Alexander the Great by Waldemar Heckel & Lawrence A. Tritle

Author:Waldemar Heckel & Lawrence A. Tritle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

II

When the young Droysen (born in 1808) began to write his book on Alexander in the fall of 1831, he benefited from the historiographic advances of the previous generations. Proceeding from these, he too would present the great economic successes of Alexander, namely, the minting of the immobile treasures of Persia and their reintegration into the economic and commercial circuits (1883: 360, 687–9);18 the abolishment of all levies in kind, and the transformation of the royal court into a locus that was rather creating and diffusing wealth (689-90); the grand works in Greece and Asia (690); the creation of new commercial routes by removing the cataracts in the Tigris (650–1), and by the opening up of direct contacts between the Indus and Babylon (597–603). In Droysen’s view, there is no doubt that this is a totally innovative set of policies, consciously developed by the Macedonian conqueror:

All of these are enough to show the importance of the commercial successes of Alexander from an economic point of view. Perhaps, from this perspective, we have never seen one man’s influence producing such a sudden transformation, so profound and on such an immense territory. This transformation was not the result of mere accidental circumstances, but, as much as one can judge, it was wanted and pursued with full intention to fulfill its goal. (Droysen 1877: ii. 296-7; 1883: 690-1)

Like his predecessors, Droysen (1877: ii. 296 n. 1; 1883: 690 n. 4) simply refers, at this point, to De fortuna Alexandri (1.5, 18), where Plutarch aims to present Alexander not as a conqueror coming to ravage Asia like a brigand, but as a civilizer coming to promote world unity on the basis of Greek values. Altogether, Droysen’s analysis has nothing profoundly original. Described by B. Bravo (1968: 136 n. 164), as “a rational, lucid, political, methodical hero crafting grandiose plans,” Droysen’s Alexander is very similar to the Alexander of Montesquieu and his followers. This is particularly evident in the pages dedicated to the creation of the route to India and the reopening of waterways in Babylon (Briant 2006c, 2007b), but similar observations can be made concerning other aspects. Take, for example, what Droysen writes about the profound transformations that, according to him, Alexander brought to the fiscal system in force under the Great Kings, and the inferences he draws from this regarding the resulting economic boom:

What was most harmful, amongst the Persians, was the infinite number of duties in kind; for the royal court alone, they were estimated at 13000 talents a year, and each satrap and dynasty followed, in his region, the example of the Great King. Certain clues point to Alexander actually abolishing this system of payments of kind. . . The sojourn of the royal court now came to boast the prosperity of a city or a country just as much as the presence of the Great King had previously exhausted it. The pomp that the king was surrounded by, particularly in the later years, no longer bore down on the peoples, but created to the contrary, growth and prosperity of commerce.

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