Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (8 page)

Bactria was a notorious hotbed of dissension. One hundred and fifty years earlier, it was probably the country identified as rebellious by Xerxes I of Persia on the famous Daiva Inscription.
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It remained so throughout the early Hellenistic period as well, until, around the middle of the third century
BCE
, it emerged as an independent Greek
kingdom, which spread from Afghanistan to bordering regions of modern Pakistan and lasted for 150 years. The legend of the survival of European races in the area endured until relatively recent times, as in Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 short story (filmed in 1975), “The Man Who Would Be King.”

Alexander’s men had every reason to hate the region: in addition to the massacre in the Zeravshan valley, hundreds more had died from severe weather as they crossed the mountains of the Hindu Kush into Bactria in the first place. Much of the protest came from his Greek mercenaries, and as a form of punishment he left thousands of them there on garrison duty while he marched on India. But Bactria was the Wild West of its day, populated by peoples who had never before come into close contact with Greeks, and the new settlers were living in rough-and-ready forts and outposts, with few amenities. Although the land was famous for its fertility (as well as for its astounding mountains) and was a major crossroads for trade routes from China, India, and the west, it is little wonder that they were discontented. In 325, just at the rumor of Alexander’s death in India, a few thousands of these Greek settlers, former mercenaries, abandoned their posts and set out for home. If there is any truth in the late report that some of them made it back,
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their trek would have made the journey recorded by Xenophon in his
Anabasis
look like a stroll in the park.

The uprising of 323, following Alexander’s death, was far more serious, and it met with a far more serious response. The mercenaries, “longing for Greek customs and the Greek way of life,”
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organized themselves, appointed a general, and prepared for the long journey home. There were over twenty thousand of them. They would have set out west beside the Oxus, and then along what later became the Silk Road to Mesopotamia. Footloose mercenaries, on their way home, were at their most dangerous: they had nothing on their minds other than getting home safe and rich.

The former Bodyguard Peithon, newly appointed to the satrapy of Media, was sent east in December 323 with adequate forces to deal with the problem. Perdiccas himself loaned him over three thousand Macedonian troops. He was under strict orders to treat the rebels with no mercy; to Perdiccas’s eyes they were no more than deserters. Nevertheless, after defeating them, Peithon dismissed them back to their homes. Later propaganda read this as Peithon’s first bid for power: he wanted to remain on good terms with the Greek mercenaries in order to incorporate them into his army and carve himself out an independent kingdom in the east. But Perdiccas had half expected this to
happen, and had told the Macedonian troops what to do. They promptly massacred the Greeks in their thousands. Peithon, having been put in his place by Perdiccas, was allowed to return to his satrapy. If he had not entertained dreams of autonomy before, he began to then.

Despite the long hostility between Greeks and Persians, Greeks had also played peaceful parts in the Achaemenid empire. As mercenaries, traders, artists, artisans, physicians, secretaries, engineers, envoys, entertainers, explorers, and translators, they had passed through or been resident in the domains of satraps, and even occasionally in the court of the Great King himself. But the numbers involved in these earlier interactions were nothing compared to the influx of Greek and Macedonian settlers in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. As the eastern Greek rebellion shows us, there were already at least twenty thousand Greek immigrants just in far-flung Bactria, before any permanent or large-scale settlements had been built there.
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The main wave of immigration lasted no more than three generations after Alexander’s conquests.
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There were two phases. In the first, land needed to be secured in the short term, and so the first settlers were usually men who had been hired as mercenaries and were now detailed to garrison an existing town or a fortress. In the second, these mercenaries were given a grant of land (the price of which was that they or their sons remained available for military duty), and the fortresses, or some of them, grew into or were replaced by Greek-style cities, and attracted further immigrants. Hence Alexander himself founded few cities but many fortresses, and the pace of city foundation gradually increased, peaking in the second generation of kings, by when immigrants with peacetime skills were in as much demand as soldiers. Dozens of these cities were founded in Asia. A magnificent Hellenistic city has been discovered, for instance, in Afghanistan. Its ancient name is unknown, but Ai Khanum was probably founded as a simple fortress by Alexander, and grew into a major Greek city that flourished for a hundred years or more.
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One of the most astonishing discoveries at Ai Khanum is an inscription showing that a philosopher transcribed the famous moral maxims from the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi in central Greece, and brought the copy five thousand kilometers (three thousand miles) east as a kind
of foundation document for the new city.
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The story encapsulates two important points: first, the philosopher’s journey epitomizes the general mobility of the period; second, the Delphic maxims, such as “Know yourself” and “Nothing in excess,” formed the heart of Greek popular morality, so that Ai Khanum was to be a fully Greek city, even if it lay on the banks of the Oxus. I should say that, in cultural terms, even Macedonians were Greeks, since for about two hundred years Macedonian kings and aristocrats had adopted and patronized the culture of their southern neighbors, and the native Macedonian language was, probably, an obscure dialect of Greek.

The fact that the cities were created as oases of Greek culture means that the mobility of the period was largely Greek mobility. Every city was bound to have a theater, for instance, and so the Guild of Dionysus came into existence (first in Athens) as an organization that supplied actors and the expertise needed to stage plays all over the world.
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As well as a theater, each new foundation had to have a gymnasium, a stadium, and Greek-style temples and porticoes grouped around an agora (a combination of city square, marketplace, and administrative/religious center). Law codes, civic constitutions, and forms of public entertainment were all recognizably Greek. Table-ware, though locally made, reproduced Greek styles, as did jewelry, painting, architecture, and so on. In Ai Khanum alone, archaeologists have unearthed “a Macedonian palace, Rhodian porticoes, Coan funerary monuments, an Athenian propylaea, Delian houses, Megarian bowls, Corinthian tiles, and Mediterranean amphorae.”
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Sophocles was performed in Susa, Homer was read in Herat—but on the other hand a poet like Aristophanes, whose work was largely pegged to a particular time and place (late-fifth-century Athens), was less popular. A great intermingling was taking place of Greeks from different parts of the world. The only aspects of Greek culture to survive such transplantation were those which were sufficiently common to all the new immigrants. A new, more universal Hellenism began to emerge in the time of the Successors.

The uniformity of Greek culture all over the new world is remarkable. On the face of it, one might imagine that literature and art in Afghanistan would have developed in different directions from those they took in Egypt. But this was not so. As art historian Martin Robertson says: “Absorption of or modification by oriental influence . . . is a trivial and marginal element in Hellenistic art.”
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Greeks had a long history of considering their culture superior to that of any other people in the world, and the new cities were regarded by their inhabitants as
oases of Hellenism in deserts considered otherwise to be more or less devoid of cultural interest. The separation between rulers and subjects in this respect is particularly striking in Egypt, where the two artistic traditions continued side by side—the Greek in Alexandria and other Greek enclaves, and the Egyptian elsewhere. There was little cultural interchange or hybridity.

In addition to security, the new settlements also facilitated trade, another major form of mobility. Even if primarily for military reasons, they commanded roads and rivers and coastlines, and hence came to play important commercial roles. Ancient trade was limited by a number of factors—chief among them being lack of technological development (due to the cheapness of available labor), too many frontiers, poor roads, and piracy—but the opening of the east enabled it to expand to the extent that it could. Traders traveled farther, established new markets, and dealt in new products (especially luxuries). Alexander undoubtedly saw the potential for this, since he standardized coinage and bullion values throughout the empire. But it took time. In the first years after his death there were only a few regions that were untroubled enough for trade to pick up. In fact, one of the goals of the contending Successors was to control regions that could provide them with the most vital commodities, such as timber, minerals, and grain—to try to corner the markets and deny them to their opponents.

For commercial as well as military reasons, then, frontiers were being pushed back. Both kinds of reason have always encouraged exploration. In the early Hellenistic period, Pytheas of Massalia sailed from southern Spain, circumnavigated the British Isles, and explored the amber coasts of the Baltic; meanwhile, military expeditions pushed farther into unknown parts of Asia than ever before, beyond the official boundaries of the empire.
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As always, the expansion of the known world created a hunger for information about distant regions. Megasthenes wrote about India, Nearchus of his voyage back from India to Arabia, and utopian writers such as Euhemerus of Messene also set their fantasies in exotic locations. On the coattails of navigation (and of an increasing interest in astrology and calendrical systems), astronomers such as Autolycus of Pitane developed more precise models to account for the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies. Around 300, a former student of Aristotle’s called Dicaearchus of Messana drew up the first map of the known world showing a few orientation lines, the precursors of longitude and latitude.

Literal mobility across geographical borders found metaphorical echoes in society. Certain conventions did not survive the transposition to the east, and social mobility increased. Fortunes were made by men from outside the highest social classes, and even by slaves, while the pinnacle of the social ladder was reached by a very few, invariably aristocrats, who became official Friends of a king. The emancipation of slaves became more common, and there was a huge increase in the number of cases in which divine honors were awarded to human beings, as though even the barrier between humanity and divinity had become permeable.

Mobility led to the erosion of old family-based structures, not just in the sense that families themselves were physically broken up as one or more members emigrated in search of opportunities abroad, but also because these emigrants were uprooted from their ancestors and their kinship groups, with all that this implied in terms of family pride and cult. Hence, in part, the importance of gymnasia and social clubs in these far-flung foundations: they were substitutes for extended families. In the era of the Successors, emigrants were usually single men, but there were also a few widows looking for better opportunities for their children, as well as unmarried women. Having left their menfolk behind, they had to be allowed to manage their own assets, which was traditionally the job of the nearest male relative, and so women gradually won greater freedom and responsibility for their own affairs. But they never gained a significant political role.

As well as enhancing security and promoting trade and other forms of mobility, the new foundations also had an accidental result. Since Greeks were the ruling elite, a certain proportion of the native population came to assume at least some of the trappings of Greek culture as a way of gaining a share of the power. The Greeks themselves, however, made little effort to educate the natives, beyond having those who were employed in the administration learn Greek; the official language was everywhere the same, a version of Athenian Greek called
koin ē
, introduced by Philip II into his court and then spread around the world by Alexander’s army.
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The new immigrants were not there to educate but to enrich themselves. They did not see themselves as bearing any ancient equivalent of the White Man’s Burden to civilize barbarian races, nor did they pretend they were bringing freedom and free trade (another pretext put forward by more recent European imperialists). Enrichment was the motive for uprooting the family and moving hundreds or thousands of miles from home. The ideal of cosmopolitanism—of a world
in which different cultures mingled and met as equals—was a philosophers’ fancy, and had little bearing on Greek and Macedonian attitudes or policies. The new immigrants arrived with the assumption that their culture was superior to that of any non-Greek people, and simply wanted to enjoy its benefits themselves, however far they were from home. Immigrants invariably yearn for the homeland and surround themselves with familiar cultural trappings. All the same, it became a sign of prestige for a native to be a member of the local gymnasium or one of the other Greek clubs, or to worship at a Greek temple. Over time, then, Greek culture began to filter out of the compounds of the ruling elite and trickle farther down the social scale. From the start there were a few educated natives who knew Greek—the Egyptian historian Manetho wrote a history of Egypt in Greek around 285
BCE
, for instance, and a decade or two later Berossus of Babylon did the same for Babylonian history—but the pace picked up somewhat as the years passed.
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