All Alexander's Women
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His close bond with Olympias in his youth no doubt opened the way to such convictions. But in this adult Alexander, who now often disregards his mother’s counsel –repeated over and over in her long letters–, the anecdote becomes more compelling. Persia has given him this level of insight; but who in Persia? And what did that mean for Alexander’s designs for his world empire, that is to say, for our cultural heritage?
THE KARIAN PRINCESS
But first we return to chronological order. After the failed sex bomb Kallixeina comes a failed bride: princess Ada II of Karia. In this affair we see an ambitious young Alexander, fearful that his status of crown prince is in danger, react by taking an enormous risk. He thwarts a diplomatic negotiation of his father, king Philip.
This princess Ada is just a pawn in a political power play at the highest level. On the one hand, the aggressive expansion of Makedon under Philip, who is already eying the rich Ionian provinces of Persia. On the other hand, the classic troubles of a succession on the Persian throne. After the death in 338 BC of Artaxerxes III Ochus, who had grabbed power through wholesale murder and deceit, the fight for the succession is once again as cruel as unpredictable.
With the faraway center of the empire in turmoil, vassal kings look around for local help. Ada’s father, the satrap Pixodaro of Karia –which borders on Ionia– contacts Philip and offers him the hand of his daughter for “the crown prince of Makedon”. Philip names as the groom his eldest son, prince Arridaios, who is mentally handicapped (this, Pixodaro does not yet know). Behind their back, Alexander offers himself to marry Ada and so, he thinks, ensure his status as crown prince.
Philip discovers the intrigue, gets furious, and punishes Alexander by exiling his closest friends and advisors. The marriage is scuttled. In the end, Ada II will become the wife of a Persian satrap, Orontobates.
Around the same time of the ‘Karian princess’ affair, a different, little incident happens in Pella, involving a young Makedonian woman. Plutarch tells it as an example of Alexander’s respect for a woman’s rights.
The palace servants have arranged for a girl to go to Alexander’s bed. She arrives very late, and confesses that she had to wait until her husband fell asleep. Alexander, who did not know she was married, sends her home on the spot. Then he gives the servants a piece of his mind because they had nearly made him guilty of such an abuse.
There is a similar anecdote which shows that Alexander, also áfter he has become an undisputed ruler, still disapproves of coming between man and wife. It happens sometime at the beginning of the campaign against Persia.
An old friend, Antipatrides, offers him a luxurious dinner and has a sexy young woman come in to entertain them with harp music. Visibly it is the intention of Antipatrides to ‘score’ with Alexander, by having her seduce him. Alexander feels like it at first, but then notices something is going on between the harper and the host. “She is your woman?” he asks, and Antipatrides admits that is true.
Alexander sends her off, and gives Antipatrides a sound drubbing.
KAMPASPE AND STATEIRA
Episodes of failed or discarded seductions notwithstanding, there is no doubt that Alexander liked to dally with sexy girls. We have a good example in the Thessalian hetaira Kampaspe. (The Roman writer Aelian confuses her with Kallixeina; the better version is that of Pliny the Elder, who calls her “Alexander’s favorite concubine”.)
She pleases Alexander so much that he asks his court painter, Apelles, to make him a nude portrait of her. As Kampaspe poses for Apelles, the two fall in love. The magnanimous reaction of Alexander, Pliny tells us, is that he keeps the portrait but sends Kampaspe, with his best wishes, to Apelles’ house. Thus, she becomes the model for his most famous painting: Afrodite arising from the Sea. Everybody said she was stunningly beautiful, and Plinius quotes the story as an example of Alexander’s self-control.
It was of course a well known (propaganda) theme that Alexander could keep down his sex drive. The most often repeated story in this vein concerns the gorgeous wife of Darius III, Stateira. Some authors doubt whether it is true that Alexander refused to enjoy this captured queen –the most beautiful woman in Asia, all sources agree– for sexual booty, “his spear-won right” as Homeros would have put it.
But I am convinced that Alexander, in such cases, gave priority to his political plans above his pleasures; and that he had the firm design to return this Stateira, unscathed, to Darius in a grand gesture. Like he did, around that same time, with a granddaughter of Ochus: a princess who was sent back to her Achaemenid husband Hystaspes after she had been captured by Alexander.
The Persians perfectly understood the purpose of such a ‘message’. For it was said that in this way, Cyrus the Great had once returned a beautiful captive, the Lady of Susa. She then had persuaded her husband to become a loyal follower of Cyrus. Whether history or legend, it featured in the writings of the Athenian general Xenofon, which Alexander knew by heart.
A few commentators, who disparage of Alexander’s magnanimity, prefer to propose such anecdotes as proof that he did not like sex with women. But there is no ground to disbelieve the statements in classical sources that he thoroughly enjoyed the sex appeal of Kampaspe, Barsine and Roxane.
The fact is that, all his adult years, he kept at his side two male lovers and four female bedmates in succession. So Alexander would have had a good laugh at the modern hype to depict him either as totally gay (because of his relation with Hefaistion and the Persian eunuch Bagoas), or as ‘undersexed’. And he would have been bewildered at the Western obsession for heated disputes about his sexuality. After all, he was just a normal bisexual, like everybody else in his world who had the means for the upkeep of such pleasures.
TIMOKLEIA
Besides Telesippa, another ‘anecdotal’ but significant woman in his life is Timokleia from Thebes. She is the first example that shows us Alexander as a powerful ruler who enforces respect for women’s rights. It was well known in his army. Sitting around the campfires, his soldiers would tell each other the tale of their king pardoning ‘that woman in Thebes’. It had happened during the rebellion in Greece of 335 BC; Plutarch and other historians still have all the details.
Alexander’s veterans would remember it like this: “I was there myself, so I tell it to you as if I see it happen before my eyes again. Now, Thebes has fallen –bloody siege, that–, and Alexander’s latest allies are sacking the city. They have many scores to settle with the Thebans. In the middle of that chaos, a group of our own soldiers come before him, hauling along a woman. They accuse her of having killed their officer. He was the commander of that brigade from Thrakia, you know, Hipparchos.
At Alexander’s questions, the woman answers that yes, she did: the officer had broken into her house, raped her, and mistreated her to make her confess where the ‘treasure’ of the house was hidden. She had led him to the well in the garden. When he was leaning over the side to look down, she had heaved him in and killed him off with stones. Finally she adds: “My name is Timokleia. I am the sister of Theagenes, commander of the Theban army who fought for the liberty of Greece against Philip, and fell on the battlefield of Chaironea.”
That’s putting up a big mouth, no? Sure she thinks she will be executed anyway over the killing of an officer. But no sir, our Alexander has a different point of view. He tells the soldiers that Hipparchos had acted against his orders, and that the woman had been right in defending herself. He sets her free, and permits her to leave together with her children.”
The anecdote stresses Alexander’s unusual chivalrous way of treating women; but there is more to it than that. The sack of Thebes has often been (and today still is) cited as a reason for harsh criticism on Alexander. The city paid heavily for its rebellion: all the survivors were sold as slaves, and all buildings –except for the house of the poet Pindaros– razed to the ground.
Alexander meant to terrify other Greek rebels into surrender so as to avoid further war losses, and it worked. Ath
ens, the true instigator of this uprising, capitulated and suffered no loss at all. In other words, the punishment of Thebes was not the blind orgy of (Alexander’s) violence decried by his critics, but a cold-blooded calculation.
He could not prevent his last-minute allies, until recently tyrannised by Thebes, from taking their vengeance on the city. But this incident proves that his own soldiers had clear orders to behave civilly. How else would they have decided, in the middle of the chaos of a city being sacked, and with a woman on their hands who freely admitted to having killed their officer, not simply to finish her off? Nobody would have taken notice. But no, they brought her to Alexander. They must have expected his decision already.
THE AMAZONS
Alexander’s positive attitude towards women is also based on his fascination with the mythical Amazons; not so difficult to understand in a man who goes to sleep with Homeros’ Iliad under his pillow. Ever since he was a child he has been listening raptly to all the Amazon legends; especially when he asked his tutors about the deeds of Herakles and Achilles, whom he regards as his direct ancestors. He dreams of equalling their feats, including their encounters with such admirable Amazon queens as Hippolyta and Penthesileia. And that dream will never die.
Mary Renault, who wrote an insightful biography of Alexander besides her famous novelised trilogy about him, told it as follows:
“Persia spent upward of a millennium embroidering the story of Sikandar Dhu’l-Qarnain, the Two-Horned, the World Seeker. In the pleasure houses, the bazaars, the inns, the harems, centuries before it got into written form, they collected fabulous exploits from eras before his birth. Of no one else did they now appear so credible.
Dispatching Poros of India single-handed, he takes the surrender of the King of China, who bestows on him the Auspicious Horseman, a gallant warrior later revealed as a lady of dazzling beauty, with whom he spends an elaborately decorated night of love. So long remembered was his wish to meet an Amazon!”
Renault is referring here to the Persian saga Sikandar-Nama, that appeared in the year 1203 AD. But the basic elements for this extravagantly embroidered romance with an Amazon had appeared over a thousand years before, in the first Alexander biographies. There the story was not so elaborated, but equally fantastic. The earliest version we have was published around 40 BC by Diodoros in book XVII of his Library of History, referring to the year 330 BC:
At the end of this period, Thalestris considered she was indeed pregnant. She left the camp and Alexander moved on with his army into Parthia.”
The tale is too good to be true. Plutarch (Alexander, 46, 1–6) gives us a long list of classical historians who either believed or denied its plausibility. The nay-sayers, he notes, “seem to have the support of Alexander himself, because he wrote a very precise and detailed letter [about his activities in that period] to Antipater [his regent in Makedon], in which he says that the Scythian king offered him his daughter in marriage; but he does not mention any Amazon. Anyway, our admiration for Alexander will not be decreased if we disbelieve the story of the Amazon, nor increased if we believe it.”
Nowadays it is accepted as fact that the Scythian leader Karthasis offered Alexander one of his daughters for a bride. She may well have been, like many warlike Scythian women, such an attractive whirlwind on horseback as described in the Sikandar-Nama. Alexander’s official chronicler Kallisthenes, who was then still praising his king into the skies, would not have hesitated a second to upgrade her to the dreamed Amazon.
But since Alexander did not take up the Scythian marriage offer, we may confidently doubt that he ever got to enjoy those thirteen days of lovemaking with an ‘Amazon’.
Anyway, his yearning to meet Amazons becomes well known among his Persian vassals. The Persians probably see this as one more example of Alexander trying to surpass the deeds of Cyrus the Great, who finally was defeated by a warrior woman.
In 529 BC, Cyrus’ last –and fatal– exploit had been a march beyond his northern frontier into the lands of the Scythian tribe of the Massagetai. He felt sufficient respect for their proud queen Tomyris to begin with an offer to marry her. But as she refused to submit to him in any way (while giving sound arguments why she turned him down), Cyrus attacked – and died on the battlefield.
This historical fact, highlighting an unconquerable queen, must have appeared to the Persians as a perfectly understandable reason why Alexander would want to conquer Amazon warriors. And so one of his satraps tries to fulfil his desire (though with only a sketchy idea of what it is all about). In 324 BC, shortly after the Susa weddings, as Alexander is making a festive journey to the old Median capital of Ekbatana, he receives a surprise gift. His Persian satrap there, Atropates, feels honoured by the king who has just made him father-in-law to general Perdikkas. Atropates conceives a shining idea to reciprocate, by regaling Alexander with not just one, but a whole troop of legendary women. The historian Arrian writes (Anabasis, VII, 13):
“He gave him a hundred women, saying that they belonged to the Amazons. They were equipped like cavalry troopers, except that they carried axes instead of spears, and little bucklers instead of shields. Some say their right breast was smaller, and was uncovered in battle. But Alexander sent them away from the army, lest they suffer any outrage from the Makedonian soldiers or the barbarian troops.
According to the story, he told them to inform their queen that he would come to see her, to get children by her. This, however, neither Aristoboulos nor Ptolemy nor any other reliable author on such matters has attested.
<…> If Atropates did show Alexander any women riders on horse, I think they were some other barbarian women taught to ride, whom he exhibited, dressed in the traditional Amazon fashion. <…> I do not think it credible that this race of Amazon women ever existed at all, despite so many eminent writers singing their praises.”
The myth stubbornly refuses to die, however. It resurfaces in another Persian folk story, retold for ages by word of mouth until it was first written down in the 12th century (the Darab-Nama; we’ll come back to it later). In our days, it has found a new and daring sequel in Western literature: see Judith Tharr 2004, Queen of the Amazons.
But in all its various versions over two millennia, it always signals the same basic message: that Alexander is ready to accept a woman warrior/queen as his equal.
THE PROPHETESS OF APOLLO
Even so, on occasion Alexander shows he has no qualms about using women as pawns in his political strategies. And he can go to the extreme of manipulating a sacrosanct personage: the pythoness of the god Apollo in Delphi. A suicidal foolhardiness, if it were not for the excuse of a ‘family precedent’.
The whole episode seems calculated to remind the Greeks that Alexander is a direct offspring of the half-god Herakles, according to the genealogy of Makedon’s royal house. (Herakles also committed a great insolence at the Delphi oracle, and Zeus ordered Apollo to pardon him.)
The incident comes in the aftermath of Alexander’s appointment as Hegemon –supreme commander of all the Hellenes– for the war against Persia. The Greeks, at the assembly in Corinth, have only accepted him grudgingly. Alexander needs to persuade them, preferably with some sign from the heavens, that it is in their interest to obey him. Thus, on the way back to Makedon he makes a halt at Delphi, so that the oracle of Apollo may judge on Alexander’s leadership for the expedition. But his visit happens to coincide, Plutarch reports, with a run of inauspicious days, when the delivery of oracles is traditionally forbidden.
Alexander doesn’t take No for an answer. He has the venerated pythoness called out. She repeats that she cannot officiate the rite of seating herself at the sacred site where the god inspires her in her trance.
Alexander insists, tugs at her sleeve, and starts to drag her towards the temple. The Pythia, apparently overcome by his forcefulness, gives up and exclaims: “My son, you are invincible!”
Immediately Alexander lets her go –after all, it ís a bad idea to pick a quarrel with Apollo– and proclaims this is the only prophecy he needs. Then, silencing the fact that there has not been an oracle at all, he spreads the word among the Greeks that the god Apollo himself recommends them to follow this unbeatable leader.
It should be noted that Plutarch has been for many years a priest at Delphi. He translated for visitors the utterances of Apollo’s pythoness as she voiced the visions of her trance. That explains why he is the first author to give background details of this ‘prophecy’ about Alexander.
The earlier writers had only registered its existence. Like Diodoros, who states that in Siwah (Egypt), when Alexander asked the oracle of Zeus-Ammon if he would rule the whole earth, the answer said that he would be invincible forever. Later, in India, Alexander remembered –so Diodoros writes– that “the Pythia had called him unconquerable, and Ammon had given him the rule of the whole world.”
In his explanation, Plutarch has the pythoness of Delphi address Alexander with the same salutation (My son) and the same description (unbeatable) that, four years later, the oracle of Zeus-Ammon will famously use to proclaim him the invincible son of the supreme god. So in reality, Plutarch claims for his own prophetess the honour of having anticipated the oracle of Siwah, a longtime rival of Delphi, by several years. But in doing so, he reveals that Alexander in fact manipulated the sacrosanct Pythia to his own means.
THAIS, FROM ATHENS