From Peter Green, a view of Alexander the Great, as seen through the eyes of the classicist Ernst Badian (from The New York Review of Books):
. . . In 336, after Philip had been
assassinated by a disgruntled bodyguard, Demosthenes assured his ecstatic
Athenian audience that Philip’s son and successor, a mere unlicked stripling,
would be easily disposed of. Athens watched, horrified, as the unlicked stripling
put down the attempted revolt of the city-state of Thebes with contemptuous
ease, slaughtered thousands, sold the rest into slavery, and leveled one of the
oldest and most renowned cities of Greece to the ground, as though it had never
existed.
Thus for the foreseeable future the
attitude of Athens and the other southern Greek states toward Alexander—despite
the existence, always, of a minority of pliant and willing collabos—was one of
deeply rooted and abiding hatred, and this is a factor that always needs to be
taken into account when attempting to assess, as Ernst Badian does in his Collected Papers on Alexander the Great,
the character, career, and legacy of that mysterious and elusive
world-conqueror. Alexander has been the subject of a great deal of
mythification, both contemporary and posthumous, much of it self-generated.
This makes close, rational scrutiny of the evidence—such as it is—of particular
importance.
The mythic aspects of Alexander’s
comet-like career had an archetypal quality that was to prove irresistibly
infectious, and the wide-ranging, passionately held, and frequently
contradictory assessments of him that posterity delivered (and continues to
deliver) remain the most striking evidence of this. Emotional neutrality is
conspicuous by its absence.
Here a useful historiographical
maxim comes into play: distrust the opinions, evaluate the facts. Actions are
far less likely to be rewritten than words. It is not, by and large, the actual
events of Alexander’s career that are in dispute, so much as their motivation.
Examining those events—including their subject’s personal habits and
characteristics—without, as far as possible, being affected by the overlay of
emotional coloring, supportive or hostile, that accumulated around them from the
very beginning, is the method Badian has clearly adopted throughout, and it
offers the best chance we are likely to have of reaching a conclusion somewhere
near the truth. . . .
[W]hen he set out for Asia he was
not yet Alexander the Great, and in many ways still the unlicked stripling
jeered at by Demosthenes: in particular, he remained dependent on the support
of Macedonia’s powerful aristocratic clans, and on none more than that of Philip’s
most trusted general, Parmenio, who saw to it that every key post in the army’s
command structure was held by a family member or relative by marriage. A great
deal of Alexander’s time and energy on the expedition was devoted to loosening,
by fair means or foul, this dangerous internal stranglehold on his authority as
both king and generalissimo.
The expedition itself produced its
own paradoxes. Its official, somewhat threadbare, justification was revenge for
the destruction, in particular of Greek temples, wrought by Xerxes’ troops
during the Persian invasion of Greece a century and a half earlier, in 480.
There was also the Panhellenism preached by various Athenian orators, Isocrates
in particular, calling for an attack on the Persian empire as a heaven-sent way
of uniting the eternally fractious and quarrelsome Greek states. An attractive
lure here was the assurance of infinite wealth for the taking, allegedly
defended by effete and unwarlike barbarians. Yet the number of Greeks who
joined Alexander’s expedition remained strikingly small, and the Spartans
boycotted it altogether. Many Greek mercenaries chose rather to fight for the
Persians. This is hardly surprising. Those who had lost their freedom at
Chaeroneia, and had seen, in the eradication of Thebes, what their new master
was like when crossed, had little inclination to follow him on his career of
conquest.
The hostility was mutual. Alexander
had no intention of weakening his control over the expedition’s command
structure still further by appointing to it Greeks whose loyalty was, in his
view, by definition questionable: the few exceptions were faithful friends of
long standing. Similarly, he was not going to risk defections at crucial
moments by using Greeks as front-line troops (though he kept a group of Greek
intellectuals around him for cultural entertainment), and his distrust of the experienced
Greek fleet was so great that he preferred to dismiss it, and run the huge risk
of attacking the powerful seaports of Asia Minor, such as Miletus and
Halicarnassus, exclusively from the landward side. Finally, though he could ill
spare them, he left at home a force at least 12,000 strong—a very necessary
precaution, as events turned out—to keep the mainland states from revolting
during his absence. Whatever his real aims were, the pursuit of Panhellenism,
so convenient as an excuse, was evidently not among them.
Other aspects of the eleven-year
expedition, which penetrated as far as India, similarly call for comment. There
were a remarkable number of supposed treacherous conspiracies against
Alexander, marked by carefully staged interrogations and ruthless executions,
most notably of Parmenio and his son Philotas. Equally suggestive, after the
defeat of Persia’s ruling Achaemenid dynasty, is Alexander’s steadily
increasing policy of accommodation with his recent enemies. He adopted Persian
court dress and protocol, and tried to introduce proskynesis, prostration
before him as monarch; he began to appoint Persian grandees to key offices, and
ordered the training of 30,000 Persian youths for integration into Macedonian
military units, another move that not unnaturally caused violent resentment
among his veterans.
But most striking of all, and what
in the long run most hardened Macedonian hostility, was the growing realization
that for Alexander conquest was an end in itself, virtually unrelated to the
establishment of an empire. (According to Arrian, the main historian of
Alexander’s career whose works have survived: “No matter what he had already
conquered, he would not have stopped there quietly, not even if he had added
Europe to Asia and the Britannic Islands to Europe, but...would always have
searched far beyond for something unknown, in competition with himself in
default of any other rival”) Veterans who had expected to return home, laden
with loot, after the defeat of the Persians, now faced demands to follow their
obsessional leader on a further march of conquest with no apparent end in
sight. Alexander’s recourse to Persian reinforcements was, in large part, a
direct response to this obstinacy on the part of his own worn-out and
disillusioned Macedonians.
There were also, by the end,
disturbing signs of megalomania. Alexander demanded to be treated as a god. He
planned vast and impracticable projects: a mausoleum for Philip that matched
the largest Egyptian pyramid, six grandiose temples at a cost of 1,500 talents
each. But above all he was planning, even on his deathbed, for further
conquests: of Arabia, and then of North Africa westward as far as the Pillars
of Heracles near what is now Gibraltar, and back by way of Spain and South
Italy. For this a thousand large warships were to be built, and a great highway
driven along the African coastline from Alexandria to the Atlantic.
The huge gap that now yawned
between Alexander’s ambitions and those of his Macedonian followers—partially
concealed by the vast bribes he paid out from captured Persian treasury
reserves to exhausted, and finally mutinous, troops—is made all too clear by
the fact that on his premature death, when he was not yet thirty-three years
old, in Babylon (whether from illness, the cumulative effect of severe wounds,
increasing alcoholism, or, inevitably, suspected poisoning), every single one of
these projects was cancelled, almost literally overnight, and never heard of
again. . . .
Conquest and Empire was the apt
title of one of the best modern biographies of Alexander, that by Brian
Bosworth (1988); and conquest and empire, or, more precisely, one’s moral and
political attitude toward them, overt or implicit, underlie most of the varying
judgments on Alexander himself down the centuries. Alexander’s admirers, more
often than not, are would-be emulators, like the succession of Roman emperors,
from Augustus to Caracalla, who made honorific visits to the great man’s
embalmed corpse in Alexandria. Critics, significantly, were fewer, and even
they tended to view his career not as a matter of imperialism run wild, but
rather as a supreme example of the vanity of human wishes. Only one or two,
like Saint Augustine, dismissed him as a kind of world-class condottiere.
The balance in favor of imperialism
was only reversed after the French Revolution and the American and Greek wars
of independence made the idea of Greek democracy respectable after centuries in
the Latinate doghouse. Nineteenth-century historians, in particular George
Grote, took moral exception to unfettered conquest as such. Since Alexander was
a powerful emotional icon not willingly abandoned, a morally valid
justification for his career had to be put in place. The solution was both
simple and effective, leaning heavily on the Victorian Age’s missionary belief
in spreading the light of its superior culture and religion to the lesser
breeds still struggling in heathen darkness. In Alexander’s case what was seen
as being propagated, naturally, were the dazzling achievements of Greek art,
literature, and philosophy. An early essay by Plutarch, not to mention the
alleged efficiency of the British Raj in India, as later of Cecil Rhodes’s and
Lord Milner’s colonial activities in south Africa, lent support to the bizarre notion
of Alexander as Hellenic cultural torchbearer to the barbaroi of Asia.
The culmination of this curious
exercise in moral mythography was the famous, and immensely influential,
version of Alexander and his career produced, between 1926 and 1948, by W.W.
Tarn, a retired British lawyer and independent scholar. The early date is
significant. The 1920s were the heyday of the League of Nations, when the
Brotherhood of Man was being promoted by many late-Victorian liberal idealists
like Tarn, including Gilbert Murray and Sir Alfred Zimmern. But this was also
the heyday of another hero, Lawrence of Arabia, whose exploits (some of them,
like the attack on Aqaba from the desert, consciously copied from Alexander)
were being sedulously promoted, and mythicized, by Lowell Thomas.
Tarn duly gave his Alexander the
character of an idealized English gentleman—honorable, sporting, temperate in
appetite, moderate and orthodox where sex was concerned, but a heroic and
original field commander in the Lawrence mold. He further saddled him with a
mission to achieve the Brotherhood of Man, under which Macedonians and Persians
would preside benignly over a kind of idealized Raj. His vision, coming as it
did on the heels of a devastating and ugly world war, was widely popular,
exactly as Lawrence’s Arabian career had been. So popular, in fact, that it not
only found its way into just about every general account, schoolbook, and
encyclopedia article, but became conventional wisdom for the vast majority of
Anglo-American teachers and scholars. As late as 1950 it was still hard work to
get any British or American academic journal to publish an article
systematically undermining Tarn’s thesis. The credit for ending this
extraordinary state of affairs goes, almost entirely, to Ernst Badian, and his Collected Papers on Alexander the Great
shows, in detail, just how he did it. . . .
The nearest thing in Collected Papers to a general survey,
“Alexander the Great and the Loneliness of Power,” reveals how, after
“fighting, scheming and murdering in pursuit of the secure tenure of absolute
power, he found himself at last on a lonely pinnacle over an abyss, with no use
for his power and security unattainable.” All that remained was the prospect of
further conquest. This is the aspect of Alexander revealed by a scholar whose
own life was shaped by the forces of totalitarianism. In 1948 Tarn looked at
his idealistic claims for the Brotherhood of Man and wrote: “I have left the
latter part of this footnote substantially as written in 1926. Since then we
have seen new and monstrous births, and are still moving in a world not
realized; and I do not know how to rewrite it.” But Ernst Badian did, and the
essays here reviewed are a permanent testament to that knowledge.
***
Peter Green, "He Found the Real Alexander," (review of Ernst Badian, Collected Papers on Alexander the Great, Routledge), The New York Review of Books, November 22, 2012.
