Alexander The Great: other important and fun readings and facts on alexander

	Alexander the Great
Alexander, bust from Delos (Louvre)	*Alexander the Great (356; r. 336-323):** the Macedonian king who defeated his Persian colleague Darius III Codomannus and conquered the Achaemenid Empire. During his campaigns, Alexander visited a.o. Egypt, Babylonia, Persis, Media, Bactria, the Punjab, and the valley of the Indus. In the second half of his reign, he had to find a way to rule his newly conquered countries. Therefore, he made Babylon his capital and introduced the oriental court ceremonial, which caused great tensions with his Macedonian and Greek officers. This is the eighteenth of a series of articles. A complete overview can be found here and a chronological table of his reign can be found here.
	The fourth beast Cultural contact Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances inherited from the past. It is tempting to see Alexander as an exception to this rule, to think that he was the brilliant conqueror who forged his own fate. This temptation should at all costs be resisted. Alexander was not the man who overthrew the Achaemenid empire, he was merely a harvester. In the century before his reign, the satraps of the western half of the Achaemenid empire had adapted themselves to the Greek culture of which Alexander was an exponent too. At the same time, the Macedonians had been pupils of the Persians. Many aspects of Macedonian society are best understood as imitations of Persian customs. East and west were already starting to resemble each other; Alexander was nothing more and nothing less than the man who united two cultures that would have been united anyway.
	This does not mean that Alexander was a mere puppet on a string. How the two cultures were united was very much of Alexander's choosing and responsibility. The decisive moment was the aftermath of the battle of Issus, when he refused to accept Darius' peace offer and proclaimed himself king of Asia. Until then, he had been the liberator of the Greek towns in Asia, from now on, his aims were higher: he became a conqueror. What had been a defensive action, changed into an offensive. It is no accident that Alexander treated the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid empire, with respect. The legendary Persian king had been a conqueror too.
Alexander with a horned diadem. Coin by Lysimachus (©!!)	The destroyer Conquerors are by definition destroyers. Alexander ruined his own country, draining its human resources: after his reign, Macedonia never regained its former power. The Persian culture suffered severe blows, too. The destruction of Persepolis served no real military purpose. In Zoroastrian texts, Alexander is called 'the accursed', because many people were killed and the religious traditions were in great peril. (It is interesting to note that the ram's horns that are shown on Alexander's coins, became an attribute of the Persian god of evil, Ahriman. Later, they were to influence the western iconography of the devil.) It is true, Alexander could show clemency towards Persians and used them as satraps and soldiers (we will return to this point); but he was harsh towards people that were of no military value.
Skopas' Pothos (Archaeological Museum of Naples)	Alexander's biographer Aristobulus introduced the idea that Alexander was driven by pothos, 'longing'. He wanted to go beyond everything done before, and was thirsting for wisdom. This last aspect of Alexander's psychology -the desire for knowledge- is certainly incorrect. To make just three basic observations: the charming story about his meeting with the Brahmans can not be found in the 'good' historiographic tradition; Arrian of Nicomedia introduces the story with 'they say', which is always an indication that he did not find it in his best sources, Ptolemy and Aristobulus. the Macedonians and Greeks never understood such basic things as the difference between the Magians and the Chaldaeans (the first were Persian religious specialists, the second were Babylonian astronomers). Alexander never learned Persian or Aramaic.
	One of his contemporaries, Demetrius of Phaleron, a Greek philosopher who was like Alexander a pupil of Aristotle of Stagira, was especially impressed by the destruction of Persia (text). This is remarkable, because as an Aristotelian, he would have been aware of Alexander's quest for wisdom, if wisdom was really what the Macedonian king was longing for. This leaves us with Alexander as a conqueror, as the man who chose violence to unite what was bound to unite. The author of the Biblical book Daniel expressed this when he portrayed Alexander as an exceedingly strong beast with ten horns and iron teeth, which devoured, broke in pieces and stamped the world (text).
Bust of Alexander from Takht-i Sangin (Tajikistan) (From A. Kuhrt & S. Sherwin-White, From Samarkand to Sardes, 1993; ©!!!)	The spread of Greek culture This can, however, not be the last word. Conquest had cultural consequences. Although the Macedonians did the fighting, the Greeks were the beneficiaries of Alexander's campaigns. Their culture spread over the Near East. For example, archaeologists have excavated a town in northeastern Afghanistan (Ai Khanum) that was in nearly all its aspects Greek. On one of its temple walls, one could read the wisdom maxims from the oracle of Delphi. Antioch and Alexandria succeeded Babylon as the world's cultural capital. Unlike Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Thebes, these cities were cosmopolitan. A Greek from Antioch or Alexandria could meet people from other cultures. The famous Alexandrian library contained translations of the Jewish Bible, ancient Egyptian texts and Babylonian scientific publications.
Alexander. Bust from the Acropolis Museum, Athens	The Greeks became increasingly aware of the achievements of other civilizations. That would have happened anyway, but Alexander speeded up the process. This was recognized by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (one of the Alexandrine librarians), who wrote that the most important result of Alexander's conquest was that the old, clear-cut distinction between good Greeks and evil barbarians had been challenged (text).