Travels with Alexander the Great

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The Battle of the Persian Gates – Persia’s Thermopylae

Nabil Rastani writes:

The “last stand of the 300 Spartans” in 480 BC is said to have been a battle in which tyranny and evil (East, Persia) fought against freedom and good (West,Greece ) and is sometimes said to have been the “only battle were a smaller army stood up to a larger one, until utter destruction”. However little is known of the stand made by Ariobarzanes, and the heroic few who were armed with little but fought and withstood 31 days of brutal and aggressive fighting against Alexander and the Macedonians until at last they were ultimately destroyed in 330BC.

According to A.R Burn in Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World, the Persian Gates played the role "of a Persian Thermopylae and like Thermopylae it fell." The Battle of the Persian Gates served as a kind of reversal of the Battle of Thermopylae, fought in Greece in 480 BC in an attempt to hold off the invading Persian forces. Here, on Alexander's campaign to extract revenge for the Persian invasion of Greece, he faced the same situation, only this time the Greeks were the invaders..

Curtius claimed that: "[The Persians]...Fought a memorable fight... Unarmed as they were, they seized the armed men in their embrace, and dragging them down to the ground... [and] stabbed most of them with their own weapons."- (Curtius 5.3.31-2)

Read an account of the battle from the Persian perspective here:

http://www.iranian.com/main/2011/may/ariobarzanes

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"The ancient writers tell of the peculiar 'melting' glance of his eyes, or of the way in which, as Plutarch says,
his body seemed to glow. ... He also grew up, to the delight of Philip, serious-minded, untiring, passionately keen
to succeed in any difficult task, and yet more keen the more difficult it was. He was a great reader, too. He had
been early caught by the glamour of the Tale of Troy, like most Greek boys..." -- A. R. Burn

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Professor Ernst Badian, John Moors Cabot Professor of History Emeritus, died on February 1 2011. Badian was considered one of the great historians of Greece and Rome of the 20th century and was the first to challenge Tarn's portrayal of Alexander as a visionaryhero.

His obituary in the Harvard Gazette states:

“Unusually for someone whose main field was Roman history, Badian was also a major force in Greek history. In particular, beginning with an article on the city of Alexandria published in 1960, he brought about a revolution in modern understanding of one of the main figures in the tapestry of ancient history: Alexander III of Macedon, often called “the Great.” Reacting against the hero worship that was still offered to Alexander in the mid-20th century, Badian forced historians to look again at the contradictory and confusing texts on which most knowledge rests, and to realize that Alexander was as ruthless as any of the Roman generals that march through the pages of “Foreign Clientelae.”

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/02/ernst-badian-professor-of-history-emeritus-85/

According to Edwin Judge, emeritus professor of history at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, “Ernst was the first person to show that Alexander was not all that really great as he was idolized".

“In a study first presented in New Zealand in 1961, Ernst addressed ‘Alexander and the loneliness of power.’ He called him a ‘perfect illustration of the man who conquered the world, only to lose his soul. He found himself at last on a lonely pinnacle over an abyss, with no use for his power, and security unattainable.’ He believed that Alexander’s genius was such that he ended an epoch and began another — but one of unceasing war and misery,’’ Judge said.

http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-23/yourtown/29575038_1_alexander-emeritus-professor-harvard

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A collection of articles from 1958 onwards from 'one of the world's greatest ancient historians',
these papers have completely changed the scholarly consensus on the conqueror, presenting him
for the first time according to the model of a dictator, tyrant and mass murderer.

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Alexander the Great and the Loneliness of Power



The Triumph of Alexander the Great 1885 Gustave Moreau

By Conrad Clough

Alexander the Great and the Loneliness of Power, by Ernst Badian, paints a picture of Alexander the Great that focuses not on his military prowess but rather on his isolation as king. The portrait that one receives from reading Badian is not an especially flattering one and Alexander does not come off as all that great, except maybe to a follower of Nicolo Machiavelli, yet the idea of Alexander that Badian presents rings true. Alexander was at once the most powerful and the loneliest man in the world. Here we will explore how Badian’s ideas about the Macedonian king are intermeshed with Alexander’s motivations and successes, and ultimately with the difficulties that followed after his death and 323 BCE.

The roots of Alexander’s motivations can be found in his upbringing as the son of Philip II and potential king of the Argead line. This upbringing directly motivated his desire for military conquest, and also stood behind his self-imposed isolation from all others as king. The Argead kings of Macedonia typically did not have long, stable reigns, with the only thing separating a current king from a former one a single dagger thrust or cup of poisoned wine.

This is a lesson that Alexander learned well in 336 when his father fell to an assassin. Whether or not Alexander had anything to do with Philip’s assassination, the young king would not forget about it, and this would be one of the chief reasons for the loneliness of isolation that he would subject himself to. By keeping every one, apparent friend and enemy alike, at arm’s length Alexander hoped to avoid his father’s fate. Alexander took this lesson to heart and Badian shows him to be, at best, extremely cautious degenerating into outright paranoia as his reign progressed. Only Hephaestion was allowed to get relatively close to the monarch, and Hephaestion who he even ran naked with in a race around the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus (Green) was a very close friend from childhood, and “the only man he fully trusted” (Badian).

Other than Hephaestian, anybody that got overly familiar with Alexander, such as Clitus having the temerity to remind Alexander that it was the army that had gotten him everything he had so far obtained, would be marked as a traitor and quickly put to death. Similarly, anybody who seemed to be amassing to much personal power, or becoming too popular with the soldiers, would find themselves accused of treason and slated for execution. These actions began to move Alexander further and further away from the ‘first among equals’ position that Macedonian rulers had traditionally held, and more and more toward the ‘great king’ position as it existed in Persia. After Hephaestions’s death in 324, Alexander was truly alone in the last year of his life.

Alexander’s isolation can help to explain his amazing success as a military leader, and conversely these successes can help explain his ever greater isolation and loneliness as well. As the son of Philip II and Olympias, descended from both Herakles and Achilles, Alexander was born for success on the battle field, and the training he received as a youth of the Argead line in Pella only served to accentuate those traits passed down to him by his glorious ancestors. Being special can often lead to isolation, and being descended from the two greatest heroes of their respective generations makes one special if nothing else.

Success in war was just as important to Alexander as it had been for his father Philip, because Macedonian kingship relied to a large extent on success in war. The king of Macedonia, though always drawn from the Argead line, was acclaimed by the military. If the current king was not an effective war leader, the military had the power, and occasionally had used it during the course of Macedonian history, to replace the ineffectual king by simply proclaiming another Argead in his place (Thomas). This fact is what drove Philips amazing strides over the course of his reign, and it was also one of the driving forces for Alexander, especially during the early part of his rule. By not turning the military leadership role over to such people as Parmenio, Alexander increased his isolation from others while at the same time increasing his personal power. Had Alexander given “practical charge of the war against Persia” to Parmenio as “was no doubt expected” because of “Parmenio’s experience and Alexander’s age” (Badian) it would have been easy for his enemies to show him as a weak king who relied upon others to win his wars. Had this occurred it would have significantly weakened Alexander’s hold over the military, and made both his future successes and his future kingship uncertain.

Alexander even saw Parmenio’s position as second in command as a weakness, and thus had rumors started about his battle prowess faltering and having to be rescued by Alexander, when in fact the battle plans called for Parmenio to have the tough job of being the anvil against which Alexander would smash with his hammer, and thus had Parmenio not been doing his job the battle plan could have not succeeded. Alexander’s ordered execution of Parmenio shows that he still felt that the old general was a threat much later in his reign, after Parmenio had been left behind to be in charge of logistics.

Alexander’s isolation is also one of the main causes for the troubles of succession that followed his death in 323. Because the king had nobody that was close to him, there was no clear successor. Alexander’s paranoia, by this point, would not allow him to name an heir for fear that the heir would want to take up his throne sooner than Alexander was willing to give it up. One of the lessons about Alexander that can be learned from Badian is that the Macedonian king was supremely self-centered, and this can be seen as both a cause and an effect of his loneliness. At the time of his death “Alexander was, essentially, not interested in a future without himself” (Badian). Alexander’s isolation was such that he simply did not have anybody left to care about after Hephaestion died, and thus who would rule after him was not a concern of his.

Alexander was lonely. He so isolated himself away from the world, in order to protect his position as king, that it could be said that he lost touch with humanity. Whether Alexander really thought of himself as a ‘god’ can be debated, but that he thought he was more than mere human is beyond question. This ‘loneliness of power’ affected every part of Alexander’s personal world, and is very evident in his motivations, military successes, and the turmoil following his death.

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Everyone has an Alexander of their own

In the following extract from his foreword Alexander: Destiny and Myth by Claude Mosse,
Paul Cartledge provides an insight into why the range of views run the gamut of tyrant to visionary.

"Every student has an Alexander of her or his own. Just to canvass in outline the views of some of the leading scholars of the past century, we have had Ulrich Wilcken's reasonable Alexander, the gentlemanly and visionary Alexander of W.W. Tarn, the titanic and Fuhrer-like Alexander of Fritz Schachermeyr, the Homerically heroic Alexander of Robin Lane Fox, and the amoral and ruthlessly pragmatic Alexander of Ernst Badian and Brian Bosworth.

There are three main reasons for this enormous diversity. The first is common to pretty much all historiography or biography: whether we are formally paid-up historians or not we make the past in our own image, and all history is, up to a point, contemporary history, in the sense that present concerns and our own self-image inevitably condition or at any rate colour our perception and representation of past figures.

Second, there is the specific character of the extant written evidence for Alexander: though ample in quantity, it is poor in historical quality, being mostly non-contemporary and partial in both senses (both incomplete and biased). So far as its dating goes, it is as if, one historian has written, we had to try to recover the history of Tudor England (sixteenth century) only from the essays of T.B. Macaulay (nineteenth century) and the histories of the philosopher David Hume (eighteenth century). So far as the bias is concerned, it is one of the paradoxes of history (and historiography) that this king, who took unusual trouble to secure the preservation of his own desired point of view, should have been handed down finally in history as an enigma.

Which in turn leads to the third reason for the diversity of modern estimates of Alexander: so stupendously mind-boggling were his achievements, however one glosses them morally or in any other way, that we historians inevitably interpret the great drama of his life and career in terms of our own relatively puny dreams and experience

[tfferg]

I guess this is an example of associative thinking (the mental process of making free associations between a given subject/object and something else not directly connected with it).

If the coal scuttle looked something like this ....



... then perhaps it could vaguely remind one of a helmet or some kind of shining body armour.





Alexander was known for his flashing armour and Curtius writes that at the siege of Tyre:

The king himself climbed the highest siege-tower (which was full of catapults and other siege-engines). His courage was great, but the danger greater for, conspicuous in his royal insignia and flashing armor, he was the prime target of enemy missiles.

Alexander the Great (Man with Arms) by Rembrandt

Good thinking, MM. The coal scuttle in your pic does indeed resemble an ancient helmet - my mental image of a coal scuttle based on vague memories of such things more than 50 years ago was of something of a different shape and not so highly polished, Thanks for going to the trouble to find an post the pics.

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Alexander the Beetle

Having held forth on how associative thinking can lead a person looking at a coal scuttle
to start thinking about Alexander the Great, I'm totally unable to explain how a giant beetle can lead to the same result.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/artworks/galleries/2010/3077188/image3.htm

I wonder if to some eyes it might look vaguely like a Macedonian phalanx?

[tfferg]

Speaking of water clocks reminded me of this snippet of information:

It is not well known that Alexander the Great invented a crude form of the wrist watch. Before each battle, he would have all his generals tear off a strip from their cloaks and soak it in the blood of a horse. When the blood dried it was time to attack. This method worked really well because of the time it takes for horse blood to coagulate. (exactly 17 minutes) the generals would tie this strip around their wrists and wait for it to dry. This became known as Alexander's rag time band.

Wicked!

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Alexander the Beetle

Having held forth on how associative thinking can lead a person looking at a coal scuttle
to start thinking about Alexander the Great, I'm totally unable to explain how a giant beetle can lead to the same result.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/artworks/galleries/2010/3077188/image3.htm

I wonder if to some eyes it might look vaguely like a Macedonian phalanx?

Tony - Initally I agreed with you.



However I checked what the sculptor himself had to say and it turns out to be a bit more complicated.

Here is the sculptor’s explanation:

"My sculpture Alexander the Great stands as an avatar for the unnoticed world at our feet and as a champion for that sense of wonder and exploration that is so easily lost. It reminds us that however great the empires of man may be, they are dwarfed by one that is far older and greater."

http://www.deancolls.com/Dean_Colls/Dean_Colls_Alexander_the_Great_corten_steel_beetle_sculpture.html

"My working title for the sculpture is ‘Alexander the Great’ and references the song ‘Alexander Beetle’. It has been suggested that if we were to disappear tomorrow, life on Earth would continue with barely a shrug, but if the insects were to disappear, most terrestrial species would be extinct within a few of years.

"In terms of population size and biomass we are dwarfed by other inhabitants; one in five terrestrial species is a beetle, they make up a greater portion of biomass than we do and yet, as adults we rarely stoop to notice our diminutive neighbours.

"My sculpture “Alexander the Great” stands as an Avatar for this unnoticed but essential world and as a champion for that sense of wonder and exploration that many of us leave behind as children.The piece will be 7.2m long, 2 m high and 5.3m wide, with its imposing scale I am jolting the viewer into a new experience, shifting the centre of the universe away from the human perspective and reclaiming the significance of the unseen world around us."

http://www.whatsthatbug.com/2010/11/19/australian-beetle-sculpture-needs-taxonomic-name/

Art critic Robert Lindsay offers this explanation:

One of the primary mechanisms of humour is a safe reversal of expectations. The title of Alexander the Great used by Dean Colls for his exceptionally large corten steel beetle, with its reference to the 4th century BC Macedonian general who created the largest empire in the ancient world, has a definite element of mirth. But humour can also be enlisted as a powerful tool for proffering the truth in a presentable and acceptable way. Here Dean Colls has reversed the hierarchy of the natural order of things; while Alexander is Dean Colls’ avatar ‘for the unseen world at our feet’; the beetle also has the potential power that comes with being overwhelmingly enormous. Alexander’s scale would dwarf any natural history museum collection and the idea of collecting and classifying him as a trophy of the natural world is virtually unthinkable. Constructed in plate steel according to high-tech computer modelling, Alexander the Great 2010 totally dominates its natural setting, a reminder that human ambitions to conquer and lay waste the environment will have disastrous consequences.

http://www.mcclellandgallery.com/pdfs/Art%20and%20Nature%20Nature%20and%20Art%20-%20Robert%20Lindsay.pdf

Listen to the Alexander Beetle song here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWflJDaIpAc&feature=related

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