The conspirators fought on, in a bloody and ultimately futile war, basing themselves in the far eastern satrapy of Bactria. By 325 Alexander had pacified Bactria and extended the empire deep into modern Pakistan (ancient “India”), but his troops had had enough and he was forced to turn back. An appalling and unjustifiable desert journey decimated his ranks and undermined his popularity, which was further weakened by measures that were perceived as an attempt to share power with native elites. In Susa, in April 324, he and all the senior Macedonians and Greeks in his retinue took eastern wives. Alexander, already married to a Bactrian princess called Rhoxane, took two further wives, daughters of the last two Persian kings. But to many Macedonians and Greeks, all non-Greeks were by that very fact inferior beings.

By the time of his death, Alexander’s empire of about five million square kilometers (roughly two million square miles) stretched patchily from the Danube to the Nile to the Indus. Modern terms show immediately the extraordinary nature of his achievement: the empire incorporated Greece, Bulgaria, much of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, western Pakistan, and parts of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and he had received the submission of further kings and chieftains within and on the borders of the empire.

His territory was so vast that it helps to think of it in terms of a few major blocks of territory, defined not just by the geographical features such as mountain ranges or seas that formed their borders, but also by the fact that ripples spread by events within one block did not necessarily reach neighboring blocks. The European territories—Macedon, Greece, and Thrace—constitute one such block, separated from Asia by the narrow and critical Hellespont; Asia Minor is another, bordered to the east and southeast by formidable mountains. With its natural defenses of desert and sea, Egypt always considered itself a separate unit, and even under Achaemenid rule often strove for independence. Syria west of the Euphrates was caught between Asia and Egypt, and was long a bone of contention. Finally, east of the Euphrates the eastern satrapies stretched all the way to the Indus River in Pakistan. ⁸

DIVINE KINGSHIP

The astonishing energy of the campaigns was due entirely to Alexander’s character. He was a driven man, and world conquest was his focus. He slaughtered by the thousands those who stood in his way. He thinned the ranks even—especially—of those closest to him at the slightest suspicion of conspiracy, or even disagreement with major policy decisions. One erstwhile close friend he ran through with a spear in a drunken rage. He exposed himself recklessly to danger on numerous occasions, not as a calculated way to win his troops’ devotion (though it certainly did that) but because he was sure of his destiny, and certain that the king of the gods, Zeus, would protect him until that destiny had been fulfilled. No wonder he was so furious when his troops mutinied in 325 in India and his will was for once thwarted.

Such rage, feigned or not, was part of Alexander’s new image. Shortly after the victory at Gaugamela in 331, Alexander was proclaimed “Lord of Asia,” but this did not mean that he felt he was merely replacing the Achaemenids. That would have been tactless, and poor propaganda, since he had come to eliminate the hated Persian rulers, not to replace them. In fact, in styling himself Lord or King of Asia, he was marking a break between himself and the Achaemenids, whose title had been “King of Persia.” By the same token, he adopted at this time the diadem—a plain hair band—as the symbol of his kingship, not the Persian upright tiara.

In addition to these symbolic differences, Alexander took practical steps to present himself as a different kind of king, not quite in the Persian or the Macedonian mold. He adopted at least some of the regalia of Achaemenid kingship, and took over other Persian practices as well, such as limiting access to his presence, having his subjects salaam or make obeisance before him, and seating himself on a golden throne (totally unfamiliar to Macedonian tradition) for official meetings. This was all cunningly done. He adopted enough Persian customs for him to be acceptable to his new subjects (and it helped that, at least as a temporary expedient, he allowed some easterners privileged positions in his court), while at the same time sending a clear message to the Macedonians: I am no longer quite a Macedonian king. They could only see him as an eastern king—that is, a despot—and that is exactly what he intended. He was deliberately developing Macedonian kingship toward a more autocratic model, in how he presented himself and how he expected his subjects to respond to him. ⁹

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that power and success had gone to his head. He began to present himself as Heracles, the ancestor of all the Argeads, and he chose to blaze like Achilles, from whom he was descended on his mother’s side. Both these heroes had carried out legendary missions in Asia, and he saw himself also as an avatar of Dionysus, who was said to have single-handedly conquered India. Alexander allowed himself to be called the son of Zeus, and Olympias had encouraged him from an early age to think of his true father as Zeus, not the mortal Philip, so that he would have the same dual mortal and immortal parentage as Heracles of legend. There is no doubt that Alexander exploited the idea of his godhood for political reasons, but there can also be little doubt that he found the idea attractive in itself.

The practice of obeisance ( proskyn

sis) was particularly infuriating to his Macedonian and Greek courtiers. They bowed to no one except the gods—but that was the point: Alexander now felt himself to be a god. To say that Alexander was larger than life is to state the obvious, but he broke the bounds of both humanness and humaneness because he was convinced that he was on a god-given mission. Many of his subjects were also ready to acknowledge his godhood, not just because they had a tradition of regarding kings as gods or the gods’ instruments, but because Alexander’s achievements were incredible, and incredible achievement was precisely the mark of divinity. The petty worldview of the Greek states with their pocket handkerchief–sized territories and focus on “our sea,” the Aegean, was exploded forever. Alexander opened up the whole known world and tore down barriers. Boundless opportunities emerged for Greeks to improve their lives of poverty.

The world would never be the same again, and such total transformation was naturally taken to be the work of a god—not just in Alexander’s case but, as we shall see, in the case of his Successors too. The gods brought benefits, as Alexander, for instance, freed the Greek cities of the Asia Minor seaboard from the threat or reality of Persian rule, and so the Asiatic Greeks were the first to worship him as Savior. Not long before his death, Alexander himself had also ordered the Greek cities of the Balkan peninsula to follow suit; Athens and others complied. Alexander’s deeds made everything about him talismanic. The history of the next thirty or forty years is, from certain perspectives, the history of his influence, of the lingering presence of his ghost.

THE SUCCESSION PROBLEM

Succession to the Macedonian throne was often an untidy business, littered with coups and corpses, but even by Macedonian standards this one was far from straightforward. Succession depended on birth into the royal house, nomination by the outgoing king (if he had time), the agreement of the king’s inner circle or council of Companions, and the approval of the citizen or army assembly.