Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [23]
Many Greeks, including a good number of Alexander's soldiers, scorned and resented their king's reliance on foreigners and his ostentatious adoption of foreign customs. Concerns that Alexander had become “barbarianized” led to an attempted mutiny at Opis. Alexander prevailed, and in victory, he hosted a celebratory feast for nine thousand people. To reconcile himself to the Greeks, Alexander segregated the guests according to ethnicity and merit. Alexander sat with the Greeks, who sat next to the Persians, who sat next to soldiers from other ethnic groups, with no intermingling across peoples.
Thus, if Alexander harbored hopes for the eventual “unity of mankind,” as some have suggested, he did not let these hopes get in the way of his overriding ambition. As Peter Green writes, Alexander's “all-absorbing obsession” was “war and conquest. It is idle … to pretend that he dreamed, in some mysterious fashion, of wading through rivers of blood and violence to achieve the Brotherhood of Man by raping an entire continent. He spent his life, with legendary success, in the pursuit of personal glory.” The fact remains that in his achievement of glory, tolerance played an indispensable role.
By 324 BC, world dominance had passed from the Persians to the Greeks. Alexander was, and remains, the ruler of the largest empire in Greek or Macedonian history. Indeed, he was arguably “the richest and most powerful man in the history of the world up to that point in time.” He held court on a throne of pure gold, and his retinue included five hundred Persian “Apple Bearer” guards clad in purple and yellow; a thousand bowmen wearing mantles of crimson and dark blue; and five hundred “Silver Shields,” elite Greek infantry warriors.50
With Alexander's conquests, the Greek language and Greek literature, art, architecture, and philosophy spread across the Mediterranean, across the continents—and ultimately across the centuries. At the same time, in the city-states Alexander established from Egypt to India, “barbarian” ideas were translated into Greek and absorbed into the empire, creating a cultural hybrid—known as Hellenism—that would profoundly influence Christianity and the Western world. For all his military feats, Alexander's greatest legacy was a degree of transcontinental cultural unity that the Persian kings never achieved.
But political unity of the region died with Alexander. Before he could conquer his next targets—Arabia, the western Mediterranean, and Europe—Alexander, at the age of just thirty-two, succumbed to a mysterious fatal fever. Alexander's empire immediately fragmented into warring kingdoms torn by internal rebellions. Tellingly, after his death, all but one of Alexander's co-bridegrooms from Susa divorced their Persian wives.51 Reunification would have to await the coming of Rome.
TWO
Gladiators, Togas, and Imperial “Glue”
[Rome] alone received the conquered to her bosom and cherished the human race with a common name, in the fashion of a mother, not of an empress; and she called “citizens” those whom she subdued and bound with her far-reaching and pious embrace. To her pacifying customs we owe everything:…that we are all of us one race.
— CLAUDIAN, FOURTH-CENTURY POET
They are all right, they no longer wear trousers.
— EMPEROR CLAUDIUS, CIRCA AD 48,
REFERRING
TO THE CONQUERED GAULS
If there is an iconic empire in the West, it is Rome. Territorially, it fell just short of the Achaemenid Empire. But the Roman hyperpower outshone its predecessor in virtually every other way. Whereas Achaemenid Persia was essentially just a war machine, Rome was also an idea.1 Inhabitants from the farthest reaches of the empire wanted to be—and became—“Roman.” Along the empire's remarkable 53,000-mile network of paved roads and bridges that linked Britons to Berbers, one could find thousands of Roman baths, amphitheaters, and temples, built roughly to the same specifications