Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  'It would be eccentric,' Aristotle had recently written, 'if a man were to say that he loved Zeus.' The love of god was not such an alien idea to the ordinary man, but the gods of fourth-century Greece cannot be approached with the hopes and attitudes of a modern Christian. If the boundary between gods and men could not be bridged by love, it was, in principle, an open frontier. 'Do not,' said a too-famous earlier Greek poem, 'seek to become Zeus'; becoming Zeus was not, therefore, an impossible aim, but, as the myths admonished, it was rash and inadvisable. And yet a truly superhuman show of excellence could still lead a man across the boundary; such excellence had been recognized long before Alexander, in two different quarters. There were the men of genius and mysticism, described, however loosely, as gods among men: Pythagoras and Empedocles, the two outstanding philosophers of the Greek West, had impressed their followers as divine, while at least one artist and a faith-healer had felt similarly about themselves, even if others had not agreed. More blatantly, because they were more popular, there were the men of achievement, none more extraordinary than Euthymus the boxer 150 years before Alexander. He too had come from south Italy, the Greek West, but he had punched his way to three victories in the Olympic Games, besides excelling against a mysterious adversary called the Hero of Temesa; his statues, both in Olympia and in his south Italian hometown, were believed to have been struck by lightning on one and the same day, and in recognition of this prowess, he was consecrated in his lifetime by the Delphic Oracle, who ordered sacrifice to be paid to him, as indeed it was, repeatedly: 'there was nothing special about this, except that the gods themselves had ordered it.' As befitted a god, Euthymus lived to an advanced old age, when it was believed that he escaped death by disappearing into his local river, which some had always suspected to be his father. Within months, the problem of how a god could die was to be faced by Alexander and his courtiers on remarkably similar terms.

  But politicians, like athletes, were also men of power and achievement, and in certain outstanding cases, they too had been worshipped like gods. Again in the Greek West, Sicilian Greeks had feted Dion, their acknowledged Saviour of the moment; earlier in Greek Asia, similar honours had been paid to Lysander the Spartan general, by the exiles whom he had restored like Alexander, although these exiles were tyrants and oligarchs, favoured in the name of freedom. Not that this deification was confined to the extremes of the Greek world, to Sicily famed for its excess, or to the coast of Asia where worship of the Roman emperor later took such a deep and lasting hold: in Greek thought it was as old as Homer's epics and so, for example, it could be suggested of Spartan kings or of Pericles the Athenian. But for the most part, independent men of power had not arisen in the same way in the dosed world of the cities of mainland Greece as in the kingships of Sicily and Asia. With the rise of Philip, the conditions had altered; Philip's father, King Amyntas, was worshipped with a shrine in a nearby Greek city, probably in his lifetime, while Philip himself had died pleasing the Greeks at a festival which enthroned him among the gods, and there can be little doubt that he would have been more freely worshipped in Greek cities had he survived. He had built a Philippcum at Olympia, in which statues of Olympias, Alexander and himself were displayed, and the round shape of this building and the gold and ivory of its statues perhaps imply that it was meant as a place of worship. 'The man who conquers Persia,' a Greek pamphleteer had told him, 'will have earned glory equal to the gods'; Aristotle suggested more cautiously that a man could only 'become a god' by a show of supreme excellence. He was not inclined to believe such excellence possible, but then his pupil Alexander went east, conquered Persia and displayed such extraordinary qualities from Babylon to the peaks of Pir-Sar that his reservations were agreed to be mistaken.

  Against this background, worship of Alexander was neither unprecedented nor blasphemous. Even more than Dion and Lysander, he had freed Greek cities and restored Greek exiles; no returning democrat in Asia or restored exile in Greece would feel the slightest scruple about worshipping him for this godlike benefaction. Too much has been made, often by Romans, of the slavishness of classical ruler worship. It is more revealing that Greek cities almost always paid it in return for favours to their remaining liberties, while for the man in the street a public cult of Alexander meant another day's holiday, festive games, building-work and the chance to enjoy the rare luxury of eating meat, that most tangible blessing of a religious sacrifice in the ancient world. No cult of Alexander is yet known in his lifetime in a mainland Greek city, but Greek envoys soon came to him, some dressed as if on a delegation to a god; only one later anecdote referred to a letter from Alexander demanding this worship from the Greeks, but this story is both wildly unreliable and implausible. At Athens, the sole source of contemporary comment, Alexander's so-called divinity attracted the usual anecdotes and witty epigrams, attributed to his many Athenian enemies, but after much heated discussion it is possible that he was indeed paid public worship in the city at the end of his life. The evidence is not yet conclusive, but even a refusal would not have been a matter of high principle: when Alexander first marched into Greece, the Athenians had hastened to offer him 'even greater honours than they had bestowed on Philip', and it is hard to imagine what these could be apart from a temporary act of worship. Within twenty years, they hastened to offer every possible divine honour to a Macedonian who had freed them beyond any argument. In 324, especially, Alexander's benefits, past and future, to the city seemed disputable, and even if those who opposed his divine honours carried the day, they were not constrained by a demand from Alexander himself. His worship was spontaneous and scattered, a hopeful flattery where it was not genuine admiration.

  Alexander himself would be pleased, naturally, to receive it. Throughout his life, he remained a scrupulously religious man who carefully sacrificed to the proper gods and consulted his oracles and seers before taking any momentous action; there are countless examples of this, but even in these last months, he was so impressed by the story of a Greek boy in a small Carian city who had been miraculously rescued and carried out to sea by a dolphin that he summoned him and appointed him to a priesthood of the sea-god Poseidon in Babylon. It is unthinkable that such a man would have dared to accept, let alone to demand, divine honours if they went against his own traditional religion. Deification had long been countenanced in Greek thought; he had seen his father's example, and he had studied with a tutor who saw nothing blasphemous in sacrifices, precincts or hymns to a living man: they were high honours, nothing more, as the ancient world did not draw distinctions between homage and worship. The only question was whether anybody in fact deserved them. Alexander's achievements put this beyond doubt: he seemed to be unbeatable, and so at Athens and presumably elsewhere it was suggested that he should be worshipped as an invincible god. The theme of invincibility which he had long encouraged thus found its final expression, despite the march through Makran.

  These divine honours were more than an intelligible development from the past. With the single exception of Caesar, Alexander is the only man in ancient history whose divinity was ever to be widely accepted and believed. Here his unique career broke completely with his predecessors: he became a precedent himself, and after Alexander, the history of pomp and kingship could never be the same again. His royal Successors invoked his name, his guidance or his invincibility, copied his claim to be the son of a god as confirmed by an oracle, and even adopted the way he had held his head or worn his diadem. Among the Romans, his impression was even more vivid; here, his effects lived for more than five hundred years, first, in their establishment of a cult of the goddess Victory, probably on early news of his extraordinary successes, then in the continual imitations of their politicians and emperors, from Scipio to Caracalla, who laid claim to Alexander's cloak or breastplate, copied his shield and statues and even recalled the memory of his horse. Christian bishops in Antioch would still be troubled in the late fourth century to find that their congregations favoured Alexander's image on their s
eal-rings: for the classical world he had become the prototype of glory and superhuman excellence, and men were reluctant to forget him.

  To project this back into his lifetime is difficult, but surely correct. For most of his worshippers, Alexander had the added aura of absence.

  They had seen him once, at most, when he first freed them and they were left thereafter with a memory of a young man in full glory. If they came to court on his return, they would find evidence of divinity written large in his appearance: the Persian diadem suggested, wrongly, he was representing Zeus, his saffron shoes suggested Dionysus, and his proskynesis, if only from Persians, implied to the uncritical that he was himself divine. In art everywhere, these themes were prolific, and it is mistaken to try and date them all to the years after Alexander's death: by his favourite Apelles, he had already been painted holding a thunderbolt, just as later the same artist would show him between hemispheres, a symbol of Castor and Pollux, themselves divine, and of relevance to Alexander's supposed ascension into heaven. 'I hold the earth,' ran the inscription beneath his statue, 'you Zeus, hold Olympus,' and on a medallion, probably struck to commemorate his Indian campaign, this Zeus on earth was shown on horseback, attacking Porus's elephant and wielding the thunderbolt of Zeus in his hand. The theme recurs on an engraved gem, and in Egypt, after his death, small terra-cotta statues show him holding Zeus's aegis, or goat-skin mantle, over one arm. These humble monuments are proof, perhaps, of how the ordinary soldier remembered him, and presumably they derive from an original sculpture of his lifetime. As for his heroic ancestor Heracles, Alexander was shown wearing a helmet made from a lion's head on an otherwise lifelike series of sculptures carved soon after his death for the sarcophagus of the king of Sidon, his own Companion: the helmet was a symbol of Heracles, and no doubt Alexander wore it in real life. On coins, Heracles's standard Macedonian portrait had taken on Alexander's features: there were precedents for this, not least in the gold coin-portraits of Apollo issued by Philip but unmistakably influenced by Alexander's features; coins also showed Alexander in his lifetime wearing Ammon's ram's-horns, and this was a theme all his own. Both in art and literature, parallels were to be drawn between Alexander and Dionysus, but though there were decided similarities between his triumphal procession on leaving Makran and the epiphany, or manifestation of Dionysus and other gods, this is a theme which only arose after Alexander's death, especially when the Ptolemies began to derive their descent through Philip from Dionysus himself. By wearing oriental dress, Alexander had unintentionally assumed certain features of Dionysus's appearance, but the connection was incidental, and though Alexander might rival Dionysus, particularly in India, he never tried to represent the god directly.

  To sceptics, it soon became fashionable to explain away Alexander's divinity as a trick designed to impress his subjects. Historians are too inclined to father their own incredulity on to figures of the past; they would do better to ask why the response they find incredible was felt to be needed by men, like themselves, in a human predicament. If Aristotle's writings reflect the mood of contemporaries, then there was already a feeling that the gods were indifferent to man's fate and content to live in disinterested ease. After Alexander this sense of a universe drained of divinity is more apparent. 'The other gods,' said an Athenian hymn to one of Alexander's Successors, twenty years later, 'are either far away, or have no ears, or do not exist, or pay us no attention. But you we see before us, not made of wood, or stone, but alive and real.' There was truth in this sophisticated tribute: Alexander, more than any Successor, was the dominant source of power on earth, and power had long been the distinguishing mark of the Greek gods. Like the gods, he was extraordinarily rich and royally born, and by a single order, he could change the history of men's lives: divine honours recognized this power won by achievement, exactly as Greek pamphlets had predicted they would, and the little that is known of Alexander's character suggests he would have accepted the comparison gratefully and seriously. As to how it affected him at the end of his life, only one description survives: it was written by a Greek pamphleteer, well aware of the details of the court, probably because he had been there. It is, by any standards, remarkable.

  'Alexander,' wrote Ephippus of Olynthus, in a pamphlet on The Deaths of Hephaistion and Alexander, would wear the sacred clothes of the gods at dinner-parties, sometimes the purple cloak, the slippers and horns of Ammon, sometimes the dress of the goddess Artemis, which he would often wear even on his chariot, where he dressed in Persian robes and showed a bow and a spear slung over his shoulders. Sometimes, he would also dress as Hermes, especially at parties when he would wear the winged sandals and the broad hat and hold a caduceus in his hand: often he carried a lion-skin and a club, like Heracles.... He would sprinkle the floors of his palace with precious perfume and sweet-smelling wines; myrrh and other incense was burnt for his enjoyment. But a hushed silence fell on all these present, as they were frightened: he was murderous and quite unbearable: he seemed, too, to be 'melancholic', that is, hot-tempered.

  This is not only a clear statement that Alexander wore female dress like Artemis; it is also the only surviving character judgement by a contemporary on the last months of his reign. It is true that in modem cases of religious delusion, paranoiacs who call themselves God will dress up irrespective of sex in male or female costume to suggest their divinity, but since the rise of Christianity, all such modem psychiatric evidence is of very dubious relevance to Alexander's world; more important, Ephippus himself is hardly a witness beyond reproach. His home town, shared by Callisthenes and possibly by Aristobulus, had been destroyed by Philip's Macedonians, and Alexander had recently announced in Greece that he refused to rebuild it; the very little that survives of his work is either facetious or flagrantly prejudiced against the Macedonians. His own life history is uncertain: probably, he is the same Ephippus who was known as a comic dramatist, who had won prizes at Athens and whose plays poked fun at the alleged divine pretensions of other well-known Greeks, a common comic theme. He had even lampooned the philosopher Plato: certainly, he wrote maliciously and his judgements must be treated with extreme caution.

  In their factual outline they make sense: dressing up as a god has a curious history, which helps to put Alexander's alleged behaviour into perspective. There were Greek myths which warned of its evil consequences, but in practice, rulers and outstandingly talented individuals had long thought otherwise. Some ninety years before Alexander, the painter Parrhasios had walked in the streets of Athens, dressed in a purple robe, a golden crown, a white ribbon and golden shoes, carrying a golden staff and claiming to be son of Apollo, god of the arts, and in close contact through dreams with the deified hero Heracles. Priests would occasionally wear divine robes, as would swearers of a sacred oath in Syracuse, who dressed in a goddess's clothes; in Greek Heracleia, on the Black Sea, the tyrant Clearchus, pupil of Plato and a man who modelled himself on the Sicilian kings, had already worn a purple robe, soft boots and a golden crown and been preceded by the image of Zeus's golden eagle. He dyed his face red to impersonate Zeus and suggest divine ichor, and named his son the Thunderbolt, a symbol which he often carried instead of a sceptre. But there was a stranger precedent, which may have meant more to Alexander, as he had probably seen it himself.

  During Alexander's youth there lived in Syracuse, always a city of pomp, the famous faith-healer Menecrates. He cured various cases of epilepsy of which the doctors had despaired and as epilepsy was known as the sacred disease, its healer, who asked for no pay, could fairly claim to be divinely inspired: Menecrates thus called himself Zeus, dressed in the usual purples and golds and surrounded himself with a troupe of former patients, who also attired themselves as gods. One was a general from Argos, who had served in high favour with the Persians, and now called himself Heracles and dressed accordingly; another, a tyrant in a small Asian Greek city which Alexander had freed after the Granicus, wore Hermes's robes and wings and carried a caduceus; a third was dressed
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br />   as Apollo, a fourth as the god of medicine, while the fifth was none other than Alexarchus, son of Antipater and possibly the most extraordinary man of Alexander's generation; he called himself the Sun, and after Alexander's death, he would found an eccentric community, called City of the Heavens, on the top of Mount Athos.

  Linked to Macedonia's viceroy, Menecrates's troupe is said very plausibly to have paid Philip's court a visit, where among much mirth, the new Zeus reclined at a gorgeous table, while his attendants burnt incense and poured libations in his honour. It was later suggested that Macedonian fellow-guests laughed so much at the sight that Menecrates fled the dining-room in embarrassment, but in view of Philip's own ambitions, Pella was not the place for men to ridicule an aspiring god. Alexander would surely have seen, or heard about, the doctor's divine arrival.

  It is important that, like Menecrates, Alexander is only said to have dressed as the gods at dinner-parties. By ancient custom, the Greeks had long held banquets for the gods, at which an empty table and a portion of the food was left for the appropriate deity: in Athens, twelve fellow-diners, representing the twelve Olympian gods, were chosen to dine in the 'presence' of Heracles, and similar sacred feasts were known at Delphi and all across the Greek world. But Alexander was himself a god; he did not need an empty table, as he could reveal his presence in an epiphany, or moment of revelation, at such sacred dinners in his honour. The moment of epiphany of a living god would soon be freely celebrated for his Successors, and it is very credible that at a 'banquet of the gods' in his own honour, divine Alexander dressed as befitted his dignity. Ammon's horns and slippers were naturally his favourite choice, and remained without imitation, except for a later queen of the Ptolemies; Heracles's lion-skin was unexceptionable and more than forty Greek imitators of Heracles were known to Roman scholars; Hermes is more surprising but can be paralleled in Menecrates's troupe and in gems of Ptolemy II, showing his helmet adorned with Hermes's wings. As for Artemis, the background here is mainly Roman: the emperor Caligula is said to have preferred dressing as a goddess rather than a god, while Heliogabalus and Gallienus, neither beloved of the senators who wrote history, were reported to show themselves as Demeter and the Great Mother goddess respectively. Among Alexander's successors, Demetrius the Besieger appeared as Athena, but only because he was being worshipped by his own Athenians; a Cynic philosopher, however, is said to have dressed in grey as a female Fury, worn a crown of the twelve signs of the Zodiac and warned his pupils that he was sent from the underworld to judge them. Tales of royal transvestism are most of them slander, and in Alexander's case, this is plainly so. Dressed as Artemis, he wore 'Persian dress and carried a bow and a lance', of a Macedonian variety especially favoured for hunting. Persian dress had long been derided as effeminate by intolerant Greeks; seeing Alexander wearing it in his chariot and armed unobjectionably for hunting, Ephippus had mockingly pretended that the new divine king who dressed effeminately was trying to look like the goddess of the chase. It was only a joke, and not a very good one.