Aristotle was reputedly kind and affectionate and his will was generous both to his children and servants. It makes reference (as his philosophy implies) to a happy family life. He described man as “a monument of frailty,” but the ultimate conclusion of his philosophy is optimistic. According to Plato, the soul is trapped in the body, desperate to escape the world of change and illusion. Aristotle argued instead that the soul is an inherent part of the body and that life is desirable for its own sake.
Aristotle’s world view, like so much of his thought, delighted in man and celebrated his potential. He believed that “All men by nature desire to know,” a statement which offers a fitting testimony to the enduring thirst for knowledge that drove him throughout his life.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
356–323 BC
He would not have remained content with any of his conquests, not even if he had added the British Isles to Europe; he would always have reached beyond for something unknown, and if there had been no other competition, he would have competed against himself.
Arrian, The Anabasis (c. AD 150), translated as Alexander’s Expedition, 7.1
Alexander of Macedon stretched the limits of the possible. In little more than a decade of brilliant military campaigning, he forged the most extensive empire the world had seen, stretching from Greece and Egypt in the west to India in the east and taking in all or part of seventeen modern states. It is said that he wept that there were no more worlds to conquer. With some justification, the statue erected to him after his death bore the legend “I hold the Earth.”
Alexander was one of the greatest military commanders who has ever lived. Julius Caesar, a superb general in his own right, was plunged into deep despair whenever he pondered Alexander’s achievements. Alexander was distinguished by his personal beauty, grace and courage and above all for his tolerance and chivalry, but he was also ruthless in battle and in court politics, a hard drinker who personally murdered one of his top commanders.
Within two years of inheriting the Macedonian throne on the assassination of his remarkable warrior-king father, Philip of Macedon, the 4ft 6in (1.35m) twenty-two-year-old had united Greece’s disparate city-states under his leadership in order to wage war on the mighty Persian empire. It was the Hellenic world’s most prized dream, and a goal Philip had spent his life working toward.
Alexander set out on his mission in 334 BC. Within two years the Persians had been totally defeated in victories such as that at Issus, which showed Alexander’s military genius and tactical virtuosity. He went on to establish himself at the head of his own empire, one that included not only Greece and Macedonia but also the entire Middle East, from Egypt and Asia Minor to Mesopotamia, Persia and beyond, into Afghanistan, parts of central Asia and, on the far side of the Hindu Kush mountains, the rich valley of the Indus. Only the final, stubborn refusal of his Macedonian army to breach the limits of the known world prevented him from going further. When he died in Babylon, at just thirty-two years old, he was planning the conquest of Arabia and may have had designs on the western Mediterranean.
Alexander’s rule united East and West for the first time. Perhaps influenced by his boyhood tutor, Aristotle, Alexander was determined to govern well. He ordered his ministers to “break up the oligarchies everywhere and set up democracies instead.” He forbade his armies to plunder conquered lands, and he founded new cities galore—usually named Alexandria. The greatest of these, at the mouth of the Nile Delta, became for many centuries the intellectual and commercial center of the Mediterranean world. Alexander wanted to create an empire fusing the best of both Greek and Eastern cultures. He recruited Persians into his armies and assigned Persian wives to his generals, sending back to Europe any Macedonians who resisted this enforced equality. He himself married the daughter of the dethroned Persian king.
Alexander was revered as a god in his own lifetime. He was reputedly a descendant of Achilles on his mother’s side, and rumors of Alexander’s supernatural abilities abounded, reinforced by his unnatural speed and apparent personal invincibility in battle. Described by a friend as “the only philosopher whom I have ever seen in arms,” he loved poetry and music. As a boy he declared that if he could only save one possession it would be Homer’s Iliad. He was always alert to symbolism. On first setting foot on the shores of the Persian empire, in Asia Minor, his first act was to make a pilgrimage to Troy to honor his ancestor Achilles. He named Bucephala, a town on the Indus, after his beloved horse Bucephalus, which had died in battle.
Alexander also had a more brutish side: he drunkenly killed one of his officers in a row at a banquet, a crime he deeply regretted. His own death is said to have resulted from too much carousing. “Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal,” he reportedly declared. He had several wives and mistresses, but his great love was his boyhood friend Hephaistion.
Alexander could be merciless. On succeeding to the throne after his father’s assassination, he executed all rival claimants, including his infant half-brother. He executed one of his greatest friends for treason, and also the friend’s blameless father, his veteran general, Parmenion: Alexander refused to run the risk of paternal vengeance. He enslaved or crucified all the Tyrians after they resisted his siege of their city and razed Thebes to the ground, a warning to the restless Greek city-states of what they could expect from rebellion. Toward the end of his life he became increasingly despotic.
Alexander’s treatment of his enemies, however, often demonstrated his nobility of spirit. When an Indian king demanded to face him in battle, Alexander fought and defeated him, but rewarded him with the restoration of his kingdom and that of a less fortunate neighbor as well. He treated the wives of Darius, the defeated Persian king, with “the utmost delicacy and respect” and allowed the Jews, Persians and others to worship as they wished.
Alexander changed the face of the world by making Hellenism—the Greek way of life—into the global culture. When asked on his deathbed to whom he would leave his kingdom, Alexander replied: “To the strongest.” After his death, his empire, which had spanned half the world, disintegrated. No one could match him.
QIN SHI HUANGDI
c. 259–210 BC
If you govern the people by punishment, the people will fear. Being fearful, they will not commit villainies.
Lord Shang’s legalism, adopted by Qin Shi Huangdi as the basis for his rule
Qin Shi Huangdi created the first unified Chinese empire, which emerged from the Warring States Period. By 221 BC he had successfully destroyed the last remaining rival kingdoms within China and made himself supreme ruler: the First Emperor. A ruthless statesman and conqueror of manic gifts, haunted by madness, sadism and paranoia, Qin Shi Huangdi’s reign quickly degenerated into a brutal and bloody tyranny. His reputation in China had always been that of a tyrant until Chairman Mao Zedong, another monstrous dictator, associated himself with the First Emperor and promoted him as his glorious precursor.
Born a prince of the royal family of the Kingdom of Qin, Zheng, as the future emperor was named, was raised in honorable captivity. His father, Prince Zichu of Qin, was then serving as a hostage to the enemy state of Zhaou, under a peace agreement between the two kingdoms. Subsequently released, Zichu returned to Qin and assumed the crown, with his son Zheng as his heir.
In 245 BC, Zichu died and the thirteen-year-old Zheng acceded to the throne. For the next seven years he ruled with a regent, until in 238 BC he seized full control in a palace coup. From the beginning, Zheng showed a new ruthlessness: he regularly executed prisoners of war, contrary to the established etiquette of the time.
Zheng now vied for power with the other Chinese kingdoms, creating a powerful army. When he had come to the throne, Qin had been a vassal state of the Kingdom of Zhaou. In a sequence of military victories, six kingdoms fell to Zheng’s forces: the Han (230), Zhaou (228), Wei (228), Chu (223), Yan (222) and Qi, the last independent Chinese kingdom, in 221 BC. A superb commander, Zheng was also a skilled dip
lomat, especially in exploiting divisions among his enemies. He now stood unchallenged within a unified China. To commemorate this feat he took a new name that reflected his unparalleled status: Qin Shi Huangdi, “The First August Emperor of Qin.”
Qin Shi Huangdi now created a strong centralized state across his territories. In an extension of existing practice in the Kingdom of Qin, the old feudal laws and structures that had remained in much of China were abolished, to be replaced by centrally appointed officials and a new administrative apparatus. Standardization of the Chinese script, currency, weights and measures changed the spheres of economics, law and language, with a unified system of new roads and canals, to weld China together as a cohesive national unit.
There was, however, a price to be paid—borne by the ordinary people of China. A million men were put to work as forced labor to build some 4700 miles of roads. Qin Shi Huangdi would have his edicts carved in vast letters on mountain rock faces. As his projects of national unity became ever more ambitious, so too did the human toll they exacted. One such project was to link up the numerous independent frontier walls that barricaded northern China from the threat of hostile tribes. This effectively created a forerunner to the Great Wall of China, but it cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
At the same time, Qin Shi Huangdi was unwilling to accept any limits on his own power—in contradiction to the Confucian belief that a ruler should follow traditional rites. So he outlawed Confucianism and persecuted its adherents brutally. Confucian scholars were buried alive or beheaded; a similar fate befell the follower of any creed that might challenge the emperor’s authority. All books not specifically approved by the emperor were banned and burned; intellectual curiosity of any kind was to be replaced by unswerving obedience.
As he grew older, Qin Shi Huangdi became obsessed with his own death. He regularly dispatched expeditions in search of an “elixir of life” that might make him immortal. He grew ever more fearful of challenges to his position, and with good reason, as he was the target of several assassination plots. The emperor’s efforts to counter such a fate became ever more paranoid and bizarre. At random, servants in the imperial household would be ordered to carry him in the middle of the night to an alternative room to sleep. Numerous doubles were deployed to confuse any would-be assassins. A close watch was kept, and anyone suspected of disloyalty was instantly removed.
Ultimately, it was Qin’s pursuit of immortality that was his downfall. It was widely believed that a man might live longer by drinking precious metals, gaining some of their durability. The emperor died in 210 BC, on tour in eastern China, having swallowed mercury tablets, created by his court physician in an effort to confer immortality.
Even in death, Qin Shi Huangdi seemed afraid that he might be vulnerable to attack. Long before he died he had ordered a gigantic three-mile-wide mausoleum to be built, guarded by a full-scale “terracotta army” of over 6000 full-sized clay models of soldiers. Qin Shi Huangdi’s aim was to ensure that in death, as in life, his every whim and desire would be catered for in his huge subterranean palace. Again, the epic scale of the building project exacted a monumental cost in terms of lives lost. Some 700,000 conscripts were required, a substantial proportion of whom did not survive its completion.
The terracotta army was rediscovered in March 1974 by a group of Chinese peasants sinking a well near the city of Xian. Digging down, they stumbled upon a vast chamber containing the figures. Upon further exploration, it became clear that the individually sculpted infantrymen, cavalry, charioteers, archers and cross-bowmen were guarding the entrance to the enormous tomb of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi.
So far, only the soldiers that guard the path to the door of the tomb have been uncovered. Each is fashioned in precise detail, and each has unique facial characteristics. All of the figures face east, from where it was assumed the enemies of the eternally sleeping emperor would come. In total, the entire funerary compound fills a whole mountain, covering a site of over twenty square miles.
The scale of what remains to be uncovered is indicated by the words of ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch’ien; c. 145–c. 85 BC), who describes the tomb thus:
The laborers … built models of palaces, pavilions, and offices, and filled the tomb with fine vessels, precious stones and rarities. Artisans were ordered to install mechanically triggered crossbows set to shoot any intruder. With quicksilver the various waterways of the empire, the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, and even the great ocean itself, were created and made to flow and circulate mechanically. With shining pearls the heavenly constellations were depicted above, and with figures of birds in gold and silver and of pine trees carved of jade the earth was laid out below.
Qin Shi Huangdi’s immediate legacy did not last long. He had declared that the empire he had built would last for a thousand years, but it collapsed only four years after his death, as China entered a fresh period of civil war. Yet Qin Shi Huangdi created the reality and the idea of a Chinese empire, a similar territory to today’s People’s Republic of China.
HANNIBAL
247–c. 183 BC
Let no love or treaty be between our nations. Arise, unknown avenger, from my ashes to pursue with fire and sword … may they have war, they and their children’s children!
The suicidal Dido, queen of Carthage, to her lover Aeneas, who has abandoned her to found Rome—in the words of Virgil’s Aeneid
The Carthaginian general Hannibal was the man who came closest to bringing Rome to its knees. A commander of determination and resourcefulness, he devised novel strategies and tactics that are still studied today. He achieved the seemingly impossible in leading an army and more than thirty war elephants over the Alps into Italy, where he inflicted a series of crushing defeats on the Romans. To them he was their nemesis, a terrifying and ruthless figure, his very name evoking fear and dread and inspiring the phrase “Hannibal is at the gates!”
Carthage, near modern-day Tunis, had been settled by Phoenicians from Tyre in the 9th century BC, and their descendants, the Carthaginians, proceeded to build up their own trading empire in the region. It was in Sicily that Carthage first came up against its rival for power in the western Mediterranean: Rome. The consequence was the First Punic War, from which Rome emerged victorious in 241 BC.
Hannibal’s father, the general and statesman Hamilcar Barca, had fought in this war, and it is said that he made his young son swear eternal hatred for the Romans. Hannibal fought alongside him as he conquered a new Carthaginian empire in Spain that was, at least partly, a family fiefdom. In 221 BC, some years after his father’s death in battle, Hannibal was appointed commander in Spain, and here, three years later, seeking revenge for his father’s defeat by the Romans, he deliberately provoked the Second Punic War by capturing the city of Saguntum, an ally of Rome.
Determined on the complete destruction of his sworn enemy, Hannibal assembled 40,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry and a contingent of war elephants. With this mighty force he crossed the Pyrenees and traversed southern Gaul and the waters of the Rhône to the foothills of the Alps. Historians argue about Hannibal’s precise route, but whichever sequence of passes he used would have presented formidable obstacles. Not only did he have to contend with narrow icy paths, landslides and starvation, but he also had to fight off hostile local tribes. Eventually, after a five-month ordeal, Hannibal and the surviving half of his army arrived on the plains of northern Italy, ready to march on Rome.
The Alpine crossing had been made possible by the immense loyalty Hannibal commanded. Even Hannibal’s staunchest enemies recognized his remarkable rapport with his men, who were drawn from many different peoples. As the historian Polybius remarked, his enterprises were “desperate and extraordinary,” but Hannibal never asked his men to do what he would not do himself. He had been only twenty-six when the army in Spain had elected him their commander, and in all his long career there is no record of mutiny or even a desertion among his forces.
Sometimes known a
s the “Father of Strategy,” Hannibal pioneered the idea that war could be won beyond the set-piece battle. A master of the ambush, he attacked the enemy’s communications and seized cities and supplies behind its back. The Romans accused him of duplicity, but he was also masterly in open battle, as his overwhelming victories over the Romans at Lake Trasimene (217) and the bloodbath that was Cannae attest. His deployment of encirclement at Cannae (216), resulting in a reported 50,000 Roman deaths, was admired by Napoleon and Wellington and is still discussed by military tacticians. After this humiliation of Roman military prestige, some of Rome’s allies in Italy deserted to the Carthaginian side.
Receiving negligible support from Carthage, Hannibal had to levy troops on the spot and provision his men himself. Eventually the Romans deployed guerrilla tactics too, wearing their enemy down. Hannibal continued to campaign, largely in southern Italy, with little help from his Italian allies. Despite winning some further victories, his army was never strong enough to attack Rome itself. In 207 his younger brother, Hasdrubal Barca, led another Carthaginian army into Italy to join with Hannibal in a march on Rome, but Hasdrubal was killed and his army defeated at the River Metaurus.
When, in 203, the Roman general Scipio Africanus mounted a counter-invasion of North Africa, Hannibal was recalled to Carthage, and the following year was defeated decisively by Scipio at the Battle of Zama. Charged by Carthage’s senate with misconduct of the war, Hannibal entered politics, where his admirable administrative and constitutional reforms alienated Carthage’s old elite; before long they denounced him to the Romans. Hannibal fled.
Hannibal spent his last years waging war against Rome for any prince who would have him. He served Antiochus III of Syria and then was heard of in Crete and Armenia. He ended up at the court of King Prusias of Bithynia, but the Romans had long memories and were set on revenge. Eventually they pressured Prusias to give Hannibal up, but the general chose death over captivity. In the Bithynian village of Libyssa he drank the poison that he had long carried with him in his ring, and so evaded his old enemy one final time.