In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Nonetheless, new textual interpretations and the associated hermeneutical uncertainties soon gave rise to categorisations of pseudohistory, cryptohistory, and historical revisionism, as methodological flaws came under scrutiny when the rules of textual interpretation were shifted by the so-called ‘fathers of historiography’. The challenges posed by the surviving classical texts generated a further 19th century debate, Altertumswissenschaft (‘science of antiquity’); this questioned whether any study of the classical past ought to include solely written works or all cultural material (as Alfred Gudeman sensed) including archeological and numismatic evidence, for example.62

  The 20th century saw the rise of the social sciences that were soon pulled into historical interpretations, and thereafter every historian needed to be a multidisciplinarian: an ‘economist, sociologist, anthropologist, demographer, psychologist’ and a ‘linguist’, pushing the Altertumswissenschaft debate into wholly new dimensions.63 Enlightened philologists further considered that any truly complete appraisal should include Egyptian, Old Persian and Arabic texts for a wider perspective still. Tertullian (ca. 160-225 CE), the ‘father’ of Western theology and born in a Rome-humbled Carthage, had long before taken a similar line on barbarian texts in his Apology, when he proposed that the ‘… archives of the most ancient nations… Egyptians, Chaldeans and Carthaginians’ were needed to establish proofs.64

  Despite this enlightenment, there remained a distinct absence of heteroglossia in the recording of Alexander’s deeds, save in the multicultural romances. As Macaulay concluded of the Greeks, they: ‘borrowed nothing. They translated nothing. We cannot call to mind a single expression of any Greek writer earlier than the Age of Augustus, indicating an opinion that anything else worth reading could be written in any language except his own.’65 So Alexander’s mainstream history remained an almost exclusively Graeco-Roman affair, paradoxical, when we consider that most of his adult life was spent campaigning in Asia Minor, Phoenicia, Egypt, Babylonia, the far-flung provinces of the eastern Persian Empire, and what the Greeks liberally referred to as India.66

  The last fifty years, in particular, have seen a proliferation in academic studies that relate in some way to Alexander and his successors, as a new generation of scholars has been at work on autopsying what we have.67 Luckily, today we enjoy the benefits of advanced historiographical methodologies to help us frisk sources for weapons of deceit, or as Joseph Speyer commented, we live in a time when objectivity has replaced subjectivity and philology replaced rhetoric.68 The study of the past has become a multi-disciplined process; the core principles of its method have evolved to six-and seven-step checklists that probe probability laws,69 at times relying on simple maths, and at others on advanced linguistic algorithms employed by cliometricians. The ancillary disciplines of Quellenforschung now include papyrology, palaeography, linguistic palaeontology, osteoarchaeology, codicology, iconography, numismatics, epigraphy and even space-archaeology – the ‘total’ evidences available, all of which are being brought to bear on the evidence. Papyri and parchment palimpsests (re-used scrolls or book pages) and even the bones at Aegae are undergoing multi-spectral imaging to reveal their historical and actual DNA, processes that the Renaissance philologists could never have conceived of.

  But if the raw disciplines of Quellenforschung are designed to be immune from bias, the operators employing them are not, and many scholars have pondered on how we unconsciously rewrite the past. One of their conclusions: ‘By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History is interpretation. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of… the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.’70 This serves as a reminder to: ‘cherish those who seek the truth, but to beware of those who find it’.71

  The path of my investigation, the ‘backstory’ to the history of the life and death of Alexander and his remarkable successors, follows my own voyage of discovery into an ocean of anecdotes, testimony and propaganda in which the tides of scholarly opinion on Alexander drift. Any author delving into the murky waters of Quellenforschung soon realises just how frail are the facts behind the life of the man on whom the late Hellenistic era bestowed the epithet ‘Great’.72 And it reminds us how little we really know about the campaigning Macedonian king. Moreover, when sources are analysed impartially, there appears evidence that those who did know, the eyewitness historians who campaigned beside him, had much invested in keeping it that way.

  After reading the available texts, both the ancient testimony and modern reconstructions, I too was dissatisfied with conclusions drawn to date and suspicious of an opacity that ought to have been black and white. Any study of the period does inevitably begin with the eyewitness historians, though they are often provided with a cursory, or even dismissive, accreditation in all but dedicated technical studies, principally because their archetypal accounts have vanished without exception. As a result, we heap too much expectation on the shoulders of the few tenderly revered and now scholar-chaperoned derivatives from the Roman era, though they represent second or third hand testimony, or hearsay further removed. Whilst readers may well be familiar with the names attached to these narratives, I was more interested in the ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ their books emerged, and in asking them a number of awkward questions and in looking them in the eye.

  When we appreciate how far removed these Roman-era accounts were, both chronologically and culturally, from both their early Hellenistic-era histories (with whom they nevertheless courted and interbred) and the events of Alexander’s day, a synthesis of his tale seems inevitable. Alexander’s deeds remain no less impressive for that, but the themes and imagery interwoven into these portrayals are less unique than they first appear. As a result, this book captures the essence of my first thesis on the subject in which I voiced a rather fulsome polemic:

  As a rule, the orphaned, crippled, raped, betrayed, bankrupted, tortured and the left-behind had no historical voices. The eyewitness accounts of gnarled veterans, dispossessed townsfolk and mercenaries forced to resettle in the distant mud-brick Alexandrias at the ends of the empire, and the half-caste children conceived when the Macedonians swept through, had no forum nor papyrus for expression either. In Alexander’s day, and through the Hellenistic era, kings did, and those sponsored by kings did, and ultimately it is their voices we hear.

  As a historiographical koinos topos – a conventional rhetorical theme – it is certainly not new and is perhaps best summed up with a quote from a study aptly named Rethinking History: ‘Put simply, history is never for itself; it was always for someone.’73 Agenda-laden historians writing under royal or imperial patronage and protection are not difficult to find. But when the archetypal historian behind an account was himself porphyrogennetos, born in the royal purple, we must further question his partiality and the resulting lack of censorship.74 But if we challenge the veracity of the few sources we have and those who fit this category, we would be undermining the very fabric of ‘Alexander’ and that would render decades, or even millennia, of historical interpretations redundant. If our platform of trust is gone, what is it that remains?

  Smouldering beneath the embers of Alexander’s still romantic ash is hot scholarly debate on every other aspect of his life and influence. At times scathing in peer critique, and evidently cyclical in opinion, arguments often fall into familiar furrows and risk losing their momentum when straightjacketed by the accepted boundaries of communis opinio. We may, as Demosthenes would have termed it, be ‘boxing like barbarians’.75 One of the results is that historians have adopted the ‘standard model’ of Alexander’s intestacy and its effect on the Graeco-Macedonian world. This is a conclusion I found paradoxical when the footprints of his testament are still visible in texts. When triangulated back to its source, the rejection of the Will appears, once more, contrived. Put simply, the standard model doesn’t quite work and much ‘dark matter’ remains undetected, to use
a cosmographical analogy.

  But whilst ‘… there is nothing so ridiculous that some philosopher has said it’, there remains much to sensibly say about Alexander if we are prepared to radically rethink what we have, for ‘the mistake is to believe the past is dead.’76

  With no academic background, I represent the countless and curious ‘self-educated’ (and originally ‘self-indoctrinated’) readers who have over the past two millennia consumed Alexander with an appetite that never felt satiated. I graduated from an easy grazer of information, to an inquisitive browser of competing sources, to a chewer of contentious fat, and on to a voracious devourer of the still unexplained, in my own gradus ad Parnassum and a correspondent Masters degree, with a thesis built around the testament of Alexander the Great.77 This book retraces the path of that ascent, and it was substantially written to answer my own questions about the era. The journey took me in many unexpected directions, some oblique, but all relevant to the heart of the investigation, and all retained here. I soon learned that fundamental to any understanding of Alexander’s legacy is the twenty-three-year reign of his extraordinary father, Philip II, and the first twenty-three-year story of Alexander’s equally remarkable successors who fought no less spectacular warfare for their piece of the vastly expanded Macedonian-governed empire.78

  When adapting my thesis to a book, I decided to subordinate commercial considerations to freedom of expression and dump the rigidity of scholarly norms along the way; I did not shorten it, simplify it, or sterilise my style. Moreover, I attempted to inject some new momentum by challenging common notions and making little attempt at sidestepping the resulting controversy. Above all, I wanted to open up the themes under scrutiny in a broader way to try and bridge the divide between the academic studies by the subject specialists (some of which require advanced knowledge) and the more accessible and broader-based narratives on the era, as Alexander remains behind a ‘poetic institution’.79

  Widening the field of debate also provided the opportunity to expand on the rarely discussed influences at work on the writings of the period. As ‘all roads lead to Rome’, I soon found myself wandering through the conscience of its republic and the excesses of its imperium. But Alexander’s legacy radiated further and wider still; into the metamorphose literature of the Middle Ages and the newly curious Renaissance, when authors and scribes with their diaskeuastic fingers attempted to rekindle the classical past, but more often than not they transported Alexander still further from his literary and historical origins.

  In 1953 Charles Alexander Robinson published his ‘fresh study of the entire ancient evidence’, whilst wryly noting his shock at having promised to ‘supply this Alexander harmony shortly’… back in 1932; Robinson never completed the second edition. His quoting from the preface of WW Tarn’s 1948 study – ‘The history of Alexander has never received much help from new material…’ – reminds us that the new material was not so different from the old.80 It is what we do with it that can make a fundamental change.

  This book has likewise been long in the making, a decade or more of stolen moments and contemplations on the subject. Each was organically born, as I had not set out to challenge anyone or anything, and I would have been more than content to know Alexander’s story had been faithfully captured on the original papyri and pergamena. But to borrow a phrase from Tacitus belonging to his Annals: ‘maior e longinquo reverential’. Although everything did look reverently preserved when viewed from afar, on closer inspection I discovered that was simply not the case. So I set about radically rebalancing and recalibrating my investigative scales, lest I was seduced into weighing up too faithfully, too literally, or too unquestioningly, the testimony from the past.81

  George Grote’s ‘first principles’ of Greek history see the subject as ‘… essential to the formation of the liberal mind, but in its turn the liberal mind is religious in examining the evidence.’82 True to his proposition, I soon realised that if I was to liberate my own thinking on the matter and pose a credible challenge to accepted interpretations, I would need to examine much more than the brief closing pages laid down by Alexander’s early biographers, those who found, and those who wished us to find, Alexander ‘guilty’ of dying intestate. As any jury knows, guilt can only be established when the supporting evidence is beyond reasonable doubt. So here we bring the subject of historical fraud, duplicity and political manipulation into the vortex of our case, out of which emerges one unavoidable verdict: after these 2,340 years, the Last Will and Testament of Alexander III of Macedonia needs to be extracted from ‘romance’ and reinstated to its rightful place in mainstream history: Babylon in June 323 BCE, the gateway of the gods.

  Virgil once asked the question: ‘Why should fear seize the limbs before the bugle sounds?’ I now think I know, and I sign this off with some trepidation knowing a phalanx of sharp and critical blades shall soon be marching in close-order my way.83

  ‘History is a bag of tricks we play upon the dead,’ remarked Voltaire.

  To which the sophistic answer would be:

  ‘On the contrary, history is a bag of tricks

  the dead have played upon historians.’

  The author

  THE ART OF THE CORRECT SACRIFICE

  Greek scholar and anthropologist, Dr Theodore Antikas, encouraged me to allow, as far as possible, the Greeks and Macedonians their onomastic ‘identity’, naming them on paper as they might have been hailed in the agora, rather than using the anglicised transliterations we have become accustomed to reading now.84 And that was my initial aim. But as any author attempting this approach has discovered, the result is an unsatisfactory compromise; moreover, Attic, Aeolic, Doric, Ionic and the common lingua franca of Hellenistic koine, with its short vowels and diphthongs, might each have rendered different phonemic results (for this reason I have avoided using diacritics). In addition, Greek proper names were often Latinised in literature before becoming anglicised in, for example, the early New Testament translations that gave us many of today’s forms, and this can leave us in macaronic territory.

  Some of the enduring characters of our past need no help, for their names have remained steadfast despite the alchemy of vernacular languages: Curtius, Cato, Claudius, Eumenes, Demosthenes and Diogenes are relevant examples. Others have not: Ploútarchos (Πλούταρχος), a victim of a voiceless velar fricative, was Latinised to ‘Plutarchus’ (he had no complaint; he became a Roman citizen with ius honorum) and it has since been anglicised to the further-cropped ‘Plutarch’.85 In Pella, the seat of government of the late Macedonian Argead kings, we would have found Philippos not Philip, Alexandros not Alexander, and his boyhood friend and general, Ptolemaios, rather than Ptolemy. In their absences on campaign, the king’s regent, Antipatros, written in English as ‘Antipater’ today, oversaw the kingdom, while in Athens (Athenai), the most populated city in the Mediterranean at the time, the metaphysical world lay at the feet of the broad-shouldered Platon (Plato) and his pupil, the remarkable polymath Aristoteles, better known to us as Aristotle.86

  As for the epithets we now attach to the colourful dynasts of the Hellenistic era, I have been more faithful to the original Greek form, so they are written in italics to stress just that and to serve as a reminder that they are in fact just epithets (rather than formal patronymics, for example). So we see Antigonus II Gonatas (an epithet that possibly stemmed either from his birthplace, from being ‘knock-kneed’, or even from the name of the protective iron knee plate)87 and Demetrius Poliorketes, and it is debatable whether these titles (some or all) would have been formally attached to, or recognised by, the individuals themselves during their own lifetimes. Alexander himself had to wait even longer for Megas – ‘Great’, Magnus in Latin – to be added to his name.88 The Ptolemies: Ptolemy I Soter and Ptolemy II Philadelphos (308-246 BCE, ‘sibling-loving’ and here referring to his sister, Arsinoe II, whom he married in Phaoronic style), for example, may well have been so titled during their lives (or soon after) as they were
distinguished by epithets, though numbering them in a dynastic line is a modern (but useful) convention.

  In Roma to the Latins, the city of perhaps a million souls in its heyday, Livy started life as Livius when writing in the day of Octavianus (Octavian, later ‘Augustus’), and Pliny signed as Plinius, and he dedicated his book to the new princeps, Titus, the son of Vespasianus, our Vespasian.89 Yet Greeks were still influential in the Roman literary world where we would have encountered the influential Arrianos, rather than Arrian, Appianos, now shortened to Appian, and the more melodious Herodianos as opposed to today’s Herodian. Convention has, nevertheless, left us with original Latinised forms such as Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek who unusually chose to write in Latin (perhaps to more convincingly segue Tacitus). That result might have seemed unfair to the Roman lyric poet Horatius whose name we spell, without his consultation, a starchy ‘Horace’, or in Victorian England as ‘Horatio’ even. Each chronicled, or poetised, a part of Rome’s own story whilst Strabon (Strabo), the apparently squint-eyed geographer, walked the unrecognisable ruins of a Novum Ilium which were believed by many (not Strabo) to cover legendary Troy – Troia or Ilios to the Greeks.90

  I have also used familiar spellings for place names for historic cities and regions that no longer carry the name today (Cilicia not Kilikia, Cappadocia not Kappadokia, though is its still informally called Kapadokya in Turkey today) and I maintained the more common Latinised forms for locations in Greece (thus Laurium not Lavrion, Phalerum not Phaleron, and Cape Taenarum rather than Tainaron). To attempt any reversion of Persian and Egyptian titles would have required a whole chapter dedicated to toponymic uncertainty and more exotic fonts besides, for their consonants are not the same as ours and their vowel sounds are regionally distinct; the result would be, to quote TE Lawrence tacking the issue in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ‘a washout for the world’.91