In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
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37.Detailed discussion of the Pamphlet in chapter titled Guardians and Ghosts of the Ephemerides. For the importance of the symposia at the Macedonian court see Thomas (2007) pp 82, 87, 97 and Borza (1995) pp 159-169, F Pownall’s discussion in Carney-Ogden (2010) pp 55-63. Heckel (1988) p 10 for the guest list. Full conspiracy text in the Metz Epitome 87-101 and Romance 31-32.
38.Argead was the hereditary tribal name of the royal line dating to the 7th century BCE Macedonian king, Perdiccas I. The Macedonian royal line retained its hereditary name, Temenid, allegedly stemming from Temenus of Argos, an alleged ancestor of Perdiccas I; Herodotus 8.137 More detail in chapter titled The Reborn Wrath of Peleus’ Son.
39.Fraser (1996) p 206 for discussion on its title. The original name of the archetypal text is unknown; detailed discussion in chapter titled Mythoi, Muthodes and the Birth of Romance. Pseudo-Callisthenes is the popular alternative name though the work was attributed to other notable writers; also discussion in Fraser (1996) p 206 and detailed discussion in chapter titled Mythoi, Muthodes and the Birth of Romance.
40.Textual similarities which argue for a common Vulgate source discussion in Bosworth (1983) p 156 and in JE Atkinson (1994) p 25 with a useful summary of earlier studies in Brown (1950) citing the works of Müller, Schwartz and Jacoby in particular.
41.Diodorus 17.117.4 and Arrian 7.26.3 for toi kratistoi from kratistos: ‘the strongest or noblest’. Latin interpretation of that from Curtius 10.4.5 qui esset optimus (the ‘best’) and dignissimus (broadly the ‘most worthy’) from Justin 12.15.
42.For the funeral games or contests see Curtius 10.5.5, Diodorus 17.117.4, Arrian 7.26.3 reporting ‘other historians’. Justin (so we assume Trogus) 12.15.6-8 gave a darker more expansive account of the disputes and slaughter that the dying Alexander expected would follow.
43.Iliad 23. Some scholars believe the Homeric funeral games (pre 1200 BCE) led directly to the founding of the Pan-Hellenic athletics contests, the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemian Games. Roller (1981) pp 107-119.
44.Quoting from Justin 12.15, translation by Rev. J Selby Watson, 1853; Curtius 10.6-10.10 and Justin 13.1 for the sentiment in Babylon.
45.Plutarch 77.2. Olympias’ actions are detailed by other historians and discussed in later chapters.
46.For Onesicritus’ fear see Metz Epitome 97. A komos was the traditional Macedonian drinking party or symposium. The theme of ‘fearful historians’ is reiterated in the Vulgate texts at Curtius 10.10.18-19, Diodorus 17.118.2, Justin 12.13.10.
47.Cicero Philippicae 9.5: ‘The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living’.
48.The ‘many and few’ sentiment echoes that of Stewart (1993) p 1.
49.Lane Fox (1973), Preface, p. 11
50.Historians consider the Hellenistic era commenced variously at the Battle of Gaugamela when Darius III was displaced, at Darius’ death, or at the death of Alexander in 323 BCE, or at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE; and it ended when Rome’s republic became ‘empire’ after the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, or when it absorbed the last Hellenistic kingdom of Egypt (Aigyptos to the Greeks) after the Battle of Alexandria, 30 BCE.
51.For the numbers of fragments and writers, see Wilken (1967) and quoting from the Introduction by E Borza p XXV.
52.Reemphasising the observation made in Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 3.
53.The saying has been attributed to Aeschylus as well as a host of modern politicians.
54.Plutarch Pericles 15, translation by J Dryden, 1683.
55.Livy 1.1.34, Dionysius of Heraclea (or Pseudo-Dionysius) Ars Rhetorica 11.2, quoting Thucydides. ‘Historiosophy’ is a term coined by Gershom Scholem. ‘Solemn’ was Cicero’s description of Thucydides in the fragmentary Hortensius; see Dominik (1997) p 36.
56.Polybius 16.14.6-8. Polybius’ exact dates of birth and death are unknown. An ‘early’ school proposes he was born ca. 208 BCE and died in the mid-120s BCE and a ‘late’ school proposes ca. 200 or 186 to 116 BCE. Discussion in Eckstein (1992).
57.Possibly originating with WS Holt, professor of history at Washington University, or Charles Beard, cited in a communication by RF Smith, American Historical Review 94, October 1989, 1247.
58.Samuel Butler Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His Son, 1901, chapter 14. It was the Athenian tragic poet Agathon who is said to have quipped, ‘even the gods cannot change the past’.
59.Robinson (1953), Jacoby (1926-1958), Müller (1853-1870).
60.Quoting Heller-Roazen (2002) p 151.
61.Following and quoting Bosworth A in the East (1996) p 32.
62.Quoting Grafton (1990) p 69.
63.Winckelmann’s 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity pushed the Altertumswissenschaft (science of antiquity) argument into new territory, as did the philological arguments of Freidrich August Wolf (1759-1824) articulated in his Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft.
64.Quoting Braudel (1969) p 68 for discussion of the social sciences being drawn into historiography, including Henri Berr’s Revue de synthèse historique of 1900.
65.Tertullian Apology 19.2.5-6, full text in Fortenbaugh-Schütrumpf (2000) p 127.
66.Quoting Macaulay (1828).
67.Discussion on Scaliger’s work on Berossus and Manetho in Grafton (1990) pp 100-102.
68.Speyer (1971) following discussion by Grafton (1990) p 70.
69.Garraghan (1946), McCullagh (1984) and Shafer (1974) for examples of the method checklists referred to.
70.Carr (1961) p 12 and Carr (1987) p 23, in the incomplete second edition of the 1961 treatise.
71.A statement credited to both Voltaire and André Gide: Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent.
72.The first recorded use of the epithet ‘Great’ came from the Roman playwright Plautus in the Mostelleria 775 in ca. 200 BCE. It may of course have been in use before but Greek literature did not employ it and was somewhat more hostile to his memory.
73.Quoting K Jenkins Rethinking History, Routledge, London 1991, p 21.
74.An honorific of the Byzantine age literally meaning ‘born in the purple’ and stemming from the Tyrian murex trade in purple dye.
75.Demosthenes Philippic 1.40. He was alluding to the reactive boxing style of barbarian boxers who are always one step behind their opponents’ moves and strategy, and here elating it to Athens’ amateurish opposition to Philip II of Macedonia.
76.Cicero Epistolarum ad Atticum, 9.10.4 and de Divinatione. Quoting Highet (1949) p 455.
77.‘Steps to Parnassus’, the highest peak in central Greece; it has come to depict a long steep path of learning or instruction; a thanks to Professor Carol Thomas for inspiring me to use it.
78.That is twenty-three years from Alexander’s death in 323 BCE to the aftermath of the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE.
79.Quoting M Pallottino in his 1957 review of DH Lawrence’s 1927 Etruscan Places, Olive Press, London, pp 13-14, including the reference to a ‘poetic intuition’; following its use by Barker-Rasmussen (2000) The Etruscans, Blackwell Publishing.
80.See discussion in Robinson (1953) Preface p VII, quoting Tarn (1948).
81.Tacitus 1.47.
82.Following Momigliano (1966) p 70.
83.Virgil Aeneid 11.376.
84.Quoting the terminology from the preface of Stewart (1993) p XXXV. Prof Theodore Antikas’ education includes degrees in veterinary science and in law, politics, economics and a PhD in medicine. He is the author of books on classical Greece including a study of Poseidippus of Pella.
85.See Hamilton (1971) Introduction: Plutarch had been granted Roman citizenship with possibly an honorary Roman consulship and also a Greek magistrate and archon in his municipality.
86.According to Diogenes Laertius Plato 4, Plato was so named by his wrestling coach because of his broad shoulders; platon means ‘broad’ in Attic Greek.
87.Discussion on the epithet Gonatas in Iossif-Chankowski-Lorber (2007) p 418.
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p; 88.The first recorded use of the epithet ‘great’ came from the Roman playwright Plautus Mostelleria 775 in ca. 200 BCE. It may of course have been in use before but Greek literature did not employ it and was somewhat more hostile to his memory; more in chapter titled The Rebirth of the Wrath of Peleus’ Son.
89.The census of Augustus in his own Deeds of Divine Augustus 15 dating to 5 BCE recorded 320,000 adult plebs in the city to whom he paid 240 sestertii each; accounting for women, children, slaves and non-citizens, the population may well have exceeded 1 million.
90.Strabo’s original name is unknown, though in Greek strabon means ‘squint-eyed’. Strabo stated, upon visiting the alleged site of Troy, known as Ilium to the Romans, ‘This is not the site of ancient Ilium, if one considers the matter in accordance with Homer’s account’; Strabo 13.1.27, translated by HC Hamilton and W Falconer, published by Henry G Bohn, London, 1854. Strabo 13.1.1 and at 13.1.38 he additionally voiced the view that no trace remained; see chapter titled Classicus Scriptor, Rhetoric and Rome for further detail.
91.TE Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Doubleday reprint 1991, p 21; its use inspired by the same in A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome, Wiley, 2016, Introduction p 6.
92.Quoting Wolfgang Schwaderwaldt in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. June 2010, review of Mindt N (2008) Manfred Fuhrmann als Vermittler der Antike: ein Beitrag zu Theorie und Praxis des Ubersetzens. Transformationen der Antike, Bd5, Berlin, New York, p 3.
93.Quoting Goralski (1989) p 83.
1
THE REBORN WRATH OF PELEUS’ SON
Would Alexander have been content to die without making a Will and without planning for a succession?
Historians have been trying to unveil the man behind the legend for the past two millennia, and the opinion of every age has, to some degree, reshaped Alexander III of Macedonia.
What did it mean to be descended from the Macedonian royal house with an elite Greek education? What was Alexander’s relationship with his father, his men, their high-ranking generals, and with his entourage of court ‘friends’, diviners, philosophers and poets? And what part did Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon, and Aristotle’s view of the barbarian Persian Empire play in his character development?
We look at Alexander’s policy, his behaviour and mindset on campaign to question whether this correlates with the man who allegedly declined to recognise his sons as heirs and failed to provide succession instructions to his generals.
‘My vast army marched into Babylon in peace; I did not permit anyone to frighten the people of Sumer and Akkad. I sought the welfare of the city of Babylon and all its sacred centres. As for the citizens of Babylon, upon whom he [Nabonidus] imposed a corvée, which was not the god’s wish and not befitting them, I relieved their weariness and freed them from service. Marduk, the great Lord, rejoiced over my deeds.’1
The Cyrus Cylinder
‘A man, he shunned humanity; it seemed A trifle to stand highest among mortals.’2
Gautier de Chatillon Alexandreis
‘… the gods and heroes begrudge that a single man in his godless pride should be king of Hellas and Asia, too.’3
Themistocles, Herodotus Histories
Babylon, mid-June 323 BCE, the ‘gateway of the gods’; an ancient city already two millennia old and which, according to legend, was founded by the Mesopotamian deity, Marduk.4 This was now the Macedonian campaign capital and the staging point for the planned expeditions to Arabia and westward to the Pillars of Heracles. Inside the lofty baked-brick and bitumen-bound walls, the city had become a hive of activity with trepidatious envoys arriving from nations across the known world, those conquered and those expecting to be.5 Prostrated in the Summer Palace of Nebuchadnezzar II on the east bank of the Euphrates, wracked by fever and having barely survived another night, King Alexander III, the ruler of Macedonia for twelve years and seven months, had his senior officers congregate at his bedside.6 Abandoned by Tyche who governed fortune, and the healing god Asclepius, he finally acknowledged he was dying.7
Growing fear and uncertainty filled the portent-laden air. Priests interpreted omens, livers and entrails as whispered intrigues and newly divulged ambitions filled heavy sweat-soaked nights. Life signs were tenuous; the king’s breathing was almost imperceptible. Finally, Alexander, born under the watch of two eagles that signified two great empires, and birthed from a womb sealed with the image of a lion,8 was publicly pronounced dead and the prophecy of the Chaldean seers came to pass.9
The ancient city founded over 1,000 years before the legendary fall of Troy was a fitting stage for the death of the king who had conquered the empire of the Persian Great Kings and vanquished their progeny, for Alexander had married daughters of both Darius III (king 336-330 BCE) and Artaxerxes III Ochus (king 359/358-338 BCE). The backdrop was no mud-brick town in the eastern regions the Greeks loosely termed ‘India’, or windswept pass in the upper satrapy of Bactria, or, as the Greek historian Plutarch put it, ‘that nameless village in a foreign land must needs have become the tomb of Alexander’, but the greatest opulence the world had to offer.10 It was appropriately theatrical and it was uniquely ‘Alexander’ and yet the reporting is wholly unconvincing as a conclusion to his story. Alexander’s final days should have provided us with the rich and colourful imagery we read in the campaign accounts, for by mid-summer 323 BCE, warships, grain ships, pack animals, cavalry mounts and Indian elephants were being prepared for a new Arabian expedition, while the citadel guarding wealth the Greeks had never imagined was being mined for funds to pay what had become a multinational army.
Gossiping eunuchs, concubines and wives frequented the Summer Palace of Nebuchadnezzar II (Naboukhodonosor to the Greeks, reigned ca. 605-562 BCE). Bodyguards, physicians, slaves, scribes, cooks, tasters and royal pages filed through anterooms filled with waiting ambassadors who brought dispatches from distant lands at the borders of the known world. According to Plutarch, the palace was now full of ‘soothsayers (magoi), seers (manteis), sacrificers, purifiers (kathartai) and prognosticators’; by-products of the king’s late obsession with death-harbouring portents.11 As events had already shown on more than one occasion, it was the seers and doctors, fearful of providing inaccurate divinations or ineffective prognoses, who had the most to lose: their lives.12 So no doubt spells (epoidai) and incantations (epagogai) had been covertly cast as complex fears and political intrigues manifested themselves in dark corridors as Alexander’s health continued to deteriorate. Indeed, the surviving texts ought to have replicated the drama captured in the final chapter of the Cyropaedia of Xenophon (ca. 430-354 BCE), the vivid and laudatory portrayal of the former Persian Great King.13
Cyrus the Great (reigned 559-530 BCE) becomes significant to our case, for Alexander inherited the Achaemenid Empire he had founded and he appears to have become an admirer. The Cyropaedia, which can be broadly translated as ‘the education of Cyrus’, laid out the perfect death for a king of kings.14 Surrounded by the loved and faithful, Cyrus distributed his kingdom to his two sons, making sure no ambiguity or conflict would arise. According to Xenophon, both he and Darius I left enduring traditions that included oral testaments and farewell speeches of enlightened and benevolent words. They rounded off careers that had already become immortal, and Cyrus’ ended his with: ‘Now I must leave instructions about my kingdom, that there may be no dispute among you after my death.’15 Although Cyrus’ final hours were, in fact, the encomiastic overlay of a Greek historian, Alexander had about him all that was required to do the same, along with a prolonged illness that provided sufficient time. According to the surviving mainstream accounts, he failed in every respect, even when, as one tradition claims, he was being pressed by his generals to announce a successor. We are left wondering what truly took place at Babylon, and who Alexander had become, for it is not only accounts of his death that conflict, but opinions of his life.
According to Aristotle, Zoroastrianism and the Magi of the East believed the
re are two ‘first principles’ in the world: ‘A good spirit and an evil essence; the name of the first is Zeus or Ahura Mazda, and the other Hades or Ahriman.’ This dualism could have featured in any introduction to the life of Alexander so divergent is his character portrayal within the Vulgate genre.16 Written in vastly different times, two books became required reading for the American founding fathers as a lesson and warning on the nature of governance: Machiavelli’s The Prince and Xenophon’s On the Education of Cyrus, copies of which remain today in the US Congress Library. Like the Magi’s opposed spirits, they represent the two faces of man: one promoting rule by fear and the other by benign enlightenment, and each book had its place in the evolving profile of the Macedonian king.
One of the leitmotifs of Alexander’s story is his belief in his own divine and heroic origins. Yet he also had mortals to emulate and one of them was Cyrus the Great. Two centuries before him – tradition suggests October 29th 539 BCE – Cyrus stood on the steps of the ziggurat of Etemenanki, the ‘Cornerstone of the Universe’, and dedicated to the god Marduk in his newly conquered Babylon.17 Rejecting the slavery and loot which was his by Victor’s Justice, he purportedly made an address which is widely regarded as the first charter of human rights. In 1879 a clay cylinder was unearthed at Babylon and it recorded the complete address previously known to us only from the biblical references in the Book of Ezra, chapter one. A copy of the so-called Cyrus Cylinder now sits in the halls of the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York.18
Portrayed as politically astute, in the first years of the campaign at least, Alexander III chose to emulate Cyrus when in 333 BCE he too entered Babylon for the first time via the ancient Processional Way having just defeated Darius III. He respected personal freedoms as well as local religious rights, and surviving cuneiform inscriptions found in the city’s astronomical diaries captured a part of the declaration: ‘Into your houses I shall not enter.’19 Alexander even sought to repair the Esagila Temple whose golden statue had been melted down by Xerxes upon his hasty return from Greece following defeat at Plataea in 479 BCE, a battle whose aftermath saw Greeks conducting annual sacrifices to their dead in Plutarch’s day, some 600 years on.20 This, along with the adoption of Persian customs and his inheriting a still largely unified Persian Empire, had led some modern commentators to even refer to Alexander as ‘the last of the Achaemenids’.21