Politically, his belief in one possible empire from the west Mediterranean to India was not refuted by the way that it failed within thirty years of his death. Those years were chaotic, but not once are the natives known to have risen seriously against Macedonian rule, except in the cities of mainland Greece which had never been firmly held anyway; there the uprising collapsed within a year. Egypt, a part of Iran and the Punjab were indeed lost to the court at Babylon, but Egypt was detached because its new satrap Ptolemy pursued his ambition of being an independent Pharaoh; some twenty years after Alexander's death, India, the Hindu Kush and probably the Helmand valley as far as Kandahar were abandoned for a price of 500 elephants to the new and ruthless empire of Chandragupta, admirer of Alexander and heir to the eastern kingdom of Magadha whose last ruler he had overthrown; if Alexander's men had not mutinied on the Beas, Magadha would have fallen to the west and Chandragupta's army would never have pressed so soon on the eastern frontier. Within eighty years of Alexander's death, Parthian tribesmen from the lower course of the Oxus had overrun new grazing-lands south and southwest of the river and cut off the one remaining land route to the rich upper satrapy of Balkh and Sogdia; there the Greek and Macedonian generals took the title of king, perhaps as much from helplessness as from sinister ambition. These Parthians, who later grew to rule Asia, were nomads and outsiders, men who would only have been forced into Alexander's satrapies by the uncontrollable pressures of weather and pasturage; as for the kings of Bactria, they were Greeks and Macedonians who wore the diadem like Alexander and went east to reclaim his Indian conquests in campaigns as surprising as they are obscure. Neither kings nor Parthians were native subjects; Alexander's empire was never challenged from beneath or within.

Secure from inside, his one kingdom could have been realized if only his high commanders could ever have agreed among themselves, for Ptolemy, Chandragupta and the Parthians only broke off their separate pieces at moments when the Asian Successors were absorbed elsewhere with struggles between themselves, their brothers and their wives. Reprisals came, but in each case too late and from kings who were pressed by rivals in western Asia; India and eastern Iran were not given up lightly as the huge price of 500 elephants was asked for them; it was proof of the kings' priorities that those elephants were promptly moved to the west, where they won the decisive battle that nude Seleucus the king of Asia. Caught between west and cast, the Successors put the west and its family struggles first; had Alexander lived, his personality would have towered over the Empire and held them together for the repulse of any nomads or Chandragupta. In another twenty years he could have schooled his sons to succeed him. As for the far west, the victories of Pyrrhus the Epirote and Agathocles the Sicilian in the next fifty years showed that the western plans which Alexander had begun through his brother-in-law and implied at the end of his life were not an impossibility. Both Pyrrhus and Agathocles linked themselves to Alexander's Mediterranean Successors; what was left to these two minor allies of his inheritance could surely have been achieved by Alexander himself and then entrusted to client kings. The 'frog-pond' of the Greeks would have extended from Sicily to the river Beas.

It was not, then, a grave lack of manpower or an outburst of native hatred which told against Alexander's aims; it was the older enemies of time and distance, combined against officers who fought amongst themselves through the accident of his early death. Because the Successors lost the east, they are often thought to have disdained it. This, however, is to pass improbable judgement on what is unknown. Alexander's belief that the court and army should include Iranians and a wide class of hellenized orientals has often been claimed as a victim of his officers' prejudices; again, the point is too complicated to go unqualified. By the third century the high court officials of the Successors' kingdoms were almost exclusively Greeks, attracted from the Aegean to a personal rank in royal service where neither class nor home were counted against them; even the Macedonians were relatively rare in administrative jobs outside the army. This open society did not extend beyond talented Greek immigrants. In the Ptolemies' Egypt, hellenized natives were very seldom admitted to high court rank; the name of Persian was confined to a privileged class of mixed senders. There is hardly an Iranian satrap or servant known at the western court of the Seleucids; they are only known to have used Iranians in their army where they were too valuable to ignore. So much, it might seem, for Alexander's 'concord and partnership in the empire'. The heirs to his colonists resorted to tortuous inter-marriage to avoid taking native wives into their family property; there are very few Greeks in eastern cities who are known to have married wives with native names. It was the prejudice of the ruling class which finally won.

Their victory may not have been total or immediate. In Egypt Ptolemy began by employing certain natives in high posts and perhaps only hardened his policy later under the influence of philosophers from Aristotle's school.

In Asia, ninety-two Iranians had been married to Companions and only five are known in their new capacity. Three were deserted for western political wives, but of the other two one was Seleucus's wife, daughter of the rebel Spitamenes. When Seleucus rose to be king of Asia he did not divorce her; their son, Antiochus I, was sent to be regent of Iran among barons who remembered his grandfather's war of resistance. This was hardly the choice of a man lacking sympathy with the east or with the promotion of Iranians. In the upper satrapies Iranians and Greeks had reason to present a common front against the nomads, a tendency which Antiochus's origins must have encouraged. The Seleucids' method of rule there is still unknown, but the barons are likely to have rallied round this semi-Iranian king. The rejection of Alexander's 'concord' may only have set in gradually as his own generation died, taking its memory with them. In upper Iran it may never have died at all.

In Asia, therefore, the Successors lived in Alexander's shadow. They abandoned his plans for Arabia, but they may not have overturned his court policies at once and just as they rallied to a half-Iranian king, so they followed him in founding and renaming a host of Asian Greek cities. It had been Alexander's belief that the Greek city was worth planting all across Asia on the sites of old Persian citadels, and this one belief was his most lasting contribution to history. He had spent his youth in a palace-society, but he had watched his father Philip found cities as far east as the Black Sea; he had also learnt from his tutor, for Aristotle wrote his political theory round the web of the Greek cities which would last far longer than the empty succession of Asia's kings, flourishing on Asia's western coast for a thousand years, until the rise of the Arabs and Islam reduced their offspring to embattled forts. The thin crust of classical culture only formed in its cities, linked by rough roads and surrounded by alien country-tribes; though Alexander's conquests opened a vast new frontier to the east and south, this new sense of space meant as little as the Greeks' daily business as the manning of the moon has meant to the strident nationalism of the planet Earth. The age of kings did not kill the spirit of the city-states in Greece, for they fought and protested as much as in any Periclean age; politically, it was an age of new beginnings, of broader federations and closer unions, which were mostly handled by their Macedonian masters with a restrained disinterest. In Asia, the age of the Successor kings was not markedly harsher to Greek city freedom and self-government than the empires of Athens, Sparta and Darius which had gone before: there was still room for manoeuvre. The real turning point comes with the Roman Conquests, stabilized into an Empire by Augustus from 31 B.C. onwards.