Dividing the Spoils: the War for Alexander the Greats Empire Free

FREE DIVIDING THE SPOILS: THE WAR FOR ALEXANDER THE GREATS EMPIRE PDF Robin Waterfield | 273 pages | 04 May 2011 | Oxford University Press Inc | 9780195395235 | English | New York, United States Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire | Oxford University Press They had been uncertain as to their future and far from home; their situation was not much different now. Would the king stage yet another miraculous recovery to cement the loyalty of his troops and enhance his aura of divinity? Or was the rumor true, and was bloodshed sure to follow? Only two days earlier, many of his men had insisted on seeing him with their own eyes. They were troubled by the thought that their king was already dead, after more than a week of reported illness, and that for complex court reasons the truth was being concealed. Knowing that he was in the palace, they had more or less forced their way past his bodyguards. They had been allowed to file past the shrouded Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Greats Empire, where a pale figure waved feebly at them. As time passed, it became clear that this time it was true: Alexander the Great, conquering king and savior god, was dead. At the time of his death in Babylon, around 3. He had recklessly exposed himself to danger time after time, but apart from war wounds—more than one of which was potentially fatal, especially in those days of inadequate doctoring—he had hardly been ill in his life and was as fit as any of the veterans in his army. How had such a man fallen ill? This Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Greats Empire friend had been the only man he could Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Greats Empire, his second-in-command, and the one true love of his life. If anyone was inured to heavy drinking, it was Alexander, and his symptoms do not fit alcohol poisoning. Excessive drinking, however, along with grief and old wounds especially the lung that was perforated in Indiamay have weakened his system. The accounts of his symptoms are puzzling. They are fairly precise, but do not perfectly fit any recognizable cause. One innocent possibility is that he died of malaria. He had fallen ill Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Greats Empire years previously in Cilicia, which was notorious for its malaria up until the s. Perhaps he had a fatal recurrence of the disease in Babylon. And, as in an Agatha Christie novel, there were plenty of people close at hand who might have liked to see him dead. It was not just that some of them entertained world-spanning ambitions, soon to be revealed. For some years, Olympias had been in voluntary exile from Macedon, back in her native Molossia the mountainous region of Epirus whose kings, at this moment in Epirote history, were the de facto rulers of the Epirote League. Unable to be supreme in Macedon, and irrevocably hostile to Antipater, Olympias returned to the foundation of her power. But she never stopped plotting her return to the center. She was widely known to have been involved in a number of high-profile assassinations, and was a plausible candidate for the invisible hand behind the murder of her husband, Philip II, insince it seemed as though he was planning to dislodge her and Alexander from their position as favorites. Recently, however, such summonses had acquired the habit of turning into traps. Antipater had good reason to think that he would be executed on some charge or other, just as other powerful and seemingly loyal officials had been. His mission had not gone well. Whatever the facts, it was a perfect opportunity for Olympias to sow mischief against her chief enemies. But even if Olympias was wrong about Antipater and his sons, there were plenty of others who could feel uncomfortable if people started speculating and looking for motives. As it turned out, even bloodthirsty Alexander would have been proud of the scope of their ambitions: they embroiled the known world in decades of war. Philip II came to the Macedonian throne in Within four or five years, by a combination of diplomacy, assassination, and military force, he had warded off internal and external threats and united the various cantons under his autocratic rule. It became clear that the Greek states to the south were his next target. He improved on Greek infantry tactics and developed the army until he had a stupendous fighting force at his personal command. He could call on two thousand cavalry and thirty thousand soldiers trained to high professional standards and equipped with superior weaponry. Many Greek states would have to unite in order to field an army of comparable size. Their failure to do so meant that he could pick them off one by one, or league by league. Athens became the focus of what little resistance there was to Macedon, but it was the last gasp of traditional Greek city-state autonomy. War, financed in part by Persia, was waged in a ragged fashion by Athens and its allies against Philip, until in he marched south. Numbers were almost equal. The battle was so hotly contested that the elite Theban Sacred Band died nearly to a man, and the Athenians too suffered crippling casualties. Almost the first action Philip took as ruler of southern Greece was to form the conquered states into a league, the Hellenic League or League of Corinth, with himself at its head. Interstate conflict was outlawed, and so Philip, a Macedonian king, took the first step toward Greek statehood, finally attained over two thousand years later. In return for votes on the league council, every state was obliged, when called upon, to supply troops for military expeditions. Though that was distant history, the Greeks had never forgotten or forgiven; Persia was the common enemy, and public speakers ever since had fanned the flames of Greek supremacism and revenge. It is a sordid tale, but worth repeating for the insight it affords into the Macedonian court. Pausanias therefore killed the king. In a series of amazing and closely fought battles, he crushed the Persians and took control of the empire. In Alexander annihilated the Persians near Issus, not far from the border between Cilicia and Syria. Alexander returned to Phoenicia and protected his rear by taking Egypt in By the time he returned from Egypt and Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Greats Empire east again, Darius had had almost two years in which to gather another army. Battle was joined near the village of Gaugamela, close to the Tigris, on October 1, It was the end of the empire; it had been ruled by the Achaemenid house for over two hundred years. Babylon Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Greats Empire Susa opened their gates without a fight, and the rest of the empire lay open to his unstoppable energy. A minor defeat near Persepolis hardly delayed his taking the city, the old capital of the Persian heartland. In the summer of he marched on Ecbatana. Darius fled before him with a scorched-earth strategy, but was killed by some of his own satraps and courtiers. The conspirators fought on, in a bloody and ultimately futile war, basing themselves in the far eastern satrapy of Bactria. Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Greats Empire appalling and unjustifiable desert journey decimated his ranks and undermined his popularity, which was further weakened by measures that were perceived as an attempt to share power with native elites. In Susa, in Aprilhe and all the senior Macedonians and Greeks in his retinue took eastern wives. Alexander, already married to a Bactrian princess called Rhoxane, took two further wives, daughters of the last two Persian kings. But to many Macedonians and Greeks, all non-Greeks were by that very fact inferior beings. His territory was so vast that it helps to think of it in terms of a few major blocks of territory, defined not just by the geographical features such as mountain ranges or seas that formed their borders, but also by the fact that ripples spread by events within one block did not necessarily reach neighboring blocks. The European territories—Macedon, Greece, and Thrace—constitute one such block, separated from Asia by the narrow and critical Hellespont; Asia Minor is another, bordered to the east and southeast by formidable mountains. With its natural defenses of desert and sea, Egypt always considered itself a separate unit, and even under Achaemenid rule often strove for independence. Syria west of the Euphrates was caught between Asia and Egypt, and was long a bone of contention. Finally, east of the Euphrates the eastern satrapies stretched all the way to the Indus River in Pakistan. He was a driven man, and world conquest was his focus. He slaughtered by the thousands those who stood in his way. He thinned the ranks even—especially—of those closest to him at the slightest suspicion of conspiracy, or even disagreement with major policy decisions. One erstwhile close friend he ran through with a spear in a drunken rage. No wonder he was so furious when his troops mutinied in in India and his will was for once thwarted. That would have been tactless, and poor propaganda, since he had come to eliminate the hated Persian rulers, not to replace them. In addition to these symbolic differences, Alexander took practical steps to present himself as a different kind of king, not quite in the Persian or the Macedonian mold.

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