Alexander The Great – The Greatest of Them All by Tom Holland

The Greatest of Them all. Revisionist professors, Hollywood turkeys, even the pacifist spirit of our age cannot wither the incomparable mystique and terrifying glamour of Alexander of Macedon.

‘All those who write about Alexander,” grumbled the Roman geographer Strabo, “prefer the marvelous to the true.” Such a criticism was not entirely accurate even when he made it 2,000 years ago, and it is certainly not fair now. We live in an age of groundbreaking classical scholar ship, when historians of the ancient world have only to get the sniff of a myth to set about busting it. Yet Alexander, more even than Cleopatra or Julius Caesar, has stood insouciant proof against every attempt at revisionism. No amount of cheese-paring by classicists can dim the brilliance of his luster. He remains what he has ever been: the epitome of youthful, world-conquering, terrifying glamour.

We are, perhaps, more squeamish about the collateral damage inflicted by his ascent to greatness, and less prone to celebrate it, than earlier ages. “Is it not passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis?” Christopher Marlowe demanded in “Tamburlaine,” his blood-sodden drama about a megalomaniacal one-time shepherd who had swaggered and slaughtered his way to a vast Asiatic empire in the 14th century. In point of boring historical fact, the mention of Persepolis in his hero’s vaunt is a serious anachronism. The city had been burnt to the ground long before the time of Tamburlaine, all the way back in 330 B.C. Marlowe, however, was a playwright, not a historian—and he could recognize a poetic truth when he saw one.

The man responsible for destroying Persepolis had been none other than Alexander: the feat that broadcast his triumph more blazingly than all his many others, since the city had served, for almost two centuries, as the capital of Asia. The Achaemenids, a Persian dynasty whose rule had stretched from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush, had demonstrated in unprecedented fashion just how vast an empire might be. Alexander, by defeating them, had wrested from them their claim to global rule. Such was the heritage—of looting, bloodshed and unabashed imperialism—to which Tamburlaine in turn had laid devastating claim. No wonder, then, in Marlowe’s rendering of his protagonist’s career, that he should instinctively have alluded to the greatest conqueror of them all.

Wondrous Signs Before the Birth of Alexander The Great

Alexander with a horned diadem. Coin by Lysimachus.

Alexander The Great was associated with Hercules, son of Zeus and may have believed himself the son of the Egyptian god Ammon, as well as the mortal king Philip. Stories about Alexander’s birth were embellished in order to fit someone of such an illustrious pedigree. Peter Green, in the second chapter of Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B.C., names some of the prodigious events that attended the conception and birth. These are also described by Plutarch.

1. The temple of Artemis burned, according to tradition, on the night on which Alexander The Great was born. The Persian Magi foretold great disaster fot the Persian Empire.

Plutarch on the birth of Alexander: “Alexander was born the sixth of Hecatombaeon, which month the Macedonians call Lous, the same day that the temple of Diana at Ephesus was burnt..the temple..took fire and was burnt while its mistress was absent, assisting at the birth of Alexander. And all the Eastern soothsayers who happened to be then at Ephesus, looking upon the ruin of this temple to be the forerunner of some other calamity, ran about the town, beating their faces, and crying, that this day had brought forth something that would prove fatal and destructive to all Asia” -Plutarch’s Life of Alexander-

2. His mother Olympias dreamed on the night before her wedding, that she was penetrated by a thunderbolt. Fire spread out in all directions. Plutarch writes: “The night before the consummation of their marriage, she dreamed that a thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire, whose divided flames dispersed themselves all about, and then were extinguished”.

3. Alexander’s father Philip looked inside his wife bedroom and saw her in the embrace of a snake. This was interpreted to be the god Zeus-Ammon, who was considered by some to have been Alexander’s father.

4. Another birth omen of a sort is reported by Plutarch who writes that Alexander’s father Philip received news of the birth of his son in a message containing three pieces of good news. The two others were that his race horse had won in Olympics and that Parmenio had beaten the Illyrians.

Source : N.S. Gill
http://ancienthistory.about.com

Alexander The Great in Egypt

Alexander III of Macedon (356-323 bc), better known to history as ‘Alexander the Great’, spent several months in Egypt as part of his on-going campaign against the mighty Persian  Empire of Darius III. After conquering Persia’s naval bases all along the coastline of Asia Minor and Syria-Palestine, Alexander marched south into Egypt where he remained for some six months. Although generally regarded as little more than an eccentric diversion, Alexander’s Egyptian sojourn was essential to his future plans. He needed a strong coastal base for both strategic and commercial purposes, from which he could not only communicate across the Mediterranean but which could also handle the highly lucrative sea-borne trade network he wanted to divert from Phoenicia. With naval reinforcements following his progress down the coast, his Macedonian army covered the hazardous 130 mile distance in only a week to reach the heavily fortified coastal town of Pelusium in late October 332 bc.

With his reputation going before him, Alexander was met by Egypt’s Persian governor Mazaces. With no armed forces and with no likelihood of any assistance following the defeated Darius’ swift departure back east to Persia, Mazaces simply handed over the treasury’s 800 talents and “all the royal furniture”. In return he was kept on as part of the new administration together with the new governor Cleomenes, who was made responsible for finance and created the royal mint around 331 bc. Cleomenes was a hard-headed, unscrupulous businessman who quickly amassed a personal fortune of 8,000 talents during his career as governor. Yet he remained loyal to Alexander with whom he kept up a regular correspondence, sending him such delicacies as smoked quail by the thousand.  After installing a garrison at the key defensive site of Pelusium, Alexander then ordered his fleet to sail south up the Nile to the traditional capital Memphis (Ineb-hedj) at the apex of the Delta where he himself would arrive by land at the head of his troops. Passing by the ancient religious site of Heliopolis (Iunu) with its vast white temples and obelisks, Egypt made an enormous impression on both the Macedonian troops and their 24 year old leader. Brought up with his formidable mother Olympias’ tales of Egyptian gods, the religiously-minded Alexander must have been completely dumbstruck in a land so steeped in ritual, where priests held enormous power wielded inside temples not built to human scale. Passing by the great pyramids of Giza, still gleaming in their shining white limestone, he finally reached Memphis to a genuinely rapturous reception.

Greek travelers had actually been visiting Egypt for centuries, many of them setting up trading colonies or acting as mercenaries. Others such as the historian Herodotus and philosopher Plato came to study a culture they regarded with awe as the cradle of civilization, their knowledge almost certainly part of Alexander’s education. Yet for almost 200 years Egypt had been occupied by Persia who had incorporated it into the growing empire, and assuming the Egyptian crown by right of conquest the Persian king had ruled in absentia through a satrap, exploiting its vast grain reserves and taxing its people. The Persians showed relatively little respect for the ancient traditions and were deeply unpopular, and the Egyptians’ had rebelled so often parts of the country remained virtually independent.

Alexander was therefore hailed as Savior and Liberator, and as the people’s choice and legitimate heir he was offered the double crown of the Two Lands. Anointed as pharaoh in Memphis on 14 November 332 bc, the culmination of his coronation was the climactic moment when the high priest named him ‘son of the gods’ according to traditions dating back almost 3,000 years. This title deeply affected him, and Olympias’ references to him being the son of Zeus must have filled his mind; indeed, there were even scenes of the king of the gods Amun (‘Zeus’) impregnating selected queens with the heir to the throne! In a world where the gods were perceived as living entities and were considered a part of everyday life, Alexander must now have began to believe in his own divinity as a fact rather than a simple exercise of propaganda.

Always a devout man who began each day with sacrifices to the gods, Alexander had no difficulty worshipping the Egyptian deities. Equating their gods with his own, he worshipped the Egyptian Amun as a form of Zeus. At the Memphite necropolis of Sakkara the new pharaoh offered sacrifices to the Apis bull, cult animal of the creator god Ptah, followed by Greek-style games and literary contests in which performers from all over the Greek world took part in a multi-cultural extravaganza. These kind of events mark the beginnings of Hellenism in their blending of Greek practices and local traditions, and Egypt and Greece would successfully co-exist for the next 3 centuries.

Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography by Peter Green

Book Description:

Until recently, popular biographers and most scholars viewed Alexander the Great as a genius with a plan, a romantic figure pursuing his vision of a united world. His dream was at times characterized as a benevolent interest in the brotherhood of man, sometimes as a brute interest in the exercise of power. Green, a Cambridge-trained classicist who is also a novelist, portrays Alexander as both a complex personality and a single-minded general, a man capable of such diverse expediencies as patricide or the massacre of civilians. Green describes his Alexander as ‘not only the most brilliant (and ambitious) field commander in history, but also supremely indifferent to all those administrative excellences and idealistic yearnings foisted upon him by later generations, especially those who found the conqueror, tout court, a little hard upon their liberal sensibilities’. This biography begins not with one of the universally known incidents of Alexander’s life, but with an account of his father, Philip of Macedonia, whose many-territoried empire was the first on the continent of Europe to have an effectively centralized government and military. What Philip and Macedonia had to offer, Alexander made his own, but Philip and Macedonia also made Alexander form an important context for understanding Alexander himself. Yet his origins and training do not fully explain the man. After he was named hegemon of the Hellenic League, many philosophers came to congratulate Alexander, but one was conspicuous by his absence: Diogenes the Cynic, an ascetic who lived in a clay tub. Piqued and curious, Alexander himself visited the philosopher, who, when asked if there was anything Alexander could do for him, made the famous reply, ‘Don’t stand between me and the sun’. Alexander’s courtiers jeered, but Alexander silenced them: ‘If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes’. This remark was as unexpected in Alexander as it would be in a modern leader. For the general reader, the book, redolent with gritty details and fully aware of Alexander’s darker side, offers a gripping tale of Alexander’s career. Full back notes, fourteen maps, and chronological and genealogical tables serve readers with more specialized interests.

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