The World

The Alexandrians and the Haxamanishiya: Eurasian Duel

QUEEN AMESTRIS AND THE MUTILATION OF ARTAYNTE

Darius disappeared into the vastness of Russia and Ukraine, chasing the Scythians. Like later invaders, he was bewildered by the scale of the steppes, tormented by the freezing winter and frustrated by elusive enemies who avoided pitched battle and withdrew, drawing him deeper into hostile territory. Whatever disasters befell him here, he survived and in 511 BC made it back to Persia, lucky not to have become a drinking goblet. He left 80,000 troops under Bagavazda¯, his cousin, who swerved southwards towards Macedonia; its king, Amyntas, submitted. But the Persian envoys abused Macedonian women: the king’s son Alexander killed the offenders and the feud was healed only when Amyntas married his daughter to Bagavazda¯’s son.

This was the beginning of the duel between the two families that would define the next three centuries. Amyntas’ Argeads, who claimed descent from Macedon, a nephew of Hellen, founder of Greece, and from Hercules, had ruled their realm since about 650. The Macedonians, rough, bearded mountaineers living in a state of perpetual feud in forested highlands under a semi-barbaric monarchy, were not regarded by Athenians and Spartans as fully Greek. Later when Amyntas’ son Alexander tried to compete in the Olympic Games, reserved for true Greeks, his qualifications were challenged; he was forced to cite his mythical genealogy – and then went on to win the race.

Darius had conquered the richer Greeks of Ionia; only Sparta and a sprinkling of city states, led by Athens, remained independent. The Ionian Greeks, who provided much of the Persian fleet but smarted under Darius’ taxes, now rebelled and burned Sardis. They were suppressed, but the western Greeks had helped them.

In 491, Darius, now in his sixties, dispatched his son-in-law Mrduniya (Mardonius), son of the greatest of the Seven,^* to conquer Greece. Mrduniya crossed the Hellespont in command of 600 ships and an army, co-opting King Alexander I of Macedon. The Persians were surprised when Athens and Sparta, feeling perhaps for the first time the bond of Greekness, combined to resist. When Mrduniya was wounded in Thrace, Darius promoted his other nephew Artafarna. Landing on the Marathon Plain, the Persians faced only the hoplites of Athens – the Spartans were late – but the Greeks routed them. After Marathon, the Athenians instituted a novelty to control the dominance of their paladins: voters could secretly write a politician’s name on a pottery shard (ostrakon) to sentence him to exile – ostracism – for ten years, providing at least 6,000 votes were cast.

Marathon was a minor setback for Darius who at sixty-four decided to lead a second invasion – while promoting Xerxes, who boasted, ‘Darius my father made me the greatest after himself.’ In October 486, Xerxes smoothly succeeded his father, then, advised by Alexander of Macedon among others, crossed the Hellespont on a bridge of ships to invade Greece with 800 ships and 150,000 troops, including Indians, Ethiopians and many Greeks. The Athenians abandoned Athens and led by the Spartan king Leotychidas retreated southwards to defend the Corinthian Isthmus – but they left a rearguard under the other Spartan king, Leonidas, whose allies persuaded him to delay the Persians at the narrow pass of Thermopylae with 300 Spartans – and several thousand Phocians and helots (forgotten in most accounts). Xerxes watched as his Immortals were slaughtered in the narrow defile, until a Greek traitor revealed a path round the Greek rear. The Persians surprised Leonidas at dawn. ‘Eat a good breakfast,’ said jaunty Leonidas, ‘for tonight we eat in the underworld’ – and then they fought to the death.^* Xerxes advanced towards deserted Athens, its people evacuated to Salamis island by their fleet. Xerxes’ fleet closed in on the Greek ships moored between Salamis and the mainland. His Greek vassal, Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus, a woman who commanded her own fleet, warned against fighting Athenian sailors in a confined space and advised a blockade. But convinced that the enemy navy would disperse and that anyway victory was inevitable, Xerxes ordered an assault, his fleet soon lured into the narrows. Seated on a silver throne, he watched admiringly as the Ionian Greeks smashed the Spartan ships with swashbuckling Artemisia in the thick of the fighting – ‘My women are men, my men are women,’ he exclaimed – but the Athenians, commanded by Xanthippos, one of the Alcmaeonids, then broke out, destroying 200 ships. Xerxes had to watch one of his brothers killed and cast into the sea. Furiously he executed his Phoenician admirals. But Salamis was not decisive. His army was undefeated, 600 ships battle ready. ‘Return to Sardis,’ Mrduniya advised Xerxes, ‘and take the greater part of the army. Leave me to complete the enslavement of the Greeks.’ After burning Athens, Mrduniya advanced on the allied forces, which he harassed with cavalry.

As the Greeks retreated, covered by the Spartans, Mrduniya, astride his white horse, charged at the head of a thousand Immortals. The training of the Spartans and the advantage given by their armour broke the lightly armed Persians. A Spartan killed Mrduniya with a slung stone, and the Persians fled. Their undefeated second army tried to retire through Thrace to Asia, but Alexander of Macedon switched sides and massacred many of their troops. The conquest was over^* – but Xerxes had burned Athens, and Persia overshadowed Greece for another 150 years.

While the Greek navy defeated the Persians, commanded by Xerxes’ brother Masišta, at Mycale off Ionia, Xerxes’ love life was destroying his court. First he had fallen in love with Masišta’s wife. In order to spend more time with her, he married his son, Crown Prince Darius, to the daughter of Masišta, Artaynte, but, dropping the mother, he fell wildly in love with the teenager. The queen then uncovered a planned coup by Masišta and his family. At the Nowruz (new year’s) feast, when the king asked her to choose a gift she demanded the Masišta family. Xerxes, his follies exposed, withdrew. The queen ordered a traitor’s death for Masišta’s wife, whose nose, ears, tongue and breasts were cut off and thrown to dogs.

Unsurprisingly Xerxes had lost his mystique: in 465, courtiers murdered him in his bedroom. In the ensuing conspiracy, Darius was outplayed by his brother Artaxerxes (Artaxšaça) who, as Great King, turned again to Greek matters, offering to fund any Greek power that would challenge the empire of Athens, now led to its zenith by the most gifted of all of the Alcmaeon family.

PERICLES, ASPASIA AND THE PLAGUE OF ATHENS

In 431 BC, Pericles, the ‘foremost man in the Athenian democracy’, stood up in the Assembly to recommend war against the city’s rival Sparta. Born in 495, Pericles grew up during the Persian War – his father had defeated the Persians at Mycale. His mother Agariste was an Alcmaeon, niece of the creator of democracy, Cleisthenes, so Pericles was brought up as a prince of democracy in a family mansion, studying philosophy, literature and music, the height of Athenian culture and haughtiness. His wide forehead earning him the nickname Squillhead; he cultivated an air of self-control and reliability in the Assembly. In the early 460s, in his mid-thirties, Pericles backed full democracy. Success in Athenian politics required oratory but also military talent since the most prestigious offices were now the ten strategoi. Pericles excelled at both, annually re-elected to wear the helmet of a strategos, which he did for thirty years.

As a young man, Pericles married a relative with whom he had two children, but they also raised an orphaned Alcmaeonid, Alcibiades, who grew up to be a handsome and gifted youth and who would one day dominate Athens. At home Pericles held a salon,^* attended by the young philosopher Socrates. But in the 440s, when he was in his political prime, he fell in love with a hetaira, a courtesan, one of the cultivated entertainers who performed at symposia, and regarded as very different from the city’s many pornai, street prostitutes. Aspasia of Miletos, the Greek city in Ionia, was a beautiful intellectual, her conversation so fine that wives of Socrates’ friends came to listen to her talk. The Athenians had long outlawed polygamy so when Aspasia moved in, Pericles divorced his wife, allowing him to remarry. But their two sons were infuriated and Pericles was criticized for his love of Aspasia, with whom he went on to have another son.

Pericles praised Athenian democracy, but it went hand in hand with a new sort of empire. Since Salamis, Sparta in the Peloponnese and Athens on the Aegean had been increasingly vicious rivals for hegemony over Greece, each building a league of allied cities. Pericles expanded the huge fleet that had defeated the Great King, creating the Delian League of tribute-paying cities, using the revenues to embellish the Acropolis with the Temple of Athena known as the Parthenon and to extend the city walls to enclose the Piraeus harbour: Athens was almost impregnable as long as grain arrived via the Black Sea, from Scythia (Ukraine was already the bread-basket of the eastern Mediterranean). By the 450s, Athens had developed such confidence – other Greeks would call it overweening arrogance – that it believed its democracy, empire and culture made it the natural leader of the civilized world. Yet it also led to the rise of slavery. Athenians disdained farm work and toil in the navy. Since the enslaved worked the farms, silver mines, triremes and households, they needed to be replenished in war: some were from Scythia but others must have been Greek.^* Athens’s thalassocracy placed the metropolis, the mother city, on a collision course with the land power Sparta. Love of its power – and fear of losing it – led Athens to bully smaller cities that defied it. The more powerful it became, the more Sparta feared and loathed it.

In 451 the Athenians again defeated the Persians in Cyprus. Finally King Artaxerxes agreed a truce with the Greeks – but the removal of the ancestral enemy undermined Hellenic solidarity and led to war with Sparta.

After Sparta had invaded Attica, Pericles bribed the Spartans to withdraw and negotiated a treaty. But the rivalry was exacerbated by clashes between smaller allies of the chief players. In 431, the Spartans dispatched an ultimatum: expel Pericles and the Alcmaeonids and halt Athens’s heavy-handed measures to enforce economic control – or fight! Pericles advocated war since it was inevitable and Athens was stronger and could win. The Spartans returned to Attica, but Pericles brought Attican farmers inside the city walls. ‘Remain quiet,’ he advised, ‘take care of the fleet, refrain from putting the city in danger,’ while he led raids against the Peloponnese. After the first year, he honoured Athenian dead in resounding if hubristic style. But within a year the very span of Athenian naval power rebounded on the city: an illness, a symptom of Afro-Eurasian trade networks though we do not know its origins, reached the metropolis through sailors. Life expectancy was already low: the mean age at death for men was forty-four, for women thirty-six; now this disease, probably a haemorrhagic fever, its symptoms ranging from fever and dysentery to vomiting and a bleeding throat, was exceedingly infectious and those who cared for the sick were the most likely to die. Some people, including an aristocrat and general, the thirty-year-old Thucydides, recovered and sensing that they were now immune (though immunity was not understood) they looked after the sick: later Thucydides wrote the history of all he had seen. A third of the city, 100,000 Athenians, died. Soon there were so many bodies that pyres were lit, on which random people would just throw loved ones. Pericles organized mass graves: one has been found containing 240 bodies with ten children.

The plague undermined confidence. ‘The catastrophe,’ wrote Thucydides, ‘was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen to them next, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law,’ and it stretched the limits of early government, impairing the ability to feed the city and undermining its religious system that was designed to keep natural disasters at bay. The Spartans withdrew, a move which saved them: the plague did not hit the Laconian homeland. The disease respected no elites. Pericles was blamed, deposed as general and fined. Aspasia was denounced, and Pericles wept in public. But he was not out for long. Within months, the people recalled him, but his two legitimate sons died of the plague and he asked the Assembly to grant citizenship to his illegitimate son by Aspasia.

Then came the ultimate blow.

ALCIBIADES AND SOCRATES

Pericles himself contracted the plague.

Already dying, in a last speech he declared that the role of the statesman is ‘to know what must be done and be able to explain it; to love one’s country and be incorruptible’. He died disappointed but claiming, ‘I have never caused an Athenian to put on mourning clothes.’ The plague eased, but a second wave hit in 426 BC, three years after Pericles’ death. Athens took the war to the Peloponnese, fostering a helot revolt, while Sparta captured the silver mines that funded Athens. In 421, both sides agreed to a truce, by which time another extraordinary leader had emerged from the Alcmaeonids.

The boy brought up in Pericles’ house, Alcibiades, now thirty years old, had grown up so uncannily beautiful that ‘he was hunted by many women of noble family’ and ‘sought after by men too’. He was a fearless soldier: in an early war against Corinth, he was almost killed but was saved by Socrates, his sometime lover. Tutored by Socrates, Alcibiades was a superb speaker – even his lisp was charming – and he was a born showman, rich enough to lay on choruses for the people. He was also a prince of democracy. Socrates taught him that ‘Ethical virtue is the only thing that matters.’ But Alcibiades turned out to be a very bad pupil.

Growing up spoiled by birth and nature, Alcibiades, now elected strategos by a fascinated people, was sybaritic, wilful and narcissistic. He used his vanity as an argument for his own ambition. ‘It is perfectly fair,’ he explained to the people, ‘for a man who has a high opinion of himself not to be put on the same level as everyone else.’ If there was envy ‘for the magnificence in which I live my life’, that lifestyle was just a way to project Athenian glory. To announce his emergence into public life, ‘I entered seven chariots for the [Olympic] chariot race (more than any private individual before).’

In 416, strategos Alcibiades advocated a return to an even more ruthless war against Sparta: ‘If we don’t rule others, others will rule us.’ An appeal for help from a city in Sicily inspired him to demand the dispatch of an expedition. ‘This is the way we won our empire,’ he said. ‘We’ve reached a stage where we are forced to plan new conquests to hold on to what we have got’ – how every empire justifies its expansion. ‘We shall increase our power!’ The Athenians agreed.

Just before he left for Sicily, Athenians awoke to find the phalloi of the city’s Hermes statues smashed – sacrilege that was blamed on Alcibiades. He was recalled to stand trial. Realizing that he would be found guilty, he defected to Sparta. Without his talents, the Sicilian expedition was a catastrophe and Alcibiades swore vengeance on Athens. ‘I’ll let them know I am alive,’ he muttered. Democracy was ‘an obvious absurdity’. He conceived a devastating strategy for the Spartans: they built a fortress near Athens that made it impossible for Attican farmers to feed the city; all food had to be imported. But while in Sparta, Alcibiades seduced the wife of King Agis and, when exposed, he promised to negotiate a treaty with Persia to fund the war against Athens. Persia held the key.

Leading a Spartan fleet to Ionia, Alcibiades appealed to the Persian king Darius II, who had come to the throne after a spasm of familial homicide, aided by Parysatis, his sister-wife. When the Spartans ordered his killing, Alcibiades defected to Darius and advised him to wait out the war. His plan was to engineer his return to Athens , where a noble coup had temporarily overthrown democracy.

The Athenian navy, headquartered in Samos, more loyal to democracy, took power in Athens which then elected Alcibiades as commander. In 410, at Cyzicus, he won a total victory over the Spartans. After a streak of victories including the capture of Byzantion on the Bosphoros, vital for the supply of grain, Alcibiades returned in glory to Athens. He was pardoned, and elected strategos autokrator.

In 408, Darius II, faced with a victorious Athens, backed Sparta, funding its new fleet in return for a free hand in Asia Minor.

The Spartans routed the Athenian fleet when Alcibiades was visiting a nearby island. The Athenians blamed the insouciant playboy, who then fled to his castles on the Hellespont. The restored democracy was now desperate. The Spartans, having secured Persian cash and Macedonian timber, denying both to Athens, could now build a new fleet. When they sank Athens’s last fleet and cut off its grain, the metropolis was forced to surrender.

There was one loose end: Alcibiades was living in a Hellespontine castle with his mistress. The Spartans sent a hit squad, and he died fighting – the last of the Alcmaeonids.

THE POISON CONTEST OF PERSIA AND THE LITERARY HALITOSIS PLOT OF MACEDONIA

Spartan ascendancy was short. Athens restored its democracy, launching investigations into the military and moral disasters of the war. In this vicious showdown, the Athenians arrested Socrates, once tutor of Alcibiades. Socrates believed all humans must aspire to arete – virtuous excellence – while the alternative, ‘the unexamined life’, is ‘not worth living’. But those who insist on telling the truth to everyone are often unbearable. Perhaps Athenian potentates did not want their follies to be overexamined by this loquacious curmudgeon, and Socrates was tried and sentenced to death.^* The city swiftly recovered. Meanwhile Sparta dared to intervene in the politics of Persia, now dominated by one of the sharpest potentates produced by House Haxamanishiya.

Queen Parysatis guided the dynasty for decades. In 423, she had helped her husband-brother Darius II win the throne, overcoming a challenge from another brother whom she had killed using a special Persian method: suffocation in cold ashes that were heaped inside a specially built tower into which the victim was placed. She and Darius had successfully increased Persian power over Greece, but she had a weakness: mother of thirteen children, she passionately loved her son Cyrus, whom she had appointed as satrap of the west: there he fell in love with an enslaved golden-haired Greek girl, Aspasia, whose chastity and beauty dazzled him. While Parysatis favoured Cyrus, Darius groomed another son, Artaxerxes, for the throne – and he too fell in love. But his choice was dangerous for Parysatis: Stateira was the daughter of a powerful clan. When her father and brothers crossed the king and Parysatis, they ordered the entire clan buried alive. But Artaxerxes successfully begged for his wife Stateira to be allowed to live. Naturally she remembered the killing of her family. For twenty years, the two women watched one another.

In 404, when Darius died, the gentle Artaxerxes, married to Stateira, succeeded, while the queen mother groomed her favourite son Cyrus, then aged twenty-two, who sounds like a charismatic sociopath, to seize the throne. Two years later, Cyrus hired 12,000 Greek mercenaries under an Athenian aristocratic adventurer, Xenophon, and marched on Persia, but when the brothers met in battle the young challenger was unhorsed and then beheaded.^* Parysatis watched the killers present her darling’s head and hand to Artaxerxes.

Parysatis never got over Cyrus’ death, and awaited her vengeance: she won Cyrus’ killers in games of dice. One was skinned; another forced to drink molten lead; and the third was killed by scaphism, in which the victim was enclosed between two boats while force-fed honey and milk until maggots, rats and flies infested their living faecal cocoon, eating them alive.

Artaxerxes inherited his brother’s breathtakingly beautiful Greek lover, Aspasia, who was brought to him gagged and tied. He had her freed and rewarded: he waited many years for her to finish grieving for Cyrus.

His mother Parysatis vied with his wife Stateira, who as the mother of three sons was growing in prestige. Stateira cultivated popularity by appearing in a carriage with the curtains open, delighting the public, and made clear that she despised the many cruelties of the old queen. While Artaxerxes fathered 115 children by his concubines, he really loved a beautiful eunuch. When the youth died of natural causes, he asked Aspasia to wear his robes; his grief touched her. ‘I come, O King,’ she said, ‘to comfort your grief.’ They become lovers, finally.

The queen mother and the queen respectfully circled one another, watched by the king: both were extremely vigilant of poison. All autocracies – from the courts of ancient Persia to those of twenty-first-century dictators – run on personal power and access that make competition among the first circle both intimate and vicious. Poison is the ideal weapon at such close quarters, measured and ambiguous – killing the family way. The Persian court was especially watchful, the cupbearer and food taster key positions at court, while the punishment for poisoning was grinding a culprit’s face and head between two stones until they were reduced to jelly. For special occasions, the king kept a rare Indian poison – and its antidote.

Stateira’s rising power may have been the catalyst for Parysatis, who doubtless regarded herself as guarding the king and dynasty from a deep threat: the two queens often dined together with extreme caution.

Now, in her Susa palace, Parysatis served Stateira a roast fowl, and had her female slave smear the Indian poison on one side of the carving knife so that when she carved the roasted bird, she was able safely to eat her own half. Stateira, reassured, then ate hers and died in agony, able to recount what had happened to the outraged king, whose antidote presumably failed to work. After torturing the servants and grinding the slave to jelly, Artaxerxes exiled his nonagenarian mother.

Artaxerxes turned his attention to Greece, playing off Sparta and Athens until in 387 he imposed the King’s Peace which recognized Greek autonomy but established him as the ultimate arbiter of the Hellenic world. Artaxerxes had succeeded where Xerxes and Darius had failed, ruling with an iron will from Egypt and India to the Greek world – where no power was so influenced by Persia as Macedonia.

The Argeads of Macedonia had thrived in the interplay of Persia, Athens and Sparta: King Archelaos leveraged their appetite for shipbuilding timber to build his mountainous, goat-infested fiefdom into a regional force for the first time, aided by his gold and silver mines. But in 399 when Archelaos was out hunting, three courtiers stabbed him to death.

This was the sort of brutishness that civilized Greeks expected of the wild Macedonians. Their dialect was almost incomprehensible. They worked their own fields instead of using slaves like most Greeks; the polygamy of their kings was uncouth and often led to queens and princes killing each other for the crown; their drinking unmixed wine led to oafish royal drunkenness and brawls. Macedonia was usually divided between settled towns in the south, ungovernable northern tribes and predatory outsiders from Persia to Athens whose patronage had allowed Archelaos to transform the kingdom, moving the capital from Agae, which remained the location for royal weddings and burials, to a colonnaded new capital at Pella, where the uncouth goat-chaser played the Greek king.

Archelaos proudly invited a literary celebrity, Euripides, to stay and was infuriated when one of his lovers mocked the poet’s halitosis. Archelaos had him thrashed. The boy plotted against the king along with two other embittered lovers. The literary halitosis plot led to Archelaos’ assassination. In 393 his nephew Amyntas III restored order. Amyntas had three sons: all three would be kings. The youngest would be the greatest Greek of his time.

ONE-EYED PHILIP AND QUEEN OLYMPIAS

Like all Greeks, the three princes were raised on Homer, but in Macedonia they also fought, hunted and spent days recovering from hard-drinking symposia. Most unusually for a Macedonian king, Amyntas died old and in his bed, leaving the throne to the eldest boy, Alexander II, who was defeated by the city of Thebes, then the leading Greek power, which forced him to surrender fifty hostages.

The king sent his youngest brother, the thirteen-year-old Philip. Spending three years in Thebes, Philip was taught a lifestyle of vegetarianism, celibacy and pacifism (all of which he later ignored), but he stayed in the house of the Theban general who was his mentor, probably also his lover, and studied the tactics of the Sacred Band, the elite corps of 300 (supposedly 150 male couples) whose victories had won Thebes its supremacy.

At home, both his elder brothers died violently, leaving a baby as King Amyntas IV. But in 359 BC the Macedonians, facing an invasion from their aggressive neighbours, the Illyrians, acclaimed Philip II, who immediately killed as many of his surviving brothers as he could get his hands on, then divided and played his enemies – by bribery, trickery and marriage (his own, to an Illyrian princess). Influenced by Persian guests, he imitated the Great Kings by creating an inner court of Royal Companions. Then he relentlessly drilled a new army, coordinating cavalry led by his Companions with a remodelled infantry, armed with xiphos stabbing swords and fourteen-foot sarissa pikes that allowed them to form wedges invulnerable to cavalry.

In 358, Philip first defeated the Illyrians and northern Macedonians, doubling the size of his kingdom and recruiting his best general Parmenion, then making marriage alliances with Thessaly and Epiros, marrying first Princess Philinna who soon gave birth to a son Arrhidaios, then his fourth wife, Princess Polyxena, a daughter of the king of Molassia, part of Epiros. In 356, Polyxena gave birth to a boy named Alexander and later to a daughter, Cleopatra. When Philip learned his team had won the Olympics, Polyxena changed her name to Olympias to celebrate. But they were never close, and soon Olympias found she positively disliked him. Vigilant and feral in her political instincts, Olympias, an adept of Dionysian mystery cults, nurtured a menagerie of sacred snakes that slept in her bed with her and frightened her menfolk – and that surely included Philip, who was afraid of virtually nothing else. Besides, he was very rarely at home.

In twenty years of harsh campaigning and silken diplomacy, Philip defeated all his threatening neighbours, then intervened in Greece proper to defend the neutrality of sacred Delphi and crush the resurgent democracy, Athens, where the orator Demosthenes rallied the resistance to the Macedonian ‘despot’, mocking Macedonia as ‘a place not even able to provide a slave worth buying’. Philip led from the front, and that was a dangerous game. An arrow hit him in the right eye, a wound he survived thanks to his doctor; on another occasion, he was stabbed in the leg. Philip’s skull and body have been found in his tomb at Agae and reconstructed, giving us a sense of this fearsomely compact and pugilistic warlord, scarred, limping, one-eyed – yet ever vigilant.

His firstborn, Arrhidaios, epileptic or autistic, was incapable of ruling. The younger one, Alexander, aged thirteen in 343 BC, was avidly reading Homer and Euripedes, and training for war – but he was also learning about Persia. Philip gave asylum to a Persian rebel satrap, Artabazus, who brought his daughter Barsine: she befriended Alexander, who regularly cross-examined Persian visitors. The two would meet again.

Alexander barely knew his father but was close to his mother Olympias, one of the few not afraid to confront Philip – and protect her son. In 342, Philip hired the thirty-seven-year-old Athenian philosopher Aristotle to tutor Alexander. When Philip faced war with Athens, he appointed Alexander as regent. Alexander always kept under his pillow Aristotle’s copy of The Iliad and a dagger, two objects that symbolized his two contradictory facets: the cultured Greek and the ferocious Macedonian.

In his father’s absence, Alexander showed his mettle by defeating rebel tribes. As Athens gathered a coalition of Greek states to stop Philip, they sent envoys to Artaxerxes III of Persia.

ROULETTE: DARIUS III AND ALEXANDER III

It was the perfect moment to approach the Great King. The impressive Artaxerxes III was keen to intervene in Greece. He had crushed Sidon, Egypt and Ionia, aided by two exceptional henchmen, a Greek freebooter Mentor and a Persian eunuch Bogoas, in whom the absence of testicles was no bar to military brutality. When Artaxerxes returned to his capital after fifteen years of war, he promoted Bogoas to Commander of the Thousand, chief minister. But, alarmed by the rise of Philip, he funded Athens and sent a unit to harass the Macedonians in Thrace, a decision that would have world-changing consequences.

Philip summoned his son Alexander, by now aged eighteen, for the battle of Greece. In the summer of 338 BC on the field of Chaeronea. Philip fielded 30,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry, giving Alexander command of the Companion cavalry on the left flank, against the coalition led by Athens that fielded double the number of cavalry. But nothing could equal Philip’s generalship nor his army’s experience: on his own right flank, he deliberately fell back while on the left Alexander led a charge that annihilated the Sacred Band of Thebes to the last man. When Philip saw the dead Sacred Band, remembering his youth in Thebes he wept and erected the Lion of the Chaeronea, a statue under which were later found the bones of 254 men (the Macedonians cremated their dead; Greeks were buried). Now the ruler of Greece – entitled hegemon of the Council of the Greeks – received important news from Persia: a wave of mutual poisonings had decimated the royal family.

Artaxerxes, aged sixty, had planned to dismiss the eunuch Bogoas, who instead poisoned the king and then one by one eliminated his sons, finally summoning a heroic general and royal relative, Artashaiyata, who had made his name by winning a series of single combats. Bogoas crowned him Darius III. Inevitably the new king longed to rid himself of the eunuch.

A deadly game of poison roulette ensued as each of them tried to kill the other. Bogoas poured the king a glass of poisoned wine and the king, for once better informed, insisted the eunuch drink his own cup. The poisoner died by poison. Regardless of the habitual spasms of murderous intrigue at the top, the empire, restored by Artaxerxes III and now led by a confident, capable soldier-king Darius III, was the unchallenged superpower – and likely to remain so for centuries to come.

At the age of forty-eight, the grizzled one-eyed Philip, hegemon of Greece, fell in love with a teenage girl, never a good look. In 337 BC, Philip announced a Hellenic expedition against Persia, officially to avenge Xerxes’ burning of Athens but really to replenish his coffers with Ionian treasure and chasten Persia for backing Macedonian enemies in Thrace – ‘You,’ Alexander later wrote to the Great King, ‘sent troops into Thrace which we control.’ As he mustered his vanguard, Philip announced that he was marrying again. After six diplomatic marriages to foreigners, including Olympias of Epiros, who had brought him possession of Molassia, he announced he was marrying the teenaged Macedonian, Cleopatra, niece of a nobleman, Attalos. His infatuation destabilized his crowded polygamous household: Olympias was infuriated. Already surrounded by a coterie of young supporters led by a kinsman Ptolemy, who may have been an illegitimate son of the king, Alexander was alarmed.

At the marriage feast, the Macedonians drank hard and fought fast. The king’s new uncle-in-law Attalos mocked Alexander, who was only half-Macedonian: ‘Now surely there’ll be born for us true-bred kings – not bastards!’ Alexander threw his goblet at Attalos, who threw his back. Philip ordered Alexander to apologize. His son refused and the soused father drew a sword and lurched towards him, but tripped, fell over, then passed out.

‘The man ready to cross from Europe to Asia,’ sneered Alexander, ‘can’t make it from one table to another.’ After dinner, Olympias and Alexander escaped into the night. Philip summoned Alexander back, but when a Persian satrap offered his daughter to the prince, the king refused and exiled Alexander’s henchman Ptolemy. Soon afterwards the Macedonian vanguard left for Asia.

In July 336, at Aegae, the family was again together for the wedding of Alexander’s sister Cleopatra to his mother’s brother, Alexander of Epiros (the clan had a lot of Cleopatras and Alexanders). Philip was exuberant: his new wife had just given birth to a daughter. The day after the wedding, he presided over games, then entered a theatre to watch a show accompanied by the two Alexanders, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd. Suddenly one of his Bodyguards Pausanias lunged and stabbed him in the heart. Attended by Alexander, he died as Pausanias was chased by the guards. Pausanias’ motives are mysterious. He had been Philip’s lover, but when the king moved on to another youth Pausanias had mocked the new boy as a ‘hermaphrodite’. The new lover had complained to his friend Attalus, who trapped Pausanias, raped him and then handed him over to his slaves, who gang-raped him. Argead court life was not for the fainthearted. Olympias was more than capable of suborning an assassin. Philip had already decided that Alexander would remain at home as regent, missing out on the Asian adventure – for Alexander the last straw. The Bodyguards caught and crucified Pausanias before he could speak.

Alexander was led out of the theatre by his father’s general Antipater and proclaimed king, whereupon he ordered the murder of rival princes – and of Attalos. Then Olympias murdered Philip’s baby daughter, and her teenaged mother Cleopatra committed suicide. Philip was cremated on a pyre, his bones then washed in wine and placed in the gold larnax box in the family’s Aegae tomb. Hearing of this in Susa or Pasargadae, Darius III must have reflected that Philip had ruled Greece for scarcely five years before Macedonia dissolved in blood-spattered chaos.

Alexander III, short, compact and fair, maybe redheaded like his father, was a man of action, destroying a Theban rebellion by razing the city, slaughtering 6,000 Thebans and enslaving 30,000. He was idealized thanks to his extraordinary career, but he was both exceptional and typical of a Macedonian king. He was a born killer, living in a state of ferocious, energetic vigilance, hand on sword: killing was at once a necessity, an inclination and a profession, essential for survival and success. He ruled amid an informal macho entourage of interrelated nobles, aware that their connecting threads were woven around him. These men had called Alexander’s father ‘Philip son of Amyntas’ and regarded ‘Alexander son of Philip’ as first among equals – a view that later become dangerous. Alexander’s friends served as the Bodyguards, led by his soulmate and lover Hephaistion, a capable royal page who had studied under Aristotle with him and his trusted henchman Ptolemy.

As a Greek, Alexander existed in a world illuminated by Aristotle’s philosophy but also bestridden by gods, spirits and humans descended from divinity. He believed like all his contemporaries that gods, often close at hand in their human guise, decided everything. As a king he presided over the sacrifices and regularly asked his diviners to read the livers of the slaughtered animals. He saw himself too in terms of the Homeric and mythical heroes. As a boy one of his slaves nicknamed him Achilles – and he believed it.

In spring 334, accompanied by 48,000 infantry and 6,100 cavalry, he crossed to Asia on an adventure in the footsteps of gods. He jumped off the boat and threw his javelin into the sand, then sacrificed to Zeus, Athena and his ancestor Hercules. Then he proceeded to Achilles’ shrine at Troy. By identifying with Achilles, Alexander drew attention to his own semi-divine brilliance as warrior, his leadership of a band of Companions, his friendship with Hephaistion (his own Patroclus) and perhaps his expectation of a short heroic life. If the gods blessed him, he would conquer.

When his soldiers advanced into Anatolia, they encountered first the armies of Darius’ satraps led by the Greek mercenary Memnon of Rhodes, brother of Mentor who had fought so well for Artaxerxes III and husband of the beautiful Persian girl Barsine, who had met Alexander when they were young. On the River Granicus near Troy, two Persian satraps charged at Alexander, riding at the forefront of his cavalry on his favourite horse Bucephalas, and struck his helmet, but he was rescued at the last minute by his old nurse’s son Cleitus. He won – and marched on.

Darius was overconfident: he should have rushed to destroy Alexander as soon as he could. He left his queens and daughters at Damascus then marched his huge army of over 100,000 to Issus, south-east Türkiye, where the king of kings in his golden chariot, surrounded by 10,000 Immortals, faced Alexander’s 40,000. Aiming to demoralize the enemy and transform numerical disadvantage into kinetic aggression, Alexander charged straight at Darius, hacking his way through Immortal flesh, ignoring a stab in the thigh, hoping to knock out the king himself, until they must have locked eyes. The Persians lost their nerve. As his troops fell back, Darius raced away on his grey horse, leaving 20,000 dead, and returned to Babylon, his priority being empire, not reckless courage.

Afterwards in Darius’ tent, Alexander mused, ‘Let’s cleanse ourselves in Darius’ bath.’

‘No, Alexander’s bath,’ replied his aide. His paladin Parmenion galloped south to secure Darius’ family. When the diminutive Alexander entered the imperial tent with the strapping Hephaistion, the queens – Darius’ mother Sisygambis and his sister-wife Stateira with her daughters – fell to their knees before the taller man. Hephaistion was embarrassed. Alexander touchingly corrected them by saying, ‘He’s Alexander too,’ and raised them to their feet, content to treat them as queens. Here too he met an old acquaintance – Barsine, half-Persian, half-Greek widow of both her uncles Mentor and Memnon. Alexander lost his virginity to her – late for a Macedonian.

For his family Darius offered a regal ransom – Syria, Ionia and Anatolia – and marriage to his daughter. Parmenion advised acceptance.

‘If I was Parmenion,’ replied Alexander, ‘I’d accept too, but I am Alexander.’ He then wrote to Darius: ‘I’ve already defeated you and your satraps in battle and now, since the gods give all to me, I control you and your country. Do not write to me again as an equal … Think of me as the master of everything you have.’

ALEXANDER, ROXANE AND CHANDRAGUPTA: WORLD KING, AFGHAN QUEEN, INDIAN KING

Alexander swung southwards, with Hephaistion in command of his fleet shadowing and provisioning him from the coast. Marching towards Egypt, which fascinated him, he took Sidon, but Tyre, aided by its sister city Carthage, defied him. When Tyre fell, Alexander let his troops run amok, massacring 8,000 Tyrians and crucifying 2,000. He planned vengeance against Carthage. On the way into Egypt, he massacred every person in Gaza.

At Memphis he had himself crowned pharaoh, son of Amun-Ra, and descended the Nile by royal barge to visit Amun’s home, the Temple of Luxor, where he ordered the engravings that still show him as Lord of Both Lands. Back at the Nilotic delta, he founded a city named Alexandria.

Now that Alexander had become a god, his retinue questioned why he was dallying in the land of mummies while Darius was mustering in Babylon. But the god-king was keen to visit the famous Oracle at Siwah, an oasis in the Libyan desert, to confirm his apotheosis. After an exciting pilgrimage across the Sahara, accompanied by Ptolemy and Hephaistion, he was told by the oracle that he was indeed the son of Amun, Horus. He asked if the murder of Philip had been avenged, maybe to lift suspicion from his mother or himself, though he never revealed the answer. But Parmenion’s son Philotas mocked the idea that Alexander’s father was Zeus–Amun: Philip was his father.

Darius moved towards Nineveh (Mosul) and waited on the plain at Gaugamela. As Alexander marched into Iraq, he learned that Darius’ wife Stateira had died in childbirth: the baby was almost certainly Alexander’s. The possession of her body was the possession of Persia. Was she seduced by Alexander? Raped?

At dawn on 1 October 331, Parmenion found Alexander oversleeping, a sign of his preternatural calm and confidence. Darius presided over the centre of his army. Alexander, at the head of his cavalry, suddenly charged obliquely across the field into the Persian left, cleaving their line. Darius then led a chariot charge, ordering his archers to fire at the king, outstanding in his golden breastplate and purple cloak, while a corps of cavalry was to liberate his mother and wives. But Alexander wheeled round the rear and headed for Darius, who galloped off the battlefield, heading across the Zagros to Ecbatana (Iran).

Alexander now assumed a new title, king of Asia, but his Companions remained dubious: Philotas mockingly said that he felt sorry for the Persians since they were fighting a demi-god. An officer offered to assassinate Alexander for Philotas. Philotas discouraged him but reported nothing. Alexander next took Babylon, where he honoured the god Marduk, whom he regarded as another Zeus. He pursued Darius, first taking Susa where he admired the inscription of Hammurabi’s law code from ancient times, then Parsa where he avenged the Persian burning of the temples of Athens. Legend recounts a drunken party at which the hetaira Thaïs encouraged Alexander to pillage the royal city, legend thus typically blaming a woman for the mayhem. No doubt there was much carousing, but he needed no encouragement. Parmenion warned against the destruction, but Alexander had promised his army ‘the most hated city in Asia’. The Macedonians ransacked the palaces, raping, killing, torturing, enslaving, smashing over 600 vessels of alabaster, lapis, marble, even decapitating a Greek statue – and Alexander systemically burned the palaces.

Alexander chased Darius towards Rhagae (Teheran), where in July 330 the king’s cousin Bessus, satrap of Bactria, murdered him and declared himself king. Darius’ body was still warm when Alexander arrived. Alexander wept and had the last of the House of Cyrus buried in the family tombs.^*

The Companions may have hoped the pursuit was now over, but Alexander reorganized his entourage and set off on a year-long, 1,000-mile manhunt for Bessus, first into Helmand in Afghanistan, where he started to wear a Persian tunic and the royal tiara. In his spare moments, he cavorted with a beautiful young Persian eunuch who sang like an angel. When one of the pages informed the general Philotas of a plot to assassinate Alexander, he again did not report it, so the page went to Alexander directly. Even though Philotas had not conspired himself, Alexander launched a purge, holding a series of show trials accusing Philotas and his father Parmenion of high treason. The soldiers stoned Philotas to death, while Alexander sent hitmen to kill Parmenion. As his army marched further into Afghanistan – where Alexander founded a second Alexandria near Bagram, and another that became Kandahar (Iskandera) – he appointed Hephaistion and Cleitus as his deputies with the new title chiliarch.^*

When the snows melted, they climbed up through the Hindu Kush – Killer of Hindus – like Hercules, and chased Bessus into Bactria and Sogdiana, where he was captured by Ptolemy before being publicly executed by being tied to two bent trees and then torn apart. The Afghans resisted; Alexander slaughtered thousands, burned towns, destroyed temples and desecrated the Avesta – earning himself the title the Accursed. Though he was wounded again in skirmishes, Alexander’s amazing constitution ensured that he rapidly healed and he established tense winter quarters in Markanda (Samarkand), where his Companions demanded a return to Macedonia.

At a drunken symposium, his general Cleitus the Black, who had once saved his life, mocked his divine despotism and his lesser talents compared to his father Philip, ending by reminding him, ‘This is the hand that saved your life.’ Alexander tossed aside his goblet, threw an apple at Cleitus, then jumped up from his couch, grabbed a spear from a Bodyguard and ran at him, only to be restrained by Ptolemy and a general called Perdiccas who begged him to forgive a man who was almost family. Alexander stormed out, seized another spear from the guards and waited. When Cleitus staggered out, Alexander speared him to death. He repented for days, then returned to war.

Alexander advanced into Sogdiana (Tajikistan/Afghanistan), where a local warlord Huxshiartas defied him from his impregnable fortress, the Rock. Alexander sent his Macedonians to scale the eyrie. After its fall, Huxshiartas offered his daughter Roxane – Rauxshana, Bright Star – who became Alexander’s wife in a Persian marriage, a new affront to his Macedonian officers. He demanded they make the proskynesis, prostration, owed to a Persian king. This was a long way from the matey informality of Macedonian companionship. Outraged officers and even the court historian Callisthenes, great-nephew of Aristotle, refused to prostrate themselves, and a group of pages conspired to kill Alexander in his sleep and put his elder brother Arrhidaios on the throne. But the king stayed out all night on a drinking spree and the culprits were arrested then stoned to death.

Now in 327, Bactria and Sogdiana secured, Alexander emulated Hercules by invading ‘India’ through the Khyber Pass, bursting into the Punjab , recruiting Indian princelings as allies and receiving dissidents from local kingdoms who may have included a young Indian exile named Chandragupta.

His two-year Indian campaign only penetrated what is now Pakistan and appears in no Indian sources because he never threatened the Nanda or Gangaridai kingdoms of northern and eastern India, but the Macedonians also encountered city states resembling Greek poleis. Alexander defeated the army of the raja of the Pauravas, the seven-foot Puru who fought from the back of one of his war elephants. Alexander may have sent Chandragupta to negotiate an alliance with Puru; he was certainly eager for further conquests. Nearing Amritsar, the army was now close to mutiny. At a council, the older generals advised a return to the Mediterranean, promising to join Alexander against Carthage: even his friends Hephaistion and Ptolemy said nothing. After an Achillean sulk in his tent, Alexander agreed to leave India, but in his own adventurous fashion, solving the mystery of the South Ocean by descending the Indus to the Gulf of Arabia and thence to Babylon. On the way, still infuriated by the reluctance of his troops to storm a hostile city, he scaled the ladders first and then jumped down almost alone into the fray. An arrow hit him in the side, puncturing his lung, and he collapsed, only just rescued by his frenzied troops who slaughtered the defenders in revenge. Air bubbled bloodily out of the wound – yet Alexander recovered.^*

After just surviving a desert crossing, Alexander made it back to Susa, where the royal Persian women awaited him. There, ever practical, he decided to merge the elites of his new empire, Macedonians and Persians, in a mass multicultural wedding. The Macedonians hated this forced splicing. Such relationships between conquered and conqueror were a way of founding enduring empires through children with a familial stake in a hybrid realm. During a three-day fiesta, a hundred couples were married on a hundred couches, with wedding presents, silver and purple robes, silverplate and jewels, and a Persian bridal tent for each. At its heart was the ultimate royal marriage: Alexander married Darius’ daughter, young Stateira, and Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes III. Kings, distrusting their own families, have to make their own: Hephaistion married Darius’ other daughter Drypetis. Alexander was crafting an Argead–Haxamanishiya world dynasty.

DEATH IN BABYLON: THE KILLING COMMENCES

Instead of administering his empire from his capital Babylon, Alexander could not resist more expeditions, sailing down the Tigris towards the Gulf and back up to Opis, where his army mutinied. Alexander ordered Seleukos,^* commander of the Silvershield guards, to execute the rebels and then, after addressing the troops on the achievements of his father and himself, he was reconciled with his army. Paranoid about the loyalty of his satraps in an atmosphere of rising menace and megalomania, he purged his entourage, killing four of his satraps, sacking four (four more died or were executed), and recalled his longstanding Macedonian viceroy, Antipater.

Suddenly he lost the man he most trusted: Hephaistion died after a drinking bout. Alexander was poleaxed, murdered Hephaistion’s doctor, cut the manes off his horses, extinguished the sacred fires of Persia, the signal for the death of a king, and ordered the carving of a lion sculpture that still stands in Hamadan.

Back in Babylon, where he lived in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace with wives, mistresses, eunuchs and Companions Ptolemy and Seleukos, Alexander – in between wild drinking bouts, gambling parties and boating trips, sometimes dressing up with horns as the god Amun-Ra – received ambassadors, threatened the Carthaginians with conquest, planned a new expedition into Arabia and proposed the building of an Egyptian pyramid bigger than Giza. He was unsentimental about love but he needed an heir and now he conceived a child with Queen Roxane.

Four days before he was due to invade Arabia, he fell ill with a fever. With his courtiers panicking and conspiring, his soldiers filed past his bed, as doctors bled and purged him. He requested he should buried divinely and pharaonically – at Siwah in the Libyan desert – then gave his ring to his long-serving Bodyguard Perdiccas, chiliarch since Hisphaiston’s death, to enable him to conduct business while he was ill. He joked weakly but with characteristic realism that he left everything ‘to the strongest’ or ‘the best’. His successors would have to compete like contestants at a funeral games. Then he sank into a coma, dying, whether of booze, poison, typhoid or old wounds reinfected, at thirty-two.

The killing started at once. Family rivalry and cold politics were entwined: the pregnant Roxane, convinced she was carrying a boy, heard that Stateira was pregnant – any child of hers would be certain to succeed. Forging a royal order in the chaos, she invited the Persian queens to Babylon and poisoned both Stateira and Parysatis, daughters of Darius III and Artaxerxes III, while Sisygambis starved herself to death – thereby ending the dynasty.

Perdiccas, chiliarch, claimed the regency and murdered an officer who challenged him. The meetings of the grandees were tense. Perdiccas assigned jobs and provinces: Seleukos became chiliarch; Ptolemy asked for and received Egypt. While Egyptian sacred taxidermists embalmed Pharaoh Alexander’s body, the paladins debated who should succeed him, considering his five-year-old son Hercules by his Persian lover Barsine, but Alexander’s brother Arrhidaios was present. He was not capable of ruling but they chose him as Philip III – to share the throne with Roxane’s unborn foetus. Weeks later she gave birth triumphantly to the joint king Alexander IV. Far away in Greece, Olympias, Alexander’s mother, offered Alexander’s sister Cleopatra to Perdiccas who, in possession of one dead king and two live ones as well as the main army and backed by his able chiliarch Seleukos, was poised to rule the empire until the baby Alexander IV grew up. As the king had predicted on his deathbed, the swaggering paladins who had conquered the world – ‘men whose greed recognizes no limits set by sea, mountain or desert and whose desires overleap even the boundaries that define Europe and Asia’, in the words of the historian Plutarch – were unlikely to be confined to any small province, and all of them, infected with the World Game of Alexander, rushed to seize whatever they could.

The shrewdest, Ptolemy, boyhood friend of Alexander, Bodyguard and Companion, now departed to take possession of Egypt.

In 321, as Perdiccas tried to win control of Anatolia, Philip III, baby Alexander IV and Queen Roxane escorted Alexander’s colossal and sumptuous hearse. Gold-embossed, myrrh-scented, sculpted with Ionic columns, figurines of Nike at each corner and busts of Ammon’s sacred horned ibex, friezes of elephants and lions, the vast hearse containing Alexander’s Egyptian human-shaped coffin and embalmed mummy, pulled by sixty-four bejewelled mules, and a guard of honour of elephants and guardsmen, wended its slow glorious way towards Aegae. As it hove into view, it must have presented a fabulous spectacle, but it was even more welcome to Ptolemy.

Somewhere in Syria, Ptolemy kidnapped the sarcophagus – history’s ultimate corpse-napping – and escorted it back to display in Memphis. Although the kings arrived safely in Greece, Perdiccas, outraged, marched down to Egypt to steal back the world-conquering mummy, but Ptolemy defeated him, whereupon Seleukos assassinated Regent Perdiccas. In the carve-up of empire that followed, Ptolemy kept Egypt, Seleukos was given Babylon and the long-serving general One-Eyed Antigonus controlled central Anatolia. In the ensuing wars, Seleukos lost Iraq, returning to serve Ptolemy in Egypt, and Antigonus emerged as a surprise winner.

The fighting between the paladins was complex, vicious and ever changing. Each time one gained ascendancy, the others banded together to stop him. Olympias, now fifty-five, was the homicidal equal of the men. In 317, the queen seized Macedonia to support baby Alexander IV and his mother Roxane, opposed by her stepson Philip III. Olympias won and at once murdered Philip, but within months another general had seized and tried her. When the soldiers refused to shed Alexander’s blood, they instead stoned her to death. King Alexander IV and Roxane were imprisoned; meanwhile Hercules and his mother Barsine lived quietly in Anatolia. But no one had forgotten them. Alexander’s family was dwindling in a cut-throat competition to liquidate all rivals.

* Mrduniya was son of the Great King’s nephew as well as his son-in-law, husband of Darius’ daughter, Artozostra. In one of the few family tablets found in royal archives, Darius dictates: ‘Darius the King commands “Give 100 sheep in my estate to my daughter Artozostra. April 506.”’ The letter, written not in the Persian of his royal inscriptions but in Elamite, reveals how he gave orders orally that were then written on to tablets by his courtiers and dispatched.

* ‘Go tell the Spartans, passer-by,’ read the poignant inscription, ‘that here obedient to their laws we lie.’

* Soon after Salamis, a Greek of good family was born in Halicarnassus (Bodrum) in Ionia, Persian territory, later moving to Athens, whence he travelled the Eurasian world, visiting Egypt (possibly with an Athenian fleet), Tyre and Babylon before settling in an Athenian colony in Calabria, Italy. When he was thirty-five, he started to write what he called ‘the demonstration of an enquiry’ whose purpose was ‘to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements’. He was Herodotos; enquiry in Greek was historie and he called the book Historiai, inventing history prose as a genre, history as a science of evidence – some of his stories were outlandish but much has been confirmed as fact – but also as a cultural weapon. Even though as many Greeks had fought for the Persians as against them, his history helped create a narrative of western – Hellenic – superiority over barbarous Persian autocracy. Herodotos’ tales were typical of the Greek version of Persian history that influenced all western historiography up to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Europeans traced their cultural superiority over Asians and others to the ancient Greeks.

* He launched the play The Persians by Aeschylus, the first instance of the literature that promoted the legend of Greek superiority over Persian despotism.

* Enslaved persons were often manumitted (freed) – ‘slaves more than freemen,’ wrote Xenophon later, ‘need hope’ – and children of masters and enslaved women were born free (unlike in Atlantic slavery).

* Socrates used this trial to promote his ideas. He was ordered to take poison. Socrates’ student Plato preserved the master’s sayings and proposed an ideal state in his Republic. Their quest for virtue was part of the evolving Greek focus on humanity: his contemporary Protagoras argued that ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ while on Kos a doctor, Hippocrates – whose father and sons were physicians too – started to categorize and diagnose diseases caused by nature and not gods: he was said to have noted that the swelling of fingers could be a sign of heart disease. One of the diseases these doctors identified was called karkinos – the crab – which was later known as cancer.

* The Persian and Greek worlds were thoroughly interlinked. While Greek writers promoted Greek superiority, half the Greeks lived in the Persian empire. Even the victor of the battle of Salamis, the Athenian strategos Themistocles, had ended up serving Xerxes; Alcibiades was as at home with Persian satraps as he was with Spartan kings. Young Cyrus’ commander, Xenophon, now had to fight his way back to Greece, an exploit he recounted in his Anabasis, the first soldier’s memoir – while our source for the Persian court is the Greek royal doctor, Ctesias.

* Darius’ pragmatic mother, Sisygambis, did not mourn him, never having forgiven him for abandoning her at Issus. ‘I have one son,’ she said, ‘and he is King of Persia.’ She meant Alexander.

* Commander of a Thousand, a Greek version of the Persian rank hazahrapatish – Master of the Thousand – that denoted field marshal and chief minister of the Great King.

* Back in Athens, as Alexander, believing himself a god, hacked his way to India, his tutor Aristotle, himself a disciple of Plato, was teaching his Lyceum students about his experiments with natural organisms that established scientific enquiry by experimentation, later the foundation of science, and his philosophy that humans should ‘strive to live according to the finest thing that is within us’ – reason.

* Starting as one of King Philip’s pages, Seleukos was one of the few paladins satisfied with his Persian marriage: he wed Apama, daughter of a Bactrian warlord Spitamana – a happy union that founded one of the great dynasties of the ancient world.