Macedonian Empire

The instrument

Drafted from Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988)formation

Alexander succeeded in 336, and the thing that made everything after it possible had been finished before that date by his father.

Philip II inherited a Macedon that was a peripheral kingdom of no account, raided by its neighbours and periodically partitioned by them. He spent twenty-three years rebuilding it, and the military reform is the part that matters here.

He reorganised the infantry around the sarissa, a pike of four to six metres held in both hands, in a formation deep enough that the points of several ranks projected in front of the first — a wall of iron that no infantry in the world could approach frontally. He paid the men year-round and drilled them year-round, which is why they could execute manoeuvres that require rehearsal. He built the Companion cavalry into a shock arm, used to break a line the phalanx had pinned. And he financed all of it out of the Pangaeum mines in Thrace, which he took in 356 and which are the reason a Macedonian king could afford a professional army at all.

That last point is the one usually skipped. Nearly every army of the period was raised from men who had to go home for the harvest. Philip's did not, and a force that trains all year is not the same kind of object as one that assembles in spring — which is most of the explanation for how a kingdom of no account beat an empire that was larger, richer, more populous, and by its own documentary record in good working order.

Philip was murdered at his daughter's wedding in 336, in circumstances the sources have argued about ever since and cannot resolve. Alexander was twenty. He had commanded the Companions at Chaeronea two years earlier, and he inherited an army built to invade Persia by a man who had already declared the invasion and sent an advance force across.

What he added was command. Great-man explanations deserve suspicion as a rule, and this is one of the places where the sources do not leave much room for anything else: the instrument existed and had already been used successfully, and what happened between 334 and 326 is not explicable from the instrument alone.

The march

Drafted from Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander (1884)expansion

Alexander crossed the Hellespont in 334 and reached the Hyphasis, the last river in the eastern Punjab that his army would cross, in 326. What follows is the shape of those eight years, from Arrian, who used Ptolemy and Aristobulus and is the soberest of the five surviving accounts.

The first two years are field battles: the Granicus in 334, Issus in 333. Both were won against Persian armies that outnumbered him, and neither ended anything, because after Issus Darius escaped and the Persian fleet still held the sea. So Alexander did not pursue him. He turned south and spent a year and a half taking the coast, which is the least glamorous decision of the campaign and the one that made the rest possible: an enemy navy with no ports is a fleet looking for somewhere to tie up.

Why the coast mattered

Darius's fleet was Phoenician and Cypriot and Egyptian — it did not belong to Persia, it was hired from cities Persia ruled. A navy like that has no home port of its own. Every squadron in it sails from a harbour that can be taken by land.

So Alexander went down the coast taking harbours, and the fleet dissolved behind him as its crews' own cities changed hands. He never fought a naval battle. He made the Persian navy irrelevant by capturing the places it came from, which took eighteen months and won him the Mediterranean without a ship.

Three sieges mattered on that coast, and one of them took seven months and a causeway.

The chapters that follow take the campaign in four pieces: the siege that decided the sea, the battle that ended the Persian empire, the river the army refused to cross, and the desert he chose to cross on the way back.

Tyre

Drafted from Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander (1884)expansion

The longest operation of the campaign began over a religious formality and ended with eight thousand people dead, and Arrian is careful enough to let you see both ends of that.

The request

Tyre did not defy him. Its ambassadors met him on the march — the king's own son among them — and announced that the city had decided to do whatever he might command. He commended both the city and its envoys.

Then he told them what he wanted: to enter Tyre and sacrifice to Heracles.

The temple there was, Arrian says, the most ancient mentioned in any history — older than Cadmus leaving Phoenicia, older than the Argive Heracles the Greeks knew. Alexander, who traced his own descent from Heracles, wanted to sacrifice in it.

Tyre refused. It would obey him in everything and it would not let him inside the walls, which for an island city with its own fleet was a reasonable position and for Alexander was the only answer he could not accept. A king who is refused entry to a temple he claims by descent has been told, in public, what his claim is worth.

The causeway

Tyre stood offshore behind a channel three fathoms deep at the worst of it, with high walls and its own ships. Alexander decided to build a road out to it.

The strait was shallow and muddy near the shore, stakes could be driven into the mud and the mud held the stones, and there was timber and rock in quantity. The mole went out quickly while the water was shallow and nobody could reach the workers — and then it slowed, because the walls were built so that labourers could be shot from them, and because the Tyrians still had the sea and could row to any point of the causeway and stop the work.

The Macedonians put two towers on the head of the mole, hung with hides against fire-arrows, with engines on top.

Arrian notes what Alexander did about morale, and it is characteristic: he lightened the work by walking about it, rousing men by speaking to them, and giving money to the ones working hardest for the credit of it.

What actually decided it

Not the mole. Ships.

The Phoenician and Cypriot squadrons that had been serving Darius came over to Alexander once their own cities had fallen — which is the coastal strategy paying off in the middle of the siege it was meant to support. Tyre lost the sea, and with it the ability to interfere with the causeway or to be resupplied.

The end came from two directions at once. The Phoenicians burst the bar across the Egypt-facing harbour and shattered the ships inside it; the Cypriots sailed into the Sidon-facing harbour, which had no bar, and took the city on that side. The Tyrians left the walls and rallied at the chapel of Agenor, and were destroyed there.

Why the assault went the way it did

Arrian gives the reason the killing was as thorough as it was, and it is not generalship.

The Macedonians went in full of rage — angry at the length of the siege, and angry because the Tyrians had taken some of their men captive sailing from Sidon, carried them up to the top of the wall where the camp could see it, killed them there, and thrown the bodies into the sea.

About eight thousand Tyrians were killed. Macedonian losses for the entire seven-month siege were about four hundred.

Those who reached the temple of Heracles were given amnesty — most of the Tyrian magistrates, the king Azemilcus, and a delegation of Carthaginians who had come to their mother-city for the sacrifice, by ancient custom. The rest were sold.

The sanctuary Alexander had demanded entry to in the first place ended the siege as the one place inside Tyre where a life was safe.

The ground Darius chose

Drafted from Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander (1884)expansion

Darius picked the battlefield, cleared it and levelled it so his scythed chariots could run. Alexander's answer was to walk sideways off it.

That is the whole battle in a sentence, and Arrian's account is worth having in detail because it shows a competent army being dismantled by a man who declined to fight where it had prepared to win.

Marching right

Alexander led his army towards the right, and the Persian line marched parallel with him, already far overlapping his left. He kept going right, and almost entirely got beyond the ground which had been cleared and levelled by the Persians.

Darius then had to act, because chariots on broken ground are useless. He ordered his left wing to ride round the Macedonian right and stop the sidestep.

What followed was a long cavalry fight on the flank that Alexander was steadily losing. He fed in the Greek mercenary horse under Menidas, who were routed by the more numerous Scythians and Bactrians. He fed in the Paeonians, who pushed the Scythians back until the Bactrians rallied them. Arrian is candid that many of Alexander's men fell, both from the numbers against them and because the Scythians and their horses were far better armoured.

The chariots

Then Darius launched the scythed chariots at the phalanx, and Arrian's verdict is four words: in this they were grievously deceived.

The Agrianians and javelin-men posted in front of the Companions threw at the teams. Others took the horses by the reins, pulled the drivers down and killed the animals where they stood. And the ones that got through met a phalanx that had been drilled to open its ranks and let them pass — so the chariots ran harmlessly through the gaps and were dealt with behind the line by the grooms and the royal guards.

The weapon the battlefield had been levelled for was neutralised by infantry stepping aside on command.

The gap

Everything so far was preparation for one moment, and it came from Darius's own countermeasure.

When the Persian cavalry surged out to envelop the Macedonian right, they opened a break in their own front line. Alexander wheeled into it, formed the Companions and the nearest part of the phalanx into a wedge, and charged straight at Darius with a battle-cry.

There was a short hand-to-hand fight. The Macedonian horse pressed in, striking their faces with their spears; the phalanx came up bristling with pikes. And then:

all things at once appeared full of terror to Darius, who had already long been in a state of fear, so that he was the first to turn and flee.

The first to turn and flee. Arrian says it plainly, and he will remember it later — when an Indian king with a spear wound in his shoulder keeps fighting, Arrian will note that he did not do as Darius the Great King did, setting an example of flight to his men.

What it decided, and what it did not

Babylon, Susa and Persepolis followed with their treasuries. In 330 Darius was killed by his own satrap Bessus while fleeing east.

That is where a war of conquest ends. Instead the hardest part began. Bessus took the title of king in Bactria, and Alexander spent three years in the north-east — Areia, Drangiana, Bactria, Sogdiana — fighting a countryside rather than an army, garrisoning as he went and founding cities to hold ground he had already passed through.

The Persian empire was beaten in three afternoons. Its eastern provinces took thirty-six months, and they are where most of the army's dead are.

The river they would not cross

Drafted from Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander (1884)expansion

Alexander crossed the Indus in 326 and beat Porus on the Hydaspes in the rain — the one battle of the campaign fought against elephants. Then he went east to the Hyphasis and the army stopped.

The two things are connected, and Arrian puts them close enough together that you can see it.

Porus

Porus lost. Arrian is unusually interested in how.

When his cavalry had been cut up, his elephants were dead or straying without keepers and most of his infantry had gone, he kept fighting as long as any body of Indians held together — he did not depart as Darius the Great King did, setting an example of flight to his men.

He was finally wounded in the right shoulder, the one part of him his armour did not cover; Arrian notes that the mail was remarkable for its strength and the close fitting of its joints, as those who saw it afterwards could observe. Then he turned his elephant and began to withdraw.

Alexander, wanting him alive, sent Taxiles — an Indian king already on the Macedonian side. Porus saw his old enemy approaching, wheeled round and got a javelin ready, and would probably have killed him if Taxiles had not spurred out of range.

Alexander was not angry. He kept sending men, and at last sent Meroës, an old friend of Porus. Porus, by then overcome with thirst, stopped the elephant, dismounted, drank some water, and told Meroës to take him to Alexander.

Then the exchange the whole episode exists for. Alexander rode out to meet him, admired his height and the fact that he was not cowed but came on as one brave man would meet another brave man, and spoke first, asking how he wished to be treated.

Treat me, O Alexander, in a kingly way.

He kept his kingdom and got more.

The Hyphasis

Beyond the next river, Alexander was told, the country was fertile and there were more nations and more rivers.

The army refused to cross.

Arrian gives Alexander a long speech, and its argument is fair on its own terms: the labours are common to you and me, we share the dangers equally, the land is yours and you are its governors, most of the money now comes to you.

When he finished there was a long silence — nobody had the nerve to contradict the king, and nobody would agree with him.

He kept asking for someone to speak. Eventually Coenus did, and what he said is the single best piece of evidence in Arrian for what eight years had cost:

Thou thyself seest how many Macedonians and Greeks started with thee, and how few of us have been left.

Some had been settled in the new cities, he said, and not all of them willingly. Some had died in the battles. Some were crippled by wounds. Some had been left behind across Asia. And most of them — the majority — had died of disease. Few were left out of many, and those few were no longer strong.

Alexander turned back.

What the two scenes say together

A king who fought to the last and was beaten got his kingdom returned to him with additions, because he had behaved as Alexander thought a king should behave. Then an army that had won every battle it fought declined to take one more step, and the king who had just rewarded courage in an enemy could not compel it in his own men.

Both are the same fact seen from two sides. Alexander's authority was personal and it ran on admiration, which is a real force and not an unlimited one. It could give a defeated Indian his throne back. It could not get an exhausted army across a river it had decided was the end.

Thirteen years

Drafted from Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988)peak

Alexander crossed into Asia in 334 BC and was dead by 323, aged thirty-two, having destroyed the largest empire in the world and reached the Punjab. The empire he created did not survive him by a year in any organised form: his generals divided it, fought each other for four decades, and produced the Seleucid, Ptolemaic and Antigonid kingdoms.

It is the extreme case of an empire coming apart: one that ended not because it was defeated or absorbed but because it had no institutions apart from one man and no agreed way of replacing him. The Achaemenid administrative apparatus he had captured largely intact continued to function under new management, which is the strongest evidence for how good it was.

The lasting consequence was linguistic and cultural rather than political. Greek became the administrative and prestige language from the Aegean to Bactria for centuries, and the Greek-speaking cities founded across Iran and Central Asia are why there is a Buddhist art tradition in Gandhara with Corinthian columns in it, and why the Kushan kings, three centuries later, minted coins with Greek letters.

Nothing written at the time

Drafted from Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988)aside?What aside means

The Achaemenids were described almost entirely by their enemies. Alexander has the opposite problem, and it is just as bad.

Not one contemporary account of Alexander survives. The people who were there wrote: Ptolemy, who became king of Egypt and whose history was probably self-serving about Ptolemy; Aristobulus, an engineer; Callisthenes, the official historian, who was executed on campaign; Nearchus, who commanded the fleet; Onesicritus, who was a fabulist. All of it is lost.

What exists is five accounts written between roughly three hundred and five hundred years later, by people working from those lost sources and from each other. Arrian, a Roman senator and governor writing in the second century AD, used Ptolemy and Aristobulus and is the soberest. Plutarch wrote a biography concerned with character. Quintus Curtius wrote in Latin, rhetorically, at an uncertain date. Diodorus compiled. Justin epitomised somebody else's epitome.

So every statement about Alexander is at three removes minimum, filtered through a tradition that had already decided what he was for. The Roman-era writers were producing a figure for Roman purposes — a model for generals, a warning about autocracy, an argument about fortune and virtue — and the underlying court histories had been producing a figure for Macedonian purposes before that.

The shape recurs wherever a figure is famous enough to be useful. The Saladin the modern world knows is substantially a nineteenth-century construction; the Zenobia of the Historia Augusta is a fourth-century invention; the Achaemenids are their enemies' account. Alexander is the extreme version, because the volume of writing is enormous and the distance from the events is total.

The personality — the drinking, the killing of Cleitus, the burning of Persepolis, the divinity — cannot be adjudicated on evidence like that, and the attempt has occupied two centuries of scholarship without settling anything. What can be said is what an army did, where it went, what it captured, and what happened when the man died. Those are the parts the tradition agrees on.

The empire he kept

Drafted from Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988)aside?What aside means

Alexander conquered the Achaemenid empire and then, to a degree that startled his own officers, governed it as the Achaemenid empire.

He kept the satrapies and in several cases kept the satraps — Mazaeus, who had commanded a wing against him at Gaugamela, was left as governor of Babylon. He kept the taxation and the treasury system. He kept the Aramaic chancery. He buried Darius in the royal tombs and hunted the satrap who had killed him, which is not the behaviour of a conqueror towards a defeated enemy and is exactly the behaviour of a successor towards a murdered predecessor.

He also adopted the court. Persian dress in a modified form, Persian ushers and chamberlains, and — the flashpoint — proskynesis, the prostration or bow the Persian court required before the king, which Greeks understood as an act owed only to gods and Macedonians understood as a humiliation. The attempt to impose it on his Macedonian officers in 327 failed and was dropped.

The Susa marriages and the enrolment of thirty thousand trained Iranian infantry in 324 are the same programme carried further, and the reaction came the same year: the Macedonian army mutinied at Opis over the discharge of veterans and, underneath it, over being replaced.

Two things follow.

The first is that this is an early instance of a pattern that recurs for the next thousand years — the conqueror who keeps the apparatus. The Arabs kept the Sasanian and Byzantine administrations; the Mongols kept the Chinese and Persian ones; the Seljuks and the Ak Koyunlu and the Timurids hired the Persian bureaucracy the moment they had a settled country. Alexander did it first and did it inside two years.

The second is that the resistance came from his own side. The people who objected to governing Persia as Persians were the Macedonians who had conquered it, and the objection was not principled but proprietary. That, too, recurs: the Qizilbash objected to the Safavid ghulams for the same reason, and the Mamluk households objected to the awlad al-nas.

Gedrosia

Drafted from Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander (1884)contraction

Having been stopped by his army at one river, Alexander went home by a route that killed more of it than any battle had. Arrian says most of the historians thought nothing else the army suffered in Asia compared with this, and then explains why the route was chosen, which is the part worth sitting with.

Why that way

He split the force. Part went back by an easier road. A fleet under Nearchus followed the coast. He took the rest through the Gedrosian desert.

Nearchus, who was there, said Alexander chose it knowing it was terrible — because he had heard that nobody had ever brought an army through and come out alive. Semiramis had got out with twenty men, Cyrus son of Cambyses with seven. On hearing this, Nearchus says, he was seized with the desire to beat Cyrus and Semiramis.

That is the explanation from inside the expedition, given by one of its commanders, and it is not flattering.

The sand

The sand was piled in high ridges and was not packed; a foot went into it as into mud or fresh snow. The baggage animals died first, of thirst and of the heat of the sand itself.

Then the army began slaughtering the horses and mules and eating them, and reporting that the animals had died of thirst. Every man was in it, so nobody informed. Arrian's judgement on this is one of his best sentences about command: Alexander knew perfectly well what was happening, and decided that pretending not to know was the better cure.

With the animals gone and the waggons broken up, the sick and the exhausted were left where they fell — because the marches were made at night and at speed and there was nobody to guide them or nurse them. Some woke and followed the tracks; few caught up. Most died in the sand, in Arrian's phrase, like men shipwrecked at sea.

The helmet

Two scenes survive from that march, and they are the ones Arrian chose to keep.

Some light-armed soldiers who had gone off looking for water found a little in a shallow cleft — a small and mean spring. They collected it with difficulty and hurried back to Alexander as if they were bringing him some great gift, and poured it into a helmet.

He took it, commended them, and poured it out on the ground where everyone could see.

Arrian says the effect on the army was as though the water Alexander threw away had given every man a drink, and he singles the moment out: this deed beyond all others I commend as evidence of Alexander's power of endurance and self-control, as well as of his skill in managing an army.

The guides

The other scene is the one that explains the deaths.

The guides eventually said they no longer remembered the way, because the wind had blown sand over the tracks. In deep sand levelled flat there was nothing to navigate by — no roadside trees, no solid hillock. And the army had never learned to steer by the stars at night or the sun by day, as sailors do: the Phoenicians by the Little Bear and other men by the Greater.

Alexander worked out that they had to bear left, took a few horsemen and rode ahead to find the sea. Even those horses gave out in the heat.

It took sixty days to reach Pura. He was thirty-one, he had been marching for eight years, and he had less than two to live.

An army that had not lost a battle in a decade was destroyed in pieces by a march its own commander had chosen because two legendary figures had failed at it.

Clad in hides

Drafted from Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander (1884)contraction

In 324 at Opis on the Tigris, Alexander told his Macedonians that he was discharging the ones too old or maimed to fight, and sending them home rich enough to be envied. He meant it as a kindness. The army took it as dismissal, and the whole accumulated grievance of eleven years came out at once.

What they were actually angry about

Arrian lists the causes, and none of them is pay or plunder.

They had been offended, he says, throughout the whole expedition: by Alexander's adoption of Persian dress, which showed contempt for their opinion; by his equipping the thirty thousand young Iranians called the Epigoni in Macedonian style; and by his mixing foreign horsemen into the ranks of the Companions.

That last one is the sharpest. The Companion cavalry was the Macedonian aristocracy — the body from which the king was, in practice, inseparable. Putting Persians in it was not a courtesy to the conquered. It told the Macedonians that their monopoly on being close to him had ended.

So when he offered to send the veterans home, they told him to discharge all of them, and to go and prosecute the war with his father — a jibe at Ammon, whose son he had let himself be called at Siwa.

Thirteen men

Arrian's Alexander does not argue at this point.

He jumped down from the platform with his officers, and pointed out by hand the most conspicuous of the men who had stirred up the crowd — thirteen of them — and ordered them taken away and executed.

Then, when the rest had gone silent with terror, he went back up on the platform and made a speech.

The speech

It does not begin with himself. It begins with his father, and with what the Macedonians had been before Philip:

He found you vagabonds and destitute of means, most of you clad in hides, feeding a few sheep up the mountain sides, for the protection of which you had to fight with small success against Illyrians, Triballians, and the border Thracians.

Then the inventory of what Philip gave them: cloaks instead of hides; the plains instead of the mountains; the capacity to beat their neighbours instead of hiding in strongholds; cities with laws; rule over the very barbarians who used to plunder them; most of Thrace annexed; the coastal ports taken, so that trade made the country rich and the mines became safe to work; mastery over the Thessalians they had once feared; the road into Greece opened by humbling the Phocians.

From being slaves and subjects, he made you rulers.

It is a remarkable thing for a king to say to a mutinous army. The argument is not that they owe him — it is that they owe the institution, and that they were nothing before it made them something. The claim about the Persians in the Companions follows from it: the army is not a Macedonian possession, it is the king's instrument, and it was always the king who decided what it was.

What it tells you about the state

The empire had no constitution, no succession law, no capital, and no administrative class of its own — Alexander was running the Achaemenid apparatus with its satraps largely in place. What it had instead was the relationship between one man and one army.

At Opis that relationship was renegotiated by execution and rhetoric, and it held: the mutiny collapsed, the veterans went home under Craterus, and the Persians stayed in the Companions.

But the terms had been made explicit, and they were not terms that could survive the man. Twelve months later Alexander was dead at Babylon with no arrangement in place, and the same army — which had just been told in public that it was nothing without its king — had to decide what to do next.

What happens when there is no institution

Drafted from Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988)end

Alexander died at Babylon in June 323 with no adult heir, no designated successor, and by most accounts no clear instruction. His wife Roxane was pregnant; his half-brother Arrhidaeus was held to be mentally incapable. The army assembly and the senior officers settled on a joint kingship of the two — an unborn child and an incompetent — with a regent to govern for them.

It lasted about as long as it deserved to. Within two years the regent was murdered, within twenty both kings were dead, and the officers had stopped pretending to rule on anyone's behalf and started calling themselves kings. The wars of the successors ran for four decades and produced the Seleucid, Ptolemaic and Antigonid states that shaped the eastern Mediterranean until Rome.

The failure is structural, and it is worth being exact about it. An empire that fragments usually has something to fragment along: a patrimonial division among sons, as with the Mongols and the Seljuks; an administrative split, as at Rome; tribal lines, as in the steppe khanates. Those are all seams, and a seam implies that something had been joined. Alexander's empire had a conquering army and a captured Persian bureaucracy and nothing connecting the two except him. It came apart not along lines but everywhere at once, because conquest is not a state, and the difference between the two is invisible until the conqueror dies.

Five point two million square kilometres, held for roughly a decade. The extent and the duration belong beside each other, and either figure alone is a distortion of what the thing was.

The use of him

Drafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)afterlife

He died at Babylon on the twenty-eighth of the month, in the evening. Plutarch copies the last week out of the court diary almost day by day, and what it records is administrative to the end. With the fever at its worst he had his bed moved down beside the great bath and spent the day discussing with his principal officers which men should be found to fill the vacant places in the army. On the twenty-fourth, too ill to stand, he was carried out of bed to be present at the sacrifices.

On the twenty-fifth he stopped speaking. The Macedonians outside decided he was already dead, came to the gates shouting, and frightened his friends into letting them in; and the whole army was let past the bed, unarmed, one man after another. Two officers were sent to ask the god at the temple whether they should carry the king there, and were told to leave him where he was.

The body nobody was watching

Then the arguing started, and it went on for days.

Plutarch is interested in the poisoning story — Olympias killing people about it six years later, the water so cold it could only be kept in an ass's hoof — and dismisses it, and the reason he gives for dismissing it is the detail worth keeping. Throughout the days of the commanders' quarrel, he says, the body stayed clear and fresh, without any sign of taint, though it lay neglected in a close, sultry place.

That is the first sentence of the afterlife. The man who had been the only institution the empire possessed was lying unattended in a hot room in Babylon while his generals worked out who was going to have what. Plutarch mentions the neglect only in passing, as evidence in an argument about poison. It is the whole situation in one clause.

Roxane, meanwhile, sent for Darius' daughter Statira with a forged letter in Alexander's name, killed her and her sister, and had the bodies thrown down a well and the well filled in — Perdiccas assisting, who was governing under cover of the name of Arrhidaeus, Philip's half-witted son, whom he carried about with him like a guard.

Everything the empire had was still there: the army, the treasuries, the satrapies, the roads. What it did not have was a rule.

What the Romans did with him

Three centuries later he was a career model.

Pompey's hair rose a little from his forehead, and there was something in the set of his eyes that people said made his face resemble the statues of King Alexander — more talked of, Plutarch adds drily, than really apparent. The name was applied to him young, and he did not decline it; some used it in mockery. A consular named Lucius Philippus, speaking for him in court, thought it a decent joke that nobody should be surprised if Philip loved Alexander.

That is comedy. The next one is not.

Caesar, at leisure in Spain, was reading a history of Alexander, and sat a long while afterwards without speaking, and then burst into tears. His friends asked what was wrong. Do you think I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?

He was in his late thirties, governing a Roman province, and he measured himself against a dead Macedonian and found himself a failure. He raised ten new cohorts more or less immediately and went to war with the tribes on the Atlantic.

And then the detail that says most about what Alexander had become. When Pompey celebrated his third triumph, the people who liked to make the parallel with Alexander exact could not quite get the ages to line up — so they said he was not yet thirty-four. Plutarch notes, flatly, that he was in truth near forty.

A man's age was worth falsifying to preserve a resemblance to somebody who had been dead for three hundred years. That is a better measure of the afterlife than any of the cities named after him.

What actually lasted

The kingdoms his officers cut out of the empire lasted between one and three centuries and were taken, one after another, by Rome and by Parthia. The Greek-speaking cities stayed. The language stayed longer than the states did. And the figure himself detached from the history altogether and went into circulation — as a model for generals, a warning about autocracy, an argument about whether fortune or virtue explains success — a figure available to anybody who needed one.

The empire lasted thirteen years. The example has not stopped yet.