Ancient civilizations-2

The nobles and the nomads

As he was finishing the conquest of eastern Iran—and at a moment when his attention was being drawn toward the conquest of India—Alexander was confronted by two human factors that were of the greatest importance for the future of his empire. The first of these was the powerful local aristocracy of this part of the Achaemenian Empire, which held enormous properties and dominated the indigenous population. The second was the nomad population that for centuries had wandered along the northern and northeastern frontiers of Iran.

Alexander seems to have admired greatly the barons of eastern Iran; he had taken note of their ardour during the two years of hard and constant fighting in his conquest of northeastern Iran. Realizing how such a force could benefit the future of his empire, Alexander convoked an assembly of Bactrian nobles. He ordered 30,000 young men to be chosen for training in the Macedonian military disciplines. He understood the importance and effectiveness of the Iranian light cavalry armed with the bow, and his army would make use of this training in its march toward the plains of India. Alexander married Roxana of Sogdiana, daughter of a chief of one of the conquered countries, thereby symbolizing the union of the two peoples.

But Alexander was not unaware that other measures were needed to ensure his control of these vast territories. He founded many new cities, or refounded some that were already in existence. Many of these were placed strategically along the northern frontiers as protection. Almost half of these new cities were located in the high (eastern) satrapies. This policy of Alexander’s would soon be abandoned by the Seleucids, whose efforts at city planning were mostly confined to their western possessions. In contrast with Alexander, the Seleucids were unable to maintain the good rapport with the eastern Iranian nobility that Alexander had believed essential. And this deficiency, a result of the Seleucids’ “pro-Macedonian” policies, was one of the principal causes for the progressive decline of the Seleucid empire.

The second of the human factors, the nomads, inhabited the immense territories beyond the northern frontiers. They fought constantly with the settled populations but could nevertheless occasionally ally with them in the face of necessity. When Alexander arrived on the banks of the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) River, it marked the limit of the “civilized” world; beyond stretched the Eurasian wilderness. The Roman historian Quintus Curtius recounts Alexander’s meeting with a delegation of Scythians who gave him a warning. They told him,

Just cross the Tanais [properly the Jaxartes] and you will see how far Scythia stretches. You will never conquer the Scythians. Our poverty makes us quicker than your army, which bears plunder from so many nations. Just when you think we are far away, then will you see us in your camp. We know how to pursue and how to flee with the same swiftness. [One recalls here the famous “Parthian shot,” a metaphor drawn from a neighbouring people.] We seek out those deserts totally devoid of human culture rather than the cities and the rich countryside.

These words sum up what the nomad world represented to an empire that stretched several thousand miles from east to west. The settled population knew the threat only too well. Alexander was not the first to cross swords with the nomads. Cyrus II, founder of the Achaemenian Empire, had paid with his life while fighting them, and Darius I, believing he could take them from behind through southern Russia, suffered a crushing defeat in his campaign against the Scythians along the shores of the Black Sea.

If the nomads and the eastern Iranian nobility were the two dominant factors in the decline of the Seleucid kingdom and if the events they provoked were some of the principal causes for the exhaustion and eventual fall of that state, these same causes later played a significant role in the collapse of Parthian power. Parthia was undermined by an aristocracy that retained its military power and refused to bend before the royal will or to give up its meddling in the country’s politics. In the meantime the kingdom’s unruly nomadic neighbours to the north and the northeast, at the cost of the lives of several Parthian sovereigns, weakened the kingdom and sometimes added a complementary element to the often numerous intrigues of the pretenders to supreme power during the course of the almost half a millennium of the existence of the Parthian kingdom.