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Alexander the Great
Journey to the End of the Earth

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NORMAN F. CANTOR
with Dee Ranieri

An e-book excerpt from

To my students

Contents

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Preface 1 The Greek World 2 Who Was Alexander? 3 The March of Conquest 4 The Last Years 5 How “Great” Was Alexander? Notes Bibliography About the Author Selected Titles by Norman F. Cantor Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisheriv 1 35 71 131 147 175 179

Preface

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in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan have drawn our attention again to Alexander the Great. Three hundred years before Christ, this hero of antiquity led an army of Macedonians and Greeks on a route through the Middle East and Central Asia that intersected with the recent tactical deployment of the U.S. Army andMarines. The first Western ruler to attempt a war of conquest in the Middle East and Central Asia, Alexander triumphed. But his army was no more comfortable than American forces have been in the difficult terrain and climate of Kabul, Baghdad, and surrounding territories. In this book I have minimized the romance and fantasies associated with Alexander, trying instead to construct a critical andwell-rounded assessment of the man and the world in which he lived.
E C E N T E V E N T S

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The Greek World

O N E

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G R E E C E , extending from the kingdom of Macedonia in the north down to the city-state of Sparta in the south, was a large peninsula or archipelago jutting out into the Aegean Sea. Much of its land was taken up by forests, mountains, and deep valleys—atopography that made unification of the Greek city-states difficult. Up the coast from Sparta lay the rich and artistic city-state of Athens—distinguished by its Parthenon, navy, democracy, and opinionated orators—with the bustling port of Piraeus some ten miles to the southwest. Thebes and Corinth were other city-states, lying halfway between Macedonia and the well-disciplined but bellicose Sparta.
N CI E N T

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N O R M A N F. C A N T O R

The two principal forms of Greek culture stemmed from two periods of Greek history. The first, which could be called the Heroic Age (about 1300 to 800 BC), was an era in which kings like Agamemnon and Menelaus ruled, and their successes and failures were recounted in a grand oral tradition of heroic poetry. These rulers held on to a so-calledshame culture in which honor and dignity were exalted and in which the worst thing was to be disgraced, to be without honor. Reflecting this societal norm, the ten-year Trojan War allegedly occurred because a Trojan prince stole Helen, Menelaus’s wife, and honor decreed that the king had to go to war to retrieve her. At the end of this period, around 800, in two epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homerset down the oral traditions of the war, thus providing the written material for Alexander’s obsession with Achilles. Homer’s writings were a kind of light at the end of the tunnel of the Greek Dark Age. During this period there had been much jockeying for power among various peoples: the Dorians, the Ionians, and the Mycenaeans. The years from about 800 to 500 BC are known as the Archaic Age.This was the period during which the city-state, or polis, was formed and the cities of the peninsula split into separate governmental bodies. This was also a time of great colonization, of Sicily and southern Italy. In art the human form underwent a transformation from an earlier style, in which it had looked almost like a stick figure, to the realistic portrayal of the human form in all its beautythat characterizes Greek art of the Classical Age.
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Alexander the Great

From 500 to 320 BC, Greek—or at least the Athenian— culture underwent a radical transformation. In the words of Edgar Allan Poe, this was the period that gave the world “the glory that was Greece.” It saw the rise of Athens and the building of the Parthenon as well as the democratic ideals and government of...