And even if “Asia” would have been a concept known to the people of Gordium, what would that have meant to the Macedonians and Greeks? Was Asia the name only of the eastern shore of Aegean Sea? Was it all the land until the Euphrates? A synonym for the Persian Empire? The entire continent? No one knew, and that made the prediction perfectly suitable as propaganda. “Asia” is of course not an Asian concept: the idea that there existed something called Asia originated on the shores of the Aegean Sea, where Europe and Asia are recognizable entities. The original, native myth behind the prediction cannot have been about kingship of Asia. The way Alexander solved the problem, by cutting the knot, has become proverbal. According to an ancient oracle, the man who was able to untie the knot with which a yoke was tied to the chariot would one day be “king of Asia”. After losing the strategic initiative during the time-consuming siege of Halicarnassus, the Macedonian armies united at Gordium, where they were forced to wait for the next move by their enemies: would they continue the naval offensive in the west or would they gather an army in Syria? During this pause, Alexander visited a shrine where an old chariot was standing. King of AsiaĪs is well-known, Alexander invaded Asia in 334, defeated a force of satraps - Persia’s royal army force was still suppressing revolts in Babylonia and Egypt - at a small river called Granicus, and proceeded to capture towns that were, after the destruction of the Persian forces at the Granicus, undergarrisoned. Yet, he had set an example for Alexander, whose spectacular career was to be matched by an equally spectacular rise in the cosmic hierarchy: crown prince, king of Macedonia, king of Asia, son of Zeus, justice incarnated, avatar of Vishnu, invincible god. Philip was murdered during the celebration (by a bodyguard, for personal reasons), and many Greeks and Macedonians must have believed that this was the fitting punishment of the blasphemer. He wanted to be the equal of the gods, isotheos. Those who attended the ceremony in the theater of Aegae saw that statues of the twelve Olympian deities had been placed on the stage, and that Philip wanted to sit on a throne between them. In October 336, the Macedonian king wanted to celebrate the wedding of his daughter Cleopatra and his departure to the Persian front. Now that he shared a shrine with a deity - the Greek word is synnaos - Philip had been raised to a rank higher than that of a mere mortal, but even better was to come. The people of Eresus (a town on the island Lesbos) erected an altar to Zeus Philippios and Ephesians placed his statue in the sanctuary of Artemis.
Several towns in Asia Minor revolted and hailed Philip, who was still in Macedonia, as their liberator. In 338, he defeated the Athenians and Thebans at Chaeronea in 337, he reorganized Greece in the Corinthian League and in the spring of 336, when the Persian Empire was suffering from a civil war, his advance guard crossed the Hellespont. The Macedonians had wanted to attack the Achaemenid Empire since 340 BCE, but their king Philip had first decided to teach the Greeks that their defeat in the Third Sacred War (356-346) had been decisive.
However, this would not have been the case if Alexander’s self-deification had not been entirely rational and if it had not offered advantages that no ancient ruler could afford to ignore. Overview Alexander as kosmokrator, "ruler of the universe"Īlthough Alexander the Great was not the first human to receive divine honors, his self-deification set an example for Hellenistic kings, Roman emperors, and other rulers.