Here is
a preliminary checklist:
[1] His
father’s army and geopolitical position
[2]
Tiger Woods training
[3] The
target for takeover
[4]
Greek population explosion and mercenaries
[5]
Alexander’s victory formula
We will
also consider:
Was Alexander’s success because
of or despite his personality?
Did Alexander really achieve
anything?
Why did Alexander sleep well, but
Napoleon never slept?
[1] His Father
That is
to say, his father’s army and favorable geopolitical position. Alexander is
famous for having conquered the Persian Empire. It was the greatest empire in
the world at that time, covering 3000 miles from west to east, 1500 miles
north/south. The expedition was planned and prepared by his father, Philip II
of Macedon, and was ready to go when Philip was assassinated at the farewell
party. The 20-year-old son took command, waited two more years to make sure the
Macedonians and the Greeks were behind him, and then carried out the epic
campaign of conquest in 10 years.
Instead
of kicking the causal can down the road, we need to ask: how did Philip come to
build this invincible army? The answer is in the organization and the
opposition.
The
Macedonian army was an organizational improvement on the Greek hoplite army.
The Greeks had developed the practice of fighting in solid ranks, forming a
combat block of shields, armor, and spears. The whole aim of battle was to keep
one’s troops together in a rectangular mass; with their heavy armor, they could
not be hurt by arrows, stones or javelins-- a Roman version was called a
Tortoise because it was impervious to anything.
The
Greek phalanx, developed in the 600s and 500s BC, was a huge shift from the
traditional mode of fighting depicted in the Iliad (around 750 BC). The traditional form could be called the
hero/ berserker style. An army
consisted of noisy crowds of soldiers clustered behind their leaders, who
didn’t really give orders but led by example. Heroes like Achilles, Hector, and
Ajax would work themselves into a frenzy, roaring out onto the battlefield
between the armies, sometimes fighting a hero from the other side, but more
often going on a rampage through the lesser troops, cowing them into a losing
posture and mowing them down with sheer momentum, i.e. emotional domination.
This berserker style remained the way “barbarian” armies fought-- that is to
say, armies that did not have disciplined phalanxes. The hero-berserker could
never beat a Greek or Roman phalanx that stood its ground; the Greeks were
always victorious over the barbarians to the north and east of them, and so
were the Romans over their respective hinterlands.
On the
other hand, when one Greek phalanx met another, the result was a shoving match.
Unless one side broke ranks and ran away, few soldiers were killed. Most
battles were stalemates, and city-states could avoid combat if they wished,
sheltering behind their walls. The main purpose of cities all over the ancient
Middle East, many of them just fortified towns, were these defensive walls,
impervious to berserkers. Phalanxes only fought by arrangement, when both sides
assembled on chosen ground for a set-piece battle.
 |
| Greek hoplite battle |
The main
weakness of the hoplite phalanx was that it was slow-moving. Hoplites were
heavy troops, quite literally from the weight of armor they carried. An enemy
that hit and ran away could harass a Greek phalanx but would be beaten if it
stayed to fight head-to-head. This was brought home to the Greeks when Xenophon
returned from a campaign in Persia during 401-399 BC, writing up their
experiences in his famous Expedition of
the Ten Thousand. A contender for the Persian throne had hired them as
mercenaries; but once they reached the Mesopotamian heartland, the Persian
leader was killed in battle, and the Ten Thousand had to fight their way back,
first against the Persian army and then against primitive hill tribes on their
path to the Black Sea. The
Persians troops were somewhere between the berserker style and the disciplined
Greeks. They relied on large masses to impress their enemy into submission;
typically these were grouped by ethnicity, each with their own type of weapons.
Among these weapons of terror were rows of chariots with scythes attached to
their axles; sometimes there were war-elephants. Troops recruited from tribal
regions were used on the flanks, as clusters of stone-slingers, archers, and
javelin-throwers; these were light troops, without armor since they fought from
a distance. The Persian armies that Alexander fought had the same shape.
None of
these troops could beat a disciplined phalanx that held its ground; the
chariots could get close only if they ran onto the phalanx’s spears, which
horses are unwilling to do; elephants, too, are hard to control and shy away
from spears. The Greeks soon recognized they could beat armies of almost any
size if they stuck together. A bigger problem was that enemy light troops, and
attacks by tribal forces with arrows and slings, could be repelled by their
armor and discipline, but hoplites were too heavy to chase them down and keep
them from repeating the attack.
The
solution was to add specialized units around the phalanx; hiring their own
barbarian archers and slingers, and adding cavalry, mainly for the purpose of
finishing off the enemy when they are running away. But in the Greek homeland,
most battles were simply phalanx-on-phalanx; in the democratic city-states,
this was as much a display of egalitarian citizenship as a military formation.
Philip’s
Macedonian army, which he put together between 360 and 336 BC, incorporated all
the most advanced improvements. Most importantly, he added heavy cavalry,
operating on both flanks with the phalanx in the center. Philip’s cavalry were
not just for chasing-down after the enemy broke ranks, but for breaking the
enemy formation itself. Philip was one of the first to perfect a combined-arms
battle tactic: the phalanx would engage and stymie the enemy’s massed
formation, whereupon the cavalry would break it open on the flanks or rear.
This was
one of the advantages of Macedonia’s marchland location; having only recently
transitioned from tribal pastoralists to settled agriculture, it could combine
military styles. Philip’s phalanx was recruited from the peasant farmers, his
cavalry from the aristocracy, used to spending their time riding and hunting.
Philip’s-- and thus Alexander’s-- cavalry were called the Companions; they were
the elite, the carousing drinking-buddies of their leader. The Companion
cavalry, usually on the right wing of battle, was complemented by another cavalry
on the left wing, recruited from the Thessalian plains people, but commanded by
Macedonian officers.
In
addition to improving on the best-of-the-barbarians, Philip also borrowed from
the most scientifically advanced Greeks, the colonies in Sicily, for techniques
of attacking fortresses. These included catapults and engines, underground
mining (to undermine walls), siege ladders and protected roofing to cover the
de-construction engineers as they worked on the fortress.
The
third of Philip’s innovations was to travel light. Greek city-state armies, if
they went very far from home, traveled with huge baggage trains: servants
carrying armor and supplies, personal slaves, women, camp followers, often
doubling the size of the mass. Philip made every soldier carry his own
equipment; he prohibited carts, since they are slow moving and clog the
primitive roads; he kept pack animals to a minimum, since they add to the
number of attendants. When an army has to engage in long-distance expeditions,
overcoming the logistics problem becomes the number-one issue. As we shall see,
Alexander followed his father exactly in this regard.
The Geopolitical Position, as
Philip Left It
Macedonia
was a late developer, a peripheral area north of the zone of city-states. Moreover, it was essentially an inland
state, not a maritime power; its strength was its extensive agricultural lands,
and its access to the plains with their horses and pastoralists.
 |
To the south was the Greek peninsula, broken by mountains and inlets of the sea, a land of walled city-states. Rarely able to expand their land frontiers, they engaged in maritime expeditions, lived by trade and booty, and by sending out colonies around the Mediterranean littoral. The same pattern held on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea. The result was that Greek city-states could rarely conquer each other. Some did become more prestigious than others, and forced the others into coalitions. This Athens did when it became the center for the massed fleet that repelled the Persian invasions, subsequently becoming a quasi-empire in their own right collecting duties to support the fleet. * But as land powers, the city-states were essentially deadlocked.
* The cultural prestige of Athens starts at
this time. Before 460 BC, Greek poets, philosophers, mathematicians and
scientists were spread all over; they concentrate in Athens when it becomes the
biggest, richest, and most powerful city. The cultural fame of Athens is a
result of its geopolitical rise. It became the place where all the
culture-producing networks came together, and remained the place for centuries
as the leading networks reproduced themselves.
Simultaneously,
the Persian empire had reached the limits of its logistics and its
administrative capacity for holding itself together. There was no longer any
real danger of Persian expansion into Greece; it was just another player in the
multi-player situation. The Persian invasions were in 490 and 480-79 BC; both
failed because the Persians could not sustain an army across the water against
navies equal to what they could raise. The last Persian forces on the European
side of the straits were thrown out by 465 BC. The Athenians played up the
Persian threat as the basis of their own power, down to about 400, when they lost
a long domestic war of coalitions.**
** The defeat of Athens by Sparta
was not the end of democracy, or anything of the sort. Greek history is
dominated by Athenian propaganda, because the great historians of this period--
Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon-- were all Athenians or sympathizers. It
helped that Socrates and Plato were Athenians, and their dialogues make the
Athenian scene come alive, as do the comedies of Aristophanes. That is why we
moderns, styling ourselves inheritors to Greek democracy and science, have such
a narrow Athenian peep-hole view into the history of Greece.
The
period from the 390s BC down to the rise of Macedonia in the 340s, is one where
numerous powers and coalitions vie with each other. Sparta, Athens, Thebes, the
Boeotian league, the Phocians, all have a try at becoming hegemon. The term
itself is revealing: it means, not conqueror or overlord, but leader,
preponderant influence. The situation has settled into a multi-sided, unstably
ongoing set of conflicts.
Outside
the deadlocked heartland, there was opportunity for a marchland state to grow.
Since the major players had their attention locked in, a peripheral actor could
grow in its own environment, becoming dominant through a local elimination
contest. This is what the Macedonian kingdom did. First its settled
agricultural zone expanded inland to incorporate nearby hill tribes, recruiting
them into a victoriously expanding army; then growing north and east into
Thrace (what is now Bulgaria and European Turkey) by beating barbarian kings
and weak tribal coalitions. Philip, who grew up as a hostage in one of the
civilized city-states, had an eye for what counted there; after returning to
Macedon, he made a point of conquering barbarian land that had gold mines, as
well as seaports as far as the straits, where the grain trade passed upon which
Athens and the other Greek city-states depended. In short, he started by
becoming the big frog in a small pond, while learning the military and cultural
techniques of his more civilized neighbours, and combining them with the
advantages he could see on the periphery.
At a point reached around 340 BC, the city-states woke up to find that their biggest threat was not Persia, nor one of their own civilized powers, but a semi-barbarian upstart, whose armies and resources were now bigger and better than their own.
At a point reached around 340 BC, the city-states woke up to find that their biggest threat was not Persia, nor one of their own civilized powers, but a semi-barbarian upstart, whose armies and resources were now bigger and better than their own.
[2] Tiger Woods Training
Alexander
was born in 356 BC, a time when his father was reforming the Macedonian army
and beginning his conquests. Obviously Philip was away from home a lot and
would not have taken a small child with him to the wars. But it is apparent
that from an early age, he trained Alexander by informal apprenticeship, having
him around him when he could. The famous incident with the horse Bucephalas
happened when Alexander was 10 years old, and his father was buying warhorses.
One magnificent horse was too shy and unruly to be ridden, and Philip was going
to send it back until Alexander begged to have a try at taming it. The story
goes on to say he had noticed the horse was frightened by its moving shadow, so
he turned the horse’s face into the sun, soothed it by stroking, and finally
jumped on its back and galloped off. Leaving aside the usual hero-foreshadowing
and prophetic comments that went along with the story, we can note that
Alexander was already a careful observer who figured out how to manage those
around him; that he was both impetuous and calculating, biding his time for the
moment to act. This was not just a colorful story of a boy and his horse; it shows
a remarkably mature 10-year-old; and the qualities Alexander shows are much the
same as his father’s.
Though
father and son butted heads and engaged in mutual jealousy, it was clear that
Philip regarded Alexander from an early age as the kind of officer he wanted to
follow him. At age 16, when Philip was away on campaign, he left Alexander as
regent, and he jumped right in, putting down revolts by leading the army in
person. Thereafter, Alexander accompanied him on campaigns, commanding the key
unit in battle, the Companion cavalry.
Philip
had other sons he could have groomed for this role. Alexander’s mother was
Philip’s fourth wife out of an eventual total of eight, and Alexander had a
number of step-brothers (most of whom came to a bad end, since infighting over
succession was common and bloody). We can infer Alexander had opportunities to
show his aptitude early; which is to say, he picked up his father’s military
art quickly and thus was given still further opportunities, in a
self-reinforcing virtuous circle. He was already distancing himself from all
rivals.
Famously,
Alexander was taught by Aristotle, in a private school lavishly endowed by
Philip. This happened between age 13 and 16. Alexander enjoyed the learning,
largely in literature like Homer, rather than technical philosophy. But it
could not have been too cloistered a period, since at its end, Philip gives the
16-year-old his own army command; and Alexander’s school-mates, sons of the
Macedonian aristocracy, come along with him as companions and generals in his
future exploits.
What is
it that Alexander learned during his apprenticeship? Obviously, Philip’s
tactics for leading an army in battle; also how to recruit and train it, since
during Alexander’s 10-year expedition he replenished his army several times
over. He must have learned how to travel with a light baggage train, since this
is what Alexander did on his Persian campaign. Perhaps this was the province of
his father’s generals, notably Parmenio, an older man of his father’s
generation who gave cautious advice on some famous occasions. (“If I were
Alexander, I would accept the offer...” to divide the Persian empire with the
defeated Persian King. “And so would I,” Alexander retorted, “if I were
Parmenio.”) Parmenio was delegated
ticklish problems like commanding non-Macedonian troops, arranging logistics
and baggage trains; and it may well be that in the early part of Alexander’s
campaign, officers like Parmenio took care of the essential grunt-work.
Even so,
it would be an extended apprenticeship for the 22-year-old. What Alexander
showed he had learned, when he left Parmenio and the old advisors behind for
the Eastern part of his conquests, was the crucial combination of logistics and
diplomacy.
Why do
these two go together? We have already discussed the problem of baggage trains
slowing down an army’s movement. On long-distance expeditions, the question is
whether an army can get there at all. The basic problem, as modern researchers
have figured out, is that the people and animals that carry food and water use
them up as they go along, and the more mouths in the supply train, the less
gets through to the army. *
* This had to have been understood by
professional soldiers like Alexander, but ancient historians never wrote about
it, since they concentrated on heroic personalities and dramatic incidents and
ignored banal realities. They also exaggerated enormously the size of enemy
armies, part of the hero narrative, claiming impossible numbers like 1,700,000
Persians invading Greece in 480 BC; and 1,000,000 on the battlefield at
Gaugamela. These numbers are impossible because such troops would need huge
empty spaces just to stand on; and stretched out marching on narrow roads they
would have covered 300 miles, making it impossible to feed them.
Using
animals to do the carrying doesn’t solve anything. A horse can carry three
times as much as a man, but it consumes three times the weight in food and
water; camels can go four days without water, but then they have to drink four
times as much.
Solution:
live off the land. But there are two problems. One, it only works in good
agricultural land. But ancient agriculture was mostly around the cities-- to
put it the other way around, ancient cities had to be adjacent to agricultural
land or to water transport, or they would starve. Inland, cities and good
agriculture were like oases, with poor land in between supporting at best a
sparse population. So traveling across poor land, or worse yet, deserts like
those in Iran or Egypt, posed a life-or-death problem for an army. The bigger
the army, the more deadly it was to itself.
The
second problem is that a big army
would have to keep moving, because even in fertile places, food and fodder
would be exhausted in a steadily widening circle. And agriculture gets
exhausted as the army passes through. The bigger the army, the more it creates
a path of no return, since if it comes back (or a rival army, or a reinforcing
one tries to use the same route), it will find nothing to eat. At best, it must
wait til next year, next harvest season-- assuming the army has not killed off
the farmers by eating up all their food so that they starve.
How did
Alexander’s army solve this problem? Essentially, by diplomacy. It would send
scouts or messengers ahead, seeking out availability of food and water. * Local
chieftans or government officials presented themselves at the camp as word got
around about an approaching army. Typically they would surrender to the
conqueror, whereupon he would usually confirm them in their positions,
enlisting them as allies. This meant they were obligated to help his army pass
through their territory. Diplomacy on the whole meant generosity and
persuasion. Alexander didn’t have to conquer everybody; leveling one resisting
city and selling the population into slavery would be enough to bring the
others around. In places where there was distrust, the invaders would leave a
garrison, or demand hostages. It was a mild form of conquest, which left
everything locally as it had been.
* We see the same thing in the Bible, when
Jesus and a growing crowd of followers travel from Galilee in northern Israel
to Jerusalem, a distance of 100 miles. Jesus sends out 70 forerunners to find
towns to host them. It is not a military expedition, but Jesus calls down
religious sanctions on the villages that refuse to receive them. “Woe to you,
Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! ... And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted to
heaven? No, you will go down to Hades.” [Luke 10: 1-16] Logistical issues recur
throughout Jesus’ career, since big crowds overstress local resources: hence
the need for miracles of multiplying loaves and fishes, and turning water into
wine.
The
essential thing was that new allies or friendly natives were obligated to
provide stores of food and fodder along the route; pack animals to replace
those lost by malnourishment, or
to marshal their own local pack trains.
For
Alexander’s army, the method worked well. It also explains why it took 10 years
to conquer the empire. Conquering the eastern part meant more marches through
deserts and mountains, careful planning of when harvests were available, and
more advance diplomacy.
Alexander
fought relatively few battles. After each one, he would stay in a well-provided
location, receive visits of capitulation, and arrange logistics for the way
ahead. His father, building a mini-empire on the barbarian fringes of Greece,
was ruthless when he needed to be, but on the whole Philip expanded by
diplomacy. It all meshed together: his fast-moving army, his combined-arms
victories, and his diplomatic agreements that solved problems of logistics. His
son operated the same way.
Philip,
too, had been a keen-eyed youth. His adolescent years were spent as a hostage
in Thebes in the 360s. At the time, its famous general Epaminondas was
dominating Greece by building a full-time professional army, inventing
combined-arms tactics and the strategy of holding forces in reserve; instead of
the one-shot shoving match between hoplite phalanxes, Epaminondas created a
two-stage battle where after the intial melée had tied up the enemy, his fresh
troops would hit them on the flank. Philip developed a version of this tactic,
using heavy cavalry.
Philip
took over as King at age 24, not much older than Alexander at 20. Both learned
their craft young, from the best of the previous generation. Both hit the
ground running.
[3] The Target for Takeover
 |
| Alexander's expedition 334-324 BC |
Most
importantly, Alexander’s success depended on the fact that the Persian Empire
was there for the taking.
Let us
unpack this. The Empire was already an organized entity. Cyrus, Darius I, and
their successors had created a unified administrative structure out of what
previously had been several major kingdoms (Media, Babylon, Egypt), plus lesser
kingdoms, plus a vast area that never before had been a state in the strong
sense of the term. Back in the time of Cyrus in the 500s BC, Mesopotamia and
Egypt, the two great fertile river valleys of the Middle-East, had already gone
through their elimination contests and winnowed down to a few strong states
based on big populations held together by water transport. But Iran, the
uplands of Asia Minor and Armenia, and the adjacent plains of Central Asia,
were still areas inhabited by sparse populations. Some were moving
pastoralists, who formed at most shifting tribal coalitions. Others lived in
pockets and valleys where agriculture could support a mid-size population and
therefore petty kingdoms; but they lacked the logistics to supply an army big
enough to conquer anybody, by carrying enough food and water to get across the
infertile areas between them.
 |
| Cross-section of mountain barriers to Iranian plateau |
What
Cyrus did was essentially what Alexander did later: starting from the major
pockets of population and agriculture, he would win a few exemplary victories,
then use his prestige to invite or overawe the outlying areas, with their lower
level of production, to enlist as friends and allies. We could call this a
system of tribute; the Great King, as Cyrus and his successors were known, was
more than just an ordinary King, but overlord of lords. He did not change much locally; the
same chiefs and petty kings remained in place, but they had to pay tribute.
Above all, they had to provide goods in kind, especially the animals and
foodstuff so that royal armies could pass that way.*
* In this respect, the expansive
emperors, Darius and Xerxes, regarded the Greek city-states of Asia Minor and
the other side of the Aegean sea as just so many more candidates for
incorporation into the system of overlordship. Greek historians, and some contemporary
politicians, saw this as a life-or-death struggle between democracy or
despotism, but this was an exaggeration. From the Persian point of view, the
Greek city-states were a version of small remote kingdoms, too much trouble to
be directly controlled. The city-states of Ionia under Persian overlordship
were left to run their own internal affairs; some continued to be democracies,
others were oligarchies but this was the same spectrum as the Greek mainland.
On the whole tribute was light, in fact generally less than what the Athenians
demanded to maintain the anti-Persian fleet.
This was
a thin administrative system. In
some places, a tributary empire could be turned into a thicker, more intrusive
system. Cyrus, Darius, and their stronger successors put their own
administrators in place: high-level satraps, intermediate level governors,
local garrisons. In richer places, older city-kingdoms like Babylon, taxes
could be collected in money for the royal treasury. Paved roads were built,
facilitating the faster movement of
armies to keep things under control; messengers connected administrators
and sent policy edicts throughout the Empire. With only moderate success, to be
sure; satraps were often near-autonomous; and since they ruled over layers of
locals most of whose traditional leaders were kept in place, they often had
little effect except keeping the taxes or tribute coming in. Under the stronger Persian regimes,
regional power was divided among a civilian head of government, counterbalanced
by a chief treasury officer, and a military commander. There also was a service
called “Eyes and Ears of the King,” roving inspectors with their own military
escorts.
To
repeat: Alexander’s success depended on the fact that the Persian Empire was
there for the taking. Now for the
second part.
That it
was for the taking was a common observation in Greece from the 390s onwards.
The success of the Ten Thousand in fighting their way back from the heart of
the Empire convinced them that Greek forces (and Greek democratic spirit) could
always beat the servile Asians.
Spartan
generals and other military stars of following decades put themselves forward
as prospective leaders of such a conquest. Such names were popular in the
panhellenic movement, what was left of the Athenian anti-Persian crusade. The
famous Athenian orator Isocrates proposed that the solution of Greece’s
problems was just such an expedition: not because Persia was still a menace,
but because it was an easy target.
Greece’s problem was there were too many poor men wandering around
joining armies. In the past Greece had taken care of its excess population by
founding colonies around the Mediterranean. But that area was getting
politically filled up, with menacing states in the west like Carthage and Rome.
The solution was to expand eastward, conquering land from the Persians. The
most recent of these prospective saviours was named: Philip of Macedon. Left
unsaid was the fact that Philip was becoming a threat to the Greeks; better get
him off to Asia and out of the way. After Philip’s assassination, Alexander
made a foray into Greece with his army, and got himself confirmed as commander
in chief (hegemon) of the panhellenic army, which now really would set out on
this task.
Why an
easy target? The Greeks could see clearly enough that their military forces
were tactically better than the Persians. Moreover, Persia had long since
stopped expanding. It had become a familiar player in Greek geopolitics, much
like any other contender, taking part in one coalition, then another. Most
striking of all must have been the way the Empire was periodically roiled
whenever a King died. The satraps would revolt, and several years went into
getting them back under control. And
Persian succession crises were filled with betrayals and assassinations,
decimating the royal families several times over. It last had just happened in
338 BC, and had not yet settled down when Philip was ready to launch his
invasion two years later.
All this
was true. Alexander was able to pick apart the Persian Empire in Asia Minor
with ease. Beating one Persian army at Granicus soon after he landed, and
besieging one holdout city (a Greek city, by the way, Miletus) was enough to
make the rest of the polities, Greek cities, semi-Greek kings, and Persian
satraps alike, all come over to his diplomacy, and to supply his logistics.
It
wasn’t until next year that the newly installed Great King could muster troops
to meet Alexander in Syria, already in reach of the Mesopotamian heartland.
Darius III was a survivor, not a particularly vigorous ruler, who got the crown
mainly because he was almost the last of the lineage still alive.
That
Alexander’s takeover of the Persian Empire went off without a single defeat was
less a result of his singular qualities as a general, than of the weakness of
Persian administrative and military structure. Alexander spent 10 years on the
takeover, not because it was difficult, but because it was so large.
Logistically, he needed that much time to make a grand tour of his Iranian and
Eastern possessions after, in the 4th year, he had occupied the major cities,
defeated Darius, and assumed his crown.
But
also, the Persian Empire had enough structure so that is could be taken over--
as opposed to crumbling to pieces. Even in the wars among Alexander’s
successors, the central part remained intact, while the Macedonia/ Asian Minor
segment and the Egyptian segment broke off, leaving the big state outlines more
or less where they were. The
Persian Empire, under whatever name, had coherence as a network, and it didn’t
matter who headed it. In this perspective, the bloody, protracted and
treacherous 20-year fight among Alexander’s successors continued the pattern of
succession crises whenever the Persian Great King died. And this is what
Alexander, in title, had become.
Sheer
military force cannot take over a territory before it has developed to an
economic level at which the conquering forces can be sustained. At the cusp of
civilization, large armies couldn’t even traverse such places if economic
organization isn’t complex enough.
Conversely, a state with a strong enough infrastructure to support its military
rulers also can support a conquering army. No Greek general, like Alexander or anyone else, could have
conquered an empire spreading into the Iranian plateau and beyond into Central
Asia, in the 500s BC when those places were still isolated agricultural oases
amidst tribes and pastoralists. It required the intermediate step such as Cyrus
took, to build the logistics networks.
A person-centered way of saying this would be: no Cyrus, no Alexander. I have already said something similar about Philip’s relationship to his son. But to focus on names is to miss the point about how structures change.
A person-centered way of saying this would be: no Cyrus, no Alexander. I have already said something similar about Philip’s relationship to his son. But to focus on names is to miss the point about how structures change.
Alexander
made no changes to the Persian administration. His methods of conquest were the
same as those of Cyrus: he accepted surrenders, then usually reconfirmed the
former official in office-- sometimes even after they had opposed him in
battle. Perhaps he did this out of gallantry; or recognizing competence where
he saw it. Also it was the easiest thing to do, much easier than trying to
create an administration of his own. In some places he left garrisons, and in
the heartland regions he installed his own officials as satraps, and tried to
reinstitute the 3-official system (administrator, treasurer, military
commander) where it had fallen into disuse. But the end result was essentially to
put the organization of the Persian Empire back in working order.
The
panhellenic prognosticators were right. The Persian Empire was ready for a
takeover. But the end result was no different. Alexander was not great enough
to make a structural change.
[4] Greek
Population Explosion and Mercenaries
Greece
had been in a population explosion from the 600s BC (when it had about half a
million people) until 400 BC (when it reached 3 million). The city-states
sponsored colonies in southern Italy, Sicily, North Africa, and around the
Black Sea, without slowing down the population surge, so the overall growth
must have been even larger. One big result of Alexander’s conquest was to open
the Asian Middle-East and Egypt to colonization. This time it worked; Greece’s
population started falling, down to 2 million by 1 AD, a loss of about
one-third. During this same period, the Persian Empire and its successors (the
Macedonian and Hellenistic successor states in Asia and Egypt), grew from about
14 million total in 400 BC to 17 million in 1 AD, with most of the growth in
the Greek-dominated areas of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt.
One
could say Alexander’s conquest solved the problem of Greek overpopulation
relative to its resources, which Greek observers had seen as the result of
growing concentration of wealth, dispossession of poorer farmers from their
land, and the creation of a dangerous class of rootless warriors.
Reversing
the gestalt, it was not so much Alexander who made possible the migration of
the Greeks, as the other way around: the mobile Greek surplus population,
already employed as warriors, made up the armies that carried Alexander to
success. We see this in the growth of mercenaries, starting at least 100 years
before Alexander.
Already
at the time of Darius the Great, the Persian king was employing Greeks to
command a fleet surveying the coast from India to Arabia, and even to survey
the coast of Greece preliminary to invasion. Around 450 BC, Greek mercenaries
were employed by Persia to put down an internal revolt by a satrap in Asia
Minor. The famous Ten Thousand hired by the pretender Cyrus to overthrow his
brother Artaxerxes in 401 BC were the first time Greek hoplites were seen on
the plain of Mesopotamia. By the 350s, Artaxerxes III was hiring his own Greek
mercenaries to regain Egypt. Thus it was no surprise when Alexander, in his
first battle of conquest, at Granicus in Asia Minor 334 BC, fought an army made
up of Persian cavalry, local infantry, plus a force of Greek mercenaries who
fought longer and harder than anyone else, and were massacred by Alexander
after the end of the battle. At the climactic battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC,
King Darius III surrounded his personal bodyguard with Greek mercenaries.
In part
this was the professionalization of warfare. Most fighters in the Greek wars of
the 400s BC were part-time citizen-soldiers; the following century turned
increasingly to full-time professionals. Greek hoplites acquired the reputation
as the best brand, and their services were bought ever farther away in the
international market. Greek generals offered to hire out to any city, tribe or
kingdom that needed them. Political loyalty and nationalist ideology were
nowhere near as important as the Athenian panhellenists made them out to be.
Some soldiers were ideological, many were not. Already in Xerxes’ invasion of
480 BC, Arcadians (Greek soldiers from the interior) offered their services to
the Persians, out of poverty. In the city-states, mercenaries were regarded
with suspicion for precisely this reason; they were apolitical roughnecks,
ready to fight for whoever had money to pay them; hence when the Ten
Thousand completed their great escape from Persia, the Greek cities viewed them
with distrust and refused to admit them. But even in ideological wars
mercenaries were used; the Athenians for instance used them for the dirty work of
massacreing enemy cities during the Peloponnesian war. Eventually everybody used them;
Alexander too had mercenaries in his army, although he preferred to rely on his
native Macedonians, and reserved officer positions for them.
The
panhellenic ideology of Greeks vs. Persians was never a widespread reality.
Already at the time of Cyrus the Great, most of the Greek cities of Asia Minor
were brought into his empire by subsidies, bribes, and treachery. Even Athens
and Sparta wavered between pro- and anti-Persian positions; it was generally
the democratic faction who favored Persian protection and peace, the conservatives
who favored war. After the invasions were thrown back, there was a
Sparta-Persia alliance during most of the 400s BC; Persian tribute in Ionia was
less than the Athenian exactions, and some cities preferred Persian to Athenian
imperialism; and Persian subsidies-- Persian gold-- financed Sparta to victory
in the Peloponnesian war. During
the 300s, the fluctuating Greek powers were all willing, at one time or
another, to make Persian alliances.
One
thing that connected mercenaries with Persian foreign policy was money.
Mercenaries, by definition, fought for pay; and they flourished in the same
milieu where subsidies/ aid/ bribery were a weapon of statecraft. The entire
Middle-East, and its peripheral zones like Greece, were becoming better
organized: in infrastructure of roads, shipping and ports; in administration,
travel and communications; in agricultural production to support larger populations,
in trade, tribute, and taxation. Coinage and a layer of monetary economy above
the subsistence sector existed by the 500s, and was widespread by the 300s. In
that sense, the argument about the spread of mercenaries is the same as the
argument that the advanced organization of the Persian Empire made it a
candidate for conquest. Not only was there a population explosion in Greece,
but also a market flowing towards the better-organized East, where there was
money to buy the thing that Greeks were best at producing: top-flight military
labor. From a higher level of analysis, the growth of mercenaries, the shift of
Greek population to the East, and Alexander’s conquest were all the same
process.
[5] Alexander’s
Victory Formula
Besides
diplomacy and advance logistics, how did he actually conduct a battle? Not
quite what you’d think: not just a headlong attack, but a mixture of caution
and impulsiveness.
A better
word would be patience. Alexander took risks once battle began, but his
strategy of when and where to give battle was the opposite of risk-taking.
Alexander
recognized that a big Persian army could not stay in one place very long. The
bigger it is, the less it can live off the land; and bringing in supplies
generates the vanishing-point mathematics of pack animals and humans eating up
the supplies they are carrying, not to mention clogging the available roads.
Facing
huge armies, Alexander delayed accepting battle. Before Issus, Darius assembled several hundred thousands on a plain near the Syrian Gates, where
the Macedonians would be expected to come out of the mountains of Asia Minor.
The plain gave unrestricted maneuverability for a large army, and there had
been time to stockpile ample supplies. Alexander, crossing them up, went on a
7-day campaign westward against the mountain tribes. Then he returned to a city
where he was well supplied by sea, made elaborate sacrifices to the gods; held
a review of the army; athletic and literary contests; even a relay race with
torches. Finally Darius had to move, and went seeking Alexander in the narrow
region of mountains and swamps, throwing away his advantage of open ground.
After two weeks inland, no doubt hurting for supplies, Darius finally met
Alexander at the Issus River, where the Persian army-- now down to about
150,000-- was packed in and unable to use superior numbers to outflank or
surround him.
At
Gaugamela 3 years later, Darius had an even bigger army, on a wide plain
supplied by the main roads of Mesopotamia. They even cleared away bushes so
that their scythe-bearing chariot wheels had room to roll. Alexander brought his army, now grown
to 45,000, to a hill overlooking the plain, where at night the torches seemed
to go on forever. Since the Persians were not going to move, Alexander gave his
army four days rest. Alexander was also playing psychological warfare, not
letting the Persians fight in their first flush of enthusiasm (the adrenalin
rush, we would say). Their suspense
grew even worse, since they began to expect a night attack, so after several sleep-depriving nights of this, Alexander chose
to attack in the daylight.
Alexander
always started the battle. His formula was to seize the initiative, establish
emotional domination as quickly as possible. His open-field battles all became
walkovers. The units of the Macedonian army—infantry phalanx, light troops,
heavy cavalry on both wings—advanced at different times, but the key was always
Alexander’s assault. Once the
Companion cavalry broke the Persian ranks in an intense but usually short
fight, the Persians' advantage in numbers was turned against themselves.
At
Issus, the Persians had large numbers of troops, realistically perhaps four
times the size of Alexander’s, lined up along a river bank. But most of those
tens or hundreds of thousands could never engage the Macedonians, because they
couldn’t get close to them. Once their defense crumbled on the right, Alexander
turned obliquely against the center; this threw the Persian army into a
stampede, particularly disabling when so many men trample each other in a
traffic jam. In every major battle, the Persians lost 50 percent or more, the
Macedonians a small fraction, perhaps 1 percent or less. The disparity in
casualties seems unbelievable, but it is commensurate with complete
organizational breakdown of one side, making them helpless victims. In violence
on all size-scales, emotional domination precedes most physical damage.
At
Granicus, Alexander positioned himself opposite where the Persian commander was
surrounded by bodyguards. He waited for the moment when he saw a wavering in
the Persian line, and charged his cavalry at that point. Alexander led 2000 or
so cavalry splashing through the water and up a steep bank. This might seem a
risky thing to do. But psychologically, relying on favorable geography for
defense is a weakness; once the advantage of terrain turns out to be
ineffective, the defending side has set itself up to be emotionally
dominated. In every respect,
Alexander aimed at the point of emotional weakness-- a point in time and space,
visible to a good observer.
Alexander
did not have to fight the entire Persian army; he picked a unit about his own
size, and counted on the superior quality of his troops-- the superiority they
created by generating emotional domination.
All
three of Alexander’s fateful victories-- Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela-- ended the
same way, with the enemy commander (in the last two, the King himself) running
away in his chariot, setting off a general panic retreat. At Gaugamela, the Persian forces were
so large and spread out that Parmenio, commanding on the left, had a stiff
fight with Greek mercenaries and other Persian forces who did not know the rest
of their army was routed. It took longer but Parmenio, too-- the other cavalry
commander-- emerged victorious without Alexander’s help. This shows that the
Macedonian style was not personal to Alexander alone.
There is
another respect in which Alexander attacked the weakness of the Persian army.
It was an army of an empire, a polyglot of 50 different ethnic groups, with
their own languages, each fighting in their own formation. The army that
invaded Greece under Xerxes had 30 generals, all Persian aristocrats; the
armies of Darius III were probably similar. We can surmise that central control
of the army, once battle began, was minimal. We can also infer that morale and
loyalty of each ethnic unit was shakey; they had been recruited by going over
to the victor, and they were aware of the possibility of going over to the
other side if things did not go well. * There was also the rigid hierarchy of
the Persian army-- something all the Greeks commented on.
* This was the pattern of warfare in India
before the arrival of European officers. Battlefields were displays of
ferocious weapons-- chariots, elephants and so on-- but outcomes were decided
mostly by side-switching in the midst of battle but arranged beforehand.
(Philip Mason. 1976. The Indian Army.)
Why this
would make a difference is illuminated by observations by Western troops
serving in today’s Middle-Eastern wars. American and British forces in
Afghanistan, for instance, have commented that local troops can be ferocious in
combat, and like the action of getting into a fight. (I have this from personal
accounts, and military publications.) Their main weakness is in their officers,
especially the NCOs. Whereas American NCOs are trained to take initiative,
especially when higher organization gets disrupted during the fog of battle,
Middle-Eastern officers are wary of doing anything they might be criticized
for. ** Success as an officer is not necessarily a good thing. Outstanding
success makes one a political threat; it also could be interpreted as showing
up one’s superiors. Extrapolating backwards to Alexander’s time, there are
numerous reasons why ethnic troops and their lower officers would not fight
vigorously for their Persian commanders, if the battle started going against
them. Generals who failed risked being executed; but generals who succeeded
were potential rebels, and many of them got executed or assassinated in a few
years anyway, in the distrustful politics of the Empire.
** In this respect, the Roman army was more
like the contemporary American one. Centurions-- leaders of a company of 100--
were widely regarded as the backbone of the army, and treated as such by
successful generals. Also similar were the widespread opportunities for upward
mobility in the revolutionary French army at the time of Napoleon.
A
puzzle: by the time of Alexander’s invasion, the Persian army had its own Greek
hoplite mercenaries. At Gaugamela, King Darius deployed 15,000. Since the
tactical quality of the troops was the same, why didn’t the Persians’ Greeks
stymie Alexander’s? Most likely because of the organizational atmosphere of the
Persian army. The Greek mercenaries were hemmed in by the status-conscious
Persian command structure. Proof by comparison is in the wars that took place,
in the same region, among the Hellenistic successor states after Alexander’s
death. When the composition of the armies became the same on both sides,
outcomes went back to pretty much even.
For
Alexander, a few big battles were enough to make the loyalty structure crumble,
setting in motion the massive side-switching and the diplomatic offensive at
which Alexander was adept. We
should add a number of sieges, first on the Ionian coast, and then in the
Levant, above all the sieges of Tyre, the harbor stronghold of Phoenician naval
power, and Gaza, on the road to Egypt. Alexander’s sieges were no different
than anyone else’s. It took patience, and he spent 7 months at Tyre, determined
to break through its strong-walled defenses. His eventual victory came by
employing the most advanced Greek engineering methods of the time; but also
through a strategic move. The Phoenicians could not be starved out, since they
were supplied by sea. Alexander found a way around this by making diplomatic
deals with other seaport cities, to bring their fleets to attack Tyre from the
water. This worked; a combined land and sea attack breached the city. When he
got to Egypt (which simply surrendered), he founded his most important colonial
city, Alexandria, as a new naval center. This had the effect of giving him
secure sea routes at his back, and quicker resupply lines for reinforcements
from Greece. In military perspective, it was a fine combination of strategic
and tactical plans.
Finally,
there are the stories about Alexander’s clever strategems where his advance was
blocked by an extremely strong position, like a fort in a mountain pass. As
always in such stories, someone discovers a little-used pathway over the
dangerous mountainside, leading around to the rear of the enemy. Alexander
leads a body of intrepid troops on this action-adventure, and all is well in
the end. Using bad weather as a cover also helps take the enemy by surprise. I don’t
doubt the truth of these stories; but they are commonplaces about generals
throughout history (there are similar stories in Xenophon). Most of these
battles were minor; none of them broke the back of the enemy organization.
Was Alexander’s Success Because
of or Despite His Personality?
“Personality”
is a noun, but that is merely how it operates in our grammar. What we mean by
personality, what the word points to, is not a thing at all but a series of
actions. Personality is the sum total of someone’s personal interactions.
Some
incidents of Alexander’s personal dealings with others were scandalously
famous. In the seventh year of his campaign, his army was in Samarkand, far
away in what is now Uzbekistan. At one of their frequent drinking-parties, Alexander
got into a dispute with one of the Companions of the elite cavalry. It was his
oldest friend, Cleitus-- his foster-brother, since Cleitus’ mother had nursed
and brought up the two of them together. Both were drinking heavily. Cleitus
began badgering Alexander about introducing Persian customs, especially making
everyone who approached him prostrate themselves on the ground, treating him as
a god on earth. Cleitus said it was offensive to his old friends, that an army
wins as a group but he was taking all the credit for himself, that he is
forgetting who-- Cleitus-- saved Alexander’s life at Granicus.
Alexander
grew angrier and angrier. Cleitus’ friends tried to pull him out of the room,
but he barged back in through another entrance, shouting another insult. (This
is the typical escalation of a bar-room quarrel; it is usually when one of the
partisans in a face contest has been ejected and makes a return, that somebody
gets killed.) What happens next is revealing in the way Alexander was treated by
his personal companions and servants. Alexander called on his guards to sound
the alarm-- the signal that would have roused the entire camp to arms. None of
the guards obeyed the order; they must have been used to such quarrels, and
defied their god-playing King to keep the situation from getting out of hand.
Since no one obeyed him, Alexander grabbed a spear and hurled it at Cleitus,
killing him.
Immediately
he calmed down. He tried to kill himself with the same spear but his guards
prevented it. He retired to his room, and stayed there berating himself for
days. Finally his advisors prevailed on him to put the incident behind him. He
resumed acting like a Persian king-god, at least in public. About this time
began a series of plots, rumoured assassinations and real executions. Two of
his favorite Companions had drawn swords on each other; Alexander settled the
matter by telling them he would execute them both if they quarreled again. He
also delegated them separate tasks, one to convey orders to the Greek-speakers,
the other to the Persians and foreigners in his army.
A
flashback reveals something deeper in the interactional style of Alexander, and
the Macedonian court where he grew up. When Alexander was 18, his father had
taken a new wife, and at the wedding party the girl’s uncle-- one of Philip’s
generals--- gave a toast to a new heir. Alexander threw his drinking cup at the
man’s head and shouted: “What do you take me for, a bastard?” Philip drew his
sword to cut down his son, but failed because he was too drunk to stand up.
Alexander and his mother had to go into exile, but eventually he was recalled.
Not long after, Philip was assassinated by another intimate with a dagger,
Alexander’s mother had the new wife and her baby killed, and Alexander became
the new King.
Heavy
drinking, brawls, plots and assassinations were common at the Macedonian court
(as the latter were in Persia too, although it is not clear that drinking was
involved.) There are striking
similarities between Alexander killing Cleitus, and Philip trying to kill
Alexander. Philip was a tough, brawling fighter, years of violence having left
him with one eye, a crippled hand, and numerous wounds. Alexander was wrecking
his own body the same way. Both did heavy drinking with the aristocratic heart
of their army. Both relied on the same battle tactics, leading the charge,
inspiring the cavalry attack. There was no way Alexander could avoid keeping up
these drinking bouts; he continued them until he died from one of them Drinking was the ritual of bonding
among the group that won his victories. Alexander’s carousing seems to
contradict his patience in arranging logistics and awaiting the proper moment
for marching or battle. But these were parts of the same thing: having to wait
around so much gave occasion for carousing, a way of keeping up morale during
dead time.
Now
Alexander is in a structural bind. As Persian King, and in constant diplomacy
playing King of Kings to the chieftans around him, he is caught in the
ceremonial that exalts him. As leader of the world’s best military, he needs to
keep up the solidarity of his Companions. The ambiguity of that name-- more
apparent to us than it would have been at the time-- displays the two
dimensions that were gradually coming apart: his companion buddies, a
fraternity of fellow-carousers, fighters who have each other’s back; and the
purely formal designation, members of the elite with privileged access to the
King.*
* Compare the protocol of King Xerxes (reigned
485-465 BC) described in the Old Testament Book of Esther. She is a beautiful Jewish woman who has
become Queen, top rank in the harem. But she risks her life in leaving her
house to enter the King’s presence uninvited. Fortunately for Esther, and for her people, the King is
happy to see her, and she is able to countermand an order sent out by royal
messengers that would have killed all the Jews in the Empire. The storyline in
Esther hinges repeatedly on who is allowed into the royal presence; at the
outset, the previous Queen is deposed because she refuses to come when the King
wants to show her off at one of his all-male drinking parties. Which way the
royal scepter pointed meant favor, or death. Similar protocol at Babylon is
described in the Book of Daniel.
Alexander was moving towards being that kind of Oriental potentate-- and the
Greeks were the first to formulate Orientalism.
Thus it is striking how much freedom from deference, how much equality
existed in Alexander’s drinking parties. It is astounding that his guards
refused to obey his orders, and even laid hands on him forcefully to prevent
his suicide. They too were part of the team.
Philip
and Alexander have the same double personalities. ** Philip, though a
bad-tempered brawler and ferocious battle leader, also is the master of diplomacy.
We have seen that Alexander’s conquest would not have been possible without
having learned to solve logistics problems by diplomacy. After some battles he
could massacre the defeated; but also he could be magnanimous. With some
conquered kings and other high aristocrats, Alexander not only would restore
them to their position, but treat them with great courtesy. Such magnanimity would also have been
good for his diplomatic reputation, encouraging side-switchers to approach him.
I am not suggesting it was simply a strategy Alexander played. Personality is
made from the outside in; habitual styles of interacting with people become
part of the way one is. Since Alexander’s daily life fluctutates among
different kinds of situations, he has many personality facets-- to fall back on
talking in nouns, an unavoidable but misleading feature of our language. His
life consisted of situations when he played the hard-drinking fraternity boy,
and when he played the diplomat; increasingly as he took over Persian organization,
he took on the side of arrogant ruler, paranoid about plots.
** One respect in which they differ is that Alexander was not
very interested in sex. He joshes his friends for their love affairs, but seems
to have been a virgin until age 23, when Parmenio gave him a captive Persian
woman. Plutarch records that the captive wife and daughters of the King and
women of the court were “tall and beautiful”, but Alexander would say
sardonically “What eyesores these Persian women are!” Nor does it appear that
he was homosexual-- although that would have been normal in Greece-- since he
forcefully rejected a present of two beautiful boys. Alexander was a monomaniac about the army and dangerous
physical action-- he preferred hunting lions. Very likely he regarded women as
dangerous entanglements, sources of strife and assassination. Observing not
just his father, but his mother, would have taught him that.
Here are
some other facets, or episodes:
The Impetuous Leader
The only
route from the royal city of Persepolis in southern Iran to Ecbatana, the old
Median capital in the northwest mountains, led over a 8000 foot pass, often
blocked from winter until April. But in March 330 BC, Alexander was eager to
get through. The ancient historian Curtius describes it with a touch of
melodrama: “They had come to a pass blocked with perpetual snows, bound in ice
by the violence of the cold. The desolation of the landscape and the pathless
solitudes terrified the exhausted soldiers, who believed they were at the end
of the world, and demanded to return before even daylight and sky should fail
them.” Alexander reacted by leaping from his horse, seizing a mattock from a
soldier and furiously attacking the ice, chopping a path through. It was the
same way he led the cavalry charge in combat, pulling his troops behind him.
In
summer they are marching through a desert, suffering from heat and lack of
water. One day, an advance party found a gulley stream, and were bringing water
up on pack animals as Alexander marched by on foot with his soldiers, sharing
their misery. A soldier filled a helmet with water and held it out to
Alexander. As he was raising it to drink, he saw his cavalry soldiers looking
at him thirstily. Alexander shook his head and dashed the water to the ground--
his cavalry shouted they could all go another day without water and they
galloped off together. One wasted helmet of water, Plutarch comments,
invigorated the whole army.
Flashforward
four years. Alexander’s army is preparing to leave Bactria, in far-off Central
Asia. The campaign has been successful; they are laden with booty, rugs, silks,
luxuries, probably a throng of camp followers. Alexander looks at the loaded
supply train, just the kind of thing that would drag them down. Burn it all!
And he starts in with his own wagons and pack animals, tearing off the bundles
and throwing them into a fire. There is a shocked moment: then his soldiers
join in, one after another; soon they are yelling in contagious joy, throwing
things into the fire. It is a combination
potlatch and display of military dedication, waking up from the soporific
dreams of peace.
Why does
he act so much better on campaign than he does in court or in camp? He is an
action junkie; the soft life repels him. But it is part of being a great King,
and that has been his life’s goal. As long as there is another battle to fight,
another danger to brave, he in in tune with his men, his buddies, his
Companions.
Two Mutinies
Eastward
into India, crossing one tentacle of the upper Indus River after another, the
army penetrates the exotic tropics. They win a great battle against a huge
host, armed with elephants; Alexander receives the Indian King’s surrender,
then returns his kingdom to him with an exchange of royal compliments. The
war-plus-diplomacy formula is still working. Then: his troops refuse to go on.
Not just the men; his officers come to explain what the soldiers are saying,
they agree with it too. Alexander is devastated. He retires into his tent,
refuses to talk with anyone. He announces the rest can go back; he will go on
with whoever will accompany him. No one offers. It is like the days after he
had murdered Cleitus. But Alexander is harder now, older too; he gets over it,
reluctantly agrees to lead his army down the river to the sea, starting their
return to the West.
But his
mood has changed. Already, since the murders and suspicions and executions in
Central Asia, Alexander had grown more personally violent. He shot with an
arrow a barbarian chief brought to him for rebelling.** Later, reprimanding his
administrators for corruption in his absence, he killed one with his own hand
by the stroke of a javelin. When Parmenio’s son is implicated in one of the
alleged plots, Alexander not only killed the son but sent orders to assassinate
the father.
** Millenia later, in the same part of the
world, this was still a style of the super-toughguy leader; in the Russian
civil war around 1920 the chief of
the partisans/bandits would personally execute a captive in front of a crowd,
this time with a pistol. (Felix Schnell. 2012. Räume des Schreckens. Gewalt und Gruppenmilitanz in der Ukraine
1905-1933.)
Thus we
should not be surprised at the following incident: Beginning the march home in
the Indus valley, Alexander fought all the tribes that would not submit. In one
city, the citadel held out. Growing impatient with the siege, Alexander himself
mounted one of the ladders, fending off a shower of missiles from above with
his shield. He reached the top with three others when the ladders broke. His
friends called Alexander to jump down; instead he jumped into the fortress. His
tiny group fought ferociously, but were almost overwhelmed in the midst of the
enemy by the time the Macedonians had frantically driven pegs into the earthen
wall to make the ascent. One companion was dead; Alexander had been pierced by
an arrow in the chest and fainted from loss of blood. His infuriated troops
killed everyone in the place down to the women and children. Alexander was always heedless of
himself in battle, but now one wonders if he cared whether he lived or died.
His soldiers had betrayed him; if they wouldn’t follow him now, they would
see! There must have been some
satisfaction as his litter passed by boat along the camp shore, the army
shouting as he raised a hand to show he was still alive.
After a
long and devastating march, the following year they were back in Mesopotamia.
**
** The big obstacle was the Gedrosian desert,
the dryest part of Iran. Alexander could have come back the way he had gone out,
looping across the northern, more fertile edge of the Iranian plateau; but
Alexander sent a subordinate with part of his troops that way-- he wanted to
try something new, maybe something especially dangerous. Usually careful of
logistics, he planned for his admiral Nearchus to sail parallel to his route
along the coast of the Indian ocean, to supply him with food and water. It was
a rare miscalculation: they did not know the monsoon winds blew the wrong
direction that time of year, and Nearchus’ fleet was stuck in port while
Alexander’s 150,000 were marching west. Three-quarters of them died in the
desert. It was the worst loss of Alexander’s career, more men than all his
battles put together. It was like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.
Then
came a second mutiny. He called an assembly of his Macedonian veterans, by now down to
a fraction of his troops. He formally discharged those who were too old or
wounded for further action, sending them home with ample rewards. The army’s
mood was sullen. The cry went up: Discharge us all! And some yelled taunting insults
about the Asian gods in whose name he would fight his further conquests.
Alexander leaped down from the platform and pointed out the ringleaders to his
guards, to seize them and put them to death. In the silence that followed, Alexander remounted the
platform and bitterly discharged the whole army. From now on Persian nobles
would fill the high posts; names of Macedonian regiments would be transferred
to the new army. For three days the Macedonian soldiers lingered, uncertain
what to do; finally they laid down their weapons and begged to be admitted into
Alexander’s presence. What followed was a tearful reconciliation. The quarrel
was patched up, in the usual ritual, by massive drunken feasting.
Partying to Death
The triumphant
return to the center of the Empire was one carousing celebration after another.
There was a drinking contest with a prize; the winner drank 12 quarts of wine
and died in three days; another 40 guests died because they were too drunk to
cover themselves in a sudden storm of cold weather. At another great feast,
featuring 3000 entertainers imported from Greece, Alexander’s closest friend
Hephaestion fell ill after swallowing an entire flagon. When he died, Alexander
went into a veritable potlatch of grief; he had the battlements of nearby
cities pulled down, and massacred the entire population of a nearby tribe who
had been causing trouble; the physician who failed to cure his friend was
crucified. Hephaestion was more than a friend; he was his fellow Persianizer,
the one who like himself wore Persian robes, the one who had fought the leader
of the pro-Greek faction after the murder of Cleitus. Now Alexander was alone,
the Persian King of Kings, without a friend. Someone stepped forward, one of
the original Macedonian Companions, inviting him on an all-night drinking
binge. They did it again the next night. Alexander woke up with a fever,
steadily worsened, and died.
It was
alcohol poisoning, of course-- literally drinking himself to death, like his
companions.
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Copy of a statue of Alexander regarded as
good likeness
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Are we
surprised at how he looks? The statue made by his favorite sculptor is
certainly not of a youth; probably from the last years of his life when he was
back from campaigning. He stood out from his bearded contemporaries because he
kept himself clean-shaven. Alexander was short but stocky, with something
twisted looking in his face and neck. He was thirty-two years old when he died.
Is this dying young? Think of him as an aging athlete, engaged in the roughest
action for 16 years; about the time professional athletes start to retire, beat
up from injuries. Alexander had been wounded in almost every battle, sometimes
severely; wounded in the leg, bludgeoned in the head and neck, arrows that
shattered bones and had to be painfully removed from shoulder, thigh and chest.
It accumulates; and there were no steroids to prolong an athletic career.
Alexander
did not die of disappointment, or for want of places yet to conquer. His fatal
drinking binge took place days before another expedition was to be launched,
the conquest of Arabia, preliminary to Carthage and the western Mediterranean.
But the atmosphere was different. The court was swarming with priests and
soothsayers, making all manner of sacrifices and oracles for the upcoming
expedition. Alexander was conventionally religious for his time-- i.e. giving
ample display of rituals before and after battle, no doubt enjoying the
Durkheimian center of attention. But there is no indication he ever let the
oracles tell him what to do. Flashback one last time, to Alexander in Greece,
19 years old, getting ready for his Persian expedition. Following good form, he
visits the oracle of Delphi. But the oracle is closed; it is not a propitious
day. Alexander forcefully drags the priestess to her shrine. “My son, you are
invincible,” she protests. It is all he wants to hear.
Did Alexander Really Achieve
Anything?
He took
over the Persian Empire. He did not change its structure or even its extent.
The mutiny in India happened when his army passed the Persian frontier; it was
just too far, by everyone’s sense of what the Empire could hold. I take this to
mean a logistics sense. There is a silly conjecture that if Alexander had not
died, he would have conquered Carthage and Rome, and created a true world
empire. This is hero-rhetoric of historians. As if anyone had the
administrative capacity at the time: Italy had still not gone through the
elimination contest that would have made it the kind of target Persia had
become. Even 500 years later, when the Romans shifted from a thin tributary
overlordship to a degree of bureaucratic penetration, they never could get
beyond the western edge of Iran.
Could
anyone else have done as much as Alexander did? Very likely. His father Philip
was all set to do it; and he probably could have carried it out, if he didn’t
get killed at some other drinking party along the way. They used the same army,
the same tactics, the same diplomacy of rule. Perhaps the only difference was
that Alexander was somewhat better, after all, at holding his liquor at
drinking parties.
The main
structural innovation that Alexander attempted was to promote mutual
assimilation between Greeks and Persians. * The god-king protocol was what his
Greeks objected to; but it was a necessary form of rule in the tributary
overlord structure of the Persian Empire, depending on impressiveness and
ceremonial obeisance that left local potentates in place. Greek city-state
democracy (and even the version of egalitarian equals inside the Macedonian
aristocracy) was structurally incompatible with the vertical hierarchy of an
oriental empire. What Alexander’s innovation came down to specifically was an
academy to train Persian noble youths, by making them, in effect, into
Persian-speaking Macedonian officers.
This is what the second mutiny was about. He couldn’t integrate the
Empire; the best he could try was integrate the office corps. Even this didn’t
take.
* Alexander was not so “Greek” as
Greek-centered historians have assumed. Certainly he was not a panhellenic
anti-Persian. When he left Macedon, he gave away all his property, acting like
he expected never to come home. His heroes were the Persian empire-builders,
Cyrus and Darius I, even though the latter invaded Greece. In fact, Macedon
became a client state of Persia at the time. Macedon was a buffer zone between
two culture areas, and such locations can go either way.
The
biggest consequence of the Macedonian conquest was creating a zone on the
eastern and southern edges of the Mediterranean in which the dominant language
and culture were Greek; and thus a zone where travel was facilitated, and
social movements could spread. The main results were two: when the Romans
started being drawn into Greek coalition-wars, starting with Epirus (on the
Adriatic side of Greece-- present-day Albania, and the place where Alexander’s
mother came from), they were drawn onwards until they were interfering in the
alliance system of the Greek-speaking states, all the way around to Syria and
Egypt. And when Rome interfered, it never withdrew.
The
second result can be seen in where Christianity spread: exactly these
Greek-speaking places. Paul the great missionary to the Gentiles is a native of
Tarsus in Asia Minor, near where Alexander fought the battle of Issus. The
letters that make up the New Testament (itself written in Greek) are almost
entirely to Christian congregations in Asia Minor and Greece. The subsequent
great centers of the church, and of the monastic movements, were Greek-speaking
Antioch and Alexandria. The inadvertent consequence of Alexander’s conquest was
to create the conditions for the linguistically unified networks that became
the great universalistic religion of the West. The panhellenic Greek spokesmen
who in the 300s BC advocated colonizing land won from the Persian Empire
thought they were exporting Greek democracy. This did not happen. What got created, instead, was a
cosmopolitan network structure, with Greek as its lingua franca. In it the very
idea of universalism-- of a religion free from worldly entanglements and local
loyalties-- could take hold.
Why did Alexander Sleep Well, but
Napoleon Never Slept?
The
preceding blog observed that Napoleon was so energized that he worked 20 hours
a day, and on campaign never slept for more than 15 minutes at a time.
Alexander was not at all like this. Alexander bragged that he never slept
better than the night before a battle; that Parmenio had to shake him three
times to wake him up before they went out to fight at Gaugamela. This is entirely
plausible. Alexander was much more physical than Napoleon, a muscle man who
tired himself out with vigorous exercise.
They
both had high emotional energy, pumped up with confidence and pumping up others
around them. But they did it by different means. Napoleon got his energy in
center-of-the-network rounds of meetings, taking care of all the many branches
of administration and moving around the pieces that had to assemble for battle.
Things were simpler in Alexander’s day; administration was a thin ceremonial
hierarchy; battle preparations were simple, and he did not so much direct his
forces as launch the attack and create a bolt of energy that would stream
behind him into the heart of the enemy army.
Who was
the greater general? Consider this a way of seeing how much had changed from
ancient organizational structures to incipient modern ones. If we imagine
Napoleon going up against Alexander, it would have to be either in one time or
the other. On an ancient battlefield, Napoleon would have been too small to
play much part. On a modern battlefield, Alexander would have been one of the
wild barbarians whose cavalry charge got mowed down by Napoleon’s artillery.
Maybe he was, in the form of one of the native armies Napoleon annihilated in
Egypt or Syria. Alexander won all his battles, Napoleon lost at least one big
one. But Alexander fought perhaps a third as many battles, all of them
one-sided, the most advanced military organization of its day against inferior
ones. Napoleon fought armies much like his own, and towards the latter part of
his career, his enemies caught up with his best techniques. It is foolish to
attribute their respective records to such transcendental impossibility as
sheer decontextualized talent.
Bottom
line: Heroic leaders, if we unpack the designation of what we are talking
about, have to be energy stars. They are persons in the center of gatherings,
where they recycle emotions into group action. It can be done in different
ways. Napoleon did it mainly by turning enthusiasm into speed; Alexander by
spreading a reputation mixed of domineering, sudden anger, and magnanimous
generosity.
They
lived on opposite sides of a moral divide. Alexander was far more personally
cruel than Napoleon, or other modern people, could be. Getting into Alexander’s
world makes us realize how different are human beings under different social
circumstances. Today someone like Alexander would be on death row. Napoleon one
could have liked. As Durkheim explained, morality, as well as emotional energy,
are products of social morphology.
References
Arrian. History
of Alexander.
Plutarch.
Life of Alexander.
Xenophon. Anabasis.
Old
Testament Bible. Book of Esther; Book of
Daniel.
J. B.
Bury. 1951. A
History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great. chapters XVI- XVII.
Donald
W. Engels. 1978. Alexander the Great and
the Logistics of the Macedonian Army.
Peter
Green. 1970. Alexander of Macedon,
356-323 BC.
R.
Ghirshman. 1954. Iran: From the Earliest Times to the Islamic
Conquest.
Colin
McEvedy and Richard Jones. 1978. Atlas of
World Population History.
H.W.
Parke. 1933. Greek Mercenary Soldiers.
Geoffrey
de Ste. Croix. 1983. Class Struggle in
the Ancient Greek World.
Randall
Collins. 1998. The Sociology of
Philosophies. chapter 3.
Randall
Collins. 2008. Violence: A
Micro-sociological Theory.
