It was a bitter truth, but Demosthenes was politically responsible for Chaeronea and the loss, permanent as it turned out, of freedom. One cannot imagine a greater failure of policy. But the orator was unrepentant. Even if Athenian efforts were doomed, it had still been right to resist Philip. In a speech in 330, he claimed:
No, you were not wrong, men of Athens, you were not wrong, when you accepted the risks of war for the redemption and the liberties of mankind. I swear it by our forefathers who bore the brunt of battle at Marathon, who stood in the phalanx line at Plataea, who strove in the sea-fights of Salamis and Artemisium, and by all the brave men who lie in our public cemeteries.
This was little more than nostalgia. There was to be no return to the great days of old.
23
Afterword—“A God-forsaken Hole”
Alexander of Macedon took being Greek very seriously. After all, he was the new Achilles whose Companions were latter-day successors of the mythic warrior’s trusty Myrmidons. He merged metaphor and fact.
Xerxes had seen his invasion of Greece as payback for the Trojan War, and the young Macedonian returned the compliment. Almost the first thing Alexander did, after crossing the Hellespont from Europe into Asia in 334, was to leave his army for a few days and ride to the ruins of Troy.
All that remained of the ancient city was a large tumulus and a tumbledown village with a gimcrack little temple. Tourists were shown a collection of bogus relics. Like the Persian king before him, Alexander sacrificed to Athena, Troy’s tutelary goddess. He received some gold wreaths from a committee of local Greeks and sacrificed at the (so-called) tombs of the Greek heroes Ajax and Achilles.
The king and Hephaestion, his best friend since his school days and probably lover, laid wreaths on the tomb of Achilles and his best friend or lover Patroclus, whose celebrated relationship lay at the heart of Homer’s epic the Iliad. Then, bizarrely, they stripped off, oiled themselves (as Greek athletes routinely did), and ran a race around the tombs.
Alexander made an offering of his own armor and took in exchange a shield and panoply, purportedly preserved from the Trojan War and hanging on the temple walls (at his first victory against the Persians at the river Granicus in May 334 he dressed up in them and had them carried before him in later battles).
Alexander continued to play the role of Achilles during the campaign in Asia. When driving south towards Egypt, the Persian official in charge of the great city and port of Gaza refused to bow to the king even in defeat. Alexander tied him to his chariot and dragged him, still alive, around the city, just as Achilles had done with the corpse of Hector in the Iliad.
The years he spent as a pupil of Aristotle under whom he studied ethics and politics made a powerful impression on the young prince. He was devoted to philosophy and, when king, funded leading thinkers of the day. He was also excited by his tutor’s researches in the sciences and brought with him to Persia a team of architects, geographers, botanists, astronomers, mathematicians, and zoologists.
Alexander was an enthusiastic reader. His personal copy of the Iliad that he kept in Darius’s confiscated casket was annotated by Aristotle in his own hand. When campaigning deep in the interiors of Asia, he asked for books to be sent to him from Greece—histories and poetry anthologies and many of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Alexander fell out with Aristotle when the philosopher published his teaching notes. These should have remained confidential, the king wrote, as distinct from the books he wrote for the general reader. He complained: “What advantage shall I have over other men if these theories in which you have trained me are to be made common property?” This was a misunderstanding, the philosopher replied. His technical work was not a secret, but was simply inaccessible to the public at large. The royal student’s advantage remained.
Alexander was one of the world’s greatest commanders. In a string of astonishing victories he defeated the Great King Darius III and took over the empire, becoming Great King himself. But his most lasting achievement, cultural rather than military, was to diffuse the Greek language and civilization throughout the lands of the Persian Empire. He founded numerous cities, many of which, and most especially Alexandria in the Nile Delta, promoted the arts and sciences. In effect, he Hellenized most of the known world. Here lay the future.
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Alexander’s brief but incident-packed career is another story, but together with that of his father, Philip, it added a full stop to the achievements of three very different types of warring state, whose interweavings have been one of this book’s themes—Athens, Sparta, and the Persian Empire. They competed with one another, and each rose and fell in turn within the space of three centuries, leaving the stage empty for the Macedonians.
Sparta was the most brittle and least appealing of them. Militaristic and introverted, its viability depended on the enslavement of its neighbors. What impressed contemporaries in the ancient world was its self-discipline. Its constitution promoted eunomia, or good order, obedience to good laws, stability. The average Spartiate, or Equal, saw himself not so much as an individual but as an undifferentiated member of a unified citizen body. The demands of the collective always trumped personal concerns.
The life of imagination and the arts was firmly discouraged and so was agricultural labor and economic activity, which was the responsibility of a servile class, the helots. As in totalitarian societies of the modern era, every aspect of an Equal’s private and public life was carefully monitored and controlled.
Spartan society was designed to produce military efficiency. This it did with considerable success. Its citizen hoplites were famous for courage, discipline, and technical competence. They did not expect to lose battles and very seldom did. Unfortunately, inequalities in landholding led to a slow decline in their number. The outside world scarcely noticed this development, which was masked by a cloak of invincibility. As already noted, 8,000 Equals in 480 dwindled to only about 1,500 at the time of the Battle of Leuctra in 371.
This defeat exposed Sparta’s reputation as a confidence trick. It never recovered from the blow.
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The failure of Persian aggression in the fifth century had a benign consequence, in that it instilled into Greeks throughout the Eastern Mediterranean a strong sense of their identity and, so they believed, their superiority. They were proud members simultaneously of Hellas as a whole and of their small but vociferous city-states.
By contrast Persians and their subjects were barbarous and could not even speak intelligibly. Generations of European scholars and students have tended to underrate the achievements of the Achaemenid Empire and seen its history through a Hellenic lens. This is understandable, for the Persians left behind virtually no narrative account of events.
But their empire was a considerable achievement. For the first time it brought together lands from the Indus to the Balkans, from Central Asia to Upper Egypt under a political and military administration. Improved communications (in particular the Royal Road), strong regional governors, and an efficient bureaucracy held the sprawling, feudal empire together. Although the Great King held absolute powers, he did not impose himself on his subjects. “Through a wise and salutary neglect,” as Edmund Burke said in another context, he left old ways, local religious and cultural customs untouched. In return for the payment of taxes and levies of men for the army, he provided peace and stability. Provinces prospered. Astutely, the Macedonian invaders took over most of the institutions of the empire they vanquished and governed it in the same tolerant manner.