From Alexander of Macedon by Peter Green “He had the whole body of Greek civilized opinion behind him. Euripides held that it was proper (eikos) for ‘barbarians’ to be subject to Greeks. Plato and Isocrates both thought of all non-Hellenes as natural enemies who could be enslaved or exterminated at will. Aristotle himself regarded a war against barbarians as essentially j ust.48 Such theories may well be dismissed as grotesque; but they are no more grotesque than de Gobineau’s concept of the Aryan superman. And grotesque or not, they have the power to compel belief, and thus to affect men’s lives in the most fundamental way. When Hitler exterminated the European Jews, he based his actions, precisely, on the belief that certain categories of mankind could be dismissed as sub- human — that is, like Aristotle, he equated them with beasts or plants. For Aristotle, however, the brute or vegetable nature of barbarians had a special quality, which must have struck a responsive chord in his pupil. ‘No one,’ he wrote, ‘would value existence for the pleasure of eating alone, or that of sex . . . unless he were utterly servile’ (i.e. slave or bar- barian). To such a person, on the other hand, it would make no difference whether he were beast or man. The key example he cites is the Assyrian voluptuary Sardanapalus (Assurbanipal): barbarians, it is clear, are to be despised above all because they live exclusively through and for the senses. The purely hedonistic life, in fact, was something which Aristotle taught his pupil to regard as beneath contempt. Such a doctrine must have had a strong appeal for Alex- ander, who always placed a premium on self-control and self-denial (at least during the earlier stages of his career), and whose enthusiastic, impressionable nature reveals a strong hero-worshipping streak. (It made no odds to him whether his hero was mythical or contemporary: he may have modelled himself on Achilles, but he was equally ready to adopt the quick-stepping gait of his old tutor Leonidas.) The Alexander who ate so sparingly, who gave away the spoils of war with such contemptuous generosity, keeping little for himself, and who said he was never more conscious of his own mortality than ‘during the time he lay with a woman or slept’50 — this, surely, was a man whose debt to Aristotle’s teaching and influence was fundamental. For good or ill, the years at Mieza left a permanent mark on him. Aristotle’s advice on the respective treatment of Greeks and barbarians is, of course, capable of a more mundane interpretation: that in order to get the best out of those whom one intends to exploit, one must humour them far enough to win their cooperation. Greeks required to be treated as equals, to have their sense of independence – however illusory -— fostered with the greatest care. Asiatics, on the other hand, would only respond to, or respect, a show of rigorous authoritarianism — the Victorian district officer’s creed. Whether Aristotle intended this lesson or not, it was one that Alexander learnt all too well. As we shall see, he applied it to every individual or group with whom he subsequently came in contact.
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