The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

without comment. Nor should we guess from Arrian that some writers had doubts about the involvement of Philotas in a plot against the king. He is content to accept Ptolemy’s statement, although the ‘manifest proofs’ of his guilt adduced by him do not amount to much. Again, the burning of the palace at Persepolis is very briefly referred to with no mention of the alternative tradition that it was set on fire during a drunken revel. On the other hand, Arrian gives a much more balanced account of the murder of Cleitus than Aristobulus seems to have done, and he is obviously reluctant to accept the statements of Ptolemy and Aristobulus that Callisthenes was involved in the conspiracy of the Pages.
     
    What the modern reader misses in Arrian’s book is an appreciation of the larger issues. Alexander emerges as a great leader, a great conqueror possessed of boundless ambition, a man who reached the height of human prosperity and who, if he committed great crimes, had the magnanimity to repent of them. Certainly the conquest of the Persian Empire was his most lasting achievement, but what we want to know is whether he was more than the supreme conqueror. What plans did he have for his empire? What part did he intend the conquered peoples to play in it? Amid a great deal that is obscure about Alexander, one thing is certain, that he was very much in earnest about what modern writers have called his ‘policyof fusion’. The clearest expression of this policy is his prayer at Opis – a prayer that Arrian records without comment – that Macedonians and Persians might live in harmony and jointly rule the empire. This was a revolutionary idea, not shared by his Macedonians, nor, we can be sure, by many Greeks either. For the most distinguished of Alexander’s many teachers, the eminent philosopher Aristotle, who inspired him with a love of Greek literature and particularly of Homer, is said by Plutarch to have written to Alexander advising the young king to behave towards the Greeks as a leader but towards the ‘barbarians’ as a master. This contemptuous attitude towards ‘barbarians’ was no doubt widespread. But Alexander, who may have felt doubts about it even before the expedition – Artabazus and other leading Persians lived as exiles at Philip’s court when Alexander was a boy – soon came to reject it. After Gaugamela we find him appointing Persians as governors, certainly not through a lack of suitable Macedonians.
     
    Arrian clearly shared Aristotle’s prejudice against ‘barbarians’ and had no conception of Alexander’s vision of a partnership between the two peoples. In the characterisation of Alexander at the end of his book he sees Alexander’s adoption of Persian dress and his introduction of Persian troops into the Macedonian army as a mere ‘device’, designed to render him less alien to his Persian subjects. Indeed, Arrian has earlier (4.7) condemned his adoption of oriental dress as a ‘barbaric’ act not so different from his ‘barbaric’ punishment of the pretender Bessus. Both acts, in Arrian’s view, indicate a deterioration of Alexander’s character. Even in the case of Bessus Arrian does not see that the punishment was a Persian punishment inflicted on him by Alexander in his position as ‘Great King’. Elsewhere, he refers to Alexander‘going some way towards “barbarian” extravagance’, and his comment on the king’s marriage to Roxane, the Bactrian princess, is illuminating. ‘I approve’, he writes, ‘rather than blame’. This ‘policy of fusion’ with the adoption of Persian dress and Persian court ceremonial was bitterly resented by the Macedonians, as Arrian is well aware. Drink led Cleitus to give utterance to grievances which were deeply felt and widely shared, while the extent of the Pages’ conspiracy leads one to think that their motives were not so much personal as political. Yet Arrian does not ask himself whether Alexander would have persisted in a