Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions (review)

As American foreign policy becomes more complex and contested, ancient historians have increasingly been pressed into service to draw lessons from the great imperial experiments of the past. The legitimacy of analogies between the U.S. of today and fifth-century Athens, or imperial Rome, can be debated, but few would argue with Frank Holt's contention in this lively, disturbing book that the grim Macedonian experience in Bactria and Sogdiana offers sobering lessons for the current western intervention in Afghanistan. Holt has put to work his considerable expertise in Central Asian history, principally during the time of Alexander's invasion and the subsequent Greek kingdoms, but also under the British and Soviet empires, in an admirable cause: he aims to show us just how difficult a task we have undertaken and how potentially ruinous our Afghan commitment may turn out to be.

Alexander entered Bactria in 329 B.C. in pursuit of the rebel Bessus, who was soon caught and punished. But Holt, following the progress of the Bactrian campaign in close detail, shows how the region itself seemed to turn against Alexander even as his principal foe capitulated. The rigors of landscape and climate took an enormous toll on the ill-equipped Macedonians; above all, the people they encountered were suspicious of their motives and uncomprehending of their ways, such that neutral or even well-disposed tribes very quickly turned into enemies. Unsure of himself in this world of shifting and ephemeral alliances, Alexander adopted progressively harsher measures, including some which Holt quite clearly deplores. The noble Hellenic ideals with which the invasion of Asia began were quickly unseated by the need for security and self-preservation. An illusion of control was established, but at a terrible cost to both occupiers and occupied; and that illusion vanished as soon as Alexander left the region in 327.

Holt's narrative of Alexander's Bactrian campaign is liberally sprinkled with parallels drawn from the failed British and Soviet ventures in Afghanistan, and the clear implication is that the U.S. and its allies are headed down a similar path. Indeed, much of his language is chosen in such a way as to resonate strongly with our current experience in Afghanistan and Iraq; thus rebel forces are sometimes termed "insurgents," with "warlords" as their leaders. Some readers may feel such terminology is distracting or inappropriate, but I found it to be judiciously applied and extremely evocative. Holt's prose style throughout is vigorous and direct, and will be read with pleasure by both specialists and nonspecialists (including students, who I think would gain a clearer understanding of Alexander's experience through following in detail this two-year campaign than through other, less penetrating accounts of the whole twelve-year invasion).

In a final stretch of the book, Holt diverges somewhat from his principal line of argument and recounts the modern-day rediscovery of the history of Hellenic Bactria, principally through its coins. He has many colorful stories to tell about the adventurers and rogues who first obtained these coins and made them known to western scholars. This is highly entertaining material but somewhat off the topic, except inasmuch as it explodes the myth, promulgated by Plutarch and W. W. Tarn, that Alexander brought stability and order to an otherwise barbarous Bactria. The picture recovered from the coin finds is very different: Bactria continued to be a land of bloody strife and factional fighting all through the Hellenistic era, carved up now by Greek "warlords" instead of native chiefs.