Thomas R. Martin, An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander

The Creation of Macedonian Power

The rise to international power of the kingdom of Macedonia¹ soon filled the power vacuum that had been created by the fruitless wars of the Greek city-states with each other in the early fourth century B.C. and that Xenophon had so acutely summed up at the end his Hellenica ². Macedonia was a rough land of mountains and lowland valleys just to the north of Greece, which had greater natural resources. Life there was harder than in Greece because the climate was colder and harsher and because the Macedonians' western and northern neighbors periodically launched devastating raids into Macedonian territory. The Macedonian population was especially vulnerable to such raids because they generally lived in small villages and towns without protective walls. That this formerly minor kingdom become the greatest power in Greece in the latter part of the fourth century and conquered the Persian Empire must rank as one of the major surprises in ancient military and political history.

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Macedonian Monarchy

Unlike the city-states of Greece, Macedonia³ was ruled by a monarchy⁴. The power of the king of the Macedonian state was constrained by the tradition that he was supposed to listen to his people, who were accustomed to addressing their monarch with considerable freedom of speech. Above all, the king could govern effectively only as long as he maintained the support of the most powerful aristocrats, who counted as the king's social equals and controlled large bands of followers. Fighting⁵, hunting, and heavy drinking⁶ were the favorite pastimes of these men. The king was expected to demonstrate his prowess in these activities to show he was a Macedonian man's man capable of heading the state. Macedonian queens and royal mothers⁷ received respect in this male-dominated society because they came from powerful families in the Macedonian nobility or the ruling houses of lands bordering Macedonia and bore their husbands the heirs that they needed to carry on their royal dynasties. In the king's absence these royal women could vie with the king's designated representative for power at court.

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Macedonians and Greeks

Macedonians had their own language related to Greek, but the aristocrats who dominated Macedonian society routinely learned to speak Greek because they admired the idea of being Greek and thought of themselves and indeed all Macedonians as Greek by blood. At the same time, Macedonians looked down on the Greeks to the south in Greece as a soft lot unequal to the adversities of life in Macedonia. The Greeks reciprocated this scorn⁸. The famed Athenian orator Demosthenes⁹ (384-322 B.C.) lambasted the Macedonian king Philip II¹⁰ (*359-336) as “not only not a Greek nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from a land worth mentioning; no, he's a pestilence from Macedonia, a region where you can't even buy a slave worth his salt.”¹¹ Barbed verbal attacks like this one characterized Demosthenes's speeches on foreign and domestic policy to the Athenian assembly, where he consistently tried to convince his fellow Athenians to oppose Macedonian expansionism in Greece. His exceptional rhetorical skill also made him the foremost of his time in the writing of speeches for other men to deliver in court cases.

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The Ambitions of Philip II

The Athenian orator and politician Demosthenes spoke so forcefully against Philip II¹² because he recognized how dangerous and ambitious¹³ was this king, who was the person most responsible for making Macedonia into an international power and doing so against heavy odds. For one thing, strife in the royal family¹⁴ and disputes among the leading aristocrats had always been so common that Macedonia before Philip's reign had never been sufficiently united to mobilize its full military strength. So real was the fear of violence from their own countrymen that Macedonian kings stationed bodyguards not only outside the door to the royal bedroom but inside the door as well. Moreover, Macedonian princes married earlier than did most men, soon after the age of twenty, because the instability of the kingship demanded the production of male heirs as soon as possible.

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Philip's Reorganization of the Macedonian Army

The situation in Macedonia was grave in 359 B.C. when the current Macedonian king, Perdiccas, and 4,000 Macedonian troops were slaughtered¹⁵ in battle with the Illyrians, hostile neighbors from the north of Macedonia. In this moment of crisis, Philip persuaded the aristocrats to recognize him as king in place of his infant nephew, for whom he was now serving as regent after the loss of the previous king in the field. Philip then rallied the army by teaching the infantrymen an unstoppable new tactic¹⁶. Macedonian troops carried thrusting spears fourteen feet long, which they had to hold with two hands. Philip drilled his men to handle these heavy weapons in a phalanx formation, whose front line bristled like a lethal porcupine with outstretched spears. With the cavalry of aristocrats deployed as a strike force to soften up the enemy and protect the infantry's flanks, Philip's reorganized army promptly routed Macedonia's attackers and suppressed local rivals to the new king¹⁷.

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Philip and the Greeks

After his reorganization of the Macedonian army, Philip embarked on a whirlwind of diplomacy, bribery, and military action to make the states of Greece acknowledge his superiority¹⁸. He financed this activity by prodigious spending of the gold and silver coinage he had minted from the mines of Macedonia and those that he captured in Thrace¹⁹. A Greek contemporary, the historian Theopompus²⁰ of Chios, labeled Philip “insatiable and extravagant; he did everything in a hurry ... he never spared the time to reckon up his income and expenditure.” By the late 340s B.C. Philip had cajoled or forced most of northern Greece to follow his lead in foreign policy. His goal then became to lead a united Macedonian and Greek army against the Persian Empire²¹. His announced reason sprung from a central theme in Greek understanding of the past: the need to avenge the Persian invasion of Macedonia and Greece of 480 B.C. Philip also feared the potentially destabilizing effect on his kingdom if his reinvigorated army were left with nothing to do. To launch his grandiose invasion, however, he needed to strengthen his alliance by adding the forces of southern Greece to it.

At Athens, Demosthenes used his stirring rhetoric to castigate the Greeks for their failure to resist Philip: they stood by, he thundered, “as if Philip were a hailstorm, praying that he would not come their way, but not trying to do anything to head him off.”²² Finally, Athens and Thebes headed a coalition of southern Greek states to try to block Philip's plans. In 338 B.C., Philip and his Greek allies trounced the coalition's forces at the battle of Chaeronea²³ in Boeotia. The defeated Greek states retained their internal freedom, but they were compelled to join an alliance under Philip's undisputed leadership²⁴, called the League of Corinth by modern scholars after the location of its headquarters.

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The Aftermath of the Battle of Chaeronea

The course of later history proved the battle of Chaeronea²⁵ in 338, in which Philip of Macedon and his Greek allies defeated a coalition of other Greek states, to have been a decisive turning point in Greek history: never again would the states of Greece make foreign policy for themselves without considering, and usually following, the wishes of outside powers. This change marked the end of the Greek city-states as independent actors in international politics, but they were to retain their significance as the basic economic and social units of the Greek world. But that role would be fulfilled from now on as subjects or allies of the new kingdoms that later emerged from the Macedonian kingdom of Philip and his son Alexander after the latter's death in 323 B.C. The Hellenistic kingdoms, as these new monarchies are called, like the Roman provinces that in turn eventually replaced them as political masters of the Greeks, depended on the local leaders of the Greek city-states to collect taxes for the imperial treasuries and to insure the loyalty and order of the rest of the citizens.

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Alexander's Rise to Power

A disgruntled Macedonian assassinated Philip²⁶ in 336 B.C. Unconfirmed rumors circulated that the murder had been instigated by one of his several wives, Olympias, a princess from Epirus to the west of Macedonia. In any case, Philip's son by her, Alexander²⁷ (356-323 B.C.), promptly liquidated potential rivals for the throne²⁸ and won recognition as king. In several lightning-fast campaigns, he subdued Macedonia's traditional enemies to the west and north. Next he compelled the southern Greeks, who had rebelled from the League of Corinth²⁹ at the news of Philip's death, to rejoin the alliance. To demonstrate the price of disloyalty, Alexander destroyed Thebes³⁰ in 335 B.C. as punishment for its rebellion from the League.

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Alexander's Hopes

With Greece pacified, Alexander in 334 B.C. led a Macedonian and Greek army into Anatolia³¹ to fulfill his father's plan to avenge Greece by attacking Persia. Alexander's astounding success in conquering the entire Persian Empire while in his twenties earned him the title “the Great” in later ages. In his own time, his greatness consisted of his ability to inspire his men to follow him into hostile, unknown regions where they were reluctant to go, beyond the borders of civilization as they knew it. Alexander inspired his troops with his reckless disregard for his own safety. He often plunged into the enemy at the head of his men, sharing the danger of the common soldier. No one could miss him in his plumed helmet, vividly colored cloak, and armor polished to reflect the sun. So intent on conquering distant lands was Alexander that he had rejected advice to delay his departure from Macedonia until he had married and fathered an heir³², to forestall instability in case of his death. He had further alarmed his principal adviser, an experienced older man, by giving away virtually all his land and property in order to strengthen the army, thereby creating new landowners who would furnish troops. “What,” he was asked,” do you have left for yourself?” “My hopes,” Alexander replied. Those hopes centered on constructing a heroic image of himself as a warrior as glorious as the incomparable Achilles of Homer's Iliad. Alexander always kept a copy of the Iliad under his pillow, along with a dagger. Alexander's aspirations and his behavior represented the ultimate expression of the Homeric vision of the glorious conquering warrior.

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The Attack on the Persian Empire

Alexander cast a spear into the earth of Anatolia³³ when in 334 B.C. he crossed the Hellespont strait from Europe to Asia (in what is today part of northwestern Turkey), thereby claiming the Asian continent for himself in Homeric fashion as “territory won by the spear.” The first battle of the campaign, at the River Granicus³⁴ in western Anatolia, proved the worth of Alexander's Macedonian and Greek cavalry, which charged across the river and up the bank to rout the opposing Persians. Alexander visited the legendary king Midas's old capital of Gordion in Phrygia, where an oracle had promised the lordship of Asia to whoever could loose a seemingly impenetrable knot of rope tying the yoke of an ancient chariot preserved in the city. The young Macedonian, so the story goes, cut the Gordion knot with his sword. In 333 B.C. the Persian king, Darius, finally faced Alexander in battle at Issus³⁵, near the southeastern corner of Anatolia. Alexander's army defeated its more numerous opponents with a characteristically bold strike of cavalry through the left side of the Persian lines followed by a flanking maneuver against the king's position in the center. Darius had to flee from the field to avoid capture, leaving behind his wives and daughters, who had accompanied his campaign in keeping with royal Persian tradition. Alexander's scrupulously chivalrous treatment of the Persian royal women³⁶ after their capture at Issus reportedly boosted his reputation among the peoples of the king's empire.

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The Siege of Tyre

When Tyre, a heavily fortified city on the coast of what is now Lebanon, refused to surrender to him in 332 B.C., Alexander employed the siege machines and catapults developed by his father to breach its walls³⁷. The capture of Tyre rang the death knoll of the impregnable city-state. Although successful sieges remained rare after Alexander because well-constructed city walls still presented formidable barriers to attackers, Alexander's success against Tyre increased the terror of a siege for a city's general population. No longer could the citizens of a city-state confidently assume that their defensive system could withstand the technology of their enemy's offensive weapons indefinitely. The now-present fear that a siege might actually breach a city's walls made it much harder psychologically for city-states to remain united in the face of threats from enemies like aggressive kings.

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Alexander in Egypt

Alexander next took over Egypt, where hieroglyphic inscriptions seem to show that he probably presented himself as the successor to the Persian king³⁸ as the land's ruler rather than as an Egyptian pharaoh. On the coast, to the west of the Nile River, Alexander founded a new city in 331 B.C. named Alexandria³⁹ after himself, the first of the many cities he would later go on to establish as far east as Afghanistan. During his time in Egypt, Alexander also paid a mysterious visit to the oracle of the god Ammon, whom the Greeks regarded as identical to Zeus, at the oasis of Siwah far out in the western Egyptian desert. Alexander told no one the details of his consultation of the oracle, but the news got out that he had been informed he was the son of the god⁴⁰ and that he joyfully accepted the designation as true.

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The Conquest of Persia

In 331 B.C., Alexander crushed the Persian king's main army at the battle of Gaugamela⁴¹ in northern Mesopotamia near the border of modern Iraq and Iran. He subsequently proclaimed himself king of Asia in place of the Persian king. For the heterogeneous populations of the Persian Empire, the succession of a Macedonian to the Persian throne meant essentially no change in their lives. They continued to send the same taxes to a remote master, whom they rarely if ever saw. As in Egypt, Alexander left the local administrative system of the Persian empire in place, even retaining some Persian governors. His long-term aim seems to have been to forge an administrative corps composed of Macedonians, Greeks, and Persians working together to rule the territory he conquered with his army.

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Alexander's March to the East

Alexander next led his army farther east⁴² into territory hardly known to the Greeks. He pared his force to reduce the need for supplies, which were hard to acquire in the arid country through which they were marching. Each hoplite in Greek armies customarily had a personal servant to carry his armor and pack. Alexander, imitating Philip, trained his men to carry their own equipment, thereby creating a leaner force by cutting the number of army servants dramatically. As with all ancient armies, however, a large number of noncombatants trailed after the fighting force: merchants who set up little markets at every stop, women whom soldiers had taken as mates along the way and their children, entertainers, and prostitutes. Although supplying these hangers-on was not Alexander's responsibility, their foraging for themselves made it harder for Alexander's quartermasters to find what they needed to supply the army proper.

An ancient army's demand for supplies usually left a trail of destruction and famine for local inhabitants in the wake of its march. Hostile armies simply took whatever they wanted. Friendly armies expected local people to sell or donate food to its supply officers and also to the merchants trailing along. These entrepreneurs would set up markets to resell locally obtained provisions to the soldiers. Since most farmers in antiquity had practically no surplus to sell, they found this expectation— which was in reality a requirement— a terrific hardship. The money the farmers received was of little use to them because there was nothing to buy with it in the countryside, where their neighbors had also had to participate in the forced marketing of their subsistence.

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Alexander in Afghanistan and India

From the heartland of Persia, Alexander in 329 B.C. marched northeastward into the trackless steppes of Bactria⁴³ (modern Afghanistan). When he proved unable to subdue completely the highly mobile locals, who avoided pitched battles in favor of the guerrilla tactics of attack and retreat, Alexander settled for an alliance that he sealed by marrying the Bactrian princess Roxane in 327 B.C. In this same period, Alexander completed the cold-blooded suppression of both real and imagined resistance to his plans⁴⁴ among the aristocrats in his officer corps. As in past years, he used accusations of treachery or disloyalty as justification for the execution of those Macedonians he had come to distrust. These executions, like the destruction of Thebes in 335 B.C., demonstrate Alexander's appreciation of terror as a disincentive to rebellion.

From Bactria Alexander headed east to India⁴⁵. He probably intended to push on all the way through to China in search of the edge of the farthest land on the earth, which Aristotle, whom Philip had once employed as the young Alexander's tutor, had taught was a sphere. Seventy days of marching through monsoon rains, however, finally shattered the nerves of Alexander's soldiers. In the spring of 326 B.C. they mutinied⁴⁶ on the banks of the Hyphasis River (the modern Beas) in western India. Alexander was forced to agree to lead them in the direction of home. When his men had balked before, Alexander had always been able to shame them back into action by sulking in his tent like Achilles in the Iliad. This time the soldiers were beyond shame.

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The Return of Alexander

After the mutiny of his troops in northwestern India and his bitter acquiescence to their demand to return homeward, Alexander led his army south down the course of the Indus River⁴⁷. Along the way he took out his frustration at being stopped in his eastward march by slaughtering the Indian tribes who resisted him and by risking his life more flamboyantly then ever before. As a climax to his frustrated rage, he flung himself over the wall of an Indian town to face the enemy alone like a Homeric hero⁴⁸. His horrified officers were barely able to rescue him in time; even so, he received grievous wounds. At the mouth of the Indus on the Indian Ocean, Alexander turned a portion of his army west through the fierce desert of Gedrosia⁴⁹. Another portion took an easier route inland, while a third group sailed westward along the coast to explore for possible sites for new settlements and harbors. Alexander himself led the contingent that braved the desert, planning to surpass earlier Persian kings by marching through territory that they had found impossible. There a flash flood wiped out most of the noncombatants following the army. Many of the soldiers also died on the march through the desert, expiring from lack of water and the heat, which has been recorded at 127 degrees in the shade in that area. Alexander, as always, shared his men's hardships. In one legendary episode from this horrible ordeal, a few men were said to have brought him a helmet containing some water they had found. Alexander spilled the water out onto the sand rather than drink when his men could not. The remains of the army finally reached safety in the heartland of Persia in 324 B.C.⁵⁰

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Alexander's Last Plans

When he had returned to Persia, Alexander promptly began to formulate plans for an invasion of the Arabian peninsula and, to follow that, all of North Africa west of Egypt. By the time of his return to Persia, Alexander had dropped all pretense of ruling over the Greeks as anything other than an absolute monarch. Despite his earlier promise to respect the internal freedom of the Greek city-states, he impinged on their autonomy by sending a peremptory decree ordering them to restore to citizenship the large number of exiles from the Greek city-states⁵¹, who had been created over the previous decades of war in Greece and whose status as wandering, stateless persons was creating unrest. Even more striking was his communication that he wished to receive the honors due a god⁵². Initially dumbfounded by this request, the leaders of most Greek states soon complied by sending honorary delegations to him as if he were a god. The Spartan Damis pithily expressed the only prudent position on Alexander's deification open to the cowed Greeks: “If Alexander wishes to be a god, we agree that he be called a god.” Scholars continue to debate Alexander's motive for desiring the Greeks to acknowledge him as a god, but few now accept a formerly popular theory that he sought divinity because he believed the city-states would then have to obey his orders as originating from a divinity, whose authority would supersede that of all earthly regimes. Personal rather than political motives best explain his request. He almost certainly had come to believe that he was the son of Zeus; after all, Greek mythology told many stories of Zeus producing children by mating with a human female.⁵³ Most of those legendary offspring were mortal, but Alexander's conquest showed that he had surpassed them. His feats must be superhuman, he could well have believed, because they exceeded the bounds of human possibility. Alexander's accomplishments demonstrated that he had achieved godlike power and therefore must be a god himself. Alexander's divinity was, in ancient terms, a natural consequence of his power.

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The Aims of Alexander

Alexander's overall aims can best be explained as interlinked goals: the conquest and administration of the known world and the exploration and possible colonization of new territory beyond. Conquest through military action was a time-honored pursuit for Macedonian aristocrats like Alexander. He included non-Macedonians⁵⁴ in his administration and army because he needed their expertise, not because he wished to promote an abstract notion of what has sometimes been called “the brotherhood of man.” Alexander's explorations benefited numerous scientific fields from geography to botany because he took along scientifically minded writers to collect and catalogue the new knowledge that they encountered. The far-flung new cities⁵⁵ that he founded served as loyal outposts to keep the peace in conquered territory and provide warnings to headquarters in case of local uprisings. They also created new opportunities for trade in valuable goods such as spices that were not produced in the Mediterranean region.

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The Death of Alexander

Alexander's plans to conquer Arabia and North Africa were extinguished by his premature death⁵⁶ from a fever and heavy drinking on June 10, 323 B.C. He had already been suffering for months from depression brought on by the death of his best friend, Hephaistion. Close since their boyhoods, Alexander and Hephaistion were probably lovers. When Hephaistion died in a bout of excessive drinking, Alexander went wild with grief. The depth of his emotion was evident when he planned to build an elaborate temple to honor Hephaistion as a god. Meanwhile, Alexander threw himself into preparing for his Arabian campaign by exploring the marshy lowlands of southern Mesopotamia. Perhaps it was on one of these trips that he contracted the malaria-like fever that, exacerbated by a two-day drinking binge, killed him.

Like Pericles, Alexander had made no plans about what should happen if he should die unexpectedly. His wife Roxane was to give birth to their first child only some months after Alexander's death. When at Alexander's deathbed his commanders asked him to whom he bequeathed his kingdom, he replied, “To the most powerful.”⁵⁷

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The Effect of Alexander

The Athenian orator Aeschines (c. 397-322 B.C.) well expressed the bewildered reaction of many people to the events of Alexander's lifetime: “What strange and unexpected event has not occurred in our time? The life we have lived is no ordinary human one, but we were born to be an object of wonder to posterity.”⁵⁸ Alexander himself certainly attained legendary status in later times. Stories of fabulous exploits attributed to him became popular folk tales throughout the ancient world, even reaching distant regions where Alexander had never trod, such as deep into Africa. The popularity of the legend of Alexander as a symbol of the height of achievement for a masculine warrior-hero served as one of his most persistent legacies to later ages. That the worlds of Greece and the Near East had been brought into closer contact than ever before represented the other long-lasting effect of his astonishing career.