Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [31]
Alexander further wanted the construction of vast, costly temples at sites in Greece and Macedonia. A temple to Athena, “not capable of being surpassed by any other,” was to be built at Troy, the place Alexander had made a monument to Greek aspirations of foreign conquest. Great sums were to be spent on memorials to those closest to Alexander in life, his father, Philip, and his best friend, Hephaestion. Philip’s tomb, the document specified, was to be built on a scale rivaling the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
Finally, and most ambitiously, Alexander’s plans called for the movement of European peoples into Asia and Asians into Europe, with the goal, as Diodorus transmits it, of “bringing the two major continents, by way of intermarriages and family bonds, into a common harmony and a brotherly affection.” It is hard to imagine what this plan entailed or how it would have been carried out. Clearly it represents a new and hugely ambitious stage of Alexander’s cultural fusion program, an expansion to global scale of the mixed marriages at Susa.
The reading of the document allowed those present to take the full measure of the leader they had lost. It was an astonishing vision that stood behind the plans: a single world-state stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, its cultures severed from continental moorings, its expanses knit together by roads and sea-lanes and bestrode by colossal monuments. It is a vision that inspires both wonder and terror from a distance of twenty-three hundred years, for it anticipates both the Christian New Jerusalem and the warped utopias of Fascist dictatorships.
The troops who heard the last plans, however, felt neither inspiration nor revulsion but fatigue. They had already shown in India that their stamina was the weak link in their king’s dream of universal empire. Asked for its response, the army rejected the plans on the grounds that they were, in Diodorus’ words, “overly grand and difficult to achieve.” Most were never contemplated again.
By the simple expedient of a vote, Perdiccas brought the thirty-five-year expansion of the Macedonian empire to a halt. He would seek merely to preserve what had been won, and that task was already proving immensely difficult.
3
The Athenians’ Last Stand (I)
The European Greek World
SUMMER–WINTER 323 B.C.
News of Alexander’s death took several weeks to reach the cities of European Greece. The quickest path was across the Aegean from the ports of western Asia. Probably a ship that left those ports in mid-June, after the first reports from Babylon had arrived there, got to a European harbor by early July. Most likely that harbor was Piraeus, the busiest trade hub in the Aegean, the port that served the Greek world’s foremost democracy and greatest military power—the city of Athens.
Many lives, and the collective fate of the city, would be profoundly changed by the arrival of this news. The politicians of Athens, called rhētores, or “public speakers,” because they wielded influence by speaking in the citizens’ Assembly, had defined themselves by their relationship to Alexander and Macedonian power. Some, like Demosthenes and his fiery-tongued colleague Hyperides, resented that power and itched for the chance to resist it; others, like Demades, collaborated. The most senior statesman of the day, the philosophic Phocion,* stood somewhere between these extremes, grudgingly accepting Macedonian power because he thought Athens too weak to do anything else. All four