The Hellenistic World

II

Alexander’s career has necessarily been sketched only in outline; it gives rise to many problems which cannot be considered here. It is however of special interest to consider to what extent his actions foreshadow and point forward to institutions and attitudes characteristic of the hellenistic world of which he was in some sense the initiator. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to some such aspects of Alexander’s life.

(a) First, the change in Alexander’s attitude towards Persia and his attempt to transform his army from a primarily Macedonian force, which still exercised the residual powers of the Macedonian people, into a cosmopolitan international force owing loyalty only to himself, in many ways anticipates the military foundation on which the personal monarchies of the hellenistic age rested. By 323 ‘King Alexander’ was the personal ruler of a vast spear-won empire which had little to do with Macedonia. His successors likewise were to carve out kingdoms for themselves with the help of armies bound to them only by personal bonds.

(b) Similarly, there was an increase in Alexander’s autocracy foreshadowing that of the hellenistic kings. In distancing himself from Macedonia and its national traditions Alexander had moreover necessarily assumed an autocratic power. The growth of this can be traced in a series of events which aroused the army’s hostility and often involved the elimination of his opponents. The first such incident occurred in 330 at Phradah, when Philotas’ execution was used as a pretext to have Parmenion assassinated. The next was at Maracanda (Samarkand) in 328, when Alexander murdered Black Cleitus, one of the Companions – the group constituting the king’s intimate advisers – and a leading cavalry officer, after provocation in a drunken brawl. Alexander subsequently reacted with a theatrical display of remorse but was persuaded by the philosopher Anaxarchus that the king stood above the law (Plutarch, Alexander, 52, 4).

In order that he might feel less shame for the murder, the Macedonians decreed that Cleitus had been justly put to death (Curtius, viii, 2, 12).

In the hellenistic monarchies (except Macedonia) the king’s decrees normally had the force of law and the king could do no wrong.

The third incident took place the next year at Bactra (mod. Balkh) and was the result of Alexander’s policy of surrounding himself with Persians as well as Macedonians. The presence of both at court led inevitably to difficulties, since the two peoples had very different traditions concerning the relationship between king and subject. To Macedonians the king was the first among his peers, to Persians he was the master and they were his slaves and the outward sign of this was an act of obeisance ( proskynesis), which a Macedonian or Greek was prepared to perform only to a god. Its exact character is controversial: some believe it to have involved physical prostration, others argue that it consisted merely in the blowing of a kiss from the upright, bowed or prostrate position. Whatever its precise form it was repulsive to Greeks and Macedonians when performed before a man, and when at Bactra in 327 Alexander tried to persuade the Macedonians to follow the Persians in according him this gesture, the Greek Callisthenes opposed him. There are two versions of what happened. According to the first, there was a debate between Anaxarchus and Callisthenes on Alexander’s proposal, in which the latter ‘while irritating Alexander exceedingly, found favour with the Macedonians’ (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 12, 1), and the whole plan was dropped. According to the second, Alexander sent round a loving-cup, which each was to take, offer proskynesis, and finally receive a kiss from the king; Callisthenes omitted the proskynesis and was denied the kiss (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 12, 3–5). Whatever the truth of the details – both versions could be true – the incident led to Callisthenes’ destruction, for he was soon afterwards accused of being privy to a murder-conspiracy by some of the royal pages.

Aristobulus declares that they [sc. the conspirators] said that it was Callisthenes who had urged them to the plot; and Ptolemy agrees. But most authorities do not say so, but rather that through his dislike for Callisthenes . . . Alexander easily believed the worst about him (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 14, 1).

Callisthenes was tortured and executed; the sources disagree only on the details. The whole incident smacks of the tyrant’s court.

(c) Alexander’s authoritarianism revealed itself, as that of his successors was also to do, in his relations with the Greeks. The expedition, as planned by Philip, had as its excuse the avenging of the wrongs suffered by the Greeks at the hands of the Persians. At the outset Alexander had been at pains to emphasize the panhellenic aspects of the war (see p. 31 for the panoplies sent to Athens after Granicus) but unfortunately our evidence is not sufficiently clear to allow us to say what status was accorded by Alexander to the ‘liberated’ Greek cities of Asia Minor. According to Arrian

he ordered the oligarchies everywhere to be dissolved, democracies to be set up, each city to receive back its own laws and to cease paying the taxes they had paid to the Persians (Anabasis, i, 18, 2).

But an inscription from Priene (Tod, 185) shows Alexander interfering extensively in the city’s affairs and although the Prieneans are declared ‘free and autonomous’ and released from the payment of ‘contributions’ – the word used, syntaxis, suggests that these were payments made hitherto to Alexander for the prosecution of the war rather than tribute paid to Persia – it is not clear just what ‘free and autonomous’ meant to the king. Some scholars have argued that the Greek cities of Asia Minor became members of the League of Corinth. This seems to have been true of the cities of the Aegean islands for an inscription from Chios, dealing with Alexander’s restoration of exiles there (probably in 332), declares that ‘of those who betrayed the city to the barbarians. . . all still remaining there shall be deported and tried before the Council of the Greeks’ (Tod, 192), which suggests Chian membership of the League of Corinth. But there is no firm evidence to determine whether the same was also true of the cities of Asia Minor. In practice they certainly had to do what Alexander ordered, like Ephesus where he restored the democracy but ‘gave orders to contribute to the temple of Artemis such taxes as they had paid to the Persians’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 17, 10).

This, however, also applied to the cities of the League, as the events of 324 clearly show. Faced with a problem of rootless men in Asia – unemployed mercenaries, political exiles, and settlers who (like 3000 from Bactria) had abandoned their new colonies and were on their way back to Greece – Alexander published an edict authorizing their return. According to Diodorus (xviii, 8, 4) he stated in this that ‘we have written to Antipater (who was in charge in Europe) about this, that he shall use compulsion against any cities that are unwilling to take back their exiles’. To ensure the maximum publicity for this decree, which, as an inscription from Mytilene (Tod, 201) shows, applied to Asia and Europe alike, Nicanor, Aristotle’s adopted son, was sent to Olympia to have read out to the Greeks assembled for the games a statement that ‘all exiles were to return to their countries, excepting those guilty of sacrilege and murder’ (Diodorus, xvii, 109, 1). A Samian inscription (Syll., 312) shows that Alexander had already previously made a similar announcement to the army. Though Diodorus says that the decree was welcomed, it certainly caused complications and even chaos over property, confiscated and sold, in every city (as inscriptions make clear) and it can hardly have pleased Antipater. It is a measure of Alexander’s disregard for the rights of the cities that he could take such a step without consulting them. In this, as in so much else, his actions were arbitrary and authoritarian. Traditional Greek rights were disregarded.

(d) Both Alexander and, later on, the hellenistic kings reinforced their autocratic power with claims to divinity. About the same time as he ordered the return of the exiles Alexander published a further demand in Greece, which met with a mixed reception. According to Aelian ( Varia historia, ii, 19), ‘Alexander sent instructions to the Greeks to vote him a god’ and this is borne out by other sources, none of which, however, mentions the exact context in which this request was sent. However, according to the Athenian orator Hypereides (Funeral Speech, 6, 21, delivered 323), the Athenians had been forced

to see sacrifices accorded to men, the statues, altars and temples of the gods disregarded, while those of men were sedulously cared for, and the servants of these men honoured as heroes.

The reference must be to the worship of Alexander and to the heroic honours which he had accorded to his dead friend Hephaestion. In the spring of 323 Alexander was visited at Babylon by embassies from Greece ‘wreathed in the manner of sacred envoys arriving to honour some god’ (Arrian, Anabasis, vii, 23, 2). In view of this evidence and a number of other passages, often ironical like the report of Damis’ motion at Sparta – ‘if Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god’ (Plutarch, Moralia, 219E) – it seems likely that the request was sent about the same time as the demand for the restoration of exiles, though there is little to be said for Tarn’s view in Alexander the Great, Vol. II, pp. 370–3, that ‘his divinity was intended by Alexander to give a political sanction to the latter request, which no existing powers authorized him to make’.

The request for divine honours seems more likely to have been a final step in the direction in which Alexander’s thoughts had been moving for some time. His father Philip had been honoured at Eresus on Lesbos by the erection of altars to Zeus Philippios (Tod, 191, 11. 5–6), a statue to him stood in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 17, 11) – though this need not necessarily imply a cult – and at Aegae in Macedonia for ‘because of the greatness of his rule he had counted himself alongside the twelve gods’ (Diodorus, xvi, 95, 1). Recently an inscription has been found which attests the existence of a cult to him at Philippi. As for Alexander himself, he had been recognized as a Pharaoh, and so as a divine being (see p. 217), and early in 331 he had visited the oracle of Amon at Siwah in the Libyan desert, where, Callisthenes reported, ‘the priest told the king that he, Alexander, was the son of Zeus’ (Strabo, xvii, 1, 43), a statement generally interpreted to mean that the priest greeted Alexander as ‘son of Amon’. Shortly afterwards, and quite independently, the oracles at Didyma and Erythrae put out the same story ‘concerning Alexander’s descent from Zeus’ (Strabo, ibid.). To Greeks and Macedonians it was common practice to identify foreign gods with their own and Callisthenes called Amon Zeus, just as Pindar had done in his hymn to Amon, where he addressed him as ‘Amon, lord of Olympus’, and in a Pythian ode (4, 16) where he speaks of Zeus Amon. That Alexander encouraged the connection with Zeus, as his son or (like Philip) identified with him, can be seen from a silver decadrachm issued later to celebrate his victory over Porus, which depicts Alexander on horseback charging Porus on an elephant and on the reverse shows a figure of Zeus, wearing a strange amalgam of dress and wielding a thunderbolt in his right hand, which has also been identified with Alexander.

A further stage in the advance towards deification can be traced in the scheme, already discussed above (pp. 38–9), to introduce proskynesis at Bactra. In order to raise the topic, Anaxarchus, the amenable philosopher from Abdera, asserted that

it would be far more just to consider Alexander as a god than Dionysus and Heracles;. . . there could be no doubt that when Alexander had passed away men would honour him as a god; how much more just was it then that they should so honour him in his lifetime rather than when he was dead, and the honours would be no use to him (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 10, 6–7).

But however attractive to Alexander, this argument went down badly with the Macedonians, as we have seen, and the plan to introduce proskynesis had to be shelved, largely in the light of Callisthenes’ speech in opposition. The final stage came with the request of 323, as a result of which several Greek cults of Alexander appeared – at Athens, probably at Sparta, and perhaps elsewhere. But Alexander’s death followed soon afterwards and any cults established seem to have been shortlived, at any rate on the Greek mainland. Cults established in Asia Minor, like the festival of the Alexandreia attested in an inscription found on the island of Thasos, seem often to date from his original campaigns of 334/3 and not to be a response to the message of 323. In their case the cult was often accompanied by the setting-up of a new dating era (as in Priene and Miletus), both being a spontaneous expression of gratitude for ‘liberation’. But the Greeks of the mainland needed no liberator and there cults were instituted only in response to pressure and soon disappeared. The difference is noteworthy. It is the Asian tradition which serves to throw light on the character of hellenistic ruler-cult during the next two centuries (see pp. 212 ff).

(e) Finally we must consider Alexander’s cities. Throughout the lands covered by his march he founded Alexandrias, not seventy, as Plutarch (On Alexander’s Fortune, 1, 5, p.328e) alleged, but a substantial number, perhaps about a score in all, mainly east of the Tigris, where hitherto urban centres were rare. Most of these foundations are merely names in lists, official names moreover, which were not always those by which they were later known. They were intended to serve a variety of purposes, some to guard strategic points, passes or fords, others to supervise wider areas; they presupposed an adequate territory to maintain the colonists and, preferably, a local population who could be pressed into agricultural work. Some were later to develop into centres of commerce, while others withered and perished. It seems certain that the bulk of the settlers were Greek mercenaries. This can be deduced from calculations based on recorded troop movements and is confirmed by remarks in our sources. To take the latter first, Diodorus reports that the Greeks whom Alexander had settled in the upper satrapies (especially Bactria)

were sick for Greek training and the Greek way of life and having been relegated to the frontiers of the kingdom they put up with this from fear so long as Alexander was alive, but when he died they revolted (xviii, 7, 1).

They were in fact 23, 000 in number and had come out East to make their fortunes – their fate was to be disarmed by the Macedonians and massacred for plunder. The picture of reluctant settlers is confirmed from a speech which Arrian put into the mouth of the Macedonian Coenus when the troops in the Punjab mutinied rather than march further east. After mentioning the sending home of the Thessalians from Bactria, he continues:

Of the rest of the Greeks some have been settled in the cities which you have founded, and they do not all remain there willingly; others including Macedonians, sharing in your toils and dangers, have in part perished in battle, while some have become invalids from wounds and have been left scattered here and there throughout Asia (Arrian, Anabasis, v, 27, 5).

Firm numbers elude us but Griffith has calculated (The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World, pp. 20 ff.) that in the course of his expedition Alexander received at least 60, 000 (and more probably 65, 000) fresh mercenaries, and that he left behind him as garrisons or settlers a minimum of 36, 000, which together with the numbers not recorded and casualties from battle or sickness must have reached a total equal to that of the new recruits. Eventually, at Babylon,

having sent home the older of his soldiers to their native land (Diodorus (xvii, 109, 1) puts their numbers at 10, 000) he ordered 13, 000 infantry and 2000 horse to be selected for retention in Asia, thinking that Asia could be held by an army of moderate size, because he had distributed garrisons in many places and had filled the newly founded cities with colonists eager to maintain things as they were (Curtius, x, 2, 8).

The Bactrian revolt shows how far Alexander had miscalculated the temper of these settlers.

Not all, however, broke loose. And though many of the cities (like Bactra) must have incorporated a strong native element, they maintained their Greek organization and later under the Seleucids they were reinforced by the establishment of new settlements. The character of these will be considered below (pp. 130 ff.). Here we may conclude this brief consideration of Alexander’s programme, which foreshadowed the many later foundations of his hellenistic successors, by noting that his first Alexandria, that founded on the Nile in spring 331, and his only settlement west of the Tigris, survived to become one of the most famous centres of the Roman empire and indeed of later times.