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funding for this program is provided by
Annenberg CPD to advance excellent
teaching he thought greatness in
everything he did he conquered the known
world in a few years and was thought to
be more God than man and when he died he
left behind warring empires a common
basis of Greek culture and a memory that
has fascinated men ever since Alexander
the Great this line on the Western
tradition
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and now UCLA professor Eugen Weber
continuing journey through the history
of Western civilization in the year 401
bc a persian prince raised a force a
very large force of about 12,000 Greek
mercenaries to fight his older brother
the King for the Persian thrill how the
prince was killed in the first major
battle and even though his Greek
mercenaries defeated the huge Persian
army the Greeks found themselves in the
middle of persia very close to Babylon
without any friends and without any
leaders they had to march a thousand
miles to the Black Sea coast and then
five hundred more miles along the coast
to Byzantium across horrible terrain and
fighting all the way but they made and
this epic long nah persuaded both Greeks
and non-greeks that the mercenaries
hoplite phalanx this wedge formation of
heavily armed infantry that the Phalanx
was invincible and they reasoned further
that if only the Greek infantry had good
cavalry support no power on earth could
withstand a prediction that turned out
to be as accurate as it seemed sweeping
the story of these mercenaries who were
known as the ten thousand was told by
one of them an Athenian soldier named
Xenophon and by the time telephone died
around 365 bc a new power was rising in
the ancient world that would bear out
the inspiration of the ten thousand
famous march the power of Macedon
the Macedonians were really Greeks but
the Greeks didn't consider them to be so
any more than 16th century Scots were
considered English these are Macedonian
ruins back in the 5th century before
Christ Macedonia was still a wild
country with a feudal system of rural
tribes and clans a hereditary King had
religious and military power over all
this and over his people at least in
theory this is what remains of the royal
palace although the macedonian royal
house and nobles were attracted by Greek
culture and quite Hellenized the land
remained a backwater until mid 4th
century BC when a Macedonian King named
Philip tamed the local wall he did it by
subjecting all free men to conscription
and by making him serve in regular royal
troops under his own office till it
copied the military methods of these
Greek soldiers but improved on them
combining the Phalanx with light
infantry and more importantly with a
heavy cavalry that the 10,000 never had
the macedonians could mount a formidable
cavalry force because their country had
great plains and broad estates where the
nobles especially road from their early
youth
as the world had surmised 50 years
before no power on earth was able to
stop them Philip set out with his army
to dominate or conquer most of the Greek
cities and he succeeded brilliantly not
only because he has a superior fighting
force highly integrated very loyal to
him but also because the Greek police
were divided even more divided than
usual the Persians have been working
hard to keep him that way so that they
would continue to fight each other
instead of the Persian Empire Philip was
able to beat the Greek poly handily but
the only thing that could then unite
them under his rule was an appeal to
them not as Athenians or as Corinthians
but as haley's Philip knew well to be a
Greek in those days was to be a free
citizen as contrasted to a barbarian
subject of a dead spot as the Persians
were it was to cherish the pride of
shallowness and Plataea great victories
over the Persian most important it was
to aspire to a fuller vengeance on the
invader of the past the Persians again
who still rule the Greek cities of the
Near East there was also the lost wealth
of those eastern cities to regain
and there were the presidents of myth
and legend in which heroes like Heracles
had done great deeds in here in fact
when Philips son Alexander the Great
crossed into Asia in 334 bc he took a
side trip to the site of ancient Troy to
convince his public that a new actually
Alexander himself was arming for the
traditional feud between Greek and Asia
and so from the beginning of the 4th
century BC we find the idea growing
among the Greeks of a war of reprisal
against the person a war of conquest in
Asia that would diffuse internal
conflict by turning Greek violence and
energy outward from the home such a war
could also open new areas for commercial
expansion and for colonization as it
were the Greeks were checked in the west
by the power of Carthage and they were
encountering local resistance to their
colonies in Italy in fact the Greek
colonial world haven't grown since the
seventh and the sixth centuries BC but
it needed to grow because constant
warfare so hurt the economy and
especially the agriculture that it could
support even a stagnant population so
Greece sent out some of its success
people art event like this blacksmith
the young and adventurous artists and
scholars and engineers and traders but
it founded no new cities and it found no
real solution to its problems of
overpopulation except for war all these
arguments for a war against the Persians
were invoked by the macedonians but they
didn't always work because many Greeks
liked the macedonians even less than
they like the Persians who were further
away and not as familiar still as long
as Philip and his son Alexander
proclaimed themselves champions of
hellenism even if they couldn't talk
some cities into supporting them at
least they could chain them into staying
neutral the Macedonians also worked hard
to intimidate the Greek mercenaries who
were in the habit of helling themselves
to the highest bidder which was
dangerous because the great king of
Persia could bid a lot higher than
Philip and Alexander good but the
mercenaries quickly got the message when
they were declared traitors to the
national cause to the Hellenic cause and
massacred or sent off to work in the
minds of slaves which was a lot worse
than being killed and so a national war
to conquer the Persian Empire in Asia
became the grand design although King
Philip was assassinated in 336 BC before
he could carry it out his son Alexander
proved equal to the top
alexander who was 20 when he succeeded
his father was a pupil of aristotle he
had red telephone and he knew what could
be done and what could be one in asia so
in 334 bc he led the greek and
macedonian forces across the Hellespont
into Asia Minor he then overthrew the
Persian Empire he conquered all the
lands from Libya to Afghanistan he
created a Grieco macedonian empire that
would spread Greeks and hellenism all
over the east and he did all this in
only 11 years after which he died of a
fever in babylon aged 32 or 33 alexander
was truly one of the greatest generals
of all time and a megalomaniac of genius
time has softened his more brutal
aspects but it's worth remembering that
the ruthless macedonian general
cassandra knew Alexander as a young men
could never pass his statue without
shuddering because Alexander's conquest
seemed impossible everybody except those
who knew him thought he was more than a
hero he was a god soon Alexander decided
that he should be treated as a god which
was also rather convenient because it
fitted in with oriental traditions where
the divinity of a king was the basis of
his authority one of Alexander's
bequests to history would be the memory
of his megalomaniac ambition and the
league account that grew up around him
it would later inspire ambitious and
ruthless men who wanted to equal his
achievements
men like Julius Caesar an approach
another aspect of this extraordinary man
was the way she appears to behave as the
philosopher king of the kind that Plato
described and that Aristotle may have
trained him to be Alexander made sure
that philosophers and scientists would
be part of his expeditions to observe
and record everything they could and he
sought greatness in everything she did
when he burnt down the persian royal
palace at Persepolis in retaliation for
the Persians burning of Athens a century
and a half before he followed it up with
a mass marriage between Persian maidens
and Greek noble a symbol of the fusion
he hoped to accomplish of Greeks and
other peoples in order to create one
great everlasting him but reality
couldn't be been to obey Alexander's
dream the world his conquests brought
together were two different and when she
died they split apart these new empires
and the culture they represented were
neither Greek nor Asian but rather a bit
of both which is why they are described
not as Hellenic not purely Greek but as
Hellenistic the subsequent period called
the Hellenistic age span the three
eventful centuries between the death of
Alexander in 323 BC and this in 30
before Christ of Cleopatra who was
descended from one of Alexander's
general it was an age that looks
remarkably like our own time we find the
same reversion from representative
institutions to authoritarian regimes
the same sense of psychological and
aesthetic fragmentation the same anti
rationalist trends the same
self-absorbed interest in the self the
same obsessive pursuit of affluence
exotic cult peculiars had astrology
magic eroticism the same preoccupation
with bigness the same detachment from
the home town with a concomitant but not
very comforting feeling that the whole
cosmos is your policy the same social
conflicts and class wars and colonialism
and wars of national liberation designed
to expel foreign oppressors and to allow
the locals to impress each other the
same bureaucracy more interested in
making and keeping rules rather than in
making things more productive or more
efficient the same retreat from
political involvement the same cringing
sense of depersonalization in the big
city in megalopolis a place of which
name actually exists in Greece in
Arcadia so let's take a closer look at
this strangely familiar period the
states that Alexander's generals founded
in the Hellenistic age like that
abdallah me in Egypt or selalu Coast in
Babylon these states were traditional
monit is highly regulated and
bureaucratic but the cities and the
royal court and the armies and the
higher officials were mostly Greeks with
cosmopolitan Greek values
although the greek for macedonians
intermarried with a local people and a
lot of the locals were Hellenized none
of this integration went very deep the
difference was too great between the
people in the relatively sophisticated
relatively free literate greek-speaking
urban sense and the people in the am
free countries idled immense regions
where the King exercised direct
authority as absolute master over his
servants subjects Greeks were reluctant
to accept the authority of monarchs who
demanded a duration in the Oriental
fashion and they didn't believe in their
divinity or infallibility either instead
the Greeks continue to maintain that law
and institutions were products of reason
not of some divine revelation so there
was no true cultural synthesis in the
Hellenistic age as you can see from this
Roman fresco of Syria on the right
contemplating Macedonia the two cultures
remained mostly suspicious and
contemptuous of one another even though
they lived side by side one way of
looking at the Greek and macedonian
colonies during this period is to
compare them with the settlements of the
British in India in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries in both cases an
expatriate ruling class in an ocean of
foreigners keep the flag flying in their
clubs and continents with their peculiar
social rituals which are designed to
mark not synthesis but distinction and
superiority this kind of separatism
could provide no basis for real
integration nor was any kind of
integration design
tired but it did offer impressive model
for the surrounding population just as
british north and administrative
practices and the english language and
even cricket have been taken over and
adapted in india and throughout the rest
of the empire which the British hold no
more I'm integrated as these Greek and
macedonian cities were in the
Hellenistic age they were going to be
vehicles of hellenization spreading
Greek culture institutions ideals tiles
and language as far away from Greece as
Afghanistan and India let me give you an
example these are the ruins of a Greek
city on the northern border of
Afghanistan but I can move we know that
the men who founded the city probably
came from Thessaly in central Greece and
from the inscription on the pillar we
know also that another Greek probably a
philosopher made an extraordinary
journey here presumably because he knew
he would find communities interested in
hearing him lecture
in this particular city which was only
excavated about 20 years ago there was a
gymnasium that very great institution of
culture and training where use met for
exercise and discussion and there was a
large administration area which
contained the library this papyrus
document was found in the library ruins
and it's written in Greek and here is
the temple inside the city walls and the
residential area with mosaic floor
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and all sorts of things that typifies a
Greek city and the in Greek institutions
and Greek traditions continued strong
here at the end of the world until the
city was destroyed by nomads from the
steps in the late 2nd century so this is
how the Greeks exported their urban
culture to love the Hellenistic world
the world which grew to be larger and
more closely linked than anything before
when Alexander's wars of conquest were
over he had quadrupled the size of the
Greeks known world and that gave a great
impetus to travel and trade most of the
Overland trade went by caravan over
tracks beaten hard by the hooves of pack
animals but the Persian kings had also
built an impressive post world which ran
1500 miles from Sardis on the coast to
their capital at souza it was lined with
tables with hostelries with force during
the Hellenistic age roads and tracks
were used mostly by soldiers and
officials but they also improve the
movement of goods when these couldn't be
shipped by water which ones of course
much is and this trade was going to grow
tremendously because the wealth of
rulers handled cities increasingly
dependent on exchange with other regions
in fact Hellenistic rulers were really
merchant princes
there were trade expeditions to Africa
and Arabia and India for elephants and
incense and spices and slate the size of
merchant ships kept growing as will
Syracuse in Sicily even launched a ship
with a capacity of 4,500 tongue and the
circulation of money grew too this is a
silver coin from Phoenicia and here is
one from syracuse
at the same time a Greek dialect called
coin a was providing a common language
from Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea which
greatly facilitated trade and the spread
of Hellenistic culture as well a Greek
intellectual like this physician could
feel equally at home in Alexandria which
was in Egypt or in Syracuse in Sicily
actors had international associations
with chapters in every important city
like the guild of Dionysiac artists and
athletes join such groups as the
International Boxing Association and if
you wanted to worship God it is like
Isis here you could find their temples
wherever in width and so in the 200
years before the birth of Christ ideas
fashions and goods were spreading
remarkably fast ironically it was the
decay of the classical Greek Polly so
admired for centuries it was it decay
that gave birth to this new era it
brought about an openness to the outside
world and the beginning of a certain
cosmopolitan even human solidarity and
this decay of the Polish which also
undermined the classical disciplines
with their order with a certain rigor or
at least a certain impersonality this
decay of civic bonds and discipline
permitted encourage a new spirit of
eclecticism that is highly
characteristic of the Hellenistic age we
shall see how this changed the way in
which people looked at their world then
and the way in which we look at our
world now in our next program so please
join us
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you
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