6 - Alexander and the Persian Empire

Summary

Alexander III inherited the Persian campaign from his father Philip II, who had aimed to conquer Asia Minor, probably in order to secure a permanent source of income from the revenues of its rich cities. Going further, Alexander ended the reign of the Achaemenid dynasty established by Darius I in 522/21 BC and campaigned to the borders of Achaemenid influence in the Indus region. Contrary to the panhellenic propaganda preserved by the Alexander historiographers, the war was about the acquisition of territory, influence and wealth – not a war of ‘liberation’ or ‘reprisal’. Since there exists no Persian historiography and the extant numismatic, administrative and archaeological sources reveal little of political history, it is difficult to view the events from a Persian perspective. However, scholarship’s traditional biased images of the Persian empire as weak, chaotic, compromised by decadence and inner strife, and hence doomed to fall, have come to be rejected as reflecting Greek and Roman stereotypes. In current scholarship, it is stressed that Alexander appropriated and adapted most of the political and administrative structures of the Achaemenid empire: it was the existing system that supported his conquest.