Alexander the Great envisioned a city network designed to control “spear won” territory in the wake of his conquests. Alexander imagined a world bridging Greek and Asian cultures – a new era of globalization. He was willing to force whole populations across continents to this end, via city mergers, mass deportations, and resettlements. From its Macedonian foundations, the Hellenistic Age had urban roots. Greek economic influence spanned from Afghanistan to the Atlantic. Trade increased markedly, as did cultural exchange. There was unprecedented hybridization, closely reflected in city building. The urban form dwarfed what existed in the old poleis. Their geopolitical importance increased under territorial empires, the dominant form of statecraft. Cities managed flows of resources. They defended trading routes against nomads, projecting royal military power. Out of Alexander’s splintered empire, his namesake Alexandria was the closest realization of his global vision. There were darker sides to this: Alexandria was part of a system entailing political domination over peripheral zones.

To ascertain soldiers’ potential status as wage labourers, this chapter discusses the process of initial enlistment and the ensuing terms of service, questioning especially whether soldiers enlisted of their own accord and retained their free status. It emerges that, from the reforms by Philip II of Macedonia onwards, political circumstances dictated a strong drift towards greater and at times complete reliance on so-called voluntary troops, who enlisted in exchange for pay. Thus, while the bulk of troops under Philip and Alexander were conscripts, these armies from the outset encouraged the enlistment of hired, voluntary troops in both elite and ordinary divisions. The lines between different troop types were blurred significantly under Alexander, whose conscript forces re-enlisted as hired men mid-way through his campaign. The Successors, whose often fickle claims to territory complicated the conscription of troops, were almost wholly reliant on voluntary troops. Accordingly, it is at this point that the epigraphic record attests military contracts, in which soldiers’ continued freedom of movement is guaranteed, alongside other terms of service. In the subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms, we see a return to conscription, especially in times of greatest need, alongside an enduring preference for professional, hired soldiers to man the standing armies.

The chapter deals with the administration of Alexander’s empire. The main focus is on the satrapal administration. Although Alexander borrowed the system of regional governance from the Achaemenids, he introduced changes to it, adapting it to the new circumstances. Alexander’s actions in the administrative sphere were not aimed at a realization of any abstract ideal. They were taken to satisfy specific needs arising at given points. Nonetheless, it is obvious that all the actions of the king were in pursuit of one main goal: the creation of an effective administrative system for the Imperial lands that would allow him to control and exploit the subjugated peoples better.

Chapter 3 deals with the possible encounters of the West with Buddhism from Alexander the Great’s expedition to India in the fourth century BCE to Saint Jerome’s belief that the Buddha was born of a virgin in the fourth century CE. It deals in particular with the question of whether the Greek historians of antiquity were identifying Buddhists among the Indian philosophers that they encountered, the difficulties that we have in interpreting their words, and the care we need to take in coming to any conclusions that they were encountering Buddhism. It examines also what is unarguably the first reference to the Buddha in the West in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis (Miscellanies) and the importance of Alexandria in the Buddha’s coming to the West. It also examines the much-disputed question of the extent to which the Buddha may have influenced Greek philosophy and particularly Pyrrho, the traditional founder of Greek scepticism. In conclusion, the chapter looks at Saint Jerome’s awareness of the Buddha as the founder of a religion and the role of the tradition of the Manichees in bringing knowledge of Buddhism to the West.

'Urbicide' is a Latin formation - as deployed in this chapter, it refers to the total or near-total destruction of cities (poleis) of the ancient Greek/Hellenic world between the 6th and the 4th centuries BCE. Urbicide was an extreme measure of interstate politics, but not as rare as one might have predicted - or hoped. It represented the other, dark side of the ancient Greeks' fierce attachment to their own native polis. In some cases a polis might be removed from the map once and for all (e.g. Arisba on the island of Lesbos). In others, it might be only temporarily annihilated (Thebes). In all cases, the possibility of largescale enslavement of formerly free Greek citizens was ever-present, and often was realised.

Macedonian kings used four methods of divination common among the Greeks – extispicy and other sacrifices, teratology, oneiromancy, and oracles – and resembled the Greeks in regard to when and how they consulted seers. The evidence mainly concerns Alexander III but allows conclusions to be drawn about traditional Macedonian royal practice. This practice differed from Greek divination on two counts: the employment of Egyptian and Babylonian seers by both Alexander and his Successors and the combination of royal divination with ruler cult; in other words, the combination of some sacrifices made by or for Macedonian kings with sacrifices made to them as quasi-divine beings. Demetrius Poliorcetes illustrates the perils of combining divination and ruler cult. This chapter also surveys Macedonian divinatory personnel, notably Aristander of Telmessus, Alexander’s chief seer, but also including unnamed Babylonian seers employing astrological methods foreign to the Greeks and Macedonians.

This chapter traces the history of professional poets and musicians at ancient Greek banquets from the archaic period through the Hellenistic age, including pipers, citharists, citharodes, harpists, and others. It also discusses various ways in which banquet music served self-promotion, personal and political. Elite symposia were venues for reperformances of victory odes, republishing a man’s fame with members of his class, sometimes beyond his own city and even his own generation. Philip II and Alexander used mocking poets at drinking parties to undercut and intimidate powerful members of the inner circle at a court where royal symposia had a quasi-constitutional function. They and other fourth-century rulers used professional musicians for display at banquets to enhance the royal vanity and promote their image. The chapter also discusses the extent to which social dining was a setting for professional poets and their poetry in the Hellenistic age and whether the works of academic poets such as Callimachus and Theocritus were sung.

This chapter addresses how the Crusades spurred a renewed appropriation of Alexander in historiography, literature, images and cartography in late medieval Europe. Alexander’s legend was particularly relevant because it reflected the era’s geopolitical and epistemological complexity. The chapter focuses first on the ancient Alexander legend’s adaptation in Crusade-era texts including Crusade chronicles, epics, antique romances and encyclopedias. These works compare Alexander to Crusaders, present Alexander as a precursor of the Crusaders who fights Asian tyranny, interpolate Alexander into the stories of Crusaders through ekphrasis, and frequently cite the legend of Alexander’s enclosure of Gog and Magog. The chapter’s second part focuses on how manuscripts present Alexander as a proto-Crusader even if texts do not overtly describe him as such. Particular attention is paid to compilations that join Alexander and holy warriors (Judas Maccabeus, Godfrey of Bouillon), and to images that Christianise Alexander or demonise his foes. The final section examines the influence of Alexander’s legend on the apocalyptic geography of late medieval maps, which often depict Gog and Magog and other elements (toponyms, sites, monstrous peoples) of the Alexander tradition.

This chapter deals with two different types of capital formation. Alexandria was by far the most important royal city in Egypt. Urban centers in the imperial possessions outside of Egypt never conflicted with the centrality of Alexandria. The Seleucids, by contrast, took over a more heterogeneous, mobile and paradoxically more connected empire with a tradition of several royal cities already established. Identifying a political center is more problematic there, but governance was “a network of ever-shifting, personalized relationships between interest groups and powerful individuals based on reciprocal transactions.” There was a particular need to establish a symbolical political center that was Seleucia-Pieria first, and then Antioch. Both authors observe, however, that it was imperial competition, and to a lesser extent local discourse, that shaped the vision of Ptolemaic and Seleucid capitals. Looking at foundation myths as a guide to the symbolic construction of these capitals, they observe a deeply entangled discourse. Each court and population responded to each other and to Rome in an antagonistic interaction that manifested itself in many other forms than war alone.

Many of the customs of kingship used by Muslim rulers were inspired by practices found outside of Islamic traditions. These came most directly from the Sasanian Empire and in the development of intellectual traditions that were inspired by Persian ideas of kingship. The rule of Jamshīd, Farīdūn, Khusraw I, and the “Persian” Alexander served as a model for many Muslim rulers who sustained dynastic successes in very different political and social contexts. What made the Persian ideal of kingship thrive, even after the defeat of the Sasanian Empire, and how was Persian imagery of rule mobilized by Muslim rulers to create imperial polities in South Asia? These are two of the central questions addressed in this chapter.

Alexander the Great's victories over Darius III and his satraps between 334 and 323 BCE have been for very long interpreted as the reliable testimony of the intrinsic feebleness and internal fragility of the Achaemenid empire, which expanded from Central Asia to Aswan and from the Indus to the Mediterranean Sea, and lasted for more than two centuries (c.550–330). And yet, notwithstanding the exceptional cultural and political diversity of the countries and peoples under the empire’s rule, the central authorities exercised a permanent control upon lands and seas. The best way for understanding the originality of such an ancient empire is to rule out the usual tricky alternative centralization versus independence/autonomy. Cultural diversity and imperial power are not mutually exclusive. The main feebleness of such a political construction was that, in front of a powerful (Macedonian) invasion, the central power could not count on any imperial ideology which would be shared by all the cultural components of the empire.