What was life like for the people during Alexander the Great's rule? How were people treated? How were captured people treated? How was the economy? Was it peaceful?

-- Anonymous, July 08, 2003

Answers

I think I'll answer this one. It is an interesting subject, even though it is much too large to cover in a few paragraphs.

Alexander's rule extended over so many different places, with so many different traditions, laws, and economies that there is no one way that "life was like" for all of them. It is possible to make a few useful generalizations, though.

The most important factor in how anyone lived was how high they lived on the ladder of power, money and influence. Just like today. City dwellers lived differently from village dwellers. Just like today. But, unlike now, back then the average person lived in a tiny village, generally a few dozen households. Almost everyone lived that way.

For a villager, life under Alexander was one heck of a lot like life under any other ruler. The only contact between villages and "the government" was sporadic and usually painful. If you were lucky, you only saw the tax collector once a year. That was bad enough. Worse was when the army came and took the young men away, after which you would probably never see or hear from them again. The very worst was when any army came anywhere near where you lived. A "friendly" army was just about as bad as an "enemy", because both of them would come to your village and take whatever food or animals or people they wanted. Sometimes they would pay you for them, sometimes not.

Once you understand this, it becomes easier to understand why Alexander adopted a policy of paying for what his army took (as often as possible). From a villager's point of view, any king who didn't rob them was a jolly good fellow, never mind where he came from.

Alexander only had a tiny army with which to rule a HUGE, VAST, ENORMOUS area. Yet, the people he conquered rarely revolted after his army left the area, even though little prevented them. All that mattered to most people, whether in Persia, Egypt or elsewhere, was how much the king left them to eat and how well he left them alone. Alexander did his best to leave them alone, thus he was actually quite popular with ordinary people.

The exception to this came in places where villagers mostly ruled themselves and no kings had ever had much power over them. Places like modern day Afghanistan. In those places, they disliked Alexander and fought back fiercely. They knew that if Alexander established power over them, they'd be worse off: poorer and less independent. Alexander had a very rough time of it when his armies passed through such independent places.

As for how captives were treated, it depended on one thing: if your family was rich or poor. Rich captives were sold back to their families for a ransom. Poor captives were sold as slaves. The only good thing about this system is that captives were valuable, so they were rarely killed. Killing them would be like throwing money away.

-- Anonymous, December 09, 2003