Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

32 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
underwent enormous changes. Few Greeks seriously believed that
the Persian Empire could be destroyed, and yet this is precisely
what Alexander accomplished. To finance the invasion of Persia, he
relied heavily on plunder. His main striking force was the cavalry.
This represented a new departure in Greek warfare, which until
now had been waged primarily by infantry.
Alexander won three major victories against the Persians. After
his second victory at the River Issos in 333 b.c.e. , the Persian king
Dareios offered to share his empire by ceding all his territory west of
the River Halys. Alexander rejected the offer and pressed on south
into Syria. He besieged Tyre for seven months before eventually
taking it. Dareios now made a new offer, surrendering the whole
of his empire west of the Euphrates and offering him the hand of
his daughter in marriage. This offer was also rejected. Alexander
continued south, capturing other cities and visiting Jerusalem. He
then invaded Egypt, which fell to him without a struggle. Since the
Egyptian pharaoh was regarded as the incarnation of Horus, the
son of Ra and beloved of Ammon, Alexander now became a god
in the eyes of the Egyptians, although there is no evidence of his
deification elsewhere at this date.
It was in Egypt that he founded the first and most magnificent
of his cities, Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile, which he filled
largely with his own veterans. By the first century c.e., its population
would reach nearly 300,000. Alexander’s biographer Plutarch,
writing four centuries later, credits him with founding some seventy
cities and military outposts in the course of his travels, many
of which he called Alexandria, but the number is greatly exaggerated.
Even if Alexander founded only six, however, as a recent,
highly conservative estimate has proposed, these six, given their
geographical locations, would have spread Greek culture to parts
of the world that had previously been entirely ignorant of it, including
Baluchistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.
During his stay in Egypt, Alexander was filled with a longing, as
Arrian (Anabasis 3.3.1) tells us, to consult the oracle of Zeus Ammon
in the Libyan desert. This episode is one of the most remarkable
in his career, because it served no strategic purpose whatsoever.
Dareios was raising a fresh army, and Alexander’s first priority
should logically have been to prepare for this decisive encounter.
The purpose of his pilgrimage remains a complete mystery.
On being questioned about his encounter with the god afterward,
Alexander merely replied that he had heard “what was according
to his wish.”