A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [81]
The coin is about 3 centimetres (just over an inch) in diameter, slightly larger than a 2p piece. It bears the profile of a young man, with straight nose and strong jaw line, showing Classical good looks and strength. He’s gazing keenly into the distance; the tilt of the head is commanding, suggestive of vigorous forward movement. It is an image of a dead leader, but one clearly intended to carry a political message of power and authority now.
You find exactly the same phenomenon in modern China, where the red currency notes carry the portrait of Chairman Mao. It could seem strange that the very lifeblood of what is now a spectacularly successful capitalist economy, its money, carries on it the portrait of a dead Communist revolutionary. Yet the reason is clear. Mao reminds the Chinese people of the heroic achievements of the Communist Party, which is still in power. He stands for the recovery of Chinese unity at home and prestige abroad, and every Chinese government wants to be seen as the inheritor of his authority. This appropriation of the past, this kind of exploitation of a dead leader’s image, is nothing new. It has been around for thousands of years, and what’s happening today to Mao on the Chinese currency was happening more than 2,000 years ago to Alexander.
Minted around 300 BC, this is one of the earliest coins to carry the image of a leader. Alexander the Great, whose head is represented on the coin, was the most glamorized military ruler of his age – possibly of all time. We’ve got no way of knowing whether this is an accurate likeness of Alexander, but it must be him, because as well as human hair this man has ram’s horns. It is the horn symbol, well known throughout the ancient world, that leaves the viewer in no doubt that we are looking at an image of Alexander. The horns are associated with the god Zeus-Ammon – a hybrid of the two leading Greek and Egyptian gods, Zeus and Ammon. So this small coin is making two big statements – it asserts Alexander’s dominion over both Greeks and Egyptians, and it suggests that, in some sense, he is both man and god.
The reverse of the coin shows Athena Nikephoros, and Greek letters spell ‘of King Lysimachus’
Alexander the man was the son of Philip II of Macedon, a small kingdom a few hundred miles north of Athens. Philip expected great things of his son, and he employed the great philosopher Aristotle as his tutor. Alexander came to the throne in 336 BC at the age of 20, with an almost limitless sense of self-belief. His stated goal was to reach the ‘ends of the world and the Great Outer sea’, and to do this he embarked on a series of wars, first crushing rebellions by Athens and the other Greek cities, then turning east to confront the long-standing enemy of the Greeks – Persia. Persia controlled at that point the greatest empire on earth, sprawling from Egypt across the Middle East and central Asia to India and almost to China. The young Alexander campaigned brilliantly for a total of ten years, until he defeated the whole of the Persian Empire. He was clearly a driven man. What drove him on? We asked the leading expert on Alexander, Robin Lane Fox:
Alexander was driven by the heroic ideals that befitted a Macedonian king, ruling over Macedonians, the ideals of personal glory, prowess; he was driven by a wish to reach the edge of the world, he was driven by a wish to excel for ever his father, Philip, who was a man of significance but who pales almost to a shadow beside Alexander’s global reputation.
Alexander’s victories didn’t just depend on his armies. They required money – and lots of it. Luckily, Philip had conquered the rich gold and silver mines of Thrace, the area that straddles the modern borders of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. That precious metal financed the early campaigns, but this inheritance was later swelled by the colossal wealth Alexander captured in Persia. His imperial conquests were bankrolled by