Alexander and the land that became Turkey
While his unwieldy force was crossing the Dardanelles, to face the waiting Persian armies on the Asian side, Alexander himself with 60 ships detoured slightly south, in order to land first at Troy, as according to Homer’s epic The Iliad (Ilium the Greek name for Troy) the Achaean Greeks had done indelibly generations before. But the memory was fresh. Above all, Alexander idolized Achilles, whom his mother Olympias, who claimed Achilles as an ancestor, must have encouraged him to emulate. “Always be the best, and win immortal fame.”
Now, as the royal trireme neared the site of Ilium, he sacrificed a bull to Poseidon, threw his spear into Asian soil, thus claiming the Persian Empire by right of conquest and leapt onto land. Approaching the tomb of Achilles, he stripped naked, anointed his body with oil, and ran three times around the tumulus, before laying his garland. At the same time, his friend and lover and fellow-soldier, Hephaistion, did the same at the nearby tomb of Patroclus, the beloved of Achilles.
It was the Macedonian pair’s public proclamation of their own unique relationship, that lasted and deepened till their deaths a decade later, first Hephaistion, at Ecbatana, and within the year, Alexander, at Babylon, of wounds and fever (and drink? grief? poison?). Periodically, an archeologist claims to have found Alexander’s sarcophagus, last seen at Egyptian Alexandria – taken there by one of his successor generals, Ptolemy – the most successful and lasting of the score of cities he founded and named for himself, one of them on Turkey’s southeastern coast, İskenderun (Alexandretta; “İskender” is Turkish for Alexander).
After Alexander had paid his homage to Achilles, he could meet the forward-positioned Persian army beside the Granicus River, successfully and move down the Aegean coast to the Mediterranean, His aim was to subdue the port cities that supplied the 300-ship Persian fleet. He had not enough ships of his own to defeat them at sea, so he would starve them out and deny them fresh water. The strategy succeeded.
Most of the cities of Ionia, Caria, Lycia, and Pamphylia peacefully welcomed the Macedonians as “liberators” from their Persian overlords. Alexander imposed no greater tribute payments, and, more importantly, allowed the democratic polities to remain democratic, the oligarchic to remain oligarchic. Greeks called this “freedom” and valued it above all other political benefits. Cities that resisted were besieged and punished: Miletus, Halicarnassus (Bodrum), Aspendus, Tyre.
After securing Side, a harbor for trade in slaves, timber and metals, General Alexander turned inland from Perge to rejoin the Royal Road to Susa in distant Iran. Passing through Cappadocia and Ankara, the gathering army, swelled by mercenaries (Alexander paid well), turned south through the Taurus Mountains’ Cilician Gates towards Tarsus. And in that region the Macedonian forces finally met the Great King of Kings, Darius III himself, and his even more populous armies, in pitched battles at Issus and, later, Gaugamela and Arbela. Now Alexander was in possession of the empire and vast treasury of the Persians. At Iranian Susa, Persepolis and Ecbatana, and further, in Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and northwest India, Alexander consolidated and extended his own empire, founding new cities and encouraging Greeks and Macedonians to intermarry with Persians and Asians (himself and Hephaistion included), and to spread Hellenic language and culture; setting up the Hellenistic age to come, after his death – engendering eventually the Roman Empire, worldwide Christianity, and other lasting trends (such as the writing of novels and romances, including those about Alexander himself). In 12 years Alexander refashioned and redirected world history.
The so-called “Alexander sarcophagus,” however worthy of his name, in Istanbul’s Archeological Museum, never held his bones. It was made for one of his friends and hunting companions, the King of Sidon. There it was dug up in the 19th century and brought to Constantinople by the famous painter and founder of the museum, Osman Hamdi Bey. Its deep-relief carvings of Alexander and his companions hunting lions and battling the Persians are surpassingly vital and artful.
If the spirit of Alexander needs an earthly resting place, this superbly modeled receptacle would be fitting, in the city – Istanbul – that straddles his two worlds of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. But Alexander the Great resists all efforts to be pinned down, geographically, spatially, or in images, concepts and words. Alexander exists for all who share his ravenousness for experience and dedication to imagination.
* Frank White is a professor emeritus at City University of New York and lives part of the year in Alanya, Turkey.
