The Age of Alexander The Great
Europe's history in early centuries is best described as under a spotlight, roving this way and that along the shores of the Mediterranean as the continent's drama unfolds. Following the decline of Athens, Greece's cities saw constant strife, sometimes against, sometimes in alliance with, the ever-menacing Persians. In 359 the kingdom of Macedon came under an ambitious king, Philip, assertively Greek and claiming descent from the Homeric Achilles.
His army of pikemen, able to engage an enemy at more than arm's length, swiftly subjugated the city states of Greece. In 336 Philip was assassinated by hands unknown, and was succeeded by his twenty-year-old son, Alexander.
The youth was clearly extraordinary. He had been taught military leadership by his father, who hired Aristotle among others to tutor him in philosophy and politics. Small but charismatic, he reputedly had one blue eye and one brown, and a mesmeric hold on those he commanded. Undaunted by his youth, perhaps emboldened by it, Alexander set out to fulfil Philip's ambition to advance his empire beyond Greece into the lands held by Persia.
It was to be the most remarkable venture in the history of European conquest. Crossing Asia Minor, Alexander in 333 defeated a much larger Persian force under Darius III at the Battle of Issus.
He took Darius's daughters captive and was later to marry two of them, though in the meantime he was entranced by a Bactrian princess, Roxana. Rather than simply return home with honour satisfied, Alexander now marched south to Egypt. Here his general, Ptolemy, went on to found a dynasty that was to end with Cleopatra.
Ptolemy built the library at Alexandria, inventing papyrus scrolls and banning their export to the rival library of Pergamum, where costly animal parchment was still in use.
Alexander again defeated Darius and marched through Mesopotamia and across a defenceless Persia to the banks of the Indus in India. Here his generals mutinied and demanded they return home.
Alexander thus had to travel back across the sands of Persia to Babylon, where in 323 he died of disease, aged just thirty-two. Every where he went, Alexander founded cities and colonies, many named after himself. He had crushed the greatest empire in south-west Asia.
He married his troops to local women and left his commanders as local governors. But the influence of these Hellenistic colonies on the lands traversed by Alexander was not political. He left no empire. Like most such ventures, Alexander's journey was ultimately fruitless, the expression of a gigantic vanity and greed for booty.
His imperial creation was vacuous and never established a secure frontier for the Greeks in Asia Minor or Mesopotamia. It was to prove Europe's most porous boundary throughout history. But the short-lived Macedonian empire did have one lasting outcome. It entrenched Hellenistic civilization, that of Greek language and literature, across the Mediterranean. As mainland Greece fell victim to civil war, Greek traders and scholars spread out across the sea, a diaspora that historians estimate eventually numbered ten million people.
The library at Alexandria became the repository and disseminator of Greece's cultural heritage.
Greece's political glory died with Alexander. But his reputation lived on, appealing to the vanity of later rulers. With his death, the window on the human spirit opened by classical Athens was to close.
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