Alexander de Grote

Overzichtsartikel in US News & World Report

Alexander's new look

Next week, a new Oliver Stone film about Alexander debuts, starring Colin Farrell as the great man and Angelina Jolie as his infamous mother, Olympias. But historians and archaeologists are also re-examining Alexander, and, unlike Stone, many argue that he may not have been quite so great after all. Prompted in part by fresh archaeological finds, the reappraisal reveals a man both self-indulgent and cruel. Yes, he was a charismatic commander, but he inherited a virtually invincible army from his father, Philip II of Macedonia. And although he has long been celebrated for spreading Greek ideas throughout Asia, new scholarship shows that cultural exchange between East and West had started long before Alexander's reign.

Born in 356 B.C. in Pella, Macedonia, Alexander was only 18 when he distinguished himself as a commander at the bloody Battle of Chaeronea, in which Philip defeated the Greek city-states to the south, bringing them under Macedonian rule. When he became king of Macedonia at age 20 after his father's assassination, he moved swiftly to quell rumors that he and his mother had plotted to kill Philip, executing several nobles -some of whom were potential rivals- as coconspirators. Soon after, the Greek city-state Thebes revolted, and he razed it, killing or enslaving 36,000 citizens. Other rebellious city-states came quickly to heel.
 

The conqueror

He trounced an advance Persian force at the Granicus River in what is now Turkey - a victory that opened up much of western Asia Minor to the Macedonians. The next year, he finally met his archrival Darius III, king of Persia, at Issus, also in present-day Turkey; the battle turned into a rout. Darius fled to fight another day, abandoning his wife, mother, and children. Historians have applauded Alexander for treating his opponent's family with respect and courtesy - indeed, Darius' mother was said to have wept years later when she heard of the Macedonian's death. But this gentlemanly behavior is better seen as a claim to the throne than an act of chivalry, argues Jona Lendering, author of the new book Alexander de Grote. "In the ancient Near East," he writes, "a new king took care of the harem and family of his predecessor." Other women in Alexander's path were not so lucky. After Issus, he turned over the wives and children of the Persian soldiers to the Thessalian horsemen as a reward for their gallantry in battle.
 

The king

Even after Darius was killed by one of his own generals, Alexander kept pressing east - into Bactria (Afghanistan), Sogdiana (Uzbekistan and Tajikistan), and finally India, where after weeks of slogging through tropical rains the conqueror's bone-weary soldiers dug their heels into the muck and refused to go farther. Upon his return to Babylon, he fell ill, and 10 days later he died, just six weeks short of his 33rd birthday.

Given the immensity of the empire he built and the sheer number of battles he won, it may seem perverse to argue that Alexander was not the military genius that history has made him out to be. But revisionists contend that most of those battles were his to lose, given the technical superiority of the army he commanded. No one is questioning his personal courage: Whether battling Greek hoplites or Indians mounted on elephants, he always led the cavalry charge, resplendent in a jewel-encrusted helmet. Still, he would not have amounted to much without his father's genius, argues military historian Victor Davis Hanson in his 2001 book Carnage and Culture: "King Philip [had] crafted a grand new army . . . and organized it differently from anything in past Greek practice." Philip gave the Macedonian phalanx fresh power by lengthening the thrusting spear from 8 to between 16 and 18 feet. He also created a heavily armed cavalry and, for the first time in the history of western warfare, made the coordination of infantry and cavalry a centerpiece of military strategy.

The son's contribution? The impulse to annihilate, says Hanson. Greek soldiers had long been respected for their skill and willingness to fight to the death - indeed, many ancient rulers employed them as mercenaries. But before Alexander, they mostly met on small battlefields where they thrust and stabbed for an hour or so before one side gave up and the killing stopped. Alexander, however, practiced "total pursuit and destruction of the defeated enemy," Hanson argues, "ensur[ing] battle casualties unimaginable just a few decades earlier."

Alexander didn't confine the slaughter to soldiers. Despite historical accounts of his mercy to those who submitted, he butchered hundreds of thousands of civilians. After the siege of Gaza, for instance, Alexander "the Accursed" -as he was known in the East- allowed his troops to rampage through the city, gutting residents at will. Brian Bosworth, a historian at the University of Western Australia, points to his near genocidal campaign against the Mallis in India, in which he systematically razed villages, killing civilians as they fled.

His reputation as a brilliant tactician has also come under fire. After the Battle of Issus, he pursued war booty in Susa and Babylon instead of tracking Darius, giving the king time to rebuild his devastated army, argues University of Missouri historian Ian Worthington. Another costly error, in his view, was the siege of Tyre. To be sure, Alexander needed to control the powerful city. But the Tyrians had already submitted and only balked at his insistence on sacrificing at their temple during a religious festival. The smart thing for Alexander to do would have been to sacrifice elsewhere and stroll on into the city, says Worthington, but his pride forced him to mount what he probably knew would be a lengthy siege.
 

The globalist

Indeed, the whole idea that there was some sort of cultural firewall between East and West before Alexander is wrong headed, argues Walter Burkert in his new book Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture. The Greeks borrowed heavily from Mesopotamia for their mathematics and astronomy, for instance. (Indeed, the so-called Pythagorean theorem is found in cuneiform texts about 1,000 years before Pythagoras.) The Greeks learned from eastern craftsmen how to make terra cotta from molds, and facets of their mythology had Oriental roots, including Egyptian funerary lore.

Moreover, Greek culture also had jumped its borders before Alexander's conquest. Thanks to traders and mercenaries, "it was a very cosmopolitan world," says the University of California-Berkeley's Andrew Stewart, who heads up an archaeological dig in Israel of a Phoenician city called Dor, where he and legions of volunteers have uncovered myriad Greek artifacts. As early as the first part of the fifth century B.C., the city's residents were using Greek mixing bowls in their drinking rituals. And by the beginning of the fourth, he says, "anyone with any means at all was eating and drinking off Greek black glaze tableware."

Still, the Macedonian's conquests obviously left their mark. After Alexander, "there were Greek soldiers crawling all over the Near East," says Stewart. He also founded a host of Greek cities -among them the glittering Alexandria- where the elites of both East and West, including engineers, artisans, and scientists, continued trading ideas and skills. By looting and then spending much of the accumulated wealth of the Persian Empire, he revolutionized local economies, says Tulane University historian Kenneth Harl, who has studied coins unearthed in the ancient town of Gordion. Before Alexander rolled through, the only coins in use had very high value and so were good only for large transactions like settling debts between governments. After him, however, regular people carried coins of low-enough value to "buy lunch in the marketplace," he says.

But did Anatolian peasants eating lunch in the marketplace suddenly start spouting Greek poetry? Scholars increasingly think not. Most people's only real contact with Greek culture was "when soldiers came through and grabbed their chickens for food," says Stewart. Nor, increasingly, do scholars think Alexander would have cared. He was, after all, a conqueror and, like others of his ilk, cared passionately about power, not cultural interchange. "We may not like him or approve of him," says Potter, "but there's an integrity to him."

B.Carpenter