Alexander's new look
His reputation as a brilliant tactician has also come under fire. After the Battle of Issus, he pursued war booty in Susa and Babylon instead of tracking Darius, giving the king time to rebuild his devastated army, argues University of Missouri historian Ian Worthington. Another costly error, in his view, was the siege of Tyre. To be sure, Alexander needed to control the powerful city. But the Tyrians had already submitted and only balked at his insistence on sacrificing at their temple during a religious festival. The smart thing for Alexander to do would have been to sacrifice elsewhere and stroll on into the city, says Worthington, but his pride forced him to mount what he probably knew would be a lengthy siege.
The globalist. Historians who embrace the dreamy-eyed notion that he waged war in order to unify East and West have misinterpreted his efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people he conquered, says David Potter, a professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan. Over the years, he adopted elements of Persian royal dress, including a purple-and-white striped tunic. He took a Persian wife and tried to introduce to his court the Oriental custom of prostration before the king. He also appointed local officials as provincial governors, a practice that incensed his officers, who felt that the lucrative posts should not have gone to those who fought for the other side. He persisted, however, because "he recognized that he couldn't control his empire without a buy-in from the conquered," says Potter, not because he envisioned "the peoples of the world singing 'Kumbaya' together on the banks of the Euphrates."
Indeed, the whole idea that there was some sort of cultural firewall between East and West before Alexander is wrong headed, argues Walter Burkert in his new book Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture . The Greeks borrowed heavily from Mesopotamia for their mathematics and astronomy, for instance. (Indeed, the so-called Pythagorean theorem is found in cuneiform texts about 1,000 years before Pythagoras.) The Greeks learned from eastern craftsmen how to make terra cotta from molds, and facets of their mythology had Oriental roots, including Egyptian funerary lore.
Moreover, Greek culture also had jumped its borders before Alexander's conquest. Thanks to traders and mercenaries, "it was a very cosmopolitan world," says the University of California-Berkeley's Andrew Stewart, who heads up an archaeological dig in Israel of a Phoenician city called Dor, where he and legions of volunteers have uncovered myriad Greek artifacts. As early as the first part of the fifth century B.C., the city's residents were using Greek mixing bowls in their drinking rituals. And by the beginning of the fourth, he says, "anyone with any means at all was eating and drinking off Greek black glaze tableware."
Still, the Macedonian's conquests obviously left their mark. After Alexander, "there were Greek soldiers crawling all over the Near East," says Stewart. He also founded a host of Greek cities--among them the glittering Alexandria--where the elites of both East and West, including engineers, artisans, and scientists, continued trading ideas and skills. By looting and then spending much of the accumulated wealth of the Persian Empire, he revolutionized local economies, says Tulane University historian Kenneth Harl, who has studied coins unearthed in the ancient town of Gordion. Before Alexander rolled through, the only coins in use had very high value and so were good only for large transactions like settling debts between governments. After him, however, regular people carried coins of low-enough value to "buy lunch in the marketplace," he says.
But did Anatolian peasants eating lunch in the marketplace suddenly start spouting Greek poetry? Scholars increasingly think not. Most people's only real contact with Greek culture was "when soldiers came through and grabbed their chickens for food," says Stewart. Nor, increasingly, do scholars think Alexander would have cared. He was, after all, a conqueror and, like others of his ilk, cared passionately about power, not cultural interchange. "We may not like him or approve of him," says Potter, "but there's an integrity to him."
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