As I mentioned in a previous post, the Classical Greeks did not produce many great generals. But there was Alexander, who was probably the greatest captain in all of Western history. After all, who can have claimed to do what he did? Hannibal? Scipio? Caesar? Alexander had probably never even heard of a little Italian state called Rome when he was sitting on top of the vastness of Greece (minus Sparta, who was never included in his Greek conquest), Asia Minor, Egypt, and the expanse from the coasts of the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, and out to the Indus. All while never having lost a pitched battle.
Heroes and Historical Materialism
A popular liberal reductionist mode of history, championed by people like Howard Zinn, attempts to fight the "big man" theory of history by taking the opposite stance- history was made by the masses of "small" people, and big men were just as brutal, potentially criminal and fallible as anyone else. Very well; I doubt anyone can seriously disagree with this. However, it also represents another form of one-sided theory that does not get us a step closer to the truth on its own. History is still full of Alexanders, Caesars, Cromwells, Napoleons, etc- to write them all off as unimportant war criminals does not answer why they exist in the first place. The fact of their deeds is more stubborn to do away with, and must be accounted for.
Furthermore, to judge history by body count will not get one very far. To write off conqueror as just a bloody killer is to get no further than to recognize part of the definition of a conqueror. Moralism sounds very nice to many very nice people, but it is much more valuable to have the tools necessary to understand a phenomenon. And of the book Alexander the Fabulous, reducing the entirety of his accomplishments to his supposed homosexuality...the less said the better.
I have, in a past post, outlined Historical Materialism, the Marxist method of historical inquiry, so I will only briefly outline some aspects of the approach as they affect our subject. Historical Materialism, by recognizing that history is made, in the last analysis, by the struggle of different historical classes, blows the great man theory out of the water. However, it does not end there. There is no mechanical conception of poor vs. rich in some eternal struggle. Nor does it reduce any political event to the mechanical reaction to economics. The mode of production- the particular way that men and women interact with one another to reproduce society on a daily basis, like slave society, feudalism, capitalism, etc.- gives a particular character to the social relations that come of it, which helps to explain the sweep of historical events. Historical materialism recognizes the roles of great men and women, but in a way that is divorced completely from the "great man" theory: as representatives of historical tendencies in times of great change.
In other words: the characters do not make the changes in society, the changes already occurring in society produce the characters who carry them through. Just as there are laws of nature, so there are laws of social development. Although it is somewhat fashionable to take the postmodernist position that "reality is a social construct" and so there is no one objective reality, this represents a massive step backward in historical thought to the emptiness of mysticism and solipsism; we will not waste any time tangled in this bankrupt conception. However, whereas the laws of nature confront humans as a force that exists with or without them, the laws of social development both confront the individual as a force alien to him (no man chooses the mode of production of the society that he is born into) and also as something that is enacted through the actions of human beings. So, it is natural that in times where the contradictions at a society's base are causing great social upheaval and change, it is often great characters of history who fill the subjective place of representative of a much wider trend that has already developed.
In other words: the characters do not make the changes in society, the changes already occurring in society produce the characters who carry them through. Just as there are laws of nature, so there are laws of social development. Although it is somewhat fashionable to take the postmodernist position that "reality is a social construct" and so there is no one objective reality, this represents a massive step backward in historical thought to the emptiness of mysticism and solipsism; we will not waste any time tangled in this bankrupt conception. However, whereas the laws of nature confront humans as a force that exists with or without them, the laws of social development both confront the individual as a force alien to him (no man chooses the mode of production of the society that he is born into) and also as something that is enacted through the actions of human beings. So, it is natural that in times where the contradictions at a society's base are causing great social upheaval and change, it is often great characters of history who fill the subjective place of representative of a much wider trend that has already developed.
There were many men in Greece who were as intelligent, athletic, and wealthy as Alexander. Likewise, there were many states with considerable military capability (Thebes, Athens, Syracuse)*. Alexander the man and Macedonia the state were not special on their own, but only as representatives of the bearers of the historical ascendancy of Greek slaves society. There were reasons that they were well-situated for the role that they would play, though.
*the notable exception of Sparta was due to the devastating defeats that the state suffered at the hands of the Thebans during their post-Corinthian War conflicts.
Only a King
Macedonia was, to most Greeks, a backward state full semi-barbarous people- they still served a line of kings, after all! They were scarcely higher on the scale of civilization than the warlike Thracians. That they would be the state to lead Greece into its long-brewing contest with Persia would have been a silly idea, to say the least.
There is, though, an interesting tendency for things to turn into their opposite. Something that once played a progressive role in moving society forward (for instance, slavery), can become a fetter (consider the long decay of the Roman Empire due to the rotting corpse of slave agriculture). The opposite took place in Macedonia. The backward state of its economy and political apparatus once ensured its status as a culturally-handicapped backwater, and it would eventually become its strength. Ultimately, it took a king- namely, Philip II- to build Greece's first truly professional army.
To back up this statement, it is necessary to look at the state of affairs in Greece, during the latter half of the 4th century. The Peloponnesian War had devastated the Greek world from 431-404. It brought a terrible outbreak of plague to Athens, the total ruin of many cities, both on the mainland and in the Aegean, and generally weakened all of the great city states. The brief period of Spartan ascendancy following the war resulted in a successful, but interrupted, invasion of Persia by the great Spartan king Agesilaus. The Corinthian War and Theban War that followed reduced Sparta to a second rate power and saw a short period of Theban ascendancy. By the period of Philip's Grecian campaign, Athens was again the predominant Greek power, although an exhausted one.
What led to this long nightmare of war among the Greeks? Ultimately, as Greek slave society grew more productive and the great trading cities of Corinth and Athens became more important in the Mediterranean, the growing economic interests of the states were bound to bring them into conflict. Military might and trade were intimately connected, as states vied for access to the rich markets of the East and pirates preyed upon unprepared traders. The conflicts in the economic sphere thus led to a series of draining and destructive wars. No state, not even the Athenian Empire, proved powerful enough to create a monopoly of trade in the Aegean or Mediterranean, and the struggles ground on.
Inside the states themselves, great contradictions were playing themselves out. As states grew more prosperous, and, in the case of Athens grew imperial ambitions, it ground against the social relations that had developed in previous periods. Democracy, for instance, which was itself the product of great class conflict between small landowners, a growing merchant class, and large land owners, required a small geographical state to ensure that citizens could easily travel to the city for voting. As the representatives of the large landowning class sought, and were pushed by the growth in slave economy to seek, greater political and economic influence throughout the Mediterranean, they were held back by the nature of the small democratic state. The Athenian empire, although it employed 700 magistrates throughout the Aegean to administer its dominion, was hardly much more than a forced confederacy when compared to the successor kingdoms or the Roman empire. The political form, balanced on explosive class conflict, was at odds with the demands of the expanding states.
Traditionally, the Greek states relied on civilian militias for defense. The fame of the "Marathon men" and the 300 Spartans attests to the effectiveness of the Greek man-at-arms. However, a major weakness of Greek armies was that the bulk of the phalanx was made up of farmers who needed to be back home by the harvest season. Indeed, this was a matter of pride and a mark of prestige for the layer of society that had made up the oldest base of citizenry back into the period of the tribal state. There was a limit to the amount of time that a state could keep such army in the field, a campaign season that coincided with the natural rhythm of agriculture.
Since the Greek states had a strong agricultural base of production, and one in which even relatively wealthy Greeks worked alongside their slaves in the fields at least for a portion of the year, especially in the period before the 5th century BC, it also ensured that the wars were of a generally limited nature. States fought over borders and access to farmland or rare grazing land. There was no military caste in Greece, as existed in the East, whose lives were dedicated to arms. This, along with the poverty of Greek cities and the agrarian nature of productive property, assured that the model of war centered around short campaigns and aimed at decisive pitched battles.
The great wars of the 5th and 4th centuries strained this system of war to its limits. States began employing mercenaries in greater numbers to augment the numbers of available citizens, as well as to overcome their seasonal combat limits. Incidentally, the mercenaries were available in greater numbers as the growth in population of the 5th century created a larger population of farmers' sons with no hope of acquiring land of their own as large land owners expanded their holdings. The ease at which Cyrus brought together 10,000 mercenaries in 401 attests to their availability in the wake of the 30 years of the Peloponnesian War.
Slaves were also filling ranks formerly reserved for citizens - a clear sign of social crisis. Athens put them to work as rowers and light troops, while Sparta went as far to put enfranchised Helots in the phalanx with full Spartiates. The great Spartan strategos, Brasidas conducted his campaigns with an army composed almost completely of freed helots and resident aliens. The conditions demanded a standing army, but the social structure of the Greek city states could not allow for its creation- democracy and oligarchy each rested upon the military traditions of the citizen soldier. It was left to Philip II, Alexander's father and one of the most brilliant military reformers in history, to accomplish what the southern Greek states could not.
The Macedonian king spent part of his youth as a hostage in Thebes during the generalship of Epaminondas and learned much from the methods of the greatest Greek military man before the reign of his son. He took the distilled lessons and advancements of Greek arms and began to build an army upon those principles. He had a fresh population to work with, unused to democracy or citizenship and unaffected by its political and social traditions. The citizen soldier spirit that had once made the Greek such a formidable foe had become a fetter on the military development, and thus political development of slave society. The hoplite was traditionally expected to arm himself and serve without pay- as the economic importance of the Greek cities increased disparity and demanded more military service, this became less possible. Philip molded the Macedonian peasants into a crack force, armed, trained, and paid full-time by the state.
In order to pay for all of this, he also had to do something impossible in the other Greek states- take on heavy state debt. Despite being able to fund some of his projects through the conquest and utilization of Illyrian and Thracian gold and silver mines (a large source of wealth in themselves), Alexander inherited a state heavily in debt to Greek lenders. No Greek politician, especially those elected to yearly posts by the fickle citizenry, and supported by the frugal large land owners, could have hoped to take on such debt in the name of warfare.
To back up this statement, it is necessary to look at the state of affairs in Greece, during the latter half of the 4th century. The Peloponnesian War had devastated the Greek world from 431-404. It brought a terrible outbreak of plague to Athens, the total ruin of many cities, both on the mainland and in the Aegean, and generally weakened all of the great city states. The brief period of Spartan ascendancy following the war resulted in a successful, but interrupted, invasion of Persia by the great Spartan king Agesilaus. The Corinthian War and Theban War that followed reduced Sparta to a second rate power and saw a short period of Theban ascendancy. By the period of Philip's Grecian campaign, Athens was again the predominant Greek power, although an exhausted one.
What led to this long nightmare of war among the Greeks? Ultimately, as Greek slave society grew more productive and the great trading cities of Corinth and Athens became more important in the Mediterranean, the growing economic interests of the states were bound to bring them into conflict. Military might and trade were intimately connected, as states vied for access to the rich markets of the East and pirates preyed upon unprepared traders. The conflicts in the economic sphere thus led to a series of draining and destructive wars. No state, not even the Athenian Empire, proved powerful enough to create a monopoly of trade in the Aegean or Mediterranean, and the struggles ground on.
Inside the states themselves, great contradictions were playing themselves out. As states grew more prosperous, and, in the case of Athens grew imperial ambitions, it ground against the social relations that had developed in previous periods. Democracy, for instance, which was itself the product of great class conflict between small landowners, a growing merchant class, and large land owners, required a small geographical state to ensure that citizens could easily travel to the city for voting. As the representatives of the large landowning class sought, and were pushed by the growth in slave economy to seek, greater political and economic influence throughout the Mediterranean, they were held back by the nature of the small democratic state. The Athenian empire, although it employed 700 magistrates throughout the Aegean to administer its dominion, was hardly much more than a forced confederacy when compared to the successor kingdoms or the Roman empire. The political form, balanced on explosive class conflict, was at odds with the demands of the expanding states.
Traditionally, the Greek states relied on civilian militias for defense. The fame of the "Marathon men" and the 300 Spartans attests to the effectiveness of the Greek man-at-arms. However, a major weakness of Greek armies was that the bulk of the phalanx was made up of farmers who needed to be back home by the harvest season. Indeed, this was a matter of pride and a mark of prestige for the layer of society that had made up the oldest base of citizenry back into the period of the tribal state. There was a limit to the amount of time that a state could keep such army in the field, a campaign season that coincided with the natural rhythm of agriculture.
Since the Greek states had a strong agricultural base of production, and one in which even relatively wealthy Greeks worked alongside their slaves in the fields at least for a portion of the year, especially in the period before the 5th century BC, it also ensured that the wars were of a generally limited nature. States fought over borders and access to farmland or rare grazing land. There was no military caste in Greece, as existed in the East, whose lives were dedicated to arms. This, along with the poverty of Greek cities and the agrarian nature of productive property, assured that the model of war centered around short campaigns and aimed at decisive pitched battles.
The great wars of the 5th and 4th centuries strained this system of war to its limits. States began employing mercenaries in greater numbers to augment the numbers of available citizens, as well as to overcome their seasonal combat limits. Incidentally, the mercenaries were available in greater numbers as the growth in population of the 5th century created a larger population of farmers' sons with no hope of acquiring land of their own as large land owners expanded their holdings. The ease at which Cyrus brought together 10,000 mercenaries in 401 attests to their availability in the wake of the 30 years of the Peloponnesian War.
Slaves were also filling ranks formerly reserved for citizens - a clear sign of social crisis. Athens put them to work as rowers and light troops, while Sparta went as far to put enfranchised Helots in the phalanx with full Spartiates. The great Spartan strategos, Brasidas conducted his campaigns with an army composed almost completely of freed helots and resident aliens. The conditions demanded a standing army, but the social structure of the Greek city states could not allow for its creation- democracy and oligarchy each rested upon the military traditions of the citizen soldier. It was left to Philip II, Alexander's father and one of the most brilliant military reformers in history, to accomplish what the southern Greek states could not.
The Macedonian king spent part of his youth as a hostage in Thebes during the generalship of Epaminondas and learned much from the methods of the greatest Greek military man before the reign of his son. He took the distilled lessons and advancements of Greek arms and began to build an army upon those principles. He had a fresh population to work with, unused to democracy or citizenship and unaffected by its political and social traditions. The citizen soldier spirit that had once made the Greek such a formidable foe had become a fetter on the military development, and thus political development of slave society. The hoplite was traditionally expected to arm himself and serve without pay- as the economic importance of the Greek cities increased disparity and demanded more military service, this became less possible. Philip molded the Macedonian peasants into a crack force, armed, trained, and paid full-time by the state.
In order to pay for all of this, he also had to do something impossible in the other Greek states- take on heavy state debt. Despite being able to fund some of his projects through the conquest and utilization of Illyrian and Thracian gold and silver mines (a large source of wealth in themselves), Alexander inherited a state heavily in debt to Greek lenders. No Greek politician, especially those elected to yearly posts by the fickle citizenry, and supported by the frugal large land owners, could have hoped to take on such debt in the name of warfare.
Conquest
The incredible tale of Alexanders conquests has been well-documented in countless books, and there is certainly no need to recount it in full here. But, the reasons for his conquests, as well as their success, are, more often than not, attributed to personal ambition or personality quirks. I cannot think of anything less useful to our purpose- surely, the personality of Alexander can account for plenty of peculiarities, but it is a rare thing, indeed, for a man to conquer the known world because of his great personality. Alexander's conquests were driven by material conditions in the Greek world.
The first among these conditions was the geography of Greece itself. The history of Greece is that of colonization and exploration; even a superficial examination of the geography of the mainland will explain such a tendency. Lord Byron called Greece "the land of mountains and the sea", and these two geographic features dominated the life of Greeks from the earliest days. A mountainous land with little in the way of arable land, and most of that being of poor quality, even by ancient standards, pushed the sons of Greek farmers to seek other lands in which to claim their own plots. Since the year 1000, Greek sailors had been colonizing the Mediterranean and Aegean from Spain to Egypt, even as far as the Black Sea.
One can be sure that during the ascendancy of Greek trade and manufacture in the 5th and 4th centuries, this tendency was not reversed- rather, it was accelerated! The population growth that came with the economic growth put further stress on the small landholders, as land became even more valuable, large slave farmers became richer, and states fought to gain access to the most fertile plains. We can be sure, by the growth of mercenary service and colonization, that there was an increasing population of Greek men and women with no means to make a traditional agrarian living. From this, we can begin to trace the origins of the long series of Greek offensives and counter-offensives into Persia; they were effects of the need for living space and access to arable land.
Whether they realized it or not (and I am certain they did not), the visions of Persian conquest held dear by Philip and Alexander were the effects of the historical need felt for land over hundreds of years. The Seleucid empire, the successor kingdom in Syria, actively encouraged Greek immigration, and they do not seem to have had problems in finding willing participants; hundreds of Greek cities were founded throughout Asia Minor in this period. The rich plains of Asia offered a stark comparison to the mountains of Greece. The city of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt also saw a great influx of Greek immigrants.
A second, and more immediate condition for Alexander himself, was driven by debt. As mentioned above, Philip accumulated a large amount of debt in order to build his military machine, and that had to be paid for. As Alexander conquered, he secured means to make money. These ranged from gaining control over important trade cities and routes to that most valuable of ancient commodities: slaves. When a city refused to enter into cordial relations with Alexander, it was besieged. Inevitably, the city would fall, and its inhabitants sold, en masse, into slavery, providing Alexander with plenty of cash.
Over the course of his campaigns, hundreds of thousands were enslaved in such a manner. This had a secondary effect, though: as Alexander won the world on the strength of an ascendant Greek slave society, he furthered the interests of slave society by flooding the market with huge amounts of cheap slaves.
What conditions allowed for success, then? Chief among them was the above-mentioned ascendancy of Greek society. Slave society was in a period of strength and growth from the 5th century, measured by the Greek dominance in almost all of the Mediterranean, both economically and socially. Greek goods could be found in markets from Asia to the dark forests of central Europe, and Greek culture was producing works of science, philosophy, and literature unrivaled by Persia; Eratosthenes, a Greek scholar in the 3rd century, using geometry, measured the circumference of the globe (that had not even been discovered by Greeks yet) with an error of only 2%. Persia, despite the confusing mix of economic modes of production to be found within its borders, rested upon the core of the old Asiatic mode of production, which saw a strong, centralized state, controlled by various castes, utilize the labor of its subject peasant populations.
The Persian state had, upon such a system, diverted major rivers, created great systems of irrigation and water travel, and showed the West the first postal service. Yet, it was being eclipsed by the Greek mode of production in the language of material and culture, and its decent was evidenced by its feeble military showing in the face of Alexander's greatly-inferior numbers. The empire, along with the whole base of its society was wiped away by the new.
Alexander, in the last analysis, represented the force of historical progress in the character of a man. Despite all the ink spilled over his personality, if it were not him, another would have taken up this task. In fact, the Spartan king Agisilaus, at the turn of the 4th century, had also waged a rather successful campaign in Asia, although it was cut short by the outbreak of the Corinthian War. The long-felt historical needs addressed above made the Greek conquest inevitable, it just happened to be Alexander who finally existed at the right time with the right resources. To paraphrase Engels, a great man always seems to step up exactly when he is needed.
*the notable exception of Sparta was due to the devastating defeats that the state suffered at the hands of the Thebans during their post-Corinthian War conflicts.
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