Robin Lane Fox - Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great

PENGUIN BOOKS

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Preface ii

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

Notes

Addenda

Bibliography

Index

PENGUIN HOOKS

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Robin Lane Fox was born in 1946 and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of New College and University Reader in Ancient History. Since 1970 he has been week ly gardening correspondent of th e Financial Times. Alexander the Great won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W. H. Heinemann Award on its first publication in 1973 . His other books include The Search fo r Alexander ( 1981 ), Bet ter Gardening (Penguin , Pagans and Christians (Penguin, 1988) and Th e Unauthorized Ve rsion (Penguin, 1972).

TO LOUISA

LIST OF MAPS

page

Greece, Macedonia and the Aegean

Turkey and the approach to the battle of Issus

no

Western Persian Empire 333/330

Alexander's route, September 330/327

North-West Frontier 327/326

Siege of Pir-Sar

Route to the Hydaspes

PREFACE

I first met Homer and Alexander fourteen years ago and for different reasons I have been intrigued by them ever since; if any one reader puts down this book with a wish to read Homer or with a sense of what it might have been like to have followed Alexander, I will not have written to no purpose. I have not aimed at any particular class of reader, because I do not believe that such classes exist; I have written self-indulgently, as I myself like to read about the past. I do not like the proper names of nonentities, numbered dates of unknown years or refutations of other men's views. The past, like the present, is made up of seasons and of faces, feelings, disappointments and things seen. I am bored by institutions and I do not believe in structures. Others may disagree.

This is not a biography nor does it pretend to certainty in Alexander's name. More than twenty contemporaries wrote books on Alexander and not one of them survives. They are known by quotations from later authors, not one of whom preserved the original wording: these later authors are themselves only known from the manuscripts of even later copyists and in the four main sources these manuscripts are not complete. The most detailed history goes back to only one manuscript, whose text cannot be checked; another, much used, has often been copied illegibly. Alexander left no informal letter which is genuine beyond dispute and the two known extracts from his formal documents both concern points of politics. On the enemy side his name survives in a Lycian grave-inscription, in Babylonian tablets on building work and astronomy and in Egyptian captions to temple dedications. It is a naive belief that the distant past can be recovered from written texts, but even the written evidence for Alexander is scarce and often peculiar. Nonetheless, 1,472 books and articles are known to me on the subject in the past century and a half, many of which adopt a confident tone and can be dismissed for that alone. Augustine, Cicero and perhaps the emperor Julian are the only figures from antiquity whose biography can be attempted, and Alexander is not among them. This book is a search, not a story, and any reader who takes it as a full picture of Alexander's life has begun with the wrong suppositions.

I have many debts, none more lastin g than the generous support and complete freedom from duties which I have enjoyed first as an undergraduate, then as a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. During my time there, Mr C. E. Stevens first showed me that history did not have to be dull to be true. Mr G. E. M. de Sainte Croix revived my interest in Alexander and fed it with many intriguing insights into th e classical past. Dr J. K. Davie s has been a constant source of suggestion and shrewd comment. Dr A. D. H. Bivar directed me to Iranian problems which have since become a primary enticement. The lectures of the late Stefan Weinstock on Roman religion raised much that I wanted to ask of Alexander and his remarkable book on Caesar would have raised even more if I had been able to take it into full account. But at a time when so much of ancient history is a desert, I have gained most from the lectures and writings of Mr Peter Brown; it is my great regret that there is not the evidence to begin to treat Alexander's age as he has treated late antiquity.

I am grateful to The Hogarth Press and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, for permission to reproduce the poem 'In the Year B.C.' from The Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy translated by Rac Dalve n and to Faber & Faber Ltd and Random House Inc., New York, for per mission to quote from W. H. Aude n's poem The Shield of Achilles.

Other debts are more personal. Like Alexander's treasurer, I have been helped through solitary years by a garden and a lady, and in both respects I have been more fortunate. The garden h as grown more obligingly and th e lady, though not a goddess, is at least my wife.

When Alexander's sarcophagus was brought from its shrine, Augustus gazed at the body, then laid a crown of gold on its glass case and scattered some flowers to pay his respects. When they asked if he would like to see Ptolemy too, I wished to see a king,' he replied, 'I did not wish to see corpses.'

Suetonius, Life of Augustus, 18 .1

As for the exact thoughts in Alexander's mind, I am neither able nor concerned to guess them, but this I think I can state, that nothing common or mean would have been his intention; he would not have remained content with any of his conquests, not even if he had added the British Isles to Europe; he would always have searched beyond for something unknown, and if there had been no other competition, he would have competed against himself.

Arria n (c. A.D, 50), Alexander's Expedition, 7.1

ONE

FLUELLEN

I think it is in Macedon where Alexander is porn. I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the 'orld, I warrant you shall find, in the comparisons between Maccdon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth; but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but 'tis all one, 'tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.

Henry V, IV, vii

CHAPTER ONE

Two thousand three hundred years ago, in the autumn of B.C., the king of the Macedonians was celebrating another royal wedding. For King Philip marriage was nothing new, as he had already lived with at least seven wives of varying rank, but he had never been father of the bride before; he was giving away his daughter to the young client king of Epirus who lived beyond the western border of his kingdom. There was no romance about their marriage: the bridegroom was the bride's own uncle. But the Greeks, correctly, saw neither danger nor distaste in a liaison with a niece, and for Philip, who had mostly combined his passions with sound politics, it was a convenient moment to settle a daughter within his own court circle and bind the neighbouring king to a close and approved relationship.

The occasion was planned for magnificence, and the guests were meant to find it to their liking. The Macedonian kings had long claimed to be of Greek descent, but Greeks had not always been conv inced by these northerners insistence and to his enemies Philip was no better than a foreign outsider. Two years before, Philip had conquered the last of his Greek opponents and become the first king to control the cities of mainland Greece; these cities, he had arranged, were to be his allies, allies who shared in a common peace and acknowledged him as Leader, a novel title which confirmed that his conquest was incidental to a grander ambition. As a Leader of Greek allies, Philip did not mean to stay and oppress the cities he occupied, but to march with Greeks against an enemy abroad. In the spring before the wedding he had lived up to his title and sent an advance army eastwards to fight with the Persian Empire in Asia. Now, in high summer, the full invasion awaited him, his allied Greek council had elected him to its supreme command, and his daughter's wedding was his chance for a splendid farewell. Foreign friends had been invited from conquests which stretched from the Black Sea to the coast of the Adriatic, from the Danube to the southern tip of Greece: Greek guests were coming north to see inside the Macedonian kingdom, and this wedding of niece and uncle might help to persuade them that their Macedonian Leader was less of a tyrant than they had so far protested.