Alexander the Great and the Magic Golden Apples

Alexander’s goal was to conquer the known world, and he did. His empire stretched east from Greece through Persia (modern-day Iran) and Iraq to the Indus River on the western border of India, north through what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan, and south into Africa. His conquering created a new culture, Hellenistic, that was a combination of four cultures: Greek, Persian, Indian, and Egyptian.

This had an impact on the cuisine of Greece, because new methods of food preparation and new foods were introduced. One writer bemoaned all the changes that were occurring with food: “Do you see what things have come to? Bread, garlic, cheese, maza-those are healthy foods, but not these salted fish, these lamb chops sprinkled with spices, these sweet confections, and these corrupting pot roasts. And by Zeus, if they aren’t simmering cabbage in olive oil and eating it with pureed peas!”24 Alexander established cities everywhere he conquered and named at least fifteen after himself. The center of learning in the world shifted from Athens to Alexandria, Egypt.

It had a library with 700,000 volumes of Greek writing, a zoo, a botanical garden, an observatory, and a great lighthouse more than 400 feet high to keep the ships safe, many of them carrying wheat from the Nile River valley to feed the Mediterranean world. Alexander was on a quest for immortality-the legendary Water of Life or the magic Golden Apples. He didn’t find either one, but he did find other apples that were supposed to let him live to be 400 years old.25 He didn’t live to be forty. He died of a fever, maybe malaria, one month short of his thirty-third birthday. Still seeking immortality, he arranged to have himself preserved in honey and placed in a glass coffin in Alexandria, Egypt. After his death in 323 B.C., as usual after the death of a powerful leader, there were wars of succession and his empire was split up into smaller areas ruled by several generals. But Alexander’s vast empire would soon appear small. Power in the Mediterranean was shifting to a fast-rising country located west of Greece on a peninsula shaped like a boot-Italy.