Alexander the Great

Born July 356 B.C. in Pella; died June 13, 323 B.C., in Babylon. King of Macedonia from 336. One of the greatest military leaders and statesmen of the ancient world. Son of the Macedonian king Philip II. From 343 his tutor was the philosopher Aristotle; his father directed his military training.

Alexander first showed his courage and military gifts in 338 in the battle at Chaeronea, which completed the Macedonian conquest of Greece. He began his reign in 335 with a campaign against the neighboring northwestern tribes of Illyrians, Triballi, Getae, and others; he routed them and forced them to acknowledge Macedonian hegemony. The incipient anti-Macedonian uprising of Greek cities (335) forced Alexander to move by rapid march to central Greece to subdue the rebellious cities. In the spring of 334, a Greek and Macedonian army under Alexander crossed the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles) into Asia Minor, beginning a war with Persia. This war was prompted by increased antagonism within the Greek city-states and by the consequent necessity of conquering new markets. Alexander’s army consisted of 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry in addition to auxiliary lightly armed detachments. Such experienced and able commanders as Antipa-ter, Ptolemy Lagus, Parmenio, Philotas, and Perdiccas led Alexander’s army. Although the Persian army was considerably larger than the Macedonian force, the latter’s superior fighting abilities, organization, experience, and technical equipment (pontoons, battering rams, and scaling towers) compensated for its relative smallness. In May 334, Alexander’s army routed the Persian force at the Granicus River. Alexander then occupied Asia Minor, where the Greek cities (except for Miletus and Halicarnassus), striving to free themselves from the Persian yoke, opened their gates without resistance. The cities were declared free and autonomous, and the pro-Persian oligarchs were driven out. In the autumn of 333, the Persian king Darius III attempted to defeat the Greco-Macedonian army at Issus. Although the Persians had three times as many troops, they were defeated, and Darius himself fled. Breaking the resistance of the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Gaza, Alexander seized all the ports on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. This action deprived the Persian fleet of bases, guaranteed Alexander’s domination on the sea, and secured his lines of communications. In the winter of 332–331, his army occupied Egypt. The Egyptian priests officially recognized Alexander as the son of the god Amon and as pharaoh of Egypt. Alexander used his “deification” for political purposes, effecting a rapprochement with the Egyptians and gaining the religious consecration of his authority.

From Egypt, Alexander’s army moved to Mesopotamia, where on Oct. 1, 331, near Guagamela, it decisively defeated the Persian forces, which significantly outnumbered the Macedonian army. Darius fled once more; in 330 he was killed by one of his satraps. Alexander occupied the Persian rulers’ capitals of Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, Ecbatana. The exploitation of anti-Persian feelings furthered Alexander’s successes: the peoples of a number of states under Persian domination (Egypt and Babylonia) greeted him as a liberator. Darius’ death gave Alexander the grounds to declare himself the “lawful” heir. He was transformed from a “Hellene-liberator” into an Eastern monarch, head of a vast Greco-Macedonian-Persian power.

By inducting representatives of the local Eastern nobility into the army and administration, Alexander initiated a policy of bringing the Greco-Macedonian nobility closer to that of conquered countries. The aim of the policy was to broaden the social base of his monarchy. He surrounded himself with Persian nobles, recruited Eastern contingents for the army, and introduced splendid ceremony at court. This produced discontent among the Greco-Macedonian circle surrounding Alexander and led to a series of conspiracies against him, which he suppressed with great cruelty (the execution of the able military commander Philotas, the murder of Alexander’s personal friend Cleitus, and the “conspiracy of pages”).

Continuing his campaign to the East, Alexander occupied the central part of the Iranian highlands in 330 and invaded Central Asia in 329. He began establishing strongly garrisoned fortress cities—named Alexandria—very intensively in order to consolidate his power. According to tradition, a total of about 70 were established. In the spring of 327, Alexander, taking advantage of the war between the Indian ruler Porus and the sovereign of the city of Taxila, undertook a campaign into western India (Punjab). At the Hydaspes River (a tributary of the Indus), he managed to defeat, with difficulty, the army of Porus, which included 200 fighting elephants, never before encountered by Macedonians. Alexander intended to continue his campaign into the valley of the Ganges River, but he met open resistance from his army, which was exhausted by the campaigns and illness. The fact that the majority of the troops were recruited from conquered areas also had some effect. On the Hyphasis River (eastern tributary of the Indus), Alexander was forced to give the order to return (326). The army was divided into two parts. One was dispatched by land, part of which was led by Alexander through Gedrosia and part by the general Craterus through Arachosia. The other—Nearchus’ fleet—was dispatched by water to the west. Alexander made Babylon his capital; there, in the height of preparations for new campaigns, he died. The vast power created by his conquests stretched from the Danube to the Indus. It was the greatest state of the ancient world. Without firm internal links, however, it disintegrated after the death of its creator, and a number of Hellenistic states arose on its territory.

The military art of ancient Greece reached its height in the victories of the Macedonian army commanded by Alexander the Great. Like his father, Philip II, Alexander studied, mastered, and further developed the techniques of the armies of Athens, Sparta, Boeotia, and other ancient Greek states in army preparation, tactics, and strategy. Alexander’s strategy was characterized by a comprehensive and thorough study of the enemy’s country and army, a concern for lines of communications and the stability of the rear, a striving to destroy the enemy’s main force, and a persistence and consistency in carrying out the planned strategy. Alexander resolved the problem of winning supremacy at sea and guaranteeing the security of his army’s lines of communications in an original manner: advancing along the shore with land forces, he occupied the enemy’s naval bases and thus completely forced the Persian fleet out of the Mediterranean Sea.

In the area of tactics, Alexander completely utilized the fighting capabilities of his own forces and skillfully exploited his opponents’ weaknesses. A phalanx of heavy infantry, armed with swords and long spears (sarissas) was usually put in the center of the Macedonian army’s battle formation and made up its backbone. On one flank, usually the right, Alexander established a strong grouping of heavy cavalry and medium infantry, whose function was to deliver the main blow. The remaining cavalry and light infantry were employed as a cover for the other flank and for the initial engagement. A frontal assault by the phalanx was combined with decisive maneuvering actions of a strike force that broke through the flank or the rear of the enemy’s main force and brought the battle to a favorable conclusion. The principle of unequal distribution of forces along the front was developed to a considerable extent in Alexander’s army. In the estimation of F. Engels “. . . the economy of forces, in the form in which it was utilized in the battle formation of Epaminondas, was developed by Alexander into a combined use of different combat arms, which Greece with its negligible cavalry would never have been able to achieve” (Izbr. voen. proizv., 1956, p. 182). The success attained in battle was consolidated by relentless pursuit with cavalry. Alexander was generally able to maneuver his cavalry with singular success. Engels noted that “... Alexander has been recognized from that time as one of the best cavalry leaders of all time” (ibid., p. 207).

The authors of antiquity had different evaluations of Alexander’s personality and activities. His successes were explained by military genius or luck (fate)—for example, Plutarch’s On the Good Fortune of Alexander the Great. It was a characteristic of early Hellenic works, especially those written by Alexander’s associates—Ptolemy, Callis-thenes, Aristobulus, and others—to endow Alexander’s personality with heroic proportions and to view his activities as “great deeds” accomplished to liberate Greek cities and avenge the Persian devastation of Greece and defilement of its sacred objects. Ancient writers opposed to Alexander (Pompeius Trogus, Curtius Rufus, and others) viewed him as a cruel conqueror who enslaved and oppressed the peoples. Many legends and tales about Alexander took shape as far back as ancient times. One of the collections of such tales, Alexandria (in Greek)—ascribed to Cal-listhenes, a contemporary of Alexander, but actually composed considerably later (in the second or third century) as was its Latin translation in the fourth century by Julius Valerius—served as the source for the medieval literary works about Alexander. These works (the so-called Aleksandriia) made their way into Rus’ no later than the 12th century. Narratives of Alexander’s campaigns (known as Iskander in Arabic, Persian, and Turkic) were widespread in Eastern literature (Shāh Nama by Firdausi, Iskander-nama by Nizami, and others).