Alexander the Great
Alexander was born in 356. His father was king Philip II of
Macedonia, where old-style kingship had continued untouched by
distant Athenian models of aristocracy or democracy. When his son
was born, Philip was leading his armies in a policy of expansion
that soon brought him control of the whole of Greece. Philip
was a brilliant leader and strategist and in 338, at the battle of
Chaironeia, he defeated the Greeks who had been encouraged to resist
him by the great speeches of Demosthenes at Athens. For
Philip, Athens was a very special place and he respected its
citizens. He had called Aristotle from studies at Plato's
Academy to be Alexander's tutor. He also needed its fleet, for
he intended to expand his empire into the Middle East, but in 336
Philip was assassinated and Alexander, who had already led the
Macedonian cavalry at Chaironea, became king at the age of twenty.
Seeing his age, Thebes rebelled while he was up beyond the
Danube. He returned south, captured Thebes in 335, and
destroyed it, although he ordered the house where Pindar had lived
to be spared. Instead of establishing a firm power base in
Greece, Alexander at once set out against the Persians who were in
confusion after the murder of their king. He first destroyed
their naval bases in Phoenicia, then went to Egypt and founded the
city of Alexandria. In 331, he was beyond the Tigris and after
a great victory against the Persians he captured Babylon. In
330 he was in Persepolis, from where he set off northwards. In
western Afghanistan he founded the city Alexandria in Arachosia,
better known as Kandahar and in 328 he was in the region of
Samarkand, and founded "Alexandria at the World's End"
(Khojent). By 327, Alexander was master of the whole area now
called Iran, and beyond. He was ruling by now, not like a Macedonian
king, but like the Persian Great King, before whom all had to bow
low.
By 326, Alexander had led his army down into the Punjab (north-west
India) but there they refused to go on. They were so far from
home and they dreaded fighting the Indian war-elephants. So
after exploring the delta of the Indus he turned towards the
west. Driven by strange energies, Alexander set out on an
expedition to the mouth of the Euphrates through desert and floods,
then returned to Babylon and insisted on marrying all his Greek
officers to Persian women. He himself had already married
Roxana, up in Turkestan, but now he married Statira, a daughter of
the last Persian king Darius, as well.
In the summer of 323 he suddenly fell ill and died, without a son
yet born, without a successor. The result of his campaigns was
a collapse of the Persian Peace, while his settlements were too
scattered to be the basis for any permanent new order.
The most significant result of his new cities was the lasting
presence of Greek culture in this part of the world so that, when
the first king of all India, Asoka, was converted to Buddhism in
259, he turned to the Greek artists still living in India to create
a representative art for this new state religion. In this way,
many of the artistic forms of Buddhism throughout the Orient derive
directly from those developed in Greece.
After Alexander
After Alexander's death, the Greeks united in a new
anti-Macedonian, Hellenic league but Antipatros, who had been
Alexander's governor in Greece, fought back, using soldiers
returning from the East, and defeated Athens, destroying its
fleet. Democracy was abolished, the great Athenian orator
Demosthenes took poison, many emigrated.
The Empire of Alexander broke into three parts, the Macedonian, the
Egyptian, and the Asian. Alexander's bodyguard and secretary,
Ptolemy ('the warlike') became governor of Egypt, taking back and
burying in Alexandria the body of Alexander. He founded there
a Hellenistic kingdom that only came to an end in 31 BC, with the
deaths of Cleopatra and Mark Antony after the Battle of
Actium. He wrote the memoirs of Alexander, using Alexander's
own journal, and this became the source for much of what we know.
If Ptolemy planned, his son built; under Ptolemy II were built in
Alexandria the Pharos (lighthouse), the Museum (Temple of the Muses)
and the Library designed to contain everything important ever
written in Greek. He also built a canal linking the Nile to
the Red Sea. The rulers of Alexandria celebrated the cult of the
deified Alexander. Alexandria became the main intellectual center of
the Hellenistic Age; it was entirely Macedonian in its ruling class,
governing the native Egyptians firmly with well-organized
bureaucracy.
The commander of Alexander's foot-soldiers, Seleukos, gained
the Asian possessions and would have taken Macedonia too, but a son
of Ptolemy who was his friend murdered him in 280. His son was
called Antiochus, which became the dynastic name and was given to a
number of cities of the "Seleucid" empire centered in modern Syria.
The history of Palestine (Judea) at this time is that of the power
struggle between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, these latter
keeping control until 198, when Antiochus III incorporated it into
his Seleucid empire.
Macedonia, having lost its royal line, became weaker, although it
kept control of the Greek cities until 229 when Athens sold the
official copies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to Ptolemy III
and bought her freedom, proclaiming herself a neutral city, friendly
to all powers. This enabled Athens to become the City of
Philosophers, the University city.