Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox

Author:Robin Lane Fox
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141925981
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2008-11-04T10:00:00+00:00

So, through the baroque imagination of a Greek master, ‘Alexander’s Wedding to Roxane’ won a prize at the festival games of Greek Olympia and survived through a Roman visitor’s description to influence Sodoma and Botticelli.

Like Achilles, men said, Alexander had married a captive lady. But in politics, if not in personality, the new Achilles had come far since his pilgrimage to Troy. Nobody could have guessed that a pupil of Aristotle, who had once refused to take a wife, would fall passionately in love with a lady from outer Iran, marry her and use her as proof of goodwill to the conquered Iranian barony; his father-in-law, moreover, had been Bessus’s close associate in a rebellion which had detained him for two awkward years. There was only one embarrassment. As father of Barsine, Alexander’s first Persian mistress, Artabazus may have been disappointed by the decision to marry Roxane, especially as Barsine was known to be bearing her first child. However, he had already resigned his command in Bactria, pleading old age before the marriage was in view; the satrapy which had first been offered to Cleitus now went to another Macedonian with a suitably large force of hired Greeks. Artabazus would never be grandfather of Alexander’s recognized heir, but he is not known to have borne any lasting resentment and his sons continued to be honoured. He was retired to the governorship of the first Sogdian rock in place of the baron Ariamazes who had been crucified. Ironically it was the rock on which Roxane had been captured.

Alexander’s plans were already extending beyond marriage. At Balkh, he ordered 30,000 native boys to be chosen for military training; their weapons were to be Macedonian and their language Greek. It was the most determined attempt at a wide Hellenization of Iran to be made by any western king: like Philip’s royal pages, not only would the boys be hostages against their fathers’ misbehaviour, they would also become the dependent soldier class of the future, when the Macedonian veterans retired and the army could be filled with westernized Orientals. From a year of frustration, even of murder, a creative plan had at last taken shape; the Iranians, so far from being treated ‘as plants and animals’, would be called to share in the empire, obliged to Alexander alone and educated away from their tribal background. Whether the boys and their parents were grateful is another matter. At the same time, Alexander’s courtiers too were to feel the change: while the cavalry officers were rearranged, Hephaistion had needed promotion in order to preserve his special dignity, and it was perhaps now that he became Alexander’s official second-in-command. His title was Chiliarch, his job had military responsibilities. But both job and title had been created by the Persian kings.

To any such change, there were bound to be complications.

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