Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [133]
The Greeks came to have a sneaking respect for the nomadic Scythians: like them they would see off an attempted Persian invasion. In general, they were quite impervious to Greek ways: but Herodotus recalls two who had a taste for things Greek, Anacharsis (who became a legendary sage) and Scyles. In both cases, ultimately it was the forbidden charms of Greek religious ceremonies to which they yielded: the Greeks were not then seen in their modern light, as the arch-rationalists of the ancient world.
Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war
Hoi huméteroi prógonoi elthóntes eis Makedonían kaì eis tèbaren állbaren Helláda kak$oTbar;s epoíēsan hēmás oudèn proēdikēménoi; egòbar;o dè tòbar;n Hellébar;nōn hēgemòbar;n katastatheìs kaì timōrébar;sasthai boulómenos Pérsas diébēn es tèbar;n Asían, huparksántōn hum$oTbar;n…Kaì to$uT loipo$uT hótan pémpēis par’ éme, hōs pròs basiléa tŋbar;s Asías pémpe, mēdè ex ísou epístelle, all’ h$oTbar;s kuríōi ónti pántōn t$oTbar;n s$oTbar;n phráze eí tou déēi…
Your ancestors entering Macedonia and the rest of Greece wronged us without previous grievance; but I, constituted as leader of the Greeks and wishing to take vengeance on the Persians, have crossed into Asia, something that you people started… And in future when you send to me, send to me as King of Asia, and do not correspond on equal terms, but as to the lord of all that is yours, tell me if you need anything…
Alexander to Darius, king of Persia, 332 BC: Arrian, ii.14
About a quarter of the way through the three thousand years of Greek’s recorded history came the single decade that changed everything.
Over the period 334-325 BC a Greek army under Alexander III of Macedon eliminated the Persian empire, over almost the whole area of the modern states of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander’s declared motive was to take revenge for Persian aggression in the Persian Wars, still very present in Greek minds, although they had been an experience of their great-great-grandparents, a century and a half before, and Greece at least was now under very different management. On the same timescale Britain should now be preparing for Russia’s serious retaliation for the Crimean War.
The result of this lightning advance, the wholesale takeover by Greek military administrators of a multi-ethnic empire that had existed for over two hundred years, was an instant trebling of the area where the Greek language might be heard, and Greek cultural traditions known and appreciated. Unlike the colonial advance around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, this advance did not hug the coastline, but assumed supreme control over all the major established urban centres. Although the unitary control by a single ruler did not last (Alexander died two years after his momentous campaign, and his empire fell apart into the domains of his different marshals), Greek overlordship did survive. It lasted for a century in central Persia, until another Iranian-speaking power, this time the Parthians from south-east of the Caspian, reasserted control. But it was to be three hundred years before it relaxed its grasp on Egypt, Syria or Babylonia. And although Alexander’s claim on the west bank of the Indus was almost immediately annulled by the advance of the equally magnificent Indian emperor Chandragupta ruling from Patna, Greek kings based in Bactria (Afghanistan) continued an independent dominion for about as long as those in Syria. They moved south into Gandhara (Swat) and the Panjab (in what is now Pakistan); though they lost hold of Bactria itself, for a time they even reached as far to the east as Patna on the Ganges.* In fact, Greek kingdoms lasted longer here than in Greece itself, where Macedonian kings yielded