There is also no persuasive analogy between the campaigns of Alexander and those of Cortés.
Although the Aztecs themselves were an imperial people, who relied upon a highly effective
professional army to conquer their neighbors and take captives (whose hearts were often cut out to
pay a debt of gratitude to the Aztec gods), the Aztecs had never invaded Spain. They had never ruled
over or enslaved Spaniards, and they never had burned any of Spain’s religious sanctuaries to the
ground. Cortés and the conquistadors attacked an empire on the other side of the world that never had
done any harm or good to the Spanish or to Spain.
Alexander and his army attacked the Persians on the grounds that the Persians had invaded the
Greek mainland twice and had burned the temples on the Athenian acropolis to the ground in 480.
These were facts of history. Whether they justified the belated Greek and Macedonian response is not
a question that can be answered objectively.
When Alexander and his army crossed the Hellespont in 334, they challenged the army of the
largest and most successful empire in the long history of great empires of the ancient Near East. The
great Persian kings (Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes) had acquired that empire by force; and their
empire, like every other one in history, was maintained by the same means, at the expense of its
subjects, including many Greeks. We can, and should, study and even admire the Persian political,
administrative, and cultural achievement. But we should not romanticize that achievement out of a
sense of guilt, or because we have not accorded enough attention to the Achaemenids in the past.
Alexander turned out to be far better at the application of force than the Persians of his day. If
Alexander is going to be criticized for acquiring his empire by force, it is a double standard not to
consider how the Persians themselves came into possession of their empire and then held on to it for
200 years. Ironically, the figure with whom Alexander can be compared most profitably in the ancient
world is Cyrus the Great of Persia: each conquered a vast empire; each could play the Fox as well as
the Lion; each became a legend. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Alexander took such care to
restore Cyrus’ tomb after it had been vandalized. Alexander knew greatness when he saw it, and he
honored it.
In sum, Alexander was not a genocidal thug like Stalin or Hitler. Nor was he a kind of ancient
conquistador. Even Justin, who is invariably hostile to Alexander, noted that Alexander had kept his
soldiers from ravaging Asia as they marched forward, telling them that they ought to spare their
property and not destroy the very things they had come to take possession of. Self-interest was the
motive for sparing Asia, but it was a motive that also profited the civilians of Asia and their property.
A PRODIGY OF WARFARE
Rather, Alexander was a prodigy of warfare. A virtuoso of violence personally, in battle Alexander
recklessly exposed himself to the gravest dangers with courage beyond reason but not beyond
explanation. Alexander belonged to that very select group of warriors who enjoy combat itself in the
same way that some of the greatest composers in history have found their greatest fulfillment in the
performance of their own masterpieces.
Alexander also possessed the luck of those who are dear to the gods. He should have been killed at
the battle of the Granicus River in 334, during his very first encounter with the Persian army; or he
should have died inside the mud-brick walls of the Mallian town. But Alexander was not destined to
die in combat, perhaps because he was the very embodiment of ancient warfare itself, the wrath of
Achilles directed against his enemies. For once, the Delphic oracle was unambiguously clear and
correct: at least in battle Alexander III of Macedon really was “invincible.”
Alexander’s terrifying rage in battle, moreover, was the razor-sharp tip of an awesomely well-
trained, experienced, and deadly force: the incomparable Macedonian army. As long as Alexander
led it, the Macedonian army never was defeated in a pitched battle, even when hugely outnumbered.
In charge of that finely tempered instrument of organized violence, Alexander also showed himself
to be a master strategist, logistical planner, and tactician. Although some military strategists have
can be no serious doubt about the daring originality of its conception, leaving aside consideration of
the brilliance of its execution. Until Alexander conquered the Persian empire, few believed that it
could be done. For scholars to assert now that Alexander should have accomplished the impossible in
a different way is a bit like arguing that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay should have reached the
summit of Mount Everest by a different route.
Moreover, by focusing upon the one logistical failure of the campaign, the terrible passage through
Gedrosia, many historians have glossed over the most obvious fact about Alexander’s conquests: the
miraculous logistical fact that in a world completely without motorized transport (let alone air
travel), Alexander personally led a reasonably well-provisioned and invariably successful army of
tens of thousands of soldiers, plus pack animals and camp followers, from Macedon to India and back
to Babylon on a ten-thousand-mile expedition that lasted for more than a decade. Alexander’s
logistical achievement is the standard by which all others in pre-modern military history are
measured.
Alexander’s tactics in the case of individual battles and sieges were based upon an uncanny ability
to understand immediately and clearly the strengths and weaknesses of both his own and his
opponents’ forces in relation to the topography of the fields of battle. Within twenty-four hours of his
arrival at what became the battlefields of the Granicus River, Issos, and Gaugamela, Alexander had
designed troop formations (the tactical square at Gaugamela) and tactics (the pawn sacrifice at
Granicus, the pinning and turning operation at the Hydaspes) exactly suited to the topography and to
what he had learned about the deployment of the forces facing him. It was as if Alexander could see
the impending conflict before it happened and then make the battle at least begin exactly as he
envisioned it. It was a gift from the gods, developed and honed to perfection through early and
repeated application. From earliest youth Alexander had been able to see what others could not see
and draw the correct inferences from it. His sheer intelligence has never been fully appreciated. If his
opening gambit went awry, as it did at Gaugamela, Alexander quickly adjusted. Long before
Napoleon taught the war ministries of early nineteenth-century Europe how to plan in “branches,”
Alexander had shown Darius and the Persian army that he had a whole treeful of secondary tactics
plotted out in advance of each major encounter.
Only Napoleon ever has rivaled Alexander’s extraordinary ability to read the topography of a
battlefield and then to make the tactical adjustments necessary to produce victory. But Alexander
never met a Persian Duke of Wellington and never suffered an Asian Waterloo. He remains the
greatest site-reader of topography in military history. Like Napoleon’s nemesis Wellington,
Alexander was always there on the spot; always read the topography for himself; and did everything
else, too, including leading the Macedonians into battle.
To win the big, pitched battles, whatever the variations of force and topography were, and
however the forces of the opposing armies were maneuvered into contact, Alexander finally used the
same tactic to achieve victory. In the great set-piece battles of the campaign (the Granicus, Issos,
Gaugamela, and the Hydaspes), unlike virtually all modern military general staff officers, Alexander
personally led devastating cavalry charges into the lines of his enemies at exactly the right time, in
exactly the right place. Alexander was a master of concentrating his forces to devastating effect. He
could execute carefully planned attacks and he could improvise on the spot. His sieges became
models for later imitators. He was the first to use catapults as field artillery. As in other spheres of
action, he broke out of the boundaries of accepted military practice, using combinations of differently
armed troops in ways never before imagined, much less executed.
Moreover, campaigns of conquest of entire continents were carefully planned, far in advance of
their execution, right down to the smallest logistical detail. Long before modern military strategists
had elaborated a theoretical science of year-round military campaigning based upon strategic
principles, Alexander had perfected the practical application in his own world. Had von Clausewitz
been around during the fourth century B.C.E. to enumerate his strategic principles, Alexander might
very well have taught the German theorist some useful lessons.
Finally, once he had the taste of victory, Alexander pursued his adversaries with the relentless
speed and insatiable appetite of a natural predator. That speed allowed Alexander to double his own
operative time in action and to halve that of his adversaries. Because of Alexander’s relentless
mobility he often sprang upon his enemies before they were fully aware of his presence. Even in
antiquity Alexander was famous for surprising, not to say shocking, his enemies by his sudden
appearances.
To those who surrendered and recognized his sovereignty, Alexander was generous to a fault; but
to those who insisted upon resistance he was implacable and unmerciful. We are horrified at the sight
of Alexander pouncing upon his victims; at the same time, we cannot help but watch.
Alexander was a military genius, indeed a great creative artist of warfare, the greatest conqueror in
the history of Western civilization and perhaps in that of the world. His tactics, logistics, strategic
vision, and leadership are intrinsically interesting and will be relevant as long as human beings
practice war. But was Alexander the Great anything more than just a marvel of violence and warfare?
A MACEDONIAN MESSIAH?
Some have believed that he was a kind of messiah or forerunner of Jesus. He certainly was not a
messianic or redemptive figure for all of humanity in the mold of Jesus. He was no disciple of the
sixth commandment. Rather, Alexander apparently received a very different set of commandments
from his gods. These were to strike quickly; to strike first; to strike with maximum force; and to
follow up his lightning strikes with alacrity. Although Alexander was not a Macedonian messiah, was
he nevertheless some kind of philosopher-king, sent on a mission from god to harmonize men
generally and to be the reconciler of the world?
THE EMPIRE OF THE BEST
Alexander apparently believed that Zeus was the father of all mankind, as Homer, his first and most
influential teacher, taught him. Greeks, Macedonians, Persians, Bactrians, and Indians all were sons
of Zeus, if not loving brothers. But Alexander also believed that Zeus made the best of mankind
particularly his own. These were the truths that Alexander held to be self-evident. Indeed, throughout
his life he strove to prove by great, even unprecedented deeds that he was one of Zeus’ very own.
Before and after every important battle or undertaking, Alexander prayed or sacrificed to the gods
and goddesses of Greece and Asia, either for their support or to give thanks, and the results, victory
against all odds, victory over all, victory without end, confirmed that his quest and his actions were
sanctioned by the gods. Each and every triumph confirmed that Alexander indeed was among Zeus’
beloved.
It was to this core belief, that the greatest of the Olympians especially loved Alexander and the best
of the rest, that Alexander wished to reconcile the world. Alexander did not intend to establish the
universal brotherhood of mankind. Rather, Alexander’s prayer at Opis was that those apparently
dearest to Zeus, the Macedonians and the Persians, might rule together in harmony and fellowship.
We should not forget that Alexander himself came from an ethnically mixed background, as Attalus
himself fatally implied at the wedding of Philip II to Kleopatra. Alexander’s mother, Olympias, was a
Molossian princess from Epirus. Moreover, Alexander had surrounded himself with people of
different ethnic backgrounds since he was a young man. His first city foundation, Alexandria in Egypt,
was not an ethnically Greek city alone. His first wife was Bactrian. Two more wives were Persian.
Alexander’s father also had married non-Greek and non-Macedonian women, for diplomatic reasons.
But Alexander married his royal Persian wives according to the custom of their country. He also
installed Ada as the governor of Caria, treated the Persian noblewomen captured after the battle of
Issos with restraint and magnanimity, gave a sumptuous funeral to Darius’ wife Stateira, executed his
own generals for their abuse of women, and kept his word to Sisygambis to see to it that her daughters
married well. His treatment of women in general was extraordinary by the awful standard of
mankind’s history. In a recent collection of essays on the topic of rape in antiquity, Alexander’s name
does not appear in the index: with good reason, for Alexander despised the crime.
None of this is to suggest that the foundation of Alexander’s perspective was not essentially that of
a Macedonian nobleman, deeply steeped in Greek literature (especially Homer and Euripides),
culture, and religion. Throughout his campaigns Alexander made regular sacrifices to the gods and
organized Greek musical and athletic festivals. By these acts he showed that he saw the world through
rather traditional Greek eyes. Nevertheless, in contact with the peoples of the Near East, Alexander
certainly developed a more open mind about the so-called barbarians and their customs than many of
his Greek or Macedonian companions, and he was willing to accommodate himself and his empire to
the best of what he found in Persia, in keeping with his fundamental principle.
Indeed, in every area of activity, in pursuit of his goal to inscribe over the whole earth his belief
that Zeus made the best his very own, Alexander became a transgressor of those boundaries by which
many of his contemporaries organized and defined the kind of world they wished to construct:
boundaries on maps between West and East; boundaries of dress and custom among old enemies;
boundaries of erotic impulses directed toward his fellow human beings; and, the final frontier, the
boundaries that separated men and gods.
As Alexander swiftly and fearlessly crossed th
ose boundaries, he outpaced many of his Greek and
Macedonian companions who either could not or did not wish to keep up with a man who would
never stop marching until he reached the ends of the earth over which his father ruled, and fulfilled
what he clearly believed was his destiny: to conquer and rule all of Asia and Europe as a god, in
harmony and fellowship with the best.
The government of Alexander’s world empire would not have been one of the people, by the
people, for the people; what Alexander had in mind, rather, was a world government of the best, by
the best, for the best. Alexander was not a supporter of the egalitarian ideal because he did not
believe that all men were created equal or that they were endowed with inalienable rights. Alexander
was not a Macedonian Montesquieu or Locke. But he was a kind of proto-multiculturalist in the very
limited sense that he could imagine the possibility that some of those most beloved of Zeus were not
members of his own country.
Such was the world that Alexander was striving to create when he died in Babylon in June 323.
His death prevented him from achieving his goal of conquering the world and establishing a world
empire of the best. Did it also wipe out what he had done?
CHAPTER 31
Alexander and the Ambiguity of Greatness
A MERE COMET?
It has become positively fashionable for historians to deny that Alexander had any historical legacies
at all. Like a fiery comet, Alexander blazed across the sky at the end of the fourth century B.C.E.,
exploded, and then disappeared in a cloud of mythic vapor.
Such a preposterous view is a classic example, perhaps the classic example, of how the study of
the past is influenced by contemporary trends. As war and empire became increasingly unpopular
over the course of the twentieth century, so too did those who had been good at them. Indeed,
Alexander’s conquests seem to have become a source of embarrassment or guilt among Western
historians—as historians of non-European heritage have duly noted.
War is undoubtedly bad. But human beings have always waged war. Indeed, war preceded the
invention of history itself by thousands of years, if, by “history,” we mean the formal, written inquiry