Alexander and Asia Minor: Conquest and Strategies of Legitimation

The theme of the impact and forms of legitimation of Alexander’s conquest in Asia Minor is a complex question, not only owing to the broad scope of the subject but, above all, as a result of the direction taken by scholarship over the last decades, where research perspectives have become more and more articulated and diversified and have widened well beyond the mere question of the nature of political relations established by Alexander with the Greek communities of the coast. While in the past scholars’ efforts had the primary objective of establishing, on the basis of the scanty documentation available, whether the Greek poleis of the Asiatic coast became part of the League of Corinth or not, more recent approaches, with a reversal of the vantage-point, have aimed instead at placing Alexander’s conquest of Asia Minor within the context of the much wider phenomenon of the ‘transition’ from the Persian empire to the Hellenistic kingdoms. This line of investigation has led, on the one hand, to underlining the significance of the Achaemenid administrative tradition and exploring the ways in which it came to interact with the Macedonian one, and, on the other hand, to probing into areas of continuity and discontinuity. In this paper I intend to take stock of a limited number of issues by means of some case studies, in articular: 1) Alexander, the Greek cities and ‘royal economy’; 2) the impact of Alexander’s conquest as illustrated by the paradigmatic cases of Ilion, Priene and Iasos. It is concluded that the origin of Alexander’s authority was rooted in the charismatic dimension, more recisely in the elaborate rituals he staged before and after crossing the Hellespont, in his heroic connections and models, in his successfully seizing control of the coastal cities of Asia Minor and, ultimately, in his selfpresentation as the liberator of the Greeks (as well as, as we have seen, of the Lydians and Carians), and new founder of some of their poleis, but the forms concretely taken by his power were shaped by the subsystems and long-established customs he integrated into his new structure of authority. In Weberian terms, this was largely achieved both with respect to the Greek ethnic component and to the native population in accordance with tradition, ensuring continuity in the functioning of the administrative and tributary structures of the Achaemenid empire. Moreover, if it is in fact undeniable that in principle the arrival of Alexander entailed the ‘liberation’ of such poleis, and, together with it, the exemption from tribute and establishment of democracies, the case of Priene, exemplifying the complexity of problems and solutions adopted, becomes emblematic: in defining the boundaries of the city’s land, and acting as guarantor for the ensuing territorial organisation, Alexander could only respond to requests that were advanced by the polis itself and, one can suppose, in the first place by its political elite. On the Weberian principle that ‘die Natur der Herrschaft von den Beherrschten aus zu bestimmen ist’, this defines Alexander’s authority and decision-making, at least in the perception of his ‘audience’, in terms of legal power. In other words, the legitimation of Alexander’s power in Asia Minor was the result of a combination of different factors involving all three Herrschaftsformen described as Idealtypen by M. Weber.