EMBASSIES

although spies are the agency which no doubt springs most readily to mind in the context of information-gathering, embassies could also make a major contribution in this area. This is a point made very effectively in the Siasset-namah, or ‘Book of Government’, composed in the eleventh century by an Arab official, but drawing on sources from the Sasanian period. It is worth quoting at length:

the preceding part of this study has shown that information of strategic and wider significance was obtained by the empire during late antiquity, and that there was a significant difference between the levels of information that the Romans possessed about the Persians on the one hand and northern peoples on the other. This third and final part of the study considers the question of how this information was acquired, and suggests reasons for the difference between east and north. Officially initiated information-gathering through agencies such as spies and embassies is one obvious subject requiring investigation, and this will be taken up in Chapter 6. But it is apparent that some information entered the empire (as well as leaving it) through informal channels: the interaction of ordinary inhabitants on either side of the empire's boundaries, already discussed in detail in Chapter 2, did not occur without the transmission of news. This phenomenon is the concern of the present chapter.

All too often in the cases discussed in Chapter 4 the agency by which information was acquired is not specified. As has been seen, late Roman writers frequently employ generalised expressions to the effect that an official or officer ‘heard’ or ‘learned’ an item of information, without specifying the source of this knowledge.

Satrapal government

When he invaded Asia, Alexander was literally on new ground. There were no precedents for the administration of the territory he annexed, no system inherited from his father. From the beginning he acted not merely as a conqueror but as the proper heir of the Achaemenids. His first gesture, if one may believe the vulgate tradition (Diod. XVII.17.2; Justin XI.5.10), was to make a spear-cast into Asia and claim the land as ‘spear-won’. There is no reason to dismiss the story as apocryphal, and it is to some degree corroborated by Alexander's first administrative acts, which were simply to place his own men over the existing satrapies, preserving the Persian hierarchy of command. In Hellespontine Phrygia he appointed as satrap Calas son of Harpalus, one of the commanders of the expeditionary force of 336, and he ordered the level of tribute to remain unchanged (Arr. 1.17.1). The territory was still subject under precisely the same conditions as under the Persian administration; the ruler was merely Macedonian and not Persian, as was his governor, who retained the Persian title of office (SIG3 302).

The centre of Persian rule in Asia Minor was Sardes, its impregnable acropolis both fortress and treasury. From earliest times, it seems, this citadel had been occupied by a garrison commander directly appointed by the king, and its garrison was quite separate from the mercenary army maintained by the satrap. The Lydian administration may indeed have been the inspiration for Xenophon's formalised picture of Persian government with its rigid distinction between satrapal and fortress commanders (Xen. Cyrop. VIII.6.1–13; Oec. 4.5–7).

The legacy of Philip

The period 336–323 B.C. is inevitably designated the age of Alexander. It marked a huge expansion of the imperial boundaries of Macedon, a virtually unparalleled outpouring of resources, material and human. Imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo. The prophecy made for Romulus'; foundation applies even more appositely to the milieu of Alexander. His empire was in any sense world-wide, his concept of his person and achievements superhuman. From the time of his death his name has been an evocative symbol of worldly glory, alternately eulogised and excoriated as the type of the magnanimous conqueror or the intemperate tyrant; and the history of his reign has all too often been a thinly disguised biography, distorted by the personality and values of its author. This book is an attempt to analyse Alexander's impact on his world without any preconceived model of his personality or motives. Sineiraet studio is perhaps an impossible ideal, given the controversial and highly emotive nature of some of the subject matter, but one should at least attempt to base one's interpretation upon the extant sources. Even there we may find prejudice enough, but we have some prospect of identifying and discounting bias, both apologetic and vituperative. Our history of the period can only be fragmentary, based on episodes randomly highlighted in the literary tradition or the scattering of documentary evidence preserved by chance. We may not go beyond the material at our disposal.

Alexander and the Corinthian League

The battle of Chaeronea marked an epoch for all ages. With the dead was buried the freedom of Greece. So Lycurgus was to lament in 330 B.C., and for all the rhetoric it is not too great an exaggeration (Leocr. 50). The crushing military defeat was compounded by a political settlement which gave Philip carte blanche to intervene wherever and whenever he pleased. The states of southern Greece, most of them under sympathetic governments, had formed individual alliances with him, and the constitutive meeting at Corinth had welded them together in a common peace. All the parties agreed to remain at peace with each other, to maintain the constitutions in force at the time the peace was established and to campaign against violations of the peace when called upon by the council and its hegemon. All this was deceptively bland. As all Greeks knew, the history of multilateral agreements over the last century had been a history of exploitation by the dominant power, whether Sparta or Thebes. A peace treaty might guarantee autonomy for all Greeks, but the most powerful state would impose its own concept of autonomy while ignoring the most blatant violations in its own sphere of interest. The Spartans, spurred on by Agesilaus, had insisted that the autonomy of the cities of Boeotia involved the dissolution of their federal government, but they had totally ignored their own subjection of Messenia.

The reign of Alexander marks a watershed in the development of the ruler cult. After his death divine honours for living monarchs become almost commonplace. Before his time such phenomena are very scantily reported in the sources, and the few attested instances of divine honours for living men have been treated with scepticism by some modern scholars. There can be little doubt that Alexander changed the entire climate of thought, creating aprecedent for the worship of a sovereign as god incarnate and prefiguring the cults of the Hellenistic rulers. What is far from clear is the process of evolution in the course of the reign and the extent of Alexander's belief in his own divinity. At one level there is his deep consciousness of his heroic ancestry (as an Argead he took his lineage back to Heracles and ultimately to Dionysus), at another there is his conviction that he was in some sense the son of Zeus, the equal at least of Heracles, and finally there is the conception of himself as a god among men. These categories are fundamentally different and represent different aspects of Greek religious thought, but in Alexander's mind they must have been conflated. His acceptance of one role could lead automatically to another, and the son of Zeus might (after sufficient infusions of flattery) come to view himself as a god in his own right.

Originally there had been a clear distinction between god and man, based on the impassable gulf between mortality and immortality. The gods by definition were ageless and deathless, whereas mortals by definition were neither.

The accession

The first few days of Alexander's reign must have been among the most critical of his career. Unfortunately no connected account survives of them. There are scraps of epitome and random flashbacks from later history, but most of the crucial details are irretrievably lost. There is infinite scope for speculation and imaginative reconstruction, but the sources themselves allow very little to be said. We must be prepared to admit our ignorance, however galling that may be.

At first there was turmoil. Alexander's friends gathered round him and occupied the palace, already armed for battle (Arr. 1.25.2). There was every reason to expect trouble, given the dynastic troubles of Philip's last year. The family and supporters of Attalus will certainly not have welcomed his accession, and there were other figures who might oppose him or form a focus for opposition. Amyntas (who had ephemerally succeeded his father Perdiccas in 359) and the sons of Aeropus from the princely house of Lyncestis are said to have commanded general attention (Plut. Mor. 327c). Only one of these groups is mentioned in the context of the assassination, the Lyncestian brothers. The sources strongly indicate that they were involved in the actual murder.3 That may be a post eventum fabrication to justify their subsequent execution, but there is no reason to believe so. The brothers may well have helped Pausanias plan the assassination.

Alexander's death led inevitably to the dismemberment of his empire. There was no immediate successor, and from the outset the marshals at Babylon had no intention of empowering a genuine king. If we may believe Curtius and Justin, their first plan was to await the birth of the child conceived by Rhoxane. Nothing guaranteed a male issue, and it was patent that the ultimate monarch would be a figurehead. The regency would be everything. This settlement with its unborn king was immediately denounced as preposterous. Incited by the phalanx commander Meleager, the infantry mutinied and pressed the claims of Arrhidaeus, Alexander's mentally deficient halfbrother. The result was a compromise. Arrhidaeus was proclaimed king, assuming the regnal name of Philip (III), and a few months later Rhoxane's child, fortunately a son, joined him in the kingship, named Alexander (IV), after his father. It was a dual kingship, as contemporary documents show, but this strange pairing of fool and infant was never more than a political expedient. The kings were the puppets of their protectors, first of Perdiccas, who became the effective guardian of the kings at Babylon and then of Antipater, who assumed the guardianship at Triparadeisus (321) and transferred the hapless rulers to Macedonia. The farce ended abruptly late in 317, when Arrhidaeus' wife, Eurydice (a granddaughter of Philip II), challenged the current guardian, Polyperchon, and attempted to enforce regal authority. She and her husband were dead within months, and the ultimate victor of the power struggle in Macedon (Antipater's eldest son, Cassander) interned the infant Alexander with his mother at Amphipolis, pointedly denying them royal privileges.

Thibron's activities after the murder of Harpalus are described by Diodorus and Arrian (Succ. f 1.16–19 Roos). Both sources give considerable detail, clearly taken from a common original, but concentrate on different aspects of the story. Arrian (or rather his excerptor Photius) is more attracted by the sensational details of his defeat and capture by Ophellas, whereas Diodorus concentrates on the earlier part of the narrative. It is evident from their joint account that the campaigns in Cyrenaica were full of action and took place over a considerable period. Unfortunately they relate the story in a single piece, placed in the general context of the end of the Lamian War; there is no precise chronological fixing. Justin permits a rough dating when he places Ptolemy's acquisition of Cyrene (the ultimate result of Thibron's campaigns) some time before Perdiccas' invasion of Egypt in 321 (xiii.6.20, 8.1). The Parian Marble to some degree confirms, synchronising Ophellas' operations in Cyrene with the fall of Athens, in the archon year 322/1 (FGrH 239 b io: Ptolemy's visit in person (Arr. Succ. f 1.19) is dated to the next year, after the death of Perdiccas). The evidence so far is consistent and indicates that the war was over and Thibron dead by the end of 322 b.c.

The reign of Alexander the Great has always engrossed the interest of countless readers, and, not surprisingly, the interest has stimulated a flood of biographies. In 1976 it could be said that books on Alexander were appearing at the rate of more than one a year, and the last decade has not witnessed any slackening of publication. A new monograph therefore requires apology and justification. That may in part be provided by the circumstances of writing. Originally this work was conceived as a contribution to Volume vi of the Cambridge Ancient History, designed to give a survey of the period for the informed reader, with reference to the most recent literature. What emerged exceeded all reasonable bounds for a general history, and the Cambridge University Press generously undertook to publish a revised version as a book in its own right. My work is a synthesis of recent research and at the same time represents a distillation of my own thinking. It forms part of a tetralogy. My two-volume Commentary on Arrian's History of Alexander (part 11 not yet published) provides the detailed exposition of evidence and technical discussion of historical and textual cruces. The general historiographical principles of research on Alexander are expounded in my new monograph, From Arrian to Alexander: Studies in Historical Interpretation (Oxford, 1988). In the present work I draw explicitly on my more specialist studies to provide a composite narrative history of the period.

The invasion army of 334 B.C.

In the spring of 334 Alexander's army was assembled at Amphipolis and a smaller expeditionary force was already operating in Asia Minor. The total number of troops is difficult to estimate because of the diversity of figures given in the sources, ranging from a maximum of 43,000 foot and 5,500 horse to a minimum of 30,000 foot and 4,000 horse. Some of the discrepancy may be explained by some authorities including the advance force in their total and others omitting it; but the inconsistencies run deep and cannot all be resolved on that hypothesis. Fortunately the size and composition of the Macedonian contingents is not seriously in doubt. Alexander took with him 12,000 infantry and left the same number with Antipater, his regent in Macedonia (Diod. XVII. 17.4, 5). There was also a body of Macedonians already serving in Asia (Diod. XVII.7.10), several thousands strong. After Alexander crossed the Hellespont the total of his Macedonian infantry was around 15,000. The majority were brigaded in six phalanx divisions (which Arrian usually terms taxeis) and had the collective title of Foot Companions (pezhetairoi). Three of these divisions at least were recruited from the old principalities of Upper Macedonia and are termed asthetairoi, a most mysterious appellation which has yet to be explained satisfactorily.2 The other taxeisdo not apparently bear any distinctive nomenclature, but they may well have been recruited on a similar regional basis (cf. Arr. III. 16.11). The other major component of the Macedonian infantry was the corps of hypaspists.