This is the second and final part of our look at Alexander III of Macedon (Part I), who you almost certainly know as Alexander the Great. Last week, we looked at the sources for Alexander’s life, the historiography (that is, the history-of-the-history) of his modern reception and then he abilities as a military commander, both on his own and in the context of the army and officers that Philip II, his father, had built for him.
This week, we turn to Alexander the King rather than Alexander the General. After all, being a king meant more than just commanding armies in the field: it demanded the administration of kingdoms, the stewardship of subjects, the managing of subordinates and the leadership of men. So this week we will look at those tasks: Alexander as Administrator, Ruler and Leader. What were his priorities, which of these did he actually achieve and how well did he keep his promises to his most loyal followers?
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Alexander the Administrator
Now, just as with Alexander as a general, we can hardly cover every aspect of Alexander’s administrative decisions or non-decisions in a blog post, so I want instead to lay out the general character of Alexander’s administration and then assess the degree to which we might view him as a skilled administrator.1
Of course the first thing to note when it comes to Alexander’s administration of his empire is the king’s physical presence. Alexander almost never returned to any area he conquered, meaning that he generally made provisions for administration once and then immediately moved on. Alexander leaves Macedon proper in 334, never to return. He leaves Asia Minor in 333, never to return. he leaves Egypt in 331, never to return. He is in the Levant twice, a first stint in 333 that runs into 332 and a second in 331, after which he, again, never returns. Alexander heads into northern Iran, in hot pursuit of Darius, in 330, leaving at the end of that year, never to return. Alexander heads into Afghanistan in 330, and leaves in 327 – wait for it – never to return. He then enters and leaves India in 326, never to return, before spending 325 and 324 hiking back to Babylon (via Susa, one of the few places he visits twice), dying in Babylon in June, 323.
The second thing to note is that in nearly all of that movement, save for the time in Egypt and the return trip to Babylon, Alexander is leading an army into potentially hostile territory and the demands of the army, especially logistics, were primary. Part of how Alexander’s sweeping campaigns were possible was that cities surrendered to him as he approached, enabling him to extract cash and supplies as he moved, without needing to settle down to secure the area or engage in lots of time-consuming foraging. Pauses to settle in for a difficult siege are relatively rare and it is striking that both (Tyre and Gaza) occur in 332 after Issus in the Levant. Alexander’s treatment of both cities was reportedly brutal: he reportedly (Q. Curtius Rufus 4.4.14-17) ordered the whole population of Tyre save those who managed to flee into temples killed and crucified some 2,000 Tyrians on the beach outside the city, while at Gaza he had the garrison commander tortured to death (Q. Curtius Rufus 4.6.29) and sold all of the survivors into slavery (Arr. Anab. 2.27.7). I think we can understand this brutality as a product of the need to cow other settlements into submission; Alexander needed those ‘surrenders in advance’ to keep his army fed in the long run, he couldn’t afford to siege every town.
Though – and we’ll come back to this – it should put the lie to the popular notion of Alexander as always the genteel and merciful conqueror; Alexander was genteel to royalty. To everyone else, including, as we’ll see, his friends and companions, he could be shockingly ruthless and brutal.
But the point here is that many of Alexander’s initial administrative decisions are going to be made based on almost pure expediency. In most cases, Alexander’s policy was to leave the Persian administrative system as he found it, merely replacing the Persian satrap with a Macedonian (and later, in the East, with Iranian nobles, a policy he will then regret and reverse, but we’ll come back to that) and dropping off a portion of his Macedonian army to secure control. For most of the subjects of the Achaemenid Empire, then, the first, last and only administrative decision Alexander ever made concerning them was the decision of which of his companions to put in charge before moving on. Again, we’ll come back to the personnel decisions, but as Kholod notes (op. cit. 300-307), Alexander did not have anyone with local knowledge to drop off, nor does he generally seem to have chosen his best to drop off, but mostly who he could spare. We never get the sense he is giving it deep thought and indeed Bosworth notes (op. cit. 864), “It is hard to see any wider policy beyond the basic requirements that the satrapies should remain peaceful with the minimum of expense and that his kingship should be universally and unconditionally accepted.” Achaemenid taxes simply became Macedonian taxes.
One thing Alexander did do was found cities, some seventy of them if Plutarch (Mor 328E) is to be believed, though we cannot account for all seventy. These foundations, along with later Hellenistic ones, will have the effect of creating vast cultural interactions and thus the Hellenistic world; of course Droysen and Tarn imagined this was Alexander’s purpose, but the sources give no hint of this. Instead, as Bosworth notes (op. cit. 866) of the cities we can locate in our sources, the great majority of Alexander’s foundations were “military control centres, garrison points in unquiet territory.” In essence, a portion of Alexander’s army – that is, the Greek or Macedonian portion – was dropped off to create a garrison, with some of the local land seized to provide an income for those settlers and some of the local population seized to provide the labor. It is crucial to note, these are not greenfield settlements, but new military centers whose purpose is to impose a new, ethnically defined ruling class on a subject population, whose land and labor have been stolen for the purpose.
And in most cases, Alexander’s involvement was profoundly minimal; with but one real exception, you should not imagine Alexander sticking around for more than the opening formalities of these ‘foundations.’ As Bosworth notes (op. cit. 868), the excavations at Ai-Khanum, probably Alexandria on the Oxus, show that the key Greek-style public buildings belong to the third century, not the fourth, meaning they weren’t built in Alexander’s lifetime, much less while he was there. He stole some land, stole some people, dropped off the garrison and moved on before anything at all was really built. Diodorus gives some sense of the rudimentary, isolated and limited nature of most of these new ‘cities’ when he notes that the Greeks Alexander settled in Bactria and Sogdiana kept their head’s down for fear of the king while he was alive, but the moment he died rose in revolt because “they longed for the Greek customs and manner of life” (Diod. Sic. 18.7.1).
Of course that real exception is Alexandria-on-the-Nile. There, Alexander sticks around long enough to mark out the location of the agora, major temples and the walls (Arr. Anab. 3.1.4-3.2.2). This too, however, seems to have been quite swift – Arrian reports a story that Alexander had to outline the city’s wall in barley meal because he didn’t have anything else to mark the surface of the ground with. Regardless of if we find the story credible – though Arrian explicit says he does – the implication is that Alexander was hardly there long (Arr. Anab. 3.2.1), perhaps days at most. He certainly doesn’t stick around for construction and once he leaves his unbuilt city with orders for, you know, other people to finish it he – wait for it – never returns.
What of the Greek cities under Achaemenid rule in Asia Minor? The liberation of these, after all, was supposed to be the reason for the entire campaign, so surely Alexander had a consistent administrative policy towards them, one founded in Greek freedom? Well, no. Unlike the Greek poleis in Greece proper, who existed in an alliance with Alexander, the Greek poleis of Asia Minor were conquered territories, ‘spear won land’ and as such had no rights which Alexander had not given them. The actual arrangements tended to depend on Alexander’s needs at the time; liberal settlements – Alexander does not make treaties with these poleis, but rather declares their new status by fiat – could clear the way for his army to march more easily, but they did not represent a consistent policy. Grynium, taken by Parmenio in the preparation-stage before Alexander’s full-scale invasion, was wholly enslaved (Diod. Sic. 17.7.9). Along the coast of Asia Minor, where Alexander needed to deprive the Persian fleet of safe anchorages to secure his own lines of reinforcement back to Macedon, he freed the Greek cities from tribute and ordered oligarchic governments (which tended to be preferred by the Achaemenids, as they were easier to manage) abolished, and democracies imposed, more from political expediency – the democratic factions will have been anti-Persian – than from a love of democracy (Arr. Anab. 1.18.1-2). On the other hand, when Alexander gets to Aspendos, Alexander evidently needed cash, so when the Greeks there asked not to have a garrison imposed, he demanded horses and fifty talents of silver, a considerable sum; when they tried to negotiate, he doubled the bill, took hostages and imposed tribute (Arr. Anab. 1.27.4). It’s also not at all clear these grants of autonomy to the Greeks who got them actually protected them much at all from Alexander’s satraps once he left.
Generally, the Greeks get a better deal from Alexander than anyone else. He only sometimes imposes a garrison, only relatively rarely imposes tribute and only sometimes overthrows their existing government (typically replacing them with more anti-Persian democratic regimes, but this is not a consistent pro-democracy policy either). But these arrangements, whatever they were, are not consistent, but generally crafted to suit Alexander’s needs in the moment.
Crucially, there is one thing Alexander does not do. As he conquers, Alexander’s system for legally constructing his rule was to adopt new titles – to wear more than one hat, as it were. This was a pattern he picked up from his father Philip II. Philip II, of course, was the King of the Macedonians (note: not Macedonia, the place, but the Macedonians, as a people, wherever they might be), but he also had controlled Thessaly by being the Tagus (‘leader/general’) of the Thessalian League, a technically elected position. Likewise, he secured Greece by being the hegemon (‘leader’) of the League of Corinth, an alliance he established after Chaeronea.
Alexander, unsurprisingly, added to this number. After Issus, Alexander insisted on being addressed as the ‘King of Asia’ (Basileus tes Asias) in his letter to Darius III (Arr. Anab. 2.14.9), an awkward title he seems to have adopted to try to encompass his conquests up to that point, given that the expedient of proclaiming himself the Great King of Persia (shahansah, literally ‘king of kings’) because he had neither captured nor killed Darius III, and indeed, would do neither, being beaten to the punch by Darius’ assassination at the hands of Bessus. On entering Egypt, he adds another hat: Pharaoh, conferred on him in Memphis. After Gaugamela, he entered Babylon and was proclaimed ‘King of the World’ which was the traditional title for the kings of Babylon.
Alexander’s rule is thus fragmented in the basis of its legitimacy, as his legitimacy comes from wearing six hats: King of the Macedonians, Tagus of the Thessalian League, Hegemon of the League of Corinth (which, note, the Asian Greeks did not join), King of Asia, Pharaoh of Egypt and King of the World (which he may have imagined covered the necessary remaining bases, but really just meant ‘king of Babylon). Alexander takes no concrete steps to merge these sources of legitimacy or the administrations beneath them. So he had a Persian-style administration in the East, but an Egyptian administration in Egypt and treaties with Greek cities in the West, while Macedon continued to be ruled as normal. You may ask how that is different from the local autonomy afforded by other, better administered empires – the Romans, say – and the difference is that those other, better administered empires at least homogenized the administrative language, record-keeping, finances and staffing (read: governors) at the imperial level, and vest ruling legitimacy in a single, supreme title so that the empire cannot be casually fractionalized.2
Alexander achieves exactly none of that. Apart from efforts at cultural fusion (which we’re coming to), it’s not clear he attempted much of it, and what he did attempt failed.
Given that fairly minimal – one might, I think, fairly say ‘indifferent’ – approach to administration, much of Alexander’s administrative impact really lay with who, rather than what: not what he did, but who he chose as satraps and other officials. Which leads us to:
Alexander the Ruler
Alexander’s selection of subordinates was, I think, on the whole, quite poor. Early in his reign, this is concealed by the simple expedient that most of Alexander’s key subordinates weren’t selected by him at all: they were selected by Philip II. However, as the campaign wears on, Alexander opts to make two large categories of what we might regard as ‘staffing changes.’ First, he begins replacing most of Philip II’s old men with companions of his own generation, the syntrophoi, and second once he gets to Persia he begins assigning satrapies to Iranian nobles, alongside a program of trying to fuse his Macedonian elite and the Persian elite.
In both cases, Alexander’s choices are hardly without fault. Some of the younger men he chooses to pull into positions of high authority are less capable than those they replace, when they aren’t simply corrupt, though some of the replacements do prove quite capable. Meanwhile, Alexander attempts to select Iranian nobles of secure loyalty to handle his eastern satrapies and largely fails to select loyal Iranian nobles, forcing him to reverse the policy. And of course, his program to fuse the two elites is, broadly speaking, a near-complete failure. As a manager of people – distinct from a leader – I would argue Alexander does not impress, particularly when compared to his far more capable father.
On the Macedonian side of the equation, beginning in 330, Alexander begins, one by one, moving out many of Philip II’s old men and replacing them with companions of his own generation. The spark here seems to have been an actual conspiracy involving one of Alexander’s bodyguards (Demetrios) and another companion, in which Philotas, son of Parmenio, was implicated (the affair is Arr. Anab. 3.26-27, but Arrian’s coverage is circumspect, see Badian, “The Death of Parmenio” TAPA 91 (1960)). Alexander has Philotas tried – with no real evidence that Philotas was in on the plot, but that he knew about it and failed to report it – and executed him. Knowing this would mean a breach with Parmenio, he had the old general – who to be clear, had done nothing at all, he was away from the army at the time – assassinated (Arr. Anab. 3.26.4).
Alexander replaces Demetrios with Ptolemy – to be Ptolemy I Soter, who you will recall is one of our sources (which may explain why Arrian’s account is so circumspect; his hey source benefited greatly from the event) – as one of the bodyguards. Ptolemy would later get field commands and turned out to be relatively effective at them, but his key qualification was having been a close friend of Alexander’s in his youth; before being picked by Alexander for his loyalty, he had not distinguished himself. Hephaestion, a boyhood friend of Alexander almost exactly his age, was made one of the two commanders of the companion cavalry, despite by all evidence being a quite mediocre military man. Alexander also preferred Perdiccas, another syntrophos, though unlike the other two, Perdiccas had distinguished himself; Perdiccas would end up as regent after Alexander’s death and catastrophically fail at that role, though it is not clear to me that anyone could have succeeded. So Alexander’s choices are not all bad.3
And then there is Harpalus.
You may have noticed that I haven’t yet really brought up finance so far. Part of the reason for that is simply that Alexander’s sweeping conquests provided so much loot – he is, after all, cashing out the entire Achaemenid treasury – that for much of the campaign finance doesn’t really matter. There is disagreement as to if this windfall lasted all the way to Alexander’s death, with the traditional view being that the lack of money awards to the army and staggering accumulating debt amongst the soldiers (Q. Curtius Rufus 10.2.9-11) were indicators that Alexander had, in fact, managed to mostly run out, whereas F.L. Holt has recently argued in a book on the topic that Alexander was likely running out, but had not yet actually run out of money when he died.4 Apart from the spending – on soldiers, gifts, religious festivals, city foundations, temples, rewards to officers and so on5 – Alexander doesn’t seem to have been very concerned with finance, which is why I didn’t delve into it in the administration section. He delegated it to others.
In particular, he delegated that job to Harpalus. Harpalus had been a boyhood friend of Alexander: along with Ptolemy, Nearchus and a few other of Alexander’s close friends, he had been exiled by Philip II for a plot to have Alexander marry the daughter of the powerful satrap of Caria (Pixodarus) which would have undermined Philip (Plut. Alex. 9-10); Alexander recalled them from exile and made Harpalus his treasurer sometime before the Battle of Issus (Arr. Anab. 3.6.6). In 333, shortly before Issus, Harplus then stole some meaningful chunk of the treasury and ran off with a fellow named Tauriskos to Greece, ending up in Megara (Arr. Anab. 3.6.7). Alexander persuaded Harpalus to return, promising not to punish him, and indeed Harpalus did return and was not punished.
Now, we might already call this a case of bad judgment: Alexander, early in the campaign, appointed a boyhood friend as treasurer who ran off with the money at the first sign of trouble. That’s not good rulership. But here’s the kicker: after Harpalus returns from exile Alexander makes him treasurer again, in 330 (Arr. Anab 3.6.7, 3.19.7). Alexander’s judgement was so incredibly poor that when he was first told about Harpalus’ first flight, he imprisoned the two men bearing the news, thinking they were lying (they were not, Plut. Alex. 41.8).
So of course the most predictable possible thing happens: with Harpalus ‘guarding’ the treasury in Babylon and Alexander off in Persia and later India on campaign, Harpalus embezzles the money, living in staggeringly lavish style, importing fish from the Red Sea, having famous courtesans sent from Athens, apparently abusing local women and so on (Diodorus 17.108.4-6). In 324, when Alexander was on his way back from India and was clearing house among his satraps (we’ll get to that in just a second), Harpalus panicked, embezzled even more money, hired a small army with it, then packed up five thousand talents of silver (approximately 145 tons) and fled to Greece, attempting to raise an anti-Macedonian force in Athens. When that failed, he fled to Crete, where he was assassinated by one of his officers. One wonders if Harpalus’ assassination was the only thing that kept Alexander from pardoning his old friend and finding him a new job, presumably as treasurer, again.
This was, in fact, an endemic problem of Alexander’s financial officials. Surveying what he know, Holt (op. cit., 136) concludes that all of Alexander’s hand-picked financial officials, “suggest a pattern of rampant corruption and abuse.”
Which in turn brings us to Alexander’s choices of satraps and local officials (which is going to overlap with the former, if anyone is wondering why I haven’t brought up Cleomenes of Naucratis yet). As noted, we have to divide these fellows into two major groups, as before Guagamela, Alexander almost exclusively appoints Macedonians at satraps in conquered territories, whereas afterwards, he often appoints Persian nobles, particularly in Persia. Of course in both cases, Alexander is dropping these new satraps off and then moving on, so it is no surprise that he only has an opportunity to assess the success of his selections beginning in 325 when he starts making his way back towards the core of his empire from India. What we see does not suggest good judgement in people.
The experiment in finding trustworthy Persian satraps does not begin well, as Satibarzanes, whom Alexander confirms as the satrap of Areia in 330, revolts against Alexander…in 330 (Arr. Anab. 3.25.1-5; he literally revolts five lines after being confirmed as satrap). Alexander replaces Satibarzanes with another Persian noble, Arsaces (Arr. Anab. 3.25.7), who he then has arrested the next year (Arr. Anab. 4.7.1) and replaced with a Macedonian, Stasanor, also removing the Persian satrap of neighboring Drangiana at the same time and putting Stasanor in charge of both (Q. Curt. 8.3.17) and perhaps around the same time also sacked and imprisoned the satrap of Hycania, Autophradates or Phradates, replacing him with Phrataphernes (Arr. Anab. 4.18.2; Q. Curt. 8.3.17).
Then we have to deal with Alexander’s actions with the satraps after his return, which Ernest Badian understands as effectively a mass purge. Badian (“Harpalus” JHS 81 (1961)) compiles the list of Alexander’s actions in this regard from 325 to 323, and when I rattle this off, please keep in mind that Alexander had but 25 or so satrapies total6 We can start with the non-Macedonians: Tyriaspes, satrap of Parapamisadae is arrested and executed, replaced by Oxyartes. Astaspes, satrap of Carmania, suspected of planning revolt, is deposed and executed. Orxines, satrap of Persia after the death of his predecessor Phrasaortes, is executed, replaced by Peukestas. The satrap of Susiana, Abulites and his son are executed as well, replaced, at least eventually, by Coenus. Badian also places the execution of (Auto)Phradates here. That is a not inconsiderable number of fatally disloyal satraps.
Nor were all of the Macedonian picks winners, though they did tend to get better treatment from Alexander. Apollophanes, satrap of Gedrosia was deposed for failure to follow orders. Alexander also opts at this point to recall Antipater (to be replaced by Craterus, one of the few of Philip’s old men, alongside Eumenes, that Alexander seems to have trusted), who had been managing Macedonia and Greece this entire time; Antipater, perhaps wisely, sends his son Cassander in his stead. Antipater instead stalls, with his army. As an aside, many folks love to theorize – often without a lot of the details – about what might have happened if Alexander hadn’t died when he did, and I never see, “civil war against Antipater” mooted as a possibility, despite it appearing, to me at least, to be very much on the table in early 323. It is not at all clear to me that a longer reign by Alexander would have resulted in the consolidation of his reign, given his quite evident problems with loyalty among both Macedonian and Persian key supporters (see below) one wonders if he would have faced further coup attempts and even open civil war.
In Egypt, at this point, the key figure was Cleomenes of Naucratis, a local Greek from the Greek polis in Egypt (Naucratis), who had primary supervision over the (very considerable) revenue of Egypt. The sources are profoundly negative towards Cleomenes, who seems to have manipulated grain sales from Egypt to enrich himself at the cost of inflicting shortages in other parts of Alexander’s empire, particularly Greece, while also extorting bribes from the Egyptian priesthood and generally embezzling funds. Alexander opts to pardon this fellow (Arr. Anab. 7.23.8), to Arrian’s dismay, a staggeringly poor decision made in the immediate aftermath of Harpalus’ second flight which ought to have given Alexander some wisdom about the treatment of embezzlers. Ptolemy, who ends up in charge of this region after Alexander’s death, is not so forgiving and promptly has Cleomenes killed.
The picture that emerges of Alexander’s choices in subordinates is not good: he appoints unqualified boyhood friends to key posts, repeatedly places his trust in loyal Persian nobles who turn out not to be loyal and repeatedly fails to punish close friends caught in manifest wrong-doing. Nor should we assume that Alexander’s late-in-life purges had ‘fixed’ the problem of troublesome subordinates. After all, the men Alexander left behind are exactly the men who will, in the 13 years after his death, murder every single one of Alexander’s relatives, including his half-brother Philip Arrhidaeus, Philip’s wife Eurdice, Alexander’s mother Olympias, Alexander’s wife Roxane and her son by him, Alexander IV. The men that Philip II handpicked, helped his son, Alexander, conquer the Persian Empire. The men Alexander handpicked exterminated the entire Argead royal house.
But we should also discuss Alexander’s program of cultural fusion and his more personal relationship with his officers and soldiers, which leads us to:
Alexander the Leader
Any discussion of Alexander’s leadership capabilities has to begin, I think, with an acknowledgement that Alexander was clearly an incredibly charismatic figure. He could be generous (often unwisely so), composed in extreme situations, gracious when it served him and had an easy wit that comes through in many of the anecdotes of his life. He was also, brave, fit, young and good-looking, which couldn’t have hurt. In short, Alexander clearly had a natural charisma to him that inspired loyalty and devotion. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he seems to have largely spent down much of that inherent goodwill that his talents and skills generated.
We can start with Alexander’s clear policy – one of his few definite policies – of trying to merge the Macedonian and Persian elite once it became clear that he had won the Persian Empire. On the one hand, you can see the clear logic: having taken over the Achaemenid Empire, Alexander sought to incorporate Persian court ritual and the Persian administrative machinery. This is a way for Alexander to try to put his regime on firmer, more traditional footing in the areas he had conquered. So the basic idea makes sense; the problem was that it failed miserably, though it can be hard to untangle all of those failures from the strong anti-Persian bias in our ancient sources.
This fusion-policy was two-pronged itself, with a fusion both of court manners on the one hand and personnel – the Macedonian and Persian aristocracies – on the other.7
In terms of combining court customs, the first step was the introduction by Alexander of a limited form of Persian royal dress, though here Arrian exaggerates the degree of the change and muddles the timing (for instance, Alexander never ditched the Macedonian diadem for the high Persian kitaris as Arrian implies, Arr. Anab. 4.7.4-5; cf. Plutarch, Alex. 45.1-4). Alexander seems to have first tried this out when interacting with non-Macedonians and some of his closest companions before employing it more broadly. Alexander tries to introduce the deep bowing of the Persian court, proskynesis late in 328; according to Arrian, Callisthenes, the court historian objects and Alexander has him imprisoned, but drops the effort to introduce the deep bow generally (though Persian members of his court continued to do so). Part of the problem here was that the Achaemenid Great King was absolute in a way that the King of the Macedonians wasn’t, and Alexander’s companions evidently feared finding themselves with the former kind of king, rather than the latter.
Arrian also presents other habits of Alexander as a product of adopting Persian customs, but we really do need some caution here, as Arrian’s deliberate pattern of presenting Alexander’s failings as a product of Eastern, Persian influence and not of, say, his character or the impact of power, fits into Arrian’s own agenda in writing. Thus, Arrian claims that Alexander’s brutal execution of Bessus was a ‘barbarian’ custom (Arr. Anab 4.7.4) and so was Alexander’s drinking (4.8.2).8 The latter point seems more than a bit stretched – Macedonians were already known as a hard-drinking culture by the Greeks and Alexander had a reputation as a hard drinker among the Macedonians.
On the personnel side, Alexander enrolled thirty thousand boys from elite families (probably in 327), who will come to be known as the Epigonoi (‘the offspring’) in the eastern parts of his empire to taught Greek, clothed in the Macedonian fashion and trained in the Macedonian manner. These are presumably the sons of high-born elites, so they serve to bind those families to Alexander and – he might hope – provide the basis for a culturally fused elite class in the future. In 324, he famously arranged marriages for some eighty of the Companions with elite Persian and Bactian women and then also follows it up by offering dowries to any of his common soldiers who married local women (Arr. Anab. 7.4.6-8). Alexander also moved to incorporate Persian cavalry into the Companion cavalry (Arr. Anab. 7.6.4-5).
The response seems to have been fairly immediate and quite strong, fueling discontent in the Macedonian portion of the army (still he largest and core component) which explodes when Alexander tries to send a number of aging veterans home on reaching Opis (in Mesopotamia) in 324 (Arr. Anab. 7.8-7.11.7). Alexander’s Macedonians mutiny en masse, mocking his claim to divinity (Arr. Anab. 7.8.3) and refusing to fight. Alexander tries to crack down on the leaders and then use a mix of charisma and threats (to further prefer Persian troops) on the rest, at which point Alexander’s troops surround his tent and plead with him (Arr. Anab 7.11.3-5). On the one hand, I think this speaks to Alexander’s hold, by 324, on his veterans, who clearly love him dearly, but they also, in their supplication demand concessions from him. Alexander responds by reassuring them and then holding a banquet, in which he seats his followers in concentric circles by closeness to the king: the Macedonians in the center, the Persians outside of them, and all of his other subjects outside of them (Arr. Anab. 7.11.8). Alexander, at last able to send the veterans home does so – but they go home without their Asian wives or children (Arr. Anab. 7.12.2), hardly a ringing endorsement for fusing the Macedonian and Persian military classes.
The program is also, fundamentally, a failure. Alexander’s efforts certainly do not seem to buy the loyalty from his Persian subjects that he had initially hoped for: by the end of his reign, Alexander has removed and mostly executed all but three of his non-Macedonian Eastern satraps. Their discontent might not be hard to understand: for all of the signifiers of fusion, Alexander was always clear who were the conquerors and who were the conquered: Macedonian men married Eastern women, not the other way around, for instance. Macedonians sat at the center of the banquet. Alexander was offering the Persian nobility a chance to keep some of what they had, but not the opportunity to share in the spoils of conquest; they were, after all, the conquered.
Meanwhile, what steps Alexander does take still infuriates his companions and his soldiers. As much as this has to do with anti-Persian sentiment, I suspect this is also a product of the changing nature of Alexander’s rule, as noted above – concerns about which must have only been intensified by Alexander’s obviously increasing self-image. Notably, of those marriages Alexander arranged with the companions, we know of only one to have held after his death: the marriage of Alexander’s bodyguard Seleucus to Apame, a Bactrian noblewoman, from which would spring the Seleucid royal line. Otherwise, as far as we know, the other companions abandoned their Asian wives shortly after Alexander’s death.
And that leads us to the second part of Alexander the Leader: how Alexander treated his followers. Did he keep his promises and treat his followers well? On the one hand, Alexander could be stunningly generous and forgiving to the point of folly for certain key companions. There is a distinct impulsivity to Alexander’s generosity which tends to mean it is not very evenly shared. On the other hand, a great deal of Alexander’s devoted followers didn’t end up rewarded, they ended up dead.
We may start with the companions. The problems start in 330 and simmer on for several years as Alexander frankly murders his way through the companions who expressed disquiet at his new court manners or his declaration that he was the son of Zeus-Ammon; after all, many of these men followed him precisely because he was the son of Philip II. As noted, Parmenio is the first to fall in 330, caught in the blast radius of Philotas being caught in the blast radius of a conspiracy by other companions against Alexander; one frankly wonders if Alexander had wanted an excuse to get rid of Parmenio. Plutarch understands this not as a plot by Philotas, but in fact as a plot against Philotas (Plut. Alex. 49.1) who had been open in his disquiet about the changes in Alexander’s rule, and as Badian notes, the assassination of Parmenio was hardly the only alternative available to Alexander after Philotas’ trial.9
Then we have a couple years of relative calm, followed by the boil of 328-7. In the fall of 328, Alexander gets into a drunken argument with Cleitus the Black (Arr. Anab. 4.8, who gives both Ptolemy and Aristobolus’ accounts of the event separately, cf. Plut. Alex. 50-51) who had saved Alexander’s life at the Battle of the Granicus in 334, with Cleitus objecting to Alexander’s claim that he had achieved his conquests by himself (not crediting his army) and belittling the achievements of his father Philip II. Finally, when Cleitus reminds Alexander that it was his hands that saved Alexander’s life, Alexander leapt up in a rage, grabbed a spear and flung it, killing him. Arrian, for his part, calls Alexander’s act savage but holds back a bit of his criticism, and its hard not to see his own politics in this: Arrian, after all, is a man at the court of the emperor Hadrian and it would not do to have Alexander the King appear too much a tyrant, too much a potential veiled mirror of a tyrannical emperor, in his history (thus, for instance, Arrian’s non-sequitor comment on drunken flattery in imperial courts in this no-flattery-involved story, Arr. Anab. 4.8.5).
Then in the winter of 327, Alexander tries to introduce proskynesis. His court historian, Callisthenes, argues against it, and is conveniently (and not particularly credibly) implicated in a plot against Alexander the following spring, is imprisoned and dies. The plot was one among the royal pages, the sons of Macedonian nobles who were enrolled in the service of the royal household; one Hermolaus felt he couldn’t take Alexander’s arrogance any longer (Arrian relates a pretty sharp public humiliation – a whipping – Alexander delivers to him because Hermolaus beat him at something, a boar hunt, Arr. Anab. 4.13.2 – if the anecdote is true, it speaks quite ill of Alexander’s character) and hatched a plot among the other pages. Alexander has the implicated pages stoned to death.
Later still, Badian notes10 the apparent destruction of the group of officers centered on Coenus and Cleander, who had been central to the downfall of Parmenio. Coenus, who had been a key unit-commander in Alexander’s army, commanding the right-most taxis of the phalanx, was the first senior officer to suggest to Alexander that he turn back from his campaign in India and then conveniently dies of illness shortly thereafter. Alexander then moves on Coenus’ friends in the return from India; Cleander, Sitacles and Heracon – all other companions of Alexander – are arrested and executed in 324.
In short then, among his companions, Alexander did not necessarily reward long and loyal service. Instead, he seems increasingly paranoid from 330 onward – in some cases he may have had reason to be – and ‘close to Alexander’ could be quite a dangerous place to be (unless you were actually embezzling royal funds, in which case you seem to have been rather safer). This is hardly to mean Alexander killed all or even most of his companions, but then many successful generals go entire careers without having their best commander (Parmenio) assassinated or murdering one of their better lieutenants in a drunken rage. I don’t think we should be too quick – as many are, it seems – to forgive Alexander for murdering his companions, on the grounds that he was a king.
As for Alexander’s soldiers, well, we have to talk at Gedrosia; this is generally omitted from the sort of single-lecture survey-course coverage of Alexander’s life because it occurs after the last of his victories, on his way back to Babylon. Arrian notes that every source save for Nearchus (who was not with Alexander for this leg of the trip) maintains that Alexander opted to take the difficult route through the Gedrosian Desert because he had heard how other famous rulers had attempted it and failed (Arr. Anab. 6.24.1-3), so this is a pure glory-hound mission. It goes poorly: the army runs out of food and water, the soldiers eat the pack animals (Arr. Anab. 6.25.1), the sick were left behind to perish (6.25.3), most of the women and children following the army – these are the families of the soldiers – are killed in a freak flood (since desert rains cause floods on the parched ground, 6.25.5). Arrian (6.24.4) reports that “many of the soldiers and the greater part of the pack animals were killed,” while Plutarch (Alex. 66.5) reports that only a quarter of the force he departed to India with ever returned. Diodorus says “many died of hunger” (17.105.6) while Quintus Curtius Rufus declares, “the plains were strewn with almost as many half-alive bodies as dead ones” (10.10.14). I don’t think we can trust Plutarch’s casualty report, but it seems clear that Alexander got a lot of his soldiers killed in that march back from India.
It is hard, then, to know how many of the soldiers Alexander departed Macedon with actually survived to the end of his campaigns: he both regularly dropped off parts of his army and regularly received reinforcements. But it seems clear that few of these men ever returned home: a relative few died in Alexander’s battles, far more died in the course of his campaigns and many more were dropped off in garrisons or settlements to hold down Alexander’s empire, from which they wouldn’t return. As a reminder, many of those settlers revolt immediately following Alexander’s death (Diod. Sic. 18.7), so we cannot necessarily assume they were happy about it, though some may well have been. Clearly Coenus seems to have been in the view that the promise was that they’d return home to parents, wives and children (Arr. Anab. 5.27.6); few would achieve that.
But from my perspective, it’s hard not to say Alexander broke faith with his soldiers too. As he campaigns beyond the Persian Empire, they begged him to turn back and head for home. It finally takes the famous mutiny on the Hyphasis (Arr. Anab. 5.25-28) to compel Alexander to turn back, at which point he grinds the army through the Gedrosian Desert, almost as a punishment for their mutiny, before threatening to replace them with Persians in the mutiny at Opis. I don’t think it is an accident, as an aside, that Alexander’s soldiers’ patience begins to run out in India: he had promised them a war against the Achaemenid Empire, so they could hardly have been upset at campaigning deep into Persia. But the moment Alexander, for his own glory and perhaps nothing else, was proposing to go so far beyond Persia…well, that wasn’t, quite literally, what he promised.
Alexander, the Great?
Finally, I think we need to talk briefly about Alexander’s character and his immediate impact in all of this. As I noted above, Alexander was charismatic and even witty and so there are a number of very famous anecdotes of him doing high-minded things: his treatment of Darius’ royal household, his treatment of the Indian prince Porus, his refusal to drink water in Gedrosia when his soldiers had none, and so on. These anecdotes get famous, because they’re the kind of things that fit into documentaries and films very neatly and making for arresting, memorable moments. But there is a tendency to reduce Alexander’s character to just these moments and then end up making him out – in a very Droysen-and-Tarn sort of way – into the ‘Gentleman Conqueror.’
And that’s just not a reading of Alexander which can survive reading all of any of our key sources on him. The moment you read more than just the genteel anecdotes (“for he, too, is Alexander,” – though note that Alexander’s gentle words do not keep him from trying to use Darius’ family to extort Darius out of his kingdom, Arr. Anab. 2.14.4-9), I think one must concede that Alexander was quite ruthless, a man of immense violence. I mean, and I want to stress this, he killed one of his closest companions with a spear in a drunken rage. I do not think there is a collection of polite-but-witty one-liners to make up for that. But Cleitus was hardly the only person Alexander killed.
Alexander had Bessus, the assassin of Darius, mutilated by having his nose and ears cut off before being executed (Arr. Anab. 4.7.3). He has 2,000 survivors of the sack of Tyre crucified on the beach (Q. Curtius Rufus 4.4.14-17). Because he resisted bravely and wouldn’t kneel, Alexander had the garrison commander at Gaza dragged to death by having his ankles pierced and tied to a chariot (Q. Curtius Rufus 4.4.29). Early in his reign, Alexander sacks Thebes and butchers the populace, as Arrian notes, “sparing neither women nor children” (Arr. Anab. 1.8.8; Arrian tries, somewhat lamely, to distance Alexander from this saying it was is Boeotian allies who did most – but not all – of the killing). Of the Greek mercenaries enrolled in the Persian army at Granicus – a common thing for Greek soldiers to do in this period – Arrian (Anab. 1.16.6) reports that he enslaved them, despite, as Plutarch notes, the Greeks holding in good order and attempting to surrender under terms before they were engaged (Plut. Alex. 16.13). Not every opponent of Alexander gets Porus’ reward for bravery and pride.
Meanwhile, Alexander’s interactions, as noted above, with the civilian populace were self-serving and generally imperious. That’s not unusual for ancient armies, but I should note that Alexander’s conduct towards civilians was also no better than the (dismally bad) norm for ancient armies: he foraged, looted what he wanted, occasionally burned things (including significant parts of Persepolis, the Persian capital), seized land and laborers for his colonies and so on. Alexander’s operations in Central Asia seem to have been particularly brutal: when the populace fled to fortified settlements, Alexander’s orders were to storm each one in turn, killing all of the men and enslaving all of the women and children (Arr. Anab. 4.2.4, note also 4.6.5, doing the same in Marakanda).
And this, at least, brings back to our original question: Was Alexander ‘Great’? In a sense, I think the expectation in this question is to deliver a judgement on Alexander, but I think its actual function is to deliver a judgment on us.
The Alexander we have in our sources – rather than in the imperialistic hagiographies of him that still condition so much popular memory – seems to have been a witty, charismatic, but arrogant, paranoid and violent fellow. As I joke to my students, “Alexander seems to have enjoyed two things in life, killing and drinking and he was only good at the former.” He could be gentle and witty, but it seems, especially towards the end of his reign, was more often proud, imperious and murderous.
He was at best an indifferent administrator and because he was so indifferent to that task, most of his rule amounted to questions of the men he chose to do the job for him, and those choices were generally quite poor. He made no meaningful preparations for the survival of his empire, his family or his friends upon his death; Arrian (Anab. 7.26.3) reports famously that his last words were, when pushed by his companions to name a successor, τῷ κρατίστῳ (toi kratistoi), “to the strongest.” Translation: kill each other for it. And they did, killing every member of Alexander’s family in the process.11
He was not a great judge of men – for every Perdiccas, there is a Harpalus – or a great military innovator. He largely used the men and the army that his father gave him, and where he deviated from the men, the replacements were generally inferior. That said, he was an astounding commander on campaign and on the battlefield, manging the complex logistics of a massive operation excellently (until his pride got the better of him in Gedrosia) and managing his battles with unnatural calm, skill and luck. He was also, fairly clearly, a good fighter in the personal sense. Alexander was a poor ruler and a lack-luster king, but he was extremely good at destroying, killing and enslaving things.
To the Romans – who first conferred the title ‘the Great’ on Alexander, so far as we know (he is Alexander Magnus first in Plautus’ Mostellaria 775 (written likely in the late 200s)) – that was enough for greatness. And of course it was enough for his Hellenistic successors, who patterned themselves off of Alexander; Antiochus III even takes the title megas (‘the Great’) in imitation of Alexander after he reconquers the Persian heartland. Evidently by that point, if not earlier, the usage had slipped into Greek (it may well have started in Greek, of course; Plautus’ comedies are adapted from Greek originals). It should be little shock that, for the Romans, this was enough: this was a culture that reserved their highest honor, the triumph, for military glory alone. And it was clearly enough for Droysen and Tarn too: to be good at killing things and then hamfistedly attempt – and mostly fail – to civilize them, after all, was what made the German and British Empires great. It had to be enough, or else what were all of those Prussian officers and good Scottish gentlemen doing out there with all of that violence? To question Alexander might mean questioning the very system those men served.
What is greatness? Is it pure historical impact, absent questions of morality, or intent? If that is the case, Alexander was Great, because he killed an exceptionally large number of people and in so doing set off a range of historical processes he hadn’t intended (the one he did intend, fusing the Macedonian and Persian ruling class, didn’t really happen) which set off an economic boom and created the vibrant Hellenistic cultural world, outcomes that Alexander did not intend at all. This is a classic ‘great, but not good’ formulation: we might as well talk of ‘Chinggis the Great,’ ‘Napoleon the Great’ or (more provocatively) ‘Hitler the Great’ for their tremendous historical impact. Yet this is a definition that can be sustained, but which robs ‘greatness’ of its value in emulation.
One cannot help but suspect in many of these circumstances, ‘greatness’ is about killing larger numbers of people, so long as they are strange people who live over yonder and dress and pray differently than we here do. It is ironic that Tarn credited Alexander with imagining the unity of mankind, given that Alexander was in the process of butchering however many non-Macedonians was required to set up a Macedonian ethnic ruling class over all other peoples. One suspects, for Droysen and Tarn, it was ‘greatness,’ to be frank, because they understood the foot inside the boot Alexander was planting on the necks of the world, was European and white and so were they. In that vision, greatness is ‘our man’ as opposed to ‘their man.’ But that is such a small-minded, petty form of greatness, ‘our killer and not your killer.’
Does greatness require something more? The creation of something enduring, perhaps? Alexander largely fails this test, for it is not Alexander but the men who came after him, who exterminated his royal line and built their kingdoms on the ashes of his, who constructed something enduring. Perhaps greatness requires making the world better? Or some kind of greatness of character? For these, I think, it is hard to make Alexander fit, unless one is willing, like Tarn was, to bend and break the narrative to force it. Had Alexander, in fact, been Diogenes (Plut. Alex. 14.1-5), rather than Alexander, but with his character – witty, charismatic, but imperious, arrogant and quick to violence – I do not think we would admire him. As for making the world better, Alexander mostly served to destroy a state he does not seem to have had the curiosity or cultural competence to understand, as Reames puts, it, “not King of Asia, but a Macedonian conqueror in a long, white-striped purple robe” (op. cit. 212). He surely did not understand their religions.12
In a sense, Alexander, I think, serves as a mirror for us. We question the greatness of Alexander and what is revealed are the traits, ideals, and actions we value. Alexander’s oversized personality is as captivating and charismatic now as it was then, and his record as a killer and conqueror is nearly unparalleled. But what is striking about Alexander is that beyond that charisma and military skill there is almost nothing else, which is what makes the test so discerning.
And so I think we continue to wrestle with the legacy and value of Alexander III of Macedon.
- For those looking for more detailed coverage of the often quite scattered details of Alexander’s administration, you can get a good overview from A.B. Bosworth, “Alexander the Great: Greece and the Conquered Territories” in The Cambridge Ancient History vol 62 (1994; that is, volume 6 of the second edition of the CAH, which we’d usually abbreviate as CAH2 6) or from M.M. Kholod, “The Administration of Alexander’s Empire” in the recent Cambridge Companion to Alexander the Great (2024). Kholod generally takes a more positive view, on the balance of Alexander’s administrative decisions, erring on the side of attributing them to sound strategic decisions.
- By, for instance, running into a situation where the priests in Babylon and Egypt or the members of the Thessalian League or the nobility of Macedon disagree on who is now king after Alexander’s death, which is of course exactly what ends up happening with just a few year’s delay. Ironically, Crusader Kings players will immediately recognize Alexander’s mistake: as a king or emperor, you need to abolish all top-tier titles except your primary to avoid this very problem.
- There is a very solid summary on these fellows and their roles by W. Heckel and J. Romm, “Alexander’s Inner Circle” in the Landmark Arrian: Campaigns of Alexander, ed. J. Romm (2010), upon which I have leaned here.
- F.L. Holt, The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man’s Wealth Shaped the World (2016). Notably, Holt’s chapter in the Landmark on this very topic, “Money and finance in the Campaigns of Alexander” – several years earlier than his book – presents something closer to the traditional view, noting that Alexander seemed to have been in debt at his death, so further review of the evidence clearly evolved his view.
- Holt, op. cit., has a breakdown, with a handy bar-chart; religious ceremonies and gifts are the largest expenditures by his reasoning.
- Listed by Kholod, op. cit. in table 18.2, but be wary of repeats for combined and divided satrapies
- Once again, the Landmark Arrian has a good overview appendix on this, J. Romm, “Alexander’s Policy of Perso-Macedonian Fusion.” J. Reames, “Changes and Challenges at Alexander’s Court” in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander the Great (2024) is useful to read in opposition, as it sets out challenges to the traditional, Arrian-focused narrative, suggesting not fused but parallel aristocracies, though frankly I am not sure I buy it. The institutions may have been parallel in 324, but surely the program of encouraged (or compelled) marriages and the education of larger numbers of epigonoi was designed to produce fusion, not two permanent parallel courts. Still, Reames chapter is very good and closes with, I think, an excellent observation that Alexander never seems to have actually understood the Persian court, to his considerable detriment.
- Arrian is, in fact, contorting the chronology to bring these events closer together, stopping his narrative in the Winter of 329/8 to run a story of Alexander’s ‘barbarian’ excess all the way through late 327, before picking back up again in Spring of 328, implying that all of these events happened in quicker succession than they actually did
- The classic reading indicting Alexander for this is, of course, E. Badian, “The Death of Parmenio” TAPA 91 (1960).
- In “Harpalus” JHS 81 (1961)
- I thus find it funny that every few years another ‘inspiring’ anecdote about Alexander’s wise last words filters around the internet that Alexander’s actual reported last words were so grim and heartless.
- On this, see F. Naiden, Soldier, Priest and God (2018)
To be fair to Alexander, the main reason he ‘never returns’ (and many of the other things) is that he died. Aged 32. I don’t suppose that was ever his intention. (Or was it? If he really wanted to do an Achilles, maybe he didn’t care about his own future, but I find that unlikely).
Similarly, if he didn’t hang around any of his new foundations to help build them himself but instead articulated the vision, then left capable subordinates to put it into effect – isn’t this what good leaders should do?
The trouble with having an angle, like Bosworth does (‘Alexander was rubbish at everything (except killing people) and was a Bad Thing (and a Bad King)’) is that you tend to lose critical judgement. For example, given Philip’s city foundations had the dual purpose of settling a military population and also creating an urban class, it is wildly unlikely that Alexander simply forgot about this effect of polis-building (we can be sure Aristotle will have gone on about it A LOT) and founded cities purely as garrison points.
“What is greatness? Is it pure historical impact, absent questions of morality, or intent?”. What indeed. The problem with applying moral judgements to the past is – whose morals? It is only fair to judge Alexander by the standards of his own time (but then, it’s quite hard to know what they were). We can hardly blame a 4th C BC Macedonian king for not being a modern post-Imperialist liberal. That’s why I tend to think that looking at history for moral lessons, or to pass moral judgements, is a mug’s game.
“That’s why I tend to think that looking at history for moral lessons, or to pass moral judgements, is a mug’s game.”
It also opens up some very weird doors. If you accept the validity of judging historical figures by the standards of contemporary morality, why can’t the moral judges of the future do the same? Are all of us in fact Objectively Terrible People because we don’t act by whatever moral imperatives are ascendant to the historians talking about us in a millennium hence?
It’s a good question. Will e.g. Martin Luther King’s statues be torn down because he ate meat (to take a person many people today would call a great man)?
And those of us who haven’t yet pre-emptively submitted to our future AI overlords are on the wrong side of history, and have a special place reserved for us in virtual hell. Just look at those sieges of Alexander’s! He never could have gotten that far without people predicting their own future.
Back, Rokos Basilisk, back to the pit which spawned ye…
No *special* hate for less wrong, actually, but given the current state of AI im either inclined to believe our future is some wall e style dystopia without the cute robot saviors where our overseer bots quietly shovel SUGAR DRINK into our mouths at the command of long dead tyrants, a terminal stop to us as a species, or Joe trapped in a simulation talking to ten chatbots each pretending to convince each other they’re real. In other words; either our AI overlords won’t care, won’t spare us, or will be deeply pointless and or stupid.
dcmorinmorinmorin, that’s a depressing view, but not easy to disagree with.
I think most people understand, on some level, that AI is going to reproduce the power structures of our current society. And the kind of person who looks to AI to fix society thinks society is broken.
The ones whom still worship it tend to two camps in my experience, as illustrated by a thought experiment.
First; if AI is never developed, what would society look like? Usually their vision is a cyberpunk hell. Second, of that society has AI, how would *they* use it?
Most acknowledge that they would misuse it. A few see revolutionary violence led by a God machine.
Hence either you have a minority whom think AI is a tool of inherent equality, magically fixing all problems, or you think there’s a very narrow window to take control of the tech before those in power misuse it. Or you expect to be in power and don’t care, but I hear enough from Musk without actually acknowledging him.
Personally I don’t think it matters. AI is still foundationally far away; generative AI isn’t actually smart or a step to becoming smart, it’s just good at building hype and fooling people.
And society on it’s current trajectory is plenty awful without AI; either the planet fries, or more likely either governmental authoritarianism or corporate feudalism kills everyone not in power. The solution to all these concerns is to fix society regardless, instead of having faith in a black box.
> Back, Rokos Basilisk, back to the pit which spawned ye…
Nah, this is just some sort of multi-party Prisoner’s Dilemma, with a big actor one side and lots of us little ones on another. (If I were actually from LW, I’d probably know what this is called.) If we all hang together, then some of us might die, but the rest will live. But we can each sell out the rest of us, guaranteeing our own survival in diminished form.
In the case of Alexander, he created a big list (ordered by how close his army was to the cities), and went down it one by one. Each city had an incentive to sell out, thus exposing the next city on the list. If enough of them in a row had resisted and died, he would have been stopped, but that didn’t happen.
And if you can see ahead far enough, and know that Alexander will be coming to your city eventually, wouldn’t it be best to start celebrating his arrival now? We all know “dulce et decorum” is propaganda, right?
But the other response would be something like:
“To the German Commander.
NUTS!
The American Commander.”
Rokos Basilisk. The term is Rokos Basilisk; the AI needs to motivate you to help it arrive. One way it can do that is to beat you with sticks when it arrives if you didn’t help it but knew it was coming, to motivate us to help it now.
We should start celebrating (helping) now, or ensure no one knows it’s coming so they’re innocent, but then we’d be stopping it’s arrival and…
The Basilisk part is just the natural conclusion of this given a conquerer whose journey to your city involves being invented in the future and whose capabilities are infinite.
…in other words Less Wrong accidentally reinvented religion and Pascals wager.
I rather think Martin Luther King would be enamored by the idea of a future where vegetarianism vs. meat consumption is the greatest remaining moral conflict!
If the consequence of further moral progress against the social ills he spoke against was the tear down all of his statues, I imagine he would definitely still be for it. (And if he theoretically wouldn’t be, then why should we have statues of him?)
That was the example Anders used, but it could have been any number of other things. What if MLK’s statues are being torn down because he was a pastor in a world that has become hostile to religion? Or a more politicized world in which his refusal to publicly endorse candidates is viewed as moral cowardice? Or a world in which Star Trek is viewed as abominable and all Star Trek fans are viewed as awful people?
What if it’s not moral progress in any sense we recognize as progress, but simple moral weirdness that becomes the order of the day in the future?
Adam, there’s almost never been a progressive moral movement without at least some foundation. There were ancient abolitionists, feminists, pacifists, tolerance advocates, and, of course, lots of suuuuper gay people. Like Alexander, probably. It’s just that the social systems and material realities of ancient society (and really, agriculture) opposed progress and tolerance. Intolerance is bad…but it mostly works to get people to follow you to war, and war paid.
Meat eating worked there because it’s conceivable that meat eating will be viewed as a moral failing in the future, as it’s already viewed as such by a rhetorically coherent minority now. Religion is less functional as a cause, but still functions somewhat for the same reason. But neither is arbitrary.
Statues are made because we think the thing the person is known for is commendable and want more of it in the future. I dont think humans are likely to stop applauding non violent struggle for equality.
The whole “controversey” about tearing down statues is bad faith from the start.
I dont think humans are likely to stop applauding non violent struggle for equality.
Why not? There have been plenty of societies that didn’t see equality as something to struggle for. Why shouldn’t the society of 4324 be one of them?
the story I always think about when the ‘statue’ controversy comes in the news, is that Iraqi guy who helped tear down the Saddam Hussein statue when the Americans invaded, he said that Saddam had killed a bunch of his relatives so he was happy to see the statues demolished. Ten years later, after the hash that America made of the occupation, he said, “I wish we had Saddam back, because things were better then than they are now, and I wish we had the statues back too.”
Values change with time, people’s opinion of historical figures changes, and not usually in only one direction.
@dcmorinmorin: Who said anything about genetics?
It’s funny you should mention MLK, given that a lot of the complaints made by Alexander’s Companions boiled down to Alexander treating the Persians too well when they were clearly just a bunch of natural slaves who were good for nothing except serving Greeks. Whilst Alexander obviously wasn’t “woke”, he was, in modern terms, considerably less racist than his critics.
Except King wasn’t a champion of meat eating. He was neither a proponent nor critic; it was completely normal to him, value neutral.
When people get judged by a modern standard it’s usually because they embody a rejected system. Alexander wasn’t just a general, he was the epitome of a conquerer who wrecked societies.
More pertinently Lee wasn’t just a southerner, he was the quintessential southern slaveholding elite. They stand out for their negative traits, they don’t fade into most of history as a normal person fur the time.
(Which is why lost cause mythmaking is so harmful; there are people who would say Lee was normal, and they’re wrong.)
Hence why there’s less of a movement to remove statues of the founding fathers than there is of Lee. And that’s not a complete example; the founding fathers are rightly judged, just not with vitriol.
A better point might be that he was religious. It’s not inconceivable that faith will be an article of revulsion in the future and King was a Pastor.
A better point might be that he was religious. It’s not inconceivable that faith will be an article of revulsion in the future and King was a Pastor.
Since the vast majority of people in most societies throughout history have been “religious” in some sense, I’m quite confident in saying most people in the future will be religious as well. It’s much more likely that atheism/agnosticism will fade in importance than that religion will.
Christianity might not survive the test of time though (or then again, maybe it will).
@Hector_St_Clare
> Since the vast majority of people in most societies throughout history have been “religious” in some sense, I’m quite confident in saying most people in the future will be religious as well.
That depends a lot on what assumptions you’re working from. Current trends show pretty consistently declining levels of religiousness over most of the world. Now of course those trends are a fairly short track record compared to the totality of world history but on the other hand modern society is historically unprecedented in a lot of important ways.
Hector, not only has religion been decreasing in relevance and power for centuries and number of believers for decades, but the remaining institutional artifacts of religion are crumbling rapidly. We’re probably in the last period of religious relevance in modern western societies, and those societies set global trends by virtue of being the most powerful.
Not, mind you, that non-western societies tend to be religious anymore either; Atheism is rising worldwide and one of the impacts of Soviet style vanguardism is that the ex-Marxist-Leninist world is largely atheistic or unaffiliated.
Plus, without putting to fine a point on it-Atheism is objectively correct and religion is an absurdity. Scientific reasoning is going to win out on all other competitors because nonscientific societies die, and scientific reasoning immediately and obviously disproves religion as a way of understanding anything, hence why scientists are overwhelmingly less religious than the general population.
Because the material incentives that produce religious belief are no longer relevant to society religious belief is dying. The reasons why religious belief used to be relevant are myriad, but at its most grossly broad; it’s a great way of creating arbitrary in/out groups to divide spoils from war or distribute wealth, land, and privileges.
Because society as a whole is no longer served by divisive ways of distributing loot religion isn’t useful to it. Hence religious authorities were first removed from the means of deciding where that loot goes, and increasingly religion only exists as a means to declare political loyalty, and an increasingly outdated one at that.
Hence the general trend towards tolerance. It’s better for convincing people to join you, and when excising people arbitrarily isn’t an economic necessity that’s the path to power.
A dubious proposition, considering that, on average, atheists don’t make babies and religious people do.
Now of course those trends are a fairly short track record compared to the totality of world history but on the other hand modern society is historically unprecedented in a lot of important ways.
I agree, but (in my opinion) not in ways that are relevant to the question of religion. People’s interest in the supernatural, in life after death, and in deeper layers of reality that underlie the material is not going away (it seems to be largely innate and genetically based, for one thing), so I don’t think any rise in atheism or agnosticism will be much more than temporary. (The rise in atheism and agnosticism is overstated anyway- what we’re really seeing is a decline in affiliation with some organized religions, in some societies, which is not the same as a decline in interest in religion itself. Most of the people in America who describe their religion as “none of the above” *also* don’t identify as athiest or agnostic, and many of them simultaneously say “religion is very important to them”.)
Again, I do think that Christianity, as a whole, will probably decline in importance in future and that people’s religious interest may take the form of new religious movements, or perhaps the revival of old ones (i think the revival of some of the old tribal/animist religions in some European countries is especially interesting in this context).
one of the impacts of Soviet style vanguardism is that the ex-Marxist-Leninist world is largely atheistic or unaffiliated.
this is greatly exaggerated and really seems to depend on the country. In Eastern Europe today, Bulgaria and Romania, and to a slightly less extent Poland, are quite religious, while places like East Germany, Estonia and the Czech Republic have very high rates of atheism. It really seems to depend more on what the religious substrate was before communism arrived- societies which had a legacy of Protestantism became massively secularized (the Czech lands had been Protestant for a while in the 16th-17th century, as were Estonia, eastern Germany and half of Latvia), societies which were Orthodox displayed much more resistance to secularization (either the capitalist or socialist variety). Outside Europe that’s even more the case: I don’t see any big rise in atheism in Vietnam, or in Laos (where the communist government even financed/finances the Buddhist clergy), or in South Yemen or Nicaragua or the various post-communist states in Africa.
as for your witnessing about how atheism is true, there’s nothing for me there to really grapple with, since it’s well, witnessing. I’ll just note that I’m a biologist and I don’t see that biology or any other natural science has anything to say about religion and the supernatural, for or against. The natural sciences study, well, the laws and patterns observable in nature- beings, events, and processes that lie outside nature, and that aren’t subject to natural laws, aren’t even within their purview to study.
We can certainly disprove certain religious claims, like creationism, but biology can’t actually answer the question of whether gods, or angels, or devils exist, or whether we have a soul or not, or whether Krishna or Jesus Christ or the gods of animist Polynesia did the miracles attributed to them.
Guilders, with actual respect, that’s stupid. Religious beliefs aren’t genetic and are only weakly heritable. Material forces have a much stronger effect. If the fastest breeding populations determined what the future would look like we’d all be Hindi, or Buddhist, or Roman Pagans (there’s probably a better term for the last).
Hector, first off, Vietnam, China, Russia, and most other eastern European countries are majority atheistic. I’m sure you can find some poll claiming there’s a majority of vague folk beliefs, but a lot of Americans perform acts of superstition like purchasing lottery tickets or knocking on wood, if you filter based on professed belief in deities and strong religious observation most of the ex-communist world is 70-90% atheist. Yes, some countries are exceptions, particularly those conquered by force during WW2 for various reasons, but on the whole they’re atheists.
And science can answer every single of those questions. The answer is no, none of those forces exist. There’s no evidence for spirits, souls are actually *contradicted* by brain damage existing, and miracles have never been observed. There should be evidence for all of them if they were true, there isn’t, they don’t exist.
This modern anti empirical theism is in direct contradiction to both history and reason. Pope Gregory the medieval (pick one) didn’t need excuses for why God didn’t ever use miracles to cure diseases, he thought God *did*. We know better now, but people with real faith believe in miracles in a verifiable, empirical sense. They believe in their beliefs.
Modern theists just believe in believing.
About the only defensible claim left is that the first cause could be some ineffable intelligence, and that provides no predictions and no meaning. No religious person believes it; they just retreat there rhetorically.
And it’s not witnessing, or if it is so are statements about the factual rate of atheism demographic growth or the sun rising. Everything is observable. There are no special magistra. My personal beliefs about God existing are as subjective as my beliefs about oxygen existing. So are yours. So is everyone’s. They can just also be informed by reality, or not.
Your own subjective experiences prove there’s no God.
Or you wouldn’t be telling me that science can’t prove it’s right.
You believe things or you don’t. If you don’t expect to see religious events then you don’t believe in them. If you do it can be tested and proven.
It’s extremely unlikely that MLK Jr. being a pastor would be a reason to denigrate his civil rights work in the future. The civil rights movement was deeply entwined with and supported by Black churches. King wasn’t a civil rights leader who just happened to be a pastor: he became a civil rights leader *because* he was the pastor of a leading Black church, coupled with his gifts for public speaking and organizing. Many of the leaders of the civil rights movement were pastors: Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson Sr. for example. The whole history of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference started with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and continued through the various protests and marches. So you can’t really separate attitudes about the civil rights movement from attitudes about the Black churches and King’s role as a pastor. Negative attitudes about the latter are likely to go along with negative attitudes about the former.
This is a spectacularly anti-empirical take. Not only is this claim unfounded, the projections (yes projections, not clear empirical trends) are that atheism (and irreligion more generally) will decline as a percentage of the global population in the immediate future because of low birth rates. More directly, ex-communist countries have experienced limited resurgences in religious affiliation. A worldwide rise in atheism is simply not observed in the present except in absolute numbers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/07/why-people-with-no-religion-are-projected-to-decline-as-a-share-of-the-worlds-population/
May I ask why you made this confident false assertion?
Who said anything about genetics?
I realize that you don’t like the idea of religion continuing to exist, but the demographic data is pretty clear–religious people make babies, atheists don’t, and the kids of religious couples who hop to atheism tend to not make babies, while the ones who stay religious do.
If one defines “religious” more functionally, perhaps as “likely to hold socially determined views on metaphysical questions”, one notices that not only are a certain subset of atheists pretty religious, they’re actually way more religious than the average theist.
Guilders, if religious beliefs aren’t heritable then it doesn’t matter if religious people have more children. If the heritability is less than other factors it’s also largely irrelevant. Given that atheistic beliefs rise *after* birth control became widespread it’s clear that no matter what these factors are, they net to not relevant.
I mentioned genetics because it’s about the only heritability inducing variable that self reinforces in this hypothetical in a predictable manner. It’s basically what you’ve got that can cause not only a heritable increase in atheism but which can be expected to grow.
James, under that definition being a Brony, a frequentist, a empiricist, or a Democrat could all be defined as religious groups of beliefs. And all humans would be equally religious on the topics of religion past age three or so. The process also fails as a schema to create definitions when applied to other magistra, but still.
Dave, I actually agree. It’s just conceivable. The correct conclusion is that it’s very unlikely that historical progressives will be viewed as agents of evil in the future, and if they are society is likely about to implode and take us all with it.
sociologue, first, you’re making the same mistake as Guilders but offloading the thinking to other people, so it appears more rigorous. For one, these trends are incredibly unreliable if you don’t consider other factors. If you used 1970’s data the obvious answer would be that religion is dead by 2000. You need to consider distinct populations and ask why those populations are growing and what that means.
Also, these are projections. They’re definitionally not empirical data. Empirically atheism grew across most time horizons for the past century and all that I’d consider rigorous. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the data is incredibly weak for the middle east and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, because not attending church or not answering yes when asked if you’re the right religion either gets you sold into slavery, a beating, or murdered. This impels belief because humans are rationalization machines, but it’s incredibly fragile.
For much of the religious world the population growth is maintained by crushing, horrific inequality. The net religious growth in Muslim nations is a manifestation of open suppression of woman’s rights and economic depravation, as it is in India. Notably, this population growth relies on freely available food, and the windfalls that produced this growth aren’t infinitely sustainable. Projections of demographics before the green revolution showed a massive dying off of literal billions, and global warming is set to cause a similar ecological catastrophe just outside the 2050 date used. The worst hit areas are the ones precisely responsible for this growth, including the Indian subcontinent and sub-saharan Africa, which will have large regions rendered uninhabitable without significant protective infrastructure they don’t have and may not be able to build.
The very economic inequality that leads to this growth also impels an inevitable demographic collapse unless this inequality is fixed. Further, the long term solution to this to prevent a horrific humanitarian crisis will necessarily include social liberalization of the nations involved which is the direct causative factor for atheistic beliefs.
Basically, if you consider the problem from a perspective informed by an actual demographic theory you end up with clear skepticism of those projections, particularly past their clear cut off date. And to take it a step further to historical theory, if we don’t move past religion people are going to find some reason to use nuclear weapons against each other or something even more destructive like an orbital kinetic strike, killing us all. The political groups which trend towards religiosity are violent, exclusory, and economically and ecologically destructive. If they manage to decide demographics we’re dead.
And to take it a step further to historical theory, if we don’t move past religion people are going to find some reason to use nuclear weapons against each other or something even more destructive like an orbital kinetic strike, killing us all.
When the USA and USSR came close to starting a global nuclear war, it was because of secular ideologies, not because of religion.
Hey genius, didn’t you just get done arguing that modern society is unusually peaceful because colonialism is good or something last week? When did we stop having theocracies again? Was it in the last couple centuries that you hold were unusually peaceful? Was the age of theocracies not one of constant and unregulated warfare?
Or, is it just maybe possible that you don’t believe anything at all?
Hey genius, didn’t you just get done arguing that modern society is unusually peaceful because colonialism is good or something last week? When did we stop having theocracies again? Was it in the last couple centuries that you hold were unusually peaceful? Was the age of theocracies not one of constant and unregulated warfare?
The last time a significant portion of Europe was under theocratic rule was during the Roman Empire.
Or, is it just maybe possible that you don’t believe anything at all?
No, I just know what the term “theocracy” means.
Teutonic order. Parts of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Catholic Church. Fuck, your king is the personal representative of God to his people, even if he doesn’t actually use that supposed power.
Yeah, the last theocracy was the Roman **Empire**, not the orders of **Warrior Monks**. Sure. Brilliant deduction.
Teutonic order. Parts of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Catholic Church. Fuck, your king is the personal representative of God to his people, even if he doesn’t actually use that supposed power.
King Charles is not a priest, and hence the UK doesn’t qualify as a theocracy under any standard definition of the term.
Yeah, the last theocracy was the Roman **Empire**, not the orders of **Warrior Monks**. Sure. Brilliant deduction.
Calm down and read my post again. I said the Roman Empire was the last time a *significant portion* of Europe was under theocratic rule. The Teutonic Knights — we can also add the Prince-Bishoprics of the Holy Roman Empire, and of course the Papal States — only ever ruled small territories. Nor, with the arguable exception of the Teutonic Knights, do these states appear to have been notably more belligerent than any other states of the time. The hypothesis that medieval Europe was full of violence due to theocratic oppression therefore doesn’t accord with the evidence.
King Charles is a priest *by definition* as head of the church of England. He’s a hereditary Priest King. Learn about your own country.
The Teutonic and Livonian orders controlled significant territory and the banking arms of the knightly orders were significant and owned both real estate and capital throughout Europe.. But this is all a ridiculous oversimplification that insults my intelligence to engage with.
Also I’m calm, you’re just subhuman scum whom should be silent. I have made the entirely calm, reasoned conclusion that you’re completely worthless and that the only engagement you deserve is scorn and ridicule, designed solely to make you appear like the idiot you are. But please, defend your broken hellscape of a country and wax poetic about Europes yesteryear.
King Charles is a priest *by definition* as head of the church of England. He’s a hereditary Priest King. Learn about your own country.
He’s not ordained, therefore he’s not a priest. This is very basic stuff.
The Teutonic and Livonian orders controlled significant territory and the banking arms of the knightly orders were significant and owned both real estate and capital throughout Europe.. But this is all a ridiculous oversimplification that insults my intelligence to engage with.
The territory of the Teutonic and Livonian orders amounted to one small country. They were far from powerful enough to set the tone for Europe as a whole.
Also I’m calm, you’re just subhuman scum whom should be silent. I have made the entirely calm, reasoned conclusion that you’re completely worthless and that the only engagement you deserve is scorn and ridicule, designed solely to make you appear like the idiot you are. But please, defend your broken hellscape of a country and wax poetic about Europes yesteryear.
I’m sure anybody reading this will be able to draw their own conclusions about which one of us is the more foolish.
Ordaining as a priest is a procedure for this specific religion. Heading a church makes you a priest *in all* religions. By this definition some Roman Emperors, a Dali Lama, or Caliphs can’t be priests, because they were never ordained, because those religions certainly don’t have Christian ordination procedures and often don’t have any.
You’re also just *formerly and specifically wrong*. The coronation ceremony *ordains the Monarch as head of church*. It’s explicitly based on priest ordination ceremonies mixed with traditional coronation. It’s what half that oil waving and swearing means.
And…look…for whatever reason, the sheer *mistake* your making just makes me pity you. I’ll explain, this once.
What your conceptually and idealogically can’t conceive is that appearing formal, presentable, and authoritative just makes you look fucking ridiculous when you say things that are insane or idiotic. Not that your presentability actually holds.
But the fact you keep responding to someone who clearly holds you in contempt reduces your own argument to the rhetorical level of whomever your talking to, which means the content or context of what your saying is even more obvious.
Given that you also have *never*, to my knowledge, conceded *anything* in conversation with someone here, even when so verifiably wrong it hurts, you’re obviously just stubborn.
In other words you need to pick at least two of A. Be right, B. Avoid responding to barbs, and C. *Concede ground* to pull off the “I’m more enlightened than you” schtick with someone who calls you degenerate scum.
That’s from the perspective of debate. From the perspective of not being subhuman racist colonialist scumshit you need to nuke your entire belief system, to the point where you probably need some drastic personal upheaval. Oh, this debate is trivial, but going back to last week I don’t actually know what madness makes you think comparing 90% of humanity to some semi-imagined murderous tribal savages to justify oppressing them is acceptable on any level, but whatever part of your beliefs made you say that isn’t salvageable. I’m not interested in entertaining your humanity until you do that.
Sure didn’t take long for that mask to slip.
You’re presuming a hell of a lot about what I believe. I can’t speak for “modern western theists” in general (I’m skeptical of modernity in a lot of ways, and don’t consider myself a man of the west, particularly, I just live here), but none of what you say really applies to me.
1) I think that the natural sciences have nothing to say about whether gods and other supernatural beings exist, but that’s not *why* I’m a theist: I’m a theist because of the argument from religious experience. That’s to say, I’ve processed people’s experiences with the supernatural (both mine, those of others I’ve talked with, and those who have had their accounts of supernatural experiences written into the historical record) and I think that they are best explained by accepting that supernatural beings (both good and evil) exist.
2) My point that the natural sciences can’t prove or disprove the miracles performed by Vishnu, Jesus Christ, or any one of the many animist gods or devils, was intended as a response *to you*, not as a positive defence of the existence of god(s).
3) I don’t know what to tell you, but I certainly think miracles have been observed, and that the gods cure disease- that’s why when someone I care about is sick I offer prayers, not just to some abstract “God”, but specifically to one of the deities or quasi-deities associated with disease and healing. You might not find the miracle accounts convincing, but our opinion on that is going to differ.
It’s interesting to look at some of the points of view brought up here.
Some things implied by the responses:
quote: “A dubious proposition, considering that, on average, atheists don’t make babies and religious people do.”
If the only way you can get people to believe what you believe is to literally give birth to them, there’s a problem. It also implies that there will never be a lack of atheists, because their parents are often religious people.
The flip side of the question is, where do you draw the line? Do you continue to revere the past even when it seems bloody-handed and cruel? Do you encourage people to use bloody-handed, cruel figures of the past as a tool to justify echoing that cruelty in the present day?
When someone talks about how someone might some day tear down Dr. King’s statues because he ate meat, it is inevitable that they are thinking of how someone may today tear down General Lee’s statues because he owned slaves and fought for slavery.
But it bears remembering that those statues were not erected because of a universal love of General Lee. They were erected by a specific class of people who had just woven the fabric of Jim Crow, covered the South with it, and now wanted to pin that fabric in place by commemorating their control and thus sending a message to the blacks they felt they had firm rule over. All those statues of Confederate generals were the pins of this triumphant “we lost the Civil War but we won anyway in the end” attitude, and we know this from the political speeches of the time.
In the same sense, we can see 19th century officers and gentlemen of colonial armies writing hagiographies of Alexander because they want Alexander’s actions to be righteous. They want to reassure themselves that being very good at conquering and making occasional dramatic magnanimous gestures is in some sense enough, that it doesn’t matter if the conqueror doesn’t really understand or respect the conquered, if many of the conquered and many of the conqueror’s soldiers die along the way, and so on.
Catering to the mentalities of people who knowingly pick out bloody-handed, cruel events and figures from history for reverence… that may not be such a good thing.
The original question and all the ensuing discussion entirely ignore the most likely reason why Martin Luther King might fall from favor: he was a serial adulterer with generally offensive (to most enlightened people now) attitudes toward women. Maybe that will bulk much larger in 200 years than it does now, who knows?
I am actually rather sure that things like murdering the man who saved your life in a drunken rage were quite frowned upon during Alexander’s lifetime.
Just for example.
Likewise, the people of his time who thought Alexander “great” were all privileged men. I rather doubt the women who were raped at his behest (let’s not be coy about it, I don’t think those marriages of his men to local women were all that consensual, plus the ordinary raping that doesn’t even get mentioned, but surely happened) and then left to raise the resulting children on their own thought he was all that great.
I assure you, all the people he harmed back then were not enamoured with him, no matter how much his privileged peers agreed with his actions. It is the height of arrogance to consider the opinion of extremely privileged men who had enough influence to have their writings survive more valid than the opinion of all those who could not record their thoughts.
Pretty much all of Alexander’s amoral actions were considered amoral by, at the very least their victims, but quite likely by a great deal of other contemporaries, too. The idea that murder is wrong is not exactly new. Nor is the idea that one should drink alcohol only in moderation. Et cetera.
There is little new in the world when it come to moral imperatives. Except perhaps for vegetarianism, which just was not doable in many regions of the word until relatively recently.
“Are all of us in fact Objectively Terrible People because we don’t act by whatever moral imperatives are ascendant to the historians talking about us in a millennium hence?”
Depends. Where do you live? Whom do you mean by “all of us”?
An indigenous woman who lives as subsistence farmer in the Amazonas jungle and wears only a loincloth she made herself has a quite high likelihood of not being deemed a terrible person by future generations.
Not even collectively, but much less individually, considering now one will know her name.
If, however, you are one of those people who live in industrialized countries, I have bad news for you: You are an objectively terrible person right now, and there are people judging you for benefitting from exploitation and for being part of the reason why climate change is happening … right now!
Seriously.
If you want to avoid being deemed a horrible person by people a thousand years in the future, just look what people are criticising you for right now, and consider that, maybe, just maybe, they might be right.
Alexander the “Great” was not some innocent orphan boy who couldn’t have known that someone living more than two thousand years after his death would consider him a horrible person for doing what he did.
Enough people considered him a horrible person right then and there!
I have rarely ever seen a historical figure unfairly judged by modern standards, i.e. standards that definitely did not exist back then.
(In fact, I cannot recall that I have ever seen that, but I might have forgotten about it.)
For example, Henry VIII is usually judged for killing many of his wives, which his contemporaries found distasteful, too – he is NOT judged for eating a lot of meat, emitting loads of carbon dioxide by heating with wood, or for presumably being a racist homophobe, or any other of the multitude of things he did that would not be considered very acceptable today.
I’m no expert on politics, but it seems to me that there is quite enough evidence of Alexander not having been all that great even without getting into his failure to rule his large empire like a good king (by the standards of his time) would have.
(Still, I would argue that he could have made preparations in case he died. Seeing as, no matter one’s age, one should expect to die when engaging in active warfare. I mean. That kind of thing was known to be rather lethal.)
An indigenous woman who lives as subsistence farmer in the Amazonas jungle and wears only a loincloth she made herself has a quite high likelihood of not being deemed a terrible person by future generations.
Depends if she is known to have smacked misbehaving children. I’d bet good money that the average indigenous person in the Amazon rainforest is more accepting of violence than the average person on this comment thread.
Henry VIII … is NOT judged for eating a lot of meat, emitting loads of carbon dioxide by heating with wood, or for presumably being a racist homophobe
What reason do you have to presume him racist? Almost everything that affects most Americans views of black people, in Henry VIII’s day, were yet to happen.
I think “great” is separable from “good”, so I wouldn’t conclude necessarily that Alexander’s victimes, or their descendants, wouldn’t consider him “great” in the value-free sense. The Christian figure of Lucifer/Satan, for example, certainly has a kind of greatness, even though it’s entirely a greatness in the capacity for evil.
There were early-modern monarchs as far afield as Malaysia, for example, who claimed descent from Alexander:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikayat_Iskandar_Zulkarnain
First off, how many of those people who were harmed considered it a moral wrong, as opposed ot just something awful that happened to them and their people? How many of them would have done differently if the shoe was on the other foot?
Secondly, what defines a moral vs immoral action is hugely contextually specific. Yeah, I’m not aware of any society that considers murder a good thing. But what constitutes ‘murder’ is very culturally contextual; is a man who kills another man in an agreed upon duel a murderer? What about a man who discovers a trespasser in his home and kills him for that? You’ll find disagreement throughout history. And how ‘big of a deal’ is it is also something that changes from time and place. Nobody likes a murderer, but there are cultures where a murderer can be redeemed especially if he does other counterbalancing good things (at least for the in group) and others that no, it’s an indelible stain.
But this sentence, “There is little new in the world when it come to moral imperatives.” is simply wrong. There are huge changes in moral imperatives, even the very structure as to how moral imperatives fit together work. Do you think you can be a good person and be an atheist? Lots of people throughout history would have answered with a resounding “No, that’s obviously impossible”. When does a human life start/how much consideration should you be giving to the life of a fetus? We can’t even agree on that one now, let alone trying to poll all throughout history. What is considered theft vs properly taking something that belongs to you and in the hands of another person? Should we even apply morality evenhandedly to all people, or are there actions that are moral for person A to take but not for person B to take in similar circumstances owing to differences in rank, race, gender, or some other factor? I would point out that in every polytheistic religion I’m aware of, the Gods reproduce through a whole pile of incest, an action that is pretty strongly reviled in humans, but hey, the Gods get different rules about who they can mate with.
“If, however, you are one of those people who live in industrialized countries, I have bad news for you: You are an objectively terrible person right now, and there are people judging you for benefitting from exploitation and for being part of the reason why climate change is happening … right now!”
Oh, that’s another good one, is collective punishment or judgment appropriate? Hey, can we apply that to the indigenous woman? Even if she herself has never committed infanticide, that is a very common practice among indigenous subsistence agriculturalists or pre-agriculturalists. Can we judge her for her infanticide? What about the infanticide her neighbor commits?
And my objection isn’t to protect Alexander. THe guy was a butcher and a bad dude. The point of the objection is to point out that judging people by standards that they’ve never heard of and probably don’t share the core assumptions that underlie it is silly and pointless except to give yourself a cheap sense of moral superiority of triumphing over someone who has never heard of what you’re talking about. I don’t mind if people in the future criticize me for the same thing that people in the present criticize me for. I would however, mind if people in the future critized me for things that seem bizarre or absurd to me today, like
“Hey, you’re monogamously married! That’s terrible and an exploitative practice, everyone knows that a proper marriage is between multiple adults!”
“Hey, you speak English! English is a forever tained language because of what the English speakers did in 3428! You’re a bad person who speaks the language!”
“Hey, you put more care and regard to your biological children instead of treating all children equally! That’s terrible and why we don’t let anyone know who their own biological children are anymore!”
“Hey, you participated in a democratic system! That makes you personally culpable for any action that democratic system did and since all governments commit at least some level of moral crime, you’re personally guilty for all of it! The only moral action is to let the Cogitators make all public decisions!”
If we can judge the people of the past for things that were normal to them and not to us (which does not cover everything they do, but certainly a lot of it, especially in the case of Alexander, since conquering your neighbors and butchering outsiders for plunder and benefit to your own people was viewed pretty morally neutrally back then) why can’t people of the future do it to us for things that we consider perfectly fine?
“I have rarely ever seen a historical figure unfairly judged by modern standards, i.e. standards that definitely did not exist back then.
(In fact, I cannot recall that I have ever seen that, but I might have forgotten about it.)”
Read some Discourses on Livy by Machiavelli and you can see one set of historic figures judging a different set of historic figures and finding them wanting by standards that we would ourselves probably find pretty horrible.
No doubt Alexander’s armies (like all armies, except maybe the Unsullied) committed many rapes, but I don’t think the marriages to Persian women really qualify. Weren’t these mostly marriages between high-ranking Greeks and the daughters of Persian nobles? As such, they would have involved as much female consent as did most marriages among that class. Of course, you could say that most upper-class marriages through history, and many lower-class ones, involve rape, but that deprives the term of all meaning outside a very contemporary context.
all militaries might commit some rape, but some of them definitely commit more than others- it’s not just something that happens.
I don’t know of any reason to believe that Alexander’s army was worse than average in this regard. I think the Soviet army is generally considered the worst offender in all of history in this regard (another good reason not to be a Communist), but possibly there are some other contenders.
@ey81:
Actually I was thinking of situations like the 26th of July movement during their armed struggle in the 1950s. The Cuban rebels were considered unusually good about *not* committing rape- they executed their men when they committed rape or robbery against civilians- and that was part of a deliberate strategy to build support and goodwill among the population, which eventually helped them win their war. Of course, that would….complicate your narrative about “this is why not to be a communist”, so I can see why you didn’t mention it.
Meh, I do not recall anybody ever going: “Look common people in 1850 all over the world were importing clothes made from cotton grown by slaves and were putting sugar produced by forced labour in the Dutch East Indies in their food! How evil is that!” So, I doubt people in the future would judge random common people ‘in industrialized countries*’ as ‘objectively terrible persons’.
Much less people like me who at least attempt to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by traveling by public transport and bicycle as much as possible and not eating meat every day.
* Whatever ‘industrialized countries’ is supposed to mean. For example, France has a lower per capita green house gas/consumption-based CO₂ emissions than such countries like Mongolia, Malaysia, or China, all thanks to the same nuclear energy the anti-science ‘Greens’ have tried to kill here in my own country. Does that mean that Mongolia and France belong in the same category?
Oh people do say that, they just ascribe blame to the political leadership not the common person. That the common person’s clothes were made by slaves was terrible, but it’s not like they could stop it. The fact that modern citizens can is why future judgement will be targeted at political parties, which is where the modern vitriol at judgement as a concept comes from.
Conservatives need to feel that they can vote their “conscience”, effectively meaning they can hyper fixate on whatever bias motivated fear/hate response catches their attention, and liberals need to fetishize civility and discussion so they can justify doing as little as possible and trading with everyone. Self reflection doesn’t play well with either ideology.
“Are all of us in fact Objectively Terrible People because we don’t act by whatever moral imperatives are ascendant to the historians talking about us in a millennium hence?”
Certainly, there are things I believe that will be indefensible to some people in the future, just as there are things I believe that are indefensible to some people in the present. The important thing to understand in criticism (and this can be difficult to learn) is that there are not merely multiple ways to read something, there are multiple *valid* ways to read something. In the future someone may set a standard and judge me by it, and they will probably not be wrong; some of those people will in turn claim that they are judging me by a standard I could have held myself to today, and that I won’t agree with.
“Objectively” isn’t a fixed point in four dimensions, only two or three.
I’m not really arguing the internal validity; Anyone can come up with a moral framework and start judging people whether or not they live up to said moral framework. But I do think it’s pointless and somewhat intellectually masturbatory to create a moral framework and then judge long dead people by it when said people would never have an opportunity to live according to its precepts and might have seriously disagreed with the validity of the framework in the first place.
I say, let them judge me. It’s unlikely I’ll be around to mind.
Yeah. I think a lot of this stuff about “HOW DARE YOU JUDGE” comes from a sort of neurotic hyperfocus on the fear that someone, somewhere, will think that one is bad.
With perhaps a handful of unambiguously virtuous and decent exceptions (Mister Rogers is the memetic example to give here), almost no one really has a right to the good opinion of posterity. It is pointless to fume angrily over the fact that past historical figures who had a good reputation in 1950 no longer have one today, and even more pointless to fume angrily over the fact that we today may no longer have such a reputation in 2150.
To be frank, a lot of it just comes from a peculiar form of conservative insecurity. If you accept judging people from the past is valid you end up opening yourself to being judged in the future. People whom fear that tend not to believe they’re on the right side from an intellectual position, or know that defending the figures they believe in for what they believe is unacceptable.
To speak clearly, this is why many Republicans insist that we can’t judge confederates by our standards, because the truth is they don’t care that they were racist scum but know they can’t *say* that, so they need to attack the very concept of talking about it instead. The fact that this discussion exists then filters into what should be unbiased topics like this one, so you end up with people arguing about how the future will judge us as though it’s the end of all things.
If we are around by then (that is to say, if an afterlife exists, which I’m certain it does), we will all also have more important things to care about, and more important figures to be judged by, than people living on the earth by then.
“many Republicans insist that we can’t judge confederates by our standards”–I observe lots of liberals reluctant to judge Communists by our standards. “No enemies on my side of the divide” is an almost universal approach.
Liberals aren’t communists.
For one, liberalism is a capitalist philosophy. This is true as a theoretical-it stands for neoliberal-but it’s also true in practice. American liberal politicians are mixed 90-10 between neoliberals and progressive socialists. Even the most progressive Democrats have still been for traditional banking, finance, and corporations, they just seek to supplement them with regulations and government programs -a pro capitalism approach to the economy. The rich both still exist and own the businesses the government is contracting to do things.
Actual socialists want to redistribute wealth. Or at least profits. State spending isn’t socialism.
What does this mean in practice? That liberals aren’t even in the same side of the divide as communists. They generally agree that open fascists are bad, people not starving is good, and nothing else. Including how to get to either goal.
Two, a lot of leftists aren’t communists in the vanguardist bent and, in fact, hate those dicks idealogically. Including me.
The vanguardist parties if the Soviet Union and communist China killed more libertarian socialists than almost any other political group. Anarchists were among the few sent to the gulags for reasons other than simply pissing off Stalin, and entire fronts of multiple civil wars were basically the Marxist-leninists saying they were all buddy chum comrades to the anarchists then shooting them in the back.
This happened consistently.
Liberals want to fix the existing system. Communists think the existing system is unfixable and want to replace it with something fundamentally different.
I observe lots of liberals reluctant to judge Communists by our standards. “No enemies on my side of the divide” is an almost universal approach.
I’m not going to get into the issue of Republicans and the Confederacy right now, but liberals aren’t really “on the same side” as communists in any meaningful sense. And I say that as someone generally more sympathetic to the communists than to the liberals.
Liberalism is traditionally considered an ideology of the center, not the right or left; liberals are broadly supportive of capitalism with some social reforms; liberals have a broadly individualistic rather than collective-oriented worldview; and in most situations where communists are actually strong enough to make a bid for power, liberals don’t end up on their side (except in those few situations where the other side is really egregiously bad).
In postcommunist societies, in fact, communist and communist nostalgic types often end up on the *conservative* side of a lot of political conflicts, for reasons that this article indicates:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/are-cultural-and-economic-conservatism-positively-correlated-a-largescale-crossnational-test/83AFEDEA5E004CF23631C5388E7C9F67
I think we need to taboo the term “liberal”; it means something different in the UK, US, and AU. I’m in America, and if I want to talk about the thing you mention, I call it “classical liberalism”. (“Libertarianism” being an offshoot.) But when people in America use the word “liberal” without any qualifiers, I assume that it means “left”, and is an umbrella term including classical liberals, neoliberals, economic left, and identitarian left, plus anything vaguely around those groups. For us, it’s roughly the coalition that made up the Democratic Party in the 1990s and 2000s, when American politics had finished re-polarising after LBJ and the Civil Rights movement. I’d bet that ey81 is American and meant it that way.
For us, it’s roughly the coalition that made up the Democratic Party in the 1990s and 2000s, when American politics had finished re-polarising after LBJ and the Civil Rights movement
That’s fine, but it doesn’t alter my point. Communists are not part of that coalition, in either the 1990s or the 2000s. The Democratic Party, whatever you might think of it, is in favor of a capitalist economy with state regulation and welfare provision, they broadly support a (regulated) free market, they’re OK with private ownership including the private ownership of large companies and the accumulation of large fortunes, they’re committed to multiparty democracy and a high degree of personal freedom, they reject the idea of a vanguard party, they tend to see the fall of communism in 1989 as a good thing or at least a qualified good thing, they support US leadership on the global stage and at the highest levels are committed (at least on paper) to regime change in the world’s remaining communist or neo-communist countries. Their whole worldview is different from that of communists- a modern US liberal Democrat has much more in common with a Republican than either of them would with a communist.
You can’t even really claim that *communists* have more in common with liberals than they do with conservatives, since that’s not always true (by any means) either, it depends on the place and time.
“Democrats aren’t Communists . . .”–No, they are not, and Republicans are neither Confederates nor Fascists. None of that addresses my point: Democrats and Communists are both on the left, by any usual classification, and Republicans and Confederates are on the right, and both Democrats and Republicans are reluctant to criticize those on the same side of the political divide as themselves.
None of that addresses my point: Democrats and Communists are both on the left, by any usual classification, and Republicans and Confederates are on the right, and both Democrats and Republicans are reluctant to criticize those on the same side of the political divide as themselves.
I think I did address your point, but in case I didn’t express myself clearly, i’ll flesh it out a bit more. This is faulty reasoning, for several reasons.
1) Politics isn’t one-dimensional. There is *one* dimension (broadly, your views on economics, and more specifically the role of the state in planning the economy, ownership of the means of production, and distribution of its fruits) in which Democrats are between Communists on their left and Republicans on their right, but there are lots of other dimensions of politics (nationalist vs. cosmopolitan, authoritarian vs. libertarian, religious vs. secular, etc.) in which that doesn’t necessarily hold.
2) In particular, over the last couple of decades the other, non-economic dimensions have gotten more important- in a lot of countries, today, the most important political divide is the nationalist vs. cosmopolitan one, which doesn’t at all map onto the traditional left vs. right spectrum at all. (In a lot of societies, communists end up in coalitions with the nationalists and in opposition to the liberals). The left vs. right spectrum doesn’t adequately describe global politics anymore (not that it ever really did).
3) Even if politics were, in a particular situation, one dimensional, you can’t argue that communists and Democrats are both on the left without defining where the center is. If communists believe in, say, 80% state ownership of the means of production, Democrats believe in 10% and Republicans believe in 0%, it would be clearly wrong to argue that Democrats have more in common with communists than with Republicans.
I think a more salient point tends to be that his contemporaries surely didn’t consider him a moral paragon: Hence why his friends keeps trying to murder him and his soldier eventually mutiny.
Rulers for centuries after his death sought to portray themselves as following in Alexander’s footsteps, so he obviously wasn’t considered a bad person.
Hence why his friends keeps trying to murder him and his soldier eventually mutiny.
Palace conspiracies and mutinies happen for all sorts of reasons unrelated to the morality of the king/commander.
I’m sure that future civilizations who emerge on the other side of the climate crisis will see us as a particularly short-sighted and wasteful people, and would feel justified in damning us with every breath.
Sure, I’ll judge him by the standards of his time: I suspect his many, many victims didn’t think he was all that great either.
Sure, but that’s not saying much; “I don’t like it when bad things happen to me” is not exactly the same thing as “I think these things are bad when they happen to anyone, even if they’re not me.”
There is a direct connection in moral philosophy between “I will judge this person by the standards of what his victims thought of him” and “I don’t like it when bad things happen to anyone, including not-me.”
Because to have a concept that it’s objectively bad for something to happen to any person, you need the underlying idea that all humans have intrinsic value. That what is not sauce for the gander is not sauce for the goose, so to speak.
So one of the prerequisites there is the ability to say “I think this person is bad because, while they think the harm they did to a bunch of irrelevant peasants doesn’t matter, I know that this kind of harm does matter.”
Why is it only fair to judge historical people by their standards? That view is almost purely a modern liberal philosophy, or even a product of civility politics that’s more clearly traced to pure pragmatism rather than any idealogical position.
It’s not like we’re talking about true aliens here. Peoples motives and values are generally understandable, even if they, along with bigotries and biases, can only be inferred. To be frank Alexander was obviously bad within his own culture, trusting corrupt fools, traitors, and incompetents, while killing his friends and brutalizing his subordinates. The words of our sources may have tip tied around power, but we need not assume that their thoughts did.
Even accounting for how the necessities of ancient warfare produce what we’d term asocial behavior towards members not of your group, it’s clear that even in the past good people did what was necessary to survive or thrive as a group and bad ones sacrificed others for themselves. It’s a shared social sense that pretty clearly unites all peoples, and judging Alexander by that standard he’s pretty monstrous.
To put it another way; if we give this ground and say history is closed to moral judgement, we justify and legitimize the action of people *today* who reject our moral standards, uncritically. There’s nothing really separating Alexander from the north korean Kim family in terms of acts towards kin, allies, and subordinates. That’s really just a rejection of having standards at all.
To be frank Alexander was obviously bad within his own culture, trusting corrupt fools, traitors, and incompetents, while killing his friends and brutalizing his subordinates.
The fact that kings and generals for centuries afterwards portrayed themselves as following in his footsteps strongly suggests that he wasn’t “obviously bad within his own culture”.
The words of our sources may have tip tied around power, but we need not assume that their thoughts did.
But we can probably assume that we aren’t interpreting them better than their contemporaries, particularly when our interpretation amounts to “They didn’t believe what other people in their own time believed, they believe what we believe now.”
No.
His contemporaries were obviously fine with him. He wouldn’t have been king for long otherwise.
His contemporaries may not have been discontent enough to betray their oaths to Alexander and risk death if discovered trying to overthrow him, while still not being “okay” with him. There’s a pretty wide gap between “I endorse this person as an example of moral virtue” and “I tolerate this person to the extent of not literally staging a coup to murder and replace him in the middle of a war.”
He wasn’t killed at Hydaspes. He wasn’t killed during or after crossing the Gedrosian desert. When he was elevating Persians, his soldiers remained loyal enough to plead with him instead of staging the ancient equivalent of a grenade incident. When people did plot to assassinate him, there were enough loyalists to overhear the plot and report to the king.
And lets not forget, he accomplished that while surrounded by professional killers for whom “staging a coup to murder and replace [the general]” was a real option, one they exercised liberally and “literally” when they had to. He remained a king because his troops and his companions were fine with him.
hon, he faced constant rebellions against him. His contemporaries weren’t fine with him, he just died before they could successfully murder him. They did murder his *entire family*, in the process severing all remaining ties of legitimacy, suggesting that while they all wanted to co-opt his legacy none of them actually respected the persons it was associated with.
There’s a lot you can say about the material and political forces that impelled those actions and their separation from the personhood of Alexander, but there’s a huge possibility space of what pretenders *may* do to the dependent family of a King, and on the weighted average it’s actually not “kill everyone dead forever”. Usually it ends with a few arranged marriages to enrich their own dynasty.
It’s weak evidence, but I firmly believe it *is* evidence that they just didn’t like him that the net reaction to his death was to kill everyone whom might be a legitimate heir.
It is a well established fact that a lot of mythology was created around Alexander- see the story about the Amazons last week. When kings and generals claimed to channel the legacy of Alexander, they were trying to accomplish two things.
First, to proclaim that they were great warrior-rulers, by channeling Alexander’s reputation for military excellence. The quality of his generalship was not in dispute, but does not make him a moral paragon.
Second, to proclaim and legitimize themselves by connection to his power, this perception of a near-divine ability to do anything and to rule all the lands. Which, again, Alexander clearly had power. But this does not make him a moral paragon.
It is disingenuous to imply that his successors in generations after him saw him as a moral paragon, just because they continued to make reference to his legacy and legitimize themselves by connections to him.
It is disingenuous to imply that his successors in generations after him saw him as a moral paragon, just because they continued to make reference to his legacy and legitimize themselves by connections to him.
Straw man. I said Alexander was not obviously bad within his own culture, which is different to claiming that he was a moral paragon.
To put it another way still further. If you claim that it is valid to impose your cultural standards of what is and isn’t morally proper on people who disagree with their moral standards, you cannot honestly complain when other people do the same thing to you. And I think it is the height of intellectual arrogance to assume that you’ve got all the answers, and everyone else is wrong.
Do you think that if the people of the future think that something we hold as normal, everyday, even admirable, like say “A good citizen takes part in democratic processes” and explicitly reject that, that they can go ahead and say every single person who votes is evil? And that all of us who do take democracy seriously are in fact evil? No chance to defend ourselves, since we’ll all be dead and not making arguments. Where do you end that sort of logic?
Adam, it’s impossible to *not* be arrogant, or more accurately sound arrogant, when talking about moral positions. Moral positions are inherently subjective, there’s no way to not be arrogant when you say your morals position is right and others are wrong. But refusing to say that you’re right doesn’t make you *better*, because that is *also* a moral position.
In other words, stop worrying about being better than it’s within your capability to determine what is better. It’s all circular anyway. Just accept that you have to judge by your own belief set and accept that and try to be right. What’s the worst that will happen? The future you never see disagrees with you? Immorality is invented and you have to spent eternity seeing people disagree with you?
That said, I am entirely confident I am right and will be found right, because morals aren’t arbitrary because humans aren’t arbitrary. We’re a subset of all possibilities, itself a subset of all probabilities. The moral standing of sentient solitary ambush killer blob monsters besides, we really are incentivized to certain moral positions by evolution and culture. Besides, if you can make any arbitrary predictions about the future it’s that the winning belief system will be the one that leads to the greatest power for the most people, and equality, humanism, tolerance, and cooperation make a society strong. I firmly believe my beliefs are the best *materially* for people to believe in, therefore I really just don’t have to worry.
Oh, and I can absolutely judge people and complain when people with actually broken minds judge me. I just won’t complain to the sociopaths or fascists or whatever. That’s pointless. You complain to the society of people who agree like you do that X is dangerous. Like we do all the time. It’s the justification for maximum security prisons or death row-some people just have broken morals and the collection of people with functioning morals overpowers them *because* of their functioning morals.
I have to admit, I don’t find your points convincing. I agree it’s unlikely Alexander explicitly intended to never revisit points of his empire, but it clearly wasn’t high on his priorities at all. I mean, after conquering the persian empire and having a large number of rebellions, this feels like a natural point to want to revisit points, but he clearly prioritised further conquest.
I think Bret would agree that a good leader would clearly articulate a vision and leave capable subordinates in charge. That is I think why he spends the largest part of the articles addressing this with “does Alexander pick capable subordinates?” being a theme throughout, concluding he generally didn’t with arguments that were convincing to me.
Bret again seemed to address this, if the civic buildings are only getting archeological evidence in the 3rd century as he claims, then that would seem to confirm them as being not major civic points until well after Alexander. Either meaning it wasn’t his intention, or that his subordinates didn’t execute his intention, neither of which reflects well on him as leader.
I am less convinced by Bret here, or at least how much it applies to modern users. I suspect a most of how we use monikers is just we use what has been traditionally applied. This would lead to monikers more reflecting the values of whoever gave them, so for this example, it seems to be the Roman and Greek world calling Alexander great, and it would reflect their view of greatness. I’ve no idea if we editorialise the historical record in removing “the great” from some leaders names who used to have it. I don’t know of it being the case, but it would only really happen in less famous cases. I’m sure Charles the Bald and Charles the Fat would love to lose their monikers.
“the great” seems to have mostly fallen out of fashion as well? Noone could accuse Louis XIV of modesty, but he didn’t try and get called the great, just the far more humble “Sun King”
Bret again seemed to address this, if the civic buildings are only getting archeological evidence in the 3rd century as he claims, then that would seem to confirm them as being not major civic points until well after Alexander. Either meaning it wasn’t his intention, or that his subordinates didn’t execute his intention, neither of which reflects well on him as leader.
The cited evidence only pertains to one city, and that in a very isolated region of the empire. It’s not enough to make sweeping conclusions about the nature of Alexandrine cities, or about Alexander’s intentions in founding them.
“the great” seems to have mostly fallen out of fashion as well? Noone could accuse Louis XIV of modesty, but he didn’t try and get called the great, just the far more humble “Sun King”
Louis was actually referred to “the Great” on occasion. Also, Frederick the Great postdated him by half a century.
Well, Mr. X., do you have any evidence of your own of cities that Alexander did seriously attempt to build up and strengthen? Dr. Devereaux doesn’t only cite one city; he cites published works that list other examples, and he himself also cites Alexandria-on-the-Nile, which is an important example because it’s where Alexander DID stop to establish a city for what was, by his standards, quite a while.
And he didn’t actually do very much there. Even when he was, by his standards, tarrying in a place and making sure it was established, he was there and gone quite quickly.
Well, Mr. X., do you have any evidence of your own of cities that Alexander did seriously attempt to build up and strengthen?
How are you defining “seriously attempt to build up and strengthen”? For that matter, how are you defining “Alexander”? Does Alexander have to personally supervise everything himself, or does appointing someone with (what he reasonably supposed to be) sufficient resources and manpower to do the job on his behalf count?
Hmm, is Catherine the last european monarch to be commonly called “The Great”?
Ah, apparently there’s a serbian prince that’s a bit later.
“Catherine the Great, as she was called for some reason” – my Polish tour guide.
Any nominations for Greats who actually were decent persons, at least by the standards of their time? Candidates would include Gregory the Great and Alfred the Great.
The strangest is Herod the Great, always portrayed as a villain in Judeo-Christian culture but nevertheless labeled the Great. Maybe to distinguish him from the other less important Herods.
Wiki has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_known_as_the_Great
I remember seeing a claim that Herod being called “The Great” is a confusion with his grandson Herod Agrippa.
Justinian I ‘The Great’ was pretty good by most reasonable standards.
He was from a lower class background (swineherds) along with his dynasty, which is always a good sign to start; less likelihood of detached institutional sociopathy. He also married the ex actress Theodora. Actress work at the time included sexual performances and prostitution, so this represented basically the maximum possible social mobility for a woman; the only larger mobility would have been if she had been a slave, and this is honestly debatable in the cultural context. Theodora was also famously politically involved, actually helping rule.
His greatest accomplishments were legal reform including the codification of protections for women from sexual assault, various conquests and defensive wars to attempt to reestablish Roman rule or preserve his eastern territories, and general strengthening of the economy. He also famously tasked two monks with smuggling silkworms out of China (or sanctioned a scheme already in progress) which probably preserved the Eastern Roman Empire for several centuries by strengthening the economy.
The big marks against him are three.
First, he had to violently suppress a riot funded by the upper class that attempted to roll back reforms and depose him, which killed many in Constantinople. I honestly think that’s justifiable objectively, given that the alternative was letting what was effectively an astroturfed rebellion roll back social reforms.
Second, his conquest of Africa was particularly bloody, probably beyond what was militarily necessary. By the standards of the time this was obviously fine. They were the enemy, they resisted, and he only resorted to conquest when his ‘rightful’ authority was questioned.
Third, he imposed religious doctrine and suppressed most alternative religions, including several syncretic ones, and effectively helped push Christianity from a potentially syncretic and tolerant faith into a non-tolerant one. He was hardly the *source* of this trend, but he contributed. By our standards this was bad, but by standards of the time this was good, great even. It’s tolerable by even my standards given the need to expand state power or suffer a complete collapse of the Roman empire, which was explicitly his justification for doing so. Even if this wasn’t necessary he thought it was.
So basically he was an progressive theocratic autocrat whom implemented legal and economic reforms that created prosperity and equality. He actually embodied the ideals of imperial rule and used the state to protect the citizens from depravation while practicing a frankly radical feminism for the time, and honestly *even today* marrying a prostitute as a political figure would be a source of scandal. That’s basically as good as you’re going to get and still get the appellation.
> “What is greatness? Is it pure historical impact, absent questions of morality, or intent?”
We can also look at how people talk about the title “Greatest Of All Time”, or “GOAT”, especially as applied to athletics. They generally aren’t measuring based on personal ethical virtue, they’re measuring based on performance in a particular domain.
There *is* an ongoing music feud where two people are competing for GOAT status, and there’s an attempt at bringing personal ethical virtue into it, but a) if either were clearly GOAT there’d be no competition, and b) the attempt itself demonstrates that the current general rule is to ignore personal ethical virtue.
> We question the greatness of Alexander and what is revealed are the traits, ideals, and actions we value.
I think this is the key sentence, actually. There’s also people who question the greatness of Alexander to see what it reveals about the traits, ideals, and actions that were valued by the people throughout history who called him that. (Although of course, when “history” includes everything up to the present moment, that includes ourselves.) (Partly, for a while, I think it was about not getting hurt by violent people who thought Alexander was awesome, which does in turn suggest an unpleasant strategy for changing the epithet or the definition.) From this point of view, questioning whether Alexander was “great” is similar to questioning whether he was “king of the Macedonians”. All of them? Really? Is that concept of “kingship” even something we approve of? To say nothing of what “shahanshah” implies… I do feel the urge, myself, and I try not to use titles when talking about Elizabeth and Charles, but I also have to admit that “Queen” and “King” are globally-recognized identifiers for those two people. So for me, I think it usually comes down to valuing “clear communication”.
(This comment was brought to you by the descriptive/prescriptive divide in linguistics, with additional support from the Humean is/ought distinction, and the Confucian doctrine of rectification of names.)
Alexander the Great as Michael Jordan seems apt given Jordan’s failures at running an NBA team; granted, he never killed one of his teammates with a spear, but I wouldn’t put it past him.
“I try not to use titles when talking about Elizabeth and Charles, but I also have to admit that “Queen” and “King” are globally-recognized identifiers for those two people. ”
This is an odd position to take. You may not think they’re good monarchs, you may not think that monarchs are a good thing to have, but “king” is literally King Charles’ job, just as “president” is President Putin’s job. By calling him President Putin I am not taking a stand about whether he is a good president or whether Russia should have a president. Russia *does* have a president, and he is it.
Yes, it’s their job. And it’s a way of signaling my disapproval of the existence of the job, a self-consciously silly and performative way, something of a joke. Still, there’s a very real core of feeling there. I wouldn’t go so far as guillotines or jacquerie, but I do have a strong dislike of hereditary nobility/servility and caste systems. Maybe I read too much early Americana when I was young?
“I do have a strong dislike of hereditary nobility/servility and caste systems. Maybe I read too much early Americana when I was young?”
Ssh, no one tell him who worked on Thomas Jefferson’s family farm.
Why in the world would Jefferson being a slaveholder make someone less against castes? The founding documents aren’t validated by the authority or virtue of their signatories, it’s not that kind of philosophy. They can all be utter hypocrites and it’d have no impact on if they were right.
“The problem with applying moral judgements to the past is – whose morals? It is only fair to judge Alexander by the standards of his own time (but then, it’s quite hard to know what they were).”
I’m never sure why this is supposed to be -a- problem, much less -the- problem. If far future people eventually come to study our time, I fully expect them to judge its mores, and I imagine at least some of those judgments will be negative. But one thing I don’t understand is why people seem so insistent that this represents a special problem. It seems to me like the most natural thing in the world, and it’s something that has been going on since time out of mind. The Greeks themselves did so in their day, judging the figures in the stories they told about their own past or about the peoples surrounding them.
Why is it a problem, at all, whatsoever, that what has been happening since the beginning of history seems likely to keep right on happening?
I mean, even if it -were- a problem, it’s would not be a problem with a solution, since even if we were capable of simply disabling the faculty of human judgment, our strange choice to do so here today would not be binding on our descendants. It doesn’t seem plausible to imagine that they would stray so far from human nature out of sheer respect for whatever precedent we set on this ACOUP comments page.
But I don’t think it’s a problem in the first place. Future peoples’ judgments of us will affect them, not us, just as today any opinions we develop about Alexander affect us and not him.
In your second paragraph you talk about comparing societies, and I take no issue with that. By comparing current mores to those of the past, people sometimes find a lens to criticize the present and that can be productive.
For me the stumbling block is when you fish out individuals who were shaped by a different society, with different mores, and you judge them by ours. With this methodology, every single person you examine will be abhorrent. It’s a pointless exercise.
* Alexander is immoral because even by Macedonian standards, killing a friend in drunked rage is bad -> This is a statement with a bit of information
* Alexander is immoral because people in 2024 don’t like warmongers -> Zero information statement, because if I brought the saintliest person from 0BC in for your judgement, you’d still find plenty of cause to condemn them.
Perhaps pointless.
On the other hand, we have the example of those 19th century European officers trying to make Alexander out to be a kind of saint. Remember, these were people who were themselves engaged in projects to glorify their nations by conquering vast swathes of the Earth, ‘uniting’ them on a crude and violent level without really understanding or caring for the people thus conquered, and often causing a great deal of destruction along the way.
It is not necessarily harmless to take a boy and fill his head with the idea that Alexander’s conquests were grand and glorious and exactly the way the world should work for the strong, that the world is your oyster if you can find a sharp enough blade to open it and that, importantly, this is a fine and noble thing.
So maybe being able to say “Alexander’s conquests caused a lot of human suffering without creating anything obviously good enough to justify them in hindsight” IS useful information, because it teaches us today not to worship the idea of conquest.
Good point. I suppose I’ve stewed too long in modernist thought.
> It is not necessarily harmless to take a boy and fill his head with the idea that Alexander’s conquests were grand and glorious and exactly the way the world should work for the strong, that the world is your oyster if you can find a sharp enough blade to open it and that, importantly, this is a fine and noble thing.
That sounds like a good description of how Alexander was raised. (I wish his childhood had been gone into more. The “House of the Dragon” TV show is all about what happens when a king has an heir of dubious status, and then takes another wife and has a younger child who’d be a more acceptable heir. The main historical outcomes seem to be “purge” or “civil war”. Edward the Confessor’s mom got him the third option of “exile”, but she was extraordinary.)
> So maybe being able to say “Alexander’s conquests caused a lot of human suffering without creating anything obviously good enough to justify them in hindsight” IS useful information, because it teaches us today not to worship the idea of conquest.
That’s a very good way of putting it, which sidesteps all of the noise about definitions and identity and judgement, and simply asks us “who do we want to be”.
@Moon Moth “sidesteps all of the noise about definitions and identity and judgement, and simply asks us “who do we want to be”.”
This. Holding historic characters up as paragons of virtue in the present day says something about who we want to be *now*. We should choose them wisely (and that means holding them up to the moral standards of today).
I don’t expect them to be flawless, but I do expect them to hold water.
Of course, when we look at the suffering caused by Marxist-Leninist regimes during the past century, we can see clearly that it is not necessarily harmless to take a young man and fill his head with ideas about “expropriation of surplus value” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” So a number of my Yale professors, not to mention a number of other notable historians of the past century, deserve obloquy if not cancellation.
Of course, when we look at the suffering caused by Marxist-Leninist regimes during the past century, we can see clearly that it is not necessarily harmless to take a young man and fill his head with ideas about “expropriation of surplus value” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” So a number of my Yale professors, not to mention a number of other notable historians of the past century, deserve obloquy if not cancellation.
When we look at the mass deaths caused by the French Revolution, we can see clearly that it is not necessarily harmless to teach young people about the values of “freedom” and “democracy”. Therefore a number of high-school civics teachers, etc.
Then again, as Jimmy Walker said, “I never yet heard of a girl ruined by a book.” Possibly the causes of human evil do not lie in historical or economic studies, even the ones with questionable conclusions.
I’m not sure I agree that it’s pointless. I am pretty confident that the ancient historians we read would not themselves have questioned the value of such an exercise in principle, even if they might not have recognized or appreciated the particular standards that we, across the gulf of two millennia, apply to it, given the importance they generally attached to considering history morally.
The ancient Greek founders of the genre of history were very much engaged not only in allowing space for the future reader to think morally about the issues raised in their histories but in deliberately pushing them to do so. I can’t imagine reading, say, the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides and not feeling strongly and purposely invited to consider the questions raised for myself, using my own judgment. The same for various episodes in the ancient Alexander historians, except it’s sometimes rather more heavyhanded than Thucydides or Herodotus.
Anyway, I’m also not sure it’s so obvious as to not need proving that your second statement does contain less information than the first or that the first is the only one that has any sort of usefulness. Certainly there’s a place for -studying- the mores of an ancient society as part of understanding the context of their history. But is it clearly and unquestionably more useful, for the general purpose of learning from the past, to go any further than that? Is suspending our own standards and adopting past ones a superior way of using the past as a source of instruction or example?
I think it’s because on some level everyone realizes that Peter Singer is right, or at least living more like Peter Singer suggests would be more right. And that’s a fundamentally uncomfortable insight, so we get all of the epicyclical reasoning involved in trying not to engage with that.
Well one important of this article is that while he’s delegating, he’s not good at it. If he is somehow able to choose loyal worthy people to represent him, he’d be a great ruler, but looks like he isn’t
It is amazing to me that this comments section could not go one line without somebody going straight to “actually, we can continue to simp uncritically for the cool fighty senpai because what even is morality maaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnn?”
Whose morals? Naming Alexander as ‘the Great’ is a moral judgment, passed by the elites of the ancient world who were his heirs in cultural terms and admired conquest and violence (so long as they were doing it and won). Persians or Theban elites probably differed (because they lost), and those who suffered his conquests probably also passed an unrecorded moral judgement on him ( ‘Alexander the Disastrous’?). Also, he’s dead – we are not in an argument with him.
We can hardly assess his record (brilliant military leader, glory-hound, treacherous friend, poor administrator ..) without making a moral judgement. If some present person announces that they heartily endorse Alexander’s methods it tells us something about their moral attitudes – as Tarn’s historical approach did about him and his cultural world. We can’t judge him by the standards of his time because we are not in his time. We can depict those standards (always remembering that they were not universal) judge him by ours – again remembering that our standards are not universal. Value neutrality is not an option – value awareness is.
Do you really consider calling someone “the Great” to be a totally amoral judgement? You’d assume absolutely nothing about someone referring to “Stalin the Great”, “Pol Pot the Great”, or “Thomas Midgley Jr the Great”?
It seems to me we’re already in the middle of a value judgement as soon as we use his normal soubriquet, it just doesn’t impinge on our consciousness.
> You’d assume absolutely nothing about someone referring to “Stalin the Great”, “Pol Pot the Great”, or “Thomas Midgley Jr the Great”?
Absolutely nothing in the third case, yes, since I’ve never heard of Thomas Midgley Jr.
I’d have some thoughts about someone using the other two, though since neither epithet is current, I probably wouldn’t put enough faith in any of those thoughts to call them “assumptions”. The primary thought would be “where did that come from?”
Moving to the question of whether Stalin or Pol Pot *should* be called “the Great”, I would say my main objection is that, under their leadership, their states were ruined and their people immiserated. Applying the same standard to Alexander the Great, you’d ask whether the Macedonians suffered because of his rule, or whether it made them better off. To the extent that you think mainland Greece was voluntarily subordinate to him, you could ask the same thing about them.
Do you really consider calling someone “the Great” to be a totally amoral judgement? You’d assume absolutely nothing about someone referring to “Stalin the Great”, “Pol Pot the Great”, or “Thomas Midgley Jr the Great”?
You’re ignoring the role of context here. Alexander’s been called “the Great” for over two thousand years, so using that epithet doesn’t carry the same level of deliberate choice, and thus value judgement, as using it of Stalin or Pol Pot would.
Alexander’s dead, nothing fair or unfair can ever happen to him again. When we judge a historical figure, what we are actually doing is judging the living people who hold up that figure as an example. People who hold up Alexander as an aspirational figure are revealing that either they proclaim admiration based on poorly understood vibes and invest no effort into actually studying the life of people they claim to want to be like, or else that the only thing they really care about is the ability to subjugate people at scale and despite organized resistance. The autocracy that results doesn’t even have to be durable, the subjugation itself is all that matters.
I think one reason for this exercise is that in the western world, Alexander comes with “the Great” already attached — and along with it the value judgment implied in the term. Basically, the reason we English speakers call him that is that we’ve inherited a lot of culture from the Roman Empire, including their view of Alexander. But western culture has also been very selective over the centuries as to which Roman attitudes to keep and which to jettison, so re-evaluating whom to call “the Great,” or indeed whether we should call anyone by that title, seems like a totally legitimate thing to do as culture changes. If you want to say, “The past is another country so we have no right to judge him at all,” fine, but the title “the Great” was essentially imposed by a foreign culture as well, so we have no obligation to use it.
My thoughts exactly.
For most of human history conquest as been seen as a Good Thing and what a good King does. A great king is great at it.
Brett already provided the other side of that coin, however–if we call Alexander “Great”, then why not Hitler, Stalin, Mao? What did he do, that they did not? Are you really prepared to go there, to say “Hitler the Great” and stand by it?
To be clear, I very strongly advocate AGAINST doing that. So it will be “Alexander of Macedon” for me from now on.
Should any historical figure be considered “Great”? That’s probably a battle historians would lose–since probably a majority of the public (I mean the global public) see one key value of history as being providing us with model leaders to emulate. To the extent that history abandons that role, it will lose public support and funding. I think this has already happened.
So heroes we need, heroes we must have. And we have them: Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, Bishop Tutu, Abraham Lincoln. Whoever we pick, the role of history will be to provide the balanced view–both the virtues and the flaws of great historical men and women (Queen Elizabeth, Harriet Tubman).
It’s a little like the Catholic Church picking saints. To confer a “Greatness” label on someone, they don’t have to be perfect, nor entirely good, but they should hit the trifecta: Large scale impact, admirable personal virtues, some net positive benefit to the world. It’s a very subjective judgement to be sure, but an excellent basis for a public conversation around history.
Alexander the Great
His death struck fear in the hearts of men
Alexander the Great
He died of fever in Babylon
“I thus find it funny that every few years another ‘inspiring’ anecdote about Alexander’s wise last words filters around the internet that Alexander’s actual reported last words were so grim and heartless.”
We must circulate in different circles, because I’ve never heard anything but “To the Strongest.” I’ve thought of it as one of the more famous things about Alexander.
I have seen a meme like this in my social media feed, along with a picture of a bearded man who was clearly not Alexander:
——————————————————————————-
With death staring him in his face, Alexander realized how his conquests, his great army, his sharp sword and all his wealth were of no consequence. He called his generals and said, “I will depart from this world soon, I have three wishes, please carry them out without fail. ”With tears flowing down their cheeks, the generals agreed to abide by their king’s last wishes.
“My first desire is that”, said Alexander, “My physicians alone must carry my coffin.” so people realize that best doctors on this earth can not save them from death.
After a pause, he continued, “Secondly, I desire that when my coffin is being carried to the grave, the path leading to the graveyard be strewn with gold, silver and precious stones which I have collected in my treasury”. with this Let people realize that it is a sheer waste of time to chase wealth and greed of power
The king felt exhausted after saying this. He took a minute’s rest and continued. “My third and last wish is that both my hands be kept dangling out of my coffin”.so I wish people to know that I came empty-handed into this world and empty-handed I go out of this world”.
O king, we assure you that all your wishes will be fulfilled.
With these words, the king closed his eyes. Soon he let death conquer him and breathed his last. . . .
Reminds me of a meme I saw where it claimed the last words of Socrates were
‘I drank what?’
As Benjamin Franklin has famously said: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet” 🙂
I’ve always heard that one attributed to Abraham Lincoln
Nah, Lincoln was too busy hunting vampires to worry about the internet.
It occurs to me that “to the strongest” could be taken as a badass deathbed boast, if Alexander knew that none of his generals was as “strong” as he was. Very much a “you can try” type of laconism.
It’s also worth pointing out that it isn’t actually certain that Alexander really said “To the strongest”, and that it wasn’t just the ancient equivalent of “an ‘inspiring’ anecdote about Alexander’s wise (or, in this case, badass) last words”.
Hm, I can see that. The reference to the apple of Eris is clear, and someone looking at the Wars of the Diadochi might well draw parallels to the ruin from the Trojan War, and insert the appropriate aphorism.
Yeah, it’s one of the cases of “The writer knew how it turns out so he inserts a prophetic anecdote to be extra spooky”
I ran into someone once who insisted that “to the strongest” was misheard and a much more logical and sensible choice would be “to Craterus” – as you can see from our host’s transliteration, it’s a plausible mistake, and I do agree that Craterus would probably have been a decent choice. But my thought is that from everything I know about Alexander, the logical and sensible choice isn’t the most likely one. Given everything he’d done up until that point, why would he leave it all to Craterus? “To the strongest” is a worse choice and therefore seems more likely.
The problem with ‘To Craterus’ is that while Craterus is a choice that might make some degree of sense, what preparations we are told Alexander made were for Perdiccas to serve as regent. He’d just sent Craterus away, in fact, to go replace Antipater.
What do historians generally think of those final words? Are they genuine? And if so was the meaning really that his companions should fight for it? To me it always read as someone who doesn’t care because he’ll be dead. Après moi, le déluge.
I had been told that the Diadochi had deliberately misheard ‘Craterus’ as ‘the strongest’ or had even made up that whole anecdote in order to justify the power grabs they had committed after Alexander’s death.
However, I do not know enough about the time period to judge the plausibility of that theory.
“Ironically, Crusader Kings players will immediately recognize Alexander’s mistake: as a king or emperor, you need to abolish all top-tier titles except your primary to avoid this very problem.”
I won’t pretend I have a tenth of the historical knowledge that went into this post, or even that I understand all the nuances in it. But at least the impression I had of Alexander was more that he was indifferent to this sort of realm-ordering more than anything else. Alexander’s first and foremost strategic goal wasn’t to make a cultural union, or even to forge an empire. He wanted to build the legend of Alexander the Great Conqueror-King. The empire, and the money and soldiers it brought him, was a tool to attain that kind of legend. And if millions of people had to suffer and die for it, well, that was a price he was willing to pay. And if the realm collapsed after he died, well, doesn’t that just prove that he, personally, was the essential ingredient for it all to work?
Which is another way of saying he was a bad king, but that’s me judging by my very 21st century notion, (or really, it was mostly cribbed from Machiavelli of all places, so 17th century Italian notion?) that a good political leader subordinates his or her own personal desires for the good of the political unit being led. But it’s one that I very much think that Alexander did not personally share, so I’m not sure how useful this sort of analysis even is, with the ultimate goal of his rulership being so different from what is conventionally understood as good rulership.
As I say in an earlier comment, it is not useless precisely because it is not entirely harmless if we have a culture that goes around praising Alexander as a great king and making him out as a kind of martial saint. The 19th century Europeans who wrote some of the hagiographical treatments of Alexander that are mentioned in last week’s blog post were, it’s worth remembering, engaged in a gigantic project to conquer remote foreign lands and subjugate them into vast, lightly held-together empires dominated by a class of conquerors. Not entirely unlike the conquest of the Persian Empire and its transformation into a ramshackle thing held together by a thin layer of Macedonian garrisons.
Given some of the ugly things those European colonial expeditions did, and the chaos they set in motion, maybe the world would, in some corners, be a better place if 19th century schools HAD chosen to teach the idea that Alexander’s quest for glory and universal conquest was in fact not a good thing and not good kingship.
While I buy it that Alexander was not great at picking administrators & rulers, I’m not so certain the policy of “keep the Persian satrapies exactly the same but with a new boss at the helm” was a mistake, especially if the goal is to both avoid a revolt in already conquered territories yet also safely move the bulk of the Macedonian army elsewhere. If he HAD given the matter “deep thought”, it seems plausible he came to that very conclusion of not messing things up too much, and turning Achaemenid taxes into Macedonian taxes with a light touch, was in fact the correct call. (Or that he dodged a bullet by not thinking about the Unity of Mankind too much!)
We have some evidence here. The British & French roll through the Middle East in 1916-18, and initially, Mesopotamia / future Iraq has the Ottoman government structure that had ruled the region for 500 years casually tossed aside for entirely new administrators from British India. (Even currency from India!) The result is a disaster – the British barely exercise any control or legitimacy outside the big cities where the armies are. By 1919-1920, they reverse course, re-install the old Ottoman-era elite, suppress rebels with violence, and basically establish the old system again, just with a new boss & new advisors, and things quiet down substantially. You can’t just upend hundreds of years of governance casually.
Or for a point closer in time… the Seleucids have to rule a gigantic, multicultural empire, and there aren’t enough ethnic Greeks to go around. While they certainly do have “ruler” and “ruled” castes, they also don’t appear to be completely psychotic about it, and let most regions continue to do their own thing as long as they don’t revolt. When they DO clamp down hard and try to impose stronger direction from the top, the result is generally revolts (e.g. the Maccabean Revolt, which is fairly well attested for coincidental reasons, but it seems like there were other, similar revolts during the declining days of the Seleucids as well – some from weakness, many from ambitious Greeks, but some because some bright administrator pissed off the “locals”, too.). And revolts are exactly what Alexander would have wanted to avoid.
On this I must agree.
With respect to Dr. Devereaux, I find his criticisms frequently speak from both sides of the mouth at once. There are very good reasons to criticize the man, but that’s a far cry from understanding him – and there are some reasons to suppose many decisions were far more astute than this article concludes.
I think the argument here is less “picking loyal Persians was a bad idea” as “he failed to pick loyal Persians and so got betrayed immediately”
“Or for a point closer in time… the Seleucids have to rule a gigantic, multicultural empire, and there aren’t enough ethnic Greeks to go around.”
the Mongols had a similar problem- in spite of the vast size of the Mongol Empire, there are actually not a lot of Mongols in the world, then or now. Mongolia is one of the least densely populated countries in the world- there are only about 11-12 million “Mongols” in the world today if you add together Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Kalmykia and Buryatia. My understanding is that starting pretty early on the Mongol armies had more ethnic Turkic peoples in them than ethnic Mongols.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolic_peoples
I believe our host commented on this very issue on Twitter. The context was a dumb, bad faith gotcha in a Congressional hearing with the meme being something like “would Genghis Khan have approved of WOKE DIVERSITY in building a military” and the answer should be something like “I dunno if we should be taking advice from a mass rapist, but yes, he would have:”
https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1681746471455010817
https://twitter.com/CSwampthing/status/1681779738745118720
Not just Turkic as the others have noted, plenty of Chinese in the Yuan Dynasty forces as well for obvious reasons.
Though this is itself a bad-faith gotcha — Genghis Khan’s military organisation was specifically designed to break down old loyalties and make everyone loyal to the Mongol Empire rather than their particular tribe, which is pretty much the opposite of what woke multiculturalism does.
i’d say that’s exactly what the American model of multiculturalism (“melting pot”) does, actually.
i’m not sure if I coined this, but i like to say it anyway: “if Austria was the prison house of nations, America is their graveyard”.
i’d say that’s exactly what the American model of multiculturalism (“melting pot”) does, actually.
The “melting pot” model is anti-multiculturalism: immigrants are expected to lose their old identities and be subsumed into the American mainstream, just like scraps of metal being melted together.
It’s also a model which woke diversity fans universally reject.
i’m not sure if I coined this, but i like to say it anyway: “if Austria was the prison house of nations, America is their graveyard”.
That hasn’t been true for some decades now.
Would you care to provide a rigorous definition of what “woke diversity” means in context, and of what you think a “woke diversity” movement would cause to happen in the context of a modern military, and of why that is bad?
I think you miss something here. Genghis Khan was not trying to break down the customs of the various steppe peoples he united into his empire. He was trying to break down the political ties, making everyone loyal to himself and to the growing empire rather than to various local bigwigs.
I have seen plenty of people who are very positive about what I am sure you would call “woke diversity,” but who are also very positive about the idea of making sure people work together to support a large governing entity that represents them, rather than following a squabbling maze of petty chiefs.
I think that you’re conflating the idea that Genghis Khan united diverse peoples under political loyalty to himself, under his banner as it were, with the idea that Genghis Khan must have wanted to break their customs and give all Mongols the same customs. This then justifies you in saying “no nation can be politically unified if it allows people to retain foreign customs.”
I dont’ think that claim actually holds water.
Would you care to provide a rigorous definition of what “woke diversity” means in context, and of what you think a “woke diversity” movement would cause to happen in the context of a modern military, and of why that is bad?
I was using the phrase because another commenter had already used it. I suggest you go and ask him if you don’t know what it means.
That hasn’t been true for some decades now.
Really? How many Finnish-Americans today speak Finnish? How many Polish-Americans speak Polish? Really, how much of their national culture do even the more recent Vietnamese or Salvadoran or Ethiopian immigrants retain? I’d say that America is actually an extremely effective solvent (for better or worse) of ethno-national identities.
Compare America’s experience with, say, Germans who settled across Eastern Europe and were still speaking German and identifying as German many centuries later.
Really? How many Finnish-Americans today speak Finnish? How many Polish-Americans speak Polish? Really, how much of their national culture do even the more recent Vietnamese or Salvadoran or Ethiopian immigrants retain? I’d say that America is actually an extremely effective solvent (for better or worse) of ethno-national identities.
If they really had lost their separate identities, they’d identify as Americans, not X-Americans.
If they really had lost their separate identities, they’d identify as Americans, not X-Americans.
I’m guessing you don’t live in North America, because this really isn’t the way most Americans, outside the Upper South, process identity.
Most of the Polish Americans I know are so thoroughly assimilated / Americanized that they mispronounce their own surnames, but they still identify as Polish American.
Simon, mr.x has no beliefs or definitions because that’d open him up to criticism, you won’t get anything falsifiable from him. His project isn’t to present a belief system, it’s to signal allegiance.
Hector, also not how Romans viewed identity! Or Chinese! Or Japanese! Or Nigerians, Brazilians, Hindustanis or Bharatis, or Mongols.
In fact, the idea of a single cultural identity rather than a varied, layered one is unique to European ethnostates and their exclusatory colonies, which imposed arbitrary binary ethnic definitions on citizens to justify state repression. Singular identity was invented by racists to justify racism, quite literally.
Race as a concept needs yes or no, black or white; being mixed was a crime or ignored, invalidated. It grew as a way to homogenize identities and invalidate their emotional appeal under a haze of hate.
Most of the Polish Americans I know are so thoroughly assimilated / Americanized that they mispronounce their own surnames, but they still identify as Polish American.
Most Scotsmen couldn’t speak a word of Gaelic, but they’re still Scottish. People can lose their original language whilst still retaining their separate identity.
“Most Scotsmen couldn’t speak a word of Gaelic, but they’re still Scottish.”
There has never been a time in history when a majority of Scots (men or women) spoke Gaelic. Gaelic is and always has been the language of the Highlands and Islands. The people of the south and east of Scotland spoke English, or Scots (a Germanic language related to English), or, if you go far enough back, various Pictish and Brittonic languages.
There is a real contrast here with Ireland, which was a much less multicultural society pre-Normans; Irish was spoken across the island.
There has never been a time in history when a majority of Scots (men or women) spoke Gaelic. Gaelic is and always has been the language of the Highlands and Islands. The people of the south and east of Scotland spoke English, or Scots (a Germanic language related to English), or, if you go far enough back, various Pictish and Brittonic languages.
When Scotland was first unified, the majority probably spoke Gaelic, or at least the early medieval variant thereof. Scots/English was only spoken in the south-east corner until the Davidian Revolution.
“When Scotland was first unified, the majority probably spoke Gaelic, or at least the early medieval variant thereof. ”
Very unlikely. If we’re talking about Kenneth mac Alpin, the first king of the Picts and Scots, his subjects were Picts in the north and east, who spoke Pictish, and Gaelic-speaking Dalriadans in the far west. In the rest of what’s now Scotland you’d have had Brittonic-speakers in the south, Cumbric-speakers in Strathclyde, and some Anglo-Saxons. The majority spoke some sort of Celtic language, but not Gaelic.
If you define “woke multiculturalism” rather narrowly, as an ideology that rejects any obligation to conform to any civic cultural standards at all, and instead proposes that every individual be unrestricted to express their public identity in any way they like, without fear of judgement or rejection, then I would concede you might have a point, but that’s a rather extreme view, held by a small minority. “American multiculturalism” has always acted to instill some core civic values in every resident and citizen, and otherwise allow freedom to express their cultural heritage as they see fit.
Most Scotsmen couldn’t speak a word of Gaelic, but they’re still Scottish. People can lose their original language whilst still retaining their separate identity.
Scots in Scotland aren’t immigrants any more than the Navajo are immigrants to the US (and yes, i know there’s a sense in which both of them are immigrants, but also a more relevant sense in which they aren’t), so this isn’t in any way a good analogy. I was talking specifically about groups that are *not native* to the territory of the US.
Hector, also not how Romans viewed identity! Or Chinese! Or Japanese! Or Nigerians, Brazilians, Hindustanis or Bharatis, or Mongols.
‘Hindustanis’ isn’t either an ethnic or civic term that i’ve ever come across (it’s a linguistic term used by linguists), but I think what you mean is that India, and to a lesser extent Pakistan, are multiethnic states (Bangladesh isn’t, of course, and really neither are Sri Lanka or Bhutan). This is true, but it needs some qualification, because it can also be misleading to an American.
1) not everyone in India or Pakistan is completely happy about the multiethnic / multinational nature of the state, there have been no shortages of secessionist movements in either one. Most famously in India’s far northeast, but of course not limited to there. I’m one of those people who would have preferred a subcontinent existing as a network of many countries based around ethnolinguistic identities, on the European model- a multireligious Bengal for Bengalis of both religions, a Tamil nation-state, nation states for the northeastern tribal groups, etc., just like you have Polish, Slovak, Bulgarian etc. nation states today- and one of the many things I hold against the British empire is that they short circuited that process. In a world where the Brits had never colonized the subcontinent and established the postcolonial boundaries, you might have seen ethno-national identities develop organically as they did within Europe, or for that matter Southeast Asia.
2) ethnicity doesn’t have an exact equivalent in South Asia- it can map partially onto language, partially onto ancestry, partly onto religion and partly onto caste, and which of these is most important depends on the specific regional and historical context (and on the individual).
3) the way different ethnic and religious groups coexist in the subcontinent is really quite different than the American model- in large part it’s about coexisting without mixing, especially at the level of intermarriage, and about sharing the same polity while maintaining strong group boundaries. The Pew survey from a few years ago, entitled “Tolerance and Segregation”, was really informative here- the people they surveyed tended to strongly value the idea of living in a diverse society, but also to be extremely attrached to maintaining the distinct identity and boundaries of their own group (especially when it comes to marriage). South Asian ethnic groups, as a whole, tend to be highly endogamous- among my own ethnic group, in the 1960s, the median married couple was third cousins- which is all very different than the American model where ethnic distinctions are expected to ultimately break down.
Scots in Scotland aren’t immigrants any more than the Navajo are immigrants to the US (and yes, i know there’s a sense in which both of them are immigrants, but also a more relevant sense in which they aren’t), so this isn’t in any way a good analogy. I was talking specifically about groups that are *not native* to the territory of the US.
I don’t see how the length of time a people have lived somewhere has any bearing. I was simply pointing out that people can retain a distinct sense of ethnic identity even if they don’t retain their language.
I was using Hindustanis as an attempt to distinguish the primarily Hindi southern Indians from the more complicated northern Indians and hitting a linguistic barrier. It’s not correct to view the subcontinent as a single anthropological unit.
My understanding of Indian ethnic divisions is that the distinct unmixed ethnic identities has a lot to do with a deeply socially engrained legal definitions imposed largely in the last several thousand years. This predates the Mughals or British, but they certainly reinforced the trend which itself started in the late B.C.E, from what I know of the genetic evidence. I think we discussed it briefly a while ago? I admit relatively complete ignorance of the other Southeast Asian nations, which I thought had more multiculturalism in the traditional sense.
My point being I don’t quite think it’s a trend that can be separated from political or legal repressions. Absent the violent decisions of the progenitors of the Indian caste system and the reinforcement of it along religious and ethnic boundaries later identities would be more layered. Although layering identities still works with distinct identities; one can be a Christian Catholic Badagas (I suspect that’d be rare, but I’m making a point) whom also calls themselves an Indian, for instance, and believe all those identities are both compatible and layered.
The contrasting singular obliterating national western identity, which in practice is both incredibly new and primarily used as a cudgal to delegitimizes minorities, is supposed to wipe out any sub identities. Hell, the Nazis flirted with wiping out religious differences and certainly didn’t tolerate mixed allegiances amongst Catholics.
And if course I didn’t proofread my comment enough to catch that I accidentally said Hindi instead of Hindu and hence completely butchered my assertions regarding Northern versus southern India. Whatever, I need some remedial Indian vocabulary.
I accidentally said Hindi instead of Hindu and hence completely butchered my assertions regarding Northern versus southern India.
It’s complicated- yes the south is on the whole, probably less Muslim than the north, but Kerala, for example, is one of the most religiously diverse states and certainly the most diverse *major* state- it’s a little over 50% Hindu, a little under 30% Muslim and a bit under 20% Christian. This is in spite of the fact it’s also one of the few states that was never under Muslim rule, as far as I know (Islam arrived in Kerala via the maritime trader route, which may be why the Sunni Muslims there belong to a different jurisprudential school than the ones in the rest of India).
One can also reasonably question whether Hinduism is actually a single religion- Hindus aren’t even in agreement with each other about whether there is one god or many. What we call Hinduism today is sort of a synthesis between the “high” Vedic religion, as it was further developed by philosophers and theologians in the late antique and medieval eras, and the “folk” Hinduism that incorporated the pre-IE animism of the subcontinent (praying to the smallpox goddess so that your children are delivered from smallpox, that kind of thing). The “high”, philosophical Hinduism doesn’t really speak that much to me, but I’m much more sympathetic to the “folk”, popular side of the religion. There are a few groups that were historically broadly considered “Hindu” that have in recent years tried to get themselves officially re-classified as separate religions.
Absent the violent decisions of the progenitors of the Indian caste system and the reinforcement of it along religious and ethnic boundaries later identities would be more layered
well, like I said in that other thread- caste covers two meanings: a violently imposed hierarchy on one hand, and a network of extremely endogamous self-contained communities on the other. The two are related but separate and you can (and do) have one without the other in some places. What you think things would ‘naturally’ look like, absent coercive enforcement, depends on wht your baseline assumptions about human nature are. I think a lot of westerners tend towards cosmopolitan views and think that people naturally mix and mingle unless they’re actively kept separate by a coercive state, but there’s an alternative view that people naturally tend to self segregate and associate with people like themselves unless they’re actively forced together (usually by an imperial state). I think the truth is somewhere in between but I definitely incline *more* towards the second perspective, and think that ethnic separatism, for most people, at most times and in most places, is more natural than cosmopolitanism.
I absolutely agree about the view depending on ones priors and take precisely the opposite view because of my priors. Although I have to admit that this is based primarily on material conditions, including governance, and that these same conditions influence government in a loop. Hence why exclusion policies are universal, because there’s a clear set of incentives which are very common particularly in pre industrial states which reward arbitrary social division.
Re; Vedic religion, I actually see a similar trend in the Roman and Greek deities. There is a kind of imposed compliance between the actual folk beliefs, which were often drastically different from the idealized pantheon of Olympian or Roman deities, and the high religions of Rome or Thebes or Athens, etc.
This seems mostly to have taken the form of regional variations, of which we only see a few primary semi coherent lineages and a few snippets we lack context for, but it also took the form of seeing the locals pray to some deity and then the visiting elite telling them what the “real” name was. This led to fascinating variations such as Hades being the same as Dionysus in certain places, associating life and celebration with death in a dualistic way.
We see this clearly with hellenized conquests elsewhere; Hellenic theocratic imperialism generally seems to have taken the form of dressing a local deity in appropriate clothes and saying they were actually an Olympian. In places this actually took off, leading to persistent syncretist deities until the Christian god bulldozed all of them, although even then there was a brief window where the Christian god may have became merely an aspect of Helios. There the process of syncretist assimilation failed.
Which itself is arguably ironic, given there is archeological evidence that the Jewish God was at one time considered compatible with Hellenic gods, showing up in murals and frescos alongside (or as) Helios and others. To say nothing of the theories that they’re just a local expression of a pre historic solar justice god that inspired all of these entities.
The reasons why some religions failed, others persisted, and still others are nearly forgotten is deeply related to power, but the sheer variation suggests a deep divide between what the masses actually believed and what the elites synthesized into a history, everywhere.
True. And previous nomad empires, built by adding tribe after tribe, fell apart quite quickly as the subordinate tribes rallied. Genghis anticipated the problem and eradicated tribal identities by dividing the tribes among standard military units officered by Mongols. Most were Turkic speakers and those languages came to predominate. When the empire did fracture it was first along the same lines as the Carolingians – each inheritance went its own way (Batu’s Golden Horde, Hulagu’s Ilkhanate, Chagatai’s Central Asia). Interestingly the names of two remnants – the Hazaras and Kalmyks – retain the names of Mongol military units.
But, notably, in the process, Genghis Khan did not convert all these Turkic-speaking nomads into more Mongols- to an extent, it was his own culture he was subjecting to a ‘melting pot’ process by blending the tribes he grew up among with so many others.
One might imagine a Mongol conservative sneering that Genghis Khan wants to destroy the uniquely Mongol flavor of “being a steppe nomad horse archer pastoralist” that made the Mongols great, and replace the Mongol people with a bunch of Turks who are clearly doing “being a steppe nomad horse archer pastoralist” all wrong, out of some ‘woke’ notion that people who speak Turkic can ever be real warriors and all that.
It would seem kind of silly, but one might imagine it.
I don’t think the concern about replacement, itself, would be foolish, but then that doesn’t really appear to be what the Mongol emperors did- in the Mongol heartland itself, Mongols weren’t replaced by Turks or anyone else. Mongolia is quite ethnically homogeneous (96%) today.
Mongols have been largely demographically replaced in Inner Mongolia by Chinese, but that seems to have happened during the Qing period and afterwards, not attributable to anything involving the Mongol empire itself.
A couple of (probably?) typos:
The actual arrangements tended to depend on Alexander’s needs at the time; liberal settlements -> liberated settlements
Alexander’s Macedonians mutiny en masse, mocking his claim to divity (Arr. Anab. 7.8.3) and refusing to fight -> divinity
Former written as intended, (‘liberal’ settlements with the same meaning of ‘generous arrangements’), latter fixed.
Is this a typo? “circumspect; his hey source benefited greatly”
Another typo: “Harplus”.
How much have the Total War and Paradox uses of titles informed the modern understanding of what would qualify someone for “the Great” as opposed to other titles? I’d ascribe “the Conqueror” to Alexander and reserve “the Great” for people like Justinian and Heraclius (who oversaw or personally led military victories, for sure, but who also contributed to the survival or improvement of great institutions). To be worthy of “the Great,” one should have done things on a large scale with a lasting impact in more than one arena. Alexander didn’t bring unity. He didn’t reform or codify the laws. He didn’t oversee or direct great architecture. What he did accomplish was an unprecedented scale of conquest, which alone should not qualify him for “the Great.”
However, unintentional as the effects may have been, his efforts did result in the first stone being laid in the foundation of Hellenistic culture, which itself contributed to the expansion and solidification of Roman rule over the eastern Mediterranean and ultimately in the smooth (compared to what it could have been) spread of Christianity. Between that great impact on the course of history and the degree of admiration in which so many subsequent people held him, he might qualify as “the Great” despite himself. At this point, the legend of Alexander seems much larger than the man himself. Alexander the Conqueror may be the real man, but the imagined Alexander the Great possesses a legacy that still informs social and political movements to this day.
Or Augustus or Julius Caesars as the great for similar reasons, keeping in mind they did break a lot of institutions in the process. Although arguably remembering them as the namesake of a part of the year is more impressive. Some things stand taller alone.
I think perhaps the biggest legacy of Alexander was linking Asia and Greece. While they had been interacting for generations and Persian kings had invaded Greece, he was the first to unify the territories connecting the eastern med under one polity, and that honestly shaped the center of power for Europe and Asia until sometime in the middle of the last *millennia*. The fact that that vital trade choke point kept ending up as a single political unit with one customs union is actually rather significant in world history, and might be the only semi intentional thing he did that truly lasted. And it was more that he gave people a historical border to fight over than anything.
Yeah, I don’t think the Fergana Valley shows up in European histories again until Marco Polo.
(Also, I just found out that Venice’s airport is named after Marco Polo!)
I’m curious, is the King of the Macedonians/King of Macedon distinction because Phillip wanted to claim some democratic legitimacy (à la Napoleon being “Emperor of the French” instead of “Emperor of France”)? Or was the point more that he wanted to claim sovereignty over Macedonians who weren’t in Macedon (analogous, maybe, to how Italy defined its empire as including Italians living in places like the US & Brazil, so they could draft those people to fight in World War I)?
IIRC, it’s because the Greek system understood it as you being ruler over the people, not the place- Athens, for example, could be moved elsewhere (and they actually threaten to do it as one point, IIRC) and it’s still Athens.
The other Greek city states defined themselves as “the citynameians” according to this blog and I assume history in general (I’ve seen it elsewhere), so might just be a Greek cultural thing. Or mix of things.
There’s also the “King of the Jews” and the “King of the Geats” and the “King of the Franks”, so maybe it has broader roots. I’d guess it has something to do with the unit of rule being an ethnos (if I can use that term), rather than a defined bit of land. “King of the Britons”, even as the territory shrank to barely Prydain. Maybe it even extends to SPQR: “Roman people”, not “people of Rome”.
Hopefully I’m not getting any details wrong here: regarding the Macedonian kingship the king was traditionally acclaimed by the army and the custom lasted into Antigonid times, IIRC Philip V was acclaimed this way. This wasn’t a vote for king thing per se but more of a coronation ceremony, a rubber stamp to confirm the king’s legitimacy, possibly analogous to the way our host briefly described the limited function of the Roman Comitia Curiata in the historical period, as the least noteworthy of the Roman popular assemblies doing little else than conferring Imperium to the respective Magistrates once they have been elected (elected in another assembly, the Comitia Centuriata)
It’s because Greek states were conceptualised in personal terms. Even republics were described as “the Athenians”, “the Thebans”, etc., rather than “Athens” or “Thebes”.
Which is why I don’t think that “Alexander was just interested in his own glory, not the good of Macedonia” is a very convincing criticism. For a Greek, the glory of Macedonia and the glory of Macedonia’s king just were one and the same, and glory was an inherently good thing.
I am going to have to reuse my favorite Will Cuppy quote here:
“Alexander III of Macedonia was born in 356 B.C., on the sixth day of the month of Lous. He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time.”
– The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950)
Clearly using “great” in this sense is an older use of the term; and I don’t think it needs to have any value in emulation. But really, I doubt one can find any ancient monarch who was morally good from a modern point of view. One is reminded of Lord Acton: “Great men are almost always bad men”.
Sure, but I think it’s not unreaqsonable to expect a bit more effectiveness at ruling than Alexander showed…
If George Washington had caught pneumonia during his inauguration and died a few days later, and the young USA had fallen apart shortly afterwards, I don’t think it would be fair to “expect a bit more effectiveness at ruling” from him.
Not that I actually think Alexander would have been as effective as GW, but he didn’t really get a chance to try. Perhaps after a few revolts, he would have come up with a different system. Perhaps if he’d settled down (yeah, right) for 30 years, some of that forced integration would have taken root. Maybe there’d be the start of a stable empire sitting at the crossroads of Rome, China, India, and Nubia, with Greek travelers and scientists compiling and sharing knowledge. Probably not, but it’s a nifty thought. 🙂
Except that what’s far more likely is that if he survives another 30 years, he has to spend it putting down revolts.
That’s kind of my point- sure, theoretically Alexander might have become a good King of he’d lived longer, but that would have required him to drastically change.
I don’t think it’s particularly productive to assume that somebody will completely reinvent themselves without some sign it’s happening.
I mean, there’s a difference in predicting that someone won’t change (usually a safe bet), and condemning them for something they haven’t even had a chance to do yet. I have some old-fashioned political and ethical objections to the second. But maybe Nayib Bukele is the wave of the future?
I know I’m being facetious, but George Washington also had to put down the Whiskey Rebellion.
“he didn’t really get a chance to try.”
“Perhaps if he’d settled down (yeah, right)”
You say it yourself. He chose not to try. Chose to chase his dreams of glory and Okeanos, despite the advice and pleading of his companions, rather than consolidating his huge wins.
Alexander III was in some kind of ruling position for 12 years. That’s about as long as Henry IV and Claudius had, and it seems fair to say that that’s a reasonable length of time to judge a monarch on. Alexander might not have conquered so far if he had taken the time to administer his empire, of course, but had he had the temperament for it, he might well have lived longer.
He spent ten years campaigning, plenty of it well after doing what he originally set out to do. He had plenty of time to do some kinging, but cared more about conquering than actually ruling.
The fact he chose to continually push forward instead of turning back to rule the territory he had, is telling in it’s own right.
“Continually pushing forward” was expected of a Macedonian king, though — Philip had done the exact same on a smaller scale, and the Diadochi would do the exact same on a similar scale. Alexander’s doing the same maybe tells us that he didn’t have the vision to look beyond the cultural script he’d inherited, but I don’t think it tells us he was a particularly bad or irresponsible king, either.
Continually pushing forward at a smaller scale. Much like how stopping at the edge of a cliff is exactly like rushing heedlessly right into the plummet, just at a smaller scale.
Continually pushing forward at a smaller scale. Much like how stopping at the edge of a cliff is exactly like rushing heedlessly right into the plummet, just at a smaller scale.
More like how a small business expanding in small ways is on a smaller scale to a large business expanding in large ways.
Companies famously never expanding in a manner that constitutes drastic overreach that ends up ruining them.
And certainly, Philip assuming hegemony over virtually all of the Greek states was a small achievemement.
Most descriptions of Alexander I’ve heard are along these lines: Highly skilled at military, lazy/unfocused/erratic/uninterested in other parts of ruling.
Which in itself is unusual and kind of interesting, most famous pre-1850’s or so generals show skills (when possible) at other things: Caesar the politician, Hannibal with some administration, Napoleon at a number of things, Ghenghis Khan reorganizing big parts of society.
Could make for a personality/psychology study, it seems. Maybe. Or just weird.
It’s not really addressed in the post, but he was extremely motivated at myth-making, which is a huge part of rulership.
There are quite a few relatively famous pre-1850 generals who are known more or less only for their military campaigns. It’s just that they tend not to be remembered centuries after the fact except by military historians, because they won’t have done much of general historical interest.
That”s why *famous”is included. There have been lots of generals, but the “best generals/conquerors in history” that we hear about most often, even if just for battles tend to have other skills as well. (Pyrrhus is borderline here if you include him, as ancient sources do, since we don’t hear much at all about running a kingdom.)
“Ironically, Crusader Kings players will immediately recognize Alexander’s mistake: as a king or emperor, you need to abolish all top-tier titles except your primary to avoid this very problem.”
That’s a basic strategy, destroying the titles tanks your prestige generation. A real master player hands out inheritances while still alive so that all the pretenders end up with capitals in border deserts and the main heir gets the block of contiguous land in the center of the empire that has maxed out buildings ready to field a massive new army; the Player Heir always inherits an immediate casus belli against all holders of any Title ‘lost’ during inheritance, and *all* of the professional troops. Even with six titles the reunification wars should be no challenge, much easier than the civil war that the subordinates whose loyalty *was* inherited will launch.
What Alexander should have done was give all the Macedonians counties *under* Persian subjects so that they’d be too busy scheming against each other to complain about the guy at the top.
“Ironically, Crusader Kings players will immediately recognize Alexander’s mistake: as a king or emperor, you need to abolish all top-tier titles except your primary to avoid this very problem”
It’s made rather easy by the fact that wars of conquests tend to leave you without any local nobility you have to play ball with. Even Alexander who was setting out to create a Macedonian ethnic elite left a lot more hands in the power of the Persians then a CKII player would.
We run into the same problem with Julius Caesar: a charismatic supremely successful conqueror who’s accomplishments are an impossible act to follow.
Eh, arguably Augustus not only followed but vastly exceeded them.
Thank you once more for your post, analysis and reflection.
One thing I would be remiss to not note is that Alexander III’s legacy is one of the points in which the medieval world surprisingly resonates more with our current values than those of the modern era since Dante Alighieri quite famously put him in the first ring of the seventh circle of hell (the one reserved for the consciously violent), alongside with Attila the Hun.
He’s late antique rather than medieval, but St. Augustine also had a dim view of Alexander- see that famous anecdote about Alexander and the pirate.
Alexander was “Basileus” twice over, and also “Shahanshah”, but apparently he never busted out “Wanax”/”Anax”. It sounds as though if anyone were to have resurrected it, he would have. Had it become as repugnant to the Greeks as “Rex” became to the Romans?
It certainly wasn’t repugnant, but I’m not aware that the Greeks had any cultural memory of “anax” as anything other than an old-fashioned title for “king” which gets used a few times in Homer. In which case, there’d be no real point to reviving it — it wouldn’t “promote” him above the rank of an ordinary basileus, and Alexander associated himself with Achilles rather than the anax andron Agamemnon.
I’d gotten the impression, back in school, that it was viewed as a “High King” position, with religious significance (priestly, not just that it’s Zeus’ title), and evoking memories of Mycenaean centralized rule. And that the various classical Greek city-states deliberately avoided it because of its implications for their treasured freedom/eleutheria. They not only kept to the lesser “basileus”, but also often broke up the functions of a basileus when constructing their multipart forms of governance. From that, it would seem like the sort of thing that a canny imperial ruler like Octavian would avoid, but also like the sort of thing that a borderline hubristic ruler like Alexander might grasp. (Although maybe he just didn’t have enough time, unlike Janet from Rocky Horror.)
Or had it just fallen out of use to the point where resurrecting it was on par with a modern ruler asking to be called cyning instead of king?
Maybe? Anax was used for Zeus, (at least some of the time?), and for Agamemnon in the Illiad, and it formed part of several names (like Anaximander), so I don’t think it was *that* archaic. If it were merely a synonym of basileus, I’d agree that it might be viewed as old-fashioned, like the “thou”s in the King James bible. (Although that’s a bad example, because we stopped using them because of the political implications.) But anax meant something over and beyond basileus, or at least that’s what I was taught.
But anax meant something over and beyond basileus, or at least that’s what I was taught.
It was also used in the term for a craftsman (cheironax = hand-anax), so I don’t think it was was simple as just “anax = basileus+”.
(Although that’s a bad example, because we stopped using them because of the political implications.)
No, we stopped using them because of ordinary linguistic drift.
and of course, “thou” is still used in biblical and liturgical context.
It was in decline, but I’d thought that the Quaker insistence on “thee” and “thou” added a political dimension that caused it to rapidly tail off (among other groups).
There was no Quaker insistence on “thee” and “thou”. The form had already died, for them, at the time they imbued it with religious significance, as you can tell by the fact that they don’t use the word “thou”. For the Quakers, “thee” is the subject form as well as being the default form.
I meant to remind everyone of this Epic Rap Battle last week, but this week will have to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVbH1BVXywY
On a less important matter: To say that someone is “great” or “greatest” generally means they have a dominant or domineering position, and there can’t have been many Macedonian King Alexanders with a greater impact on their country’s history.
Morally: comparing Alexander impulsively killing a friend with his cold demeanour in battle does rather remind me of a story of a neurologist a few years ago, who accidently discovered he was a psychopath to the astonishment of himself and no one who knew him.
He had a perfectly practical outlook on life – don’t make trouble for yourself – but his feelings for other people weren’t what you could call deep.
I note a bias against Persians here:
“Alexander replaces Satibarzanes with another Persian noble, Arsaces (Arr. Anab. 3.25.7), who he then has arrested the next year (Arr. Anab. 4.7.1) and replaced with a Macedonian, Stasanor, also removing the Persian satrap of neighboring Drangiana at the same time and putting Stasanor in charge of both (Q. Curt. 8.3.17) and perhaps around the same time also sacked and imprisoned the satrap of Hycania, Autophradates or Phradates, replacing him with Phrataphernes (Arr. Anab. 4.18.2; Q. Curt. 8.3.17).”
“Then we have to deal with Alexander’s actions with the satraps after his return, which Ernest Badian understands as effectively a mass purge. Badian (“Harpalus” JHS 81 (1961)) compiles the list of Alexander’s actions in this regard from 325 to 323, and when I rattle this off, please keep in mind that Alexander had but 25 or so satrapies total6 We can start with the non-Macedonians: Tyriaspes, satrap of Parapamisadae is arrested and executed, replaced by Oxyartes. Astaspes, satrap of Carmania, suspected of planning revolt, is deposed and executed. Orxines, satrap of Persia after the death of his predecessor Phrasaortes, is executed, replaced by Peukestas. The satrap of Susiana, Abulites and his son are executed as well, replaced, at least eventually, by Coenus. Badian also places the execution of (Auto)Phradates here. That is a not inconsiderable number of fatally disloyal satraps.”
But for the Macedonians:
“Instead, he seems increasingly paranoid from 330 onward – in some cases he may have had reason to be – and ‘close to Alexander’ could be quite a dangerous place to be (unless you were actually embezzling royal funds, in which case you seem to have been rather safer). This is hardly to mean Alexander killed all or even most of his companions, but then many successful generals go entire careers without having their best commander (Parmenio) assassinated or murdering one of their better lieutenants in a drunken rage. I don’t think we should be too quick – as many are, it seems – to forgive Alexander for murdering his companions, on the grounds that he was a king.”
You´re implying that the Persians were really “fatally disloyal” and Alexander was correct to purge them (but wrong to promote them), yet the Macedonian companions were basically in the right and Alexander was paranoid to punish people who were altogether innocent or who had justified grievances?
So Alexander´s handpicked men were less reliable than Philip´s picks. How safe was Philip´s court for his companions, compared to Alexander´s court? We know it was not safe for Philip, because Philip was openly, acknowledgedly assassinated, and Alexander was not acknowledgedy assassinated, only disputedly. We know it was not safe for Alexander´s assassin, because he was raped and could not get justice. But how did it compare to Alexander?
I think there are fewer attested executions in Philip’s court, but that comes with the enormous caveat that our sources are far less detailed for Philip’s reign than for Alexander’s, so it’s quite possible he killed people of whom we’re unaware. There’s also the fact that Alexander’s empire was both much bigger and conquered much more quickly than Philip’s, which would mean Alexander would have a harder time keeping an eye on things and, potentially, more conspiracies against him.
You’re comparing passages that are talking about things from different perspectives. The Persians being described are “fatally disloyal” in the sense of “not loyal to Alexander, who you may remember has just conquered the Persian state and is trying to replace much of its power structure with a Macedonian elite.” Persian ‘disloyalty’ to Alexander is not necessarily a moral vice, and arguably is a virtue from a Persian nationalist standpoint. But for Alexander’s own purposes, it is obviously at best inconvenient and at worst dangerous, and thus highly undesirable to Alexander if he finds himself appointing Persians who are not loyal to him to high positions of power.
Thus, we see that Alexander was unable to either secure the loyalty of a wide selection of Persian subordinates. And beyond that, he failed even to choose those who will be loyal and not disloyal. And this represents a significant deficiency on Alexander’s part. Not a moral deficiency, but a deficiency of competence.
Meanwhile, Alexander’s Macedonian companions were far more likely to be loyal to him by default, but in the final years of his reign he has managed to alienate several of them, and is lashing out and killing them. This is more a sign of his personal paranoia, his inability to retain the loyalty of men who started out very loyal to him, or both.
I don’t think there’s any inconsistency here.
“The Persians being described are “fatally disloyal” in the sense of “not loyal to Alexander, who you may remember has just conquered the Persian state”
“Thus, we see that Alexander was unable to either secure the loyalty of a wide selection of Persian subordinates. And beyond that, he failed even to choose those who will be loyal and not disloyal. And this represents a significant deficiency on Alexander’s part. Not a moral deficiency, but a deficiency of competence.”
“Meanwhile, Alexander’s Macedonian companions were far more likely to be loyal to him by default, but in the final years of his reign he has managed to alienate several of them, and is lashing out and killing them. This is more a sign of his personal paranoia, his inability to retain the loyalty of men who started out very loyal to him, or both.
I don’t think there’s any inconsistency here.”
I do see an inconsistency.
The one satrap Alexander appointed for whom we have actual evidence of disloyalty is Satibarzanes: “he literally revolts five lines after being confirmed as satrap”.
For everyone else, what is quoted is Alexander´s actions – dismissing, arresting, executing his appointees.
If we grant that Alexander acted out of paranoia and some of the people he purged were innocent, it might have been just as true for the Persians he purged as for the Macedones he purged.
To push back slightly on part of the judgement, I think we can be harsh in hindsight to some of Alexander’s mistakes of administration, because of what we (and all his heirs) have learned from them. Had anyone else conquered so many diverse people and places in such a short time? In recorded history, I don’t think there’s anyone until Genghis Khan who comes close. (Maybe Caliph Umar?) He was faced with an unprecedented problem, and probably chose the best solution he could come up with. And with only 12 years to do it in, plus carrying out the conquests themselves, it’d be amazing if anything he could have done would have worked. The Roman Empire wasn’t consolidated in a day; it took centuries of cultural assimilation to create an identity that people were still invoking in the 20th century. And partly it’s a question of priorities: if he’d been slower to conquer, he could have spent more time consolidating, but it sounds like that would have required an entirely different sort of person and personality.
One of the reasons to value the study of history is that it lets us look back and learn from the mistakes of others, and Alexander seems like a great (heh) example of what happens when someone flies by the seat of their pants.
There is a staggering blindness here. Who else conquered so many diverse people in such a short space of time? Darius the Great (Darius 1) whose empire included the core Persian empire, the Indus, Thrace, and Macedon (i.e. largely exactly the same scope as Alexander’s empire). Alexander grabbed a bit more in Afghanistan, while Darius held more in the steppes of modern Kazakhstan and the shores of the Black Sea. There might be a case for arguing Alexander was great because he replicated the conquests of Darius, but Darius also laid the foundations for the achemaenid empire which lasted until Alexander put himself at the top of it…
I believe, in terms of conquest, you mean Cyrus II (‘the Great’). Darius I was the great administrator, organizer and regularizer of the empire, but not its greatest conqueror.
Nope – although Cyrus is another good candidate who conquered essentially the same area as Alexander. Darius the Great’s career is a really good parallel. He starts off as a noble within the Persian Empire (which the king of Macedon was for much of the kingdom’s history). Darius then had to win a civil war to take the Persian Empire (and from a Persian point of view Alexander’s conquest looks very much like Cyrus the Younger’s attempt to conquer the Persian empire by combining Greek foot and western Anatolian horse which was civil war). After securing the core Persian empire Darius then adds the Indus satrapies, most of Kazakhstan, Thrace, Macedonia, and the shore of the Black Sea. Looks very comparable to Alexander to me.
Darius took control of the Persian Empire through a palace coup rather than by conquering it. There were widespread provincial rebellions after this, and although it’s not clear how serious these were, the fact that order was restored within a couple of years suggests they fell well short of “This province needs to be reconquered again, pretty much from scratch” levels of seriousness. Darius was undoubtedly a very able and impressive king, but his conquests don’t really parallel Cyrus’ or Alexander’s.
So there’s this rough progression, which shows an empire sitting in Mesopotamia, extending into Asia Minor and Egypt occasionally, and when the Medes take over the core shifts to the Iranian plateau, with the Medes, Persions, Parthians, and Sasanians all having a turn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Assyrian_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Babylonian_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_(ancient_kingdom)#Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seleucid_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthian_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashidun_Caliphate
Cyrus II the Great took 29 years to cover less area, but to his credit he seems to have spent more effort on management, and most of the conquering was done in a 14-year span, 553-539. It seems like he spent 3 years in taking Ecbatana, but then married into the Median dynasty and had a smooth transfer of power. After that, he used his new state to take out Lydia and Elam and the Neo-Babylonians, and then turned to creating a stable and integrated empire.
Darius I the Great inherited/stole a large empire, expanded it a bit (Egypt, the western Indus valley, Scythia) over 36 years, but notably failed to conquer Greece, a failure that would haunt his empire until its fall.
Alexander III the Great went on a non-stop conquer spree for only 12 years, but covered as much territory as Darius I ever had. He fought his way from the outside in against Darius III, through Asia Minor to Egypt and then Babylon and then Persepolis, and after that had to put down the rival claimant Bessus. He didn’t simply take over a throne and have the rest of the empire follow along; he had to do it all step by bloody step, figuring out how to hold the fraction of the empire that he’d carved out, while still prosecuting a war against the rest of the empire. And along the way he took the opportunity to push out the borders of the empire even more, wherever he happened to be. Although apparently some bits broke off, in places where he was never personally present.
(There’s an older narrative of history that says that Alexander wasn’t particularly “Great”, except for maybe ego. First, Darius in 490 and Xerxes in 480 failed to conquer Greece, demonstrating the superiority of the hoplite phalanx over the Persian (Achaemenid) system of battle. More battles from 466(?)-387ish showed that a unified Greece was capable of taking on Persia, but that a divided Greece would fail. The exploits of the 10,000 in 401-399 showed that a phalanx, with minimal support, volunteer leadership, and on-the-fly logistics, could move with relative impunity through the Persian Empire. And after that, it was only a matter of time before someone unified Greece and turned east. Philip prepared for it, but Alexander was the one who carried it out.)
Egypt had been conquered by Cambyses II who had ruled Persia in-between Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great.
Also, I had the impression that there exist historians of Ancient Greek and Persian militaries (like Roel Konijnendijk) who would disagree with the claim that ‘the hoplite phalanx was superior over the Persian (Achaemenid) system of battle’. Not that it matters much, Alexander had a Macedonian Pike Phalanx instead of a Greek Hoplite Phalanx anyway; a whole different beast.
Argh, I wrote a long comment that got eaten by the spam filters, maybe due to excessive links. Here’s a short version.
Cyrus came to power at age 41, started his expansion at age 46, and kept expanding for about 14 years. He had a 3-year campaign to take over the Median empire, after which he married into the Median dynasty and seems to have had a smooth transfer of power. He then leveraged that new empire to add Lydia, Elam, and Neo-Babylon, after which he settled down for a decade to consolidate and administer, before dying at age 70.
Alexander came to power at age 20, and almost immediately started a whirlwind of conquest over the next 12 years of his life. He fought his way from the outside in, through Asia Minor, the Levant, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and all the way to Persepolis, after which he chased a rival around the northeastern part of the empire, and then followed it up with expanding the empire even further across the Indus. He didn’t step into a power vacuum, he had to carve off one bit at a time, and figure out how to administer it and keep it loyal, while simultaneously continuing the fight against the rest of the empire.
Alexander seems to me to have had a much more impressive trajectory as a conqueror. Cyrus was more of a well-rounded empire founder, although I’m not sure how much of his reputation derives from his significance in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.
Cyrus’ empire lasted much longer than Alexander’s, although Cyrus did have the advantage of being survived by an adult male son.
Yes. Using the sports analogy, maybe Cyrus was more of a team player… Maybe soccer-football is a good example, at least at the lower levels that I’m more familiar with as an American. Some forwards score lots of goals themselves but can actually drag their team down by being a ball-hog. Other forwards don’t score quite as many goals personally, but provide the passes and coverage that let their team win, time after time.
Alexander is what the Spartans thought they were. Skilled at conquest, proud of never learning any more productive skills.
Re: Alexander’s skill as an administrator, I think it should be pointed out that the provinces largely remained loyal after his death. Yes, there were civil wars, but these were carried out by Macedonian generals leading Macedonian troops; there were no serious attempts on the part of the various Asian elites to drive out the conquerors and restore the Persian (Babylonian, Egyptian, Median…) empire. Given the cultural difference between the Macedonians and the peoples they now ruled, and given that there weren’t enough Macedonians to hold down the empire in the face of widespread discontent, I think this speaks quite well of Alexander’s policy of not rocking the boat too much.
Yeah I think this part actually is a point in Alexander’s favor. All Diadochi are Macedonian, which means his conquest actually sticks for a while. Now I want series about Seleucus, though maybe there’s not much source?
Interestingly, Seleucus, the most successful of the Diadochi, was also the only one to remain married to his Persian wife. I don’t know enough to say for certain, but I suspect this isn’t a coincidence.
Certainly not, since he was also the successor who took control of Persia. Whether you have a Persian wife is a matter of no particular significance if you’re trying to rule Egypt. It matters a lot if you’re ruling Persia!
Given his habit of never visiting the same place twice, it seems to me that a better name for him would be “Alexander the Hamiltonian”.
Euler’s network thingy: How can Alexander follow the major roads of Greece through Middle East and India and not repeat any steps?
Konigsberg was just at an updated version to be more topical.
Instead of examining the life and reign of Alexander III of Macedon in a vacuum to decide whether he ought to be called “the Great”, I think it would be more illustrative to compare and contrast him to other historical rulers commonly styled “the Great.”
I think we would find that who gets named “the Great” and who does not is essentially arbitrary. However, I will note that of all the rulers I can think of that were called “the Great”, the one thing they all have in common with each other, but not Alexander, is that, at the very least, their realms and associated institutions survived for a long time after their deaths.
The institutions and realm Alexander built lasted pretty long, just divided between warring successor realms. Charlemagne’s empire only gets divided one generation later and there was more cooperation between the Carolingian kings than between the Diadochi, but in general the two are comparable in that regard. Herod the Great’s realm also got divided, and those pieces got annexed by the Romans bit by bit in the following generations
In general I get the impression that rulers called “the Great” stand out AMONG THEIR DYNASTY, not necessarily in all of history.
Another example would be Theodosius the Great, the last ruler of the united Roman Empire.
“In general I get the impression that rulers called “the Great” stand out AMONG THEIR DYNASTY, not necessarily in all of history.”
Alfred the Great is another example I think. His achievements, while worthwhile, pale in comparison to the likes of people like Darius or Alexander. Militarily, he essentially lost half of England to Danish rule (but managed to hold onto the rest of it). He enacted some pretty thorough and beneficial reforms (which were successful, unlike Alexander), but on a miniscule scale compared to anything achieved by most classical monarchs of note.
I get the impression us English were jealous of everyone else’s ‘Great’ monarchs and wanted one of our own, so picked our most successful king to date.
Though, to be honest, Alfred’s achievements of defending one’s people from invasion, promoting education, reforming taxation to better match people’s wealth, and codifying legal practices are more fitting with what I’d consider ‘great things to do’ than Alexander’s murderous rampage across the Near East.
What’s your take on the hypothesis that he didn’t say “Kratistos” but “Krateros” and that since Krateros wasn’t there, the others preferred to pretend that he said “Kratistos” ?
What’s a treasury (or two) between friends, anyway?
As I’m reading this, the question occurs to me: was Alexander bad at picking loyal satraps, or was he in an impossible position where pretty much anyone he picked would’ve been disloyal? (I.e., was he bad at picking, or were [basically*] all his choices bad?) His other questionable judgment might point towards the former, but perhaps he also just didn’t really have many good feasible options.
*it sounds like he found a few loyal people, at least.
“he in an impossible position where pretty much anyone he picked would’ve been disloyal?”
If it’s an impossible position, it’s a position that he put himself in. “I’m moving too fast to consolidate my rule” is a self-imposed problem. So he’s still making bad choices as a king.
The Achaemenid Empire had vastly more resources than Macedon, so Alexander needed to be continually on the attack in order to keep the Persians off-balance. Going slowly would have resulted in a war of attrition which Alexander would be hard-pressed to win. And not invading Persia in the first place wasn’t really an option, either; the Leage of Corinth, which Alexander had inherited from his father, was explicitly created for the sake of invading Persia, so if Alexander just sits tight in Macedon he’d lose legitimacy among his Greek subjects.
I mean, he probably needed to actually completely defeat the empire, rather than letting it rally, but once that was done, all the subsequent pushing was pretty transparently voluntary.
The “subsequent pushing” consisted of his campaign in India; everything before that had been either in Achaemenid territory or necessary to secure the borders of Alexander’s new realm. IOW, most of his satrapal appointments happened during the “needed to defeat the empire” stage rather than the “voluntarily keeping invading stuff” phase.
The campaign in India was, I think, pretty clearly an unforced own-goal. He had the chance to try to settle down and administer his conquests, and didn’t.
If he’d died immediately after conquering Persia, then I’d agree that a lot of the criticism was unjustified, but he had a chance to spend some time on consolidation, and showed no interest in doing it.
As is, assuming that if he’d just lived another X years he’d have started to concentrate on administration seems unjustified.
Half tongue-in-cheek and half serious: the reason Alexander is ‘the great’ and Napoleon and Hitler aren’t is that Alexander had the good sense to die before it all came crumbling down.
Or at least to murder anyone who might have had a contradicting opinion of his rule. Though now I’m wondering; do any Persian accounts of Alexander III’s conduct/conquest survive?
None contemporary. We don’t get that until much, much later. (and those are reliant on greek sources rather than persian ones)
I’ve heard a theory that Caesar intentionally let his final assassination to happens because he wants to go out at his height. Seems very unlikely especially for Alexander, but an interesting theory
Caesar was actively planning further military campaigns at the time of his death. If his assassination was some plan to go out on top, it was a damn convoluted one because it entails leaving evidence that he still has a lot of work he was planning to do.
Would it be fair to say that Alexander was an alcoholic? From the way you described him, he was highly skilled at his day job (being a general), but then went home, got wasted, and made some *very bad decisions* in his off hours. That’s classic high-functioning alcoholic behavior.
I guess it would be simple to say that he was good at war but bad at ruling. And maybe that’s true. But it seems odd that a man with such charisma would also be so terrible at getting people to stay loyal to him outside of the battlefield. It would make more sense if he was getting drunk and then picking bad people (maybe forgetting who they even were), or doing something so outrageous that it turned his friends into enemies.
Yes, I think it is fair to say Alexander drank too much. A a historian, I’m hesitant to say ‘alcoholic’ because that’s a diagnosis and it’s hard to make those at distance. But his drink seems to have gotten the better of him more than once.
I guess I’m looking for something stronger than “drank too much.” You don’t have to diagnose him with any specific medical condition. But I’m wondering if a lot of his decisions were driven by alcohol, for better or for worse. Like, was he ever drunk while he was fighting?
Would it be fair to say that Alexander was an alcoholic? From the way you described him, he was highly skilled at his day job (being a general), but then went home, got wasted, and made some *very bad decisions* in his off hours. That’s classic high-functioning alcoholic behavior.
Him, and most of the Macedonian court. Famously, Alexander had almost met Cleitus’ fate as a young man, when he got into a drunken argument with Philip and the latter tried to attack him, though as it turned out Philip was too drunk to stand up and Alexander’s friends managed to usher him away.
I guess it would be simple to say that he was good at war but bad at ruling. And maybe that’s true. But it seems odd that a man with such charisma would also be so terrible at getting people to stay loyal to him outside of the battlefield. It would make more sense if he was getting drunk and then picking bad people (maybe forgetting who they even were), or doing something so outrageous that it turned his friends into enemies.
One thing to bear in mind is that Alexander’s empire was immeasurably bigger and wealthier than anything any Greek had ever ruled before, which meant both more incentive to rebel (more land and money to seize) and more opportunity (since it was harder for Alexander to keep an eye on what everyone else was doing). Even at the polis-level, Greek politics were notoriously factionalistic and strife-ridden, so it’s possible any Greek ruler would face similar difficulties if suddenly put in charge of such a huge empire.
Thanks! I never heard that story, and I didn’t know that Phillip II was *also* a heavy drinker. That also kind of supports the alcoholic theory… it runs in the family…
/quote Even at the polis-level, Greek politics were notoriously factionalistic and strife-ridden, so it’s possible any Greek ruler would face similar difficulties if suddenly put in charge of such a huge empire.
Sure. But even so… some of Alexander’s decisions defy logical explanation. I don’t get the sense that he “tried his best, but was undone by the impossible task.” It feels more like a guy who was *usually* smart, but randomly did idiotic things because he was drunk.
(ask me how I know what that’s like…)
I think on some level it’s a cultural thing: There was a culture of heavy drinking among macedonian aristocracy that wasn’t really the same among greeks. (who obviously were still drinking, but don’t seem to have gone on binges the same way)
Thanks! I never heard that story, and I didn’t know that Phillip II was *also* a heavy drinker. That also kind of supports the alcoholic theory… it runs in the family…
The whole Macedonian court was famous for heavy drinking. A good king was expected to get plastered with his nobles on a regular basis.
Sure. But even so… some of Alexander’s decisions defy logical explanation. I don’t get the sense that he “tried his best, but was undone by the impossible task.” It feels more like a guy who was *usually* smart, but randomly did idiotic things because he was drunk.
TBH I think the sources would mention it if Alexander was in the habit of making important decisions whilst drunk. More likely his bad personnel choices were a combination of the inherent difficulty of the task and an excessive trust in his friends.
Now that I think of it, there have been suggestions that Alexander was suffering from PTSD by the latter part of his reign, which might perhaps help explain some of his more erratic decisions, as well as his (apparently) increasingly heavy drinking.
Sounds more and more like Alexander is an excellent example of “Generals shouldn’t be kings”. He was really good at fighting, which is good for a general. But he was ONLY good at fighting, and made administrative decisions based on what’s best for the fighting, thus landing him in all sorts of trouble he could have probably avoided if he were trying to rule instead of conquer. He would have been a fantastic general operating under a firm ruler, but as a ruler himself he was focused on the wrong things.
I do think you’re being somewhat unfair to him, though. There are numerous passages where you disparage Alexander for having other people handle various aspects of his rule for him (“…amounted to questions of the men he chose to do the job for him”, to give one example). But that’s fundamentally the job of rulers. NO ONE can run a kingdom. No one person can even run a construction site (I’ve seen this tested to be confident in this statement). Alexander, like any ruler, absolutely NEEDED to pick people to do his work for him, and–critically–would have whether he was off fighting wars or not. Rome provides examples of this. Sure, Rome ruled the empire, and the Emperor ruled Rome, but the Emperor can only be in one place and needs subordinates in various positions for the city, much less the empire, to function.
It’s absolutely fair to criticize Alexander for his poor choices, and even more fair for not giving himself sufficient time to learn whether his choices were good or bad. That’s the general in him–he’s always looking for the next fight. But to criticize him for the fact that he delegated authority is a bit much, since that’s a key aspect of the job. That he did the job isn’t bad; that he was bad at it (because he wasn’t a king or ruler, he was only a conqueror), is the problem.
I think Bret’s argument isn’t that Alexander was a bad ruler for picking subordinates to do his job: As said, that’s what a ruler does. The problem is that he often seems to have picked the wrong people.
Would it be overly harsh to say that Alexander’s death didn’t cause the fracture of his empire, but rather that it was on the brink of fracture anyway, and the only thing preserving Alexander’s reputation for the ages was the fact that he had the good sense to keel over before this could happen?
It’s hard to be sure, but I think it’s a plausible claim that would merit taking seriously.
With specifically corruption, I wonder if there was ever actually a way to get that working. You have people a bunch of people with basically no concept of dealing with the kind of money they are getting their hands on getting their hands on more money than they could ever dream of, and quickly spending/embezzling as much of it as they could. I’m not sure there was a person in Macedon who could be trusted with the kind of money Alexander had.
Philip had spent his income as and when it came in, usually on preparing for the next war, rather than husbanding it for the future. So not only are Alexander and his generals getting their hands on more money than they could ever dream of, they’re also coming from a cultural background where the concepts of frugality and financial prudence don’t really exist.
Could they have existed?
Alexander was engaging in what amounts to a long, drawn-out war of conquest, and the point of such wars is loot. If I’m one of his immediate subordinates I expect to get paid–and to be paid lavishly. After all, we just conquered a few kingdoms; surely Alexander can afford to be generous. And if not, well, maybe it’s time for a change in leadership, if you get my drift.
And to be clear, I’m not necessarily saying Alexander was buying loyalty. There have been many societies where lavish rewards, gifts, and other things were considered a requirement for the rulers. Look at El Cid or Beowulf–in both you see a king lavishing rewards to their subordinates and in both cases it’s used as a way to show that this was a good king. And if a ruler fails to rule properly by the standards of his society, it tends to go badly for him, not because the subordinates are greedy, but because the ruler failed to hold up his end of the social contract (as it were).
As for embezzlement, the line is hazier today than most people think, and in the past it would have been even harder to pin down. As late as the “Bounty” breadfruit expedition the people in charge of the treasury were expected to make a profit (Blye’s pay was docked to account for the profit he’d make serving as his own purser). Add to this a society that says that loyal lieutenants are to be rewarded, and I can see where defining corruption, as opposed to normal operations, can become very sticky.
I think there is a difference between someone who collects the taxes, sends them on to the king, and expects rewards or pay in return, versus someone who collects the taxes, takes some part *without their being an existing cultural or legal understanding that this part of the taxes is due them,* and then passes on the remainder to the king.
I don’t know about Macedonian practices, but in the former Achaemenid territories which they were now governing, satraps were essentially semi-independent kinglets with wide discretion in how they raised/spent money provided the tribute kept going to Persepolis. Raising taxes and using the money to build yourself a new palace or whatever would be entirely in keeping with this tradition.
I’ve always thought of Alexander as the quintessential “great man” of history. Where just one man changed the course of history, and if he had made different decisions, the world would be in a very different place now. Possibly a better place if he had never existed, but at least a very *different* place.
I guess historians mostly veer away from that “great man” view of history now, right? And maybe that’s true in general. Someone would have invented the steam engine if not James Watt (and lots of other people did). The South would have lost the civil war regardless of what any specific general did. A country with great natural resources is always at an advantage over a country with nothing. Etc.
But still. Alexander single-handedly conquered like 20% of the world’s population, and then let it go into a spiral of random chaos. That’s… something. That’s a great man. Not a *good* man, and maybe a terrible man, but a great man.
Though I do still like the SMBC view of history: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-15
I do wonder about Alexander III’s impact on history, actually. This isn’t like Rome, where a single polity creates a long, internal peace that allows society to stabilize at a higher equilibrium and encourages technological, cultural, and economic diffusion through its entire sphere, to the point that when the polity collapses we can see it through the demographic changes (mass famine and die-offs). Alexander’s empire collapsed pretty much the moment he died. If he had never made his conquests… The wealth of the Persian empire would not have been distributed through the Hellenic world? Rome would not have fought the same Macedonian combat system again and again as it conquered its way east? There would have been an Egyptian or Persian in change of Egypt rather than a Greek dynasty?
I also wonder about those his legacy inspired. How many conquerors would have conquered in exactly the same way anyway, were they not attempting to emulate Alexander?
How many people internalised the mode of conquering where you sweep through a territory in lightning fashion, glossing over the fact you need to consolidate your gains and integrate new territory into your polity in a meaningful and deliberate fashion? Would they have acted differently if there was a different precedent set for ‘greatest single-handed conqueror’? Or even ‘greatest single-handed European conqueror’ (which may be more accurate considering the Great Khan…).
I’d love to read a post or three on premodern rulers who weren’t necessarily great generals but were outstanding administrators. Your posts recently have mentioned lots of ineffective Hellenistic rulers; who were the effective ones? What about the broader ancient Mediterranean?
Such leaders seem much less prominent in our cultural consciousness. When I tried to get ChatGPT to give me examples it suggested Augustus (I’m guessing you’re not his biggest fan), Charlemagne (same problem as Alexander– his empire splintered too easily), and Alfred the Great (ehhh). Maybe some of the later Roman, and Eastern Roman, emperors? Diocletian? Justinian? All of their reputations still seem to rest a lot on military success…
It would be tricky, since military success is such a big part of ruling, plus one of the main paths to power is through the military, either overthrowing a previous ruler or getting promoted through military power.
Augustus I’m guessing our blog author would be mixed about, based on previous commentary. A lot of destructive actions, but also important reforms. Some important figures on Athens might fit, who are known for government reforms.
Concerning Augustus, our host wrote this Tweet:
For a great administrator who wasn’t necessarily a great general, Hadrian comes to mind. I think he should get some of the credit for the Roman Empire lasting as long as it did, because he consolidated and fortified the frontiers. Vespasian was also pretty good, put the Roman Empire back together after the Year of the Four Emperors.
Liu Bang/Emperor Gaozu of Han managed to turn Qin Shi Huangdi’s unstable tyranny into a lasting Empire, and like Augustus with Agrippa, he was not himself his greatest general, that was Han Xin. (Gaozu had his number of questionable decisions, but overall his balance is pretty good.) I’ve heard people name Li Shimin/Emperor Taizong of Tang as greatest Emperor in Chinese history, and I can see it. The early Tang dynasty was sort of a Golden Age and he is responsible for much of that.
And for rulers who were great administrators and great generals: Cyrus the Great, who built the Persian Empire and gets pretty good press from at least some of his subject peoples – he was more benevolent to them than their previous overlords. I would also count Constantine as a good administrator in addition to a good general. People give Diocletian a lot of credit for getting the Roman Empire out of the Crisis of the Third Century. But many of his reforms failed, while Constantine’s succeeded (Diocletian’s price edict vs Constantines currency reform; Diocletian’s attempted to impose belief in the Roman gods by force vs Constantine converted to Christianity but only imposed a more generic state monotheism that didn’t exclude pagans; Diocletian’s tetrarchy vs Constantines more flexible divisions within the same family).
Charlemagne inherited a long-standing tradition of partible inheritance from the Merovingians and previous Peppinids. In fact he was sole ruler only because his brother Carloman died shortly after their joint rule began. The same tradition insisted that the patrimony belonged as a whole to the ruling family – hence the constant divisions and re-divisions. It was quite successful until it ran out of Carolingian males (the last was the Emperor Arnulf, died 899, or maybe Louis the Child, died 911).
All the comments rather confirm what I said in the first place – that singling out figures from the past for moral judgement is a mug’s game. Not that it’s a bad idea, or that we (who?) should stop (how?) people from doing it. But it doesn’t really get us anywhere.
Ancient Greece was a society of racist, misogynistic, slave-owning paedophiles. They were all terrible, horrible people. At least, all those with any agency were, the men with power; let’s absolve the victims (and not ask how complicit even they were, on occasion, in maintaining the system).
So where does that get us? I don’t think it gets us anywhere useful, other than to note with self-satisfied pleasure, as we consume our way to ecological catastrophe and destroy the very world on which future generations depend, that we at least are morally superior.
The problem is that those with an axe to grind – like Bosworth, whose main objective is to show how horrible Alexander was – end up writing some pretty wonky history. Alexander’s city foundations took several years, or even decades, to develop, and public buildings were not put up overnight – so Alexander had no real interest in city foundation. Some of those Alexander appointed to positions of authority abused that authority – so Alexander was a lousy administrator, a poor judge of men, incapable of inspiring loyalty (!).
The death of Coenus is a good example – as I recall, Bosworth’s judgement was that Coenus’ death from disease, a short time after his support for the mutineers, “cannot have been a coincidence”. Bret doesn’t go quite as far, but says that Coenus “conveniently dies of illness shortly thereafter”. Well maybe it was convenient, and maybe it wasn’t a coincidence (I don’t see why it can’t have been an inconvenient coincidence myself, but there you are). But where’s the evidence? If the fate of Coenus fits into a pattern of Alexander quietly doing away with those who opposed him, maybe we can judge it likely that that is what happened in this case; but the pattern is largely constructed from cases like that of Coenus.
Another example – Bret: “Hephaestion, a boyhood friend of Alexander almost exactly his age, was made one of the two commanders of the companion cavalry, despite by all evidence being a quite mediocre military man.” What evidence is that, then? AFAIK there is almost no evidence for what Hephaistion did before his appointment as hipparch, and after his appointment he seems to have performed perfectly well. Is Alexander’s fault that Hephaistion had not held high command before he became hipparch? How many men in their twenties had? Or that he got the job only because he was Alexander’s friend (or partner)? Alexander was specifically looking for a way to prevent anyone using the command of the Companions against him (paranoid? Probably – but Macedonian kings tended not to die in their beds). So picking his friend (or partner) seems like a good move. There is no evidence to suggest that this was a bad choice, militarily.
Historians with an axe to grind sometimes lose their ability to make sensible judgements. Starting from the position that Alexander was Bad (because War is Bad, or Kings are Bad, or whatever) rather gets in the way of dispassionate analysis. By all means, having carried out the analysis, and found Alexander wanting, say so, but that’s too often not how it works. (I’m not particularly singling out this blog post here, which is after all just a blog post).
Ancient Greece was a society of racist, misogynistic, slave-owning paedophiles.
Although, as I mentioned above, Alexander seems to have been noticeably less racist than most of his generals.
Also worth noting that we’ve recently (a few weeks ago) had a post explaining that the Seleucid Empire was a paper tiger that ended up being crushed by Rome in large part because the Romans co-opted conquered peoples whilst the Seleucids relied entirely on a few tens of thousands of Greek settlers for their manpower. So, it felt a bit incongruous seeing Alexander’s attempts to take the Roman route being portrayed as a mark against him. One could equally say that it shows Alexander in a good light as a far-sighted statesman, able to look beyond his cultural prejudices to discern what was needed for his empire’s long-term stability, and willing to take the necessary steps in the face of blinkered and xenophobic opposition (this is where the idea of Alexander as a promoter of the unity of mankind largely comes from).
I’d say it’s the exact opposite. Looking beyond one’s cultural prejudices as a ruler – that is, alienating one’s own cultural allies – is a flaw and a mark of bad rulership. Pushing back against narrow-mindedness and xenophobia costs significant social resources that Alexander had no capacity to spend.
In other words, the Macedonians aren’t Romans. Alexander isn’t Roman. The Diadochi aren’t Roman. Rome could benefit from having a system of socii and later auxilia, because the populace accepted it as normal – Macedon didn’t, so their people didn’t.
Our host mentioned a similar example in one of his previous posts. If Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to prepare for a battle by butchering a goat, his men would be appalled and disgusted. If a Roman general refused to call the gods by organizing haruspicy, his soldiers would be severely disappointed and distraught by him. If Ulysses S. Grant tried to lead his troops from the front row of one of the brigades, his troops would be angry at him for recklessly risking his life. If a Spartan general led from the front, he inspired his troops with his bravery.
It seems to me that Dr. Devereaux, in large part, also acknowledges (or at least implicitly assumes) that the morals of the time are an important metric to judge the effectiveness of one’s rulership or generalship. He specifically separates modern moral judgement when assessing past figures by our standards.
Rome was quite hierarchical, but government.ts came around to giving lots of citizens their own land instead of doing the serf peasant thing. More controversially, they hated monarchy but ended up in one, which did seem to fix a lot of problems in the late Republic.
If a cultural tendency contributes to bad governance, lack of prosperity, or other poor outcomes, changing this is a far sighted and intelligent move. Cultures so change over time, ‘someone’ has to make the first move, and a powerful king is as good a choice as any. The issue with Alexander is that the way of going about this wasn’t much successful.
I agree. And, had Alexander taken up that struggle upon himself, and pushed for greater multiculturalism using his immense influence and elite charisma, and managed to achieve it, he might also be honored by history as a great influence on the world.
However, for that to happen, he basically couldn’t do anything else. He’d have to dedicate all of his resources just to mitigating and managing the pushback from the more conservative elements of his nation.
I can totally imagine an Alexander, in his 50s, some 15 years after he’s finished campaigning and putting down rebellions and now controlling a vast, semi-stable empire, having secured his succession, to then start trying to integrate Persian customs into his royal court to build up a more unified, multi-culture. But I can’t imagine him taking up that project when waging war already takes up all of his resources. While on the campaign he needs as much temporary unity and support as he can get, so rocking the boat is counterproductive to his aims.
I can totally imagine an Alexander, in his 50s, some 15 years after he’s finished campaigning and putting down rebellions and now controlling a vast, semi-stable empire, having secured his succession, to then start trying to integrate Persian customs into his royal court to build up a more unified, multi-culture. But I can’t imagine him taking up that project when waging war already takes up all of his resources. While on the campaign he needs as much temporary unity and support as he can get, so rocking the boat is counterproductive to his aims.
Taking Persians and Macedonians on campaign together would give both groups a chance to win some shared glory, learn to work together, have a common goal to strive towards. This would tend to make unifying the groups easier, not harder. “Unite people by giving them a common enemy” is a well-known political tactic for a reason.
I’d say it’s the exact opposite. Looking beyond one’s cultural prejudices as a ruler – that is, alienating one’s own cultural allies – is a flaw and a mark of bad rulership. Pushing back against narrow-mindedness and xenophobia costs significant social resources that Alexander had no capacity to spend.
By that logic, Abraham Lincoln was a bad president for opposing slavery, but I’d bet a very significant sum of money that neither Bret nor anyone else criticising Alexander here would subscribe to such a view.
Our host mentioned a similar example in one of his previous posts. If Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to prepare for a battle by butchering a goat, his men would be appalled and disgusted. If a Roman general refused to call the gods by organizing haruspicy, his soldiers would be severely disappointed and distraught by him. If Ulysses S. Grant tried to lead his troops from the front row of one of the brigades, his troops would be angry at him for recklessly risking his life. If a Spartan general led from the front, he inspired his troops with his bravery.
These are all bad analogies. Sacrificing or not sacrificing before a battle doesn’t have any practical impact (beyond that on morale), whilst in the context of 19th-century battles, a general could be more effective by telling different units where to go than by picking up a musket and blasting away at the enemy. Those situations are completely different to implementing a necessary but unpopular reform.
And neither do I. The logic doesn’t really hold for Lincoln, because it ignores the strong abolitionist movement in the North. The US itself was on the cusp of a civil war due to irreconcilable differences over the Slavery Debate. Between John Brown, the Underground Railroad, the negative response to Dredd Scott v. Sanford, the Caning of Charles Sumner, and other incidents, the tension in the nation was boiling. Lincoln had to take a side. I know that it’s not an argument, but Paradox Interactive’s Victoria series, partly for game-balancing reasons, has the northern states secede as the Free States of America if the US player remains staunchly pro-slavery and pro-south.
Even Lincoln himself agrees with my point of view, in his August 22, 1862 letter to Horace Greeley, that he himself gets to free the slaves only because it’s the best choice he has at the time:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union”
If, on the other hand, either George Washington or Benjamin Franklin, both well-respected men that could sway some opinions up to a point, had decided to push for a hard abolitionist angle, trying to filibuster any attempts at reconciling slavery, staunchly opposing the three-fifths compromise, and thus leading to a failure to draft the US constitution and form the USA to begin with, leaving the thirteen American states weak and in danger of being preyed upon by European colonial powers, then we would look upon those men with much more negative criticism.
Lincoln’s 1860 position on slavery (leave it alone where it exists, but prevent further expansion to the territories) was absolutely standard Republican policy at the time. If you see his cultural allies as fellow Republicans, he wasn’t alienating them at all. The South seceded because (1) the 1860 election showed that Republicans were now strong enough to elect a president without any southern electoral votes and (2) because that policy, if not later rescinded, would mean the eventual end of slavery years later after more free states joined the union. Lincoln only went further to abolition when the logic of the war itself both enabled and promoted it.
If, on the other hand, either George Washington or Benjamin Franklin, both well-respected men that could sway some opinions up to a point, had decided to push for a hard abolitionist angle, trying to filibuster any attempts at reconciling slavery, staunchly opposing the three-fifths compromise, and thus leading to a failure to draft the US constitution and form the USA to begin with, leaving the thirteen American states weak and in danger of being preyed upon by European colonial powers, then we would look upon those men with much more negative criticism.
Alexander didn’t monomaniacally push Persian integration at the expense of everything else, so this analogy doesn’t apply, either.
Lincoln’s 1860 position on slavery (leave it alone where it exists, but prevent further expansion to the territories) was absolutely standard Republican policy at the time.
So the Republicans as a whole were bad.
Sounds to me, based on what Dr. Devereaux wrote, that he did try to push it monomaniacally due to being ignorant of the expenses. He stopped once he got pushback from his Macedonian troops and elites, but we’re discussing the fact that, indeed, he did try.
If you disagree with the framing of our host, do feel free to make the argument that Alexander’s pro-Persian position has been over-represented by this series.
Lincoln got elected in 1860 by the majority of states and the plurality of the population. If we were to categorize the U.S. population by their stance on the slavery debate, Lincoln and the Republicans aligned themselves with the bigger half. The U.S. (in the north) was significantly abolitionist.
I chastised Alexander for trying to push back against the social mores of his own culture. Lincoln would have ended up more guilty of doing the same in the context of slavery if he had ignored the abolitionist sentiment of the entire Northern part of the US to focus on maintaining slavery as an institution. That would make him more comparable to Alexander.
Mr. X@8:24am:
No, the Republicans as a whole were practical. Bismark famously said “Politics is the art of the possible.” Complete abolition in 1860 was not possible within the existing political structures, and was a minority position within the Republican party. They settled on a position that (a) would keep the problem from getting worse and (b) would put the nation on a path towards eventual peaceful abolition, if not reversed by future administrations.
The Southern states refused to accept even that more limited position on slavery, but they might have if they were less high on their own supply. They could have reluctantly accepted the Lincoln administration, while working to build a larger electoral coalition that might have reversed the policy after he was no longer President. Or they might have pursued legitimization of a right to secession through the courts rather than the battlefield. Either would have resulted in a better outcome for them (specifically for the elites in charge) than what they actually got.
If the Republicans had held out for immediate abolition, (a) they probably wouldn’t have gotten the electoral votes to win the presidency, (b) probably would have driven the border states into the arms of the Confederacy, making the Civil War much harder to win, and (c) quite possibly split their own electoral coalition. Hard to see that as an improvement over the actual history.
Sounds to me, based on what Dr. Devereaux wrote, that he did try to push it monomaniacally due to being ignorant of the expenses. He stopped once he got pushback from his Macedonian troops and elites, but we’re discussing the fact that, indeed, he did try.
“Monomaniacally” would mean trying to do it to the expense of everything else, not trying to do it full stop. Trying to implement a reform, and then wheeling it back when people object, is not monomaniacal.
The Southern states refused to accept even that more limited position on slavery, but they might have if they were less high on their own supply. They could have reluctantly accepted the Lincoln administration, while working to build a larger electoral coalition that might have reversed the policy after he was no longer President. Or they might have pursued legitimization of a right to secession through the courts rather than the battlefield. Either would have resulted in a better outcome for them (specifically for the elites in charge) than what they actually got.
So, when Lincoln attempts some moderate reforms, the fault is on the South for refusing to compromise; when Alexander does the same (it’s not even like he was pushing for full equality; the empire would still be Macedonian-dominated), it’s Alexander’s fault for trying.
If Alexander is weak enough (due to being in the middle of a military campaign) to not be able to weather dissent from his populace, then yes, it’s his fault for trying.
Otherwise, if Lincoln had embroiled the US in a deadly war with either Mexico or Britain-Canada during the Slavery Debate, and then provoked the American Civil War while already waging an another one, then yes, I’d consider Lincoln to be a fool.
“I know that it’s not an argument, but Paradox Interactive’s Victoria series, partly for game-balancing reasons, has the northern states secede as the Free States of America if the US player remains staunchly pro-slavery and pro-south.”
As the originator of this idea, it would amuse me greatly if it was ever given serious consideration by a historian. My reasoning was mostly about what was doable with my very basic skills at the time. Switching the USA to the CSA and making the northern states revolt (as the USA in my initial version) was easy to do with the event scripting system in the game.
If Alexander is weak enough (due to being in the middle of a military campaign) to not be able to weather dissent from his populace, then yes, it’s his fault for trying.
Firstly, Alexander wasn’t on campaign at the time — the Persian marriages and the like occurred after his return from India.
Secondly, “Try announcing a policy, then walk it back if it proves too unpopular” is a common political tactic, and isn’t in itself a sign of weakness.
Thirdly, it’s not even clear that Alexander did actually walk back anything of substance. He had his feast where the Macedonians had a higher position than the Persians, but his senior generals still had their Persian wives, and the new Persian recruits were still part of the army. Ultimately, Alexander’s reforms failed because Alexander himself died so soon after beginning them, not because he was forced to back down by Macedonian opposition.
@AiryW: I should note here that there were some in the North who actually did propose that the free states secede, most notably William Lloyd Garrison (who described the Constitution as “a pact with Hell, written in blood”), but this was not an opinion held by anyone who was anywhere close to the mainstream of Northern political opinion.
If, on the other hand, either George Washington or Benjamin Franklin, both well-respected men that could sway some opinions up to a point, had decided to push for a hard abolitionist angle, trying to filibuster any attempts at reconciling slavery, staunchly opposing the three-fifths compromise, and thus leading to a failure to draft the US constitution and form the USA to begin with, leaving the thirteen American states weak and in danger of being preyed upon by European colonial powers, then we would look upon those men with much more negative criticism.
I don’t agree- I think the racially based slavery system as practiced in the US was morally bad, and I don’t really have strong opinions one way or the other on the existence of the USA and its constitution (I have no particular emotional attachment to America, and I have to wonder, would the world really be worse off if Massachusetts and Michigan were independent countries?) So I have to conclude that I think it would have been a better alternate history if people like Benjamin Franklin had gone hardline and refused to reconcile with the American slavery system as it existed.
@60guilders
IIRC the USA revolt from CSA concept was more about democracy then abolition. Historically it took a pretty large dose of minority rule (both at the state and federal level) to hold abolitionism back until the 1860s. Going even farther would require even more subversion of democracy.
If Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to prepare for a battle by butchering a goat, his men would be appalled and disgusted. If a Roman general refused to call the gods by organizing haruspicy, his soldiers would be severely disappointed and distraught by him.
The last line in Eisenhower’s Order of the Day before the landings in Normandy ran: “And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.” His opening line referred to the expedition as a “Great Crusade”. He couldn’t have been more obviously calling for and anticipating the support of the supreme supernatural power of the world however many goats he sacrificed.
The rituals people expected to lead to Divine Favour had changed; the desire for that favour had not.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/general-eisenhowers-order-of-the-day
“If Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to prepare for a battle by butchering a goat, his men would be appalled and disgusted.”
It is still a requirement for officers in some regiments of the British Army to be prepared to slaughter an animal, ideally a buffalo, in front of their troops for religious reasons. (In practice the officer normally asks around quietly to find out which of the soldiers is the best at beheading, and lets them do the job in his stead. It would not be good for morale if the OC took four or five swipes to finish off the luckless animal.)
See here for details – Major Murray took the course advised above, though other officers have to my knowledge had a swing themselves. https://www.dvidshub.net/news/77738/2-royal-gurkha-rifles-celebrate-hindu-festival-dashain
It is still a requirement for officers in some regiments of the British Army to be prepared to slaughter an animal, ideally a buffalo, in front of their troops for religious reasons. (In practice the officer normally asks around quietly to find out which of the soldiers is the best at beheading, and lets them do the job in his stead. It would not be good for morale if the OC took four or five swipes to finish off the luckless animal.)
thanks for posting that! it’s heartwarming for me that rituals like this still exist, and that the British officers even participate in them.
Well, there are cases of WWII generals taking up a submachine gun and going to fight at the front, but that is usually considered an act of suicide. I remember reading at least one case where the aide stopped his general by noting, “Not yet, only in [a city much further in the rear].”
Although, as I mentioned above, Alexander seems to have been noticeably less racist than most of his generals.
What makes you think racism had anything to do with it? Of course Alexander wanted to incorporate Persian nobles into his system – it widened his power base. Of course his existing Macedonian nobles objected – it made his power less dependent on them.
There is no need for racism (or anti-racism) to explain what would be inevitably caused by self-interest.
Classical Greek attitudes towards Easterners were very racist*, so it would be quite surprising if racism *wasn’t* a factor, even if self-interest was also present. And I’d note that, whilst the Macedonian nobles seem to have looked down to a degree on the non-Macedonian Greeks in Alexander’s service, they didn’t look down on them nearly as much as they did on the Persians, even though the presence of other Greeks also diluted their power. Eumenes might have had difficulty keeping his army in line, but at least he had an army, whereas the chances of the same men following a barbarian would be approximately zero.
From Alexander’s point of view, meanwhile, it’s not clear that promoting Persians was a net benefit for him. It widened his power base, yes, but it also antagonised his existing followers.
* Easterners’ supposed servility was often explained as a result of the hot climate rather than innate inheritance, so you could argue that it wasn’t racism in the strict sense, but in practical terms it cashed out the same.
“War is Bad” seems to be a fairly common opinion. The trouble is that it doesn’t take many people who think that one particular war would benefit them to start one. Alexander was one such person. His wars did benefit him, and a few of his closest hangers-on. They were almost certainly foreseeably bad for almost everyone else.
As someone observed above, there is a pretty obvious reason why Dante placed him in the 7th circle of hell. With the murderers.
Of course, his enthusiasm for conquering the neighbours when he got the chance was hardly unusual for a King.
His wars did benefit him, and a few of his closest hangers-on. They were almost certainly foreseeably bad for almost everyone else.
Looting defeated enemies was a good way to get rich quick, so his soldiers also foreseeably benefitted. Arguably Macedonia and Greece as a whole could also expect to benefit from the influx of Persian wealth. One of the reasons war was so popular for most of human history is that, for the winning side, it usually was a net benefit.
On an unrelated related note, when will we get that ‘Caesar was bad, actually’ post?
I wouldn’t mind if we took a while to get there.
The thing I’m hoping for is a lengthy discussion of the fall of the Republic, from the Gracchi brothers through Marius and Sulla to Julius and Octavian and their Triumvirates. Especially with a focus on factions and sub-factions, unprecedented actions, the breaking of norms, opportunism, and the cycle of retaliation. What caused the Republic to fall apart in the 1st century BC, and not a century earlier or later? What kept earlier rivalries in check? Was the system ever stable, or were its flaws baked in? Was the nature of glory-seeking such that each generation wanted to outshine the previous ones, and eventually there was nowhere to go but dictator, and then dictator for life, and then something even more? What happens when people start undermining their civilization’s institutions for temporary political advantage? (Do they eventually have to aim for non-temporary advantage once they start running out of institutions?) What happens when people start justifying civil violence because of previous civil violence against “their side”? What kind of propaganda is used to explain all this?
Maybe it’s not so bleak, but that’s exactly why I’d like an actual historian to weigh in. 🙂
I’d worry that a discussion of Caesar’s personal faults, in isolation, would detract from an analysis of the overall system in which he lived and died, and which drove him while he was driving it. I’m not 100% on board with the “giant impersonal forces” theory of history, but I sort of try to reconcile it with the “great man/personal choice” theory through an economic/gaming lens: what was the state of play, what were the incentives, what realistic options were present and how were they weighed against the goals? Would a Julius who’d lived 100 years earlier have tried similar things, or would he have gone down in history as just another “great” Roman republican?
I’m all for him building up to, but I definitely want to read his full thoughts on.
I may be confusing the blog with twitter, but I think we already got a fairly long “Caesar’s existence did not make anyone’s life better” diatribe.
I remember him making the statement a number of times, but not an actual explanation.
I stopped using twitter some tine ago, so it’s possible I missed it.
And it was clearly enough for Droysen and Tarn too: to be good at killing things and then hamfistedly attempt – and mostly fail – to civilize them, after all, was what made the German and British Empires great. It had to be enough, or else what were all of those Prussian officers and good Scottish gentlemen doing out there with all of that violence? To question Alexander might mean questioning the very system those men served… One suspects, for Droysen and Tarn, it was ‘greatness,’ to be frank, because they understood the foot inside the boot Alexander was planting on the necks of the world, was European and white and so were they. In that vision, greatness is ‘our man’ as opposed to ‘their man.’ But that is such a small-minded, petty form of greatness, ‘our killer and not your killer.’
The problem with this kind of psychoanalysis is that it can be turned on pretty much any position. If Droysen and Tarn could somehow read this blog post, perhaps they’d respond that “one suspects” Alexander’s critics are simply jealous because they know they could never achieve anything similar, or because they’re stuck in unfulfilling office jobs or they’re still untenured adjuncts rather than full professors, and they’re just trying to make themselves feel better by sniping at his accomplishments. It poisons the well, and it doesn’t prove anything about who’s right or wrong.
I think it would be interesting at some point to veer back into fiction, as per the Helm’s Deep / Battle of Minas Tirith / Game of Thrones posts, and analyze the character of Edward Swallow. In contrast with Alexander, I wonder how Caesar’s Legion fares. It’s curious how, on its surface, Caesar’s Legion seems to have a similar structure to Alexander’s empire – essentially, a singular army leaving behind outposts to spread culture, yet with the leader permanently attached to the army and focused mainly on conquest and expansion as a source of imperial stability, almost like a wandering court. There’s Caesar failing to discern and prepare a proper successor, with both Legate Lanius and Vulpes Inculta lacking in skill and charisma, similar to how Alexander did not prepare for his eventual passing. There’s even a parallel between Cleitus the Black and Legate Joshua Graham, both of which were (attempted) murdered despite being close retainers!
I would especially find it interesting to see Dr. Devereaux’s judgement in how much effort Caesar spends to wipe out the cultural identity of his main tribes, and remodel them as Roman legion LARPers. Also Caesar’s claims that his military campaign hinges upon “crossing the Rubicon” (Hoover Dam) to conquer New Vegas, whereupon Caesar will seek to domesticate and settle his Legion, reforming it into a more stable empire, and whether there’s any historical precedent to such an action, and whether previous historical attempts were ever successful.
whether there’s any historical precedent to such an action, and whether previous historical attempts were ever successful.
The Franks, the Goths, the Visigoths, the Angles, and the Saxons come to mind.
This got me thinking about other historical rulers and their influence, and I ended up wondering: Taking into account the different difficulty level of the situation they faced, who was the better ruler, Octavian/Augustus or George Washington?
Wonderful piece.
Even though I have reservations over several remarks, your elaboration raises admiration.
I cannot comprehend how you or people like you (there are not much talented in writing) are not represented more in academia. It is tragic, how detached it is from brain storming but centered more on “craft”.
Cheers!
Query/Suggestion to the host to check out Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece as something that seems to be an intersection of his interests in strategy games and the ancient med if he’s not familiar with it.
Its an older game built around Greek polis warfare. The interesting thing about it is how effectively it uses fairly simple systems of logistics (feeding your armies is vital to successful campaigns, denying food to your enemies is the most effective way to take cities) and diplomacy (straight conquest is an inefficient strategy compared to taking a page out of the Roman book and using military power to impose favourable alliances on your former enemies). This makes the warfare feel quite ACOUPian in nature.
It came to mind to this article because the story campaign is a Philip of Macedon simulator, doing the rare thing in wargaming of focusing on the state building father rather than the more famous conquering son (although I personally find the campaign as Athens in the first half of Peloponnesian War to be more fun and compelling).
As best I know, the only man who ever managed to be called “the Great” without killing anyone was Albertus Magnus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_Magnus).
And his reward was to spend a few centuries polishing Death’s head.
St James the Great (meaning, in his case, simply “senior to St James the Less”).
“I don’t think it is an accident, as an aside, that Alexander’s soldiers’ patience begins to run out in India: he had promised them a war against the Achaemenid Empire, so they could hardly have been upset at campaigning deep into Persia. But the moment Alexander, for his own glory and perhaps nothing else, was proposing to go so far beyond Persia…well, that wasn’t, quite literally, what he promised.”
The Clausewitzian phrasing is: Alexander committed all three strategic sins. He excelled at (and presumably received training for) operations and tactics, and having fallen into the statesmanship of the polity, subordinated strategy to operations. Rather than the more common manifestation, namely of launching new operations in the pursuit of strategic goals which are often already lost beyond all retrieval, he managed to err in the other direction, and continued launching new operations after the strategic goal had already been achieved. (Speaking of: to what extent would it have been possible/plausible for Macedon — even if ruled by someone like Philip II — to govern and actually hold the entire flipping empire, without it either falling to pieces in civil war, or having to coopt existing structures to the extent that the outcome would have been described as “the Achaemenid Empire conquered Macedon with Macedon’s army”? Because to the extent that it would not have been possible, a reasonable statesman would have offered/accepted peace after Issus or at the latest Gaugamela, eating only as large a chunk of the empire as Macedon could digest.)
Going onto very thin ice: “Any man who must say, ‘I am the king,’ is no true king.”
Wearing the diadem of a king while — in terms of skills, habits, etc. — being a general (and thus, one could say, by definition a rogue general) (or in any other way unfit to wear the diadem) would make many people very touchy about asserting their kingship.
(“Power corrupts”? Not quite — the less-than-absolute power of Philip II did not much corrode him.
And despite the stock trope of Eastern decadence, the many Achaemenid rulers seem to have been able to withstand their absolute power relatively well. It did, however, corrupt Alexander.)
> Wearing the diadem of a king while — in terms of skills, habits, etc. — being a general (and thus, one could say, by definition a rogue general) (or in any other way unfit to wear the diadem) would make many people very touchy about asserting their kingship.
This is anachronistic, right? The Romans saw the right to rule, the right to judge, and the command of the military as one and the same thing – imperium. As far as I can tell, this is the same for most or all ancient kings. A king who is not a general is not a king for long.
You’re making the (I think invalid) assumption that “the great” has a coherent meaning. I call Alexander III “the great” because that’s the most expedient way to refer to him. I don’t call George Washington “The great” because that’s not an appellation available in our culture.
I’d argue that ‘the Great’ does have a coherent meaning, or at least coherent enough of a meaning to support the discussion.
A) Someone must have decided they did great enough things to deserve the epithet ‘the Great’ in the first place. I doubt expediency of differentiating between monarchs is the main driver (that’s what having numbers after your name is for).
B) There’s an implication that having done great things is something that people would want to emulate. I’d argue this is reasonably common, considering how much of a motivation ‘equalling the conquests of Alexander’ has been a goal for a number of historical conquerors.
C) Once someone is known as ‘the Great’ and that becomes the most expedient way of differentiating them, we don’t often stop to examine what about them made them great at the time, and whether that still holds today (or whether we want that to hold today).
As such, it’s useful to properly explore what about them we want to emulate (if anything), especially as they are usually given this epithet at quite some temporal and cultural distance.
I’d argue that you call Alexander ‘the Great’ because it’s the most expedient way to refer to him, but that colours our cultural perception of what makes someone great and who that person was in the first place. Such is the way that culture unwittingly evolves.
Alexander is Great because he casts a shadow over all that comes after. He is great in the sense of being historically large, not “he’s a good person”, and it’s arguably not even meant that way in the first place, though people who seek to become historically large will of course lean towards saying that he was /also/ a good person since of course that’s the type of person they want to be, and everyone wants to be a good person. The core idea is that he is an exceptionally capable person given a certain context that we’re using to measure capability. Every conqueror of the classical era automatically compares themselves to Alexander. Generals are judged using Alexander as a benchmark. There’s no moral element to it beyond what modern people project, and honestly I find that attempts to judge morality are a bit of a joke, usually done by people who have no real background in ethics, and rarely based on any sound reasoning beyond poorly-thought-out idealism.
Isn’t that already a moral judgement though? Because The Great as a moniker is “historically significant in a way worthy of emulation”: after all, we have monikers for “historically significant in a way not at all to be emulated”, like The Terrible. Or hell, for “good at conquests but I’ll keep mum on if one needs to emulate them” like The Conqueror.
>Because The Great as a moniker is “historically significant in a way worthy of emulation”
No? It simply means they were great in the sense of being a titan of history, that’s the original meaning of the word. Perhaps if you take for granted the idea that being historically large is something itself worthy of emulation. These are simply what they ended up being known as. Pretending to have the moral high ground and deciding we need to change it is just theater. Also, the Great is a much more common title than the Conqueror in the first place. The latter seems to be mostly used for people where a specific entity they conquered is their main legacy in any case, at least in English. William the Conqueror was known for conquering specifically England, Mehmed the Conqueror was known for conquering specifically Constantinople, and Alfonso the Conqueror basically conquered Portugal into existence.
>like The Terrible
The Terrible means someone who is terrifying, not someone who is bad; literally it comes from the idea of “one who inspires terror”. It doesn’t mean the person himself was bad. Ivan the Terrible was brutal but not especially a horrid ruler by the standards of the time. If you were to re-translate his title, Grozny is probably best rendered as “the Formidable”, “the Awe-Inspiring/Awesome”, or even the Impressive.
I’d say that Ivan the Terrible was a horrid ruler, personally (starting with, triggering a massively disruptive succession crisis by killing both your son and your unborn grandson in a fit of rage, and that’s not even getting into the problems i have with the Czarist social order in general) but a lot of Russians historically seem to disagree with me.
I think you’re right on wht “terrible” traditionally means, though (just like “awful” and “artificial” used to have positive or at least neutral connotations).
I take as granted the idea that it also means they’re deemed worthy of emulation by the ones who gave the title because I have yet to see an example where that isn’t the case though: the Romans wanted to emulate Alexander, the Persians itou for Dariu and Cyrus, and so on, and so forth. So do we still think them worthy of emulation is interesting beyond theatre: we’re not bound by past assessments, no more than future people are bound by ours.
The reason Alexander is Great is that he has an impact on everything that follows. Though it’s possible that he wasn’t always intended to be interpreted that way, people who aspire to be historically significant will naturally lean toward claiming that he was also a good person because that’s the kind of person they want to be, and everyone wants to be a good person. He is great in the sense of being historically significant, not because “he’s a good person.” The main thesis is that, within the parameters of our competence measurement, he is an extraordinarily talented individual. All classical conquerors instinctively set themselves up against Alexander. Alexander is the standard by which generals are evaluated. There’s nothing moral about it.
Well said !!!
I’d be very interested in a similar series on Napoleon.
You write
> One cannot help but suspect in many of these circumstances, ‘greatness’ is about killing larger numbers of people, so long as they are strange people who live over yonder and dress and pray differently than we here do.
Then again, we’ve been admiring such greatness across almost all recorded history and we’ve probably been admiring that since before we were human. It does seem to be clear that before maybe 50,000 BCE H. sapiens was one of many Homo species scattered about (primarily in Africa). But once art appears in the archaeological record, “behaviorally modern humans”, suddenly H. sapiens spreads across the world and all the other Homo species disappear.
“Hephaestion, a boyhood friend of Alexander almost exactly his age, was made one of the two commanders of the companion cavalry, despite by all evidence being a quite mediocre military man.”
This is the only time Hephaestion is brought up and I think that’s a significant omission. They were lovers and Hephaestion’s death was the beginning of Alexander’s. It’s worth interrogating both as nepotism and as an administrative decision, since the relationship was evidently load-bearing for Alexander.
I don’t know about Hephaestion’s “military mediocrity”, though. He was present for Alexander’s entire military career, second-in-command for much of it and no major screw-ups are attributed to him. At worst he was suitable to an incredible task. If he was truly mediocre he could not have handled the position so well.
When you say his interactions with “the civilian populous” were self-serving, don’t you mean populace?
Fixed