India was the objective in 327, though Alexander did not reach the Indus valley until 326, after passing through Swāt Cas from the district of the Kābul River. In 326, at the great Battle of the Hydaspes (Jhelum), he defeated the Indian king Porus in the first major battle in which he faced a force of elephants. How much farther east Alexander might have gone is a question that has fascinated posterity, but the curiosity and patience of his army was exhausted. At the Hyphasis (Beas) River he was obliged to turn back.
Alexander did not, however, retrace his path but took the route southward through the Indus valley toward the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman. He narrowly avoided death at the so-called Malli town, where an arrow seems to have entered his lung. The subsequent march westward in 325 through the desert region of Gedrosia (Balochistan) was a death march; its horrors emerge vividly enough from the literary narratives, but they are certainly understated. Alexander’s motive for ordering the march may have been the desire to outdo the mythical queen Semiramis and the legendary Cyrus the Great; but the scale of the catastrophe does suggest that his judgment was by now badly impaired. Meanwhile, Nearchus led the fleet from the mouth of the Indus to that of the Tigris, a voyage recorded by Arrian in his Indica, using the account of Nearchus himself. The final phase
In Carmania, to the west of Gedrosia, Alexander first staged a weeklong drunken revel, in which he himself posed as Dionysus, as a release of tension after the preceding nightmare journey. Then he ordered his satraps and generals to disband their mercenary armies, like Artaxerxes III in 359 and perhaps for the same reason, namely, fear of insurrection. This was a period of punitive action against disobedient or negligent satraps. One official who in this atmosphere preferred to abscond rather than brazen out the inquisition was Harpalus, the royal treasurer, who made his way eventually to Athens. The exact fate of the money he took with him was and still is a celebrated mystery. The fact that Harpalus’s activities as treasurer had evidently been quite unsupervised was typical of Alexander’s short and impatient way with administrative problems. (It is most unlikely that he planned an ambitious financial restructuring of the empire, giving special responsibilities to men with the right expertise. One finds men like Cleomenes in Egypt or Philoxenus in Anatolia combining territorial with financial responsibilities, but no general conclusions can be drawn.)
At Susa in 324 Alexander staged a splendid mass marriage of Persians and Macedonians. He himself had already married a Bactrian princess, Rhoxane (Roxane), in 327, but he now took two more wives, a daughter of Darius III called Barsine (or Stateira) and Parysatis, the daughter of Artaxerxes III. This and other demonstrations of “Orientalizing,” including the brigading of Iranian units into the army, overcame a final mutiny at Opis near Babylon. After haranguing the troops, threatening them, and finally sulking, Alexander won back their affections; following this meretricious and emotional performance, he chose to heal the rift symbolically by a more-organized piece of theatre, a great banquet of reconciliation (thus demonstrating for the last time in Archaic and Classical Greek history the usefulness of the banquet, or symposium, as an instrument of social control).
Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, fresco by Sodoma, c. 1511–12; in the Villa Farnesina, Rome.SCALA/Art Resource, New York
Other actions or schemes in this final phase were of the same megalomaniac type: a request for his own deification, sent to the Greek cities; a demand that they take back their exiles; a monstrous funeral pyre for his dear friend Hephaestion (never completed); and a plan of circumnavigation and conquest of Arabia. So much is well documented. Lists of other spectacular last plans survive, but they are hardly needed; the achievements of the last 13 years were extravagant enough. Alexander died at Babylon, after an illness brought on by heavy drinking, in the early evening of June 10, 323. Greek civilization in the 4th century Historical writings
The 4th century is in many ways the best-documented period of Greek history. There is, admittedly, a greater number of documents from the 3rd century, when inscriptions and papyri abound (there are virtually no documentary papyri before the time of Alexander). The writings of the 3rd-century prose historians, however, are mostly lost. In the 4th century, by contrast, there is an abundance of evidence of all kinds. Inscriptions are much more common than in the 5th century and begin to appear in quantity from states other than Athens. Forensic oratory from the 5th century has scarcely survived at all, but from the 4th century there are more than 60 speeches attributed to Demosthenes alone. Most of this corpus of oratory is set in an Athenian context, but one speech of Isocrates deals with business affairs on Aegina. Although there is no 4th-century tragedy and no epinicion poetry like that of Pindar, the comedies of Aristophanes from the beginning of the century and those of Menander from toward the end have survived. These are illuminating about social life, as are the prose writings of Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, especially his Characters. The writings of Plato, in their anxiety to define an ideal polis invulnerable to stasis or civil strife, give evidence of the instability of the 4th-century world in which it could be said that in every city there were two cities, that of the rich and that of the poor. Aristotle’s Politics examines the theoretical conceptions underlying Greek attitudes toward polis life. This is a precious document, although it can be criticized for insufficient awareness of the monarchical and federal developments of the age.
No such criticism can be leveled at the historiography of the age. It is from Xenophon that one learns of the grand plans of Jason of Pherae, and knowledge about Dionysius I is derived, by less-direct routes, from the 4th-century historians of the Greek west Ephorus, Philistus, and (toward the end of the century) Timaeus of Tauromenium. In fact, the process of explaining history in terms of personality already begins with Thucydides, who arguably came to see that a dynamic personality like Alcibiades could by sheer charisma and force of character have an impact on events irrespective of the content of his policies. It was surely this aspect of Thucydides’ work that Aristotle had in mind when he defined history as “what Alcibiades did and suffered.”
Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes began by recording the history of the city-states in a fairly traditional way (which, however, did more justice to the Theban hegemony than had that of Xenophon), but then he joined Alexander’s staff in order to write the Deeds of Alexander. Evidently, history was now seen as what Alexander did and suffered. Even earlier than that, however, the central role of Philip’s personality had been acknowledged by Theopompus of Chios, who (like Callisthenes) moved in the direction of writing history that revolved around the person of a king; he called his history of Greece Philippica (“The Affairs of Philip”). Meanwhile there were local historians of Attica, such as Androtion, who continued to value Athens’s past and even ventured to rewrite (not merely to reinterpret) the facts about it. These men, who are known as Atthidographers, were not simply antiquarians escaping from the monarchic present. On the contrary, the greatest of them, Philochorus, was put to death in the 3rd century by a Macedonian king for his excessive partiality toward King Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt. All these authors were, in different ways, coming to terms with monarchy.