have been somewhat

  overrated. At the same time the value of the so-called Vulgate authors

  have undergone a positive reappraisal, particularly thanks to new

  commentaries (Atkinson, 1980, 1994 and 2009) and other studies

  (Baynham, 1998a) on Curtius Rufus, who for all his extravagant rhetoric

  and moralising is a very valuable author especially in that he was well

  informed about events within the Persian camp. Although today hardly

  anyone believes in the existence of the so-called mercenary source, i.e. an

  account written by a Greek mercenary in the Persian camp that Curtius

  Rufus and Diodorus had seen, evidence corroborating what these authors

  write about the Persian camp has been fou
nd. Therefore we can assume

  that the Vulgate authors had indirect access to this information from

  earlier historians who had actually heard the oral accounts of Greek

  mercenaries on Persian pay. Interest in Plutarch is currently undergoing a

  genuine revival, whereas the commentary to his Alexander (Hamilton,

  1999; 1st edition in 1969) is rightly considered to be classics of the genre.

  Historical and philological commentaries have also appeared to his other

  work: On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great (D’Angelo,

  1998; Cammarota, 1998; Nawotka, 2003). Finally scholars have now more

  boldly made use of smaller anonymous works such as the Metz Epitome

  (which is associated with the Vulgate group though it makes no references

  to the others and is based on the works of historians a generation after

  Alexander) or extant fragments of the writings of Alexander’s

  contemporaries Ephippus and Chares. The author of this book agrees with

  Alexander the Great

  xi

  those (Plezia, Bielawski, 1970) who argue that the document found in an

  Arab manuscript is the translation of a genuine letter from Aristotle to

  Alexander regarding the treatment of Greeks and barbarians. With newly

  discovered 4th-century Greek inscriptions as well as already well known

  but newly researched ones we have an increasingly better understanding of

  Alexander’s policies towards the Greeks and how they were received –

  differently on the east coast of the Aegean and differently on the west

  coast. Of particular value is the steadily increasing amount of eastern

  sources, which not only allow us to more accurately establish the dates of

  key events but also move away from the Eurocentric view held in some

  earlier studies. That is also the value of later, even mediaeval Zoroastrian

  sources maintaining the Persian tradition, which unlike the western