Alexander and the East The Tragedy of Triumph A. B. BOSWORTH CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD Alexander and the East This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-815262-0 Preface THE origins of this book are of some interest. In 1993 I was invited to give the Sixth Broadhead Lecture at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand. For the occasion it seemed appropri- ate to give a general lecture on Alexander, developing many of the ideas I had only been able to adumbrate in my Historical Commentary on Arrian. It also gave me the opportunity to rebut some misappre- hensions of my concept of Alexander's reign, which have become common currency. My work is not 'revisionist' (it goes back in fact to Niebuhr and Grote, before Droysen produced his classic encomiastic interpretation of the period), nor is it 'unromantic'. However, the romance is not the trivial picture of the wild-eyed, visionary Alexander. It is a much darker conception, its perspective that of the victims, the eggs in Alexander's ecumenical omelette. Before I came to the lecture, I had spent some years working through the text of Arrian. It was a depressing experience, cumulatively so, as the record of slaughter went on, apparently without an end. The slaughter was what Arrian primarily saw as the achievement of Alexander, and, for all his humanity, Arrian shares the Roman mentality which measured glory in terms of enemy casualties—with a lower limit of 5,000 enemy dead, the body count for a triumph. Alexander's most sympathetic chronicler in ancient times describes the reign as more or less continuous fighting, at times verging on massacre for its own sake, and his emphasis is certainly correct. Alexander spent much of his time killing and directing killing, and, arguably, killing was what he did best. That brute fact needed emphasis, and it was central to the Broadhead Lecture. The Broadhead Trust stipulates publication of its lectures, and it seemed to me that 'The Shield of Achilles' would appear at best advantage as a thematic introduction to a set of studies exploring the background to Alexander's actions in the east of his empire, with particular emphasis on the period 329-325 BC, which I have come to consider of central importance for the entire Hellenistic Age. I vi Preface already had an unpublished general lecture ('Alexander and the Desert'), which investigated Alexander's motives for conquest and the human cost of his passage through the Makran. The two pieces had a unity, and could be tied together by a series of detailed studies of the period. The result is the four central chapters of the book, in which I explore various overarching themes. I begin with the extant sources, with the problems of assessing variant traditions, and draw attention to the pervasive phenomenon of literary elaboration in the primary and secondary sources. The study of the sources leads naturally to investigation of their origins, the local informants ex- ploited by Alexander and the accuracy of the information they imparted (Chapter 3, Information and Misinformation). In particu- lar I was attracted by the remarkable complicity between questioner and informant which has bedevilled modern anthropological research. Alexander and his men had their prejudices and expecta- tions about the lands they invaded. They expected to find Amazons when they believed themselves close to the Black Sea, and there were fabulous stories in circulation about the Indian lands, which they were eager to verify. Their informants duly obliged with a medley of material, both true and ben trovato, which was designed to satisfy the curiosity of their new masters. The most remarkable development, the evolution of the myths of Dionysus' and Heracles' conquests in India, is analysed in Chapter 4 (The Creation of Belief). Here I attempt to document how Alexander bolstered his conviction of divinity by evidence provided by his staff from their interrogation of the natives. At the same time I investigate the circumstances of the campaigning, when Alexander was isolated in the recesses of Sog- diana or Gandhara, engaged in vicious siege warfare, often with a mere handful of senior officers. The isolation encouraged the most extravagant concepts of his person and monarchy, and the absolut- ism of his last years is, to my mind, starkly foreshadowed as early as the Sogdian Revolt of 329. The circle is closed in Chapter 5 (The Justification of Terror), where I examine what conquest meant for its victims and how its atrocity could be justified in Alexander's eyes. His demands for sovereignty were absolute, and all peoples who had ever come under the sway of the Persians (or the mythical Dionysus) were automatically his subjects. Resistance was ipso facto rebellion, and it was treated as such, with indiscriminate massacre and enslavement. In the course of these central chapters I make use of analogies Preface vii from the Spanish conquest of Mexico, in particular the years 1519 to 1522, when Cortes moved inland from the coast of Yucatan to discover and ultimately destroy the Mexican capital of Tenochtitlan. I was attracted to the period because I felt that Alexander's mental development in the isolation of Sogdiana and India might have its counterpart among the Conquistadors in America. That proved a dead end. The analogies were relatively trivial, precisely because Cortes never experienced the intellectual isolation of Alexander. There was always a representative of the Church to remind the conquerors of their religious duties, and the enmity of Diego Velazquez (the governor of Cuba) meant that Cortes was always acutely conscious of the need to operate in the political contexts of Spain and the Indies. However, if the analogy did not work in macrocosm, it certainly did in microcosm. The interaction of the Conquistadors with their new subjects paralleled that of Alexander with the Indians in many ways. The use of interpreters was start- lingly similar, as was the interpreters' transformation of their subject- matter to accommodate the interests of their employers—and Dona Marina must have fulfilled for Cortes the role which men such as Calanus assumed for Alexander. Similarly the source tradition of the Mexican conquest, rich and abundant, is strongly reminiscent of the first generation of Alexander historians. It provides a working model with all the precise compositional dates and autobiographical detail which are lacking for the reign of Alexander. One caveat must be lodged. I am not adducing the Mexican material as a general explanatory matrix. The differences between the two periods are profound, and the scale is quite disproportion- ate. Cortes took an army of a few hundred Spaniards (and several thousand Indian auxiliaries) to conquer the Valley of Mexico, a region densely populated but no more than 10,000 sq. km. in area, whereas Alexander headed the greatest expedition ever to leave Greek shores, and overran the eastern world as far as the border between modern Pakistan and India. The political settings, as we have seen, are totally different, as are the conceptual horizons. Alexander never entered a totally unknown world. At the Hyphasis he came closest to Cortes, the Cortes at Cempoala (August 1519), who had heard of the great inland empire of Montezuma and was eager to conquer it. That was Alexander's reaction to the reports of the Nanda kingdom of the Ganges, but his army notoriously failed to support his ambitions. Otherwise the two situations are distinct, viii Preface and we cannot call upon Cortes to explain Alexander. However, the similarities of detail cannot be discounted, and, in my opinion, they may be considered parallel manifestations of universal phenomena, all the more impressive in that they are so separated in time and cultural context. Onesicritus' conversation with Calanus through his three interpreters does match Cortes' interviews with Montezuma via Dona Marina and Aguilar, and the distortions produced by the interpreting are remarkably similar. Even the justification of conquest is comparable. Alexander did not have or need a Requeri- miento, but he conceived himself as justified as Cortes in the terri- torial claims he made, and saw his victims as insubordinate vassals. Similar modes of thought evoked similar responses. For all the differences of scale the Mexican conquest supplies a host of small- scale analogies which can illuminate the reign of Alexander. As usual, there are many debts to acknowledge. To Kate Adshead and Charles Manning I owe the invitation to give the Broadhead Lecture, generous hospitality while I was a visitor at Christchurch, and, indeed, the primary inspiration for this book. Elizabeth Bayn- ham discussed the subject-matter with me while she was in Perth on study leave, and read the entire work in draft, making a large number of very helpful comments and criticisms. At a late stage I had the advantage of the detailed observations of Simon Hornblower and Sir John Elliott, which materially improved my presentation of Chap- ter 2. I have also benefited from the acute eye of Norman Ashton, who has read and criticized much of the book. My department and university gave generous material support, in particular a Time Release Award for the first semester of 1995, which enabled me to do most of the writing in ideal conditions; and a subvention from the Australian Research Council's Large Grants Scheme gave me the opportunity to work on the Indian material at Oxford in 1994 and 1995. Finally, and most importantly, I should thank my wife, Jo, for her encouragement and understanding thoughout the gestation of this work. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, who was embroiled in a war he detested, witnessed some of the worst that man can do, and acquitted himself with dignity. October 1995 A.B.B. Contents List of Figures xi Abbreviations xii-xvi 1. The Shield of Achilles: Myth and Reality in the Reign of Alexander the Great 1 2. Windows on the Truth 31 3. Information and Misinformation 66 4. The Creation of Belief 98 5. The Justification of Terror 133 6. Alexander and the Desert 166 Appendix Alexander and the Ganges: A Question of Probability 186 Bibliography 201 Index 211