The Military Campaigns of Alexander the Great

views updated

The Military Campaigns of Alexander the Great

Alexander III . In 336 b.c.e., at the age of twenty, the Macedonian king Alexander III, or Alexander the Great, inherited the resources and wealth of the Macedonian state left to him by his father, Philip II. The problems began almost immediately. Alexander was forced to execute several pretenders to his throne, subdue the Thra-cians and Illyrians (old enemies of the Macedonians), and quell a Greek revolt before he could travel with his army into Asia Minor to begin his conquest of Persia (in 334). By 331 he had defeated the Persian king Darius in two important battles and crossed into Egypt. The priests there crowned him Pharaoh, and he founded the city of Alexandria (later a center of learning and Greek culture). He invaded Mesopotamia next, where he defeated Darius yet again, pushed across the mountains into Persia proper, and seized the mound of royal treasure that had been accumulating for over two centuries at Persepolis. He journeyed on into Ecbatana and to another battle with Darius, but as Alexander approached, the Persian king was assassinated by his own guards, who then fled. Alexander now had full control of Persian lands. Many commanders would have then moved to more civilized regions to consolidate their conquests, but not Alexander. He knew that to retain Mesopotamia he would have to retain control of the Iranian plateau, subject in the north and east to marauding nomads from central Asia. Moreover, Alexander wanted to push his conquests to the edge of the known world (which he thought could not be much further east than the Indus).

Adventure into the Unknown . Alexander’s last major campaign was the conquest of India, an expedition that was not only a military venture but also a fantastic journey to the outer limits of the world. Marching with his men to what Alexander thought was the edge of his new territory, he discovered more land to the east and another great river, the Ganges. His army refused to press further east (although Alexander was eager to travel further), and he was forced to lead his men back (through southern Iran, losing many of his men in the unforgiving heat of the Gedrosian Desert), reaching Susa by 324 b.c.e.

Audience Expectation . When he marched east in 326 b.c.e., Alexander’s expedition included a geographer and other scientific staff: he was thus armed to record information as well as make conquests. Unfortunately, although there were reports of a more scientific nature that were handed down, most of the literary works that came out of Alexander’s march did little more than earlier writings about the east, which were catalogues of Eastern monsters and marvels. This approach was not a sign of naivete on the part of the geographers but a recognition of audience expectation (and reader ignorance: the later geographer Strabo states that these writers were not able to resist exploiting the innocence of their audience, “because the expedition took place at the ends of Asia, far from us, and the distant is difficult to disprove.”) Also, because Alexander did not journey east of the Hyphasis, that land remained a source of mystery and exotica for centuries. Geographers who wrote in the period following Alexander’s death about this mysterious area, unpenetrated by any traveler, are summarized by Strabo:

Everything about [the trans-Hyphasis frontier] is reported as bigger and more freakish, such as the gold-mining ants, and other beasts and men who have singular forms, or in some way have totally different qualities; like the Seres, whom they say are long-lived, prolonging their lives beyond two hundred years. They also tell of a certain aristocratic system of government, made up of 5000 counselors, each of whom furnishes an elephant for public use. And Megasthenes says the tigers among the Prasians are the biggest of all... and that the long-tailed apes are bigger than the biggest dogs . . . and that stones are dug up have the color of frankincense and are sweeter in flavor than figs or honey; elsewhere there are snakes two cubits long with webbed wings, like bats, which fly by night, and let fall drops of urine (some say of sweat) which cause the skin of the unwary to rot away; and that there are winged scorpions, exceeding all others in size; and that ebony grows there; and that there are powerful dogs, which do not let go of whatever they bite until water is poured into their nostrils.

ALEXANDER FINDS THE SOURCE OF THE NILE

There was much curiosity among educated Greeks about the Nile River in Egypt. What was its source and its upper course? Why did it flood yearly? Geographers had tried for centuries to answer these questions, with varying degrees of success; the mysterious Nile had come to represent a mythic geographical riddle. While in India in 324 B.C.E. Alexander the Great thought he had the answer. The historian Arrian tells the story:

Alexander fancied at this time that he had discovered the source of the Nile, his reasons being that he had, on a previous occasion, seen crocodiles in the Indus, and in no other river except the Nile, and had also observed a kind of bean like the Egyptian bean growing on the banks of the Aescines, which, he was told, flowed into the Indus. His notion was that the Nile (under the name of Indus) rose somewhere in that part of India and then flowed through a vast desert tract, where it lost its original name and received that of the Nile from the Ethiopians and Egyptians at that point where it began to flow through inhabited country again, ultimately flowing into the Mediterranean.

Source: Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander, translated by Aubrey de Selin-court (New York: Penguin, 1958).

Quest . Although Alexander had been frustrated in his quest for the eastern edge of Ocean (a goal he still hoped for even at his death), some later works claimed he had penetrated East further than he actually had and had

made a mythical journey beyond the Ganges and into confrontation with freaks and monsters. There exist several “miracle-letters” which are purported to be written by Alexander himself (which they certainly were not), describing journeys to the edge of the earth and encounters with strange creatures. In these letters, “Alexander” reports seeing wild races of hairy subhuman creatures, nine feet tall; talking trees; emeralds collected from the carcasses of snakes who wear them as necklaces; and bats with teeth the size of a man’s. He is at last directed by divine voices to return to the inhabited world (and at the same time receives a prophecy of his own death). Tales like these were probably circulated in order to increase the young king’s heroism; amplification of Alexander into a mythic explorer could be easily accomplished with fantastic tales of his feats east of the Ganges, since no expedition had actually traveled that far.