THE GREEK REBELLION IN THE EAST

Alexander had left Afghanistan secured with fortresses and garrisons. While the subjugation of Bactria had proved relatively easy, Sogdiana, on the far bank of the Oxus, was another matter. It took Alexander the best part of two years to fail to subdue it, and he suffered the worst military defeat of his career when a force of two thousand men under one of his generals was wiped out in an ambush in the Zeravshan valley. He could not expect that the region would remain calm; hence the fortresses and their garrisons.

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. ¹It 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, ²their trek would have made the journey recorded by Xenophon in his Anabasislook 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,” ³organized 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.

MOBILITY AND THE SPREAD OF HELLENISM

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. ⁴

The main wave of immigration lasted no more than three generations after Alexander’s conquests. ⁵There 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. ⁶

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. ⁷The 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. ⁸As 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.” ⁹Sophocles 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.